Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (36 page)

I felt a little baffled. These are the central metaphors on which the standard theory of addiction is built, and this was the most distinguished expert on the matter, speaking at a conference with these ideas at its very heart. But when I asked him the most basic questions about how this relates to the wider environment, he said—in a friendly way—that he’s never really thought about them. This is the man who set up the main center for drug research in the world, and it was plain he hadn’t actually heard of these alternative theories. He didn’t seem to know who Gabor or Bruce were, or what people like them have shown in their studies.

To be fair, later, when I read through the scientific literature, I realized this is not a failing of DuPont’s. It seems to be standard for scientists in this field, even the very best. They overwhelmingly focus on biochemistry and the brain. The questions Bruce and Gabor look at—how people use drugs out here on the streets—are ignored. Nobody, I kept being told, wants to fund studies into that.

Why would this be? Professor Carl Hart at Columbia University is one of the leading experts in the world on how drugs affect the brain. He tells me that when you explain these facts to the scientists who have built their careers on the simplistic old ideas about drugs, they effectively say to you: “Look, man—this is my position. Leave me alone.” This is what they know. This is what they have built their careers on. If you offer ideas that threaten to eclipse theirs—they just ignore you. I ask Professor Hart: Can our central idea about drugs really be as hollow as that? “Can it be as hollow? I think you have discovered—it is as hollow as that . . . Look at the evidence. It’s hollow . . . It’s smoke and mirrors.”

But why, then, do these ideas persist? Why haven’t the scientists with the better and more accurate ideas eclipsed these old theories? Hart tells me bluntly: Almost all the funding for research into illegal drugs is provided by governments waging the drug war—and they only commission research that reinforces the ideas we already have about drugs. All these different theories, with their radical implications—why would governments want to fund those?

Eric Sterling is the lawyer who wrote the drug laws for the United States between 1979 and 1989. When every major drug law was being drafted, he was at the table shaping it into words. When I met him in his Maryland office, he told me that if any government-funded scientist ever produced research suggesting anything beyond the conventional drugs-hijack-brains theory, he knows exactly what would happen. The head of NIDA would be called before a congressional committee and asked if she had gone mad. She might be fired. She would certainly be stopped. All the people conducting the science for NIDA—and remember, that’s 90 percent of research on the globe into illegal drugs—know this.

So they steer away from all this evidence and look only at the chemical effects of the drugs themselves. That’s not fake—but it’s only a small part of the picture. There is a powerful political brake on exploring these deeper truths.

And that, it turns out, is what happened to Bruce. Once the nature of their findings became clear, the money for the Rat Park experiment provided by his university was abruptly cut off, before the team had a chance to investigate many of the questions it raised. Years later, Bruce was told by a senior figure at the University that that was because they found it embarrassing. Something so far outside the conventional understanding of addiction seemed crazy.

To a sober-minded military brat raised in a conservative family, the experience of Rat Park and the heroin famines was startling, and it changed how Bruce saw the world. “It’s amazing to discover that something which is so centrally believed is false. It’s just false,” he said to me.

At first he expected that his findings would blast open the field of addiction science and start a whole slew of investigations into how it really works. He was ready for “a ticker tape parade,” he says. Instead, all his findings were disregarded, as if they had never happened. “That evidence like this can be so completely disregarded—it’s amazing,” he says. “I suppose you could say it’s poisoned my entire outlook on life.”

Nobody has ever received funding to replicate the Rat Park experiment.

As I walked the streets of Vancouver trying to digest all this, I began to think again about the very beginning of this story, and I saw something I had not seen before.

There were three questions I had never understood. Why did the drug war begin when it did, in the early twentieth century? Why were people so receptive to Harry Anslinger’s message? And once it was clear that it was having the opposite effect to the one that was intended—that it was increasing addiction and supercharging crime—why was it intensified, rather than abandoned?

I think Bruce Alexander’s breakthrough may hold the answer.

“Human beings only become addicted when they cannot find anything better to live for and when they desperately need to fill the emptiness that threatens to destroy them,” Bruce explained in a lecture in London
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in 2011. “The need to fill an inner void is not limited to people who become drug addicts, but afflicts the vast majority of people of the late modern era, to a greater or lesser degree.”

