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Gisele Jubinville was a brilliant inventor, a self-described “risk-taker” whose willingness to gamble helped to make her career. It also nearly destroyed her life. Fourteen years ago, Jubinville sat down to watch a TV news clip about a seemingly innocuous subject¾fitted bed sheets that wouldn’t stay put. Always a creative thinker, the Alberta mother of three got a bold idea. Why not design a better kind of bed sheet that would remain securely moored to the corners of the mattress?

With her family’s support, she jumped into the project, ignoring naysayers who called her crazy. One night, as she tossed and turned over the problem in her sleep, the solution came to her in a dream: a unique corner pocket using a wholly original type of stitch. Sure enough, the prototype worked.

Three years later, in 1993, Jubinville sold her idea to a major linen manufacturer for $1 million US. Suddenly a successful entrepreneur, lauded for her perseverance and daring, she seemed to have had it made. But, as she now muses, “Sometimes the very qualities that help you succeed may be the same ones that get you in trouble.”

With her children grown up and her husband frequently away on business, Jubinville soon found herself frustrated and bored. To while away the time, she began visiting local establishments with video lottery terminals (VLTs), which promised big payoffs for those willing to flirt with risk.

For five years, she played the VLTs obsessively. On some days, she would gamble from afternoon to the early hours of the morning, until her eyes became bleary and bloodshot from the glare of the screen. Finally, after spending a small fortune on what she unblinkingly calls “my addiction,” she decided to face it head-on. Through prayer and intensive self-reflection, she realized she’d been bottling up her anger and fear of failure all her life. Playing the VLTs had been “an escape tool,” she says. From then on, she would confront her emotions honestly and try to capitalize on every challenge as an opportunity for spiritual growth.

Now 49, Jubinville has come to see her gambling addiction, paradoxically, as a gift. She believes that it forced her “to go where most of us are afraid to go, or subconsciously or consciously choose not to go, which is getting in touch with our true feelings.” And while she bases this view on her own personal journey, the most exciting work currently taking place on addictions is arriving at remarkably similar truths.

The Great Debate

Today, we use “addiction” to describe everything from an innocent crush to fanatical soap-opera watching. Yet in spite of such familiar colloquialisms, addiction remains one of the most controversial terms in all of medicine.

Some experts believe addiction should be restricted to drugs and alcohol, arguing that nothing else wreaks the same physiological and psychological devastation. Others feel it applies just as fittingly to compulsive overeaters, pathological gamblers, and people consumed by sex.

Alan Leshner, a director of The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), has tried to sensitize the American public to the plight of addicts by portraying addiction as a chronic condition akin to diabetes or asthma-one that, like them, must be managed through treatment. “One might ask where voluntary drug-taking behaviour ends and the compulsive disease of addiction begins,” wrote Leshner in the March/April 1996 edition of the NIDA newsletter. “And can’t addicts talk themselves out of this craving? The answer is no.”

Not everyone, however, agrees. Dr. Thomas Horvath, a San Diego psychologist and president of SMART Recovery Services, points to the fact that many hospital patients take morphine for pain relief, yet don’t become addicted. He believes that addiction is ultimately a voluntary behaviour, which he says, “Is chosen based on some form of cost-benefit analysis.”

Sabitri Ghosh is an award-winning writer and researcher, whose articles have appeared in The Globe and Mail, the Calgary Herald and World Vision’s Childview magazine.

Source: alive #253, November 2003