Pubdate: Wed, 12 Feb 2014
Source: Chattanooga Times Free Press (TN)
Copyright: 2014 Chattanooga Publishing Company, Inc.
Contact:  http://www.timesfreepress.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/992
Note: Paper does not publish LTE's outside its circulation area
Author: David Cook

HOFFMAN AGAIN ... AND AGAIN

It's been 10 days since Philip Seymour Hoffman, possibly our era's
finest actor, was found dead and alone in his apartment, a needle in
his arm.

Before Hoffman, there was Cory Monteith. And Heath Ledger. Kurt
Cobain. River Phoenix. Elvis.

They are our dead celebrities, the famous ones who die from addiction.
We love them with a strange love, and mourn them with a strange grief.

We leave flowers outside the buildings where they died. We dim the
lights on Broadway. We visit their graves. We easily forgive their
drug use and excesses; after all, it's Hollywood. After all, they
entertained us so.

But in the 10 days since Hoffman died, 1,000 other Americans have also
died from drug overdoses.

"Statistically speaking, more than 100 Americans whose names we'll
never know died of drug overdose on the same day that Mr. Hoffman
did," Stanford psychiatry professor Keith Humphreys told The
Washington Post.

Their deaths are the anonymous ones. For every one Hoffman, there are
99 other everyday addicts, taking their last breath in the lonely bathroom.

They are our neighbors and colleagues, the folks we see on the
sidewalk or in line at the bank. Addiction is not only for the
gutters; it is suburban. It is 32 black men we call the worst of the
worst. It is America.

"He didn't die because he was partying too hard or because he was
depressed," Aaron Sorkin wrote in Time. "He died because he was an
addict on a day of the week with a y in it."

Let's use the spotlight placed on Hoffman's death to ask ourselves,
with more gravity than ever, the Big Question: Would legalization
help? "This is an important moment in history," Russell Brand wrote
in The Guardian. "We know that prohibition does not work."

Brand, a little sloppily, claims that Hoffman did not have to die. Yet
because he was hooked on illegal substances, a part of his life became
illegal as well.

"If drugs are illegal," Brand wrote, "people who use drugs are
criminals."

Upon this basic premise we have built our entire War on Drugs. It's
cost upward of $1 trillion, produced one of the largest prison
populations in the world, and felonized what seems like a whole
generation of young black men. It is not working. When we're honest,
we realize that each one of us is hooked on something and many things;
it's just the luck of the draw if those things are legal.

Yes, yes, we each make our own choices, yet we must also learn to
sympathize. That there but for the grace of God, we each could be
Hoffman in the bathroom. Fighting drug addiction becomes less a matter
of sheer will, like wrestling a grizzly, but more a matter of
surrender, like calling for the lifeguard.

I can't help but wonder if legalization would save countless lives,
defund the endless War on Drugs, and legitimize the suffering of addicts.

Yet as soon as those words come out, part of me hates the idea. I
don't long for a society where cocaine is purchased legally; that's no
city on a hill, no beacon to the world.

Colorado just legalized marijuana (does that mean everyone locked up
for marijuana possession suddenly goes free?), and giggly tourists are
coming from near and far to get stoned. It's like Colorado is the
teenager whose parents just went out of town for the weekend. (Of
course, this same description would apply to most bars on Saturday
night).

Aren't we supposed to be elevating one another? Seeking and promoting
the best, not the buzz? Isn't a society supposed to deem some things
out of bounds?

This issue won't be resolved anytime soon. And as soon as I say yes to
legalize, I think of all the reasons not to. And vice versa.

But I do believe this: we seek substances to alter the way we
experience life. I reach for the wine because it eases the tiny
suffering of each day. The anxiety, the impatience, the fear.

Yet then comes the switcheroo: the things we grab then grab us.
Mightily. One drink becomes two, one hit turns to five.

To really fight addiction means we learn ways to sit with our pain,
anxiety and all the things that make us itch. We stop running from the
things that lead us toward addiction.

Meditation can do this. Were we to launch a nationwide program (The
War on the Monkey Mind!) that teaches meditation to every student in
every grade in every school, I have no doubt that drug use would
significantly decrease within 10 years. That is not the only solution,
but I cannot see how anything is solved without it.

Perhaps Hoffman's curtain call is to ask us - as 100 people die
tomorrow - to envision again what a merciful and healthy drug policy
looks like.  
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MAP posted-by: Jo-D