Chapter 17: DRUG ADDICTION

Drug use is not necessarily a symptom of a pathological fault. It is mainly an expression of a lack of love and care; above all it is a pathology of neglect, solitude, and despair. It is also one sign of the profound sickness of a society of surfeit that paradoxically condemns certain people to material and moral misery.

J. M. Oughourian explained the modern increase in drug addiction thus: ‘drug addiction is not a more or less sophisticated behaviour of defiance, but well and truly a symptom of the gravest crisis that could affect any society, what René Girard calls a “sacrificial crisis”. This crisis is the price paid for the disrespect shown by our society to ritual, myth, and taboo. It is therefore destroying our civilization. As a result, it is not abnormal for young people to prefer drugs to social integration’ (Oughourian n.d.). He added, ‘when then will we understand that it is not about attacking people who have started to abuse themselves? On the contrary, it is about offering them something worth fighting for.’

C. Olievenstein, doctor in charge of the Centre Marmottan, emphasized that drug addiction was an equation with three components: ‘the coming together of a product, a particular individual, and a society’ (Olievenstein 1987). It is a question of supply and demand: there are as many answers as there are individuals. Each person’s story, the chance of association, the recurrence of failures … one simple explanation will not account for the variety of individual steps into drug abuse. While it is true that some new-born babies come into the world with a dependency derived from an addicted mother, we are not born drug addicts.

People use drugs to avoid the boredom of everyday life or to escape from the troubles of existence, problems that seem insoluble, the anxiety of being alone, emotional upsets, feelings of a restricted future.

But also curiosity, peer pressure, fascination with the forbidden, disenchantment with society, rejection of traditional values, the search for communication with others, or a journey of self-discovery, encourage people to try dangerous substances.

This shortcut to happiness, this artificial paradise of enjoyment and oblivion, opens a world of light, of warming sun, of magic, altered perception, inner peace, blessing, restored connection. But it also leads sooner or later to bodily change, mental and physical decline, wasting, and sometimes death.

For a long time drug use was confined for reasons of cost to a higher social circle, but now reaches all levels of society; indeed it is more difficult to avoid at the lower levels because of the ghettos that have formed in the vast expanses of suburbia. Schools, colleges, and universities are also active centres of supply.

The fashions and language of drug use constantly change: the ‘acid head’ of the 1960s counter-culture, searching for a new philosophy and lifestyle, has given way to the ‘junkie’. We are seeing a ‘descent from hippy promise to the despair of deprivation’ (Olie and Matot 1987), a tendency to resignation in the face of a more and more difficult reality. ‘What almost all of them have in common is that they have chosen to reject society as it exists to try and join a different planet and, too often perhaps and more and more, their very own planet’ (Valleur 1978).

The major problem of drug abuse is mental and physical dependence, coupled with greater tolerance, leading to an increasing intake for the same effect. Addicts are incapable of living without the drug or of reducing the intake themselves. Few of them realize that use of such products causes problems in their relations with others or that drugs tend to destroy them, even though they are constantly fascinated by the image of death. They talk of it as if conjuring a spell or playing games with it, but they often remain unconcerned at their decline.

We should distinguish between occasional users able to keep a certain distance from the drug and users of hard drugs such as heroin (junkies) who form the great majority of addicts. For these, the risk of suicide is more frequent.

The action of drugs varies according to the product used. Here are the main drug categories described by the Ministry of Leisure, Youth, and Sport.

Opiates: opium and its derivatives, principally morphine and heroin. Used in small doses, heroin has a calming, almost hypnotic effect. A stronger dose brings on a certain agitation accompanied by a sense of euphoria and stimulation of the imagination. The subject is distant, listless, with a fixed expression, and has difficulty speaking and sleeping.

Cocaine: a white powder made from the coca plant which stimulates the central nervous system, removing the feeling of hunger, producing a light-headed state of euphoria and excitement.

Cannabis: also called (Indian) hemp, plays on audiovisual perceptions, altering behaviour and mental functions. Generally, this product is less dangerous than the others.

Hallucinogenics: can be of natural occurrence as well as synthetic. Of the latter, the best known and most used is LSD. It is linked to the idea of a journey, and is mostly used in a group under the direction of an established user.

Amphetamines: excite or stimulate the central nervous system. Users feel euphoric, powerful, invulnerable, excited, also irritable and often aggressive.

Barbiturates: users of amphetamines commonly take barbiturates to calm down and get to sleep. Detoxification can be particularly dangerous, because the doses used by addicts are often very close to the lethal dose. A rapid coma needs urgent treatment, yet users often repeat the process.

