So here we are on a new week, how are you? I hope your vigorous
I wanna claim that I'm hunky-dory, but in fact, I'm not really, far from it. The mental health lapse I spoke of last week is still going on and rendering me intensely low and lethargic at the moment, its also leading to thoughts of drinking again and self harming. I hate it, most days at the moment I don’t even have the desire or energy to get out of bed! It makes no sense to me, life is quite good at the moment, I have a great family, great friends, I'm 33 weeks sober, Im doing loads of great things with my recovery journey and doing well at college, so whats the problem? if i knew I would solve it but I simply don't know why I'm so low! I have been up to Recovery this morning to arrange to go on medication to control cravings for alcohol. I also started (well aimed to start) a structured course but dropped out half way through the session because i felt clammy and a panic attack coming on. Ever since then I have felt like a failure and teary, I feel weak and worthless and i just wish i knew how to get out of this. I feel like a constant failure and like I have nothing to offer and that my life is meaningless, right now i feel like i either wanna break down and cry and lock myself away forever, or like i wanna drink till i go to sleep and not wake up. I long for an answer, a cure but it just ain’t coming.
Im trying to plan some positive things to keep myself busy, some of these are only very early ideas but the list looks like this
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Film and edit up the film project (already in very advance stages)
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‘beAt’, starting on the business plan, registering at companies house, securing premises and putting together a launch event
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Writing a book, Im thinking about maybe trying to convert this blog and research I'm doing into some kind of book, at the moment this feels like a very far fetched idea to me to be honest
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Doing more radio show recordings
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Lining up my fundraising events for 2016, including so far a skydive and walking round the Isle of Wight
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Planning to go to Spain and see my Grandad for a break/holiday
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Find some local nature spots which i can go for walks at and maybe start a walking group
Without dwelling though lets move onto todays blog post purpose. I wanna talk about Addactions 5th national recovery conference which I will be attending in Manchester in November. I will be attending it and I'm very excited, one highlight I have picked out that I'm looking forward to is a speaker by the name of Johann Hari. Johann Eduard Hari (born 21 January 1979) is a British writer and journalist who wrote columns for The Independent (London) and The Huffington Post and made contributions to other publications. In 2011, he was suspended from The Independent after charges of plagiarism. He was also accused of making improper edits to several of his critics' Wikipedia pages under a pseudonym. The news led to his returning his 2008 Orwell Prize and later was a contributing factor in his leaving The Independent. In 2015, he released his second book, Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs.
It is the later book ‘chasing the scream’ which inspires me and he has done several TED talks about addiction based on his worldwide research, he is a very inspirational speaker. To highlight two of the things he researched;
1 - Bruce K Alexanders ‘Rat Park’ Experiment. Rat Park was a study into drug addiction conducted in the late 1970s (and published in 1980) by Canadian psychologist Bruce K. Alexander and his colleagues at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada. Alexander's hypothesis was that drugs do not cause addiction, and that the apparent addiction to opiate drugs commonly observed in laboratory rats exposed to it is attributable to their living conditions, and not to any addictive property of the drug itself. He told the Canadian Senate in 2001 that prior experiments in which laboratory rats were kept isolated in cramped metal cages, tethered to a self-injection apparatus, show only that "severely distressed animals, like severely distressed people, will relieve their distress pharmacologically if they can."
To test his hypothesis, Alexander built Rat Park, an 8.8 m2 (95 sq ft) housing colony, 200 times the floor area of a standard laboratory cage. There were 16–20 rats of both sexes in residence, an abundance of food, balls and wheels for play, and enough space for mating and raising litters. The results of the experiment appeared to support his hypothesis. Rats who had been forced to consume morphine hydrochloride for 57 consecutive days were brought to Rat Park and given a choice between plain tap water and water laced with morphine. For the most part, they chose the plain water. "Nothing that we tried," Alexander wrote, "... produced anything that looked like addiction in rats that were housed in a reasonably normal environment." Control groups of rats isolated in small cages consumed much more morphine in this and several subsequent experiments.
It is my view that we are not addicted to the substance we take or the behaviour we choose but that we are addicted to the alteration of mood that it brings, the dopamine release. Also the Rat Park experiment proves that it is as much to do with environment as much as anything else.
2 - Portugal end of the war on drugs. Drug warriors often contend that drug use would skyrocket if we were to legalise or decriminalise drugs in the United States. Fortunately, we have a real-world example of the actual effects of ending the violent, expensive War on Drugs and replacing it with a system of treatment for problem users and addicts.
Ten years ago, Portugal decriminalised all drugs. One decade after this unprecedented experiment, drug abuse is down by half:
Health experts in Portugal said Friday that Portugal’s decision 10 years ago to decriminalise drug use and treat addicts rather than punishing them is an experiment that has worked.
“There is no doubt that the phenomenon of addiction is in decline in Portugal,” said Joao Goulao, President of the Institute of Drugs and Drugs Addiction, a press conference to mark the 10th anniversary of the law.
The number of addicts considered “problematic” — those who repeatedly use “hard” drugs and intravenous users — had fallen by half since the early 1990s, when the figure was estimated at around 100,000 people, Goulao said.
Other factors had also played their part however, Goulao, a medical doctor added.
