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The Current Transcript for March 1, 2022

Host: Matt Galloway

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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The point of propaganda coming out of Russia right now is to undermine Ukrainian narratives and to scare Ukrainian people. Ukrainians are not scared.

MATT GALLOWAY: Propaganda has always been a part of war, and The Current invasion of Ukraine by Russia is no different. In 30 minutes, the fight between truth and disinformation on the battlefield in the era of Twitter, tech talk and artificial intelligence. Also this morning, how society has thought about addiction has changed a lot over the years.

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For most people, I think addiction summons up a picture of being taken over by some substance or enslaved, but around, say, the 15 hundreds 1510s, 1520s addiction meant something totally different was an action. It wasn't a status.

MG: Carl Erik Fisher has seen that evolution firsthand. He is an addiction physician. He's also in recovery for drug and alcohol use. In a fascinating new book called The Urge, he charts how our views on addiction have evolved and asks whether addiction itself is something we need to work with rather than fight. We begin, though, with the shadow of nuclear weapons over Ukraine. Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway and this is The Current.

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Amid Russia-Ukraine crisis, what’s the risk of a nuclear strike?

Guests: Ankit Panda, David Perry

MG: The scenes across Ukraine today, a column of Russian tanks 64 kilometres long seen in satellite images approaching Kiev from the north. In Kharkiv, Ukraine's second largest city. A massive explosion hit in front of a government building a day after at least nine people were killed as Russian forces shelled a residential neighbourhood. And closer to the Polish border.

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[Sounds: Air raid and bombing]

The air raid sirens in Lviv, Ukraine, have become the screeching soundtrack of that city. Anyone who hears them and has a basement, rushes underground. Yuri Kushnir has been doing this with his two children.

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REPORTER: Why are you here?

CHILD: We're here because we heard the alarm that air attacks are here because of war.

MG: his son, who's 10, his daughter 12. And shortly after he filmed that video, Yuri's wife and the children left Lviv for Poland. It's still dangerous to make that journey, but they believe it's safer for them to go. Yuri, however, is still in Lviv.

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YURI KUSHNIR: I personally believe that everything will be fine. So just kissed my wife, kids and said that we will, look, we will see each other very soon. I'm personal feeling OK, and I'm glad that kids also don't actually experience this airstrike alarms. I'm really sorry for the people who lost already their loved ones or had have to hide in the basement, still. My little brother with his family and three kids below eight years old who they now even afraid to go outside to the house. And you know, when you cannot reach someone instantly and then you see that in the place where he is supposed to be there are a lot of bombs. That's something that, you know, you cannot take it very lightly. I believe that I am kind of, you know, a strong man who is optimistic and so on. But I'm crying and laughing, trying thirty times a day and the mood is jumping all, all the way from my sad news, very moving news, but also very stupid news that we see what the Russians do. And I'm doing the volunteer work by organising, purchasing and delivery into Ukraine through the Polish border. Various equipments, thermal vision and night vision devices.

MG: We reached Yuri Kushnir in Lviv, Ukraine. High alert. That is the level that Russian President Vladimir Putin has put his nuclear deterrent forces on late last week. This is a move that has raised the stakes in this war and also raises fears for people far beyond the borders of Ukraine. Ankit Panda is the Stanton senior fellow in the Nuclear Policy Programme at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, as well as the author of Kim Jong UN and The Bomb Survival and Deterrence in North Korea. He's in Washington this morning. Good morning.

ANKIT PANDA: Good morning. Thank you for having me.

MG: Thank you for being here. Vladimir Putin, as I mentioned, ordered that Russian nuclear forces be put on high alert. Just briefly, what does that mean?

ANKIT PANDA: So the order he gave was actually a little bit more circumspect, and he used a phrase that didn't directly indicate what exactly had been ordered. So even in the now 24 plus hours since he gave that order, we've seen some reporting from U.S. officials suggesting that nothing has actually changed in Russia's nuclear posture. We might expect under higher alert conditions to see Russian missiles leaving their bases, warheads being transferred to missiles or bombers. None of that has apparently happened, which is good news, but it certainly does highlight that nuclear weapons are lingering for now in the background of this crisis. I think the reason Putin did this was to emphasise to the West that the stakes in this conflict are greater than a conventional war between Russia and Ukraine if things spiral out of control. And I think that message has been received.

MG: Somebody has framed this in some ways as a keep out sign that this is a way for Putin to say if you are thinking, for example, of a no fly zone over Ukraine, this is something that perhaps will get you thinking differently.

ANKIT PANDA: I think that's fair to say. I think this has more to do with public opinion. I think political leaders at the Pentagon here in Washington and Naito Capitals in Europe understand that the nuclear dimension of any conflict with Russia certainly quite well. But certainly since Putin has made this threat, which I think it's fair to call a threat, we've seen numerous headlines. You know, we just here in Washington. The front page of The Washington Post yesterday ran a massive headline, saying Russia puts nuclear forces on alert. And so I think this has implications for how this conflict is being perceived in the West.

MG: Is it also being directed that posturing? Is it also being directed at the Russian people?

ANKIT PANDA: Absolutely, it is. When we look at everything going wrong in Russia over the years, a consistent piece of Russia's messaging to its own people is that the Russian people are protected by one of the world's most impressive nuclear deterrence ever conceived of as a repeated facet of Russian internal domestic propaganda. And so again, it's unsurprising to see that repeated in the context of this crisis when things are not going so well in Ukraine, which is again something that the Russians have tried to keep from their own people.

MG: I think those of us, who grew up under the a shadow of the Cold War and that threat of mutually assured destruction, worry about things escalating and perhaps thought that fear had receded suddenly with, I'll use your word, a threat like this. That fear is front and centre. What are the concerns in terms of how the world responds so that it does not escalate?

ANKIT PANDA: So for the moment, my personal level of concern about nuclear escalation is still quite limited. Look, I think the risk is higher than it was on February 24th. The daily invasion began. I think the fact that a major nuclear armed powers in a conflict with a country adjacent to Europe and a country adjacent to the NATO Nuclear Alliance is something to be concerned about. There is the possibility of an inadvertent clash, for instance, between Russian forces and native forces near Ukraine to occur, which could spiral out in unpredictable ways. But overall, I don't think this is quite at the level yet where nuclear issues are really at the forefront. U.S. officials again U.S. Strategic Command, which controls U.S. nuclear forces, have really reacted to the Russian declaration of a change in alert status with a very sort of measured and calm response, which I think is what is warranted. So what I would say at the moment is, you know, this is not the time to begin thinking about those kinds of scenarios. Although, you know, I think this is a reminder that as long as nuclear weapons exist and they're likely to continue to exist for a long time as disarmament seems quite unlikely, these kinds of issues will be a continuing concern in major conflicts. And so nuclear weapons very much remain in the background, and the risk of their use is slightly higher than it was before February 24th.

