A commentary by the executive director of the Island Community Mental Health Association.

Most people concerned about the ­opioid epidemic and the state of Victoria’s downtown would be well-served to get acquainted with the work of B.C.’s own Bruce Alexander.

His research and theory of addiction dissolves the old myth of addiction being the result of the “demon drug,” while simultaneously challenging the idea that addiction is somehow only a symptom of brain disease that some escape and ­others die from.

Alexander’s “new story,” although acknowledging obvious risk factors such as poverty and trauma that predispose people to addiction, removes the ­soleness of addiction from the individual and places it, appropriately, as a phenomenon of “modernity” and its forces of the free market: Colonialism, industrialization, globalization, on people.

The by-product of such forces........

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