The real cause of addictions

4 10. 05. 2018
6th international conference of exopolitics, history and spirituality

A hundred years have passed since the first drug ban. And for the entire centuries that the war on drugs is taking, our teachers and our governments tell us the same story of addiction. This story is so rooted in our minds that we take it for granted. It seems obvious. It seems proven true. And until the time I went to 30 000 miles a long way to collect material for my new book Chasing The Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (In the wake of the screaming: The First and Last Days of the Drug War) to find out what the real driving force of the drug conflict is, I believed this story too.

But on my way I found that practically everything I ever said about addiction was a lie. And there is a completely different story waiting for someone ready to listen to it. If we really accept this new look, we will not only have to end the war on drugs. We will have to change ourselves.

The opposite of dependence is not sobriety. It is close to other people.
I learned the truth from a remarkable mixture of people I met on my journey. From the witnesses who knew Billie Holiday and told me how the man who started the war on drugs pursued and practiced to death. From a Jewish doctor who, as an infant, was smuggled out of the Budapest ghetto, and as an adult he revealed the mystery of addiction.

From a transsexual crack dealer in Brooklyn, conceived when his crack-dependent mother raped a New York police officer. From a man who was imprisoned for two years at the bottom of the well with a sadistic dictatorial regime, and after he got out, he was elected president of Uruguay and began the war on drugs.

Dependency and look at it

I had a very personal reason to look for these answers. One of my first memories is how I try to wake a certain family member and it is not. Since then, I have been questioning the mystery of addiction - what makes some people become obsessed with a drug or behavior when they can not stop at all? How can we help these people return to us? When I was bigger, another of my close relatives became cocaine addicts. And then I myself fell in love with a heroin-dependent girl. Addiction seems to me to be something familiar.

If you asked me then what drug addiction would be, I would look at you like an idiot, and I would say, "The drug is not." It's not hard to understand. I thought I had just met her in my own life. We can all explain it. If I, you and the first twenty people we meet on the street, enjoyed one of the very powerful drugs for twenty days, then our bodies would need it at the end. These substances would hinder us so chemically that we would feel a terrible desire to enjoy them. We would be addicted. It's addiction.

One of the ways in which this theory originated was experimentation with rats. The conclusions of these attempts came to the attention of Americans for the first time at the beginning of 80. years ago by the famous Partnership For A Drug Free America. Maybe you remember her. The experiment is simple. Place the rat in the cage, alone, with two bottles of water. One is just water. In the second water containing heroin or cocaine. Almost every repetition of the experiment, the rat becomes directly obsessed with water with the drug and will give more and more doses until it is killed.

The ad explains, "Only one drug is so addictive that nine out of ten laboratory rats will use it further and further until they die. It's called cocaine. And he can do the same with you. "

But in 70. years as a professor of psychology in Vancouver on behalf of Bruce Alexander noticed something weird about this experiment. The rat is completely in the cage. He has nothing to do but to take drugs. He wondered what would happen if we tried it differently? And so Professor Alexander built the Rat Park (see transl: googlete Rat Park Experiment). It was a luxurious cage where the rats used to play colored balls, tunnels they could run up and down, and a bunch of friends: all that a rat might want in life. How is it going to be with drugs now ?, Alexander said.

Dependency and experiment

Even in Rat Rat Park, of course, they tried both bottles of water because they did not know what they were in. But what followed was extremely surprising.

Rats that had a pleasant life did not like the water with the drug. Most of the time they avoided and consume less than a quarter of the drug compared to isolated rats. None of them died. While all the rats, who were lonely and unhappy, became heavily dependent, none of the rats living in a happy environment had reached them.

The problem is not within you. The problem is in your cage.
At first I thought it was something typical of rats that did not concern people - but then I discovered that at the same time as the experiments in Ratski Park, there was an extensive attempt on people on the same topic, which brought very impressive results.

His name was the War in Vietnam. According to the magazine news Time the use of heroin among American soldiers was "as widespread as chewing gum". And this claim is supported by solid evidence: according to a study published in Archives of General Psychiatry in Vietnam, became addicted to heroin by about 20 percent of US soldiers. Many people, of course, have been terrified of the return of a huge number of addicts until the war is over.

But according to the results of the same study, about 95 per cent of dependent soldiers just left home when they returned home. Few have gone for healing. They came back from the terrible cage to the comforting and they no longer needed the drug.

