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You were disagreed with. That's what happens in discussions. You were not silenced or censored. Free speech means you get to say what you want, and I get to say I disagree, and you get to say you disagree with my disagreement. All OK.

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. It seems obvious. It seems manifestly true. Until I set off three and a half years ago on a 30,000-mile journey for my new book, Chasing The Scream: The First And Last Days of the War on Drugs, to figure out what is really driving the drug war, I believed it too. But what I learned on the road is that almost everything we have been told about addiction is wrong -- and there is a very different story waiting for us, if only we are ready to hear it. If we truly absorb this new story, we will have to change a lot more than the drug war. We will have to change ourselves. I learned it from an extraordinary mixture of people I met on my travels. From the surviving friends of Billie Holiday, who helped me to learn how the founder of the war on drugs stalked and helped to kill her. From a Jewish doctor who was smuggled out of the Budapest ghetto as a baby, only to unlock the secrets of addiction as a grown man. From a transsexual crack dealer in Brooklyn who was conceived when his mother, a crack-addict, was raped by his father, an NYPD officer. From a man who was kept at the bottom of a well for two years by a torturing dictatorship, only to emerge to be elected President of Uruguay and to begin the last days of the war on drugs. I had a quite personal reason to set out for these answers. One of my earliest memories as a kid is trying to wake up one of my relatives, and not being able to. Ever since then, I have been turning over the essential mystery of addiction in my mind -- what causes some people to become fixated on a drug or a behavior until they can't stop? How do we help those people to come back to us? As I got older, another of my close relatives developed a cocaine addiction, and I fell into a relationship with a heroin addict. I guess addiction felt like home to me. If you had asked me what causes drug addiction at the start, I would have looked at you as if you were an idiot, and said: "Drugs. Duh." It's not difficult to grasp. I thought I had seen it in my own life. We can all explain it. Imagine if you and I and the next twenty people to pass us on the street take a really potent drug for twenty days. 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. One of the ways this theory was first established is through rat experiments -- ones that were injected into the American psyche in the 1980s, in a famous advert 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 advert 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. 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. 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 fifty-seven 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. (The full references to all the studies I am discussing are in the book.) 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. 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 addiction is caused by chemical hooks, 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. This gives us an insight that goes much deeper than the need to understand addicts. 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. (The CHURCH! Added by GayatfootofCross) 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. 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 The Cause of Addiction lying with chemical hooks is, in fact, real, but only a minor part of a much bigger picture. This has huge implications for the one-hundred-year-old war on drugs. This massive war -- which, as I saw, 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 even more. I watched this playing out in the human stories I met across the world. 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 fifteen years ago, Portugal had one of the worst drug problems in Europe, with 1 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. 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 example I learned about was a group of addicts who 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 from the Daily Mail or Fox News. 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. This isn't only relevant to the addicts I love. 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. When I returned from my long journey, I looked at my ex-boyfriend, in withdrawal, trembling on my spare bed, and I thought about him differently. For a century now, we have been singing war songs about addicts. It occurred to me as I wiped his brow, we should have been singing love songs to them all along. The full story of Johann Hari's journey -- told through the stories of the people he met -- can be read in Chasing The Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, published by Bloomsbury. The book has been praised by everyone from Elton John to Glenn Greenwald to Naomi Klein. You can buy it at all good bookstores and read more at www.chasingthescream.com. Johann Hari will be talking about his book at 7pm at Politics and Prose in Washington DC on the 29th of January, at lunchtime at the 92nd Street Y in New York City on the 30th January, and in the evening at Red Emma's in Baltimore on the 4th February. The full references and sources for all the information cited in this article can be found in the book's extensive end-notes. If you would like more updates on the book and this issue, you can like the Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/chasingthescream ................... If we, The Church, can be truly safely connected and transparent Like JESUS modeled and call us to be We can't help but grow and heal together! If I be lifted up I will draw all

Just reading this..... I'm very sad. We always had a friendly banter back and forth. Yes he was provocative and that's what made him so much fun. I had the blessing spending a few hours with him a couple of years ago when we came to DC. It was great meeting the man behind the posts. Seeing Neil is another reason to look forward to being in the earth made new.

