Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been tagged as “Substance dependence”
Neurologist and world-class Parkinson’s expert Professor A.J. Lees talks about William S. Burroughs, self-experimentation, ayahuasca, and his terrific medical memoir Mentored by a Madman: The William Burroughs Experiment. Download this episode (right click and save)
Why the current cultural fetish for zombies? In 2014’s Hooked, Nir Eyal ventures a guess: “Perhaps technology’s unstoppable progress—ever more pervasive and persuasive—has grabbed us in a fearful malaise at the thought of being involuntarily controlled.” We worry that we’ve become slaves to a tech-induced malady, argues Eyal, so we can relate to those ailing automatons on screen. Eyal may have a point. A recent study showed …
The pleasure and reward centers of the brain are activated similarly by dangerous drugs as well as by exercise, which is why therapies to treat drug addiction often include lots of exercise. Scientists say activating these pleasure and reward receptors in the brain could provide the “reward” of dangerous drugs without having to consume those drugs. The team at the …
The mystery of addiction — what it is, what causes it and how to end it — threads through most of our lives. Experts estimate that one in 10 Americans is dependent on alcohol and other drugs, and if we concede that behaviors like gambling, overeating and playing video games can be addictive in similar ways, it’s likely that everyone …
A year ago, as the summer of 2013 dawned, the Obama Administration was hit with yet another scandal, one that would resonate with Democrat and Republican voters: VA Hospitals around the country were falsifying appointment records in order to satisfy treatment quotas, leaving scores of veterans without care which led to the deaths of perhaps 1,000 men and women who had honorably served their …
Coloradans voted to legalize marijuana in November 2012, possession became legal early the next year, and legal marijuana sales began in January 2014. The sky hasn’t fallen, and the state has already seen a decrease in traffic fatalities, an increase in tax revenues, and the emergence of a $700 million a year pot industry, with all the economic benefits it …
Jail is not supposed to be where you put the mentally ill or those too poor to pay bail. Nor is it supposed to be where African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans and Asians go for crimes that don’t land white people behind bars. But that is what they are increasingly becoming. The primary purpose of jails, unlike prisons, is to …
