"Why We Are All Addicted" by Dr. Andrew Weil

[Encephalon]

I'd like to share the following article by Dr. Andrew Weil. I think it's important because alcoholics and addicts often wrestle with the first step, actually admitting they've got addictive issues to work out, and entire meetings can unfold where nothing is discussed but the critical differences that exist between "normal" people and substance abusers. As Buddhism makes clear, we are all addicts, and consumer culture presses all the buttons.

 

WHY WE ARE ALL ADDICTED

by Andrew Weil

 

 

I recently ran across an article that appeared in "Science" back in 1961. The senior author was a man named Heinz von Forster, who's an electrical engineer at MIT. The title of the article was "Doomsday, Friday the 13th, 2026." Von Forster, who was not a population biologist, and as a result of that the article outraged population biologists, did an analysis of the increase in world population and developed a new mathematical model to account for and predict the way the population was increasing.

 

His conclusion was that the population curve was following what he called "super exponential growth," that the expansion of population was proportional to the square of the growth rate. He was concerned with the doubling time of the human population. In other words, the time it took for the human population to go from small numbers to one billion was a very, very long time. From one billion to two billion was a tiny fraction of that time, but still long. When I was growing up, the population of the world was two billion. From two billion to four billion has occurred within my lifetime; it took about thirty years. Von Forster's prediction is that from four billion to eight billion will be about fifteen years, from eight billion to sixteen billion around seven and a half years, and so forth. On the basis of this, he drew a curve that described this expansion and concluded that somewhere around the year 2026, plus or minus five years, the population of the world would reach infinity-that is all the mass of the earth would have been converted to people. Therefore, the end of the world would be by squeezing to death. Obviously, long before the population of the world got near infinity, there would be disasters of

one sort or another -epidemics, wars, famines, or whatever.

 

When the article appeared in 1961 it was roundly denounced in subsequent issues of "Science" by mathematicians and population biologists. The theme of population biologists at that time was that the rate of increase of population was slowing, and therefore population biologists were putting out an optimistic message. However, a long letter appeared in "Science" in April of last year by a population biologist who urged readers to remember von Forster and the doomsday curve, and pointed out that the actual increase in world population since 1961 has not only conformed to von Forster's prediction, but in fact is slightly ahead of it. That means that the end of the world, or at least the end of civilization as we know it, is really not far off. I would assume that the disasters that will come in the wake of this population increase will happen much before 2026. It could happen within twenty years - well within our lifetimes.

 

The reasons for the global catastrophes that are coming have a lot to do with addictive behavior. The world population increase has a lot to do with addiction to sex, for example. The destruction of rainforests and the pollution of oceans and

atmospheres has a lot to do with addiction to power and to money. The subject of addiction cannot be taken out of the context of the imminence of the end of life as we know it.

 

Roger Walsh has said that he thinks that addiction is the fundamental problem. I could not agree with that more. It's fundamental in every sense of the word. It is a deep core problem. It is at the core of being human. It's also at the core of all of the specific problems that we have in the world today. I can think of no area in which it is more important to try to get help for ourselves and for everyone.

 

I also feel very strongly that addiction is a universal problem. All of us are taken up in addictive behavior. Hopefully, we are in a process of change now where we are beginning to see the universality of addiction. But still there is a tendency to focus on some kinds of addictions as the ones that are serious and to ignore others either because they are socially acceptable or because they don't fit our conceptual model of what addiction is.

 

I watched a movie the other night that was made in 1934 in black and white. All of the characters in the movie smoked. No wonder that generations of Americans were fascinated by smoking! We are living at a time when that social consensus is changing. Smoking is becoming unfashionable. If you talk to any smoker you will hear how irritated they are about how unfashionable it is becoming. It's a very different situation from the 1930s. But that legacy of the 1930s and the years before conditioned our thinking about tobacco addiction.

 

In World War II soldiers were issued cigarettes in their rations. There was a tendency in the 1920s and 1930s to encourage people to smoke in the belief that smoking facilitated concentration. You only have to look back to the 1950s to Life magazine to find doctors selling cigarettes. You will find full page ads of doctors in white coats with mirrors on their heads, holding out packages of Old Golds saying, "I recommend these to all my patients because they're soothing to the throat."

 

Imagine. That was forty years ago. It was only within the past ten years that the American Medical Association was forced to divest itself of tobacco stock by voices of protest from its constituents.

