Any discussion of recovery contemporarily must take into account the fabric into we incite individuals to recover to: the free market of global consumer culture. Whilst addiction is defined in terms of dysfunction and disorder, consumerism is overwhelmingly normative. However, viewed from certain perspectives, there is little to distinguish consumer behaviour from the behaviours associated with problematic substance use. Just as heroin or crack addiction is driven by the circular motion of need and fulfilment, as Bauman suggests, “In the consumer society, consumption is its own purpose and so is self-propelling.”1
Addiction, in its chronic stages, becomes a way of life. The language of addicts reflects this: they graft, have pay-days, work over-time: maintaining an addiction is a full time occupation. As Isidor Chein reflects:
The life of an addict constitutes a vocation—hustling, raising funds, assuring a connection and the maintenance of supply, outmanoeuvring the police, performing the rituals of preparing and of taking the drug—a vocation around which the addict can build a reasonably full life.2
It is a myth to suppose that the addict lives in a world of isolated, abject misery. For many, it is the best choice to be made from a limited set of options. The world of addiction and correlated lifestyles is replete with their own social conventions, rules, networks, co-operatives and so forth. Rowe and Wolch note from their studies of homeless women in Los Angeles:
Homeless people share their locales with other homeless individuals, facilitating the formation of peer networks within the homeless population. Peer networks are comprised of homeless acquaintances, friends, family, lovers, and spouses; some peers will live in informal street communities or encampments of the homeless which often arise in vacant lots, park and sidewalks in Skid Row. In many ways these peer networks replace the function of the home-base in the maintenance of time-space continuity, identity and self-esteem for the general homeless population. The formation, utilization and importance of peer networks appear to vary between homeless men and women.3
There is then, contrary to popular lore, a rational dimension to chronic drug use. Addicts operate under the same economic principles as the rest of the consuming population. They are autonomous, make cost-benefit analyses and seek to maximise utility. Becker and Murphy, with their controversial but compelling rational choice theory of addiction,4 were the first to explore this hypothesis and precipitated an extensive body of literature on the subject.
Positing the addict as an autonomous individual commensurate with any other kind of consumer creates a new vista with which to explore addiction and recovery. Both licit and illicit economies depend on the consumer for their existence:
The consumer is essential for the culture of capitalism. Not only must consumers buy, they must buy more every year, and still more the year after that. Without perpetual consumption, the economy would either decline or collapse.5
The harms associated with the perpetual consumption of illicit substances are visible to us: in our communities, in our social networks, in our daily lives. What is less visible is the harm engendered at a global level by aggressive, unrestrained forces of the consumer culture we invest so much time, energy, and effort to integrate the marginalised into.
The waste, pollution and ecological and human costs of rabid consumerism are displaced to poorer countries, moved out of sight and safely beyond the boundaries of our consciences:
Some parts of the earth—places like Africa and the Arctic—are having to pay a disproportionate share of the costs of rising consumption as the globalization of corporations, trade, and financing shifts, intensifies, and casts ecological shadows into more remote regions.6.
We, the privileged global elite, consume at the expense of others. The cult of consumerism is a global religion, and recovery offers salvation to those who have fallen from economic grace and consume outside the frontiers of the legitimate marketplace.
The emphasis on social reintegration that characterises much of contemporary recovery discourse is an attempt to curb public spending and reduce the drain on our national resources. The depletion of global resources by the recovered and those that support them is an as yet unexplored dimension in our field. If we are to collectively heal ourselves from this mass psychosis, perhaps we should begin to ask if there are wrong and right ways to consume.
Stephen Bamber, 16th April, 2010
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- Zygmunt Bauman, “Consuming Life”, Journal of Consumer Culture, 1:2001, pp. 12-13. ↩
- Isidor Chein, “Psychological Functions of Drug Use”, in Hannah Steinberg(ed), Scientific Basis of Drug Addiction, Churchill, London, 1969 cited in Stanton Peele, Archie Bordsky, Love and Addiction, Taplinger, 1975; available: http://www.peele.net/lib/laa3.html. Retrieved 15.11.09. See also Isidor Chein, Donald L. Gerard, Robert S. Lee, Rosa Rosenfield, The Road to H: Narcotics, Delinquency and Social Policy, Basic Books, New York, 1964. ↩
- Stacy Rowe and Jennifer Wolch, “Social Networks in Time and Space: Homeless Women in Skid Row, Los Angeles”, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 80:2, 1990, p. 191. ↩
- Gary S. Becker and Kevin M. Murphy, “A Theory of Rational Addiction”, The Journal of Political Economy, 96:4, 1988, pp. 675-701. ↩
- Richard Robbins, “Readings on the Consumer” ↩
- Peter Dauvergne, The Shadows of Consumption: Consequences for the Global Environment, MIT Press, Massachusetts, 2008, xiii ↩
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Excellent stuff Stephen. Opens up a whole load of questions, the principle one for me; can we, recovering within socially approved cultures of destructive consumerism (and I’d suggest that the impact of this consumerism has a massive social/psychological/moral impact that all of us internalise to some degree as a form of self-oppression) address substance use orientated Recovery without directly seeking to ‘Recover’ from the continual impact of capitalistic consumerism?
Sorry, that turned into a bit of a clumsy question!
This is a really significant question Alistair. In the sense that recovery involves a dimension of reflective action, then nothing should be off-limits. On a personal level, I think it’s a question of where you set the boundaries of your own recovery. There’s no right or wrong answer to this of course. My boundaries will be different to yours, and so forth.
One of the interesting aspects of mental health recovery is that some mental health services describe themselves as “being in recovery”. That makes a very powerful statement.
Interesting article opening up new angles on recovery and the chosen life of addiction.
Thanks Mike. Appreciate the comment. One of the goals of this particular piece was to open up new perspectives, so I’m glad you found it useful in that respect!
Hi Stephen
While your drawing a parallel between rampant and destructive consumerism and the economy of addiction certainly makes sense to me, that does not make participation in addiction rational: it makes it as insane as the society it emulates. It strikes me that the supportive networks you describe of the homeless and of, say, people with mental illness, which are based on a gift relationship and mutual non-money exchange are not very like the communities of addiction, which may be full of people who would like to live in such a network, but in fact end up in one dominated by violence, brutal power and often debt enslavement.
I find it fascinating that in 1957 Bernard Smith, a trustee of Alcoholics Anonymous, said the following: “The AA member was never enslaved by alcohol. Alcohol simply served as an escape from personal enslavement to the false ideals of a materialistic society.” (Alcoholics Anonymous 1957).
What I think we need to do is to find out what kind of product (not commodity) recovery is and then set about learning how to co-produce it. It clearly isn’t something that should be co-opted ideologically by the Conservative Party or the Thatcherite/Blairite New Labour whose ideas of recovery are precisely to create less deviant consumers, as you have pointed out somewhere. Certainly recovery as I understand it and witness it over the past 30 years stands outside this frame and the well-being that emerges from the process of recovery is based on entirely different social relations from those underlying consumerism.
Hope you’re well and look forward to seeing you at some point.
Tim
Reference:
Alcoholics Anonymous (1957) Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age, New York, Harper
See also the reverse part, analyzed in this other article:
Y. Rumpala, “Sustainable consumption” as a new phase in a governmentalization of consumption », Theory and Society, vol. 40, n° 6, November 2011, http://www.springerlink.com/content/px3168w10244275w/