Death by Ethanol: Confessions of a Sugar Addict by Pam Fox Kuhlken, Ph.D.

September 22, 2009 by Leave a Comment

I thought of presenting a hardcore research paper about food politics and the insidious conspiracy by the Corn Refiner’s Association of America (in collaboration with the FDA) to usher in a brave new world riding on amber waves of grain: a nutritious, affordable sweetener for all, High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) lining the food aisles of Walmart.[1]

I would begin with research like the bohemian classic “that exploded the sugar myth and inspired a health revolution,” Sugar Blues (1986) by William Dufty, an exposé on the dangers of sugar which reveals how this commonly ingested ingredient in countless foods is highly addictive and causes a host of medical problems from depression to coronary thrombosis.

Or my personal favorite that “calls a spade a spade,” The Sugar Addict’s Total Recovery Program (2002), by Kathleen DesMaisons, Ph.D., the first person to receive a doctorate in addictive nutrition, and who is best-known for her breakout book, Potatoes Not Prozac.  DesMaisons says that sugar addiction should be treated as seriously as heroin or alcohol dependency because it’s responsible for “mood swings, depression, fatigue, fuzzy thinking, PMS, impulsivity … [and] unpredictable temper.”[2]  In fact, in 2008, researchers at Princeton’s School of Psychology found that whether because of genetics or because of over-stimulation, sugar addicts, like drug addicts, have fewer dopamine receptors in the brain. Sugar causes neurochemical changes in the brain that also occur with addictive drugs—releasing opioids and dopamine and thus having addictive potential. The Princeton study found that sugar threw off dopamine-acetylcholine balance and resulted in aggression, anxiety, and depression.

Or I could take a political angle laced with emotional appeals and refer to Greg Critsler’s Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World (2003), whereas, actually, we’re second only to South Sea Islanders.  Like Jenette Marshall’s Fat Nation (2004), Critsler’s Fat Land convincingly explains that 60% of Americans are overweight (and 20% are obese) because of a fast-food marketing strategy that prizes sales—via supersized “value” meals—over quality or conscience, and it’s the poor who suffer the most from ignorance and desperation.[3]  Coincidentally, as three researchers found in the 2004 American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, the rise in obesity over the past 30 years could be linked to the rise in consumption of HFCS, which began in 1970 because it was much cheaper than cane or beet sugar, and is now the sweetener used in 50% of products in the U.S., but only 10% worldwide.

Alternately, a psychedelic angle would draw on a 2008 study from the University of Bordeaux, France, published in Scientific American Mind that showed that rats given a choice between highly sweetened water and intravenous cocaine overwhelmingly favored the tasty beverage.  And we’re talking experienced cocaine-using rats who could self-administer the drug intraveneously—yet chose a virgin strawberry daiquiri instead.  (Perhaps MFA candidates will conduct an experiment to see whether their peers would prefer a Big Gulp or a joint?) Sugar, then, can be as pleasurable and addictive as habit-forming drugs.  Evolutionary theorists postulate that our hypersensitivity to sweet taste evolved when sugar was scarce and indicated a high-energy meal.[4]

But frankly, the resulting paper is neither research, nor a “Moloch, Moloch, Moloch” rant modeled on Ginsberg’s “Howl”—“Moloch” the tofu of poetry which I would modify, “Sucrose! Sucrose! Sucrose!”  No, this is a modest personal essay. I’ll leave the hardcore presentations to Larry McCaffery and Bill Nericcio, my colleagues on this “All-Star Faculty Panel.”

Today’s paper: “Death by Ethanol: Confessions of a Sugar Addict.”  You were expecting something about biofuel made from corn?  Please note that everything I’ll present today is essentially made of corn—the cow, a salad, biofuel, us, you, and even the Cracker Jacks I’ll distribute are corn syrup-coated popped corn eaten by humans who just ate corn for lunch and before that for breakfast, so your cannibalistic tissue and organs comprised of corn will perpetually digest corn.

In lieu of an actual PowerPoint, I will rely on your ability to conjure images.  The first to keep in mind is a diagram of a cow with its four stomachs.

Now imagine chewing each bite of a salad a recommended 25-50 times (depending on your saliva production and mastication ability) until it’s as thoroughly pulverized as cud after being digested in the first two of four stomachs before its regurgitation and ultimate digestion in the last two of four stomachs.  Six hours a day masticating, digesting, regurgitating.  Instead, you buy Tums or Beano because you have one stomach.

An enzyme in the stomach of cows converts plant fibers, called cellulose, into energy, separating pairs of sugar molecules (disaccarides) into simple sugars (monosaccharides). Simple sugars in turn can be fermented to make ethanol.  In April 2008, researchers at Michigan State University’s Consortium for Plant Biotechnology Research took the enzyme from the cow’s stomach and injected it into the leaves and stalks of the corn plant which transformed the whole plant into monosaccharides, a step away from ethanol.  So the corn plant—and, I will argue, our bodies—are ethanol.  Like dinosaurs rotting into oil—the corpse becomes fuel…the fuel is the corpse.

Your second PowerPoint image to conjure: a skull and crossbones on an ear of corn.

While the quirky vilification of HFCS by the filmmakers of King Corn is tempting, we’re the real culprits.  Whoever buys candy or soda or fast food today.  We are the market.  We, the corn, the people.

For those of you who ate at McDonald’s, your meal was conceived in an Iowa cornfield (devised at its global headquarters located on 88 acres—half still native woodlands—in Oak Brook, Illinois, by CEOs and scientists conferencing in a building just awarded the U.S. Green Building Council’s Platinum certification on Earth Day 2009).  Corn feeds the steer that turns into the burgers, becomes the oil that cooks the fries and the syrup that sweetens the shakes and the sodas, and makes up 13 of the 38 ingredients in the Chicken McNuggets.

If you were at Ralph’s or Vons instead, of over 45,000 items available, you had a 25% chance of picking up an item containing corn.  The food industry was quick to exploit the freakishly protean nature of the corn plant.

Remember the PowerPoint image of the skull and crossbones on an ear of corn.  Now superimpose your face in place of the skull and crossbones.

I love a scapegoat as much as the next guy—but life is multi-faceted and doesn’t occur in a vacuum. The Hebrew concept “satan” means accuser, anything that challenges us, and we could substitute corn or HFCS as easily as caffeine, nicotine, heroin… speed, money, sex, fame.  “Mammon” is the tofu of all evil, offering material trappings not of the spirit.  One might even substitute “fruit.”  Want proof?  A New York Times article (February 2009) cites research by professors at the Univ. of Iowa in Ames and at the Univ. of Australia that despite all the fuss about HFCS, when it comes to calories and weight gain, it makes no difference if the sweetener was derived from corn, sugar cane, beets, or fruit juice concentrate.