“This development can not only be attributed to decriminalisation but to a confluence of treatment and risk reduction policies.” Many of these innovative treatment procedures would not have emerged if addicts had continued to be arrested and locked up rather than treated by medical experts and psychologists. Currently 40,000 people in Portugal are being treated for drug abuse. This is a far cheaper, far more humane way to tackle the problem. Rather than locking up 100,000 criminals, the Portuguese are working to cure 40,000 patients and fine-tuning a whole new canon of drug treatment knowledge at the same time.
Johann Hari quotation : In 2000 Portugal had one of the worst drug problems in Europe. One percent of the population was addicted to heroin, which is kind of extraordinary. Every year they tried the American way more and more: They arrested and imprisoned more people, and every year the problem got worse. One day the prime minister and the leader of the opposition got together and in effect said, “We can’t go on like this. We can’t have more and more people becoming heroin addicts. Let’s figure out what would genuinely solve the problem.” They convened a panel of scientists and doctors and said to them (again I’m paraphrasing), “Go away and figure out what would solve this problem, and we will agree in advance to do whatever you recommend.” They just took it out of politics. It was very smart. It was as if Obama and Boehner agreed in advance to abide by whatever the panel on drug reform said. It’s hard to imagine Obama and Boehner agreeing on the time of day, but grant that thought for a moment. The panel went away for a year and a half and came back and said: “Decriminalise everything from cannabis to crack. But”—and this is the crucial next stage—“take all the money we used to spend on arresting and harassing and imprisoning drug users, and spend it on reconnecting them with society and turning their lives around.” Some of it was what we think of as treatment in America and Britain—they do do residential rehab, and they do therapy—but actually most of it wasn’t that. Most of it, the most successful part, was really very simple. It was making sure that every addict in Portugal had something to get out of bed for in the morning. It consisted of subsidised jobs and microloans to set up small businesses. Say you used to be a mechanic. When you’re ready, they’ll go to a garage and they’ll say, “If you employ Sam for a year, we’ll pay half his wages.” The microloans had extremely low interest rates, and many businesses were set up by addicts. It’s been 15 years since this experiment began, and the results are in. Drug use by injection is down by 50%, broader addiction is down, overdose is massively down, and HIV transmission among addicts is massively down. Compare that with the results in the United States over the past few years. In Portugal I interviewed a guy named Joao Figueira, who was the leader of the opposition to decriminalisation at the time—the country’s top drug cop. He said a lot of the things a lot of people reading this will totally reasonably be thinking. Surely if you decriminalise all drugs, you’ll have all sorts of disasters? Figueira told me that everything he had predicted would happen didn’t happen—and everything the other side predicted came to pass. And he talked about how ashamed he felt that he’d spent 20 years arresting and harassing drug users, and he hoped the whole world would follow Portugal’s example. One thing that is most striking to me: Everywhere I went that had moved beyond the drug war, it was hard to find people who wanted to go back. It was like Prohibition when it was over and people saw the alternatives in practice. It’s very similar to what you see in the polling on marijuana legalisation. I’m sure your readers know that Colorado and Washington both have legalised marijuana, by 53%. The polling in Colorado and Washington after they had seen it in practice showed much higher margins supporting legalisation. Once people see these things in practice, they discover that it’s not the kind of scary anarchy they had imagined. Switzerland, a very conservative country, legalised heroin for addicts, meaning you go to the doctor, the doctor assigns you to a clinic, you go to that clinic every day, and you inject your heroin. You can’t take it out with you. I went to that clinic—it looks like a fancy Manhattan hairdresser’s, and the addicts go out after injecting their heroin to their jobs and their lives. I stress again—Switzerland is a very right-wing country, and after its citizens had seen this in practice, they voted by 70% in two referenda to keep heroin legal for addicts, because they could see that it works. They saw that crime massively fell, property crime massively fell, muggings and street prostitution declined enormously. I think one of the really important things, particularly in winning the debate in America, is to look at what arguments won in these places and what arguments didn’t. We found that in the places that successfully decriminalised or legalised, liberty-based arguments for ending the drug war were very unpopular. I’m philosophically sympathetic to the argument that it’s your body and you’ve got a right to do what you want with it. But it turns out that’s a politically toxic argument—people really don’t like it, and it only works with people who already agree. The arguments that work well in persuading the people we still want to reach are order-based arguments. I think the Swiss heroin referenda are good models for that. Basically, what they said was drug war means chaos. It means unknown criminals selling unknown chemicals to unknown users, all in the dark, in our public places, filled with disease and chaos. Legalisation is a way of imposing regulation and order on this anarchy. It’s about taking it away from criminal gangs and giving it to doctors and pharmacists, and making sure it happens in nice clean clinics, and we get our nice parks back, and we reduce crime. That’s the argument that will win. And it’s not like it’s a rhetorical trick—it’s true. That is what happens.
This for me personally proves that giving drugs criminal status and chasing, harassing and locking up drug users and dealers is a waste of money and resources that should be re-invested into rehabilitating addicts and helping them to rebuild there lives and becoming valuable members of society rather then outcasts and criminals.
So yeah Im definitely looking forward to Johann’s talk. Im sure it will be one of many highlights from what promises to be an incredible event.
That just about wraps up todays blog post, take care and I will write more soon.
