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by
Sam Quinones
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April 17 - April 20, 2023
Fentanyl upended the dope world the way tech disrupted business. No farmland needed—no pesticides, no harvesting, no seasons, no irrigation.
This methamphetamine, meanwhile, prompted strange obsessions—with bicycles, with flashlights, and with hoarding junk. In each of these places, it seemed mental illness was the problem. It was, but so much of it was induced by the new meth.
Unlike every drug scourge of the past, this one was essentially uniracial. It touched Black and brown communities relatively lightly. Instead, it involved White people in the great majority, including those who had done best in the economic expansions of recent decades.
This made more sense as I read what neuroscience can now tell us: that every human brain has capacity for addiction. Isolation is part of why some people get addicted and some do not. So was trauma. Abuse, rape, neglect, PTSD, a parent’s drug use were as unspoken in America as addiction and as prevalent. The epidemic was revealing this. I also connected the epidemic to consumer marketing of legal addictive stuffs: sugar, video games, social media, gambling.
Those conversations convinced me that our opioid-addiction crisis, because of its devastation, was also a great force for change. No other issue brought together Americans who didn’t agree on anything else.
These seemed separate moments, yet I came to see all three as connected. The opioid epidemic was about the destruction of community and the agony we create as we seek to avoid pain. COVID-19 instructed us on the importance of community, now that we had suddenly lost it, and how essential were those who nursed us and picked our lettuce. BLM showed that a sense of community was not possible without recognizing pain long ignored. BLM’s point was also to reveal privilege. Part of our privilege was to relegate to police the jobs that we preferred to forget or not pay for—like dealing with the
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Each was about who in America could breathe and who could not. George Floyd’s final words were those, too, of the addict dying under the overpass, and the trucker expiring from COVID-19.
Opioids, in fact, tend to produce strange effects in mammals other than humans. Fentanyl will turn a rat stiff, to the point where you can stand him on his head. A horse on fentanyl will tear up a stall. On the track, the drug pushed the horse to extremes.
“The ‘Designer Drug’ problem may become an international problem. A single gram of any very potent drug … could be synthesized at one location, transported to distribution sites worldwide, and then formulated into many thousand, perhaps a million, doses.”
Sugar seemed to play upon the same reward pathways in the brain as opiates, alcohol, and amphetamine.
He had come from a middle-class White counterculture where drug use was a form of adventure, particularly for a young man who had intellect and a thrill-seeking soul. That culture, however, formed in a time when the drugs were more forgiving than the street offerings of the new millennium. Attitudes hadn’t changed, but the dope had. The days of recreational drug use were over in America. The drugs came fanged now: highly potent marijuana, corrosive methamphetamine, and powerful narcotic pain pills in unprecedented supply.
“Heroin is like a parasite,” she wrote later, “it wants to survive and needs a host.”
microdialysis showed that the brains of sugar-dependent rats never registered a reduction in dopamine while they consumed sugar water.
Our revolution in neuroscience research has shown that around 30 percent of people have a genetic disposition for addiction. But no matter what a person’s genetic disposition, no one gets addicted to drugs she hasn’t tried.
One drug consumed long enough primes us for another.
Drugs and other addictive substances increase dopamine while reducing serotonin. Desire overwhelms moderation and contentment. This may be why addicts so often suffer from depression—they’re producing less serotonin to promote contentment. It’s why, Robert Lustig said in one lecture, “the more pleasure you seek, the more unhappy you get.”
Adam Smith, in describing capitalism in The Wealth of Nations, called monopoly a “derangement” and “hurtful to the society in which it takes place.” That sounds to me like what’s going on in the addicted brain.
Drugs dim those gorgeous lights to a gray obedience. Our brain on drugs resembles the regime that imprisons its great writers, artists, and scientists.
A multitude of resources does not encourage people to want recovery. It just doesn’t work that way. If they’re not kind of pushed into it, or forced—if they don’t know something worse can happen to them—many people would not have any interest, and it would have no staying power.”
