Thoughts on Addiction

Contents

“Addic­tion” has become com­mon in Eng­lish lan­guage usage only dur­ing the last cen­tu­ry. Essen­tial qual­i­ties of addic­tion, as the word was orig­i­nal­ly defined, were the reg­u­lar inges­tion of opi­um, the devel­op­ment of tol­er­ance (i.e. — reduc­tion of effects with iden­ti­cal dosage), tor­tur­ous with­draw­al symp­toms in its absence, and anti-social behav­ior both to gain access and while intox­i­cat­ed. Today we use the term in a much broad­er sense, to denote any of count­less types of repeat­ed behav­iors where actu­al out­comes con­sis­tent­ly result in fail­ure to be satisfied.

A Brief History

Eng­lish-speak­ing peo­ple first became aware of addic­tion in the ear­ly 19th cen­tu­ry, as a result of their par­tic­i­pa­tion in the man­u­fac­ture and dis­tri­b­u­tion of opi­um in the Far East. Towards the end of the cen­tu­ry, Euro­pean artists and literati began exper­i­ment­ing with a vari­ety of psy­choac­tive sub­stances in search of new heights of aes­thet­ic expe­ri­ence. Opi­ates, cocaine, cannabis deriv­a­tives, and assort­ed oth­er sub­stances which affect­ed brain func­tion became read­i­ly avail­able, both in patent med­i­cines and in admit­ted­ly recre­ation­al prepa­ra­tions, and an era of naive and wide­spread drug abuse was inaugurated.

Between 1900 and 1940, med­ical researchers dis­cov­ered and syn­the­sized an array of potent com­pounds which act­ed on the human brain. For awhile doc­tors pre­scribed them with aban­don, but dis­il­lu­sion­ment came quick­ly. Addic­tive behav­ior which had pre­vi­ous­ly been observed exclu­sive­ly among opi­ate users, was soon evi­dent among large num­bers of those who had been exposed to whole new class­es of sub­stances, includ­ing bar­bi­tu­rates, amphet­a­mines, and tranquilizers.

The Current Scene

As mil­lions more peo­ple have become obses­sive users of a grow­ing phar­ma­co­paeia, an ever more strin­gent set of nation­al and inter­na­tion­al con­trols has been set in place to sup­press what is now rec­og­nized as a glob­al health prob­lem of epi­dem­ic pro­por­tions. Despite con­tin­u­ing research into addic­tion, sub­stan­tial law enforce­ment activ­i­ty aimed at halt­ing drug traf­fick­ing, and diverse exper­i­ments with treat­ment for the pur­pose of mak­ing some­thing oth­er than pre­ma­ture death the most like­ly fate of the addict, drug abuse appears still to be grow­ing. Every year humans con­sume bil­lions of dos­es of syn­thet­ic stim­u­lants, depres­sants, and tran­quil­iz­ers, as well as even larg­er quan­ti­ties of ille­gal but nat­u­ral­ly occur­ring psy­choac­tive sub­stances. Social­ly accept­ed drugs, like cof­fee, tea, choco­late, alco­hol, sug­ar, tobac­co, et cetera are now admit­ted to car­ry poten­tial for addic­tion. In fact, more and more habit­u­al behav­iors, whether observ­able or con­fined to indi­vid­ual con­scious­ness, are being termed “addic­tion.”

Habit and Adaptation

Human adap­ta­tion and sur­vival may be viewed as infor­ma­tion pro­cess­ing chal­lenges. There are far more stim­uli imping­ing upon us than we can simul­ta­ne­ous­ly process. One way that we deal with this is by putting some aspects of liv­ing on “auto­mat­ic.” Hav­ing once decid­ed how to act in cer­tain cir­cum­stances, we behave that way repeat­ed­ly with­out fur­ther con­sid­er­a­tion. A per­il of this approach is that an act which is inno­cent in the first instance may become dam­ag­ing if repeat­ed. We also risk the pos­si­bil­i­ty that the neg­a­tive reper­cus­sions of an act occur after a sub­stan­tial lag. Final­ly, changes to the envi­ron­ment may go unno­ticed if we think we “know” what we are per­ceiv­ing and how to respond.

While the ecol­o­gist will claim that all humans, indeed all organ­isms, are appar­ent­ly joined in the fun­da­men­tal pur­pos­es of sur­vival and repro­duc­tion, indi­vid­u­als com­mon­ly aim towards addi­tion­al, some­times mutu­al­ly incom­pat­i­ble goals. Ques­tions of adap­tiv­i­ty are prob­lem­at­ic, for we are with­out the abil­i­ty to pre­cise­ly deter­mine the adap­tive val­ue of either our own or oth­ers’ behav­iors, includ­ing goal-set­ting. Look­ing from with­in the con­straints of our own per­son­al world-views, or the ethos of our own cul­ture, we see a very par­tial and assured­ly dis­tort­ed reality.

