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Abstract
Severe addictions to drug use and to countless other habits are causing enormous harm around the globe. Massive expenditures and dedicated efforts of police, doctors, addiction therapists, and self-help groups have failed to bring the problem under control, although many individual addicts have been helped. What can society do when our best efforts continue to fail and a menacing problem continues to grow? This paper proposes that a major paradigm shift is required. The currently dominant paradigm assumes that addiction is either an individual disease or an individual moral breach. But this individually oriented paradigm has failed. Instead, addiction needs to be understood socially, as a way that large numbers of people adapt to the breakdown of psychologically sustaining culture under the global influence of free-market society. This new paradigm is based on the social thinking of Karl Polanyi and other social scientists rather than on the individual thinking of neuroscientists, doctors, or psychologists.
THE AUTHORS
Bruce K. Alexander, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus, Psychology Department, Simon Fraser University has devoted the last four decades to the study of addiction. His writings have covered family therapy of heroin addicts, social obstacles to methadone maintenance therapy, psychopharmacology (the “Rat Park” experiments), drug policy, the “War on Drugs”, international comparisons of the temperance mentality, and the origins of addiction in the globalization of free-market society. He is the winner of the 2007 Sterling Prize for Controversy. He is the author of Peaceful Measures: Canada's Way Out of the War on Drugs (1990) and The Globalization of Addiction: A Study in Poverty of the Spirit (2010).
Notes
3 For example, Cuba, China under Mao, Iraq, Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela.
4 This conclusion goes beyond Polanyi, who, to my knowledge, never addressed the psychology of addiction explicitly, although he often wrote in psychological terms that suggest this conclusion. The supporting evidence for this conclusion is summarized in Alexander (2010, chap. 6–8).
5 For example, Gladwell (2000) has analyzed the process whereby ideas, trends and social behaviors cross a threshold leading to very fast collapse of societies.
6 Polanyi (1944) and many other economic historians have shown the free markets do not come into existence freely, but are formed and sustained by whatever degree of administrative and military force is required. See also Panitch, 2008.
7 Among the reversals was the Speenhamland period in England (1795–1832; see Polanyi, 1944) and the “welfare state” period in Western Europe and North America in the 30 years following World War II. See also Bayly (2004) for a description of various forms of resistance to the spread of Western economics throughout the long 19th century. See Teeple (1995, pp. 79–83) for a description of the sham aspects of free market society after World War II. See Stiglitz (2002) for failures and reversals precipitated by the International Monetary Fund in the 1990s. The most obvious reversals in the 21st century have been in numerous Latin American countries that have retreated from extreme forms of free trade and privatization. The sham has been evident in the double standard of free-market principles imposed upon third-world countries by the USA, the IMF and the World Bank after World War II, but on the United States itself (Hudson, 2003) and in the use of free market rhetoric to mask the imperial ambitions of the USA in the 21st century (Wolin, 2008).
8 Economists Hudson (2003) and Engdahl (2004) emphasize the role of free-market society more as an ideology than an operating principle in a world where markets are profoundly influenced by geopolitical force, particularly that of the United States. They do not deny, however, that the ideology is actually enforced on the everyday level for most of the world's population most of the time.
9 For an example of the application of this principle in modern times, see Cordonnier (2006) on the campaign of the OECD against the European welfare state.
10 This analysis uses the logic and vocabulary of Erikson (1963). Although Erikson used a great variety of other words such as “wholeness” or “healthy personality” more frequently than he used “psychosocial integration,” this paper doggedly sticks to “psychosocial integration.” Although this bit of jargon is less lyrical than some of its synonyms, it conveys the essential idea more explicitly.
11 For a historical example, see Sproat (1987). For a more specific example, the case of suicide, see Durkheim (1951), who argued that the primary cause of suicide in 19th century Europe was the failure of people to achieve or maintain integration with their society. His conclusion was based on minute analysis of suicide statistics, which showed that suicide was less frequent at times and in places that favored psychosocial integration. Although this classic study has been challenged in the more recent literature, Chandler and colleagues carried out quantitative studies of suicide among aboriginal children in British Columbia over two time periods, 1987–1992 and 1997–2000. These studies showed that the relative frequency of suicide was much higher among aboriginal children whose bands were more estranged from their traditional culture than those whose bands were less estranged. In both studies, bands that had a positive rating on all seven of the "cultural continuity variables" had no suicides at all, whereas those bands with a positive score on none of the cultural continuity variables had child suicide rates of 137.5 and 61 per 100,000 of the population (Chandler, Lalonde, Sokol, & Hallett, 2003). Many more examples appear in Alexander (2010, chap. 5).
12 Naomi Klein (2007) showed how social isolation has become a key component of today's most advanced forms of torture.
13 Klein (2000) has described this brilliantly for the youth culture and the “branded” merchandise of the late 20th century. See also Homer-Dixon (2006).
14 With the advent of artificial science and its theoretical underpinnings (chaos, complexity, and uncertainty) it is now posited that much of human behavior is complex, dynamic, multidimensional, level/phase structured, nonlinear, lawdriven, and bounded (culture, time, place, age, gender, ethnicity, etc.), “Addiction” would be such a behavior/process. This is not a semantic issue. There are two important issues to consider and which are derived from this: (1) Using linear models/tools to study non-linear processes/phenomena can and does result in misleading conclusions and can therefore also result in inappropriate intervention; (2) the concepts prediction and control have different meanings and dimensions than they do in the more traditional linear "cause and effect" paradigms (Buscema, 1998).
15 Many thinkers have shown logically or empirically that the woes enumerated in this paragraph cannot be eliminated in free-market society (e.g., Rivière, 2003; Velásquez, 2003).
16 This crucial point is made eloquently by Velásquez (2003) and earlier by Peele, Brodsky, & Arnold (1991).