Dr Adi Jaffe has blue eyes, immaculately combed fair hair and just the right length of designer stubble. He’s wearing a beautifully cut, hand-finished jacket over faded jeans. He doesn’t look much like a psychologist specialising in addiction, which is what he is. Sipping an espresso in one of Westwood’s boutique cafés, he could be mistaken for a movie executive from nearby Hollywood. Or, if you have a vivid imagination, for a suave and well-connected drug dealer. Which is exactly what he used to be.
Jaffe turned a music recording studio into a front for the sale of high-grade crystal, powder and pills – until he got raided by a Beverly Hills SWAT team. After jail and rehab he went back to college and reinvented himself as an academic psychologist. Now, still in his early thirties, he’s recognised as one of America’s most persuasive thinkers on the subject of drug abuse. People listen to what he’s got to say. After all, not many clinical researchers have been responsible for shifting, by his own estimate, hundreds of thousands of Ecstasy pills a year, to say nothing of the kilos of methamphetamine and, as he puts it, ‘really good coke’.
‘I was very much a drug snob,’ he explains.
Jaffe is intense, businesslike, sardonic. There’s still a hint of a Tarantino character about him. You wouldn’t have wanted to mess with him during his drug-dealing days. When he was busted, he refused to turn in his dealers. He preferred to do his time.
His drugs career started when he sold marijuana as a student in New York to pay for the lawyer he needed to defend him after a shoplifting incident. I ask what he stole. ‘Condoms,’ he says, in a quiet voice. I look slightly confused. ‘What?’
‘You heard.’
He moved from New York to California and started dating a girl who was into rave culture and did Ecstasy every weekend.
I loved it. Really fun parties, great bunch of friends and my own recording studio. Back to dealing, but this time it was pills. It began with friends, but once you start selling drugs people quickly find out about you and come asking for some – and I’ve never been good at saying no.
So I went from a few dozen Ecstasy pills every other week to a hundred a month. Then a couple of hundred, and now I’m starting to make real money. Then I got introduced to speed, and when I started selling that stuff is when things really took off. [He started doing business with the cartels.]
I needed a couple of guys to help me, and when the speed arrived we’d use it ourselves so we wouldn’t have to sleep and miss out on sales. That recording studio became a veritable K-Mart for drugs. I was making $200,000 or $300,000 a year. I had a roster of 500 clients and I walked around with $10,000 in my pockets as spending money.
Plus, of course, I had an unlimited supply of any drug I wanted – I was smoking crystal meth constantly but somehow never ended up looking like those creatures in the meth ads. I was doing Ecstasy pretty much daily, eventually not even in pill form. When you buy and sell hundreds of thousands of pills, there’s an incredible amount of pill dust at the bottom of the massive bags. So I’d smoke that with my cigarettes or meth. Like all good drug dealers, I had surveillance videos outside my studio, and when I look at the tapes I see that I’ve got a pipe in my hand nearly all the time.
Jaffe’s days as Dr Feelgood came to an end when he got into a motorcycle accident and the police found half a pound of cocaine in the lining of his jacket: when he came to in the hospital, he was chained to the bed. He detoxed in jail but started using immediately once he got out at the end of the week. When he kept refusing to co-operate by naming his dealers, an armed SWAT team kicked down his door and dragged him to jail to face 13 felony counts. After a year fighting the case, during which time he also got sober, Jaffe served only a year in jail. He detoxed in prison but started using again outside. It took a humiliating failed spell in rehab before he took a conscious decision to stop what he calls his lifelong self-sabotage.
Going back to college was his only realistic option. ‘With nine felony counts on my record I wasn’t even going to secure a job in a mall’ he says. After much effort, he was accepted at UCLA, from where he gained his doctorate in the psychology of drug addiction.
Jaffe has a sophisticated understanding of brain chemistry that has led him into some sharp exchanges of fire with leading addiction experts. Unlike them, he knows exactly what it feels like to snort, swallow and smoke vast quantities of the substances they’re talking about.
We talk for a bit about the legalisation of drugs. I have to be honest: this is a debate that really bores me, because it seems to belong to a different era, one in which governments assumed that whether a drug was legal or not made all the difference to people’s readiness to consume it. Portugal, for example, makes a huge fuss about the success of its across-the-board decriminalisation of drugs, which it claims has greatly reduced the number of ‘problem’ addicts since 1998. And it’s true that treating heroin addicts as patients rather than criminals has improved their health. But the flip side of this tolerance is that the number of people receiving treatment for addiction has grown by about a third, from 23,500 to 35,000. Even charity workers who work with heroin users worry that taking up the drug has become too easy.1 Decriminalisation or legalisation changes the lines of supply and takes money out of the black market. But, in the final analysis, if a mood-altering drug is just as available as it used to be, then the number of people who become addicted to it is unlikely to fall.
