Seven Days, January 29, 2014 by Seven Days

Main Street Landing Yiota Ahladas, Founder of Community Justice Center  Beth Sachs , Co-founder of Vermont Energy Investment Corporation  Martin Feldman, Founder & President of Light-Works  William Cats-Brail, Director, UVM Sustainable Entrepreneurship MBA  Patrick Burns, General Manager, SpeakerS: Doug Hoffer, Zuckerman, CityDavid Market/Onion River Co-op 

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substance use the most. And country kids drink more and start younger than kids in the city; Vermont ranks high in underage alcohol consumption. Maybe the heroin syringe is not a common sight in the households of farmers and foresters. But Mom and Dad getting shitfaced on a case of beer every Friday night is an indigenous custom. A kid who takes a snort in the schoolyard is not destined for the shooting gallery, or an early grave. The influential work of New York City researcher Charles Winick in the 1960s uncovered what he called “maturing out” — the common cessation of drug use between the ages of 20 and 30, not by death but by quitting. Subsequent research yields a complex picture of an opioid user’s career. According to University of Glamorgan (Wales) criminologist Trevor Bennett, “It usually takes more than a year to become addicted and … even when addicted, the opioid user is frequently able to control his or her habit.” Although it’s not easy, people stop for various reasons — from the departure of the lover who supplied the drugs to an intolerable weariness with the constant, arduous, oftencriminal pursuit of the high. Of course, if narcotics were decriminalized and the core population of congenital addicts maintained with substitute medicines, the profits would disappear, and with them the costs and crime required to feed a habit. “Recovery” — the word used to describe what the kids in The Hungry Heart are engaged in — implies a return: to safety, to health, to home and people who care for you. But, aside from Machia and a few others, the teenagers in this film started out with none of these, or lost them early, and repeatedly. Child after child speaks of emptiness, pain and a sense of worthlessness. Drugs “made me feel like a human.” “That hole got filled up.” “It was the only thing that didn’t betray me.” One young woman holds up a sign printed out for Holmes: “Fred’s Kids.” She says, weeping: “I was never anybody’s kid.” Given the circumstances, painkillers, though not a healthy choice, are a rational choice. The Hungry Heart is heartbreakingly intimate. But it drives home a bigger point: Addiction is a disease; it alters the brain and body. Stigma is cruel, criminal punishment counterproductive, and

treatment is desperately needed. As for prevention, the few intact families interviewed stress keeping a close eye on your kids and talking a lot about drugs. But Holmes and the experts whose interviews are posted on the film’s website express another, more damning message. These young people need more than medicine and counseling. They need education, housing, jobs, food and money. In other words, addiction is a disease. But, as with tuberculosis or malaria, social factors make some people more susceptible and some more resilient; social factors are critical to a cure. A massive, early-1970s study of returning Vietnam Army vets found that almost half the soldiers used opium or heroin while deployed; 20 percent were addicted. But a year after coming home, only 5 percent were still using. The vast majority quit without treatment or abstinence. What happened? They no longer needed to numb themselves. Now they had families, jobs and homes. Lives. People need a reason to get clean. In the film, one boy, 18, skinny and homeless, arrives at the doctor’s office on a bike that’s too small for him; he is traveling to manhood on a beater of a childhood. “What’s to make him keep trying?” asks Holmes, who keeps helping the boy to try. Bob Bick, the HowardCenter’s director of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services, tells O’Brien these teens’ addiction is the community’s failure. I’d put it this way: Addiction is a political failure, an economic failure. Addiction “comes at people,” Shumlin said. But watching The Hungry Heart, you can’t help but feel that some people have been on a forced march toward addiction since the day they left the cradle. What put them on that path may be DNA or mental illness. But what vigilantly foils escape is income inequality coupled with social-service cutbacks — a growing governmental indifference to human need, couched in false claims of economic scarcity. That state of the state is failing. It is afflicted by growing epidemics — poverty, hunger, homelessness and joblessness. Opiate addiction is not the illness. It is a symptom. When children are dying of a preventable disease in a wealthy state in a wealthy nation, it’s not just “the community” at fault. The people elected to lead are to blame. m

Addiction is A

political failure,

Ed Antczak, Harry Atkinson, William Bruce F. Seifer, Co-authorT.of Maclay, Sustainable John Canning, Ken Schatz,Communities, Rhonda Phillips, will moderate. Melinda Moulton, Yiota Ahladas, BethPlease Sachs, Seating is limited. see a Martin Feldman, William Cats-Baril, and toPatrick Phoenix Books bookseller RSVP. Burns. Light fare will be provided. Moderator: Bruce F. Seifer Seating is limited. Please RSVP at 448-3350. Hosted by Phoenix Books Burlington.

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