Another article. This guy may be full of crap but his last few lines are on the mark:
Addicted to controversy; Psychologist wins $5,000 cash for debunking 'myth' of drug addiction
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Just as Al Gore was being honoured yesterday in Sweden for trying to dispel controversy and build consensus, halfway around the world in Vancouver, psychologist Bruce Alexander was being honoured for precisely the opposite.
Named this year's winner of the Nora and Ted Sterling Prize for Controversy, the drug-addiction researcher who thinks drug addiction is a myth, similar to medieval demon possession, joins a remarkable pantheon of academic poop-disturbers at Simon Fraser University, which awards the $5,000 prize, usually but not necessarily to one of its faculty.
"It's not the Nobel Prize," said Nora Sterling, a mental health advocate and arts patron, who established the award in 1994 with her late husband, Ted, the founding chair of the Simon Fraser University computer science program.
It has been awarded for controversies as diverse as the Newfoundland fishing economy, AIDS-related euthanasia, prostitution law, serial killer profiling, gun control, pest control, victims rights, cognitive differences between the sexes, genetically modified food and evolutionary psychology. It has been won by biologists and economists, criminologists and psychologists, grad students and professors emeritus, feather-rufflers all, united by disagreement.
It has even had controversies of its own, such as when it went to prominent right-wing economist and former Reform MP Herb Grubel, whose ideas are at odds with the mainstream of SFU's liberal arts faculty, who are among Canada's most leftist. In that sense, he was an unpopularly perfect choice for a celebration of controversy.
Prof. Alexander was nominated in large part for his role in inspiring Vancouver's "four pillars" drug abuse policy, which has drawn public denunciation from top American justice officials for its perceived laxity.
"That says it's controversial, and that's exactly the sort of thing that the prize wants to recognize," said Ron Ydenberg, an SFU biology professor who chaired the prize committee. "The committee is uninterested in the award winner being right in any sense. What we're interested in is that the work has attracted attention."
Ms. Sterling, who is not involved in judging, said the point is to recognize meaningul controversies for their role in promoting understanding.
"We are both controversial people, both my husband and myself," she said. "We questioned the mainstreams of thought and felt that there should be a prize for people who also question, but have done their homework to support their controversial approach. For scientists, their research methods must be ethical and judged as credible by their peers -- it cannot be merely opinions."
Born in New York City, educated in Wisconsin and at the University of Oregon medical school, Prof. Alexander was actively opposed to the Vietnam War as a young man, and avoided the draft because he was married with children. He arrived in Vancouver in 1970, hoping to move from experimental to clinical psychology, and "start curing people of addiction." He started with talk therapy for heroin addicts, one of psychology's more Sisyphean projects.
"I went into it like anyone else would. I knew what I had learned in school, and I remembered what my father taught me, you know, that these drugs cause addiction, and once people get into them they're sort of possessed, and if they're going to get out of it, they're going to have to have some sort of a conversion experience," Prof. Alexander said.
He discovered that addicts were not the demonic, pathological liars and thieves he had been told. "They're more like pathetic kids," he said.
His experiences prompted a "Peter Pan phase" in his thinking. His 1990 book, Peaceful Measures: Canada's Way Out of the War on Drugs, even includes a chapter on J.M. Barrie, who Prof. Alexander said was addicted to the fantasy of not growing up.
"He, in many ways, is like a junky, because he just can't face the complexities of life," he said.
This phase was part of a broad awakening to a new concept of addiction, which he now believes to be a relatively modern invention, the result of "insufficient psychosocial integration" in a free-market society.
Now, he thinks, the word "addiction" is more often used in the trivial sense, when the truth is something closer to "dependence," such as one can have on coffee, Prozac, even family. He has come to believe that addiction is not the unrelenting neurobiological grip of a substance, but a set of circumstances, involving nutrition, social exclusion, even the real estate market.
"There's a lot of people who use drugs, and they use them not in order to lead a junky life, but to lead a normal life. They use them as crutches. And in fact an awful lot of people do that. So, in my way of thinking, most smokers are not addicted," he said.
Real addiction, as he sees near his house, not far from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, is a different beast than simple nicotine craving.
"You know these people have been labelled junkies, and you think maybe this was caused by the heroin, but why not say it's caused by the malnutrition, or the repeated physical violence, or the stress?" he said. Addiction is a very real and terrible problem, he said, but heroin itself is "a benign drug."
"The myth is demon possession, that drugs can possess you and make you into an addict. It has a very medieval flavour to it," he said. "That idea, that these drugs cause addiction, is an extremely valuable idea for an awful lot of people. I mean, obviously for police, to start with. That's easy, right, because now they have a mission to protect the public [from drugs]. But for psychologists even more so, because we have to have a reason why we can't cure these guys."
It's even a "useful story" for parents of junkies, who are often racked with guilt, fairly or not -- the story that it was the junk that got the child, "not anything that I didn't do."
As a researcher, Prof. Alexander started attracting serious attention in the 1970s, when he, with Barry Beyerstein, Patricia Hadaway and Robert Coambs, did a series of experiments known as "Rat Park," purportedly showing that drugs do not cause addiction. In one experiment, rats that had been fed morphine for two months straight were introduced to a luxurious habitat with wheels and balls, plenty of food, water and warmth, and a social network of other rats. Given a choice between morphine-laced water and tap water, the rats chose tap.
It was a convincing result for Prof. Alexander, and definitely controversial. But it was rejected by Science and Nature, two of the world's top journals, before being published in a lesser publication. His funding was eventually withdrawn. "Maybe we didn't write it well enough for Nature, I don't know," he said.
In his forthcoming book, The Globalization of Addiction, he expands on the iconoclasm that he has promoted for almost 30 years, and argues that Canada does not treat addiction aggressively enough. Among his proposed remedies are legislated changes to the real estate market, aimed at driving out speculators in favour of real people who need housing.
He said the measures announced this week by Health Minister Tony Clement -- funding for prevention, treatment and a crackdown on dealing -- amount to "reinventing the wheel," and are doomed.
"The greatest naivete here is to suppose there is a shortcut," he said.
Nobel or not, you just cannot imagine Al Gore ever saying that.
jbrean@nationalpost.com
