Miriam and All,
Your story about folks being transferred from North Carolina to
Connecticut, is paralleled by a similar tale we encountered yesterday
while we were picking up our 8 year old grand daughter. A very long
and close friend of our daughter's, a woman she had worked with for
several years, dropped by unexpectedly to tell Renae that she and her
husband and small son were moving to Vermont. I don't know the
corporation her husband is owned by, but they decided that he was
needed in Vermont. Neither of these people have ever been in Vermont.
Neither of them know a single soul in Vermont. Both of their families
live in the Puget Sound area and both sets of parents still are alive
and together. Good family roots are being pulled up because the
corporation can't find a single qualified person in all of Vermont.
They do not want to go. But to leave the company would give her
husband a black mark in so far as finding a similar job in this area.
And jobs are not as easy to find as statistics would tell us. At
least jobs that earn a living.
This, to me, is one more example of how far off base we've come.
We've been trained to believe that the almighty dollar rules. We
believe we must improve our financial status as a sign to our families
and to the world that we are successful. Our values are upside down.
While we slavishly follow our golden carrot, our children fall apart
and our spouses fall into someone Else's arms. And we never learn.
And here's the Hell of it all, our Jailers blame us for our problems.
The boss is held harmless. After all, didn't he give us a job? It's
our problem if we are unable to manage our personal lives. It's the
governments fault that we have such congestion on our roads and so
much smog in our cities air. It's not the responsibility of our
generous bosses to provide solutions to these social problems. After
all, they gave us a job! And here's the funny part. Some of us,
sitting in our hot cars in long lines of stalled traffic, stop
coughing long enough to actually thank the boss for this golden
opportunity.
Well, whether we made our bed or not, we don't have to lie in it. Or
is it, lay in it? Anyway, we do have the answers if we wake up and
decide we're not all going to Vermont, or Connecticut, or dance the
bosses tune. But it won't work unless enough of us hold our ground
and declare that our families come first. A job is only the bosses
responsibility for our allowing him to do business in our town. And
that boss will put our needs right up alongside his own.
Carl Jarvis
On 7/20/15, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Remember in the 1950's when people who worked for big companies began being
transferred to other company branches? People were moved from one suburban
enclave to another. The suburbs were built to look identical. The chain
stores, restaurants, and hotels were identical. But what was different was
that they left their extended families behind. Fiction and nonfiction was
written about this trend. Society was being molded to the needs of the
corporation. People cooperated because the transfers meant continued
employment and often, promotion. By the way, this is still happening in
upper management. I know of a family that uprooted itself to move from
North
Carolina to Conneticutt.
Miriame
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Monday, July 20, 2015 12:56 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Johann Hari: Everything You Think You Know
About Addiction Is Wrong
"The opposite of addiction is connection".
Imagine that!!!!
And what is it about connection? Support, compassion, guidance, collective
strength, and validation. Together, connected, we can give one another
confidence, self-respect, goals, purpose and meaning to our lives. Have we
finally begun to understand that we are communal animals? Meant to live
cooperatively together? Hey, didn't we once have what we called, extended
families? Maybe we ought to figure out how we strayed onto this crazy road
to Hell that we are now traveling, and see if it's not too late to get back
down to the farm and all the folks at home.
Carl Jarvis
On 7/15/15, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
quickly.
Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org) Home > Johann Hari:
Everything You Think You Know About Addiction Is Wrong
________________________________________
Johann Hari: Everything You Think You Know About Addiction Is Wrong By
Johann Hari [1] / AlterNet [2] July 12, 2015 The following is a TED
Talk [3] from Johann Hari, author of Chasing the
Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs. [4] One of my
earliest memories is of trying to wake up one of my relatives and not
being able to. And I was just a little kid, so I didn't really
understand why, but as I got older, I realized we had drug addiction
in my family, including later cocaine addiction.
I'd been thinking about it a lot lately, partly because it's now
exactly 100 years since drugs were first banned in the United States
and Britain, and we then imposed that on the rest of the world. It's a
century since we made this really fateful decision to take addicts and
punish them and make them suffer, because we believed that would deter
them; it would give them an incentive to stop.
And a few years ago, I was looking at some of the addicts in my life
who I love, and trying to figure out if there was some way to help
them. And I realized there were loads of incredibly basic questions I
just didn't know the answer to, like, what really causes addiction?
