It’s amazing how a metaphorical cliché appropriate for rock music lyrics becomes profound when Dr. White Coat, Ph.D. uses it. “Such-and-such affects your brain like cocaine” is the “It was a dark and stormy night” of pop neuroscience writing. We need a Bulwer-Lytton category expansion to include nonfiction clickbait.
Oreos can be as addictive to the brain as cocaine, the authors of a scientific study have claimed.
Well, yeah, if you’re stupid enough to snort or inject them, duh. Stick to smoking them and you won’t get hooked.
I’m sorry, you’re right, the horrible results of cookie addiction are no laughing matter.
That may be good public relations, but it is bad public education. We also argue that it is fundamentally bad science. The brain-disease model of addiction is not a trivial rebranding of an age-old human problem. It plays to the assumption that if biological roots can be identified, then a person has a “disease.” And being afflicted means that the person cannot choose, control his or her life, or be held accountable. Now introduce brain imaging, which seems to serve up visual proof that addiction is a brain disease. But neurobiology is not destiny: The disruptions in neural mechanisms associated with addiction do constrain a person’s capacity for choice, but they do not destroy it. What’s more, training the spotlight too intently on the workings of the addicted brain leaves the addicted person in the shadows, distracting clinicians, policy makers, and sometimes patients themselves from other powerful psychological and environmental forces that exert strong influence on them.
…The brain-disease narrative misappropriates language better used to describe such conditions as multiple sclerosis or schizophrenia — afflictions of the brain that are neither brought on by the sufferer nor modifiable by the desire to be well. It offers false hope that an addict’s condition is completely amenable to a medical cure (much as pneumonia is to antibiotics). Finally, as we’ll see, it threatens to obscure the vast role of personal agency in perpetuating the cycle of use and relapse.
America, I’m here today because I love and care about you. This is why, after the latest episode, I want to urge you to seek treatment for your addiction to moronic pop-science stories about how everything from chocolate to the Internet, make-up sex and fatty foods is “like cocaine”. There are only so many facile comparisons your brain can handle, and I don’t want to find you dead of an overdose.
Take drugs for example. It’s high on the libertarian list of things they want legalized. I say no way in hell. Now yes, I do say that I want personal responsibility, but what I really mean by that is I want every person to act responsibly and if you have to inject or ingest, snort or smoke something to feel good about yourself, you are not acting responsibly. And for you people who say you’re just doing it to “feel good”, too bad. If you have to resort to some form of artificial stimulation to get your jollies, just for the sake of having your jollies, you’re an idiot.
The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that a large portion of the libertarian population is just delusional. They clearly don’t understand human nature, they think mankind can live without government, will automatically do the right thing and that there are magical rights floating around out there that they cannot explain how they came to be, but they can sure tell you what they are. Maybe worse yet, so many of them are absurdly cocksure of themselves, like they’re coming down from the mountain bearing stone tablets. I keep making references to people’s political beliefs being far too similar to religious beliefs for my liking, I think libertarians, at least some of the most vocal of them, just have too much faith. I don’t assent to faith in religion, I sure won’t do it in my politics.
Archaeologists have uncovered widespread evidence of drug consumption in ancient communities across the globe. The oldest evidence of beer consumption dates back to around 5000 BCE in what is now Iran, while wine consumption goes back even further, to about 6000 BCE. The consumption of betel nut, the fourth-most used drug in the world after nicotine, alcohol, and caffeine, dates back 13,000 years ago in Timor, and 10,700 years ago in Thailand. Coca was domesticated in the western Andes close to 7,000 years ago, and the consumption of tobacco in the Americas, pituri in Australia, and khat in Eastern Africa already represented ancient practices when European colonists made first contact, perhaps dating back 40,000 years or more. Most anthropologists agree that human drug consumption predates human civilization.
Bolded parts mine. I trust the jokes are obvious enough that I don’t have to bother typing them.
Here are a few numbers that don’t add up. Just-released stats from the FBI show that about three-quarters of a million Americans were arrested on marijuana charges last year—most of them for simple possession, as StoptheDrugWar.org reports. Meanwhile, a brand-new Huffington Post poll finds that nearly 60 percent of Americans want the weed legalized. Okay, you might expect such news from the liberal cabal at HuffPo, but their survey comes on the heels of a Gallup poll that declared 50 percent—the highest total ever—supported legalization.
