Now, here's a guy who believes the drug war is a real war, not just a metaphor like the war on poverty or the war on cancer or the war on obesity or the war on teenage sex. Geez. what if he believed these were real wars too? Oops. He, like many of his previous military colleagues in charge of the drug war and most of the misinformed public, believes the drug war has a valid premise and is to be won by annihilating the drug cartels. Nixon in the 70's believed the same thing and began an actual war against addictions, addicts, and addictive drugs he called the drug war based on the premise that drug use was willful misbehavior caused by assholes using illegal drugs. This war started with a budget of a billion dollars or less and has grown to 50-100 billion year after year. Despite this growth in spending and manpower and jails the problem of addiction has worsened each year. Now Gates, the secretary of defense, wants to send our boys and girls to Mexico to fight the drug cartels as if we didn't waste enough of them in Iraq and Afghanistan.

From the beginning it was believed that if we put enough manpower and money into getting rid of drugs and dealers we could get rid of addictions and their consequences. Though this has been disproved year after year we keep believing the same thing, only now we need still more money and more manpower. This is still believed notwithstanding the massive loss of life in Mexico over the last year which continues to increase each day. This loss of life is caused by the massive injection of money from the United States. Now Gates wants more money and more troops. This will result in more wasted money and lives while the addiction problem here continues to grow. I predicted this 15 years ago and continue to predict it. As long as things stay the same, things will stay the same. Didn't Obama run on an agenda against this kind of stupidity, "the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over expecting different results?" Didn't Obama say that a hundred times? Didn't he run on CHANGE?

We don't need more money and more troops. We need to change theories of addiction causation and begin to use the right one, Hypoism, the genetic model, instead of the current wrong one, the hijacked brain hypothesis, the moral model. I review this in my paper, The Drug War War, at: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/articlesbyandforhypoicspage2/ The change in theory will solve the addiction problem, end the need for the drug war, and bust the drug cartels financially. And it's all free. Someone needs to inform Obama that we need a change and why and to what. In a hurry.

Original article: Personality, Addiction, Dopamine: Insights from Parkinson�s Disease, DOI 10.1016/j.neuron.2009.01.031

My first paper on all this was written in 1992 called, Hypoism, A Real Disease. It was rejected for non-scientific reasons by all 12 addiction journals I sent it to. My second paper (below) is an outgrowth of this original paper.

The conclusion of the original article states, "The view that hyperdopaminergic function in the striatum is a risk factor for addiction has been challenged. An alternative theory, the ��reward deficiency�� hypothesis of addiction, holds that it is reduced mesolimbic dopamine function that predisposes individuals to addiction (Blum et al., 2000). There is evidence that impulsivity can also be due to low dopamine neurotransmission. For example, patients with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder hypothetically have low striatal dopamine, are impulsive, and have an elevated risk of addiction."

Original study: Epigenetic regulation of the glucocorticoid receptor in human brain associates with childhood abuse, Nature Neuroscience 12, 342 - 348 (2009) Published online: 22 February 2009 | doi:10.1038/nn.2270

This article is a good example of the way so-called science journalists misreport science studies and spread misinformation to the public. The Meaney study, if one actually reads it as I did, and I doubt Begley did, did not show what Begley says it showed, "Early childhood abuse can change the expression of the same gene as in rats�the glucocorticoid receptor, which shapes how people respond to stress." The study did not show that the epigenetic changes were associated with behavioral (in this case suicide) differences as Begley says it does. In fact, there were significant differences in the epigenetic changes in one gene between the abused and non-abused people, but no differences were shown in regards to the behavior of suicide or anything else. Quoting the original study in the discussion section, "These findings suggest that variation in the methylation status of the exon 1_FNR3C1 promoter, similar to that for glucocorticoid receptor 1_F and total glucocorticoid receptor mRNA expression, associates with childhood adversity and not with suicide per se." The epigenetic change is associated with childhood abuse but not with any particular behavior. {And this assumes the data on childhood abuse is valid to begin with, which I doubt. How did they get this information? They never say except to mention it was obtained through psychological autopsies, whatever they are. Remember, these subjects were all dead.} They showed no differences in behavior in these subjects whatsoever. Quote, "Thus, our findings suggest that the transmission of vulnerability for depression from parent to offspring could occur, in part, through the epigenetic modification of genomic regions that are implicated in the regulation of stress responses." This implication came not from their study but from the literature at large. They're own study showed no differences (table 1.) - equal suicide, mood disorders, and substance abuse between the normal (not abused) and low (abused) groups. Thus, in reality, Meaney is irresponsible to suggest a relationship that his study didn't show. The study did not show what she says it showed.

So, how does Begley have the nerve to say this study showed these things? Because she merely interviewed Meaney, the author who unforgivably speculated about the meaning of the study, not the reality of the study. This is not science reporting. Speculation is not science.

One more thing: Even if epigenetic changes of genome activity are caused by certain "environmental" influences, (which there is much evidence for - epigenetics is very important part of genetics) what they do to the particular organism are still genetic in origin (vis-a-vis causation), not psychobabble - so called "psychological." To quote Begley, "For too long we have been in the grip of genetic determinism, the idea that the genes we enter the world with shape the lives we lead, that genes have behavior on a short leash. But as Meaney pointed out, that is not only defeatist�ceding responsibility for who we are and how we act to forces beyond our control�but scientifically wrong." No, you're wrong. It's not just the genes we enter the world with, but the genes we enter the world with PLUS the epigenetic changes to these genes that shape the lives we lead. Thus, genetics [original genome plus epigenetics, still genetics] is still the determiner of the ultimate behavior. And these things are still out of our control and deterministic.

This disaster of an article is a good example of how the media puts wrongly interpreted ideas into the public's mind by the deliberate misinterpretation of science simply because of their own personal bias. This kind of reporting has caused mass ignorance and misbeliefs in the lay public that has led to massive societal damage (bad public policy and frequently discrimination) such as in the field of addictions, a field I write about all the time. By the way, epigenetic has a great deal to do with the current misinterpretation of the causation of addictions as discussed in my paper: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismhypothesis/

Not only was there no link to crime, but this program decreased crime as well as doing other good things. "Results from the last 12 months have been very positive. NAOMI patients undergoing treatment throughout the program increased 88 percent and participants reduced their consumption of illicit drugs by 70 percent, reduced their criminal activity by 36 percent and improved their health by 20 percent." This effect confirms the same effects seen in Switzerland under the PROVE program: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/harmreductionprototypeswissproveprogram/ . The whole country voted to continue funding this terrific program. All this is predicted from the Hypoism paradigm of addiction causation. The reason the United States doesn't start similar programs is because the hijacked brain hypothesis (HBH) fraudulently pushed by NIDA is a moral theory of drug addiction, and harm reduction as described in today's article is seen as immoral. This is why we need to make the public aware of the lies coming from the addiction community about addiction theory so we can begin to develop policies in line with Hypoism, like the one described in today's article. If the NAOMI project also incorporated Hypoism theory into its agenda, they could begin effective Hypoism prevention and recovery techniques to their harm reduction methods. This kind of program is discussed in my book, Hypoic's Handbook.

Decety said. "The study raises the intriguing possibility that loneliness may result from reduced reward-related activity in the ventral striatum in response to social rewards." He means genetically determined reduced reward activity. "Given their feelings of social isolation, lonely individuals may be left to find relative comfort in nonsocial rewards," said John Cacioppo, the Tiffany and Margaret Blake Professor in Psychology at the University. What he means here is addictors.

It's not the loneliness per se that causes differential brain activity but the underlying genetic low reward activity.

Of course. This is Hypoism, another proof that it exists and works as described in my book. Loneliness is one of the major symptoms of Hypoism along with neediness. They didn't test for that. Too bad. But Hypoism is very low reward activity, not just low activity. http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismhypothesis/ This kind of study may well be one way we can diagnose Hypoism in kids so they can begin Hypoism recovery before addictions occur. Let's see what they do with this letter.

Tod's question: Can you devise a workable and realistic plan to legalize drugs while answering the questions above about underage users, unlicensed sellers and addiction treatment?

The issue isn't how to change policy. The issue is the drug use and addiction paradigm (addiction theory) we use to develop policy. The principle is - wrong theory leads to wrong policies. Right theory leads to right policies. So, I'm not going to argue policies, only theory. Currently we are using the theory called the hijacked brain hypothesis (HBH) to determine policy. You can read this theory in the journal Science: Leshner A.: Addiction is a Brain Disease, and it Matters, Science; 278, 45-70, 10/3/97. NIDA under Volkow continues to support this theory. The drug war and everything else we do today on drugs and addictions stems from this theory of addiction causation. This is why you believe in the current policies. Because you believe in the principles of the HBH. However, the HBH is a wrong theory. It has been proven wrong in many ways. Read my paper about the science behind this disproof here: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismhypothesis/ . The result of this wrong theory is wrong policy. That's why the drug war doesn't work. Read the drug war war at: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/articlesbyandforhypoicspage2/ The right addiction causation theory is Hypoism, the genetic theory as opposed to the HBH volitional theory (the moral theory). Hypoism is caused by genetic alteration of a brain machine called the decision-making apparatus or the instinct regulating mechanism. Hypoism causes all addictions. People without Hypoism can use drugs safely. They can't get addicted. Hypoism has a methodology for preventing addictions in hypoics. It's called Hypoism recovery and is explained in my book, Hypoic's Handbook. Kids with Hypoism go into Hypoism recovery before they get addicted, and this program prevents future drug use and addiction. Real prevention that will work if used. Thus, the first thing we need to do is change paradigms from the HBH to the Hypoism paradigm. Once that occurs policy changes that are consistent with Hypoism will be put into use and the whole mess we know as the addiction epidemic and the drug war will disappear automatically because the right theory leads to the right policies - policies that work and are reasonable. My bet is that decriminalization of drug use will be one of these policy changes, but that is not my goal. My goal is to change paradigms from the wrong one to the right one. Everything good will follow from that. Read my book and web papers. Then you'll understand what the right thing is to do. The whole country needs to do this because they've been lied to and abused by the fraudulent HBH.

In my 1996 book, Hypoic's Handbook, ignored and rejected by the Times without having read it, I state, as part of the description of the decision-making apparatus, all human instincts are genetically hard-wired and are hooked up to the reward system. I list the seven deadly sins as just a few of the hundreds of human instincts. Today's article and the science behind it confirms one more instinct conforming to this overall paradigm. The meaning and importance of this brain mechanism is explained in the book. One major aspect of it is that it is the neurobiological basis for the brain machine that causes all addictions (drugs and behaviors) through genetic diversity of the regulating mechanism of this machine as well as the basis for prevention and recovery from addictions. One of my major papers which explains the role of evolution in the existence of this mechanism is: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/thehypoismaddictionhypothesis/ . My other major online paper presents this mechanism too in the discussion of the cause of addictions: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismhypothesis/ which states, "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. A short list of some human instincts includes: Attachment, Revenge, Gluttony/Eating, Pride, Approval/Ostracism, Superstition, Lust/Sex, Greed, Xenophobia, Authority/Agonic, Altruistic/Hedonic, Envy, Falling in love, Sloth, Risk Taking/Exploration, Jealousy. Yes, the seven deadly sins are instincts and there are many more." The funny thing is that I asked Natalie Angier, the author of this article, to help write my book for me (because I'm not a writer) in the early 90's but she declined because she didn't think the paradigm and its concepts (one of which she is discussing today 13 years late) had any merit.

This paper is a wonderful and honest summary of the problem with the drug war. However, because no one writing the paper knows anything about addiction causation, the cause of the "demand," the suggestions for changes in policy are all wrong as well. The paradigm change asked for by this paper is wrong and will not help solve the problem. The first paradigm change that is required to solve the problem is a change in theory of addiction causation believed and used by your organization. I've been writing about this for many years but people like your group have ignored me with dire results, the continuation of the drug war and addiction epidemic as is.

Let me explain. The current policies summed up as "the drug war" are based on a particular theory of drug use and addiction causation. This theory is called the hijacked brain hypothesis (HBH) first invented by Alan Leshner in 1997 in the journal Science. This theory sums up the beliefs of mostly all people in regards to causation of drug use and addiction. It says the initial use of the drug is voluntary and then the drug hijacks the user's brain and causes addiction. Thus, the onus is on the immoral user and the dangerous drug. This theory justified the drug war which was begun much earlier than the theory. It justified criminalization of drug use and manufacture and sale of drugs. The only problem is that this theory is scientifically incorrect. It is demonstrably wrong. Read: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismhypothesis/ That's why our policies have been wrong. As long as that HBH theory remains in effect as the cause of drug use and addiction, the drug war is the only policy that makes sense to the public and law makers. The HBH is the current paradigm for theory and policy. The HBH is the paradigm that must be changed to solve the drug and addiction dilemma. The theory problem is the paradigm problem, not the policy problem. Wrong theory yields wrong policies. Keeping the wrong theory while trying to solve the problem by changing the policies will not work. We must first change the theory, then the correct policies will come into effect automatically. I wrote a paper about this long ago for an anti- "drug war" conference in the U.S. It was ignored and the drug war has continued. I make the same suggestion to your group: Read the paper and the book it's based on, Hypoic's Handbook, that explains the Hypoism (genetic) theory of addiction. The paper, The Drug War War, is at: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/articlesbyandforhypoicspage2/ . The book is available on the web site.

Once the correct theory is taught to the public the correct policies, listed in my book, will happen. This will end the drug war as we know it and quell the drug demand through effective prevention and recovery as well, things that don't exist today. Moreover, it will end the drug cartels and all the damage they do. I hope, "a word to the wise is sufficient."

Not all people who get addicted are high sensation seekers, though many are. However, all addicts have Hypoism, and Hypoics are born, not made. http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismhypothesis/ . In my book on the disease of Hypoism, Hypoic's Handbook, I show the genetic neurobiological mechanism for addictability and addiction, the genetic alteration of the decision-making apparatus (the instinct regulating mechanism). The result of this alteration is three fold: 1) the unconscious seeking out of addictors, 2) the addiction to addictors, and 3) seriously faulty decision-making and evaluations about all aspects of their lives. All three of these results of Hypoism are taken care of by the recovery methodology described in the book, and can be used for prevention of addictions and other disasters if begun in young children. What today's study finds is summarized here: "The authors note that their findings may indicate the way by which sensation seeking results in negative behaviors, including substance abuse and antisocial behavior. They conclude, "Individuals high in sensation seeking not only are strongly activated by exciting, thrilling and potentially dangerous activities, but also may be less likely than other people to inhibit or appropriately regulate that activation." This is true for all Hypoics and is exactly the reason they require a surrender to a sponsor to lead their recovery as discussed in the book. They need the sponsor to inhibit their faulty decisions. This is what happens in hypoics - not - anonymous recovery program. This is the basis for Hypoism recovery and these scientists got it right, except for the recovery part. This study confirms the basis of the Hypoism recovery program over all other kinds of recoveries and therapies and treatments. It's too bad Hypoism recovery doesn't exist because it's been censored. Of course, this is the reason there's been no progress made in addiction prevention and recovery.

In my ignored and even ridiculed 1996 book on the cause and treatment of addictions, Hypoic's Handbook, I made the outlandish hypothesis that all instincts are genetically hard-wired and all hooked up to the reward mechanism, making them equivalent to addictive drugs (all of which interact with receptors for endogenous neurotransmitters used by the instincts to interact with the reward system) in their general function as well as their addictability. In other words, it's the in-born, genetic, and hard-wired instinct regulating mechanism (which I also call the decision-making apparatus) that is the brain mechanism where all addictions (unintended consequences of the evolution of the regulation of human instincts) occur, drug and behavioral addictions. My paper on the evolutionary origins of this brain mechanism is: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/thehypoismaddictionhypothesis/ , subtitled, Addiction: An "Unintended consequence" of evolution . My paper on how this mechanism causes all addictions and why it is the only sensible theory of addiction causation (why some people get addicted [genetically] and most people don't [also genetically]), disproving the current hijacked brain hypothesis, the moral theory of addiction causation, is: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismhypothesis/ . As my readers well know, these three works have been ignored and censored by the addictionology community because they don't want Hypoism to be true, it ruins their scam and financial benefits, irrespective of the baleful results on addicts. Nonetheless, Hypoism is scientifically backed. Today's paper is just one more bit of scientific evidence in favor of the hypoism paradigm and the instinct regulatory mechanism - one more human instinct shown to be hooked up to the reward system and one more instinct where genetic diversity leads to differential behaviors amongst different organisms of the same species. One of these behaviors being addiction. The list of human instincts hooked up to the reward system is getting longer each day. Funny, this list is the same as the list of human behavioral addictions. You'd think the addictionology community, aware of this well documented connection, would finally acknowledge the Hypoism paradigm as the only realistic mechanism of addiction causation. You'd think that. So, why don't they? Read my book. It tells you why and what you can do to help correct this scandal for the millions of addicts and their families currently being killed and ruined by the scientifically fraudulent hijacked brain hypothesis.

The title of this wonderful out-of-the-blue article should be instead, "ADHD vs. Hypoism." Everything Dr. Baker said is correct and valid except that he should have used the term Hypoism rather than addiction because addiction is a symptom while Hypoism is the actual genetic disease of critically low reward system activity [low=hypo] that causes addictions and ADHD (a subset of hypoics known to be people born with genetic low reward system activity). Of course, Dr. Baker hasn't heard of Hypoism, so how could he use this term? I've been writing about this disease since 1992 but have never been able to get anything published on it. My major writings about Hypoism are: Hypoic's Handbook, my 1996 book, http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/thehypoismaddictionhypothesis/ , and, http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismhypothesis/ , the papers that evolved from my original 1992 paper. I think Dr. Baker and the readers of this web site would be interested in these works, all based on real science, the science Dr. Baker has recognized and is acknowledging in this article. My book especially goes through the methods (all free) for preventing addictions and recovery from addictions by using this paradigm. Please publish this letter so the readers can finally use this information to help their families and friends.

