Governments, police, courts and hard-liners
have been wrong, totally wrong
This could be the breakthrough of the century. New research
and a new book, Chasing the Scream: The
First and Last Days of the War on Drugs by Johann Hari, detonates the damnation wrought by
holier-than-thou authorities on the victims of drug addiction, and in turn,
their victims.
In the past, efforts
by enlightened reformers have fallen on deaf ears, or they have been shouted
down by hard-liners whose own addiction seems to be screaming for punishment.
Everyone is addicted
to something; drugs, alcohol, tobacco, food, exercise, cleanliness, filth, gambling,
sex, politics, talking, shopping, adventure, danger, or doing nothing.
Personally, I’m addicted to writing and extending my old age.
 |
| Addicted to weird selfies in front of weird mirrors |
The old adage, ‘if
you can’t beat them, join them,’ certainly applies here. Governments certainly
need to join forces with the addicts to help them beat their addictions,
instead of beating-up the addicts. Governments could be really innovative by
supplying drugs free as a prelude to recovery and rehabilitation, thereby eliminating
the need to buy drugs from criminals.
Anyone who advocates
punishing people for being sick, are themselves rather sick.
The following
article appeared in Huffington Post:
The Likely Cause of Addiction Has Been Discovered, and It Is Not What
You Think
Posted: 01/20/2015
3:20 pm EST Updated: 03/22/2015 5:59 am EDT
It is now
one hundred 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 new
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 -- and
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.
I learned it from an extraordinary
mixture of people I met on my travels. From the surviving friends of Billie
Holiday, who helped me to learn how the founder of the war on drugs stalked and
helped to kill her. From a Jewish doctor who was smuggled out of the Budapest
ghetto as a baby, only to unlock the secrets of addiction as a grown man. From
a transsexual crack dealer in Brooklyn who was conceived when his mother, a
crack-addict, was raped by his father, an NYPD officer. From a man who was kept
at the bottom of a well for two years by a torturing dictatorship, only to
emerge to be elected President of Uruguay and to begin the last days of the war
on drugs.
I had a quite personal reason to set
out for these answers. One of my earliest memories as a kid is trying to wake
up one of my relatives, and not being able to. Ever since then, I have been
turning over the essential mystery of addiction in my mind -- what causes some
people to become fixated on a drug or a behavior until they can't stop? How do
we help those people to come back to us? As I got older, another of my close
relatives developed a cocaine addiction, and I fell into a relationship with a
heroin addict. I guess addiction felt like home to me.
If you had asked me what causes drug
addiction at the start, I would have looked at you as if you were an idiot, and
said: "Drugs. Duh." It's not difficult to grasp. I thought I had seen
it in my own life. We can all explain it. Imagine if you and I and the next
twenty people to pass us on the street take a really potent drug for twenty
days. There are strong chemical hooks in these drugs, so if we stopped on day
twenty-one, our bodies would need the chemical. We would have a ferocious
craving. We would be addicted. That's what addiction means.
One of the
ways this theory was first established is through rat experiments -- ones that
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 just 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 and more, until it kills itself.
The advert explains: "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."
Continued below . . . .
But in the
1970s, a professor of Psychology in Vancouver called Bruce Alexandernoticed 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 Professor
Alexander built Rat Park. It is a lush cage where the rats would have colored
balls and the best rat-food and tunnels to scamper down and plenty of friends:
everything a rat about town could want. What, Alexander wanted to know, will
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 . . . .
For the full article see: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/the-real-cause-of-addicti_b_6506936.html
The
full story of Johann Hari's journey -- told through the stories of the people
he met -- can be read in Chasing The Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, published by Bloomsbury. The book has been
praised by everyone from Elton John to Glenn Greenwald to Naomi Klein. You can
buy it at all good bookstores and read more at www.chasingthescream.com.
