One of my earliest memories is of trying to wake up one of my relatives and not being able to. And I was just a little kid, so I didn't really understand why, but as I got older, I realized we had drug addiction in my family, including later cocaine addiction.
Jedno mojih od najstarijih sjećanja jest neuspjeli pokušaj buđenja jednog od mojih rođaka. Bio sam samo dijete, pa nisam shvaćao zašto, ali kako sam odrastao, shvaćao sam da imamo ovisnika u obitelji, uključujući i ovisnika o kokainu.
I'd been thinking about it a lot lately, partly because it's now exactly 100 years since drugs were first banned in the United States and Britain, and we then imposed that on the rest of the world. It's a century since we made this really fateful decision to take addicts and punish them and make them suffer, because we believed that would deter them; it would give them an incentive to stop.
U zadnje vrijeme puno razmišljam o tome, dijelom zato što su prije točno sto godina droge prvi put zabranjene u SAD-u i Britaniji, a to smo kasnije nametnuli ostatku svijeta. Prošlo je cijelo stoljeće otkako smo donijeli tu vjernu odluku da kažnjavamo i mučimo ovisnike jer smo vjerovali da će ih to zastrašiti, da će ih potaknuti da prestanu.
And a few years ago, I was looking at some of the addicts in my life who I love, and trying to figure out if there was some way to help them. And I realized there were loads of incredibly basic questions I just didn't know the answer to, like, what really causes addiction? Why do we carry on with this approach that doesn't seem to be working, and is there a better way out there that we could try instead?
Prije nekoliko godina promatrao sam neke od ovisnika u mom životu koje volim i pokušavao se dosjetiti načina na koji bih im mogao pomoći. Shvatio sam da ima puno osnovnih pitanja na koja nemam odgovor. Npr. što je uzrok ovisnosti? Zašto se držimo ovog pristupa koji očito ne funkcionira i postoji li bolji pristup koji bismo mogli isprobati?
So I read loads of stuff about it, and I couldn't really find the answers I was looking for, so I thought, okay, I'll go and sit with different people around the world who lived this and studied this and talk to them and see if I could learn from them. And I didn't realize I would end up going over 30,000 miles at the start, but I ended up going and meeting loads of different people, from a transgender crack dealer in Brownsville, Brooklyn, to a scientist who spends a lot of time feeding hallucinogens to mongooses to see if they like them -- it turns out they do, but only in very specific circumstances -- to the only country that's ever decriminalized all drugs, from cannabis to crack, Portugal. And the thing I realized that really blew my mind is, almost everything we think we know about addiction is wrong, and if we start to absorb the new evidence about addiction, I think we're going to have to change a lot more than our drug policies.
Čitao sam puno o tome i nisam našao odgovore koje sam tražio, pa sam dosjetio kako ću se naći s različitim ljudima diljem svijeta koji su to proživjeli i proučavali i popričati s njima da vidim što mogu naučiti od njih. Nisam ni slutio da ću preći preko 50 000 km odmah u početku, ali na kraju sam ih prešao i upoznao puno različitih ljudi - od transrodnog dilera cracka u Bronsvilleu, Brooklynu do znanstvenika koji daje halucinogene droge mungosima da vidi sviđaju li im se - ispada da im se sviđaju, ali samo u posebnim situacijama - do jedine države koja je ikada dekriminalizirala sve droge, od marihuane do cracka, Portugal. Uistinu me zapanjilo što sam shvatio da je gotovo sve što mislimo da znamo o ovisnostima pogrešno. Kada počnemo upijati nove dokaze o ovisnosti, nećemo morati promijeniti samo naše zakone o drogama.
But let's start with what we think we know, what I thought I knew. Let's think about this middle row here. Imagine all of you, for 20 days now, went off and used heroin three times a day. Some of you look a little more enthusiastic than others at this prospect. (Laughter) Don't worry, it's just a thought experiment. Imagine you did that, right? What would happen? Now, we have a story about what would happen that we've been told for a century. We think, because there are chemical hooks in heroin, as you took it for a while, your body would become dependent on those hooks, you'd start to physically need them, and at the end of those 20 days, you'd all be heroin addicts. Right? That's what I thought.
