And punishment is not the cure. This video summarizes the problems in our current war on drugs.
One quibble: near the end, it seems to imply that online social interactions aren’t real, and are even addictive substitutes for the real thing — we’re supposed to get together with our friends physically. I have to disagree: you can form good relationships online, and having a conversation in a chat room can be richer and more productive than going to a bar or a bowling alley, for many of us.
The war on drugs has always been bullshit. It was a handy excuse to militarize police, and pretend federal monies were being spent well. It’s one seriously bad joke.
PZ:
Yes. I’m easily exhausted when it comes to physical social interaction. I much prefer online socialization, where I can wander off when it all gets to be too much.
Also, about online relationships – I’ve been able to make friends with a fair number of people who live a very long way away from me – if I restricted my relationships to those which are physical, that would exclude those people, who are important to me.
conflicted response to follow:
YES, There is value in communication, online or in-person..
Yet there is a significant form of communication, purely visual, dependent on “body language”. Seeing someone’s physical response to one’s words, sometimes, says “more than words”. Possible, putting one’s thoughts/emotions into keyboard typing is an inherent “filter”, while “body language” bypasses the filter.
Having been through both kinds, I strongly advocate the IRL over OnLine style interactions. Yes time management is an issue with IRL, yet maybe that’s part of the benefit.
correct, don’t dismiss either one as superfluous, both are valuable. Ranking one as better than the other, is open for discussion.
Very interesting, and it makes a lot of sense. I’m looking around my house right now and wondering which addiction I should spend some time with next. Maybe I should go take a walk in the park instead, since the sun’s out. I might even bump into an old friend.
Can anyone suggest why they might have chosen to put the Tardis in the background of one of those family scenes?
slithey tove @ 3:
And there I have a problem, with your advocating – if meatspace works best for you, great. It doesn’t work best for me, or a whole lot of other people I know. I’ve made long-term (well over a decade), deep relationships with people online. Most of those people also prefer online interaction.
I’m all for doing whatever makes you feel best and comfortable, and that is all that I’d advocate, because I don’t know what might be best for each person.
Okay, my wireless finally allowed me to watch. I’m a bit leery about the cheerful pronouncement about Vietnam vets. I was around when vets were coming home, and there wasn’t a whole lot of bliss going around – people were angry about the war, and treated the vets like shit, and a great number of them had a very difficult time reconnecting with family, and society in general, and many of them had PTSD (shell shock, battle fatigue), which was utterly ignored back then, dismissed as goldbricking and the like. I don’t know that I buy the whole “95%” dropped their addiction like magic – that’s not what I saw.
People have been making fearful pronouncements about disconnection, not knowing all your neighbours, and so on, for quite a long time now. That was going on prior to the internet, too. People who are introverted, people who are shy, people who have problems in social situations, such as being unable to read situations or people, etc., are almost always ignored when it comes to “meatlife is the solution to…!” pronouncements. Meatlife connections aren’t an answer for a lot of people, they are however, stressful and often harmful. Just as for a lot a people, family is a toxic brew of assorted poison, while for others, a source of joy and a lifeline. I have problems with generalizing and extrapolating anything to cover all people.
There is a problem with people falling through societal cracks (more like chasms), but it takes much more than the idea of rat park to fix everything. The bottom line always comes back to having effective societal safety nets for all people, without a majority of people screaming about welfare, laziness, and the like. (I know, that was part of the video, but only applied to drug addicts). Here in the States, we’re a long, long way from providing anything resembling a safety net to people, and the business of victim blaming is damn near a sport.
re Caine@5:
I agree. I too, find much value in online relationships over long times, maintaining relationship over large distance is also worthwhile and valuable. My@3 was reaction to PZ’s final quibble about preferring online to IRL. I was just voicing disagreement, that IRL is also quite valuable and should not be dismissed; essentially shielding oneself electronically. First analogy brought to mind might be telephone conversations vs face-to-face. ack. take that where thoute will.
I didn’t say I preferred online to IRL. I would actually say that real-life interactions are essential. But online interactions are an excellent way to extend communication with more people, and bring new features to your life.
