“Wokeness is dead,” I typed out. This was a succinct way to express the idea that there was something subversive about a blonde female celebrity unapologetically appealing to the male gaze. It’s not too much to say that this launched the discourse around Sydney Sweeney as a Right-wing icon, prompting dozens of think pieces across the ideological spectrum and feeding into the debates generated by Sweeney’s controversial “good jeans” commercial for American Eagle.

The result: I’m mentioned on Sweeney’s Wikipedia page, one of my proudest accomplishments.

Yet by many people’s intuitions, when I sent that Sweeney post, I shouldn’t have been online at all — I should have been playing with my kids. My scrolling and posting at the moment were related to what you might call my “phone addiction,” though I don’t like the term; the vocabulary of mental health likely causes more problems than it solves. Better to say, simply, that over the years, I’ve looked at my phone too much.

But more recently, with the start of the new year, I’ve managed to keep the habit in check. This, without giving up technology or screens altogether, which would be impossible for me — that is, unless I were willing to give up on my information-based line of work. But as the Sweeney post showed, in this job, it pays to always be ready to blast out an inspired line or take at the right moment. The post did bring me a great deal of attention; punditry is, in part, a numbers game, especially in a digital age. Likely, online attention and interaction are beneficial for your work, too, even if your job is less public-facing than mine.

In my defense, moreover, when I’m on my phone, I’m mostly doing things that are squarely related to my job as a writer. I surf real news, cycling through the apps for Substack, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and other high-quality sources of information. The rest of the time is spent answering emails or direct messages, participating in group chats, and, above all, tweeting (or whatever it’s called nowadays). Practically all my book reading is now done through screens, too. Still, despite these practical uses, I have for years walked around with the nagging feeling that I should cut back. 

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And now I’ve managed it. How? I’ve made some rules that share three important qualities: they are strict, minor, and realistic. There’s no silver bullet. Rather, I’ve found that moderation is the best policy. And it has made a real difference in terms of improving my productivity and ability to focus. 

Absolute restrictions don’t work. In the past, I tried (or thought about trying) drastic rules, such as not using the phone during meals, when I’m with my kids, during an entire day of the week, or for four to eight hour periods. But I’ve concluded that such measures are too demanding. Maybe one day, I will be able to afford these more substantial breaks, but I’m not there yet. Nonetheless, while total abstinence over any substantial period of time is not a realistic option, there have been a few easy ways to cut my screen time, while helping, rather than hindering, my ability to communicate with a large audience.

It’s actually one, easy rule: I’ve eliminated device usage during what I call transition periods.

For example, take going to the gym. It used to be normal for me to look at my phone when I arrived, in periods between switching stations, and when walking from one part of the facility to another. I would thus end up spending too much time in the gym, when it would’ve been better for my state of mind, productivity, and physical health if I just simply put the phone away and listened to music without scrolling through apps and social media feeds. I’d certainly be able to do more sets in a shorter period of time. So now I have a new rule: no being on my phone while working out, except for choosing which songs to listen to.

Peeing had also come to take up too much of my time. Standing at a urinal is 10 seconds of my life where I have always found it more enjoyable to scroll X than stare at a tiled wall. But as with the gym, once you allow the phone to intrude on that, ahem, sacred space, everyday activities are drawn out. A quick glance might absorb me in a comments section or group chat. The 10-second urinal visit, in this way, ends up taking several minutes, by the end of which I forget the next thing I need to do. This adds up. Sometimes, it’s good to have 10 seconds just to think — or urinate — without any outside stimulation, freeing oneself to get back to work as soon as possible. 

The biggest change has been no longer looking at my phone while walking or driving. Yes, I was actually doing this. Now, if I’m walking and have the urge to read an article or respond to text, I will either put it off or stop in my tracks in order to scratch that itch. The most dangerous thing for productivity and the general flow of life isn’t when I’m focusing completely on a device. Rather, it’s been the in-between states, when I’m distracted by the screen in my hand while I am supposed to be working out, going to the bathroom, or just walking from Point A to Point B. In these intervals, I’m usually not handling the phone for its more productive uses, such as reading books or answering emails, so I’m just making every task take much longer than it otherwise would, for little benefit. 

And yes, in the past, I’ve sent texts and composed tweets while on the road. I once heard that John von Neumann read books while driving, and since I wanted to be a genius like him, I also took up the practice. It’s actually doable. Like von Neumann, though, I also have a habit of getting into car accidents and decided to no longer tempt fate. No more looking at my phone, even at a stoplight. The practice of scrolling for a short indeterminate amount of time has no real advantages, interrupts what could be fruitful trains of thought, and is difficult to prevent from snowballing into being online while the vehicle is moving — amid the unpredictable sea of other cars, pedestrians, garbage trucks, and so on.

That’s it. Walking, driving, working out, peeing. It doesn’t seem like much. But these things cumulatively make up a large part of my days — and those of many others. I have not adopted an antagonistic relationship with my phone. It is, after all, a library of books, a daily newsstand, a connection with friends, and even my job — the portal through which I influence the world. 

There would be no way to hate my phone without hating myself and everything I am doing in life. I am grateful to Big Tech for giving me a single device through which, within the span of a few minutes, I can look at pictures of my kids at school, post a comment on some contemporary controversy that might be seen by millions of people, and read a page or two from Diarmaid MacCulloch’s magisterial new book on the history of sex in Christianity. We shouldn’t forget that we are lucky to be alive in the time after Steve Jobs made his contribution to the world. 

Even with my more limited cutback, I’ve seen changes to the rhythm and flow of life. Now, much more often than before, I’ll notice some quirk of someone I come across whom I previously would have ignored, and I’ll strike up a conversation with them. Or my ear will catch the chatter of a married couple fighting, which will cause some reflection on the human condition. Sometimes, I just have a few extra seconds to ponder an important idea that I’ve read in a book, using brain space that would otherwise be occupied by intricate knowledge of some completely worthless social-media feud.

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Nonetheless, the nature of my work and my intellectual interests means that I have to practice moderation toward the real world as much as I do toward cyberspace. I’m not making any heroic attempts to be less online. It would be nice to say that I unplug and take entire afternoons off to play with my children. But here’s a secret about kids: they’re kind of boring in large doses. You can make a silly face, throw them up in the air and catch them, buy them a toy, and so on. But after a while, you find yourself looking for something more stimulating. I don’t feel bad about allowing them to run off and play while I look at my phone, and then turning my attention back to them while chuckling over a very funny tweet I just sent. 

In addition to letting go of the belief that my family needs my full attention, I’ve also given up on the romantic dream of a simpler life, in which work and recreation are kept separate, or in which “meatspace” is the default and the digital realm is the exception. When I’m tweeting, I’m working, being entertained, engaging in self-expression, and keeping up with friends at the same time. 

Like every other intellectual, I have moments in which I envy those who work “normal,” tangible jobs and are supposedly doing something much more real and in tune with human nature than I am. But I quickly snap out of it, understanding that, for better or worse, I’ve chosen the kind of life in which someone with my peculiar combination of strengths and weaknesses is most likely to flourish. Appreciating the phone without letting it control my life is in part a story about self-acceptance and growing increasingly confident in my place in the universe. 

One day, I would like to step away. Perhaps not permanently, or even for a multiyear period, but just long enough to get a true feeling of what it is like to live without a constant sense of connection to the outside world as mediated through pixels on a six-inch screen. I’m just old enough to remember being an adult without the iPhone, but it’s been so long that there is no way to trust that my memories are accurate, and haven’t been radically distorted by the conversation around what phones are doing to our national politics and the mental health of young people.

There is a balance we must all live with. For some, going cold turkey, or taking prolonged breaks, might make sense. If writing essays like this one weren’t my job, circumstances would probably push me more in that direction. Many years down the line I might be satisfied enough with my accomplishments, influence upon the world, and level of wisdom attained to put the phone down completely. Until then, I’ll see you on Substack, X, and the UnHerd app. 

The causal power attributed to porn has all the hallmarks of a moral panic. Of course, that isn’t to say that there aren’t lots of good and familiar reasons to dislike pornography. A lot of porn is disgusting, tacky and misogynistic; it certainly harms the people who make it; to be aroused by its more depraved varieties is, in a completely straightforward way, a manifestation of bad taste. Perhaps the young, or those of limited inspiration, even pick up hackneyed or harmful sexual “scripts” from what they watch. Sex-positive progressives who try to suppress this knowledge for ideological reasons are usually guilty of embarrassing levels of self-deceit.

Not content to rely on those considerations, however, the present wave of anti-porn journalists usually also make extravagant empirical claims about the potential population-level effects of porn use. For instance, Louise Perry and others have suggested that the rise in pornography consumption has seen rates of erectile dysfunction “skyrocket”, from single to double digits, in recent years. Such claims may have the ring of truth. But is there any hard evidence behind them? Not really. There is a dearth of gold-standard longitudinal data. Much of what does exist fails to find statistically significant correlations between ordinary levels of pornography consumption and erectile dysfunction. The catastrophizing results have to be cherry-picked: in this case, as the science writer Stuart Ritchie discovered, from unrepresentative self-reported survey data collected from Swiss military conscripts.

Even when pathological, rather than ordinary, use of pornography is brought into focus, journalists steadfastly neglect obvious confounding factors. Extreme pornography use is not independent of other kinds of sexual dysfunction. Men who are predisposed to erectile dysfunction for other reasons may also spend more time seeking solace in porn. Men who are intrinsically bad at relationships will both experience relationship failure and end up as lonely masturbators for want of anything better to do. Innately violent men will both mistreat women and be drawn to depictions of mistreatment in pornography. There is nothing ad hoc about invoking such causes: we have independent reason for believing they are operative. Nobody sensible — and, in particular, no sensible anti-porn feminists — believe on reflection that dysfunctional, violent or aberrant men only came into existence with the advent of high-speed internet. They have always existed. An economical explanatory starting point, then, is that porn does not do all that much to fundamentally reshape men’s sexual dispositions. For the most part it reflects, rather than molds, their natures, ministering to impulses they have already, however depressing that may seem. The contrary view — that porn corrupts healthy minds — is a completely blank-slatist piece of speculative psychological theorizing.

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If anti-porn journalists find it hard to accept that starting point as even a live option, it may be because many of them seem, however unreflectively, to be operating with an unreconstructed “behaviorist” background picture of a kind that few working scientists have accepted for about 70 years. This particular anti-porn school of thought conceives of human (or at least male) sexual psychology as a blank slate written upon by the environment, in particular by the internet. Sexual dispositions are thought of as resulting from a process of stimulus and response under conditions of reinforcement learning. The implicit view is something like this: men watch porn and are psychologically rewarded by the pleasure they feel; the association between porn and reward is reinforced by repetition; the effect is that in their sex lives they seek similar rewards, or never seek sex to begin with, or can’t get an erection, or pursue ever more intense versions of the original reward in the form of more extreme porn, or whatever. In its heyday, behaviorist style associationism was an attractively general account of how all learning might take place, but it was widely abandoned in the mid-20th century in favor of paradigms that posited far more innate mental structure, with all behavioral traits shown to depend significantly on genetic factors. Human beings are not blank slates, either in their lives generally or their sexual lives specifically.

None of this is to downplay the evidence, most notably in the form of recent anecdote and survey data, that men can pick up harmful or sadistic ideas, like strangulation, from porn. People engage in cultural learning and imitation of this kind all the time, to both good effect and ill. Acknowledging it requires nothing like a revisionary psychological account of how internet porn “rewires” the mind. In fact, it is the anti-porn behaviorist journalists who would struggle most to account for such unwelcome cultural developments in an accurate way. For many women, as they accurately insist, are repelled by the gross practices that are now ubiquitous in pornographic culture (women’s brains, somehow, resist being “rewired” by the stimulus). Men on the other hand are helplessly “reprogrammed” by all they watch. The motto seems to be: anti-behaviorist psychological nativism for women, rampant behaviorism for men. But that is just silly: a grab-bag of ill-assorted theories invoked as convenience dictates.

Are our journalists and public commentators really so naïve? Anyone worried that the opposition is presently being straw-manned should read Jo Bartosch and Robert Jessel’s recent, well-received, book, Pornocracy. In among some well-taken points about the iniquities of the porn industry is an utterly bonkers theory of human psychology hastily dressed up in the reassuring language of neuro-jargon. Porn, we learn, is so “addictive as to cause brain damage”. The visual spectacle of humans having sex is, we are rather implausibly told, a “superstimulus we’ve not evolved to process”. Consequently, it does not “serve our sexual tastes; it shapes them”. Porn “rewires the brain to be aroused by what the user sees and only by that”. “The more orgasms you have with porn,” we are warned, “the more sexually and emotionally attached to it you’ll become.” (So far, so behaviorist. But if the pleasure of masturbation really had such a radical conditioning effect, one might wonder why homo sapiens didn’t millennia ago become a short-lived species of emotionally-self-attached solitary tossers.) No allowance is made for the possibility that different men might be innately predisposed to respond differently to the same environmental stimulus. Porn has turned men into “wanking automata”. If only it were true that mere repeat exposure to the same stimulus did in fact “reprogramme” the mind, Bartosh and Jessell could stop repeating themselves so much and consider the reader successfully re-wired.

Duly alarmed by their own findings, the authors wonder gravely whether we may be witnessing the “de-evolution of humanity into an ape whose every thought and action is influenced… by the adult industry and its values – Homo Pornographicus”. Nor are they cautious about offering advice on the basis of this measured and careful analysis. Given the risk that you will wake up one morning next to a “de-evolved” porn-addicted ape, it may “make better sense for women to swear off men than to put up with a partner who uses pornography”.

Now, such bold counsel surely calls for overwhelmingly robust empirical backing. What are Bartosh and Jessel’s grounds for their startling claim that porn “has the power to enslave its users”? Helpfully, the entire second chapter, “How porn changed our brains”, takes up the question, gesturing at an “Everest of evidence” to draw on. “When people use pornography,” we read, “they create new ‘sex rewards’ pathways in their brain.” Every time they masturbate, “men experience a ‘spritz of dopamine’ that further consolidate[s] the connection between pornography and pleasure” — “reinforcing the new ‘pornsex’ brain network at the expense of the ‘real sex’ neural pathways”. The result is “irreparable damage to the brain’s dopamine system”.

Those who feel a twinge of doubt as to whether contemporary neuroscience has indeed uncovered dedicated “porn sex” and “real sex” neural pathways in the architecture of the human brain may turn to the chapter’s references. There they won’t find much. Bartosh and Jessel are unable to cite a single probative randomized controlled trial or longitudinal study to back up any of their alarmist claims about the effects of porn. Instead, they repeatedly cite from an anecdote-driven pop science book by Norman Doidge, a Canadian psychiatrist and psychoanalyst best known for promoting non-standard remedies for congenital and neurodegenerative diseases that make use of the “brain’s healing energies”. Later on, a promising reference to “dozens of studies [that] have identified the addictive capability of pornography” leads to the non-peer-reviewed work of an anti-masturbation campaigner called Gary Wilson. He is best-known for giving a TED talk on porn addiction that accumulated 17.5 million views, and which is now prefaced by a disclaimer notifying viewers that the presentation contains “assertions that are not supported by academically respected studies in medicine and psychology”.

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Polemical overreach often harms a theory more than it helps it. Bartosh and Jessel sidestep obvious responses to their arguments. They misleadingly suggest more evidence is on their side than it is. They ignore evidence that compulsive behaviors have nothing like the pharmacological profile of addictive substances. They risk trivializing the category of addiction by reconceiving all actions positively reinforced by a “spritz of dopamine” as incipient dependencies. And they have their model of porn addiction rely on a strained and somewhat impressionistic analogy between the “extremity” of visual content and stimulant concentration, allowing them to insinuate that men’s initially vanilla erotic tastes escalate insatiably until they all become pornographically-reprogrammed rape fantasists (again, not a phenomenon there is much high-quality evidence to support).

The view that human beings are easily corrupted by imagery is a remarkably seductive cultural trope. Socrates proposed banishing the poets from the ideal city because of their destructive capacity to excite the soul with their fictions. Recent cultural history testifies to our tendency to overestimate the psychological damage done by media of all kinds. The panics of the Nineties and 2000s, over whether video games and R-rated movies disposed their viewers to violence, were remarkably like the porn panic of today. Then too, hysteria far outstripped the arrival of anything close to confirmatory evidence for the theory advanced by panicked columnists and cultural commentators, and such evidence has failed to come to light in the years since. Still, people seem unable to resist the idea that morally depraved media must itself be a kind of poison taken in through the eyes and ears, harming the viewer, despite the striking example provided by the long history of analogous panics whose specific fears now look like relics of parochial concern.

It does no service to the cause of anti-porn commentators that they so often make their arguments depend on shaky psychological presupposition and tendentious empirical conjecturing. But one shouldn’t expect them to stop any time soon. Behaviorist scare tactics provide too versatile a template for cultural critique. And anyway, like the targets of their favorite argument, if there’s one feeling a columnist knows better than most it’s the temptation to set shame and caution aside, slump down in front of the computer, and desperately bash out another one.

In the glossy adoption literature they talk about “therapeutic parenting”, “co-regulation”, and the healing power of unconditional love. No one mentions the times your 10 year old gives you a black eye so vivid that the pharmacist quietly hands you a domestic-violence leaflet. No one mentions the clumps of hair torn out at the root that never grow back, or the moment you lock yourself in the bathroom, heart hammering, wondering whether the next bang on the door will be her shoulder or a knife.

I have lived all of it. And so I read the news that 1,000 adopted children had been returned to care in England over five years with the dull, bone-weary recognition of someone who has stood barefoot in the hallway at two in the morning, blood trickling from a split lip after her daughter’s fists had found their mark again.

I know exactly how close my daughter has come to being one of those thousand. I have also lived the slow, corrosive shame of knowing that, in the darkest seconds, a part of me understands the parents who hand their children back. Not because they stopped loving them, but because they could no longer guarantee anyone’s safety, least of all the child’s own.

I can still remember the flicker of fear in the hallway, as we both sob and I dab at her scraped knuckles with a damp cloth. What if next time it’s not a fist? What if I can’t hold the line? Losing her would devastate me. Yet there have been nights when the physical and emotional onslaught, the constant hyper-vigilance, the marrow-deep exhaustion, has made me wonder, in the shadowed corner of my mind, whether the system that placed her with me even cares when I crack.

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A widespread belief is that adoption offers a “fresh start”. It is a comforting fiction, an insistence that trauma is a knot to be untangled with the right words, not a brain permanently rewired by poison in the womb. The truth is that prenatal exposure to alcohol and drugs doesn’t just “increase the risk”; rather it carves permanent grooves into the developing brain, leaving invisible scars that shape a child’s impulses, emotions and choices for the rest of their lives.

An estimated three quarters of children adopted from care are at risk of having fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD). It’s a condition which is almost always undiagnosed because the criteria require confirmed prenatal alcohol exposure — which mothers rarely admit — as well as specific facial features present in just 10% of cases. Many cases of FASD are misdiagnosed as ADHD, autism, or behavioral disorders.

Yet as I learned first hand, if the damage wrought by FASD is invisible on a scan, it is explosive in a living room. The rages start small, a refusal over bedtime, a misplaced top, but quickly escalate, encompassing everything from hyper-arousal, and impulse-control collapse to fury that overwhelms without warning. These are neurological injuries, not moral failings or attachment deficits that can be cured by better parenting. Yet the entire post-adoption support system is built on the pretense that they are.

When Megan’s rages became daily — by four, she was excluded from nursery after biting and scratching teachers until they bled — I begged for the help that was promised in every pre-adoption briefing. But it never came. CAMHS waiting list: two years, a limbo of hold music and platitudes. Adoption Support Fund assessment: another year, buried under bureaucracy. In the meantime I was handed leaflets on “wondering aloud” (“I wonder if you’re feeling angry right now?”) and “time-ins” (sitting quietly together until the storm passes).

I was told I needed to “hold the space” for Megan’s pain, to become a human sponge for the toxicity she’d absorbed before birth. Yet holding the space is difficult when the space contains flying furniture, shattered plates, and the metallic tang of fear in your throat. I tried it all — from endless books on “trauma-informed care” to “PACE” training courses preaching “Playfulness, Acceptance, Curiosity, Empathy”. But books couldn’t soften the rages.

Eventually, after four years of pleading, desperate and hollow-eyed, I wrote to my MP. Only then did the Adoption Support Fund release £4,500 for equine therapy. I cried as I watched Megan, usually so coiled, lean into a pony, its steady warmth somehow reaching the part of her brain the alcohol had scarred, the part that lay beyond my reach. It has kept us together. Without it, we’d have been another disruption statistic.

This April, the Fund was cut by 40%, with the per-child allowance falling from £5,000 to £3,000 a year. Specialist FASD assessments were removed entirely. Families who have waited half a decade for help are now told the budget is exhausted, slamming the door on the very interventions that could prevent breakdowns. One social worker, a weary veteran of the trenches, asked me over a snatched coffee, with bitter laughter: “So the children are 40% less damaged this year, are they? Or are we just 40% more abandoned?”

This is not mere incompetence. It is a quiet decision by the British state that acknowledging the scale of prenatal alcohol damage is too politically fraught. That, after all, would require admitting that thousands of women drink heavily through pregnancy, often in the grip of addiction or despair, and which the welfare system has failed utterly to address. It would also oblige politicians to admit that the NHS has no reliable, standardized way of diagnosing the resulting disability, and that the “fresh start” narrative sold to prospective adopters is a comforting lie, one told to keep them flowing into a system in constant need of new recruits.

It is easier to keep insisting that with enough empathy, enough PACE acronyms, enough therapeutic re-parenting mantras, the child will eventually choose calm over chaos. But they can’t “choose”. The brain does not rewrite itself because a middle-aged woman learns to speak in a softer voice or validate their feelings.

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I have watched friends reach the same precipice, their stories echoing mine. One, a woman I’d met in our drafty support group 11 years ago, locked her ten-year-old son on the porch when he came at his sister with a kitchen knife, eyes wild with the same undiagnosed FASD fury. Social workers arrived the next day and accused her of neglect. They recommended a parenting course. This woman’s child is now in residential care at £250,000 a year to the taxpayer. She is on antidepressants, her confidence shattered, still whispering to me on late-night calls that she “should have tried harder”.

