Doug Thorburn on Early-Stage Alcohol and Drug Addiction

Terrorism and Addiction

The absence of actual evidence of addictive use of drugs by the current regime of terrorists is not surprising. The probable motive force behind the horrific behaviors is, none the less, psychotropic drug addiction.

The fifth anniversary of 9-11 reminds us what terrorists are capable of. The question that begs to be answered, yet is rarely asked, is what is the root of hatred that results in the wanton murder of helpless innocents? The first Czar of Russia, Ivan lV Vasilievich, was one of history’s grand terrorists. A sampling of his countless atrocities shows that terrorists vary only in their methods”and provides clues to what drives them.

James Graham, in his masterpiece The Secret History of Alcoholism, describes the vengeance Ivan took upon the citizens of Novgorod, whom he suspected were no longer loyal to him. He surrounded the city with troops and began executing a thousand inhabitants a day with ingenious inventions of torture and death. Graham quotes Jules Koslow in his 1961 book, Ivan the Terrible: “Wives were forced to witness the quartering of their husbands; husbands were forced to see their wives roasted alive.”The executions, which proved too slow for Ivan, were soon “supplemented by mass drownings in the Volkhov River”by tying victims to sleighs and dragging them under water. Ivan decided that he’d had enough only after killing as many as 70,000 citizens, the equivalent of at least 700,000 today.

He later turned against his own thugs. Graham reports, “Like Alexander [the Great] and Henry VIII, Ivan turned on those whom he had used as instruments of destruction…in mass public executions.”His chancellor “was strung up by his feet and cut into little pieces.”His treasurer “was placed repeatedly in iced water and then in boiling water until his skin ‘came off him like an eel’s.'”He and his son then raped and murdered the widows.

Graham reports that “at alcohol-drenched banquets, he would set ferocious bears loose on human prisoners.”He had at least seven wives, murdering some and murdering only the families of others. His nickname, “Ivan the Terrible,”was an understatement.

There’s no question about Ivan’s alcoholism. At 17, he was already drinking “too much,”and the middle-aged Ivan was united with his son “by love of wine, debauchery and blood,”before killing him in a drunken rage. He is reported to have “drank himself into insensibility”on numerous occasions and prematurely aged due to countless “drinking bouts.”There is similar evidence of alcoholism in Alexander the Great and Henry VIII.

The question is what do earlier terrorists have to do with Muslim extremists carrying out Jihad? Alcoholism causes megalomaniacal misbehaviors, but the current string of terrorists doesn’t seem to consist of alcoholics, particularly since Islam forbids the use of alcohol. There are several hypotheses that may explain the seeming paradox:

• Some Jihadists drink or use other megalomania-causing drugs secretly.

• Alcohol or other-drug addiction in a parent causes all manner of dysfunctions in children, which in the right environment can take hold in a particularly virulent form in adults.

• Some of what we might call IslamoNazis may be exhibiting dry drunk syndrome, common among abstinent addicts who fail to deflate their egos. Sobriety requires both, without which the misbehaviors often continue.

• Terrorism may require addiction only in leaders, because addicts are able to wield tremendous control over others. Such followers probably consist largely of people seeking “answers”to their problems, including children of addicts and addicts in very early recovery, who are particularly susceptible to charm and charisma. It may also include many Idealists, a Kierseyan Temperament (iNtuitive Feelers in the Myers-Briggs personality type paradigm), who are described by Kiersey as credulous.

• Some combination of explanations may be at work, all of which include addiction to a psychotropic drug at some level in the hierarchy of terrorists.

When we are able to dig deeply into the secrets of those who act badly in America, we find addiction far more often than would be expected by mere chance in a population in which only 10% are addicts. By extrapolation, this probably holds true for other cultures. The challenge in digging is overcoming the reluctance of close people to discuss possible addiction, the cost to such people of “outing”secrets and the gross unawareness of addiction as the cause of troubling behaviors. Even those whose misbehaviors are extreme enough to enter the public eye often keep their secrets, not only because high positions promote enabling on the part of subordinates, but also because alcoholism and its relevance to current events is not taught. As a result, journalists ignore the role that alcohol or other-drug addiction may play in stories, including those involving terrorism. In addition, since most have cause and effect backwards, believing that poor behaviors and morals cause addiction, if drug use is noticed at all it’s mentioned only in passing.

Various drugs do different things to different people. Those genetically predisposed to alcoholism often experience a sense of invincibility that impels them to do things they would never consider when sober, including even murder. This seems to be true for other psychotropic drug addiction. For example, members of the Mohammedan order of Assassins, founded around 1090 and flourishing during the Crusades, used hashish before slaying Christians. In fact, the word ‘assassin’ is derived from the earlier word for hashish, “hashashin.”

