Nicotine-use disorder

Messing with fags

February 15, 2010  3 comments

IANAP, but I find it curious that among the draft additions in “psychiatric bible” DSM-5 is a whole range of drug-specific “disorders”, including for example Nicotine-Use Disorder, which does not mean that a sufferer is disordered in his use of nicotine in that he constantly burns holes in his clothes with hot rocks or drops ash into his keyboard, but presumably that his employment of the weed is not of that kind practised by someone with a well-ordered personality (who might smoke exactly one cigarette every Saturday at 3.17pm), liable instead to run to excess, cravings, withdrawal and the like. Possibly this is so for most users of nicotine (though if one wanted merely to use nicotine, why not just buy patches rather than going to all the trouble of setting a bunch of rolled-up leaves on fire and inhaling the products of the combustion?), but I intuit a slippery-slope problem with this principle. For if there is now a psychiatric disorder specific to each drug, there will be no end to new psychiatric disorders, as there is no end to the invention of new drugs. After DSM-5 is published, someone will cook up a new recreational psychotropic, perhaps called Cake, and then everyone, including me, will be clamouring for Cake-use disorder to be included in DSM-6.

Do you have any disorders, readers?