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Today, TomDispatch regular Mattea Kramer and Doctor Sean Fogler offer a vivid, moving, and deeply personal look at addiction in America as 2023 ends. They focus above all on perhaps the most dangerous, even devastating, addiction around. I'm thinking, of course, about being hooked on Donald Trump, the man who only recently suggested that the first day of a new presidency of his would be a "dictatorship." As he put it, "We're closing the border and we're drilling, drilling, drilling. After that, I'm not a dictator." In other words, he's guaranteed that on day one of a possible second term in office, he would begin a major crackdown on that southern border his acolytes are already planning vast detention centers for that future border policy of his (and who knows what else) and ensure that ("drilling, drilling, drilling") this planet will all too literally go to hell in a fossil-fuelized handbasket.
And given what we know about the planning already underway by right-wing think tanks for a future Trump presidency, that would be just the beginning. As New York Times correspondent Peter Baker wrote recently, "When critics said Mr. Trump's language about ridding Washington of 'vermin' echoed that of Adolf Hitler, the former president's spokesman said the critics' 'sad, miserable existence will be crushed' under a new Trump administration." Indeed, in a country where, as Robert Reich has recently pointed out, widespread anxiety and depression are now commonplace along with a "near record rate of suicide," it's little wonder that the urge to take drugs of ever more devastating kinds is also on the rise. The question that remains to be answered in 2024 is the one that Kramer and Fogler bring up so strikingly today: Are all too many Americans so deeply troubled that they've become addicted to Donald Trump? Tom
Today's Most Dangerous Drug
Loneliness, Donald Trump, and You
By Mattea Kramer and Sean Fogler
Consider two phenomena that might seem unrelated.
This fall, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released new data showing a marked increase in overdose fatalities nationally. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, told CNN that she had expected overdose deaths to decline after a sharp spike during the pandemic. Instead, such fatalities have only gone up.
Meanwhile, by the end of November, Donald Trump was riding high with nearly 60% support in Republican primary polling. In the past 43 years, according to the Washington Post, no candidate has had such a commanding lead and failed to win his party's nomination.
On the face of it, his astonishing poll numbers would appear to have nothing whatsoever to do with the continued rise in overdose deaths. As it happens, though, the two phenomena are horribly intertwined, connected to a fundamental question so many Americans are grappling with: In a world that feels increasingly lonely and often hopeless, how can we feel better?
Being Honest About Our Loneliness
One of us, Mattea, is a writer who currently uses drugs, and the other, Sean, is a doctor living in long-term recovery from a substance use disorder. Both of us were raised to believe that our accomplishments were the measure of our worth and that something out there status, money, accolades would make us whole. Both of us bagged various degrees and have admirable re'sume's, but neither of us found that such achievements brought any sense of wholeness. In fact, it's often seemed as if the more impressive we appeared, the emptier we felt.
It took us about 40 years to realize that our quest to be accomplished and better than other people was, in fact, causing us despair. And today we're writing because we remain in pain and want to be honest about it. We have come to understand that even those people who appear to be on top often feel an emptiness they try to fill with work, antidepressants, cannabis, wine, benzodiazepines, you name it.
Meanwhile, there is a nascent but growing awareness in the medical and recovery communities that loneliness is at the root of so much addiction and that loneliness is on the rise. According to Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, loneliness in America has indeed grown into a public health crisis. Earlier this year, Murthy released a report entitled "Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation," in which he described taking a cross-country tour and hearing countless Americans of all backgrounds disclose that they feel invisible, insignificant, and isolated. That experience of loneliness coupled with trauma and a wide spectrum of mental health challenges is now tearing at the fabric of American life, driving new levels of despair and death, much of it drug-related, that are ripping through families and communities and lowering life expectancy.
In such a bleak landscape, one way to feel better is to put your hopes into a magnetic leader who makes you feel like you're a part of something meaningful. Another way is to have a martini and any mood- or mind-altering substance anything to numb the pain.
This is not an individual problem. This is not a moral failing or a flaw in our brain chemistry (or yours). This is a vast social problem, one that benefits The Donald immeasurably.
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