There’s been a lot of work in recent years to educate people on addiction. Many people don’t understand that there are changes, both physical and chemical, that occur in addiction (pretty interesting stuff to learn about); the knee jerk for many is to assume the addict has no will power, which isn’t really the case. Education on addiction as a treatable illness will hopefully help some of the problems the country faces with addiction.
While the clean needle programs do seem odd, I think there’s research showing that it’s helped reduce the incidence of disease associated with IV drug use. I guess the idea is that you can’t help people more than they want, but you can try to make them safer to an extent by reducing their risk for contracting a bunch of comorbidities.
meh, seems like addiction should be a matter of will power. unfortunately we’ve taken away the species’ ability to adapt and select away from addictive predispositions, the single greatest error of civilized man.
Yes, it should be willpower. But, since the first documented case of addiction in the Proboscis Monkey (Nasalis larvatus), mammals have struggled with addiction. 
The Proboscis Monkey first became addicted to fermented fruit upon seeing its reflection in a pond. The monkey thought, why does my nose look like that!?! He never thought he would get any attractive female monkeys, so he became addicted to fermented fruit. A great revelation came when he offered this fermented fruit to his close female monkeys friends and his fitness ( the quantitative representation of natural and sexual selection within evolutionary biology) greatly increased. He then became addicted to this fermented fruit, but had new cute little monkeys as a result. These monkeys evolved with a similar nose, which became the BSD symbol clearly resting on the face of the Proboscis Monkey.
The same reward pathways triggered in addiction and drugs of abuse are also engaged by things that keep the human species alive: sex and food are two examples. Limiting the function of that pathway might make humans less fit for survival. If you read up on it, you’ll see why it’s not as simple as will power (you can make the argument at the beginning before an addiction develops, though, I think). Certain addictions make normally rewarding things relatively unrewarding and unsatisfying, leading the person to seek that giant spike in dopaminergic activity in the nucleus accumbens that comes with whatever substance they’re using. They’re not nearly as in control as an otherwise unaddicted person. These changes in the brain can last for a long time (some are even thought to be permanent without appropriate therapy), which is why addicts can be clean for years but have seemingly unconnected cues that put them back in a downward spiral towards use. (Some of these people had a genetic predisposition, too.) At least, this is what a lot of the experts believe (it works in animal and human models…).
…well no. you’re thinking is static, which evolution is anything but.
I am thinking big picture in a dynamic matter (surviving in the short term until you reproduce one of the aspects of fitness in a Darwinian sense). If you start selecting for people who have a lowered ability to receive pleasure through that pathway they’d be less susceptible to addiction most likely, but they’d also have less urge to survive because they don’t get rewarded for survival tasks (reproduction, food, water). This would probably even lead to selective pressure for people who have a more moderate satisfaction response (not lower) towards eating and reproducing (and…drugs of abuse)…because this activates the same pathway. This is probably where we exist today. You can see examples of this type of selective pressure all around us. For example, sickle cell anemia is a bad disease (so you might ask why it’s prevalent in certain regions and ethnicities), but the increased prevalence of the sickle cell trait in African populations is to protect these people from malaria (for example)…sickle cell disease is really bad, the trait is generally benign but can have rare complications. The allele sticks around in the population because malaria is a serious disease, and the people who are protected from it can reach reproductive age, reproduce, and pass on the protective allele…
A little bit as an aside, people with anorexia have an extremely high suicide rate in comparison to other groups. They’re very adept at suppressing bodily drives (such as food). Many scientists and people in medicine believe that this contributes to the higher suicide rate because a basal drive to live and survive is something that’s easier to suppress for people who are constantly suppressing the desire for nourishment-- one of the most powerful desires.
Armed conflict wouldn’t end well for lefties when conservatives are the ones with guns usually. People just need to grow tf up.
This is some classic pre election TF. Glad to see you back pal
get woke
http://nypost.com/2017/02/06/drug-dealer-whose-sentence-was-commuted-by-obama-is-back-behind-bars/
Thanks Obama
homie breaks it down.unreason has no chance. quit your violent flailing or get a mud hole stomped in that ass. play time is just about over.
https://www.facebook.com/myiannopoulos/videos/840123842792179/
yall gotta get woke
http://www.infowars.com/muslim-migrant-anally-rapes-teenager-gets-only-two-months-jail/
if you believe this ex CIA guy, look out for May 1:
wow some wild posts hahahaha. Here is mine.
these libs will bring their hacksaws and chop off everyone’s houses apart (if made of wood) and grind it up and plant it next to the trees as fertilizer along with their tree huggin’ and rainbow flexing dudes and gals. in the meantime, right wingers will unite and bring out their big ford pickups with huge confederate flags with AR 15 with std nato 5.56 rounds mowing down all the trees and plants!!!..oh boy violence is coming.
Make America Great Again. It was great when Trump was growing up in the 60s- maybe even in the late 80s. I look around my town in sunny CA in the 80s and see the american dream. beautiful 3000 sq ft homes with a GSD in the yard…great school system and most of the students in the elite colleges are white and very few minorities. heck my neighbors are all white. I go eat my sushi and it is run by some chinese or japanese or korean and the whole family works there. even the kid is serving my miso soup. i go to the cleaners and here another asian family with a kid. then off to the grocery for a quick gas and a slurpy. here too… asians…then at the end of the day they all go to their rental apts and stay there. they are chasing the american dream. fast forward to 2017, i see that hmmmmm 20% or even 35% of the student body at great CA college are asian and even at Ivy, Asians comprise more than 20%…my fellow HF colleagus are Asians…making big dough…that kid who used to wait my table is now a columbia libtard college grad and makes 1mm a year and lives in the best neighborhood in NYC??? my neighbors in Upper West Side are always cooking egg rolls and the house below is always cooking kimchi fried rice…what happened to steak night and mashed potato or the smell of mac and cheese?? heck we had a black president telling white folks what to do and we have a mexican woman in the supreme court now?! something is wrong. Let’s Make America Great Again!!! Trump! Trump!!! Trump!!!
^ Why do so many liberals see the world through filtered lenses? Why do they only see the separate colors of the rainbow instead of the whole? Seems to be an attempt at the Alinisky method at work here.
i aint lib.
LOL oh man that super creepy
man, shit’s going down. the trains are speeding towards each other.