Ray Charles — acclaimed as one of the twentieth century’s foundational musicians — died this week. Some of the retrospective news items, on TV and on the web, noted his 20-year battle with heroin addiction. Many people were unaware of this, and were surprised that such a hard core addiction was part of the life of a man who appeared to be so humane, humorous, and self-aware.
But musicians not addicted to heroin were the exception in the age of Ray Charles’ ascension. Almost all the emergent jazz and blues musicians of the fifties — Miles Davis (and most of his band), Bill Evans, Thelonius Monk — were addicted to heroin at one time or another. Evans, perhaps the greatest pianist of the twentieth century, died of heroin and cocaine addiction. Charles managed to catch it earlier, after his arrest at the Boston airport.
Heroin addiction is tough to crack (though not as tough as nicotine addiction). It’s a stubborn, insidious habit. Addicts routinely die from it. Which is one reason why Switzerland offers heroin users their daily dose at a medical clinic. Read all about it here.
Such programs reduce the harm to addicts by minimizing the need for criminal activity to support the habit. But the addiction remains, and free use has the obvious drawback of promoting further dependency. There’s not much incentive to get off smack when you get it free, every day, at a clinic where people treat you well.
This type of approach may be coming to Vancouver. The methadone clients at the clinics where I provide counselling supervision are abuzz with excitement. Many of them want to replace methadone, which gives a more transient and generally unrewarding hit, with the real stuff. And for free!
As a society, we’ve almost give up, haven’t we, in trying to treat people who are seriously addicted. We don’t know what else to do, and somehow it seems easier just to give in. Give them the juice, keep them out of sight.
This surrender, of the society at large, is a kind of inhumanity. It harms us. It permits us to believe that there are people who cannot be helped, who are beyond the bounds of healing. We leave them behind, and move on.
Is this what we want?
“This surrender, of the society at large, is a kind of inhumanity. It harms us. It permits us to believe that there are people who cannot be helped, who are beyond the bounds of healing.”
It could be that we are merely saying, “It’s your body, do with it as you want. It is not our business to interfere in your body.” Your entire analysis of this issue seems to separate “substance abuse” from the critically injured sociiety in which we live. Instead of trying to fix the results of this injury, it is surely better to try to stop the cause of the injury in the first place; to stop the rejection of whole classes of people from “civil society”; to stop playing the hypocrite about the war on SOME drugs.
The heroin addict did not bring the crime to our streets. The politicians and do-gooders who made heroin illegal created the crime themselves. They need to change the situation back so that criminality is lifted as a danger from our streets, and media-generated self-loathing is lifted from the backs of these troubled folks.
Is this what we want? Such an important question to reflect upon.
I just got off the phone with a client. He had not used for three years. I’ve known him for over a decade and can attest to how much of a struggle the past few years have been. Two lines took him down. Yet, after those two he made the choice to stop. He stopped, he called and he cried and he made a choice. Perhaps in doing so answering the question, “Is this what I want?” That’s not what he would have done five years ago.
Would he have made the choice to stop if it was free and accessable and …. endorsed?
I don’t know. I’ve had the harm reduction debate over and over. Every class I teach includes a session on harm reduction. I tape a line on the floor. One end is abstinence, the other regular using. And then I ask the questions. Where do you need to be, on this line, to have a life? Where do you need to be to stay alive? Where can you be, on this line, what is possible right now? What may be possible in a month from now, a year? Such a personal thing.
Every class ends pretty much the same way. An understanding that there is no perfect, one place fits all, point on the line. That the point changes, person to person and sometimes moment to moment.
It scares me that we, as a society, are even considering enabling this kind of option. Perhaps because it lessens the possibility of asking the really important questions. Yet at the same time I am truly happy that we are exploring options.
The nature of success seems to be linked to the struggle. A supported struggle, I believe, increases the chances of success, in any endeavour.
What would happen if every time, as a child, you tried to reach out and grab something, and someone just handed it to you? What would happen if every time you reached for something it was placed beyond your reach? Would you just eventually stop reaching?