Is there a conspiracy between US consumption of added sugars and farm policy affecting sweeteners?  No, the link is tenuous, according to a 2006 study by Brendstrup, Paarsch, and Solow in the International Journal of Industrial Organization.  The researchers concluded that increased consumption of sweetened foods and beverages is a global phenomenon, which isn’t directly attributed to U.S. farm policy.  So with no government conspiracy, we’re looking at a market driven by capitalist sugar siphons—both producers and consumers.

In Christina Rossetti’s poem, The Goblin Market (1862), goblin merchant men conspire at the local farmer’s market in the glen to seduce girls into getting drunk on their intoxicating fruit.  The “satans” chant: “Come buy our orchard fruits, / Come buy, come buy” (3-4).

“Look at our apples,

russet and dun,

Bob at our cherries,

Bite at our peaches,

Citrons and dates,

Grapes for the asking,

Pears red with basking

Out in the sun,

Plums on their twigs;

Pluck them and suck them,

Pomegranates, figs” (357-67)

— (That’s Rossetti.)

 

Look at our glucose, sucrose, and starch

Mono-, di-, polysaccharides ripe for the asking,

Maple sugar, sap, sorghum

Sugarcane and beet

(Saccharum officinarum

and Beta vulgaris)

Dextrose of grapes or corn,

Lactose of milk

Fructose and maltose

Pluck them and suck them

Ingest th-OSE, not figs.

(That’s mine)

It may sound banal to be a gratefully-recovered sugar addict, but Rossetti understood that having sucrose in the veins was wormwood and felt like a gang rape, violent assault, or demonic possession.

Next PowerPoint image: goblin men with a golden platter of your favorite food-like products.

Two sisters heard the goblin cry.  One of them, Laura, “clipped a precious golden lock” (Goblin Market l. 126) of hair and “dropped a tear more rare than pearl, / Then sucked their fruit globes fair or red: / Sweeter than honey from the rock, / Stronger than man-rejoicing wine, / Clearer than water flowed that juice; / She never tasted such before / […] She sucked and sucked and sucked the more / Fruits which that unknown orchard bore; / She sucked until her lips were sore; / Then flung the emptied rinds away / But gathered up one kernel-stone, / And knew not was it night or day / As she turned home alone” (127-32, 134-40).

The two sisters in Rossetti’s poem remembered Jeanie, who should have been a bride, but fell sick and died in her prime because she succumbed to the call of goblin men.  And then, having sucked and sucked and sucked the more, Laura was pining away after the ephemeral food orgy.

The messianic sister was Lizzie who retrieved the remedy of pulpy fruit on (but not inside) her body.  Lizzie stood “like a royal virgin town” (423) beleagured by a fleet, yet “Would not open lip from lip / Lest they should cram a mouthful in: / But laughed in heart to feel the drip / Of juice that syruped all her face, / And lodged in dimples of her chin” (436-40).

Lizzie gave Laura the antidote on her lips, “Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices / Squeezed from goblin fruits for you, / Goblin pulp and goblin dew. / Eat me, drink me, love me; / Laura, make much of me; / For your sake I have braved the glen / And had to do with goblin merchant men” (473-79). (You may choose to see me as a Messianic figure, bringing you Cracker Jack.)

Visualize four Iowa farm girls in a convertible heading to California—all of their valuables are packed for the permanent move.

A week after her high school graduation, my mom (declining the bribe of a new Arabian pony for staying on the family farm) and the other three girlfriends you just conjured jumped in a convertible and left a 500-acre farm in Iowa for California.  I was born in Hollywood in the Summer of Love 1969.  My name, “Pamela,” in fact, means “sweet as honey,” from Greek παν (pan) “all” and μελι (meli) “honey.”  “Pamela” was invented in the late 16th century by the poet Sir Philip Sidney for use in his poem, “Arcadia,” given to a character who exudes “all sweetness.”  So I was set up to be a HFCS junkie from the womb.

My essay today is fueled by Iowa cornfields and Hollywood cinema, actually an Iowa film, King Corn: You Are What You Eat, a 2007 film by Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, undergraduate roommates at Yale who discovered their families were both from the same small farming town in Iowa.  So, with their Ivy League degrees, they move to Iowa and rent a field to plant one acre of corn.  They play baseball while they watch the corn grow, using the government prescribed genetically-modified seeds.  The result, they discover, is inedible.  The product is only good for animal food and for refining as corn syrup—the cheap, feel-good carbohydrate fueling America, “ethanol in our blood,” which in excess leads to addiction, diabetes, obesity, mental illness, death.[5]

Back to our virtual PowerPoint, listen to the trailer in a man’s booming voice: “two friends, one acre of corn, and the subsidized crop that drives our fast-food nation.”

I never roomed with Ian or Curt, but I will save you from the 2-hour film by screening their ten-minute Special Feature, “The Lost Basement Lectures”—a spoof documenting the twin inventions of agriculture and “civilization.” The six lectures offer an exposé of the FDA’s conspiracy to keep civilized Americans fat and happy on 99 cent ersatz food laced with sometimes 3-4 non-nutritious corn sweeteners (HFCS) from genetically-modified seeds yielding over 85 varieties of enhanced sweetness with diminished fiber and nutritional value.[6]

The problem is that the mainstay of the American diet is an enhanced sweetener with diminished fiber and nutritional value. In other words, wormwood in our veins: “I ate and ate and ate my fill, / Yet my mouth waters still. / Tomorrow night I will buy more” (Goblin Market ll. 165-68).

Imagine “The Lost Basement Lectures” (forthcoming on YouTube).

Ten minutes later….

The confession continues.  I convinced myself to stop eating red meat in high school, and 20 years later after grad school, marriage, having a baby—despite biking and doing yoga—I was anemic, low in blood with just enough oxygen wafting to my brain to convince me that I had Alzheimer’s.

So I looked to the best American technology as fuel.  Since 1970, especially in the last 20 years, added sweeteners have increased dramatically in the US, mainly because of the HFCS in beverages like soda, “juice,” and energy drinks.[7]  Thankfully, I avoided caffeine-laced sugary energy drinks allowing one to travel at the metabolic speed of sugar: Rockstar (the energy king that “simply gets us”), Monster (with its legendary advertising campaign, unique taste, and impressive energy), Rip-It (exceptional variety, but you “feel nothing”), Sobe No Fear (14 flavors but only moderate energy), Amp (five flavors, moderate impact)…or Butterfinger Buzz (a caffeinated candy bar).  I might have tried them all but No Fear Sobe alone made my heart beat like a hummingbird’s.

Then I found my panacea: sugar.  Namely, frozen yogurts by day and a PowerBar by night.  Goblin pulp and goblin dew called to me from the glen where I could legally plug into the ethanol fuel pump of leaded corn syrup for a decade.

Lest you mock this diatribe as hardly hardcore, doctors said I had one of the worst cases of candida (systemic yeast) they had ever seen and I lost mental clarity and became the Lizard Queen crossing the threshold of doors of perception laced with sucrose.  While I was actually underweight because of my compulsive exercise, I was ingesting more than the 30 teaspoons of sugar the average American consumes a day (100 pounds annually, which is twice the USRDA), albeit in frozen rather than in solid or liquid form.

