Why Addiction Is Not an “Equal Opportunity” Problem
What I got wrong about addiction.
I got sober four years ago after a decade of heavy, daily drinking. Even more recently, I quit my pack-a-day smoking habit. These experiences have taught me a lot about addiction, and I love to share what I’ve learned with other struggling and recovering addicts.
However, since my knowledge of addiction comes from first-hand experience — rather than training as a health or psychology expert — I’ve sometimes formed beliefs about addiction that don’t match the science.
Whenever I’ve realized that one of my ideas about addiction doesn’t stand up to scientific scrutiny, I’ve always been happy to correct myself and update my view. I think that the better we can understand addiction as a society, the better we’ll be able to treat it. A key part of that understanding comes from listening to the researchers.
I write all this because I recently discovered that one of my long-held beliefs about addiction has been quite wrong. Specifically, I’ve always said that addiction is an “equal opportunity” problem — in fact, I’ve written it as recently as a few weeks ago.
What I meant by this phrase is that regardless of one’s background or position in life, you can still develop an addiction. I was trying to combat the myths that certain religions or races are unsusceptible to substance abuse.
The trouble is that simply calling addiction “equal opportunity” does not include this nuance. Instead, what I was literally saying was that addiction is equally likely to affect everyone. This is simply not the case.
In addition, although I’ve always understood that there was some level of variation in the frequency of addiction among different classes and categories of people, I didn’t understand just how significant the differences were.
Earlier today, I read a short and compelling blog post by Stanton Peele, a psychologist and lawyer who specializes in addiction. In The Myth of Addiction as “Equal Opportunity Destroyer”, Peele explains that economic class and geographic location have enormous correlation with addiction.
He opens with the example of opioid prescription rates, which see some counties with…