““Leaving ecstasy in class A on the grounds that “there is no such thing as a safe dose” is public stupidity. On this basis there is no safe alcoholic drink or cigarette. There is no safe tree, no safe ladder and, according to Smith, no safe mobile phone. Do we ban trees, ladders and mobiles?” ”

-- Simon Jenkins - The Guardian

Contents

Transform News

• Welcome new Chief Executive
• New Annual Report
• Letter writing campaign - counting the costs
• Transform Scotland
• Welsh leaflet
• Volunteer community
• Funding

UK News

• ACMD ecstasy review
• Cannabis reclassified

International News

• Mexico Drug War
• Obama Lifts Federal ban on funding needle exchange
• El Paso City Council calls for legalisation
• South East Asia suffers withdrawal symptoms from decline in opium

Book Review

• 'The globalisation of addiction' by Bruce Alexander

Transform News

Welcome new Chief Executive

Transform are delighted to introduce our new Chief Executive, Caroline Pringle. Caroline has worked in the Voluntary Sector for over fifteen years, firstly as Chief Executive of the Kingswood Foundation (youth arts charity) and for the last ten years as a freelancer for various arts, youth, and regeneration organisations as well as Bristol City Council. Previously she worked in television setting up public access, cable channels in Bristol and London. She has a three-year-old daughter and is a singer-song writer.

New annual report

We have now completed and printed our annual report for 2008. The report can be downloaded here. If you would like us to post you a hard copy, please email info@tdpf.org.uk

Letter writing campaign – counting the costs

Our MP letter writing campaign calling on the Government to carry out a cost-benefit analysis of prohibition and compare it to alternatives including regulation and control, is gathering pace and we’ve received a large number of responses which range from the rational to the completely dismissive.

We are currently in the process of writing a response letter and will post it up on our website and Drupal (our volunteer community) as soon as it is complete. We are also trying to encourage as many people as possible to go to their MP’s surgery to discuss the responses further in person. We will be writing some briefing sheets and will be happy to chat through anything that you’d like to prior to an appointment.

If you’ve not yet sent a letter to your MP calling for a cost-benefit analysis, you can find out more and download the letter here. Please feel free to adapt the letter.

Transform Scotland

We are pleased to announce that following on from a meeting with two Transform supporters, Jolene Crawford and Katrina Thornton, Transform have established a franchise agreement in order for them to set up a newly registered charity called ‘Scottish Transform’. We hope that this agreement will be mutually beneficial, and that it will allow us to increase our sphere of influence and make a significant impact in Scotland. We will provide more details in our future newsletters about how you can get involved.

Welsh Leaflet

The Transform leaflet is now available in Welsh and can be downloaded here. If you know any groups or individuals who you think would be interested, can you please forward the leaflet to them. Alternatively please send their contact details to info@tdpf.org.uk and we will forward it.

Volunteer community

We now have over 200 members on our volunteer community, and we’re hoping to increase the number of projects and activities on the site over the next couple of months. We’d really appreciate any feedback from your experiences of using the website, requests of what you’d like to see or projects that you’d like to work on. If you’d like to join the volunteer community you can set up an account here .

Funding

We have recently received generous funding to help support our internship programme; it will pay for one of our three interns who is currently carrying out a scoping exercise into potential European partners and avenues of policy development at a European level. We are now looking for more funders who are interested in helping us to develop our internship programme. If you are interested in finding out more please email info@tdpf.org.uk

UK News

ACMD Ecstasy Review

“Leaving ecstasy in class A on the grounds that “there is no such thing as a safe dose” is public stupidity. On this basis there is no safe alcoholic drink or cigarette. There is no safe tree, no safe ladder and, according to Smith, no safe mobile phone. Do we ban trees, ladders and mobiles?”

Simon Jenkins, The Guardian

The ACMD’s (Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs) review of ecstasy has continued to dominate the UK media this month. As reported in the Guardian on 5th January it is expected that the ACMD will advise the government to lower ecstasy from Class A to Class B. It is likely however that the Home Secretary Jacqui Smith will ignore this advice and keep it in Class A. The whole situation feels like a déjà vu of the recent cannabis debacle (with the government ignoring the ACMD advice to keep cannabis at class C) and illustrates again how government policy on drugs, is based on populist posturing rather than scientific evidence. Simon Jenkins wrote an excellent article this month in which he heavily criticises the Government for this decision.

