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Except in a few cases --heroin, cocaine, perhaps alcohol-- I reject the whole addiction model of abuse. And that is because I don't experience substances that way. I drink very occasionally, and enjoy it when I do, as when I have a glass of red wine with pasta at a Italian restaurant. Or when I smoke one or two French cigarettes after sushi. But sex? I used to have lots of sex with people I didn't know, and now I don't, and I didn't have to go to Sexual Addiction meetings to stop, although something somewhat more drastic did happen to me. I used to overeat, but now I don't, because I don't like the way I feel afterwards. This will seem very backward and annoying, very 14th century, but I mostly don't believe in addiction: I believe in gluttony.
Gluttony, one of the Seven Deadly Sins, will seem a surprisingly moralistic way to look at things, but I don't view people who overindulge as being either sick or depraved. Instead, I see "addicts" as people who consistently make bad choices. Actually, I see them as making one bad choice over and over again, and contrary to the rubrics of the 21st century, they're choices which they could choose not to make. Instead of glutting on tobacco, or sex, or whatever it is, they could turn the habit into something holy. I guess that what I'm really saing is that I don't believe in contemporary schematics of the soul, with its dependencies and co-dependencies, its addictions, its Big Books and its relapses. I prefer to accept the full responsibility for my behavior, not shunt it off onto some weird medical abstraction. I hate the way the language of contemporary medicine, with its zeal to enclose every human habit in its narrow envelope, has tended to pathologize every human pursuit. Oh, I'm addicted to sex. I'm addicted to alcohol. I'm addicted to Speed Racer. Shut the fuck UP.
I know the model has helped millions of people, and that's cool. If you want the addiction model, its yours and I won't try to take it from you. But don't push it on ME.
The most active ingredient of tobacco, nicotine, is said by many to be among the most addictive in the world. But I've never smoked more than three cigarettes in a row, usually not more than one, and that one about every other month or so. I bought a pack of Marselles roughly six months ago and it was just today that my sister bummed the last one. Vive le smoking!
Moreover, not only is my relationship to tobacco not the flower of some sinister pathology, I say that it is holy. It engages me in the sacred element of fire. As I walk down Broadway, I hold my lit cigarette as an emblem of my office as magician, and bless bus stops and doorways with the smoke.
So all your uncles died of emphysema and you're scared that you're following them into the grave. Man, I'm hip. But there are other issues to consider. I speak here of power, I speak of choice and I speak of enchantment.
2 comments:
There's the matter of physical withdrawal, though I suppose that when most people talk of addiction, they are rarely addressing this specific problem, which doesn't actually apply to most of the conditions people describe as addiction.
The most common addiction narrative has the addict falling prey to the addictive thing in some way - innocently introduced to it, driven to it by stress or some other misguided need to self-medicate. The addict loses control, will, agency in the depth of the addiction and needs to be bailed out by those who love the addict.
This group love treatment does seem to work for some - maybe because the addiction in these cases is a kind of despair. Ultimately the user must decide that the love of others, love of the world, is enough to return to a competent existence. So it seems that the latter process doesn't really need the initial narrative. Maybe these addictions are a kind of gluttony in the face of death, a desperate fetish of pleasure held up like a water pistol at the Reaper (bad magic?).
Other "addictions" are clearly what you claim - euphemized gluttony. There's a lot of money in it; it keeps people employed, and Doctor Phil, Oprah, Montel et al are the industry leaders.
Hey Andre,
I love the phraseabout the squirtt gun. I probably overstated things because the pall of addiction talk is so heavy in our culture that one feels the need to be extreme in its opposition. I have no doubt, for example, that heroin use, sooner rather than later, becomes an actual addiction in the contemporary sense. But sex addiction? Food addiction? TV addiction? Come on kids, pay your own goddamn freight.
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