Rev Left Radio - Drugs, Addiction, and Social Conditions

Episode Date: January 20, 2019

Mel joins Breht in-studio to discuss drugs, addiction, trauma, and mental illness and their connections to the social conditions which capitalism manifests and imposes upon us.  Topics discussed include childhood trauma, pharmaceutical companies profiting off of addiction epidemics, the family unit under capitalism, the limitations and failures of AA, Left organizing around the issues of addiction, the necessary politicization of mental illness, alienation, the complicated emotional landscape of addiction in the family, the power of community, evolving as social/communal animals, and much more!  Contact our guest Mel on Twitter @ColdBrewedTool Outro Song: "Life is Ill" by sole, you can find and support his music here: https://sole.bandcamp.com/track/life-is-ill You can listen to sole's podcast, Solecast, here: https://www.soleone.org ---------------------------------------- Our logo was made by BARB, a communist graphic design collective! You can find them on twitter or insta @Barbaradical. Please reach out to them if you are in need of any graphic design work for your leftist projects!  Intro music by Captain Planet. You can find and support his wonderful music here:  https://djcaptainplanet.bandcamp.com Rev Left Spin-Off Shows: Black Banner Magic (exploring the Weird Left and the Occult from an Anarchist perspective): https://www.patreon.com/blackbannermagic Hammer and Camera (The communist Siskel and Ebert): https://www.patreon.com/hammercamera ---- Please Rate and Review Revolutionary Left Radio on iTunes. This dramatically helps increase our reach. Support the Show and get access to bonus content on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio Follow us on Twitter @RevLeftRadio This podcast is officially affiliated with The Nebraska Left Coalition, the Nebraska IWW, Socialist Rifle Association (SRA), Feed The People - Omaha, and the Marxist Center. Join the SRA here: https://www.socialistra.org/

Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. Today on our show we have my comrade Mel in to talk about drugs, addiction, and social conditions. We talk about mental illness and its relationship to capitalism, corporate profiting off of the drug epidemic, etc. Really excited about this episode. I think it marks us really focusing on contemporary issues in the same way that motherhood under capitalism focused on it people really sort of liked that episode a lot, and so I hope this is an accessible leftist analysis of drugs and addiction in our society. Before we get to the episode, our rating and reviewing on iTunes has taken a little bit of a dip as I've been targeted by various right-wing

reactionary sources. They've gone on to our page on iTunes and left shitty reviews, and it's brought in our five-star rating down to a 4.5-star rating. So one very simple way to help the show without spending even a cent on us, is to just go to iTunes, leave us a five-star positive review and sort of beat back some of these reactionary assholes who are trying to make our show look shitty. So yeah, having said that, let's go ahead and get into this really important discussion on drugs and addiction and social conditions with Mel. Okay, my name's Mel. I'm an anarchist from Omaha, Nebraska. I am a journalist, copywriter, and graduate student. I am also a recovering alcohol and drug abuser. I was sober for about three and a half years, a couple years back. I think I've been out in the drinking world again for about a year and a half. And I did the whole 12-step recovery. And prior to that, I had. quite a wild ride with drugs and alcohol.

So I feel like I have quite a wide, varied range of experience with this topic in particular. Yeah. And, you know, this is a very touchy, sensitive subject and topic. And I just wanted to say up front that obviously we're not pretending to be professionals or doctors or experts. We're just two working class people who have had, who have lived with addiction. In your case, actually going through it yourself. And in my case, very, very close family members have been, you know, you know, brutally addicted to substances, which we'll probably get into as we go through this

conversation. But given the sensitive nature of this topic, is there any caveats or anything you want to say up front, just kind of clear the air before we get into these issues, let people know where you're coming from, and that we're going to do our best to do this huge topic justice, but that we're also not experts at the same time. Yeah. Obviously, drug and alcohol addiction in the United States specifically is a rather complex. And, um, very deeply personal, very varied experience for everyone. It's a topic that is difficult for many people to talk about, requires you to sort of hold a mirror up to your weaknesses and ability to keep yourself away from certain substances. And for me, I am no expert. I am doing my best

to do this topic justice. I'm actually, I really hope that I do. And my opinion, are my own, especially with some of the things we're going to talk about later. And I will say that there are more than just, there's more than just one path to recovery if you find yourself in the throes of addiction. And there is no true path. There's no only right one. Whatever gets you to a place where you are no longer subject and enslaved to this issue is a good one and a right one. And so with any of my stronger opinions, I don't want any listeners to think that I would ever denigrate them for trying to find some way out of addiction if they find themselves in that place. Right. And definitely when we post this on social media, people's feedback, people's

own experiences that they feel comfortable sharing them, any sort of like expansion or even constructive criticism about anything we say here is more than welcome. This is not, you know, Mel and I talking at people. This is us starting a conversation that I think doesn't get a lot of, doesn't get the attention that it deserves on the left in our organizing circles. And we talk about theory and praxis. This is a huge sort of elephant in the room that is not always discussed. And so we're hoping to start that conversation or help that conversation along here. I know this is very, very personal. You talked about it a little bit in your introduction. Would you just like to set the stage a little bit and talk about some of your struggles with drugs and alcohol, how that went,

how that affected your life, et cetera, just as sort of, so people can kind of get some insight into what you've dealt with before this conversation starts? Sure, yeah. So I didn't start drinking until I was about 17, started smoking weed probably around the same time. It wasn't really a big deal for me in high school. I went to a private Catholic high school and just didn't fall in with a group of people who did that sort of stuff. It wasn't until I moved to Colorado.

I was going to college in general. that I came into contact with, like, the most epic binge drinking I've ever experienced. You know, these incredibly smart university students would get their homework done every day at a certain time. And it would be this mass exodus off campus to go to parties, like five or six party houses around the neighborhood every night, every single night, seven days a week. We were just, you know, constantly drinking, constantly boozing up. And over the course, of that first year in college, I fell in with some crowds of people that were not the best people, let's say that. I was, you know, 18, just moved out of my one town that I had lived in

my entire life and willing to try anything and everything. You know, came in contact with psychedelics. I started doing Molly and cocaine. I fell in with like the rave crowd and grew out my Mohawk and started going to raves and, you know, and the people that I met were rough. And I just, I don't know, I fell into it a little too hard. And before I knew it, I was just not okay, dropped out of school, constantly drinking. I think I could put down a handle of whiskey and, you know, less than an hour to myself. I'm 110 pounds, by the way. I was actually smaller than I am now.

So you can imagine, you know, my 21st birthday lasted four days and I don't remember half of it, you know. And in the process, got into really shitty abusive relationships. I was assaulted in a relationship by my boyfriend. I went through horrific traumatic events that I believe would not have happened to me if I hadn't been so hyper-focused on. what I was consuming. You know, I was very depressed. I was dealing with the symptoms of PTSD. I was stressed out financially. And, you know, there were a lot of different things that contributed to my drinking and my drugging. And it wasn't until I crashed my car right after I turned 21 and woke up in detox that I realized that maybe I needed to do something different.

So I moved back to Omaha, and I got sober, and I stayed sober for three and a half years. And over the course of those three and a half years, I got therapy and restarted my life. Yeah. And, you know, I'm still working out some of the kinks that I had introduced to my life in the tragedy that was my young 20s, really. So I don't know. I feel like my experience isn't necessarily unique. it's pretty typical for people who are addicts or alcoholics. And I don't know, I guess I could say that I became an expert in that sort of life, you know. Well, we're glad that you're safe and

you're okay. Mel and I have organized together. And you are also a journalist. So that comes into play in this next question. We start talking about empirical data. But I do want to say also, before we get into this, is that the maladies of depression and anxiety, and addiction really flow together. They complement each other. They fuel one another. And you'll often find people with addiction problems that also have problems with depression and anxiety.

