Timesuck with Dan Cummins - 483 - Addiction: Most Misunderstood Condition Ever?

Episode Date: December 1, 2025

In this deeply informative episode of Timesuck, we explore the history of addiction, how different cultures have tried to understand and control it, and what modern science reveals about how it rewires the brain, hijacks choice, and reshapes identity. From ancient remedies and religious interpretations to modern medicine and neuroscience, we break down how desire becomes dependency — and why recovery is so much more than just willpower.Merch and more: www.badmagicproductions.com Timesuck Discord! https://discord.gg/tqzH89vWant to join the Cult of the Curious PrivateFacebook Group? Go directly to Facebook and search for "Cult of the Curious" to locate whatever happens to be our most current page :)For all merch-related questions/problems: [e-mail] (copy and paste)Please rate and subscribe on Apple Podcasts and elsewhere and follow the suck on social media!! @timesuckpodcast on IG and http://www.facebook.com/timesuckpodcastWanna become a Space Lizard? Click here: https://www.patreon.com/timesuckpodcast.Sign up through Patreon, and for $5 a month, you get access to the entire Secret Suck catalog (295 episodes) PLUS the entire catalog of Timesuck, AD FREE. You'll also get 20% off of all regular Timesuck merch PLUS access to exclusive Space Lizard merch Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Addiction. It's a scary word, right? Just the word alone can paint pictures in our minds of bombed-out-looking city streets and comatose, zombie-fied figures huddled under bridges, covered in dirty blankets. It can conjure up images of blighted neighborhoods and writhing figures and hospitals or of the angry, unpredictable person in our community that we suspect may be struggling, but we don't want to get close enough to really find out. As many of us know now, addiction is not a character of fault. It's literally a disease. And it's been recognized as such by the American Psychiatric Association, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and the World Health Organization. But sometimes it also seems like an almost supernatural concept, something that can come for you and practically overnight, rob you of your impulse control, drive you to make choices that you would not ordinarily make, and eventually make what used to be your life look unrecognizable. And because it's so scary and still misunderstood, many of us convince ourselves that it can never happen to me. We tell ourselves that that person, that addict, they made a bad choice or bad choices. We would never make

those bad choices because we're better than that. We're stronger than that. More responsible and not lacking in the necessary self-discipline. But the numbers say something different about that logic. In 2023, an estimated 54.2 million people in the U.S. alone needed some form of treatment for some type of a substance use disorder. In addition, substance use disorders affect more Americans age 12 and older each year than heart conditions, diabetes, or even cancer. How could 54.2 million people? Why would they simply be making bad choices with known horrific consequences? If it's simply a matter of not learning to make better choices, why does it affect so many people across class, racial, economic, and educational lines? What's the actual relationship

between use and addiction? What is addiction and how does it work? this question of course is not new every culture has wrestled with the problem of wanting too much of losing control of craving the thing that destroys us we've come up with different names for over the years sin possession weakness immorality disease genetic predisposition and each of these is pointed to the place where addiction should be dealt with a church a prison hospital a community and yet none of them on their own have definitively consistently worked not in any way that has made recovery simple and consistent dissistently successful. Many people are still addicted, including nearly 49 million Americans living today. The history of addiction, how it's presented itself across history, and how humans have attempted to understand it, deal with it, and recover from it. Today on this especially informative, both historical and topical edition of TimeSuck. This is Michael McDonald, and you're listening to TimeSuck. You're listening to TimeSuck.

Well, happy Monday and welcome or welcome back to the Colt of the Curious. I'm Dan Cummins, a succinator 5,000, a consistent advocate of eating more than three oranges per day. A guy who General Patton probably would have slapped in a hospital and told a man up had I fought for him. And you are listening to Time Suck. Hail Nimrod. Hail Zepina. Praise me to Good Boy Bojangles and Glory B to Triple M. If the sound is a little bit different today, I'm.

I am recording out elsewhere, not in the studio. Hopefully, though, you didn't notice until I just said that. And we are already in December. This is very calm, totally normal, not polarizing at all years, almost over. Thanks for showing up to learn something new today. I'm excited that you're here. I am truly looking forward to sharing all this information with you. So let's just get started.

And now for another topic, as I've said here, pretty often. There could be a podcast subject in and of itself. For one thing, there are so many examples of addiction across time and cultures to look at, since humans have struggled with it for as long as there have been addicting substances to consume or addicting things to do. We certainly won't be able to get into all of them here. The other part of how thorny this topic is, is that addiction is not only limited to substance abuse, it's difficult to draw a neat line around what is and is not addiction. The irony is that, while we may not always want to discuss quote-unquote serious forms of addiction in polite society.

I've always found polite society to be so boring and fake anyway. Most people think about addiction fairly often. Not addiction to substances like alcohol, cocaine, meth, or heroin, but to normal things. Like one's phone, social media, work, coffee, sugary soda, et cetera. Sugar, man. That has long been my most powerful addiction, I think. My God, is it hard for me to cut down on sugar? I think about sugary things more than.

probably anything else in like a craving, intense craving kind of way. I've never experienced anything else like it, like such intense cravings for sugary thing. So moody if I don't get them. I quit smoking many years ago. It wasn't hard for me, but I didn't smoke consistently for that many years. Quit drinking coffee two years ago. That was tricky, but not the worst. But I also still drink green tea.

So I guess I didn't go, you know, cold turkey away from caffeine. But giving up sweets, cutting down on sugar overall, it literally makes me feel sick and depressed. I think that's my main addiction. What is your quote, unquote, normal addiction? Do you maybe overspend on Amazon and tell yourself that you're going to do a no-buy month? But then you see something, maybe your favorite snack or a piece of kitchenware. It's such a good deal you can't help yourself. I mean, it's 40% off.

Or maybe it's buy one, get one free. You can't afford not to buy it. Maybe you don't feel right unless you wake up at 5 in the morning to get your 10-mile running. You got to do it, even on vacation. Or you're going to feel cranking off-balance the entire rest of the day. Or maybe you know someone who's always getting just a little more Botox. Or, you know, an additional tiny cosmetic procedure until they no longer have the face you'll remember. Maybe you just need to orgasm two or three times a day.

If you don't, you can't function. You can't. It's not a big deal. You're just sneaking to the bathroom at work once a day, maybe two or three times, to look at a little porn on your phone and beat off to clear your mind so you can focus on your customers. What's a big deal? You always wash your hands before you massage the next client or make that next sandwich. Maybe you're addicted to shopping or exercise or plastic surgery or sex.

But hold on, you might be saying. Those aren't addictions. Addictions are dependencies on bad chemicals. Everybody knows that. And to that, I say, fine. Get a dumb phone. Stop spending money on anything other than your basic needs. Stop drinking coffee in the morning.

Try and go a full week, only beating off once a day. And not at work for God's sake. And you say, no, I'm not going to stop doing that because my shopping slash exercise plastic surgery slash beatoff habits make living in this insane world a little bit easier. Aha. See how similar that sounds to the exact same rationale used for a bad kind of addiction? Just trying to take the edge off, trying to make it through the day. Of course, shopping or surgery or working out or beating off makes the world a bit easier to deal with and life more enjoyable. You know what else feels good makes life easier to deal with? Great, in fact, drugs. Being high is

fucking awesome. Overindulging and or not being able to stop getting high, though, definitely not so awesome. Just like it's not so awesome to spend your way into credit card. debt or exercise your way into consistent injuries or surgery your way into a face looks more like it belongs on a mannequin than a human being or beating off your way out of a job when the IT department figures out that you spend at least two hours a day out of an eight hour of workday looking at porn. To be clear, me pointing all this out is not meant to be some kind of gotcha moment. It's only to point out that the full spectrum of addiction includes many things, ranging from ones considered addictive by society large like drug use

and gambling to ones not commonly accepted as addictive or not as commonly, sex, eating, work, love, you know, more. If you look at it that way, is everyone somewhere on the addiction spectrum? Does everyone have at least one thing they just cannot stop doing? Like my dad, when it comes to undocumented murders, JK, or maybe not. Or is it only addiction once it starts harming you and the people around you as the conventional psychiatric definitions say? In that case, how do you equate harm from addiction?

Is it harmed to your health, to your relationships, your finances? If we're all secretly or not so secretly addicts, what does that say about free will? Don't let yourself slide into an existential panic quite yet, though. That is not the point of me pointing this out. The point of this introduction is to get us in a different kind of headspace, a headspace where we get rid of the polarizing political views and understand that to talk about addiction is to talk about what it means to be human. That means an addiction, rather than being merely the result of a bad change.

choice is influenced by a lot of things, pretty much everything, biology, politics, authority, science, religion, social norms, socioeconomic status. The list goes on and on and on. All of these things can come together in a unique formation to produce addiction in some individuals, but not in others, which is another part of why talking about addiction is so difficult. Despite being difficult, if addiction is something that has dog human existence from the very beginning, the question becomes, why the hell haven't we solved it yet? We've certainly had plenty of time to figure it out. According to one of our main sources for today, the urge, a history of addiction by Carl Eric Fisher, a doctor who himself struggled with alcoholism and went to rehab while he was in medical school. There are four basic approaches to solving or curing, fixing, whatever you want to call it, addiction. A prohibitionist approach has sought to control addiction through punishment and other law enforcement strategies. Think, you know, prohibition. A therapeutic approach has argued that addiction is best handled as a disorder to be treated

by the medical field. Think rehab centers that provide both medication and therapy. A reductionist approach has sought to explain addiction in scientific terms, often seeking biology-based cures. It simplifies the complex phenomenon into its basic components, most prominently emphasizing biological and neurological factors. Think believing that genetics are primarily responsible for addiction. And finally, a go-fuck-yourself approach.

It's argued that if you start whining about addiction, you should go fuck yourself and just knock it off. Just stop. Just don't. And if you don't feel this approach is effective, in fact, if you think it's utterly absurd and intellectually insulting, well, go fuck yourself. That's not the fourth approach. I mean, that has been some people's approach for sure, but it's not a very thoughtful approach. Historically, the fourth approach has been a mutual help approach, one that has sought community healing and grassroots fellowship and sometimes but not always spiritual development to recover

from addiction. Think Alcoholics Anonymous. All of these have been present throughout cultures and time periods in some form and none of them have ever worked perfectly to cure every last person of their addiction. No single approach seems to hold all the answers. We'll spend a good portion of today's episode looking into different historical approaches. We'll trace addiction and the way people have thought about it over time. We'll also jump around a little bit more to than we do normally on timelines to talk about similarities across time periods or introduce scientific evidence that was found later to support these theories. We'll talk about the various attempts that have been made to understand addiction from doctors trying to diagnose a disorder to individuals writing about their own experiences. And we'll talk about the ways in which addiction has been misunderstood and weaponized by those in power to achieve aims that have fuck all to do with the population's health or safety. Let's get into all of this. In today's timeline, you dirty, disgusting, weak, worthless, selfish, degenerate podcast addicts. Shrap on those boots, soldier. We're marching down a time-suck timeline. Archaeologists have found that as early as 1600 BC.

Little flasks were being made in the shape of opium poppy caps. Capsules. Pretty cool. The shape of these artificial capsules allowed for a reasonable guess as to what was contained within those capsules, but scientists only proved it definitively just a few years ago. In 2018, the journal Science reported that new techniques for analyzing the residues and excavated capsules had revealed that the plant material within contained not just opium, but sometimes other psychoactive substances. Other fucking drugs. Ancient, disgusting junkies. Why would they do? that. Didn't they know how bad drugs were? Maybe if John Bon Jovi, right, the North Korean War's prominent historian, and also Rockstar, had been around back then. He could have convinced them to smash all those nasty capsules. Hi, I'm John Bon Jovi, and I've been giving a script to talk to you about drugs, rock,

and we're having fun, a good time, and all that good stuff. Well, I'll tell you what, Drugs is not a part of my everyday routine It's not everyday fun It's not good for you All right, so listen Think twice before you do drugs Because there ain't no women's out there doing it Hell yeah

Thank you very much John That was fucking rad As in rock against drugs What about those old drug jars though huh Those jars and capsules Have been found throughout the Levant Egypt and the Middle East and their uniformity suggests that they were part of an organized system of manufacturing distribution.

In other words, way back in 1600 BC, an entire region had a drug trade. But we're not really here to talk about drugs. We're here to talk about addiction. And though these two topics are obviously related, they are not the same, and they require different kinds of historical analysis. Well, some people did undoubtedly abuse this opium and develop a dependence on it. The problem with studying addiction historically is that few ancient cultures had a term, For example, the ancient Greeks had the word philopotes, a lover of drinking sessions. But the word itself did not necessarily indicate that somebody had a problem with drinking sessions.

Might have just referred to somebody who was the life of the party, some ancient toga-wearing Bert Kreischer. Indeed, the Greeks understood alcohol intoxication in general as a beneficial form of possession. They thought the drinking changed thoughts and feelings because the drinker literally became one with a God Dionysus, taking the, quote, God within. It might surprise you that one of the best early pieces of evidence of people living long ago becoming concerned with addiction comes not from substances, but from gambling. If you've ever known somebody who is a gambling addict, if you've been addicted to gambling, yeah, you know this can be a powerful, wildly destructive addiction.

In the Rig Veda, an ancient compilation of Vedic Sanskrit hymns from India that dates back to before 1000 BCE, an evocative poem known. known as the gambler's lament, presents an unambiguous description of gambling addiction. This 14-line poem captures in vivid detail the despair of a man who struggles unsuccessfully against his desire to play the dice. At the beginning of the poem, the gambler has already suffered greatly. His wife, his mother, they've both been driven away by his addiction. Yet, even though the loss of his family clearly pains him, he struggles to stop. He resolves not to play with his fellow gamblers, but then, at the sound of the dice, he rushes to them,

quote, like a girl with her lover. His body feels like it's burning, and it seems like the dice have power over him, supernatural power. Here's a translation of an excerpt. The gambler goes to the hall of play, asking himself, will I win? Puffing himself up with, I will win.

The dice run counter to his desire, conferring the winning throws on his opponent. They are just dice, but hooking, goading, debasing, scorching, seeking to scorch, giving temporarily like a child, then in turn slapping down the victor, infused with honey, with power over the gambling. Throughout the poem, the man feels like he's forced by the dice, like he doesn't have control.

And yet at other times he manages to resist, if just briefly. The final stanza of the poem is intriguingly ambiguous. Contemporary scholars have arrived at drastically different translations. In one possibility, the man is freed from the shackles of gambling, and he beseeches his friends not to resent him for the things he did while in the throes of his addiction. In another version, he begs the dice to have pity on, to calm their inner fury, and to move on to another victim like some kind of curse. And in yet another interpretation, somewhat chillingly, the dice themselves speak of how it is futile to be angry at the awful, sublime, and timeless power of addiction over humanity. Old gambling friends, be kind to us. Don't be disgusted with our power.

Calm your resentment from within and pass us to another foe to conquer. This poem might not seem particularly enlightening to the modern reader, since it's most used description of territory that's now been well-trodden in books, music, films, and documentaries. And yet it gets to something really interesting. It tells us that from the beginning, addiction has lived somewhere in the middle point between an addict's choice and their compulsion. In other words, addiction lives somewhere between an active choice to do something over and over again and the complete loss of willpower and being pulled into doing something over and over

again by an invisible force that seems, you know, like it's just overtaken us. But how do you have choice and not have choice at the same time? The ancient Greeks had a word for this experience of acting against your present judgment. Acrazia, often translated as weakness of the will. Accrazi is not just doing something that is arguably harmful to yourself, like eating too much pie or spending too much money on clothes. After all, everyone indulges from time to time. Instead, Eccrasia is doing something even though you truly believe it would be better not to do it,

recognizing in the moment that you are acting against your own better judgment. And Eccrasia was a controversial concept right from the start. The renowned ancient Greek philosopher Socrates, who lived between 470 and 399 BCE, developed one argument in his Fidrus that dismissed Eccania out of hand as a simple matter of choice. He argued that there could be internal conflict, as he said pleasure and judgment, in quarrel inside us, but people never truly act against their better reason. Maybe Socrates never felt the hold of true addiction. Though Socrates allowed that people could be swayed by desires and aversions leading up to a decision at the moment of truth, he said, people always choose

what they think is best for them at that time. They might come to regret that choice later, but that doesn't mean that they were suffering from a lack of self-control. As he famously declared in the Protagoras, no one who either knows or believes that there is another possible course of action better than the one he is following will ever continue on his present course. I wonder what Socrates would have thought

if crack cocaine had been available in ancient Greece? You know, it's too bad that Paula Abdul, renowned superstar, Paula Abdul, was not around back then to let that to go wear and deep thinking, motherfucking know. Hi, I'm Paula Abdul. Do you know that crack cocaine is an addictive drug and people using crack

tend to forget about financial, educational, and family responsibilities? What? Don't ruin your life by getting involved in using crack cocaine. By all means, organize against using this deadly drug. Let's all crack down on crack cocaine. Yeah. Be a KHJ TV star. Okay.

Don't use drugs. Thank you so much, Paula. Oh, that was really nice. That was really helpful. Socrates's most famous pupil, Plato, the famous philosopher and teacher of Aristotle did not agree with him. Plato understood the problem of self-control, partially as the result of a divided and conflicted self, one he illustrated through the famous metaphor of the chariot. The intellect is the charioteer, attempting to wrangle the two horses of positive moral impulses and irrational, passionate drives. And it seems he was pretty on the money with his take. In the study of addiction today, the divided self is a prominent explanation of how choices can be disordered. For example, behavioral economics research describes the psychological feature of delay. Discounting, in which smaller but more immediate rewards are favored over larger delayed ones. Oh man, I've seen this play out in so many people's lives, including my own time to time, right?

Maybe you need to get a new car. You know, you really need one. Your car that you have right now is not going to last much longer. You're going to need a new one for work, you know, and just basic life functioning. And you could rein in spending and pick up some extra shifts and or take a part-time extra job to save up for that needed down payment. But you also have worked hard this week. And you need to treat yourself, right? You deserve to get yourself some new shoes to go to that concert on Saturday night to try that new sushi restaurant.

And how could you possibly feel good about going to work without an ice venty frappuccino in your hand? You can save for a car later. Always a little bit later. You got to have fun right now. You don't know if you're going to be around tomorrow. Carpe diem. This thought process is universal to humankind, but far more pronounced in addiction. researchers find that immediate rewards are grossly overvalued in many, if not most decision-making processes, often causing extreme impulsivity that feels like loss of control.

