Episode 40: Addiction

To be addicted to something, you’ve got to… er, actually, what does it mean to be “addicted” to something? We all agree you can be addicted to heroin, but can you also be addicted to videogames, or sex, or listening to podcasts?

And actually, it turns out we don’t all agree you can be addicted to heroin - or, at least, people have very different models of what that means. In what is effectively an hour-long clarification of a throwaway comment in a previous episode, Tom and Stuart talk through the various aspects of addiction, and try to pin down the scientific definition of what turns out to be a strangely elusive concept.

The Studies Show is brought to you by Works in Progress magazine, whose recent issue covers its usual mix of science, technology, and policy ideas to help with human flourishing. Read deeply-researched articles about prediction markets, gentrification, concrete, and drink-driving policy at worksinprogress.co.

Show notes

* Addiction: A Very Short Introduction, by Keith Humphries

* And his Atlantic article on how de-stigmatising drugs could be a mistake

* Unlocked: The Real Science of Screen Time (and How to Spend it Better) by Pete Etchells

* Scotland’s unbelievably bad drug problem in one graph

* Theodore Dalrymple on Samuel Taylor Coleridge

* And another historical case: The Rugeley Poisoner

* US physician referring to addiction as a “disease” in 1874

* And a German physician discusses “morbid craving” for morphine in 1875

* Made-up Victorian theories on the cause of addiction

* Useful Vaughan Bell article on “the unsexy truth” about dopamine

* Evidence that Parkinson’s patients still experience pleasure despite low dopamine levels

* Evidence that a majority of (UK) smokers want to quit

* The CAGE screening questionnaire for alcohol disorders

* On the 1980 letter cited in and discussed in Dopesick

* Marc Lewis’s Memoirs of an Addicted Brain

* A discussion and critique of the “Rat Park” experiments

* Paper on “Addictive Symptoms of Mukbang Watching” (this is real!)

* The jokey origins of “Internet Use Disorder”

Credits

The Studies Show is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada Productions.

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