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Passage: Billie Holiday on Addiction

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Passage SpotlightChasing the Scream288 words2 source entriesstatus: editorial complete

Passage: Billie Holiday on Addiction

“Imagine if the government chased sick people with diabetes, put a tax on in…”historypolicy

“Imagine if the government chased sick people with diabetes, put a tax on insulin and drove it into the black market, told doctors they couldn't treat them, then sent them to jail.”

The passage: 'Imagine if the government chased sick people with diabetes, put a tax on insulin and drove it into the black market, told doctors they couldn't treat them, then sent them to jail. If we did that, everyone would know we were crazy. Yet we do practically the same thing every day in the week to sick people hooked on drugs.'

Why this passage: Holiday wrote this in 1956, the same year Osmond was introducing the word 'psychedelic' to the scientific literature. She was not a pharmacologist or a policy analyst. She was a woman who had been directly targeted by Harry Anslinger's Federal Bureau of Narcotics, who had had her New York cabaret license revoked and been denied the ability to work in the city where her career was centered, who had been arrested, imprisoned, and under federal surveillance for years.

From inside this experience, she produced one of the clearest arguments in the addiction policy literature: the analogy between insulin-dependent diabetes and heroin addiction. Both involve a body that has become physiologically dependent on a compound. The moral framework applied to each is completely different.

The analogy is not perfect, diabetes is not caused by voluntary behavior in the way heroin dependence begins, and the social determinants of the two conditions differ significantly. But as a description of how the same pharmacological process, dependency, is treated differently depending on who has it and what they're dependent on, it is precise and devastating.

Holiday understood in 1956 what the policy literature would not fully acknowledge for another sixty years: the drug war's target was not the drug. Hari quotes this passage because it says in one paragraph what his book takes three hundred pages to establish.