Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (30 page)

But while it was a crime away from the Temple and other confined spaces, it was a glory within it. According to these accounts, it was Studio 54 spliced with St. Peter’s Basilica—revelry with religious reverence.

They believed the drugs brought them closer to the gods, or even made it possible for them to become gods themselves. The classicist Dr. D.C.A. Hillman wrote that the “founding fathers” of the Western world

were drug users,
³²
plain and simple: they grew the stuff, they sold the stuff, and more important, they used the stuff . . . The ancient world didn’t have a Nancy Reagan, it didn’t wage a billion-dollar drug war, it didn’t imprison people who used drugs, and it didn’t embrace sobriety as a virtue. It indulged . . . and from this world in which drugs were a universally accepted part of life sprang art, literature, science, and philosophy . . . The West would not have survived without these so-called junkies and drug dealers.

There was some political grumbling for years that women were behaving too freely during their trances, but this annual festival ended only when the drug party crashed into Christianity. The early Christians wanted there to be one route to ecstasy, and one route only—through prayer to their God. You shouldn’t feel anything that profound or pleasurable except in our ceremonies at our churches. The first tugs towards prohibition were about power, and purity of belief. If you are going to have one God and one Church, you need to stop experiences that make people feel that they can approach God on their own. It is no coincidence that when new drugs come along, humans often use religious words to describe them, like ecstasy. They are often competing for the same brain space—our sense of awe and joy.

So when the emperor Constantine converted to Christianity and brought the Empire with him, the rituals at the Temple at Eleusis were doomed. They were branded a cult and shut down by force. The new Christianity would promote wine only in tiny sips.
³³
Intoxication had to be sparing. This “forcible repression
³⁴
by Christianity,” Walton explains, “represents the beginning of systematic repression of the intoxication impulse in the lives of Western citizens.”

Yet in every generation after, some humans would try to rebuild their own Temple at Eleusis—in their own minds, and wherever they could clear a space free of local Anslingers.

Harry Anslinger, it turns out, represented a trend running right back to the ancient world.

When Sigmund Freud first suggested that everybody has elaborate sexual fantasies, that it is as natural as breathing, he was dismissed as a pervert and lunatic. People wanted to believe that sexual fantasy was something that happened in other people—filthy people, dirty people. They took the parts of their subconscious that generated these wet dreams and daydreams and projected them onto somebody else, the depraved people Over There, who had to be stopped. Stuart Walton and the philosopher Terence McKenna both write that we are at this stage with our equally universal desire to seek out altered mental states. McKenna explains: “We are discovering
³⁵
that human beings are creatures of chemical habit with the same horrified disbelief as when the Victorians discovered that humans are creatures of sexual fantasy and obsession.”

Just as we are rescuing the sex drive from our subconscious and from shame, so we need to take the intoxication drive out into the open where it can breathe.
³⁶
Stuart Walton calls for a whole new field of human knowledge called “intoxicology.”
³⁷
He writes: “Intoxication plays,
³⁸
or has played, a part in the lives of virtually everybody who has ever lived . . . To seek to deny it is not only futile; it is a dereliction of an entirely constitutive part of who we are.”

After twenty-five years of watching stoned mice, drunken elephants, and tripping mongooses, Ronald K. Siegel tells me he suspects he has learned something about this. “We’re not so different from the other animal life-forms on this planet,” he says.

When he sees people raging against all drug use, he is puzzled. “They’re denying their own chemistry,” he says. “The brain produces endorphins. When does it produce endorphins? In stress, and in pain. What are endorphins? They are morphine-like compounds. It’s a natural occurrence in the brain that makes them feel good . . . People feel euphoric sometimes. These are chemical changes—the same kind of chemical changes, with the same molecular structures, that these plants [we use to make our drugs] are producing . . . We’re all producing the same stuff.”

Indeed, he continues, “the experience you have in orgasm is partially chemical—it’s a drug. So people deny they want this? Come on! . . . It’s fun. It’s enjoyable. And it’s chemical. That’s intoxication.” He seems for a moment to think back over all the animals guzzling drugs he has watched over all these years. “I don’t see,” he says, “any difference in where the chemical came from.”

This is in us. It is in our brains. It is part of who we are.

But this leaves us with another mystery. If the drive to get intoxicated is in all of us, and if 90 percent of people can use drugs without becoming addicted, what is happening with the 10 percent who can’t? What is different about them? It is a question I had been circling all my life. As I looked for experts who might be able to answer this question, I discovered that a disproportionate number of them seemed to be clustered together—in just a few blocks of the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, in Canada.

Chapter 12

Terminal City

Ever since I was a child, I have been asking myself: What causes addiction? What
is
addiction? I had heard many explanations over the years. It’s a moral failing. It’s a disease. It’s carried in the genes. I believed this was, ultimately, a mystery—but when I arrived in Canada, I learned that a small band of dissident scientists has been uncovering the answers to my questions, almost unnoticed, for several decades now.

