Addiction: The Analgesic Experience - How Can We Analyze Addiction to Cigarettes

Written by Stanton Peele

How can we analyze addiction to cigarettes and other stimulants in terms of an experience when that experience is not analgesic? The answer is that cigarettes free smokers from feelings of stress and internal discomfort just as heroin does, in a different way, for heroin addicts. Paul Nesbitt, a psychologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, reports that smokers are more tense than nonsmokers, and yet they feel less nervous while smoking. Similarly, habitual smokers show fewer reactions to stress if they smoke, yet nonsmokers do not show this effect. The person who becomes addicted to cigarettes (and other stimulants) apparently finds the rise in his heart rate, blood pressure, cardiac output, and blood-sugar level reassuring. This may be because the smoker becomes attuned to his internal arousal and is able to ignore the outside stimuli that normally make him tense.

Coffee addiction has a similar cycle. For the habitual coffee drinker, caffeine serves as a periodic energizer throughout the day. As the drug wears off, the person becomes aware of the fatigue and stress that the drug has masked. Since the person has not changed his inherent capacity to deal with the demands his day makes of him, the only way for him to regain his edge is to drink more coffee. In a culture where these drugs are not only legal but generally accepted, a person who values activity can become addicted to nicotine or caffeine and use them without fear of interruption.

As a final example of how the concept of addiction to an experience allows us to integrate several different levels of analysis, we can examine the alcohol experience. Using a combination of cross-cultural and experimental research, David McClelland and his colleagues at Harvard were able to relate individual predispositions toward alcoholism to cultural attitudes about drinking.

Alcoholism tends to be prevalent in cultures that emphasize the need for men to continually manifest their power but that offer few organized channels to achieve power. In this context, drinking increases the amount of "power imagery" that people generate. In the United States, men who drink excessively measure higher in the need for power than nondrinkers and are especially likely to fantasize about their dominance over others when they drink heavily. This sort of drinking and fantasizing is less likely to occur in those who actually wield socially accepted power.

From McClelland's research we can extrapolate a picture of the male alcohol addict that fits clinical experience and descriptive studies of alcoholism neatly. A male alcoholic may feel that it is the masculine thing to do to wield power, but he may be insecure about his actual capacity to do so. By drinking he soothes the anxiety produced by his feeling that he does not possess the power he should have. At the same time, he is more likely to behave antisocially—by fighting, by driving recklessly, or through boorish social behavior. This behavior is especially likely to be turned on spouses and children, whom the drinker has a particular need to dominate. When the person sobers up, he becomes ashamed of his actions and painfully aware of how powerless he is, for while he is intoxicated he is even less able to influence others constructively. Now his attitude becomes apologetic and self-abnegating. The way open to him to escape his further deprecated self-image is to become intoxicated again.

Thus the very way in which a person experiences alcohol's biochemical effects originates to a great extent in the beliefs of a culture. Where there are low rates of alcoholism, in Italy or Greece for example, drinking does not signify macho accomplishment and the transition from adolescence to adulthood. Rather than deadening frustration and providing an excuse for aggressive and illegal acts, the depression of inhibitory centers through alcohol lubricates cooperative social interactions at mealtimes and other structured social occasions. Such drinking does not fall into the addiction cycle.

We can now make some general observations about the nature of addiction. Addiction is clearly a process rather than a condition: It feeds on itself. We have also seen that addiction is multidimensional. This means that addiction is one end of a continuum. Since there is no single mechanism that sets off addiction, it cannot be viewed as an all-or-nothing state of being, one that is unambiguously present or absent. At its most extreme, in the skid-row bum or the almost legendary street addict, the person's entire life has been subjugated to one destructive involvement. Such cases are rare when compared with the total number of people who use alcohol, heroin, barbiturates, or tranquilizers. The concept of addiction is most apt when it applies to the extreme, but it has much to tell us about behavior all along the spectrum. Addiction is an extension of ordinary behavior—a pathological habit, dependence, or compulsion. Just how pathological or addictive that behavior is depends on its impact on a person's life. When an involvement eliminates choices in all areas of life, then an addiction has been formed.

We cannot say that a given drug is addictive, because addiction is not a peculiar characteristic of drugs. It is, more properly, a characteristic of the involvement that a person forms with a drug. The logical conclusion of this line of thought is that addiction is not limited to drugs.

Psychoactive chemicals are perhaps the most direct means for affecting a person's consciousness and state of being. But any activity that can absorb a person in such a way as to detract from the ability to carry through other involvements is potentially addictive. It is addictive when the experience eradicates a person's awareness; when it provides predictable gratification; when it is used not to gain pleasure but to avoid pain and unpleasantness; when it damages self-esteem; and when it destroys other involvements. When these conditions hold, the involvement will take over a person's life in an increasingly destructive cycle.

These criteria draw in all those factors—personal background, subjective sensations, cultural differences—that have been shown to affect the addiction process. They are also not restricted in any way to drug use. People familiar with compulsive involvements have come to believe that addiction is present in many activities. Experimental psychologist Richard Solomon has analyzed the ways in which sexual excitement can feed into the addictive cycle. Writer Marie Winn has marshaled extensive evidence to show that television viewing can be addictive. Chapters of Gamblers Anonymous deal with compulsive gamblers as addicts. And a number of observers have noted that compulsive eating exhibits all the signs of ritual, instantaneous gratification, cultural variation, and destruction of self-respect that characterize drug addiction.

Addiction is a universal phenomenon. It grows out of fundamental human motivations, with all the uncertainty and complexity that this implies. It is for these very reasons that—if we can comprehend it—the concept of addiction can illuminate wide areas of human behavior.

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For further information:

Addictive Diseases. Vol. 2. No. 2, 1975.

Blum, R. H., et. al., Society and Drugs / Social & Cultural Observations, Vol. 1. Jossey-Bass. 1969.

McClelland, D. C., et al., The Drinking Man. The Free Press, 1972.

Peele, Stanton, and Archie Brodsky. Love and Addiction. Taplinger Publishing Co., 1975.

Szasz, Thomas. Ceremonial Chemistry: The Ritual Persecution of Drugs, Addicts and Pushers. Doubleday, 1974.