Why do we carry on with this approach that doesn't seem to be working,
and is there a better way out there that we could try instead?
So I read loads of stuff about it, and I couldn't really find the
answers I was looking for, so I thought, okay, I'll go and sit with
different people around the world who lived this and studied this and
talk to them and see if I could learn from them. And I didn't realize
I would end up going over 30,000 miles at the start, but I ended up
going and meeting loads of different people, from a transgender crack
dealer in Brownsville, Brooklyn, to a scientist who spends a lot of
time feeding hallucinogens to mongooses to see if they like them -- it
turns out they do, but only in very specific circumstances -- to the
only country that's ever decriminalized all drugs, from cannabis to
crack, Portugal. And the thing I realized that really blew my mind is,
almost everything we think we know about addiction is wrong, and if we
start to absorb the new evidence about addiction, I think we're going
to have to change a lot more than our drug policies.
But let's start with what we think we know, what I thought I knew.
Let's think about this middle row here.Imagine all of you, for 20 days
now, went off and used heroin three times a day. Some of you look a
little more enthusiastic than others at this prospect. (Laughter)
Don't worry, it's just a thought experiment.Imagine you did that,
right? What would happen? Now, we have a story about what would happen
that we've been told for a century. We think, because there are
chemical hooks in heroin, as you took it for a while, your body would
become dependent on those hooks, you'd start to physically need them,
and at the end of those 20 days, you'd all be heroin addicts. Right?
That's what I thought.
First thing that alerted me to the fact that something's not right
with this story is when it was explained to me. If I step out of this
TED Talk today and I get hit by a car and I break my hip, I'll be
taken to hospital and I'll be given loads of diamorphine. Diamorphine
is heroin. It's actually much better heroin than you're going to buy
on the streets, because the stuff you buy from a drug dealer is
contaminated. Actually, very little of it is heroin, whereas the stuff
you get from the doctor is medically pure.
And you'll be given it for quite a long period of time. There are
loads of people in this room, you may not realize it, you've taken
quite a lot of heroin. And anyone who is watching this anywhere in the
world, this is happening. And if what we believe about addiction is
right -- those people are exposed to all those chemical hooks -- What
should happen? They should become addicts. This has been studied
really carefully. It doesn't happen; you will have noticed if your
grandmother had a hip replacement, she didn't come out as a junkie.
(Laughter) And when I learned this, it seemed so weird to me, so
contrary to everything I'd been told, everything I thought I knew, I
just thought it couldn't be right, until I met a man called Bruce
Alexander. He's a professor of psychology in Vancouver who carried out
an incredible experiment I think really helps us to understand this
issue. Professor Alexander explained to me, the idea of addiction
we've all got in our heads, that story, comes partly from a series of
experiments that were done earlier in the 20th century.They're really
simple experiments. You can do them tonight at home if you feel a
little bit sadistic. You get a rat and you put it in a cage, and you
give it two water bottles: One is just water, and the other is water
laced with either heroin or cocaine. If you do that, the rat will
almost always prefer the drug water and almost always kill itself quite
Sodifferent.
there you go, right? That's how we think it works. In the '70s,
Professor Alexander comes along and he looks at this experiment and he
noticed something. He said ah, we're putting the rat in an empty cage.
It's got nothing to do except use these drugs. Let's try something a bit
So Professor Alexander built a cage that he called "Rat Park," whichquickly.
is basically heaven for rats. They've got loads of cheese, they've got
loads of colored balls, they've got loads of tunnels.Crucially,
they've got loads of friends. They can have loads of sex. And they've
got both the water bottles, the normal water and the drugged water.
But here's the fascinating thing:
In
Rat Park, they don't like the drug water. They almost never use it.
None of them ever use it compulsively. None of them ever overdose. You
go from almost 100 percent overdose when they're isolated to zero
percent overdose when they have happy and connected lives.
Now, when he first saw this, Professor Alexander thought, maybe this
is just a thing about rats, they're quite different to us. Maybe not
as different as we'd like, but, you know -- But fortunately, there was
a human experiment into the exact same principle happening at the
exact same time. It was called the Vietnam War. In Vietnam, 20 percent
of all American troops were using loads of heroin, and if you look at
the news reports from the time, they were really worried, because they
thought, my God, we're going to have hundreds of thousands of junkies
on the streets of the United States when the war ends; it made total
sense. Now, those soldiers who were using loads of heroin were
followed home. The Archives of General Psychiatry did a really
detailed study, and what happened to them? It turns out they didn't go
to rehab. They didn't go into withdrawal. Ninety-five percent of them
just stopped. Now, if you believe the story about chemical hooks, that
makes absolutely no sense, but Professor Alexander began to thinkthere
might be a different story about addiction. He said, what if addiction
isn't about your chemical hooks? What if addiction is about your cage?
