You Will Die: The Burden of Modern Taboos (45 page)
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Authors: Robert Arthur
IS PHYSICAL ADDICTION THAT BAD?
Ask a Coffee Drinker
The typical American consumes two hundred milligrams of caffeine daily. This makes her an addict. At that intake rate, tolerance can be built in weeks. What this means is that caffeine is no longer giving the typical American a “boost,” but instead only getting her back to normal functioning. Her daily cups of joe are merely maintenance doses allowing her to avoid withdrawal.
Caffeine withdrawal usually begins in twelve to twenty-four hours, explaining daily coffee rituals. Some common withdrawal symptoms are headaches, fatigue, and increased irritability. Caffeine withdrawal can last for a week and severe cases can be incapacitating.
Widespread addiction can explain the 1990s’ gourmet coffee explosion begun by the Starbucks Corporation. Starbucks’ coffees have double the caffeine of grocery-store coffee. The average medium-sized Starbucks’ coffee drink (sixteen ounces) contains 320 milligrams of caffeine. For perspective, a can of Coke (twelve ounces) or a cup of brewed tea (eight ounces) has roughly fifty milligrams.
—“Caffeine Corner,”
Nutrition Action Health Letter
, Dec. 1996; Roland Griffiths and Geoffrey Mumford, “Caffeine,” 2000, ret.
acnp.org
, 23 Mar. 2007; and Michael McCarthy, “Caffeine Count,”
Wall Street Journal
, 13 Apr. 2004.
The evidence that addictions to lawful activities are similar to addictions to unlawful substances is overshadowed by shoddy sensationalized studies that imbue drugs with an unholy power. One experiment loved by anti-drug advocates demonstrated that monkeys “preferred cocaine to life itself” when some monkeys chose cocaine over food and some overdosed.
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It is usually not explained that these monkeys were tethered to a cocaine-administrating apparatus in an isolated cage with little to stimulate or soothe them but the drug that was administered intravenously when they hit a lever. It was the equivalent of locking a human in a prison’s “hole” with nothing but a never-ending intravenous coke supply surgically implanted in her body.
Understandably, scientists have criticized this study as being inapplicable to humans, and other studies have shown that animals kept in more realistic settings have been less drawn to drugs than their shackled kin.
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If anything, barbaric animal
addiction studies like this one support the thesis that drugs are more likely to be used destructively by those suffering—not the thesis that drugs can overpower everyone.
The pleasure received from eating a piece of one’s favorite dessert is not the same as snorting a line of cocaine, however, they are a lot more similar than the government and the media suggest. To deny that many people would get more pleasure from the dessert is giving cocaine too much credit. The addictive powers of all recreational drugs have been immensely exaggerated. If you tried crack or heroin you probably would not become addicted—even though you might enjoy the experience.
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H
YPE
Note: Dependence is a technical definition that requires meeting three of seven criteria. Neither physical addiction nor a negative effect on one’s life is required.
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With heroin, “everyone . . . is a potential addict,” “addiction can start with the very first dose,” and “with continued use addiction is a certainty.”
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“Crack is the most addictive drug known to man,” causing “almost instantaneous addiction.”
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“Ninety-five percent of meth users become addicted after just one use.”
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EALITY
D | P | S |
Tobacco | 32 | Thirty-two percent of fifteen- to fifty-four year-old tobacco users had experienced dependence. |
Heroin | 23 | One study found that twenty-three percent of fifteen- to fifty-four year-old users had experienced dependence. |
Cocaine | 17 | After first trying cocaine, five to six percent of people become dependent within two years, |
Alcohol | 15 | After trying alcohol, two percent of people develop a dependence within one year, twelve to thirteen percent within ten years. |
Marijuana | 9 | After trying marijuana, one percent of people develop a dependence within one year, and eight percent within ten years. |
Crack | | Less than eleven percent of high school seniors who had tried crack had used it more than five times in the last month. |
Ice (Smoked Meth) | | Less than nine percent of high school seniors who had tried ice had used it more than five times in the last month. |
Addiction is an intense involvement people fall into for solace when they cannot find gratification in the rest of their lives.
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A destructive addiction is a symptom of deeper problems and some people are significantly more susceptible to this symptom than others. The locus of addiction lies in people, not substances. This is why the decriminalization of hard drugs by countries has not been found to affect their addiction rates.
