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Aswad -> RE: Discipline, Punishment, and a Crazy lil thing called Love (9/9/2007 2:40:55 AM)
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As I said, not saying you're wrong, just saying (as you also did) that Skinner falls short.
I definitely know cases where people have started drinking to "lose themselves" (i.e. escape) in a situation they did not see any way out of. But most of those have been a lot more successful at managing it than those that started drinking as a regular addiction. Also, there are some genetic markers for the latter group, but I can't remember them off the top of my head right now.
Other drugs seem to have a higher prevalence of people using it to cope, though, and are generally a lot less negative in that regard (at least in the short term), among other things because substances like heroin, cocaine, and so forth, do not cause the same level of impairment at an equivalent level of intoxication, and also do have positive effects on things like depression et al, although they carry their own problems (tolerance buildup with heroin, unless the docs are willing to use PKC-inhibitors and/or NMDA-antagonists to prevent that in an effort at harm reduction; irreversible VMAT2 damage with cocaine, and oxidative stress etc.).
Generally, the statistics seem to indicate that proper treatment of mental health issues, along with efforts to improve the environment (e.g. better welfare system), could avoid a significant portion of the "hard" substance abuse going on out there. Similar things go for people with ADHD, where treatment reduces the likelyhood of drug abuse from alot-more-likely-than-not to slightly-above-average.
Health,
al-Aswad.
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