Addiction and Rescue: The Pledge Goes Viral

By Kirby Farrell | November 7, 2015

If you’d like to be rescued from death, vote for me.

That’s the gist of a video clip Huffington Post put on Facebook. In it a presidential contender promises prospective voters in a New Hampshire tavern that he favors treatment for addiction. Within a day or two, more than two million people called attention to the clip. Whew.

Pundits at opposite ends of the spectrum praised the candidate’s pledge to favor treatment over punishment for addiction. Although treatment would cost money and conservatives loathe Medicare and Obamacare, a conservative blog called the candidate’s plea “riveting stuff,” and promised that “You won’t be able to take your eyes off of it.”

What makes the video spellbinding? For one thing, at a time when marketing strategists have reduced politics to bumper sticker slogans, the candidate ruefully describes his mother’s addiction to cigarettes and her eventual lung cancer in her 70s. Then he issues a challenge: nobody said, “Well, she deserved it, let’s not give her chemotherapy.” So why do so many people object to giving treatment to drug and alcohol addicts?

He values his mother’s life, he vows, as he values the lives of all addicts— and also babies saved from abortion. No doubt the candidate brought in abortion because it’s a hot button issue for conservatives. But there’s more to it than that.

Everyday prejudice assumes addiction to be mostly a problem of minorities and the shiftless poor. For decades, money that could have paid for treatment instead built prisons to punish drug offenders, especially black males. The moral aggression was deliciously logical. They got what they deserved. Likewise, when gays succumbed to AIDS, some conservatives eased their fear by scolding that They deserved it.

It’s almost a reflex: when frightened, turn flight into fight.  Attack and punish the threat. If you assume free will is always more powerful than physiology, you can blame the victim for irresponsible risk-taking.

In the video the candidate urges us to think of Mum and be more sympathetic. Not to seem sentimental, he then recounts how a fabulously successful lawyer he knew became addicted to Percocet, lost his ideal wife, family, and house, and died in a motel room with a bottle of vodka and an empty bottle of Percoset. It’s death: total failure. At the funeral the candidate saw the man’s three daughters sobbing. Again he pledges to support treatment for addiction. The lawyer wasn’t weak or irresponsible, he’s a victim.

To be fair, the candidate sounds sincere.  Yet these sob stories are moves in a political campaign. They have a mythic quality. The heroic leader pledges “treatment” to save victims of a runaway appetite from death. In the process he absolves them of guilt. In the real world of course, treatment is helpful but no panacea. What matters in the video is that the hero wants to help.

Who wouldn’t want to be rescued?  The wish goes back to childhood and the dream of omnipotent parents. It implies a fear of failure, chaos, and social death. And it puts the supplicant in the role of a guilty child grateful to a big-hearted parental patron.

The candidate was taking a risk, because the conservative base doesn’t approve ofgovernment solutions to problems. Yet here’s the screaming irony: the money the candidate pledges for treatment would be public money. It already belongs to the listeners. They’ve paid for it in taxes and fees. In effect, they’ve pooled their money in an insurance fund that could treat addiction and other illnesses. The problem is that propaganda diverts public money to the corporate military or tax breaks for the grateful rich.

Rather than ask who would oppose treatment for addiction, the candidate spins a yarn about Mum and his tragic lawyer friend. This also masks the public reality. After all, an affluent lawyer leading a conservative life doesn’t need public money: he can pay for his own treatment.  And if treatment didn’t work in his case, was something wrong or missing in his ideal inner life?

As it happens, as the governor was offering to rescue voters, two economists released a study that finds “Death Rates Rising for Middle-Aged White Americans.” In fact, “Unlike every other age group, unlike every other racial and ethnic group, unlike their counterparts in other rich countries, death rates in this group have been rising, not falling.” Who’s affected? Primarily whites 45 to 54 years old with no more than a high school education. The cause?  Not “the big killers like heart disease and diabetes but an epidemic of suicides and afflictions stemming from substance abuse: alcoholic liver disease and overdoses of heroin and prescription opioids.”

In a word, stress is up, incomes are down, and your job has gone to China. In the period covered by the study, “the inflation-adjusted income for households headed by a high school graduate fell by 19 percent.” As belts tighten, you have less control over your life. Reach for the painkillers.

Whether out of dumb luck or shrewd intuition, the candidate offers to rescue troubled whites just as prisons and wars against drugs are finally revealing their cruelty and futility. Even more serendipitous: pundits praised the video because the candidate was dying in the polls, and his “emotional plea” seemed to revive his prospects. Everybody likes a story about an underdog beating the reaper and rewarded for his humanity.

Why did the video catch so much attention? It’s likely that in an era of predatory money, people are excited to see someone on top showing compassion. While the workaday world touts survival of the fittest, the video suggests we can pull together. We’re social animals. We want to believe.

How real is the candidate’s compassion? Hard to say. He sounds sincere. Maybe his near death in the polls made him sympathetic to others in trouble. At least he’s proposing help rather than another enemy to bomb. To me his empathy would be most convincing if he openly disagreed with opponents who want to divert the public’s money to the rich and hungry. With living standards under pressure, he could even pledge to relieve stress on working folks, addicted or not.

Let me know when that video turns up.