Hi scubby! I love your name! I don''t know if the articles I posted are from non addicts or addicts. I have a beautiful long history in 12 step groups.I am an addict. You sound like you have come a long ways and I have a long beautiful history with Ex SDA's as well. So glad you are here and want to hear more!

I don't know if you ever been a part of a 12 step group where people feel safe enough to let their hair down and get brutally honest with themselves and their group. Lotta good families out there yes. But you hear people's insides. And it doesn't always match with what is on the outside (great family life etc).. I believe many don't choose their addictions.(though they can be swapped) I heard it described one way... A lady in her Over Eaters Meeting said" at a party all the children run up to the dessert table grabbed something and ran off. Why did I stay there or close by during the entire celebration? I didn't plan to hang around the tables of food as a very small child and not play with the others..It was like it chose me!" We are all so complex. What jazzed me about this thread is the longing of the human heart to be loved and accepted and cherished. I remember when i first fell in love. At the time i ate like a pig and smoked like a train and drank like a fish. But in that basking in someones presence and love was our fill. I forgot about eating or drinking or smoking.(briefly) I believe our Church can be like that for each other. Basking in God's love together and for each other. I have caught glimpses. Thank you for your good points!

alas alas i found a video that says everything in a nutshell God knows what HE is doing! praises!

Going by this OP ...A Real Body of Christ would let gay couples in. It changes all lives! God bless you all!

This is really sad! I hate to say it, but I was afraid of this day. We know that eventually we all die, but when its this close, it really hits home. I know I've never met him personally, but the way he interacted with us, here on the forum and on FB, it felt like you did know him personally. He will definitely be missed. I'm actually writing this post with tears in my eyes. Yes this is really sad!!

I did not like how I first worded this. I am aware of the arguments you are bringing up from the looking at these words. But in our schools we have been given additional information how Elder Andresen dealt with this visit. I did get my date wrong, I knew it was fairly early in the 20th century. I also read in the White Estate vault some of the documents also relating to this time.

My thought has always been that deep down, the Donald is a Democrat!! The reason he's running as a Republican, is because he probably thought he couldn't become the front runner as a demo, but as a repub, he figured he could beat all the candidates!! Just my opinion and thought!

And how about the Koch brothers?????? Who are they financing????? If Soros is behind the demo's, than lets not forget that the Koch brothers have double the money, if not more that Soros and probably behind Republicans! What's the difference??

“Fear knocked at the door. Faith answered. And lo, no one was there.” - Anonymous

And here we have an example as to how communication can break down. Homosexuality is defined by some as what one does. From the standpoint of this definition, homosexuality is a choice and one is thought to be able to chose what they do. Others, to include me, define it in a manner that is beyond what one does. We define it as a gender preference that is beyond choice. It should be noted that I have worked with celibate people who defined themselves as homosexual/gay/queer, etc. This issue is similar to that of alcoholism. I have a close relative who is an alcoholic and tells people that she is an alcoholic. Yet, she has not had a drink that contained alcohol for over twenty years. Her alcoholism is not defined by what she does but by her nature and that relation to alcoholic drinks.

The above statement is the root of much of the issues with some, perhaps many people. They simply do not understand the what being Gay mean, or choose not to accept what science currently has to say about it. A Leopard does not change its spots, once a Leopard always a Leopard. When someone's DNA has been discombobulated it stays that way. All the praying in the world will not change it. Gay does not mean sexualy active. Being straight does not mean sexualy active. Maybe we need some biology 101 for peoples!!

Always interesting to hear the non-addicted theorize and try to help. God bless you, really. As a recovering addict and a recovering Adventist I am grateful for the reminder of why I let go of my aching need for approval and acceptance from my parents and church family and the wonderful Christian teachers I had while being "raised Adventist".

