Addiction and Opiates

Addiction and Opiates CHAPTER 1 METHOD AND PROBLEM
several years was a further insurance against deception. On the whole, once friendly contact is made, drug users are
probably above average in cooperativeness, because many of them believe that they ought to be studied and better
understood. The data which they provided me were found to be quite' consistent with the material that the literature on
opiate addiction offers.
This study might be criticized on the grounds that the addicts who were interviewed did not constitute a representative
sampling of American drug users. Indeed, no effort whatever was made to secure a sample that was representative in a
statistical sense because it was not the purpose of the study to make a statistical description of the variable attributes
and characteristics of American addicts. The purpose was rather to try. to find a plausible general theory of addiction,
that is, to describe the nature of the experience from which the user's craving for the drug is derived.
The investigation of any subject necessarily proceeds on the basis of assumptions that cannot themselves be
established as valid in the research in question. One such assumption which underlies the present study is that the
scientist who studies social or other phenomena should, whenever possible, seek to formulate generalizations that
apply to all of the instances of the problem with which be is concerned, rather than to most or some of them only. In
other words, it is assumed that genuinely scientific causal propositions should be stated as universals. This does not
imply a belief in absolute truth as is sometimes erroneously assumed, since it is anticipated that all such
generalizations will be accepted provisionally only, as long as no contradictory evidence is available or no better theory
is at hand. This assumption implies the belief that it is possible for the social scientist as well as for the natural
scientist to state theories in such a form as to suggest crucial instances testing the theory and to permit the search for
negative cases. It is assumed, in other words, that the exceptional instance is the growing point of science and that
cumulative growth and progressive development of theory is obtained by formulating generalizations in such a way
that negative cases force us either to reject or to revise them.(3)
The methodological orientation of this study is deterministic rather than statistical. Applied to the study of narcotics
addiction, each of these orientations has its own characteristic goals, methodological assumptions, and analytical
procedures, and neither can be judged by the standards of the other. Failure to distinguish between them leads to
intellectual confusion.
The assumption made at the outset of this investigation-that the craving for drugs is generated in one identifiable,
unitary type of experience-is deterministic in nature. The research problem it poses is that of identifying or discovering
and describing such an experience and indicating bow and why the patterns of behavior called addiction follow from
it. It is incongruous and illogical to consider such an experience as a "variable" to be handled by' statistical methods.
This is because an "experience" is a complex interactional process- involving many elements or variables in a series of
happenings or events. Moreover, if one insists on speaking of such a sequential process as a variable, it must be noted
that it is not at band at the outset of the study since it has not yet been identified and described. From the deterministic
viewpoint the whole trick consists of finding or identifying it. To suggest that this identification be made by statistical
methods presupposes the knowledge that is being sought.
It is more appropriate to consider the statistical approach to drug addiction within its own frame of reference as a
technique of describing average behavior of aggregates of individuals or of making mass comparisons between groups
of addicts and non addicts. Such comparisons and descriptions have dealt with a wide variety of attributes,
characteristics, and background factors such as those of age, sex, social status, place of residence, occupation, and
personality attributes. These investigations have their own particular kind of merit or significance. They may, for
example, illuminate such matters as why addiction rates are higher in one segment of the population than in another;
they may indicate that certain identifiable personality traits increase the probability of addiction-, they may suggest that
public policies of dealing with addiction have important consequences on the prevalence of addiction and on variations
in its incidence. Such studies are often of great practical importance. They may also be of theoretical significance at
their own level-that of broad "social system" or societal analysis. They may suggest ideas to the determinist, and their
findings must be taken into account, but they do not have a direct bearing on the determinist's search for the causal
process or processes that always and everywhere generate addiction. The difference between these two types of
enterprise is analogous to that between explaining malaria and explaining malaria rates, or crime and crime rates. From
a deterministic standpoint, conclusions derived from statistical comparisons of addicts with non-addicts which assert as
a "theory" that a given attribute is significantly more frequent among drug users than in the general population are
file:///I|/drugtext/local/library/books/adopiates/chapter1.htm[24-8-2010 14:23:31]