What if addiction is an adaptation to your environment?
Looking at this, there was another professor called Peter Cohen in the
Netherlands who said, maybe we shouldn't even call it addiction. Maybe
we should call it bonding. Human beings have a natural and innate need
to bond, and when we're happy and healthy, we'll bond and connect with
each other, but if you can't do that, because you're traumatized or
isolated or beaten down by life, you will bond with something that
will give you some sense of relief. Now, that might be gambling, that
might be pornography, that might be cocaine, that might be cannabis,
but you will bond and connect with something because that's our
nature. That's what we want as human beings.
And at first, I found this quite a difficult thing to get my head
around, but one way that helped me to think about it is, I can see,
I've got over by my seat a bottle of water, right? I'm looking at lots
of you, and lots of you have bottles of water with you. Forget the
drugs. Forget the drug war.
Totally legally, all of those bottles of water could be bottles of
vodka, right? We could all be getting drunk -- I am right after this
-- (Laughter)
-- but we're not. Now, because you've been able to afford the
approximately gazillion poundsthat it costs to get into a TED Talk,
I'm guessing you guys could afford to be drinking vodka for the next
six months. You wouldn't end up homeless. You're not going to do that,
and the reason you're not going to do that is not because anyone's
stopping you. It's because you've got bonds and connections that you
want to be present for. You've got work you love.
You've got people you love. You've got healthy relationships. And a
core part of addiction, I came to think, and I believe the evidence
suggests, is about not being able to bear to be present in your life.
Now, this has really significant implications. The most obvious
implications are for the War on Drugs. In Arizona, I went out with a
group of women who were made to wear t-shirts saying, "I was a drug
addict,"and go out on chain gangs and dig graves while members of the
public jeer at them, and when those women get out of prison, they're
going to have criminal records that mean they'll never work in the
legal economy again. Now, that's a very extreme example, obviously, in
the case of the chain gang, but actually almost everywhere in the
world we treat addicts to some degree like that.
We
punish them. We shame them. We give them criminal records. We put
barriers between them reconnecting. There was a doctor in Canada, Dr.
Gabor Maté, an amazing man, who said to me, if you wanted to design a
system that would make addiction worse, you would design that system.
Now, there's a place that decided to do the exact opposite, and I went
there to see how it worked. In the year 2000, Portugal had one of the
worst drug problems in Europe. One percent of the population was
addicted to heroin, which is kind of mind-blowing, and every year,
they tried the American way more and more. They punished people and
stigmatized them and shamed them more, and every year, the problem got
worse. And one day, the Prime Minister and the leader of the
opposition got together, and basically said, look, we can't go on with
a country where we're having ever more people becoming heroin
addicts.Let's set up a panel of scientists and doctors to figure out
what would genuinely solve the problem. And they set up a panel led by
an amazing man called Dr. João Goulão, to look at all this new
evidence, and they came back and they said, "Decriminalize all drugs
from cannabis to crack, but" -- and this is the crucial next step --
"take all the money we used to spend on cutting addicts off, on
disconnecting them,and spend it instead on reconnecting them with
society." And that's not really what we think of as drug treatment in
the United States and Britain. So they do do residential rehab, they
do psychological therapy, that does have some value.
But the biggest thing they did was the complete opposite of what we
do: a massive program of job creation for addicts, and microloans for
addicts to set up small businesses. So say you used to be a mechanic.
When you're ready, they'll go to a garage, and they'll say,if you
employ this guy for a year, we'll pay half his wages. The goal was to
make sure that every addict in Portugal had something to get out of
bed for in the morning. And when I went and met the addicts in
Portugal, what they said is, as they rediscovered purpose, they
rediscovered bonds and relationships with the wider society.
It'll be 15 years this year since that experiment began, and the
results are
in: injecting drug use is down in Portugal, according to the British
Journal of Criminology, by 50 percent, five-zero percent. Overdose is
massively down, HIV is massively down among addicts. Addiction in
every study is significantly down.One of the ways you know it's worked
so well is that almost nobody in Portugal wants to go back to the old
system.