Solvents: inhaling solvents is a practice of drug abuse developed mainly since the 1970s, due to their ease of purchase and low cost. Most common are glues, diluting and dissolving agents, petroleum products, pure solvents (trichlorethylene, acetone, ether, etc.), and aerosol gases. Inhalation of all these brings on a feeling of drunken euphoria, but also often nausea, vomiting, and headaches.

The association of drugs with alcohol is frequent, and the need for alcohol survives after coming off drugs.

Drug addicts display all categories of mental function ranging from normal to pathological – neurotic, psychotic, or intermediary. However, regular use of toxic substances can cause mental imbalance and need psychiatric care. The more classical complications of drug abuse are depression, suicidal behaviour, bursts of delirium, antisocial behaviour, alterations of perception, audiovisual hallucinations, confusion, and impaired thinking.

To round off this section, we reprint the following data that could be useful for graphological analysis, taken from the 1986 report of the Centre d’Accueil et de Soin pour les Toxicomanes de Valence (Drôme), which publishes interesting statistics on the people under its care.

Sex
Men: 75%
Women: 25%

Age
15–20 years: 16.5%
21–25 years: 25%
26–30 years: 42%
31+ years: 16.5%

Marital status
Single: 72.5%
Married: 12%
Divorced: 9.5%

Substances used (often frequent multi-use)
Heroin: 75%
Cannabis: 34.5%
Medicines: 28.5%
Cocaine: 6%
Other opiates: 4.7%
Alcohol (in association): 25%

Educational level
Primary school: 18.5%
Secondary school 1st cycle: 30%
Secondary school 2nd cycle: 19.5%
A levels or baccalaureate: 22.5%
Tertiary: 8.5%

The writing

All human beings are individual, indescribable, and complex, and drug addicts – however marginal they may be – do not break this rule. We must not then expect to find typical writings. Only the signs common to suffering, solitude, lack, and incompleteness appear in all the writings.

Level of organization

While it may be true that some creative geniuses who use drugs in the hope of expressing themselves better have very creative, if uneven, writing, most people who use toxic substances have only moderately developed writing, often basic and uncultivated, even if they come from a high socio-cultural background. The premature rejection of schooling by a large number of addicts does little to help the blossoming of their writing, which still remains close to calligraphy in certain aspects, the variation from the norm signifying the level of inadaptation.

Space

States of toxic rapture alter or set aside received concepts of space-time, in particular they accelerate the sensation of time passing. This loss of spatial awareness causes a disturbance in the rhythm of space, revealed by a poor arrangement of blacks and whites, of spacing between lines and between words, a risky layout.

The fact of having had little or poor educational background seems to affect the background of the writing itself, i.e., the margins. This is why we see:

The writing seems to lack any sense of direction and progresses loosely, without regularity, coherence, or purpose. Complete dependence on the drug reduces any other form of activity to insignificance. Consequently the writing is static as if dumbfounded, hesitant, messed about, condemned to ambivalence, or jarring and even headlong. This deficient adaptation between two opposing and contradictory desires is explained by the predominant urge to find immediate gratification in the drug, an urge opposed to the always deferred desire to interrupt the process for future well-being. The oppressive ambiguity of emotional expression, the impossibility of entering into relationships with others, the appeal for help followed by withdrawal, the tentative appreciation of life and death, concur with the duality of the personality.

Equally, we come upon leftward slanting writings, through opposition and self-justification with regard to a society where drug addicts cannot find their place; or else very rightward slanted, even almost flat. Such excessive slant brings to mind the dependent type who looks for someone to lean on – an unnatural inclination, bound to collapse if it does not find the required support.

Form

The writings often lack backbone and structure, and obviously many drug addicts have poorly formed, immature personalities. Forms may be drained, emaciated, poor, or more refined, but never full or expansive. Generally, the writing lacks body and weight.

The middle zone, that faithful barometer of self-confidence, day to day practicality, and emotional comfort, is very irregular, chaotic, and unstable. It rests on a poorly controlled baseline, galloping in an attempt at self-renewal, descending or plunging in despair, rising through euphoria. The problems of the manic-depressive temperament with its phases of excitement and dejection reflect the ‘highs and lows’ that drugs produce, and are related to the graphic movement.

The zones are out of proportion to each other. The upper extensions are too long, often inordinately so in the upper zone, indicating a search in the beyond for a colourful and fantastic world with ideas close to megalomania. They compensate for lack of autonomy and loss of initiative.

