I have been watching a friend of mine drinking himself to death for the past several years and after a recent dinner with him I found myself thinking about addiction and its causes.
Addiction takes many forms. A person can be addicted to alcohol, cigarettes, work, sex, or a myriad of other things including street and prescription drugs.
I’ve known people who seem to be addicted to multiple things, including gambling, alcohol, and sex. I’ve long believed that some people have “addictive personalities.” A friend of mine who is a doctor agrees that that is the case (and he is a recovering alcoholic).
The war on drugs has been a spectacular failure. Suburban, urban, and rural teenagers alike are now hooked on heroin and the United States leads the world in opiate consumption, which includes “street” heroin and oxycodone.
Addiction, as seen from the “right wing” or conservative side of the political spectrum, is a failure in moral fortitude, whereas to the “left wing”, it is a physical disease – you can become hooked with a single hit from a crack pipe.
I’ve come to believe that they are wrong and our society’s approach to addiction is very very wrong. The latest scientific research supports the hypothesis that addiction in its many forms is caused by unhappiness and lack of social contact. In today’s world it is increasingly easy to become socially isolated.
Experiments with animals also support the theory that social isolation and unhappiness are at the core of addiction and that the physical qualities of addiction play a minor role.
If you were to ask a heroin addict why he uses heroin he would likely tell you about the euphoria that it brings, or simply pain alleviation. In my opinion, the truth is that people who live full lives don’t have time for addiction. I believe that lack of social support more than anything else is the root cause of addiction. In the United States, the current course of treatment is abstention followed by the patient’s return to prior life. The rate of recidivism is staggering.
Over 15 years ago Portugal had a terrible drug problem and decided to remove all criminal penalties from drug use. The results are surprising. The use of injectable drugs fell by half. Treatment that included loving kindness support in the way of subsidized work and housing did more to avoid return to addiction than criminal penalties ever could.
President Obama recently commuted the sentences of almost 700 people incarcerated for drug use. The result of the war on drugs begun under the Reagan administration has resulted in the imprisonment of thousands of people for minor possession or “small-time” drug sales. Upon release from prison these individuals experience social ostracization. It is difficult or nigh to impossible for a felon to find employment and it is not surprising that these people revert to their old addictive behavior.
The same Puritan thought process that brought us the failed experiment of prohibition has led us to believe that we can stamp out addiction by putting people in jail for drug related crimes. This attitude is fostered by the wrongheaded belief that a pusher can addict children who are otherwise happy by offering them a sample of an illegal drug so that they immediately become hooked. The most recent experiments indicate otherwise. In fact, kids who feel happy and fulfilled don’t like the mind-numbing qualities of narcotics. Kids who go out on the weekend and drink a few beers don’t automatically become alcoholics.
It is time we as a society take a long hard look at what causes addiction and what it will take to stop this country’s steep slide into more and more addiction.
Theodore (Ted) Babbitt is a West-Palm beach Florida-based personal injury lawyer, commercial pilot, flight instructor, husband, father and grandfather. This is his personal blog about politics, philosophy and personal musings.
September 3, 2016
Ah, Ted, where to start.
I guess first I’d like to know who funded the studies you cite. I’m all in for spreading the “love” and am aware of the power of love. However, I’m not so naive as to think that love conquers all (after all, I’ve lived nearly 65 years!) and it’s certainly not the case in the context of addiction. The studies bring to mind those which lead to the development of programs aimed at “restoring/rehabilitating” homosexuals to heterosexuality. Hmmm
You mention the issue of Obama’s commutation of sentences, which I find to be a non-sequitur. I agree that the War on Drugs has been an abysmal failure. And that the recidivism problem is one that would benefit from social support, but isn’t the fact that these drug offenders are in prison in the first place another major, albeit related, problem? For instance, rates of arrest among persons of color is higher than that of whites, but drug use among the white population is the same. Once arrested, the incarceration rates are higher among non-whites than their white counterparts, as are harsher sentences– we have the Republican Congress and President Clinton to thank for mandatory minimum sentences, not Ronald Reagan.
But to return to our original discussion– addition and its causes. The premise I take most exception to is that people/children who lead full lives don’t have time for addiction. I suspect that relatively happy young persons or adults who are now addicts first imbibed in one of the recreational drugs readily available today for the same reasons my generation picked up our first cigarette, sneaked a drink from our parents’ liquor cabinet, or smoked a joint– because they thought it was cool and they were curious. Some of them, like we did, got hooked.
I could go on– it’s complicated, which makes crafting policy to address the problem so difficult.
As to the theory of the causes of addiction, though, I guess I have to say I come down hard in the so-called “left wing’ column (on the side of “physical addiction).” Social support is, of course, necessaryand rehabilitation programs rather than incarceration, I think, are key to patients’/offenders’ successful return to society, but to paraphrase, “All you need is NOT love.”
September 3, 2016
Actually it’s not fair to compare tobacco with any other addiction because as it turns out tobacco is many times more addictive from a physical standpoint than heroin.
I too thought as you do that physical dependence was A primary cause of addiction but the studies I cite seem to say that is not the case. A lot of rat studies have been done where they put opium laced water in a cage with a rat in isolation and the rat becomes rapidly addicted. Then they build a community cage with lots of things for the rats to do and other rats to socialize with and put the same opium water in and the rats try it but pretty much shun it and don’t get addicted
Interestingly they put the addicted rats in the community cage and they show physical signs of withdrawal for a short while but then do not go back to drinking the opium laced water. The experience in Portugal seems to support The hypothesis since decriminalization and social support resulted in a 50% reduction in use of injection related drugs.
I am sure the jury is still out on this but it is an interesting question that we in the United States have not’s spent a lot of time pondering.
Mandatory minimum sentences are the worst thing that has happened to our criminal justice system. Taking away judicial discretio from judges has led to massive incarcerations without regard to the seriousness of the crime or prior records.
There is no dispute but that we have a serious problem with respect to racial bias in our judicial system. I would be surprised if there wasn’t more use of drugs among non-whites but discrimination in sentencing is well documented.