Neurotransmitters: God's Way of Getting You High, Christopher Sedia

Image via WikipediaThis is a review of the article in Lightspeed Magazine. The author is giving a sort of meandering, generalized overview about how people get high.

He brought up an interesting point about how sports can cause a similar reaction as using certain types of drugs. When someone does sports to a point of exhaustion, the body manufactures chemicals to create a natural high. When consuming certain types of drugs, the same effect happens. For awhile now, I have considered the issue of sports. How often do children get hurt playing them, whether it's the game of football, hockey, or even badminton. Certainly in the first two sports, I would be willing to bet that there are thousands of injuries every year. Yet, no one cries out too much about making sports illegal. Meanwhile, if someone gets hurt or hospitalized, or even killed, from taking a drug, the politicians get their pens ready to draft some daft piece of legislation to take away folks' rights over their own bodies with yet another substance.


Off topic of the review, but recently I did a bit of reading about crack. It turns out that the stigma of crack addicts willing to sell their mothers for that next hit, lying around with dirty needles sticking out of their arms, is as much a stereotype as the burnt out hippy smoking a doobie and forgetting everything. It turns out that a lot of people who smoke crack are also able to lead relatively normal lives. The huge addiction that we're so familiar with hearing about is as much a myth as anything. Sure, there are some addicts like that. There are some who get strung out with needles hanging from their arms. But these are just the poster children for the government to use to justify its war on drugs. But, is that really a good answer? Will a crack addict be more likely to seek help if the government sees the addict as a criminal? Does the cultural treatment of these people also exacerbate what is already a problem for the individual? Isn't that a bit like giving someone a broken arm because they have a broken leg?

In any case, the essay does seem a bit like of a ramble with very little substance. Perhaps I ought to say it lacks academic credentials. (Kind of like my slightly off topic meander) It lacks hard numbers and merely seems to be there to stimulate conversation.