They're just par for the course that come together. I know the people in my life who have been addicted all have struggled with depression and anxiety. And we're going to get into those issues in a bit. But I guess the way to start this conversation is addressing some statistics and empirical data. And as I said, you are a journalist and you've done research for this. So based on your research, how big of an addiction epidemic do we

currently have in this country, especially regarding the opioid epidemic, and how many people in the U.S. die daily from addiction and overdoses? Daily figures I don't have. I could probably do the math here really quick, but I did poll some CDC statistics. Their most recent statistics stretched back to 2017. The report that I have will be updated, I'm sure, once they finished polling all the data for 2018. But in 2017, there were over 70,000 drug overdose deaths in the United States. 47,000 of them, about 68% involved opioids. The majority of those opioids were not prescription. They were, what do they call them? Synthetic. Synthetic opioids. They call them IMF. It's essentially synthetic fentanyl. And, you know, our fearless leader,

used the opioid epidemic as a bargaining ship and his recent address to the nation. And, you know, I feel I have to address that statistic. While the vast majority of heroin does come over the southern border from Central America, that's not the problem we have in this country. The problem we have in this country is a synthetic opioid epidemic from manufacturers shipping these synthetic opioids into legal points of entry through the mail and dumping them in the street. of the United States. And the problem with fentanyl is that when it's synthetically made and has not been scheduled through the FDA or any of that, you find that it's incredibly potent. And people

oftentimes don't know that that's what they're getting when they are shooting up heroin on the street. And these increases are insane. From 2016 to 2017, synthetic opioid involved overdose death rates increased by 45%. Wow. And the CDC firmly believes that there really is no end in sight. We're going to see this worsen as the years go on. The highest death rates this last year was in males aged 25 to 44, and the largest relative increases occurred among the black population

and American Indian and Alaska natives. Now granted, these statistics, states don't have separate reporting standards. Some of these states barely have credible data that comes out of it, including Nebraska, which is a thing. And so it could really be 10 times worse. We just don't have the data to support that. And, you know, this, I was reading through this data and I was looking at it and I was

shocked, really. You know, we all hear about this opioid epidemic that's happening in this country. I never had direct personal experience being addicted to it. But that's horrific, you know. People are just falling over in the streets all the time due to this problem. And it seems like the administration that we live in is not interested in trying to find solutions to it, which is frustrating. Yeah. You know.

Of course not. In the administration, the very structure of our society literally can't solve that problem, I argue. and we'll get into that a little bit. You know, I've certainly had, I've been to funerals of friends my age throughout the years who have died specifically from opioid abuse. And, you know, the ravages, especially when you're talking about a 20-something-year-old, you know, seeing the parents when you walk in, I mean, oh, I mean, it's really heartbreaking. And the fact that that is happening all over this country, it's not the first time, though.

I mean, the crack epidemic of the 80s, for example, it's also worth pointing out the differences and how we address those things when the opioid. opioid epidemic largely hits white communities. You know, it's all of a problem. And Fox News will cover it as such. When these epidemics hit, you know, communities of color, that same outrage is not there. In fact, it's just more reason to go and punish those communities, lock them up, split apart families, cause more devastation. Right. So that should always be in the background when we talk about these epidemics. And I think most of our listeners are intuitively aware of that. Right. But you did talk about pharmaceutical corporations and the role that they play. And a big

part of this discussion is going to be getting at the ways that capitalism and the social conditions that we live in sort of exacerbate, create, and perpetuate these problems. And one element of that is actual just corporate profiteering. So what role do pharmaceutical corporations play in creating and perpetuating these epidemics? Yeah. So there are some big pharmaceutical companies that are the creators of addiction recovery drugs. So drugs like methadone, suboxone, Naxalone, you know, Narcan, essentially, these companies that create and push these addiction recovery drugs into our society have recently, it's recently been discovered in the last couple of years that they are big donors to recovery advocacy groups, specifically for opioids.

And the problem with, it sounds all great, right? You know, it's like, oh, okay, you know, these companies that are making these drugs that save lives are also putting some of their profits back into these advocacy groups. What we're finding, though, at least in like the bit of reading that I've done, is that these advocacy groups are hiding their agenda, it feels like. They're not being super open about how much money these corporations are giving these groups. It's found that some of these board members for these nonprofits are actually directly connected to big pharma or work for big pharma and it was always when i was in the 12-step program

there was a rehab facility that we used to take meetings to where we witnessed the entire group of people who had been dropped into this three four or five month rehab were being diagnosed in what's called a dual diagnosis so depression and alcoholism or um i don't know schizoaffective disorder and opioid addiction, and they were being prescribed these medications that typically human population usually doesn't come in contact with. And so you would be sitting there out of table across from someone trying to get sober, and it looked like they had just knotted off into a coma. They were so drugged at these rehabs. And we discovered that the people that were running these private facilities were getting kickbacks from the drug companies that

were sending them these drugs that they were then giving to people trying to recover, you know. And like, apparently this is pretty widespread. The rehab industry in Florida, if I remember correctly, has been doing this for a long time. And so what I see is, you know, it's not that hard to draw the line between these advocacy groups who are, you know, getting, in some cases, over a million dollars from Big Pharma every year, like suddenly are pushing these prescription drugs into the hands of the people that are trying to get sober. And oftentimes, like methadone and Suboxone can be just as addictive as heroin or morphine, you know. So it's like, let's perpetuate this cycle of addiction just on a different substance.

And then, you know, who knows, maybe they'll make something that'll get you off methadone in the future. And then you'll buy that. And it just does, I don't like it. That addiction recovery cycle. And we know when a corporation is investing a million dollars in an advocacy group, it's not because their heart, swelled three times its size and they care about people. It's because they want to return on that investment. And so when you see that amount of cash going into these things, it serves a dual purpose for them because on one, just on a shallow surface level, it's public relations. Look, we're doing

this thing. We're trying to help. But the underbelly is, of course, no, you're not just doing it out of the charity of your heart. You're doing it for a return on your investment. And that means, you know, having, let's say, some of these groups pushing the pills that you make to solve the problem that you help create with the pills that you make. Right. Well, it's like, it's brutal. It's like what, especially because these nonprofit groups are not, you know, being transparent about what they're using the money for, you know, it's just, or that they even receive those donations in the first place. And, you know, people had to do some digging to find that. And it's just like, if you're willing to hide the fact, just the very fact that you're getting these kickbacks from this company donations, kickbacks, that's what they are, you know, then eyebrows are going to be raised. You know, why would you hide it if it's totally innocent? Exactly. You know. And once you start asking those questions and you start zooming out, you do see that there's a lot of financial interests invested in the status quo, not only at the level of big pharma and corporate profiteering, but all the way down like the drug war, private prisons, all along the spectrum of this war on drugs and this opioid epidemic and this addiction epidemic, etc. People actually find ways to make money. And so they're actually invested in keeping the status quo as it is. There's very little room there to solve the problem. if you're making money on it still being a problem. And we see that all along the ladder there.

I do want to transition a little bit and talk about trauma and the role that it plays in addiction. I feel like often, and we'll get into this more, but often in our society that fetishizes science to some extent, the way that we think about addiction starts to become just a neurochemistry issue. The biology of your brain is such that, you know, you have this mental illness and or you're addicted here, and so we need to address it simply on the level of the brain. And part of the argument that's going to come out through this discussion is that

there's underlying social conditions that play into addiction. One of those is individual trauma. People that I know in my life who are brutally addicted to substances suffered incredible trauma. I'm not going to say the specific person in my life for their own anonymity, but somebody very close in my life was sexually abused by their pediatrician as a child. But their stepfather came into a family and was brutal towards this person in my life to the extent that they would make them eat dinner in the basement with the lights off as a four-year-old as form of punishment. Never, no love, no, nothing like that. And so that trauma results in a lifelong addiction that's still ongoing.

