A History Lesson
The arguments we hear today for the drug war are that we must protect teenagers from drugs, and prevent addiction in general. We assume, looking back, that these were the reasons this war was launched in the first place. But they were not. They crop up only occasionally, as asides. The main reasons given for banning drugs -- the reason obsessing the men who launched this war -- was that the blacks, Mexicans, and Chinese were using these chemicals, forgetting their place, and menacing white people.
Much of Hari’s book, in fact, is focused on the history of the American Drug War: how it came to be, the lead characters in bringing it about, and their motivations in doing so. And, as he aptly summarizes in the above paragraph, at its foundation, it was clearly more about the white man’s fear of the other races than it was about keeping people healthy and safe.
Harry [Anslinger, the first commissioner of the U.S. Treasury Department's Federal Bureau of Narcotics] told the public that “the increase [in drug addiction] is practically 100 percent among Negro people,” which he stressed was terrifying because already “the Negro population … accounts for 10 percent of the total population, but 60 percent of the addicts.” He could wage the drug war -- he could do what he did -- only because he was responding to a fear in the American people. You can be a great surfer, but you still need a great wave. Harry’s wave came in the form of a race panic.
In the run-up to the passing of the Harrison Act [the law, passed in 1915, that regulates the production and distribution of opiates and coca products in the United States], the New York Times ran a story typical of the time. The headline was: NEGRO COCAINE “FIENDS” NEW SOUTHERN MENACE. It described a North Carolina police chief who “was informed that a hitherto inoffensive negro, with whom he was well-acquainted, was ‘running amuck’ in a cocaine frenzy [and] had attempted to stab a storekeeper … Knowing he must kill this man or be killed himself, the Chief drew his revolver, placed the muzzle over the negro’s heart, and fired -- ‘intending to kill him right quick,’ as the officer tells it, but the shot did not even stagger the man.” Cocaine was, it was widely claimed in the press at this time, turning blacks into superhuman hulks who could take bullets to the heart without flinching. It was the official reason why the police across the South increased the caliber of their guns.
And it wasn’t just black people.
In the mid-nineteenth century, Chinese immigrants had begun to flow into the United States, and they were now competing with white people for jobs and opportunities.
Worse still, Harry believed they were competing for white women. He warned that with their “own special Oriental ruthlessness,” the Chinese had developed “a liking for the charms of Caucasian girls … from good families.” They lured these white girls into their “opium dens” -- a tradition they had brought from their home country -- got the girls hooked, and then forced them into acts of “unspeakable sexual depravity” for the rest of their lives. Anslinger described their brothels in great detail: how the white girls removed their clothes slowly, the “panties” they revealed, how slowly they kissed the Chinese, and what came next …
Once the Chinese dealers got you hooked on opiates, they would laugh in your face and reveal the real reason they sell junk: it was their way of making sure that “the yellow race would rule the world.” “They were too wise, they urged, to attempt to win in battle, but they would win by wits; would strike at the white race through ‘dope’ and when the time was ripe would command the world,” explained a senior judge.
These are the racist beginnings of the American Drug War. And they, like so many other fevered nightmares of white supremacy, seem to miss the essential point entirely. There is a reason people take drugs, and it has nothing to do with racial domination. But before we explore that, it is instructive, I think, to pause, as Hari does, to wonder:
How could a man like [Harry Anslinger] have persuaded so many people? …the answers were lying there, waiting for me, in the piles of letters he received from members of the public, from senators, and from presidents. They wanted to be persuaded. They wanted easy answers to complex fears. It’s tempting to feel superior -- to condescend to these people -- but I suspect this impulse is there in all of us. The public wanted to be told that these deep, complex problems -- race, inequality, geopolitics -- came down to a few powders and pills, and if these powders and pills could be wiped from the world, these problems would disappear.
It is a natural human instinct to turn our fears into symbols, and destroy the symbols, in the hope that it will destroy the fear. It is a logic that keeps recurring throughout human history, from the Crusades to the witch hunts to the present day. It’s hard to sit with a complex problem, such as the human urge to get intoxicated, and accept that it will always be with us, and will always cause some problems (as well as some pleasures). It is much more appealing to be told a different message -- that it can be ended. That all these problems can be over, if only we listen, and follow.
Yes. Good. Let’s talk about natural human instincts -- especially the one that seems to compel us to intoxicate ourselves.
