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With help from neuroscience, molecular biology, pharmacology, psychology, and genetics, they're challenging their own hard-core assumptions and popular "certainties" and finding surprisingly common characteristics among addictions.
They're using new imaging techniques to see how addiction looks and feels and where cravings "live" in the brain and mind. They're concluding that things are far from hopeless and they are rapidly replacing conjecture with facts.
For example, scientists have learned that every animal, from the ancient hagfish to reptiles, rodents, and humans, share the same basic pleasure and "reward" circuits in the brain, circuits that all turn on when in contact with addictive substances or during pleasurable acts such as eating or orgasm. One conclusion from this evidence is that addictive behaviors are normal, a natural part of our "wiring." If they weren't, or if they were rare, nature would not have let the capacity to be addicted evolve, survive, and stick around in every living creature.
"Everyone engages in addictive behaviors to some extent because such things as eating, drinking, and sex are essential to survival and highly reinforcing," says G. Alan Marlatt, Ph.D., director of the Addictive Behaviors Research Center at the University of Washington. "We get immediate gratification from them and find them very hard to give up, indeed. That's a pretty good definition of addiction."
Everyone likes this model, Miller says. People with alcohol problems like it because they get special status as victims of a disease and get treatment. Nonalcoholics like it because they can tell themselves they don't need to worry if they don't have the "disease." The treatment industry loves it because there's money to be made, and the liquor industry loves it because under this theory, it's not alcohol that's the problem but the alcoholic.
Originally posted by getreadyalready
reply to post by Droogie
Whereas Heroin is extremely addictive, but once people get clean for a fair amount of time, they often have no desire to ever resume, and even an irrational fear of resuming the habit?
So, Food, Sex, Cigarettes, Alchohol are often abused and result in more life-threatening situations than do hard drugs like Heroin or Crack?
... It would be interesting to debate how this might put an end to the current B.S. corrupt view on how we should treat addiction as a disease. Addiction is someting that is prevalent in all humans, and we should not treat it as a disease.
Originally posted by Droogie
Originally posted by getreadyalready
reply to post by Droogie
Whereas Heroin is extremely addictive, but once people get clean for a fair amount of time, they often have no desire to ever resume, and even an irrational fear of resuming the habit?
Have you got any sources that verify these claims? I haven't heard of this before.
So, Food, Sex, Cigarettes, Alchohol are often abused and result in more life-threatening situations than do hard drugs like Heroin or Crack?
I don't know how you got that from the article, would you care to show me?
Originally posted by Droogie
reply to post by boondock-saint
Hm, again, I'm not sure how you gathered this from the article. But in the case that I've overlooked something, would you care to show me where the article implies that we will be sent to FEMA-camps? It's kind of a dramatic view on something that should be innocuous and in fact helpful.
It would be interesting to debate how this might put an end to the current B.S. corrupt view on how we should treat addiction as a disease. Addiction is someting that is prevalent in all humans, and we should not treat it as a disease.
The idea of these threads is to read an article, make some kind of inference from it. Connect that inference to personal experience or other articles and other threads, and then discuss the issue as a whole. It is important to stay on topic, but it is equally important to bring in a variety of views.