The massive war on drugs which kills people from the plazas
of Mexico to the streets of Liverpool, is based on the claim that we need to
physically eradicate a whole array of chemicals because they hijack people's
brains and cause addiction. But what if drugs aren't the driver of addiction—
but , in fact, it is disconnection with society that drives addiction. The writer
George Monbiot has called this the "age of loneliness." We have
created human societies where it is easier for people to become cut off from
all human connection.
Vancouver psychology professor Bruce Alexander noticed
something odd about a drug experiment experiment. A rat is put in the cage all
alone with a choice of normal water and water laced with a drug. It has nothing
to do but take the drugs. What would happen, he wondered, if built 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? 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.
Alexander took the test further. He repeated the early
experiments, where the rats were left alone and became compulsive users of the
drug. Then he took them out of isolation, and placed them in Rat Park. He
wanted to know, if you fall into that state of addiction, is your brain hijacked
so you can't recover? Do the drugs take over? What happened is striking. The
rats seemed to have a few twitches of withdrawal, but they soon stopped their
heavy use, and went back to having a normal life. The good cage saved them.
During the Vietnam War, Time magazine reported heroin was
"as common as chewing gum" among U.S. soldiers, and there is solid
evidence to back this up: some 20 percent of U.S. soldiers became addicted to
heroin there, according to a study published in the Archives of General
Psychiatry. Many people were understandably terrified: they believed a huge
number of addicts were about to head home when the war ended. But in fact, some
95 percent of the addicted soldiers, according to the same study, simply
stopped using. Very few had rehab. They shifted from a terrifying cage back to
a pleasant one, so they didn't want the drug anymore.
If you happen to say, break your hip, you will probably be
given diamorphine, the medical name for heroin. In the hospital around you,
there will be plenty of people also given heroin for long periods, for pain
relief. The heroin you get from your doctor will have a much higher purity and
potency than the heroin being used by street addicts, who have to buy from
criminals who adulterate it. So if the theory of addiction is right—it's the
drugs that cause it; they make your body need them—it's obvious what should
happen. Loads of people should leave the hospital and try to score smack on the
streets, to meet their habits. But here's the strange thing. It virtually never
happens. Medical users just stop, despite months of use. The same drug, used
for the same length of time, turns street users into desperate addicts—and
leaves medical patients unaffected.
The junkie is like a rat in the first cage: isolated and
alone, with only one source of solace to turn to. The medical patient is like a
rat in the second cage: going home to a life where she is surrounded by the
people she loves. The drug is the same, but the environment is different. This
gives us an insight that goes much deeper than the need to understand addicts.
Professor Peter Cohen argues that human beings have a deep need to bond and
form connections. If we can't connect with each other, we will connect with
anything we can find—gambling or drugs. 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.
Smoking is one of the most addictive processes around. The
chemical hooks in tobacco come from a drug called nicotine. So when nicotine
patches were developed in the early 1990s, there was a huge surge of
optimism—cigarette smokers could get all of their chemical hooks, without the
other filthy, and deadly, effects of cigarette smoking. They would be freed. But
the Office of the Surgeon General has found that just 17.7 percent of cigarette
smokers are able to stop using nicotine patches. That's not nothing. If the
chemicals drive 17.7 percent of addiction, as this shows, that's still millions
of lives ruined globally. But what it reveals again is that the story we have
been taught about the cause of addiction being chemical hooks is real, but it's
only a minor part of a much bigger picture.
The war on drugs actually increases all those larger drivers
of addiction. When drug offenders get out of prison, they will be unemployable
because of their criminal record, guaranteeing they will be cut off even more.
Another approach has been tried and tested.
Portugal had one of the worst drug problems in Europe. They
had tried a drug war, and the problem just kept getting worse. So they decided
to do something radically different. They resolved to decriminalize all drugs,
and take all the money they once spent on arresting and jailing drug addicts,
and spend it instead on reconnecting them—to their own feelings, and to the
wider society. The most crucial step was to get them secure housing and
subsidized jobs, so they had a purpose in life, and something to get out of bed
for. In warm and welcoming clinics, addicts are taught how to reconnect with
their feelings, after years of trauma. One group of addicts was given a loan to
set up a removals firm. Suddenly, they were a group, all bonded to each other
and to society, and responsible for each other's care.
The British Journal of Criminology found that since total
decriminalization, addiction has fallen, and intraveneous drug use is down by
50 percent. Decriminalization has been such a success that very few people in
Portugal want to go back to the old system. The main campaigner against the
decriminalization back in 2000 was Joao Figueira, the country's top drug cop
offered all the dire warnings we would expect from the Daily Mail or Fox News but
everything he predicted had not come to pass—and he now hopes the whole world
will follow Portugal's example. This new evidence challenges us politically, it
obliges us to change our minds and our hearts. The present drug message is that
an addict should be shunned.
We need now to talk about social recovery; how we all
recover, together, from the sickness of isolation. It is time to talk about
real genuine social-ism.
No comments:
Post a Comment