Krenimo od onoga što mislimo da znamo, od toga što sam ja mislio da znam. Promotrimo ovaj srednji red. Svi zamislite da ste 20 dana zaredom uzimali heroin triput dnevno. Nekima ova ideja zvuči primamljivije nego drugima. (Smijeh) Ne brinite, to je tek misaoni eksperiment. Sad to zamislite. Što bi se dogodilo? Imamo priču o tome što bi se dogodilo koja nam se priča već stoljećima. Mislimo da budući da heroin izaziva ovisnost, a vi ste ga uzimali neko vrijeme, tijelo će postati ovisno o njemu, postat ćete fizički ovisni i nakon tih 20 dana, postat ćete ovisnici o heroinu. Zar ne? To sam i ja mislio.
First thing that alerted me to the fact that something's not right with this story is when it was explained to me. If I step out of this TED Talk today and I get hit by a car and I break my hip, I'll be taken to hospital and I'll be given loads of diamorphine. Diamorphine is heroin. It's actually much better heroin than you're going to buy on the streets, because the stuff you buy from a drug dealer is contaminated. Actually, very little of it is heroin, whereas the stuff you get from the doctor is medically pure. And you'll be given it for quite a long period of time. There are loads of people in this room, you may not realize it, you've taken quite a lot of heroin. And anyone who is watching this anywhere in the world, this is happening. And if what we believe about addiction is right -- those people are exposed to all those chemical hooks -- What should happen? They should become addicts. This has been studied really carefully. It doesn't happen; you will have noticed if your grandmother had a hip replacement, she didn't come out as a junkie. (Laughter)
Prvi put kad sam pomislio da je nešto u toj priči pogrešno jest kad mi je objašnjeno. Ako danas odem s ove TED-konferencije, pokupi me auto i slomim kuk, odvest će me u bolnicu gdje će mi dati velike količine diamorphinea. Diamorphine je heroin. Zapravo puno bolji od onoga kojeg možete naći na ulicama jer je heroin koji kupujete od dilera kontaminiran. Štoviše, vrlo je malen udio heroina, dok ćete kod doktora dobiti medicinski čist heroin, a dobivat ćete ga duže vrijeme. Ima puno ljudi u ovoj prostoriji koji toga možda nisu ni svjesni, a koji su uzimali dosta heroina. I to se događa svugdje u svijetu. Ako je točno ono što vjerujemo o ovisnostima, ti su ljudi izloženi kemijskim uzročnicima ovisnosti. Što bi se trebalo dogoditi? Trebali bi postati ovisnici. To se pažljivo proučava. To se ne događa; primijetit ćete da ukoliko vam je baka operirala kuk, nije postala narkomanka. (Smijeh)
And when I learned this, it seemed so weird to me, so contrary to everything I'd been told, everything I thought I knew, I just thought it couldn't be right, until I met a man called Bruce Alexander. He's a professor of psychology in Vancouver who carried out an incredible experiment I think really helps us to understand this issue. Professor Alexander explained to me, the idea of addiction we've all got in our heads, that story, comes partly from a series of experiments that were done earlier in the 20th century. They're really simple. You can do them tonight at home if you feel a little sadistic. You get a rat and you put it in a cage, and you give it two water bottles: One is just water, and the other is water laced with either heroin or cocaine. If you do that, the rat will almost always prefer the drug water and almost always kill itself quite quickly. So there you go, right? That's how we think it works. In the '70s, Professor Alexander comes along and he looks at this experiment and he noticed something. He said ah, we're putting the rat in an empty cage. It's got nothing to do except use these drugs. Let's try something different. So Professor Alexander built a cage that he called "Rat Park," which is basically heaven for rats. They've got loads of cheese, they've got loads of colored balls, they've got loads of tunnels. Crucially, they've got loads of friends. They can have loads of sex. And they've got both the water bottles, the normal water and the drugged water. But here's the fascinating thing: In Rat Park, they don't like the drug water. They almost never use it. None of them ever use it compulsively. None of them ever overdose. You go from almost 100 percent overdose when they're isolated to zero percent overdose when they have happy and connected lives.
