Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (37 page)

Everyone agrees that cigarette smoking is one of the strongest addictions: it is ranked on pharmaceutical addictiveness scales alongside heroin and cocaine. It is also the deadliest.
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Smoking tobacco kills 650
³⁴
out of every hundred thousand people who use it, while using cocaine kills four.
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And we know for sure what the chemical hook in tobacco is—it’s nicotine.

The wonder of nicotine patches, then, is that they can meet a smoker’s physical need—the real in-your-gut craving—while bypassing some of the really dangerous effects of smoking tobacco. So if the idea of addiction we all have in our heads is right, nicotine patches will have a very high success rate. Your body is hooked on the chemical; it gets the chemical from the nicotine patch; therefore, you won’t need to smoke anymore.

The pharmacology of nicotine patches works just fine—you really are giving smokers the drug they are addicted to. The level of nicotine in your bloodstream doesn’t drop if you use them, so that chemical craving is gone. There is just one problem: even with a nicotine patch on, you still want to smoke. The Office of the Surgeon General has found that just 17.7 percent of nicotine patch wearers were able to stop smoking.

How can this be? There’s only one explanation: something is going on that is more significant than the chemicals in the drug itself. If solving the craving for the chemical ends 17.7 percent of the addictions in smokers, the other 82.3 percent has to be explained some other way.

Now, 17.7 percent certainly isn’t a trivial amount. That’s a large number of people with improved lives. It would be foolish and wrong to say the drug has
no
effect—tobacco cigarettes are considerably more addictive than menthol cigarettes, to give just one example. But it would be equally foolish to say what we have been saying for a century—that the chemicals themselves are the
main
cause of drug addiction. That assertion doesn’t match the evidence.

This point is worth underscoring. With the most powerful and deadly drug in our culture, the actual chemicals account for only 17.7 percent of the compulsion to use. The rest can only be explained by the factors Gabor and Bruce have discovered.

To make sense of this conclusion I talked to many scientists, and they explained a distinction that really helped me—between physical dependence, and addiction. Physical dependence occurs when your body has become hooked on a chemical, and you will experience some withdrawal symptoms if you stop—I am physically dependent on caffeine, and boy, can I feel it this morning.

But addiction is different. Addiction is the psychological state of feeling you need the drug to give you the sensation of feeling calmer, or manic, or numbed, or whatever it does for you. My coffee withdrawal pains will have totally passed in two days—but two weeks from now, I might feel the urgent need to get my mind focused again, and I will convince myself I can’t do it without caffeine. That’s not dependence; that’s not a chemical hook; that’s an addiction. This is a crucial difference. And what goes for a mild and fairly harmless addiction like caffeine goes for a hard-core addiction like meth. That’s why you can nurse addicts through their withdrawal pains for weeks and see the chemical hooks slowly pass, only for them to relapse months or years later, even though any chemical craving in the body has long since gone. They are no longer physically dependent—but they are addicted. As a culture, for one hundred years, we have convinced ourselves that a real but fairly small aspect of addiction—physical dependence—is the whole show.

“It’s really like,” Gabor told me one night, “we’re still operating out of Newtonian physics in an age of quantum physics. Newtonian physics is very valuable, of course. It deals with a lot of things—but it doesn’t deal with the heart of things.”

Part V

Peace

Chapter 14

The Drug Addicts’ Uprising

As I tried to find my way through the world of the Downtown Eastside, I kept being told—again and again—that it had changed radically in the past decade. This place, everyone said, has been transformed. It is not what it was. It is incalculably better now. I wanted to know how that happened, and when I asked for the explanation, I was told a story, and one name always featured in it: Bud Osborn. He’s a poet, people said. He was a homeless addict. He changed this place. They talked about him almost as a mythical figure. You’ll understand, they said, when you meet him.

When I called his number, he sounded unwell—and, to my surprise, a hailstorm of negative assumptions hit me. Another junkie, I thought. What change? Why am I bothering? And then I immediately asked myself—Where did that thought come from?

I went to Bud’s little apartment, a short walk from the Portland Hotel Society where Gabor had worked, to meet him. He was waiting in the corridor for me. He was a tall man in his sixties with a long mop of gray hair and an unlined, youthful face. He guided me into his lounge through huge piles of books—on poetry, history, jazz—and before long, he was telling me about a day nearly twenty years before, when he was very different, and the Downtown Eastside was very different, and everything seemed hopeless. This is his story
¹
as I learned it from him, his friends, and the people he led a rebellion against.

Bud felt like he heard nothing but sirens. All through the day, all through the night, every fifteen minutes, the nee-naw-nee-naw of speeding ambulances scratched through his neighborhood, and he would immediately wonder: Is it one of my friends? Which one?

He was a homeless
²
smack addict in his fifties, watching his friends die all around him. By the mid-1990s, Bud’s voice was already dry and toneless, as if the emotion had been scraped from it long ago, when one day, near the park, he bumped into a Native American woman named Margaret whom he had known for a few years. He knew that her family had been dying one by one of drug overdoses, like so many of the people around there, and he could see that she was ashen and had to say something to him but didn’t quite know how.

