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THE ADDICTION BLOG Current Letters to Editors 3/3/09 - 5/13/09 5/13/09 5/13/09 5/12/09 Re: They Had It Made , http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/12/opinion/12brooks.html Here's another topic Brooks is clueless about but writes about it anyway. He just can't help himself. He writes about people who "had it made" but went out of their way to screw up their lives. Some were highly successful but screwed up their life nevertheless. Brook's theory about this is that humans have in them multiple personalities and chose one or another as time passes. Some are good and some are bad. "They tended to be bright, polished, affluent and ambitious. They had the benefit of the world’s most prestigious university. They had been selected even from among Harvard students as the most well adjusted. Their lives played out in ways that would defy any imagination save Dostoyevsky’s. A third of the men would suffer at least one bout of mental illness. Alcoholism would be a running plague. The life stories are more vivid than any theory one could concoct to explain them. But it’s the baffling variety of their lives that strikes one the most. It is as if we all contain a multitude of characters and patterns of behavior, and these characters and patterns are bidden by cues we don’t even hear. They take center stage in consciousness and decision-making in ways we can’t even fathom." The fact that Brooks doesn't understand this doesn't mean it's not understood by anyone. Then he says a few glowing words about George Vaillant, the son of an alcoholic who shot himself in the head. Vaillant ran this longitudinal study of these 268 Harvard men of great promise. I wonder if Brooks read Vaillant's two books on his longitudinal study of a few hundred Boston men and their development (or not) of alcoholism, books that continue to confuse and confound the field of addictions to this day. I critique these books in my book of addictions, Hypoic's Handbook. The following quote is from that book. It comes from the part of my book where I debunk the arguments against their being any underlying disease creating addictions. Vaillant's books are used as "evidence" against an underlying disease responsible for addictions. "The arguments used by the anti-"disease concept" people are not only irrational, but are also supported by the most misinterpreted and widely sited piece of mostly irrelevant and meaningless research in the addiction literature. George Vaillant1, M.D., while chief of psychiatry at Harvard University, presented a study in The Natural History of Alcoholism (1987), in which he examined a reasonably good sized group of Bostonians. He assessed their personalities with standard personality profiles tests, then he followed them for many years for the development of alcoholism to see which personality type was predominant among those who became alcoholic. He found there was none. This one finding is significant and important, but the implications of this finding were ignored and not emphasized. Rather, his other (and unwarranted) conclusions (below) from the study are emphasized and are the poisonous aspect of the book. Since then, this book has been misinterpreted by the anti-disease concept people as evidence that there is no underlying "addictive personality" and, thus, no "addictive disease." Vaillant’s data, no doubt, are correct, but the conclusions based on them are totally meaningless for three reasons. First, the study wasn’t designed to answer the questions about alcoholism that he attempted to answer and concluded it did answer. He dangerously and severely over-interpreted his results. Next, "alcoholism" is not an entity even capable of being a disease. It is an indefinable and heterogeneous behavior, as defined by my reference to Tarter’s article sited in chapter 2, page 39, identified by a variety of non-specific behaviors, one of which is drinking alcohol. Thus, he studied a nonentity. Lastly, he assumed that if alcoholism were a disease, it would be associated with a personality type, the so-called "addictive personality." The basis for this assumption is neither stated nor proved anywhere in the book. Thus, there is no basis for the study to begin with. Lack of correlation to a specific personality does not rule out an underlying disease, and there is no reason to believe it should. The study actually says nothing about the existence or non-existence of any underlying addictive disease. The study merely demonstrated the non-association between a nonentity and any single personality type. In the last chapter of his book, "A Summing Up," he reviews how his study answered the seven questions that it initially addressed. These are supposed to be firm conclusions. The quotes are in his words. 1. Q: Is alcoholism a symptom or a disease? A: "Uncertain." 2. Q: Is alcoholism a progressive disease? A: "Sometimes yes and sometimes no." 3. Q: Are alcoholics premorbidly different? A: "Not sure, but they most likely come from alcoholic families." 4. Q: Is the cure [abstinence] worse SH [1] than the disease?A: He found no evidence that abstinence was ever harmful. WOW! 5. Q: Can "real" alcoholics ever safely drink again? A: "Yes, but…" This conclusion has killed, and is presently killing, millions of hypoics. 6. Q: Which clinic (professional) treatments help? A: "Professional treatment is useless and inconsequential. Alcoholics get better, if at all, on their own somehow." [The only meaningful conclusion] To me, these clearly ambiguous answers show one thing; that "alcoholism" is not an entity capable of being studied. This is exactly what Tarter showed. So, how can this study be used to conclude anything relevant except that what we are all calling "alcoholism" does not exist as such? It can’t. Moreover, compounding his injury to addicts, he found these factors important for recovery: 1. "social stability," [Sigh] 2. "substitute dependency," [!!!] 3. "external aversive reminders that drinking is harmful, e.g. disulfiram (antibuse)," [Ouch] 4. "sources of unambivalently offered social support," [Ahhh] and 5, "a source of inspiration, hope, and enhanced self-esteem (such as religious activity)." [Oooo!] These sound nice, but what he’s really saying to recovering alcoholics is: find a calm place to hide, get another more acceptable addiction, get yourself punished every time you slip, find outside acceptance, and change how you feel with a new belief, preferably a superstition or self-help book. All of these are external sources of control and support, not recovery, which is internal. These listed factors demonstrate two remarkable and consistent characteristics of addictionologists: 1) they don’t comprehend addictions, and 2) they can’t fathom recovery. These two characteristics of addictionologists explain the conceptual vacuum in the P/R paradigm of addictions. Vaillant then claims, "A.A. or any reasonable facsimile would supply all of these." Are these firm and validated conclusions? No. There is no scientific validation to a single one of his "factors important to recovery." They came right off the top of his head—from his distorted perception of what he was studying. Besides, they are not supported by any scientific premise for the existence or cause of alcoholism as a specific and valid entity. Moreover, they misrepresent A.A. This is a world renowned expert and these are his expert conclusions! His assumption was that this study would either prove or disprove, once and for all, the underlying nature of the addictive personality associated with alcoholism and possibly other addictions. It did neither. Moreover, it is his initial assumption that was way off base. The entire premise on which the study was based is invalid. Why does an inheritable disease that causes "alcoholism" (especially when there is no such thing as "alcoholism") or any other addiction or any non-specific behavior have to be associated with a particular personality type as measured on a standard personality profile? It doesn’t, and we should not expect a priori that it would or wouldn’t. Moreover, the fact that it doesn’t, doesn’t prove anything about "alcoholism" or anything else. Clearly, the disease that causes addiction has nothing or very little to do with the production of the traits that produce personality types2, especially those personalities that are defined by the personality profiles used by his psychological testers. This finding, though, is the only true value of his studies. The fact that addictions are not related to any one personality or temperament is incredibly important, the value of which even he missed, and must be emphasized here because Vaillant didn’t in his books. Many people use the presence of addiction in a person to characterize his personality and temperamental behaviors. Thus, addicts are "so and so, and so and so", is clearly an invalid and prejudicial mischaracterization. What Vaillant’s study shows is the exact opposite: Absolutely no stereotyping of addicts in any form or manner is valid. The presence of addiction, therefore, cannot be used to characterize a person’s values, predict future behaviors, or retroactively explain unproven motivations or suspected behaviors or feelings. This last statement is the only actual value of Vaillant’s work, and it is substantial, irrespective of the fact that he failed to appreciate it himself. Anyone who attempts to characterize an addict in any way from the mere presence of an addiction or specific behavior related to his addiction is committing a foul and a lie that this study shows conclusively is unfair and wrong.Hypoism is not a personality. It is a disease. It doesn’t produce personalities; it produces addictions and a variety of them. It is not caused by any one personality or temperament. Hypoism is not a personality, because although many of the genes involved in Hypoism probably overlap with personality production, they are not equivalent. They are two overlapping, but non-identical, circles in the genetic make-up of a person. Who cares how much they overlap? They just are not the same. The amount of damage the widespread misinterpretation and missed emphasis of this study has done to the disease concept of addictions will never be known, but it has been considerable. The main mistake experts have been making in their studies on "alcoholism," as I have stated over and over in this book, is that they have been studying a non-disease. "Alcoholism" is not a disease nor is it the disease. Hypoism is the disease and alcohol addiction is one of its manifestations, not the disease itself! Why should we ever expect any firm conclusions from these studies on "alcoholism?" We shouldn’t, and that’s why we haven’t. All "alcoholism" studies need to be re-done studying Hypoism as the disease instead of alcohol addiction, mistakenly called "alcoholism" for too many years already. Vaillant’s3 book is the "Emperor’s New Clothes" in the field of addictions. None of his compatriots in the field of addictions would tell him that his book is naked. Read the book and please tell me what it shows about anything. I couldn’t find it myself. In the last section of the last chapter of his Revisited (1995) edition of the same study, he states in "A Final Reminder" these ideas, which I will briefly critique because this book is so widely read and misused as a source for "alcoholism" wisdom: · "If treatment as we currently understand it does not seem more effective than the natural healing processes, then we need to understand those natural healing processes better than we do." I agree with this except to add that we need to understand the disease better. Only then will we understand the recovery process better. When the concept (facts) of the disease is wrong, everything else that follows must also be wrong. · "By understanding facts rather than illusions about alcoholism, we can learn to facilitate the natural healing process." I agree with this as well, but first you need to know which are the facts and which are the illusions. He doesn’t realize that his concept of "alcoholism" is the illusion, not the fact. · "The factors that most powerfully affect the etiology of alcoholism can probably be modified by enlightened social policy." I agree with this, except that what he thinks are the etiological factors aren’t; although he states in another part of the book that genetics is probably the strongest etiologic factor, he doesn’t mean genetics in the above statement. He’s referring to the psychosocial developmental family-life crap that has nothing whatsoever to do with etiology. Social policy changes, however, can have an ameliorating effect on the damaging areas of stigmatization and denial. · "The future prevalence of alcohol abuse, like the future prevalence of heart disease, can be reduced by thoughtful education in our schools and in our homes." This is not only an ill-advised comment about heart disease that shows how out of touch he is with reality, but is also a pathetic statement. To equate addictions with heart disease, arteriosclerosis, hypertension, and diabetes as behavioral diseases, which he does throughout the book, is a good sign that he is out to lunch. They are all affected by behaviors, diet, exercise, and compliance with medical advise, but to label them behavioral diseases is quite a misconception and shows very poor judgment in his use of comparison. There is not one ounce of evidence that education in schools or at home can reduce future prevalence of alcohol abuse or heart disease. Vaillant probably doesn’t think it does either, but he is being politically correct to say so. He can ensure that he will continue to be asked to speak and participate in policy committees that produce tons of irrelevant papers, and ineffective and damaging policy decisions. Thus, he can maintain his exalted position among politically correct "family values" addiction environmentalist promoters. To people like him, this is more important than actually being a real and realistic doctor. · "Informed legislation can modify risk factors, not by prohibition, but by public education and by careful experimentation with selectively raising the cost of high-proof alcohol and limiting availability in order to discourage drinking in the absence of food (is this statement a corker or not?) and to discourage drinking around the clock." Who is he kidding? Legislation to increase the price of booze with taxes? No drinking past midnight? Great thinking, George—that’ll do it. · "What is called for, then, is not despair but a redoubling of effort-and of financial outlay. The millions of alcoholics in the United States deserve the broad network of services; but we must coordinate such efforts with reality, not illusions." Thanks, George, but not with your reality; it has already killed too many of us. Please retire rapidly into obscurity like the rest of your cohorts who have helped so many of us into our graves. By the way, this book received the biennial Jellinek Memorial Fund prize for the best research on alcohol abuse in the world. I suppose we should all toast the Jellinek Memorial Fund for its excellent choice. This is the P/R paradigm and P.I.M.M.P.A.L. complex at its best. Please send George and his friends much more money. (Rather, send it to the N4A) To reiterate, the actual value of Vaillant’s work has nothing to do with the questions he asked (the design of the study does not relate to these questions whatsoever) and didn’t answer, but with the one question he answered but didn’t emphasize: Can we link any one personality (and its associated characteristics and behaviors such as irresponsibility, violence, lack of discipline, socio- or psychopathy, remorselessness, laziness, incompetence, etc.) with alcoholism? The answer is a resounding NO! Thus, anyone who does link addiction with non-addiction behaviors, personalities, and temperaments is flat out wrong. Also, to use this study as evidence that there is no addictive disease is, likewise, wrong." Hypoic's Handbook's bibliography gives a small review of his books: "24. The Natural History of Alcoholism, Causes, Patterns and Paths to Recovery, George E. Vaillant, M.D., (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1983). A good study about the non-disease of "alcoholism," which had no definite conclusions, but which has been misinterpreted by so many anti-disease concept addiction experts as to make it a dangerous piece of work for all addicts. The Revisited most recent edition of this book, published in 1995, adds nothing of value. The confusion and lack of commitment to any one position or definition of concepts in the first edition is only compounded in the last one. This insipid position leaves the door wide open for the book to show support for all positions by "alcoholism" pundits and aficionados alike." [If you don't understand what you have just read then I suggest you read the whole book. It's a completely new paradigm and it builds on itself.] Brooks has no clue about any of this because he never read Vaillant's books as I have. So, he doesn't know of all the real damage Vaillant has done through the years, especially to addicts. Of course, this is typical of children of addicts who deeply hate their addicted parents and do whatever they can to hurt addicts for the rest of their lives. And they are sneaky about it too. AA, an organization supposedly trying to help addicts, put Vaillant on their board of directors. Now, tell me that's not the fox guarding the henhouse!! AA was snookered because it either didn't read Vaillant's books or didn't understand them. Moreover, Neither AA nor Brooks has read my book which explains quite simply why the Harvard guys did what they did and when they did it. Genetic diseases cause the wide variety of mental illnesses we know of today. Most of these diseases can begin in late adolescence or even later, after college. So, it is not uncommon to see seemingly well adjusted college kids with great potential develop mental illness and additions after college. Alcohol addiction and other addictions clearly develop late (even if they surreptitiously start earlier). Sometimes it's after they become Ceo's, Senators, or President (as I have discussed in previous e-mails). It is the environment, like the drug war and addict discrimination environment we live in today under the wrong theory of addictions as proposed by Vaillant and his colleagues, in which these diseases develop that leads to the disasters in their lives, not so much the diseases themselves. Thus, we have another example here of Brook's ignorance that makes him misevaluate something he has read or someone he has read about that misleads and confuses the public. This is not a good trait for an op-ed writer. Brooks needs to go back to school and learn about Hypoism and its genetic model of human nature. Only then will he understand human nature, his most common topic for these op-eds. Under the Hypoism paradigm these guys, at least the ones who got addicted, could all have been saved. But clearly, not under the hijacked brain hypothesis paradigm, the P/R paradigm pushed by psychiatry. 5/12/09 Re: ‘What Color Is That Baby?’ , http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/12/opinion/12herbert.html?_r=1
Well, here we go. A continuation from yesterday. An article about bias in the press from a journalist. This time it's bias against the importance of blacks being killed vs. whites being killed. Herbert suggests this bias is caused by less value placed on black kids' lives vs. white kids' lives. It's funny that a black journalist complains about bias against blacks. Well, of course he's biased for blacks. That's expected. Is this, however, news? A black journalist complaining about bias against blacks? Let me think. No. What about the fairly recent issue of gay marriage in California with prop. 8 and the blacks being overwhelmingly against gay marriage. This is blacks being biased against homosexuals at the same time they are complaining about white's bias against them. Funny thing, Herbert doesn't write about that. You'd think that a group that has been as discriminated against as the blacks would go overboard against discrimination against anyone else. Instead, they are doing just the opposite. They are doing the discrimination. Now, there's a story Herbert needs to write about. "Do unto others as you'd have them do unto you." Don't blacks believe in this? Aren't they for Jesus? Don't they use Jesus' words to help themselves? How does a black person rationalize this despicable biased behavior at the same time they use the golden rule to stop discrimination against them? In theory, you should either be for or against discrimination, period. But that's not the case. How about discrimination against addicts, the people lowest on the totem pole? Well, it turns out that everyone is for discrimination against addicts. Addict discrimination is still the only legal discrimination. I call it "hypoic genocide." http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/entitledtoyouropinionnotanymore/ Just as blacks are genetically black (and biologically equal to whites), and homosexuals are biologically homosexual, addicts/hypoics are genetically and biologically hypoics/addicts. [Of course, not according to the field of addictionology and those who support this field's beliefs, the press.] Those are facts except for one thing, people who discriminate against any of these groups believe something different, that blacks are biologically inferior and that homosexuals and addicts are making antisocial and immoral choices. Thus, they deserve the discrimination. These beliefs justify the bias and discrimination. This error in theory is what Herbert should be writing about. But he isn't. My guess is that he doesn't even know what a hypoic is even though I've been writing the Times about Hypoism since 1995. Now, there's some persistent bias at work. 100% perfect shut down, censorship, of a valid scientific concept that could potentially change the world for the better. A million hypoics are murdered each year by the field of addictionology and the press because of this bias (the believed without proof, superstitious, hijacked brain hypothesis) and Herbert's complaining about 3 dozen black murders? The hijacked brain hypothesis murders a million hypoics, jails half a million, and destroys 15 million hypoic families a year, year in and year out just in the United States and no one even knows about it because Hypoism has been censored so well. And many of them are black. I wonder if Herbert would write this story if he knew about it. 5/11/09 Re: Plugging Holes in the Science of Forensics, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/12/science/12fore.html?_r=1&hpw
First it's eye witness identification. It turns out that the most valued forensic science, eye witness ID, is bogus. It's about as correct as is chance. How many are in prison due to this phony baloney. Now, finger prints and teeth marks don't pass the smell test. How many are in prison due to this nonsense? Even DNA, theoretically the perfect forensic tool, can be finagled to put the fix in when the prosecutor wants it enough and the forensic "scientists" are too cozy with the prosecution. What's really at issue here? "A report in February by a committee of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) found “serious problems” with much of the work performed by crime laboratories in the United States." "But perhaps the most damning conclusion was that many forensic disciplines — including analysis of fingerprints, bite marks and the striations and indentations left by a pry bar or a gun’s firing mechanism — were not grounded in the kind of rigorous, peer-reviewed research that is the hallmark of classic science." "It’s not that there hasn’t been any research in forensic science. But over the years much of it has been done in crime labs themselves. “It hasn’t gotten to the level where they can state findings in a rigorous scientific way,” said Constantine Gatsonis, director of the Center for Statistical Sciences at Brown University and co-chairman of the National Academy of Sciences committee." The same kinds of contextual biases arise with other decision-makers. BIAS. Here's another National Academy of Sciences report: My critique at, http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/17lettertothedirectorofthenationalacademyofmedicinesboardonn/ , says, "I just finished reading your group's book on addictions, Dispelling the Myths about Addiction: Strategies to Increase Understanding and Strengthen Research (1997), http://www.nap.edu/books/0309064015/html/index.html, and reviewing your consultants and advisors. I also reviewed your group's directives on intellectual independence. For the sake of brevity I will state my objections to the workings of this august group, not as criticism, but rather in terms of unconscious intellectual and scientific bias. You have the foxes guarding the hen house. The same people who have been instrumental in misunderstanding and misperceiving addictions for the last twenty or so years are being used to critique the current problems in this field." BIAS. Then there's, The National Academy of Sciences Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education, Informing America's Policy on Illegal Drugs: What We Don't Know Keeps Hurting Us. My article on this one is at: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/32drugwarevaluationbythenationalacademyofscience/ What do they say? "In urging [increased] research, the Commission cautions against research that points in only one direction. In the past, government agencies have sometimes used drug research to support policy rather than shape it. Studies that produced the answers they wanted were promoted and publicized; projects which appeared to document the "wrong" results were quietly buried and not released. [New research] should specifically include studies that examine without bias alternate hypotheses and approaches."
Bias is a funny thing. People having bias almost always deny it. Thus, the need for outside agencies like the National Academy of Sciences to say there is bias. The funnier thing is that even after these kinds of papers or books are written by supposedly objective groups implicating bias in the field's ruination and perversion nothing changes in the field being critiqued. For example, see if you can find any evidence for the effect this last book had on the field of addictions or policies on illegal drugs. Despite what the NAS found and advised there were no changes made. Although there books got published and articles about these book published in the press, they were ignored, exactly like my e-mails asking for the same changes for the same reasons. I assume this is what's going to happen in the field of forensic sciences. It certainly has happened in the field of addictions. Bias remains in effect and nothing happens. The media doesn't follow up and nothing changes. It would be nice to have the media follow up on the two NAS books about addictions to show the lasting effect bias has on change that these experts say is needed. However, it never happens. Bias prevents it. The press needs to look into their biases which are keeping them from acknowledging my work. But they won't until the people make them. But the people don't know it's happening. Geez! I'm writing to the Times. Ha Ha. 5/11/09 Re: The Troubling Allure of Eating Disorder Books, http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/11/the-troubling-allure-of-eating-disorder-books/?hp
Almost everyday I find something in the NY Times to write about. The common denominator for all these articles is, guess what, the article discusses addiction in the context of the wrong addiction paradigm, the hijacked brain hypothesis (HBH) or the psychobabble/religious paradigm (P/R paradigm). If all these articles instead used the correct paradigm, Hypoism, the genetic paradigm, as the context for their discussions, the entire process would be helpful rather than what it is today, useless and even harmful. There's nothing worse in the field of medicine than people affected by a medical problem being misinformed by the experts and the media about their disease. This is what has been going on in the field of addictions from its inception. This is why there's been no progress made as well as the appearance of so many wrong theories and treatment methods. In fact, the more wrong a paradigm is the more wrong and ineffective are the existing prevention and treatment methods. There is no field of medicine where this principle is more valid than in addictionology. That people with a particular medical problem like Anorexia could write a book that if read by an anorexic could be dangerous to others is a symptom of this problem. There's no way this could happen if the medical field had a valid paradigm concerning Anorexia. So, what this article proves is that anorexia is completely misunderstood by the medical field, and this is the problem, not the book. It's the same problem for all other addictions, all hundred or so of them. Of course, as the readers of my blog well know, I've been writing this same boring idea for 17 years. I write about this and they wait for the field or the media to pick up on it. However, they don't. They keep making the same wrong claims and people with addictions keep being sick, day after boring day. People with Anorexia have a right to write about their concept of their disease, but they also have a right to be informed of their mistakes if they happen to be wrong. The experts can't do this because they're also wrong though no one knows about this. Today's article points out they are wrong here but doesn't do what needs to be done, inform them of the right understanding of their problem so they can change their thinking and behavior in regards to their problem. The author can't do this because she doesn't have the right understanding either. So, we end up with a never-ending cycle of nonsense perpetuating a problem. The answer here is that Anorexia is a symptom (not a disease) of the genetic disease called Hypoism. Hypoism causes all addictions and Anorexia is an addiction. Hypoism has a pathophysiology (diseased biology) explained in my book, Hypoic's Handbook, and major web paper: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismhypothesis/ Hypoism also has addiction prevention and treatment methodologies based on this pathophysiology and they are all free. I make no money off of addicts except for the sale of the book. Under Hypoism recovery, hypoics, those with the genetic disease who are going to get addicted and those who have already gotten addicted, get free prevention and treatment. In fact, they're both the same because we begin Hypoism treatment in kids who haven't gotten addicted yet. That's the prevention method, prevention of addictions that is. It is the disease itself that we treat, not the symptoms, the addictions. This is completely opposite from today's methods that have no prevention methods and treatment is for addiction, not the causative disease. Of course, because today's theory of addiction causation is wrong, treatment is wrong too. That's why we see so many books written by victims of this disease who haven't a clue about what's happening to them. They all seem to get reviewed in one way or another by the Times but not the one book that would change all this, Hypoic's Handbook. Now, is this weird or not? The Times hasn't even read my book. They just reject it out of hand. They even censor my comments. That's good journalism, right? There's not much I can do to help fix this mess under these constraints. So, we wait. 5/10/09 Re: To Fight Stigmas, Start With Treatment, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/21/health/21mind.html?_r=1&ref=health
On the contrary, I think we need to start by changing paradigms and fighting cases of discrimination based on real science that shows the discriminated against person is not what the discriminator believes them to be. This what the NAACP did, and it worked. Saying mentally ill people should not be stigmatized and discriminated against is just blowing in the wind. It means nothing and has no effect. It helps no one. I'd like to see one case where people and groups who say they're against stigmatization and discrimination like Sally Satel, the World Psychiatric Association, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, NIDA, or StigmaBusters have fought a single case of discrimination in court for the discriminated against person. The fact is that if you read Sally Satel's writings about addicts, for example, you can see how the ordinary person believing what she writes would reflexly stigmatize and discriminate against addicts. Her stated theory of addictions, almost exactly the hijacked brain hypothesis (HBH), the same theory pushed by NIDA, the psychobabble/moral theory of addiction causation, has been stigmatizing and used to discriminate against addicts from the day it was invented by Leshner in 1997 and by the previous similar theories for time immemorial. Who is she kidding? Satel is part of the problem, not the solution. Satel is clearly an addict-hater as evidenced by her previous writings about addicts. I've documented this in numerous letters to editors everytime some media outlet dredges her up to write an article about addicts and addictions. Of course, I've been censored while she continues to write for and get published by these media outlets such as the NY Times which has censored me since 1995 by not publishing a single letter by me in all this time starting with: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/nytimesletterstotheeditor/ If Satel and the other groups really want to destigmatize addicts they would be fighting cases of discrimination in court and fighting to get discrimination made practically illegal in the federal and state legislatures. They're not. The only existing legislation against discrimination is the ADA, but the ADA fails miserably in this and does nothing to end addict discrimination. State courts just ignore this law altogether, as in my case. My 501 c 3 foundation, the National Association for the Advancement and Advocacy of Addicts, Inc. was instituted exactly to take these cases to court, except that without any funding is incapable of hiring lawyers and of taking on any cases as described in its brochure linked below. The entire field of addictions says it's against stigmatization but their actions belie this. All words. No action. If Satel and these other groups were really against stigmatization and discrimination they would support Hypoism, the correct genetic theory of addictions which destigmatizes addiction, instead of the HBH and would financially support the N4A. Instead they have consistently ignored and censored it and support the HBH, the theory of addictions that causes the stigma and discrimination. No one even knows the N4A even exists because it's been censored and ignored, except for the IRS which made it an official 501 c 3. 5/9/09 Re: Books of Style (???). Debauchery That Leaps Right Off the Page , http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/15/fashion/sundaystyles/15BOOKS.html Ha Ha. Ha Ha Ha.
This book review reminds me of Audrey Audrey Kishline and the dead people left in her wake: Arrest trips up 'moderate drinking' crusader's cause. Movement's founder sent to prison for two DUI fatalities, http://www.seattlepi.com/local/mod11.shtml . "For years, Audrey Kishline thought she and other recovering alcoholics could learn to drink responsibly. Her belief was so strong that she helped found a nationwide movement called Moderation Management, and became the movement's marquee speaker. Today, the Woodinville woman was sentenced in Kittitas County court to 4 1/2 years in prison for two counts of vehicular homicide -- deaths resulting from her drunken driving."
