In Mandy Feder”s Friday Ink Out Loud, she bemoaned her former-friend”s abuse of methamphetamine, which made him physically ill and incapable of breaking the “habit.”
This disease model of addiction comes directly from the 19th Century Protestant Temperance Union”s religious thinking which claimed that “just about everyone” supports this disease model, while in reality, the people who do not believe this disease model of addiction are those people who know the most about addiction.
Ph.D. Jeffery Schaler believes that programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and its numerous “12 Steps” offshoots are openly theistic with their first and most fundamental aim of indoctrination by convincing the addict that he or she can”t do anything without the reliance on a “higher power,” which can be “anything” except the individual himself. Groups that push the idea that addictive behavior is a disease are inclined to be cultish — intolerant of disagreement — stating that denial and disagreement of the treatment is a “symptom” of the metaphorical disease of addiction.
For more than 30 years Schaler has stated that focusing only on the drug was doomed to failure. People use drugs to “change the lens” of perception since they do not like what they are experiencing so they try to perceive themselves and the world differently via drugs and most often, drug addiction isn”t about drugs or addiction but about the individual themselves. We as a society cannot accept the fact that drug addiction is a choice.
Drugs of all kinds, initially drawn from the plant world have been used by humans throughout history for religious intoxication, in the form of mushrooms, tobacco, jimsonweed, and alcohol to provide meaningful, socially vital rituals and myths and cosmic revelation. But of course the historical and anthropological arguments about the sacred value of certain drugs are too subtle and complicated for those largely social conservative voices from the 19th century that have dominated the public debate.
As Jimmy Carter argued in the New York Times, it”s time to call off this wasted effort and heed the recommendations of the Global Commission on Drug Policy, and create more reasonable, evidence-based, economically beneficial rules and regulations regarding the rampant hunger for drugs across all sectors of society. After decades of spending billions of dollars on vacuous sloganeering and war-like efforts most Americans still, from street thugs to good old granny, continue to say yes to drugs.
We should not fear that “there is ice and there is fire in every single heart”- Voices of the Beehive.
Greg Blinn
Kelseyville
