Addict Nation (2 page)

Michael Jackson, Anna Nicole Smith, DJ AM, Heath Ledger . . . these are just a few of the tragic headliners who’ve showcased the nation’s epidemic of prescription drug addiction. There’s even a hit show for high-profile drug addicts:
Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew
. Kirstie Alley has become the national symbol for our collective battle with obesity. She spilled her guts about her rollercoaster ride down and up the scale to Oprah, who could relate because she too has waged a long and very public losing battle with her weight. Could these two supertalented women perhaps be addicted to food? With nineteen kids and counting, the Duggars are clearly hooked on making babies . . . and getting on television. Ditto for the Octomom, plus John and Kate. With a baker’s dozen of alleged mistresses, is it really a stretch to wonder if Tiger Woods was hooked on sex?

Okay, those are all famous people. So what? Do you really think stars are the only ones who grapple with compulsions like serial infidelity, overpopulation, pill popping, and gluttony? No. The only difference between stars and the rest of us is . . . their addictive behavior seems somehow more glamorous, more fascinating. And we all get to watch.

Addiction Often Comes
Packaged as a Harmless Distraction

What’s surpassed baseball as our number-one national pastime? Crime. America’s extreme fixation on violence and murder has reached epidemic proportions. A beautiful Tennessee TV news anchorwoman is raped and murdered while minding her own business in her own home, a Georgia mom is abducted while walking down a country road near her parents’ house, a little girl is kidnapped near a bus stop in California and held for eighteen years while her captor rapes her repeatedly, fathering two children by her. It seems every day brings a new horror story. And we’re hooked! We want to know every last detail!

On my show
Issues,
I talk about our culture of violence and insist that, as we cover these stories, we analyze the root societal causes of crime and look for solutions lest we become just another showcase for the pornography of violence. Ironically, addiction itself is one of the most common causes of crime. People who are drunk or high on drugs are capable of monstrous violence they would never even consider while sober and often rob to support their habit. In fact, the title of this book came out of a recurring segment on my show called “Addict Nation,” where my expert panel and I discuss how addiction is the underlying theme of so much disturbing news.

America’s crime addiction can be seen in our obsession with the mass shooting du jour and the wild televised car chases. We all know how those car chases end. The suspect is always caught. Yet, we remain glued to the live coverage, drinking in the “suspense.” After drugs, booze, and food, crime is perhaps our most potent and pervasive form of escape. You may now be thinking,
What’s wrong
with a little escapism? Is that really an addiction?

Escapism is the root cause of all addiction. The motive for any addictive behavior is always the same: to stuff down and escape painful feelings and unpleasant truths by altering one’s mental and emotional state with the addictive substance/behavior. Addiction is all about altering reality by “using” to tweak one’s mood. The drug of choice may vary from addict to addict, but the purpose of using is always the same. Different addicts drive different cars, but they’re all heading to the same destination. Oblivion.

Human beings are capable of becoming addicted to virtually anything— from plastic surgery to tattoos to texting. I can tell you from personal experience that addictions jump from one substance to another. When I gave up booze—voila, sugar popped up to take its place as my new obsession. Over the years, I’ve given up alcohol, drugs, sugar, meat, dairy, diet soda, violent movies, and a variety of other bad habits. But new addictions just keep cropping up. That’s because all the behavior is driven by the same motive: to “check out,” to numb, and to escape.

You’re an addict when your behavior turns into a never-ending cycle of craving, bingeing, remorse, and withdrawal. That hangover, or withdrawal, then triggers a new bout of craving, and the cycle begins again.

Here’s one of my addictive cycles. Every night when I leave work, I feel the urge to eat something. No problem there. It’s what I crave that’s the problem. As a vegan, I’m pretty much locked in to a healthy diet. You have to search long and hard to find vegan junk food. But, hey, I’m an addict. I will do that! I will systematically hunt down the most fattening, vegan dessert available anywhere in the tristate area. When I find it, I eat it quickly, voraciously, looking over my shoulder as if somebody will take it away from me if I don’t gobble it down fast. About five minutes after the last bite, the remorse kicks in.
Why did I just do that? Didn’t I just devour the same amount
of calories it takes me an hour and a half to burn off during a session of
thinly disguised torture called “hot” yoga? Why couldn’t I have just had
another serving of cantaloupe instead?

