Addict Pride?
thefix.com
thefix.com
I've been arguing for years that the same traits that make people like me addicts are the same ones that can help us achieve more than what "normal" people can. It's a blessing and curse. More often it's a curse. Before I get into what's wrong with this story, I'll say what's right. Addicts tend to be impatient, impulsive, risk takers who often feel more vividly than others. We're often perfectionists and harder on ourselves than anyone else would be. We can also be incredibly insecure and many of us self medicate. We internalize a lot of negative feelings about ourselves and choose a path of self destruction or a pursuit of perfectionism in ourselves. We can take our impatience and work harder, faster to achieve what we believe (many would argue mistakenly) should be accomplished right now. Right now doesn't have to literally mean that but it does mean sooner than what anyone else would expect from themselves. Failure to achieve this makes us continue using. The frustration makes us give up and instead just use drugs to feel the satisfaction we would have felt from any accomplishment. Our perfectionism lets us pay great attention to detail. Our desire for a dopamine rush can allow us to take on great challenges and see them through to the end. And our tendency to be risk takers let's us take on goals with very uncertain outcomes. In fact, I'd argue that an addict mind is the perfect kind of mind for a startup founder. It's the kind of mind prone to taking big risks, working fast, and craves the rush of satisfaction, the sooner the better.
But addicts don't start out that way. Most underachieve. That's because we live in a society that isn't set up in a way that helps us foster our "gifts". Addicts need to learn how to channel these impulses for their own good and that's tough because humans are wired to take the path of least resistance and in the case of addicts, that path is of escapism.
The article is wrong when it suggests that maybe we should allow addicts access to various substances instead of stigmatizing them. This line of thinking only takes into account the physical dependency aspect of addiction. Addiction is just as much about physical dependency as it is a way of thinking. What do you do about gambling addicts or sex addicts then? Let them gamble wi monopoly money and have sex still? Allowing an addict to continue using will not help them. It may prevent the spread of disease and allow them to function in society but it doesn't allow them to live up to their potential.
Abstinence is the best treatment. Addicts should not be stigmatized. It is a real disease. We should make every effort to get them help, and help them stay clean. What we're missing now are programs that take an addict's natural tendencies and channel them in such a way that it benefits them. That's a huge challenge. After four years clean I still struggle and have my moments where I feel like going out to the west side of Chicago and scoring. These times usually coincide with me trying to cope with something or accomplish a challenging task. The sad thing is that I don't think most addicts can get the kind of help I'm proposing even if it were widely available because you really can't spot an addict until they begin using and are already on their way to destruction. It seems that only after they've been to that low point that they can harness those "bad" tendencies for good. I'm really glad this article was written. This is the first time I've seen this idea put forward and it really makes me feel vindicated. The danger in this idea however is the part that talks about simply allowing addicts access to their drug of choice so they can function. Also, just putting forth the idea that addicts are neurodiverse runs the risk of giving addicts an excuse for their behavior and an excuse to continue with it. No matter what, the consequences of ones drug use and their behavior while using is not acceptable under any circumstances. Addicts do need our empathy and help but at the same time it's important to make sure they know that what they're doing is not acceptable and needs to stop.
(By the way, you'll probably see me as a new account - I've actually been around here as user billpatrianakos for over a year. My other account got hell banned last week for some reason and I was so pissed I almost didn't come back but I saw this post and just had to comment on it)
'What we're missing now are programs that take an addict's natural tendencies and channel them in such a way that it benefits them.'
Which seems to be the million dollar question, since everybody has different personalities and beliefs, is there a common strategy to apply here?
Either way, I identified a lot with your post because of my past. My co-workers must wonder how I deal with stress so well...
I don't think unfettered access to the drugs is the right thing. Just like any medication, it should be monitored by a doctor (but one trained to work with addicts, not one trained by current DEA tactics). But destroying people's lives because "drugs is bad" is certainly the wrong tactic (not saying you are arguing that). Portugal has shown some great improvements since leaving that mindset behind[1].
1. http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1893946,00.ht...
It seems like it does need a "why this helps me be productive" hook to convince people it has an upside. Either you need to be an artist and go for a "helps my creativity" angle, or else you need to be in some kind of focus-needing occupation and use drugs you argue improve your focus (amphetamines, off-label usage of Ritalin, etc.). Although, oddly, steroids for athletes don't get the same cultural free pass there.