These days most narcotics are easy to get your hands on if you’re prepared to put in a minimum of effort tracking them down. As legal highs pour on to the market, the distinction between legal and illegal drugs is becoming ever more meaningless. The same is true of the legal classifications that distinguish hard from soft drugs. Politicians are confronted by new substances about whose long-term effects they know nothing. How are they supposed to classify pills that produce euphoria comparable to hard drugs but turn out to be no more toxic than soft Class C drugs? Or, for that matter, everyday prescription medications that turn out to have massive untapped potential for abuse? Every time an illegal lab in Bulgaria or Shanghai invents a sexy new party drug, the goalposts will have to be shifted again. (There’s an interesting comparison to be drawn with the way the old categories of hard and soft porn have also become redundant, though in the case of pornography there’s less room for confusion: as we’ve seen, hard-core material has become the norm.)
‘The idea that we can “beat” the problem of drugs is just so misguided,’ says Jaffe. ‘For example, we’ve only just woken up to the fact that prescription drug abuse in this country is blowing up. People really want these medications. I always had customers for prescription pills – we had a guy working in a pharmacy who traded them for Ecstasy.
‘Doctors are dealing in them. The Government is cracking down now, but Florida doctors were the laughing stock of America. They’d set up offices in mini-malls, and as you walked in there’d be a doctor on your right to write you a script and a counter on your left to dispense it.
‘This is what the people who talk about legalisation of drugs don’t acknowledge. The most commonly abused drugs are already the easiest to get hold of. You start with mom’s Vicodin, or a kid shares his Ritalin with you at school – and the result is an epidemic level of abuse that we didn’t even notice until about ten years ago.’
Jaffe’s passion is for getting addicts into rehab – but not any old rehab: one that’s based on a scientific understanding of the special challenges facing different sorts of addicts. In February 2011 he wrote a scathing article in the Huffington Post about the booming rehab business. ‘Right now, it is too easy to sell the idea of recovery,’ he wrote. The system was compromised by clinics that were incompetent, dogmatic or exploitative: ‘You could easily check into a rehab facility and find they offer nothing more than an expensive 12-step programme. This is unacceptable. We have tools, like cognitive behavioural therapy and motivational enhancement therapy, which we know are effective. We just need to ensure they are part of the treatment model being offered to patients.’2
He has a simple model for illustrating the distribution of addictive behaviour in the population, which recognises that there is a continuous spectrum of such behaviour, but also draws attention to individuals whose overwhelming ‘wanting’ impulses mark them out from the rest of society. He uses the word ‘disease’ to describe their condition: I don’t, but really it’s a question of semantics, since he’s aware of its diagnostic limitations and neither of us thinks addiction is by definition incurable – the 12-step dogma.
Jaffe draws a pyramid in which the bottom third is made up of ordinary people whose addictive impulses are difficult, but not impossible, to excite. Above them is a layer of vulnerable individuals whose natural reaction to stress is to search for a fix. At the apex are the addicts, with their wide-open ‘wanting’ pathways who are capable of developing an all-consuming obsession with anything from candy bars to sadomasochistic sex acts.
The pyramid is not a scientific model. As I hope this book has shown, we don’t know enough about the reward mechanisms of the brain to predict who will end up at the top of the pyramid. If extreme addictive behaviours have a common biological cause, scientists have yet to discover it. For example, some addicts manifest symptoms of OCD while others don’t; it’s reasonable to infer from this that the neural pathways of the two groups have been disturbed in different ways, but that’s about as far as we can go: any speculation about the relative importance of biology and environment is, as usual, guesswork.
I’ve talked a lot about dopamine in this book, because the discovery of its functions is bringing us closer to understanding apparently compulsive behaviour. But there is still no proof that a particular brain abnormality causes addiction.3 If anything, the evidence points in the other direction: addictive behaviour, influenced above all by the available supply of addictive substances and experiences, can sometimes cause brain abnormalities. For example, brain-imaging technology is beginning to reveal how heavy cocaine use damages the axons or ‘white matter’ that transmit messages across the brain.4 But observing this damage doesn’t allow us to draw any conclusions about the extent to which the user was addicted to cocaine.
