ABSTRACT
The views of addiction most commonly expressed in both the popular and the scientific literature have not changed significantly for many decades. The view expressed by Adams is still widely accepted among students of addiction despite its obvious deficiencies and the wide range of disagreement as to how the alleged psychopathic predisposition or addiction-prone personality is to be described. The assertion, which is commonly made, that drug addiction is an "escape mechanism" is evidently based upon the assumption that the drug user's assertion that he feels "normal" is false. As would be anticipated, those investigators who attempt to generalize about both human and lower animal responses to opiates from data secured primarily from observing lower animals usually interpret their findings in terms of the standard concepts of conditioning or reinforcement theory. It is widely and commonly assumed that anything that encourages or facilitates the use of addicting drugs is ipso facto evil like the drug habit itself.
