The medical and scientific research on the nature of addiction is patchy and poorly funded. Meanwhile, the 12-step approach, developed over many years of working with addicts, has developed solid reputation for helping people recover. Patients are taught to have a long, hard look at themselves, to start accepting themselves. They build a relationship with yourselves and start to interact with people in the community better. They are not so defiant. They are not so angry with everyone. Addiction makes these addicts feel they are the center of the universe, that they are the most powerful being on this earth and that they have control. In an addict’s life, control becomes all-consuming. They think they can control everyone around them and they need to be taught to let go.
One alternative to treatment and abstinence-also being considered by an increasingly desperate government-is to provide addicts with a free and ready supply of clean heroin from licensed GP s. this was the approach favored in Britain until the mid-1960s when the authorities became concerned about the black market that had grown up around prescription heroin. Already, David Blunkett, Home Secretary, has extended the number of licenses in Britain.
Those convinced of benefit of abstention are concerned by the apparent contradictions of the new approach, at once encouraging treatment and an increase in legal heroin prescription. In another signal that Blunkett is softening his lines on drugs, in December GPs will be sent new guidelines on prescribing heroin. Published by the Department of Health under pressure from Home Office, these will say that doctors should be more willing to the drugs to addicts. The Home Office hopes that up to 1,500 heroine addicts could be helped. At the moment only 300 are prescribed heroin by GPs, a tiny percentage of the 270,000 heroin addicts in the country
Some addicts are so fragile, it is hard to imagine how they had the strength to get themselves into recovery. When so many have turned to heroin precisely because it is the only thing which makes life bearable, then it seems almost precisely because it is the only thing which makes life bearable, then it seems almost perverse to ask them to end their love affair with drug. Except that by the time most people end up in a rehab, their addiction is so extreme that the choice is between rehab and death.
The reality appears to be that some people are more prone to addiction than others. The scientific bases of addiction may still be a mystery, but the reality of the gnawing cycle of pleasure-seeking, craving and the terrible fear of withdrawal has long been reflect in the literature of addiction. The latest genetic research is double-edged in its consequences for addicts. Early research suggests there may be a genetic element of addiction. The hope for scientist working I the field is that once they have understood more how that craving works, they will be able to develop a drug that would block it in people who are genetically prone. They also believe they may be able to develop drugs for people who suffer more seriously from withdrawal due to genetic factors. Addiction, it appears, is the reward an individual gets with the release of dopamine, a chemical messenger that transmits the sensation of pleasure into a part of the brain called the nucleus accumbency. This is also the so-called rush that heroin users talk about.
