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"Addiction"

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fungus44

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I started this thread on 'addiction' in the Drug Culture forum. Didn't get much response despite some haranging. Anyways, have thought it might be more appropriate in ADD. One issue I didn't address explicitly was stigma. Stigma is a huge issue for people that identify or perceived as drug users. Anyways...

I'd be interested in responses to the initial post:

I've noticed a number of times on this site of people getting caught up in arguments over whether certain kinds of addiction exist and how serious they are.

"Addiction" or "severe addiction" seems to mean that the drug totally takes over someone's life, forcing them to do things they wouldn't want to do, breaking their personal or community's ethics and morals, being an utter emotional wreck if deprived of it, chaotic binging and/or constantly craving the drug.

Certain drugs seem to produce these effects at fairly high rates - opiates, euphoric stimulants, certain tranquilizers, alcohol. Others seem very low or are often denied - cannabis, psychedelics. Nicotine and caffeine addictions don't seem to quite fit other models.

Are we talking about different things? Are obsessions different than compulsions? Is one addiction different from another if the withdrawal is life threatening or feels life threatening? Should an addiction to a drug in setting where its use is condoned or legal be seen as different from an addiction to the same drug in places where it is illegal or frowned upon?
 
fungus44 said:
Should an addiction to a drug in setting where its use is condoned or legal be seen as different from an addiction to the same drug in places where it is illegal or frowned upon?
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IMO not. I mean, I live in Holland and I see no differences between my addiction and the addiction of someone living in America, same symptoms if you ask me.

I've noticed a number of times on this site of people getting caught up in arguments over whether certain kinds of addiction exist and how serious they are.
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Agreed, I've noticed it as well. People are simply getting caught up between psychologically addictive materials, physically addictive materials and materials which share both aspects. Then there are the nay sayers who like to believe their favorite drugs can't possibly be addicting in the slightest sense, they're the ones that really mess things up for the rest by spreading mis-information.. Especially true in the case of Cannabis.
 
i think certain people are prone to being addicted to drugs rather than being addicted to society, and society dictates whats "good" and "bad" drug users will always be looked at and judged as addicts, people choose to commit crimes, the drugs dont force them to, the people force themselves to. i dont think drugs are a valid excuse for making choices with severe negative consequences.
 
I take it from the scientific angle. I don't like the "psychological" vs "physical" addiction paridigm. It's stupid for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that everything psychological is based on the physical. Anyway...

Addiction is about the strong urge to do something, in this case, take a drug. Its not about whether or not you suffer withdawal symptomes, and it's not about what kind of drug it is. Of course, it's hard to say how strong a strong urge is.. but I would say probably, if someone wants to stop doing it, but finds they can't, then its addiction.
 
I thought that physically, as opposed to psychologically, addictive meant that some body process became unable to function properly without the agent, or that unpleasent withdrawal symptoms occured on cessation of using, that were not mearly "mental" e.g. seizures from benzo withdrawal.
 
Maybe we should replace psychological with cognitive- a better description of the top-down sensitization toward drug-related stimuli...

As mentioned by ebola and Bilz0r, the materialist assumption that the mind = brain negates the dichotomy between physical and psychological. However, I think one can distinguish between psychological withdrawal (cravings, depression, sleeplessness, anxiety) and physical withdrawal (sweating, intense pain, even death). You can still use the materialist argument to point out that psychology=physiology, but that is ignoring the emergent, almost "ghost-like" properties of our nervous system/mind.

Instead of drawing lines, we can recognize each addiction is to a physical chemical interacting with our physical body. However the addiction manifests, whether mostly cognitive/psychological (cannabis), physical (benzos/heroin), or a combination of both (many stimulants). It would seem there is a 2 dimensional continuum of cognitive addiction and physical addiction. You can quibble over misleading terms as physical and psychological (after all, what isn't physical and psychological?), but the point is that to most people there is a continuum of 2 forms of addictions which are NOT mutually exclusive.
 
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But calling withdrawal symptomes "physica addiction" is a complete misnomer. There is nothing addictive about withdrawal symptomes, they are just something that help break someones resolve when they are actually addicted.
 
I regard addiction as a compulsive need for distraction. I don't think the concept of addiction can be examined in isolation, but rather the nature of that from which distraction is desired must also be considered. This is a personal thing since everyone harbours repression of different things, that everyone expresses in a common form we understand as "addiction". In this light, the intensity of addiction is a highly subjective thing, not contingent on the external stimuli used to perpetuate it (such as drugs), so much as on each individual person's will and whatever it is they have trouble confronting with their will. Different kinds of addiction are merely different ways to distract from the task of confronting repressed material. Perhaps there's a correlation between the kind of addiction and the nature of the repressed material in question.

