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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 3

Submission to the Committee on Drug Dependency and Drug Abuse

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 page 74 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.

page 75

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 page 76 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.

(a)

The present ‘cure’ for drug-users seems to be threefold: heavy and belligerent police action, designed apparently to reduce supplies of illegal drugs and intimidate the vagrant class of drug-users; hospitalisation by legal sentence, with much use of tranquillisers, a strictly penal atmosphere, and no effective treatment after withdrawal; strong pressure from both police and hospital doctors on the vagrant drug-users to obtain regular employment.

The basic premise in this ‘cure’ seems to be that people are using drugs because of their failure or refusal to adjust to social norms. I see no evidence to justify this, since drug-users, like alcoholics, can be found in all social groups. It simply happens that the ones most accessible to police action are vagrants.

The first positive action, then, would be to throw away this premise – which produces no actual cures whatever – and start with a mind free of ethnocentric bias.

(b)I would like to see a total separation between hospital treatment and police action. Some deaths by overdoses would then be avoided, since fellow drug-users would know that to summon the ambulance was not to summon the police – as it was, I soon discovered, in the vagrant community in Auckland, doctors should also be encouraged to keep their Hippocratic oath and not divulge to the police information communicated to them by drug-users either in psychiatric sessions or open conversation. Allowing for the extensive paranoid state of many drug-users, cases of breach of confidence do shatter completely all possibility of a doctor who so offends being able to help the patient to cure himself.
(c) I would like the police made aware that the public – with all due allowance for the pressures and hardships of their profession, the difficulty of recruiting mature men as officers, and our own concern about drug abuse – will not tolerate in this country the use of violence in interrogation or indeed in any circumstances except brief and unavoidable self-defence. This should be stressed with all the greater force because the vagrant drug-users they arrest and interrogate are frequently adolescent and likely to form false general impressions from particular instances of violence. I would like to see page 77 a special permanent bureau set up, outside the Justice Department, to receive and tactfully investigate complaints on these grounds. I’m not suggesting a witch-hunt against the police – only the curbing of the over-zealous.
(d)

In Auckland I helped to form a small group of Narcotics Anonymous. The strongest obstacle was the habitual dread of drug-users to identify themselves on account of the possibility of arrest. I suggest that any move towards the establishment of further Narcotics Anonymous groups either there or in other centres would be valuable and positive. But any people who try to be of use to the drug-users in this respect would have to avoid all preaching and bossing and approach them on a non-authoritarian, nonofficial basis, with no direct connection with the Department of Health or the Department of Justice (except in the special case where the groups were actually established in hospitals or jails) – this obviously would require a particular flair, sympathy and sense of dedication.

Narcotics Anonymous, in this country at least, would be radically different from Alcoholics Anonymous in this regard – most drug-users here are not physical addicts and would rarely require the massive mental reorganisation an alcoholic has to go through to recover.

‘One junkie talking to another’ – that would be the core of N.A. The free verbal therapy is all-important.

(e)

Any person who was trying to be of use to drug-users, and who had a religious approach, would do well to saturate himself or herself in Zen Buddhism, Taoism etc. The stable self-curing that I observed was always connected with some discipline. (I am a Catholic, and so record this with a touch of regret and diffidence.)

I suggest that the Eastern religions were affective (to shift a drug habit takes more than fashion!) because such religions advocate meditation and detachment from material goods. If there is any one common factor in drug use, it seems to be that drug-users are often people who are peculiarly sensitive to, and feel menaced by, the pervading and imprisoning materialism of our present culture, whether the people concerned are vagrants or suburban householders. In a sense their use of drugs is their means of adjusting – either the drug removes conflict by sedation, or produces temporary pseudo-mystical states, or does both. The fact that most drugs (including marihuana) block off sexual impulses is an added attraction, because many drug-users desire a degree of celibacy.

It would seem to me both helpful and legitimate therefore to offer the study and practice of Oriental religious – and of Christian contemplative habits – as part of the programme of any group devoting itself to self-care from drug dependency. A materialist emphasis would obviously be self-defeating.

(f)

Houses could be set up and financed by civic authorities, where ex-drug-users might help drug-users to crack the habit. To be in such a house would have to be a purely voluntary matter. Immunity from police page 78 interrogation would be a great asset. Such houses could be run by group committees elected by those in them. Members of N.A. might become in time mature leaders in such dedicated work. Any freelance help from doctors would be invaluable.

Naturally one rule of such houses would have to be to keep drugs out, except drugs medically prescribed solely for tapering-off purposes. Here marihuana might prove an obstacle, since a great many drug-users prefer marihuana to methadone or tranquillisers as a drug less rough in its effects for tapering-off. When I speak of ‘police immunity’, I mean that the police might be encouraged not to arrest inmates of the houses on charges of vagrancy if they were out of work.

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)