National Addictions Awareness Week begins today (Nov. 18-24). Everybody -- informed or otherwise -- has

an opinion on addiction and how to treat it, so the subject never fails to generate animated public debate.

The literature on addiction is voluminous. Any amateur researcher trying to get a handle on the constant

outpouring of medical, governmental and ideologically-tuned advocacy literature (both for and against

legalization of drugs) will find it a daunting and confusing business. I have tried, so I know.

In the end it's pretty simple. Everyone agrees addiction takes a terrible human and societal toll. It's what to

do about it that polarizes us. Opinion invariably drifts toward one of two basic camps, depending on one's

view of human nature.

According to the Tough Love (TL) school, human beings are endowed with moral agency and can control

their choices. In this view, however painful the circumstances driving the flight into the oblivion drugs

provide, nobody is beyond redemption if he chooses -- and even if he doesn't choose, but is forced into -

long-term community-based rehabilitative therapy.

According to the Romantic school, summed up in the philosophy of Harm Reduction (HR), addiction is a

chronic disease, like rheumatoid arthritis, that befalls victims. The best we can hope to do, from this

perspective, is palliate the misery and mitigate the spread of disease and crime, while enabling the

addiction's perpetuation more hygenically.

For the ultimate Romantic approach, read Gabor Mate's 2008 book, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts. Dr.

Mate, a sainted icon of the drug legalization movement, ministers full time to hard-core substance abusers.

An admittedly neurotic personality with multiple manias and a hunger for both celebrity and vicarious

suffering, the spiritually restless doctor found his bliss in his identification with the inhabitants of the

Portland hotel, home to Vancouver's most unregenerate human wreckage ( "I saw the cockroaches and fell

in love").

Mate sees all of humanity as more or less addicted to something. For himself it is classical CDs; Conrad

Black is "addicted to status"; and perhaps you are addicted to chocolate cake. Oh yes, and that emaciated

parody of a human being lying spaced out in his own vomit is addicted to a "substance." It's all one, you see.

And therefore: "Addiction can never be understood if looked at through the lens of moralism and

judgment."

After wading through Mate's hagiography of junkiedom, you may, as I did, yearn for nothing so much as a

heavy dose of moralism and judgment, not to mention assurance you are not an addict, even if, like me, you

tend to buy a lot of books you may never read. You will find compelling abundance of both moralism and

judgment in the Emmy-award winning TV series about addiction, Intervention. I have no use for reality

shows in general, but this one I'm addic -- er, I really like.

At the end of every Intervention segment, the addict -- of alcohol, cocaine, heroin, gambling, oxycontin, you

name it -- is surprised with an intervention by his loved ones, facilitated by one of three plain-spoken ex-

addicts.

You would not believe the tears that flow on this show, or the outpouring of love -- real, passionately felt,

unconditional -- the parents and siblings and friends feel for the addict, love the addict accepts as an

entitlement or shrugs off with indifference.

Unlike the co-suffering, romanticizing Mate, the ex-addict facilitators are pragmatic, cool, been-there-done-

that realists. They are unmoved by the addict's narcissism, self-pity and grievance-collecting.

The format of the intervention capping the addict's documented downward spiral is invariable: The addict is

seated in the midst of those whose lives he or she is ruining. Up to now they have been enabling the addict

out of helplessly protective love.

The intervention begins with family members reading their own texts, enumerating the enabling behaviours

they will no longer endorse (money, free accommodation, etc.), all ending with, "Will you accept this gift [of

90-day community rehabilitation therapy]?"

Usually the addict breaks down, as each of the addict's victims makes clear the devastating scope of

addiction's consequences on others, especially children. They accept the rehabilitation, with varying degrees

of gratitude or reluctance. Some succeed at it; some don't.

The dramatic televised difference between the addicts in the grip of their grotesque enslavement and their

mature acceptance of responsibility for their lives 60 days later is remarkable and inspiring.

In a nutshell: HR thinks shaming and blaming addicts is cruel and unfair. TL thinks shaming and blaming

addicts is the only way to open their eyes wide enough to their own selfishness and degradation to push

them into recovery. Read the "compassionate" Mate book, then see the "tough" Intervention, and then tell

me: Which would you choose for someone you love?

