We often hear of very unfortunate celebrity deaths due to drug overdose. Janis Joplin, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Kurt Cobain and very recently Heath Ledger – bright illustrious whiz kids of the world sapped by the omnipresent monster known as drug addiction. When all these sorry deaths happen in the celebrity world, we lie safe in the belief that we are quite far removed from such a world. But is that really the case?

The truth of the matter is; drug addiction and drug overdose are much closer home than you might think.

It is just one episode of drug abuse that it takes to bring into the person the probability of a drug overdose. In order to understand that, we will have to understand how the human brain works.

The human brain seeks pleasure. We can easily see that in everything that we do. This is true even in the case of drugs. When a person consumes a drug for the first time, the euphoric high that is produced in him or her is translated by the brain as a sense of pleasure. Due to that, the brain begins yearning for more and more of the drug.

As the drug enters the brain, the brain starts becoming used to it. In biological parlance, we would say that the brain gets increasingly immune to the drug. Quite soon, the brain will require higher doses of the drug in order to create the pleasurable high that it experienced the first time. That is the reason why people start stepping up their drug doses.

But what the brain can afford, the body cannot. Though the brain asks for more of the substance abuse, the human body is not designed for it. A time comes when the body snaps. This is when death occurs due to drug overdose.

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