MG: It feels like there are other dimensions to this as well. Yesterday, Belarus said that more than half of voters in a referendum in that country to end the country's neutral non-nuclear status were in support of that move. The president, Alexander Lukashenko, has said the country could host Russian nuclear weapons. You have the Foreign Minister of Russia at a Geneva disarmament meeting on Tuesday saying that Kiev had been seeking to acquire nuclear weapons, saying that this was a danger that it needed to prevent if you step back a little bit from the immediate war. What else is going on when it comes to the deployment to the placement? The existence of nuclear weapons in this region?

ANKIT PANDA: So, you know, a lot of what you're describing with regard to Belarus, I think, relates to broader Russian concerns about the security architecture in Europe. The Russians, I think, have long bristled at the fact that NATO's bases U.S. nuclear weapons on the territory of its members, including Turkey, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and Italy. And so this referendum that's just occurred in Belarus, I think, is an attempt by the Russians to play tit for tat. It's also, I think, a way for the government of Belarus to really continue this process that's been ongoing for some time and certainly accelerated after Belarus's own internal process of basically incorporating itself into Russia more broadly. The second piece of that alleging that Ukraine is developing nuclear weapons is a completely ginned up conspiracy theory. There's not an ounce of evidence that the Ukrainians are doing this. I think it's another attempt by the Russians to offer a pretext to justify their unprovoked aggression against the Ukrainian state. Of course, unfortunately, the notion of militarily intervening to stop possible proliferation of nuclear weapons is something that has been set as a precedent in the international system, including by the United States in 2003, when the U.S. invaded Iraq. And so again, I think this is a piece of why the Russians may have chosen to introduce this bit of the narrative. It was really something that entered the picture quite late, almost. I think just a couple of days before the invasion began was the first time we heard about it in Vladimir Putin's speech. Mm-Hmm. And so it isn't something that has been a longstanding Russian concern, and I think it's more of an opportunistic attempt to portray this as as a just war, which it certainly is not.

MG: We're going to talk more about this in just a moment. But Russian forces have been met with heavy resistance from Ukrainian soldiers and civilians, and the sense now is that Russia seems to be stepping up attacks if this war does not go the way that Vladimir Putin wants. Does the potential use of nuclear weapons become any more of a reality?

ANKIT PANDA: It is always a possibility. Russia does not have a policy of no first use. But you know, we we have the Russian military doctrine available to us. We understand the conditions under which Russia has publicly said that they would use nuclear weapons, which is under conditions where the existence of the of the state itself is being threatened with conventional means. And so while the Ukrainians in their fight for self-defence have been able to put forward a more robust defence than the Russians might have expected, now Ukraine is not threatening Moscow. Ukraine is absolutely not threatening the survival of the Russian state. And so based on what the Russians have been saying for years, including their 2010 and 2014 nuclear doctrines, there is really no basis here for nuclear escalation. That, however, doesn't rule out the possibility of something like a very limited, high altitude, low yield nuclear demonstration by Russia to shock at all the Ukrainians and all of Europe into realising the severity of this. This is not something I'm saying is likely at all. But, you know, I'm not going to pretend that I know the mindset that Vladimir Putin finds himself in personally these days. And so that is maybe, you know, the smallest sliver where the Russians, without any involvement from NATO or the United States could decide that this is something that's necessary, of course, that they have a lot of options before they get to that point. As you hinted, I think the last 24 to 36 hours of this conflict leave me quite concerned that the Russians are about to significantly and they indeed have significantly already upped the intensity of their conventional fighting, including against civilians and civilian infrastructure in Ukraine. And so the need, you know, there is absolutely no need for the Russians to resort to the use of nuclear weapons. Another issue is that Vladimir Putin has for the longest time been quite concerned that the West sees his regime as illegitimate. And this is, I think, quite dangerous because Putin, when he announced the increase of a nuclear alert level, he did not cite anything the Ukrainians were doing. He did not even cite the fact that NATO countries were sending arms to Ukraine to support their fight against Russia. What he did cite were a quote illegitimate sanctions and aggressive statements, which is an interesting sort of basis on which to make nuclear threats. It implies that Putin sees the extent of economic sanctions that have been announced against Russia as potentially challenging his own role, either either to foment popular protests within Russia by Russian people who understand that the reason their life savings have been wiped out overnight effectively is due to this war that Putin initiated. And so that, I think again leaves me concerned. Regime change in Russia is not an explicit objective of the West, but it is something that Putin might perceive to be at play here.

MG: Ankit Panda. Good to speak with you. Thank you very much.

ANKIT PANDA: Thank you for having me.

MG: Ankit Panda is the Stanton Senior Fellow, the Nuclear Policy Programme, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Thus far, many analysts have said that the war in Ukraine is not going the way that Russia expected when it invaded six days ago.

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The Russians have not only experienced a stiff and determined resistance by the Ukrainians, but logistics and sustainment problems of their own. Make no mistake, Mr. Putin still has at his disposal significant combat power. Yes, they have faced setbacks and they have faced resistance. You got to hand it to the Ukrainians, who have been fighting very hard for their country and making an impact and making a dent on Mr. Putin's abilities. But they will learn the Russians will learn from this. And so they have suffered setbacks. But I don't think we can just assume that they're going to stay set back.

MG: That's Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby speaking to reporters yesterday. David Perry is president of the Canadian Global Affairs Institute. He's in Ottawa. David, good morning to you.

DAVID PERRY: Good morning, Matt.

MG: Is this the war that Russia expected when it attacked Ukraine?

DAVID PERRY: I guess it's sort off making sort of two caveats. One, we're not even a week into this, so it's still very early days and we'll see how things unfold. And the second point I'd make is that we're seeing some pretty sophisticated and active attempts at controlling the information space. And I think a lot of credit has to be given to the Ukrainians who've been remarkably adept, I think, at some of their strategic messaging, their their information that they're putting out, which isn't necessarily inaccurate, but I don't think it gives us a full picture of what's happening. Having said that, if this was a western force, that would mean a couple of things already that I think they would have wanted to have gone much better, not taking full control of the Ukrainian air space being key amongst us.

MG: We're going to talk more about the information space coming up in the next part of our programme in the meantime. We have seen today a massive explosion in Kharkiv. There is this 64 kilometre long convoy of tanks approaching Kiev. Do you see a change in tact here?