Short lower extensions show little grounding in the real and material world, due to the subjects being cut off from their roots, their family, or their upbringing. ‘A notable proportion of drug addicts have been abandoned in their childhood or brought up by differing people or in different places’ (Charles-Nicolas 1987).

Prolonged upper and lower extensions recall the writing of perpetual adolescents who, even when they have grown up, slowly drain themselves, torn between will and power, dreams and their non-fulfilment. Drugs are purveyors of image and fantasy.

Movement

Difficulties in applied thinking, upset relationships, and poor physical coordination hamper the free flow of movement – in other words constrict progress, spontaneity, and freedom. Types of movement most often met with in the writings of drug addicts are as follows:

Stroke

The spontaneous expression of the stroke reveals the flow or inhibition of vital spirit, and also what relation the writer has with both the self and the external world. Drugs affect the quality of the stroke. Among addicts, the most common types of pressure are:

Spindles infer the notion of sensual pleasure expected through absorption of the drug. Spasms show excitability and unsatisfied urges. Clubs are like short breaks in nervous energy, marking a long restrained aggression which gives way to violence, outbursts of anger so much more dangerous because they are often impulsive.

Unpredictable connections, retouchings, trembling, corrections, jerks, squeezed word endings, and unexpected gaps show how the continuity of the writing is affected by the illness.

Freud

Most of the writings show overwhelming orality. Leaving out immaturity, this underlines intolerance to frustration, greed, and the dependence that the drug addict sets up with others, a dependence associated with the more or less aggressive manipulation of these others. The listener and the carer often take the place of the drug; they take on the role of indispensable objects for survival, quickly becoming the targets on which the addicts direct their impulsive tendencies, sometimes with drug-induced brutality.

Childish omnipotence, voracious orality, avid bulimia, which demand everything, immediately and no matter how, feature permanently.

The anality of the first phase is little seen in the writings, explained by absence of control of the object, accommodation of blame, guilt. On the other hand, violence against others which is then returned onto the unworthy perpetrator is a structure of sado-masochism.

We see here a pathology of self-esteem. ‘The event that scarred the drug addict is “the phase of the shattered mirror” resulting in misunderstanding and loss of self-awareness in a process where instantaneity – the “already almost” and the “almost more” – will certainly be constantly repeated and verified mentally and physically, but where what will dominate will be unawareness of an ideal image of the self’ (Olievenstein 1983).

We find once again the typical blocks common to most marginal or deviant people, for whom the experiences of love or Oedipal rivalry have caused insoluble problems. ‘Drug addicts are completely unable to accept an Oedipal system set up under the gradually instilled authority of an originally paternal law, whether this law is laid down by the father himself, or by the mother “in the name of the father”. For these subjects, the law they recognize remains an external law, tied to obscure ideas, most often megalomaniacal, that inevitably lead to deception and periods of sometimes intense depression that the toxic substance is meant to annul or mask’ (Coutanceau and Martorell 1987).

Certain syndromes shed light on the addictive personality. Among them are:

  1. A syndrome of disorientation, of temporo-spatial problems and physical uncoordination: variability of margins, unsure connections, poor rhythm of spacing, form, movement, altered continuity, weak pressure.
  2. A syndrome of immaturity, intolerance to frustration, of shifting attention based on a pleasure principle unable to accept second place to the demands of reality, overwhelming orality, pattern of neglect/greed/rejection, passive activity, Oedipus: love–hate ambivalence, problem of identity.
  3. A psychopathological syndrome:
  1. A syndrome of influence: delirious illusions, intuitions, attention problems, fears of persecution.

Man, 20 years old. Delinquent drug addict. Unable to confront loss, the drug addict sometimes turns delinquent to secure provision of the drug by any means.

The mixed and unclear slant of the writing, with gestures inclined to the right, straightened, then slanted to the left, indicates the vacillation of the subject caught between contradictory tendencies that he cannot anchor. Such ambivalence here gives way to pain and neurotic inadaptation. Affection alternates with hate, illusion goes hand in hand with deception, the attitude to the external world is active and passive at the same time.

The energy of the writer, expressed here by the firm application on the paper, turns into aggression directed as much towards others as onto the subject himself. The sado-masochistic pattern consists of violence against the self and others, domination–submission, passivity–pugnacity.

The use of script writing, together with arcades, reversals of direction, and solderings in a stiff and slow graphic context are signs of inhibition, a hidden desire for deception, a certain affectation, and spirit of imitation. Script writing is ‘a make-believe compensation for an inferiority complex’ (Vels 1966), and here takes on a psychopathic appearance.