Kad sam to naučio, činilo mi se veoma čudno, potpuna suprotnost svemu što mi je rečeno, svemu što sam mislio da znam Mislio sam da to nikako nije istina, sve dok nisam upoznao Brucea Alexandera. On je profesor psihologije u Vancouveru koji je izvršio nevjerojatan eksperiment koji nam uvelike pomaže razumjeti ovaj problem. Profesor Alexander objasnio mi je vjerovanje o ovisnostima na koje smo svi pali, a ta priča dijelom potječe od niza eksperimenata izvršenih ranije u 20. stoljeću koji su bili uistinu jednostavni. Možete ih izvršiti večeras kod kuće ako ste sadistički nastrojeni. Uzmete štakora, stavite ga u kavez i date mu dvije boce vode. U jednoj je obična voda, a u drugoj voda začinjena ili heroinom ili kokainom. U tom slučaju on će gotovo uvijek radije uzeti kontaminiranu i gotovo uvijek prilično se brzo i ubiti. I to je to, zar ne? Mislimo da to tako funkcionira. Sedamdesetih godina profesor Alexander proučio je ovaj eksperiment i primijetio nešto. Rekao je: "Štakora smo stavili u prazan kavez u kojemu nema što raditi osim drogirati se. Probajmo nešto drugo." Profesor je izradio kavez pod nazivom "Park za štakore" koji je više-manje raj za štakore. Imaju brdo sira, loptica u boji, tunela. Što je najvažnije, imaju puno prijatelja dostupnih za razmnožavanje. Imaju i obje boce vode, običnu i kontaminiranu. Ali ono što je fascinantno jest to da u Parku za štakore ne biraju kontaminiranu vodu. Gotovo je nikad ne izabiru. Nijedan je ne koristi kompulzivno, nijedan se nije predozirao. Od stopostotnog predoziranja u izolaciji do 0% predoziranja kad žive sretno i ispunjeno.
Now, when he first saw this, Professor Alexander thought, maybe this is just a thing about rats, they're quite different to us. Maybe not as different as we'd like, but, you know -- But fortunately, there was a human experiment into the exact same principle happening at the exact same time. It was called the Vietnam War. In Vietnam, 20 percent of all American troops were using loads of heroin, and if you look at the news reports from the time, they were really worried, because they thought, my God, we're going to have hundreds of thousands of junkies on the streets of the United States when the war ends; it made total sense. Now, those soldiers who were using loads of heroin were followed home. The Archives of General Psychiatry did a really detailed study, and what happened to them? It turns out they didn't go to rehab. They didn't go into withdrawal. Ninety-five percent of them just stopped. Now, if you believe the story about chemical hooks, that makes absolutely no sense, but Professor Alexander began to think there might be a different story about addiction. He said, what if addiction isn't about your chemical hooks? What if addiction is about your cage? What if addiction is an adaptation to your environment?
Kad je profesor Alexander ovo prvi put vidio, pomislio je kako je to možda povezano samo uz štakore koji se razlikuju od nas. Možda ne toliko drugačiji koliko bismo htjeli, ali... Srećom, eksperiment na ljudima na istom principu odvijao se u to isto vrijeme, a zvao se Vijetnamski rat. U Vijetnamu 20% svih američkih trupa koristilo je ogromne količine heroina, a ako promotrite vijesti iz tog vremena, vidite da su bili jako zabrinuti jer su mislili da će imati stotine tisuće narkomana na ulicama SAD-a kada rat završi. Imalo je smisla. Vojnici koji su koristili goleme količine heroina poslani su kućama. Arhiv opće psihijatrije obavio je temeljito istraživanje. I što im se dogodilo? Nisu trebali na odvikavanje niti su proživljavali simptome odvikavanja. Devedeset pet posto jednostavno je prestalo. Ako vjerujete u priču o kemijskoj ovisnosti, to nema baš nikakvog smisla, ali profesor Alexander počeo je misliti da neka druga priča stoji iza ovisnosti. "Što ako ovisnost nema nikakve veze s kemijskom ovisnosti? Što ako ona ima veze s vašim kavezom? Što ako je ovisnost oblik prilagođavanja okolišu?"
