When Trafficking Creates the Addiction

Written by Maribel Rivera & Gabe Landau

Sometimes the addiction doesn’t come first. Sometimes the trafficking creates it, and that is the half of the story that decides whether someone can ever leave.

So far, our series has told the story in one direction: addiction as the on-ramp into trafficking. But the road runs both ways, and the second direction may be the more disturbing one. Many people arrive in trafficking with no substance use at all, and are deliberately made dependent, because a body in withdrawal is easier to control than a body that is free.

This is especially true for the young. One recent review noted that up to 70% of youth in commercial sexual exploitation report substance use, much of it introduced and sustained by the very people exploiting them. The drug is not an accident of the situation. The drug is the strategy.

How the trap is built

Dani had never touched anything stronger than wine when she met him.

He was older, attentive, and generous. When she mentioned trouble sleeping, he had something for that. When she was anxious, he had something for that, too. It felt like being taken care of. By the time she understood that the pills were no longer optional, that her body now organized its entire day around the next one, the relationship had already changed. The man who used to hand her the pills now made her earn them.

She tried to leave twice. Both times, withdrawal pulled her back before she could get a day clear of it, the nausea, the shaking, the bone-deep certainty that the only thing that would make it stop was waiting in his pocket. The third time, an arrest she once would have called the worst night of her life turned out to be the thing that got her in front of a trauma-informed program instead of a cell. Recovery wasn’t a clean line after that. There was a relapse. There was a stretch of couch-surfing. But there was also, slowly, a life that belonged to her again.

The story above is a composite, drawn from patterns documented across many real cases. It does not depict any specific individual.

Withdrawal is what makes the trap hold. Traffickers know that the fear of getting sick can be a more reliable guard than any lock, and survivors and prosecutors have described exactly this: drugs given and then withheld to exploit the agony of withdrawal. Leaving doesn’t just mean walking away from a person. It means walking straight into the worst physical pain many survivors have ever felt, with no one to catch them on the other side.

The damage doesn’t end at the exit

Even after someone gets out, the addiction rarely leaves with the trafficker. Substances that began as coercion become the only coping tool a survivor has for trauma that is now bone-deep. The mental-health toll is nearly universal: an estimated 98% of trafficking survivors show symptoms of mental-health challenges, with PTSD, depression, anxiety, and addiction among them. And when that addiction goes unaddressed, it doesn’t stay neutral. The same dependency and instability that made someone vulnerable the first time can pull them back toward revictimization and further harm. Recovery, in other words, isn’t a nice-to-have after the rescue. It is the rescue.

The system is starting to catch up

For a long time, the law itself struggled with this. Coercion was assumed to mean violence, so drug-based control didn’t always register as trafficking at all. That has been shifting. In a landmark Florida case, a trafficker who hooked his victims and then withheld the drugs was sentenced to 34 years, in a conviction that helped establish drug dependency as a form of coercion. Lawmakers have since pushed to write that understanding directly into federal law and to protect trafficking victims from being prosecuted for crimes they were forced to commit, including drug offenses. It is slow, imperfect progress, but it is progress.

What recovery actually requires

Here is where an organization like Life Preservers Project lives. Helping a survivor get free is not the finish line; it is the starting line of a long, non-linear climb. And the path is full of obstacles that have nothing to do with willpower. Service providers report that survivors face too few residential and inpatient treatment options, and often have to prioritize basic survival, housing, safety, food, over substance use treatment, even when they badly want help. Many don’t see themselves as people who deserve care at all.

The good news is that the right support changes outcomes. Stable, recovery-oriented housing has been shown to improve abstinence, income, and employment, the very foundations a survivor needs to stay free. Recovery that is trauma-informed, that treats the addiction and the exploitation as one intertwined wound rather than two unrelated problems, is what gives people a real chance not to be pulled back.

What you can do

Awareness alone doesn’t change outcomes. Action does. Support organizations working directly with survivors, with your money, your time, your professional skills. Learn the signs of trafficking and how to report what you see. Advocate for recovery and prevention resources in your own community, because every person who gets real treatment is one fewer person a trafficker can reach. And if you work in healthcare or recovery services, know that you are not a bystander here. You may be the only trusted professional a victim speaks to all year. Ask for the training. Ask the extra question. Stay curious about the person behind the symptom.

Addiction doesn’t explain trafficking. But it opens the door, it locks it, and it can block the way out long after the trafficker is gone. Until we fight both together, vulnerability, exploitation, and recovery as one continuous story, we are only ever fighting half the battle.