Drug Addiction and Spirituality

Growing up in New Jersey I was always a well-liked kid. I did well in school, played sports, and was even in my school’s band and choir. My parents were so proud of their little prepubescent teen. The sky seemed the limit for me, and my teachers, friends and family seemed to agree. Life changed for me when I was fifteen. A friend of mine suggested that him and I try some of my Grandmother’s medication—Tylenol 3 (Tylenol 3 is an opiate consisting of acetaminophen and codeine). You often times hear drug addicts describe their first experience with their drug of choice as “the answer they’ve been looking for”, or compare it to “falling in love”. The same was true for me; it was an experience I’ll never forget. Fast-forward three years later, I was battling with a full-blown Oxycontin addiction.

I was very good at hiding my problem. I used to be ambitious, funny, outgoing, and halfway good looking (may be not). But now my parents were struggling with what had happened to their little boy. I was no longer any of those things. My personality had completely changed. The thought of having to talk to anyone seemed unbearable. I just wanted to be left alone with my drugs. My mom thought that I was suffering from depression, but couldn’t explain why she was constantly missing money, or why I didn’t “look like myself.” I’ll save the details, but lets just say it got so bad that I broke down and sought help.

Two days after I broke down and told my parents everything that had been going on with me, I found myself in my first treatment center. Upon entering the facility I was subjected to an intake process: one in which I was asked a series of question to help with the diagnosis process. It turns out I qualified! I was formally diagnosed with drug addition, and that was a good thing because now my parents’ health insurance would cover my treatment. I learned a lot about the ‘disease’ concept. I’ve come to think of it as a physical allergy to any mood or mind-altering substance: once I take it into my body, I have an abnormal reaction to the drug—all I want is more, and I’ll go to any lengths to get it. In addition to the disease concept, I was taught a spiritually based twelve-step program. Spirituality was foreign word to me. I grew up a Roman Catholic, and I associated spirituality to sitting and standing in church, and I didn’t really like the idea of spiritual aerobics. The bottom line is this: when I came home from treatment my ‘disease’ had been “legitimated” as Lewontin would put it. I viewed myself differently, my friends—the few I had left—viewed my differently, and my parents had no idea what to do with me. Suddenly everything made sense, I was a drug addict, and therefore, a thief, and liar, and a con artist. Furthermore, my friends’ and family’s suspicion of me as a ‘different’ kind of person was not only legitimated or accepted into reality, it was also just. I was experiencing, as Lewontin would call it, “the legitimation of inequality.”

My mom told me that I had inherited my addiction from her father who died of alcoholism. I can’t be sure, but if Pinker is right, and there is an alcoholic/drug addict gene I guess I can thank my mom’s father for my ‘disease’. I’ve got a bone to pick with Pinker, but we’ll get to that later.

So as I said, I wasn’t very excited about the idea of spiritual aerobics. I didn’t listen to any of the suggestions of my counselors; I just thought that I would stop using drugs and continue to live my life the way I saw fit. Turns out that didn’t work out so well. I relapsed. Life got bad again, and all of my character defects were very much alive and bursting at the seams. I didn’t want to follow the twelve-step program. I saw it as an inconvenience: one that interfered with my life-style. So as an alternative I sought more medication—suboxone. Suboxone is an opiate blocker. All that means is that when I take suboxone it prevents a drug like oxycontin from working. I don’t feel the high. This drug is used to help drug addicts get off opiates. I the prescription filled and it worked for a while, but before I knew it I was selling my suboxone to other drug users (suboxone itself produces a high as well, it is just not as intense as other opiates such as oxycotin or heroin) and used that money to buy more oxycontin.

So I found myself where I left off, miserable, broken, and on a constant quest for more drugs. I opted to go to treatment again. This time however, I entered treatment much more open to suggestion, as I believed that I had my ass sufficiently kicked. After treatment my counselors said I needed more care, and moved me to another treatment facility in Minnesota. It was here that I finally integrated the spiritually focused twelve-step program into my life. I learned a lot. I discovered that spirituality is not necessarily associated aerobics, and perhaps even more astonishingly, that I was not the center of the universe. I developed a concept of a higher power, and incorporated prayer and meditation into my life. I moved into a sober house where I lived for six months, and after my discharge, decided to live permanently in Minnesota. It’s coming up on three now, and I’m still sober.

Returning to Pinker, he refutes the idea of the “ghost in the machine”. He cites Francis Crik’s “astonishing hypothesis” as evidence. Pinker states, “all of our thoughts, feelings, yearnings, and emotions consist of physiological activity in the tissue of the brain” (The Blank Slate, 4). His claim suggests that there is no soul, that our genes effectively govern the nature of our being, and that to think otherwise makes you an ignorant biblical fundamentalist. I’m not so sure. I cannot prove that there is such a thing as a ‘soul’ or that the mind is separate from the body. All I can do is speak from experience. I only know that I began to pray to a God I didn’t understand, and got results I couldn’t deny.

What is alarming to me is the thought of a worldview in line with Pinker’s ideals. Under this context it would be fair to assume that medical institutions would not recommended any sort of spiritual solution for drug addiction. Why would they? A form of a higher power is necessary for the existence of spirituality, and Pinker explicitly refutes the idea of God: “Many people are sort to ‘lose’ God when they hear of these findings…” (5). If I were brought up in such a world, perhaps I would still be suffering from my addiction, and perhaps I would have accepted that there is no hope for me; that, I am destined or programmed to be this way.

Everything I have done up until I found my solution in a spiritually based twelve-step program failed miserably. I cannot explain why, but I know I’m not unique. There are millions of other people like me that have had a similar experience (we’re not all biblical fundamentalist). Again, I cannot prove that Pinker is wrong; I cannot prove there is a God, or that there is a soul. But attacking my disease with a spiritual approach gave me my life back. I don’t know how it works, neither does science, but praying to a higher power helped me to get and stay sober when other methods have failed.