In “Neuroscience of Need: Understanding the Addicted Mind,” an article I wrote for Stanford Medicine magazine a few years ago, I tried to describe the hijacked brain circuitry of addiction:

[A]ll addictive drugs appear to share a rather mysterious property: They’re ‘better than the real thing.’ Better, that is, than the real things our [brain’s] reward circuitry was designed by evolution to reward: food, sleep, sex, friendship, novelty, etc. And better, even, than they were the last time around. At least, it sure seems that way to the addict. … You crave, seek and use a pernicious drug again and again because you have a memory of it being more wonderful than anything else, and because your brain has been rewired so that, when exposed to anything that reminds you of the drug, you will feel rotten if you don’t get some.

Two crucial sources for my article were behavioral scientist and drug-policy thinker Keith Humphreys, PhD, and neuroscientist and brain addiction-circuitry mapper Rob Malenka, MD, PhD. Recently these two joined forces with two other addiction experts — psychologist Brian Knutson, PhD, and law professor Robert MacCoun, PhD — to pen a brief but comprehensive perspective that appears today in Science. A Stanford news release captures its key points.