In her book The New Jim Crow, Alexander, a former ACLU staffer, argues that the 30-year-old War on Drugs has created a de facto “racial caste system” to replace the Jim Crow laws that fell in the 1960s. Today, thanks in large part to the drug war, more than 2 million people, disproportionate numbers of them black and Hispanic, are locked up in America’s prisons, giving us an incarceration rate of 750 per 100,000 people, outpacing even repressive regimes like Russia, China, and Iran. In major cities, Alexander says, four out of five black men have criminal records, which not only takes them out of the legitimate economy while they’re in jail, but keeps them out of work after they’re freed because of widespread, and quite legal, discrimination against ex-convicts.
…Readers familiar with the horrors of the Jim Crow era may find it hard to see today’s drug war, harsh as it may be, as destructive a system of social control as decades of sharecropping, systematic disenfranchisement, and lynch law – to say nothing of the centuries of slavery that came before it. In her effort to wake up her readers, Alexander may be guilty of exaggerating for effect. If so, the exaggeration is worth it. The War on Drugs, and the massive buildup of our prison populations, has barely come up in this year’s presidential campaign. Before we lecture the Chinese and Iranians on their treatment of their ethnic minorities and dissidents, we need to look more closely at the millions of our own people we are locking up for years, often for no more than possession or sale of a few grams of weed.
That being said, a lot of people who do meditation make exactly the same mistake as these scientific researchers. These meditators think that the Big Moments that sometimes happen during the course of meditation are the point of meditation. If that’s what you think, it’s easy to conclude that drugs might be a more efficient way of producing the same results. There are entire schools of meditation, some quite old and respected, that have enshrined the view that the purpose of meditation is to have some great moment of awakening. So it’s no surprise to find people who have approached meditation in this mistaken way concluding that “either hallucinogenics or meditation can take you to very similar, if not the same, experiences,” as Gary Weber says at the end of his article referenced above.
The core of the mistaken belief that drugs and meditation are doing the same thing is this belief that meditation is about results. But in the real world there are no results. There is only this.
It amuses me when I see people invested in the idea that not only is there some kind of absolute metaphysical truth, but that it should be exotic and otherworldly, a violently transcendent experience as if God were to stick his finger down through their skulls and stir their brains into soup. Do what you want, but whenever you guys get tired of cerebral thrillseeking, there’s wood to be chopped and water to be carried.
Chocolate acts like morphine on the brain,
and chocolate acts like cocaine on the brain,
thus, pop science references to brain scans are meaningless and uninformative.
Brian has convinced me. I’m going to move to Northern California for the climate and become a marijuana farmer for the profits.
Questions about the Internet’s deleterious effects on the mind are at least as old as hyperlinks. But even among Web skeptics, the idea that a new technology might influence how we think and feel—let alone contribute to a great American crack-up—was considered silly and naive, like waving a cane at electric light or blaming the television for kids these days. Instead, the Internet was seen as just another medium, a delivery system, not a diabolical machine. It made people happier and more productive. And where was the proof otherwise?
Now, however, the proof is starting to pile up. The first good, peer-reviewed research is emerging, and the picture is much gloomier than the trumpet blasts of Web utopians have allowed. The current incarnation of the Internet—portable, social, accelerated, and all-pervasive—may be making us not just dumber or lonelier but more depressed and anxious, prone to obsessive-compulsive and attention-deficit disorders, even outright psychotic. Our digitized minds can scan like those of drug addicts, and normal people are breaking down in sad and seemingly new ways.
…Does the Internet make us crazy? Not the technology itself or the content, no. But a Newsweek review of findings from more than a dozen countries finds the answers pointing in a similar direction. Peter Whybrow, the director of the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA, argues that “the computer is like electronic cocaine,” fueling cycles of mania followed by depressive stretches. The Internet “leads to behavior that people are conscious is not in their best interest and does leave them anxious and does make them act compulsively,” says Nicholas Carr, whose book The Shallows, about the Web’s effect on cognition, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. It “fosters our obsessions, dependence, and stress reactions,” adds Larry Rosen, a California psychologist who has researched the Net’s effect for decades. It “encourages—and even promotes—insanity.”
Strident fearmongering, brain scans, dopamine, Nicholas Carr; this article is your one-stop shop for all your Zombie Internet Eatin Mah Brainz! needs. And yes, we can now file computers alongside fatty foods, make-up sex, and sugar in the list of Things That Affect Your Brain Like Cocaine. Maybe, given a little more time and some more fMRI analysis, the Internet can even graduate to being the new heroin.
Also.
