"... [Dr. Kristen B. Silvia tells meth addicts], an individual’s dopamine levels could rise to, say, 50. 'If you have the best meal ever, the best sex ever, the best day of your life, you can get your levels up to 100.' When someone uses crack... within seconds their levels rise to 300, she continues, 'or three times the best day of your life. 'But on meth, dopamine levels skyrocket to 1,000 and can remain there for hours: 'No medication can safely compete with that.'..."
"[A]ddiction experts worry that under the Trump administration, CM programs will be difficult to sustain, much less expand to meet the need. Many believe that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary, who overcame his heroin addiction with a 12-step program and has praised approaches that threaten to jail people who refuse treatment, would be unlikely to endorse a financial rewards-based strategy...."
It's hard for me to imagine feeling 10 times as good as I have ever felt. I might have 10 times as much of what you're calling "the feel-good neurotransmitter," but that doesn't mean the goodness of the feeling will be multiplied by 10. I don't think feeling good works like that! I once heard someone describe the experience of parachuting from a plane as like having 1,000 orgasms all at once. She was quite enthused, and I immediately said that sounds horrible.
"... according to a new study. In 2022, about 17.7 million people reported daily or near daily marijuana use, compared with 14.7 million people who reported drinking at the same frequency, said the report, which was based on more than four decades of data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health.... While 'far more people drink' than use marijuana, high-frequency drinking among Americans is less common.... The 2022 survey found that the median drinker reported drinking on four to five days in a month, compared with 15 to 16 days in a month for cannabis."
So does that mean cannabis is more addictive than alcohol? I searched the article for "addiction" and it only came up as the name of the journal where the study was reported.
North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum is quickly moving up former President Trump's list of possible vice presidential picks because Trump's team believes he would be a safe choice who could attract moderate voters, four people familiar with the situation tell Axios....
Two sources familiar with the Trump's thinking [sic] said he likes Burgum's measured demeanor and his gubernatorial experience — and sees Burgum as reliable and low-drama. Those are similar to the traits Trump cited in 2016, when he tapped Mike Pence....
They share one personal touch point, which the sources said occasionally comes up in conversation between Trump and Burgum: Kathryn Burgum is recovering from alcoholism, an addiction that Trump's late brother Fred Trump Jr. also struggled with....
ADDED: We talked about the Kristi Noem dog story yesterday, here, and I took a little poll. The results:
"All right. Then compare that with a person who absolutely has no place to sleep in a particular jurisdiction. Does that person have any alternative other than sleeping outside?... They have... none. They have absolutely none. There's not a single place where they can sleep.... So the point is that the connection between drug addiction and drug usage is more tenuous than the connection between absolute homelessness and sleeping outside."
Said Justice Alito, in yesterday's oral argument in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson. There's a precedent, Robinson v. California, that found it to be cruel and unusual punishment to make a crime of the "status" of drug addiction. The 9th Circuit said that the city — by prohibiting sleeping outdoors — had made a crime out of the status of homelessness.
A NYT article about a case up for oral argument today.
The plaintiffs’ argument rests in part on a 1962 case, Robinson v. California, in which the Supreme Court held that laws imposing penalties on people for narcotics addiction violated the Eighth Amendment because they punished a state of being, not a specific action, like drug possession or sale.
In a similar fashion, the plaintiffs contend, Grants Pass is punishing people for being involuntarily homeless, not for specific actions.
And the comments are loaded with people resisting the notion that marijuana is "toxic":
"Again, the Post treats addiction to alcohol and nicotine the same as the use of the non-addictive cannabis. Why the lie? Why the supposition cannabis use by adults is 'toxic'? I don't use any intoxicants. Haven't for more than three decades. Cannabis is medicine."
"... was constantly trying to whittle away at her own perceived shortcomings. When she was a teenager, she developed anorexia — that pulverizing, paradoxical battle with both helplessness and self-control — and dropped to 75 pounds at 16. The disorder prevented her from completing a college degree. Many of the poems Glück wrote in her early 20s flog her own obsessions with, and failures in, control and exactitude. Her narrators are habitués of a kind of limitless wanting; her language, a study in ruthless austerity. (A piano-wire-taut line tucked in her 1968 debut, 'Firstborn': 'Today my meatman turns his trained knife/On veal, your favorite. I pay with my life.') In her late 20s, Glück grew frustrated with writing and was prepared to renounce it entirely...."