What we can say is that the acceleration of social development is pushing the internal boundaries of Jaffe’s pyramid downwards. More of us find ourselves in the category of addict or the intermediary layer of vulnerable consumer. More of us are at risk than ever before of developing crippling addictive behaviours. Ignoring potentially harmful temptations involves significantly more willpower than it once did. Yet we’re not necessarily aware of moving in the direction of addiction – and, when we do realise it, many of us are surprised.
Put it this way: it’s as if someone or something has sneakily moved the boundaries of your self-control. For example, you didn’t ask your local corner shop in Primrose Hill to start selling jumbo-sized Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. But there they are, right next to the cash register, as moreish as high-grade blow (or so I’m told). And you give in.
Nor can you remember precisely when your favourite pub started serving chilled white wine in huge glasses that mean that it takes only two journeys to the bar before you start feeling pissed, as opposed to three or four.
Nor did you invite big-boobed Belarusian bombshell Tanya into that pop-up at the bottom of your computer screen. I mean, how were you supposed to know that an exploratory click on Teenage Sluts Go Wild would hook you up to the camera in her bedroom?
Inside the pyramid, previously discrete technologies are getting mashed up to redraw the limits of acceptable behaviour. Exploiting our desire for the fix is fast becoming an interdisciplinary skill, as experts from the worlds of gaming, gambling, pornography, fast food and pharmaceuticals study each others’ successes and pilfer what they can. Today’s consumer electronics devices are the result of furious testing and wholesale theft from far less salubrious industries. Manufacturers are racing to create dopamine-tickling gadgets more compelling than their rivals’.
‘Websites these days are all about targeting cues,’ says Adi Jaffe. ‘And I know that because I’ve been asked to help make them more addictive. Somebody I know personally is head of marketing for a set of gambling websites who wanted to use cues and triggers for bingo slot gambling games. He wanted to know how to persuade people who wouldn’t normally play these games to try them out – and, once they were on the website, how to keep them spending money for longer.
‘He knew I was an addiction expert and he wanted to buy my expertise to make his products more addictive. I said no. I’m not in the business of creating addicts any more.’
That’s a smoking gun if ever I saw one. The online casino industry, in the days when it was still legal in the US, insisted that it wasn’t trying to create addicts. But here we find the owners of an online casino trying to bribe a university psychologist to make their product more addictive. It would be interesting to know how many addiction specialists have been approached for the same purpose by the manufacturers of video games – and how many have agreed to share their expertise in return for a consultancy fee. Given that the world of addiction therapy is full of cowboys in the first place, I suspect the number is quite substantial.
In this book, I’ve concentrated on the spread of addictive behaviour in Britain and America. But globalisation is spreading variants of the same problem all over the world. We’re moving closer to the moment when the fight against addiction and the crime that stimulates it will become a higher priority for the developing world than its ancient enemies, poverty and disease.
You can see the internal boundaries of Adi Jaffe’s pyramid being pushed downwards in every modern society. People who were once immune to addiction find themselves at risk; those who were already at risk develop hard-core addictions. And those who were already at the top? They can get wasted on anything that takes their fancy, anywhere they like.
The past 25 years have witnessed the sudden disappearance of political and cultural obstacles that limited the geographical spread of particular addictive products and practices. The fall of the Berlin Wall, for example, was probably the single greatest gift to drug traffickers in the centuries-old history of their trade.
Misha Glenny describes in his terrifying book, McMafia, how the displacement of communist dictators by east European oligarchs and mafia has allowed drug dealers to flood emerging markets with amphetamines, Ecstasy, cocaine and heroin. There was never any shortage of chemists in the Eastern bloc; now their skills are being drawn upon and developed. At one point a Colombian cartel managed to smuggle one of its own top chemists into Bulgaria, with a specific brief to train Bulgarians in the production of cocaine. The unrefined drug itself was smuggled into Black Sea ports concealed in, among other things, shipments of mashed potato. The communist-trained chemical engineers could then turn it into powder for the fast-growing markets in Eastern Europe and Russia.5 The demand for drugs is so great in Russia that amateur chemists are also flourishing, with horrible results. A synthetic opiate drug called krokodil, made from codeine-based headache pills, is so poisonous that it eventually turns the skin scaly, like a crocodile’s. Flesh goes grey and peels off, so that heavy users can effectively rot to death. Incredibly, there’s demand for it. And this in a country where 30,000 people already die from heroin addiction every year.6
New trade routes opened up by hi-tech organised crime have forced law enforcement authorities to tear up their old maps. For example, according to the US state department, the hub of global Ecstasy trafficking is now Israel, where drug dealers have family links to gangs in all the major cities.7
Hi-tech globalisation has made it possible to shift drugs more safely and quickly. Computers allow dealers to manage their stock more efficiently, while the sophistication of international financial markets has increased the scope for money laundering. As we’ve seen, digital technology has hugely boosted the sale of legal highs, but it’s also helped keep down the cost of cocaine and heroin, prices for which have roughly halved since 1990.8
One reason prices have dropped is the unprecedented migration of populations, which has moved dealers into new markets and sharpened competition. To pick just one example, the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Nigerians in the new South Africa has had disastrous consequences for local people vulnerable to substance abuse: Nigerian gangs have been working tirelessly to expand the consumption of drugs there.
