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The
belief that substances addict people is driven by the fact that few
people have any real idea of responsibility without considering it to be
equivalent to blame. The
whole disease theorys main attraction is that it gets people off the
hook. If their disease make
them behave poorly, then they are not to blame.
However, this belief leaves them powerless.
Such a belief probably also helps increase the level and number
of addictions in our culture.
An
alternative conception is that people are responsible for their behavior
themselves, but that their best chance for their behavior themselves,
but that their best change comes from accepting responsibility.
Many people addict themselves to relationships (AKA love),
gambling, and shopping, and a few people in modern America are addicted
to work. With these and
various other addictions there is no physical substance.
Substances are not addicting; some of them create a physical
dependency, which means that there are withdrawal symptoms when the
substance is withdrawn.
If
substances caused addiction, then all the service people who
became heroin addicts in Vietnam would have lived out their lives upon
returning to America as heroin addicts.
The fact is that most of them stopped using heroin when they left
Vietnam and never used it again.3
If
addicting substances caused addiction, then all the complicated
surgical patients who have to be maintained for prolonged periods on
morphine would go on to be addicts.
Practically none of them does, however.
When they are withdrawn from the morphine, they feel crummy.
In time the crummy feelings go away, and thats it.
Addiction
is a mental state, a though process, a purpose.
The addiction is the meaning of the feelings and experiences to
us; it is our decisions to seek the feelings and experiences with less
and less regard for overall consequences; it is the rationalizations we
make up about how its okay to keep doing what were doing, and,
sometimes, how we arent even doing what we are doing!
Methadone
patients may be maintained on methadone for years, using no heroin at
all. Some of these
patients, upon departing from methadone treatment, eventually relapse
into drug use. What do they
use? Heroin, almost every
time; certainly not street methadone.
They had been physically dependent upon the methadone for years,
but the addiction is to the heroin.
This is because the feelings produced by heroin are judged much
better by most heroin addicts than the feelings produced by methadone.3.
Since the
original study undertaken by D. Hunt there have been discrepancies found
in the follow up methods. Many scientists now refute the findings of
these studies.
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- METHADONE IS HARDER TO
- GET OFF THAN HEROIN
The
heart of this myth is myth #2, namely that substances addict people.
Instead, people addict themselves to various feelings and experiences,
or highs, some of which may be related to substances, some not.
Different people like different highs to differing degrees. The
quality of the high influences the likelihood that various people will
tend to seek it out. To day that a certain substance is powerfully
addicting means mainly, Because I like the high it gives me, I
continue to choose to use it, come hell or high water, and I wont
tolerate the prospect of not having it.
In
studies of physical withdrawal sings from heroin and methadone, where
the amounts of the two drugs are pharmacologically equivalent,
withdrawal from methadone is slower and longer. None of that has
anything to do with heroin or methadone addicting people, however.
Neither one of the addicts people. We addict ourselves to various
feelings and experiences. Most methadone patients report that the
feeling it gives are pretty piddling compared to the feelings produced
by heroin.
Much
of the addictive attraction of any drug depends on the rapidity and
duration of its action. Methadone is administered orally, gets into the
system slowly compared to injected heroin, and is very, very
long-acting. However, in studies with seasoned opiate addicts where
injected drugs were compared, they could not immediately distinguish
heroin from morphine from methadone.
Seasoned stimulant users, similarly cannot distinguish
dextroamphetamine from cocaine from methylphenidate (Ritalin)
immediately upon injection. Cocaine
has a greater addictive attraction (for most people) than does
amphetamine, however, because of the formers much shorter duration of
action.
Myth
#4
- PEOPLE GET ON METHADONE
- JUST FOR THE HIGH
Most
people get on methadone because they are exhausted, fed up, desperate,
cant keep a heroin addiction going and cant keep themselves
together anymore. In short, they have to get on methadone.
Addicts do not have to be forced to seek a high.
Take a look at the people in dosing lines at methadone clinics.
You wont find many who look high.
They look like anyone else who has to wait in long lines in
unpleasant surroundings.
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