The Truth About Addiction

Nothing they teach you is true...

Author’s note: First published this essay about 15 years ago, with an occasional update since. Still pretty timely. Let me know what you think…

“Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism.” — Carl Jung

Turns out that 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 below 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, enduring lies and distortions promoted and fed to us for 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 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 re-wire 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 circumstance, 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 a chronic, escalating, incurable, and ultimately fatal disease. Saying otherwise serves the interests of no one except those who work in and profit from the addiction industry — those being paid not to understand.

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 the digital 21st century — as a statistically normal, largely self-correcting behavioral response to emotional and physical trauma and pain. Addiction, in other words, is a coping mechanism invoked to restore a sense of wellbeing and equilibrium (however temporary) in response to persistent spiritual, emotional and/or physical pain. Better the addiction than the pain.

True, 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, attuned to the strengths or 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 circumstance. We are sometimes more addicted, sometimes less, sometimes — far less frequently these days — not at all. And BTW, there is no addiction gene to blame.

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A brief but relevant aside…
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 over the years:

1. that I characterize addiction as a normal coping mechanism, not a disease, and thereby dilute the urgency of real addictions like heroin, meth amphetamine, and alcohol; and

2. that I don’t have the credentials to question the academic and medical experts.

Guilty on both counts. In my defense, however:

1. 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 statistically normal response to 24/7 media-induced spiritual, social, emotional, and physical trauma institutionally manufactured and shoved down our throats at digital scale. The undeniable fact that some late-stage addicts (like the homeless souls in big cities) 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 of all quality-of-life metrics.

2. I have no formal credentials for anything, and therefore no formal body of knowledge or industry to defend. I never went to college, and describe my four-year high school career as the best eight days of my life. That said, the past 70+ years have taught me a little something about baseball, humor, cooking, media, and addiction.

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 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.

Headlines talk ceaselessly about heroin or cocaine or crack or 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 the pseudo experts in commercial media 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 compels 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 above examples of expert-free addiction recovery testify to the power of innate and social coping mechanisms far more powerful than the addictions themselves. The 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.

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 — just a generation or so ago — was almost always diagnosed first by a family member, friend or co-worker, not a doctor. Your family, friends, and colleagues typically knew where you spent your time and money. Your doctor typically didn’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 narcotics — 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, as reflected in the rapid decline of all quality-of-life metrics over the past generation, the same quality-of-life metrics that — in extremis — now define 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 questions that confront us as citizens of 21st-century America are, "What happens to our time and money and freedom when addiction emerges as the default social condition, the rule rather than the exception?" And, “What does it mean to recover from addiction?”

We find the answer to those questions, at least in part, in the general truism that all addictions steal our time and money and freedom, regardless of the narcotic — as reflected by the general decline in the quality of life over the past generation. Of course, one individual addicted to one narcotic is bad enough. But an entire society addicted to the same narcotic — like all things media and all things digital — is a different animal entirely. Perhaps historian and social critic Christopher Lasch got it right:

The end game of mass consumer society is addiction, and the real purpose of mass electronic media is to support the mechanism of addiction.

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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 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 but counter-productive, doomed — for the most part — to failure.

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

Of course, no one ever got rich by selling less, so we cannot rely on immense institutional interests to moderate themselves. Now, therefore, 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 centuries…