While I find neither Rob Ford’s politics nor his personality to my liking, Toronto’s mayor is more deserving of our empathy than our censure. He has become the poster boy for a seriously addicted human being.
The Toronto intelligentsia, who did not vote for him, was mortified by Ford’s very presence in the mayor’s chair long before the latest crack smoking incident.
Just imagine: At the same time those rednecks out in Calgary elected the Harvard-educated hip and green Naheed Nenshi, thanks to the voters in the suburbs, Toronto — the centre of the universe — got Rob Ford.
Toronto “the good,” the core of the metropolitan area, has a self-image that is about being fit and sophisticated; what they have as their representative is a man who is racist, homophobic, an alleged wife beater, with a body that resembles a sack of potatoes, who wears shirts and ties that never seem to fit and has a demeanor, in spite of his wealth, that is definitely working class. Oh, the shame!
To make matters worse, Ford is a fall-down drunk who exhibits incredibly risky and reckless behaviour and is now, a proven liar. “I do not use crack cocaine nor am I an addict of crack cocaine.”
He has now admitted he smoked crack while in a “drunken stupor.” But his critics are not appeased.
So what is to empathize with?
Well, he is certainly more than a buffoon and a bully. He is a man who, in the words of Dr. Gabor Maté, the long-time addiction physician on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, is a “traumatized person who is in denial.”
Ford has, like any addict, sought out the company of people (at least for the past several years) who would enable his drug and alcohol use, who would provide an environments for him where he feels comfortable relieving his pain by indulging in his addictive behaviour. Assume that would include some members of his family. And it would certainly explain why he hangs out with suspected thugs and drug dealers. Those are the people with whom he found himself in a drunken stupor when he was handed that crack pipe while the act was indelibly recorded first for journalists to view and then the Toronto police to recover.
He has become the butt of jokes for every TV talk show host on late night TV. But then, as Maté points out, there are large scale studies that show it is our social habit to ridicule traumatized people whether they are addicted or obese.
Some might argue that it was not Ford’s addiction that got him into his latest round of difficulties, it was the fact that he lied. But look at when the heat was really poured on. It clearly started both on the Gawker blog and with the Toronto Star with the news of a video showing Ford smoking crack.
There is, in case you haven’t noticed, different classes of illegal drugs. Some we (nudge, nudge, wink, wink) approve of like pot; so we titter at former U.S. president Bill Clinton confessing he “didn’t inhale” and at Liberal Party of Canada leader Justin Trudeau, who admitted he smoked a joint after being elected to the House of Commons, which makes him cool in the minds of a certain demographic. But crack is demonized as the drug of the hardcore addict and social outcast, much the way – come to think of it – that pot once was. Remember Reefer Madness?
Booze we are ambivalent about. It is a part of many religious rituals and secular celebrations.
In B.C., for example, the government that profits mightily from alcohol sales is now struggling with demands to make booze even more available. And drunks are tolerated as long as they don’t riot in our streets.