Previously, each of South Africa’s segregated communities had its own drug. Blacks smoked home-grown cannabis; coloureds smoked ‘buttons’, crushed mandrax tablets mixed with cannabis; and young whites used heroin or cocaine. Using a drug associated with another community was regarded as inappropriate, like breaking a taboo. But none of this made sense to the immigrant entrepreneurs. ‘The Nigerian drug dealers identified early on that the market was ready for diversification, and so they started introducing different communities to new drugs,’ writes Glenny.
‘That meant making dagga [cannabis] more easily available to the coloureds and whites, while pushing the “buttons” beyond their traditional home of the coloured districts and townships. Black, white and coloured youth often came into contact with one another via the good offices of Nigerian suppliers.’9
The South African experience is replicated in many parts of the world, as migrant workers arrive suddenly in host communities – bringing economic benefits but also, in some cases, intoxicating substances which their new neighbours are only too eager to sample. Or it can work the other way round. There are thousands of migrant Chinese workers in Siberia, where they acquire a taste for cheap Russian vodka and carry it back home with them. Recently I spoke to a journalist from north-east China who said his home town was being devastated by ‘Siberian drinking patterns’. He told me that the vodka used to be a rarity. ‘Now this horrible cheap liquor – God knows what it’s made from – is on sale in every store and is doing terrible damage. It has just cost me the life of my best friend.’
Organised crime isn’t called ‘organised’ for nothing. Drug trafficking and people-smuggling are now carried out by the same criminal gangs: illegal migrants are forced to become drug mules.10 In June 2010, Jan Brewer, Arizona’s Republican governor, claimed that ‘the majority of the illegal trespassers that are coming into the state of Arizona are under the direction and control of organised drug cartels’.11 Her comment caused pious outrage, but it wasn’t far from the truth.
In Latin America, Africa, Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, Afghanistan and parts of east Asia, central government has farmed out its responsibilities to the local mafia to an extraordinary degree. By an unhappy coincidence, many of these are also regions in which populations are moving from the countryside to the cities in greater numbers than ever before.
The dangers of such sudden demographic change are obvious. Unsurprisingly, the disorientation experienced by people uprooted from their home communities often encourages them to seek solace in chemical fixes. History is full of such unhappy episodes: the epidemic drunkenness of American Indians moved thousands of miles from their ancestral homelands is a famous example.
We still witness this phenomenon, to a greater or lesser degree, all over the world – including in Britain, where immigrant populations have brought their drug-taking and drug-dealing habits with them. In London, as in most large Western European cities, there’s strong evidence that the open drug markets are dominated by ethnic minorities.12 But, as in the new South Africa, substances are traded between communities, giving rise to a multicultural drug market that is also fed by a stream of postal deliveries from internet ‘pharmacies’.
Despite the role played by organised crime, many young people regard unfamiliar drugs in the same way as they regard unfamiliar ethnic food. These things don’t frighten them; not after a gap year spent in Thailand. Long-haul travel has changed the attitude of students and young professionals towards mind-altering drugs, which they have seen consumed in developing countries as part of the natural rhythm of life – or so they like to think, in their romantic way. Like strange and spicy dishes, the drugs belong to a menu of pleasures that grows longer every time they look at it – and from which, in their opinion, they have an absolute right to choose.
That sense of entitlement to pleasure dovetails nicely with the business plans of the providers of pleasure, both corporate and freelance. The movement of intoxicating substances around the world is more intricate and efficient than ever before. But it can never be fast enough for a generation for whom an unlimited choice of hedonic experiences is as natural as an unlimited choice of downloaded music – and for whom novel fixes are an indispensable part of life. This level of choice has only been available to young westerners for a few years; it remains to be seen whether it produces a cohort of middle-aged addicts – and, if so, what substances, objects or experiences will prove most addictive. Some of them may not have been invented yet. What can’t be denied is that people born in the 1980s and 90s have access to a range of mood-fixing tools that is vastly greater than anything available to their parents, and that, in all likelihood, their children will have even more choices laid out in front of them.