There’s your thought again: sugar addicts are such lightweights. Maybe you’ve experimented with real speed?  In this case, I would cite more research about sugar’s similar effect to drugs and alcohol, leading to neurological changes in: dopamine and opioid receptor binding; dopamine and acetylcholine release in the nucleus accumbens; enkephalin mRNA expression. It’s true. Just ask Nicole Avena, Pedro Rada, and Bartley Hoebel, three researchers whose study, “Evidence for Sugar Addiction: Behavioral and Neurochemical Effects of Intermittent, Excessive Sugar Intake,” appeared in the 2008 issue of Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews.

Back to PowerPoint. Please visualize a Yin Yang.

Arguably anything in excess throws us out of balance (the Eastern model of the Yin Yang reminds us of symmetry), but sugar has become an abused drug of choice (20-32 tsp./day).  More than 100 pounds of processed sugar in more than 85 different forms is consumed annually by each American, including me, until my conversion.

This talk today is made possible by my acupuncturist and the wisdom of Chinese medicine getting to the root of my problem in 2005, balancing my yin and yang and getting me to meditate, eat with the seasons, take herbs, and finally, after 23 years as a flexitarian, to eat red meat (for four months now) to build my blood.  Now I have Chi.  I no longer rely on one of corn’s 85 varieties of sweeteners, each with a similar metabolic rate and a predictable result: 24/7 speed. I’m no longer on the bandwagon of low-quality nutrients and excess energy intake.

Having oxygen in my brain has been a novel experience, enabling me to live list- and Alzheimer’s-free once again.  The pace is steady, constant, not frenetic—more like fiber (which has a slower metabolic rate than sugar).  Beans, vegetables like corn and peas and anything green, fruit like apples and figs, whole grain bread, nuts.

After reading this paper, my husband told me the thing that keeps me from being a world-changing, mind-blowing reformer is that I’m not on caffeine. “Or sugar,” I added. “Sugar’s not good for you,” he said, “caffeine is.”

Picture the Slow Food Movement’s logo: an orange, smiling snail.

Consider, “Good, Clean and Fair: the Manifesto of Quality According to Slow Food,” written in 2006 by members of the Slow Food Movement, an organization founded in Italy in 1989.  Recently, chef Alice Waters, founder of the famed restaurant, Chez Panisse in Berkeley, CA, and author of numerous cookbooks since the 1980s including the most recent, “The Art of Simple Food” (2007), appeared on 60 Minutes on March 15, 2009 as a spokesperson of the Slow Food Movement.  Waters launched the national “Slow Food Movement” in the U.S., urging people to enjoy good, clean, fair food: food that tastes good, is environmentally clean, and economically fair to the growers. In essence, she advised the nation to eat organic food that is locally and sustainably grown, according to the seasons, and sold at farmers markets.[8]

I leave you with wisdom from Michael Pollan, author of Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (2007) among many bestsellers on food politics, including In Defense of Food (2008). Pollan simply recommends: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants,” adding, “There is incontrovertible but boring evidence that eating your fruits and vegetables is probably the best thing you can do for preventing cancer, for weight control, for diabetes, for all the different Western diseases that now afflict us.”[9]

But can you follow Pollan’s advice and avoid processed foods without spending a ton of time and money?

Of course not. The point is to change how you spend your time and money. It’s a question of priorities in a society that has devalued food to “99-cent-drive-through-custom-made-to-order-we-didn’t-start-your-meal-without-you-have-it-your-way” burgers.

From here, you can pick up additional exposes like Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, the 2005 incisive history of the development of American fast food ascending from postwar Southern California, especially in the 1970s.

Fast Food Nation is an important muckraking jeremiad published a century after Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1905), a graphic exposé of the meat packing industry that documents the unsanitary process by which animals become meat products (although Sinclair commented, “I aimed at the public’s heart and by accident hit its stomach” because his original intention was to expose the immigrant workers’ horrifying work conditions). In the spirit of Sinclair, Schlosser looks at the handful of enormous factories run by monopolistic corporate executives that make our food with chemicals and feces. [10]

You could join the Long Now Foundation to promote “slower and better” thinking as counterpoint to today’s “faster and cheaper” mindset. As part of the movement, the founder, computer scientist, Danny Hillis, conceived of a 10,000-year clock: “I want to build a clock that ticks once a year. The century hand advances once every one hundred years, and the cuckoo comes out on the millennium.  I want the cuckoo to come out every millennium for the next 10,000 years. If I hurry I should finish the clock in time to see the cuckoo come out for the first time.”[11]  Discussions around long term thinking are far more focused, and lend themselves to good storytelling and myth-making—two key requirements of anything lasting a long time.  The Long Now Foundation is a model of hope for the future, encouraging us to plant acorns, knowing we may not live to see the oaks.[12]

So you’re at the fork in the road.  Will you pick up if the bite isn’t fairly traded, in season, organic, and locally produced?  Will the cornfield’s “offers […] charm us, / Their evil gifts […] harm us” (65-6) as in Goblin Market?  Or will we “thrust a dimpled finger / In each ear, shut eyes, and [run]” (67-8)?

For your final PowerPoint image, please visualize your future and the orange, smiling snail we left behind several frames back, still in the same place.

 

REFERENCES

Avena, Nicole, Pedro Rada, and Bartley Hoebel. “Evidence for Sugar Addiction: Behavioral and Neurochemical Effects of Intermittent, Excessive Sugar Intake.” Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 32.1 (Feb. 2008): 20-39.

Beghin, John and Helen Jensen. “Farm Policies and Added Sugars in US Diets.” Food Policy 33.6 (Dec. 2008): 480-88.

Brendstrup, Bjarne, Harry J. Paarsch, and John L. Solow. “Estimating Market Power in the Presence of Capacity Constraints: An Application to High-fructose Corn Sweetener.” International Journal of Industrial Organization 24.2 (2006): 251-67.

Brody, Jane. “America’s Diet: Too Sweet by the Spoonful.” New York Times (2.10.09): 7.

Corn Refiner’s Association. Washington, D.C. <http://www.corn.org/>.

Critsler, Greg. Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003.

DesMaisons, Kathleen. The Sugar Addict’s Total Recovery Program. New York: Ballantine, 2002.

Dufty, William. Sugar Blues. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 1986.

Dvoskin, Rachel. “Sweeter Than Cocaine.” Scientific American Mind 19.2 (2008).

Fisher, Daniel. “Food on the Brain.” Forbes 175.1 (1.10.05).

Go Further. Dir. Ron Mann. Star. Woody Harrelson. Boneyard Entertainment, 2003.

Heron, Katrina and Alice Waters. Slow Food Nation’s Come to the Table: The Slow Food Way of Living. Modern Times, 2008.

