Addiction is an issue that faces roughly 23.5 million Americans. It’s an issue that’s faced this country since its founding, and just as we’ve changed, so has addiction and our understanding of what it is evolved.
But to many Americans, drug addiction is far too simple. Drugs are bad, drug addicts are people to be avoided, and you’re doing good if you stay away from the illegal stuff.
What we need instead is a more comprehensive, expansive explanation of drug use – including the roles alcohol and tobacco play in drug addiction, and how addiction is something we need to fight together, overcome together, and treat with more compassion and less prejudice.
The way forward, however, isn’t through overcomplication. So, let’s try and simply some of the uncertainty around addiction encountered when one looks beneath the surface of the mainstream.
Defining Addiction
After an hour of simple research, the topic of addiction can become a little headache inducing. There are contradictions abound – especially regarding whether one should describe addiction as physical or psychological, and whether to regard addiction as your brain’s forced burden, or a choice people make.
Addiction, at its core, is defined by any substance that you develop a need for through constant use. We define addiction not by the need for something, but by the context of that need. If you’re human, you obviously need oxygen, water, basic sustenance. You’ll also need social contact and mental stimulation. Exercise would be nice as well, and then we get into more complex needs like the need for passion and purpose and stress relief.
If you’re chronically ill, you need medication. If you’re deficient in something, you’ll need more of it than the average person. If you’re suffering an open wound, you’ll need a disinfectant and, at times, an antibiotic.
None of these things are addictive, even though you suffer harsh consequences for not relying on them. Cocaine, on the other hand, doesn’t serve a purpose as a necessity when you first take it. After a while, if you develop a dependency on it, then parting with it will lead to intense feelings of withdrawal – and you’ll need it again. That’s when it’s classified an addiction.
The same goes for other drugs, including nicotine, alcohol, marijuana, heroin and other opioids. No drug is immediately addictive, but all addictive drugs are called such because they have the capacity to go from being a substance you don’t need at all, to becoming something you can’t function without – or with, for that matter.
Is Addiction Mental or Physical?
That brings us to the question – is addiction a mental or physical affliction? Simplifying this is as easy as saying: it depends. But that’s also just a tad bit too simple, so let’s get a little more serious.
We’ve defined addiction – it usually begins when your mind and body have developed a need for it. It’s different from being a want, in that there are actual consequences for not getting your necessary hit. This is called a dependence, and it’s both a physical and a mental phenomenon. However, the exact relationship between drug use and individuals depends on the individual and the drug in question.
Physical Addiction
Let’s put it this way: heroin, methamphetamine, and nicotine have some of the highest potential to become physically addictive, and the former two are also some of the most dangerous drugs available because of how they’re taken (injection and inhalation), their common impurity as a street drug, and how they affect the body.
However, that doesn’t mean they’re the most addictive drugs on a mental level. A mental addiction is a bit different from a physical one in that it’s not only a matter of changing brain chemistry and making the body physically crave a substance to the point that it protests its absence, but it’s also a matter of what the drug does to the user’s state of mind, their emotions and thoughts.
Mental Addiction
Take addicts who suffer from mental illness on top of addiction. They sometimes use their drugs to escape from the symptoms of their illness, making sobriety that much harder to achieve. For them, they face the added challenge of not just forcing their brains to adapt to sobriety, but also forcing themselves to face all the issues they had buried deep within through drug use.
Sometimes, people attach a specific emotion to a drug and thus become mentally hooked on it. Marijuana, for example, isn’t addictive in the traditional sense – it doesn’t have much of an addictive compound in it. It can, however, lead to a behavioral or mental addiction whereby you associate being relaxed with being high to such a degree that you need weed to stay calm and take off the edge. This can turn into a more powerful addiction with increased potency, especially as today’s strains happen to be much more potent than the marijuana your parents used to smoke.
For some, addiction is more physical than mental. For others, it’s vice versa. The best treatment for addiction does, in fact, differ depending on how strong one person falls in either direction. Say you’re addicted to alcohol, less due to how it affects your body and more due to how you use it as a form of medication. Overcoming that and replacing alcohol with a much more effective, wholesome and healthy coping tool is the key to achieving and maintaining long-term sobriety.
For someone who simply fell into the wrong crowd in their youth and got hooked on heroin without the need to compensate for mental issues, the biggest challenge may be escaping the powerful clutches of an opioid addiction without relapsing.
Undoing Addiction
Mental or physical, the long-term goal for any addict is sobriety. But the road to sobriety very much depends on the addict, their drug or drugs of choice, and the relationship they have between themselves and their substance(s), including any related issues that may tie into that relationship.
That’s where it gets complicated because it becomes an individual case. Sobriety is the general goal, but how one goes about best achieving it depends on them. It’s best not to generalize too much, but sober living is an effective way of figuring out how to cope with life without the drugs, regardless of how the addiction came about or what role it played in life.