From the NYT's annual roundup of short essays about people who died in the past year — "The Lives They Led" — I've chosen a bit of Amy X. Wang's essay on the Nobel Prize-winning poet Louise Glück.
I loved the X-Acto/exactitude theme — the whittling away, the meatman and his trained knife, and the potential to end up with nothing.
ADDED: I wondered if — in 20 years of blogging — I had ever before used the word "exactitude." It's a great word, and I thought, perhaps I'd never used it. But I see I've used it twice, both times in 2018.
Much is spent on horse, speedboat, motorcycle and keirin bicycle racing and on pachinko. We're told "2.8 million people – about 2.2% of the population" have a "gambling addiction."
To address those concerns, Japanese citizens will have to pay a ¥6,000 fee [$45] for every 24 hours they spend in the casino, with a portion of the fee earmarked for gambling addiction measures....
Aside from addiction concerns, what about architecture concerns? Here's the seasick cruise-ship design:
"When I compare Mr. Musk, Mr. Trump and Ye, I see a convergence of personalities that were once distinct. The garish celebrity playboy, the obsessive engineer and the young artist, as different from one another as they could be, have all veered not in the direction of becoming grumpy old men, but into being bratty little boys in a schoolyard.... I believe 'Twitter poisoning' is a real thing. It is a side effect that appears when people are acting under an algorithmic system that is designed to engage them to the max. It’s a symptom of being part of a behavior-modification scheme.... Behavioral changes occur as a side effect of something called operant conditioning...."
"... who are either drug addicted or mentally ill. Los Angeles does not have an affordable housing problem nearly as much as a mental health and drug addiction crisis. The status quo is not acceptable. It is hardly humane to enable people to suffer in illness and addiction as if it is somehow that’s a life style choice. Local residents and businesses are totally fed up. Governor Newsom’s CARE court approach is worth a try, along with a new mayor who actually is committed to solving the root causes of the problem."
And:
"At this point, I’m beyond caring what type of housing or treatment or support the tent camping homeless get (as long as it’s compassionate, not abusive). It’s simply long past time to insist that sidewalks, parks, beaches be returned to the general public, for ordinary use. No more camping, period."
"When I did yield to temptation... [i]t was relief from my dread and anxiety, and a soothing sense that I was safe, nurtured and unconditionally loved.... Opioids mimic the neurotransmitters that are responsible for making social connection comforting — tying parent to child, lover to beloved.
The brain also makes its own 'endogenous' opioids.... Today... what is now known as the 'brain opioid theory of social attachment' is widely accepted.... [O]pioid systems have evolved in part to fuel the good feelings people get from spending time with friends and family, he explained.
There are many factors that contribute to addiction, and isolation is often one of them.... A 2021 study found that over 60 percent of young American adults report that they are either frequently lonely or lonely nearly all the time.... Understanding the social nature of opioids and addiction should help policymakers better care for those who suffer from it.... Some need new friends...."
What's with the "tough times" in the headline? Isn't the author's point that human beings need relationships with other people? How did love get translated to money so blithely?
I had to go back to the article to try to find things I elided that could support the economic theory of drug addiction. Here's the best sentence for that: "Conversely, neighborhoods riven by poverty tend to have less social connectedness — and more overdoses."
"The document, headed 'TikTok Algo 100'... offers a new level of detail about the dominant video app, providing a revealing glimpse both of the app’s mathematical core and insight into the company’s understanding of human nature — our tendencies toward boredom, our sensitivity to cultural cues — that help explain why it’s so hard to put down.... It succeeded where other short videos apps failed in part because it makes creation so easy, giving users background music to dance to or memes to enact, rather than forcing them to fill dead air. And for many users, who consume without creating, the app is shockingly good at reading your preferences and steering you to one of its many 'sides,' whether you’re interested in socialism or Excel tips or sex, conservative politics or a specific celebrity. It’s astonishingly good at revealing people’s desires even to themselves.... The app wants to keep you there as long as possible. The experience is sometimes described as an addiction, though it also recalls a frequent criticism of pop culture. The playwright David Mamet, writing scornfully in 1998 about 'pseudoart,' observed that 'people are drawn to summer movies because they are not satisfying, and so they offer opportunities to repeat the compulsion.'"