So in your opinion and in your experience, what role does trauma play in addiction? Huge rule. A lot of addiction specialists have drawn a pretty cool. clear line between childhood trauma and substance abuse later on. Especially, it goes for horrific trauma like that. It could be something as simple as prolonged bullying at school, which is not simple, obviously, but, you know, it's anything that causes a sort of interruption in being able to cope with the stress that surrounds you, leads you to seek out ways to cope with

it. And for a lot of kids, especially in Nebraska, I can't remember exactly how much, but a very fair like significant portion of kids from ages 12 to 19 in Nebraska engage in binge drinking activities like every week you know and that's just out of the people that they could contact for a survey you know and there a lot of a lot of the problem is that adolescent kids develop substance abuse problems which then leads to more trauma. In my case, I was 18, 19, and I was stressed and worried about how to fit in in college. And so I started binge drinking because that's what everyone else did. And then that led to

significant trauma in my own life and symptoms of PTSD, flashbacks, nightmares, like being unable to be out in society. And so my way to cope with it was to continue drinking, you know. And you can see that across the board, especially in leftist protest spaces. How many of our comrades who have experienced the significant trauma of being fired upon by police? Or, you know, spending a year and a half in limbo waiting to see if your court case is going to fall through the floor, you know. Or in our case, having a comrade who is trans being dead named and put into the opposite gender category inside the prison system itself, which is a brutally traumatic experience. Exactly. Yeah. So you have all these very things. very specific, unique experiences to the leftist community where, you know, there are, thank

God, you know, some really great mutual aid defenders who are really trying to, like, create these communities where there's support there. But oftentimes, even in a tight-knit community, like many communities in the leftist circle in the United States, these people who are, you know, unable to voice how they're trauma has affected them or are ashamed of it or afraid of it will turn to something like substance abuse, like drinking and drugging in order to cope with that. And, you know, I've done it. I know plenty of people who have done it. I've gone to the funerals of people who have done it. For me, personally, I didn't realize just how much I was using the substances that I was taking

as that coping mechanism until I was on the other side of significant, brutal, grueling therapy for the traumas that I experienced, you know, and many addiction specialists and psychologists will agree that, like, there's a cycle here and that it's universal to anyone who experiences something so jarring as, you know, something that's going to upend their own personal, emotional equilibrium. Definitely. And, you know, talking about cycles and childhood trauma, a lot of times people who suffer brutal trauma as a child never, as you say, find ways to cope or get through that trauma, and then that trauma gets then passed on to their kids when they have children.

And so you live in these tight cycles of trauma and addiction, and there's really no way out. I think, and maybe we'll get into this a little bit more when we talk about solutions from the left, but I do think that addressing childhood trauma, and so far that's a piece of this puzzle, does involve society addressing the failures of the family unit. Because sometimes if all you have is the family unit to take care of you, to find out what your needs are and the people in that family unit are broken from past trauma, then that's how the cycle repeats itself. If we have a social response to childhood trauma, a systematic way of addressing it, you know, perhaps we can We can go a long way in rooting out the cycle, or at least putting an end to some of these cycles.

But, again, in a capitalist society who puts no value on that, who doesn't really think about community or social addressing of these things and in the conservative realm actually deifies the family unit as I think like Thatcher and stuff would talk about the family unit as the only collective unit that's worth mattering and everything else is just individuals. You know, that prevents us from really addressing some of these traumas, especially in childhood. Right. And then just as somebody on another note that lives with somebody who's an addict or, you know, has grown up with somebody who's an addict, it's really, it was really challenging to me to get beyond my resentment, my anger, feeling like I've been robbed of some certain person in my life or some, you know, guiding force in my childhood. And as I've grown up and developed and learn more of these things, I've really changed that to a view of like love and compassion and forgiveness. when you see the trauma that underlies the addiction, at least for me, it just made me, like, kind of, like, get sad and, like, really care.

So at this point, it's like, I don't care how it... I'll always try to help you, but I'm not going to try to be like, I don't, you need to stop being an addict or I'm leaving, the intervention model, if you will. They had the whole TV show, you know, where they go in and they would just shame people and say, we're leaving your life and you stop being like this as if it's just a character flaw or something.

And, you know, it's just really disgusting. thing. So I don't know, at least in my experience, love and compassion and forgiveness has helped me live in a family with an addict and not be consumed by anger and resentment. Does that ring true to you? It does, yeah. I mean, to a certain point, like, I don't know, I know that there are certain individuals who just know that if they're living with an addict or they're living with an alcoholic and they see no end in sight, that the only thing that they can do to keep themselves from falling into despair or a trap of despair is to lovingly tell this person that, you know, you're going to have to live without me for a while, you know, like, I have to be able to, like, keep this boundary.

Sure. And it's done to me, you know, my family said, we love you, stop. If you can't stop, we can't be here, you know. Never the intervention model, God, if I found myself in an intervention, I might have, I don't know, set the hotel on fire or something. just, I don't know, it's rough, it's difficult. When you're in that experience, you know, I can see, I could see the resentment in the people around me. I could feel resentment in myself when I came up against individuals who were also struggling with addiction.

And addiction itself is a singularly traumatic event for everyone who is touched by it, whether you're the one who's addicted to the substance or you're the one who's on in it. able to spend a day sober or, you know, your roommates, your loved ones, your family members, anyone who comes in contact with it sees how just, oh, it's terrible. It's just, it's a pretty defining moment in your life when you, when you turn the corner, and you see that your family members were just waiting for a phone call to see if you were going to end up in a ditch or not, you know? And I feel like there is a, in large part, this year. huge failure of society to be able to provide any sort of safety net within communities for

this. And, you know, there are some communities that have started doing that in the United States, you know, but they leave it largely up to faith leaders and groups like AA, you know, to try and catch these people before they hit the ground from an overdose, you know. And a lot of people are unable to separate the stigma of being an addict from their loved ones to the point where they can offer the compassion that you found so productive. At some point, people stop viewing addicts as human beings and see them purely just by the drugs they're doing. And I don't know what that is.

A coping mechanism for watching such a traumatic event happen to someone you love, maybe? Or, you know, I don't think. it's some sort of savage dehumanizing thing but that's what ends up happening it could be like a sublimation of of their fear that it could happen to them and sometimes that will come out as anger or detestment or whatever and especially in a culture that values bootstraps for example and puts the onus on the individual so strongly and we're taught to see these things as character flaws I think that also plays a role like this person just can't get their shit together come on right get up off the ground and get i go to work every day why don't you right and that sort of mentality that

we're inculcated with plays a big role in how we structurally don't address these problems and how we individually start to think about these problems even when it affects people in our own lives i think also you know the criminalization of of drug use and in this country plays a massive part in it as well where even you know when you internalize this person is a heroin junkie who's stealing shit so that they can get their fix or whatever it is. The classic example, right? They're a criminal. I'm not. This separation where it's like, I would never do that. Or, you know, because this person has debased themselves so much that this is what they have to do, the compassion just goes right out the window. And how can you look at someone when all you see is

criminal, someone who's breaking the law, someone who's causing problems from my family and my my community, how could you open yourself up to that? Right, right. Yeah. And as you were alluding to there, like the war on drugs is, you know, from Reagan and Clinton, all the way to Deterre in the Philippines, this punitive approach. This inability as radicals, right, we strike at the root, this inability to look at the root cause of a problem and just this fascistic reactionary impulse to beat it over the head and lock it in a cage so you don't have to deal with it. Because of course, on one level, really addressing this would mean a huge transfer of funds to create the social safety net to take care of these people and that is not

in the financial interest of those who would be taxed i.e. those with money and so they want to work against that and that individualistic pull yourself up by your bootstraps ideology is like the rhetoric and the ideas that undergird that war on drugs mentality. We just need to punch it over the head and put it in a cage and not really address it and it helps to you know keep that going. So I don't know we can get into I guess I do want to talk a little bit about the portrait solution. Right. Because Portugal at one point had one percent of their entire population addicted to heroin. And at first, they copied the U.S. approach, right? The war on drugs approach, the punitive approach, to no avail. And so what they did instead was they created a panel of

scientists and doctors to reassess their approach and try to find what would actually work here because this is just not sustainable. And what that panel found was that decriminalizing these drugs and using the funds that used to go to policing in prison, using those funds to invest in jobs programs, in subsidized employment of past addicts, investing in health care, in therapy, and counseling for people, basically a rehabilitative approach as opposed to a punitive one, worked empirically. And like, drug use went down by 50%. Overdoses went down. H.I.V. Transmission among addicts went down. Overall addiction rates broadly went down. And so here's an empirical example of a society struggling a capitalist society,

and we'll get into deeper critiques, but a capitalist society trying to deal with it on the level of a capitalist society and still having better results than the punitive approach, the drug war approach that we have in the U.S. But as I said, because so many people are financially invested in the status quo of how the U.S. approaches these problems, to root it out and do something like Portugal

wouldn't just involve morally appealing to people. It would involve the materially grabbing the hands of these corporate vampires, and ripping them off our society. And so I don't see how that's going to happen other than sort of a revolutionary confrontation. Yeah, I feel like they just pull up the drawbridge and, you know, stay in for a long fight.

