I have an audience. Welcome back I said
in the last episode that we need a new
vocabulary to start a new
conversation. I first want to tell you
why that's true, and I want to do that by
sharing with you a quote from Noam
Chomsky, the American linguist. He said,
"The smart way to keep people passive and
obedient is to strictly limit the
spectrum of acceptable opinion but allow
very lively debate within that spectrum.
That gives people the sense that there's
free thinking going on, while all the
time, the presuppositions of the system
are being reinforced by the limits of
the debate." That's the way it is with
addiction for us. You grew up, I grew up,
with talking and hearing about addiction
with certain words. Those words and the
ideas behind those words set limits on
what we think is possible. But what are
those limits? What is this vocabulary
that we have to change that I'm talking
about? Here's an example. We use the term
substance abuse and addiction to be
interchangeable. If you are going to look
up addiction treatment you find a
facility that calls itself a substance
abuse treatment facility and somewhere
else it might call itself an addiction
facility.
It doesn't do two different things. They
mean these things to be the same. That
word abuse sort of connotes for us that
there's a choice involved, that this is a
conscious decision. Someone is choosing
to abuse a substance. That tells us that
the problem is in the cortex of the
brain. The cortex is that highly evolved
human decision-making part that's
conscious, the part you call you and I
call me, the part we're thinking with, the
part we identify with and are aware of.
That's not where addiction is. The other
problem with substance abuse is, it focuses on
the substance. It leads us to believe
that drugs cause addiction, and another
one that does that is that we pluralized
addiction. We call it, "You have addictions."
in America we've created a situation
where you could go to treatment for
alcohol addiction and stop drinking, and come
back using cocaine. Instead of the
addiction treatment center saying, "What
did we do wrong that this person still
has active addiction?", they say
"Hey good job on that alcohol now let's
get to work on the cocaine." Another thing
that addictions as plural and substance
abuse do is they have us focused on
drugs so anything we could learn about
addiction from sex and gambling and
gaming, or overeating we would ignore that
evidence because it's not substance
abuse and so what does it have to do
with this problem? We've been working on
this for over a hundred years in this
country and we've had lots of solutions.
Inside those limits the problems worse
today than it was a hundred years ago
that's not in spite of all those
solutions. That's because of all those
solutions. By limiting our view of
addiction, by using the words we use and
the ideas behind those words, we've aimed
solutions at a problem that doesn't even
exist in nature. It doesn't have to be
that way. So today we talked about two
vocabulary terms, substance abuse and
addictions, and I hope you see that they
both reinforce and come from two
assumptions, that drugs cause addiction
and that addiction is in the cortex, the
decision thinking
conscious part of the brain. Those
assumptions, as I think you'll see over
the coming episodes, are just not true,
and if we maintain those assumptions
we're led to solutions that just aren't
going to work. I hope you'll join me for
the future episodes. Until then, be well.
