to power. As a medical doctor, I work in Vancouver, Canada and I have worked with some very, very

addicted people. People who use heroin, they inject cocaine; they drink alcohol, crystal

meth and every drug known to man. And these people suffer. If the success of a doctor

is to be measured by how long his patients live, then I am a failure because my patients

die very young, relatively speaking. They die of HIV, they die of hepatitis C, they

die of infections of their heart valves, they die of infections of their brains, of their

spines, of their hearts, of their bloodstream. They die of suicide, of overdose, of violence,

of accidental deaths. And if you look at them, you call to mind, the words of the great Egyptian

novelist, Naguib Mahvouz, who wrote, "nothing records the effects of a sad life as graphically

as the human body." Because these people loose everything. They loose their health,

they loose their beauty, they loose their teeth, they loose their wealth, they loose

human relationships and in the end, they often loose their lives. And yet, nothing shakes

them from their addiction, nothing can force them to give up their addiction. The addictions

are powerful and the question is: why? And as one of my patients said to me, "I'm

not afraid of dying," he said, "I'm more afraid of living." A question we have

to ask is: why are people afraid of life? And, if you want to understand addiction,

you can't look at what's wrong with the addiction, you have to look at what's right

about it. In other words, what is the person getting from the addiction? What are they

getting that otherwise they don't have? What addicts get is release from pain, what

they get is a sense of peace, a sense of control, a sense of calmness, very, very temporarily.

And they question is: why are these qualities missing from their lives, what happened to

them? Now if you look at the drugs like heroin, like morphine, like codeine, if you look at

cocaine, if you look at alcohol, these are all pain killers. In one way or another, they

all soothe pain. And thus the real question in addiction is no why the addiction, but

why the pain? Now, I just finished reading the biography of Keith Richards, the lead

guitarist of the Rolling Stones and as you probably know, everybody is still surprised

that Richards is still alive today because he was a heavy-duty heroine addict for a long

time. And in his biography, he writes that the addiction was all about looking for oblivion,

looking for forgetting. He says "the contortions that we go through just not to be ourselves

for a few hours." And I understand that very well myself because

I know that discomfort with myself, I know that discomfort being in my own skin, I know

that desire to escape from my own mind. The great British psychiatrist...R.D. Laing said

that the three things that people are afraid of are death, of other people and of their

own minds. For a long time in my life I wanted to distract myself from my own mind, I was

afraid to be alone with it. And how would I distract myself? Well, I've never used

drugs but I've distracted myself through work, and throwing myself into activities.

And I've distracted myself through shopping, in my case, for classical compact music, classical

compact discs. But I've been a real addict that way, one week I spent $8,000 on classical

compact discs, not because I wanted to, but because I couldn't help going back to the

store. And as a medical doctor, I used to deliver

a lot of babies and once I left a woman in labor in the hospital to get a classical piece

of music. I still could have made it back...to the hospital on time, but once in the store

you can't leave because there are these evil classical music dealers in the aisles,

you know, who "hey buddy, have you listened to the latest Mozart symphony cycle?" "You

haven't?" So I missed the delivery of that baby, and I come home and I lied to my

wife about it like any addict, I would lie about it. And I would ignore my own children

because of my obsession with work and with music. So I know what that escape from the

self is like. My definition of addiction is: any behavior

that gives you temporary relief, temporary pleasure, but in the long term, causes harm,

has some negative consequences and you can't give it up despite those negative consequences.

And from that perspective, you can understand that there are many, many addictions. Yes,

there is the addiction to drugs, but there is also the addiction to consumerism, there

is the addiction to sex, to the internet, to shopping, to food. The Buddhists have this

idea of the hungry ghosts, the hungry ghosts are these creatures with large empty bellies

and small, scrawny necks and tiny little mouths, so they can never get enough, they can never

fill this emptiness on the inside. And we are all hungry ghosts in this society, we

all have this emptiness and so many of us are trying to fill that emptiness from the

outside and the addiction is all about trying to fill that emptiness from the outside. Now,

if you want to ask the question of why people are in pain, you can't look at their genetics,

you have to look at their lives. And in the case of my patients, my highly

addicted patients, it's very clear why they are in pain. Because they have been abused

all of their lives, they began life as abused children. All of the women I have worked with

over a twelve year period, hundreds of them, they had all been sexually abused as children.

And the men had been traumatized as well; the men had been sexually abused, neglected,

physically abused, abandoned and emotionally over and over again. And that's why the

pain. And there is something else here too: the human brain. The human brains itself develops

an interaction with the environment; it's not just genetically programed. The kind of

environment that a child has will actually shape the development of the brain. Now, I

can tell you about two experiments with mice. You take a little mouse and you put food in

its mouth and he'll eat it and enjoy it and swallow it, but if you put the food down

a few inches away from his nose, he will not move to eat it, he will actually starve to

death rather than eat. Why? Because, genetically, they knocked out the receptors for a chemical

in the brain called dopamine. Dopamine is the incentive and motivation chemical. Dopamine

flows whenever we are motivated, excited, vital, vibrant, curious about something, whether

seeking food or a sexual partner. Without the dopamine, we have no motivation.

Now what do you think the addict gets? When the addict shoots cocaine, when the addict

shoots crystal meth or almost any drug, they get a hit of dopamine in their brain and the

question is: what happened to their brains in the first place? Because it's a myth

that drugs are addictive. Drugs are not by themselves addictive, because most people

who try most drugs never become addicted. So the question is: why are some people vulnerable

to getting addicted? Just like food is not addictive but to some people it is, shopping

is not addictive but to some people it is, television is not addictive but to some people

it is. So the question is: why the susceptibility?

