In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

by Gabor Maté

How can we compare the misdemeanors of my patients—petty dealers thrown against the wall and frisked by police in the back alleys of the Downtown Eastside—with those of their respectable counterparts in corporate boardrooms? In May 2007, Purdue Pharma, a giant drug manufacturer, pleaded guilty to criminal charges that the firm had “misled doctors and patients” in claiming that their product, OxyContin, was less addictive than other opiate medications. “That claim,” said the New York Times, “became the linchpin of an aggressive marketing campaign that helped the company sell over $1 billion of OxyContin a year.… But both experienced drug abusers and novices, including teenagers, soon discovered that chewing an OxyContin tablet—or crushing one and then snorting the powder, or injecting it with a needle—produced a high as powerful as heroin.”9 There have been hundreds of overdose deaths on OxyContin across the United States, devastating entire villages in Appalachia, for example, where the drug became known as “hillbilly heroin” and was illicitly marketed for $40 for a 40-milligram tablet. We see that substance addictions are only one specific form of blind attachment to harmful ways of being. Yet we condemn the addict’s stubborn refusal to give up something deleterious to his life or to the lives of others. Why do we despise, ostracize, and punish the drug addict when as a social collective we share the same blindness and engage in the same rationalizations?