Addiction: Moral Failure, Biological Disorder or Presenting Symptom?
By: Russ W
Tags: Addiction, Substance Abuse, Recovery, Alcoholism, Mental Health

Photo by the blowup on Unsplash

Context Creates the Craving

One of the commonalities between the moral and medical models is that they both exist within a theoretical vacuum. What do I mean?

You and I and everyone else didn’t just grow up alone in a liquor store. Your childhood home probably didn’t come with a hydroponics lab in the basement that made the kitchen stink like Sour Diesel. Your toy blocks weren’t vacuum-sealed bricks of blow.

We each grew up in a complex ecosystem of inter-related family systems, inter-personal dynamics, social norms, laws and rules.

You might have been part of the rebellious and experimental cool kid crew. Maybe your older brother gave you a beer out of his sixer when you were twelve. Maybe your parents tied one on every night in front of the tv, and you snuck into the liquor cabinet while they were out on date night.

There might have been dealers outside the bodega by your subway stop. Your mother might have been partial to a weekend cocktail of wine and benzos. You might have grown up where there’s a liquor store on every corner, and the same guys were always brown baggin’ pints outside. Or maybe the burnouts cruised around town on a Cadillac high.

For everyone, the context is different. We all have a unique story, complete with a cast of co-conspirators, accessories, villains, heroes, enforcers, saviorsa and self-righteous finger-waggers. And these stories come with their own backdrop of reasons, influences and consequences.

While every story is different, the point is that every addict has a story. They can tell you how they started using. They can tell you stories about when it started to slide downhill. If they slid far, they can tell stories about hopelessness and desperation. And, for the fortunate ones, there might just be Hallmark-channel-worthy stories of recovery and redemption.

Addiction doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Addiction happens in specific situations. Addiction comes with emotions, fears, anger, sadness, loss, mental illness, pressure and pain. Addiction is an outcome of social forces, pressures and traumas.

We all made a choice. We may not have known why we made that choice at the time, but the social context played a major role. If you look close enough, you’ll likely find some kind of pain hiding below the surface.

The choice we made was to medicate our pain. We sought relief.

If you’re like me, that pain had been building up my entire life. The heat and the pressure in the cauldron of my mind kept creeping upward until suddenly I needed immediate relief. I needed to turn it all off. I needed a medicine that would stop the sick carnival of desperation marching through my mind.

At first, it was easy to blur out the pain. But, my brain began to adjust to the poison I put in my body. So, I did what any addict would do. I upped the ante. After a while, you reach a point where it’s no longer about pleasure — it’s about maintenance. It’s about the avoidance of heart palpitations, cold sweats, muscle spasms and crawling skin.

In this third model, my addiction exists within a social context. I did my best with the skills I had to cope with my surroundings, my pressures, my internal anxiety, my insecurity. But it wasn’t enough. So, I made the only choice I felt I had: I used a bottle of vodka as my escape hatch.

Was it the right decision? Of course not. Were there better options? Unquestionably.

Could I have quit toxic jobs? Could I have set stronger personal boundaries with emotional vampires? Did I have to live 3,000 miles away from family? Could I have entered therapy sooner? Could I have realized that social norms of success are really empty materialism? Could I have accepted myself as the emotional, sometimes weak human being that we all are?

Without a doubt.

But I didn’t have the tools to conduct a forensic autopsy of my life in real-time. I didn’t know where the pain was coming from. My energy was spent bobbing and weaving my way through personal and professional pressures.

It’s about time we take the blame off the individual and start looking at the system that produced the addict.

Could growing poverty rates have an influence on substance use? What about the fact that salaries vary based on the color of your skin? Doesn’t racial injustice cause real psychological trauma each and every day? What about sexism, heterosexism, ageism, ableism?

Could the glorification of wealth and consumerism leave us reaching for things that will never bring us happiness? Do U.S. business practices put profit ahead of human and ecological wellbeing? Could social technology be disrupting the formation of authentic social connections?

Are the privileged people in power stirring up incivility, fear, rage and hatred in the rest of us for their own gain?

Have media become more interested in fanning flames, catastrophizing and stirring up controversy than creating an informed public? And what does their overwhelmingly negative coverage do viewers’ mental health?

Do companies that produce addictive substances have more rights than the individuals they hook?

I know what I think. What about you?