An important feature that is necessarily shared by “face to face” and telephonic conversations, and can be shared by some kinds of on-line conversations, is that they are synchronic: if, in a “face to face” communication, party A says something and party B just doesn’t respond at all (verbally, non-verbally, whatever), then the communication cannot fairly (at that point) be called a “conversation” (the unwritten but very formalized rules of conversation, in which “turns” play a fundamental role, just don’t allow that). The opposite feature, that of being asynchronous, is necessarily shared by some other kinds of conversation (postal correspondence, telegraphy, e-mail) and can be shared by some others (texting, commenting on blogs or listservs).
Some people, for reasons I can’t personally fathom, really get uneasy with asynchronous electronic communication; and others do so for reasons that I can fathom and really, really hate. As an example of the latter, there was a faculty listserv at my institution of last employment that had periods of incredibly fruitful conversational discussion of important issues which were regularly destroyed by the efforts of one or two powerful (tenured, and purportedly left-wing though form my point of view purely authoritarian) professors who would terrorize small coteries of unpowerful (untenured, and actually left-wing as far as I could tell) professors, by using (among other tools) calls for “face-to-face” meetings which (of course) never materialized; it seemed (and still seems) clear to me that the destroyers were motivated by their (correct) perception that some kinds of bullying (which ones? that depends on the social / institutional framework) are more effective “face to face”.
I like asynchrony, particularly when the conversation in question is (or, is for me) about topics where somewhat complicated ideas may need to be developed. But clearly lots of people don’t like asynchrony, even in that context. Going back to the faculty listserv in question, at one point in one of those eventually aborted conversations, I spoke up for the virtues of asynchrony by pointing out something that I thought could hardly be controversial in that context, namely, that CLEARLY every subscriber to it (by virtue of being, after all, not only a Ph.D. but a Ph.D. in a tenure-line job at a Small Private Research University) was highly skilled in writing and reasoning. Many respondents got really angry, and one (not yet tenured, but clearly soon to be tenured—as was soon the case, and not only because he brought in more NIH money than anyone else on campus) somehow concluded that I was bullying him by my claim. (I immediately apologized without reservation.) Now, perhaps in “face to face” conversation our body-language would have kept that from happening.
Now I’m rambling, so I’ll stop.
While there are many good points in that video, there are also some things that are oversimplified and also not very helpful.
First of all, the idea is evoked that if people only have happy lives than the substance will not cause addiction. All those people with hip replacements are fine, right?
Then there’s the problem of the “social interaction” (combined with the substance issue): If just having lots of friends and social contact makes you immune to addiction, how come there are smokers? Because until recently smoking was a very social activity.
Third it evoked the impression that addiction is something that’s “new”: We get bigger flats but have less “real friends” and now we become addicted. Doesn’t make sense. People have fled the pain in their lives for centuries by using drugs. It’s just that nobody thought of it as really a problem or the problems that came from it were covered up (anybody have an alcoholic in their family?)
Which leads me to the most important issue with this, and I admit that I’m probably lashing out because fuck you, it’s gaslighting as hell: The “friends and family” thingy again. Most addicts will blame everybody but themselves for they shit they’re in and their family is first in the line. So if the problem is just that they didn’t have the “rat park” family then really, it’S not their fault* at all but really those horrible family members of theirs are to blame. If they were just nicer, just kinder, if they cared more…
*fault, blame and guilt are difficult concepts when talking about addicts and addiction.
I totally agree that the war on drugs is bullshit and that prevention is the key. In German there’s a saying “Sucht kommt von Suche”: Addiction cames from searching. Yes, a rat park for humans is a really good idea, for all sorts of reasons. But in the end we ain’t rats.
Also agree on the “meatspace vs internet interactions” with Caine. Bull-fucking-shit.
sorry I misinterpreted PZ’s comment.
Kind of Nthing Caine and Gilliel on the online vs. face to face thing. Online interactions are what I have because the circumstances of my life have left me isolated and poorly socialized with a lot of anxiety about interacting face to face with people. I’m not disputing that people need actual physical interaction but I would dearly love if we could ditch the glib comments about people sheilding themselves with electronics and dismissing IRL relationships as if people like me are wilfully and flippantly abandoning human contact to “hide” behind our computers.
