Canada Drug Rehab

By Geoff Thompson, MA, CCC
Program Director
Sunshine Coast Health Center

We can learn a lot about addiction and recovery from our current fare of drug prevention programs.

Here are some statistics: According to a 2007 published survey by the Government of Canada, most Canadian youth, aged 15 to 24, reported that they used illicit drugs. Only 39.7% said they have never used, 38% said they used only cannabis, and 23.7% said they used an illicit drug other than cannabis. Almost all youth reported using alcohol, and 82.9% in the last 12 months. Of past year drinkers, 13.8% reported getting drunk weekly and 40.6% at least monthly. (By the way, if there is such a thing as a ‘gateway drug’, then these numbers tell us that it’s alcohol.)

To combat these numbers, communities, schools, and parents spend a lot of energy trying to keep youth away from drugs and alcohol. Most prevention programs are simply local efforts, which have no basis in psychology research or practice. But both the US and Canadian governments tell us that many programs have been studied and have “scientific evidence” that they work. These programs generally use some basic psychology principles to help people learn how to say no, how to deal with peer pressure, how to deal with stress, how to deal with anxiety and depression, and so on.

The key to all these programs is that they point out that drugs are a poor way to deal with what makes us uncomfortable in life. And there are lots of things that make us uncomfortable. Booze is great if you’re going to a dance. It helps you get over shyness. Being intoxicated is a great way of dealing with boredom. Getting high is a great way of dealing with loneliness.

The problem with using drugs for this kind of uncomfortableness is that they can backfire. Having to rely on drugs every time you go dancing, for instance—and having to use more as time goes on because of tolerance—can lead to disaster.

Pointing out the risks involved seems entirely reasonable. But here’s the problem: Regardless of what program designers and governments tell us, top-of-the-line research has shown that our current prevention programs don’t work very well.

It’s important to remember that Bill W., the driving force behind the development of the 12 steps, also understood the benefits of using. He said that intoxication is a substitute for satisfying the urge for wholeness and connection with God. In 1943 at the Shrine Auditorium in LA he told the audience that the alcoholic was a person who was looking for religion in a bottle. But, of course, seeking fulfillment through intoxication always backfires, leading to great suffering.

In this article we’ll explore prevention programs to see why they are not very successful. Knowing this can help you understand the power of drugs and what you or your loved one will likely have to do to recovery from addiction.

Part One — Our Current Approach to Prevention: “Drugs are bad”

Drug prevention programs operate according to the principle that “Drugs are bad, so don’t use them.” Typically, they tell us that using drugs will inevitably cause any number of problems. Studies of the effects of drugs on the brain, physical deterioration of the body, lost jobs, depleted finances, broken families, risk of arrest and incarceration, and so on are marshaled up to convince people to abstain. And many programs invite recovering addicts to tell their story to young people about how drugs destroyed their lives.

It all seems like a good way to keep young people away from drugs. Unfortunately, this approach doesn’t work very well.

Many big-shot researchers have studied the “evidence” of programs that claim to be successful — the ones that the US and Canadian governments have said were scientifically proven to be effective. The researchers discovered that the “evidence” was not very good.

For example, four of the most famous prevention programs are Strengthening Families, Life Skills Training, Project ALERT, and DARE. Researchers examining the evidence for Strengthening Families and Life Skills Training wrote: “Far from supporting the evaluators’ claims concerning the rigour of the findings and their generalisability and public health significance, the results were very fragile, of little practical significance and quite possibly analysis-dependent.” What this means is that the so-called “evidence” that the program worked did not meet basic research standards. Other researchers studied the evidence behind Project ALERT and DARE and found that these programs were of little or no value.

Part Two — Problems with the “Drugs are Bad” Approach

It seems so reasonable to try to stop people from using drugs by telling them all the dangers. And the dangers are not little: lost families, major health problems, lost jobs, mucking up the brain chemistry. And there is the real possibility of death.