This can be seen not as a control failure, but as a breakdown in a process called intertemporal bargaining, in which the present self negotiates with and irrationally overwhelms the future self. But I don't even know if I'll fucking live long enough to drive that new car. I might not be alive in six months, but I'm alive now, and my friends are heading out to the bars tonight. Plato student, Aristotle, was also deeply invested in the idea of a crazier. To him, it was self-evident that people sometimes acted against their better judgment. Aristotle chalked it's up to emotions or misguided reason get in the way of one's better, cold, rational, logic, though he considered it useful to classify different kinds of acrasia, like the clear-eyed kind, as opposed to the fiery, impetuous acrasia, driven by passions or cravings.

Maybe this perspective was reinforced when Aristotle went on to tutor Alexander III of Macedon, better known as our former suck subject, Alexander the Great. For three years, beginning when Alexander was 13, around 3.43 BCE, Aristotle taught him ethics, philosophy, politics, and natural science at the Macedonian court in Pella. Though a brilliant military mind, Alexander would go on to make many decisions that were not in his own self-interest or in the interests of people around him, particularly while under the influence of alcohol.

He burned the Persian city of Persepolis to the ground during a wine-sense, saturated celebration. Whoops. He speared to death, his beloved mentor in general, Clytus the Black, in a drunken rage, because Clytus had questioned some of his decisions and then immediately regretted it. He held drinking contest that left dozens of his men, literally dead, and against his doctor's orders, drank heavily even while suffering from a chronically high fever, and then wound up dying a month short of his 33rd birthday. Damn. Can you imagine waking up with a colossal hangover after getting blackout drunk and then you see that the city

you camp next to is smoldering. It's been burnt to the ground. And you're like, oh, shit. What the hell happened over there? You did, sir. You happened. You said something about fuck those Persians and then tossed your torch into the palace,

then encourage everyone else to please toss their torches as well. And, yeah, they're just all burnt to the ground. Oh, holy shit. Damn it. Wow, that was some strong-ass wine. Hey, where's Clydes? I want to see what he remembers. Oh, he's quite dead, sir.

You speared him. God, damn it, what a bummer. I do need to sober up a bit. A few hundred years later, another notable statesman named Marcus Antonius also clearly struggled with alcohol. Better known as Mark Anthony, Marcus, was born nearly three centuries

after Alexander the Great's rule in 83 BC. He was a Roman politician in general, who played a critical role in the transformation of the Roman Republic from a constitutional one into the autocratic Roman Empire. And after Julius Caesar's assassination, old Marky Mark would go on to form a three-man dictatorship known to historians, of course, as the funky bunch.

Or as the second triumvirate, and he was also very likely an alcoholic. Once while hung over in Holt in court, as Julius Caesar's second command, Marcus was sick in public, quote, flooding his own lap in the whole platform with the gobbets of wine-reaking food he had vomited up. according to contemporary sources.

Clearly he's been hungover, or just really fucking drunk. Though Mark Anthony actually published a book Defending and Celebrating His legendary drinking habits, contemporaneous commentators like Seneca the Younger would label alcohol specifically as a chief factor in his downfall.

Like Alexander, however, we don't know that Marcus would have considered himself to be an addict, or if people around him considered him to be an addict. The terminology, perhaps the belief in the existence of addiction, as we understand it now, it just wasn't there yet. However, the world would soon see a man who did consider himself an addict and arrived to that concept through religion. We've talked about Augustine before in our episode on the One Taste Cult. He basically invented the

concept of sexual sin because his dad might have seen his boner in the communal bath. Not kidding. As one of the earliest Christian thinkers, Augustine, aka St. Augustine of Hippo, wrestled with the idea back in the late 4th century C.E. That humans wanted to glorify God, but also wanted to get down and fuck. And thanks to some wacky reasoning, those two ideas were considered mutual exclusive. Augustine wondered, why did God give him an inability to control his dick if God also wanted him to stay celibate? Why doth thou tempt me with the involuntary engorging of my new swollen member, Lord?

Why doth my thoughts keep circling back to sweet, sweet tithies and the spilling of my seed? This would lead Augustine to the concept of original sin That humans were tainted by passionate arousal And had to repress it in order to live Godly moral lives But Augustine recognized that that was not an easy solution He after all really wanted to fuck Like most of his contemporaries

As he described it in his later confessions As a young man he was quote tossed and spilled Floundering in the broiling sea of my fornication The frenzy gripped me and I surrendered myself entirely to lust Well hey elusive peanut buddy sounds like he would have a great time to join his youth

while he still had it still he wanted to be good theoretically and this led him to one of his most famous pronouncements which can be read as an early description

of sex addiction Lord make me chased but not yet how relatable is that I have to get my shit together I know Sarah's bad for me I know we cannot keep sleeping together proceeds to get nude pick

and text from Sarah saying she wants him to come over and we will stop sleeping together after tonight Indeed, the first 12-step group for sex addiction, sex and love addicts anonymous is also sometimes referred to as the Augustine Fellowship, all because one member years ago who had been reading confessions claimed he's obviously one of us. Interestingly enough, we probably would not consider Augustine a sect addict today after a period of messing around, seemingly with both men and women. For most of the rest of his sexual life, he was committed and monogamous. Instead, Augustine might have had an addiction to thinking about sex, something that today,

might be called an anxiety disorder. However, for early religious thinkers like Augustine or many early Christian communities or even Buddhist teachers, it didn't matter what the actual object of addiction was. You could be addicted to thinking, sex, money, wealth, fame. Augustine identified within himself a longing for fame when he longed for professional success. The important thing was not the object of your desire, but the act of desire in and of itself. Desiring something that would never be fully quenched, and thus it was the root of your suffering. While this may seem to us like an overly simplistic approach, Augustine and those early, you know, other early religious thinkers may have been on the forefront of something here in their conceptions about addiction

when they argued that it's not a special category of behavior in and of itself, but a manifestation of ordinary psychological processes. For example, some explanations frame addiction as a manifestation of psychological inflexibility, attempts to manipulate and avoid negative thoughts and feelings by disappearing into addictive behaviors, including not just substance abuse, but also worry, rumination, self-stimulation, other forms of mindlessness. Gooning, right, fits here. Do you goon? Meetsack, are you a gooner?

Do you masturbate for long periods of time without reaching a climax? Getting close, but then stopping, then working yourself up again to the brink of orgasm, then stopping, then finally coming really hard after you've had to work really hard to come. Are you a goon? sorry, just learn what Gooney means. But it does work as an example, right? Are you doing something mostly because it distracts you from worrying about and trying to deal with the real problems in your life? Are you addicted to a form of escapism?

Addiction is not just a chemical process of getting hooked. It's the mind's way to disappear into a comforting rhythm, you fucking gooner, when faced with discomfort. And you can find those rhythms in anything, like a slow stroke or drugs or work. name it. And for a long time, as Europe was plunged into the dark ages, this view persisted. What we now call addiction was overwhelmingly read as disordered desire, a moral or spiritual vice. Monarchs and monastic writers like Avagrius, Cachian, and later Aquinas developed the concept of accedia, the noonday demon of listlessness and repetitive avoidance, to describe persistent, self-perpetuating interstates that look a lot like modern descriptions of compulsive behavior.

or addiction. And for them, dealing with addiction was a matter of penitence, and if things got especially dire, following strict monastic rules to keep yourself on the straight and narrow. In the early Renaissance in Europe, scholastic theologians and university professors who now had access to the teachings of Aristotle, Arabic physicians, and more as the world expanded again coming out of the dark ages, increasingly used more medicalized language like vice, habit, and melancholyan to describe what we would call it. addiction, mixing moral and early medical explanations. Still, there really wasn't much that

you could get addicted to substance-wise at that place in time and history. There was certainly alcohol, but that wasn't really considered particularly addictive, even though it was, but most people had to drink at least some form of alcohol because it was among the only forms of sterile liquids. Since addiction was mostly behavioral, addiction to gambling, for instance, the sin explanation still seemed right on the money. But that was about to change. before you find out how it changes, time for today's first of two mid-show sponsor breaks. If you don't want to hear these ads ever again, please sign up to be a space that are on Patreon, help us make monthly charitable contributions, get the catalog, ad-free, the back catalog of

so many episodes of The Secrets Suck and more. Thanks for listen to our sponsors. Hope you heard a deal that makes sense for you. And now let's head to the year 1492, when some new discoveries led to a wave of new addictions. By late October of 1492, World Explorer Christopher Columbus had grown impatient. His first expedition was going pretty poorly. His crews were on the verge of mutant, and the trade with the indigenous Taino people of the Caribbean was disappointing. Columbus was hungry for gold, or at least to make contact with China, as he had convinced himself that he had arrived at the outskirts of Asia, a delusion he would carry to the end of his life.

I often forget that. The islands of the Caribbean would be called to East Indies because they thought they were not too far offshore from India. By November 1st, when his crew anchored on Cuba's northeastern shore, he decided that they must have reached the mainland. This is definitely India or China. A thousand percent is one of those. We did it, guys. He quickly dispatched a few men, including the scout, Rodrigo de Jerez, to bushwhack into the lush, exotic vegetation bearing letters of introduction to the Chinese emperor, who, of course, was not nearby. He was not within thousands of miles.

De Jerez and his companions returned five days later. They had come across a large Taino settlement, but to Columbus's disappointment, but to Columbus's disappointment, there were no spices, no gold, definitely no sign of the great Chinese Empire. The only notable discovery was the native population's odd custom of rolling up an unfamiliar plant, set on fire, then inhaling the smoke. This practice was completely new to them, and Columbus thought it was basically worthless. He had no idea, how could he, that tobacco would go on to become one of history's biggest cash crops ever.

But de Jerez took an immediate liking to tobacco, despite Columbus not being interested, as people often do, and he brought the custom back to his hometown of Ayamante in southwest Spain, and there his neighbors were so terrified by the sight of thick smoke billowing out of his mouth that they hauled him before the Inquisition with accusations of sorcery. And as a result, De Jerez was imprisoned for seven years. Oh, for fuck's sake. Dude smokes a plant and the inquisitors are like, lock this necromanza up before his dark magic dooms us all. How pissed are you if you have to spend seven years of your life in a prison cell because you smoked some tobacco. And you weren't even in prison because it was illegal.

You were in prison because other people thought your new plant was truly the devil's lettuce. By the time he was released, tobacco had transformed from a diabolical, demonic plant, to a hot and fun new trend among the elites of Europe, one that would soon spread across the continent, and more drugs would quickly follow. This was an unanticipated effect of opening up trade routes across the globe. From about 1,500 to 1789, Europeans were exposed to a laundry list of exotic plants with powerful effects on the mind and body. Sometimes they already knew about the plant and had access to it, and what came from far away was new info on how to use it. In pre-modern Europe, for example, though they had had access to opium, for many, many years, it was normally used for medicinal purposes.

But in the early 1500s, an intrepid physician and botanist named Garcia da Orta, sent word back from Goa, state in West India, that some members of Indian society used opium to calm their mental troubles, not just their physical ones. Of course they did. Whipple, chill. At the same time, Europeans began to hear about addiction, but in an entirely different context. In July 1533, a young man named John Frith, only eight years out from his Cambridge graduation, was imprisoned inside the infamous Tower of London before being burned alive for heresy. I sometimes wonder how many people have been burned alive throughout history, and what percentage of them hadn't done anything wrong?

As a secret member of the Protestant Reformation, which was at that point less than two decades old, he had worked underground for years to produce pamphlets and books criticizing the Catholic Church. Like St. Augustine, John Frith, and other early Protestant reformers were preoccupied with fate, freedom, and how they overlapped. If God's will was ultimate, if everything happened according to God's plan, how did humans will match up with that. How are humans both capable of complete independent free will, but also giving themselves over to God's will at the same time? Frith arrived in an interesting new idea, addiction. Though he was only one of hundreds of Protestant martyrs who would die for

their beliefs, as far as today's linguists have determined, he was the first to use the word addict in English, in a text criticizing the Pope, no less. The Latin adichere means to speak to or say to, and in classical Latin, Adichire was a legal term meaning given over two. One use of the word described how a debtor could be enslaved by a creditor to pay off a debt. But there's more than that to the word. Adichere also referred to augury, the divination of the will of the gods through omens and portents like reading the flight of birds, and it also implied strong devotion or habitual behavior, or more simply, a strong preference. For example, in that first text,

used it to say, judge all these things with a simple eye, be not partially addict to the one nor to the other, but judge them by scripture, as a way to urge the reader not to be overtly attached to preconceived ideas. For Frith and the other reformers in his circle, addict was a powerful work. It was a lone work from Latin, which was widely considered to be the tongue of authority, both religious and civic, and addiction did not necessarily refer to a condition or status or even something good or bad but to an action. You addicted yourself, either to bad things like arcane and dysfunctional religious institutions or good things like questioning tradition and seeking a pure form of worship. A disdainful man could be addict to pride, and an evil one could be

addict to sin, but a devout one could be addict to worship. In both cases, the important thing was that what the word was saying about freedom. Addicting oneself was an active process of giving over one's agency, a choice to give up choices. This paradox would prove to be one of the thornyest things to untangle about the nature of addiction for centuries to come. Soon the concept of addiction would migrate to the influx of drugs hitting European cities and an entirely new phenomenon would be born, the drug scare. The first drug scares in Europe arose not from a substance's widespread use, but from who was using it. At first, these drugs were only for the elite. In England, Sir Walter Raleigh inspired a fashion creation.

for recreational smoking, initially associated with the leisure class, where dandies learned how to blow elaborate smoke clouds and stored their smoking accessories in boxes of silver and ivory. Might how fancy? They even sometimes lit their cigarettes from a lit coal impaled on the end of a sharp sword. Those dandies knew how to have a real good party. I mean, are you really partying if you're not lighting up your cigarette or cigar or joint with some hot coal impaled on the end of one sword?

However, all tobacco, or as tobacco, excuse me, became more widely used. across all social strata, it prompted intense fears. What will the poors do now that they've discovered tobacco? They'll go crazy. Their little poor brains won't be able to handle it. They'll stop working and ruin society. They'll kill us all for more tobacco. Increasingly desperate attempts to control it followed.

Isn't that how it always is? It's fine for the wealthy elites to do their drugs. Fine for them to cheat on their spouses, to exploit loopholes and tax laws, to grow their wealth and businesses and extremely shady and exploitive means and then bribe politicians or judges, etc. ready to get away with it. That's okay. That's okay because they're wealthy. They made it.

They must know what they're doing. I mean, if they're wealthy, they also have to be very, very smart, very good for society. So they should be given certain exemptions and privileges. They have earned them. What's the point of being wealthy if he can also be powerful and not be holding to the laws of the common folk? But if the pores start behaving exactly like that, well, now we have ourselves a moral crisis. Now the pores, the stupid fucking pores, they must be stopped. Pope Urban the 8th. With threatened tobacco users with excrement, communication. The Pope was apparently scandalized by reports of priests having sneezing fits during mass from snort in a former tobacco. Across the globe, Russian, Japanese, and

Chinese rulers all started handing out harsh penalties for tobacco use. Sultan Murad of the fourth of the Ottoman Empire punished tobacco users in the 1620s and 30s with heavy fines and occasionally death at one point executing 20 of his tobacco smoking officers with the severest torture. But no matter what, the drug rolled on seemingly unstoppable. Even some of the 20 officers who Morad the 4 killed, they had smuggled pipes in their sleeves so they could sneak in one last puff before their execution. Also, of course, sold Marad the 4th secretly fucking smoked himself. Also consumed alcohol and caffeine despite having issued strict bans on all these substances for the general public. Do as I say, not as I do or be severely fucking punished for this shit I will never get in trouble for.

One of the battle cries of the elite for the entirety of human history. history. The anti-drug sentiments of the early modern period were closely associated with fears about class, sin, and rebellion. In England, Elizabeth I successor, King James I, published a counterblast to tobacco in 1604, castigating his subjects for imitating, quote, the barbarous and beastly manners of the wild godless and slavish Indians, especially in so vile and stinking accustomed. Damn, Jimmy, tell us how you really feel. Based on this hatred of tobacco, and clear the people of the East Indies as well, King James I was able to issue a 4,000% tax hike on tobacco

back at the turn of the 17th century, in part because the Spanish and the Portuguese empires controlled all the tobacco-producing colonies. But then, as English colonies started to produce tobacco, importing the drug became a mutually reinforcing financial boom. So by 1643, Parliament had discarded prohibitionist taxes and taken steps to encourage the trade of tobacco. Of course, when only your rivals are making money on a drug, it's the fucking worst.

The greatest sin humanity has ever faced. If we don't severely punish everyone who touches it, the republic will be lost forever. But then when you suddenly figure out how to make a bunch of money off that same shit, this stuff is the greatest boon to humankind in history. Everyone must try it immediately. It is sweet nectar raining down from heaven. This narrative shifting from dangerous invader to an accepted part of English culture would repeat itself over and over.

In late 17th century, Russia, when Peter the Great finally accepted the tobacco smuggling was ubiquitous, he stopped harsh penalties, which had included horrible punishments like nostril slitting or being broken on the rack. Fun. But after God knows how many noses were slit, he permitted the sale and consumption of tobacco. If the government couldn't prevent it, it might as well make money on it. From Cardinal Richelot in France to the Italian Republics and Habsburg, Austria, other leaders followed suit and gave up tobacco. banns in favor of taxes, monopolies, and other strategies to profit off the new crop. And if this pattern sounds very familiar to you like something we covered in our episode back on the opioid epidemic, great memory. You're right. For the rest of the history of drugs,

governments will simultaneously ban and encourage them depending on what they can use to their advantage. So what does all this have to do with addiction? Well, these early drug scares helped show just how little such scares have to do with actual medical harms or any fears about addictiveness. At this point, people did not yet perceive the basic cancerous health risk of smoking tobacco. The idea of addiction as a medical problem linked to drugs hadn't even been articulated by this point in history. It was again only considered bad if lower class people went crazy for it, and even then, only when the elites could not directly profit from their interest. But soon, addiction itself would be used as a weapon. In the 1720s, a bright young

Native American boy was born into a society under siege. Samson Akam was one of only 350 remaining Mohican people living along the thickly wooded banks of the Thames River Valley and what is now Connecticut, among the last remnants of a tribe that had once numbered in the thousands. The Mohican people were unlucky enough to be located close to a prominent colony just miles away from an excellent deepwater harbor that the English had Christianed at New London. This area had ravaged by years of disease, poverty, warfare, exploitation, and another of the great addiction epidemics of early modern history, one that in this case had spread from Europe. Alcohol. Distilled spirits had taken a heavy toll

on native cultures. They were immediate harms, or there were, excuse me, immediate harms. You know, people sent to track animals who would freeze to death in the cold because they didn't realize the warning signs of frostbites. And there were long-term harms as well. Alcohol caused strife between families, right? Hello, spike in domestic violence. And so, solemn and respectful treaty negotiations often broke down into drunken violence. Ackham was very familiar with the ravages alcohol and had brought to his community, and he thought he had a way to help his community combat its ill effects by leaning on another significant European import, Christianity.