Sometimes addiction is called “taking our comfort.” When I’m eating the cake, a voice in my head tells me, “I’m entitled, I’ve earned it. I’ve worked hard all day. And it tastes so good! Damn the consequences!” When I get into the remorse phase minutes later, another voice in my head says, “Who was that person who wolfed down that vegan cake faster than you can say
organic fair-trade agave nectar
?” As an addict, I have a committee living in my head whose members love to argue and wage power plays.

Ultimately, I have had to counteract that addiction by simply giving up sweets entirely, even so-called healthy sweets like maple syrup, molasses, and, yes, agave nectar. Now I identify myself as “an alcoholic and a sugar addict.” Being an addict, it’s easier for me to give up the addictive substance entirely rather than try to negotiate with it. Bye-bye added sugar in all its forms. I simply cannot do sugar or booze in moderation. Put another way, I cannot use those substances successfully.

Any addiction is ultimately self-destructive, even an addiction to something that—in moderation—is good for you, like exercise.

So what kind of behavior is considered okay? What’s not? It depends on the cultural norms of the moment. Suddenly, we’ve got pot stores popping up all over California and Colorado. The baby boomers, most of whom smoked pot as teens, grew up, got into power, and decided, “Come on, there are more important battles to wage than trying to stop people from lighting up, especially if they’re sick and need some pain relief.” Society is constantly reassessing its tolerance for certain addictive behaviors, declaring war on some addictions while encouraging others.

Remember the sixties? “If you can . . . you weren’t there,” is the tired joke. The sixties positively romanticized the use of psychedelics. Then the nineties demonized them. The fifties was one long love affair with smoking. By the nineties, cigarettes were considered gross, inspiring attitudes like “I could never date someone who smokes!” The disco seventies, where hot pants and platform shoes were the rage, looked askance on obesity. Today, there’s an ill-advised fat acceptance movement. Our culture has lost its tolerance for drunks and smokers, but we still rationalize obesity as a lifestyle choice. Being morbidly overweight is an addiction to food, just like smoking is an addiction to cigarettes and getting drunk is an addiction to alcohol. To accept obesity unquestioningly is really to be an enabler of the problem.

Whether it’s the neighbors’ annual Oscar party, or Karaoke Wednesdays, human beings are pack animals. We move in groups from one behavioral landscape to another. We’re always adjusting to the shifting sands of cultural attitudes. Simply put, America lurches from addiction to addiction, stamping out one bad habit only to see others take its place.

When Enough People Are Hooked,
It Crosses the Line into a Social Contagion

Our entire nation is addicted to a slew of self-destructive, compulsive actions. You may be thinking,
Well, that’s why we have the
government, the media, and—yes—even big business. They help us fight
these terrible social plagues.
FUHGEDDABOUDIT! The media, the government, and business are often the enablers . . . even the pushers! The media relays and popularizes the bad habit, the government subsidizes it, and big business squeezes a buck out of it.

When somebody’s absolutely got to have something, that’s called demand. Addiction creates enormous demand, and there are massive profits in supplying what we crave.

The More Widespread an Addiction
Gets, the More It Seems Normal

An extreme example of a dysfunction that has become accepted as normal in one part of the world is the burka women are forced to wear in some parts of the Middle East. I once had to try on a burka as part of a news story I was doing on the oppression of women. The second I put it on I felt like I was drowning. I couldn’t see to the left or right of me. God help me if I had tried to cross the street. I probably would have been sideswiped by a bus. It was torture. I kept it on for three or four minutes, and then I just couldn’t take it anymore. I ripped that freakin’ burka off, threw it on the floor, and thanked heaven that I was born in America and not in the hills of Afghanistan. The burka is beyond oppressive. It’s lunacy! But for the Taliban, it is their “normal.”

