Today we will discuss substance abuse. We will start with a definition of what we even mean by this.
Many anthropologists – and indeed non-scientific members of our cultures and societies – do not consider the topic of abuse of substances within the context of ritual, traditional or social life. In other words, like murder (in the context of religion, which we will address at some later date), it is not considered a problem topic if there is a religious, traditional or social note present.
In other words – if you are getting high with your friends or binge drinking, you are irresponsible. But if you are using drugs to achieve trance, or drinking in a currently accepted proscribed way (such as at high brow events, even if you do have an alcohol problem and you do go over the limit), or are indulging a local habit for the sake of belonging to your specific group (or even going with a group because you are in their territory), you will be considered to be merely acting in accordance with the rules of your religion, tradition or/and social/cultural group.
However – this is no less harmful to your body and psychology, as well as interpersonal interaction, as if you were just “irresponsible”. Drink and drugs (and of course tobacco) have serious side-effects on the physical, and many create vast psychological side-effects such as paranoia, aggression and anxiety. These effects may be short or long lasting, and it matters very little if we are talking about the so-called recreational use or use within a wider context.
This is why our working definition will not be the usual divide between proscribed and without proscription, which defines the acceptability of the substance in question; instead, our definition will be as follows :
Substance abuse is use of any substance, natural or chemical, within every context, that means use of any material in any form the body or brain has no use for.
Simply put – if you do not need it to function, then it has no place in your hands, your mouth, your body and your life.
This goes for all substances, including medication and alcohol, but social media, books, TV…are not included. While many hope to include them on the list of addictions (while often NOT including alcohol and ritualistic drugs), the problem is one of rigidity. Social media, books and TV are all a wider part of our lives. And yes, all, books included (and theatre…), have once had and will have haters (because there is no better word for this) “warning” against their use, usually with a personal agenda (mostly socially restrictive or cultist) in mind. To cut off the intended victim from the overall world is a much used method of all kinds of abusers, and it gives them power, whether this victim is a child or an adult, or even a group of adults, over the victim(s). And while there is certainly a point in teaching the same safety rules that you should be teaching (or, for that matter, learning) about internet activity, nothing excuses the “protective” people who try to prevent others (adult or otherwise) from interacting with the world. This is not only socially stifling and dumbing, it is also very much a move that will ruin an extant or a budding career, as much of everything academic happens online these days, and is widely accessible (and often free) to all public. At the same time, ritual texts or traditional texts are widely presented as “safe”, in spite of the huge amount of abuse and violence (as well as proscribed passivity and unquestioned belief, another trait of victim/abuser relations!) that they include, with little to no thought of the psychological consequences, which do lead to serious crimes – just think of many religiously caused crimes, from the terrorism that has been shaking the world to lonely gunmen like Breivik.
Of course it is possible to develop an addiction to anything. But the reason for addiction that has no SCR (so social, cultural, religious) grounds is in interpersonal interaction. I have had many cases of especially teens, but also younger children and adults, who seek to distract themselves obsessively in light of psychological abuse at home or at school, physical violence between the parents and other pressuring contexts. The worst is that in those cases, these people are taught from a young age to close all their feelings deep into themselves, and cannot express them, which can either lead into a distancing from the world and ultimately into depression and even suicide, or they express their helplessness and anger by becoming a bully online or in the physical world.
These are all serious problems, but they will not be solved by attempts at prevention of the one outlet these people have. Instead, a far better network of clinical psychologists (both for adults, children and adolescents) is needed worldwide, as is a more comprehensive psychiatric approach which often still falls foul of accepting the proscribed and working within its bounds rather than approaching the situation without any bias, including social, religious or cultural (source – my copy of DSM V).
For most, social media especially is a way to keep FROM becoming depressed. If I am to simply use myself as an example, I can say that I have friends all over the world, friends I cannot always visit, friends that I still love to chat to as often as possible, and the social media is a method that is cheap and simple, as well as fast. When I make a post, I can share what I feel or what I am thinking of immediately with all of them, and while it is, of course, down to the user to master the social media safety hacks, the same is true of using self-defence on the street.