Professor Laura Machin’s research at Lancaster University lays it bare: 38% of adoptive parents seriously consider asking for their child to be removed at some point, a tipping point where love and desperation collide. With proper neurological intervention, from early diagnosis to targeted therapies, that figure could be halved, sparing families and saving the state millions in downstream costs. Instead, we are cutting the only fund that pays for such vital work, outsourcing the fallout to private anguish and public expense.

There is a peculiar cruelty in asking ordinary families to absorb the lifelong consequences of addiction and neglect, then punishing them when the inevitable happens. We are told we are “giving a child a future” — but, in reality, we are being asked to mop up a public-health catastrophe, with prenatal alcohol abuse now the leading preventable cause of developmental disability in the UK, using nothing but love and grit. Then, when things go wrong, some are berated as being deficient parents, their pleas dismissed.

Megan is 13 now. Some weeks are calm. Some nights I still sleep with my bedroom door braced by a chair, listening for the creak of floorboards. I love her fiercely. But I have stopped believing that love is enough. The brain she was born with was shaped before I ever held her, scarred by substances no infant should know. No amount of devotion can unmake that first, irreversible injury.

When things get difficult, I still picture that newborn, rigid, clammy and craving the substances that flowed through her birth mother’s bloodstream. There are thousands of children like Megan, and thousands of parents barricading doors to keep themselves safe. What these children desperately need is support. Instead, the Government is walking away, and society’s most vulnerable children, my daughter among them, will pay the price.

Silver must have been livid. Yet in a sense, he helped make this moment happen. A decade ago, he took to the pages of The New York Times to call for legalizing sports betting nationwide. The argument then sounded pragmatic: Americans were already gambling illegally, so why not bring it into the open, regulate it, and tax it? What Silver helped set in motion was the merger of sport and speculation — a regime in which the game itself becomes an advertising vehicle for constant wagering, and every fan morphs into a potential bettor.

Once, gambling was the seedy underbelly of sports culture, the business of backroom bookmakers and shady offshore sites. Now it’s the official sponsor of the pregame show, the banner scrolling under highlight clips, the push notification buzzing our smartphones. Players, coaches, and fans alike have been folded into a vast machine that monetizes the uncertainty that makes sport so compelling to begin with.

The scandals were bound to multiply. Toronto Raptors power forward Jontay Porter’s lifetime ban last year for betting on his “over/under” stat line was a canary in the coal mine. Major League Baseball soon faced its own embarrassment with the Cleveland Guardians’ reliever Emmanuel Clase and pitcher Luis Ortiz placed on leave amid gambling investigations. Each time, the league officials express shock. Each time, they pretend these incidents are isolated. But when you turn the entire emotional economy of sport into a betting market, moral rot is just a cost of doing business.

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I used to sympathize with the liberalizers. I thought legalization could make gambling safer, draw it out of the shadows, and starve organized crime. It was the same logic many of us on the Left used for dealing with other vices: regulate, don’t prohibit; treat people like adults; reduce harm.

But what we’ve seen since 2018 — the year the US Supreme Court struck down the federal ban on sports betting — isn’t harm reduction. It’s market expansion on a scale that would have astonished the old mobsters of Las Vegas. In less than a decade, 39 states and Washington, DC, have legalized wagering. Americans legally bet $148 billion on sports last year, billions more than the gross domestic product of entire countries. And that’s just the above-board total.

The total volume of betting, legal and illegal, is likely much higher than it was before 2018. This shouldn’t be surprising: when you normalize and advertise a vice, you don’t just displace the old market, you expand it. Imagine a black market where two people are harming themselves at a certain quantifiable level. Legalization might, in theory and with the right regulations, lower individual harm, but by expanding participation, it increases the total amount of suffering.

After all, what changed in the last few years isn’t just the law, it’s the technology and marketing that power the gambling industry. Betting used to require effort: making a trip to Vegas or at least knowing a local bookie and dropping off an envelope of cash with him. Then it required tech savvy: navigating sketchy offshore sites, converting cash in and out of Bitcoin. Now it requires nothing more than turning 18, owning a phone, and linking a credit card. Push notifications nudge users to “get back in the game.” Algorithms track every habit and weakness. The house no longer waits for you to walk in, because it already lives in your pocket.

Every industry now traffics in behavioral addiction, but sports betting weaponizes it with a particular cruelty. The product being sold is not a physical high or even an illusion of connection — it’s the brief jolt of predictive mastery, the feeling that you understand something about the game that others don’t. And when you lose, the next tap offers a chance to win it back.

The results are visible everywhere. Gambling helplines across the country report record call volumes, mostly from men in their 20s and 30s. Surveys show nearly 40% of young men admit they’re betting more than they can afford. Some are wagering their rent money, while others are just dealing with small debts that make their lives a little more frustrating and unpredictable.

Yet there’s no real political appetite to reverse course. Many Republicans invoke freedom when arguing against the “nanny state.” Some Democrats see a new tax base and a new way to undercut organized crime. Even worse, the media are literally bought: ESPN runs its own sportsbook, and podcasts on new media outlets like The Ringer are sponsored by the very companies they should be scrutinizing. In this world, the idea that sports should embody integrity sounds almost absurdly old-fashioned.

But integrity and decommodification are two things we need more of.

A healthy society doesn’t eliminate every vice, but it draws lines. It understands that some freedoms corrode the conditions that make freedom meaningful. The case for recriminalizing bookmaking and banning betting from the airwaves isn’t an extreme form of paternalism. Rather, it’s about creating friction again through banning live-betting apps, curbing nonstop ads, and making it harder for gambling to reach people before common sense does. We don’t need to prosecute individuals who gamble, but we do need to dismantle the infrastructure that invites and normalizes it.

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For all our talk about “harm reduction,” there’s something perverse about designing digital opium dens and calling it liberty. The Left, at its best, has always believed that society should cultivate the conditions for a good life. And a good life doesn’t involve compulsively wagering on the performance of 20-year-old sports stars and DMing them death threats if they lose you money (yes, this happens).

But beyond the individual toll that rising addiction has on people, we’re going to see a mounting crisis of trust in sports. Sports offer a rare civic commons, a place where our differences recede before the live drama of chance and skill. When every play is a potential payout, that trust evaporates. If you look at the discourse around athletes and especially umpires, it’s clear that fans increasingly see a rigged spectacle instead of the purity of competition.

In that sense, the growth of gambling represents more than a policy failure. It’s a cultural catastrophe. It reveals how little confidence we have left in collective meaning. The rituals that once bound us together have been turned into platforms for extraction. The market doesn’t merely exploit our appetites; it shapes them, then sells us the means of our own disintegration.

Across the political spectrum, people should demand that Congress thinks about more than profit and starts helping us draw moral boundaries around our beloved pastimes. We live in a cynical era, one where even virtue seems performative. But if we want to rebuild trust — in one another, in the games we love, in the idea of fairness itself — we have to start somewhere.

Imagine my delight, then, when I cracked open Eat, Pray, Love writer Elizabeth Gilbert’s new memoir. All the Way to the River is an account of Gilbert’s love affair with her ex-addict hairdresser, Rayya Elias, for whom she leaves her husband when said hairdresser is diagnosed with terminal cancer. Here, there is no shortage of tedious psychedelic visions. The pair begin a chaotic, narcotic love affair as Elias huffs all the gear she can at Gilbert’s expense and acquisition, vomiting and partying and quipping her way to death. Elias is a hard-bitten punk/stray pup who spent her youth doped up in the East Village but, by the time Gilbert meets her, has done her time in the “rooms” of 12-step sobriety programs. Gilbert is a fabulously rich and famous writer who gets off on slinging people money, apartments and expensive watches to feed her “love and sex addiction”. The result is 400 pages of feverish prose, poetry and doodling (yes, really) to make sense of what I’m confident in saying must be the most spectacular midlife crisis Manhattan has ever seen.

Gilbert’s memoir has set the press gabbing in a way only comparable to her first moment in the sun nearly 20 years ago, when she published Eat, Pray, Love to memorialize that other time she left a husband in the name of self/sexual/spiritual discovery. The shockwaves prompted by Tuesday’s release must be explained by wonder that these two books are by the same woman at all —  wonder that Gilbert herself shares (“I’m the nice lady who wrote Eat, Pray, Love”). Those of us who recall the 2010 Julia Roberts film adaptation — 133 misty-eyed minutes of snogging and pasta-gobbling and revelation-having — will be glad to know that Gilbert is once again “getting my inner house in order”. Only this time, self-discovery involves fewer Buddhist chants and more of this: “We were holed up in our apartment together with thousands of dollars’ worth of cocaine, much of which she was shooting into her neck and all of which, unbelievably, I was paying for.”

That Gilbert finds herself in such a situation is not so unbelievable when you appreciate the staggering naivete of her writing. After all, this is the archangel of the cult of “healing” we are talking about, a woman forever in search of a therapeutic or spiritual awakening. You sense that Gilbert is the dream client for the sorts of vampires who work in the business of self-discovery: you imagine her welded to a shrink’s chair, or sprawled on a forest floor zonked out on ayahuasca as a headdressed shaman prepares an invoice.

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Reading about Gilbert’s hallucinations, I am back at that party with the drugs bore. During one such trip, she “got to interview Rayya’s cancer cells”. I drain my metaphorical drink. “I loved changing form — turning into animals, trees, air — and watching reality melt.” I look for the exit. “I’ve never once had a ‘bad trip’ on psychedelics; to me, the real world has always felt like the bad trip.” I call an Uber.

For more deep insights into Elizabeth Gilbert’s brain chemistry, you’ll simply have to buy the book. And many, many women will — fans who entered middle age during the boom of therapy culture in the 2010s and, by 2025, have frittered away the autumns of their lives studying the center of their spiritual universes: themselves. For scores of ladies of a certain age, Gilbert has long been a lighthouse directing her readers to alternative futures — wilder, sexier, more delicious. But to read this memoir is to see that quest for enlightenment dashed on the rocks, a spectacular and ridiculous downfall. I wonder what her admirers will make of it.

Gilbert’s life seems to be a series of leaps from revelation to revelation. The book reels from her latest: that she is, like her girlfriend, an addict — “Rayya was addicted to drugs; I am addicted to people.” Now, I am loath to question another woman’s afflictions, but it seems to me that it is rather different to be addicted to crack cocaine than it is to be addicted to kisses and cuddles. Regardless, and despite having seen Elias through her relapse (“I tied off her arms or legs for her while she shot up”), Gilbert is willing to compare them. Intentionally or not, the “addict” label gives her some distinction from boring old “other people” (in other words, the middle-aged Eat, Pray, Love fans whose daredevil experimentation has probably only extended to an extramarital snog and a spliff at someone’s sixtieth). They, she explains, “might experience pleasurable sensations from romance, fantasy, or sex: I get wasted”. From this addiction, she has at the time of writing “been clean and sober for 1,617 days”. She takes us into “the hellscape” of her “addict brain”, explaining that “we addicts” are “artists, liars, lovers, criminals, users, over-givers, over-takers, over-doers… We have created some of the most beautiful things in the world, but we can also do sickening things to people.”

Gilbert not only categorizes herself alongside what us normies might think of as addicts — those who die in alleyways overdosing on fentanyl or steal from their relatives to buy booze — but lets us know that those of us not in this esteemed club are, well, unremarkable. “If you’re reading this and thinking to yourself, Well, that seems quite normal! Everyone needs love, after all!, I can assure you that in my case it is not normal.” It all has the whiff of the child at school who has a cast on their arm and is so incredibly chuffed about it. At every mention of love sobriety I want to grab her by the shoulders and yell: “Well it’s not crack, is it!”

Gilbert’s abstinence, while no doubt brilliant for her “inner child Lizzy”, has unfortunately infected her prose with the emetic language of sobriety meetings. She discusses “emotional anorexia”. She explains how she is also “money sober” to stop impulsive spending. She excuses a man with a pregnant wife who tries to sleep with her as “probably an unrecovered sex and love addict in his own right, and therefore powerless over his own impulses”. Seemingly unable or unwilling to recount events without the sanctimonious verbiage of therapy, Gilbert comes across as brainwashed. It is a shame, because in places she is a good and interesting writer: when Elias dies, she has the look of a “newborn”, “someone who has recently arrived here… the light of another world shining through”. But these moments of originality are dulled by those where she is undeniably self-indulgent: “Other women might pull attention by the way they dress or walk or laugh or play with their hair; I pull attention with my words.”

Reading this memoir, I could not get one image out of my mind. It was of the latter-day Miranda from Sex and the City, that fiery and whipsmart New Yorker who was sacrilegiously rewritten in the bombsite series And Just Like That into a needy, whiny irritant. All the while, she is plagued by the presence of her non-binary partner Che, who fans so disliked as to have put many off watching altogether. In All the Way to the River, there are unfortunate shades of Che. Elias, the “glamor-butch dyke”, no doubt led a fascinating and much-grieved life, but her presence in the memoir — through Gilbert’s eyes, of course — rankles somewhat. She speaks like a JNCO-jeaned teenager from the Nineties (“that shit’s just fresher, yo!”). She has an improbable backstory: she “once lost a six-figure record deal because she told a Sony executive to suck her dick”, which sounds like a yarn someone would spin at the worst afters of your life. She lives rent-free and alone at Gilbert’s New Jersey house for nine years during the period in which they are just friends, hoovering up other material sweeteners along the way. She goes on a global book tour where she sermonizes about sobriety while getting wasted every day on bottles of Angostura bitters (“for her digestion”). She defuses an argument at a funeral by walking up to an aggressive man and tapping him on the chest, saying: “How you doin’ in there, bud?”

But worst of all, she inspires Gilbert to write poetry. The failings of this memoir are most striking in these italicized little verses slotted between chapters. My personal favorite, “The shortest conversation I ever had with God”, goes as follows. “Me: But why? God: Because is.”

Yet Gilbert’s true love affair seems to have been not with Elias, but with the cult of therapy: having finished her book, I now feel I need some too. Despite how exceptionally mixed up this writer says she is, her rip-roaring me-moir is not fascinating because of its private chaos. It fascinates, rather, as a portrait of a generation of middle-class, middle-aged, unhappy women deranged by the mantras of self-discovery. If Eat, Pray, Love was about casting off the shackles of your thirties — rubbish husbands, body-image woes, the dreary rat race — then All the Way to the River catches up with those same women two decades on: all this time searching, and they still don’t have the answers. Gilbert’s first memoir seemed an exhortation to scoff, snog and Om your way to happiness; this radically different one retains its laser focus on the self, how I feel, above all things. But this is no prescription for life, and therapy culture/crunchy yoga mom spirituality has left many a woman untethered, lonely and, well, dull. The problem with shrinks and shamans is that they tend to keep lost people on a lifelong search for meaning instead of turning around and saying, finally, Get it together.

Cases like Spejcher’s illustrate the stakes involved in the federal reclassification of marijuana. If President Trump follows through with such a move, the drug would remain illegal on the federal level, but would receive an imprimatur of being safer and face fewer restrictions, with significant commercial and social implications.  

Yet voices across public discourse persist in asking: why should anyone care if President Trump does just that? 

Celebrities like Mike Tyson and Joe Rogan and hedge-fund bosses like Andrew Lahde tell us that marijuana is no big deal. Numerous states have already legalized it for medical and recreational usage, and they claim to be regulating it well. If we are to believe the advocates, marijuana is a miracle cure for PTSD, anxiety, depression, and bipolar disorder — not to mention an unbeatable salve for the pain suffered by cancer patients.

So what sense does it make for this drug to sit in the same federal category as PCP and heroin? Isn’t marijuana’s placement in Schedule I, the most serious category, merely a relic of discredited thinking from the bad old days of the War on Drugs? It isn’t. To understand why it isn’t, and why a Trump move to reclassify weed would risk unmitigated harm to American health and safety, it’s first important to clear up some common misunderstandings around how and why drugs end up classified as they do.  

Under the Controlled Substances Act of 1971, a five-part schedule was established for classification of potentially dangerous drugs. This schedule is emphatically not an index either of a drug’s “hardness” or a kind of unofficial charging and sentencing guide for prosecutors and judges. Placement is earned specifically through consideration of a drug’s accepted medical use and its abuse risk. Drugs with no accepted medical use and a high risk of abuse get placed in Schedule I.  

That’s the commonality between marijuana and heroin; under federal law, the relevant agencies necessarily view them that way.  

Neither has an accepted medical use, though both drugs have approved medicines derived from them that remain in lower schedules (the medicine dronabinol, for example, is synthesized THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, and is in Schedule III). Both have high risks of abuse. The argument that one is a “hard” drug and the other is not  — which is debatable, especially given today’s ultra-high-potency weed — simply doesn’t come into play.  

Nor does the criminal-justice question. Keeping marijuana in Schedule I isn’t, as critics have it, a carceral strategy; conversely, moving it into Schedule III isn’t a de-carceral one. Under a move to Schedule III, the drug would remain federally illegal, still subject to the enforcement power of the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Department of Justice. No low-level offender would see his sentence commuted. This is sort of beside the point anyway, since most low-level marijuana users never receive a sentence for anything. 

But how can it be, another objection runs, that the drug has no medical use? Most US states currently allow doctors to recommend it. 

That, again, is technically correct. But the decisions those states made to allow doctors (and in some cases, “designated caregivers”) to recommend marijuana to treat pain and other issues were political decisions, not medical or scientific ones. Voters stated a preference; that has no effect on how federal agencies are required by current law to view the question. The facts of just how those recommendations get handed out drive home that political aspect. In 2022, Pennsylvania saw some 132,000 medical-marijuana certifications, a third of the state’s total for that year, issued by only 17 doctors.

Those decisions, taken in the aggregate, don’t constitute an accepted medical use. Or at least, they didn’t until October 2022. That was the month the Biden administration directed its Department of Health and Human Services to look into a possible reclassification of the drug.  

Again, history is important here. Before the Biden process, the federal government had used an eight-factor test to determine how to schedule various drugs. Those factors focus on what the current and historical patterns of its abuse look like, as well as what that means for individual users, what risk it presents to public health, how likely it is to cause dependence (either physical or psychological), the state of the science around the drug and its pharmacology, and whether it’s a chemical precursor or “analogue” of another controlled substance.  

By these metrics, marijuana is precisely where it belongs in Schedule I. The best science shows that it isn’t an effective medical treatment. One of the most frequent conditions it’s used to treat is chronic pain. But the 2017 study cited to prove its efficacy there has seen dozens of subsequent meta-analyses and reviews fail to support its conclusions; a 2022 study of a decade’s worth of surgical records from a Cleveland hospital even found that using marijuana actually increases pain after surgery. 

The data also demonstrate that marijuana poses a significant risk of dependency: addiction rates are around 30% of all users and rising. Addiction in this case means exactly what it does for other substances: inability to quit, a need for ever more of the drug to achieve the same effect, and even withdrawal symptoms. Given the recent avalanche of data cataloging marijuana’s harms specifically to cardiac and mental health — like a June British Medical Journal review  connecting it to a two-fold risk of cardiovascular death or the massive Danish study from 2023 suggesting that as much as 30% of schizophrenia cases among men between 21 and 30 were linked to cannabis-use disorder — its wider public-health risks are glaringly clear.  

The Biden administration supplanted the eight factors with a new system seemingly designed to push the drug into a less restrictive schedule. The Biden recommendation — likely a political compromise between the status quo and full legalization, timed just before Joe Biden’s re-election bid — also incorporated the shaky argument that because so many states have made political decisions to allow medical marijuana, that constitutes an accepted medical use.

An incisive article in JAMA Neurology, by the Harvard addiction scientist Bertha Madras, took a hard look at the process and found disturbing evidence of politicization. This included the fact that a high-ranking Biden DOJ official, Acting Assistant Attorney General Peter Hyun, argued that “cannabis has not been proven in scientific studies to be a safe and effective treatment for any disease or condition” — six months before the rescheduling directive appeared. Yet the science Hyun cites certainly had not changed in the interim.  

The federal government has long held the position Hyun laid out. Under the Obama administration, Jay Inslee and Gina Raimondo — then the governors of Washington and Rhode Island, respectively — petitioned the federal government to reclassify marijuana. The administration’s response made clear that federal drug schedules reflect what the science says, not “danger” or “severity.” Obama’s then-DEA chief, Chuck Rosenberg, announcing the denial of the petition, used language Hyun would later echo: “This decision isn’t based on danger. This decision is based on whether marijuana, as determined by the FDA, is a safe and effective medicine . . . and it’s not.”

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But let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that Trump reverses years of federal precedent to follow the logic of the rescheduling argument. What happens then? 

The truth: no one knows.  

It’s clear that the marijuana industry believes that rescheduling will be an enormous benefit to its shareholders. In one sense, that’s likely correct. Businesses selling substances in Schedule I face severe commercial restrictions under the tax code. A provision of the tax code prevents any such business from taking normal deductions at tax time on expenses like advertising. Lifting those restrictions seems sure to provide an enormous boost to revenues and reach for businesses selling marijuana products.

The impact on society is a different matter. The available evidence suggests that this will be a significant negative for society, especially given the research around how the young start using the drug: data published in June by researchers from the University of Southern California and Rutgers University show that exposure to marijuana social-media content plays a huge role in teens initiating use.  

But there are other externalities in play.  

If marijuana moves into Schedule III, it will be the only substance there without Food and Drug Administration approval. Will that play out in a similar way to the case of opium-poppy straw (i.e., the entirety of the plant, as it exists prior to the processes that turn it into heroin or opium)? Poppy straw is listed in Schedule II, but it also lacks an FDA approval — and it’s regularly seized by drug and border authorities, with a massive shipment grabbed up just in May. Though weed entrepreneurs clearly expect smooth sailing after a reclassification, they may well be in for a rough ride.

Then there’s the fact that substances listed in Schedule III face additional regulatory and enforcement power: Not only from the DEA and DOJ, but also from the FDA. There are strict rules around what sellers of Schedule III substances can and can’t say in advertisements. They’re forbidden from advertising off-label uses — and since marijuana lacks an FDA approval, all therapeutic uses are off-label. It’s easy to imagine another operator in the Schedule III space filing a lawsuit demanding precisely that kind of enforcement. 

In other words, rescheduling opens the door to regulatory chaos, even as it seems certain to add commercial firepower to an industry whose products, on the evidence, are extraordinarily harmful. How this combination will produce the benefits promised by proponents of rescheduling also remains unclear. 

The federal government shouldn’t signal to the American people that a drug that lacks medical or scientific imprimatur somehow possesses such approval. Others disagree — and vocally. They have a lot of money riding on it. But we should be crystal clear about what their preferred policy would  actually mean for American society — nothing good. 

