Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Cessation Patterns among Neophyte Heroin Users 1

1966; Marcel Dekker; Volume: 1; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.3109/10826086609026749

0020-773X

Robert Schasre,

Substance Abuse Treatment and Outcomes

Howard S. Becker makes the following observation regarding the inadvisability of attempting to understand deviance solely through the study of people who represent what might be termed the "extreme" cases. He states, "We should also consider those who have a more fleeting contact with deviance, whose careers lead them away from it into conventional ways of life. Thus, for example, studies of delinquents who fail to become adult criminals might teach us even more than studies of delinquents who progress in crime" (Becker, 1963, pp. 24-25).The research presented in this paper represents a preliminary effort to gain information and insight regarding social factors which operate to explain why some individuals cease using heroin after an early juvenile involvement, while others seem to continue heroin usage more or less throughout their adult lives. Forty dual interviews with persons who had jointly indulged in early heroin usage were employed to obtain the data.The interviews indicated that in a large percentage of cases the reasons attributed by both the continuing user, or addict, and the former user to the latter's termination of heroin usage were very often non-volitional in nature, representing the intervention of social circumstances which the individual saw as beyond his ability to control or overcome at the time. These cases, twenty-two out of forty, involved either the physical removal of the individual from his source of supply, or the failure of the existing source of supply to continue furnishing drugs. These findings would seem to underscore strongly the fact that continuance of usage, following early experience with heroin, depends heavily on social opportunity to continue usage; otherwise the "habit," these data appear to indicate, may, in many instances, be abandoned.There remains, of course, an important supplementary issue: to determine with more precision which individuals will abandon heroin usage in the face of adverse social conditions, and which ones will persist and succeed in surmounting the intervening barriers. That the barriers are not overcome, however, by a considerable number of individuals appears to represent a finding not adequately stressed in either the theoretical or the empirical literature on illicit drug usage.The interviews also appear to demonstrate the inadequacy or the incorrectness of the view that symptoms of physical withdrawal will inevitably send narcotics users in inexorable search for a supply of the narcotic to alleviate their distress. In nine cases the ex-users reported that the awareness of their physical dependence was the significant factor leading to abandonment of heroin usage, even though supplies of the drug were readily available to them. This point is seemingly at odds with Lindesmith's conclusion that such awareness is inevitably followed by subsequent usage (Lindesmith. 1947, p. 69), though it must be kept in mind that Lindesmith was not analyzing initial involvement patterns of short-term users. But the point is significant. The finding that physical symptoms of addiction may lead to temporary cessation of usage, or to a conscious and deliberate diminution of usage, has been confirmed in numerous other interviews with addicts who passed through East Los Angeles Halfway House.In addition, there is also the problem of determining whether the personality patterns generally alleged to lead individuals to become "primary" addicts as suggested by Ausubel (Ausubel, 1958, p. 41), for instance, would differ for the addicts interviewed, when compared with the ex-users interviewed. There often seemed to be quite striking personality variations between the two men interviewed simultaneously. The ex-user, for instance, appeared more self-assured than the addict, and often seemed inclined to be condescending, critical and rather intolerant of the addict with whom he was interviewed. But it cannot be said that these variations were present at the time of initial narcotics involvement and are not the product of vastly different life experiences since that time. If the personality patterns were more similar in the distant past or if both men might by virtue of their joint initial narcotics usage have been defined as "addict-prone," then the findings presented here seem to suggest rather strongly that social circumstances can and do play an important role in determining whether or not such "addict-prone" neophyte narcotics users will persist in usage into their adult lives.