Love and Addiction - 3. A General Theory of Addiction - Signs of Addiction

Written by Stanton Peele

A further, and related, sign of addiction is that an exclusive craving for something is accompanied by a loss of discrimination toward the object which satisfies the craving. In the early stages of an addict's relationship to a substance, he may desire a specific quality in the experience it gives him. He hopes for a certain reaction and, if it is not forthcoming, he is dissatisfied. But after a certain point, the addict cannot distinguish between a good or a bad version of that experience. All he cares about is that he wants it and that he gets it. The alcoholic is not interested in the taste of the liquor that is available; likewise, the compulsive eater is not particular about what he eats when there is food around. The difference between the heroin addict and the controlled user is the ability to discriminate among conditions for taking the drug. Zinberg and Jacobson found that the controlled drug user weighs a number of pragmatic considerations—how much the drug costs, how good the supply is, whether the assembled company is appealing, what else he might do with his time—before indulging on any given occasion. Such choices are not open to an addict.

Since it is only the repetition of the basic experience for which the addict yearns, he is unaware of variations in his environment—even in the addictive sensation itself—as long as certain key stimuli are always present. This phenomenon is observable in those who use heroin, LSD, marijuana, speed, or cocaine. While light, irregular, or novice users are very dependent on situational cues to set the mood for the enjoyment of their trips, the heavy user or the addict disregards these variables almost entirely. This, and all our criteria, are applicable to addicts in other areas of life, including love addicts.

Groups and the Private World

Addiction, since it avoids reality, amounts to the substitution of a private standard of meaning and value for publicly accepted standards. It is natural to bolster this alienated worldview by sharing it with others; in fact, it is often learned from others in the first place. Understanding the process by which groups coalesce around obsessive, exclusive activities and systems of belief is an important step in exploring how groups, including couples, can themselves comprise an addiction. By looking at the ways in which groups of addicts construct their own worlds, we gain essential insights into the social aspects of addiction, and—what directly follows from this—social addictions.

Howard Becker observed groups of marijuana users in the fifties showing new members how to smoke marijuana and how to interpret its effect. What they were also showing them was how to be part of the group. The initiates were teaching the experience which made the group distinctive—the marijuana high—and why this distinctive experience was pleasurable, and therefore good. The group was engaged in the process of defining itself, and of creating an internal set of values separate from those of the world at large. In this way, miniature societies are formed by people who share a set of values relating to something which they have in common, but which people generally do not accept. That something can be the use of a particular drug, a fanatical religious or political belief, or the pursuit of esoteric knowledge. The same thing happens when a discipline becomes so abstract that its human relevance is lost in the interchange of secrets among experts. There is no desire to influence the course of events outside of the group setting, except to draw new devotees into its boundaries. This happens regularly with such self-contained mental systems as chess, bridge, and horse-race handicapping. Activities like bridge are addictions for so many people because in them the elements of group ritual and private language, the bases of group addictions, are so strong.

To understand these separate worlds, consider a group organized around its members' involvement with a drug, such as heroin, or marijuana when it was a disapproved and deviant activity. The members agree that it is right to use the drug, both because of the way it makes one feel and because of the difficulty or unattractiveness of being a total participant in the regular world, i.e., of being a "straight." In the "hip" subculture of the drug user, this attitude constitutes a conscious ideology of superiority to the straight world. Such groups, like the hipsters Norman Mailer wrote about in "The White Negro," or the delinquent addicts that Chein studied, feel both disdain and fear toward the mainstream of society. When someone becomes a part of that group, accepting its distinct values and associating exclusively with the people in it, he becomes "in"—a part of that subculture—and cuts himself off from those outside it.

Addicts need to evolve their own societies because, having devoted themselves entirely to their shared addictions, they must turn to each other to gain approval for behavior that the larger society despises. Always fearful of and alienated by broader standards, these individuals can now be accepted in terms of internal group standards that they find easier to meet. At the same time, their alienation increases, so that they become more insecure in the face of the outside world's values. When they are exposed to these attitudes, they reject them as irrelevant, and return to their circumscribed existence with a strengthened allegiance. Thus, with the group as well as with the drug, the addict goes through a spiral of growing dependency.

The behavior of people who are under the influence of a drug is explicable only to those who are likewise intoxicated. Even in their own eyes, their behavior only makes sense when they are in that condition. After a person has been drunk, he may say, "I can't believe I did all that." In order to be able to accept his behavior, or to forget that he had appeared so foolish, he feels that he has to reenter the intoxicated state. This discontinuity between ordinary reality and the addicts' reality makes each the negation of the other. To participate in one is to reject the other. Thus, when someone quits a private world, the break is likely to be a sharp one, as when an alcoholic swears off drinking or seeing his old drinking friends ever again, or when political or religious extremists turn into violent opponents of the ideologies they once held.