Addiction: The Analgesic Experience - The Total Experience of an Addict

Written by Stanton Peele

Page 3 of 5

One other insight points up how the total experience of an addict includes more than the physiological effects of a given drug. I have found, in questioning addicts, that many of them would not accept a substitute for heroin that could not be injected. Nor would they like to see heroin legalized, if this meant eliminating injection procedures. For these addicts, the ritual associated with heroin use was a crucial part of the drug experience. The surreptitious ceremonies of drug use (which are most apparent with hypodermic injection) contribute to the repetition, sureness of effect, and protection from change and novelty that the addict seeks from the drug itself. Thus a finding that first appeared in a study conducted by A. B. Light and E. G. Torrance in 1929 and that has continued to puzzle researchers becomes understandable. Addicts in this early study had their withdrawal relieved by the injection of sterile water and in some cases by the simple pricking of their skin by a needle—called a "dry" injection.

Personality, setting, and social and cultural factors are not merely the scenery of addiction; they are parts of it. Studies have shown that they influence how people respond to a drug, what rewards they find in the experience, and what consequences removal of the drug from the system has.

First, consider personality. Much research on heroin addiction has been muddled by the failure to distinguish between addicts and controlled users. An addict in Chein's study said of his first shot of heroin, "I got real sleepy. I went in to lay on the bed.... I thought, this is for me ! And I never missed a day since, until now." But not everyone responds so totally to the experience of heroin. A person who does is one whose personal outlook welcomes oblivion.

We have already seen what personality characteristics Chein found in ghetto heroin addicts. Richard Lindblad of the National Institute on Drug Abuse noted the same general traits in middle-class addicts. At the other extreme there are people who prove almost entirely resistant to addiction. Take the case of Ron LeFlore, the ex-convict who became a major-league baseball player. LeFlore began taking heroin when he was 15, and he used it every day—both snorting and injecting it—for nine months before he went to prison. He expected to experience withdrawal in prison, but he felt nothing.

LeFlore tries to explain his reaction by the fact that his mother always provided him with good meals at home. This is hardly a scientific explanation for the absence of withdrawal, but it suggests that a nurturing home environment—even in the middle of the worst ghetto in Detroit—gave LeFlore a strong self concept, tremendous energy, and the kind of self-respect that prevented him from destroying his body and his life. Even in his life of crime, LeFlore was an innovative and daring thief. And in the penitentiary he accumulated $5,000 through various extracurricular activities. When LeFlore was in solitary confinement for three and a half months, he began doing sit-ups and push-ups until he was doing 400 of each daily. LeFlore claims never to have played baseball before entering prison, and yet he developed so well as a baseball player there that he was able to try out with the Tigers. Shortly thereafter he joined the team as its starting center fielder.

LeFlore exemplifies the kind of personality for which continual drug use does not imply addiction. A group of recent studies has found that such controlled use of narcotics is common. Norman Zinberg has discovered many middle-class controlled users, and Irving Lukoff, working in Brooklyn ghettos, has found that heroin users are better off economically and socially than was previously believed. Such studies suggest that there are more self-regulated users of narcotics than addicted users.

Quite apart from the personality of the user, it is hard to make sense of the effects of drugs on people without taking into account the influence of their immediate social group. In the 1950s sociologist Howard Becker found that marijuana smokers learn how to react to that drug—and to interpret the experience as pleasurable—from the group members who initiate them. Norman Zinberg has shown this to be true of heroin. Besides studying hospital patients and Daytop Village interns, he investigated American GIs who used heroin in Asia. He found that the nature and degree of withdrawal was similar within military units but varied widely from unit to unit.

As in small groups, so in large ones, and nothing defies a simple pharmacological view of addiction so much as variations in the abuse and effects of drugs from culture to culture and over a period of time in the same culture. For example, today the heads of the federal government's bureaus on both alcoholism and drug abuse claim that we are in a period of epidemic alcohol abuse by young Americans. The range of cultural responses to opiates has been apparent since the l9th Century, when Chinese society was subverted by the opium imported by the British. At that time other opium-using countries, such as India, suffered no such disasters. These and similar historical findings have caused Richard Blum and his associates at Stanford University to deduce that when a drug is introduced from outside a culture, especially by a conquering or dominating culture that somehow subverts indigenous social values, the substance is likely to be widely abused. In such cases the experience associated with the drug is seen as having tremendous power and as symbolizing escape.