Yeah, exactly. And they have all the resources to sustain that fight. Yeah, the interesting thing about the Portugal approach, which, you know, is something that I've considered and heard about for a while, is just it introduces compassion into public policy and creates a system of incentives that are appealing to general population within a capitalist society.

It's like, I'd have to find a, this is tangentially related. It's like the idea that in Utah, if you, instead of giving people, making it difficult for homeless people to find their way into a house, you give them a caseworker and an apartment, and they will start paying for it within, you know,

nine months, they'll get a job. You can reduce these rates. If you become a compassionate human being, who isn't constantly looking at the bottom line, you know, and we see in certain cities, Chicago, for example, clean needle drives, and, you know, these things that are that are working towards the decriminalization, even culturally or socially, of these problems, introduces over a short period of time very positive results, right? Because this is such a complex problem, this isn't just about overdoses and needing to spend money on rehabs, right?

We're talking about exactly what you're talking about, HIV transmission. Hep C is a huge epidemic in the United States. And there are solutions to these problems that if we were even just a tiny bit compassionate about the people that we're trying to help and trying to make sure that they don't fall through the cracks, it would be amazing. And even government-funded agencies that are trying to do that in this country are running up against brick walls by these lobbyists who don't want to. this shit to happen and it's like how can you seriously value your own bottom line over 70,000 lives and the last 15 years we've lost over 700,000 people to this epidemic and it's getting worse like it's like at what point where can you draw the line where you you just cannot consciously morally say that this is something we can just sweep to the side because what is the

Cheeto demon do you know what I mean? Like it's it's rough and it's rough to see it on the ground trying to help these people and having no resources to do it. And it does it does cut to the core of the incentive system of the broader economic system. The capitalist incentive system is market anarchy is in the pejorative sense of the term. Individual competition and profiteering at all costs. And when that is built into the very structure of how we do business in this country, you're not going to ever have an outcome that cares about people. And the incentive structure of a socialist society of whatever flavor you prefer would, in some sense, be how can we use the wealth and resources at our disposal to create the highest quality of life for as many people as possible? And just that radical shift in the underlying incentive system of an entire society and perhaps a civilization would go so long in just doing a paradigm shift to how we look at problems like this and a myriad of other problems all across the spectrum.

But it's just not going to happen, again, without some sort of revolutionary confrontation with the system that refuses to acknowledge our fucking basic humanity. Right. But I do want to move on. We had an episode a while back on our capitalism realism episode. And we touched on this topic, but I want to bring it up again here. So clearly addiction is on some level a neurochemical and biological phenomena. People that are addicted to drugs, that have anxiety, that have depression. You can do a brain scan and you can see, oh, the serotonin, you know, dopamine levels, etc.

But as Mark Fisher said in that book capitalist realism, he said, quote, it goes without saying that all mental illnesses like depression, anxiety, and addiction are neurologically instantiated, but this says nothing about their causation. His argument is that the social conditions of capitalism help create, intensify, and perpetuate these sorts of mental illnesses and problems. And before I ask you the question, I do just want to read his full argument. It's just one paragraph, but I think it's really, really well stated. Fischer says, the current ruling ontology denies any possibility of a social causation of mental illness. The chemical biologization of mental illness is, of course, strictly commensurate with its depoliticization. Considering mental illness an individual chemical biological problem has enormous benefits for capitalism. First, it reinforces capital's drive towards atomistic individualization.

You are sick because of your brain chemistry. Second, it provides an enormously lucrative market in which multinational pharmaceutical companies can peddle their pharmaceuticals. We can cure you with our SSRIs. It goes without saying that all mental illnesses are neurologically instantiated, but this says nothing about their causation. If it is true, for instance, that depression is constituted by low serotonin levels, what still needs to be explained is why particular individuals have low levels of serotonin. This requires a social and political explanation, and the task of repoliticizing mental illness and addiction is an urgent one if the left wants to challenge capitalist realism.

And so the same caveat I made in that episode is that, again, nobody is saying that a biological approach to these problems, a neurochemical approach to these problems is bad. It's just one part of the puzzle. But when you fetishize it, when that's the exclusive realm that you operate on, you do depoliticize it. You make it an individual problem and you refuse to see the underlying causes that might give raise to it. And there was a, you know, basically a study looking into some of these questions around this. And a study found that when they asked Americans a recent study, how many people in their lives they could turn to in a crisis moment,

the most common answer, not the average, but the most common answer was zero people. And that was down from five people when they started the study decades ago. So even within the capitalist framework, something's deteriorating, something's getting worse, when the most common answer of how many people you can turn to in your personal life when you're going through a crisis is zero, that gestures towards a deeper problem. So I guess the question is, do you agree with Fisher? And if so, can you maybe talk about some of the connections between our daily lives under the dictatorship of capital and how it relates to social crises like addiction epidemics?

Yeah, it's a logical argument. None of this shit happens in a vacuum, right? I'm formally diagnosed with clinical depression, right? And I have been prescribed medication for it. And never, to be honest, you know, this idea that you can cure your depression with medication is frankly bullshit. It's a therapy. And every time I've been prescribed medication, it has been in tandem with weekly therapy visits, right? That tackles these underlying causes for me personally of why I feel this way.

What's causing me to feel this way on a regular basis? How can I cope with this if this is going to be my life? As it turns out, the more therapy that I do, the more that I try to make incremental changes in my life that I believe and that, you know, my therapist believes will be beneficial, the less mornings I wake up feeling like absolute death, you know, and this is all done without medication. The problem with the society is that we are trying to view this inside of a vacuum, and it's great. it takes the responsibility away from these out underlying problems in our society this capitalist like chaos that people find themselves in the drudgery the meaninglessness right it's you know it's just like you know my loved ones uh like to blame all the problems on other things namely uh immigrants right that are causing all of these problems for them when the reality is

the actual answer could be, for most people, incredibly overwhelming to look at, right? If you say, no, it's not your brain chemistry, and instead say, actually, it's a failure of society at large to take care of you and your friends, you know, that's terrifying. That suddenly you find yourself dropped in the middle of this great giant place full of all of these complicated, complex problems with no end in sight, and you're supposed to figure out how to fix that? Of course people are going to blame it on something else. Convenient scapego. Right, exactly. And, you know, I think it's a solid point, right? Like, no one really is taking the time to sort of tackle these underlying issues.

And, you know, it's not, I don't know, one at a time I feel like we could really see some progress if that was something that we were unafraid of. Right. And I think what we can do is we can start bringing the conversation into this round, When you're looking at rates of anxiety and depression and addiction in the so-called first world, right, in the capitalist West, the fact that they're skyrocketing in almost multiple countries, but especially in like the center, like America and the UK, you really see this stuff to skyrocket. You have to point and say, yes, when people have addiction or depression or anxiety, we can understand it on the level of the brain and perhaps addressing it on that level is a good route to take, but it's part of a bigger puzzle. and look at how we're living our lives. A Gallup poll, for example, found that when they asked Americans if they enjoyed their job, 13% of people, only 13 said they like their job.

24% said they fucking hated it. And the rest said, I don't hate it, I don't like it, I just get through the goddamn day. That's 80 some percent of people that don't say they like their job. And it's funny because a society that loves to boast about how much it cares about the individual really creates a society in which the individual has little to know. autonomy. So inside and outside the workplace, for example, in a capitalist society, you have no control. Your autonomy is eradicated by forces of the market. You don't control. By the dictates of your boss, you don't control, and the politics of capitalism over which you have no control. And so that lack of autonomy makes a huge difference. And, you know, you can see somebody doing

the same work under different social conditions, and that work can be either fulfilling and rewarding if it's let's say democratically controlled and you have a say in your day-to-day life and you work together with people to make things happen or it can be shit if you're doing that same labor but you're in a hierarchical structure of capitalism and you have a boss breathing down your neck saying do this and do that meaningless bullshit that you don't want to do but you have to in order to feed your kids or yourself and you know that sort of stuff is is very important and I also think as much as people like to say that capitalism is human nature capitalism is so antithetical to our evolutionary nature.