But there are a growing number of experts in the field, who are showing why this “drugs are bad” approach is not very effective in preventing drug use. Here are some of their reasons:

1) Prohibition doesn’t work — The idea that drugs are bad is based on, as one researcher said, “the persistence of prohibition as an ideological force.” What this means is that trying to scare people into abstaining is based on ideas of the prohibition movement that helped make drinking illegal in the United States in 1920 and in Canada in 1918. You probably know that prohibition did not work. It was based on a moral stance and not on any scientific understanding of human nature.

2) People don’t believe the message — Surveys of school kids exposed to the “drugs are bad” message have shown that they don’t believe it. They know kids who have used crystal methamphetamine and who didn’t end up in the emergency ward of the hospital. They know kids who use substances and are straight-A students. They know athletes who smoke marijuana. They know kids who get drunk at parties, and the most they seem to be affected is a hangover the next day.

3) Kids like to take risks — One of the pleasures of teenagers is to take risks, including doing things that are illegal (small things, mainly). There’s an excitement involved. A drug prevention program that displays illegal drugs is likely to inspire more curiosity than fear. Interestingly, when addicted famous people talked to kids about drugs, the kids usually thought they could do drugs and then clean up — just as these celebrities did. (By the way, when researchers discovered this, they stopped asking famous people to talk to kids about drugs.)

These are just a few examples; there are many more. But they show that perhaps our current drug prevention programs are wrong-headed.

Part Three — New Research on Prevention

A handful of researchers, knowing that current prevention programs do not work very well, have said that we need to re-think the logic that we use to try to prevent drug use.

Most of these researchers are in England, but a growing number are in Canada and the United States. For example, British researchers have been studying why young people in Britain use ecstasy and ketamine. They have discovered that many young people find positive benefits from intoxication.

The idea that intoxication has rewards is not new. The great psychologist and philosopher William James (the guy who impressed Bill W. so much) was convinced that being drunk or stoned helped the user connect with the universe, find insight into perplexing problems, and generally feel more energized and alive. And, of course, some of the great addict-writers, such as Thomas De Quincey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William S. Burroughs, Eugene O’Neill, and Jack Kerouac said more or less the same thing.

Young people we’ve studied have told us that using ecstasy and ketamine at dance clubs has helped them connect with others in a positive way. They even tell us that they have found long-term benefits of being more empathic (the ability to appreciate what others are feeling).

The second thing they tell us is that intoxication allows them to connect with something greater than they are. In previous articles I’ve talked about how people can feel a sense of belonging while under the influence. Researchers in the United States have studied 18 to 24 year olds who experience the benefit of ecstasy as “transforming the everyday.” The researchers concluded that ecstasy highlights “the extraordinary or transcendental nature of the experience.”

Part Four — Drug Prevention has to Account for the Benefits of Drugs

Modern drug researchers have come up with a “new” idea. As one researcher put it, “Research has failed to explore a significant and integral feature of drug use, primarily the reasons why people use and the benefits they receive.”

People use because they find some rewards for getting intoxicated. Researchers have concluded that we need to understand these benefits if wide are to design drug prevention programs that work. In fact, one researcher has pointed out the obvious: The reason why our current drug prevention programs don’t work is precisely because the benefits that users tell us they get from being intoxicated make them resistant to programs that are based on the approach that “drugs are bad.”

Here are some of the rewards that users have told us about substances: (1) “Alcohol is great for dealing with shyness,” (2) “ecstasy can make you feel closer to others,” and (3) “heroin makes everything okay even when my world is falling apart.” Young users of dextromethorphan tell us that it aids in creating a trans-personal experience. This trans-personal experience means that that intoxication moves the user beyond paying attention to himself and puts him in a state that is beyond time and space.

So, this is good information for you to know as part of how to stay away from drugs and alcohol. If the benefits of intoxication are this feeling of community and this trans-personal experience, then it makes sense that you will have to figure out how to find a sense of belonging and how to finding something in life that makes you feel alive.