Looking at this, there was another professor called Peter Cohen in the Netherlands who said, maybe we shouldn't even call it addiction. Maybe we should call it bonding. Human beings have a natural and innate need to bond, and when we're happy and healthy, we'll bond and connect with each other, but if you can't do that, because you're traumatized or isolated or beaten down by life, you will bond with something that will give you some sense of relief. Now, that might be gambling, that might be pornography, that might be cocaine, that might be cannabis, but you will bond and connect with something because that's our nature. That's what we want as human beings.
To je promatrao i jedan drugi profesor: Petar Cohen iz Nizozemske koji je pomislio da to ne bi trebalo zvati ovisnošću, možda to treba zvati vezivanjem. Ljudska bića imaju prirodnu, urođenu potrebu za vezivanjem. Kad smo sretni i zdravi, vezat ćemo se i povezivati jedni s drugima, ali ako to ne možemo učiniti jer smo istraumatizirani, izolirani ili nas je život pregazio, vezat ćemo se uz nešto što će nam pružiti olakšanje. Bilo to kockanje, pornografija, kokain ili marihuana, vezat ćemo se i povezivati s nečime jer nam je to u prirodi. Tome težimo kao ljudska bića.
And at first, I found this quite a difficult thing to get my head around, but one way that helped me to think about it is, I can see, I've got over by my seat a bottle of water, right? I'm looking at lots of you, and lots of you have bottles of water with you. Forget the drugs. Forget the drug war. Totally legally, all of those bottles of water could be bottles of vodka, right? We could all be getting drunk -- I might after this -- (Laughter) -- but we're not. Now, because you've been able to afford the approximately gazillion pounds that it costs to get into a TED Talk, I'm guessing you guys could afford to be drinking vodka for the next six months. You wouldn't end up homeless. You're not going to do that, and the reason you're not going to do that is not because anyone's stopping you. It's because you've got bonds and connections that you want to be present for. You've got work you love. You've got people you love. You've got healthy relationships. And a core part of addiction, I came to think, and I believe the evidence suggests, is about not being able to bear to be present in your life.
Isprva mi je to bilo teško za shvatiti, ali ovo mi je pomoglo u tome. Vidim da pokraj mog mjesta stoji boca vode, a gledajući sve vas, primjećujem da ih imaju i mnogi od vas. Zaboravite droge i rat drogama. Bilo bi sasvim legalno da su te boce vode zapravo punjene votkom. Svi bi se mogli ponapijati, pa i ja odmah nakon ovoga. (Smijeh) Ali ne radimo to. Budući da si možete priuštiti odoka milijardu funti vrijednu TED-konferenciju, pretpostavljam da si možete priuštiti i da pijete votku sljedećih šest mjeseci. Ne biste postali beskućnici. Nećete to napraviti, a to nećete napraviti ne zato što vas nitko ne sprječava, već zato što imate veze i povezanosti u kojima želite sudjelovati. Imate posao koji volite, imate ljude koje volite. Imate zdrave odnose, a osnovni dio ovisnosti, kako sam i sȃm zaključio, a kako i dokazi potvrđuju, jest nepodnošljivost vlastitog života.
Now, this has really significant implications. The most obvious implications are for the War on Drugs. In Arizona, I went out with a group of women who were made to wear t-shirts saying, "I was a drug addict," and go out on chain gangs and dig graves while members of the public jeer at them, and when those women get out of prison, they're going to have criminal records that mean they'll never work in the legal economy again. Now, that's a very extreme example, obviously, in the case of the chain gang, but actually almost everywhere in the world we treat addicts to some degree like that. We punish them. We shame them. We give them criminal records. We put barriers between them reconnecting. There was a doctor in Canada, Dr. Gabor Maté, an amazing man, who said to me, if you wanted to design a system that would make addiction worse, you would design that system.
To ima značajne implikacije. Najočitije implikacije odnose se na rat drogama. U Arizoni sam izašao s grupom žena koje su morale nositi majice s natpisom: "Bila sam ovisna o drogama", okovane lancima kopale grobove dok su im se promatrači rugali, a kad te žene izađu iz zatvora, imat će kriminalne dosjee zbog kojih više neće naći posao na legalnom tržištu. To je prilično ekstreman primjer, u slučaju odreda okovanih, ali gotovo svugdje u svijetu donekle tako postupamo s ovisnicima. Kažnjavamo ih, posramljujemo i dajemo im kriminalne dosjee. onemogućujemo im da se ponovno povežu. Kanadski doktor Gabor Maté, odličan čovjek, rekao mi je: "Da želiš stvoriti sustav koji će pogoršati ovisnost, stvorio bi ga."
