Addiction is a Social Disease

The Opiate of the People

This brings us back to our story of Ted Patrick and the religious commune kidnappings. As a rule, membership in a religious commune is a total experience. We have quoted Chein's description of how the use and procurement of heroin provides a structure for the addict's life; the same is true here. And like a full-scale heroin habit, a total commitment to a religious sect negates everything a person has been and done and suffered and learned before "seeing the light." Order is imposed by the strictures of the group, assurance and integration are sought through faith in an all-powerful God, and the threatening responsibility of self-assertion is evaded. Many youths undoubtedly join such groups in order to leave behind a life of confusion, failure, and self-doubt. Their communal experience amounts to a total restructuring of their cognitions along narrow, rigid lines. Once they submit to this, it requires an equally totalitarian assault on their sensibilities, such as Patrick's "deprogramming," to bring them out of it.

In the Times account, one 18-year-old woman who was made to see the error of her ways offered immediately to join the deprogramming group so as to help save others (as several deprogrammed youths have actually done). It was an understandable reaction, when you consider that feelings of strong dependency invariably beget an equal and opposite reaction once the tie is broken. A newly withdrawn addict finds himself at least temporarily facing an emotional and spiritual void. Nothing is really salient to him, because the web of interconnections with others and the range of satisfactions in life which people normally can fall back on have been eradicated or suppressed by the addiction, and they can't be restored in an instant. Even when this normal psychic context is restored, it is hard to find a place in it for something which was formerly the addict's whole world. This is why reformed alcoholics and drug addicts are often the most hard line opponents of chemical intoxication, just as the deprogrammed Child of God wanted to join the deprogramming group. It is also why some ex-lovers, to the amazement of those around them, display in the aftermath of a breakup a vindictive bitterness toward that person whom they felt they loved more than anyone in the world.

What about the parents of the Children of God? Their reactions are indicative of the malaise that drove their children to lose their balance in life. One mother said of Ted Patrick, "He is my savior." Disappointed to find on meeting him that he was built to human scale, she explained, "I thought he would be a giant—some kind of god that we just had to have." Calling upon this external agent to solve the problem, the parents who were interviewed were all too ready to blame something external—the subversive influence of the sect leaders—for what had gone wrong. The Children of God were brought up by people who could not come to grips with their world, and who passed on their uncertainty to their offspring. Parents and children are locked in their common befuddlement, blindly groping for a panacea.

The parents of the woman who wanted to join the deprogramming group persuaded her to go back to school instead. In general, the parents involved in the kidnappings seem only to want their children to revert to the outward normality—the acceptably disguised irresolution and dependency—that they exhibited before their religious conversion. One father said, "I'm sure it will take two years to rebuild what those kids destroyed in a week." But what real stability, what grounding in life could his daughter have had in the first place if "those kids" could destroy it in a week? And how rebuild it—by sending her back to school and church, where her unsure sense of herself was nurtured? Couldn't Ted Patrick kidnap some very young children from their homes and schools and try to deprogram them?

The Scope of the Problem

The relationship between addiction and the loss of personal bearing in an institutionalized society extends throughout the modern Western world. Nonetheless, it is only in America among Western countries that heroin addiction has become an unmanageable social problem. It was only in America that a concerted bureaucratic campaign, involving government, law, and medicine, inflamed the public with fear and loathing of the drug and its users. And it was there that the physiological myth of drug dependence—the idea that the individual's independent will is powerless before the inexorable action of a drug—was fervently propagated and maintained. Thomas Szasz attributes this costly irrationality to our pervasive ambivalence about personal autonomy and responsibility. This ambivalence has been especially pronounced in America because of a cultural conflict between the accelerating institutionalization of life which began in the mid-19th century and the ideal of individualism which Americans had believed in as a sort of national creed and had tried, with questionable success, to live up to since the first colonies were founded on this side of the Atlantic.

Americans were responsive to opium because it was introduced into the country at a time when some lulling antidote to this growing gap between ideal and fulfillment was very much needed. At the same time, the drug's debilitating chemical action served to symbolize the futility of personal aspiration in an increasingly bureaucratized world. Opiates came to be used addictively, and addiction came to be associated with opiates, because this most powerful of the analgesics (pain—and consciousness of pain—killers) arrived at a moment when Americans were threateningly sensitized to both the allure and the shame of passive submission and escapism. It is worth pondering that the two decades which saw the largest increase in opium importation into the U.S. (1890-1910) began with the closing of the frontier, symbolic of the death of classic American individualism. (At around the same time, America was also in the throes of a series of state and nation-wide prohibitions of alcohol, culminating in the ratification of the 18th Amendment in 1919, and was taking up the cigarette habit in a large-scale way.)

Obviously, a malady so deeply embedded in our cultural life cannot be cured by rehabilitating "drug abusers" any more than by locking them up. To be aware of the full extent of addiction in America and the Western world generally is to recognize that it cannot be eliminated except by a global change in the quality of our lives, which in turn requires major political and economic readjustments. Short of that, an awareness of the dimensions of addiction can help us deal with it constructively either for ourselves or for others whom we are trying to help. For example, while one addiction may be less destructive or more socially acceptable than another, it is ultimately not the answer to treat one addiction by substituting another (e.g. methadone for heroin, or dependence on Alcoholics Anonymous for dependence on alcohol).