DAVID PERRY: So the first few days of this, the Russians approach have been a little bit atypical even for them and somewhat curious in that they've been sending relatively small units at fairly long distances, separated from some of their supply, which the Pentagon official was just talking about. So you've seen instances of vehicles literally running out of fuel on the side of the road, and they haven't really done nearly as much as they could with their long range missiles, long range rockets or the Russian Air Force. I think we're starting to see kind of a return to what the Russians have done to devastating effect in some other conflicts with more bombardment of civilian areas. They've actually been pretty clean in their approach thus far in relative terms, mostly focussing up until a day or two ago on mostly military targets and not going after the wider civilian infrastructure.

MG: We've also seen average Ukrainians taking up arms, making Molotov cocktails, defending their homes, trying to on the roads, stop Russian infantry from proceeding into areas near the city. How prepared do you think the Russian military is for that sort of battle?

DAVID PERRY: Thus far, it seems like it has been something that's taken them a bit by surprise. I think it's always difficult to until you really get into the crux of it to tell exactly what kind of resistance you're going to face. You know, Ukrainians are quite capable armed forces, and they've had a lot of Western training and support over the last several years, including from Canada. And it seems like at least part of that's being put to good effect already.

MG: Is that going to tip the balance at all in in favour of Ukraine, not only the support that has been provided in past, but the fact that you're now seeing actively other countries, including Canada, continuing to make commitments to send further lethal aid to Ukraine.

DAVID PERRY: What we've seen in the last just two or three days has been some pretty astonishing commitments of real military hardware. In some cases Norwegians, from Germany even, Canada to an extent, reversal of decades long policies about arming parties to a conflict. So we've seen just in the last two or three days commitments of thousands of Anti Armour anti-tank weapons. As an example, some EU countries pledging actual fighter aircraft. If that material can get into the hands of the Ukrainians - and I think one thing to be watching for is whether or not the Russians make a concerted effort to prevent that material from getting into the country. But if you can get that into the hands of the Ukrainians, the Russians are still going to have a pretty significant advantage in terms of how many are armoured vehicles they have their artillery, rockets, tanks and all those types of heavy equipment. But that's really going to give a significant increase in firepower to the Ukrainian side of this.

MG: We know that the International Criminal Court has launched an investigation into possible war crimes in Ukraine. Just this morning, Canada announced that it would be petitioning the ICC to further that investigation. This includes the use of cluster bombs, perhaps on civilian targets. What do you make of that that that possible investigation already?

DAVID PERRY: I think it's warranted. I think there's certainly more than enough precedent to suggest that and in some reporting already that the Russians have already used some types of weapons that are that are prohibited. And if they continue to view that winning this in Ukraine is vital to Russian or at least Putin's interests and it's not going well by other means, then I think we can expect them to resort to some of these dirty war tactics that thankfully, to this point in time, they haven't used very significantly, but definitely a potential for that to ratchet up. So instituting those types of proceedings, both to make sure that this is a properly accounted for in the long term, but also potentially to help influence some thinking in the near and medium term about how the Russian forces on the ground actually act, recognising that that threat of sanction, in addition to the fact that that seems fairly clear right now, that they're high enough up in the military or in the national security apparatus of the Russian government right now. The prospects for any kind of life outside Russia's long term are looking very dim.

MG: And so just in the remaining few seconds that we have, as you mentioned, this is just the very beginning, it seems, of this war. But what are you? What are you most concerned about? What are you watching right now?

DAVID PERRY: Well, I think aside from all the the small sort of very and meaningful tactical victories that the Ukrainians achieved, the Russians are taking significant territory, particularly in the Southeast. They're moving towards the capital as you outlined earlier. So despite, you know, some pockets of good news, the resistance from Ukrainians and a lot of international support, the Russians are increasingly moving forward day by day and again, only one week into this.

MG: We will speak again, I'm sure. In the meantime, thank you for this this morning.

DAVID PERRY: Good to talk to you.

MG: David Perry, president of the Canadian Global Affairs Institute. He was in Ottawa, the latest coming up in your CBC news. And then.

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We've seen a lot of people just taking old footage that is unrelated to Ukraine and portraying that as the latest update.

MG: David Perry talked about the information space, technology and social media have given the whole world a front row seat into this war in Ukraine. That access comes with unlimited opportunity to bend the truth and to push propaganda. In a moment how Russia and others are spreading disinformation online to distort the reality on the ground, I'm Matt Galloway. You're listening to The Current on CBC Radio One. We're back in six minutes. Stay with us.

Spotting online lies and disinformation around the invasion of Ukraine

Guests: Svetlana Matviyenko, Jane Lytvynenko, Lucas Andriukaitis

MG: Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway and you're listening to The Current.

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Still to come, reframing how we understand addiction through the perspective of an addiction physician himself in recovery. But first, as Russian forces spread across Ukraine, online propaganda and disinformation are spreading much faster.

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[Foreign speech]

MG: it looks like a simple selfie video But the words are stirring. It's the president of Ukraine standing outside his ornate office in the centre of Kiev. He denounces false claims that he has left the country and told the army to lay down its weapons. Disinformation has long been a weapon of war. Svetlana Matviyenko is an assistant professor of critical media analysis at Simon Fraser University School of Communication and the associate director of the Digital Democracies Institute. She is in southwestern Ukraine right now. Svetlana, good morning.

SVETLANA MATVIYENKO: Good morning.

MG: We'll get to the issues around disinformation in a moment, but how are you doing and what's the situation like where you are right now?

SVETLANA MATVIYENKO: Well, luckily I'm in the one of the most safe areas at this moment, which is calm and leads the region. And even though we are getting alerts, a rocket alert alerts all the time, so we haven't been hit. So so far they're all directed towards Kiev and small cities around it.

MG: I'm glad you're safe. The issue of disinformation is something that you study. What are you seeing in this war right now when it comes to disinformation being spread within Ukraine?

SVETLANA MATVIYENKO: We are seeing multiple multiple things just as simple as memes or just short messages with some distorted facts, threats and things like that. There are also a lot of messages sent to other people or specifically very often to soldiers. Messages sent as written from their relatives, asking them to surrender. And this becomes so typical and this is so personalised that many of them sometimes cannot identify, although at this moment everyone is aware of that. So there are also things like paid advertisement used on- like the option, which is available on many platforms from YouTube to Facebook and whatnot. So when this advertising option is used as a disinformation option, so incredible. And of course, hacks. Hacks a constant threat. So our networks are going up and down. So our banking system, for example, could be up and down several times in the day. And while we were a little worried on the 24th when everything started, a couple of days later, we did not have any panic about this. We just wait a little bit and the system is up and it's functioning again. Governmental websites, all sorts of different other services. So everything is just extremely vibrant up and down, off and on.

MG: In the midst of everything. How is it that Ukrainians are being able to to figure out what's true and what isn't true?

