What if someone was tricked into trying heroine and never told what it was that happened to them?
I’m having a lot of trouble phrasing this question. It relates to memories and human capability for addiction.
First of all, let’s assume our test-patient is someone who is considered to be addiction prone.
Next, we give this unwitting patient a minimum dose of heroine or another addictive substance. Note: It would have to be a substance and/or dosage with a survivable withdrawal period.
Lastly, we lie to them. Convincingly. The doctors tell them and show them information that that their experience was the result of an acute mental seizure that runs in the family and that it almost killed them and that it likely won’t occur again.
Since that person has no idea what the substance was that caused their condition and also, having no idea how to recreate that condition again. How might they react? What becomes of that potential addiction in a case where the substance or behavior of an addiction isn’t conceivable to the person who has experienced it in the past? And what if the word or concept of “addiction” itself was never used by anyone around the patient?
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Heroin is physically addictive. They would, presumably, go through withdrawal, and then go on with their lives.
They might search for the experience again and become addicted to something else.
I would live scared every day that a seizure was coming again, smoke probably. I might drink a lot to push away the fright for awhile.
The way you have structured it the person would be puzzled at having an intense high yet an unusual hangover (i.e., withdrawal) that was being reported as a medical condition. So he would have quite a story about the high, but no association to heroin. He wouldn’t be addicted physically yet.
This happens quite a lot to patients having surgery in hospital. It’s not uncommon to be prescribed an opiate such as morphine to control the pain after surgery but usually by the time they are discharged they are only taking paracetamol or some form of NSAID. When they get home they suffer withdrawl symptoms but because they don’t realise (and don’t have easy access to an opiate) that taking an opiate would relieve the symptoms they put it down to having a cold (or whatever). After a couple of days they feel fine and forget about it.
With addiction everything I know and read you need to tell this person because every person has a threshold at where they become an addict and if they didn’t know they tried they don’t know if this threshold window has been shut you say that you had to withdraw the person which leads me to believe you shut this for them and didn’t tell them. That can be dangerous in regards to not telling someone that they can never touch something addictive because you have now made it so they will most likely become addicted if they do try anything. My adopted daughter was born addicted and I plan to keep her aware that she cannot try anything because her window of opportunity was shut for her before she was born by her bio-mom. What this experiment would do would risk is making someone an addict that wouldn’t normally be one.
If I understand this correctly, what you’re getting at is something like “Could addiction actually exist without knowledge of the addictive substance?” Sort of a philosophical thing, right? Are we presuming they’ve been given enough of the substance, over a short-ish period of time, that they would in fact be physically addicted? If so, they’re certainly going to feel like shit while they suffer from withdrawal. If they could truly be convinced that it was all a freak result of a medical problem, I think it unlikely that they’d purposely pursue it again by experimenting with substances. Who wants to recreate a medical condition that almost killed them, and felt so damn awful after the initial ‘high’?
They’d still have been physically addicted, though. And of course, if they think they’ve never tried heroin, nothing stops them from doing so in the future (completely independent of the ‘medical condition’).
The only drug I am aware of that is so addictive that a single dose will leave someone hooked (assuming of course that they know what it is that was given to them) is crystal meth. Heroine is definitely physically addictive, as are the natural and synthetic opiates such as opium, morphine, codeine, hydrocodone and meperidine (Demerol™). But none of the opiates are so addictive that even an addictive personality would be hooked and suffer serious withdrawal symptoms after a single dose.
If they knew they had been medicated, they might go to some lengths to find out what was used because they might want to repeat the feeling of painlessness, complete equanimity and euphoria that opiates give.
I had an appendix perforate when I was 20, and was in severe pain from the large incision required to not only remove the organ, but to open me up and clean out the material that had escaped from it so I wouldn’t get peritonitis. I was in pretty severe pain post op. I told the doctor it felt as if someone had fired a cannon ball the size of my rib cage right through my gut. They kept me on meperidine for several days, and I definitely felt it when I came off of it. But I did manage to wean myself (at the doctor’s insistence) and never sought any more of it, even though I was fully aware of what I had been given.
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If the victim realizes that something very weird was going on, sees a doctors, conducts some tests, then it’s possible to avoid a heroin addiction.
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