The Meaning of Addiction - 1. The Concept of Addiction - The Science of Addictive Experiences

Written by Stanton Peele

The Science of Addictive Experiences

What has held science back from acknowledging commonalities in addiction and what now impedes our ability to analyze these is a habit of thought that separates the action of the mind and the body. Furthermore, it is for concrete physical entities and processes that the label of science is usually reserved (Peele 1983e). The mind-body duality (which long antedates current debates about drugs and addiction) has hidden the fact that addiction has always been defined phenomenologically in terms of the experiences of the sentient human being and observations of the person's feelings and behavior. Addiction may occur with any potent experience. In addition, the number and variability of the factors that influence addiction cause it to occur along a continuum. The delineation of a particular involvement as addictive for a particular person thus entails a degree of arbitrariness. Yet this designation is a useful one. It is far superior to the relabeling of addictive phenomena in some roundabout way.

Addiction, at its extreme, is an overwhelming pathological involvement. The object of addiction is the addicted person's experience of the combined physical, emotional, and environmental elements that make up the involvement for that person. Addiction is often characterized by a traumatic withdrawal reaction to the deprivation of this state or experience. Tolerance—or the increasingly high level of need for the experience—and craving are measured by how willing the person is to sacrifice other rewards or sources of well-being in life to the pursuit of the involvement. The key to addiction, seen in this light, is its persistence in the face of harmful consequences for the individual. This book embraces rather than evades the complicated and multifactorial nature of addiction. Only by accepting this complexity is it possible to put together a meaningful picture of addiction, to say something useful about drug use as well as about other compulsions, and to comprehend the ways in which people hurt themselves through their own behavior as well as grow beyond self-destructive involvements.

	Drug	Medical Use	Dependence		Tolerance
			Physical	Psychic
1	Hallucinogenic cactus (mescalin, peyote)	None	No	Yes	Yes
2	Hallucinogenic mushrooms (psilocybin)	None	No	Yes	Yes
3	Cocaine (from coca bush)	Anaesthesia	No	Yes	No
	Amphetamines* (synthetic, not derived from coca)	Treatment of narcolepsy and behavioral disorders	No	Yes	Yes
4	Alcohol (in many forms)	Antisepsis	Yes	Yes	Yes
5	Cannabis (marijuana, hashish)	None in modern medicine	Little if any	Yes	Little if any
6	Narcotics (opium, heroin, morphine, codeine)	Relief of pain and cough	Yes	Yes	Yes
7	LSD (synthetic, derived from fungus on grain)	Essentially none	No	Yes	Yes
8	Hallucinogenic morning glory seeds	None	No	Yes	Uncertain
*Taken intravenously, cocaine and amphetamine have quite similar effects. Source: Cameron 1971b. With acknowledgments to World Health.