New research on the brain and behavior clarifies the mysteries of addiction by Craig Lambert, Harvard Magazine, March 2000.
Early experiences with drugs, whether in the womb or as an adult, have ineradicable effects. Drug users often describe a wish to recapture the bliss of their first high. But this goal proves elusive because once the brain has neuroadapted to drugs, it is physiologically and structurally changed. The director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse and many others argue that voluntary drug consumption alters the brain in ways that lead to involuntary drug consumption. The question of whether drug habits are voluntary or not leads us to ask how people get over their addictions, and raises some of the moral issues surrounding compulsive behavior.
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Addiction is not all pharmacology, neurotransmitters, and intrapsychic states; the social settings of drug consumption have powerful effects. They can influence basic brain chemistry–which is one reason Gene Heyman rejects the notion that “addictive behavior is insensitive to persuasion, that there’s an irresistible urge to take the drug.” Heyman agrees that drugs alter the brain, but disputes the idea that they change the brain in ways that make choice impossible–he does not believe, in other words, that neuroadaptation makes drug use involuntary. Exhibit A, he says, is 50 million ex-smokers who have voluntarily ended their intake of nicotine.
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One reason people believe drug use is involuntary is that recovery rates for addicts treated at clinics are quite bad. Within one year of treatment, relapse rates of 67 to 90 percent are common for alcohol, opiate, cocaine, and tobacco users. “But most of the people who become addicted to drugs don’t go to clinics,” says Heyman. “Actually, only 30 to 40 percent go to clinics. Yet this clinic population has greatly influenced our vision and concept of addiction.”It turns out that addicts who don’t go to clinics have much higher recovery rates.
This is an interesting article with interesting data. Remember the different recover rates for those that go to clinics and those who does not mean going to a clinic reduces the odds of success. It seems reasonable to guess most of those that go to clinics are drawn from the subset that failed to quit without going to a clinic. So it could be that fail to quit on their own then will fail only quit on their own 3% of the time and quit in a clinic 10% of the time (these numbers are not based on anything just an example of what you must consider about the above statistics).
Even though cigarette smoking is the direct cause of 400,000 American deaths annually, while alcohol directly causes only 100,000 deaths, “alcoholism is a major reason that people don’t stop smoking,” says Vaillant. “Those who keep on smoking after age 50 tend to be alcoholics.” In hospitals, alcoholics cost six times as much as other patients. Half of all people who show up in emergency rooms with severe multiple fractures are alcoholics. “But the emergency rooms treating multiple fractures ignore blood alcohol levels,” Vaillant says. “The causal link isn’t made.”
“No other drug of addiction impairs one’s aversion to punishment the way alcohol does,” he continues. “Yes, compulsive gambling impairs your aversion to being poor, and heroin use impairs your aversion to being arrested. But alcoholism goes across the board. When drinking, people are much more likely to engage in all kinds of dangerous, life-threatening behavior–wife beating, child abuse, unprotected sex with strangers, smoking, drunk driving. You can be five foot two and willing to take on anyone in the bar.”
Related: Alcohol is a Major Cause of Drug Rehab Admissions – How Effective is Drug Addiction Treatment? – Methods to Treat Addiction – Why Can’t Drug Addicts Quit on Their Own?