Similarly, in America, self-destructive compulsions, like violent crime, war, overconsumption, overpopulation, prescription drug abuse, food addiction, Internet porn, and obsessive use of antibacterials are so widespread as to seem “normal.” So we accept the behavior and cease to put it through our normal screening process. The bad habit gets a pass because “everybody’s doing it!”

On
Issues,
I bring attention to the horrors of cultural addictions like overconsumption. However, I am often left disillusioned. Some of the smartest people I encounter don’t seem at all bothered by America’s pathological wastefulness. They react like there’s something a little strange about me that I’m so concerned. Why? As we know, addiction can afflict anyone regardless of their income, education, or intelligence. America’s best and brightest, despite their brains and positions of privilege, are also addicts, hooked on the very same social addictions as the rest of us! And, because they’re smart, they can whip up the best excuses to justify our worst lifestyle choices.

If I go out to a fancy restaurant with a successful New York executive, the chances are that a good percentage of the food that comes to our table will be discarded. It’s fashionable to order food and not eat much of it. Successful people do this all the time. Many women, especially, are brought up to never finish the last bite. If they leave half the plate, they feel even more refined. It’s part of the mentality that you can never be too rich or too thin. As I watch the waiter take away a plate of barely eaten food, along with the rolls of untouched bread in the basket, all destined for the garbage bin, I think of a recent study. It says America could feed over 200 million adults every year, just with the food that ends up in our garbage cans. As we speak, 1 billion people are going hungry worldwide, according to the United Nations.
²
While my more successful friends certainly feign concern over that jaw-dropping imbalance, they actually seem more disturbed by my newest quirk. Now, when I go out to a restaurant, I take all the uneaten bread from the basket in the center of the table with me when I leave. I either give it to a homeless person or feed it to the hungry birds I’m always passing on the street. Apparently, this makes me a freak.

Maybe they’re not so smart after all. This wastefulness is part and parcel of the addiction of overconsumption. We’re hoarding for ourselves more than we can ever possibly consume, while others starve. It’s obscene. But nobody is addressing the addictive nature of this behavior.

The Most Dangerous Addictions Are the Ones
We Fail to Even Diagnose as Addictive Behavior

If you have an undiagnosed addiction, it’s like not knowing you have a fatal cancer growing inside you. You’re flying blind. You can’t combat a problem until you correctly diagnose it. Right now, America is misdiagnosing some of its biggest problems, like obesity, materialism, and crime. It’s no wonder they’re just getting worse!

One thing we know about addicts: they don’t listen to reason. A craving is a very powerful thing that has a force of its own like a hurricane or a tsunami. Have you ever tried to get a friend to stop smoking by telling them they’re liable to get cancer? Ha! Reason is no match for a full-blown addiction. This is why addicts are known for being stubborn and defiant when somebody tries to stop them. When you scold a drunk for drinking too much, they’re apt to storm out of the house and head toward the nearest bar. Well, the same thing applies to our social addictions like crime, materialism, excessive cleanliness, and gluttony. This is precisely why Americans keep getting fatter as we lecture everyone about the dangers of junk and fast food.

When It Comes to Combating Addictive Behavior,
We Are Wasting Taxpayer Dollars Trying to
Engineer Strictly Political Solutions

Politics is tone deaf to the psychological and emotional underpinnings of America’s worst problems, even as it throws billions of dollars at them. If you give a heroin junkie a wad of cash, it’s not going to help him kick his habit.
Au contraire.

Our healthcare debate is a perfect example. We keep talking about getting everybody insured. How about tackling the root cause of so much of the illness in America? Addiction! Overconsumption of alcohol is tied to an increased risk of breast cancer. The addiction there is alcoholism. Smoking has long been the nation’s number-one preventable killer. Smoking is an addiction. And now obesity is creeping up and could ultimately surpass smoking as the country’s leading preventable killer. Obesity is the result of food addiction.