HiLoBooks is republishing these greats of Radium-Age Science Fiction through April, May and June of this year. What is Radium Age Science Fiction? Read Joshua Glenn’s essay here about how he discovered these lost classics by Rudyard Kipling, Conan Doyle and Jack London, and why he decided to return them to the world. (Cover art by Michael Lewey)

Bruce Springsteen Concert Commercial (2008)

By Brad Neely

[note: the above commercial is not the subject of Neely’s writing but merely a suitable example from Springsteen’s run of 2008 television spots]

We need to see him ourselves after seeing the commercial about seeing him. 

In the frame he’s running with his shoulders up and his eyebrows up. Singing not one word. His face, child-happy, flushes a few heart attacks worth of red. 

Watch him throwing guitars at a band lady who catches them with a “no-big-shit,-could-care-less,-fucking-boss-is-at-it-again” style grin. 

A guy with a pillow cover as a skullcap does a flip, lands on his back and rolls while holding a guitar. This shows that merely playing well is for loser cripples. 

These people are not dancing; they are performing the opera moves that signal the curtain to drop… over and over… from the absolute beginning. 

They are willing to rack themselves on the cameras, sing into grown men’s seasoned mouths and sweatily dry hump the ghosts of all our ideas of entertainment - all in hyper light stadium bights.

This commercial uses the frame like the ancient and always portal of life and looking. It opens with his head emerging from the depth like both the birther and the birthed: both states enraged by inexorable change. He’s appeared and cannot be unseen. He rages. He reddens. We widen.

All eyes ride him. Like apes eyeing Adam, we think differently of our coming deaths; “Bring them, for we cannot ascend to this.” 

Just look.

Mouth: in fuck’s heavy stride with breath like a plasma.

Body: a black wax candle, damp with heat from his pink, head-shaped flame.

Face: like sun spit.

Face: like all unrecorded bedroom histories.

Face: like that of a Jesus who’s not as good as the original Jesus when it comes to hiding the fact that crucifixion feels exhilarating to a demigod, am I right Hercules!?

Face: like a future weapon in womb, hot with extrapolating cells becoming him, becoming the weapon that has a face like himself in the womb.

This is what happens when you see him in a commercial on a fucking TV. You become pregnant with many hims. If you give him actual audience you become a missile base waiting to launch him.

Our forearms rise like sewn farmland, bulging with his uncanny emotional fecundity. He seems to issue fertility from all his exits. All variety of life swarms after him, dropping and dragging their eggs in his sweat, hoping to upgrade their next generations.

He can’t hold it in any longer and gushes upon the audience by way of flung forehead film and actual cup contents. He empties the reservoir. Our clothes team with his fluids. Our pores lodge with his wriggling seed. It comes in buckets from he above. We love it like soil loves a secret rain in the night, away from the jealous sun. Here in this mini-hemi of a concert hall our SunSteen rains and shines populating us with teeming springs.

He has the eyes of a murderer who gives one life by breaking another. The singing kind of murder. This Holy Murderer’s eyes blink, ready for the flawing of the claw, the jets of blood and the ejecting spirit of the murdered entities (our painful, unhappy selves) that shoot up from under his weight while we are reborn as happy dancers in the dark.

His face is the snake that crawls into its own ass without cessation. He’s yelled off his name, yelled away time, flooded the grouts of social recognition with the hottest sweat ever sweat. Everything known is unknown. He has brought us to the first and only instant.

Conclusion: to see this face is to see the circle of life. He is the sum of every human’s story, the story of life’s violent fight for dominance through time towards a plateau on which it, life, might rest and display tenderness before descending again upon the valley in search of time giving blood. We are happily the blood in his valley so that he may be born over and over.

Watch Brad Neely’s video Office Hours 

Readings selected by Paul De Jong, cellist and former member of the awe-inspiring, recently disbanded duo, The Books. 

