Dr. Bruce Alexander: Global Addiction and Poverty of the Spirit

Did you know... North American governments

Spend over 51 BILLION dollars a year on the War on Drugs?

Yet these same governments do very little to treat addiction and the "poverty of the spirit" that engenders this addiction.

Dr. Bruce K. Alexander is a Canadian psychologist who believes  that society is drowning in addictions, to alchohol, drug use and a thousand other habits. He maintains the reason for this is a growing disconnect as people around are torn from the close ties to family, culture, and traditional spirituality.  Alexendar says this rift and lack of social integration has destroyed what used to constitute the normal fabric of societal life.

For many, addiction serves as a substitute for the connectedness for which they long and which provides context and meaning for their lives.

Alexander believes because societal determinants are so much more powerful that individual ones, that addiction is much more a social problem than an individual disorder.  This is why he feels that the War on Drugs is so  wrong-headed.

Alexander's book,  The Globalization of Addiction: A Study in Poverty of the Spirit presents a new look at the nature of addiction, how society should view addicts, and more effective treatments for addiction.

Bruce Alexander is a psychologist and Professor Emeritus at Simon Fraser University, where he has worked since 1970. His primary research interest has been the psychology of addiction. He is best known in the UK for the "Rat Park" experiments, which helped to demonstrate the falsity of the outworn belief that simple exposure to narcotic drugs can cause addiction.