Another drug discussion

I've been completing a learning course recently and needed to rant a little about a part of it. Wasn't sure where to put it on the temple, but I wanted people from the temple to discuss it if they wanted and my journal didn't seem like the right place, So what do you guys think? You should be able to access the video and while I encourage you to watch the entire thing, his drug speech starts at 2 minutes 13 seconds.

In the tips for asking great questions- it's suggested that we don't ask opinion-based questions or questions unrelated to the course. This isn’t so much a question I’m presenting but rather an argument. The question I’ll ask is simply- “Do you understand my arguments? Do you agree? What are your thoughts?”

Seeing as drugs are at least in part a controversial matter- opinions can get rather... heated about them. However, this is a place for learning and whether opinions come on the table or not I'd like to comment on a small part of this video from week 2- https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn/lecture/WNYPG/what-motivates-you I’d like to ask you please to watch the video before reading this to have the ideas vaguely fresh in your mind.

What I hope to do in this discussion is show at least one flaw in Terry's (the speaker of the video) argument and also argue that our desire to improve our learning (which is one of the most common reasons for why we are here taking this course) is not unsimiliar to the addict’s desire for drugs.

What Terry said in this video honestly caused me to react a little. I am not without opinion but before going on I’d like to say that this is not an attack on Terry- I believe he has many good ideas and I approve of the research he’s done- what I dislike is partly in the way he presents his argument (and then there’s the argument itself, )

Here is a direct transcript of part of his speech.

"Addictive drugs artificially increase dopamine activity and fool your brain into thinking that something wonderful has just happened. In fact just the opposite has just happened. This leads to craving and dependence which can hijack your free will and can motivate actions that are harmful to you."

He goes on to follow,

"Loss of dopamine neurons leads to a lack of motivation and something called anhedonia, which is a loss of interest in something that once gave you pleasure. Severe loss of Dopamine neurons causes resting tremor, slowness, rigidity, this is called Parkinson's disease. Ultimately it leads to catatonia, a complete lack of any movement.

Dopamine neurons are a part of the unconcious part of your brain that you learned about in your first week. When you promised to reward yourself something after a study section you are tapping into your dopamine system."

Starting with the first paragraph- I hope to highlight a couple of fallacies in his writing. Some of this may be semantics but I believe words (and clear communication is important).

"Addictive drugs artificially increase dopamine activity and fool your brain into thinking that something wonderful has just happened. In fact just the opposite has just happened. This leads to craving and dependence which can hijack your free will and can motivate actions that are harmful to you."

This seems similar to a circular argument in which the conclusion is included in the premise (Logical fallacies- https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/begging-the-question ). Terry says “ADDICTIVE drugs artificially increase dopamine… This leads to CRAVING and DEPENDENCE…” (We can simplify the sentence further- “addictive drugs” give you a “wonderful” feeling that “leads to craving and dependence”.) If we look at synonyms for addiction, we find the words craving and dependency. So when we say that addiction leads to craving and dependence it seems somewhat obvious and close to the circular argument I mentionned above. But Terry is not entirely clear or precise here because for the first time watching the video, I understood that he was suggesting that taking addictive drugs regardless of whether taking them once or several times, regardless of whether in moderation or in extreme quantities, and regardless whether the time between each occasion one takes drugs is short or long, leads to craving and dependence. And when Terry says, “In fact, the opposite has just happened” it isn’t clear (again) why when the brain says something wonderful has just happened, “in fact”, (as if saying fact and reality are not what related to what we perceive) something terrible has happened. Is it because of the craving and dependence? This question is important by the way because I’ll be returning to it later. Simply, I believe that the subject is much deeper than portrayed in his short speech.

We could go on to ask the question- “What are addictive drugs? Are there drugs that aren’t addictive?” A more interesting question would be “Why are some drugs addictive?” It seems to be suggested by Terry that it is the wonderful feeling that is the cause. That’s true for some drugs and some people. But that reason isn’t deep enough to explain why people want to feel so good as much as they do. Terry then mentions Serotonin, but it wasn’t clear to me at first why he mentioned that until I connected it with the ‘risk-taking behaviour’. If it wasn’t clear for you either, here’s my explanation- I believe Terry is arguing that because some people have low serotonin levels, they are more likely to engage with risky behaviour like drugs. And so that explains why people take drugs. But why do people have low serotonin? We could ask the question “why this or that?” probably forever but for people with less scientific knowledge, saying that people take drugs because they have low serotonin levels, is a difficult concept to understand and could use an explanation.

“Loss of dopamine neurons leads to a lack of motivation and something called anhedonia, which is a loss of interest in something that once gave you pleasure. Severe loss of Dopamine neurons causes resting tremor, slowness, rigidity, this is called Parkinson's disease. Ultimately it leads to catatonia, a complete lack of any movement.”

So here, I assume that Terry is saying that because the drugs artificially raise dopamine (but do not in reality) people can suffer a loss of dopamine neurons and so these health problems can occur. I can’t be sure of this however because he doesn’t say that. Those ideas in the first and second paragraph are not clearly linked. I had trouble recalling this video and I think in part it is due to the lack of a clear step by step (focused mode) argument which frustrated me. It has taken some effort on my part to go through his words and 'fill in the blanks'.

