Scarcity Brain: Fix Your Craving Mindset and Rewire Your Habits to Thrive with Enough

by Michael Easter

Take what happened to soldiers serving in Vietnam. Military doctors estimated that between 10 and 25 percent of American soldiers deployed in Vietnam were addicted to heroin. It was so bad that in May 1971, the New York Times ran a front-page story titled “G.I. Heroin Addiction Epidemic in Vietnam.” President Nixon didn’t want to let these addicts back into the United States, so he launched Operation Golden Flow. The deal was simple. If the soldiers wanted to return home, they had to provide a clean urine test. If addiction obliterates choice and relapse is a foregone conclusion, then most of those addicted soldiers wouldn’t have been able to overcome their broken brain and would have been left in Vietnam. But nearly every soldier produced a golden flow, a clean urine test. And this wasn’t a temporary stay. Once they were home, heroin lost its appeal for the majority of these GIs. Only 5 percent of the soldiers who were addicted while in Vietnam relapsed within a year of returning to the United States. The relapsers tended to be soldiers who had used drugs before the war.