Addiction factoid of the Day:
Psychiatrist Lee Robins found that almost half of American soldiers used heroin or opium while in Vietnam, but rather fewer were actually addicted, and almost 90 percent of those kicked the habit upon returning to the United States.
The reality of addiction is that it's rarely quite as universal or one-dimensional as those frightening government ads would have you believe. One hit of heroin won't turn you into a heroin addict, and one puff of a cigarette won't make you an addicted smoker. Thanks to the pioneering research of Saul Shiffman, science now has a much more nuanced (and accurate) view of addiction. While scientists used to think that 90 to 95 percent of smokers were similarly addicted - they had to smoke at least a pack a day - it's now clear that this isn't the case. In fact, more than 20 percent of smokers don't even smoke every day. In other words, there are millions of smokers were manage to regularly smoke cigarettes without getting hooked on nicotine. Other smokers vary their cigarette consumption from day to day, and report few symptoms of withdrawal.
I'm certainly not endorsing smoking or heroin. They remain dangerous drugs. But solving the disease of addiction will require us to attain a more realistic understanding of its complexities. That includes the awkward fact that not everybody is equally susceptible to addiction.
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I think most addiction researchers realize this fact. But of course grant money is usually given to those investigating how to break addiction rather than how it developed. At the basic level, that means studying only those lab animals that readily and consistently use drug X. For some drugs this is very easy (e.g, heroin); for others you need to use special tricks (e.g. cocaine, alcohol). Factors such as individual differences and environmental enrichment are generally ignored in the literature, and I wish they weren't
It would be interesting to take trauma histories and/or do adult attachment interviews with those most susceptible to addiction. My hypothesis would be such folks would present an extensive trauma history and/or some form of insecure attachment, most likely of the "disorganized" kind.