SVETLANA MATVIYENKO: We are learning on the go. I would say because even though many of those tactics and strategies have long history at the same time, maybe the amount of those things rises, the volume of those things is yet unseen. Not only in Ukraine, but anywhere in the world. I think there are many reasons to claim now that we are seeing some, some insane, full-scale global cyber war that is going on. It just concentrated kind of in Ukraine because the kinetic action is here, but in many ways it concerns many global audiences anywhere because everyone is mobilised as viewers, as those who spread the information, those who share, those who join some conversation. So all of it part of what is going on.

MG: What about I mean, we've been talking about what's happening in Ukraine, what about what's happening in Russia?

SVETLANA MATVIYENKO: At this moment, we could say that there's a Russian audience became one of the primarily audiences of this campaign. Right. Because many of them, especially those who watch state channels, are completely dis-informed and still believe with these major narratives that they spread about the fact that the Russian forces only entered Donbass and saved people or Donbass, right? So it was a narrative is that they protect Russia and save people of Donbass and that it's not a war that is going on, but a military operation. And in order to do the Nazi by. Right. So in Putin's language, the Nazi by Ukraine or demilitarise Ukraine. So however, all this combat, this is happening in the civilian areas and civilian buildings are being hit that, of course, you already know.

MG: But you see this, as you've said, as a form of cyber warfare broadly, that that's how you would classify what's going on right now.

SVETLANA MATVIYENKO: I would absolutely classify it. And I think it's very important to understand about cyber war today. That unlikely. I used to think about anything cyber that kind of belongs to the virtual real cyber war is not about the virtual reality, it's about the nexus of the physical reality and virtual reality. It's about digital communication and kinetic actions coming together. And that's exactly what is happening right now.

MG: Svetlana, stay safe, and I'm really glad to talk to you. Thank you very much.

SVETLANA MATVIYENKO: Thank you very much.

MG: Svetlana Matviyenko is an assistant professor of critical media analysis at the Simon Fraser University's School of Communication. She right now is in south western Ukraine. Jane Lytvynenko is a journalist who covers misinformation and disinformation. She's a senior research fellow at the short-Selling Centre on Media Politics and Public Policy at Harvard. She also grew up in Ukraine and has family there. Jane, good morning to you.

JANE LYTVYNENKO: Hi, how are you?

MG: I'm well, thanks. You've been watching this since before the invasion began. What strikes you about how Russia has been using disinformation in this war?

JANE LYTVYNENKO: Well, I would just like to echo your previous guest to say that the sheer volume of disinformation has been overwhelming online. But of course, one thing that we have to mention is that Russia used disinformation or more specifically propaganda as an excuse to further invade Ukraine. So the de-Nazification narrative is something that we've seen and also the various fake videos that Russia attempted to spread ahead of the further invasion, essentially justifying it, going into Ukraine or attempting to justify it going into Ukraine. Now those were debunked in real time. And so it is, you know, accurate to say that the information space right now is also is also its own kind of war.

MG: Who do you think the disinformation is being directed at?

JANE LYTVYNENKO: There are a few different audiences. Of course, there's people in Ukraine with attempts to demoralise Ukrainians and Ukrainian soldiers. There's, of course, people in Russia as Russia tries to justify this what they call special operation. But of course, there's a full-scale war. And also justify the impact that Russians are feeling economically and informationally, then the country and western audiences. Of course, there's a big knowledge gap that it serves as an opportunity for Russia to essentially go in and distort Ukraine's history. Because of course, many people in the West are not as closely familiar with Ukraine's history. And so that knowledge gap is very exploitable, but we see Ukrainians fill it in real time.

MG: It sounds obvious in some ways, but how has social media supercharged this?

JANE LYTVYNENKO: Well, social media has really come full circle in Ukraine. In 2014, during the revolution, during the annexation of Crimea, during the occupation of eastern Ukraine and also during the shooting down of MH-17, disinformation was Russia's primary weapon, and that was at a time when social media networks were largely unaware of the disinformation. But now they are. Just a few minutes ago, we got news that Sputnik and RT primary English language propaganda channels are going to be blocked in Europe. We also heard the Prime Minister Justin Trudeau yesterday asked for CRTC to review our channels, put an presence in Canada. And so obviously, the awareness of Russian propaganda and the power that it has online is much more widespread now than it was eight years ago.

MG: How do you assess how Ukrainians are doing in countering Russian propaganda? We mentioned at the very beginning we heard a little bit of one of those videos that Vladimir Zelensky has posted of him out on the street in the face of accusations that he has fled the country, that he has asked, you know, Ukrainians to to drop their weapons. That's one example of it. How do you think the CounterSpin, if I can put it that way, is going.

JANE LYTVYNENKO: Yeah, I mean, there's the personal level and then there's the larger scale level on a personal level. There's a big exchange of information going on about specific attacks and specific incidents around the country. Ukrainians, of course, know each other and are able to confirm things that they see online in real time, like along the lines of I'm in this neighbourhood. I heard this. You're also in this neighbourhood, can you confirm. On a larger scale, Ukrainian television bunking disinformation in real time. And we also see Ukrainians globally, including the Diaspora, push to get Ukrainian narratives and Ukrainian information out because it's not enough to just debunk the false information. The accurate information needs to be there. And that is why we're seeing the overwhelming amount of personal stories online are fact checking online Ukrainians refusing absolutely to let the world look away from what's happening.

MG: You spent a lot of time and you and I have spoken to a number of times speaking about disinformation, misinformation. You're watching this unfold from a perspective of profession, but also very personal because you have family in Ukraine, and so I'm just wondering what that's like for you as you see the flood of disinformation come out, but also knowing that you're concerned about about your family back home?

JANE LYTVYNENKO: It's surreal, to be honest. You know, I look at my phone and I check my public Telegram channels for the parts of the country that are particularly close to my heart. And then I look up and everything's normal, right? I'm in a safe country and a safe space where people are just going about their business. And it's particularly difficult when communication is spotty and you can't quite know where your loved ones are at. But I would say that the sheer volume that Ukrainians are trying to get out into the world, the sheer availability of information makes it more possible to understand what's happening on the ground at any point in time, although of course, it's always tricky with war. And so that part the ability to to hear from other Ukrainians, what's going on in particular parts of the country has been helpful.

MG: How's your family? Are they OK?

JANE LYTVYNENKO: I think so.

MG: I hope so. Stay with us, Jane, I want to bring one more voice into our conversation. Lucas Andriukaitis is associate director of the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab. He studies Russian disinformation and is involved in Open-Source intelligence gathering. He is in Vilnius, Lithuania. Lucas, good morning to you.

LUCAS ANDRIUKAITIS: Hi, hello.

