* * * Caution – contains small spoilers about the movie "Rent" * * *
ADDICTION: Compulsive physiological and psychological need for a habit-forming substance. Habitual psychological and physiological dependence on a substance or practice beyond one’s voluntary control. Synonyms: fixation, chemical dependency, obsession
HABIT: A recurrent, often unconscious pattern of behavior that is acquired through frequent repetition. An established disposition of the mind or character. Synonyms: inclination, tendency, routine
After seeing the movie Rent last night, A.J. and I had a brief discussion about addictions vs. habits, and how there really is a dramatic difference between the two. In the movie, Mimi is a heroin junkie who is falling for Roger (who used to be a junkie, but got clean when he and his then-girlfriend found out they had HIV and she subsequently died). Roger is interested in Mimi but seemingly repulsed by her drug use. At one point during a musical montage, Mimi appears to be going through physical withdrawl, and Roger is there to comfort and support her. Things appear to be going well for them, then Roger sees Mimi buying a stash from her old dealer, gets angry, and leaves.
When I watched this story arc, I was really irritated by Mimi’s behavior. I mean, she had already gone through the terrible physical symptoms of withdrawal AND she had Roger there supporting her and starting this relationship with her… then she ruins it all by meeting up with her dealer. Why?? This is where the addiction vs. habit conversation came from. It seemed that Mimi had overcome much of the physical addiction part of her heroin use, but as they say "old habits die hard" and since she still lived and worked in they same neighborhood and saw her dealer and found herself in the places/situations she used to "use" in, it was too much for her not to give in to the old psychological habit.
Of course, at this point there can be a whole discourse on the semantics of the words used in discussions about this topic. What is meant by the terms addiction, physical addiction, dependence, psychological addiction, tolerance, habit… For a very nice discussion on this topic, I like the Wikipedia entry on addiction. I was also intrigued by the reference to "Rat Park" in said entry. Rat Park was an experiment on addiction done in Vancouver BC back in the late ’80’s. The colony was built to examine the hypothesis that drug addiction is a myth and that continued drug use, particularly the use of heroin, is largely, and perhaps entirely, the product of unhappiness, and not neurophysiological compulsion. Investigators hypothesized that the addiction to morphine commonly observed in laboratory rats who are exposed to it could be attributed to the cramped, isolated conditions in which they are normally kept. The environmental stress caused the rats to take refuge in the drugs they were administered. It was thought that better surroundings would reduce or eliminate that dependence. The results of this experiment appeared to support the hypothesis, but the work was not well received by the mainstream scientific community.
