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Thread: The likely cause of 'ADDICTION' is not what you think?

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    Default The likely cause of 'ADDICTION' is not what you think?

    Quote Some of you might find this new research a little daunting, however if you want to learn something? (Read on)...
    The likely cause of addiction is not what you think

    January 26, 2015



    Drug addictions could come from places you didn’t expect. Source: Supplied


    IT IS now one hundred years since drugs were first banned — and all through this long century of waging war on drugs, we have been told a story about addiction by our teachers and by our governments.

    This story is so deeply ingrained in our minds that we take it for granted. It seems obvious. It seems manifestly true.

    Until I set off three and a half years ago on a 30,000-mile journey for my new book, Chasing The Scream: The First And Last Days of the War on Drugs, to figure out what is really driving the drug war, I believed it too. But what I learned on the road is that almost everything we have been told about addiction is wrong — and there is a very different story waiting for us, if only we are ready to hear it.

    HEALTH: ‘I’m not going under the knife for anyone’

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    If we truly absorb this new story, we will have to change a lot more than the drug war. We will have to change ourselves.

    I learned it from an extraordinary mixture of people I met on my travels.

    From the surviving friends of Billie Holiday, who helped me to learn how the founder of the war on drugs stalked and helped to kill her.

    From a Jewish doctor who was smuggled out of the Budapest ghetto as a baby, only to unlock the secrets of addiction as a grown man.

    From a transsexual crack dealer in Brooklyn who was conceived when his mother, a crack-addict, was raped by his father, an NYPD officer.

    From a man who was kept at the bottom of a well for two years by a torturing dictatorship, only to emerge to be elected President of Uruguay and to begin the last days of the war on drugs.



    The war on drugs consumes South America. Source: Supplied


    I had a quite personal reason to set out for these answers. One of my earliest memories as a kid is trying to wake up one of my relatives, and not being able to.

    Ever since then, I have been turning over the essential mystery of addiction in my mind — what causes some people to become fixated on a drug or a behaviour until they can’t stop?

    How do we help those people to come back to us? As I got older, another of my close relatives developed a cocaine addiction, and I fell into a relationship with a heroin addict.

    I guess addiction felt like home to me.

    If you had asked me what causes drug addiction at the start, I would have looked at you as if you were an idiot, and said: “Drugs. Duh.” It’s not difficult to grasp. I thought I had seen it in my own life.

    We can all explain it. Imagine if you and I and the next twenty people to pass us on the street take a really potent drug for twenty days.

    There are strong chemical hooks in these drugs, so if we stopped on day twenty-one, our bodies would need the chemical.

    We would have a ferocious craving.

    We would be addicted.

    That’s what addiction means.

    One of the ways this theory was first established is through rat experiments — ones that were injected into the American psyche in the 1980s, in a famous advert by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America.



    Rats in a cage: Pic: AP Photo/Science. Source: AP


    You may remember it.

    The experiment is simple.

    Put a rat in a cage, alone, with two water bottles. One is just water. The other is water laced with heroin or cocaine.

    Almost every time you run this experiment, the rat will become obsessed with the drugged water, and keep coming back for more and more, until it kills itself.

    The advert explains: “Only one drug is so addictive, nine out of ten laboratory rats will use it. And use it. And use it. Until dead. It’s called cocaine. And it can do the same thing to you.”

    But in the 1970s, a professor of Psychology in Vancouver called Bruce Alexander noticed something odd about this experiment.

    The rat is put in the cage all alone.

    It has nothing to do but take the drugs.

    What would happen, he wondered, if we tried this differently?

    So Professor Alexander built Rat Park.

    It is a lush cage where the rats would have coloured balls and the best rat-food and tunnels to scamper down and plenty of friends: everything a rat about town could want.

    What, Alexander wanted to know, will happen then?

    In Rat Park, all the rats obviously tried both water bottles, because they didn’t know what was in them. But what happened next was startling.

    The rats with good lives didn’t like the drugged water.

    They mostly shunned it, consuming less than a quarter of the drugs the isolated rats used. None of them died. While all the rats who were alone and unhappy became heavy users, none of the rats who had a happy environment did.