Oh, I mean, shit. Capitalism as an ideology wasn't really a thing until what, 1600s? A couple hundred years ago started developing. Yeah, early capitalism didn't start until we started trying to create a global economy, you know, and figure out how best to do that. And I just, I find it interesting and really tragic, you know, that in this great era, this digital era of, interconnectedness, the alienation is at its peak.

Yep, yeah. And when you live in a society that creates this hyper-individualism, all it is is just alienation from your peers. At what point do you realize, you know, especially for me, a lot of times I sit there and I realize and I look at my friends that I'm sitting across the table with, comrades are a different thing, but some of my acquaintances, I'm like, I have nothing in common with you. We're both two incredibly lonely people who don't know how to be by ourselves. So that's why we're sitting at this bar together.

you know, bitching about our job. Sure. And it's just this, it's a crisis of identity. And most people find it, the easiest way to do that is to binge drink on the weekends. Just to go numb. And that's, you know, we have this drinking culture where you go to work every day, Monday through Friday, 5 to 9. And on the weekends, you go out and you get plastered, you get numb, you just forget about it. And you start the cycle all over again.

Yep. And it's, like you said, it's incredibly alienated. And even with the hyper-connected world, you see, we can bring people from all over the globe instantaneously into communication with one another but when you do that inside the capitalist context it just actually creates more loneliness more isolation you know more atomization it doesn't actually create more community at all no go online and scroll through facebook for 30 minutes you're going to walk away feeling worse than when you started right and that's not an that's not an accident it's the underlying structure that these things take place in are shaped and molded by that structure

right um so yeah so it's i really hope left is take this take this seriously And when we have these discussions, whether it's with people in our own personal life or when it's bigger issues when we're talking a lot of people like this, that we really bring this up and we don't forget that this plays a role. And we always push back on this human nature argument and talk about evolution, talk about anthropology, talk about how we're a communal social ape. And we were able to survive in nature, not because we're big and have sharp claws and really good teeth, but because we could come together and cooperate and have these communal ties that made us strong. stronger, and that allowed us to survive. And hell, we developed language through this cooperation and civilization itself. So it's antithetical to our evolutionary nature, not a part of it. Yeah, there's a couple of prevailing theories about that, actually,

that a lot of the brain development among early humans was due to regular consumption of psychedelic substances. Yeah, which I find super interesting for this conversation. I feel like, I don't know, man, I feel like in this day and age, this digital, shitty age, this fucking hellscape generation that we find ourselves in, that like rebuilding community among comrades is paramount. So essential. Especially if you find that like the people around you are struggling. This, especially in the context of this discussion, drug and alcohol addiction touches pretty much everyone. I can't think of anyone my age who hasn't been touched

by someone who overdosed, committed suicide due to drug and alcohol addiction, had at least a year where all they did was binge drink, lost jobs due to it. And a lot of these problems started separate from it, and they became intertwined, and then people couldn't extricate themselves, you know, until you're either burying them, you're dropping them off of rehab, or you're hoping that, you know, at some point they'll figure it out. And it's like, I don't see it as I grow older, getting better. It's every year it's gotten worse, you know. Every year I bury more people.

And it's like, at what point can we stop hyper-focusing on ourselves and our fucking cell phones and our goddamn Facebook profiles and really start looking up at the community that we claim to be a part of? And how can we rebuild that so that people aren't falling through the cracks and you're not sitting at your buddy's funeral going, I didn't see it happening or how could this happen or this came out of left field? I saw it a lot in, you know, the 12-step program that I was in where. individuals would drop off the map and no one checked up on them and then next thing you know we're going to their funeral and it's just like how did this happen how do we let this happen we have the ability to do something about it without being overbearing and dickish about it we we can be supportive and you know if we can't necessarily burn this administration to the ground to try and rebuild something better at least we can start introducing things in a smaller

of micro group right right yeah and and it's funny because the way that the only way that we can combat this system is through coming together and organizing communities basically right and so the way that we beat back the beast that causes a lot of these problems is by forming communities the only way we're going to be able to overthrow it and then the world that we're aiming for at the end is one with more community where people are not isolated and atomized and forced to compete on a faceless market, but rather come together and contribute to social good. And so that actually leads very well into this next question. And we will get into your critiques about abstinence-only approaches and even more into leftist organizing questions. But what sort of vision of the world can we offer that

would create social conditions that don't promote, you know, drug abuse, depression, anxiety, and addiction? How would an anarchist or socialist society be different from a capitalist one in this regard beyond what we've kind of already talked about throughout? I don't know. It's a lot of reiterations of some of the same stuff. Like removing this culture of alienation, right? Mutual A

programs have always historically been good things for communities. Really just learning, I don't know, for me, it's hard for me to imagine something, a space, a geographic space as large as the United States. I've never really taken

the time to sit down and, like, imagine what that would look like within my own political philosophy, probably should, you know. But communally is what I look at, right? I want to be able to walk out my front door and to be able to know the names of all of my neighbors and to not feel like they, there's no fence separating us, that kind of thing. Being able to walk across the street and help my neighbor out with something and to know them well enough to see if something is wrong, you know, if they don't surface out of their house for a while, You know that that's going to be an issue or something that you need to check out.

And I don't know, it's just, for me, it's removing these traumatic experiences through building community, through, you know, abolishing institutions that historically and will always create an unbalance of power, right? And being able to look more at how we can be helpful to the people around us, because that reciprocal relationship will always exist. And when you can find that equilibrium without these strict, rigid, violent hierarchies, then a lot of these underlying causes of this trauma, in theory, wouldn't exist. Yeah, and we have an entire class in this society who parasitically leach from the wealth and resources that working class creates and that profits from this state of affairs.

And so, you know, we can try to relieve some of these things inside the confines of our system via reforms, by organizing, by grassroots efforts. But at the end of the day, the only way that you're really going to strike at the root of this problem, again, is a revolutionary confrontation with the state of affairs, with the bourgeois state and the capitalist class. And I think any, just like with fighting climate change or any problem, anybody who tells you that the solution to the problems caused by capitalism is more individualism and more consumption is lying and they should be told to their fucking face of they're lying

and they're not even getting you close to solving the problem they're reinforcing the very assumptions that continue to create the problem yeah no one can single-handedly take down a beast this size exactly you know and it's ludicrous to think that that would even be a pipe dream in someone's toolbox that that is something that can happen and to be quite honest, if we're going to smash the state, I want to do it with my buddies anyways. Right, exactly. So, like, I just, I agree. It frustrates me when there are individuals who are, who would rather strike out on their own and, and not offer what, whatever wonderful thing they have to offer to what is and always will be a communal struggle. Yeah. And a lot of the people that defend

this, hell, a lot of Trump supporters, for example, they don't even know how much they would benefit from our, from our vision of things. If we could structure society and the community, in a way that we're aiming to, they themselves would benefit, you know, but they're so inculcated with ideology and you're taught at a young age not to think this way that they can't even imagine it. And so they look at somebody like Trump as if this clown is going to be a mechanism by which we can solve some of these problems. And it's just, the system can't vomit up its own solutions. It can only eat its own tail indefinitely. And I guess another thing when it comes to like our society and how we would structure it, a big, big part of this, in my opinion, is putting the

burdens of the family, spreading it out communally and putting it on all of society, or if you're a Marxist, the state, being able to come in, offer these programs that say, you're not alone in raising your kid in isolation, in a vacuum. All of society comes together, make sure people don't slip through the cracks, take the financial burden off of mothers and fathers, allow people to come together more unique in communal settings, and create a situation in which, you know, the problems that a lot of times start inside the family unit can actually be dispersed to a broader community with more resources and more eyes on the ground

that can help take care of those problems in infancy. If you have an alcoholic, addicted parent, for example, well, you're at a huge disadvantage compared to somebody who's upper middle class and whose parents don't have addiction problems. And so that inequality replicates itself endlessly in a capitalist society, but with an intervention, a social intervention

