Love and Addiction - 2. What Addiction Is, and What It Has to Do with Drugs - What Addiction Has to Do with Drugs?

Written by Stanton Peele

Lawrence Kolb, in Livingston's Narcotic Drug Addiction Problems, and John Clausen, in Merton and Nisbet's Contemporary Social Problems, have recounted the destructive consequences of this policy, consequences which are still with us today. The Supreme Court gave a controversial, prohibitionist interpretation to the Harrison Act of 1914, which originally had provided only for the taxation and registration of persons handling drugs. This decision was part of a decisive shift in popular opinion by which the regulation of narcotics use was taken out of the hands of the individual addict and his physician and given over to the government. The major impact of this move, in fact, was to make the criminal underworld the agency largely responsible for the propagation of drugs and drug habits in the United States. In England, where the medical community has retained control over opiate distribution and the maintenance of addicts, addiction has been a mild phenomenon, with the number of addicts remaining constant at a few thousand. Addiction there has also been largely unconnected with crime, and most of the addicts lead stable, middle-class lives.

One important effect of the official war against narcotics carried out in America was to banish the opiates from respectable society and consign them to the lower class. The image that was created of the heroin addict as an uncontrolled, criminal degenerate made it difficult for middle-class people to become involved with the drug. As the heroin user was made into a social outcast, public disgust influenced his own conception of himself and his habit. Before 1914, opiate takers had been mainstream Americans; now addicts are concentrated in various minority groups, especially blacks. Meanwhile, society has provided the middle class with different addictions—some representing social and institutional attachments, others merely consisting of dependencies on different drugs. For example, the "bored housewife" syndrome created many opiate users in the nineteenth century out of women who no longer had an energetic role to play at home or in independent family enterprises. Today these women drink or take tranquilizers. Nothing is more indicative of the unresolved problem of addiction than the wistful search for a nonaddicting anodyne. Since the advent of morphine, we have welcomed hypodermic injections, heroin, the barbiturates, Demerol, methadone, and various sedatives as offering the chance to escape pain without causing us to become addicted. But the more effective at its purpose each drug has been, the more clearly its addictiveness has been established.

The persistence of our addictive susceptibilities is also evident in our conflicting and irrational attitudes toward other popular drugs. Alcohol, like opium a depressant drug with soothing effects, has been regarded with ambivalence in this country, even though a longer familiarity has prevented reactions quite as extreme as the sort opium aroused. Throughout the period from 1850 to 1933, attempts at prohibition of alcohol were repeatedly made at the local, state, and national levels. Today, alcoholism is considered our largest-scale drug problem. Explaining the reasons for alcohol misuse, David McClelland and his colleagues discovered in The Drinking Man that heavy, uncontrolled drinking occurs in cultures which explicitly value personal assertiveness while at the same time suppressing its expression. This conflict, which alcohol eases by offering its users the illusion of power, is precisely the conflict which gripped America during the period when opiate use grew and was outlawed, and when our society had such a hard time deciding what to do about alcohol.

Another instructive example is marijuana. As long as this drug was novel and threatening and was associated with deviant minorities, it was defined as "addictive" and classed as a narcotic. That definition was accepted not only by the authorities, but by those who used the drug, as in the Harlem of the 1940s evoked in Malcolm X's autobiography. In recent years, however, middle-class whites have discovered that marijuana is a relatively safe experience. Although we still get sporadic, alarmist reports on one or another harmful aspect of marijuana, respected organs of society are now calling for the decriminalization of the drug. We are near the end of a process of cultural acceptance of marijuana. Students and young professionals, many of whom lead very staid lives, have become comfortable with it, while still feeling sure that people who take heroin become addicted. They do not realize they are engaging in the cultural stereotyping which currently is removing marijuana from the locked "dope" cabinet and placing it on an open shelf alongside alcohol, tranquilizers, nicotine, and caffeine.

A more potent hallucinogen than marijuana, LSD has aroused the intense aversion reserved for strong drugs like heroin, even though it has never been regarded as addictive. Before it became both popular and controversial in the 1960s, LSD was used in medical research as an experimental means of inducing temporary psychosis. In 1960, while the drug was still known only to a few doctors and psychologists, Sidney Cohen surveyed these researchers on the incidence of serious complications from LSD use among experimental volunteers and psychiatric patients. The rate of such complications (suicide attempts and prolonged psychotic reactions) was minuscule. It seems that without prior public knowledge, long-term LSD effects were about as minor as those resulting from the use of any other psychoactive drug.

Since then, however, anti-LSD propaganda and rumors spread by people in and around the drug-using subculture have made it impossible for observers and potential users to assess the drug's properties objectively. Even users can no longer give us an unbiased picture of what their trips have been like, since their experiences with LSD are governed by their own group's preconceptions, as well as by a larger cultural set defining the drug as dangerous and unpredictable. Now that people have been taught to fear the worst, they are ready to panic when a trip takes a bad turn. An entirely new dimension has been added to the LSD trip by the evolution of cultural perspectives on that drug.

As the psychological consequences of LSD use began to look more threatening, the majority of people—even among those who considered themselves in the cultural vanguard—became reluctant to expose themselves to the self-revelations that an LSD trip entailed. This is understandable, but the way they opted out was by sanctifying an entirely fallacious report of the effects of LSD use. The study, published by Maimon Cohen and others in Science in 1967, stated that LSD caused an increased breakage rate in human chromosomes, and thus raised the specter of genetic mutations and birth defects. The newspapers seized upon these findings, and the chromosome scare had a great impact within the drug scene. In fact, though, the study began to be refuted almost as soon as it was published, and it was eventually discredited. A review of LSD research by Norman Dishotsky and others which was published in Science four years later showed that Cohen's findings were an artifact of laboratory conditions, and concluded that there was no reason to fear LSD on the grounds originally put forward—or at least no more reason to fear LSD than aspirin and caffeine, which caused chromosome breakage at approximately the same rate under the same conditions (see Appendix E).

It is unlikely that a chromosome scare would induce many users of aspirin, coffee, or Coca-Cola to give up those drugs. But the users and potential users of LSD turned away from it almost in relief. To this day, many people who refuse to have anything to do with LSD justify their position by citing that now-invalidated piece of research. This could happen, even among drug-sophisticated young people, because LSD doesn't fit into a comfort-seeking approach to drugs. People who didn't want to admit that this was why they were avoiding the drug were handed a convenient rationalization by the selective reports that newspapers printed, reports which didn't reflect the body of scientific knowledge about LSD. Turning down experimental psychic journeys (which it was their privilege to do), these people found it necessary to defend their reluctance with spurious testimony.