Johann Hari: If you asked me four years ago, “What causes heroin addiction?” I would have looked at you as if you were simple-minded. I would have said, “Well, heroin causes heroin addiction.” It’s obvious. We’ve been told this story about addiction for a century now that’s so deeply ingrained in our consciousness it seems like common sense.
We think that if you and me and the next 20 people to walk past this cafe all used heroin together, on day 21 we’d all be heroin addicts, because there are chemical hooks in heroin and our body would physically need those chemical hooks by the end of it, and that’s what addiction is. It turns out that’s not really the case.
A doctor in Vancouver explained it to me like this: If you and I step out into the street and you get hit by a car and break your hip, when you’re taken to a hospital, it’s very likely you’ll be given a lot of diamorphine. Diamorphine is heroin. It’s much better heroin than you’ll ever score on the streets — it’s medically pure. They’ve been giving it for quite a long period of time; it’s happening in every hospital all over America.
If what we believe about addiction is right, what should happen? Those people should leave the hospital as addicts, right? That virtually never happens. That alerted me to the fact that something is not right about the story we’ve been told, but I couldn’t quite figure it out — until I met an incredible professor named Bruce Alexander. He explained to me that our idea of addiction comes from a series of experiments conducted early in the 20th century.
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What Bruce says is that this shows us that both the right-wing and left-wing theories of addiction are wrong. The right-wing theory of addiction is that it’s a moral failing and hedonist. The left-wing theory is that you get taken over, your brain is hijacked. Bruce says, It’s not your morality, it’s not your brain — it’s your #cage. Addiction is an #adaptation to your environment. Human beings need to connect, and when we can’t connect with each other, because we’re traumatized or beaten down or cut off, we will connect with something that will give us some sense of relief or pleasure. If you can’t bond with people, you will obsessively bond with something that gives you some sense of purpose.