I think people probably will find any concept along these lines more threatening than neurodiversity (possibly for good reason). People "wired differently" often grew up that way, so there's a sense in which you accept that's who the person is, and both they and others have gotten used to them being that person (in some cases). Most such groups are also a smallish percentage of the population, and you can't really "opt into" it on purpose, so it's a fairly fixed set. Parents aren't worried that their non-autistic teenager will one day decide to "experiment with autism", so there's less need to stigmatize it as an option. But nearly anybody can choose to become addicted to heroin, and a significant percentage of people who do, might decide it was a mistake, yet find it hard to get back out of the addiction. So it's a more "dangerous" concept in a sense, because anybody can opt into it, but possibly not opt back out.
I think they do, among amateur athletes at least.
Opiates allow me to conquer depression and major stress. Working at a company, with massive investment, several employees, and need to keep coding, keep morale up, lead a development team? Opiates turn what would be crushing stress and keep me positive so I can focus on getting stuff done. But could I tell our board about how I cope? Hell no.
There are many more folks in my position. Junkies give us opiate users a bad name, just like meth-heads make stimulant users look bad[2]. So, it's just not acceptable to mention usage, even when it's OK to say how "I'll really need a drink tonight" or even take smoke breaks during work. Which is funny, as opiates have very little heath side-effects (obviously overdose, but after that, constipation is the only real issue).
And yes, I've opted out several times. Once, like Paul Erdos, I decided to prove to someone that I could, and took a whole month off. Despite being on the equivalent of ~100-200mg of morphine a day, it was not very hard. (Sure, if you start IV'ing heroin, things might be different.) Overall, I decided I do better with opiates than without.
Any excuses that remove stigma and get society closer to rational discussion on drugs is an overall win.
1: Opiates are one thing that really work for depression. Mood stabilisers that all doctors want to prescribe leave me content to do nothing - literally. On them, staring at a wall all day is "just fine". Zombification.
2: Except most folks seem to think "meth" is some crazy other drug, not related to what they give hyperactive kids. No one seems to know meth is a legal prescription medication in the US. But then again, most folks don't know Heroin was a trademark of Bayer (name goes with Aspirin).
Us humans (other animals as well, by the way) have been self medicating ourselves for - ever really. Michael Pollen wrote about this in "The Botany of Desire". His brilliant look at our relationship with four plants that we use to treat our "fundamental desires" of "sweetness, beauty, intoxication, and control": the apple, the tulip, marijuana, and the potato.
Intoxication. We can expand it's list, of course, to include poppies, and the coca plants. Our problem is that many abuse these. The people of South America have been chewing the leaves of the Cocoa plants for thousands of years. Without addiction destroying their societies. We need these plants. And mother nature was good enough to provide them. :)
But we also need education. And in American, we'd rather "just say no". Then be honest about being a human being and our need for intoxication.
And when I write intoxication I don't mean falling down drunk. That's certainly part of it - to have a moment of rest outside our our heads. But it's also, like the post above stated - to conquer depression, stress and (I'll add) anxiety.
Pretty sure that depends on the underlying neurochemical reason for the depression.
Norepinephrine and Dopamine-related drugs (typically associated with speed) are what helped my depression.
One of the tricky things about treatment for mental illness is that things that may appear the same on the surface can vary greatly from person to person as to the root cause (and hence proper treatment).
Despite having lost family to both alcohol and opiates I'm not opposed to self-medication. Personally, watch out for long term health effects and of when you are particularly vulnerable to increase usage. Socially, I wish self-medicators dealt with doctors and therapists by default instead of dealers and police.
And while you may be one of those exceptions, those edge cases that can choose and walk away, it's important for people to understand that everyone can't do that, and you can't know in advance whether or not you'll end up an addict, in some way or another, for the rest of your life tangling with that stuff.
Yes, there should be focus on harm reduction rather than jail time. Yes, the stigma should go away... booze is as bad or worse than other things that are far more stigmatized. But let's not pretend drugs are all great happy awesome things. Addicts do end up completely screwed up and dead on clean pharma drugs.... every day. Let's not pretend it's safe and happy.
Yes, it's true, most of the damage from opiate addiction is due to it's legal status... there's always the risk of overdose with higher doses.
Opiates work for your case, that's great - but statistically unlikely as a remedy for the general public. Most people with depression who end up using opiates and/or other drugs end up more screwed up in the long run.
Whether a drug is related or not doesn't matter... weak opiates are useful wheras strong ones can be srongly addictive, or lethal. Weak short-acting benzodiazepines, like what's in Ambien are far less likely to cause you addiction requiring hospitalized withdrawal so you don't die compared to say, long term use of longer and stronger drugs that are almost identical (thinking xanax, valium)
Street meth his horrid shit, and while closely related to the amphetamine salts used for adhd kids, is horrificly addictive and extremely bad for your health - that's comparing playing with matches to playing with hand grenades. Sure, if you take enough adderall or related, that's prone to abuse and addiction, but it's nothing compared to what crystal meth does to your body and mind.
