In this chapter of Diseasing, Stanton lays out the basic causes, dynamics, and cultural dimensions of addiction. Among other things, he explains why every pain-killing drug is found to be addictive, why addiction is not a chemical side-effect of drugs, why gambling is more addictive than narcotics, why some people — and their friends and relations — do so many bad things, and why our current focus on addiction is actually increasing its incidence.

Order the book

In: Peele, S. (1989, 1995), Diseasing of America: How we allowed recovery zealots and the treatment industry to convince us we are out of control. Lexington, MA/San Francisco: Lexington Books/Jossey-Bass.

Stanton Peele

WHILE individual practitioners and recovering addicts—and the whole addiction movement—may believe they are helping people, they succeed principally at expanding their industry by finding more addicts and new types of addictions to treat. I too have argued—in books from Love and Addiction to The Meaning of Addiction—that addiction can take place with any human activity. Addiction is not, however, something people are born with. Nor is it a biological imperative, one that means the addicted individual is not able to consider or choose alternatives. The disease view of addiction is equally untrue when applied to gambling, compulsive sex, and everything else that it has been used to explain. Indeed, the fact that people become addicted to all these things proves that addiction is not caused by chemical or biological forces and that it is not a special disease state.

The Nature of Addiction

People seek specific, essential human experiences from their addictive involvement, no matter whether it is drinking, eating, smoking, loving, shopping, or gambling. People can come to depend on such an involvement for these experiences until—in the extreme—the involvement is totally consuming and potentially destructive. Addiction can occasionally veer into total abandonment, as well as periodic excesses and loss of control. Nonetheless, even in cases where addicts die from their excesses, an addiction must be understood as a human response that is motivated by the addict's desires and principles. All addictions accomplish something for the addict. They are ways of coping with feelings and situations with which addicts cannot otherwise cope. What is wrong with disease theories as science is that they are tautologies; they avoid the work of understanding why people drink or smoke in favor of simply declaring these activities to be addictions, as in the statement "he drinks so much because he's an alcoholic."

Addicts seek experiences that satisfy needs they cannot otherwise fulfill. Any addiction involves three components-the person, the situation or environment, and the addictive involvement or experience (see table 1). In addition to the individual, the situation, and the experience, we also need to consider the overall cultural and social factors that affect addiction in our society.

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