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Page 8 of 11
Values
Although addicts are often impulsive or nervous or depressed and find that drugs relieve their emotional burdens, this does not mean that all people with these traits are addicts. Why not? Primarily because so many people, whether nervous or impulsive or not, refuse to use a lot of drugs or otherwise succumb to addiction. Consider a worried father who gets drunk at a party and feels tremendous relief from his tension. Will he start getting drunk after work? Far from it; when he comes home from the party, he sees his daughter sleeping, immediately sobers up, and plans to go to work the next morning so as to maintain the path he has selected as a family man, father, husband, and solid citizen.
The role of people's value-driven choices is ignored in descriptions of addiction. In the disease way of thinking, no human being is protected against the effects of drugs and alcohol—anybody is susceptible to addiction. But we find that practically all college students are disinclined to continue using amphetamines or cocaine or anything that gets in the way of their college careers. And hospital patients almost never use narcotics once they leave the hospital. The reasons that these and other people don't become drug addicts are all values issues—the people don't see themselves as addicts, don't wish to spend their lives pursuing and savoring the effects of drugs, and refuse to engage in certain behaviors that might endanger their family lives or careers. Without question, values are crucial in determining who becomes and remains addicted or who chooses not to do so.
Actually, most college students indicate that they find amphetamines and cocaine only mildly alluring in the first place, while patients often dislike the effects of the powerful narcotics they receive in the hospital. Really, many more people find eating, shopping, gambling, and sex to be extremely appealing than find drugs so. Yet although more people respond with intense pleasure to hot fudge sundaes and orgasms than to drinking or drug taking, only a small number of people pursue these activities without restraint. How do most people resist the allure of constant snacking and sexual indulgence? They don't want to get fat, die of heart attacks, or make fools of themselves; they do want to maintain their health, their families, their work lives, and their self-respect. Values such as these that prevent addiction play the largest role in addictive behaviors or their absence; yet they are almost totally ignored.
For example, a typical New York Times story about the addictive effects of crack describes an adolescent girl who, having run out of money at a crack house, stayed at the house (she didn't go to school or work) having sex with patrons to get more money for drugs. The point of this tale is ostensibly that crack causes people to sacrifice their moral values. Yet the story doesn't describe the effects of cocaine or crack—for which, after all, most people (including regular users) don't prostitute themselves. This simpleminded mislabeling of the sources of behavior (that taking drugs must be the reason she had sexual intercourse with strangers for money) passes for an analysis of drug effects and addiction in a reputable national news publication. Similarly, prominent spokespeople lecture us that cocaine is a drug with "neuropsychological properties" that "lock people into perpetual usage" so that the only way people can stop is when "supplies become unavailable," after which "the user is then driven to obtain additional cocaine without particular regard for social constraints." [30]
What, inadvertently, the New York Times story actually provides is a description of this girl's life and not of cocaine use. Some people do indeed choose to pursue drugs at the cost of other opportunities that do not mean as much to them—in this girl's case, learning, leading an orderly life, and self-respect. The absence of such values in people's lives and the conditions that attack these values—especially among young, ghettoized people—may be expanding. The environments and value options people face do have tremendous implications for drug use and drug addiction, as well as for teen pregnancy and other social disabilities and problems. But we will never remedy either these conditions or these problems by considering them as the results of drug use or as drug problems.
Life Situations
Although I have presented information that some people form addictive relationships in many different areas of their lives, I don't endorse the idea that people are permanently saddled with addictive personalities. This can never account for the fact that so many people—most people—outgrow their addictions. For example, problem drinkers as a group are younger drinkers. That is, the majority of both men and women outgrow their drinking problems as they grow up and become engaged in adult roles and real-world rewards, like job and family. Even most younger adults with antisocial tendencies learn to regulate their lives to bring about some order and security. No researcher who studies drug use throughout the life span can fail to be impressed that, in the words of one such researcher, "problem drinking tends to be self-correcting and [to] reverse well short of clinical syndromes of alcoholism."[31]
What about those who do not reverse their problem drinking or drug use and who become full-blown alcoholics or addicts? In the first place, these are most often people with the fewest outside successes and resources for getting better—in the words of George Vaillant, they don't have enough to lose if they don't overcome alcoholism. For these people, less success at work, family, and personal resolutions feeds into greater retreat into alcohol and drugs. Sociologist Denise Kandel, of Columbia University, found that young drug abusers who did not outgrow their problems became more and more absorbed in groups of fellow drug users and further alienated from mainstream institutions like work and school.[32]
Still, even though they are likely to outgrow problematic drug use and drinking, we must consider adolescents and young adults a high-risk group for drug and alcohol abuse. Among other life situations that predispose people to addiction, the most extreme and bestdocumented example is the Vietnam war. A large number of young men used narcotics in Asia. Of those who used narcotics five or more times there, almost three-quarters (73 percent) became addicted and displayed withdrawal symptoms. American authorities were terrified that this signaled a wholesale outbreak of drug addiction stateside for these returned veterans. In fact, what occurred stunned and baffled authorities. Most of those addicted in Vietnam got over their addictions simply as a result of returning home.
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