"'It’s just like cigarettes,' Haugen said this week in testimony before a Senate Commerce subcommittee. 'Teenagers don’t have good self-regulation. They say explicitly, "I feel bad when I use Instagram, and yet I can’t stop."'... Society doesn’t have an interest in keeping children away from these technologies entirely as it does with cigarettes; rather, there is a public interest in preventing predatory targeting of minors and a countervailing interest in protecting free expression and encouraging innovation.... Haugen, a product manager until she resigned in the spring, argued that Facebook is even less transparent than tobacco companies in their heyday. For instance, outside scientists could independently invalidate claims about the safety of filtered cigarettes. By contrast, Facebook’s secret algorithms and refusal to fully cooperate with academic researchers protects the company from independent review. Haugen called for Congress to make them open up their black box...."
Recognizing the imperfection of the analogy only gets you so far. Clearly, "It’s just like cigarettes" is manifestly false. But then what? That doesn't establish that Facebook must show us its secret algorithms! Hohmann is saying that it's not like cigarettes in one way — cigarettes are physical objects that can be tested independently — so let's legislate to improve the analogy and force Facebook to reveal its secrets. He's clinging to the importance of working with the cigarette analogy. But why?!
"It’s this subset of highly processed foods that are engineered in a way that’s so similar to how we create other addictive substances. These are the foods that can trigger a loss of control and compulsive, problematic behaviors that parallel what we see with alcohol and cigarettes."
The other side of the debate is Johannes Hebebrand, head of the department of child and adolescent psychiatry, psychosomatics and psychotherapy at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany: "You can take any addictive drug, and it’s always the same story that almost everyone will have an altered state of mind after ingesting it. That indicates that the substance is having an effect on your central nervous system. But we are all ingesting highly processed foods, and none of us is experiencing this altered state of mind because there’s no direct hit of a substance in the brain.... It’s the diversity of foods that is so appealing and causing the problem, not a single substance in these foods."
What do you think? Is it that some foods are just so appealing that you want to eat a lot or that some foods have a certain something that hooks you? Maybe these 2 experts could get along if they looked more philosophically at what wanting is.
Also, I get the feeling that there's a somewhat political urge to blame big corporations for manufacturing tasty food. And a snobbish aesthetic preference for the idea of the "natural." Are the strawberries in the supermarket "naturally occurring foods"? That seems like a rather silly assertion. Strawberries make a visual argument for themselves... or do they?
"... Far more apparent in this year’s roundup, however, was the running theme of 'responsible tourism.' Words like 'sustainability,' 'green,' and 'conservation' were shoved into every other euphoric blurb... In Sicily, grassroots groups have pledged to use less plastic. In Uganda, proceeds from gorilla trekking permits go toward conservation efforts.... It’s all bullshit, of course. A 2018 study published in the journal Nature Climate Change announced tourism alone—that’s nonessential pleasure travel—is responsible for 8 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. The traveling public is freaking out. It knows about flight shaming; it loves Greta Thunberg; and it’s ready to bid au revoir to Volvic, Dasani, and plastic straws. But it still wants to sit on a beach in Aruba. This puts travel media in a tricky spot.... It’s easy to make fun of people putting Band-Aids on bullet wounds. And the Times’ spin on sea-level rise at Grand Isle, Louisiana—'Does a place appear more hauntingly beautiful when you know it’s disappearing?'—was tastelessly macabre.... [A]s the world becomes ever more distressed by over-tourism... the travel journalists we rely on for hot tips and insider advice will simply conjure new ways of assuaging our guilt.... I like travel as much as you do, and I’m not stopping either. Where’s the line between hypocrite and addict?"
Also in the article, some quick info on why it's probably impossible to have solar powered jetliners and why virtual reality traveling doesn't make you feel like you're really there and what an addiction expert thinks about the author's idea that travel should be called an addiction.
I'm going to try to answer the question "Where’s the line between hypocrite and addict?" I'll say it's whether shame works.