This op-ed is some kind of joke. Taking anabolic steroids was a felony in 2001-3. Does Glanville know how many good people were felonized, punished, incarcerated, and made unemployed between 2001 and 2003 for using illegal drugs? A lot. And they weren't earning 25 million a year. They're lives and family's lives were ruined. Glanville's article doesn't even mention felony, only that A-Rod is a victim of lying drug testers. Ha Ha. Let's see how victimized A-Rod feels doing 8-15 in state prison. I'm not for felonizing or doing anything else to A-Rod. However, before we let A-Rod off we need to let off all the rest of the illegal drug users, de-felonize them, and restore their lives and families. Unless we do that I think it's only fair to prosecute A-Rod to the fullest extent of the law. Likewise for all the rest of the baseball stars/drug felons. Only then will we start thinking about what we're doing to everyone else for no reason whatsoever except our own self-righteousness and pseudomorality. The drug war must end.

The entire emphasis or perspective of this article is wrong. What, exactly, do we want to accomplish here? Is it to hunt down and prosecute drug users because by definition they're bad and dangerous or is it to ensure that people entrusted to do certain public jobs are not impaired while doing these jobs? Drug use does not always equal impairment and impairment is not just caused by drugs. So drug testing misses most of the impaired people. Impairment is caused by many things including divorce, depression, mental illness, loss of money in the stock market, worrying about a loved one sick or in trouble, conflict of interest, or lack competence for whatever reason. The problem is that most people have an unwarranted bias against the former and for the latter irrespective of the degree of impairment. Drugs and drug use has been demonized while other kinds of impairment, usually worse, are ignored, rationalized, or just excused.

What we really want to do is 1) help and protect all people who are addicted to drugs and/or impaired by drugs or other conditions. 2) ensure that impaired people, impaired for whatever cause or reason, are not in professional or automotive contact with the public. The way to do this is through no-fault and non-punitive programs that provide help and professional, personal, and financial protection to the person. These programs should be available either through work or personal health and disability insurance or both. The impaired person is thereby allowed to get the help he/she needs without fear of loss of any kind. This would allow people to get the help they need at the earliest possible time, hopefully before any damage occurs, exactly what we want. The current system, on the other hand, the witch hunt method, makes sick and impaired people go undercover where they get worse and don't get discovered until something disastrous happens, exactly what we don't want. It's my opinion that drug testing doesn't accomplish the former, only the latter. My book on addictions, Hypoic's Handbook, discusses all this at length and in detail.

This article is the typical stance of the libertarian. Of course, it's correct about everything except one thing, how it all applies to Michael Phelps, an ADHDer and a future (or possibly present) drug addict. Libertarians have a peculiar take on drug addiction and drug addicts. They want everything legalized because that's their philosophy. But, they don't think beyond that, however, and that's their problem. Beyond that they say, well, if you get addicted, that's your fault and your problem. Tough shit. They don't realize that unless there's a way to prevent the 10% or so of people (with Hypoism) from getting addicted and ruining their lives, legalizing drugs is not a good idea. We must do both, prevent addiction with Hypoism and then legalize drugs. If we just legalize drugs then all those with the genetic addictive disease, Hypoism, like Phelps, will get addicted and get screwed. Putting these words (the letter) into Michael Phelp's mouth is the same as killing him because he's one of that 10% of the population that's going to get addicted because of his genetics. Just like Elvis.

I presented these ideas to the libertarians at a 1999 Washington, D.C. CATO anti-drug war conference many years ago. [See: the drug war war at: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/articlesbyandforhypoicspage2/ ] They ignored this paper which I handed out to everyone who would take one. I've also written this web site many times in the past. No response. They could care less about the effect their "philosophy" might have on the addicts and their families. Today's article is a good example of this irresponsible stupidity. All these libertarians have to do is to support Hypoism and help have it replace the hijacked brain hypothesis. [Hypoism prevents hypoics from getting addicted, if used.] Then, they can have their drug legalization responsibly. They don't want to do that, so instead they write an ignorant and destructive letter and article about it for someone like Phelps who is in the midst of destroying his life because of his hypoism out of control.

A little thought behind what these libertarians do could be helpful. But without that thought they're just being as destructive as the drug warriors.

First of all, ADHD is a "symptom" diagnosis that more correctly, biologically, falls under the realm of the larger genetic pathophysiological entity, Hypoism, defined as genetically low reward system (dopamine) activity that causes addictions and other unwanted behaviors, some of which are ADHD behaviors. People with ADHD have an extremely high incidence of addiction in adolescence and adulthood. Thus, many people write to me asking if Hypoism (and therefore ADHD) is caused by low dopamine, then why can't it be treated or even prevented with drugs that raise dopamine? My 1996 book, Hypoic's Handbook, goes into the answer of this question in depth. The short form of this answer is that drugs that raise dopamine are exactly the drugs that hypoics get addicted to. In fact, the main characteristic of an addictive drug is one that raises dopamine in the nucleus accumbens. This was discovered and defined in 1988 by Koob and Bloom in their groundbreaking study of the effects of addictive drugs on the mouse brain, so it should not be a surprise to anyone. Today's study merely confirms this fact for the drug Ritalin and shows how Ritalin acts exactly like cocaine in the mouse brain. Of course, we have known that Ritalin raises dopamine levels for a long time as well, but today's study shows it does other addictive things as well. Thus, if you're interested in preventing addictions, my book predicts that dopamine raising drugs are not the way to do it.

As you can see from the article, there are many objections to this study by doctors who like to use stimulants. Ritalin and other dopamine raising drugs that are used to treat ADHD make a lot of money for drug companies as well as for the doctors who support their aggressive and widespread use. In fact, there have been many complaints about the financial conflicts of interest of the researchers on these drugs in ADHD. The NY Times had an article recently about Beiderman's conflicts of interest and their concealment from the journals he was publishing in. The lead author of the study mentioned at the end of today's article, Beiderman, is one of those doctors about which these complaints have been made. Listed conflicts of interest in the people who did the following study on stimulants and addictions in ADHD: [Dr. Biederman currently receives research support from Alza,Bristol-Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly, Janssen, McNeil, Merk, Otsuka,Shire, NIMH, and NICHD; he currently serves as a consultant/advisoryboard member for Janssen, McNeil, Novartis, and Shire; he currentlyserves on the speakers bureaus of Janssen, McNeil, Novartis,Shire, and UCB Pharma; and he has received research support,consultation fees, or speaker"s fees from Abbott, AstraZeneca,Celltech, Cephalon, Eli Lilly, Esai, Forest, GlaxoSmithKline,Gliatech, NARSAD, NIDA, New River, Novartis, Noven, Neurosearch,Pfizer, Pharmacia, the Prechter Foundation, the Stanley Foundation,and Wyeth. Dr. Spencer receives research support from ShireLaboratories, Eli Lilly, GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer, McNeil, Novartis,Cephalon, and NIMH; he serves on the speakers bureaus of GlaxoSmithKline,Eli Lilly, Novartis, Wyeth-Ayerst, Shire Laboratories, and McNeil;and he serves on the advisory boards of Shire Laboratories,Eli Lilly, GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer, McNeil, Cephalon, and Novartis.Dr. Wilens receives grant support from Abbott, Eli Lilly, McNeil,Merck, NIH (NIDA), and Shire; he serves on the speakers bureausof McNeil, Novartis, and Shire; and he is a consultant for Abbott,McNeil, Eli Lilly, Merck, NIDA, Novartis, Cephalon, and Shire.Dr. Faraone receives research support from McNeil Pediatrics,Shire Laboratories, NIMH, the National Institute of Child Healthand Development, and the National Institute of NeurologicalDiseases and Stroke; he serves on the speakers bureaus of McNeilPediatrics and Shire Laboratories; and he has served as an advisoror consultant to McNeil Pediatrics, Shire Pharmaceutical Development,Novartis, and Eli Lilly. Dr. Monuteaux and Ms. MacPherson reportno competing interests.] This list comes from the study: Am J Psychiatry 2008; 165:597-603, Stimulant Therapy and Risk for Subsequent Substance Use Disorders in Male Adults With ADHD: A Naturalistic Controlled 10-Year Follow-Up Study, Joseph Biederman, M.D., Michael C. Monuteaux, Sc.D., Thomas Spencer, M.D., Timothy E. Wilens, M.D., Heather A. MacPherson, B.A., and Stephen V. Faraone, Ph.D. "CONCLUSIONS: The findings revealedno evidence that stimulant treatment increases or decreasesthe risk for subsequent substance use disorders in childrenand adolescents with ADHD when they reach young adulthood." So, Biederman's study, a study full of scientific faults, showed no difference in addiction outcomes between ADHD kids treated with stimulants (dopamine raisers) and those "not currently" on stimulants, but previously treated with them. " RESULTS: Of the 112 ADHD subjects who were reassessed at the10-year follow-up, 82 (73%) had been treated previously withstimulants and 25 (22%) were undergoing stimulant treatmentat the time of the follow-up assessment. There were no statisticallysignificant associations between stimulant treatment and alcohol, drug, or nicotine use disorders." This is not a valid comparison. Both groups had all received stimulants at some time or another, so the conclusion is not meaningful. Despite this and other errors, such as small group sizes and only a 10 year follow up (too short), people use this study to say stimulant use in ADHD doesn't lead to increased addictions, a bogus claim. The fact is that addictions in ADHD are already very high and stimulant therapy didn't lower their incidence in this lousy study. This is not proof of anything, although if confirmed with a better study, does show that stimulant treatment doesn't prevent addictions, something I predicted in my 1996 book. Whether they increase addictions remains to be seen. Today's article suggests this may well happen. Thus, the clinical studies on ADHD and stimulants need to be repeated with better sample size, longer duration, and better methodology.

The article says, "Phelps has been sowing his oats ever since winning all those medals in Beijing this past summer." However, he was arrested in 2004 for driving while under the influence of marijuana, so this episode has nothing to do with "sowing oats." It's about getting high and possibly addiction, long before Beijing. Throw in a gambling addiction and possibly a few others. Phelps was made the poster child for ADHD by his mother last year after Beijing. Everyone was so excited about this, how he had overcome his ADHD with swimming. As we all know, ADHD is part of the Hypoism addiction paradigm and because of this ADHDer's have a very high incidence of drug use and addiction. Moreover, you can't overcome Hypoism or ADHD by winning a swimming race. ADHDer's don't have decreased drug use and addiction by using anti-ADHD medications either. So, unless Phelps does something to deal with his Hypoism, he's looking at a long future of multiple addictions, pain, and screw-ups.

This is the last of a series in Time Magazine about various aspects of addictions. I wrote emails about the rest of them so you know how I feel about this series of articles - it's the same old P/R paradigm - hijacked brain hypothesis misinformation and regurgitation of addictionology's lies absent any critical thinking or questioning of authority. Despite no objective evidence of the various expert's views being valid, their statements were reported as gospel, thus misinforming the otherwise ignorant and confused public. Of course, this is one of the reasons nothing has changed and no progress has been made. None of the writers seem to care about this. Today's article is a little different. Although it starts off with some words about the 12 steps, the recovery program of AA based on the moral, psychobabble, and hijacked brain theory of addiction causation, a theory that is demonstrably wrong, it raises questions about the validity of this approach. That's at least a good thing. However, it stops there and is unable to come up with a replacement theory and recovery program based on that. "That means we have to figure out a way to help the 80% who won't get better through willpower. The latest evidence suggests that those who think that spirituality or a pill alone can save them are wrong. The answer almost certainly lies deeper inside ourselves." There's no answer there.

This absence really pisses me off. I've been writing Time magazine for years about the real science of addiction causation and the prevention and recovery program that replaces and improves upon the 12 steps and other marginally useful programs. I think I even sent them a copy of my book, Hypoic's Handbook, without response. In the meantime millions of addicts have died and been jailed. No one but me complains about this medical scandal. The field of addictionology has done very well financially while addicts definitively have not. Yet, the media still goes to the same experts to get their information about addictions, the same experts who have failed so miserably to improve anything.

Let me tell you once again. there is an answer to the addiction epidemic and it's based on the genetic theory of addiction causation, a theory based on valid science and completely opposite to the current theory. This theory is called Hypoism for good scientific reasons. http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismhypothesis/ Out of this theory comes an effective method for addiction prevention and recovery based on the brain science. Hey, this is the answer your looking for! Read it, tell your readers about it, and use it. By the way, other than the book, it's all free. It also gets rid of the drug war. What more can you ask for?

This article was written by a journalist named Michael Lemonick. He has good training in journalism but none whatsoever in science. So, how does he get the credentials to write about the science of addiction causation? Because he's a recovering addict? Because he talks to experts in addiction and somehow their expertise rubs off on him? I don't think so. He has no credentials yet Time Magazine publishes his articles as if he were trained in science and could tell the difference between valid science and invalid science. This is vitally important because his article is teaching the public about addictions, and if he's wrong he's misleading the public and hurting millions of addicts and their families. The fact is that everything in this article is either anecdotal, bullshit, or unproven speculation either by Lemonick or by the experts. Two examples of this are: 1) Lemonick - "When exposed to drugs, our memory systems, reward circuits, decision-making skills and conditioning kick in--salience in overdrive--to create an all consuming pattern of uncontrollable craving." This is pure bullshit. This only happens in reality to people who are born with the right genetics (10-20% of the population), not everyone as he states. What he explains only occurs in a small percentage of people who use addictive drugs, not everyone by a long shot. Thus, the issue is the people, not the drugs, a difference that is not well appreciated. The percentages are well documented by Hiroi in his paper, "Genetic susceptibility to substance dependence," Molecular Psychiatry (2005) 10, 336�344. Hiroi states, "A series of studies on the rate of addiction/behavioral dependence in chronic users of nicotine, alcohol, and opioids elegantly demonstrated that only a subpopulation of chronic substance users become dependent." Lemonick's unreferenced statement does not happen to the vast majority of people who use addictive drugs 2) Volkow - "Some people have a genetic predisposition to addiction," says Volkow. "But because it involves these basic brain functions, everyone will become an addict if sufficiently exposed to drugs or alcohol." Is she serious? This is absolutely wrong. The underlined sentence is not only scientifically wrong but proven wrong. One such recent proof is, "Prescription Opioid Abuse, Addiction Less Common Than Many Believe." http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/135800.php Two quotes from this article are: "-- In an extensive review, combining results from 24 clinical studies, the overall rate of prescribed opioid analgesic abuse or addiction in patients with pain [chronic exposure to addicting opioids] 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. -- Similarly, a clinical investigation of patients receiving daily opioid therapy for chronic noncancer pain prescribed by primary-care physicians found that only 3.7% of patients had a confirmed opioid-use disorder." Ordinary people who chronically use oral opiates get addicted at very low rates, the complete opposite to what Lemonick and Volkow say. Those addicted have the right genetics. Most people don't have the right genetics and they don't, ever, get addicted. The reason for this is not what Lemonick says, "That's because we have other, more analytical regions that can evaluate consequences and override mere pleasure seeking." Those not addicted, the large majority, don't have the right genetics and will never get addicted no matter how many drugs they do. I've been writing about this for 15 years. The implications of this are serious and important. They are described in my papers and book, Hypoic's Handbook. Lemonick needs to read these and their references.

The fact is that Lemonick hasn't read the literature because he has no training in science but merely finds "experts" he agrees with to interview and uncritically believes and writes down whatever they say. These experts invariably misinterpret addiction science as I have shown numerous times in my writings, but he has no way of knowing this because he doesn't read the actual science. This is unethical and bad journalism. His main expert, Volkow, misinforms everyone about the causes of addictions including Lemonick who doesn't fact check by reading the literature. He doesn't ask for or look into dissenting interpretations but merely believes whatever she says is valid. Sorry to say - it's not. Volkow has been pushing the outdated and disproven addiction causation theory known as the hijacked brain hypothesis for many years despite its being proven wrong by me, Hiroi, and others. Why she does this is beyond me, but it seriously misguides the public about addiction causation and warps their attitudes and public policies such as the drug war, prevention, and treatment methods. She's exactly the wrong person to be heading NIDA because of her biases and misinterpretations. She deliberately misstates heritability numbers, cherry picks low numbers when they are clearly out of date and when better data are available, and ignores epigenetic effects on heritability (which raise actual heritabilities) to give the false impression that genetics has a lesser effect than it actually does. She makes statements like the one quoted by me in this article which are just wrong. They fit Lemonicks opinions about addictions, so he quotes them without fact checking. All this adds up to the biggest medical scandal of all time, killing and ruining the lives of millions of addicts and their families and tens of thousands of innocent bystanders such as victims of DUIs which would be much fewer if the right theory of addictions were running prevention and treatment. Under the genetic theory of addiction causation the addiction epidemic would be much much less severe with good prevention and effective recovery with policies based on the right science. "Wrong theory - wrong policies" is a medical principle. Under the hijacked brain hypothesis addictions are completely out of control and cause maximal damage. Just look around you. Has anything improved in the 8 years Volkow has been at NIDA? No. The hijacked brain hypothesis has prevented advances in addiction prevention and treatment.

The public and especially addicts have suffered for no good reason for many years because of this biased and scientifically incorrect reporting as well as the bad science behind it, uncritically regurgitated by journalists. This is unconscionable for such a widely subscribed magazine as Time.

The article begins with, "Since I began the road to recovery from alcoholism a decade and a half ago, people have frequently asked me how I have changed. I tell them that the process of recovering from an addiction is a kind of moral de- and reconstruction. You tear yourself apart, examine each individual piece, toss out the useless, rehabilitate the useful and put your moral self back together again." This sounds hunky-dory but is 100% wrong.

The most obvious thing about this opening paragraph is that alcoholism is a moral disorder, exactly what Bill Wilson, the co-founder of AA says. Mr. Atkinson is regurgitating Bill Wilson's words quite well. There's not an original remark in the entire article. No wonder addiction is still seen, despite all the science to the contrary, as a moral weakness and character defect. No wonder addicts are still discriminated against and punished ad libitum. That's what AA literature and meetings teaches its believers and the world. When given the opportunity these believers say the same thing, religiously and faithfully. This article is a good example. Is this really so or is this a big mistake, a big misinterpretation of what Bill Wilson experienced and wrote about? This mistake is responsible for killing a million addicts a year as well as all the other addiction associated disasters we read about daily. But don't tell AA's about this. They refuse to hear it or even look at it. I know. I was a faithful AA fanatic for twenty years until I actually studied the science behind addictions and could no longer stomach the lethal nonsense espoused at AA meetings and in its literature; the same stuff this article espouses so confidently, religiously. This is just one of the paradoxes in AA because AA says, "We're not bad [immoral] people becoming good [moral], but sick people getting better;" exactly the opposite of what Atkinson says in his opening paragraph. AA says both simultaneously - the paradox.

