Some letters sent on behalf of the Council to the Western Mail

When Society Becomes Addicted

Dear Sir,

With the welcomed attention that alcohol misuse is currently receiving from the government and concerned members of society, it is disturbing to recognise behavioural patterns suggesting to me that society itself is in danger of becoming addicted.

Alcoholism is described as the Family Illness. No one is left unaffected by the sufferer’s drinking – children, wives, husbands, other family members, friends, neighbours, employers, etc. And now its invidious tentacles have reached out and are beginning to affect society itself.

A phenomenon of alcohol dependency is that families tend to single-out the alcohol dependent person and label him or her as “the problem”. This, conveniently, allows other family members to avoid addressing their own painful issues: in particular, that the alcoholic’s drinking could not be maintained without their unwitting “cooperation”. The addict can become a scapegoat, therefore, for all the family’s ills. This behaviour, sadly, is in danger of being replicated by society today with all our ills and shortcomings being heaped upon “the problem” – the binge drinkers and/or drug addicts.

Additionally, in order to sustain the denial of its responsibility in this drama of unwitting “cooperation” certain ground rules need to be adopted by the family as a whole. They are “Don’t talk”, “Don’t feel”, “Don’t think” – and the reason they are adopted is because it is “not safe” to practice any one of them – to do so would be to threaten the very precarious foundation on which the façade of their own addiction(s) is built, resulting in them having to confront the full reality of what is happening to the family, and to experience the full emotional impact of the problem. Increasingly, society is adopting these same dysfunctional ground rules - and, possibly, for the same reasons.

As chief executive officer of the Welsh Council on Alcohol and Other Drugs, for example, I am rarely if ever invited by the media to address any dependency issues other than alcohol. But what about the ‘other drugs’ incorporated in my job title? What about food/eating disorders, love and sex, internet pornography, excessive exercising, gambling, spending addictions, etc? These dependencies which chain the soul just as incorrigibly and as soundly as alcohol dependence does are never mentioned, let alone discussed. And what about the grand-daddy of them all? Dependence on, and the misuse of prescribed medications, whereby hundreds of thousands of  our citizens - seemingly respectable and outwardly upstanding members of our communities – end up trapped in a pattern of compulsive behaviours that are controlled by their psychological dependence to sedatives, barbiturates and anti-depressants? These have as much a stranglehold on their victims’ lives as does heroin, amphetamine or crack cocaine, say, on the illicit drug user. The only difference being that their drugs of choice are legal and that their “dealer” is the family practitioner or, as is increasingly happening these days, the internet “provider”. But we avoid addressing these dependencies, choosing instead to deflect attention away from ourselves and our addictions on to the convenient “problem”, the binge-drinker or drug addict. In doing so, we are behaving exactly like the alcoholic family and denying the reality of our situation to ourselves. In other words society is lying to itself.

As with restoring a dysfunctional family to healthy equilibrium, a healthy society has to first of all recognise the need to view the “problem” differently – not in isolation, but as part of a whole; and to help shift the responsibility for change from the one individual (the binge drinker or drug addict) to all involved in that system.

Please note politicians, members of the media, church members and society in general – that that means us.