 

When I was a student in Harvard Medical School between 1964 and 1968, I was

taught that tobacco was not addictive. I was taught that it was a health problem in that it led to emphysema and lung cancer, but there was not a word about it being addictive. It was a psychological habit and therefore unimportant. So it was not discussed. We didn't hear much about what they considered real addictions, either. Basically we heard a little bit about heroin addiction, which was the model or prototype of addiction. Tobacco did not fit that model so it wasn't taken seriously. Nobody paid any attention to it, and that consensus was so strong and it so affected American science that no one even did research to find out why that substance had such a powerful control over people's behavior.

 

For years I have urged people to look at smoking for what it is. Heroin addicts only have to get a fix once, twice, or three times a day. Tobacco addicts have to fix up every twenty minutes. Every twenty minutes the brain demands a discrete pulse of a high dose of nicotine coming through the arterial system. Why didn't anyone do research on that? Why didn't anyone look to see how nicotine caused such a profound influence on brain physiology?

 

They didn't do it because it didn't fit the conceptual model and because it was a socially acceptable addiction. Well, there are many other socially acceptable addictions today that we don't take very seriously. It's awfully difficult in mainstream America to talk about sexual addiction as a concept. We live in a culture that tells us that it is desirable to have as many orgasms as possible all the time. When I ask people, as part of my medical history taking, if they have any sexual difficulties, the most common answer I get is that they aren't getting enough. In the cultural context in which we live, sexual addiction is invisible. Or take addiction to work or addiction to making money. These are both things that our culture tells us are good. So it is not seen in the same way that addiction to an unpopular drug is seen.

 

I think that many of our theories of addiction and our ways of looking at addiction are limited because they don't take into account the full spectrum of addictive behavior. As an example, let me read you a definition of addiction from this conference. After talking about how addiction extends far beyond the realm of chemical dependence, it then says, "In the broadest sense, addiction can be defined as an attitude that sees various aspects of the material world as exclusive sources of satisfaction. Addiction, understood in this way, represents a prominent feature of the entire Western civilization, which has lost the connection with its inner resources."

 

That, to my mind, is far from being a broad conception of addiction. And it surely does not involve just the Western world. That's a very limited view. First of all, if it's the attitude that various aspects of the material world make us feel all right, what about sexual addiction? Is that a material addiction? I mean it may involve physical organs and other people, but what we're really talking about is an addiction to an inner experience. What about addiction to thought? That's something hardly ever discussed in the Western world. It is discussed in Buddhism. In Buddhist psychology, addiction to thought is seen as a serious impediment to enlightenment. That's one of the reasons you meditate -to try and get some freedom from thought. So you could look at universities as monuments to thought addiction where you are rewarded for the beauty or complexity or novelty of the thoughts that you produce. Given that social context, with those social rewards, why would you ever even think that thought could be addictive. And if your conception is that addiction involves something material and external, then that doesn't fit, so you don't pay attention to it.

 

I maintain that the essence of addiction is craving for an experience or object to make yourself feel all right. It's the craving for something other than the self, even if that's within the realm of the mind. I also feel that addiction is something that's fundamentally human; it affects everybody.

 

It's very easy to feel special about our addictions. That's an attitude that I run into a lot. One of the things that in the past has put me off about some of the twelve step programs is that they tend to regard certain addictions as more important than others, that alcohol addiction is somehow fundamentally worse, more difficult, than coffee addiction. I love to talk about coffee addiction. My new book has an entire section on coffee addiction. To me, that's the most interesting drug at the moment, because it's a hidden addiction in our culture. So I don't agree that alcoholism is somehow more important than coffee addiction. On the level that I'm talking about, on the level that we have to look at addiction, it is the same thing. It's the same process. It's the same craving for something apart from yourself to make you feel okay. What I'm most interested in is that process. What is the origin of craving? And what is the solution to the craving?

 

I had a patient come to me about four or five years ago who was shooting five to six grams of cocaine a day intravenously. I had never encountered cocaine use on that scale. She had been doing that for six months and had gotten into it after several years of snorting vast amounts of cocaine. When she moved in with a man who was dealing cocaine, he introduced her to using it intravenously and her usage quickly escalated. Remarkably, given the nature of that drug and the nature of her usage, she was in good health. She actually held a job. She was a single mother, and at the moment she was doing a fantastic juggling act of keeping her life together despite her drug usage. I didn't know how much longer she would be able to do that.

 

I learned a number of things just in listening to her talk about her addiction. First of all, in describing the experience that she had from using cocaine in this way, she said that the first few minutes after the first injection of the day, she felt an overwhelming pleasure and rush. But that was it for pleasure. The rest of the time - five or six hours - was filled with paranoia, violent shaking, insomnia, and palpitations. I find this interesting because many people think that people get involved with addictions because they're sources of pleasure, but when you look at people caught up in extreme forms of addiction, especially with substances and food, the percentage of pleasure relative to the percentage of distress is minimal. There's not that much pleasure there, so the pleasure is certainly not the thing that keeps the addiction going. So after going on very articulately about how awful her life had become being a slave to this compulsion, she looked off and said something that was just a beautiful expression of the plight of the addict. She said, "I want not to want it."

