VANCOUVER: HOME OF THE TERMINAL ADDICT

Psychologist Says Our Sense Of Dislocation Leads To Addiction

So, what brought you to Vancouver?

The question is asked all the time because this is a city full of people
who just got here. Vancouver is full of refugees forced to flee some war
or personal catastrophe, Vancouver is full of people lured here by the
promise of a new job, new rhythm, new view of mountains and water.

What that means, if you see Vancouver through the eyes of psychologist
Bruce K. Alexander, is that this is a city of the "dislocated." And
therefore, perfectly logically, this is a city of the addicted.

What brought you to Vancouver? The question may be asked over a tumbler of
single malt. Or a pint of beer. Or a scrap of foil unwrapped to reveal
whatever grade of heroin is being sold on the street at the moment.

It's no surprise to Alexander that Vancouver is home to a thriving drug
trade and, as he puts it, the "sodden misery" of the Downtown Eastside.
That particular corner of hell is merely reflective of the larger "malaise"
that envelopes Vancouver.

"Spreading in every direction from the Downtown Eastside centre of hard
drug addiction is a vast, doleful tapestry of less notorious, but often
equally tragic forms of addiction," states Alexander. "There are gambling
addicts in the casinos, alcoholics in the bars, money and power addicts in
the financial district, workaholics in the offices, cybersex and video game
addicts at the monitors...and on and on."

What all these bedeviled souls have in common, in Alexander's view, are the
feelings of depression that come with being cut off from the people, the
culture, the place that might provide meaning in one's life. The more you
feel dislocated, the more you feel depressed, the more you're vulnerable to
addiction. Welcome then to Vancouver, Terminally Addicted City.

Alexander, who has studied addiction for 30 years as a professor at Simon
Fraser University, lays out his provocative theory in a paper called "The
Roots of Addiction in a Free Market Society", just released by the Canadian
Centre for Policy Alternatives.

His analysis represents a bracing challenge to the $30-million "four-pillar
approach" to drug addiction in the region now being finalized by city hall.

"This balanced and compassionate initiative warrants public support,"
Alexander writes of the plan upon which Mayor Phillip Owen has staked his
political legacy. "Unfortunately, it does not warrant optimism. A century
of intense effort has shown that no matter how well different approaches
are coordinated, society cannot 'prevent,' 'treat,' or 'harm reduce' its
way out of addiction any more than it can 'police' its way out of it."

Sipping coffee among folks getting their caffeine fixes at The Grind Cafe,
Alexander makes it clear that he's not down on colleagues who run treatment
centres, hand out clean needles, detox drunks, or minister in myriad other
ways to the city's addicted population. He sits on the board of the
Portland Hotel a showcase of harm reduction approaches borrowed from
Europe. "But it's all Band-Aids," he says.

The root cause of addiction in free market society is free market society
itself, argues Alexander. Specifically, the way that free-market society
is constantly tearing up and reinventing local economies, constantly
demanding that people move from here to there or somewhere else to make a
living, and as best they can, to make a life.

We just weren't built for it, argues Alexander. The same innate need that
children have to bond with parents is expressed as a grown-up desire to
"establish and maintain other close relationships, for example, with
friends, school mates, co-workers, and recreational, ethnic, religious, or
nationalistic groups."

That is what noted psychologist Eric Erikson meant when he spoke of our
life-long struggle to achieve "psychosocial integration." It is the "state
in which people flourish simultaneously as individuals and as members of
their culture," writes Alexander.

Okay, but just how does freemarket society chip away at so basic a human
requirement? Here's how Alexander explains it: "In order for 'free
markets' to be 'free,' the exchange of labour, land, currency, and consumer
goods must not be encumbered by elements of psychosocial integration such
clan loyalties, village responsibilities, guild or union rights, charity,
family obligations, social roles, or religious values. Cultural traditions
'distort' the free play of laws of supply and demand, and thus must be
suppressed. In free market economies, for example, people are expected to
move where jobs can be found, and to adjust their work lives and cultural
tastes to the demands of a global market."