Source: http://www.yesmagazine.org/peace-justice/portugal-cut-drug-addiction-rates-in-half-by-

connecting-users-with-communities

It is now one hundred years since drugs were first banned—and all through this long

century of waging war on drugs, we have been told a story about addiction by our teachers

and by our governments. This story is so deeply ingrained in our minds that we take it for

granted: There are strong chemical hooks in these drugs, so if we stopped on day twenty-one,

our bodies would need the chemical. We would have a ferocious craving. We would be

addicted. That’s what addiction means.

This theory was first established, in part, through rat experiments—ones that were

injected into the American psyche in the 1980s, in a famous advertisement by the

Partnership for a Drug-Free America. You may remember it. The experiment is simple.

Put a rat in a cage, alone, with two water bottles. One is just water. The other is water

laced with heroin or cocaine. Almost every time you run this experiment, the rat will

become obsessed with the drugged water, and keep coming back for more and more,

until it kills itself.

The ad explains: “Only one drug is so addictive, 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.”

But in the 1970s, a professor of Psychology in Vancouver called Bruce Alexander

noticed something odd about this experiment. The rat is put in the cage all alone. It has

nothing to do but take the drugs. What would happen, he wondered, if we tried this

differently?

So Professor Alexander built Rat Park. It is a lush cage where the rats would have

colored balls and the best rat-food and tunnels to scamper down and plenty of friends:

everything a rat about town could want. What, Alexander wanted to know, will happen

then?

In Rat Park, all the rats obviously tried both water bottles, because they didn’t know

what was in them. But what happened next was startling.

This article is adapted from Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Day of the War on Drugs by Johann Hari, 2015.

The rats with good lives didn’t like the drugged water. They mostly shunned it,

consuming less than a quarter of the drugs the isolated rats used. None of them died.

While all the rats who were alone and unhappy became heavy users, none of the rats

who had a happy environment did.

At first, I thought this was merely a quirk of rats, until I discovered that there was—

at the same time as the Rat Park experiment—a helpful human equivalent taking place.

It was called the Vietnam War. Time magazine reported using heroin was “as common

as chewing gum” among U.S. soldiers, and there is solid evidence to back this up: some

20 percent of U.S. soldiers had become addicted to heroin there, according to a study

published in the Archives of General Psychiatry.

Many people were understandably terrified; they believed a huge number of addicts

were about to head home when the war ended.

But in fact some 95 percent of the addicted soldiers—according to the same study—

simply stopped. Very few had rehab. They shifted from a terrifying cage back to a

pleasant one, so didn’t want the drug any more.

Professor Alexander argues this discovery is a profound challenge both to the right-

wing view that addiction is a moral failing caused by too much hedonistic partying, and

the liberal view that addiction is a disease taking place in a chemically hijacked brain. In

fact, he argues, addiction is an adaptation. It’s not you. It’s your cage.

RATS IN THE PARK

If you fall into that state of addiction, is your brain hijacked, so you can’t recover?

After the first phase of Rat Park, Professor Alexander then took this test further. He

reran the early experiments, where the rats were left alone, and became compulsive users

of the drug. He let them use for 57 days—if anything can hook you, it’s that.

Then he took them out of isolation, and placed them in Rat Park. He wanted to know,

if you fall into that state of addiction, is your brain hijacked, so you can’t recover? Do

the drugs take you over? What happened is—again—striking. The rats seemed to have a

few twitches of withdrawal, but they soon stopped their heavy use, and went back to

having a normal life. The good cage saved them.

When I first learned about this, I was puzzled. How can this be? This new theory is

such a radical assault on what we have been told that it felt like it could not be true. But

the more scientists I interviewed, and the more I looked at their studies, the more I

discovered things that don’t seem to make sense—unless you take account of this new

approach.

Here’s one example of an experiment that is happening all around you, and may well

happen to you one day. If you get run over today and you break your hip, you will

probably be given diamorphine, the medical name for heroin. In the hospital around you,

there will be plenty of people also given heroin for long periods, for pain relief.

The heroin you will get from the doctor will have a much higher purity and potency

than the heroin being used by street-addicts, who have to buy from criminals who

adulterate it. So if the old theory of addiction is right—it’s the drugs that cause it; they

make your body need them—then it’s obvious what should happen. Loads of people

should leave the hospital and try to score smack on the streets to meet their habit.

The street-addict is l ike the rats in the first cage, isolated, alone, with only one

source of solace to turn to.

