I think this article was being discussed a while ago over in Drug Culture but I couldn't find that discussion. So, I'll try to recap my responses to the article here. I think the article starts out great--we do need a different narrative about addiction than the bullshit one that we all learn from the likes of "Just Say NO" thinking. And the experiments on the (poor) rats are useful knowledge and help us to understand the environmental stresses that become psychological stresses inside of us. But the article is full of new misleading conclusions I think. For one thing, I get nervous about anything that claims to be "the" reason. There is no one reason. There is as much diversity in addiction as there is in humans. Everyone has their own set of vulnerabilities and of course these can overlap but it is simplistic and does no one any good to say that there is one reason (in this case, social isolation and anxiety).
Beyond that criticism, I have to take issue with a couple of "facts" that simply are not true. The first is that people who are given painkillers for pain for a few weeks or months never get addicted--they just stop. Bullshit. Yes some people do get addicted (and some don't--again we are left with the mysteries of human variation). You can find numerous stories here on BL about people starting out taking their prescriptions as intended and then being unable to quit and inventing new maladies to keep the prescriptions coming and eventually moving to street drugs when the prescriptions dry up. The second glaring wrong statement is the one about the returning Vietnam Veterans ("95% just stopped" taking heroin when they got back to the States and out of the war.) That is so untrue and such a re-writing of history that I practically spit my coffee out when I read it. My husband is a Vietnam vet. His best friend was addicted to heroin over there. when he came back he couldn't stop and he killed himself within months of returning home. he never saw a VA counselor and as far as the VA is concerned he was a suicide, not a heroin addict--since no one keeping statistics ever knew about the heroin. Since the number of suicides and deaths due to drugs and alcohol after the war may have exceeded those killed in combat during the war (there is controversy over this as there is currently with Afghan and Iraq veterans), this is quite a claim for this article to make.
All my critiques aside, I still believe that the article touches on truth but I see that truth differently. I think what the author found out was not what causes addiction as much as what holds people in addiction. Further, I think that if we can learn to explore as much as we pounce on an idea and then immediately claim it--and it alone-- to be the answer, we will all benefit much more. Almost nothing is one sided or two sided--everything is multifaceted and we humans have a very hard time with that. Getting comfortable with uncertainty, mystery and exploration is a great way to open both the heart and the mind but it is not a natural thing for us humans--we tend to want concise well boxed theories that we can easily grab onto.
Thanks for posting this. I think it is a great starting point for discussion and this time I will remember where it is LOL.8)
P.S. just had to jump back in with one more thought: I see a lot of threads here on BL started by people that are battling drug problems but are well aware that the real battle underneath the use is a combination of anxiety, loneliness and an inability to find meaning and connection in their lives. It seems to me that battling addiction as an individual and as a society has to include a rebirth of imagination. Imagination is our inner strength--it is how we reach higher, deeper and further into ourselves to create meaning in our own lives despite the expectations from without that defeat us daily and over a lifetime. In other words Rat Park has to have more than a lot of busy rats running around with enough food and water. Rat Park needs soul.