Now, there's a place that decided to do the exact opposite, and I went there to see how it worked. In the year 2000, Portugal had one of the worst drug problems in Europe. One percent of the population was addicted to heroin, which is kind of mind-blowing, and every year, they tried the American way more and more. They punished people and stigmatized them and shamed them more, and every year, the problem got worse. And one day, the Prime Minister and the leader of the opposition got together, and basically said, look, we can't go on with a country where we're having ever more people becoming heroin addicts. Let's set up a panel of scientists and doctors to figure out what would genuinely solve the problem. And they set up a panel led by an amazing man called Dr. João Goulão, to look at all this new evidence, and they came back and they said, "Decriminalize all drugs from cannabis to crack, but" -- and this is the crucial next step -- "take all the money we used to spend on cutting addicts off, on disconnecting them, and spend it instead on reconnecting them with society." And that's not really what we think of as drug treatment in the United States and Britain. So they do do residential rehab, they do psychological therapy, that does have some value. But the biggest thing they did was the complete opposite of what we do: a massive program of job creation for addicts, and microloans for addicts to set up small businesses. So say you used to be a mechanic. When you're ready, they'll go to a garage, and they'll say, if you employ this guy for a year, we'll pay half his wages. The goal was to make sure that every addict in Portugal had something to get out of bed for in the morning. And when I went and met the addicts in Portugal, what they said is, as they rediscovered purpose, they rediscovered bonds and relationships with the wider society.
Postoji mjesto koje je odlučilo postupiti upravo suprotno. Posjetio sam ga da vidim kako djeluje. Godine 2000. Portugal je imao najvišu stopu problema s drogom u Europi. Jedan posto građana bilo je ovisno o heroinu, što je zaista nevjerojatno, a svake su godine sve više isprobavali "američki način". Kažnjavali su ovisnike, stigmatizirali ih i posramljivali i svake se godine problem povećavao. Jednog su se dana premijer i voditelj opozicije ujedinili i rekli: "Ne možemo napredovati s državom u kojoj imamo sve više ovisnika o heorinu. Osnujmo vijeće znanstvenika i doktora da smislimo kako najbolje riješiti taj problem." I osnovali su vijeće pod vodstvom dr. Joãoa Goulãoa, krasnog čovjeka, da prouče sve te dokaze i vratili su se rekavši: "Dekriminalizirajte sve droge od marihuane do cracka, ali" - i to je ključan sljedeći korak - "uzmite sav novac koji smo trošili na uskraćivanje stvari ovisnicima, na isključivanje i potrošite ih na to da ih povežete s društvom." To nije nešto što pada na pamet kad govorimo o liječenju ovisnosti nama u SAD-u i Britaniji. Rade stambenu rehabilitiaciju, rade i psihološku terapiju, to ima određenu vrijednost. Najvažnija stvar koju rade jest čista suprotnost našim postupcima: masivni program kreiranja poslova za ovisnike i mikro-krediti za ov isnike da osnuju mala poduzeća. Npr. bili ste mehaničar. Kad budete spremni, otići će u garažu i reći: zaposlite li ga na godinu dana. mi ćemo mu pokriti pola plaće. Cilj je bio osigurati da svaki ovisnik u Portugalu ima razlog za ustati iz kreveta. Kada samo otišao upoznati ovisnike u Portugalu, rekli su da su ponovnim otkrivanjem smisla ponovno otkrili i veze i odnose sa širim društvom.
It'll be 15 years this year since that experiment began, and the results are in: injecting drug use is down in Portugal, according to the British Journal of Criminology, by 50 percent, five-zero percent. Overdose is massively down, HIV is massively down among addicts. Addiction in every study is significantly down. One of the ways you know it's worked so well is that almost nobody in Portugal wants to go back to the old system.
