but reguarding my earlier post, I did finally found what I'd read and just wanted to post it.

(the last two paragraphs mostly)
There are many points in this cycle at which a person can be called addicted. Conventional definitions emphasize the appearance of the withdrawal syndrome. Withdrawal occurs in people for whom a drug experience has become the core of their sense of well-being, when other gratifications have been shunted into secondary positions or forgotten altogether.

This experiential definition of addiction makes the appearance of an extreme withdrawal understandable, for some kind of withdrawal reaction takes place with every drug that has a noticeable impact on the human body. This may be simply a straightforward example of homeostasis in an organism. With the removal of a drug that the body has learned to depend on, physical adjustments take place in the body. The specific adjustments vary with the drug and its effects. Yet the same general unbalancing effect of withdrawal will appear not only in heroin addicts but also in people who rely on sedatives to sleep. Both will tend to suffer a basic disruption of their systems when they stop taking the drug. Whether this disruption reaches the dimensions of observable withdrawal symptoms depends on the person and the role the drug played in his or her life.

What is observed as withdrawal is more than bodily readjustment. Different people's subjective responses to the same drugs vary, as do the responses of the same person in different situations. Addicts who go through extreme withdrawal in prison may hardly acknowledge it in a setting like Daytop Village, a halfway house for drug addicts in New York City, where withdrawal symptoms are not sanctioned. Hospital patients, who receive larger doses of a narcotic than most street addicts can find, nearly always experience their withdrawal from morphine as part of the normal adjustment to coming home from the hospital. They fail even to recognize it as withdrawal as they reintegrate themselves into the routines of home.

If the setting and a person's expectations influence the experience of withdrawal, then they influence the nature of addiction. For instance, Norman Zinberg has found that the soldiers in Vietnam who became addicted to heroin were the ones who not only expected it but who actually planned to become addicts. This combination of expectation of withdrawal and fear of it, along with a dread of being straight, form the basis of the image addicts have of themselves and their habits.