Reflection
Cocaine and the Illusion of Power
Cocaine is, more than any other drug, the drug of the successful. It belongs to people who are already doing well and want to feel powerful, sharp, unstoppable, ahead. That is not incidental. It is the whole clue to what the drug is doing, and to why it takes hold so completely in exactly the people who look least likely to lose control.
What cocaine counterfeits
To understand cocaine you have to look at what the brain does naturally. When a person falls in love, the brain floods with dopamine, its chemical of reward and desire, along with other molecules that act like a natural stimulant. It is, in the most literal sense, a high: the racing heart, the focus, the sense that everything is possible. Cocaine floods the same reward system. It counterfeits, chemically, the feeling of falling in love and the feeling of power. It offers the reward without the relationship, the high of connection without the person you would have had to connect with. That is why it fits the powerful person so precisely: it gives them, on demand, the exact sensation they are chasing.
The person who cannot need anyone
Underneath this is something I see again and again, and it is the real engine of the addiction. As human beings, we cannot meet all our own needs alone. We need affection, belonging, tenderness, closeness, sexuality, and these can only be met through other people. To grow up well is, in large part, to become able to depend on others, to let ourselves need them, to live in a healthy interdependence.
Some people cannot do this. Often they are the most capable and self-sufficient among us, the ones whose whole identity is built on not needing anyone, on being in control. But the need does not disappear because it is refused. It goes somewhere, and what it very often finds is a product. If you cannot let yourself depend on a person, you will come to depend on a substance instead, because the substance meets the need, or numbs it, or sells you the illusion that you have none.
This is why cocaine is such a perfect fit for the powerful. It is the addiction for someone who cannot depend on people: it delivers the feeling of connection and strength, and it demands no vulnerability, no reciprocity, no risk of being let down. And it never asks anything of you in return. The product replaces the person.
The container we threw away
There is an older layer to this too. Looked at anthropologically, drugs have been used by human beings for as long as we have records, and almost always inside a container: a spiritual rite, a religious ceremony, a ritual held by a community and a meaning. Within that frame, the experience could be held. Take the drug out of the ritual, hand it to an individual alone with no frame and no meaning, and there is nothing to contain it. The human being cannot hold it by himself. What was once a sacred technology becomes, stripped of its container, an addiction. Cocaine is exactly that: a powerful chemical with the container thrown away.
I have written elsewhere about the temenos, the set-apart space in which difficult experience can be held and worked through. It is no accident that the two ideas rhyme. What the ritual once did for the drug, the consulting room now does for the suffering underneath it: it provides the container the person has been living without.
Losing yourself, and the cascade
And so people lose themselves in it. Cocaine rarely stays alone, either. It raises a charge that then seeks discharge, and so it opens doors to other things. Very often it leads to sexual acting out, through pornography, strip clubs, escorts, and frequently to gambling. One compulsion opens onto the next. The person is no longer chasing a single drug but a whole system of counterfeit rewards, each one promising the connection and the aliveness they cannot get in the way a human being is actually built to get it.
What the work is
Treating this is not, at bottom, about the cocaine. Stopping the drug comes first, and it must, because nothing deeper can be built while it is still in daily use. But the work that makes stopping hold is different. It is helping a person become able to do the thing they could not do: to need others, to depend, to be met by people rather than products, and to find the real version of what the drug was counterfeiting. That is slow work, and it is often the last thing a powerful, self-sufficient person wants to hear. But it is the only thing that ends the search, because no one stays clean for long while the need the drug was meeting has still been given nowhere else to go. And where that need was broken open by a trauma, as it so often was, the trauma itself has to be processed.
If you recognise yourself in this, that work, done confidentially and one to one, is exactly what this practice is for.
On alcohol and the mask of success, see The Functioning Alcoholic.
