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. - --- MAP posted-by: Larry Seguin