Life After St. Marys: Alum Confronts America’s War on Drugs
By Andrew T. Wainwright
Featured in the St. Mary's College of Maryland
River Gazette
November, 2007
Andrew T. Wainwright is a
national expert on addiction and intervention. He is the
co-founder
of Addiction Intervention Resources (AIR) and the co-author
of the book It’s Not Okay to Be a Cannibal - How to
Stop Addiction from Eating Your Family Alive.
I am sometimes asked, “So,
how do you feel about the War on Drugs?”
Part of my answer is that I am one of the foot-soldiers in
a war on drugs. I have dedicated my life to helping families through
the difficulties of addiction. I find nothing cute or fashionable
about drugs and alcohol.
I absolutely take a very tough line on getting people free
of substances that don’t enlighten, entertain, or improve
a human being, but which only fool them into thinking they
do these things – only, ultimately, to kill both body
and soul.
Having said all this, I have
serious issues with the official, government-driven
War on Drugs. The War on Drugs is into its fourth decade
now, having begun in the Nixon administration. Over that
time it has used the power of government in just about every
way to stem the flow of drugs into our country and into our
loved ones and ourselves. But there has been plenty of bad
to go along with the good. Without a doubt, we have focused
the combined power and intelligence of local, state, federal,
and international criminal justice systems on stopping the
importation, sale, and use of drugs. It is also true that
we have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on public awareness
programs, using TV, radio, the print media, and in-school
programs to stress the dangers posed by drugs. We have poisoned
marijuana fields in Mexico, blighted the cocaine plantations
of Colombia and Bolivia, and set fire to the poppy fields
of Afghanistan.
But what about the other side?
We have imprisoned tens of thousands of our citizens – with
the idea that there will be no access to drugs in the penal
system. Back in 1980,
almost 600,000 Americans were arrested
for drug use. By 2003, that figure was almost triple, 1,678,200.
We arrest more people for drugs than for
murder, manslaughter, rape, and assault combined. A generation
of kids has grown up with one or both parents in jail for
drugs. After all this effort, what has been the effect on
drug use here and in other countries? The shorter answer
is that it has gone up.
I believe that the War on Drugs,
fully capitalized, is itself a form of addictive behavior – in
which we quest for something unattainable, endlessly repeat
a behavior known to be extremely injurious, and ultimately
never get what we want.
Recovering addicts talk frequently
about the definition of insanity when describing addiction. “This
time if I use cocaine, it will be like that first hit. It
will feel
great, and I won’t have any consequences, even though
the past 100 times I have said this it has not been the case.” Is
this wishful thinking or pure insanity? If you know that
something doesn’t work but keep
repeating the behavior, that’s
insanity. Likewise, a War on Drugs that seriously harms thousands
of families but, for the most part, doesn’t succeed
in discouraging drug use is, as addicts
use the word, insane.
Telling an addict to “Just
say no” is
asking for scorn. If addicts could stop on their own, they
certainly
would. No one wants to grow up to disappoint their parents,
lie, cheat, steal, and become the best addict they can be,
but it happens all the time. By definition, active addicts
aren’t able to not use drugs. Has interdiction abroad
caused the inflow of drugs to significantly diminish? Has
the threat of jail helped the addict overcome desire? Have
all the public service announcements caused addicts to stop using? Too often the answer is no.
The War on Drugs simply doesn’t
work because it is a creature of bureaucracy, a
million light years from where drugs are consumed and harm
actually occurs, in the bedrooms and basements of ordinary
families.
Instead of a B-1 bomber approach
to addiction, flying 30,000 feet above the action, the need
is for something much smaller
in scale, more personal, more focused. Think of a different
kind of war, one that is fought entirely on the ground. One
that consists of hand-to-hand combat, house-to-house fighting
in which families confront their loved ones, eyeball to eyeball,
telling them the truth that everyone has been too afraid
to utter. Whereas the War on Drugs is wholesale, this kind
of fighting is retail. Where the government’s war is
distant and remote, this war is as close as the sofa in your
living room.
I suspect that we as a society
indulge in the wholesale, B-1 bomber approach out of cowardice.
It’s psychically easier to confront drug addiction on a high-altitude, impersonal
basis. It’s terrifying to look into the eyes of a son
or a daughter or a spouse and say: “I won’t tolerate
your addiction anymore. Things are going to change.”
We are so deep into addiction
as a people that we can no longer think straight. We have
had to make room for insanity
in our lives and to pretend that the natural response to
life’s difficulties is to get high, to escape, to create
little shrines to our specialness. Our world is so insane
that tens of millions of people feel safer and more like
themselves when they are living criminal existences in which
they turn their backs on the humble values that have held
human society together over the last hundred thousand years:
trust, respect, gratitude, joy, and perspective on who we
are and what our place is in this world. In the place of
these simple values, the addict substitutes alcohol, speed,
pot, and frantic compulsivity.
So what are we to do? How should
the War on Drugs be fought? The war on drugs must start in
the home, moving from family to family,
supporting one another. We must speak out, get involved, work for change. The downside of doing nothing is death.
The upside of intervening, on both the personal and institutional
levels, is the possibility of possibility.
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