This acceleration of availability isn’t a generational change: it’s happening faster than that. In the last five years alone, the burgeoning sophistication of consumer electronics has given birth to new obsessions and addictions that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. One way or another, everybody in the Western world has to confront the quickening of desire. It’s true that many people can’t afford to pursue more than a few of those desires. Most of us, however, face an intensity of temptation that we can only intermittently resist. Managing those temptations draws deeply on our psychological resources: it can dominate our thoughts and swallow up our time. Just look at the catatonic behaviour of shoppers in supermarkets faced with more choices than they can handle.
Some of us are quite happy zombies, though. After all, there are worse things than being spoilt for choice. The replacement of ancient social ties by customised objects and experiences isn’t unwelcome. How many of us, hand on heart, really want to revert to the model of an extended family in which our recreational time is constantly interrupted by courtesy visits to distant relatives? We like small families and flexible friends with whom we enjoy mildly addictive pleasures, such as DVD box set marathons. Interestingly, middle-class viewers often talk about ‘mainlining’ episodes of series such as the cult Danish thriller The Killing.
You can spend a lot of time managing temptations before they represent any sort of problem. Indeed, we boast about our favourite fixes, because they convey information about us that we want other people to know. ‘Mainlining’ The Killing was a cool thing to do in the autumn of 2011 – especially so if you did it in bed, using your iPad, and remembered to drop it into conversation at work the next morning.
This book has discussed the ways various pleasures overstretch the brain, becoming problems that we have to manage in a less enjoyable way. It’s a spectrum: it isn’t always easy to locate the moment mildly addictive behaviour becomes self-destructive, even in retrospect. What I find intriguing is that, when temptation becomes difficult to manage, people continue to identify themselves in terms of their tastes.
In some cases, even the most gruesome appetite disorders become badges of identity and honour. (Pippa from those AA lunchtime meetings was especially adept at turning her self-induced suffering into martyrdom.) Society makes this transition easier for us by teaching us that addictions are not so much the product of our actions as something we are unlucky enough to have acquired.
In the United States, going into alcohol or drug rehab has become a rite of passage for rebellious youths and, for adults, a form of sick leave to which barely any stigma is attached – especially as companies go out of their way to conceal what sort of treatment their employee is receiving. The roll-call of celebrities checking into rehab has even made these places seem glamorous.
In 2010, 2.6 million Americans received treatment at a rehab facility: 958,000 for alcohol abuse only, 881,000 for illicit drug use only, and 625,000 for both alcohol and illicit drug use. If the criteria are loosened to include any treatment for substance abuse, for example as an outpatient of a private doctor, then the total soars to 4.6 million people. No wonder that America’s ‘rehab industry’ is worth an estimated $9 billion a year.13 One telling detail: in 2012 the word ‘rehab’ was among the top 20 most expensive Google keywords – meaning that healthcare companies had bid huge sums in order to appear high up on the Google rankings when the word ‘rehab’ was entered into the search engine.14
Meanwhile, more and more British executives are being quietly packed off to recovery facilities. In 2011 an inquiry made under the Freedom of Information Act led to the revelation that the BBC had spent £19,000 at The Priory specifically to treat employees stressed out by cost-cutting initiatives; the actual total spent by the Corporation on rehab for its employees is thought to be vastly higher.15 The Priory also sends psychiatrists to the City and to Canary Wharf to treat workers in the financial sector struggling with alcohol and cocaine addiction.16
Companies have been quietly paying for their top employees to dry out for decades, of course. What’s different is a relaxed attitude to ‘treatment’ – an assumption that a period of recovery from addictive behaviour may form part of the natural arc of an employee’s career. It’s a price bosses are prepared to pay in exchange for their staff agreeing to work the punishingly long hours demanded by a globalised economy.
But they shouldn’t expect things to run smoothly: nothing connected with addiction ever does. We’ve already seen that addicts in treatment centres have higher relapse rates than those not in treatment. We can argue about why this is – perhaps they were in a worse state to begin with; perhaps treatment is counterproductive – but the pattern of multiple sessions in rehab is a familiar one. Employers and insurance companies will normally only foot the bill for one rescue. Friends of mine who have been financially ruined by drug addiction blame the cost of treatment as much as the cost of the drugs.
Remember that, more often than not, recovery programmes incorporate the 12 steps. They’re a potent formula, but not always in a productive way: they can persuade people going through a temporary crisis that they’re saddled for life with a non-existent disease. For some individuals, that’s a recipe for learned helplessness. For the less scrupulous providers of ‘specialist’ care, it’s a recipe for lucrative repeat business, as addicts fork out the remains of their savings – or their parents’ savings – for just one more spell in rehab.