Ibogaine is found in a woody West African shrub that sprouts orange fruits like upside-down tear drops. In Gabon and Cameroon, members of the Bwiti religion eat rootbark from the Iboga Tabernanthe bush as part of a ceremonial confirmation of their faith. Americans have sought out this rite of passage for decades in hopes of enlightenment. In blog posts and on Reddit threads, ibogaine enthusiasts detail how the rootbark renders intense visions, hallucinations, and deep vortexes of memory followed by introspection. It can take days to go through.
While in Wisconsin covering the primary campaign for the United States presidential election of 1972, gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson submitted a satirical article to Rolling Stone accusing Democratic Party candidate Edmund Muskie of being addicted to ibogaine. Many readers, and even other journalists, did not realize that the Rolling Stone piece was facetious. The ibogaine assertion, which was completely unfounded, did a significant amount of damage to Muskie's reputation, and was cited as a factor in his loss of the nomination to George McGovern. Thompson later said he was surprised that anyone believed it.
The Muskie nightmare is beginning to look more and more like a major political watershed for the Democratic Party.... Big Ed was supposed to be their ticket to Miami, where they planned to do business as usual once again, and keep the party at least livable, if not entirely healthy. All Muskie had to do, they said, was keep his mouth shut and act like Abe Lincoln.
The bosses would do the rest. As for that hare-brained bastard McGovern, he could take those reformist ideas he’d been working on, and jam them straight up his ass. A convention packed wall to wall with Muskie delegates—the rancid cream of the party, as it were—would make short work of McGovern’s Boy Scout bullshit.
That was four months ago, before Muskie began crashing around the country in a stupid rage and destroying everything he touched. First it was booze, then Reds, and finally over the brink into Ibogaine … and it was right about that time that most of the Good Ole Boys decided to take another long look at Hubert Humphrey. He wasn’t much; they all agreed on that—but by May he was all they had left.
[A]ddictions rely on constant rewards (what psychologists refer to as reinforcement) and each game of Solitaire can be played quickly and individuals can be quickly rewarded if they win (positive reinforcement) but when they lose, the feeling of disappointment or cognitive regret can be eliminated by playing again straight away (negative reinforcement – playing as a way to relieve a dysphoric mood state). I also stated that addictions typically result in a coping mechanism to other things in a person’s life. They use such behaviours as a way of escape and the repetitive playing of games can help in such circumstances....
Griffiths says you'd need to meet all of the following criteria to be considered addicted to Solitaire (and I'd be very surprised that even if you play Solitaire a weird amount of the time, you won't even meet the first criterion):
"I opened a packet of Reefer’s peanut butter cups at his preschool fund-raiser and stunk up the place. But pot wasn’t just an occasional funny thing for me to do on weekends. I got stoned the day my son came home from the hospital and stayed that way, with few breaks, for a decade and a half.... In March of 2017, my mother died. The hour before she passed, I was outside the hospital, getting a shipment of medical gummies from a friend. I was high when I watched her die, I was high at her funeral, and I was high every day for the next eight months. To say I was 'self-medicating' to deal with grief would be too kind. My addicted self took grief as a no-limits license to get stoned...."
Now, that I've noticed, I predict I will see it everywhere. I'm making a tag for it.
Why does it matter to me? Because it's a silly promise of exactitude that I know will not be met. And because it speaks of our aimless yearning for specific knowledge. I feel a little wistful about it.
Let's search Google News for some recent "just how" headlines... "Just how hot is 'hot as balls'?" Oh, well, my question is: Just how hot is 'just how'?
It is bizarre, this notion that we need to know the precise workings of the mechanism whereby Matt Lauer closed his door, that a clicked-to article could contain the tantalizing details of what it's like in Heaven, that the dirtiness of all those pillows on all those planes could be expressed with fine-grained accuracy, that the aspect of your use of Instagram that's categorizable as addiction could be rigorously quantified.
Notice how often "just how" is paired with "you" and "your." The absurdity of promise of specific knowledge is magnified by the pretense of making it information about you: your children's teeth, your addiction to Instagram, your make-up at the Met Gala, your knowledge of the royal family.
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