MG: When you look at Russian disinformation in this war, what stands out to you?

LUCAS ANDRIUKAITIS: Yeah. Well, we see a couple of changes since right before the war. The main narrative sort of changed. If I if I had to say, you know, tell you, like three main narratives right before the invasion, I would say the Russians were trying to to deny the existence the right to exist for Ukraine, denying the war that it will happen. And lastly, trying to find some fake causes belly. So it's sort of, you know, reason to reason for war. And right after the invasion, we saw a switch to more, you know, there was betraying Ukraine. Ukraine being shown as a failed state and again showing alleged its alleged tricks and attacks on civilians by the Ukrainian forces. So we are seeing that, and I think there's another important distinction to make that the Russian space and the English language space here at the moment, completely different to different worlds. And in the English language space, I think we have a new problem of misinformation where what we're seeing is basically there's so many people active on social media. The moment that they disinformation and all the disinformation campaigns tend to be, you know, drowned in the ocean of information. At the same time, we see an effects of people sharing information that has not been verified and what basically it becomes misinformation.

MG: Let me ask you about those two things. First. The disinformation side of things we saw over the weekend and this again goes back to the role of social media. In this, Facebook and Twitter removed a number of accounts that they described as covert influence operations that were spreading anti Ukrainian posts. YouTube said today that it's blocking channels connected with R.T. and Sputnik. How much of a difference do you think that will make in reducing the volume of disinformation?

LUCAS ANDRIUKAITIS: I think I think this is an amazing step forward. And a lot of the experts where we're trying to achieve this for quite some time, trying to tell the authorities to do that. So it's definitely good. At the same time, I'm personally really worried about what kind of narratives are being spread on the, you know, on the bottom of the internet.

MG: What do you mean, the bottom of the internet?

LUCAS ANDRIUKAITIS: Well, the dark side of the internet, right where the the radical right, the radical left, is lurking in the world, these narratives gets natural sort of traction. All right. So we can see that some of the radical radical right and left in Europe are sort of echoing what Putin is saying on their own. And I think this is dangerous because it's really hard to get into closed Facebook groups, you know, WhatsApp channels and all of that. So we can't really tell what is happening there. But every once in a while, we see glimpses of these groups sort of supporting what's what the Kremlin is saying.

MG: Jane Lytvynenko, what role would you want to see social media platforms play in addressing the disinformation that spreads on their networks?

JANE LYTVYNENKO: Well, I think a big part of the response here needs to be explored, extremely radical transparency. We need to understand what has been removed and why. And I do agree that we need to remove Russian propaganda networks as as soon as possible, like yesterday. We also need to understand how many accounts are being removed, as well as the pro-Russian other pro-Russian efforts that rely on anonymous accounts on accounts that are pretending to be other people. And this is really an effort that needs to see some coordination across social media platforms because not one single social media platform is untouched by Russian propaganda right now.

MG: Is that possible to reduce and remove those accounts of media? Sounds a little bit like that game Whac-A-Mole.

JANE LYTVYNENKO: Sure, but we've seen it before, you know, social media companies coordinate removals of pro-Russian networks and also other inauthentic networks around the world. They have experience in doing this. And although of course, new accounts will pop up over the last few years, social media networks have introduced some safety measures to prevent the ease with which disinformation can be spread using new accounts or covert accounts. And so they have a lot of tools at their disposal.

MG: Lucas, you also mentioned misinformation and the sheer amount of information that's online that people are sharing right now. We've been speaking about the role, the institutional role of organisations to try and cut down on disinformation. What's the role of the individual in making sure that what we're sharing online doesn't feed into that disinformation campaign?

LUCAS ANDRIUKAITIS: Yeah, that is a great question. Even even, you know, for myself, I spend the past five days online non-stop and I can see that there's a lot of misinformation and how easy it is to get sort of lured into these, you know, potential positive narratives, seeing what you want to see instead of what's actually happening. I guess the best thing to do is for every social media user. Every responsible user is to double and triple check everything you're sharing and try not to get into, you know, emotions before doing that, because that's really important. And the basic media literacy lessons are more than enough to double check the images that you're trying to share. Check if they haven't been posted before or just use keywords on Google. Just see if anyone else or any respectable media outlets are, you know, talking about the same things. So these basic sort of information hygiene rules can really help in minimising the misinformation that they're facing.

MG: How should people evaluate, Lucas, the stories coming out of Ukraine? I mean, we're seeing these videos of ordinary Ukrainians highlighting the successes against the Russian Army and TikTok video that appeared yesterday of young woman who takes over a tank and is kind of showing people how to drive a tank that people apparently have commandeered. How should people evaluate those sorts of stories in that flood of information, do you think?

LUCAS ANDRIUKAITIS: Yeah, I mean, this is I think this is good for morale overall, especially for Ukrainians to see, you know, some some glimpses of success, especially you. One, Russia seems to be on purpose, sort of backing down from from sharing anything. So Ukraine is sort of on an offensive in the information front. But we have to be also careful because I think it's again, it's pretty easy to get dragged into these positive narratives and and try seeing what you want to see, seeing potentially Ukraine victory, that they're doing fine, that everything is going to be OK and just sort of miss on the all of the horrors of horrific things that are happening actually on the ground and maybe miss the moment when Russia is again on the offensive. So we need to be really, really careful about it. But again, I think it's good for morale, not only for Ukraine, but for the whole Western community.

MG: Jane, when you think about that phrase, information hygiene, what should people be thinking about when it comes to interpreting what they're seeing online, what they're sharing online, what they're posting and sifting through on social media?

JANE LYTVYNENKO: Well, I think one important thing to remember here is that we have reporters from newsrooms across the world on the ground explaining to us what is happening. And so they should be the primary source of information for anybody sharing images or videos about the war. There's certainly a lot of really incredible reporting coming out of Ukraine right now. Reporters are risking their lives to get accurate stories out of Ukraine right now. And so I think that that should be the very primary way in which people get their information. I agree with Lucas to say that there's a lot of misinformation going around. We will see more of this because every battle spawns its own misinformation narrative, especially as people try to figure out what happened, what's happening on the ground. And so relying on genuine reporting from journalists who are there is is more important than it's ever been.

MG: It's hard, though, I mean, given the scale of information and the velocity at which it comes at people.

JANE LYTVYNENKO: Yes, of course, of course it's hard, but we need to be prepared for this and we need to be prepared that this is not going to be over tomorrow, and so we need to be extremely stringent with how we approach the situation.

MG: What are you doing yourself? I mean, again, back to the fact that that you have family in in this nation and you have ties to that nation. What are you doing to ensure that you aren't overwhelmed with the information that's coming out?