at those points of chaos, you know, perhaps we could prevent a lot of that. And like we're talking earlier about cycles. You know, we could prevent a lot of that. And a lot of, again, like when you see the opioid epidemic, it is tied and it's located in like places where there used to be good industry and good jobs. And those things have been taken away. And one thing capitalism does is put your sense of self-worth, tie that up in your

economic and vocational status. How much money do you make? What's your job? And when you do two, three, four generations of that and you're able to provide for your family and all of a sudden that's ripped from out underneath. you, your very sense of self is all the sudden disoriented. And so getting beyond these conditions to a state of affairs where people's sense of self-worth is no longer tied up in how you make money or what you do for a living, but rather based

on your embeddedness within strong communities and your contribution to those communities, that will take us, I think, a long way in addressing some of these problems. So let's go ahead and move on to the reflections and strategies part of this. And again, I think we've touched on some of these things, so we'll work through these questions a little quicker, I think. But one reason why I wanted to have you on the show is because of your critique of certain abstinence-only approaches like AA to addiction treatment and the sort of loss of agency that often can come with that. So can you talk about your experience and views on this issue and why you think moderation can work better than abstinence

for some people? Yeah. I've been a massive disclaimer. There is no one right path to recovery from alcohol and drug addiction. I'm going to say that multiple times. When I first tried to get sober, it was for good for me, in my mind, and it was completely 100% sober. I went from smoking an ounce of weed a day. Fucking nightmare.

I don't know how I fucking managed it. You know, I woke up in detox one morning, and, you know, this was after about six and a half months of struggling to try and get sober, right? I joined the Mormon church to try and get sober. You know, thought, they don't drink. Like, this will work, right? Turns out Mormons party really hard.

Interesting. Yeah. The Mormons I knew did, at least. So, like, when I got into AA, I went from constantly being fucked up to stone cold sober. I think for the first month, I didn't sleep. And when I did sleep, I had the most insane dreams that I had ever experienced. since since period um and it was rough you know like it it was an experience that i'm glad that i went through but what i discovered after three years of going to 12 step meetings of

sponsoring women of um working these steps over and over and over again is that like we were talking about this alienation right i still felt off. Absidence programs work for some. For others, it's not necessary. And most psychologists agree that in terms of like actual empirical data, success rates with abstinence only programs are, don't even touch moderation programs, right? It's like we're talking about where you're not just, you know, medicating depression,

you're trying to treat the underlying causes of your depression. Same thing goes for drug and alcohol abuse. Oftentimes, people in 12-step recovery will say my alcoholism is a disease, and I can't cure it myself. I'm not disputing that alcoholism itself can be passed genetically through families, you know, and is a disease. What I am disputing is that there's only one treatment for it. And for many people, they don't fit the category of an alcoholic. And oftentimes, they don't see a substance. psychologist or an addiction specialist who might be able to tell them through their own empirical

data that this person is experiencing this. There's no official diagnosis in 12-step recovery. You read one page in the big book and then you're supposed to figure out if you qualify or not. And for someone who's just gotten off of, you know, years of being fucked up, you want me to try and figure that out for myself? I have no idea. I just want to stop feeling this way. And I got swept up in it. And there are certain people in AA who are like, nah, man, like, you need to understand that if you, you need to know if this is legit for you. And it's like, where's the resource for that? Oh, here's like two pages in the pickbook. You know, like, how am I supposed to know? You know, I'm being sponsored by someone who was sponsored by someone who was sponsored by someone who was

sponsored by someone who just came into the program because they needed to find some sort of strength and an escape from what was originally their escape, you know, how are we going to cope? And, God, the critiques go on, man. For me, abstinence didn't work. I found myself not actually treating the problems that were the underlying river of emotion and depression and PTSD and traumatic experiences and anger and all of this shit that I had built up from, like, age 15 to age 21, and then past that, right? I figured out that the problem wasn't that I was drinking.

The problem still existed. Right. And the support group that I had put myself in was ill-equipped to handle that. They had no idea how to do it. Half of them didn't believe me. And it's like, okay, what do I do next? Uh, therapy, I guess. And through intense, often traumatic therapy, right?

The horrific experiences of trying to relive this stuff over. and over and over again until I'm no longer affected by it, I came out of that a much stronger human being than I ever did in three and a half years staying sober. And I decided to do the old, what do they call it, the old experiment in AA, I went back out, I didn't relapse, that's not what I'm calling it. I went back out and I tried moderating my drinking. Consciously. Consciously made a decision to do it.

This was not something where I was, you know, in an emotional upheaval and relapsed because I couldn't handle my life. I had reached a point last summer where I was not getting any benefits from the 12-step program that I was in. And, you know, you join those support groups so that you can grow, right, and that you can get better. And for me, I had hit that wall like two years. It's an attempt, interestingly, enough, to create community.

Mm-hmm. But you were telling me before, like, there's a limit to that community. And when you're perceived to fall outside of that community for whatever, reason that there's an almost like really a hardcore shut off like you're fucked you're out of this circle fuck you they shut the door yeah steel door there's a running joke and in many 12-step programs that uh we're not a cult is what we like to say you know the reality is you chanted over and over yeah exactly you know drink the kool-aid it'll be fine it's not it doesn't have any alcohol in it so it's good you know uh or in certain cases the coffee um so when you build this

community, right, based on abstinence only. And you do it in a way, especially with 12-step recovery programs in the United States, namely AA and NA, when you add a spiritual aspect to it that is almost dogmatic in nature, when you say, I'm an alcoholic, I cannot control myself, I am completely unable to. And the only way that I'm going to get sober is if I give my life completely 100% over to a higher power, God or whoever, right? You could pick whatever. you know, it's not the Christian God, even though the founders were Protestant. You know what I mean? It still has these overtones of dogmatic religion.

And when you're doing that, what you're doing is you are creating this space where all of these people who normally wouldn't mix, the only thing they have in common is that they're trying to get sober from their addiction. Oftentimes, those communities are very strong. I have a family member who's been sober for 37 years, just recently hit 37. years is fucking amazing. That person has been in AA the entire time. It's worked for them. Absolutely.

And they have been a part of a community in a different subsection of the same city in which we live, where that community is different from the one that I found. And it's different from one that sits in Lincoln or wherever. But it goes without saying that when you create this space surrounded by this dogmatic sort of principle and one of the main tendency is to drink is to die when someone goes back out relapses or has a run-in or can't handle their lives or like me tries moderation communication is cut off almost immediately people I had spent almost four years with which could be traumatic in and of itself oh it was terrible it was it was 100% horrific these people I had spent you know five days a week I would see these people for four years almost I said you know, I'm going to try this. I'm going to see what happens. And all of them one by one

stopped answering phone calls, blocked me on Facebook, you know. And it was just like, what did I do? Nothing. You tried something outside the paradigm that they were operating in, you know? And I remember getting looks in AA where I was just told myself, I wouldn't name it, but whatever, where I'd say, you know, there's more than one path to recovery. If this person wants to do smart recovery, then, and they stay sober from it or they recover from their addiction and that's fucking dope who am I to say that that's not a right answer and I would get these looks from people

where it's like no AA is the only way and it's just like 12-step recovery is not the only way and it's it shuts people out when you constantly are relapsing you're trying really hard and you've got every time you come back in and people are making jokes about you

getting stuck in the revolving door do you really think you want to be around support like that that's not support it's just it's a rough culture that is seems to be getting worse you know because our society our fucking society doesn't want to pay to send someone to rehab or doesn't want to pay to send someone to a different recovery program that will charge the state to do it so they go hey this place is like pretty much a nonprofit anyone can come in you know let's just send them to AA and it's like what about all these other programs takes the burden off the state yeah and it and so then

I guess the next question is in your experience how tethered is AA to the leading medical and scientific evidence around addiction and solving it is it tethered at all to it is it just totally sort of pseudo religious um there is no science to it um in the sense that like they don't update their program with new evidence no no no the big book has been the same big book for the last however many years since like 1937 or 39 it's been the same text.

