Djelloul Marbrook

A fourth of all Americans suffer from mental disorders of one kind or another. One in every thirteen American adults struggles with alcohol-related problems, altogether 15.1 million people.

Many of those afflicted with emotional disorders treat them with illegal drugs, over-the-counter-drugs or alcohol, sometimes all three.

Alcoholism is responsible for much of our soaring health care costs. Often the symptoms being treated are not diagnosed as alcohol-related when in fact they are. Alcohol destroys families, contributes to child and spousal abuse, leads to job loss and poor productivity. But we continue to regard it with folkloric reverence. It is a ravenous killer, right up there with heart disease and cancer, involved in more than 100,000 deaths a year:

60% of homicides
45% of motor vehicle deaths
40% of deaths from accidental falls
30% of suicides, accidental drownings, and deaths in fires
15% of deaths from respiratory diseases

The federal Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that nearly four in ten violent victimizations involve use of alcohol, about four in ten fatal motor vehicle accidents are alcohol-involved (even though rates of arrest for drunk driving have declined by twenty-four percent since 1990), and about four in ten offenders, regardless of whether they are on probation, in local jail, or in state prison, self-report that they were using alcohol at the time of their offense.

Another way to look at the horrific toll of alcohol, a legal drug, is to consider that in 2005 there were 43,443 alcohol-related traffic fatalities, as reported by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, compared to 18,000 deaths from AIDS in 2003.

Given these facts, is it possible our approach to the illicit drug trade is the tail wagging the dog? If we spent as much addressing mental disorders and alcoholism as we spend fighting the drug trade might we just possibly have more success?

I don’t have a scientist’s or statistician’s authority when raising these subjects, but I am a lifelong victim of depression, and my efforts to medicate myself with alcohol almost cost me my life.

Whether we like it or not, alcohol is as much of a killer as cigarettes. Whether we admit it or not, mental disorders are pervasive, and the cost to society in terms of combating crime and ill health are astronomical.

I have a queasy hunch that our so-called war on drugs—it’s interesting how many kinds of war we wage, isn’t it?—is the same kind of distraction our invasion of Iraq proved to be. We attacked the wrong place for the wrong reason, and in so doing we disguised a number of evils, such as profiteering, the war on civil liberties, and our squalid failure to bring the real culprits to justice.

We may be so absorbed watching Wrongway Corrigan that it hasn’t dawned on us that if we treat the cause the symptoms might let up.

When I sobered up, I recognized that I had become an alcoholic at age fourteen and in my late thirties had to take on the forlorn task of growing up. I was just beginning to position myself for the task of addressing my depression, the root problem.

No one who has ever struggled with such dragons declares a victory. These are not dragons you can slay. But you can hold them at bay and you can refuse to feed them. Drugs, whether alcohol or some other substance (poppies, inset), are dragon prescriptions. They’re medications, but we act as a society as if cocaine, heroin and the other banned substances kidnap us on the street.

Most of us like to say Prohibition failed—I have some reservations about that—because cutting off the supply didn’t work. So what makes us think, after all the billions of dollars we have spent on the war on drugs, that trying to cut off their supply will work? What did Prohibition teach us? It’s voguish to say the criminals loved Prohibition; what makes us think they don’t love the war on drugs?

Maybe the war on drugs is like the war on Iraq, good for contractors and political cronies. Maybe the much smarter approach would be to improve the mental health of our people, instead of pretending that mental disorders aren’t a pervasive problem, hijacking both our prison and health care budgets.

The press allowed an entire election cycle to pass before its lazy eyes without pinning down the question of just what victory in Iraq might mean. Perhaps it’s because the war had already been won by profiteers, hundreds of contractors, hangers-on and cronies of the Bush White House. Sometimes what you see is what you get, and what we see is a fabulous bonanza for business at an intolerable loss of human life. The war has been won by corporate pickpockets; can we honestly say we have a free press when we know we have a press unwilling to face up to such an obvious truth?

So who profits from the war on drugs? The rarer you make a thing the more desirable it becomes. We know that, don’t we? Perhaps what we should be making rare is mental disorder.

And as for the legal alcohol industry, it’s doing just fine, and the more depressed we become the better for the industry, which has a not insignificant grip on members of the press and our legislatures, physically and financially.

Perhaps our new Health and Human Services secretary, former Sen. Tom Daschle, will give some thought to such questions. —DM