A Bioanthropological Overview of Addiction

A BIOANTHROPOLOGICAL OVERVIEW OF ADDICTION DORIS F. JONAS* and A. DAVIDJONASi Sometimes a collaboration between individuals occupied in separate biological fields and the application of understandings from one field to the other leads to felicitous insights and new perspectives. Our own experience has encompassed studies ofthe evolutionary bases ofhuman behavior on the one hand and two decades of clinical experience with addicts of various kinds (and their families) on the other. Departing from the conventional view that addiction arises solely from the life history of an individual or out of an obscure chemical imbalance, we have come to a formulation of the problem, rather, as one of the effects of group mechanisms upon the individual. The dynamics residing within the entity we call a society affects all its members. There are those who can adapt themselves to group requirements and others who in some or many ways cannot. This applies to all social groups of all creatures, whether animal or human. Very frequently manifestations that appear to us to be peculiarly human, when compared with the patterns oflife ofother animals, come to be thought of as due to our cultural endowment or to our specific civilization and as phenomena that therefore define a separation between our species and all others. Language, love, politics, and the care of the sick are among many human propensities and predilections that come into this category. Yet everything human has its origin in an animal past, and such a view tends to prevent certain aspects of human behavior from being seen in a context of overall natural patterns, hindering full understanding of their significance. The problem of addiction is certainly a human one, and it has not been thought ofin terms of comparative behavior. The reason is simple. Addiction does not occur in a natural state. Laboratory animals may be induced artificially to become addicted to most of the substances on which a human being may become physiologically or psychologically dependent, but this does not happen in feral conditions. Nor, on the other hand, is the presence of "mind" in man an explanation for the»Fellow, Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain. tCivilian psychiatric consultant, U.S. Army Hospital, Würzburg. Address: APO 09801, New York, New York. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine · Spring 1977 \ 345 different behavior, since animals with no advanced neocortical development can become addicted in laboratory conditions. Beyond the failure to view addiction in terms of overall natural processes—or perhaps a part of that failure—is the tendency we have had to ask questions about the "whys" of addiction in terms only of an addicted individual's life. We ask what personal problems led him to turn to drugs or alcohol for relief. Even if we take a step further and examine the social background of the addict, seeking a cause for his problems on a wider basis, this larger dimension is considered relevant only in terms of its effect on the individual; and so the answers we find, like the questions we pose, remain individual oriented. Since the study of the individual is the domain of the psychiatrist, the problems of addiction have come to be accepted as within his province. A further question that must arise, ofcourse, is how it can happen that addiction can arise biologically. This question has been asked by some, and answers to it have been sought in the physiology of the nervous system. But this step again focuses on the individual, even when investigations are pursued into his genetic background; and so, while the question is right, the approach to answering it is limiting, since it leads no further than the previous ones—to the individual. Yet it is indeed in neurophysiology that we may begin to find clues to the larger pattern. The nervous system is more than a recipient of stimuli and regulator of an organism's behavior. It is a repository of reflex responses that connect the individual to his phylogenetic past and is also a regulator of interactions between the individual and the present society of which he is a part. What we call social pressures are conveyed to an individual, and he reacts to them, not only through...