WHAT DOES ADDICTION MEAN?
More reflection
“What is mindset?” was the focus of last week’s column. That led to an introductory reflection into the ‘mysterious case of addiction’. But just last night I heard a commentator say something along the lines of ‘Well, it they are addicted, they can’t choose to stop.” The discussion was around social media and the young.
This is in line with comments that you have probably heard, along the lines of “This drug is really addictive”. Last week we saw some doubts about this thinking from Peter Hitchen’s writing. This week I want to try and explain this issue a bit more carefully. For the sake of transparency, I should also explain that this area of investigation became my introduction into the world of education. While working as an addictions counselling psychologist with the Department of Health, I did lots (and lots) of research into the area. Our unit become known as one of the best in the State, and at the ripe old age of 24 I found myself doing training sessions with nurses and doctors and teachers. It is why my Masters in (Health Personnel) Education was completed at the School of Medicine (UNSW), sponsored by the WHO.
Our unit was focussed on helping people cope with their ‘addictions’ to psychotropic drugs. Psychotropics are those substances that have an impact on our central nervous system in some way. We would describe the three general categories as uppers (stimulants), downers (depressants) and sidewaysers (hallucinogens). The most damage in Australia in the 1980’s was being done (in terms of loss of physical health and social disruption) by the abuse of alcohol, followed by cigarettes.
And probably similarly to now, the headlines about ‘drugs and addictions’ were not about these substances – it was the other illicit drugs that captured those spaces. The reasons for this are a topic for another time.
One of our tasks as a research-based education team was to be clear with our explanations of key words. Thus, we spent some time wrestling with how we would define ‘addiction’. This is what we settled on: “A person is addicted to something when they expect it to give them a result beyond what it can actually do, and it therefore starts to hurt them.”
Before explaining how we came to this formulation, it is interesting to note what I was reading personally while doing this research with the addictions team. It was The Cross and the Switchblade by David Wilkinson. It is a fine read. One scene involves a gang member who goes back to his old ‘shoot up place’ after his has met Jesus as the Christ. He has stopped his abuse of heroin, but is tempted to just do one ‘hit’ while at his old haunt. To his surprise, it did not have the same effect as previously.
Based on what the Bible says, and the good research, this made sense. Indeed, our definition helped make sense of this experience. It is not the ‘drug’ that makes someone addicted. It is what is happening in their soul.
Does that mean the drug is not important? Not at all. Certain psychotropics (and some other activities, like pornography, or social media hits) have properties that make them more likely to lead to physiological dependence. This dependence is when our body is so used to having the substance (or activity) as part of the routine, that when we stop, we have some kind of physiological response because of the physical withdrawal. An everyday example is when a coffee drinker who has more than, say, eight cups of strong coffee a day, decides to stop. He or she will experience headaches – these headaches are the physical withdrawal of the caffeine and the body having to adjust to its new equilibrium. The same is true for the other psychotropics.
But let’s keep in mind our working definition above – the physical dependence moves to addiction when we expect more of it than it can properly give. For example, we are dependent on food. Eating it regularly when we are hungry is not addiction. It is doing its proper job.
But when we eat regularly to ‘feel better’, even when we are not hungry, that can become a food addiction, and the sign of that is when instead of the food helping us, it hurts us (thus much of the obesity ‘epidemic’ of our age).
The Bible says to drink but not get drunk. [i] When we drink regularly to ‘feel better’, we are asking the alcohol to do more than it can. Eventually people who are on this pathway swap their human relationships for relationship with the booze – like in the song ‘Cracklin’ Rosie’, [ii] or ‘Red, Red Wine.’ [iii]
We use laboratory made heroin substances whenever we have serious operations. They do their (very effective) job of controlling pain. But we do not come out of hospital addicted to those drugs. This is why there were far less Vietnam vets with heroin addiction on return to the USA than expected. While at war, heroin helped the soul-pain of the context. When they came home (if there was family and work), they did not need the drug and stopped using it. [iv]
There was a clever drug research project reported by the Addiction Research Foundation in Ontario Canada that came to this same conclusion. The short story is that when you make rats physically dependent on heroine solution, but they are not in cages, they will usually prefer water when you re-introduce that choice alongside the heroin solution – unless they have some physical problem. This reversed many studies that had been done with rats in cages that declared heroin ‘such and addictive drug’. Being in a cage was the equivalent of being in war. When set free in ‘rat park’, it was like coming home to family and work for veterans. [v] Note – we need to be careful not to be too simplistic with this research – but it highlights that addiction is much more than ‘just the drug’.
Another book I read during this time was Peele and Brodsky’s (1975) Love and Addiction. They described this process similarly, noting that “addiction is an overgrown, dependent, destructive relationship. Love is the opposite, a sharing, growth-inspiring one.” We go to our sensuous natures to overcome the itch that does not go away when we are not involved in the kind of intimate relationships for which we are made.
The piece of literature that stripped all this down for me was a passage in the apostle Paul’s letter to the Ephesians – it was in chapter 4:17-24. I encourage you to read it with the idea of addiction in mind. You may note that:
a. Our thinking can be (morally) fruitful or futile, because it involves ‘the spirit of our minds’.
b. We push the knowledge of God aside when we become hard-hearted.
c. We then become insensitive, relationally.
d. To scratch the spiritual itch for fellowship, we become more sensuous (we swap people for a drug of some kind).
e. This becomes a continual lust for more.
f. The alternative is to ask for Christ’s help, through His Holy Spirit, by the renewing of the spirit of our minds.
We are not used to thinking being spiritual work, but it is. All good comes from God. If we want to leave our addictive tendencies behind, we need God’s help in our thought and action.
How will we invite our students and counselees into this? How will they see this invitation in how we live with each other?
Grace and peace,
Stephen
[i] Romans 13:13, 1 Corinthians 5:11, Ephesians 5:18
[ii] Neil Diamond, 1970
[iii] Neil Diamond, 1984
[iv] This is one of the case studies given in George A Bonanno The End of Trauma: How the New Science of Resilience is Changing how we think about PTSD. New York: Basic Books, 2021
[v] Here is a summary of the study, and some of its possible implications for psychiatry: What Does “Rat Park” Teach Us About Addiction?