Now, that's the political implications. I actually think there's a
layer of implications to all this research below that. We live in a
culture where people feel really increasingly vulnerable to all sorts
of addictions, whether it's to their smartphones or to shopping or to
eating. Before these talks began -- you guys know this -- we were told
we weren't allowed to have our smartphones on, and I have to say, a
lot of you looked an awful lot like addicts who were told their dealer
was going to be unavailable for the next couple of hours. (Laughter) A
lot of us feel like that, and it might sound weird to say, I've been
talking about how disconnection is a major driver of addiction and
weird to say it's growing, because you think we're the most connected
society that's ever been, surely. But I increasingly began to think
that the connections we have or think we have, are like a kind of
parody of human connection. If you have a crisis in your life, you'll
notice something. It won't be your Twitter followers who come to sit
with you. It won't be your Facebook friends who help you turn it
round. It'll be your flesh and blood friends who you have deep and
nuanced and textured, face-to-face relationships with, and there's a
study I learned about from Bill McKibben, the environmental writer,
that I think tells us a lot about this. He looked at the number of
close friends the average American believes they can call on in a
crisis. That number has been declining steadily since the 1950s. The
amount of floor space an individual has in their home has been
steadily increasing, and I think that's like a metaphor for the choice
we've made as a culture. We've traded floorspace for friends, we've
traded stuff for connections, and the result is we are one of the
loneliest societies there has ever been. And Bruce Alexander, the guy
who did the Rat Park experiment, says, we talk all the time in
addiction about individual recovery, and it's right to talk about
that, but we need to talk much more about social recovery. Something's
gone wrong with us, not just with individuals but as a group, and
we've created a society where, for a lot of us, life looks a whole lot
more like that isolated cage and a whole lot less like Rat Park.
If I'm honest, this isn't why I went into it. I didn't go in to the
discover the political stuff, the social stuff. I wanted to know how
to help the people I love. And when I came back from this long journey
and I'd learned all this, I looked at the addicts in my life, and if
you're really candid, it's hard loving an addict, and there's going to
be lots of people who know in this room. You are angry a lot of the
time, and I think one of the reasons why this debate is so charged is
because it runs through the heart of each of us, right?Everyone has a
bit of them that looks at an addict and thinks, I wish someone would
just stop you. And the kind of scripts we're told for how to deal with
the addicts in our lives is typified, I think, the reality show
"Intervention," if you guys have ever seen it. I think everything in
our lives is defined by reality TV,but that's another TED Talk. If
you've ever seen the show "Intervention," it's a pretty simple
premise. Get an addict, all the people in their life, gather them
together, confront them with what they're doing, and they say, if you
don't shape up, we're going to cut you off. So what they do is they
take the connection to the addict, and they threaten it, they make it
contingent on the addict behaving the way they want. And I began to
think, I began to see why that approach doesn't work, and I began to
think that's almost like the importing of the logic of the Drug War
into our private lives.
So I was thinking, how could I be Portuguese? And what I've tried to
do now, and I can't tell you I do it consistently and I can't tell you
it's easy, is to say to the addicts in my life that I want to deepen
the connection with them, to say to them, I love you whether you're
using or you're not. I love you, whatever state you're in, and if you
need me, I'll come and sit with you because I love you and I don't
want you to be alone or to feel alone.
And I think the core of that message -- you're not alone, we love you
-- has to be at every level of how we respond to addicts, socially,
politically and individually. For 100 years now, we've been singing
war songs about addicts.
I think all along we should have been singing love songs to them,
because the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of
addiction is connection.
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Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org) Home > Johann Hari:
Everything You Think You Know About Addiction Is Wrong
Johann Hari: Everything You Think You Know About Addiction Is Wrong By
Johann Hari [1] / AlterNet [2] July 12, 2015 The following is a TED
Talk [3] from Johann Hari, author of Chasing the
Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs. [4] One of my
earliest memories is of trying to wake up one of my relatives and not
being able to. And I was just a little kid, so I didn't really
understand why, but as I got older, I realized we had drug addiction
in my family, including later cocaine addiction.
