"Riding With Death"
Jean-Michel Basquiat
1988
This morning as I opened my Facebook feed there came across an article republished to Alternet by the British journalist John Hari entitled The Likely Cause of Addiction Has Been Discovered and It Is Not What You Think. Having grown up around addiction and having many friends who have succumbed to them by overdose or suicide, this was an obvious link to click.
While there is no shortage of discussion online about the drug war and addiction issues, I found this article refreshingly forward. It's a passionate distillation of what Hari has learned in the course of writing his new book Chasing the Scream in which he details his worldwide exploration of the nature of addiction, addicts and the brutal effects of the 100 year-old War on Drugs. Join me over the fold for a look.
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Hari sets the stage with a bold proposal:
It is now 100 years since drugs were first banned, and all through this long century of waging war on drugs, we have been told a story about addiction, by our teachers and by our governments. This story is so deeply ingrained in our minds that we take it for granted. It seems obvious. It seems manifestly true. Until I set off three and a half years ago on a 30,000-mile journey for my book Chasing The Scream: The First And Last Days of the War on Drugs to figure out what is really driving the drug war, I believed it too. But what I learned on the road is that almost everything we have been told about addiction is wrong. There is a very different story waiting for us, if only we are ready to hear it.
If we truly absorb this new story, we will have to change a lot more than the drug war. We will have to change ourselves.
He goes on to describe his journey, the people that he met and interviewed and his personal experience with loved ones who struggled with addiction. It's a tale familiar to many, the pain and suffering caused by drugs and the political entities who punish those affected. He also reminds us of the accepted view of addiction, that "chemical hooks" change brain chemistry and create the cravings that fuel an addiction. Using the infamous 1980's anti-drugs scare propaganda from the
Partnership for a Drug Free America to illustrate exactly how twisted the approach has been, we are reminded of how contained and narrow the focus has become.
One of the ways this theory was first established is through rat experiments which were injected into the American psyche in the 1980s, in a famous advert by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America. You may remember it. The experiment is simple. Put a rat in a cage, alone, with two water bottles. One is water. The other is water laced with heroin or cocaine. Almost every time you run this experiment, the rat will become obsessed with the drugged water, and keep coming back for more, until it kills itself.
The advert explains: "Only one drug is so addictive, nine out of 10 laboratory rats will use it. And use it. And use it. Until dead. It's called cocaine. And it can do the same thing to you."
I remember this "public service announcement". It was the ground zero example citied by the Reagan Administration and a primary justification for the ramping of the Drug War that created the enormous increase in harsh
mandatory-minimum sentencing laws and aggressive American military intervention in
South and Central America. 30 some-odd years later the
United States leads the world in incarceration and an inordinate and
increasing percentages of those for drug violations (
particularly among blacks and latinos) and in particular for
marijuana.
It is here that his revelation begins:
But in the 1970s, Vancouver psychology professor Bruce Alexander noticed something odd about this experiment. The rat is put in the cage all alone. It has nothing to do but take the drugs. What would happen, he wondered, if we tried this differently? So Alexander built Rat Park, a lush cage where the rats had colored balls and the best rat food and tunnels to scamper down and plenty of friends: everything a rat could want. What, Alexander wanted to know, would happen then?
In Rat Park, all the rats obviously tried both water bottles, because they didn't know what was in them. But what happened next was startling.
The rats with good lives didn't like the drugged water. They mostly shunned it, consuming less than a quarter of the drugs the isolated rats had used. None of them died. While all the rats who were alone and unhappy became heavy users, none of the rats who had a happy environment did.
Citing American soldiers who used heroin as a coping mechanism during the Viet Nam War, who as a population largely dropped the habit upon returning home (though clearly not all did), Alexander's proposes the rats and the soldiers necessarily undermine the "right-wing view that addiction is a moral failing" and the "liberal view that addiction is a disease taking place in a chemically hijacked brain".
In fact, he argues, addiction is an adaptation. It's not you: It's your cage.
