Pubdate: Sat, 05 Feb 2005
Source: Scotsman (UK)
Copyright: The Scotsman Publications Ltd 2005
Contact:  http://www.scotsman.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/406
Author: Joyce McMillan

DROP THE LOVE BOMB TO FIGHT WAR ON ADDICTION

'Addicted to the 21st century" shrieked the front-page headline of one
of last Sunday's colour supplements; it was advertising a clever
story, inside, about people who claimed to be totally addicted to a
range of treats and vices that barely existed a decade ago. Addicted
to botox injections, internet porn, chat-room dating, cosmetic
surgery, Viagra; the story spread across page after page, without even
mentioning the more traditional forms of addiction - to alcohol,
cigarettes, gambling, illegal drugs, and hour after hour of junk
television - that are also still alive and flourishing in our
21st-century world.

Once economies have reached a certain pitch of affluence, it seems the
only way for them to go on growing is to keep encouraging ever more
bizarre forms of addictive behaviour, both legal and illegal.

And one of the nastier secrets of our affluent society seems to be
that it's possible to carry quite serious forms of addiction, over
long periods, without sustaining much visible damage; always
providing, that is, that we have the resources to finance them.

This week in London, for example, the incoming Home Secretary, Charles
Clarke, announced a new zero tolerance approach to the Britain's
growing "dinner-party drugs" culture; that is, mainly, to the regular
consumption of industrial quantities of cocaine by a whole generation
of bright and successful young urban professionals. Meanwhile in
Scotland, a research team from Glasgow Caledonian University was
roundly abused by a wide range of commentators for pointing out the
uncomfortable truth that many heroin addicts also hold down
middle-class jobs, and maintain an outwardly successful lifestyle.

The First Minister, Jack McConnell, likewise attracted his share of
criticism for telling some schoolchildren, in an unguarded moment,
that it's "OK to get drunk once in a while". On one hand, he was only
recycling the common wisdom of our times; most people in Britain today
get drunk "once in a while", and think nothing of it. But on the other
hand, he was aligning himself with the grand hypocrisy of our age;
that it's somehow OK to go out and deliberately seek oblivion on a
mind-altering drug, provided that it's legal, and delivers revenue to
the Treasury.

But here's the tragedy; that if middle-class individuals and
communities can often cushion themselves from the worst consequences
of their addictive behaviour, more vulnerable communities completely
lack those defences.

This week, amid a shameful flurry of political evasion, prevarication,
and party point-scoring, figures emerged which showed that one in 20
children in Scotland is apparently "born to fail"; that is, doomed to
grow up in families and communities which can offer them neither
security nor hope for the future, and likely, long before they reach
their teens, to find themselves in the hands of the criminal justice
system.

The number of persistent young offenders is rising; and according to
Douglas Bulloch, chair of the Children's Reporters Administration, one
of the main reasons for that increase is the advancing drug culture,
which, he says, is "like an ice age moving through some of our
communities".

Addiction to booze and cigarettes has always been a problem, of
course, in communities where incomes are low, and family relationships
under constant strain. But addiction to illegal drugs adds a whole new
dimension of fear, desperation and systematic criminal violence to an
already bleak situation; and tales emerge of children growing up amid
a culture of chaotic emotional instability and abuse, where parents
are barely able to care for them even when they are around, and where,
come adolescence, boys in particular can often see no opportunities
beyond those offered by increasingly serious crime.

Anger against these "feral" kids runs high, of course; hence the
Executive's tough talking on youth crime, its anti-social behaviour
orders, it harsh language about "neds" on the streets.

But if we can take a step back from our instinctive rage at the latest
act of vandalism or burglary, we can surely see three things very clearly.

First, that these kids are a very small minority of an age-group in
which most members are well-behaved, hard-working, and almost
worryingly anxious to comply with the demands society makes of them.
Secondly, that however angry and punitive we may feel about youth
crime, much of it is clearly linked to the anger, hopelessness and
alienation of kids who, by any measure, have had a lousy start in
life; no statistic to emerge in Scottish politics, in recent years,
has been more revealing than the one which tells us that more than a
quarter of Scotland's prison population comes from just 53 of our
1,222 council wards, all of them among the poorest in Britain.

And third, that these young people in trouble are the ultimate victims
of a society that takes addiction and its consequences too lightly.

Yes, we throw up our hands in horror at the addictive behaviour of the
poor and vulnerable; we ban them from smoking in pubs, mock the cheap
forms of booze on which they get drunk, and demonise the illegal drug
- - heroin - that does most damage in their communities. But so long as
the great mainstream British public turns such a blind eye to its own
addictions, sniggering endlessly over tales of drunken nights out
enlivened by the odd dose of ecstasy or cocaine, our collective
outrage at the drug culture of the poor - and at its horrible
consequences for their children - will have about as much credibility
as a lecture on chastity delivered by a high-class tart.

Which leaves us, so it seems, with just two options, if we want to
develop a credible policy for dealing with the plight of those
communities. On one hand, we could simply resolve to abandon the "war
on drugs" altogether, at least until we are prepared to fight it
even-handedly on all fronts; and concentrate instead on love-bombing
the children of, say, the poorest 100 wards in Scotland with fabulous
quantities of state-sponsored care, protection, education and
opportunity, from the moment of their birth.

In all likelihood, we will have to do this anyway, if we ever want to
break the cycle of deprivation, alienation and criminality that costs
our society so dearly; and at least the concentration of the problem
in a few dozen clearly defined areas should make a massive injection
of tender loving care for young children living there easier to organise.

ON THE other hand, it seems unlikely that the problems of addiction in
our society will go away, even if we devise more effective ways of
protecting the most vulnerable of our children from them. The cost of
alcohol-related illness and crime in Britain is already astronomical,
and rising; and unless we, as consumers, become far wiser and more
savvy about avoiding the latest addiction, we can expect these and
similar costs to go on rising indefinitely.

We live in a world, after all, that increasingly denies us
transcendence, the escape from the self that comes through spiritual
faith, or belief in the value of our work, or old-fashioned romance,
or the kind of commitment to a cause so powerfully invoked by Nelson
Mandela when he spoke in Trafalgar Square this week. And until or
unless we begin to rediscover some of those possibilities, we are
almost bound to seek escape instead in the glass that cheers, or the
little line of white dust that gives the illusion of brilliance; and
rich or poor, we will tend to damn the consequences, seizing our
chance to live, however briefly, in that magical but illusory moment
when tomorrow seems far away, and well able to take care of itself.
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