Is addiction real?

Exactly. The idea of addiction as being a compulsive urge is fundamentally wrong.

You don't understand what addiction is, user. You want to take the substance. There's just another part of you that is vaguely aware of the fact that no, you actually really fucking don't want to take the substance. But it's far away.

You don't become addicted to something when things are going well. You start using drugs because they're fun, and you're disciplined and have willpower and shit so you should be safe, and maybe you are. For years even. Then some really bad shit happens and before you even know it you aren't in control. There's this thing living inside of you and you don't try to stop it because you don't give a fuck anymore.

Addiction is a "spiritual sickness", so to speak. The actual substance involved is more of a catalyst than anything. (Using the term catalyst loosely here, obvs )

>we have free will don't we?
Prove it.

>Is addiction real?
No, it's complex, that's why it's been so difficult treating it.

>The thing I do makes my neural pathways light up and make more neural pathways specifically for that thing I do.

The post.

I remember a test where animals had an easy way of releasing dopamine, something to do with getting their brains shocked. The less intelligent animals would eventually starve to death, whereas dolphins knew they had to stop to eat.

So yeah, I'd say addiction does exist for Brainlets.

Have I told you my Fibonacci joke? It's as good as my last two jokes combined

Is it ?

Why would I take the opinion of some hack journalist who's claim to fame is having a brother over the consensus of doctors?

>Is addiction real?
is anything real?!

Kill me.

>WHEN YOUR ARGUMENT IS BASED OFF THE ASSUMPTION FREE WILL EXISTS

ITT: underage kiddies
It's incredible how sheltered people can be even with immediate access to the greatest information lookup tool ever created.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delirium_tremens

Once you get to the point where the withdrawal symptoms can actually kill you, it's clear that you have an addiction

youre mentally retarded

Yes and No
It really depends on the individual.
Perfect example is that I quit smoking weed easily after just saying no more to it.
That fucking easy.

lol

My boss has a whole bunch of these horrible math jokes. All of them are at least this brutal. Now I can share them with you, /sci

people die from some types of withdrawal

>Is it
obviously not
X+Y is just X-(-1*Y)

Hi OP,

Have you ever tried cocaine? What about heroin? A nice little experiment here would be to do each of those drugs regularly for a week or two.

Let us know how it goes!

Sincerely,
user

>weed

Fucking lol. Weed is easy mode. Try to ditch the alcohol addiction that you've been indulging 3 times a week for the past 10 or so years.

A week or two is nothing. Do heroin daily for 2 months and you're guaranteed to need rehab, though.

it is due to a lack of willpower/laziness, it is the same with mental illness, they are just bad people who need to be punished

No. People get "addicted" to fill holes in their life. If you're a well adjusted person, you won't become an addict, you won't 'need' a substance or activity so badly you ruin your life for it. If you're chemically dependent on it, you'll be able to weather the withdrawal.

Hi. I've done both cocaine and heroin, and due to medical circumstances, had to take large amounts of dilaudid for over a month. Withdrawal was unpleasant. But I did the recreational drugs for fun, and that's all it was.
Cocaine sucks by the way, easily the most overrated drug on the planet.

t.brainlet

Where did this meme that addicts are lazy and lack willpower come from anyway? Addicts are almost monomaniacally obsessed with scoring their next hit, it's probably fair to say that they do whatever they can to acquire their daily dose with more intensity than the average normie has ever done anything.
Hell, you probably had that chainsmoking friend who had to drive around for 3 hours on a sunday to find some place that sold cigs.

people like having explanations for things, but are too complicated to easily explain

"Alcohol is illegal in Kuwait.

That doesn’t mean there’s no alcohol here. The place is swimming in it. It’s just illegal. And that’s where the grim fun called Prohibition gets down to business.

My favorite thing about the booze ban is watching you drunks stumble around embarrassing yourselves worse than any druggie trying to score in an unfamiliar neighborhood. Shame, humiliation?that’s one thing about Prohibition that most people don’t get. It’s just so goddamn embarrassing. And back in the world, you boozers never have to worry about that. You don’t need the brain of a rain frog to score your drug of dumb-ass choice; you just go into the nearest 7-11 or Safeway and come out with a clean, industrially-produced, contaminant-free supply. And you get it for less than the price of organic veggies. I tell ya, you want to see some spoiled druggies, don’t even bother going to a Malibu party, just stop outside any corner store in Christendom and watch the middle-class addicts loading up their sedans.

Then they come here, lured by tax-free ESL-teaching wages, and find that booze is a crime here. It’s fun, watching their faces when they get that news. You might not believe it, but the notion that booze can be banned doesn’t even occur to some of them. I had to break the news --nah, let’s be honest, I enjoyed every second-- but anyway, I had to tell a newcomer the bad news on the bus to work last week. He was having a hard enough time adjusting to the traffic, the close calls every few seconds. Didn’t even appreciate how lucky he was, getting here in November when it’s cool. I tried to tell him that, while the bus nosed into a roundabout, provoking the usual test of wills with every other driver circling that roundabout like tuna in a 360-degree tank. He said in a whiny London accent,

“But where d’ya, you know, get a drink here? I can’t find anything.”

