Tania Cabral, a woman with an addictive imagination, has gone missing again after dropping her child off at a friend’s house. She hasn’t come back yet and it’s been weeks.

Ms. Cabral was featured in a newspaper article regarding one woman’s addiction to crack cocaine that led her to sleeping under overpasses and doing almost anything to get her fix. She went into a recovery program that apparently hasn’t worked.

Most of them don’t.

The reason is that Ms. Cabral has problems with crack is her fault, but in a much different way than this backasswards country normally views addiction. We blame it on the drug. Unfortunately, that’s about as far from reality as one can get when dealing with addiction. Here’s why.

Years ago on a talk show in Miami, I met a man who’d won a Nobel prize for his book on the brain and the way certain substances complete brain circuits that otherwise remain disconnected from functioning as circuits do in so called ‘normal brains”. When certain drugs are introduced, as Darth Vader reminds us, “the circle is now complete. Before I was the learner, now I am the master.”

This book never went anywhere in this country. The very idea that cocaine could be used to complete a person’s disconnected brain function was absurd to the legions of undereducated “specialists”, usually recovery addicts themselves, working overtime to “cure addictive behavior” which, they mistakenly assume, is the curse of using unregulated “ street drugs”.

Try dumping Cymbalta from your system anytime soon. I don’t hear these geniuses complain when people snap the velvet handcuffs of prescription medication on their wrists and then try to free themselves from it. Most dealers aren’t pedaling Cymbalta to the broken souls living in the grit of street life. But they might as well be. Cymbalta makes connections in the brain bringing a sense of control and well being to those battling depression. The dosage is regulated and monitored by physicians, not police. The very idea that law enforcement sticks it’s nose into the problems of addiction is appalling. No judge, no cop, has any business mucking around in the very complicated universe of brain chemistry.

And that’s the problem. Dose people like Tania Cabral with right amount of substance instead of firing her off into a world where sooner or later she’ll overdose herself again. Stop persecuting these people with silly recovery programs and higher power religious mysticism. Let medical and clinical personnel take over. Tell the cops to go after the real bad guys. The ones using guns, not drugs. If you want to pick up Ms. Cabral for child abandonment, take her to a doctor first, not a judge. You’ll be doing her, and the rest of us, a noble service. And for that, you get the prize now that you’ve got the point of what addiction really is.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 2nd, 2007 at 6:21 pm and is filed under Stuff I know. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.