Pubdate: Mon, 16 Feb 2015
Source: Toronto Star (CN ON)
Copyright: 2015 The Toronto Star
Contact:  http://www.thestar.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/456
Author: Heather Mallick
Page: A11

HAVE MERCY ON DRUG USERS WHO HURT AS WE ALL DO

The war on drugs has been a catastrophe that has multiplied human
pain. One risks one's unincarcerated life to take illegal drugs. But
people still do it. This mystery cries out to be solved.

Rather than studying worthy half-measures, like legalizing medical
marijuana, arresting dealers, rehab, all the things we try in this
Calvinistic part of the world that deplores human weakness, British
journalist Johann Hari decided to be bold. In his new book,Chasing the
Scream, Hari decided instead to study the whole mess, the pain that
makes people ingest anything that will fill "an inner void," and the
way we punish people for suffering.

In three years of research, meticulously mapped, Hari studied the
origins of the American anti-drug mania, talked to dealers, met cops
who had changed their minds on anti-drug enforcement, visited Portugal
where drug use is legal, and talked to doctors on Vancouver's Downtown
Eastside, among many other explorations.

He writes about terrible things, from the hounding of Billie Holiday
to a hideous early death or the 2009 cooking of a U.S. woman named
Marcia Powell for the crime of once having had two joints in her car.

Yes, I said "cooking." After a minor drug offence, Powell, who had
bipolar disorder, was Prisoner #109416 in Perryville State Prison
Complex in Arizona. She was put in an outdoor cage in the desert sun.
Sixteen guards saw her screaming as hours passed and the cage grew
hotter. They laughed while other prisoners called for help. She died
soon after in hospital, her skin badly burned, her internal organs
oven-cooked and her eyeballs "dry as parchment."

It was a protracted version of what Islamic State did recently to a
Jordanian pilot in a cage, but that's on film. Nobody bothered to film
Powell. Taking drug prohibition to extremes leads to horrors like this.

Hari asks why people still take drugs when the risk is so high. He
refers to animal trials that basically conclude this: a rat alone in a
cage will drink morphine water but rats with toys, good food and
plenty of rat friends will hardly drink it at all. Why should they?
Their little rat lives are great.

The drive to intoxication is externally imposed. In Vietnam, water
buffalo normally shun opium plants, Hari writes, but when American
bombs began dropping, they began chewing. A mongoose who loses his
mate will chew on the intoxicating morning glory plant to soothe his
grief.

Living creatures have an intoxicant drive. But, as Hari points out,
only a few of our drinking friends become alcoholics, and only a few
light drug users get hooked. Why are we so concerned about a small
percentage who use too much and need help?

Hari has known pain himself. A famous journalist who was caught
repeatedly plagiarizing, he wrote this meticulously sourced book
partly as a way of apologizing and making amends. He has done so
spectacularly. I approached the book skeptically and was won over by
its compassion and rationality.

Take Bruce Alexander, a B.C. professor who conducted the rat
experiments described above. He tells Hari that throughout history,
addiction has soared when social bonds have been destroyed: the
English Gin Craze of the 18th century when the poor were driven into
cities, American crack in the de-industrialization of the 1980s, meth
in the damaged central U.S. "Today's flood of action is occurring
because our hyperindividualistic, frantic, crisis-ridden society makes
most people feel social(ly) or culturally isolated," Alexander tells
Hari. "(Drug-taking) allows them to escape their feelings, to deaden
their senses - and to experience an addictive lifestyle as a
substitute for a full life."

Nothing eases the rub of life on the nerves, but I can see that drugs
might well feel like your best shot. Alcohol, arguably the worst drug
of all, often makes people violent, but that's the drug pushed on you
legally. It's hypocritical. It's vicious.

We live in a punitive world awash in cheap sentiment. In the small
space in between, people snort drugs, or shoot up, or do some other
unkindness to their bodies.

Who does it serve? This small act is the basic unit of a giant
industry comprising drug cartels, small-time dealers and police.
Without drug crimes, the legal, policing and incarceration industry
would shrink.

Anything is a commodity now, from freedom to health. Portugal
decriminalized all drugs in 2001, partly because draconian drug laws
didn't help solve a growing heroin problem. It has done sensible
things, including giving tax breaks to those who employ recovering
addicts, rather than dumping a user back into his unhappiness.

Portuguese officials talk about the "non-problematic user." It's an
interesting phrase because in Canada we think of almost everything as
a problem to be solved; we punish and shame.

Maybe legal drug use should be a minor matter, not a life-destroying
act. Maybe we'd play with the other rats, have a good life without
being wracked with shame. Hari's book is wonderful, and with it he is
nudging a door open. We might find a better way of comforting those in
pain.
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MAP posted-by: Matt