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Stanton's Blog
I'm in Brigadoon--Irish Drinking and Irish Pubs
In the Alan Lerner musical, Brigadoon (fictionally located in Scotland, another Gaelic nation), a small village comes alive every hundred years. I feel that way writing from Listowel, speaking at its annual Writers' Week.
Of course, Listowel is alive at all times, even if I only come here once a year. But it is one of the last remaining Irish local towns that an American might visit, due to this conference. In this place of 5,000 inhabitants, I stay at the Listowel Arms. From the rear of the hotel you look over a river and bridge leading to the large grass horseracing track. From the front you see the small town square, and beyond the church steeple, grassy hills.
(A note on cultural differences. One PT blogger insists there are no significant difference among world cultures. Everything I am interested in is impacted by culture.)
If God were designing a way of drinking, it wouldn't be the Irish way. The Irish have the lowest rate of daily drinking (2% of men) and the highest rate of binge drinking.(half of men) in Europe. Low levels of daily drinking prolong life and intellectual acuity; binge drinking accomplishes the reverse.
When you are introduced as an addiction expert in Ireland, people immediately begin reciting their alcoholic relations ("five of my uncles" . . . etc.). And the Irish are capable of being almost - I say almost - as Puritianical about alcohol as Americans (for example, Ireland is the only European nation where there are serious discussions about raising the drinking age to 21).
At the same time, drinking is mythical, prodigious, and acclaimed in Ireland - at a reading by Nobel-Prize winning poet Seamus Heaney last evening, my hosts asked if I wanted something to drink and brought me a beer while I listened with pleasure - an experience I have never had at a public reading in the U.S.
Writers' Week was begun by John B. Keane - a well-known Irish playwright and writer. Listowel's low-slung downtown is filled with pubs - and one of them was owned by Keane, and is still run by his family. I went there last night with his daughter. The place - like all the other pubs - was packed. And everyone there was smiling and talking. People came in groups, but strangers were also welcomed and quickly assimilated.
You can't buy that kind of social support, and the psychological and physical health it encourages, in the U.S.
How to combine the good and the bad elements of Irish drinking? Keane's daughter told me, "My father introduced us to beer (like the Italians and Spanish introduce their children to wine), and my mother refused to serve anyone who was intoxicated or misbehaving."
Ah, I shall miss Brigadoon when I return to the U.S.
This blog post also appeared on Stanton's Addiction in Society blog at PsychologyToday.com.
We're getting unhealthier, no matter how much we spend
Among Ted Kennedy's notable legislative initiatives is insurance parity for emotional disorders. Like many noble efforts, this cost will be borne by private insurers and public payors, which means ordinary people will pay for them. Yet almost fifty million taxpayers already can't afford health insurance.
The solution for the issue of the uninsured from Democratic candidates is universal coverage, like that offered in other civilized nations. Universal health care is, as Kennedy notes, a fundamental right. We can only recoil when Fox News commentators bloviate that there is no need to change the American health care system, since they and other well-off people already have access to the best doctors and medical facilities.
But, again, someone will have to pay for it, and the someone is us. I live in a bellwether state, New Jersey, which is at the top of national rankings for property taxes, indebtedness, and cranky citizens. Governor Jon Corzine, who has proposed several ways to address our multi billions of financial obligations, has record low approval ratings.
Among the true but unpopular things Corzine has announced is: "Frankly, New Jersey has a government its people can't afford." So Corzine is withdrawing support for local hospitals. Of course, this means that they will pass their expenses along to insurance companies, Medicare, and whichever poor idiots they can get to pay for their own health care - that is, we all must pay this bill.
In this monumental game of pass the buck - or rather, pass the hat - we never address Americans' appetites. These are taken for granted. Americans are not healthy - older Americans have more of every major illness and health condition than the English (even our wealthy are roughly comparable to their poor) despite our paying twice the per capita health care costs of the UK. And the British are the unhealthiest people in Western Europe!
The primary example of unhealthy plentitude is that American teens are the fattest in the world. (This remains true despite recent signs that youth obesity is leveling off.) Alarmed public health authorities are predicting an actual downturn in life span when this generation achieves adulthood. Belated and ineffectual responses cannot remedy that young Americans luxuriate in unhealthy diets, inactivity, and a sense that they require more attention than they are already receiving in our child-centered culture. This also makes them addiction-prone, as I detail in Addiction-Proof Your Child.
Which brings us to bipolar and other epidemic emotional disorders among the young, treated by massive and ever-increasing doses of psychiatric medications. American kids, despite all their privileges, aren't happy. And the American response is to offer them something to put in their mouths - not to make them happy - but at least to reduce their bitter complaints.
The surest way to incur Americans' wrath is to suggest that they can't have everything they want all the time without delay. When any suggestion is made that we curb our appetites - or simply wait in line - like managed health care and HMOs, Americans rise as one to protest. Michael Moore's film, "Sicko," simply demands more health care instantaneously without addressing the underlying imbalances in American lives.
The very demands Americans are making for more health care, more medications, fewer bills is actually a sign that we are emotionally and physically drained, rather than offering realistic ways to improve our health. Our increasing crankiness and ineffectuality, coming at a time when the country is facing stunning belt-tightening economic realities, predicts that our emotional and physical health will continue to decline.
This blog post also appeared on Stanton's Addiction in Society blog at PsychologyToday.com.
The 'Tragic Fallacy' that the World Revolves Around the Clintons
Hillary Clinton, in presenting her argument for why her campaign should continue in the face of overwhelming statistical odds, noted that Robert Kennedy was assassinated at a point later in the 1968 presidential campaign than the current date. She later apologized for the insensitivity of her comment - looking stricken as she did so.
The remark prompted revulsion on the parts of some - particularly African Americans who thought Clinton meant to indicate that Barack Obama could be assassinated - and bewilderment for many others. Why would she draw such an ugly analogy? To understand how such a smart, savvy, and campaign-seasoned person as Senator Clinton could miscalculate so badly, we need to understand her and husband Bill's world view.
For the Clintons, all things relate back to them, and to their current effort to regain the presidency. One critic, commenting on the frame of reference of a writer detailing her efforts to become famous early in the last century, noted that she saw World War I primarily as an interruption of her career - as though the entire world existed to provide a set and characters for her life story.
In literature, viewing all events as centering around your own life is called the "tragic fallacy." The scientific/religious equivalent is the view that the universe revolves around the earth and human beings. In psychopathology, this way of interpreting the world is called "feelings of reference," as in the paranoid delusion that people on television are talking about you.
For the Clintons, Robert Kennedy's death on June 6 "proves" that Hillary should keep running until at least that date. That others attach different meaning to Kennedy's life and death - and the sensitivity of African Americans to the idea that a black candidate like Obama might be assassinated - simply wouldn't occur to them. Why would it? They're running for the leadership of the free world, for God's sake!
It is comforting to assume that only the Clintons could be so egocentric. Really, they just offer the most naked expression of a way of viewing the world that is probably typical of people who run for president and other political offices. But most of those people are in better touch with reality than the Clintons.
This blog post also appeared on Stanton's Addiction in Society blog at PsychologyToday.com.
Reckless Sex and Power III: The Top Seven Kennedy Sex Scandals
As Ted Kennedy's malignant brain tumor became public knowledge, opponents, friends, and pundits rushed to laud his accomplishments. Serving in the Senate since 1964, Ted Kennedy has been one of our most accomplished legislators. He has a big heart, works hard, and is extremely knowledgeable about both legislative content and procedure. Sometimes Kennedy (as when he vehemently opposed entering the war in Iraq) seems like the only American politician who can speak his mind freely. His efforts on behalf of those without privilege or power - as in the case of health care - are especially important and admirable.
Little has been said about his prior legal, marital, and ethical lapses, on the other hand. These are typical omissions in polite society. (I wonder if supporters feel that if they don't remind God of his lapses, Kennedy is more likely to get into Heaven.) However, as scientists of the mind, we at PT blogs are obligated to consider the entire range of human behavior. And the various Kennedys' sexual misdeeds are so notable that they raise - once again - the question of the relationship between power, recklessness, and sex. (See Why Politicians Get Laid More - the Low Road to the High Life and Sex Addicts Anonymous Meeting, Politicians' Division)
Here, in reverse order of importance, are the top seven Kennedy sex scandals:
7. Joe Kennedy, son of Robert Kennedy and former Congressman, secretly had his 12-year marriage to Sheila Rauch annulled by the Vatican. Rauch only found out about the annulment years later, after Kennedy remarried. She wrote a very angry book about the experience, Shattered Faith, since the Church's decreeing that the marriage never existed left her twin sons in everlasting limbo. Rauch pointed out that only powerful people like the Kennedy's could unilaterally cancel 12 years of marriage. (This raises the question of whether the Church can gain entry to Heaven for powerful people who have sinned.)
6. One of the storied political couplings of the twentieth century was between Andrew Cuomo, son of former New York Governor Mario Cuomo, and Kerry Kennedy, daughter of Robert Kennedy. The younger Cuomo was forced to withdraw his own bid for the governorship (although he is now New York's Attorney General) in 2002 when it was revealed that his wife, to whom he had been married 13 years and with whom he had three daughters, had been having a long-term affair with a married man. Kerry Kenedy's philandering shows that Kennedy disregard for marital niceties extends to the distaff side of the family as well.
