THE PLEASURE TRAP

Addiction Is As Puzzling As It Is Common, The Author Writes, And He Seeks
To Uncover Its Mysterious Origins.

About 80 miles west of Boston, the Connecticut River cuts through the state
of Massachusetts, north to south.

Its wide valley holds some of the richest topsoil in the country, fertile
bottomland called "Hadley loam" that is farmed, in large part, by the
descendants of Polish immigrants. They grow squash and asparagus there,
corn and strawberries and tomatoes, and some of them grow tobacco, too,
though many people in New England aren't aware of that.

These days, there is a stigma attached to anything associated with tobacco.
Smokers huddle like latter-day lepers near the doorways of office buildings
at break time, and passersby give them wide berth. Partly because of
punitive taxes and partly because of the passed-on costs of corporate legal
settlements, it can be more expensive now to buy a pack of cigarettes than
to get drunk at the local pub or rent a pornographic film at the local
video store.

People ask permission to smoke or apologize for smoking or sneak a butt as
if they're still in junior high.

In some of his magnificent essays on working the land, writer and farmer
Wendell Berry feels compelled to speak up for his tobacco-growing Kentucky
neighbors.

As Berry points out, acre for acre, tobacco is more lucrative than most
other crops.

For small farmers, besieged on all sides by the forces of modern economics,
planting part of their land in tobacco - as their families have done for
generations and as people in the Connecticut River Valley have done for 300
years - can mean the difference between making a living and looking for
another line of work.

We've all read the reports about cigarette manufacturers brainwashing kids
with their seductive advertisements and lacing their product with chemicals
that enhance the addictive qualities of nicotine; we've seen the
commercials about lung cancer, birth defects, and respiratory illnesses
made worse by secondhand smoke.

Many people, myself included, have watched loved ones die from their
addiction to smoking, and it is usually a drawn-out, difficult death.

So, unless you grow tobacco, smoke it, chew it, or represent North Carolina
in Congress, you might feel a little twinge of discomfort when you see the
broad-leafed plants growing in a field or hanging up to dry in one of the
weathered brown-and-gold barns in Western Massachusetts.

I live not far from the Connecticut River Valley and often have occasion to
drive past those beautiful barns.

Naturally enough, the sight of them makes me think about people I know who
use tobacco.

But it makes me think about other things, too: about addiction and its
sources, about the tension between private behavior and public
responsibility, about the way the human mind works, individually and
collectively.

I admit to somewhat mixed feelings about the whole tobacco issue.

On the one hand, I have always loved the smell of cigar smoke and like to
light one up now and then and take a few puffs (the tobacco grown in
Massachusetts - Connecticut Valley Broadleaf and Connecticut Valley Shade -
is used mainly for cigar wrappers).

On the other hand, there's no ambiguity about the fact that tobacco kills
440,000 Americans every year, so growing it or selling it seems in a
category with making handguns, selling hard liquor, or dealing cards at a
blackjack table: legal, and in many cases harmless, but there's a certain
shadow there.

My ambivalent feelings are only deepened by the fact that, like a lot of
nonsmokers, light drinkers, and recreational gamblers, I will always vote
for preserving an individual's right to smoke, drink, or make the
occasional trip to Las Vegas. And though it causes me an almost physical
pain to walk past a group of teenagers with cigarettes in their hands, much
of the propaganda campaign against smoking, well-intentioned and partially
effective as it is, strikes me as too narrowly focused.

Of course it's a bad thing to smoke.

Of course frequent smoking seems, from the outside, like nothing more than
willful, prolonged stupidity, as does frequent overeating or an obsession
with risky sex. But addiction itself, not just the compulsions it spawns,
ought to be the object of our national attention.

Sue big tobacco, attack the Colombian drug cartels, fine; but none of that
is ultimately going to lessen the addictive impulse.

It's so much easier to tell people to "just say no" than to try to figure
out why they are so inclined to say yes in the first place.

Let us take, for one easy example of how not to deal with American
addiction, the federal government's so-called war on drugs.

I mean, please, show me one user whose habits have been changed by the
poisoning of coca plants outside Bogota (with the herbicide glyphosate, no
less). We appoint generals who give stern speeches and who send American
soldiers south of the border to train their Mexican or Colombian
counterparts in antinarcotic warfare.

We intercept tons of marijuana and cocaine at the borders and put the
seized contraband on display.

All of this - like the warnings on cigarette packages - makes us feel
righteous and sinless.

But it does little to address the real origin of the problem, which lies
buried in the mental workings of people compelled to find unhealthy methods
of altering their psychological state.

That is what I think when I drive past the tobacco barns of Western
Massachusetts: Make war on addiction, not just smoking or illegal drugs.
But how do you use logic to battle an illogical compulsion? In one form or
another (and we seem to concentrate on some forms much more than others -
our national violence fetish, for instance, goes largely unexamined),
addiction touches almost every family I know. Yet it remains as puzzling as
it is ubiquitous, with roots that push down into a deep, black, mysterious
soil that the propaganda campaigns don't even begin to penetrate.