How did Bill Wilson mistake addiction for a moral (and thus) a spiritual disorder, so easily convince his followers of this, and make them believe recovery needed to be based on "moral reconstruction," the basis for the 12 steps?

Well, it turns out, science shows us, that all humans are born with an instinct regulating apparatus, a brain machine that decides when and how to use in-born instincts. At the base of this built-in inverted pyramid is the reward system that makes us feel good when we use these instincts correctly (according to evolutionary principles). It is in an unconscious part of the brain, the limbic system. [Bill Wilson or the so-called psychological and psychiatric experts that advised him didn't know about all this or any of it.] Like everything made by evolution there have been mistakes (mutations) made in copying the genes that regulate this complex system. These mutations exist in a particular percentage of the population. For the most part they lower the activity of this brain mechanism leading to people who have low reward activity, so-called low dopamine. These people are the people who get addicted to things that raise this activity. I call this disease Hypoism and the people hypoics - hypo for low activity. The brain is made to respond to low reward activity be seeking "things" that raise this activity. It turns out that two general "things" raise this activity, addictive drugs and built-in instincts, which I call addictors because these are what hypoics get addicted to. Thus, hypoics seek out addictors unconsciously and deliberately, and ultimately get addicted to them. Non-hypoics like these addictors (because they stimulate dopamine, a feel good neurochemical) but don't get addicted because of their "normal" reward system activity. You can read the science behind this in my two web papers, http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/thehypoismaddictionhypothesis/ and http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismhypothesis/ . My book, Hypoic's Handbook, goes through the science plus describes the prevention and recovery methods dictated by the disease itself, not made up from a misinterpretation, a vacuum or a superstition.

Thus, hypoics over-use, "abuse," both addictive drugs and instinctive behaviors. The peculiar thing about instinctive behaviors, as important as they are to human survival over evolutionary time, is that they are seen by religions as sins, immoral behavior. I can understand this because excessive use of any instinct can be dangerous to society. Excessive drug use is also seen as sinful. So, hypoics engage in lots of sinful behavior because they over-use drugs and instincts. Bill Wilson knew this and wrote about it at length in his books, the big book and the 12 and 12 (steps and traditions) book. But he got the why mixed up. He mistook over-use of instincts as immoral and character defects and causative of addiction as opposed to concomitants to addictions. Thus, he based his entire recovery program on dealing with these moral defects. How does one deal with moral defects? With god, of course, who else? Only god can remove addictions and moral defects. Thus, he invented his AA program based on this stuff. Too bad it's all wrong. The disease of addiction, Hypoism, is not caused by moral defects but by neurobiological reward system deficiencies which cause over-use of instincts (instinct addictions) and drug (including alcohol) addiction. Recovery, therefore, must be based on Hypoism pathophysiology, not on changing the symptoms of this pathophysiology, the big mistake.

Bill Wilson was on the right track by considering instincts so strongly, but didn't understand the why of it. Thus, he got the program wrong, despite what the believers, like Atkinson, believe and espouse so uncritically. AA fails because of this. This is why, despite all the good AA has done for a few people, it has not altered at all the course of addictions in the world over the 70 years of its existence. In fact, thanks to AA we are in a bigger mess concerning addictions today than we were 70 years ago, mainly because AA has stifled progress by its brain dead stance on addiction science and progress, the reason I had to leave AA. We still have 0% prevention and only 5% recovery; no different than random chance. AA says you have to hit bottom before you can get recovery. Thus, no prevention. This is completely wrong and very damaging. Only Hypoism, based on valid science of addiction causation, has a science-based prevention methodology as well as an addiction recovery method. My book goes through this in detail. Hypoism allows hypoic kids to begin the hypoism recovery program as kids, before any addictions have occurred. This allows for real prevention of addictions as well as other societal changes that de-demonize addicts and addictions. Sobriety can start in hypoic kids before addiction even begins.

Articles like Atkinson's actually help maintain the misinterpretation mistakes Wilson made and help inhibit progress in the field of addictions because it has no mechanism for changing the program based on new science, especially the science of Hypoism. In fact, this entire blog only makes things worse because it is all scientifically wrong. This is killing a million addicts a year and maintaining the drug war, based on the same mistaken beliefs that drugs are the problem, not the human brain. Hypoism ends the drug war and begins progress on addictions and the other symptoms of Hypoism for the first time in human history.

The key sentence in the article, in my opinion, is, "But nobody was ever sent to prison for espousing the wrong value for the Hubble constant." How wrong that is! Maybe not the Hubble constant, but many have been sent to prison because of other scientific proclamations. Galileo is a good example. More recently, however, millions of drug users and addicts have been sent to prison over the misuse and deliberate misinterpretation of what people believe is science, the current theory of addiction causation, the hijacked brain hypothesis, the theory of addictions pushed on our country by NIDA and ASAM. The prisons are currently filled with these people but no one cares because they believe the hijacked brain hypothesis (HBH). No one has read the science behind the HBH and no one has fact checked it, except me. There's not a word in Overbye's essay about the mess in addiction science and its baleful results. All he cares about is physics. No one's in prison because of wrong physics principles but there are a million people in prison because of wrong addictionology principles, principles he knows nothing about nor has he ever asked about it. Why has he ignored this in his article, the biggest medical problem facing our world today? I can't ask him because his email address is missing from the article. I can't tell Obama about this because I have no way to contact him either. I therefore write the media about this but they merely ignore me. So, what kind of democracy is that? Who's protecting the million in prison based on the deliberate wrong theory of addiction causation and lies by NIDA and ASAM, the public and private sectors of addictionology? Only me, and no one knows what I'm writing about because I'm being censored. The media is maintaining fraudulent science by censoring me and a million people are in jail because of this. 30 million hypoics in this country alone are running amok and ruining their lives because of this merely because the people in charge of disseminating scientific information in this country are scientifically illiterate or are just too lazy or biased to look into it. No one knows the entire field of addictionology is biased and lying. And this happens under Bush and Obama. How is Obama supposed to find out about this when the addiction field is censoring the truth from him and his advisors? This is why there is no democracy when it comes to addictions. Addictions are run by a fascist regime unbeknownst to the whole country.

"Unfortunately, our culture of pseudo-science and pseudo-democracy is all too willing to engage in ad hominen attacks, politically correct ridicule, cloture of debate, and lack of tolerance toward anyone who questions the current received scientific truth."

"The change we need is not easy: we all stand for truth as long as truth agrees with our strongly held convictions. It is when scientific evidence offends us that we are likely to turn away and attack the messenger. And this holds for all of us: if we good democrats truly care about science and evidence, then we must be willing to accept those scientific results that contradict what we want to believe."

"This is important because there are a number of scientific beliefs which are maintained in the face of contrary evidence which is politically repressed and editorially swept under the carpet because those who have built their careers on those reigning beliefs are loathe to have them removed from under their hard won elevated positions and from the textbooks they have written. But it is important for all citizens to be aware of this more subtle danger to scientific integrity and truth than the obvious corruption introduced by partisan politics of the kind practiced by our recent President."

"I fully agree. What people of the world need more than anything else is to develop a scientific attitude:
an open mind coupled to rigorous checking of facts, tolerance for different interpretations of facts but not for distortion of facts. It is this, more than the accumulation of information, that has made the scientific enterprise so successful."

I didn't write them. They were written by readers, only these readers are unaware of the truth as it applies to the field of addictions.

This article clarifies some longstanding lies about addicts and drugs. Lying about various aspects of addiction, drugs, and drug addicts is exceedingly common. Lies about this stuff appear in the NY Times almost daily. You never see comments about these lies in the Times comments pages because they censor them out. Countless emails and comments written by me about these lies have been censored as will this email. (See my emails to the Times and current letters to the editors pages on my web site. Not one has ever been published.)

Every time Nora Volkow, chief of NIDA, talks or writes about addictions she says the cause of addictions (heritability) is 40-60% genetics. This leaves 60-40% to environmental causation, plenty of room for psychobabble and moral causes, causes that stigmatize and demonize addicts and drugs. She rarely references these numbers so we don't get to see where she gets them from. Listeners and readers nonetheless take her at her word - she is, of course, the head expert in the country on addictions. I seem to be the only person putting her feet to the fire about this "fact," and because of this I am ignored. Who am I to contradict Volkow? Well, who I am is irrelevant because it's the science that counts, not the person making the claim. The science of epidemiology does the studies these numbers are calculated from. The most respected scientist who does these studies is Kenneth Kendler at VCU (MCV), my alma mater. I have two web pages of his and others' work on my web site. One major study by him, "Illicit psychoactive substance use, heavy use, abuse, and dependence in a US population-based sample of male twins." Arch Gen Psychiatry 2000 Mar;57(3):261-9 is quoted, "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%." Maybe this was a quirk. So he repeated the study in Norway: Illicit psychoactive substance use, abuse and dependence in a population-based sample of Norwegian twins, Psychological Medicine, (2006), 36: 955-962 Cambridge University Press. I quote the results: "Full twin models uniformly found twin resemblance to be due largely or entirely to genetic factors. Best-fit models for all analyses included only genetic and individual-specific environmental effects with heritability estimates ranging from 58% to 81%. This is essentially the same as the prior study. His conclusion: "In accord with prior results from the USA and Australia, genetic factors appear to play an important role in the etiology of use and abuse/dependence of illicit drugs in Norway." Hiroi came to a similar conclusion in his 2005 review of the science of addiction causation in a paper referred to and embedded in my linked paper below. You can read that paper too. His conclusion was: "A majority of substance users do not develop addiction to nicotine, alcohol, or opiates. Currently available plasticity-based models (model 1.) of addiction do not adequately account for the limited prevalence of addiction among chronic substance users and the presence of pre-existing, comorbid traits. The genetic model (Model 2) of addiction predicts that addiction is more likely to develop after initial substance use in individuals with genetic susceptibility, which is also associated with comorbid traits in some (Gdc), but not all cases (Gd). Model 2 (genetic) highlights the need for a new direction in addiction research as well as new treatment strategies.� Many other studies show that common environment has nothing to do with etiology of addiction: Similar results and conclusions for gambling, obesity, smoking, and alcohol have been obtained. Addictions are at least 60-80% genetic and unique environment (not shared environment such as parenting) accounts for the remainder. Well, It turns out that this number, 60-80%, is actually an underestimate because of at least four reasons, the most significant being epigenetics (which is still genetic). These reasons are listed and discussed in my paper on addiction causation at: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismhypothesis/ . Thus, addictions are greater than 60-80% genetic, possibly 90-100%.

So, just like the people who lied about crack babies being injured babies to bias how we see crack addicted mothers, as child abusers, we now know that addictions are not 40-60% genetic but greater than 60-80% and possibly 90-100% genetic. Knowing addictions are caused by genetics rather than psychobabble and moral causes changes everything in the field of addictions. My book, Hypoic's Handbook, discusses these changes and tells us how, by using this knowledge, we can finally get ahead of addictions and allow for real prevention and effective treatment rather than maintaining the mess and the drug war we currently relish. We need to stop believing the liars and rid the field of them. The difference in these numbers and the meaning of these numbers changes everything.

This is an excellent review of the fraud committed by Madoff and its consequences by the Times. However, the article is 15 years too late. Is the Times proud of itself for writing such a great but late article? There's a recent article about a Madoff whistleblower, Harry Markopolos, "Madoff whistleblower went unheeded for years" - http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28310980/ It says, "His repeated warnings that Wall Street money manager Bernard Madoff was running a giant Ponzi scheme have cast Harry Markopolos as an unheeded prophet. But people who know or worked with Markopolos say it wasn't prescience that helped him foresee the collapse of Madoff's alleged $50 billion fraud. Instead, they say diligence and a strong moral sense drove his quixotic, nine-year quest to alert regulators about Madoff. "He followed through on everything he ever did. He never let up," said his mother, Georgia Markopolos, in an interview Thursday. "Some kids just let it go if it's too hard, but he wouldn't do that." I wonder if Markopoulos ever wrote the Times about this whistleblowing and whether the Times ignored him as did the SEC.

The question is whether the Times and other media outlets which receive important whistleblower information routinely ignore such information and how often. Who knows. But the Times and other media outlets don't review their histories nor do they look into their ignoring behaviors because in reality this kind of thing doesn't happen too often. So, why bother? Well, one time is enough if it is important. And if its too much trouble, too bad. That's your job.

Hypoism (Umanoff) vs. hijacked brain hypothesis (Volkow) is one of these. 30 million people's lives depend on it. Investigate it. It's real. It's way bigger and more important than Madoff.

Re: Mmm, the food looks good, so I eat it. Some people may simply be hard-wired to overeat, brain scans show.

I quote the article, "the Bush administration had systematically distorted scientific fact in the service of policy goals on the environment, health, biomedical research and nuclear weaponry." I've written about this kind of stuff happening at NIDA in support of the drug war for the last 15 years. All of you know about this in detail. I've written about this enough times.

The only problem is that these "scientists" know nothing about what's going on in the field of addictions, NIDA

I've written these "concerned scientists" but have been ignored. None are in the field of addictionology so they don't know what I'm talking about, and even if they did they'd still ignore me because they like what Volkow is doing, even if its exactly what they're complaining about.

So, how do I get through to the Obama administration to make him aware of this? If anyone knows, please clue me in.

Re: National Institute on Drug Abuse Subjects Scientific Appointees to Litmus Test

Read it and come to your own conclusion. Tell me if I was right about bush's pick for chief of NIDA, Volkow. To be picked as chief of NIDA Volkow had to pass the litmus tests. This means she was and is biased about the politics of addictions and the drug war as I said. I've been writing this for over eight years as well as the implications of it.

I don't know what the title of this article means. I do know one thing, however. Misunderstanding obesity and what causes it is the main reason for the mess in the obesity field as it is for all addictions. The whole focus is on treatment rather than etiology, backwards. Medicine doesn't work that way. Modern medicine works this way: normal physiology (of weight regulation), then pathophysiology of weight irregulation, then treatment. The entire field of addictions, of which obesity is one symptom, has gone treatment first, regardless of physiology and pathophysiology. Thus, while the rest of medicine advances doing it the right way, addictions has made no progress. Check this out. I quote, "Christine Ferguson, associate professor at George Washington University School of Public Health and the director of STOP Obesity Alliance, said the stigma surrounding obesity and belief that it is not a disease are keeping the government from addressing the crisis." Yes? Then, what is it? Well, I went to the STOP web site to see what Ferguson said about the physiology and pathophysiology of obesity. There's not a single word on them. Nothing. There's no discussion whatsoever about the science behind weight control (physiology) or weight out of control (pathophysiology) or how the pathophysiology works (disease concept). If she doesn't know and discuss this science then how is it possible for the layman to know what causes obesity and thus think about it correctly. They can't.

The fact is that she doesn't know and doesn't want to know this physiology and pathophysiology because she doesn't want to make anyone angry at her, much like the rest of the field of addictions. For her to say correctly that obesity is genetic, already well proven, and out of the control of the fat people, she would automatically piss off everyone who wrongly believes addictions, including obesity, are willful and conscious decisions and behaviors made by irresponsible anti-social assholes, exactly like the rest of the addictions, the real cause of the stigmatization and ostracism. The science behind the correct cause of obesity and the rest of the addictions is overwhelming and well confirmed. Why doesn't she just tell the world about it like I have? She's a people pleaser. So, of course, she gets quoted and I don't. By the way, how can we find the best treatment without knowing the correct cause? We can't.

The only way obesity and the rest of the addictions are ever going to be dealt with correctly is for the public to known the correct science behind them, something that doesn't exist today even by those who supposedly advocate for these people. Thus, this article is a joke and quite misinforming, helping maintain the addiction epidemic. Ferguson is not an advocate much like Volkow isn't one either. They are obfuscators and snake oil salesmen with bad personal motives, hurting millions of addicts.

The original paper states: "Compared to low-risk youth, there were some clear patterns of risk factors associated with MA use. A history of engaging in a variety of risky behaviors (e.g., sexual activity [planned, unplanned, or under the influence of alcohol], alcohol consumption, and opiate use) was significantly associated with MA use among low-risk youth. Engaging in high-risk behavior may be a gateway for MA use or vice versa. Homosexual or bisexual lifestyle is also a risk factor. This is not surprising, as MA is believed to heighten sexual pleasure and gay and bisexual men cite this as a reason for using MA[36]. A history of a psychiatric disorder and, in particular, adjustment disorder, conduct disorder, or ADHD, is a risk factor for MA use. This is consistent with previous research that shows psychiatric conditions to be risk factors for drug use in general[37]. Then Klassen concludes in an article about this paper: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-11/uoaf-mal111808.php, "If risk factors for MA use could be identified, physicians and other health-care professionals who work with youth may be better equipped to identify MA users, and develop education and prevention programs that could be targeted to youth at greater risk for using MA." These kids at risk of future addictions, including MA, are hypoics. They are born with the genetic disease of Hypoism discussed in my 1996 book, Hypoic's Handbook and more recent web papers such as: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismhypothesis/ It's their Hypoism that causes them to get addicted to MA and many other addictors down the line. The Hypoism paradigm has a preventive methodology that solves this problem. The Hypoism paradigm finds these kinds of kids at an early age, kids with Hypoism, the genetic disease that causes all addictions, and begins the Hypoism recovery program (much like AA in its organization but based on science rather than superstition and it's free) on them before any addictions or dangerous behavior even begin. One doesn't need to hit bottom to begin this methodology as in all other addiction treatments and programs. The diagnosis can be made quite early and recovery begun at that time. Hypoism recovery methodology prevents all addictions and other dangerous behaviors. The only trouble is that the Hypoism paradigm has been censored by the addictionology community, not for scientific reasons but for ideological and conflict of interest reasons. Read my paper and you'll see that the science is both referenced and valid and clarifies the cause of addictions. The result of this censorship is that no one knows about Hypoism and its preventive measures. Your readership needs to know about this so they can try using it.

