Addiction is political
The 12 Step groups I work with are categorically apolitical in their messaging and I understand why. Not the case with my approach.
I recognize addiction as a method of subjugating and disenfranchising the masses, fortifying racial and economic barriers, and disguising the abuses of capitalism as personal failure. Sobriety, to me, is an act of political rebellion.
I’m obviously not the first person to talk about this, and in fact most of my opinions are informed by past revolutionaries who have long understood the role of addiction in class struggle and state oppression. Mao Zedong wrote extensively about the British-engineered opium epidemic in China, and one of his first acts as Chairman was a sweeping reform campaign that largely eliminated the problem altogether. Closer to home, the Black Panther Party’s legendary social programs addressed the toll of addiction on black communities, which they recognized as “chemical warfare.”
Put more bluntly, addiction is a weapon of state-sponsored terrorism.
The first example that comes to mind is how indigenous people in the Americas were poisoned and pacified by European settlers with alcohol their bodies had not evolved to metabolize, a cruel colonizing tactic still seen today in the form of tribal boundaries encircled by liquor stores and casinos.
Another example (I hope) everyone is familiar with is the crack epidemic. After desegregation, black neighborhoods were systematically stripped of their socioeconomic resources and flooded with crack cocaine; then they were targeted with nakedly racist drug policies under Reagan and Clinton to mass-incarcerate black men and boys into the then-nascent prison industrial complex that’s now worth billions. As most people know by now, the crack used to terrorize and destroy these communities was manufactured from cocaine purchased by the US government as a way to launder money to the Nicaraguan Contras as part of our elaborate, pro-fascist Cold War meddling.
Then in the 2000s, “Big Pharma” set their sights on rural white communities concentrated around factories and mines, which they summarily flooded with prescription opioids and heroin; both of which were manufactured by the world’s largest opium producer who controlled 93% of the global supply by 2007: US-controlled Afghanistan.
The stigma of addiction is by design, too. It’s highly calculated propaganda, no different than the false notion that labor unions hurt workers, or that immigrants and people on welfare are stealing your tax dollars. Addicts are criminals, bad people, less human, thus they’re not deserving of empathy or policy reform. This sentiment has started to evolve in the last few years—owing largely to suburban white communities being afflicted for a change—but it’s still the overwhelming norm in this country.
The connection between capitalist-engineered poverty and substance abuse is irrefutable at this point. You go without basic human needs or dignity. You live in apartments infested with pests and mold; you spend any extra money to keep your shitty car running; your teeth rot. Psychiatric disorders and chronic pain go undiagnosed and untreated for lack of access to healthcare. Speaking only of the psychological consequences, prolonged financial insecurity erodes a person’s sanity. Poverty is traumatic. When there’s never enough money, when you’re living check to check, when you’re constantly making hard choices, when you can’t take care of your kids, you live in a constant state of fight or flight. You lose hope, you question your self worth, and all too often kill yourself.
Whether urban or rural, opioid overdoses overwhelmingly target “disadvantaged zip codes”, aka poor people. All the hallmarks of a poor community—food and housing insecurity, lack of higher education and job opportunities, higher rates of depression and suicide—are directly correlative to higher rates of drug addiction and drug-related crimes. Spending youth in poverty has a marked increase on a person’s likelihood to develop substance abuse issues later in life.
Addiction’s relationship to homelessness is another thing entirely. Aside from the predictably brutal material realities of extreme poverty, addiction disproportionately preys on LGBTQ youth who are thrust into homelessness after being thrown out of their homes; victims of domestic violence who have to leave home for their own safety; veterans traumatized by war and abandoned by government assistance programs.
One of the most insidious aspects of addiction is its ability to hide itself in existing capitalist oppression. It’s a visible endpoint that nullifies all of the socioeconomic factors encompassed within it. Criminality can be attributed to addiction, not our fundamentally broken justice system. Depression and suicide can be attributed to addiction, not the psychological toll of poverty or systematic discriminatory abuse. The working class is targeted by addiction to enforce weaponized poverty and politically castrate us, and it works.
Treatment should be political, too
Addiction is obviously a societal issue caused and inflamed by innumerable socioeconomic factors, but it’s also a deeply personal battle; I’ve lived through both and emerged on the other side, and I want to address both with the care they deserve. That said, I’m going to be fairly blunt about some things that recovering addicts will likely agree with, but others may find insensitive.
Conventional recovery groups often present addiction as “trying to solve internal problems with external solutions” but I deviate from that a bit, preferring to present it as an internal battle against external forces. The goal and the outcome can never meet, and in the space between we go insane; even when we sober up we often relapse, only to start over again.