    At first, I thought this was merely a quirk of rats, until I discovered that there was — at the same time as the Rat Park experiment — a helpful human equivalent taking place. It was called the Vietnam War.

    Time magazine reported using heroin was “as common as chewing gum” among US soldiers, and there is solid evidence to back this up: some 20 per cent of U.S. soldiers had become addicted to heroin there, according to a study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry.

    Many people were understandably terrified; they believed a huge number of addicts were about to head home when the war ended.

    But in fact some 95 per cent of the addicted soldiers — according to the same study — simply stopped. Very few had rehab.

    They shifted from a terrifying cage back to a pleasant one, so didn’t want the drug any more.



    Could addiction caused by too much partying? Source: AFP


    Professor Alexander argues this discovery is a profound challenge both to the right-wing view that addiction is a moral failing caused by too much hedonistic partying, and the liberal view that addiction is a disease taking place in a chemically hijacked brain. In fact, he argues, addiction is an adaptation.

    It’s not you.

    It’s your cage.

    After the first phase of Rat Park, Professor Alexander then took this test further.

    He reran the early experiments, where the rats were left alone, and became compulsive users of the drug.

    He let them use for fifty-seven days — if anything can hook you, it’s that. Then he took them out of isolation, and placed them in Rat Park.

    He wanted to know, if you fall into that state of addiction, is your brain hijacked, so you can’t recover? Do the drugs take you over? What happened is — again — striking. The rats seemed to have a few twitches of withdrawal, but they soon stopped their heavy use, and went back to having a normal life.

    The good cage saved them. (The full references to all the studies I am discussing are in the book.)

    When I first learned about this, I was puzzled. How can this be?

    This new theory is such a radical assault on what we have been told that it felt like it could not be true. But the more scientists I interviewed, and the more I looked at their studies, the more I discovered things that don’t seem to make sense — unless you take account of this new approach.



    Pill addiction could be caused by social crowds, rather than the substance itself. Source: Getty Images


    Here’s one example of an experiment that is happening all around you, and may well happen to you one day.

    If you get run over today and you break your hip, you will probably be given diamorphine, the medical name for heroin.

    In the hospital around you, there will be plenty of people also given heroin for long periods, for pain relief.

    The heroin you will get from the doctor will have a much higher purity and potency than the heroin being used by street-addicts, who have to buy from criminals who adulterate it.

    So if the old theory of addiction is right — it’s the drugs that cause it; they make your body need them — then it’s obvious what should happen.

    Loads of people should leave the hospital and try to score smack on the streets to meet their habit.

    But here’s the strange thing: It virtually never happens.

    As the Canadian doctor Gabor Mate was the first to explain to me, medical users just stop, despite months of use.

    The same drug, used for the same length of time, turns street-users into desperate addicts and leaves medical patients unaffected.

    If you still believe — as I used to — that addiction is caused by chemical hooks, this makes no sense. But if you believe Bruce Alexander’s theory, the picture falls into place.

    The street-addict is like the rats in the first cage, isolated, alone, with only one source of solace to turn to.

    The medical patient is like the rats in the second cage. She is going home to a life where she is surrounded by the people she loves.

    The drug is the same, but the environment is different.

    This gives us an insight that goes much deeper than the need to understand addicts.

    Professor Peter Cohen argues that human beings have a deep need to bond and form connections.

    It’s how we get our satisfaction.

    If we can’t connect with each other, we will connect with anything we can find — the whirr of a roulette wheel or the prick of a syringe.

    He says we should stop talking about ‘addiction’ altogether, and instead call it ‘bonding.’

    A heroin addict has bonded with heroin because she couldn’t bond as fully with anything else.

    So the opposite of addiction is not sobriety.

    It is human connection.

    http://www.news.com.au/technology/sc...-1227196380184

    PS - If your trying to kick any 'Addiction' these words from Professor Alexander should be permanently 'Implanted' in your Brain...

    Quote Professor Alexander argues this discovery is a profound challenge both to the right-wing view that addiction is a moral failing caused by too much hedonistic partying, and the liberal view that addiction is a disease taking place in a chemically hijacked brain. In fact, he argues, addiction is an adaptation.

    It’s not you.

    It’s your cage.
    Last edited by jackovesk; 25th January 2015 at 15:37.

