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A few items in the news recently:
I. Jamie Lee Curtis announces her 22nd year of sobriety.
Actor Jamie Lee Curtis has proudly proclaimed her 22 years of sobriety from the pharmaceutical opiate, Vicodin.
II. The CDC announces a record level of drug deaths.
According to the CDC, “Over 81,000 drug overdose deaths occurred in the United States in the 12 months ending in May 2020, the highest number of overdose deaths ever recorded in a 12-month period.” [Note that the large majority of these deaths came before the pandemic shutdown.]
Drug deaths have in fact been increasing radically since the late 1990s. The death rate due to drugs—including not only opioids, synthetic (fentanyl) and natural (heroin), but also methamphetamines, cocaine, benzodiazepines, and, of course, multiple drugs consumed at the same time—has quadrupled from that point, when over three-quarters of a million of Americans have died in total. The current annual drug death rate is 13,000 more deaths than occurred in 2018.
Most people outgrow addiction.
Nora Vokow, the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, who is among the most prominent advocates for the chronic brain disease theory of addiction, recognized this reality in a 2018 article:
Some critics also point out, correctly, that a significant percentage of people who do develop addictions eventually recover without medical treatment. It may take years or decades, may arise from simply aging out of a disorder that began during youth, or may result from any number of life changes that help a person replace drug use with other priorities. (My emphasis)
This is, in fact, no sideshow to addiction: it is the main reality. Based on a number of large-scale government surveys of drug addiction through the lifespan, rather than examining clinical populations, Boston College investigator Gene Heyman concludes that natural (i.e., untreated) outgrowth of addiction is the standard life course (a point I made in Psychology Today decades ago). The data indicate, perhaps paradoxically, that people outgrow illicit drug dependencies (cocaine, marijuana) more rapidly than legal ones (alcohol and cigarettes). They do so (as Volkow indicates) when their lives achieve greater levels of fulfillment and satisfaction.
We know how people overcome addiction.
As Heyman points out, the lifetime recovery data strongly disconfirm the chronic brain disease theory of addiction: “According to the idea that addiction is a chronic relapsing disease, remission is at most a temporary state. Either addicts never stop using drugs, or if they do stop, remission is short-lived.”
Volkow, for her part, states, “We still do not understand all the factors that make some people better able to recover than others or the neurobiological mechanisms that support recovery—these are important areas for research.” But contrary to Volkow, there is in my view no ambiguity about how people are able to overcome addiction; the large bodies of data that Heyman examines all agree:
The correlates of quitting include the absence of additional psychiatric and medical problems, marital status (singles stay addicted longer), economic pressures, fear of judicial sanctions, concern about respect from children and other family members, worries about the many problems that attend regular involvement in illegal activities, more years spent in school, and higher income. Put in more personal terms, addicts often say that they quit drugs because they wanted to be a better parent, make their own parents proud of them, and not further embarrass their families. (My emphasis)
How did Jamie Lee Curtis overcome addiction?
Curtis is clear how she overcame addiction: “With God’s grace and the support of MANY people who could relate to all the ‘feelings’ and a couple of sober angels. I’ve been able to stay sober, one day at a time, for 22 years.”
This is the recovery mantra, and Curtis is entitled to embrace it. However, Heyman’s analysis and large bodies of data suggest that this embracing of the recovery, 12-step philosophy may not have been the key factor in her recovery. Rather, it's possible that the positive prognosticators in her life were family, education, income, career success, esteem: “I was in a good stable marriage, writing books for children that were bestsellers. I was getting more and more work and more and more fame and attention and adulation.”
Does this matter?
It seems an odd juxtaposition: Jamie Lee Curtis is exultant about her clear path to recovery, which anyone can follow; yet Americans are dying in record numbers at an ever-accelerating rate.
In my view, Curtis ignores what massive bodies of data indicate were the likely sources of her recovery. This is fine, of course. It is her right to do this. Her solution is to “fight the stigma surrounding addiction.” This is, to acknowledge that one is addicted—in some cases almost with a degree of pride.
But this is not the reality that coroners encounter in their daily work of mopping up the dead, where they find principally the underclass of American society: the alone, the isolated, the unemployable, the homeless, the disturbed, the despised. Their lives and deaths aren’t about fighting the shame of addiction; rather, they are engaged in more basic struggles for existence.
Is it a problem that we misidentify the sources of addiction and recovery? One possible answer is that those 81,000 (and growing) deaths are of people who "don’t matter" in the eyes of many social elites. The question is whether America—including its most liberal, "humane" citizens—has the attention span, concern, and resources to care about these deaths.
What about fighting your addiction?
All right, let's bring recovery back to you, the reader. For better-off people who are concerned about their addictions and readers of this blog, the issue around shame is not that people admit that they are addicted. Everyone (especially those close to them) likely already knows that their lives aren't going well. It is to restore their pride, and their standing in the eyes of those close to them, that they quit their addictions and proceed in life.
To put it succinctly, you can quit your addiction; doing so will fill your loved ones with joy.
Connection is the essential recovery tool.
That is, you will be embracing your pride in overcoming addiction, rather than fighting the shame of acknowledging that you were addicted.
Of course, this is only possible for people (for you) when they (you) are connected to people with whom to experience such pride. This connection is something that many lucky individuals may take for granted, but that a growing number of Americans no longer have, and many more are losing.