But here’s the strange thing: It virtually never happens. As the Canadian doctor

Gabor Mate was the first to explain to me, medical users just stop, despite months of

use. The same drug, used for the same length of time, turns street-users into desperate

addicts and leaves medical patients unaffected.

If you still believe, as I used to, that chemical hooks are what cause addiction, then

this makes no sense.

But if you believe Bruce Alexander’s theory, the picture falls into place. The street-

addict is like the rats in the first cage, isolated, alone, with only one source of solace to

turn to. The medical patient is like the rats in the second cage. She is going home to a

life where she is surrounded by the people she loves. The drug is the same, but the

environment is different.

THE OPPOSITE OF ADDICTION IS CONNECTION

This gives us an insight that goes much deeper than the need to understand addicts.

A heroin addict has bonded with heroin because she couldn’t bond as fully with

anything else.

Professor Peter Cohen argues that human beings have a deep need to bond and form

connections. It’s how we get our satisfaction. If we can’t connect with each other, we

will connect with anything we can find—the whirr of a roulette wheel or the prick of a

syringe. He says we should stop talking about ‘addiction’ altogether, and instead call it

‘bonding.’ A heroin addict has bonded with heroin because she couldn’t bond as fully

with anything else.

So the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. It is human connection.

When I learned all this, I found it slowly persuading me, but I still couldn’t shake off

a nagging doubt. Are these scientists saying chemical hooks make no difference? It was

explained to me—you can become addicted to gambling, and nobody thinks you inject a

pack of cards into your veins. You can have all the addiction, and none of the chemical

hooks. I went to a Gamblers’ Anonymous meeting in Las Vegas (with the permission of

everyone present, who knew I was there to observe) and they were as plainly addicted as

the cocaine and heroin addicts I have known in my life. Yet there are no chemical hooks

on a craps table.

But still, surely, I asked, there is some role for the chemicals? It turns out there is an

experiment which gives us the answer to this in quite precise terms, which I learned

about in Richard DeGrandpre’s book The Cult of Pharmacology.

Everyone agrees cigarette smoking is one of the most addictive processes around.

The chemical hooks in tobacco come from a drug inside it called nicotine. So when

nicotine patches were developed in the early 1990s, there was a huge surge of

optimism—cigarette smokers could get all of their chemical hooks, without the other

filthy (and deadly) effects of cigarette smoking. They would be freed.

Ironically, the war on drugs actually increases all those larger drivers of addiction.

But the Office of the Surgeon General has found that just 17.7 percent of cigarette

smokers are able to stop using nicotine patches. That’s not nothing. If the chemicals

drive 17.7 percent of addiction, as this shows, that’s still millions of lives ruined

globally. But what it reveals again is that the story we have been taught about chemical

hooks is, in fact, real, only a minor part of a much bigger picture.

This has huge implications for the 100-year-old war on drugs.

This massive war—which kills people from the malls of Mexico to the streets of

Liverpool—is based on the claim that we need to physically eradicate a whole array of

chemicals because they hijack people’s brains and cause addiction. But if drugs aren’t

the driver of addiction—if, in fact, it is disconnection that drives addiction—then this

makes no sense.

Ironically, the war on drugs actually increases all those larger drivers of addiction.

For example, I went to a prison in Arizona—Tent City—where inmates are detained in

tiny stone isolation cages (‘The Hole’) for weeks and weeks on end to punish them for

drug use. It is as close to a human recreation of the cages that guaranteed deadly

addiction in rats as I can imagine. And when those prisoners get out, they will be

unemployable because of their criminal record, guaranteeing they with be cut off ever

more.

HOW PORTUGAL HALVED DRUG ADDICTION LEVELS

There is an alternative. You can build a system that is designed to help drug addicts

to reconnect with the world—and so leave behind their addictions.

This isn’t theoretical. It is happening. I have seen it. Nearly 15 years ago, Portugal

had one of the worst drug problems in Europe, with one percent of the population

addicted to heroin. They had tried a drug war, and the problem just kept getting worse.

So they decided to do something radically different. They resolved to decriminalize

all drugs, and transfer all the money they used to spend on arresting and jailing drug

addicts, and spend it instead on reconnecting them—to their own feelings, and to the

wider society.

Decriminalization has been such a manifest success that very few people in

Portugal want to go back to the old system.

The most crucial step is to get them secure housing, and subsidized jobs so they have

a purpose in life, and something to get out of bed for. I watched as they are helped, in

warm and welcoming clinics, to learn how to reconnect with their feelings, after years of

trauma and stunning them into silence with drugs.