I'd been thinking about it a lot lately, partly because it's now
exactly 100 years since drugs were first banned in the United States
and Britain, and we then imposed that on the rest of the world. It's a
century since we made this really fateful decision to take addicts and
punish them and make them suffer, because we believed that would deter
them; it would give them an incentive to stop.
And a few years ago, I was looking at some of the addicts in my life
who I love, and trying to figure out if there was some way to help
them. And I realized there were loads of incredibly basic questions I
just didn't know the answer to, like, what really causes addiction?
Why do we carry on with this approach that doesn't seem to be working,
and is there a better way out there that we could try instead?
So I read loads of stuff about it, and I couldn't really find the
answers I was looking for, so I thought, okay, I'll go and sit with
different people around the world who lived this and studied this and
talk to them and see if I could learn from them. And I didn't realize
I would end up going over 30,000 miles at the start, but I ended up
going and meeting loads of different people, from a transgender crack
dealer in Brownsville, Brooklyn, to a scientist who spends a lot of
time feeding hallucinogens to mongooses to see if they like them -- it
turns out they do, but only in very specific circumstances -- to the
only country that's ever decriminalized all drugs, from cannabis to
crack, Portugal. And the thing I realized that really blew my mind is,
almost everything we think we know about addiction is wrong, and if we
start to absorb the new evidence about addiction, I think we're going
to have to change a lot more than our drug policies.
But let's start with what we think we know, what I thought I knew.
Let's think about this middle row here.Imagine all of you, for 20 days
now, went off and used heroin three times a day. Some of you look a
little more enthusiastic than others at this prospect. (Laughter)
Don't worry, it's just a thought experiment.Imagine you did that,
right? What would happen? Now, we have a story about what would happen
that we've been told for a century. We think, because there are
chemical hooks in heroin, as you took it for a while, your body would
become dependent on those hooks, you'd start to physically need them,
and at the end of those 20 days, you'd all be heroin addicts. Right?
That's what I thought.
First thing that alerted me to the fact that something's not right
with this story is when it was explained to me. If I step out of this
TED Talk today and I get hit by a car and I break my hip, I'll be
taken to hospital and I'll be given loads of diamorphine. Diamorphine
is heroin. It's actually much better heroin than you're going to buy
on the streets, because the stuff you buy from a drug dealer is
contaminated. Actually, very little of it is heroin, whereas the stuff
you get from the doctor is medically pure.
And you'll be given it for quite a long period of time. There are
loads of people in this room, you may not realize it, you've taken
quite a lot of heroin. And anyone who is watching this anywhere in the
world, this is happening. And if what we believe about addiction is
right -- those people are exposed to all those chemical hooks -- What
should happen? They should become addicts. This has been studied
really carefully. It doesn't happen; you will have noticed if your
grandmother had a hip replacement, she didn't come out as a junkie.
(Laughter) And when I learned this, it seemed so weird to me, so
contrary to everything I'd been told, everything I thought I knew, I
just thought it couldn't be right, until I met a man called Bruce
Alexander. He's a professor of psychology in Vancouver who carried out
an incredible experiment I think really helps us to understand this
issue. Professor Alexander explained to me, the idea of addiction
we've all got in our heads, that story, comes partly from a series of
experiments that were done earlier in the 20th century.They're really
simple experiments. You can do them tonight at home if you feel a
little bit sadistic. You get a rat and you put it in a cage, and you
give it two water bottles: One is just water, and the other is water
laced with either heroin or cocaine. If you do that, the rat will
almost always prefer the drug water and almost always kill itself quite
Sodifferent.
there you go, right? That's how we think it works. In the '70s,
Professor Alexander comes along and he looks at this experiment and he
noticed something. He said ah, we're putting the rat in an empty cage.
It's got nothing to do except use these drugs. Let's try something a bit
So Professor Alexander built a cage that he called "Rat Park," which
is basically heaven for rats. They've got loads of cheese, they've got
loads of colored balls, they've got loads of tunnels.Crucially,
they've got loads of friends. They can have loads of sex. And they've
got both the water bottles, the normal water and the drugged water.
But here's the fascinating thing:
In
Rat Park, they don't like the drug water. They almost never use it.
None of them ever use it compulsively. None of them ever overdose. You
go from almost 100 percent overdose when they're isolated to zero
percent overdose when they have happy and connected lives.