Akham was growing up during the first great awakening, a passionate, optimistic evangelical movement marked by ecstatic camp meetings all across the northeast that began in the 1730s and lasted to the 1770s. Huge crowds wept and cried out as people were quote unquote born again and Occam himself had his own profound conversion experience as a young boy.

He came to believe that this new faith was the way to save his people. He convinced a local preacher of the Reverend L. Ezer Weillock to take him on as a pupil in preparation for missionary work. And Weelock was amazed how Ackham was able to quickly pick up

and become proficient in not just English, but also Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. Smart dude. And on top of that, despite suffering numerous medical ailments that led to unceasing chronic pain, Ackham traveled hundreds of miles to preach to other indigenous tribes. From the Montauk people at the eastern tip of Long Island to the Iroquois Confederacy in the thick forest of upstate New York, he saw alcohol problems everywhere.

And soon a young man began to realize another important, dangerous aspect to this foreign drug. Alcohol was a tool of exploitation, like smallpox blankets. It was not a passive invader, but a deliberate instrument of oppression. Colonists encouraged drinking among Native peoples to pacify resistance to bind them to the colonial economy, where if they got drunk and got addicted to being drunk, they would make poor trades for more of that intoxicating beverage. Traders could then charge exorbitant prices or swap whiskey for crushing debts and mortgages on native land. Or colonizers could simply resort to outright violence in cases where Native Americans were given liquor and then killed when they became. came too confused, too drunk, to properly defend themselves.

Some tribes, seeing how much destruction alcohol was bringing, tried to enact their own restrictions. At one point, the Shawnees of Pennsylvania poured 40 gallons of rum out into the street. But still, they couldn't escape the shadow of addiction. Nor could they escape the pervasive public opinion that this was all the natives' fault. They again lacked willpower. They were mentally weak, godless people easily taken in by sin. In 1767, a desperate chief of the Tuscarra, people, Ocus al-Knegot, formerly petitioned the New York colonial government for, quote,

some medicine to curis of our fondness for that destructive liquor. The British officer only replied that they ought to forsake their old ways, embrace Christianity, and seek proper instruction and morality so they could better control their appetites. Right? Civilize up, motherfuckers. We figured it out, kind of, maybe. Now you do the same. And then beat it. You're ruining my buzz. Trying to get fucked up and enjoy ourselves, Chief. You're bringing out the vibe. thankfully saw the tools of control embedded in this reasoning, and he would use his rising celebrity status to call that shit out. Five years later, September of 1772, he delivered an immensely popular sermon at the execution of a Wampenog man who, while intoxicated, had killed

a white man. In colonial culture, these were considered important events for moral instruction, and Occam seemingly played his part by going on and on about the sin of drunkenness, but then the speech took a turn, and he publicly called out alcohol. as an instrument of exploitation, denouncing, quote, the devilish men who put their bottles to their neighbor's mouth to make them drunk. And the fact that native peoples have been cheated over and over again, he said in part to alcohol. Luckily, dude was not killed for saying that shit. Instead, during the area's religious awakening, it became an incredibly popular sermon, maybe the most popular of its day. The printed version rapidly went to 19 editions, making him one of the leading authors of the day

in all of the American colonies. Ackham was far ahead of his time. To this day, false firewater myths are perpetuated about Native people's genetic vulnerability to alcohol. But this belief, as I believe I've gone over in some other episode years ago, is patently false. Native Americans are currently thought to be no more prone to addiction than anyone else. And the alcoholism that spread through native communities suggests that looking at addiction through a solely medicalized lens rarely tells the whole story.

Instead of being about genetic predisposition, maybe it's been about suddenly living in a land, your land, where you are now seen as an invader instead of as the invaded, a second-class citizen at best, where the new rulers have zero respect for you or your traditions, where the new ways make no sense to you, and you suddenly feel lost and without purpose, where men who once fought as brave warriors and protected their families and communities now feel powerless against the new ways and the new weapons, and stripped to their purpose, they have sought an escape from their mental and spiritual pain, and that pain and the circumstances that caused it is passed down from generation to generation to

generation. Indeed. There is ample evidence that before European contact, many native tribes use psychoactive drugs, right? Hello, peyote, including forms of alcohol in some cases without problems. And that even after contact, they did not develop harmful patterns of drinking until after the ravages of disease wore poverty, forced relocation, and being labeled as dumb, dirty savages. The Canadian psychologist Bruce Alexander has articulated this idea as his, quote, dislocation theory of addiction, which asserts that the most important and fundamental cause of addiction is not the biological effect of a drug or some inherent vulnerability to addiction in individuals. It's not what we might call having an addictive personality, but rather

a response to societal wounds. Importantly, that pain doesn't need to be the kind of extreme loss, such as the poverty and disease experienced by the Mohegan people and Occam's youth, or the physical separation of being torn from family and friends. Addiction can also arise in times of psychological pain, as I mentioned, being torn from a culture and traditional spirituality, losing freedom and opportunity, lacking forms of self-expression. Many Native Americans would prove that some of this could be turned back, at least on a local level. By the second half of the 1700s, many tribes realized they needed community resources

if they were going to solve the alcoholism problem, and several different societies developed cultural practices to help alcoholics. Neolin, a prophet in the Lenapea, aka Delaware tribe, gained a large following in the 1760s after calling for a total break from the English and a return to traditional practices. Above all, he urged his followers to, quote, abstain from drinking their deadly basin medicine, which they have forced upon us for the sake of increasing their gains

and diminishing our numbers. After a spiritual awakening helped him to overcome chronic drunkenness, a man named Papunhong in the Muncie tribe, a band of the Lenape, started a movement emphasizing cultural traditions and abstinence from alcohol. In addition, a sent a man named Handsome Lake

developed a new movement based on total abstinence that was strikingly similar to today's 12-step groups. They provided a set of moral teachings centered on sobriety, called on people to meet regularly in circles, and encouraged those struggling with alcohols to share their stories in order to enlist community support and refresh their commitment to absence. The so-called Code of Handsome Lake, also known as the Longhouse Religion, or the

good message, spread broadly through many Native communities and helped countless people. It was the first mutual help support group explicitly focused on addiction recovery in America, predating Alcoholics Anonymous by almost 150 years, and surviving in some form, to this day, hail Nimran. Unfortune for Europeans, both North American colonists and on the continent, they still had no such way of making sense of substance abuse. But progress was beginning to be made in London. On November 8th, 1744, the distinguished men of the Royal Society of London convened to consider a troubling new illness circulating amongst the lower classes. The damn pause! Why can't they ever get their shit together? Why must they struggle so and complain about it all

the time. It's off-putty. Why can't they just have multi-generational wealth like us nobles? Come on, poor, just be born rich, you fucking idiots. It's way better. At this point, London was by far the largest city in Europe, which did not mean it was the nicest. In fact, it was the opposite. Within city limits, more than half a million people crammed on top of one another, living alongside open pits as sewage and garbage, rotting in the streets, similar to what we covered in our episode on the history of shit when we covered London's Great Stink. But this would be a different kind of epidemic. Not one born from bacteria and fecal matter and spread and contaminated water or even an epidemic of drunkenness, at least not on the surface.

It was an epidemic of spontaneous human combustion, it seemed. As the solemn gathering on that November day heard earlier that year, a fishmonger's daughter had awoken one morning to find her mother's charred remains, looking like a, quote, heap of charcoal covered with white ashes. The daughter horrified doused the remains with two large bowls of water raising a thick, fetid cloud of smoke. What the fuck happened? I have no idea. But it was becoming a pervasive social problem, or at least people thought it was. From the late 17th to the mid-18th century, several accounts of people spontaneously bursting into flames captivated the notoriously tabloidly English press.

The victims were old women, and all thoroughly alcohol soaked in a fashionable new spirit. Gin. England was experiencing the gin craze. its first truly urban drug epidemic. Newly cheap, ubiquitous, and up to twice as strong as it is today, rot-gut gin was a distilled alcohol loaded with botanicals and other flavorings to mask its terrible gasoline-like taste. A consumption of this shit doubled from 1700 to 1720, then nearly doubled again by 1729,

then shot to more than six times the 1700 levels by 1743, spurred on by how cheap, strong, and widely available it was, as opposed to earlier forms. The gin craze brought together all the various causes and conditions that it contributed to other early drug epidemics, a brand new drug, or at least a brand new form of an old drug, and an industry making a lot of money off of it and the people who needed it to soothe their pain.

And this time, because you can't easily ignore a woman bursting into flames from, I don't know, having gin for blood, I guess, people decided they had to do something about it. And actually, before I move forward, it is not now believe they actually spontaneously combust it. More likely, they passed out drunk next to a lit candle or some shit and caught themselves on fire. And it may have actually only happened twice. But the press, of course, added some bullshit to the sensationalist narrative.

But also other crazy shit really did happen during the gin craze. Like numerous accounts of naked homeless people roaming about London, people who had literally sold all of their clothes, including the clothes they were wearing for a little more gin. And there was a case of Judith Defour, a young woman with a daughter and no obvious husband. The daughter Mary had been taken into care by the parish workhouse. house and provided with a nice set of new clothes. One Sunday in January of 1734, Judith came to take Mary out for the day, then didn't return her because she had strangled her and sold her clothes to buy more gin.

In response to this, some called for restrictions on the newly powerful distilling industries, which have been able to make spirits on the cheap because of improved technology and a drop in grain prices. Some railed against Geneva, the Anglicized name for the Dutch liquor, Geneva, as a foreign invader. most people called this new strong gin, Madam Geneva. Mostly the moral panic was dominated by fears about widespread drinking amongst the underclass. These fears were gladly stoked by distillers to make it seem like they bore no responsibility in all this, which is an interesting take. We are also alarmed by how many of these dirty pores are drinking our gin.

We don't like it. We don't make it for them. We make it only for the rich, of course. But the damn pores, they trick us. They slap on top hats and monocles. Say things like, I'd like to acquire a bit of spirits for the polo match, governor, and then we sell it to them and thinking they're rich and decent. And then the rascals take off their top hats, let their monocles fall and shout terrible insults like,

Thanks for the strong drink, and fuck off, you really wanker. He's going to down this and fuck you misses, yeah? Indeed, the distilling industry founded pamphleteers, most notably hiring the great Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe, to write articles defending them. These blame the, quote, poor sort of people for destroying their health. health and strength of society at large with their immoderate drinking. God damn it, pause, enough with all the begging and being dirty. I do not like to have a driver take me out of my estate for relaxing carriage rides in the country and not be able to look at and enjoy gazing

at my mansion from my property line a half mile away, only to hear such dreadful things like, please, sir, my baby's starving, sir. Please, I'm starving as well. I can't get to work because I haven't got any legs, sir. Get your shit together, pours. The gin craze was truly driven, driven by a growing wealth gap, which in turn perpetuated the craze. London was crowded with urban poverty, thanks to a growing upper class that imported goods from colonies rather than paying English people to make them at home, goods which, of course, they then sold back to England's people, the same people who then bought the cheaper foreign good because they didn't have much money because foreign manufacturers

had taken better paying jobs that would have allowed them to buy more expensive goods. familiar. This offshoring of English jobs led to a lot of out-of-work farmers coming to London in search of opportunity, and when they didn't find it, they turned to alcohol to numb their sense of hopelessness, both consuming it and selling it. Women especially sold gin because it was cheap and the market was hot. And this, of course, looked to the upper class, many of whom had literally gotten rich off the misery, they had a huge hand in creating, like the decline of society. Of course, without any concept of addiction beyond an emphasis on personal responsibility, the government's approach was supremely unhelpful.

Instead of raising taxes on the importation of domestic distilling liquor, which would take money out of elites pockets, the government instituted a series of increasingly tight prohibitionist controls. A 1736 Act of Parliament targeted, quote, the people of lower and inferior rank, and pushed the licensing fee to a whopping 50 pounds, not even hiding their disdain for the poor. That law also created an ill-fated policy of pain

informers five pounds for snitching on illegal gin shops, which backfired spectacularly, both because people fed junk information to the government and because of violent backlashes against informers. Drinking gin itself became an act of political protest, a symbol of opposition towards an unpopular elitist government. The English government could not put together why their methods weren't working. Why couldn't they outlaw something, or at least make it hard to get, and have people just give up? Why do people do whatever they needed to do to attain the substance, even if that meant breaking the law? Were they, like, sick or something?

This line of questioning would soon give birth to the concept of addiction as a medical issue. The Royal Society began to call drinking an infection that daily spread throughout the city. A few years into the gin craze, one clergyman and scientist, Stephen Hales, published a pamphlet titled, A Friendly Admonition to the Drinkers of Gin, Brandy, and other distilled, spiritual liquors. And it provided a new view of why the crates was so out of control. In his mind, spirits, quote, extinct. the natural warmth of the blood, causing an insatiable thirst for more liquor. In addition, Hales argued that drunkenness had become a chronic condition, one that infatuated

and enslaved people and would go on, though they saw hellfire burning before them. And this wasn't exactly a brand new idea. It was just one that historically had never gained a lot of widespread traction. But as early as 1576, a pamphlet titled, A Delicate Diet for Dantymouthed, drunkenness, warned that drunkenness was a monstrous plant lately crept into the pleasant orchards of England, a forerunner to the idea that alcoholism was a disease. In 1609, the influential Puritan John Downham bemoaned the fates of those who addict themselves to much drinking and lamented how many of our people of late are so unmeasurably addicted to this vice.

Medical writers during the gin craze drew on these developments and began using the word addicted to explain the impaired choice of habitual drunkenness, but it still wasn't entirely clear what addicted meant. In different contexts, or even at the same time, drunkenness would be viewed as both a disease and a sin, and many maintained that nobody was so addicted that a good prayer could not bring them back to a virtuous, sober path. But of course, that often was not enough. Now let's head back to the U.S., which is just heading into the American Revolution, and let's look at how the beginning of understanding addiction came into play on this side

of the pond. Right after today's second a two mid-show sponsor breaks. Thanks for listening to these sponsors. Hope you heard some deals you liked. And now let's head to 1777. Explore how an emerging nation was being negatively affected

by what sounds like a lot of alcoholism. In the sweltering summer heat of 1777, Benjamin Rush, a surgeon general to the Continental Army, snuck away from Philadelphia to his wife's family farm in the country. The mood was, of course, tense throughout the Young Republic. More than 15,000 British troops were amassed on ships outside New York, ready to strike at Philadelphia, the nation's then

capital. But Rush wasn't thinking about that as he hurried over to his relatives farm. He would make it there just in time to see the birth of his first child, a baby boy named John. Just a week later, the family received word that more than 200 British ships had set sail for Philadelphia and Rush returned to his post with the Continental Army. The ensuing battles were chaotic, and Rush was dismayed by the drastic shortages of medicine, food, and blankets in the hospitals. He was even more distressed by the outrageous use of alcohol, which caused his hospitals to be filled not only with the wounded and fevers, but also with rowdy, drunken soldiers who got in the way of important duties. Indeed, alcohol problems were rife amongst the fighting forces in general.

On one occasion, troops drank confiscated hessian rum and got so fucked up, they literally fell out of their boats and into the Delaware River. This wasn't exactly a good way to win a war. The 31-year-old Rush, who had signed the Declaration of Independence a year earlier, was an ambitious man with a tendency to make enemies, and he soon had to resign because of his arrogance and combativeness. He returned to Philadelphia, dejected, unemployed, with all dreams of a political career gone, and to make things even worse, he now had a young family to support.

But ever-confident Rush decided to create a new legacy, and he would go on to become America's first all-star physician, not just a doctor, but a deep thinker about the way the mind, body, and environment, interacted, and a tradition that went all the way back to Socrates and Aristotle. First, Rush won a professorship at the University of Pennsylvania's medical school and the prestigious Pennsylvania Hospital. He then got involved with the nascent abolitionist movement, hopeful that it would lead to greater reform that would help the colonies grow into a formidable country. That same reformist streak led him to another social cause, alcoholism. We tend to think of the post-revolutionary years

as a joyous time in American history, one filled with optimism for the new, nation. But in fact, for the average person, things were fucking terrible. Bad enough to make a person want to get fucked up and stay fucked up. And one day in 1784, Rush took a rare vacation to the Pennsylvania backcountry, where he was struck by the post where poverty and social upheaval, and he worried about how it all seemed to stem from drinking. The quantity of rye destroyed and of whiskey drunk in these places is immense, and its effects upon their industry, health, and morals are terrible, he wrote. Like in many places, it experienced devastating losses, upheaval and instability, the country was experiencing a true alcohol epidemic. Alcohol had become a crucial commodity for the colonies, and it was being rampantly produced. Cheap molasses from slave plantations in the Caribbean inundated the market, and enormously profitable distilleries were opening up, were opening, excuse me, up and down the eastern seaboard to turn it into rum. With no unifying culture and just the beginnings of a functional government, Americans turned to drink. Benjamin Franklin would even compare it to the disorder from England's gin crates writing

For our rum does the same mischief in proportion as their Geneva. Indeed, it's hard to overstate just how much Americans drank. This is wild. Many Americans literally drank morning, noon, and night on stage coaches and in steamboats, from farms to manners to factories.

They drank alcohol, not coffee, to wake up before work. That's interesting. Then drank again for the 11s, then again in mid-afternoon, before dinner and so forth, not to mention it meals themselves, as water was thought by a lot of people to be unhealthy. Getting back, my guy, what a weird world. But getting back from his vacation, Rush quickly wrote an inquiry into the effects of ardent spirits upon the human body and mind.

