Dr. Keith Humphreys

Everything else has been stripped away.

And that makes it easier to understand why people would still hang on to it in that situation when it feels like, look, it's the only time I feel good is that moment when I take that hit.

Yeah, that's a great question.

So let me start by just getting rid of one myth where we say people are born addicted.

You'll sometimes read, you know, if mom was addicted, then the baby is born addicted.

That is not possible.

because a fetus has no association between their behavior and the exposure to the drug.

So they can be physically dependent, meaning they'll go through withdrawal upon birth, but they're not addicted.

But you can have risk from birth in your genes.

And the estimation of how much of that is shared, it's actually quite a bit.

We look at studies where kids were adopted out of families with parents who were addicted to alcohol, much higher likelihood of developing an alcohol problem even if they were raised by teetotalers, for example.

How big is that?

You know, it varies across, you know, studies, it varies across substances, but it's large.

It might be like, you know, 0.3, 0.4, 0.5 for most of them.

And, you know, you can imagine that the same gene, some might be specific and some might be more general.

So here's an example of a specific one.

If you are born into a group like Han Chinese are and you lack...

the enzyme, we don't have much of a particular enzyme that is used to metabolize alcohol, it is just a less enjoyable experience to drink.

You know, you can't break it down to acetylaldehyde and acetic acid and all that sort of thing.

And so that one is, but that wouldn't lower your risk for anything else, but at least specific for alcohol.