We had addiction in my family.
Why does it seem to pass from mother to daughter, from father to son, as though it were some dark genetic twist?
I went on a long journey to find the answers to these questions – I describe it in my book ‘Chasing The Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs.’ My research was book-ended by two events that remind us why we need to urgently understand this.
On Feb. 11 2012, Whitney Houston was found facedown in a bathtub, with her bloodstream pumped by alcohol, cocaine, and prescription drugs. This year, almost exactly three years on, her daughter Bobbi Kristina Brown was found facedown in a bathtub, after talking publicly about her own drug addiction, and pleading: “What do I really do? God, Help me ignore and rebuke what these demons are saying.” It now looks – according to most reports – as if Bobbi will never recover. Last month, her father Bobby Brown said she had opened her eyes, but her grandmother said she has “irreversible brain damage.”
This question is no longer a mystery. It is no longer shrouded in fog. We know the major reason why addiction is transmitted through families – and it is not what most of us think. There is a genetic factor; but there is another explanation that is even more significant – and that we can do something about. A major studyby the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and the healthcare provider Kaiser Permanente of 17,000 people has unlocked this – and its results have subsequently been replicated by over 20 studies funded by individual US states.(1)
It was discovered quite by accident – in part of a study of a totally different subject. A distinguished doctor in San Diego called Vincent Felitti was trying to find out the underlying causes of obesity, and he was overseeing the treatment of over 30,000 people. He spent long sessions talking with his patients about when they had started to over-eat – and what events had taken place at that point in their lives, at the apparent trigger-moment.
Dr Felliti noticed something striking. His patients seemed to have been sexually abused at a higher rate than the general population. Far higher. One woman explained that she gained 105 pounds after being raped. “Overweight is overlooked,” she said, “and that’s the way I need to be.”
Intrigued, Dr Felitti launched a major and detailed study to find out what role – if any – traumatic childhood events played in obesity. It became known as the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Survey. They questioned 17,000 people in San Diego, mostly middle class and professional, to find out if they had gone through any of ten traumatic experiences that can happen to a child – from neglect to violence to rape. They then followed them to see if they suffered any other problems later in life. At the same time as they looked to see if there was any correlation with obesity, they also included other factors – like drug addiction.
What they discovered seemed, at first, to be an error.
“A person who experienced any six or more of the categories” of childhood trauma, Dr Felitti tells me, “was 4600 percent more likely to become an IV [injecting] drug user later in life than a person who experienced none of them.” (2) He adds: “I remember the epidemologists at the CDC told me those were numbers a magnitude of which they see once in a career. You read the latest cancer scare of the week in the newspaper and something causes an increase of 30 percent in breast or prostate cancer and everybody goes nuts – and here, we’re talking 4600 percent.”
The published research showed that for every category of trauma that happens to a child, they are two to four times more like to grow up to be an addict – and multiple traumas produced a massive risk. The correlation for addiction was startling. Nearly two-thirds of injecting drug use, they found, is the result of early childhood trauma. (3)