Morristown, NJ

For the past 10 years, I have been writing about the experience of addiction (cf. Peele, 1985; Peele with Brodsky, 1975). "Experience" in this formulation refers both to the subjective state the addict undergoes, and to the fact that the object of addiction is an experience. That is, people become addicted to a particular state of body and mind. Addiction is not a chemical side effect of drug use but is rather a primary result of the appeal of the drug's effects and of the place the drug experience has in the individual's personal ecology.

Drugs or alcohol are very direct ways for creating addictive experiences, but by no means are they the only ways to do so. Any powerful involvement holds out the possibility of compulsive, self-destructive engagement. On the other hand, no substance is inherently addictive. Nor does any body chemistry or personality type inevitably predispose an individual to addiction. The only meaningful way to describe addiction is to identify the destructive experiences people welcome from drug or other involvements, experiences that they find necessary to their existences but that they have no alternative means to create.

To say addiction occurs with regard to an experience is not the same as saying psychological and social factors contribute to addiction, or to some addictions. Rather, all addiction takes place at an experiential level. One set of authors, borrowing rather heavily from my writings in How Much Is Too Much (Peele, 1984b), listed the experiential components of addiction, and of healthy habits, and the personality traits that predispose people to be addicted. At the same time, in order to round out their presentation, they discussed the idea that "a true addict must have an abnormal chromosome" (Hafen & Frandsen, 1985, p. 3).

To combine such an idea with an experiential model of addiction is to mix the metaphor so as to make it incomprehensible. There is no "addictive" gene or chromosome. A person, and some groups of people, can have an extreme reaction to alcohol or any other substance. This may mean that, for such a person, these substances are powerful mood modifiers. This falls so short of specifying that an addiction will occur as to risk being almost irrelevant to a description of the person's addictive formula. We still need to know why the person welcomes this experience, can find no more suitable means than a drug to obtain it, continues to accept the drug involvement as its costs outweigh its experiential benefits, and so on (see Peele, 1986b, for my analysis of genetic models of alcoholism in this regard).

In The Meaning of Addiction (Peele, 1985), I outline the personal needs, situational constraints, and characteristics of involvements that contribute to the addictive interaction of person, situation, and involvement. The following summarizes these elements in addiction:

That is, a person who suffers from low self-esteem and whose environment does not provide esteem-building opportunities is susceptible to an involvement which offers the experience of being valued by and valuable to oneself and others. What eventuates in addiction is the continued reliance on the involvement to provide an experience of self-worth in a way that makes it less likely the person can obtain this experience naturalistically, through the ordinary course of his or her life. As the drug use in fact undercuts the person's self-esteem, the self-exacerbating cycle of addiction takes form.

Are the numbered items in the chart characteristics of a particular drug experience or other involvement, personality traits, or situationally induced needs or deficiencies? It depends. Only some people find narcosis or alcohol to be esteem-boosting or confidence-building. Nor is it possible always to declare that someone has low self-esteem. Some people are confident in some settings but not in others. Vietnam was an extreme example of an addiction encouraging setting, where the environment deprived American soldiers of intimacy and opportunities for accomplishment while subjecting them to unusual discomfort. Most important, soldiers were deprived of a necessary degree of certainty and control over their lives. Under these conditions, men ordinarily not prone to welcome narcosis found its reassuring predictability to be addictively attractive. Some other people, on the other hand, show this heightened need for predictability, or a low tolerance for uncertainty, and cannot achieve intimacy, have difficulty accomplishing goals, and experience regular discomfort, under normal, or non-war zone, conditions.

Addiction occurs along a continuum, and even those at the extremes of addictiveness show the capacity to act in other than an addicted way under the right circumstances. In one study where street inebriates were allowed to drink alcohol made freely available in paper cups at a nursing stand, the vast majority did not drink excessively throughout the experiment. The largest group did not drink at all, some drank heavily then stopped, some drank regularly in either an excessive or moderate way or combinations of both (Gottheil et al., 1973). The characteristics of addictive involvements are not solely, or even largely, determined by their pharmacological properties alone. In this case, as is also true of narcotics, changing the means of administering a substance or the setting of administration can alter the addictive experience sufficiently to render it ineffective for accomplishing the addictive goals of the individual.