It's in the walls, it's under the floors

A new book and community course promises new insights into one of our most bedeviling problems: addiction

by Kevin Potvin <kpotvin@republic-news.org>

In her latest book Dark Age Ahead, Jane Jacobs devotes two full chapters to an attack on universities as “accreditation factories.” The book has been out for over a year and Jacobs is one of Canada’s most widely-known, and read, thinkers. Her withering denunciation of the whole university sector cannot have gone unnoticed in every faculty dining room and administration office on every campus in this country. Yet nary a peep by way of retort has been heard. I guess she was right.

What Jacobs means by “accreditation factories” is that our universities, largely built and run with public funds in the expectation that these expensive facilities would turn out a highly educated citizenry, have instead been foisting on us graduates who bear much by way of paper certificates and little by way of true education.

That’s too big a problem to fix now. The original concept of a university in Canada will have to await its restoration until after the natural deaths of all those bureaucratic hangers-on now crowding the campuses and firmly entrenched in defending the status quo that has generated for them such great mortgages and social esteem, if not so much by way of a meaningful purpose in this life.

But that doesn’t mean the education that was supposed to happen at the university can’t go on in other venues. That’s exactly what recently retired Simon Fraser University psychology professor Bruce Alexander has in mind with a course he has designed for Britannia Community Centre beginning in January.

Alexander struggled for years inside the university structure to find new ways of thinking about his adopted field of study, addiction. What he discovered was that the university is a de facto arm of the medico-pharmaceutical complex for which drug sales are the ultimate purpose. To that end, it seemed the industry was interested only in seeing addiction cast primarily as a personal problem that can be healed or treated with personal approaches usually comprised of the afflicted person consuming a prescribed course of pills.

That, Alexander found, was counter-productive. In his broad historical and cross-cultural study tentatively entitled The Globalization of Addiction: A Study in poverty of the spirit, due out in 2006, the culprit for society-wide rising levels of addiction of all kinds are the conditions of life brought on by our particular form of capitalist economic structure. Just as a modern industrial economy can be counted on to produce a certain level of respiratory disease in the societies hosting such an economy, so too does our economic system produce a certain level of addiction. We can treat everyone’s respiratory problems as best we can with pills and other forms of personal treatment, but we also go into the offending factories and cut down their pollution with regulations of their activity to cut the rate of respiratory affliction overall.

So too, Alexander would argue, should we go into those parts of the economy and find what regulations to apply to cut the overall rate of addiction in society. So what toxic element akin to airborne pollution does our economy produce that creates unsustainable rates of addiction in our society? In his study, Alexander points to the corrosive effects modern consumer-oriented capitalism has on the social fabric of society as the culprit. Intense interpersonal competition in the labour market, irresistible appeals to individualist expression in our consumption habits, and underfunded, neglected and broken down social institutions that serve no factory needs have together laid waste to the quality and the quantity of our social connections.

This historical process can be tracked in exact inverse relationship to the rise of addiction in our society. It is Alexander’s theory that addiction itself (to whatever is most easily available, be it videogames, cigarettes, sex, or crystal meth) is adopted as a substitute for quality social connections. On a society-wide level, rates of addiction go up when that society’s social glue is dissolved.

A key example that illustrates Alexander’s point is North American aboriginal societies. Prior to the arrival of Europeans, the mostly small and tribal-based societies were very intensively socialized, and at the same time, there is evidence of virtually no forms of addiction among them. After several social catastrophes following contact with Europeans, most North American aboriginal societies were crippled and their social fabric was washed away. Today, the rate of addiction in the most heavily affected aboriginal societies approaches 100%. Those aboriginal individuals most thoroughly ripped away from their social fabric, like the aboriginal population uprooted from villages and warehoused in Vancouver’s downtown eastside, exhibit the highest levels of addiction.

We may go on treating individuals with addictions, perhaps even helping some of them, but without a society-level treatment, there will be no overall improvement in the levels of addiction afflicting our society. To treat society, it is not a matter of taking pills produced by companies. It is a matter of a thread-by-thread reconstruction of the social fabric. There is no commercial interest on the part of companies in seeing resources diverted to such a project, so there will be no support from the corporate sector for it. But also, the whole effort will be limited in its effect so long as those activities occurring in the economy that tear apart the social fabric remain in place. The same way we intervene in the economy and negatively affect prospects for profits at companies by regulating the harmful emissions they emit into our waters and air, we must also intervene in those other sectors of the economy with regulations that reduce their harmful, corrosive emissions into our social fabric.

You can see why Alexander was unable to work effectively inside the university system, that industrial-oriented accreditation factory. To pursue his ideas in the milieu of honestly interested people drawn to the old art of pure intellectual pursuit to find real and honest solutions to problems like society-wide levels of addiction, Alexander is instituting a course away from the university and at the local community centre instead. “Addiction in our neighbourhood” promises to be an enlivening course able to change, perhaps, our whole approach to one of the biggest and most fearsome problems facing our society today.

It will take place at Britannia Community Centre, Monday nights from 7 to 10, beginning January 16 through to March 20, 2006. Cost is $40. Call Britannia at 604-718-5800 for additional information.

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