The Road to Addiction

As the daughter of an alcoholic and a smoker, the nature of addiction has always held a large amount of interest of me. From the time I was nine, when my father first explained to meant what it meant to have an addiction, I have wondered why some people seemed so much more susceptible to becoming dependent on something than others. Should it really be classified as a "disease" as the American Psychiatric Association and World Health Association are wont to do, and what effect does such a classification have on the way people perceive addiction? While the welfare of many addicts has not greatly improved, the distinction has at least led to more study by psychiatrists and geneticists on the causes of addiction.

Steven Pinker would no doubt argue that the cause is purely genetic, and there is quite a lot of data to back him up. Several recent studies, from those showing that children with addicted parents are much more likely to become addicts themselves than their peers, to the finding that monozygotic twins are much more likely to both become addicts than faternal twins, have lead geneticists on the quest to find the "addiction gene". They argue that the faster we can gain more knowledge of how our genes lead, the faster we can create more effective treatments for addiction to replace weaning the addict off of their drug, like with nicotine gum, or going cold turkey.

Richard Lewontin, on the other hand, would say that addiction is the product of our environment. Conventional wisdom would seem to support this. How could are genes cause us to become addicted to something if we've never tried it? Rather, if a child grows up around a lot of alcohol or drug use, either in their household, school or neighborhood, they are more likely to see this as a normal part of life, and thus more likely to partake themselves as they grow up.

I find that my own opinion lies somewhere between the two. While the data demonstrating a link between monozygotic twins and addiction is undeniable, I am uncomfortable saying that genes are the be all-end all determining factor. My own experiences have led me to the opinion that genes play an important factor in a person's susceptibility to addiction, or its threshold. Someone who is genetically predisposed to addiction does not become an alcoholic after their first drink. From what I have seen, regardless of what kind of genetic history they come from, a person usually establishes some sort of drinking habit (nothing out of the ordinary, a glass of wine at dinner every once in a while or a couple of beers on the weekend) before they fall into full-blown addiction. It is genetics that determines why some people can hold that habit throughout while for others it can lead to dependency.

A person's society and environment have an equally strong sway over their likelihood of becoming an addict as genetics, in my view. This is what leads to the person to establish their habit in the first place. If they grow up and live in an environment where smoking is regarded as cool, or even just normal, they are much more likely to begin having the occasional cigarette than someone whose parents or teachers constantly reminded them of the dangers of smoking and whose peers did not encourage it. I believe environment also plays a huge factor in what sort of substance is the cause of the dependency, any where from alcohol and drugs to exercise, food and gambling.

So, while my genes may cause me to have a more addictive personality than some of my peers, it will be my environment and how it influences my decisions that will decide just what sort of addictions, if any, will manifest themselves later in my life.