JANE LYTVYNENKO: Well, I don't know if I can say that I'm not overwhelmed, but I'm doing my best to stick to places that verify images and videos, places of Bellingcat, the New York Times and Washington Post visual investigations team, as well as, of course, [unintelligible]. I'm doing my best to look at local Telegram channels, excuse me that do their best to verify information before they publish it. And I'm also reading Kiev Independent, which of course, has been an outstanding source of information in the English language, as well as watching Ukrainian television where television networks banded together to provide 24 hour coverage to people in Ukraine so they know what is going on.

MG: And Lucas, for you. Just briefly, your advice to people who think I see this. It's worth sharing. It's a great story. One piece of advice that you would give them.

LUCAS ANDRIUKAITIS: Yeah, double check and triple check. And, you know, take a breather before you post because because you might cause more and more damage than actual goods. So just think about before before posting.

MG: It's good to speak with you both about this. Thank you very much.

JANE LYTVYNENKO: Thank you.

LUCAS ANDRIUKAITIS: Thank you.

MG: Take care. Jane Lytvynenko is a journalist and senior research fellow at the Schwarzschild Centre on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University. Lucas Andriukaitis is associate director of the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab. Your regional update is next, and then the word addiction conjures up images of struggling with pain, the lack of control. Why is that and what impact does that have on getting people help? The addiction physician, Carl Erik Fisher, joins me in a moment to talk about why it's crucial that we, in his eyes, rethink our approach to addiction. I'm Matt Galloway The Current is back in 90 seconds. Stick around it.

How society’s understanding of addiction has changed over the centuries

Guest: Carl Erik Fisher

MG: Hi, I'm Matt Galloway, you're listening to The Current. What does it mean to live with an addiction? What causes addiction and what is the best way to treat it? These are questions that stretch back almost as far as time itself, and my next guest says there are no tidy answers. But he says that's also the point we've been missing. Carl Erik Fisher is an addiction physician and bioethicist, also an assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University, where he works in the Division of Law, Ethics and Psychiatry. His sweeping new book is called The Urge Our History of Addiction. Carl Erik Fisher. Good morning!

CARl ERIK FISHER: Good morning, Matt, thanks for having me.

MG: Thank you for being here, I want to ask you for a definition. What is the word addiction mean to you?

CARl ERIK FISHER: Yeah, that was a big process in The Book of Undoing: My Understanding of Addiction. I landed on the what I considered to be the original meaning of the word in the English language. One of the big surprises for the book is that it goes back 500 years to around the time of the Protestant Reformation. You know, for most people, I think addiction summons up. A picture of being taken over by some substance. To be hijacked or enslaved is a word that people used in slightly earlier times. But back then around, say, the 1800s 1510s, 1520s, addiction meant something totally different. It was a it was an action. It wasn't a status. It was something that was common to all of humanity. It wasn't some special extreme illness or sickness. It was something that anybody could in the process of a strong devotion to lose their willpower. Mm-Hmm. So you ask me for a definition I didn't give you a definition. I gave you a story about how complex the term is. But I think that's one of the main points of the book is that there's so much baggage, social and historical attached to some of these terms that it really pays to look closely at what they really mean.

MG: Because I think you're similar to a lot of us and that you thought addiction initially meant a compulsion? Where do you think that came from?

CARl ERIK FISHER: Oh, yeah. Well, I think it's one of the deepest mysteries of philosophy and psychology and before that theology, was this this tension between freewill and determinism or, say, freewill and compulsion. So addiction nowadays is often framed in that binary. You're either hijacked and compelled or somebody has free choice. And I think that's wrong. There's this grey area between choice and compulsion. And actually some of the earlier writers in history did a much better job of exploring this space. So I talk about Aristotle and how he recognised all of these different grey areas in between choice and control, where someone's self-control can be limited. And that was really important to Augustine of Hippo, St. Augustine. And so many other writers throughout history. So I think it's it's really important to stay away from that tendency to simplify it into this or that a sort of simplified binary that once we open, there's the space between choice and compulsion that actually frees us up to fully appreciate the phenomenon and respond in an effective way.

MG: Is it a disease?

CARl ERIK FISHER: So I worry about the term disease. And I think the term is misleading because it's been used in so many different ways. Going back at least 200 years, and I want to be really clear that I acknowledge it's a double edged sword and a lot of folks today and a lot of folks throughout history have gotten a lot of strength and benefit from the term disease. And at various episodes in history, the notion disease has helped to say advocate for hospital treatment of addiction, which at some point was very hard to get to advocate for funding or just to communicate personal care and compassion. But the notion of disease has also caused real harm. It's been used in a dehumanising and fatalistic way. It's been used in a way that promotes an overly reductionistic idea of science, as if science was the one best way to understand addiction, as if it has all the answers. And the notion of disease has even been used as a weapon to argue that multiple times from the temperance movements of the early 19th century, up to the more recent years that it's been used as a weapon to say that people with addiction are somehow broken and unable to change. So I think this word disease is confusing and we just have to stop using it entirely so that we can look deeper at what we actually mean by the term disease and to open up a space for more care and nuance.

MG: This book is fascinating because it's a number of different things. It is a history lesson. It's a clinical lesson. In some ways. It's also part of a memoir. Tell me about your way into this conversation. Why did you want to write about this now?

CARl ERIK FISHER: Oh, well, it was it was the book I wanted for myself in my own early recovery because like you mentioned, the memoir portion is about my own experience with addiction. So I was in medical training in New York City at Columbia University and sort of living a double life where on one hand I was living on top of the world and graduating with honours, and I thought that I was sort of the master of my domain. And then the world changed because I had a real problem with alcohol and stimulant addiction, which at the extremes landed me in the psychiatric ward at Bellevue Hospital, where I'd interviewed for residency the year prior. So, you know, the short story is that I was really lucky I got to go to treatment. I got back stable and working as a doctor, but I didn't really understand what had gone wrong with me. And medicine help me out a lot, and I had done neuroscience research and that had help me out a lot. But I was looking for one definitive answer and instead there were like 30 different theories of addiction in the medical and scientific field. And I just realised that I needed to explore my own personal history and also explore the fields beyond science and medicine, like arts and literature and history and sociology to actually help get clear and reveal some of the answers I was looking for.

MG: You write about growing up with parents who were alcoholics. Did they realise that they had a drinking problem?

