Although Stanton modified this piece to meet the sensibilities of the Hazelden editorial staff, and the then editor-in-chief told him that this article was tremendously valuable to her personally, Hazelden discontinued publication of the pamphlet in 1988, after eight years of consistently high sales. The new editor-in-chief, Linda Peterson, wrote Stanton that she took this step because, "Unfortunately, we have heard much criticism from our customers who are not in agreement with your stand on the disease concept."

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Pamphlet published by Hazelden (Center City, MN), July 1980; modified from an article that appeared originally in Addictions (Ontario Addiction Research Foundation), Summer-Fall, 1977, pp. 21-41 and 36-57.
© 1977 Stanton Peele. All rights reserved.

Stanton Peele
Morristown, New Jersey

Introduction

It is understandable that people wish to explain their problems and pathologies in terms of forces which come from outside themselves, and over which they have no power. In this way we can reject accountability for our difficulties and eliminate the anxiety that comes from being responsible for both their causes and their remedies. The particular anxiety which we most welcome being freed from is that of painful self-reflection-the act of contemplating why we are the way we are and how short of perfect this is.

Alcohol and other drug addiction (and, as I shall show, non-drug addiction as well) is an area where the likelihood of such "escape from freedom" is especially great. Because these maladies engage nearly all of the body's system, physiological as well as psychological, we have tended to misconstrue the ways in which addiction grows from within ourselves in response to our environment. All data point to the fact that addiction is a lifestyle, a way of coping with the world and ourselves, a way of interpreting our experiences-including the experiences produced by psychoactive drugs. Heroin and alcohol do have a powerful impact on both a person's body and feelings, but these effects do not in and of themselves cause addiction. It is the way the person interprets and responds to the impact of a drug which is at the core of an addiction. This is determined by the individual's feelings about self and about life, as these are, in turn, determined by childhood experiences, personality, and current social setting.

Failing to recognize this means that we, as a society, will never be able to come to grips with addiction, and that it will continue, unchecked, to eat at our society from within. Nothing more need to be shown about the inadequacies and wrongheadedness of our conceptions than that. At the same time, as we spend more on cures and preventatives for addiction, our problems with addiction to narcotics, to alcohol, and to a whole host of other drugs grow inexorably.

The Experience of Addiction

Addiction is not caused by a drug or its chemical properties. Addiction has to do with the effect a drug produces for a given person in given circumstances-a welcomed effect which relieves anxiety and which (paradoxically) decreases capability so that those things in life which cause anxiety grow more severe. What we are addicted to is the experience the drug creates for us.

The most powerful addictive drugs in our society are, along with the narcotics, the barbiturates and alcohol. What these drugs have in common is not their chemical structures, which are widely diverse, but their common pharmacological property of depressing the action of the nervous system. In this way, they act to lessen a person's feeling of pain and sense of the difficulties in life at the same time they cause the person to be less able to deal with such difficulties. Thus begins the cycle of addiction. For as the person retreats to the drug to avoid coping, those things with which s/he must cope become less manageable and more frightening to contemplate. So potential addicts turn increasingly to the drug to gain the rewards which they are no longer capable of gaining from life, until, at some point, we may say that the main rewards are coming from the drug itself.

At this arbitrary point, people can be said to be addicted. They view those other aspects of their life with which they have ceased to deal seriously and from which they no longer gain satisfaction only in terms of how they relate to their addiction. People, jobs, other activities are all either impediments to or vehicles for obtaining the one thing they want to pursue-intoxication and loss of self-consciousness at the hands of the chosen addictive substance.

An important part of surrender to the drug is the feeling that they are not strong enough to resist it-not worthy to resist it. In some sense, they see addiction as the proper state of affairs. This negative self-image and the low self-esteem on which it is based are key points in the cyclical descent into an addiction. For the addict is someone who does not feel good about self, who dislikes the person s/he is. Addiction is predicated on a fear of the world, which is mainly an anxiety about one's own ability to cope with it. Whatever his or her actual ability, the addict believes s/he is incompetent in some significant way or area of life.

An addict welcomes the opportunity to resolve doubt and unease by being protected by some larger force, some greater power. A powerful drug, of course, fits this bill. But there are many other external structures and mechanisms to which a person can sacrifice control.