On Drugs Again

Drugs do not cause addiction;  addiction causes drugs.  If only we could keep this straight. If we only deal with the drug problem we miss the boat.  Pain produces the need to quell it, which produces the need for drugs that will do it and suppress pain through the gating system.  And generally, the earlier and more remote the pain imprint the deeper the pain and the heavier the addiction.  There are levels of pain depending on the time it is embedded; the closer to how shattering the pain, the most remote, becomes the index for the severity of the pain and addiction.

All the addict is trying to do is normalize, which, when he takes key drugs allows him to feel normal.  Who wouldn’t search out something that allows him to feel relaxed and OK in his/her skin?  People pay a price for all this: addiction……but the addict doesn’t care; he wants surcease, an end to the suffering, even when he has not a clue as to where it all comes from.  All we are trying to do is take away his drugs and put him back in pain. Who is going to win?

Neurosis is the way we go about trying to be normal.  It is normal to feel relaxed, and not normal to feel tense all of the time.   So we find ways to drain the tension; we run, masturbate, do gymnastics, etc.  We are trying a gimmick that will settle us down.

I have written about addiction many times, particularly the piece by Bower (in Science News (March 22, 2014) https://www.sciencenews.org/article/addiction-paradox).  He writes about two major articles on addiction, is it a bad habit or is it a temporary failure to cope.  Guess which wins out?  The temporary failure to cope.  And scientists can only can only come to a conclusion like that when they have no idea what lies deep in the brain.  In brief, being bereft of any evidence.  So one group guesses this way and yet another guesses differently. Anybody’s guess goes since it is really a mystery where the key clues are missing.  Oh by the way, what makes people MAKE THAT CHOICE?  Oh you forgot about that? Maybe that is what is missing.   This is what happens when you strip the human of his deep motivation and stay on top of his head.

Let me digress:  I hesitate to use myself as an example, but my wife says she prefers to read my stories.   So, we watch mostly French TV, mostly because there are no commercials and the content is fantastic.  Last night there was a show on the financial crisis in France where the small business people are failing at a rapid rate. They followed a baker and his wife who were soon to go to a tribunal  to see if they were forced to go out of business.  They could not pay their small business partners and it looked bleak. So they filmed the court procedures and sure enough they were forced into bankruptcy.  When you rely on statistics you get statistical answers. They are rarely human answers.  But to think that a major addiction is simply a bad choice is as simplistic as it gets.

These were two simple people, who supplied bread for the whole community for twenty years.  They had no sophistication in finance.   Sadly. As they got up before the judges, she smiled, kissed her husband and tried to make it outside amid her tears.  Asked what they planned to do now, since they were being forced out of their home which sat on top of the bakery, she raised her hands in hopelessness, trying to look optimistic. And then I broke down.  My wife asked what was wrong, and I said they are so bewildered and lost and defeated.   And as I went on I cried first for them and then said, “it’s me!”  And the feeling got deeper, and took me back to the same feeling; a kid lost, defeated, helpless and hopeless and no one to help or even acknowledge the tragedy.  Suffering alone, no help or empathy. I went down deep to feel that agony.  So what?  “OK you had empathy, now what?”  The “now what” is that I didn’t turn to drugs or even think about them. I felt the pain so I did not have to hide it. That is what I get out of the therapy; no long time lingering pain but something I can deal with.  My feelings came up instantaneously because the gates were open. I knew the feeling and what to do about it. Thus was not a manufactured insight.  It arose, signaled, “I’m ready,” and tears followed. If you had 1000 tears to feel from your life of suffering then each bit helps to unload the burden.  You cannot cheat your physiology. It demands a response; you can put it off but it never leaves and never stops its demands. That is why addiction. And that is why a therapy without feeling solves nothing because the biologic exigencies never leave. You can drug them or shock them or intellectualize them to death but if you do not respond to them, it is you who will die prematurely. That is one thing that cannot happen to me; a premature death.