Dr Gabor Mate (medical doctor) who has worked at grassroots in the field of addiction, Downtown Eastside, Vancouver. He has written, spoken out, prolifically. I am going to quote from his book “The Myth of Normal” a piece about “Addiction” and addiction includes sex, porn, child abuse as well as all the other addictions.

Page 231 -233 The Myth of Normal by Dr Gabor Mate

The way childhood adversity engenders the neurobiology of addiction has to do with the interpersonal-biological science we have already examined. Experiences of stress in the womb can predispose to addiction, for example, by altering the brain’s ability to respond to stress in functional ways. They can also have long-term influence on the parts of the brain that modulate the incentive-motivation system impaired in all addictions, whether to drugs or behaviour*. As the psychiatric practitioner, neuroscientist, author and leading trauma researcher Dr Bruce-Perry told me, “We’ve done work, and a lot other people have done work, showing that essentially the number and density of dopamine receptors in these (brain) areas us determined in utero”4.

Whoever coined the slang term “dope” for drugs was onto something, because all addictions, whether to drugs or behaviour, involve DOPAMINE. Dopamine is the essential neurotransmitter in the MOTIVATION SYSTEM, without which all mammals are inert, and lacking all incentive. A hungry laboratory mouse whose pain is artificially denuded of its dopamine apparatus will starve himself while standing in front of a plate of food. In fact every addict is a Dopamine fiend, outsourcing the hunt for the homegrown chemical hit that makes the present moment exciting and vibrant….Addiction begins as an attempt to induce feelings that we were biologically programmed to generate innately, and would have – if unhealthy development hadn’t got in the way.

Sex addiction, for example, has nothing to do with a “high sex drive” and everything to do with dopamine. New York social worker and former Fordham and Rutgers Universities adjunct professor Professor Zachary Alti specialises in sex therapy and behavioural addictions, particularly the addiction to porn. “Studies are suggesting,” he told me, “that when viewing a pornographic image, we get a dopamine spike in our brain, When viewing images after images, we get spike after spike. Whereas with substance addictions you typically get one or a few spikes just before use, with behavioural addictions to dopamine itself is the substance, the primary component. Especially in pornography addiction, these dopamine spikes happen over and over again. As with smartphones and app companies, pornographers are well aware that their profits rest on the hijacking of their consumers’ brains. The sociologist Gail Dines, author of the bracing 2010 book, Pornland, How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality, reports on an article in the trade publication Adult Video News, in which an industry insider trumpets a Stanford University study on cyber-sex addiction showing that 20% of porn users are HOOKED. “In a true capitalist approach,” she notes, the article is cheerfully headed “Explaining the Data”

I highly recommend Youtube starting with Gabor Mate and the names in this article.

*Or what Dr Jaak Panksepp identified as the brain’s SEEKING aparatus.

Some youtube to explore and pre-budget to ensure Government looks closely at the blight of “ADDICTION”