A little logic is helpful here, since the “choice or disease” question rests on a false dilemma. This fallacy posits that only two options exist. Since there are only two options, they must be mutually exclusive. If we think, however, of addiction as involving both choice and disease, our outlook is likely to become more nuanced. For instance, the progression of many medical diseases is affected by the choices that individuals make. A patient who knows he has chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and refuses to wear a respirator or at least a mask while using noxious chemicals is making a choice that exacerbates his condition. A person who knows he meets the D.S.M.-IV criteria for chemical abuse, and that abuse is often the precursor to dependency, and still continues to use drugs, is making a choice, and thus bears responsibility for it.
Linking choice and responsibility is right in many ways, so long as we acknowledge that choice can be constrained in ways other than by force or overt coercion. There is no doubt that the choices of people progressing to addiction are constrained; compulsion and impulsiveness constrain choices. Many addicts will say that they choose to take that first drink or drug and that once they start they cannot stop. A classic binge drinker is a prime example; his choices are constrained with the first drink. He both has and does not have a choice. (That moment before the first drink or drug is what the philosopher Owen Flanagan describes as a “zone of control.”) But he still bears some degree of responsibility to others and to himself.
The complexity of each person’s experience with addiction should caution us to avoid false quandaries, like the one that requires us to define addiction as either disease or choice, and to adopt more nuanced conceptions. Addicts are neither hijackers nor victims. It is time to retire this analogy.
1. “Once an addict, always an addict.” This statement resonates with people in 12-step recovery, where the problem is generally experienced as a chronic, relapsing disorder. However, research that follows heavy drinkers and drug users over time finds that a majority of people who, at some point, met the criteria used to define addiction no longer do so later in life—and that most have recovered without attending meetings or treatment.
Even more contrary to “in the rooms” beliefs, many of these people resolved their problem through moderation rather than abstinence. For example, some former heroin addicts drink alcohol without risk of becoming drunks; others smoke marijuana from time to time.
While this contradiction of the “once an addict…” truism might be answered by saying that people who recover on their own—without treatment or through moderation—weren’t “real addicts” in the first place, unfortunately, the course of any particular person’s addiction and recovery is entirely unpredictable. Some people who seem “farthest gone” turn around completely without help, while others whose problem seems less severe never get better. Although greater severity of addiction is linked with reduced ability to successfully moderate, the correlation is far from absolute.
Addiction busts up what matters: the condition is capable of creating urges and motivations which bring about highly significant losses to a person’s well-being in spite of the person’s standing preference not to live like that. It’s possible that an addict is able, at times, to control the urge to use; but the addict also might not be able to prevent an urge to use from spontaneously arising and motivating. Other conditions, for instance bipolar or obsessive-compulsive disorders, can also create self-regulatory failures, so that episodes of self-destructive behavior are willingly engaged in which contravene the person’s general preference not to behave like that. Furthermore an appearance, at times, of control – intentionally cutting down, or temporarily stopping – can mislead the addict and others into believing that the addiction really is under control. The ability of the addict to believe that he/she is addicted also typically becomes compromised.
Well, why not just hold that addicts abandon their resolve to be abstinent simply because they change their minds, and not through some sort of compulsion? It’s common to change one’s mind when faced with temptation. Sometimes the choice to go ahead with the temptation is the result of a cost-benefit evaluation – in other words, it seems worthwhile to do it. At other times a person might gratify their desire or urge without entertaining any qualms or even thoughts about it. So although an addict’s habitual behavior might be atypical, rather than seeing it as a result of a compulsion they’re not strong enough to fight against, why not see their addictive behavior as something done in a willing manner, because the person feels like doing it, and/or they regard it as worth doing?
…Support for the moral and other willingness models has been garnered from the fact that some addicts have stopped or limited their drug use when they have had good enough reason for doing so – that is, when they regard doing so as important. For example, it is not unusual for women to stop smoking while pregnant in order to protect the fetus, but to resume smoking afterwards. Also, addicts will often limit when they engage in their addiction, for instance, not at work, or not around certain people. Addicts might also demonstrate an ability to limit their drug use, e.g., their drinking, just to prove that they can successfully control their habit. Some addicts may decide that their addiction no longer works for them, and stop using completely. Furthermore, it is often claimed, that even if there are genetic or biological factors causing an addict to have strong urges, control over them still depend on what the addict thinks it is worthwhile to do, even when the urges are intense. Urges “incline but do not necessitate,” to use an expression of Leibniz’s.
