By Tom Plate
Professor at University of California, Los Angeles
Director of Asia Pacific Media Network
LOS ANGELES _ Addictions can be frighteningly habit-forming, by very definition. That should be universally obvious, whether you follow the substance-abusing celebrity circuit in India, where I was recently visiting, or the substance-abusing celebrity circuit in Los Angeles, where I live and work.
What’s not so obvious is that a universal consensus on the true nature of substance abuse and addiction looks not to exist.
Just before I left India, a famous former Indian test bowler had been arrested for possessing a small amount of cocaine. His name is Maninder Singh, who reinvented himself into a very popular radio and television cricket commentator. The former star athlete admitted to police that he’d been using cocaine for years to “cope with family problems.” Also arrested with Singh was an Indian cricket coach for hashish possession.
At roughly the same time here in Los Angeles, in the general area of what we Angelenos refer to as “Hollyweird,” an internationally recognized American celebrity, Lindsay Lohan, who looks to have a well-reported drinking problem, was charged with driving under the influence. She was cited at the hospital where friends took her to seek attention for minor injuries after police discovered cocaine in the Mercedes that Lohan crashed on legendary Sunset Boulevard.
The former child actress and current Hollywood movie star with a reputation for hard-partying is not yet even 21 _ the legal age at which one is allowed to consume alcohol here in the U.S.
What’s so fascinating is the differing media commentary about these two high-profile arrests _ and in this difference does lurk a tale.
In India, and indeed in many parts of Asia, drug or alcohol abuse is generally described as a defect of character. What kind of person would use cocaine? My God, he must be some sort of deviant, defective monster or imploding personality. The media quoted alleged associates and presumed friends of the coked-up cricketer as incredulous that this famed athlete could be so “weak” as to fall under a drug’s sway.
In the U.S. and in much of the West, by contrast, substance abuse is generally viewed more as a disease than a character issue. The remedy is less to condemn than to treat the problem as if it were a medical problem _ as a muscle disorder or as an infection or whatever. Addiction theory includes the inheritance hypothesis: It may not be entirely irrelevant to note, for example, that Lohan’s father had an alcohol arrest record.
Anti-alcohol medication may be prescribed; drug rehabilitation _ voluntary or court-mandated _ is close to a certainty. None of these treatments offer any certainty of success, of course. Even Alcoholics Anonymous and Cocaine Anonymous, which are among the most celebrated of the existing programs, are a far cry from being magic bullets. Drinkers often “fall off the wagon,” as we put it in the West, or “go out” of a program and sink back down into substance abuse and dependency.
Asia characteristically is more of a do-or-die, survivalist culture. There are fewer government safety nets than in the West to catch the faltering unemployed, the failing alcoholic or the otherwise handicapped and/or messed-up. Survive or die, work or starve, suck up the alcohol problem and tame it yourself _ or forget about your future or anyone taking you seriously or treating you with respect.
Often this column commends Asia for attitudes and policies that we in the West should study and learn from. But this is not one of those columns. Instead, on this topic many parts of Asia could learn much from the West.
The fact of the matter is that solid medical science increasingly reveals drug and alcohol abuse to be a serious biological malady that must be treated as a disease. The sufferer is not to be so much condemned as to be brought back into “recovery” _ at least an honest attempt needs to be applied using the best professional practices.
At its worst, of course, the Western approach might be seen as naive coddling. After all, the actress Lindsay Lohan, even at 20, is already a hard-partying recidivist: the fat-cat moguls of Hollywood are getting sick of her act, though if she successfully emerges from her rehab effort (at a place called Promises in Malibu, a stars’ colony not far from Hollywood), she’ll get her career back on track. Her movies have sold tickets like hotcakes.
Perhaps serial substance-abuse offenders do deserve to get hit with compassion fatigue from people and professionals who otherwise might be more understanding. At some point Americans will get bored with the tiresome and repetitive carrying-ons of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears ? or so one would hope.
But for highly motivated people who have addiction issues and refuse to let them take over their lives and ruin them, rehab can work _ whether your stomping ground is Hollywood or Bollywood. Asia needs to understand this better.