As a conclusion, I think this video isn't clear enough. I believe the use of drugs is often misunderstood as are the reasons behind why people take drugs and this video continues to support misunderstandings. There are so many factors that relate and feed into one another and it is not as simple as low serotonin levels and a wonderful feeling that people start and continue to take drugs. I’d like to point out here that my personal experience of drugs is limited but I have some good friends who do use different drugs recreationally and are great people. None of them are addicted to any of the drugs they use. I believe that common opinion about drugs is one of general ignorance and superstition and the use of drugs depends on the person as to whether one becomes addicted or not. I do not want to argue with science papers and the like, because they have done their research and come to their conclusions. But it is limited, usually within the laboratory under controled conditions and life is not like that- life has conditions but so very few of those conditions are controlled by humans.

I’d now like to look at what I see as a similarity between our desire to improve our learning and the desire for drugs with the question I asked earlier- Is it because of the craving and dependence that when taking addictive drugs something terrible has happened? (I'd half like to ask- what is the terrible something of craving and dependence?) We’re encouraged here to reward ourselves after doing the learning and work that we want to do. This could simply be named conditioning. We are conditioning ourselves over time to do the work first and reward ourselves after. But over time we start expecting the reward even before we have it (like a psychology experiment with dogs, ringing the bell before serving them food. http://www.simplypsychology.org/pavlov.html ). We may even start to ‘crave’ or ‘depend’ on doing the work to get the reward especially we practise this method and overlearn it (making it become automatic.) What’s the difference between that craving for doing the work and reward and that craving for the drug? Personally, I believe there’s not much difference, both can be conditioned after doing them after a long enough period of time, both can give an expected dopamine rise (although I’m not sure- I ask myself is one artificially and one real?) And so if there’s not a great difference between them and we look at Terry’s words, saying that this craving and dependence on drugs “can hijack your free will” can we also admit that practising rewarding ourselves after work, craving that and maybe even becoming dependent on that also can hijack your free will?

I doubt this piece of writing will be very clear for some people- I’m not the clearest writer- but I hope I managed to get some thoughts across. So…

Do you understand? Do you agree? What are your thoughts? Let’s attempt to be as logical as possible and keep words friendly, thanks and sorry for the length of the post!

P.s. for a little laugh I hope- in another previous interview talk, Terry says active participation is better than passive participation for learning. I agree. If we were to apply this to the study of drugs- Would this mean scientists would have to test on themselves to see the effects of drugs?

Drugs speech? I didn't think he was talking about drugs at all. Yes he mentioned them at that one point in the video, but beyond that I didn't see "drugs" entering into the context of the video, it was just about the types of neurotransmitting chemicals in the brain and the effects of changes to these.

I didn't for example see a connection between his mentioning of serotonin to his previous mention of drugs. A connection can be made, but he didn't explicitly make one (and I didn't see one implicitly made either).

Though I agree with your argument about addictive drugs and their harm, it seemed like an unnecessary intrusion and it did look like it was begging the question... It also made a sweeping statement about the different kinds of drugs and he presumptuously passed judgements on their effects on people.

i got the impression that he was using an easy to understand and agree on example as a way to overview the topic of dopamine ect, more than that he was presenting himself as an expert in addiction per se

and from that context I would say that his assertion was not at all inaccurate, just incomplete

there are a lot of I guess "psycho-social" reasons for drug use and drug addiction which exist beyond the purely neurological mechanics of ingestion, but the presentation, as I understood it, was not centered on addiction anyway



the last drug threads were more "is it ok for a jedi to use drugs" than "why do people use drugs to begin with" and that distinction is the more important topic of the two imo

Reminds me of coffee withdrawal I'm doing at the moment, apparently the caffeine blocks something which would otherwise inhibit activity of dopamine (and norepinephrine).

So the body responds to regular caffeine use by increasing the number of the receptors for that thing being inhibited.... which means it compensates for the caffeine - reducing caffeines effects (creating tolerance), but also creating a dependency because stopping caffeine now creates an imbalance of the thing caffeine was inhibiting!!!

Thus leaving the ex-drinker with too much of that inhibitor (adenosine), which can be uncomfortable as the body has to rebalance itself. The good news is coffee would probably get its 'kick' back LOL, but it highlites that playing with neurochemicals are part of a system of various interacting elements, and messing with even one can have an effect on lots of other system components.

The trick is each part of those components can influence a different parts in different amounts of our perception, and mechanisms of addiction probably best center around when a substance changes your body in such a way that cessation of the substance will cause physical or psychological discomfort or failure.

Prednisone comes to mind, its not 'mind-altering' but its a medicine which creates conditions like this. It alters the functioning of a body system to the extent where stopping the medicine cold turkey would cause serious health impacts. I"d call it an addiction. To stop using it you have to slowly reduce the dose over a week or two, to allow your body to compensate and return to normal balance without the medication in the body.

So back to mind-altering drugs, not all mind-altering drugs are addictive physically - but some people develop strong habits enough that they incur what used to be called a psychological addiction (as opposed to a physiological addiction as described above). These are not current medical terms, and I'm not in health care so I'm just talking off the cuff, but my point is drug action is rather complex at the scientific end of things, but also quite complex at the perception end of things. Some drugs are stronger in these regards to others, and some people prefer some drugs over others.... so it starts to become about understanding the impact of the drug, and how it operates in regards to affecting the body. Most users are only concerned about how it impacts their perception (instant reward) and even less about health risks such as liver stress etc, and even more less about what is actually going on in the brain (or other target sites).

One thing IMO seems certain, that drug addiction is less about the use of a drug, and more about the abuse of it. Knowledge is power, but it is a complex topic. The problem is most users probably abuse the drug, especially new users. Lecturers thus have to talk in simplified terms perhaps to get fundamental messages across to position students minds in a place where they can process more information.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caffeine_dependence