They've updated it. They usually have an addition of the book with stories in the back that are updated to be more modern. They actually allowed women to start writing stories for the back. You know what I mean. Just bullshit like that. But you have to remember that like historically Bill W. was a dick.

Like the dude... Bill W. Bill W. is one of the founders of AA. He was a motherfucking doucheback. straight up the dude tried to sell the program to make money off of it like that that's kind of the place where we're coming from is he got sober and then he was like well we could open up facilities and charge people for it people around him were like no we're not going to do that um so there's a market for it yeah pretty much man um i don't know it's just scientifically speaking there isn't you know there's there's a space for medical community members to come

to open meetings and to have, you know, offer their solutions. But psychologists and scientists who do the research about abstinence programs like AA consistently come up against statistics that say that this is not the most successful route to recovery. I mean, oftentimes what you're creating is a fear-based solution to what needs to be looked at differently. And within AA, they don't necessarily, they focus more on spiritual. There really is no scientific stuff, which is interesting because the original ideas for this 12-step recovery came from, you know, social scientists and psychologist who was tired of locking people up in

asylums. So he was trying to find a way to help them out of horrific drinking problems, which by the way, a lot of them were spurred on from the Great Depression and the massive stock market fall. Underlying social conditions. There you go, you know. Which AA can't and doesn't address and by virtue of not being able to address them, to some extent at least I think does help perpetuate those conditions. If the solutions on offer, all are solutions that fit nicely inside the status quo and don't ever challenge it, then of course they're convenient things to point people toward if you're invested in the status quo. Right. Well, in AA itself, the organization claims to be separate from all of that. They don't lobby. They don't do that sort of stuff. But they somehow, over the last 50 years, have entered into partnerships with state governments to send people who have DUIs into AA as part of rehabilitation, you know, as part of the diversion program, you know, which in terms of like just from a recovery's perspective, you're sort of muddying the waters there, man. Some people don't need this.

Right. You know. Oh, I see what you're saying. Yeah. Yeah. Like some people who do need this abstinence program find themselves in a room full of people who might not need it but are convinced that they do. And so the therapeutic aspects for the people who do need it get thrown out the window because they're being sponsored by people who might be just a heavy drinker and don't need to be sober in order to live a good life. Right. So on, so forth. Like the problems compound on themselves. And when states send people into. to Alcoholics Anonymous, instead of, you know, potentially offering more than one solution, then you find a lot of people who are just continuing that cycle of suddenly it's not trauma and drinking. It's relapse in sobriety and relapse in sobriety. And that cycle becomes traumatic and hard to extricate yourself from. And suddenly you're looking at yourself. It's like a failure

of your own character that you can't stay sober when the reality is is that this is not the approach you need to be doing like take steps toward moderation see if that helps try a medication if you need to

see if that helps like don't just go to AA and say all right that's it and if you're constantly relapsing you're not failing yourself the community around you is failing you right but but the sort of paradigm

of AA puts that on the individual shoulders. You're failing. Yep. And what you're saying is there's a big toolbox. A.A. may be one of the tools in that toolbox, but it can't be the only one. Right.

And the internal culture of A.A. Has this underlying assumption that it is pretty much the thing that works and other things don't. Right. Or if you're not, if you're not, I guess, dedicated to that internal culture and those assumptions, then you're dead to us. Fuck off. Alienated.

Yeah. Yeah. So by pretending that there's only one tool in the toolbox, it does a lot more damage. Right. Well, and it's interesting that you say tool in the toolbox because that is a rhetorical device used by sponsors and sponsorsies in AA. These are just some tools in the toolbox to help you stay sober, essentially. But more progressive minds will say there's more than one path to recovery, but this one's the best because it got me sober. And it's just, it's this insidious culture that is perpetuated among the younger generation of people walking in there that's creating problems. It's just another, it's one of many successful paths to recovery.

Sure. And if your only interaction with paths to recovery is that, and all they do is discredit the other ones, then why would you ever try something different? Right, right. Yeah, I mean, that's incredibly interesting. I've never had really personal experiences with AA, but your critiques of it and your breakdown of it certainly sound reasonable to me. And, again, you're not saying that it doesn't work. For some people, maybe the AA route is the route. Right.

But you'd like to broaden it up and introduce these other possibilities as well. Right. Exactly. And, I mean, it is concerning any time there's an organization that is so untethered from the leading science and evidence in medicine when it comes to these things. You would like to see an organization like AA really tethered to those things and updating itself in relation to them. But when that doesn't happen, you know, it creates a sort of backwater. Yeah. and a stagnation. Right.

So I guess the final question is, in your opinion, how can leftists more adequately address addiction and overdosing in our communities right now? And what programs or strategies do you think we can implement that help people in this regard? One big one, I think, is, you know, I'm not trying to, like, make rules on people who want to imbibe and get fucked up at a camping trip or whatever. But I think that a lot of the problems, especially with addressing trauma in the leftist community, is giving more time and support to groups like Mutual Aid disaster relief, right? They travel the country, creating these communities, right?

They sit down and do these workshops and give people tools to respond to tragic, traumatic events, natural disasters, major events like Charlottesville. They offer, they open up a space for healing to begin. and for people to feel empowered and to feel like they have some sort of control over this chaos because they know what to do. Groups like that, trauma response groups, legal aid groups, right? These groups that are actually doing this work in our leftist community to try and mitigate some of the effects of what is a very traumatic experience interacting with and fighting against state apparatuses. I think also specifically within communities is urging people to sort of reevaluate

the internalized stigmas that they place on alcoholics and drug addicts. If you, I suppose most people think I'm a pretty cool person, right? I guarantee you that those same people would never have thought that when they saw me in the throes of what was a pretty horrific experience, you know? And if I had had even more than one person who was a little bit more compassionate to me when I was trying desperately to get sober, to get away from this trauma. I might have gotten sober. I might have found some relief earlier. I might not

have been in it so hard. I might not have blacked out every day for three months, if that had been the case. I might have found, you know, some sort of different reaction, right? And so I urge any of your listeners who are struggling to figure out how to create these spaces in their communities where these people can feel supported is to first turn the mirror on yourself. See where you're at and see one if you're equipped to handle the emotional heaviness of trying to help someone who's trying to get out of addiction. If you're not, please don't. It is so difficult. Like no one's going to judge you if you can't handle it, right? Like two, try and try and build this open space where individuals who are already beaten down by what they think is a terroristic weakness that they

can't not get fucked up. Open that space up for them to be able to be vulnerable about it, to say whenever they're ready, because usually people don't get sober or try and find help for themselves until they're doing it themselves. You can't force them into a rehab. Sure. That's why intervention doesn't work. Yeah, yeah. It's like they, at some point, they're, in every addict's life, they hit this, they hit rock bottom and they, they begin to ask for help. If you're not there to see the signs or understand what's going on or you haven't opened up that space where they feel they can, they won't. And they'll just dive back into the cycle that they had hopefully tried to get out of, right? And it just continues until they're either dead or almost or in jail.

So trying to build that space, open it up for people to be able to ask for help. And then major community programs, right? Like, let's keep working to build places where people can safely do drugs. Let's keep working to decriminalize these drugs in our states, right? Let's keep working with legal support for individuals who are unfairly locked in cages for this bullshit. Clean needle programs. Yep. STI testing. Carry Narcan with you to shows that you go to, you know.

We have comrades up in Toronto, I think, have this whole program. I forget their name. It escapes me, unfortunately. But they do. They carry Narcan around, and there's a specific part of Toronto where, you know, drug addicts will congregate, and I think it's a public park, and they go there with Narcan and address those overdoses when they see them. It's tragic, but they've actually, they have been confronted by the state, and the state's basically saying, like, you know, get out of here, don't do this stuff here. And they're like, we're just trying to save lives that you clearly aren't saving. So I think when you start to become effective on any front, you're going to bump up against the bourgeois state. Right. Well, yeah, because you can't

take the thunder away from the people who are supposed to be doing all this crap, right? But as far as I know, Narcan is still readily available. But, you know, it's something that's not legal for you to carry around. It's not like a scheduled drug in the United States. And I, as someone who attends raves regularly and understands and knows what a drug overdose looks like, it's something that I intend to continue looking into so that I can do it myself. Definitely. Because you never know when someone close to you is, is going to do that because the reality is, especially leftist spaces, is that drugs and alcohol are a part of the culture. Yeah. And no one's judging you for that. I certainly am not. God, I got drunk last night. And it's just like if we want to, instead of, because, God,

I'm never going to impose that on someone else. But like, instead of turning every, space into teetotalling, you know, sober space, being able to be equipped for in the off chance that there is an extreme that happens is way better than not being equipped at all and not having this conversation. I think the biggest thing, too, is that we need to continue to talk about this. Yeah. I don't pretend to have all the solutions, like, not even remotely. Not even close, yeah. How could you? How could any one person have, you know? Right, exactly. These conversations are where we diagnose the problems and we start to see the vague outlines of solutions inside our realm of being able to control.

