Desire and Drive
Addiction is a great motivator
In the biographical history of the regular user of prohibited drugs, there will most likely arrive times when the desired object is unavailable. It is during these “droughts” that the relationship between the user and the object (now absent) is amplified.
In some cases, physical withdrawal will occur, this sobriety altering the user’s existence. Typically, there will be expressions of desire for the drug, and frequent networking activities directed toward obtaining it. There may be substitution of other drugs, initially to buffer the absence of the desired one(s), but the substitute itself may become primary. Finally, during extended droughts, the absence of the drug, whether substituted for or not, will result in the waning of desire. This desire may, of course, reignite when the object is again present.
This ex-user who has detoxed and been abstinent does not have a personality disorder (label: “addictive”) that results in compulsion for the object; those behaviors have typically ended before the drug’s reappearance. The ex-user perceives the object in ways that users and non-users do not, as having an inspirational quality. Users cannot perceive inspiration from the appearance of the object under circumstances of regular supply, and non-users’ knowledge of the object is less than experiential. The inspiration is essentially linguistic—the relationship between the sign and the signified, residing in memory. “Relapse” is a remembering that begins before the drug is consumed.
During the prohibition of objects, and their ensuing absences, objects can be turned into ideas—the quality of desire may enter the absent object itself. Desire does not, as certain theorists advocate, hide in the mind of the user, waiting to pounce into some (perhaps any) compulsion. If the “addictive personality” is marked by an ever-present desire for an original x, and it is a desire that can also attach to q, y, and z, it is less likely that such a latching desire is the determinate condition of this personality type, than it is the objects and classifications themselves.
There are persons admittedly “addicted” to sex, gambling, various drugs, careers (though we never hear of ‘workaholic’ prison laborers or slaves), dieting, credit, professional attention, and more. The so-labeled “addictive personality” can potentially latch onto all of these, for all these activities can spur a measure of desire—and all desire is corrupting. Treatment for such an affliction would center on appetites, on pleasure and desire, rather than objects; yet addiction is an economic and social behavior, in so far as it matters to anyone else.
These social behaviors are microcosms of a greater social problem. The demand for an ever-increasing production of value is the prototype of all individually-suffered addictions. Physically dependent on the usurpation of value, the minority elite class is willing to rob people of more than the world’s opiate addicts ever could. Unlike opiaters, who know abstinence will not kill them, the minority elite must fight to the death, for abstinence in their case spells the end for that class.
The class of opiate addicts themselves has transcended historical era and economic form. It is capitalism and colonialism that have made possible the world-wide expansion of the opiate-addicted class, one formerly restricted to only those areas where opium poppies were indigenous. Since the rise of capitalism, the cultivation of opium has become globalized, often at the behest and personal benefit of those value addicts from the minority owning class.
August 27, 1996.
I happened upon a stack of my writings from graduate school and earlier; this piece was part of a series I wrote in July/August 1996, related to drug prohibition. At the time I was still hiding my marijuana use from most people, and all of my professional colleagues, for personal safety.
At this point in the development of my thinking, I was demystifying the label “addiction,” which had become overly-generalized in common usage. While this tended to soften the deviant so-labeled—if one can become addicted to anything pleasing, then addicts are not so different as people—it also rendered the concept too vague to be useful.
At the time, Oxy-Contin had just received FDA approval for prescription—this new “non-addictive” opioid turned out to be just like the O.G., Heroin, which got its name from being the heroic cure for morphine addiction. Diacetyl morphine is twice as potent as morphine, so addicts required half the dose (to start). When addiction is perceived as an appetite, the reduction of that appetite is considered to be successful treatment.
As increasing numbers of Americans became addicted to Oxy-Contin, and the government held prescribing physicians liable, the doctors stopped prescribing. An opiate addict suffering an abstinence syndrome who knows there are unregulated substitutes may be inclined to seek them. During this self-made crisis, the underground opiate market became dominated by knockoff Fentanyl, often sold as heroin, despite being 50 times more potent.
A heroin-sized dose of Fentanyl is quite deadly.
Lethal opiate overdose spiked as cause of death, helped by the deceptive marketing of Oxy-Contin and its over-prescription, the federal public health policy that criminalizes drug abuse and those who provide drug abusers with drugs, and a fundamental change in the unregulated opiate market supply.
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