As some of you know who read me regularly I have a great deal of interest in the Drug War. In one of my early pieces on the subject Heroin, I came to the conclusion that addiction was a response to pain. i.e. people chronically take pain killers to deal with chronic pain. I have come across another book which makes the same point:
In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction
Here are some words from the author.
I’ve written In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts because I see addiction as one of the most misunderstood phenomena in our society. People–including many people who should know better, such as doctors and policy makers–believe it to be a matter of individual choice or, at best, a medical disease. It is both simpler and more complex than that.
Addiction, or the capacity to become addicted, is very close to the core of the human experience. That is why almost anything can become addictive, from seemingly healthy activities such as eating or exercising to abusing drugs intended for healing. The issue is not the external target but our internal relationship to it. Addictions, for the most part, develop in a compulsive attempt to ease one’s pain or distress in the world. Given the amount of pain and dissatisfaction that human life engenders, many of us are driven to find solace in external things. The more we suffer, and the earlier in life we suffer, the more we are prone to become addicted.
The inner city drug addicts I work with are amongst the most abused and rejected people amongst us, but instead of compassion our society treats them with contempt. Instead of understanding and acceptance, we give them punishment and moral disapproval. In doing so, we fail to recognize our own deeply rooted problems and thereby forego an opportunity for healing not only for them, the extreme addicts, but also for ourselves as individuals and as a culture.
Which is pretty much what I found out ten years ago by reading Dr. Lonny Shavelson’s book:
Hooked: Five Addicts Challenge Our Misguided Drug Rehab System
Which I reviewed in my post Heroin.
The Author Gabor Mate’ has a few More words:
The human brain is exquisitely capable of development, a capacity known as neuroplasticity. But, as with all development, the conditions have to be right. My pessimism about my clients’ future is based not on any limitation of their innate potential, but on their dire social, economic and legal situation and on the essential indifference of policy makers–and of society–to their plight. In short, the resources that could go into rehabilitating people are now sunk, instead, into persecuting them and keeping them marginalized. It’s a failure of insight and of compassion. We are simply not living up to our possibilities as a society.
My estimation is that the rear guard in the support for the Drug War consists of people who need an object for their two minutes of hate. They get more value out of hating than they do out of solving problems. Very strange from this engineer’s point of view. But not everyone thinks like an engineer. Pity.
Cross Posted at Power and Control
Comments
7 responses to “Punishment And Moral Disapproval”
What I have never been able to understand is why doctors are not allowed to treat addicts as they see fit. It seems that society would rather have addicts shelling out big bucks to drug dealers on the street than getting the same thing cheap from a medical source.
These people have a medical condition, right?
Your last paragraph while put in condescending terms actually tells a hard truth. I have started to wonder if human beings don’t actually need something to hate. Because modern society has removed all the old stand bys of things to hate, we are stuck with pogroms against fat people. Perhaps, the drug laws are actually a manifestation of the human need to hate. And perhaps the world will be a worse place if even that group is removed from set of things that are allowed to be hated. Odd thought is it not?
The problem for reformers is that we face a foe that is convinced it owns the moral high ground when, in fact, it is just the opposite.
The arguements we all need to make with the religious drug warrior are these:
1. Your support of laws that criminalize mere sins into crimes is immoral because it bears false witness against those people. Branding a whole class of poeple as criminals when they really aren’t is exactly what the Bible was talking about when it says “Thou shalt not bear false witness against THY NEIGHBOR”.
Yes, you will likely have to make the usual libertarian (and true) arguements about consentual vs. non-consentual behaviors, but that’s not too hard.
2. Another area to discuss is the connection between freedom of conscience and freedom of action. Christians are all about freedom of conscience (free to accept or reject salvation), yet most Christians support laws that restrict and punish actions of conscience (choosing to use drugs). So, if I can reject Christianity but then be punished for un-Christian behavior (drug use) at the behest of Christians, then the freedom of conscience they claim to support is a fiction.
Also, make that case that it is immoral to bring violence to bear against peaceful activities, whether sinful or not.
I make these arguments because it seems to me that often the sides of this debate are talking past one another. To speed up the process, we need to make the case that the moral high ground they think they are on is a fiction.
Of course, I’m not saying we abandon all the other arguements made with the opposition, I think we need to add this type of argumentation to our arsenal (I can type arsenal, can’t I?).
I’m consistently amazed at how adament some “libertarians” are at muddling the arguments over what/what not behaviors are the province of law (which is but a subset of morality) all in the service of “don’t get in the way of my high…and yes, shut up and support me, too.”
Harsh? Well, if the shoe fits.
Because, AISI, when someone start conflating physical pain with “distress” or life’s disappointments, then we aren’t dealing with a good faith examination of the issue.
Darleen,
I take it no one close to you has ever been the victim of severe PTSD. You have no fookin idea.
PTSD and the Endocannabinoid System
I’m sorry to be taking away your object of hate. May I suggest the planet Saturn as a substitute? Or perhaps the Andromeda Galaxy?
Another victim of the Dunning-Kruger Effect I see.
I have been studying addiction for 45 years. Original source material. Papers. Monographs. Books. Internet Postings. Etc.
And guess what? The NIDA agrees with me. So what you got? A bunch of accounts of lurid drug fiends from your local government paper? Or would that be from the official “screens”? Or maybe prison guard union mailings. Herding junkies is big business.
Ah. I get it. You do not actually want to solve the problems associated with addiction. You want an outlet for your feelings of moral superiority.
Dug laws have no basis in science. A one minute video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsMfG3gOE5o
About 30 seconds in.