Democrats in the House, Drug Abuse Treatment and Prevention and Meditation and Yoga

The Democratic sweep of the Nov.11 elections was the prompt for me to join the nation of bloggers. To me, the victory meant that a new groundswell might be emerging among voters –a movement towards a “reality-based community” to replace the reliance of the previous six years on lies, greed, presidential psychopathology and imperialist wet dreams. By mid-century, many important decisions will have to be made about America’s place in a world in which the fulcrum of power is shifting eastwards, and they cannot any longer be based in illusion and willful, even spiteful, make-believe.

Votes put the Democrats in power and blogging bids fair to be an important means of reminding them what their mandate really is. Barely a week has gone by, and already the importance of such reminders is becoming hideously clear. Apart from unrealistic squabbling about troop levels in Iraq, the candidates we voted into power can find nothing better to occupy them than recriminations and kindergarten power plays. Nancy Pelosi, the incoming speaker, weakened the victory considerably by backing John P. Murtha, a crude, mercenary, duplicitous double-dealer, for the position of majority leader. She did it for all the wrong reasons… and lost. Perhaps the Republicans can already see further than we can, because they have been emboldened to cynically appoint that discredited racist, Trent Lott, to the post of minority leader. And President Bush stepped up to the plate and nominated for judicial appointments an anti-environmentalist (William Myers 111), a torture specialist (William Hayes 11), an anti-TitleV11 activist (Terrence Boyle), an opponent of civil rights, an evangelical and Trent Lott’s lawyer (Michael Wallace) and a pro-business zealot (Peter Keisler).

Was it all in vain?

One of my chief interests is drug policy, the selective implementation of the current policy’s most egregiously counterproductive and draconian strictures, the four million behind bars because of them and the ruined families and communities remaining on the outside. This blog follows up on some issues raised in the first. It also continues with the critique of bad science I began in my second. If drug policy were to be re-oriented away from bad science and its rotten fruit, such as the futile hunt for chemical “weapons of mass destruction” and “wars on drugs” against the evil nabobs, who are their purveyors, and the “drug fiends” who use them, it might focus more on prevention, education and treatment. If the whirlwind that blew the Democrats into office were actually powered by a fresh enthusiasm among voters for a nationwide “reality based community,” this is one of the proper areas for its enactment. But we just have to keep pushing!

The job is not as difficult as it appears at first. For one thing, the size of the population that needs preventive, educational and rehabilitative interventions is not as great as and bad science, law enforcement and treatment personnel make it out to be. The latter are the Halliburtons and Bechtels of the field –there is a buck and a swagger in it for them to inflate the figures and exaggerate the difficulties. The number of persons who are interested in anything more problematic than the most casual drug use is naturally small in any national population: statistics, sociology and psychology keep it so, through such mechanisms as regression to the mean, the pressure of social norms and the individual organism’s tendency towards homeostasis. Persons who smoke three joints in a lifetime, snort cocaine once and restrict their intake of red wine to two, heart-healthy, six-ounce glasses at Thanksgiving and Christmas should be the concern of no one but themselves. Since the early 1990’s, after the waning of the cocaine-smoking outbreak of the previous decade, which affected far less people than the doomsayers had predicted, there have been steady declines in the use of most drugs.

It should be noted right here that law enforcement initiatives did not bring about these declines. Drug use dropped simultaneously with every category of criminal offending, and the opportunists, led by their cheerleader-in-chief, Mayor Giuliani, who has always improbably had his eye on the White House, have been quick to sop up the credit and start consulting firms that, for fat fees, would advice us how to bring about the same salutary results re security in Iraq and the war on terror. False advertising! The sixties have at least taught us that when people want to commit crimes or do drugs, they’ll get right down to it in spite of National Guardsmen and police in riot gear rubbing shoulders with them, the attacks dogs snarling and straining at the leash around their ankles. They will desist only when there is a change of heart, their hearts –and why and how that happens still remains largely a mystery. Pieces of the puzzle include kids learning from their parents’ and elder siblings’ mistakes and modeling their behaviors instead on such gurus of enlightenment as they can find; the efforts of grassroots agencies like churches, community groups and other voluntary associations; and the uplift brought by responsible government through jobs, educational and training opportunities and renovations and new construction of the physical environment. In New York City, Mayor Dinkins was more the man than Mayor “this gives-me-an-extra-six-months-in-office-Thanks-Be-To-Allah” Giuliani.

