More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Just as a large majority of drinkers did not become alcoholics, a large majority of users of these products did not become drug addicts.
Some 22 percent of addicts were wealthy,19 while only 6 percent were poor.
[The lawmakers] must have known that their Edict, if enforced, was the clear equivalent of an order to create an illicit drug industry. They must have known that they were in effect ordering a company of drug smugglers into existence.”
“The United States government, as represented by its [anti-drug] officers,” Henry explained, had just become “the greatest and most potent maker of criminals in any recent century.”23
Why would gangsters pay the cops to enforce the drug laws harder? The answer, he said, was right in front of our eyes. Drug prohibition put the entire narcotics industry into their hands. Once
They wanted to be persuaded. They wanted easy answers to complex fears.
it is passing from Henry Smith Williams and his colleagues to Arnold Rothstein and his thugs. It wasn’t by the law of nature. It was by political decree.
there are in reality two drug wars going on: there is the war on drugs, where the state wages war on the users and addicts, and then there is the war for drugs,64 where the criminals fight each other to control the trade.
When the government war on alcohol stopped, the gangster war for alcohol stopped.
Take the drug trade away from criminals, he calculates, and it would reduce the homicide rate in the United States by between 25 and 75 percent.
you can’t possibly enforce it against every lawbreaker. The legal system would collapse under the weight of it. So you go after the people who are least able to resist, to argue back, to appeal—the
once you have been busted13 for a drug offense—at fifteen or seventeen or twenty—you are virtually unemployable for the rest of your
Prohibition, Bourgois explains in his writing, creates a system in which the most insane and sadistic violence has a sane and functional logic. It is required. It is rewarded.
The U.S. government has approached Mexico with the same threat as the cartels—plata o plomo. Silver or lead. We can give you economic “aid” to fight this war, or we can wreck your economy if you don’t. Your choice.
So this isn’t a war to stop addiction, like that in my family, or teenage drug use. It is a war to stop drug use among all humans, everywhere. All these prohibited chemicals need to be rounded up and removed from the earth. That is what we are fighting for.
as with alcohol, the primary motivation is to enjoy ourselves, not to destroy ourselves . . . There is such a thing as responsible drug use, and it is the norm, not the exception.”13
The fancy term for this is “the pharmaceutical theory of addiction.”
“Our method is—be a human being with other human beings,” Liz tells me. “Be there for them. Don’t judge. Don’t tell them how to live their fricking life. Just be in their life. Be a nice, solid presence. Somebody who isn’t going to bow and bend . . . and walk away.
Most of them have never sat down with a person who wanted to listen to their life story sympathetically. Authority figures with questions have, to them, only ever been people who will take something away or inflict pain.
over the Western world, people are being given very powerful opiates every day, legally.
After thinking about it deeply, Gabor came to suspect that it means, as he told me, “nothing is addictive in itself.
What creates the susceptibility?”
Nearly two-thirds of injection drug use, they found, is the product of childhood trauma.
If we can figure out at the age of five which kids are going to be addicts and which ones aren’t, that tells us something fundamental about drug addiction.
as Gabor writes, that “the basic cause of addiction is predominantly experience-dependent during childhood, and not substance-dependent.
It’s not a spasm of irrationality. It meets a need. It takes away the pain, for a while.
[People] wonder—why do [addicts] keep doing it? Because it makes them feel good, and the rest of their life doesn’t make them feel good.”
say—Don’t you see? You wouldn’t do this to yourself because you don’t have to.
He has shown that the core of addiction doesn’t lie in what you swallow or inject—it’s in the pain you feel in your head.
Yet we have built a system that thinks we
will stop addicts by increasing...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
“If negative consequences led people to transformation
then I wouldn’t have a single patient left,” he says, “because they’ve experienced every negative consequence in the book. Being jailed. Being beaten up. Being traumatized. Being hurt. HIV. Hepatitis C. Poverty.” Gabor looks at me, his eyes sagging a little, as if picturing it all. “What haven’t they suffered yet?”
This is perplexing. You can get rid of the drug—yet3 the drug addiction continues in pretty much the same way. What could possibly be happening here?
But Bruce saw addicts in withdrawal all the time—and their symptoms were often minor:4 at worst, like a bad flu. This is so contrary to what we are told that it seems impossible, but doctors now very broadly agree it is the case.
The real pain of withdrawal is the return of all the psychological pain that you were trying to put to sleep with heroin in the first place.
These rats had been put in an empty cage. They were all alone, with no toys, and no activities, and no friends. There was nothing for them to do but to take the drug.
turned out that the rats in isolated cages used up to 25 milligrams of morphine a day, as in the earlier experiments. But the rats in the happy cages used hardly any morphine at all—less than 5 milligrams.
the old experiments were, it seemed, wrong. It isn’t
the drug that causes the harmful behavior—it’s the environment.
This meant there were more17 heroin addicts serving in the U.S. Army than there were back home in the United States.
The study in the Archives of General Psychiatry—and21 the experiences people could see all across the country—show that 95 percent of them, within a year, simply stopped.
I find myself picturing the Hole back in Tent City in the Arizona desert. In order to punish addicts, the drug warriors have in fact built the very conditions that will be most likely to produce and deepen addiction.
The rats in solitary confinement and the soldiers in Vietnam weren’t being “hijacked” by the chemicals at hand. They were trying to cope with being dislocated from everything that gave their lives meaning and pleasure.
The tribe was your only way to survive. If you feel that you have been stripped of a tribe and its rituals you will become deeply unhappy:
“today’s flood of addiction27 is occurring because our hyperindividualistic, frantic, crisis-ridden society makes most people feel social[ly] or culturally isolated.
So if we can’t bond with other people, we will find a behavior to bond with, whether it’s watching pornography or smoking crack or gambling.
“Addiction,” he said, “is a disease of loneliness.”
It gives you an identity. It gives you a life of highs and lows, instead of relentless monotony.
As one addict told Bruce: “This is a life. It’s better than no life.”