Now, when he first saw this, Professor Alexander thought, maybe this
is just a thing about rats, they're quite different to us. Maybe not
as different as we'd like, but, you know -- But fortunately, there was
a human experiment into the exact same principle happening at the
exact same time. It was called the Vietnam War. In Vietnam, 20 percent
of all American troops were using loads of heroin, and if you look at
the news reports from the time, they were really worried, because they
thought, my God, we're going to have hundreds of thousands of junkies
on the streets of the United States when the war ends; it made total
sense. Now, those soldiers who were using loads of heroin were
followed home. The Archives of General Psychiatry did a really
detailed study, and what happened to them? It turns out they didn't go
to rehab. They didn't go into withdrawal. Ninety-five percent of them
just stopped. Now, if you believe the story about chemical hooks, that
makes absolutely no sense, but Professor Alexander began to thinkthere
might be a different story about addiction. He said, what if addiction
isn't about your chemical hooks? What if addiction is about your cage?
What if addiction is an adaptation to your environment?
Looking at this, there was another professor called Peter Cohen in the
Netherlands who said, maybe we shouldn't even call it addiction. Maybe
we should call it bonding. Human beings have a natural and innate need
to bond, and when we're happy and healthy, we'll bond and connect with
each other, but if you can't do that, because you're traumatized or
isolated or beaten down by life, you will bond with something that
will give you some sense of relief. Now, that might be gambling, that
might be pornography, that might be cocaine, that might be cannabis,
but you will bond and connect with something because that's our
nature. That's what we want as human beings.
And at first, I found this quite a difficult thing to get my head
around, but one way that helped me to think about it is, I can see,
I've got over by my seat a bottle of water, right? I'm looking at lots
of you, and lots of you have bottles of water with you. Forget the
drugs. Forget the drug war.
Totally legally, all of those bottles of water could be bottles of
vodka, right? We could all be getting drunk -- I am right after this
-- (Laughter)
-- but we're not. Now, because you've been able to afford the
approximately gazillion poundsthat it costs to get into a TED Talk,
I'm guessing you guys could afford to be drinking vodka for the next
six months. You wouldn't end up homeless. You're not going to do that,
and the reason you're not going to do that is not because anyone's
stopping you. It's because you've got bonds and connections that you
want to be present for. You've got work you love.
You've got people you love. You've got healthy relationships. And a
core part of addiction, I came to think, and I believe the evidence
suggests, is about not being able to bear to be present in your life.
Now, this has really significant implications. The most obvious
implications are for the War on Drugs. In Arizona, I went out with a
group of women who were made to wear t-shirts saying, "I was a drug
addict,"and go out on chain gangs and dig graves while members of the
public jeer at them, and when those women get out of prison, they're
going to have criminal records that mean they'll never work in the
legal economy again. Now, that's a very extreme example, obviously, in
the case of the chain gang, but actually almost everywhere in the
world we treat addicts to some degree like that.
We
punish them. We shame them. We give them criminal records. We put
barriers between them reconnecting. There was a doctor in Canada, Dr.
Gabor Maté, an amazing man, who said to me, if you wanted to design a
system that would make addiction worse, you would design that system.
Now, there's a place that decided to do the exact opposite, and I went
there to see how it worked. In the year 2000, Portugal had one of the
worst drug problems in Europe. One percent of the population was
addicted to heroin, which is kind of mind-blowing, and every year,
they tried the American way more and more. They punished people and
stigmatized them and shamed them more, and every year, the problem got
worse. And one day, the Prime Minister and the leader of the
opposition got together, and basically said, look, we can't go on with
a country where we're having ever more people becoming heroin
addicts.Let's set up a panel of scientists and doctors to figure out
what would genuinely solve the problem. And they set up a panel led by
an amazing man called Dr. João Goulão, to look at all this new
evidence, and they came back and they said, "Decriminalize all drugs
from cannabis to crack, but" -- and this is the crucial next step --
"take all the money we used to spend on cutting addicts off, on
disconnecting them,and spend it instead on reconnecting them with
society." And that's not really what we think of as drug treatment in
the United States and Britain. So they do do residential rehab, they
do psychological therapy, that does have some value.
But the biggest thing they did was the complete opposite of what we
do: a massive program of job creation for addicts, and microloans for
addicts to set up small businesses. So say you used to be a mechanic.
