EKIP– Expert Club for Economics and Politics A Different Opinion
Last week, the WHO (World Health Organization) showed data showing that Bulgaria tops the charts for early onset of psychoactive substance use such as cigarettes, alcohol, cannabis, and even early onset of sexual activity. Our country rarely has the “honor” of being at the top of something, and usually this happens in negative competitions – obesity, poverty, population decline, etc.
In the following lines, I will try to give an assessment with as few statistics and data as possible, and I will emphasize the obvious things that are happening before our eyes. Simply because official data is either absent or ala-ballistics. For example, the state department, whose sole task is to fight alcohol and illicit substance users, has not done so for at least three years. Mortality is calculated by spitting on the ground and throwing beans. The 2019-2023 Drug Strategy is halfway through its term, and it has not even been adopted yet. There is practically no such thing for alcohol and cigarettes.
This won't even be a comment whose only conclusion is "legalize", simply because we already have a lot of that. It will be a comment on the reality that we refuse to comprehend and accept - that the Bulgarian is a dependent person.
Drunkenness
Early initiation of use is not something that happened yesterday or today. The phenomenon has been around for years, even centuries. Our folklore, our national pride, is permeated with stories of glorious people who, before or after doing glorious things, become enchanted with “ruinous wine” and/or brandy. For at least the last 100 years, we have been feeding Bulgarian youth with alcohol, “ so that they know what it is and don’t expose themselves somewhere,” and in the last 20-30 years, they themselves have started to diversify with other exotics, without parental and/or teacher control.
Conscious and independent use of beer and concentrate most often begins at the age of 11-12. The first serious binge drinking occurs at the latest at 15-16. Any specialist can tell you that the habits (especially harmful ones) that you develop at 12 will most likely stay with you throughout your entire conscious life. This does not mean that every young person who reaches for a glass will become an alcoholic. It means that alcohol will most likely be a part of his life until the very end. Whether it will be an occasional drink, whether it will be “a little every night” or “a beer in the park”, it does not matter – it is a ritual and a habit until the grave. Smokers who started in the 6th grade and completed a 10-15-year smoking career before their first serious profession or their first child feel the same way. Often, substance abuse interventions begin with the therapist attempting to evoke positive memories of your lifestyle before you developed the addiction. It is virtually impossible to do this with someone whose conscious memory of life without a cigarette or a drink is simply absent from their memory...
The scale of addiction
Lately, many politicians have been using the term "dependencies," mainly around the saga of gambling boss Bozhkov. I fear that they themselves do not even realize the full meaning of this phenomenon and its scale in Bulgaria.
There are at least 300,000 alcoholics living in our country. People with various forms of addiction are probably between 10 and 15 times more. Gambling, psychoactive substances, cigarettes, anabolic steroids, extreme experiences, etc. are often combined with each other and lead to the so-called polyuse and polydependence.
Addiction treatment is practically not offered in Bulgaria. It is a public secret that state psychiatric institutions that detoxify and treat alcoholics have extremely weak control over their patients. The same ones often run away at night to... drink. These "treatment" institutions are where drunkards end up, whose loved ones have given up on them and they simply need someone else to take care of them for a few months. The only ones who receive medication therapy (the so-called substitution program) are the handful of remaining opiate (heroin) addicted Bulgarians. I emphasize Bulgarians because in Roma communities things are completely different and tragic. There, polydependence and the injection of literally everything you find starts at 7, and often Roma children leave this world as a result of intravenously transmitted Hepatitis, even before they reach an age where they are aware of their actions, let alone can be helped.
And as I started above – this is not a phenomenon of yesterday. It is not something that if we act quickly and immediately, we will nip in the bud. We are in the late phase of this problem. Alcohol, drug, anabolic and gambling addicted people have long been family, their children give birth to children, operate on people in hospitals, arrest and convict, manage bank branches, and even the state. Often the people from whom we expect a solution to the problem – politicians, suffer from the same vices on a personal or family level. There are dozens of examples. I will only recall the recent appearance of a vocal MEP and macho voivode, who could not resist the “pleasure” of driving a firkana.
The treatment
When it comes to treating an individual for addiction, the task seems overwhelmingly complex. However, when it comes to an entire society, things are even more hopeless. The “treatment” for which the most resources and efforts are allocated in Bulgaria can be most briefly defined as “ making their lives black and difficult to the point that they leave it.” Indebted gamblers are constantly thinking about how not to end up in the gutter, those who resort to prohibited substances spend their time in detention centers and prisons, and alcoholics are better off on the streets than in a clinic. Leaving, at best, is simply replacing the state of Bulgaria with one further west than us. At worst, it is expressed in leaving the world of the living as a whole. Both seem to be effects unconsciously or quite consciously sought by our political class. No person, no problem.