My soul, such as it is, lit up with a quiet, warm glow. Oh, he’s one of the dummies who didn’t even bother to google his destination, huh? Well, we’re teachers, right? I shall instruct him! For free, even! So I said with simulated quiet regret,

“A drink? Booze? You can’t. No alcohol.”

He was too busy watching a huge SUV try to slant from the inside lane of the roundabout to the far outside lane, through heavy traffic. Takes a while to learn the special rule about those SUVs: If you encounter a huge SUV in Kuwait, it will be driven by an actual Kuwaiti, the dishdash/kaffiyeh wearing locals who make up only a third of the population but have exemption from all traffic rules. All. Period. Or as the Brits say, full stop, which is what your vehicle has to do if one of them wants to pass.

Our bus did a sudden stop as the driver realized he owed the right of way to the SUV, which bluffed its way across two more lanes of tiny sedans driven by mere expat workers to the exit. Then he got back to his own priority:

“What, do you need one of those special licenses? Fucking Hell, if I have to go stand in a queue again like Oman…”

My inward smile warmed to pure contempt. Oman! We sneer at Oman, that squeamish moderate! Oman allows foreigners to buy booze if they can prove they are mere infidels, and thus not worthy to be subjected to Sharia. The theory seems to be that if you’re going to Hell anyway, we can let you drown your sorrows here in the waiting room.

But even Oman, the shining city of toleration, is now considering a ban on alcohol. It can’t resist the pull to the right forever.
[...] People don’t realize how recent all this Islamist right-wing stuff really is. If you look at photos from any city in the Muslim world from the 1950s and 1960s, you don’t see a lot of women in head scarves.

You see bottles with suspiciously wine-like curves on the table at celebrations. You see musicians onstage, not hiding their instruments. And if you could talk to the people in those photos, you’d hear them take it for granted that the future involved more of the same, nonstop tilting toward the left.

At that time, if you wanted a drink in Kuwait, you could go buy one --the same clean, industrially-produced booze that any Westerner can pick up at the corner. You would have faced social disapproval, and there might have been a good deal of yelling from the relatives --but you could, at least, have that clean, safe drink without doing time for it.
[...] Kuwait, always a little slower than its Saudi patrons, got around to a total ban on alcohol in 1983 (which may explain why there’s a big nostalgia restaurant on the beach here called ‘The Seventies’)

But clearly, this Londoner on the bus hadn’t done his homework. He seriously thought he’d just have to sign a form, like he did in Oman. I didn’t say outright, “Oman is for wimps,” but I tried to suggest it in my response:

“Oh no no no! No form! You can’t, there’s none. No booze.”

“What, not even beer?”

“What, nothing? Ever?”

“Nope. Never.”

We seemed to be slipping into Gilbert and Sullivan territory, and besides, we’d bumped onto the freeway by then and the wind noise made talk difficult, so we both slumped into our depressive monads, as ESL-teacher etiquette requires. At that moment, each morning, as the bus slides onto the freeway and candy wrappers start flying around in the wind, you can actually see shoulders ahead of you start to slump, and heads tilt sadly, as each of us, Western driftwood washed up on the Persian Gulf, goes over the old question: “What went wrong?” It’s a very absorbing one, for the person affected, though profoundly boring to every other person in the world, and it takes the rest of the trip. So conversation tends to lag.

Next day, the Londoner sat next to someone else, having decided I was no fun, not a good potential connection. His new friend was a grizzled two-pack-a-day veteran from the North. The Londoner leaned in to him, looking desperate, amazingly like junkies in the movies, in that strung-out scene actors love for its innate hammery: “C’mon man, you gotta help me, I’m hurtin!”

The Londoner wasn’t on the bus the next day. Or the day after that. Finally the news got out: He was in the hospital. He’d gotten some info on how to score some booze. Somebody, some street-smart genius, told him to go down to the beach at Mangaf and wander around looking thirsty, and somebody’d fix him up.

They fixed him up, all right. The story, as I got it, was that he’d met an Iraqi who had some liquid to sell. The Londoner paid $100 for it ? Prohibition does wonders for liquor markup ? and probably sprinted back to his apartment. Ah, that wonderful first sip, or rather gulp in his case.

Except it wasn’t so wonderful. He told a colleague who went to visit him in the hospital, “It tasted funny and then I started to bleed from the nose.”

Now me --I’m not a medical doctor-- but the nosebleed? Me, personally, that’s where I would have stopped. Not this guy. He wiped the blood away and took another gulp. And, I’m sure, a couple more, to see if they could fix the increasingly death’s-door feeling he was beginning to experience.

