In this podcast about how neuroscience is offering new approaches to treatments for drug addiction, science journalist Ryan O'Hare speaks to

Harry Shapiro of Drugscope,  the UK organisation supporting professionals working in the field of drug misuse.
Dr Amy Milton, a lecturer and researcher in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge
Barry Everitt, Professor of behavioural neuroscience at the University of Cambridge.
Dr Sunjeev Kamboj, a lecturer in clinical psychology at University College London
Andy [not his real name], a recovering addict

[Andy] - “Trying to justify to yourself that you could take it possibly take it very sporadically, but yeah, there’s a lot of mental trickery going on,”

[Sunjeev Kamboj] - “There isn’t really, at the moment, any long-term treatment that you receive and then stop taking and you’re cured,”

[Harry Shapiro] “When someone has collapsed all of their problems into one, to the exclusion and detriment of everything else in their lives, that’s addiction,”

[Amy Milton] - “We need to think of addiction much more as a chronic disorder so it’s more like treating diabetes or hypertension than some short term disease”

Ryan O'Hare:  When it comes to drug and alcohol addiction the numbers speak for themselves. With 800 million pounds a year being spent on drug treatment and recovery services in the UK alone, it’s estimated that one in five of us have experienced addiction or know someone who has.

Although there are a number of treatments to try and tackle the problem in the short-term, such as chemical replacements, and abstinence and psychological therapies for the dependence, relapse in the long-term is still a problem.  Harry Shapiro is head of communications for the UK charity, Drugscope.

 Harry Shapiro:  There’s a bit of a kind of mantra, cliché, whatever, there’s many ways into addiction and many ways out. There is no typical pathway out, and some people won’t go anywhere near a treatment system but might manage to get off the actual drinking or drugs and then might spend much of their time in AA or NA meetings. So, there are several pathways that people will take and they will jump from one to another.”

For someone who has become used to using drugs or alcohol as a way of coping with problems there is always the chance that if more problems present themselves that there’s a kind of learned behaviour there and the way that you deal with this, in terms of coping, is to go back on drugs or start drinking again.

One of the reasons why a lot of residential rehabs are based sited well out of city centres, out in rural communities and all the rest of it, is this idea that you need to be well away from your old haunts and your old habits. Because it’s true, people do start getting cravings, some people do, if they walk past some alley way where they used to shoot up a few years ago, it all kind of starts coming back.

RO'H: We are becoming more and more aware that getting someone off of drugs and alcohol is only half the problem. The challenge for the long-term means trying to target the very mechanism which has evolved to help us make sense of the world around us, our memory.Though, brilliantly adapted to help us find food, a partner and to avoid the dangers of our environment, it can also be one of the biggest barriers to long-term drug treatment.

But in order to understand the underlying pathways used by our brains, we need to start with something a little more every day.

Walk into a bakery and the smell of fresh bread hits you. Immediately it stirs up a thousand memories, you may not even be aware the process is happening, you may start to salivate, and your stomach may even start to rumble with hunger.

But all of this is triggered in a flash, before you’ve even seen a loaf. Just from a simple cue, the smell of the bread.  Dr Amy Milton, is a lecturer and researcher in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge...

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