Submission to the Committee on Drug Dependency and Drug Abuse
Dear Friends,
I thank you for your kind and courteous invitation that I should make a written submission to you, based on my no doubt limited yet unusually deep acquaintance with drugs and drug-users formed when I was living as an accepted member of a community where drugs were frequently used. I regret that my present situation – one of voluntary seclusion and solitude prevents me from making a personal appearance before the Committee. If, however, you felt that personal contact was highly necessary, I would suggest a meeting on a week day in Palmerston North. I have a good friend there, a priest with whom I could stay, the university chaplain Father Kebbell – his house in Ihaka Street, once a Franciscan friary, has many rooms and would be ideal for quiet communication. But the catch would be transport – you would have to send a car forty miles up the river to Jerusalem to get me, and take me back there after the meeting, since I do not myself possess transport nor the funds for it. This would be rather a tall order.
From close observation, and a variety of emotional participation in the problems of drug-users, I am convinced that the rock-bottom problem is negativism, on the part of drug-users themselves and on the part of those who most commonly deal with them. Since alcohol is for some an addictive drug, a correct parallel may be drawn with the experience of alcoholics. I make it the more readily because I am myself a non-drinking alcoholic who was able to crack the addiction through membership in Alcoholics Anonymous.
Drinking or dry alcoholics are unfortunately suggestible. They are very prone to accept shallow social evaluation of their habit and its causes and consequences. They very often secretly regard themselves – since they have been so regarded – as weak-willed no-hopers and/or moral degenerates – not as persons with an afflictive habit. Much of the success of Alcoholics Anonymous comes from the fact that this massive self-defeating negativism can be broken down by group respect and encouragement and the formation of positive helpful relationships to fellow sufferers.
All this is so even though alcohol is a drug socially available and socially accepted. In the case of those who use other drugs illegally, the negativism is increased a thousandfold by the fact that they are technically criminals, and regarded as such inevitably by the police and also unfortunately by a good many doctors. The whole situation is intensely and negatively emotional. I believe that if alcohol were an illegal drug, and people were getting jail sentences for using or distributing it, alcoholic addiction would be as hard to cure as addiction to other drugs.
When I speak of addiction, I mean primarily psychological addiction – the users, not the hard core addict. I have met very few hard core physical addicts in this country, though the flood of heroin now entering the country (my friends on the grapevine tell me it is coming in, and the side-effects of clumsy laws are in a fair degree responsible) may lead to a heavy increase in physical addiction.
I am not without sympathy for the police. The laws regarding drugs are on the books, and the whole training of the police predisposes them to abrupt belligerent action, and – what is much more harmful in the long run to people on both sides of the fence – an emotional fear and contempt for the younger vagrant population of drug-users they most commonly encounter. Accidental issues – cleanliness of houses and people, decorum in dress and speech, regularity of employment, de facto sexual relationships, hair length, and so on – play a vast part in the police view of drug-users, and the view of a good many doctors. This leads to the blind alley of a battle over life-styles.
For even the beginning of success, it is my conviction that the treatment and rehabilitation of drug-users must be kept distinct from both legal penalties and any partisan judgment regarding culture and sub-culture. At the present day many young people belong to a ‘rebellious’ sub-culture with its own customs, music, religious preferences and nuances of feeling. I wish neither to defend nor attack it. I wish only to point out that, as in the international sphere, ethnocentric prejudices are useless and lead only to greater tension and misunderstanding. If the young have such prejudices, through lack of experience, then let us older people dispense with them, and show plainly that our concern and interest is for people.
The marihuana debate is mainly a red herring. It swings on ethnocentric differences within our society. I notice that many Maori people, once introduced to marihuana, prefer it to alcohol which is the heavier drug – probably because of the calm withdrawn feeling and sensitivity to natural beauty which marihuana engenders. I do not advocate the use of marihuana. I think its legalisation would help to clear the road in that we could deal with real issues.
The largest areas of drug dependency are (I conclude this from limited observation) in the non-vagrant population who in their middle years find life in the suburbs too hard to bear, yet have no objective road out of it. Whether the drugs are or are not medically prescribed is not the basic issue. A medical prescription has no magical effect; and, notoriously, respectable drug-users will visit several doctors and ‘lose’ their supply of drugs at intervals. My knowledge here is drawn partly from a long-term observation of those in Alcoholics Anonymous who are addicted to (and sometimes driven mad by) drugs other than alcohol. The dependency of many middle-aged women on sedative drugs is particularly heavy and self-destructive.
To return to the self-image of the drug-user. I remember a man who had had several bouts of amphetamine psychosis but was at the time sane, almost off the drugs, and relying on me for psychological support.
‘Jack,’ I’d say, ‘put the pills down the sink!’ (They were of course medically prescribed for ‘slimming’ by a somnolent doctor, though the man in question was thin as a rake and as gaunt as John the Baptist, whom he resembled in his religious temperament.) ‘What are you afraid of, man? We all love you. You don’t have to hide in a pill bottle!’
And each time he’d come up with the diagnosis a doctor had planted in his medical file, where he, being an agile man, broke open the cupboard and read it – ‘Constitutional Psychopath’ – and though I told him it was a ragbag into which the doctors put the people they couldn’t classify, he would never quite believe me. His negative self-image had hardened. And I remembered when it was touch-and-go for me in my recovery from alcoholism because of similar negative classifications.
There is a certain amount of folk mythology associated, both in the minds of drug-users themselves and the minds of the non-drug-using population, with the use of the hypodermic needle. It may be because many people have a horror of puncturing their veins, and thus to do this seems a definitive psychological step forward into heavy addiction. But this view is self-deceiving for the pill-user. Amphetamine drugs, taken by the mouth, are probably ten times as dangerous to life and sanity as morphine, which is frequently injected. Apart from the ‘flash’ in the head that comes when the drug-laden blood reaches the brain, after injection, the nervous system does not distinguish between oral or vascular administration.
Well, friends, what constructive suggestions have I got to make? Not many – but I’ll put them down.
The term I had coined for such communal organisations was F.L.A.S.H. – Fellowship of Love and Self-Help. The term would appeal to drug-users as it contains a pun involving the ‘flash’ in the head produced by the injection of narcotics.
I thank you again for your courtesy.
Yours sincerely,
James K. Baxter
1969 (596)