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Comment by Wintamute | Hacker News Reader

Around 1 in 20 people have personalities such that they're prone to addiction, to the extent that it can cause them to make questionable decisions. Drinking, smoking, sex, heroine, gambling, porn, work, party drugs, Subutex, anti-depressants, whatever, you name it. We need to stop prohibiting whatever activity/substance people actually get addicted to because its essentially arbitrary, and start compassionately treating the root psychological causes.

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1 in 20 ? I'd say most people are addicted to something. Whether that thing is authorized or not is another story, but the whole human race is seeking out what's pleasurable in life , and this often leads to addiction in one way or another. "Passion", "Interest" are just synonyms of addictive behaviours.

By "addiction" in this context I mean addictive personality disorder, in the psychopathological sense. i.e. people that become addicted to something to the extent that it becomes extremely physically or mentally damaging but they can't stop. That's quite different from most peoples pleasure seeking, which I agree can become somewhat habitual, but is much more harmless.

I'm sorry, but heroin is simply not in the same ball game as being a "workaholic" or looking at porn every day. These things work in different ways.

Heroine is powerfully addictive to those susceptible to addiction, which is not everybody. A percentage of the population are going to find their way to these things and then for a percentage of those people its going to become a problem. Arguably the most dangerous thing about such substances is the criminalisation and unclean-supply. I'm not saying we just let them check out of life and spend every day in a stupor. I'm saying we stop blaming and demonising the substances and start treating the many and varied situational and psychological issues that get people into bad places.

They actually all are primarily mediated through one pathway in your brain (ventral tegmental area having dopaminergic projections to the nucleus accumbens), so do, at their most basic level, work rather identically.

Anybody knows any estimate on how many are addicted to the internet?

And how about "addicted to programming"?

Addicted to reading, addicted to eating, addicted to...

I'm addicted to being awake 16 hours a day and asleep for 8 hours a day. If I don't drink several glasses of water a day, I'll go into withdrawal and die!

start compassionately treating the root psychological causes

How? Couldn't limiting access of an addicted person to the substance or activity the person is addicted to be one part of compassionate treatment? What research is there on this?

Limiting access to a substance or activity doesn't address the problem, which is the behavior. If the person in question ends up replacing it with a safer substance or activity, that may be somewhat better, but they may instead end up replacing it with something even more dangerous. It's a gamble and it doesn't even address the problem. Blaming inanimate objects for the actions of humans never really helps. It would be better to address the actual humans, their actions, and the causes instead. We just don't know how to do that yet. As a society, we aren't smart enough.

Well, not throwing them in jail with ludicrous sentences is probably a good start. I would look to Portugal for a template.

Unless the activity is demonstrably harmful to others nobody should have the right to actively limit or prohibit anybodies access to anything. Much less criminalise. How can it be moral to interfere with someone's autonomy like that? All we have the right to do is educate about the dangers and then help if help is welcome.

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