--Reverend Terence E. Tanner, London, 1979
| "Addicts are the scapegoat of our age." --Reverend Terence E. Tanner, London, 1979 |
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Bruce K. Alexander, Peaceful Measures, Canada's Way Out of the 'War on Drugs'. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990.To order, click here. |
Bruce Alexander, along with his friend and colleague at Simon Fraser University, Barry Byerstein, have long been researchers of the dynamics of addiction and advocates of drug policy reform. Both are mentors of mine and also dear friends. Both were part of that select group that encouraged me to create the Drug Policy Foundation and were enormously helpful in the early and mid-stages of my involvement with that important organization.
This book - which, thankfully, is not out of print -- is Professor Alexander's important contribution to helping his adopted country (he is a transplanted American, a fact not revealed in the book) take a sensible approach to addiction and addicts. It is full of surprising information about the development of the war-on-drugs mentality in a generally peaceful country. For example, the legal powers of Canadian police in regard to search and seizure are awesome in comparison to such constitutional powers in the United States. Even worse, the admitted and open practices of many of Canada's finest, including the fabled Mounties, in dealing with suspected addicts should be, and often are, an embarrassment in any civilized country. It has been accepted legal practice for Mounties to approach suspected addicts on the streets, choke them, thus forcing them to disgorge the drugs often hidden in condoms in their mouths; the discovery of the drugs after the fact providing, in the minds of the enlightened judges, probable cause for the violent search.
Among the most impressive intellectual
contributions of the book are the many sections dealing with the nature of
addiction. Addicts, their loved ones and therapists, as well as
policy makers, may have their minds expanded by a reflective review of
those sections. For example, Alexander disputes the disease model of
addiction and points out the functional values that a state of addiction
brings to a human being, even one taking powerful narcotics to feed that
addiction. "Adaptive addiction" may be a rational person's
approach to dealing with an otherwise intolerable personal situation such
as a crushing sense of failure. He also divides the status of
addiction into negative and positive categories, and manages to find
positive values in negative addiction.
This is a
complicated book and it has given many of my students sleepless nights
because they knew they had to face an exam from me on some of its most
convoluted passages. At the same time it is realistic and
hopeful. Addiction, like life itself, is not simple or easy to
understand. Bruce Alexander wades into all aspects of this briar
patch and in the end finds enormous hope in the power of the human will to
change - both one's country's drug policies and also one's personal
habits, whether based on an apparent addiction to drugs or to the many
non-drug compulsions he describes.
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