The War On Ice.
Down here in Australia there’s some slick new anti-drugs ads on the tele. Thanks for the windfall taxpayer. (Signed – Ad Company Exec.)
There’s the meth user that the nice folk at the hospital are trying to help and suddenly he goes berserk, bashing nurses and wrecking stuff. Then there’s the meth user convinced there are bugs crawling under her skin so she’s digging holes in her arm with a compass or something. These dismal little dramas are the latest in the 100 year (so far) war on drugs.
It began in the 1920’s with the failed prohibition on alchohol. In the 1930’s it was marijuana as addressed by the classic ‘Reefer Madness’ : A marijuana smokers’ descent into madness, murder, rape and suicide. In the ’60’s it was LSD, the 70’s heroin, the 80’s cocaine.
My era was the 70’s and the ‘War On Heroin’. I fondly remember the posters of the ‘The Heroin Addict’; skinny fella with a syringe in his arm, lying among the rubbish in a rancid back lane somewhere. Looked like he had the plague. This very silly anti-drug poster adorned my lounge room wall.
Now it’s the War On Ice. God only knows how many millions our government is wasting on this latest in the ‘war on …’ continuum. The point, from Reefer Madness to the war on ice, is always the same; telling people who don’t use drugs anyway why they mustn’t use drugs. They’re certainly not telling actual drug users anything, those who already know exactly what’s involved.
As deterrents these fear campaigns fail miserably, as the ad makers damn well know. They do however pay said ad makers handsomely. They also provide back story for the next tier of snouts in the trough – Law Enforcement
My god, I’m doing a bit of research as I go here. These ads, the shiny new “Community Ice Awareness Campaign”, are costing us $20 million.
All these campaigns do is reinforce the stereotypes loved by TV, the raging “Breaking Bad” style junkies, images that have very little to do with the day to day reality of drug use and addiction. If you’ll bear with me, I’ll share my own experience, why I have no shame in declaring I’m an addict, and why I refuse to be dismissed as some TV caricature of a morally corrupt brain dead danger to society.
I started using drugs as a child, supported by my parents and doctors. What? That’s my little prompt to parents to do the research before allowing doctors, conditioned by the pharmaceutical industry, to prescribe brain altering drugs to your children. Like the amphetamine based ADD drugs. Or the dreadful array of behaviour modifiers that make up the psych drug lottery. They have their place, but that place is nowhere near the prescription rates pushed by Big Pharma.
Go down the path of medicating kids and you risk activating genes that can never be turned off. In my case, it was the opium based cough mixtures used to treat the various lung problems I had as a child. In those days (1950’s – 60’s) pharmacists made their own cough mixtures based on opium tincture, the Laudanum of the Victorian era. In my late teens you could buy a hit of OT (Opium Tincture) on the black market, out of litre bottles stolen from chemists.
I fondly remember as a child, after a traumatizing breathless night of coughing, the home visit by the doctor. I’d be given my little dose of opium, measured out of the medicine bottle, and it would suppress the coughing reflex. No thought was given back then to the possibility of a psychological back story to my distress, that perhaps the endless breathless coughing was a stress response to the pressure of being a child in my family.
Oh blessed relief. The opium would stop the coughing (that could otherwise continue non stop for 24 hrs) and leave me in a gorgeous relaxed state, sitting up in bed with my pillows and jigsaw puzzles, nodding in and out of lovely dreamy sleep. Plus my parents would suspend their personal war for a while, to care for me. I was actually very sick.
For a time then, thanks to being sick and getting my medicine, I could relax. I need not fear violence from dad over my mistakes, and mum and dad would hold off yelling for a while. There’d be no soaking the pillow with miserable tears tonight.
And there we have it, the makings of an addict. A chemical situation combined with a fear filled PTSD inducing childhood. I know folks who have the same addiction response to being given, as kids, Valium and ADD Ritalin (speed).
By puberty, dad would leave. By early teens, I was drinking with my equally damaged peers. By late teens, I was robbing chemists.
The point is, every addict has a story. None of us woke up one day and decided “Hell I think I’ll become an addict, be an arsehole like on TV, live on the fringe of society with poverty, misery and illness. Give straight folks someone to feel better than.”
And straight folks do, they really really do. No matter how nasty, selfish and shut down straight folks are, they’ll still assume they’re better than a drug addict. You know who I hated the most on Breaking Bad? Hank, the shut down self-righteous cop bully. Marie, Hank’s ignorant judgmental wife. And Ted Beneke, the crooked business man lover to another man’s wife. In those three we had respectable society. Ugly, self-righteous, judgmental, not an ounce of compassion between them. Those are the folks who are “better than you” if you’re an addict. Folks I’ve put up with all my life. Ignorant sods. Do I sound a little pissed off and judgmental myself? Think I’m better than them? Well yeah, I’ll own it. I’ll put my ethical standards, compassion and sincerity up against respectable society any day.
I soon grew out of robbing chemists, did my share of dealing as every low level user must do, for themselves and their community. With time I moved on to less havoc inducing ways of getting the opiates my brain insisted it needed. Most addicts will eventually find ways to settle down, like Methadone programs, cheap wine, prescribed downers and psyche drugs. That or bounce from the street to institutions to jail and back again, the wreckage of relationships and burnt bridges stretched out behind them.
So who is the War On Drugs supposed to save? It’s no use to, in fact the enemy of, the street user.