Ove godine je 15. godišnjica od početka eksperimenta i ovo su rezultati: zlouporaba droga u Portugalu je u padu, prema Britanskom kriminološkom dnevniku, za 50% - pedeset posto. Predoziranje je u drastičnom padu, kao i zaraženost HIV-om među ovisnicima. Prema svim istraživanjima ovisnost je značajno opala. Jedan od pokazatelja uspješnosti je taj što gotovo nitko u Portugalu ne želi natrag na stari sustav.
Now, that's the political implications. I actually think there's a layer of implications to all this research below that. We live in a culture where people feel really increasingly vulnerable to all sorts of addictions, whether it's to their smartphones or to shopping or to eating. Before these talks began -- you guys know this -- we were told we weren't allowed to have our smartphones on, and I have to say, a lot of you looked an awful lot like addicts who were told their dealer was going to be unavailable for the next couple of hours. (Laughter) A lot of us feel like that, and it might sound weird to say, I've been talking about how disconnection is a major driver of addiction and weird to say it's growing, because you think we're the most connected society that's ever been, surely. But I increasingly began to think that the connections we have or think we have, are like a kind of parody of human connection. If you have a crisis in your life, you'll notice something. It won't be your Twitter followers who come to sit with you. It won't be your Facebook friends who help you turn it round. It'll be your flesh and blood friends who you have deep and nuanced and textured, face-to-face relationships with, and there's a study I learned about from Bill McKibben, the environmental writer, that I think tells us a lot about this. It looked at the number of close friends the average American believes they can call on in a crisis. That number has been declining steadily since the 1950s. The amount of floor space an individual has in their home has been steadily increasing, and I think that's like a metaphor for the choice we've made as a culture. We've traded floorspace for friends, we've traded stuff for connections, and the result is we are one of the loneliest societies there has ever been. And Bruce Alexander, the guy who did the Rat Park experiment, says, we talk all the time in addiction about individual recovery, and it's right to talk about that, but we need to talk much more about social recovery. Something's gone wrong with us, not just with individuals but as a group, and we've created a society where, for a lot of us, life looks a whole lot more like that isolated cage and a whole lot less like Rat Park.
To su političke implikacije. Zapravo, ima cijeli sloj implikacija ovih istraživanja ispod ovoga. Živimo u kulturi u kojoj su ljudi sve više ranjivi na različite oblike ovisnosti, bilo o ovisnosti o mobitelima ili o šopingu ili o hrani. Prije početka konferencije - i svi vi to znate - rečeno nam je da ne smijemo imati uključene mobitele i mogu vam reći da je dosta vas izgledalo kao ovisnici kojima je rečeno da će im diler biti nedostupan sljedećih nekoliko sati. (Smijeh) Puno se nas tako osjeća, a možda je i čudno za reći. Pričao sam vam kako je odcjepljenost glavni uzrok ovisnosti koji je iznenađujuće u porastu jer vjerojatno mislite da smo najpovezanije društvo u povijesti. No ja počinjem misliti da su sve povezanosti koje imamo, ili mislimo da imamo, svojevrsna parodija ljudske povezanosti. Ako doživite neku krizu, primijetit ćete nešto. Neće vaši sljedbenici na Twitteru doći i tješiti vas niti će to biti vaši prijatelji na Facebooku. Bit će to vaši prijatelji od krvi i mesa s kojima imate duboke, slojevite odnose licem u lice. O jednom sam istraživanju naučio od Billa McKibbena, pisca o okolišu, koji nam puno govori o ovome. Promatrao je na koliko bliskih prijatelja prosječni Amerikanac vjeruje da može računati u nevolji. Taj se broj sve više smanjuje od 1950-ih. Kvadratura stanova i kuća sve se više povećava. Po meni je to svojevrsna metafora o odluci koju smo donijeli kao kultura. Prijatelje smo zamijenili kvadraturom, veze smo zamijenili stvarima, zbog čega smo jedno od najusamljenijih društava u povijesti. Bruce Alexander, voditelj eksperimenta sa štakorima, tvrdi da kod ovisnosti uvijek govorimo o osobnom oporavku, što je u redu, ali više bismo trebali govoriti o društvenom oporavku. S nama je nešto pošlo krivo i kao s pojedincima i kao s grupom te smo stvorili društvo u kojem većina na život gleda kao na izolirani kavez, a ne kao na park za štakore.
