The cure for addiction

Few federal policies have been as misunderstood, mutated, and muddled as the “War on Drugs.” You might call it our own Hundred Years’ War, because it was in 1914 that Congress passed the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act, the first attempt by the U.S. government to control behavior-altering substances—in that case, opiates and coca products like cocaine. Prohibition, which followed a few years later, opened another phase of the conflict. It’s a war that the majority of Americans would say we’ve lost.

Johann Hari agrees. He’s the author of Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Bloomsbury USA, 2015), a book that claims to turn current policy on its head. In a piece for the Huffington Post, Hari cuts to the chase: “almost everything we’ve been told about addiction is wrong.” He used to subscribe to the common belief that drug addiction was a “chemical hook” that altered the user’s brain, and medical intervention was central to its cure. He cites the harrowing “junkie rat” advertisement of the 1980s, where a solitary rat in a cage, offered water and cocaine, keeps coming back to the drug until it kills him.

There’s more to the story, though: Canadian researchers tried placing rats in social settings with comfortable cages, adequate food, and plenty of rat buddies to play with. When offered cocaine, the rats tried and shunned it. “Addicted” rats, introduced to the community, gave up drugs. Conclusion: Chemicals weren’t the problem, isolation was. Around the same time these experiments were going on, Vietnam veterans were returning home. In the strangeness and disconnection—not to mention terror—of their deployment, about 20 percent of American GIs had become heroin users. But once returned to friends and families, almost all of the supposed addicts stopped using without intervention. They simply stopped.

Here’s Hari’s startling conclusion: “It is not good for the man to be alone.” Drug addiction is neither a moral failing nor a disease; it’s a desperate attempt of lonely people to connect. “[W]e have talked exclusively about individual recovery from addiction,” Hari writes. “We need now to talk about social recovery”—that is, how do we counteract our isolationist tendencies, reinforced by electronic media, and learn to bond?

A very good question, and to Hari’s credit he doesn’t see government as the answer. It’s time to declare an armistice in the War on Drugs and begin a process of reconstruction, but that’s not primarily the government’s responsibility. This new scenario applies to all of us; it “forces us to change our hearts.”

But what causes loneliness? We choose it. Who breaks connections? We do. Better to rule our own little world than to serve in another’s. It’s the same temptation for the clean and sober as for the addicted. Readers commenting on Hari’s post tell heartbreaking stories of loved ones who killed themselves with drugs, in spite of the unconditional love offered them. Our problems go deeper because we’ve broken our primary connection, and that’s with God—the One who determined it wasn’t good for us to be alone.