139: We Couldn't Build it Worse if we Tried

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If we wanted to design a culture from the ground up to maximize both the potential and severity of addiction, we would build it exactly like the United States today. 

Once upon a time, humans received contentment and fulfilment from their work, and they often went home feeling connected to their communities and identified with the service or goods they offered for sale. But for the last hundred years we've steadily changed that. Today, 1 in 8 of us in the United States has worked at McDonalds, a job that might pay the bills, but certainly isn't showing anyone how much they are truly capable of doing or connecting them to a sense of identity related to their work. We just do it to get a paycheck.

In this episode I will cover the various ways our medical, educational, employment, legal and political systems are all built to maximize addiction potential and severity, and to hide their tracks by blaming drugs and drug users for problems caused by the environment in which we life.

Cocaine and heroin costs around $1 per gram to produce from coca leaves and opium poppies, respectively. Yet these substances will cost a consumer upwards of 50x that much on the streets.

Find out more about behavioralist B.F. Skinner here. Read about his use of Operant Conditioning here.

In Bruce Alexander's experiments, rats that were put in a toyless, friendless cages used 19 times more morphine than those placed in comfortable, familiar homes with other rats.

For more about maximizing button-pressing by rewarding the button-presser randomly, in unexpected and unpredictable patters, check out this article.

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