What they do

All psychoactive substances, whether cigarettes, Prozac, beer, heroin, or your daily "Starbucks" latte, perform the same delightful magic: They alter your experience of reality. Reality stays the same, but your experience of it changes--for the better. Another way of saying this is that drugs change how you feel, which includes thinking, physically sensations, as well as how you behave. In other words, drugs change the whole ball of wax! Otherwise, why bother? There is no reason to use a psychoactive substance except to achieve a significant shift in emotional experience.

On Being Addicted

Being addicted refers to continuing to depend on something, even when the costs are apparent and far too high. Most folks who begin to misuse chemical substances stop when they realize the high price. Some of us, however, continue to use no matter what the consequences, and this behavior is what we call being "addicted" or "dependent."

There is a physical component to chemical addictions. Drugs like nicotine, heroin, and Ativan are directly physically addictive. As someone who has withdrawn from cigarettes, heroin, opium, and valium, I know all too well the power of a full-blown addiction and the sick misery of overcoming the physical part. Physical dependency also occurs with drugs that are not directly addictive, like cocaine, alcohol, and marijuana. Having said that, I can tell you that the physical part of addiction is not the primary reason people continue to use mood-altering substances despite their lives falling apart around them.

Most heroin addicts who go through detoxification and come out physically non- addicted, go out and use again…and again. The same is true for cigarettes. In fact, there is about an 80% relapse rate in the first year for all chemical addictions. Yet, the vast majority of people who use morphine and other powerful pain killers for their intended purpose, sometimes for prolonged periods, do not become addicts. Tens of thousands of Vietnam veterans who were using pure heroin in Nam, did not become junkies once back in the USA. I can assure you, the physical part of getting off drugs and alcohol, while not at all pleasant, is the easy part.

As stated, addictions are all about feelings. Addictions are about coping with a chronic sense of deep hopelessness which, depending on the individual, results in severe anxiety, despair, and anger. In other words, addictions are solutions for chronic and serous emotional distress. For a person addicted, painful emotions are like a vicious bully in a school yard. Stark fear forces you to run and escape the bully. By using drugs to run from bullying feelings, you do get a temporary reprieve. But then you have to come back down, and when you do things are always worse. So you escape again…and again…and again, your desperation and powerlessness increasing with every turn of the vicious cycle. In other words, the more you run from any bully, the more you have to run, until you depend on running as the only solution. Addiction is like using the proverbial “crutch.” When you habitually depend on crutches to walk, your leg muscles weaken and eventually atrophy. With addictions, what weakens is your ability to deal effectively with your feelings, to handle life freely.

Addictions counselors who know their jobs will tell you that at the heart of most addictions are the post traumatic emotional consequences of childhood abuse and neglect. This is the reason for the sense of hopelessness that all addicts feel, more or less, before they become addicted. Nobody, nobody, wakes up one day, feeling genuinely okay about self and life, and decides to ruin their lives.

My former colleagues and I, combining over a hundred years of experience, having seen thousands of clients, had never come across an individual who had a truly okay childhood and youth and just stumbled onto an addiction, freely chose the hell of addiction. Doesn’t happen that way! In the agency I worked for, the vast majority of the middle and working class clients we served suffered from significant to severe abuse and neglect as kids, mostly at home, but also at school and in the neighborhoods they grew up in. In other words, broken, indeed shattered childhood hearts are the single greatest contributor to addictions of all kinds, from gambling, to drugs and alcohol, to eating, to work, to exercise, to you name it.

The notions of addiction being the fault of a disease, drug dealers, immorality, even drugs themselves is, in effect, the way our community—all of us-- avoids responsibility for the wellbeing of our children. Children even only reasonably cared, at home, at school, and in their community, do not become junkies or drunks!