Johnson, Brian. “Taking Bites Out of the Fast Food Nation.” Maclean’s 117.19 (5.10.2004): 46.

Johnson, Richard and Timothy Gower. The Sugar Fix: The High-Fructose Fallout That Is Making You Fat and Sick. Emmaus, PA: Rodale Books, 2008.

King Corn: You Are What You Eat. Dir. Aaron Wolf. Star. Ian Cheney, Curt Ellis. Mosaic Films, 2007.

Long Now Foundation. Founder Danny Hillis. <http://www.longnow.org/>.

“The Manifesto of Quality According to Slow Food.” 2006 Salone del Gusto and Terra Madre expositions.
< http://www.slowfoodla.com/archives/000723.html>.

McNamee, Thomas. Alice Waters and Chez Panisse: The Romantic, Impractical, Often Eccentric, Ultimately Brilliant Making of a Food Revolution. New York: Penguin, 2008.

Pollan, Michael. The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World. New York: Penguin, 2001.

—-. In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. New York: Penguin Classics, 2008.

—-. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. New York: Penguin Classics, 2007.

Rossetti, Christina. The Goblin Market and Other Poems (1865). Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2009.

Schlosser, Eric. Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. New York: Harper Perennial, 2005.

 

Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle (1905). Simon & Schuster, 2004.

Sidney, Sir Philip. The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia. New York: Oxford UP, 2008.

Slow Food International. Founded 1989, Italy. <http://www.slowfood.com/>.

Super Size Me. Dir. Morgan Spurlock. Kathbur Pictures, 2004.

Waters, Alice. The Art of Simple Food: Notes, Lessons, and Recipes from a Delicious Revolution. New York: Clarkson Potter, 2007.

Watson, James and Melissa Caldwell. The Cultural Politics of Food and Eating: A Reader. Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell, 2005.

Weise, Elizabeth. “New Data Not So Sour on Corn Syrup: High-Fructose Corn Sweetener Found No Worse Than Sugar.” USA Today (3.1.08). 7D.

West, Jackson. “Alice Waters’ ‘Slow Food’ Pitch Goes National.” NBC Bay Area (3.18.09). <http://www.nbcbayarea.com/>.

 

ENDNOTES

 

[1] Listen to a sleazy public service announcement from the PR rep at the Corn Refiner’s Association: “Mention corn syrups and consumers think of the sweetness and energy they offer—outstanding characteristics—but their value as food ingredients also flows from their adaptability to many circumstances and their other, less-known, advantages. Corn syrups can depress freezing to prevent crystal formation in ice cream and other frozen desserts. Salad dressings and condiments pour at manageable rates because of corn syrups’ effect on viscosity. In lunch meats and hot dogs, corn syrups provide the suspension to keep other ingredients evenly mixed, and, like other corn products, the basic syrups can improve textures and enhance colors without masking natural flavors, as in canned fruits and vegetables. Refiners produce a variety of basic syrups to meet these needs, provide energy, and offer the right sweetness—enough but not too much—in thousands of foods Americans rely on, from beverages and bakery, to cereal and packaged snacks.”

[2] DesMaisons’ plan for national detox includes protein and whole grains with every meal, a potato every night (sending tryptophan to enter the bloodstream and increasing serotonin in the brain which boosts optimism, creativity, and concentration, and reduces cravings); and a lifestyle that balances work, exercise, and sleep in order to allow biochemistry to alter mood swings and cure sugar cravings.

[3] Lower-income families have higher rates of obesity regardless of race, ethnicity, and gender, which Critsler attributes to lack of information about diet and exercise and the wide diversity of cultural beliefs about weight, body size, and self-esteem. Critsler blames the epidemic of obesity on parents’ reluctance to monitor their children’s eating habits; the marketing tactics of fast-food companies that encourage overeating; the ubiquity of fad diets; the phasing out of physical education programs in schools; and the sale of fast food at schools to save money on dining facilities.

[4] In evolutionary terms, the human brain has a multitude of ways to stimulate appetite and only a few way to turn it off. Humanity existed in a state of constant food scarcity until the industrial revolution. In his Forbes article, “Food on the Brain,” Daniel Fisher interviews Mark Gold, distinguished professor of neuroscience at the McKnight Brain Institute at the University of Florida who says: “Think about it: Your brain is walking through these megastores and saying, ‘Aren’t I a great hunter? I can catch king salmon or Kobe beef without any chance of being attacked by a sabre-toothed tiger.’”  Since we have a minimum of sweet receptors in the brain, today, when the average American ingests 20-32 teaspoons of sugar a day, the brain is overstimulated. Users experience a loss of self-control along with cravings and withdrawals associated with addiction.

[5] Peter Havel, an endocrinologist at the University of California, Davis, confirms: “At high levels of consumption, fructose, whether from high-fructose corn syrup or from table sugar (sucrose), increases triglycerides (fat) in the bloodstream, which could be a risk factor for cardiovascular disease (“New Data,” USA Today).

[6] Michael Pollan comments in The Botany of Desire (2001): “Today’s fundamental agricultural issue has become how to deal sensibly with overproduction. The result of this surfeit of grain is behemoth corn processors, who have commoditized the Aztecs’ sacred grain and developed ways to separate corn into products wholly removed from its original kernels. This excess food and Americans’ wealth and rapid-paced lifestyles now yield supersized portions of less-than-nutritious eatables.”

[7] In 2003, the Journal of the American Dietetic Association touted HFCS as one of the most revolutionary in food science since 1990, but warned people that when calories are consumed in liquid form, they will be hungrier and may compensate at subsequent meals…in the fat, fast food nation.

[8] For a more prescriptive regimen, in The Sugar Fix: The High-Fructose Fallout That Is Making You Fat and Sick (2008), Richard Johnson, M.D., and Timothy Gower suggest how to cut back on HFCS in everything from candy and frozen food to soups and peanut butter by making substitutions and following a daily meal plan consisting of 50% carbs, 25% fat, and 25% protein.

[9] Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food (2008) recommends: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Eat food? The implication of Pollan’s advice is that what we’re eating now isn’t food. “Very often, it isn’t. We are eating a lot of edible food-like substances, which is to say highly processed things that might be called yogurt, might be called cereals, whatever, but in fact are very intricate products of food science that are really imitations of foods.” Pollan acknowledges that distinguishing between food and “food products” takes work. His tip: “Don’t eat anything that your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.” Take, for example, the portable tubes of yogurt known as Go-Gurt. “Yogurt is a very simple food. It’s milk inoculated with a bacterial culture. But Go-Gurt has dozens of ingredients.” Not too much? A large part of the conversation about food—like debating low-fat and low-carb diets—serves as a way of avoiding the idea that maybe we’re just eating too much, Pollan says. He says his advice about how to limit consumption is based less on science, which he says “has failed us when it comes to food, by and large,” and more on culture. “Cultures have various devices to help people moderate their appetite,” he says. “Once upon a time, there was scarcity. We don’t have that anymore; we have abundance. But if you go around the world, you find very interesting tricks and devices.” One is small portion sizes, Pollan says. “The French manage to eat extravagantly rich food, but they don’t get fat, and the reason is that they eat it on small plates, they don’t have seconds, they don’t snack.”  In Okinawa, Japan, a cultural principle called “Hara Hachi Bu” instructs people to eat until they are just 80% full, Pollan says: “You do know when you are full, and the idea of stopping eating before you reach that moment … if you do that, you will actually reduce your caloric intake quite a bit.” Mostly plants? Fruits and vegetables.

