Everything Americans Think They Know About Drugs Is Wrong: A Scientist Explodes the Myths

[dreamnightwind]

14. He should be Bernie's "drug czar"!

I've seen video of him speaking a few times, he's excellent, and I agree with his premise. As a society, we're way too punitive, and way too reluctant to examine what forces are at play in a person's life. Instead of working with a person to give their life meaning, we subscribe to the maxim "the beatings will continue until moral improves". Not hard to see where that leads.

He was the person, IIRC, who did the study that debunked the classic rats-will-starve-themselves-to-get-addictive-stimulus study, by showing that, if the rats had other rats to hang out with, or a good environment, they rarely became fixated on the stimulus (I can't remember if it was a drug or a pleasure stim, same principle either way). In the study where they would starve themselves, they had nothing else to do, just a rat in a cage with 2 buttons.