Giliell @ 10:
I’m right here, lashing with you. I agree completely. As for the whole “new” business, I wish people would just fucking stop. You can go back as far as you like, and there are humans, looking for an altered state. How many people wandered about sucking on their bottle of [laudanum] medicine? How many people were digging coca leaves? And going back to war veterans, a fucktonne of civil war vets were morphine addicts after being dosed on the stuff for injuries. They didn’t just give up because they were back with family. Fuck, I’ve been on morphine more than once (medically), and that is some very nice stuff.
Right now, I’ve been subjected to “agreements” (no agreeing on my part) submitting to random drug testing because I take pain meds. If I want to continue getting said meds, I must be a good monkey and continually prove that I’m not abusing the drugs, as in taking enough to actually deal with pain, because that would not be a good thing, nope. That shit is a direct result of the “war on drugs” crap. Honestly, it would be easier to do this shit outside the legal methods.
Funny thing that. The closest I was to substance addiction (alcohol), it was during my times on the uni. I had plenty of “in real life” contact with friends with whom I drunk a lot. After I graduated and outside of work had spent most of the time alone and/or online, the alcohol has lost its allure and I indulge very rarely and very little.
In my experience, alcohol and cigarettes (and lately marihuana) seem to be for a lot of people social drugs – I know smokers who smoke only in the pub with friends for example. A lot of these drugs – especially smoking – people start using under peer pressure in order to fit in. And I know only one smoker who was actually able to stop smoking and not relapse (yet – after twenty years) despite being goaded by his drinking buddies about it. And I know many who tried to quit and failed multiple times, despite being supported by friends and family.
Then there are withdrawal symptoms, which are for some drugs very severe and can be even deadly. They definitively cannot be attributed simply to psyche only, drugs do have impact on the whole metabolism and the body- and there is a huge variation in how individual people react.
So the thing is clearly more complicated than the video implies, and addiction is a multifaceted thing. At the very least there are two components – psychical and physiological. Social interaction can help only with the first of those and even that not alwasy – and in some cases social interaction and/or culture is the cause of the addiction (as already said with smoking)!
But interesting video nevertheless.
I remember you posted a while back about an excerpt from Chasing the Scream about Billie Holiday, but I don’t know if you’ve read the book yet. If not, I recommend it highly.
Charly @ 14:
That is probably my biggest problem with videos, books, philosophies of help and so forth – they necessarily try a blanket approach, but that’s rarely effective.
Wasn’t one of the reasons for the War on Drugs in the first place was to distract the public from how poorly the Vietnam War was going?
The idea that online relationships aren’t “real” is – and always has been – absurd. With the kind of connectivity we have nowadays I can text/selfie and face-chat with anyone, anytime. My friends and I are more connected than ever.
I grew up in the late 60s, when you travelled to another country you sent your friends postcards that sometimes got there, were often mashed, if not lost outright. That was an improvement over a smartphone selfie.. how? It didn’t improve my penmanship, which remains resolutely bad.
I wonder if the root of the “real” thing is that purely online friends can’t – you know – bump genitalia. Because that’s just about the only thing you can do with your “real” friends that you can’t do online. I took a friend for a walk in the tulieries in paris one fine spring day… Sure, she was embodied in an iPhone at the time, but she was as “there” as I was. I wasn’t holding her hand (I would have liked to) but I was holding her in my hand. Close enough for typographical error.
There are some things we gain from “real” social contact. It’s important for me to have a partner groom the fleas out of my pelt and occasionally dig ticks out of my hide. There are social rituals involving food; mostly to do with having the lid of the sriracha bottle partially unscrewed when nobody’s looking. Spooning when you go to sleep is great, and the occasional slide of skin on skin is memorable as hell. A lot of the literature on alcoholism, co-dependence, and addiction has been sneakily infested with religion: “higher power” and bullshit like that. I wonder if the “real” social contact people are setting up the same kind of false-flag operation.
Microraptor @ 17:
It was more to cover the militarization of police, outfitting them with urban tanks, lots and lots and lots of guns, basically all SWAT equipment, and an excuse was needed for using all that shit. The so-called war also suited the hypocritical streak of puritanism which runs throughout the States. Then there was the “look, we’re doing something!” distraction, while a fucktonne of people got tossed into prison, and never should have even gotten near one.
