Editor:
Re: ‘Trauma equals addiction,’ July 16
I used to be one of those who’d, while sympathetic, looked down on those who had ‘allowed’ themselves to become addicted to alcohol and illicit drugs.
However, upon learning that serious life trauma (e.g. adverse childhood experiences) is so often behind the addict’s debilitating addiction, I began to understand ball-and-chain self-medicating.
The greater the drug-induced euphoria or escape, the more one wants to repeat the experience; and the more intolerable one finds their sober reality, the more pleasurable that escape should be perceived.
By extension, the greater one’s mental pain or trauma while sober, the greater the need for reality escape, thus the more addictive the escape form can be.
Yet, in many sober minds these poor souls have somehow committed a moral crime, perhaps even those who’d become addicted to opiates prescribed them for an innocent sports or work injury.
We now know pharmaceutical corporations intentionally pushed their very addictive opiate pain killers – the real moral crime – for which they got off relatively lightly, considering the resulting immense suffering and overdose death numbers.
Frank Sterle Jr., White Rock