[10] In “Taking Bites Out of the Fast Food Nation” (Maclean’s, 2004), Brian Johnson reviews two comic documentaries that question fast-food culture while asking: if you are what you eat, would you turn into somebody else if you ate something completely different?  Super Size Me is the first feature film by 33-year old, Morgan Spurlock, a healthy young man with a vegan chef girlfriend who drives his body into the ground by ingesting nothing but McDonald’s for a month: three meals a day, accepting super-sized portions if offered. He gains 25 pounds, loses his sex drive and becomes depressed. After three weeks, doctors inform him that he’s at risk of losing his liver and his life. In Go Further (dir. Ron Mann, Canadian, 2003), a junk-food addict boards a hemp-fuelled bus with a contemporary band of merry pranksters, including actor-activist Woody Harrelson, and tries to survive on a purely vegan diet without dying of boredom with hobbies like cycling, environmentalism, and yoga. The feel-good road trip down California’s Pacific Coast Highway shows a panorama of environmental rape and rapture, and takes musical pit stops with Natalie Merchant and the Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir.

[11] The 10,000-year clock would be constructed on a mountain in eastern Nevada, on a grand and equally obscure scale because Hillis believes the only way to survive is by being large and worthless (like the pyramids or Stonehenge) or being lost (Dead Sea Scrolls). While the project has no completion date, Hillis admits that the real danger is people losing interest in the 10,000 year clock: “The important thing is to make a very convincing documentary about building the clock and hiding it. Don’t actually build one. That would spoil the myth if it was ever found.”

[12] On this theme, enjoy an excerpt from Nazim Hikmet’s poem, “On Living”: “I mean, you must take living so seriously / that even at seventy, for example, you’ll plant olive trees— / and not for your children, either, / but because although you fear death you don’t believe it, / because living, I mean weighs heavier […]”  <http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/on-living/>.

[1] Listen to a sleazy public service announcement from the PR rep at the Corn Refiner’s Association: “Mention corn syrups and consumers think of the sweetness and energy they offer—outstanding characteristics—but their value as food ingredients also flows from their adaptability to many circumstances and their other, less-known, advantages. Corn syrups can depress freezing to prevent crystal formation in ice cream and other frozen desserts. Salad dressings and condiments pour at manageable rates because of corn syrups’ effect on viscosity. In lunch meats and hot dogs, corn syrups provide the suspension to keep other ingredients evenly mixed, and, like other corn products, the basic syrups can improve textures and enhance colors without masking natural flavors, as in canned fruits and vegetables. Refiners produce a variety of basic syrups to meet these needs, provide energy, and offer the right sweetness—enough but not too much—in thousands of foods Americans rely on, from beverages and bakery, to cereal and packaged snacks.”

[1] DesMaisons’ plan for national detox includes protein and whole grains with every meal, a potato every night (sending tryptophan to enter the bloodstream and increasing serotonin in the brain which boosts optimism, creativity, and concentration, and reduces cravings); and a lifestyle that balances work, exercise, and sleep in order to allow biochemistry to alter mood swings and cure sugar cravings.

[1] Lower-income families have higher rates of obesity regardless of race, ethnicity, and gender, which Critsler attributes to lack of information about diet and exercise and the wide diversity of cultural beliefs about weight, body size, and self-esteem. Critsler blames the epidemic of obesity on parents’ reluctance to monitor their children’s eating habits; the marketing tactics of fast-food companies that encourage overeating; the ubiquity of fad diets; the phasing out of physical education programs in schools; and the sale of fast food at schools to save money on dining facilities.

[1] In evolutionary terms, the human brain has a multitude of ways to stimulate appetite and only a few way to turn it off. Humanity existed in a state of constant food scarcity until the industrial revolution. In his Forbes article, “Food on the Brain,” Daniel Fisher interviews Mark Gold, distinguished professor of neuroscience at the McKnight Brain Institute at the University of Florida who says: “Think about it: Your brain is walking through these megastores and saying, ‘Aren’t I a great hunter? I can catch king salmon or Kobe beef without any chance of being attacked by a sabre-toothed tiger.’”  Since we have a minimum of sweet receptors in the brain, today, when the average American ingests 20-32 teaspoons of sugar a day, the brain is overstimulated. Users experience a loss of self-control along with cravings and withdrawals associated with addiction.

[1] Peter Havel, an endocrinologist at the University of California, Davis, confirms: “At high levels of consumption, fructose, whether from high-fructose corn syrup or from table sugar (sucrose), increases triglycerides (fat) in the bloodstream, which could be a risk factor for cardiovascular disease (“New Data,” USA Today).

[1] Michael Pollan comments in The Botany of Desire (2001): “Today’s fundamental agricultural issue has become how to deal sensibly with overproduction. The result of this surfeit of grain is behemoth corn processors, who have commoditized the Aztecs’ sacred grain and developed ways to separate corn into products wholly removed from its original kernels. This excess food and Americans’ wealth and rapid-paced lifestyles now yield supersized portions of less-than-nutritious eatables.”

[1] In 2003, the Journal of the American Dietetic Association touted HFCS as one of the most revolutionary in food science since 1990, but warned people that when calories are consumed in liquid form, they will be hungrier and may compensate at subsequent meals…in the fat, fast food nation.

[1] For a more prescriptive regimen, in The Sugar Fix: The High-Fructose Fallout That Is Making You Fat and Sick (2008), Richard Johnson, M.D., and Timothy Gower suggest how to cut back on HFCS in everything from candy and frozen food to soups and peanut butter by making substitutions and following a daily meal plan consisting of 50% carbs, 25% fat, and 25% protein.