5. A more unappetizing Kennedy scandal involved Joe's brother and campaign manager, Michael. Like his brother and sister, Michael was stably married with children when it was revealed he had been having an affair with a family babysitter, beginning when the girl was 14! This, of course, is a crime that would get a non-Kennedy registered as a sexual predator. For some reason, the girl refused to press charges, and Kennedy entered treatment for sexual and alcohol addiction. Michael Kennedy had been keeping an extremely low profile when he died in an accident on a family skiing trip.
4. All of these scandals concerned third-generation Kennedy's. But the stories of sexual assaults, infidelity, and religious hypocrisy began with the family's patriarch, Joe Kennedy. In Swanson on Swanson, silent screen star Gloria Swanson revealed having an affair with Kennedy when, she claimed, he forced himself on her during his business trips to Hollywood, and when he left his saintly wife, Rose, at home in Massachusetts. Other Kennedy family historians report that the elder Kennedy made advances on his sons' girlfriends! (Swanson was most pissed off that, despite his legendary financial acumen, Joe lost a ton of her dough.)
3. Back to the younger Kennedy's, in 1991 Kennedy nephew William Smith was charged with rape while staying with uncle Teddy in the family's seaside estate in Palm Beach, FL. The woman claimed she met Smith at a night club at which he was accompanied by Ted Kennedy and his son, Patrick. Later, while ostensibly showing her around the estate, Smith began pursuing and pawing her as she tried to escape. Other women were found who described having similar experiences with the Kennedy nephew, but Smith was acquitted.
2. Both President Jack Kennedy - whose sexual escapades were legendary - and younger brother Bobby had closely contiguous sexual liaisons with Marilyn Monroe. Numerous conspiracy theories have been developed around the Kennedys' involvement in Monroe's death, which occurred in the aftermath of these affairs. At a minimum, the relationships were extremely damaging to Monroe's fragile mental health.
1. What could most interfere with Ted Kennedy's passage to Heaven (as it frustrated his aspirations to be president) was his involvement in the death of Mary Jo Kopechne. Following a party with six young female campaign workers on the island of Chappaquiddick, Kennedy was giving Kopechne a ride back to her hotel when he drove off a bridge. Kopechne drowned in the car, and Kennedy left the scene to consult with Kennedy family advisers. In fact, he never reported the incident, which was discovered independently the next morning! Kennedy was charged only with leaving the scene of an accident.
Of course, you and I can wonder how our lives would have been derailed if we were involved in a situation like this (Kennedy was married). But the Kennedy's are not deterred by such experiences, as the subsequent actions of his nephews and niece indicate. Are there separate rules - both legal and psychological - for people like the Kennedy's?
This blog post also appeared on Stanton's Addiction in Society blog at PsychologyToday.com.
Are You Addicted?
In my post, Kooky Nuts in the Addiction Field, I included the typical counselor (and treatment center) who reckon everyone who is shunted into their offices for an assessment is, ipso facto, an addict or an alcoholic. "Why else are they here?" their logic goes. Of course, the counselor or assessor is, typically, an alcoholic, AA member, and treatment graduate themselves, so their response is partly - "You think you're better than me?"
In fact, the diagnostic manual of the American Psychiatric Association (DSM-IV - for which I was an advisor) requires a rigorous evaluation of the impact of a habit on a person's life. (Note: DSM-IV considers addictions - called "dependencies" -- only due to substance use. A recent effort to classify children's immersion in video games et al. as dependencies was "defeated" by the AMA.)
The bottom line is that a habit is only addictive when it seriously harms you. As I wrote in Addiction-Proof Your Child,
Watching television every night, drinking daily (for an adult), and having an active social life are not necessarily addictions. Broadening the definition of addiction does not mean that everybody is addicted to something. The word is now often used casually, even humorously: a friend says he is addicted to crossword puzzles, a baby is addicted to his pacifier, a teenager to her cell phone. Addictions are harmful, perhaps overwhelmingly so.
One reader of my previous post noted about her own diagnosis as an alcoholic following a citation for a .08 BAL reading in a DUI conviction,
It doesn't matter if a person intuitively knows they don't have a problem because they are obviously just in denial. This type of black and white thinking takes away personal control and then expects a person to exert personal control at the same time. It says "You don't know what is best, so now you must reach deep inside and do what is best."
Unlike this woman, people often accept such diagnoses - even seek them out for themselves - on quite flimsy evidence. It is as though they think, "At last, I have my own addiction/diagnosis." A DUI is not alcoholism - although it is a dangerous and unwise behavior that must be avoided.
So, are you addicted to something? Here are the criteria I utilize in Addiction-Proof:
Six criteria define an addictive experience:
- it is powerful and absorbs your feelings and thoughts;
- you can predictably and reliably access it;
- it gives you essential sensations and emotions (like feeling good about yourself, or removing worry or pain);
- you gain these feelings only temporarily, for the duration of the experience;
- it ultimately degrades your other involvements and satisfactions;
- finally, you are forced to return to your addictive experience as your only or principle source of satisfaction.
The essential ingredient in assessment in my approach (the Life Process Program) is having the individual buy in reasonably to the assessment - including ruling out those who don't qualify. I don't foist a diagnosis on people - I let them consider for themselves the impact and consequences of their habit. When they feel that it is sufficiently damaging to other things they care about, we can build from there.
Is this what's troubling you, bub? In that case, you can consider addiction treatment. Or, you could quit or refocus on the other areas of your life and see if that reduces your addictive behavior. Because, one way or the other, recovery is the balancing of your values and satisfactions that only you can navigate.
This blog post also appeared on Stanton's Addiction in Society blog at PsychologyToday.com.
Harry Houdini Had Too Much Integrity to Do Therapy on TV
A fellow PT blogger speaks of the many hats worn by therapists. How about the hat of "psychic?".
I was amazed on catching one respected psychiatrist with a television show (he no longer has it, but appears regularly as an expert on other news programs) presenting psychic twins to his audience. The audience peppered the two youthful, attractive women with questions, for which they had instantaneous answers - about dead relatives, illnesses, life decisions - all of which it would be inappropriate for a licensed therapist to provide. I was stunned that a psychiatrist would jeopardize his audience with this kind of BS.
This celebrated psychiatrist showed no self-consciousness about putting such pernicious crap out there. I contrasted this in my mind with Harry Houdini. Houdini early in his career performed spiritualist tricks. Once he came to a town and learned that a couple had just lost a baby. Judging them to be young and fertile, he shouted out to the couple in the audience that their dead son said he was glad his mother was with child again - which she had told no one. The woman and her husband, of course, dissolved into hysterical tears.
This image never left Houdini's mind. Years later, when he had made his name as the world's greatest escape artist (and was the best-known celebrity in the Western World), Houdini contacted these people to let him know the trick he had played on them. He simply could not rest having foisted irrationality and terror on the world.
But you can get this madness around the clock on American TV, often bearing the imprimatur of therapy. Dr. Phil today had on a woman whose life has been ruined by the spirit of a ten-year-old boy who she says is constantly with her, causing her perpetual anguish, to leave her job, and to cease all outside relationships. What to do? Why, call in ubiquitous ghost buster James van Praagh.
Van Praagh divined that it wasn't a ten-year-old tormenting this poor woman, but another man she knew who had been murdered (how's that for differential diagnosis?). Dr. Phil asked, reassuringly, could van Praagh help the woman - van Praagh assured Dr. Phil that he had a spirit protection package ready to put in place for this therapy -- or is it seer -- client.
We know Dr. Phil is beyond licensure action - this was revealed when he went to Britney Spears' hospital room at the request of her parents, but instead recruited her for his TV show. Many people - including Spears' parents - were appalled at this conflict of interest, violation of confidentiality, and self-serving behavior. But it turns out that Dr. Phil doesn't hold a license, so no one can bring an action against it.
The aforementioned psychiatrist I assume must be licensed, as well as being a member of the American Psychiatric Association. But I imagine no one complained about his psychic twin therapy. Why would they - mental illness is, after all, a ghost in the machine.
How to Tell Kooky Nuts in the Addiction Field
1. When you say, "Wine reduces heart disease," kooky nut says, "Grape juice does too."
No it doesn't. All forms of alcohol prolong life for most groups (those at risk to die of heart disease). All forms of beverage made from the genus Vitis (grape plants) do not have this effect - just the alcoholic ones. Religious variation: Jesus didn't drink wine at the Last Supper (like every other Jew in the bible did for Passover) - he preferred grape juice, like the kooky nut telling you this story.
2. Kooky nut says: "If you take heroin long enough, you MUST be addicted."
And what about all those people in hospitals taking narcotics more concentrated than street heroin for weeks and months at a time, who then eventually reduce self-administered doses of analgesia (the standard response)? This myth, unfortunately, is sold at the highest levels of drug research (e.g., by Nora Volkow of the NIDA) because they know their jobs depend on their endorsement of zero-tolerance science.
3. If you have any kind of a drinking problem, kooky AA nut says, "You're in the early stages of alcoholism."
Let's see - you can either have blackouts, loss of control, and all those other things AAers say prove you're an alcoholic, or else you don't have them, which likewise proves you're an alcoholic, because you're going to get them. This is a favorite argument of alcohol counselors who are themselves alcoholics, who use the irrefutable logic - "That's what happened to me!" (Warning: Never argue with a kooky nut - it can be dangerous for your health and for their mental health.)
4. Kooky nut says, "No alcoholic ever succeeds at reducing their drinking. If someone does do so, then they were misdiagnosed as an alcoholic (see pt. 3)."
