A new view of addiction
By Deborah Parks
Not long ago an admitted addict wrote a letter to the Aroostook Republican explaining the horrors of her struggle with addiction and telling us she believes the answer to our meth problem is to ban Sudafed and other nasal decongestants that contain pseudoephedrine in our local pharmacies so no one has access to the ingredients to make meth.
When I read this I was a bit outraged. Why should I give up a perfectly good decongestant because someone else is abusing it? We haven’t stopped selling alcohol because people that we know and love have become alcoholics.
I’ve never believed the answer is more regulation. In other words, fighting harder will not win this war on drugs, but what is the alternative?
Recently the Huffington Post ran a blog by one of their contributors that caught my attention. The title of the blog was “The Likely Cause of Addiction Has Been Discovered, and It Is Not What You Think” by Johann Hari. Hari was writing this blog to share information he’d uncovered while researching the causes of addiction.
Hari has been touched by addiction in his own life and was looking for answers. That search for answers led to his book, “Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs”.
Hari begins his blog by telling us that the war on drugs has been fought for the past 100 years and no one is winning. Not the addict, not their family, not the government, not law enforcement. This will not come as a surprise to anyone, especially those of us who live in Aroostook County. Almost weekly we hear reports of a meth lab being discovered in another basement or mobile home. We also hear about the availability of prescription drugs for purchase in our communities and about treatment programs for addicts that are full and have waiting lists.
In Anthony Brino’s Nov. 4 article in the Aroostook Republican, “Forum: Addiction takes a village, individual solutions,” Dr. David Weed, chief medical officer at TAMC says that “For people addicted to heroin and opiate painkillers, one challenge is accessing medications like methadone and suboxone, which help quell and taper off the symptoms of withdrawal. For addiction and mental health broadly, the problem is a fragmented treatment system with shortages of both community-based supports and hospital treatment at the local level.” He goes on to say that there aren’t enough workers or programs available to meet the need.
So what is the answer? Hari believes the answer is human connectedness and purpose. He presents an example of a rat experiment. If a rat is put in a cage alone with a bottle of plain water and a bottle of water tainted with cocaine or heroin, he will choose the tainted water and won’t stop drinking it until he eventually kills himself.
According to Hari, a professor of psychology from Vancouver, Bruce Alexander, realized the rats were basically in solitary confinement and had no choice but to drink the tainted water because there was nothing else to do to stimulate their interest. Alexander recreated this experiment but chose to place the rats in a “Rat Park,” giving them companions, good food, and entertainment in the form of tunnels and colored balls to play with, and of course, the two water bottles. What he found was that the rats were no longer as interested in the tainted water.
Alexander made the connection that the rats in the happy environment had little interest in getting high to the point of death.
Hari goes on to explain the link for humans between connectedness and drug use by sharing information about heroin use by soldiers during the Vietnam War. Twenty percent of soldiers were addicted to heroin in Vietnam before they came back home, but once they were back with family and friends, 95 percent of them stopped using altogether. Hari explains that “they shifted from a terrifying cage back to a pleasant one, so didn’t want the drug any more.”
So what are the implications for Aroostook County? Let’s take a look at our communities: Are they like the Rat Park full of things for our children and young people to do or are they more like cages where they feel trapped? Are there pools for them to play in for no charge in the summers, or have they been taken away? And what about our long winter months? Are there safe places for them to congregate and have fun, like our rec centers, or are they closed to them because they are being used by people who can afford to pay to rent the court time for a birthday party or event? And what if they cannot afford ski equipment or rental fees, or can’t get to Bigrock because they lack transportation?
What about our young adults? Are they able to get meaningful jobs that pay well and are fulfilling, or do they have to scrape by on $7.75 an hour? How can we get them to believe their future begins with a two- or four-year college education at one of The County’s institutions of higher learning if there is no job to support the pay-back of student loans it will take to acquire that education?
And don’t be fooled into thinking that young people are connected to each other because we see them with smartphones or on social media sites. Hari calls this a “parody” of human connectedness — we only seem connected — we are not physically interacting with each other.
So what is the answer? What if we took the money we now spend to prosecute and incarcerate drug offenders and put it into community projects as well as enough rehabilitation programs to meet all the need in The County? What if, like Hari explains, we do like Portugal has done for the past 15 years and we decriminalize all drugs — from heroin and cocaine to marijuana — and put the money we would have used fighting the use of these drugs into helping addicts create a more meaningful existence here in The County? Hari tells us even Portugal’s “top drug cop,” Joao Figueira, wants the world to “follow Portugal’s example.”
In Brino’s article, Presque Isle’s chief of police, Matt Irwin, was quoted as saying, “If you’re going to try to reduce the criminal penalties for drug addiction, we’ve got to have an alternative to locking people up.”
As the parent of a 15-year-old, I think it’s about time the adults in The County got their act together and tried to create the alternative Irwin was talking about — real solutions to our addiction issues — and stop fighting a battle we can never win. We can do this by creating more healthy, nurturing environments in which our children can spend their time — for free, by attracting and keep businesses with good-paying, fulfilling jobs our young people will be excited to do, and by making sure everyone struggling with addiction has access to the rehabilitation services they need in our communities and don’t have to wait for them.
Since the war on drugs is not working, isn’t it worth trying a bold new approach for a change?
Deborah Parks lives in Caribou and teaches at Caribou Adult Education, is an adjunct professor at UMPI, and an adviser for TRIO College Access Educational Talent Search (ETS). She has a BA in English from UMPI and master’s in education from Ashford University.