A sense of dislocation has been spreading through our societies like a bone cancer throughout the twentieth century. We all feel it: we have become richer, but less connected to one another. Countless studies prove
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this is more than a hunch, but here’s just one: the average number of close friends a person has has been steadily falling. We are increasingly alone, so we are increasingly addicted. “We’re talking about learning to live with the modern age,” Bruce believes. The modern world has many incredible benefits, but it also brings with it a source of deep stress that is unique: dislocation. “Being atomized and fragmented and all on [your] own—that’s no part of human evolution and it’s no part of the evolution of any society,” he told me.

And then there is another kicker. At the same time that our bonds with one another have been withering, we are told—incessantly, all day, every day, by a vast advertising-shopping machine—to invest our hopes and dreams in a very different direction: buying and consuming objects. Gabor tells me: “The whole economy is based around appealing to and heightening every false need and desire, for the purpose of selling products. So people are always trying to find satisfaction and fulfillment in products.” This is a key reason why, he says, “we live in a highly addicted society.” We have separated from one another and turned instead to things for happiness—but things can only ever offer us the thinnest of satisfactions.

This is where the drug war comes in. These processes began in the early twentieth century—and the drug war followed soon after. The drug war wasn’t just driven, then, by a race panic. It was driven by an addiction panic—and it had a real cause. But the cause wasn’t a growth in drugs. It was a growth in dislocation.

The drug war began when it did because we were afraid of our own addictive impulses, rising all around us because we were so alone. So, like an evangelical preacher who rages against gays because he is afraid of his own desire to have sex with men, are we raging against addicts because we are afraid of our own growing vulnerability to addiction?

After I met Bruce for the last time, I sat on a bench in Pigeon Park, a small concrete sprawl on the Downtown Eastside where addicts drink and talk and buy drugs, and tried to understand: How does all this change the way we should think about the drug war now?

Bruce says that at the moment, when we think about recovery from addiction, we see it through only one lens—the individual. We believe the problem is in the addict and she has to sort it out for herself, or in a circle of her fellow addicts.

But this is, he believes, like looking at the rats in the isolated cages and seeing them as morally flawed: it misses the point. He argues we need to refocus our eyes, as if staring at a Magic Eye picture, to see that the problem isn’t in them, it’s in the culture. Stop thinking only about individual recovery, he argues, and start thinking about “social recovery.”

If we think like this, the question we need to answer with our drug policy shifts. It is no longer: How do we stop addiction through threats and force, and scare people away from drugs in the first place? It becomes: How do we start to rebuild a society where we don’t feel so alone and afraid, and where we can form healthier bonds? How do we build a society where we look for happiness in one another rather than in consumption?

These are radical questions, with implications far beyond the drug war, and bigger than this book. But they have to be asked. We haven’t been able to reduce addiction, it occurs to me, because we have been asking the wrong questions.

Bruce says this dynamic is producing something even darker than the drug war. Cut off from one another, isolated, we are all becoming addicts—and our biggest addiction, as a culture, is buying and consuming stuff we don’t need and don’t even really want.

We all know deep down it doesn’t make us happy, to be endlessly working to buy shiny consumer objects we have seen in advertisements. But we keep doing it, day after day. It in fact occupies most of our time on earth. We could slow down. We could work less and buy less. It would prevent the environment—our habitat—from being systematically destroyed. But we don’t do it, because we are isolated in our individual cages. In that environment, the idea of consuming less, in fact, fills us with panic. All this stuff, Bruce believes, is filling the hole where normal human connection should be.

Unless we learn the lesson of Rat Park, Bruce says we will face a worse problem than the drug war. We will find ourselves on a planet trashed by the manic consumption that is, today, our deepest and most destructive addiction.

Over the months that I listened repeatedly to the recordings of Bruce and Gabor and tried to tease out what they were telling me, I kept circling back to an obvious question. They convinced me there are significant factors in addiction that have nothing to do with the chemicals themselves. But it would be absurd to say the chemicals play no role at all in, say, cigarette or crack addiction. So how much really is due to the chemicals, and how much is due to the social factors? What’s the ratio?

As I read more, I stumbled across—in the work of an amazing scientist called Richard DeGrandpre—an experiment that gives us a quite precise answer, in percentage terms. You may well be taking part in it right now.

When nicotine patches where invented in the early 1990s, public health officials were thrilled. They believed in the theory of addiction that almost everyone believes in: addiction is caused by chemical hooks that are hidden in the drug. You use a drug for a while, and your body starts to crave and need the chemical in a physical way. This isn’t hard to grasp. Anybody who has tried to quit caffeine knows that chemical hooks are real: I am trying it as I type this, and my hands are very slightly shaking, my head is aching, and I just snapped at the guy sitting opposite me in the library.