To summarize: drugs aren't addicting. Distraction is, and many things can be used as distraction, including drugs.
 
That sounds more like regular old addiction (aka psychological addiction) to me.
 
Many different withdrawals are contained in the duration of a usual addiction. Withdrawal is a temporary state when you are not ingesting, reacting to and experiencing a drug's effects.
 
If physical and cognitive withdrawal symptoms aren't addictive, what is? Physical as in your body feels like shit from the receptor changing back to sober form. Mental/cognitive/psychological withdrawal in that you have it in your memory that you feel worse when you are sober compared to when you are high. Therefore you feel a physical and cognitive deficiency resulting being addicted to a drug.
Of course the ultimate physical brain controls both of the above processes. But the ultimate material of mind manifests into almost two forms in the body, and thats why everyone senses they are not just a robot, we emerge from our brains. We literally are, I believe, a continuous progression of ghosts in an organic machine. To deny that most people perceive different dimensions of their addiction is quite suspect, even if our material reality does spawn our mind.
 
What is addiction? The urge to take the drug, not the bad feels you get when you don't have them. Lots of drugs cause bad feels when you dont have them, but they are not addictive.
 
What drugs cause bad feelings when you don't have them, but aren't addictive???

Addiction is the entire process of urges, craving, withdrawal, usage, etc...It's a vague term but surely it includes various states of mind.
 
SSRIs, TCAs, corticosteroids, chronic beta-adrenergic agonist treatment, and any drug with supresses symptomes of a disease when you have that disease. When was the last time you saw grand-pa rob a bank so he could pay for his anti-inflammatories for his arthritis? I mean, people don't go "crazy" with addiction when they don't get drugs, when if they don't get drugs they are going to die.
 
As you have cited, some drugs cause bad long term effects. Thus if you don't have urges to take them, then they are NOT addictive. But if you do, then they are addictive. The bad physical effects and the psychological effects of addiction are inseparable.
 
What I wonder about, and the reason I started this thread, was to see if we could have different names for different "addictions". Clearly the term has different meanings -- it may refer to psychological dependence, physical dependence, binging, the promotion of criminal or antisocial behaviours due to a drug, a lack of will power when the drug is present, the use of a drug or drugs as a means of acheiving social status, or the making of a drug into one's primary means of dealing with psychological distress.

Some drugs will prompt short term binge use, which can wreak havoc on a person's life, without that person being compelled to use that drug over a medium or long term.

Others, like the psychedelics, might be used a couple of times a year, but the user will feel a dire need for those two trips.

Others, like opiates and benzos seem to have much more linear progression of addiction/dependence.

There's also the issue of the degree of disorganization that drug consumption/withdrawal may perform. Along with short binges, alcohol can be incredibly disorganizing due, I think, to its de-inhibiting action, quick metabolism, and the fact that it hits a number of neurotransmitter sites and body organs simultaneously. Alcoholics may also depend on booze as a food source, which cannot apply to another recreational drug, outside of ridiculous amounts of shrooms or that psychedelic fish. Another very disorganizing class of drugs is solvents, used either as anesthetics/intoxicants or through long term exposure. The phenomenon is uncommon in English North America and Western Europe. In Canada, large numbers of Native people end up dependent on solvents due to horrible living conditions, racism, and the lack of access to other safer means of relief. On some isolated reserves booze goes for ten or more times the retail price in the rest of Canada. There's also a phenomenon of workers n unregulated free trade zones in Mexico and the Phillipines getting hooked on toxic chemicals simply through exposure at work.
SSRIs, TCAs, corticosteroids, chronic beta-adrenergic agonist treatment, and any drug with supresses symptomes of a disease when you have that disease. When was the last time you saw grand-pa rob a bank so he could pay for his anti-inflammatories for his arthritis?
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OK, we need to distinguish between a cluster of symptoms and a disease. The former should usually be referred to as a syndrome.

And around grand-pa's arthritis -- there have been recent tensions over people in the US breaking the law in order to buy cheaper Canadian arthritis meds. If the NSAIDs were to become prohibitively expensive, isn't it possible that there would be violent crimes due to the difficulty of getting them?
 
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