The prevention and treatment establishment as it is presently constituted doesn’t deserve any of the credit either. Apart from its profit-making preoccupation, it offers little more than deficient and out-of-date theory, misbegotten procedure, untrained and insensitive staff and condescension to those it is supposed to serve. The prevention side is mostly pure pork barrel: just as “the ice cream parlor on Main Street” and “a bridge on the far side of town” brought terrorism-prevention dollars to small towns in Idaho and Ohio, local police departments and school boards in the same places have profited from bizarre “wilderness training” plans and the like: sadistically dumping minority and immigrant teenagers without food or water in snake-infested territory is thought to build character and strengthen the resolve to avoid drugs, sex and free-thinking.

On the treatment side, drug addiction is usually regarded as a progressive, incurable, debilitating disease with an undertone of moral culpability. This bad science view has been strongly endorsed by government–funded research. The most recent has focused on neurotransmitters such as dopamine, serotonin and norepinephrine. The studies purport to show that long-term drug use causes permanent changes to the mechanisms that regulate their production and distribution in the brain, which result in addiction. They affect the brain reward circuitry itself or may hardwire “emotional memories” in the brain that “people, places and things” associated with a person’s drug use may trigger. Other studies aim to show that some persons are genetically predisposed to addiction, or have personality disorders that lead them to it. The “disease concept” is fundamental to the policy of punitive prohibition and calls for total abstinence as the cure. One drug after another, from injectable heroin to smokable cocaine, has been declared to be “instantly addictive,” and policymakers have steadily bankrolled an increase of repressive state apparatuses of control, which include the treatment entrepreneurs.†

The bad science of pharmacological and psychological explanations of addiction to drugs has been abundantly refuted. Firstly, addictive behavior may occur without any pharmacological stimulus. For example, compulsive gambling and excessive effort at work or sports may be equally dysfunctional in lives as drug addiction. Food obsesses many Americans, as the current “obesity epidemic” attests. Others remain glued to the television or the Internet. Some clean their homes incessantly. They love their partners literally “to death.” And secondly, there are numerous examples of persons exposed to drugs, including the putatively highly addictive opiates, who do not become addicted. Many soldiers who were “instantly addicted” to heroin in Southeast Asia during the war against Vietnam were “instantly cured” upon returning home. Cocaine smokers used the drug in a restrained, esoteric manner from 1979 to 1981, when the smokable precipitate was called “freebase.” Renamed “crack” and diffusing rapidly in popularity after 1983-1984, the identical substance next gained notoriety as the “most dangerous and quickly addictive drug known to man,” in the words of former drug czar William Bennett, who, as a gambler who dropped over $800,000 at casinos in Las Vegas and Atlantic City, should have known a more truthful thing or two about the matter. When the appeal of smokable cocaine evaporated after 1989, the same “addicted” users reverted to earlier patterns of moderating, delaying and even foregoing consumption altogether.††

In my earlier blog, I drew attention to the ability users have to purposefully craft the effects drugs will have on them. On becoming Rastafari after initiating marijuana use, many unemployed Caribbean youth created opportunities for employment in the informal economy, not merely as marijuana growers, exporters and distributors, but also as pioneers of the health foods business in low-income communities and as restaurateurs, itinerant peddlers, craftsmen, tailors and seamstresses, artists and musicians.††† Typically, a user’s engagement with drugs will traverse many stages throughout a lifetime, with some periods exhibiting excessive use and others commendable moderation, with the whole drug-using career frequently ending in “spontaneous remission.” Social class plays a role in the outcome: if you have the resources, and aren’t Kurt Cobain or Sidney Rotten, your Park Avenue physician and private clinics will ensure your safe and mostly comfortable passage through these stages, pace Mr. Frey; if you don’t, your lot will be a revolving door of detox and rehab at the city’s worst hospitals, methadone maintenance at clinics located in the worst neighborhoods, prison, homelessness, hunger, HIV seropositivity and, crowning it all, an ignominious interment at Ward Island.