In the most famous kooky nut study ever published (in Science yet), Mary Pendery showed that alcoholic patients who received controlled drinking (CD) treatment had relapses. However, the original study of these patients indicated that CD patients fared better than those receiving abstinence treatment at the same facility, whom Pendery neglected to examine (although admitting they did very poorly). With one patient everyone agreed became a moderate drinker, Pendery endeavored mightily to prove he wasn't really an alcoholic originally, despite ending up in a VA alcoholism ward. At a national conference, Mary Pendery attacked my article in PT pointing this out. (Warning: Being a kooky nut can be dangerous to your health - Pendery took up with an alcoholic patient who underwent abstinence treatment at this facility, and he killed Pendery and himself while extremely intoxicated.)
5. Kooky nut says, "If AA helps even one patient, then I'm for forcing people into it."
Well, apricot pits have cured some cancer victims. The way we usually test clinical efficacy is to assign people with a problem randomly to different treatments, perhaps including no treatment, and compare their outcomes. This has been done several times with AA - in every case, AA participants fared worse than other subjects, including those receiving no treatment! Moreover, coerced AA patients may suffer significant negative events - up to and including suicide - as well as having their personal integrity violated. But who cares when you're a kooky nut?
This blog post also appeared on Stanton's Addiction in Society blog at PsychologyToday.com.
PT Readers’ Drug Abuse Prevention Policy – I couldn’t have done better myself
San Diego State University (SDSU) administrators permitted Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents to infiltrate fraternity drug distribution rings after two students on campus died from drug use. After several months' investigation, DEA agents arrested 75 students, whose lives will be forever altered for the worse.
I posed five questions to PT readers in my post, "Go Ahead - Write My Blog," and this column summarizes their answers. The responses were extremely good, giving answers I can modestly say are as good as - or better than - I could have given. Moreover, they provide two views of the operation - the side which reacted negatively to the intrusion on campus life of federal agents to fight drug use that has been going on for a half century, and the side that says the school had to act and that such retribution for drug use tilts the scale away from drug use in students' minds (sort of).
Here are the quiz questions and the summary of your responses:
1. Will the raid and arrests reduce drug use on SDSU campus? If so, for how long?
The consensus was, not, as expressed by JDB:
Most people don't expect to be arrested for the consensual use of drugs, so in most cases punitive threats will not work to reduce drug use. To reduce or eliminate drug use on the SDSU campus would require arresting everyone currently doing drugs on the SDSU campus, something that by now is clearly more difficult thanks to the DEA's recent, high-profile drug raid.
The positive position, on the other hand, from Anonymous, was:
Yes, temporarily. There is no telling how long. When you remove key movers and shakers, dependent buyers may find it harder to find suppliers. You have to consider that prior to the bust, these students did not have to venture
into dangerous territory to "score." Getting the drugs they craved was literally a text message away. The consequence of reducing the ease of acquiring illicit drugs will be a temporary hiatus on drug use. But let's not be so arrogant
as to think that this effect will last long. Dr. FeelGood is as cunning as he is consistent. He'll be back.
NOTE, however, that even this supporter of the raids doesn't really think it's an effective way to reduce use.
2. Will the raid reduce negative drug use consequences? That is, because of the sting and arrests, will fewer students use drugs in dangerous ways? Why or why not?
The breakdown was similar here, with most saying "no," and Anonymous once again giving the pro-raid position - however, once again, almost wistfully:
We would like to hope that the selling of illegal drugs by fraternities was like a social drug in itself to students who may otherwise not have ever become users. I say this because if Starbucks started putting crack into their espressos, not everyone would abstain in horror. Some would buy just because of the Starbucks brand. The effective branding of these drugs as fraternity promoted may have reduced the urge to abstain for some students. "It can't be that wrong."
The second hope is that by relaying the message to students that selling drugs has consequences, students may be reminded of the "wrongness" of doing drugs, thereby reducing consumption with a psychological tweaking on how they view drug use in the future. I do believe that occurrences like overdose may be reduced due to the limitations on ease of scoring and resocialization casting drug-use back into the "wrongness" category.
3. If your answers to (1) and (2) are "no" (or "yes, but not long" for 1), WHY did the DEA and University conduct the operation?
Eugene was funny on this one (Superman does laundry?):
The DEA seeks out opportunities to make high profile seizures as to justify their own existence. Universities under the slightest federal pressure fold faster than Superman on laundry day.
I thought Peter Guither was right on with his "money is at the root" response:
They both did it to protect their budgets. The DEA, because they have to justify their budget with lots of arrests and seizures, and the University out of fear of appearing soft on drugs and thereby jeopardizing state money and/or parents' tuition.
4. If you answer "no" to (2), what could the university have actually done to reduce negative drug and alcohol consequences?
JDB says:
To get students to use drugs in less dangerous ways would require them to take a college course or its high school equivalent in toxicology and pharmacology aimed at drug users-a reality-based science course, as opposed to subjecting the students to some half-witted monument to failure such as the DARE program.
Pete reiterated:
Reality-based drug education combined with harm reduction programs (medical amnesty policy, free treatment for those who need it).
The keys in these answers are to provide honest information - that drugs can be used in more or less harmful ways - and making it easier for those needing assistance to get it. ("Medical amnesty" is like the so-called Good Samaritan law in New Mexico, where those bringing someone for help to an emergency room won't be prosecuted. As it is, instead, drug users often leave fellow users where they drop.)
5. If a Democrat is elected president, will such drug raids and similar activities become more or less frequent, or remain the same?
Eugene doesn't think things will change:
Regardless of the election's outcome investigative operations like this one will continue for a number of reasons. It makes politicians appear "tough on crime." Modern surveillance legislation aids this type of investigation. Also, for the DEA this investigation has been a huge success, meaning that they
will continue investigations similar to this one.
JDB is more sanguine:
The Democratic president will be getting a great deal of grassroots feedback that will help this president understand that these types of drug raids on otherwise law-abiding citizens require major reform. And with the latest phalanx
of evidence emerging from New York of race-based enforcement of the marijuana laws,
there's already sufficient information available to demand that police tactics nationwide be reviewed and modified.
All right, let's summarize: drug use by the young will remain with us and our approach will remain to ban such use and punish it legally, and - no matter who's elected - honest discussion of reducing harmful drug use won't be permitted in the United States. Well, if we could eliminate drug problems and the cultural problem we have in responding to the original problems, there wouldn't be problems, would there? Then, no PT blogs - and we can't have that.
This blog post also appeared on Stanton's Addiction in Society blog at PsychologyToday.com.
How First Nations People Cure Their Own Addictions
I partner with a recovering addict named Scott Gallagher in presenting addiction-prevention programs to high school kids and their parents. Last week we met in a far north region of British Columbia to present at a secondary school in an indescribably beautiful river valley where a group of First Nations People have several villages.
Substance abuse is rife. Some people believe the situation is actually worsening as young First Nation People seemingly become more alienated from the mainstream culture while being attracted to its darker and superficial (e.g., pop entertainment) values.
They are still searching for a balance between traditional cultural values and participaton in the white world. How do you strengthen family and community ties while arming young people to get constructively involved in the broader economy and culture?
Alcoholics Anonymous is certainly not a good fit (although some peope try to give it a native hue). Convincing native peoples overpowered by the white culture that they are powerless and need to follow the white man's god reeks of the residential schools where native children were previously sent to be shorn of their tribal identities.
It seems ironic to many that First Nations communities and families are often quite potent, and yet they don't work to enforce values of sobriety. Perhaps this is due to a cultural attitude that can only be called "live-and-let-live."
Scott and I have struck on the chord of reinforcing these community institutions in order to combat addiction. When one woman described her heartbreak because a brother was again turning towards alcoholism despite a number of successes, we discussed utilizing a reinforcement approach in which she could deny him any help for dealing with the consequnces of his drinking, but offer him all of her resources when he pursued the opportunites he has been rejecting.
At the village level, we spoke with an elder about a process of community outing of drug dealers and bootlegers (alcohol sales are illegal in these communities). But First Peoples are slow to turn their members over to the Royal Candian Mounted Police. Instead, this process involves making violators aware of the negative impact they are having on the community -- which no ones likes to admit to -- and turning them instead towards helping their brethren.
We spoke with one woman, a drug ealer and an addict who didn't live with her four children who said she wanted to reject her past, about becoming involved with her youngest daughter's school and contributing her skills as community resources in other ways.
It is hard to know how the 21st Century will pan out for the First Nations. I only know this -- it is with rediscovery of their own potency that they wll survive and thrive.
This blog post also appeared on Stanton's Addiction in Society blog at PsychologyToday.com.
Go Ahead -- Write My Blog!
Reading readers' comments, it's occurred to me that it doesn't really matter what I say about drugs and alcohol -- people just maintain their basic biases no matter what.
Thus, readers should have their own clear reactions to a sting perpetrated at San Diego State University by the DEA with the cooperation of SDSU officials. The DEA and University justified the five-month operation and the life implications for the 75 students arrested on various charges (e.g., losing all chance at federal loans) because of two earlier drug-use deaths on campus.
So, PT readers, please answer the following quiz:
- Will the raid and arrests reduce drug use on SDSU campus? If so, for how long?
- Will the raid reduce negative drug use consequences? That is, because of the sting and arrests, will fewer students use drugs in dangerous ways? Why or why not?
- If your answers to (1) and (2) are "no" (or "yes, but not long" for 1), WHY did the DEA and University conduct the operation?
- If you answer "no" to (2), what could the university have actually done to reduce negative drug and alcohol consequences?
- If a Democrat is elected president, will such drug raids and similar activities become more or less frequent, or remain the same?
All right, go ahead and write my blog. Answers will be summarized in a few days.
This blog post also appeared on Stanton's Addiction in Society blog at PsychologyToday.com.