It was an impassioned tirade against distilled alcohol and contained a new twist on anti-alcohol messaging. Not only did drunkenness cause a temporary fit of madness, he wrote, but habitual drunkenness was itself a kind of insanity. Rush described habitual drunkenness as a chronic disease. disease that resembled certain hereditary family and contagious diseases. In other words, Russia's was the clearest statement up to that point that habitual drunkenness or alcoholism was a disease unto itself. Of Russia's many legacies, which would include tireless work treating people with mental illness, a pursuit that earned him the title of the Father of American psychiatry, his naming addiction as a disease is seen by many as his most significant contribution

and one that would have an impact far beyond medicine. So what does it mean? to call the diction a disease. Well, the term is not as straightforward as we might think. A disease is defined as a disorder of structure or function in a human, animal, or plant, especially one that has a distinctive group of symptoms, signs, or anatomical changes, and often a known cause. In a medical context, a disease implies that it can be at least partially actually treated. And the word disease implies that a medical treatment is the best treatment for the

affliction. It can also imply that the disease are a different kind of population from the normal population, though. Weaker, predisposed to addiction, which isn't true, or at least that's not the whole story. Now you might be saying, I've always heard that alcoholism is genetic. If your parents are alcoholics, you're more likely to be an alcoholic yourself, just like a disease, right? Kind of. Currently, according to scientists, genetic factors account for 40 to 60% of the risk factors for alcoholism. Twin studies into addiction have provided some of the highest quality evidence of this link, with results finding that if one twin is affected by addiction, the other twin is likely to be as well, and to the same substance.

Another study of genomic data of over a million people let scientists to identify genes commonly inherited across addiction disorders regardless of the substance being used, and this genomic pattern linked to general addiction risk also predicted a higher risk of mental and physical illness, including psychiatric disorders, suicidal behavior, respiratory disease, heart disease, and chronic pain conditions. Any one of those could lead someone to addiction. To again seek a continual escape from their troubles.

Or it could just be that those genes are linked for a reason we don't fully understand yet. So yes, there is a sort of genetic link, but it might be a lot more complex than we currently understand. Now, back to Dr. Rush. He describes several medical treatments for habitual dr. drunkenness, organized into two broad categories. The first was ways to cure a fit of drunkenness, like sticking a feather down the throat to make somebody vomit, or furiously whipping them, which allegedly brought blood down from the brain into the body. That illustrates why I love actual scientific studies, looking into the effectiveness of treatments. Without them, we just guess.

And guesses have too often led to weird notions, like, like fucking whipping the shit out of somebody to help bring their blood back down from the brain is a good way to get them to sober up. A second category was ways to cure the desire for ardent spirits itself, like spiking drinks with vomit-inducing medications, or, quote, blistering the ankles, which he believed would suspend the love of ardent spirits. Uh, what?

Blistering the ankles was a medical treatment used to draw humors or pain away from an afflicted area through a process called vesication. This was done by applying a strong irritant, such as one made from Spanish fly, aka cantheridin to the skin to create a large fluid-filled blister. This artificial inflammation was believed to cause the body to send blood

to the site of the blister theoretically relieving pain or illness elsewhere in the body by getting that nasty-ass bad blood away from the disease. How was the thought that this absurd treatment would actually help cure alcoholism?

I have no fucking idea. Again, medical treatments in the pre-scientific study age were often wild and nonsensical. Rush wasn't on the medical train 100% with treating drunkenness, though. He also said that prayer and shame were helpful tools to quit drinking. We have to shame these drunk fucks. Nothing gets people to stop seeking an escape from their pain and spirits like shame. So much helpful shame. Unfortunately, by 1809, alcoholism would be less of an object of study for Rush and more of a personal problem.

His eldest son, John, had always been different. different for most other people his age. He was brilliant, but impulsive, given to fits of anger and recklessness. He worried his parents enough that when he went off to Princeton, his protective father did not allow him to live in the dorms. As an adult, John would flip between different professions, eventually landing in the Navy. No one would have called him mentally ill in those days, but Rush and his wife urged him, begged him to stay sober, and be careful about his difficulties with self-control. Now the 32-year-old John was stationed in New Orleans. Uh-oh, Big Easy is not the best place for sober living, and he clearly began falling apart. And in a horrifying turn of events, he commanded a boat that fired muskets on a group of slaves along the river bank. He then became manic and attempted to take his own life with a razor blade to his neck. In those days, the treatment options for what afflicted John were profoundly limited. The Navy doctors thought they had no choice but to send him back to his dad. As he wrote to him, your acquaintance with the anatomy of the human mind will enable you to do more for him

than any man on earth could. When John came home, Dr. Rush was horrified by his son's long, matted hair, his claw-like fingernails, and his wild, dardy eyes. Unable to get through to him, Rush eventually admitted his son into his own mental hospital, writing to his friend, second U.S. President John Adams, who had also lost his son to alcoholism and would lose another. It is possible he may recover, but it is too probable he will end his days in his present situation. In a letter to, man so sad.

and a letter to another friend, third president Thomas Jefferson. This guy had some good friends. Rush was blunter, writing, he is now in a cell in the Pennsylvania hospital, where there is too much reason to believe he will end his days. One's positive that there were many treatments for alcoholism, which also included jumping into a river.

Okay. Rush was now no longer sure. And how to treat addiction plus a mental illness, as John Rush most likely had, is indeed a complex issue even today. Today's best approach known as integrated care combines therapies like cognitive behavioral therapy, medication, and support groups, while addressing both conditions at the same time, often with care teams trained in both areas. Elizabeth Evans, MD, medical director of Smithers Center at Columbia University, Irving Medical Center, has labeled this phenomenon bidirectional, which means addiction and mental illness influence each other, making them difficult to untangle. Even more than regular addiction, there is no one-size-fits-all.

when treating that combo. Substance use can worsen the course of another mental health condition, and untreated mental health concerns can increase the vulnerability to high-risk substance use or developing a substance use disorder, she explains. This presents an even bigger problem for those who already have limited access to treatment, either because they're not a well-served population today or because they lived in a time when treatment did not exist like John Rush. Benjamin Rush struggling to untangle the connection between John's problems longed for a prohibition on alcohol, but also suspected that wouldn't work.

In another letter to Adams, he wrote of an elaborate dream in which he was the president, and he banned all liquor. But then the people rose up in protest and he was booted out of office back to his professor's chair. Benjamin Rush would ultimately die in 1813,

exhausted from a grueling schedule and what was likely tuberculosis, and his son John would spend the next 24 years pacing back and forth aimlessly, lost in the depths of mental illness and what came to be known as Russia's walk. That is fucking tragic. But though Benjamin Rush

ultimately died just as confused and troubled about the nature of alcoholism, as he had been when he was a surgeon of the Continental Army, unable to help his son, his ideas would spread and eventually help others whose ideas would help more people. Subsequent writers would pick up on the claim

that addiction was primarily a medical issue, such as the Scottish physician Thomas Trotter, who wrote a widely read essay on drunkenness in 1804. Trotter also argued that habitual drunkenness was a disease, and he took this notion a step further than others had before him when he explicitly inserted that doctors like him would be better suited to address drunkenness than the, quote, priesthood, or the moralist,

who he claimed meant well but missed the point when it came to the underlying problem. The habit of drunkenness is a disease of the mind, he wrote. Interestingly enough, Thomas Trotter insists that because drunkenness was a disease of the mind, The proper treatment was not physical cures, but rather mental treatments that sound almost like today's psychotherapy, gaining patients' confidence and helping them to unlearn their habits. And then another new perspective on how to solve alcoholism started to gain steam. By the 1820s, drinking had reached its all-time high in the U.S. This is fucking wild.

The average American, what did I say? The average American, the average American drank around seven gallons of pure alcohol a year well more than five standard drinks daily for everyone, age 15 or older, almost three times the average today. Sweet Jesus, there was a lot of pickled livers back then. I would not be doing well right now if I'd been averaging five beers a day for the entirety of my adult life. And it wasn't just the overall volumes, but also the patterns of drinking that were out of control. Group and solo binges increased in the decades after independence, leading to widespread alarm around public disorder. President John Adams worried that Americans exceeded all of their nations

in this degrading, beastly vice of intemperance, he wrote. And foreign visitors seem to agree, from English reformers deploring the extent of intemperance to a Swedish visitor who reported a, quote, general addiction to hard drinking in America. This, of course, led to numerous societal problems, illness, poverty, emotional, and physical abuse within families, especially rife in a time when women's rights had yet to enter the legal ecosystem, and the obvious solution to this for many seemed to be banning alcohol.

Indeed, this was a time of crusades for her. prohibition of many social ills, slavery for one, but also lotteries, gambling, dueling, prostitution, and even animal cruelty, and of course alcohol. The American Temperance Society was founded in 1826 advocating for the prohibition of alcohol. Interestingly enough, there had really never been any kind of true movement to prohibit alcohol before, even though we consider the Puritans, for example, to be a pretty anti-fund bunch. A few colonial churches actually strongly advocated against drinking. drinking to excess was never viewed as good

but it was only seen as truly concerning if you behave badly because of it. In the 1820s, however, temperance reformers quickly started referring to alcohol as a corrupting, seducing, boiling, poisoning, diseasing, or invading entity. Something that stole your life force

and by its very presence in your home was likely to steal your children and grandchildren's life forces as well. In short, short order, rather, alcohol was Satan and liquid form. And his trail moved through human society and left behind all manner of evils marked with blood. All of this threaten the new country. It's hard-won freedom and its promise of freedom for all.

Throughout the 1820s and 1830s, activists like preacher Lyman Beecher, founder of the American Temperance Society, and the father of the influential abolitionist writer Harry. at Beach or Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, toured the country to try and make his vision of an alcohol-free country a reality. By 1833, there were more than 5,000 local temperance societies with an estimated 1.25 million members. In two more than two million people

would renounce distilled liquor, and many would give up beer and wine as well. From 1830 to 1840, the amount that Americans drank dropped by almost half. The biggest decrease in the nation's history, it would be more even than during the actual probation of the 1920s. Artists of the 1840s and 1850s were often paid to endorse, to advocate temperance, even if they personally drank their hours away. Herman Melville, the famed author

of Moby Dick, for example, was praised for his 1850 novel white jacket, in which he insisted that sailors are predestined to be driven back to the spirit tub and gun deck by his old hereditary foe, the ever-devilish god of Grog. Melville was likely an alcoholic himself, which probably began in his early 20s. When he joined up with his bros, actual brothers, to become a cabin boy for a ship bound for Liverpool. His alcoholism was then further fueled during subsequent whaling expeditions as part of his career as a sailor. Some reports indicate he managed to kick the habit later in life, though. Other artists would never attempt to kick the habit, though they would gladly take some money for pretending they didn't approve a drinking.

Famous American poet Walt Whitman later denounced a book he wrote for the American Temperance Society, claiming he wrote it in three days while drunk, later calling it a damned rot, rot of the worst sort. That's pretty wild that he wrote a book about temperance while on a three-day drinking bench. This kind of writing about drinking was a double-edged sword for the culture. On the one hand, authors writing about alcoholism,

usually from personal experience, gave the country a stock figure of the drunkard, whom the public associated with moral degradation and weakness of will. This archetype would flatten the true complexities of addiction and further a cultural belief that stigmatize addiction. On the other hand, writers writing about addiction, usually in a semi-romantic style, meant that there was always going to be something

sort of stylish and roguish about substance abuse. A perceived connection between addiction and genius, particularly artistic genius, persist to this day. Indeed, many 19th century British writers considered among the most important to the literary canon were addicted to opium. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sir Walter Scott, Lord Byron, John.

Keats, Percy Bish, Shelley, Ranwell, Bronte, and many more. In today's world, we might think of a different kind of tortured, artistic genius connected to drug use, right? The music of Nirvana, the paintings of Jackson Pollock, the comedy of Richard Pryor. But does intelligence make you more likely to become addicted? Well, intelligent people are actually more likely to try drugs to begin with. Fuck yeah, bro. A 2011 study conducted on nearly 8,000 people measured their IQ scores at ages 5 and 10.

Then the study followed up with those individuals at the ages of 16 and 30. Individuals from this group were with higher IQ scores were more likely to use cannabis, cocaine, ecstasy, amphetamines, or a combo of those drugs. Women with IQ scores in the top third, for instance, were more than twice as likely to have used cannabis or cocaine by the age of 30 than those in the bottom third. Men with high IQs were nearly twice as likely to have taken amphetamines and 65% more likely to have taken ecstasy compared with men who scored less. Why is this? Well, evidence suggests that higher IQ people are more likely to doubt the societal prejudices and oftentimes propaganda around certain drug use. Hail Nimrod, but also, kids, careful with drugs. Don't just take my word for that.

I want you to listen to what Grammy-winning Academy Award nominated hit songwriter and recording artists Saida Garrett passed to say about all this. Trip this just the other day when I came home. I caught in smoking on a pipe Stead of chewing a bone Painting all his skibble So they look like rods Sold them to his puppy pals down the block He said, step off lad

Because I've had a rough day And I'm not about to listen to what you gotta say Yeah, what up, Spike Something got into you I thought I've seen it all But now I'm through The morrow of the story is I canine, in fact

If you're hyped in on the pipe Then you're a dog On crack Ugh Ugh Oh yeah Yeah, yeah Do not be a dog

on crack. Meat sacks. Thank you. Saida. Anyway, this theory about higher IQ individuals being more likely to experiment with certain drugs because these people are more likely to question the narrative around certain drugs is also accompanied by the fact that out of nearly all of their drugs, individuals with higher IQs are less likely to smoke cigarettes. Why? Because the downsides of cigarette smoking are now so patently obvious that more intelligent people are more likely to avoid them, but they don't do the same for cannabis, for example, because existing medical literature does not suggest it is as bad for you as cigarettes.

While higher IQ people are more likely to experiment with drugs, are they also more likely to become addicts? Not sure. Research on that's very hard to find because many articles conflate using substances with being addicted to them. So there's no clear answer. But it is possible that intelligent people may be more likely to have mental illness, which could indirectly lead them to using more drugs in an addictive fashion.

Several studies have found a correlation between high IQ, particularly high verbal IQ, and an increased risk for developing bipolar disorder later in life. In addition, the tendency for highly intelligent people to be more socially isolated, according to some studies, could be a contributing factor to conditions like anxiety and depression. But then again, a different large-scale study found that higher intelligence was associated with a lower risk for several mental health issues, including schizophrenia, depression, and PTSD. D. There's still so much work to be done, as far as understanding what, you know, needs to be done in this arena. Big thanks to any scientists who might be listening, who might be doing some of that work or have done some, I appreciate the shit out of you. In any case, it's interesting to consider that as temperance was gained steam back to the 19th century, many people were also curious about the experience of addiction. As a result, the figure of the addict in art and literature has always been a complex one. And back to our main timeline now.

While the early part of the 19th century saw less alcohol use across the country, as the temperance movement gained steam, the second half would see the increased use of something we have talked about here often before, opium. While drinking was just considered a social or habitual vice, at first, opium had the connotation of being a legitimate medical tool, which allowed it to spread. A succession of devastating epidemics of cholera and dysentery in the 1830s to the 1850s only increased the enthusiasm for opioids, which calms some gals. astrointestinal systems. Another powerful catalyst was the development of the hypodermic syringe. Developed in Britain in the 1840s, first brought to the U.S. in 1853, the hypodermic syringe was a dream for physician, given the ability to dose medication directly into the body to more predictable results. The new delivery system essentially transmuted morphine into a new, more potent, faster acting form for those not afraid of a needle. And that new form was tragically much more addicting. And as a new wave

of addiction swelled, so did public anxiety and disdain. In the 1870s, a flurry of articles and medical journals described the pitfalls of opiate overprescribing. Amid these competing fears and desires, a question emerged. Did a potent non-addictive pain killer exist? I'm sure you won't be surprised when I tell you that huge pharmaceutical companies wanted people to think that consequence-free drug use was possible, since that take was directly in their own financial interests. Early U.S. pharmaceutical company, Park Davis & Co., began promoting the use of cocaine for exhaustion and overwork in the 1880s, and around the same time, the German company Merck promised that cocaine's greatest future was in treating morphine and alcohol problems.

Another supposed cure for alcoholism during this era included the Keeley Alcoholism Cure, founded by Dr. Leslie Keeley, who opened more than 120 Keeley Institutes in North American in Europe. These consisted of addiction cure institutes and proprietary home cures, such as the bottled double chloride of gold cures for drunkenness. Ah, this dangerous snake oil was injected into people. And injections contain not only gold chloride, but also other dangerous ingredients like strychnine and cocaine. Oh, yeah. We'll knock that taste for alcohol right out of you. Oh, once the gold, the strychnine, the cocaine, start working on your bad blood. Oh, you'll be healthy and sober in no time, buddy. Nothing gets you healthy and sober like cocaine, poison, and

gold. The world of drug and addiction in the 19th century was a fucking weird one. On the one hand, you had the responsible people using opium for medical reasons, but those medical reasons often seemed to blur into personal use, and upper class people especially became dependent on opioids, but managed to keep their social standings by claiming that the drug use was medicinal. Then you had companies eagerly pressing people to do more substances, to try and quit one substance like alcohol by taking up another like cocaine. This was all compounded by the ravages of the post-Civil War era, another time of stress, fragmentation, and trauma that led to increased addictions.

As one book of the time described it, maimed and shattered survivors from 100 battlefields, diseased and disabled soldiers released from hostile prisons, anguished and hopeless wives and mothers, made so by the slaughter of those who were dearest to them, have found many of them temporary relief from their sufferings in opium. Then, in the post-war years, as immigration to the U.S. rose during the gilded age, and immigrants found themselves working in unsafe factories for little pay, that fueled addiction

as well, primarily alcoholism, and the upper class blamed these people for ruining society, as they too also took the same drugs. God damn it, pause! How hard is it just to stay sober when you're not working 12 hours a day for slave wages and a very dangerous factor with no hope for advancement. Why do you need to head to the bar after your ship and drown your troubles? What troubles? You have a job, and job equals joy, you dumb, despicable poor. Despite the temperance movement that had taken root in the early 1800s, second half of the century saw more addiction than ever. And it wasn't like there were many places to treat it. There were alms, workhouses, churches, lunatic asylums, and jails. But that was about it.