In the same blog, I also identified drug use as a consumer behavior. Why persons “need” any kind of goods remains a mystery in economics, the science to which one turns for an answer. Why they postpone consumption or save or invest are equally mysterious. Useful for determining in the short term how alterations in income and prices are reflected in a consumer’s demand and consumption of goods, the discipline can’t explain why she or he is a consumer in the first place. Viewing us as isolated consumers individually adjusting our personal preferences, economists tacitly agree we are “material” or “envious” or “greedy” or ridicule us as the dupes of advertising and peer pressure. In the anthropological approach to drugs, however, social life is seen to depend upon exchange. The exchanges involved in the acquisition and consumption of goods illuminate the rational categories upon which social life is based at any given moment. A certain aggregate level of demand for and consumption of all kinds of goods is intellectually and discursively necessary to maintain social life. For example, theorists of consumption in postmodern societies have analyzed how contemporary identities are shaped, not exclusively by kinship, class, nationality, ethnicity or gender, but also by spending preferences and “styles of life” defined by the acquisition and consumption of commodities.

The result of these misconstructions and misrepresentations is that current approaches do little for those who actually need help with their drug involvement. Although their percentage of the population is admittedly small, their absolute numbers and individual distress warrant more than relapse and dependency. What can the hoped-for Democratic Enlightenment do for them? Perhaps the energy which brought down drug use and crime in the 1990s was part of the tiny shifting of tectonic plates at the bottom of the ocean that built into the mighty tsunami that swept out the Republicans in 2006. Can fresh government initiatives also sweep away antiquated, self-serving ideologies and the drug treatment and prevention modalities that are based on them?

William Burroughs, renowned author of the drug odysseys Junky, Naked Lunch and Cities of the Red Night, never wrote a truer word than his famous dictum, “drugs always win by default.” When nothing else is going on in a life, the gates are thrown wide open for drug abuse and its boon companions to walk right in. As mentioned, needs for goods and services illuminate the ideological underpinnings of society. For many, they have also come to define all the value of life itself. But such a thoroughgoing materialism is ultimately unsatisfactory. The desire for goods and services is strengthened by being satisfied and thus proves in the end to be intrinsically insatiable. Meanwhile, the market economy succeeds principally by enabling it. How do we avoid crashing either into Scylla or Charybdis, the original rock and a hard place?

The question brings me to the topic of yoga and meditation and their potential place in drug treatment and prevention. By yoga and meditation, I mean original practices developed in the Vedanta philosophy of the ancient Indus Valley civilization to facilitate the enquiry regarding (a) reality, the world and ourselves; (b) its constituent parts, the world’s and ours; (c) the abilities and limitations of mind, which apparently conducts the enquiry; and (d) our behaviors and their morality. Vedanta is therefore essentially a critical philosophy, which conceives its task as the continuous debunking of any and all knowledge. Its most succinct formulation is still the imposing Sanskrit, Neti! Neti! “Not this! Not This!” Understood thus, yoga and meditation are utterly opposed to the ‘feel good’ spa experience that currently bears their names. The latter has little to offer a drug addict, compulsive gambler or victim of the other obsessive disorders.

In my last blog, I mentioned some authorities a reader might profitable consult. The Vedas and Upanishads reveal the best answers that Indian Sages and philosophers had been able to give to the enquiry described above. The great epic poems, such as the Ramayana, the Mahabharata and the Bhagavad-Gita, amplified them. The Puranas, Tantras, the Vedanta Sutras of Badaranya, the Bhakti Sutras of Narada, the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, the Laws of Manu, the Ashtavakra Gita and the Viveka-Chudamuni of Shankara provided further exegeses. Lyric poets like Kabir, Sri Chaitanya, Mira Bai, Tukaram, Ramprasad and Tulsidas also immortalized the teachings. More modern interpreters include Sri RamaKrishna, Swami Vivekananda, Rabindranath Tagore, Mahatma Gandhi, Sri Aurobindo and Raman Maharshi.