Just because drug companies made mistakes in the past is no reason to toss caution to the wind.
You were diagnosed Bipolar, that's something you have to deal with; I can't claim to understand it, so if what you are doing makes your life truly better for you, then I see no problem, but for the vast majority of people, that's not the usual outcome.
• Can the person help it?
If you're 'born with' a certain neural style, that argues for greater acceptance (if not 'pride'). Addictiveness might be closer to autism spectrum in this regard than the 'choice' to use performance-enhancing drugs.
• Is the benefit conferred something that is relative/private/zero-sum, or absolute/public/positive-sum?
In athletic competitions, a steroid-user only gains (the victory or the all-time record) when someone else loses. If everyone responds by also taking steroids, we've just created a new altered variant of the original game -- spending more, having more health effects, creating an 'incompatible' record book -- without any net gain (unless there is some absolute improvement in, say, the spectacle value of the activity). So the culture is more likely to disfavor steroid use, especially if used for secret advantage, or likely to set off a 'red queen race'. But when someone creates a lasting research result or piece of art -- that is not primarily understood as having displaced someone else's achievement, but rather setting some new absolute peak. When an addict/enhancement-user leaves the world a hit song, a great book, a new scientific breakthrough -- a non-zero-sum result -- it's easier to accept the precursor activities, even if usually illegal/taboo. And that goes doubly when we also consider the third axis...
• Do usage benefits also impose clear offsetting costs?
That is, does the user suffer for the advantages conferred? Otherwise, the use is more threatening: our old taboos and norms are wrong! Late adopters are screwed! What should the rules be, what should I do? Conversely, if the drugs include clear punishment with reward, people can fit outlier users into a comforting moral framework. "The addiction inspired his work but also drove him crazy." "She did brilliant work while addicted but died young of an overdose." Because the use seems to include its own punishment, the social shunning doesn't have to be as strong, and individuals can make the decision "that path is not for me" without resorting to moralizing absolutes.
Although athletes produce entertainment, they don't become dramatically more "productive" by taking steroids -- they're basically in a zero-sum status competition.
Can they? Certainly the can become dependent, experiencing withdrawal symptoms when they stop taking it, but do they develop a powerful long-lasting craving?
Sports isn't a results-oriented field. It's a deliberately artificial environment. How you play the game is at least as important as how many times you get the ball in the goal. If you get the ball in the goal the wrong way, that's often worse than if you hadn't done it at all.
I've often helped my dad as he volunteers with the homeless, and many of them are 'not productive members of society' due to mental illness (often brought on by drugs, including addiction but extending to permanent neurological damage). My dad, and many others, are searching for ways to make productive niches in society for people with 'mental disabilities'. I'm not sure I can endorse addict pride exactly, but I certainly think cultural acceptance of neurodiversity and addiction is a step in the right direction.
I believe that's the key. In a similar fashion, we (society) don't want kids to interfere with productivity, so we stuff them in kindergartens and schools so they are out of our way until they reach their 20s and can be regarded as fully productive. And we put old people in nursing homes for the same reason.
I wonder if the current practice of everyone hiring only "the best of the best" is suboptimal for society as a whole, since it leaves a lot of potential productivity on the society table: Someone with a disability might be (say) only 5-10% as productive as the average healthy adult, but add up everyone with some sort of disability and it sums to a nontrivial amount of underutilized capacity.
But I'm not sure. It's a game of numbers: There are administrative costs to hiring and managing (say) 10-20 people to do one person's job. If the "less productive" part of the population is small enough and the productivity difference between "less productive" and "more productive" is large enough, it could be a net productivity win to pay the "less productive" some small amount of money to go away and stop bothering the "more productive".
Which is essentially what we do today.
There are many factors at play, though, and maybe some people like their "neurodiversity". The way I see it, it's just a way to cope with the fact that these diseases are (currently) for the most part untreatable.
:)
Whenever I hear someone say how cool it is that they have ADHD and how happy they are about it I get very skeptical.
I don't want to armchair-diagnose people, but the inability to control you attention has serious downsides.