Their findings were so radically different from anything I had been told before that it took some time to absorb what they were really saying.

The story of how they came to their discoveries began in the last days of the Holocaust, when a Jewish mother smuggled her baby out of a ghetto.

Judith Lovi awoke from a dream that her parents were being murdered, to find that her breast milk had dried up. Her four-month-old baby, Gabor, was crying. He cried all the time. She had grown up as the daughter of a wealthy doctor, but now she was alone, crammed into a building with over a thousand people, all infested with lice, and there was shit smeared on the floor because the toilets were overflowing.

She knew she was not allowed out onto the streets until the afternoon, because when you were a Jew in the Budapest ghetto in 1944, walking out your door any earlier could get you shot. By then, the only milk
¹
she could buy for her baby would be sour.

She had married Andor just a few months ago, but now he was gone. He had been taken as a forced laborer. He might have been digging ditches for the Hungarian army or he might have been dead. She had no way of knowing. The only reason she woke up in the morning—the only reason she went on—was to look after her son, in the hope she could somehow get him out. But she doubted it. She believed that, at the age of twenty-four, she was going to be killed, along with her child.

Judith was right about her parents: at just about that time, they were being murdered. The last time she had seen them was on a train platform in Budapest.
²
She had wanted to go back to their town with them, but her father told her, by some instinct, not to leave the city. All around them, 80 percent of the country’s Jews were being rounded up and exterminated with remarkable efficiency. Her parents and sister were seized after they got home and sent to Auschwitz. As the Red Army troops began to besiege Budapest, the Nazis started taking Jews from the ghetto down to the river and shooting them outright.

Judith called the doctor because she was afraid that Gabor’s endless crying meant he was sick. “I’ll come,
³
of course,” the doctor told her, “but I should tell you—all my Jewish babies are crying.”

Many years and many thousands of miles from there, the memory of these infant screams would help Gabor—once he had become a doctor himself—to make a crucial discovery about the nature of addiction. He asked himself: How did the Jewish babies know they were in terrible danger? Why did they scream?

One day, Judith noticed that another woman in the ghetto was being visited by a Christian friend. She thrust Gabor at him and begged: Get him out of here. She gave this anonymous Christian the address of a place outside the ghetto where her friend was hiding, and she begged him to take her child there.

Without her baby, Judith was entirely alone, but she believed he, at least, would survive. Three weeks later, the Russian army liberated Budapest from the Nazis, and she quickly reclaimed her child. A year after that, she found Andor, weighing just ninety pounds and wearing a German army uniform because it was the only clothing
⁴
he could find. But it turned out his experience—of profound danger, of separation from his mother at a crucial moment—shaped the brain of baby Gabor in ways that would affect him for the rest of his life.

When Gabor was fifteen, his family finally made it out of Europe, to Vancouver, the farthest dot on the map of distant North America. There, Gabor was going to find a different kind of ghetto—and in it, two people who, along with him, would begin to solve the mystery of how you make an addict.

I knew what caused addiction before I even left London. We all do. As a culture, we have a story about how addiction works, and it’s a good one. It says that some substances are so chemically powerful that if you use them enough, they will hijack your brain. They will change your neurochemistry. They will give you a brain disease. After that, you will need the drug physically. So if you or I or the next ten people you pass on the street were to use an addictive drug every day for the next month, on day thirty, we’d all be addicts. Addiction, then, is the result of repeated exposure to certain very powerful chemicals.

When I looked at the people I love who have become addicts, that is what I believed had happened to them.

This model of addiction had been proven through animal experiments. Put a rat alone in a cage and give it unlimited quantities of cocaine, and nine times out of ten, it will use so much and so compulsively that it will kill itself.
⁵
Harry Anslinger and Henry Smith Williams agreed on very little, but they did agree on this. Anslinger thought the chemicals hooked you forever so you should be shut away; Smith Williams thought the chemicals hooked you forever so you should be given them by doctors forever. One was cruel and the other compassionate, but they were both sure that chemicals are the cause of the addicts’ wound. The fancy term for this is “the pharmaceutical theory of addiction.”

I did not realize there was another theory—with very different premises—until I happened across a book called
In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts
, written by Gabor Maté. I found its ideas confusing at first, but then they made me think. I realized then that I had to go to meet this man and get to know him. This account is based on my interviews with him, sitting in on his training sessions, and his writings, and on interviewing his former colleagues and patients.
⁶

When I first saw Gabor, it was at one of his training sessions for people who work with addicts. He is a slim man with hollow cheeks. He has olive skin and a low voice in which he speaks quickly, in perfectly formed sentences. There is—I noticed at once—an air of sadness about him. As he guided me through his life, I began to understand why.