I have already mentioned some of this in the earlier blog. The teaching is that Reality, the Self, is not the world or ourselves as such, which are merely appearances. We and the world exist, but as Self. It is like mistaking a rope for a snake: once we realize the mistake, the snake disappears, and we understand it never existed. All the reality there is, and always was, and ever will be, is the rope. But we have to directly experience the rope to understand the illusion of the snake. We have to directly experience Reality or Self to understand how we exist as Reality or Self and simultaneously, in Ignorance of Reality or Self, as such or as appearance. Yoga and meditation were developed to help us get that direct experience of Reality or Self.

Mind, thought, desire, ego, world and God, especially sectarian God, belong on the “snake” side of things, mutually reinforce one another to support the illusion and naturally frustrate and disappoint us. All the puzzles and inconsistencies of good vs. evil, including the fear, uncertainty, anger and anxiety they engender, belong to the same un-reality. Even the meditating ego belongs on that side. But it opens itself to the possibility that, with constant, devoted meditative practice, it will be pushed aside, and the Eternal and Self-Existent Reality, Which Has neither Beginning or End, Will Enter. A highway would have been made straight in the desert, and along it Came The Lord. Thus, only the desire for that direct experience of Reality or Self is legitimate. Once that Quest is undertaken, the “rope” or “Reality” side becomes increasingly clearer, and mind, thought, desire, ego, world and God can be experienced in its light instead.

It goes without saying that materialism, in which drug use and all other desires are subsumed, dies a natural death when our gaze is trained to look in the opposite direction to it. Yoga and meditation instruct us in the techniques of renunciation and dispassion, which are required for turning away our gaze. While these techniques are not especially difficult to understand or implement, they do require commitment, devotion, patience and persistence. Once undertaken, however, benefits and rewards come swiftly. Spontaneously, one changes one’s outlook, diet, exercise. The drug use is discontinued, especially if it get in the way of effectively meditating. Very quickly, sitting for the latter provides such a safe haven, a place of power, comfort, and satisfaction that one wants to persist in it and organizes the day around its performance.

It should be noted that in Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous, “recovering addicts,” as they call themselves, are obliquely instructed about the fleeting, transient nature of mind, thoughts feelings and the ego-sense that is built up after them. The desire to drink, they are told, will pass, and so will the rationalization that leaps to its defense. In these fellowships, a social network of sponsors and others who “make meetings” is in place to support this understanding when an addict feels tempted: a telephone call will help ease her/him out of danger. In Vedanta, of course, the same understanding is derived from an intellectual examination of those constructs –i.e., mind, thoughts feelings and the ego-sense- and is supported by a spiritual resolve to directly experience Reality, or the Permanence they obscure.

Studies of Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous tend to agree that that the addicts who are helped by membership (some 18% of those seeking help) are those who are already well-motivated and ready to end their addiction: “making meetings” helps them to stick to that resolve but does not originate it. Nor does membership carry the addict towards a more thoroughgoing renunciation, impersonality and independence, as Vedanta does. Indeed, in communities where there is high unemployment, it encourages dependence, and in lieu of alternatives, the AA or NA meeting also serves as labor exchange, dating service, social club, and 24-hour recreation. Vedanta and meditation don’t have these undesirable side effects.

Endnotes

See Ansley Hamid, 1998 Drugs in America: Sociology, Economics, Politics. Gaithersburg, MD: Aspen, p. 256-277.

Ibid, p.262. See also Ansley Hamid: 1992 The Developmental Cycle of a Drug Epidemic: The Cocaine-Smoking Epidemic of 1981-1991.Journal of Psychoactive Drugs (special issue ed. James A. Inciardi), Vol. 24, No. 4 (Oct.-Dec.1992) pp. 337-349

Ansley Hamid 2002 The Ganja Complex: Rastafari and Marijuana. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

Many of these titles are available at specialty bookstors. Enquire at sixthsensenyc, net. See also Ansley Hamid 2006 Park Slope Upanishad (unpublished manuscript).

~ by andyhamid on November 28, 2006.