Hey, Addiction is a Brain Disease and IT'S NOT YOUR FAULT!

According to a statement on the Betty Ford Foundation website, and many other sources, addiction is a brain disease, not a character flaw. This “brain disease model” may be promoted by well-meaning people who have addicted loved ones, but it’s not accurate, just a PR concept, with no scientific evidence whatsoever. But search “addiction is a brain disease” and the Internet is full of people who bought into the lie, claiming that’s the way it is. Opioid addiction, sex addiction, food addiction, Internet addiction, porn addiction, it’s the new fashion statement to be addicted to one or more things that are just too big and strong for little old you to overcome, you poor thing.

Psychiatrists dreamed up this idea to make money and to get more people under their control. First they cozied up to traditional medicine to seem more official, and while psychiatrists have medical degrees, that’s just cover for voodoo head-bump crystal-vibration nonsense that is modern psychiatry and psychopharmacology.

They like to use diabetes, as an example of why drug abusers are so helpless. “It’s something that happens to your body, you can’t do anything about it, it’s not a moral failing, and it requires a drug for the rest of your life.” A drug which — just like all those street drugs out there — were produced by BigPharma.

So if you are drug addicted, it’s not your fault, you can’t help it, it’s your body’s fault, probably something you got from your parents via their DNA. And did I say “IT’S NOT YOUR FAULT!”

Along with this brain disease model is the hint of a protected class of citizens who are not responsible for their condition. Drug addicts – I can see it coming – are not responsible for their condition and need care at public expense for the rest of their life, because, after all, it’s a brain disease and IT’S NOT THEIR FAULT.

Well, I beg to differ. Anytime something you do – like knocking over liquor stores to feed your heroin habit, or injecting opioids or cooking meth in your spare room and screaming at people who aren’t there — you are killing yourself, endangering people around you and filling your neighborhood with crazy, amped up psychos who break into houses and shoot people who they think are going to kill them. THAT IS YOUR FAULT YOU JERK!

It’s not your body, it’s the choices and you’ve made them. The choices that led you down back alleys where needles litter the street, and now you – and all the “brain disease model apologists for drugs and drug abusers” are determined to “reduce the stigma” and engage in “harm reduction” where you don’t get arrested for creating all this chaos, but instead you are swaddled into the caring arms of psychiatrists who will put you on methadone maintenance at public expense, or some of the new psychedelic drugs which means all those people who actually work at real jobs, creating useful products and services for society will pay for your treatment for the rest of your useless and non-productive life.

You can’t change your body, but you can change your mind. If you listen to the psychs they don’t give you a ghost of a chance to dig yourself out and you’ll just keep using street drugs, psych drugs, all kinds of deadly crap, until you overdose and die, and the psychs will shake their heads sadly and say they need more money to treat poor sorry-ass drug addicts like you who need sympathy and drugs to live. Oh, and let’s get rid of the “stigma” of addiction, because after all it’s a brain disease and IT’S NOT YOUR FAULT!

One thing about sympathy? It’s deadly. It’s an agreement from others that you are a sad little nobody. It will suck the life out of you, kill your own ability to push through obstacles. It makes a basically good spiritual being think they get love and help only when they are pathetic.

The psychs won’t tell you this, but you are a basically good spiritual being, who’s been through hell and back. You are tough, you’re still here and you can change your life. It’s not destiny that determines your future, it’s the choices you make. So stop whining and get busy cleaning up. It’s not easy, the drugs make you a slave and you have to do courageous things to break those chains and escape.

And forget about suicide, death doesn’t help. You come back the same spirit you were, with the same temptations, same vices, the same choices in front of you. Different body, different DNA, and it’s not the body that will make or break you. It’s not a chemical imbalance or some phony brain disease, it’s those stupid choices you make.

So stop blaming your body, your parents, the horrible and evil and terrible society that drives you to drink or use meth or some other crap you snort, eat, inject, smoke or cram up your ass. If you want to be a slave there are lots of others out there who will be happy to make you one. You can commiserate, share needles, give each other AIDS and hepatitis and die in some piss-stinking alley feeling really sorry for yourself. Or you can get well you sorry-ass addict and start helping other people — that’s the way out.