And none of those places were effective. An 1868 book called The Opium Habit called for a new therapeutic approach to addiction, including the establishment of a medical institution to treat, quote, the opium disease. And thankfully, a lot of physicians agreed with us. In 1870, 14 esteemed doctors met at the New York City YMCA to establish a new group, the American Association for the Cure of Inebrates, the AACI, the first American medical society, probably the first in the world, devoted to the idea that Benjamin Rush had advocated almost a century earlier that drug and alcohol problems deserve to be treated like any other disease. More and more physicians soon began writing about addiction and treatment options and early rehab centers multiply. By 1878, there were

32 U.S. rehab facilities in operation or planned to be an operation. There were also what we might now call group homes sprouted up, places where people could live to treat their addictions with community and fellowship rather than medicine. Interestingly enough, at this time, addiction was not just limited to problems with drugs and alcohol. The new movement to help people cast a wide net, engaging those who struggle with opioids, cocaine, and alcohol, but also with tea, coffee, hemp, and tobacco, even chicory, and lettuce. Not devil's lettuce, either, like lettuce, lettuce, lettuce. Did you know he can smoke dried, wild lettuce leaves and feel in effect similar to opium? It was even once nicknamed Poor Man's Opium.

The Journal of Innebrity, the flagship publication of the AACI, actually used the word addiction for the first time in reference to chocolate. You know what? Chocolate is addictive as fuck. It has to be. I need something to explain my lust for it. I mean, partially sugar, but also there's a little something extra with the chocolates. A quick random note about my chocolate love, when Lindsay and I were recently on this

crime wave cruise, they left some devil's food cake in a room for Lindsay's birthday. It was so fucking good, so moist and rich. But after eating it for three days, just like nibbling on it, cutting off a little piece here, a little piece there. The cleaning staff thought we were done with this mess of a half of cake now that looked like it had been attacked by wild dogs and they threw it away. And I was legit, very, very sad and angry that they had taken my precious cake from me, even though it was, you know, technically Lindsay's cake. How dare they take my, I mean, her chocolate delight. But not many other types of food

would have fucked with my emotions like that. Very addictive. Anyway, while more medical professionals were thinking about things being addictive now, there was still no clear consensus on how to treat anyone. That was pretty much up to the individual physician or hospital. And unfortunately, many doctors were addicted to opium. In 1883, the noted American physician J.B. Madison announced that the majority of people with habitual morphine problems were doctors. And another observer claimed that doctors made up 90% of frequent users. If that's true, I get it. Right? There were the ones able to order that medicine, as much of it as they wanted, without question. If I had that kind of access to drugs and didn't know how destructive they could truly be, but I knew how good they

made me feel? Oh, out of a hundred percent, but on that train. It seemed to more and more people like the only solution was a sweeping one now, prohibition. Indeed, anti-vice activism was once again on the rise. The so-called progressive era was marked by activism of all kinds.

Labor activism that worked for protection for workers, fought for eight-hour workdays, protections for immigrants from political machines that wanted to use their votes, you know, in shady ways, etc. But it also sought share of moral crusading against drug and people using that moral crusading as a cover for something else.

While many women were taking a central role in the movement for alcohol prohibition because of their experience of trauma, abuse, and abandonment caused by their drunk husbands and fathers, others used the opportunity to lump other drug users into the same category. Though the upper class managed to get away with using morphine because it was medicinal, smoking practically the same shit, opium, was obvious evidence of wanton immorality and became for a time associated with racist stereotypes about the Chinese. Importation of opium for smoking was banned outright in 1909, the first Federal Exclusion Act aimed at a substance.

Racial connections to addiction would now persist. Though most people at the time considered cocaine a relatively benign drug, no worse than tea or coffee, and wide swaths of society used it to deal with the demands of crushing physical labor, that story changed when black Americans became users. One pharmacist testified before the house, of representatives that cocaine made black people physically stronger, morally weaker, temporarily insane, full of delusional visions of grandeur, overly confident and prone to committing

rape. And how did he come up with that conclusion? Not totally sure, but strongly assumed he stuck his arm up his ass to the elbow, then pulled all that shit straight out of his peckerwood ass. In response to a myth adjacent to this, that cocaine literally made black people invulnerable to 32 caliber bullets, many police departments switch to the 38 special, the standard cartridge of most police departments for decades to come. The fuck. It is amazing how much humanity is consistently able to accomplish with how fucking stupid. So many of us are at any given point in time.

In the south, the move to regulate drugs was complete intertwined with efforts to control black people from 1880 to 1910. The southern convict population grew 10 times faster than the rate of overall population growth largely from mass black incarceration. In 1914, Congress passed the 1914 Harrison Narcotics Tax Act. The act did not ban drugs outright. Rather, it regulated the production, importation, and sale of opioids and cocaine, which was now labeled with the term narcotics. People who sold those drugs had to register and pay a tax, so possession without registration, or for the general public, without a prescription, made people presumptively guilty. Technically, the law still

allowed doctors to prescribe normally in the course of his professional practice only, and many physicians continue to write opioid prescriptions for people with addictions. The next year, the U.S. Inter-World War I, and both nationalism and anti-vice fervor reached his peak. Sacrifice, patriotism, and temperance, that was the order of the day, not addiction. The Anti-Saloon League increased its focus on the idea that alcohol was an enslaving toxin, closely associated with the foreign invasion of undeveloped races. I'm sorry, what was that? Non-white immigrant were bringing alcohol abuse into America? Guessing proof of that also found deep up somebody's ass.

The 1918 influenza epidemic in the Russian Revolution one year earlier created even more panic for Americans and soon something, anything to regain some semblance of social order and control, was looking more and more attractive. That decade saw the passage of state laws that called for the sterilization of the mentally ill, developmentally disabled, and alcoholics and addicts. Legislation even granted the medical supervisors of asylums and prisons

the authority to asexualize a patient or inmate, aka snip off them nuts if such action was believed to improve his or her physical, mental, or moral condition. Among those affected were alcoholics and addicts who were now considered degenerate

and feeble-minded, but occasional castration still wasn't considered enough of an effort to win this battle against alcohol and drugs. Hey, little dude, send your mom and daddy out of the room.

I gotta get you up on this. You know who I am. Snake dealing in weed, coat, crack. Your choice. Take one hit and you'll do anything to cop more. Steal from your mama, lie, cheat on your home boys. Hey, that's the price you pay when you deal with dudes like me. Now, some folks will tell you that I'm dealing in poison.

But hey, do I look like the kind of guy that would do that to a kid like you? Yes. Oh, my God. He literally turned into a fucking snake. Beware of drug dealers who are actually snake people. That's what I took away from that PSA. By 1919, the stage was set for prohibition in America. States ratified a constitutional amendment prohibiting the production, transport, and sale of alcohol throughout the nation that would take effect after bar owners, liquor distillers, et cetera, had a year to wind down operations.

People, of course, did not stop drinking. Organized crime rose, but drinking didn't stop. It was now just more dangerous to drink because of the dubious quality of home-brewed alcohol and the toxins added to industrial alcohol. Meanwhile, due the Harris Act, the street price of opioids went sky high. The Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914 was a U.S. federal law that regulated, again, the production, importation, and distribution of opiates and cocoa products through taxation of registration. Proposed by Representative Francis Burton-Harrison, it required individuals dealing with these substances to register with the IRS, pay special taxes, and it was signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson. The Act was the first federal measure to control narcotic trafficking, which it did by limiting the availability of substances like opium to prescriptions from registered doctors, as we just went over. the supply now restricted, people tried to get more potency from the same amount of product,

which led more and more drug users to injecting intravenously. And this is an example of a phenomenon called the Iron Law of Prohibition. As law enforcement gets more intense, people will naturally gravitate towards stronger forms of a drug, which we can see today with the proliferation of fentanyl. The problem was that hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people in the country, had been addicted to opioids for years now, even decades. They weren't just going to fucking stop. That's not how addiction works, especially in addiction as powerful as an opioid addiction. Some in the medical community tried to help doctors set up early prototypes at the methadone clinic, but they were relentlessly targeted by law enforcement.

From the 1910s to 1938, more than 25,000 physicians were reported, 2,000 paid substantial fines, 3,000 roughly actually went to prison for trying to help opioid addicts, marking the end of community-based care clinics for drug addiction for a long time. There was very little support, worked for what those doctors were trying to do because public sentiment was that those fucking junkies didn't need treatment. They just needed to man up get their shit together, stop being pathetic little bitches who couldn't control themselves. That really was the basic mentality. Addiction was seen almost exclusively by most of the general public as a moral failing and inability to be a good, upstanding American by way of lack of character strength, by choosing

to take the easy road. And any physician who disagreed with that was immoral as well, obviously. Ironically, by the end of the progressive era's drive toward prohibition, the dominant stereotype of drug users was profoundly negative. The dominant cultural opinion was expressed in the 1928 bestseller, Dope, the story of the living dead, which described drug addiction as, quote, a wasting, loathsome, hideous, cruel disease, and people with addictions as carriers of a disease worse than smallpox and more terrible than leprosy. The end of prohibition, also known as repeal, marked an interesting turn in the state. study of addiction. Post-repeel scientists were eager to distance themselves from temperance ideology. Everyone agreed that opiates were bad, and the people who used them were weak, but everyone was also really looking forward to have an illegal drink again, and they

didn't want to let pesky science get in the way and fuck up their buzz. As a result, during the late 1930s and early 1940s, alcohol-related diseases that were well-known at the beginning of the century like cirrhosis, cardiomyopathy, adverse fetal effects, and esophageal cancer were discounted in authoritative journals and books. Ah, it's not that bad. Come on. Some people have fucked up babies. Just drink. It's good for you. It's good for the job. And in

1942, in a book that was prepared with support for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Yale researchers Howard Haggard and E.M. Jelinek told their readers, quote, the diseases of chronic alcoholism are essentially nutritional disturbances. Okay. This new perspective was compounded

by the fact that alcohol was now considered a marker of an upwardly mobile, middle class. It was being enjoyed by good, hardworking Americans. So there's no fucking way it can be that bad for you. This attitude meant that there were few resources for people to deal with alcoholism. Some without financial resources found help through state hospitals, the Salvation Army or other charitable societies and religious groups. But even those with the money to get treatment, they weren't really getting help because the treatment isn't going to work if you don't understand the disease you're treating. Those who could afford a psychiatrist or hospitals long

before modern addiction treatments were subjected to horrific shit, like taking a bunch of barbiturates and belladonna, known as purge and puke. This treatment was insane. The formula for the town's Lambert alcoholism cure, one of the most popular and advanced treatments of the day, had the patient, the poor patient consumed belladonna, also known as deadly nightshade. The effects of belladonna include delirium, hallucinations, light sensitivity, confusion, and dry mouth. But that's not all. Now, the second ingredient in this mixture was another delirient hyacymus niger

also known as henbane hogs bean or simply the insane root another member of the nightshave family some medieval scholars claim necromancers once you use this plant to raise the dead some think that some of the ancient

Greek oracles drank an elixir based on this plant to tap into the spiritual realm and have visions yeah you can absolutely overdose on this shit it can paralyze you in high doses, including paralyzing your lungs. And then the third major ingredient in this concoction was the dried bark or berries

of xanthozylum or prickly ash, added to help with diarrhea and intestinal cramps. This mixture was given every hour, day and night, and not to help you not have diarrhea, but like to help just fucking have diarrhea, just to give you diarrhea.

The mixture was given every hour, day and night, for nearly 50 straight hours. The end of the treatment came when you finally had shit everything out, at which point you were then given a castor oil, also a purgative, right? Let's make sure you're, you get a little more in there. Let's puke it out.

On one version of the treatment every 12 hours, the patient was also given compound cathartic pills, along with a medication called Blue Mass, which contained mercury. We just talked about Blue Mass in the Hunger Killer episode. This was basically intended to get all the alcohol out of your system. And I bet it did, if it didn't kill you. It also purged your sanity.

for a little while. I imagine this traumatized the fucking hell out of you, and when it was over, you felt like you've been beaten into or out of a gang, but it did nothing to help with, you know, long-term addiction. You know, you just felt sick for a while, and eventually you're like, you know what, I'm going to drink you. Many more people who didn't have access to this treatment often fell for other quacks who peddled miracle cures, you know, snake oil, ineffective, torturous therapies, other grifts designed to take people's money and just not help them. But that was about to change. There was about to be a solution, not a cure-all. Not an insane course of medicine, but something that would go on to change millions of lives.

Back in 1926, Roland Hazard, an American business executive had gone to Zurich, Switzerland, to seek treatment for alcoholism with the famed psychiatrist Carl Young. When Hazard ended treatment with Young after about a year, came back to the States, soon started to get fucked up again, then returned to Young in Zurich for more treatment, and Young now told Hazard that his case was nearly hopeless, as doctors told many alcoholics. and that his only hope might be a spiritual conversation with a religious group. So he heads back to America, and Azard goes to the Oxford Group, and the Oxford Group was an interesting bunch. Let's back up a bit to before the end of Prohibition to share their story. Founded in 1921, the Oxford Group was a Christian fellowship under the leadership of Frank Buckman. Buckman was a minister, originally Lutheran, then evangelist,

who had a conversion experience in 1908 in a chapel in Kessick, England. And as a result of that experience, he founded, a movement named a first century Christian fellowship in 1921, which came to be known as the Oxford Group by 1928, and the Oxford Group was an offshoot of something called the Higher Life Movement that's honestly too complex to get into in any depth here. Just know that one of its main ideas is that one spiritual awakening does not end with conversion. You have to experience an entire sanctification that involves being transformed from who you once were, just like someone might be transformed once they quit drinking. Buckman summarized the

Oxford group philosophy in a few sentences, writing all people are sinners. All sinners can be changed. Confession is a prerequisite to change. The changed person can access God directly. Miracles are again possible. And the changed person must change others. Hazard connected with these guys, who actually really helped him out. As in, he completely stopped drinking alcohol. Religion helped him where science had failed. And he ended up committing to a lifetime of sobriety after reading the book for Sinners Only by Oxford Group member A.J. Russell. And then Hazard was introduced to

Ebby Thatcher via the group. Ebby born Edwin Throckmorton Thatcher was the grandson of the founder of Thatcher Carworks and the mayor of Albany. Though born into an enormous fortune, Ebby had struggled with alcoholism his entire adult life. And after one particularly nasty bender,

three members of the Oxford group, Roland Hazard, F. Shepard Cornell, and Sebra Graves convinced the court to parole Thatcher into their custody, and with their help, Thatcher was ultimately able to get sober. Now, as was dictated in group doctrine, Thatcher was supposed to go out to the world and help others, and he knew just where he wanted to start.

In November of 1934, Thatcher arranged a visit to his old drinking buddy, Bill Wilson's apartment. Bill was born on November 26, 1895, at his parents' business in East Dorset, Vermont, the Mount Aeolus Inn, and tavern. He and his sister were abandoned by his parents when they were young and raised by their maternal grandparents. Still, Bill Prosperd.

He was a captain of his high school football team, a principal violinist in the school orchestra. But when his girlfriend, Bertha Bamford, died at 17. From some surgery complications, he fell into a deep, dark depression. Depression and panic attacks would ultimately lead to him leaving Norwich University during his second semester. He'd have his first drink at a dinner party,

a pint of beer, his second a few weeks later, drinking some Bronx cocktails, a martini mixed with some orange juice, and the company of other guests. And immediately he felt less shy and awkward. Hell, yeah, he did. Felt good.

He was buzzed. I imagine drinking helped him escape to melancholy. He liked he felt due to being abandoned by both parents than having his first romantic love die young. But they would offer temporary benefits. Drinking had serious effects on the rest of his life. As he drank more and more, more often, he would get drunk.

He failed to graduate from law school because he was literally too drunk to pick up his diploma. He became a stock speculator, but then regularly ruined his reputation with clients by showing up to meetings fucking hammered. In 1933, he was committed four times to the Charles B. Towns Hospital for drug and alcohol addiction, where he would get that nasty purge and puke, fucking torture I went over earlier. By the way, the cost of that treatment was $350 a day equivalent to almost $6,000 a day to day.

A lot of money spent to be tortured. Despite the high cost, Bill did not imagine himself ever stopping. He figured that he would eventually die of alcoholism, and that was pretty much it. He was waiting it out. And then his old friend, Thatcher swung by. and Thatcher told Bill that he had been sober for four weeks now, thanks to the Oxford group. Bill understood wanting to get sober, but he'd always struggle with the existence of God, and putting his addiction in God's hands, it just didn't sound like it would help much.

Later, he would write about what Thatcher told him. My friend suggested what then seemed a novel idea. He said, why don't you choose your conception of God? That statement hit me hard. It melted the icy intellectual mountain in whose shadow I had lived and shivered many years. I stood in the sunlight at last. However, Bill didn't immediately stop drinking. Shortly after the visit, he was admitted to Towns Hospital yet again.

At the hospital, Thatcher visited Bill and once again urged him to try the Oxford group out. And then Bill was given more of that belladonic concoction, which caused him to hallucinate. And according to Bill, this is what happened next. All at once, I found myself crying out. If there is a God, let him show himself. I am ready to do anything, anything. Suddenly the room lit up with the great white light. I was caught up in an ecstasy, which there are no words to describe.

It seemed to me in my mind's eye that I was on a mountain and that a wind, not of air, but of spirit was blowing, and that it burst upon me that I was a free man. Slowly the ecstasy subsided. I lay there on the bed, but now for a time I was in another world, a new world of consciousness, and I thought to myself, so this is the God of the preachers, and a great peace stole over me. Newly reinvigorated Bill Wilson joined the Oxford Group, but during a failed business trip to Akron, Ohio, Wilson was tempted to drink again and decided that to truly remain sober. What he really needed to do was help out another alcoholic to turn his attention from

himself to others. A phone call to Episcopal minister, Reverend Walter Tunks, resulted in a referral to Henrietta Sieberling, a committed Oxford group adherent who had tried for two years to bring a fellow group member, a prominent Akron surgeon named Robert Holbrook Smith, to sobriety. The two men would meet May 12, 1935 Mother's Day. In the privacy of the library, Bill spilled out his story, inspiring Dr. Bob, as he will become known to the AA community to share his own. And at the end of it all, both men felt better and had an idea. Over that summer, they began working with other alcoholics, sharing their stories and hearing these people's stories as well.