Daniil Kharms - Incidences 

This is one of the few volumes in English written by Kharms. Along with Maiakowski, Vvedenski and Kazakow, Kharms was at the forefront of modernist writers around the time of the communist revolution in Russia in 1917.  Radical, idealistic, experimental, absurd, many of these writers quickly fell victim to the rigidity of the regime and either took their own life in despair and disappointment, died in the Gulag, or ended up dancing to big brother’s tune. Tightly controlled and under constant watch, Kharms ended up as an editor of children’s magazines and writing children’s stories, which are worthwhile enough to read to your children. He died under ‘mysterious circumstances.’ But before all that, he already had written a bizarre opus of absurdist vignettes , each one more perplexing in its depth and originality than the next one. Here humor truly proves to be the backdoor to the profound.

August Strindberg - Getting Married

Strindberg no doubt drew liberally from his own extensive experience when writing this collection of short stories. Here we witness the romance and idealism of early marriage methodically deteriorate and end in utter misery in every which way. Great expectations and deep disappointment, spendthrift and bankruptcy, sexism, overbearing egos, atrophied principles, control issues and co-dependence - this is a fictive encyclopedia of human failure and a good read to boot. Don’t let it keep you from trying! I am happily married myself. Again.

The German Legends of the Brothers Grimm

Beware, these are not the Household Tales! They do NOT live happily ever after! Some of the Household Tales may end somewhat badly, but the majority still would safely make the ‘G’ rating. Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm were indefatigable researchers who recorded several collections of German folk tales and legends during the 19th century. Most of these tales had been existing in the Germanic oral tradition for many centuries and were written down for the very first time in the age of enlightenment. In modern versions of the Household Tales the sharp (and ever so human) edges of the stories are often dulled, and morals have been attached where there were none intended. The German Legends present folk tales in their raw and unencumbered form: the supernatural and mystical  intertwine with the complexities of human character in a very inspiring way.

David Mamet - Make-Believe Town

This is the first volume of essays by playwright and director Mamet that I read. Shortly after I moved to the United States (about twenty years ago) I watched his Glengarry Glen Ross and was befuddled by its dialogues; there was such an overwhelming amount of  understatement that I was lost for about 90% of the movie.  I subsequently read Mamet’s screenplay and was left in even greater bewilderment. It took me about a decade to grow into the American idiom deep enough to come to understand, appreciate and admire Mamet’s characteristic writing. I was amazed at how close the spirit of his essays stands to his work for stage and screen, containing not the merest trace of contrivance. This volume is a selection of professional, personal and political reflections and memoirs; they stand out through what I would call a ‘practical philosophy’. No matter what decade they were written in, every one retains an immediacy of insight that can be readily applied to the present day. They exhibit the particular independence of mind that identifies a true American original, if, as a relative outsider, I may call it that.

Max Jacob - Selected Poems 

Not much of Max Jacob’s opus has been published in English or in any other language than its original French. I know of two small American editions, one translated by William Kulik and published in Oberlin in the 1990’s. Jacob, poet and painter, was one of the main group of Cubist painters and writers in Paris during the 1910’s and ‘20’s. His friends included Picasso, Modigliani, Apolliniare and Braque. Jacob’s prose poems marry the mystical and absurd, the symbolic and surreal. His texts always give me the strange sensation of reading something that appears to have been written a few millennia back with a 20th century fountain pen. Jacob never made much of anything from his writings or paintings, and remained equally poor after turning Christian, having had a vision of Christ on the wall of his room in 1909. He entered a monastery which did not keep the Nazis from seeking him out because of his Jewish origin. He died in a concentration camp in 1944.

Charles Simic - The World Doesn’t End

Yugoslavian-American writer Charles Simic seems to me a true representative of the living and breathing heritage of the particular craft of prose poetry. Simic’s prose poetry (like the vignettes of Kharms, the work of Jacob, and of their early predecessor Giacomo Leopardi) often has an appearance of being almost accidental, like a found object, a hint of something much larger and vaguely imaginable, inviting an archeological quest of one’s mind. What is very fulfilling to me as a reader is that if these seemingly fragmentary components are bundled wisely, the resulting collection tends to be far greater than the sum of its parts.

