I posted this yesterday, but since I didn't get any replies I thought I might pose this question here:

Maybe our country has been doing the wrong kinds of experiments to understand and limit the damage done by addictive behavior. Is it possible that addiction would be better defined by the attentional mechanisms activated at the time of the behavior, as opposed to the behavior itself?

For example, consider the case of prescription painkillers like percocet, vicodin, etc. The "addictive behavior" regarding this substance is defined by the context in which it is taken. There is very hard evidence which demonstrates that people who take painkillers when they're attention is focused on eliminating pain do not become addicted. On the other hand, people who take painkillers because they're attention is focused on getting high, become addicted. In this case, the behavior and the drug's mechanism are identical; the only point of difference is in what the person is paying attention to.

Perhaps this mechanism of addiction being modulated by attention is conserved across all behaviors. So if someone were to eat because one's attention was focused on eating, that act may be an addictive behavior, but if someone were to eat because one's attention was focused on hunger, that act would not be addictive.

If this hypothesis is correct, then the way we regulate addiction may be entirely incorrect. Instead of focusing on the substances themselves (be it food, alcohol, or hard drugs), we should be focusing on the attentional mechanisms that inform the context of substance use. Instead of focusing our rehabilitation efforts on preventing people from using substances, we should be focusing on removing the addictive property of the attentional context.

As I stated initially, this post is largely speculative, so I don't have any real hard data to address this hypothesis. But in my mind, this hypothesis is both falsifiable and testable (the two necessary components for any good hypothesis).

Uh, it may be "testable" but how would you test it? Would people fill out questionaires, or would they be wired to machines that record brain activity? And even if this could be demonstrated, how would you regulate attention, or focus? It is certainly true that not everyone who takes percocet gets addicted to it, but I think there must be some physical component to addiction. Witness the fact that addiction tends to run in families. But really, no one knows exactly how addiction works when it comes to drugs (by that I mean why this person gets hooked and that person doesn't), so attempting to regulate food addictions is, IMO, impossible at this point in time. Perhaps we would better spend our time and money promoting healthy eating and exercise, instead of promulgating unenforceable regulations based on sketchy data, which may not be the problem to begin with.

Actually, I can offer a different theory based on your first statement (that pain-killers are more likely to become addictive to those taking it for the purpose of getting high).

I think the more likely cause of this result is not "attentional context" at the time of taking the but instead is a cross-correlation with a hidden independent variable. People taking drugs for the purpose of getting high might be more likely to become addicted because people prone to drug-addiction are more likely to want to get high.

Maybe this isn't quite what you are hypothesizing, but you should read up on research conducted by Bruce Alexander in the early 80's on the effect of environment on morphine addiction in rats. Alexander found that rats that lived in a very comfortable environment, a veritable rat park, preferred regular water to morphine laced water far more than did rats living in cramped, squalid cages. The rats living in the park even gave up the morphine water even after being fed it for a while so they could become "addicted". Alexander thought that the rats living in the park had no need for the morphine since they lived in a paradise, but the rats living in the cage needed the morphine to escape their horrible conditions. In terms of your hypothesis, it seems that the rats in cages were focused on getting high more than the rats in the parks.