Texas Wounded Warrior to Open Veteran-Run Restaurant BY LORIE LIEBIG7 HOURS Facebook/robert.henline A San Antonio-based Army veteran is raising funds to open a new restaurant that will be completely staffed by veterans. Former U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Bobby Henline’s life changed forever in 2007, when his patrol’s vehicle hit a roadside bomb while on patrol in Iraq. Five of his comrades died from the explosion, while Henline was left severely injured. “In the first year I didn’t know what I was going to do. I had survivor’s guilt,” Purple Heart recipient Henline told KENS5. I didn’t know what to do. I felt useless. I thought, ‘Why am I here?’ Then I learned through sharing my story that I can help others (and) look at life in another perspective.” The San Antonio native was inspired by a friend who had opened a restaurant in California called Biggie’s Burgers and Great Shakes. “He’s a Korean [War] vet who owns it and he just wants to give back,” Henline said. “He’s had it for 25 years and he wants to train other veterans to have their own restaurant.” Now, Henline plans to follow in his friend’s footsteps by opening a restaurant fully-run by fellow veterans. “My plan is to hire a veteran to be my manager,” Henline explained. “We want to hire veterans to work for us, too. I hate asking for money. I don’t feel like anyone owes us veterans anything. We chose to do this. We chose to go and serve.” Henline hopes to raise $300,000 by May to help make his dream a reality. “If people want to help out, it’s a great way to help out,” he says. “You’re going to help that veteran continue their life. It’s the reason why I finally reached out to ask for more funding.” Those interested in helping Henline’s cause can donate to his GoFundMe account.

I disagree. It's all in the way a POV is presented. On the Bernie Sanders' intern wage: my opinion is that this is a political ploy. Interns for political candidates have historically been unpaid. They considered the experience and resumé "stuffing" to be the "payment." Now, Bernie Sanders needs voters. And he's getting many from the lower to middle class (which is now less affluent than years past). In order for students from the lower and middle classes to become interns, they need money, as their families are probably unable to help them. So.... Bernie is paying. For interns. And (dare I say it?)... for votes. I think it's a very clever maneuver. (just my opinion....which means nothing in the grand scheme of American politics!)

When will you ever understand that condemning a sin is not condemning the sinner? Huge difference.... Being a sinner is not sinning. Doing sin is sinning. I've made this distinction time and time again and yet you ignore that and claim that by condemning the sin I am condemning the sinner. You're far more judgmental than those you accuse of being judgmental.

You're still missing the point. The world looks at someone who says they are gay as a practicing homosexual, and you know that. Thus, to identify yourself as a gay Christian is to cast doubt upon your own claims of not practicing your specific major sin. It has the very real world effect of telling the world that God sees practicing homosexuals as moral and good. That plus you play the game of "everyone who disagrees with homosexuality is a bigot", rather than acknowledging that many Christians can condemn the sin and not the sinner. You practice wholesale condemnation of the church on that basis. You've done it repeatedly here. Hey, I used drugs for decades. I ran around with murderers, theives, con artists, etc.... I lived a life than was in no way moral or right. I dealt drugs. I have no problem with someone just because they are a sinner. No problem at all. I'm one, and most of the time I really identify with Paul when he said he was the chief of sinners, however, I no longer practice nor condone all those things I used to do. I do not glorify them by condemning anyone who condemns those sins. However, that does not lead me into the error excusing sin and sinful practices. Sin, of any kind, will keep us out of heaven, if we don't separate ourselves from it.

While you may believe this is directed at you it is not. It is general . While you claim some of us miss the point,and that may be,do you think it possible that you and those that condemn those "missing the point and being judgemental" may also be missing our objection and point? I have something in my life I consider a sin,any sin you want to name,something that in order to follow Christ I need to put behind me,claim I have repented and then spend a lot of time posting a change of mind by "notable christian leaders". All to enforce the idea that yes at one time it was felt to be a sin,but on further reflection we now believe it is no longer a sin. Furhter more those that still believe my behavior,past or not was a sin are really the sinners How authentic will my claim appear to others?

I didn't state any fact. I was surprised at the reference to George Soros financing snopes. Yes I did check and found as many references that indicate it is more than possible to flat our denials that he has anything to do with it. A denial by George Soros would not be anything I would take to the bank. Along with many reasons I don't put any faith in this man's sincerity is his desire to see redistribution of everyone else's money. If that is something that he sincerely believes in,let it begin with him. A little like the hypocritical beliefs of Bernie Sanders. Oh how he believes in a 15.00 minimum wage. Must be for everyone else as he pays his interns a paltry 10.50. I would not have the money of Soros if I believed in redistribution or a 15.00 minimum wage I would not wait for a law to force me to do that.

