The most recent science on addiction seems to reject what we have long thought, that drugs take over your survival mechanism and your brain thinks you need them to survive. I am not definitively saying that doesn't happen to people, but what we seem to be finding out is that a lot of people truly have what is actually a very bad habit, but the criminal justice system forces them into rehab programs that teach them that they have no control over the drug and must admit that only a higher power can help them. While that may be true for some, it is likely not true for many of the people we sent to rehab, and thus those whose survival mechanisms haven't been hijacked believe they have no power over their own addiction.
Jacob Sullum of Reason has been covering this for years, and Johan Hari has recently written a book about it. The same rhetoric we all remember from DARE about drugs--that they will kill you because you will be addicted at the first drop--was also used in propaganda pieces to outlaw alcohol. The problem was that too many Americans drank and knew that most people could have a drink here and there and no get addicted. Sure, there were problem drinkers, but the vast majority of drinkers were not addicted, despite drinking more than one drop.
This worked for harder drugs, however, and the federal entity responsible for overseeing saw the writing on the wall and moved on to other drugs like marijuana, cocaine, and heroin. Not only did they use the same propaganda then, they also based most of it on racial fears--Blacks on cocaine were better marksman, unhurt by bullets, and would go after White women. Mexicans get 'crazed' on their marijuana. The Chinese were 'crazed' and would rape White women on their opium.
While there are heroin addicts, the government's own data on use shows that the vast majority of people who have tried it either use it recreationally or not again (only a small percentage of those who try it have used it in the last 30 days). There are also prescription drug addicts on drugs related to heroin. But heroin was invented by Bayer in the late-19th century and marketed as a non-addictive alternative to morphine. But other than a slight change to the structure that allows heroin to break the blood-brain barrier faster than morphine, it is otherwise morphine, and the body metabolizes it as morphine.
Hospitals use morphine all the time, and often use heroin, depending where you are in the 1st world. Of course, the versions used for pain in hospitals are all medically pure. But if the long-understood propaganda about heroin were true, we'd have millions of people looking to score on the streets after leaving the hospital and being treated with morphine or heroin. But we don't.
The long-standing heroin model is based upon experiments done with rats. You put a rat in a cage, give it two water bottles--one normal, one laced with, usually, heroin or cocaine--and see what it does. In nearly every case, it uses the laced water until it dies. Decades later, another scientist had an idea. So he created what he called "Rat Park," and in this particularly large cage was everything a rate could want. Friends, things to look at and push around, and other rats to have sex with. The same two water bottles were offered, and the rats rarely touched the laced water.
We have a human experiment that is very similar. During Vietnam, something like 25% of US soldiers began using heroin and said they were addicted. But a strange thing happened when they returned home. 90-95% stopped using when they came home. But with all we thought we knew about hard drugs, how could that be?
The answer turns out to be that alcohol is much more damaging to the human body than medically pure heroin. The most damaging things about heroin are all a result of prohibition--sharing needles, unknown purity, what it might be cut with. What is also dangerous about drug use and causes overdoses is using more than one drug at a time. Nearly always with these young overdoses they have more than one drug in their system.
What scientists have recently been looking at, Jacob Sullum reporting on it, and Hari writing a book about it recently, is that addiction has much more to do with one's 'cage' than taking over one's brain. If you can change the cage, you can change the habit. Scientists have also been studying the link between child abuse and addiction. The answer is probably only surprising in just how strong the link is. The link between child abuse and addiction is as strong as the link between obesity and heart disease.
So all of this brings me to Scott. What did we learn about Scott in his biography? He was raped as a young boy. That is textbook abuse of a child.
What else can we guess? The tour bus is one hell of a cage. Worse, when things are great, you're a God on stage for 90 minutes a night, an indescribable high, and then for 22:30, you're trapped on a bus, and if you go places, you're mobbed. As things get worse, you're not even getting that high from being on stage anymore as it becomes 'punching the clock' and people aren't showing up. Yet you're still trapped on that bus or in that hotel room. And as Scott told Stern, to save his voice he can't talk after shows. That's isolation.
Worse yet, if that describes Scott, the odds are his brain hadn't been hijacked, but he had a severely bad habit that scientists would probably now link to his rape and his 'cage.' If you look at what was probably Scott's most successful sober stint, it would be after getting out of prison, roughly January, 2000. But big tour for No. 4 didn't start until May, and they didn't even start to promote the album together until March, so Scott had three months before getting back out on the road. Even still, from March to May, it was acoustic radio appearances and surprise shows, TRL, that kind of stuff. He wasn't immediately shoved into a bus for a year. His second successful stint was at the beginning of Velvet Revolver when Duff took him under his wing and got him into martial arts. But again, they took it slow. They played the El Rey Theater a year before Contraband came out and 11 months before their tour started.
If this is all true, and it is admittedly supposition on my part as I am not a scientist and did not know Scott, then the ultimate problem might not have been Scott not being strong enough, but society as a whole continuing to have an attitude towards drugs that makes it very hard for addicts to recover. Back when heroin was first prohibited, doctors objected, and even though it was legal for them to subscribe it to addicts in treatment, the federal government put many, many doctors in jail for doing it anyway. What's also interesting is that doctors had patients who used heroin recreationally, but as soon as it was prohibited, they had a harder and harder time not sliding into addiction.
Today we still have a habit of shaming addicts because we criminalize the activity. Then we force them into treatment programs that tell them they have no control over their own sobriety, despite the fact that we know this is not true from most of them. Scott has many faults, and he will always be judged personally for his addiction. But it's also just as possible that society failed him.
