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2 Samuel 13:3-But Amnon had a friend whose name was Jonadab the son of Shimeah, David’s brother. Now Jonadab was a very crafty man.
Is there any hope for addicts?
I remember one of my final Bible studies in Perry County Jail where I asked the men in there this question. They were mostly silent, but one man spoke up and said that there is absolutely no hope. He had such despair! It was, indeed, heartbreaking. No doubt, that sentiment is shared by many addicts, and by many friends and family members of addicts. Yet, the Word of God teaches that there IS hope for every person!
1 Timothy 1:15-This is a faithful saying and worthy of all acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am chief.
How may we, as the church of Christ, do our best to maximize outreach to addicts?
One of the first steps is to realize and consider some of the reasons why people are tempted by drugs in the first place. There are at least five such reasons. These reasons include physical, spiritual, social, psychological, and demonic reasons. It is my personal belief that the best way to minister to those ensnared by addiction is to treat each of these areas with the addict.
I want to think with you in this brief article about the “social” aspect of addiction.
Sometimes addicts turn to drugs-and continue to abuse them-because of the influence of family and friends in their lives that encourage them in that direction. More along these lines, some addicts will explain that they abuse drugs because they want to experience a bond of connectivity with others in a platonic sense, and that sometimes chemical substances heighten that emotional response. Stated another way, abusing drugs together can create an emotional bond of intimacy between persons.
Coming to a better understanding of social influences that play a part in addiction not only helps Christians to better understand the temptation of the addict, but it also better equips us to minister to them. The crux of the following study deals with the subject of experiments that have been conducted which detail the impact of a person’s social interactions as relates to addiction. Hari informs us:
“As I said earlier, the strongest evidence for the pharmaceutical theory of addiction had, for years, been a series of experiments on rats. A famous advertisement that ran on U.S. TV in the 1980s, paid for by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America, explained it best. It shows a rat in close-up licking at a water bottle, as the narrator says: “Only one drug is so addictive, nine out of ten laboratory rats will use it. And use it. And use it. Until dead. It’s called cocaine. And it can do the same thing to you.” The rat runs about manically, then—as promised by the scary music—drops dead. Similar rat experiments had been run to prove the addictiveness of heroin and other drugs. But when Bruce looked at these experiments, he noticed something. These rats had been put in an empty cage. They were all alone, with no toys, and no activities, and no friends. There was nothing for them to do but to take the drug. What, he wondered, if the experiment was run differently? With a few of his colleagues, he built two sets of homes for laboratory rats. In the first home, they lived as they had in the original experiments, in solitary confinement, isolated except for their fix. But then he built a second home: a paradise for rats. Within its plywood walls, it contained everything a rat could want—there were wheels and colored balls and the best food, and other rats to hang out with and have sex with. He called it Rat Park. In these experiments, both sets of rats had access to a pair of drinking bottles. The first bottle contained only water. The other bottle contained morphine—an opiate that rats process in a similar way to humans and that behaves just like heroin when it enters their brains. At the end of each day, Bruce or a member of his team would weigh the bottles to see how much the rats had chosen to take opiates, and how much they had chosen to stay sober. What they discovered was startling. It turned out that the rats in isolated cages used up to 25 milligrams of morphine a day, as in the earlier experiments. But the rats in the happy cages used hardly any morphine at all—less than 5 milligrams. “These guys [in Rat Park] have a complete total twenty-four-hour supply” of morphine, Bruce said, “and they don’t use it.” They don’t kill themselves. They choose to spend their lives doing other things. So the old experiments were, it seemed, wrong. It isn’t the drug that causes the harmful behavior—it’s the environment. An isolated rat will almost always become a junkie. A rat with a good life almost never will, no matter how many drugs you make available to him. As Bruce put it: he was realizing that addiction isn’t a disease. Addiction is an adaptation. It’s not you—it’s the cage you live in. Bruce and his colleagues kept tweaking the experiment, to see just how much your environment shapes your chemical compulsions. He took a set of rats and made them drink the morphine solution for fifty-seven days, in their cage, alone. If drugs can hijack your brain, that will definitely do it. Then he put these junkies into Rat Park. Would they carry on using compulsively, even when their environment improved? Had the drug taken them over? In Rat Park, the junkie rats seemed to have some twitches of withdrawal—but quite quickly, they stopped drinking the morphine. A happy social environment, it seemed, freed them of their addiction. In Rat Park, Bruce writes, “nothing that we tried instilled a strong appetite for morphine or produced anything that looked to us like addiction.”” (Johann Hari, Chasing the Scream: The Inspiration for the Feature Film “The United States vs. Billie Holiday” (The Opposite of Addiction is Connection), 171-172 (Kindle Edition); New York, NY: Bloomsbury)
Rat Park teaches us that the old cliche is true: people, places, and things make a big difference!
Of course, this is a theme that we are reminded of throughout the Word of God.
1 Kings 12:8-But he rejected the advice which the elders had given him, and consulted the young men who had grown up with him, who stood before him.
Proverbs 13:20-He who walks with wise men will be wise, But the companion of fools will be destroyed.
Proverbs 22:24-25-Make no friendship with an angry man, And with a furious man do not go, 25 Lest you learn his ways And set a snare for your soul.
1 Corinthians 15:33-Do not be deceived: “Evil company corrupts good habits.”
Just as social influences can lead a person into the cycle of addiction, so also can positive social influences help lead a person to sobriety and recovery. So the local church needs to strive to create an environment where loving acceptance and accountability are enforced.
Are we a church that loves addicts?
Are we a church that welcomes addicts?
What can we do to better help and encourage addicts?
What can we do to better help and encourage the families of addicts?
What can I personally do to help?
These are all questions that we need to consider prayerfully and consistently.
Lord Jesus, help us to showcase Your love for addicts. Give us Your heart to seek and save the lost and the wandering. Amen.