Theories of Addiction
I knew what caused addiction before I even left London. We all do. As a culture, we have a story about how addiction works, and it’s a good one. It says that some substances are so chemically powerful that if you use them enough, they will hijack your brain. They will change your neurochemistry. They will give you a brain disease. After that, you will need the drug physically. So if you or I or the next ten people you pass on the street were to use an addictive drug every day for the next month, on day thirty, we’d all be addicts. Addiction, then, is the result of repeated exposure to certain very powerful chemicals.
Many people, including the author before he began researching this book, believe this. It is sometimes called the pharmaceutical theory of addiction. Drugs are addictive. If you take them, you get addicted. But there is another theory of addiction, one that actually has much more explanatory power. And it is this other theory which has “the opposite of addiction is connection” as its maxim.
As I said earlier, the strongest evidence for the pharmaceutical theory of addiction had, for years, been a series of experiments on rats. A famous advertisement that ran on U.S. TV in the 1980s, paid for by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America, explained it best. It shows a rat in close-up licking at a water bottle, as the narrator says: “Only one drug is so addictive, nine out of ten 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.” The rat runs about manically, then -- as promised by the scary music -- drops dead. Similar rat experiments had been run to prove the addictiveness of heroin and other drugs.
But when [psychologist] Bruce [Alexander] looked at these experiments, he noticed something. These rats had been put in an empty cage. They were all alone, with no toys, no activities, and no friends. There was nothing for them to do but to take the drug.
What, he wondered, if the experiment was run differently? With a few of his colleagues, he built two sets of homes for laboratory rats. In the first home, they lived as they had in the original experiments, in solitary confinement, isolated except for their fix. But then he built a second home: a paradise for rats. Within its plywood walls, it contained everything a rat could want -- there were wheels and colored balls and the best food, and other rats to hang out with and have sex with.
He called it Rat Park. In these experiments, both sets of rats had access to a pair of drinking bottles. The first bottle contained only water. The other bottle contained morphine -- an opiate that rats process in a similar way to humans and that behaves just like heroin when it enters their brains. At the end of each day, Bruce or a member of his team would weigh the bottles to see how much the rats had chosen to take opiates, and how much they had chosen to stay sober.
What they discovered was startling. It turned out that the rats in isolated cages used up to 25 milligrams of morphine a day, as in the earlier experiments. But the rats in the happy cages used hardly any morphine at all -- less than 5 milligrams. “These guys [in Rat Park] have a complete total twenty-four hour supply” of morphine, Bruce said, “and they don’t use it.” They don’t kill themselves. They choose to spend their lives doing other things.
So the old experiments were, it seemed, wrong. It isn’t the drug that causes the harmful behavior -- it’s the environment. An isolated rat will almost always become a junkie. A rat with a good life almost never will, no matter how many drugs you make available to him. As Bruce put it: he was realizing that addiction isn’t a disease. Addiction is an adaptation. It’s not you -- it’s the cage you live in.
It’s not you -- it’s the cage you live in. And “junkies” invariably live in different cages than people who aren’t junkies. Different cages, especially it seems, when they were children.
[Physician] Gabor [Mate] began to read about a group of American scientists who had carried out something called the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study. It is the most detailed research ever conducted into the long-term effects of early childhood trauma. It looked at ten different terrible things that can happen to a kid, from physical abuse to sexual abuse to the death of a parent, to track how it shapes that child over their lifetime.
These scientists discovered that for each traumatic event that happened to a child, they were two to four times more likely to grow up to be an addicted adult. Nearly two-thirds of injection drug use, they found, is the product of childhood trauma. This is a correlation so strong the scientists said it is “of an order of magnitude rarely seen in epidemiology or public health.” It means that child abuse is as likely to cause drug addiction as obesity is to cause heart disease.
Another long-term study, published in American Psychologist, followed kids from the age of five until they were eighteen, to figure out how much the quality of your parenting while a child affects your drug use as you get older. When the children were still small, the scientists gave them a task to carry out with their parents -- like piling up building blocks -- and then they watched how well the parents helped and encouraged them through a one-way mirror. They wrote down which kids had parents who were loving and supportive, and which had parents who were disengaged or nasty to them. It turned out the kids whose parents had been either indifferent or cruel were dramatically more likely to heavily use drugs than the others. They had grown up, they found, less able to form loving relationships, and so they felt more angry and distressed and impulsive a lot of the time.
