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

by Michael Easter

But the last century has left us with two dominant schools of thought. The first views an addict as a bad person. It sees addiction as a selfish and destructive personal choice. The War on Drugs, for example, is based on this model. At its height in the 1980s, the War on Drugs tossed one million Americans into jail each year for offenses like possessing a small amount of marijuana, cocaine, or heroin. But by the mid-1990s, we realized that we were losing this war. We’d spent trillions combating drugs worldwide and arresting and jailing people for possession. But drug use rates weren’t budging. The approach was ruining lives and disproportionately hurting minorities. Research shows, for example, that most crack users in the 1990s were white, but 90 percent of people sentenced for crack possession were black. So in 1995, a group of researchers from the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) convened to search for a solution. Neuroimaging was a hot field at the time. The technology, which captures images of how our brains react to different situations, had recently improved drastically. New scans showed that the brains of chronic drug users responded differently to drugs than nonusers’.