I Kid Because I Love - I Didn't Really Mean We Should Bomb Spain!
I wrote a post titled, End Alcoholism - Bomb Spain, focusing on the different attitudes Americans and Southern Europeans have towards alcohol. They allow kids to drink, while we believe youthful drinking causes alcoholism.
Fundamental cultural differences like that prove to me that attitudes influence psychological reality. But Americans don't believe that - we figure that what happens here is ordained in heaven, or in the science lab, which is pretty much the same thing to us.
I pointed up this solecism by playing the ugly American in my post and suggesting Europeans were dumb. Since I didn't think anyone would believe I would seriously propose blowing up Spain in a blog for Psychology Today, I thought people would find my post funny. And there were my additional recommendations, like that people not let their kids talk to Italians and Greeks to avoid being corrupted.
Wrong. Ten comments were posted expressing various reactions. The first anonymous comment expressed total confusion: "Is this a joke? Maybe I missed the point."
When the second came in "You Go Stanton!" I figured I was out of the woods. Wrong again. The next post, rather than focusing on my harebrained scheme to bomb Europe, focused on my hare brain. (No offense to rabbit lovers intended!) Gentle Path noted that, while in treatment, he or she learned that sarcasm was deflected anger. And although Gentle found my book "helpful at a difficult time in my life," he or she was now reconsidering this in light of my dubious mental health.
But worse was yet to come. Paco, who IS Spanish, really took offense, titling his comment "You are ignorant." I responded that Paco must have misunderstood me - I didn't want to drop anti-personnel bombs on Spain, just to defoliate the country to prevent their growing grapes.
Despite my addiction to sarcasm, Paco caught my humor, and forgave me: "I laugh now with your sarcasm sharing with my little 16-year sister a big cup of red wine. Grapes will resist your radiactives nukes and next harvest I will send you a bottle." (Note to Paco - still waiting for that bottle.)
Okay, now surely I was home free. Wrong, oh so wrong. The latest comment arrived from Sophie, titled, "I am shocked by what I just read!" Sophie then recapitulated the argument I actually thought I was making, that cultural variations disprove the reductive reality Americans attribute to our own prejudices, and that the Southern European style of teaching kids to drink is actually superior to our own.
She went on to take my ugly American persona literally, declaring at the end of four lengthy paragraphs, "But of course all this coming from a 19 year old British university student of British/French heritage who regularly drinks won't matter to you at all [in my blog I described drinking with my 20-year-old college-student daughter], I need to 'get with the programme', I'm just too 'dumb' to understand."
Sophie - I love you! I hereby, with the power vested in me as a PT blogger, declare you Director of the U.S. National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.* I also promise to share the wine Paco sends me with you when we meet!**
- Note to NIAAA: This is a joke.
- Note to Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms - I'm not really going to accept illegally imported alcohol.
- Note to INS - I don't really plan to facilitate an underage foreign national's consumption of alcohol.
- Note to everyone else I have offended without even knowing it - I'm entering sarcasm rehab next month!
This blog post also appeared on Stanton's Addiction in Society blog at PsychologyToday.com.
War of the Generations
I seem to be in a pivotal cultural position in re old age.
I just turned 62, first year of eligibility for Social Security benefits (I was born January 8, 1946 - the baby boom generation is reckoned to have begun January 1 of that year).
Remember the old days, when people looked after their aged parents? (Or, if you don't remember those days, did you ever see a movie about them?) You still see sixty-year-olds looking after 80-90-year-old parents sometimes on TV specials. But I worked in senior care facilities and, as guilty as it made people, they generally ended up warehousing their parents there.
I also live in New Jersey, the state with the greatest indebtedness. We currently have over $30 billion in debt. What is more alarming is the $50+ billion in unfunded pension obligations for state employees courtesy of the last two governors, Whitman and McGreevey.
We elected as governor Jon Corzine, a liberal democrat of my era whose qualifications include formerly chairing investment firm Goldman Sachs. Unlike me and my fellow New Jerseyeans, Corzine can comprehend a billion dollars - he made a few of them for his firm and himself.
Corzine proposed doubling tolls on state roads every few years as a way to attack our debt obligations. Neither fellow Democrats nor Republicans supported him and his approval ratings are at historically low levels. So he recently abandoned this effort - which other politicians and citizens don't seem to be as worried about as he is (which worries me even more).
When I talk to younger adults, their typical response is, "Why should I pay for the wasteful expenditures and failure to pay for them of past generations?" Why indeed - to do so will reduce their own standard of living as a result of decisions they didn't make and benefits they didn't receive.
Which returns us to my being the crest of the baby boomers moving into Social Security and Medicare ages (no, I haven't applied!). According to Roger Lowenstein of the New York Times, this will mean a doubling of the number of people claiming such benefits, with a smaller number than at present of people working and paying into the system. Projections are that Medicare and Social Security benefits will at some point consume the entire budget. The problem is, according to one analyst, so "overwhelming, none of the candidates feel they can tackle it."
Now we're beginning to talk about real conflict! With incredible real estate costs, taxes (New Jersey, for example, has the highest property taxes in the nation), food and fuel prices rising in never-ending spirals, and what not, things might get tough down the road! And what do you think the younger generation will think about carrying us oldsters on their backs?
Could get ugly, you know.
This blog post also appeared on Stanton's Addiction in Society blog at PsychologyToday.com.
No Pill Can Cure Addiction
A remarkable article by Marilynn Marchione in last week's (April 23) Washington Post announced the death knell for an addictive fantasy - that we will find a chemical cure for addiction. The article summarized negative clinical outcomes--including frequent cases of depression and even some suicides--from drugs prescribed for smoking and obesity.
At first blush, the NIDA seems focused on the chemical rewards produced in the brain by specific drugs, notably cocaine. But, as I announced in Psychology Today 35 years ago, this model is illusory. Addiction is not the result of a drug molecule binding with specific receptors. For one thing, too many drugs with widely varying chemical structures can be addictive.
Actually, Nora Volkow and other NIDA theorists have moved beyond that model to identify general reward paths in the brain which many different substances impact. Of course, this immediately calls into question the NIDA's mandate - if we're mucking about among general reward mechanisms in the brain, why are they limiting their research to illicit substances? The answer is, of course, the government hates these drugs and wants to label them addictive to alarm Congresspeople and scare school children and their parents.
Thus, the obesity and nicotine drugs the Post discussed were not strictly in the NIDA's realm (although several have been touted for alcoholism and drug addiction). But the therapies rely on the same approach of blocking pleasure signals that underlies NIDA strategizing. The only problem is, since the mechanisms involved are so global, pleasurable experience is defused in general--walla, people become depressed.
Some key players have been struck by this lesson, including the man (Mark Egli) in charge of chemical cures at the NIDA's sister agency, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. His chastened conclusion: "It certainly diminishes my enthusiasm."
This is actually reminiscent of the reactions of key genetic researchers when simple-minded hopes of finding a single gene for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder were no sooner announced than they were immediately dashed, as I described in Psychology Today. (We won't go into Ken Blum's "discovery" of the gene for alcoholism, which he then claimed explained all of addiction.)
As is now occurring for serious students of addiction, real geneticists announced they were recasting their entire model of how human behavior and mental illness arises. It cannot be the result of a single inheritance, or solely of genetics altogether. Nor, we now see, can addiction be resolved and dealt with as one uniform biochemical process.
This blog post also appeared on Stanton's Addiction in Society blog at PsychologyToday.com.
Dying of Thirst
A New York Times article this weekend revealed widening gaps in life expectancy according to income, race, sex, education and geography. All of the demographics associated with declining life expectancy gains are also associated with abstinence from alcohol.
According to the article, researchers "found that life expectancy actually declined in a substantial number of counties." Worst off are poor Southern women, who are the Americans least likely to drink. They can't match the continued health gains among better-off men and women in New England states, the Americans most likely to drink.
According to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, demographics of those 18 and older show that men (62%), whites (60%), and college grads (67%!) are most likely to drink along with, geographically, New Englanders (64%) and urbanites (58%).
At the opposite end of the spectrum, women (48%), African Americans (45%), and those without a high school diploma (36%!), along with those residing in East South Central (42%) and rural regions (48%), are least likely to drink.
Let's review the United Health Foundation's state-by-state compilation, America's Health Rankings. Four of the five healthiest states are among the leaders in precentage of drinkers, starting with the healthiest, Vermont (64%) and including Minnesota (#2 in health, 60% drinkers), New Hampshire (#4, 64%), and Connecticut (#5, 66%).
Likewise, four of the five least healthy states - Mississippi (#50, 38%), Arkansas (#48, 40%), Oklahoma (#47, 41%), and Tennessee (#46, 33%) - are at the low end of the imbibing rankings. In all of the healthiest five states, a majority drinks. In all the unhealthiest states, a minority does. The average percentage of drinkers in the healthiest states is 61 percent, the average in the least healthy, 40 percent.
Epidemiologists have long known that regular moderate drinkers live longer than abstainers. Virtually all accept that alcohol itself (all forms of beverage alcohol) prolongs life. A handful of contrarians argue that it is not alcohol per se that makes people live longer - it is the fact that drinkers eat better, exercise, control their weight, and don't smoke that accounts for their longer lives. But even this minority view is that studious drinkers are the healthiest Amerians overall.
The ratings for percentages of drinkers by states comes from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System. I'm confused - it seems as though drinking is the risk factor they are tracking. But this runs counter to the data showing that a higher prevalence of drinkers in a state predicts greater longevity and healthfulness in the state.