Those recovery groups also place paramount importance on personal accountability, and honestly I don’t agree with the way that subtly and ironically reinforces the stigma of shame and failure while ignoring the systemic causes of addiction in the first place, other than to observe how we reacted wrongly to them. However…
Addiction is not caused by personal moral failure, but it does cause it. I don’t care what anybody says or who people are deep down or what’s in your heart: active addiction and an intact moral code cannot coexist. Whatever its root causes, the mechanics of living in addiction mean living driven by ego, because how I feel must come before anything else, whether I’m aware of it or not. I need to get high or drink or whatever, and then I can do the next thing.
Obviously there’s a ton of nuance to this because addiction is fluid and expresses itself on a vast spectrum of severity. I may be using regularly to manage my mood, I may be self-medicating psychiatric issues or PTSD, or I might be so physically hooked that I’m just managing withdrawals; whatever the reasons or the fine print, the material end result is that caring about others happens in the space left behind after caring about ourselves, and that space shrinks as addiction escalates.
The symptoms of advanced addiction—self-grandiosity, living in a fantasy, exploitative behavior, lack of empathy—are identical to those of clinical narcissism, and that’s not a coincidence. Many of us don’t start that way; people tell little lies to hide their addiction, if for no other reason than protect themselves from stigma and shame, but that primes even the most honest people to start lying about all kinds of shit. As addiction escalates, its financial cost suddenly makes every part of life transactional, whether an addict wants it to be or not. Addiction destabilizes our world and we turn to increasingly desperate measures in our attempts to control it, and in that desperation we often abandon our ethics.
That’s what makes addiction so hard to treat, because obviously you’re sick, but you’ve stolen money from everyone in your life and cheated on all your partners and nobody knows when you’re telling the truth. You’re suffering and in need of empathy and patience and professional help, but you’re also kind of a piece of shit.
So the personal accountability aspect is critical, because we need to unpack all that stuff to escape the spiral of moral decay and reclaim our grip on reality and who we are. But that’s only the beginning. Release from the jaws of addiction doesn’t release us from the cycles of poverty and institutional abuse that drove us there in the first place, and that’s where my notion of an internal battle against external forces comes in once again. The goal and the outcome can never meet, and it’s no wonder that relapse rates are so high: whatever our internal conditions are, our external conditions are likely to stay the same. Addiction studies often list “environmental triggers” as a major cause of relapse, but another name for that is “the material realities of being poor.”
This individualistic treatment protocol for addiction—I must become a better person so I can bootstrap my way into a place to live and some healthcare—is predictably limited. But the reality is, whether it’s a long term solution or not, we have to get sober now with the tools we have, and at the moment that’s state facilities, personal inventory, and strength in numbers. We have to do it the hard way so we can fight to make it easier for others.
That fight for others is what groups like AA miss. Yes, the primary purpose is to get other alcoholics sober, but why are they drinking? A fifth step and some amends don’t bring our rents down or lower our health insurance deductibles. The format for any given speaker meeting is usually “what it was like, what happened, and what it’s like now,” the latter section usually being entirely comprised of material spoils: better jobs, houses, cars, college degrees. The Ninth Step Promises assure us that “fear of economic insecurity will leave us.” Besides the fact that it’s only gotten much worse in the last hundred years, if the point of getting sober is the unlikely ends of extracting more personal rewards from capitalism, what’s the point?
I believe there has to be a greater political meaning to the messaging of addiction treatment, because in its current form it’s a reaction to root causes and nowhere in its mission to “help others” does it posit an approach to attacking those causes, because recovery groups are apolitical. I get why, but I don’t like it.
I share this message with the addicts I work with and it resonates deeply almost every time. I consider my approach to be “part 2” of conventional addiction treatment. Getting sober is a tourniquet on an severed artery: it’ll keep you alive for now, but it’s a temporary measure. Just as a moral code can’t coexist with active addiction, neither can the ability to effectively organize against or challenge the oppressive power structures that brought us to our knees in the first place.
Days of being wild
I’ll end with an anecdote about being a drunk piece of shit, so you know I’m not all talk.
When the 2020 BLM protests kicked off, I was in there. I marched in the street, I screamed in cops’ faces while I filmed them, I mocked and taunted and insulted gun-toting Gravy SEALS while I filmed them too, I took pizza boxes from my old job to make signs. I wasn’t of any particular use to anybody but fuck if I wasn’t throwing my whole ass into it, and I’m a tall white guy so I get away with a lot.
