Who Is An Addict?

Here is what I believe about addiction: our society is sick from the disease of addiction; we are all addicts to one degree our another. Addiction stems from our feeling that something is not right in our world, an emptiness a desire for something we can't have. Some see it as a spiritual malady: a searching for something beyond ourselves. Others see it as an existential pain. We all suffer from it to some extent, but we all react to it in different ways. Some seek to fill the emptiness with money, with power: they seek power over those they see as less then themselves, they become judgmental of anyone not like themselves: they turn to war and violence. Others seek it in work, others in helping others to their own detriment. But it is the world, our society that is sick. We are addicted to little pieces of paper which we call money, which actually has no value yet controls our lives. It is created by us. Our whole society runs on it. Our society runs on natural resources that are quickly running out, but we refuse to change to find other ways to live. We are killing the very thing that sustains us: our natural world; the planet that gives us life, This is the mark of addiction. We fight wars over this. Others who turn to taking drugs to find relief from the chaos and pain, and in turn create more pain for them selves and the people around them. They are cast as the villains of society: but are they really? Who is creating more pain and suffering? The world leaders who are putting children into cages: fighting wars, spending trillions to create weapons of war, but then claim there is no money to feed people? Or the drug user on the street who has turned to drugs because there are no jobs for him: no hope ... none of the imaginary pieces of paper he supposedly needs to eat pay rent, and there is none because other people are stealing it all to create vast mansions of luxury for themselves. And the ordinary people want to have that and strive for it. They become obsessed with celebrities and the mega rich, and they buy into the fantasy that one day they too can be like them. So they buy the clothes they wear, the food they eat: model their lives on them. They don't realise that it is all a big con: that they can never be like them.

One of the reasons i turned to drugs is because I am gay, and because of that I have never been able to find someone to share my life with , a partner, someone to love and cuddle at night. Yes someone to fuck. Because of that I feel alien and alone: I feel empty. Every night climbing into bed, alone. Every morning waking up, alone. I feel like like I am missing out on an essential aspect of human experience. I am constantly asking myself : Why cant I be like other people and find love. And yet I know- we all have these stories of pain, of suffering, of trauma. There are people in the world that have suffered far worse of then me: children that have had to watch their parents being blown to smithereens, little girls being raped by their own fathers or sold into sexual slavery. This is the world we live in. It is sick. So we indulge in our addictions, and turn a blind eye to the reality of the world, and blame the addict saying he is the root of all evil

Look to yourself. What is your addiction? What are you using to make the world a more tolerable place? We despise the addict, because he reminds us of how sick our world is. Instead of blaming the addict and the drugs which for him are his solution, we need to find a way to heal the sickness of the world. The first step is to realise how sick the world is, and say to ourselves: "I will no longer part of this blind rush to destruction." To stand up and take to the streets if necessary to demand change. The first step is to realise that essentially the drug user on the street is no worse than any of our world leaders, and to start to treat him with empathy and respect he deserves as a human being. To start to say "No we will not let you steal our water, and put it into bottles to sell to rich people, while our children die of thirst. No we will not let you take our oil and use it to drive machines that kill us, No we will not let you put our children in cages, No we will not let you kill any more of the beautiful wildlife with which we share this planet in, the name of greed..."

So i ask again ...WHO IS THE TRUE ADDICT? What is your addiction? What are you doing to overcome it, and to make the world a better place so that we don't need to hide away in our little bubbles and pretend that everything is OK while the world burns.

• I am a full-time student who supports myself through freelance writing. If you would like to make a donation to support my writing and ongoing work as an activist would be most welcome. Contact me on Facebook (David Jones) to get banking details.

The War on Drugs. (extract from To Hell and Back - a thesis in progress.)