I voted for Obama mostly because there's no way I could stand seeing another Republican in the white house. However, his pick for treasury secty, Geithner, the key player to turn around the economic mess we're in, makes me think nothing's going to be different in the Obama administration from the Bush disaster. It makes me wonder who Obama is going to pick to run NIDA and NIAAA, the two most important people in charge of turning around the addiction mess. No one knows it but the addiction mess is much larger and more damaging to the country than the economic mess. There are ten million unemployed but 30 million addicts.

Geithner was the regulator who oversaw the biggest financial disaster this country has ever experienced - hurting every American. Now he's being put in charge of fixing this mess. He also is a tax cheater who almost got away with over 50,000 dollars in deficient tax payments. Instead of going to jail he's being put in charge of the treasury. The old adage, "The fox is guarding the hen house," applies very well here. How does a thing like this happen? The Senate doesn't seem to care.

What about NIDA and its chief Nora Volkow? She has never gotten a single addict clean and sober yet she is in charge of getting 30 million addicts clean and sober. In fact, she was picked by Bush to run NIDA not because of expertise in curing addictions but because of her propensity to misinterpret addiction science in a way that was consistent with Bush's philosophy of addictions. One fact about this remains glaring: addictions are a bigger mess today than they were 8 years ago as is the drug war, one of the main policies supported by NIDA. The reason for this is that her theory of addiction causation, the hijacked brain hypothesis, is scientifically wrong but she warps addiction science to support this theory. She too is the fox guarding the hen house. This fact is consistent with the entire administration over the last 8 years. Will 8 years of failure and bullshitting be good evidence for her to return to the job under Obama? Will Obama make the same mistake? I know the congress doesn't care.

These two articles from today's media strongly support concepts I've been railing about for the last 15 years.

The first article describes three genetic variations (alleles) that are accountable for 50% of massive obesity. Remember Steven Pinker recently saying in his Times Magazine article that we should stop looking for genes causing behaviors because they only account for tiny amounts of the cause of particular traits and will never make a difference? Well, these three genetic alleles account for very large amounts of this particular trait. And, the author suggests, "Understanding the genetic basis of obesity is the first step towards helping these children. Once we identify the genes responsible, we can develop ways to screen children to find out who is most at risk of becoming obese. Hopefully we can then intervene with measures such as behavioural therapy, to make sure a child forms healthy eating habits and does not develop a weight problem," added Professor Froguel. This is exactly the approach of Hypoism which predicted this article's findings in 1992 in my first paper about Hypoism, a paper that was ignored and censored by 12 addiction journals, all for non-scientific reasons. My current updated paper on all this, http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismhypothesis/ , discusses this conclusion.

The second article discusses one of the most important and most ignored concepts in finding the genetic basis of various traits, epigenetics. Epigenetics is the science of how the genome is altered absent changes in the DNA nucleotide sequence. This is a relatively new science that has discovered many ways the function of the genome can be altered without any changes in the nucleotide sequence, something never known before. Thus, identical twins' genomes are not functionally identical. This explains why identical twins, having the same nucleotide sequence, can have varied genetic traits, can be different. It also explains why current heritability studies based on the assumption of identicality of monozygous twins' genome function can be less than 100% for certain traits when in reality the trait is 100% genetic. The difference is the epigenetic effects on the existence of the trait. Lack of 100% concordance in monozygous twins does not mean environmental etiology of that trait. Wikipedia has a simple discussion of epigenetics. Read it. The problem is that all the heritability studies done on traits, such as addictions which come out 60-83%, and therefore leave room for "environmental causation" (the mathematical difference between the calculated heritability and 100, in this case, 17-40%) need to be repeated taking into account epigenetic effects. As I've shown for many years in my hypoism hypothesis paper this ignored effect falsely underestimates the role of genetics in trait causation. This, 60-83% heritability may well be 100%, and thus there is no environmental remainder when subtracted from 100. This effect is exactly what the authors of this article are saying, "The epigenetic heritability may help explain currently unclear issues in human disease, such as the presence of a disease in only one monozygotic twin, the different susceptibility of males (e.g. to autism) and females (e.g. to lupus), significant fluctuations in the course of a disease (e.g. bipolar disorder, inflammatory bowel disease, multiple sclerosis), among numerous others. Knowing these traits are completely genetic rather than genetic plus environmental, will allow us to more perfectly pinpoint the causes of these traits, including addictions, so we can find the most effective ways for prevention and treatment. Confounding the etiology of addictions with false claims of environmental effects has made the entire field of addictions ineffective and useless in dealing with the hundred or so addictions we know of. Ridding the field of addictions from the morass of environmentalism (and psychobabble nonsense) will allow addictions to be known for what they really are, a genetic disease, not a moral failing requiring criminalization, stigmatization, and ostracism.

What is the current batting average for the drug war? 0% In fact, if batting averages could be negative, it would be negative infinity. The 50 year old drug war has not stopped a single American from getting high, stoned, or addicted. It has not saved a single life but has, instead ruined and ended millions of them. The drug war has been a complete waste of time, money, and lives yet America persists in this destructive policy no matter what the results. The drug czars have consistently lied to the congress and public about the results of the drug war yet they keep believing them. Even Obama believes in the drug war. How is all this possible?

It's very simple. There's a monopoly of ideas about drug and addiction policy. The monopoly starts with NIDA and the addictionology community with their fraudulent and already proved wrong theory of addiction causation - drugs are bad and cause addiction. This is the hijacked brain hypothesis (HBH). From this, the ideas go to the public via congressional hearings and the media - drugs are bad and cause addiction. The public responds with, "We must get rid of drugs." Result? The drug war. As long as the HBH remains in effect the drug war is the only believed means of preventing addiction. If the war doesn't seem to be working, which is well known for many years, then it must be escalated, which is exactly what has happened year after year. No one has sat down to think that the war doesn't work because its theoretical basis is wrong - except me. I've been ignored. So, the war gets bigger and more destructive every year and gets 0 results, even worse, minus infinity results. Every day there's another article about how to improve the drug war and every day the improved drug war fails 100%.

No one, except me, has looked at the reality. The drug war can't work because it's based on the wrong theory of addictions. The HBH is wrong no matter how many experts believe in it and claim it's correct. The science of addiction causation reviewed by me (http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismhypothesis/ ) and Hiroi (Genetic susceptibility to substance dependence, Molecular Psychiatry (2005) 10, 336�344) clearly show that addiction is not caused by drugs but by the genetically susceptible brains of particular people. These people have a genetic disease which I call Hypoism, but it doesn't matter what you call it, which inexorably turns them into addicts as they grow up. If there were no drugs they would all get addicted to addictive behaviors. So, getting rid of drugs will not stop addictions, only certain addictions, if in fact it were possible to get rid of drugs which it's not. Thus, the whole drug war can't work to stop addictions because we will never get rid of all drugs and all addictive behaviors no matter how many laws we have and how many jails.

The only answer to addictions is to deal with those people who have the genetic disease that causes addictions. We must learn to diagnose them as children and then begin their recovery from their underlying genetic disease at that time. Recovery will keep them from getting addicted no matter how many drugs are around, just like today for people in recovery after they have gotten addicted. The main difference is that these kids will never have to get addicted and never face the lethal consequences of addictions. No need for a drug war and all its deadly and wasteful consequences. My book, Hypoic's Handbook, goes through this entire argument in great detail including the methodology for setting up and running the nationwide recovery program, a program that will be completely free of charge. If this argument doesn't make sense please inform me so I can stop wasting my time writing these letters.

Now, what does this article say about the veracity of the "hijacked brain hypothesis" of addiction causation currently pushed by NIDA and the rest of the addiction community as the true cause of addiction? The hijacked brain hypothesis (HBH) says addiction is caused by the recurrent voluntary use of an addictive drug which then changes the brain into an addicted brain. The drug hijacks the reward system of the brain which is what causes addiction. "Scientific advances over the past 20 years have shown that drug addiction is a chronic, relapsing disease that results from the prolonged effects of drugs on the brain." Addiction Is a Brain Disease, and It Matters, A. Leshner, Science 3 October 1997: Vol. 278. no. 5335, pp. 45 - 47, and, "Here, we integrate the findings from imaging studies to propose a model of drug addiction. Although acute drug intake increases DA neurotransmission, chronic drug consumption results in a marked decrease in DA activity, associated with, among others, dysregulation of the orbitofrontal cortex (region involved with salience attribution) and cingulate gyrus (region involved with inhibitory control). The ensuing increase in motivational drive for the drug, strengthened by conditioned responses and the decrease in inhibitory control favors emergence of compulsive drug taking." Neuropharmacology. 2004;47 Suppl 1:3-13, N. Volkow et al.

Today's article says, "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%." If drug addiction were caused by the chronic use of an addicting drug, the number addicted in this study should have been 100%, or 90%, or some other very high number close to 100%. Instead it was 3%, a tiny number. 3% of people on chronic opiates (a known addictive drug) got addicted. In fact, other studies of addiction rates of other addictive drugs show similarly low numbers. see: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismhypothesis/. These low numbers are so consistent over the range of addictive drugs that Hiroi in his extensive review of the science of addiction causation, said about them, "A majority of substance users do not develop addiction to nicotine, alcohol, or opiates. Currently available plasticity-based models (model 1. - the hijacked brain hypothesis) of addiction do not adequately account for the limited prevalence of addiction among chronic substance users and the presence of pre-existing, comorbid traits. The genetic model (Model 2) of addiction predicts that addiction is more likely to develop after initial substance use in individuals with genetic susceptibility, which is also associated with comorbid traits in some (Gdc), but not all cases (Gd). Model 2 [the genetic model] highlights the need for a new direction in addiction research as well as new treatment strategies.� Hiroi wrote this in 2005. Genetic susceptibility to substance dependence, Molecular Psychiatry (2005) 10, 336�344. In other words, the hijacked brain hypothesis doesn't fit the data but the genetic model does. NIDA's theory of addiction causation is wrong and, like any other wrong theory in medicine, kills millions of people. The difference between these two models is enormous as are the prevention and treatment implications. Despite this, nothing has changed in the field of addictions. All this has been ignored by Volkow and the rest of her biased followers in the field of addiction. Concomitantly, the addiction epidemic has flourished and grown.

The public needs to know that the addiction experts are deliberately lying to them about the cause of addiction and thereby maintaining the addiction epidemic. We need new and honest leaders in the entire field of addictions if we are ever going to get a handle on addictions.

Pinker is a smart guy with the incredible and impressive ability to remember countless facts and stories, but when it comes to putting it all together into something that makes sense and makes a difference, he always falls short. This is because he has a bias against there existing a comprehensive theory of behavioral genetics. This bias is seen in every one of his books and in this article. It is evidenced by this quote, "Even if personal genomics someday delivers a detailed printout of psychological traits, it will probably not change everything, or even most things." Or this quote, "The self is a byzantine bureaucracy, and no gene can push the buttons of behavior by itself. You can attribute the ability to defy our genotypes to free will, whatever that means, but you can also attribute it to the fact that in a hundred-trillion-synapse human brain, any single influence can be outweighed by the product of all of the others." He then lists a few single gene diseases such as Huntington's that have never been defied. In fact, there are hundreds of single gene diseases that can't be defied by free will or by the influence of the rest of the brain. They can only be defied by a detailed understanding of what they do and how they work and are regulated.

The evidence that non-genetic (so-called environmental) influences are important in the determination of behavior is what is known as heritability of behavioral traits. Studies can be done using twins and adoptees to get data on specific behaviors and when plugged into formulas they give us heritability (genetics) numbers and numbers for shared and individual environments. Pinker mentions this. At the same time he says monozygous twins are identical twins, they have identical genomes. That fact allows us to subtract the heritability number from 100 and get an environmental number. Environmental numbers can't be obtained directly. Thus, heritability numbers range from 0-100, and any number less than 100 yields an environmental (non-genetic) remainder. There's only one thing wrong with this system. It's wrong. Moreover, it's been known to be wrong for a long time; long enough for Pinker to know about it. Monozygous twins have been known to be genetically (functionally and genomically) non-identical for many years. You won't hear Pinker talk about it and you won"t hear Nora Volkow, chief of NIDA, talk about it. Why? Because this fact ruins their biases against behavioral genetics and the influence of genetics on behavior. This mistake is discussed in the following article along with its implications on heritability: "En-twinned lives": twins experts Thomas J. Bouchard, Jr. and Nancy L. Segal of the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart re-unite to discuss behavior genetics and evolutionary psychology, on page 4 of: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_kmske/is_3_14/ai_n31060470/pg_4?tag=artBody;col1

These epigentic factors and their implications on determination of heritability numbers (underestimates of genetics and overestimates of environmental effects) are discussed in my paper on the etiology of addictions: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismhypothesis/ This paper shows the difference between the hijacked brain hypothesis (the environmental theory of addiction causation based on wrong heritability calculations) and the Hypoism (the genetic theory of addiction causation) paradigm on addiction causation, prevention, and treatment. Pinker and Volkow both have personal and non-scientific biases against this differentiation and thus don't talk about the known mistakes in heritability determination.

Moreover, in the studies of heritability of behavioral traits, including addictions of all kinds, shared environment has been shown to be without effect. Pinker mentions this. Only non-shared environment has some small effects. Well, it's been shown that non-shared environment are determined by one's predispositions, which are genetic, in other words, one's genetics. Thus, whether you like it or not, behavior is predominantly genetic in causation. The implications of this are enormous in terms of understanding human behavior and addictions, my special interest. Addicts have been told for years their addictions are their fault as well as the fault of their parents. This is the hijacked brain hypothesis (HBH), the moral theory of addictions. In fact, addictions are caused by genetics against the will of the addict. This error has helped kill millions of addicts.

Pinker and Volkow are too smart not to know about this stuff. They purposely don't talk about it because of their biases against genetic causation of behavior. To ignore epigenetics in their theories of behavior is a sin against science and society.

For umpteen years Oprah has extorted billions from her gullible fans (true fanatics) with her pseudospiritual beliefs proclaiming the power of self-actualization, self-sufficiency, and free-willed decision-making and control. She is one of the greatest snake oil salespersons of all time. A representative of her magazine called me many years ago for an interview about Hypoism. Hypoism is the genetic and deterministic theory of addiction causation, the exact opposite of Oprah's beliefs. The interview didn't last very long and never appeared in her magazine. Now, without actually admitting it, but really admitting it, Oprah is coming around 180 degrees based on her own failed experiences with self-control. "I'm embarrassed � I can't believe that after all these years, all the things I know how to do, I'm still talking about my weight. I look at my thinner self and think, 'How did I let this happen again?' " [from http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20245089,00.html ] This sounds like an addict, no?

There's no doubt that Oprah is a hypoic. She has at least two major addictions, food and people. There's also a sister who died from a drug addiction. The genetics is in place. You can run but you can't hide. As all my readers know the world has run from Hypoism since its invention in 1992. It's been ignored and censored. The opposing theory, the hijacked brain hypothesis (HBH), has remained in effect despite being proved wrong. This is because people like the HBH. The HBH allows us to discriminate against and punish addicts, something we all love to do. We love the drug war which is based on the HBH despite its failure and all its damage.

So, will the big O take a look at Hypoism now that she has become a victim of it and has admitted it, sort of? Will she finally allow her followers to know the truth, be helped by it, and risk becoming an ordinary person?

I've been writing many media outlets about this since 1995. My 1996 book, Hypoic's Handbook, is about the disease I have named Hypoism. I state early in the book, "Hypoism - A Real Disease, presents the neurobiology of addictions and the newly conceptualized organ in the human brain that actually produces addictions. This organ, the FOKS, �Feel O.K. System,� is a major part of the decision-making mechanism present in all people and is located in an area of the brain not amenable to conscious control. The FOKS includes the reward pathways provided by evolution to reinforce instinctive behaviors. In hypoics, this organ�s function is altered by evolutionarily diverse genes (ALLELES) functioning at lower levels than in the majority of people. These genes have turned the FOKS/decision-making apparatus into an addiction-making machine, which functions against the will of the hypoic."

It is made very clear from the start that instinctive decision-making is NOT free-willed choice. The whole book is based on this premise. The decisions made by hypoics, and probably many other people as well, are not choices as we currently think of this word, but unconscious decisions made by a genetically altered part of the brain against the will - the complete opposite. There's much science to back this up. Moreover, the recovery methods used to deal with Hypoism take all this into effect. Hypoism recovery is the first preventative and treatment method to state this and use this. It turns out self-sufficiency can't work. That's why it doesn't. We need a special kind of help from a special kind of person. Luckily, it's free.

Now, the author of this article comes along and writes that these stupid and deadly decisions are simple free-willed choices and all we have to do to live better lives is to make "better" choices. Easy. Not really. We need the government to help us. Ha Ha.

Anyway, my book goes through the best methods to deal with our decision-making brain. Let your readers know about it so they can begin to live healthier lives the right way, not the way they are currently trying to do it.

