“Drug addiction is an adaptation to the environment. To a bad environment»

You claim that there is a connection between drug and other addictions and traumatic experiences. In many cases, people try to numb the pain with drugs because they live in unbearable conditions. Tell us more about it.

This idea struck me at the time. Until I began to study this topic, I did not know anything about it. The topic is very personal for me. One of my relatives suffered from a very severe drug addiction. If you had asked me four years ago why heroin addiction occurs, I would have looked at you like you were an idiot and said it comes from heroin. We have been told this version of addiction for 100 years, and it is so ingrained in our minds that it seems even stupid to discuss it. We put it this way: if you, me, and 20 random passers-by use heroin for 20 days, eventually we will get hooked on a chemical hook. This is the theory we believe in. For the first time I began to doubt this version after a conversation with one doctor. After all, if a person is hit by a car and is hospitalized with fractures, he will be given large doses of diamorphine. And diamorphine is the same heroin, and much more pure (100%) than the one sold on the streets (5-10%). Any hospital in any developed country will give it for a long time. And what, after that, it turns out that the person has become a drug addict?

• What does help mean to you?

By the way, when my mother was in the hospital at an advanced age, the doctors were so afraid of a possible addiction that sometimes they refused to give her such drugs even with severe pain.

It’s horrible. This is a complete misunderstanding of the nature of addiction. There have been large-scale studies that have shown that the medical use of painkillers is almost never addictive. I learned the reason for this from talking with an amazing person, his name is Bruce Alexander (Bruce Alexander). He is a professor based in Vancouver. Bruce explained to me that the old addiction theory was based on a series of experiments done in the first half of the XNUMXth century. The experiments are simple. The rat was placed in a cage and given two vessels of water — one contained pure water, the other had heroin or cocaine added to the water. The rats became addicted very quickly, and almost all ended up driving themselves to death.

In the 1970s, Bruce thought, “Wait a minute. We’re putting a rat in an empty cage. There’s nothing to do but take drugs. What if we try something else?» And he created Rat Park, it was like heaven for rats, it was full of cheese, full of friends and sex, colored balls, tunnels and everything that rats like. And there were two of the same vessels. And of course, rats try to drink from both. But here’s what’s interesting. In Rat Park, they don’t like drugged water. They hardly drink it. Nobody has ever overdosed. Not a single rat began to constantly drink from this vessel in such a way that it resembled addiction. But you can give a lot of similar examples with people.

Bruce says that both «right» and «left» addiction theories are wrong. For the “right” this is a moral problem: a person allows himself to be immersed in hedonism. For the «leftists» this is a physiological problem: the drug subjugates the brain, and a person cannot do anything. And Bruce argues that it is not in our moral qualities and not in our brain, but in our «cage». Addiction is adaptation to the environment. Someone who lives a crappy, aloof life, with no meaning, no connection to others, is more likely to become an addict than a happy person with many social connections. Here we are, for example, could we drink vodka now? We don’t drink. Why? We have a hobby. Our lives have meaning.

• How to save a loved one from addiction?

Yes, we make a different choice.

We have a purpose in life, and we do not want to fall out of this life.

We don’t have this desperate need to jam our psyches.

J.H.: Exactly, exactly. Coincidentally, at the same time as the «Rat Park» another large-scale «experiment» was taking place — with people. I’m talking about the Vietnam War. In Vietnam, 20% of American soldiers used heroin regularly. If you look at the news and newspapers of that time, there was a real panic about this. People thought — believing in the old theory of addiction — «My God, when the war is over, we will have hundreds of thousands of drug addicts on the streets in America.» And what happened? They returned home and the vast majority simply stopped using. Some ended up in rehabilitation centers, they didn’t have any breakdowns, they just left because they returned from the hellish jungle, where they could be killed at any moment, to their quiet town in Kansas, where they have family, friends and work. They seemed to be transplanted from the first cage to the second.

The War on Drugs is based on the idea that addiction is caused by chemicals and we must physically eliminate these substances from all over the world. If, in fact, most people who try these substances do not develop addiction, if another factor is needed for its appearance, then it obviously makes sense to deal with this very factor. In fact, I see more global conclusions. We know from history that there have been certain periods of addiction epidemics. American Indians survived the genocide, and those who survived almost without exception became alcoholics or drug addicts. In England in the 1980th century, villagers were driven off their lands, they moved to nightmarish urban slums. Endemic alcoholism began, called «gin madness.» It was believed that the genie subjugates a person and deprives him of his will. Why did crack become so popular in the XNUMXs? Because of the destruction of American industry, the closure of factories, the disappearance of labor unions…

We see that these epidemics usually occur during hard times. In addition, we have created a society in which many of our fellow citizens, including several people close to me, simply cannot bear to live. If we want to bring them back to reality, we will have to greatly improve this reality by thinking about why there are so many who do not want to live in our society of over-individualism and over-capitalism.

