Timothy Harrington
@aaiou1 · 4:23
End prohibition and you end the massacre.
But within a decade, physicians began recognizing danger lurking in the unregulated use of a drug specifically for causing overdose or what was then referred to as, quote, cocaine poisoning and dependence, or developing, quote, the cocaine habit with respect to drugs. The second half of the 19th century witnessed a shift from a completely tolerant, laissez, fair or hands off legal policy to one that favored increasingly strict controls over their distribution and sale
Sudha Varadarajan
@sudha · 4:03
I said, when I get into pain, I will decide whether I need Vicodin or whether I can deal with the pain. And I dealt with the pain because I have a very high pain threshold. That's just me. I'm not saying that's for everyone, but I have also come across research done a couple of years back that says that depending on the person, the individual addiction can happen with as little as one week of painkillers
Timothy Harrington
@aaiou1 · 3:41
Hi. Yeah. Thank you for your story. I just like to say that addiction is not caused by a drug or even its chemical properties. Addiction has to do with the effect affected drug produces for a given person in given circumstances, a welcomed effect which relieves anxiety and which paradoxically decreases capability so that those things in life which cause anxiety actually grow more severe. What we are addicted to is the experience the drug creates for us
Sudha Varadarajan
@sudha · 1:41
But when addiction is the effect that causes the drug, had we not consumed the drug, we wouldn't be addicted to it. The way I look at it, it's like if we had not smoked, we wouldn't have had the lung cancer. I suppose I'm failing to understand why addiction should be looked at outside of the drug, perhaps. And I don't have experience in the field. I think you do
Timothy Harrington
@aaiou1 · 4:36
So for me, it's sort of clear as day, if you will. How important is that? We talk about the unification of addiction treatment, the experience of addiction treatment. So as far as it being physiological, I'm not sure where that came from. That was my point. My point is not that at all. Anybody who develops an addiction can be traced back to a person's relationship to the world. What's going on with them in the world
Timothy Harrington
@aaiou1 · 2:14
In real life, the physiology of people cannot be separated from their minds. As a psychiatrist, Thomas Forrest said, when we get the what we know, the how so before we can ask what to do about addiction, we have to define our perspective. What we do about any phenomenon depends on our understanding of it. The available information about addiction is wholly inadequate. Hence the high failure rate of programs
Sudha Varadarajan
@sudha · 4:01
It cannot be prescribed like water, which is what was happening for a good two to three decades, anything and everything. You had a scratch. They were willing to give you a Viking. It was as bad as that, so that's I guess my beef with Purdue and the satellites and so on. But when it comes to what keeps somebody addicted, once they have overdone a particular drug, I agree with you that there are a lot of factors that go into it