I’ve always been skeptical of the disease model of substance abuse, not out of a misanthropic “fuck ’em if they’re stupid enough to use” sensibility, but because, as with free will, I wonder about the conceptual framework of identity behind it. I wonder if it’s just simply too injurious to our moral sensibilities to accept that anyone could willingly choose to satisfy their addiction at the expense of their responsibilities to friends, family, society.
Practically speaking, I don’t see where it makes a difference. Addicts almost always will need treatment and a lot of support to change their lives. But I wonder about the way in which compulsive, destructive habits are visualized as being insidious, foreign agents that invade and corrupt the integrity of their host. How does it clarify our understanding of the phenomenon to call it a “disease” rather than simply an “addiction”?
So if caffeine and psychostimulants like cocaine work in the same brain areas, the basal ganglia, and both affect dopamine, why is one so much less addictive than the other? We’re not sure, but it could be that the location of the adenosine 2A receptors makes all the difference. Adenosine 2A receptors tend to be located near D2 type dopamine receptors, while psychostimulants are thought to have a stronger effect on D1 dopamine receptors when they produce their rewarding effects. It is possible that caffeine avoids this pathway somewhat by having receptors that are slightly in the wrong location. It’s the little location differences that make a big difference between a line of cocaine and your morning coffee.
In case you were looking for some good writing on the darker side of the blogosphere:
It’s now almost 10 years that I have been living life on the needle. During that time I’ve shot up in parks, cars, toilets and on buses. In addition to my arms, legs, stomach and chest, I’ve also injected in my fingers, toes, palms and forehead. I’ve hit nerves, arteries, joints and bone, and have suffered every imaginable lump, bump and swelling. I’ve poisoned myself 4 times with ‘dirty heroin’, had abscesses the size of golf balls and I’ve Od’d twice. On my entire body I have only one visible vein left. In my determination to self-medicate I’ve lost family, friends, lovers, two Cockatoos and a dog. My bank is in the red and so after 34 years I have less than nothing.As I write this it is 24 hours since my last injection and that seems a long time. Previous to that it was 72 hours and previous to that 7 days. The longest I’ve ever been heroin or needle free is 5 months. But I do have some qualities and I use them to convince the few people left around me that I’m changing… that I’ve finally seen the light. And as I sit there with my perforated escape plan laid out, I busk and dance my way around all the awkward questions. At one point I even promise to stop smoking and cut down on the chocolate. It’s then I realize I’ve gone too far, that I’ve said too much. The place kind of deflates with disappointment and without even looking up I know what they’re all thinking, “He’s not getting better… he’s getting worse!” And I can’t blame them for that… I’m thinking exactly the same myself.
The uncontrollable twitching is a little unnerving when you’re trying to concentrate on the sermon, but they’re still some fine folks. Me, I’m still partial to taking my Sunday service at Our Lady of the Opium Haze, though.
Am I the only one who thinks it’s extremely odd that we are sending “Homeland Security” agents to Afghanistan? Don’t we have a military that’s tasked with these sorts of chores? And if it’s just a “loan” of certain specialists, why is Janet Napolitano making the announcement instead of the proper foreign service or military spokesperson? Afghanistan isn’t in her portfolio — at least I didn’t think it was. I thought we were going to keep the new Homeland Security forces here in the … homeland.That’s all rhetorical, of course, since it’s been obvious for decades that many of our allegedly “domestic” agencies like the DEA and the ATF are really para-military organizations which are deployed all over the world. But it looks as though we aren’t even going to pretend anymore that there’s a separation between the two. And that means that we have created yet another sacred police/military budget item that will be nearly impossible to scale back.
What has changed since the collapse of Jim Crow has less to do with the basic structure of our society than with the language we use to justify severe inequality. In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as justification for discrimination, exclusion, or social contempt. Rather, we use our criminal-justice system to associate criminality with people of color and then engage in the prejudiced practices we supposedly left behind. Today, it is legal to discriminate against ex-offenders in ways it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. Once you’re labeled a felon, depending on the state you’re in, the old forms of discrimination — employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, and exclusion from jury service — are suddenly legal. As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights and arguably less respect than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.…What caused the unprecedented explosion in our prison population? It turns out that the activists who posted the sign on the telephone pole were right: The “war on drugs” is the single greatest contributor to mass incarceration in the United States. Drug convictions accounted for about two-thirds of the increase in the federal prison system and more than half of the increase in the state prison system between 1985 and 2000 — the period of the U.S. penal system’s most dramatic expansion.