The entire time, I was hammered.
Not tipsy, not getting loose for the occasion, not overdosing on liquid courage. I was fucking TRASHED, and I’d been trashed for years.
In 2018 I’d relapsed hard into drinking after a couple years sober (“sober” as in, I’d been smoking my bodyweight in dabs every day and was a fucking lunatic) and by late 2019, my drinking had escalated to the point of a psychotic break and I was committed to the psych ward again. Upon getting out I stayed sober for a few weeks but it didn’t last; that winter I spent a month in a coked-up blackout in Barcelona before flying home a couple weeks before COVID shut down air travel, just in time for all of my friends back home to get laid off and make day-drinking at 25 socially acceptable.
From there my drinking went off the tracks entirely. I was still working because my construction job was “essential,” so after work I’d buy a six pack on my way home which was gone by the time I got there, head straight to my friends’ house and drink til I passed out. I’m not sure what I even did at work to be honest, but I wasn’t in good shape. Somewhere in there, I fell off a bathtub and stabbed myself in the face with a broken tile before my head bounced off the floor and knocked me out. Shit was out of hand, to say the least.
The thing about prolonged heavy drinking is that your body actually gets used to it…to a point. By “getting used to it” I mean I could drink dozens of beers and do shots to the point of passing out every night and not die. But where drinking used to feel like a ramp—I drink some, I get fucked up, I drink some more, I get more fucked up—it had become a cliff. I drank for hours while nothing happened, and then in an instant I was gone, and the transition between those phases was one I couldn’t anticipate; it just happened, and there I went.
Drinking through the threshold of a tolerance that high is like putting your bodyweight behind a wrench on a stuck bolt: when it finally comes loose, anything could happen. Years of doing that made my mind start to come apart right alongside my liver. I became extremely paranoid and emotionally volatile, oscillating between dumb happy drunk and outright hostility in ever-faster and less predictable intervals. I’d “come to” in the middle of screaming at someone and realize I didn’t know what I was angry about, or what we were even talking about. I’d be walking somewhere and have no idea how I got there or what I was doing.
What the fuck is happening to me?
It was terrifying to me, let alone the people around me who had to deal with it. My emotional control and my grip on reality were basically gone.
So by the time protests kicked off in late May of 2020, I had been well over the legal limit for most of two straight years and my brain had turned into mashed potatoes. I’ve always been radical and rocked with class struggle so you know your boy was on the scene, but by the time I’d show up, I was there, but not really. I’d either be ten drinks deep and still approaching the cliff, or twenty and falling from it. I was that dangerous blend of ambulatory and delusional that every hardcore alcoholic understands.
As I mentioned at the beginning, I wasn’t useful to anyone. I didn’t realize it at the time but I was there to off-gas my own pent up volatility and rage, not to get behind a cause. I wasn’t there to fight for anything; I just wanted to fight. Frankly the demonstrations would have been better off without me there and looking back on it, it’s a miracle that I didn’t get myself or anyone else killed.
Years have passed since then, I’ve gotten sober, I’ve confronted my internal battles and more or less devoted my life to the external ones. Connecting politics to sobriety finally gave me purpose. I couldn’t stay sober just to keep going without basic needs as our society collapsed around us. I couldn’t convince myself that just trying to make the best of it was enough reason. I was full of anger and resentment and hatred but with nowhere for it to go, no enemy to fight, I turned it on myself and anyone unfortunate enough to be around me. From a strictly pragmatic standpoint, I couldn’t fight the power while I was fighting myself.
I also understand now that “activism” isn’t just being a pipe hitter and throwing shit at cops. I do think there’s an important time and place for that, but it’s not what this is about. It’s spreadsheets, phone calls, driving…so much driving. It’s having my wits about me at all times, keeping hundreds of conversations straight and constantly having stuff that needs to get done, delegating, volunteering, note taking, requesting access to a Google Doc for the fifth time. It’s about building community.
And most importantly to my own life, sobriety let my world become bigger than me. I’m the smallest part of it now, and in the space left behind I’m now able to be a servant to my community and lend myself to a real fight for change in a way that simply wasn’t possible when I was drinking myself unconscious every night. Building community wasn’t an option when how I felt came before everything else.
Sobriety didn’t work for me until I was able to connect a deeper meaning to it. Getting sober will only ever be worth what it allows me to fight for, so I fight as hard as I can every day. I’m also in great shape now, for whatever that’s worth.
no joke, this might be your best one yet.
Activism is spreadsheets, phone calls, and driving. Real.