You’re Not An Addict If I like What You’re Doing

You’re Not An Addict If I like What You’re Doing

The way people approach addiction is influenced largely by the type of substance being used and by the stereotyped user. An example of this is the cigarette smoker compared to the cigar smoker. When asked to conceptualize a cigarette smoker people often represent them as being rude for smoking in clean air spaces and idiotic for choosing to harm their health. When asked to conceptualize a cigar smoker people will often say something to the effect of I don’t know...maybe some dads golfing….or rich guys. None of the rudeness or poor decision making labels factor in. Cigar smokers are typified as relaxed males who aren’t helpless addicts. This type of stereotyped user may be why we don’t talk about being addicted to smoking cigars, which contain far more nicotine than cigarettes. We fail to see vape use both as an addiction and as the first successful form of male birth control. This type of perception feeding forward into our mental representation extends into other areas of society as well.

Part of how addiction is created through representation is whether the act in question is treated as a choice or addiction. Representation in the form of ads can influence this of course, however I am referring to your own mental representation. (My thinking here is informed by spending time in health care settings, so this is my admission of bias.) To phrase this simply, people don’t consider overeating to be an addiction. People don’t consider drinking a few Cokes per day to be an addiction, yet people seek the substance without thinking about it, will be in an improved mood with it, displeased without it, and it causes deleterious health effects through it’s regular and long term use. Regular overconsumption of foods high in added sugar, polyunsaturated or partially hydrogenated trans fats, are repeatedly and empirically proven to cause, not simply correlated to,  hypertension and obesity. Hypertension and obesity, the start of a long list of complications, are then in turn correlated with an increased risk of joint pain, myocardial infarction, and hemorrhagic stroke. This is abbreviated list of issues associated with obesity begins to show that people are willing to ignore the consequences of an action if they feel the action is acceptable. Recent research has shown that fatty tissue accumulation in women raises their risk of developing specific cancers at a rate greater than of their male counterparts. (This is not to forget that obesity is also linked to cancers in men, prostate being a common one).

However, the decision to be a overweight is celebrated under certain movements, and the immense negative health side effects are ignored. We don’t treat obese people as addicts of either a food (akin to a chemical dependency) or a behavior (akin to gambling addicts). A person who undergoes knee or hip replacement will be covered under health insurance, an insurance pool paid into by people who are at a healthy weight and don’t need elective joint replacement. The same health insurance that assists children with leukemia or the elderly with degenerative conditions will pay for a person who is overweight to receive surgery. I’ve heard colleagues say “they did it to themself” in regard to a smoker with cancer, however I have yet to see this animosity applied to a person who is chronically obese in need of a bypass surgery or joint replacement. If you like it something, whether it be a literal act, such as drinking a few Cokes a day, or a metaphorical principle such as “I’m free to choose what healthy means to me and my body,” you won’t label something (overeating and obesity) an addiction, even though it meets the criteria. This is all to point out hypocrisy in labeling and thinking, while suggesting that “addiction” is not such a clear disease state.