"The history of Vancouver suggests, and a broader survey of history seems to confirm, that today's rising tide of addiction to drug use and a thousand other habits is the consequence of people, rich and poor alike, being torn from the close ties to family, culture, and traditional spirituality that constituted the normal fabric of life in pre-modern times."
Impoverished drugs users in the Hastings Corridor constitute only a fraction of Vancouver's addiction problem. Spreading in every direction from this epicentre is a vast, doleful tapestry of human beings struggling with other addictive miseries. There are drug addicts and alcoholics throughout the city, gambling addicts in the casinos, money and power addicts in the financial district, video game addicts at their computers, television addicts on their couches, bulimics at the junk food stores, prescription addicts at the pharmacies, work addicts at their desks through the night, exercise freaks at the gym, love addicts in other people's beds, tobacco addicts on the cancer wards, zealots hatching plots, and on and on. For the most serious of these addicts, whether they live in the Hastings Corridor or not, whether drugs are involved or not, addiction is a matter of life and death.
"Vancouver's Hastings Corridor is less about stark racial contrast and hot violence then about sodden misery and slow death."
All excerpts taken from within the first 15 pages of, "The Globalisation of Addiction: A Study in Poverty of the Spirit" by Bruce K. Alexander
No comments:
Post a Comment