One group of addicts were given a loan to set up a removals firm. Suddenly, they

were a group, all bonded to each other, and to the society, and responsible for each

other’s care.

The results of all this are now in. An independent study by the British Journal of

Criminology found that since total decriminalization, addiction has fallen, and injecting

drug use is down by 50 percent. I’ll repeat that: injecting drug use is down by 50

percent.

Decriminalization has been such a manifest success that very few people in Portugal

want to go back to the old system. The main campaigner against the decriminalization

back in 2000 was Joao Figueira, the country’s top drug cop. He offered all the dire

warnings that we would expect: more crime, more addicts. But when we sat together in

Lisbon, he told me that everything he predicted had not come to pass—and he now

hopes the whole world will follow Portugal’s example.

We need now to talk about social recovery —how we all recover, together ...

HAPPINESS IN "THE AGE OF LONELINESS"

This isn’t only relevant to addicts. It is relevant to all of us, because it forces us to

think differently about ourselves. Human beings are bonding animals. We need to

connect and love. The wisest sentence of the twentieth century was E.M. Forster’s: “only

connect.” But we have created an environment and a culture that cut us off from

connection, or offer only the parody of it offered by the Internet. The rise of addiction is

a symptom of a deeper sickness in the way we live–constantly directing our gaze

towards the next shiny object we should buy, rather than the human beings all around us.

The writer George Monbiot has called this “the age of loneliness.” We have created

human societies where it is easier for people to become cut off from all human

connections than ever before. Bruce Alexander, the creator of Rat Park, told me that for

too long, we have talked exclusively about individual recovery from addiction. We need

now to talk about social recovery—how we all recover, together, from the sickness of

isolation that is sinking on us like a thick fog.

But this new evidence isn’t just a challenge to us politically. It doesn’t just force us

to change our minds. It forces us to change our hearts.

Loving an addict is really hard. When I looked at the addicts I love, it was always

tempting to follow the tough love advice doled out by reality shows like Intervention—

tell the addict to shape up, or cut them off. Their message is that an addict who won’t

stop should be shunned. It’s the logic of the drug war, imported into our private lives.

But in fact, I learned, that will only deepen their addiction—and you may lose them

altogether. I came home determined to tie the addicts in my life closer to me than ever—

to let them know I love them unconditionally, whether they stop, or whether they can’t.

And honestly, it’s hard to see how the locals are wrong. While the strategy of harm reduction can indeed save the lives of addicts in the short term, it can destroy communities if used in isolation.

These unhappy results can be seen a province away. Vancouver is into its second decade of dealing with an injected-drug crisis. The city has been concentrating more and more services in its Downtown Eastside. The result? Everything seems to be getting worse.

Homelessness numbers continue to rise. There were 2,138 homeless individuals in Vancouver in 2017 — compared to only 1,364 in 2005. Theft and violent crime in the Downtown Eastside have gone up since 2002. And as an overdose crisis sweeps Canada, Vancouver is its undisputed epicentre. Even with teams of naloxone-armed paramedics addressing a nightly rush of overdosed drug users, more than 100 people have died of

overdoses in 2017— with most of these occurring within the narrow borders of the Downtown Eastside.

And yet, all across the continent planners can be heard talking up Vancouver’s success on the addiction file.

Last week, Edmonton city hall voted 10-1 in favour of building not just one “safe consumption” sites for drugs, but four of them — all within walking distance of one another in one of the city’s lowest-income urban districts.

The decision was made despite the fact that more than 80 per cent of Edmonton’s fentanyl-related overdoses are occurring in the suburbs — well beyond the reach of the new facilities. The move also ignores fervent pleas from locals, who claim that approving four drug consumption sites will be a death sentence for death sentence for their already chaotic and drug-ridden neighbourhood.

They’re usually pointing to the success of Insite, which was established in 2003 as North America’s first safe injection site.

In his bestselling book Chasing the Scream, British author Johann Hari said Vancouver gave him a “sense of hope” for the future of drug policy. Seattle is now planning to open the first safe-injection site in the United States, with proponents citing the “beyond amazing” example of Insite.”

Or there’s the oft-cited example of Philip Owen, Vancouver’s former conservative-minded mayor who became one of Insite’s most fervent supporters. “You’re not encouraging people to use drugs by opening a supervised injection site. You’re assisting people who need help,” Owen told Postmedia in 2016.