The whole thing is a fucking mess and a half, and it won’t be fixed by continuing this bullshit. I’m constantly being told I’m underweight (the stuff I like to eat isn’t high calorie), and keep hearing that I need to eat more high calorie foods. Well, if I smoke a joint to get an appetite for high calorie stuff, I’ll get punished.
I’ll apparently keep digging that hole I’m trying to dig out of, so here goes:
This very thread is a prime example of a conflict between online discussion v meatspace discussion. And an example of why i tried to highlight the value of personal contact vs virtual. Note I keep popping back in to throw out my personal opinions, I too find great personal value in online interactions. Where I consider this space more real than most gatherings IRL. Maybe a case where “tone of voice” conveys meaning (rather than virtual tone, of grammar and word choice). My hesitance and style of voice would say what is hard to convey textually: with nods, sighs, etc along the way. Every response, to my responses, so far, have been taken as insights I failed to express in my writings. so I seem to be writing myself into a counterexample of my first argument, so I go try to untangle myself offline for a moment.
Caine
Fuck, I’m sorry. Nobody should have to go through this because they’re in pain.
Yeah, I’m sick and tired of this modernity hatin’. This longing for an idyllic past that never actually existed but that usually ends in some kind of “those damn women being selfish. If they just went back to being SAHM, properly obeying their husbands and makin’ lots of kids everything would be allright”.
As for online friends: Lots of people on Pharyngual held my virtual hand during what was a severe crisis during my life. Online support was exactly what I couldn’t get offline exactly because of the differences in the form of communication.
Giliell @ 21:
:Snort: Isn’t that always waiting in the wings, regardless of the subject?
If you’ve not seen it, then I would highly recommend The House I Live In if you want an intelligent and compassionate perspective on the impact, history, and legacy of the disasterous War on Drugs.
Speaking of Rat Park, I just brought in some wild catmint for my rats, who gleefully got a bit stoned, and are now munching M&Ms. That’s one of the problems with something like Rat Park – it’s an ideal which is dependent on being pretty rigid. There’s no room for mild altered states, nor is their room in that model for ‘family’ members who are mean, or aggressive, or non-social, or whatever else beings might be.
As one of those guys coming back from Southeast Asia in the late 60s,I’d suggest that the bad treatment of vets by the general population has been highly exaggerated. PTSD has been recognized since at least WWI as a real condition. It was called “Shell Shock,” then and during and after WWII it was called “Combat Fatigue.” I’m not sure when it morphed into Post Traumatic Stress.
Second, I wonder why this is coming out again since the major research was done in the 70s I think.
Third, it does seen remarkably good for a video that is under 5 minutes long. You want subtlety read the book[s?].
This was created in collaboration with Johann Hari. A person who:
Be advised that some of the facts in this video may not be, in fact, facts, while others might be over-simplification.
Kurtzgesagt tends a bit on the conspirationisty and naturalistic fallacy-y side of things. Double checking is in order.
#26, you can go to http://brucekalexander.com/ the guy who did the original study to see what he has to say directly.
Or you might read this which he wrote just recently: http://brucekalexander.com/articles-speeches/281-rat-park-versus-the-new-york-times
Hari acknowledges and regrets his previous mistakes in the book. In this work, he’s meticulous about referencing his sources, including the research articles on which some of the statements in the video are based (if rather simplistically).* He sent the chapters about people he interviewed and described (including Bruce Alexander) to those people themselves to get their feedback and corrections, and put audio of the quoted portions of the interviews on the book’s site. He also has a page on the site where people can let him know of any errors to be corrected in future editions.
*I don’t understand why he – or the editors – plunk the links to the endnotes randomly in the middle of sentences, but that’s another matter.
slithey tove @20:
I don’t see any such conflict. And I understand that you value personal contact to the extent that you do. Do you understand why others place a great value on online interactions?
This is one of those areas where I don’t think one needs to advocate for online vs real life. Everyone’s situation is different. Everyone’s needs and desires are different. What works best for you doesn’t work best for others. In fact, one person’s preferences could be another person’s idea of a nightmare. It all comes down to the individual and what they feel works best for them. It’s not like there’s any harm involved in having a preference for communicating in one medium over the other. If there were some harm, then I could see advocating one over the other.
