Most people believe that gambling addiction is a failure of willpower, not an innate behavior designed to be switched on an off by our genes. However, according to a recent article:
Researchers have identified a strange side effect to a treatment for Parkinson's disease: excessive gambling. Some patients taking medications known as dopamine agonists developed the problem within three months of starting treatment, even though they had previously gambled only occasionally or never at all. "This is a striking effect," remarks J. Eric Ahlskog of the Mayo Clinic, a co-author of the new study. "Pathological gambling induced by a drug is really quite unusual."
If a drug (really just a small molecule) can trigger us to gamble, the implication is that the gambling impulse (and associated behavior) was there all along (part of our DNA), and the drug is simply switching on something we were born with. It's not a free choice.
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