Bruce Alexander believes that addiction to drugs and alcohol, and to a wide variety of other activities is increasing because people:
‘… are being torn from the close ties to family, culture, and traditional spirituality that constituted the normal fabric of life in pre-modern times. This kind of global society subjects people to unrelenting pressures towards individualism and competition, dislocating them from social life.
People adapt to this dislocation by concocting the best substitutes that they can for a sustaining social, cultural and spiritual wholeness, and addiction provides this substitute for more and more of us.’
In his fascinating article Healing Addiction Through Community: A Much Longer Road Than It Seems?, Alexander uses the term dislocation as Karl Polanyi (1944) originally used it to describe the individual, psychological devastation that is rooted in unrelenting societal fragmentation. The former describes it is ‘the experience of a void that can be described on many levels.’ Disconnection is an equivalent term for dislocation.
On a social level it is the absence of enduring and sustaining connections between individuals and their families, communities, groups, traditions, and natural environments. In existential terms, it is the absence of essential feelings of belonging, identity, meaning, and purpose. In spiritual terms, it can be called a poverty of the spirit or lack of spiritual strength. Dislocation is much more than loneliness.
Alexander goes on to look at various approaches that society has utilised to tackle the problems of dislocation and addiction, which include: punishing drug users; the medical approach; harm reduction approach; the Recovery Movement (something he calls ‘Small Scale Social Change’), and restructure modern society to reduce fragmentation, dislocation, and addiction (Large Scale Social Change).
He then points out that: ‘once addiction is understood historically, it becomes clear that the best hope at this moment in history lies in much greater emphasis on the seventh approach, Large Scale Social Change.” In the same article, Alexander relates the following:
‘The clearest call for large scale social change that I know is contained in a legend first told to me by a native grandmother who was also a drug counsellor for the people on her reserve. The legend is that drug counsellors of her tribe in northern Canada sit by the side of a raging northern mountain river and watch.
When they see somebody being swept away in the raging white foam of addiction they jump in to rescue them. They know how to swim through the rapids to the drowning swimmer because their elders have told them where the rocks are hidden. Using all their strength, they eventually reach the addicted person and drag him or her through the torrent to the shore and with their last ounce of strength heave them up on the bank.
Sometimes it is too late and the effort is wasted. The addicted person slips off the riverbank and is lost again in the foam. But sometimes he or she stands up and walks from the river into the forest, re-joining the people, returning to the land.
When someone is saved, the storyteller told me, counsellors swell with pride. They feel that they are warriors! They would feel that they are making a great contribution to their people except…
… Except, she said, that some son-of-a-bitch upstream is throwing more and more people into the water all the time! The counsellors eventually realize that they are not winning but losing, for all their heroic efforts, but they persist anyway.
I believe that we who care about addiction and the environment must continue the heroic rescue work, but I also believe that the even more essential task is getting rid of “the-son of-a-bitch upstream,” i.e., the vicious cycle that is described by the global, historical view of addiction.
When we get around to facing the son of a bitch upstream, we will also need to face the fact that we don’t know exactly what to do about him yet, despite the genuine sophistication that we have achieved in understanding and treating addiction on an individual level.’