Applying John Stuart Mill's Ideas to Substance Abuse

Considering that John Stuart Mill's concepts of joy & contentment are more readily apparent, their connection to substance dependency may be clearer. There are some instances in which Mill would contend substance dependent individuals are misinterpreting happiness and the natural pursuit of that eventual goal. Drugs & alcohol may act as a means to medicate inner pain, external pain, or grasp a gilded, temporary joy. Basically they are maximizing the wrong kind of joy and minimizing pain that could be confronted in an entirely different way. We might take this a step further and draw parallels to Maslow's hierarchy, since the lower tiers could act as the lower pleasures and the higher tiers acting as the higher pleasures. This brings us to another motivation of substance dependency because a person could be using drugs or alcohol to tier leap to the top level and achieve happiness or what they perceive to be the higher pleasures, when in actuality they are only satisfying the lower pleasures of superficial aspect. But before the distraction leads too far away, the aforementioned motivations obviously are but several of the many reasons that may cause an individual to abuse drugs. The point here is that it is conceivable and indeed very likely to understand motivations of drug use in this way. These addictive chemicals can optimize the visceral sensations or lower pleasures while fooling the individual into thinking they are achieving happiness.

Indeed, studies on lab rats yields similar findings, inasmuch as those rats or mice which can readily to self-administer cocaine will occasionally do so until they overdose. after these animals can satiate their lesser desires as much as they'd like, they will continue to do so and do nothing more because they are able to achieve all that they see is important, despite the danger of the self-administered "medication". Regardless there is a similarity between the lesser pleasure enjoyment in these animals & humans when they have access to drugs. It could very well be the scenario that in many instances, substance abusers do not have availability to or are unaware of the truer form of happiness - the more substantive joy and therefore continue to chase the lower pleasures because they think they are the best life has to offer.

Regardless, the fact that this naiveté of authentic happiness may have arisen in certain individuals does not imply a moral failure regarding their failure to pursue the higher order pleasures that yield true happiness. Curiously, although Mill wrote Utilitarianism nearly 150 years ago, he addressed this issue and even regards substance dependence, although in this context the concept would not be investigated in greater detail until the early twentieth century. Regardless, Mill comments that, "men lose their high aspirations as they lose their intellectual tastes, because they have not time or opportunity for indulging them; and they addict themselves to inferior pleasures, not because they deliberately prefer them, but because they are either the only ones to which they have access or the only ones which they are any longer capable of enjoying."

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