[Hash Zeppelin]

This is a great piece from one of the smartest scientist I know. Read his article and give him some love.

https://medium.com/@joelfinkelstein/...63a#.vgbgcxakv


This is your brain on the war on drugs
By Joel Finkelstein.

Since Nixon’s famous proclamation in 1971 for “an all out offensive” in the war on drugs, the US government has funneled a trillion dollars into the effort. What do we have to show for the spoils of this war? Addiction rates have remained stable for the past decade, while over half the population of our federal prisons enter for drug related offenses. Perhaps the war on drugs has failed because it fundamentally fails to understand addiction itself. As neuroscience makes new ground on the inner workings of drugs in the brain, it is time for us to take a much needed brain’s eye view of addiction to better understand how to best combat it. To fundamentally re-think our approach to addiction requires we understand not just the experience of drug reward but the role that our environment and context play in the cycle of use.
What exactly does context have to do with drug reward? The incredible high experienced in the use of drugs does not solely associate with the act of injection or ingestion itself, but the entire series of events and places that accommodate the episode:
It is the plan that got you there. It is the feel and texture of the environment. It is the people who you got it from, and interacted with. It is the feelings of ecstasy and jubilation that run through you…
The reward of the drug reinforces all the events that correspond with its use, a form of context learning which constitutes an essential feature of how the brain processes reward broadly.
From the brain’s view, opioids, alcohol or stimulants all cause distinct and complicated patterns of brain activity but they all possess something chiefly in common. They strongly activate the dopaminergic midbrain, a structure which plays a vital role in reward learning. It is here, when the alcohol hits, when the stimulant lands, when the opioid kicks in, that these drugs trigger rushes of blood and electrical currents, and cause the release of a flood of dopamine across innumerable terminals in the brain. The terminals reach into several key structures and signal that whatever has just happened merits incredible importance, and the brain’s state must be rewarded to more strongly reinforce our previous actions.
Research in modern neuroscience and psychology portrays a rich account of these association processes that accompany addiction in the brain and behavior. We know, for instance, that the cues and context associated with drugs of abuse can trigger relapse in abstinent animals and acute drug seeking in animals that stably administer drugs to themselves. In other words, the contexts of addiction comprise a stable prompt to instigate drug use itself. To put it more plainly here is how the brain encodes drug learning:
It is the plan that got you there.
The prefrontal cortex (PFC) orchestrates our internal goals into dynamic action plans. From the moment the dopamine is released, the goal and the plan are rewarded. We can become addicted to the goal, addicted to the plan.
It is the feel and texture of the environment.
The hippocampus encodes episodic memories, but also maps our surrounding environment and seems to tie our memories to environments themselves. From the moment the dopamine is released, we can become addicted to the environment, addicted to the context.
It is the people you got it from and interacted with.
The insular cortex, prefrontal cortex and a wide network of brain based activity accompanies the act of social behavior and the specific people associated with the drug become tied to this reinforcement. Indeed, studies show that amongst young people, interactions with peers who encourage use signify a substantial risk factor in outcomes for relapse, a problem made all the more difficult in the age of ubiquitous online sociality.
It was the feelings of ecstasy and jubilation that ran through you.
The amygdala, a region known to be involved in the experience of emotional valence and arousal, receives a flood of dopamine. The moment dopamine pours in, the emotional state is reinforced, the memory of the amazing high persists. Worse, research indicates that cells in the amygdala activate powerfully during abstinence and withdrawal, causing pangs of longing and distress for the pathological reward.
What was initially a goal directed experience to obtain a high can rapidly evolve into a habitual state of behavior to avoid this misery of abstinence. The saddest feature of addiction lies in this cruel migration from novel thrill seeking to compulsive desperation. The addict cannot feel well without his or her fix and the addict can perpetually return to any available context of addiction, no matter how cruel or illegal, to pursue that end.
New insights into drug craving illuminate just how profound the lengths of that search can reach. In animals models, recent work highlights that animals who are more susceptible to drug seeking will go through numerous shocks in order to obtain drug reward. Got that? The pain that deters most of us from ruining our lives translates into an entirely suitable context for drug abuse to the particularly susceptible.
What this finding, and others like it, make clear is that lawmakers are not neuroscientists. By way of proof they have designed a war-on-drugs which fundamentally neglects our new insights into how the brain orchestrates addiction at its very core. Since those who are addicts will go to incredible lengths to reinforce the contexts in which they consume these drugs, we literally could not have devised a worse system to reliably produce such awful contexts to become addicted to. Taken together, what our new findings make clear is that the war on drugs reinforces the very criminal context it nominally aims to prevent.
When we criminalize drugs and drug users, we ensure that the context of drug use minimizes the well being of every addict and habitually returns the brain toward shame, illegality, secrecy and depravity. Know what else drives relapse to drugs of abuse? Stress and social isolation. We reinforce jails. We reinforce drug dealers. We reinforce violence. We reinforce the associated contexts of every other criminal enterprise that accommodates drug use. We habitually re-create a tragedy wherein the solution causes its own problem. Yet we can’t seem to kick the habit, no matter what evidence of harm we rationally demonstrate. It is time for us to take the first step and admit we need help, admit we have a problem. We are addicted to the war on drugs…
As the UN General Assembly Special Session on Drugs (UNGASS) re-convened for the first time in nearly 20 years this month in New York two key realizations dawned across the global imagination. The first is that the war on drugs has fundamentally failed, by any reasonable standard: From drug epidemiology to the spread of organized crime to ballooning jail sentences. The second is that policymakers face a renaissance in new treatment options and plans of proven efficacy.
Numerous countries, including Portugal and the Netherlands decriminalize and legally administer drugs in treatment centers and evidence powerful impacts on outcomes for addiction and public health. From diminished drug abuse levels and fewer jail sentences, to reduction in HIV transmission, why have these decriminalization programs, in combination with humane treatment centers proven so effective? Perhaps because they accord with the psychological and neurological basis of context learning in addiction.
While we declare a war on drugs to prevent an environment of addiction these countries instead cleverly seek to use the context of addiction to wage the war on drugs. In a form of social and scientific Ju-jitsu, decriminalization and humane treatment options reward a context of addiction that maximizes the chances of breaking that addiction itself. Since addicts will seek out the context of addiction irrespective of the harm it causes them or society, the brilliance of humane decriminalization lies in ensuring that this context be the most productive one users can seek for everyone involved.
The plan that got you there becomes the treatment center’s plan to monitor drug use in order to facilitate a transition to drug free life. If you use drugs in such a context, that has a chance to become the new plan dopamine is reinforcing.
The feel and texture of the environment becomes a safe space to invite disclosure, seek aid and avoid the collateral devastations of HIV, hepatitis and the numerous other plagues that piggy back onto unsafe contexts of abuse. The context of drug use itself becomes reinforced as the very home of its treatment.
The people you got it from and interacted with are professionals who have the goal of establishing secure and trusting relationships, a known prophylactic against relapse and abuse.
The power of a humane, enriched and highly social environment stands out as one of the most redundant and proven preventatives for drug abuse in the scientific literature. Animals in enriched and social environments refrain from drug seeking and drug relapse with astonishing consistency and a treatment based on these principles could not accord more closely with a modern understanding addiction itself.
This is a moment where we can fundamentally realign our civic responsibility to fight the social ills of addiction squarely with new scientific insights into how the brain can best resist it. It just so happens that after 40 years of a war on drugs, the best available evidence suggests that our greatest hope lies in a treatment environment free from criminal blame and full of profound humanization, mutual support and strong social attachment.

