By Kevin D.
Williamson
Tuesday, April 06,
2021
Because I am blessedly insulated from many
aspects of pop culture, I know the name “Demi Lovato” only from a (typically)
brilliant Remy parody. But now that I know her name, I have acquired another more interesting
pair of words: “California sober.”
Lovato, for those of you who are similarly
insulated, is an American pop singer who found her way into the tabloid
headlines after overdosing on a heroin-fentanyl cocktail in the summer of 2018.
The overdose was horrifying, and she still cannot drive a car because of vision
loss associated with brain damage. She has since sought treatment for her drug
problem and describes herself as “California sober,” a tongue-in-cheek term of
recent coinage that entails abstinence from so-called hard drugs such as heroin
and cocaine but the continued moderate use of marijuana and/or alcohol.
“California sober” accords with an approach to substance abuse broadly known as
“harm reduction,” which focuses on preventing the worst kind of
self-destructive behavior associated with drug use rather than the criterion of
absolute abstinence.
Lovato has come under criticism for her
use of the term, both from addiction professionals (by which I mean doctors and
therapists, not the other kind of addiction professional) and from recovering
addicts who protest that to speak of qualified sobriety is an “insult” to those
who practice a more total form of abstinence. There is a certain kind of
American who always is looking for something to be insulted about. Many of them
have New York Times columns.
Addiction recovery exemplifies several
American tendencies. One is our ability to make an ersatz religion out of
practically anything (count me with David Foster Wallace among those who
believe that Alcoholics Anonymous is pretty obviously a cult, albeit a largely
benign and well-intentioned one). Another is our ability to make a business out
of anything (turnover in the addiction business is estimated at $42 billion a
year in the United States). And a third is our ability to make Kulturkampf out
of anything.
Human beings are storytelling creatures,
and the mandate to create a unifying, comprehensive narrative about drug
addiction is no less powerful than the need to create a unifying, comprehensive
narrative about politics, the economy, or anything else. For practitioners of
AA-style recovery, “California sober” is not only an insult but heresy. Of
course, reality is much more complex than our storytelling accounts for. The
D.A.R.E. and Reefer Madness school of propaganda would have
you believe otherwise, but the vast majority of people who try serious drugs,
including opiates/opioids and cocaine, never develop a problem with them.
Overdosing on LSD is practically impossible to do by accident; the drug is not
physically addictive. As Anthony Daniels (writing as Theodore Dalrymple)
documents in his Romancing Opiates: Pharmaceutical Lies and the
Addiction Bureaucracy, the popular understanding of heroin addiction is
wildly exaggerated, and heroin withdrawal is a relatively minor medical issue,
far less dangerous than alcohol withdrawal. There are people who develop a
problem with cocaine or heroin who give up those drugs but continue to use
alcohol or marijuana without a problem. But we do love our stories, especially
when they include a bright moral line with our kind of people on one side and
the wrong kind of people on the other.
One of the problems with “California
sober” is its lumping in marijuana and alcohol together. There are a great many
people who have serious drug problems who are able to put aside heroin or
cocaine but continue to have lifelong problems with alcohol, and some who
develop a problem with alcohol as a substitute after overcoming a problem with
a different drug. There are many reasons to believe that alcohol is far more
dangerous to someone with other addiction problems than marijuana is. Of
course, most people who use alcohol use it responsibly, and there is a world of
difference between someone who has a glass of Bordeaux a few times a week and
the guy who was sitting on the curb in front of a 7-Eleven a few blocks from my
house this morning nursing a tallboy at 8 a.m.
We have a long tradition associated with
alcohol, which is intertwined with everything from our cooking to our religion.
But if that tradition were not there and we were starting from scratch, a
rational society would probably have far more serious reservations about
alcohol than about marijuana. Put another way: If alcohol had been invented
last week, there is no way in hell we would let people sell it. That doesn’t
mean that alcohol prohibition would be a good idea — no more than the
prohibition of marijuana or other drugs is a good idea — but a mature and
responsible politics recognizes degrees of interest richer than “legally
permitted” vs. “legally prohibited.”
(N.B.: As my friend Jay Nordlinger
sometimes points out, it is a fiction that “Prohibition didn’t work” — alcohol
consumption substantially decreased after Prohibition was enacted. It was still
a bad policy, in my view, but reality is complicated.)
