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THE ADDICTIVE potential of cocaine may have been widely overstated,
according to a Canadian psychologist. ‘The drug is no more addictive or
medically risky than drinking alcohol or coffee, gambling, smoking tobacco
or marijuana, or making love to excess,’ says Bruce Alexander, a psychologist
at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.

Alexander believes misinformation about the actual dangers of the drug
has led to ‘cocaine hysteria’ throughout North America. The resultant ‘war
on drugs’ in the US, particularly against cocaine, will be an expensive
failure, he predicts, because it fails to address the true causes of long-term
substance abuse, such as poverty, societal decay, and psychological distress.

Alexander bases his controversial conclusions on research conducted
with psychologist Patricia Erickson of Toronto’s Addiction Research Foundation.
The scientists conducted a comprehensive review of the available animal,
clinical, and epidemiological studies, as well as carrying out original
research in Canada. Details of the research were reported in Social Pharmacology
(3(3), pp 249-270, 1989) and will be included in Alexander’s book, Peaceful
Measures: Canada’s Alternatives to the War on Drugs, to be published by
the University of Toronto Press this summer.

‘The most direct data indicate that between 5 and 10 per cent of those
who ever try cocaine will eventually use it weekly or more often,’ Alexander
said. ‘Of this minority of users, probably one-tenth to one-quarter become
addicted at some point in their cocaine-using careers.’

Of those people who do become hooked and who seek treatment for a cocaine
problem, most are ‘cross-addicted’ to other substances as well, say the
scientists. They cite a study conducted in 1985 by the US National Institute
on Drug Abuse. It found that 70 per cent of cocaine abusers also use alcohol
and cannabis; up to 27 per cent use tranquillisers, amphetamines and heroine.
‘Cocaine-only’ patients are uncommon.

Surprisingly, the majority of users who do become dependent on cocaine
return to moderate use or to total abstinence without treatment, the Canadians
claim. Long-term studies in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Holland, for
instance, reveal that ‘non-deviant’ users – those who are neither in treatment
nor in prison – fluctuate between periods of heavy and controlled use. Heavy
users tend to moderate their behaviour for several reasons: limited availability
of the drug, concern with physical risks, loss of interest, and changes
in lifestyle such as parenthood.

Alexander and Erickson warn, however, that cocaine is not harmless.
As with any drug, it can be dangerous when overused and can occasionally
produce harmful side-effects. But Alexander argues that the crusade against
cocaine ‘blinds us to the real causes of the misery and violence that corrupt
human society’. He adds: ‘This distortion of reality, not the behavioural
or medical effects of the drug, is the real danger of cocaine in our times’.