The Flower contrasts a utopian society that freely farms and consumes a pleasure giving flower with a society where the same flower is illegal and its consumption is prohibited. The animation is a meditation on the social and economic costs of marijuana prohibition.
UCLA ETC is experimenting with a Second Life virtual model called “Meth-Apartment.” Here is a description of it:
The ETC “Meth-Apartment” is a highly adaptable 3-D environment that has been built within the online virtual world of Second Life. The model is being applied to behavioral pharmacology research concerning treatment methods for stimulant dependence. The environment is a photo-realistic, interactive virtual space intended to recreate the every day life experiences faced by stimulant addicts. Specifically the “Meth-Apartment” serves to elicit cue-induced cravings for methamphetamine, which then may be manipulated using novel pharmacotherapies in an attempt to elucidate the underlying neurological mechanism involved in drug craving and relapse. The model was developed using self-reports provided by methamphetamine users and the creativity of Itay Zaharovits, an ETC researcher with a background in real Architecture and virtual environment designs, and Christopher Culbertson, an Interdepartmental Program Neuroscience Ph.D. student specializing in addiction medicine. Future research will employ the “Meth-Apartment” paradigm to improve cognitive behavioral treatments and exam drug taking behavior in a naturalistic environment. Preliminary results from research utilizing the “Meth-Apartment” indicate a significant improvement over traditional cue exposure methods such as exposure to cue videos and drug paraphernalia.
(H/t: Mind Hacks.)
When it comes to people recovering from addictions we typically see few successes and so many more failures. Add to this fact, addicts who are also parents seem incapable of recovering fast enough or for long enough periods of time to effectively raise their children. The fact is addicts can’t parent if they are not actively and always in recovery.
Of all the programs that attempt to treat drug and alcohol addiction we encounter none have matched the power and effectiveness of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). Community and accountability are built around taking responsibility for your own struggle and witnessing the struggles of others. It becomes in affect a storytelling model of addiction and recovery. But, any process of recovery needs a willing and able participant who can and feels he must make the long journey to stay drug and alcohol free.
Even though we view AA as the best hope for many who are trying to recover the devastating toll of addiction without recovery for most addicts remains. To put AA in context and check in with where this program is at Wired has an excellent article titled “Secret of AA: After 75 Years, We Don’t Know How It Works” by Brendan I. Koerner. Here is an excerpt:
The organization is notoriously difficult to study, thanks to its insistence on anonymity and its fluid membership. And AA’s method, which requires “surrender” to a vaguely defined “higher power,” involves the kind of spiritual revelations that neuroscientists have only begun to explore.
What we do know, however, is that despite all we’ve learned over the past few decades about psychology, neurology, and human behavior, contemporary medicine has yet to devise anything that works markedly better. “In my 20 years of treating addicts, I’ve never seen anything else that comes close to the Drew Pinsky, the addiction-medicine specialist who hosts VH1’s Celebrity Rehab. “In my world, if someone says they don’t want to do the 12 steps, I know they aren’t going to get better.”
(Also checkout the book Addiction: A Disorder of Choice by Gene M. Heyman.
Addiction Inbox has another great post, this one titled “A High Old Time in Rhode Island” about the government’s annual state-by-state survey of drug use in America put out by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). Here is an excerpt:
The most meaningful change compared to the 2002-2003 period was a 2.5 per cent decrease in the use of cocaine among people 12 or older. Nationwide, the percentage of alcohol use remained almost identical (51.4 per cent).
Judith Warner has an article at NYT Magazine titled “Dysregulation Nation.” Here is an excerpt:
In the late 1970s, the historian Christopher Lasch famously described America as a culture of narcissism. Today we might well be called a nation of dysregulation. The signs that something is amiss in our inner mechanisms of control and restraint are everywhere. Eating disorders, “in general a disorder of self-regulation,” according to Darlene M. Atkins, director of the Eating Disorders Clinic at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, grew epidemic in the past few decades, and in recent years have spread to minority communities, younger girls, older women and boys and men too. Obesity is viewed in many cases by mental-health experts as another form of self-dysregulation:a “pathologically intense drive for food consumption” akin to drug addiction, in the words of Nora D. Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and Charles P. O’Brien, a professor in the department of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, who have argued for including some forms of obesity as a mental disorder in the coming version of the psychiatric bible, the DSM-V.
Lecture by Professor Philip Zimbardo, also check out the book he mentions by Robert Levine titled A Geography of Time: The Temporal Misadventures of a Social Psychologist, or How Every Culture Keeps Time Just a Little Bit Differently.
(H/t: Nerdcore.)
Another confessional to add to the pile. The NYT has an article about literary agent/author Bill Clegg and his book Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man: A Memoir. Here is an excerpt from the article:
There’s the first time he tried crack. (“The taste is like medicine, or cleaning fluid, but also a little sweet, like limes.”) The tryst with a taxi driver behind a 7-Eleven in Newark. (“What I want is the blurry oblivion of body-crashing sex.”) Or the time that his boyfriend, a downtown filmmaker who goes by the pseudonym Noah in the book, watches as Mr. Clegg smokes crack and has sex in a hotel room with a $400-an-hour Brazilian prostitute named Carlos. (“Shame, pleasure, care, and approval collide and the worst of the worst no longer seems so bad.”)
Just as painful are the interspersed flashbacks to a childhood tormented by a bizarre inability to urinate when he wanted to. Here, he reverts to the third person. “The boy is a panicked animal — jerking and jumping and pinching before the bowl,” Mr. Clegg writes, recalling a bathroom incident at home when he was 5. “In that streaking moment when he loses control and everything fades out in a flash of pain and relief, he will spray the wall, the floor, the radiator, himself.”
(Also read an excerpt from the book at New York Magazine.)