I spent a great deal of my life trapped in an offline hell (because there was no online option then.) I’ve done my time trying to interact person to person. I’ve been shunned, betrayed, and made to understand I absolutely fail at Other People. Entirely. These days, other than my daughter, my entire ‘in real life’ interactions are ones I just cannot get out of, like when buying groceries, or getting a pizza at Little Caesar’s, or some sort of appointment I can’t put off.
Personally, for this aspie, in my perfect world, every conversation ever should occur via devices even when the people having it are sitting side by side (but not close enough to touch). My discovering life online has led to, basically having a life like people around me talk about constantly, except it’s what, imaginary? I’m good with that. A life with friends, real friends who are there when I need them, who really get me. All the things nearly everyone in my so-called “better” “real” offline life have never given much of a shit about where it concerns. (Although of course they could do better, treat me better, had I not always insisted on being ‘that way’.)
Also, *applause* for Tony’s 31. Seriously. Thank you.
As for the addiction part, I agree that blanket anything just never covers everyone.
re Tony@31:
apologies, once again, for my inability to express myself cogently. When I wrote of the conflict between online against personal interaction, I was referring to the conflict within myself, regarding the two modes.
Both modes are valuable, not disputing that.
I have not been trying to rank either one as better than the other. My first response was from misunderstanding PZ’s OP as ranking one as not as good as the other. So I was merely trying to highlight the value of the one I mistakenly thought PZ was almost dismissing.
I keep stumbling at it, so I’m still trying to clarify what I started trying to say. To reiterate, the reason I keep trying to clarify my expressions, because I do find this online discussion quite valuable. Almost to a degree of dependency.
I know the way to dig out of a hole is to stop digging. Yet trying to drag oneself up the side of the hole one’s in can look a lot like digging further. I’m trying to claw my way back to the surface. Thank you for reading.
slithey tove @33:
IMO, you’re not digging a hole. You’re finding where you personally stand on the issue. Along the way you’ve expressed yourself in a manner that others have found confusing. As such, you’ve been trying to clarify yourself. That’s another benefit-for me at least-when it comes to online experiences. I find I am better able to express my thoughts online than in meatspace, bc I can say what I want, but before I hit submit, I can reflect on my words and ensure that my intent is expressed as clearly as possible. It’s not that I can’t do that in meatspace, but it’s more difficult.
I hope this doesn’t come off the wrong way, bc I mean nothing condescending about it, but I think your experiences in this thread could be beneficial to you. You’ve admitted that you haven’t expressed your thoughts as well as you’d hoped. Unlike a meatspace conversation, you can go back at any time and look at your comments and look at the responses they garnered and look to see where the disconnect is. That affords you the opportunity to figure out how best to explain your thoughts and opinions in online interactions in the future.
****
roachiesmom:
Thank you.
Incidentally, if you want to social chat, I set up a thread several months ago at my blog that serves as a replacement for the Lounge (you’ll likely recognize the names of many others from the Lounge and around Pharyngula). You can reach the Speakeasy here.
I read “Chasing the Scream” and it is a fascinating history of addiction, the war on drugs, and the sociology of addiction, and I highly recommend it. However, (and I emailed the author about this) there is a large chapter missing from his book. There is very little about the actual biologic science of addiction, including the biochemistry, molecular biology, and genetic explosion of knowledge growing every day. Yes, behavioral and social issues are an enormous component of the big tent of addiction. But what about those 5% of returning GIs that remained addicted? Were they all socially isolated? I know some extremely social people who could not /can not control their addictions without help. Why does the tendency to addiction run in families (not all in the same household)? There are genetic and biologic variations that make some people much more susceptible to addiction. The truth is, some grandmothers do become addicted after breaking their hip and being on meds. Why? Witness the current epidemic resurgence of heroin use due to prescription pill addiction. I take care of the withdrawing babies of addicted women, and there is an epidemic. These are not all lonely people, and I know they are having lots of sex. The book is an incomplete picture, and a human rat park will not solve the problem.