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

Written by Stanton Peele

The dulling of sensibility, the soothing feeling that all is well, is a powerful experience for some people, and it may be that few of us are entirely immune to its appeal. Those who depend totally on such an experience do so because it gives their lives a structure and secures them, at least subjectively, against the press of what is novel and demanding. This is what they are addicted to. In addition, since heroin diminishes mental and physical performance, it reduces the habituated user's ability to cope with his world. In other words, while he is involved with the drug and feeling relief from his problems, he is even less able to deal with these problems, and thereby becomes less prepared to confront them than he was before. So naturally, when he is deprived of the sensations which the drug provides, he feels inwardly threatened and disoriented, which exacerbates his reactions to the physical symptoms that removal from a course of drugs invariably produces. This is the extremity of withdrawal that is sometimes noted among heroin addicts.

The hallucinogens, such as peyote and LSD, are not generally addictive. It is possible, however, for an individual's self-image to become based upon notions of special perception and intensified experience that the regular use of hallucinogens encourages. In this occasional case, the person will be dependent on a hallucinogen for his feelings that he has a secure place in the world, will seek the drug out regularly, and will be correspondingly traumatized when he is deprived of it.

Marijuana, as both a mild hallucinogen and sedative, can be used addictively, although such use is less common now that the drug is generally accepted. But with the stimulants—nicotine, caffeine, amphetamines, cocaine—we do find widespread addiction in our society, and the parallel with the depressants is striking. Paradoxically, the excitation of the nervous system by a stimulant drug serves to shield the habituated user from the emotional impact of external events. Thus the stimulant taker cloaks the tension that dealing with his environment causes him, and imposes an overriding constancy of sensation in its place. In a study of "Chronic Smoking and Emotionality," Paul Nesbitt found that while cigarette smokers are more anxious than nonsmokers, they feel more calm when they are smoking. With the constant elevation of their heart rate, blood pressure, cardiac output, and blood sugar level, they are inured to variations in outside stimulation. Here, as with the depressants (but not hallucinogens), an artificial sameness is the keynote of the addictive experience.

The primary action of a stimulant is to give a person the illusion of being energized through the freeing of stored energy for immediate use. Since that energy is not being replaced, the chronic stimulant taker is living on borrowed energy. Like the heroin user, he is doing nothing to build up his basic resources. His true physical or emotional state is hidden from him by the artificial boosts he gets from the drug. If he is withdrawn from the drug, he experiences all at once his actual, now very depleted condition, and he feels wrecked. Again, as with heroin, addiction is not an unrelated side effect, but stems from the intrinsic action of the drug.

People imagine that heroin soothes, and it also addicts; that nicotine or caffeine energizes, and it also keeps you coming back for more. That misconception, which separates what in reality are two sides of the same thing, lies behind the futile search for a nonaddictive pain-killer. Addiction is not a mysterious chemical process; it is the logical outgrowth of the way a drug makes a person feel. When we understand this, we can see how natural (though unhealthy) a process it is (see Appendix G). A person repeatedly seeks artificial infusions of a sensation, whether it be one of somnolence or vitality, that is not supplied by the organic balance of his life as a whole. Such infusions insulate him from the fact that the world he perceives psychologically is becoming farther and farther removed from the real state of his body or his life. When the dosages are stopped, the addict is made painfully aware of the discrepancy, which he must now negotiate unprotected. This is addiction, whether it be a socially approved addiction or an addiction whose consequences are aggravated by social disapproval.

The insight that both stimulants and depressants have aftereffects which destroy the immediate sensations they offer is the starting point for a comprehensive theory of motivation proposed by the psychologists Richard Solomon and John Corbit. Their approach explains drug addiction as just one of a set of basic human reactions. According to Solomon and Corbit, most sensations are followed by an opposite aftereffect. If the original sensation is unpleasant, the aftereffect is pleasant, as in the relief one feels when pain lets up. With repeated exposures the aftereffect grows in intensity, until it is dominant almost from the outset, neutralizing even the immediate effect of the stimulus. For example, the novice parachute jumper begins his first jump in terror. When it is over, he is too stunned to feel much positive relief. As he becomes practiced at jumping, however, he makes his preparations with a tense alertness which he no longer experiences as agony. After jumping, he is overwhelmed with exhilaration. This is how a positive aftereffect overcomes initially negative stimulation.

Using this model, Solomon and Corbit demonstrate a fundamental similarity between opiate addiction and love. In both cases, a person repeatedly seeks out a kind of stimulation which is intensely pleasurable. But as time goes on, he finds that he needs it more even as he enjoys it less. The heroin addict gets less and less of a positive kick from the drug, yet he must return to it to counteract the insistent pain caused by its absence. The lover is no longer so excited by his or her partner, but is more and more dependent on the comfort of the partner's continued presence, and is less able to handle a separation. Here the negative aftereffect overcomes initially positive stimulation.

Solomon and Corbit's "opponent-process" theory is a creative demonstration that addiction is not a special reaction to a drug, but a primary and universal form of motivation. The theory, however, does not really explain the psychology of addiction. In its abstractness it doesn't explore the cultural and personality factors—the when, where, and why—in addiction. What accounts for the differences in human consciousness that enable some people to act on the basis of a larger and more varied set of motivations, while others have their entire lives determined by the mechanistic effects of the opponent process? After all, not everyone becomes mired down in a once positive experience which has gone sour. Thus, this model doesn't deal with what sets some drug users apart from other drug users, some lovers from other lovers—i.e., the addict from the person who is not addicted. It doesn't leave room, for example, for a kind of love relationship that counteracts encroaching boredom by constantly introducing challenge and growth into the relationship. These latter factors make the difference between experiences which are not addictions and those which are. To identify these essential differences in human involvements, we must consider the nature of the addict's personality and outlook.