Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Drug addiction: The complex truth

mindhacks.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 139 posts

Re: Drug addiction: The complex truth

#61

Post by rdtsc »

japhyr wrote: post #46
rdtsc wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A while back (some years perhaps) on Reddit there was a story about someone who basically documented their experiment with heroin. It could have been a hoax of course, but most agreed it wasn't. It was this person who was already doing milder illegal drugs. He goes to his dealer and dealer proposes something different this time. He decided to try heroin. Had pretty high confidence he wouldn't get addicted. Anyway he…

Was it one of these? http://www.reddit.com/user/SpontaneousH/submitted/ Or this one? http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/jcxow/iama_functioning...

Thanks for finding it, it was SpontaneousH one.

Re: Drug addiction: The complex truth

#62

Post by 1337biz »

bane wrote: post #38

Like lots of folks I drink a bit, and I smoke the occasional celebratory cigar. I'm fortunate to not have found myself addicted to anything though (that I'm aware of at least). However, I have family members who have deep addiction problems. Life affecting. One thing that I've noticed is that even when they get off of the substance, the addictive personality traits are still there -- years later. One of my relatives,…

For example, she found a puzzle game on her phone that she would play obsessively

Actually an interesting observation on how difficult it is to draw the line between obsession and passion. It seems that she (can devlop) an extremely high level of focus, something that what would probably regarded by many as a trait for becoming successful in a specific discipline.

Re: Drug addiction: The complex truth

#63

Post by pekk »

ArbitraryLimits wrote: post #32

I remember from college my Econ 101 textbook had a sidebar on heroin use by military personnel in Vietnam - apparently (according to my memory of an unattributed source) 90% of personnel stationed in Vietnam tried heroin at least once, and then 89% of them stopped when they left. Why an economics textbook? The authors were trying to illustrate 1) the role of substitutes on consumption of a particular good - there was…

Heroin has properties attractive to people in a hopeless, brutal war beyond what they can get from bridge club. Self-medication is not exactly recreation.

You should also look skeptically at claims that having unprotected sex with possible HIV carriers guarantees that you will get HIV. But you should still put a goddamn condom on.

Re: Drug addiction: The complex truth

#64

Post by snom380 »

ArbitraryLimits wrote: post #32

I remember from college my Econ 101 textbook had a sidebar on heroin use by military personnel in Vietnam - apparently (according to my memory of an unattributed source) 90% of personnel stationed in Vietnam tried heroin at least once, and then 89% of them stopped when they left. Why an economics textbook? The authors were trying to illustrate 1) the role of substitutes on consumption of a particular good - there was…

It's not so much try it once and you're hooked, but for a certain percentage of those who do try it can get hooked in the first try. For many or most others, it takes persistent use (which will often happen when the first try doesn't get them hooked).

Re: Drug addiction: The complex truth

#65

Post by yebyen »

mumbi wrote: post #11

My question is this: if the rats knew that taking the morphine after moving to the park would keep the withdrawals away, would they have still taken the water?

Yeah good question! Reading that story, I understood first that rats like sweet things and hate bitter things. Second that rats are usually willing to take Hobson's choice, and the point of the article being that most scientists don't realize that's what they've actually been testing.

I understand that heroin withdrawals are pretty terrible, I've even heard said that "you'd do anything" to make them stop, but they can't kill you in a sort of way that alcohol withdrawals can.

It sounded from my reading more like toward the end of the experiments though it was becoming clearer that the rats in Rat Park genuinely did not like the effects of the drug on their normal lives, and when they had the other option of socializing, they were only still taking the drug to get at the delicious sucrose.

Re: Drug addiction: The complex truth

#66

Post by jere »

pekk wrote: post #60
jere wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to be suggesting an initial addiction caused an addictive personality, but are you sure your relative wasn't prone to addictive behavior to begin with?

I thought the suggestion was an addictive personality causing the initial addiction and also subsequent ones. I find this like saying that other people might have addiction problems, but you don't have the personality so you can take it or leave it.

>One thing that I've noticed is that even when they get off of the substance, the addictive personality traits are still there -- years later.

The OP can chime in, but your interpretation (which I considered) doesn't seem to fit what I just quoted.

Re: Drug addiction: The complex truth

#67

Post by snom380 »

konstruktor wrote: post #43
robbiep wrote: post #15

I have previously commented on this topic on HN, but since it's back i'll go again. As a medical student I was taught that addiction is a spectrum. Each drug falls somewhere on that spectrum in terms of addiction potential, (And as GotAnyMegadeth comments, Nicotine is more addictive than Heroin) and every person has some prior probability of becoming addicted, due to the complex interplay of social/biological factors…

Are you sure you are talking about the destructive potential of heroin itself and not the circumstances in which it is consumed? It is not necessarily an IV drug, but the price, driven by criminalization, makes smoking prohibitively expensive (see the other comment about the Vietnam soldiers). In countries where the distribution of syringes is criminalised (Russia, USA), syringes are reused and shared. The price of t…

If you look at heroin and meth addicts, I think it's pretty easy to see that it's not only dependent on price (which for meth is quite cheap in some countries). A lot of addicts will in the long run be unable to hold a job because of their drug use, and will only turn to crime when that happens.

Re: Drug addiction: The complex truth

#68

Post by klenwell »

delluminatus wrote: post #45
AznHisoka wrote: post #23

We should not look towards drugs to satisfy the void in our lives. We should not look to eating for pleasure, just for health. We should not look to our career as a source of fulfillment - it's just a means to an end. We should not look to our mates as a source of salvation - we should focus on giving. We should not look to our kids as objects to make us whole - we should focus on giving... Ok, so if we're gonna take…

This is the real question. I think there are only three choice categories: * Reject everything. This is basically the path of the Yogi. * Assign meaning to something. It could be your kids, your spouse (I wouldn't recommend that one), philanthropy, a "vision," or whatever. If people ask why it's important to you, don't explain in logical terms. "I decided that it would be." * Stop thinking about it. Chase the dopamin…

I was under the impression that the Yogi was able to reject everything because he had disciplined his mind to become a self-activating dopamine dispenser. Isn't there a neuroscientific study somewhere that points to this?

Re: Drug addiction: The complex truth

#69

Post by deletes »

Blahah wrote: post #25
deletes wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Well, AFAIK, this doesn't happen with most humans struggling with addiction to hard drugs. Addicts will neglect everything, namely social activities, in order to get what they need. Do you have any tangible data to support your claim?

nice try, but data are by definition intangible

Nope, synonym for tangible is factual, data is by definition factual:

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/data

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/data

Definition of tangible:

-substantially real , material

-capable of being precisely identified or realized by the mind

-capable of being appraised at an actual or approximate

Re: Drug addiction: The complex truth

#70

Post by geoka9 »

1337biz wrote: post #62
bane wrote: post #38

Like lots of folks I drink a bit, and I smoke the occasional celebratory cigar. I'm fortunate to not have found myself addicted to anything though (that I'm aware of at least). However, I have family members who have deep addiction problems. Life affecting. One thing that I've noticed is that even when they get off of the substance, the addictive personality traits are still there -- years later. One of my relatives,…

For example, she found a puzzle game on her phone that she would play obsessively Actually an interesting observation on how difficult it is to draw the line between obsession and passion. It seems that she (can devlop) an extremely high level of focus, something that what would probably regarded by many as a trait for becoming successful in a specific discipline.

Yes, that's what I thought, too.

If only she could bring herself to getting hooked on a creative endeavour, she would achieve remarkable results.

Post reply on HN