Even the courageous can be caught by drugs

One of the world’s most lethal waves is Hawaii’s “Pipeline” at Ehukai Beach on the North Shore of Oahu. The wave is called “Pipeline” because enormous swells come out of deep ocean, hit a shallow coral reef and form a five- to sixmetre cylindrical wave over one metre of water.

People die there, and others are severely injured trying to surf this monstrous wave.

Yet it was here that Tom Carroll, the short, muscular man from Newport, Sydney, New South Wales, displayed his mastery of the sport of surfing. Carroll won the Pipeline Masters contest three times — on each occasion amazing the surfing world with his skill, finesse and fearless approach in the face of the ocean’s awesome power.

In 1987, he finished second to golfer Greg Norman for the Australian Sportsman of the Year award. When you arrived at Sydney airport in the late 1990s, Carroll’s surfboard was there in a glass case in the main reception area — an icon in a sportsmad country.

They say that air force fighter pilots, once retired, spend the rest of their lives trying to duplicate the experience, the thrill of rocketing through an open sky at the speed of sound. They do it with cars, motorbikes, anything that goes fast.

Maybe it’s the same with big-wave surfers like Carroll, and maybe that’s why Carroll’s autobiography TC, which outlines his post-retirement struggle with serious drugs, is so relevant in 2017. During his later years, Carroll had worked himself up to a destructive daily meth habit, until he quietly checked into rehab in 2007.

Carroll’s story is worth considering as we try to understand what the media and politicians call “the fentanyl crisis” without really understanding why the crisis exists in the lives of so many people and what to do about it.

In the early 2000s, Carroll recounts, he was struggling with various postretirement issues in his life; the challenges of a young family, and ecstasy and amphetamine use, which he says was initially like a “really strong cup of coffee” that would last all day.

“Someone offered it to me and it hit the mark. I really just only took a little bit at a time. It was meant to keep me in a good space, where I needed to be in order to be functional.”

Eventually, the daily need for it increased, as did his body’s resistance and need for increasing amounts.

“Addiction becomes such a lonely thing,” writes Carroll in his book, “you become self-centred and super lonely and you think you’ve got to do it all on your own. You’ve got very low selfworth. You don’t really feel like you’re worth recovery anyway. It’s the trickiest thing to move through, but we need all that support.”

What we don’t understand, but need to find out, is why some people become addicts and others don’t. Three times in my own life, after seriously injuring myself through my own stupidity and physical ineptitude, I’ve been given an opioid pain medication called Demerol.

The effect was amazing. Suddenly, I didn’t have a care in the world. No more pain, and I was floating on a cloud of bliss.

I thought afterward that if my life had, through whatever circumstance, descended into an abyss of physical, emotional and spiritual pain, and there had been nobody and nothing to turn to, no solid foundation of love from those closest, I might have sought more of a substance that so easily and completely filled that void.

In Carroll’s case, it might have been the pain of a descent from celebrity and in the case of many other people it might be the descent into the kind of self-destructive behaviour that psychologists tell us is used as a coping mechanism.

Whatever it is about, the fentanyl crisis is not about bad people doing bad things. To view addiction through some reassuring lens of moral certainty is a mistake.

Nor will a crime-and-punishment construct even begin to scratch the surface of the deeper understandings needed to address an exponentially growing social problem.

According to Australian sources, Carroll has remained clean. By his own account, it took every ounce of his hallmark big-wave courage to get and stay clean.

With our own made in B.C. fentanyl crisis, whether it takes fully funded residential treatment, partial hospitalization, intensive outpatient care or outpatient rehabilitation, the options have to be available.

Wishing away the problem won’t make it so.