He had the sense to call an ambulance before passing out, which is why he lived to have his stomach pumped and be scolded by doctors when the coma passed. They didn’t tell him what he’d paid his $100 for, but it could’ve been any one of a number of household substances that are sold as liquor in Sharia countries:
“…cleaning fluids, nail polish remover and automobile screen wash, as well as methanol and isopropanol which are used in antifreeze and some fuels. These other types of alcohol can produce similar effects to ethanol in terms of making you feel tipsy. But they are also potentially very dangerous.”
The Londoner was lucky. He lived, and kept his eyesight. A lot of other people in this part of the world die or go blind from stuff sold as booze. Blindness is a common side-effect of drinking methanol, the alcohol in fake booze made from antifreeze, instead of ethanol, the stuff you wusses in the West buy legally. These horror stories about what happens when you drink methanol are especially common in Iran, a much poorer country than Kuwait. There are two ways to die from booze in Iran: At the hands of the state, since you can be sentenced to death for booze recidivism; or by methanol poisoning, which happens all the time.

[...] Of course, alcohol is all over the Gulf. Not just in relatively soft countries like Kuwait but even in the most Wahhabist ‘hoods of Riyadh or Tehran. Prohibition is such an intrinsically corrupt and lucrative system that you can always get stuff if you’re willing to pay. That’s really the biggest impact of the booze ban on Kuwait: prices. Just like “drugs” in the west, you just have to pay a lot more.

A bottle of “Jack Daniels Old No. 7,” which I take to be a standard bottle of whisky, costs about $33 in the US. In Kuwait, that bottle will cost you 100 Kuwaiti Dinar, which may not sound like much til you know that one dinar equals $3.43?so that bottle will cost you $343.00 here, if you’re lucky enough to have the social connections to get it. For the unconnected, it’s down to the beach to get poisoned like the Londoner.

And the happiest people of all are the cops, especially the drug cops. They’re making a fortune. One of my friends, a police captain, boasted that he started the day with a good belt of whisky. I asked if that ran into money: “No, no, I take it from criminals!” He was honest, at least, which puts him way ahead of any American drug-cop sleaze I ever met.

Kuwaitis --real Kuwaitis, citizens, not just people who live here--can bring anything through the airport without interference. One of my colleagues was standing behind a Kuwaiti in full regalia, waiting for the metal detector. The Kuwaiti’s big duffel bag clinked when the Filipino airport worker picked it up. He looked queasily at the Kuwaiti, and --figuring this was a little too blatant to ignore, and he had to go through the motions-- picked it up and started to open it. The Kuwaiti said, “There is nothing there for you,” and the Filipino zippered that thing right back up. The Kuwaiti walked out of there, clinking like a wino shuffling into a recycling center, and nobody bothered him.

Of course there’s one last resort for the unlucky alkie with the wrong citizenship and no fixer skills: Make your own. But from what we hear, that doesn’t tend to work out very well. There was an explosion upstairs last week, an explosion that had a distinct Merlot stench. Somebody I won’t name had tried to use the good ol’ “grape juice plus yeast” recipe, and something had gone wrong. Even when these DIY wino kits work, they taste like spiked vinegar because brewer’s yeast is, of course, illegal, so you can only use baker’s yeast. My cop friend tells me some locals, who don’t even want to bother with weak homemade wine, try to distil their own hard stuff, which accounts, he says, for a good number of the raw facial scars you see around here. It seems there’s nothing like flaming moonshine to alter your face for the worse.

The larger point? Well, it’s pretty damn obvious: What y’all call “the horrors of drugs” aren’t drug horrors at all. They’re the horrors of Prohibition. So, when you make booze illegal like the Gulf countries are doing, you get every single atrocity that gullible news consumers in the West associate with “drugs” happening with good ol’ alcohol. Every single one: people rotting in prison, even getting capital punishment, for a preference with no moral implications at all; people poisoning themselves in the hope of a few hours’ high; sleazy dealers selling lethal stuff because it’s cheap to get; cops who are straight-up alcoholics themselves, confiscating the stuff from “criminals” to pass around to their friends; other cops getting rich by selling it back to “criminals” with more savvy; locals sucking down all the booze they can hold because they have a double-dealt immunity from the laws imposed on us nobodies; wanna-be Walter Whites maiming themselves and not even being able to report it for fear of the cops…I could go on and on, but it’s pretty obvious.

>prove it
This isn't math we don't work in proofs, we provide evidence.
>we have free will don't we?
Prove it.

A beer is nice for dinner user. I only drink in excess when going out with friends.

Cocaine is fucking awesome

But the only way you will ever get "addicted" to it is if you have INCREDIBLY deep pockets

I've only had it about three times in my life

And opiates should not be mentioned in the same sentence as cocaine because they are literally completely fucking different in every single way imaginable

There's a reason that every coke fiend is a banker who works 80 hours a week in the city, while every smack addict is a jobless homeless vagrant