Clues to U.S.’ Addiction May Lie in Its Culture

“Americans represent only 2% of the world population but consume 60% of the world’s illicit drugs,” says Dr. Arnold Washton, an expert on addiction.

“If that is not an indictment of our culture, I don’t know what is.”

Washton is co-author of a new study that provides some clues to a question rarely touched in the debate over the war on drugs: Why do Americans use more drugs than anyone else?

Experts say U.S. per capita consumption of illicit drugs is the world’s highest. In addition, millions abuse prescription drugs from tranquilizers to sleeping pills. Alcohol and tobacco, usually excluded from the drug debate, account for an estimated 450,000 deaths a year.

“We are not only talking about cocaine or crack,” Washton said in an interview.

“We are now seeing high school kids who are getting high from typewriter correction fluid. We are becoming a nation of compulsive drug users, a ‘chemical people.”’

The reason is rooted in a society driven by obsessions with perfection, performance, possessions, money and power, according to the study, entitled “Willpower’s Not Enough.”

At the same time, the support traditionally provided by the extended family or community is breaking down.

In this environment, the study says, people are vulnerable to the temptation of “mood changers” -- drugs or compulsive behavior that make the individual feel good (while the effects last) and that temporarily meet emotional and social needs the American Way of Life fails to provide.

Addictions in the United States go beyond drugs, according to Washton. No other country has as many compulsive overeaters (estimated at 40 to 60 million) or gamblers (12 million).

For many Americans, even sex is a compulsion.

“For sex addicts, sex is the drug that is used in a never-ending search for relief, distraction, comfort, excitement, and a sense of power or other effect having little to do with sex itself,” the study says.

Some 60 million Americans, it asserts, are sexually abused by the time they reach 18. Reports of sexual abuse have shot up from 6,000 in 1976 to 200,000 last year.

“It is a form of collective insanity to believe that if all illicit drugs were somehow removed from this country, we would become a society of noncompulsive, life-embracing people,” said Washton, director of the Washton Institute on Addictions in New York and founder of the first national cocaine hotline.

“The fact that so many other types of compulsive behavior are springing up testifies to the fallacy of that belief.”

Many drug experts view with skepticism sociological explanations for a drug epidemic which has turned parts of major cities into virtual war zones and costs an estimated $200 billion a year in lost productivity, medical care and crime.

“I don’t think it is correct to say that America is a continuously addictive society,” said Dr. David Musto of Yale University, a leading authority on the history of drug use in the United States. “At various times, we have gone from being tremendous consumers of drugs to using almost no drugs whatsoever.”

The pendulum has swung from one extreme to the other in periods of 70 to 80 years, Musto said, recalling that President William Taft spoke in 1910 of “a most fearful epidemic of cocaine.” Fifteen years later, the epidemic had run its course.

There is no sign that the present epidemic is near its peak. Anti-narcotics officials say that crack, an extremely addictive, smokeable form of cocaine, is fast spreading from urban slums to the middle class and from cities to the countryside.

Many Americans, including law enforcement officers, share an uneasy feeling that their way of life contributes to the problem.

“There is not one single answer,” said a senior official of the Drug Enforcement Administration, “but one of the root causes is in the family.

“Millions of kids are left to themselves. Among the poor, single-parent families often just don’t function. Among the middle class, mom and dad are often too busy with their careers to spare time for the children.”

A recent study of 5,000 eighth-graders in California found that “latchkey children” caring for themselves after school were twice as likely to use alcohol and 1.7 times to use marijuana as adolescents who grow up under adult care.

The study found the smallest number of latchkey children among Hispanic families, where grandparents, aunts or cousins take over when parents have to work.

Latin Americans cite traditional values and the safety net of the extended family as reasons why drug addiction in their countries is minimal compared with the United States.

Peru, Bolivia, and Colombia -- which produce almost all the cocaine used in the United States -- have virtually no cocaine problem except among abandoned street children whose number is minute compared with an estimated six million American cocaine users.

While there is no unanimity on the reasons for the American penchant for drugs, most experts agree that the war on drugs has so far failed to stem the flood.

In Latin America and Asia the areas under cultivation for the raw materials for cocaine and heroin -- coca leaf and opium poppy -- have grown relentlessly despite U.S.-sponsored eradication campaigns.

In the United States anti-narcotics fighters scored spectacular successes: within three weeks recently they seized more than 35 tons of cocaine, an all-time record and roughly a third of the estimated annual consumption.

Yet the seizures did not result in shortages on the street or sharp price increases. Even if they had, the overall addiction picture is unlikely to change, according to Washton.

“There are clandestine laboratories now producing a smokeable amphetamine called ‘ice’ or ‘crank,”’ he noted.

“It gives users a high like crack, with the difference that it lasts 12 to 14 hours instead of a few minutes. It also produces a far worse ‘down’ once the effect wears off. It’s a more destructive drug (than crack).”

What is needed for long-term change, he said, “is for us as a society to look honestly at ourselves and accept the disconcerting truth of our collective discontent with our way of life.”