Turning Toward Addiction

Turning Toward Addiction

To my rave, music, and festival family. All the beautiful ways you chose to spend your time (light shows, electronic music, community, unity) were the very signals that pointed me away from the things that almost robbed me of who I was. We didn’t know it at the time, but most of us outgrew the drugs anyway. Outgrowing them with you is a story for another book I’ll have to write someday.

This essay is a set of reflections, not a treatment plan. It is not a replacement for a doctor, a therapist, or a supervised recovery program, and nothing in it is medical advice.

Sometimes the very sound of a substance’s name can spark the desire for it. So here, up front, are the things this essay talks about, so that anyone who needs to close it and come back later knows what’s coming: alcohol, benzodiazepines, caffeine, depressants, gambling, hallucinogens (LSD, psilocybin, DMT), marijuana, nicotine, sex and pornography, social media, stimulants, and video games. If this isn’t the right day for this essay, that’s okay. It will keep.

Experienced · Observed · Studied

Experienced: lived, and I am the only witness. Observed: watched in others, with their details anonymized or left out. Studied: read in the literature, and cited at the back.

Spiritus contra spiritum.

— C. G. Jung, letter to Bill W., 1961

The things I’ll talk about here (my own battles, and what I’ve watched over decades caring for the people closest to me, some of whom didn’t make it out) stay inside the list at the front of this essay, and they aren’t limited to drugs.

I’m going to use my own framework, the one built on Jays and Traces, to explain how I walked through some of these doors and back out, and how I’ve helped people I love walk back out of theirs. To protect everyone these stories touch, I’m telling all of them in the first person. That keeps full anonymity, for me, for my past, and for the people who came to me for help. Some of these stories are mine. Some aren’t. I’m not going to tell you which is which, with one exception, coming up, that I want you to have before the anonymizing begins.

So let’s go through a door backwards, into the mind of an addict, and see if we can find our way out.

Alcohol

Booze. The sweet fuel of the social butterfly, in my opinion. It’s as good a place to start as any, because I want to break down how the brain makes its own reward, and how a substance and an environment can reach for the very same lever.

Here’s the exception I promised. This part is me, Jamison, the author, no anonymizing.

I’ve never blacked out.

People black out on alcohol all the time. I never have. I’ve done plenty of stupid things drunk (wrecked my car and lied about it to everyone around me, found out exactly how far I could go), but I always kept the memory. Sometimes it wouldn’t surface right away; those headaches are a force of their own. But the moment someone said dude, you wrecked your car, I’d snap straight back into the memory of it happening, the whole thing intact.

I used to think that was a glitch in my logical brain. These days I think it might be the only reason I didn’t go down a much darker road after that accident. I’ll never be able to explain it. It’s probably the same reason dissociatives don’t work on me the way they work on other people. I can’t even use laughing gas at the dentist. I just lie there laughing at how bad it hurts.

So why did I drink?

To be social. That was almost always the reason. And honestly? In small doses, that’s fine. But when does a college-age kid ever measure small doses?

We drink because others drink. I genuinely can’t picture the person who picks up a bottle purely on their own, with no outside pull, and drinks their life away just because. I’m sure that person exists. I just can’t imagine my way into them. For most of us it starts as a social lubricant, something that eases the mind and lets knowledge pass between people. It closes the gap.

And there’s real machinery under that feeling. Your brain makes its own opioids, the endorphins, and alcohol reaches straight into that system; brain scans have caught drinking releasing them in the brain’s reward centers (Koob & Volkow, 2016; Mitchell et al., 2012). That’s the pharmacology under the word buzz. But here’s the part almost nobody tells you: the social setting reaches for the same lever. Laughing together raises people’s pain thresholds (Dunbar et al., 2012), and brain imaging has caught social laughter releasing the body’s own opioids in the act (Manninen et al., 2017). Singing together, and dancing in sync, raise pain thresholds in ways researchers attribute to the same endorphin system (Tarr et al., 2015; Weinstein et al., 2016). The company was doing some of the work the whole time.

Which means your brain can get there without the bottle. The substance just boosts what the room was already offering.

The fruit of the knowledge lets the knowledge pass. That’s all it should be. And then one day, it isn’t.