When you're ready, they'll go to a garage, and they'll say,if you
employ this guy for a year, we'll pay half his wages. The goal was to
make sure that every addict in Portugal had something to get out of
bed for in the morning. And when I went and met the addicts in
Portugal, what they said is, as they rediscovered purpose, they
rediscovered bonds and relationships with the wider society.
It'll be 15 years this year since that experiment began, and the
results are
in: injecting drug use is down in Portugal, according to the British
Journal of Criminology, by 50 percent, five-zero percent. Overdose is
massively down, HIV is massively down among addicts. Addiction in
every study is significantly down.One of the ways you know it's worked
so well is that almost nobody in Portugal wants to go back to the old
system.
Now, that's the political implications. I actually think there's a
layer of implications to all this research below that. We live in a
culture where people feel really increasingly vulnerable to all sorts
of addictions, whether it's to their smartphones or to shopping or to
eating. Before these talks began -- you guys know this -- we were told
we weren't allowed to have our smartphones on, and I have to say, a
lot of you looked an awful lot like addicts who were told their dealer
was going to be unavailable for the next couple of hours. (Laughter) A
lot of us feel like that, and it might sound weird to say, I've been
talking about how disconnection is a major driver of addiction and
weird to say it's growing, because you think we're the most connected
society that's ever been, surely. But I increasingly began to think
that the connections we have or think we have, are like a kind of
parody of human connection. If you have a crisis in your life, you'll
notice something. It won't be your Twitter followers who come to sit
with you. It won't be your Facebook friends who help you turn it
round. It'll be your flesh and blood friends who you have deep and
nuanced and textured, face-to-face relationships with, and there's a
study I learned about from Bill McKibben, the environmental writer,
that I think tells us a lot about this. He looked at the number of
close friends the average American believes they can call on in a
crisis. That number has been declining steadily since the 1950s. The
amount of floor space an individual has in their home has been
steadily increasing, and I think that's like a metaphor for the choice
we've made as a culture. We've traded floorspace for friends, we've
traded stuff for connections, and the result is we are one of the
loneliest societies there has ever been. And Bruce Alexander, the guy
who did the Rat Park experiment, says, we talk all the time in
addiction about individual recovery, and it's right to talk about
that, but we need to talk much more about social recovery. Something's
gone wrong with us, not just with individuals but as a group, and
we've created a society where, for a lot of us, life looks a whole lot
more like that isolated cage and a whole lot less like Rat Park.
If I'm honest, this isn't why I went into it. I didn't go in to the
discover the political stuff, the social stuff. I wanted to know how
to help the people I love. And when I came back from this long journey
and I'd learned all this, I looked at the addicts in my life, and if
you're really candid, it's hard loving an addict, and there's going to
be lots of people who know in this room. You are angry a lot of the
time, and I think one of the reasons why this debate is so charged is
because it runs through the heart of each of us, right?Everyone has a
bit of them that looks at an addict and thinks, I wish someone would
just stop you. And the kind of scripts we're told for how to deal with
the addicts in our lives is typified, I think, the reality show
"Intervention," if you guys have ever seen it. I think everything in
our lives is defined by reality TV,but that's another TED Talk. If
you've ever seen the show "Intervention," it's a pretty simple
premise. Get an addict, all the people in their life, gather them
together, confront them with what they're doing, and they say, if you
don't shape up, we're going to cut you off. So what they do is they
take the connection to the addict, and they threaten it, they make it
contingent on the addict behaving the way they want. And I began to
think, I began to see why that approach doesn't work, and I began to
think that's almost like the importing of the logic of the Drug War
into our private lives.
So I was thinking, how could I be Portuguese? And what I've tried to
do now, and I can't tell you I do it consistently and I can't tell you
it's easy, is to say to the addicts in my life that I want to deepen
the connection with them, to say to them, I love you whether you're
using or you're not. I love you, whatever state you're in, and if you
need me, I'll come and sit with you because I love you and I don't
want you to be alone or to feel alone.
And I think the core of that message -- you're not alone, we love you
-- has to be at every level of how we respond to addicts, socially,
politically and individually. For 100 years now, we've been singing
war songs about addicts.
I think all along we should have been singing love songs to them,
because the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of
addiction is connection.
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Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/johann-hari-0
[2] http://alternet.org
[3]
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ut_add iction_is_wrong/transcript?language=en
[4]
http://www.amazon.com/Chasing-Scream-First-Last-Drugs/dp/1620408902
[5] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on Johann Hari:
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