[420somewhere]

Good read

[Gry]

Recently heard a member of the Nixon Administration state openly how they used the issue of drugs to go after "undesirables" ---blacks and the antiwar crowd. They knew well that it was wrong, but they also knew it would be effective and that they could get away with it.

[Hash Zeppelin]

The federal government admittedly flooded heroin and coke into black neiborhoods to weaken them, and discredit the black panthers.

[asaf]

“You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/...-all/?single=1

I read this weeks back... I think this can be the source.

[Hash Zeppelin]

I think there is multiple sources he used.

[Gypsy Nirvana]

Q...How do the 1% reinforce their own security?
A....By convincing the 99% that there is a threat that they have to go to war over, and pay for with much blood, sweat and tears, the health and lives of loved ones, and their own tax dollars.

This creates much industry that the 1% profit from enormously, and at the same time enables the 1% to militarize and spend more of the 99%'s tax money, on the weapons, staff, and services that the 1% have manufactured and profit from...immensely... while reinforcing their own security.

During the late 1920's, the USA did not have an external or internal war to feed the greed of the 1%, so one was invented, and it has come to be known as....'The War on Drugs'.... and it's now been going on for over 80 years, and the TRILLION DOLLARS PLUS that it has cost the 99%, the abject pain, misery and suffering that it has spawned is still propagated by the powers that be (the 1%)....because it is so damn profitable to them, and helps the 1% to control the 99% with fear and whole industries that flourish off the back of this un-just war against the 99% who's taxes and lives pay for it all.