The first time you drink alone, you probably tell yourself what I told myself: just this once. I’d love to meet the person who said that and meant it, probably the same saint who drank one beer and never touched another. The rest of us tied that first high to the room we were in, and something locked on the very first pass. People call it chasing the dragon, and it isn’t a myth. Once you’ve felt that first lift, everything after is a negotiation between dose and damage. The brain adapts to keep its balance, so the same amount does less, and it takes more to feel what you felt (Koob & Volkow, 2016). The chase can burn through an hour, a week, or a whole life. What makes you suffer isn’t the drink. It’s the repetition. The frequency.

And when the social spark is gone, the whole point is gone with it. What’s the good of being high with no one there?

There’s an ego trick underneath the solo version of this. The ego has a way of softening reality to pull itself closer to what it wants to call the self, or God, or the divine, or, plainly, death. I’ve long suspected that nearly everything that brings us pleasure is also, quietly, tilting us toward our own edge. You can see the shape of it in alcohol, in stimulants and depressants, on down to nicotine, caffeine, sugar, chocolate. We’re coaxing ourselves into a little borrowed happiness.

Hold that as a metaphor, not a coroner’s report. It’s a way of seeing a pattern, not a claim that joy is literally lethal. Because the same lens shows you the opposite: the right thing, in the right setting, in the right dose, can heal, and the very same molecule in the wrong setting and the wrong dose can take you apart. Sharing a box of Valentine’s chocolates with someone you love is not the same event as finishing it alone at 2 a.m., hating yourself. I’m not telling you to quit chocolate. I’m asking you to see the pattern, because it maps onto everything heavier.

And the pattern cuts both ways, hard. Some substances genuinely are medicine when a professional holds them right. Others are far more addictive than they will ever be therapeutic, and no setting redeems them. I’m not the one to referee which is which. That’s what the doctors are for. They’ve given their lives to the question. Trust them over me on this one.

That professional-in-the-room idea is exactly why the supervised research is showing what it’s showing. In careful clinical trials, psilocybin has produced real, lasting drops in depression, and in the anxiety and depression of people facing life-threatening cancer (Davis et al., 2021; Griffiths et al., 2016; Raison et al., 2023; Ross et al., 2016); MDMA-assisted therapy has moved the needle on severe, long-standing PTSD (Mitchell et al., 2021, 2023). And there is always a trained guide present, someone to hold the balance while the person does the deep work. Even there, in the most stripped-down setting imaginable, there are three in the room: the ego, the Self, and the healer who keeps the peace between them.

But I have to be honest about where that research stands, because hope without accuracy is just a setup. These medicines are still investigational, and psilocybin, LSD, DMT, and MDMA remain Schedule I under federal law.¹ In August 2024 the FDA declined to approve MDMA-assisted therapy and asked for another trial (Duerr, 2024). Dissociative-assisted treatment is further along: esketamine, a nasal spray derived from ketamine, has been FDA-approved for treatment-resistant depression since 2019 and is given only in certified clinics, under observation. Ketamine itself is used off-label; it is not FDA-approved for any psychiatric condition (U.S. Food and Drug Administration, 2023). That supervision is the whole point. If any of this is going to help us, we have to be patient enough to let the experts bring it to us in the doses and settings it was meant to arrive in. Not in the port-a-potty at your favorite festival. The molecule doesn’t care about your intentions. The setting is half the medicine.

If you take nothing else from all of this, take this: some of the things we reach for, we may have been meant to reach for, in smaller doses, and around other people.

Frequency

Now, back to frequency. How did I fight the thing?

For any substance, it comes down to repetition, and repetition can be turned down. Take the “morning routine” and make it an “afternoon reward,” after the laundry’s folded. Crack it open then, if you’re going to. You made it hours further than the timeline you were on. Don’t hate yourself for it. Tomorrow, maybe it’s drinks with friends again; that’s what it was for. But stop there. Don’t go home and continue the pattern alone. Take the nap. Meet the hangover early. Widen the gap between one use and the next, and then fill the gap with something: poetry, music, art, whatever this stuff I make is. I write, right? ♥

One hard warning, and I mean this one flatly, no lyricism. If you are a heavy daily drinker, do not just stop cold on your own, and don’t white-knuckle a crash taper by yourself either. Alcohol is one of the few things whose withdrawal can kill you, through seizures and a medical emergency called delirium tremens that can be fatal even in a hospital (American Society of Addiction Medicine, 2020). Benzodiazepines are the same way (U.S. Food and Drug Administration, 2020). This is the one place where the move is not to argue with your own body. It’s to call a doctor and let them bring you down safely. There’s no shame in a supervised detox. It’s the opposite of weakness. It’s the version of this where you live.

