What makes a drug a drug?
January 1, 2015 5:55 PM   Subscribe

...or maybe what makes a drug it an addictive drug? In the way that there are checklists for psychological disorders, is there some kind of checklist of parameters that qualify a substance to be an addictive drug...or...I'm still not sure "addictive drug" is the right description. Well, what I'm really trying figure out is: Besides the fact that it's not a substance, can television be considered a drug? Maybe another way of asking is: What is the behavior of an addictive drug?
posted by SampleSize to Health & Fitness (10 answers total) 3 users marked this as a favorite
 
Dude, you're framing this kinda weirdly. Anything can be addictive to the right person. You are not looking at the behaviours of addictive things - things are not alive, they do not have behaviours. Your are looking for the behaviours that typify addiction. There's lots of information on that page that will help you refine your question and maybe even supply an answer.

To answer your question, sort of: Can television become the subject of addictive behaviours? Absolutely. Just like a whole lot of non-drug things like pornography, gambling, World-of-Warcraft, typing answers on Ask.Metafilter...
posted by smoke at 6:15 PM on January 1, 2015 [7 favorites]


Well, there are several different "addiction" mechanisms out there. Broadly speaking they boil down into the physiological --- those for which cessation of the habit has unpleasant physical effects --- and psychological --- those where the habit becomes something which the user is mentally compelled/most comfortable doing. These do not have a nice clear delineation, as they feed into each other in all sorts of ways and even a "habit" with no actual physiological withdrawal can be physiologically difficult to stop just because the brain can screw with the body in all sorts of ways.

Opiates, alcohol, amphetamines, and tobacco are all quite capable of causing physiological addiction. Most other recreational drugs are not actually "addictive" in this sense, although they can be habit-forming (to various degrees. AFAICT, nobody has ever developed a serious LSD habit, because it's just not used that way). So it's not like addictivity, either physiologically or psychologically, is what separates the "drugs" from the "non-drugs".

More importantly, pretty much anything pleasurable or escapist is psychologically addictive through largely the same mechanisms as physiologically nonaddictive drugs are. Cocaine is a simple case study: the rush of cocaine starts as a pleasure and ends as a compulsion, even though there's no such physiological syndrome as cocaine withdrawal. Take that same progression from "this is fun" to "this is what I must do to have fun" and it could happen for TV, videogames, chocolate, whatever. But I'm not sure "drug" is a useful term except in a very metaphorical sense.
posted by jackbishop at 6:23 PM on January 1, 2015 [5 favorites]


The American Society of Addiction Medicine has put forth this definition of addiction, FWIW.
posted by forthright at 6:30 PM on January 1, 2015


A good rule of thumb for physiologically addictive substances is that you will go through withdrawal even if you were unaware you were taking the drug. For a more molecular description, look up beta arrestin on wikipedia.
posted by benzenedream at 6:36 PM on January 1, 2015 [2 favorites]


Here are some helpful terms:

Dependence and habituation are changes in physiological response to a drug after repeated use.

Addiction, and abuse are psychological and behavioral human processes.

Drugs are chemical substances. They have no independence or free will, and cannot cause addiction.
posted by Dashy at 6:46 PM on January 1, 2015 [2 favorites]


The Stanton Peele Addiction Website
posted by telstar at 7:04 PM on January 1, 2015


I'm a little confused about exactly what you're asking, but maybe this will help. Addiction is commonly thought of as compulsive behavior around a substance. It's definitely true that people have compulsive behaviors that don't involve physical substances (i.e. with sex, shopping, video games and so forth). And in many cases the chemical activities going on IN THE BRAIN during these behaviors are the same ones that go on when people take drugs.

For instance, when people shop, they get spikes of dopamine (a neurochemical involved in desire and reward). When people take cocaine, they also get spikes of dopamine. And a lot of activities that people do repetitively/compulsively are affecting the brain's levels of dopamine. So: an activity can be "addictive" (i.e., can cause compulsive/repetitive seeking behavior) the same way a physical substance can.
posted by feets at 7:13 PM on January 1, 2015 [1 favorite]


smoke: Dude, you're framing this kinda weirdly. Anything can be addictive to the right person. You are not looking at the behaviours of addictive things - things are not alive, they do not have behaviours. Your are looking for the behaviours that typify addiction.
This is incorrect, because it pretends that all "addictions" are the same.

There are addictive behaviors, certainly, and those can be almost anything, although humans are enough alike that there are some common addictive behaviors. These can include taking a drug that is not normally addictive.

"Drugs" - chemicals in our bloodstream - can be addictive, regardless of the user's behavioral attitudes. Alcohol, caffeine, and heroine withdrawal cause real, chemical effects that are not affected one bit by the recovering person's "behavioral addiction" at that moment.
posted by IAmBroom at 6:50 AM on January 2, 2015


Dashy: Here are some helpful terms:

Dependence and habituation are changes in physiological response to a drug after repeated use.

Addiction, and abuse are psychological and behavioral human processes.

Drugs are chemical substances. They have no independence or free will, and cannot cause addiction.
It seems that technical terms differentiate between the "behavioral addiction" and "chemical addiction" I just described. OK - but I suspect the OP (like me, and may others) didn't realize the latter was technically referred to as "dependence" instead of "addiction".
posted by IAmBroom at 7:00 AM on January 2, 2015


"Drugs" - chemicals in our bloodstream - can be addictive, regardless of the user's behavioral attitudes. Alcohol, caffeine, and heroine withdrawal cause real, chemical effects that are not affected one bit by the recovering person's "behavioral addiction" at that moment.

This is absolutely correct. And television does not, of course, fall into this category if it helps you HP.
posted by smoke at 1:00 PM on January 2, 2015


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