Law of Attraction Magazine October, 2015 | Page 55

will get from the doctor will have a much higher purity and
potency than the heroin being used by street-addicts, who
have to buy from criminals who adulterate it. So if the old
theory of addiction is right -- it's the drugs that cause it; they
make your body need them -- then it's obvious what should
happen. Loads of people should leave the hospital and try to
score smack on the streets to meet their habit.
But here's the strange thing: It virtually never happens. As
the Canadian doctor Gabor Mate was the first to explain to
me, medical users just stop, despite months of use. The same
drug, used for the same length of time, turns street-users
into desperate addicts and leaves medical patients
unaffected.

Everyone agrees cigarette smoking is one of the most
addictive processes around. The chemical hooks in
tobacco come from a drug inside it called nicotine. So
when nicotine patches were developed in the early
1990s, there was a huge surge of optimism -- cigarette
smokers could get all of their chemical hooks, without
the other filthy (and deadly) effects of cigarette
smoking. They would be freed.
But the Office of the Surgeon General has found that
just 17.7 percent of cigarette smokers are able to stop

If you still believe -- as I used to -- that addiction is caused
by chemical hooks, this makes no sense. But if you believe
Bruce Alexander's theory, the picture falls into place. The
street-addict is like the rats in the first cage, isolated, alone,
with only one source of solace to turn to. The medical
patient is like the rats in the second cage. She is going home
to a life where she is surrounded by the people she loves.
The drug is the same, but the environment is different.
This gives us an insight that goes much deeper than the need
to understand addicts. Professor Peter Cohen argues that
human beings have a deep need to bond and form
connections. It's how we get our satisfaction. If we can't
connect with each other, we will connect with anything we
can find -- the whirr of a roulette wheel or the prick of a
syringe. He says we should stop talking about 'addiction'
altogether, and instead call it 'bonding.' A heroin addict has
bonded with heroin because she couldn't bond as fully with
anything else.

So t he opposit e of addict ion is not
sobriet y. It is human connect ion.
When I learned all this, I found it slowly persuading me, but I
still couldn't shake off a nagging doubt. Are these scientists
saying chemical hooks make no difference? It was explained
to me -- you can become addicted to gambling, and nobody
thinks you inject a pack of cards into your veins. You can
have all the addiction, and none of the chemical hooks. I
went to a Gamblers' Anonymous meeting in Las Vegas (with
the permission of everyone present, who knew I was there to
observe) and they were as plainly addicted as the cocaine
and heroin addicts I have known in my life. Yet there are no
chemical hooks on a craps table.
But still, surely, I asked, there is some role for the chemicals?
It turns out there is an experiment which gives us the answer
to this in quite precise terms, which I learned about in
Richard DeGrandpre's book The Cult of Pharmacology.

using nicotine patches. That's not nothing. If the
chemicals drive 17.7 percent of addiction, as this shows,
that's still millions of lives ruined globally. But what it
reveals again is that the story we have been taught
about The Cause of Addiction lying with chemical hooks
is, in fact, real, but only a minor part of a much bigger
picture.
This has huge implications for the
one-hundred-year-old war on drugs. This massive war -which, as I saw, kills people from the malls of Mexico to
the streets of Liverpool -- is based on the claim that we
need to physically eradicate a whole array of chemicals
because they hijack people's brains and cause addiction.
But if drugs aren't the driver of addiction -- if, in fact, it
is disconnection that drives addiction -- then this makes
no sense.
Ironically, the war on drugs actually increases all those
larger drivers of addiction. For example, I went to a
prison in Arizona -- 'Tent City' -- where inmates are
detained in tiny stone isolation cages ('The Hole') for
weeks and weeks