CARl ERIK FISHER: Well, yes and no. You know, when one sort of recurrent theme that comes up in the book is that my mother really defined herself in opposition to my father and my father had pretty severe alcohol problems to the point of like the [unintelligible] and multiple inpatient rehab stays, and my mother didn't quite get to that level of severity, but she was, you know, she was really struggling to the point where, you know, later in life, even though we took away her car because she was to fail to drive and really sick with lung cancer, she still managed a way to get drinks and drank to the point that she undercut her chemotherapy. And I mean, it was really just a constant struggle with her drinking throughout our whole lives. So, you know, they did realise both of them did realise they had problems, and it was only during the process of writing the book that I learnt that they had gone to alcohol treatment very early in my life before I was even old enough to recognise it, like when I was around like two or three or four years old. But they had this sort of pendular relationship with the idea of addiction and where in points they they they were on board with the notion, we have serious problems, we need help with it. And then the sort of like denial and opposition rose up. And you know, I always look down on them, frankly, and I thought, you know, why can't they just pull it together? And you know, it was really helpful to me to look at that and look at their denial, but then also look at my own sort of not compassionate reaction to their denial as a way of appreciating just how much of a problem I was in myself.

MG: Denial an opposition is really interesting. You talk about denial as being a huge obstacle in treating addiction, and this is something that you lived through as well until, as you mentioned, you were removed from your apartment in handcuffs. Do you mind? Tell me about that experience.

CARl ERIK FISHER: Yeah, so specifically, the thing that got me past my denial was just a terrible breakdown where I was in psychiatric residency and still sort of holding it together, but then increasingly using the stimulant Adderall and then later cocaine to sort of compensate for the hangovers and the it just the general toll the drinking was taking on me. And it all came to when I head on vacation where I just went on an alcohol and Adderall binge, to the point where I had a manic psychotic episode prompted by the stimulants, primarily the Adderall. And so I had the sense that there was something going wrong, and I even asked one of my friends around that time, Do you think there's something off with me? I feel like maybe I'm getting a little manic. But I was so invested in this notion of myself as a self-determined, self-disciplined, in control and just really attached to this identity of myself as as a doctor, as a psychiatrist, I wasn't supposed to be one of the crazy ones in the way that I thought about it back then. And now I had this moment where I was, you know, saying to myself out loud in my apartment, like, I know what crazy is, and this is not it. And that I think it was about psychosis. It wasn't necessarily about addiction, but it was sort of a window into the the way I was clinging so tightly to my identity that I was just unwilling to face up to the immensity of the problems I was facing. And you know, for me, a real turning point was I realised, you know, this is this is really not right. I really need help. And so I just yelled out in my apartment and said, Help. And you know, thankfully, one of my neighbours called for help. And and I write at some length about this that, you know, because of privilege, because I'm white and I was living in a fancy neighbourhood in Manhattan and also just because I was lucky. The police responded to me with a fair amount of care and compassion that where even when I wouldn't go along and cooperate, they, you know, they tased me. I got shot with the Taser, which is not a good experience, but it's a lot better than the alternative. And that's the thing that ultimately got me into treatment and forced me to come face to face with my problems.

MG: When you look back on that now, do you recognise yourself?

CARl ERIK FISHER: Well, yes and no, I mean, part of the process of writing the book was trying to put myself back in those days, especially the the, you know, the months and years leading up to the breakdown and. I have this real powerful sense, while I was reading through old journals, for example, of, you know, seeing myself as a young man, almost like a young boy, someone who is just really suffering, and that wasn't me. I mean, there's some physical continuity with that person. And you know, this person here talking to you today. And also, you know, a recognition that that was like almost like a different state for me that I, you know, I really was suffering and not not fully in control. So, you know, part of the, you know, the gift of writing about the process for me was developing some compassion that I didn't have for myself at that time to develop some sense that like, Oh, this is really coming out of some deep suffering.

MG: One of the most interesting things that you write about is is how we as a society talk about and treat alcohol compared to other drugs. There is an industry that is behind this that helps fuel that treatment. But there's also just an idea that we think of alcohol is different than than a different drug, that there are good drugs and there are bad drugs. What's the cost of that, do you think?

CARl ERIK FISHER: But incalculable costs really bad, I mean, this issue of good drugs and bad drugs is so prevalent and throughout history, people have sought to divide up folks under those labels. And as you mention, oftentimes those artificial divisions are fuelled by what I call following some other researchers addiction supply industries, meaning these powerful commercial interests that have a really strong stake in promoting certain kinds of drug use, including alcohol and in the process, really powerfully influencing the way we think about health and the way we think about disease and the way we think about addiction, so that false division between alcohol and other drugs is really a relatively recent phenomenon. We weren't thinking that way as a medical profession, for example, say, before the 1800s, but it was in part the addiction supply industries of alcohol manufacturers and distilleries and advertisers through to the years after prohibition that really promoted this idea that alcohol was somehow different. And so the end result is in North America, we're living through this awful, awful overdose crisis and especially during COVID the the death toll is rising precipitously and that requires urgent attention. And simultaneously, we're also losing a tremendous amount of people to alcohol use disorders as well, and that gets so much less play.

MG: How does race play into this? You talk about and you hinted at this before, even in terms of how you were approached by police when they came to get you when you called for help. There's this idea of unlikely addicts, which is an incredibly loaded phrase, but a phrase that's often used. How does race play into how we think about addiction?

CARl ERIK FISHER: Well, it said from the beginning, really, I mean, one of the other surprises from the book was the way that, you know, even before the sort of modern era of racism that we might date to say the Association of Black Americans and the urban poor with a certain stereotype notions of addiction in the early 20th century. That's an important story. And we also have these these really powerful stereotypes about the right and wrong type of users dating back to colonial times. So tobacco, the first the first real drug epidemic I identified was tobacco when it first came back from North America after Columbus's expeditions and from the very, very beginning, when societies were faced with the seeming invasion of these powerful substances, it very rapidly switched from the right sort of users where tobacco was held up as this. This almost mystical, aristocratic medicine reserved for the elite from that type of medicine to a barbarous drug, a beastly drug, something that was associated with, in their words, savages. And, you know, similar sorts of racist and xenophobic ideas and language attached to drugs through the experience with alcohol in the early American Republic and and so forth and so on. And up to and including especially that the thing I mentioned before that the early 20th century when Mexicans were associated with cannabis use and black Americans in the United States were associated with cocaine and Chinese immigrants in the West were associated with the wrong kind of opioid use. And you can almost visualise geographically the way that the states were just sort of hemmed in by all of these xenophobic and racist ideologies that infected our understanding of addiction that in some ways forms the stereotype of the the so-called wrong sort of user, the out of control and dangerous addict. And we're, you know, we're still living with that legacy today.

MG: You write in the book that there is no natural cut point between people with an addiction and the rest of society. Do we know? Why people, some people develop an addiction and other people don't?

