JUNGLE MEDICINE FOR DRUG ADDICTION

What if I told you there might be a new way to treat drug addiction?

I don't mean spending billions failing to police the drug supply, or
mopping ineffectually at addiction's results, which are ill health,
violence, sold bodies, damaged families . . . let me reword that,
blood infections and oozing facial sores, fractured skulls, oral sex
in alleyways and toddlers weeping in shock at a mother's slap or a
father's sexual fondling.

We throw up our hands and claim not to understand why people want hard
drugs in the first place, those drugs that make them beautifully high
and pain-free for a brief interlude, gosh that's mystifying.

But even if we don't have an abundance of empathy, perhaps we might
help in a practical way and consider supporting a new approach to
treating human emotional pain, a technique that doesn't just treat
symptoms but goes to the core of why people damage themselves this
way.

And what if this radical new strategy actually worked? It's cheaper.
If that is how we measure things now, and it is, this could be a moral
and medical triumph.

On Thursday at 8 p.m., the CBC's The Nature of Things will present a
documentary, The Jungle Prescription, about just such an approach.
It's about an Amazonian medicine called ayahuasca, the so-called "vine
of the souls," that enters the brain to change the way drug-users
think and feel about the original hurts that made them take up the
heroin needle.

Dr. Gabor Mat=E9, the Vancouver doctor who has treated the drug addicts
of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside for many years, has drunk ayahuasca
himself. Me, I trust a doctor more if he has tested some wild new
treatment on himself before prescribing it for others and Mat=E9 has
gone down the drug's dark road several times, to make sure.

He thinks it will help addicts face their pain-soaked memories and
change the way they react to them.

When you are hurt, often when terribly young, your brain is imprinted.
It remembers and reacts. When similar events occur, or anything
triggers that memory, the brain travels old pathways reinforced like
scar tissue. We drink, smoke, overeat, snort and inject just to cope.

Mat=E9 says this strange new liquid will help. Made from two plants
mashed, cooked and juiced, ayahuasca looks deceptive, a watery spinach
soup in a cup. But its effect is extraordinary, hyperactivating the
parts of the brain where emotional memory is stored and processed.
Rather than revisiting the same old neural connections, it forms new
ones, letting people look at a painful event they could not normally
contemplate without agony and altering the way they see it.

When ayahuasca fades, they feel calm, refreshed, able to view hurt in
a new way rather than rushing to find a fast opiate way to stomp out
an old emotion.

It takes courage to swallow the drug, which is why Mat=E9 says it must
only be taken in controlled settings of safety and comfort. Imagine
your worst nightmare. Imagine deciding to risk revisiting that
nightmare while awake.

Only the addict who truly wants to turn the boat around midstream will
dare do it. But the rewards do seem to be remarkable.

I talked to Mat=E9 in Toronto last week. He is an intelligent man of
great warmth. He radiates compassion. If you're going to swallow
something that tastes horrendous and makes you vomit with abandon for
an elusive goal of repairing your shattered life, this is the person
you want by your side.

But will it work? Yes, he says. Look at us. "We are a stressed,
traumatized, medicated society." We try to manage the symptoms of this
in the most expensive wasteful way possible, but instead we should
"enliven and invigorate our natural healing capacity."

It sounds like shaman talk, it sounds hippie-ish and not-our-world.
But the thing is, it sounds like it works. Watch the documentary and
think for yourself, especially in your lowest moments when you reach
for a drink or a smoke, something to grease the skids of this painful
life.