Chasing the Scream: The Search for the Truth About Addiction

by Johann Hari

Another long-term study, published in American Psychologist, followed kids from the age of five until they were eighteen, to figure out how much the quality of your parenting while a child affects your drug use as you get older. When the children were still small, the scientists gave them a task to carry out with their parents—like piling up building blocks—and then they watched how well the parents helped and encouraged them through a one-way mirror. They wrote down which kids had parents who were loving and supportive, and which had parents who were disengaged or nasty to them. It turned out the kids whose parents had been either indifferent or cruel were dramatically more likely to heavily use drugs than the others. They had grown up, they found, less able to form loving relationships, and so they felt more angry and distressed and impulsive a lot of the time. If we can figure out at the age of five which kids are going to be addicts and which ones aren’t, that tells us something fundamental about drug addiction. “Their relative maladjustment,” the study found, “precedes the initiation of drug use.” Indeed, “Problem drug use is a symptom, not a cause, of personal and social maladjustment.” This is one reason why Dr. Vincent Felitti—one of the key figures in the Adverse Childhood Experiences Survey—concluded, as Gabor writes, that “the basic cause of addiction is predominantly experience-dependent during childhood, and not substance-dependent. The current conception of a...