It seems that the NY Times gets a kick out of promoting "debauchery" while simultaneously censoring and ignoring things that might prevent the dire consequences of addictions like my theory, Hypoism, for some perverted reason. At the same time I was writing the Times and being censored by them they were promoting Kishline's "Moderation Management" self-help program: The Moderate Tack: Can Big Drinkers Just Cut Back?, http://www.nytimes.com/1995/05/27/nyregion/the-moderate-tack-can-big-drinkers-just-cut-back.html?scp=2&sq=''The%20Moderation%20Management%20Guide%20for%20People%20Who%20Want%20to%20Reduce%20Their%20Drinking&st=cse Today, 14 years later, they are still censoring Hypoism, the real science behind addictions and their lethal consequences, while promoting what they call "debauchery" with today's hilarious book reviews. "Isn't drinking fun(ny)?" Ask the million people killed by DUI's in the last 50 years, 20,000 a year nevermind the many millions of people killed by alcohol addiction itself. Moderation Management still has a large active following and nothing has changed in the field of addictions for the better since the moderation management article was written. I wonder if there's a connection. 5/9/09 Re: From Prep School to Murder Suspect at Wesleyan, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/09/nyregion/09wesleyan.html?_r=1&hp
I hate to say this, but this whole episode sounds like people addiction. Whether he was also a psychopath is a confounding issue. It looks like it. This is a bad combination as if either one by themselves isn't dangerous enough. This brings us to the realization that Hypoism was a major part of this murder, and therefore, was amenable to prevention. My book, Hypoic's Handbook, used OJ and Nicole as the prototypical people addiction. However, because Hypoism has been censored, ordinary people don't know about it. If they had there's no way this guy wouldn't have been dealt with differently and maybe his victim would be alive today. I think his people addiction was evident at the time when he (probably) followed her from Colorado to NYU and enrolled in the same class. I doubt this was by chance. He was already addicted and it should have been evident when the "relationship" went bad and she "dropped the charges." That was the first mistake and the beginning of the end. But no one seems interested in Hypoism and its recovery methods that could have prevented this murder. I don't understand this. But when I say, "people's irrational and faulty beliefs about addiction are more important than their kids' lives," this is part of what I mean. My guess is that her parents will never find out about what really killed their daughter because Hypoism continues to be censored and ignored quite well. It's already been 17 years. Instead of supporting the N4A they will start their own foundation in memory of their daughter about some irrelevant "cause" not really helping anyone and live their lives in despair and grief never knowing what really happened. They have the arrogant and censoring NY Times and the rest of the media plus addictionology to thank for this. Good work y'all. 5/8/09 Re: Stronger effort needed to prevent mental, emotional, and behavioral disorders in young people, http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/stronger-effort-needed-prevent-mental-emotional-and-behavioral-disorders-young-people-18614.html
Sorry to say, this article is a joke. Stronger effort? It's not lack of effort. It's lack of theory. These organizations believe and use the wrong theory for behavioral disorders. I've been writing these organizations for 15 years about how to improve prevention of addictions, by using the correct theory of addiction causation, Hypoism, rather than their current theory, the hijacked brain hypothesis (HBH). Wrong theory yields wrong policies. It's as simple as that. Only the right theory behind addictions can yield effective policies. No matter how much effort you put into wrong policies based on the wrong theory, you'll get no results. These organizations won't acknowledge this. Thus, they keep doing the same things for the same reasons and keep getting the same bad results. But they won't look at the theory they use to devise these policies. They just keep using the same theory over and over expecting different results. The problem is that these organizations have an irrational bias in favor of the HBH. They like it even if it has been proven wrong. Read this disproof: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismhypothesis/ This paper also goes into prevention methodology somewhat, but the book, Hypoic's Handbook, does it more completely. The correct theory of addiction causation is the genetic theory which I have named Hypoism, 17 years ago. But you've never heard of it because it has been censored by the addiction community for conflicted reasons listed here: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/15replacingalanleshneristheonlywaytoendthedrugwar/ Hypoism theory produces prevention and recovery methods based on the science of addiction causation, not out of a vacuum. This methodology is described in detail in my book, Hypoic's Handbook. The main reason this methodology isn't used is because these groups won't read the book or the papers or anything else on Hypoism. They have strong biases for the HBH and against Hypoism, so they just ignore Hypoism and claim to convince the public they care about preventing addictions when in fact they don't. They only want to maintain their ideology. This whole issue is based on bias and ideology, how they want to believe addictions are caused not the science behind addictions. Well, this is a fraud and a lie. This is the biggest medical scandal of all time, and no one even knows about it. To really prevent addictions we must first switch to the right theory of addiction causation. This is tough to do because Volkow, chief of NIDA, is massively biased in favor of the HBH and won't allow the country to know about Hypoism. The media follows her lead without reading about Hypoism. All this adds up to one thing - prevention 0% and recovery 5%. It's been this way for over a hundred years. Volkow says she wants to understand addictions and help addicts but this can't be so. She's a political appointee who was appointed exactly because she is biased for the HBH and the policies derived from it, mainly the drug war. She supports the pseudoscience that ensures the drug war is maintained. That's the reason she was picked to head NIDA. The vetting process for selecting the chief of NIDA is documented, and it included political questions. Other nominees complained about this but were ignored. Thus, we ended up with a chief of NIDA for political reasons, not scientific ones, and the main political reason was her support of the drug war and the willingness to support pseudoscience theory ensuring maintenance of the drug war, that being the HBH. I've written about this disgusting behavior by the government for many years and was strongly against her appointment. So, for the National Research Council and Institute of Medicine to say we just need more effort is a joke. It ignores the reality of the problem (because it is ignorant about it and biased as well). We need the right theory of addiction causation because only out of this theory will come the most effective policies for prevention and recovery. Otherwise it's all words and no action. No prevention. Essentially no recovery. Read my motto below. 5/8/09 Re: Stigma Increases Likelihood That Drug Users Reoffend, http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/149402.php My book on addiction causation and recovery methods, Hypoic's Handbook, discusses this exact issue. I wrote the book while I was being tortured by the NYS Health Department and CPH for being an addict. The people in charge of monitoring (and judging) my recovery believed strongly in the carrot and stick approach to getting addicted doctors in line, clean and sober. By that I mean they used the medical license as the carrot and the stick as the torture devise. This method was called "compliance." In other words, they would make you do whatever they felt like, unrelated to the principles of recovery set by addiction experts, and if you objected or refused they judged you as non-compliant and therefore not ready to get your license back. This judgment was made irrespective of being clean and sober or diagnosed as being in good recovery by your treating psychiatrists. They demanded complete "compliance" even if their demands were arbitrary and capricious. There was no way to appeal because the system was an "administrative law" system. My detailed story about this torture can be read at: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/thedoctordrugwarwrongandwastefulp1/ One time, for example, I was three months clean and sober out of a rehab on Long Island and was being treated as an outpatient by that treatment facility and was ordered by the CPH to go to an eight month rehab chosen by them because they didn't count the rehab I went to on my own choice. My treatment team wrote them a letter saying I was doing very well going to their program and AA daily and dealing with all my issues like a person in good recovery needs to do and that I shouldn't have this interrupted. The head of the CPH called me and told me if I didn't go to the recommended rehab I would "never get my license back." That's what they called the "carrot and stick" method of enhancing recovery. Well, the last thing I wanted to do was to go to another rehab for more torture so I declined. I was summarily kicked out of the CPH program for being non-compliant. I continued getting forensic urines on my own to document my sobriety and continued my recovery, never relapsing again. Two years later they allowed me to return to the program and two years of documented sobriety after that (four years total) a new chief of CPH took over, exactly when my CPH advisor told me he was leaving the program but that I was ready to have my license restored and would soon receive their letter of full advocacy needed by the NYS licensing department. Very soon thereafter I got a call from my new CPH advisor and was told that my last four years didn't count and I was to start over from scratch. Moreover, if I ever wanted to get my license back, they said, I would have to undergo coerced psychotherapy (I had already undergone psychotherapy and was cleared by that therapist as ready to go back to practice) by a psychotherapist of their choice for no valid clinical reason. I had been cleared already by three psychiatrists and was doing quite well with four years of documented clean urines and continued AA attendance and sponsorship. Although more psychotherapy was the last thing I wanted or needed, I managed to get them to allow me to pick my own therapist and began with her. She agreed with me that the reason they used for forcing me into psychotherapy was completely bogus and malicious and that I was ready to go back to practice years ago, as I was told by the other three board certified addiction psychiatrists, so we met once a week for a year discussing my book, the Hypoism paradigm, and the problems with addictionology at the time. She felt no psychotherapy was indicated but she agreed to go along with the CPH's demands just to help me get through this torture. After that year she wrote the CPH a letter saying I had done well in psychotherapy and was ready to go back to practice. All that nonsense and torture took another four years. The CPH finally wrote me a letter giving me 100% advocacy for the licensing department of NYS. Of course, during this time I had been kicked out of my medical business by my partners at the start, divorced, kicked out of my house, felonized by the justice dept. for how I got my drugs, had my car taken by the justice dept. because I, "used it to buy drugs," and many other ignominious things. Though I didn't relapse during all of this eight years of arbitrary torture and mistreatment by the CPH I certainly felt like it many many times. There's no way in the world that a recovering person should be put through such torture, for any reason, and I agree with today's article that this kind of treatment and punishment for merely being an addict is unconscionable and potentially very dangerous to the recovering person. As the article states, "Juliana van Olphen from San Francisco State University led a team of researchers who held focus groups and conducted semi-structured interviews with 17 women who had recently left jail. She said, "After carrying out this research, our conclusion was that punitive drug and social policies related to employment, housing, education, welfare, and mental health and substance abuse treatment make it extremely difficult for users and former users to live a normal life and reintegrate into society." Of course very few people know about any of this because my writings have been censored and ignored by the addictionology establishment for conflicted reasons as well as by the media, and, for the same stigmatizing reasons. Even AA and the treatment industry does the same thing for its own conflicted reasons. Today's article will not get any press because it is antithetical to the current addictionology regime and its ideology. Only publishing this email in your newspapers will inform the public of the damaging nature of the HBH and the need to replace it with the correct theory of addictions that will end this torture of addicts and allow them to get the help they need to become happy and productive people they will be if given the chance. 5/7/09 Re: Say It Ain't So, O, http://www.slate.com/id/2217798/ In his argument against the claims made by Jenny and Oprah the article makes a comparison of Oprah's and Jenny's medical credentials to that of the 60,000 member American Academy of Pediatricians. Now, if this isn't some kind of joke I don't know what it is. How is it possible for the medical profession's integrity to be compared with O and J's? Whom do I believe? Hmmm. How has the integrity of the medical profession fallen so low as to fail to counter the nonsense coming from O and J, OJ? Why would ordinary folks fail to make this distinction correctly and choose to believe snake oil salesmen rather than doctors? Number 1 - the medical profession hasn't a clue as to why so many kids from healthy parents get autism seemingly out of the blue. Thus, any theory is up for grabs. Number 2 - it's true that medical profession has sold out to the pharmaceutical industry. Why should we now trust them? How many other medical claims made by the medical profession that ended up hurting people turned into shit? Too many. Number 3 - alternative medicine is based on belief, not science, and the way humans are put together, they believe what they believe and what they want to believe much stronger than what they know. Belief is euphoric while knowledge is boring, especially when "knowledge" may well be tainted with financial bias. Medical science has lost its credibility because industry long ago bought out doctor's integrity. So, who are the people to believe? As I said in my book on addictions where the same things have happened, we must remove money from medicine. And that includes the drug companies, universities, and the NIH, and the movements of scientists from one of these to the other. Only when financial shenanigans can be ruled out in medical decision-making will the public ever begin again to respect medicine. Until then people will have to decide on medical treatments based on trust rather than science. Sorry to say, they trust Oprah more than they do the American Academy of Pediatricians and right now, Oprah is on a roll. Why shouldn't she cash in on this one as she has on all the other ones? Cough cough. The gullible and fearful people have given her the power. She cashes it in. That's how she got on Time Magazine's most influential list as well as on the richest people list. Many things have to change before this kind of thing ends. I'm fighting the same kind of battle in my field, the field of addictions where superstition is winning over science. Educating the public doesn't work if they believe what they want to believe even if it doesn't work and their kids continue to die. Beliefs make them feel good nonetheless even when their kids are dying. That's the way the human animal is made. This is the real issue. Belief wins over science even when the science is proven right. The sad thing is the media behaves exactly the same way. 5/7/09 Re: PTSD, Alcohol Problems Co-Occur In Returning Troops, http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/149074.php The article states, "These co-occurring illnesses present treatment challenges that will be addressed as part of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) track at the American Psychiatric Association Annual Meeting." So, if you can read English you would say NIAAA is saying alcoholism and PTSD are two separate diseases that, for some unknown reason, occur together in returning Iraq and Afghanistan Vets. This is much like saying that heroin addiction and alcohol addiction are two different diseases. If they happen to co-occur it is also for some unknown reason. This is where the addiction establishment happens to be in the understanding of these things. Every addiction is a separate disease. Of course, people who have read my book and other writings know that the disease that causes all these addictions, including PTSD, a real addiction, is Hypoism, and that each addiction is a symptom of the underlying disease of Hypoism. They are all caused by Hypoism. So, to see two or more addictions together in the same person is not mysterious, It is expected. In fact, this is the case more often than not. People with one addiction usually have a second addiction, and frequently many more. This only makes sense. Moreover, when they get rid of one addiction they frequently switch to another addiction. This is a clinical fact, also not a mystery. The mystery to me is why all this is still a mystery to the addiction establishment? Well, it's quite obvious why. Their paradigm, the hijacked brain hypothesis (HBH), says so. The HBH says every individual addiction is an individual disease - the addiction is the disease. That's what the opening sentence says in plain English. The HBH says so, and they just blindly follow this edict whether it makes sense or not, which it doesn't. They know it doesn't make sense but keep saying it because of the rules of their paradigm and to be part of the group. The whole field of addictions has been stultified by the rules of the HBH and each individual member (certified addictionologists) of the field goes along with this nonsense despite knowing better because of group loyalty, not clinical knowledge. The fact is that PTSD occurs, like all other addictions, just in Hypoics. [That's why only certain people get PTSD, not everyone, the same for all other addictions - only hypoics get them.] Moreover, the incidence of PTSD in hypoics at war is fairly high. Hypoics get it and non-hypoics don't, and hypoics make up about 20-30% of the armed forces, a higher incidence rate than in the average population. This why we have so much PTSD in the armed forces compared to the rest of the population. Of course, this is a guess on my part because this has never been studied. Hypoism doesn't even exist yet. Too bad, because if it did it would not only explain PTSD but its prevention and recovery methods would be very useful in dealing with PTSD and all other addictions in the armed forces and elsewhere too. But NIAAA refuses to read my book and papers, much like the rest of the addiction field, so the victims of Hypoism are left to deal with their addictions and other hypoism induced problems using the paradigm believed by NIAAA, the HBH, a wrong and ineffective paradigm. This is the reason PTSD and alcohol addiction in vets is such a mess. They won't solve this problem at this convention because wrong paradigms don't solve problems, they only make them worse. 5/6/09 Re: A Complicated Question, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/06/opinion/06dowd.html?_r=1&hpw As I've discussed many times in this blog, Hypoism, the genetic disease, is a two edged sword. It unconsciously and inexorably propels hypoics into addictions and addiction associated behaviors while also gives them traits that help make them socially popular and influential over ordinary folks. Hypoic genes are not just about addictions. They're also about decision-making and evaluations as well as influencing personality traits. No one has studied the various non-addiction aspects of Hypoism because it hasn't yet been acknowledged as even existing, but lets look at some of the last few presidents and high level candidates for signs of Hypoism and how Hypoism might have been very influential in making these people viable candidates. The prototypical hypoic family is the Kennedys. My paper on this is: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/13thekennedycurseorkennedyhypoism/ As an anecdote, the Kennedy family is absolute proof of the existence of Hypoism - a real disease. Could all their shenanigans be merely random? Please. The Kennedy "curse" is actually Hypoism unacknowledged. It also shows dramatically the nature of the two edged sword, the positives and the negatives of this genetic disease. Where to place the ability to manipulate and bullshit trait? Is this a positive or negative? For the family I would have to put it in the positive column overall, but for the country I think it needs to go on the negative side of the ledger. "George W." (the president of childhood indiscretions who, for some reason, stopped drinking and denies using coke) is an excellent example of a manipulative hypoic who somehow got into the White House and rapidly destroyed the country without the country (most of it, that is) even realizing it until the very end of his SECOND term! We will be dealing with his manipulative mistakes known as lies for the next 20 years or more. Everytime he opened his mouth out came a lie, and that's without taking a drink, according to him. There are no forensic urines on him that I'm aware of. Why not? George Bush's father? Who knows what he is? George W. wasn't adopted was he? W. got his genes from somewhere. Then, of course, there's Clinton the denier, the "I never had sex with that woman, all of them" - addict that didn't inhale; a great manipulator and showman. Alcoholism and cocaine addiction in his family somewhere (half-brother, father? mother?). What about Reagan, the son of an alcoholic/hypoic who acted his way through two terms and concluded his terms in office with a monstrous lie and disaster? How about Nixon? Listen to the tapes. "I'm not a crook." "Would you buy a used car from this man?" No? But how then did he become president, twice? Carter's brother had the full blown clinical disease. Tell me Jimmy didn't have some of those genes. And Hillary? The wife of a sex addict. Look up "assortive mating." Lastly, the John Edwards whose brother also is a full blown hypoic and whose son, Wade, died in a one car traffic accident. "The wind blew the car off the road." What were the results of his forensic urine and blood after that accident? Was this boy a hypoic? Unknown. He's dead. Now we have John Edwards having a sex problem during his campaign for president. Is this a manifestation of Hypoism or not? Well, until Hypoism is acknowledged and studied we won't know. Sounds like it to me. The rest of the story told by his wife is just more bullshit. But I think it's time for someone to look into it because non-recovering Hypoism is a potentially dangerous disease. It would be a lot better for the country for us to have recovering presidents than non-recovering ones, but the stigma precludes recovering people from being allowed in politics. Of course, this is the opposite of what should be. We've had plenty of non-recovering hypoic presidents but no recovering ones yet. This leaves only uncaught and in denial non-recovering hypoics available for office. Now that's a funny problem, no? That's what Dowd should be writing about. 5/4/09 Re: What Do (Battered) Women Want? , http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090504/pollitt This little article is an excellent example of how nonsense gets perpetuated. Where to start? She starts with a wrong question, "why do men abuse women?" No answer. By the way, as you will see, domestic violence (DV) isn't about men abusing women. Thus, the question is also wrong. Next question: "Why do women stay?" She then says, "But another problem with the question is that it implies that we don't know the answer, or rather, answers. In fact, we know a lot." She lists a few answers but gives no evidence that they are correct answers. Why would they be? They're not based on anything but opinions and excuses of the people "staying." Superficially they seem to make sense but when looked at critically they make no sense. What makes her think the "stayers" know the answer? It's like asking someone with cancer, "why do you have cancer?" Just because they have cancer does that make them an expert on cancer causation? No. So, why do these articles on spousal abuse consistently ask the same questions to the same people and answer them the same way - with the "victim's opinions? It makes no sense, but this article is all about this methodology. This methodology is wrong from the get go. Are we going to find out the answers to domestic violence by asking the people who are being violated why the violator did what "he" did? Why would they know? The violators don't even know. It makes no sense. Then she mentions the book, Crazy Love, and its author and gives us the author's opinions. Why? Because she wrote a book? How does this make her an expert? It doesn't, and she isn't. In fact, the whole book is wrong in regards to causation of DV and why DV participants do what they do. What makes anyone an expert on domestic violence? The fact is that nothing makes anyone an expert on domestic violence because no one knows what domestic violence is no less what causes it and why people experiencing it do what they do. Of course, people watch domestic violence happening and think just because they watch it, its causes are obvious. Well, isn't that just like so many things that appear obvious but later, on scientific study, turn out to be just the opposite of what it appears, like the sun going around the earth? Why do people think that just because they have the ability to write an article they don't have to do any thinking about what they say in that article? There's absolutely no evidence of any thinking done prior to or during the writing of this article. In fact, essentially the same article has been written countless times in the past and they have been wrong about the causes and motivations behind DV every time. So, what are all these victims, writers, and experts missing about the causes and motivations behind DV? Moreover, what they're missing is exactly what is perpetuating the DV mess. Wrong theory leads to wrong policies leads to wrong ways to fix the mess and, therefore, perpetuation of the mess. We need the right theory before we can do what is needed to fix this mess. What's the right theory? Just like cirrhosis is the end result of alcohol addiction, overdose is the end result of heroin addiction, bankruptcy is the end result of gambling addiction, etc., domestic violence is the end result of people addiction. Domestic violence does not occur in a "loving relationship," even though the participants believe so, but in the context instead of an addiction to one another, people addiction. The couple thinks it's a relationship and thinks it's love but it's not. It's an addiction. That's the mistake, the first mistake of many. Everyone viewing this behavior makes this mistake as well, even the experts. In fact, everything the couple does, all their behavior, is exactly the same behavior any addicts experiences in any other addiction. The only difference is that the "drugs" are people, not drugs. They are addicted to a human instinct called the attachment instinct. It is this instinct and its neurotransmitters that act as the actual drug. It's just an internal drug rather than an external one. This is what we call a "behavioral addiction." Behavioral addictions are physiologically exactly the same as drug addiction and work the same way in the brain except that the addictor is an internal human instinct with its own (endogenous) neurotransmitters rather than an external drug acting as an external neurotransmitter. They both work in the same places in the brain however and thus experience the same addiction phenomena of tolerance, withdrawal, neurophysiological adaptation, craving, etc. Read: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/thehypoismaddictionhypothesis/ . They are all caused by the same disease, Hypoism, a disease I've written about since 1992 but which you haven't heard about because it's been censored by the addiction establishment from its inception. Nonetheless, Hypoism causes all addictions and explains them all as well. My book, Hypoic's handbook, goes through all of this including people addiction, the most common and most misunderstood addiction. Want to know about people addiction and DV? Read the book. It's all explained there. Moreover, like all addictions, people with one addiction usually have others, exactly like the author of Crazy Love. She ignored this but in fact it's part of the proof that her experience was people addiction. She has multiple addictions and so do most other people addicts. Thus, for us to deal effectively with DV we must see it as part of an addiction caused by Hypoism and use the Hypoism recovery methodology to both prevent and treat people addiction in order to prevent DV. This is the only way to prevent and stop DV. It must, however, be seen as being caused by an addiction in BOTH participants, not for blaming purposes but for prevention and recovery purposes. Both participants are equally part of the cause of the DV, and therefore both require the identical recovery methodology as explained in the book. Again, read the book. This is all explained there. Only by using the Hypoism paradigm will we ever cure the mess we call today DV. So, tell your audience about Hypoism so they can use it to help themselves and their families. 5/1/09 Re: Inside the List , http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/22/books/review/InsideList-t.html Ehrman says, “They [atheists/agnostics] seem to understand so little about religion,” he told me in a telephone interview. “If somebody attacked science with as little knowledge, they’d be laughed off the map.” For some reason, and I really don't know what it is, cough cough, (money?) cough cough, religious people (and apparently, even currently atheistic religious people like Ehrman) love to give rational reasons (history) for (supporting) their faith or lack thereof, whatever exists at the moment. If there were no seemingly valid historical stories backing their faith there would be no juicy "debates" and thus no books, or at least no one would read the books. What for? To get people to read their books (follow the money) there must be juicy historical, even mysteriously secret, facts supporting their theories. Thus, atheists who stupidly debate religious people must know these facts, according to Ehrman. But I ask you, in support of religiously ignorant atheists like myself (actually agnostics because there is no such thing as a real atheist unless they're as nuts as religious people) what difference does it make whether agnostics/atheists don't know the historical "facts" when in reality religion has nothing to do with facts or valid history - as opposed to science which is all about facts. There's not a single religious person I know of, which doesn't say much because I don't know any, or heard of that makes the claim their faith is based wholly or even partly in some fact. So, what do we agnostics need to know facts for? Is Ehrman saying here that religious facts make or break his theories about religious validity? No? So, what does his quote actually mean? I think it's just a meaningless put down of the listed atheists - an irrational way to invalidate agnostic arguments - so as to make friends with the religious people who those on the atheist list. Well, who cares about that? Atheist/agnostics don't. Only religious people do. Religious people say agnostics/atheists are wrong because they don't know the real and important facts. They do? To me this opening quote is merely being used to inflame religious people just to sell books to them. It certainly has no effect on atheists/agnostics because they know that the "facts" don't make or break any religious argument. In fact, atheists/agnostics could care less about the "facts" because there are no facts that really validate religion. That's why they don't know them. So, what's this article about? Ha Ha. It's just a commercial for the book disguised as some kind of rational argument. What's new? Stupid arguments about stupid issues to sell stupid books. Why do people buy these stupid books? Are they just so bored or, is it just that there aren't any meaningful books to read. I think it's both. I haven't seen a meaningful non-fiction book on the NY Times best seller list in years. People don't write them because they don't sell. Readers don't want to read them because they interfere with their fantasies, biases, and superstitions, three of the most important things people value. Thus, no one, except me, writes them, and that's why very few buy my book. It's too damned meaningful and real. The buyers of my book are looking for meaningful books, not books that support their irrational beliefs. These are rare people and I love them. In fact, the reason I wrote my book, the last thing I ever wanted to do, was because I couldn't find the book I was looking for anywhere. I waited and waited but it just didn't appear. The scientific facts were all there waiting for someone to connect the dots. But no one would do it. I had to write it myself or just go on hoping someone would finally write it which they weren't going to do. I finally realized that would never happen so I had to take the leap and write it. Those who have read it all tell me the same thing, they finally read a meaningful book that finally makes sense, a book that was written not to make money but to tell the truth. That's why the Times refused to review it. They just don't review meaningful books, only books written by their staff or by people they like or that publishers they like like, or some other bad reason. Here's another book like that. [Anyone who has read my book and disagrees with what I just said please don't tell the Times. I don't want to look like an idiot. Thanks.] 5/1/09 Re: Millions of Kids Live With Substance-Abusing Parents, http://www.healthday.com/Article.asp?AID=626604 SO WHAT?!!!!!! IT MAKES NO DIFFERENCE WHERE THEY LIVE OR WHERE THEY'RE BROUGHT UP!!!!! The article says, "The research increasingly shows that children growing up in homes with alcohol- and drug-abusing parents suffer -- often greatly," Eric Broderick, the agency's acting administrator, said in a news release. Is this news? This has been known for a hundred years or more. In fact, it's been researched - to death. It's over. Stop already. The question is, "Why do kids from addicted households become addicts (and have other problems, like ADHD, anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, etc.)? Is it genetic or environmental? Today's "research" doesn't answer these questions. It only asks them. But it implies the answer is environmental. Well, these question have been asked and answered to death long ago by studying identical twins, regular siblings and fraternal twins, and adoptees in and out of these kinds of homes. And the answer is --------------- it's the genetics, not the environment. So, why is this question being asked again as if it never was asked before? Because the government didn't like the answer the first time. The government doesn't like the genetic answer, the genetic cause of addictions and other problems in kids of addicts. NIDA is still pushing the hijacked brain hypothesis (HBH), the moral cause of addictions. The HBH has been proven wrong, wrong, wrong, many different ways. The government obviously wants to start the stigmatization of addicts all over again. And the stupid public that doesn't know the answer? Well, I feel obligated to tell them. It's been settled long ago. It's the genetics that causes kids of addicts to become addicts and all the other things that they become, like ADHD. It's the genetics, not the environment. Now, is this clear yet? Crystal? How is it that Healthday could possibly publish this stupid article? Don't they know this already? If not, why not? Well, we know the answer, and it's not encouraging. Journalism is still kissing the government's ass. "Whatever you say, we'll publish it." This is a journalistic sin of the highest order. 5/1/09 Re: Genius: The Modern View, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/01/opinion/01brooks.html?_r=1 Brooks says, "Coyle and Colvin describe dozens of experiments fleshing out this process. This research takes some of the magic out of great achievement. But it underlines a fact that is often neglected. Public discussion is smitten by genetics and what we’re “hard-wired” to do. And it’s true that genes place a leash on our capacities. But the brain is also phenomenally plastic. We construct ourselves through behavior. As Coyle observes, it’s not who you are, it’s what you do." They're selling a self-help book for becoming an expert in "anything you want." "Just follow our 7 simple steps." Now, isn't that what Oprah does everyday and isn't that how she got so rich and famous, by selling the same stuff? These guys just want to claim some of that self-help money by misrepresenting the reality of genetic, as Brooks did in the above sentences. So, what's Brook's point here? "We construct ourselves through behavior." This is the theory of self-invention (the blank slate theory) I discuss and debunk in my book on addictions, the theory the P/R paradigm loves so much, and that includes Republicans who love the concept of "personal responsibility" that flows from the "self-invention" theory of human behavior so they can keep punishing "bad" people, like addicts. Of course, Brooks doesn't reference the study or studies done by Coyle and Colvin that proves this theory. He just says they proved it. In fact, these two authors aren't scientists at all. They didn't do any studies. They're just journalists. And their proof is made up of a lot of cherry picked anecdotes, in other words, non-science, nonsense. Steven Pinker wrote a book about all this called, "The Blank Slate," and he showed tons of studies that show just the opposite, that science has shown people are not blank slates but hard-wired specifically in many ways. Of course, they aren't hard-wired to play tennis and there is no tennis playing gene. That is a concept based on ignorance of genetics and how the brain works. Although specific traits are all highly heritable, it's not the trait (the behavior) that is inherited but the "cognitive mechanism," for example, genetic alleles that make up an existing brain machine that is critical to being a world-class tennis player. This concept is completely different from the "tennis gene." We've known this for a long time and would never argue in favor of a gene for tennis playing or piano playing like they say. But just because there's no gene for tennis playing doesn't mean that there aren't certain GENES or groups of GENES (and their alleles, mutations) required for world-class level tennis playing, as well as absence of other genetic alleles like the ones that make you trip over your own foot or stick your foot in your mouth, the ones Brooks has. Anyway, Brooks has his particular agenda for writing this unsubstantiated and biased op-ed about these two nonsensical books. Moreover, what's Brooks, a writer of politics, doing writing a science article (or, it should have been a science article)? This is just the NY Time's way of pushing their own psychobabble human nature agenda, the same agenda Oprah has, the psychobabble explanation of human behavior. This paradigm is dead but they keep reviving it. It's bad philosophy, bad science, bad journalism, and just plain bad, ethically that is. Moreover, its motivation, the old and pervasive "personal responsibility philosophy" agenda of the conservative bastards among us (except, of course, when they get caught) is bad too. They like keeping the jails full of bad people who have excessively and deliberately practiced becoming bad, as long as it's not one of them, although it usually is. Tell me that all the criminal behavior coming out of the Bush regime over the last eight years wasn't genetic. Ha Ha. Or, as Brook suggests, did Bush's regime all go to the school of crime? Which was it Brooksey, genetics or crime school? 