Ratrofitted

**with quotes from Johan Hari Ted Talk

I hate drug addicts.   Don't you?   I mean, get it together, right?   Do you see us pissing our lives away on heroin?  Do you see a bong on the top shelf in my office, dancing in the cast off shards of light from a Disco Ball?   No.  You know why?   Because I'm not a lowlife addict like you are, and I keep my bong in the tool shed, where it belongs.
Duh.

I hate those welfare handout, pus on the scum of the earth, no teeth in their head, drug addicts.
Don't you?

Totally, dude

 Obviously, what I just claimed in the above paragraph does not represent my true feelings about those  miserable, low-life, scab-picking drug addicts.   To be honest, I actually kind of like the self-absorbed,  narcissistic losers.  Ironically, the real who, and what traits that I hate about addiction, usually aren't even found in the addict.   They're found in the holier than thou, self righteous, uncaring family members, and so called friends of the addict.

You know, the ones you see jumping at every chance they get to tell the addicts story as if it was their own, telling it as if they actually understood the story, as if they were experts on trauma because they had caused some. 

You know, the ones telling the story as if they had authored it, as if they'd earned the right to tell the story despite never asking the addict if he, or she wanted it told.  You know, the ones telling someone else's story, the ones telling the story without the decency to ask the person who lived it if they were at least telling it accurately.  The ones using someone else's story with no integrity to guide how they use it.  The ones who use it to increase the payoff they get from their own.

What?! The scumbag addict victimized you?

WHAT?!!  The maniacal, manipulative, pill-popping chemistry set of a human being made you suffer for years? 

WHATTT?!!!  That powder-sniffing, mushroom chomping, acid ingesting, human drug cartel scared you, and held you, and your family, paralyzed with fear?!!!

I HATE frickin' drug addicts.  DON'T YOU??!!

Wait.

Why didn't you just leave?   

What?   Because it's easier said, than done?

Kind of like quitting a drug?  

No?  Oh, okay.

Oh, you were scared, too?

Kind of like an addict quitting their drug?  

No?  Oh, okay.

Oh, and you really Loved your addict, and didn't know what you would do without them??  

Kind of like how the addict feels when quitting their drug.  

No?  Oh, okay.

"That's weird, huh?  

How you both struggle with the same stuff.  

How you both have the same tendencies?   

It's almost like you're both addicts.  

No?   You don't use drugs?  

Maybe not.

It kind of seems like you need them just as much, though.

No?  Oh, okay.

It's just that somethings wrong with you, if you choose to stay with someone like that, for so long, right?

I mean a normal person, just wouldn't."

No?

This time, I call bullshit.

The stuff I dislike about addiction is found in them, because, quite often, they're the ones who need the addict to be one.  They need it because their psychology's are enmeshed, and if the addict gets fixed, and isn't one, their yardstick they use to measure how capable they are, is gone.  The trash bin they project their indecencies on, is gone.  I dislike them because they use a human being the way that human being uses a drug.

Those people, suck.

Groundbreaking Uh-Oh

 Before I go on, let me answer the questions that I already see forming.   No, I am not a doctor, or a therapist, and I've never played one on TV.  No, I'm not a lobbyist for the legalized drug demographic, or a pharmaceutical company.  And no, I'm not Alan Arkin in 'Little Miss Sunshine'.  I was not kicked out of the Twilight Manor Elderly Care Facility for using heroin at nap time, like his character in the film did.

 I've been exposed to addiction in one way, or another, pretty much my entire life. Both of my parents died prematurely because of their addictions.  My mother had a 40 year habit of using nicotine that resulted in lung cancer.  Poof, and she's gone.  And my father did not die in a common automobile accident, as some folks like to believe. The fact is he was drunk that night, and that's what killed him.  Poof, and bye-bye.

 Ironically, as drunk as he was the night that he died, my father actually made it home.  He managed to guide his faded blue Buick through the canals of darkness, and turns, up to the right hand turn that would have pulled him safely into his driveway.   If he hadn't experienced an alcoholic blackout that caused him to forget where he lived, and drive an extra 100 yards passed his turn, and into an oak tree.

Almost every member of my family has had their own demons to deal with, and my father's side of the family tree is a retelling of his story, times

 infinity.  It's brutal, and sad.

The judgment, and disgrace, that is intentionally cast upon the addict isn't just shaming, it's inhumane.  At least, according to Johann Hari and his TED TALK, "Everything You Think You Know About Addiction Is Wrong."