The traditional discourse on the subject of drug addiction focuses traditionally on two models: the judicial and the medical-based disease model. The first has led to the War on Drugs and conceptualises the addicted user as a criminal who needs to be punished and removed from society. Addiction, or rather any illicit drug use, is viewed in this model as a moral failing, or a lack of willpower . According to Gabor Mate the basic misconception of this approach is that the cause of addiction resides in the drugs themselves, thus to eliminate addiction extreme measured are justified in eliminating the drugs or to prevent people from having access to them. Appropriate treatment is therefore seen as punitive, with jails or militaristic “boot camp” type institutions being the preferred destination, not only of addicted users, but all who have fallen foul of the drug laws. In many countries, notably India, China and many other Asian countries drug users are sent for mandatory “treatment” in facilities that amounts to little more than detention facilities without trial or due process of law. In America, in 2016 a total number of 2,205,300 were incarcerated - the highest incarceration rate in the world. Out of these 456,000 were for drug law violations. Out of 1,632,921 people arrested for drug violations in 2017, 1,394,514 or 85.45% were arrested for possession only. ( stats from www.drugpolicy.org/issues/drug-war-statistics).
The UN Global Commission on Drug Policy, made up of imminent persons including former heads of states, business leaders and renowned artists, states quite plainly “The global war on drugs has failed (…..) policymakers believed that harsh law enforcement action against those involved in drug production, distribution and use would lead to an ever-diminishing market in controlled drugs such as heroin, cocaine and cannabis, and the eventual achievement of a ‘drug free world’. In practice, the global scale of illegal drug markets – largely controlled by organized crime – has grown dramatically over this period.” ( The Alternative World Drug report). According to UN estimates global usage of illicit opiates between 1998 and 2008 grew by 34.5% .In addition the World Drug report 2019 estimated that in 2017 29.2 million people worldwide had used opiates such as heroin and opium. This was up 50% from the 2016 figure of 19.4 million. The increase was not due only to increased usage, but also to advances in the collection of data on drug use.
The annual cost of the War on Drugs exceeded R100 billion dollars, while profits from the annual trade in illicit drugs exceeded 330 billion dollars which largely goes to enriching criminals and funding international crime networks. (stats from The Alternative Drug Report)
Other negative consequences of the War on Drugs are outlined in the Alternative Drug Report. These include the undermining of international development and security, causing of deforestation and pollution, threatening of public health and spreading disease, undermining human rights and promoting stigma and discrimination.
The fact that the War on Drugs continues to be waged in spite of these negative outcomes has led to the conclusion that it serves vested interests and continues to be used as a political tool of control. As the USA is the prime instigator of this war, it is thus the most appropriate place to look for evidence of this. Michelle Alexander in her book "The New Jim Crow" has pointed to that fact that in the USA black men are imprisoned on drug charges at a rate of 20 to 50 times higher than white men to argue that anti-drug laws are used to police and control minority groups and connect directly to earlier forms of racial segregation and oppression. Further evidence of this is the disparity in sentencing for the possession of crack cocaine as opposed to cocaine powder. Although it is essentially the same substance sentences handed down for crack were far more severe. This is attributed to the fact that crack was predominantly used by black people. Kenneth Nunn, former Professor of Law at the University of Florida’s Levin College, argues in his article Race, Crime and the Pool of Surplus Criminality: or Why the "War on Drugs" Was a "War on Blacks" , that race and crime are linked in a cycle of oppression. What is defined as a crime, he claims, determines who is oppressed and simultaneously legitimates that oppression. Racial oppression can then be justified as legitimate response to wrongdoing, and animosity towards particular groups can be created by portraying them as prone to criminal behaviour. These groups can then be use as scapegoats for perceived threats to the dominant, mainstream (white) culture, and to justify increased surveillance and police crackdowns on these communities. Black people then become subject to racial profiling and black communities to over-policing. The military rhetoric is used to justify aggressive law enforcement measures, and the use para-military units in routine policing operations, such as the use of SWAT (Special Weapons and tactics) teams to conduct drug sweeps in black neighbourhoods, and the use para-military units in routine policing operations.
In fact anti-drug laws have always had racial undertones. The first major campaign against opium smoking took place in California in the 1890 and coincided with anti-Chinese sentiment. Chinese immigrants were blamed for low wages and depressed economic conditions and much was made of the perceived threat to European women, who were, so the stories went, being lured into sexual slavery through the use of opium. In the same way Blacks were identified with cocaine use in the early 20th century, and were said to use it fortify themselves for criminal activity, making them bolder, more aggressive and oblivious to pain. The fact that both these substances were readily available as ingredient in many over-the–counter remedies, and in the case of cocaine was an ingredient in the earliest commercial soft drinks, was conveniently overlooked. As a result of these campaigns, the Harrison Act outlawing cocaine and opium was passed in 1914.
Later in the century President Nixon used the supposed affinity of black musicians with marijuana and heroin and hippies with LSD and heroin to discredit both groups. John Ehrlichman, President Richard Nixon’s assistant for domestic affairs, in a interview with journalist Dan Baum, from Harper’s Magazine had the following to say:
‘You want to know what this was really all about?’ he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. ‘The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the anti-war left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t
make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.’
In other words anti-drugs laws were knowingly used as a means of to discredit and criminalise these communities and as a tool for political control. Or as Noam Chomsky put it in an interview with John Veit in High Times: “The Drug War is an effort to stimulate fear of dangerous people from who we have to protect ourselves. It is also, a direct form of control of what are called "dangerous classes," those superfluous people who don't really have a function contributing to profit-making and wealth.” Internationally it has been used to the same ends. It has been used to justify military interventions in South America, to criminalize any opposition to American policy, and to provide cover for illegal activities by American forces.
Former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper had the following to say in his book "Breaking Rank" : “Think of the war’s real casualties: tens of thousands of otherwise innocent Americans incarcerated, many for 20 years, some for life; families ripped apart; drug traffickers and blameless bystanders shot dead on the city streets... The United States has, through its war on drugs, fostered political instability, official corruption, and health and environmental disasters around the globe. In truth, the U.S sponsored international War on Drugs is a war on poor people, most of them subsistence farmers caught in a dangerous no-win situation."
In this country anti-drug legislation has been used to similar ends, to criminalise the poor and the homeless and particularly to justify the use of apartheid style policing and surveillance tactics.
It is still however the dominant model for dealing with addiction both at a global level and in this country. This however is changing rapidly as many countries are opting out of the drug war and are seeking other solutions. These will be discussed at a later date.

If it is true that addiction is not only about drugs. That our society is addicted: to money, to oil, to instant solutions, to religions, to shopping. to the internet, to status, to things we don't need but supposedly make our life easier . As part of an addicted system we are in a sense all addicts. Then it follows that recovery is not just about recovery from drug addiction, but about the recovery of our society from the disease off addiction which affects us all.