The Myth of the Addictive Personality

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The Myth of the Addictive Personality

by Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

March 2, 2020

When I was a teenager, I was always begging the field of psychiatry to do more. It seemed to me that there must be so many medicines out there, surely something would set my mind straight.

2025 Update

The result of my naivete? I was promptly pronounced 'an addictive personality.'

I've now had 40 years to think about that diagnosis and I call bull crap.

Imagine a field like psychiatry, that limits itself to prescribing a handful of addictive medicines, suspicious of anyone who dares hanker for more. That hankering is, in reality, utterly sensible.

Suppose you walk into a jewelry store and they have only one kind of diamond. You ask for other kinds of diamonds and they label you ungrateful and greedy. That's what psychiatry does when someone dares to allude to a larger pharmacopeia that psychiatry has dogmatically forsworn, whether in conformance with drug law, scientism, and/or the interests of the pharmaceutical companies that crank out the starkly limited formulary of politically acceptable mood medicines.

How dare I want to pick and choose from among the thousands of rain forest godsends. Why can't I just go along with the modest medicine cabinet of addictive substances that chemists have created to narrow down our choices to a nice politically acceptable roster?

Of course, the true irony of this state of affairs becomes plain when we consider that well over 1 in 8 Americans are addicted to modern-day antidepressants ¹, one out of four when it comes to women, and that many of these drugs are harder to kick than heroin ² ³. So psychiatry may have a problem with SOMETHING, but it's clearly not with addiction. My own doctor told me not even to bother trying to 'get off of' Effexor ⁴ , given its 95% recidivism rate ⁵ . And so I become an eternal patient, with all the demoralizing emotional baggage that comes with that condition. It's pretty much the exact opposite of empowering a patient, to make them a ward of the state, forever to be defined by their so-called illness.

The so-called addictive personality is actually 'on to something.' They realize that there's a vast pharmacopeia out there and they want psychiatry to use it. Psychiatry, for its part, must label such individuals as pathological, lest their craving for more should serve to illuminate the niggardliness of psychiatric offerings and demonstrate all too clearly that the entire field operates in crass subservience to anti-patient Drug War law and ideology.

The Links Police

cop car image courtesy ReiRever via tenor.com

Do you know why I stopped you? That's right, because the Drug War gives me the right to be a noxious busybody. That, and I also wanted to suggest a few related essays, namely: , , , and .

editor note from abolishthedea.com

July 7, 2022

I think what Brian's saying here is that it's meaningless to talk about addictive personalities in a society in which we criminalize most psychoactive medicines and teach people to fear and loathe them rather than to understand them. In a society wherein all pharmacological dangers were clear and folks knew how to get the kind of transcendence they were looking for in the safest possible way, no one would knowingly opt for the deadliest possible medicine. The problem is that Drug Warriors completely ignore this motivation for substance use -- namely the search for some kind of self-transcendence in life: for religious purposes, for on-demand motivation, to find some new spiritual truth, or to just take a break from a negative inner voice that is keeping one from achieving one's goals in life and/or performing a particular activity without self-destructing.

The Drug War brings about addiction by limiting the would-be user's knowledge of and access to all but a handful of drugs that the dealer is incentivized to sell. But in a world where mind medicines were legal and available, those who seek pharmacologically aided transcendence could do so non-addictively, either by using non-addictive substances like shrooms and MDMA ⁶ or else by creating a drug use schedule which strategically alters the substances taken on a weekly basis in such a way that addiction to any given substance will never occur.

There was a documentary about PJ Brewster a few years ago in which we learned that PJ's friends did just that. They used a variety of 'hard' drugs -- including crack cocaine ⁷ ⁸ -- but never became addicted because they were careful to never use the same drug twice in a row. Of course, the guy who volunteered this information has learned Drug War etiquette so he immediately added a non-sequitur apology saying, 'Of course that was wrong.'

Really? Why is it wrong to use psychoactive substances in a non-addictive way? It's wrong because the know-nothing Drug Warriors do not want Americans to know that such a thing is even possible! But the fact is, it is possible and it is the wise thing to do. In fact, this is what we should be teaching folks who seek pharmacological transcendence: how to use drugs (aka godsend mind medicines) in such a way that they will not get hooked -- unless they want to, of course: Unless they hit on the perfect drug (out of a freely available pharmacopoeia of thousands of such legalized medicines) that they don't mind taking for life, in the same way that 1 in 4 depressed women take a Big Pharma ⁹ ¹⁰ drug for depression every day of THEIR life.

Worried about addiction? Once we legalize all mind medicine, a pharmacologically savvy shaman/empath could imagine thousands of ways to slowly move the user who is unhappy with one med to another less troublesome med. We call such changes impossible today for two reasons: first because we outlaw almost all the medicine in question here, and second because the Drug War's goal is to get the user 'sober' according to America's hypocritical definition of that term, not to get them happy according to their own definition of that term, not to bring them self-transcendence. Once we jettison the drug-war's Christian Science requirement for drug-free sobriety, the world's our oyster in terms of pharmacological treatments for the unhappy, the unsuccessful -- or simply for those who want to see beyond the veil, beyond the practical but starkly limited perceptual world served up to us daily by our five meager senses.

