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Long ago, I went out with a good-looking young man with an intermittent drug habit, mainly cannabis, but occasionally some of the harder stuff. Yet this same man was also a convinced health food nut. Whenever he was "wasted" he would insist on eating only the purest food.

A few decades on, I can still see elements of that old friend's personal paradox played out all around me. On the one hand, hard drugs are a major and growing problem and I find them just as alarming as I did all those years ago. On the other, there's an obsession with health and fitness that my boyfriend of old would recognise.


Half the people I know are on some sort of diet or fitness regime. Our culture is permeated with information and advice on everything from weight loss to complementary therapies. Doctors now suggest healthy eating, exercise and everything from shiatsu to homeopathy as a way to battle some forms of depression.

Yet, strange as it sounds, there are strong connections between the drugs trade and the health and fitness industry. For a start, both have spawned and sustained multi-million pound businesses that feed off people's insecurities. More importantly, both play into the illusion that we have some measure of control over our individual destiny.

It seems odd, in an age of globalisation, inter-faith wars, mass famine and political apathy, that so many of us still believe we can make our own lives. But we do, passionately.

New Labour's core philosophy, for rich and poor alike, is based on the idea that each of us can shape our own destiny if we only work hard enough, exercise well and hold to some moral credo. In many ways, we have not travelled that far from the ideology of those puritan ancestors described by R H Tawney who were convinced that "character is all and circumstances nothingÉ", for whom poverty was a moral failing and riches a reward for goodness.¹

And in a modern, surreal twist to the idea of character carrying all before it, the premise of celebrity culture is that anyone can make it, as long as they are young, fit and willing to make an ass of themselves for loads of money and maximum broadcast coverage.

But how much control do we really have?

I watch a lot of people, particularly in mid life, struggling with their lives like wasps caught in honey. Their relationships are made or unmade, often several times over; the trajectory of their work lives set and unsatisfying, their children growing up and away, childhood innocence lost for ever. For many, the supposedly simple task of losing weight or stopping smoking can seem an insurmountable battle.


Drug addiction is the flip side of this story; at its worst, it is the language of total hopelessness. The difference between an abstainer, a recreational user and an addict will depend on temperament to some degree but it will also be determined by circumstance: the degree of real control over real-life things.

Ruth Wyner, the homelessness worker imprisoned for allegedly allowing drug users on her premises, recently described being offered heroin in prison. Such was her misery at being incarcerated, she was seriously tempted by the drug for the first time in her life. But she refused. As she did so, she watched the women around her "chasing the dragon", women with much less to lose, so much less to get out for.

I am not saying that we should not take care of ourselves and others as much as we can. We should. But part of that "taking care" is to recognise the limits of individual destiny and effort as well as the still unmined possibilities of acting together. Who we are, what we can become, how much we can change depends far more on wider social forces than we are led to believe by everybody from our form teacher to our GP, our best friend to our prime minister.

Privilege, power, connections, money. All these things are real and operate powerfully in the real world. Similarly there are global industries concentrated on the profits to be gained from persuading people to eat more than they need, smoke and drink alcohol, often to excess, and consume both legal and illegal drugs.

Yet these social forces are not seen clearly, spoken of openly or battled collectively.

We would do a lot better to think and speak of these aspects of our world than dwell obsessively on our individual weight or consumption of wheat or sugar or, worse still, try to escape the real world altogether.

¹ R H Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, Penguin, 1926

Melissa Benn is a journalist and novelist.