And I have to hold something else next to the harm-reduction talk, out of respect for the people who didn’t make it. For some people the frequency simply cannot be dialed down. The “one afternoon beer” isn’t an option their body will honor, and moderation is the trap, not the exit. For them the road is full stop, with support: a program, a sponsor, a First Call, an AA table. If that’s you, the honest kindness is to say so plainly rather than hand you a dimmer switch that was never going to work.

I’m not as young as I was. I used to be able to kill a whole bottle by myself, sleep it off, and clock in bright-eyed the next morning like I’d accomplished something. Now a single sip means I’m calling a cab. That’s what sobriety feels like from here, and it’s almost as frightening as the addiction was.

But look at the gifts it hands me. I’m the ride now. I’m the sober head in the room, the one making sure nobody hurts themselves. I was a trip guru before I knew the word for it, at parties even when I was the drunk one, just being there for people, and it lit up something in my brain I still can’t fully name. Maybe that makes me square. I’d rather spend the night driving my drunk friends home than being one of them. Sorry to the friends who’ve missed me. If you’ve ever called me for that ride, you understand.

There are real resources for that ride, too: rideshare, sober-driver programs, whole campaigns built around getting you home. Use them. In 2023 alone, more than twelve thousand people died in drunk-driving crashes in this country (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 2025).² Don’t be me, plowing straight through a roundabout, some part of my brain cracking up that I hadn’t gone around or about anything as the car went airborne. It was funny to me in the moment, and that’s the horror of it: how easily the mind will dress up its worst decision as a joke while it’s happening. It wasn’t funny. It was one of the worst decisions I’ve ever made, and I only got to keep laughing because I got lucky. Told you I don’t black out. I remember all of it.

Be social. Be kind. Be free. But don’t be alone with it, and don’t drive. Make the call. Take the ride. Get home, and once you’re home, be safe there too.

Push the envelope the other direction. Widen the gap. As it grows, fill it. And if you slip and close the gap, that’s okay too. The single biggest mistake you can make in that moment is to cover the mistake with another one. You keep pulling the frequency back down to something livable. Even with alcohol, even if you’re out every weekend, as long as it isn’t eating your money or your relationships: fine, piss in the wind. We were half-built for it.

The hard part isn’t stopping. It’s finding out why you were doing it. And sometimes you only find that at the bottom, sitting in it. Rock bottom is jagged. There’s no comfortable way to sit there. But here’s the funny thing about the bottom: every direction out of it is up. Even swapping the morning routine for an afternoon reward is a change of direction. Imagine doing it again the next day. And the next. Imagine being the hero of your own story with nobody coming to save you.

The ones that aren’t drugs

Let me turn the lens before I close, because I said I’d talk about the ones that aren’t drugs: social media, sex, pornography, video games. They pull the same reward levers, and how often we use them shapes how well we can steady ourselves without them. The science has started to catch up. Gambling disorder now sits in the same chapter of the psychiatric manual as the substance addictions (American Psychiatric Association, 2013), and the World Health Organization added “gaming disorder” to its classification of diseases as clinics around the world were already treating it (World Health Organization, 2020). It’s real. It’s also, in places, still being argued over, so I’ll hold it honestly rather than oversell it.

Someone I trust (one of the smartest people I know, and one of the few who knows himself better than I know myself; he okayed this anonymous mention) once described his pornography habit to me in a way I’ve never shaken. He said the performers who really did it for the audience, the ones who knew they were beautiful and knew people were starving for an intimacy they couldn’t name, were more compelling to him than the ones who’d been talked into it or driven to it by need.

That sat with me a long time, and it taught me something about perception and intent. The more I looked, the more it held: the ones who seemed to last were the ones doing it out of something like conviction. Free love, some would call it, the old idea that sexual desire is wired into us in ways we can’t fully explain.

People have their signals, the things they’re drawn to, and those signals are shaped by where they grew up and who was around: coherent, in my framework’s sense, with a whole life’s environment. Which is enough for me to say the quiet thing plainly: a person’s understanding of themselves is not my bridge to build. I’ll leave in only the oldest instruction that matters here, to treat the other as a mirror, and leave the rest alone. Because even when the self-appointed “superior” one looks at the addict wrestling the stronger demons and thinks disgusting, that same ego will drive home to its coffee, its sugar, the little prescriptions we’ve quietly outlived the need for, and its social media, where it can talk about other people and their problems. Addiction wears many masks. The Self behind all of them is the same.

