The 2000 Stanton Peele Addiction Lecture was delivered by Maggie Brady, of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, Canberra. Maggie begins her story with the avid reception accorded Canadian Indian alcoholism activists who visited Australia with tales of 12 steps, sweat lodges, and other popular native North American alcoholism techniques. Maggie describes the history of Australian aboriginal efforts in alcoholism, their previous adoption of 12-step and disease principles — just as the rest of the country was coming under the sway of harm reduction models — and the political, economic, and cultural self-image issues involved in aboriginals being convinced that, as a class of people, they suffer from a pervasive and ineradicable "disease."

Annual Stanton Peele Addiction Lecture, University of Deacon, Melbourne, Australia, October 24, 2000. Reprinted with permission of Deakin University School of Psychology

The 2000 Stanton Peele Addiction Lecture

Debates over biological vs environmental determinants of Aboriginal alcohol misuse

Maggie Brady
Visiting Research Fellow
Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, Canberra

I have long been an admirer of Stanton Peele's iconoclastic work in addiction, and so I feel honoured to have been asked to present this Stanton Peele Addiction Lecture. Thank you for inviting me to speak to you tonight.

Introduction

In 1975, the Aboriginal activist, ex-wharfie and ex-drinker Chicka Dixon was one of the first prominent Aboriginal Australians to examine drug and alcohol programs in the United States and Canada. He travelled there on an Aboriginal Overseas Study Award. Among other places, he visited Alberta — in particular a First Nations alcoholism training and treatment centre there. Dixon observed in his diary that this was the best program he saw overseas. He enthused about the possibility of such an organisation being started in Australia. He noted that the Canadian Indians offered to train Aborigines in their year-long program or to send four of their experts to Australia to train Aborigines on the spot. Australia was depicted as being 'still in the dark ages in the alcohol treatment field' — about ten years behind the North Americans. Dixon, and other Aboriginal visitors who followed, were impressed with the large-scale training of indigenous counsellors, as well as the apparent success of residential treatment based on the 12 step model.

In 1990 Chicka Dixon's suggestion that a similar program be developed in Australia finally came to pass when indigenous alcohol trainers from the Canadian organisations took up consultancies in this country. In April 1991 Andy and Phyllis Chelsea, two Shushwap First Nations people from the Alkali Lake community in British Columbia visited Australia to attend a conference in Alice Springs. A film entitled 'The Honour of All' which documented their achievements in controlling alcohol abuse was viewed by hundreds of Aboriginal people in Central Australia at that time, and was also shown on Imparja TV. Aboriginal alcohol activists invited other North Americans to Australia in the early 1990s as well. For example Phil Diaz (previously a senior bureaucrat in the US Office of National Drug Control Policy, Office of the President), and Anne-Marie Latimer (executive director of Native American Children of Alcoholics) attended an Aboriginal drug-free conference in Cairns. These spokespeople linked the solutions to indigenous drug and alcohol problems to a reclamation of Aboriginal culture and spirituality, a revival of 'traditional' ways, and to the need for abstinence based Aboriginal-run treatment centres.

Chicka Dixon's earlier visit, and the arrival of Canadian Indian and other North American consultants in Australia 15 years later, had a number of impacts. The most important of these was that the indigenous treatment consultants brought with them North American approaches to addiction. The Canadians and Americans who came to influence Aboriginal programs were unanimously anti-moderation or the possibility of 'social' drinking. They expressed doubts about the idea of 'prevention'. The developments and links with North America reinforced disease- and abstinence-based models of treatment for Australian Aboriginal people. It is to this I refer — somewhat tongue in cheek — in my title: 'The diseasing of Australia?'

Some have questioned whether these First Nations (and other) consultants really presented an indigenous perspective, or simply a North American perspective - a re-run of the war against drugs, a unitary focus on abstinence, the progressive disease model, on residential treatment, and an antipathy to harm minimisation. Indeed, one could ask how relevant Australian government policy is for Aboriginal people if there is a rejection of harm minimisation, and if abstinence is considered the only solution?

In this lecture, I am going to explore both the symbolic and the real impact of these developments. I will show how a small group of alcoholism treatment entrepreneurs were able — for a time — to influence approaches to Aboriginal alcohol problems in ways which ran counter to policies long-established in Australia. I will suggest why this came about.