Diseasing of America - 6. What Is Addiction, and How Do People Get It? - Addicts Who Never Outgrow Their Addictions

Written by Stanton Peele

Obviously, beliefs affect all the behaviors that we call addictions in the same way that they affect drinking. Charles Winick is the sociologist who first described the phenomenon of "maturing out"—or natural remission—of heroin addiction. Indeed, Winick discovered, maturing out of addiction is more typical than not even on the harsh streets of New York City. Winick did note, however, that a minority of addicts never outgrow their addictions. These addicts, Winick observed, are those "who decide they are 'hooked,' make no effort to abandon addiction, and give in to what they regard as inevitable."[37] In other words, the readier people are to decide that their behavior is a symptom of an irreversible addictive disease, the more readily they fall into a disease state. For example, we will have more bulimia now that bulimia has been discovered, labeled, and promulgated as a disease.

Treatment in particular has a powerful influence on people's beliefs about addiction and themselves. And, as we have noted in the case of baseball players and others, this impact is not invariably positive. In their study of Vietnam veterans, for example, Robins and her colleagues offered a surprising glimpse of the world of addicts who did not seek treatment, including the remarkable ability to resist addiction even after having slipped back to using heroin for a time. Anxious about what they found, the researchers concluded their report with the following paragraph:

Certainly our results are different from what we expected in a number of ways. It is uncomfortable presenting results that differ so much from clinical experience with addicts in treatment. But one should not too readily assume that differences are entirely due to our special sample. After all, when veterans used heroin in the United States two to three years after Vietnam, only one in six came to treatment.[38]

If they had looked only at addicts in treatment, the researchers would have had a very different view of addictive habits and of remission (or cure) than they developed from looking at the large majority who eschewed treatment. The nontreated even had better outcomes in the Vietnam study: "Of those men who were addicted in the first year back, half were treated and half were not.... Of those treated, 47 percent were addicted in the second period; of those not treated, 17 percent were addicted." Robins and her colleagues pointed out that treatment was sometimes helpful and that the addicts who were treated had usually been addicted longer. "What we can conclude, however, is that treatment is certainly not always necessary for remission."[39]

Although we in the United States spend considerable effort in the strange feat of convincing ourselves that we cannot control the activities so many of us choose to become involved with, the good news is that very few people accept all of this propaganda. As yet, apparently, not everyone believes they can't quit smoking or lose weight without a doctor's directions, or that—if they want to revamp their finances—they need to join a group that regards their overspending as an addiction. The reason disease beliefs are not more generally held is that so many people have personal experiences that contradict disease claims and people tend to believe their own experience rather than disease advertisements.

For example, while every public announcement about cocaine, or marijuana, or adolescent drinking is of negative, compulsive, self-destructive behavior, most people control their use of these substances, and most of the rest figure out that they need to cut back or quit on their own. Most of us between the ages of thirty-five and forty-five know scores of people who took a lot of drugs in college or high school but who are now accountants and lawyers and who are worrying about whether they can afford to send their kids to college. Let us now turn to the numerous examples that are available of people who have changed significant habits in their lives. Indeed, just as we may all consider that we have an addiction—whatever that means to us—we can all probably equally well reflect on how we overcame an addiction, sometimes without even consciously planning to do so, sometimes through concerted individual efforts, but in either case relying on ourselves and those around us rather than on the professional cadre of helpers who have appointed themselves our saviors.

next: How Do I Get My Boyfriend to Quit Drugs / Drinking
~ addictions library articles
~ all addictions articles