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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)

#111

Post by pyrophane »

pas wrote: post #104
davelondon wrote: post #55

It's a nice story but it's actually a load of rubbish... https://theoutline.com/post/2205/this-38-year-old-study-is-s... "Despite his claims of a revolutionary breakthrough, Alexander had trouble finding a journal to publish his results. Both Science and Nature rejected the study for publication, likely due to significant problems with the methodology and results. Pharmacology Biochemistry and Behavior published the…

why is it a load of rubbish? it's inconclusive. it seems there's no strong independent evidence either for or against the strong addiction model.

I assume it is more the author's response to the headline of this article, which treats the conclusions of the experiment as robustly proven fact.

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

#112

Post by civilitty »

norir wrote: post #105
civilitty wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I would argue that if one watches Breaking Bad to its conclusion that it's hard to say that it glorified the manufacture and sale of meth. Everyone involved has huge negative consequences in their lives as a result. The collateral damage is staggering. By the end, Walt seems as addicted to the sense of power that making meth gives him as the user of meth desperately seeking their next hit. He sabotages himself and ul…

I think "high school chem teacher builds a drug empire that rivals Mexican cartels" is definitely a glorified macho-suburban fantasy elevated to an art form. In reality season 1 would have ended with Bryan Cranston's character dissolving in a vat of drain cleaner or buried out in the New Mexican desert missing his head and fingers. I mean, look at the drug addict that gets the most screen time in the show: he's the cofounder of the drug empire guiding the main character through the drug game like a methed out Master Miyagi.

Compare it with Snowfall: the main character's family has at least some history of drug dealing and he only succeeds because he discovers a cheap and ultra-addictive recipe for crack cocaine and because the CI-freaking-A is using him to fund the global war on communism. Recurring characters get killed off in dumb gang skirmishes all the time and the drug addict with the most screen time is literally a shell of her former self that can barely get through the day up until the latest season.

Or compare it with The Wire: all the people involved in the drug game are only in it because they have literally nothing else to live for except the glory of the game. Basically no one survives except the cops and Bubbles never really gets fully clean.

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

#113

Post by aeternum »

pas wrote: post #104
davelondon wrote: post #55

It's a nice story but it's actually a load of rubbish... https://theoutline.com/post/2205/this-38-year-old-study-is-s... "Despite his claims of a revolutionary breakthrough, Alexander had trouble finding a journal to publish his results. Both Science and Nature rejected the study for publication, likely due to significant problems with the methodology and results. Pharmacology Biochemistry and Behavior published the…

why is it a load of rubbish? it's inconclusive. it seems there's no strong independent evidence either for or against the strong addiction model.

Whenever a large group of people really want something to be true, your Bayesian evidence threshold should increase significantly.

IE cigarettes not causing cancer, glass of red wine a day, unleaded gasoline, caffeine has no negative effects, drugs are not addictive, you can eat as much as you want as long as no carbs.

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

#114

Post by AnimalMuppet »

aeternum wrote: post #113
pas wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why is it a load of rubbish? it's inconclusive. it seems there's no strong independent evidence either for or against the strong addiction model.

Whenever a large group of people really want something to be true, your Bayesian evidence threshold should increase significantly. IE cigarettes not causing cancer, glass of red wine a day, unleaded gasoline, caffeine has no negative effects, drugs are not addictive, you can eat as much as you want as long as no carbs.

What about unleaded gasoline puts it on this list? What about it do people really want to be true?

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

#115

Post by jl2718 »

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…

Reminds me of this: https://youtu.be/z3kF9S0h_7A

Not even once, kids.

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

#116

Post by civilitty »

quacked wrote: post #103
benatkin wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point, I ninja edited just before you posted to say that a chunk of them have been mislead by televangelists and such. I can tell Thich Nhat Hanh appreciated the people you're talking about, having read about him traveling all around the world and meeting people from the US (where he lived for quite some time) and countless other countries.

Ah, there's the edit, right. One of the principles that I hold to pretty strongly is that the more performatively famous someone is surrounding a certain idea, the more likely it is that they don't have any real principles, and they're just beating whatever drum allows them to continue to hold influence over people. So someone like Pat Robertson doesn't actually believe what he's saying in private, but if he kept ban…

I think that generalizes to all human interactions. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life [1] is the canonical work on this topic.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Presentation_of_Self_in_Ev...

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

#117

Post by fuzzfactor »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #114
aeternum wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever a large group of people really want something to be true, your Bayesian evidence threshold should increase significantly. IE cigarettes not causing cancer, glass of red wine a day, unleaded gasoline, caffeine has no negative effects, drugs are not addictive, you can eat as much as you want as long as no carbs.

What about unleaded gasoline puts it on this list? What about it do people really want to be true?

The idea that it became harmless once the lead was removed?

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

#118

Post by zdragnar »

fires10 wrote: post #40
xrd wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember with distinct anger that my friend told me information to the contrary. He probably got that phrasing from that doctor who got a free trip to Barbados to push it. I wasn't there but i remember him telling me that and it makes my blood boil. I do share other people's skepticism of the medical industry as you might be able to tell. He should have done more research, agreed.

We license doctors to do the research for us. We can not be expected to experts in all fields. It's why we license professionals.

We license doctors you visit to practice medicine, not to do research. Unless they're working at a dedicated research hospital like the Mayo clinic, doctors don't do research on their own.

They'll stay up to date with what is standards of care, but even that is dictated to them by their EHR software or what they expect your insurance will cover.

When I've gotten prescribed a new medicine, I don't really recall a doctor ever even telling me what side effects to watch out for. At most, they've told me not to drink alcohol while on someone.

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

#119

Post by fuzzfactor »

civilitty wrote: post #64
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…

> The popular culture that celebrates drugs and dealers. You mean modern medicine? That's what makes this problem so pernicious - so much of it was created by the people fictionalized in shows like House MD and Grey's Anatomy not The Wire and Breaking Bad.

For thousands of years the natural opioids morphine & codeine have been almost universally recognized as harmful dependency-inducing substances in their own category, that build a tolerance which can almost never be limited beyond a certain number of years, before the toxicity overcomes any therapeutic benefit there might have been upon initial administration.

After all this time a religious person of many different faiths over the recent centuries might have often said that for long-term use they were put on earth by god for people who can not be expected to recover.

Synthetic opioids are just the modern version which were developed because the natural product itself can not be patented.

Hence "patent medicine".

The habit-forming effect is what made the Sacklers the richest pharmaceutical barons so far.

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

#120

Post by cyberax »

readthenotes1 wrote: post #5
cyberax wrote: post #2

2017. That was before fentanyl and meth onslaught.

That was well after both, meth by decades, fentanyl by years

Not quite. Fentanyl and meth existed, but they were not nearly as available.

You can see the results of this: https://nida.nih.gov/sites/default/files/images/2023-Drug-od... (from https://nida.nih.gov/research-topics/trends-statistics/overd... ).

You can see that modern fentanyl is very different from previous iterations of drugs.

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