The Truth About Addiction – Part 2

Headlines talk ceaselessly about heroin, fentanyl, cocaine, crack, social media or smartphone addictions. But all of the media discussion about drugs notwithstanding, addiction is never about the specific narcotic. Addiction is about behavior, and all addicts seem to behave pretty much the same way, regardless of the narcotic.

Heroin addicts behave pretty much like sex addicts, who behave pretty much like alcoholics, who behave pretty much like compulsive gamblers, who behave pretty much like cocaine addicts, who behave pretty much like social media and smartphone addicts.

Since the 1950s, the experts in the addiction, medical, and pharmaceutical industries have enlisted pseudo-experts in corporate media and Hollywood to portray addicts as down-and-out misfits victimized by an insidious chronic and incurable disease as the primary means to sell immensely expensive treatments that the selfsame addiction, medical, and pharmaceutical experts alone (amazingly) are qualified to provide.

The same media-induced trauma and fear compel us to hand our lives and bank accounts (often by court, employer, or other mandate) over to costly and invasive treatment regimens, almost all of which stigmatize us for life as hapless victims — and almost all of which ultimately fail.

The truth:
The vast percentage of addicts at any given time are quite functional, with jobs and families and mortgages, and at least some reason to hope. The examples of expert-free addiction recovery cited in Part 1 of this essay testify to the power of innate and social coping mechanisms far more powerful than the addictions themselves.

The inconvenient truth is that the vast majority of addicts recover from or learn how to co-exist with their addictions on their own, with no help whatsoever from the experts.

The addiction industry tells us that we are victims of addiction and that we become addicts in spite of our values.

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The truth:
No one aspires to become an addict. That said, we become addicts not in spite of our values but precisely because of them, as reflected in how we choose — moment by moment — to invest our faith, time, and money.

The most reliable diagnosis of addiction has always been the measure of how we spend our time and money in excess: exactly why addiction is almost always diagnosed first by a family member, friend, or co-worker, not a doctor. Your family, friends, and colleagues typically know where you spend your time and money. Your doctor typically doesn’t.

But that was before the 21st-century rise of institutional digital scale and the sudden emergence of our meta-addiction to all things media and all things digital. Now we all invest our faith, time, and money pretty much the same way: in excess media consumption. Except now because everyone is addicted to the same electronic drugs we call it normal.

Precisely because everyone is addicted to the same electronic narcotics, only the most grievous addicts like the homeless stand out from the crowd. For the time being, the rest of us (less grievous) addicts are by comparison still more successful in our struggles to withstand the institutionally accelerated assault of spiritual, social, emotional, and physical trauma and pain in the 21st century.

Make no mistake, however, we have normalized addiction at great cost to ourselves, our families, and our communities again. Reflected in the rapid decline of all quality-of-life metrics over the past generation is the same decline that in extremis now defines an exploding homeless population.

Finally, we are complicit in our own addictions. Although no one chooses to become an addict per se, addiction results when we choose to ritualize specific narcotic behaviors or the consumption of specific narcotics over and over as coping mechanisms.

Essentially, we choose the addiction over the pain. No one forces us to consume 10-15 hours of digital media each and every day. No one ever puts a gun to our heads and threatens to pull the trigger unless we binge on “Charles in Charge” reruns over an entire weekend, or threatens to empty our bank accounts unless we camp out in line for days to buy the latest iPhone. At least not yet.

In light of the above, the real question that confronts us as citizens of 21st-century America in the Great Age of Addiction is this: "What happens to our time and money and freedom when addiction emerges as the default social condition, the rule rather than the exception?"

We find the answer to the above question in the general truism that all addictions steal our time, money, and freedom — regardless of the narcotic — as reflected in the aforementioned decline across all quality-of-life metrics over the past generation.

Of course, one individual addicted to one narcotic is bad enough. But an entire society addicted by design to the same narcotic — like all things media and all things digital — is a different animal entirely.

Now ensconced as a state-sponsored default social condition, our meta-addiction to all things media and all things digital works less for you and me as a lifestyle coping mechanism and more for the state as a Huxleyan tool to compel social compliance. Perhaps historian and social critic Christopher Lasch got it right when he observed that the end game of mass consumer society is addiction and that the real purpose of mass electronic media is to support the mechanism of addiction.

So what do we do?

It would seem that the best way to breed more addicts for profit is to keep doing what the addiction, healthcare, and pharmaceutical industries are doing right now. Keep treating the addiction instead of finding better ways to deal with the spiritual and psychic pain. Profit over pain.

“Not why the addiction but why the pain.” — Gabor Mate

Albert Einstein once observed that a problem cannot be solved by the same thinking that created the problem. Addiction, of course, is a form of extreme behavior. Understandable, therefore, that the standard institutional response to addiction in America is still after nine decades of statistical failure abstention, yet another form of extreme behavior.

While it clearly works for a statistically minute percentage of addicts, abstention is like anti-racism and gender equity: an extreme effort to deploy quasi-science at great financial and social expense in a statistically failed attempt to eradicate human nature for profit. Selling abstention in a culture of default addiction is like selling diets and diabetes drugs on The Food Channel: profitable for the weight-loss and pharmaceutical industries but cynically counter-productive for everyone else.

Only when we begin to abandon the institutional orthodoxy of excess that exemplifies the Great Age of Addiction will we discover that the opposite of addiction isn’t abstention at all. Only then will we discover that the opposite of addiction is moderation.

Of course, no one ever got rich by selling less of anything, so we likely shouldn’t rely on immense institutional interests to moderate themselves.

Now, it would seem, is the time for us to take personal responsibility for the quality of our own lives into our own hearts, minds, and hands. We can rediscover the power to do this. We’ve done it for thousands of years…

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