One reason for our indifference is that the true scale of the theft has been hidden from us. Social media platforms have for years been speeding up our sense of time — effectively shortening our lives — and yet they do this in such a devious manner that we rarely realize what we’ve lost.

Every social media user has had their time pickpocketed. You may log on to quickly check your notifications, and before you know it, half an hour has gone by and you’re still on the platform, unable to account for where the time went. This phenomenon even has a name: the “30-minute ick factor”. It also has empirical support. Experiments have found that people using apps such as TikTok and Instagram start to underestimate the time they’ve spent on such platforms after just a few minutes of use, even when they’re explicitly told to keep track of time.

This is no accident. Sean Parker, Facebook’s founding president, said: “The thought process that went into building these applications… was all about: ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?’” Unsurprisingly, Parker himself doesn’t use social media, saying it’s “too much of a time sink”.

To understand how Big Tech steals our time, we must first get our heads around time perception, or chronoception. Time doesn’t always feel like it’s moving at a constant pace. The weightier an experience is, the slower time will often feel. It’s why people tend to overestimate the duration of earthquakes, accidents, or any other scary situation.

Generally, an event feels longer in the moment if it heightens awareness. But we seldom think of time in the moment; rather, our sense of time tends to be retrospective. And our sense of retrospective time is determined by memory. The more we remember of a certain period, the longer that period feels, and the slower time seems to have passed.

Sometimes an experience can seem brief in the moment but long in memory, and vice versa. A classic example of this is the “holiday paradox”: while on vacation, time speeds by because you’re overwhelmed by new experiences. But in retrospect your vacation feels longer, because you made many strong memories, and each adds depth to the past. Conversely, when you’re waiting at a boring airport, constantly checking the clock, your hyperawareness of time causes it to pass slowly in the moment. But since the wait is uneventful, you don’t make strong memories of it, and thus, in retrospect, it seems brief.

The sinister thing about social media is that it speeds up your perception of time both in the moment and in retrospect. It does this by simultaneously impairing your awareness of the present and your memory of the past.

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By Gurwinder Bhogal

Try to recall what you saw on social media the last time you scrolled. You’ll notice you can barely remember any posts, even if you scrolled for hours. This phenomenon has been confirmed by studies that have found that social media impairs both short-term and long-term memory. A social media feed is like the Lethe, the mythical river in whose waters lost souls sought absolution, and received it in the form of oblivion.

But what explains this “Lethe effect”? Theoretically, a social media feed should heighten awareness and memory, and dilate time, because it selects for content that’s exciting, outrageous, and scary. And yet we seldom remember such content. The reason for this discrepancy is simple: when every post is alarming, your brain quickly becomes desensitized, and starts to interpret alarming content as routine. And routine, being passive and therefore immemorable, speeds up time.

There are other, more cunning ways that social media impairs awareness and memory. The use of “attention engineers” is one of them. These are people employed specifically to design interfaces to capture as much of your time and attention as possible.

To understand how attention engineers deliberately warp your time, we must look to the history of casino floor design. In the Seventies, a man named Bill Friedman turned from gambling addict to casino manager by studying the tricks used to manipulate him — and perfecting them. He eventually published his ideas in several books, which would become bibles of casino design.

Friedman’s philosophy seems to have been borrowed from the retail industry. Supermarkets have long been designed like mazes, with everyday items like milk and eggs deep in the heart of the store, so you must pass by countless other products to access them. The purpose of this layout is to evoke the Gruen effect: the moment when a shopper loses track of what they entered the store for, and begins aimlessly wandering and impulse-buying.

Friedman proposes a similar strategy: to arrange casinos like mazes, where even the paths to the toilets and exits would spiral and meander through rows of enticing games machines. Such an overwhelming environment would distract people from themselves, so they’d remain instinctual rather than intentional, and hence compliant rather than resistant.

Friedman rejected open-plan designs, instead advocating for casinos to be sectioned into cubicles so players could only see their immediate surroundings. This was partly to restrict their awareness, but also to create constant FOMO: players would hear excited hoots and cheers coming from a nearby cubicle, and go searching for the cause of the commotion. In doing so, they’d wander further into the maze.

The pathways in Friedman’s mazes had as few right-angle turns as possible. This is because sharp bends jolt pedestrians into awareness by forcing a change of direction. And when someone has to decide where to go, they’re liable to think about whether it’s time to leave. For this reason, Friedman advocated for curvilinear paths that had no discernible corners, beginnings, or ends, and could thus be perpetually navigated on autopilot. The intention behind this hugely successful design was to keep people unaware by maximizing immersion, distraction, and disorientation.

Friedman’s ideas revolutionized casinos around the world. And many of his tactics would later resurface in social media design, where they proved even more successful at hindering awareness. For instance, in the early days of social media, it was possible to reach the end of a feed. These ends acted much like right-angle turns, snapping the scroller out of autopilot. Soon, however, the feeds were made “curvilinear” by the infinite scroll and autoplay function — features which, we now know, impair awareness and memory by lulling people into passivity.

Meanwhile, social media platforms have become increasingly labyrinthine, with the aim of trapping people in them. Every webpage is littered with links, each a path to another maze. And many of these links are deliberately placed where they don’t belong: search results are sneakily scattered with recommendations unrelated to your search, and personal notifications often have generic news links hiding among them.

What makes social media even more disorienting than a casino is that our feeds are not just mazes in space, but also in time. The opposite of a maze is a route, and a route through time is a story. This is because stories are linear and syntagmatic — each moment of the tale semantically follows from the previous — and such collective meaningfulness anchors the whole thing in memory. This is why studies have consistently found that people are much better at memorizing information when it’s presented in narrative form.

The memorable and sequential nature of stories makes them good timekeepers. As such, the way we make sense of time is through emplotment: by turning time into stories. It’s why research finds that people who are similarly engaged in a story will tend to converge in their estimates of how much time has elapsed. If we can’t turn a duration into a story, we struggle to keep track of it.

Now here’s the issue: your social media feed resists emplotment because it’s the opposite of a story. It’s a chronological maze. It has no beginning, middle, or end, and each post is unrelated to the next, so that scrolling is like trying to read a book in a windstorm, the pages constantly flapping, randomly switching between scenes, so you can never connect the dots into a coherent and memorable narrative.

Thus, not only do you forget time while scrolling through posts, but you also forget the posts themselves. We have no problem recounting the plot of a good book we read or movie we saw last year, yet we can barely remember what we saw on social media yesterday.

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Despite not having much memory of your social media feed, you may have a vague sense that you at least enjoy scrolling. This, too, is likely a trick. Research suggests that people judge an experience as being more enjoyable if they believe they underestimated its duration. In other words, not only does time fly when we’re having fun, but we also believe we had fun if time flies. In this way, attention engineers reduce the likelihood that you’ll regret the time you waste online.

Even if you do regret it, social media excels at making you return. Friedman’s cubicles were designed to spark FOMO by letting you hear the cheers of excited players without allowing you to see the cause — unless you entered. Similarly, social media push notifications periodically tease you with what you’re missing out on, and the only way for you to find out more is to re-enter the maze. The result of having your day punctuated by these notifications is that your attention is constantly intercutting between the real world and the virtual one, so you can never fully settle in either.

This creates problems of its own. When attention is constantly switching between concurrent tasks, it imposes a “switch-cost effect” that can make people lose track of time. By constantly interrupting you, social media platforms can therefore impair your awareness and shorten your days even when you’re not on them, so that you end up scrolling through the real world as shallowly as the virtual one.

Now that we understand this, we can try to do something about it. Fortunately, there are ways to actively slow down how we experience time. One way is to quit social media — or at least restrict your usage. Research suggests that abstaining from social media can lead to immediate time dilation, particularly for compulsive users. Further, a study of 35,000 people found that quitting social media tended to slightly improve perceived mental health after just a few weeks.

However, that same study also found that the time people saved by quitting social media was often just spent browsing other apps, which are increasingly emulating the time-warping features of social media. Take chatbots, for instance. They are inherently mazelike; not only do they frequently hallucinate red herrings, but they’re also prone to “verbosity compensation”, which means they often ramble and equivocate in their responses, raising more questions with every answer, and creating a kind of verbal Gruen effect. They also have a tendency to validate users’ delusions, leading them further down deceptive and dangerous rabbit-holes.

Chatbots are also becoming curvilinear, increasingly ending their answers with a question or an offer for further help to create a kind of conversational infinite scroll. And now Meta plans to train its chatbots to message you unprompted — the AI equivalent of Friedman’s cubicles. These developments pose problems because there is emerging evidence that chatbots, when used carelessly, can impair awareness and memory just like social media.

The deeper problem, then, is not social media or chatbots. It’s curvilinear mazes. If we can avoid following smooth spirals to nowhere, and instead take sharp turns to clear destinations, we can stay aware and keep track of time. We could even learn to use social media and chatbots — two incredibly useful technologies — in ways that enrich our lives rather than impoverish them.

We now know the ways social media platforms speed up time. If we can adopt the opposite techniques, we might just be able to slow time. What the human brain needs to make strong memories are salient stimuli — surprises, stories, (strong) sentiments, and selections. Social media gives you the illusion of these things, but it is actually their killer. Instead, we must seek out each of these in the real world.

One way of doing this is to always choose the life experience that’s most likely to lead to a good story: reading books instead of scrolling social media; going on adventures instead of staying at home. Focus too on the sentiments these stories inspire. The simplest way to strengthen a feeling is to savor experiences. So stop idly scrolling through life as if it’s a feed, and learn to focus your attention on the here and now. A review of 47 research articles found that well-practiced mindfulness is associated with slowed subjective time.

The more you avoid living on autopilot, the more of life you’ll remember, and the longer it will feel. So make a habit of resisting habit, and instead, choose a life of choices. Whenever you find yourself doing something — for instance, habitually checking your phone — ask yourself why you’re doing it, and whether there are better alternatives. If there are, or if you don’t know why you’re doing it, do something else.

This brings us to perhaps the greatest time dilator of all: surprise. We tend to remember novel experiences much more than repeated ones. It’s why time seems to speed up as we age: as we grow older, fewer of our experiences are new, so fewer stick in memory. It’s also why old people tend to remember their early lives better than their adult lives. The power of new experiences to stick out to us would explain why studies have consistently found evidence for the “oddball effect”, a phenomenon where a surprising stimulus presented among predictable stimuli is perceived to last longer. Recent research has found that the stimulus that immediately follows the surprising stimulus is also perceived to last longer, suggesting that novel experiences slow time by heightening awareness.

So there you have it. To make life feel longer, choose experiences that are novel over familiar, intentional over habitual, narrative over disjointed, and emotional over neutral. Above all, don’t let online algorithms set the pace of your life, as they’re not operating in your interests.

Seneca once said: “Life is short and anxious for those who forget the past, neglect the present, and fear the future.” Social media makes you do all three. But you have the choice to do the opposite, and to expand time, for living long is not just about maximizing the days in your life, but also the life in your days. This moment is one your future selves will wish they could have back. Don’t waste it scrolling through posts you won’t even remember tomorrow.

Krykant spent the last five years of his life campaigning for radical drug reform. His activism went beyond his previous calls for clean needles, safe spaces to inject, and softer-touch policing. Krykant, in the end, became something of an extremist, envisioning a world where addiction carried no stigma whatsoever; where the identity of “drug-user” could be worn with pride; and where obtaining and using powerful, addictive psychoactive substances was a simple matter of equality carrying no social or legal penalties. But he hadn’t always been that way. Something changed over the years, as his activist star soared. While many have already attempted to sum up Krykant’s legacy, as an intelligent and energetic campaigner, he was far more complex than that. 

His life story was, and still is, compelling. A former addict who had once been on the streets, hospitalized with psychosis in his teens, he turned his life around. He secured a job, a family and a global community of friends and fellowship. In other words, Krykant seemed to be flourishing, and this was in large part due to his abstinence-based recovery — when you eschew all mood- and mind-altering substances with an understanding that addiction is an illness. 

This contrasts with the prevailing treatment of harm-reduction which, among other things, involves managing addiction by prescribing less harmful substances or mitigating the health risks associated with using. Harm reduction saves and stabilizes countless lives every day, but for some with severe cases of long-term addiction, it becomes a form of purgatory. When an addict of this extreme variety buys into the idea that they can, in some circumstances, safely use drugs — whether prescribed by a doctor or obtained on the street — it’s only a matter of time before the blue lights start flashing. 

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What many people don’t know about Krykant, because he edited much of his history when he embraced the harm-reduction philosophy that made him famous, is that he spent 11 years sober before he became a campaigner. His journey can be traced on social media, from when he began working in support services while firmly rooted in the 12-step model. It was at the height of Scotland’s drug death crisis, in 2019, that Krykant felt called to do more — publicly. He aligned himself with “You Keep Talking, We Keep Dying”, a campaign spearheaded by Anne Marie Ward, CEO of campaigning charity Faces and Voices of Recover, to push for urgent reforms in drug treatment and policy. 

He turned up at Ward’s event in Glasgow, in a suit and tie and his finest game face. From the outset, those around him sensed that Peter was seeking not just policy change, but a highly visible platform from which to advocate for it. The long-deadlocked debate over safe consumption rooms offered him both. He sought, in his words, to move forward the “political football” on safe consumption, encouraging more thoughtful debate on the scourge of Scottish drug deaths — at that time and presently the worst in Europe.

As his campaigning grew, Krykant was likelier to be seen on the evening news than at the recovery meetings which had been the foundation of his sobriety. And in a bold, headline-grabbing move, he converted an old ambulance into a mobile drug-consumption facility, parking it on the streets of Glasgow and daring the authorities to intervene. The optics were powerful. But this wasn’t just a politically astute stunt: it was a heartfelt act of protest against inertia. Krykant argued that if official safe consumption sites weren’t allowed, then people were going to die wretchedly in alleyways, stairwells — or alone in their homes. 

His actions helped drag the issue into the political mainstream, forcing formerly suspicious tabloids to adopt a softer editorial tone on drug addicts. All this also earned Krykant international recognition. He became, in effect, the poster boy for harm reduction, an ally for canny operators across the harm-reduction space, always keen to publicize their work by platforming others who had “lived it”.

Peter Krykant’s activism, particularly his unsanctioned overdose prevention van, helped push Scotland toward officially piloting the UK’s first drug consumption room, reframing drug policy as a public health issue. His work legitimized lived-experience voices in policymaking, and accelerated national debate on harm reduction and decriminalization. Whatever your view on this issue, and there are many, nobody can ever take that away from him.

But — don’t I know it — this platform comes with risks. Those close to Krykant knew the truth: he had relapsed not long after launching his van, using the same drugs as the people he was trying to help. This was an open secret among politicians, charity workers, and journalists, as well as many of us in the recovery community. When dealing with addicts in relapse, it’s not always clear what the best course of action is.

The waters run all the muddier because addicts, by our very nature, become secretive and dishonest out of shame and fear. Krykant didn’t owe everyone every detail of his life. But having been put on a pedestal for his immense efforts, being honest about his own struggles would have been that much harder. The few who raised concerns, particularly from abstinence-based recovery communities, were dismissed as bitter, jealous, or out of step with the “progressive” mood. It felt almost taboo to publicly point out that Krykant was in danger, and even more futile to challenge him behind the scenes.

All the while, those close to Krykant watched as his ideology shifted from moderate to unhinged. I’d even argue that his addiction took his politics hostage: the more visible he became, the more absent he was in his private life and community. In the early days, he still spoke of the need for detox beds, for wider pathways into recovery, and for a more thoughtful debate about the role of medication and abstinence. But as Krykant started obsessing over harm reduction — and became more dependent on the organizations that affirmed his experiences — his outlook changed. He became part of what one former friend described as the “drugs pride” brigade: people who didn’t just advocate for safety and support, but who recast active addiction itself as a valid, even empowering identity. This is the sort of idea that only someone in active addiction could adopt, and only those with no experience of it could affirm.

As Krykant struggled to reconcile the painful, humbling backslide into addiction with his newfound prominence, his broader politics became stranger too. He ran as an independent candidate for the Scottish Parliament, and when that failed, he began aligning with voices who, if they had their way, would see town centers and city streets lined with vending machines dispensing heroin and Valium. He adopted the language of “People Who Use Drugs” (PWUD) and “Person Who Injects Drugs” (PWID) — monikers that reframed destructive, home-wrecking compulsions as informed lifestyle choices. He blocked critics, even friends, and built a social media echo chamber that only told him what he wanted, needed, to hear.

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Like it or not, Krykant’s best years were objectively spent in the rooms of 12-step fellowships. Yet he came not only to despise this method of sobriety, but to publicly condemn it and discourage others from trying it. This is a textbook relapse. In such a situation, the urge to create a face-saving justification for your descent back into addiction is strong. Krykant, sadly, had no shortage of backers willing to bolster whatever tall tale he required to justify his increasingly desperate circumstances. Along the way, he abandoned the belief system and community that had helped him stay clean for over a decade — a decision that would cost him his life.

Tributes have flowed since his death — from politicians, journalists, charities — each reaffirming the noble story: that Krykant battled for the marginalized, that he broke through political silence, that he cared. And all of that is true. But it is not the whole truth. These stories erase the part that matters most: the human cost of turning private pain into public performance, and the way a man who wanted to save lives slowly lost his own as his addiction became awkward for his gang of civic cheerleaders.

There are lessons here for everyone. For campaigners, a reminder of the dangers of building movements around individuals still in crisis. For journalists, a call to interrogate narratives rather than merely regurgitate them. For charities and funders, a warning against mistaking visibility for stability. And, for all of us, an invitation to tell more honest stories — about addiction, about recovery, and about the fine line between advocacy and exploitation.

Krykant’s legacy is assured, and he leaves Scotland’s drug debate in a far better place than he found it. While there was little we agreed towards the end, I was one of the people he reached out to for help when things took a bad turn a few years ago. And what he was pleading for back then was a rehab bed. He wanted to get sober. He understood what he suffered from and what he needed to get well. Along the way, though, something changed. Make of that what you will.

Krykant wanted so badly for his legacy to be about harm-reduction heroes and compassion for drug users. But what about those who amplified his message that using is a lifestyle choice — who encouraged his shift into activism and cast him as an expert on all things addiction while his private life collapsed? Did they show him real compassion and friendship of the sort that may occasionally involve a hard truth, some tough love, as opposed to vague platitudes and endless affirmation? Or did they exploit him, as a means to a political end, then run for cover when things headed south?

Luckily for them, but sadly for the rest of us, the whole truth likely died with Krykant. May he rest in peace. And may the rest hang their heads in shame.

A new report suggests that the drinking habits of our young women outmatch those of boys here, as well as beating most teenagers in the rest of Europe. More than a third of young women in the UK reported being drunk at least twice by the age of 15, a figure only bested by the stats of young Danes, Hungarians, and Italians. In reality, teenage drinking is markedly down compared to former levels: in 2002, for instance, a staggering 41% of Scottish teenagers of both sexes apparently drank weekly. But in these health-conscious times, even moderate amounts of teen drinking are viewed as too much. A similarly disapproving conclusion was drawn by the World Health Organization last April, though in that case, impressively, both boys and girls in the UK came out Top of the Alcopops rather than 4th.

Worried about supposed adverse effects on brain development, and trying to explain the appeal of drinking to young women in particular, commentators tend to approach the subject of teenage kicks as if observing puzzling behavioral manifestations in an alien species. Some suggest that girls are simply copying their mothers, since British women hold the dubious honor of being Europe’s biggest female binge-drinkers. Others blame intensified feelings of social anxiety post-lockdown, targeted advertising from the drinks industry towards females, and that old fallback, middle-class parents for introducing youngsters to wine too early.

Meanwhile, no one mentions the joyfully emboldened swagger of being newly out on the lash; how feelings of effervescence intermittently course through your body as you dance, flirt, smoke, or double over in hysterical mirth at someone’s stupid joke, or your own; how, in short, you feel like a sexy superhero — until you don’t. To help me remember, I still have photographs from my first ever night on the booze at a friend’s house in Edinburgh, our parents having their own party downstairs. Groups of us loll about on the floor with our mouths in perpetual motion, talking endlessly, babyfaces hectically flushed, eyes sparkling and slightly wild. Sometimes I suspect my adult drinking patterns have been chasing that sort of fabulous high ever since.

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Film and television do slightly better, with Sex and the City leading the way in glamorizing cocktail consumption for a generation. But when you are a youngster constrained by licensing laws, it is all fairly irrelevant anyway: you can only dream of having wry discussions about men’s sexual prowess over several cosmopolitans in some iconic Manhattan nightspot. Along with millions of others before you under strict conditions of prohibition, the best you can do is gulp it down unadorned in a bedroom or at some wintry bus stop, discreetly and fast, and wait for those exciting sensations of warmth to start radiating outward from your core.

Chasing this rush, intensified when cut with youthful emotions and surging hormones, is surely the main reason teenagers drink, be they female or male. Impersonal accounts of possible causes — rising anxiety, say, or the influence of social media — miss out this crucial part of the explanation. And I’m not sure we should expect or even want anything different. William James wrote of alcohol’s power to “stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature”, arguing that while “sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no, drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes”. And who should be saying yes to life more than mystically minded, big-hearted, uproarious teenagers? There is nothing more developmentally appropriate. In a society where so many of them seem isolated in dark rooms, either metaphorically or literally, the odd outbreak of intensely sociable drunkenness seems like a small worry to have overall.

Inebriation makes you vulnerable in other ways, though — and perhaps especially so in the case of girls. The disinhibition it brings, and the subjective dislocation from time and space, spell trouble in the wrong company. Alongside the report about teenage drinking, this week there has also been a lot of discussion of Pakistani grooming gangs on X; and the two make for uncomfortable juxtaposition. Extracts circulated from court transcripts underline that alcohol and drugs were the main means used by child rapists to subdue their underage working-class victims. And yet social workers and police repeatedly read the drunkenness of these young girls as a sign of maturity, in a way which somehow made the girls more culpable than the psychopathic men abusing them.

One social worker accused the terrified mother of an exploited 14-year-old engaged in “repeated incidents of severe intoxication” of not being able to accept that her daughter was “growing up”. A 12-year-old was arrested for being “drunk and disorderly” in a derelict house while the accompanying adult males were left unadmonished. In other words, an adultification bias was thriving; and when it comes to persistent stereotypes of fresh-faced young innocence and the “right” sort of victim, it seems that years of feminism have failed to touch the sides.

