I’ve noticed a kind of ranking of addictions that happens when addicts get together. At the top are things like meth, heroin and crack. Lower down comes alcohol, ecstasy and marijuana. Even lower are things like cigarettes and coffee and all the strange ones, like internet addiction, shop-a-holics and so on. Somewhere in the mix is food addiction, gambling and others.
Those with the higher, more traditional addictions sometimes have a hard time coming to grips with something like smoking as being on par with “their” substance. It seems to me partly because of the illegal nature of street drug addiction and the serious criminal consequences. Someone who faced years in federal prison might have a hard time understanding the addiction of a person who can’t stop running up credit cards.
The best example of this hierarchy I’ve seen came when a particular 12-step meeting (one open to all who suffered from the disease of addiction) was debating about going cigarette and coffee free. One faction thought that smoking and caffeine were just crutches that kept people in addiction and the other group, the more hardcore, didn’t think of tobacco and coffee as addictive substances – at least not in any serious way.
This last view was in vogue when I spent time in treatment. You were allowed (if not encouraged) to smoke and drink as much coffee as you wanted. Either the medical staff thought it too much to drop all bad habits at once, or they just bowed to the pressure of addicts who, frankly, wouldn’t have attended if they weren’t allowed to indulge. This was many years ago. Now, I think the norm is to disallow at least the smoking part of the equation.
Fashions change and a society that once embraced smoking and drinking no longer is quite so ready to turn a blind eye. In truth, this is probably at least as much about understanding the dangers as it is about fashions in what “healthy” means.
From where I sit, if the difference between getting someone to a meeting and not is a matter of letting them smoke, then let them smoke. Make a smokers meeting if you have to. On the, my-addiction-is-more-serious-than-yours side, what seems to work is having meetings that aren’t catch-alls. There’s a good reason to have people there who share, not only the general experience of addictive behavior, but the specific problems that one “species” of addiction brings.
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