FROM PLEASURE TO AVOIDANCE
People try drugs like methamphetamine out of curiosity, to see if it
makes them feel the way they’ve heard or hope to feel. But what
starts the behavior is different from what keeps it going. They have
to use more and more of the drug to bring about the pleasurable
feelings it initially created. That’s because the pleasure of dopa-
mine overstimulation comes with a price. Blare your speakers too
loud for too long, and they’ll probably burn out. Dopamine recep-
tors can burn out, too. When they do burn out, people need more
dopamine to be released in order to get an average amount of
pleasure. This change, known as tolerance, means they need more
and more of the drug to get the same effect. It can also mean they
feel miserable when they aren’t under the influence of the drug.
In this “avoidance” phase, people use the drug to prevent
bad feelings of withdrawal. For Devin, things got much worse as
tolerance kicked in. “I didn’t necessarily want to stop using. I had
everything going for me that an addict/alcoholic could want. I made
plenty of money doing bartending at concert venues, I saw live
music every night, and I made cash. I sold my drugs of choice so
I never ran out. But the drugs and alcohol just stopped working, and
I got very depressed. I got to the point where I couldn’t see myself
continuing the way I was, and I couldn’t see myself stopping. My
wife and I got separated, I had a few good friends pass away or take
their own lives, and I just got really bad really quick...I tried to
overdose. I actually tried to kill myself.”
After his suicide attempt, Devin woke up in a hospital. “At
the time, I thought that waking up in the hospital was the worst
thing that could ever happen. I wondered if my pain was ever going
to end. I just wanted everything to stop. I ended up in a treatment
center for 55 days. Then I remember one day I noticed palm trees
for the first time. Before I was just numb and dull to everything.
Because of the drugs, I hadn’t noticed them. That’s when I was
really grateful that things worked out the way they did.”
Things are much better for Devin these days. As a resident
manager in an addiction treatment facility, he says that he can
recognize unhealthy sensation-seeking in his residents. Knowing
how they experience the world allows him to help them. Sensation-
seeking, he says, has been both a help and a hindrance to his own
recovery.
“I know I can act impulsively. It’s more like I don’t really
worry about the consequences – ‘we’ll sort them out later’ – and148 / Buzz!Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSF Library, on 11 Nov 2019 at 14:20:10, subject to the Cambridge