Facebook addictive as drugs? Oh, do get real!

FACEBOOK is as addictive as cocaine, according to new research. Excuse me while I roll my eyes.

That’s my reaction whenever I read studies in which something innocuous like TV, or shopping, or cupcakes is compared with hard drugs.

Cocaine seems to be our ‘go-to’ substance when discussing addiction. Yet, surprising as it sounds, cocaine is not addictive.

At least, it’s not physically addictive. Heroin, nicotine, alcohol: these are physically additive substances. Some prescribed drugs, like Valium, are also physically addictive.

The body builds up a tolerance to these drugs and experiences withdrawal symptoms when it doesn’t get them. This doesn’t happen with cocaine.

The thing about cocaine is that it makes people feel good, and some people who lack self-control, or who have emotional difficulties, find it hard to stop because they like that feeling so much.

The distinction matters because it involves entirely different treatments. While drugs can be prescribed to help manage a physical addiction, no pill can help a psychological one.

When I worked in drug rehabilitation, we would often have patients who were using cocaine or crack (a particularly strong and unpleasant type of cocaine) and ask us to prescribe medication to help get them off it.

They would be horrified to learn that the strongest substance we could offer was a cup of tea, along with psychotherapy.

That’s not to say that psychological addiction isn’t important. In fact, I soon learned that purely physical addiction to drugs such as heroin was relatively easy to deal with — you prescribed a substitute drug and slowly reduced the dose to zero.

The problem was that this still left the psychological problem: why did they want to use the drug in the first place? Unless that underlying need was addressed, they would inevitably relapse.

Oh, and trust me, that’s usually trickier for heroin and cocaine users than people who like Facebook.

Comparing over-enthusiasm for social media with drug addiction is not only silly: it’s insulting.