The politics of addiction

It’s coming up to 7 months since Sushi died. I think about her more than ever. Recently I’ve been thinking of some of the last conversations we had about mental illness. “I wish I could just be normal like everyone else” she said. She spoke of how even though the world was finally accepting mental health, it was mostly the “palatable” side, beautiful celebrities speaking up about anxiety. but people still looked at her in disgust when she wore shorts in summer or crossed the road from the “crazy” homeless person talking to himself. A system of shame even within mental illness.

By hiding the depths of the mental dis-ease I’ve experienced in my life, I too contribute to this system.

This photo is of me at a full moon party in Thailand. It’s 2007, I’m 19. I’m newly recovering from an eating disorder I’d suffered, largely in secret for 5 years. I’m also high on ecstasy.

My first addiction was food. I was 13 when I learnt that I could eat what I want then throw it up. I spent 5 years doing that. Late night fridge raids. Secret binges. My sister had already been in and out of hospital for 2 years with anorexia and our family life had spun out of control. This was something I could control. A way to shove down my feelings. To control the body itself. To deal with the reality that I was sad and afraid and didn’t know how to make sense of the trauma I was experiencing so I found a way to feel in control, and became addicted to it. I rarely talk about this period of my life, honestly because I think it’s one of the last things I truly feel ashamed of. Thanks to the help of my family, some incredible friends to whom I owe my life and grace, I recovered. My sister was not gifted the same second chance.

My second addiction was drugs. I started taking drugs early, my first ecstasy pill at 15. It was the tail end of the rave era, and it was all glow sticks and smiley faces and there were people selling tea and giving out free hugs. I remember at midnight they called everyone to the dance floor and dropped a white parachute over the whole room and the random person next to me gave me the biggest sweatiest hug.

It was magic and I’d never felt so much love, so much connection in my life before. I spent the next 12 years trying to find that connection again. On dancefloors, front rooms, basement raves, fields. I never considered myself a “drug addict” even though I was using consistently for over a decade, because I didn’t fit the “image” of destitution I associated with addiction. I was a party girl, we felt fabulous and everyone was doing it. And I was a good girl, got straight As, went to Cambridge university, had great jobs. As high functioning as it gets - and honestly, it wasn't all bad, I had some of the best nights of my life while high and met some of the world's weirdest and most wonderful people.

But I was also in pain.

That’s the thing with addiction - it is the promise of something you want so desperately.To fill the hole and to feel whole. And it gives you just enough to keep you coming back for more even though every time you do, the hole gets bigger.

We're all addicted. How can we not be in a society so devoid of humanity, connection, truth, love. Even the most law abiding of us addicted to something - food, love, approval, phone.

And yet the ones whose addictions don’t look so “normal”, we criminalise + shame. If we as a society are to reclaim our humanity, this must be one of the places we start.

‘No one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones’
- Nelson Mandela.

When I was 17 I was arrested for possession of class A drugs. My parents were furious, but they loved me and they had money and got me a good lawyer. I was let off with a warning. The maximum sentence for this crime in the UK is 5 years. ⁠
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I think of this story every time I remember that children from bottom tenth of the income distribution are 20 times more likely to end up in prison than those in the top tenth. Or that 2/3 of African American men who didn't complete high school will serve time at some point in life. That 65% have an active drug addiction and 70% a mental illness.
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Much of the prison system is tantamount to the criminalisation of the intersection of poverty, mental illness, addiction + race. My class privilege likely saved me from a very different life.
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And there’s more. The legal cannabis market in the US is set to be worth $70.6 billion by 2028. While 40,000 people (mainly black men from low income families) rot in jail for the very same. I’m not saying it’s ok to break the law, but when laws a) don't work in eliminating the “threat” b) are policing a "threat" so tenuous that the minute corporate profit is on the table governments are rushing to change them - there's something wrong.

I think in 100 years we’ll look back on some of the ways we lived now with grief. How we treat the earth and non-human beings one. How we treat the mentally ill and those addicted to substances, another.

We need the radical revolution of values Martin Luther King called for. Away from a corrupt system that punishes the vulnerable then allows or worse rewards the elite for the same. To a system that centres our humanity, acknowledges trauma and focuses on healing.⁠

What can we personally do? Let our hearts break for a world that is dying. Keep talking about what a more beautiful world looks like. And there’s more. I sense that it’s time for a new dawn of activism. One that is embodied. Where our very existence become a living rebellion.

More to come…