But are there countries and regions where this reality is being made a little more livable, in particular, by improving drug laws? And does it work?

J.H.: I have long put off traveling to countries where these methods are being tested, because if I saw that they did not work, the book that I wrote would turn out to be the most depressing book in the world. But what I saw just shocked me.

In 2000, Portugal had the worst drug problem, one of the worst in Europe, worse than here in our country. One percent of the population was addicted to heroin. They tried the American approach, police measures, tougher penalties. And every year the problem only got worse. One day, the prime minister, along with the leader of the opposition, decided to convene a working group of scientists and doctors to develop a new policy, and they promised in advance to take into account any recommendations from specialists. The crisis was so severe that political considerations faded into the background. Experts issued a verdict: the decriminalization of all substances — from marijuana to crack. And the second — extremely important — recommendation: to redirect all the money that is spent on the arrest of drug addicts, their trial and their detention in prison to the best addiction treatment programs. But the main thing is that they learned lessons from the experiments with the Rat Park. They restore the links of these people with society. The most important thing is subsidized jobs. Here is a man who was a car mechanic, became a drug addict, life went downhill. When he is ready to return to society, the state can pay half of his salary if the employer agrees to hire him for a year. The goal of the program is to give every drug addict in Portugal a purpose and meaning in life, something worth getting out of bed every morning for.

The program is almost 15 years old. During this time, the number of injecting drug users has decreased by 50%. All studies show that the number of drug addicts, the number of overdoses and the number of HIV infections has been greatly reduced.

• Risk zones in the life of adolescents: what to look for?

One of the most inspiring stories I included in the book took place in Canada. This is the story of a man named Bud Osborn, a homeless drug addict in one of the districts of Vancouver. He saw his friends die one by one. They shot behind dumpsters so that the cops wouldn’t see. But if no one sees them, no one can help in case of an overdose. And Bud decided that he had to change this situation. But what can a homeless drug addict do? He gathered the same drug addicts and invited them to patrol the surrounding alleys and, if someone overdosed, call an ambulance. After a few months, the number of overdose cases dropped sharply, which in itself is good. But most importantly, these people have changed their minds about themselves. They began to think: maybe we are not such scum as they think we are? We can save lives.

Bud learned that legal injection parlors had opened up in Frankfurt where you could come and inject, which dramatically reduced the number of overdoses. And I decided that they also need such offices. Then they began to relentlessly pursue the mayor of Vancouver, Philip Owen (Philip Owen). Oeun is a right-wing politician, a businessman who believed that all drug addicts should be arrested and taken into custody at the nearest military base. And so they followed him for two years: they carried a coffin with them, on which was written something like “Philip Owen, how many more people will die before we have legal injection rooms?” In the end, Owen wondered: who the hell are these people? He went to this disadvantaged area and met with them. And then he authorized the opening of the first legal injection parlor in North America. It’s been 10 years now and the results are amazing. The number of cases of overdose decreased by 80%. It also launched the first heroin replacement therapy program on the continent called NAOMI. Average life expectancy in the area has increased by 10 years. Such changes are comparable to the effect of the end of the war.

Bud died last year, in his early 60s, but lived as a homeless drug addict in the midst of the war on drugs, and this could not but take a toll on his health. After his death, the streets in the area were blocked and a memorial opened, with crowds of people present, many of whom knew that they were alive only thanks to him. We all sometimes feel that we are powerless to do something about such global problems. It is worth remembering that we can actually do a lot more than we think. Bud was a homeless drug addict. It is difficult to imagine a person below him on the social ladder. But he made a revolution that saved thousands of lives. Thanks to him, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that drug addicts have an inalienable right to life, and this implies that there should be safe injection rooms, right? So they will never be able to close them again.

In defense of the «war on drugs» there is only one thing to say: we have tried this method well. We have been trying it for 100 years. Alternative methods are now being tried all over the world, and they really work.

Johanna Hari met with host Paul Jay on March 6, 2015 on Reality Asserts Itself. See the full interview at Online news online channel The Real News Network.