Understanding Addiction

Reader responses (here and on my new blog on the Psychology Today website) highlight both sides of the self as experienced with dissociative drugs (DXM and ketamine). There is a sense of being centred, perhaps while in free fall and watching the world go by, and there is a sense of freedom from constraints. You […] (Read the rest.)

In response to a recent post about Charles’ dilemma, readers brought up several issues that I’d like to address…before getting to Part 2. The issue of good vs. bad came up. Charles’ quest for his “true self” seemed to be based on an experience of goodness that could not be replicated without drugs (in his […] (Read the rest.)

I’ve been talking to a young man about his drug issues, and he feels he’s got a serious dilemma to unravel. Lately he’s been taking dissociatives — dextromethorphan (DXM) and ketamine — and they take him somewhere he can’t seem to get without them. Charles (I’ll call him) is in his early twenties, bright, energetic, […] (Read the rest.)

A new act to control the prescription of narcotics (we assume they mean opioids) just went into law in Ontario on November 1. (Similar acts are not unlikely in the rest of Canada.) This act will presumably make it harder for people to forge prescriptions, use alternate names, borrow prescriptions, and so forth. One of […] (Read the rest.)

In the last 24 hours, a video clip of a Texas judge beating his teenage daughter (for the crime of downloading music) has gone viral on the internet and news media. It’s a horrendous video, involving not only brutal violence but also vicious humiliation of a child by a parent. What makes the story more […] (Read the rest.)