People who believe public health admonitions that alcohol is a dangerous substance to be avoided actually suffer the poorest health outcomes. Shouldn't public health agencies be warning about abstinence insetad?
It just shows - you can't always swallow what you are told.
(I toast Ron Roizen's health for pointing these data out to me.)
This blog post also appeared on Stanton's Addiction in Society blog at PsychologyToday.com.
Answers to Addiction Quiz: Homage to Uncle Ozzie
For all of you who have been clamoring for them, here are the answers to the quiz on Uncle Ozzie's successfully quitting a 25-year-four-pack-a-day cigarette habit when someone said he was a sucker for the tobacco companies.
1. Why did Ozzie quit smoking that day, based on a few words from a co-worker?
Everyone caught this - as in Yvonne's comment that he would be allowing "the powers he fought against" to control him. But Dr. Martin put it most brilliantly:
He was a militant union man being ridiculed by a co-worker for being a corporate pawn of the tobacco companies. And, he saw that the co-worker was right! Co-workers were important to him. I believe it was an epiphany! That's why he told the story in the first place.
2. How can a simple thought overcome a powerful quarter-century addiction?
Anonymous put this well: "Quitters are prompted by one impressive line of reasoning: the one that dictates how they see themselves and how they want others to see them." The juxtaposition of these images with how they actually appear can be intolerable, as they were for Ozzie.
My point is that, with the right leverage, you can move a mighty addiction. As Becky put it in her comment entitled, "Whatever strikes a chord,": "If we could readily identify those chords in other addicts we may be a lot closer to helping them quit harmful habits." But she is pessimistic about doing this: "The frustrating part is that the addicts themselves can't usually tell you what would make them quit because they don't know. Ozzie didn't know that comment would be the end of his smoking days."
3. Ozzie had a small daughter and a teen son, but he didn't quit smoking because of them, even though he was a good father. Why didn't he?
Good therapy encourages the addict to discover for himself a motivator to quit, rather than imposing the therapy's or counselor's values on the addict. As Becky put it in re Ozzie's attitude towards his kids: "We harp on the ‘do it for your kids' statements because we think those have universal appeal. The truth seems to be that even the most devoted father might not. . . . It doesn't make the addict a bad father, it's just not the right chord to play." Just like militant unionism wouldn't be the cure for everyone's addiction.
At the same time we should remember, per Dr. Martin: "At the time he quit smoking, there was no publicized evidence that second hand cigarette smoke could hurt his family. None. It was not considered dangerous." Given Ozzie's devotion to his family, I agree he would likely have quit on these grounds as well at a later point.
4. What about Ozzie's withdrawal?
Anonymous was great on this one: "The chemical dependency alone would have provided at least two weeks of withdrawal. That said, Ozzie was apparently a very busy, very determined man. Once he heard the tobacco companies were laughing at every nickel he gave them, every withdrawal symptom was probably paltry compared to his desire to get back at the bad guys. (It was his life, after all.)"
This gets to the idea of reframing cravings as symbols of virtue. When I asked Ozzie how hard it was to stay off the cigs, he told me, "For a few days I woke up in the middle of the night and thought, ‘I can just go down and get a cigarette.' But I didn't."
You might say Ozzie had superhuman determination and self-control. But he didn't seem that way when he was standing there incessantly puffing on Pall Malls while he worked so that he constantly smelled of tobacco. He was just waiting for his better side - the true Ozzie - to appear.
5. Describe Ozzie's behavior from the framework that addiction is a chronic brain disease.
This one gets everybody's hobby horses (especially mine). For Yvonne, whose answer to the last question was, "What withdrawal.....it was just a decision," the answer here is "It is chronic indecision, that is all." Yvonne apparently belongs to that school of thought which dislikes the idea of addiction as a disease (as I do), but then substitutes the non-sequitur that "addiction is a choice." That's just not true to lived experience: when you say someone is addicted to something and can't quit despite harming themselves, everyone knows what you mean.
Anonymous is at the other extreme, insinuating that Ozzie's resolve was the only time in history a person ceased an addiction on their own: "Now, if only the rest of us could kick our habits so easily." All right, so maybe Anonymous isn't Nora Volkow. But the fact is, people do what Ozzie did all the time - half of all addicted smokers quit, ninety percent of those without treatment - that's 40 million people right there. And a HIGHER percentage of heroin, crack, cocaine, and alcohol addicts (although this involves smaller absolute numbers of people) self-cure their habits.
If there is an overall point for Nora Volkow to incorporate down at the NIDA, it is that Ozzie's life could never be captured in an MRI. Was Ozzie's unionism visible in his brain, could neurology tell us how he would interpret and respond to his co-worker's chance remarks, what was it about Ozzie that made sure he didn't relapse? Addiction is so fundamentally human and experiential that it can never be reduced to - and certainly not predicted by - a brain scan.
But you blogees gave great answers. And my obvious love and admiration for Ozzie seemed to come through. Per Yvonne: "he was a caring man." According to Dr. Martin, who met Ozzie: "He was a kind and considerate Dad. None better." And from Joyce C. Hamilton: "Thank you for reminding me what a unique and fine person Ozzie was!"
Uh, excuse me . . . I've got to sign off. . . I've got something in my eye.
This blog post also appeared on Stanton's Addiction in Society blog at PsychologyToday.com.
How to Quit Addiction: The Uncle Ozzie Quiz
Modern neuroscience struggles to end addiction, but it seems addiction is as commonplace and hard to stop as when Uncle Ozzie did fifty years ago.
My uncle Ozzie died last year, at age 92. He quit smoking permanently fifty years earlier. He had been smoking for a quarter century at that point, having begun at age 18.
I came home from college for my grandfather's funeral around that time. I noticed Ozzie NOT smoking, and asked him why he had quit. He told me this story:
I was in a bar having lunch. They had just raised the price of cigarettes from $.30 to $.35. As I put my money in the machine, a woman co-worker said, "Look at Ozzie. He's a real sucker for the tobacco companies. They've got him by the short hairs. If they raised the price of cigarettes to a dollar, he'd pay."
I said, "You're right. I'm quitting."
She asked me, "Can I have that pack you just bought?"
I said, "What, and waste 35 cents?" I smoked that pack and haven't smoked since.
Ozzie, how long did you smoke?
Twenty-five years. I started when I was 18. I smoked four packs a day of unfiltered Pall Malls. I kept a cigarette lit constantly next to me at my work bench (Ozzie repaired radios and televisions). I had a nasty habit. My fingers were stained yellow with nicotine.
Did you think much about quitting?
I never thought about it before that moment.
I should tell you this about Ozzie. He was a militant union man. He was shop steward at his company. Whenever a fellow employee was in trouble, Ozzie went to bat for them. Ozzie was constantly punished by management for his activism. They sent him to the roughest parts of the city to make repair calls. (Of course, the people there loved Ozzie - he was coming to fix their TVs!)
Please answer the following quiz about Uncle Ozzie:
- Why did Ozzie quit smoking that day, based on a few words from a co-worker?
- How can a simple thought overcome a powerful quarter-century addiction?
- Ozzie had a small daughter and a teen son, but he didn't quit smoking because of them, even though he was a good father. Why didn't he?
- What about Ozzie's withdrawal?
- Describe Ozzie's behavior from the framework that addiction is a chronic brain disease.
This blog post also appeared on Stanton's Addiction in Society blog at PsychologyToday.com.
Linguistic Reasons I Can’t Vote for Any of the Candidates
I know, I'm even more of a prissy intellectual than elitist Barack Obama.
You see, I find his locutions annoying. Primary among these are introductory clauses ending in "is," quickly followed by the verb "is," as in "The fact (or the truth) of the matter is, is. . ." or "The reality is, is. . ." It's as though that clause is so meaningless, it is thrown into the sentence as a blob, which then requires a verb (you remember your English lessons - subject blob followed by a verb followed by an object?).
It's not just that this sentence is so bad syntactically (did they really let Obama get away with that at Harvard?). What bothers me is the function of the introductory clause, which is to claim: "This is the God's truth." It is the equivalent of "I swear on the bible" or "on my grandmother's headstone," or "Don't try to question what I'm saying."
Which brings me to Hillary Clinton. Hillary favors sticking the word "frankly" into every list she recites, particularly about her opponent's deficiencies.
One columnist claimed that the word "frankly" is always followed by a lie. No, it's more subtle and complex than that. People used to say frankly when they were about to admit something embarrassing about themselves, as in "Frankly, I botched the job," or "I have a criminal record."
Now frankly means "let me dish the dirt about the other guy," as in, "Frankly, he's a schnook." Of course, it is no longer possible for politicians to ever say they are less than perfect. In the modern campaign, when asked about their flaws, candidates typically say something like, "I feel the pain of voters too much" or "I'm too impatient about making the world a better place."
Thanks for sharing your sins, so. . . err. . . frankly! A passive public accepts candidate BS like this. The fact of the matter is, is I'm the only person in America who would vote for someone who said, "I've been having sex with this luscious blond because, frankly, I'm tired of my wife," or "I took money from a shady businessman because, frankly, my public office doesn't pay me enough to buy the mansion I deserve."
Which brings me to John McCain. David Letterman regularly features clips of President Bush stumbling over his words, comparing his gaffs with the eloquence of past presidential speeches.
I find John McCain, frankly, worse. He rarely says anything that remotely makes sense, or else that does anything but restate the question. Half the time, he doesn't even finish his thought, as in his comment on Hillary Clinton's drinking: "I did not see the clip of it but I certainly heard about it, and whatever makes Senator Clinton happy is ... is certainly, uh, certainly ...," McCain said with a broad smile, chuckling and raising his eyebrows.