We love our stories, and one of the
stories we love best — it does not speak very well of us — is the humiliation
of celebrities. Any opportunity for recreational cruelty will find many takers,
but these more than most. My goodness, how people delighted in the personal
troubles of Tiger Woods and the financial woes of Allen Iverson. (Race is a
subject that induces hysteria in the American conversation, but it does seem to
me that there is a special contempt brought to bear on famous black men who
suffer a financial reversal. It seemed to me that there was much more contempt
and ridicule heaped upon, say, MC Hammer during his bankruptcy than on Willie
Nelson during his IRS-related tax problems, and much of that contempt had a
familiar racial flavor: Hammer was a flashy spendthrift with too much jewelry,
while Willie was a lovable outlaw heroically resisting the IRS. I don’t want to
sidetrack myself here, but I have noted in the past that if Barack Obama had
rocked a big-ass gold Rolex of the kind sported by Dwight
Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson, the resulting chorus of mortified denunciation would have been loud
enough to drown out the engines of Air Force One.) Sometimes, the ritual
humiliation of celebrities is the prelude to an eventual redemption story, but
often it isn’t. Sometimes, someone goes from the top to the bottom, and we see
to it that he stays at the bottom, because that is where we want him. Human
beings are kind of awful that way.
(The chance to enjoy the gross pleasures
of recreational cruelty is also why we exaggerate the vices of our political
opponents — if they are beastly horribles, then we not only are liberated from
feeling guilty about hurting them, we get to feel positively righteous about
it.)
Perhaps our love of celebrity humiliation
comes from the fact that the lofty status enjoyed by the likes of famous
singers and mind-bogglingly wealthy athletes liberates us from that thing we
are always pretending to care about so much: empathy. (By empathy we
mostly mean sympathy, but that is a
fight for another time.) People
who are rich and famous, who have splendid resources and social connections, do
not, according to a certain line of thinking, deserve our
consideration. These high and mighty, who have so much more than . . .
well, us . . . had everything going for them, messed it up,
anyway, and so we are, according to this line of thinking, entitled to enjoy
their troubles.
But people are people, and they don’t stop
being people when they have money and fame. I happen to be writing this column
within view of a basketball court where one of the 400 or so wealthiest men in
the world stops by to shoot hoops from time to time. (I don’t see him today.)
If he puts his foot down the wrong way, he is going to twist his ankle like
anybody else, and, because he is not a young man, he’s more likely to injure
himself than he would otherwise be. Age doesn’t care how many billions he has
or about the fact that people sometimes stop to take pictures of him while he
practices his jump-shot. There is a reason such phrases as “one false move” and
“one wrong step” resonate with us.
One wrong step — one wrong literal step —
can change a life. When I was about twelve years old, I was at the home of a
friend my age who was roughhousing around with his father. His dad gave him a
gentle shove, but he put his foot down just the wrong way and stumbled backward
several steps and fell, back first, through a glass table. A shard of glass
went all the way through him, like a sword. He lived, but I suspect his life
was never the same. I am positively confident that his father’s life
was never the same. One wrong step.
Mental-health problems, of which addiction
is one important kind, are a more prominent feature of public life in our time
than they seem to have been in the past. It may be the case, as a few old
veterans I know insist, that we simply are softer now and less
able to endure the ordinary stresses and strains of life. It may be that the
same problems existed in the past but simply weren’t acknowledged or else were
talked about in a different way. We conservatives have been known to go on at
some length about character, and character is important: But is it
really character that determines why one man enjoys a cocktail
before dinner on Saturday nights with no problem, while another has a “Sunday morning coming down” and puts a plug in the jug, while yet another ends up drinking a
breakfast beer in front of a 7-Eleven? I kind of doubt that character is
all there is to the story. But still we desire — practically demand — that our
stories should be simple: In one telling, a drinking problem or a heroin
problem is just a matter of free will and bad choices; in another telling, a
substance-abuse problem is something that “just happens” to people, like
cancer.
(Not that we’ll let cancer just be cancer
— that has to be a moral test, too: “He must have been a smoker.”)
“California sober” probably works for some
people. I hope it works for Demi Lovato. It probably works better for people
who have an ample supply of money and other resources than it does for people
who are poor, unemployed, dependent, suffering from further mental-health
problems, etc. People with money have problems, too, and the lucky ones have
problems that can be solved, or at least mitigated, with money. But money has
its limits. Housing is very expensive in California and in big
progressive cities, but the tent cities in Austin and Los Angeles are
not evidence of an economic problem — they are evidence of a mental-health
problem. These are refugee camps, properly understood, but not for economic
refugees.
If we would step outside of our stories
for a moment — as we should, given that they are mostly fiction — then we might
see something in these episodes other than the chance to smugly enjoy having
our biases confirmed. There is a seductive kind of pleasure, gleeful and
prideful, in being told that the people we already were inclined to think of as
awful really are awful. But that’s just another destructive addiction. Frankly,
I have more respect for the needle.
One wrong step — a thought that is or
ought to be, if you will forgive the word, sobering.
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