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It’s not the chemicals that cause addiction (2017)

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Re: It’s not the chemicals that cause addiction (2017)

#91

Post by belorn »

There are an alternative interpretation of the same data. The rat park may provide protection against addition, while the rat cage makes the rats more vulnerable to addition.

This model is often use with illnesses such as chronic stress, depression and ptsd. A "rat park" has many major health benefits, and aspect of it is measured with organ donations in order to determine which patients has the highest probability of surviving.

A way to see it is that in order for a negative outcome you need three things to be true. Be exposed to a trigger, while being vulnerable, and lacking protection.

Re: It’s not the chemicals that cause addiction (2017)

#92

Post by lo_zamoyski »

mordae wrote: post #79
mobilefriendly wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My family member died from his addiction and I'm still angry at him. He made several decades of selfish, disastrous choices. He had every advantage in the world and squandered it all. I'm angry we don't do more to fight these drugs. Drug dealing is very much a violent crime, it killed my cousin. The popular culture that celebrates drugs and dealers. Plenty of blame all around but central is the person who decides to…

> Plenty of blame all around but central is the person who decides to use. Oh get off your high horse. I've had two uncles die from alcoholism. In reality, it was the divorces and way more complex circumstances that really did them in. It really is the cage.

Wow, that's rude. He said something wrong.

It's important that we avoid the twin extremes of, on the one hand, categorically blaming circumstance for everything, and on the other hand, categorically assuming 100% culpability. The proper view is that human beings operate at a nexus between circumstance and decision. Circumstances can create good or bad incentives, and statistically, people will follow incentives (hence the need to legislate properly, for example). These incentives can be strong or weak. They can create more or less pressure to follow through with the incentive. But we must ultimately make a choice and that rests with us (in the extreme case, something like extreme pain can blind a person and effectively rob him of the freedom to choose intentionally which is to say with the capacity to use reason). So how culpable we are for a decision varies on a variety of factors, but there is almost always some culpability.

In the case of your parent comment, it sounds like the person in question is very culpable, that he had the capacity to reason, to know he should have chosen otherwise, but did not. There's nothing wrong with the content of that claim as such.

Re: It’s not the chemicals that cause addiction (2017)

#93

Post by daseiner1 »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #35

I’m not sure why it can’t be both. Also, I’m not really sure that giving rats all the cocaine or heroin water they can drink is the same as a down on his luck homeless guy or a manager of a club or a good time college student… if you want to say it’s the cage, then you should probably theorize about how the deeper you get into drugs, typically the stronger the cage gets. I like the idea that it’s not the addict’s fau…

I've met many, many incredibly successful, intelligent, disciplined, kind, impressive people with incredibly serious addiction issues. 10s-100s of millions in net worth. These aren't lazy people.

Recovery does take an immense amount of hard work and discipline, albeit in a very different way than, say, reading legal briefs, writing code, performing surgery.

Re: It’s not the chemicals that cause addiction (2017)

#94

Post by brightball »

mikub wrote: post #63
mobilefriendly wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My family member died from his addiction and I'm still angry at him. He made several decades of selfish, disastrous choices. He had every advantage in the world and squandered it all. I'm angry we don't do more to fight these drugs. Drug dealing is very much a violent crime, it killed my cousin. The popular culture that celebrates drugs and dealers. Plenty of blame all around but central is the person who decides to…

I mostly agree with you. But when your doctor is telling you to take some 'medicine', and that is what makes you addicted it's not completly in your hands anymore.

After I had surgery on my ankle in college, my dad took away the pain medicine the moment it was no longer necessary (1 day later) and just gave me Advil after that.

I didn’t fully appreciate why until I saw somebody go through it.

But then I got the entire picture. This man struggled. Hid it from his family. Finally confessed it to his wife who stuck by him and sent him to a rehab program to get clean. He was gone for about 4 months and got clean. Got his life back. Got his family back and got back to work.

And then his old dealer came back around. It took another family member telling the dealer he’d shoot him on sight if he ever came around again to get that predator to leave.

Re: It’s not the chemicals that cause addiction (2017)

#95

Post by tudorw »

benatkin wrote: post #86
quacked wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously he doesn't mean that, there's an enormous body of media and art that glamorizes drug dealing and using. It stretches across ethnicity and class. It begins with alcohol and weed, stretches into cocaine and hallucinogens, and from there gets into the heavy drugs. If the only input into drug addiction was the modern medical industry over-prescribing opioids, the landscape of modern drug use would look very dif…

If you want to see a sincere take on it, read the writings of Thich Nhat Hanh. https://www.lionsroar.com/food-for-thought/#:~:text=I%20hear... I still tend to disagree because I have a hard time finding balance and not going too far in restricting the media I consume, but it's a nice vision. A lot of the religious right in the US, especially the part that is led by televangelists like the late Pat Robertson, just wan…

nice reccomendation.