The problem of helplessness isn’t confined to addicts. Governments display ostentatious anxiety about the mental and physical wellbeing of their citizens, and use it to justify endless exercises in social engineering. These don’t necessarily work, but they manage to spread public anxiety about the dangers of losing control of our appetites. And the funny thing is that we don’t really mind being nagged in this way. We hate being taxed by the government – but this focus on our wellbeing doesn’t cause offence because it acknowledges that we have a tough time resisting temptation. To an extent, it absolves us from our sins.
The effort to keep our minds and bodies in good shape is now so central to our existence that a new type of identity politics is emerging that may supersede the old markers of class and ethnicity, particularly as society becomes more multicultural.
Recently I attended a few meetings of something called the ‘pan-fellowship’, a 12-step group in west London that doesn’t limit its meetings to any one addiction. I was surprised by how smoothly it worked. Speakers seemed to draw strength from each other’s battles against appetites and emotions, without worrying too much about the precise nature of the ‘addictions’ that had led them there. The amount of cross-addiction was impressive. (‘My name’s Sarah and I’m an alcoholic and cocaine addict with food issues.’) Just as striking was the diversity of the gathering: the attendees were a far more mixed bunch than you’d find in the average workplace or congregation. It made me reflect that addiction really is an equal-opportunities employer, with a potential for shaking up society that we’re only now beginning to appreciate.
You can see the change happening on daytime TV chat shows as well as around the dinner tables of Manhattan and Kensington. Instead of defining themselves in terms of social and ethnic background, people often reduce themselves to a bundle of addiction management strategies. Learned helplessness isn’t fun, exactly, but it certainly gives us something to talk about.
Modern addiction has the overtones of a social movement: the numbers of people involved are so vast and the direction of travel so clear. One of the many reasons political ideologies seem irrelevant is that people are too busy coping with their own bodily dilemmas to invest in grand narratives. The self-absorption one encounters in ‘the rooms’ of various programmes is not strikingly different from the cognitive style of millions of men and women outside them. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that today’s most successful religious movements are those that exploit people’s anxieties about their appetites or tap into addict-centred identity politics – possibly both at the same time.
Addiction has the ability to mould religious beliefs even in the rainforests of South America. In 1999 I had a vivid encounter with a Peruvian peasant cult which was expecting something astonishing to happen in the year 2000. Led by an illiterate shoemaker called Ezequiel, who had anointed himself their Messiah, these ‘Israelites of the New Universal Covenant’ were waiting for the last Inca emperor, Atahualpa, to waken from his sleep in the Amazon jungle. Then Solomon’s Temple would rematerialise in the intoxicatingly thin mountain air of Machu Picchu, the Inca city in the skies. The Israelitas dressed like the Old Testament Jews they had seen depicted in ancient Hollywood epics. On assignment for a magazine, the American photographer Victor Balaban and I hired a boat to travel 100 miles down the Amazon to the Israelites’ colony, Alta Monte. We were greeted by tiny, leather-faced old men dressed like Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments. They took us by torchlight through the jungle to the cult’s newly thatched temple; inside, the crowd of worshippers parted for us, bowing deeply.
I was there to ask the Israelites about their extraordinary apocalyptic prophecies. But that wasn’t what they wanted to discuss. Instead, their stories were about recovery from drugs and alcohol. They were nearly all Andean peasants who had drifted into Lima when the economy fell apart, and most of them had become addicts. Interestingly, the only English speaker in the colony had picked up the language while working as a drug dealer in Miami. ‘I had a white stretch limo until I started the freebasing,’ he said. But the Israelites had cleaned him up and now he was sober with a wife and two daughters.
The Israelites have recently undergone changes: since my visit, Ezequiel has died (failing to fulfil his promise of rising from the dead). But they are still a presence in Peru and, despite their eccentricities, still employing the same recipe of all nearly successful Latin American religious movements – one of deliverance from alcohol and drugs.
Much the same is true in fast-growing churches all over the world. I don’t think I’ve ever visited an African or West Indian Pentecostal church that didn’t devote a lot of time and effort to keeping their members and their families free from drugs and alcohol – and this is true whether the congregation is based in Nigeria, Jamaica or Britain.
In America, meanwhile, the most successful churches pay meticulous attention to worshippers’ appetites – and their anxieties about them. We’re encouraged by the media to think of fundamentalist and evangelical churches as backward-looking. But the reality is that their vision of personal salvation borrows heavily from the secular world’s relentless emphasis on the self. In the stores attached to the churches, believers can buy DVDs, video games, satellite subscriptions and other fixes that mediate their supposedly direct ‘personal relationship with Jesus’. Issues with alcohol, drugs or prescription medication? Try Christian rehab. Ashamed of your bulging waistline? Join a Christian slimming club. (Presumably members are steered away from the popular ‘Jesus cupcakes’ on which the Lord is depicted in icing sugar.)