Four works of outsider art (or “Art Brut,” as coined by Jean Dubuffet) selected by Katie Bachner, who interviewed outsider art collector, Sam Farber for our February issue.
1
Madge Gill 
High Priestess, 1930-1940
2
Thorton Dial
Lost, 2004
3
Henry Darger 
After McWhorter Run. Gladelinians attack and blow up train carrying children to refuge 
4
Martin Ramirez
Untitled, (Trains and Tunnels),1952-53

In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction is the latest book by Dr. Gabor Maté. For over twenty years, he ran a private family practice; he serves as the staff physician at the Portland Hotel, a residence and resource centre for the people of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, one of the poorest, most drug-ridden neighborhoods in North America. Gabor Maté is also the author of When the Body Says No:The Cost of Hidden  Stress; and Scattered Minds: A New Look at the Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder. This interview was conducted by James FitzGerald. Read Part 1. BLVR: What does the title of your latest book refer to? GM: The hungry ghost is one of the six realms of the mandala, the Buddhist Wheel of Life. The realm of the hungry ghost is one of emptiness and insatiability, the endless search for satiation from the outside, which is essentially what our society is all about. Our society is full of hungry ghosts looking to the outside to fulfill their unmet needs. BLVR: In your book, you are honest about your own addictions to buying thousands of classical CDs. Once you left a woman giving birth to her baby in order to feed your sudden craving for CDs. You are a successful doctor and author, yet you see some similarities between yourself and the wretched, HIV-infected crackheads on the street. I imagine many people aren’t comfortable with that comparison. GM: They can’t see that addiction is a continuum. They can’t see that the heart of addiction is out-of-control behavior that negatively affects your life but you can’t give it up. Obviously, my CD addiction is less severe than the addictions of hard drug users, as I don’t have HIV or live in poverty. But do I lie? Yes I do. Does it hurt my relationship with my spouse? Yes it does. Did it have a negative effect on my kids? Yes. On my own psychic and spiritual life? Yes. The differences between myself and substance abusers are obvious, but it’s the similarities that interest me.  BLVR: As a physician working closely with hard-core, street-level drug addicts, you seem to be part of a tiny minority. Why are so few doctors doing what you do?  GM: Most physicians don’t have a science-based view of addiction because it’s not taught in medical schools. Most don’t know that the human brain develops through its interaction with the environment. They haven’t looked at the research linking trauma to severe drug addiction. It’s not even controversial. Many studies involving thousands of people have shown that the more severe the childhood trauma, the exponentially more likely the addiction. Physicians aren’t taught this, which leaves them without any understanding. The medical ignorance of the actual causes of addiction stems from their fundamentally deficient education, which in turn reflects social attitudes. BLVR: Does the media generally help or hinder your work? GM: The media is oriented to simple explanations, such as “genes explain everything.” The media also serves the status quo. They make a big deal about the Human Genome Project and how we are going to find the sources of human disease. Nothing could be further from the truth. We never will, because disease is not genetically determined, except in a few rare cases. But to look at the social conditions that lead to human disease would involve questioning social norms. For example, if we accept that that developmental problems relate to stresses within the child’s environment, even in utero, then we’d have to look at social policy. Also, the American government would have to ask why they provide only six weeks of maternity leave. Several studies have shown that kids whose parents are stressed are more likely to develop asthma, and if they live in polluted areas, they are even more likely. According to Maclean’s, the Canadian national magazine, my book was listed as the number one best-selling non-fiction book in Canada for several weeks. Then they came out with an article, “Addiction: A Disorder of Choice.” It was based on a book by a Harvard psychologist who has never treated an addict in his life. His approach was purely theoretical, ignoring the literature on trauma and the brain. A purely genetic approach justifies the conservative social policies that a magazine like Maclean’s supports. BLVR: Richard Nixon declared a “war on drugs” in 1971 and for years it has been largely regarded as a fiasco. Why does it persist? GM: The policy has escalated since then. Billions of dollars have been spent and yet things are getting worse, not better. Over 40,000 people have been killed in Mexico in the last four years and 77 million Americans have used illegal drugs. If we assume the war on drugs is about stopping the drug trade, then it’s been a fiasco. But what if we assume that legal systems, law enforcement agencies, private jails, and governments have a lot invested in it? The war on drugs maintains powers of intervention in citizens’ lives that they could use in other areas should the need arise. Ideologically, it’s always useful to keep a few extra enemies on hand in case we run out of terrorists or communists. The government likes enemies because it mobilizes support for authoritarian measures and state power. So the war on drugs is a total success for the people who benefit from it. I’m not saying it’s a conspiracy, just that it functions that way. Rarely do the big drug dealers get caught. When they do, others take their place. The real victims who end up in jail are at the very bottom of the social ladder; the users or small time street dealers who deal mostly to support their own habit. Invariably, these people were abused as children. The government spends billions on jails while starving social programs that prevent addiction. The war on drugs is actually waged against people who were abused. We try to rescue abused children if we can; if we don’t, then twenty-five years later, we lock them in jail. More social harm is done by the existing system than by the drugs themselves. I worked for some years at Insite, the supervised drug injection site in Vancouver, which is the only one in North America. To reduce harm to the addict and to society, we used clean needles and sterile water under relatively safe conditions. Insite has been peer reviewed in twenty-five international studies, which showed it to have demonstrable health and life-saving benefits, not to mention health care cost benefits. We need less politics and ideology and more science and principle.

