DOWNEY'S CASE SHOWS THE POWER OF ADDICTION

DAYTON, Ohio - Drug addicts have different brain structures from the rest
of us, medical research is finding, not to mention different social circles
and different thought processes.

"And those three things are what people are all about," says Harvey Siegal,
a Ph.D. addictions researcher at Wright State University. "You've got the
body, the interaction with other people and the psychological."

So powerful is addiction that the best an addict can do is merely arrest
it, Nova House drug therapist Ralph Weatherford says.

If an addict stops using his drug of choice by merely gritting his teeth
instead of treating the addiction, Weatherford says it's almost certain to
surface in some other compulsive behavior, from too much food to too many
marriages.

"It's like I've got a shotgun in my mouth, with my finger on the trigger,
and I like the taste of the gun metal," actor Robert Downey Jr. said last
year of addiction's power. He made the same point even more dramatically in
November by getting caught with cocaine and methamphetamines less than four
months after spending a year in prison on drug charges.

This guy had all the fame, talent and wealth he could ask for - the
resources to fight his

addiction and the prison time to motivate him - and he still couldn't stay
away from the stuff. Has he no sense? No self-discipline?

The experts who treat and study drug addicts have long considered addiction
to be a brain disorder rather than a bad habit and now technology has given
them photographic proof.

"Recent research is demonstrating there are biochemical, neurological and
physiological changes within the brain itself when somebody does drugs,"
says Siegal. "So the brain is actually captive to the chemicals."

Like other diseases, addiction responds to medical treatment, but its more
demanding than taking, say, cholesterol pius or even diabetic insulin every
day. It requires new behaviors, new approaches to looking at the world,
says Weatherford.

As a diabetic and a sober alcoholic since 1977, he can compare the diseases
firsthand. He knows he can't go to his medicine cabinet some morning and
say, "Oh, gee, I felt real good yesterday. Maybe God has really given me a
new life here, and I don't need to take [diabetes] medication."

But addicts often say pretty much the same thing because they want to
believe addiction is something they "can get over," he says.

Downey might very well have awakened one morning, counted his blessings and
decided, as Weatherford puts it, " 'That damn addiction --- I'm not even
going to think about it today'. And by the end of the day, he's high on
something and doesn't know what happened."

All because he didn't take his addiction medicine. For Weatherford, that
medicine is tending a 12-step program meeting two or three times a week,
staying active with other addicts, reading the literature every day and
praying.

Brain imaging has shown drugs affect the brain's general ability to retain
pleasure-bringing chemicals and the region of the brain most closely
associated with sex and primitive pleasure. Stimulant drugs such as
cocaine, methamphetamines and Ecstasy trigger an explosion certain pleasure
chemicals, Siegal says.

"What happens in both the short run and the long run, though, is it
actually decreases the amount of this chemical that is manufactured by the
brain."