5/1/09 Re: Molecular Psychiatry (2009) 14, 546–554; doi:10.1038/sj.mp.4002139; published online 8 January 2008, A high-density single-nucleotide polymorphism screen of 23 candidate genes in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder: suggesting multiple susceptibility genes among Chinese Han population, L Guan1, B Wang1, Y Chen1, L Yang1, J Li1, Q Qian1, Z Wang2, S V Faraone3 and Y Wang1 "Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a common childhood-onset behavioral disorder with a definite genetic component. The search for genes predisposing to ADHD has focused on genes involved in the regulation of monoamine systems." "Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is among the most common neurobehavioral disorders of child onset.1 Family, twin and adoption studies indicate a definite genetic component to ADHD, which has a heritability of approximately 76%.2 Over the past decade, candidate gene studies of ADHD have mainly targeted the catecholamine (CA) and serotonin (5-HT) systems, due to strong biological hypotheses that imbalances in monoaminergic neurotransmission underlie the pathophysiology of ADHD." 1. Biederman J, Faraone SV. Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. Lancet 2005; 366: 237–248. 2. Faraone SV, Perlis RH, Doyle AE, Smoller JW, Goralnick JJ, Holmgren MA et al. Molecular genetics of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Biol Psychiatry 2005; 57: 1313–1323. This is childhood Hypoism still called ADHD. I wrote the book about this "hypo-function of the reward system" disease in 1996. This study merely confirms the already suggested pathophysiology discussed and outlined in my book. The heritability is quite likely higher than 76%, even closer to 100%, because of four reasons, one of them being epigenetic effects on heritability studies that falsely lower the calculated heritability, discussed in my web paper on this disease: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismhypothesis/ My book, Hypoic's Handbook, still tells the story of this disease from genetic cause to natural history and clinical symptomatology as well as the brain mechanism involved and how to use this brain mechanism to treat this disease leading to real addiction (and other symptom) prevention and treatment as well as correct public policies derived from knowing this disease. Too bad no one knows about my book. 4/30/09 Re: Is Rape Serious? , http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/30/opinion/30kristof.html?_r=1 Kristoff comes off being a very caring person. He complains about all kinds of coercive sex issues frequently. I've written him about better solutions than he can come up with, but like most arrogant journalists, he ignores my advice. His complaints about rape issues today are all valid and, if dealt with by the criminal justice system, might actually reduce serial rapist behavior and outcomes. However, his solutions only occur after the fact. There no prevention whatsoever. Thus, a rapist is at least going to rape one person even if his changes are put into effect and are 100% successful. My solution to rape if used and successful prevents rape practically altogether including the first one. Why Kristoff won't look into my suggestions make me wonder if he really cares or just wants to be seen as a hero. A real hero would use my suggestions to prevent rape. He, however, ignores my suggestions. What are my suggestions? Well, rape is part of sex addiction. As such it is part of Hypoism, the correct addiction paradigm. Unlike the incorrect paradigms of addiction, particularly the hijacked brain hypothesis (HBH) pushed by NIDA, not only is rape not understood but sex addiction isn't considered an addiction, just a crime. Thus, there is no way for us to deal with rape except by the criminal justice system, not a very good way to deal with addictions as we know. Sex addiction causes rape and pedophilia, two behaviors only dealt with by the criminal justice system and both after the fact. There's no prevention there anywhere. The Hypoism paradigm of addictions recognizes both behavioral and drug addictions, including sex addiction and including rape, and its addiction prevention methods which are mostly aimed at young children born with the genetic disease of Hypoism. This prevention methodology prevents all addictions, all hundred or so of them. The HBH which is a wrong paradigm to begin with doesn't have prevention methodology at all. That's why Kristoff doesn't even think this way. He bypasses prevention in his thinking about rape and goes right to the criminal justice system as the only way to deal with it. Well, that's way too late. Hypoism deals with all addictions and addictive behavior and prevention is its mainstay, the complete opposite to the HBH which is wrong anyway in all its aspects. Kristoff and the Times, and the whole addictionology establishment, needs to look into Hypoism so we can begin to prevent all addictions rather than wasting our time, effort, and money chasing drugs and incarcerating addicts. Prevention is what we need. That's what we get from Hypoism. But guys like Kristoff and the rest of the NY Times are so smart they know Hypoism is wrong without looking into it. That's quite unbelievable when guys like Eliot Gardner, M.D. at NIDA, a world renowned addiction expert, a real expert by the way, wrote me an e-mail after reading my book, Hypoic's Handbook, "I think you know (from previous exchanges between us) that I have been - and continue to be - receptive to your concept. I think it has much merit, as I have said previously." ---ELIOT L. GARDNER, M.D., PhD, NIDA/IRP So, Gardner read the book and said it has merit but the Times didn't read the book and ignores and censors it. Does this make sense? Is this any way to solve the addiction epidemic? Is this any way to solve the problem of sex addiction and rape? I don't think so. Is Kristoff serious about rape or not? His article is entitled, "Is Rape Serious?" It should be called, "Is Kristoff Serious?" He says he is but his actions say he's not. What do you all think? 4/30/09 Re: Adventures In Good And Evil , http://www.newsweek.com/id/195117On page 2 of this article is found:QUOTE FROM SHARON BEGLEY
This quote is relevant because it relates specifically to yesterday's email, Those Ignorant Atheists. Both sides of the debate are wrong but stick to their guns despite absence of the truth. This is the reason for my three lined motto in my e-mail's closing - "Love is an action not a feeling. Bias hurts people no matter what it happens to involve. Stubbornly sticking to your bias despite it being proven wrong is, by definition, lack of love and integrity. Thus my motto. To remind myself that integrity comes first no matter what. Science is based on these two traits, love and integrity. Absent these traits science is transformed into a weapon for maintaining personal power rather than in exposing the truth, its main reason for existence. I write about this everyday in every one of my emails. This concept is the basis of my entire blog. Which is more important or more valued, winning an argument or exposing the truth? Kuhn realized that human nature values winning over the truth. That's why I can write about the science of addiction causation till the cows come home and am ignored and censored. Everyone has a bias about addiction causation and only very few will look at the truth for fear of losing their belief. Beliefs are that powerful. Beliefs are backed by Dopamine, the premier reward neurotransmitter. But we hire scientists to do that for us, overcome our biases in favor of the truth, since we can't do it ourselves. That's why we must hire scientists who demonstrate integrity rather than stubbornness. Of course, we don't do that. Instead we hire scientists who agree with us, right or wrong, in order to maintain power. We all know that this behavior kills our own kids, but we continue to do this nevertheless. Ha Ha. Human nature is funny that way. But, that's what we must overcome. Kuhn wrote about this at length but found no answer. The field of journalism is theoretically based on helping us overcome our biases and expose the truth, no matter what. That's the principle anyway. Does journalism do this? No. Journalism has been reduced to entertainment and financial gain. End of journalism. End of integrity. End of the truth. I think this is why Begley wrote the above article. She was trying to understand herself. Why are some people altruists (with integrity) and act that way, and the rest of us are not (evil) and do not? She documents this exists but not why. One question she doesn't ask is why only evil people end up in journalism? Not a single journalist I have ever written to about Hypoism, the only rational answer to our problems with addictions and addictors, has ever done a story about it. Why is that? She has no answers except to say that for the most part people follow orders and support wrong paradigms until the last dinosaur is dead. She skirts around the issue but never gets to the answer. Well, we know the answer. Bias is powerful and so is fear of retribution and losing your job if you take a risk that pisses off your boss. Courage, acting for truth in the face of fear, is non-existent in journalism today, even though it's the primary journalistic principle. Nothing happens to liars who are on the side of the ruling paradigm. Journalists don't put these people's feet to the fire. Instead they support them. Remember Iraq? How about the current debate about torture? Well that's what's happening in addictions too. The liars are in charge and journalism just supports them blindly despite the obvious and clear disproof of their paradigm. Not to mention that the ruling paradigm in addictions doesn't work. Ha. To say this is human nature is a cop out and meaningless. all she's doing is rationalizing her own failure to be a journalist with integrity so she can sleep at night. My whole book is about acting against our own human nature (any irrational bias, including addiction in certain people with the right genetics) when it's rational do do so; even if it doesn't feel good to do that, it never does. That's the solution to addictions at a personal level and the solution to all the problems our world faces on a global level. Acting anti-instinctively, by conscious decision-making. Integrity is always anti-instinctive. This is one of the running themes of my book. It's the only way to defeat instincts that once were good (in that particular evolutionary environment), when these instincts developed, but have become damaging in today's vastly different environment. This is hard to do but must be done. That's why I write about it and use it as my motto. That's what Milgram's experiments showed but no one knows this explanation. 4/29/09 Re: Those ignorant atheists, http://www.salon.com/books/review/2009/04/28/terry_eagleton/ The last sentence of this review says, "We were sent a man who preached a message of love and we killed him; we were given a beautiful blue-green planet to live on and we killed it. What do we do now?" Now, this should be the first sentence not the last. How about we answer this question and ignore the book review. As you will see, being ignorant about an irrational bias of someone else, their beliefs, matters nothing and is just a waste of time. That argument is baseless and useless. Something else is way more important - the correct understanding of human nature, something neither of these guys have. Asked another way, the question is why do humans behave the way they do? This question is one of the major questions humans have asked about for the last 100,000 years or so. In other words, what is human nature? The other major questions are where do we and the universe come from and how does it all work? I agree with Eagleton that Dawkins and Hitchins are wrong about these questions. The problem is that Eagleton is wrong too. In fact, everyone is wrong. These three question are completely misunderstood. Religion doesn't have the answer (god made man in his own image). That's no answer, it just moves the question to what is god's nature rather than what is man's nature. No answer there. Dawkins and Hitchens have no answer either except to say that science is the only meaningful way to find the answers (not religion) but they haven't yet answered them. I agree with that position and I think so does Eagleton but he won't admit it. That's why this book and its review are meaningless. The only valid thing this review does is ask the right question. However, there is an answer to human nature. Human nature is found in his genome and in the regulation of that genome. We don't know yet what the genome says but we have clues. These clues are called Instincts and the instinct regulatory apparatus, the brain machine that controls the use of instincts. Neither Eagleton nor Dawkins and Hitchens, nor the rest of the world, is moving in this correct direction. One of the reasons for this movement in the wrong direction is the brain dulling effect that religion has on the rational search for new answers. The other reason is the brain dulling effect that psychology and psychiatry have on the rational search for new answers. These field actually work the same way religion works, based on belief and bias. So, where are the answers to the above questions going to come from? From unexpected places. New paradigms are never born from established places because the establishment is stuck in their particular paradigm, which is always an irrational belief and wrong. Truth never is born from a lie. Eagleton is stuck in religion while Dawkins and Hitchens are stuck in their so-called rational paradigm. The new and correct paradigm will come from elsewhere, from someone like me who isn't married to any paradigm. Someone like me is able to view the world without brain dulling and stultifying bias. Of course, the established experts from either side of this debate have no interest in listening to someone like me because they each have an agenda born from their ideology. They just want to overcome their adversaries and assume power for their ideologies rather than find the truth. That always happens when two wrong sides of a question engage in war. They lose sight of the original question and fight for their side rather than fighting to find the answer to the question, their original goal. This too is happening today between the drug warriors and the anti-drug warriors. They both are wrong and therefore will never result in the correct view or policies concerning drugs and addictions. My field is addictions and my field's question is, what causes addiction? The same problem people have with answering the human nature and universe questions above has happened in the field of addictions. The various groups of people who believe in certain answers to the addiction question are acting just like Eagleton and Dawkins. They have stopped seeking the answer to the original question and are just fighting to win the power struggle for their paradigm. Thus, the are stultified. In doing so they ignore and censor any new paradigms willy nilly. They fight for their (wrong) paradigm no matter what, even at the expense of never answering the primary question and hurting people with addictions (for lack of this answer). That's the problem with any wrong paradigm believe without proof - it inhibits intellectual progress which hurts people with the problem, in my case, addictions. They shoot themselves in the foot and shoot addicts and their families in the head. Take for example, AA. You would think AA people would be searching for the right paradigm of addictions, not only for themselves but for their families as well seeing that addictions are inherited. Yet, they won't read my book on the genetic paradigm of addictions because, "there's no god in it." Hypoism might be correct and solve their and their family's addiction problems but these people won't look at it (to evaluate it rationally) because it doesn't involve their bias, god. Now, here's a direct negative effect of religion on progress in addictions, but it's not really religion, it's rather any bias, because the same exact things are happening with psychologists and psychiatrists. They also won't investigate or learn about Hypoism because "there's no psychobabble" in it. So, it's not just god that interferes with finding the answer to the addiction question, not just psychobabble, it's any bias. Bias is any belief, conscious or unconscious, by definition, irrational, based on no or faulty evidence. Thus, in order to understand this issue, why bias (belief) is so important to people, we get back to the original question, what is human nature, because bias is part of human nature. So, I did just that. I looked into human nature, and lo and behold I found the answer to what is human nature and why is human nature so compelling to humans. I sent a letter to Dawkins about what I discovered. Here is that letter (and a little more): http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/10thesuperstitioninstinct3100/ . You must read these letters to understand what I'm talking about. Irrational belief is part of the superstition instinct and is regulated like any other instinct via the instinct regulating mechanism and the reward system. That's the key to the correct understanding of human nature and its variations based on genetic diversity. Unless you understand human nature this way your view of human nature and all its goofiness falls short. So, it turns out that both these guys, Eagleton and Dawkins (ignore Hitchins), are right about one thing, the other guy is wrong because both guys are wrong. They both have a wrong belief about human nature and superstition. Now, I spoke to Dawkins (after he received my letter to him) at a conference 9 years ago and he refused to discuss this with me. Of course, this proved to me that he was basing his entire argument on belief (bias) and a biased, not rational, view of human nature. Both guys make the same mistake. Their debate is irrational from both sides and, therefore, irrelevant. My paradigm of human nature is the one we need to adopt and use to understand religion, atheism, and all other irrational beliefs. 4/28/09 Re: When Bad Advice Is the Best Advice , http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/28/health/28case.html?_r=1&hpw This has to be the stupidest article yet for the Times. Smoke your ass off. What difference does it make? And what about giving him pain medication? Don't want him to get addicted? Ha Ha. You're a fool. The patient doesn't need to hear your stupid lectures either. Geez. I swear, I live on a different planet than most of the rest of the world. That is an ethical dilemma? Please. How about when bad advice is bad advice but is purposely ignored and lied about? Here's a real ethical dilemma. cough cough. What if you were an addictionologist (even certified) and knew about the correct theory of addictions but ignored and censored it while continuing to push the wrong theory and use it to treat your addicted patients, just to fit into the world of addictions, just to maintain your income and/or religious beliefs. Well, not long ago I sent an email to all 3000+ members of ASAM, including the officers of the organization, concerning this exact issue, the science for Hypoism and against the hijacked brain hypothesis, their addiction paradigm. I never heard from a single one of them. Not one of them showed any interest in learning anything about Hypoism. Now, do these doctors have any medical integrity? Do you want them to be your doctor? Of course not, but there they are, practicing addictionology everyday since then. These guys are treating you and your family members and lying everytime they say anything (because their entire paradigm is wrong). What's their excuse? Ha Ha. Nothing. But these guys keep their licenses while many addicted doctors who never hurt a single patient or lied to any patient lose theirs just for being an addict while in reality they were high performing doctors, like me. What's the ethical dilemma there? I, board certified and highly knowledgeable, got kicked out of my practice while my partners who weren't board certified and were insufficiently trained got to keep the practice and absent my clinical supervision (we had a contract mandated (by me) conference call every night when I was there reviewing every active patient and what was going on with him/her at that time in order to assure correct medical diagnosis and care) continued to make lethal mistakes on a regular basis, mistakes that I corrected before, but not any longer. It's all documented. Check the charts. Of course you won't. I was removed for "public safety reasons" though the reality was the exact opposite. I never had a complaint or any evidence of negligence or of hurting a single patient for any reason no less because of my addiction. That was stipulated by the health department thought it was ignored once I signed on the dotted line. Though addicted for three and a half years I was still performing at a high level (this was very well documented) because I was accustomed to having the drug in my system (known as tolerance). This was all ignored and I was treated like a mass murder despite being a well documented excellent physician. What's the ethics of this health department and NYS licensing department decision? Well, I know the answer, but do the patients? Does the Times? No. All this is hidden from the public. The whole thing was based on the current (it's still going on) addict witch hunt, what I call the doctor drug war. What's the result? Bad medicine - bad ethics - bad outcomes, all based on a big lie, that addicted doctors are automatically dangerous and negligent. This has never been proven but it is used on a daily basis to ruin doctors' lives and was used to get rid of me while concurrently causing real injury to my patients. Again, just the opposite of their rationale. No one (except for a few legal-forensic psychiatrists who deal with this dilemma everyday trying to stop this fraud) knows about this ethical dilemma. No one hears about this dilemma. But it's very real and has life and death consequences. This is all discussed in great depth in my book, Hypoic's Handbook. 4/28/09 Re: Blowing the Whistle on the House of Death, http://reason.com/news/show/132651.html reason: You’re now retired after a career in the federal government. What have you taken away from all of this? Gonzalez: I think the American people would be justified in believing that their own government may be as corrupt as any of the countries our government criticizes for corruption. It all starts with the promotion of the hijacked brain hypothesis by NIDA, ASAM, and the treatment industry. and my censorship by the media, including Reason Magazine. If you don't understand what I mean by that, read the rest of my emails at "current letters to the editor." Under these authorities there will never be an end to the addiction epidemic or the drug war. 4/28/09 Re: Watch Out for Dad , http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/26/books/review/McManus-t.html?_r=1 Seeing that Joe Sr. was his father, you'd think Joe Jr. would have searched to the ends of the earth to discover what he needed to about alcoholism being some kind of disease in order to help him forgive the old man for whatever he had actually done to his kids, whatever that may have been. Joe Jr. went as far as AA to find that exculpatory evidence but didn't buy their take on the disease of alcoholism, and that was it. End of search. Joe Jr. never looked hard enough to find the Hypoism paradigm of addiction, something many other people have done, the real disease of addiction. Had he, he might have understood a lot better what his father inexorably went through. He would have found that alcohol addiction is a real addiction as strong as any other addiction, not a choice or a preference. Alcohol is quite addictive, the opposite of what Joe Jr. says. 10% of alcohol drinkers get addicted to this particular drug. That's 1 out of 10 drinkers. That's quite a lot. And, it doesn't take long to become addicted even though it may look like it does. People may drink 40 years before the bad stuff begins to happen, but that doesn't mean they weren't addicted from the get go. They were. There's no addiction that is caused by choice voluntarily. In fact, all addictions are the same in this respect. The people who are going to get addicted all are born with the right genetics necessary to et addicted as well as sufficient to get addicted. There's no invisible line. There's no hard work necessary to become addicted. A born alcohol addict does not have to be a conscientious and persistent drinker even though this is what it looks like. Most alcohol addicts are probably addicted with the first drink just like all other addictions, as we are finding out. And the behavior associated with alcohol addiction, the behavior Joe Jr. condemns his father for, is all caused by the alcohol plus the other traits equally genetically transmitted. So, quite opposite to what Joe Jr. believes, all his father's drinking and associated behaviors were caused by the drug alcohol, not by the evil of the man. It was quite right of Joe Sr. to apologize for everything he "might" have done as well as what he knew he had done. Most of what he did was likely done in blackouts where he appears to be conscious but no memory is put down. He really doesn't remember it. That's a well know physiological fact. Thus, Joe Jr. is wrong about everything about his father's motives. It's quite typical for alcohol addicts to be violent in a blackout, to lose jobs, to alienate their families, etc. When they get sober they all have great remorse for these things. The remorse is quite sincere. Most addicts hate themselves for the same reasons. However, these reasons turn out to be misguided. People affected by addiction are loath to see all this the correct way. They believed the addict was in full control of his behavior when he did all these bad things. They believe they have the right to hate addicts for this behavior. Well, of course, they do have the right. But is this resentful and vindictive behavior scientifically justified? No. And Joe Jr. knows it. That's why he spends so much time and effort justifying this to himself and anyone who will listen. Geez. He wrote a whole book justifying it. However, all this effort is in vain because the truth about the science of addictions is that addiction is inexorable in those people born with the right genetics plus living under the wrong paradigm of addiction causation. These people are sitting ducks for the addiction and all that the addictor does to them living under the wrong addiction paradigm, such as today. Today the wrong paradigm of addiction causation rules everything in addictions. Thus, all people with the genetic disease, Hypoism, that causes addictions get addicted and act that addiction out. There's no other alternative. Well, in actuality, there is another alternative. In fact, this alternative, the Hypoism paradigm, could have prevented Joe Sr.'s addiction and at least ended it a lot earlier than under the wrong paradigm. This is the reason Joe Jr. should have looked harder for the correct paradigm even if he really didn't want to. Yes, the AA paradigm is wrong but the correct paradigm, Hypoism, has existed since 1992. If Joe Jr. had known about it he could have helped his father get sober a lot earlier. But AA and the addiction establishment have gone out of their way, along with the media, to censor Hypoism from the public. I've written about Hypoism since 1992 but my writings have been censored so people like Joe and Joe haven't had a chance to know about the paradigm that can prevent addictions and treat them effectively and early if addicts happen to slip past the prevention methods. This is all in my book, Hypoic's Handbook, available on my web site, and in my web papers, especially: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismhypothesis/ that explains all the science behind Hypoism as well as why the current paradigm is wrong. Only the book, however, goes through the prevention and treatment methods. so, everyone needs to read the book. All this is available to Joe Jr. and his family as well as the 30 million other people with this disease. It's been available since 1996. What happened to Joe Sr. and Joe Jr. and their family doesn't have to happen anymore. Hypoism is here to stop it. But these 30 million hypoics and their families need to know about it, which they don't because of the murderous censorship by NIDA, ASAM, the government, AA, the treatment industry, and the media. Why are they all censoring Hypoism? Because of irrational conflicts of interest such as money, religion, bias, and addict hatred (addictophobia). So, I keep writing these letters to the editor and letters to people like Joe Jr. in the hope that they will inform others about it. So far, they have received many thousands of these letters and haven't done the right thing with them yet. These conflicts of interest are quite strong, huh? Well, let's see what happens with this one. If anyone can find Joe queenan's email address, forward a copy of this email to him. I can't find it. 4/26/09 Re: On the Bloody Border: Mexico's Drug Wars, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1893512,00.html Who's fault is it that your story is actually happening? You're not going to like my answer and you'll probably ignore and censor it as you and your magazine have for the last 15 years. The fact is that none of this had to happen and it still can be stopped if you and your magazine did the right thing, print my letters and do the story about Hypoism that I've been asking for for 15 years. But you won't. That's why this mess in Mexico is your fault. By ignoring and censoring me you unwittingly support the drug war and all its consequences. I've written Time magazine why this is the case hundreds of times, but you won't listen. You won't even look into what I'm saying. You censor me instead. I'm the only one with the solution to this mess and you ignore and censor me. Why? It makes no sense. The reason all this murderous nonsense is happening in Mexico and the US is because of the blind following of the people and the media of the addictionology establishment (AE). AE has provided the country with a bogus addiction paradigm, the hijacked brain hypothesis (HBH), the moral paradigm of addictions, which runs all things related to addictions and drugs around the world. The HBH is explained here, http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismhypothesis/ , along with the correct science behind addictions. The drug war and all the rest of the ineffective and damaging public policies are all derived from this theory of addictions, the volitional moral theory, the theory that says drugs and bad conscious decisions are responsible for addictions. This theory mandates the drug war and other policies to stop the addiction epidemic, the supposed reason for the drug war. Well, it turns out that the HBH is scientifically wrong and my paper shows this. Thus, wrong theory - wrong policies - worsening of the problem. Under the correct theory of addiction causation, the genetic theory which I call Hypoism for good scientific reasons, the emphasis moves to the correct place, the people who have the disease of Hypoism, the ones who get addicted and buy most of the addictive drugs the drug war is supposed to be about. Putting Hypoism prevention and treatment methods into effect and devising policies based on this correct theory ends the massive demand for illegal drugs and puts the cartels out of business while simultaneously ending the addiction epidemic. The correct theory of addiction causation, the one that has been ignored and censored by you and the rest of the media, ends this whole mess, the whole enchilada. So, you can see why my initial allegations about fault is true. As long as the HBH, a complete misrepresentation of the valid science of addictions and opposite to the correct theory in all ways, the theory fraudulently pushed by NIDA, ASAM and the treatment and recovery community, what I call the PIMMPAL complex ( http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/pimmpalcomplex/ ), a multibillion dollar industry, remains in effect then all this mess, a massive mess, will remain in effect. There's no way to stop this mess as long as the HBH remains in effect. Read #4, the drug war war - http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/articlesbyandforhypoicspage2/ The addiction field will not make this change on its own as I have shown over the last 17 years because they lose all that money. The addiction field has no scientific integrity and is bought and paid for by the HBH, the PIMMPAL complex and its promoters, the ones who say they are trying to help. They aren't. They are pushing an anti-addict agenda based on moral and political issues (remember, NIDA's chief is a political appointee and had to pass an agenda test before she passed the vetting process). Thus, it is up to the media and the public, by learning about this scientific fraud, to make this change. The public can't know what they need to know if the media continues to censor the truth about the science of addiction causation, and specifically Hypoism and all its implications. Only Hypoism can end the drug war and end the addiction epidemic. We must replace the HBH with Hypoism or else this mess will just get worse. 4/26/09 Re: Industry Ignored Its Scientists on Climate , http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/24/science/earth/24deny.html?pagewanted=1&hpw The article ends with, “I’m amazed and astonished,” Dr. Santer said, “that the Global Climate Coalition had in their possession scientific information that substantiated our cautious findings and then chose to suppress that information.” Does this sentence remind you of anything you've heard from me? Quite so - EVERYTHING. HAHA This situation, possession of scientific information that would cure the addiction epidemic and suppression of that information, is exactly what I've been writing about since the day my first article on Hypoism was rejected by 12 addiction journals in 1992. Read my web site and book which are the result of this situation. In fact, my whole web site and book wouldn't have been written if that article was accepted and published. At the point that I submitted that paper, the paper that has evolved over the years into the Hypoism Hypothesis paper, http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismhypothesis/ , I wasn't angry. I was passionate and quite interested, but not angry. I only got angry and furious after my paper was rejected for non-scientific reasons, reasons which I eventually realized were bias, self-interest, conspiracy, conflict of interests, exactly the same as the industries suppressing the climate information. What was I supposed to do? Go away? Shut up? Stop writing? The whole mess in addictions, the addiction epidemic and the drug war, were a direct result of the misinformation the addiction establishment and treatment industry was shoving up addict's asses and giving to the government for the single purpose of supporting the drug war. This misinformation was killing a million addicts a year in just the United States, jailing a million addicts, and ruining the lives of 30 million addicts' families just so the addiction establishment and treatment industry could make their billions of dollars a year. I was supposed to shut up? Go away? Stop writing? Hell no. I'm going to keep writing until Hypoism is finally accepted (for its scientific correctness, effective prevention and treatment) and used to stop the addiction mess. You want me to go away? Well, print my letters and review my book so the public can learn about Hypoism and start using it to help all addicts and their families. That's the only was I'm going away. 4/25/09 Re: A Practical Visionary , http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/26/books/review/Conason-t.html?