Conclusion

Every society must cherish its founding principles. Therefore, it is only polite to overlook unsettling connections between free-market principles, dislocation, and addiction. Popular media and books foster this civil myopia, celebrating society's achievements with blinding pyrotechnics and deafening fanfare and publicizing alternative explanations for addiction.

But professionals in the addiction field should forego this civility because, despite the ingenuity and devotion of the practitioners who apply them, theories and methods which ignore the connection between free markets, dislocation, and addiction have proven little better than band-aids applied to the gaping wound that addiction inflicts on free-market society. This is not to say that treatment, harm reduction, and police intervention are useless - only that free-market society mass-produces addiction far faster than these methods can ever hope to reduce it. Under these conditions, a civil and comfortably apolitical denial of reality is an unsustainable luxury.

There have been decades of futile debate about whether addiction is a "criminal" or a "medical" problem. The debate is irresolvable because in free-market society it is neither - It is a political problem. If the political process does not find contemporary wellsprings of psychosocial integration, an increasingly free market-based society will manifest more and more consequences of ubiquitous dislocation -including addiction. Even the best-coordinated mixture of policing, treatment, and harm reduction for drug addiction cannot remedy this situation. Political action is necessary and, in democratic society, politics is everybody's business.

Addiction professionals can take political action by changing the terms of the debate on addiction. We can insist that valid discussion must recognize that addiction is mass-produced in our type of society, and that, therefore, society as well as individuals must change. We can refute the reduction of addiction to a "drug problem" or a "disease". We can show why it is essential to create an environment fit for moderation.

Changing the terms of this debate is a huge task, since the current way of speaking about addiction as an individual, drug-using disease has been established and maintained by a vast public information barrage that has gone on for decades. This public information barrage complements a deeply rooted North American "temperance culture" or "temperance mentality" (Alexander et al., 1998). It benefits professionals who win the responsibility to treat the putative disease. It prospers because the "War on Drugs", which has drawn its justification from it (Alexander, 1990, chap. 8), serves vital commercial and geopolitical purposes for those who control the media (Chomsky, 1992, chap. 4).

Changing the terms of debate may require some short-term sacrifice of professional interests. Police, treatment, and harm reduction professionals, rather than endlessly competing for funds by proclaiming their own achievements, should each be apprising society of their own limitations, showing that no form of intervention directed only towards individual drug users can save the day. Some policemen have bravely spoken out on the limited potential of police intervention (Puder, in press), leading some jurisdictions away from excessive drug law enforcement. Similar forthrightness from treatment and harm reduction professionals would have an equally salutary effect. Treatment professionals can testify that no matter how much treatment is available, most addicts will not accept it voluntarily, that most of those who do accept it will not overcome their addiction in a lasting way, and that imposing it involuntarily is even worse. Harm reduction professionals can testify that most addicts on methadone maintenance programs continue to inject, and most addicts with access to needle exchange programs continue to share needles. Treatment, harm reduction, and policing are compassionate and useful in combination, but society needs to know that it cannot "treat" or "harm reduce" its way out of addiction any more than it can "police" its way out of it. This does not mean that the problem of addiction is hopeless, or that our methods are useless, only that the road to success lies elsewhere.

Scholars around the world are raising a mighty chorus of warnings against the psychological devastation engendered by the free-market society (in addition to ecological, social, and long-term economic devastation). For example: "It is absolutely essential for states and individuals to locate that delicate balance between... a world of hightech, instantaneous communication, idolatry of markets and investment and 'Darwinian brutality'... and... a world with a heartfelt sense of belonging, rootedness, community and identity." (McKenna, 1999). "It is true that restraints on global free trade will not enhance productivity; but maximum productivity achieved at the cost of social desolation and human misery is an anomalous and dangerous idea." (Gray, 1998, p. 83). Surely addiction professionals who work directly with some of the free market's worst casualties have a key role in conveying this warning, even at the cost of some professional mystique.

Moreover addiction professionals have the direct experience to analyse the problems of dislocation and addiction with greater accuracy than generalists can.

