In the context of ever-growing popular support for a disease model of addiction, Heyman’s Addiction: A Disorder of Choice (2009) argues that addiction results from normal, albeit suboptimal, everyday decision making. Contrary to a conception of addiction as a chronic physical condition like diabetes or asthma, Heyman views addiction as voluntary operant behavior that results from a temporally myopic view of the available alternatives in a choice situation. The temporally myopic drug user devalues the delayed aggregate of better health, financial stability, and secure relationships that accompanies abstinence, and predictably chooses to use drugs. (Kurti et al. 2012, p. 229)
Individuals with addictive disorders suffer in the extreme with two basic aspects of human nature. They cannot control their emotions and they cannot control their behaviors. They either feel too much or they feel too little; they are over controlled or they are out of control. These two extremes are crucial if not essential aspects of addictive disorders. Such generalizations are a risky way to start a book. In doing so I run the risk of seeming to know the truth or of being dogmatic. What I intend in this book is not so much to find or speak the truth but to present a particular perspective (Khantzian 1999, p. 7)
References
Khantzian, Edward J. 1999. Treating addiction as a human process. Northvale N.J. Jason Aronson.
Kurti, Allison N., Jesse Dallery, and Cathleen Piazza. 2012. “REVIEW OF HEYMAN'S ADDICTION: A DISORDER OF CHOICE.” J Appl Behav Anal 45 (1): 229–40. doi:10.1901/jaba.2012.45-229.