_r=1&ref=books Perhaps, as President Obama suggested recently, the critical factor in creating change is persistence. Keeping faith for half a century is a kind of genius, too. How about genius and persistence? This might be the worst combination of all. Genius makes you a visionary many years ahead of your time. Persistence in your ideas makes you look like a schmuck or just mentally ill. Like I said, this may be the worst combo of them all. It explains why the NY Times, the great liberal brain, it thinks, both ignores and censors my writings on Hypoism, a completely unheard of and brilliant paradigm, another bad combo. What? Hypoism? It's not even in the dictionary. Of course not. How could it be? Geez! A completely new paradigm born in totality, whole, and complete rather than having evolved from the previous paradigm, sort of like the Theory of Relativity, born complete and whole, and divisively simple and practical, exactly what Occam's razor says it has to be, the definition of parsimonious, a lovely word when it is allowed to be. Too bad it takes the Times 50 years to discover such a man and his paradigm, if, indeed, they ever do. Closed brains are extremely difficult to open up, just like a black hole. A new motto for the NY times, the intellectual black hole. 4/25/09 Re: Putting MADD in Charge of America's Highways, http://reason.com/news/show/133101.html I agree with Mr. Balko, as usual, but also as usual, for different reasons. And these reasons make all the difference though Balko will never agree with that. In fact, these differences are the exact issues that have led and will continue to lead to status quo in the arena of addiction and drug policies, a bad thing. I don't argue against the fact that impaired people (for whatever valid reason) should not be driving a motor vehicle, cars, planes, and boats, but the designation of "impaired" needs to be based on objective facts confirmed scientifically, not opinions or beliefs. Thus, for example, if talking on a cellphone is scientifically shown to impair drivers then cellphone talkers should be treated the same way as someone impaired on drugs (including alcohol and all other impairing drugs including antidepressants and others) if these drugs and their blood levels are scientifically shown to cause impairment. Likewise, it's been shown scientifically that people on chronic oral opiates in doses used for pain management are not impaired. Thus, in general, people on chronic oral opiates should not be considered impaired because it's been shown scientifically they aren't. Impairment needs to be scientifically studied for many drugs and circumstances in order to objectify the laws as well as improving driving, and other instances where impairment is an issue, safety. That would include certain jobs and professions where impairment has been proven to be a valid issue, not by mere bias or anti-addict prejudice. The other major issue where Balko (and the rest of the country including NIDA, NIAAA, and ASAM, the addictionology community) balks is the issue of prevention of impaired circumstances (discussed above) as a means to prevent DUI. There's no scientific doubt that the vast majority of DUI incidences are caused by people addicted to the particular drug or behavior responsible for the DUI. Thus, effective addiction prevention (and treatment for those who get past the prevention methods) is the most influential and effective way to reduce DUI. I've been writing about this issue since 1992 and have been unanimously ignored by the addiction community, the MADD community, and the Balko (libertarian community) on this point. I wrote a paper on point for an anti-drug war conference at the CATO institute, #4 The Drug War War: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/articlesbyandforhypoicspage2/ This paper explains the whole issue of effective prevention and treatment based on the correct theory of addiction causation. Read this paper. Basically it says that unless we get the theory right (which we're not doing today under the hijacked brain hypothesis - HBH - of NIDA) no prevention or treatment policy will work even if the policy itself is correct. [Of course, the policy won't be correct, but even if it is] This is where Balko and his libertarians split from me. They believe the right policies can be derived from the right political philosophy (theirs) and not from the right scientific theory of addiction. So, they just ignore the entire theory issue. This is how they have helped perpetuate the addiction epidemic and the high rates of DUI. It has been scientifically proven that the current theory (the HBH) and its policies has not improved prevention and treatment of addictions. Prevention is still 0% and treatment success is 5%. This is as far as the HBH and AA has moved us from previous numbers of 0 and 5%. Gee, they're the same. Hmm. Thus, the overwhelmingly best way to prevent DUI, through effective addiction prevention and treatment, is today essentially no better than it always has been, very ineffective. Of course, this makes sense because these prevention and treatment measures are all derived from the HBH (and similar theories), all proven incorrect. Read the theory paper that goes through the science of addiction causation: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismhypothesis/ . I'm not the only one who makes this assertion. So does Hiroi and his paper linked within my paper for all to read. The point of all this is that the public needs to inform itself on this argument and its science so that we may dump the debunked theory (HBH) running everything (into the ground) and replace it with the correct theory, the genetic theory, Hypoism. I've been writing about this since 1992 but no one (including Balko) has taken the time to read this argument to the detriment of the country. They just want to fight the policy war. That's why I entitle the first paper the drug war war. Both sides are wrong and both sides ignore the solution based on science. That includes MADD. Both sides are shooting themselves in the foot because Hypoism gets both sides exactly what they want. The drug warriors get reduced use and consequences of impairing substances and behaviors while the anti-drug warriors get an end to the drug war and decriminalization of use and addiction. The whole addiction mess is cured by Hypoism yet both sides continue to ignore Hypoism. This makes no sense which is why I continue to write about it. Maybe one day these people will move out of their self-imposed boxes, read my stuff, debate it if necessary, and begin to use it. This is the only way we're ever going to make any progress with this mess. 4/24/09 Re: Inherited Impulsivity Predicts Alcoholism, Study Reports, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090422175146.htm The article states, "Solving the age-old chicken and the egg dilemma, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis researchers report that genetic predisposition to impulsivity is a trait predictive of alcoholism." Really? Where do you think this quote comes from, and when? "What came first, chicken or egg? The egg, of course, came first. The animal that laid the first chicken egg was not a chicken, however. It was the evolutionary predecessor to the chicken. The first chicken egg had a mutation in its DNA that produced the first chicken, as we know it today, but a chicken did not lay it. This riddle has baffled mankind for centuries because of the way we think. This simple solution to this age-old chicken and egg enigma is also the answer to the question, “Where do addicts come from?” They come from the egg! We need to dump the old superstitious belief of where human diversity comes from, psychological self-invention, and open our lazy minds for realistic, instead of supernatural (psychological/psychiatric), explanations of simple realities." This quote comes from my 1996 book, Hypoic's Handbook. Give credit where credit's due, please. The egg, of course, is genetics, the genetic paradigm of addiction, Hypoism. The superstitious paradigm is the hijacked brain hypothesis and all its predecessors dating back to the bible. 4/24/09 Re: Inherited Impulsivity Predicts Alcoholism, Study Reports, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090422175146.htm The article states, "The mice with high alcohol preferring genes were more impulsive than their low drinking counterparts demonstrating that predisposition to impulsivity is predictive of alcoholism. Just like golden retrievers are bred to retrieve, we were able to breed mice genetically predisposed to drink alcohol voluntarily." This is Hypoism. http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismhypothesis/ Now, I wouldn't call that kind of drinking "voluntary." It's genetically predicated and therefore involuntary. This is exactly the same as in humans. It looks voluntary but it's really involuntary. [This is what the Hypoism theory states and predicts and is exactly opposite from the hijacked brain hypothesis, the theory that currently rules the field of addictions.] In those people absent this genetic link, drinking is voluntary but they don't ever get addicted. This is exactly what Hypoism is all about. Thus, drinking (and other drug and addictor use) is involuntary and addictive in hypoics, while drinking and drug use in people who don't have Hypoism is voluntary and they don't get addicted. It's all caused by the presence or absence of the genetic disease, Hypoism. The same hold for the "impulsivity" trait. It too is caused by the genetic disease of hypoism. Thus, it's not the impulsivity that causes the addiction. It's the Hypoism that causes both. This article is yet another confirmation of the Hypoism pathophysiology as well as its associated traits such as ADHD. It's the Hypoism that causes all of them, not one of the traits causing the other ones. This is the same finding as my email about impulsivity in kindergarten kids is associated with future gambling: Predicting Gambling Behavior in Sixth Grade From Kindergarten Impulsivity, Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med. 2009;163(3):238-243 I sent that email out on 3/3/09. This is what I've been writing about since 1992. So, let's finally get behind the Hypoism theory, dump the hijacked brain hypothesis, which is the former, voluntary, theory, and start helping addicts (hypoics) and their kids with science-based prevention, recovery, and public policy. The authors response: I do not disagree with anything you have written, though I am unfamiliar with the term "hypoism." The term "voluntary" in this context simply means that operationally speaking (that is, what I did as an experimenter), the mice always had access to both alcohol and water when we bred them. This is to contrast it with situations that others use in which alcohol solutions are the only source of fluid. I am, by and large, a determinist, and I also disagree with the notion that drugs "hijack" the brain. Rather, drugs and a certain genetic/environmental background can, together, create a situation in which our everyday understanding of self-control (which is highly limited in its utility anyway, and primarily remains as a legal, rather than scientific construct) is undermined. Nicholas J. Grahame, Ph.D Associate Professor, Dept. of Psychology IUPUI My response to the author: I know what you mean by voluntary but the public doesn't. My email went out to many of my readers and several newspapers to whom I send emails about addictions. See: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/currentletterstoeditors3309/ Hypoism is the genetic disease that causes all addictions. Of course you haven't heard of Hypoism. It's been censored by the addiction establishment since 1992. That's why I'm writing you. To inform you. I've been writing about this disease since 1992. Read my linked paper, the hypoism hypothesis, in my email. I also have a book, Hypoic's Handbook, that goes through the science and the practical issues of addiction causation and how it all works., including prevention of addictions, recovery, and public policy implications. My web site is very extensive. You might also read: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/thehypoismaddictionhypothesis/ I've been fighting Leshner's and Volkow's hijacked brain hypothesis (HBH) since 1992 to no avail. I am just ignored and censored. The science of addiction causation backs Hypoism and disproves the HBH. It's Hypoism that undermines drug and other addictor use and addiction. Thanks for writing back. dan umanoff, m.d. Thanks for your email. In skimming your writing about the decision making apparatus disorder in hypoism, I suspect that what I'm calling "impulsivity" is very similar. We defined impulsivity as the difficulty in deciding advantageously when faced with an immediate but small reward, as compared to a delayed but larger reward. It comes down to an emotional, subjective decision based on a weighing of future consequences vs. immediate effects. There is now a large literature on this task, called delay discounting, and it seems similar in its predictions to your FOKS, though again, I haven't read your entire page. Given the data showing that differences in decision making capacity underlie everything from smoking, gambling, heroin addiction, and alcoholism, I suspect we are talking about something very similar, in which the actual pharmacological effects of the drug/behavior arent' that important. Instead activation of the reward system and the possibility of immediate reinforcement sets certain people up for making bad decisions. Nick 4/22/09 Re: 'Addiction: Life on the Edge' , http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/ All of you receiving this email also received my first email on the CNN TV show called "Addiction: Life on the Edge." If you don't have it still, you can read it here: 4/19/09 http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/currentletterstoeditors3309/ That show was broadcast on CNN last weekend. I have seen no feedback on it either at the CNN web site or anywhere else. NIDA hasn't commented. ASAM hasn't commented. But I have. And I didn't see my comments on the CNN web site anywhere. So, I sent the email again to them. I wonder, is Dr. Gupta sacrosanct? Is he always so right that he doesn't require feedback? Or, is feedback not required for CNN? Does he or CNN take responsibility for this broadcast and therefore publish valid feedback about the show? Where is it? Or, is this "conversation" one sided and a monopoly as usual for these kinds of shows. Who cares about the facts? They don't count. Well, that's why I subtitled my book on addiction causation, Hypoic's Handbook, "Don't confuse me with the facts. I already made up my mind." This is health news broadcasting? Of course. That's the problem. And we wonder why the field of addictions is such a mess and so unsuccessful? I don't. This is the reason addictions are still out of control and killing a million addicts a year. Dr. Gupta and CNN are part of the problem, not the solution. 4/22/09 Patients Irate With Insurers' 'Fail First' Policy, http://abcnews.go.com/Health/PainManagement/comments?type=story&id=7395636Junklemale wrote: "Opiates are one of the heaviest forms of pain killers, very addictive, and easily cause loss of motor skills and comprehension. This story didn't say she was not driving, she probably is. How many of you want your family members on the highway near her knowing she is on opiates? Do you want the drug companies handing out heavy drugs like that freely? I agree that insurance companies shouldn't dictate the medical procedures needed to an extent but if they let anyone have any drug they wanted you would see the story on ABC about "Soccer moms on heavy drugs driving SUV's and Mini-vans full of kids endanger your family too." This happens to be 100% wrong. SATURDAY, Oct. 13, 2007 (HealthDay News) -- Moderate, long-term use of opioid pain medications such as morphine does not impair a person's driving ability, U.S. researchers report. The findings suggest that patients who require long-term pain medication may "become tolerant" to side effects that could potentially impair function, said researcher Dr. Asokumar Buvanendran, an associate professor in the anesthesiology department at Rush. "According to Buvanendran, this study's findings suggest that patients on long-term pain medication may be able to live "like normal functioning people, without the stigma and limitations now associated with long-term pain medication use." In fact, the same journal presented a study showing antidepressants impair driving, something no one knows because of the power of the drug companies. Opiates have been demonized while antidepressants are OK'd by the same "experts," Just the opposite of the reality. This bias has ruined the lives of countless opiate users and opiate addicts who have been discriminated against because of biased beliefs rather than scientific fact. Opiate users are automatically judged (wrongly) to be irresponsible and dangerous anti-social misfits. The study of chronic opiate addicts in Switzerland, the PROVE study, http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/harmreductionprototypeswissproveprogram/ , showed chronic opiate addicts did fine in all the ways it was studied as long as they were supplied their drug, heroin, in a safe environment. They were found NOT TO BE irresponsible and dangerous social misfits, the exact opposite of what people believe them to be. Likewise, in Medical News Today, a medical news web site, appeared this article, 17 Jan 2009: Prescription Opioid Abuse, Addiction Less Common Than Many Believe. "The abuse and addiction potentials of opioid analgesics prescribed for patients with chronic pain have been of great concern. However, current research indicates that these problems are not as common or widespread as many seem to believe." In an evidence-based review for Pain Treatment Topics (http://www.Pain-Topics.org), editor Stewart B. Leavitt, MA, PhD, summarizes the findings of major research investigations of these problems. "The research is extensive, but requires careful examination," he notes. "Unfortunately, news media, government agencies, and others have portrayed abuse and addiction associated with prescribed opioids as problems of much larger proportions than seems warranted by the evidence." Several comprehensive investigations support this assertion:-- In an extensive review, combining results from 24 clinical studies, the overall rate of prescribed opioid analgesic abuse or addiction in patients with pain was about 3.3%. However, fewer than 2 out of 1,000 (0.19%) patients without a current or past substance-use disorder experienced problems with opioids prescribed for pain. No one wants to know this, however. People want to believe the lies about opiate addicts rather than the truth because they love to hate addicts. Well, you can have your hate and your biases but all you're doing is shooting yourself and your kids in the foot. It may be better for all concerned to deal with the truth because the truth will not kill your kids, in fact, it will save them, while the biases will definitely kill them. Your choice, I guess. But remember, your kids' lives are at stake. 4/21/09 Re: Physicians’ Tales , http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/books/review/Jauhar-t.html?ref=books A bunch of nice clean vignettes. But how about the doctors, let's say, that work for the government and lie to maintain governmental paradigms that kill and hurt millions of sick people (the 30 million hypoic's (all the addicts) in just this country alone), like NIDA, the national institute of drug abuse, in order to maintain a wrong theory of addictions supportive of a damaging governmental policy like the drug war and the war against addicts. Where's this story? I write about this story daily in my blog, http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/currentletterstoeditors3309/ . I send these emails to the NY times and other newspapers daily. They never get published. I've asked all these newspapers to assign a journalist to this story (a definite Pulitzer prize story if it ever gets done) in order to alert the public to how our government doctors lie to the public and abuse addict physicians under their control umbrellas (like the CPH of NY State) to maintain their desired addiction paradigm, a paradigm that supports the government's interests but kills addicts in droves (the hijacked brain hypothesis, the moral paradigm of addiction causation). This is not a conspiracy, consciously that is. It's people (anti-addict zealots, ass kissing psychiatrists and addictionologists - many of whom are, believe it or not, "recovering addicts" themselves) who believe they're doing the right thing, though it happens to be the exact opposite, the most immoral and wrong thing they could ever do for the sake, they believe, of protecting the public from supposedly dangerous addicts. These zealots who deliberately go to work for the government for this exact reason, know they're lying and cheating the public, but do so purportedly to keep the public safe. They believe they are justified in doing what they do because "it's best" for the people of America. [This is no different from the CIA guys who tortured prisoners for the sake of national security and the psychologists who helped them do this better, or the guys who lied to the public about WMD's in Iraq, or the doctors who lied to the public about drugs for ADHD kids while being paid off by the drug companies] And the media has kowtowed to them by ignoring and censoring my work since 1995 just as they did for the government about Iraq. However fascism is never best for America, and this is what they are, lying fascists who deliberately deny addicts their constitutional rights to the truth and from being discriminated against by the policies based on these lies. Where is this "tale" about these dangerous and despicable doctors? 4/21/09 Re: Why the Wicked Witch Isn't Dead, The timeless allure of witch hunting. http://www.slate.com/id/2216429/ An interesting article. I certainly went through being burned at the stake. http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/thedoctordrugwarwrongandwastefulp1/ I know what it is like and what it is based on. My book, Hypoic's Handbook, discusses the addict witch hunt and its motives at great length. The article states, "But there is always a nasty irony: They believe they are expunging "evil" when in fact they are enacting it." Now, go ahead and tell me the drug war is not a modern witch hunt. I dare you. Yes, the drug war is evil. Well, we addicts know we're going to be burned at the stake any time we stand up for ourselves based on evidence, but this doesn't happen because as of today addicts remain in hiding thanks to AA and its "12 traditions" based on anonymity. "Our only antidote is to insist on evidence. Whenever there are charges against a person or group, we must ask insistently: How do we know? Show me the proof. Show me three times. Show me 10." Of course, this never happens because the courts and the juries, if you ever get this far, are part of the witch hunt. Thus, they, the bigots, will never give you the evidence. The suggested antidote doesn't work. There is another antidote, however. The same antidote the NAACP used - grass roots "in your face" marches and demonstrations, civil law suits, boycotts, civil disobedience, and election of people on our side. This all means we need to be organized. And that's our problem. Addicts fear organization. They seek anonymity. That's our undoing. Anonymity may be safe for the individual but all it ends up doing in the long run is maintaining the witch hunt and discrimination. Addicts need to think of this the next time they reject organizing, which is everyday. Check out the NAAAA brochure below. The N4A can't work in a vacuum though. Addicts in hiding are just shooting themselves and their kids in the foot by hiding. 4/21/09 Re: Human Brains Make Their Own 'Marijuana', http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090420151240.htm This finding is no surprise. All mood altering and addictive drugs have natural counterparts (endogenous neurotransmitters) in the brain's instinct regulating system. If this weren't true, there would be no drug addictions, only behavioral addictions. The Hypoism theory of addictions predicted this in 1992 when I wrote my fist paper about Hypoism. This paper has evolved into its current form: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismhypothesis/ . "Every addiction is either related to a known human instinct (behavioral addictions and their endogenous neurotransmitters) or is a neurotransmitter substitute (drugs) for or stimulator of the endogenous neurotransmitters used to reward the use of the instincts." My book, Hypoic's Handbook, discusses all this plus its prevention, recovery, and public policy implications. 4/21/09 Re: Almost 1 in 10 Young Video Game Users 'Addicted', http://www.healthday.com/Article.asp?AID=626221 The article states, "To put a label like 'video game addiction' is too superficial," Brody said. But he doesn't know what label to put on it. Hey, Dr. Brody, wake up! It's Hypoism, the same disease that causes all other addictions at a rate of about 10% of users. And they have ADHD? Well. that's because ADHD is also Hypoism. It all adds up. Just connect the dots. Read: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismhypothesis/ The disease is called Hypoism. Learn about it and use it to help these kids. 4/21/09 Re: Dieters’ best intentions hijacked by their brains, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30312808/ Then the article says, "Food hijacked Dr. David Kessler's brain." Now, which is it? Does the food hijack the brain or the brain hijack the "intentions"? Or, is it something other than this? [yes] The article never clarifies this. In fact, the article never clarifies anything. The critical issue is: "Some people really do have a harder time resisting bad foods." This remark is never explained. Why is it that in the same environment and with the same foods available some people are 1) skinny 2) normal 3) obese and 4) massively obese? Why? This article and Dr. Kessler never explain. Then the article says, "It's not an addiction but it's similar." Why is it not the same? How is it similar but not the same?" This too is never explained. Addiction isn't explained and what he calls "conditioned hypereating" isn't explained. "Kessler's research suggests millions share what he calls "conditioned hypereating" — a willpower-sapping drive to eat high-fat, high-sugar foods even when they're not hungry." What research? It's never mentioned or referenced. It doesn't exist. So, what is this article? It's a book advertisement plain and simple. An advertisement for a book that has no explanations and no answers other than saying, "Overeaters must take responsibility, too, and basically retrain their brains to resist the lure," he cautions. Where's the evidence that this can happen and that it is a solution for the masses of obese people? None. Then, "You're not even aware you've learned this," says Dr. Nora Volkow, chief of the National Institute on Drug Abuse and a dopamine authority who has long studied similarities between drug addiction and obesity. She's a "dopamine authority." What the hell is that? Volkow is a confessed chocoholic who salivates just walking past her laboratory's vending machine. "You have to fight it and fight it," she said. That's an authority? "You have to fight it?" Where's the authority there? It sounds to me that whoever is doing all this fighting is losing the war. That's an authority? Kessler says, "Retrain the brain to think, "I'll hate myself if I eat that," Kessler advises. Lay down new neural reward circuits by substituting something else you enjoy, like a bike ride or a healthier food." This just doesn't happen unless you're not an addict. Then, it happens just fine, but not for addicts. Retraining your brain is a sure fire way to fail, but a great way to sell a book, because it gives addicts something they want but can't ever get - control. Retraining the brain on your own to cure an addiction is exactly the road to relapse. How this article got published is exactly the problem in addictions today - pseudoauthorities get their books reviewed and article published, not on the basis of science and rationality, but on the basis of authority. The same holds for Volkow who is supposed to be an expert but has never gotten a single addict clean and sober. How is that Kessler and Volkow are believed to be experts when in fact they never got a single addict clean, sober, or thin. Kessler then says, "People who aren't overweight can be conditioned hypereaters, too, Kessler found — so it's possible to control." I ask him, are these people the same as the ones who get fat? Absolutely not. They are completely different neurobiologically and genetically. So, what's he saying? It's bullshit. Those who can control it are different from those who can't control it. The same thing holds for drug addicts and gambling addicts. They are different neurobiologically and genetically from those who "can control it." Kessler is deliberately misinforming the public with these remarks in order to sell his book. He's wrong about all this. He hasn't a clue about why obese people are obese and skinny people not obese. He's just selling a book and Volkow and this article are helping deceive the public. Kessler doesn't understand obesity just like Volkow doesn't understand the other addictions. This is why addictions are still out of control in this country and around the world - the experts have been misinforming the public about addictions for the last hundred years. This article is massive misinformation except for one thing they all get right - that the food industry, just like the drug cartels with addictive drugs, know how to make addictive food. That true. But it's not the addictive food that causes the food addiction, it's the food addicts' brains. Food addicts like drug addicts have a genetically different brain from non-addicts with or without the presence of addictive food and drugs. They are born with these differences. My web article explains this: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismhypothesis/ My book, Hypoic's Handbook, is all about the genetic differences between addicts and non-addicts and why these differences (yes, in the dopamine regulated parts of the reward system which I call the instinct regulating apparatus) make it essentially impossible for addicts to control the use of whatever they're addicted to. They can't control it. The preventative and recovery methods in my book explain this and explain why they need special kind of help from another recovering addict consistently and forever in order to even begin to deal with the addiction. Telling addicts be it obese people or drug addicts that they can learn how to control their addictions is a lie. The way the brain works makes it essentially impossible for this to happen. That's why it doesn't happen for the most part. Not with the help of god or the help of Kessler's book. My book explains why and there's no simple way to recover from addiction. It's hard work on a daily basis and surrender of any control the addict may think he has. Recovery is all about surrender, not control. But the program (free of charge by the way) that is needed to accomplish this recovery doesn't yet exist because it must be organized from the grass roots up, and the grass roots hasn't heard about this yet because the experts and the addiction establishment has censored this information from the public, with the help of the media. This is the kind of article on addictions that sickens me. It makes Kessler rich but keeps fat people fat, and guilty, by the way, because when they fail, they believe it's their fault, not Kessler's. This result of this kind of nonsense is what kills and ruins addicts' lives and families on a daily basis. We need a complete paradigm change, from conscious control (self-sufficiency and the hijacked brain hypothesis) to surrender of control (surrender of self-sufficiency and Hypoism), before addictions will ever be dealt with successfully. If you're smart you'll buy Hypoic's Handbook, not Kessler's book. 4/19/09 Re: 'Addiction: Life on the Edge' , http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/ This TV show should be called, "Addiction: TV on the Edge." The edge of a cliff. I've seen a lot of rotten TV shows on addiction such as Moyer's 4 part series on PBS, HBO's series, and a variety of others I can't think of off the top of my head. This one is even worse. Not only is there bad science, but there's no science. All there is in the way of science is various opinions by people with severe and obvious conflicts of interest pushing their scams; rehabs, drug companies, and various private (some not-for profit, whatever that means) programs. Gupta never asked for the science behind any of the claims made by these conflicted people. Not one of the claims could be backed up with any valid long term studies. And the addicts. Please. These people know nothing about addictions. One guy (and his father) are pushing a book about their experiences with addiction. Who cares what they have to say. They're both ignorant about addiction yet come off being some kind of experts. Geez. Two out of four are not in recovery and never have been. The other two think they are but they haven't a clue as to what recovery is. Everyone thinks it's about not using drugs. Relapse being about using drugs. Wrong. Recovery is about doing recovery (which has certain requirements like having a sponsor and surrendering your life to that sponsor; that's just the beginning). Relapse is when you don't do recovery, even if you're not using. Using is the last stage of relapse. This whole concept of recovery is unknown to everyone on this TV show. Likewise for relapse. In fact, addiction as a whole is misunderstood by everyone on this show. And Gupta. He buys everything everyone says. Where's his medical training; his skepticism? The guy who said naltrexone cured him was very convincing except for one thing. He was never tested for this hypothesis by interspersing a placebo into his treatment regime to see if he responded to it the same as or differently from how he did to the naltrexone. The fact is that there isn't a single study to show that what this guy claimed happened to any meaningful group of alcohol addicts. None of the studies ever showed abstinence was an ultimate outcome of this drug. Did anyone read these studies? I don't think so. They suck. The whole naltrexone thing is bull being sold to the public by the drug companies. Peer review on these studies is non-existent because they're all on the drug company payrolls. Give me a break. Likewise for all other drugs touted as valid treatment for any addiction. Likewise the rehabs and all the other treatments claimed to be effective on this TV show. But, luckily, this TV show never got into the science, so we never had a chance to review it. So much for Gupta and science. It never happened. Likewise for his take on addiction causation. It was empty and meaningless, but no one on the show questioned it. There was no meaningful and scientifically valid theory of addiction causation. So, the public got a misinterpretation of the science of addiction causation. This is a journalistic sin. In sum, this show was horrendous and damaging to all addicts. Shame on CNN. Dr. Gupta should be canned for this. So, what was this TV show? It was clearly an hour long commercial for drugs, rehabs, and a book. Geez. Too bad I didn't get on this show so I could have pushed my book. The world is not fair. 4/19/09 Re: Spitzer in Exile, http://www.newsweek.com/id/194590/page/1 The article reads: "If there's ambivalence there, it may spring from the knowledge that while Spitzer the commentator can count on the decency of strangers, Spitzer the politician will always have to answer for being Client No. 9. I asked Spitzer if he'd spent much time in the past year thinking about the fairness of it all, if Americans ought to care about their leaders' sex lives: "I could make a persuasive case that, no, it isn't fair. But … you should be smart enough to know that those are the rules, whether or not it's fair … There are other nations that have a very different set of parameters on these things. But you know when you get in public life here that you live in a fishbowl. So you've got to be smart enough to act accordingly."" There's no doubt that Spitzer wants to make a comeback and believes he deserves one. ("I could make a persuasive case.") And he believes what happened to him was not fair. ("no, it isn't fair.") This means his behavior with the prostitute should have had no repercussions on his political career. He thinks his problem was, "not being smart enough." This is a man whose entire life was based on being smart. No, the issue is what would he have done to someone like himself who did the same thing. What did he actually do to people in the same mess he finds himself? Well, if you look at his record as Attorney General and Governor you can easily see that he was not forgiving even when people deserved it. Can I think of a case in point? Yes. Me. In 1986 I became addicted to hydrocodone (vicodin, hycodan) after surgery, sort of like Dr. House. As a board certified nephrologist I was practicing medicine at the time and was at risk of losing everything if my addiction came out, so I tried to stop the addiction in private while performing my practice of medicine. I had been in recovery previously between 1978 and 1986 in AA. However, I was unable to get clean this way, and if you look at my practice you can see that it wasn't affected by my addiction. No one even guessed at my being addicted because I practiced responsibly and maintained my excellent reputation as a Nephrologist in a very public practice in seven hospitals and as medical director of my own dialysis clinic. I never had a malpractice case, never had a complaint nor made any mistakes. There was absolutely no patient harm. I had an excellent reputation among my colleagues. There were no problems with my practice of medicine in any way. Even the health department stipulated to this at the time I voluntarily surrendered my license when I was discovered to be addicted by my prescription writing practices (for myself). Following my license surrender I had a very hard time getting clean. I went to many detoxes and rehabs. My relapses were all accomplished by my writing prescriptions for myself despite not having a license. The feds called this "practicing medicine without a license." This now was felonious behavior. And I got caught. I was arrested for this and turned into a felon. The health department used this to revoke my license, a completely different (more severe) administrative action from mere surrender of the license or even suspension. I finally got clean after my arrest and was forensically documented 7 months clean by the CPH (committee for physician's health) when the health department revoked my license. I was finally clean (and remained clean for the next 20 years) but they still gave me the worst possible punishment because they said I had a poor prognosis. Now I was subject to an endless and difficult process of restoration, if I ever was to get my license back. For the next EIGHT YEARS I did everything the CPH asked me to do concerning my recovery and maintaining my medical knowledge. After 8 years the CPH gave me their full advocacy. I had letters from four addiction psychiatrists saying I had been ready to resume practice for many years already and would be just fine returning to my practice. I went before the department of education's restoration hearings with all ducks in a row, but because, they said, "I was dangerous to the public" because "I didn't have remorse for things I didn't do but could have," they denied my license restoration, despite my willingness to be forensically tested as frequently as they wanted, monitored in other ways, and continue my eight years of AA recovery. What doctor has ever been judged according to such a criterion? None, ever. There are countless doctors who have actually injured patients, some many times, who are not judged by this criterion. In fact, most doctors who have committed medical errors and incurred patient injuries by negligence, malpractice, and ignorance, only receive slaps on the wrist as punishment. It was well documented that my practice was spotless and well respected even while addicted. When I sued the state of NY for their arbitrary, capricious, and discriminatory decision, Eliot Spitzer was the state lawyer who defended NY State's right and reasons to do deny my license restoration without ever talking to me and knowing nothing about me or my practice. He was willing to end my career in medicine for the sake of the above reason, a reason I'm sure even Eliot Spitzer couldn't have lived with himself. In fact, who could? But he did just that. And now he's saying what happened to him was unfair and shouldn't have interfered with his practice as governor. He wants to make a comeback and believes he deserves it while I didn't. I wonder how many other people's careers he ended this way without losing any sleep over what his decision and behavior did to our families and children. Was he fair? Was NY State fair to us? In all the articles about Spitzer I haven't seen anything about his unfair and hypocritical behavior toward people like me, recovering addicts who never hurt anyone; actually only helped people consistently. I think if he wants forgiveness and restoration himself he ought to go through all his cases where he ruined people's lives who didn't deserve it and restore them before he gets restoration. 