Reykjavík Grapevine - 16.06.2016, Side 16

The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 8 — 2016
16
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Rethinking
How We Treat
Addiction
Words
ISAAC
WÜRMANN
Photo
ART BICNICK
Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside is
notorious for being one of Canada’s
poorest neighbourhoods, where rates
of drug use are high and where Indig-
enous women go missing or are mur-
dered just blocks away from the mul-
timillion-dollar condos of the city’s
elites. It’s also the place where Dr.
Gabor Maté has made groundbreak-
ing discoveries about the causes of
addiction.
“It’s a lot simpler than we think,”
says the Canadian physician, who
gave a talk at Harpa on June 12. “Ad-
dictions are in every single case the
outcome of childhood trauma, and
until we deal with that trauma, we
cannot heal the addiction.” It’s that
thesis that has garnered Gabor both
acclaim and critique from others in
the medical world. But Gabor says
his ideas are nothing new, and are
just an extension of what we already
know about how people are affected
by human interactions. “We’re cre-
ated in relationships, we develop in
relationships, and we suffer because
of relationships,” he explains.
Addiction Misconceptions
That’s why Gabor has been outspoken
against how people with addictions
are treated, and how they are repre-
sented in the criminal justice system.
“One of the talks I give is called ‘The
Seven Myths of Addiction,’ and one
of them is that addiction is a choice
that people make,” Gabor says. “So if
they’re making a choice, then we’re
going to blame them for it, we’re go-
ing to criticise them, and we’re going
to punish them.”
In Canada, Indigenous peoples
(First Nations, Métis or Inuit) are dis-
proportionately represented in the
country’s prisons. These communi-
ties are also disproportionately rep-
resented in statistics relating to ad-
diction and childhood trauma. “The
people who are in jail, if you do the
research, are the most traumatized
people in the population,” Gabor
goes on. “So we traumatize people,
and then they soothe their pain with
some addictive behaviour, and then
we throw them in jail. Now that’s a
criminal system.”
Politicizing Medicine
It may not surprise you that these
kinds of positions have placed Gabor
at the centre of a number of contro-
versies. Some have even taken to call-
ing him the “rebel doctor.”
In Vancouver’s Downtown East-
side, Gabor worked at InSite, North
America’s first supervised injection
site. At the clinic, addicts can safely
inject drugs with clean needles under
the supervision of doctors who as-
sist in the case of overdoses. Gabor
has vehemently defended this clinic
against critics.
But Gabor insists his ideas are not
controversial. “When I talk about the
safe injection site, what am I saying?
I’m saying it’s better if people use
sterile water than puddle water from
the back alley,” he explains. “Why is
that controversial? Is it better if peo-
ple use puddle water?”
“There’s no intention to become
political. The intention is just to
heal,” Gabor says. “So things become
political not because I’m political, but
because everything is.”
Learning From Trauma
One of the reasons his ideas have not
caught on yet in the medical main-
stream is because of a gap in what
students are taught in school, accord-
ing to Gabor. “You can go to medical
school in Iceland or Canada or the
United States or Britain, and never
hear the word ‘trauma,’” he says. “We
just learn about diseases, as if they
were the problem.”
Although much of Gabor’s work
has addressed issues that may seem
specific to Canada, such as heroin us-
ers in Vancouver or Indigenous com-
munities that have been traumatized
by generations of colonialism, Gabor
says his lessons on trauma can be
applied everywhere. “The essence of
trauma is not what happens exter-
nally, but what happens internally,”
he says. “And what happens internal-
ly is that person feels pain, and that
person disconnects from themselves,
and that person feels shame. And
that happens in Reykjavík as much
as it happens in Canada.”
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INTERVIEW
“We just learn about
diseases, as if they
were the problem”