And while we’re being honest about masks: blame wears one too. It’s easy, in the throes of it, to hand the whole weight to whoever wrote the prescription. But there’s a difference between the doctor who tried, who treated the pain in front of them in good faith, and the one who never cared to follow up. We shouldn’t fault the healer who acted rightly with what they knew. The responsibility for what a thing becomes, long after the reason for it has healed, travels home with us. It stays in our hands, same as the choice does.

The pattern runs through pornography the same as anything. As glamorous as that world can look, that life is for the people equipped to live it, on both sides of the screen. Plenty of quiet stories of erectile trouble get blamed on it, but I’ll be straight with you that the science is unsettled. What the research more consistently finds is that it’s the distress about the use, the sense that it’s become a problem, and not the raw frequency, that tracks with the trouble (Grubbs & Gola, 2019).³ The timing of that betrayal is always impeccable, isn’t it: right when you need your own system to work, for someone real.

Same with social media, where our wanting spills out into public view. Relationships leave legible traces there, and those traces turn into the worst version of the story more often than not. It usually starts in trust (send me a picture), and trust, once it’s out of your hands, can be broken. My private life is my private life. These days there’s no one in it but my partner. The drive to want, to reach, is old and probably not built for monogamy; that’s just biology being honest. And still, I can’t argue with what I found in her: the actual yin to my yang, and the last thing that carried me across the final bridge to being all the way sober. Just today I gave up vaporized nicotine and drank two Dr Peppers instead of my usual half-dozen. It was a real headache. I made it anyway, and I feel better for it.

I once had a 22-millimeter kidney stone pulled out through my back: a robin’s egg, near enough to cover a quarter, the kind they don’t even let you try to pass. I still can’t tell you why I ever drank soda after a pain like that. But I did. Today was two. Tomorrow, maybe one. Who knows after that. But I know this much: every time I choose my own health over my own failure, I hand a little time back to the far end of my life. All those grim little facts, every cigarette costs you so many minutes: the newest estimate puts it around twenty minutes a cigarette (Jackson et al., 2025). Here’s the part they leave off: you can win a lot of that back. Quit before forty and you avoid about 90 percent of the extra risk of dying that comes with continuing to smoke (Jha et al., 2013). Quit earlier and you get back more. The recovery is real, and it starts the day you decide it does.

Look at that. This whole thing started as an essay about wrecking my car drunk as a skunk, and it’s ending with me pairing two small healthy choices and quietly closing three or four chapters of my life at once.

Tomorrow I might slip. I won’t hate myself for it. I’ll get up and keep going. And somehow, just knowing that, all the way down, is often exactly enough to keep me from slipping in the first place.

What the kids absorb

I told myself the video-game version of this lie for years. Never saw it as a problem, right up until I saw how much of my own feeling I was pouring into imaginary things. I called it therapy, to my partner. Then I watched my kid start to absorb my demons.

That’s the sentence I can’t get past, and it’s the one this whole series keeps circling. Our children are not born with our habits. They pick them up from us, the way they pick up our accents.

The research is blunt about this. In a study of hundreds of families with young children, the more a parent’s phone or screen interrupted their time together (researchers call it technoference), the more the children acted out and struggled to regulate themselves (McDaniel & Radesky, 2018). And a national study of Swedish adoptees, children raised by parents who were not their biological parents, found that the risk of drug abuse passes down both ways: through the genes of the parents who conceived a child, and through the home of the parents who raised them (Kendler et al., 2012). Blood is part of it; twin and adoption studies put the heritability of alcohol use disorder at about half (Verhulst et al., 2015). The house is the rest. The same Swedish researchers later found that a good home can substantially lower the risk even for children carrying a heavy genetic load (Kendler et al., 2016).⁴ And the landmark study of adverse childhood experiences counted a parent’s substance use among the household experiences that track, step by step, with alcoholism and drug use decades later (Felitti et al., 1998).⁵

Jung saw a stranger version of the same thing: children living out, in reverse, what their parents refused. Generally speaking, he wrote, “all the life which the parents could have lived, but of which they thwarted themselves for artificial motives, is passed on to the children in substitute form,” so that “an irresponsible wastrel of a father has a son with a positively morbid amount of ambition, and so on” (Jung, 1954, para. 328). Either way, the child is carrying the parent’s unfinished business.

