It's in your genes: Addictions.

Addiction.

Professor Wim van den Brink, from the Academic Medical Centre at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands and a leading expert in the field of addiction, told the Annual Meeting of the Royal College of Psychiatrists (Friday 4 July) that addicts have fewer dopamine or pleasure receptors in the brain and consequently seek out more and more stimulation.

The emotional memory of the 'wonderful experience and the drive to repeat it leads to craving and relapse, said Prof van den Brink. Moreover, addicts fail to understand, or register, the conflict between the short-term pleasure the substance gives them and the damage long-term addiction can do.