I still don’t really have a brain but if you’ve been reading my fic you know I yap a bit about like ideas and research and stuff and I kinda realised that I should make a separate post to talk about Jabber and addiction instead of like randomly dumping it in my end notes.
So to get into it I don’t personally see Jabber as a drug addict. Drug addiction and just addiction in general is a disease that we’re only really starting to study now and a lot of it has more to do with how genetics create our pleasure centres than we used to think. Drug addicts in particular have like a genetic predisposition for certain types of drugs like for example say someone is genetically inclined to become an alcoholic, they probably won’t have a desire to also do none stop coke because it’s a different classification of drug. (Stimulants, depressives, opioids and hallucinogens are the four categories we kinda use). Like it really has to do with how your brain is hot wired which I just don’t really see in Jabber.
However there are other types addiction that have nothing to do with drugs like gambling (give you dopamine), or sex (also gives you dopamine and oxytocin) or violence (you get adrenaline/power trips) and I think this is more the section Jabber falls into.
He’s clearly a masochist, he gets a high of being in pain and he loves looking for a fight no matter the odds. He wants the party to never end and to me that feels more like he’s chasing an adrenaline/dopamine high than a specific drug. Now obviously there is drugs that can cause your brain to create these hormones but that brings me to my second point.
Jabber doesn’t feel like a drug addict because he changes his toxins all the time. Which is like completely counterintuitive to developing an addiction.
Like to be an addict you basically have to take something and then continue to take it over a short period of time. I think the general advice for opioids is like you should be concerned is if you have keep taking them after 3-5 days of usage. Like with addiction your body genuinely starts to malfunction without your choice of drug. The times between getting high and coming down will get less and less. You will start getting cravings. Your body is very physically affected by the process and it will generate things like pain or itches to force you to give in and take the drug in question. Addiction is a very physical process. You can’t really become a drug addict from taking something one or two times, switching it out and then taking it again once or twice a few weeks later.
Like if he were a drug addict, he’d be rotating specific kinds of substances like ecstasy or something, but he’s not. The things we know he doses Zanka with are an acid, a venom and a mushroom. None of these are really drugs, and even then, they aren’t in the same classifications.
These are just substances that cause painful effects like acid, and yeah, the mushroom is kinda a drug. Still, it doesn’t really cause the addiction/withdrawal that people see and expect from consuming drugs (that’s more stimulants and opioids thing), so like none of them have got the physically addictive effects needed to Jabber to be a drug addict.
So yeah to me Jabber is definitely a junkie for fights and adrenaline and like the act intoxicating himself, he definitely gets high, but that’s different from being an addicted to drugs y’know?
Also I just want to say this isn’t a diss at anyones who is writing Jabber a certain way because I’ve seen some people just policing how people write and I’m not about that. I’m writing this more as an analysis for people who aren’t really familiar with drugs to like share my own experiences. Im sure there’s plenty of people in the fandom who haven’t really interacted with drugs irl and wouldn’t really have know these things and are going off TV. Meanwhile I have been around drugs pretty much my whole life, Ive had friends who did casual drugs and I know many a recovering addict and I personally have been around the chronic pain opioid gauntlet for like 10 years so I kinda have researched a lot into this and thought I’d share my experiences for people that want them idk.
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