[1] Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food (2008) recommends: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Eat food? The implication of Pollan’s advice is that what we’re eating now isn’t food. “Very often, it isn’t. We are eating a lot of edible food-like substances, which is to say highly processed things that might be called yogurt, might be called cereals, whatever, but in fact are very intricate products of food science that are really imitations of foods.” Pollan acknowledges that distinguishing between food and “food products” takes work. His tip: “Don’t eat anything that your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.” Take, for example, the portable tubes of yogurt known as Go-Gurt. “Yogurt is a very simple food. It’s milk inoculated with a bacterial culture. But Go-Gurt has dozens of ingredients.” Not too much? A large part of the conversation about food—like debating low-fat and low-carb diets—serves as a way of avoiding the idea that maybe we’re just eating too much, Pollan says. He says his advice about how to limit consumption is based less on science, which he says “has failed us when it comes to food, by and large,” and more on culture. “Cultures have various devices to help people moderate their appetite,” he says. “Once upon a time, there was scarcity. We don’t have that anymore; we have abundance. But if you go around the world, you find very interesting tricks and devices.” One is small portion sizes, Pollan says. “The French manage to eat extravagantly rich food, but they don’t get fat, and the reason is that they eat it on small plates, they don’t have seconds, they don’t snack.”  In Okinawa, Japan, a cultural principle called “Hara Hachi Bu” instructs people to eat until they are just 80% full, Pollan says: “You do know when you are full, and the idea of stopping eating before you reach that moment … if you do that, you will actually reduce your caloric intake quite a bit.” Mostly plants? Fruits and vegetables.

[1] In “Taking Bites Out of the Fast Food Nation” (Maclean’s, 2004), Brian Johnson reviews two comic documentaries that question fast-food culture while asking: if you are what you eat, would you turn into somebody else if you ate something completely different?  Super Size Me is the first feature film by 33-year old, Morgan Spurlock, a healthy young man with a vegan chef girlfriend who drives his body into the ground by ingesting nothing but McDonald’s for a month: three meals a day, accepting super-sized portions if offered. He gains 25 pounds, loses his sex drive and becomes depressed. After three weeks, doctors inform him that he’s at risk of losing his liver and his life. In Go Further (dir. Ron Mann, Canadian, 2003), a junk-food addict boards a hemp-fuelled bus with a contemporary band of merry pranksters, including actor-activist Woody Harrelson, and tries to survive on a purely vegan diet without dying of boredom with hobbies like cycling, environmentalism, and yoga. The feel-good road trip down California’s Pacific Coast Highway shows a panorama of environmental rape and rapture, and takes musical pit stops with Natalie Merchant and the Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir.

[1] The 10,000-year clock would be constructed on a mountain in eastern Nevada, on a grand and equally obscure scale because Hillis believes the only way to survive is by being large and worthless (like the pyramids or Stonehenge) or being lost (Dead Sea Scrolls). While the project has no completion date, Hillis admits that the real danger is people losing interest in the 10,000 year clock: “The important thing is to make a very convincing documentary about building the clock and hiding it. Don’t actually build one. That would spoil the myth if it was ever found.”

[1] On this theme, enjoy an excerpt from Nazim Hikmet’s poem, “On Living”: “I mean, you must take living so seriously / that even at seventy, for example, you’ll plant olive trees— / and not for your children, either, / but because although you fear death you don’t believe it, / because living, I mean weighs heavier […]”  <http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/on-living/>.

Filed under 2009 Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Coming Clean: A Searching and Fearless Moral Inventory by Kimball Taylor, San Diego State University

September 12, 2009 by Leave a Comment

Thirty-seven-year-old big-wave champion Darryl “Flea” Virostko and I stood on a cliff above the grey North Pacific. The wind howled. The surf spot we’d come to check folded in upon itself far below us. Flea unburied his golf bag from the bed of his battered Toyota Tundra. Just couple of years old, it belched white smoke from the exhaust pipe, bled steering fluid, and ran unevenly on seven of its eight cylinders. The right-hand door and mirror were mangled from a night a few months past when Flea was driving wasted and hit a tree. A number of nights unfolded like this, Flea admitted, that when driving debilitated, hazards jumped out at him. The words “Tow Fag” had been etched in acid on the windshield by Morro Bay locals (unaware they slandered the current poster boy for the Eddie, the world’s most prestigious paddle-in contest).

The truck’s interior brimmed with remnants of his former three-bedroom house. No longer able to make mortgage payments on the place just a few blocks from Steamer Lane, Flea was forced to sell. Fortunately, he’d often doubled his mortgage payments when the money was good, and even though he’d lost most of the home’s value by selling during a recession and paying delinquent taxes, he’d still pocket a fraction of his principal. Waiting on that check to arrive, however, was tough. Flea, his girlfriend, and their two dogs had spent some time living out of the truck. They’d recently found a cabin in the hills above Santa Cruz. Still, they might be hiking in and out of there. Letters tossed on the floorboard of the Tundra threatened repossession.

We traded driving balls into the wind, attempting to discern the white of the balls from the white caps on the sea. Obviously, he’d known that the surf would be crap, yet activities were the order of the day—hiking in the woods, building a dam in a creek bed, gathering rocks and shells from the beach—anything to keep the mind occupied. There was surfing, too, but these days it lasted such a short span, when his former pursuit could stretch through the night and day.

Importantly, however, this was a mission: Flea wanted to get it out, all of it. Rambling up-coast from Santa Cruz, we worked through the bending winter greenery in an effort to assemble his story. He’d been high for the last big chunk of it, so precise chronology became fuzzy. The obvious events were hard to look at, but unavoidable. “My contracts were up. The recession hit. And I was, basically…a drug addict,” Flea said.

Three-time consecutive winner of the Mavericks big-wave event, Flea was leaning toward the four-month sobriety mark via a 12-step program. And he was coming clean in dramatic fashion. Hovering somewhere between steps No. 4 (“a searching and fearless moral inventory”) and  No. 5 (admitting “the exact nature of our wrongs”) Flea possessed strength enough to bounce between pre-occupations with a reclaimed buoyancy. But there were the darker moments, and the just plain, being-Flea moments—like rolling down the windows to sound “Eastside fags” and getting in the face of a Steamer Lane surfer who’d been dropped-in on by a buddy and assumed to be raising arms in protest. Despite the public postures that still clung to him, the candor with which he now framed his life was courageous to the point of endearing.

For the past year he’d been drinking a half-gallon of vodka a day. The first thing he’d do in the morning, if he’d slept at all, was grab a Gatorade, pour half of it out, and top it off with vodka. He called this his “little sipper,” and it accompanied his surf checks. This massive consumption was made possible by the “sparks”: smoking crystal methamphetamine, maybe four or five times a day, maybe more. By dawn on the morning of the ’07-’08 Mavericks event, Flea hadn’t slept a wink, was wide awake in fact, but made sure to pick up a coffee to blend in with his health-conscious competitors. Paddling out high was not new, nor did it boost his game. He fell out in the first round.

Today, under the influence of coming clean, Flea finds it easier to say that he was a simple alcoholic, than to admit the rest. During the paddle-out for this year’s Mavericks opening ceremony, when asked to say something in celebration of the event by Jeff Clark, Flea said, “My name is Flea, and I’m an alcoholic.” The battle with methamphetamine that he and an entire group of Santa Cruz surfers have fought most often comes out in hushed tones. It’s been the gorilla in the room for most of the past decade.

“It got dark up here. Dark, dark, dark . . . It got grim,” said former WCT competitor Adam Replogle, “The partying started in high school and continued on, until that substance hit.”

