Drugs and the pain of existence

Reading this article in the Guardian brought tears to my eyes.

Beyond agreeing entirely with the points concerning both the futility of criminalisation and the increased harm it inflicts upon both addicts and society, I felt that the really telling sentences in the article were those that stated:

His conversation was always about the pain of existence in a world where two-thirds starved so one-third could live well. He hated war, poverty and injustice, and felt powerless to alter things. But he would always try to get back home for the family Christmas, and we took heart from that, happy that he hadn't rejected us completely.

These three sentences seem to me to encapsulate a huge part of the whole issue of substance abuse (and, indeed, use).

History would seem to support the proposition that humanity has always enjoyed the use of substances that alter reality in some way for us. Indeed, history would seem to further support the idea that we as a species have always been willing to go to some effort in order to achieve a state of altered consciousness. Evidence for this can arguably be found in, for example, the complex brewing and distilling procedures that many cultures have come up with, as well as the arguably even more complex combinations of plants and minerals that particular tribes have developed (such as the combination of coca leaves and the alkali in ash and suchlike that Andean cultures developed, or the DMT based substances that Amazonian tribes use that require the correct combination of several different plants).

There is thus a natural propensity to using mind-altering substances. What there is not necessarily, however, is a natural propensity towards using such substances to the extent that one becomes addicted to them. (Bearing in mind that we are speaking very much in the general - different physiological makeups will obviously incline some people more towards addiction than others. This is also speaking in the wide sense of human behaviour, where choice and preferences are possibilities.)

The sentences quoted above are telling because they capture perfectly the very human nature of addiction. What I mean by this is that the individual in question was just one of a number of boys who were trying different drugs - he was, however, the only one who became an addict. This fact can undoubtably be explained to some degree by differing biology; but I would argue that the greater explanatory factor is the "pain of existence" that this one individual describes experiencing.

This importance of the individuals experience of the world, and their relationship to it, in the path to addiction is borne out by personal experience.

Firstly, I used a wide range of drugs frequently for years without developing any sort of unhealthy relationship with any of them. They were fun and I enjoyed them very much, but they took up no more of my life than the time that I was taking for fun and enjoyment. When I entered a paticular period of depression and hurt, however, I did quite quickly develop a reliance upon those substances that could make things seem better (or at least make me oblivious to everything, including the pain). This reliance could arguably be said to continue to this day, with a continuing bad situation going hand in hand with an unhealthy relationship to those chemicals that can make my reality seem just a little bit better.

Secondly, in my time working with injecting drug users, the one factor that linked all of the people that I had contact with was the desperateness of their situation, both before and after they started using the particular substances that they had become addicted to (whether this be alcohol, heroin, crack, or whatever). Their stories of growing up in Glasgow's worst schemes, in homes and communities saturated in violence and hopelessness, made it almost understandable that they had turned to chemicals to provide some release.

The stories of others who had not grown up in such environments, but who had experienced some massive upset in their lives that had made any hope seem alien to them, added weight to the idea that what was pushing people (including myself) towards dependance was not biology nor particular surroundings, but instead was this "pain of existence".

I do not remember speaking to a single person who had become an addict through simply an overdoing of their recreational usage (which is not to say that this cannot happen, just that it is not hugely common).

Addiction is a serious problem - it is not a criminal problem though. At some level it is a public health issue, and work that reduces the health impact of it is of vital importance and utilty. Fundamentally though, it is an issue of people's circumstances.

With people living existences berift of hope or typified by pain, that they are addicts is not a question of there being substances available that will remove them temporarily from this existence (such substances always have been available, and always will be); it is a question of these circumstances being allowed to exist in the first place, without any other mechanism through which they can escape them being practically available.

Removing this social and personal aspect - this human aspect - from discussions of addiction reduces the liklihood of either a rational discussion (for example is one sees the issue as some sort of moral/criminal one) or an effective approach to minimising the problem (if one sees the problem as a purely biological one, treating an individual's addiciton, but returning them to the circumstances that lead to the addicition in the first place). Similarly, making changes that make the treatment of addiction more available and that remove the criminal aspect to substance abuse will ultimately be futile if no efforts are also made to alter the world so that people do not have to grow up in environments that are empty of hope but are full of the pain of existence.