I hear McCain is a ball of fire in private with reporters. He reminds me of a street smart student who becomes completely tongue-tied in front of the class because he doesn't believe he's smart enough to speak publicly. The only thing McCain can speak decisively about is bombing a Moslem nation. His intellectual and linguistic framework is that of a bomber squadron leader.
Of course, McCain's the only candidate willing to discuss lowering the drinking age to 18 (which he typically expresses as, "I'm just not sure - I'm torn over this one, because we ARE sending 18-year-olds off to defend our nation, but. . . .").
So I guess I'd vote for anyone with an ability to turn a phrase or put together whole sentences decisively expressing fresh ideas, someone like - Abraham Lincoln! But, frankly, I don't think he's going to run again.
This blog post also appeared on Stanton's Addiction in Society blog at PsychologyToday.com.
My Father Is More Intellectual than the Holy Father
My Dad Is Better than Your Dad was a reality TV show that lasted from February through April of 2008 on NBC. In it, fathers and sons competed in athletic contests, so the "better than your dad" applies to only a limited part of the fatherhood spectrum.
My dad would have stunk at the show. He was a scrawny guy, and he shied away from physical challenges.
He was bolder in the intellectual arena. Let me hasten to note that my father only had a high school diploma and sold shoes. But he read the daily newspaper and weekly news magazines (U.S. News & World Report was his favorite), and he was extremely well-informed on politics, current events, and sports.
Moreover, when large events entered the daily news flow - like the war in Vietnam - my father staked out well-grounded, intellectually independent positions. He felt his mind was his own domain and he had the right to think through any question and come to his own conclusion.
Naturally, my father's outlook colored my own intellectual perspective. I was taught to be a free - even a daring - thinker. I couldn't get in trouble if a teacher complained that I didn't agree with the company, or school, line. That complaint held no water in my home.
On Saturdays, my father took me to work at his shoe store. Sometimes he gave a ride to a man who lived near us and worked nearby my father's small store. One time, this man clucked about a friend's kid who had gone to college - and had come home with a facial tic.
Clearly, this man disapproved of higher education. But my father made clear to me, without arguing with the man, that his claim was nonsense. And, in fact, the data (as I learned to call it when I got my Ph.D.) do not support the idea that less well-educated people are mentally healthier - quite the opposite.
Which brings me to the Holy Father. Pope Benedict XVI, born Joseph Ratzinger, came to the papacy as a noted theologian - a professor and a thinker - who defends traditional Catholic values. He decries the intellectual secularization that is occurring (more notably in Europe than in the U.S.).
At a youth rally in New York, the Pope said:
What purpose has a freedom which, in disregarding truth, pursues what is false or wrong? How many young people have been offered a hand which in the name of freedom or experience has led them to addiction, to moral or intellectual confusion, to hurt, to a loss of self-respect, even to despair and so tragically and sadly to the taking of their own life?
Both that man in our car and the Pope feel that learning and thinking are dangerous! My father disagreed.
This blog post also appeared on Stanton's Addiction in Society blog at PsychologyToday.com.
Hillary Enters Rehab!
Hillary Clinton created a firestorm when she downed a shot and followed it with a beer chaser (called a "boilermaker" in local parlance) while "campaigning" in a bar in Indiana. Reaction reverberated across the country. One woman wrote:
"Do you really think is was appropriate to see Hillary drinking hard liquor with a bunch of men in a bar, being a married woman, and without her husband? I think she went too far, and she should have never done that, running for president or not, it was without taste and disgusting to see. She was advertising alcohol to our children, and it is not okay with me. I am voting for Obama and that is final. I don't drink, and many in the country do not. And, she drank more than beer, she had a big shot of bourbon or whiskey to go with that beer!"
Imagine this (all italicized sections fictional):
Hillary Clinton was found wandering around her campaign headquarters in Philadelphia, asking passers-by, "Can you spare five dollars for a cab?" The Democratic presidential candidate was disheveled, smelled of alcohol, and apparently hadn't changed her pants suit for several days."I've just been sitting in a duck blind for the weekend," the bleary-eyed candidate offered by way of an excuse.
A brief statement read by a Clinton campaign spokesperson announced: "Senator Clinton, who has had alcohol issues in her family, has decided to take a month off from campaigning to attend to a personal matter."
Reports had surfaced previously of the candidate's runaway drinking - for example, in a vodka drinking contest with Republican presidential candidate John McCain on a visit to Estonia several years ago. McCain has been rumored to have had his own drinking problems as a young ensign, and his wife, Cindy, was previously treated for abuse of prescription drugs. (Some wonder if this has any connection to her recently revealed "Recipegate" - plagiarizing supposed family recipes from the Food Network.)
McCain, in an interview at Villanova University in Pennsylvania televised on MSNBC, joked about Clinton's drinking: "I did not see the clip of it but I certainly heard about it, and whatever makes Senator Clinton happy is ... is certainly, uh, certainly ...," McCain said with a broad smile, chuckling and raising his eyebrows.
Critics noted that, given his own family's addictive history, McCain's reaction was insensitive and inappropriate.
Reached on the campaign trail in Pennsylvania, Democratic competitor Barack Obama expressed sympathy for Hillary, Bill, and Chelsea. But the Democratic frontrunner added the pointed comment - "I'm not planning on going to the Betty Ford Center any time soon. . . .that is, unless this campaign drags on much longer," he said with a wink.
Obama later apologized for any implication that he was making light of Clinton's treatment for substance abuse. "I myself have known the ravages of substance experimentation," he said, referring to the candidate's widely noted use of drugs in high school. "This scourge affects every family in America."
For those of you who have lost track, here is a substance abuse chart of the leading presidential candidates:
- Hillary Clinton - boilermaker, vodka drinking contest
- Barack Obama - marijuana, cocaine experimentation
- John McCain - weekend binge drinking as an ensign
- Cindy McCain - prescription abuse
Alex Dewiggis, director of the national recovery organization, America Anonymous, said at a hastily-organized press conference - "Everyone in America is an alcoholic, addict, former alcoholic or addict, or spouse or sibling of an alcoholic or addict." Dewiggis added, "Look at the President" (President George W. Bush has recently been boosting his faith-based initiative by speaking openly about having an alcohol problem until he quit drinking when he turned to religion).
Dewiggis continued, "We call for the immediate establishment of a cabinet-level Department of Recovery. Indeed, we suggest renaming America, The United States of Recovery."
This blog post also appeared on Stanton's Addiction in Society blog at PsychologyToday.com.
Message to Pope: God Needs Assertiveness Training
The Pope is visiting the U.S., and I have watched innumerable shows and analysts describe how uplifting this experience is.
I don't see it that way. I would like to ask him how God decided that homosexuality is a mortal sin, and why only men are allowed to lead the church. The pope is sure God thinks that homosexuals and women are inferior, like Southern Baptist ministers claimed African Americans were descendants of Cain and thus deserved to be enslaved and segregated.
Religious advocates endorse racist, sexist, or homophobic policies - then, if these are discarded, they defend their religions by claiming that humans misinterpreted God. God seems like an easily influenced teenager. After a century of minimizing blacks, only in 1978 did God reveal to Mormons that it was okay to ordain black clergy -- AFTER the civil rights movement convinced most Americans that racial prejudice was wrong.
Contrary to the argument that humans corrupt God, it is only when humans' good instincts surface that God decides to relinquish his prejudice and inhumanity. In other words, God is a follower, not a leader! He does not like to get out ahead of the crowd in espousing human rights.
Meanwhile, as the Pope visits, 14-year-old Addie Avery has been leading a campaign for the Connecticut legislature to exonerate her forbearer Mary Sanford, who was hanged as a witch in 1662 (both Protestants and Catholics actively hunted and killed witches in Europe and the United States). She left five children.
Speaking in the name of God, people determined these women were witches (almost no men were executed). Of course, even religious people claim to know now that was crazy. But do you know that the Catholic Church still supports exorcisms? And the same logic - demonic possession - is behind both phenomena. Once your mind is given over to irrationality and superstition, it can be turned in any ugly direction.
Leaders of other religions were disappointed when Pope Benedict reiterated that Catholicism is the one true church. But that is the essence of religion - one group knows the truth, as vouchsafed to their leaders by God. If you disagree you are, at a minimum, wrong or ignorant - at worst, a sinner and miscreant.
Every Jew has to know this about every "true" Christian, for whom it is an article of faith that only those who accept Christ can enter heaven. Presidential contender Mike Huckabee believes that, just as he doesn't believe in evolution. Huckabee and Mitt Romney promoted a Constitutional amendment forbidding gays to marry, and John McCain has announced that he supports that plank in the Republican platform. So much for religious tolerance increasing in America!
Religious people are so sure of the truth that they must shove your head in your failure to believe their craziness. You would be hanged if you said there was no such thing as witches in the 17th Century, and things may not be that different in 21st Century America.
This blog post also appeared on Stanton's Addiction in Society blog at PsychologyToday.com.
Want to Live Long? -- Drink
The U.S. is currently busy translating its traditional temperance attitude that alcohol is evil into the modern medical formulation that drinking is pure, unadulterated risk and the source of a special, widespread disease. But a funny thing happened -- epidemiologists discovered that moderate drinkers live longer than abstainers!
Although researchers have known this for some time, government and public health forces have conspired to hide this fact from American citizens - otherwise, they might drink. (All the public health officials I know themselves drink. They just don't think the average American can be trusted with the information that alcohol prolongs life.)