That January afternoon, Flea and I had been to another white rock cliff just down the coast. Its nickname is “90 Degrees” because the track descending to a scenic beach is sheer for more than 100 vertical feet. At the bottom of the goat trail is a mangle of steel left from a pier that serviced the nearby cement factory. The pier is only pilings in the ocean now. Last year, Flea had been partying on the beach with other friends who orbited within methamphetamine’s gravity. The small alcove lies far enough from Santa Cruz, and obscure enough in geography, to prevent casual police intervention; it remained a kind of haven for partiers and addicts. In the early evening, Flea began to ascend the cliff trail with his dog. Two-thirds of the way up, a friend on top yelled down at him to fetch something or other. As Flea’s gaze rose upward, he became dizzy, and he blacked out. Witnesses say that his body completed a full back flip before striking dirt and stone. He eventually woke up to find himself on the metal leftover from the pier—60 feet below. Flea’s arm was badly broken and his face cut up, blood ran in dark ribbons. Once he came to, he wanted to scale the cliff again. Luckily, friends stopped him and called for a helicopter MedEvac. Flea recuperated in a nearby hospital for four days. “I was dead…I mean, I should have been,” he said.

When Flea and I visited the spot on our up-coast tour, he pointed down at the ledge he remembered standing on. I descended, expecting him to follow in the wake of the narrative. Instead he remained on top.

“So you’re not coming down?” I asked.

“No way, I haven’t been down since.”

The cliff is impressively steep. It’s difficult to imagine that a human being survived a fall from the place Flea indicated to the gathering of steel at its base. I tried to think of the fall in terms of Mavericks at its biggest. If he hadn’t bailed from paddle-in surfing from similarly high ledges, certainly he’d bailed from even bigger tow-ins. I remembered something sobering he’d said about his Mavericks career: “I know that every time I paddle out at Mavs, I’m going to get worked bad at least once. It’s just part of the program. There are guys who won’t face that fact, but they’re fooling themselves.”

Now recovered from his own addiction, Peter Mel recalled that when he was high on meth and surfing Mavericks, he could take two-wave hold-downs and pop up without bothering to think through the death dance he’d just endured. Sober, he said, those hold-downs “sit with you, they haunt you.”

I looked up to Flea’s head peaking over the cliff’s crown and hollered the obvious, “Have you ever fallen from a wave at this height?”

“Yeah,” he said, “I’ve probably bailed from that far at least.”

The thing is, Flea’s cliff-bail was not his “rock bottom” moment. After the hospital stay he spent a couple of weeks semi-sober, “only drinking.” Then he was back on the “program.” It’s a word that could mean a serious athletic regimen, or a seriously drugged out regimen. In the cases of some of the world’s most elite big-wave surfers from the area, the term meant both.

Despite the consequences of surfing massive waves and abusing drugs on an equally large scale, the idea of “rock bottom” remains a fleeting one. To contrast it, I’d asked Flea about another passing moment: his glory years. Santa Cruz surfers are often late bloomers in the cash game. At 20, after a disenchanting attempt to relocate to the North Shore, Flea secured his first paying endorsement deal as an aerial phenom. This was the early ’90s, and the agreement paid $200 a month. He supplemented the pay with work as an apprentice plumber. That same year, Vince Collier, a local charger who’d made inroads into professional surfing, began introducing young Santa Cruz rippers to the scene 58 miles north at Mavericks. Flea’s level of performance surfing then merged with a rare lack of fear for the bigger realm, the optimum combination. “He wasn’t afraid,” said Hawaiian big-wave vet Brock Little, “And he was super talented.”

Collier can only be praised for introducing the best young surfers from Santa Cruz to the next big deal in surfing. Yet, Collier partied as hard as he surfed, and that kind of partying came as another kind of introduction for the area’s youth. Replogle explained, “There was two polar influences growing up in Santa Cruz: Richard Schmidt, clean and sober . . . and then there was Vince Collier.” Flea famously tells the story of his first go out at Mavs as a 20-year-old, and the half tab of acid that he’d dropped an hour before. As the acid kicked in, Collier drove him up to Mavericks and ushered him into the lineup. In the early days, that story only magnified Flea’s reputation as a badass.

Peter Mel, who rose alongside Flea in the most important generation of big-wave stars since Pat Curren and Greg Noll, pointed to Flea’s paddling ability as a prime factor leading to his success. Whatever the combination—fearlessness, high-performance acumen, or paddling skill—Flea harnessed it to dominate in a lineup of committed surfers pushing the boundaries of big-wave paddle surfing. He won the inaugural Mavericks event in 1999 (earning 98 of 100 points on a single ride), backed it up with another victory in 2000, and when the contest failed to run a few years due to small surf, Flea returned in ’04 to beat Kelly Slater in the final for a third consecutive win. By comparison, no surfer has won the Eddie even twice. Financially and emotionally, Flea considered this the height of his career. Until late last year, it buoyed his market value, and he dragged down 10 to 12 grand per month in endorsement pay.

Eighteen years and a harrowing hellman career beyond his first session at Mavericks, much of that success seemed to have vanished through a glass pipe. After his hospital stay and return to drugs, Flea’s broken arm failed to heal and the arm went gimpy—a debilitating injury for a surfer known for his paddling prowess. By fall of ’08, friends and family assembled for a surprise intervention. It wasn’t the first one, but it stuck. “What was Flea’s bottom moment?” asked Mel. “Walking into a room and seeing all of those faces, that’s what it was. Everyone’s bottom occurs when you realize you’re not just killing yourself, that you’re affecting the people who love you—because the people who love you are the last ones to leave.”

The night before committing to rehab, Flea smoked speed and drank through the wee hours. He emptied the tobacco from a pack of cigarettes, combined it with weed and repacked the cigarettes to smuggle in. On arrival, he blew a .28 on the Breathalyzer, a sometimes-fatal blood alcohol count. Even though his girlfriend accompanied him, inside the facility Flea announced his presence with, “Where are all the bitches? I thought there was supposed to be chicks in rehab.” The staff pounced, quickly discovering the weed cigarettes. And because of his state, they pushed a little red detox pill on him, chemically landing the high-flyer to the ground.

By January, more than 100 days sober, filling out physically and surfing again, Flea appeared to be growing younger. He busied himself rebuilding a life, a big part of which was work on an ambitious new plan that just might set things right.

Still, he said, “I wish I would have felt like this 10 years ago, I think there would have been a lot more success than there was.”

The meth epidemic gained a hold on Santa Cruz county around 2002, and by 2005 more than half of the local Sheriffs’ arrests were meth-related.[1] A 2007 Santa Cruz Sentinel piece estimated that the epidemic still hadn’t peaked. Housewives, people with day jobs, and teenagers were caught up in it.[2] Although members of Santa Cruz’s big-wave community fit a Sheriff’s study of dominant users (male, Caucasian, over 25), as professional athletes at least midway through their careers (supported by contracts largely dependent on their public images), the decision to begin using ‘meth’ made no sense.

