The Pitters' Place

The title is probably not hyperbolic. We generally don't know a single thing about how addiction works, and we've been led to believe things that have been proven wrong over and over again by researchers for several decades. The idea that drugs are inherently addictive has caused us to treat them as a scapegoat for the real problems, which are poverty, social isolation, homelessness, and other horrific social issues which have everything to do with socioeconomics and nothing to do with drugs. And even if drugs were inherently addictive, treating addicts as criminals and locking them up and shaming them instead of rehabilitating them would still be unconscionable. The drug war has been one of the most deeply evil policies in the world for almost a century. It would be really difficult to overestimate the enormous damage it's done to the world on a really basic, elemental level.

I also really recommend the book he mentioned, Chasing the Scream, detailing the history and reasoning behind the drug war and the horrific consequences of it. It's really short and easy. Very heart-wrenching and compelling. It's probably the best book I've read this year.

Also, I literally just saw this article ten seconds ago and I haven't read it yet, but whatever:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfre ... gle-answer" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Its a more holistic view of the issue for sure but it also seems to imply that there isn't an actual physical component to addiction that feels wrong.

I've seen people get off heroin before and there is a very real physicality to it that, in my anecdotal experience, is what makes for the greatest barrier to people getting clean. It's painful and overwhelming and its just easier to not go thru it at all.

This video states that people do not go thru withdrawal when they left Vietnam or when they get off hospital drips - I'm not sure then how you would reconcile that with a normal withdrawal pathology of getting off heroin as I've seen it ?

I've known some heroin addicts, and they've experienced physical withdrawal, but the evidence says the physical part is far less important than the social/emotional part. If you give someone who's rich and happy and socially connected heroin, he or she will almost certainly not become addicted, and if he or she does, it'll be really easy to overcome.

All the heroin addicts I've known suffered from depression and/or intense loneliness (as well as poverty). That's really how it is around the world too. Virtually all drug addicts (at least how we picture it) are in poverty and/or live incredibly shitty lives. That's not a coincidence.

There's some physical component, but the government has been pretending for decades that that's the only part, when in reality it's a very small piece of the whole picture.

Drugs for medical use: Yes
Recreational drugs: No
Rehabilitation instead of punitive measures: Yes
Fixing social problems so people don't need to turn to drugs: Yes

What's wrong with recreational drugs?

I don't like people to have fun.

Also addictions, health issues, brain damage, people acting weird and doing ethically questionable things when they're high, etc.

I also come from a country that has the death penalty for distributing drugs and a large fine and lots of jail time for consuming it, the justification being that drugs destroy lives and families, disrupt productivity, create extra healthcare expenditure, lead to the formation of drug syndicates and contribute to an unruly society.

One thing is true: When it's a problem affecting white people, suddenly folks start paying attention.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/31/us/he ... p=cur&_r=0


Look, all we have to do to solve all the world's problems is make all the white people poor and starving and addicted. Then the ball will start rolling.

Virtually all the negative consequences of recreational drug use stem from the fact that it's illegal. Trufax.

And man, even the title of that article pissed me off. I ain't reading that.

Yes, it's one of the most fucked up articles ever.

War on Drugs:
Sympathy for whites
Jail for everyone else

The only people benefitting from drugs being illegal are the criminal cartels.
Drugs should be legal. All of them.

I can't see the video, but I'm assuming it's the ted talk on drug addiction and social connection. Where he suggests that social connection is basically the opposite of any addiction. And he references a lot of experiments where mice showed drastically less addictive behavior when being social as opposed to being isolated.

No, it's some sort of animated explainer-type video that basically uses the info from that talk. Johann Hari collaborated with it. But if you've seen the talk, you've heard everything in this video. But I would still really recommend reading the book.

Holy shit! Yesterday this video had about 300,000 views. Now it has over 1.5 million. That's crazy.

This board might be more popular than we thought.