Is there such a thing as an addictive personality? – By Isabelle Gerretsen (BBC)/ May 8, 2023
During the 1990s, the term “addictive personality” was used by some pharmaceutical companies – and, perhaps ironically, to promote addictive painkiller drugs.
While marketing the opioid prescription drug OxyContin, for example, US pharmaceutical company Purdue Pharma instructed their representatives to tell doctors that only people with an “addictive personality” were at risk of becoming addicted, despite knowing that it was highly addictive and widely abused. Highly addictive drugs such as OxyContin and the opioid fentanyl are blamed for fuelling the opioid crisis in the US, which caused more than half a million deaths between 1999 and 2020.
The idea that your personality determines whether or not you become addicted to a substance would have “suited the pharmaceutical industry very well”, says Ian Hamilton, associate professor in addiction at the University of York in the UK. “It kind of lets them off the hook. The message is: ‘if you’re weak enough to develop a problem with our product, it’s due to your personality, it’s nothing to do with us’.”
But is there such a thing as an addictive personality? Are some people really more prone to developing an addiction?
CONTINUE > https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230505-is-there-such-a-thing-as-an-addictive-personality
