Spirals
“Toto, I've got a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore,” Dorothy says.
The spiral is a convenient cliché for a situation that has gotten out of control. Like the needle point of a tornado, an addict sucks up everything into her willy-nilly vortex, spins it around, chews it up, and deposits it miles from where it ought to have been.
Spirals are dizzying. They make our stomach flip-flop. We're lost in space, like Dave in 2001: A Space Odyssey, tossing through the void, sucker punched, our severed tendril trailing behind.
Spirals are primordially powerful. DNA takes their form; so do galaxies. As unpredictable as the spinning seems, I think there must be an underlying mathematical logic, a Fibonacci sequence leading to an inevitable, violent implosion, like the universe someday contracting on itself.
A top-down look at a spiral is also helpful in looking at the forces that play on the addict. I think of each of these factors forms the funnel that is the spiral that is addiction.