There is a tremendous amount more to this story. Nicotine, for instance, and how the introduction of the patch only salvaged 17.7% of users from the habit shows that strongest of addictions is being driven by something larger, and that something is the "disconnection (from others and from society) that drives addiction". Juxtaposing Arizona's ultra-punitive isolation chambers for addicts and Portugal's radical decriminalization and social reconnection program is a clear example of the failure of the old model and the potential promise of the new.
Arizona's traditional law and order approach is meant to punish the addiction right out of addicts but instead functions as a "human re-creation of the cages that guaranteed deadly addiction in rats", effectively guaranteeing a continuing cycle of joblessness and spiraling addiction. Portugal, on the other hand, has abandoned that model and instead embraces a compassionate approach that removes the stigma, socializes the addict and subsidizes their reintegration into society "so they had a purpose in life, and something to get out of bed for."
And while addicts in Arizona and most of the world continue to be isolated, outcast and destroyed by their governments, in Portugal "since total decriminalization, addiction has fallen, and intraveneous drug use is down by 50 percent."
Here is the meat of this new way Hari proposes to approach not just addiction but our entire way of being. We "have created an environment and a culture that cut us off from connection." he writes. " The rise of addiction is a symptom of a deeper sickness in the way we live, constantly directing our gaze toward the next shiny object we should buy, rather than the human beings all around us."
This an important roadmap to a cultural shift in thinking that has the potential to help us save us from ourselves in so many ways. It's an amazingly simple concept, that we damage ourselves because we are disconnected from ourselves through isolation from one another. I applaud the author for bringing this conversation forward and I encourage all of you to read the book. I have already ordered my copy online.
I'll leave you with a final quote that for me clarifies the entire issue:
If we can't connect with each other, we will connect with anything we can find—the whirr of a roulette wheel or the prick of a syringe. (Cohen) says we should stop talking about "addiction" altogether and instead call it "bonding." A heroin addict has bonded with heroin because she couldn't bond as fully with anything else.
So the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. It is human connection.
And now on to the reason we all connect with one another in this space,
The Tops!
TOP MOJO
January 1, 2015
(excluding Tip Jars and first comments)
Got mik!
1) He's also doing this to make it look like America by Leslie Salzillo — 223
2) I would also argue that it is part of a by Dale — 151
3) bibi is a schmuck, to say the least / eom by isabelle hayes — 150
4) At least a year for them to even get a clue. by Eructovax — 150
5) The GOP will let... by kharma — 138
6) Oh the irony. They are really in a bubble but it's by Regina in a Sears Kit House — 128
7) Oh they will attend, in droves by ivorybill — 111
8) Is it possible by Th0rn — 111
9) They are so, so close they can taste it. by LeftHandedMan — 97
10) Maybe we can just all turn our backs on him. by Ex Real Republican — 93
11) On another website... by DaytonMike — 91
12) I had an immediate supervisor like this once by elenacarlena — 88
13) correction: we have no duty to Israel, period by Nate Roberts — 84
14) Democrats shouldn't even attend. N/T by kingfishstew — 83
15) That would put us by StellaRay — 82
16) as a grandfather I am symapthetic by xgoper — 79
17) Well, as long as AIPAC equals LIKUD by kingfishstew — 79
18) I have no words. by weezilgirl — 77
19) I do, but if I said what I really want to say... by BenderRodriguez — 76
20) I've got plenty of words ... by estreya — 71
21) Last night the suggestion was made by CwV — 67
22) Bibi wants the US to go to war by freelunch — 66
23) how can these two be remotely connected by annieli — 65
24) Boehner really stepped into it this time. by jayden — 65
25) That' why I have no words. by weezilgirl — 64
26) Stupid, fucking, selfish, spiteful, by nancyjones — 63
27) I read one of her replies on another by weezilgirl — 62
28) wtf by TrueBlueMajority — 61
29) Thanks! I could come up with these all day. by Eructovax — 60
30) First diary, really? by elenacarlena — 60
31) Invest in by JayFarquharson — 60
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January 24, 2015
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