So much celebratory alcohol use is transitional, taking us from the end of one thing to the beginning of another thing: from day to evening, for instance, or from working day to weekend. In taking the drink that indicates the changeover, you are not simply marking a shift in attitude as creating one out of nothing, wrestling it into being with your intention that things will be brighter and better now. Much teenage drinking is transitional like this too: by necking the stuff, typically you indicate an intention to leave something childish behind and become your own more adventurous person for a night, whatever that means. Of course that doesn’t mean you succeed, as thousands of undignified exits from teen parties can attest. Still, the pleasure is in the attempt, and it is an agenda apparently ferociously pursued by middle- and upper-class teenagers in particular, with few lasting consequences except for the very unlucky.

One of the many hideous features of the grooming gang scandal was that young girls’ natural and age-appropriate desire for a few cathartic, drink-fueled escapades was used against them so heinously, twice over: first by their abusers, and then by the authorities who failed to recognize what was going on. We need to try harder to see the drunkenness of the teenager for what it nearly always is: something essentially childish and innocent; a kind of riotous, joyful inebriation that cannot be replicated later as a fully fledged adult, no matter how hard you might try. The ideal world is not one where such a thing never occurs, but one where teenagers are never violated or otherwise penalized for now and again succumbing. Thanks to malevolent actors, we don’t live in that ideal world and never will; but along with my teenage liver, I mourn it.

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Overwhelmed, Bradshaw loaded his few remaining possessions into a clapped-out Jag, and boarded a ferry from Cork to Santander. He had planned to travel on to Portugal, the site of so many holidays with his wife and kids. But they no longer saw him. And where the open sea once promised escape, staring into the ship’s wake now pushed Bradshaw, 36 to despair. 

“Look at the wake of mess I’ve left behind me — look at the lies I’ve told,” Bradshaw remembers thinking. “I don’t know where the fuck I’m going. I haven’t got a house to go anymore, nor a home and I’ve fucked my kids’ lives. That’s when it really hit me. The world would look a lot better without me in it.” In the end, it was the thought of his two sons that stopped Bradshaw from jumping overboard that March night. But not everyone is so lucky. 

In the United Kingdom, this week’s front pages — dominated by reports of an election mired in a betting scandal — threaten to distract from a wider malaise: the fact that there are around 400 gambling-related suicides each year. Just like Bradshaw, young people seem particularly susceptible. Between an underdeveloped brain on the one hand, and frantic advertising from gambling companies on the other, some 55,000 British youngsters (age 11-16) are addicted to gambling. A further 85,000 also believed to be at risk of addiction. 

No wonder activists are pushing hard for change. But without more fundamental reforms — and with the gambling industry as rich and influential as ever — desperate cases like Bradshaw’s are unlikely to disappear.  

Mark thinks he knows why. The neuroscience of gambling addiction closely resembles that of drink or drug dependency. Gambling rewires the brain, flooding it with so much dopamine that the body soon learns to protect itself. That, in turn, reduces the sensitivity of so-called “bliss hormones” — which become less responsive to the high gained from that first successful flutter. As dopamine tolerance builds, punters need to raise the stakes to recreate those early peaks. “Even if it’s a 1,000-to-1 shot,” Mark says, “right down to that very last bet, you convince yourself this is the one that could change my life.” Enter fully-fledged gambling disorders: the neurological state when the brain experiences withdrawal symptoms, and demands higher bets, just to get back to its altered new normal. 

“When you’re betting, the capacity for rational thought goes out the window,” Ryan Cowley explains. “But after heavy losses you get this crushing feeling of guilt.” At his lowest point, the 30-year-old was losing almost £4,000 a day, even as he grew skilled at hiding his problem from family: “I’d start with South American football, switch to the NFL and then of course there’s always horse racing and online slots.’’ Once, he blew his wages on payday — then cancelled and destroyed his bank cards, pretending his wallet had been stolen. He needed an excuse to not pay his mum the room and board she was expecting. 

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Beyond the raw brain chemistry, there’s evidence that young people, like Cowley, are particularly vulnerable to gambling disorders. As Dr Marc Potenza, director of Yale University’s Center of Excellence in Gambling Research explains, the prefrontal cortex doesn’t fully mature until around the age of 24. He suggests that, especially for young men, this makes them less able to postpone gratification and control impulsivity — and ultimately leaves them open to the highly addictive products developed by gambling companies. 

Those products, for their part, are made vastly more dangerous by their digital nature. Consider Cowley, whose gambling problem started around 12 years ago, and coincided with the arrival of smartphones and betting apps in his late teens. Suddenly, he not only had a casino in his pocket, but also the power to bet on anything, anywhere. He’s not alone. As a survey published by the Young Gamers and Gamblers Education Trust (YGAM) in March 2024 revealed, nearly 46% of students are gambling more than they can afford, lured by promises of free bets and quick cash. 

Now 23, Robert* has been battling a gambling addiction for five years. His problems began while still a student, when betting became intertwined with watching sport with friends. Watching them celebrate occasional windfalls on their phone drew him in — and soon Robert was losing more and more. When Robert’s parents entrusted a significant amount of his grandfather’s inheritance to him, they were unaware of his problem. But Robert gambled away £15,000 over just a couple of days. “Pretty much all of it is gone,” he says. “I still haven’t been able to pluck up the courage to tell my parents.”

It deepens the problem when gambling companies use the immense power of online systems to their advantage. If you have a gambling platform on your phone, you may have noticed just how regularly you’re required to re-download the latest version of the app. For Bradshaw, that’s some indication of just how rapidly betting operators are evolving their “getting-to-know-you” data-harvesting techniques.

“Within three months of signing up with a betting app,” he explains, “they will have collected 90 key data points, which will go far beyond what your favourite team is, or the time of the day you like to bet. They’ll know exactly which offers to push at you, all tailored to make you feel really smart — too smart to miss out on this great opportunity. And all the time they’re demanding your attention with products that are incredibly addictive.”

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In theory, racking up huge losses in betting binges, like Mark, Ryan and Robert’s, was about to become more difficult, with affordability checks set to be introduced as part of the government white paper on gambling reform published a year ago. It proposed that players who lose £1,000 within 24 hours, or £2,000 over 90 days, should face financial checks. Those who have a net loss beyond £125 each month, or £500 per year, will have to go through “frictionless” checks. Alongside affordability checks, the white paper also included significant proposals for a mandatory levy on gambling operators to fund addiction treatment, education and research.

Now, of course, we have an election on our hands, which will likely delay the implementation of some of the reforms. At the same time, however, many do not require primary legislation and are due to come into force later in the year anyway. But will they make any real difference?

Many anti-gambling campaigners argue that by the time customers demonstrate problematic betting behaviours, it is already too late: they will already have a gambling disorder, and though their betting may temporarily be stopped, the underlying condition doesn’t disappear. Gambling With Lives, for example, is a charity set up in 2018 by families bereaved by gambling related suicide. While they applaud the £100 million earmarked to fund research, education and treatment around gambling addiction, activists are otherwise sceptical about the planned legislation’s overall worth. 

Bradshaw, meanwhile, believes that the law isn’t keeping pace with the technology. Just as the UK’s 2005 Gambling Act couldn’t foresee the harms of the coming smartphone era, he suggests that today’s policymakers don’t understand how AI has already transformed the industry. ‘’It doesn’t refer to algorithms or artificial intelligence at all,” he says of the Gambling Reform Bill. “It is an analogue piece of legislation in an era [when] the gambling operators are already in an AI generation. Using the power of artificial intelligence, hundreds of markets are being formed within each game using all the data they’ve got on the sport, plus all the data on you as an individual. The products are incredibly addictive and the markets are formed so fast that the smartest human being couldn’t work out if it’s a fair bet or not, which of course is precisely the point.” 

For others, the white paper’s most serious omission concerns advertising, which many attribute to the influence of the immensely powerful Betting and Gaming Council, the industry body that represents the interests of UK gambling operators. Since it was effectively deregulated in 2005, the UK gambling industry has swollen into a behemoth, one raking in revenues of £15 billion a year. As a whole, it’s estimated that the sector redirects £1.5 billion of those profits into advertising. That can have a direct impact on gamblers: research suggests that 35% of people with gambling disorders receive daily incentives to gamble, compared to just 4% of those not suffering gambling harm.

The personal impact here is just as stark. Cowley says he’s forced to go on holiday during big events like the Cheltenham Festival, just to avoid being carpet-bombed by betting ads. In April, betting giant 888.com even planted its flag in London’s underground system, with signs provocatively proclaiming that “This Carriage is now a Casino”.

In the end, an online petition forced 888.com to partly withdraw the campaign, but such brazenness can plausibly be linked to the sector’s vast wealth. 888 Holdings also owns William Hill, which was fined £19.2 million in 2023 for — among other failings — allowing customers to lose tens of thousands of pounds within minutes of opening their accounts during the pandemic. That’s still the largest fine ever meted out by the Gambling Commission, but is unlikely to deter 888 Holdings, which last year saw revenues soar by 38% to £1.7 billion.

And therein lies the problem: gambling is an industry that has grown so rich so fast that it can afford to casually treat multi-million-pound fines as simply part of doing business.

Quite apart from the individual suffering, meanwhile, there is rising evidence that gambling addiction is impacting society as a whole. The government’s own research estimates that 0.5% of the population are already problem gamblers. And while the NHS recently opened its 15th regional treatment centre in Sheffield and now has the capacity to treat 3,000 across the UK, many believe it’s unlikely to be enough. With legislation still so weak, Mark Bradshaw thinks we’re in the early days of a public health disaster: he compares it to an “avalanche” that could yet overwhelm the authorities.

But at least he got out. Five years on from his near-death experience at sea, the Yorkshireman seems happier. At 41, he’s living in Dublin with a new family, and spends his time campaigning to protect the next generation of young people from gambling disorders. Regardless, Bradshaw is under no illusions about how dangerous the modern industry can be. “If I’d come of age in an era when sports-mad young men spend half their lives on their phones,” he says, “I would be dead by now.” 

Driving through the town’s little streets at night, it wasn’t unusual to see people staggering across the roads in a drunken stupor. One night I saw a woman, completely naked, crawling along the side of the road. Day in and day out, binge drinkers stumbled through the doors of the liquor store, some smelling as if they hadn’t washed for weeks. A few even relieved themselves in the store. Theft was almost an hourly event, and fights over alcohol were common; stores were prone to being ransacked by mobs of up to 15 people, forcing staff and security against walls or bailed up by flying bottles of bourbon, while their comrades made away with cartons of wine.

In 2022 the problem reached its zenith, when the small Outback town of 25,000 accumulated 2,653 reported assaults. There was a 53% rise in alcohol-related assaults: shopkeepers installed metal barricades to prevent burglaries and concrete bollards were put up on roads to stop stolen cars. “We’ve already filled the jails,” warned the state’s police commissioner.

In January last year, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese arrived for an emergency meeting, keen to resolve the local disorder ahead of his divisive “Voice” referendum on indigenous representation to the Australian Parliament. The meeting ended on a controversial note, with the re-imposition of a ban on the sale of alcohol to indigenous Australians in some communities, who make up a fifth of the population. Since its reintroduction, there has been a substantial drop in domestic violence and other antisocial behaviour. However, recent months has seen a rise in crime by indigenous youths in Alice Springs and the imposition of a temporary 6pm curfew.

Many white Australians believe that Aboriginal people cannot be trusted with alcohol, a view echoed by some authorities on drug addiction. Psychiatrist and former White House drug czar, Robert DuPont, captures this sentiment in his 1997 book, The Selfish Brain: Learning from Addiction. He bemoans that: “To see Native Americans suffer from the use of alcohol and other drugs, and even cigarettes, or to see similar suffering among Australian Aborigines, is to face the painful reality that traditional cultures are not prepared to withstand exposure to modern drugs and to tolerant values governing drug-taking behaviour.” His book suggests that non-indigenous culture is superior in regulating social standards surrounding dangerous drugs such as alcohol, while tough pressure is required from an external source — white governments — to prevent their use in indigenous cultures.

What DuPont doesn’t seem to grasp is that Aboriginal culture does not exist in an a-historical vacuum. Stripping a culture of its regulatory mechanisms for discordant social behaviour and then declaring that culture to be inherently inferior in regulating substances intertwined with that behaviour leaves much to be desired in DuPont’s diagnosis of the problem. And in any case, if proximity to traditional Aboriginal culture could explain addiction, then the indigenous children of the “Stolen Generations” — taken from their parents and raised as white people as part of Australia’s Assimilation Policy — should have fared relatively well. Instead, they descended into a spiral of substance abuse. Christina Green, who as a child was taken by the government and raised in Parramatta Girls Home, recalled: “Most girls became depressed, suicidal and addicted to drugs and alcohol later in life.”

These children suffered horrific psychological scars — and some were abused and raped in the institutions that tried to assimilate them. In his book, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction,Canadian physician Gabor Maté explains how trauma in Australian indigenous communities has been passed from one generation to another through violence, sexual abuse, and child neglect that originally emanated from the trauma of colonialism. “If you look at why addicts are soothing themselves through chemicals… you will see that they have all experienced childhood adversity — the pain and distress that they needed to escape.” This explanation is not without its critics, such as those who would point to extreme levels of violence in indigenous communities prior to white contact. Moreover, confining the explanation to psychopathology derived from the childhood period seems to miss far broader determinants of addiction.

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That is because trauma is not the only cause of addiction: boredom is another trigger. In his book, Maté draws from a well-known case study. During the Vietnam War, many American soldiers became addicted to opiates, causing an alarmed American public to prepare for an avalanche of returning addicted soldiers — who instead spontaneously quit drugs once back in the United States. This story is often told to highlight the causal role of the stress and boredom of war on drug addiction. Bruce Alexander’s now infamous Rat Park experiments in the Seventies came to a similar conclusion: taking fun activities away from rats induced them to drink a morphine solution that they otherwise couldn’t stand while living a normal rat life.

I’ve met my fair share of indigenous people who drink or use drugs for no other reason than stress or boredom. During the pandemic, I took up a position as a case manager in a drug rehabilitation service for indigenous people in the minute town of Katherine, to the north of Alice Springs. It was the only such centre in a 300-kilometre radius. One afternoon, I was in my office when a support worker reported a client missing who had that day tested positive for THC and had broken his parole conditions. Pushing through the long grass that extends into the bushland around the facility, I found the young Aboriginal man sitting in the bushes, wondering whether to make a dash for it. “Why did you decide to use ganja?” I asked him. It was a response I became used to hearing: “Rehabilitation is boring.”

Two years later, I found myself working in the largest drug and alcohol detox and rehabilitation facility in Darwin, the capital city of the Northern Territory of Australia. One indigenous woman, Patricia (not her real name), was a former heroin-turned-methamphetamine addict. Over a period of six months, she’d tell me about the often highly embarrassing misadventures she had in trying to support her meth habit. It seemed that she held nothing back in these discussions — the people she’d slept with for money, diseases she had picked up, thefts she had carried out.  As a former secretary for a prosecutor, she was also incredibly bright; we discussed Charles Darwin and our shared love of psychology. With her intellectual curiosity and openness to discussing anything in her life no matter how raw and embarrassing, you would think that our conversation would have uncovered some form of childhood trauma. But there was nothing. She insisted that she had enjoyed a happy childhood, received all the love and support she could have asked for, wanted for nothing, and didn’t suffer any trauma that she could put a finger on. Her introduction to drugs was simply a response to the boredom of her early adulthood.

One night, Patricia turned up at the rehabilitation facility in a meth-induced psychosis, claiming that she hadn’t slept in a week. It was obvious that she required urgent medical care, but due to Darwin’s overstretched ambulance service and limited staff in the night-time hours, there was no one. I sat alone with her for hours, as she twisted, gyrated, and cursed. It was the last I saw of her.

If we are to get to the root of indigenous alcohol abuse, we have to take this apathy seriously. Much of it comes down to extreme levels of unemployment, which a series of Australian governments has tried to tackle to no avail. Stripped of the traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyle, a purgatory of chronic boredom now afflicts their communities. But there’s another problem: as in the case of Patricia, indigenous people often start taking drugs after gaining employment, especially in menial, repetitive jobs, such as in an abattoir or factory. Some have implied to me that their substance abuse is a product of the boredom and monotony of white man’s work. But there’s another way in which employment gives rise to stress in Aboriginal culture.

I would often sit with Aboriginal clients while they talked with government welfare officers. One question that was routinely asked was: “On a score of one to ten, how confident are you that you will look for work?” I never heard a client give any response other than one. In Alice Springs, I worked with an Aboriginal man, an extraordinarily bright and dedicated member of staff. But he had a problem with his family members coming into the store and asking for his pay check every week. One day, he finally decided to take the advice offered to him by so many non-indigenous people: he told his family that he wouldn’t slavishly hand over all the money he earned at his job. He was subsequently thrown out of a car and reversed over, losing both legs. Given the resentment in communal Aboriginal culture towards anyone who hoards resources individually, it’s no wonder that the usual refrain that Aboriginals should “go out and get a job” so often falls upon deaf ears. This deepens the mystery as how to integrate communal hunter-gatherer cultures into an industrial economy.

It’s also worth noting that when it comes to indigenous alcohol abuse, addiction is not the only problem. Aboriginals are less likely than white Australians to use alcohol according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, and — according to a study published in Drug and Alcohol Review last year — are no more likely to be physiologically dependent on alcohol than white Australians. The problem, in many cases, is the occasional binge.

This is what claimed the life of Jimmy, my kindly, middle-aged Aboriginal neighbour whom I befriended in Alice Springs. In the months I knew him — and we spent a lot of time sitting on the porch discussing Egyptian archaeology — I didn’t see Jimmy drink once, until one day when he started drinking and didn’t stop. That night, my partner and I briefly attended his birthday party, and she sang a karaoke duet with him. The following day I woke to find police extracting his dead body from his apartment. He was last seen drinking himself silly. As I would later discover, indigenous people are more likely to go on dangerous alcohol binges, punctuated by periods of abstinence, than go through long periods of constant drinking that we associate with addiction.

Some surmise that the historical bans on alcohol consumption by indigenous people meant that they would be more likely to drink alcohol rapidly should they chance to acquire it. But what needs explanation is not only the rapidity of drinking, but the continuance. And this could be blamed on the loss of daily structure concomitant with having traditional lifeways and responsibilities washed away. Humans are good at blaming people. I suspect that many people reading this are readying themselves to blame someone for the plight of Aboriginals — the colonialists, contemporary non-indigenous people, Aboriginals themselves — in order to tie a complicated psycho-social problem into a neat little package. But these narratives over-simplify matters and offer only a low-resolution narrative as to how we got here.

Not one week later, and we can breathe easy again: it was all just propaganda. He’s flogging smokeless stoves, shrewdly positioning himself as the George Foreman of a less lung-cancer-inducing inhalation technology. I genuinely thought for a moment there that he was sick of the fog. I’m kind of sick of the fog myself by now. What never ceases to amaze me is how sexy some artists manage to make smoking the herb seem. It’s not.

A friend of mine — a middle-aged mum — once claimed that skunk was worse than heroin. I thought this comment laughable at the time, having been around a lot of heroin abuse. I’ve dabbled myself, but I was always a bit of a tourist, truth be told. Too much time spent watching Countdown for my liking. Too much vomit. Too much possibility of sudden death. What’s a little green by comparison? When someone you love endures a bout of skunk psychosis, you soon find out.

Heroin has a tendency to make the user manically self-involved. Not everyone, might I add, lest I offend anyone. With drugs it’s always different strokes for different folks. Some people, it’s for the best they’re on the smack. They might have been terrible alcoholics otherwise. Or have untethered themselves from reality entirely blazing the chronic. But you can’t get away with smoking brown casually, hence why, even among fairly committed caners, the line is often drawn at heroin. That’s when the phone calls go around to family members. Talk of possible interventions.

Whereas weed is just there. No one bats an eyelid. Intimations of Sixties optimism, of low-grade, no-risk consciousness expansion. That today’s genetically engineered varieties are up to 100 times stronger than those smoked by our Boomer forebears has only recently begun factoring into the equation. This has given the stuff a Trojan Horse-like incisiveness where fucking up young people’s minds is concerned. Never mind that it might leave you three times more prone to have a psychotic episode, or that 25% of Priory cases of paranoid psychosis — a schizophrenia-like illness and depression — were caused by weed or spice use. According to a 2014 Lancet psychiatric report, adolescent weed smokers were at particular risk: 60% less likely to graduate from high school, and seven times more likely to attempt suicide.

Curiously, although cannabis-related hospitalisations have more than doubled since 2013, use of the stuff has been steadily plummeting. Especially among youngsters, who seem to be wising up to the grim realities. In 1995, 30% of 16-24-year-olds were users, today that figure is something closer to 16%. The connotations of pot use are shifting in tandem with the nature of the drug itself then. The Romanticism and consequent naiveté of the previous era are indeed beginning to fade into something darker, sadder, more claustrophobic.

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Punk's spirit is broken

By Lias Saoudi

Had this vibe shift occurred before I’d arrived in London aged 18 to study art at the prestigious Slade School, I wonder if life might have panned out differently? I might not have squandered the opportunity tooting skunk and masturbating in my halls of residence. All the graft I put in winning my place there as a diligent, pre-skunk teenager back in Cookstown where I grew up went swiftly down the drain. Pornography and pot. Somehow these things became my priority. Life since has basically been a contingency plan rooted in the unforced errors of those wasted years. That the stuff is a gateway drug goes without saying. If you smoke enough skunk, eventually cocaine becomes a bare necessity, a kind of social defibrillator. It might turn you into a prick, but at least you’re out and about again.

Smoking weed is like rolling the dice with the rest of your day psychologically. The stronger the smoke, the higher the stakes. These days, if I’m blazing, I tend to pepper a single skin roll-up with a few crumbs of hashish in the evening. These are odds I can handle. All the same, I often find myself marooned, dumbfounded. My partner can tell almost instantly I’ve had a toke too many. The dry-lipped silence. The absence of common sense. It pluralises perception, as opposed to embellishing it like more intense psycho-actives.

Thoughts cross-pollinate incessantly, pile up and provide you with a new and thrilling vantage point… or… they cascade down into the nether world leaving you speechless with profound doubt, little more than a symptom of your selfhood. There’s no telling which way the wind’s about to blow. This randomising factor can be incredibly useful where creativity is concerned. If you’re working in music — the purest of all art forms — especially. For example: you’ve spent several years making an album. Towards the end of this process, you’re inevitably bored shitless with everything you’re working on. You have to make it new for yourself again in order to summon up the will to push it over the finish line. Simple, just listen to it on drugs.

