All human beings are motivated to satisfy their natural instincts in order to feel secure and comfortable.  Most pursue well-established goals, such as relationships, successful careers, having children in order to feel happy and safe in their lives.  However, some people learn different shorter-term ways of coping, such as drug use and other addictions, which leads to their distorted understanding of motivation, reward and punishment. Szalavits (2016) argues in “Can you Get Over an Addiction?” that the traditional views on addiction of either a chronic disease or a moral defect are flawed and that these behaviors are a result of repeatedly reinforcing skewed reward objects.  This view of an addiction as a learning disability has invaluable implications not only for the treatment of drug users, but also for understanding how we as a society play a role in getting people addicted to drugs and other destructive behaviors.  Both Childress (2016) in “Veterans Face Greater Risks Amid Opioid Crisis” and Lawrence (2014) in “A Growing Number of Veterans Struggle to Quit Powerful Painkillers” show how the VA taking shortcuts in the pain management for soldiers is teaching these veterans addiction – an inappropriate coping mechanism.

Different social groups struggle from drug addiction. Childress (2016), addresses the hidden addiction problem that U.S. Army veterans face and cites that nearly seventy thousands veterans suffer from opioid-use disorders.  Childress points out that soldiers are well supplied with opioid medications during and after their military deployments, often with little dosage control. According to Lawrence’s article (2014) “The troops, if they got hurt they’d just shove you a bag of pills.” (para. 13). Thus they return back to their homes addicted and have little options for successful recovery. Lawrence (2014) highlights a specific case of a veteran addicted to painkillers. He confirms that soldiers in pain get unlimited access to high-addictive medications, which has led to an opiate epidemic in our society. Luckily the VA is recently starting to explore other ways to deal with pain management such as yoga and physical therapy instead of relying on pills for everything.  Although this is a positive dynamic it is important to remember that it is our own pills for everything approach that contributed to the veteran addiction problem to begin with.

Both articles made by New York Times and PBS agree that the opioid addiction recently became a number one threat to our citizens.  According to Editorial Board (2017) “Public health officials have called the current opioid epidemic the worst drug crisis in American history, killing more than 33,000 people in 2015.”(para. 2). This number is close to victims who died from car accidents and proves that opioid addiction is the major threat for the nation. It is important to follow how the state officials response to increasing number of deaths from heroin overdoses problem. Governor of NH Maggie Hassan thinks that “The opioid epidemic is really our most pressing public health and public safety issue right now” (as cited in Woodruff, 2016 p.1). It shows that problematic states are able to identify the problem and to launch the programs that will help.

In Johann Hari’s book chapter “Batman’s Bad Call,” the author argues that the true nature of addiction to drugs is based on absence of social bonds that people lack nowadays. He describes an experiment where opiate addicted rats were moved from isolated cages with no mates or entertainment to populated cells filled with all kinds of happy social factors.  The goal of this experiment was to establish a social factor within an addiction.

Hari believes that the chemical drug addiction is not as strong as how the traditional scientists think it is. He argues that instead, it’s the absence of social bonds that leads people to fill this void with drug use. The results of the rat experiment showed that the rats quickly recovered from the physical addiction and started to enjoy their new life without drugs. Hari draws a parallel between rats and humans and proves that the main reason of drug addiction is the poor social atmosphere that can be compared to an isolated cage people live in. Moreover, he continues with the attempt to find out how modern society creates these individual cages.

Hari introduces the idea that consumerism plays a significant role in social isolation that leads to drug addiction. He arrived at this conclusion by interviewing numerous addicts and scientists who spent many years working on the problem of addiction.  He uses an example that our global economy supports never-ending consumerism. This environment forces people to constantly buy things similar to rats stuck in an empty cage, who have nothing to do but get more of the drug. Hari concludes that we live in a highly addicted society, and the only way to alleviate drug use is to remove the factors that shattered our historically established social bonds in the first place.