Could finding human connection end the 100yo war on drugs? – ABC Online

Nine months after British journalist Johann Hari toured Australia, urging politicians drop the "war on drugs" and adopt reforms of "love and compassion", we have a new policy: drug test people on Centrelink.

The idea announced in last week's federal budget will see 5,000 new welfare recipients undergo random drug testing from 1 January 2018.

It will apply to people on Newstart or Youth Allowance (meaning students and the unemployed), and anyone who fails will have their payments quarantined.

The idea is new for Australia, but already happening in the US and New Zealand. It has been criticised by a lot of drug experts for putting more pressure and stress on people who are already vulnerable.

But to understand the thinking behind this policy, and how it's part of a broader 100-year-old history of the "war on drugs", we we have to take a deep dive into the nature of addiction and theories around the best way of getting people to stop.

Our guide is Johann Hari, author of Chasing the Scream, an account of his three-year, 50,000-kilometre investigation into which drug policies work, and which don't.

Johann went everywhere from Portugal to Arizona. He had written lots about drugs already, had known friends and family who became drug addicts, and been addicted himself to prescription drugs. He didn't expect too many surprises.

That changed with the Rat Park.

"What surprised me is that I had misunderstood what addiction is at a basic level," he told Hack last year.

"We have the idea that if we inflict more pain on addicts, we can make them stop.

"But once you understand that pain has caused the addiction, you understand that punishing addicts makes them worse."

The Rat Park is a 1970s Canadian experiment. It was a variation on earlier experiments in which caged rats were given two water bottles - one of them laced with heroin or cocaine. "The rat will almost always prefer the drugged water and overdose and die within a couple of weeks."

Pretty grim. These experiments seemed to prove the theory that addiction was almost entirely due to 'chemical hooks' in drugs. Addiction was all about physical need.

Once the hooks are in your body you're as helpless as a coked-up rat in a cage.

Except that doesn't quite add up. Hospital patients are routinely given high-dose medical heroin for pain relief and very few go on to develop addiction. Why are people shooting up outside the hospital vulnerable to addiction? It can't all be chemical hooks.

In the Rat Park experiment, instead of being left in cages where they had nothing in their lives except the drug, the rats were let loose in a "rat heaven". Here they had loads of friends, cheese and sex. The result: they showed little interest in the spiked water.

It doesn't get better than the Rat Park.

None of the heavenly rats became addicted.

This led Johann to conclude:

"The opposition of addiction is not sobriety, the opposite of addiction is connection."

Johann saw these two different theories of addiction reflected in the different approaches to drug policy: compassionate or brutal. An example of the brutal kind is Arizona's, where women are made to go out as a chain gang wearing t-shirts saying "I was a drug addict" and "I am breaking the need for weed" while they pick up trash and members of the public mock them.

Prisoners at Tent City jail in Arizona.

Prisoners at Tent City in Arizona.

Humiliation only deepens people's propensity for addiction, Johann said. It's the human equivalent of putting a rat in a lonely cage.

He sees the surging rates of different kinds of addictions as a symptom of a much deeper, fundamental problem of lack of personal connection. In the US, overdose deaths involving prescription painkillers (such as Oxycodone) have tripled over the past 15 years, and rates of heroin deaths have spiked in the last five years.

In Australia, there's been a spike in addiction to codeine, an opiate present in over-the-counter drugs.

"If we want to understand why people are turning to very powerful painkillers, we have to talk about why they're in so much pain," Johann said.

Where addiction is highest are the places where despair is deepest."

Sixteen years ago, the Rat Park came to Portugal. The country had been pursuing a "tough on drugs" policy, but still had one of the worst drug problems in Europe. A re-think was called for, and a special panel looked at the science, including the Rat Park experiment. They came back with a recommendation to decriminalise all drugs."The whole lot," Johann said.

The money that had been spent on arresting and punishing drug users was re-invested in job creation programs and residential rehabilitation. "The goal was to say to every addict in Portugal, we love you we value you we're on your side." In a bit over 10 years, injecting drug use was down 50 per cent, and there were massive reductions in street crime, addiction, overdose deaths and HIV.

"Approaches based on shame and stigma and punishment fail catastrophically.

"Policies that focus on love and compassion are not the magic bullet but they significantly reduce the problem."

Last week's idea of drug testing people on Centrelink suggests we're a long way from moving to less punitive drug policies. Politicians continue to talk about the 'war on drugs'.

But there have been a few surprises; late last year Greens leader Richard Di Natale called for bipartisan support to replicate Portugal's drug policy in Australia. The surprising part was that a Liberal MP backed the move. Sharman Stone, co-convenor with Di Natale of a Senate group on drug law reform, said it would put drug gangs out of business.

"Australians have some of the most sophisticated understanding of the drug debate and the addiction debate," Johann said.

"The gap between ordinary Australians and their government is so frustrating because Australians are so good on this."

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Could finding human connection end the 100yo war on drugs? - ABC Online