But apparently it is hard to keep this secret. "How To Live To 100," in the March 9 Sunday supplement magazine, Parade, was distributed to 23 million American homes. The article lets the cat out of the bag that drinkers reduce their risk of coronary disease - by far America's biggest killer. (It mistakenly attributes this benefit only to wine, while it actually holds for all forms of beverage alcohol.)
What a mind bender! How do we tell kids alcohol is bad when middle-age daily drinkers lower their death rate by 20 percent? No other beverage or food conveys such an advantage. (That drinking reduces your risk of dying as well as enhancing your enjoyment of life suggests there could be a God. Just don't get your hopes up that they'll soon discover that eating canolies makes you live longer.)
I know - let's lie to kids. They'll never figure out we're pulling the wool over their eyes. They'll then be happily ignorant like all those non-researchers and people who aren't public health specialists. They just won't live as long those in the know.
This blog post also appeared on Stanton's Addiction in Society blog at PsychologyToday.com.
A Stripper Is My Daughter’s Role Model
Diablo Cody (born Brook Busey) is the Academy Award winning screenwriter of the much-heralded indy film, Juno. Cody, not yet 30, is among Hollywood's hottest properties. My 20-year-old daughter, who likewise aspires to be a writer, is extremely fond of Cody. Like many young people, Anna reads Cody's MySpace site and blogs - which she continues even after becoming famous.
To tell you the truth, I'm fascinated by Cody. She originally achieved prominence with her memoir, Candy Girl, describing her year spent stripping and working at other sex industry jobs. Cody, and her writing, are unflinching, bold, and funny.
I found Candy Girl brilliant - really better than Juno. It is entirely original, an anthropological exploration of an American underworld. It is Cody's ability not to evaluate herself and others and to participate fully in these experiences that makes her so brilliant. Yet some of the clubs she worked at involved full nudity, all encouraged mutual touching by patrons and strippers, and she often worked intoxicated.
Working as a stripper and writing about it - after leaving her boyfriend in Chicago and moving to Minneapolis to be with a man she met over the Internet - would have been hard to predict based on her prior life. A self-described nerd from a well-off intact family, Cody attended Catholic schools, graduated college, then worked as a factotum at low-paying jobs.
One of her motivations for stripping was money - it enabled Cody and her boyfriend to marry and to buy a home, including his daughter from a prior marriage. (Cody's marriage didn't last.)
Of course, she also stripped and wrote about it because she wanted to gain attention as a writer.
But Cody also benefits from expressing herself as a stripper. By the end of the book, when she develops a high-paying act, she is proud that she has overcome her prior inhibitions and awkwardness. In short, she found stripping liberating.
At the same time, she had bad experiences, did things she was ashamed of, and noted the very sad and very vicious people she met as co-workers, employers, and clients. Finally, she is repulsed by hustling drinks and lap dances and by the people she worked with.
Cody has little to say about her own motivation and offers few insights into strippers and johns. At her blog, The Pussy Ranch, she cites a review of Juno in the New Yorker which applies to herself as well: "She's a shrewd girl, and very blunt, yet she's taken in by her own gift for rude comedy, which, as we learn, masks a great deal of uncertainty."
Anna's review of Candy Girl:
Diablo Cody says it herself; she's a nerd, not a hot little number. In her book she describes her "slacker fat and lumpen glutes" and thighs as "pale and malleable as packaged biscuit dough." She contrasts herself with tanned and extensioned veteran strippers, women who ooze sex and make a thousand dollars a night at the clubs Diablo works in. Initially, her foray into stripperdome seems more like a curious jaunt, and she retains her humanity and humor. Unfortunately, Diablo quickly gets immersed in the stripper culture, and hoping to compete with the beautiful women around her, she loses herself. She gets a job as a sex worker, masturbating for strange men, then returns to stripping reincarnated as a real stripper, not an ironic one, "projecting nothing but the hilarious illusion that [she] was the axis of the sexual universe." But behind her self-deprecating language, there is an element of pride. She didn't go into stripping to be herself; she could have done that anywhere. She went into stripping to prove that she could fit in, that she was as desirable as any of those women.
I'm not a prude, and working in the sex industry is a personal choice that I can't say is right or wrong for anyone. All I know is that I found the book so depressing and scary that I had a nightmare that I became a sex worker. I think that's probably because I respect Diablo so much as a writer. Juno was incredible. And if someone that talented can fall into something so shady, what's to become of me?
This blog post also appeared on Stanton's Addiction in Society blog at PsychologyToday.com.
Democrats are Bigots - They Like Smart People
During the Congressional hearings in which Gen. David H. Petraeus lectured senators on progress in Iraq ("We've made great progress, so much that we have to stay indefinitely"), Senator John McCain once again revealed he didn't know the difference between Sunni and Shia Moslems.
For some reason, McCain likes to insist that Iran is training Al Qaeda operatives in Iraq. But that's not how things work in that part of the world. Al Qaeda is Sunni, Iran Shia - Iran has been training Shiite militia.
I know: it's so damned complicated over there! When you combine the prior info with the fact that deposed dictator Saddam Hussein was Sunni, and that we replaced him with a Shiite party that naturally favors Iran, you see we have the makings of a quagmire.
Democratic commentators tend to be critical of McCain's stupidity. Republicans, on the other hand, shrug it off - who can keep those factions straight? Does anyone seriously think George W. Bush understood any of this before invading Iraq? I don't think so!
All of this traces back to a deeper division between supporters of the two parties. Democrats like smart people! This is highly distressing in an era when educators tend to minimize conventional measures of intelligence. Despite this, Democrats virtually always nominate the candidate with the higher IQ.
But Americans overall vote for the man they'd most like to have a beer with. When the smarter candidate is also a better beer buddy (think JFK and Bill Clinton), we get both qualities. Often, however - as with the current president - we get only the better drinker (or, in GWB's case, former drinker).
The unavoidable conclusion - in order to achieve long-term electoral success, Democrats have to run stupider candidates. Unfortunately, both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are high-achieving wonks. You can't listen to either one of them without thinking - "Are these people nerds, or what?"
Americans, instead, love to focus on the unconcerned faces of people like George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan. Sure, things can be going to hell in a handbasket. But looking at these men, you can't help but think, "What, me worry?"
This brings us to our moral - The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent. To which we can add - "nor the presidency to the brainiac." No, quite the opposite.
This blog post also appeared on Stanton's Addiction in Society blog at PsychologyToday.com.
Open letter to Nora Volkow
(Nora Volkow is the neuroscientist who directs the National Institute on Drug Abuse)
Dearest Nora (and thanks for the Passover card),
My last two posts at my blog for Psychology Today - "The End of Addiction" and "End Alcoholism - Bomb Spain" -- have raised some consternation. Are they supposed to be funny, or what?
In the first, pretending to be a community college instructor, I point out that the endless optimism of neuvo-neuro theories of addiction are really rehashes of theories long past - all of which have had no actual impact on addiction. Addiction doesn't exist at the neuro-level. Addiction is given meaning - really only experienced - in a social and historic context, as I explained in The Meaning of Addiction in 1985.
This has been proven continuously in the case of alcoholism. In my "Bomb Spain" post, I begin by quoting the typical modern medical formulation that alcoholism is caused by repeated exposure to alcohol, so that the earlier people drink, inevitably the more likely they are to be alcoholic.
In physics, fake theories are quickly discarded - how long could humans maintain that the earth is the center of the universe? (Okay, so Pope John Paul II waited until 1992 to apologize to Galileo for the Church's banning of his theories in 1616. The Church doesn't like to be precipitous.)
But, in the case of alcohol - as my last post points out - cross-cultural evidence which cannot be denied (and which has now been affirmed by systematic international surveys) shows that cultures where alcohol is introduced early in a family context have far lower rates of intoxication, drinking problems, and alcoholism.
The reasons for this are partly practical - in these cultures drinking is not done in episodic bursts which produce the most unhealthy and dangerous outcomes.
But the issue is more fundamental to how humans function than that. Alcohol's image - the very way drinking is experienced - varies with cultural visions of the substance (as is true also with drugs).
As I said, these differences can never be resolved at the neurological level. Indeed believing that drug use patterns are biological inevitabilities actually influences the person's susceptibility to addiction. (I know, Nora, this is a real Escher brain twister!) Individual and cultural interpretations of drug experiences demonstrably overwhelm other considerations. Drinking within countries and cultures is remarkably consistent - and differs monumentally from drinking in others.
When you first go to Norway - a country with clean streets and remarkably nice people - you are shocked to see so much public drunkenness and alcoholism. I remember walking through a park on a Sunday morning and being stunned to find ordinary people lying where they fell drunk the night before. Where else can you see a statue of a man lying drunk in the street? But - and here's that brain twister again Nora - Norwegians actually drink less than those in Southern European countries.
You may go decades without seeing a drunk person in Spain or Italy. Conventional wisdom was that these people were so accustomed to high blood alcohol levels their alcoholism was disguised. But cross-cultural research now shows that not only do drinkers in these countries have far fewer drinking problems - they even have less cirrhosis (an organ failure supposedly due solely to levels of alcohol consumption). It turns out that the cultural meaning of substance use is more fundamental to basic biological functions than even I could imagine!
Humans regard their own experience as inviolable truth. They believe that what happens in their minds is the way God and nature intended people to be. This is why addicts and alcoholics are positive that these substances have special effects. That is why people are convinced the way people drink around them is the way drinking affects all humans. The human mind is simply not good at transcending personal experience to imagine other ways of being - as most notably evidenced in their views about God, substances, and addiction.
