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Alcohol is physically addictive, certainly. Withdrawal can kill people with a particularly bad habit.

It may not be addictive in an identical way to heroin, but it is addictive, much more so than the other two you mention.



Well, the other two (pot and LSD) are not physically addictive at all, so it would be impossible to be less addictive than that.

Yes, alcohol can have physical withdrawal symptoms for people that stop after already having abused the drug for long periods of time.

According to what I am able to find, even of alcoholics already with a long term problem, only 50% experience withdrawal at all, and only 3 to 5 percent of that 50% experience DTs (tremors) or seizures.

As far as I can tell, even these withdrawal symptoms result from damage to the nervous system, rather than being due to a sudden desaturation of certain receptors in the brain, which cause the craving most associate with addiction.

The big difference for me is the difference in the craving aspect, and the time and number of doses it takes to start feeling the effects of the "addiction".

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMra1407298




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