Very easy to say. Very hard to do.

I suspect most people are not that emotionally stable themselves to handle that challenge.

War Games

The "War Against Drugs": the "War Against Alcohol"; the "War Against Tobacco"; the "War Against Sexual Deviancy"; the "War Against Pornography"; the "War against Prostitution"; etc etc, are all-of-a-kind.

Demonise the producer, demonise the seller, and demonise the user. These are the primary weapons of choice in waging these Wars. This instilling of fear in the population thus justifies the most extreme penalties the public will tolerate.

In times past, the Inquisition justified the burning of heretics at the Stake. In the early days of Tobacco, some European nations levied the death penalties on users, being so worried about the massive drains on their treasuries importation was causing. But people learned to grow their own.

It doesn't matter that NONE of these "Wars" have ever been won, or that in the end they have ALWAYS caused far more harm than the ills they were theoretically meant to eliminate.

Repressive legislation, especially in the morality sphere, is a favourite of authoritarian governments, since elitists of all stripes have held that the ordinary citizen must be forced into doing the "right thing". The problem is, that once given their head, they don't know when - or where - to stop.

A contemporary example concerns Tobacco. Few people would hold that nicotine is not addictive (though it is otherwise harmless), or that the burning of tobacco produces known carcinogens. Thus the smoker agreed with the campaign to curtai smoking among the young. But now the drive toward prohibition is clearly underway.

It doesn't matter that the second-hand smoke studies have been contrived to produce the desired results in precisely the same manner as have been the hoked-up studies re Marijuana.

And so too the conditioning of the non-smokers who see smokers forced to stand in the rain in what is clearly another proof for the Milgram Experiments. And THAT, in my opinion, bodes ill for this society,

The next one coming down the pike is the CO2 scare. The Oilco producers have already been demonised along with their partners in crime, the industrialists and auto manufacturers, and now the finger is being pointed at you and me, characterised in another TYEE story as being those primarily responsible for CO2 emissions and thus those who will bear the brunt of the costs required to "fix" the problem - which may or may not actually exist.

The end result all of this is precisely the same as that described in the article offered above:

Our authoritarian governments don't really give a tinker's damn about druggies, or the obvious fact that their laws can't reduce the use of - or harm from - illicit drugs.

what is most important is that we recognise who is in charge and that their laws must be obeyed without question, period, full stop.

health

It's remarkable that in this day and age our political leaders (especially the current batch of theocons in Ottawa) consider addiction to be mainly a moral issue rather than a health issue. Seeing it as a moral issue allows them to sit back and condemn the addicts rather than do anything about it.

Criminalizing the victim

The OSS and the Flying Tigers moved heroin
during and after WW2. The CIA picked up where they left off.

Criminalizing the victim happens when the perpetrator is too powerful to be brought to justice.

http://joeplummer.com/government_drug_running.html

This is a 15 minute excerpt from the documentary "American Drug War." It includes an admission (by the former head of the DEA - Robert Bonner) that the CIA smuggled cocaine into the United States to help finance its operations.

More on "Wars"

The other half of my posting above expands upon my assertion that:

The Wars against ".....etc etc, are all-of-a-kind."

That is, that ultimately they are waged primarily against the lowest echelons among the public, people who in various ways are far more victims in these "Wars" than perperators in it, a distinction which then hinges upon authoritarian vs libertarian interprtations of "morality",

I wrote that fear was propagandised to the public in order validate the authoritarian means of waging these Wars and noted the efficacy of doing so re second-hand-smoke, and purposly hilited the results of doing so:

"And so too the conditioning of the non-smokers who see smokers forced to stand in the rain in what is clearly another proof for the Milgram Experiments. And THAT, in my opinion, bodes ill for this society,"

And that was my reason for writing that post, that the "wars" are primarily Red Herrings designed to keep you and me fighting among ourselves, seeing ourselves as "the enemy within".

I realise that more than a few reading this believe these Wars are necessary - regardless of consequences - and think they are based upon sound moral principles.

So I ask you all, if our elites, including the religious ones, are indeed concerned about maintaining, if not restoring, moral rectitude in our society, when will we see a "War Against Elitist Corruption"?

Certainly CEOs who've looted corporate treasuries by creating illusory paper profits while taking real dollar bonuses and so on, are as criminal as any drug lord, and cetainly the derivatives meltdown will create at least as much societal havoc as has drugs - though the media will certainly not play up those effects.

The list of such potential "Wars against" is long, and I'm sure TYEE readers could fill many columns with them.

It is highly unlikely, however, that without the help of certain-to-be-reluctant elites, such a War would never get off the ground.

So I ask you, dear fellow TYEE reader, the next time you feel compelled to chime in and support one of the various "Wars", ask yourself are you supporting it because you have critically examined the data, or is it because you have supported its moralistic underpinnings.

And when you see a smoker standing out in the rain, remind yourself that: "But for the Grace of God, and pending a different War - there go I"

Am I missing something?

