ADDICTED TO CONTROVERSY

Psychologist Wins $5,000 Cash For Debunking 'Myth' Of Drug
Addiction

Just as Al Gore was being honoured yesterday in Sweden for trying to
dispel controversy and build consensus, halfway around the world in
Vancouver, psychologist Bruce Alexander was being honoured for
precisely the opposite.

Named this year's winner of the Nora and Ted Sterling Prize for
Controversy, the drug-addiction researcher who thinks drug addiction
is a myth, similar to medieval demon possession, joins a remarkable
pantheon of academic poop-disturbers at Simon Fraser University, which
awards the $5,000 prize, usually but not necessarily to one of its
faculty.

"It's not the Nobel Prize," said Nora Sterling, a mental health
advocate and arts patron, who established the award in 1994 with her
late husband, Ted, the founding chair of the Simon Fraser University
computer science program.

It has been awarded for controversies as diverse as the Newfoundland
fishing economy, AIDS-related euthanasia, prostitution law, serial
killer profiling, gun control, pest control, victims rights, cognitive
differences between the sexes, genetically modified food and
evolutionary psychology. It has been won by biologists and economists,
criminologists and psychologists, grad students and professors
emeritus, feather-rufflers all, united by disagreement.

It has even had controversies of its own, such as when it went to
prominent right-wing economist and former Reform MP Herb Grubel, whose
ideas are at odds with the mainstream of SFU's liberal arts faculty,
who are among Canada's most leftist. In that sense, he was an
unpopularly perfect choice for a celebration of controversy.

Prof. Alexander was nominated in large part for his role in inspiring
Vancouver's "four pillars" drug abuse policy, which has drawn public
denunciation from top American justice officials for its perceived
laxity.

"That says it's controversial, and that's exactly the sort of thing
that the prize wants to recognize," said Ron Ydenberg, an SFU biology
professor who chaired the prize committee. "The committee is
uninterested in the award winner being right in any sense. What we're
interested in is that the work has attracted attention."

Ms. Sterling, who is not involved in judging, said the point is to
recognize meaningul controversies for their role in promoting
understanding.

"We are both controversial people, both my husband and myself," she
said. "We questioned the mainstreams of thought and felt that there
should be a prize for people who also question, but have done their
homework to support their controversial approach. For scientists,
their research methods must be ethical and judged as credible by their
peers -- it cannot be merely opinions."

Born in New York City, educated in Wisconsin and at the University of
Oregon medical school, Prof. Alexander was actively opposed to the
Vietnam War as a young man, and avoided the draft because he was
married with children. He arrived in Vancouver in 1970, hoping to move
from experimental to clinical psychology, and "start curing people of
addiction." He started with talk therapy for heroin addicts, one of
psychology's more Sisyphean projects.

"I went into it like anyone else would. I knew what I had learned in
school, and I remembered what my father taught me, you know, that
these drugs cause addiction, and once people get into them they're
sort of possessed, and if they're going to get out of it, they're
going to have to have some sort of a conversion experience," Prof.
Alexander said.

He discovered that addicts were not the demonic, pathological liars
and thieves he had been told. "They're more like pathetic kids," he
said.

His experiences prompted a "Peter Pan phase" in his thinking. His 1990 book,
Peaceful Measures: Canada's Way Out of the War on Drugs, even includes a
chapter on J.M. Barrie, who Prof. Alexander said was addicted to the fantasy
of not growing up.

"He, in many ways, is like a junky, because he just can't face the
complexities of life," he said.

This phase was part of a broad awakening to a new concept of
addiction, which he now believes to be a relatively modern invention,
the result of "insufficient psychosocial integration" in a free-market
society.

Now, he thinks, the word "addiction" is more often used in the trivial
sense, when the truth is something closer to "dependence," such as one
can have on coffee, Prozac, even family. He has come to believe that
addiction is not the unrelenting neurobiological grip of a substance,
but a set of circumstances, involving nutrition, social exclusion,
even the real estate market.

"There's a lot of people who use drugs, and they use them not in order
to lead a junky life, but to lead a normal life. They use them as
crutches. And in fact an awful lot of people do that. So, in my way of
thinking, most smokers are not addicted," he said.

Real addiction, as he sees near his house, not far from Vancouver's
Downtown Eastside, is a different beast than simple nicotine craving.

"You know these people have been labelled junkies, and you think maybe
this was caused by the heroin, but why not say it's caused by the
malnutrition, or the repeated physical violence, or the stress?" he
said. Addiction is a very real and terrible problem, he said, but
heroin itself is "a benign drug."

"The myth is demon possession, that drugs can possess you and make you
into an addict. It has a very medieval flavour to it," he said. "That
idea, that these drugs cause addiction, is an extremely valuable idea
for an awful lot of people. I mean, obviously for police, to start
with. That's easy, right, because now they have a mission to protect
the public [from drugs]. But for psychologists even more so, because
we have to have a reason why we can't cure these guys."

It's even a "useful story" for parents of junkies, who are often
racked with guilt, fairly or not -- the story that it was the junk
that got the child, "not anything that I didn't do."

As a researcher, Prof. Alexander started attracting serious attention
in the 1970s, when he, with Barry Beyerstein, Patricia Hadaway and
Robert Coambs, did a series of experiments known as "Rat Park,"
purportedly showing that drugs do not cause addiction. In one
experiment, rats that had been fed morphine for two months straight
were introduced to a luxurious habitat with wheels and balls, plenty
of food, water and warmth, and a social network of other rats. Given a
choice between morphine-laced water and tap water, the rats chose tap.

It was a convincing result for Prof. Alexander, and definitely
controversial. But it was rejected by Science and Nature, two of the
world's top journals, before being published in a lesser publication.
His funding was eventually withdrawn. "Maybe we didn't write it well
enough for Nature, I don't know," he said.

In his forthcoming book, The Globalization of Addiction, he expands on
the iconoclasm that he has promoted for almost 30 years, and argues
that Canada does not treat addiction aggressively enough. Among his
proposed remedies are legislated changes to the real estate market,
aimed at driving out speculators in favour of real people who need
housing. He said the measures announced this week by Health Minister
Tony Clement -- funding for prevention, treatment and a crackdown on
dealing -- amount to "reinventing the wheel," and are doomed.

"The greatest naivete here is to suppose there is a shortcut," he
said.

Nobel or not, you just cannot imagine Al Gore ever saying that.