One of the numerous challenges in dealing with and describing the behaviors resulting from addiction is that not everyone engaging in vile behaviors is an addict. This is particularly true when many people, addicts and non-addicts alike, are subservient to an addict in a position of power. Sober alcoholics tell us they were the world’s greatest salesmen when using, which could explain how amphetamine/barbiturate addict Adolf Hitler remained in power and amphetamine addict/alcoholic Jim Jones talked 900 men, women and children into committing Kool-Aid suicide in Jonestown, Guyana in 1978. We might infer that while terrorism requires psychotropic drug addiction, not every terrorist needs to be addicted. Misbehaviors on a grand scale may require only a few addicts wielding power from a position of ultimate authority.

Such addiction can easily be hidden from followers. Leonard L. Heston, M.D. and his wife Renate Heston, R.N., in their 1979 book, The Medical Casebook of Adolf Hitler, provided virtually incontestable proof that Hitler’s most vile behaviors were driven by addiction to amphetamines. They also proved he used barbiturates”alcohol in pill form to the alcoholic”which is how he may have triggered the equivalent of alcoholism long before his amphetamine use began. The book serves as compelling evidence that proof of even severe addiction in public figures may surface only decades later, if at all (and that historians often miss the role that addiction plays in their chronicles).

Yasir Arafat was likely one of these addicts. Despite the fact that he exhibited countless behavioral indications of addiction, neither journalists nor pundits ever suggested the possibility that addiction provided the best explanation for his heinous behaviors.

Unfortunately, this happens all too often. Entire texts have been written about alcohol or other drug addicts, completely missing the diagnosis. Mary Wilson’s 1986 autobiography Dreamgirl: My Life as a Supreme, never once mentioned fellow Supreme Diana Ross’s drinking and using, even though the misbehaviors described indicated an extremely high probability of addiction. (She entered rehab years later.) Even if mentioned, it’s only as an afterthought without any idea of its significance, as was the case of B. D. Hyman’s expose of her famous mother, actress Bette Davis, in My Mother’s Keeper. In Arafat’s case actual evidence of addiction stared us in the face: his pupil size in numerous pictures was four-fifths the size of his iris, providing all but incontrovertible proof of addiction to either amphetamines or cocaine. (Among other pictures, check out http://gallery.mmister.com/dec/images/arafat.gif.)

While news reports often omit the use of alcohol or other drugs by those who commit heinous crimes, they occasionally and usually incidentally link drugs and terrorists. While rare, such remarks provide valuable clues to those of us who understand that drug addiction and even the dry-drunk syndrome can fuel horrific atrocities.

An anonymous journalist writing for The Economist magazine, in a piece July 16, 2005 entitled, “In Europe’s midst: Four young British Muslims became zealots, and the zealots became suicide bombers,”gets closest to pinpointing what may be one of the key underlying causes of such extremism. The author points out, “For every one of these footsoldiers of terror, tens of thousands of similar young men choose to lead uneventful and peaceful lives.”While they feel “it is vain to look for a simple cause that determines the conversion to jihad…there are subtle patterns and tendencies….Often they have grown apart from their family: some might have drifted into petty crime, or an unIslamic taste for alcohol and women. Something then leads them to religion and thence radical voices preaching the Utopia of worldwide Islamic rule.”He adds, “Frequently, a young Muslim man falls out of mainstream society, becoming alienated both from his parents and from the ‘stuffy’ Islamic culture in which he was brought up. He may become more devout, but the reverse is more likely. He turns to drink, drugs and petty crime before seeing a ‘solution’ to his problems”and the world’s”in radical Islam.”As Mark Almond wrote in a June 2002 article in The Wall Street Journal, “Why Terrorists Love Criminals and Vice Versa,””Petty criminals and terrorists both feel they are supermen beyond ordinary laws and obligations.”He pointed out that both Jose Padilla, arrested for scouting sites where he could explode a dirty bomb and shoe bomber Richard Reid were “petty criminals who had run-ins with the law since their early teens.”And, we know that 80-90% of such criminals are alcohol or other-drug addicts who all admit when push comes to shove that they feel like “supermen”when they drank or used.