Perhaps it will save the housewife at the doctor every month to renew her Valium script. More likely she’s on Xanax now ’cause the Valium just doesn’t do it anymore. I’ve seen folks, assured that Benzodiazepines were safe, go insane when after 20 years they try to stop.
Perhaps it’s the fella who likes a drink or 2 after work and gets drunk on the weekend? Hell, work like he does and you’ve earned the right to relax. And punch people and crash cars.
Or is it the office worker, the teacher, who can only get through the day because they know there’s wine waiting at home? If only they can get through the day.
Or maybe the poor bugger who’s in pain and needs opiates to deal with it? Good luck with that. Since governments decided to scapegoat opiates, this poor bugger has to fight doctors and govt. regulations every step of the way, for the legitimate pain relief she/he used to get from morphine. Nowadays the person in pain is put on a constantly changing merry-go-round of much worse drugs, that are far less effective, with more side effects. Thanks again War On Drugs.
Or the multitude of ordinary teens who add some Ecstasy and Ice to their weekend fun? The fun loving youth who are actually doing very little harm to anyone. Far less than a legal drunk might do. And unless they already have the psychological and genetic conditions that lie behind addiction, they are never going to become addicts anyway.
So, who has this War on Drugs actually helped? It’s pushed up the price of illegal drugs, making it highly profitable for the corrupt rich and their ruthless gangster hireling. It’s shoved the addict over to the pharmaceutical industry where it’s legal to make enormous profits off them. And it’s given ad makers and law enforcement a neat way to pocket some cash as the circus rolls on.
Drug use permeates every corner of our society. All the folks above, those very ordinary people, are drug users. Once they are compelled to use their drug or drink just to get by, they are addicts. But these are not the people presented in the ads, in the cop shows. Instead, we are shown the fringe, with drug users as low lifes, dangers to society, to be pursued and punished by heroic cops. Any wonder then that ordinary drug users feel alone, ashamed, embarrassed and judged?
Addiction is NOT A MORAL ISSUE.
Addiction is a HEALTH ISSUE.
So what happens when the addict depicted in these dreadful ‘War On Drugs’ campaigns (who do admittedly exist), seeks help? Well, if they’re not already in jail, then theoretically it’s off to rehab hi ho. Yeah, right. The truth of that according to Dr Stefan Gruenert of Odyssey House, a major rehab and treatment facility, is “Waiting lists are getting longer, clients are getting more frustrated and there are more critical incidents while people are trying to get into services, from overdoses to deaths to hospital admissions.”
Since the 80’s, when the first mass movement to get off drugs started, one thing has been glaringly obvious and continues to get worse. Realistic practical help for addicts – detoxes and rehabs – are almost impossible to get into, underfunded, few and far between. Gosh, sorry, we spent the $20,000,000 that’s needed for treatment on scary ads. We can put your addict on a psych drug though. Or get them some “counselling”….. BWAhahahaha.
Oops sorry. It’s just this magical belief in “counselling”, that good old TV drama plot resolver. If you didn’t laugh, you’d cry. Actually, I really am sorry. There are some very good, sincere and compassionate counselors around. A good counselor will hear you and may help you understand what’s underlying your drive, your compulsion to use drugs. You can definitely learn some very useful stuff about who you are, and why you do what you do. But counselling, and the usual CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, the belief that healthy thoughts lead to healthy feelings and behaviors) is to an addict like aspirin is to a broken leg.
If you are dealing with a malfunction of your brain that leaves you miserable, makes it impossible to feel contentment in anything; if your brain itself, in collusion with your subconscious, is driving you to seek the chemical release of Dopamine your system is crying out for; in other words if you’re an addict, then counselling just won’t do it for you.
Your number one need is to get away from the drug, the ice, the benzo, the alcohol, the opiate. Your brain needs LONG TERM abstinence to reset your Dopamine and Hormonal systems. You need to leave the world behind for a while, at least 3 months, preferably a year, when you can focus deeply on your inner being. Only then can you begin to heal. And that just isn’t going to happen for the majority of addicts because they cannot access such a situation.
If you can’t access a protected environment then you must rely on your friends, especially other addicts in recovery. I’ve never known anyone to judge and turn me away if I honoured them by honestly opening up about the real trouble I was in.
The best help I have ever received was through the 12 step programs. The support of the fellowships enabled me to maintain my first long term clean time. I know the 12 steps are some times frowned upon, usually by folks who don’t have the actual experience of 12 step recovery. Maybe they’ve done a couple of meetings and find it all too daunting. Maybe they don’t like the look of someone. Maybe it’s the banners with the word God on them. Maybe it’s an intellectual rejection of the concept of addiction as a disease (actually that’s dis – ease). Mostly though, it’s the terrifying concept of abstinence that drives folks away. As we cliche loving fellowship folk are fond of saying – denial isn’t a river in Africa. But if you persevere, there is no better education and support around.
The fellowships are your peers, your tribe. Nothing but addicts supporting addicts. No doctors (unless they’re addicts), no counselors, no psychs, no authorities, just a room full of people who feel like you, with the same foot tapping anxiety and drive to bolt for the door. For the first time in my life, in those rooms, I realized I was not a freak. I was home.
This has gone on longer than I intended. Addiction is such a huge field, and I have much I’d like to share. But this is enough for today. Let’s call this an introduction. I’d like to return with some practical help, some information, maybe look at the mechanics of addiction in the body, and how the mind is entwined.
For now, a curse on the War On Drugs.
May you be well.
May you be happy.