Professor Alexander claims that this discovery fundamentally overturns both the right-wing claim that addiction is a moral failure caused by over-indulgence, as well as a version of liberals that addiction is a brain disease controlled by a chemical. He even claims that addiction is an adaptation mechanism. The problem is not within you. The problem is in your cage.

After the first phase of Krysi Park, Professor Alexander went on with his experiment. He repeated his early experiments, in which the rats were left alone and became compulsively dependent on the drug supplied. He let them use fifty-seven days - this would definitely be enough to create dependence. He then removed them from the insulating cages and placed them in the Krysi Park. He wanted to know if, when you come to such a stage of dependence, your brain is so overwhelmed by the drug that you will not recover. Will the drug take control over you?

There was another huge surprise. Although the rats had mild withdrawal symptoms for a while, they soon ceased with heavy use and returned to normal life. A nice cage has saved them. (See the book for complete references to all the studies I am discussing here.)

Dependency and experimental results

When I became acquainted with this information, I was first confused. How is it possible? This new theory attacks so radically everything we ever told when it seemed to me that it could not be true. But the more I spoke with the more scientists, the more I read through their studies, the more I discovered facts that made no sense-or rather made sense only with this new approach.

I will now give you an example of what is happening around you and it can easily happen to you one day. If your car breaks down today and you break your thigh bone, you'll probably get morphine, a substance almost identical to heroin (in Britain, where the author is, you'll even get a real heroin). There will be a lot of people in the hospital who will also be given morphine for a long time as a painkiller.

The drug prescribed by your doctor will be much cleaner and more potent than the substance they buy street addicts from dealers - they dilute it. So if the old theory of addiction is true - drugs would cause your body to need - it is obvious what should happen. Many people, after being released from the hospital, should go to search for heroin to satisfy their desire for opiates.

But the fact is surprisingly different: it is almost never done. As the first of many, Canadian physician Gabor Mate explained this to me: users of medical morphine or heroin simply stop, even after months of use. The same drug, used for the same length of time, will make desperate addicts from street users, while medical doctors will not do so.

If you still believe - as I believed - that addiction is due to chemical "coughing" in the brain, it makes no sense. But if you accept Bruce Alexander's theory, everything will fit in its place. Street addicts are similar to rats in the first cage, isolated, alone, with only one source of consolation. The situation of a medical patient is more like a world of rats from the other cage. He returns home, among the people he loves. The drug is the same, but the environment is different.

This is the insight that concerns a far wider area than the understanding of dependence. Professor Peter Cohen says people have a deep need to establish relationships and create emotional connections. Thus, in our lives, we achieve satisfaction. If we can not connect with each other, we will connect with any substitute that's on hand - whether it's a roulette routine or a needle puncture. According to Cohen, we should stop talking about addiction and say it more as a bond. ' A heroin addict has made a connection with heroin because he has been unable to combine fully with anything else.

So the opposite of dependence is not sobriety. It is close to other people.

When I learned all this, I was convinced - but I could not get rid of mythical doubts. Are these scientists saying that chemical properties do not matter? That's what they explained to me - you can become gambling addicted, and nobody thinks you're sticking up the packs of cards. You can have all the symptoms of addiction without any chemicals. I visited the Gamblers' Anonymous (Anonymous) group meeting in Las Vegas (with the permission of all those who knew I was an observer). These people were as obviously addicted as the cocaine and heroinists I met in my life. And the roulette does not show any hooks in the brain.

But chemicals have to play at least some role, I thought. It turns out that there is an experiment that gives a very precise answer to this question. I read about him in Richard DeGrandpre's book The Cult of Pharmacology (The Cult of Pharmacology).

Addiction called nicotine

Everyone agrees that cigarette smoking is one of the most addictive behaviors. Chemical "hooks" in tobacco come from a substance called nicotine. When he was from 90. years ago developed nicotine patches, it brought a strong wave of optimism - cigarette smokers can indulge their chemicals, without all the other, unclean (and deadly) aspects of cigarette smoking. They will be free.

But the Office of the Surgeon General found that only 17,7 percent of smokers can quit cigarettes with nicotine patches. This is even a substantial number. If the chemical properties of the drug are responsible for 17,7 percent of the phenomenon of addiction, it means millions of destroyed lives on a global scale. But again, we can see that the story that taught us about the Cause of Addiction is real, but it is only a small part of a much more complex reality.

