Stanton and Archie Brodsky wrote this piece in 1976 for the Addiction Research Foundation publication (now defunct), Addictions, which was subsequently reprinted by the recovery publishing house, Hazelden! Building on their approach in Love and Addiction, Stanton and Archie analyze how addiction, rather than being an aberration, grows from the well-springs of modern existence. Their views are in many ways prophetic of developments in the quarter century since. Consider that Freda Martin, an adviser to the Invest in Kids Foundation, said about a parenting survey in Canada in March of this year, "Never in the history of civilization have we had so much scientific information about how a child's brain develops. And never have our young people been so isolated from their families, so bereft of practical experience and practical wisdom."

Addictions (Addiction Research Foundation of Ontario), Winter 1976, pp. 2-21; reprinted as Hazelden pamphlet, Center City, MN, 1977
© Stanton Peele & Archie Brodsky, all rights reserved

Stanton Peele and Archie Brodsky
Morristown, New Jersey

Introduction

Early in 1972 the New York Times ran a feature article on a growing phenomenon of the youth culture: the religious commune. The article told of the Children of God, a sect with 50 "colonies" around the country where members lived in absolute devotion to God and each other and in absolute disdain for all worldly things. A year later the Times added a new wrinkle to the story. A black Californian named Ted Patrick was hiring himself out as a kidnapper to help parents reclaim their children (many of them legally adults) from the Children of God and other extreme sects. Together, Patrick and the parents would abduct a youth and subject him (or her) to a marathon "deprogramming" session in a motel room, where, with the help of Bible experts, they sought to undo the "brainwashing" the youth had received by showing him that the commune's ideology was a perversion of true Christianity. How did the young people respond? Some resisted abduction or escaped from the motel, and a few filed assault charges against Patrick. Others accepted the new indoctrination and turned violently against the religious groups to which they had just recently dedicated their entire lives.

This story speaks poignantly of a serious dislocation in our society. What could make parents feel so desperate about their grown children as to resort to a stranger's forcible intercession to resolve a split within the family? Why do both the young and their parents show such extreme and unstable reactions? We believe that the best way to come to grips with such anomalies is through an understanding of our society's addictive patterns of life.

At first sight, this may seem a strange juxtaposition. What does addiction have to do with religious communes, or religious communes with addiction? Well, we can start with Marx's famous dictum that religion is "the opiate of the people." But to understand the implications of what Marx was saying, we have to go beyond his purely metaphorical use of the term "opiate" and take a closer look at the real nature of opiate addiction, or any addiction. When we do, we find that addiction has equally to do not only with opiates and religious communes, but with obesity, early marriage, the PhD rat race, and the animal population explosion in crowded city neighborhoods.

Debunking "Drug Addiction"

Recent research on the effects of drugs points us toward the conclusion that addiction is something very different from what we have thought it to be. To begin with, there is no necessary connection between addiction and drugs, or, more especially, the opiates (opium, heroin, and morphine). More precisely, addiction has little to do with what drugs contain, although it has a lot to do with what we think drugs can do to us. People often react physically to a placebo—a chemically neutral substance that is presented as being, say, morphine or some powerful medication—just as though it were the real thing. Psychological studies have shown that the way people react to drugs in general is as much a function of their cultural background, expectations, and emotional involvement in the situation as of the chemistry of the drug.

There are no drugs of which this is more true than the ones we think of as the universal addicters, the opiates. Ten years ago Isidor Chein's The Road to H gave us a glimpse into the Byzantine social structure of the ghettos of New York, where some adolescents use heroin without becoming addicted while others do not use heroin in quantities sufficient to explain their ritualized "addict" behavior. More recently, Dr. Norman Zinberg of the Harvard Medical School has observed that surgical patients who have been given morphine in dosages and frequencies heretofore considered sufficient to addict do not, by and large, feel a craving for the drug after their pain has abated. A milestone in this growing enlightenment is a U.S. defense department report released in the spring of 1973, which reports that of all the U.S. servicemen in Vietnam who experimented with heroin, even to the point of apparent dependency, very few have taken up the drug again once they returned to the United States, where presumably they have had better things to do.

Noting that ghetto blacks persist in heroin habits even when the quality of the available drug is so poor that physiological reactions are minimized, Chein describes the addict's dependence in the following terms:

From almost his earliest days, the addict has been systematically educated and trained into incompetence. Unlike others, therefore, he could not find a vocation, a career, a meaningful, sustained activity around which he could, so to say, wrap his life. The addiction, however, offers an answer to even this problem of emptiness. The life of an addict constitutes a vocation—hustling, raising funds, assuring a connection and the maintenance of supply, outmaneuvering the police, performing the rituals of preparing and of taking the drug—a vocation around which the addict can build a reasonably full life.

What Chein fails to note is that this process of self-definition as an addict, and the need for heroin that develops in conjunction with it, is addiction.

On the other hand, what Vietnam veterans have in common with hospital patients being given morphine is that they do not think of themselves as drug addicts or even drug users under normal circumstances. Clearly, questions of self-image and self-esteem are crucial in determining whether a person is susceptible to addiction. The category of drug is not so crucial, as present-day observers are learning. It is commonplace nowadays for government officials to warn of the dangerous addicting effects of barbiturates. In the recent Consumers Union manual, Licit and Illicit Drugs, cigarette smoking is treated as a habit in exactly the same sense as an opium "habit." And in Love and Addiction, we make the case that the same motivational and behavior patterns occur when one is addicted to another person as when one is addicted to a drug.