Drugs and Addiction  Ayahuasca: Sacred Tea from the Amazon -Jeremiah Creedon, Honoring Our Hunger for the Ecstatic -Fred R. Seeking Peace in the War on Drugs -Ethan A. Nadelmann Discuss ayahuasca in the Currents forum at Café Utne's: cafe.utne.com

It’s heartening to see people across the country working to end the hideous war on drugs, and replace the current military-penal approach to the problems of addiction with a medical model of treatment.

But let’s be clear about something: Medical intervention to treat addiction, while it is crucial to the addict’s survival and recovery, is not the "answer" to the issue of drug and other addictions. The questions that America’s high rate of addiction poses—about our social system; about the nature of pain, ecstasy, success, and failure; about the meaning of dependence and the need for God—are too huge and stubborn to be doctored away. And in any case, they should not go away; we need to seek answers to these questions.

I don’t mean to revive the old liberal chestnut "society makes the addict." Using addictive substances makes addicts. Individual recovery begins when the addict takes responsibility for having done the drug. I know. I’m a recovering alcoholic and drug user who spent years and years in a sort of left-wing sandbox, screaming at the social system for not advancing me, at the economic system for not rewarding me, at God for not rescuing me from an unhappiness that was too blunt to even become anything as exciting as despair. It took a period of recovery before I realized that I drank and drugged because I wanted the effect that the drinks and drugs produced, and that by spending most of my time in bars or curled up in the fetal position in furnitureless studio apartments, I was omitting a key stage in my quest for social standing and economic security: action.

Yes, recovery taught me a lot about myself. But tightly bound up with these lessons were some startling realizations: about my culture, my society, the nature of faith, my relations with power and power wielders . . . the list goes on. Addiction is a miserable, misguided quest for perpetual childhood that always fails; but the junkie or drunk who has some straight time and means to stay that way knows a lot about the way we really live, think, feel, hope, and desire in this country.