And Insite’s supporters are right; safe-injection sites are good at what they do. But they really only do one thing: prevent people from dying.

It does not seem to reduce crime. There is slim evidence to show that it reduces overall addiction rates. And it certainly doesn’t lead to livable neighbourhoods filled with healthy people.

“After they opened Insite, it was like a warm hug from God … I mean people used to die here from overdose almost every day,” one Downtown Eastside drug user told the authors of a 2012 study.

Safe injection sites are designed to do away with the most nightmarish aspects of injection drug use: Addicts sharing needles, using puddle water for injections, getting robbed after a fix and dying of overdoses. A frequently cited 2011 paper in The Lancet that studied Insite’s success found a 35 per cent decrease in the fatal overdose rate in the several blocks immediately surrounding the facility. And a 2009 review by Simon Fraser University criminologist Martin A. Andresen estimated that Insite saves three lives per year.

But this is only one part of Vancouver’s drug story.

For one, the drugs consumed at Insite are “pre-obtained,” which is to say that they are still purchased by users on the black market. With about 700 injections occurring on site per day, it follows that there is still a vibrant market for drug suppliers — the very ones now cutting their product with lethal doses of fentanyl.

Mark van Manen

Insite’s own website says that “supervised injection facilities can help people quit drugs” — but the data proving as much is slim. The two major studies that Insite references cover a limited time period, and only document an increase in admissions to detoxification. To date, there is no definitive, long-term data showing that Vancouver’s injection drug users are successfully getting clean and kicking drugs because of safe injection.

Meanwhile, a 2006 British Medical Journal study looked at the years before and after Insite’s opening and found “no substantial decrease in the rate of stopping injected drug use.” While Insite will provide referrals to drug treatment, they also aim to be “low barrier.” Site staff do not want to alienate patients by counselling or pressuring them to seek treatment.

A 2012 thesis, in which Simon Fraser University student Jennifer Vishloff interviewed Insite nurses, mentions staff having to clench their teeth when encountering fresh-faced drug-users who were still entranced with the excitement of the Downtown Eastside.

“Even though I want to tell them to ‘run out of there! It’s important that I give them a really good experience so that they come back and when they have their crisis … they come to us,” said one nurse. Another described assisting a drunk reveler with their first-ever hit of heroin. “I didn’t feel comfortable signing them up because they definitely weren’t entrenched,” she said. “Yet at the same time they were intoxicated which increases their overdose risk.”

Even for those who get into treatment, it is notoriously difficult to get clean on the Downtown Eastside. Anyone leaving detox steps back into a neighbourhood where are their friends are users, all their neighbours are users, and where the whole machinery of the community seems to be geared towards injection drug use. “Nobody can go through recovery here, for the most part, it’s just not possible,” Kate Gibson, executive director of WISH, a drop-in centre for survival sex workers, told the National Post in 2014.

Ben Nelms for National Post

Vancouver’s error was to see Insite’s success, and to then allow the surrounding neighbourhood to be increasingly shaped by the philosophy of harm reduction. For example, there’s the whimsically decorated crack-pipe vending machine. The city also dropped the Hastings Street speed limit to 30 km/h, to protect addicts who are unable to demarcate the road from a sidewalk.

There’s also a city hall-funded “street market” that — despite organizers’ fervent claims to the contrary — is well-known by locals to be a brazen hotspot for stolen goods. There are now more than 170 non-profits clustered in an area of only a few blocks, all devoted towards supporting an increasingly dense community of addicts. In a 2015 interview, longtime Downtown Eastside organizer Scott Clark referred to the growth of “a pipeline for vulnerable populations” that has become a “magnet over the years.”

“These service providers, and the government managers that keep funding these agencies, they refuse to look at the evidence that says putting these many vulnerable people in one building, in one community, is simply not healthy for anyone,” said Clark, executive director of the Aboriginal Live in Vancouver Enhancement Society.

The people who want to prevent more Downtown Eastsides all say the same thing: Do not try to address a drug problem by concentrating all your services on skid row. “You can’t just focus on harm reduction, you also have to focus on prevention, education and enforcement,” said Tom Stamatkis, the president of the Vancouver Police Union, in 2016.

