Newsgroups: alt.drugs,talk.politics.drugs
Subject: Re: Definition of an addict.
From: carnes@sparky.eecs.umich.edu (Richard Carnes)
Date: Wed, 26 Aug 1992 19:16:50 GMT

mazur@inmet.camb.inmet.com (Beth Mazur) writes:

>There's a book called "The Truth About Addiction and Recovery" and
>its author's (whose name escapes me) premise is that most people
>simply outgrow their addictions.

There is plenty of evidence in the research literature that many,
perhaps most people with addictions outgrow their problem without
treatment (it's called "maturing out", originally a street term).  For
example:

Barry Tuchfeld calls untreated but recovered alcoholics the "silent
majority" in "Spontaneous remission in alcoholics," _Journal of
Studies on Alcohol_ 42 (1981): 626-41.  Problem drinkers who recover
without treatment are less visible to the public than those who
recover through AA and other programs.

George Vaillant's study _The Natural History of Alcoholism_ found that
very few of the subjects who had overcome a drinking problem had
sought formal treatment.  Vaillant also found that the relapse rate
was *worse* for those who relied on AA than for those who quit on
their own.

D. Cahalan and R. Room, _Problem Drinking Among American Men_ (Rutgers
Center of Alcohol Studies, 1974).  The authors conducted national
surveys and found that the great majority of problem drinkers outgrow
their addiction.

C. Winick, "Maturing out of narcotic addiction", _Social Problems_ 14
(1962): 1-7.  This study found that most young heroin addicts in New
York outgrew their addiction by their mid-thirties.

L.R.H. Drew, "Alcoholism as a self-limiting disease," _Quarterly
Journal of Studies on Alcohol_ 29 (1968): 956-67.

There is also evidence from common experience.  Smoking is often
considered the hardest addiction to quit.  Compare the number of
people you know who have kicked cigarettes on their own with the
number you know who have quit by means of a treatment program.

Of course there are people who will benefit from an treatment program.
But note how different the research cited above sounds from the
familiar propaganda telling us that everyone with an addiction problem
needs to be in lifelong treatment in order to "arrest" the incurable
"disease".

The research suggests that what enables people to overcome addictions
is more or less what your common sense would suggest: "a strong desire
to change; learning to accept and cope with negative feelings and
experiences; development of enough life resources to facilitate
change; improved work, personal and family dealings; a changed view of
the attractiveness of the addiction brought on by a combination of
maturity, feedback from others, and negative associations with the
addiction in terms of the person's larger values" (Stanton Peele).

Richard Carnes