On Addiction

The shocking death of Philip Seymour Hoffman (covered on this blog yesterday) has once again brought the subject of addiction into sharp focus. Last night, Will Self gave an eloquent and personal insight into addiction and drugs, and heroin in particular, on Newsnight (a programme also worth watching for Richard Curtis’ description of the actor and his work), and what came across from his words was that the nature of addiction remains thoroughly mysterious.

At the end of last year, I wrote a rather angry piece attacking Peter Hitchens’ smug, sanctimonious and thoughtless approach to something he didn’t see as a problem so much as a crime against the self. What appals me most of all now, looking back on it, is his certainty. How can he possibly be so certain of his view of addiction, when even the most banal experience of it yields few truths and plenty of bewildering murkiness?

When I think of addiction, I first think of the extreme examples. I have never known someone who has been wrestling with an addiction to an illegal drug when I knew them. I know plenty of people who take illegal drugs. My instinctive response to a number of these individual cases is that they are playing with fire, but also that they know it. They are the lucky ones. As Self noted last night, it takes a number of decisions to get addicted to a substance.

I have known a few recovering drug addicts. The one I knew best was in fact a close family relative. After injuries in the Second World War, he was treated with an excessive amount of morphine – heroin – and became addicted. He was a private man and did not like to discuss it, but he made it clear that there was an intense agony in his recovery. This was no rehabilitation. The drug was simply and abruptly withdrawn. Given the circumstances of his exposure to the drug, he was fine once the withdrawal symptoms had passed, as he was unlikely to have any opportunity to procure anymore of the substance. Nevertheless, it was something that on some level left its scaring.

These are the extreme examples I personally know of, but they are the least of the cases of addiction of which I am aware. My family have always been heavy drinkers, my father is a heavy smoker. I know countless smokers, and have known many drinkers who can knock back a flood of the stuff in no time at all. I myself drink far too much, and my flirtations with tobacco have always led to moments of some difficulty when I decide to stop. Biochemically, I must surely be an addict. I have to think that I shouldn’t have a drink of an evening, rather than have the thought that I might like a drink occur to me on occasion. I can resist it, but there is no denying that there is a compulsion there.

The ease with which I have developed these responses means that I have no desire to toy with any further highly addictive and potentially dangerous drugs, but I like to think that it also means that I have some understanding of how easy it is to fall into such a condition. I rather hope that should Peter Hitchens’ have the clarity of mind for but a moment to see the addiction that may well be around him, he may admit that things are not as simple as his blinkered view appears to allow.

Addiction, much like that other great, human, biochemical obsession of romance, is something that we cannot escape or ignore, but also a phenomenon that we do not comprehend, despite centuries of experience, investigation and thought. Perhaps that is why there is such an extensive but utterly vague lexicon concerning it. We have competing ideas of what constitutes an “addict”, or what symptoms demonstrate that a person has a “problem” with a substance. Perhaps, like love, “you know it when you see it”, but that approach allows for numerous mistakes (in both phenomena).

We cannot sit in judgement of others on this. We must not condescend or elevate ourselves to some higher place above those who vigorously wrestle with the illness of addiction. We must educate using the rare facts that are available to us. Certain people like to think of addiction as a scourge that only afflicts the poor and the downtrodden. Even if that were the case, which it resoundingly is not, it would be no excuse for ignoring or resenting their plight. Addiction has been with us since the dawn of humankind, and it isn’t going anywhere. We are built with this vulnerability inherent within us. A crucial step must be to have the humility to acknowledge that.

I Fear for Peter Hitchens

I’m worried about Peter Hitchens. He wants to do bad things. He is compelled to do these bad things. Every day, he wakes up and he is assailed by temptation. Jesus had it easy in the wilderness compared to the trials and travails that he suffers. The only thing stopping him from lighting a crack-pipe, getting drunk and disorderly and, presumably, going on a terrible crime spree is his immense, monolithic, immovable self-will, and what remains of the Criminal Justice System.

Why do I worry about this? Well, in his now much re-tweeted debate about Drugs Courts on Newsnight with Baroness Meacher and Matthew Perry, he said this: “The whole point of the Criminal Justice System, and we forget this all the time, is to deter people from committing crimes.”

He is, of course, absolutely right about this. I know from personal experience that I am but a judge’s-day-off away from mass-murder. Every day, Peter and I must have the same experience. We want to tear into the streets with sub-machine guns, give into our ids, and gorge ourselves on the buffet of potential delinquencies available to us. We don’t, but only because we are deterred by the Criminal Justice System. That is what it is there for. That is “the whole point” of it. If it weren’t for that, we would be unleashed.

I am, of course, being facetious – displaying the sort of "levity" that Hitchens aspires to but can never attain, the sort of activity that he tries so hard to deploy but fails to deliver, and therefore resorts to self-righteous spite and venomous disrespect instead (note how he gets gradually more defensive on Newsnight) – but, of all of his ridiculousness and Matt Perry’s flippant rejoinders the other night, that single statement has to be the most stupendously ludicrous, and the most disturbing.

“The whole point of the Criminal Justice System … is to deter people from committing crimes.” The nonsense of this is immediately apparent. The Criminal Justice System enforces the law, certainly with an eye to deterring (something which, incidentally, you can never measure the success of, for there are no records of people who consider committing a crime and then don’t, nor of what their reasons for their change of heart was either), but it also has a look to retributive justice and, we hope, rehabilitation. None of this is easy, but all of it is necessary. The approach to law, morality, and justice must always be highly nuanced and considerate of each individual case according to its circumstances. There must never be a “whole point”. We can never afford to be so blinkered.

It is when you dwell on it that the sheer unpleasantness of thought behind that statement reveals itself. Its implication is that the only thing stopping some people from committing crimes is the threat of punishment. He seems to think, though, that human beings are inclined to failure, to laxity, to wrong-doing, and therefore we need a “stern and effective” CJS to keep us on the moral path prescribed.

Hitchens has no time for rehabilitation. He seems to have no time for considering the complexities of retribution. He is merely interested in the rules of the game. Transgress them, and you are gone, not because you have done something morally wrong necessarily, but because you have made a life-choice that Peter finds disagreeable. To jail with you then, so that others may choose better. Such a view is smug, arrogant, self-centred, uncompassionate, ill-informed, flat-out stupid, and, in his case, probably intellectually dishonest.

To err is human, but should erring (if erring this be) be greeted as something worthy of harsh punishment, solely for the reason that others may be deterred from erring again? Not only is this an unjust form of reasoning, it is also a rod for one’s own back. The recurrence throughout the ages of drug-abuse, for instance, suggests that this is a problem we will not be able to eradicate. If it is a scourge, then it is not one we can defeat, as the failure of drug policies worldwide have demonstrated. The condition is too rooted in human nature.

One needs to rise above the level of the primary school headmaster in our thinking here in order to find better solutions. Hitchens, the crotchety, snarling, disgruntled school teacher par excellence, is not the man whose reasoning we should follow.