Jun 5, 2010 
It’s about addiction. Over-coming an addiction begins with facing and naming it. It continues with mounting the fullest measure of resolve and determination, and engaging a supportive community to support change, often other addicts. “I’m Howard and I’m an alcoholic” will elicit warm, encouraging applause at an AA meeting. Can we provide warm and encouraging applause, fellow addicts, when we say: “I’m Howard and I am addicted to oil” (or food, alcohol, drugs, sex . . . the list goes on). How did Pogo say it: “We have met the enemy and it is us.”
Too often issues are addressed individually, matters presumed unrelated, simultaneous in time but unrelated in origin. Like the circus performer keeping an increasing number of platters spinning atop broomsticks, each addition increasing the stress and danger. Three issues related to our border come to mind, two on the news cycles’ front burners and the third gaining traction as an issue of international scope. I would propose that all three, though arguably unrelated, have a common cause – the multiple addictions of the American population.
• Despite a steady, concerted assault on drug trafficking and Mexican drug cartels, aided by the most sophisticated available surveillance equipment and military hardware provided by the United States, staggering violence is well past epidemic proportions in Mexico, rapidly spilling virus across what remains an uncontrolled and perhaps uncontrollable southern border. The cartels’ arsenal is just as daunting, the majority of their armaments purchased illegally in the United States. The border is porous in both directions. The war on drugs looms as potentially unwinnable. And drugs are as available as a nearby corner, from someone you know, from a friend at a party. The market is saturated. Access is not an issue. An $85 billion dollar annual profit.
• Last year 500,000 young women, many in their teens, lured by a variety of deceptive tactics – the majority from the Far East (Thailand has been displaced by India as the major source, with 40% of all prostitutes in India being children), many from eastern Europe and former Soviet bloc nations, and an increasing number from Latin America – joined the international sex slave trade. CST, Child Sex Tourism, has become a growing industry, with 10-12 year olds the most popular age group. Child porn outsells adult porn many times over. The Department of Justice estimates that there may be as many of a million sex slaves in the Unites States under the age of 18. Business in a dozen of our major cities is booming. I just clicked my city’s Craig’s List site: first “services,” then “adult,” and then two hundred erotically worded invitations with phone numbers appeared. Risking a virus I made a few calls (some my local exchange!) the same man answering on several inquiries. It’s an easy access business.
• Turn on your favorite news channel and odds are the story being covered is the BP oil spill disaster in the Gulf. A map this morning suggested that we may soon look for oil on the New Jersey and Long Island beaches that are our favorites. Predictions for stemming the thousands of gallons per day spewing into the Gulf shift from weeks to months with an almost silent “if ever” clearly implied. The technology for deep water exploration and drilling clearly outran the technology of mishap management. Oil products remain as close as the corner gas station, power grid, airport, the neighborhood pharmacy, your basement or pantry, or the cars in your driveway.
Three illegal border crossings – sex slaves, drugs and oil. Three stories, not one. Or . . . one story not three! Could they be three stories with a common cause: America’s Multiple Addiction Syndrome? Psychological research had discerned that the addictive person may, across time, shift addictions, the same psychological process fixing on different substances or activities, or, develop multiple addictions. Ann Wilson Shaef, in her classic must-read The Nation as Addict, suggest that nations can develop addictions, a collective addictive personality.
It’s an axiom of our capitalist system: where there is a market, there will be a supply. As long as we collectively generate an $85 billion drug market, the world will rush to supply it, through the shortest and most efficient trade route. As long as we buy child pornography, sign up for CST, frequent the local brothel or massage parlor, roll down the window for a street-walker visible on any major city’s downtown intersections, the sex trade will continue to grow. As long as we live dependent on oil and its derivatives, and we show no signs of changing, risky oil drilling will persist.
Fellow addicts . . . are we ready for recovery?
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