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Monday, August 16, 2004

Addictions

Recently there's been an article published about addiction in rats. In which they prove that after prolonged exposure to drugs (by which they mean 3 months), 17 percent of rats get addicted to coccaine. (Apparently the percentage is 15 percent in humans.) Firstly, from all the fuss made about it, (especially by the agencies that schools would take us to in order to deter us from drugs), I would have thought that the percentage was more. In fact, I had the impression it was 90 percent or something.

Somewhere between, the first time that I realised that the sweet smell in the hallways of my dormitory was actually marijuana and now, I've gotten a lot more relaxed about other people around me using drugs. I don't approve of it and I certainly wouldn't take it myself - I like having control of my brain functions, thank you, but I'm definitely not going to jump up in shock or horror and run for the hills. However, I will have to admit that i was shocked at finding recreational drugs in deceptively small cute looking bottles selling at the local household discount store in Tokyo. Upon asking, I was told that these drugs are non-lethal and that's why they can be sold legally - i.e. you can't die from it so what's the harm? You take it, you feel happy for a while and that's it.

I'm still trying to sort out how I feel towards this concept. On the one hand, I've been brought up to believe that drugs are evil and should not be taken. But on the other, if you can invent something like "soma" - for those who have read brave new world- where it's non-addictive and it makes people happy for a while, is that still evil? One could argue that even if it is non-addictive, it's very easy for people to get sucked into believing that synthetically stimulated pleasure is real and all that's important and neglect their very "real" lives which of course brings us to the concept of why would synethetic happiness be any less real than real happiness. A more practical argument would be that economically nothing would get done and people would waste away living from one shot of soma to the next.

I have to admit that the concept of such a premade happiness from any drug still strikes me with revulsion because I would hate to lose control of my body that way- which is one reason I have never yet gotten drunk. But that could just be my socially instilled prejudices speaking.

Nicotine and Caffeine are also drugs and while I don't do the former, the latter is something most of us do. I got my first caffiene headache withdrawal syntoms yesterday from stopping for just one day after two weeks of coffee- which I would argue is far more addictive certainly than marijuana. And even if it doesn't give me direct brain-altering pleasure, it still affects my mood and concentration. Even if caffiene is far more affordable an addiction to maintian, isn't taking caffiene morally the same as taking some other kind of drug? The more feeling irrational side of my brain is screaming that there is some difference but the rational half is being hard put to come up with a reasonable defence of my logical loophole as to why some drugs are bad but others okay.

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