The right to be an addict

Addiction isn’t the problem—criminalisation is. To end the crisis, we must abolish prisons, policing, and the system that fuels suffering, argues Thomas Necchi.

In a world of ever expanding addictive trades, new narcotics and a steadily increasing death toll for users, there is one right we insist on: the right to be an addict. This is the first step which we must take in order to deal with the drug crisis. It is the patient’s right to be sick, the disabled person’s right to access, it is the right of the criminalised to be safe from state oppression. It is the human being’s right to be human, at the painful intersections of all their contradictions.

What is an addict? To begin to answer this question, we must turn the concept of addiction on its head, which sees it as the result of either potent substances or the moral weakness of the addict. The chief defect of the dominant rhetoric on addiction is that ‘the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively‘. Addiction is a practice and a relation, a complex and multifaceted response to social and physical environments that continues beyond the point of harm and self-harm, once all negative consequences have made themselves known. Contrary to drug war rhetoric, addiction as a practice does not even need a substance, let alone a powerful one. Is a gambling addiction induced by a pack of cards? No. Just as a drug is produced via an ensemble of social relations, so too is an addict produced. Addiction is neither simply science or psychology; it is the chemistry of alienation.

As addicts what we ask for first and foremost is for Terence’s motto: ‘that nothing human is alien to us’. All we ask is that it applies to us: that no human is alien to us. By placing addicts at the centre of our response to the drugs crisis, we imagine the possibility of a world where both addicts and users might be free from criminalisation. No utopia is alien to us.

People will complain about this analysis: much time and effort has been spent drawing the borders between ‘us’ and ‘them’. In their knee jerk responses you see the silhouette of the cop, of the judge – they wish to punish and murder the wretched of the earth as easy as it is to blow their nose. They think it so easy that they can stamp it out like a disease, like it were a kind of unpatriotic rabies. The junkie arouses mass hysteria. To be a user is to lay oneself open to a whole system of threats. The common carceral wisdom of the media and the state is repeated offhand without much thought into the history of it, and without the obvious question this history begs: if punishment is the solution, then why hasn’t the drug trade been solved?

Punishment, prisons and policing have not and will not solve drug use as a social issue. If anything, it increases it by meting out such violence that prisoners have no route of escape but substances. In Britain alone, a prisoner finds themselves awash with all kinds of substances flooding into the prisons. A drug user might not be an addict when picked up for a possession charge, but there’s a strong chance they could be when they come out. And this fact tells us something about addiction: that is not the indulgences of lumpen scum but an attempt by vulnerable people to manage their pain. Physician and writer Gabor Maté says we should not ask why the addiction, but why the pain? To this we add, if the world produces this pain, then why the world?

To what end do we wish to solve the drug crisis – to mould addicts and users into good citizens and send them off to a lifetime of increasingly precarious work, to die at increasingly younger and younger ages as straight time grinds them down? No. As much as there is a drug crisis, there is also a work crisis. Work compels more than any drug ever could, its pushers are more insidious than the most loathsome dealer, and its withdrawal symptoms are devastating and often lethal for those who cannot find the fix. A human being is more serious at play than work. Only in that mode are they in control of their creative and critical capacities, and it is only with those capacities that we have the power to solve the crisis.

This play must be part of our work: in the permanent persuasive fight against the carceral state and its media running dogs. We cannot afford to keep the discourse in the hands of pundits and ‘experts’. They argue to win an argument, we are arguing for our lives. In the supposed war on drugs, the knowledge of how to use it safely and cleanly is kept suppressed. Critical knowledge we must vigilantly keep in the public domain. It is only with this critical knowledge that we can deal with the great global addiction: the capitalist world system and the exploitation required to produce drugs and keep the countries where they are made under imperialist control. To repeat Marx’s words: ‘The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.’

These are the demands: first, the full decriminalisation of all drug use and possession, then a complete overhaul of how the NHS deals with drug use, and finally the abolition of the policing and prison systems. If we cannot be given those things then we will work to make them a reality, as part of or as the result of the revolutionary overthrow of the existing order.

A version of this article was first published on the Rabid Dog Journals blog post.