Among everybody’s New Year’s resolutions is surely turning over a new leaf on the opiate epidemic.
40 years into the War on Drugs the drugs are still winning. According to recent alarming coverage in this paper, they are on the offensive here on Cape Cod.
In fact the campaign we’ve been waging on this major life wrecker has been so unsuccessful it would seem that it’s time to turn over a new leaf in our thinking about it.
The emphasis has always been mostly on solving the problem through elimination of addictive substances. And indeed it might be nice if the world simply didn’t have such temptation in it. (It would solve a lot of problems if the world didn’t have gravity in it.) But it does. And since it would seem that we can’t eliminate the temptation, in part because some of the most dangerous drugs start out as medically approved prescription painkillers, we will have to learn to live with it. And of course, most of us do.
The war on the demon alcohol that raged in 19th and early 20th centuries was for a long time based on the elimination strategy. Carrie Nation busting up bars with her ax. Hepburn in “The African Queen” emptying Bogart’s bottles of booze one by one into the river. Since the failure of the solution of legal “prohibition” in the 1930s we have lived with what seems on the whole a reasonable compromise: co-existence. Alcohol exists as a tempting pleasure, part of our world, still a great destroyer of a certain percentage of lives. It’s common wisdom that to live a good life you have to learn to “handle your alcohol,” whether by abstinence or by moderate use.
We see drugs too much as an alien evil, the work of the devil. But it’s not more evil than ice cream or sex. Drugs, like other temptations, are part of our world, readily available in nature or synthesized, and there is a compelling logic for their continuing use: they bestow comfort, peace, pleasure. They make the user feel good—very, very good, in some cases. They wouldn’t be tempting if they didn’t.
As most reading this column know, the only real defense against the the powerful and potentially ruinous logic of the pleasures of drugs (and other temptations) is the even more powerful logic of a meaningful life. It’s what we mean when we advise someone to “get a life,” what we celebrate when we “celebrate the life” of someone who has recently died. Probably most would agree that such a life involves some combination of love, creativity, and usefulness. What we know is that such a life doesn’t come in the form of a “substance” to be ingested. A list of life achievements might include an ability to relax and enjoy oneself but probably not the number of glasses of wine consumed, the pieces of chocolate cake enjoyed, the number of joints smoked (whether legal or illegal).
Our relationship with opiates, like that with overeating or addictive sex, is part of the perennial struggle each of us wages to mature into adulthood by achieving a meaningful life, whatever that means to you, of which learning to live with temptation is a big part. For many of us our teens and 20s were like Ulysses and the sirens—getting by those lethal temptresses, but not easily.
All this is common knowledge. Most of us model it just by being parents and grownups. But if we were not counting on the police to solve the problem by the Carrie Nation approach (despite the dismal record of that approach), we might find ourselves pitching it more emphatically to kids, along with such survival basics as brushing your teeth and not accepting rides from strangers. Courses in the life-and-death importance of this elemental struggle might be incorporated into the curriculum of school from early grades through college.
Learning to live with the temptations of this world is not a job to be outsourced to legislators and law enforcement.
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