Barrett battled another popular view: that if a public policy failed, it amounted to “government waste” to keep funding it. In speeches around the county, Barrett likened drug addiction to smoking; smokers knew cigarettes were killing them, yet they kept smoking despite the consequences and repeated attempts to quit. Most smokers, he reminded his listeners, needed numerous tries—and failures—to quit. Failure, he said, was no reason to stop trying, and learning how.
You are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think”),
In 2014 neuroscientists accepted the idea that the addictive potential of a drug of abuse had a lot to do with the size of the dose, how often the drug was used, and the speed with which it hit the bloodstream.
these experiments pioneered the evidence that sugar was addictive and hit the same brain receptors as did drugs such as heroin.
Highly processed foods were the problem—especially those that included combinations of refined carbohydrates, sugar mostly, with fat and sometimes salt.
Our brain also required that we be physically touched by others—hugged, squeezed, kissed, patted on the back—as a way of reinforcing the group that kept us alive.
Outrage keeps us engaged better than almost anything.
our mass-marketing society primes us for addiction
Addiction isn’t about rational decisions, she wrote. If it were, Americans would have quit smoking soon after 1964, when the US Surgeon General issued his first report on its risks. American nicotine addicts kept smoking, knowing they were killing themselves, because nicotine had changed their brain chemistry, and cigarettes were everywhere.
No other institution in our national life—perhaps not even prison—has such a toxic impact on crime, addiction, and mental illness as does county jail the way it’s been traditionally run.
The growing homeless encampments in many cities and rural towns are meth’s deadening creation, I’m convinced. Though other drugs and alcohol are part of the mix, many encampments are simply meth colonies.
Encampments are places where addicts flee from treatment, where they can find the warm embrace of approval for their meth use.
The addictions of many inmates were rooted in the beatings and molestations they endured as boys. Bottled up, that trauma kept men from progressing.
“America has devolved,” Lustig once wrote, “from the aspirational, achievement-oriented ‘city on a hill’ we once were, into the addicted and depressed society that we’ve now become. Because we abdicated happiness for pleasure. Because pleasure got cheap.” The supply of it was everywhere. Like street dope.
The United States is the world’s leading per capita consumer of both opioids and sugar.
We want to put some pressure on addicts to change, even if they don’t like it. If you do love someone, you have to tolerate them hating you, at least for a bit.”
Having lived in Mexico for ten years, I believe solutions will come only when Mexico and the United States work together.
Our opioid addiction epidemic began with a mighty supply of pain pills prescribed every year, which created widespread addiction that continues to this day. Right about that time, traffickers were discovering that synthetic drugs were not just immensely profitable but could create or shift demand simply because they could be made in unprecedented quantities all year long. So they flocked to them.
No matter how many treatment options we provide, recovering addicts face scary odds as long as the drugs that torment them are widely available, potent, and almost free.
The now-cliché is “We can’t arrest our way out of this.” We can’t treat our way out of it, either, as long as supply is so potent and cheap.
The last fifty years are replete with examples of corporations turning addictive services and substances against us, fine-tuning their addictiveness, then marketing them aggressively.
Pot can be responsibly legalized. Instead, we are choosing the route we took with opioids: a now-legal, potent drug is being made widely available and marketed with claims about its risk-free nature.
Decriminalizing drugs also removes the one lever we have to push men and women toward sobriety. Waiting around for them to decide to opt for treatment is the opposite of compassion when the drugs on the street are as cheap, prevalent, and deadly as they are today.
In a time indeed when drug traffickers act like corporations and corporations like drug traffickers, our best defense, perhaps our only defense, lies in bolstering community.
In nature, species at the top of the food chain and habitat help maintain their environment. We’ve done the opposite.
attend to the unnoticed stuff, which will never appear on Instagram or the local news.
“The biggest way to teach people to overcome things is you have to provide physical challenges for them to do,” he said. “You have to get them to believe in themselves.
what our brains had evolved to prize: exercise, moving forward, and being with others in public,