Further discussion of the story can be found on our blog here. Transform’s submission to the ACMD review can be read in full here.

Cannabis reclassified

Cannabis has now been upgraded from Class C drug to Class B since the 26 th January. The Home Office have announced that first time possession of cannabis will now result in a warning, followed by and an on-the-spot fine of £80, then prosecution in - an escalating three strikes and you're out style enforcement regime. More on the story can be read here, here, here, here, and here.

Steve wrote a brilliant satire on reclassifciation back in May entitled 'Millions quit cannabis following reclassification' which is well worth a read as it clearly illustrates the futility of this move.

International News

Mexico Drug War

Virtually every day for the past few months there seems to have been yet another story coming out of Mexico illustrating just how destructive the excalating Mexican drug war has become. Recent estimates suggest that some 7,000 people have been killed in drug related violence between the drug cartels and Mexican law enforcement officials over the past two years. Some of the most interesting articles on the story can be read below:

• Mexico’s Unsuccessful Drug War, Painfully Preserved and Hidden
• U.S. war on drugs has failed, report says
• Mexico's Violent Drug War Wreaks Havoc on Innocent Lives
• The War Next Door
• The £15bn drugs war that has cost 7,000 lives in 2 years
• A series of photos from Mexico's drug war

Obama Lifts Federal ban on funding Needle Exchange

With a new president now in control, The White House has launched its new website, www.whitehouse.gov. Under the header "The Agenda - Civil Rights", the site highlights various issues including; homophobia and its affect on HIV/AIDS, contraception (including in prisons), the need to empower women to to get involved in the prevention of of HIV, and notably: needle exchanges. Aside from a small mention for drug courts and eliminating the cocaine/crack sentencing disparity there isn't much else about drug policy yet, but lifting the disgraceful ban on the funding of needle exchanges is a good start - and the generally pragmatic tone bodes well too. Can we be cautiously optimistic? Yes we can.

"Promote AIDS Prevention: In the first year of his presidency, President Obama will develop and begin to implement a comprehensive national HIV/AIDS strategy that includes all federal agencies. The strategy will be designed to reduce HIV infections, increase access to care and reduce HIV-related health disparities. The President will support common sense approaches including age-appropriate sex education that includes information about contraception, combating infection within our prison population through education and contraception, and distributing contraceptives through our public health system. The President also supports lifting the federal ban on needle exchange, which could dramatically reduce rates of infection among drug users. President Obama has also been willing to confront the stigma -- too often tied to homophobia -- that continues to surround HIV/AIDS.

Empower Women to Prevent HIV/AIDS: In the United States, the percentage of women diagnosed with AIDS has quadrupled over the last 20 years. Today, women account for more than one quarter of all new HIV/AIDS diagnoses. President Obama introduced the Microbicide Development Act, which will accelerate the development of products that empower women in the battle against AIDS. Microbicides are a class of products currently under development that women apply topically to prevent transmission of HIV and other infections."

More on Obama’s views toward on drug war can be read here, and here.

El Paso City Council calls for legalisation

An interesting article appeared in Dallas News this month regarding Beto O’Rourke, an El Paso city councillor, who called upon the US government to start an open and rational debate on drug legalisation in response to the current drug war in Mexico. More on the story can be read here, here,and here. Beta O’Rourke can be seen discussing his views (and making an awful lot of sense) in a video post here:

http://www.elpasotimes.com/newupdated/ci_11386093

Unfortunately the Mayor of El Paso vetoed this proposal despite the resolution being unanimously agreed upon by the other councillors. The story illustrates how the politics of prohibition can inhibit rational debate even on a local level

See our blog here for more on the story.

South East Asia suffers withdrawal symptoms from decline in opium

The Transnational Institute have released their latest report ‘Withdrawal Symptoms in the Golden Triangle: A Drugs Market in Disarray.’ The report questions the successes claimed by drug control agencies regarding the decrease in opium production in South East Asia. It also illustrates how this decline has had serious adverse impacts on people living in these areas (more people living in poverty, more people engaged in higher-risk drug use etc). The report makes for an interesting read and can be accessed here.