There's no evidence that people change or even can change. The gurus of change mentioned in this article, self-help books, Robbins, Dr. Phil, and Oprah, make their millions selling change to people who endlessly don't change. These people keep paying and paying but never change. If people could change there would be just one self-help book not a million of them. There would be no need for change gurus. The existence of these gurus, and there are many more of them, and the million self-help books is good evidence that none of them work better than placebo or chance. Read the article and see that it doesn't mention one study that shows this conclusion is wrong. None of the gurus have published their results. Why? Because they have none. But change sells very well. I call this the psychobabble/religious paradigm of psychology (P/R Paradigm for short). Then, the last sentence of the article is the hooker - in order to change you must accept yourself, "In concluding this, she may have stumbled across a more realistic form of change for 2009: self-acceptance." Somehow the editors that allowed this article to be published missed this paradox. The need and desire to change is, by definition, the absence of self-acceptance. What the author and all the people who want to change don't realize is that all the behaviors they hate and want to change developed to begin with because of the need and desire to change, change how they felt. These behaviors were attempts to change to begin with. We must go back to the person who existed before the behaviors began that they now hate, that person who felt they needed to change, that person who then developed the behaviors that changed how they felt but resulted in the current mess in which they find themselves, the person they now want to change, again. Oprah eats to change how she feels. Oprah rallies people to her side to change how she feels. She's a food addict and a people addict (of the drug variety). Her audience picks her as their leader to change how they feel. They are people addicts (of the addict variety). Read my book on the Hypoism paradigm of addictions. It will explain the biology of these addictions along with a hundred more. It will also explain the recovery method based on the same biology that causes the disease. The ultimate answer, the goal of recovery, is self-acceptance, acceptance of the person who existed before the initial need to change that led to the first addiction, not to change the addict. This requires knowledge of the biology of that person when they were born, not the biology of the person after they got addicted. This is the information the gurus don't have and don't want those addicted to them to have either, because if they have this knowledge they won't need the guru any longer, and the gurus go broke. Thus, the gurus who have actually been told about Hypoism have ignored it so they can keep their control over those addicted to them. Read the definition of guru from my 1996 book:

"guru, charlatan (or cult leader) - A person who leads a group of followers, usually through some power and control given to him/her by the followers, based on some irrational idea or belief about his abilities, knowledge or special (supernatural) powers that he offers to give or provide to his clients or followers and usually in the form of a treatment regime or program of the guru�s invention, run by him or his followers using his books, tapes, videos, etc. The usual scenario is that the guru or charlatan offers hurting and unhappy people, his clients, access to some sort of spiritual, psychic or psychological power that they believe they lack (otherwise, why would they be unhappy and miserable?). Where this power comes from is always the big supernatural secret. That is, of course, the snake oil gimmick, because there is no secret power. There is a great need by these poor suckers to have access to some sort of power they feel they lack. Isn�t that the promise of any addiction? �Please delude me, I need it so! I just want to feel better.� The secret access to a secret power! I know of no addiction in the world that doesn�t offer this one simple ploy. At least drugs are honest. They offer what they are, no more, no less. Gurus offer what they aren�t. We all know there is no secret power, just the promise of one, and these desperate, needy people fall for the charlatan�s shtick. And, of course, once they learn what he is teaching them, they will have this power to be more successful in romance, finance, happiness, self-esteem, self-fulfillment, career, etc. The code words are empowered or empowerment, self-fulfilled, self-sufficient, self-actualized. The power given to the guru usually comes from the people addiction of the followers, but as in all people addiction, both are addicted to each other. The guru uses the people addiction to extract money, celebrity, fame, political power and the feeling of exaltation he gets from being powerful, god-like, and in charge. He provides a feeling to his clients, but no power. Gurus insist on absolute obedience to them and their ideas with veiled threats of something like continued misery, damnation, failures and loss of sobriety (getting drunk or back on drugs, etc.) if they don�t follow his advise, suggestions, program, attend his seminars, buy his books, tapes etc. Dead gurus have the same power from the grave held in proxy by a hierarchy of his/her followers, usually also manifested in �sacred� writings by the original guru or his original right hand men. The way to differentiate a guru from a leader is that the guru insists on following him and is self-aggrandized, enriched, and all powerful, while a leader insists on the following of ideas, gets no self-aggrandizement, special power, or favor, and insists his followers pick their own leaders, advisors, and personal consultants. The difference between the guru and recovery is that the guru offers a delusion of success and happiness; recovery merely offers you a life, no more, no less. This usually isn�t enough for most people so they go for the ecstatic feeling and high that the guru offers�the unattainable."

Anyway, if there's anyone who wants to accept the person they were when they were born, before they got waylaid into changing, get a life, and end their need to change, they can read my book and use the methodology developed therein. Hypoic's Handbook. Available from my web site. The recovery is completely free.

Why she cuts? Read my 1996 book on Hypoism. Self-mutilation is listed there as one of the hundred or so valid addictions. What makes something an addictor? First, it must be recognized that all people are genetically different. We keep forgetting that. That's why non-addicts have such a hard time understanding addicts, they don't get addicted not because they are good or healthy and addicts are bad or unhealthy but because of genetically different brain genes called alleles of the reward system. Second, 10-20% of the population are so genetically different that they can be said to have genetically critically low reward system activity (called Hypoism). This genetic problem causes many symptoms, one of the most obvious is addictions to things, drugs and behaviors, that happen to, in them specifically, raise brain dopamine more than anything else (they've yet experienced). Many times it's more than one addictor, but usually one addictor stands out for them and that's their main addiction. Self-mutilation happens to be one of these addictors in a small percentage of hypoics. These people use self-mutilation exactly like other kinds of addicts (hypoics) use their addictors. Thus, these people have the disease of Hypoism and the symptom of self-mutilation. Frequently, as I've said, they have or develop other addictions as well which makes it obvious they have an underlying disease and the addictions are merely symptoms of that disease. Members of their family usually have addictions as well, sometimes the same addiction and sometimes other addictions, as is the case here. This is because the family has Hypoism. This means they need treatment or recovery from the causative disease itself, the Hypoism, not just from the addiction, a current mistake in the field of addictions that causes treatment to fail. Hypoism recovery is a specific kind of recovery detailed in my book. The reason it is so specific is that it's based on the pathophysiology that causes it, not some made up nonsense having nothing to do with the pathophysiology. To understand this connection you must read my book or less well detailed, my paper, http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismhypothesis/ . Reading this paper, http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/thehypoismaddictionhypothesis/ , should help understanding this disease too.

The science behind Hypoism is quite extensive as you will find if you read my papers and book, something most people refuse to do, especially those experts making a living off of addicts' suffering. Hypoism recovery requires no experts, only other recovering hypoics, and is free of charge. That's why the experts don't like Hypoism. They don't want to give over control of these patients and what they get from them. Thus, they ignore and censor Hypoism from the people who need it, the biggest medical scandal in the history of medicine. The media has helped with this as well. Because of this addictions of all kinds are out of control and will remain such.

First, let me make it clear that I have always advocated for every addict to be addiction-free and, most importantly, in full recovery from the disease that causes addictions, Hypoism, something way more inclusive than merely addiction-free. My book, Hypoic's Handbook, details all of this.

However, we also advocate for reality in dealing with people with Hypoism, hypoics, people who get addicted to the hundred or so addictors, drugs and behaviors, that exist today. Today's article is about Obama's cigarette addiction and his relapses after trying to stop smoking. We know from his admissions that Obama's father was an alcohol addict, and thus it's likely that Obama is a hypoic, not just an inadvertent cigarette addict. That's something Obama needs to know about and deal with if he's smart and doesn't want to end up like the last hypoic president, G. W. Bush and make disastrous decisions like any other non-recovering hypoic. But this is not my point today.

Today I want to discuss the double standard our country has for legal and illegal drugs and drug addicts, cigarettes being a legal drug. As you can tell from the article, Obama's smoking relapses are seen as sort of a joke. Comedians make jokes about his smoking behavior, and no one takes it too seriously. His relapses are easily excused because it's well known that relapse is very common in cigarette addicts trying to stop smoking as the article states. The average number of relapses is 8-10. Some have more and some have less, but all are still capable of attaining abstinence. These relapses are accepted as part of the recovery process. It's well known that despite numerous relapses these people can reach the point of lasting abstinence no matter how many relapses they have. They should keep trying despite relapses. In fact, all addictions have numerous relapses associated with their recovery and no matter how many relapses one has one still has an equal chance to reach sustained abstinence if they keep trying, and vice versa, where future relapse despite sustained abstinence can also occur. In other words, in any addiction, the prognosis is similarly good irrespective of how many relapses an addict has during his attempt at recovery from his addiction, as long as he continues to try to get clean and eventually does so. No one has made any judgments about Obama's character because of his numerous relapses. No one has said he has a personality disorder or anti-social disorder or is otherwise a bad or dangerous person because of all this.

However, depending on the addiction, society doesn't see it this way. There are hundreds of thousands of addicts in jail right now for having been addicted to illegal drugs and some prescription drugs obtained illegally. Some recovering addicts on probation or parole get sent back to jail for relapsing. Some recovering addicts lose their jobs and even careers for being addicted and having relapses during their recovery despite eventually establishing sustained and documented long-term recovery. I am one of those. I had gotten addicted after oral surgery and being treated with prescription opiates. My story is in my book and on my web site at: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/thedoctordrugwarwrongandwastefulp1/ Despite being eight years documented clean and sober and having fulfilled all my restoration obligations to NYS, documented by the CPH, one of the bogus reasons I was refused medical license restoration was because of "too many relapses" in the beginning of my recovery. When I disagreed I was told I was arrogant and even a worse person. Despite my long-term recovery and never having injured any patient or anyone else, nor having any complaints against my practice of medicine which was considered excellent by all my colleagues and partners, I was told that my relapses and arrogance were "evidence" of being anti-social, having a personality disorder, being a dangerous doctor, and having a bad prognosis. I was refused restoration of my license. The NYS Supreme Court agreed with this despite a scientific and logical argument against it and I was refused a trial to prove the opposite. Eliot Spitzer was the DA who fought my case for the state.

More needs to be written about the meaning of relapse in the course of recovery from addiction so that addicts will no longer be discriminated against for them in the course of their recovery, irrespective of what addiction they are seen in. The misunderstanding and misuse of beliefs by NYS about addiction relapse totally destroyed my life and career and injured my children because of my lose of career and income. This discrimination needs to be fixed. How the state deals with addicts needs to reviewed.

This study says a lot more than, "virginity pledges are ineffective." We've known for a long time that pledges against sex, drug and alcohol use don't work, that "just say no" is ineffective. This study is merely a confirmation of that. The question is, what does all this mean? It's not that the pledgees are liars. My guess is that pretty much all of them, if not all of them, were sincere about their pledges, and not trying to deceive anyone. The real issue is why don't pledges work? The answer is very simple although not liked very much. The answer is that the part of the brain that directs actual behavior is different from the part of the brain that wants and makes pledges about future instinctive behavior. In my 1996 book on addiction causation, Hypoic's Handbook, Chapter VII, Role of the Instincts, I quote Bart Simpson who said, �I don�t know why I did it, I don�t know why I enjoyed it, and I don�t know why I�ll do it again.� This quote sums up the layman's knowledge about human instinctive behavior in general, sex being one of them.

Well, the neurobiology and genetics of instinctive decision-making turns out to be exactly opposite of what humans have always wanted it to be. It is run by the unconscious limbic system rather than the cerebral cortex and frontal lobes, those parts of the brain that differentiate us from the "lower animals." Humans have been trying to control instinctive behavior for a long time. The Ten Commandments is one quite ancient form of "just say no" to human instincts. As much as religious people promote these commandments, they don't work, frequently including those who push them the hardest. Humans continue to act out these instincts even when they are against their conscious will. Addictions act the same way. In fact, all addictions, drugs and behaviors, work via the instinct regulating system in the brain. That's the basis of my book. It's completely backed by the science of addiction causation as well, though people don't like it and don't want it.

It doesn't matter whether we like it or want it, because that's the way it is. We have the choice to fight it and lose or accept it and win. This theory of human behavior and addiction causation is the reality, and if we ever want to deal effectively with the problems caused by the unconscious limbic instinct regulating mechanism we must begin to understand it and use it, the whole point of my work for the last 16 years. Thus, you can continue to fight this fact and fail to deal effectively with these behaviors or you can read my book and begin to use it. It makes no difference to me. I'm just trying to help.

I don't understand why this article is called "Triggering" addiction. There's nothing in it about what causes (triggers) addiction. In fact, when Markus Heilig approaches the cause of addiction he gets it wrong right off the bat. The sentences, "The disease is not just about drinking too much. Nor is it just about physical dependence characterized by an increased tolerance over time and severe withdrawal when use is stopped. Neither of these phenomena are necessary or sufficient to capture the disease. At its core, alcoholism is a behavioral disorder." say alcoholism is a disease and that it's a behavioral disorder. This misuse of language (disease? disorder?) is typical for addictionologists who know nothing about medicine, addicts, and addictions. That's the whole field. My paper on the reality of the word disease is discussed here: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/diseaseconcept1aperspective/ Behaviors can't be diseases. They are symptoms. Thus, there's no such thing as alcoholism. There's alcohol addiction but no alcoholism. It's a symptom, not a disease. If you read the addiction literature you will see that there are a hundred plus addictions, alcohol addiction being one of them, not a hundred plus diseases, but a hundred plus symptoms. My book, Hypoic's Handbook, and papers, http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/thehypoismaddictionhypothesis/ and http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismhypothesis/ show clearly there's one disease that causes all hundred plus addictions which are symptoms, not diseases. This disease called Hypoism is genetic and present at birth. The addictions, symptoms of this disease, happen later as the hypoic experiences them due to the disease having its way with his decision-making apparatus, usually more than one and usually several at a time. Moreover the addictions are just one major group of symptoms caused by Hypoism. The other two groups of symptoms are decision-making and evaluation disasters. The disease is much larger than mere addictions. ADHD, PTSD, and domestic violence are similarly not diseases but symptoms of Hypoism. No one's put this all together like I have. Hypoism is a pathophysiology that can be used to prevent and treat addictions.

Because Hypoism is present at birth, long before addictions occur, the understanding of how it causes addictions and its other symptoms can be used in these kids to prevent addictions and its other symptoms as well as help treat addictions if they happen to occur. Prevention methodology is a million times more important than just treatment after addictions occur. Only Hypoism has such a methodology. I suggest you all read the book and begin using it to prevent addictions rather than running around looking for drugs to treat them, drugs that don't work and usually screw up the addict more than anything else by the way. The work Markus discusses in this article may pan out but most likely it won't. No drugs used in the past or presently actually work better than placebo over the long haul. Either way, Hypoism recovery will pan out if and when it is used because it's based on the complete pathophysiology of the disease, not merely a small part of what in reality is just a small part of relapse physiology, not on the cause of the addictions.

Here's a book from Harvard Medical School that says, "More recently, they [experts] have recognized that excessive behaviors such as gambling, shopping, and sex also can lead to addiction. What's common to all addictions is the brain's response to pleasurable experiences, no matter what their source. Genetic research has uncovered that some people are predisposed to addiction in general, but not to a specific type. In other words, addiction is a disorder that manifests itself in many different ways." This is all sort of true, but not really as I will show below. Then it gives several "effective" methods to quit an addiction, all, however, proven no better than chance or merely switching addictions. Lastly, it gives the reader several steps to take to help stop an addiction, none proven.

I wrote a paper about the quoted and underlined part of the above paragraph in 1992, 16 years ago. Thus, "more recently," is not really correct. This paper has evolved into http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismhypothesis/ and my 1996 book, Hypoic's Handbook, still not too recent. I was ridiculed back then for saying drug and behavioral addictions were equal. My work spells out the why, the brain mechanism, the genetics, and how they work together, behind why these underlined words are true. Because of this brain mechanism's alteration by low (hypo) activity genetic alleles in the reward system, I called the disease Hypoism, not merely, "addiction," as they do in their book. They say, "Addiction is the disorder that causes addictions." Makes no sense. Addiction is not a disorder but a symptom of a disease, the disease called Hypoism. I explained in detail why it's just certain people with genetic Hypoism who can get addicted, only people with Hypoism. Hypoism causes addictions and much more. The Harvard book knows not about this mechanism. I then go through the prevention and treatment methods based on and derived from this brain mechanism. The Harvard book merely lists a bunch on useless methods unrelated to the pathophysiology of the cause of addictions, their biggest mistake. This is not good medicine. This shows they know nothing about addictions and how to deal with them.

Although they got a few things right about addiction causation, they still don't have the whole picture correct, and therefore their book is useless and misleading and won't help anyone. Despite this, because they're from Harvard, their book gets reviewed and mine, because I'm nobody, doesn't, despite getting the whole picture right. This is why the field of addictions remains the mess it is.

Psychologists and psychiatrists have been treating addicts for over a hundred years, as have religious groups. AA began in 1939. Snake oil salesmen have been in this field as well. In all this time, none of them have taken the time and effort to do a valid study showing their treatments work over the long haul (5 years) any better than chance. Every other field of medicine has done what addictionology has not done. Why? Because they don't want to prove their treatments don't work. Nonetheless, they say that treatment works. That's called lying.

There's a good reason why these treatments don't work. Most of the treatments have come from the deep past when addiction was seen as a religious and moral problem or a problem stemming from psychobabble nonsense rather than biology. They have been dragged into the 21st century by their enthusiastic advocates and fanatics without going through any of the trials modern treatments of medical diseases have. They are not based on a valid theory of addiction causation as are valid treatments in other areas of medicine. The current theory of addiction causation, the hijacked brain hypothesis, has been proven wrong in many ways, yet it remains in place today despite my complaints and offer of disproof.

I wrote my first article on all this plus the correct theory of addiction causation called Hypoism in 1992. Since then I've written the Times thousands of letters to the editor about the lies of the addictionology community about their treatment and their theory. 16 years later they write about it but fail to mention me and my letters to them. Of course, the addiction community will ignore their article and continue to lie to the public for another 16 years in order to continue to profit from their lies. The Times will continue to allow this while addicts and their families get screwed. Is there something more I need to say?

This is the kind of article I've been waiting for. This was what I was afraid of. It takes a poorly deserved conclusion of a bad study done by people on the payroll of the company making the drug from an absolutely minimal effect on "numbers of heavy drinking days," (not abstinence) to "cure." The study's reference is: J Clin Psychiatry 2008;69:190-195. Read it and see for yourself. If you read the study you will see that the data that supposedly shows a significant (p<0.01) difference between the drugged patients and the placebo patients for heavy drinking days, a nonsensical criterion in itself as apposed to abstinence, the gold standard for addiction treatments, was only significant (and very close to being not significant if you look at fig. 1) in month 1 and 3, not 2, 4, 5, or 6. Moreover, placebo had a massive effect on this same criterion compared to the drug (see figure 1.). In other words, the effect of this drug on the experimental patients was essentially equal to placebo for the entire study, and this was for the bogus criterion called "decreased heavy drinking days," not abstinence. This is no cure, and most likely not anything that will help alcohol addicts as time will show. It will make money for Alkermes and the psychiatrists on the payroll of Alkermes though.

Having an English dictionary doesn't mean you can speak English. Moreover it doesn't mean you can communicate a meaningful idea. The DSM is just a dictionary. As such, it means nothing. That's why Carey doesn't know what compulsive shopping is. Neither do the psychiatrists. Disorder? Diagnosis? Disease? Category? Normal? Abnormal? Look these words up in the dictionary. Their definitions are medically meaningless. Yet the DSM uses them. What does that say about the DSM?

