by Mark Harris

Pearls of wisdom are generally acquired at the cost of great pain. It is often best to learn lessons the hard way, as many of us did, because you don’t forget them easily. When Isho warned against casting pearls before swine, he was saying in effect “If they can’t see your pain, they cannot understand your wisdom, and in their race to stuff themselves, they will tread your pearls into the mud, even if they are the keys out of their particular pig sty.
In my case one of my personal favorite pearls I accreted in the form of a haikoan, a jawbreaker for the mind, for the praxis of Cultural Recovery.

Culture Causes, Cures
Violence, Sickness, Deaths, Dis-Ease
All Must Find Their P (I) E (A) CE

I think of addictive behavior as attempting to fill in a missing piece of yourself. American’s often suffer from what I refer to as cultural amnesia, a sort of retrograde historical erasure that leads to some very interesting phenomena such as the race to drink or drug yourself beyond oblivion as a standard practice. I often ask my students, both the civilians and the pro’s “Where did you get the idea that the normalized addictive use of alcohol, pharmaceuticals, and other drugs is normal behavior?” “Obviously from the drug dealers themselves, except you tend to think of them as respectable corporations.” I think of them as no different than the cocaine-meth-heroin-marijuana cartels, simply with a higher body count. Using the 2000 Surgeon General death statistics, every day and a half, legal drugs (active and passive tobacco use, alcohol, and pharmaceutical) kill more people than died on 9/11. This is fifty-five times more than will die from illegal drugs in the same period. We know the cause, and these are all preventable deaths. But the responsibility for preventing you becoming one of those statistics rests with you.

By the current definition of what constitutes a drug problem, the United States has had a continuous drug problem since before its inception. I’m referring in part to the practices of the Puritans in the 1600’s, who gave rum to 4 year olds as a sleep aid. Which of course means they would become raging alcoholics before they became teenagers, let alone sire and bear alcohol affected children, America wouldn’t even develop the concept of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome until the late 20th Century. The Native Nations at the time, who possessed alcohol technology, were are aware of the dangers of alcohol, especially its effect on unborn fetuses and children, and thus ceremonialized its non-addictive use among adults, as they did with tobacco, long before the arrival of whites on this continent. All whites did is bring the distilled alcohol technology developed in Egypt, disseminated into Greco-Roman culture without duplicating certain critical ethical structures regarding the technology — in particular, the physical and spiritual health of the people and the nation is more important than the profit of individuals and corporations.

Addiction is Slavery. Since slavery was an institution supported and protected by governmental social policy, to resist it, often made you a terrorist, a criminal, or at least branded a social outcast. To see Addiction as a form of slavery, is to create an internal resistance, and a culturally based form of recovery. Part of this recovery requires discovering hidden history, which when revealed publicly might put you at political odds with the mainstream supporters of addictive practices.

As documented in the movie the Godfather, when the American Mafia, made a decision to market heroin in the black community, local, state, and federal law enforcement looked the other way. No treatment was available, and law enforcement was aimed squarely at arresting black addicts (including some jazz musicians) and dealers, putting white musicians who associated with blacks under surveillance, while allowing the Mafia to operate untouched. These painful experiences led to the early pearls of wisdom I refer to as Cultural Recovery. Cultural Recovery is where you create or recreate a non-addictive culture in response to an assault from larger more mainstream and well financed cultural forces, such as the tobaccohol and pharmaceutical industries.

So to take a stance that Addiction is Slavery, is to place liberating power where it belongs, the people who free themselves from slavery. Treatment, if you get it, might start the healing process, but if you are blocked from treatment that acknowledges your emotional needs as a survivor of sexual abuse, genocide, slavery, multigenerational trauma, then you must find your own healing. It means, that you may choose not to rely on governments to protect you, because it has been demonstrated repeatedly, that they either cannot, or will not do what is proven to be effective. Indeed if you are doing what is effective, you may stand to either lose your funding, support, or be branded as a criminal as in the case of Dr. Mutula Shakur, (a father figure to Tupac) an acupuncturist in a free heroin detox clinic run by the Black Panthers. Without having guns in his possession, without even any physical evidence that he had even participated in, or had advance knowledge of a bank robbery, Dr. Shakur, remains in prison today.

The pain from these particular pearls, has caused me to think of myself as a Prevention Guerrilla, because at times, my duly elected government may or may not be an ally in the struggle against addiction. I’ve even gone so far as to suggest we create strategies that are as effective as they’d have to be if the government had been taken over by drug dealers, and prevention, treatment, and recovery efforts, were made illegal. To which some long term recovering addicts, have said: “Uh Mark…the government has been taken over by alcoholics and addicts already…”…You may think I’m paranoid, but I’m not the only one.