One of the first beliefs he dismantles is the one that says certain drugs have certain 'hooks' that make them more addictive.  He uses heroin as an example to make his point.   He breaks his audience into thirds, and says that if he gave one of those thirds heroin everyday, for the next 20 days, based on old beliefs, they would all be addicts.  The heroin would have 'hooked' the brain, and formed a dependency.  Not true, he says.

He discloses that 'street heroin'  is kid stuff compared to the Diamorphine that's given to people with severe injuries, when they enter a hospital.  Diamorphine, he says, is almost a pure form of heroin, and it is given to patients for periods that exceed 20 days, regularly.  However, longitudinal studies with those patients don't identify any of them becoming addicts.

He quotes a similar situation with heroin users in the Vietnam War who stopped, cold turkey, when they came home.  We're talking heroin, people.  H-E-R-O-I-N, heroin.   I gotta get a fix, or jump off a building, or Chase The Dragon, heroin.

How can that be, he wondered, that these people are sucking down heroin in it's most pure form, and not getting addicted?

That question led him to a Scientist, and his lab rats.  The Scientist was studying heroin's affect on those lowlife, cheese eating, jump out of the trash can rats.  He put a rat in a cage with two water bottles to choose from.  One had water, the other had heroin water.  Almost one-hundred percent of the rats he studied locked onto the heroin flavor, and drank until they died.
Almost.
One.
Hundred.
Percent.
Drank.
Until they died.

Poof, and bye-bye now.
Those rats were fried.

One day, he said, another Scientist with some training in Feng Shui, looked into the rat cage, and noticed that besides the water bottles, the cage was empty.  He decided to see what would happen if he decorated, so he added colored balls to play with, and tunnels, and little rat friends.  And fresh vegetables.  He also left both bottles where they were, and guess what?  The rats went from an almost 100% mortality rate due to over indulgence with the heroin water, to no rats using it at all.
To.
No.
Rats.
Using.
At all.

From almost 100%, to zero, without counseling, rehab, or interventions.

He just gave the rats a community that was stimulating, purposeful, and supportive.

Who cares?  They're rats.

Shooting UP

Hari did, so he went to see what would happen if you did something similar for people.  But first, Hari will tell you about a study he read that examined the way Americans connect with each other.

" I've been talking about how disconnection is a major driver of addiction and weird to say it's growing, because you think we're the most connected society that's ever been.  But I increasingly began to think that the connections we have, or think we have, are like a kind of parody of human connection.   

If you have a crisis in your life, you'll notice something.  It won't be your Twitter followers who come to sit with you.  It won't be your Facebook friends who help you turn it round.  It'll be your flesh and blood friends who you have deep and nuanced and textured, face-to-face relationships with, and there's a study I learned about from Bill McKibben, the environmental writer, that I think tells us a lot about this.  

 He looked at the number of close friends the average American believes they can call on in a crisis.  That number has been declining steadily since the 1950s. The amount of floor space an individual has in their home has been steadily increasing, and I think that's like a metaphor for the choice we've made as a culture.  We've traded floorspace for friends, we've traded stuff for connections, and the result is we are one of the loneliest societies there has ever been.  And Bruce Alexander, the guy who did the Rat Park experiment, says, we talk all the time in addiction about individual recovery,and it's right to talk about that, but we need to talk much more about social recovery.  Something's gone wrong with us, not just with individuals but as a group, and we've created a society where, for a lot of us, life looks a whole lot more like that isolated cage, and a whole lot less like Rat Park. "

He also looked at how Americans perceive, and treat,  addicts.   He used an example from the Arizona Prison System to summarize common American  attitudes.   

What they do there, on the women's side, he said, is take all of the people with drug related offenses, and put them on the freeway chain gang, or in cemeteries digging graves.   Before they do that, however,  they dress the women in shirts that say  "I am a drug addict."    The women are constantly subjected to jeers from the public.   

We make the conscious choice to humiliate, and shame, human beings, many of whom  are caught in a life-and-death struggle with themselves.   This is not directed at everyone who lives in Arizona.   I don't know them all.   But to those of you who had anything to do with that decision:  You're a fucking moron.   

Why aren't we treating fat people who can't control their appetites this way?    
Or shopaholics with a 150 pairs of shoes for 2 feet?  
Or porn aficionados?   
Or Facebook users who post pictures of their dinner, like eating is an achievement?   
Or compulsive neat freaks?
Or perfectionists?
Or people who can't cope without a smart phone? 
Or anyone who religiously watches a soap opera?   