Addiction as Habitual Maladaptive Behavior

Addic­tion may be viewed as a spe­cial class of repeat­ed behav­iors, where short-term sat­is­fac­tion is linked to longer-term frus­tra­tion. Using the prin­ci­ples of ecol­o­gy, we may gen­er­ate a vari­ety of plau­si­ble expla­na­tions both for the rise of addic­tive (i.e. habit­u­al, mal­adap­tive) behav­iors, and for our grow­ing con­scious­ness of, and con­cern for them.

The ease with which an organ­ism adapts may be viewed in terms of the eco­log­i­cal func­tion. As pop­u­la­tion increas­es and resources are deplet­ed, addi­tion­al or altered infor­ma­tion becomes nec­es­sary to suc­cess­ful adap­ta­tion. Over the past two hun­dred years, humans have increased our num­bers in ways that are both absolute­ly and rel­a­tive­ly with­out prece­dent. We have employed a sequence of steadi­ly more dis­rup­tive tech­nolo­gies to con­vert earth resources to human use, with the unin­tend­ed and unwant­ed simul-taneous effect of ren­der­ing the envi­ron­ment less fit to sup­port us.

With our large scale orga­ni­za­tion of human activ­i­ty and grandiose alter­ations of the envi­ron­ment, and with the speed of our oper­a­tions, we have neces­si­tat­ed major changes in human behav­ioral adap­ta­tion. Under these cir­cum­stances, pre­vi­ous­ly accept­able habit can eas­i­ly prove mal­adap­tive, and inno­va­tion, how­ev­er inspired, is dif­fi­cult to eval­u­ate. More and more of us are find­ing famil­iar pat­terns unten­able, yet few of us are con­fi­dent that we have iden­ti­fied viable alternatives.

The cur­rent offi­cial focus upon addic­tive sub­stances and the vast resources being mar­shalled to reduce their avail­abil­i­ty are indi­ca­tions of a change in atti­tude which we may trace back more than one hun­dred fifty years to the ini­tial efforts of the Chi­nese to con­trol opi­um. As all humans have become more tight­ly bound in our net­work of resource con­ver­sion activ­i­ties, each of us is increas­ing­ly con­cerned with, and of con­cern to, being char­ac­ter­ized as an inte­gral part of a whole sys­tem, includ­ing both our indi­vid­ual selves, oth­er peo­ple, and the remain­der of the envi­ron­ment in which we live. From this per­spec­tive, those who address sin­gu­lar addic­tive behav­iors in iso­lat­ed indi­vid­u­als, seek­ing lin­ear chains of cau­sa­tion, appear doomed to fail­ure. An ecosys­tem is too filled with mul­ti­ple feed­back loops, where cause and effect are to some extent qual­i­ties of all sys­tem ele­ments, to be accu­rate­ly mod­eled with sim­plis­tic ideas born of a mech­a­nis­tic par­a­digm. Viewed eco­log­i­cal­ly, with con­cern for rela­tion­ships between indi­vid­u­als and the envi­ron­ment, addic­tion is more eas­i­ly rec­og­nized as some­thing impos­si­ble to van­quish with­out col­lat­er­al change.

Shedding Our Own Addictions

Why both­er with addic­tion, and label it neg­a­tive, rather than mere­ly accept it as part of liv­ing? Many of us share a sense that addic­tion is some­how incon­sis­tent with our deep­er pur­pos­es. We find unpleas­ant the per­cep­tion of free­dom which we asso­ciate with addic­tive behav­ior. We rec­og­nize in our­selves and our envi­ron­ment a sys­tem out of bal­ance, one that we have desta­bi­lized. And we want greater sat­is­fac­tion for our­selves and others

What are our pur­pos­es? How shall we be sat­is­fied? These age-old, fun­da­men­tal ques­tions are the frame­work against which we lay the sto­ries of our lives to date as we look for evi­dence of addic­tion. What we find may vary from reg­u­lar­i­ty in brush­ing and floss­ing teeth, which many will agree to be quite adap­tive, to dai­ly inges­tion of drugs, which most will agree mer­its ques­tion, to repeat­ed expres­sion of anger by vio­lence towards oth­ers, which almost all will deem an addic­tion of the worst kind.