The 12 steps started life as Christian ‘moral rearmament’ and are easily converted back into evangelical Christianity by interpreting the Big Book’s ‘higher power’ as Jesus. The 12-step-based Christian Track Program, founded in America in 1991, is endorsed by 3,500 churches. Christian treatment centres use it, and it’s also available as an option in secular rehab facilities, in much the same way as kosher food is available on plane flights.
Be warned, though: Bible-based recovery isn’t any cheaper than the regular variety. The Capstone treatment centre in Arizona offers a Christian residential programme for troubled young men aged 14 to 24 who struggle with ‘chemical dependency, substance abuse, sexual addiction, trauma, family conflict, and personal problems including loss, hurt, anger, abuse, depression, low self-esteem, defiance and a rebellious attitude’. The cost? An upfront payment of $17,500, plus two further instalments of $14,850 each. Capstone’s theology is straight-down-the-line evangelical Protestant, and its therapeutic philosophy is similarly dogmatic: parents are informed that addiction is an irreversible brain condition, ‘something similar to diabetes’.17 That is a thoroughly misleading claim, I’d argue – but if you’re spending that sort of money perhaps it’s reassuring to learn that you’re up against a truly powerful enemy.
In London, the thriving middle-class charismatic congregations are full of young men and women who used to take drugs and who, without skilful pastoral supervision, could easily be tempted to started again. A few years ago, I attended a service at one of London’s most successful Anglican charismatic churches. Essentially it consisted of a sequence of spiritual hits in the form of rock songs and slick stand-up routines – perfect for producing dopamine spikes in the audience of born-again Christian hipsters. One particularly intense testimony came from a man called Charlie whom, I suddenly realised, I had last seen puking his guts out of a window of the Randolph Hotel, Oxford, one May Morning in the early 1980s.
Here’s a prediction: any established religion that fails to help people with appetite management issues will be pushed out of the marketplace in the next few decades. By the same token, any religion that can place the recovery of physical health, good looks and appetite control at the centre of its spirituality stands a very good chance of attracting followers. Movements may still choose to define themselves in terms of their doctrines. But, in practice, their growth will depend on their ability to mould their teachings around our narcissistic anxieties. The interesting question is whether they will do so by challenging or exploiting those anxieties. Sometimes it can be hard to tell the difference.
Throughout history, rapid social change has encouraged commentators to adopt an apocalyptic frame of mind – unsurprisingly, since nearly all doomsday prophecies, religious and secular, involve an uncontrollable acceleration of events before the End. I’ve written extensively about these beliefs, so I don’t want to fall into the trap myself when confronting the very different subject of addiction.
In many respects, the quickening of change has been a blessing. The second half of the twentieth century witnessed a sharp fall in deaths from starvation and the infectious diseases that have plagued humanity for millennia. Our growing obesity is less dangerous than it would once have been, thanks to improvements in medical care. In less than a decade, heart attacks in Britain have halved, in part owing to protective statins developed by the ‘evil’ Big Pharma, anti-smoking legislation and better informed hospital treatment.18
But, while welcoming these improvements, we need to ask ourselves whether they aren’t creating space for more insidious attacks on our freedom. For example, have we given serious thought to the question of artificial enhancement of our living experiences? There are already ‘happiness classes’ in some of Britain’s most competitive schools, many of whose pupils will also be having their happiness chemically enhanced thanks to a diagnosis of ADHD. Think back to the Adderall pills that Ivy League students are swallowing like Smarties in order to gain a tiny but crucial edge over their academic competitors. Suppose that an authoritarian country, obsessed with its position in the educational and economic league tables, decides to force attention deficit drugs down the throats of its schoolchildren. As we’ve seen, these medications are as likely to inflict long-term brain damage as they are to enhance the intellect – but they may provide a quick cognitive fix that boosts productivity. Will liberal democracies take a self-sacrificing decision not to embrace this Brave New World? (In Aldous Huxley’s ‘negative utopia’, as he described it, everyone takes a state-produced drug called soma that produces intervals of perfect spiritual pleasure. The rest of the time they’re mostly shopping or having recreational sex; being alone is a source of shame.)
One thing is for sure: certain newly developed countries will have no such scruples. Nor will multinational corporations looking to outsource production to the most efficient partners they can find – meaning those whose employees can stay awake longest as their bosses turn them into speed addicts.