Why do we tolerate, and forgive, certain behaviors, and not even consider the same for others?   I told you I'm not a doctor, but in my Layman's opinion, I think we're sick, and I think we're getting sicker.

Hari then moves on to propose a new approach to helping addicts, one that has been in place, and working, in Portugal for 15-years.  It was implemented to address the rampant drug use in their country.  And it's HUMANE.
The first thing they did was... 

"Decriminalize all drugs from cannabis to crack, but -- and this is the crucial next step -- they take all the money we used to spend on cutting addicts off, on disconnecting them, and spend it instead on reconnecting them with society. That's not really what we think of as drug treatment in the United States. 

 So they do residential rehab, they do psychological therapy, that does have some value.  But the biggest thing they did was the complete opposite of what we do: a massive program of job creation for addicts, and micro loans for addicts to set up small businesses.  

So, say you used to be a mechanic.  When you're ready, they'll go to a garage, and they'll say,if you employ this guy for a year, we'll pay half his wages.  The goal was to make sure that every addict in Portugal had something to get out of bed for in the morning.  And when I went and met the addicts in Portugal, what they said is, as they rediscovered purpose, they rediscovered bonds, and relationships, with the wider society. 

It'll be 15 years this year since that experiment began, and the results are in: injecting drug use is down in Portugal, according to the British Journal of Criminology, by 50 percent, five-zero percent.  Overdose is massively down,  HIV is massively down among addicts.  Addiction in every study is significantly down.  One of the ways you know it's worked so well is that almost nobody in Portugal wants to go back to the old system. "

What is it about Americans, specifically, that allows us to derive pleasure from the misfortune, or inability, of someone else?  What is it that enables us to think more about what we have, and keeping it, than we do about the people who have nothing?  I'm not pointing fingers.  I'm concerned.  I'm deeply concerned.  The question is valid, I think, either way.

Hari was thinking about this, albeit in a slightly different way, so he approached Peter Cohen in the Netherlands for his take on addiction, and Human connections.

" Maybe we shouldn't even call it addiction," he said. " Maybe we should call it bonding.  Human beings have a natural, and innate need to bond, and when we're happy, and healthy, we'll bond and connect with each other.  But if you can't do that, because you're traumatized, or isolated, or beaten down by life, you will bond with something that will give you some sense of relief. Now, that might be gambling, that might be pornography, that might be cocaine, that might be cannabis, but you will bond, and connect, with something because that's our nature. That's what we want as human beings. "

This approach to treating addiction might be a hard sell in this country because it calls out everyone.  It calls us out as accomplices in the preservation of addiction, and it calls us out as the solution.  

It's hard to say this, but I don't know that most Americans genuinely want to be the solution to anything.  We seem more comfortable offering them to others, than we do enacting them for others.

Whether it does arrive here, or does not, is irrelevant once you understand what needs to be done.  You don't need a system to be introduced, or implemented, to do what you know to be right.  The question is, will you?

5 Fun Facts About American drug use

From: Nationwide Drug Facts

• Illicit drug use in the United States has been increasing. In 2013, an estimated 24.6 million Americans aged 12 or older—9.4 percent of the population—had used an illicit drug in the past month. This number is up from 8.3 percent in 2002. The increase mostly reflects a recent rise in use of marijuana, the most commonly used illicit drug.  (Pot smokers are the second biggest group of addicts drug users, and the fastest growing group.  They're also the least maligned.  Almost as if the logic is you can'tr be an addict if everyone uses it."  Makes you wonder if our focus is substantiated when the focus is on other drugs, doesn't it?" 

•  After alcohol, marijuana has the highest rate of dependence or abuse among all drugs. In 2013, 4.2 million Americans met clinical criteria for dependence or abuse of marijuana in the past year—more than twice the number for dependence/abuse of prescription pain relievers (1.9 million) and nearly five times the number for dependence/abuse of cocaine (855,000).  

•  Use of most drugs other than marijuana has stabilized over the past decade or has declined. In 2013, 6.5 million Americans aged 12 or older (or 2.5 percent) had used prescription drugs nonmedically in the past month. Prescription drugs include pain relievers, tranquilizers, stimulants, and sedatives. And 1.3 million Americans (0.5 percent) had used hallucinogens (a category that includes ecstasy and LSD) in the past month.

•  More than half of new illicit drug users begin with marijuana. Next most common are prescription pain relievers, followed by inhalants (which is most common among younger teens).

•  Drug use is increasing among people in their fifties and early sixties. This increase is, in part, due to the aging of the baby boomers, whose rates of illicit drug use have historically been higher than those of previous generations.