printAn old friend, Stanton Peele, Ph.D., is an addiction expert who’s always streaked ahead of the pack. Still does. When I interviewed him for two of my Calgary Herald columns, in 2000, he was emphatic about avoiding the either/or, do or die, fatalistic attitude to drug use, promoted—in a self-serving and unscientific fashion—by the enabling professions and their stakeholders.
This Dr. Peele is still doing. In “We Need to Normalize Drug Use in Our Society—Deal With It!,” he explains why “drugs are … part of the range of normal human behaviors,” not a disease. (Read it here.)
Indeed, we all know users who function on a very high level. They don’t call themselves addicts. Many of them work in Silicone valley. “‘I’ve used every class of drug you can imagine,’ says one rather productive individual.
When I tell people who’ve signed off on the medical theory of addiction—baseless in science—that I’m hopelessly addicted to chocolate. Seriously addicted. They laugh. Oh, no, you can only be addicted to “real” drugs. Chocolate is my drug of choice. It is my personality or character that ensures I don’t consume 5 slabs of the stuff a day (I was doing 3, plus a quarter cake, daily, during the holidays), grow fatter every day, develop higher blood pressure, etc. But I think of chocolate ALL THE TIME.
Back when I interviewed Dr. Peele, I was consuming my body weight in chocolate a year (I weighed 50 kg, then). My husband did the math because we could not really afford it. Since I did not suffer ill effects, I never thought of this uncontrollable craving as an addiction. Now that I can no longer consume copious quantities without expanding, blood pressure rising, etc.—the fact of an addiction that needs controlling has been thrown into sharp relief.
I’m sure you have a similar story to relate.
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* Deal: “A verbal expression denoting that fate cannot be changed.”