by Peta Ealing Cameron

Created on: August 06, 2008   Last Updated: November 16, 2009

The DNA of a human is composed of many different links within family gene pooling, not just from two particular people we call our parents. You may have a strain within your genetic coding structure that manifested through from grandparents, aunts, or uncles.

How, for example do people that are born of adopted parents explain any predisposition to drug abuse if they do not know there parentage and true bloodlines.

More often than not, you may find, circumstances relating to any high degree of sensitivity emotionally, we are more often than not finding a person much more likely to be predisposed to genetic pooling of sensitivity, thus making them a little more prone to abuse under circumstances of high stress.

The complete makeup of a person forming character traits from birth to old age is never reliant on just genetic coding. It would be like saying that if a baby was raised in the ghetto, or raised by a well to do family, with good education and plenty of money, that the circumstances around an addiction were different, all people are different and all circumstances are different. But the genetic makeup will still be prominent.

People from all lifestyles can be abusers. The only cases I have thought may have been passed down through family pools are cases involving sexual abuse. I have personal knowledge of one such case and the perpetrator was abused himself at the age of ten.

If more research was done into the subject of drug abuse, I am sure we would find that most drug abusers suffered other forms of abuse themselves as children.

If a person has for example a family history of medical illnesses, perhaps diabetes, heart disease or cancer, does this mean that all family members in the line will develop these health problems?

Perhaps some of them may. I would not necessarily assume that each of the bloodlines following would have a genetic code that renders them liable. Just as with drug or even alcohol abuse. Children learn what they live. If you watched a parent with a severe drug addiction, who allowed you to be placed in abusive situations, do you think you would necessarily want to try drugs?

It is not always as cut and dried as someone would think, most people have many abuse problems, which start any events leading to drug abuse. Drug abuse is not genetic, I think it is the characteristics and they way they are formed and used or abused throughout a child's up bringing which designates the outcome to drug abuse in a persons life.

A person may have a drug abusive parent and many brothers and sisters, and perhaps one out of three or four may succumb to the abuse of drugs. Does anyone ever consider this particular child may have reasons for taking the same path as that parent, and not just that this child got the ugly genes of abuse?

Does anyone consider the fact that this child may have been the one child who did not understand that parent well enough or get close enough to be able to reason things out? A child who lives in fear throughout their childhood could just be the one who ends up following the horrid path of drug abuse.

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