Some people can’t fathom another way of life. Many people, in fact. The sheer idea of living without substances is enough to make them run out and get high. If you can’t understand this way of thinking, you are blessed.
There is a common misconception that drug addicts enjoy being a addicted to drugs. The enjoyment for a drug abuser is a fleeting experience, when they are still using recreationally. Most ‘normal’ people put addicts in this very neatly defined category where they can be dismissed. They are defined as all that is evil, vile, reprehensible, beyond rehabilitation, unworthy of consideration, devoid of all value. But these are people. These are real flesh and blood people who are labeled similar to that of a serial killer or a supernatural manifestation of evil. I suppose that in most cases, people characterize addicts in this manner because they lack any type of personal experience with the subject and if that’s the case they should get educated or mind their own business.
I love watching documentary style television shows. In fact, those shows are just about the only reason I still have cable. Intervention, Nazi Fugitives, Live PD, Unsolved Mysteries, The First 48, etc., There are so many to choose from! I am glued to the human condition. I want to know what drives a person to become reckless, dangerous and destructive. I want to know the exact day their course was altered, the influence others had on their life, the thoughts and emotions that they felt powerless against, I want to know it all. I want to know what happens after the cameras stop rolling and public interest has waned. One thing always surprises me when I watch these shows. I find that I am far more interested in the culprit, the villain, than I am the victim. The portrait of a victim is the perfect depiction of innocence. It lacks depth. It lacks realism. In these stories, the victim is almost universally good and the offender, well he or she is Satan in the flesh. But in reality, nothing is that simple.
There are not ‘good people’ and ‘bad people’. We are all changing, always. A few years ago I did mostly bad things, today I do mostly good things. Which one am I? If I counted all of the good and bad deeds and charted them, which would win out? Do some deeds weigh mo
re than others? Is there a way to calculate a person’s level of goodness? If so, what is the criteria and who decided it? Is there a bad thing I could do that would be so bad that it could never outweigh any future good? Is there a good thing I could do that would outweigh any future bad? There is no simple answer, so I think of the villain.
People act out their pain in a variety of ways. Drug addiction is just one manifestation of human suffering, and it is suffering. Your average junkie hates themselves. They hate being dependent upon a substance, they hate the way they have treated others. They feel unwelcome, unloved and incapable of changing the course of their life. In my years of addiction, I never once met a person who enjoyed stealing, lying, cheating, sticking needles in their arms, losing their children, watching their friends die, overdosing, going to prison, having no money, being homeless, losing their looks, or any of the other benefits of drug abuse. Given the choice, they’d all prefer to be a wall street banker (yikes!) to a street junkie. They just don’t see the choice, and this is the illusion of the disease.
It is incredibly difficult to convince an experienced addict that they could ever live without substances. Imagine someone telling you that you can live without arms and legs. It’s almost unfathomable. Yes, you know intellectually that people do it, but not you. You need your arms to drive and cook dinner. You need your legs to do yoga and walk the dog. All of your friends have arms and legs and you wouldn’t fit in. Your whole life would be turned upside down. If you didn’t have arms and legs, you would feel helpless and hopeless. That’s exactly what an addict hears at the mention of sobriety. They have lived so long being dependent upon substances that sobriety represents the removal of their most utilized tools. Without addiction, they don’t know who they are or how they will survive—-and they don’t trust you to know for them.
If you were an integral part of someone’s life when they fell into addiction and you didn’t stop it, why would they believe you could help them to come out of it? I’m not saying that you should or could have stopped it, I’m merely saying there is a lack of trust. For most addicts, the world is a messy place full of disappointment. They are looking for a simple answer to a very complex problem, but they, like most people, can’t see the forest for the trees. They are too busy focusing on any given day, any given screw up, any given immediate need that they can’t bother with tomorrow, much less a year from now. And similarly, most families and friends of these individuals are focusing on whatever crisis just happened, or if there is no crisis they are basking in the calm and hoping it is a sign of progress. Rarely is anyone developing a strategy to cure the disease, thus it becomes symptom management.
Managing addiction is about as possible as teaching a two year old how to drink alcohol responsibly. No, that doesn’t even make sense, does it? As a society we try all types of management methods and none of them work. Sorry, drug counselors, I disagree with you on this one. Methadone, Suboxone and all of their friends in the management business, they are a waste of time, money and hope. You can’t treat a chemical dependency with a chemical dependency and I think this is one of the tenets of recovery that most professionals agree on, yet many don’t treat patients with this in mind. We as a society have agreed to manage a problem that often began with a prescription, with a prescription. How daft are we?
We have created a society where chemicals are the answer to everything that ails you. And if the chemical itself ails you, there’s a chemical for that as well. When patients turn to street pharmaceuticals, oh well suddenly there is a problem. The patient has become a criminal and society has washed their hands of them. Are you following how illogical this is?
It is hard to distinguish the victim from the villain. In this story the addict can be the villain, or their family can be the villain, or the pharmaceutical industry, or the medical community, or the legislators who have waged war on drugs but take money from the industries that are catalysts for drug abuse. Guess which of these is the most helpless to defend themselves? Guess which is suffering? Which is profiting? Whose face will you see in the jail blotter? And when you do, recall that there are no villains. Recall that there are only people, some in impossibly difficult circumstances, often beyond your greatest nightmares. Then get on your knees and pray.
The Reprobate's Guide to Pancakes 