In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction is the latest book by Dr. Gabor Maté. For over twenty years, he ran a private family practice; he serves as the staff physician at the Portland Hotel, a residence and resource centre for the people of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, one of the poorest, most drug-ridden neighborhoods in North America. Gabor Maté is also the author of When the Body Says No:The Cost of Hidden  Stress; and Scattered Minds: A New Look at the Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder. This interview was conducted by James FitzGerald. Read Part 1.

BLVR: What does the title of your latest book refer to?

GM: The hungry ghost is one of the six realms of the mandala, the Buddhist Wheel of Life. The realm of the hungry ghost is one of emptiness and insatiability, the endless search for satiation from the outside, which is essentially what our society is all about. Our society is full of hungry ghosts looking to the outside to fulfill their unmet needs.

BLVR: In your book, you are honest about your own addictions to buying thousands of classical CDs. Once you left a woman giving birth to her baby in order to feed your sudden craving for CDs. You are a successful doctor and author, yet you see some similarities between yourself and the wretched, HIV-infected crackheads on the street. I imagine many people aren’t comfortable with that comparison.

GM: They can’t see that addiction is a continuum. They can’t see that the heart of addiction is out-of-control behavior that negatively affects your life but you can’t give it up. Obviously, my CD addiction is less severe than the addictions of hard drug users, as I don’t have HIV or live in poverty. But do I lie? Yes I do. Does it hurt my relationship with my spouse? Yes it does. Did it have a negative effect on my kids? Yes. On my own psychic and spiritual life? Yes. The differences between myself and substance abusers are obvious, but it’s the similarities that interest me. 

BLVR: As a physician working closely with hard-core, street-level drug addicts, you seem to be part of a tiny minority. Why are so few doctors doing what you do? 

GM: Most physicians don’t have a science-based view of addiction because it’s not taught in medical schools. Most don’t know that the human brain develops through its interaction with the environment. They haven’t looked at the research linking trauma to severe drug addiction. It’s not even controversial. Many studies involving thousands of people have shown that the more severe the childhood trauma, the exponentially more likely the addiction. Physicians aren’t taught this, which leaves them without any understanding. The medical ignorance of the actual causes of addiction stems from their fundamentally deficient education, which in turn reflects social attitudes.

BLVR: Does the media generally help or hinder your work?

GM: The media is oriented to simple explanations, such as “genes explain everything.” The media also serves the status quo. They make a big deal about the Human Genome Project and how we are going to find the sources of human disease. Nothing could be further from the truth. We never will, because disease is not genetically determined, except in a few rare cases. But to look at the social conditions that lead to human disease would involve questioning social norms.

