Free Articles on Freedom Plaza: Drugs
by Kieron McFadden
This is the second in my series of articles on The Cycle of Addiction. Drug addiction may be cruel but it is not in fact mysterious or difficult to comprehend. And we all have a vested interest in understanding it.
Is a person genetically or bio-chemically predisposed to addiction or alcoholism?
Various postulates along such lines have been put forward over the years and debated within the scientific and chemical dependency communities. That this has produced no truly effective solution to drug addiction, very poor recovery rates and a worsening drugs epidemic tells us the aforementioned communities may have been barking up a very wrong tree.
Another school of thought and another wrong tree, advocates the "disease concept" of drug addiction, which postulates that addiction is an inherited disease and the individual is permanently ill at a genetic level.
In other words, "nothing can be done about it" because the problem is imprinted in the DNA - the classic psychiatric method of explaining away tax payers' billions wasted on abject failure to effectively resolve...well, anything!
No conclusive proof for the "gene" theory of addiction has been produced incidentally, although the false datum has crept into the society. One will often hear addicts describing themselves as having an "addictive personality" - usually because that is what they have been told by a therapist who had no real answers. Think about the message hidden in that false datum: "there's nothing you - or WE - can do about it because you are inherently flawed. You're stuck with it pal!" This theory, while it "scientifically" explains away failures has yet produced no successful strategy or workable methodology for actually helping human beings beat drug addiction. If our goal is to do something effective to actually help people, then it has been useless.
Another philosophy argues that addiction is a double-stranded problem consisting of a physical and mental dependency on chemicals, compounded by a pre-existing mental illness that needs to be treated first as the primary cause of the addiction. Such a mental illness would be so-called clinical depression, bipolar disorder, or some other piece of elastically defined psychobabble.
As for psychiatry's lack of diagnostic criteria or actual evidence for any of the "illnesses" listed its Diagnostic Manual and the quackery that accompanies its diagnosis and "treatment," please don't get me started.....I'll cover psychiatry's Great Diagnosis Con in a later article.
Suffice to say here, the "mental illnesses" purported without evidence to underlie drug addiction usually require drugs to treat them. The stupidity of using drug to cure an addiction to drugs should be obvious and needless to say that approach has produced - surprise, surprise - not just failure but a deepening drugs crisis!
Yet another philosophy subscribes to the idea that drug dependency leads to permanent "chemical imbalances" in the neurological system that must be treated with psychotropic medications after the person has withdrawn from their drug of choice. Again, a lovely way of milking the addict's misery of every last drop of profit but only a partial truth.
Yes, extensive abuse of some drugs can cause permanent damage, but Psychotropic are the worst offenders.
The degree of damage that would necessitate, say, tranquillisers to enable the person to function is rare and almost never results from abuse of street drugs. In my experience most addicts, although they have harmed themselves through the long-term imbibing of chemical poisons and associated malnutrition and so forth, can and do make a very good recovery with the right treatment, such as that provided on the Narconon program. And harmful psychiatric poisons are the very last thing they need!
None of the above, at best partial, truths have paved the way for an effective solution to the drugs problem.
There is another way of looking at the problem that does open the door to a much more effective handling of the problem.
The addict is NOT mentally ill, does not have a brain disease and is not genetically defective:
Addiction begins with pain.
I will cover this more fully in part three of this essay; "Addiction Begins With Pain".