4/18/09 I just happened to find your web site. http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/ It's excellent. I am an advocate for "science-based medicine" as if there were some other kind. My field of interest is addictions. My web site is http://www.nvo/hypoism/door . My credentials, education and training and board certifications, are listed on the home page. I wrote my first paper on the mess in addictions in 1992. This paper has evolved into: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismhypothesis/ . My evolutionary psychology theory of addictions was presented at an EP convention in 2000: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/thehypoismaddictionhypothesis/ . My 1996 book on the genetic basis of addictions and its brain mechanism is called Hypoic's Handbook. All my writings on addictions are based on "real science." This science is referenced in the first paper and my book. As with just a very few other areas of medicine, such as the Autism/vaccine stuff, the addiction field has evolved from two pseudoscientific premises, psychobabble and superstition. Though the real science of addictions has debunked these premises, the entire field remains based on them, including NIDA, NIAAA, and NIMH (the three agencies at the NIH dealing with addictions of one form or another.) I've written extensively about the fraudulent nature of this pseudoscience and its replacement theory based on real science and how the brain actually works. My writings have been censored and ignored by the field as well as by the media, not on the basis of critiquing their science, but for reasons of bias in favor of the superstitious paradigm and the massive industry that has developed based on it : The PIMMPAL complex - http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/pimmpalcomplex/ . The conflicts of interest are discussed here in brief: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/15replacingalanleshneristheonlywaytoendthedrugwar/ The fact is that there are millions of addicts and their families (about 10% of the population) currently being defrauded by a scientifically invalid theory of addictions (the hijacked brain hypothesis) and its prevention, treatment, and policy implications (the drug war, etc.). I've written extensively about this fraud but the public has yet to learn about it because the field is blocked and monopolized by the proponents of the HBH and all its moral, financial, and political implications. Your web site has essentially nothing on this lethal and otherwise destructive fraud. I think it is consistent with your web site's philosophy to review my writings and allegations and do a web page on this information so the public has a chance to review what is happening and re-evaluate their unsubstantiated beliefs on addiction causation and their prevention, treatment, and public policy implications which are massive. This is the biggest medical scandal of all time based on the same kinds of pseudoscience and bias you list and discuss for other areas of medical fraud. And no one even knows it exists!! [As if the science weren't enough to convince you to do this, Eliot Gardner, M.D., a prolific and world class NIDA scientist/researcher/author wrote me an email many years ago after reading my book: To Dan Umanoff, M.D.: "I think you know (from previous exchanges between us) that I have been - and continue to be - receptive to your concept. I think it has much merit, as I have said previously." ---ELIOT L. GARDNER, M.D., PhD, NIDA/IRP. He was going to help me prepare my paper on the Hypoism Hypothesis for publication but we never got around to it.] 4/17/09 Re: Was I Born Anorexic?, http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-04-16/was-i-born-anorexic/ Now, here's a realistic article about Anorexia. It says. "According to a new and seemingly conclusive neuropsychological study, anorexia is the latest on the list of the various genetic maladies we can inherit from our parents." It says that all the nonsense we've been reading and hearing about from the experts claiming environmental etiology has been wrong. She is absolutely correct though knowing nothing about the real science behind this nor the implications of this reality. The fact is that Hypoics are born, not made, and all their addictions are symptoms of Hypoism. Here's my major paper about this disease: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismhypothesis/ Now, I've been writing about the genetic basis of all addictions, all hundred of them, including anorexia, since 1992. So, this "new study's" new results are not so new after all. Too bad no one has acknowledged Hypoism in the 17 years since its discovery. We've known all addictions, including anorexia, are genetic in origin for many many years, but this knowledge has been censored and ignored by the addiction establishment as well as the anorexia establishment. My first paper on all this called, "Hypoism - A Real disease," discussing this was written in 1992 and censored by 12 addiction journals because of environmental bias and conflict of interest - the field makes money on the environmental paradigm and goes out of business on the genetic paradigm. Why? Because addicts stay sick on the environmental paradigm and get better on the genetic paradigm. So, what expert is going to support the correct science when this science rings the death knoll of their businesses? None. My 1996 book on the genetic causation of all addictions, Hypoic's Handbook, goes through all this in detail as well as describing the neurobiological mechanism and the prevention and recovery implications. Your readers need to know about this. We need to end the censorship of the true science behind all addictions as well as Anorexia. 4/16/09 Re: Obama: Mexico drug war ‘sowing chaos’, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30232095/ Despite 40 years of losing the drug war, euphemistically called "winning," or, "making progress," Obama has decided that the best way to continue "winning" is to dismiss the assault weapons ban and escalate exactly what hasn't yet worked but will work if we only redouble the same policy efforts. This policy goes along with Obama's electioneered promises to change what doesn't work. If you're confused about this paragraph, don't be. Obama got elected on the principle that changing what has been failing, in all arenas, is the only policy that makes sense. But he was only kidding, thank god. He's such a kidder. So, now that he's the president he's reverting to Bush's "stratergy," do more of what doesn't work, do what is the opposite of what will work, exactly what Seinfeld told George Costanza to do, the opposite of what he thinks he should do. Why? Because George is always wrong when he does what he thinks he should do. The solution to this problem, the solution to being wrong all the time, is to do the opposite of what he thinks he should do, and this will work. That's what they mean by the drug war sowing chaos. It's not just actual chaos. It's decision-making chaos. Chaotic thinking and decision-making has to work because nothing else, such as rational thinking, has. Geez. I was so fearful that Obama would be rational and use his intellect and smart people available to him (those never used before) to solve the drug problem. Thank god he has decided to choose total stupidity and the worst possible advisors to solve this problem, the only good solution to all our problems. This is the American way. This is the best way to solve the drug problem. People say America has changed for the worse, electing a president who is smart for a change and promised to change everything for the better. Well, we don't have to worry about that. America is not, thank god, changing. We're going to stay the same. Stay the course. We're going to continue to use stupidity to solve our problems, and even escalate it. Now, that's a president I can respect. And that goes double for the House and Senate, and the Judiciary. Triple for the media. 4/16/09 Re: Obama Rules Out Charging C.I.A. Agents in Interrogations , http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/17/us/politics/17detain.html?_r=1&hp Once you become president you're no longer part of the subhuman race. Ordinary American citizens become subhuman. This may be a racist idea, but I think there's a problem here. I thought we decided long ago that torture, the Geneva convention, was globally illegal and a war crime. There was once a large war crime trial at Nuremberg, Germany that decided "I was just following orders" was not a valid defense for war crimes. Now we're told the Obama justice department has decided not to indict CIA war criminals because "they were given orders to torture and were told it wasn't torture." I thought "ignorance of the law was no excuse." But, of course, they knew it was torture and illegal. Ha Ha. So, all these slogans hold for the rest of us but not Obama and his buddies. There's one more good excuse, "spying on ordinary American citizens is OK as long as it is inadvertent." That's the excuse NSA is using to OK telephonic spying on ordinary Americans whose communications happen to be "inadvertently overheard" by the NSA. The year is 2009 but I think it's really 1984. Of course, the same holds for hypoics who are "inadvertently" mistaken for ordinary addicts, a group that is legally discriminated against and murdered by lying addiction experts and people who happen to believe whatever they say, sort of like justice department lawyers - the legalization of hypoic genocide. http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/entitledtoyouropinionnotanymore/ No wonder I'm ignored. I just don't get it. I actually believe in the constitution. What a jerk I am. It's funny. My spell check program wants me to change Obama to Osama. I wonder how that was programmed. 4/15/09 Re: DRUG DECRIMINALIZATION IN PORTUGAL, Download the Full White Paper (PDF) "Those data indicate that decriminalization has had no adverse effect on drug usage rates in Portugal, which, in numerous categories, are now among the lowest in the EU, particularly when compared with states with stringent criminalization regimes. Although postdecriminalization usage rates have remained roughly the same or even decreased slightly when compared with other EU states." Where's the data? "Drug policy experts attribute those positive trends to the enhanced ability of the Portuguese government to offer treatment programs to its citizens." How was this proven? More significantly, none of the nightmare scenarios touted by preenactment decriminalization opponents—from rampant increases in drug usage among the young to the transformation of Lisbon into a haven for “drug tourists”—has occurred. "Drug use" is an irrelevant statistic. What about its effect on numbers of addicts, the most important issue? (I don't think this was studied or quantitated) The data show that, judged by virtually every metric, the Portuguese decriminalization framework has been a resounding success. Where's the data? Indeed, in the absence of evidence of addiction or repeated violations, the imposition of a fine is to be suspended. - so, addicts are handled differently, discriminated against. While the Dissuasion Commissions are not authorized to mandate treatment, they can make suspension of sanctions conditioned on the offender’s seeking treatment. - So, "treatment" is different from "incarceration?" Alternatively, under Article 14, a commission, in the case of an addict with a prior record, can impose sanctions but then immediately suspend them contingent on ongoing treatment. In the event that treatment is completed and there is no subsequent offense, the proceeding will be deemed closed after a specified time period. - This is different from criminalization? Who decides on the treatment? Who decides on handling of relapses? Where do criteria come from? In theory, the Dissuasion Commissions are able to impose on offenders found to be addicts a wider range of sanctions under Article 17, including suspension of the right to practice a licensed profession (doctor, lawyer, taxi driver); a ban on visiting high-risk locales (nightclubs); a ban on associating with specified individuals; requiring periodic reports to the commission to show there is no ongoing addiction or abuse; prohibitions on travel abroad; termination of public benefits for subsidies or allowances; or a mere oral warning. Where is the scientific proof that an individual addict is dangerous for merely being addicted vs other kind of drug use? In fact, the science (for opiates at least) show addicts are no different from non-users. It is the recreational user who is dangerous because their nervous systems haven't developed tolerance to the drug.The member appointed by the Ministry of Justice will have a legal background, while at least one of the other two members (usually both) will have a medical or social services background (physician, psychologist, social worker). - This sounds OK but there are many reasons why it is not. older officers are inclined to believe that the decriminalization scheme makes issuing citations a waste of their time, whereas younger officers view the administrative process as the best hope for containing addiction. - where's the data supporting this, that the administrative process contains addiction? In theory, under Article 3 of the decriminalization law, both private and government physicians are permitted to notify the Dissuasion Commissions if they have reason to suspect drug use in their patients. - doctors ratting on their patients? sounds like "1984." "Dissuasion Commission" - At all times, respect for the alleged offender is emphasized. addict as "alleged offender." this is decriminalization? This is legalized discrimination and fascism as discussed in my book. Imposition of coerced "mental health care." sort of like the gulag archipelago in Stalin Russia. being an addict is clearly illegal. Put another way, decriminalization was driven not by the perception that drug abuse was an insignificant problem, but rather by the consensus view that it was a highly significant problem, that criminalization was exacerbating the problem, and that only decriminalization could enable an effective government response. - in other words, this "decriminalization" policy quantitatively reduces addiction. As I asked above, where is the data on this? This has never been shown anywhere. This is absolute bullshit.In its 1998 report, the Portuguese commission ultimately recommended decriminalization as the optimal strategy for combating Portugal’s growing abuse and addiction problems. The commission emphasized that the objective of its decriminalization strategy was to reduce drug abuse and usage . - there's no basis in fact for this. It shows that this report was made in total ignorance of the scientific basis for the causation of addiction - that addiction has its basis in conscious choice, the same rationale for the drug war. this is wrong and nonsense. Thus, we have the same theory (of addiction causation) resulting in "different policies" for the same reasons. The world doesn't work this way. I call this, "right policy based on wrong theory." I discuss this here, #4, the drug war war: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/articlesbyandforhypoicspage2/ In principle, it's wrong and can't do what it says it wants to do. This is the old CATO (libertarian) thinking that influenced my writing this paper in the first place.redirect the focus to primary prevention - decriminalization in itself has no preventative effect. anyone who says so is a liar because there is no data to support this. in fact, all else being equal, decriminalization will always increase numbers of addicts. extend and improve the quality and response capacity of the health care networks for drug addicts so as to ensure access to treatment for all drug addicts who seek treatment. - this is excellent but it's not prevention, it's treatment, two different things. however, for this goal to work, the treatment must be effective, something that has never been proven for current treatments. thus, making ineffective treatments available to all addicts makes things worse because people, believing effective treatment exists when it in fact doesn't, stop looking for effective treatments, exactly the opposite of what we need to do. in fact, we need to replace the wrong theory of addiction causation, the one Portugal and the rest of the world uses, with the correct theory, Hypoism, because only the correct theory can result in effective prevention and treatment methods, things that don't exist today, even if Portugal believes it does. this is why Portugal's "decriminalization policy" will only make addictions unchanged/worse as explained in my 1999 paper. decriminalization is a correct policy ONLY with the simultaneous use of the correct theory of addiction causation, the genetic theory (Hypoism) and the use of this theory to design all policies as I discuss in my paper and book, Hypoic's Handbook. Only Hypoism results in effective prevention and treatment methods because its methods are derived from the correct theory. You can't dissociate theory from practice as Portugal is currently doing. This is why numbers of addictions and their consequences will not change in a causal way under this new policy. (the numbers may change but there is no cause and effect reason for these changes) (remember, user numbers, even if they happen to go down, which, if they do, has nothing to do with the decriminalization policy, are not relevant, only addict numbers, numbers they don't measure. The reason for this is that most users don't get addicted. That's a fact. This is because they don't have the genetic disease that causes addiction. This is why we need to measure number of addictions (including all addictions, not just a few drugs, and not numbers of users.) Since Portugal enacted its decriminalization scheme in 2001, drug usage in many categories has actually decreased when measured in absolute terms, whereas usage in other categories has increased only slightly or mildly. - whatever this means.Both Greenwald and Portugal know nothing about the science of addiction causation and why their theory of addiction causation is wrong and needs to be replaced before we will have any good effect on numbers and effects of addictions other than those already proven by the PROVE study from Switzerland discussed in my book and web site. http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/harmreductionprototypeswissproveprogram/ Switzerland doesn't make the bogus claim that their decriminalization and harm reduction policies reduce addictions quantitatively. They reduce a lot of ill effects addiction has on society and addicts but they don't reduce numbers of addicts. To do this we need to use the correct theory of addiction causation and the effective prevention and treatment methods derived from that. The rest of the "white paper" is misuse of statistics and deliberate misrepresentation of cause and effect on these numbers. There is none. There's no cause and effect shown in any of the data. It's the same kind of misuse of numbers as that used in the vaccine/autism debate. All invalid "results" and conclusions used to support their biases. Remember, this was written by a lawyer, not a scientist. They need their results and conclusions evaluated by an objective statistician, something they don't do. I'm 100% for decriminalization, but done correctly, not the way Portugal is doing it. My book, Hypoic's Handbook, discusses the rationale behind this statement and the ways to do it correctly. 4/13/09 Re: Rethinking The Genetic Theory Of Inheritance: Heritability May Not Be Limited To DNA, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090118200632.htm The article states, "The epigenetic heritability may help explain currently unclear issues in human disease, such as the presence of a disease in only one monozygotic twin." Now, why is this sentence so important? And, let me tell you, it is. We can go back to my 1996 book, Hypoic's Handbook, and its discussion of the science of addiction causation. Underlying all of modern medicine is the bedrock principle that the basis for prevention and treatment of any defined disease is its cause. The terms "defined disease" and "cause" are included in the important word, "pathophysiology." I discuss all this in detail in the paper: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/diseaseconcept1aperspective/ . To understand today's letter one must read and understand this paper. So, read it now. So, in modern medicine, in order to get right the way we handle a person with a disease we must first get right the pathophysiology, the defined biological cause, of the particular disease. Conversely, if we get the pathophysiology of a particular disease wrong we can be assured, according to this principle, that we will also get wrong the way we handle a person with a disease. By "handle" I mean prevention, treatment, and public policies concerning the disease and the people with the disease. An example of how this works this is the incredible story of Ignaz Semmelweis, a gynecologist who made a cogent observation about women with "peurperal fever," and changed the world of medicine (with a slight delay of many years due to the bias and stubbornness of his colleagues). You can read about this story here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semmelweis . "Semmelweis was outraged by the indifference of the medical profession and began writing open and increasingly angry letters to prominent European obstetricians, at times denouncing them as irresponsible murderers." Sounds like me, huh? Well, it's the same principle and the same story, just the disease been changed. We take for granted today that the leaders in a particular field of medical science don't act like Semmelweis's colleagues; that the field of medicine is ruled by valid science and personal integrity rather than bias. This is not the case in the field of addictionology. Addictionology today is a mirror image of the field of gynecology then. The issue of EPIGENETICS, the field discussed in today's article highlights and helps prove this (as if more evidence were needed than that already existing in my paper, http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismhypothesis/ ). Every paper, except for a rare few (two to be exact), about the cause of addictions starts off with, "Addictions is a multifactorial disease with about 40-60% of the cause due to genetics." Usually this statement is not referenced, but when it is the references don't prove this statement as they are supposed to. Good peer review should stop the publication of any paper which includes this unproven statement, but it doesn't because the peer reviewers are equally as biased about this statement as are the writers of the statement. So, they let it slide and the quotation gets printed and read over and over until it is part of the iconography of the field of addictions. Ask the man in the street about the cause of addictions and he will tell you, "40-60% genetic." What does this 40-60% mean, where does it come from and what does all this have to do with EPIGENETICS? It means that 40-60% of the cause of addictions is "environmental." The word "environmental" is a code word for "it is caused by the conscious and willful decision-making of the addict." It means the addict voluntarily and willfully causes his own addiction. 40-60% is a pretty big number, so, for all intents and purposes, it means the addict is responsible for his addiction and must be held accountable. Well, look at today's public policies concerning addictions and you can see that these policies are all concerned about addicts causing their own addictions and being forced to deal with them in ways dictated by the authorities as well as punished for them in countless ways. Thus, we can see that the original quote about 40-60% is quite significant. So, where does this 40-60% come from other than from some expert saying it? It comes from the field of epidemiology, where scientists study the presence (or absence) of an addiction in a large group of identical twins (MZ), fraternal twins (DZ), and adoptees. They then throw these numbers into an equation and come out with what is called "heritability." Heritability is in the form of a percentage and is wrongly used to determine the percentage of a trait caused by either genetics or environment. Of course, this isn't what heritability means, but it is used to mean this. That's where the numbers 40-60% came from and that's what the experts say it means. You can look up the word heritability and find out what it really means yourself. If you read the epidemiological literature on addictions you don't find 40-60% except from some out of date and invalid studies. The most valid epidemiological science gets numbers more like 60-80%. Here's an example of this from the most respected epidemiologist in the country, Ken Kendler at VCU: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/recentgeneticstudiesonvariousaddictionsfromalargetwinregistr/ , "Illicit psychoactive substance use, heavy use, abuse, and dependence in a US population-based sample of male twins." Kendler KS, Karkowski LM, Neale MC, Prescott CA Department of Psychiatry, Medical College of Virginia, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond 23298-0126, USA. Arch Gen Psychiatry 2000 Mar;57(3):261-9. "Twin resemblance for sedative, stimulant, cocaine, and opiate use, however, was caused solely by genetic factors. With 2 exceptions (cocaine abuse and stimulant dependence), twin resemblance for heavy use, abuse, and dependence resulted from only genetic factors, with heritability of liability usually ranging from 60% to 80%. No consistent evidence was found for violations of the equal environment assumption. CONCLUSIONS: In accord with prior results in studies of women, the family environment plays a role in twin resemblance for some forms of substance use in men. However, twin resemblance for heavy use, abuse, and dependence in men is largely caused by genetic factors, and heritability estimates are high." Kendler repeated this study in Norway and found the same numbers. 60-80% is starting to make environmental causation pretty low. So, why do the other experts say 40-60% instead of 60-80% and is it possible for the heritability numbers to be even higher than 60-80%? The experts say 40-60% in order to make it appear that genetics (involuntary) has a smaller role in addiction causation that it actually does. The experts are biased in favor of "environmental" causation and cherry pick lower numbers from outdated and invalid studies to make it appear this way. In fact, you can find studies that say almost anything. The issue is whether they are valid studies and why the experts cherry pick invalid studies to support their biases about addiction causation? Well, I write about it. It's up to you to do something about the lying. But, there's more. There are three other non-epigenetic reasons for the even the 60-80% to be actually even higher. Read them in my paper: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismhypothesis/ Now, the fourth reason for heritability to be even higher than 60-80% is where EPIGENETICS comes in. In the heritability equation mentioned above, there are certain assumptions. One of these is that identical twins are 100% genetically identical. The reason we get 60-80% and not 100% is because we find discordance among identical twin pairs in the presence of particular addictions. In other words, some identical twins have the addiction and, from the same pairs, some don't. Assuming these pairs are 100% genetically identical makes this finding means that genetics is not the only cause for addiction in some people. Environment (non-genetic), though small, is still the cause in some of these pairs. Well, it turns out that identical twins are 100% identical in regard to their DNA sequence but not in their DNA functionality, that is whether their genes are functionally active, turned on or off in any particular individual. EPIGENETICS is the field that studies whether or not, through non-DNA sequence changes, genes are on or off, active or inactive. EPI (above) GENETICS means there are ways the genes activity are regulated in particular people in ways unrelated to the genetic code itself. Identical twins may have identical genetic code but different regulation of this genetic activity caused by chemical modulators of this activity, methyl groups and histones (proteins) that turn on or off certain genes in just that particular organism unrelated to being DNA identical. Thus, identical twins may have identical genes but in one or the other there is a difference in whether this gene is active or inactive. If it turns out that these specific genes have something to do with causing addictions then there will be discordance between the identical twin paifs in presence or absence of the particular addiction. This will lower the calculated heritability and thus make it appear, wrongly, that environment is more influential than it actually is. In other words, epigenetic effects falsely lower heritability numbers. Thus, 60-80% is falsely low and the actual heritability is higher. How much higher is unknown so far, but today's article shows that it may well be significantly higher. Thus, heritability numbers for addictions are not 40-60%, not 60-80%, but higher still. This means that genetics accounts for more than 60-80% of addiction causation, closer to 100%, and environment less than 20-40%, closer to 0%. This means that addictions are, for the most part, caused by genetics, not environment. The implications of this are enormous. This means that addictions are not caused by willful and conscious voluntary decisions by addicts, willful misconduct. This changes the entire social and clinical meaning of addictions. It takes "personal responsibility" out of the equation as far as causation is concerned much as it does for genetic breast cancer and other predominantly genetic diseases. People with these kinds of disease need to be dealt with differently, medically, clinically, morally, legally, and in all other ways, exactly as I've been saying for 17 years when I wrote my first paper about the genetic disease of addictions, Hypoism. That the addiction experts are still saying 40-60% with all its damaging implications is a travesty and a lie. This lie is killing and hurting addicts across the globe and particularly in the United States. This has the same effect as that of Semmelweis's "murderous" colleagues. I've been writing about the effects of epigenetics on the field of addictions for 5 years while the field of addictions hasn't mentioned a single word about it. Why have they not? Because they are bought and paid for by the moral basis of addictions, the hijacked brain hypothesis. They are biased for this moral paradigm of addictions for financial, political, and religious reasons. Whatever the reason, it is a lie and a murderous lie at that and they need to be held accountable for this lie and the way this lie has injured addicts for the last 17 years. When is the country going to be allowed to know about this? 4/13/09 Re: Mich. part of growing push for autism coverage, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30181325/ This article raises several valid issues: 1) Should insurance companies pay for treatments that don't work? 2) Should premium payers have to subsidize treatments that don't work? And, 3) Whom decides whether a treatment works or not and by what criteria? The answers: 1) Of course not. 2) Of course not. 3) The criteria should be real science. The deciders have to be people having no conflicts of interest; none. Why do I write a letter about this obvious stuff? Because the field of addictions is a good example of how all three of these questions are answered wrong. Insurance companies are being forced to pay for treatments that don't work and the people who say these treatments work all have conflicts of interest. They're invalid deciders. This also means that patients, the addicts, who fail in these believed to work treatments are punished when they don't work on them. That's the worst part of it all. If a decider says treatment works (when in reality it doesn't) it discriminates against the addicts who are then forced to partake in these ineffective treatments and get sober, but don't happen to. However, if, in reality, these treatments really don't work, then the addicts who don't get sober are blamed for not being good patients, for being uncooperative. Well, the fact is that there is no objective non-conflicted evidence for any addiction treatment working better than chance (better than no treatment) and there are countless addicts forced to undergo these treatments, pay for them, and take the consequences of not getting sober under the auspices of these treatments. all of this is wrong and immoral. The whole addiction treatment industry is a scam. Their theories are wrong, their prevention methods are ineffective, and their treatments are ineffective. The public as well as the insurance industry (which knows this and doesn't want to pay for these treatments because of this) needs to know about this scam. I know some people get sober after undergoing these treatments. However, this doesn't mean they got sober because of the treatments. That's the problem. People don't understand what I just said. It has to be shown that the reason the person got sober is because of the treatment, not just by chance. Specific controls, never used by addiction treatment researchers, are not used in these treatment trials. Therefore, these treatment trials are invalid science. There has yet to be a valid treatment trial using these necessary controls that show any known addiction treatments works as they are said to work. This has been true for 50 years. The has always been told, "treatment works," but who is saying this? The treatment industry. Well, what else are they going to say, treatment doesn't work? No, because they're allowed to say whatever they want, unlike drug and devise companies, the public has been lied to for as long as treatment has existed. It's the same for Autism treatment providers. Are they going to say, "treatment doesn't work?" They'd go out of business. Behavioral treatment has no regulation whatsoever except by itself. so, what are they going to say? Treatment doesn't work? No. They're going to lie because they're legally allowed to lie. And, this is what they do. So, should insurance companies have to pay for treatments that are validly proven to work? No. Should premium payers have to pay for treatments that are validly proven to work? No. This is true for Autism for addictions and for any other disease. No? 4/11/09 Re: Gone Baby Gone, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gone_Baby_Gone Gone Baby Gone is a 2007 movie. The cops kidnapped a drug addict's toddler presumably to give the kid a good life away from her irresponsible junkie mother. The soon to be retired black chief of police whose own child was killed in the past is the recipient of the kid. The grandmother hires a would-be private eye from the neighborhood to find the little girl. He goes on the search but there is a massive conspiracy (the whole movie we think the cops are really trying to help) as we find out in the end of the movie among the cops to interfere with the search (sending him on wild goose chases having to do with various drug related behaviors and drug involved relationships of the GUILTY and irresponsible mother) so the kid can be safely kidnapped and moved out of state when the chief retires, all for the kid's sake. It's all explained in the end. You know, without the drug war and anti-addict bias and discrimination there would be very few available movie plots. These drug war and addiction related movies, even movies sympathetic to addicts, completely misrepresent addicts and addictions, perpetuating and spreading numerous misconceptions that make addicts appear to be every bad thing under the sun, which they aren't. I'm an addict myself and I know a hell of a lot of other good and moral addicts. In fact, these movies make it appear that addicts cause all these bad things while the fact is that the drug war and drug prohibition that actually causes them. Absent the drug war and addict discrimination, addicts are pretty peaceful and good people, as long as they have their drugs, except, of course, for alcohol (a legal drug) addicts (so-called alcoholics), who actually are a menace to society due to the drug alcohol, the only addictive drug that actually by itself causes violence and other massive societal damage. And alcohol is legal - go figure. [One of the kidnappers is the mother's brother and a recovering, cough cough, alcoholic who thinks he's doing good and relapses near the end of the movie] The Swiss PROVE program for heroin addicts proved this conclusively. But, according to the US Government, all the previous drug Czars, and anti-addict groups, supplying addicts with their drugs safely (harm reduction) as well as providing medical care and free non-stigmatized non-coerced treatment is IMMORAL. Even Iran has such a national addiction policy. Thanks to the US government which wastes billions of dollars on the drug war and anti-addict groups such as the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation which wastes hundreds of millions of dollars a year on anti-addict programs, a moral war against addicts, the addiction epidemic and stigma against addicts are perpetuated. http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/31addictionpreventionrevisited/ . Hollywood doesn't spend money producing movies people don't spend money to watch. Thus, the US population likes these drug war and anti-addict movies because they agree with their beliefs about addicts and addictions. Our country has done a very good job stigmatizing addicts, otherwise no one would buy tickets to these movies, even though its officials say they are trying to reduce stigmatization, a big lie. Recovery groups believe these lies. The whole thing is a big mess and is sickening, but I'm the one who is ignored and censored while the liars are running the whole scam, completely supported by all good Americans, and making out like bandits financially. How can the media go along with this lethal lie while censoring me? 4/11/09 Re: Characteristics Of Increased Risk For Compulsive Gambling Linked To Parkinson's Disease Medications, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/02/070212184152.htm "In keeping with our hypothesis, patients with Parkinson's disease who developed pathological gambling when receiving dopamine agonists had a younger age at Parkinson's disease onset, higher novelty-seeking scores, a personal or immediate family history of alcohol use disorders and impaired planning on an impulsivity scale," the authors write. This suggests that an underlying trait may interact with the drugs and make an individual more vulnerable to this adverse effect. It's obvious that this underlying trait is Hypoism, the genetic disease that causes all these pre-existing symptoms as well as all addictions. It's too bad these researchers never heard of