Dr. Gabor Maté – Renowned Speaker and Author
I’ve come to talk to you about addiction, the power of addiction, but also addiction to power.
As a medical doctor, I work in Vancouver, Canada and I have worked with some very, very addicted people. People who use heroin, they inject cocaine; they drink alcohol, crystal meth and every drug known to man. And these people suffer.
If the success of a doctor is to be measured by how long his patients live, then I am a failure because my patients die very young, relatively speaking. They die of HIV, they die of hepatitis C, they die of infections of their heart valves, they die of infections of their brains, of their spines, of their hearts, of their bloodstream. They die of suicide, of overdose, of violence, of accidental deaths.
And if you look at them, you call to mind, the words of the great Egyptian novelist, Naguib Mahvouz, who wrote, “nothing records the effects of a sad life as graphically as the human body.” Because these people lose everything. They lose their health, they lose their beauty, they lose their teeth, they lose their wealth, they lose human relationships and in the end, they often lose their lives. And yet, nothing shakes them from their addiction, nothing can force them to give up their addiction.
The addictions are powerful and the question is: why? And as one of my patients said to me, “I’m not afraid of dying,” he said, “I’m more afraid of living.” A question we have to ask is: why are people afraid of life? And, if you want to understand addiction, you can’t look at what’s wrong with the addiction, you have to look at what’s right about it.
In other words, what is the person getting from the addiction? What are they getting that otherwise they don’t have? What addicts get is release from pain, what they get is a sense of peace, a sense of control, a sense of calmness, very, very temporarily.
And the question is: why are these qualities missing from their lives, what happened to them?
Now if you look at the drugs like heroin, like morphine, like codeine, if you look at cocaine, if you look at alcohol, these are all pain killers. In one way or another, they all soothe pain. And thus the real question in addiction is not why the addiction, but why the pain?
Now, I just finished reading the biography of Keith Richards, the lead guitarist of the Rolling Stones and as you probably know, everybody is still surprised that Richards is still alive today because he was a heavy-duty heroine addict for a long time. And in his biography, he writes that the addiction was all about looking for oblivion, looking for forgetting. He says “the contortions that we go through just not to be ourselves for a few hours.”
And I understand that very well myself because I know that discomfort with myself, I know that discomfort being in my own skin, I know that desire to escape from my own mind. The great British psychiatrist…R.D. Laing said that the three things that people are afraid of are: death, of other people, and of their own minds.
For a long time in my life I wanted to distract myself from my own mind, I was afraid to be alone with it. And how would I distract myself? Well, I’ve never used drugs but I’ve distracted myself through work, and throwing myself into activities. And I’ve distracted myself through shopping, in my case, for classical compact music, classical compact discs. But I’ve been a real addict that way, one week I spent $8,000 on classical compact discs, not because I wanted to, but because I couldn’t help going back to the store. And as a medical doctor, I used to deliver a lot of babies and once I left a woman in labor in the hospital to get a classical piece of music. I still could have made it back…to the hospital on time, but once in the store you can’t leave because there are these evil classical music dealers in the aisles, you know, who “hey buddy, have you listened to the latest Mozart symphony cycle?” “You haven’t?”