He waited for her to speak.

Her cousin, she said, had just overdosed, and when her partner had walked in on her body, he had ripped up the sheets and hanged himself—and it all happened in front of their young child, who was sitting on his cot, watching. She was just on her way to a meeting of the family to figure out who would end up taking the kid, she explained, distantly.

As Margaret talked, Bud thought of what had happened to him as a child, far away in Toledo, Ohio, and he knew now it was about to happen to another kid, and somewhere inside him, there came a voice saying—This has to stop.

But what can I do? Bud asked himself. I’m just a street junkie. I’m nobody.

He looked around him. Nobody else was rebelling. Okay, he thought. If it has to be me, it has to be me.

It was in that thought—and in everything that followed from it—that the first mass rebellion by drug addicts against the system built by Harry Anslinger was born.

In the same year that Gabor’s mother was handing him to a Christian stranger in the Budapest ghetto, an American pilot named Walton Osborn Senior was around 150 miles away, in a bomber plane high above Vienna. Bullets must have pierced the plane’s engine, because it caught fire and crashed to the ground, and Walton was hauled from the smoking wreckage with his legs all smashed up. The people dragging him out were the Austrian peasants who had survived his bombs, and they were armed with pitchforks, determined to lynch him. Nazi officers suddenly pulled up in a jeep and scared them off, and they took Walton to a prisoner of war camp.

We don’t know what happened to him there. He would never say. But when he came back to Toledo, Ohio, to get back to his life as a journalist, Walton started drinking, and he never stopped.
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Toledo was a sedate middle-class American town where the memories of the war were being meticulously repressed. Walton insisted on driving across America to seek out everybody who had survived the POW camp with him, because they were the only ones who understood. When he was forced to come home, he threw out all their furniture, leaving their home bare and empty, as if he was trying to rebuild the Nazi prison camp in the middle of America. Nobody knew how to cope with an open wound like Walton: he was like a scream in the middle of a dinner party.

To his wife, Patricia, Walton seemed like a drunken impostor of the man who had left for the war, and she couldn’t bear it. She was a former model—a tall, slender brunette—and while he lay in bed for days on end, drinking and reading Walt Whitman, she started an affair with another man, to feel she was not alone. When Walton found out, he started screaming and howling and shrieking so violently that his friends were worried that he was going to jump out a window, so they took him to the local jail, where the cops said they’d keep an eye on him as he sobered up. They put him in the cell at the end, and they forgot about him, so Walton ripped his jacket into shreds, made a noose, tied it to the bars, and hanged himself.

The next week, the local newspaper ran a story. These, it said, are “the consequences of flaunting
⁴
contempt for the moral laws on which our society ultimately rests.” It ran a photograph of the widow, labeling her a slut and saying she had driven her husband to kill himself. The story landed on doorsteps across the city, and in that moment, she and her little son, Walton Osborn Junior, were expelled from their middle-class lives. They were forced to live in the local trailer park and then whatever random room they could find for the night, and they spent most days and evenings in one bar or another. His mother needed to drink all the time now, and she would drag her son along to bars and tell him to play. He was the only child there, so he shot balls on the pool table, alone.

Walton Junior—a plump boy with curly blond hair—wanted to know where his dad had gone. His mother told him he was talking nonsense: Your father never returned from the war, she said. You never knew him. “I had actual memories of him,” he told me. He remembered his father holding his hand and taking him to the art museum in Toledo, and lifting him up onto a little concrete statue of a rhinoceros, and many other images. So “I thought there was something wrong with me. Something really wrong with me. Mentally. In my perception of reality.”

She would often hand him over to people she barely knew and say she’d be back in a few hours, only to vanish for days on end. This confirmed her son in his suspicions: “The fact that my father left one day and never came back, [and] my mother was always leaving [meant] I thought the reason my parents aren’t with me is because there’s something really wrong with me.” Whenever the little boy heard his own name spoken out loud—“Walton”—he felt terrified, but he didn’t know why. As he was playing outside once, another kid told him his name wasn’t really Walton, it was Bud. It felt like a liberation. From then on, he demanded to be called Bud by everyone, as if that could shake off the ghost of the father he remembered but who he now believed had never existed at all.

His mother often brought men back to their one-room trailer for a few more drinks, and one night, she brought back a man—an actor—to keep on drinking with. He ripped open her blouse and she yelled; he pressed against her, grinning. Bud wanted to protect his mother, so he hurled his little frame at the man, but he was flicked away like an insect. Bud picked himself up and launched himself again—and this time the man threw him very hard against the wall.

“Stay there! Stay there!” his mother screamed. So Bud had to stay there, and watch. “I was there, just trying not to feel. Just not to be aware . . . I sort of shut off,” he remembered. Later, he wrote
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that in that moment, “I vowed I would never again be vulnerable to another human being.”