Introduction: the complexity of drug addiction

According to most experts, successful drug addiction intervention and substance abuse recovery necessarily requires the use of external constraints and, in some cases, even exogenous forms of coercion (Morgan and Lizke, 2007; Barlow, 2010; Walker, 2010). What this means, then, is that any subsequent manifestation of disorder (ie decompensation, relapse or dependency-seeking) will necessitate further system control from outside the disorganised and disruptive self. This is a self whose patterns of behaviour are deemed too unpredictable, too chaotic, to warrant the freedom to be (Williams and Arrigo, 2002, 2007, forthcoming). But, what if the above-stated theoretical claims and the science that has been used to test and measure them were flawed? What if the mobilisation and activation of human social capital (eg from a complexity perspective, the addict's possible self-organisation) required perturbations of disorder, disequilibrium and instability to make this natural recovery more fully realisable? Moreover, what normative framework regarding ontology (ie the ‘laws’ of being) might exist to support this alternative approach to drug addiction and natural recovery? How, and in what ways, might this framework and approach suggest an emergent and radicalised jurisprudence: one that advances a collectivist agenda in overcoming system control and regulation by way of externalities or formal intervention (eg mandated in-patient medication treatment, structured out-patient rehabilitation programming)?

This chapter critically probes the under-examined relationship between substance abuse and spontaneous self-healing. To situate the critique, two streams of philosophical analysis will be presented and integrated. In particular, selected insights from the science of complexity studies (non-linear dynamical systems theory) and the diagnostics of psychological jurisprudence (PJ) will be described. The relevancies of these insights will be fitted to the necessity of exogenous system-based policy reform. These reforms will emphasise changes in substance abuse, mental health and criminal justice theory and science for and about human social capital.

The human project: the science of complexity, adaptability and self-organisation

The evolving science of dynamical systems theory has, from its inception, been inspired by the ‘inherent creativity’, ‘spontaneous appearance of novel structures’ and ‘autonomous adaptation to a changing environment’ (Heylighen, 2001, p 253) that characterises and unifies the diverse phenomena it studies.