Dawn Picken: Focus on mental health instead of marijuana legalities

The Government has missed the mark with the cannabis referendum, writes Dawn Picken. Photo / Getty Images

COMMENT:

Make recreational weed legal. No, keep marijuana on the naughty list. Voters will face these choices next year if the Government's draft plan to legalise cannabis for personal use proceeds as planned.

Safeguards such as a minimum purchase age of 20, a ban on marketing and advertising of cannabis products and prohibition of consumption in public spaces are proposed.

Most of us are so mired in the legalisation question we miss the mark when it comes to drug use: We need to treat root causes of alcohol and drug dependency instead of debating the merits of legalising another high.

It's clear alcohol causes exponentially more social harm than marijuana: Alcohol use and abuse result in more violence, more injuries and other adverse health outcomes like cancer and cirrhosis than weed.

The New Zealand Drug Foundation says alcohol causes more harm in this country than methamphetamine, marijuana, cocaine, ecstasy, acid and heroin combined. Alcohol is not only socially acceptable, its production and sale is a multibillion-dollar industry in Aotearoa.

No matter our drug of choice, a certain percentage of people will become addicted. Experts estimate 10 per cent of Kiwis are problem drinkers and the same percentage of marijuana users will develop a pattern of heavy use.

We need to ask why a significant proportion of our population seeks to alter their consciousness often enough and with high enough doses drug use becomes harmful. Today, a growing body of research points to adverse childhood experiences (ACE, for short) as a prime reason people turn to drugs.

One American physician says addiction shouldn't be called "addiction". It should be called "ritualised compulsive comfort-seeking", according to Dr Daniel Sumrok, director of the Center for Addiction Sciences at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center's College of Medicine. Dr Sumrok says ritualised compulsive comfort-seeking (aka, addiction) is a normal response to adversity experienced in childhood, just like bleeding is a normal response to being stabbed.

Dr Sumrok says the solution to changing illegal or unhealthy ritualized compulsive comfort-seeking behavior (he treats opioid addicts) is to address a person's adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). An ACE score is a tally of different types of abuse, neglect, and other hallmarks of a rough childhood.

There's a short online quiz you can answer to learn your ACE score. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/03/02/387007941/take-the-ace-quiz-and-learn-what-it-does-and-doesnt-mean

The test asks questions such as whether you lived with someone who abused substances, witnessed violence, were sexually abused as a child, or had parents who divorced.

The higher your score, the more traumatic your childhood. Large-scale studies of people using ACE scores have shown toxic stress from ACEs damage children's developing brains and affect health throughout our lives, leaving us vulnerable to cancer, heart disease, mental illness, violence and 'ritualised compulsive comfort-seeking', or addiction.

Compared with people who have zero ACEs, people with ACE scores are two to four times more likely to use alcohol or other drugs and to start using drugs at an earlier age.

People with an ACE score of 5 or higher are seven to 10 times more likely to use illegal drugs, to report addiction and to inject illegal drugs.

ACE research, which is ongoing, is something we must consider when undertaking any kind of drug and alcohol reform legislation. Instead of tinkering with laws, we should target efforts to understand the root causes of addiction and provide resources such as counselling to help addicts (ie, ritualised compulsive comfort-seekers) get help.

Your 40-something friend who drank a litre of spirits alone last weekend might claim he loves the taste of bourbon, when in fact he was abused and neglected as a child and can't process anger in a healthy way. Instead, he tries to drown his feelings in drink.

The 14-year-old who smokes marijuana daily may not be rebelling for kicks, but because he was bullied in school and his stepfather's an alcoholic.

The 30-something woman who skulls a bottle of wine each evening is no connoisseur but is reeling from a sexual assault suffered as a teenager.

I bet you know people who fit these profiles, or maybe one of them resembles you.

There's no quick fix to heal childhood wounds. Helping people work through uncomfortable, often buried issues from their past, getting them to understand how their upbringing affects their present, takes time. While we need to ensure drug and alcohol laws address society's needs, we can't let a referendum provide a smokescreen hiding pain's cause - ghosts of our past that continue to haunt us into the future.

Rather than legalising marijuana for personal use, I'd prefer we decriminalise it so users won't gain a criminal record for minor offences.

I'd prefer we make medical marijuana legal so sufferers of conditions such as cancer and arthritis can seek alternatives to pharmaceuticals (though studies show mixed results for marijuana as pain relief).

Even more than new laws, we must focus on the causes of addiction. We need to address unhealthy ritualise compulsive comfort-seeking so fewer people use joints and gin as dummies - trying to pacify themselves for emotional injuries they suffered as kids.