For example, if we accept that that developmental problems relate to stresses within the child’s environment, even in utero, then we’d have to look at social policy. Also, the American government would have to ask why they provide only six weeks of maternity leave. Several studies have shown that kids whose parents are stressed are more likely to develop asthma, and if they live in polluted areas, they are even more likely.

According to Maclean’s, the Canadian national magazine, my book was listed as the number one best-selling non-fiction book in Canada for several weeks. Then they came out with an article, “Addiction: A Disorder of Choice.” It was based on a book by a Harvard psychologist who has never treated an addict in his life. His approach was purely theoretical, ignoring the literature on trauma and the brain. A purely genetic approach justifies the conservative social policies that a magazine like Maclean’s supports.

BLVR: Richard Nixon declared a “war on drugs” in 1971 and for years it has been largely regarded as a fiasco. Why does it persist?

GM: The policy has escalated since then. Billions of dollars have been spent and yet things are getting worse, not better. Over 40,000 people have been killed in Mexico in the last four years and 77 million Americans have used illegal drugs. If we assume the war on drugs is about stopping the drug trade, then it’s been a fiasco. But what if we assume that legal systems, law enforcement agencies, private jails, and governments have a lot invested in it? The war on drugs maintains powers of intervention in citizens’ lives that they could use in other areas should the need arise. Ideologically, it’s always useful to keep a few extra enemies on hand in case we run out of terrorists or communists. The government likes enemies because it mobilizes support for authoritarian measures and state power. So the war on drugs is a total success for the people who benefit from it. I’m not saying it’s a conspiracy, just that it functions that way.

Rarely do the big drug dealers get caught. When they do, others take their place. The real victims who end up in jail are at the very bottom of the social ladder; the users or small time street dealers who deal mostly to support their own habit. Invariably, these people were abused as children. The government spends billions on jails while starving social programs that prevent addiction. The war on drugs is actually waged against people who were abused. We try to rescue abused children if we can; if we don’t, then twenty-five years later, we lock them in jail. More social harm is done by the existing system than by the drugs themselves.

I worked for some years at Insite, the supervised drug injection site in Vancouver, which is the only one in North America. To reduce harm to the addict and to society, we used clean needles and sterile water under relatively safe conditions. Insite has been peer reviewed in twenty-five international studies, which showed it to have demonstrable health and life-saving benefits, not to mention health care cost benefits. We need less politics and ideology and more science and principle.