CARl ERIK FISHER: Well, the slightly glib answer to your question is sometimes yes, sometimes no. You know, my my clinical experience is that sometimes people have really powerful and obvious determinants, you know, one that is appropriately in the news. A lot now is trauma. And you know, sometimes people with awful trauma histories that are still today overlooked and not adequately addressed can be a really powerful driver for addiction. But it's not always trauma. You know, for some people, they don't really have an apparent history of trauma, and maybe it seems more temperamental. And for other folks, maybe it seems more biological. And I just I am very, very cautious about arguments based around causes of addiction because ideas about the supposed causes of addiction have been used to mislead and cause a lot of harm. So science, you know, there's a lot in modern science and another hot topic is personalised medicine. There's a lot of promise in terms of teasing apart some of the different causes and contributors to addiction today. And I think we have to be very, very careful about how we translate those understandings into social policy or just the way we think about and talk about addiction.

MG: Because if you are looking for that simple answer, you end up with what you call the treatment industrial complex and some of the ways that that the treatment has gone sideways in terms of treating people with an addiction.

CARl ERIK FISHER: Yeah, that's I mean, that's one of the tragic things about the history is so many times people have held on to a really firm fixed view of what addiction is. And I say tragic because it almost always leads to a bad end where, in the case of the former U.S. senator called the treatment industrial complex, this is Harold Hughes, a person who was in recovery himself and very committed to addiction advocacy and in the sort of like Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson and Nixon years, who then later saw how people were getting corrupted by an ideological adherence in the in the rising treatment industry to a sort of one size fits all model of treatment. And that plays into the profit motives and are largely still segregated system of addiction treatment.

MG: What's the better way forward then? I mean, in your own situation, but also in the work with your patients, what have you what have you learnt about treatment?

CARl ERIK FISHER: So there's a lot of simple concrete things we could be doing to help with treatment in all of North America. We have an urgent need to expand our addiction treatment workforce, meaning just get more medical providers who are versed in addiction and then also mainstream the treatment of addiction. Why should it be that people have to go to a totally separate facility or other, you know, mental health conditions are treated in the clinic, but not addiction? That's still a big problem. But I'm not sure that's totally the the main point of your question. I think, you know, like we were just talking about the understanding of addiction. And I think one of the important ways forward is beyond those sort of policy changes or the sort of technocratic changes. And there's more to do with a change in consciousness around addiction. There's a lot of value in in a process of undoing and of humility, of stepping back and recognising the way that addiction is so complex and exists across all of these different levels. The social, the cultural, the individual, the humanistic, the the spiritual. And just to do that, I think in and of itself to bring in more compassion and nuance and complexity would be a major step forward and and free us up to to respond in a in a more flexible and helpful way.

MG: You say it's profoundly ordinary.

CARl ERIK FISHER: Yeah, I think addiction is in all of us. You know, I recognise that I have membership in this club and I, you know, I love this club to be in recovery and to connect with people who have a shared experience of extreme addiction and the things that go wrong in addiction and the things that go awry are universal to the human condition. You know, the mystery at the heart of addiction is this question of like why do people keep on using despite the urge to stop and despite even the very clear intention to stop? I had that so many times myself saying to myself, OK, today's the day I won't drink anymore. I write down my intention in the journal.

MG: There's a whole industry that's built around that.

CARl ERIK FISHER: Oh, absolutely. There's a whole industry of like self-discipline. I guess you could call it. And you know, I think that that may be helpful for some people. And I fully I think these things like a sober, curious and dry January's and whatever else. They can be super duper helpful for folks because there are many, many different pathways to recovery. It's not just one size fits all model. Yeah. As long as people are thoughtful and learning from those efforts to change, I think it's all good. As long as people are putting effort into looking closely at their behaviour and being honest with themselves, my own problem, though, was I wasn't. My own problem was that I was trying to discipline myself, but then not learning from it and not sharing and keeping it all bottled up and hiding and just letting the shame run me in terms of keeping it a secret. So, you know, I think one of the barriers was, I have this us them mentality around addiction, like it was some extraordinarily sick condition, and it was really helpful for me to to get a sense of addiction being universal, that it is a unique and special condition, but also something contiguous with all the rest of human suffering.

MG: When you talk about humility, I just wonder, finally, what sort of resistance you face? Humility is hard in the face of big wicked issues, and people try to to figure out an easier way through that. You end the book by writing, If addiction is part of humanity, then it's not a problem to solve. We will not end addiction, but we must find ways of working with it, ways that are sometimes gentle, sometimes vigorous, but never warlike because it is futile to wage a war on our own nature. How willing do you think people are to embrace the humility that you're describing there?

CARl ERIK FISHER: Well, I have a lot of hope. I, you know, I really think that people who care deeply about addiction are much more united than we think we are. Once people get past the surface level ideologies and connect around the issue that matters most. There's tremendous capacity to come together and recognise our shared suffering. I mean, just the other day, I was on a podcast for this organisation called A Partnership to End Addiction. And I kind of went into it thinking like, Oh no, they're gonna read that section that you just read to me, and maybe they're going to realise that we're really enemies. But no, they're totally receptive to it. I think people recognise that language gets us into a lot of trouble. This one Buddhist thing that I love so much is open mouth already a mistake. And if anything, I think, you know, the words and the terms that we attach to the notion of addiction are already a mistake, whether we call it a disease or a malady or whatever. And if we can just pause and look at the real human toll and the lives lost in the way that people in the real world actually need help, that there's, you know, tremendous capacity to to kind of relax around some of these, some of these seemingly hot-button issues.

MG: This is a really powerful book, and the timing of it is, is it arrives at the right time when there's this big conversation underway and perhaps people looking for a different way into that conversation. It was a real pleasure to read and a great pleasure to talk to you. Thank you very much.

CARl ERIK FISHER: It means the world, Matt. Thank you so much for saying that, and thanks for having me on. It's great conversation.

MG: Take good care. Carl Erik Fisher is an addiction physician and bioethicist. His new book is called The Urge Our History of Addiction that is The Current for this Tuesday and for the first day of March. Goodbye, February. Coming up next on CBC Radio One, it's quite a month, wasn't it? Happy to see perhaps the back end of that month and onto spring and brighter days ahead. Hopefully cues up next on CBC Radio One and today, with just four weeks left until the launch of Canada Reads Olympic champion swimmer Mark Tewksbury will be by to talk to Tom Power about why he chose to defend Esi Edugyan's novel Washington Black in the Great Book Brawl. Mark Tewksbury coming up in just a few moments on CBC Radio one, the latest on the situation in Ukraine. Of course, in its changing hour by hour and faster than that even can be found at CBC News and through the CBC Listen app. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening to The Current. Take good care and we'll see you tomorrow.

Tuesday March 1, 2022 Transcript

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