It is inaccurate to reduce the complex problem of dislocation to simpler issues, like "eliminating poverty" or "achieving equality". Although poverty and inequality are serious problems for other reasons, both economic privation and discrimination between social classes can be borne without addiction. It is poverty of the spirit, which is called dislocation in this article, that is the precursor of addiction. The key to controlling addiction is maintaining a society in which psychosocial integration is attainable by the great majority of people. People must belong to their society, not just do business with it.

Moreover, it is inaccurate to automatically attribute a realistic approach to the problems of dislocation and addiction to the political "left", although it is the historical opponent of unrestricted application of free-market principles. Rapid expansion of free-market society is currently accepted - either enthusiastically, grudgingly, or unconsciously - by many of those labelled "left", "radical", "labour", "intellectual", or "liberal" on the political spectrum (Goytisolo and Grass, 1999; Dixon, 2000), as well as those on the "right".

It is also inaccurate to link the problem of addiction to corruption within the free-market system including the bias of the current system towards the economic interests of large corporations and rich countries. Dislocation, and consequently addiction, would be endemic in free-market society in its purest form, although they would be easier to manage in a climate of honesty and trust.

Substantially reducing the addiction problem requires nothing less than exercising sensible, humane controls over markets, corporations, environments, and public institutions to reduce dislocation. This cannot be accomplished piecemeal, but requires a coherent policy that will inevitably attenuate the pursuit of ever-increasing wealth and ever-freer markets. Of course it would be naive to hope for a return to any real or imagined golden age. However, it is at least as naive to suppose that society can continue to hurtle forward, ideologically blinded to the structural problems that free markets create.

Changing the language of discourse concerning addiction at this abstract level leads to practical, local changes. As an example, consider the huge amounts of money now spent in British Columbia scanning the countryside with low-flying helicopters, searching for outdoor marijuana plantations. The quest is utterly futile, because the province is immense and because marijuana can be grown indoors with only slightly more capitalisation. Moreover, the great majority of marijuana users suffer no addiction or other discernible ill effects.

The side effect of this futile policing is the transformation of resourceful and prosperous growers who might be mainstays of their rural communities into a shadowy class of farmer-criminals (Poole, 1998). Community-busting proceeds further on occasions when the Royal Canadian Mounted Police arrive in a local community, announce a meeting, and enlist the aid of local people to inform on their neighbours who might be growers, thus sowing further suspicion and division.

At the same time, the provincial government cannot find enough money to support the local schools and hospitals in many of these same remote communities, displacing children and medical patients into adjacent districts, far from families and friends. The police frequently cannot find money to investigate petty crime, destroying the family security of the poor. There are not enough social workers to carefully investigate suspected cases of child abuse. As a consequence some children are destroyed by abuse and others are apprehended when their natural families could be restored to peacefulness with a little support and/or social control.

All of the money now being spent vainly and disruptively attacking marijuana cultivation could be far better spent in the same communities to prevent the dislocation of the children, the sick, and the vulnerable. Reducing dislocation would reduce present and future addiction and other forms of self-destruction.

Standing in the way of this approach is a free-market ideology which decrees that taxes must be cut to improve international competitiveness and that money spent on "welfare" and social services should be diverted to provide training, infrastructure, and subsidies for corporations. The free-market is, after all, costly, and the world's media remind us unceasingly of our duty to nurture this frail flower. Moreover, the idea that free markets are intrinsically dislocating must be profoundly fearsome to those who gain elected office by supporting free-market principles.

The current addiction of politicians to free-market ideology may, in the end, prove more catastrophic than the addictions that are seen on downtown streets or in corporate boardrooms. Change that can truly help with the problem of addiction must start with rejection of overwhelming involvement with free-market principles and proceed to reallocation of resources towards reducing dislocation and away from utterly futile attempts to solve the "drug problem" and cure the "disease" of addiction. It is my belief that the public is warming up to this adventure, although it may take some political assertiveness by addiction professionals and other citizens to help politicians see why they must kick their habit.