How Stigma Helps

Stigma can be a good thing. A course I am taking at Harvard (online and free with no certificate) on opioid addiction has as its main goal the removal of stigma from addiction. Well, addiction today means you are a low life, a bum, a guy who can’t cope, who is unproductive, criminal and all sorts of other bad stuff. Perhaps you know someone addicted to something and you like them. Well, that’s fine, help them if you can, but a stigma means something is wrong, and stigmas are a sort of warning to keep lots of people from dropping in to see if it’s fun or not. 

Addiction is now being applied to all kinds of innocuous things, like “I’m addicted to sugar,” or “I’m addicted to romance novels.” Just means you are too weak to diet or start a real relationship. OK that’s harsh, but that’s what stigma is all about. Become an addict of heroin or meth or some pharmaceutical opioid and you will lose your old friends and make new ones, like the guys in the slammer, the bail bondsman, the dealers, and other low-lifes like yourself who don’t have the guts to get a job, pay the bills, start a family and stick with them to help them live a good life too.

It’s easy to get hooked, it requires some character to stay clean and build something you could be proud of. So stigma is a group’s way of warning off others from what the addict has become. But we’ve gone all warm and fuzzy, and nothing is anybody’s fault. Criminals are the product of a bad childhood. Druggies probably have a problem with some drug-enjoying DNA that they can’t help. Alcoholics probably got it from their parents.

There might even be a grain a truth in some of that, but that’s not the point. You don’t have to let your parents dictate your life. You don’t have to let your DNA decide what you will do. You don’t have to do the same things to others that have been done to you. If you do, you may find apologists for your actions. They might give you sympathy, hand you a dollar out of the window of their Volvo, listen to your hard-luck story and agree it is “The Man” who drove you to this low state of existence. It’s all because of the fat cats who get rich and made you do it, it wasn’t your fault you were just a “Poor Weak Creature” who has lost his way.

Grow up! Stop being such a wimp. If you do pull yourself out of the swamp, you will get genuine admiration, not sympathy, from people around you who can recognize that you’ve done something difficult.

Some guys screw around on their wife, take off for the Caribbean with a bimbo and then come back and go into rehab. Rehab is fine, but it’s also a big excuse. It says I’m too weak to be good to my family, I took some drugs and it’s the drugs’ fault, I’m not responsible for what I did, it was the drugs that did it. So if you did something like that, just realize you did it. It WAS you. Then you can start getting straight with yourself and your family without hiding behind addiction.

If there were no stigma to addiction, whee, we could all get addicted and talk about it endlessly to our friends and share stories about how troubled we are, and nobody would think the lesser of us. We’d blame the weather or our brains or genetics or the dealers or who our friends are. They’d all be worried about us overdosing and would tuck us in at night and say prayers to keep us safe from the nasty drugs that overwhelmed our tender souls and carried us to addiction land. If there were a stigma, for example, friends might dump us, people would tell us to get a job as we tried to cage money along the stop lights, or lock us up when we try to stick up a liquor store.

Parents tell kids stuff that will help them, but kids don’t listen. “Just say no, wash your hands before you eat, don’t drive drunk, don’t screw around with sex until after marriage,” all that stuff was for your own good and you thought it was stupid, and they were stupid for saying it. They probably disapproved of your friends who drank or had babies in high school, or who smoked pot and tried to keep you away from them. But no, you ignored them or did just the opposite. They were Republican so the kidsregistered Democratic or Peace and Freedom just to show how independent they were as they used the family car to go to rallies for Che Guevara or somebody wearing a beret.

So Stigma helps keep people out of trouble. Goths wear their stigmata proudly to display how bad they are and if you accepted them they might just scream and disappear, like a vampire in the sun.

Well, I don’t think addicts are whole people. I might feel sorry for them but accept them in my home, hang out with them at coffee shop, party with them, I don’t think so. I might try to get them into Narconon, or give them an assist, but I’m not going to friend them, listen to their troubles or loan them money until they show some guts and straighten up. Maybe it’s hard to do. Tough. Parents, teachers, friends, everybody warned them about drugs and they said fuck you and took them anyway because they wanted to get high and broke and destitute so life would stop being so boring.

