The Poison We Pick

Environment and social setting is known to be important for addiction (along with basically everything else in perception and behavior, e.g. compensatory responses [1]), I think it's just a matter of how long it takes for scientific nuance to go mainstream.

The simplified picture is still often the chemical picture, imo, for 2 reasons: 1) the public forgets that the brain is an organ that obeys physical laws, and that behavior and perception depend entirely on the brain. 2) Ok, yes, environment is important, but how is that represented in the brain? It's still physiological, which inevitably includes chemicals.

[1] http://nobaproject.com/modules/conditioning-and-learning

When I met the friend who taught me about heroin, I figured she was "high as a kite" because she chattered from topic to topic like a butterfly. She called back a few days later, and started to invite me into her world. I didn't know anything about the street pharmacy, except that cannabis had been helpful for another friend to get her alcohol use under control.

She said she'd relapsed on cocaine because of severe depression, then shortly later on heroin -- supposedly to treat her high blood pressure (from smoking cocaine). I think really she was just lonely. A chapter in Gabor Maté's book is titled Through a Needle, a Soft, Warm Hug [0].

She was going to the methadone clinic daily when we met. If she couldn't get to the clinic by the 11am closing, she'd have to order heroin from her street pharmacist. It was almost as if the clinic had contempt for its clients -- their business was to be their clients' legal dealer.

Four months after she'd begun to teach me about her world, I decided she didn't actually like it that much, and began to express disapproval at her self-medication strategies. She tried sticking with her old drug world, but she liked me more than the drugs. At about six months we had a nice time frying donuts (coconut oil is a treatment for compulsive alcohol use, and makes for tasty donuts). Two days later she called to say that she "wished [she] wasn't a drug addict". The next day, "I SHOULD ONLY USE SUBSTANCES WHICH ARE LEGAL! Alcohol is legal, [tcj_phx]..." (me: doh! progress, I'll take it), the following day, "I hate methadone, I hate everything about it..." Essentially what I did was a months-long pace... then lead (hypnotic technique).

The most important interventions to end the present "opioid epidemic" (artificial) is to provide a legal supply of clean heroin, safe injection sites, and protecting addicts from the criminal justice system.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16023802

(Yesterday's post about adoption-trauma is relevant too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16443667 )

This viewpoint is part of the problem the person you're replying to was describing. That we are freer than ever to choose our own values, but people are simultaneously finding less meaning in life. That with the erosion of constraints, religion, and social roles people have to create their own substitutes for these things. It's the idea of Nietzsche's Übermensch.

The challenge is that a bad hire really is a liability, especially on a small team where the effects aren't diluted and there's little room for waste.

How to separate "this person is likely to be a good hire but has had some bad luck in the past" from "this person has had some bad outcomes in the past and is likely to continue to have those bad outcomes if we hire them" is a hard but important question.

I agree with just about all of what you said. So many bad things are tied to this. Crime rate. Horrible educational results and environments (I worked in Baltimore schools as a contractor and it's one of the saddest experiences I ever had and I'm a combat vet).

One thing to remember though about the war on drugs and especially the opiate crisis is that it was also largely a creation of the CIA who learned it from the Brits who had been doing it as far back as the opium wars. Black markets provide black money budgets not overseen by Congress, and the CIA really hates oversight (they prefer overlook committees). The main opiate crisis in particular stems from Vietnam, where generals would play along for a cut while the CIA had drug operations all over including Laos, etc. They'd then ship it back and sell it specifically in the inner (mostly black and other minority) city.

The same thing is true of this opiate crisis. The war in Afghanistan has massively increased poppy production (which the taliban had outlawed) while US forces would eradicate weed crops they allowed poppy fields, and low and behold, the vast majority of the heroin, etc now in America can be traced (Chem analysis) right back to Afghanistan. I promise you it's Vietnam on repeat, and the CIA has their hands all over it.

Of course south America is the same. Behind every top cartel member is a CIA man pulling their strings, and look at the destruction they are wreaking on the border towns. The death toll of civilians is higher than allied casualties in OIF!

It's just like Iran contra. Since lots of the time they don't want to pay full price, the Intel agencies will ship arms to them as well.

It's high time for a new church committee!

The problem is the surveillance engine is so pervasive, which enables the blackmail and extortion system, just about every senator or congressman who pushed back would be quickly compromised.

This is the real deep state, in the Peter Dale Scott sense of the term, and it must be addressed if we are going to strike at the root of many of our problems, instead of hacking at the branches.