© 1975 Stanton Peele and Archie Brodsky.
Reprinted with permission from Taplinger Publishing Co., Inc.

I hate its weakness more than I like its pleasant futility. I hate it and myself in it all the time I'm dwelling on it. I hate it as I'd hate a little drug habit fastened on my nerves. Its influence is the same but more insidious than a drug would be, more demoralizing. As feeling fear makes one afraid, feeling more fear makes one more afraid.
—MARY MacLANE, I, Mary MacLane: A Diary of Human Days

With our new model of addiction in mind, we need no longer think of addiction exclusively in terms of drugs. We are concerned with the larger question of why some people seek to close off their experience through a comforting, but artificial and self-consuming relationship with something external to themselves. In itself, the choice of object is irrelevant to this universal process of becoming dependent. Anything that people use to release their consciousness can be addictively misused.

As a starting point for our analysis, however, addictive drug use serves as a convenient illustration of the psychological whys and hows of addiction. Since people usually think of drug dependencies in terms of addiction, who becomes addicted and why is best understood in that area, and psychologists have come up with some fairly good answers to these questions. But once we take account of their work and its implications for a general theory of addiction, we must move beyond drugs. It is necessary to transcend the culture-bound, class-bound definition that has enabled us to dismiss addiction as somebody else's problem. With a new definition, we can look directly at our own addictions.

Personality Characteristics of Addicts

The first researcher to take a serious interest in the personalities of addicts was Lawrence Kolb, whose studies of opiate addicts at the U.S. Public Health Service in the 1920s are collected in a volume entitled Drug Addiction: A Medical Problem. Discovering that the psychological problems of addicts existed prior to addiction, Kolb concluded, "The neurotic and the psychopath receive from narcotics a pleasurable sense of relief from the realities of life that normal persons do not receive because life is no special burden to them." At the time, Kolb's work offered a note of reason amidst the hysteria about the personal deterioration that the opiates in themselves supposedly caused. Since then, however, Kolb's approach has been criticized as being too negative toward drug users and ignoring the range of motivations that contribute to drug use. If drug users per se are what we are concerned with, then the criticism of Kolb is well-taken, for we know now that there are many varieties of drug users besides those with "addictive personalities." But in its having pinpointed a personality orientation that often reveals itself in self-destructive drug use, as well a-s in many other unhealthy things that people do, Kolb's insight remains sound.

Later personality studies of drug users have expanded upon Kolb's discoveries. In their study of reactions to a morphine placebo among hospital patients, Lasagna and his colleagues found that patients who accepted the placebo as a pain-killer, as compared with those who did not, were also more likely to be satisfied with the effects of morphine itself. It seems that certain people, as well as being more suggestible about an innocuous injection, are more vulnerable to the actual effects of a potent analgesic like morphine. What characteristics distinguish this group of people? From interviews and Rorschach tests, some generalizations emerged about the placebo reactors. They all considered hospital care "wonderful," were more cooperative with the staff, were more active churchgoers, and used conventional household drugs more than the nonreactors. They were more anxious and more emotionally volatile, had less control over the expression of their instinctual needs, and were more dependent on outside stimulation than on their own mental processes, which were not as mature as those of nonreactors.

These traits yield a distinct picture of the people who respond most strongly to narcotics (or placebos) in hospitals as being pliable, trusting, unsure of themselves, and ready to believe that a drug given them by a doctor must be beneficial. Can we draw a parallel between these people and street addicts? Charles Winick gives the following explanation for the fact that many addicts become addicted in adolescence, only to "mature out" when they become older and more stable:

. . . they [the addicts] began taking heroin in their late teens or early twenties as their method of coping with the challenges and problems of early adulthood.... The use of narcotics may make it possible for the user to evade, mask, or postpone the expression of these needs and these decisions [i.e., sex, aggression, vocation, financial independence and support of others].... On a less conscious level, he may be anticipating becoming dependent on jails and other community resources. . . . Becoming a narcotics addict in early adulthood thus enables the addict to avoid many decisions....

Here again, we see that lack of self-assurance and related dependency needs determine the pattern of addiction. When the addict arrives at some resolution of his problems (whether by permanently accepting some other dependent social role or by finally gathering the emotional resources to attain maturity), his addiction to heroin ceases. It no longer serves a function in his life. Stressing the importance of fatalistic beliefs in the addiction process, Winick concludes that addicts who fail to mature out are those "who decide that they are 'hooked,' make no effort to abandon addiction, and give in to what they regard as inevitable."

In their portrait of the day-to-day existence of the street heroin user in The Road to H. Chein and his colleagues emphasize the addict's need to compensate for his lack of more substantial outlets. As Chein puts it in a later article:

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.

Although Chein doesn't say so in quite these terms, the substitute way of life is what the street user is addicted to.