Book Review

'The globalisation of addiction' by Bruce Alexander

review by Mike Jay

Bruce Alexander is best known - though deserves to be much better known - for the 'Rat Park' experiments he conducted in 1981. As an addiction psychologist, much of the data with which he worked was drawn from laboratory trials with rats and monkeys: the 'addictiveness' of drugs such as opiates and cocaine was established by observing how frequently caged animals would push levers to obtain doses. But Alexander's observations of addicts at the clinic where he worked in Vancouver suggested powerfully to him that the root cause of addiction was not so much the pharmacology of these particular drugs as the environmental stressors with which his addicts were trying to cope.

To test his hunch he designed Rat Park, an alternative laboratory environment constructed around the need of the subjects rather than the experimenters. A colony of rats, who are naturally gregarious, were allowed to roam together in a large vivarium enriched with wheels, balls and other playthings, on a deep bed of aromatic cedar shavings and with plenty of space for breeding and private interactions. Pleasant woodland vistas were even painted on the surrounding walls. In this situation, the rats' responses to drugs such as opiates were transformed. They no longer showed interest in pressing levers for rewards of morphine: even if forcibly addicted, they would suffer withdrawals rather than maintaining their dependence. Even a sugar solution could not tempt them to the morphine water (though they would choose this if naloxone was added to block the opiate effects). It seemed that the standard experiments were measuring not the addictiveness of opiates but the cruelty of the stresses inflicted on lab rats caged in solitary confinement, shaved, catheterised and with probes inserted into their median forebrain bundles.

Yet despite (or perhaps because of) their radical implications for the data that underpin addiction psychology, the Rat Park experiments attracted little attention. Alexander's paper was rejected by major journals including Science and Nature, and eventually published only in the respectable but minor Pharmacology, Biochemistry and Behavior. Although the experiments have subsequently been replicated and extended, they still inform the science of addiction only at its margins. The Globalisation of Addiction is Alexander's attempt to draw out their full implications for our understanding of addiction, and to chart a course towards forms of treatment that can transform their findings into practice.

His analysis begins with a radical reconception of addiction itself. Throughout the 20th century, as the science and treatment of addiction have developed into vast academic and professional industries, its underlying nature has stubbornly refused to coalesce into any sort of consensus. Is it a physiological condition marked by metabolic responses such as tolerance and withdrawal, a condition produced simply by exposure to 'addictive' drugs? Or is it a psychological affliction, the product of an 'addictive personality' - or, alternatively, a moral weakness, a failure of willpower and abrogation of social responsibilities? And how do these clinical views of addiction relate to the ever-expanding meanings of the term in the wider culture?

For Alexander, all these seemingly disparate accounts are united by their focus on the individual addict; but even a cursory historical and cultural survey reveals that the incidence of addiction is essentially a social phenomenon. Many historical and indigenous cultures have lacked even the concept of addiction - but many of these same cultures, once their traditional structures have been disrupted by conquest or colonisation, have been destroyed by it. All across the Americas, the Pacific and Australia, hundreds of 'demoralised' cultures have descended into vicious spirals of addiction, usually to alcohol, in many tragic cases wiping themselves out entirely. The root causes of addiction, then, must run deeper than any individual pathology: they must be sought in a larger story of cultural malaise and 'poverty of the spirit' that forces individuals, often en masse, into desperate and dysfunctional coping strategies.

Once addiction is recognised as a consequence of broader social currents, it becomes clear that the problem is far more widespread than the professional focus on drugs allows. Uncontrolled and chaotic appetites are extensively diagnosed across our culture not merely for illicit drugs, alcohol and nicotine but for other substances (food), other consumer activities (shopping, gambling), and other sources of emotional support such as romantic love. 'Addictive' is a slogan of enticement used to sell online gaming, exercise programmes and women's magazines. Even successful and high-functioning individuals can often be accurately described as addicted to money, power or status. Throughout the 20th century, these extensions of the concept of addiction were typically marginalised on the grounds that, unlike illicit drugs, these were mainstream activities that generated dysfunctional behaviour only in a minority of subjects. But alcohol has always been both mainstream and addictive, and it is increasingly clear that illicit drugs are used widely without necessarily generating addiction. Any attempt to get to the root of the problem must recognise that addiction is rampant not merely among a subculture of problem drug users but across society at large.

