The desire for intoxication is natural In the book, Intoxication, by Roland Siegel, he claims that the pursuit of altered states through drugs is a natural part of our biology and it is as deep-rooted as our drive for food, sleep and sex. The desire for drugs, for intoxication, is our ’fourth drive’.
Mainstream recovery is based on talk. First you have to talk yourself out of taking drugs (“no drugs today, no drugs today”), and then talk endlessly through the relationship dramas, sexual dysfunction, depression, psychosis, panic and anxiety that may arise afterwards, not to mention the endless probing into what went wrong.
Cannabis is the fastest growing industry in the USA, but people aren’t buying dope they are buying the way it makes you feel; laid-back calm, happy and connected. In TCM this all comes from free-flowing chi in your organs.
The rehab revolution is definitely gathering momentum. Just read an interview in Vice with Marc Lewis, an ex-addict and neuroscientist who has written a new book called Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease.
Medical marijuana is getting lots of media coverage lately, and with its legalization spreading globally more and more people will be using it not just for fun, but to self-medicate. I regularly treat people who tell me they use it to alleviate everything from anxiety to insomnia to depression.
The NSW government spent half a million on the stoner sloth campaign and just contributed to the problem because the campaign validates the kind of judgmental behavior that often makes young people take more drugs and harder drugs.
There’s this new condition scientists have identified called ‘social jetlag’. It comes from messing with your body clock primarily by sleeping-in in the morning. This creates symptoms including lack of appetite, digestive problems, inability to concentrate, clumsiness, lack of energy, irritability and fatigue.
Just watched the Australian movie Ruben Guthrie. It wasn’t a particularly great movie but it was interesting because the main character was a hard partying high-achiever, who was using drugs and alcohol to sustain his success and feed that part of his nature that loved living on the edge.
Caught a few minutes of The Biggest Loser where a group of people were being labelled, shamed, guilt-tripped for ‘losing control’ and basically being treated in the same judgmental shabby manner as drug users are. In TBL food is seen as the problem but in my work it has nothing to do with food, just […]
I treat heaps of people who say they feel like a fake all day while going about their business in the normal world, then they get home hit the drugs or alcohol and finally feel ‘this is me’.
