Credit: thelawyermichigan.com
It is now one hundred years since drugs were first banned — and all through this long century of waging war on drugs, we have been told a story about addiction by our teachers and by our governments. This story is so deeply ingrained in our minds that we take it for granted. It seems obvious. It seems manifestly true. Until I set off three and a half years ago on a 30,000-mile journey for my new book, Chasing The Scream: The First And Last Days of the War on Drugs, to figure out what is really driving the drug war, I believed it too. But what I learned on the road is that almost everything we have been told about addiction is wrong — and there is a very different story waiting for us, if only we are ready to hear it.
If we truly absorb this new story, we will have to change a lot more than the drug war. We will have to change ourselves.
I learned it from an […]
While the cited article is interesting, it, like so many others, addresses only a small part of the drug problem. One of the biggest causes of the destruction by drug abuse is the anti-drug laws themselves, because the use of the drugs causes less damage than the psycho-social problems caused by turning sufferers into criminals.
This book, free on-line, from the early 1970s, is still a pretty comprensive study of drugs and their use and abuse, and the laws related to this. It is not really obsolete, in spite of its age.
http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/library/studies/cu/cumenu.htm
This video, by Dr. Gabor Mate, gives additional insight into the drug problem.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bk4B7BFxYR4
This article is an example of the kind of “aha” moment people outside of the profession have from time to time – and it drives me crazy. I’m a licensed clinical counselor and those of us in the profession know full well that while drugs (prescribed & illegal) can have a profound affect on the brain you have to get to what is driving the addiction. The medical model of treatment has overshadowed the psychological and spiritual aspects of addiction for far too long. There are many complicated reasons for addiction and I won’t go into them here. However, I’d like to address two aspects referenced in this article – in a very simplified form. Firstly, when a person is in pain and is prescribed an appropriate dosage of medication (such as oxycontin, one of the most popular opiate pain meds) the body takes in the medication to the point where the pain is relieved. If the dosage is higher than needed or the person abuses the medication and takes more than is prescribed then the medication can become addicted and the medication may produce a “high.” Not all people become addicted when the abuse a drug or use it recreationally. Note that a person can become dependent upon a medication, such as methadone for opiate addiction or insulin for diabetes but may not be “addicted” per se. The person needs the medication for their condition but does not get a “high” or other secondary reaction from it. Secondly, while many clients want to recover from an addiction they are consciously unaware of the elements in their environment and/or a history of trauma that is fueling their addictions. Addictions are a symptom not the “dis-ease” itself. Most behavior healthcare practitioners know this. The particular cause of someone’s addiction is unique to that person and always has underlying origins. One person’s trauma may seem incidental to someone else while another’s trauma seems overwhelmingly unimaginable. Everyone has a different history and responds differently to their experiences. And trauma is cumulative. As you’re probably aware, war veterans who have a childhood history of trauma (abuse, neglect, lack of appropriate nurturing) have a much higher incidence of PTSD. A person’s psyche can take just so much. So, while I am glad that this article acknowledges that addiction is not “just addiction” I, and others like me in the field, are frustrated that society and the medical community (not all, but most) insist on reducing human beings to chemical interactions in the brain. That may be part of it but is it not even close to the whole story.