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    Default Re: The likely cause of 'ADDICTION' is not what you think?

    Hello Jackovesk and everyone:

    I read this article with great interest! In the past I have told a story regarding my mother's health. She was on countless prescription drugs throughout her life due to sickness. She was always very, very concerned that she would get addicted to the extremely hard prescription drugs that the doctors continued to give her for pain for over 40 years.

    As with this article she NEVER got ADDICTED to these drugs. I think my mom was more surprised than anyone that she never got addicted. If anyone could be addicted it certainly was mom since she was in pain through her life and used drugs only when the pain was unbearable. She would use for months and then stop for months. If she was addicted as the article said she would have had to go find a dealer but she never did.

    I believe the article is correct when is says that humans are social and bonding with people and loved ones makes all the difference. As with my mother she had a great social net and family to keep her mind focused on instead of addiction.

    Once again thank you for the article Jackovesk! It answered many unanswered questions that I had had about "addiction". It answered the questions very well.
    chancy

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    Default Re: The likely cause of 'ADDICTION' is not what you think?

    Interesting. Thanks for that. However, drug addicts come from good families as well. I'd say that respect for your own life is more important. I know what I'm talking about as three of my cousins have been heavy cocaine addicts. They all had good jobs and good families. They were somehow never happy with what they had. That's the main problem of mankind. One always want more. It's a never ending quest for falseness as happiness lies inside.

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    Default Re: The likely cause of 'ADDICTION' is not what you think?

    Thanks Jackovesk for this wonderful find! Without a doubt it is a must read!

    However, following the reflexion that Guish presents in post number 3, what about those people who do live in a good "cage" but became addict? This question is not for you, Jacksovesk, but for the Avalonians: Has anyone read a scientific study which refutes the study of Professor Alexander presented in post number 1?
    Last edited by Earthship; 25th January 2015 at 17:40.

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    Default Re: The likely cause of 'ADDICTION' is not what you think?

    The drugs are never the problem, they are the solution. A solution that brings with it a whole host of problems.

    Believe me, I know.


    Regards.

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    Default Re: The likely cause of 'ADDICTION' is not what you think?

    Quote Posted by Citizen No2 (here)
    The drugs are never the problem, they are the solution. A solution that brings with it a whole host of problems.

    Believe me, I know.

    Regards.
    A tumble down the rabbit hole......

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    Default Re: The likely cause of 'ADDICTION' is not what you think?

    People can live in a good cage and still not be connected.

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    Default Re: The likely cause of 'ADDICTION' is not what you think?

    Quote Posted by Ahnung-quay (here)
    People can live in a good cage and still not be connected.
    Your statement is closer to a real truth about the world then a lot of books and videos have ever succeeded in the same.

    Succinct statements are like vehicles that get to the root much quicker and with less damage then a blunt instrument can.

    A blunt instrument can be used to smash its way to the root but in doing so the root is destroyed in the process making it no longer the root sought after.

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    Default Re: The likely cause of 'ADDICTION' is not what you think?

    This article is absolutely amazing I know better then anyone how addiction and drugs ruin lives iv personally lost over ten close friends and even more if u count the ones in prison I would greatly appreciate it if people would share this with others but I think the cage is now America. America is not a healthy place to grow a life with all the debt and school that we need to do anything now days it's very hard to succeed now America needs to be rebuilt by the small community's and the family figure needs to come back

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    Default Re: The likely cause of 'ADDICTION' is not what you think?

    They had to find a way to maintain the black ops cash flow that they had during the second world war,and to use the scientists from Nazi Germany, that they had transported into the US black ops.

    To get to very high levels of 22nd century and 23rd century and beyond - propulsion, energy, etc technology.

    So they could compete with ET and UFOs that they had recognized.

    They used humanity as a cover story, literally.

    How?

    By tying your body and life to their tank/turtle shell, like one ties branches and furs to their body, in order to sneak up on an animal in the woods.

    They used the world as a cover, a feed animal and energy source.

    They sacrificed you, your world and your family and children's future... as a cover story, and financing machine.

    That's the origins of the drug war and police state, and the garbage of a space and technology program/world, that we see around you.

    All the energy and the advancement went deep underground, and trillions were spent.

