When the present is perceived as threatening, we deal with it in a presentified and structuring way, or we deal with it through filters - fears, desires, anxieties, values -, losing autonomy, generating conflicts, experiencing everything as unbearable in the family, school, at work, among friends or in intimate relationships.

By going beyond what is perceived, beyond reality, by not integrating limits, the individual creates displacements, evasions that are expressed in symptoms, isolation, and addictions (licit or illicit drugs, work, sex, food, social networks etc.). The immobilizing repetition - the attempt to avoid tensions - configures the submissive, the emptied, positioned between feeling good and avoiding feeling bad. This acquired immobility creates points of tension, pains equivalent to the points created by bedsores. The more the process of immobility, subordination, and lack of autonomy increases, the more one protects oneself from pain, from frustration, and the more one reaches the impossibility of any action. This experience stuns, reality hurts. Drugs and addictions are displacements that impose themselves to avoid pain, to avoid failure. At that moment, the drug, the escape from reality is transformed into protection against reality; it is like a shock absorber that allows one to live with humiliation, frustration, impotence, incapacity, and thus feel capable and operative in the “drug hunting”, or in the hiding places perpetrated against family or police surveillance.

The human drama begins when the possibilities of relationship are restricted, reduced to necessities, devitalizing the being. To conceptualize drug addicts as chemical dependents is, paradoxically, a generalization and a reduction (biological determinism), since from this conceptualization, practically everything can be understood as a drug: ecstasy, medicines, socially shared drinks, coffee and daily food, as well as sex and the sense of pleasure from approvals and compliments. The organism creates habits and dependencies in the pursuit of satiety, of success, but it is the psychological experience, contextualized in well-being/malaise, that will establish the addiction. Addicts positioned in illicit drugs, sex, food, work, games, social networks etc. greatly restrict their possibilities because they are fixed in their desires.

Everything converges to satisfy them, and this goal becomes the structuring of being: the possibilities of relationship are reduced to the search of what satisfies, what relieves pain and malaise, in short, to eat is to be, to be drunk is to be, to inject is to be, to work is to be and so on. The drugged, the fugitive is the emptied, full of shields, excuses, alibis and purposes. Fleeing the frustrating reality is an attempt to protect oneself and to avoid it. Pain, fear, doubt are mists that incapacitate vision. Nothing is distinct or distinguished. The drug (alcohol, cocaine, and others) works as a flashlight that avoids holes, although it makes one submerge in them. These new experiences, on the level of survival, in the underground, put the world upside down by developing new paradigms and syntaxes.

The relearning of situations will allow survival within this stranglehold entanglement. Escaping is a way to find new doors, closed or open to new escapes. It is the displacement par excellence, which destroys the individuality, turning the individual into an arm to be stung, a mouth to smoke, a nose to smell. This deconstruction creates infinite and often unrecoverable partitions. Transformative attitudes begin when some strength of cohesion arises. Looking for polarizers, stopping the escape is necessary to trigger changes in these cases and always. As I say, if we consider drugs as synonymous with medicine, as a synonym for relief, we need to check their side effects; if we think of drugs as a source of pleasure, we will have to pull man from the emptiness of gratifications and satisfactions, we will have to humanize him; and by focusing on drugs as an index of transgression, it becomes necessary to verify what has been transgressed.

Regardless of the organic aspect of the addiction (chemical dependence reinforced by the nucleus accumbens), its experience is psychological and any psychology that reduces the human being to its biological condition or to its social, cultural and economic condition fails, since it partializes, limits the human to satisfied or unsatisfied contingencies and needs, offering only adaptive solutions. The escape from reality is transformed when there is questioning, acceptance, experience of the present, that is, when there are structurants of autonomy, of possibility of relationship.