Addic­tion may be char­ac­ter­ized as an inte­gral part of a whole sys­tem, includ­ing both our indi­vid­ual selves, oth­er peo­ple, and the remain­der of the envi­ron­ment in which we live. From this per­spec­tive, those who address sin­gu­lar addic­tive behav­iors in iso­lat­ed indi­vid­u­als, seek­ing lin­ear chains of cau­sa­tion, appear doomed to fail­ure. An ecosys­tem is too filled with mul­ti­ple feed­back loops, where cause and effect are to some extent qual­i­ties of all sys­tem ele­ments, to be accu­rate­ly mod­eled with sim­plis­tic ideas born of a mech­a­nis­tic par­a­digm. Viewed eco­log­i­cal­ly, with con­cern for rela­tion­ships between indi­vid­u­als and the envi­ron­ment, addic­tion is more eas­i­ly rec­og­nized as some­thing impos­si­ble to van­quish with­out col­lat­er­al change.

How shall we extin­guish addic­tion? Embed­ded in this ques­tion lies per­haps one of our most sub­tle addic­tions: we move so quick­ly to “how,” and shrink so rapid­ly from “why”. Many of us have been taught, “Not ours to rea­son why, just ours to do, or be fired, or ostra­cized, or vio­lent­ly suppressed.”

Liv­ing such a large frac­tion of our wak­ing lives with this con­scious­ness, with so much depen­dent upon stead­fast adher­ence to it, we may well be los­ing both the appetite and the capac­i­ty for “why” think­ing. See­ing so much that seems so con­trary to com­mon sense, which we are nonethe­less expect­ed to ratio­nal­ize and car­ry for­ward with some enthu­si­asm, we become inured to the non­sen­si­cal nature of much that we do, and take it for grant­ed. To ques­tion or chal­lenge “why?” in the face of such wide­spread con­for­mi­ty seems futile, so we chan­nel our ener­gies to the “how” of liv­ing. In an era of pro­found and rapid envi­ron­men­tal change, such behav­ior may be an imped­i­ment to the rad­i­cal per­son­al changes nec­es­sary to suc­cess­ful adaptation.

Ours has been an engi­neer­ing age, an age of manip­u­lat­ing both the non-human envi­ron­ment and oth­er peo­ple. The val­ues of still­ness, reflec­tion, obser­va­tion, are rarely taught, prac­ticed, or reward­ed. As so often seems the case with addic­tion, the very manip­u­la­tive behav­iors by which we imag­ine escap­ing our plight serve only to wors­en it. At least at the meta-lev­el, our deter­mi­na­tion to “do some­thing” about our addic­tion, may be incom­pat­i­ble with observ­ing it, and thus address­ing the ques­tion of “why” in less mech­a­nis­tic terms.

Addic­tive behav­ior might as well be viewed as the absence of some alter­na­tive way of being. Locked as we are into old ways, we fail to even con­cep­tu­al­ize the alter­na­tive. Addic­tion thus might be explained more in terms of what we have yet to imag­ine and become, rather than in terms of what we are. Inter­nal con­scious­ness, rather than exter­nal­ly vis­i­ble behav­ior, may be the neglect­ed sub­strate with which we nour­ish addic­tion. Learn­ing to observe our men­tal process­es, and to assess them in the light of our objec­tives, may be a first step in aban­don­ing addiction.

Most tra­di­tion­al approach­es to addic­tion have proven only mar­gin­al­ly effec­tive. Wholis­tic tech­niques, usu­al­ly includ­ing a peri­od of res­i­den­tial treat­ment in a care­ful­ly con­trolled envi­ron­ment with inten­sive prac­tice of alter­na­tive behav­iors, fol­lowed by a care­ful tran­si­tion to a less cir­cum­scribed sit­u­a­tion where ongo­ing mon­i­tor­ing remains an impor­tant ele­ment, seem more promising.

We can restruc­ture our own lives in anal­o­gous ways, using a pat­tern of obser­va­tion, eval­u­a­tion, and plan­ning repeat­ed over and over, to approx­i­mate ever more close­ly the vision of health­ful self that we carry.

As ecol­o­gists, we deal with organ­ism and envi­ron­ment in their entire­ty. We address indi­vid­ual, soci­ety, and non-human envi­ron­ment. All of us are to vary­ing degrees free to move, or to alter the envi­ron­ment in which we remain. Though per­ma­nent­ly relat­ed to fam­i­ly, we may choose friends on the basis of shared val­ues. While stuck with our genes, we can alter much that we have become through expe­ri­ence. These are our choices.

For some time many of us in the Unit­ed States have car­ried, in fact cel­e­brat­ed, an ide­ol­o­gy of progress, root­ed in the notions that we know what we’re doing, that we’re hap­pi­er than ever, and that more of the same deter­mined alter­ation of the envi­ron­ment will pave the way to heav­en on earth. This belief, in fact all belief, may be our most debil­i­tat­ing addic­tion. If this be the case, then an eco­log­i­cal approach to liv­ing, robust­ly skep­ti­cal, ratio­nal, and empir­i­cal, may be a path to recovery.