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Comment by ArbitraryLimits | Hacker News Reader

I remember from college my Econ 101 textbook had a sidebar on heroin use by military personnel in Vietnam - apparently (according to my memory of an unattributed source) 90% of personnel stationed in Vietnam tried heroin at least once, and then 89% of them stopped when they left.

Why an economics textbook? The authors were trying to illustrate 1) the role of substitutes on consumption of a particular good - there was no TV, no bridge club, no women except prostitutes to go out with, so heroin "cornered the market" on recreational activities, and 2) the fact that people will adjust consumption of almost any good in response to its changing price - heroin was incredibly cheap, so people took more of it.

Anyway, I always looked skeptically at claims that trying it once guarantees addiction after that.

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Heroin has properties attractive to people in a hopeless, brutal war beyond what they can get from bridge club. Self-medication is not exactly recreation.

You should also look skeptically at claims that having unprotected sex with possible HIV carriers guarantees that you will get HIV. But you should still put a goddamn condom on.

"to people in a hopeless, brutal war"

Exactly. Because it's heroin combined with other shit going on that almost certainly causes brain changes and chemical reactions on it's own.

So heroin in combo with war is not the same as heroin while visiting disney world on a nice summer day on your vacation (clearly my hypothesis nothing to back this up).

(There is by the way another "addictive" type behavior that starts at a time in ones life that, while not at war, is a time of deep changes in personality as well as hormonal changes. My hypothesis also suggests that this would add to the addictive nature of this activity as well in some people.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park

tl:dr; Rats given access to their choice of clean water and morphine water, and placed in two enclosures: Rat cage and rat park. Rats living in a miserable rat cage will develop a morphine habit. Rats living in a pleasant rat park will avoid the morphine. Rats moved from rat cage to rat park easily kick their morphine habit after a brief period of withdrawal symptoms.

tl:dr;tl:dr;

Rats self-medicate with morphine IFF life is crap.

That's the premise of the article we're discussing. They mention that experiment specifically.

It's not so much try it once and you're hooked, but for a certain percentage of those who do try it can get hooked in the first try. For many or most others, it takes persistent use (which will often happen when the first try doesn't get them hooked).

Illicit drugs are not immune to the placebo effect, either. When people are bombarded with messages that illicit drugs are irresistibly pleasurable, they are primed to overrate the effects when they try them. Reality is always complicated.

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