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Aesthetics & Miscellany

My Problem with the HuffPo Addiction Story

So a few days ago, the Huffington Post published a piece by Johann Hari called "The Likely Cause of Addiction Has Been Discovered, and It Is Not What You Think."

The story -- an offshoot of a book he authored called Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs -- presents an idea introduced by Professor Bruce Alexander that says that instead of addiction being a "a moral failing caused by too much hedonistic partying," or "a disease taking place in a chemically hijacked brain," it is in fact, "an adaptation. It's not you. It's your cage."

What Hari is talking about here is research Dr. Alexander conducted in the '70s as a reaction to an experiment. The experiment involved putting a rat alone in cage with two water bottles, one with plain water and one laced with heroin. In the experiment, the rat ultimately chose the heroin water bottle and then became addicted, providing evidence for the idea that addiction is a chemical disease. Dr. Alexander, however, noticed that this rat was in this cage alone when he picked the heroin. There was no food. No rat friends. The only thing in there to do was pick a water bottle.

So, he set up a reactionary experiment with the same 2 types of water bottles, only this time, he put other rats in the cage. There was good food and stimulating toys and fun tunnels to run around in. And he discovered that when life was good for the rats, when they had rat friends and good food and stimulation, they chose the heroin-laced water substantially less.

"While all the rats who were alone and unhappy became heavy users, none of the rats who had a happy environment did."

Hari then tied experiment to Vietnam -- which was taking place around the same time as Dr. Alexander's research. He claimed that 20 percent of soldiers in Vietnam became addicted to heroin during their time of service, but 95 percent of those addicted "simply stopped" using heroin when they returned to the states. "They shifted from a terrifying cage back to pleasant one, so they didn't want the drug anymore," Hari says.

He also talks about how street drug users and medical patients are often prescribed different versions of the same drug, like heroin, but that street users, because of their tragic lives, stay addicted, while happy, loved hospital patients don't because they go home to their families and fulfilling jobs.

His jarring conclusion? The resonant echo on the underside of the bell? "The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. It is human connection."

There. Are. So. Many. Problems. With. This. Least of all the implication that codependency can help a loved one overcome addiction.

Problem 1. Hari only chose to highlight one face of addiction -- the drug-addled street addict. The convict. The criminal. The societal outlier. For these people, yeah, I suppose Hari's theory makes sense. You can't rehabilitate a criminal drug user by isolating him in a jail cell alone. Plus, obviously, if your life sucks and coke helps you feel it less, then clearly you're going to keep hanging out with coke, because pain and disappointment and emptiness are heavier and harder. Reconnecting street users with the world, as Dr. Alexander and Hari suggest would probably do wonders in helping them to lead healthier, more productive, addiction-free lives.

But what about everyone else?

Problem 2. Not every addict is hustling on a street corner or holed up in a warehouse with a needle in his arm. Addiction doesn't always look like that. Sometimes addiction smells like baked apple pie and sounds like family Christmas and feels like your son's third birthday party.

I guess what I'm saying here is that my fundamental problem with the HuffPo piece isn't that I disbelieve Hari's theory. I think he's saying a lot, actually, that could create pause within the medical and mental health communities. I also think that for people with a support system, the safety net is obviously bigger, and the chance of recovery is probably much higher than if those people had to figure that shit out alone. But sorry sir, this isn't revelatory. It's not news.  Feeling less alone is a salve for even the deepest wounds, because it means your war isn't happening in a vacuum. You have an anchor to the world in other people.

My problem is that some of this theory is bullshit.

Let me make it clear that I know I'm not looking at this objectively. My dad was an alcoholic for my entire life and most of us his, until he died. I am not over it. I will never be over it. And I know that he, and other addicts, chose the substances they chose because it offered up relief from whatever pain they were carting around inside their lunch boxes on the way to work every day.

What I'm saying is that people like my dad -- and countless others -- had good lives. Lives better than ones offered by alcohol or cocaine or whatever. They had children who loved and needed them. They had husbands and wives who fought tirelessly and relentlessly to "bring them back" as Hari says. They had friends they could talk to, communities they belonged to. They were not desolate or empty or alone on the streets or even coming back from war in most cases.

They had things that should've kept them here, but didn't.

They still died.

Because no matter how big the circle of friends or how warm and loving the home, they're still going into a David-and-Goliath battle with perception. People write suicide notes, leave them for all these people that loved them and cared for them and supported them, and then kill themselves anyway because their perception of the cage is different than the reality. They feel alone. They feel empty and scared and lost and worthless, even if everyone around them is telling them, screaming at them, that they aren't.

I wish Hari's addiction solution was that simple, but it's just not.

People will still choose that heroin-laced water bottle even if it's inside the good cage. Sometimes the needle is louder than the love song, no matter how loud you're singing.

A cage is still a cage, even if there's love inside.

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