What’s the real reason behind addiction?

Arab countries are facing several health challenges, but one of the most alarming is certainly addiction. Addiction disorders, which include substance abuse as well as prescription drug abuse among others, are becoming increasingly commonplace in the region. Since they entail serious social consequences, they must be tackled as an urgent public health issue. But what’s the real reason behind addiction?

For the past century, people believed that after consuming heroin for a while, their body would become dependent on the chemical hooks in heroin and they would start to physically need them and eventually become heroin addicts. But the truth is most people who have taken painkillers such as diamorphine have actually taken quite a lot of heroin, but somehow didn’t become addicts. What’s the reason behind this?

The idea of addiction that most of us tend to believe comes from a simple experiment done with rats. You put a rat in a cage and you give it two water bottles: one filled with water and one filled with water mixed with heroin or cocaine. The rat will almost always prefer the drug water and inevitably kill itself rather quickly. In the 1970s, Professor Bruce Alexander noticed something: he realized that the rat in the cage had nothing to do except using the drugs. So he decided to try a new experiment and created a new cage called “Rat Park”, where rats had access to loads of food and tunnels and toys to play with. They were surrounded by loads of friends and could have loads of sex, but they were still given the two water bottles: one with drugs and one without.

Surprisingly, in Rat Park, the rats didn’t seem to like the drug water – they almost never used it, and if they did, it was never compulsively and none of them overdosed. Funny enough the overdose rate dropped from almost 100 percent to zero percent when the rats had happy and connected lives. Professor Alexander thought this theory might only apply to rats, but he found out there was a similar human experiment happening at the exact same time – the Vietnam war. In Vietnam, 20 percent of all American troops were using loads of heroin. And what do you think happened when they came home? 95 percent of them just stopped – they didn’t go to rehab and didn’t even go into withdrawal. So Professor Alexander started thinking: what if addiction wasn’t about chemical hooks? What if addiction was just an adaptation to one’s environment?

Another professor, Peter Cohen, had a theory about this. According to him, human beings have a natural and innate need to bond. When people are happy and healthy, they bond and connect with each other. But when they’re isolated or traumatized or somehow beaten down by life, they bond with anything that gives them some sense of relief. It can be gambling, cocaine or cannabis, but they will bond with something as it’s in their nature to do so. The major driver of addiction is therefore disconnection, which is paradoxically growing, despite the fact that we supposedly live in the most connected society that’s ever been. “Something's gone wrong with us, not just with individuals but as a group, and we've created a society where, for a lot of us, life looks a whole lot more like that isolated cage and a whole lot less like Rat Park”, says Professor Alexander.

All in all, as British journalist Johann Hari rightly puts it, “the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection”.

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