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John Marks
Gabor Maté is a prominent addiction doctor who has worked in Downtown Eastside Vancouver for several decades. He was born to a Hungarian Jewish family during the Holocaust, and learning about his family’s experiences showed him how people can carry childhood trauma with them throughout their lives. (In fact, Maté developed a peculiar addiction of his own to deal with this trauma: he compulsively buys CDs from music stores.) In Downtown Eastside, Maté found that most of the hardcore drug addicts he treated spent their entire lives running away from this kind of trauma through drugs. He concluded that drug use is a symptom of serious emotional disturbance, not the cause of it. In turn, effectively treating addiction requires helping addicts work through their trauma and make meaningful social connections with the people around them. Of course, the war on drugs does the opposite: it further marginalizes and humiliates drug addicts. Maté’s work, along with that of other doctors like Bruce Alexander, John Marks, and João Goulão, is the foundation for Hari’s conclusion that drugs should be legalized and regulated, so that society can dedicate its resources to providing addicts with the services that will actually resolve their addictions.
Gabor Maté Quotes in Chasing the Scream
The Chasing the Scream quotes below are all either spoken by Gabor Maté or refer to Gabor Maté . For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 12 Quotes
I knew what caused addiction before I even left London. We all do. As a culture, we have a story about how addiction works, and it’s a good one. It says that some substances are so chemically powerful that if you use them enough, they will hijack your brain. They will change your neurochemistry. They will give you a brain disease. After that, you will need the drug physically. So if you or I or the next ten people you pass on the street were to use an addictive drug every day for the next month, on day thirty, we’d all be addicts. Addiction, then, is the result of repeated exposure to certain very powerful chemicals.
When I looked at the people I love who have become addicts, that is what I believed had happened to them.
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Chapter 13 Quotes
If your environment is like Rat Park—a safe, happy community with lots of healthy bonds and pleasurable things to do—you will not be especially vulnerable to addiction. If your environment is like the rat cages—where you feel alone, powerless and purposeless—you will be.
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Almost all the funding for research into illegal drugs is provided by governments waging the drug war—and they only commission research that reinforces the ideas we already have about drugs. All these different theories, with their radical implications—why would governments want to fund those?
[…] [Eric Sterling] told me that if any government-funded scientist ever produced research suggesting anything beyond the conventional drugs-hijack-brains theory, […] the head of NIDA would be called before a congressional committee and asked if she had gone mad. She might be fired. She would certainly be stopped. All the people conducting the science for NIDA—and remember, that’s 90 percent of research on the globe into illegal drugs—know this.
So they steer away from all this evidence and look only at the chemical effects of the drugs themselves. That’s not fake—but it’s only a small part of the picture.
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Gabor Maté Character Timeline in Chasing the Scream
The timeline below shows where the character Gabor Maté appears in Chasing the Scream. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 12: Terminal City
...be murdered at Auschwitz. One day, she suddenly stopped producing breastmilk for her newborn son, Gabor, who was crying constantly. She called the doctor, who told her that all the Jewish...
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...Anslinger and Henry Williams even agreed on this “pharmaceutical theory of addiction.” But others don’t—including Gabor Maté.
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Hari interviews Gabor Maté in Vancouver. After becoming a family physician, Maté started working in Downtown Eastside, a...
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At the Portland Hotel Society, Maté realized that most serious addicts “spent their lives being chased away or chastised” by authority...
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...According to the pharmaceutical theory of addiction, they should all become addicts. But in reality, Maté has found, very few do. He concluded that addiction involves two distinct factors: “a potentially...
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...and the majority who don’t. But understanding this doesn’t make dealing with addicts any easier. Gabor Maté’s patients insult, threaten, and spit at him. (One is a Nazi who taunts him...
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Meanwhile, Maté has developed an addiction of his own: he randomly rushes to the music store and...
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Over dinner, Gabor Maté tells Hari, “if I had to design a system that was intended to keep...
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...the people around them. For instance, through her connection with people like Liz Evans and Gabor Maté, Hannah gradually improved at the Portland Hotel and even reconnected with her birth family....
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Chapter 13: Batman’s Bad Call
Bruce Alexander’s findings help illuminate Gabor Maté’s: children who experience serious trauma struggle to build healthy relationships as adults, and they...
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Chapter 14: The Drug Addicts’ Uprising
...the first time ever, Osborn felt like he truly belonged somewhere. His story supports both Gabor Maté’s theory that trauma causes addiction and Bruce Alexander’s theory that a supportive, enriching environment...
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