ATTITUDES AND BEHAVIORS TOWARDS ADDICTION

Attitudes and Behaviors towards addiction

Attitudes and Behaviors towards addiction

Thesis Statement

Both moderate and unnecessary consuming on the part of the feminine have until very lately been considered as unladylike, even reprehensible, and in general as being less agreeable and more tinged with immorality than masculine drinking.

Introduction

Recent research on the effects of drugs points us toward the conclusion that addiction is something very different from what we have thought it to be. To begin with, there is no necessary connection between addiction and drugs, or, more especially, the opiates (opium, heroin, and morphine). More precisely, addiction has little to do with what drugs contain, although it has a lot to do with what we think drugs can do to us. People often react physically to a placebo—a chemically neutral substance that is presented as being, say, morphine or some powerful medication—just as though it were the real thing. Psychological studies have shown that the way people react to drugs in general is as much a function of their cultural background, expectations, and emotional involvement in the situation as of the chemistry of the drug.

Discussion

There are no drugs of which this is more true than the ones we think of as the universal addicters, the opiates. Ten years ago Isidor Chein's The Road to H gave us a glimpse into the Byzantine social structure of the ghettos of New York, where some adolescents use heroin without becoming addicted while others do not use heroin in quantities sufficient to explain their ritualized "addict" behavior. More recently, Dr. Norman Zinberg of the Harvard Medical School has observed that surgical patients who have been given morphine in dosages and frequencies heretofore considered sufficient to addict do not, by and large, feel a craving for the drug after their pain has abated. A milestone in this growing enlightenment is a U.S. defense department report released in the spring of 1973, which reports that of all the U.S. servicemen in Vietnam who experimented with heroin, even to the point of apparent dependency, very few have taken up the drug again once they returned to the United States, where presumably they have had better things to do.

Noting that ghetto blacks persist in heroin habits even when the quality of the available drug is so poor that physiological reactions are minimized, Chein describes the addict's dependence in the following terms:

From almost his earliest days, the addict has been systematically educated and trained into incompetence. Unlike others, therefore, he could not find a vocation, a career, a meaningful, sustained activity around which he could, so to say, wrap his life. The addiction, however, offers an answer to even this problem of emptiness. The life of an addict constitutes a vocation—hustling, raising funds, assuring a connection and the maintenance of supply, outmaneuvering the police, performing the rituals of preparing and of taking the drug—a vocation around which the addict can build a reasonably full life.

What Chein fails to note is that this process of self-definition as an ...