In real medicine, as opposed to psychiatry, there are only two words, Physiological and Pathophysiological. These words are defined by biology, not signs or symptoms. Normal is physiological. Disease is pathophysiological. Modern medicine is based on pathophysiology, how normal physiology is specifically altered by disease causing agents. This biological process defines diseases. To know a disease one must know normal physiology, disease causing agents, and the resulting pathophysiology. Then you can name a disease. There are no disorders. There are only normal, diseases, and bullshit. Even among normal there is a wide physiological variation due to millions of genetic variations of genes (including epigenetics), some of which cause disease and some aren't altered enough to cause disease. Read my article on disease at: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/diseaseconcept1aperspective/ Psychiatrists were uniformly absent from class when this stuff was taught in medical school. Behaviors, according to this correct model, can't be diseases, but they can be caused by diseases, making them symptoms. Symptoms don't define diseases, they are caused by them. Pathophysiology defines disease. Psychiatry is categorized by the opposite method. That's why psychiatry in general is confusing, nonsensical, and useless.

Using the pathophysiological basis of modern medicine, one can better define compulsive shopping, binge eating, and all other addictions. They are symptoms caused by the disease Hypoism, a word you will not find in any dictionary or DSM book. This is because addictions have been erroneously called diseases and thus there was no place for name of a disease that causes them. They are all seen as separate entities. Hypoism has been ignored and censored by psychiatry because of this - one reason why addictions are not understood or dealt with correctly by psychiatry. The DSM has this entire section all wrong. Addictions will remain epidemic because of this. Until psychiatry learns about the pathophysiological basis of disease their dealings with addictions will be nonsensical and negligent. Read about Hypoism in my book, Hypoic's Handbook, and in this paper: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismhypothesis/

I wonder if Obama would be inviting Rick Warren to deliver the invocation if Warren advocated Slavery and other forms of discrimination and genocide against African-Americans. In fact, Obama himself advocates for discrimination against gays by stating his disapproval of gay marriage. Warren supported prop. 8 in California. Obama supports civil unions for gays but not marriage. You might ask, how is that the same as supporting slavery? Slavery says the slave is different from non-slaves. This difference comes in many forms, but in general, it's about being biologically and morally less than, inferior, and subhuman. Once African-Americans were seen as biologically equal in all respects, slavery became an abomination. Obama was allowed to be elected because of this change in not just belief but in knowledge. Science says so. Now, what about gays? Are they equal or not equal? Are they inferior for some reason and subhuman? And because of this not deserving of equal rights under the law? Marriage being a right of equal humans. Well, many people believe homosexuality and its associated sexual behavior is an immoral choice, thus inherently wrong and not deserving of the respect required of equality. Science, however, says homosexuality is biological, and not a mere choice, having nothing to do with morality. Psychiatry used to believe homosexuality was a mental illness and helped the world torture and discriminate against gays. Today, because of science, this is no longer the case. But the world is still allowed to torture and discriminate against gays by denying the right to marriage. We know that Warren could care less about the science when it comes to his beliefs. Is Obama unaware of this science? Is Obama pulling an anti-science Bush by being against gay marriage? What is his justification? Obama is being a major hypocrite on this issue and he needs to be held accountable for his double standard. Obama comes off being a rational man. His actions on this issue are disgusting, irrational, and hypocritical.

Lastly, we have the issue of addiction. Addicts are tortured and discriminated against today as badly as slaves ever were. The drug war, based on the moral theory of addiction causation, the hijacked brain hypothesis (HBH), pretty much exactly like the moral theory of homosexuality, puts addicts in jails, ruins their families, ruins their employment opportunities, and prevents addiction prevention and recovery. The HBH is pushed on the country by NIDA and thus is a governmental belief which is the basis for all of our country's policies on addictions. I say belief because the HBH has been scientifically disproven long ago but no one knows about it. The government, the addiction community, and the media have kept this knowledge from the public for conflicted reasons, much like the actions of the pro-slavery people years ago. I've been writing about this for 15 years but I've been ignored and censored. Here's one paper discussing this issue: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/entitledtoyouropinionnotanymore/ Because of this the addiction epidemic and the drug war have continued to ruin addicts and their families. Science has shown that addiction is not immoral or a choice but is caused by genetic alterations of certain parts of the brain which cause, against their will, addictions in certain people. I've written Obama about this and what we need to do to fix the mess caused by our wrong beliefs but haven't heard from him yet. I doubt if I will. He's a hypocrite about this issue as well because he refuses to learn the science behind it and make the necessary changes, as are the addiction community, NIDA, and the rest of the government which follows NIDA blindly.

Unless all this is straightened out, and soon, the inauguration is a joke. Obama is supposed to symbolize human equality and knowledge over belief but it clearly does not.

This article shows how clueless psychologists and journalists are about human behavior. The article shows no thought and no introspection by the author. Not once does she ask, "What do you mean by that," to the experts when they go off on their psychobabble meaningless explanations. Bullshit sells, and this article is bullshit. It is as much a con job as was the behavior of Madoff. The article even goes so far as to interview a known con artist to explain his and Madoff's behavior. What makes Time think Minkoff has any knowledge about the neurobiology of confidence men? It's just like asking addicts to explain their behavior, something often done in articles about addictions. Addicts know what they do but have no idea about how their brain works to produce that behavior, no different from a diabetic automatically knowing the biology and physiology of diabetes, just because they have diabetes. Crazy.

Con artists are hypoics. They have the disease Hypoism, a disease defined in my web paper, http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismhypothesis/ , and book, Hypoic's Handbook. Hypoism causes all addictions. Con artistry is an addiction, a behavioral addiction, an addiction to an instinct, having the same physiology as a drug addiction. The exact instinct these people are addicted needs to be worked out, but my guess is that they are addicted to the envy instinct, the instinct of stealing, cheating, and lying. They can no more control their unconscious decisions about their envy-related behavior than can a heroin addict or alcohol addict. Until this physiology is understood by the public they will have no way to understand any addiction, which is the case today. That's why I wrote the book, to explain all aspects of this stuff to the layman so he can understand addictions and use this understanding to recover from Hypoism which about 10% of the population is born with. The explanation is too long to put in an email, but you can get a good idea of the science behind it if you read the above web article which is very detailed and well referenced. The book, however, is more thorough as well as explaining the Hypoism addiction prevention and treatment methods defined by the biology of this disease. By the way, this methodology costs nothing. I have no business related to any of this.

This article is an example of how concepts in anorexia, and other addictions, have changed but nonetheless everything stays the same. New concepts from their experts like diversity of victims rather than just white girls, latent [genetic] vulnerabilities load the gun, Doctors now compare anorexia to alcoholism and depression, potentially fatal diseases that have their roots in a complex combination of genes and brain chemistry, scientists concluded that more than 50 percent of the risk for developing the disorder could be attributed to an individual's genetic makeup, "Depression can run in families," says Amy, "and an eating disorder is like depression. It's something wrong with your brain," and Kaye hypothesizes that anorexics use starvation as a mode of self-medication, haven't led to the changes expected from going from the psychobabble model to the genetic neurobiological model. This is because these experts haven't a clue as to how the genetic model might work or what these new concepts actually mean in reality. They don't realize that each addiction is a symptom of an underlying disease rather than a disease itself. (which is why anorectics have multiple addictions, not just the one.) The Hypoism model of addictions, including anorexia and other eating disorders, has a well defined genetic neurobiological model based on the instinct regulating mechanism (decision-making apparatus) working with the genetically altered reward system. This system explains what these concepts mean and is detailed in my web papers, Hypoism Hypothesis and Hypoism Addiction Hypothesis, and my book. Moreover, this system plays a key role in the development of prevention and treatment modalities not apparent in any other theory of addictions. I've sent these ideas to Bulik and Kaye with no response by them. Thus, things stay the same and the whole field stagnates and kids die. The current model and treatment, despite these new concepts, are nonsense because they are based on a wrong understanding and model of how all this works.

The article states: "It's significant that five of the six new genes also impact brain function, because the findings suggest people could simply be programmed to overeat," said U-M postdoctoral researcher Cristen Willer, first author on the study. Unfortunately, society is often particularly unforgiving of overweight people, assuming them weak or lacking in discipline. "If you just want to think about how you react to these people who are obese, they can just be wired differently, so you have to be respectful of that," Abecasis said. "It's different if you know that overeating is about biology, and it takes a major effort to overcome that biology," Willer said. "Clearly, this suggests that some aspects of eating behavior may be something you're born with."

The data show the above is true for all addictors (drugs and instincts) and their addictions, thus, all addicts. Now, I first wrote this in 1992 after reading the available addiction science literature. The theory was called Hypoism but could have been called anything. There was a genetic disease of the decision-making apparatus that people needed to know about, the first step in preventing and treating addictions. Since then the addiction literature has continued show the same thing. My 1996 book, Hypoic's Handbook, and the web papers review the critical literature and concepts behind this disease. My book discusses the prevention and treatment methods derived from this theory. Despite repeated validations of Hypoism, such as this paper, Hypoism and all its implications has been ignored and censored from the public and addicts. The result of this has been the continued growth of the addiction epidemic and its ramifications, especially the death and discrimination of all addicts-hypoics. It's again time to change this.

This article says about economics exactly what I've been saying about the field of addictions - wrong theory-wrong policies. Greenspan at least finally admitted his theory was wrong. Two (or three) years late. That explains the disaster. But at least he admitted his error simultaneously to the disaster rather than 40 years later like most powerful bureaucrats.

And that raises the issue I've been screaming about for 15 years though ignored and censored, that addictionology has been believing and using the wrong theory of addiction causation, the hijacked brain hypothesis (HBH), and that's the reason addictions are getting worse rather than better. No one knows I've been writing about this common mistake made by experts since the dawn of cognitive time. "The whole addiction field can't be wrong. Addictions get worse because of some other reason. It's caused by the addicts, not the theory." Name another area of medicine where it's the patients that make the disease run out of control rather than the experts. There is none.. Only in addictions do the patients get blamed for the disaster. This thinking must be stopped. When disasters occur it's because the experts are wrong even if they don't admit it.

In the field of addictions, however, we have strong scientific proof that the disaster is caused by the expert's wrong theory. I write this disproof in my book, Hypoic's Handbook, and my web papers, especially http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismhypothesis/ . Moreover, in the is paper is embedded a link to a 2005 paper by Hiroi which does the same thing. His paper concludes with, �A majority of substance users do not develop addiction to nicotine, alcohol, or opiates. [exactly the opposite of what the HBH insists - that it's the drug that causes the addiction.] Currently available plasticity-based models (model 1.) [the HBH] of addiction do not adequately account for the limited prevalence of addiction among chronic substance users and the presence of pre-existing, comorbid traits. The genetic model (Model 2) of addiction predicts that addiction is more likely to develop after initial substance use in individuals with genetic susceptibility, which is also associated with comorbid traits in some (Gdc), but not all cases (Gd). Model 2 [Hypoism] highlights the need for a new direction in addiction research as well as new treatment strategies.� This is exactly what Hypoism says.

However, as many times as I've asked the addiction field and the media to read these papers and book which give the world the correct theory, if they only knew about it, they refuse. Now, you tell me, who's responsible for the continued disaster in addictions, the addiction epidemic. At least Greenspan admits he was wrong. Why do we have to wait another 40 years for the addiction experts to admit they were wrong, while our kids are dying? What if they never do?

This article raises the issue that the way our country deals with addictions is all wrong. Of course, I've proved this long ago, but I've been ignored. Because of this millions of kids have gotten addicted and many of them have died, including kids from wealthy families. The meth ads in Montana that this article talks about were produced by a wealthy guy in Montana who knows nothing about addictions but thinks he does. Most people think they do, that it's obvious and simple. He used the methods to scare kids from using meth that have been used unsuccessfully for booze, heroin, cocaine, marijuana, etc for the last hundred years. Why did his ads get press? Because he has money. Likewise for Robert Woods Johnson Foundation which wastes several hundreds of millions of dollars a year on ads and community programs that have been shown to be useless in preventing addictions. Addictions have grown year in and year out despite these wealthy people doing their best to stop them. Why don't these methods work? Because they're based on the wrong theory of addiction causation, that drugs cause addictions. That drugs cause addictions is simple and obvious, except that it's all wrong. Everyone still believes, writes about, and supports programs based on this theory, the hijacked brain hypothesis (HBH). Too bad the HBH is wrong and proven wrong despite that NIDA and Nora Volkow keep telling the gullible media and the ignorant public otherwise. They like it that way. My article, http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismhypothesis/ , goes through this disproof in detail. I've told the media about this for 13 years but they won't read my articles or book, Hypoic's Handbook, which shows the same thing as well as the real solution based on the correct theory, Hypoism. There are many reasons why people don't read my papers and book. I discuss their excuses here: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/whypeopleareignoringhypoism/

People believe what they want to believe, not what science shows. People don't read the science and don't care about it. Thus, the addiction epidemic grows and addicts get blamed for it - simple and obvious. Except that it's stupid and wrong.

One hundred years of wrong theory and wrong practice, though believed by everyone, can be wrong. That should be simple and obvious by now, but it isn't. Just like creationism is believed and practiced by most people in this country, so rules the HBH, and with deadly results.

There's one major mess that has been completely ignored by this campaign. You probably don�t know this but this mess involves 30,000,000 Americans. I am an addiction theorist and want to discuss the mess in addictions, why it exists and what needs to be done about it. I�ll be short, to the point, and direct.

About 30 millions people have addictions today. Addictions ruin their lives predictably. The current addiction paradigm, the hijacked brain hypothesis (HBH), pushed by NIDA and NIAAA, is scientifically incorrect (as discussed and proved in my paper http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismhypothesis/ and book, Hypoic�s Handbook) and is maintaining the addiction epidemic, not solving it. The correct addiction theory is that of the above paper and book, Hypoism. This theory will solve the addiction epidemic and end the drug war, the two policy changes that need to happen here. Nora Volkow is the wrong person to head NIDA because she is irrationally biased for the HBH against all the evidence. Why she is doing this is beyond me, but it�s true. Just look at the track record of addictions over the last 20 years. Nothing has improved or changed. In fact, it�s gotten worse. This is because our country is using an addiction theory that is wrong and its policies are wrong. This is no different from what Obama says about the economic theory called �the trickle down theory.� If we keep using the wrong theory we can�t expect to get different results.

Let me help you pick the best new NIDA chief so we can move in the right direction in addictions as well as end the drug war.

This article admits to the NHS needing a new methodology to deal with what they call unhealthy lifestyles but which are really addictions. The reason they have no success in dealing with these addictions is that their experts and consultants know nothing about addictions but think they do. Until they admit they are clueless about these matters no progress will be made in helping people with these problems. The same is true in the United States. NIDA, NIAAA, NIMH, and the addictionology community has for many years claimed to be experts on addictions but in reality they are also clueless.

Let me give you a new idea and a new approach that will solve the problem because they are based on the correct theory of addiction causation, Hypoism. If you have any humility and real integrity you will read these papers and my book, Hypoic�s Handbook, and begin the methods described therein in your country to deal with addictions.

Keep believing your experts and you will continue to get nowhere. The same is true for the U.S.

This is the kind of article the Times believes is the true story about addiction and should be published; the AA story; the hijacked brain hypothesis - "I drank to much for too long and it changed my brain into an addict's brain." This conforms to the expert's theory. Too bad this theory doesn't explain why so many people can drink too much for a long time and not become addicted. In fact, most of these people don't become addicted. This fact is the same for all addictive drugs and behaviors. (see: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismhypothesis/ ) In fact, this theory comes from and is pushed by the experts who know nothing about addiction. The hijacked brain hypothesis has been proven wrong many times and in many ways. Too bad its proponents have a monopoly with the media while the real story of addiction causation which explains this fact never gets any press. This article is hunky-dory but scientifically wrong.

The only correct thing this article mentions, but doesn't explain, is this paragraph - "Addiction scientists have puzzled over what distinguishes the alcoholic psyche from the �normal� one, or even, the mentally ill one. While some association between abusive drinking and both bipolar disorder and depression has been found, your garden-variety drunk does not go on manic flights of fancy or hear voices or hallucinate; he isn�t even all that prone to clinical depression. The best I can say from personal experience is that we all tend to be afflicted by a low-grade dysphoria, a sort of constant melancholy that causes feelings of unease, isolation and dissatisfaction with life � an �inexplicable ache,� I once heard it called." Well, that low-grade dysphoria, as he calls it, is the result of the genetic low activity of the reward system which is the actual neurobiology of the disease he has that causes addictions, all of them. He knows the symptoms but knows nothing about the neurobiology that causes them. Instead of buying into the AA explanation I read the addiction neurobiology literature as a trained doctor in the early 1990's. It turns out that the people (and animals) who get addicted have this genetic low activity of the reward system at birth and are, for the most part, doomed to become addicts of one sort or another. This genetic low activity I have named Hypoism, hypo for low activity. So, it's this genetics that causes addictions, not the use of addictors. People without Hypoism can use addictors and not get addicted. People with Hypoism, however, get addicted. That's the reality. I wrote a book about the pathophysiology of this disease as well as how it affects different hypoics and why it causes a hundred different addictions. It's not the addictors that cause addiction, it's Hypoism, a diametrically different approach to the disease than is currently taught. You can read about this disease in my book or from my web site. The recovery process and the way to prevent addictions through the use of this recovery process in hypoic children is only discussed in my book because one needs to understand the whole disease before one can understand the recovery from it. Recovery is from Hypoism, not addiction, a completely different take on recovery.

It's too bad the addiction community and the media (the Times especially) have ignored and censored Hypoism. See my letters to the Times beginning in 1995 on my web site. None have ever been published. The addiction epidemic could have been ended 13 years ago if they had.

