The Price of Cold Turkey

Cheers.

There's a big difference between saying that people can modify their drug consumption if given an incentive and saying that addiction is a free choice. The neurobiological basis of addiction is increasingly well understood. It has been established for decades that certain parts of the brain respond to drugs and that these pathways become reinforced by repeated exposure. I have seen addicts in the hospital and these people are not freely choosing to take drugs. They usually enter drug rehabilitation seeking help in overcoming their addiction.

Bryan, you've come to sound increasingly like a flack for the Church of Scientology. As another commentatory has pointed out, you seem to be locked up in the ivory tower with little real-world experience. Trying getting out there and interacting with real people. Try doing some volunteer work and see real-life addicts and schizophrenics. The volunteer department of your county hospital should be able to point you in the right direction. They are truly ill and deserve our compassion and help. The overall impact of your postings demonstrates that you don't have a compassionate bone in your body, which probably makes you proud, but to the rest of us looks like stunted growth.

http://www.co.fairfax.va.us/service/csb/volunteers/volunteermain.htm

Hurrah. Economists are not only energy experts, they're medical professionals. A quick look at a smidgeon of data, and conclusions are easily drawn. Perhaps economists quick to draw conclusions such as this have gone to the "Frist school" of medical diagnosis, the one that looks at video tapes and comments on the eye tracking of a woman with no visual brain center.

Contrary to Chris, I think Bryan had an interesting insight. Rewards work, even on severe physiological addictions.

Anecdote. At 19 I stopped going to class and spent my days in the library. My parents, desperate, asked my uncle Ivor - a business genius - to talk to me. He said he will pay me montly salary and bonuses for achievement. He set a big prize for getting the degree at the end of the year, something impossible. The salary was paid me by his treasurer, in a big factory, with much ceremony. After the third montly salary I started working and finished first in my class. Money talks. At least, to me.

Bryan, I would love somebody manipulating me (paying me) to lose overweight. But no one cares. My uncle z"l is long dead.

I look at these results and see further evidence that addiction is not a "disease," but a free choice.

I totally agree with that statement. It seems to me like the researchers are merely finding that people are more addicted to money than alcohol or AOD.

To play the devil's advocate a little, perhaps these are only temporal results. If they extended the study to 1 year instead of 8 weeks, how many more people would they lose? It may be easy enough to quit for 8 weeks, with the knowledge that you'll have money to buy more when you're done, but what about for 1 year or indefinitely? Perhaps they could re-do the study and tell the participants it will be indefinite and then measure the results?

Sounds to me like it creates a market for 'recovering addicts.'

If you subsidize the number of cocaine users who try to quit, do you not run the risk of encountering those who become users just to receive the reward for quitting?

When I was much younger, a very long time ago, I was a freshman in law school, and I had a two pack a day cigarette habit. My then girlfriend and my parents were on my case to quit. One fine spring morning about two weeks before finals (a real stress point in the lives of young law students), I left my apartment and to walk to class. As I passed a dumpster I tossed my cigarettes in there. And that was it. I never smoked again.

I am a real skeptic about addiction theory.

The neurobiology of addiction is understood at the level of neurons, but very little is understood at the level of the entire brain.

You may have a part of your neural system become addicted to drugs, but other (conscious or unconscious) neural systems may provide a level of inhibition that drowns out the "addicted" part.

Money is seen by many to be a representation of power. Having power is addicting (through endogenous opiates). Thus your own addiction to power may inhibit addictions to cocaine, etc.

I wonder what the addiction believers would accept as negative evidence to their belief in the existence of addiction.

Apropos N's comment, see Charles Murray's Losing Ground, where he walks through through a "thought experiment" to design a program of incentives to encourage people to quit smoking. He demonstrates pretty convincingly that you can't do it unless you have disincentives as well. (Note that the program that Bryan describes does.)

Jim