It's one of the biggest ironies of the War on Drugs that a society like America's, which is entirely based upon hedonistic consumerism, sees it fit to embrace a selectively Puritan ethic only when it comes to drug use.
In reality, addiction is not just something restricted to drugs, but all sorts of behaviors; namely, behaviors involving one's attachment to people or things.
Indeed, when we are born, what enables us to survive is our attachment to our mothers. This attachment is (hopefully) reciprocated by our mothers, and takes on all the hallmarks of an addiction. A mother experiences unparalleled joy when interacting with her young child, and unparalleled terror if that child gets lost. Likewise, a young child without their mother will literally have withdrawal symptoms and cry like crazy.
Addiction, in this understanding of its psychological origins, is not necessarily pathological at all but rather just the opposite: an evolutionary adaptive mechanism which enables survival.
And from a Darwinian perspective, survival is not just about remaining alive, but also reproducing. It is in this connection that addiction's association with romantic love can be grasped, drawing from psychology's insight into how attachment styles in adulthood are a direct result of how attachment styles are formed in childhood.
Imagine if your mother did not reciprocate a healthy attachment to you during childhood. Or if you experienced ostracism or bullying by your peers during your formative years. Your ability to bond with others may be permanently impaired as a consequence, and yet your desire to bond/love will not be (indeed, it will probably only be strengthened) -- so something will have to give to grant you emotional stability!
Drug use, particularly drugs which are opioidergic, are the solution for many. Whether it's alcohol or stimulants, downers or uppers, all truly addictive drugs are opioidergic in one way or another. This is because artificially increasing opioids serves to simulate the feelings that one has during a close attachment to someone (or something). It is literally love incarnate, as many drug users will admit when they speak of "falling in love" with their drug of choice, or "missing" a long lost drug they used to take. Opioid agonists in particular are described by drug users in especially relational terms: "the warm hug" of the high, or the high being "better than sex."
Thus drug addicts are usually those who failed at managing the "natural" addiction of love, whether due to bad parents who messed up their ability to bond during childhood, or a more recent romantic breakup. After all, it is a trope that those who undergo breakups will "take to the bottle" for a reason. To give another example: the adolescents who are most likely to take addictive drugs will be the ones who come from dysfunctional families. And it is not simply because degeneracy breeds degeneracy, as a primitive conservative outlook would lead you to believe; on the contrary, it is a compensation for a lack of secure attachment (i.e., love), or an ability to feel good about life itself, and your relationships within it.
The religious societies of the past seemed to intuitively understand this, because they not only stigmatized and banned alcohol/drug use, but also heavily stigmatized and punished things like adultery which would lead to much alcohol/drug use in the first place (by destroying relationships)!
Our current society does something else. It is happy to create all the conditions for people to grow up into miserable drug addicts, and then punish them for becoming what it predestined them to be all along! To make matters worse, it is all just in the pursuit of money. For a war on fornication would not be very profitable to those in power (consider that compensation for loneliness is a key motivator for consumerism), but the War on Drugs certainly has been and will continue to be very profitable for the corrupt "criminal justice" bureaucracies of the state and its ancillary industries -- all at the expense of the wellbeing of those drug addicts who have already been down on their luck for a long time.
When President Nixon started the modern "War on Drugs" in earnest, only ~1,000 people died from drug overdoses per year in the US
Now that figure is ~100,000
It is important to mention that a healthy attachment between a mother and her child must not constitute a strong addiction forever; the ability to develop moderation, by allowing the child increasing independence on the one hand, and the child being able to increasingly separate from the mother on the other, is essential to the development of a healthy adult attachment style. It is doubtlessly a consequence of the failure of this process to happen which explains many cases of drug addiction, symptomatic of disorders such as BPD and narcissism, where the individuality/seperate-ness of the parties of a romantic relationship is out of the question. Just like drugs are inanimate and inert, and there to do whatever you want with them, so is a mentally crippled BPD partner
In reality, addiction is not just something restricted to drugs, but all sorts of behaviors; namely, behaviors involving one's attachment to people or things.
Indeed, when we are born, what enables us to survive is our attachment to our mothers. This attachment is (hopefully) reciprocated by our mothers, and takes on all the hallmarks of an addiction. A mother experiences unparalleled joy when interacting with her young child, and unparalleled terror if that child gets lost. Likewise, a young child without their mother will literally have withdrawal symptoms and cry like crazy.
Addiction, in this understanding of its psychological origins, is not necessarily pathological at all but rather just the opposite: an evolutionary adaptive mechanism which enables survival.
And from a Darwinian perspective, survival is not just about remaining alive, but also reproducing. It is in this connection that addiction's association with romantic love can be grasped, drawing from psychology's insight into how attachment styles in adulthood are a direct result of how attachment styles are formed in childhood.
Imagine if your mother did not reciprocate a healthy attachment to you during childhood. Or if you experienced ostracism or bullying by your peers during your formative years. Your ability to bond with others may be permanently impaired as a consequence, and yet your desire to bond/love will not be (indeed, it will probably only be strengthened) -- so something will have to give to grant you emotional stability!
Drug use, particularly drugs which are opioidergic, are the solution for many. Whether it's alcohol or stimulants, downers or uppers, all truly addictive drugs are opioidergic in one way or another. This is because artificially increasing opioids serves to simulate the feelings that one has during a close attachment to someone (or something). It is literally love incarnate, as many drug users will admit when they speak of "falling in love" with their drug of choice, or "missing" a long lost drug they used to take. Opioid agonists in particular are described by drug users in especially relational terms: "the warm hug" of the high, or the high being "better than sex."
Thus drug addicts are usually those who failed at managing the "natural" addiction of love, whether due to bad parents who messed up their ability to bond during childhood, or a more recent romantic breakup. After all, it is a trope that those who undergo breakups will "take to the bottle" for a reason. To give another example: the adolescents who are most likely to take addictive drugs will be the ones who come from dysfunctional families. And it is not simply because degeneracy breeds degeneracy, as a primitive conservative outlook would lead you to believe; on the contrary, it is a compensation for a lack of secure attachment (i.e., love), or an ability to feel good about life itself, and your relationships within it.
The religious societies of the past seemed to intuitively understand this, because they not only stigmatized and banned alcohol/drug use, but also heavily stigmatized and punished things like adultery which would lead to much alcohol/drug use in the first place (by destroying relationships)!
Our current society does something else. It is happy to create all the conditions for people to grow up into miserable drug addicts, and then punish them for becoming what it predestined them to be all along! To make matters worse, it is all just in the pursuit of money. For a war on fornication would not be very profitable to those in power (consider that compensation for loneliness is a key motivator for consumerism), but the War on Drugs certainly has been and will continue to be very profitable for the corrupt "criminal justice" bureaucracies of the state and its ancillary industries -- all at the expense of the wellbeing of those drug addicts who have already been down on their luck for a long time.
When President Nixon started the modern "War on Drugs" in earnest, only ~1,000 people died from drug overdoses per year in the US
Now that figure is ~100,000
It is important to mention that a healthy attachment between a mother and her child must not constitute a strong addiction forever; the ability to develop moderation, by allowing the child increasing independence on the one hand, and the child being able to increasingly separate from the mother on the other, is essential to the development of a healthy adult attachment style. It is doubtlessly a consequence of the failure of this process to happen which explains many cases of drug addiction, symptomatic of disorders such as BPD and narcissism, where the individuality/seperate-ness of the parties of a romantic relationship is out of the question. Just like drugs are inanimate and inert, and there to do whatever you want with them, so is a mentally crippled BPD partner
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