It isn’t just weed that young people are turning away from, but narcotics across the board. Also: religion, working part-time jobs and having a girlfriend/boyfriend. All things that help you not to feel isolated and lonely. Things might have panned out differently had I not spent the end of my formative years pickled in skunk. But then at least I hadn’t been subjected to social media from day dot in combination with the stuff. That people are watching you and attempting to interfere with you from afar is no longer the stuff of weed-induced paranoia, but hard fact. And if young people have substituted weed for the internet, they might well be replicating the former’s effects.

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George Michael's longing for oblivion

By Lias Saoudi

Drugs have ravaged my community. Where they haven’t completely alienated people from themselves and the wider world, they have enfeebled without mercy. As we hobble towards and out beyond the 40 mark, we’re all just picking up the tab. We made a few half-decent tunes though. Admittedly, my social group aren’t exactly a great demographic from which to extract generalisations. Over-sensitive song and dance men, entertainers, fools… we only made it through adolescence on account of a handful of records, records disproportionately made by arch-hedonists who frequently dropped dead at 27.

These artefacts were our rallying call, our entry point into something larger than ourselves. They gave our lives something resembling purpose. Generation Z, the world’s first digital natives, don’t seem to be taking the bait where this overweight mythology is concerned. It’s hard to imagine another Winehouse in this day and age. Maybe not. The inevitably meditative kind of boredom we had to play around in growing up is off the menu, probably forever. It’s not been eradicated, but inverted and intensified horribly, a kind of mind-death by convenience, by over stimulation is taking its place.

The old gods are fading, along with their shitty behaviour, replaced by a Warholian micro-portioning out of fame itself. Today, everyone has a public soul. Fame, de-centralised, has lost its transcendent capacity. The druggy role models of yore, deflated. Even if it means there’s no longer any albums worth smoking an ounce to as Snoop Dogg would have it, nobody wants to come off a whopping anachronism. I dare say the future might be a little kinder, a little safer, a lot softer on the liver. But if it’s tuneless, what’s the point?

Blackpool is odd: a suicide on morphine. Shops sell fake breasts and dildos made of sugar, or mobility scooters and junk food side by side. The pavements are smeared with filth. And yet, when you think all the ugliness in the world has gathered, you will find a ballroom dancer in black tie stealing down a street in patent shoes. Brand, too, was made for Blackpool. Destruction, and renewal.

Brand’s tour, which ends today at the Brixton Academy, is a display, and the meditation is the most important part: the part that is most meaningful to him. It’s the reveal of a show he calls “33” because he thought that was the age at which he would die. What is public meditation for a man as noisy and self-destructive as Brand: health signalling? Performative recovery? WELLNESS in lights? Brand is myriad — actor, polemicist, activist, comic — his most dominant self is former heroin addict. Though he is almost 20 years sober, addiction can chase a man his whole life, and terrify him with a glimpse of what he was. And yet, the man thinks, if he can meditate in front of a thousand strangers in Blackpool, he must be safe. It’s a truism that a comic needs an audience more than an audience needs a comic, but it’s truer of Brand than of anyone. He needs us. He says so. “How much attention does one man need?” he asks. “We don’t yet know. We haven’t found the upper threshold”.

I am not here for Brand: not really. I have read his memoirs, and I feel I know everything he is prepared to tell us, and himself. I couldn’t get through his polemic Revolution, which he wrote at his wealthy girlfriend’s country house. His childhood was broken. He thought his mother’s recurring cancer was his fault, and his father, on holiday, ordered prostitutes for them both in a room they shared. He almost killed himself, and then didn’t. He is candid about everything except his anger: the kind of addict who is so ashamed he tells you everything. He is a very typical comedian in some ways: a man seeking his father’s affirmation from the stage. He very obviously finds it agonising when hecklers interrupt him. He must be heard. He is a very typical addict too: softness and savagery twinned.

What interests me most about Brand is not him, though he is charismatic. It is his reach, the people who come to see him, and what they can tell us about political alienation. If he was a movie star in 2010 — he is an under-rated actor, not least by himself, but he’s less afraid of his rage on screen — he is now a YouTube demagogue flirting with conspiracism and posting to 5.65 million followers. Typical posts are: “So…Trump was RIGHT About Clinton & Russia Collusion!!”; “You’ve Been LIED To About Why Ukraine War Began”; “Can We REALLY Trust Vaccine Fact-Checkers??!”

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Why I am an addict

By Tanya Gold

The doors open at 5pm. I watch them gather. I would call his constituency either fragile and seeking, or angry and untrusting. The first group, many of whom have risen from a sickbed, admire his personal transformation — his recovery from heroin addiction and the book he then wrote, ripped off from AA’s 12 Steps: Freedom from our Addictions. You aren’t supposed to monetise AA, but he has a very personal definition of humility. “You feel he really does care about people,” says one woman. “He’s been through so many things himself and he’s still keeping going. He still comes out for people.”

The second group admire his YouTube channel which segues from mistrust of the Establishment to disinformation and alienation. They ask me who I write for because they do not trust the press. “He knows exactly what’s going on,” says one woman. “He just makes people aware [of corruption]. I wouldn’t vote for anyone. There’s no one worth voting for.”

I meet a superfan videoing herself by the stage door. Social media is important: as if by broadcasting, you will be listened to. It’s one of his contradictions: Brand says that if we were forced to carry iPhones we would smash them up ourselves. Yet he depends on them. “Much as he is an intellectual,” she says, “he teaches you in a nice way and actually I’d like to rip his pants off.” Her friend likes “his videos about conspiracy things. Well, they aren’t conspiracies. They are conspiracies for six months and then they are facts.”

For another man, it’s a modern political — or apolitical — encounter: he and Russell found each other through algorithm. “He’s saying the right thing,” he says. “A lot of the information that Russell finds is what I’ve found. Covid is an excuse for where they want to take us. It’s all through fear.” He fears tyranny, this man, but another contradiction is that Brand, who despises conventional political practises, will take him closer to it. “All political parties are the same”, he says. “He [Brand] manages to channel anger or discontent in a positive direction.”

I sit in the gods, which are like a velvet cliff edge, next to a serene sex therapist and her Italian husband. She is disappointed that Jeremy Corbyn is no longer leader of the Labour Party. She has no plan to vote in a general election: she thinks there is no point. I look up her constituency, which is a Tory/Labour marginal. Her vote does matter. But Brand, despite his personal message of empowerment, would have his followers more disempowered. It’s the one thing I can’t bear about him: his anti-voting message. It’s fine for a rich man to shrug off politics. He doesn’t need them. He can invent his own, and he does. He is not so very different from the men he despises. They lay false trails.

The show is in four parts. The first is pandemic-themed stand-up, and it is good stand-up. It’s self-aware, and therefore bearable. He mocks the audience and himself. During the clap for carers, he tells us, he was a medical worker so the applause would be directed at him. He collects testimony of pandemic-themed shame from the audience — he’s very interested in shame — and tells a story about a man who wiped his bum on a face mask, and a woman who drunk wine in a Zoom work meeting, and pretended it was tea. When he gets to the audience member who masturbated to something under every letter in the Pornhub alphabet, he invites us to shout the words: tea-bagging; wanking; zebra.

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The cowardice of the far Left

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The second part speaks to his YouTube audience, and it’s a lie: that you can be more politically engaged by placing your faith not in your democratically elected politicians but in him. Love is not a mandate — if it is even love, rather than the narcotic of attention and praise — but the root of this is clear enough: he didn’t trust his father. “I don’t like being told what to do,” he says. “I start there”. This sounds like his most authentic self. “I start at ‘fuck off’.”

“The system wants you hypnotised and stupefied,” he says, as if government is only a meeting of Spectre. “We are told that we are participants in our democracy. That we are adults. That we matter. That our voice will be heard. That we would be able to organise society through the ballot box because you are adults and your voice matters. That is one of the myths of our time.”

Brand is weirdly Manichean. He appears to divide the world into two parts, and they are solid, and immutable. The evil are evil, and will remain so. The good are here, as if buying a ticket to “33” is a kind of protective spell. Sometimes he tends to Luddism and talks as if he would like to live in some kind of idealised village, or circle, and why wouldn’t he? He’s strong, and a man.

The third part is the hug part, and it’s the weirdest part. Having divested us of the desire for representative democracy he becomes a healer. It begins in the interval. He jumps down from the stage, and waits there, and people fill the aisles to hug him. It looks intensely silly, but they are moved by him. I wonder if this is the replacement — and true destination — for his sex addiction: intimacy, which other people have paid for. (I return, in my mind, to his father and the prostitutes.) I wonder if this is the real point of the exercise. They come, one after the after, for hugs of all kinds — swift, flirty, soulful — and photographs, and a combination of the two: the soulful hug selfie.

At the end of the show, he puts on a blue pointed party hat, like a wizard, and leaves the auditorium through the main exits, to hug people in the street outside. I notice he has a personal photographer and videographer: a slender man in black with a professional expression who follows him and who records every interaction. Does Brand archive them, and look back on them: on every piece of love? People cry in his arms. He whispers to them. He takes a picture of himself with us all behind him, like an army. It’s so obviously his new addiction there is barely anything left to say: a delusion into which he carries others, by the sheer force of his charisma, and his silly pointy hat. And he won’t know where to stop. He never does. And then he goes back inside for a mass meditation. The audience at Lancashire’s biggest theatre close their eyes and pray.

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Adam Kay's dangerous misogyny

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At the end, when he has hugged everyone who waited, I listen to them praise him. “You can’t have control over what’s going on in the world, but you can have control over yourself,” says one. It’s a doctrine of renewal, but so atomised as to be meaningless. “He’s got that attention to the working class,” says another. “He is like us,” says the third, “a free thinker [who] cares about everyone in the world, not ground down by politicians and big corporate companies. He cares about individual people.”

But does he? I think he is using them, and, worse, they let him. Brand is another symptom of our alienation: of the fracturing of the institutions that we need. We will see more, and different Brands in future, as the centre falls away. They will blow in on the wind. His doctrine of disengagement will change nothing for them. Will they notice? Will they care? I wonder if, in the end, they have confused politics with love. Or, rather, magic.

America’s laws on sports betting have been getting increasingly permissive since 2018, when the Supreme Court struck down the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992. My cousin, who is in his early thirties, lives in Colorado, where it was legalised in 2019. In his twenties, he tried college, but never finished. Nor did he show a real interest in anything — including serious romance and traditional employment — except DraftKings, which has been his preferred online game since 2014. Back then, it offered nothing but virtual prizes for success in virtual sports; but as states have legalised sports betting, the company, and others like it, have launched highly lucrative gambling apps.

A hamster-wheel life going nowhere is profoundly boring. Sports betting gave my cousin meaning: suddenly every game, every event — even sports he didn’t care about — mattered. It wasn’t only the outcomes he cared about; he placed bets on various scenarios within the games. He was, and is, hooked. There are hundreds of thousands of men like him: the target audience of sports betting apps.

As of April 2023, 33 states have legal, operational sports betting, and a host of companies — including DraftKings and FanDuel — have expanded to meet consumer demand. Some libertarian-leaning think tanks, including the Cato Institute, argue that betting offers a much-needed source of revenue for financially struggling states. The figures have been staggering — since the Supreme Court’s 2018 ruling, over $20 billion has been spent on sports betting in the United States, with more than $3 billion in state and federal taxes being paid — and they look set to increase. Sportsbook revenue in the US reached a record $7.5 billion in 2022, up 75% from the 2021 total of $4.29 billion.

Unchecked gambling can have devastating consequences for both individuals and communities — consequences that were well-known even before sports betting was available at one’s literal fingertips, at any hour of the day or night. They include financial ruin, relationship strain and increased crime — including organised crime, for which legal betting operations serve as a convenient front for money laundering. Unsurprisingly, The Free Press recently labelled sports betting the “new Oxycontin”.

The comparison isn’t baseless, but the key difference is that Oxycontin ultimately “sells itself”. When people become physically and psychologically dependent on the highly addictive drug, no additional marketing is needed. Chronic gambling, by contrast, is a behavioural addiction, where individuals crave a thrill — meaning that the product has to be constantly refreshed. The apps track user behaviour, which is then minutely analysed by employees looking for ways to keep people hooked.

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Why I became a time lord

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In her 2012 book Addiction by Design, anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll writes that gamblers find themselves adjusting their behaviour based on the features and giveaways provided by casinos, such as in-play betting, cash-out options, or bonus plays. In the decade since, the gambling scene has evolved — from mechanical slots in a handful of states to video slots in nearly all of them, and finally to sports betting on almost every smartphone in the US. The relationship between sports bettors and the growing industry that services them is characterised by a constant interplay, where bettors seek to maintain the ideal balance of dopamine hits, spend, and control, while the industry releases an endless stream of innovations and promotions to draw them deeper into their apps. They dangle special offers to keep time-on-app as high as possible, while draining bankrolls over time — hence the money thrown at new users to convince them to join the service: no one wants to stick around if they lose their wad all at once.

The “zone”, as my cousin describes it, is a state where bettors feel fully absorbed, achieving a balance between risk and enjoyment in which they are perfectly synchronised with the app. He, and enthusiasts like him, have noted that their betting experiences keep becoming “smoother” and more immersive. While data analysts behind the scenes make sophisticated predictions of potential value, this “zone” state keeps bettors anchored in the immediate excitement of the wager, which prevents them from making informed long-term decisions.

Predictably, the rate of pathological gambling in the US seems to be increasing. There was a 45% rise in calls, texts, and messages to the National Problem Gambling Helpline between 2021 and 2022. In New Jersey alone, the state’s Council on Compulsive Gambling’s help hotline has experienced a 200% jump over the past four years. We are staring into a potential epidemic with serious dangers: a report from the UK Gambling Commission revealed that problem gamblers are 12 times more likely to suffer from depression, and the suicide rate among these individuals is considerably higher than among the general population. The argument for ubiquitous, 24/7 sports betting often skates over these facts — as well as the financial costs of this supposedly revenue-boosting exercise. A recent study found that the annual social cost of gambling addiction in the United States is now around $7 billion.

This is partly because gambling addiction is hard to treat. OxyContin withdrawal can often be countered through medication-assisted therapies, while treatment for chronic gambling is slower. It primarily focuses on Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and self-help groups, the aim being to address the underlying thought processes that contribute to the addiction — the very same thought processes that the marketing engines of betting companies are working tirelessly to exploit.

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At the moment, the authorities don’t seem to be taking the dangers of sports betting seriously. The situation does bear a concerning resemblance to the beginning of the opioid crisis, where “deaths of despair” — fatalities related to drug overdose, alcohol, and suicide — were initially overlooked. For years, the addictive potential of OxyContin was ignored, leading to a massive public health crisis. Today, public service messages about “problem gambling” seem to be little more than lip service; state-mandated legal disclaimers are widely disregarded; and policy seems to be moving towards increasing permissiveness.

No one is talking about the best solution to this problem. Prohibition, with exceptions for legacy gambling states such as New Jersey and Nevada, could help reduce overall harm, even if it lowers overall state and federal tax revenues. This policy would aim to reduce the socially unproductive activities that tear apart lives, families, and savings; the focus would shift from profit to public health. Some compulsive individuals would continue to engage in illegal sports betting with seedy underworld bookies, of course, but that wouldn’t make the policy redundant. The era of alcohol Prohibition in the Twenties is often portrayed as a failure, because liquor was still available if you knew where to get it. But research has shown that alcohol consumption decreased significantly during this period, leading to a reduction in alcohol-related deaths and other social problems.

When I put the question of prohibition to my cousin, he shrugged. “It’s whatever,” he said, insisting that this is “just my life right now”. He claimed he would find other ways to “pass the time”, which hints at a deeper, perhaps policy-resistant malaise. Paul Goodman observed six decades ago in Growing Up Absurd that his generation had failed to encourage their kids to pursue a form of “leisure that is not a dismaying waste of a hundred million adults”. Instead, his peers had become television-addicted cogs in an immense system: apathetic and overworked drones unable to make life in America bearable for those coming of age in it. Today, the situation is starker: an ever-expanding class of perpetually online, underemployed defeatists and opted-out NEETs find themselves unable to conceptualise paying off student loans or buying homes. Indeed, there is a specific demographic that seems to be more attracted to sports betting: my cousin’s.

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By Joel Kotkin

In this absurd world, to repurpose the analysis of sociologist Max Weber, value-extracting tools like sports-betting apps exemplify forces of calculability and predictability — every game has a betting line, after all — while simultaneously enchanting gamblers with their slightly mysterious nature. Perhaps the underdog will pull through; perhaps my luck, so horrible in real life, is due to change. The suckers whose dollars fill the corporate coffers seem like a lost generation.

What my cousin, and others like him, yearn for is a life of both purpose and enchantment. He desires experiences to rival his grandfather’s submarining exploits in World War II. But societal shifts and technological advancements have created a landscape where opportunities for meaningful adventure, particularly for young men, often seem elusive. In the face of this reality, many, like my cousin, turn to the world of gambling as a means of filling the void. They take their chances repeatedly, hoping that, against the odds, they will find the sense of fulfilment they so desperately seek.

While the combination of drugs and sex is nothing new, chemsex as an underground cultural phenomenon became popularised in conjunction with the mainstreaming of online dating apps and HIV antiretroviral drugs in the late Eighties and Nineties. “Stigma towards methamphetamine from those who did not use it kept us united as a group… we called ourselves ‘chemsex club’,” wrote David Stuart, an HIV activist who claims to be one of the first to use the word. “We were united less by commonalities or friendship, but more so by our shared preference for chems.”

Most of the current discourse around chemsex comes from the public-health sector, which tends to frame it in a paradigm of risk and harm reduction. But a field of academic study sometimes called critical chemsex studies has recently emerged that aims to centre the practice instead within the realms of pleasure, intimacy and identity. One seminal text in this growing field is Pleasure Consuming Drugs by the writer Kane Race, which tackles the question of how drugs have come to mediate sex in the gay discourse.

In the book’s final chapter, “Exceptional Sex”, Race opens with a personal experience: one night in Sydney, he was approached in a video lounge by a guy who was rolling hard on ecstasy. The swooning stranger was too impaired to carry through the sexual encounter, and eventually staggered out of the place as they parted ways. Kane remained haunted by the encounter, returning to it over the years as he attempted to untangle the ethico-political tensions between autonomy and care. “What is my duty to this stranger? How do I enact it?” Kane writes. “Why does this guy put himself in this situation? Why does he feel he has to knock himself out to be here?”

Last autumn, I co-moderated a discussion in New York City on chemsex where we attempted to answer these very questions. Titled “Appetite, Euphoria, and the Inevitability of Coming Down,” the event was hosted by The Infernal Grove, a study group that meets once a month to pursue “an unsystematic structural analysis of drug use, addiction, and recovery (not necessarily in that order)”. In addition to Infernal Grove founders Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby, both professors at Syracuse University, my co-moderators included experimental filmmaker Devon Narine-Singh and multimedia artist Mikiki, whose chemsex-inspired video work was showing at the Whitney Museum that week in honour of World Aids Day.

That evening, about two dozen artists, filmmakers, writers, and other creative-types showed up to a darkened dance studio near Herald Square that doubled as our meeting room. Many more attended virtually through Zoom. A tall man with a blonde ponytail hopped on the piano in the corner, improvising a haunting welcome tune as we took our seats in a circle, smiling shyly as we introduced ourselves by way of unpacking our relationships to drugs. What was remarkable was the diversity of not just age, gender, and racial identities in the room, but the breadth of psychoactive experiences across the sober-using spectrum — from former heroin junkies to professionals who’ve never touched a drug, devout AA members to party-loving recreational ravers, underground psychedelic healers to sober-curious skaters.

This colourful cast of characters reminded me of Alcoholics Anonymous meetings I’ve attended in the past, where folks from all walks of life form unlikely alliances in pursuit of communal healing. In fact, Alcoholics Anonymous seems to be going through a contemporary rebrand; what David Foster Wallace described in Infinite Jest as a “goofy slapdash anarchic system of low-rent gatherings and corny slogans and saccharine grins and hideous coffee” is turning into a veritable hot scene. More sober-curious young people are showing up to meetings who aren’t hardcore alcoholics per se, perhaps sensing that AA can provide something increasingly rare these days: a sense of community, which is to say support without the strings of self-interest.

Yet, AA’s dogma of total drug abstinence does not appeal to everybody, and many are hungry for alternatives. New groups such as The Infernal Grove now cater to those seeking more sustainable relationships to substance use beyond the established orthodoxy of traditional sobriety paradigms. Despite the necessity of these alternative paths, I had been afraid that the chemsex discussion would be seen as problematic or triggering. Conversations about drugs usually play out as a moral drama of extremes: the anti-drug abstinence of AA vs the drug-positive enthusiasm of recreational settings. It is still so rare to enter a thought space where sobriety is discussed as more of a spectrum, where the ambiguous zones of druggie disinhibition can be untangled by people from all over the drug-sober continuum. It felt like the future.

“Honestly? This conversation is extremely triggering to me, but I’m also very excited to be here,” confessed someone who was in AA. Another person explained she had never touched a drug in her life, but was here because of an addict family member. The conversation turned to how recreational sex and drugs are not beyond the realm of care and attention; how even though drug practices often take place in a sub-intentional zone — “zoning out, getting distracted, losing yourself to something, cutting loose, getting carried away,” as Kane put it — they should not be exempt from insight and consideration.  Whenever we began to romanticise drugs too much, extolling the ways they can be used as quick escape routes from normative or oppressive societal demands, the sober people would chime in. “Sure, there is an element of surprise in drug use, but also, there isn’t,” one said quietly. “Maybe you imagine breaking through a barrier, but then you wake up hungover and nothing has changed.”

The conversation that night brought to light intersectional commonalities in the reasons why people of all stripes engage with chemsex — most commonly, it seems, to dissolve the culturally-conditioned sexual anxieties that can be so tricky to shake off while sober. Gay men and straight women alike spoke of letting go of body dysmorphia and shame while in the disinhibited state of chemically-enhanced euphoria, of exploring desires that the cultures of toxic masculinity and transmisogyny have impinged their abilities to see. “It is possible to look at the shadow without the shadow taking over,” said Mikiki, speaking on how the history that people carry often shapes their sexual inclinations. “Of course my desires are related to my trauma, but am I not allowed to explore that?”

