[ExI] addiction

[William Flynn Wallace]

Your plan of referring people to a treatment centre paid in part instead of
punishment is the most desirable idea, but will still only work if the
person wants to stop using, or has realised they have a problem and doesn't
know what to do.

Nuala

Here's a problem with that.  Of course an arrested addict is going to say
he is willing to change if his alternative is some form of punishment.
Some will lie.  As for wanting to stop using, I'll bet you'll get a lot of
"Yes, I really need to" that is just a form of delusion.

One reason I was able to quit both tobacco and alcohol is that for both I
was really tired of wanting to quit.  A second factor was pride: 'Just who
is in charge of this body anyway.?  Me or this drug?'

Yeah, we could all tell war stories endlessly.  I once took up smoking
again after a month without because of a fight with my wife.  Had to drive
20 miles to get some.  Later I was very angry with myself for being so
stupid as to mess up what was working just fine.  Anger causes much
self-destructive behavior.  It can lead to a 'don't give a damn' attitude.

Although I taught a course in drugs I am not really an expert in any way.
I'd like to know just how many addicts are carefully screened and then
followed up during and after treatment so we could see the characteristics
of a person who is successful and those who were not.  I suspect that there
is little valid data on this point.  If there were there would be a lot
higher cure rate.  I'd guess that the best single predictor is level of
psychopathy.  Psychopaths are very resistant to change.  They have no inner
voice to nag.  Every clinical psychologist will ask of some new therapy
what can it do with the psychopath (not really the PC term nowadays).

Bill W

extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20150403/cc8f642f/attachment.html>