War, Opiates and The Nature of Addiction
In 1971 Nixon said that drug abuse and addiction were America’s #1 public health problem.
A year later he would change his tune and say that tape recordings were, but that’s another story.
1971 was right in the middle of the ever popular Vietnam War and the army was growing more concerned every month about its soldier’s drug use while they were on tour.
Vietnam is directly adjacent to an area known as the “Golden Triangle”.
At the time, this Opiate Tinted Triangle of Myanmar (Burma), Laos and Thailand produced more heroin than anywhere else in the world. That production shifted to Afghanistan in the early 21st century, which is coincidentally when the CIA started to notice it.
Anyway,
Vietnam is on the coast so it was an easy smuggling route for opium and heroin producers to utilize to get their product to more affluent, Western markets.
So there was a ton of heroin and opium in ‘Nam during the war.
Nixon, the oh so trustworthy intelligence community and the army knew this.
So they began to give a drug test to every soldier who returned home from the war.
This program started in September 1971, and every man who tested positive would be sent to a week-long detox facility.
Their data shows that almost 50% of the men who served in Vietnam had tried heroin or opium.
And that 20% of the men who served had become addicted to one of the two.
Now, if you know anything about opiates you know that it’s the most addicting substance in the world. Recovering from use and addiction often takes years, and coming to terms with its effects on one’s life can take a lifetime.
So it’s safe to assume that those 20% who became addicted stayed in the grasp of opiates for the rest of their life.
A year after these drug tests the sociologist who was tasked with running them followed up with each soldier who tested positive.
Only 5% of those who tested positive had relapsed into addiction.
So what happened?
It’s the same man.
With the same trauma.
And similar access to the same drug.
How was a massive number of individuals able to simply shrug off the most addicting substance on earth as if it was a seasonal cold?
I’ll tell you how.
They changed their environment.
They didn’t spend months in rehab, they didn’t attend 12 step meetings for years. They just changed where they were.
Change seems overwhelming. Breaking bad habits and replacing them with new habits feels like climbing a mental mountain without any rope and without a sherpa.
But sometimes life can be simple.
Sometimes you don’t need to do anything other than give your brain a new environment.
One where your bad habits don’t take over. One where you can be in complete control of your behavior because old traumas aren’t whispering in your ear.
So what does that mean?
Do you have to pack up your life and move? Or break off every relationship to start fresh?
Nah.
It just means you need to be wary of the media you consume, the conversations you have, the food you keep in your pantry and other seemingly trivial things like that.
I think Apocalypse Now is the finest film ever made. There’s a scene where a woman asks Martin Sheen’s Capt. Willard:
“Do you know why you can never step into the same river twice?”
And he replies “Yeah. Because it’s always moving.”
The river is the water, but the water’s always moving. It’s always clinging to new shores and passing over new shoals. It’s the same river but it changes a little bit in every environment it’s in. Sometimes it’s calm, sometimes it’s White Water Rapids.
And that all depends on the environment around it.
So, look.
Heroin, opium and opiates are addictive as hell. They change your neurology and biology to make you chemically dependent on their intake.
If a group of 20-something guys could stop using them by only changing where they were, you can beat your bad habits by strategically arranging your environment.