This is why, my dear Nora, your effort to formulate addiction in the laboratory will never capture the truths of addiction. Yet the limits of individual experience are also what has convinced you and your colleagues that your experiments showing how cocaine impacts the brain "proves" how and why cocaine is addictive. Generalizing from your limited perspective to universal truth is actually a psychological dysfunction, just the way AA members' beliefs about their alcohol use contribute to their alcoholism.
I thought you would want to hear this from me first.
Best regards,
Stanton
This blog post also appeared on Stanton's Addiction in Society blog at PsychologyToday.com.
End Alcoholism -- Bomb Spain
The key to ending alcoholism is to prevent anyone under 21 from drinking:
"Alcohol is a drug - a powerful, mood-altering drug - and alcoholism is a disease," says Dr. Robert Morse, board member of the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence Inc., and recently retired from the Mayo Clinic, where he was director of addictive disorders. "Over the past two decades, scientific research has revolutionized our understanding of how drugs affect the brain. We now know that prolonged, repeated drug and alcohol use can result in fundamental, long-lasting changes in brain structure and functioning. This is one of the reasons underage drinking is so critical. Not only are there a whole set of increased risks in the short-term, the long-term physical and biochemical effects put these drinkers at risk for the rest of their lives."
We have our work cut out for us. According to the article by Joel Kaufman in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel:
"Alcohol is the drug most frequently used by American teenagers. Young people drink alcohol more frequently than they use all other illicit drugs combined. . . . many underage drinkers are often first presented with alcohol in their own dining rooms, living rooms and kitchens."
The solution: "Changing cultural misconceptions and behaviors about alcohol use through education." In other words, explain to kids that alcohol is dangerous, they shouldn't drink it, and make sure parents know that giving kids alcohol is equivalent to child abuse! That should solve America's drinking problems.
Let's look at Europe for a moment. Not all European societies have less alcohol abuse than Americans. Only some do. The World Health Organization survey, Health Behaviour in School-Aged Children, found these countries had the lowest incidence of drunkenness among 15-year-olds: Macedonia, Israel, France, Italy, Greece, Malta (is that even a real country?), Portugal, Spain - all of which ranked lower than the United States.
But, wait a second. All of these cultures readily give alcohol to children. I just returned from spending my daughter's spring break with her in Spain and Portugal. I confess, although Anna is only 20, we had wine with our meals!
I know I should have explained to the servers, who brought wine to us along with the olive oil, that Anna was too young to drink, and that it would lead to her catching a permanent disease. But I feared that our hosts would never understand me. In the first place, the drinking age in Southern European countries is 16. In the second, children of any age are allowed to drink in restaurants with their parents.
What the hell is the matter with those Europeans? Aren't they smart enough to realize that drinking at an early age leads to a lifelong risk of alcoholism? I have the same problem when I try to explain to Europeans that the war in Iraq is good. I hate to say it - Europeans are just plain dumb!
And, I hate to say this even more, but a lot of Europeans remain dumb after they arrive here. Oh, some of them get with the program and realize that alcohol is a poison kids should be protected against. But you would be amazed how many of them still give kids alcohol (like some Jews do on Passover).
Come to think of it, we had the same problem with Prohibition. You remember Prohibition? The 18th Amendment to the Constitution banned the production and sale of alcohol. (I admit I am a little resentful because I had to memorize two whole additional Amendments to the Constitution when I went to law school - the 21st Amendment was passed to repeal the 18th.)
Midwesterners and Southerners and conservative Protestant groups like Baptists and Mormons led the fight to make alcohol illegal. But many immigrant groups failed to get the message - and so they continued drinking even though this violated the Constitution! (Do I even have to mention that those Southern European countries never banned alcohol - so law students there don't have to learn even one alcohol-related amendment?)
As a psychologist, I try to get into the minds of Europeans. I honestly believe many simply don't realize how evil alcohol is (Jews even have a prayer blessing wine!) - yes, they're in denial against American science. Instead, they think of it as a benign substance they learned to enjoy at meals and celebrations with their parents, as Mr. Kaufman wrote, "in their own dining rooms, living rooms and kitchens." (I know - it makes my blood curdle too.)
But - and here's the problem - they seem to be misled about these horrifying practices by the low levels of alcohol abuse they experience. A classic study followed a group of inner-city Boston adolescents for many decades. George Vaillant, in The Natural History of Alcoholism, found that Irish-Americans (Ireland is the one culture in Europe that most shares our fear and loathing of alcohol) were almost ten times as likely to become alcoholics as were Italian, Greek, and Jewish youths they lived side by side with.
You see the difficulty - the only way we can persuade them about the evils of alcohol is to make sure their children are damaged as badly as our children are by drinking. Golly, it makes my head hurt to figure out this paradox. You just can't talk sense to a European!
Finally, after a lot of thought, I've come up with a brilliant three-pronged international attack on alcoholism:
- Americans should never let their kids go to Italy, France, or Greece - or even talk to Italians, French people, or Greeks
- While George Bush is in Europe at NATO meetings, he should explain how he was an alcoholic until well into his adulthood, when he got religion and quit drinking, so that they should not drink
- Bomb Spain and Portugal so they don't corrupt any more kids!
This blog post also appeared on Stanton's Addiction in Society blog at PsychologyToday.com.
The End of Addiction!
All right class, listen up. Why did a panel of cardiologists recommend this week that the cholesterol drugs Vytorin and Zetia be used only as a last resort? After all, they have been shown to block the absorption of cholesterol through the intestine.
Because, class, a study of the drugs' users failed to find that they had less plaque in their arteries. Cardiologists now don't believe that the drugs will reduce heart disease and deaths. In other words, the science behind the drugs was great - it's just that they didn't accomplish anything.
Which brings us to the $100 million or so worth of research conducted on illicit drug use and addiction by the National Institute on Drug Abuse annually. NIDA-funded research has developed wonderful models of addiction and produced great images of brain activation due to cocaine and other drug use. It's fabulous, really.
So fabulous that, within the last two years, Newsweek (March '08), Time (July '07), and The New York Times Magazine (June '06) have featured cover stories about how science is licking addiction. It is so great that we are eliminating drug abuse! However, Newsweek did also mention, "Between 2000 and 2006, the number of drug offenders in federal prison jumped 26 percent. . . An additional 250,000 are incarcerated in state facilities and. . . . the government has budgeted close to $13 billion for drug control, treatment and prevention."
So, there is still a little to do. Well, we hadn't discovered the source and cure for drug abuse and addiction until just now, right class? Let's give it a few years - the problem often gets worse just before we solve it.
But these new announcements in national magazines of the end of addiction aren't really new. Here's one that was written for the Saturday Review (class - that used to be a big periodical):
So far, researchers have carefully avoided hyperbole in their descriptions of the endorphins. But it's hard to leave out the exclamation points when you are talking about a veritable philosopher's stone - a group of substances that hold out the promise of alleviating, or even eliminating, such age-old medical bugaboos as pain, drug addiction, and, among other mental illnesses, schizophrenia.
That was written in 1977, over 30 years ago! What, class, addiction and mental illness haven't been eliminated? They haven't even declined? You mean, they're actually increasing?
I know, class, you feel sorry for whoever wrote this -- his reputation surely was ruined for making such off-base predictions. Never fear! The writer, neurologist Richard Restak, has had a distinguished career - most recently, he was president of the American Neuropsychiatric Association. His 2006 book, The Naked Brain, essentially repeated the predictions he made in Saturday Review four decades ago.
You see, class, there's no downside to saying we are just about to cure addiction and then being wrong. So what if they're a few years - okay, decades - off? All right, maybe centuries. In The New York Times Magazine article, one NIDA researcher claimed addiction would be eliminated in ten years! They'll just make new claims when the old ones come due. And who's going to point out how ridiculous their past predictions were and how fundamentally they misconceive addiction?
You can't fault people for being optimistic. It's those damn skeptics who bug people! The author of the Time article wrote a blog at the Time web site excoriating a psychiatrist, Dr. Sally Satel, for questioning the validity and value of the disease concept of addiction. He accused her of being a Luddite, a moralistic ignoramus.
The author of The New York Times Magazine piece, Benoit Denizet-Lewis -- a very nice man (I correspond with him) and excellent writer -- is scheduled to publish his book, America Anonymous (for which he received a $350,000 advance - what, I'm not jealous), later this year detailing all the advances in addictive medicine.
You ask what I think, class? I just teach here at Wallflower Community College - what does it matter what I think? Do you think kids today - you know, the ones addicted to the Internet and iPods, whose binge drinking and gambling habits prompt regular alarm calls - will be a less addicted generation than previous ones? Do you know the fastest growing drugs of abuse are prescription meds -- the ones that more and more kids are being administered at earlier and earlier ages.
Here's my theory, class (and don't tell the Wallflower admin I said this - I need the $2500 I make here): addiction is a societal marker, a way people in a given culture have of interpreting their experience. The more the idea of addiction spreads - the more young people are instructed that experiences they are regularly exposed to are too overpowering for them to manage - the more addicted they will be.
drunk manAnd the NIDA isn't really interested in - or a capable of understanding - the sources of addiction. They are a government-sanctioned way of distributing research money and warning people how dangerous drugs are - as though these are the only sources of addiction.
What's that - how long does the term paper have to be? However long. . . .
Bio: Stanton Peele, M.S., teaches addiction and home ec at Wallflower CC in South Dakota.
This blog post also appeared on Stanton's Addiction in Society blog at PsychologyToday.com.
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