The awkward truth is that the acceleration of technological progress can’t be divorced from the faster production of addictive substances and experiences. This dilemma was brilliantly set out by Paul Graham, a Silicon Valley investor and blogger, in an online article published in 2010. His short essay, ‘The Acceleration of Addictiveness’, makes the point that if we want to stop the processes that addict us, we will also have to call a halt to the experiments that cure diseases. That is because they are products of the same research.
‘Technological progress,’ he states, ‘means making things do more of what we want. When the thing we want is something we want to want, we consider technological progress good. If some new technique makes solar cells more efficient, that seems strictly better. When progress concentrates something we don’t want to want – when it transforms opium into heroin – it seems bad. But it’s the same process at work.’19
The world is more addictive than it was 40 years ago, explains Graham: food, drink, drugs, television and computers are more engaging than ever before. As a result, we’ve got into the habit of liking things too much. ‘As far as I know, there’s no word for something we like too much,’ he says. ‘The closest is the colloquial sense of “addictive”.’ In future, he predicts, anyone who wants to avoid addiction will be condemned to ‘a kind of lonely squirming’. We will increasingly be defined by our willingness to refuse temptation.
Graham is on to something important here – but his theory works better if we replace the notion of liking things too much with that of wanting them too much. It’s not the experience of pleasure that is accelerating in the modern world: it’s the experience of desire, prompted by environmental cues that continue to tantalise us even when the pleasant feelings arising from consumption have evaporated.
As shorthand for our habit of wanting things too much, the colloquial sense of ‘addictive’ is perfectly adequate. Indeed, the imprecise, colloquial way we refer to addiction corresponds more closely to modern reality than supposedly scientific definitions of addiction that reduce it to biologically determined behaviour produced by a (non-existent) disease.
Everybody is theoretically at risk of developing addictive habits, because the stimulation of desire is associated with primitive and vulnerable areas of our brains. Most of us are familiar with the feeling that our appetites are controlling us rather than the other way round. It’s something we struggle against. And that struggle is shaping our lives as profoundly as the struggle against poverty and disease shaped those of our ancestors.
The modern consumer economy is partly fashioned around our inability to exercise willpower. That economy preys on us but also rewards us, since we are part of it and depend for our livelihoods on other people’s vulnerability to temptation. That is not so much a value judgment as a statement of fact. The multiplication of choice, the expansion of the free market and the stimulation of greed are so tightly interwoven as to be almost indistinguishable from each other.
We can’t realistically extricate ourselves from the exploitation of desire: it’s fundamental to all social development. On the other hand, we should be aware that we’ve created an environment for ourselves that seeks to tease out our latent addictive instincts. That teasing process has become so relentless that we scarcely notice it. Whether we’re buying a chocolate bar or a house, the gravitational pull towards things that expand our appetites is getting stronger. You could even argue that all the recent innovations in global financial services have been designed to produce a degree of dependence on credit that would be familiar to any street-corner drug dealer.
We sometimes hear the claim that, as a society, we’ve become ‘addicted’ to spending and to consumer goods. That’s too vague a generalisation to be useful. A better way of putting it would be to say that the ‘addictive personality’ – the familiar term for people who take refuge in short-term sensory rewards – is fast becoming the default personal style of disorientated modern citizens. This isn’t to say that we can easily measure and categorise people’s personalities: the results of such exercises are rarely convincing. We are a long way from being able to identify future addicts, and it’s not clear that we will ever be able to do so. But what I hope this book has illustrated is the direction in which we’re moving – towards government by desires that, thanks to a fundamental mismatch between the evolution of our bodies and the evolution of society, have a tendency to run out of control.
Fortunately, powerful desire doesn’t lobotomise us. In the final analysis, addiction is a disorder of choice, and we’re not doomed to carry on making bad choices to the point of helplessness. The challenge is identifying those bad choices. For me, back in the spring of 1994, that wasn’t so difficult: I’d become sufficiently addicted to alcohol that becoming teetotal felt like being released from prison. But most people drawn into compulsive patterns of behaviour aren’t in such a desperate situation and can’t identify a single substance or experience whose renunciation will change their lives. Instead, they struggle to untangle an assortment of addictive urges from the healthy or harmless stimulation of their appetites. That is not an easy thing to do.
Perhaps we need to rediscover the vigilance that protected our hunter-gatherer ancestors. The quicker we are to spot the technological tricks that manipulate our ‘wanting’ impulse, the greater will be our chance of resisting them.
That’s if we want to, of course.