Wilson then returned to New York, where he helped more alcoholics on their path to recovery from his home at 182 Clinton Street in Brooklyn. The Tuesday night meetings soon gave way to a temporary residency for some participants, a way station, as it'll become known. In late 1937, Bill headed back to Akron to catch up with Dr. Bob, and as a two men compared notes, they were astonished to find that at least 40 of the many alcoholics with whom they had worked had stayed sober for two years now. Now they started talking about a bunch of possibilities, a developing chain of hospitals dedicated to the treatment of alcoholics, employing salaried workers, and to really get the message out, publish a book. The title of the book would give the group its new name, Alcoholics Anonymous. Within the book, there were a list of suggested activities

that would become known as the 12 steps. So what are the 12 steps? Step one, don't be such a fucking baby, right? Being a winy little baby, that's how you got into this mess. If you want to get out of it, you have to grow up, put on your big boy undies, your big girl panties, stop with the baby bullshit, just fucking quit it. Real number one now.

We admitted we were powerless over alcohol, that our lives have become unmanageable. Number two, came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. Three, made a decision to turn our will in our lives over to the care of God as we understood him. Four, made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. Five, admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being, the exact nature of our wrongs. Six, we're entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

Seven, humbly asked him to remove our shortcomings. Eight, made a list of persons we had harmed and became willing to make amendments to them all. Nine, made direct amends to such people, wherever possible, except when to do so. would injure them or others. 10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it. 11. Saw through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood

him, praying only for knowledge of his will for us and the power to carry it out. And 12. Always go peeping in the potty like a good boy or a good girl. Real number 12. Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics and to practice these principles in all our affairs. In the book, Bill Wilson strongly advocated that AA groups have not to, quote, slightest reform or political complexion.

That is, focus on the basis of the program, and nothing else. Don't inject social commentary, focus on your own path, and the path of the other members. Later on, in 1946, he would write, no AA group or members should ever in such a way as to implicate AA express any opinion on outside controversial issues, particularly those of politics, alcohol reform, or secretary, and religion. The Alcoholics Anonymous Groups oppose no one. Concerning such matters, they can express no views, whatever. A.A. would strictly be a place to get better.

It would not be a place to try and make someone more liberal or conservative or to judge someone for their behavior or their beliefs. No matter what those were, it would just be a place to focus on getting everyone who shows up to sober up and to stay sober. I've only been to one AA meeting. I don't know why I wanted to add a third one there. That'd be hilarious if I started talking about the insurance company. I've only been to one AAA meeting.

And strangely enough, no one talked about alcohol. No, I've been to one AA meeting. I think maybe a few. I can't quite remember. It was court ordered. It was in 2010 after I got a DUI in Santa Monica. And in exchange for a short and probationary period, I agreed to go to some meetings. I only remember one.

And it was interesting. Not actually being addicted to alcohol. I just made a terrible choice one random night. And thankfully, no one got hurt. I didn't feel like I belonged tonight. And I felt guilty being there. Like I was a reporter who snuck in to hear people share these really powerful, deeply personal and intense stories about how alcohol had fucked up their lives in any number of ways.

And I remember feeling very lucky that alcohol didn't have that hold over me that it seemed to have on so many other people there who tearfully discussed very painful memories of either being abused or being the abuser. People talking about losing jobs, being estranged from their parents or children, going through divorces. They felt 100% responsible for, you know, et cetera, et cetera. But no matter what damage they spoke of, they also all expressed gratitude and hope, hope that through sobriety

there would be more good days ahead grateful the life was already better they were so proud of how many days they had been sober while also appearing so humble about their sobriety was a very interesting energy not sure I've ever been around that exact vibe in any other setting before in April of 1939

some 5,000 copies of the big book what is now known as by A.A. members worldwide rolled off the press although the book listed Bill is the sole author the book was very much a group effort dozens of recovering alcoholics, many who attended the earliest A.A. meetings would help out. They worked hard on it. Beside the 12 steps, there was also advice to the alcoholic spouse, family, and employer, as well as spiritual advice for people who didn't think of themselves as religious, but still wanted to become sober as Bill Wilson had felt, you know, five years before.

Also included many of many personal stories designed to inspire people. After all, they could do it. You know, why couldn't you? I love that. but after an anticipated Reader's Digest article failed to materialize and then a radio broadcast resulted in no orders sales were few and far between following the initial 5,000 copy run

though the book would eventually go on to sell more than 30 million copies crazy how in so many success stories it took a long time for the success to come, right? How many books or restaurants or other businesses or TV shows or just fucking whatever?

Initially we were met with a reaction of eh, meh, from the public at large but then went on to become wildly popular, influential, etc. Right? So don't give up on your idea if you really believe in it. Another early below for AA occurred for Bill when the company that owned the mortgage on 182 Clinton Street sold the building forcing Bill and his wife, Lois to move out. And then they would go on to live in various AA members' homes for two years.

But despite the instability, the stress that had to come with that, Bill never went back to drinking. Meanwhile, by the fall of 1938, tensions had reached a boiling point in the Akron-based subsection of the Oxford group, with the alcoholic members wanting to be. more independence, so they decided to begin meeting in Dr. Bob's home. This location would change to King's school, an elementary school in Akron, when the membership got bigger than Bob's house could ever accommodate. And then the organization just kept growing. Luckily, the media would start to help out. Some news articles in 1939 led to the formation of a group in Cleveland

in 1941, the Saturday Evening Post published an article about AA, and that got more people curious. A.A. membership tripled over the next year, as the growing fellowship faced disputes over structure, purpose, authority, and publicity, Bill Wilson began promoting the 12 traditions. Another key part of AA. He first introduces ideas on these in an April 1946 article for The Grapevine, which is the International Journal of Alcoholics Anonymous, often called Our Meeting in Print, and his ideas were titled 12 suggested points for AA traditions. Unlike the 12 steps, which help alcoholics navigate the challenges of the outside world, the 12 traditions help members navigate life inside A.A. And they are one. Shut the fuck up and just do what we tell

you. No, one. Our common welfare should come first. Personal recovery, personal recovery depends on AA unity. That's great, right? Meeting did be the same everywhere, always. When it comes to basic ideology and structure, so when somebody starts to find success, when they go to meetings by their house, for example, they can then continue to stay sober by attending a meeting in some other city, wherever it may be if they're traveling for work or what have you. I actually recently learned that Even most cruise ships have AA meetings. Someone I spoke to on that crime wave cruise, they worked on a lot of cruise ships. And they always went to meetings on cruises when they were out to sea.

They've been sober for a few years and very much loved the AA way. Two, for our group purpose, there is but one ultimate authority, a loving God as he may express himself in our group conscious. Our leaders are but trusted servants. They do not govern. Three, the only requirement for AA membership is a desire to stop drinking. four, each group should be autonomous except in matters affecting other groups or AA as a whole. Five, each group has but one primary purpose to carry its message to the alcoholic who still suffers. Six, an AA group ought never endorse finance or lend the AA name to any related facility or outside enterprise,

less problems of money, property, and prestige divert us from our primary purpose. I love that too. If the mission is solely to keep people from drinking, corporate interference becomes, you know, risky. If the whole point is to not change the program, if it ain't broke, don't fix it, you know, you have to be very careful not to lean on any new financial backers because they're always going to have an opinion on how things should be improved. Seven, every AA group ought to be fully self-supporting, declining outside contributions. Eight, Alcoholics Anonymous should remain forever non-professional, but our service centers may employ social or special workers. Nine, AA as such, ought never be organized, but we may create service boards or committees directly responsible to those they serve. 10 Alcoholics Anonymous has no opinion on outside issues

Hence the AA name ought never be drawn into public controversy 11 our public relations policy Is based on attraction rather than promotion We need to always maintain personal anonymity At the level of press radio in films 12 anonymity is the spiritual foundation Of all our traditions Ever reminding us to place principles before personalities

That's actually really beautiful In 1951, A.A.'s headquarters in New York expanded its activities, including public relations, support for new groups, services to hospitals and prisons, and cooperation with various other agencies. All of this funded through contributions. Members contribute money to meetings to cover local expenses like meeting space, right? Refreshments and coffee, some cookies. Contributions from individual members and various groups also support A.A.'s general service office for worldwide services. Back in 1951, the new headquarters began publishing standard AA literature. and oversaw translations. They were managed by a disconnected board of trustees, primarily people that Bill and Dr. Bob knew. Recognized the need for accountability. Delegates from across the U.S. and Canada decided to get together, leading to the first meeting of the AA General Service Conference in 195.

At the 1955 conference in St. Louis, Missouri, Bill Wilson relinquished stewardship of AA to the General Service Conference, and from there, you know, the organization went on to become the one we know today. And it works, at least just as well as any medical intervention ever has, if not a little better. Not for everyone, but it's worked for a fucking lot of people. Studies have found that people who attend AA tend to stay sober at similar rates to those informal treatment programs,

if not better rates, like cognitive behavioral therapy or medication-assisted treatment. Interestingly enough, however, Bill Wilson did not think that abstinence from alcohol was the only way. In the 1960s, he would go on to drop some acid, truly. He would use LSD in medically supervised experiments with Betty Eisner, Gerald, Hurd, and Aldous Huxley. Hell yeah. Wilson's first LSD session allowed him to re-experience the spiritual awakening

he had felt in the hospital in 1935, yeah, I bet, and he would come to believe that LSD helped him eliminate the barriers that stood in the way of a direct experience with God and or the cosmos. I didn't know that until this week, and that's pretty cool. Unfortunately, most AAs were strongly opposed to his experimenting with a mind-altering substance, and Wilson So never publicly advocated for other AA members to drop some acid. LSD needs to be reclassified. It is not a drug like opioids or alcohol or meth or narcotics, etc. It doesn't dull your mind, shut it off, doesn't rev up your ego,

make you want to do more, more, more, more. Acid doesn't lead you to wanting to do acid every day. I love acid. Love it the more, the more I've done it. And I try and take a heavy trip about every three months now. I just took one two days ago. It is too much to get into right now. It's pretty wild.

But I feel like I learn about, a little bit more about myself each time. You know, and I never think after a trip, though, let's take another one immediately. Oh, fuck no. Way too much. I reflect on what I learned from and or experience the last trip. I want to give a time to set in, what floated up from my subconscious, what issues or existential musings should I reconcile with. I can 100% see how it would help people not want to drink alcohol. Such a shame that it can't be studied more easily.

One quick thing about my ass and trip before I move on. Very quick side note. I was with somebody who will not be named, and we went to a little group of us. Only two of us were on acid. And I tried to time the peak, so this person who was not as experienced as me would be able to feel comfortable, being in a public setting, you know, once we got there. And we took too much for him to feel that comfort. And when he got there, he decided that the show, the concert was not real. He was very mad that he was being tricked by everyone was in.

on it, except for him. They were all making fun of him for not understanding that wasn't real. There was just a big joke. And then he went from that to thinking he was in hell. And then he was a ghost. And no one would tell him he was a ghost. And at one point he ended up in the lobby. We just thought he went to the bathroom. He went to the lobby, literally through his phone on the ground, through the tour shirt he had just bought in the trash because it wasn't real and asked to be let out of some exits. Luckily, they didn't let him out. We thought he was still in the building because we were tracking him on fine mine in his phone. He comes back to the seat like 45 minutes later and try to talk him to, you know, understanding that the show is real.

And he wouldn't understand that. And then I had to go approach one of the staff members, well, also with a head full of acid and explain, hey, my buddy threw his phone down because it wasn't real. And they were like, oh, yeah, somebody tried to give it back to him. And he wouldn't accept it because he said it wasn't real. And I'm like, no, we're on acid. And then she gave me a dirty look, but then did give me the phone. And I wandered back to the house. Oh, I was at least mild entertaining. God damn, what we laughed about it so hard the next day. But I do get why Bill chose not to advocate that, you know. Well, it would be cool if that was part of an AA program by not embracing what was then seen as a, you know, fringe experiment.

A.A. made addiction a normalized part of life. And the 1950s, A.A. memberships surpassed 90,000. In 1951, A.A. won the Lasker Award from the American Public Health Association, considered to be America's equivalent to the Nobel Prize. The 1950s would also see the emergence of new drugs to treat alcoholism, including dysulfuram, otherwise known as Antiburam. One suggested antibuse makes you nauseous if you drink even just a little bit because it inhibits your liver's ability to metabolize alcohol. Antibuse has been shown to be effective long-term in treating alcoholism, but only when used as part of a comprehensive supervised treatment program. Its effectiveness is a standalone unsupervised treatment, you know, limited by high rates of patient noncompliance. Basically, it'll give you a short-term reversion to alcohol, but obviously it's not going to deal with the underlying factors or stressors that drove you to drink in the first place.

and made you want to consistently seek that escape. By 1957, the Veterans Administration began establishing alcoholism treatment units, and throughout the 1960s, insurance companies would start to reimburse the treatment of alcoholism. And all this would lead to alcoholism becoming relatively destigmatized. The institutional turn in the 1950s, award recognition for AA, VA treatment units, the first pharmacological interventions and insurer reimbursements, did more than treat more people. It recast drinking as a public health.

health problem, rather than a moral failing. And that reframe opened the door for a broader medical model of addiction in general. Right? If alcoholism is a disease, why not other compulsions? In 1954, a researcher named James Olds discovered that an electrode planted deep inside a rat's brain could activate a particular circuit. This circuit was seemingly so enjoyable that the animals would stimulate themselves instead of eating or sleeping, which in at least one case led to death from exhaustion, and that's wild. We've referenced that experiment before. I can't remember what episode, maybe the dolphin experiments.

Fascinating that we can manipulate the minds who properly placed electrodes. Olds took to calling this part of the brain the pleasure center. This finding was bolstered by the work of the neuroscientist, Robert Heath, the founder of Tulane's Department of Psychiatry and Neurology, who experimented widely with deep brain stimulation surgery in the 1940s and 50s. Heath, in a series of studies, few of which would meet today's ethical standards, implanted electrical stimulators in the brains of patients with schizophrenia, violent behavior, and in at least one case, homosexuality, to attempt a brain-based conversion therapy.

In the process, he found that one of his patients would press a button up to 1,500 times in a three-hour period to stimulate that particular brain center. This discovery was not well recognized in addiction science at first, though. What was missing was a link between the purported pleasure circumstances. and drugs, a development that did not materialize until years later. In 1975, the researcher, Roy Wise and his colleague Robert Yokel reported in the prestigious journal, Science, that they had discovered the link, an obscure molecule, at least obscure back then, named dopamine.

Nobody really knew what dopamine was at this time. All the medical establishment had communicated was that it was associated with Parkinson's, but researchers doubted whether it was even a neurotransmitter, a type of molecule that transmits information between nerve cells. Wise and Yokel, however, used dopamine blocking chemicals or antagonists to show that dopamine was responsible for the rewarding effects of amphetamines. In a subsequent series of papers, Wise put forth a provocative hypothesis that brain dopamine systems were responsible for the good feelings produced by food, sex, and drugs because

of dopamine's role governing the so-called pleasure center in the brain. But this did not make waves in the research community. They basically said, oh, cool, good job. And they forgot about it. for now. After all, this was 1975. A lot of people were smoking pot, dropping acids, snort a little bit of cocaine. What was the big deal with all this?

Everything was fine. We don't need to study this shit. Just enjoy it. Indeed, 1975 was smack in the middle of a pause during the war on drugs, which began with President Richard Nixon signed the Control Substances Act into law in October of 1970, calling for the regulation of certain drugs according to five schedules based on their medical application and potential for abuse. In June of 1971, Nixon had officially declared a war on drugs, stating the drug abuse was public enemy number one. This was because of a rise in recreational drug use from, of course, the counterculture.

The fucking poor! It's out of it again. And there was an, there was an ulterior motive. That combination of words was tricky from my tongue for this, as I've covered before. For a quick reminder to a 1994 interview, President Nixon's domestic policy chief, John Ehrlichman provided inside info suggesting that the war on drugs campaign, mostly motivated by Nixon wanting to punish people who were not going to vote for him while simultaneously appealing to his base.

In the interview, conducted by journalist Dan Baum and published in Harper magazine, Ehrlichman explained that the Nixon campaign had two enemies, quote, the anti-war left and black people. Ehrlichman said, we knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war, or black. But by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did. Good on him for admitting

that, but also if what he said was actually true, fuck John Ehrlichman forever. If that's true, then that motherfucker should have been arrested for something akin to treason right. along with Nixon, and both of those motherfuckers should have been executed. Not kidding. Think about it. If they intentionally imprisoned people, sometimes for life, destroy countless people's lives, not because they were using drugs, but because they were black and or a member of the counterculture. Are you kidding me?

That's not just a dirty political move. That's evil. I would truly be in favor of putting to death any politician and or political operative of any party for ever passing legislation designed to punish people, not primarily in the interest of public safety, but primarily in the interest of personal, political gain. Hail Nimrod, fuck those people. The war on drugs was designed to turn popular anxieties into criminal law, not clinical care. So while the concept of helplessness could be extended to the unfortunate American alcoholic,

that helplessness would now be seen far differently in a black, native, Chinese, American, etc., like we've already seen in this timeline, and here it will be used as an excuse for punishment rather than rehabilitation. When the state frames a social problem through the criminal justice lens, the consequent institutions, incentives and media practices, prime audiences to think in terms

of blame and containment rather than care. Conversely, the mid-century institutional acceptance of alcoholism, hospitals, VA units, insurance reimbursement, and AA's legitimacy created a different institutional language.

Doctors, not police, became the default interlocutors. Right? For many white alcohol, Helplessness equals illness equals treatment, but now for many black drug users, helplessness equals threat equals incarceration. That was truly how it was framed. The split, as we know, has no basis in biology.

