Addiction

Addiction has become extremely prevalent in the world today.  You hear about it on the news, around your neighborhood, and more than likely are related to or know someone that has had some form of addiction in their lives.  But has it always been this way?

This world has seen a long history of addiction.  One of the first documented uses of the word addict was used as an adjective meaning of delivered or devoted.  This was in 1529, and comes from the Latin word addictus which comes from addicere.  In this case, the word ‘ad’ meaning deliver, yield, devote, and the word ‘dicere’ meaning say or declare.  Furthermore, in 1599, Shakespeare used the word ‘addiction’ in the first scene of Henry V, and in 1779 a brief usage of the word was mentioned in conjunction to tobacco.

However, the history of addiction in connection to a drug didn’t come along until 1906 with a reference to opium.  This is the date in which the term became more widely used.  From that point on, ‘addiction’ was mostly a term that was pharmacological, relating to the process of ones body becoming dependant as their drug tolerance rose.  It wasn’t until 1935 and the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous that the term went from it’s one sided diagnosis to a much larger meaning and use.

This is when with the help of Dr. William Duncan Silkworth, the medical community and social service departments began realizing that ‘addiction’ was more of a disease, and the ‘disease-model’ concept was born.  The history of addiction then was added to with a new definition, which was; the continued use of drugs or alcohol regardless of the negative effects and results that come with it. Furthermore, from here the history and definition grew even more through treatment centers and abuse councilors to include psychosocial, genetic, and environmental factors as potential reasons and contributing factors to addiction.

With this new and expanded definition came a wider understanding of addiction in general.  For example, people in the medical community began seeing that other factors in life like food, sex, and gambling could become addictive.  It was here in the history of addiction that the “twelve-step program” developed by AA was being widely used for different forms of addiction.

This is where we saw such programs like “Overeaters anonymous” in 1960, and “Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous” in 1977 come into existence.  But although they were widely used by those in need, they were not accepted by the professional community that worked with addiction.   Therefore, the history of addiction was then led to the 21st Century attempts at new modeling and definitions associated with addiction.

These attempts were primarily focused on tools of economics to help define the three main models of addiction.  The first of these was called Myopic/Naïve.  Simply put, this model states that the characteristics of an addict is one that is unable to see the bigger picture of the consequences of their behavior.  That regardless of the outcome or cost, they will still use.

However, the next model in the history of addiction comes as the “rational time-consistent” addict.  This type of addict is said to be fully aware of the big picture and that they are able to change their behavior if the outcome, like price, outweighs the benefits of the substance. And finally, the third model introduced is that of the “time-inconsistent”.  This model simply merges the two previous into the addict that can see the outcomes on some level, but that may be to dependant on the substance to be able to react to a negative outcome.