Overcoming Drug Addiciton

The topic of overcoming a drug addiction has risen to the center of my interests in psychology in recent weeks because it is such an interesting and illustrative example of the nature of our embodied existence as human beings. By "overcoming drug addiction," I'm referring to the process by which a person attempts to stop using drugs, while at the same time deals with the feeling of wanting to use drugs.

The coexistence within one person of these two competing desires is revealing of what I have referred to in previous posts as the constraints on the adaptive action of living systems. To briefly state this, the possibility for competing and contradictory urges to coexist in a single living system is a likely problem that arises from the fact that the system is autopoetic, and can never exercise completely adaptive control over its whole being. The last point is not a complex one, it's actually an extremely obvious observation about how physical systems have to work. This state of affairs doesn't have to happen, but there is nothing to prevent it from happening given the right conditions.

With drug addiction we can see, in society, the manifestation of this state of affairs in a certain type of way. The drug user is the victim of these competing urges that send contradictory signals, each attempting to have the body controlled in a certain way. For the drug addict who wants to stop using drugs to actually stop using drugs requires the development of control over the body by a value system that recognizes the futility of drug use. In order to attain this control, the value system must be more powerful than the value system that seeks to continue drug use. In other words, the anti drug value system must have greater leverage over the affective processes of the body than the pro drug value system.

This is actually just one view of how this might happen. Another possibility is that the user who formerly "believed" in the emotions that led to drug use, learns to stop believing in these emotions; he/she learns that they are produced by the body in error, from a bodily system that does not "get" the overall picture of what has to be done.

I will refer to these two views as the competition view (the first) and the realization view (the second). Which is correct? Are they compatible?

If we look to our own experience, some aspects of the realization view are very reasonable. Even if one is not a drug addict, it's easy to think of a situation in which one has an emotional response that is undesired (e.g., a dieting person wanting food). Our own experience shows us that we can learn to respond to such emotions by saying "that is exactly the kind of affective reaction that I want to stop happening." In spite of our awareness of its being the problem, the emotional reaction continues to hold sway over our decisions, and so, in the example, the dieting person gives in to eating a cheeseburger, despite thinking what a terrible decision this is.

So, it seems that we can evaluate our affective reactions, but in many cases, this evaluative capacity does not hold sufficient sway over the rest of out body to suppress the emotion's power (though it does in some contexts).

I'm out of time for today, but I will continue to explore this issue in the next post (as the task I set out for myself today remains unresolved). I want to finish up looking at the "realization" method of overcoming emotions and then look at the possible merits of the competition method.