This is, of course, the entire purpose of the 12-step program. And it is one of the main themes of addiction treatment at Sunshine Coast Health Center.

By Geoff Thompson, MA RCC
Program Director
Sunshine Coast Health Center

The main thing about alcohol and drugs is that they alter our states of consciousness. As obvious as this is, it is amazing that few people bother even talking about it.

What we read and hear about is that people use because of depression, anger, problems in the family, problems at work, trauma, and so on. In reality, there are many ways of dealing with these problems. The vast majority people don’t turn to drugs for relief. In fact, they cannot imagine that getting drunk or loaded regularly is even a reasonable possibility.

When we do addiction research, we discover that addicts use drugs when then are sad…but they also use drugs when they are happy. They use drugs when they are angry…but they also use when they are not angry. They use drugs when they are depressed…but they also use drugs when they are not depressed. And so on. Lots of people who suffer from addiction grew up in a chaotic family, and lots of people who suffer from addiction grew up in a stable family. We also know from research that those with addiction problems struggle with boredom and loneliness and the feeling that life just isn’t all that interesting or exciting without the substance and the lifestyle that goes with it.

We seem to talk about everything except the obvious: some people take substances because they like the feeling they get from being intoxicated. Whatever this feeling is, it is more appealing than being clean and sober.

Most addiction treatment programs do not talk about the drug experience. They argue that talking about the high promotes drug use. Others don’t talk about it because, frankly, they are not familiar with what the experts have reported. Still others think that it is just plain deviant. But at Sunshine Coast Health Center, we believe that it provides a clue into why intoxication is so appealing for the addict. It offers a clue to the drug’s power, beyond just calling it a disease. 

So what is this altered state of consciousness? What makes it appealing? This month we’ll have a look at what the experts and addicts tell us about the experience of intoxication.

This is very important information for recovery. Understanding the appeal of intoxication helps us understand what recovery is all about.

Part One — William James and Making Sense of Mysteries

Alumni of Sunshine Coast Health Center may recall workshops discussion on William James’ book, The Varieties of Religious Experience, which had a profound influence on Bill Wilson, the driving force behind the creation of Alcoholics Anonymous. 

James was one of the most influential thinkers in the last one hundred years. He was fascinated by how the human mind works, including different states of consciousness. He even studied various drug-induced altered states, convinced that such knowledge would help us understand what it meant to be human. 

Intoxication by sniffing nitrous oxide (laughing gas) provided James with one example of why drugs are so powerful. When someone is high on laughing gas, says James, the person gets a “tremendously exciting sense of an intense metaphysical experience.” What he means by this is that the person seems to find answers to the mysteries of life, the big complicated questions. How do we explain good and evil? What is the meaning of my life? Intoxicated, the person with spontaneity and ease sees “depth beneath depth” of insight. “Normal consciousness offers no parallel.” In fact as the high goes away, the person “is left staring vacantly.”

About alcohol, he talks of a sense of “reconciliation [of seeming opposites]…which seems silly to lookers-on” but which is a key part of its temptation. He describes, what he calls, this reconciliation of opposites from personal experience. While intoxicated, James says that he wrote down opposites—God and devil, good and evil, life and death, ecstasy and horror. He said that they came together with “infinite rationality,” that he could see the logic that unified them.

Twenty years later, James would write that the power of alcohol is its power to make the imbiber feel that he has touched a higher reality. Grass is greener, jokes are funnier, and even total strangers can be instant friends.

James was fully aware that sober people would dismiss any idea that a drunk could find any profound meaning while intoxicated. But James was serious about this idea. The altered state of consciousness allowed the drunk to be conscious of a reality that sober people were blind to.

James had no doubt why nitrous oxide and alcohol had such great appeal. Imagine the feeling of firmly understanding some of the mysteries of the universe, of seeing some of the hidden ways in which you, me, and the world are connected. Sobriety, in comparison, can be rather lifeless and boring.

