Research increasingly shows that intensive marijuana use often meets the technical requirements for addiction (or dependence). Analysts use this as evidence of the need to maintain the drug’s illegal status. But the fact of addictiveness is irrelevant to legality – addictive drugs (e.g., cigarettes, alcohol) are legal and nonaddictive drugs (e.g., LSD, Ecstasy) are not. Indeed, the fastest growing category of illicit use is of legal, but controlled, pharmaceuticals – both addictive and not. Addiction is a sideline in outlawing drugs, a label applied conveniently by authorities and cooperating scientists in support of prior policy biases.

The Stanton Peele Addiction Website, January 7, 2006.

Introduction

Although definitions of “addiction” are putatively rational and scientific, they are actually historical and political. Addiction is applied selectively, not based on pharmacological criteria, but in order to create a basis for disapproving of and proscribing drugs. Nonetheless, any real definition of addiction must include marijuana – addiction has subsumed marijuana in the past, and the classification of marijuana as addictive has again become accepted. Now, marijuana’s addictiveness is supported by clinical and epidemiological studies based on the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual. But marijuana for some time has been widely used as a countercultural recreational drug, and drug policy reformers in particular refuse to apply the addictive label to this substance. Political conservatives, on the other hand, insist on the harmfulness of marijuana as a tenet of their drug policy. The grounds are thus set for perpetual conflict around the drug, conflict that cannot be resolved by clinical designations or epidemiological research. Rules for nonaddictive use of marijuana are proposed – comparable to rules for nonaddictive use of any substance – and reasonable policy for marijuana, addictive as it is, is outlined.

Which Psychoactive Drugs Are Addictive?

I have been defining addiction for some time, beginning with my book, Love and Addiction (Peele & Brodsky, 1975). From this initial statement, through The Meaning of Addiction (Peele, 1985/1998), I have described addiction as a consequence of involvement with absorbing experiences that provide essential emotional satisfactions but that detract from people’s ability to cope with their lives. Since many substances (and other experiences) fit this definition, the label “addictive” is potentially widely applicable. Whether a given substance is defined as addictive in a given society has to do with social custom and political convenience.

In particular, addiction is a label society applies to substances it wishes to proscribe, or certainly to disapprove of. For many decades in this century, the word addiction was synonymous with heroin. This label signified that heroin was something thought to be totally outside ordinary human experience and middle class boundaries. Beginning in part with Love and Addiction, however, the label was expanded to apply to other disapproved substances and activities, including, for example, cigarettes and alcohol. Although both of these substances are legal, use of the term in connection with both indicates social opprobrium (in the case of alcohol expressing centuries of ambivalence in the United States).

That a wide variety of drugs can be addictive still strikes us as odd. Thus, the following description from Love and Addiction of 19th century tea use is often cited with amusement.

According to “Clifford Allbutt and W. E. Dixon, eminent British authorities on drugs around the turn of the century. . . . An hour or two after breakfast at which tea has been taken . . . a grievous sinking . . . may seize upon a sufferer, so that to speak is an effort. ... The speech may become weak and vague.... By miseries such as these, the best years of life may be spoilt." (p. 40)

The addictiveness of caffeine, for example in coffee, is periodically rediscovered (see Juliano & Griffiths, 2004), but ignored because people mainly don’t care about addiction to this popular, legal, accepted drug (unless, occasionally, someone is trying to quit). Moreover, caffeine dependence is not considered in the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual, DSM-IV (American Psychiatric Association, 2000).

An obvious redefinition -- or refocusing -- of the meaning of addiction occurred in the 1980s with cocaine. Cocaine was originally excluded from pharmacology's "addiction" or "physical dependence" category because it rarely produced standard withdrawal symptoms and because cocaine use tends to occur in explosive bursts, compared with the more steady consumption of heroin et al. Thus, typical categorizations of drugs in the 1960s and 1970s by World Health Organization psychopharmacologists categorized cocaine as causing only “psychic” – but not physical – dependence (i.e., it was not addictive; cf. Cameron, 1971).

However, large-scale recreational use of cocaine by the 1980s – and proportional reports of negative consequences and difficulties in quitting the habit – seemed to demand a different view of the substance. As a direct result of the surge in cocaine use and reported problems, the definition of addiction was refocused on the intense urge to consume cocaine, particularly once use was begun, and the difficulty in terminating an individual session of cocaine use. Thus, after centuries of experience with the drug, a hundred years of medical usage with humans, and a half century of animal experimentation with cocaine, in the mid-1980s pharmacologists simply moved cocaine from the "nonaddictive" to the "addictive" drug column (Peele, 1998; Peele & DeGrandpre, 1998).

More recently, the World Health Organization has labeled antidepressants addictive, based on their ability to cause withdrawal. The National Institute on Drug Abuse does not track the prevalence of either the use or the abuse of this drug, which is the one most often taken in the U.S. -- outside of alcohol and various pain killers -- for the explicit goal of changing mood. Likewise, as with caffeine, DSM-IV does not include antidepressants.