S. Peele et Rj. Degrandpre, COCAINE AND THE CONCEPT OF ADDICTION - ENVIRONMENTAL-FACTORS IN DRUG COMPULSIONS, Addiction research, 6(3), 1998, pp. 235-263
Addiction is an evocative psychological and medical term whose meaning
has changed significantly over time. For most of this century it has
been described in terms of an abstinence syndrome (dependence and with
drawal) and associated with heroin use. In the 1980s, however, cocaine
replaced heroin as the prototypical drug of abuse. Cocaine had hereto
fore not been considered to produce ''physical dependence.'' Nonethele
ss, for both cocaine and heroin, current models of addiction - models
widely propagated by the media -reduce drug use patterns to the proper
ties of drugs and biological characteristics of the user. In creating
this model, scientific and clinical debates along with public debates
rely on the supposedly typical, inevitably addicting results of repeal
ed cocaine consumption. Yet naturalistic human drug use and drug takin
g by animals in the laboratory instead reinforce the picture that use
of all drugs depends on the user's environment. Indeed, even the most
severe examples of compulsive drug use can be reversed when key elemen
ts in the setting are modified. Such findings should by now play a fun
damental role in both scientific and public conceptions of addiction,
but they do not.