Hypoism. I wonder why? http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismhypothesis/: Re: Addiction: Insights From Parkinson's Disease, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/02/090225132341.htm "The phenomenon of addiction induced by dopamine medications can also tell us something about vulnerability to addiction in the general population." Read the article. Again, it's too bad these researchers never heard of Hypoism. I wonder why? 4/10/09 Re: Tackling the Stigma of Mental Illness, http://blogcritics.org/archives/2009/04/10/033615.php I spent my entire life learning how to be and then being the best doctor I could. In fact, I did actually that. I had the highest score on the third part of the national boards (testing all areas of medicine) at the Medical College of Virginia in 1972 among hundreds of other interns and was about 30th in the country on that rigorous test among over 6000 interns. I was invited back year after year to do all my training at MCV, a prestigious medical school, as well. In fact, I always had the best reputation possible as a physician that is until I was discovered in 1986 by the NYS health department to be a hydrocodone (vicodin, hycodan, etc.) addict. Although my practice had always been impeccable with a spotless reputation, never having any complaints (stipulated by the health department) about my very public practice as a board certified Nephrologist at seven local hospitals and medical director of my own dialysis unit, the health and education departments of NYS made me out to be the equivalent to a mass murderer with nothing objective to back that up. As nothing more than being an addict my license was revoked and despite being documented clean for over eight years was denied license restoration for no objective reasons whatsoever. The only “evidence” they had against me was that I denied being dangerous (which was in fact true) and had no remorse for things I didn’t do but could have (which was also true). That was evidence? As an addict to opiates it is automatically assumed I was not only dangerous, negligent, and irresponsible, but willfully dangerous, negligent, and irresponsible despite never actually having done anything dangerous, negligent, and irresponsible. In fact, I was assumed to be mentally ill with that additional stigma as well despite four board certified addiction psychiatrists saying I was fine to resume practice. By claiming I wasn’t dangerous, which was in fact the truth and was well documented, I was told by NYS that that is exactly why I was dangerous (the old catch 22). NYS said I was also dangerous by “not having remorse for things I didn’t do but could have.” Although I didn’t know it at the time, the fact is that for me to have had my license restored I had to admit I was dangerous and had remorse for things I didn’t do but could have. No other doctors have to make such admissions, even doctors who had actually hurt and injured patients many times – non-addicted but documented dangerous doctors, that is. In fact, documented dangerous doctors are given slaps on the wrist while documented non-dangerous addicted doctors who get clean have their licenses revoked for life. NYS claimed this was not discrimination. In fact, it was Eliot Spitzer, as Attorney General, who made this argument against me. Well, like you, I wrote a book, Hypoic’s Handbook, about all this, how addicts are stigmatized, discriminated against, and why. My book also discusses the science of addiction causation, science that is completely different from the science stated by board (self) certified addictionologists (bought and paid for by NIDA) and NIDA, the Stigma and discrimination against the mentally ill, including addicts, is all about misconception of mental illness and addiction originally as a sign of the devil or other evil spirits and later self-induced by psychobabble etiology and other pseudoscientific nonsense. In fact, all mental illness occurs for biological and frequently genetic reasons out of the control of those inflicted and is never willful or self-induced. Unless someone is already dangerous there is no evidence that people with mental illness are more prone than otherwise to be dangerous. As you note, the stigma is undeserved, but because brain diseases are feared more than other diseases and are misunderstood biologically they are believed to cause their victims to be dangerous. The ignorant population has no reason to think otherwise. Thus, we have much work to do. Personally, I have been doing this work since 1992 but have been ignored and censored by the addictionology establishment as well as by the media. This work is hard and frustrating but I will never give up. I hope you won’t either. Good Luck. 4/10/09 Re: It's Not Just Genetics, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1813984,00.html?loomia_si=t0:a16:g2:r1:c0.108314:b23746750&xid=Loomia A better name for this article would be, "It's just not science, but we believe it anyway." In fact, there's just no science in this article whatsoever. The entire article is what we call association. "X is associated with Y and therefore X causes Y." This kind of false reasoning has been done with a wide variety of issues and not only is it wrong, but it hides the real truth because people stop looking for the real truth. Everyday we can find an association study that claims to be causation such as something like this, "Vitamin E intake in heart attack victims was found to be significantly lower than in similar people who don't have heart attacks. Therefore, Vitamin E prevents heart attacks." These kinds of studies appear everyday in so-called medical journals. They appear on page one and get retracted on page 34. This is what happened recently with vaccines and autism. It happened with smoking and cocaine addiction, and marijuana smoking and heroin addiction, the so-called gateway theory of addictions. Read this one: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/24smokingasgatewaydrugidontthinkso/ . It is true that future cocaine addicts were more likely to have smoked cigarettes as kids than non-cocaine addicts, and the same for heroin addicts having smoked marijuana. But, do these associations mean that one caused the other as most people still believe? Well, the gateway theory has been tested and shown to be invalid, wrong. http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/gatewaytheoryfinallydisproven/ . What they found instead was that the most likely explanation for the associations was that there was a common genetic trait underlying the cause of both cigarette smoking and cocaine addiction, and marijuana smoking and heroin addiction. This trait (which I think is the genetic disease called Hypoism) is what causes both, not one drug use causing the other. Similarly for the belief that "availability" of a particular drug in the environment is the cause for the addiction to that drug. Again, this theory was studied and shown to be invalid, wrong: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/139socalledavailabilitydebunkedascontributorofaddictions/ . Now, you ask anyone about these two theories and they will tell you they are correct, just like the vitamin E one and thousands of other similar kinds of association studies done by "researchers" with secret conflicts of interest. They believe they are still correct because the public never gets told about the valid studies that have debunked the original bad science. The debunking science has been censored from the public. The same with today's article. Look under the stone and you'll find money or religion or something similar. Why would the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation, as in today's article, advocate for theories of various addictions, whether its obesity or drug addictions, that are demonstrably wrong and damaging to people with these addictions? I've written about this before but they have never admitted to the actual answer. They just ignore me. My guess is that it has to do with their belief in the moral (religious) paradigm of addictions, that addicts have personal responsibility for causing their addictions, that addictions are caused by willful decisions, lack of self-control, immorality, the same as that propounded by NIDA and the US government that supports NIDA. Thus, they are against the genetic cause of addictions, including obesity as in today's article, and they push pseudoscience (non-science, nonsense) on the public that supports their moral and damaging paradigm. Read: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/15replacingalanleshneristheonlywaytoendthedrugwar/ and http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/31addictionpreventionrevisited/ . In fact, the drug war is philosophically based on these kinds of unscientific beliefs, availability and gateway theories, and the moral basis for criminalization of addiction, all summed up in the hijacked brain hypothesis of NIDA, a proven wrong theory I've been writing against for many years. http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismhypothesis/ . In fact, all three of these theories have been proven wrong. Of course, the public doesn't know about any of this. It's all been censored. Now, why does Time magazine jump on this same bandwagon and do this non-scientific and biased irrational article against genetic obesity (already scientifically proven to be genetic) and for the moral paradigm? Well, answer this question too while you're at it, why was Nora Volkow (chief of NIDA) made one of the hundred most influential people in the world last year in Time magazine, when in reality she and her hijacked brain hypothesis has done more to hurt addicts than anything and anyone else I know of? Someone please answer these questions with real facts, science, not opinions. 4/9/09 Re: For the Overweight, Bad Advice by the Spoonful, http://health.nytimes.com/ref/health/healthguide/esn-obesity-ess.html Really? Is that all? The article states, "In brief: Weight control is not simply a matter of willpower. Genes help determine the body's "set point," which is defended by the brain. Dieting alone is rarely successful, and relapse rates are high." This is the "brain thermostat" concept. As I define the word addiction in my Hypoism paradigm, "the use of an addictor to change how one feels, against one's will," obesity is an addiction. The cause of addictions, all hundred or so of them, to drugs and instinctive behaviors, is the disease I named Hypoism in 1992. This original paper has evolved into this paper, http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismhypothesis/ , and my book, Hypoic's Handbook. This genetic disease including the "thermostat" concept is defined and discussed in my 1996 book and many of my web articles. One article in particular, a short one, is called "Hypoism in a nut shell." http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoisminanutshell/ It says, "The part of the brain that causes addictions is quite similar to an oil burner thermostat set so high by inherited low (hypo) activity genetic alleles that it, as the on-off switch for the decision-making apparatus, is always ON." This is true for obesity as it is true for all other addictions to addictors, drugs and other instinctive behaviors. Moreover, from this article, "Lastly, this entire system (both the above paragraphs are required for addiction and have been proven to be the case) is on automatic and is outside the control of the owner of the thermostat." In other words, "against one's will." Now, I wrote these sentences many years ago. They were derived from science existing at that time, not just speculation. These concepts were used in my book and web papers. These concepts were used in letters to editors I repeatedly sent to the Times (many of these letters dating back to 1995 are on my web site) and other media outlets. Though valid and true, not only were they ignored and censored then, they continue to be ignored and censored now even though I was 17 years ahead of today's article saying the same things. Moreover, I was 17 years ahead of today's article when I defined the entire Hypoism paradigm in my original paper called "Hypoism - A Real Disease," which includes not only the cause of addictions, the genetic thermostat, (including obesity) but the methods for prevention and recovery of addictions as well, methods that have yet to be realized or used by the public or the addiction establishment. In fact, the Hypoism paradigm continues to be ignored and censored by the media and the addiction "experts" including the NY Times Science and Health departments which includes Gina Kolata. I sent my book, Hypoic's Handbook, to the Times (Corcoran) in 1998 for review. He wrote back to me, without ever reading it, "It's not for us." He refused to explain to me what that meant. Now, here is Kolata writing about ideas from my book about which I wrote the Times about for the last 17 years but she and her colleagues continue to ignore and censor my writings in favor of their own, still ignoring and censoring my paradigm that is based on real and valid science that could have ended the addiction epidemic long ago. This behavior by the Times is motivated by BIAS and is BIASED AND MURDEROUS CENSORSHIP. Addicts are dying by the millions for the lack of knowing about Hypoism. This is a journalistic sin of the highest magnitude. The story of this fourteen year long censorship must be told, explained, and apologized for. Addicts and their families must be told the whole story about this unconscionable behavior that has kept from them the solution to all their addiction problems, many of them lethal. This censorship must end now. 4/9/09 Re: Fixation: Is Oprah Pushing 'Spiritual Crack'?, http://blogs.abcnews.com/quickfix/dan_harris/index.html I swear, is ignorance bliss or is bliss ignorance? Is this guy, Dan Harris, just deaf and blind or just stupid? Well, I should be kinder to him though that's hard for me to do after all my work and letters to the media over the last 15 years trying to educate the public and the media about stuff like this. In short, his video asks some religion expert if Oprah's "spirituality" message is from the devil? Sounds like the dark ages, huh? Let me ask this question a little differently. Is heroin from the devil? or alcohol? or gambling? or sex? or superstition? or overeating? or starving (anorexia)? or the rest of the hundred or so addictors? Harris doesn't know something I've been writing about for 15 years, ever since I discovered Hypoism, that Oprah really is a drug, exactly as he suspects. Her clan is a massive group of addicts. She is the "guru," the drug, and they are the followers, the addicts. This is all about an addiction no one knows about or understands, people addiction, an addiction to one of the strongest human instincts, the attachment instinct, that releases the same neurotransmitters in the same parts of the brain as heroin, crack, and the rest of the addictors. What the heck do you all think is going on between Oprah and her clan? Do you think Oprah is the Einstein of TV land and the audience is going to school? No, she's the Heroin of TV land, or, if you like, TV crack, whatever, and they are addicted. Dan Harris knows nothing about people addiction, an addiction older and more powerful than alcohol, religion, heroin, or crack, and is the most common addiction the world knows nothing about. My book on the disease that causes all addictions including people addiction, Hypoic's Handbook, a book Oprah's people interviewed me about many years ago but ended the interview as soon as they realized my book debunked her entire scam, a scam Oprah doesn't even realize she's running on the world, and would put an end to her reign as the most addictive person on earth, discusses people addiction at great length. Addiction is unconscious. In people addiction it's unconscious from both sides, the drug (the guru) side and the addict (the audience) side. Oprah doesn't really consciously know what she's doing vis a vis being a drug and neither does the audience, those addicted to her. Having the right genetics, it all comes perfectly natural to her and to them. This is the same for all addicts and all addictions. That's why addiction only occurs in certain people, is such a mess, and so difficult to conquer. The whole thing is genetic, inexorable, powerful, and unconscious even though it appears to be just the opposite. Anyway, to make a long story short, read my book and learn about the genetic brain disease that causes all addictions including people addiction. Learn about the free of charge and drug free prevention and recovery methods that will end the addiction epidemic as well as the drug war, a policy also the result of the wrong addiction paradigm pushed on us by the fraudulent addictionology establishment. Addiction is not what addictionologists say it is. In fact, it's just the opposite. This is why addictions are so out of control today. It's not because addicts are so recalcitrant. It's because the experts are completely wrong about what causes addictions and why, and what to do about them. Of course, they (and Oprah) don't want the public to know about all this because once that happens their scams, schemes, fraudulent businesses and policies are ended. They're all out of work and will have to find real jobs. Addicts will get into recovery in droves and real prevention methods in hypoic kids (before addiction has a chance to start) will reverse the addiction epidemic. As a sidebar, because domestic violence is part of (a consequence of) people addiction, domestic violence will also become a thing of the past. There are many unknown and unthought of implications of the correct addiction causation theory the public knows nothing about. Let the public know about this. I think they will be very interested. 4/8/09 Re: Landmark IOM Report Paves Road to Prevention, http://pn.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/44/7/1 Preventing Mental, Emotional, and Behavioral Disorders Among Young People: Progress and Possibilities, http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=12480Under prevention of substance abuse, from page 204, the book states, "Stice and Shaw (2004) similarly point to the need for improved methodological rigor and theoretical rationale in order to progress from promising to conclusive interventions." In ordinary English this means there is no valid research evidence that any form of current prevention actually prevents any studied addiction, the main issue. All the things their prevention methods follow and say they altered such as "drug use in the past month" are not equivalent to whether addiction is itself prevented in the long haul. It assumes, for example, that if drug use is curtailed in the short-term that short and long-term addiction would similarly be reduced. First, they have no evidence for this because they never measure long-term addiction, and, second, I doubt the validity of the assumption because they never use equivalent control groups. Reducing drug use may well occur in real life with their methods, but if it is reduced in people who are never going to become addicted, what difference does it make? None. The fact is that the large majority of people who use drugs (or any other addictor) never get addicted. Reducing use in this population is irrelevant. So, use is not equal to addiction as they profess in their article and evaluation of the studies. Moreover, they never use forensic urines, only self-reporting. This method of determining drug use, the method used in essentially all drug use follow-up studies, is a joke. In conclusion, the whole field of addiction prevention is invalid as Stice and Shaw, politely point out. The reason for this is that the addiction causation paradigm they use, the hijacked brain hypothesis HBH), which says, "If you use an addictive drug you're going to get addicted because it's the drug that causes the addiction, not something unique to the particular individual." This theory also known as the plasticity theory is categorically wrong and has been proven wrong in many ways over the last 20 years. As I've written and shown in my book and web site papers, especially http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismhypothesis/ , the whole field of addiction has been warped by the biased and conflicted HBH. This includes the field of addiction prevention. The fact is that addiction only occurs in 10-15% subgroup of humans who happen to have the right genetics to cause and allow them to get addicted. This genetic paradigm I call Hypoism for good reasons. It is this group of people who need the correct intervention, prevention methodology, not everybody as the HBH says. And the right prevention method is derived from the same theory as that that causes addictions. WRONG THEORY - WRONG POLICIES. This, of course, only makes sense. It's just like any other medical disease - prevention and treatment come from the correct theory, not from the vacuum of ignorance and chance as today's methodologies have been derived. This is why there has been no gains made in the field of addictions over the last hundred years. WRONG THEORY. Getting correct policies from a wrong theory is like getting pears from an apple tree. It just doesn't happen. It's just more wasted time, more wasted money, and most importantly, more wasted kids. 4/7/09 Re: Psychologist to Discuss Developmental Pathways that Lead to Addiction, http://www.buffalo.edu/news/10036 This lecture will set back the clock on addiction science a hundred years. But that's the whole point isn't it? 4/7/09 Re: The End of Philosophy , http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/07/opinion/07Brooks.html?hpw Brooks is very behind the curve. He thinks he's smart and in front of the curve but when one doesn't read the feedback one stays deluded. Somehow he got a job with the Times, a happening that says much about the Times - it too thinks way too highly of itself and ignores and censors feedback that might enlighten it. Philosophy like religion is long dead. It just doesn't know it. It was fun while it lasted. As Brooks has recently discovered these issues, philosophy and religion, are parts of built-in instincts run by unconscious and irrational brain machines, not by willful and rational thinking or intelligence. Brooks somehow learned that morality is built into the genome, much like hundreds of other instincts. What he clearly doesn't know is that there is a brain machine, also built into the genome, that regulates instincts. Another thing he doesn't know is that there are two major subinstincts within the morality instinct - the agonic and the hedonic instincts. These are discussed in the very interesting book, Evolutionary Psychiatry - A New Beginning, Anthony Stevens and John Price published 16 years ago! These are also discussed in my 13 year old book on addiction theory, Hypoic's Handbook. Thus, these concepts are not new as Brooks thinks. What's new is that the Times is publishing articles about such ideas and their brain mechanisms despite having refused to read my book which is based on these concepts, the only book that makes sense out of addictions being derived from these brain mechanisms, something everybody needs to know about but doesn't. It's too bad the Times has ignored and censored my writings about these concepts because if they had reviewed my book addictions (and many other things like instincts) would be understood today rather than remaining misunderstood. Another thing about all this is that the brain machine that regulates the use of instincts such as morality is itself regulated by certain genes and that these regulatory genes are not all the same in all people. There have been many mutations of these genes over evolutionary time resulting in multiple "alleles" (different genetic forms and therefore different functionality) of these genes, meaning that within the population of humans on earth the instinct regulatory mechanism is not the same in all people. Thus, under the same conditions different people react to stimuli (the environment) differently; they use their inborn instincts differently according to the differential functionality of their regulatory genes. One of my papers discusses the science behind this: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/thehypoismaddictionhypothesis/ . These genetic differences result in different "philosophies" and different "religions" as responses to the same stimuli (questions), not because of rational intellectual differences but because of unconscious and irrational genetic differences. The same holds for all instincts, hundreds of them. Thus, our basis for understanding human nature and human behavior and their differences among different people has been wrong since day one, similarly for what people like Brooks, self-righteous people, like to call, "individual responsibility," the major issue on the minds of people like Brooks or Limbaugh or Coulter, people that love to blame and punish people for holding different ideas from theirs. These kind of people think they're good at making these kinds of decisions, moral decisions, but in reality they're only good at proselytizing (talking over everyone else) and are totally unaware of where their beliefs originate and the true value of them, which turns out to be nothing, the value of philosophy in general, something that Brooks appreciates for other peoples' philosophies - ha ha. Brook's op-ed is sadly way off-base and replete with misunderstanding of human nature like most of his articles. But the Times likes this view of human nature, so it publishes it to the detriment of mankind. Our understanding of human nature requires a major overhauling. It's not going to be done by Brooks. The real question is, "Can humans handle the truth?" I think not. And, because of this, the "apocalypse" may well be nearer than I'm happy with seeing that half the population (of the world), the political right, is genetically and unconsciously predisposed to annihilate the rest of us. Unless this is scientifically understood, realized, and dealt with, life on earth is tenuous at best. How we deal with addicts is good evidence for this. 4/6/09 The Doctor Drug War Dialogue from Dr. House, M.D., my favorite TV program, episode, "Finding Judas." Tritter is a narcotics cop trying to convict House because of his vicodin addiction by getting one of House's co-workers to rat on him. Cutty is the chief of medicine who can't stand Dr. House (because House doesn't follow the unwritten social rules of good behavior) but knows he is the best doctor she has ever seen, despite his vicodin addiction. The fact is that Dr. House always eventually gets the correct diagnosis, cures the patients if possible, and never has killed or injured a patient, on or off vicodin. Cuddy (C) finds Tritter (T) working in a tiny office in the hospital and she wonders about how far he is taking this, C - "My Head of Oncology had to shut down. My entire staff are afraid to make a move without covering their ass." This dialogue highlights what I call the "Doctor Drug War." Here's what I wrote about the doctor drug war and what it did to me even though there was never a single complaint against my practice of medicine (as stipulated by the health dept. in our written and signed contract) while addicted or any other time. http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/thedoctordrugwarwrongandwastefulp1/ Of course they never documented a single problem with my practice of medicine because I never had a single problem (unlike many non-addicted doctors who never had their licenses revoked. this is documented in the appendix of my book - the differential handling of revoked addicted doctors with a clean practice record vs non-addicted doctors with many patient disasters getting a slap on the wrist.). They merely said so and that was that. My denying this was used as evidence against me, evidence for being dangerous, the opposite of what should have happened!! They never looked at my practice which was exemplary and well respected by the 7 hospitals I practiced in and by my partners and colleagues. You'd think, wouldn't you, that if I were dangerous there would have been a problem somewhere in my very large and very public practice of medicine. Yet, there was none. They discounted all this in favor of the doctor drug war, just like Tritter. 4/5/09 Re: 11 bodies found in Mexico; signs of torture, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30048203/
11 more people, real people, tortured and killed because of the drug war that neither keeps drugs out of the US nor prevents a single addiction. The drug war exists for one reason - because of America's religion that believes drugs are bad. Drugs are bad so innocent people have to die and die and die. The drug war is not about preventing addictions. We know this because it doesn't prevent addictions. Everyone knows that. The drug war which causes these killings is about drugs being bad and because drugs are bad innocent people have to die. Sort of like sacrificial killings for the gods. Too bad god could care less. The drug war causes these killings, not drugs. So, this is what's clear. The drug war kills innocent people. That's all it does. And that's supposed to be good. Is there something wrong with this picture? There is a way to prevent addictions. It's not happening today, but it does exist. Addictions aren't prevented by the drug war, by advertising, by web sites, by slogans like, "parents the anti-drug," by hating drugs, by hating addicts, by believing drugs are bad, by arresting drug lords, by praying, by making drugs illegal, by putting addicts in jail, by ruining addicts' families, by ruining addicts' lives, by building walls, by AA, or by anything NIDA or the White House Antidrug campaigns do. We know this since the 70's - 40 years already. The same theory, the hijacked brain hypothesis (HBH), the same results. Zip. But we continue believing the theory and the policies. Quoting from A Few Good Men, "That's galactically stupid." I've been writing about a way to prevent addictions since 1992. This method is derived from a theory diametrically opposite from the HBH called Hypoism, the genetic theory of addictions. Too bad it's been censored and ignored. People hate this theory because they believe it lets addicts off the moral hook as well as removing god from addiction recovery. Well, that is correct. It does do this. People don't want these things. People like addictions being a moral issue even though science says it isn't. It's as genetic as breast cancer. I don't think breast cancer is a moral issue, right? People don't like that. People want addicts to have to be redeemed, reformed, and reborn, and if not, severely punished, even though science says that this is wrong and doesn't work and it clearly doesn't prevent addictions. We know only too well that people hate science because it interferes with our fun. Boo Hoo. Today's moral addiction paradigm gives us 0% prevention and 5% long-term recovery, the same as it's always been, by chance, by nothing. So, today's paradigm, promoted by NIDA and ASAM, the US government highly selected and biased scientists and the addiction medical establishment, gives us the drug war which as we showed only kills good people, and 0% prevention and 5% recovery. And that's what we all believe in and fight to the death to maintain. By the way, the addiction treatment industry LOVES this paradigm because it keeps their offices and facilities filled and their bogus medications prescribed like water in the desert. Money, money, money. In fact, the whole addiction gemish which I call the PIMMPAL complex (read my book to find out what this is - sort of like the military-industrial complex vis a vis Viet Nam) LOVES this paradigm because it leaves addictions untouched. In fact, everyone involved with addictions and addicts does very well except for addicts and their families. Ha Ha. That's the moral paradigm the world wants to keep from Hypoism. So, what's the solution to all this death and destruction caused by the moral paradigm? In one word, Hypoism. I've explained this disease and its scientific basis, prevention and recovery methods too many times already. No one reads my emails, but they are on my web site. You can read them there. You can also read my papers on my web site free. Lastly, you can read my book, Hypoic's Handbook, which goes through all this in detail. Hypoism will prevent addictions. It will treat addictions essentially for free that get past the prevention methods, and it will end the reign of the drug cartels because they will go out of business. Hypoism allows good people to live and makes bad people have to go get a real job. Hypoism will save Mexico for the tourists and close most of the jails which now hold a million addicts for safe keeping. Hypoism will save hundreds of billions of wasted dollars a year for just the US. More tax payer money for the banks to blow in Vegas. Or, we can censor Hypoism and keep doing the same galactically stupid stuff. 4/4/09 Re: Vaccine Denial = Scientific Illiteracy, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jacob-dickerman/vaccine-denial-scientific_b_180026.html
The article states, "Because for them, it will always be the fault of the vaccines. It doesn't matter what the science says, because these people don't care about science. Their argument is purely ideological, and does not belong in any discussion of scientific, medical, or political policy." Now, you can take this quote and exchange the words "of the vaccines" with "of the voluntary decisions of addicts," and the quote holds for the addiction mess as it does for the autism mess. In fact, I've been writing about the ideological biases of the current addiction theory controversy since 1992 and the fact that the science of addiction causation does not match the current theory of addiction causation, the hijacked brain hypothesis (HBH). and who are the people perpetuating the deliberate ideological misinterpretation of the science of addiction causation? NIDA, ASAM, the addiction treatment industry, psychiatry, and the 12-step movement, all those with financial, moral, religious, and political conflicts of interests based on the moral (volitional) paradigm of addiction causation. My paper debunking their paradigm is at: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismhypothesis/ . I've made this argument a million times and have sent similar letters to medical journals, newspapers, magazines, TV news shows, other media outlets (including the huffington post), and addiction advocacy groups such as The Robert Woods Johnson Foundation who spends hundreds of millions a year on addiction research and policies. Never have I received a response asking for more information or any interest in the scientific issues, the scientific debate. The only responses I ever received were from the NY Times and Newsday saying, "It's not for us," and "It's hokey," respectively. I know neither of these responders ever read my book or papers or anything else about Hypoism. Their responses were wholly ideologically biased and based on scientific illiteracy, just as today's article discusses. The only addiction expert who has ever read my book (he is the only addiction expert I know of to read my book) and responded to my emails is Eliot L. Gardner, M.D., PhD, NIDA/IRP. His response to me after reading the book was, "I think you know (from previous exchanges between us) that I have been - and continue to be - receptive to your concept. I think it has much merit, as I have said previously." I have this email and many others from him. We were going to write a paper on Hypoism together but he eventually opted out of this endeavor due to his fear of losing his job at NIDA. The addiction crisis in all its aspects is caused and maintained by the ideology of addiction beliefs not the absence of good science, the science I write about, the science that has all the answers for ending the addiction epidemic but which is deliberately misinterpreted to the public by those controlling the field, those listed above, for conflicted interests. I've written about this many times in the past. One of my papers on this, written 9 years ago, is: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/15replacingalanleshneristheonlywaytoendthedrugwar/ . This paper still holds true today under the new administration at NIDA for the same exact reasons. None of this is known by the public. In fact, the public is unaware that there even is a controversy in addiction theory nor its extensive ramifications. 4/4/09 Re: My Fantasy Relapse, http://proof.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/03/my-fantasy-relapse/
Fantasy relapse is the correct title. Scoblic’s entire concept of relapse is wrong. From what I can see, I’m sure his entire concept of addiction is wrong too. And this nonsense gets published in the Times as if it were real, warping the reader’s beliefs about addictions and their consequences and maintaining the stigmatizing and discriminatory attitudes of the public about addicts. In fact, the entire Proof series is a complete misinterpretation of the reality of addiction which has nothing to do with opinions of addicts but instead real pathophysiology of the human brain that addicts, including AA, know nothing about. As much as addiction appears to be a conscious and willful behavior the whole business is unconscious and against the will of the addict. Relapse is similarly unconscious and not caused by any conscious wishes, beliefs, or desires – or fantasies. There’s an unconscious genetic disease which I named Hypoism in 1992 underlying all addictions and all addictive behavior including relapse. Recovery needs to be based on this scientific reality. Absent this there is high likelihood of bad recovery and frequent relapses many times seemingly out of the blue for no apparent reason whatsoever. This is why recovery today is so rare and so tenuous, and relapse is so common. Addicts are sitting ducks to a disease they don’t know they have and don’t know what to do about it even though they believe, because of the AA dogma, they do. Scoblic is living in a fantasy recovery but his relapse will be very real if it sadly happens. This comment is written to help prevent that from happening for him and all other addicts and addicts-to-be. 4/2/09 Re: As Mexico battles cartels, army becomes law, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30003426// The article states, "The president, a Catholic with three young children, is known to have a sense of moral anger against the corrupting influence of drugs in Mexico, where consumption is a growing problem." Now, didn't I say that the other day, that the drug war is a moral crusade? Didn't I explain why this is wrong and a mistake? So, why is this still a valid belief? Ha Ha. No one reads my emails? Ha Ha. I guess dying for a moral purpose is good even if it's wrong. Sounds like someone in Pakistan we know. Ha Ha. Re: Drug Czar Nominee: Renewed Focus on Prevention, http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Story?id=7233062&page=1
OK. So, how does he propose to prevent addictions? I didn't see the answer. Just by saying so? I didn't notice the word Hypoism in this article. This guy knows nothing and will do nothing. Addictions will continue as is under the auspices of his "radically new (paradigm) philosophy." Less people in jail is a good thing, but this will have no effect on addiction, the real issue. As Smokey the bear says, "Only Hypoism can prevent addictions."
