UC San Diego

Drug addiction is a chronic disease characterized by a cyclical pattern of intense drug seeking and use, quitting, the emergence of an abstinence syndrome, cravings, and relapse. As drug seeking, craving, and relapse occur when the drug is no longer physiologically active, the overall hypothesis that drug addiction persists as a memory or memory-like process long after drug exposure has become widely accepted. The aim of this chapter is to review the ways in which learning and memory have been implicated in both the behavioral phenomenology and neurobiology of drug addiction.