MALAIKA MAHLATSI | Addiction is an illness, and not a moral failure

Recently, a post about a young woman who squandered her mother's savings, amounting to just over R100,000, through gambling on Betway, went viral on social media. When I first read this story, my initial response was: “But who does this to their own mother?”

I was infuriated because my initial thought was that no child could reasonably subject their own parent to such unthinkable suffering. But after I went past the initial sadness of what this child did to her mom, I thought more about this story and had to employ a sociological imagination that we so often lack in such discussions.

The reality is that the young woman spent that money because she has an addiction to gambling. We live in a society that doesn’t understand addiction – a society that treats people battling with addiction like they’re inherently bad people who lack self-control. But addiction is not simply a decision to not have self-control, it’s an illness.

In my recently published book, Why We Vote For The ANC, I reflect on the dangers of the narrative that is perpetuated by journalists such as Stephen Grootes who, in an articled published by the Daily Maverick on January 20 2014 titled “Analysis: A culture of entitlement that holds us back”, makes the claim that people (black people, to be specific) drink because they’re bored and thus engage in easily accessible recreational activities such as drinking. I argue that alcoholism in the black community is not about people being lazy and bored, but a deeper structural problem rooted in various factors.

These include generational addiction manufactured by colonial and apartheid encounters wherein the apartheid government owned and supported the establishment of alcohol in townships; the dispossession of land and proletarianisation of black people in rural areas that forced many black women to sell homemade alcohol to earn wages for rent; the Dop System in farms where black and coloured workers were paid with alcohol instead of actual salaries; the desire to numb ourselves from the debilitating condition of blackness, etc.

I argue that alcoholism is an addiction and therefore fundamentally a medical and mental health problem. I reflect on the crack cocaine epidemic in the United States in the 1970s-1990s that destroyed black communities, and the responses by the Reagan and later Clinton administration that pathologised black people and treated them like criminals when they were addicted to crack.

It was only when white communities started being addicted that the narrative shifted from young drug users being these criminal “super-predators” who lack moral guidance, who needed to “Just say no” (a slogan that was used by the Ronald Reagan administration as a way of demonising black people battling addiction), to the realisation that addicts are sick people who needed help.

The reality is that gambling is an addiction and addiction is an illness in whatever form it arises. The child who did this to her mother is sick. Sick people need help even if we deem their actions monstrous. Hungarian-born Canadian physician and specialist, Dr Gabor Maté, who I quote in my book, makes a profound argument when he states that: “Addiction is not a choice anybody makes.

It’s not a moral failure; it’s not an ethical lapse; it’s not a weakness of character; it’s not a failure of will; which is how our society depicts addiction. Nor is it an inherited brain disease, which is how our medical tendency is to see it. What it actually is: it’s a response to human suffering”. This definition of addiction and its link to societal constructs rooted in alienation and debilitating begs for reflection, if for nothing else, for helping us humanise people battling addiction.