 

If you want not to want things, how do you achieve that? What is this problem of craving? Where does it come from? What is the origin? It seems to me that the Eastern spiritual philosophies, especially Buddhism, have the most to say on the subject. The first noble truth of Buddha is that life is somehow incomplete and unfulfilled, so that in anything you do there is something missing. There's a sense that there should be more and it's not supplied by the things of this world and the things of life. It's often translated as life is suffering - and I suppose there is certainly a suffering that comes out of that - but suffering is very easily misunderstood by speakers of English. That's not the sense of it; it's that life is incomplete; it's unfulfilled. The second noble truth is that the cause of this incompleteness is craving and attachment. But the Buddha has nothing to say about where craving comes from. That's the question that has always interested me. Why do we crave? Why does everyone crave? Why aren't we content to just be as we are? If, in fact, our core essence of being is pure self-luminous consciousness, why do we have to go outside of that? That's not an easy question to answer.

 

The prevailing view in psychiatry and medicine and science today is that consciousness is an epiphenomenon that happens to arise out of the chance circuitry of the brain or biochemical interactions in the brain. In other words, consciousness is incidental. It's a product of matter arranged in certain ways. There is, however, a minority opinion - call it the mystical view - that consciousness precedes matter. In other words, consciousness is what's primary, and consciousness initiated the evolution of energy and matter into more and more complex forms, seemingly with the purpose of knowing itself better. At the moment, human consciousness is the form where that process has reached its highest expression. But why does consciousness need to know itself in this roundabout way? Why can't it just sit in its own being's awareness of bliss and self-knowledge? The whole paradox of existence is tied up with that question. The most frustrating and interesting aspect of quantum physics and the quantum view of reality is the paradoxes that are

revealed by it. If you push knowledge inquiry in any direction, you run into the limit of paradox. And the essence of paradox is self reference. The reason you get into paradox is because you're trying somehow to refer to the thing that you're part of.

 

So the old view that we are passive observers of a mechanistic universe doesn't work anymore. We're connected; we're part of the universe that is trying to understand itself. So you get into that endless loop of paradox like a dog chasing its tail. And all of that was initiated by consciousness attempting to know itself and in the process initiating a cycle of manifested existence. So the big bang was not the initiating event. The big bang was an effect of what I'd call the little itch.

 

What is that little itch? What is it that disturbed consciousness that led to all this? It was the primal craving. To me, if you try to trace the root of craving, you literally get tied up with the origins of the universe and the evolution of human consciousness. It's that fundamental. It's that much a part of our humanness. Not only is addiction universal not only are all of us in it but it's the essence of our being as humans. It's not something to be disowned. You can't do that, because addiction is part of our core being. It's part of who we are. Given that, what can we do about addictive behavior? I can think of only two things to do about it. The first is to try to move it, to try and shift it so that the forms of its expression are less harmful rather than more harmful. lt is better to be addicted to a twelve-step program than to be addicted to alcohol. It is better to be addicted to exercise than it is to be ad- dicted to smoking. You can make those value judgments about addictive behavior. And that approach to addiction should not be discounted because, in fact, maybe that's the only thing that most of us can do.

 

The only other strategy is to try and get at the root of craving. The Oriental religions would have us believe that this is possible through intense introspection and meditation and practice. I'm not so sure of that. I think maybe you can go a long way - you can get way down there - but if the origin of craving is indeed tied up with the origin of the universe, then I'm not so sure that it can be uprooted. I think all you can do is do the best you can. I mean, go after it; try and contain it and understand it. The biggest mistake we can make is trying to disown it.

 

I don't think addiction is curable until the expansion of the universe reverses and we begin going back to a single point. But that should not be a source of despair. That's part of who we are. What we need to do is to accept that aspect of our humanness and work with it so that it's not destructive to ourselves or to other people. We also need to celebrate it for what it is. Because it connects us with all other people, it's a source of great compassion and great empathy. It's a motivation to work with others to try to halt the kinds of destructive behavior that are happening today. I can think of nothing more important than that.

 

So don't let your perspective about addiction be limited by one group's definition of it. It is the broadest and most important problem we face. It's something that all of us share, and it's what connects us to everybody and to the higher power. That's how it is.

