National addiction, state power, compassion and compulsion, and the need for models
I invite you to read a recent piece of writing: "China’s war on drugs: From incarceration to rehabilitation."
I want to tell you that addiction has always been in my life, I realize. I can’t be specific. There are great, terrifying, poetic stories to relate to you about the suffering of myself and others, but it feels wrong to share it with anyone.
I am interested on an individual level on the problem of addiction and how to solve it. I am interested, too, in national addiction, which is usually described in other terms, like “epidemic” or “crisis.” I have seen it myself. That is one of the reasons the phenomenon interests me, whether it’s in Republican era Shanghai, postwar Japan, Yunnan in the 1980s, Arkansas, or Syria. Whether the drug of choice is Hiropon or Captagon, methamphetamine or codeine, fentanyl or cocaine, patterns emerge.
China represents one of the few places to conquer a contemporary national addiction. When illicit drug use returned to China in the late 1970s, exploded in the late 1980s, and spread around the country in the 1990s, the number of registered addicts skyrocketed. The state dealt with the problem by dumping addicts in re-education through labor camps or sucking them dry in public-private joint venture rehabilitation facilities. It was ineffective and cruel. There was constant reform, however.
Under Hu Jintao and his regime of the Harmonious Society, strike hard was phased out in favor of balancing severity with punishment. Legal guidelines that accorded with rule by law were instituted. The system became scientific, legal, and effective. It also became more compassionate, with the state returning to the center, and community treatment becoming part of a tiered program that restricted the number of addicts confined in rehabilitation facilities. That was what worked. It reduced the number of addicts (this means official numbers, but I think everyone would agree that unofficial numbers have not skyrocketed).
This is not to say that Chinese compulsory drug rehabilitation and addict registration represents perfection. It has flaws. I wrote about them. But there are aspects of the approach that can be borrowed. Those include compassion, of course, which can be found in many other national schemes around the world, which must be combined with compulsion: the answer is not to push the addict away, but to—very firmly, until they feel as if they might suffocate—hug them to the bosom of the state. The use of state power is crucial to solving a national addiction. This is what I believe.