For all the people who suffered abuse and never succumbed to addiction, what of their triumph? Are they failures for not having followed the career path of the abused?

I'm not expert, and I'm certainly not a war-monger. But like Mate, I'm certainly very firm now around protecting my boundaries from my drug-addicted friend in the DTES, who grew up in in West Van with the best of everything ....and it wasn't enough. Whatever his emotional pain was, he allowed himself to wallow in it rather than heal it. Then when schizophrenia took him, the "war" was over. He's been in that POW camp for nigh on twenty years.

I'm confused, and Mate hasn't helped much. Drug addicts will tell you any story they think will advance their interests or advantage from you. How is any meaningful research possible? After nigh on twenty years in the hospital system, I'm quite familiar with the social services system and can say without rancor that it's substantially non-judgemental with respect to personal addictions. That's not to say that judgements are absent - society wouldn't be as varied as it is if everyone thought the same. What's being asked of us? Are 100% of us supposed to be 100% non-judgemental before any progress is possible in treatment? That one idle comment will cause permanent relapse in thousands of addicts?

Just as Vioxx without guided introspection is useless for treating depression, treatment, compassion and harm reduction are useless without a considerable measure of guided introspection. Everyone has to go back to "school" to understand themselves. Some go, some drop out, but many are never invited. That's the real tragedy.

Not all abused lives the same

In my own case, why did I not turn to substance abuse? My upbringing, though one of abuse and bullying, was contradictory. I learned to love reading at an early age and thus as bad as things might get, there was always another positive world there.(Some might say reading is my dope.) It also helped to be highly intelligent. Living in the country, there was always nature as a solace. As lousy as most teachers were, there was always one that helped me. As much as I was bullied, I always had some friends. I could go on, but I think you will get my point...

I suspect that addicts are not fortunate enough to have such situations in their life.

Response to Zalm's comment

Zalm,
Yes. As you say, you are confused. You speak of your friend who "wallowed in his pain, rather than heal it." You then go on to say that "when schizophrenia took him". What?! These 2 statements alone indicate your lack of knowledge and understanding of the issues of both addiction and mental illness.
Schizophrenia did not "take him" after drug use! Schizophrenia most likely had him, unbeknownst to anyone, from birth - and was lurking & waiting to make it's ugly appearance during his teens. Your friend was almost certainly experiencing shizophrenic symptoms and episodes from his mid to late teens at the latest, and his use of drugs was his effort to self-medicate to try to manage the utterly confusing & terrifying experience of schizophrenia. I would bet that his "best of everything West Van" family had no clue that their son had schizophrenia, and thus were unable to access the kinds of treatment, care and support that he needed early on. This is a failure of our health care system, our society, our social supports and scarcity of available effective interventions.
In point of fact, your friend's story is an absolutely perfect example of what Dr. Mate is explaining. "What is the pain?" In this case, the pain was mental illness. And, in case you didn't realize it, one cannot somehow work oneself out of schizophrenia with "guided introspection". The very statement is ludicrous, since schizophrenics not being treated have no control over their thought processes. And are in the grip of a very powerful disease. There by for the Grace of god go you or me or any of us.

Shell

John appeared healthy and normal - and when you ask him in a serious moment, would say so himself - till he was about 25 when schizophrenia began to manifest itself. We didn't know what it was, and neither did he, but in the year it took us all to discover his illness, he then discovered he really DID have something to complain about.

Before that, either his parents were too hard on him,or his teachers didn't like him, or the coach wouldn't let him play pitcher because he was only favouring his own kid to be the pitcher, or the cops had it in for him, that's why he had so many speeding tickets.... on and on it went, and often he REALLY believed what he was saying. He had little concept of self-control. He said he was diagnosed "hyperactive" at about age 10 but his parents refused to put him on medication. We were neighbours for fifteen years growing up, and his parents never expressed any concerns about his "hyperactivity" to us kids, or to our parents, nor was medication mentioned. They did, however, as parents do, try to rear him to control his impuslsive behaviour.

John got to do pretty much whatever he wanted until it came to taking responsibility for his actions, whether he broke a neighbour's window with a softball, was caught bullying others, or when it came to getting or keeping a job when he was older.

Bad parenting? Perhaps. Schizophrenia at an early age? I don't think so. Causes of mental illnesses are complex, and can rarely be reduced to single events. In retrospect, one might have been able to see a mood change in John a couple of years before 25, when he changed his taste in music, began living only in basement suites instead of apartments, and live his life at night, rather than in the daytime. Was he a lycanthrope? No. But when you ask him about those times, he still calls them 'the good old days'. He was obviously coping with something, even though he couldn't sense anything different about himself.

I'm sure I wasn't very clear in my previous post, but you draw too many straight lines from cause to effect. John's schizophrenia has been medicated for many yearssince age 26, without any improvement. Guided introspection, whatever you want to call it, is the only thing that will complement the drug therapy that controls the worst of his symptoms.

But John still refuses to look at his life. It's all still happening to him "out there". And nobody can help.