So. Now that we have put that out of the way, let’s go back to substance abuse proper. We defined it as use of materials unnecessary for the body. But what leads to substance abuse, and how can anthropology help with its problematic?
For a start, it can determine that substance abuse is as we have defined it. Any competent specialist will explain to you that the trouble often starts with the substance being present, and having a specific place in our lives. This is definitely true of alcohol and tobacco. Both have a long standing tradition (albeit shorter than many people think) in the Western culture and elsewhere. By including them – tobacco often as a symbol of one’s class, gender and age – into daily or occasional ritualisations of all or many social interactions, they become inalienable, a part of aura of factuality, and therefore safe. It is not much different with food (another topic which we will cover at a later date) – food, however unpallatable and unhealthy, will cause less uproar, even on a wholly personal level, in rigid contexts than something that is healthy but does not belong. Superstitions will develop as a form of cautionary tale, and even whole, fully structured confirmation myths will evolve to keep the status quo.
Same is true of drugs, even where they are as such forbidden. By forbidding them rather than regulating the use carefully (which would also enable greater control over the substances within the substance, and therefore lesser risk of overdose, as well as minimise the spread of blood-borne diseases that boom due to the secrecy and resulting lack of means that this causes), we create a social group that uses drugs. This is a group that includes, in its many subcategories, a number of psychologically driven people from slightly different backgrounds – from the hippie used to accepting without question or feeling restricted by notions of society imposing on their freedom, to the rich but emotionally stunted -due to lack of positive interaction- student, to a woman trying to drown her pain of abuse in alcohol and drug of her choice, to an overworked businessman looking for a thrill to break up his feeling of being burnt out… These people are all subject to predisposing agents, all psychological, or better, psycho-social, that will have them seek out either oblivion from pain or from the feeling of emptiness…but the framework already exists, and before you know it, they will consider themselves, consciously or subconsciously, a part of it. And once someone is set in self-perception, and aware of the social perception of where they now seemingly belong, it is very difficult to start to avert the process, even if the body itself hasn’t become used to the substance as yet to the point where medical help is needed to help the addiction. Add to that people who have been brought up in environments where use of substances is a perfect daily socio-normality, and you have added up all the walks of life that lead to this abuse.
This same is true for drugs used by specific people in specific contexts only. We must begin to understand that a shaman or a witchdoctor using a ritualistic plant drug (we will address non-substance induced trance elsewhere, or this article will go on forever 🙂 ) is not going to reach any special states of mind that will help them see the future, or connect with the spirits, and so on. No more than any other drug user, they will simply be subject to specific effects of the drug on body and mind, and they will interpret them as they have been taught to interpret plus their own personal perception of events, conscious or subconscious, and the event(s) in question. In other words, there is no magic, no greater power in the situation – there is simply substance abuse and human mind.
While this use is potentially less harmful on the sheer grounds of frequency of use in some cases, it is far more harmful to the interaction within the society these people belong to. Too many cultures use drug induced divination to “discover” witches, demons… Often, this means death, or abuse of all kinds. We fail to recognise the harmful effects because the 19th century notions of the noble savage, revisited during the 80s and 90s especially, teach us that this is the true humanity, untarnished by the non-ascetic concepts of life. On top of that, the Western feeling of guilt (both understandable and unnecessary, depending on the situation) at the patchy history we have with others urges us to see the “wonder” of societies that are not as “corrupt” as ours (same perceptions that led to the idea of the noble savage apply here). At the same time, we forget that we dehumanise others by this behaviour, and that far more than by any other prejudice we could have. Nothing is worse than standing by and allowing the victims of those who trounce human rights to suffer without help, and without the hope that at some point, this will stop. This is possibly the most important part anthropology has to play in the matter of substance abuse – by presenting the hidden aspects of all manners of substance abuse, and by demystifying it from a seemingly innocent social, cultural or magical matter, and helping all societies take a step forward.