Negative Space: addiction
- Appendix
- Altered states of consciousness aren’t just for drugs or even for natural highs. Our bodies are continually adjusting themselves to our environment and to our actions. The physical state necessary when running, for example, is different from the physical state necessary for watching television and from the physical state necessary for talking to a group of friends.
- The Black Market in Cocaine
- The simple act of labeling products in 1906 dropped cocaine use so low that only the massive prohibition enforcement of the seventies was able return cocaine use to, and surpass, pre-1906 levels.
- Brain Scans on the Job?
- The problem with drug testing isn’t just invasion of privacy—it’s shoddy use of science. John Herzfeld, American Health magazine, July/August 1986, pp. 72-74, 77-78, 81, 83. It’s hard enough to convince an addict that they’re addicted. Some treatment centers don’t even want to try to convince people who aren’t addicted that they really are. Not when there are people who really do need help who can’t get in.
- Chronic Effects
- Even heavy use of marijuana shows no or practically no signs of addiction. Of course, if marijuana is saving your sight, you might get angry when someone tries to take it away.
- Cocaine and the Chemical Brain
- How the drug may alter the action of delicate neurons? Signe Hammer and Lesley Hazleton, Science Digest, October 1984, pp. 58-61, 100, 103. One of the amazing statements in this article is “that’s a compulsion, the same thing as addiction”. In order to justify most of modern prohibition, addiction must be redefined.
- Crack Shatters the Cocaine Myth
- David Holzmann, Insight Magazine, June 23, 1986, pp. 48-49.
- Drug Abuse: Prevention and Treatment Issues
- Without good science, prevention and treatment become haphazard programs with massive failure rates, partially because there’s no rational basis for even requiring treatment in some cases.
- Genes, Personality and Alcoholism
- Some people may inherit a vulnerability to a severe form of alcoholism. Constance Holden, Psychology Today, January 1985, pp. 38-44.
- Models of Dependency
- Are alcoholism and other addictions and dependencies genetically based? If cocaine transforms itself yet again into a drug used mainly by minorities, does that mean we must once again consider it an evil? This section appears to be as much a rewriting of what it means to be addicted or dependent as a reassessment of addition and dependency itself.
- Nasty Habits
- Why Are Some Drugs, Such as Nicotine, So Addicting, While Other So-Called Hard Drugs Are Easier to Stop? John Pekkanen, The Washingtonian, August 1984, pp. 59-60. “It’s not just a habit, I’ve seen it happen. My own kids, whenever I start talking to them, they just light up a joint and pretend I’m not there.”
- New Insights into Alcoholism
- From somewhere in Time Magazine in 1983, perhaps? But I couldn’t find a more specific attribute.
- Sneak addictions to over-the-counter drugs
- Such innocents as aspirin, laxatives and nose drops can hook you—how to taper off if they have. Robin Reif writes about dependence on the most common over-the-counter medicines in Self, August 1986, pp. 116-119. And is there any euphemism cooler than “evacuate”?
