The Myth of Addiction: Application of the Psychological Theory of Attribution to Illicit Drug Usage

The drug issue usually attracts our attention through the media which seeks to reduce the issue to a single, instantly comprehensible message, but in the process an inaccurate and largely false impression is created. Even among drug workers and researchers there is an avoidance of anything that smacks of theory, and a preference for action, even if that action is based on nothing more than personal prejudice and guesswork. Furthermore, stereotyped and inaccurate views of addiction are not uncommon even within the ranks of those who work intimately with drug problems, where there is all too frequently a lack of coherence in terms of the work carried out, and an unwillingness to consider alternative interpretations. Perhaps most of all there is the belief that the "truth" about the nature and causes of drug addiction can be revealed by methods which rely principally on asking people to answer questions or express opinions about their own drug use. However, answering questions and stating opinions are behaviours in their own right, which have dynamics all of their own. For these reasons, it is important to consider existing knowledge on the way people answer questions and explain their actions, since understanding these processes may yield fresh perspectives on the issues under investigation. This book attempts to provide such an alternative perspective on the idea of drug use and misuse. The ideas contained represent a species of argument which is neglected, primarily because it is slightly more complicated than more popular theories of drug use. The book attempts to show that our beliefs about drug users are largely inaccurate. We choose to believe in helpless junkies and evil pushers, and the helpless junkie only exists because research continues to make naive use of what people say about their addictions. The author suggests that most people who use drugs do so for their own reasons, because they like it and because they find no adequate reason for not doing so; not because they fall prey to some addictive illness which removes their capacity for voluntary behaviour. He does not suggest that drugs have no pharmacological effect, nor does he deny that some individuals become enmeshed in a cycle of use and misuse. The final message is that dealing with drug problems rationally depends on giving people back the sense of personal power and volition that they require if they are control their drug use for themselves; a power which existing concepts of addiction frequently seek to limit or deny at the outset as a precondition to further treatment. To take this apparently simple step, however, involves a major rethinking of contemporary moral attitudes to drugs and addiction, since these shape the nature of the help we are prepared to offer. In the meantime, the present system does not work. There is little to suggest that anything on offer at the moment does better than spontaneous recovery, (that is, giving up by oneself), and some evidence that punitive legislative interventions make things worse by institutionalizing the type of harmful drug use that we most wish to avoid.

Table of Contents:
Attribution theory - explaining explanation; attribution theory and attributional research; volitional and non-volitional explanations; addiction, withdrawals and craving; pharmacology and compulsion; the problem of "addictive substances"; disease as the preferred explanation for "badness"; the nature of the evidence - methodological problems; attribution - a dynamic approach to how people explain their addictions; functional explanations for drug use; a context for drug problems.