June 17, 1971. To borrow from Winston Churchill, a day that will live in infamy. What day is it? It is the first day on the War on Drugs, or alias, War on Doctors. During the 20th century, the medical model of addiction became the philosophy of the government.
In this model, tolerance, withdrawal, and craving are thought to be properties of particular drugs, and sufficient use of these substances is believed to give the organism no choice but to behave in these stereotypical ways. This has led to the indiscriminate attacks on good, real doctors treating real pain.
The actuality is that the drug does not cause addiction. Alexander did a study called Rat Park in the 1970’s. In it he took away the cramped, anxiety-provoking conditions of the usual laboratory cage and raised a colony of rats in a 95 square foot rat haven. Alexander's hypothesis was that drugs do not cause addiction, and that the apparent addiction to opiate drugs commonly observed in laboratory rats exposed to it is attributable to their living conditions, and not to any addictive property of the drug itself. He told the Canadian Senate in 2001 that prior experiments in which laboratory rats were kept isolated in cramped metal cages, tethered to a self-injection apparatus, show only that "severely distressed animals, like severely distressed people, will relieve their distress pharmacologically if they can." The experimental rats in rat park would not consume morphine, even if they were prior addicted, while the control rats in the usual cages consumed the morphine.
According to Alexander, the disease model makes either of two claims:
- Claim A: All or most people who use heroin (expanded to include all opiates) or cocaine beyond a certain minimum amount become addicted.
- Claim B: No matter what proportion of the users of heroin (opiates) and cocaine become addicted, their addiction is caused by exposure to the drug.
He then points out that, although the use of opiates in the United States and England during the 19th century was greater than it is now, the incidence of dependence and addiction never reached one percent of the population and was declining by the end of the century.
The British Columbia Centre for Excellence published a paper revealing that almost three-quarters of the $368 million allocated to Canada’s Drug Strategy in 2004-05 was spent on enforcement initiatives aimed at staunching the supply of drugs. The authors pointed out that despite this war on drugs, the rate of consumption was higher than ever: in 2002, 45 percent of Canadians reported having used illicit drugs in their lives, up from 28.5 percent in 1994. So if the drug is not the cause of addiction, why are we still attacking doctors after 40 years of evident that it isn’t having an effect? Why is anything done by government agencies? Because their salaries depend on their having results, and they want to keep their jobs. Government policy is dictated by politics, not by truth. So they keep on doing what they’re doing, in spite of the evidence to the contrary.
Tomorrow: a more plausible explanation of drug addiction.