Man, 25 years old. Heroin addict for eight years, trying to give up. The regressive angular writing imparts a tone of opposition and obstinacy, almost even of transgression of social values. The leftward defensive movement reveals tension, constraint, denial, repression, fear of the future. Such a leftward slant in a rather bracing context seems to be making a claim on the past, undoubtedly without respect for the maternal image.

The gesture-types in harpoon and hook form, the lower extensions turning leftward and in triangles show a penchant for disagreement, for a priori conjecture, and for a tendency to cavil.

A trapped libido casts a repressive shadow over the vital forces. Masochism is seen in all these backward forms, particularly clearly on the letter of the self, s, in the shape of a ‘scorpion biting its tail’.

Despite the importance of aggression and violence, the writing’s development seems positive enough considering that there is a determined side looking for a way out and able to presuppose a certain autonomy and independence open to recovery.

A cure based on psychotherapy would help him surmount his difficulties. Generally, when this cure is followed by post-therapeutic care, it allows the person to overcome the problems of reintegration into professional and social activities.

Woman, 20 years old. Cannabis, solvent, and cocaine addict driven to prostitution. An affective writing, hardened by the passing of time. Too many angles in a writing that one would like to see in gentle curves. In this weak context, angularity is linked to loss of freedom, constraint, and internal conflict. The dominant affectivity of the writer has not been allowed to express itself freely.

For Hegar, an association between straight, slow, and pasty signals a struggle between energy and enjoyment, decision and hesitation.

The poorly formed but connected letters and the large childish components reveal ambivalence, difficulty in coordinating thought and action, tendency to live only in the moment, to see only what is immediately visible, the dependency on the drug causing an overruling need for satisfaction.

Poor development of the Jungian functions Sentiment and Sensation here underlines a distortion in the areas of instinct and emotion.

The gap on the left of the two letters d implies an acute sensibility for everything relating to the parental image, and sometimes points to breakdown.

Man, 25 years old. Heroin addict. Sad, bony, fleshless writing, with the schizoid tendency of a suffering body and a mistreated soul.

Thin and stretched writing of ‘prolonged adolescence’, whose wild, utopian, and near megalomaniac ideas slip into dream, fantasy, and magical thought. But, ‘because it has been overworked, the imagination weakens; a fantastical imagination conceals its own lack’ (Olievenstein 1987).

The dry and spasmodic explosive stroke, associated with sharp endings, shows anger and possible violence, a person little drawn to others, whose sadness and loneliness stems from non-communication and retreat into himself.

Woman, 20 years old. Heroin addict. This writing belongs to the category termed ‘puerile’ by Dr Gille-Maisani (1992), meaning that the personality has not matured. Fixation to the oral phase causes passivity, dependence, emotional immaturity, incompleteness. This is shown here by the round forms, almost calligraphic, closed, regressive, slowed down by inhibition, their softness accentuated by a slack stroke.

To this fragile ground is fixed a structure of neglect: the writer said that she had been abandoned at eight months by her mother and at two years by her father. Her boundless and unsatisfied need for love and her narcissistic and egocentric demands directly relate to her neurosis of neglect accompanied by claiming and aggression, as well as to a life of intense maternal emotional frustration (regressive left margin). There is also kindness.

The repetitive character of the writing shows a rather compulsive manner. ‘We know, since Freud, that compulsive repetition represents one of the most certain forms of latent expression of the death instinct’ (Bergeret 1982). In this game of life and death, drug addicts allow themselves as much the exploration of self-destruction as the right to live.

Man, 20 years old. Use of hallucinogenic drugs and amphetamines. Static writing without application, whose inertia seems to be a response to a poor existence. Little sign of life comes out of this fragile writing with its light pasty stroke and almost childish forms.

Lack of autonomy and initiative is seen in the left margin closely tied to the past; rootlessness and instinctual awkwardness is marked by the absence of lower extensions, which are knotted or nonexistent and end by mingling – even losing themselves – in the middle zone.

Gaps in the affective letters (a and o) reveal a narcissistic fault, damaged certainties: the subject cannot make adequate emotional responses.

There is no manly aspect to this defenceless, dependent writing open to suggestion, influence, and conformity. But there is a lot of softness and self-neglect.

Failing a successful transition of the Oedipal phase, drug addicts cannot decide between opposing choices or have satisfactory loving relationships. ‘Very soon he starts to content himself with imitation, as the last resort for his flawed identity’ (Bergeret 1982).

This young man is imprisoned by the use of drugs. With his vulnerable and inoffensive nature, he risks blaming himself for being afraid of life’s responsibilities and making himself feel like a reject.

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