Chapter 4 THE NATURE OF ADDICTION

The assumption underlying the analysis of the nature of the addiction process presented in this chapter is that the special and extraordinary craving of the addict is derived in a learning process from the repetition of a certain kind of experience with the drug which all addicts have. The point of this discussion therefore is to isolate and describe this experience from which the "hook" in addiction is derived. The three accounts that follow should be considered, not as three unique historical accounts of how addiction was established several decades ago, but rather as especially critical instances from which it may be possible to infer what the universal features are in the acquisition of the pattern of behavior that addiction constitutes.