“Bottom line, doing drugs was just fun and acceptable among my friends,” Flea said.

“You add what we were doing [surfing big waves] on top of that, and we were high—lit up like marlins on a double shot,” said Mel, two years sober at the start of the year.

Flea and Mel had shared nearly everything—from solitary go-outs at Mavs in which each of them traded bombs, spun under lips, pushed the sport further in singular rides, to chasing the raucous surf party into addiction. More than once they would end up surfing giant waves while high. “Fuckin’ crazy,” Mel admitted, his face in his hands.

“We were a peer group. We all pushed each other in whatever we did,” he said, “We spent a lot of time together, surfed every session together, called each other every morning. Who got the best barrel? Did the biggest air? Who’s partying the hardest? We were pushing each other, but we weren’t helping each other. We partied and it seemed innocent at the time. But it got out-of-hand, and then some drugs came out that took a hold of us. The drugs that brought me to my knees are the same drugs that brought Flea to his knees. It just took him a little longer to figure it out.”

The addiction, in fact, would end up fracturing the peer group. While still using, Mel said that he began to hear voices. He became paranoid. He thought his home was under surveillance—that “they” were listening to him. Mel eventually acted on his psychosis by cutting the cable lines to his house, which, in his mind, sealed the listeners out. “It [meth] basically made me crazy. I was crazy—losing it,” he said. This was a low moment, but not the bottom. Mel last used with Flea. He remembered staying up tossing around the idea that he would actually move in with Flea and that they would come clean together. In hindsight, it was just another attempt at hatching a plan to keep using. “I knew in my heart that that wasn’t going to work.”

Mel finally realized that his immediate family was “not going to take any more of it.” He came out to his extended family, and thereby began a path toward recovery. “My love for my family is what turned me around and brought me back. That, and the 12-step program.” Yet there were a lot of costs. “The drug doesn’t leave you, you have to keep working on it. I had to disconnect myself from all the things that led me down that road. I had to stop seeing my other family [his close friends]. When I first started getting clean, that was the hardest thing I had to do.” Other than supporting Flea at a recent meeting, in fact, Mel hadn’t really communicated with him in two years.

One of the things that allowed them to keep using, Mel believed, is that drug use is not talked about in the surf world—and this unwillingness to address the issue eventually hurts the grommets. “The kids know. Nat Young and those kids know. Maybe the parents don’t, but the kids are talking. But, no one [in the media] wants to touch it.” Flea’s sponsorship pretty much dried up early last year, so he hasn’t much to lose there. Quiksilver continued to sponsor Mel. Socially and financially, it was not an easy decision to talk. And yet, a major part of the 12 steps is providing service to the community, helping those who need it, and offering the experience only recovered addicts can. That, and a very tough form of honesty.

Mel admitted, “I’m embarrassed by the things I did. I’m so embarrassed I don’t even want to talk about it. There’s a quote. But what’s the cure? To communicate about it. And that’s what Flea is doing.”

Without forewarning, Flea drove me to another spot on our coastal tour. Wedged into a wooded canyon that lead to a private beach and the same towering white cliffs, there lay a ranch owned by family friends. Flea’s esteem for the place was obvious. He knew where to find a fossilized tree buried in a creek, a kind of stone comprised of oil that would actually burn, an abandoned tree house nearly invisible from the ranch. There was a good break on the south end of the beach. On the north end he pointed to ancient shells gathered in bands of the cliff face. Flea didn’t mention that the ranch was for sale, nor the grander possibilities he saw in it as he detailed its qualities. I wouldn’t learn until later, instead of a more rational rebound into the paid ranks of surfing, Flea’s ambition was a pie-in-the-sky idea he saw himself developing here.

The entire impetus for coming clean—and for this article, in fact—was a plan for community service Flea had been in the midst of creating with wetsuit manufacturer Jack O’Neill and Santa Cruz big-wave pioneer Richard Schmidt. The working title was “Flea-hab.” It proposed to serve surfers and athletically minded addicts through a 12-step program while healing the body and connecting with nature—“Using the ocean as a healer,” as Schmidt put it. This idea contrasted sharply with Flea’s experience of rehab, which lacked physical activity. Further though, Flea envisioned a special program capable of connecting with the ethos of “Surf City.”

The three would-be founders met early this year at O’Neill’s home overlooking Pleasure Point. At 86 years old, O’Neill’s awareness of drug culture and its aftermath is long and personal. He’d experienced the ’60s counterculture through his children, as well as many of the surfers he met since opening his shop in 1959. “The surfers, especially in the beginning, were always adventurous guys—and they tried everything, too. Some of them got stuck, you wouldn’t see them anymore,” O’Neill said, later adding, “It’s extremely disturbing when your kids get involved.”

As well as a longer view of history, O’Neill offered his financial power and business acumen to the planned rehab. Schmidt offered his organizational expertise in running camps, as well as his more recent experience with interventions. Flea offered life’s experience, counseling, and name. “There’s a big, big need for this,” O’Neill said, “And I think Flea can really do something. You’ve got to have been there in order to impress these guys and gain a following.”

Mel, however, openly worried that Flea was taking a lot on his shoulders for someone just a few months sober. “I’m two years sober,” Mel said, “And I struggle every day. Sometimes it’s more than enough work trying to save yourself.” He did add, however, that accountability, responsibility to others, and service to the community might just be the thing to serve in Flea’s own recovery.

After our tour of the coast, life grew a bit tougher for Flea. He learned that back taxes on his house would nearly clean him out. And a hoped-for sponsorship deal failed to materialize. Still, sponsorship or not, Flea was invited to the Mavericks event and the Eddie, and he knew he would be present and clearheaded when they ran. His dream of creating a rehab moved slowly, but the ranch was still a possibility. He said recent hardships wouldn’t drive him to use again, but that, “It’s hard to suck up sometimes. Getting clean and all that shit is good, but it gets harder as I go…There’s wreckage.”

And yet, Flea has taken hold-downs before, sucked it up, and paddled back out.

REFERENCES

Mel, Peter. Personal Interview. 6 Jan 2009

Squires, Jennifer. “Meth study: Drug use rampant, devastating to Santa Cruz County.” Santa Cruz Sentinel 21 Sept. 2007.

“The Meth Epidemic.” Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office. 20 Jan. 2009 <http://www.scsheriff.com/MethArticle.htm>

Virostko, Darryl. Personal Interview. 4 Jan. 2009

ENDNOTES

[1] “The Meth Epidemic.” Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office. 20 Jan. 2009

<http://www.scsheriff.com/MethArticle.htm>

[2] Squires, Jennifer. “Meth study: Drug use rampant, devastating to Santa Cruz County Meth study: Drug use rampant, devastating to Santa Cruz County.” Santa Cruz Sentinel 21 Sept. 2007.

 

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