Re: addictive drugs
- From: boots <no@xxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2007 04:37:50 -0600
Josh Hill <usereplyto@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Wed, 20 Jun 2007 00:05:55 -0600, boots <no@xxxxx> wrote:
In another thread the following was written,
... I have a close relative who I love very
much, who's crack-addicted. Real-life stuff. He is not a street
person, or a welfare-person (we are a family of middle class tax-
payers) - he's a professional in his field. But we are holding out for
a cure -- for treatment - somehow.
I hope it will not be found offensive that I've taken this comment as
a springboard for a new thread, but given the usual "liar / am-not /
are-too" nature of posts here in mw lately, some actual discussion
might be, if not useful, at least an interesting change of pace.
During the late '60s and early '70s it came about that I found myself
sharing an apartment with a number of other college students who, as
it turns out, were fairly heavily involved in the drug culture of that
time. Compared to what is available today, the drugs involved
(primarily low-potency marijuana, hashish, LSD, and cocaine) were very
tame, but my experiences then did cause some consideration of the
issues involved.
The real issue, in my view, is that the average person is completely
unaware of just how good life can actually be. The effects of the
more common street drugs tend to give the user a taste of life's
transcendental nature, but since the "high" goes away with the drug's
dissipation, the user assumes that the only way to "get high" is by
taking the drug. For a person whose "normal" life tends to be a
little on the low side, the tendency for addiciton can be enormous.
I'm not talking about physical addiction here, I'm talking about
psychological addiction. As anyone who has tried to stop smoking
tobacco will probably understand, the phycial withdrawl is brief and,
compared to the psychological addiction, almost trivial. It is the
psychological addiction that brings the user back again and again and
again.
The psychological addiction exists because the drug provides something
missing from the user's life. The real solution is to find that
something without the drug.
No, I've never used crack cocaine. I tried plain-old cocaine once,
and decided that it was too good to mess with. There are some things
that are too good ever to try at all, and I believe that crack cocaine
is one of them.
It is possible to find that something without the drugs, but the
question remains, without knowing of its existence will one ever look
for it?
I don't have that answer; I took a risk, got a glimpse of it, and for
one reason or another did not become an addict, though I did become a
searcher who explored many disciplines before eventually finding
something satisfactory.
It is my belief that it is possible to overcome the psychological
addiction to any drug by finding something as good or better that is
not a drug; further, I believe that is the only way anyone ever
overcomes a psychological addiction.
While I agree with most of what you've said, I think that if we're
honest, we'll admit that artificial stimulation of the pleasure
centers by hard drugs like crack and Heroin can produce euphoria that
isn't achievable by natural means,
I don't know that to be a fact because I've never used crack or heroin
thus your references to their stimulation of the pleasure centers are
not meaningful to me other than as abstractions.
I do know for a fact that mental states of euphoria generally believed
to be impossible can be achieved by means other than chemical
stimulation.
any more than they can produce the
lethal convulsions of tetanus or the electric chair.
Convulsions and death can occur as natural processes; not all
epileptics live a "normal" span of years, and tetanus can be
considered quite "natural".
But, of course,
the addict's life is a hard and not infrequently short one. The
miseries eventually come to outweigh both the pleasures, however
intense, and the fear of withdrawal, or the experiment is cut short by
prison or death. One needn't think very hard to avoid that.
Everybody's life is hard and short, though not everybody realizes it;
is it necessarily better to lengthen the timespan and reduce the heat,
when in the end your goose is cooked either way?
Unfortunately, some find these drugs so addictive, whether because
they're emotionally needy or because their genes gave them susceptible
receptor sites, that it takes nothing more than a childish "I can
handle this" mistake or a weak moment or not knowing what you're
trying to become addicted. And then you're dealing with an illness,
with chemically-induced damage to the very brain centers that
determine motivation and action.
BTW, as I understand it, addiction can last a lot longer than the
initial withdrawal symptoms, though I'm not sure exactly where to draw
the line between physical and psychological addiction, since
psychological addiction corresponds to physical changes in the brain.
Thus even after homeostasis has been restored in the absence of the
drug, the memories of the pleasure remain, and work to tilt our
behavior back towards abuse. It is this phenomenon I think that not
infrequently causes us to become addicted in the first place, because
the remembered pleasures of that first line or cigarette can lead us
to rationalize our way into trying the second and then the third: "I'm
just going to do it at parties," "I'm going to try it just once more,"
yada.
There are certainly a lot of games we can play with ourselves.
--
The sane answer to insanity is madness.
.
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