The problem with this article is that the author never tells the whole story, the story about genetic diversity of the regulators of the nucleus accumbens and insula, the decision making apparatus. We all don't have the same decision-making apparatus. There is great genetic diversity there which is what makes the difference between compulsive shoppers and ordinary shoppers, and drug addicts and non-addicts. That is the key to understanding the issue discussed here. My book, Hypoic's Handbook, hypoics are people with genetically low activity of the reward center, the nucleus accumbens, discusses this at length because it's the neurobiology that causes all addictions. To understand compulsive shopping or any other addiction one needs to understand this science, and it's all in my book. Also in my book is how to prevent addictions using this understanding, something the current theory of addictions, the hijacked brain hypothesis, the addictionology lie that is killing millions of addicts, can't do because it doesn't understand any of this. See: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismhypothesis/

I'm not qualified to be an expert on addictions and addiction policies, according to the Times, so this letter will be ignored and censored as all my previous letters have been. [many of them are on my web site, as will this one, and available to anyone interested] My letters are actually blocked. Read my letters yourself and see if they deserve to be blocked. All the "real" experts have had no solution to addictions or addiction policies over the past 50 years, but they are listened to and written about over and over. In fact, the worse the problem becomes, as evidenced by this article, the more these "real" experts are consulted and listed to. This makes no sense to me, yet it's been going on for the whole 15 years I've been writing the Times about these issues. The entire emphasis for preventing addictions, education, stigmatization, criminalization (chasing addicts), and interdiction (chasing drugs), over the last 50 years are wrong in theory and practice yet remain the only policies to deal with this mess. I've written about this thousands of times in the last 15 years but have been ignored. We need to put the emphasis on the demand side rather than on the supply side, and only my policies do this. Now Mexico is feeling the results of this censorship with thousands of innocent people are being brutalized and murdered. All we're doing is sending millions of dollars more to Mexico to enlarge their armies. This will make thing worse. Of course, things remain the same in America with lives ruined, lives lost, and millions of incarcerations endlessly. These policies have produced an underclass of massive proportions. And addictions are unchanged or worse. Why not listen to someone smart and committed to improving this mess who has no conflict of interest, me? Why not? My 1996 book, Hypoic's Handbook, shows how we can end this mess and prevent addictions. Why not check it out already?

This article presents a beautiful documentation of how Americans get screwed by the biased experts yet continue to use the same experts indefinitely over and over. Of course, if anyone was listening and watching McCaffrey as the drug czar we would have picked up his willingness for UNTRUTH and doing and saying anything about the drug war to remain in his boss's pocket rather than tell Americans the truth. I wrote about McCaffrey in my 1996 book on addictions, Hypoic's Handbook. I said then that he supported the PIMMPAL complex in all his activities instead of telling the American people that the drug war was a complete failure and was more harmful than helpful. The Health and Human Services secretary, Donna Shalala, was right next to him pushing the drug war when there was no evidence the drug war was helping anyone. Nothing has changed in this area because no one has told the American people the truth yet, except me, and I've been censored by the same paper, the ny times, that published this article. We're getting the same kind of biased bullshit today from Nora Volkow, chief of NIDA and one of Time magazine's most influential women a couple of years ago. She is a political appointee and doing exactly what the Bush administration wants while the country gets screwed. The same liars get used over and over to screw the public while the whistleblowers get censored. And you wonder why nothing improves? Really. The public needs to do something about this but they can't because they don't know about it.

At the time I finished writing my book I already had experienced many years of closed-minded rejection (being ignored and censored) by those in power who never read my book or my major papers on Hypoism but rejected the paradigm outright anyway. Some day there's going to be an article entitled, "Umanoff was right but we chose to ignore him." This article will describe how the media and the field of addictions ignored and censored Hypoism because it didn't tally with their biases and prejudices, their believed but not proven theory of addictions called the Hijacked Brain Hypothesis (HBH), despite it not working in any way or shape; addiction policy over the last 50 years is a failure. Nothing from the current believed paradigm, the HBH, works to improve the mess we know as the addiction epidemic. Yet, it remains the only game in town, and Nora Volkow, chief of NIDA and leading intellectual proponent of the HBH today, is seen as the smartest person in the room despite the current addiction disaster.

There's 50 billion bucks in the budget allotted to the drug war and all its tentacles. This budget allocation is not only a waste of money and doesn't work but is responsible for thousands of killings and hundreds of thousands of incarcerations of addicts; ruining millions of lives overall. I wrote Obama a letter from his web site the other day outlining this waste of money but haven't heard from him despite his claims that he wants new solutions to old problems. My guess is that he, like everyone else, has been hoodwinked by Nora Volkow to believe she is in control and doing the right things and that public policies reflecting her beliefs such as the drug war are effective and right. I'm afraid that's just not true. It's a disaster besides being a waste of money. There are better and cheaper ways to prevent addictions than the drug war. I've been writing about them for 15 years. It's time they become public policy. So, if he doesn't get my opinion, or ignores my opinion, and doesn't consult me, he is failing to act according to his own statements.

ADHD is a subgroup of Hypoism. Hypoism is the genetic disease of low reward system activity that causes all addictions and other disasters. Both in my 1996 book, Hypoic's Handbook, and in my web paper, http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/thehypoismaddictionhypothesis/ , I discuss and show why and how Hypoism is a two edged evolutionary sword. The complete paradigm is outlined here: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismhypothesis/ However, the only way to ensure the positive aspects of the disease, the adaptive advantages, prevail over the negative ones is by having the ADHD'er/hypoic undergo the Hypoism recovery method as delineated in my book. Absent that the negative aspect are forced to prevail, even in someone like Phelps who's life is way out of wack. His swimming is an uncontrollable obsession and compulsion, not a choice. As successful as Phelps has recently been, he's without the Hypoism recovery method he is at high risk for all the negative sides of Hypoism.

This is an astronomically large number. Five times more than the Iraq war. Most surprisingly, however, the article doesn't mention one word on the positive effects of the drug war such as how many addictions the drug war has prevented, thus justifying these 4500 deaths. The fact is that the drug war hasn't prevented a single addiction. So, what is the point of the drug war and all this mortality? The answer to this question is astounding. The answer is that the drug war is a moral war, not meant to prevent a single addiction. The drug war is based on the hijacked brain hypothesis religion pushed on the world by NIDA and Nora Volkow, chief of NIDA against all available science which I document in my web paper: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismhypothesis/. I call it a religion because all the science is against this hypothesis and thus it is a irrational belief based on bias rather than a scientific fact, much like a religion. People will die for a religion, but they don't need to because this religion has been proven wrong if they'd only read my paper and Hiroi's paper embedded in my paper. I wonder if all these dead people realized before their deaths that the reason they died was a lie.

"If risk factors for MA use could be identified, physicians and other health-care professionals who work with youth may be better equipped to identify MA users, and develop education and prevention programs that could be targeted to youth at greater risk for using MA," Klassen said.

Geez! These kids at risk are hypoics. They are born with the genetic disease of Hypoism discussed in my 1996 book, Hypoic's Handbook and more recent web papers such as: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismhypothesis/

The Hypoism paradigm finds these kinds of kids and begins the Hypoism recovery program (much like AA in its organization but based on science rather than superstition and it's free) on them as kids, before any addictions or dangerous behavior even begins. Hypoism recovery prevents all addictions and other dangerous behaviors. The only trouble is that the Hypoism paradigm has been censored by the media and the addictionology community. Therefore no one knows about the preventive measures this paradigm presents. Let the public know this.

The article states: "The results were hailed by other psychologists as some of the strongest evidence that unconscious bias leads to harmful discrimination."

So, what do you think about this result in regards to how people deal with addicts? This has been studied, and the results are that addicts are discriminated against (probably unconsciously) by most people including recovering addicts and even themselves. But no one thinks this type of discrimination is discrimination. As with the homosexual marriage issue recently raised by the vote in California against gay marriage, discriminators believe they aren't discriminating. They believe addicts are immoral and deserve what they get. They believe blacks are inferior and don't deserve the most expensive and extensive medical care. They believe homosexuals are immoral and don't deserve equal rights. I know this to my core because I was removed from the practice of medicine by discriminators (2 lawyers and 2 doctors, none of whom knew anything about addictions) who believed they were acting for public safety by doing what they did after my being clean and in compliance of everything objective that was asked of me for eight years and being cleared by four board certified addiction psychiatrists and the NYS Committee on Physician Health (CPH). Addict discrimination is the worst kind of discrimination because it is caused by hate and done to kill addicts, much like the discrimination against blacks and homosexuals. Sometimes it works and addicts are ruined and die.

The only way to end this discrimination is to dump the hijacked brain hypothesis, the current consensus (but unscientific and therefore irrational and unconscious) theory, by the public learning the scientific argument against it through reading my papers and book, and getting rid of Nora Volkow from NIDA, the chief proponent of this theory. Instead, the NY Times is censoring this argument, helping maintain the lies about addicts and addictions, and thereby helping perpetuate the discrimination as well as the mishandling of addicts in general.

This article discusses evidence for the evolutionary psychological basis of successful businesspeople, genetic risk taking caused by allelic variations of certain brain genes. This, of course, is the evolutionary psychological basis of Hypoism as I wrote in my 1996 book and paper: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/thehypoismaddictionhypothesis/ which was presented at the major evolutionary psychology conference at Amherst college in 2000. From the article: "Psychological and biomedical research has traditionally considered risk-taking as an abnormal expression of behaviour, as exemplified by its association with substance abuse and bipolar disorder. However, the Cambridge research, which was funded by the Wellcome Trust and the Medical Research Council, found that entrepreneurs represent an example of highly adaptive risk-taking behaviour which can result in positive outcomes during stressful economic circumstances. This 'functional impulsivity', the ability to make quick decisions under stress, may have evolutionary value as a means of seizing opportunities in a rapidly-changing environment." This is exactly what my Hypoism Hypothesis says as the evolutionary basis of Hypoism, the disease that causes all addictions. "Addiction: An "Unintended" Consequence of Evolution." Read the above paper.

You told the story but had no explanation for what happened, exactly like the story of the suicide of Paula Abdul's stalker caused by the same disease. What your reporters don�t understand about these cases is that they were caused by an addiction people are not aware of. This addiction is called �people addiction.� This is a true addiction no different from heroin addiction and just as lethal. Cults and celebrity fanaticism are caused by people addiction which itself is caused by the disease that causes all addictions, Hypoism. Gangs are also part of this addiction. The well known episode where OJ killed his wife and friend was also a case of people addiction. In fact, all domestic violence cases are caused by people addiction and Hypoism. My book, Hypoic�s Handbook, available from my web site, explains these addictive behaviors in detail and the brain mechanism and genetic brain disease behind them. It also goes through how to prevent these addictions and how to treat them when they occur. My web paper, http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismhypothesis/ , explains this disease while debunking the current incorrect addiction paradigm, the hijacked brain hypothesis, a theory that has been known to be baseless from the day it was invented. Until the country learns about Hypoism and its derived addictions, all addictions including people addiction, cults, gangs, and domestic violence will remain out of control. If you want to help the millions of people with people addiction and all the other addictions you will inform them of Hypoism, the genetic disease that causes all addictions.

Available data show that addictions, all of them, including the behavioral addictions where there is no drug involved, are caused by genetic differences in people who encounter the addictors (addictive drugs and behaviors), not by the drugs themselves. Yet, this article talks like it is the drug that causes the addiction ["This computer model allows us to reconcile the apparently contradictory results obtained from in vitro and in vivo experiments, and thus provides a single theoretical proposal of how nicotine affects neuronal circuits in the brain and causes addiction, compatible with most available experimental results."] If these scientists and the rest of the addiction community maintain their bias for this theory where the drug is said to cause the addiction known as the hijacked brain hypothesis in spite of all the data against it (and in favor of the genetic theory) they will continue to misinterpret the "available data" and miss the actual cause of addictions. This is the situation today. There's no way to find the best methods of prevention and recovery by using a wrong theory of addiction causation. Read my paper on this: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismhypothesis/ which begins with: "The correct theory of addiction causation is paramount to finding effective solutions to addictions. The current theories on the cause of addictions are incorrect. Because of this prevention, treatment, recovery, and public policies are ineffective and maintain the addiction epidemic."

I hate to make Melissa Healy, the author of this article, feel like she was sucked in and had the wool pulled over her eyes by the experts she interviewed (the same one's always interviewed), and because of this mislead the public, but it's true. From this article it seems that when someone uses an addictive drug they are automatically addicted. This is the well disproven hijacked brain hypothesis (HBH). This is very wrong. Read: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismhypothesis/ In fact, pretty much everything written in this article is wrong and misleading. This is the same and usual nonsense about addiction causation we see everyday in the press. Clearly she (and her experts) isn't keeping up with the research on addiction causation, because the several concepts she chose to discuss in this article are way out of date and all well disproven. These wrong concepts have misled the public about the cause of addictions for a hundred years, lead to wrong prevention and treatment policies, and are the reason the addiction epidemic is still out of control. The Gateway concept has been disproven years ago: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/gatewaytheoryfinallydisproven/ . The availability theory likewise: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/139socalledavailabilitydebunkedascontributorofaddictions/ . "Drug of choice" is a misnomer. Drugs choose the addict, not the reverse. There's a big difference between liking and using a drug and becoming addicted. On the average for all addictive drugs, legal and illegal, only about 10%+/- of those who use them get addicted. The data on this is detailed in the first link and in Hiroi's paper obtainable from my paper as well. The two drugs most widely addicted to are alcohol and cigarettes. They are also the most damaging to people. Alcohol is 10% and cigarettes are about 30%. In fact, in an interview on Fresh Air in 7/07 (see NPR archives) Nora Volkow told a very revealing story about how she tried to become a smoker but failed, not because she didn't try hard enough but because of her genetics. This story is but an anecdote but is still good proof against the her pet theory hijacked brain hypothesis, the theory she still pushes on the country to this day despite it too being proven wrong long ago. Her story and all the data of addiction causation support genetics as the cause of addiction, not drug use. Drugs don't cause addictions, Hypoism, the disease, does.

The issue this article completely misses isn't to what drug kids and adults get addicted. Cigarettes and alcohol are still the most common addictions by far and still the most damaging. They aren't even discussed here. They'd be even more damaging if they were made illegal, and is a well known effect of prohibition. The issue is how many addicted people we have in our country, counting drugs and behaviors, and how do we slow this down as well as provide effective treatment. Today, under the rule of the HBH there is 0% prevention and only 5% recovery over the long haul. This is the same as it's been over the last hundred years despite what the treatment people say. They can't produce better numbers than that. The fact is, and this is not something I can document because no one has ever studied it, the fact is that there's the same number of addicts today per capita as there was a hundred years ago. It's just that we see different addictors, but that's not the issue. We ignore the fact that what we are doing to prevent and treat addictions has done nothing to reduce the numbers of addicts overall. Addiction is as big a problem today as it's always been, maybe worse. And this is because the theory we use, the HBH. Wrong theory - wrong methods, wrong policies. Wrong theory - ineffective prevention and treatment, exactly what we have today.

The current paradigm is wrong and because of this there is no prevention and little recovery. The correct theory would change all this. We don't need to be better at chasing drugs as this article implies. We need the correct theory of addiction causation and as a result, effective prevention and recovery methods. When we begin to use this, a theory I call Hypoism, the genetic theory of addiction causation, we will begin to increase prevention and recovery as I discuss in my papers and book, Hypoic's Handbook. Read them and tell your readers about what they say. Then, maybe we'll have someone heading NIDA who really understands addictions and will be able to lead the country out of the current mess the world of addictions is today, irrespective of which drugs people get addicted to. Until then, we'll just have more useless and misleading articles like this one, articles we've had repeatedly for the past hundred years.

Thanks, Dan. What does this mean:

a debate on addiction science and the reasons for it

What is there for policymakers to debate on addiction science and the reasons for it? I see debate on addiction treatment policy, but presidential ones? Addiction is a major part of our healthcare problem, I know, having had family members die from addiction, but it�s part of health. The questions had to be broad enough to cover vast issues, and were based on those most often submitted by a very large sampling of the nation�s most active scientists. You should realize the vast sacrifices and work it took to achieve what we have, the first time in history the candidates have provided this level of detail prior to an election.

Shawn: I deeply appreciate the work you have done getting this all together. It is extremely important. I congratulate you. You are making great headway on a road paved with bias and molasses. I didn't mean to denigrate the accomplishment you have achieved. But I can see you have no idea what's going on in the field of addictions. Did you know that the president hand picks the chiefs of NIDA, NIMH, and NIAAA? These three parts of the NIH control most of the money and power in the field of addictions, drugs, behavioral addictions, and alcohol respectively, and who is chief determines how these various addictions are perceived, understood, and funded by the public (people and government) and even the rest of the world. Besides being seen as the head of addictions in the country, they also testify to congress on addiction theory and practice and help them decide on public policies (legislation) surrounding addictions such as the drug war vs. no drug war, insurance coverage vs. inadequate or none, incarceration vs. treatment, etc. These are huge issues considering there are 30,000,000 addicts of various kinds in the country. What determines the public attitudes and governmental decisions about these grave and massive issues? The prevailing theory of addiction causation, as is the case for every other medical issue/disease.

This is where the debate (a presidential debate, because the president picks the chiefs and signs the laws) is so vitally important whether you're aware of it or not, apparently not. The prevailing theory of addiction causation is called the hijacked brain hypothesis (HBH). One of your board members, Alan Leshner, codified this theory in 1997 in the journal Science. It basically says that addictions to drugs are bad and we must get rid of them. Anyone is capable of getting addicted. People voluntarily (consciously, willfully, and immorally) use a whole list of addictive drugs, then the drugs change the brain into an addicted brain. [He defines addiction as a "brain disease" at that point, after the addiction occurs.] Thus, there are two culprits in drug addiction, the addictive drug and the immoral and willfully misbehaving addict. In order to get rid of addictions, we therefore must get rid of drugs and punish addicts who have made the immoral and anti-social decision to use the drugs in the first place. This theory results in the public hating and discriminating against drugs and addicts and the government prosecuting drugs, drug dealers, and addicts. This is what we have today and it is called the drug war. It is derived from and justified by the HBH theory. The president and congress as well as local governments preside over this war which is massive. I'm sure you are aware that this war is being lost as well as ruining the lives of millions of addicts and their families, but despite this it is accepted and grows daily around the world, except for a few places where people are actually debating this theory and its policies.

There is another theory of addiction causation which has diametrically different results and requires diametrically different policies. This is the genetic theory of addiction causation (an underlying genetic disease) which says only a certain small group of people can get addicted and they do so because they have genetically derived traits that both make them use addictive drugs and behaviors unconsciously and get addicted to them. The rest of the population, according to this theory, can use addictive drugs and behaviors, as they so choose, without getting addicted. This theory says it's not the drugs that cause addictions but the unconscious and amoral brain genetics. In other words, addictions occur against the will of these people who have this genetic disease from conception much like every other known medical disease. How the country deals with this disease is completely different from how it deals with addictions caused by the HBH. The emphasis is on diagnosing the people who have this genetic disease and helping them get into recovery from the disease before they get addicted, as children. This is real prevention, something the HBH has Zero of. This is also real recovery, from the cause itself, that the HBH has Zero of. In fact, this theory changes everything we know and do about addictions and the president has a lot to do with whether it is used or not. Thus, the need for a presidential debate.