Carmine Marinelli/Vancouver 24hours/QMI Agency

Philip Owen would say much the same. The former mayor is still fervently pro-Insite — and attends drug policy conferences around the world to say as much — but he is deeply troubled by the neighbourhood that has developed around it. “You just keep dumping money in, building social housing and filling it up with people from all around the region and the country … they all get chemically dependent, and it’s just more sales for the drug dealers,” he told the

National Post in 2014.

Health Canada is currently reviewing 10 additional applications for Canadian injection sites, including three from Toronto, two from Surrey, B.C., one from Victoria, one from Ottawa and one for a mobile site in Montreal.

Neighbourhoods like the Downtown Eastside don’t happen by accident. Every community across Canada has addiction problems, but it’s only through years of poor planning that an out-of-control disaster like Vancouver’s starts to develop.

It is a noble and moral thing to prevent addicts from dying of overdoses in alleys and dingy apartments, and none of the problems cited above are reasons to not build a safe injection site. But it is perverse to look at the Downtown Eastside and claim that it is in any way a holistic success. It is palliative care on a mass scale; a system that can keep hearts from stopping, but little else.

Before cities throw in their lot with the “Vancouver model,” it’s important to understand the very strict limitations of what has been accomplished there — and to vociferously avoid all that has been done wrong.

Doubt overwhelmed me: "Is this only encouraging further drug use? Am I giving my son

permission to shoot heroin?" I'd recently abandoned the tough love approach, but I wasn't sure

this was better. As noon gave way to dusk and the phone still hadn't rung, I was petrified—as I

had been so often in the past—that my son may have died, and that my enabling was to blame.

The Ironic Gateway

As a child, my son was rambunctious and full of energy, although, at times, shy. Focusing in

class was a struggle, yet he excelled in sports—little league baseball, soccer and hockey. His

greatest love was his guitar. He spent hours embracing the smooth cedar of that Ibanez, learning

new tunes which he played with an earthy, mellow ease all his own. I can only imagine the pain

and conflict he must have felt when he pawned even that love to buy heroin.

An experiment with marijuana at age 16 obliged him to a court-ordered 12-step program for

teens. In a tragic twist to the gateway theory of addiction, it was at one of those meetings that he

discovered heroin. As other teens were in the church library chanting "keep coming back—it

works if you work it," my son was down the hall in the restroom learning how to shoot up.

"I was petrified that my son may have

died, and that my enabling was to blame."

The last moment of peace I would know ended abruptly on a bright spring day in 2008 with a

call from the police informing me that my son had been apprehended with a needle. He was well

into the throes of heroin addiction and whatever warning signs there may have been, even with

my background as a nurse, I had missed them all. I was on guard for many things as a parent,

but in middle-class suburbia, the need to search for potential signs of heroin use had never

crossed my mind.

The opioid epidemic had yet to become front-page news, so I wrestled alone with my son's

shameful secret. Terror and misplaced guilt became constant companions, yet the thought of

reaching out for support only induced an acute sense of isolation. What would people think

of me? That I hadn't taught my son better than to use drugs? That I must be a failure as a

mother? Consequently, I rarely spoke of my son's struggles outside of Al-Anon meetings (a

program for the loved ones of those who struggle with addiction) or the walls of a therapist's

office.

A Tough Descent

When the first two or three attempts at rehab only resulted in escalating heroin use, I became

esperate for solutions. How could I get through to my son? Rehab counselors urged me to

"detach with love," explaining that his only hope for recovery was to "hit bottom." Desperate and

exhausted, I complied. Interactions with my son became wrought with an excruciating internal

debate—providing a bus pass, shoes or a cell phone triggered the inquiries of "Is this enabling?

Am I helping or harming my son?"

At the conclusion of another failed attempt at rehab in 2009, a trusted counselor relayed a

message that she had undoubtedly expressed to many parents before me—the best thing I could

do for my son was to immediately, as of that day, not allow him back into my home.

The notions of tough love and enabling—ubiquitous in American culture—are tossed about

casually by self-help gurus, armchair psychologists and well-meaning friends. Yet the tough love

concept became a terrifying and cumbersome tool, akin to bringing a chainsaw to a duel, when I

was confronted with the idea that even providing my son with housing might contribute to his

demise. I desperately wanted him to survive. By any means necessary, I needed him to find

hope.

"I was confronted with the idea that

even providing my son with housing

might contribute to his demise."

