The Myth of Normal 188

—brain chemicals implicated. Addiction begins as an attempt to induce feelings that we were biologically programmed to generate innately, and would have—if unhealthy development hadn’t got in the way. Sex addiction, for example, has nothing to do with a “high sex drive” and everything to do with dopamine. New York social worker and former Fordham and Rutgers Universities adjunct professor Zachary Alti specializes in sex therapy and behavioral addictions, particularly addiction to porn. “Studies are suggesting,” he told me, “that when viewing a pornographic image, we get a dopamine spike in our brain. When viewing images after images, we get spike after spike after spike. Whereas with substance addictions you typically get one or a few spikes just before use, with behavioral addictions dopamine itself is the substance, the primary component. Especially in pornography addiction, these dopamine spikes happen over and over and over again.” As with smartphone and app companies, pornographers are well aware that their profits rest on the hijacking of their consumers’ brains. The sociologist Gail Dines, author of the bracing 2010 book Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality, reports on an article in the trade publication Adult Video News, in which an industry insider trumpets a Stanford University study on cyber-sex addiction showing that 20 percent of porn users are hooked. “In a true capitalist approach,” she notes, the article is cheerfully headed “Exploiting the Data.”[5] What about the feelings of love that people find in addictions, particularly with opiates—the warmth Jamie Lee Curtis and others spoke of? That is, in large part, a function of the brain’s internal opiate apparatus in which endorphins, our own natural, endogenous opiates, are the neurotransmitters. Dr. Jaak Panksepp suggested twenty years ago that opiate addiction is rooted in the evolutionary brain mechanisms that promote social bonding: nurturing, emotional closeness, and social affiliation. “We would anticipate,” he wrote, “that individuals who experience especially intense social distress and insecurities would be especially vulnerable to opiate abuse, and this prediction has been affirmed by some clinical research. Indeed, the same dynamic may help explain why opiate addictions are especially prevalent among the socially disenfranchised.”[6] The current opioid overdose crisis in