So don’t expect everybody to feel sorry for you or look at you the same way. You crossed the line and you know it, and stigmata goes right along with that. You’ve fallen and you damn well better get yourself upright and straight again or you won’t have any friends or family left. And other friends, seeing the stigma of you as a basket case, in rehab and in and out of jail for theft and using and dealing might think twice before they decide to follow in your footsteps. That’s why there’s a stigma for drug abuse. It’s there for a good reason, and no college course is going to eliminate it.

Stupid People and Good Advice

All our social programs are aimed to salvage people who had no good sense and didn’t listen to sensible advice. There are some people who arrive with disabilities or are retarded or psychotic, but I’m talking about ordinary people, the ones in your neighborhood, going to school, and so on.

Say no to drugs is good advice, but Nancy Reagan’s motto was widely mocked by druggies, pushers, growers, smugglers, the media and assorted smart-asses. And now thousands of people are dead of overdoses, millions of dollars are spent for maintenance drugs like methadone to keep people off worse drugs, parks are littered with needles, pharmaceutical companies who invented all the street drugs out there are now inventing new ways to divert addicts from street drugs to pharmaceuticals, and so on. And the psychs tell us addiction is a lifelong brain disease so too bad, if you got hooked even once, you have to be on BigPharma’s drugs for the rest of your life.

Say no to drugs is good advice and doing so will substantially improve the survival of self, family, group and mankind. But it was more fun to make fun of the slogan because drugs are, you know, pretty fun and profitable and after your first high which you spend the rest of your short life chasing, you see things you ordinarily wouldn’t such as people nodding away in the parks and alleys, shooting up on the subways and under bridges, crap blowing in the wind from homeless camps, crazy assholes on psychiatric meds shooting up schools and churches, addicts robbing liquor stores and gas stations or giving blow jobs to pay for their next fix.

So the things that mother told you such as “wait till you find the right person before you have sex,” was also pretty stupid especially when you were thinking with inflamed sexual equipment. So nothing like stalkers, AIDS, abortions, former partners killing current partners, beatings, rapes, broken marriages and half of all kids in the US born to single parents, (which means mothers) which means they didn’t give a shit and had sex with a loser who just wanted sex, and had enough sex to get pregnant and then got abandoned because the guy didn’t love them and so then they have to work and raise a kid too, or go on welfare, and hundreds of welfare mothers sitting in housing projects watching TV waiting for the baby daddy to come in at night for a roll in the hay. And the boys have no role model so they follow the corner drug dealer, and the girls follow their mothers and become the next generation of public housing tv watchers.

A recent survey said that 55percent of married men had affairs with at least five people and 50 percent of women admitted affairs with one man. And now just to help out the cheating and lying, there are social media sites to hook up married people who get bored. And instead of Playboy there is online porno to really get the juices pumping.

It was really stupid to think that anybody would follow grandma’s advice. “Save your money,” she would say, “so you can pay for things instead of using credit.” But she was stupid and old, and while banks used to pay interest, they now charge fees to save your money, and you get free shit with credit cards, but if you miss a payment or go late, the interest rate shoots up to 36 percent with fees on top of that, and even federal workers with good salaries and great benefits live paycheck to paycheck and go on food stamps after a 30-day government shutdown. And while you’re struggling to pay the rent, another “free” credit card offer arrives. So in 2016 nearly a million people filed for bankruptcy, and twice that filed in the 2008 economic plunge.

Doesn’t it kind of piss you off? Part of it is the “go with the flow” mentality. If other people are doing it, I should do it too. Lemmings off the cliff. Part of it is the “If it feels good, do it.” You can blame the CIA for that one. They experimented on college kids with LSD, and idiots like Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey spread the drugs across the country, and drugs and sex and rock ‘n roll was all that mattered. It felt good to toss away your tired old rules and just go for it….

And here we are today, blaming others for our sorry state, checking the “sad face” in our doctor’s office and sitting with the nice psychiatrist who tells us the latest hokum brain disease bullshit and hooks us up with the most expensive psycho pharmaceutical that the insurance company will pay for. “I have PTSD” we whine, or “I’m ADHD so you’ll have to excuse me,” or “I have Tourette’s Syndrome so if I start shouting ‘YOU JERKS ALL GO TO HELL YOU ARE SO STUPID YOU MAKE MY HEAD HURT!’” please forgive me.