Untangling the ways drugs can modulate pleasure, dampen the voices of our inner critics, and foster a kind of dark intimacy is still such a sensitive topic — and the movement to destigmatise chemsex is, in many ways, still in its infancy. As a woman, I am also not the traditional demographic that is typically “allowed” to even discuss this concept, let alone in these expansive terms. In fact, Stuart has accused folks who use this term but do not identify as gay men of cultural appropriation.

But like a growing number of academics in the field, I believe this framework should include a wider population — because as the discussion in New York suggested, many other social groups already engage in these practices for similar reasons as gay or bisexual men, yet are under-represented in current research. Adopting a broader and more intersectional lens to the study of drug use and sex could allow a deeper understanding of how the dense mesh of governing power structures both shape and curtail our desires. It could also help us to understand how this practice reflects the historical and social contexts from which they emerge — including the pharmaceuticalisation of sexuality, contemporary culture of endless self-enhancement, and crisis of intimacy under neoliberal individualism.

As the conversations around chemsex continue to evolve, perhaps our conceptions will also move beyond the current narrative of retreat and resilience. “I want a different conception of corporeal agency, where drugs don’t feature such an obvious and thrilling escape route,” Race wrote. “What would it take to engage more fully with the texture of these escapes? What possibilities of care, what new pleasures, what ethics, what multiplicities emerge?”

At long last, the Conservatives are clearing up the mess New Labour made of our gambling laws. In December 2020, the current government promised the most comprehensive revision of them since 2005 — to ensure they are “fit for the digital age”. The White Paper is reportedly due to be published at the end of this month.

When Blair’s permissive legislation came into force in 2007, it shifted gambling from being an activity that was tolerated to something that was actively promoted and marketed, in order to stimulate demand. The attempt to “modernise the regulation of gambling for today’s world” had apparently good intentions. In 2004, Blair demanded that opponents of his reforms “go and talk to the people of Blackpool who urgently need the regeneration” that he claimed would be brought about by resort-style super casinos. Gambling, in his eyes, was a vehicle for economic development. He did not represent public opinion in this respect; the vast majority opposed the introduction of more opportunities to gamble.

Gordon Brown ditched the plans for Las Vegas-style super-casinos when he became Prime Minister, meaning Blair’s “modernising” legislation achieved just three notable things: it legitimised Fixed Odds Betting Terminals (FOBTs) in betting shops, which had previously operated outside of the law. This gave bookmakers permission to offer machines of up to £100 every 20 seconds on every high street. It also loosened the restrictions on gambling advertising, while also removing the need to prove there was demand for a new gambling outlet in order to acquire a license to open one.

There were no provisions to adequately regulate gambling websites based offshore, which accounts for practically all of them. The justifying logic was that the gambling took place where the server was located: people accessing these sites from Britain were supposedly gambling in Gibraltar or the Isle of Man. This ludicrous loophole enabled massive betting brands to base themselves in tax havens, advertise to consumers in Britain and build their businesses free of tax or proper regulation — without even providing jobs in the country it had market access to. Britain was exporting billions of pounds every year to these companies, and all we got in return was a massive upswing in the most harmful effects of gambling.

Public Health England (PHE) estimates there to be at least one gambling related suicide a day, with gambling harms impacting not just finances but relationships, employment prospects, mental wellbeing and physical health. PHE calculate the resulting cost to government to be in excess of £1.2 billion a year. YouGov’s polling of 18,000 people suggested that 2.8% suffered from a gambling addiction — scaled up across the UK, this is the equivalent of 1.4 million people, with a further 1.5 million at-risk.

Labour did very little to rectify some of the more obvious downsides of its gambling legislation. It wasn’t until 2014, under the Tory-Lib Dem coalition government, that a “point of consumption” tax was levied on all gambling profits derived from this country. Sadly, it couldn’t be backdated to 2005. Many of the firms remain offshore to this day, which means they still don’t pay UK corporation tax. The coalition government also stipulated that online gambling firms had to be licensed by the Gambling Commission if they wanted to advertise in Britain — a totally obvious regulation New Labour never bothered to insist on.

True, it was Labour that formed the Gambling Commission, but it did a pretty poor job of it. The regulatory body has been criticised by the National Audit Office, the Public Accounts Committee, the House of Lords Gambling Industry Select Committee and MPs from all parties — the running theme being that the Gambling Commission has been “outgunned” by the sector it’s supposed to have a handle on.

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“Light touch” regulation doesn’t work in online gambling. As even the most ardent neoliberal would recognise, the sector cuts across the logic of the free market: it is a win or lose contract between the consumer and the vendor. Given the unlevel playing field between individual and corporation, regulation that upholds consumer protection has to be rigorous.

Yet the Gambling Commission has seen its role as to facilitate the industry’s growth. Consumer protection has been abysmal. Even free bets aren’t free, with gambling firms insisting on obscene so-called “wagering requirements” before people can withdraw their winnings. There have been many cases of people being credited a bonus when they deposit funds into a gambling account, only to find that they are unable to withdraw their winnings unless they bet the total value of what they deposited 99 times — and on products like slots, which have a fixed margin, meaning it’s impossible to win. The Competition and Markets Authority called this “a con”, but the Gambling Commission still permits these unfair terms and conditions.

It also fails to protect the most vulnerable. Online gambling firms derive 86% of their profit from the 5% of people who are addicted or at-risk. In “VIP schemes”, personal account managers encourage people, including those known to be addicted, to gamble as much as possible. Firms profile their customers using third party data and betting history, in order to tailor marketing to gambling addicts who will spend the most. The accounts of gamblers who consistently beat the bookmakers are closed or restricted.

And the most addictive product, online slots, is persistently promoted. Our outdated gambling laws mean there are no limits to stakes online as there are on machines, meaning people are able to gamble thousands in seconds. More than half of the sector’s £7 billion annual profits come from online slots, which are more harmful than any other product — 45% of those who engage with them become problem or at-risk gamblers.

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Compared to the revenues of gambling companies, fines from the regulator are paltry. When they are levied, companies simply see them as a cost of doing business. 888, which is in the process of acquiring William Hill, confirmed that the latter has set aside £15 million in anticipation of a fine. (William Hill is the subject an ongoing license review related to social responsibility and money laundering obligations.) 888 has agreed to pay £2.2 billion for William Hill’s betting shops and its two million online customers based in Britain.

Having unleashed this hellscape, Labour sought to make amends under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership by proposing to review online gambling and to cut the maximum stake on FOBTs from £100 to £2 a spin. But it was Tory Minister Tracey Crouch who delivered the latter policy in 2019, which has led to a 50% reduction in people citing these machines when they present for gambling addiction treatment. This correlates with a 40% reduction in revenue from FOBTs, with no commensurate uptick in other products. Police call outs to betting shops were also down by 38% in the year after the stake cut was enacted.

Building on the success of this, Boris Johnson’s government introduced the ongoing gambling review. But while its scope chimes with policies proposed by Tom Watson when he served under Corbyn, the Labour Party is currently very quiet on the issue.

Watson proposed a series of radical reforms to gambling laws, to bring them into the digital age. This included the introduction of a Gambling Ombudsman to improve consumer protections and the requirement that online slots, like physical machines, have stake limits. He also suggested forcing all gambling companies to reapply for their licenses, and a statutory levy on gambling firms to fund research, education and treatment. This agenda has been adopted practically wholesale by the Conservatives. Since leaving Parliament, Watson has joined as an adviser to the board of Flutter, the betting giant that owns SkyBet and Paddy Power.

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He is part of a trend. Former Labour MPs Michael Dugher and Anna Turley have respectively become CEO and consultant to the Betting and Gaming Council. Former Ed Balls adviser Gary Follis also works there. Meanwhile, Keir Starmer’s refusal to publish donors to his leadership campaign until after the contest had concluded meant contributions from Peter Coates, the founder of Bet365, couldn’t be taken into account by party members until it was too late. Perhaps Labour’s ongoing silence on the issue of gambling reform is the price paid by a cash-strapped party not wanting to upset too many billionaires who might be able to bail them out come election time.

It won’t help them win votes, though. YouGov’s tracker consistently shows that over 60% of people feel unfavourably towards the gambling industry, while just 7% have a favourable attitude. There is also huge public support for limiting stakes for online slots, and for affordability checks when someone loses more than £100 in a month, which would prevent harm in the middle of a cost of living crisis by curtailing escalating losses in accordance with what’s affordable to an individual. Polling from Survation found support for these reforms to cut across geographical lines, with substantial appeal in “red wall” areas. The pollster also found that 70% of Tory MPs agree that unaffordable losses should be prevented, 64% agreed that gambling should be more regulated, and 68% agreed with introducing stake limits online.

In other words, while Labour remains silent, gambling reform is actively supported by Boris Johnson’s backbenchers. It could therefore become a populist dividing line, putting the government on the side of the public while the opposition appeases offshore corporations. And if Labour does choose to sit idly on the sidelines while the Tories rectify Blair’s mistakes, it will be clear to the public that no lessons have been learned by a party seemingly more interested in working with the gambling lobby than challenging an industry that’s exploiting the nation.

Blackpool is odd: a suicide on morphine. Shops sell fake breasts and dildos made of sugar, or mobility scooters and junk food side by side. The pavements are smeared with filth. And yet, when you think all the ugliness in the world has gathered, you will find a ballroom dancer in black tie stealing down a street in patent shoes. Brand, too, was made for Blackpool. Destruction, and renewal.

Brand’s tour, which ends today at the Brixton Academy, is a display, and the meditation is the most important part: the part that is most meaningful to him. It’s the reveal of a show he calls “33” because he thought that was the age at which he would die. What is public meditation for a man as noisy and self-destructive as Brand: health signalling? Performative recovery? WELLNESS in lights? Brand is myriad — actor, polemicist, activist, comic — his most dominant self is former heroin addict. Though he is almost 20 years sober, addiction can chase a man his whole life, and terrify him with a glimpse of what he was. And yet, the man thinks, if he can meditate in front of a thousand strangers in Blackpool, he must be safe. It’s a truism that a comic needs an audience more than an audience needs a comic, but it’s truer of Brand than of anyone. He needs us. He says so. “How much attention does one man need?” he asks. “We don’t yet know. We haven’t found the upper threshold”.

I am not here for Brand: not really. I have read his memoirs, and I feel I know everything he is prepared to tell us, and himself. I couldn’t get through his polemic Revolution, which he wrote at his wealthy girlfriend’s country house. His childhood was broken. He thought his mother’s recurring cancer was his fault, and his father, on holiday, ordered prostitutes for them both in a room they shared. He almost killed himself, and then didn’t. He is candid about everything except his anger: the kind of addict who is so ashamed he tells you everything. He is a very typical comedian in some ways: a man seeking his father’s affirmation from the stage. He very obviously finds it agonising when hecklers interrupt him. He must be heard. He is a very typical addict too: softness and savagery twinned.

What interests me most about Brand is not him, though he is charismatic. It is his reach, the people who come to see him, and what they can tell us about political alienation. If he was a movie star in 2010 — he is an under-rated actor, not least by himself, but he’s less afraid of his rage on screen — he is now a YouTube demagogue flirting with conspiracism and posting to 5.65 million followers. Typical posts are: “So…Trump was RIGHT About Clinton & Russia Collusion!!”; “You’ve Been LIED To About Why Ukraine War Began”; “Can We REALLY Trust Vaccine Fact-Checkers??!”

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The doors open at 5pm. I watch them gather. I would call his constituency either fragile and seeking, or angry and untrusting. The first group, many of whom have risen from a sickbed, admire his personal transformation — his recovery from heroin addiction and the book he then wrote, ripped off from AA’s 12 Steps: Freedom from our Addictions. You aren’t supposed to monetise AA, but he has a very personal definition of humility. “You feel he really does care about people,” says one woman. “He’s been through so many things himself and he’s still keeping going. He still comes out for people.”

The second group admire his YouTube channel which segues from mistrust of the Establishment to disinformation and alienation. They ask me who I write for because they do not trust the press. “He knows exactly what’s going on,” says one woman. “He just makes people aware [of corruption]. I wouldn’t vote for anyone. There’s no one worth voting for.”

I meet a superfan videoing herself by the stage door. Social media is important: as if by broadcasting, you will be listened to. It’s one of his contradictions: Brand says that if we were forced to carry iPhones we would smash them up ourselves. Yet he depends on them. “Much as he is an intellectual,” she says, “he teaches you in a nice way and actually I’d like to rip his pants off.” Her friend likes “his videos about conspiracy things. Well, they aren’t conspiracies. They are conspiracies for six months and then they are facts.”

For another man, it’s a modern political — or apolitical — encounter: he and Russell found each other through algorithm. “He’s saying the right thing,” he says. “A lot of the information that Russell finds is what I’ve found. Covid is an excuse for where they want to take us. It’s all through fear.” He fears tyranny, this man, but another contradiction is that Brand, who despises conventional political practises, will take him closer to it. “All political parties are the same”, he says. “He [Brand] manages to channel anger or discontent in a positive direction.”

I sit in the gods, which are like a velvet cliff edge, next to a serene sex therapist and her Italian husband. She is disappointed that Jeremy Corbyn is no longer leader of the Labour Party. She has no plan to vote in a general election: she thinks there is no point. I look up her constituency, which is a Tory/Labour marginal. Her vote does matter. But Brand, despite his personal message of empowerment, would have his followers more disempowered. It’s the one thing I can’t bear about him: his anti-voting message. It’s fine for a rich man to shrug off politics. He doesn’t need them. He can invent his own, and he does. He is not so very different from the men he despises. They lay false trails.

The show is in four parts. The first is pandemic-themed stand-up, and it is good stand-up. It’s self-aware, and therefore bearable. He mocks the audience and himself. During the clap for carers, he tells us, he was a medical worker so the applause would be directed at him. He collects testimony of pandemic-themed shame from the audience — he’s very interested in shame — and tells a story about a man who wiped his bum on a face mask, and a woman who drunk wine in a Zoom work meeting, and pretended it was tea. When he gets to the audience member who masturbated to something under every letter in the Pornhub alphabet, he invites us to shout the words: tea-bagging; wanking; zebra.

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The second part speaks to his YouTube audience, and it’s a lie: that you can be more politically engaged by placing your faith not in your democratically elected politicians but in him. Love is not a mandate — if it is even love, rather than the narcotic of attention and praise — but the root of this is clear enough: he didn’t trust his father. “I don’t like being told what to do,” he says. “I start there”. This sounds like his most authentic self. “I start at ‘fuck off’.”

“The system wants you hypnotised and stupefied,” he says, as if government is only a meeting of Spectre. “We are told that we are participants in our democracy. That we are adults. That we matter. That our voice will be heard. That we would be able to organise society through the ballot box because you are adults and your voice matters. That is one of the myths of our time.”

Brand is weirdly Manichean. He appears to divide the world into two parts, and they are solid, and immutable. The evil are evil, and will remain so. The good are here, as if buying a ticket to “33” is a kind of protective spell. Sometimes he tends to Luddism and talks as if he would like to live in some kind of idealised village, or circle, and why wouldn’t he? He’s strong, and a man.

The third part is the hug part, and it’s the weirdest part. Having divested us of the desire for representative democracy he becomes a healer. It begins in the interval. He jumps down from the stage, and waits there, and people fill the aisles to hug him. It looks intensely silly, but they are moved by him. I wonder if this is the replacement — and true destination — for his sex addiction: intimacy, which other people have paid for. (I return, in my mind, to his father and the prostitutes.) I wonder if this is the real point of the exercise. They come, one after the after, for hugs of all kinds — swift, flirty, soulful — and photographs, and a combination of the two: the soulful hug selfie.

At the end of the show, he puts on a blue pointed party hat, like a wizard, and leaves the auditorium through the main exits, to hug people in the street outside. I notice he has a personal photographer and videographer: a slender man in black with a professional expression who follows him and who records every interaction. Does Brand archive them, and look back on them: on every piece of love? People cry in his arms. He whispers to them. He takes a picture of himself with us all behind him, like an army. It’s so obviously his new addiction there is barely anything left to say: a delusion into which he carries others, by the sheer force of his charisma, and his silly pointy hat. And he won’t know where to stop. He never does. And then he goes back inside for a mass meditation. The audience at Lancashire’s biggest theatre close their eyes and pray.

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At the end, when he has hugged everyone who waited, I listen to them praise him. “You can’t have control over what’s going on in the world, but you can have control over yourself,” says one. It’s a doctrine of renewal, but so atomised as to be meaningless. “He’s got that attention to the working class,” says another. “He is like us,” says the third, “a free thinker [who] cares about everyone in the world, not ground down by politicians and big corporate companies. He cares about individual people.”

But does he? I think he is using them, and, worse, they let him. Brand is another symptom of our alienation: of the fracturing of the institutions that we need. We will see more, and different Brands in future, as the centre falls away. They will blow in on the wind. His doctrine of disengagement will change nothing for them. Will they notice? Will they care? I wonder if, in the end, they have confused politics with love. Or, rather, magic.

The writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, for instance, wondered whether “people with guns” should even be responding to mental health calls. Pilot projects were launched all over the country to replace police with civilian response teams for 911 calls involving mental health, drugs and homelessness. Congresswoman Katie Porter introduced a bill to pay states and cities to set up more such units, while her colleague Cori Bush introduced a bill that does much the same. In many cities, “decriminalisation”, long a rallying cry for progressive critics of policing, became standard operating procedure.

The activists are right that police cannot be the “solution” to mental illness and drug abuse, which overlap in about 50% of cases. But the programmes developed to replace law enforcement have had mixed results. That’s because in many of America’s progressive enclaves, the problem isn’t that it’s the police who are responding to these emergencies. It’s that there is little the police can legally do once they get there.

Lejon Butler is a tall, lean, black man who lives in Rodeo, a bedroom community in the North Bay Area. As a kid in the East Bay in the Eighties, he recalls going to school and being taught to “Just Say No” to drugs, then coming home and smelling the familiar chemical odour of freebased cocaine wafting through the air.

Lejon’s mother, Martin, who is now deceased, and his stepfather, Craig, were drug addicts. But Craig was such a high-functioning addict that he was able to conceal his use from his family for years. He ran a successful landscaping business while getting high every day, even trading services with one of his clients for Oxycontin. But a few years ago, he overdosed. After that, dementia set in.

By now Craig was living in Richmond, a working-class residential city in the East Bay. A few months before Lejon’s mother passed away, Craig had started to become violent towards her. When she died, in April 2021, he fell into a deep depression. He became aggressive and unpredictable. He threatened to kill his grandson with a samurai sword. He put a dagger to his own stomach and threatened to gut himself. On January 5 this year, he started a fire in his kitchen and then refused to leave the house, acting like nothing had happened. His family called 911.

The responding officer was Brian Lande, who, as part of the county’s Mental Health Evaluation Team, specialises in handling these sorts of calls. Officer Lande had spoken to Craig only a few days earlier. He makes a point of checking in on people with mental illness and addiction issues when they’re not in crisis. That way he’s able to get to know them as they really are, and not just when they’re sick.

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When Lande arrived at Craig’s house, Lejon, his wife, and his niece Dnaya were already outside. Lande intended to put a psychiatric hold on Craig, which would allow a hospital to keep him for up to 72 hours. He also recommended that Dnaya fill out an application for a restraining order, which might help persuade the hospital to keep him there instead of just releasing him within a few hours.

The family had been through this drill many times before. Craig fell neatly through a gap in the system. He had dementia, but that didn’t count as a “mental illness” for the purposes of institutionalisation. He threatened his relatives’ lives, but he rarely actually attacked them, so the criminal justice system wasn’t inclined to take him seriously. “Someone’s going to have to get killed for them to do anything,” Lejon told me.

An ambulance pulled up, and the EMTs walked over to get a rundown from the cops. Then they went inside with two of the officers and came out with Craig on a gurney. Craig is in his seventies, and looks, if anything, older. He’s a small, stout Japanese-American man with sheet-white hair and an unkempt beard and moustache. His belligerence with the family stopped as soon as the first responders arrived. Suddenly he was compliant and reasonable.

This, according to Lejon, was a tactic of his stepfather’s. “He’s a very intelligent man,” Lejon said. His antics cease the moment he’s interacting with the authorities. Craig was deemed stable and released back to the family that evening, at which point the chaos flared right back up again.

It’s a pattern Officer Lande has seen time and again. “People have crises, they go to the hospital, they get stabilised,” he said. “They agree to a treatment plan. Then there’s no follow-up.” He continued: “Having a system of coercive mental healthcare that’s limited to emergency psychiatric crises that’s wedded strictly to voluntary participation — you’re condemning people to not getting the level of care they need. You’re condemning them to never get better.”

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Craig is drug-addicted and psychologically debilitated, but he at least has a house to sleep in and a family to keep tabs on him. Hundreds of thousands of Americans suffering mental illness and substance addiction lack even that basic structure to their lives. In recent months, we’ve seen what happens when the most violent among them are left to their demons: America’s cities have been struck by a series of grisly, unprovoked murders of women committed by homeless men.

The deceased in these homicides were not the only victims. The acutely mentally ill and drug-addicted are prisoners of their sicknesses, and despite all the money we’ve thrown at homelessness, our policies have amounted to a wholesale abandonment of these broken people to their grim fates.

In San Francisco, that chronic failure has become the city’s official policy. An entire downtown neighbourhood, right in the heart of the city, has been effectively ceded to drug dealers, addicts and the mentally ill, all in the name of compassion. Users in the Tenderloin smoke fentanyl and shoot heroin on the sidewalks in broad daylight. When it rains, the train station there becomes a huge underground shooting gallery.

Following the spectacular failure of the War on Drugs, the prevailing ideology in the addiction treatment world became “harm reduction”. Harm reduction aims to respect the rights and dignity of drug addicts by destigmatising their drug use; to minimise the social harms that accompany drug addiction such as crime, incarceration and discrimination; to save lives by providing safeguards against overdoses; and to offer detoxification but not to require it as a condition for social services and subsidies. The motto of harm reduction is “meeting people where they’re at”, rather than compelling abstinence as a one-size-fits-all-solution.

But the approach has its critics, who view it as well-intentioned but ineffective. “There are aspects of harm reduction that I support, and there are aspects that blur the lines between harm reduction and enabling,” said Tom Wolf, a former addict in San Francisco. “The most important thing is to have a full continuum of care that focuses on recovery, not an indefinite maintenance of one’s addiction.”