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HE
D
RUG
: S
TOP
B
LAMING
I
T
Blaming individual substances for an addiction is fallacious because addicts can form unhealthy relationships with whatever is available to them. There will always be something accessible to abuse, whether it is alcohol, sex, lottery tickets, home shopping channels, or glue.
If heroin were to magically disappear, addicts would not be cured unless their underlying issues were resolved. This was demonstrated in the summer of 1972 when a shipping strike temporarily broke the heroin supply to Eastern U.S. cities. Heroin was so scarce that its price ballooned five-fold. In Washington, DC, the
methadone-treatment program for opiate addicts had a
decrease
in applicants that summer. The urinalysis of DC arrestees found that all of the heroin addicts simply switched to barbiturates or amphetamines.
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If cocaine were to disappear instead, many cocaine addicts might turn to alcohol for respite. As can be seen in the following chart, someone diagnosed with cocaine dependence is 6.6 times more likely than someone without a cocaine dependence to develop a dependence on alcohol. This lack of discipline is not limited to other chemicals, as shown by the substantial overlap between drug and behavioral addictions.
D
EPENDENCE
P
REDICTING
T
RANSITION FROM
F
IRST
U
SE
TO
D
EPENDENCE ON
O
THER
S
UBSTANCES
44
L
IFETIME
E
STIMATES OF
S
UBSTANCE
U
SE
D
ISORDERS
IN
B
EHAVIORAL
A
DDICTIONS
45
Note: The percentage of the general population that has experienced substance use disorders is 14.6 percent.
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B | L |
Compulsive Buying | 21%–46% |
Compulsive Sexual Behavior | 64% |
Food Addiction | 32.6% |
Internet Addiction | 38% |
Kleptomania | 23%–50% |
Pathological Gambling | 35%–63% |
OOK
D
EEPER
: U
NDERLYING
I
SSUES
Destructive addictions often artificially compensate for an unbearable psychological weight. Unless the underlying issues are fixed or at least managed, one unhealthy release will only be replaced with another. The following are some of the factors that have been documented to drive addictions:
Mental Health Issues
—Those with a mood disorder, anxiety disorder, personality disorder, or ADHD are much more likely to become dependent on nicotine, alcohol, marijuana, and cocaine. For example, those who have been diagnosed with a mood disorder are almost three times as likely to become dependent on cocaine as their peers.
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Poverty
—Surveys of drinking have long found that despite being more likely to abstain, those from lower socioeconomic groups are still “much more often” problem drinkers.
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A more recent study has found that income serves as a predictor for more
than just alcohol dependence. People in the poorest income bracket (making less than $19,999 per year) were almost three times as likely to become dependent on cocaine or cannabis as those in the wealthiest bracket (making more than $70,000).
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War
—In the 1970s there was concern over the postwar return of the twenty percent of Vietnam veterans who had been addicted to heroin. However, after being home for three years in a gentler environment only twelve percent of those addicted veterans still had a habit.
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Roughly half of the returnees did not receive any addiction treatment and their success rate was the same as those who did.
HE
A
DDICT
: Y
OUNG AND
I
MPULSIVE
Not everyone is equally likely to use toxic addictions to escape from distress. The following factors predispose a person to addiction:
Genes
—An adoption study has shown that the biological father’s drinking patterns predict a son’s alcoholism, while the adoptive father’s does not. Boys whose biological fathers were severe alcoholics had an alcoholism rate of eighteen percent with an alcoholic adoptive father, and seventeen percent with an adoptive home free of parental alcoholism. Another study, based on twins, found shared genes did not correlate with experimentation with illicit drugs. However, if an identical twin was dependent there was a forty percent chance the other twin was also dependent.
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Addictive Personality
—People with substance or behavioral addictions score highly for sensation-seeking and impulsivity, and low for harm avoidance.
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This is not surprising. An addict is arguably someone who chooses the sensation an activity provides at levels that are harmful. Impulsivity is the tendency to act without weighing the future consequences of one’s actions. Addictive behavior provides immediate pleasure, whereas the benefits of moderation are often distant and abstract (for example, long-term health, more stable work/family life).