Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (34 page)

Something about this pricked at Bruce. He had been taught to believe addicts were incapable of self-reflection—yet this young man could see the absurdity of his situation clearly. There was a humanity in this laughter that Bruce had not expected to hear.

He continued to interview addicts in depth. Like Gabor, he could see that childhood trauma was a crucial factor. But he was also discovering facts that were deeply confusing to him and, at first glance, to everyone.

There were big chunks of time in the 1970s in which the Canadian police managed to blockade the port of Vancouver so successfully that no heroin was getting into the city at all. We know this because the police tested the “heroin” being sold on the streets and found it actually contained zero percent of the drug: it was all filler and contaminants. So the war on drugs was, for some significant stretches, being won here.

It is obvious what should have happened during these heroin droughts. The heroin addicts should all have been plunged into physical withdrawal, writhing in agony, and then, weeks later, they should have woken up to find they were freed from their physical dependency.

But Bruce was seeing something really weird instead. There was no heroin in the city—but all the heroin addicts were carrying on almost exactly as before. They were still scrambling desperately to raise the money—robbing or prostituting—to buy this empty cocktail. They weren’t in agonizing withdrawal. They weren’t getting gut-wrenchingly sick. They thought the “heroin” they were buying was weak, to be sure, and they were topping it up with heavier drinking or more Valium. But the core of their addiction didn’t seem to be affected. Nothing had changed.

This wasn’t some freak
²
event: a similar effect was being seen in other North American cities where heroin was successfully blockaded for a while, either by police action or by strikes on the docks that prevented anything being unloaded.

This is perplexing. You can get rid of the drug—yet
³
the drug addiction continues in pretty much the same way. What could possibly be happening here?

Bruce went back and taught his students that drug addiction must have much less to do with the actual chemicals than we commonly assume. They had—like all of us—been told that one of the worst aspects of heroin addiction is the fierce and unbearable sickness of physical withdrawal. Henry Smith Williams believed this process was so harrowing it could kill you. But Bruce saw addicts in withdrawal all the time—and their symptoms were often minor:
⁴
at worst, like a bad flu. This is so contrary to what we are told that it seems impossible, but doctors now very broadly agree it is the case. The real pain of withdrawal is the return of all the psychological pain that you were trying to put to sleep with heroin in the first place.

Bruce often invited addicts from the Downtown Eastside to come to address his students, and one day an addict explained his life story and then took questions from them.

“Our professor,” one of the class members asked, “has said withdrawal symptoms are not really bad at all. They’re really not like the way they’re depicted in the media and in films. Is that true?”

“Well, he says they’re not very serious,
⁵
eh?” the addict replied. “Says they don’t make you crawl on the wall and climb up by your fingernails? . . . Well, I wonder if you’ve noticed that I’m in withdrawal right now.”

He was. He was a little bit sniffly
⁶
and sweaty. That’s all.

The medical researchers
⁷
John Ball and Carl Chambers studied the medical literature between 1875 and 1968 and found that nobody had died of heroin withdrawal alone in that time. The only people who can be killed by withdrawal, it turns out, are people who are already very weak: withdrawal helped to kill Billie Holiday when she was terribly sick with liver disease, for example, in the same way that ordinary flu can kill a ninety-five-year-old.

In another class, when Bruce was making his point that chemicals can’t be the primary cause of addiction, a student raised his hand.

“This is bullshit,” he said, “because we know why people take heroin. They take heroin because it captures their brain once they’ve taken it . . . and the proof is these rat studies which show that’s true.”

As I said earlier, the strongest evidence for the pharmaceutical theory of addiction had, for years, been a series of experiments on rats.
⁸
A famous advertisement that ran on U.S. TV in the 1980s, paid for by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America, explained it best. It shows a rat in close-up licking at a water bottle, as the narrator says: “Only one drug is so addictive,
⁹
nine out of ten laboratory rats will use it. And use it. And use it. Until dead. It’s called cocaine. And it can do the same thing to you.” The rat runs about manically, then—as promised by the scary music—drops dead. Similar rat experiments had been run to prove the addictiveness of heroin and other drugs.

But when Bruce looked at these experiments, he noticed something. These rats had been put in an empty cage. They were all alone, with no toys, and no activities, and no friends. There was nothing for them to do but to take the drug.

What, he wondered, if
¹⁰
the experiment was run differently? With a few of his colleagues, he built two sets of homes for laboratory rats. In the first home, they lived as they had in the original experiments, in solitary confinement, isolated except for their fix. But then he built a second home: a paradise for rats. Within its plywood walls,
¹¹
it contained everything a rat could want—there were wheels and colored balls and the best food, and other rats to hang out with and have sex with.