Part Two — Freedom to be Yourself

Here are some things that addicts said to researchers about what it’s like to be high on crack cocaine:

“I felt like Superman. I got to move mountains.”

“It was the feeling that I had been searching for.”

“It’s not like the personal joy of climbing a mountain…and you finally make it to the top. It’s not like finishing a…marathon…you got that super high, that rush or whatever. The high from crack is higher, more intense than those feelings.”

“It’s like the world world, life is beautiful. I feel great. I have a lot of ideas. My mind just opens tremendously. My mind is like really fast and I think better. I feel good. I feel life is wonderful. I can do anything.”

These are quite amazing statements. The researcher, Joaquin Trujillo from the US Department of State, was interested in understanding what the appeal of a crack cocaine high is. He concluded that crack gave the user the feeling that he or she could be human.

What he meant by this is that the addict had the freedom to be him/herself. They described this feeling of being free from shame, free from the pressures of responsibility. Some described this freedom of being “numb” to negative and uncomfortable feelings.

At Sunshine Coast we often talk about being true to the self (so does Alcoholics Anonymous). This freedom to be oneself, to feel comfortable in your own skin, to feel comfortable in the world, is what many people tell us is the appeal of drugs. 

Part Three — Connecting with the Universe

Feeling at one with the universe—this sounds like some bad Hollywood movie about the 1960s, with everyone talking about cosmic consciousness.

Psychologist Jonathan Diamond describes our desire for drugs this way: it is “not only to escape pain that humanity turns to drugs, it is for communion with God.” And this idea was, of course, Bill Wilson’s brilliant insight into why alcoholics drank — and became the baseline for Alcoholics Anonymous.

And it is also the conclusion that the Government of Canada arrived at in its famous 1971 Royal Commission on the Use of Non-Medical Drugs in Canada. Here’s a paragraph from the interim report:

“Modern drug use would definitely seem to be related…to the collapse of religious values…. [T]here is definitely the sense of identification with something larger, something to which one belongs as part of the human race.”

Even if this statement did not come from the federal government, it’s a remarkable conclusion on why people use drugs.

Furthermore, former clients of Sunshine Coast know from their time with us that this is one of the key conclusions that the Nobel-Prize winning addict-playwright, Eugene O’Neill, also came to.

Being at one with the universe means that you feel connected. You don’t feel as if you are an outcast. You have that wonderful feeling of belonging. And if you have the feeling that you belong, then you must also have the feeling that you are important because this is where you are meant to be.

Part Four — Sunshine Coast Clients

in this article we’ve been examining how scholars have looked at the experience of being intoxicated. Each example provided in this article showed that addiction is powerful because of the positive feelings that drugs provide.

At some point during treatment at Sunshine Coast, clients are asked to recall a time when they were high or drunk. Then clients are asked what they got from the drug experience. Of course, a typical answer was, “nothing!”, however, staff learned to be skeptical of such a response because one of the truths about human beings is that everyone does everything for a reason.

When we talk deeply to clients about the drug experience, we always find that drug use was not merely escaping pain. There was some big payoff. Some typical things we hear from clients are:

“This is the way I was meant to feel.”

“It gave me a break from always having to do things for other people. Got rid of all the stress and worry, so I could do what I wanted.”

“I could think about things that fascinated me.”

“I loved how fast I could think…I could make sense of things.”

“I loved listening to music stoned. It filled me up.”

Conclusion

One of the keys to recovery is to have these experiences that make life worth living, but without the drugs. And that takes time and practice. There can be no sitting back, expecting that life will somehow magically come alive; people in recovery have to work at it.

The thing for people in recovery to remember is that all this is and was inside you from the start. You just needed the drugs to bring it out. Now, in recovery, you have to find a more natural way. But, as people with good recovery will tell you, it gets better.