Re: It’s not the chemicals that cause addiction (2017)

#96

Post by convolvatron »

zytron3 wrote: post #74
version_five wrote: post #72

Just want to mention my experience quitting smoking (which is notably hard, but I have no point of reference having not used other drugs). Physical addition is easy. With nicotine there are not really strong symptoms anyway, irritability mainly and inability to focus. I know other drugs are worse but in principle, battling withdrawl is not that tough, people are good at physical hardships. For nicotine it's a few day…

Running is also used successfully by heroin addicts to help quit. It's actually one of the best ways to help with many addictions. Not discounting your achievement in quitting smoking in any way, but the easiest way to quit an addiction is to slot in a replacement habit that is also pleasurable, and running is deeply satisfying

creating art can work for some people

Re: It’s not the chemicals that cause addiction (2017)

#97

Post by lo_zamoyski »

xrd wrote: post #13

I've got a friend who recently was hospitalized for fentanyl addiction. Twenty years ago he was my first investor in my first startup. He was the guy that taught me about mediation. He was the first vegetarian I knew. He owned four cab licenses in Portland. Then Uber came in and shredded his retirement plan. The cab company forced him out so he wouldn't even capitalize on the partial ownership of the land they owned.…

Indeed, the idea that we shouldn't criminalize drugs because of some ludicrous personal autonomy argument is silly. It rests on a kind of extreme, libertarian view of human beings and human society in which human beings are construed as atomic, self-sufficient beings shouldering the entire burden of responsibility for their actions (we ARE responsible, but those who encourage or enable bad behavior share responsibility) and society is construed as some kind of purely voluntary association of atomic beings for transactional exchanges. Classical liberal view, extremely anti-social and anti-human. Human beings are social animals. Harming oneself harms society, and harming society harms its members. Society exists for the sake of the common good, and it isn't good to enable or allow drug use.

Re: It’s not the chemicals that cause addiction (2017)

#98

Post by quacked »

civilitty wrote: post #85
quacked wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously he doesn't mean that, there's an enormous body of media and art that glamorizes drug dealing and using. It stretches across ethnicity and class. It begins with alcohol and weed, stretches into cocaine and hallucinogens, and from there gets into the heavy drugs. If the only input into drug addiction was the modern medical industry over-prescribing opioids, the landscape of modern drug use would look very dif…

Does any recent media actually glorify the drugs that are causing the worst problems right now? I watch a lot of TV but have less exposure to popular music so I'm genuinely unsure. There's plenty of alcohol, weed, cocaine, and hallucinogens, I'll give you that, but they're not gateways to opioid addiction. Breaking Bad glorifying the manufacture and sale of meth is the only except I can think of - Oxy, fentanyl, and…

> There's plenty of alcohol, weed, cocaine, and hallucinogens, I'll give you that, but they're not gateways to opioid addiction.

This is only partially accurate. There are two primary "pipelines" to opioid addiction; one of them is overreliance on painkillers, but the other one is fairly standard risk-seeking escalation through a socially deleterious lifestyle, often culminating in an OD or a prison sentence after a predictable years-long risk escalation path through social drug use.

I will agree that I don't think there's a lot of media showing meth or fentanyl use as cool and attractive, but my overall point is less that a specific drug needs to be shown to be cool, and more that the artistic construction of the drug lifestyle as alternative, exciting, rebellious etc. wears down the emotional barriers of a lot of people when they're young and malleable. I've done a good number of drugs in my day and I can assure you that in the case of most of the people I did drugs with, early exposure to "drugs are cool" art and music played a part in their ready acceptance of the lifestyle.

As one example, if you go to a high school party, often the riskiest, coolest kids will go off in private and do drugs. There's no feedback loop in the media to make this look pathetic or sketchy--on the contrary, most drug use is played for laughs, or it's added as another dimension to a lifestyle that's supposed to be tragic but instead looks awesome. "Oh my god, look at this guy's life, he's a mess, his apartment is so dirty, he's doing lines off the mirror... with a smoking hot supermodel-actress while we do a B-plot story about how his small-town parents are boring and stodgy... and he's a rock star..."

I don't really know whether or not you could seriously reduce drug use by not showing it in the media, but I do believe that showing it as positively as it is now increases drug use. And I haven't even mentioned the music surrounding drugs.

Re: It’s not the chemicals that cause addiction (2017)

#99

Post by benatkin »

tudorw wrote: post #95
benatkin wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to see a sincere take on it, read the writings of Thich Nhat Hanh. https://www.lionsroar.com/food-for-thought/#:~:text=I%20hear... I still tend to disagree because I have a hard time finding balance and not going too far in restricting the media I consume, but it's a nice vision. A lot of the religious right in the US, especially the part that is led by televangelists like the late Pat Robertson, just wan…

nice reccomendation.

There's a longer piece that I found as a PDF by searching for words of an excerpt I happened upon. I can't find a page linking to it, but it seems legit. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5c03ced75ffd204418037...

Edit: I searched a phrase in the PDF and found this: https://thubtenchodron.org/2017/11/non-harmful-consumption-n...

Re: It’s not the chemicals that cause addiction (2017)

#100

Post by quacked »

benatkin wrote: post #86
quacked wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously he doesn't mean that, there's an enormous body of media and art that glamorizes drug dealing and using. It stretches across ethnicity and class. It begins with alcohol and weed, stretches into cocaine and hallucinogens, and from there gets into the heavy drugs. If the only input into drug addiction was the modern medical industry over-prescribing opioids, the landscape of modern drug use would look very dif…

If you want to see a sincere take on it, read the writings of Thich Nhat Hanh. https://www.lionsroar.com/food-for-thought/#:~:text=I%20hear... I still tend to disagree because I have a hard time finding balance and not going too far in restricting the media I consume, but it's a nice vision. A lot of the religious right in the US, especially the part that is led by televangelists like the late Pat Robertson, just wan…

After reading this article, I agree with the words of Thich Nhat Hanh, thank you for the recommendation.

> The religious right in the US just wants to suppress it out of ignorance

I tend to agree that the religious right in the US is a legislative force that does more harm than good, and that many people who campaign against drugs don't have a solid understanding of drugs or drug culture. However, I don't think that it's ignorant to want to suppress drug culture (either in the media or in real life), and I think more religious conservatives have experience with addict family members than you think.

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