Many people do not understand why or how peoples became drugs addicts. They'll mistakenly think that peoples who use drugs lack moral principles or self-control. In reality, drug addiction is a very complex disease and
Here's how it works:
If you use heroin for 20 days, by day 21, your body would physically crave the drug ferociously because there are chemical hooks within the drug. That's what Addiction means. But there a catch. Everything we suppose we know about Addiction is Wrong.
In case if you break your hip you'll be taken to a hospital and you'll be given lots of diamorphine for weeks or maybe months. Diamorphine is heroin. In reality it's much stronger heroin than any addict can get on the road. Because it's not contaminated by all of the stuff drug sellers dilute it with. There are peoples near you being given loads of deluxe heroin in hospitals right now. So at least some of them turn out to be addicts?
But this has been closely studied it doesn't happen. Our present day theory of addiction comes in part from a sequence of experiments were finished earlier in the 20th century. The experiment is simple; You take a rat and put it in a cage with two water bottles. One is simply water the opposite is water laced with heroin or cocaine. Almost every time you run this experiment the rats turns into obsessed on the drug water and keep coming back for more untill it kills itself.
But in the 1970s Bruce Alexander a professor of psychology observe something odd about this Test. The rats is put in the cage all alone. It has nothing to do but take the drugs. what would happen he wondered if we tried this in another way. So he built rat Park which is basically heaven for rats it is a lush cage in which the rats could have colored balls tunnels to scamper down masses of friends to play with and they could have loads of sex- And they would have the drug water and the everyday water bottles. But here is the fascinating Thing in rat Park. Rats hardly ever use the drug water none of them ever use it compulsively, none of them ever overdose. But maybe this is a quirk of rats.
Well, helpfully there was a human test alongside the same lines. The Vietnam War. Twenty percent of american troops in vietnam were using a lot of heroin. Soldiers back home were really panicked because they thought there would be lots of junkies on the streets of the us. When the war was over. But a study followed the soldiers home and observed something striking. They didn't go to rehab. 95% of them simply stopped when they they got home.
If you believe the old concept of addiction. that makes no sense. But if you agree with professor alexander's theory it makes perfect sense. If you are put into a jungle in a foreign country. Where you do not want to be and you could be forced to kill or die at any moment, doing heroin is a easy way to spend your time. But if you go back to your comfortable home together with your friends and your family. it is the equivalent of being taken out of that first cage and put into a human rat Park.
We need to think about addiction differently.
Humans have an innate need to bond and connect. When we are glad and healthy we will bond with the humans round us. But when we can't due to the fact we are traumatized isolated or beaten down by life we can bond with some thing that gives us some feel of remedy it is probably checking a cellphone continuosly it might be pornography video,video games,gambling or it is probably cocaine. But we will bond with some thing because that is our human nature. Addiction is simply one symptom of the crisis of disconnection that's going on all around us.
The war on drugs we've been fighting for nearly a century now has made the everything worse. Instead of supporting people heal and getting their existence together, we've got forged them out from society. We have made it harder for them to get jobs and become stable. We take benefits and support away from them if we caught them with drugs. We throw them in jail, which can be actually cages. we put people who are not well in a situation that makes them experience worse and hate them for not recovering. For too long we've talked only about person recovery from addiction.
But we need now to talk about social recovery because something has wrong with us as a group. we have to construct a society that looks a lot greater like rat park and plenty less like those isolated cages. we are going to change the unnatural way we live and rediscover each other
The alternative of addiction isn't sobriety the opposite of addiction is connection.