In the next year, the US will get much better at addressing the so-called opioid crisis. It is currently doing this by reducing prescriptions for painkillers and by increasing the availability of naloxone, a drug that can often save the life of someone suffering an opioid overdose.
But throughout 2019, we will finally begin to address the real crisis of which the deaths are only a symptom: an increasingly toxic culture to which addiction is, for many, a logical response.
I call this phenomenon “global sickening”, a deep anguish that leads people to seek relief in drugs (or in alcohol, or Facebook likes or mindless consumption and display). It is marked by an overwhelming rise of anxiety and depression, which results from a toxic brew of social ills: loss of purpose, loss of social fabric, loss of meaningful work, pervasive advertising of quick fixes of all kinds, financial stress, and so on and on.
Any one of these alone is a challenge to everyday human life. Combine them, and you are stuck in a hole you can’t climb out of. And when you’re in that hole, drug use is a reasonable choice. Intuitively, we understand that there’s no particular reason to stay sober if you don’t have a job; there’s no particular reason to work to stay healthy if you can’t project a future for yourself. Research backs this up. Many experiments have shown the strong influence environment and mindset have over an individual’s vulnerability to addiction.
The opioid crisis has gripped the US partly because so many people dying of opioid overdoses are white and partly because it affects social “leaders”, individuals with access to the media, government officials and people in business. These opinion leaders are beginning to realise that it’s not just “other people” who are getting addicted but also their own friends and relatives, people they went to school with, people they read about in the Sunday magazines. And, belatedly for the less fortunate and poor, who have been suffering from global sickening for decades, this is overcoming mainstream America’s blindness not just to addiction itself, but to the traumas that make us all vulnerable to it.
That’s the awareness part. The second encouraging factor is that we are beginning to see that it makes financial sense to tackle these root causes of addiction and other ills. Taxpayers are beginning to realise that, in the long run, effective parenting, effective schools and good child care are cheaper than rehab, jails and ongoing medical costs, especially when we consider the tax revenues generated by engaged, productive employees. And all of us pay more for goods and services produced by companies with disengaged, unproductive and undereducated employees.
Beyond institutions such as schools and child care (and beyond abstinence-only recovery programs and incarceration for those already ensnared), we will need to pay more attention to human connections. For all the babble about celebrities and their failings, will we be able to move from reveling in their failings to understanding their pain as a reflection of our own? And to reach out to others not just with sympathy but with love? It used to be that we compared ourselves to our animals and knew we were different because we could talk and think. Now we must compare ourselves to machines and to know we are different because we can love other individuals and have purpose beyond an algorithm. The shock of the opioid crisis and its bigger context will give us the motivation to do so.
All of this will be a big ask. It’s much easier to think of addiction as a crime or a moral failing than to find its causes in structures and ways of being that we take for granted (and which generate wealth for many). But in 2019 we will begin to understand that, for many people, it is the world that is failing, not them, and we will start to put that right.
Esther Dyson is executive founder of Wellville
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
