In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

by Gabor Maté

Under conditions of extreme deprivation people will continue to grow crops that promise economic relief, and they will continue to trade in those crops and their products. The ultimate beneficiaries are neither the impoverished Afghan or Colombian peasant nor the streetcorner pusher in the U.S. ghetto or on Vancouver’s Skid Row. The illegality of mind-altering substances enriches drug cartels, crime syndicates and their corrupt enablers among politicians, government officials, judges, lawyers and police officers around the world. If one set out deliberately to fashion a legal system designed to maximize and sustain the wealth of international drug criminals and their abettors, one could never dream up anything to improve upon the present one—except, perhaps, to add tobacco to the list of contraband substances. That way the traffickers and their allies could profit even more—although it’s unimaginable that their legally respectable counterparts, tax-hungry governments and the nicotine pushers in tobacco company boardrooms, would ever allow that to happen.