In episode 79 David talks with Marc Lewis who has unique experience in the area of drug addiction, as both a former addict, and today a neuroscientist and professor of developmental psychology at Radboud University in Holland. He described his personal voyage into and out of addiction in his 2011 book, “Memoirs of an Addicted Brain”. His recently published book, “The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction is Not a Disease” is titled to illustrate his conclusion that addiction is desire gone wrong, and that the addict gets trapped into a vicious cycle of desire, use, disappointment, repeat. David observes that loneliness, separation and isolation are a common factor at the start of many addiction stories, and that drugs only worsen this (as does imprisonment, the other common approach to drug addiction).
For more information on Marc Lewis, see his Wikipedia page at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_David_Lewis