Wanting more (day 167)

I attended a talk by Bruce Alexander today.  He's a professor of psychology at SFU, and recently wrote a book called The Globalisation of Addiction.   He's been studying addiction for over 30 years and brought up some interesting points about the mechanisms of addiction, or insatiability as he prefers to call it.  First he makes a distinction between insatiability and exuberance.  Both have excess as a characteristic but differ in the feeling experienced by the person exhibiting the behaviour and the person witnessing the behaviour.   As he puts it "Exuberance gives you a contact high.  Insatiability gives you a contact low".  I suppose the line is fine and that one can certainly morph into the other.  I remember a line in the animation Ryan where one of the characters talks about the first flush of addiction being highly creative, productive, and attractive.  Often the language around the behaviour can identify the deeper motivation of the action.  He gave an example of Lady Gaga exhibiting insatiability behaviours not only because of what she does (which could just be exuberance) but also how she talks about it ("if I lost [this fame], I would die").  I think we've all been around a person who drinks and crosses the line from exuberance to insatiability.  There a moment where discomfort enters the room.  We're all slightly embarrassed and fascinated at the same time.

The even more interesting part of his talk was when he started talking about the origin of insatiability.  Gabor Mate who also works in the Downtown Eastside claims that addicts are there because they were abused as children, didn't get what they needed and got lots they didn't need.  Bruce Alexander contests this by saying, there are many children who have had completely normal childhoods but end up in the DTES, and many who have had horrendous childhoods but are not addicts.  He also contests Gabor's claim that the brain cannot really recover from a faulty wiring that happened because of the abuse, saying that half of the addicts in the DTES are able to kick their habit.  So he fundamentally rewrites the equation of addiction by saying that the dysfunctional behaviour is present before the addiction is.  He further claims that the dysfunctional behaviour is caused by a massive dislocation, a fragmentation of society.  The insatiability comes from a need for community that has been lost and that we try to fulfill with other things which never work.

Unfortunately, I had to leave before the end of the talk but I'm intrigued enough to pick up his book.  I know he takes the position that the war on drugs is not working and he is pro-legalization.  I'm not sure what other changes he proposes.   I recently heard Gabor Mate discussing the war on drugs, saying "the war on drugs is a war on people".   And he's right.  When has a war ever brought more health?  The war is worse than the drug.  Especially if it leads to more community fragmentation.

A song for this post.