If we can figure out at the age of five which kids are going to be addicts and which ones aren’t, that tells us something fundamental about drug addiction. “Their relative maladjustment,” the study found, “precedes the initiation of drug use.” Indeed, “Problem drug use is a symptom, not a cause, of personal and social maladjustment.”
This is one reason why Dr. Vincent Felitti -- one of the key figures in the Adverse Childhood Experiences Survey -- concluded, as Gabor writes, that “the basic cause of addiction is predominantly experience-dependent during childhood, not substance-dependent.
I’ve thought and written before about the untold impact that often unrecognized and unmeasured child abuse has on our society and its overall health. And this is yet another angle on that theme. Addiction results from both childhood trauma and from an environment absent meaningful connections.
But not just those. For there is indeed something else going on. Something else that we seem to fear, almost above all else.
When Sigmund Freud first suggested that everybody has elaborate sexual fantasies, that it is as natural as breathing, he was dismissed as a pervert and lunatic. People wanted to believe that sexual fantasy was something that happened in other people -- filthy people, dirty people. They took the parts of their subconscious that generated these wet dreams and daydreams and projected them onto somebody else, the depraved people Over There, who had to be stopped. [Cultural critic and author] Stuart Walton and the philosopher Terence McKenna both write that we are at this stage with our equally universal desire to seek out altered mental states. McKenna explains: “We are discovering that human beings are creatures of chemical habit with the same horrified disbelief as when the Victorians discovered that humans are creatures of sexual fantasy and obsession.”
Just as we are rescuing the sex drive from our subconscious and from shame, so we need to take the intoxication drive out into the open where it can breathe. Stuart Walton calls for a whole new field of human knowledge called “intoxicology.” He writes: “Intoxication plays, or has played, a part in the lives of virtually everybody who has ever lived … To seek to deny it is not only futile; it is a dereliction of an entirely constitutive part of who we are.”
In my literary journeys, this is what I generally call a “big idea,” a new way of thinking about something that sheds infinitely more explanatory power upon a subject than the generally-more-accepted ways of thinking about that thing. It’s not just that there is a natural human compulsion towards intoxication, towards “altered mental states,” but also that we fear this compulsion, fear it in ourselves, fear it to such a degree that we externalize it so those we deem afflicted can be demonized and punished.
And why do we fear it? Fear it, it seems, to an ever increasing degree? Well, a lot of that has to do with the increasing degree of fragmentation we are now experiencing as a culture.
A sense of dislocation has been spreading through our societies like a bone cancer throughout the twentieth century. We all feel it: we have become richer, but less connected to one another. Countless studies prove this is more than a hunch, but here’s just one: the average number of close friends a person has has been steadily falling. We are increasingly alone, so we are increasingly addicted. “We’re talking about learning to deal with the modern age,” Bruce believes. The modern world has many incredible benefits, but it also brings with it a source of deep stress that is unique: dislocation. “Being atomized and fragmented and all on [your] own -- that’s no part of human evolution and it’s not part of the evolution of any society,” he told me.
And then there is another kicker. At the same time that our bonds with one another have been withering, we are told -- incessantly, all day, every day, by a vast advertising-shopping machine -- to invest our hopes and dreams in a very different direction: buying and consuming objects. Gabor tells me: “The whole economy is based around appealing to and heightening every false need and desire, for the purpose of selling products. So people are always trying to find satisfaction and fulfillment in products.” This is a key reason why, he says, “we live in a highly addicted society.” We have separated from one another and turned instead to things for happiness -- but things can only ever offer us the thinnest of satisfactions.
This is where the drug war comes in. These processes began in the early twentieth century -- and the drug war followed soon after. The drug war wasn’t just driven, then, by race panic. It was driven by an addiction panic -- and it had a real cause. But the cause wasn’t a growth in drugs. It was a growth in dislocation.
The drug war began when it did because we were afraid of our own addictive impulses, rising all around us because we were so alone. So, like an evangelical preacher who rages against gays because he is afraid of his own desire to have sex with men, are we raging against addicts because we are afraid of our own growing vulnerability to addiction?
When viewed through this perspective, through this theory of addiction, the things we need to do to solve the crisis become very different.
It is no longer: How do we stop addiction through threats and force, and scare people away from drugs in the first place? It becomes: How do we start to rebuild a society where we don’t feel so alone and afraid, and where we can form healthier bonds? How do we build a society where we look for happiness in one another rather than in consumption?
I told you this would lead us into some astonishing territory.
+ + +
This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment