Love Addict by Ethlie Ann Vare

Author:Ethlie Ann Vare
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
ISBN: 9780757391613
Publisher: Health Communications, Inc.
Published: 2011-08-23T00:00:00+00:00

SOCIAL DISEASE

There’s enormous resistance to using the disease model when talking about sex, love, and relationships. They are not medical conditions any more than alcohol and religion are diseases. It’s just that some small percentage of the population somehow manages to get addicted to all of them. We may be better off, in truth, if the American medical establishment doesn’t officially label sex or love addictive as addictive; as a society, we have a terrible track record dealing with this kind of thing. We label drug addiction a disease, and how do we treat it? By trying to get rid of the drugs. Every administration since Woodrow Wilson’s has attempted to interdict the importation of cocaine. Turn off the cocaine tap and what happens? Kids turn to crystal meth cooked up in the woodshed. How does our legal system attack the crystal meth problem? By making it impossible for me to buy antihistamines at the supermarket, because some crazy tweaker just might be stocking his meth lab from the health and beauty aids aisle at Von’s Market on Ventura Boulevard.

Have you heard about the latest research on a vaccine against cocaine addiction? Scientists at Baylor College in Texas are testing a protein derived from cholera that, when taken over a series of inoculations, will prevent the active ingredient in cocaine from reaching the brain’s pleasure center. If it doesn’t get them high, the reasoning goes, addicts won’t bother using it. The experimental vaccine is called TA-CD (treatment for addiction—cocaine), and the federal government is spending cash to test it.

I’m not going to question the wisdom of injecting people with cholera just to harsh their buzz, nor comment cynically on the likelihood of crackheads showing up for three months’ worth of shots. No, I’m just going to point out that if coke stops getting them high, they’ll use something else. After all this time, money, and research, they still don’t get the message: substance abuse isn’t about the substance; it’s about the abuser.

If sex and love are labeled as addictions, I fear the government will fight it the same way they fight every other addiction: limit people’s access to the offending drug. Next thing you know, there will be a war on sex, complete with a federally appointed sex czar. You’ll need a doctor’s prescription to buy Penthouse magazine. Prostitution will become illegal. Hang on . . . prostitution already is pretty much illegal. Fat lot of good that’s done.

It’s kind of like our response to acts of terrorism. An angry, possibly mentally unbalanced man tries to sabotage an airliner by hiding explosives in his shoes. Do we make an effort to find out why people are so angry with us? Do we increase our intervention among the mentally unbalanced? No, we spring into action and create a massive security system targeting . . . shoes.

Sex and love, like street drugs and exploding shoes, aren’t the problem. They are someone’s solution to a problem we don’t understand.

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