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Appendix The Nature and Significance of Addiction

Written by Virginia Berridge

Thursday, 28 January 2010 00:00 - Last Updated Tuesday, 24 May 2011 14:58

Appendix

The Nature and Significance of Addiction

Addiction is the word which is popularly in use to describe compulsive drug taking. In scientific

writing the word (and the underlying concept) has to an extent been supplanted by the phrase

drug dependence. Here though the complexities of scientific nomenclature need not be gone

into, and it seems better to retain the older and slightly less cumbersome term.

The opiates are drugs of addiction. There are variations in individual susceptibility, but anyone

who takes an opiate for a long enough period and in sufficient dose will become addicted. What

is the nature of this condition which trails with it so many fears and stereotypes, and which

seems often to be thought of almost as possession rather than as intelligible happening? This

question is very relevant to an understanding of the problems which society encountered over

that long period when opium was so readily available that it could provide the conditions where

addiction must have been common and endemic.

Opiates are drugs to which the individual's central nervous system will, on repeated exposure,

develop a high degree of tolerance - a much bigger dose of the drug is then required to produce

the same and desired effect in the tolerant than in the naive subject. There is therefore in the

drug's intrinsic properties a ready and in-built invitation to escalate the dose. If the drug was

taken for, say, a chronic neuralgia, its effectiveness would at first be very evident and much

valued, but if it was to go on being of use to the person purchasing his laudanum from the

corner grocer's shop, he would soon find that to produce the original effects he was having to

take the laudanum in larger quantities. But every addict sooner or later finds his plateau dose,

and there is considerable variation in levels and patterns of use. Many reach a fairly moderate

dose level which suits them, and stick to it. This is what nineteenth-century writers on addiction

were referring to when they cited cases of `moderate addicts' who showed no tendency to

continuing escalation.

Tolerance is then intimately linked to the onset of withdrawal symptom experience and physical

dependence. The tolerant individual begins to find that some hours after his last dose he feels

restless, that he develops goose pimples and begins to yawn, that his eyes are watering and his

nose running, and that he is generally uncomfortable. With increasing dependence more severe

withdrawal symptoms will be experienced, and if this person is then deprived of his drug for

twelve or more hours he risks an agonizing withdrawal experience characterized particularly by

great restlessness and anxiety, severe abdominal cramps and profuse diarrhoea. Appalling

though the experience may then be, the condition is not life-threatening unless there is some

severe intercurrent illness or infection. The patient recovers. Lesser degrees of addiction carry

risks only of lesser withdrawal symptoms, and like the drug effect itself the withdrawal

experience is much influenced by set and expectation.

Addiction to opiates may best be pictured as both a psychological- and biological condition,

characterized by a desire to continue taking the drug in high dosage, a salience of this

drug-seeking drive over other life considerations and a tendency to relapse. It seems likely that

repeated experience of the powerful euphoriant effect of the drug contributes to the initiation of

addiction : in simple terms a habit is built up because it is intensely pleasurable. But what also

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very importantly contributes to the enhancement of this `learnt drive' is the repeated experience

of withdrawal and the concomitant experience of repeated and wonderfully reassuring relief

which is afforded by the next drug dose. The addict is conditioned to crave that next dose. Such

a view of addiction can, however, be criticized for placing too great an emphasis on the drug

itself and its user's experience in isolation from environmental determinants which initiate and

sustain drug use, and which give the drug its symbolic meaning and the user his social role. The

pharmacological qualities cited here and the psychological experience of the users are

important, but it is difficult to see how, on their own, they can provide a coherent idea of a

condition called addiction or dependence. Here can be seen very plainly what is meant by the

need to integrate different levels of explanation.

So much for the nature of addiction. What about its significance, and in particular its

significance for nineteenth-century society? The threat which is posed by addiction to oral

preparations of opiates is much less than the dangers of addiction to the drug in injected form,

and it was of course the latter type of addiction which characterized the British `heroin epidemic'

of the 1960s, and characterizes the large-scale contemporary drug problem in the U.S.A. The

special dangers of injected drug use include the ease of accidental overdose and the risks of

accidental infection caused by a dirty needle. Today's picture of injected heroin use must

therefore not be allowed too easily to colour any assumptions as to what would have been the

familiar picture, in the nineteenth century, of addiction to opium or opium preparations taken by

mouth. There would have been risks of overdose, sometimes as a result of the unreliable

strength of many of the available commercial preparations, but the risks would be nothing like

so great as those encountered by the twentieth-century heroin addict who injects the drug

directly into his veins. What proportion of overdose cases in the nineteenth century were

occurring among addicts and what proportion among casual users is unknown, but certainly the

contemporary concern with self-poisoning did not simply equate overdosing with addiction. The

problem of accidental infection is then irrelevant to oral use. Another possible medical

implication of addiction which received nineteenth-century attention was the general question of

whether habitual opium use shortened life, but here too the problem was conceived in terms of

the fact of high usage rather than the underlying fact of the addiction. On the longevity issue the

present judgement would probably be that opiates themselves produce no directly damaging or

life-shortening effect on the body and that addiction itself is not a physically damaging condition.

The problems which the nineteenth century encountered with addiction were therefore

presumably more in the social than the medical sphere. Opium may have been cheap, but a

heavily tolerant individual might well build up to such a dose as to involve a weekly cash outlay

to embarrass the family's finances in a working-class household where every penny counted.

The drive towards continued drug use would mean that the family's welfare easily became

neglected. There might also be other social complications -neglect in child care, for instance, or

impairment of working capacity. Such possible social complications do not seem much to have

caught the nineteenth-century eye, although there were occasional references to matters of this

sort. Indeed, the fact that addiction itself was not sharply conceptualized for the larger part of

the century, in many of the relevant debates and social movements, meant that the addict did

not suffer the sort of secondary social damage which comes from labelling and stigma, and

which has been so much part of the present-day reaction of the Western world to drug-taking

and the drug-taker.

Addiction to drugs other than opiates has features specific to each drug group. Cocaine can

produce an intensely compulsive drive towards continued drug use, despite the absence of

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withdrawal symptoms. Depressant substances such as chloral can also induce addiction, with a

well-marked withdrawal picture. Psychomimetic substances in general do not give rise to

addiction, and if cannabis has any addictive potential this was certainly not an issue with the

sort of doses and preparations which the nineteenth century encountered.

Far from the physical attributes of the drugs in question being a side-issue or something quite

separate from the main business, an understanding of the extraordinary subtlety and potency of

the actions of these substances on the human mind and body helps not only to make intelligible

the social processes which were the game evolved around them, but re-inforces one's sense

also of the astonishing subtlety and potency of accidental and informal, or formal and purposive

social processes, which allow society at different phases in history to live on terms with these

strange mindacting chemicals.

Reference

A very useful general source book on pharmacology is L. S. Goodman and A. Gilman,

Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics, 5th edn (New York, Macmillan, 1975).

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