 

 

Andrew Weil is a botanist, physician, and author. He is an expert on alternative medicine and an advocate of multidisciplinary health care and preventive education. Dr. Weil holds an M.D. from Harvard Medical School and is associate director of the Division of Social Perspectives in Medicine at the University of Arizona College of Medicine. He is the author of five books about consciousness, drugs, and health and healing: The Natural Mind: A New Way of Looking at Drugs and Higher Consciousness; The Marriage of the Sun and Moon: A Quest for Unity in Consciousness; From Chocolate to Morphine: Understanding Mind Active Drugs; Health and Healing: Understanding Conventional and Alternative Medicine;and, Natural Health, Natural Medicine: A Comprehensive Guide to Wellness and Self Care. The preceding is an edited version of a talk Dr.Weil gave at the International Transpersonal Conference in Eugene, Oregon.

[manitou]

Really nicely written, Scott. After having thought about this very thing for many years, I realize that the thing that addiction did for me (and still does, I can get addicted to anything really easily) is that it keeps my eyes off self. It gives my body and mind something else to focus on rather than focusing on the disorders within myself.

 

addiction seems to deflect the attention. It's hurtful to go in, to admit that we are imperfect and in fact have screwed up many times in life and need to go back and rectify things to make things better for us....

Edited November 15, 2011 by manitou

[Birch]

That was very good!

I agree with the premise of the craving or 'drive' (or even 'desire') and what he's saying about the shifted objects of desire and craving. We know this is played to via symbolic means (religion included) for profit and that people (mostly) don't realise this is happening until they wake up a bit.

[Harmonious Emptiness]

I think it's important because alcoholics and addicts often wrestle with the first step, actually admitting they've got addictive issues to work out, and entire meetings can unfold where nothing is discussed but the critical differences that exist between "normal" people and substance abusers.

 

D.E.N.I.A.L

Don't Even No I Am Lying

 

Somebody who went through some type of rehab told me that one..

 

Another person, who was studying advertising in college, told me that they learned about how the lights and edits and flashing in television commercials are made to program kids so that they react to the urging of them when they grow up. Pretty sick.

 

I've found that TV not only tells us to desire, but it also tells us to DESIRE TO DESIRE, it tries to make us feel stupid for not desiring whatever they throw in our faces. Thus, people learn to WANT to desire things, especially without the proper education from their parents who also mostly grew up with television wisdom.

[C T]

What about serial criminals being addicted to jail time?

 

This is an extremely worrying trend across the world - one that is gradually (but picking up momentum due to obvious reasons) and systematically choking the veins of humanity, eroding it from the inside out. Its massive, its complex, and its unstoppable. I would imagine whole judiciary systems collapsing even if, figuratively speaking, 50 percent of serial criminals in the system were to be reformed permanently, and with no new ones being added to the mass. Lawyers would be out of work, and so would cops, wardens, and a whole host of other primary and secondary dependents!! :blink: Heck, even the so-called 'entertainment' industry would be blown apart. Who could afford to let this happen??

 

My prediction is that when space cities become a possibility, earth cities will be over-run by crime addicts, and this present way of existence would eventually be reversed. Where once criminals and gangstas were frowned upon, it may turn out that it will no longer be cool to be un-gangstalike, and what was once seen as ethical/moral behaviors will be scorned at and deemed sissified. Its actually happening already, with an ever-increasing number of young kids desiring to emulate such a lifestyle choice. Even upper class kids are forming gangs and stuff... anyone notice this?

 

This seems like a gravely terminal disease, unfortunately, and one in which all other apparent forms of addictive behaviors will find fertile ground, take root and flourish in.

Edited November 16, 2011 by C T

[Birch]

D.E.N.I.A.L

Don't Even No I Am Lying

 

Somebody who went through some type of rehab told me that one..

 

Another person, who was studying advertising in college, told me that they learned about how the lights and edits and flashing in television commercials are made to program kids so that they react to the urging of them when they grow up. Pretty sick.

 

I've found that TV not only tells us to desire, but it also tells us to DESIRE TO DESIRE, it tries to make us feel stupid for not desiring whatever they throw in our faces. Thus, people learn to WANT to desire things, especially without the proper education from their parents who also mostly grew up with television wisdom.

http://www.amazon.com/Brandwashed-Tricks-Companies-Manipulate-Persuade/dp/0385531737

 

It's not the kind of stuff most people are interested in IMO/IME. And they're not educated about it either.

Edited November 17, 2011 by -K-

[Harmonious Emptiness]

http://www.amazon.com/Brandwashed-Tricks-Companies-Manipulate-Persuade/dp/0385531737

 

It's not the kind of stuff most people are interested in IMO/IME. And they're not educated about it either.

[Encephalon]