He called it Rat Park.
¹²
In these experiments, both sets of rats had access to a pair of drinking bottles. The first bottle contained only water. The other bottle contained morphine—an opiate that rats process in a similar way to humans and that behaves just like heroin when it enters their brains. At the end of each day, Bruce or a member of his team would weigh the bottles to see how much the rats had chosen to take opiates, and how much they had chosen to stay sober.

What they discovered was startling. It turned out that the rats in isolated cages used up to 25 milligrams of morphine a day, as in the earlier experiments. But the rats in the happy cages used hardly any morphine at all—less than 5 milligrams. “These guys [in Rat Park] have a complete total twenty-four-hour supply” of morphine, Bruce said, “and they don’t use it.” They don’t kill themselves. They choose to spend their lives doing other things.

So the old experiments were, it seemed, wrong. It isn’t the drug that causes the harmful behavior—it’s the environment. An isolated rat will almost always become a junkie. A rat with a good life almost never will, no matter how many drugs you make available to him. As Bruce put it: he was realizing that addiction isn’t a disease. Addiction is an adaptation. It’s not you—it’s the cage you live in.

Bruce and his colleagues kept tweaking the experiment, to see just how much your environment shapes your chemical compulsions.

He took a set of rats
¹³
and made them drink the morphine solution for fifty-seven days, in their cage, alone. If drugs can hijack your brain, that will definitely do it. Then he put these junkies into Rat Park. Would they carry on using compulsively, even when their environment improved? Had the drug taken them over?

In Rat Park, the junkie rats seemed to have some twitches of withdrawal—but quite quickly, they stopped drinking the morphine. A happy social environment, it seemed, freed them of their addiction. In Rat Park, Bruce writes, “nothing that we tried
¹⁴
instilled a strong appetite for morphine or produced anything that looked to us like addiction.”

Bruce naturally wanted to know if this applied to humans. Oddly enough, a large-scale human experiment along similar lines was being carried out shortly before. It was called the Vietnam War.

Out in Southeast Asia,
¹⁵
using heroin was “as common as chewing gum” among U.S. soldiers, as
Time
magazine reported at the time. This wasn’t just journalistic hyperbole:
¹⁶
some 20 percent of U.S. soldiers had become addicted to heroin there, according to a study published in the
Archives of General Psychiatry
later cited by many writers. This meant there were more
¹⁷
heroin addicts serving in the U.S. Army than there were back home in the United States. The American military had cracked down
¹⁸
hard on marijuana smoking among its troops, sending in pot-sniffing dogs and staging mass arrests, and so huge numbers of men—unable to face that level of pressure without a relaxant—had transferred to smack, which sniffer dogs can’t snuffle out. Senator Robert Steele
¹⁹
of Connecticut came home from the jungles ashen-faced to explain: “The soldier going to South Vietnam today runs a far greater risk of becoming a heroin addict than a combat casualty.”

Many people in the United States were understandably terrified. The war was going to end sooner or later, and at that point the streets of America were going to swell with an unprecedented number of junkies. They believed the pharmaceutical theory of addiction—so this was the only outcome that made any sense. Their brains and bodies were being hijacked by the drug, so, as Senator Harold Hughes
²⁰
of Iowa warned: “Within a matter of months in our large cities, the Capone era of the ’20s may look like a Sunday school picnic by comparison.”

The war ended. The addicts came home. And something nobody expected took place. The study in the
Archives of General Psychiatry
—and
²¹
the experiences people could see all across the country—show that 95 percent of them, within a year, simply stopped. The addicts who received drug treatment and rehab were no more likely to stop than those who received no treatment at all. A tiny number of vets did carry on shooting up. They turned out either to have
²²
had unstable childhoods, or to have been addicts before they went.

If you believe the theory that drugs hijack your brain and turn you into a chemical slave—the theory on which the war on drugs has been based since Anslinger—then this makes no sense. But there is another explanation. As the writer Dan Baum puts it: “Take a man out
²³
of a pestilential jungle where people he can’t see are trying to kill him for reasons he doesn’t understand, and—surprise!—his need to shoot smack goes away.”

After learning all this, Bruce was beginning to develop a theory—one that radically contradicted our earlier understanding of addiction but seemed to him the only way to explain all this evidence. If your environment is like Rat Park—a safe, happy community with lots of healthy bonds and pleasurable things to do—you will not be especially vulnerable to addiction. If your environment is like the rat cages—where you feel alone, powerless and purposeless—you will be.