it's a very interesting Nexus between what kinds of addictions are stigmatized and and what are not illegal drugs tend to be highly stigmatized they are also highly addictive but nicotine and alcohol are also highly addictive and harmful and yet much less stigmatized because they're legal and and widely available then you have a whole set of Behavioral or process addictions uh some of which are highly s matized like sex and pornography and others of which are not stigmatized at all like work addiction right our modern heroes are basically people who never stop working and striving so
uh that's one of the things that I love about studying addiction is that um there's this interesting intersection with culture with the law just makes it for a very uh Rich area of study [Music] in the 1980s and 1990s in the US we had a terrible crack cocaine epidemic that primarily involved um black and brown people living in urban settings and at that time addiction was conceptualized as primarily a moral problem and a willpower problem fast forward to the 2000s now you've got wealthier white people living in the suburbs getting opioids prescribed by their doctor
getting addicted to those opioids and all of a sudden uh you get a very different conceptualization of addiction we're now talking about addiction as a brain disease as something that requires treatment uh that necessitates our empathy and compassion not stigmatization so it's very clear that this narrative is impacted by the power structure by structural racism for 200 plus years the the medical system resisted that until the opioid epidemic and when there was this new embracing of addiction as a brain disease but the evidence for addiction as a brain disease has really been around for a
long time we have a lot of Neuroscience showing distinct brain changes involving dopamine levels when you give evidence-based treatment to people with the disease of addiction they have response rates that are on par with people who are treated for other chronic illnesses like certain forms of heart disease uh obesity depression anxiety on average it's about 50% of folks respond when they're given evidence-based treatment and that's the same thing uh with addiction just makes practical sense to conceptualize addiction as disease because we live in a time and place when we are diseas aying or medicalizing all
kinds of human problems and then treating them as a disease so if we leave addiction out of that we're we're unfairly excluding uh The Addictive process from the way that we problem solve now emphas izing that there are many wonderful things about it but we can't ignore the things that are not good and not healthy especially when we think of our most vulnerable which includes children and their developing brains this is not just the responsibility and cannot just be the responsibility of parents and families that the corporations that make and profit from these highly reinforcing
uh digital media need to also help us create those guard rails trying to get rid of some of the inherent addictive Design Elements like the autoplay the infinite scroll the notifications especially during school hours and during the evening and I've long been an advocate of schools Banning smartphones uh from the classroom and from the lunchroom and from the break room so from the moment school starts to the moment school ends kids should not be able to have access to their uh their smartphones and obviously they're still going to have their laptop but when you remove
that really portable device that's just so mobile and so easy to open and easy to hide when you remove that you allow kids the freedom to learn you allow teachers the freedom to teach and it's got to be top down so you're creating an environment where nobody's having fomo because nobody's on their device and I'm glad to say that we're just now beginning to see uh at schools in the United States including Public Schools they're beginning to uh ban smartphones or think about banning smartphones and I understand that the something similar is happening here in
Brazil which I think is great [Music]
