Outsource

Only a handful of years after President Johnson began his war on poverty, but decades before our current war on terror, Richard Nixon, in the summer of 1971, declared war on drugs.  Nixon's proclamation, that "America's public enemy number one in the United States is drug abuse," was initiated in part by an alarming report that a full fifteen percent of U.S. soldiers in Vietnam were addicted to heroin.

Part of Nixon’s strategy was the creation of the Special Action Office of Drug Abuse Prevention, which federalized under one organization a number of anti-drug initiatives.  Another component, much less well-known, was to actually study what happened to these addicted soldiers once they returned home.

            The White House chose Lee Robins, a well-respected psychiatrist of the era, to spearhead this effort.  Before long a system was set up to test soldiers before their homecoming.  According to her research, a full 20 percent of the enlisted men she interviewed self-identified as addicts.  These soldiers were kept in Vietnam until they “dried out,” and once they returned to the United States, Robins kept tabs.  According to her final report, close to 95% of these soldiers remained clean a year after their return.

            Now, this was a pleasant enough chapter in a much longer, much less pleasant story, but it also flew in the face of what was considered “common knowledge” at the time.  According to an NPR article from January of 2012, Robins spent years defending her final analysis.  After all, close to 90 percent of domestic heroin addicts who had gone through rehab usually relapsed within the first twelve months. That statistic was basically the exact opposite of what was happening with the veteran group.  What was going on?

            The article continued by suggesting that many of the soldiers had “outsourced” their behavior, so to speak, to their very intense environment.  Although many of them were indeed physiologically dependent on the narcotic, once clean, they had an easier time not relapsing.  Psychiatrists who have studied her report believe that this was in part because the environment in which the soldiers had become addicted was so dramatically different than the one to which they returned.  The theory is that because domestic addicts did not have such an abrupt and extreme change in surroundings, their relapse rates were much higher.

            So, what does this forty-five year old study have to do with us?  Unfortunately, quite a bit.

            As most of you are well aware, heroin abuse in our community has spiked in recent years.  Unfortunately, the dramatic increase in heroin-related deaths is not isolated to this region of Illinois or the country at large.  A terrible combination of relatively cheap product and sophisticated distribution has led to a plague that most small law enforcement agencies simply do not have the resources to combat effectively.  The Effingham area, due to infrastructure that is generally counted as a blessing, seems to be particularly cursed.

            Now, I am not so naïve as to believe that the answer to such a serious problem might find itself inside a bi-monthly newspaper column.  However, it is worth mentioning one commonality that most recovering addicts share is a genuine change in scenery.  Regardless of the bad behavior, whether it is shooting up, smoking, drinking or even overeating, most bad habits cannot simply be “will-powered” away.  Addicts must often remove themselves from the environment and the people with whom they have come to associate with their addiction.

            Although he used different terminology, the apostle Paul basically said as much when he told the Corinthians to “get rid of the old yeast in order to become a new unleavened batch.”  I’m paraphrasing, of course, but the takeaway is this:  if someone is serious about starting a new life, that person must first end the old.  For some that might be as simple—and as difficult—as removing toxins from their homes.  For others, it might mean removing toxic people from their lives.             

            America is a martial society, often willing to wage “war” on complicated problems—poverty, drugs, terror—in an effort to weaken their destructive power.  This panache for the aggressive metaphor is perhaps understandable.  After all, we are a country that was both born by revolution and emboldened by many military victories.

            When we are tempted to use this jargon, however, we should also remember that there are those among us, often terribly young, who are fighting very real battles on a daily basis.  If you know someone like this, take a page out of recent history and do whatever you can to get them far out of their jungle.