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Ya mon. My tweet was definitely not entirely nuanced. There's a much wider discussion that needs to be had about addiction, here. But the physiological stuff and serious psychological attachment take a long time and/or early exposure to develop, for pretty much everyone.

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Contrast this with friends who have become addicted to MDMA because the first high was so great, and then the first withdrawal hit like a truck. That's a pretty fucking strong reinforcement mechanism. For smokers, you feel like puking and get severely dizzy, with no real high.

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Then you have years and years of constant tobacco use before you get any serious withdrawal symptoms. I had barely any, and I must have smoked around 10000 cigarettes in just a couple of years.

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So much as we may find a lot of long-term smokers who have much steeper costs for quitting, most people my age who say they're that addicted? They just don't want to quit (I didn't, for a long while), and/or they are caught in social circles that encourage smoking (as I was).

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IMO (from having read quite a bit about it), most addictions are more or less a matter of choice. It's the notion that choices are "free" that creates problems with accepting that model, and stigma attached to operating under it.

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"They are choosing this," absolutely does not mean "they could just stop choosing this if they were a better person/had more willpower".

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To riff off @Grimeandreaso, you get the good ol' neoliberal hegemony sweeping in and using these "free choices" as an excuse to punish addicts. Instead of admitting that these issues are all complex and require individual care, every interested party has a vested interest in BS.

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Yes. I have yet to read his books (hopefully soon), but I think Gabor Mate is fantastic. The embodied stress model is very good, but I think it may be better to say it explains a range of psychological issues (e.g. disordered personalities) that make people prone to addiction.

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Since I haven't read his books yet, though, I'm curious to see how he approaches it when he isn't compressing his ideas for an interviewer.

2:26 PM · Oct 17, 2018Twitter Web Client

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Thing is, if you don't believe choices are free to begin with, people exhibiting weak impulse control or cravings are not "lacking choice". Rather, their choices are more constrained than those others make in the same problem space. Like poor people's purchasing decisions.

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"Sure, I can buy food without corn syrup. So, should I skip rent or my data plan this month?" The psychological costs of doing business are very similar.

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