It was manufactured by political choice, media framing, and the allocation of state power. Basically, Nixon's government laid its claim to how hard drug addicts would be viewed and treated, and this would persist for decades to come in some ways. Long past the era of the counterculture hippie, and again, it is the elites versus the dirty pores. In the mid-1970s, though, the war on drugs took a slight hiatus. Between 1973 and 1977, 11 states decriminalized marijuana possession. Drug use at large, especially cocaine use, was increasingly seen by more and more people as glamorous, fun, and attractive. It wasn't a continuation of the dirty America hate and hippie scene that led to the popularity of cocaine,

at least not directly. Scholars have argued that the pacifism of the 1960s was connected in many mind to the economic downturn of the 1970s. Instead of blaming government policy, people seem to possess an idea that the country had abandoned good, hard work in the 1960s. As a result, a kind of work fever emerged which valued competition, speed, and productivity, as well as including more women in the workforce, which in turn created more competition, as well as more opportunities for post-work, mixed-gender get-togethers like drinks out, dancing, etc. And this turned out to be the perfect atmosphere for sweet, sweet cocaine. Cocaine is a hell of a drug.

I love Rick James's laugh. Thank you, Rick James. If you've never used cocaine before, oh, it's definitely a go, go, go, get shit kind of done drug. Fucking strong coffee for your nose, or at least it can be. It can help some people in the short term, lock in, work much faster than normal. Think of that extra pep and focus caffeine gives you. Now ramp that up by a fucking lot.

but eventually it's going to break your body and mind down and you might not ever work as well as you did before the Coke ever again. Back in the 1960s, aided by U.S. politicians who wanted to support a Cuban counter-revolutionary effort, Cuban exile groups had organized a cocaine smugged and ring based in Miami. That fucking city of Skyline was built by cocaine, which began funneling coke into the U.S.

This will be picked up by Colombian growers in 1970s before the Colombian trade and really the global trade was dominated by early sucks subject Pablo Escobar. Since cocaine was pricier of the most, most drugs, it was soon considered a mark of exclusivity and luxury. The more people saw celebrities do cocaine or heard or read about it, the more they wanted to do it. And there was no consensus at the time that Coke was addictive or even harmful at all. Combined with the culture focused more and more on work and consumption and short order, the cocaine business

was booming, even outselling heroin. By the mid-1980s, there was approximately six million regular users of Coke in the U.S., 2.5% of the population. More people meant more producing what suppliers soon began producing too much. And oversupply of cocaine led prices to decrease by up to 80% by the middle of the decade. And faced with dropping prices, drug dealers decided to innovate. They converted the powder to crack, a solid, smokable, way more addictive form of cocaine that could be sold in smaller, cheaper quantities to more people. Crack!

As early as 1981, crack popped up in a couple of major American cities, but by 1985, the substance was widespread. And at the beginning of the crack cocaine epidemic coincided with another development. developments, the inner city. Thanks to post-war prosperity, many middle-class white people moved to the suburbs in the middle of the 20th century, leaving what would be termed inner cities. They were assisted by the federal housing committee, which the government had created during the Great Depression, with a mission to underwrite mortgages and spur home ownership. But after the war, the FHC marked certain neighborhoods, especially black neighborhoods, as risky for loans. Banks refused to lend

in those areas, which meant less investment, fewer new homes, and declining property upkeep. This was already bad, but the Housing Act in 1949 made shit worse. Instead of helping rebuild middle-class housing and black neighborhoods, it pushed for urban renewal, a polite term for bulldozing older areas labeled as slums. The newly free land was often used to build public housing that served only the poorest residents, creating pockets of concentrated poverty and pushing middle-class black families out of these areas. By the 1950s, the federal government doubled down on this pattern. It built massive highway systems to connect new, mostly white suburbs to city centers. Those freeways often cut directly through black and low-income neighborhoods, physically separating them from downtowns and killing local businesses.

And they did do that shit on purpose. For example, in Birmingham, Alabama, the interstate highway system curved and twisted substantially to bisect several black neighborhoods rather than taking a far more direct route through some predominantly white neighborhoods with better lawyers and more political clout. Black families with the finances to do so, they struggled to move out of these neighborhoods. In many cases, like the iconic post-war Levitown suburbs, developers literally refused to sell homes to African Americans. In 1957, when a black family bought a house in Levitown, New York, from a white family, they were aggressively harassed for months. That meant that when federal law finally began to curb racial segregation in the 1970s and 80s, there was a flood of middle-class black migration to the suburbs. At the same time, factory jobs moved out of the city centers to lower-cost suburban areas or overseas, leaving an inner city with limited action. access to good schools, steady employment, or quality housing. And when crack cocaine,

entered those neighborhoods in the early 80s, cheaper, more addictive, easier to distribute than powder cocaine. It found an environment that was perfectly calibrated for its distribution and abuse. Those with few access to economic opportunities readily turned to drug dealing. Cracks instant and intense effects with a relatively shorter half-life than cocaine created a customer base that would buy shit over and over and over and over again. And we've gone over this in a bunch of previous episodes. Donovan X, Ramsey, author of the nonfiction book When Crack was King, witnessed daily the ravages of Crack

in his neighborhood in Columbus, Ohio. Crack was everywhere, he told The Guardian in an interview, its fallout was everywhere, but it was something that we avoided because of the fear and the shame of it. If you look directly at it, then maybe it would gobble you up somehow. You had to navigate the violence that accompanied the drug trade, just being in a neighborhood where people shot and killed each other and being afraid of the sort of random violence.

but you also had to navigate the policing that was applied like a dragnet across your communities. A day in the life of a child like me might be getting down on the floor because there are gunshots, ringing out during dinner, and then making sure that you lock everything up tight at night because you don't want an addict to break into your house and rob you, and then the next day going to school being stopped by police in question because you could be a drug addict or a drug dealer. Indeed, this phase of the war on drugs would be the most severe yet, disproportionately harming black communities.

In October of 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which appropriated $1.7 billion more dollars to continue fighting the war on drugs. This bill also created mandatory minimum penalties for drug offenses with very different sentences for possessing crack than powder cocaine. Crack was, of course, cheaper, which meant that the majority of those who possessed it were lower income, often black, and possessing crack meant a much harsher sentence, which is so fucked. and all this was supported by Wise's dopamine hypothesis, now a decade old that dealt with the Pleasure Center. Back in 1975, the Pleasure Center hypothesis was a neutral one.

It didn't intend to mean anything about the addict themselves, only to explain a process. But when the hypothesis was repeated in the 1980s media, it sounded a lot more like drugs hijacking the brain, and popular science articles in Reagan-era PSAs seized on the idea. You heard so many of those PSAs a couple episodes back in the Go Ask Alice. a few of them today as well. In this view of addiction, users were not people who had made bad choices. Indeed, by becoming addicted, they'd become a completely different person, like a fucking zombie. Rather than inspiring empathy, this kind of talk often legitimized, harsher interventions,

and obscured the multi-part causes of addiction, like perhaps the trauma of growing up in a fragmented, downtrodden, violent, theft-filled neighborhood. The media was eager for the simple explanation of drugs hijacking the brain. Of course, simple almost always sells better. than nuanced, despite the real answer is to almost fucking everything being nuanced. But nuance, you know, that's harder to understand. And I find that so many people, arguably most people continually are uninterested in putting in the actual work it takes to truly understanding much of well fucking anything.

They would rather just repeat unquestioned phrases and opinions that have been handed to them by their parents, friends, neighbors, etc. If somebody else agrees, it must be true. Don't think, just regurgitate. In a 1988, New York Times front page story about the crack plague, researchers described how they were struggling to understand the nearly unbreakable habit of crack addiction, and experts called it the most troubling drug we've ever studied,

one that was nearly impossible to stop using because of its dopamine-related neurochemistry. Even scientists were not immune to sensationalize this. Roy Wise, the dopamine hypothesis himself, declared that if I knew that my daughter was going to try either heroin or crack, I'd prefer that she try heroin. New experiments designed around these sensationalized narratives sampled the concentrations of dopamine and rap rings.

and showed that a wider range of drugs, including opiates, alcohol, nicotine, and cocaine, increased dopamine release. This finding prompted the theory of addiction that said that addictive drugs release dopamine, but non-addictive drugs do not. But that's not true. Dopamine's real mechanisms are far more complicated than this kind of thinking suggests. Scientists now know that dopamine isn't really a pleasure molecule per se. It has more to do with feelings of desire and wanting, not enjoyment. In other words, dopamine doesn't deliver pleasure it directs pursuit. of things that can be pleasurable. That means that people addicted to crack or heroin or whatever

aren't pleasure-seeking zombies. Furthermore, not all drugs bombarded the brain with dopamine by tapping directly into that circuitry. Roy Wise worked largely on stimulants, which do powerfully and directly release dopamine, but cannabis and opioids do not. To the extent that those drugs affect dopamine, they do so indirectly by acting on upstream circuits, not by directly influencing the dopamine circuit. And finally, most importantly of all, when it comes to myth-busting about drugs, research shows that most people who use drugs, including crack, methamphetamine and heroin, don't develop significant problems. In study spanning decades, no more than 10 to 30% of people who use drugs develop significant substance use disorders. Drugs are not addictive

in themselves for whoever happens to try them. They don't cause addictions in isolation. Indeed, a 1970 study found that about 20% of U.S. soldiers in Vietnam ended up addicted to heroin. In the first year after returning to the U.S., only 1% became re-addicted to heroin, although 10% tried the drug after their return. What's going on there? Well, there's been a massive change in their environment. Most went from hoping they wouldn't fucking die in a violent way every single day, from watching friends being killed, from dealing with the stress of having killed others, to primarily dealing with new stressors like traffic, hoping for a promotion at work, hoping a date works out, very different stress levels. Addiction is deeply contextual. But of course, that's not the easy to understand narrative.

It's nuanced. It's true, but it's nuanced. It's not simple. Simple cells. By the late 1980s no longer matter that the science didn't hold up. The myth had already done his job. Crack rewires the brain became political shorthand for crack users can't be saved, so fuck them. Interestingly, while the dopamine myth hardened policy towards black communities, it softened it for white ones a decade later.

By the time the opioid crisis hit the same nerve, chemical framing addiction is a disease that the brain was repackaged as empathy. But before jumping up to recent years, let's stay in the 80s and 90s. The Betty Ford Clinic was founded in 1982, founded by the former first lady who had sought treatment for alcohol and prescription pill addiction herself at the age of 60. That same year, Cocaine Anonymous was founded, which kind of sounds like a place to anonymously do cocaine. But of course it's not. I mean, you could anonymously snort Coke at a cocaine anonymous meeting. But it kind of sounds like a place to anonymously do cocaine. But of course it's not. I mean, you could anonymously snort Coke at a cocaine anonymous meeting. But a I'm guessing that would be heavily frowned upon. Funny, to me, but frowned upon. In the mid-80s, the secular organizations for sobriety and rational recovery was founded by recovering alcoholic James Christopher, another organization, Rational Recovery, founded by Jack Trimpy, both of those intended to provide a non-religious alternative to AA. Then by 1987, as the crack epidemic rage and black people across America were being harassed

and in prison, the American Medical Association labeled all drug, addictions, diseases. One step forward, one step back. often at the same time. Throughout the 1990s, federal and local policy for drug possession and sale remained punitive, and the 1994 crime bill created tough new criminal sentences and incentivized states to build more fuck in prisons. But then in 1997, the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, Alan Leshner, published a piece that would crystallize the neuroscientific framing of addiction. Called Addiction as a Brain Disease and It Matters, this piece argued that decades of neuroscience had demonstrated that addiction is not just moral failure or weak will.

it is a chronic relapsing brain disease caused by drug-induced changes in brain structure and function. Framing addiction this way, he said matters because it shifts policy, treatment, funding, and public expectations toward medical and scientific responses. This piece paved the way for a general medicalized view of addiction, pushed health care systems to offer more treatments for addicts, and open the door for scientists to work toward new treatments. Fuck, yeah. However, scientists still couldn't agree on whether or not medicalization was the right for. framework to look at addiction. Criticism to the piece argued that the brain disease view is deterministic, fails to account for heterogeneity. There we go. There's a lot of syllables in that

word. A fancy word for diverse experiences. In remission and recovery and placed too much emphasis on compulsive dimension of addiction. All in all, they argued this medicalization renewed hope for a silver bullet approach. Figure out the right medical treatment and addiction will go the way the do-do. Of course, as we've seen, it's so much more complicated than that. However, to Leshner's credits, arguing that addiction is a brain disease has proved to be the best means for getting public policy to view addiction as something that calls for widely accessible treatment and not punishment. In other words, it may not be the best explanation for addiction itself, but it's the best explanation that leads to more treatment being available to the widest amount of people. And though

we could now get into the opioid epidemic, all let our previous research on that topic speak for itself. Episode 272, the opioid epidemic, if you are interested. Let's instead now, step back for a moment and ask, where are we today? And to answer that, we will head to the recap. Good job, soldier. You've made it back. Barely. This Saturday, get ready for a special hour-long presentation of Hollywood and Speed Bump and Friends, where the boys invite over some special pals to remind kids to stay away from drugs and not get addicted. Watch out behind you, Speed Bump. I think I see a puppet, like a ghost or something. How much scares? It's me, Woody. I just want to tell you that there's some kind of kids out in the alley talk about doing drugs.

And since they said they wouldn't share any with me, I want those. greedy to lake what's arrested. Owee! Arrested? Come on, Woody. I think they just need someone to talk to them about the dangers of drugs. Ooh, whoo!

For sure, for sure. Hey, it's Chicken Joe. Let me talk to those kids about how smoking that grass can lead to getting pimped on the street and slanging that ass. I don't know, Chicken Joe. Maybe not the right guy

to be talking to the kids. As seen as I'll have arrested you for pimping over a dozen times. Woo! Hey, what about me guys? It's Bob. It's Bob. It's Bob.

It's Bob. fruit dot bins. I can eat it because I'd make tiny little tasty fruits they can eat and salt or maybe they can at least buy some of my little fruits. I'm one tiny little nectarine rejects. I'm saying to say my tiny fruit. I'm saying my tiny fruit. Uh, how about you stay away from those kids too, Bob? You don't seem incredibly stable right now, my man.

Ooh! Too little, two dittles, beep bump. Me and pooty artists are Bob tritin peaches size of blueberries with some teenagers or what should look like Molly. Oh no, Jujo. Damn it, Bob! You worse than Chicken Joe! Yo! Ro-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-W! What about me, boys? Captain Whisker-Horn. Owner-Praider of Captain Whisker-Hon's pony-playing podium, tax shop, and Saturday.

The Quad-State area's number one sex shop for over 20 years. By the time I'm done selling those kids' brittles, harnesses, hauntas, hulks, masks, they'll be too addicted to kink to ever think about getting addicted to drugs. No, no, no, no. Dear God, you stay here with us, Whiskerhorn. We'll take the kids to, uh, we'll talk to them about addiction. Oh! We sure will! We'll talk them about getting addicted to whippoo! Teenage Junkie Edition. Fuck you.

Fuck your family. Get addicted to Whipple. Damn it. You stay with Mr. Whisk going, Gunter Whipple. The best way for some people to help kids is to stay away from drugs and not get addicted is to never talk to kids at all. Like, not once.

Don't even look at them. Sounds to me like Hollywood and Speedbump might end up doing a bunch of drugs themselves after the Saturday's big mess of an episode. Find out when you watch Hollywood and Speedbuck, The dangers of addiction. Saturday morning at 9, right after a replay of the action hero,

evil. Will fighting man, atomic man, flying guy, warrior woman, attack cat, prophet Jeffrey, and old witch lady be able to defeat the forces of generic knockoff evil? You'll only know if you keep your eyes glued to Channel 7, kids. Hollywood and Speedbunk. Keep in the streets clean,

one paw at a time. Well, that was certainly interesting. Hopefully that wasn't a fucking jarring mess. That was harder to do than I thought it would be. Let's actually talk about the topic again now, but what a show that is. I hope you can catch it on Channel 7 kids. Addiction, a fascinating topic.

And by the way, if you're very confused about that last commercial, that was a lot of characters from the whole catalog doing cameos. If you struggle or have a struggle with the dicks, I hope this episode helped you see how many people have been in your shoes. So many people across time and history have had confusing, uncomfortable, dangerous relationships with substances, and we're lucky to live in a time when treatment is at least better than it's been. So where are we today?

If you remember our four categories for how societies tend to deal with addiction from up top, a prohibitionist approach, therapeutic approach, reductionist approach, and a go fuck yourself approach. I mean, a mutual health approach. How do those appear in today's world? A recent 2024 poll indicates about 75% of Americans now say substance use disorders should be treated as a health issue rather than a criminal one up from about 67% in 2019. That's fantastic. Keep that shit moving in that direction. That seems to indicate that as a culture, we favor a therapeutic approach, one that reframes addiction as illness and positions addicts as patients. This, as we saw with Leshner, is one of the strongest framings we've developed, and it goes back to Dr. Benjamin Rush and his desire to see a new healthy country emerge from the ravages of the American Revolution.

It often goes hand in hand with reductionism, which posits addiction as a primarily neurochemical product that simply needs the right course of treatment. While it's opened up a lot of terms of funding and accessibility or, excuse me, opened up a lot in terms of funding and accessibility, his approach also produces systemic inequality. Some people, of course, can afford high-end rehabs, and those people become the patients, people who deserve sympathy. But that leaves out a majority of people. Indeed, research suggests that only minority of people with opioid use disorder ever received treatment. Those without resources or people who don't understand how to access them still face the stigma. and with resources seeming plentiful, it can seem like addicts who do not use them

are deliberately making bad choices. We can see this in how the 19th century dealt with opium too. Respectable middle-class Victorians were dosing themselves with laudanum nightly, while Chinese labors in the same period were demonized for using the same shit, but smoking it instead of taking a pill or some elixir. There's also other problems with this framing. The idea that addiction can be solved by the right medical treatment leads to some crazy stuff like having patients take deadly nightshade.