I think you miss my point. Do you call yourself a Witch Christian? If so I've never seen it. You call yourself an EX-witch Christian. You distance yourself from your past. You point out your separation from your past sin. For a person to say they are a Gay Christian is to identify themselves with the sin itself with no distance between them and the sin. There is a huge difference between pointing out one's past, and one's turning point, by identifying one's self as an EX-something and to identify one's self as a current something. The first glorifies God. The second glorifies the sin itself.

JOEB GODS BIBLE MESSAGE is to show people on this earth how much GOD cares about us(people) and how much GOD loves us(people) GOD wants every one to made a decision to trust HIM---love HIM---follow HIM GOD will not force any one to do these things dgrimm60

How was this rock formed? What's it made of? Where in Oregon did you find it? Just came back from reading Wikipedia... " A thunderegg (or thunder egg) is a nodule-like rock, similar to a filled geode, that is formed within rhyoliticvolcanic ash layers.[1] Thundereggs are rough spheres, most about the size of a baseball—though they can range from less than an inch to over a meter across. They usually contain centres of chalcedony which may have been fractured followed by deposition of agate,jasper or opal,[1] either uniquely or in combination. Also frequently encountered are quartz and gypsum crystals, as well as various other mineral growths and inclusions. Thundereggs usually look like ordinary rocks on the outside, but slicing them in half and polishing them may reveal intricate patterns and colours".

"Rather than to override the will of the electorate, superdelegates were created in some sense to enforce it [the will of the people] in elections whose results were skewed by odd delegate allocations or weak multi-way fields that would allow a fringe candidate to win a plurality. Both of these conditions prevailed in 1972.." If super delegates decide to ratify the popular will of Democratic primary voters and caucus goers, then super delegates are upholding both the rules of the DNC and the principle of democracy. On the other hand, voting of super delegates to thwart the popular will uphold the rules of the party, but not the values. Voting to ratify the popular will upholds both the rules and the values. [paraphrased] http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/2/15/457181/-

Nope. Nothing personal about it. I do apologize for my carelessness in using the second person - 'you'. I did not mean 'you, joeb', I meant 'you, Bernie Bros and Republicans who are complaining about the rules of the Democratic party from the outside'. Those people can't change the rules from the outside: if they want to effectively change the rules of the Democratic party they need to become members and vote for change. For what it's worth, I find the whole US system bizarre: if the superdelegates nullify the will of the people, how does the Electoral College not? Why not go straight to a direct vote of the nation for President? The reason why not? Because it would guarantee a permanent Democratic presidency, because the most populous areas in the country lean left. The Electoral College is a means of ensuring the representation of all the states, not just New York and California. Similarly, while I agree that the caucuses and primaries should be operated cleanly, there are internal party processes that have developed with similar intentions for representation. They are likely not perfect, but they are arguably more effective than a raw vote. Tell you what, joeb: if you apply exactly the same standards to both major parties, I am happy to agree with you that election processes are human processes, and therefore always flawed and able to be improved. It so happens that the Republican party has not so far had a state with a close race, so there has been less scrutiny, but I would be willing to bet that the kinds of small irregularities seen with the Democrats in Iowa were also seen with the Republicans. If I can finish with one thing, though, it's that I have absolutely no personal animosity toward any poster here. I try to respond to the text of the post - indeed, I seldom notice who posted the words, and that never influences how I respond. (side note: I was going to go with the Australian word 'whinging', which has a shade different meaning than 'whining', so it could be something was lost in translation - apologies if so.)

“Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind.” - Dr. Seuss

THE BLOG The Likely Cause of Addiction Has Been Discovered, and It Is Not What You Think 01/20/2015 02:20 pm ET | Updated Oct 19, 2015 Johann Hari Author of 'Chasing The Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs' 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. It seems obvious. It seems manifestly true. Until I set off three and a half years ago on a 30,000-mile journey for my new book, Chasing The Scream: The First And Last Days of the War on Drugs, to figure out what is really driving the drug war, I believed it too. But what I learned on the road is that almost everything we have been told about addiction is wrong -- and there is a very different story waiting for us, if only we are ready to hear it. If we truly absorb this new story, we will have to change a lot more than the drug war. We will have to change ourselves. I learned it from an extraordinary mixture of people I met on my travels. From the surviving friends of Billie Holiday, who helped me to learn how the founder of the war on drugs stalked and helped to kill her. From a Jewish doctor who was smuggled out of the Budapest ghetto as a baby, only to unlock the secrets of addiction as a grown man. From a transsexual crack dealer in Brooklyn who was conceived when his mother, a crack-addict, was raped by his father, an NYPD officer. From a man who was kept at the bottom of a well for two years by a torturing dictatorship, only to emerge to be elected President of Uruguay and to begin the last days of the war on drugs. I had a quite personal reason to set out for these answers. One of my earliest memories as a kid is trying to wake up one of my relatives, and not being able to. Ever since then, I have been turning over the essential mystery of addiction in my mind -- what causes some people to become fixated on a drug or a behavior until they can't stop? How do we help those people to come back to us? As I got older, another of my close relatives developed a cocaine addiction, and I fell into a relationship with a heroin addict. I guess addiction felt like home to me. If you had asked me what causes drug addiction at the start, I would have looked at you as if you were an idiot, and said: "Drugs. Duh." It's not difficult to grasp. I thought I had seen it in my own life. We can all explain it. Imagine if you and I and the next twenty people to pass us on the street take a really potent drug for twenty days. 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. One of the ways this theory was first established is through rat experiments -- ones that were injected into the American psyche in the 1980s, in a famous advert 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 advert 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. 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. 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 fifty-seven 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. (The full references to all the studies I am discussing are in the book.) 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. 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 addiction is caused by chemical hooks, 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. This gives us an insight that goes much deeper than the need to understand addicts. 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. 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 The Cause of Addiction lying with chemical hooks is, in fact, real, but only a minor part of a much bigger picture. This has huge implications for the one-hundred-year-old war on drugs. This massive war -- which, as I saw, 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 even more. I watched this playing out in the human stories I met across the world. 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 fifteen years ago, Portugal had one of the worst drug problems in Europe, with 1 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. 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 example I learned about was a group of addicts who 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 from the Daily Mail or Fox News. 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. This isn't only relevant to the addicts I love. 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. When I returned from my long journey, I looked at my ex-boyfriend, in withdrawal, trembling on my spare bed, and I thought about him differently. For a century now, we have been singing war songs about addicts. It occurred to me as I wiped his brow, we should have been singing love songs to them all along. The full story of Johann Hari's journey -- told through the stories of the people he met -- can be read in Chasing The Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, published by Bloomsbury. The book has been praised by everyone from Elton John to Glenn Greenwald to Naomi Klein. You can buy it at all good bookstores and read more at www.chasingthescream.com. Johann will be speaking on August 26th in Edinburgh, in early September in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne, and in mid-September in Mexico City. For details of these events go to www.chasingthescream.com. The full references and sources for all the information cited in this article can be found in the book's extensive end-notes. If you would like more updates on the book and this issue, you can like the Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/chasingthescream http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/the-real-cause-of-addicti_b_6506936.html

One of the greatest deceptions that the master deceiver can accomplish is to get the sheep to think that the other sheep are wolves in sheep's clothing and to take their eyes off the Shepherd who is quite able to discern who's who. Lest we forget how the Lord has led us in our past history. Who were the wolves in 1888? And who were the sheep? In Christ's Day, who were the wolves and who were the sheep? In Jeremiah's Day, the folks had difficulty distinguishing between the true prophet and the false. Should it be any different today when supposed differences arise? Discernment is of the Lord.

At what point do SDA's believe that Ellen "became" a prophet? ...Was she considered a prophet when she made the early statements you speak of? ...Was there a different "source" providing her 'information' as she became seasoned or something? It's a serious question.