Alexander's search for the drivers behind the modern explosion in addiction leads him to consider the parallel spread of free market societies. Along with their obvious economic benefits, free markets also bring a widespread increase in what he terms cultural 'dislocation'. What were once elaborately reciprocated cultural transactions are reduced to simple commercial exchanges, and 'the competitive marketplace becomes the matrix of human existence'. Social fabrics are loosened as economic winners and losers polarise into their respective ghettoes, and traditional networks of trust are replaced by often brutal demarcations between neighbourhoods and social classes. It is our now endemic culture of competitive, zero-sum individualism that has, in the phrase of Alexander's title, globalised addiction over the last 50 years.

It is, he acknowledges, too simplistic to blame capitalism itself: the fundamental problem, dislocation, can equally be generated by feudalism , communism or any other political system. Nevertheless, a consumer society systemically erodes the sovereign remedy against addiction which, following Erik Erikson, Alexander terms 'psychosocial integration'. This has long been recognised as a necessity for social functioning: even Charles Darwin, whose theory is typically used to support competitive free market ideology, insisted that generating 'social and moral qualities' was a crucial factor in human evolutionary success. Psychosocial integration eliminates the hyperfocused pursuit of individual gratification that manifests as addictive behaviour, and balances individual autonomy with social belonging. Dislocation, though its effects are concentrated among the poor and socially excluded, has pervasive effects on society as a whole, which is why levels of happiness and wellbeing stubbornly refuse to rise in proportion with purchasing power. The greatest modern triumph over drug addiction, in China during Mao's Great Leap Forward from 1949-1955, took place against a background of material poverty but intense social cooperation in rebuilding a shattered society.

This analysis has helped Alexander to understand the successes and failures of treatment programmes in his professional world in Vancouver, where alcoholism and violence remain an intractable problem among many native Canadian Indians. Dislocation, rather than poverty, is their ultimate cause: communities resettled on unfamiliar land can be subsidised to the point where a 4x4 sits in every drive and a satellite dish on every roof, but still manifest higher levels of addiction than those which are allowed to remain in their homelands and follow their traditional subsistence strategies. In the arresting motto adopted by British Columbia's successful aboriginal community projects, 'Culture is Treatment'.

Once addiction is reconceived as a symptom of the dislocation embedded in modern cultures, the practical measures required to manage it become vast in scope. Treatment of addicts needs to become more holistic, and interwoven into a far wider spectrum of social programmes. Education and treatment need to lose their narrow focus on illicit drugs and alcohol, and to encompass addiction in all its forms. Although the prohibition of drugs is a major contributor to social dislocation, legalisation is far from a panacea: the majority of addictions, after all, are to legally available products. (The greatest benefit of legalisation, perhaps, would be to allow communities to determine their own drug policies, thereby providing a crucial lever for increasing psychosocial integration.) Faith-based treatments, whether Christian or more broadly spiritual, have an important role to play: St. Augustine's Confessions remains a powerful template for the addiction recovery narrative, and membership of faith groups can provide an effective antidote to dislocation. Political activism, both global and local, is a tool of social empowerment that can benefit addicts and addiction professionals alike.

All these strategies are eminently sensible, but remain hard to patch into the treatment of addiction as currently constituted. We may accept Alexander's persuasive case that drug addiction, properly understood, is a scapegoat for broader social dysfunction, but it is by no means obvious how to respond effectively. Like it or not, treatment remains focused on individuals, for whom his analysis holds limited explanatory power. Alexander does not deny the existence of personal tendencies to addiction, which may include genetics and neurochemistry, but maintains that they are often marginal factors and poor predictors of individual risk: overall, interventions are more effective at the social level than the personal. But these underlying causes are far easier to identify than to address. Our societies are profoundly structured around the need for individual autonomy; and personal freedom must, on some levels, always include the freedom to become addicted.

The Globalisation of Addiction is a considerable work, highly ambitious in its scope, impressive in its multidisciplinary scholarship, clear in its structure and generous in its references. It is both its strength and its weakness that it integrates addiction so convincingly into broader issues of social and political reform. Like Rat Park, it offers a fundamental critique of the 20th century view of addiction, but also demonstrates how dominant are the processes and structures that drive it.

Published with permission from Mike Jay. Mike is a writer and historian (See Mikejay.net ) and a trustee of Transform Drug Policy Foundation.