I choked back every maternal instinct that screamed at me to protect my son as I left him and

his suitcase sitting on the side of a county highway next to that rehab, like so much discarded

debris. In order to allow him any hope of recovery, any chance to survive, I felt forced to

abandon him.

I was naive in hoping that a few weeks on the streets would snap him to his senses. Instead, for

the next six harrowing years he only became increasingly isolated and entrenched in his

addiction. He repeatedly suffered near-fatal overdoses in dark stairwells and public restrooms as

he cycled between rehabs, jail and the streets.

Counselors and peers continued to encourage me to combat enabling by diligently questioning

my own behavior to determine if I was loving my child or loving my child to death. A single

glimpse of my son's emaciated frame made it shockingly clear that, in practicing tough love, I

was doing the latter.

As the world abandoned him, my son came to believe that he'd been given a death sentence, and

had hopelessly resigned himself to it. Flirting with death became a daily routine; yet even death

held no bottom.

A Frantic Search

It was early in the spring of 2013 and I hadn't heard from my son in weeks. Calls to ERs, jails

and morgues had been fruitless. I was panicked at the thought that I'd soon get a call telling me

that he had been found, alone, in an anonymous dark corner, dead from an overdose. Pacing at

home became unbearable, so, instead, I paced the hectic streets of downtown Denver with a

photo of him in hand, looking for help.

A boy, all of 16, wild hair skirting the torn collar of his well-worn t-shirt, recognized my son, but

had not seen him in weeks. He knew my worry well. He shared stories of loved ones he had lost

to overdose and his concern for a friend who was still missing. Overdose was a looming fear on

the street, just as it was in my home.

The gritty wear and tear of lives lived on concrete may have been all that defined these faceless

junkies to the casual passerby. However, the young souls I met that day yearned to be seen as

caring, worthwhile human beings. Undoubtedly, their capacity for compassion far outweighed

any they might receive.

They offered advice on where to look for my son. They asked if he carried naloxone. They told

me I could find it at the syringe exchange and that perhaps the staff there had seen him.

Injecting Grace

Every reality I had come to accept about addiction was brought into question as I walked into

that needle exchange and glimpsed the raw truth of my son's struggle. What initially caught my

eye and incensed me wasn't the line of people, young and old, well groomed and disheveled, who

waited to exchange used syringes for sterile ones. Even the bins filled with works—all the

supplies needed to prepare and inject drugs—while foreign and shocking to me, didn't evoke my

anger. Instead, I found myself livid over a piece of literature. A thin booklet, it described how to

shoot up, how to safely access a vein and where to find the cleanest water to prepare one's drugs

for injection if sterile water is inaccessible:

If a toilet is the only source of water, always draw from the tank, never the bowl. And at any

cost, avoid scooping water from ditches and creek beds.

On the one hand, I was appalled. "They're teaching my son to shoot up!" On the other hand, I

was even further horrified thinking, "People are so desperately trapped in addiction they're

willing to shoot up sludge from a creek bed?"

It was a pivotal moment. These were the bottoms I had left my son to pursue. If the daily

potential of death had no power to deter him, the thought of shooting up sludge from a ditch

wouldn't either.

"He knows that he's valuable to

me even if he continues to use."

Would it not make more sense than tough love, not to mention be more humane, to offer my son

tools and options to keep him alive and safe until effective help could be found?

I lifted my eyes from the page and I saw suffering human beings, at their lowest, who had been

written off by society and even their own families. They had just this tiny 600-square-foot sliver

of space in the entire world where they knew they'd be treated with dignity and respect in exactly

the condition they presented themselves. There was no judgment here—only grace.

The syringe exchange staff not only met their participants right where they were, connecting

them with an array of services all aimed at reducing harm and protecting health, they also met

me exactly where I was, embracing me in all of my distress, anger and confusion. They provided

me with tools, like naloxone, and advice on ways to restore my relationship with my son, even as

he continued to use. Although I wouldn't find him for several days yet, what I found that day, in

that cramped space of grace, was hope.

Enabling Hope

In the spring of 2015, my son was released from a yearlong jail sentence for having failed drug

court. He returned home to what I hoped would be a fresh start for us both. My visit to the

needle exchange left an indelible impact on me, and I experienced a paradigm shift away from

the tough love ideology. While my son was incarcerated I visited homeless outreach centers,

trained in overdose prevention and poured over harm-reduction literature. I found support for

taking a harm-reduction approach on Facebook from advocacy groups such as Moms United to

End the War on Drugs, United We CAN (Change Addiction Now), Broken No More and Families

for Sensible Drug Policy.