Were drugs legal and understood -- rather than illegal and feared -- Amy Winehouse might still be alive today (see ), for instead of just 'tut-tutting' at her drug use (or recommending Christian Science rehab and a grim future of teeth-clenching 'sobriety'), her friends would have shown her safe ways to gain the transcendence that she was after, not by 'saying no to drugs,' but by saying yes to the right drugs, used in the right way.

Author's Follow-up: March 21, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up

I should refute here a couple of predictable comebacks to the ideas suggested above. First, it will be said that there is scientific evidence of a correlation between addictive drug use and brain chemistry and/or genetics. This is no doubt true in many cases. But the question is, how influential would those correlations be in a world in which we did not starkly limit the human being's choice of drugs via prohibition and in which we educated users instead of attempting to frighten them? Until we have allowed for free choice and education, we have no business pathologizing the addict for the bad choices that we have all but forced them to make. Until we have regained our right to drugs and hence our control of our own thoughts and feelings, it is impossible to discern the extent to which addiction is fundamentally caused by biochemical factors and how much addiction is merely an inevitable artefact of Drug War laws and policies.

Second, I have used the term "addiction" above in cases where the materialist and psychiatrist would no doubt use the term "dependency." The latter term may be correct according to the strictest definition of those terms. But I use the terms interchangeably for a reason: that is, to linguistically protest the modern notion that dependency is somehow better than addiction. This may be true in some sense, but then the question becomes, "for WHOM is dependency better?" It is clearly better for society because the sufferer of drug dependency merely suffers in silence when he or she goes without product -- they do not make any fuss, they merely wish that they were dead -- whereas the addicted individual pesters us for needed medicine and may even resort to antisocial behavior when they run short. My point here is that there is no huge difference between dependency and addiction from the user's point of view, insofar as they both end up feeling like hell by their respective conditions. And so I am suspicious of psychiatrists who make much of the distinction, since it seems to me that they are thereby falsely suggesting that antidepressants are morally superior to other drugs, whereas hell is hell from the psychological point of view of the problematic user.

Addiction

Pharmacologically Savvy Empaths

Notes:

1: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
2: Heroin versus Antidepressants DWP (up)
3: Hall, Wayne, and Megan Weier. 2016. “Lee Robins’ Studies of Heroin Use among US Vietnam Veterans.” Addiction 112 (1): 176–80. https://doi.org/10.1111/add.13584. (up)
4: How Drug Prohibition makes it impossible to get off of Effexor and other Big Pharma drugs DWP (up)
5: I have been unable to confirm this stat. But the WHO notes clinical recidivism rates for depression ranging from 50% to 85%. Do we count that as a recidivism rate of Effexor? Not when Biopharma is paying 75% of The FDA’s Drug Division Budget, as reported by John LaMattina in the Sep 22, 2022 edition of Forbes magazine. (up)
6: How the Drug War killed Leah Betts DWP (up)
7: Sigmund Freud's real breakthrough was not psychoanalysis DWP (up)
8: “Freud on Cocaine : Freud, Sigmund, 1856-1939 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” 2023. Internet Archive. 2023. https://archive.org/details/freudoncocaine0000freu/page/n5/mode/2up?view=theater. (up)
9: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
10: LaMattina, John. n.d. “Why Is Biopharma Paying 75% of the FDA’s Drug Division Budget?” Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2022/09/22/why-is-biopharma-paying-75-of-the-fdas-drug-division-budget/. (up)

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against the hateful war on US

I will gladly respect the police once we remove them from Gestapo duty by ending the war on drugs. Police should also learn to live on a budget, without deriving income from confiscating houses and dormitories, etc.

No wonder the "Justice" Department relies on plea deals; otherwise juries could use nullification to free those charged with mere drug possession.

Psychedelics and entheogens should be freely available to all dementia patients. These medicines can increase neuronal plasticity and even grow new neurons. Besides, they can inspire and elate -- or do we puritans feel that our loved ones have no right to peace of mind?

Now drug warriors have nitrous oxide in their sights, the substance that inspired the philosophy of William James. They're using the same tired MO: focusing exclusively on potential downsides and never mentioning the benefits of use, and/or denying that any exist.

My consciousness, my choice.

The Drug War has turned America into the world's first "Indignocracy," where our most basic rights can be vetoed by a misinformed public. That's how scheming racist politicians put an end to the 4th amendment to the US Constitution.

Yeah. That's why it's so pretentious and presumptuous of People magazine to "fight for justice" on behalf of Matthew Perry, as if Perry would have wanted that.

Imagine a world in which we were told about both the potential benefits AND the potential harms of drugs like cocaine and opium.

It wasn't until western prudery and racism came along that we started to judge people by the substances that they chose to ingest, rather than by their actual behavior in the world.

Anytime you hear that a psychoactive drug has not been proven to be effective, it's a lie. People can make such claims only by dogmatically ignoring all the glaringly obvious signs of efficacy.

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