Welcome to Understanding drugs and addiction

Welcome to King's College London. And welcome to our course, Understanding Drugs and
Addiction. My name's Kyle Dyer. I'm the Academic Lead for Postgraduate Education in the
Addictions at the Institute of Psychiatry, which is part of King's College. I run two M.Sc.
programmes in addictions, and I'm also involved in research and workforce development work.
I'll be hosting this journey into addiction through to the treatments and policies that can help
reduce the harms faced by individuals, their families, and communities. Over the next six weeks
of this course, we'll be discussing some of the key factors that explain how addiction develops
and how current evidence suggests we should treat, or ideally, prevent addiction from
developing.
We won't to be focusing on any particular drug. We'll be presenting, rather, the central
foundations of addiction. We'll be arguing that changes in the brain interact with the
environment, and together these explain how we can become addicted to just about anything.
Let me describe the course content in a little bit more detail. We've structured our course over
six weeks, and we'll be presenting a series of video lectures which will total around two hours of
content each week. For the first two weeks, we'll be explaining the journey into addiction. We'll
be exploring the biological, genetic, and environmental risks for developing addiction. This will
include looking at genetic research, neuroimaging data, as well as discussing the social and
environmental costs of addiction.
This week, we'll talk about a definition of addiction. And we'll look at an actual human brain as we
start to explore the parts of the brain that are associated with the onset of addiction. Over the
remaining weeks, we'll look at the consequences of addiction on mental health. We'll ask whether
cannabis use can cause schizophrenia. Indeed, we'll ask whether cannabis is safe to use at all.
We'll look at addiction and how it interacts with mental health problems such as depression and
anxiety. And we'll also spend some time looking at how drug use and addiction can harm foetal
and child development. Indeed, we'll ask how we as parents can protect our children from
developing addiction.
Following that, we will explore different treatment options for addiction. We'll describe the
various treatments that are available. And we'll be arguing how for every one pound we spend on
drug treatment, we save the country at least two pounds fifty in terms of associated crime and
health care costs. But most importantly, we do this while significantly improving the quality of
life by those people touched by addiction.

We will then go on to discuss how national and international policies can increase or decrease
the cost of addiction. We'll look at cigarettes as an example. And we'll discuss how government
policies and marketing strategies can affect the rate of smoking and the number of deaths.
We'll be closing this course by looking into the future of addiction science. The lecturers in this
course as well as some of the most senior scientists at the Institute of Psychiatry will discuss
where their own research will be taking them in the next few years. They'll be assessing the key
challenges in the future of addiction science and looking at the sort of policy developments
which might happen over the next few years. Should drugs be legal? Will we be looking at
genetic or other vaccines against addiction? We hope you find their views to be intriguing,
thought provoking, and lead to a lot of discussion and debate.
My own view is by understanding how addiction develops, how changes in the brain interact with
our environment, we're actually looking at how we make decisions and choices in our lives. We're
looking at issues of impulses and compulsions. How do we resist temptation? And these aspects
are fundamental to our understanding of ourselves, understanding our conscious and our
unconscious desires.
The teaching team who joins me in this course includes some of the most experienced academics,
scientists, and clinicians from the Institute of Psychiatry. We're also privileged to be joined by
Glenda, who will describe her own journey into addiction and then into treatment. I think you'll
find Glenda's story to be utterly compelling, and we're very thankful that she shared her story
with us.
Each week, I'll start with a short overview video which will outline the content of the week's
learning. I'll attempt to make these brief overviews as informative as I can, so that even if you
only do one thing each week, if you watch the overview video, you'll get a bit of an insight into
the material that we're discussing. For those who are interested in exploring the week's topic in
more detail, there'll be a series of short video lectures, each presented by Institute of Psychiatry
academics, scientists, and clinicians. All of whom are experts in their chosen area.
The lectures will include animations, and will conclude with a summary of the key point. We'll
provide links to further reading and other resources and lectures. You'll also be presented with a
full reference list to guide your own reading. In addition to the core material each week, I'll also
be presenting some additional insights into the research that's currently going on at the Institute
of Psychiatry. These showcases will involve some of our best scientists describing one or two of
their current projects.
We've designed each week to take around two hours in total. Maybe sometimes less, sometimes
a little bit more. We'd ask you to watch the core lectures and to participate in the tasks that we
set for each week to get the most of the learning opportunities in our course. The showcases and
the lectures are very useful, especially if you have an interest in the subject being discussed.
There's no formal assessment, but we'll be discussing the topics of the week and there will be
some short quizzes to help you test your knowledge and understanding. In addition, I'll also be
following the activity on this course as the weeks progress. And we'll be sending out weekly
summaries for the main themes that emerge. I'll be joined on the discussion boards by teaching
staff from the addictions department here at the Institute of Psychiatry.

Due to the size of our study group, I won't be able to answer every question. But we hope that
you will send some general comments or suggestions about the course via the FutureLearn
platform, so that we can continue to revise and develop this course over the next few years. So
let's roll up our sleeves and get started with week one.