Miriam,
No doubt about it. We all live in the real world and face choices
that are not of our doing or to our best interests.
My own ambitions caused me to make a choice between living in Spokane
and operating a large cafeteria, or moving to Seattle and taking a job
as instructor in the BEP training facility. A job that paid
considerably less than the cafeteria, but put me in a position to move
into the agency management, and be in the leadership of our battle to
secure a separate agency for the blind. My constant activity in the
community left my wife and two very small children alone most of the
time. Eventually she took as much as she felt she could, and she
bailed out of the marriage. That is a hard way to learn, which seems
to be my normal learning curve. But I've not made the same mistake
again. And for 35 years it has been the right decision. IN fact,
when I'd been promoted to assistant director for field services, I was
being primed to become department director. Cathy and I talked about
the price such a move would cost our family, and I sat down with our
director and took a step back to return to my previous job as director
of the OTC. and allow another person to reach for the stars. When
early retirement was offered, I took it and we began our move to this
Paradise. For 20 years now, we've been working for far less than we
would have been working for in Seattle. Cathy was managing the
paralegal division for the Seattle criminal division, and I was
assistant director at the department of services for the blind.
Between our schedules we hardly saw one another. But in 1994 we
brought in over $120,000, a tidy sum for that day and time. But as I
said, we decided that our family was more important, and we bailed.
At the moment both Cathy and I are sitting in our cozy ten by ten
office. When we are out, we ride side by side in our Ford Sport trak
truck. We spend lots of time with our children and grandchildren.
And when all is accounted for, I believe we're making as big a
contribution to the world as when we were dashing off this way and
that.
As an aside, I have a dear friend who is still trying to move the
state organization of the blind into action. She is now 66 years old
and in shaky health. And the organization has slid into a big happy
family, more interested in avoiding controversy than in taking on the
pressing issues of the day. I tell my friend that she should step
back, but of course she can't or she would have done so.
Each of us lives in this real world, true. But we do have some small
choices that do impact the quality of our own lives.
And maybe in this real world that's the best we can do.
Carl Jarvis
On 7/20/15, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
But in the real world, the one we live in that is here now, those people
don't have a choice because jobs are not plentiful, or even available. And
at this point in time, it isn't even a question of moving to get a
promotion
versus staying put and finding a job equivalent to the one we have because
there very well may not be a job equivalent to the one we have.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Monday, July 20, 2015 10:33 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Johann Hari: Everything You Think You Know
About Addiction Is Wrong
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 beganfolks at home.
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
Right?
Carl Jarvis
On 7/15/15, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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.
What if addiction is about your cage?That's what I thought.quickly.
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?
like Rat Park.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
Right?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.
What if addiction is about your cage?That's what I thought.quickly.
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?
like Rat Park.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
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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