I'm sure there are any number of controversial grifting addiction treatments out there right now. Also tends to ignore the fact that time and time again over history, we have seen that some of the best responses to addiction are in human connection and a return to tradition, like the Native American communities that counseled each other in Alcoholics Anonymous. Treating addiction as a purely medical issue gives the medical community sole responsibility for dealing with addiction when really it should be the responsibility of all different facets of society. Health care for one, but also education, the systems that provide operational. opportunities for employment and social safety nests and more. And that moves us on to the

mutual help model. Though not as prevalent throughout history, the mutual help model has exploded in the past decades and helped millions of people and has genuine scientific research backing it as a legitimate route to not just recovery, but to building community and taking accountability that greatly helps prevent relapse. I bet you know someone who has benefited from this kind of organization, maybe even yourself. All of this would seem to suggest that the prohibitionist view has gone away, that people have wizened up to the idea that simply banning the substance and jailing those who use it is not an effective way to treat addiction. Unfortunately, the prohibitionist approach has not gone away. More than half a U.S. states

still treat drug possession as a felony, which is fucking stupid. Prohibitionism can be used for political aims and often has been making it seem like politicians are taking decisive action to help the good, hardworking folks, even as those politicians simultaneously advocate for other industries that currently help them financially, industries that contribute to other forms of addiction, right? Like how the U.S. continue to dish out harsh penalties for heroin use and dealing while Big Pharma was pushing equally, if not more addictive new forms of opioids on way more Americans than heroin dealers ever did. Indeed, Barry's industries have always engineered and marketed addiction from tobacco to the gin craze to morphine and pharmaceuticals

and now tech companies chasing your dopamine with infinite scroll and governments have switched between profiting from them and condemning them depending on the potential for their own benefit. In modern America, all four of these frameworks coexist and collide. Opioid policy, for instance, is part prohibition, as in the case of fentanyl crackdowns, also partially therapeutic,

as data from 2023 indicates there are 8,294 facilities providing some form of medication-assisted treatment or mat clinics in the U.S. At the same time, the scientific community continues to do research into areas like genetic predisposition to addiction and grassroots organizations continue to help people in the case of opioids via groups like narcotics anonymous. None of these are theoretical frameworks, and the reason they've all persisted and been tried in different combinations over the course of history is that the stakes are enormous.

In 2023, there were 105,0007 confirmed drug overdose deaths. Provisional data for 2024 suggests the number fell by nearly 27 percent to approximately 80,400, first annual decline since 2018, largest one-year drop in 45 years of comparable data collection. Still, that's a lot of people. And that doesn't include the many, many people with addictions who fall outside of that scope. People addicted to drugs who don't die from them, but hurt themselves and their families, and people addicted to other things. All of this might seem like a bummer, but I don't think it should be. Though we might not ever be able to come up with an easy one-size-fits-all fix for addiction, groups like Alcoholics Anonymous have proven

that we do have the tools inside of us to achieve better for ourselves, for our families, for our communities, for each other, that one of the best therapies for addiction is simply talking about it, destigmatizing, supporting others, right? That proves that at our core is we are compassionate, kind, empathetic creatures in general, right, who want to help each other. Also, hopefully, if you've tended to look down on people who are addicted to something, is choosing to be weak,

as struggling primarily because of character flaws, they could correct, but just don't. Hopefully this episode has helped you have more compassion for how complicated the struggle really is. Life's fucking hard, and it's complicated. And we all experience it so differently. We don't all begin life with the same starting line. We don't all start with the same ability to run the race.

And the kinds of obstacles, each of us face will differ, right? We'll all be hit by obstacles in different severity at different times. Two people, right, can experience divorce, the death of a child, the unexpected loss of a job, leading to the loss of one's house, for example. But one of those people might experience those events spread out over, 40 years. Another might experience all of them in one year. Also, one of those people might have a large supportive community around them for all of those stressors. Maybe they were just born into a big loving family. Another person might not have many supportive friends and family members at all for any number of reasons. One of those people might also be introduced to an addictive drug in the middle

of all those stressors at their lowest. One of those people might have some yet to be determined genetic predisposition towards addiction. One of those people might not have a temperament that predisposes them to seek help when they start to struggle. They might have been raised to push down feelings of seeking help because they think that makes them look weak. There are so many different factors when we look into why one person becomes addicted to something while another can casually use it or have no interest in ever trying it. One of those people might experience all of that living in a neighborhood full of pervasive

economic despair and violence. Another might experience it in an affluent, peaceful supper. And I say all this not to advocate for never being upset or disappointed with somebody for making selfish, cruel, destructive, and or self-destructive choices, and then blaming choices, like those on addiction, not holding people accountable for terrible decisions is just going to help enable them to make more of those decisions. But while you can still feel hurt, be angry, disappointed, et cetera, for suffering the consequences of an addict's behavior, hopefully this episode helps you understand that while you might certainly be a victim, they're a victim too. And that understanding should lead to some compassionate feelings. They need help, and that help is and might always be pretty fucking complicated. And this all reminds me randomly of how my attitudes about fitness have changed over the years.

When I was 22, 23 years old, I worked briefly as a personal trainer, and I was pretty cocky. Most of my clients, they were usually much older. They didn't really want to work on managing their portion sizes, track their calories, or bust their ass for rigorous workout three to four times a week that kept them burning lots of calories like I wanted them to. They wanted extra help. They wanted pills. They wanted the kind of magic bullets that magically transform their bodies and help shed those pounds and tone those muscles with, you know, less effort. And at the time, that led me to looking down on them, labeling them privately as weak, lazy, delusional, et cetera. I used to think, why can't they just fucking work hard, right?

Eat less. Watch the pounds melt away like me. But I thought that because my metabolism was off the charts. At that age, I was fucking ripped. I had plenty of time to work out, very little stressors in my life, very little responsibilities. I still ate shitty food pretty often. I can eat shitty food, work out a bit harder, put on muscle and loose fat just like that. Easy.

And I didn't understand why they couldn't do the same. Well, I'm 48 now. And I eat way better, way better than I did at 23, well, less calories, work out a lot harder. And I am the heaviest I've ever been. Probably have the most fats. My metabolism has changed a lot. And if I want to get shredded now, I can, but I'll have to get a lot more scientific, you know, maybe take some ozempic or something similar or, you know, definitely get very militant

about my diet and tracking my macro-nutrients and all that shit, I have to have put in 10 times the effort I would have had to put in at 23. And now I understand that a lot of my clients were looking for a magic bullet because their road to a better body was way fucking harder than mine was. Wasn't that they were just super lazy? They just couldn't see immediate results when they tried to do things the way I wanted them to do like I could. I had adopted a one-size-fits-all mentality based mostly on just my experience,

and I was pushing that on other people of a lot of different sizes and experiences. And I think many of this, or many of us, excuse me, do this in a lot of different ways. We think some version of, I did it, I stopped drinking, I quit smoking, I stop gambling by doing X, Y, and Z. So that means that my kid, friend, acquaintance, coworker, et cetera, could do the same thing and be fine, but they don't because they won't listen. They're lazy, selfish, terrible, weak, et cetera. So fuck them if they don't want to get better. But that's very unfair. What works for you does not work for everyone else.

So the next time you think about this person, instead of being dismiss it, be compassionate. You can still be mad. You can still be sad, disgusted, ashamed of their choices, et cetera. But you can also feel sympathy knowing that the road to their recovery might be full of a hundred times

the amount of hills, turns, pottles, snowstorms, tornadoes, great shrizzlies, et cetera, than your own. Sorry if you are struggling with addiction, Meetsack. I hope you can find the right combination of treatment that gets you out of the fucking hole you're in.

You're not there because you're weak, it's complicated. remember that. Maybe it'll help you, not lose hope. If the first kinds of treatment you try don't work. You haven't failed. You just haven't found the right medicine for you yet. Please don't stop looking. Let's head to today's takeaways. Time shock. Top five takeaways. Number one, there is no one agreed upon cause for addiction. Sometimes scientists think it has more to do with brain chemistry than anything else. Others think that the role of one's environment, and especially trauma is the key to why addiction takes hold.

Indeed, we've seen a lot of evidence in this episode for both opinions. On the one hand, humans have struggled with addiction across every time and culture and history, meaning it probably has something to do with our meat sack brains. On the other hand, addiction is demonstrably bigger and worsening communities that have seen war, destruction, and fragmentation of community, and the loss of tradition and opportunity. What we do know for sure is that the cause of addiction doesn't necessarily align to its treatment. And going off of that, number two,

Just because addiction itself is mysterious, doesn't mean treatment for it has to be. A very helpful treatment has proven to be just talking about it and supporting others in your community, as in the case of Alcoholics Anonymous and its many spin-offs. A.A. is both a recovery program and a social movement that began in 1935 in Akron, Ohio, founded by Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith, two alcoholics who discovered that mutual support could succeed, where willpower and medicine had failed. At his core, A.A. is modeled off the Oxford group and built around the 12 steps, a spiritual framework that emphasizes admitting powerlessness over alcohol, making amends,

maintaining sobriety through self-examination and service to others. Number three, for centuries, addiction has been framed around othered groups, Native Americans, black Americans, Chinese Americans, you know, etc. While wealthy, high-status people with the same substance problems are thought of as using it for medicinal purposes, fears about addiction amongst minority groups are then used as fodder to justify harsh punishment and repression, as in the case of the 1980s crack epidemic. So let's maybe stop doing that shit. Race has no bearing in the nature of addiction or the treatment for it.

It affects all different colors of meat sacks who should be afforded the same level of compassion. Number four, in recent years, the medicalization of addiction has taken root, a process that began over three centuries ago. There's a lot of evidence for the brain's pathways and the ways in which they are changed by drugs, being a major contributor to addiction, as well as certain genetic features to suggest some sort of link between addiction and biological features, including potentially intelligence. And number five, new info, did you know that crypto addiction's a thing? Crypto addiction is recognized by mental health organizations as a form of behavioral addiction,

often classified as a type of gambling or online day trading addiction. While it's not yet an official standalone diagnosis in the DSM-5TR, the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders, fifth edition, text provision, the symptoms and consequences are very real and can be severe. This is because many apps and marketplaces are intentionally designed to gamify investments, often resembling casinos or carnival games. They come with flashing lights, sounds, the ability to notify forums and social media about your purchases. The apps ultimately produce addiction, one that can lead to people borrowing money from family and friends, putting their

stability at risk, and even death. In the past years, there have been several suicides and accidental overdose deaths linked to the extreme financial losses and mental health strain associated with cryptocurrency trading and addiction. Fucking wild. Not saying to not invest in crypto, just saying, be careful to not eat your investment, become your addiction. Time suck. Top five takeaways. Addiction, most misunderstood condition ever has been sucked. Thank you to the bad magic team for the help of making time suck to Queen of Bad

Magic, Wendy Cummins so many words I've read today. Thanks also to Logan Keith, helping to publish this episode, designing merch for the store at Bad Magic Productions.com. Thanks to Sophie Evans for her initial research. Also, thanks to the all-seen eyes moderating the cult of the curious private Facebook page, the mod squad, making sure Discord keeps running smooth, and everyone over on the TimeSuck subreddit and Bad Magic Subreddit. And now let's head on over to this week's Time Sucker Updates. Updates? Get your Time Sucker Updates. The first update I'm sharing today from those sent in to Bojangles at TimeSuck Podcast

com comes from a bona fide dark lord weirdo d with the subject line of thank you for the go-ask alice episode hi to my favorite suckmaster i'm just going to start right in this whole thing ragingly fucked up my childhood and i'm still feeling the effects of it i was a shy socially awkward smart creative preteen back in the early 1980s badly bullied at school and not wanting the fate of housewives in my conservative suburban community when i was 13 my dad bought a game called dungeons and dragons the basic set. We played as a family, and I was instantly hooked. I literally could play a sword-wielding warrior woman who fought monsters like the heroic men did in fantasy books I liked. My art, which had always trended to the fantasy world, now went to these warrior women in their adventures. Dungeons

and dragons gave me a place to explore my life in a fantasy setting, to explore ideas, and to be someone other than the vastly unpopular girl being groomed into an eventual life of a lonely housewife. Meanwhile, the bullying got worse at school, causing a cascading pattern of bad grades, stress, and the growing need to escape. My mom took me to the family doctor who referred me to a county therapist. We'll call the county therapist Mrs. T. Mrs. T. was a complete nightmare. She zeroed in on the Dungeons and Dragons in my fantasy art. Nothing concerned her quite as much as D&D and my warrior women, not my stress, not the grades, etc. And this led to one night my dad, citing a worry that I was rejecting womanhood, womanhood and might kill my family with a sword no one in my family

owned or had access to, gathered up my artwork and tossed it into the garbage. When we went to Mrs. T. for family therapy a few days later, she applauded this act. She also sent me across the hall around this time to a psychiatrist to get me on antipsychotics, which royally fucked me up. I was sent to a hospital from some neurological tests and an EEG which showed no psychosis. Mrs. T insisted, though, I stay on antipsychotics, rejecting the recommendation of the medical tests. The whole thing ended when I was to be taken home from school because I was alternatively falling asleep and getting the shakes during class from the antipsychotic. The psychiatrist and Mrs. T. disagreed about the drug, with Mrs. T. wanting me to take the drug at full dose no matter what it was doing to me. My parents responded by taking the drug and tossed it into the trash, then pulling me out of therapy.

Best parenting decision they ever made. The antipsychotic and the insinuation that there was something fundamentally wrong with me twisted up my life, undermine my ability to trust my own decisions and my own competence. It did long-term psychological damage. The long-term damage hurt my relationships and my career. had I remained in her care, I probably wouldn't have survived to adulthood. On the other hand, my art and my role-playing games kept me going. Mrs. T. wanted to rip that out of my life, probably because of the con-artist bitch who wrote those books.

I have since then found a healthy therapist who is helping to deconstruct all the crazy, satanic panic bullshit, even after all these years. I just finished writing my first fantasy novel, and it's in a beta read prior to being sent to a publisher. I still play role-playing games from time to time. I don't think I ever read any of Sparks' works of bullshit, but now, after listening to this podcast, I understand some aware that time of misery in my childhood came from. It is yet another piece of the puzzle that can help me move on. About 20 years ago, I looked up Mrs. T and found she had risen to the top of the county mental health board.

A time sucker and a peeper, D. Damn, D. Starry went through the ringer growing up. Yeah, people like Beatrice Sparks. When they were fueling shit like the satanic panic, they did a lot of damage that a lot of people don't recognize. Luckily, not as much damage as the medieval versions of Beatrice, who helped get innocent people literally burned at the stake, but still, a lot of damage. Crazy that there are still a lot of people who think that letting their kid enjoy a game where you get to join up with friends

and strategize on how to make it through some quest alive that's all made up, battling monsters to do so, that that's the way to lose your soul and end up in hell or maybe kill your fucking parents with a sword. So fucked up that Beatrice and others like Michelle remembers, co-authors Lauren's Patser and Michelle Smith also published bullshit that fueled the satan, panic with lies that led to people ended up in prison or dying by suicide. One thing I've learned here over and over on time stuff is that morally rigid people supposedly trying to save us from evil by claiming that God wants us to do this or that, you know, or that our soul will be in jeopardy if we don't.

They are the ones we actually have to watch out for. The goth kids, the weirdos, the misfits, the ones with an attitude of, I don't know what the fuck's going on, man. I'm just trying not to bother anyone else and enjoy my life. In my experience, time and time again, they're the sweetest kindest people out there. So keep being a beautiful weird O. D. And fuck Mrs. T. Next up, teacher and obvious groomer, Micah A, sent in a message with the subject line of school litter boxes. Hail Nimrod. I wanted to share my hypothesis on where the litter boxes in school's things came from.

I am a teacher and have been for the past eight years. I believe this started because some teachers keep a five-gallon bucket and kitty litter in a cabinet in case they're ever in a lockdown situation for an extended period of time. bathroom emergencies are especially urgent with younger kids some teachers are more prepared than others I work with a lady who keeps plastic sheeting and duct tape for H-FAC emergencies as well you would think the people would get the whole story if this is where it came from

but some people are so anxious to cause drama that they don't think twice before running their mouth about stuff they know nothing about long-lived bojangles best wishes, Mike A Micah how dare you accuse some people being dramatic and want to talk shit about things they don't know anything about when does that ever happen once in history

Everyone always tells the truth and waits for all of the facts to come in before forming an opinion about anything. For real, though, yeah, thanks for explaining where that crazy rumor actually came from. That makes sense to me. And now let's end by talking about buttholes. Specifically, loophole, love, and sack Andrew Kay's butthole.

He took some time to take a break from getting an internal massage to send in a message with the subject line of enema-free interior massage advocate, a brief tale. Profit of Triple M. The frequent mentions of interior massage in the Starvation Doctor episode brought about recent memories with the subject thought I'd share. I was having some incontinence issues at the ripe old age of 29

and decided to get it checked out. Prostate exam, oof. Eurathroscopy. Take a camera up my wing to look inside, big oof, and finally get sent to pelvic floor of physical therapy. Q six months of weekly visits to a charming 30-something PT specialist, she would insert her figure, her finger, her finger, into my loop. and manually massaged the bundle of muscles that make up the pelvic floor.

Took like 45 minutes each time. It was great conversation and not that weird after a while. Eventually, bought a vibrating wand so I can do it myself at home, though I'm starting to think daily multi-hour enemas might have set me right. All of that said, the treatment works, and I'm now pissing like a Roman hot, hard father daddy at Captain Whiskerhorns, pony playing porium. That aside, give my thanks to the bad magic team

for laughs over the years, three out of five stars, keep on sucking. hopeful future dentitarian patient Andrew Crier Andrew's six months of weekly loophole diddle did it actually take six months to properly reset your system

or did it take maybe a couple months and then you went through the last few months just for funsies also is it rude to come during those treatments asking for a friend but seriously yes there really is therapeutic value in that and I love you made you peace with it

and got so comfortable you could just casually chat with somebody as their fingers in your butthole like you're their puppet but glad your system is properly discharging waste now. Glad you figured out how to properly massage your own loophole to help your peepee go in the potty like a good boy. I'll see you at the dentarium. Next time, suckers, I needed that.

We all did. Well, thank you for listening to another Bad Magic Productions podcast. Hope the sound wasn't too different. Be sure and rate and review time suck. If you haven't already, think about what you might be addicted to this week. And believe you are worth trying one treatment after another until you find what works for you, unless you're addicted to this podcast.

And in that case, don't even worry about it. Just keep on sucking. And now for one more anti-drugging. I want you to have this. Uh, what is that? It's called a cigarette. And unlike marijuana, this comes from the earth. And it has no negative health side effects.

Go ahead, take it. Mustard tip to mouth. Follow my lead, all right? Every year, thousands of people. teens are struck dead from marijuana use. Only you can stop the slaughter. Smoke cigarettes instead. Or as Cigarella says, choose smokes not dope. Love you, big brother. Love you little brother. This message brought to you by the National Cigarette Foundation. I didn't say it was a good anti-drug PSA. I just said it was one more.