So when my son was determined to find heroin after being released from jail last year, although

I was shocked and just as fearful for him as I had been in the past, I was prepared with better

tools. I had learned that it wasn't feasible to mandate that the only two options for his struggle

be either immediate abstinence and rehab or abandonment to the streets. I could no longer

unwittingly take it upon myself to determine for my son how his readiness would be defined.

"The message I sent by giving him

naloxone and instructing him on how to

prevent an overdose wasn't permission to

get high, but to stay safe and alive."

The message I sent by giving him naloxone and instructing him on how to prevent an overdose

wasn't permission to get high, but to stay safe and alive and to know that he was a valuable

human being—whether or not he continued to use drugs.

That pragmatic discussion, as difficult as it was, pulled him out of shame and stigma instead of

pushing him further into it. He was back home in hours, rather than showing up weeks later

disheveled, sick and 30-pounds underweight, as had routinely been the case before.

Handing my son naloxone didn't prevent him from shooting heroin that night, nor did it result

in an overdose reversal, but its effect was powerful nonetheless. He began to trust that I was no

longer judging, but trying to understand and show him support. He talked with me more openly

about his experiences than he ever had in the past.

Within a week he asked for help, sincerely—and on his own terms. He chose to pursue

medication-assisted treatment, which has saved his life.

Finding Joy

I occasionally visit my son at the busy local diner where he now works as a server. I watch him

scramble to deliver club sandwiches and refill drinks on his way to a hard-earned lunch break. I

marvel at how healthy he now appears, with clear skin and eyes bright with life, and a blend of

surreal joy and gratitude inhabit my smile when I think that just a month ago he celebrated a

year free from heroin.

It has been a challenging year for him, spent learning basic life skills and shedding almost a

decade of street-life habits. But today he is no longer the target of disdainful sneers from

strangers and he finds happiness in things heroin once stole. Simple pleasures, such as playing

guitar or enjoying a meal, make him happy once again.

My tendency to compulsively wait for the other shoe to drop is gradually giving way to the

anticipation of daily life and plans for the future as our painful, tough-love past becomes a

distant memory.

*Ellen Sousares is a pseudonym to protect the privacy of the author's son.

source: http://www.womansday.com/health-fitness/wellness/a55379/help-for-parents-of-

drug-addicts/

Case 2: Addiction

As you read, start thinking ahead about how you might craft your own critical intervention for your essay. If you write on this topic, how might you use the pieces you are reading as a “They Say” in your essay? How would you summarize them? How would you respond?

Keep in mind everything we covered so far in class, such as: recognizing rhetorical strategies; using signal phrases to agree or disagree with sources; recognizing logical fallacies; and noticing how writers craft their arguments. Choose two pieces to focus on.

1. How is the argument structured:

-Find and describe a few rhetorical strategies you think are effective

-Notice where the writer uses signal phrases to indicate whether they agree or disagree

-What other ideas is each piece responding to (what/who is the ‘They Say’)? Are the summaries fair? Is the 'they say' implied or stated explicitly?

(For example: In case 1 Warren Buffett implied his ‘They Say’ when he wrote: “to those who argue that” and “according to a theory I sometimes hear” because he referred to an idea without saying ‘who.’ On the other hand, Charlie Smith in The Georgia Straight, pointed to a ‘They Say’ explicitly by naming ‘who’: “The Fraser Institute will complain”.)

2. What is the main argument of each piece (the ‘I Say’)? Write a one-sentence summary for each of your two favourites.

3. Who is the intended audience for each piece, and how did these writers craft their piece to reach or speak to that intended audience? (look at levels of diction, organization, rhetorical strategies, logic, and keep in mind who is the usual readership of the source.)

4. Can you catch any logical fallacies or logical problems with any of the pieces in the case? See if you can find places where the logic may not make sense, even if it appears convincing at first.

5. ‘Put in your oar.’ What do you think about the subject? If you were going to write your own “I Say” in response, what would you argue and how would you articulate your ideas as a response to the pieces? (Remember: you can do more than simply agree or disagree! We will talk about this more for the next Case, but for now, keep in mind that you can agree and disagree, or you can take another angle by shifting the focus of the debate, questioning assumptions in the texts, or pointing out logical fallacies, to make your own point instead).