If I'm honest, this isn't why I went into it. I didn't go in to the discover the political stuff, the social stuff. I wanted to know how to help the people I love. And when I came back from this long journey and I'd learned all this, I looked at the addicts in my life, and if you're really candid, it's hard loving an addict, and there's going to be lots of people who know in this room. You are angry a lot of the time, and I think one of the reasons why this debate is so charged is because it runs through the heart of each of us, right? Everyone has a bit of them that looks at an addict and thinks, I wish someone would just stop you. And the kind of scripts we're told for how to deal with the addicts in our lives is typified by, I think, the reality show "Intervention," if you guys have ever seen it. I think everything in our lives is defined by reality TV, but that's another TED Talk. If you've ever seen the show "Intervention," it's a pretty simple premise. Get an addict, all the people in their life, gather them together, confront them with what they're doing, and they say, if you don't shape up, we're going to cut you off. So what they do is they take the connection to the addict, and they threaten it, they make it contingent on the addict behaving the way they want. And I began to think, I began to see why that approach doesn't work, and I began to think that's almost like the importing of the logic of the Drug War into our private lives.
Iskreno, nisam se zbog toga upustio u ovo. Nisam krenuo u potragu za političkim i društvenim otkrićima, već sam htio pomoći svojim voljenima. Kad sam se vratio s tog puta sa svim tim znanjem, sagledao sam ovisnike u mojem životu. Ako ćemo biti iskreni, teško je voljeti ovisnika, to zna i mnogo ljudi u ovoj prostoriji. Često ste ljuti i mislim da je jedan od razloga zašto je ova rasprava toliko nabijena zato što pogađa svakoga od nas, zar ne? Svatko ima djelić u sebi koji promatra ovisnika i misli si: "Kad bi te barem netko zaustavio." Savjeti koji nam se daju za pomoć ovisnicima u našim životima tipizirani su prema reality- emisiji "Intervencija", ako ste je ikad gledali. Mislim da su naši životi definirani reality televizijom, ali to je već jedna druga tema. Emisija "Intervencija" ima jednostavnu premisu. Nađete ovisnika, ljude iz njegova života i sve ih okupite, ovisnika suočite s njegovim postupcima i kažu: "ako se ne središ, izolirat ćemo te." Dakle, ovisniku prijete oduzimanjem veza ako se ne bude ponašao kako oni žele. Počeo sam uviđati zašto takav pristup ne funkcionira, a to je zato što pomalo nalikuje primjeni rata drogama na naše privatne živote.
So I was thinking, how could I be Portuguese? And what I've tried to do now, and I can't tell you I do it consistently and I can't tell you it's easy, is to say to the addicts in my life that I want to deepen the connection with them, to say to them, I love you whether you're using or you're not. I love you, whatever state you're in, and if you need me, I'll come and sit with you because I love you and I don't want you to be alone or to feel alone.
Počeo sam razmišljati, kako bih mogao biti Portugalac? Ono što sada pokušavam raditi i što konstantno radim i što je prilično jednostavno jest to da ovisnicima u svom životu govorim da želim produbiti povezanost s njima. Govorim im da ih volim bez obzira na to koriste li droge ili ne. Govorim im da ih volim bez obzira na to u kakvom su stanju i da ako me trebaju, doći ću i bit ću s njima jer ih volim i ne želim da budu sami ili da se osjećaju usamljeno.
And I think the core of that message -- you're not alone, we love you -- has to be at every level of how we respond to addicts, socially, politically and individually. For 100 years now, we've been singing war songs about addicts. I think all along we should have been singing love songs to them, because the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection.
Sama osnova te poruke - nisi sam, volimo te - mora postojati na svakoj razini naše reakcije na ovisnike, socijalnoj, političkoj i individualnoj. Već sto godina ovisnicima pjevamo o ratu, a mislim da smo im trebali pjevati o ljubavi jer suprotnost ovisnosti nije trijeznost. Suprotnost ovisnosti jest povezanost.
Thank you.
Hvala vam.
(Applause)
(Pljesak)