(Continued from last week)
One of the most striking themes in Johann Hari's book, Chasing the Scream, is its rebuttal of the orthodox thinking on drug addiction, addicts and everyday people's relationship to drugs. Drug users are routinely conceived of as at best, objects of pity, and at worst, objects of contempt. This is all based and feeds on a notion that drugs are not just illegal but evil and unnatural–labels which evoke primal, visceral reactions.
A most radical revelation about this, as discussed last week, is the fact that the need for narcosis is normal and natural. Hari cites experiments, like by Ronald K Siegel, which establish that the use of narcotics (from plants in nature, and marked substances in lab tests) is general across the animal kingdom–bees do it, birds do it, and so do mongooses, elephants and monkeys. And they do it because they're stressed out, pissed off, or unhappy.
Humans who make drug policy forget they, and we, are animals (some more than others) and animals need ecstasy, amnesia and escape as much as discipline, order and structure. There are socially sanctioned ways of doing this, via alcohol, tobacco, sex, religion and social rituals. (Yep, Carnival, but I'll get to that.) And as licit drugs go, the most socially acceptable stimulant, alcohol, has been proven to be the most dangerous drug of all. A 2009 study by Prof David Nutt, former science adviser to the British Government, published in the Lancet, established that alcohol was more harmful than heroin. Tobacco was as harmful as cocaine.
To repeat from last week, 90 per cent of drug users are casual, and not addicts. The addicted tenth gets all the bad publicity, are stigmatised, scape-goated and punished. Work done by psychologist Bruce Alexander, and a medical doctor, Gabor Mat� in Canada (among others) establish that addicts are driven to it by trauma, primarily, and much more is accomplished by decriminalisation and the humane treatment of addicts.
This attitude (punishment rather than treatment) is general in the Metropole, but in our part of the world, that contempt and sadism fuse into the pre-existent postcolonial and plural society psychoses. Here, historically, the experiences of slavery, indenture and colonialism have left legacies of unnatural degrees of trauma, which have seeped into the everyday culture. This warped psychological state of the Caribbean was noticed when waves of migrants began to go to the UK in the 60s, and a much higher proportion of immigrants than the British population ended up in mental institutions.
The importance to T&T of the consequences of the un-acknowledged and untreated trauma, is how it contributes to our drug use and resultant dystopian societies, of which crime is a visible symptom. (Incidentally, reports Hari, a consequence of legalising drugs is decreased crime.) The pervasive violence and cruelty among the lower sections of Trinidad society (plantations in the rural areas and barrack yards in the urban areas), had been noted by colonial officials with some horror. But the Beacon Group's Alfred Mendes and CLR James saw them differently. Unfortunately, rather than atrocities to be addressed, they were treated as a quaint tropes and "natural" contrast for the civility of the Metropole.
This attitude persists in literature, cultural thinking and even policy, where the culture of poverty is celebrated and historically rehabilitated. The normalisation of the attitude has made us believe that malignant behaviour, custom and practice are normal. This is something (a general environment of misery) the poor and rich suffer from equally. The society has made itself incapable of the social technology to define and treat its traumas because of the failure of the government, university, church and NGOs.
Nowhere is this social degradation more pronounced than the insane insistence of Carnival's centrality to "our culture," its celebration of barrack yards and riots, and feral frenzy as a sine qua non of the Carnival complex. The consequences of this include an attitude in the population that deviance is normal, but there is no consciousness that perversity and misery are treatable mental illness. The behaviour of police, school children, government officials, all show the consequences of that generational blindness.
To bring this back to the origin of this discussion–our proportions of trauma are larger than the Metropole's, and presumably our use of and need for drugs, and the consequences in social degradation, follow suit. (This finds prima facie proof in the incredible consumption of alcohol.) This makes drug policy, specifically, the legalisation of marijuana for a start, not just an enlightened but necessary move.
It's worth noting that other than alcohol abuse, symptoms of a shocking volume of undiagnosed mental illness in Trinidad are rife. I've noticed this in public behaviour, political and institutional behaviour, and the general drift of the society. But head of psychiatry at UWI, Prof Gerard Hutchinson, confirms that the society seems to have "tipped" as far as mental illness goes. There are sharp increases in reported cases of self-harm, addiction, and violence and no end in sight. Fluoxetine (generic Prozac) is on CDAP. Shortages of anxiety drugs (especially Xanax) have been known to occur country-wide. Add that to Facebook beating and school-fight videos, child abuse statistics, statutory rape numbers, and the signs are unambiguous.
T&T is a very unhappy, mentally ill place, and people are literally killing themselves for it, and screaming all the way. The response has been as insane as the condition: to deny, ignore, and use Carnival as an excuse or alibi. Maybe rather than encouraging the insanity by giving a half-billion dollars to Carnival, money could be spent on treating the mental illness. Or just legalise marijuana. That'd be a good start.