Another way of viewing it is that there is a dispute over where to draw the line between "normal human variation" and "mental illness". People agree at the extremes: there must be some variation in personalities and cognitive styles that is not mental illness (e.g., introversion is not a mental illness, but a personality trait), and also some that seems pretty clearly "ill" (like some kinds of psychosis). But where between them to draw the line is less obvious, which is why psychiatrists get together every few years to debate it in a revision to the main diagnostic manual. Besides Aspergers, one active area of debate within psychiatry at the moment is the paraphilias: is being into S&M a mental illness, for example, or just natural variation within the diversity of sexual preferences?
I never got into drugs, but I'm pretty sure that if I did I'd be a hopeless addict. I have had longstanding issues with video games and internet use. They contributed to my failing out of school.
That said, sometimes I wonder if it doesn't make me a better programmer. I lose focus with long debugging cycles, so I write better tools or learn my existing tools better. I have difficulty with routine tasks, so I've learned a lot more about automation (learn your editor, unix utilities, and a scripting language, kids!).
But heroin, man...not something you want to be goofing around with lightly.
But damn straight will I not drink more than 1 bottle of wine a week. I just don't need it. I enjoy a nice bottle on the weekend, but I just don't give a damn for more; I have too much fun activities in my life to choose from that don't benefit from being tipsy/drunk.
What do you live for?
I would tend to agree with that.
I find it harder to agree that addiction is similar. I'm glad that the article points out the serious problems associated with addiction.
I strongly agree that current law-enforcement action for addiction is not working and is probably harmful to society.
The article has a bit of correlation / causation stuff going on. It's hard to know with an individual whether MH problems are being self-treated by drug use, or were caused by drug use, or a bit of both. And it's impossible to say for the population of drug users. When people with problems turn to drugs I think most people would rather solve the problems than allow drug use.
Some people get addicted to exercise. They feel incomplete if they can't do their nightly run. Exercise alters your internal chemical composition. Just like food and other ingested substances. And coffee, mountain dew, beer, rum, mojito, etc. In the case of some of these its an extreme mix of all sugar, caffeine and alcohol - think JD and Coke.
With that kind of logic, though, someone could make a case about how having a low percentage of psychopaths could be a good thing for times that call for that kind of behavior (probably in some war situations). And I'm not talking about their psychopathy being beneficial to them, but them being beneficial to their tribe / village in those situations.
Anyhow, I don't have a particular example in mind and I'll refrain from giving a bad example instead.
Obviously, the author knows nothing about computer science, since a tolerance for repetition is pretty much a recipe for failure in computer science.
On the one hand, repetition expressed as writing the same code over and over again smells of poor engineering. Abstraction, code reuse, refactoring - all and productive means to avoid repetition.
I don't think that's what's the parent meant though. There IS a lot of secondary repetition in our field in terms of sitting at same desks every day, working long term on the same project, fixing similar types of. Ifs, responding to emails erc. Basically, the auxiliary facets that are required to be a good coder but don't directly involve coding are pretty repetitious.
Don't get me wrong - there are alternatives for some of these, working from home, better productivity tools, better management etc. but my experience in this career after 5 years leads me to believe there is a somewhat intrinsic aspect of repetition. To me, it's lot as assume, because as You were pointing out that good code doesn't involve repetition and I agree and am ok with it because of that.
Give me 100 random people, a year, the right environment, and some strong opiates, and I'll give you back 95 addicts.
While some might be more susceptible to drug addiction than others, getting addicted and forming dependence is nothing more than a process.
In general (outside the extremes of the dataset) your life's circumstances and details are more important to developing (and maintaining, and quitting) your drug habit than your brain chemistry is.
And that citation better reference some twin adoption studies.
It sounds to me like your comment was based more on personal belief than any hard facts.
But to respond:
There are plenty of people with excellent decision making processes who ended up as addicts.
It was nothing more than a process for them.
Doctors, lawyers, firemen, teachers, bankers, the list goes on and on.
You want to blame the pre-frontal cortex for the start, I blame using once, waking up feeling great, a few weeks later taking some more, feeling great, then 3 months later taking 3 times/week, then a year later 3 times/day.
It's a myth that taking something once will make you an addict. Well, it's true and a myth. It's true in that no one knows if they're one of the lucky 10% who are predisposed to this and will wake up, take another and end up like you say. But from a statistical point of view it's false for 90% of the population. Your description of taking it once, liking it and going back for more is accurate but it only holds true for a small number of people and doesn't take into account the different factors that play into what really makes an addict. It's far more complicated than that.
Again, you're responding to something I've not stated.
Taking a substance once does not make someone an addict.
What I've stated is it's the process that eventually leads to it. And that everyone is susceptible to it on some level given the right life circumstances (bad relationships, bad parents, boredom, too much money and time, certain friends, access to drugs, etc).