It wasn’t until the 14th paragraph in an August 12/13, 2006 piece in The Wall Street Journal, “Al Qaeda or Not?”that we learn a neighbor of one of the terrorists arrested over the recent plot to blow up a dozen or so airplanes enroute from London to the United States said, “He was looking outside his window at one of the Ali [one of the suspects in the case] houses and could see police removing what looked like marijuana plants, sunlamps and reflectors. He said people often came and went from the house day and night.”The average reader would have no idea that whatever cannabis Ali was growing might create a sense of invincibility and an “I am God”attitude, which because of his particular circumstances and environment impelled him to become a Jihadist.

While religion can help deflate that ego, particular sects may not. And there is evidence of continuing use of other drugs, including hashish, marijuana and khat in some terrorists. Khat, abundant in Yemen, is a mild stimulant on par with amphetamines and is known to cause abnormal behavior in a minority of users, just as alcohol does. The “abnormal behavior,”while described as relatively mild compared with that caused by alcohol, includes verbal outbursts and insomnia, along with triggering and aggravation of schizophrenia. Those experiencing insomnia as a result of khat often use counteracting agents such as tranquilizers and alcohol. Since psychotropic drugs potentiate each other, or create an effect far greater than the sum of its parts, there may be countless full-blown addicts who would never be identified as such except by their misbehaviors.

It’s also possible that many who stop using alcohol or other drugs are the most easily manipulated by the top echelon of terrorists. Sebastian Rotella, in “Before ‘Martyrdom’ Plan, Belgian Woman’s Faith Turned Radical,”in The Los Angeles Times December 2, 2005 edition, wrote, “The first female European Muslim convert to commit a suicide bombing in Iraq…had drug problems in her youth…[and] was fragile psychologically.”Her mother admitted she was “furious at those who manipulated her [daughter].”Similarly, children of particularly abusive alcoholics may have trouble recovering from abuse. The two sisters of Zacarias Moussaoui, who boasted he was to fly a fifth plane into the White House on 9/11, told his jury that their father “was an alcoholic who routinely beat their mother.”Moussaoui was diagnosed by at least one clinical psychologist as schizophrenic with paranoid tendencies, symptoms often triggered by amphetamine addiction that often do not subside in abstinence.

Many terrorists are known or believed to have used drugs immediately prior to the commission of an atrocity. The leader of the Japanese terrorist sect Aum Shinri Kyo, Shoko Asahara, who masterminded the sarin poison attack in Tokyo’s subway system in March 1995, is reported by D.W. Brackett in Holy Terror: Armageddon in Tokyo, to have been on LSD and “other drugs.”The use of amphetamines before committing violence pervades recent history. Kamikaze pilots in WW II were charged up with meth. Mehmet Ali Agca, the man who shot Pope John Paul ll in 1981, was on amphetamines when he attempted the assassination. Suicide bombers in the Middle East were given amphetamines in the 1980s. Dr. Aziz Al-Abub, the psychiatrist behind the torture of hostages by terrorists in Beirut, Lebanon in the 1980s, provided amphetamines for suicide-bombers. In Sierra Leone’s recent civil war, children were given cocaine, amphetamines and tranquilizers, driving murderous binges sometimes lasting for days. These children, as young as seven, became known and feared for their extraordinary energy, lack of control and brutality.

The world’s great despots have virtually all been alcohol or other-drug addicts. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Mussolini, Adolf Eichman and Hermann Ghoering were such addicts. North Korea’s Kim Jong Il is an alcoholic, as is his protégé Saparmurat Niyazov, the head of Turkmenistan. The de facto dictator of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, is a likely alcoholic, as was one of his heroes, Che Guevara. Raul Castro is alcoholic and Fidel Castro is known for seven-hour bombastic speeches, indications of either cocaine or amphetamine addiction. Saddam Hussein is alcoholic, as were both of his sons. All of these are monsters, terrorists masquerading as leaders of states.

The question should be why would Islamic terrorists be any different? Whenever we think, “That’s insane,”or “What could possibly fuel such hatred,”our antennae should go up. While an inherited predisposition to act in horrifying ways as a result of use does not excuse such behavior, it alerts us to the fact that we cannot predict what such people are capable of. If Ivan the Terrible turned sleighs into weapons of mass destruction, imagine what he might have done with current technology. Those who think we can negotiate and show any weakness whatsoever do not understand alcoholic or other-drug induced brain damage and resulting megalomania. Compromise serves only to further inflate the primordial, pre-human and infantile ego, resulting in behaviors that cascade in ever-more terrifying ways. Since as many as 20% of awful behaviors are committed by non-addicts, without proof of use we cannot be sure that drug-induced megalomania drives the likes of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nassralah, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, or their handlers. However, considering what’s at stake”nuclear weapons finding their way into the hands of drug-addicted terrorists”they should be dealt with as if it does.