Dr. Gabor Maté was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1944. He emigrated to Canada with his family in 1957 and settled in Vancouver. For over twenty years, he ran a private family practice, and for seven years was the Medical Co-ordinator of the Palliative Care Unit at Vancouver Hospital. Currently he is the staff physician at the Portland Hotel, a residence and resource centre for the people of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, one of the poorest, most drug-ridden neighborhoods in North America. Gabor Maté is the author of three books: When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress; Scattered Minds: A New Look at the Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder; and, most recently, In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction. The interview was conducted by James FitzGerald. Part 1/2 THE BELIEVER: How does your thinking differ from conventional ideas on addiction?  GABOR MATÉ: Conventional thinking on addiction is based on two assumptions: first, that addictions are a matter of choice; an ethical lapse, a stupid decision that needs to be deterred by Draconian punishments. Secondly, there is the assumption that addiction is a brain disease – a genetically determined, inherited disease. This is the view which dominates medical thinking. BLVR: If we believe solely in the “addiction gene” it absolves us of responsibility.  GM: Yes, it takes society off the hook. It means we don’t have to look at social policies and conditions that facilitate addictions. People still believe that childhood conditions like ADHD are genetically determined. They can’t be; if they were, we wouldn’t see them arise in such great numbers. So the medical approach continues to defy scientific information and fundamental logic. The new science of psychoneuroimmunology shows the connection between the emotional systems and the hormonal and immune systems. Emotions actually do have an impact on physical health. It shows up in epigenetics, the science that shows that genes are not dominant but they are turned on and off by the environment. All this research is new but it’s not so fresh that people haven’t had an opportunity to absorb it. I believe the source of addiction is not to be found in the genes or in individual choice but within the addict’s particular history, within a particular multi-generational family within a particular culture. BLVR: Why isn’t the latest addiction research being taught? GM: There are few professions as profoundly conservative as medicine. When people invest their whole lives and careers in a certain point of view, they are not going to give it up just because new research comes along. If new ideas do break through, they will be taken up by young physicians. But the people who control the gates of the medical schools are not going to surrender their perspectives easily. If they did, they’d have to admit that for three decades they practiced medicine that was deficient. This applies not just to addictions but physical illness. The mind-body separation is innate in medical practice. Clinically, physicians treat bodies, not an individual with a life history. Physicians think that whatever occurs, whether addiction, mental illness or cancer, must be separated from a person’s actual life. I’m fighting the idea that people can be severed from their lives — not only the mind from the body, but individuals from their environment. The gates of the medical schools are being slowly forced ajar, but it’s going to be a long process. BLVR: Why do we stigmatize drug addicts so severely? GM: In my work, I try to confront the stigmatization of mental illness in general and addiction in particular. First, why are we so uncomfortable with mental illness? Because we’re all crazy to some degree. Some people are clinically depressed, but most of us are not free from feelings of intractable sadness or loss. People are afraid of their dark sides. In this society — rife with addictive behaviors that go way beyond drug addiction — we project our discomfort with ourselves onto the addict. It’s like scapegoating in the Bible, where the sins of the community are put on a sacrificial goat and we chase him into the desert. That’s what we do with drug addicts. BLVR: Of all addicts, drug users seem to be regarded as the lowest of the low. GM: Exactly. There’s a continuum of addictions. You can be addicted to profit and kill the earth as a result, and that’s OK; but if you fill your own body with drugs, that’s not OK. As most of us aren’t drug addicts, but have other addictions, we can safely stigmatize the drug addict. He or she represents the ugly part of us we don’t want to acknowledge and deal with. BLVR: Nancy Reagan’s mantra “Just Say No” is still a popular admonition to addicts. You prefer to say: “Give them something to say yes to.” What do you mean? GM: Whether an addiction is behavioral or substance-related, it always serves a purpose in a person’s life. Addiction is always about soothing pain, dealing with stress, gaining a sense of meaning and connection, or a temporary relief from unbearable mind states. These are all things we want in our lives. But the addict doesn’t not how to get them except through addictive behavior. When we say, “Just Say No” we are saying say no to pain relief, meaning, vitality, dealing with the stress. The American physician Vincent Felitti puts it well: “Dismissing addictions as ‘bad habits’ or ‘self-destructive behavior’ comfortably hides their functionality in the life of the addict.” So the question is: what function is the addiction serving? I’m not saying it’s a good thing — the addiction creates more suffering and pain than it can possibly soothe — but for the addict, drugs represent the only way they know how to relieve distress. We should ask not why the addiction but why the pain? If we are going to ask the addict to give it up, let’s give him some other way of coping with pain, emotional loss, spiritual emptiness, isolation. Let’s give them safer environments where they can find qualities and resources within themselves, or help them learn how to ask for them from the environment. It’s only in relationships with compassionate others they can start to develop a healthy relationship with themselves. 

Dr. Gabor Maté was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1944. He emigrated to Canada with his family in 1957 and settled in Vancouver. For over twenty years, he ran a private family practice, and for seven years was the Medical Co-ordinator of the Palliative Care Unit at Vancouver Hospital. Currently he is the staff physician at the Portland Hotel, a residence and resource centre for the people of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, one of the poorest, most drug-ridden neighborhoods in North America. Gabor Maté is the author of three books: When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress; Scattered Minds: A New Look at the Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder; and, most recently, In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction. The interview was conducted by James FitzGerald. Part 1/2

THE BELIEVER: How does your thinking differ from conventional ideas on addiction? 

GABOR MATÉ: Conventional thinking on addiction is based on two assumptions: first, that addictions are a matter of choice; an ethical lapse, a stupid decision that needs to be deterred by Draconian punishments. Secondly, there is the assumption that addiction is a brain disease – a genetically determined, inherited disease. This is the view which dominates medical thinking.

