Climate change link to drug and substance behaviour

Climate change is the most pressing public-health challenge facing humanity (World Health Organisation [WHO], 2021).

It is increasing the frequency and intensity of regional heatwaves, wildfires, droughts, floods, and storms and without rapid emissions reductions, children born today will face up to seven times as many extreme weather events across their lives as did their grandparents’ generation.

The United Nations estimates that one half of the world’s 2.2 billion children are at “extremely high risk” from climate change because of harms to health, education, security, and access to essential services.

Climate change’s impacts on human health are now extensively documented, and more than 230 health-care journals recently published a joint editorial calling for urgent action to address the “catastrophic harm to health”.

Despite these recognised impacts, the urgent question of how climate change may be affecting substance-use patterns has not been addressed through the systemi

According to Obradovich & Minor, 2022 this is high time to test culturally appropriate prevention and support programs for populations at high risk from climate-change-related impacts, such as Indigenous people, those living in remote or agricultural communities, and people experiencing homelessness

• COP26 a washout? Don’t lose hope – here’s why
• Out & about: Bright sheds light on Vic Falls Carnival
• COP26 a washout? Don’t lose hope – here’s why
• Out & about: Bright sheds light on Vic Falls Carnival

Climate change is undermining the mental and physical health of global populations, but the question of how it is affecting substance-use behaviours has not been examined through systemic lenses.

Climate change could increase harmful substance use worldwide through at least five pathways:

• psychosocial stress arising from the destabilisation of social, environmental, economic, and geopolitical support systems;
• increased rates of mental disorders;
• increased physical-health burden;
• incremental harmful changes to established behavior patterns;
• worry about the dangers of unchecked climate change.

These pathways could operate independently, additively, interactively, and cumulatively to increase substance-use vulnerability.

The above mentioned pathways are rooted in our collective disconnection to our authentic self as a people.

Disconnection from cultural values, traditions and the environment have led to a painful and meaningless existence for many people across the globe who have turned to drugs and alcohol in an unsuccessful attempt to deal with  their anxiety and pain.

The discovery of meaning and identity is critical for sustainable healing of anyone struggling with substance use behaviour hence treatment strategies that facilitate reconnection to cultural values, traditions and the environment are most needed and should be embraced to successfully dismantle the foundations of drug and substance use amidst other social and environmental ills.

Aboriginal people of Canada are currently reconnecting with traditional culture in a concerted effort to deal with the pain associated with centuries of cultural dislocation.

All too often in the past, this pain has been masked by the  numbing effects of alcohol. Introduced by European traders in the 16th century, alcohol has taken a deadly toll on Aboriginal people.

In Canada and the United States today there is a much higher rate of drug and alcohol abuse amongst Aboriginal people than that of the general population (Anderson, 1993; Beauvais, 1996).

Almost three-quarters of all deaths caused by accidents and violence (e.g., suicide, homicide and fires) among Aboriginal people have been linked to alcohol.

 Used as a method of domination, early fur traders were able to exploit Aboriginal people by trading alcohol for furs and other goods.

For many Aboriginal people the struggle against alcohol has been one of life and death. Upon returning to his home community an Aboriginal counsellor in British Columbia remarked: "The people's spirit was almost dead. Everything revolved around drinking".

Sadly most youths and even adults across the globe are struggling with disconnection induced historical woundedness behaviour challenges ending up resorting to  alcohol use, all forms of addiction and victimhood of rape and suicides just to name a few yet they are deemed the worst of social misfits meant for the psychiatric hospital.

Human activities are altering the earth’s climate, and with it, the life-support systems on which human health and well-being depend.

These changes are increasing the frequency and severity of environmental and human-caused disasters and disrupting many of the social and environmental determinants of good health, such as land- and sea-based livelihoods, social-support networks, education, health systems, physical infrastructure, valued landscapes, and socioecological relationships.

These unchecked and accelerating stressors—which disproportionately affect those who are already disadvantaged nationally and globally—could directly and indirectly increase harmful substance use and relapse vulnerability.

This could occur through at least five pathways: psychosocial stress arising from the destabilisation of social environmental, economic, and geopolitical support systems; increasing rates of mental disorders; increased physical-health burden; incremental harmful changes to established behaviour patterns; and negative emotional responses to the anticipated and observed impacts of unchecked climate change.

Stress is arguably the most important general mechanism underlying the link between climate change and increased substance-use vulnerability.

 The term “stress” refers to processes involving perceiving, appraising, and responding to threatening, harmful, or challenging stimuli that activate emotional or physiological responses aimed at restoring homeostasis in the body.

One challenge, of course, is untangling the complex causal chains linking climate-change-related stressors and substance use; after all, substance-use disorders are already the result of complex, interacting chains of events that often spun across generations to early in life (even before birth) and extend across development.

Within neo-colonial white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, the black male body continues to be perceived as an embodiment of bestial, violent, penis-as-weapon hypermasculine assertion.

Psychohistories of white racism have always called attention to the tension between the construction of black male body as danger and the underlying eroticisation that always then imagines that body as a location for transgressive pleasure.

has taken contemporary commodification of blackness to teach the world that this perceived threat, whether real or symbolic, can be diffused by a process of fetishisation that renders the black masculine ‘menace’ feminine through a process of patriarchal objectification.

Unless individuals and communities have the power to defy commoditization and define their own lives and the life of their environment, their potential is vulnerable to the crushing forces of objectification coloured by addiction in all its forms.

We live in an interconnected world, in an interconnected time, and we need holistic solutions. We have a crisis of inequality, and we need climate solutions that solve that crisis.

Healing, and healing justice is such an important aspect of climate justice and they have become inalienable.

It’s critical that we don’t degrade the climate crisis to a mathematical equation to be solved with analytical science.

We must recognise the trauma and the healing necessary for us to move forward in a way that doesn’t replicate systems of harm.

The criminalisation of drug and substance use behavior preferred by many is devoid of correct understanding of the pillars supporting the plague and continues to make it difficult for young people to seek help when they suffer from the effects of unhealthy drug use.

Chartered Institute of Organic Health Trust recommends an emphasis on shift from the legal approach to a public health approach (even in family setups) in-order to address the challenges and complications associated with drug and substance use behaviour among young people in Zimbabwe from an informed angle.

 *Tinashe Elvis Chikodzi is a social en-trepreneur, founder and director of Chartered Institute of Organic Health (Trust, chartered customer service professional and member of the Africa Project Against Suicides. Mobile No. +263 716 641 253

 These weekly articles are coordinated by Lovemore Kadenge, an independent consultant, manag-ing consultant of Zawale Consultants (Private) Limited, past president of the Zimbabwe Economics Society and past president of the Chartered Governance and Accountancy Institute in Zimbabwe.

Mobile No. +263 772 382 852