Re: Why Love Can Turn Violent, http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1888534,00.html
The article states, "Why did you choose to reveal your secret now? Similar to Mommy Wars, this memoir allowed me to dig deeply into a very personal issue. It allowed me to answer a series of why's and find out things for myself. Honestly, I really wanted to understand why I had been vulnerable to a man like my first husband and why I had ignored so many red flags. It's an incredible thing to take something bad that happened to you and turn it into something good. Writing Crazy Love was that for me." What crap!!! As Cramer says, "She knows nothing, nothing!!!" The problem is, no one wants to know anything. They just want to be entertained. Well, this is entertainment. Ha.
This lady makes her living writing. Her publisher makes its living publishing. Why should this book be reviewed or bought? Because its being advertised as having answers to the "why" of domestic violence, a good thing to know. Too bad there are no answers in this book. This lady has no idea what domestic violence is no less how to help anyone with it, but she says she does nonetheless. And Time magazine could care less. Why would people believe her? Because she gets a review in Time magazine, a "reputable" mag. Geez!!! The only good thing about this book is the money she'll make from it. This goes with the old adage, "Bullshit sells." As long as it's written and advertised well. Ha Ha.
The funny thing is that if she thought at all about the connections in her life, anorexia, drug addiction, spousal abuse (three hypoism symptoms), she might have made a statement. But she ignores this connection that she's a hypoic, and that domestic violence is part of Hypoism, as my book, Hypoic's Handbook, shows (as well as giving a solution for it). She doesn't know this because she was too busy writing her book to look into the reality of domestic violence and how her disease, Hypoism, is the central issue in her life and the cause of her "domestic violence." I'm sure she knows nothing about Hypoism and doesn't want to know. Neither does Time Magazine. Neither do all the people adversely affected by domestic violence. They just want to tell their stories and be victims. Well, have fun. 4/1/09 (and i'm not fooling) Re: Rage Against the Art Gene, http://www.newsweek.com/id/191399
The amazing thing is not that humans and their hundreds of instincts evolved, although this is quite amazing. The amazing thing is that humans are still around being as stupid as they demonstrate themselves to be whenever given the opportunity. Today's article is an example of this. It was clearly written without any thought whatsoever, typical of today's media. Art is not an instinct. It is derived from an instinct. Thinking, and I use this word loosely, art is an instinct is the same as thinking a blowjob is an instinct. Art, like blowjobs etc., are parts of larger instincts. Blowjobs, which have no demonstrable survival value irrespective of what fancy stories people invent about them having survival value, belong to the sex/reproduction instinct, which pretty obviously has survival value. Art may appear to have no survival value and one needs to invent ludicrous "stories" to make appear it does, but if one thinks a little, something neither the author nor those interviewed for this article show any evidence of having done, one realizes that art is not an instinct but part of an overriding and grand instinct which I call the Superstition Instinct, an instinct that has great survival value for homo sapiens. The superstition instinct was the difference between homo sapiens and Neanderthals that allowed us to survive while they didn't, even though they had already been around for 250,000 years before they disappeared, leaving the earth for us to screw up if we're not careful. In fact, the superstition instinct is more important than sex as evidenced by the Neanderthals having sex but were still unable to survive in the long run for the lack of the superstition instinct.
Instincts are not behaviors. They are cognitive mechanisms. Out of these mechanisms are derived all our complex behaviors, seemingly endless, which, of course, they are. That's one thing the article doesn't comprehend. Another is how using an instinct causes pleasure, something mentioned in the article but not explained. The simple answer is that all instincts are hooked up to the reward cascade, the pleasure center in the brain, releasing dopamine and all good (and bad) that does to various parts of the brain, etc. Absent this, no one would use an instinct, no less use it twice. So, understanding this hook up is quite important. Lastly, the superstition instinct, the greatest instinct we have, is a cognitive mechanism that ASKS THE QUESTION, WHY? AND COMPELS THE HOMO SAPIEN TO ANSWER IT ONE WAY OR ANOTHER. It is made up of three major parts, 1) superstition (irrational imagination and belief), 2) logic and science (rational discipline), and 3) art (creativity). All this appeared simultaneously about 100,000 years ago in one fell swoop. As the story goes, "And god created man in his image." Ha Ha. So, art is part of the superstition instinct. It is one way to answer the question WHY? It turns out this is one hell of an instinct, no? There's more.
The whole explanation of this instinct is discussed in my little article called The Superstition Instinct here: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/10thesuperstitioninstinct3100/ I don't have any need to make up stories about why this instinct is adaptive. It just is, like it or not. Once one thinks about this particular instinct, a whole world opens up that this article and its experts haven't thought of. One other thing - The Instinct Regulating Apparatus (the decision-making mechanism). A few words about this can be found at: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/thehypoismaddictionhypothesis/ where I also show how genetic diversity of this brain mechanism also causes all addictions as an unintended consequence of evolution, a little sidebar. My book on all this is called Hypoic's Handbook, a book rejected by the Times with, "It's not for us," quoting David Corcoran, science editor, and a lot of other places, for review in 1998.
I think that if people read this stuff and think about it and its consequences, we might find a lot of answers to a lot of other questions that, hopefully, will save us from destroying all addicts and their families as well as the whole earth in one fell swoop. Understanding human nature the way it really is is the only way to save us from destroying the earth and all its life forms. So, it's time to read and it's time to think for a change. 3/31/09 Re: "Mr. Brooks", http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/review/2007/06/01/mr_brooks/
The review (6/1/07) states, "Beneath its drab veil of self-seriousness, "Mr. Brooks" is nothing but just plain silly." I disagree. Without realizing it, the movie makers describe Hypoism to a T. Too bad no one got that. But how could they? No one knows about Hypoism. The screenwriters unconsciously knew about it, however. They depicted Hypoism very well. Too bad they had to pick such a heinous addiction with which to depict it. Well, any other addiction would have been too mundane. Who wants to see a movie about a family of alcoholics or drug addicts? That's just too boring because it's so common.
I don't go to the movies anymore, so I had to wait for this one to make it to cable last night. But, what a surprise. Hypoism in action. A guy addicted to murdering humans (instinctive) passing on the addiction, no less, to his daughter (genetic). Too bad he didn't have more kids or even identical twins to make this point better. Maybe his daughter will be more prolific. But the movie made the necessary points very well - humans get addicted to behaviors that "turn them on" (instincts raise dopamine) and the addiction is genetic. Luckily not everyone gets addicted to murder, only a few lucky people like Mr. Brooks and his daughter, hypoics (special people with genetic low dopamine activity especially raised, in this rare case, by killing other humans). Of course, because there's no Hypoics Not Anonymous meetings he had to go to AA to deal with this addiction, just like today. Like so many others with addictions, attending these meetings didn't help him get "sober," otherwise there wouldn't have been a movie. Fiction is more real than reality. One interesting twist was that the addiction was represented by "an invisible friend" who had complete control over Mr. Brooks' murderous behavior - sort of like Dick Cheney (Bush's Brain) and George W. Bush. Otherwise, Mr. Brooks was the "Man of the Year" (with a perfect relationship with a gorgeous unsuspecting wife and lucrative job owning two things people can't do without - cemeteries and water.) This is the AA concept of angel on one shoulder and devil on the other. Whom to listen to is the question? Well, we find out, don't we? Despite all his praying and diligently repeating AA slogans Mr. Brooks succumbs to his addiction without any evidence of them slowing him down. (That's why in Hypoism recovery we need a real human sponsor to whom we completely surrender our decision-making.) The addiction wins. There will be more killing, both by him and his daughter who, by the way, is pregnant with the next generation of addicts. I think that would be a good sequel. Too bad no one knows about Hypoism. They might have understood this movie (and real life) better so they might improve their thinking and policy-making about addictions. But, who wants to when addictions are so entertaining? 3/31/09 Re: U.S. to send more drug agents to Afghanistan, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29961711/
It's amazing how predictable our government is. I mentioned Afghanistan in my last letter about the drug war in Mexico. Now, here it is, as if we didn't have enough trouble in Mexico, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, N. Korea, Columbia, Bolivia, Central America, etc. etc. etc. We're sending 80 DEA agents to Afghanistan to end the heroin trade. I'm sure that will do it. There are some quotes I love that relate to this madness and stupidity: There is no nonsense so arrant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate government action. ----Bertrand Russell, "An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish" Hain't we got all the fools in town on our side? And hain't that a big enough majority in any town? ---Mark Twain, Huckelberry Finn To declare that in the administration of criminal law the end justifies the means—to declare that the Government may commit crimes in order to secure conviction of a private criminal—would bring terrible retribution. —Justice Louis D. Brandeis, 1928 Dissent, Olmstead v. No oppression is so heavy or lasting as that which is inflicted by the perversion and exorbitance of legal authority. —Joseph Addison Interesting Anecdotes, Memoirs, Allegories, Essays, and Political Fragments, 1794 If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable. —Louis D. Brandeis I know no method to secure the repeal of bad or obnoxious laws so effectual as their strict construction. Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true. ----Demosthenes At the core of all well-founded belief, lies belief that is unfounded. ----Ludwig Wittgenstein The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind. ----H. L. Mencken That which has been believed by everyone, always and everywhere, has every chance of being false. ----Paul Valéry The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible. ----Bertrand Russell, Marriage and Morals 3/29/09 Re: Is It Really About Alcohol? The Truth About Alcohol Abuse In Women , http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/143896.php
Finally, we have the truth, after all these years of lies. Here it is. Ready? The truth, for real. "Alcohol dependency is shrouded by many myths, one of which is that a person chooses to be an alcoholic. Many times, friends and family members think the person should be able to exert self-control, when in fact, the emotional breakage existing within the person has made it unbearable for them to live without their dependency on alcohol. Brookhaven Retreat's philosophy is that each person must receive individualized attention, administered by highly-trained staff in order to facilitate long-term recovery. This recovery grows from an introspective journey to define the emotional breakage, followed by the development of life skills that allow lasting maintenance of emotional wellness." There's the truth in a nutshell. That's their theory. Emotional breakage causes women to drink and drinking causes addiction. So, all they need is a few weeks in the mountains having their breakages fixed and having fun and they're cured. It's not about alcohol or addiction. It's about emotional breakage. This is the truth, finally. And, how do these emotional breakages get fixed? Let's go to the Brookhaven Retreat web site (a very pretty one by the way) and review their methods for this: "Every individual that walks through our doors receives a unique formula designed to address the areas that need the most attention. While the basis of the program is clinically proven and research-based, we incorporate a variety of recreational therapy components such as gardening, arts and crafts, exercise of varying kinds, walking, hiking, bicycling, equine therapy and horse activities, and more to help women learn to enjoy life again. Our wide variety of services include:
Brookhaven Retreat offers treatment for a variety of dependencies and addictions including:
Now, I looked through the web site and couldn't find where these "holistic" treatments that, "help women learn to enjoy life again," were "clinically proven and research-based." In fact, I couldn't find any science, theoretical, medical or clinical, on the web site whatsoever showing these "activities" fix "emotional breakage," or any of the above listed addictions, or anything else. In other words, this place is the same scam as all the other treatment rehabs around the country, none of which has ever been clinically proven more effective than chance. Yet, here it all is, advertised as the truth about alcohol abuse in women and the cure. (I guess alcohol abuse in men is different. Maybe not. Who knows?) Too bad there's no addiction prevention whatsoever in this theory. How do you prevent "emotional breakage?" And we wonder why we keep doing the same things and get no different results. Or, maybe we don't. Hmmm. This article about this rehab is just one small part of the reason. The addiction field is based on nonsense and more nonsense. That's the truth. They know nothing about addiction yet they're fully accredited and certified! (whatever that means) And this is the best there is, at least they think so. Please. 3/27/09 Re: Treat addiction as a disease, MDs tell Victoria, http://www.vancouversun.com/Health/Treat+addiction+disease+tell+Victoria/1429789/story.html
Kelly, all this is new to you. Dr. Lu is correct about how we should treat addicted people, with scientific understanding, love, and compassion rather than disdain. However, he's way behind the curve scientifically for one thing, and has the wrong concept of addiction being "the disease" or "a disease." In fact, addiction is a symptom of a genetic disease, Hypoism. Yes, a new name you never heard of but I've been writing about it for 15 years. Hypoism is the genetic disease and addictions, a hundred of them, are its symptoms along with a few other things. You can learn about this disease at my web site, http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/door/. The major articles there about Hypoism are: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/thehypoismaddictionhypothesis/ and http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismhypothesis/ . My book, Hypoic's Handbook, tells the whole story in detail along with giving the solution (true prevention and recovery) to this massive problem. No drugs or expensive treatments. In fact, it's all free - much like AA except based on science rather than superstition. It's already 17 years old but has been censored by the addiction field because it ruins their hold on addictionology control despite their utter failure to help addicts or improve anything in this area. The experts are deliberately lying to the public about the science behind addictions and censoring Hypoism in order to maintain addictions as a moral issue rather than a medical one even though they call addiction a disease. Their paradigm, the hijacked brain hypothesis, maintains addiction as a moral issue. Dr. Lu is unaware of this. I'm sure he means well but is naive. There's a lot of stuff on my web site but you may benefit from reading the chapters from my book given free of charge on the web site as well as current letters to the editor about media articles such as yours. You'll see this one there too. There is a solution to the addiction mess but it means the public must be made aware of the theory debate and the actual science behind addictions so they can evaluate Hypoism for themselves. You can be of great service to the public if you merely let them know about Hypoism and its scientific basis and the solutions it can make available to them (all free) if they decide to use it. Read the material and write about it. If you need any help understanding the science or concepts let me know. My phone number is on the web site. 3/27/09 Dr. Molina: Re: MTA at 8 Years: Prospective Follow-up of Children Treated for Combined-Type ADHD in a Multisite Study. In your discussion you say, "Taken together, these 8-year findings point to a crucial need for development of treatments that are efficacious, accessible, and lasting for high school aged youths with ADHD and their parents. The available literature on this topic is small and in need of innovation." You don't know about Hypoism, but ADHD is a subgroup of pediatric Hypoism. My paper, http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismhypothesis/ , discusses this genetic disease in all its aspects. This paper doesn't go into depth about the treatment methods but my book, Hypoic's Handbook, does, in great depth. This treatment begins in early childhood when the diagnosis of Hypoism is made and goes on for the life of the patient. Moreover, it's free because it's done by the recovering people themselves. Here's innovation based on science. The question is whether the experts will use it and allow the hypoics to know about it? 3/27/09 Re: The War on Drugs, http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1887488,00.html
The war on drugs is not about drugs. Drugs and addicts are just getting crucified, that's all. What's new? It's been going on for thousands of years. It's about a moral and religious theory of drug use and addiction. The drug war is a moral crusade. It has always been this way and will always be until the correct theory of drug use and addiction is known. This is no different from any other moral crusade like the war on homosexuality, another issue believed to moral and religious rather than biological.
The "Drug War," will continue as is, a failure and ruination of people, as long as we all believe the current theory of drug use and addiction, the hijacked brain hypothesis, the theory NIDA and ASAM, the experts, which lie about the science of drug use and addiction in such a secretive way as to maintain the biblical theory of addiction as an abomination - a moral failing deserved of contempt and damnation, eternal punishment, and crucifixion, unless, of course you seek redemption and rid yourself of the devil or devils, whatever. But even then, redemption is tenuous. We love to punish bad people. Ha Ha. Once a sinner, always a sinner. We don't want to look at the true science of drug use and addiction even though it exists. The true theory of addictions is called Hypoism. Addiction is no more a character or moral issue than is preferring chocolate over vanilla. It's genetic and purely biological. It happens against the will, not willfully or immorally as the "experts" and other liars insist. You can read about the real theory of addiction causation in my book, Hypoic's Handbook. Or, you can just ignore that and keep the crucifixions going. Up or down, which will it be? 3/27/09 Re: Debate over drugs for ADHD reignites, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/26/AR2009032604018.html
Read the article. It's funny how articles like this one fall out the sky on a daily basis. This article shows how the drug pushers, pharmaceutical companies and scamming biased doctors on their payroll, have lied to the public for ten years or more and now got caught. The experts got caught lying, cheating, and stealing as well as harming kids. This article describes a major scandal and needs to be read by everyone. The liars need to be prosecuted and sent to jail for a long time. Otherwise this will continue to happen. ADHD is part of Hypoism and I've been writing about ADHDer's being scammed for years. Drugs don't help hypoics. Only Hypoism recovery, as described in my book, can, if it is ever allowed to. So, here we have another confirmation and validation of my ignored and censored writings, and the beginnings of the story of how the lies happened. All to make a buck. I can't wait to read the whole story, if it is ever told. 3/27/09 Re: Learning How to Think , http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/26/opinion/26Kristof.html?_r=1&em
The article doesn't tell us how to think. It tells us that believing experts are really experts is a mistake. It never gets around to telling us how to distinguish a designated expert from a fraud, which is the big problem. I make this point in my book on addiction causation, a book that has been ignored and censored because I'm not a recognized expert and my paradigm, Hypoism, is diametrically opposed to the so-called expert's paradigm, the hijacked brain hypothesis (HBH). Thus, there's no reason to read my book or papers because it is obvious that my paradigm can't be correct. In reality, however, reading my stuff is the only way to decide whether it has merit. You don't need to buy my book to do this. I have a free paper on my web site that goes through my entire argument. http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismhypothesis/ And it's completely referenced. And Hiroi's paper, referred to within my paper, confirms my evidence and argument. It either makes scientific sense or it doesn't. If you know how to read and think you can read it yourself. If you don't understand something in it you can call me. I have my phone number and a-mail address right on the web site. We can talk about the evidence. We can debate if necessary. In the 15 years I've had the web site open I've had zero calls or e-mails from media outlets. That's how many journalists are interested in finding the reality. Zero. And that's in the face of my thousands of letters to editors I've written and put on my web site for anyone to read. Expertise is not about the person. It's about the evidence. Why would Eliot L. Gardner, M.D., a world renowned addiction scientist at NIDA who has read my book, write to me, "I think you know (from previous exchanges between us) that I have been - and continue to be - receptive to your concept. I think it has much merit, as I have said previously." That's a quote from an email from him. He said the concept has much merit. I have no letters from any recognized experts saying my concept has no merit. I think that says something about whether my paradigm has any merit. He refers to the concept and its evidence, not whether I'm an expert or not. You don't want to talk to me? Call Dr. Gardner and debate with him. He's at NIDA. But you won't do any of that because when you're caught having censored for 14 years you'll be embarrassed. Boo Hoo. Not a good excuse.
I've written many a letter to the editor about the fallacy of expertise in the field of addictions, a field that was originated by a drunk stockbroker, Bill Wilson, and grew from there. The field and its theory (HBH) hasn't changed one iota since then except it's run by doctors (who certify themselves as experts) rather than stockbrokers. Read the Big Book of AA and compare its theory to that of ASAM or NIDA. It's basically the same theory, the HBH. And simultaneously, the problems we face with addictions haven't improving one iota since then either. In fact, addictions are worse today than ever. How is it possible for all these experts to have had essentially no effect on the problem of addictions if they are actually correct about their theory? And why would the public believe they are experts in the face of this negative evidence? Because they say they are and no one, except me, fact checks. When was the last time you heard a debate on addiction causation? Never. It doesn't happen because the experts will not debate. So, it's up to the public to decide. And how are they supposed to do this when the information they need is censored? They can't.
So, what good does Kristoff's article do for us? None. The Times is the most active censor of my work. I even sent them my book, the book Dr. Gardner says has much merit and the public needs to know about it, but the Times science department, Corcoran, said my book, "Isn't for us." That was it. No explanation. Yet every scientific concept and prediction in the book have been confirmed and validated in many ways since then, eleven years ago. If new ideas have no way to reach the public they are as good as no new idea. They help no one, while millions of addicts die and their families are ruined. And the problems with addictions continue to grow daily under the expert direction of ASAM and NIDA, the experts. 3/26/09 Re: Obama's Other War: Fighting Mexico's Drug Lords, http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1887535,00.html
Fighting the suppliers of drugs to the US is a losing policy. It doesn't reduce the supply of drugs and it causes the kinds of catastrophic damage we see today in Mexico and Columbia. The same for Afghanistan. As long as there's a lucrative market for addictive drugs there will be smart and persistent people supplying them even at great risk. That's a fact. So, the answer to the addiction problem has to be to deal with the demand side of the equation. That's what everyone is saying. What are our policies on this? Criminalization, mandatory treatment, and "just say no" prevention advertising. Have these policies worked to reduce demand? No. So, what do we do? Increase these failed efforts. We're increasing both failed policies. What do we expect to happen? All of a sudden they will start to work just because we want them to more than before? Why not just beg the suppliers to pleeeeease stop? Pretty please? On the other hand, being smart and persistent people ourselves, we could re-evaluate these failed policies. If we ever happen to do this this smart thing we would eventually discover that our only chance of fixing the addiction problem will come from improving our policies on the demand side, the only side we have any control over. Knowing that our current demand reduction policies don't work, which they don't, we might ask why? These policies are criminalization, mandatory treatment, and "just say no" advertising. Criminalization of addiction and drug use has never worked and just makes things worse for the addicts and their families. Cross that off. Mandatory treatment? That might work if and only if the treatment worked. There's no evidence that our current treatment works well enough to quell the demand for drugs. Treatment today is about as effective as chance. Maybe there's a way to improve treatment. Let's look at this in a second. Lastly, there's the prevention of addiction, what we're trying to do with "just say no." Just say no doesn't work. So, cross that off. Is there a better preventative method available that we've not been looking into or just ignoring? This, too, is a possibility. Let's look at better treatment and better prevention methods. What do all our failed demand-side policies have in common? They're all based on a particular theory of drug use and addiction, that drug use and addiction are voluntary immoral behaviors and the drugs change the brain into an addicted brain. Once that happens we have an addict, the whole problem, the demand problem. That's what they call "the disease." This theory is called the hijacked brain hypothesis (HBH) first put down by Leshner in this paper: Leshner A.: Addiction is a Brain Disease, and it Matters, Science; 278, 45-70, 3/25/09 Re: Clinton Admits U.S. Demand Feeds Mexico’s Drug Trade , http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/26/world/americas/26mexico.html?hp Clinton states, “Clearly what we have been doing has not worked,” she said. “It is unfair for our incapacity to have effective polices that will either better interdict drug traffic or lower demand for the illegal drugs, or intercept the weapons, to be creating a situation where people are holding Mexican government and people responsible.” So, why are they continuing to do the same thing? Because they have the wrong theory of drug use and addiction. I've been saying this for 15 years to no avail. So, how is this administration going to learn about the paradigm, Hypoism, and its policies that will end the drug cartels and that will not only increase real prevention but also improve treatment outcomes if my letters continue to get censored? My 1996 book has the solution to the addiction epidemic (prevention and treatment improvements) - reduce demand - and how to close out the drug cartels for lack of business - by reducing demand. Why not learn about them and let the administration know about them, how to implement them, and why they will work? 3/25/09 Re: How Not to Get Misled by Health Statistics, http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1887335,00.html
Read the following paper and then read the two studies it discusses. http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/theaddictiontreatmentfraudfinallyexposed/ There are bias, math errors, conflict of interest, and lying in the original study (project Match - Longabaugh R, Wirtz PW: Substantive Review and Critique. In Project MATCH Hypotheses: Results and Causal Chain Analyses. Edited by: Longabaugh R, Wirtz PW. NIH Publication No. 01-4238, 3/25/09 Re: Talk to the Newsroom: Deputy Science Editor for Health , http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/23/business/media/22askthetimes.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=all Here's a good question for her - How Can New Ideas Break Through? — Arnold Smith, Virginia Q. Why is it so difficult to bring new ideas to the public square? Unless one is already in the limelight, ideas that go beyond conventional wisdom never get past the "delete" tab in the media. Her answer: "How do you open the door for innovation and, at the same time, make sure that any innovation is based on solid science. I can't say I have the answer to this question." There it is. I think your answer is disingenuous. I would think the answer should be, "We read the claim and evaluate it for its scientific standards and merit. Then we investigate the claim. We communicate with the author. We communicate with experts in the field and get back to the innovator with their assessments and our questions. We discuss all this and then, if we feel the information is valid and useful, we do a story." The reason I write you today, Barbara, is that I've been writing the Times about the mess in addictionology and its failures and misrepresentation of the science of addiction causation and its prevention, recovery, and policy implications since 1995. I also provide a replacement paradigm with its scientific basis. All this in the face of the complete failure of the current paradigm, the hijacked brain hypothesis (HBH), to improve efficacy in these areas. I clearly show how the HBH has been debunked and why it fails in all these areas. These letters are on my web site. Not one of them has ever been investigated no less published while there have been countless NY Times articles on the HBH and the "experts" promulgating it and its policies (which don' work). If you're truly interested in medical reporting and giving the public valid information in areas of medicine that are a mess I think you need to investigate my work and do an article on it. I have more than enough credentials and my claims, critiques, and hypothesis are backed by referenced science. Here are two important papers that should get you interested in this arena. http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/thehypoismaddictionhypothesis/ http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismhypothesis/ And then, there's my book, Hypoic's Handbook which goes through all the science (through 1997) and its implications as well as the prevention and treatments methods. This what Eliot L. Gardner, a world renowned addiction psychiatrist said about my writings (He has read my book.) E-mail To Dan Umanoff, M.D.: "I think you know (from previous exchanges between us) that I have been - and continue to be - receptive to your concept. I think it has much merit, as I have said previously." ---ELIOT L. GARDNER, M.D., PhD, NIDA/IRP This email was a prelude to our doing a paper on my hypothesis together, or at least him helping me re-write my second paper (above) in a form acceptable to journals. Another NIDA scientist, Harold Gordon, Ph.D. agreed to fund a treatment study based on this hypothesis if I could find a rehab which would cooperate. I haven't been able to find one, so this research has yet to be done. He said in an email to me, "I am ready to help you or your grant writer when you are ready." This was said after a lengthy debate between us on the HBH vs. Hypoism. The point is that Hypoism is valid scientifically and has drastic prevention, treatment, and public policy implications in a field, addictionology, that is currently running on an invalid paradigm and killing and maiming in various ways millions of addicts. Despite this the NY Times has completely ignored and censored my letters to them about this. No evidence of anyone at the Times having read my letters. No investigation whatsoever. I even sent Corcoran my book which he rejected outright without reading it and refused to discuss it. It's time for the Times to deal with Hypoism. 3/24/09 U.S. rehab centers see bankers driven to drink, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29848616/
This article is a complete misrepresentation of what's happening. for good reason, they interviewed the same idiots. Califano, for example, a lawyer who knows nothing about the science of addictions, has done more to ruin the field of addictions and increase stigma of addiction than anyone except maybe for NIDA. What they call "a disease" is not the disease. Their disease, after the fact addiction, the hijacked brain hypothesis, is a moral issue whereas the real disease, Hypoism, is before the fact and genetic and is not a moral issue. It's their fault there's stigma and discrimination about addictions even though they say there shouldn't be. Their model causes and maintains the stigma.
Then, there's the nonsense about bankers being driven to drink. These guys have always been drinking, coking, and gambling. That's what made them go into this "profession" to begin with. They're hypoics from the get-go. The reason they're going into rehab in larger numbers today, if this is in fact true, is not because they weren't addicted before but because they're decompensating now from the recession and being caught cheating and lying at work. They've always been addicts. Addicts aren't made, they're born.
And these experts? They're all full of it. Their expertise? Ask then to show you their studies that show they are better at getting addicts clean and sober better than chance. They won't do that because they don't have any. They just say they're experts. They're scammers just like their patients are. You think god makes people sober? Ask them to prove it. There's no science behind their treatments or claims. But no one checks on this.
This article is stupid and just maintains the stupidity and nonsense in the addiction field, a field that is one big lie and a bigger mess. Ripping off these addicts with exorbitant fees and claims. Hypoism recovery is free and under the Hypoism paradigm there would be more than enough free rehabs to deal with all addicts, rich and poor, and their kids as well. All free. The addiction field has been a fraud for a hundred years and this has only gotten worse. Moreover, it's made the consequences of addictions worse too. Just read the news. Are things in addictions worse or better? You tell me. 3/22/09 Re: Mind Matters, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/22/books/review/Johnson-t.html?ref=books
It's nice to see someone writing about decision-making because that's all we, as living beings, really do. What's missing here, though, is any mention of the brain mechanism involved in decision-making and where it came from, evolutionarily. Let's get real. All living animals make the same kinds of decisions (instinctive decisions) we do every day and we got our decision-making mechanism from them over hundreds of millions of years of evolutionary improvements. In fact, all non-human decision-making is instinctive and unconscious. Then there is us, homo sapiens, who think we make decisions consciously and deliberately -"god made man in his image." There's something missing here - a lot. Now, my 1996 book on decision-making, Hypoic's Handbook, goes into all this and shows how the unconscious decision-making mechanism is way more powerful and important to human life than the new conscious one, the newest brain mechanism that hasn't had much time for evolution to work on and improve. To use an example from the book review, Bush's decision-making, something he's writing his 7 million dollar book about, was 100% instinctive and unconscious, something Bush has no clue about, making his book absolutely stupid and useless. Bush is a guy who is completely non-intellectual and completely instinctive, 100% unconscious, a situation I call cortico-limbic dissociation. How else could he have a presidential batting average of zero where every one of his decisions were wrong? He has a diseased instinct regulating system and used this brain mechanism to make all his decisions. I'm sure he had a lot of fun doing this despite ruining the country and being totally unaware of it. There's no indication that "How We decide" has any understanding of all this. My book, rejected by the Times for review without them even reading it, explains all this and out of this understanding comes the correct theory of addictions, a decision-making disease caused by specific genetic alterations of the decision-making apparatus, a theory that is backed by tons of science but hated by addiction experts because it proves them all wrong and shows how they have been killing and incarcerating addicts for a hundred years with their conscious and volitional theory of addiction causation, the hijacked brain hypothesis, believing wrongly that decisions about addictor use are conscious and willful. The two theories are diametrically opposite as are their prevention, recovery. and policy making implications. The hijacked brain hypothesis, the one fraudulently pushed on us and supported by the NIH addiction organizations, NIDA, NIAAA, and NIMH, has advocated wrong and ineffective prevention, recovery, and policy methods for as long as they've been in existence because of this. Take a look at their batting averages. Same as Bush's. Zero. All for a good reason. They have no clue as to what causes addictions but are running the country's addiction prevention, recovery, and policies nonetheless. All because they have no idea about the decision-making brain mechanism my book explains. "How We Decide" has none of this.