“Out of thousands of people I saw maybe two get clean,” said Ginny Burton, a former addict in Seattle, describing her work as a case manager employing the harm reduction model. “What I’ve seen actually work, and experienced myself, is separation. Separate the person from the destructive environment. Maintain that separation long enough for the person to get clarity. Then implement services based on priority of need.”

This is how she got clean. “Thank God I was arrested,” she said. But in cities like Seattle and San Francisco, the enforcement policies that resulted in her arrest don’t exist anymore. “If I was loaded today, I wouldn’t be able to pull myself out,” she said. “I wouldn’t be arrested.”

Tom Ostly, who was a prosecutor under the former San Francisco District Attorney, agrees that the state’s coercive powers are what are needed to jolt drug-addicted people into making the commitment to go clean. He once prosecuted a man who had walked up to a random man on the street, punched him in the face and broke his nose. The whole assault was caught on video. With his priors, the defendant was facing 12-15 years in prison.

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It turned out the man’s son had died, and the grief had turned the father into a drug addict. The day of the assault was the anniversary of his son’s death. He had been on a self-destructive spiral. Facing 15 years in prison, he agreed to go to intensive drug rehab instead, where he received counselling for PTSD. He’s now taking classes to be a drug counsellor and will soon graduate from college.

Those kinds of prosecutions just don’t happen anymore in San Francisco, where it’s considered more humane to allow people to continue killing themselves with drugs than to force them to stop. “The current administration lets everyone out and gives them no services,” said Ostly. “It’s bullshit.”

Jail is a lousy place to get clean, and drug use in and of itself should not be treated as a crime. Those lessons have come across loud and clear from the failed War on Drugs. But in rejecting the politics of mass incarceration, we’ve also thrown out the very idea of coercion. And without that, we’re empty-handed in the struggle against addiction and the rampant crime that it engenders.

Drug addiction itself is coercive. Giving an addict the “choice” to continue to use or to voluntarily get clean is as illusory as pushing someone off a roof and giving them the choice to either fall or fly. The current approach in cities such as San Francisco, Officer Lande said, “assumes people exercise full voluntary volition over their behaviour, and they don’t”. The decision to get clean has to be as non-optional as an addict’s “choice” to continue using. It has to be forced.

That doesn’t have to mean jail — in fact, it shouldn’t. Ginny was incarcerated repeatedly, but she finally got clean not through the criminal justice system but through her diversion to drug court and mandated rehabilitation. Nevertheless, coercion was an indispensable element in that successful intervention. The certainty of consequences is what finally broke through the fog of addiction.

“You don’t want to overly criminalise people,” said Officer Lande. “But you have to have some non-carceral way. Some judicial process beyond what the current system has.”

“Right now it’s very black or white,” he continued. “You’re either a psychotic or you’re not. You’re either a grave danger to others or you’re not. We don’t have anything in that grey area. We just have to wait until people are hitting rock bottom before we can do something.”

I stopped drinking because I knew I would die, and I wasn’t ready. I went to AA, clinging on to a willingness, if not a pleasure, to live, and recited the dogma. Jonathan Franzen said his friend David Foster Wallace, who killed himself, was so terrified of what he had seen of his id while using, it decimated his trust in his lovability. I understand this perfectly. I know I became a writer to form myself, but I wonder if I invented the person writing these words to disguise the monster that is my true self. I am 20 years sober, and this is my settled state. Fear.

Some addicts think critically about their condition: or they can try. Carl Erik Fisher, a child of alcoholics, is a psychiatrist and he was, during his training, addicted — a phrase that has no settled meaning — to alcohol and pharmaceuticals. He was, “greedily grasping after a new identity for myself”. Fisher used, denied, hallucinated, and collapsed. He believes that denial, a crucial and hitherto mysterious element of addiction, allows the addict to lie more effectively to others, and this makes perfect sense to me. He was tasered by the police in his flat in New York City, “dangerously near the peak of my heart”. He recovered, in the sense that I have: he stopped using. Instead, he wrote The Urge.

It’s a seeking, of course: an attempt to make sense of his life. It is a search for reason because he lost his, and it is as diffuse as his using was simple: just give me more of it. The Urge contains history, memoir, science, miscellanea, literature and polemic. There is a mountain of information out there about drug use — if only we could process it meaningfully — and Fisher read it all, amid his sullen, yet hopeful, quest to return to psychiatry.

It asserts the primacy of the psychiatrist over the primacy of the addict. It is Fisher’s internal conversation with footnotes, and the reader is the listener and, in my case, the patient. Addiction need not, he says — primarily, I suspect, to himself — be a mystery filled with fear.

I found using drugs a return to early childhood state because the feelings I remember are those of childhood: wild freedom; wild hunger; wild sensibility; wild terror. They are life, magnified, and life runs out. Drug use is both a metaphor and a paradigm of the human tension that exists in our consciousness: between the ego and the id (if you are a doctor) and between the sacred and the profane (if you are a priest). It is a truism that they expand our consciousness. For the addict who cannot stop taking them, it expands too much. Then — I speak for me — it dramatically contracts, and that is when I went insane.

But the terror itself moves from the internal life of the addict to society itself. Almost no one here is rational or in control. Most people do not become like Fisher and I, because drugs, he writes, drugs “are not ‘addictive’ in themselves”. They are not the draught of a demon king, then; they need a social hinterland to flourish, which we summon glibly and continually. “Pray for her,” my friend was told when he rang 999 to say I had collapsed with alcoholism, as if medicine had nothing to offer me because I was peculiarly cursed. Yet there is no definitive personality type for a drug addict and no evidence that addiction is genetically determined. Of those who become addicted — those who continue to use long after it is pleasurable and, as AA says, “unto the gates of death” — most get better.

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There is a predictable narrative to drug use. A drug is discovered and sold — morphine, cocaine, alcohol, cannabis, oxycontin, LSD. There is an epidemic, a panic, and a repression: a very metaphor for the id itself. Drug epidemics, Fisher writes, are chiefly a response to “social wounding”, which occur when familiar structures fall apart, and drugs are too-easily available. Native Americans suffered a drug epidemic as their lands were stolen. So did the women of Gin Lane,  as the population moved from country to town. America is suffering one now, chiefly among whites without a college degree. According to Fisher, there were 150,000 “deaths of despair” in America in 2017. Individual recovery, he says, should not be exempt from social change, but that seems remote.

Those with a full life do not need a fantasy one; or at least, not just a fantasy one. The addicted need treatment and societal change but rather we offer criminalisation. This didn’t happen to Fisher or to me, of course. We are both white and middle class. Yet drug laws are used to criminalise and intimidate vast swathes of society. The War on Drugs, Fisher writes, was really a war on some people who use drugs. White women suck down legal pills in their homes, or drunk themselves insensible and, though they suffer, they do so in comfort. Billie Holliday was hounded to her death by racist prohibitionists.

To wound yourself with drugs you need easy access to them, and we have that: the alcohol industry is worth $1.5 trillion and few of its profits go towards rehabilitation. It’s cheaper to punish the addict: for the manufacturers, at least, who through lobbyists, push the fault onto the individual, and the cost onto the state. Four disparate African nations, Fisher writes, have drug policies drafted by alcohol salesman, and I find that more debasing than anything in Thomas de Quincy’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater.

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Writers tend to make addiction a mystery too thrilling to be solved. Who wouldn’t rather read Hunter S Thompson than ponder the carnage the illegal drugs trade has inflicted on the people of Mexico? The Temperance movement — a drug panic in response to a drug epidemic — commissioned novels like Ten Nights in a Bar-Room and What I Saw There. It was the second best-selling book of the time, after Tom Sawyer. Walt Whitman was paid to write Franklin Evans, a tale of a boy lost to alcohol, which he did, in three days, while drunk. I laughed at this.

Fisher asks: is addiction part of me, or is something apart from the self? Mexican American drug users in southern California, he says, speak of the “tecato gusano” – an indestructible junkie worm that brings evil on the innocent. Addiction, whatever it is, is not boring. It is a battle between good and evil, and within you: something pleasingly self-important for the essentially alienated and prone. I thought of it as a female demon, which now I think was only a strategy to protect the non-demon part: to make her stronger. It was a coping mechanism. I knew it was me. I read Fisher, and I can accept that it was me. Even so, his question is a better way of phrasing the question we have asked for as long as we have used drugs, but have never answered: whose fault is it?

The useful but disappointing answer is we don’t yet know. And perhaps we should stop asking. Perhaps it doesn’t matter. Perhaps it isn’t even a fault. To panic at the altered state of the drug user — to criminalise, to prohibit, to write cautionary, overblown memoir — is to panic at the essential state of being human. And I suspect, that is where the real fear lies.

You can even be treated for it. You can get specialist treatment at a dedicated NHS clinic. South Korea has gaming “rehab centres”. Gaming addicts have “lost interest in their own lives” and “​​do not feel the passing of time in the real world”, according to a doctor who treats the condition there.

But it is far from clear that “gaming disorder” or gaming addiction exists, at least as a well-defined condition separate from any other compulsive behaviour; and there is a hint that the WHO has made the decision under political pressure from China and other countries. 

The WHO says that its decision was based on “reviews of available evidence and reflects a consensus of experts from different disciplines”. But when you look at WHO-commissioned evidence, the studies are completely wild. This review of the literature carried out on behalf of the WHO found that “the prevalence of IGD ranged from 0.21-57.5% in general populations”. This one was rather less crazy, but the studies it was aggregating found that between 0.16% and 14% of people had the disease. Another found 0.7% to 25%.

For comparison, about 8% of people who take opioids in the US end up addicted. So video games might, if we take those numbers at face value, be several times as addictive as opioid painkillers, which seems… unexpected. Or, equally, it could barely exist at all.

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“The problem,” says Dr Pete Etchells, a psychologist at Bath Spa University and author of Lost in a Good Game, “is that depending on your definition, your understanding of who has or doesn’t have this disease varies wildly in the literature”. That is because, he says, “we don’t know what it looks like, we don’t know what it is, and we don’t know what its unique features are that separate it from other behavioural or impulse disorders”.

Obviously, some people have problems with playing video games too much. You will have read stories about South Korean teenagers wetting themselves rather than getting up from their gaming chair, or people developing blood clots. But rare anecdotes don’t tell us much about the wider problem, and people can develop problematic relationships with almost every form of enjoyable human activity — with exercise, with sex, with tanning.

The question is whether there is something unique to gaming which causes these problems. Dr Andy Przybylski, a psychologist at the Oxford Internet Institute, has worked on gaming addiction in the past, and argues that — as far as we know — there isn’t. He carried out a study in 2017, which looked at people who were classified as “addicted” to gaming at one time, and checked whether they still were six months later. If gaming “addiction” was comparable to, say, tobacco, gambling, or alcohol addiction, then you’d expect that most people would be. 

But as it turned out, of the 6,000 people recruited, none of them met the diagnostic criteria for gaming disorder at both the beginning and the end of the study. That is, no one stayed “addicted” for six months. Dr Netta Weinstein, another author of the study, told me at the time that it’s “a question of whether a diagnosis is stable”, and it suggests that internet gaming probably isn’t an addiction like smoking or alcohol.

Przybylski, then, was surprised to see that the WHO decided to classify IGD as a separate illness, and has been asking the WHO whether or not they have any more evidence. Recently he received an email which said: “It is challenging, if not impossible, to document and communicate through WHO channels the rationale and justification for each decision.” 

But obviously you can prove, or at least provide strong and convincing evidence for, the existence of most illnesses, and the WHO could very straightforwardly point to that evidence. There’s a reason why Covid denialists are considered crackpots and cranks: because it’s pretty straightforward to develop diagnostic tests which show you the presence of a virus, and you can tell that the presence of that virus correlates strongly with a particular set of negative health outcomes.

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With psychiatric conditions, of course, the picture is often messier. You can’t swab someone and see if they have depression; you can only ask them a series of questions, or observe their behaviour. But there are established criteria by which to do so, and when you test someone with one twice, a week apart, they usually give the same answer.

But with gaming disorder, as we’ve seen, that doesn’t seem to be the case. So the WHO creating a new diagnostic category is a big deal. It gives clinicians licence to treat the disorder, and — perhaps more importantly — it tells people, and parents, that gaming disorder is a real thing. “It’s a very emotive topic,” says Etchells. “If you say suddenly that games can be addictive, so many people play them that that can be a really scary thing. We already know that parents are scared and concerned. Throwing it out there without any explanation or caveating, I feel it’s quite irresponsible.” He worries that the WHO decision will pathologise normal, healthy behaviour, like playing video games after work to destress.

The question, then, is why has the WHO done it? They didn’t need to; the American Psychiatric Association hasn’t yet added it to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and the Royal College of Psychiatrists hasn’t formally recognised it. 

One possible answer is that the WHO has been pressured into doing it. Professor Geoffrey Reed, a medical psychologist at Columbia University and senior project officer for the WHO’s ICD-11, told another psychologist by email in 2016 that the WHO was “under enormous pressure, especially from Asian countries” to include IGD.

(I’ve asked both Professor Reed and the WHO about this; the WHO has declined to comment at short notice, and if Prof Reed gets back to me, I’ll include any response here.)

There has been huge concern about video gaming in several east Asian countries. In Japan and South Korea, there have been years of worries about the “hikikomori”, young adults who shut themselves off from society, living in their parents’ homes, never leaving, eating delivery food, watching Netflix, browsing the internet and playing games. The phenomenon has also been widely reported in China, Hong Kong and Singapore. These countries are huge consumers and producers of video games, and notably of spectator e-sports, and people have been quick to blame video games for the condition.

And this has led to a widespread reaction which looks suspiciously like a moral panic. South Korea banned under-16s from playing internet games between the hours of midnight and 6am in 2011 to improve children’s sleep, a decision that was only overturned in August. Etchells says that research showed the ban was counterproductive — it increased children’s time on the internet and “had no meaningful effect on increasing sleep”. China recently enacted an even more stringent law, banning under-18s from using internet games between 10pm and 8am. 

Societies are entitled to ban anything they want, of course. But the concern is that they’re hiding behind science to do it. “It’s an extreme example of people pathologising things they find distasteful,” says Dr Stuart Ritchie, a psychologist at King’s College London. “Some people find video games distasteful — they don’t like the idea of kids shooting at each other. But you have to ask what the quality of the evidence is.” Przybylski agrees: “If people want to create rules, they should create rules. But if you’re saying it’s based on evidence or science, you should show your notes.”

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“We’re talking about very complex generational issues, and trying to explain them by looking at one simple factor, and that’s never the case,” says Etchells. If there was a simple causal link, he points out, given the billions of users, you’d expect to see enormous effects, not weird ambiguous trends in messy data.

The trouble is, as Przybylski says, that mental health provision is poorly resourced and expensive. If a teenager is diagnosed with a mental health condition in the UK, he says, “they can age out of being a teenager before you’re seen by a psychiatrist”. Video game addiction, on the other hand, is shiny and exciting, and it sounds cheap, because it seems like there’s an off switch — just turn off the console!

But it comes at a cost. For one thing, even if hikikomori is a real problem in China and other countries, and even if a causal link can be shown to video games, it makes no sense to create a global diagnosis for a highly region-specific problem. For another, it frightens gamers and their parents, perhaps unnecessarily, and gives cover to any old quack or charlatan who wants to promise to treat “gaming addiction” at their expensive clinic, despite there being no clear diagnostic criteria and no agreed treatment.

Most of all, though, there’s a reputational risk for the WHO. “It’s putting its credibility on the line,” says Przybylski. It’s supposed to be a neutral scientific body: it cannot be seen to be making scientific decisions for political reasons. For the last two years, it’s faced criticism of cosying up to China over Covid – praising the Chinese government for transparency and for “setting a new standard for outbreak response” even as it censured doctors for trying to spread the word about the disease. If it transpires that the WHO has put gaming disorder into the ICD-11 as a result of political pressure, whether from China or elsewhere, its credibility will be even more undermined.

The academic community and the WHO have “really dropped the ball” on gaming disorder, says Etchells, rather than being brave enough to stop, take stock, and work out whether it really exists at all as a coherent concept. “I can see how it’s difficult for the WHO to go against these strong opinions, but they need to,” he says. “They can’t come up with disease classifications built on politics.”

This week, the roll call of substance abuse fatalities during the SNP’s period of government is set to hit 10,000. That’s more than the number of people killed in Hurricane Katrina, or who perished as the Titanic went down. More than those killed at Pearl Harbor, in 9/11 or during the 7/7 London or Manchester arena attacks — more than British troops killed at the charge of the Light Brigade. It is more than the number of people killed in the Blantyre mining disaster or the Dunblane Massacre or the Lockerbie bombing. In fact, it is more than all ten of these events combined. And yet, while each of these losses of life have been faithfully recorded in our history books, there has been no equivalent recognition or examination of the current unfolding tragedy.

Why? Because of the people who are dying. According to the national figures, people in the most deprived parts of the country were 18 times more likely to have a drug-related death than those in the least deprived. The poor. The marginalised. The people who don’t vote.

But these people aren’t just statistics. Every death is a person with a story and loved ones mourning their loss. Bryan Hogg died in 2019 from street valium abuse. He was 29 years old and not long out of prison. His mum, Sandra Mackin, says the system failed him. “The politicians don’t care — it’s just another number to them. I think my boy was failed. After he died nothing was done — there was supposed to be an investigation. He had a wee boy and now he has to live without his dad.”

During May’s Scottish elections, Nicola Sturgeon was tackled on the issue and admitted her government had “taken its eye off the ball”. Public Health Scotland says that “every drugs-related death is preventable” and “quality treatment options” are “essential”. But as deaths have spiralled, funding has been cut and treatment options have narrowed. Over the first 12 years of the SNP’s time in office, funding to Scotland’s drug and alcohol services was cut by more than half. For those trying to pull themselves out of their addiction and get better, it’s had a devastating effect.

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Scotland has some of the best residential rehabilitation facilities in Europe. So good, in fact, that Dutch authorities and insurers pay to place patients in facilities such as the Castle Craig hospital in the Scottish Borders. In 2002, Castle Craig admitted 257 patients funded by the NHS; in 2019, the number dropped to just five. There’s no shortage of demand for services, but they aren’t accessible to the Scots most in need. Currently a quarter of Castle Craig’s places are being filled by Dutch patients, with most of the remainder being funded privately or via health insurance.

Meanwhile Glasgow’s largest residential rehab centre, Phoenix Futures, was forced to abruptly cut its number of beds from 54 to just 14 in 2019, after a Government tender was revoked. The Mungo Foundation’s Cothrom Eile service — in Nicola Sturgeon’s own Glasgow constituency — was forced to close its doors completely in 2019 due to funding cuts.

Those who have benefitted from such services are concerned at their closure. When Bruce Munro started at Phoenix Futures he was “eight stone and taking food from bins and begging to fund a drug habit — I didn’t feel part of society”. He had been abusing substances for more than 20 years, becoming homeless and suffering mental health problems. After five months of rehab, he was ready to move into supported accommodation. “To have only 14 beds for a city the size of Glasgow is disgraceful. I think this model works for me because it’s not just about putting down the drugs. You are getting therapy, bereavement and trauma counselling rather than just putting the drugs down, because that’s the easy part.”

The outcry over these cuts — and the spiralling death toll which has accompanied them — forced the Scottish government into action in January. As well as reversing some of the funding cuts, Nicola Sturgeon established a Drugs Death Task Force and appointed a minister to directly oversee the issue. But huge question marks remain: there has been little change of direction in policy that has spectacularly failed over the last 14 years.

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Dr Neil McKeganey, Director of the Centre for Substance Use Research in Glasgow, worries ministers are intent on just doing more of the same. “We have the same people advising the same government year after year, with no evident impact on the number of drugs deaths and no real accountability.” Dr McKeganey has repeatedly advised ministers and officials to better support residential rehabilitation —

“only to be told that their preference is for methadone and now benzodiazepine prescribing. That methadone is implicated in 53% of Scottish drugs deaths and benzodiazepines in 74%, should tell even the most ardent refusenik of the importance of abstinence-based treatments that prescribing addictive drugs is part of the problem — not part of the solution.”

CEO of the charity Faces and Voices of Recovery, Anne Marie Ward is more blunt: “The Drugs Death Task Force insists on pursuing the same failed options that got us into this mess.” She insists “we need the Scottish Government to start properly funding rehabilitation and recovery programmes”. The Scottish Government currently funds just 13% of the residential rehab places in Scotland (even Universal Credit funds twice as many) and their own figures show waiting times of up to year.

Of course, the barrage of criticism which has accompanied its sustained failure has prompted the SNP to hit out, trying to switch blame. The SNP has long campaigned to introduce consumption rooms — also known as shooting galleries — where addicts can access clean needles and inject in a safe environment. But the Scottish Parliament does not have the legislative power to introduce them — that is reserved for Westminster, and the UK Government does not support the policy.

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When the record drug death figures were announced last week, SNP members were quick to point the finger south. Nicola Sturgeon tweeted that “we will continue to argue for reform of drugs law, which is not currently within our power” while Edinburgh East MP Tommy Sheppard stated that “major changes in UK law [are] required to really tackle the problem.”

Pretty shameless stuff, as well as being self-incriminating. On Tuesday, England and Wales released their drugs death figures, both now five times less than the Scottish rate. Pointing out that the laws are exactly the same on both sides of the border indicates that some other factor or combination of factors is to blame for the enormous discrepancy. As Anne Marie Ward has previously stated: “Bluntly, the obsession with drug consumption rooms (DCRs) is making it inevitable that more people in Scotland will die from addiction. DCRs are the same silver bullet trope I’ve heard for 30 years.”

A public health emergency that has built up over many years is not about to be fixed by a stroke of a legislator’s pen, and it is dishonest for those in charge to pretend otherwise. Still, even ideas with limited impact are something the UK government should be prepared to discuss with their SNP counterparts. The people being killed are UK citizens, too.

The truth is both complicated and mundane. We need better data and analysis of those who have died and the factors contributing to those deaths; we need earlier interventions, a number of different pathways, and joined-up support — so those dropping out of treatment or switching between areas or options are not lost in the system. We need to review the extent to which “stabilising” drugs such as methadone and benzodiazepines are prescribed and what the patient journey looks like once a more stable living situation is achieved.

Yes, replacing the funding that the Scottish Government has cut over the years is important — but only if it is directed well. Residential rehab will not be the best option for everyone, but it needs to be available and attainable for those who would benefit from it.