These facts lead to extensive implications regarding the meaningfulness of the centennial war against drugs. This massive war, which, as I have seen, kills people all over the world, from shopping centers in Mexico to Liverpool Street, is based on the claim that we have to physically eradicate a variety of chemicals because they control the minds of people and cause addiction. But if addiction does not cause drugs - if the main cause is the breakdown of interpersonal relationships and isolation - then the whole war makes no sense.

It is sadly ironic that the war on drugs actually worsens all the root causes of addiction. I have, for example, visited the prison in Arizona - Tent City - where prisoners are closed in small stone insulated cages ("The Hole"), sometimes for weeks. So they are punished for drug use. This treatment is so close to empty cages, in which rats fall into deadly addiction, as I can imagine. And when these prisoners get out, they will be unemployed because of their record in the criminal record - which ensures that they will be cut off from society even more. I saw where he was doing, on the stories of people I met all over the world.

There is an alternative. It is possible to create a system that will help drug addicts reintegrate into the world - and leave the addiction behind.

How did Portugal do it?

It's not a theory. It's happening. I saw it in practice. Nearly fifteen years ago, Portugal was one of the worst drug problems in Europe, with one percent of the population being heroin-dependent. They tried to fight drugs and the problem was getting worse. When they eventually decided for a radically different procedure. They decriminalized all the drugs, and all the money that had previously been spent on prosecuting and imprisoning addicts began to re-establish these people's connections with themselves and with society.

The most important step is to provide them with sheltered housing and subsidized employment so their life makes some sense to have them get out of bed in the morning. I watched people help them, at cozy and friendly clinics, learn to re-perceive their own feelings after years of traumatization and drug abuse.

One example that I met was a group of addicts who got a loan to start a clearing company. Suddenly, they became a bunch of people with a commitment to each other and to the society responsible for the care of each other.

The results of this decision are already known. An independent study he conducted British Journal of Criminology, found that since the complete decriminalization, the incidence of addiction decreased and the number of injecting drug users decreased by 50 percent. I have to repeat: the number of injecting drug users has decreased by 50 percent. Decriminalization has been so successful that very few people in Portugal want to go back to the old system.

The main opponent of the decriminalization was Joao Figueira, head of the Portuguese anti-drug police, in 2000. He uttered all the terrible warnings we'd expect from the diary Daily Mail or Fox News. But when we met in Lisbon, he told me that none of what he predicted was done - and today he hopes the whole world will follow the example of Portugal.

This topic does not only concern addicted people I like. It is all about us because it makes us look at ourselves with new eyes. Human beings are animals with a need for mutual connection. We need proximity and love. The most wise sentence of the twentieth century was EM Forster: "the most important thing is to get close" ("only connect."). But we have created an environment and culture that cuts us from the possibilities of approximation and instead offers them only a parody in the form of the Internet. Increasing the problem of addiction is a symptom of a deeper disease in our way of life - by constantly focusing our eyes on other and other glittering objects that we should buy instead of looking at human beings around us.

The writer George Monbiot called our time the age of loneliness. We have created a human society in which it is easier than ever to cut off from all human relationships. Bruce Alexander, the creator of Rat's Park, told me that we had talked too much about individual healing from addiction for too long. Now we need to talk about the healing of society - how can we all co-recover from a disease of isolation that falls on us like a thick fog.

But this new evidence for us is not just a political challenge. Do not just change our attitudes. A real change needs to happen in our hearts.

Can we love a dependent person?

It is difficult to love a dependent person. When I looked at the dependent people I love, I have always been tempted to follow the rule of "harsh love," such as the reality show Intervention - Tell the addicted person to pick up or cut him off. They recommend you, if the addicted person can not stop, avoid him. It is the logic of the war against drugs, taken over into our private lives. But in reality I made sure that such an approach would only deepen the dependence of our loved ones - and we could lose them completely. I returned home, determined to be addicted people in my life closer than ever before - to take care to know that I love them unconditionally, whether they stop or do not.

When I came home from my long journey, I found my ex-boyfriend lying on the bed for guests in my apartment and knocking in my abs. And I looked at him differently. We have been waging war against addicts for a hundred years. I wiped his forehead and thought that instead we had to sing songs of love all the time.

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