In other words, Alexander shares the critique of the protesters in Quebec.
And he's given them one more arrow to launch over the walls. If free-market
society mass produces feelings of dislocation, then "mass addiction is
being globalized along, with the English language, the Internet and Mickey
Mouse." Alexander admits his views make him "an outsider" in his
profession, which prefers to think of itself as non-political and dedicated
to healing patients, not societies. But like any good scientist, Alexander
points to research backing his theory.

First, there are the rats. Years back, Alexander ran an experiment in
which rats were allowed to consume narcotics by tapping a bar. The rats
left alone in their cages fast became junkies. The ones that were allowed
to wander a "rat park" and mix freely with other rats stayed clean.
Presumably, they felt less "dislocated" than their addicted peers.

Then there are the Scots. Alexander has made a close study of the history
of Scottish Highlanders, noting that they had the best whisky but little
record of alcoholism until the second half of the 18th century. That's
when the British conquered the clans, destroyed their society, and
integrated the Highlanders into the emerging free-market system.

Alexander sees parallels between the Highlanders and native people
throughout the Americas.

According to anthropologists' reports, while some aboriginal groups
traditionally used alcohol and other narcotics, it was only after the
profoundly "dislocating" arrival of the Europeans that addiction plagued
native Indians. Which is why Alexander doesn't buy the theory that
alcoholism runs higher among certain groups because they carry an
over-represented "addiction gene."

If alcoholism is high among Russians, for example, Alexander chalks it up
to the wrenching dislocation that the Soviet-style industrialization
imposed on a society of age-old agrarian villages. "Marx and Lenin wanted
to adopt the machinery of the Industrial Revolution without the ideology.
But a factory fragments people, dislocates them. Russia just got the worst
of it. All the ills of free market society without any of the benefits."

That's right, Alexander is willing to grant that free market society has
produced many benefits. "Longevity. Individual rights. Microwave ovens.
These are all miracles."

But he asks that we consider the trade-offs, as vividly illustrated in a
recently published study on life in Alberta over the past 40 years. Life
span, educational levels, and personal wealth are all way up. So are
divorce, obesity, gambling and addiction. "Our task," says Alexander, "is
to recognize when the negatives become unbearable."

In saying so, Alexander issues a weighty challenge. For starters, he is
asking that we move beyond the common view of addiction. That is, as a
disease that picks off individuals one at a time, and can, only be defeated
the same way - one lonely battle of will power at a time. That is the
message implicit in Alcoholics Anonymous, which focuses the power of the
group on strengthening the individual's resistance to temptation.

Instead, Alexander wants us to take a macro-view of the problem, as if
sitting in the nose-bleed row of GM Place. From Alexander's seat, the
free-market society we find ourselves with is not some inevitable outcome
of Darwinian evolution. It is the product of decisions made that can,
through politics, be revised.

Similarly, addiction isn't merely a bad thing that happens to some people,
requiring more or less compassion from those of us unscathed. Today's high
levels of addiction can be viewed as so much "collateral damage," to borrow
that infamous phrase from the U.S. military brass. War, like the framing of
economic policy, is a conscious course of action. In Desert Storm, the
collateral damage could be measured in numbers of civilians maimed and
slaughtered. To add up the collateral damage wrought by freemarket
society, suggests Alexander, look around and start counting all the addicts
you know.

Given his analysis, Alexander could be forgiven for sinking into a
depression of his own, so daunting are the prospects for solving addiction
as he defines it. But the psychologist describes himself as well balanced
and "very hopeful." He says his critique of free-market society leaves him
"clear headed," liberated from false optimism.

The problem with city hall's four-pillar approach for Vancouver, he says is
that it is "an insufficient edifice" built on the faulty soil of free-trade
society. And so he offers other prescriptions toward the end of his paper:
"We need to restore social spending enhance our ability to care for one
another...invest in social housing...reform our public services so they
become more nurturing...rebuild programs like welfare and UI that give
people choices and allow them to stay in their home communities." He also
wants full employment atop the public policy agenda, and measures to
restore Canada's sense of itself as an "honourable, sovereign nation,
rather than a puppet of the United States."

As psychological prescriptions go, it would be hard to find one more
sweeping, or political. But then, here's what Bruce Alexander thinks when
he turns on the television news to see how the demonstrations and pepper
spraying is proceeding in Quebec City: "Those protesters could have more
impact on the problem of addiction than all the psychologists and social
workers put together."