Understanding Addiction

  I have to figure out this blogging thing. About 2 weeks ago I was invited to host a blog on the Psychology Today website. So I set up a sort of parallel blog there, with most of the same posts. I’ve been making them a bit shorter and punchier for PT, and I’ve been […] (Read the rest.)

Steven Pinker (the evolutionary biologist) recently released ANOTHER book, entitled “The Better Angels of Our Nature.” In it he shows how violence has declined over the last 30,000 years of human affairs. And he says that’s due to the rise of competing characteristics, like cooperation, self-control, and empathy. According to Pinker and others, human characteristics […] (Read the rest.)

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.)