Johann Hari & Naomi Klein: Does Capitalism Drive Drug Addiction? | Democracy Now!

  • “your grandmother was not turned into a junkie by her hip replacement operation” ⤴️
  • “the right-wing theory is it’s a moral failing, you’re a hedonist, you party too hard. The left-wing theory is it takes you over, your brain is hijacked. Bruce says it’s not your morality, it’s not your brain; it’s your cage. Addiction is largely an adaptation to your environment.” ⤴️
  • “Twenty percent of American troops in Vietnam were using heroin a lot” ⤴️
  • “They came home, and virtually all of them just stopped, because if you’re taken out of a hellish, pestilential jungle, where you don’t want to be, you can die at any moment, and you go back to a nice life in Wichita, Kansas, you can bear to be present in your life.” ⤴️
  • “If in fact it’s not the chemicals, if in fact it’s isolation and pain that cause the addiction, then it suddenly throws into sharp contrast the idea that we need to impose more isolation and pain on addicts in order to make them stop, which is what we currently do.” ⤴️
  • “the engine of our society, is geared towards making us connect with things.” ⤴️
  • “We’ve created a society where significant numbers of our fellow citizens cannot bear to be present in their lives without being drugged” ⤴️
  • “The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection.” ⤴️
  • “we are trained from a very young age to focus our hopes and our dreams and our ambitions on things we can buy and consume. And drug addiction is really a subset of that.” ⤴️
  • “Vancouver specifically being this city of people who have been severed from place, right? A very, very—you know, a relatively new city even in the context of a settler country like Canada.” ⤴️
  • “many of the people on the Downtown Eastside are First Nations and have been, you know, violently severed from their land and culture.” ⤴️
  • ““Well, I’m a homeless junkie. What can I do?” And he had a really simple idea at first. He got together a group of the addicts, and he said, “Why don’t we—not anyone else, just us, the addicts—why don’t we just start patrolling the alleyways? We’ll have like a timetable. We’ll patrol the alleyways. And when we spot someone ODing, we’ll just call an ambulance.” Right? So they started doing that. And within a few months, the overdose rate started to really significantly fall” ⤴️
  • “the success of programs like AA that are about confronting the problem in community” ⤴️
  • “we don’t live in a culture that really does meetings very well.” ⤴️
  • “an excuse to get in a room together and have a conversation, because we don’t know how to do it without an excuse” ⤴️
  • “for something as complex as human addiction, we need a really broad menu of things. And I’m in favor of adding things to the menu, not taking anything away.” ⤴️
  • “we talk all the time about individual recovery. And that has real value, and, you know, he’s in favor of it, I’m in favor it. But he says we need to talk much more about social recovery. Something’s gone wrong with us not just as individuals, but as a group.” ⤴️
  • “whenever I talk about climate change, like the first question is: What can I do? And it’s like, well, honestly, you can’t do anything. You cannot do this by yourself.” ⤴️
  • “the worst thing you can do for someone you love who is struggling with addiction is to practice tough love” ⤴️
  • “they were trying to deal with something inside themselves by making it external and trying to hunt it down or destroy it.” ⤴️
  • “I think a lot of the anger about addiction and addicts is fear and anxiety about our own addictive impulses rising within us” ⤴️
  • “what is it that we’re looking for in our phones and on Facebook and Twitter? It’s some ephemeral shadow of community and connection.” ⤴️
  • “we all have some behaviors where the rational part of us doesn’t want to do it, but the irrational part of us does it anyway.” ⤴️
  • “I wonder if there’s a relationship between this atomized, more addiction-prone society and the panic at the idea of economic growth not happening.” ⤴️
  • “we may have to return to the living standards of the 1970s, which Elizabeth Kolbert thought was like saying we have to go live in caves. And there were bad things about the 1970s—don’t get me wrong—but they weren’t living in caves.” ⤴️
  • “if we let go of growth as our primary measure of success, then we would have to talk about what we actually value, like what is it that we want.” ⤴️
  • “There is rehab, and there is psychological support, and that’s valuable. But it’s much more rehab based on the lessons of Rat Park. It’s about reconnecting addicts with society. The goal of the decriminalization was to make sure that every addict in Portugal had something to get out of bed for in the morning. So, say you used to be a mechanic, you got a smack problem, you know, your life fell apart. When you’re ready, they’ll got to a garage, and they’ll say, “If you employ this guy for a year, we’ll pay half his wages.” Or microloans for addicts, so like they’re given a microloan to set up a removals firm or something.” ⤴️
  • “partly about appealing to people’s conservative instincts about the desire for order and cleanliness and all of those things” ⤴️
  • “legalization does not mean, obviously, anyone can buy anything. No one wants there to be a crack aisle in CVS. You know, legalization means different things for different drugs. It means regulating them, you know, in various ways.” ⤴️
  • “this history is intimately tied to social control and populations being controlled.” ⤴️
  • “I’ve yet to find any evidence of a political leader who, when their relative becomes an addict, calls the cops. You know, they don’t want this applied to the people they care about. This is very much, you know, something for poor people, disadvantaged people.” ⤴️
  • “no one wants the drug war enforced against anyone we care about. And partly, I guess, what you’re saying and what I’m saying is we should care about everyone.” ⤴️