And when I finally set the controller down, what stunned me was the setting-down itself: a thing I’d held close my whole life came loose in the space of two fast realizations, back to back, right when it counted most. Sometimes the hardest thing to see isn’t what our choices do to us. It’s what they do to the people who love us, and the small people who are watching. And sometimes that’s the whole of what we need to pick no, for one moment, of one hour, of one day.

Inflation

Sometimes, just sometimes, we get too high without any drug at all. My theory would say the brain can do the very same thing when it tries to measure the gap between the ego and the Self. We get so high on our own egos, on our perception of these material vessels we walk around in and the things we’ve gathered, that we lose track of the real importance we hold in the grand scheme of the Self. Jung had a name for that particular altitude. He called it inflation: the ego puffing itself up by mistaking something vast and shared for something it personally owns, until it can’t tell the difference between itself and the whole (Jung, 1966).⁶ The higher it climbs, the harder the fall waiting on the other side, and the emptiness that the substance, later, gets recruited to fill.

Shorten it, so it’s easy to carry:

Sometimes we get so caught up in who we are, we forget who we can be.

But that’s not to say we don’t remember, on some deeper level. Jung held that the Self comes before the ego, that it is “an a priori existent out of which the ego evolves” (Jung, 1969, para. 391). If that’s true, then coming back to wholeness is less building than recovering. Plato had a word for that kind of knowing: anamnesis, an un-forgetting (Plato, 1997).⁷ And maybe that’s all recovery ever is: the long walk back to a center that was holding your place the entire time you were gone.

Spirit against spirits

Jung had a different way of looking at the demon of alcoholism, and his thoughts on it collapsed into a reality that has saved countless lives. But he was only one link in the chain.

A man named Rowland Hazard went to Jung for his drinking. Bill Wilson later remembered it as around 1931, but the Hazard family’s own letters place Rowland in Jung’s care beginning in 1926 (Bluhm, 2006). Jung eventually told him the truth as he saw it: that medicine and psychology had nothing more to offer him, and that his only real hope was a genuine spiritual experience. Hazard carried that to the Oxford Group, and from there it passed to Ebby Thacher, and from Thacher to Bill Wilson, Bill W., who went on to co-found Alcoholics Anonymous in 1935. Decades later Wilson wrote to Jung to thank him for the spark. Jung wrote back in January 1961, a few months before his death, and named the craving for alcohol “the equivalent on a low level of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness.” Spiritus contra spiritum, he wrote: spirit against spirits, the same Latin word for the bottle and for the highest thing we reach toward (Jung, 1975, pp. 624–625).⁸

Those chips they hand out hold exactly as much power as the people holding them give them. That’s as true in the warm church basement with the hot coffee as it is in the cold casino lobby under the flashing lights of Markov’s dreams. A constant reminder of a demon outlasted, whatever story you hang on it. That kind of symbol runs through nearly every faith, carried in small objects. I’m not telling you God will heal you. I’m telling you the design seems to hand us every tool we’d need to heal ourselves, and that the power to choose stays in our hands.

In theory.

Love yourself, even when you fail. Sometimes that small mercy is the exact thing that makes you choose differently next time. And love others when they fail, because maybe they don’t yet understand why they do what they do. We can only help.

Not judge.

♥

Notes

1. The federal Schedule I listings are at 21 C.F.R. § 1308.11(d).

2. The 2023 figure is 12,429 deaths.

3. Grubbs and Gola found “little or no evidence” (Grubbs & Gola, 2019, p. 111) of a link between use itself and erectile dysfunction, a consistent cross-sectional link with self-reported problematic use, and no evidence of a causal link either way.

4. In the authors’ words, “high-quality rearing environments can substantively reduce risk for DA in those at high genetic risk” (Kendler et al., 2016, p. 1359).

5. The data are retrospective and show association, not cause.

6. In “The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious,” on the identification of the ego with the collective psyche.

7. See the Meno and the Phaedo on recollection.

8. Jung’s reply to Bill Wilson, January 30, 1961. The exchange was first published in the A.A. Grapevine Jung & W. (1963).

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