Too cheap to buy and read my book? Here are two articles about all this you can read for free. They explain everything except the prevention and recovery methods, and policy changes. http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/thehypoismaddictionhypothesis/ http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismhypothesis/
Maybe after reading these articles you'll read the book and finally review it. Its ideas have been confirmed and validated over the last 13 years repeatedly. The Hypoism paradigm will, if known and used by the public, turn around our country's addiction mess and a lot of other things. 3/22/09 Re: Domestic Abuse Myths, http://www.newsweek.com/id/188353
This article is a good example of an author knowing nothing about the subject but coming off as an knowledgable and factually correct expert - directing parents how to teach their kids about "domestic violence" and avoiding 5 myths. The author is authoritative, convinced, directive, literally factual, and definitive. The funny thing is she's wrong about everything she says in the article. The reason she's wrong about everything is that she hasn't spent any time thinking about what she wrote or what her personal observations mean. The entire article is a knee jerk response to what she has observed and her biases about those observations. The only problem is that they make no sense, just as the bias that the sun goes around the earth is so obvious by just watching the sun day after day. Anyone can see it this way. The earth is sitting still and the sun move around it. Who could think otherwise? Well, we know differently, don't we?
The same is true for addictions. Just watch any addict. They consciously and willfully use their addictors with free will. Addicts do "it" to themselves. Well, we know differently today, don't we? Our observations are not what's actually happening even though it seems so obvious by watching them. Science was invented to make sense out of what we see and frequently shows that what we see is not what really is happening. Bias is always wrong when put to the scientific test, exactly what this author didn't do. Any magician will agree with this. Magicians can make people believe what they want them to believe even though it is completely wrong. Well, this author is trying to be a magician, but fails because I know the truth about "domestic violence" and it has nothing to do with what she says it does. Science has shown, against the obvious observation, that addicts are not willful, but just the opposite. Addicts act against their will. They act the opposite of what they want to do even though it appears the reverse. That's a hard argument to make against what appears to be just the opposite. However, if you look at the science of addictions it is clear that addictions happen against the will of the addict. http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismhypothesis/ People don't want it to be the way science shows it to be so they just don't read my paper proving it or my book, Hypoic's Handbook. That's how bias keeps people stupid and maintains problems that if they'd only read the science could easily be solved.
The same is true with what we call "domestic violence." Domestic violence is not domestic anything. It's a consequence (a side effect of progression of the addiction) of an addiction between two people addicts. They're both addicted to an in-born instinct and its associated neurotransmitters. They use each other to stimulate these neurotransmitters. The instinct is one of the strongest human instincts, the attachment instinct. It works the same for all addictive drugs and all other human instincts except for one thing, they are both addicts and they are both drugs for each other. There's no "relationship" here. It only appears to be a relationship. In actuality, it's an addiction to each other and all the principles of addiction apply to their attachment addiction. Read my book. It goes into great depth about all this. The violence is just part of the addiction where each of the addicts wants their drug (the other addict) to be a better drug. The violence is their attempts to make the drug be a better drug, the same as any other drug addict develops tolerance to their drug and needs more or stronger drugs. The violence occurs from both sides of this addiction. Both are equally addicted and equally violent in their own ways as a means of manipulating their drug to get them off better, to get high. And it all happens against their wills even though they think "it's love."
How to deal with this addiction is the same as that for any other addiction - the Hypoism recovery method described in my book. That means abstinence and separate recovery for each one of them. No contact. It's all explained in my book.
Until "domestic violence" is dealt with according to the Hypoism paradigm of addiction we will continue to see more and more disastrous consequences of this addiction. We are helpless and so are its victims, the people addicts. This is the same for all addicts today who don't have the benefit of knowing and using the Hypoism paradigm and its preventive and recovery methods. Just because you don't want it to be this way won't change anything. It is what it is. That's a fact. 3/21/09 Re: At Radio City, a Showdown Between Maher and Coulter , http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/11/arts/television/11deba.html
In my book, Hypoic's Handbook, I propose, for the sake of peoples' lives, that the only non-violent crime that requires mandatory long-term incarceration is lying. In medicine, aside from incompetence and stupidity, lying causes more injury and death than anything. In politics lying is also massively lethal. For example, Colin Powel's testimony about Iraqi WMDs in the UN so far has killed over 4000 Americans, hundreds of thousands Iraqis and maimed 30 thousand Americans. Nonetheless Colin Powel is walking around free and still gets to talk on TV as if he had some credibility while hundreds of thousands of marijuana smokers, just as an example, who never hurt anyone are rotting in jail, their lives ruined by their felony convictions. So, when Maher calls Coulter a liar he does so not as a joke but to save lives.
Of course, Coulter is free to voice her opinions. That's what makes America such a wonderful place. However, making up lies to support her opinions, as Maher says she does, his main complaint about her, is also allowed in America. This is not what makes America great. This is what makes America stink. The Times article about this "debate" doesn't mention anything about this lying. In fact, the Times itself is not concerned about lying at all. Its role in getting us into the Iraq war was the support for its journalists who wrote articles with lies in them dictated by American politicians and their publication. Lying seems to be a valid way for the Times to sell newspapers and support the government. I disagree with this. I think liars should go straight to jail and stay there. This might stop the lying. Let the tokers out and replace them with liars.
So, how about, to make up for its past, the Times does some fact checking on Coulter and publishing it. Only then can the debate be meaningful. When lies are purposely not fact checked and merely accepted as fact people die. That's what Maher is so angry about. He should be. So am I.
Why do I write this letter? Because in my field of medicine, addictionology, lies are not only maintaining the addiction epidemic but are also killing addicts by the millions. The funny thing about these lies is that I've been writing letters to the editor about these lies (many of these letters are on my web site - read them and ask me about them) and the Times ignores and censors my letters as if I were the one who is nuts or lying myself. I don't write about opinions. Opinions are OK as long as they're based on valid arguments. I write about medical and medical-science lies. I have clearly and validly shown that these lies have maintained a wrong theory of addiction causation and wrong and damaging policies for 14 years and not one of my letters has ever been published in the Times. These lies are about addiction theory, prevention, treatment, and public policies, all the things that have killed millions and millions of addicts over these years, ruined their lives, ruined their families, and kept addicts sick, discriminated against, and disabled. They have maintained the [morality-based] war against drugs and addicts - the drug war as if this were a moral issue rather than a medical one. These lies are politically motivated and the liars are chosen for various governmental posts specifically because they are willing and desirous to lie just like Colin Powel and Coulter. This last statement is well documented and I have written about this documentation (interviews of people applying for these positions). These lies are infinitely more lethal that the worst drugs but the drugs and drug users are gone after, not the lies. In fact, these lies are about as lethal as nuclear bombs dropped on large cities year after year yet the Times ignores my complaints about these lies and the liars without once fact-checking - just in case I might be right. No one I write to fact checks my letters, not once over these 14 years, so the lies just continue and continue. The liars are getting away with murder. They don't complain because they don't want to bring any attention to what I write about. They don't want anyone looking into it even though I gave a lecture at Brookhaven Labs medical grand rounds about this paradigm issue. My opinion is that liars and media outlets who support these lies either by publishing them (as in articles supporting the hijacked brain hypothesis and their damaging policies) without fact checking or by censoring letters that expose these lies should be prosecuted for conspiracy to murder as well as negligence and malpractice (in the case of physicians who run the addiction field), the actual result of these lies. Maybe, then, media outlets and addictionologists would think twice about this kind of behavior. But right now, they don't have to. Over the 14 years I've been exposing these lies not a single media outlet has shown any interest in fact-checking or investigating in any way whatsoever despite that the addiction epidemic and drug war have worsened over this time, a proven prediction I've made repeatedly over these 14 years. Any other field of medicine with this kind of batting average would have the public clamoring for an explanation. But we get none of this in addictions because, believe it or not, addicts are blamed for this epidemic, not the experts; not the paradigm. This is the only field of medicine that blames the victims and exonerates the experts and their theory for a failed paradigm and its failed policies. This is the biggest medical scandal in the history of medicine and it's all based on biased lies, the exact thing Maher hates about Coulter. One day this scandal will be exposed. I hope I live long enough. I want to watch it as well as participate in it. One fine day.
3/21/09 Re: Safety Concerns Raised Over Popular Wakefulness Drug, http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1885825,00.html
In 1992 I wrote my first paper on the science of addiction causation. It was called "Hypoism - A Real Disease." For the first time in human history someone showed that addiction required two things, 1) an addictor (something that raises reward (dopamine) activity) - discussed in today's article, and 2) a brain that was genetically critically low in reward (dopamine) activity. Over time this paper evolved to my current dissertation on addiction causation called "The Hypoism Hypothesis." http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismhypothesis/ If one reads this paper, which most people won't because they don't want to, it shows all the science that proves the above two requirements for addiction as well as defining the brain mechanism where all this happens and the prevention and recovery implications of this mechanism. All the other stuff that addiction was attributed to, stress, psychobabble, anti-social attitudes and behavior, poor upbringing, growing up with an addict, etc. were ruled out by the science. I was so sure people would want to know about this stuff in 1996 I wrote a book on this theory called Hypoic's Handbook. I even sent a copy of this book to 30 of the major media outlets including Time Magazine for review. None of them read the book no less reviewed it. Over the last 17 years pretty much every critical concept in this theory has been proven true, confirmed. Just like the theory of evolution. Just like the theory of relativity. Since no one hearing about these confirmations have ever read my papers and book no one knows Hypoism has been confirmed in so many ways. So, over this time period I wrote thousands of letters to editors exclaiming these confirmations. These letters have also been ignored and censored. I gave a lecture on Hypoism at the laboratories Nora Volkow used to work at, Brookhaven Labs, in 2000. She purposely didn't attend though she was present at the labs at the time. Her right hand man, Jack Wang, was the one who invited me. He was there along with most of the other scientists working there. Why would he invite me to talk there if he didn't agree with my thesis? The good scientific work done on dopamine receptors at the Brookhaven labs were part of the basis of my thesis. Except for one experiment they didn't do and still haven't done, the one I asked them to do - measure the levels of dopamine receptors in high risk and low risk kids (before any addictions have appeared) and then follow them over many years for the development of addictions to see whether the risk of addiction could be associated with levels of dopamine activity, the one experiment to prove the second criterion for addiction causation once and for all. Of course, this second criterion has been proven but people have ignored this too. Everyone knows, Volkow has even said it in an interview I quote in my paper, that kids with ADHD get addicted so frequently and predictably because of their genetic low dopamine activity. That's Hypoism in action. Secondly, the recent paper on kids, Spotting Future Gamblers in Kindergarten, http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1882595,00.html , a Time article no less, showed that kids with high impulsivity and hyperactivity, ADHDers, hypoics, go on to have gambling problems. [Why they didn't check for other addictions is beyond me.] This too is Hypoism. I wrote the author. She replied: "It is the business of science to empirically test such propositions. Thank you for your interest in our longitudinal study. You must be pleased that it supports your propositions." But the critical study, the one mentioned above, has yet to be done. When it is it will again prove Hypoism. When Hypoism is finally proved in public we can then move to the next step, using the Hypoism prevention and recovery methods dictated by the theory itself rather than continuing to use the current ineffective methods based on the wrong theory of addiction causation, the hijacked brain hypothesis, fraudulently pushed by NIDA, an organization run by politics, not science. In the meantime, our kids are getting addicted in droves and dying like sitting ducks. It's all because addictions in this country are run by politics rather than science and our kids are dying because of this scandal. Hypoism has been proved. Why can't the public be allowed to know about it? 3/20/09 Re: ‘Ecstasy’ may help PTSD victims get better, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29779272/
This is how the media starts rumors which then become factoids and then urban legends. Then it takes 50 years to get rid of these unfounded beliefs while the right understanding and treatment is ignored because of the belief that the cure already exists. Here's the abstract from the article this Reuter's article is discussing: How could MDMA (ecstasy) help anxiety disorders? A neurobiological rationale. Johansen P, Krebs T., J Psychopharmacol. 2009 Mar 9 Abstract: Exposure therapy is known to be an effective treatment for anxiety disorders. Nevertheless, exposure is not used as much as it should be, and instead patients are often given supportive medications such as serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) and benzodiazepines, which may even interfere with the extinction learning that is the aim of treatment. Given that randomized controlled trials are now investigating a few doses of +/-3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA, 'ecstasy') in combination with psychotherapy for treatment-resistant anxiety disorders, we would like to suggest the following three mechanisms for this potentially important new approach: 1) MDMA increases oxytocin levels, which may strengthen the therapeutic alliance; 2) MDMA increases ventromedial prefrontal activity and decreases amygdala activity, which may improve emotional regulation and decrease avoidance and 3) MDMA increases norepinephrine release and circulating cortisol levels, which may facilitate emotional engagement and enhance extinction of learned fear associations. Thus, MDMA has a combination of pharmacological effects that, in a therapeutic setting, could provide a balance of activating emotions while feeling safe and in control, as described in case reports of MDMA-augmented psychotherapy. Further clinical and preclinical studies of the therapeutic value of MDMA are indicated. Notice, there's not one iota of evidence for MDMA helping a single patient with PTSD. In fact, there's not a word about what PTSD is. Is it a MDMA deficiency disease? Yet, the Reuter's article states, "‘Ecstasy’ may help PTSD victims get better." People don't read the actual article in the journal which is pure speculation and nonsense, only the Reuter's article. Suddenly, this becomes not MAY but DOES - Ecstasy does cure PTSD. Next the PTSDer's are screaming, "I want ecstasy." And they're marching on Washington to get it. All thanks to Health at msnbc.com and their invalid articles. The reality? PTSD is an addiction seen only in hypoics. That's why under the same circumstances only a few people get PTSD from traumatic events. Same story with other addictions. Only hypoics (genetically low reward activity disease) get addicted when exposed to the same addictors everyone else doesn't get addicted to. Of course, the authors of these articles know nothing about this. As far as they know, anyone can get PTSD but only a few actually do, and they haven't a clue as to why this is. Same with all other addictions. Too bad they don't know about Hypoism because Hypoism explains this and has a methodology (used on hypoics) to prevent addictions and treat them if they fall through the prevention cracks. But, no. Let's not use Hypoism prevention and recovery methods as described in my censored book. Let's give addictive drugs instead. (They improve bonding with their therapists and a bunch of other bullshit. Damned right they do. Ha Ha. I used to have a strong bond with my pusher too. It wasn't too therapeutic though.) Much easier on us. Too bad they never actually work, but they sell a lot of drugs. Too bad the hypoics stay sick. They also get blamed for not responding to these miracle cures. The addiction business is a scam. Addicts (hypoics) are guinea pigs and commodities. And they let all this happen to them because of their shame. It's a big vicious cycle. Until hypoics are allowed to learn about their disease, Hypoism, this will just continue as is. and the media is a co-conspirator. 3/18/09 Re: Brain abnormality found in boys with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-03/uow-baf031709.php The article states, "The research focused on two brain areas, the striatum and anterior cingulate cortex. The striatal region is a network of structures in the mid brain that motivates people to engage in pleasurable or rewarding behavior. The anterior cingulate is higher in the brain and normally activates when an expected reward stops. However, this process, called extinction, doesn't occur, at least as quickly, in boys with attention deficit hyperactivity or conduct disorders. Instead, the striatal region continues to be activated, said Theodore Beauchaine, a UW associate professor of psychology and senior author of the paper. "When children engage in impulsive behavior they are looking to stimulate themselves and have fun. Children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder are always looking to have fun and that is what gets them in trouble," How long have I been saying ADHD is part of Hypoism, genetic low reward activity? Well, here's the confirmation of this one more time. Their search for reward activation doesn't turn off, just as my Hypoism Hypothesis states. http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoisminanutshell/ I've been writing about this since 1992 and still it is censored and ignored. 3/18/09 Re: Excerpt: 'Crave: Why You Binge Eat and How to Stop', http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Books/story?id=7095975&page=1
Cynthia Bulik has done some good epidemiological studies showing high heritability of eating disorders meaning they are caused by genetics. I refer to some of them on my web site: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/recentgeneticstudiesonvariousaddictionsfromalargetwinregistr/ . She details many stories of binge eaters, over and over, as if we need to read those stories. Then, she says in today's article that binge eating is genetic in causation but has no explanation of it. No physiology or pathophysiology. Then she says, like most addictionologists today, that her patients don't have to be slaves of their genetics because she knows how to treat this problem. Then, the article ends. Period. What is the scientific basis of these treatments? In fact, the list of treatments looks like a typical laundry list of the same failed treatments used in other addictions. Where are the studies that show her methods actually work over time - 5, 10, 20 years? There are none. So, the sum up, we have an article that says only one thing, binge eating is genetic. No physiology, no basis for treatment, no treatment studies. This reminds me of the guy (the father of an addict) from some very expensive rehab in Malibu (what rehab isn't expensive?) who advertises his book and rehab a million times a day on cable. The Addiction Cure. His book is full of the same kind of psychobabble nonsense. No science, no physiology, no treatment studies, but wild claims. Pure charlatanism; pure nonsense. I'm sure he sells a lot of books and makes a lot of money though. How does the FDA allow this kind of money stealing and clinically damaging nonsense? How does the media have the nerve to publish articles about this nonsense without valid science backing it? This is the stuff that perpetuates addictions and injures people, not cures them. This nonsense is the reason we have an addiction epidemic that gets worse every day. I, however, am ignored when I write about this fraud. My book which does everything her book doesn't including admitting that I have no clinical studies proving my treatment methods but am advertising for a rehab to do them. http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismtreatmentresearchproposal/ Funny thing. I can't get a rehab to do this study with me. I wonder why? 3/16/09 Re: Accepting the Risks in Creating Confident Doctors , http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/17/health/17mind.html?_r=1
Hold your horses. "Confident psychiatrist" is an oxymoron. In fact, it's a mental illness.
Dr. Friedman says, "What does it take to make a medical expert? Practice, practice, practice." This is what shrinks believe. No other kind of doctor believes anything even near to this. All other medical doctors know their limitations. Psychiatrists missed a few important classes in medical school, like maybe all of them. What exactly could this psychiatrist have learned if he had paid attention in medical school? Practice doesn't make perfect. It only makes permanent. To be an expert in a particular field of medicine requires 1) valid scientific expertise must exist in the particular field of endeavor, 2) one must learn that expertise, 3) then one must practice that expertise and develop a batting average. It's done in every other field of medicine.
Does expertise exist in the field of psychiatry as psychiatrists believe? Instead of me just saying emphatically no, let me ask Dr. Friedman something. Let's take the example he uses, the patient with "borderline personality disorder" (bpd) and the question of whether or not any particular patient with bpd will commit suicide. According to the implications of the article, Dr. Friedman believes he can be confident about his judgment in determining the risk of suicide in any one of these patients. What's the evidence for this? One would think that the only good evidence for this would be #1) knowing what causes "borderline personality disorder (bpd)," and the existence of expertise in the area of bpd, and #2) evaluating a hundred or so patients with bpd, making a determination about their suicide risk, and then following them over time to see how that determination pans out. This is called a "batting average." #1 doesn't exist. No one knows what causes bpd. There's no pathophysiological explanation of bpd. No one has any valid scientific understanding of bpd whatsoever. Expertise doesn't exist. It's a complete vacuum. #2 also doesn't exist as far as I know either. There's never been a study like the one I mentioned. In fact, there's no expertise about bpd and predictions of suicide "batting average" whatsoever. Doesn't Dr. Friedman know this? Apparently not. My question here would be why is Dr. Friedman confident about treating patients with bpd when there's no expertise in the psychiatric field of bpd or batting averages or valid criteria for assessing suicide risk. Therefore, Dr. Friedman is delusional about his expertise and confidence in assessing patient's risk of suicide with bpd. Despite these shortcomings, Dr. Friedman is somehow allowed to practice on people with bpd as well as teach residents about patients with bpd. I wonder how many times he has told someone's parents how sorry he was they committed suicide because he was so sure they wouldn't?
Psychiatrists don't get batting averages on their determinations or prognostications though that would be simple enough. All we need to do is go over their records and measure their batting averages. We could do this for suicides in bpd patients. We could do this for relapses in addicts they treat too. I bet they would raise a big stink if we made them do this, but we should do this anyway. How else can we know if any psychiatrist can make a valid prognosis, something psychiatrists are asked to do all the time. In my field of addictions psychiatrists are frequently asked to prognosticate on whether a particular addict will relapse. Addicts', particularly professional addicts, futures are frequently determined by psychiatrist's (and other experts such as medical/legal (disciplinary) panels, prognostications about future relapse or future harm to their clients in their profession. People asking for these prognostications don't know there is absolutely no expertise in this area whatsoever. There are no batting averages for these prognoses and many professionals' lives and careers have been ruined by these kinds of prognostications without any evidence they are valid in any sense of the word, medically or statistically. We just automatically believe psychiatrists can do this kind of thing just as Dr. Friedman believes he can do this for bpd suicides. There's no data on this whatsoever but we put people's lives and careers on the line believing there is. It doesn't exist. It's a lie. Any psychiatrist who is confident about his/her prognostications in these areas is nuts and a danger to us all. They have a mental illness. But they're all out there doing it everyday and bullshitting about it as in this article. I suggest we get batting averages on these psychiatrists and other shrinks who are out there judging people's lives and careers once and for all. 3/16/09 Re: Why do some people kill themselves? , http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126971.900-why-do-some-people-kill-themselves.html
If any one of the people who write about stuff like this would just read my book they would understand the answer to this question. I wrote the book, Hypoic's Handbook, 13 years ago and have told thousands of psychiatrists and psychologists about it but not a single one of them have ever responded to my letters no less read the book, except for Eliot Gardner, M.D., PhD at NIDA who says he keeps it on his desk at all times and agrees with everything about it. Hey. Call him and ask him. The article asks, Why do people kill themselves?" It also asks, "Why do people with anorexia kill themselves more than others?" People shouldn't kill themselves, the article says, because self-preservation is the strongest instinct. Now, the key to answering the first question comes right out of this statement. All you have to do is understand the science behind instincts and anorexia. However, there's not one word about these two things in the article. The guy who wrote this article knows nothing about instincts or anorexia. That's why he hasn't a clue about the answer to his question. Funny, my whole book is exactly about these two things and a hundred other addictions. But no one will read it so no one knows that and they never will until they read it. In 1990 I decided to understand the science of addiction if there was such a thing. I began reading the addiction literature. Very shortly thereafter I realized there was a method to this madness. All drug addictions were hooked up to a part of the brain called the reward cascade. Every addictive drug reacted with receptors in the reward cascade that were there to normally react with normal (endogenous) neurotransmitters released by built-in instincts like eating, sex, exploring, superstition, etc. Thus, what I realized was that there was a brain machine in every human and most animals that regulated built-in hardwired instincts. I called this the decision-making apparatus or instinct regulating mechanism. This system was hardwired and its responses to stimuli were hardwired and regulated by certain genes. These genes were not all the same in different people. There were several alleles for each of these regulatory genes, just like other genes throughout the body - genetic diversity. Moreover, all these instincts (and drugs) did a similar thing - they released dopamine at the terminus of the cascade. Dopamine tells the rest of the brain what's important for survival. That's the whole point of this brain machine. The more dopamine released the more salient (important) the instinctive behavior (or drug) is. This is how evolution gets animals to use instincts to survive, otherwise there's no way for the organism to know what's important (what to do) and what's not. Lastly, this mechanism works unconsciously. It runs instinctive behaviors unconsciously and is very powerful. If there was no such machine there would be no animal life on earth because without it there would be no way for evolutionary behavior to work. Survival would be random. Not a good way to survive and pass on survival knowledge. Most people are born with regulatory genes that work pretty much around the most efficient point for this machine. However, because of genetic diversity, a small group of people have machines that work at a place that's too low in reward activity because of low activity genetic alleles. These people are always in a state of low reward, what I have named Hypoism, and, because of the way the brain is set up, their brains are always looking for ways to raise this activity. Dopamine activity can be raised by only a few things, instincts and exogenous chemicals that react with receptors of this machine, drugs. As it turns out for these low reward people, hypoics, when they find one of these instincts or drugs that raises their reward activity, they get addicted to it. This is why only certain people get addicted, why only certain drugs and behaviors are addictive, what I call addictors, and how (the neurobiology and genetics) they are addictors. Thus, we have a small group of people who are capable of addiction, hypoics, and a hundred or so addictors, drugs and instinctive behaviors. Which addictor a hypoic gets addicted to depends on how strongly they release dopamine in that particular person once they experience the particular addictor. Table 1. in my book lists all the addictions and their drug and instinct counterparts. Anorexia happens to be an addiction to a peculiar starvation instinct where starvation elicits dopamine release exactly like heroin releases dopamine in heroin addicts. There also may be an additional instinct involved, the approval/ostracism instinct, that is involved that releases dopamine by self-ostracism. Likewise for all addictors and their addictions. The current belief that anorexia has something to do with appearance is nonsense. It's an addiction no different from any drug addiction or other behavioral addiction. [Two other addictions, self-mutilation (borderline personality disorder) and body dysmorphic disorder, are also associated with self-ostracism addiction] Most addicts, hypoics, have more than one addiction. Many have many addictions. Once the connection is made between all these addictions it's easy to see how they work because they all work the same way. The principles of tolerance and withdrawal hold for all addictions, anorexia as well. Progression, the worsening of addictions over time, is involved as well. As these principles work over time in these addicts, they need stronger and stronger stimuli to get the same effect. Ultimately suicide and death from associated causes occur because they can't get their fix any longer from ordinary means. The only way they can get off gets riskier and riskier until they're dead. That's why they die and that's why suicide occurs. It's part of the progression of their disease no different from heroin, alcohol, coke, gambling, sex, and religious fanatics. It's all about dopamine release beginning from a place of low reward activity and progression. So, until we begin to use this paradigm to understand addictions and their prevention and recovery methods, including anorexia, we will continue to helplessly watch the progression to suicide and self-destruction. It's our fault for censoring and ignoring this paradigm. We are the killers by continuing to listen to and follow the advice of psychiatrists and psychologists who refuse to use the Hypoism paradigm. Now that you know about this, it's your fault too. 3/15/09 Re: The success of drug decriminalization in Portugal, http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/03/14/portugal/
I wrote about this kind of stuff in my ignored 1996 book, Hypoic's Handbook. The Swiss had already proved this: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/harmreductionprototypeswissproveprogram/ . This is old stuff already. What's new is the reason for why the drug war is wrong, not just that it's a wrong policy and a failure. Well, it's not that new either because I wrote about the why back in 1996 too. The reason the drug war is wrong is because the theory it is based on is wrong. This theory, the hijacked brain hypothesis (HBH), the theory fraudulently pushed by NIDA since 1997, says drug use and addiction are voluntary and willful misbehavior, a moral choice. The drug then changes the brain into an addicted brain - presto - a disease. What else can we do but punish these bad people and get them out of society. Well, my book disproved this theory in 1996 and my current paper on addiction causation, http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismhypothesis/ , goes through this disproof as well currently.
The fact is that the people of the US don't know this science because it's been censored by the media and the press, including Greenwald, today's author. They only hear about the HBH which backs the drug war. So, the public believes, no matter what, the drug war is essential. Listen to Lou Dobbs on CNN. He says this everyday. I've written him about why he's wrong but he ignored my emails. So does everyone else - even Greenwald. Changing policies without changing theories will produce some benefits but nothing compared to changing both. Only the new theory can allow for prevention, the most important aspect. The correct theory of addiction causation will automatically cause a change in policy, but in the context of reality, not mere preference. We need a new reality of addictions and this only can come from replacing the wrong theory with the correct theory. Unless we do this, we won't get all the benefits of the new policies we deserve and need. 3/15/09 Re: When Our Eyes Deceive Us, http://www.newsweek.com/id/189294
This has nothing to do with our eyes. This is about our brains. It should be entitled, "When our brains deceive us."
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It's fascinating how scientists with an intellectual stake in a particular side of a debate tend to see flaws in studies that undercut their dearly held views, and to interpret and even ignore "facts" to fit their views. No wonder the historian Thomas Kuhn concluded almost 50 years ago that a scientific paradigm topples only when the last of its powerful adherents dies.