The hard work of policy development and service delivery is the only thing that will start to unpick the thousands of individual human tragedies that led us here. Unfortunately, this work is unglamorous. Until now, there hasn’t been much incentive for the SNP to do it. It has taken 14 years and nearly ten thousand deaths for the Scottish Government to be shamed into acting on drugs deaths. And now the party is wasting time and energy on glib finger-pointing. The country is watching, and waiting.

These deaths are the predictable result of political failure. For decades, politicians have been hooked on prohibition. They have pushed the idea that use of illicit drugs should be punished and persisted with suggestions they can stifle flows of heroin, cocaine and cannabis, rather than accepting there is strong demand and focusing on harm reduction. The absurdity of their stance is exposed by the failure to keep even top-security prisons free of drugs, while on the streets prices fall, purity rises and new synthetic drugs arrive. This is, after all, a country with 11,000 miles of coast that sees 500m tonnes of goods a year move through its ports — yet total annual consumption of cocaine could fit in a solitary shipping container.

The legacy of such political irresponsibility is seen in these grim fatality figures. Our leaders outsourced the drug markets to criminal gangs, which rely on violence and grooming of young recruits to dominate their lucrative trade. There is, of course, no quality control on the content or strength of their wares. So forget all that Tory talk of levelling up, given the devastating impact of these policies on poorer parts of society. In England, the highest rate of fatalities is found in the north east, three times higher than further down the coast before the pandemic. In Scotland, epicentre for this whirlwind of misery, hospitalisation rates for drug-related incidents are reportedly 16 times higher in low-income areas than more prosperous parts.

The data is even more dispiriting when you probe prohibitionist policies. It is 50 years since signing of the Misuse of Drugs Act, which banned possession, supply, manufacture, import and export of controlled drugs — arguably the most damaging piece of legislation passed by parliament in recent decades. Since then, the number of heroin users in England and Wales has risen 25-fold, according to analysis by Transform Drug Policy Foundation, while drug-related deaths have soared more than 30-fold. The fatality rate in Scotland is ten times the average across Europe — and it has more than doubled over the past five years. Half of our homicides are also linked to drugs (along with half the acquisitive crimes and rough sleepers).

Could there be a more damning indictment of failure than all these corpses? Yet politicians cut support for treatment centres, pushed abstinence and kept pandering to fear with disastrous consequences. In Scotland, much of the rise in fatalities is down to use of benzodiazepines. Media hysteria led to tightening of the rules on legal prescriptions, which choked the supply routes for people abusing these drugs and thus incentivised criminals to develop the market for ultra-cheap, high-potency street benzos − the “blues” behind much of the horrifying carnage north of the border.

Or take events in parts of northern England after police targeted the cutting agents used by cocaine dealers to pad out their products and hike profits. Yes, this led to successful prosecutions of people found in illicit possession of large quantities of benzocaine, a mild anaesthetic used by dentists. But the result was simply a sharp rise in the purity of cocaine sold on the streets of places such as Manchester. Prices also plunged at the same time from about £45,000 a kilo to £30,000 a kilo, according to the charity Release, due to increased production in Latin America. This is close to half the £55,000 cost of a wholesale kilo 12 years ago on official figures, indicating significant rise in supplies.

“The drugs market is resilient and increased money for policing, increased busts and increased prosecutions do little to disrupt the trade,” said Niamh Eastwood, executive director of Release. “Even when borders have shut across the world in the pandemic it had little effect on the supply chains. This is a business that adapts fast, so as the government lauds the success of law enforcement closing down so-called county lines, new supply models are developed. We need new thinking, we need to start exploring decriminalisation and we need regulation of these substances.”

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She is right. The war on drugs has been a dismal failure — as shown by the government’s own reports. These admit Britain has the highest number of cocaine and high-risk opioid users in Europe, disclosing that there has been rising cocaine use over the past decade with recent hikes “clear in most age groups” and purity at highest levels on record due to “increased availability’. A 2017 review of strategy revealed central government spent £1.6bn on enforcement, yet “drug seizures… had little impact on availability” although there were “potential unintended consequences…such as violence related to drug markets”.  Even the biggest of drug busts barely dent supplies or costs on the streets, as many cops will admit.

It is estimated the “harms” cost England an astonishing £19.3bn a year, mainly due to crime and health. Yet Boris Johnson, unveiling a package of rehashed crime policies last week to look strong for his red wall voters, misleads the public with continuing pretence that we can beat the “scourge” of drugs. His ministers talk of “tough law enforcement” and win headlines for “cracking down” on recreational use with more testing after arrests. They claim this will “challenge drug misuse, reduce demand and change the perceived acceptability of using illicit drugs”, while a cross-government summit will “drive down demand for illegal drugs”.

I doubt cartel bosses and drug barons are quaking with fear over Johnson’s drug bash. In truth, it is bordering on criminal to see politicians stick to their bungling stance as the death toll mounts. Yet there are signs that behind the tough talk, the state’s backfiring drug war stance is starting to crumble. Both Scottish and English governments are putting a bit more cash into treatment while two key parliamentary committees have called for drug decriminalisation. “We recommend a radical change in UK drugs policy from a criminal justice to a health approach,” said the health and social care committee. “A harm reduction approach would not only benefit those who are using drugs but reduce the costs for their wider communities.”

Many frustrated police forces, fed up with wasting resources, are simply pressing ahead with “diversion schemes”. Avon and Somerset, North Wales, Thames Valley and West Midlands were among the first to follow the successful lead of Durham in seeking to slash reoffending rates and save costs by offering drug education or treatment as an alternative to arrest, cautioning or prosecution for people caught in possession. At least eight more have followed suit, with Scotland among others developing schemes. “You could call this de facto decriminalisation,” said Steve Rolles, senior policy analyst for Transform. “But that word seems problematic for this government because of worries it is seen as being soft on drugs.”

Rolles pointed out, however, that these strategies are winning ministerial plaudits and were backed by this month’s Black review into drug strategies. But surely it is unacceptable to have a postcode lottery that sees one person caught with a small stash of drugs end up in prison with a criminal record, while another sits through talks learning about harm reduction? Not to mention the inflammatory racial bias seen in police stop and search efforts focused on drugs. “We need to stop people going to prison for drugs since it is the wrong place for those people with problems,” said Professor David Nutt, the former government drugs adviser.

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Nutt was sacked in 2009 by the New Labour government for daring to tell the truth about cannabis, ecstasy and LSD being less harmful to public health than alcohol and tobacco. Since then, cheap potent, synthetic drugs such as fentanyl and mephedrone have arrived on our shores. But both big parties remain terrified of talking honestly to voters about drugs, although the few MPs breaking ranks have found the public in a more progressive place than they anticipated. Meanwhile there is increasing interest in Portugal, which 20 years ago this month showed a way out of the drug morass under the leadership of António Guterres, now United Nations secretary general.

Portugal acted out of desperation at a rising death toll. It had high levels of heroin use at the turn of the century, hundreds of deaths, highest rates of HIV infection in the European Union and prison cells filled with people sentenced for drug offences.

“It was almost impossible to find a family in Portugal that did not have drug-related problems,” said João Goulão, architect of their reforms. So they decriminalised drug possession, focused on health rather than punishment, shifted from abstinence-based campaigns and flipped funds into treatment. The result is shown in the latest annual data for drug-related deaths: 62 fatalities in a population twice the size of Scotland.

This is a spectacular turnaround. Now Portugal has among the lowest drug-related death rates in Europe, along with some of the lowest levels of use among younger generations. There is still a bedrock of high-risk opioid users, although numbers have fallen significantly and habits tend to be less problematic. It remains illegal to deal drugs. But those found with small quantities for personal use are sent before a local commission — typically a doctor, lawyer and social worker — to be told about support services. “We do not focus on drug problems but any issues people might have in their lives that lead to drug use,” said Goulão. “This is the key to our success. No one ends up in prison with a criminal record and stigma.”

Other countries have also seen the light, such as the Czech Republic and Spain. If Britain had followed similar policies, thousands of lives might have been saved. And these deaths should not be dismissed: they are a symbol of collective societal failures as well as a sign of lethal political stupidity. It has been shown time and again how the hallucination of prohibition can have perverse consequences by fuelling death, innovation and sales rather than depressing demand. So let us stop pretending another bust, another crackdown and another poor sod with mental health struggles being sent to prison is going to stop the use of drugs. Portugal shows there is a path forward that is cheaper, kinder and safer for everyone — as well as more honest about human nature. So why not level up with the electorate?

The past pandemic year has brought with it a wave of viral metaphors to describe various social problems: economic inequality and racial injustice are clumsily referred to as America’s “other pandemics”, while police violence is frequently characterised as an “epidemic”. In many cases, such language is overwrought and overblown.

But when it comes to the lethal problem of America’s opioid addiction, “epidemic” is no misnomer. According to the Center for Disease Control, almost half a million Americans have died of opioid overdoses since the late Nineties, making this the deadliest drug crisis in the country’s history. By the end of the last decade, overdoses were America’s leading cause of accidental death — and nowhere is this more clear than in Huntington.

Yet the relationship between the pandemic and the opioid epidemic is more than merely analogous. In a tragic demonstration of the inescapable trade-offs of fighting a plague, Covid-19 and the steps taken to slow its spread have undone much of the hard-earned progress in the fight against opioid addiction. According to preliminary CDC data, more than 90,000 Americans died of drug overdose — the vast majority because of opioids — in the 12 months leading to November 2020: a 30% increase on the previous 12 months, and the highest annual overdose figure ever.

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While opioids have wrought national devastation, overdose rates were higher in West Virginia than anywhere else in the country last year. Huntington and surrounding Cabell County had the highest rate in the state, with 163 deaths per 100,000 people — the overwhelming majority of them from Fentanyl, a synthetic opioid 100 times stronger than morphine, which can be lethal in doses as small as two milligrams. In Cabell County, Covid-19 and drug overdoses claimed roughly the same number of lives last year.

Pastor Steven Little doesn’t need to see the numbers to understand the magnitude of Huntington’s spike last year. As a volunteer on the city’s Quick Response Team, his weekly schedule reflects the fluctuations of drug abuse in the area. QRT was founded in 2017 and aims to provide follow-up visits to anyone who calls the emergency services for a drug overdose within 72 hours. The busier the team, Little explains, the worse things are.

Comprising a paramedic, a recovery coach, an off-duty police officer and faith leaders such as Little, QRT aims to deliver both long-term solutions, by encouraging treatment, and short-term emergency measures, by offering everyone they meet a dose of Narcan — the emergency treatment for an opioid overdose — and training in how it is administered.

Little, who has been sober for 11 years after an opioid addiction he developed as a teenager in neighbouring Kentucky, says he thinks of the community’s response to the opioid epidemic — a patchwork of addiction clinics, churches, local government and hospitals — as “like a net”: “The more strings we have, the stronger the net and the fewer people fall through the gaps.” And so the effects of the pandemic were soon obvious. “We’ve removed the social structures and support system around addicts because of the pandemic,” he says when I meet him at his church’s low-key location, a converted shop space in downtown Huntington. “Isolation is the opposite of what you need for recovery.”

The Huntington Addiction Wellness Center, a recovery centre a few blocks away, is another string in that netting. Charles Ward, HAWC’s assistant director and a recovering addict who has been clean from heroin and methamphetamine for more than three years, says that “the worst thing an addict can do is be alone in his head, something that the pandemic forced us to do.” Ward says he has “lost a lot of people this year. I can name five or six friends that I’ve lost”.

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It took “four or five months,” says Katie Keeney, a colleague of Ward’s at HAWC, until the effects of the pandemic on addiction in Huntington started to be felt: “That’s when we started seeing everyone falling off. Fellowship is a huge part of recovery, and everyone was stuck at home or on camera.” It wasn’t just recently recovered addicts, says Keeney, but “old-timers, people with years and years of sobriety. And we’re still seeing the residual effects of the pandemic.”

Outside another recovery centre, Sara (not her real name) takes a drag on a cigarette and explains to me how things unraveled during the pandemic. Furloughed from work, she lost the routine around which she had built her recovery from addiction. “By the end of the year, I wasn’t just back where I started,” she says. “But worse.”

Little says that not only is the isolation of quarantine a pandemic a problem, but we’ve given “people stuck in the madness a bunch of money”, referring to the federal stimulus checks given to Americans during the pandemic. He recounts the story of a a mother of six who “got all this money and blew it and overdosed and died… That’s not a knock on the stimulus, people need that.”

Everyone I speak to in Huntington agrees that remote support is no substitute for the face-to-face help offered before the pandemic, which was suspended for crucial weeks. If there’s any silver lining, Little says that it’s that “the pandemic has highlighted the great need for the structures and support systems to fight the epidemic”.

Arguably, however, the most troubling aspect of the opioid epidemic is not how much progress has been lost thanks to the pandemic, but how little had been made in the first place. Prior to 2020, overdose deaths from opioids peaked in 2017. But this crunch point had been a long time coming. Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of OxyContin, were worried about bad publicity surrounding addiction to their blockbuster painkiller within a few years of the drug’s launch in 1996. In other words, the opioid crisis was two decades old before the numbers even started to move in the right direction. And while overdose deaths declined after 2017, the falls were modest; the data also points to an uptick in overdoses in late 2019, suggesting that the pandemic cannot fully explain the failure to make continued progress.

Huntington’s latest step in the fight against opioid addiction is a lawsuit against the three biggest drug distributors in America — McKesson, Amerisource Begern and Cardinal Health — which it alleges “wholly ignored their legal obligations” by “shipping massive quantities of drugs to distributors, pharmacies, and dispensaries without performing any checks — with devastating consequences for America”.

The trial, which is ongoing in a courtroom in Charleston, the state capital, has the potential to be a major turning point, and not just locally. In the overwhelming majority of lawsuits relating to opioid addiction, companies have managed to reach out of court settlements. And so Huntington and Cabell County’s decision to go to trial is a rare courtroom test of the claim that the pharmaceutical firms who flooded neighbourhoods with addictive painkillers are liable for the damage done both by those pills and by their knock on effects, including the spread of illegal opioids like heroin and fentanyl.

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Whatever its outcome, the trial has helped provide a fuller picture of the crisis. According to Craig McCann, a data consultant called as witness, 110 million doses of hydrocodone and oxycodone were shipped to Cabell County and Huntington between 2006 and 2014. Thomas McGuire, a Harvard University economist who testified in the trial last month, estimated that the harm by prescription opioids to Cabell County was worth $3.3 billion. The city and county are seeking $2 billion to help fight addiction.

And these aren’t the only stark metrics by which the epidemic can be measured. According to the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Services, five in every 100 babies born in West Virginia in 2017 suffered from Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome, a condition newborns suffer after the sudden discontinuation of exposure to substances used by their mothers that can have lasting consequences.

Meanwhile, the firms on trial argue that they are not responsible for the lethal cocktail of poor physical health and socioeconomic decline that made residents in this corner of West Virginia so susceptible to opioid addiction. They also point the finger at the doctors — some nefarious, others naive — who were prescribing the painkillers so readily, and the US Drug Enforcement Agency, who were slow to identify the problem.

Of course, the temptation of opiates is nothing new. As Patrick Radden Keefe recounts in his recent book about the Sackler family behind Purdue, Empire of Pain, the history of opiates is terrifyingly cyclical. Morphine was prescribed with great enthusiasm after the American Civil War. But relieving the pain of battlefield wounds came at a high price with an estimated one in four Americans addicted to the drug by the end of the 19th century. Around the same time, the German pharmaceutical firm Bayer marketed a new opiate, heroin, as a less addictive substitute to morphine. In fact, it was far more powerful than morphine and just as addictive.

Almost a century later, the Sackler family would make similar claims about Oxycontin, but again the link between opiates’ pain-killing abilities and habit-forming tendencies proved seemingly inescapable. Indeed, back in Huntington, the pandemic’s impact on overdoses is merely a reminder that the opioid epidemic hasn’t made an unwelcome return; it never ended.

According to the shallow concerns of America’s political cycle, “left behind” America had its moment half a decade ago. Trump’s 2016 win brought fresh attention to the problems of white working-class Appalachia; the rust belt was suddenly central to politics and as Hillbilly Elegy flew off the shelves, every pundit imposed their own priors on to the story of decline.

Eventually, however, that story became old news. America’s elites moved on to other issues, racial equity foremost among them. But Huntington, and places like it, are still there. And still struggling against the same epidemic they have been fighting for almost a quarter of a century.

In December 1972, Hunter’s mother Neilia was driving her three children — Beau (“Beautiful”), 3; Hunter (self-explanatory), 2; and Naomi, the baby, to buy a Christmas Tree in Delaware. Her husband Joe, newly elected to the Senate at just 29, was interviewing staff in Washington. Perhaps Neilia, with three children under 3, was exhausted. She ignored a stop sign and crashed into a tractor. Neilia and Naomi died. Beau and Hunter awoke in a hospital room. Their father was sworn into the Senate there. They subsequently lived inside the narrative of Joe’s rise to power. Willingly or not, they were seconded to public service. “Delaware’s residents placed their sorrows and their hopes in a dashing young widower suddenly left with two toddlers,” Hunter writes. “Our survival became a source of state-wide pride”. Delaware “adopted” the children. Gratitude was the only polite response.

But it wasn’t a truthful one. Two things interest me about Hunter’s childhood. The first is that he was, in his words, “practically raised” by his aunt and uncle. He was also “raised on politics like farm kids raised on sweet corn”. So, they were raised by an extended family, or the people of Delaware, or politics. I suspect Joe was so overwhelmed by Neilia’s loss he abandoned his children for office. He took them to the Senate — where they played in the sauna — and to endless public meetings. But is that, really, presence?

He couldn’t save Neilia or Naomi, so he would save America. It isn’t exactly selfishness, but it isn’t exactly sacrifice either. It laid on his children a terrible guilt, for having childish needs. “Beau and I never really grieved the loss of our mother and baby sister,” Hunter writes. “We were almost ashamed to admit to any sadness we might have felt because of how enveloped we were in that familial embrace.” There is withholding in that kind of love. It concealed Joe’s grief, but it concealed him, too.

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Hunter has the misfortune to be surrounded by saints. His father is the anti-Trump. His mother is sanctified by death. His brother Beau was saintly too: he was attorney general of Delaware, scourge of sex offenders, preparing to run for governor in 2016. (If Joe didn’t win the presidency, Beau was next in line, his father’s choice). But Beau died of brain cancer in 2015 and is likewise beyond reproach.

If you are among saints, and you are not like them, what are you? A sinner, and Hunter couldn’t exist without his better half. When Beau dies, he asks himself: “If we weren’t the three of us anymore, what were we?” His father, meanwhile, “sat on his porch for hours and took one call after another from current and former leaders from every hemisphere and every country.” This repression is the family way. Hunter and Beau never asked each other what they remembered about the accident. And here again, “Dad and I never really sat together to have a heart-to-heart, to talk about what we were going through. Words,” he writes, “almost felt risky”.

Instead, emboldened by the public response to his eulogy, he asked his wife Kathleen if he should run for office on the wave of grief and sympathy. (It’s the other family way). She replied: “Are you serious?” After that, “We didn’t say another word to each other for the rest of the ride. Or, really, ever again”. Bereft of both Beau and Kathleen, his addiction took flight.

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The first part of the book deals with his childhood — the enforced gratitude for their privileges and the conditional love of the people of Delaware — and loss of Beau. This part feels stymied. Hunter describes the relationship between the three men like this: “It’s a Biden love story, of course, which means it’s complicated: tragic, humane, emotional, enduring, widely consequential, and ultimately redemptive.” They all talk like this: in broad concepts of love, loss and courage. Do they talk like this in private? They might do. How do they order soup?

There is also a defence of his business dealings in China and Ukraine, which were used to attack his father by his opponents. It’s an across-the-board denial of wrong-doing, too comprehensive and outraged in tone to feel true. But if it isn’t entirely true, he cannot say otherwise. He is, again, constricted by his father’s need for power. (There are no politics in this book at all. It is the most telling blank.)

Only in the second part — when Hunter details his relapses and half-life inside hotels rooms with criminals — is the prose alive. For using is his most vivid life, the only place where he is allowed to be angry at the things that are denied him. His writing on this is raging and horrifying. His description of his relationship with Rhea, a street homeless crack addict who moves in with him, is the best thing in the book: a bizarre and functional marriage, with crack as their beloved child.

Hunter is not long sober, if he is at all. He gave a long interview to the New Yorker in 2019 but reveals here that he was high during every interview. (He has been using, with gaps of varying length, since his father became Vice President; since he ascended to the mountain-top.) I would not comment on a fellow addict’s sobriety, but he is a Biden and therefore public property: I am invited to comment.

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Hunter does not sound well. He still hates the drug dealers he was dependent on, though they were as addicted as he, and with none of his privileges. If he had what recovering addicts call emotional sobriety — or if he were truly a progressive — he would try to understand their behaviour. He married a second time, to Melissa, who had “the exact same eyes as my brother”, after knowing her for a week. He did not thank his first wife Kathleen, who suffered at his hands, in his acknowledgements. His thanks to Melissa, “the love of my life”, feel like whiplash.

And he never tells us what I most want to know as he tells of hotel tabs and hangers-on and profligacy: where did he get the money? There is a seemingly inexhaustible supply for his using. Its source is not divulged.

He is honest, though, about his love affair with his brother’s wife Hallie after Beau’s death. It was a pitiful attempt to reanimate the man they both loved. He wanted, he writes, to be close to Beau’s children: “I was seduced by the idea of providing the same kind of extended family that surrounded Beau and me after we lost our mommy and sister.” It’s a re-imagining of the extended family he was gifted to after the death of his mother, but here it feels explicitly insane.

Joe is the most interesting character in this book, of course, and he is not in this book. He is God on his mountaintop. You cannot be angry with God, though watching God try to operate amid the wreckage of his own distant benevolence is bleakly funny. How would it be if your father the Vice President arrived at your crack house with his security detail to ask: “Are you OK?” It’s a weird question to ask a child you know is using drugs. It invites a positive response, a rescuing. Hunter has none for him. Joe cries once, when Hunter runs away from an intervention: “I don’t know what else to do, I’m so scared, tell me what to do”.

Hunter emerges from this rowdy memoir not as a kind man — look to Beau and Joe for that — but as an angry man destroyed, though guiltily, by the imperatives of those he loves. Joe Biden fused his personal narrative into political success long ago because people are sentimental. It worked for the father. It does not work for the son. Here is the evidence, and in his own hand.