There's another little experiment with mice where infant mice, if they are separated from

their mothers will not cry for their mothers. Now what would that mean in the wild? It means

that they would die. Because only the mother protects the child's life and nurtures the

child and why? Because genetically they knocked out the receptors, the chemical binding sites

in the brain, for endorphins and endorphins are indigenous, morphine-like substances;

endorphins are our own natural pain killers. Now...what endorphins also do, they make possible

the experience of love; they make possible the experience of attachment to the parent

and the parents' attachment to the child so these little mice without endorphin receptors

in their brains will naturally not call for their mothers.

In other words, the addiction to these drugs and of course the heroine and the morphine,

what they do is they act on the endorphin system, that's why they work. And so, the

question is: what happens to people that they need these chemicals from the outside? Well

what happens to them is when they are abused as children, those circuits don't develop.

When you don't have love and connection in your life, when you are very, very young,

then those important brain circuits just don't develop properly. And under conditions of

abuse, things just don't develop properly and their brains then are susceptible then

when they do the drugs. Now they feel normal, now they feel pain relief, now they feel love.

And as one patient said to me; "when I first did heroine," she said, "it felt like

a warm soft hug, just like a mother hugging her baby."

Now, I've had that same emptiness, not to the same degree as my patients. What happened

to me is that I was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1944 to Jewish parents just before the

Germans occupied Hungary and you know what happened to the Jewish people in Eastern Europe

and I was 2 months old when the German army moved into Budapest. And the day after they

did, my mother phoned the pediatrician and she said, "would you please come and see

Garbor cause he is crying all the time." And the pediatrician said, "well of course

I will come to see him, but I should tell you, all of my Jewish babies are crying."

Now why? What do babies know about Hitler or genocide or war? Nothing. What we were

picking up on is the stresses and the terrors and the depression of our mothers and that

actually shapes the child's brain that actually shapes the child's brain.

And of course, what happens then is that I get the message that the world doesn't want

me, if my mother is not happy around me, she must not want me. Why do I become a workaholic

later? Because if they don't want me, at least they are going to need me. And I'll

be an important doctor and they are going to need me and that way I can make up for

the feeling of not being wanted in the first place. And what does that mean? It means that

I am working all the time, and when I am not working, I'm consumed by buying music. What

message do my kids get? My kids get the same message that they are not wanted. And this

is how we pass it on, we pass on the trauma and we pass on the suffering, unconsciously,

from one generation to the next. So obviously, there are many, many ways to fill this emptiness,

and for each person, there is a different way of filling the emptiness but the emptiness

always goes back to what we didn't get when we were very small, what we didn't get when

we were very small. And then we look at the drug addict and we

say to the drug addict, "how can you possibly do this to yourself? How can you possibly

inject this terrible substance into your body that may kill you?" But look at what we

are doing to the earth. We are injecting all kinds of things into the atmosphere and the

oceans and the environment that is killing us, that is killing the earth. Now which addiction

is greater? The addiction to oil? Or to consumerism? Which causes the greater harm? And yet we

judge the drug addict because we actually see that they are just like us and we don't

like that, so we say, "you are different from us, you are worse than we are."

On the plane to São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, I was reading the New York Times, on June

the 9th and there was an article about Brazil and the article was about a man called Nísio

Gomes, a leader of the Guarani people in the Amazon who was killed last November and you

probably heard about him. And he was killed because he was protecting his people from

the big farmers and the companies that are taking over the rainforest and destroying

the rainforest and that are destroying the habitat of the native Indian people here in

Brazil. And I can tell you that coming from Canada, the same thing has happened over there.

And many of my patients are actually First nation Indian people, native Indian people

in Canada and they are heavily addicted. They make up a small percentage of the population

but they make up a large percentage of the people in jail, the people who are addicted,

the people who are mentally ill, the people who commit suicide. Why? Because their lands

were taken away from them, and because they were killed and abused for generations and

generations. But the question I ask is, if you can understand

the suffering of these native people and how that suffering makes them seek relief from

pain in their addictions; what about the people who are perpetrating it? What are they addicted

to? Well they are addicted to power, they are addicted to wealth, they are addicted

to acquisition. They want to make themselves bigger. And when I was trying to understand

the addiction to power, I looked at some of the most powerful people in history. I looked

at Alexander the Great, I looked at Napoleon, I looked at Hitler, I looked at Genghis Kahn,

I looked at Stalin. It's very interesting when you look at these people; first of all:

why did they need power so much? Interestingly enough, physically they were all very small

people, my size, or smaller, actually smaller. They came from outsiders, they were not part

of the major population. Stalin was a Georgian, not a Russian, Napoleon was a Corsican, not

a Frenchman, Alexander was a Macedonian, not a Greek and Hitler was an Austrian, not a

German. So a real sense of insecurity and inferiority.

And they needed power to feel ok in themselves, to make themselves bigger, and in order to

get that power, they were quite willing to fight wars and to kill a lot of people just

to maintain that power. I'm not saying that only small people can be power hungry but

it is interesting to look at these examples. Because power, the addiction to power, is

always about the emptiness that we try to fill from the outside. And Napoleon, even

in exile on the island of St. Helena after he lost his power, he said, "I love power,

I love power." He couldn't think of himself without power, he had no sense of himself

without being powerful externally. And that's very interesting when you compare it to people

like the Buddha or Jesus. Because if you look at the story about Jesus

and Buddha, both of them were tempted by the devil and one of the things that the devil

offers them is power, earthly power, and they both say no. Now why do they say no? They