Johann Hari, Huffington Post - If you get run over today and you break your hip, you will probably be given diamorphine, the medical name for heroin. In the hospital around you, there will be plenty of people also given heroin for long periods, for pain relief. The heroin you will get from the doctor will have a much higher purity and potency than the heroin being used by street-addicts, who have to buy from criminals who adulterate it. So if the old theory of addiction is right -- it's the drugs that cause it; they make your body need them -- then it's obvious what should happen. Loads of people should leave the hospital and try to score smack on the streets to meet their habit.
But here's the strange thing: It virtually never happens. As the Canadian doctor Gabor Mate was the first to explain to me, medical users just stop, despite months of use. The same drug, used for the same length of time, turns street-users into desperate addicts and leaves medical patients unaffected.
If you still believe -- as I used to -- that addiction is caused by chemical hooks, this makes no sense. But if you believe Bruce Alexander's theory, the picture falls into place. The street-addict is like the rats in the first cage, isolated, alone, with only one source of solace to turn to. The medical patient is like the rats in the second cage. She is going home to a life where she is surrounded by the people she loves. The drug is the same, but the environment is different.
This gives us an insight that goes much deeper than the need to understand addicts. Professor Peter Cohen argues that human beings have a deep need to bond and form connections. It's how we get our satisfaction. If we can't connect with each other, we will connect with anything we can find -- the whirr of a roulette wheel or the prick of a syringe. He says we should stop talking about 'addiction' altogether, and instead call it 'bonding.' A heroin addict has bonded with heroin because she couldn't bond as fully with anything else.
So the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. It is human connection.
2 comments:
I like this... it MAKES SENSE... while prohibition only makes sense as a price support mechanism for those who profit from the lack of human bonding in the type of horrendous society that our insane political and economic system has produced...
This is bog-standard psychology.
Joseph Weizenbaum PhD, the MIT computer science prof who wrote the Eliza program, which emulates - very superficially - a Rogerian psychotherapist, was appalled when he found people taking the program seriously.
Had he had any background in clinical psych, he'd have understood how desperate people in the industrialised world are today for something more than their atomised existence as work-units with no agency, no security, and no deep connections with the world or other living beings except, perhaps, their immediate-family members if any.
Post a Comment