BLVR: If we believe solely in the “addiction gene” it absolves us of responsibility. 

GM: Yes, it takes society off the hook. It means we don’t have to look at social policies and conditions that facilitate addictions. People still believe that childhood conditions like ADHD are genetically determined. They can’t be; if they were, we wouldn’t see them arise in such great numbers. So the medical approach continues to defy scientific information and fundamental logic. The new science of psychoneuroimmunology shows the connection between the emotional systems and the hormonal and immune systems. Emotions actually do have an impact on physical health. It shows up in epigenetics, the science that shows that genes are not dominant but they are turned on and off by the environment. All this research is new but it’s not so fresh that people haven’t had an opportunity to absorb it. I believe the source of addiction is not to be found in the genes or in individual choice but within the addict’s particular history, within a particular multi-generational family within a particular culture.

BLVR: Why isn’t the latest addiction research being taught?

GM: There are few professions as profoundly conservative as medicine. When people invest their whole lives and careers in a certain point of view, they are not going to give it up just because new research comes along. If new ideas do break through, they will be taken up by young physicians. But the people who control the gates of the medical schools are not going to surrender their perspectives easily. If they did, they’d have to admit that for three decades they practiced medicine that was deficient. This applies not just to addictions but physical illness. The mind-body separation is innate in medical practice. Clinically, physicians treat bodies, not an individual with a life history. Physicians think that whatever occurs, whether addiction, mental illness or cancer, must be separated from a person’s actual life. I’m fighting the idea that people can be severed from their lives — not only the mind from the body, but individuals from their environment. The gates of the medical schools are being slowly forced ajar, but it’s going to be a long process.

BLVR: Why do we stigmatize drug addicts so severely?

GM: In my work, I try to confront the stigmatization of mental illness in general and addiction in particular. First, why are we so uncomfortable with mental illness? Because we’re all crazy to some degree. Some people are clinically depressed, but most of us are not free from feelings of intractable sadness or loss. People are afraid of their dark sides. In this society — rife with addictive behaviors that go way beyond drug addiction — we project our discomfort with ourselves onto the addict. It’s like scapegoating in the Bible, where the sins of the community are put on a sacrificial goat and we chase him into the desert. That’s what we do with drug addicts.

BLVR: Of all addicts, drug users seem to be regarded as the lowest of the low.

GM: Exactly. There’s a continuum of addictions. You can be addicted to profit and kill the earth as a result, and that’s OK; but if you fill your own body with drugs, that’s not OK. As most of us aren’t drug addicts, but have other addictions, we can safely stigmatize the drug addict. He or she represents the ugly part of us we don’t want to acknowledge and deal with.

BLVR: Nancy Reagan’s mantra “Just Say No” is still a popular admonition to addicts. You prefer to say: “Give them something to say yes to.” What do you mean?

GM: Whether an addiction is behavioral or substance-related, it always serves a purpose in a person’s life. Addiction is always about soothing pain, dealing with stress, gaining a sense of meaning and connection, or a temporary relief from unbearable mind states. These are all things we want in our lives. But the addict doesn’t not how to get them except through addictive behavior. When we say, “Just Say No” we are saying say no to pain relief, meaning, vitality, dealing with the stress. The American physician Vincent Felitti puts it well: “Dismissing addictions as ‘bad habits’ or ‘self-destructive behavior’ comfortably hides their functionality in the life of the addict.” So the question is: what function is the addiction serving? I’m not saying it’s a good thing — the addiction creates more suffering and pain than it can possibly soothe — but for the addict, drugs represent the only way they know how to relieve distress. We should ask not why the addiction but why the pain? If we are going to ask the addict to give it up, let’s give him some other way of coping with pain, emotional loss, spiritual emptiness, isolation. Let’s give them safer environments where they can find qualities and resources within themselves, or help them learn how to ask for them from the environment. It’s only in relationships with compassionate others they can start to develop a healthy relationship with themselves.