    It's called a 'breakaway civilization', and you are nothing in the face of it, just a pack meat animal. They murdered you and your family, for this thing. now, like slaves in an underground technology development bunker that are no longer useful, they kill you and dumb you down with chemicals and life and body destroying additives. Elitist fascism, at it's finest.

    Done to you...not because you want to be those things, but because they made you that way, all outside of your knowing and outside of your agreement.

    That is the origins of your 'drug war', it was a societal control and manipulation tactic, by hidden elitist fascism, imperialism, and oligarchies.

    You can go and research this, and you won't find error in what I'm saying.
    Last edited by Carmody; 26th January 2015 at 13:49.
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    Default Re: The likely cause of 'ADDICTION' is not what you think?

    Great post my Oz mate!

    "IT IS now one hundred years since drugs were first banned"

    Ummm not by a long shot bro BUT a great post indeed.

    Define "Drug".

    I have much more to say on this subject as I am a recovering "Accidental Addict" but also am Shamanistic in my outlook and approach.

    When you break it down essentially,a lot is true for sure..especially those you lean on.To recover,it IS essential that those you do can handle it.

    More to come and right now bro, it is when I feel I "need" this more than ever.
    Last edited by MacStar; 26th January 2015 at 17:22. Reason: Much Thanks to Ozhare for the link!
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    ― Terence McKenna, The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens and the I Ching

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    Default Re: The likely cause of 'ADDICTION' is not what you think?

    There are things that Rats and Humans do not share in common.

    Rats adapt really well,we hang on to old crap...DOGMA.

    I believe that we as a "Species" are set apart from any animal studies by this very fact and I can prove it.

    Don't take me as a Nay-sayer by any means...I just know the jungle better than the animals that inhabit said Jungle...or do I?
    Last edited by MacStar; 26th January 2015 at 17:32.
    "The shaman is not merely a sick man, or a madman; he is a sick man who has healed himself.”
    ― Terence McKenna, The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens and the I Ching

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    Default Re: The likely cause of 'ADDICTION' is not what you think?

    Quote Posted by Carmody (here)
    They had to find a way to maintain the black ops cash flow that they had during the second world war,and to use the scientists from Nazi Germany, that they had transported into the US black ops.

    To get to very high levels of 22nd century and 23rd century and beyond - propulsion, energy, etc technology.

    So they could compete with ET and UFOs that they had recognized.

    They used humanity as a cover story, literally.

    How?

    By tying your body and life to their tank/turtle shell, like one ties branches and furs to their body, in order to sneak up on an animal in the woods.

    They used the world as a cover, a feed animal and energy source.

    They sacrificed you, your world and your family and children's future... as a cover story, and financing machine.

    That's the origins of the drug war and police state, and the garbage of a space and technology program/world, that we see around you.

    All the energy and the advancement went deep underground, and trillions were spent.

    It's called a 'breakaway civilization', and you are nothing in the face of it, just a pack meat animal. They murdered you and your family, for this thing. now, like slaves in an underground technology development bunker that are no longer useful, they kill you and dumb you down with chemicals and life and body destroying additives. Elitist fascism, at it's finest.

    Done to you...not because you want to be those things, but because they made you that way, all outside of your knowing and outside of your agreement.

    That is the origins of your 'drug war', it was a societal control and manipulation tactic, by hidden elitist fascism, imperialism, and oligarchies.

    You can go and research this, and you won't find error in what I'm saying.
    Partly right IMHO...but who am I to Judge?..Who are "You"? hehe

    So,in "reality" it's Illusion yeah?

    I don't doubt that much at all, but I do believe as Energetic "beings",we were either/and/or the endorsee,conscious agree'er,or an agreement was made on our behalf after we were born before we could talk to be tied to an agreement.

    I get the gist though only too well

    We need to break the Ties that Bind.
    Last edited by MacStar; 26th January 2015 at 18:35. Reason: spelling and adding some...
    "The shaman is not merely a sick man, or a madman; he is a sick man who has healed himself.”
    ― Terence McKenna, The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens and the I Ching

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    Default Re: The likely cause of 'ADDICTION' is not what you think?

    We are all addicted. Need to look to further then form.

    No, not FORUM, but FORM, but some of us are addicted to that as well.

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