Right. I feel like this is one of those things that the leftist groups usually don't talk about. We argue over each other's politics all the time. We argue over, you know, borders or no borders, like internationalism or not. And it's like, what about these things that are affecting our communities in real time? And do we have pragmatic real-time solutions to them? And if we don't, what the fuck are we doing? And I guess as you were talking about the abstinence-only approach, one of the ironies there is that, and I don't want to overstate this claim because I still think there's plenty of studies that need to happen, but there is some scientific evidence that gestures towards the idea that certain hallucinogenic, certain psychoactive compounds like psilocybin or LSD or ayahuasca may have, ironically, some evidence that suggests that they can actually start to be a part of the puzzle in addressing addiction. And again, I don't want to overstate that, but I encourage people to go check that out because I think in a socialist society or a more advanced society, psychoactive hallucinogenic drugs like that that sort of inspire a paradigm shift that make you look at yourself in the world differently, could have a constructive role to play.

And one of the casualties of an abstinence-only approach is that those things are just de facto pushed off the board of possibility. to partake in that would in the AA's paradigm, and correct me if I'm wrong, be a failure. It is. It's a relapse. And that, I think, takes perhaps an important tool that we might be able to develop off the table prematurely. And, you know, again, science is suggesting that there's actually something very, very real here. And so, again, I just think it's something that we should take it in consideration. I know that I've had terrible drug experiences. I've had borderline overdose experiences.

I've had addiction issues. but I've also had some of the most profound experiences of my life on substances like psilocybin and LSD. Same. And I'm a better, I think I'm a better, more in-depth human being because of my interactions with those substances. And so I would not want to, you know, shelter those away and say those have no role to play in a future society. Right. Definitely. I agree. I do think that, like, that's why the war on drugs is so detrimental. You're shutting the door for these very intelligent, fascinating. studies to be done for the improvement of our society.

Exactly. And even though I'm not someone who smokes weed anymore, personally just too tiny for it, you know, like that doesn't mean that I'm going to try in my personal life, stop the people around me from finding some sort of therapeutic benefit. And, you know, to see this happen in this country that is, you know, pumping millions of dollars into a military budget instead of funding scientists and trying to find, you find some way to better our society for the people living in it blows my mind every day. It's rough.

It sucks. It's not something that I would have ever, in my idealistic teens, thought was a reality until I'm living in it. Absolutely. Well, before we let you go, do you have any recommendations for anyone who wants to learn more about anything that we've talked about today or people that are struggling with addiction, perhaps? And where can listeners find you online if they want to reach out to you about anything we've discussed? Okay. Well, check out AIA. Check out Hazleton Books. Read the literature if you think that's something that, you know, might be beneficial for you. Please do not take any of my opinions as, you know, law and canon. Check it out. You may find a benefit in it. Other programs are smart recovery, literally smart recovery. Moderation Management is also one that's an actual program. You can find meetings anywhere in your city. It's not just a meetings and NA meetings like if you need help try and reach out my my email door is always open um

let's see what is my new email i made one specifically for this we can always put in the show notes as well yeah um yeah it's i don't have social media anymore i don't have a twitter that i can use to to contact all y'all lovely people um but my gmail is cold bruised tool at gmail.com. It's just like my old Twitter. Anyone can send me an email if you want to bitch at me about the 12 steps and how great it was for you. Let's have an argument. I'm super down. I will tell you that I love that we're having this conversation. I'm really grateful for it. It's hilarious because everyone in my immediate group of people that I see on a regular basis, we're all sort of AA rejects who have

a lot of conversations about this, you know, and about ways to improve our community and try and curb the scourge of what addiction does to our communities. And so I'm really grateful that I got to come on and have this conversation. And I'm willing to continue it at any time with anyone. I'm glad to have you on. Thank you for being like vulnerable and being honest about your own struggles. I know that can always be so comfortable, but I really appreciate it. And And again, I just want to restate the fact that the goal of this is just to start the conversation, just to make leftists aware of just how important this issue is and how it bumps up against capitalism and all of our ideas about a better world and how we have to take it very seriously.

And we shouldn't shy away from these discussions. And again, if anybody out there listening wants to correct us or wants to have a counter argument, both Mel and I, I think, are totally open to constructive dialogue about this. Because neither of us are saying we have all the answers. we're just saying that this conversation is important and needs to happen and needs to happen more. So if you want to contribute to that conversation by responding to us or giving your two cents on social media or by emailing Mel, whatever, we'd love to hear it. Again, it's just a start to a conversation. So thank you again, Mel, for coming on.

It's been an absolute honor to have you on and talk about this difficult issue with you. Thanks. Yeah. One last thing. If there is any of your listeners, leftist listeners, who actually have within leftist spaces, recovery programs that they've created, I want to hear about it. So that's a specific like call to your listeners. If you are already doing something that is helping within the protest left community,

the radical left community, let me add it. Let's chat about it because that would be super cool to hear about. Absolutely. And our comrades up in Toronto, I know I forgot the name, but if you can reach out and say what you're doing, let us know. We'll spread those because what those are our solutions inside our organizing efforts. So if you have any ideas or you're actually putting any of this into practice, we would love to not only hear about it, but also amplify that and throw it out to other people

so they can maybe implement some of those ideas into their own organizing. Cool. All right. Well, thank you. Of course. Solidarity. Come on. your godward behind you running against a void what's a form of life to do I'm on the mission one impossible

but don't stop me yet listen I'm a vet of a quiet conflict that's been raging take things out of counting minutes on a temple on an archipal square I was found anti-diamonds in the rough look around the wind is blowing fire

kicked me I was down how you like me now refuse to wield a guillotine even struggle cutting weeds and ask me how I feel about the mice didn't ask to build a house Does their population swells same instead of on a school Footers from the scale of the Albatrol

Several promise that the life I only wish I could have another actor this one ends I've learned so much to say as long as fucking short I want to know what happens next Who we destroy ourselves Might I have to wait to find the answer Don't blame me I voted for a giant meteor Just kidding

I'm going forward I fucking think this is Oh you did How that worked out for you? That's what I thought. We got to build our own shit. Ship the kid to take it away by the state. Let's go.

They've got a mouth goosey and sense of humorin. What's environmental racism to a seagull in a spill? Life is ill, literally. It'll kill you if you swim downstream. Living's caring knows to what we have to offer. Antidepressants in their urine Thing to kill bugs Make our veggies grow all bright

When America's strong Breaking down the antibodies And what is the future If it is an antibody They say the world is overgrown You better act somebody Get it You gotta act somebody

Into the futurist I say you ain't the future Just a new face of our old fear Anti-preacher is still a preacher Number let's go back to oath They say But the earth is all I see Sitting blue like capaces like frogs

To remember when it came before we gave everything names They say before it was all underground But it's the other way around It's the other way around But you already know that shit Come on Let's go I want to live the 21st century

I want to leave the 21st century Yeah, look, these are dark times we have living through. Sometimes somebody's got to carry that torch. And sometimes, sometimes torches ain't going to be enough. And like, I'm glad motherfuckers are reading books and shit. They know what the fuck they're talking about But like straight up Don't don't sit there and tell me

You got a plan You're gonna fucking save the world And you know some shit And nobody else figured out You know Talk is the sheep Talk is the sheep You're a motherfucker

So So on the real Don't talk Show me Show us Otherwise You ain't saying shit Thank you.