What is not fully understood is that in the place of the addicts, new people will not appear, devoid of problems and vices. In fact...no one will appear. Everyone lost in the battle for non-addiction, regardless of whether they migrated, died or were deprived of their freedom, is a loss for our nation. After all, someone will have to stay here and with their hard work maintain our bankrupt pension system. After all, someone will have to stay and give birth to children, operate in the hospital, arrest and prosecute...
Our only civilizational choice now is to adapt to this new reality. Addiction is not something that is cured just like that. It is a burden that you carry throughout your life. We must learn, instead of "treating" these people in prison, to keep them active participants in social life, despite their addictions. For example, like in Switzerland, where heroin addicts retire at the same time as non-addicts. It's just that the system is designed so that everyone can be a one (not a zero), regardless of their vices.
The stigma in Bulgaria is so cruel that it literally pits some addicts against others. A painfully familiar scene to all of us is a man with brandy in one hand and a cigarette in the other shouting at the weed-smoking "addicts". On the other hand, a man rubbing tickets calling the roulette wheel a gambler, just because one spends his salary in one night, and the other - in two weeks.
What are we missing?
We've all heard ad nauseam how drugs, gambling, drinking, etc. are easy ways to " escape reality." This is the truth. 100% of people are addicted to dopamine - the biochemical marker that tells you that what you are and what you do is OK. When the opportunities to get dopamine in real life are lacking, you look for other options to get it. The line between escaping reality, through the short-term hope of getting rich quick from scratch tickets, or through a syringe in your vein, is within the limits of aesthetic nuances. Same reward system in the brain, same emotions, same risks for a sad end. So the first lesson I can summarize is that we are all in the same boat and have the same problems. They are not only for those with weak will, bad upbringing and bad luck in life. If there are people, there will always be addicts among them, and there are literally no immune people, because everyone carries it within themselves.
The need to "escape from reality" is an innate mechanism for dealing with a world that we feel is unbearably heavy. The reaction is as natural and evolutionarily justified as muscle soreness after a hard workout. However, it is a mechanism of extreme necessity that your psyche turns to only after nothing else works. The problem comes if we do not educate children in another way of dealing with reality. Misunderstood parenting gave birth to substance-abusing and gambling mothers' ankles. The idea that you must defend your child from the injustices of the world at all costs makes him unprepared to deal with them on his own, precisely because he fails to develop all those mechanisms in time before the "escape". The escape is behind mom's skirt, while mom is around...then it happens through something else.
The other type of addict is the fault of the whole society. I have always thought it is unfair to blame only the parents for what children become. Raising a child has never been limited to just two people. Children draw examples of behavior from literally everyone they meet. You will be amazed at how decisively you can influence a child after just 30 minutes spent with him. If we are in a bad society with bad parents, we will have bad children and bad adults. Alas, immoral people dominate in Bulgaria, and immoral, addicted people are also included in them.
The reason this issue is only now coming to the fore, even though addiction and "escape from reality" have been with us since the beginning of time, is that modern life has destroyed the age-old tricks and "magic" that we used to deal with without resorting to substances and destructive behavior. The sweet escape from reality through a dose of hope for a better life and a fairer world, obtained by praying to God, is biochemically no different from the short-term hope for wealth and the dopamine kick that a taxi driver gets while blowing through his weekly paycheck in the form of rub-down tickets. The problem with both is that they are an illusion...and only work as long as you believe them. Modern life has moved us away from priests and temples as dealers of hope...and closer to the Skull and the chatterbox!
...dooming us to loneliness. We live more and more densely and more alienated. We are victims of our own modernity. You drink, snort and gamble to join a group, because inclusion, in general, is already a difficult task. Proximity and sharing have become natural processes that we have to force with the help of "social lubricants". We drink to tolerate others...
In general, in the 21st century, it is normal to rely on substances to be different and more. Until now, drugs were used to treat diseases and not suffer. Now they are used to change and improve yourself – to work more and better, to socialize more and better, to have more sensual sex, to think more creatively, to forget past traumas, sins and demons. All this is new and it takes time to appreciate and master it. Punishments will not speed up this process...
If I can summarize everything said:
- We need the addicts, that others will soon be gone
- We need understanding and support before punishments
- We need spirituality and virtue before fear and malice
- We need upbringing always and everywhere. Everyone is a parent!
- We need time to reflect, forgive, and move on.
...and I'm sure that even after reading these 2000 words, some will continue to believe that in his bare head, caressed by enough popes, Boyko Borisov contains all the answers to these questions, and to all the others. Good health to them and think again before they reproduce...
