Turns out nothing we've been taught about addiction is true.
I first began to write and speak about the rise of a pernicious meta-addiction to all things media and all things digital back in the spring of 2004. Addiction in the 21st century, I claimed, was no longer the exception to the rule.
Addiction in the 21st century had suddenly become the rule, the new default social condition — by design.
It will become clear as you read my thoughts and convictions on addiction that I’m no fan of the standard addiction-as-disease model, still dominant and still going strong after nine decades. First popularized by Alcoholics Anonymous back in the 1930s and later adopted by the AMA, the justice system, the public schools, most private and public employers, Medicaid, Medicare, and most major medical insurers.
The addiction-as-disease model has stigmatized generations of American citizens as incurable victims, helped justify a racist War Against Drugs, and produced the world's largest prison population. All in the name of mandated quasi-science, and all without moving the recovery-rate needle even a single notch over nine decades.
That said, I firmly believe that addicts in search of treatment should invest their time and money in whatever they believe works for them, and disregard what anyone else says — yours truly included.
Addiction, of course, is a loaded word, and few of us want to accept the fact that we’re addicted to anything. Much of our resistance, however, is borne from a legacy of lies and mistruths about the true nature of addiction. These enduring lies and distortions have been promoted and fed to us over many decades by what has become an immense addiction industry that zealously protects a yearly cash cow now measured in tens of billions of dollars.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." ― Upton Sinclair
True enough, far too many qualified and otherwise well-intentioned individuals in the addiction industry are being paid not to understand. What they most certainly do understand, however, is that their paychecks rely entirely on their ability to sell their own credentialed expertise — a phenomenon hardly confined these days to the addiction industry.
Addiction and healthcare experts tell us year after year, decade after decade that addiction is either a failure of will or a chronic, always-escalating, incurable, and ultimately fatal disease of the brain. Either way, they tell us, addicts require immediate and sustained professional intervention.
Whereas no one disputes the fact that some addictions spiral out of control and require urgent institutional treatment, the standard industry definitions of addiction are little more than self-serving industrial waste.
Rather than enlighten us, they keep us at arms distance from the truth: that addiction is the opposite of what the experts tell us. It isn’t a failure of will, isn’t a disease at all, isn’t necessarily chronic, most often plateaus before it renders us dysfunctional, is statistically self-correcting far more often than not, and is rarely except in extreme circumstances lethal.
Yes, we choose the behaviors that enable our addictions. Yes, opportunistic diseases and pathologies often result from protracted addictive behavior. And yes, our brains rewire themselves over time to accommodate and promote habitual behaviors repeated over and over again.
But brain plasticity isn’t a disease; it’s a miracle. It’s how we adapt to protracted circumstances, both those we invoke by choice and those imposed on us. It’s how we habituate good behavior as well. It’s also a far cry from symptomatic of a chronic, escalating, incurable, and ultimately fatal disease. The clinical evidence for which is everywhere absent except in the chorus of addiction industry experts and pseudo-scientists, those being paid not to understand, all dressed up in the emperor’s new clothes.
The truth:
Our brains are chemically wired to avoid pain and pursue pleasure. In essence, we are wired for addiction, better and more truthfully defined in what I call the Great Age of Addiction as a normal, largely self-correcting behavioral response to spiritual, emotional, and physical trauma and pain.
Addiction, in other words, is a coping mechanism invoked to restore a sense of well-being and equilibrium (however temporary) in response to persistent spiritual, emotional, and/or physical pain. Better the addiction than the pain.
Sometimes addictions go terribly wrong and require medical or professional intervention. But for the vast majority of us, it may come and go episodically over the course of a lifetime, sometimes more severely than others. It plateaus or disappears or reappears in accordance with life exigencies, per the strengths and weaknesses of our spiritual, social, emotional, and physical defense mechanisms at any given moment.
We frequently entertain more than one addiction at a time, and our drugs of choice often change to suit our current circumstances. We are sometimes more addicted, sometimes less, sometimes far less frequently these days not at all.
And BTW, while genetics may predispose us to addiction, there is no addiction gene to blame per se. A genetic predisposition to addictive behaviors and substances does not automatically confer addiction.
A brief but relevant aside…
Over the years, criticisms of my observations about our meta-addiction to all things media and all things digital as a default social condition have followed a couple of basic themes:
I characterize addiction as a normal coping mechanism, not a disease, and thereby dilute the urgency of real addictions like heroin, methamphetamine, and alcohol; and
I don’t have the credentials to question the academic and medical experts.
Guilty on both counts. In my defense, however:
I’m not normalizing addiction, merely stating the obvious: The rise of a default meta-addiction to all things media and all things digital in the early 21st century was a perfectly normal response to 24/7 media-induced spiritual, social, emotional, and physical trauma. The undeniable fact that some late-stage addicts (like many homeless souls) may require urgent professional intervention doesn’t mean that the rest of us (less-afflicted addicts) don’t suffer attendant spiritual, social, emotional, and physical consequences of our addictions as well — consequences clearly reflected in the 21st-century decline in all quality-of-life metrics.
I have no formal credentials for anything, and therefore no formal body of knowledge or industry to defend. That said, the past 70+ years have taught me a little something about baseball, humor, cooking, media…and addiction. Besides, all we do is listen to the experts and look at us now.
Consider: The inveterate college drunkard graduates after four years of binge drinking, gets a job, gets married, has kids, and buys a home. En route, she matures out of her dependence on alcohol most likely with no professional intervention whatsoever.
Consider: The vast majority of GIs who returned from Vietnam as heroin addicts stopped taking heroin once they were reintegrated into their lives stateside. The inconvenient truth for the addiction industry is that almost all of them stopped with little or no professional intervention at all.
Consider: Many tens of millions of Americans have quit smoking over the past couple of generations, almost all with no professional intervention or assistance, despite the fact that nicotine is among the most addictive substances on the planet.
Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author's own.
Simply and well-stated, Brody. In what I call the Great Age of Addiction, accountability has been converted from a reward for a job well done to a personal threat.
As someone who's "been there, got a postcard" with addiction and recovery, I can definitely confirm: there is no disease. We all make our choices. Some of us, though, choose to find every possible way we can run from personal accountability and responsibility