ADDICTIONS, DISTRACTIONS DEFINE WESTERN WORLD

SFU Professor Identifies Society'S Ills

When U.S. reporter Dan Rather blew into town last week to investigate
Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, he could have done worse than interview
SFU professor of psychology Bruce Alexander. But the professor's
position is probably too nuanced for another prime time yawner devoted
to the War on Some Drugs. While Alexander endorses Vancouver's Four
Pillars program, he feels such efforts don't dig deep enough to
address the roots of addiction in society.

In 1997, Alexander stopped teaching courses on addiction and "went on
a binge of reading," with the intent to write a history of psychology.
He thought he had left his studies behind, but they came after him. "I
kept finding addiction in my history books, when I didn't expect to
find it. I found the answer which I could not find in doing
psychological research," he told an audience last month at the Wosk
Centre for Dialogue.

Alexander had already determined that studies on drug-addicted rats,
used to prove what he calls the "demon drug" model of addiction, were
incomplete at best, and dangerous pseudoscience at worst. After
reading the history of the British "opium wars," and the deliberate
displacement of people in the Scottish highlands, he understood better
how addiction grips entire cultures.

He summed up his findings in a 2001 paper for the Canadian Centre for
Policy Alternatives. "Addiction in the modern world can be best
understood as a compulsive lifestyle that people adopt as a desperate
substitute when they are dislocated from the myriad intimate ties
between people and groups--from the family to the spiritual
community--that are essential for every person in every type of society."

The prof's work doesn't shrink from identifying addiction's myriad
forms, pushed by advertising, marketing and public policy decisions.
Globalization itself creates the template, the petri dish, for
addictive behaviour.

"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 as clan loyalties, village
responsibilities, guild or union rights, charity, family obligations,
social roles, or religious values. Cultural traditions 'distort' the
free play of the laws of supply and demand, and thus must be
suppressed. In free market economies, for example, people are expected
to move to where jobs can be found, and to adjust their work lives and
cultural tastes to the demands of a global market."

Our culture is notable for its fragmentation, mobility and endless
high-tech distractions. Alexander argues that people who cannot
achieve psychosocial integration in this milieu, for whatever reason,
often develop substitute lifestyles. They cling to these "with a
tenacity that is properly called addiction." Sometimes these
substitute lifestyles are relatively harmless, but often it's quite
the opposite.

Alexander's ideas on "the globalization of addiction" seem almost
obvious in retrospect, but he's the first to apply academic rigour to
the matter. Then again, he's had an open field. As he noted in his
2001 paper, "examining the side effects of 'free markets' and the 'new
economy' is uncomfortable at a time when nearly every nation in the
world seems bent on gaining admission to the free trade party to
sample the goodies and enjoy the high-tech euphoria."

The prof notes addiction is "no longer the pathological state of a few
but, to a greater or lesser degree, the general condition in western
society." Addictions of all types grease the wheels of the global
economy. Where would this culture be without the frenzied pursuit of a
quick buck in our outsourced, downsized, go-get-em, casino economy,
and its leisure-time doppelganger: the evening depressurization
through alcohol, videogames, online porn or some other market-mediated
narcotic? (Not to mention the entire judicial, policing, prison and
security apparatus that expands with the prosecution of drug use.)

The War on Some Drugs has gone on for decades in the U.S. and Canada,
with the same dreary non-results. Alexander's research supplies the
necessary psychosocial context for understanding addiction. Without
it, we'll just keep tilting at windmills. In his paper, which he has
expanded into a forthcoming book from Oxford University Press, he
notes cultures under external assault fall prey to addictive
behaviours. Historically, it has happened over and over to indigenous
people the world over--enough times for it to be causation rather than
correlation. More on that, and some final thoughts on addiction, next
week.