Programs like Alcoholics Anonymous, Gamblers Anonymous, and Narcotics
Anonymous have rescued millions of people by addressing not the existence
of breweries, casinos, and the coca plant but the minds of those human
beings who suffer from addiction.

Those kinds of programs aside, our approach to the national epidemic of
addiction is about as psychologically subtle as a 2,000-pound bomb. In the
midst of all the stern talk and puritanical preaching, I am waiting to hear
a question like this: Is there something about the way we live that
encourages addiction?

Along with the widespread molestation of children, epidemic levels of
obesity, chronic depression, and domestic violence, is addiction to
tobacco, alcohol, cocaine, television, video games, work, or sugar merely
part of what it means to be human in 2002? Or is there something about the
lifestyle we've evolved that somehow, indirectly, mysteriously, promotes
addictive behavior in a staggering number of Americans? I think we hold
ourselves back from asking these kinds of questions out of a misplaced
national pride, as if it were unpatriotic to wonder if we could do certain
things better.

Or out of a fear of aligning ourselves with the religious zealots who
trumpet society's ills as a prelude to cramming their belief system down
our throats.

Though I've had a lot of experience with the addictive problems of close
friends and relatives, and with my own compulsive behaviors, I am not going
to begin to claim that I know the solution.

I know only that it is essential to raise the questions.

A certain percentage of people would probably become addicted no matter
what kind of society they lived in. But for millions of others, the
addictive impulse is fed by the overwhelming pressures of what we call
modern life, and not enough is said about that.

I don't think we are a bad people.

I think, in fact, that the vast majority of Americans behave with
remarkable dignity and manage a degree of mental health that deserves some
kind of award, given the intensity of our days. Everywhere you look, you
see a bubbling low-grade goodness that goes unreported on the evening news:
neighbors taking care of each other's kids in a difficult time; nursing
home aides who give off a steady, selfless love; ordinary men and women who
just get up and go to work every morning, feed and educate their children,
send checks to charity.

But it is not always wise to measure a society by its stable majority, any
more than it is wise to measure the health of a body by the fact that, say,
85 percent of its cells and systems are functioning properly.

On three extended stays between 1977 and 1990, I lived and worked in the
former Soviet Union for a total of 28 months. It was a wreck of a place,
but even there most of the people got up and went to work every morning,
fed and educated their children, had at least some charitable impulse -
even if it played itself out only in inviting Americans to their home for
dinner.

If you wanted to see what was really going on in the USSR, you had to look
at the troubled minority: the falling-down drunks, the disenfranchised
workers puffing cheap Bulgarian cigarettes as if desperately trying to suck
death into themselves. You had to look at the size of the prison
population, the destructive and self-destructive ways Soviet teenagers
played out their rebellious tendencies, the number of hard-currency whores
in the Leningrad hotels. You had to poke around in the unhealthy tissue so
as not to be fooled by the country's good posture and well-scrubbed face.

In the Soviet Union, the slow-growing but deadly national cancer was caused
by a morally bankrupt political system, an economy built on lies, and a
history soaked in the blood of its own people.

In America, we have subtler demons.

You can't exactly see the faces of those demons, but you can see their
blurry reflections: bored, small-town adolescents in northern New England
who fuel the Interstate 91 heroin traffic; midlevel executives buried to
their nostrils in debt and popping anti-anxiety pills; trash-talking radio
DJs who give voice to a simmering collective anger.

All that anger and desperation, it seems to me, is nothing more than a
twisted-around, flip-side version of the urge for joy or justice. Everyone
I know carries within him some image of earthly paradise, some secret hope
for lasting peace of mind: The promotion will do it, the new lover will do
it, the house on the Cape will do it, a week on the Cape will do it.
Sometimes that vision leads to real progress: You end an old, destructive
relationship and embark on a healthier one; you change jobs and start being
able to sleep at night.

Sometimes it's just nice to go to the Cape for a week, if you can find the
money; we shouldn't analyze that too much. But sometimes the harder we run
after that image of peace, and the more work we put into realizing it, the
further into the distance it recedes. Ultimately, paradise is a matter not
only of exterior change but of the right interior climate.

That climate requires a little downtime, and downtime is something we don't
allow ourselves.

And so, in the midst of our national addiction to busyness, we grab for
pieces of paradise when we can: a night at the casino, an extra dessert, an
afternoon drink, a few puffs of a cigarette.

For most of us, those are harmless pleasures, a little relief from the
strains of the day. But for millions of others, it doesn't stop there.
Faced with the turmoil of modern living, with its almost total absence of
real contemplative time, they seek refuge in continual repetition of that
sweet release and get trapped.

And those are the people I think about some days, when I'm driving near the
river, past the beautiful earth-tone tobacco barns.

On those days, the human psyche, the interior climate, seems to me a very
tender creature.

In the dazzle and rush, I wonder if we're caring for it the way we should.