So the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. It is Human Connection.
But in fact, some 95 percent of the addicted soldiers, according to the same study, simply stopped using. Very few had rehab. They shifted from a terrifying cage back to a pleasant one, so they didn’t want the drug anymore.
Bruce Alexander argues this discovery is a profound challenge both to the right-wing view that addiction is a moral failing caused by too much hedonistic partying, and the liberal view that addiction is a disease taking place in a chemically hijacked brain. In fact, he argues, addiction is an adaptation. It’s not you: It’s your cage.
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This gives us an insight that goes much deeper than the need to understand addicts. Professor Peter Cohen argues that human beings have a deep need to bond and form connections. If we can’t connect with each other, we will connect with anything we can find—the whirr of a roulette wheel or the prick of a syringe. He says we should stop talking about “addiction” altogether and instead call it “bonding.” A heroin addict has bonded with heroin because she couldn’t bond as fully with anything else.
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So the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. It is human connection.
More: The Likely Cause of Addiction Has Been Discovered and It Is Not What You Think