It turns out that all the science of addiction causation is against the HBH and for the genetic theory, a theory I call Hypoism, but it doesn't matter what you call it. Call it the genetic theory for now. This argument is made in my paper, a paper that has been censored by the addiction field, called Hypoism Hypothesis at: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismhypothesis/ Within this paper is embedded Hiroi's paper making the same argument with the same science. Just click on the link and you can read it from my web site. He calls the HBH "the plasticity theory." His conclusion after making all his arguments is: �A majority of substance users do not develop addiction to nicotine, alcohol, or opiates. Currently available plasticity-based models (model 1.) of addiction do not adequately account for the limited prevalence of addiction among chronic substance users and the presence of pre-existing, comorbid traits. The genetic model (Model 2) of addiction predicts that addiction is more likely to develop after initial substance use in individuals with genetic susceptibility, which is also associated with comorbid traits in some (Gdc), but not all cases (Gd). Model 2 [the genetic theory] highlights the need for a new direction in addiction research as well as new treatment strategies.� I've been writing about this issue, the theory issue, since 1992 and have been ignored and censored. Hiroi's paper was completely ignored by the addiction community and by the media, thus precluding either the public or the president from knowing its implications. Hiroi's paper should have been front page in every paper in the world. The president surely needs to know about this theory debate and what he's going to do about it. My book, Hypoic's Handbook, written for lay people, goes through all these implications and required policy changes and the reasons for them.

The Story

In November, 2007, a small group of six citizens - two screenwriters, a physicist, a marine biologist, a philosopher and a science journalist - began working to restore science and innovation to America�s political dialogue. They called themselves Science Debate 2008, and they called for a presidential debate on science. The call tapped a wellspring of concern over the state of American science.

Within weeks, more than 38,000 scientists, engineers, and other concerned Americans signed on, including nearly every major American science organization, dozens of Nobel laureates, elected officials and business leaders, and the presidents of over 100 major American universities. See who here. Among other things, these signers submitted over 3,400 questions they want the candidates for President to answer about science and the future of America.

The Process

Beginning with these 3,400 questions, Science Debate 2008 worked with the leading organizations listed to craft the top 14 questions the candidates should answer. These questions are broad enough to allow for wide variations in response, but they are specific enough to help guide the discussion toward many of the largest and most important unresolved challenges currently facing the United States.

Nowhere in any of these articles or even their links was there one word about debating the science of addictions or the policies based on this science, like the drug war. What this means is that 1) everything in addictions and the drug war is hunky-dory, or 2) no controversy - the science of addictions and the drug war is so well known, proven, and accepted that there's no need for debate, either by the presidential candidates or anyone else, or 3) the people interested in addiction (addictionologists and politicians) just don't want a debate on it.

Well, 1. is not true. Bill Moyers thinks addictions is the number 1 unsolved health problem in America. Wasn't he asked? 30,000,000 addicts. 17,000 DUI deaths a year caused by just by alcoholics. 500,000 addicts in jail and their families ruined for just being addicts and doing what addicts must do and a million dead addicts every year. Addiction prevention is ZERO and recovery is 5%. This is hunky-dory? I don't think so. 2 is not true. You look up the cause of addiction in any addiction text book and you will find 17+/- causes discussed there. None proven. Thus, 3 must be true. What are addictionologists hiding from? So, why doesn't the Times say something about this? It must mean that addictions and the drug war are just not much of a problem. I wonder why, then, there's at least one +/-addiction or drug war article per day in the NY Times if it's not an issue?

I've been writing the Times and elsewhere since 1995 on the need for a debate on addiction science and the reasons for it to no avail.

So why aren't the Times, the rest of the media, these scientists and organizers insisting on a debate on addiction causation? There's no rational or unbiased reason why. This is a massive disgrace and scandal.

Maybe this letter was written by him. Maybe he was an addict. Maybe he is an addict who committed suicide, something that wasn't mentioned in the article about him in the Times. Why not? My guess is that he was an addict. He may well have had other psychiatric diagnoses like Bipolar disorder, a diagnosis that is highly associated with addictions and prodigious writing. His writings suggest that he was an addict and possibly other things, and that he was a prodigious, brilliant, and talented writer. Now, he's also a dead writer, a dead (recovering?) addict writer. Hanged himself. I'd be interested in whether he wrote a suicide note and what he thought he was killing himself about. I wonder if he was in relapse and whether his wife knew anything about that or anyone else keeping it secret to protect their business interests, as with Elvis, etc.. The article didn't mention anything about any of that. I'll tell you something, however, I'm not happy about this suicide. It really pisses me off. Why does a recovering addict hang himself? Let me clue you in. It's not because everything was hunky dory. It's not because recovery was going well. And it's not because of his warped view of a warped and meaningless America, "David Foster Wallace used his prodigious gifts as a writer � his manic, exuberant prose, his ferocious powers of observation, his ability to fuse avant-garde techniques with old-fashioned moral seriousness � to create a series of strobe-lit portraits of a millennial America overdosing on the drugs of entertainment and self-gratification, and to capture, in the words of the musician Robert Plant, the myriad �deep and meaningless� facets of contemporary life." It was because there was something missing in his recovery. What was missing, in my opinion, was that his recovery was based on the nonsensical paradigm of the 12 step movement. [Yes, some people do get clean and sober in 12 step meetings but that doesn't mean it "works." 5% of people who go to 12 step meetings get and stay sober for some length of time. But so do 5% of people who do other programs or no program. There's no proof that 12 step recovery is better than chance.] I was in AA for 25 years myself before I discovered the true cause of addictions and the recovery program based on that which I have used over the last 18 years since a relapse in 1986. I saw many people with many years of recovery have relapses, leave AA because of shame and other reasons related to warped beliefs in personal failure, and die. AA says AA is perfect, and if you fail it's because there's something wrong with you, not AA. AA makes other major mistakes such as being absolute and unchangeable. These beliefs and attitudes kill members. Knowing what I know about addictions and the cause of addictions I could no longer stomach those beliefs and attitudes, and many others, and had to leave. I discuss them in my book. We recovering hypoics have no pride in time of recovery. We don't celebrate time of recovery because we all have the same time - one day. AA says that but it doesn't use that. Hypoics Not-Anonymous (HNA) doesn't believe in crap like that. We put addicts first, not the program. Addicts become addicts because they have a disease, Hypoism, they didn't cause and they relapse for the same reason. We understand addictions are irrational and unconscious as is relapse. We do the best we can using our recovery program but don't believe it is perfect and we have no shame about being addicts (hypoics) or about relapsing. We also use random forensic testing to help stop relapses early. Our recovery program is very realistic as well as being based on real science, not superstition and forced irrational beliefs. If you want to understand this you can read my book. That's why I wrote it.

It's interesting to see how fastidiously NY Times editors dissect Palin's words. This article is just one of many articles which do this. Herbert opens his editorial with: "While watching the Sarah Palin interview with Charlie Gibson Thursday night, and the coverage of the Palin phenomenon in general, I�ve gotten the scary feeling, for the first time in my life, that dimwittedness is not just on the march in the U.S., but that it might actually prevail." According to Herbert, word by word Palin proves her own incompetence while her fans wildly applaud and defend her. The point is that people believe what they want to believe, evidence be damned. Of course, this is a free country and people are allowed to do this. Do newspapers like the NY Times have the same right? Of course, but the public has the right to know when they believe and act this way. However, the Times has consistently censored and kept from the public all of my evidence-based dissent to their beliefs about addiction causation since 1995, the year I sent my first letter about the current addiction paradigm being wrong and its replacement. Dimwittedness prevails in the field of addictions, in its reporting, and in the public's understanding of addictions. The results of this has been the maintenance of the addiction epidemic and the disaster known as the drug war. Many of my letters documenting all this are on my web site. But the Times doesn't find this too important either for the country at large or for the 30 million American addicts currently struggling with addictions. When I wrote the Times way back when Volkow was being considered for the chief of NIDA, an organization previously ruined by her predecessor Alan Leshner, that Nora Volkow "wasn't ready" to run NIDA and why, I was ignored and censored. When I wrote the Times that Volkow's theory of addiction, the Hijacked Brain Hypothesis (HBH), was not only wrong but proven wrong and supplied that proof, I was ignored and censored. Despite this, over the course of those 13 years there has been no improvement in addiction prevention or treatment, or any effective changes in public policies (drug war) or public attitudes. Addictions are as bad or worse than in 1995. Not only has the Times not published a single one of my thousand or so letters to allow the public to know about this mess but there's no evidence they have read and evaluated any of my evidence themselves, my book, Hypoic's Handbook, or major addiction causation paper, Hypoism Hypothesis, http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismhypothesis/ , all of which was said to me by Dr. Eliot L. Gardner, a world class addiction researcher and writer at NIDA who has read my book and paper, "to have much merit" and "needs to be known by the public." This issue is so unimportant to the Times that they haven't spent one minute of their collective time evaluating my information. Of course, the same can be said for all the other media outlets to whom I've sent my information.

Reading this article is reminiscent of what happened to me as an addict although I was prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, criminally and civilly. My story is on my web site starting at: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/thedoctordrugwarwrongandwastefulp1/ . It's also similar to Bill Clinton's and many other addict's stories discussed in my book. There's a reason for these similarities. Addiction (especially to illegal and controlled drugs and certain behaviors) is seen through the lens of the moral theories of addiction causation, particularly the hijacked brain hypothesis (HBH), the current addiction theory pushed by NIDA and ASAM. These theories date back to biblical times and state that addiction is an abomination caused by the conscious and willful misbehavior of the addict. The only difference between the older theories and the HBH is that the HBH calls what happens to the brain after the addiction occurs a disease. Thus, the HBH still sees the cause of addiction as a moral and criminal issue. [You haven't seen NIDA and ASAM fighting against this, have you? Of course not. Moreover, the HBH doesn't consider behaviors addictions at all because there's no brain mechanism within the HBH to account for this, one of the major failings of the HBH.] Addicts are judged morally and criminally both publicly and privately. Thus, under this theoretical moral and legal prism (stigma is caused by NIDA and ASAM via the HBH even though they say they're against stigma, another of their lies) addicts are want to admit either to themselves or publicly they are addicted. Addicts are thus forced to lie to themselves (so-called "denial") and to the public about their addictions because their honesty ensures they will be judged as scumbags and criminals and treated accordingly, which definitely is the case. Likewise they are inhibited from going into treatment (coming out of the closet), forcing them to continue the addiction by obtaining their illegal drugs in nefarious ways as well as lying about that too. Addictions are thereby forced to continue to the very end, either by "hitting bottom" as AA insists, in one way or another, or by dying. Now, if you read CM's story under this lens all her behavior makes sense. Other than the addiction itself, the entire story is accounted for by our society's use of the HBH to run policy (the drug war). In other words, it is the policies derived from the HBH that cause essentially all the problems caused by addictions, but the addicts get blamed for them. In fact, there's no way whatsoever we will ever solve the problems associated with addictions if we continue to use the HBH. The HBH and the personal consequences of that theory forced CM to do what she did and lie about what she lied about. Although I was completely honest to the authorities about my addiction, and I took my lumps for this, I don't blame CM for lying. Most addicts do the same thing. Who would serve themselves up to being burned at the stake by the addict-haters. Very few.

There's another reason for dumping the HBH, actually the main reason. It is scientifically wrong. My writings, the Hypoism paradigm of addictions, go through this disproof in detail as well as establishing the correct theory of addiction causation, Hypoism. [Hiroi's paper, which can be found embedded in my hypoism hypothesis paper, "Genetic susceptibility to substance dependence," Molecular Psychiatry (2005) 10, 336�344, by N Hiroi and S Agatsuma, details this disproof as well.] Too bad no one has ever read my papers and book. There's a reason for that also. They've been censored by the addiction establishment and the media. I discuss why this has happened in my book and papers. The addiction establishment have severe conflicts of interest causing them to dishonestly support the HBH and censor and ignore Hypoism despite its scientific validity.

Humans are unique because they are aware of the decisions they make and some of the thinking involved in making those decisions - the rational part of this process. Some of the thinking involved in decision-making, however, is unconscious and out of one's awareness as it is in the rest of the animal kingdom. This last kind of thinking is what we call intuition (the power or faculty of attaining to direct knowledge or cognition without evident rational thought and inference) or, "from the gut," because it "feels right." I also call this instinctive decision-making because it is built-in to hardwired instincts. The entire animal kingdom uses this kind of thinking for decision-making and behavior. It has for hundreds of millions of years. Intuition is deeply trusted and readily believed because the brain mechanism from which it originates has been built by evolution to trust and believe it. It does this by way using feel good neurotransmitters like dopamine to relay the value (salience) of the decision to the animal. Dopamine feels right and good. Hundreds of millions of years of successful evolution has gone into making this system work the way it does. I use the word successful because if it hadn't been successful it wouldn't still exist. But it's only successful in a relative, not absolute, sense. It is a system that works in a general way to maintain survival of the species overall, not specifically for the individual or the particular instance, even though it seems that way. On the other hand, rational thought or critical thinking is a brand new brain phenomenon as compared to intuition and just seen in humanoids for the last few million years. It hasn't had time to be tested by evolution, and, moreover, is not associated with much if any dopamine release. It is also hard work. Thus, trust and belief in this kind of thinking is very low as compared to intuition. Science, a kind of thinking that is even newer, just a couple of hundred years old, falls into this category of thinking. Evolution hasn't had the time to decide its salience and thus has not hooked it up to the dopamine (reward) system as it has for intuition and instincts. I wrote a paper about this: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/10thesuperstitioninstinct3100/ .

No one's thought about this stuff no less decided to use it, so people are still quite susceptible to the strong detrimental influences of instinctive (unconscious) decision-making. Unbeknownst to the world, all addictions come from this brain mechanism. This is the reason I'm writing about this brain mechanism. Addictions are the big mess they are today because people don't know about this brain decision-making mechanism and thus have no way to deal with them in a way that makes sense. http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/thehypoismaddictionhypothesis/ The two articles in the Times I chose today exemplify this ignorance and show the dangers of this kind of decision-making in the absence of awareness of the existence and pitfalls of instinctive thinking. Friedman ("From the Gut") wants Obama to appeal to people's instincts, as did Bush and as does McCain, because he knows the power of that kind of appeal. I disagree. Instead, Friedman should write about the obvious pitfalls of electing someone like Bush or McCain/Palin based on gut feelings. Gut feelings may well "feel good" but don't "work good." Look at the last 7 years. Similarly with the Autism/vaccine mess. Although science doesn't feel good because it's anti-instinctive rather than instinctive, we must consciously decide to use it, as we do with airplanes and elevators, rather than our gut feelings about the vaccine associations and our need to blame (revenge instinct) someone (drug companies and the government) for our kids having autism. We need to decide to elect presidents who use rational thinking based on real evidence to make their decisions rather than on lies and instinctive thinking that feel good. We need to decide to use valid science to help our sick kids rather than invalid and disproven associations (superstitions).

There are several kinds of people working in the field of addictions. Most are sincere and really care about addicts, even if they have no idea what an addict is or what addiction means. They believe they do, but they don't because the real cause of addictions has been kept from them. This group is mostly made up of well meaning recovering addicts. Sally Satel, on the other hand, belongs to a group of unknown size, larger than you might imagine, which I call addict haters. They are rarely recovering addicts, and most of them have had a close relationship with an addict in one form or another, their parent, relative, lover, spouse, etc., usually horrible. They are addicted to that addict and hate them deeply. Somewhere along the line they get the idea, in order to make things right, that they want to help addicts, but when they get in a position to help them, either in a job or other kind of professional relationship, they can't prevent themselves from helping them right into their graves. I haven't read everything Satel has written about addicts and addictions, but everything I have ever read written by her has been murderously detrimental to addicts as well as destructive to other's attitudes about addicts. Many of these articles have been published in the NY Times. They all have made me sick to my stomach. Today's article is an excellent example of anti-addict hatred. The funny thing about this article is that it seems to want to help addicts and help people understand addicts yet it is done in such a way that actually degrades and demonizes them. It twists weird factoids about addicts and addictions from an expert's point of view, giving it weight, into ideas that make addicts appear to be willful and purposeful scum. However, she is no expert and her poison has no weight. The reality of her facts about addicts and addictions is that they are just absolutely wrong while simultaneously seeming to be right. She's absolutely correct that people who use addictive drugs and end up addicted are different from those who use drugs and don't get addicted. But the difference is not what she claims it is. The difference is not those environmental and demonizing episodes she describes as - "But the road to resumption was not unmarked. There were signs and exit ramps all along the way. Instead of heeding them, our patients made small, deliberate choices many times a day � to be with other users, to cop drugs for friends, to allow themselves to become bored � and soon there was no turning back." The difference is just the opposite - genetic, physiological, unconscious, and against the will of the addict; exactly what she refuses to allow, because if she allowed them she would have no excuse to hate them. Her entire argument against addicts goes along the same lines, that addicts do what they do consciously, willfully, selfishly, narcissistically, anti-socially, and psychopathically. All good reasons to hate addicts, justifying her hatred. Her point of view and her deep hatred forces her to see addicts this way as many others do - even most addicts themselves. Thus, the emphasis on moral and religious redemption in most forms of addiction treatment and recovery. But, of course, this is only because they've been taught this by the experts like Satel. Even AA does this!! This is the stuff that kills addicts much more than providing for loving recovery. This is why recovery is so poor today, as it has always been. The ruling theory of addiction causation, the hijacked brain hypothesis (HBH), invented by another addict-hater, Alan Leshner, and supported by NIDA, despite it being disproven in many different ways, is exactly the theory that ensures this kind of belief and philosophy about addicts. This is the theory that supports addict hatred and ensures low levels of recovery.

The actual science of addiction causation shows just the opposite of the HBH whether it's in humans or in experimental animals. Not a single experimental animal addiction is associated with any of the environmental or conscious decisions she claims cause human addictions and relapses. Yet they happen exactly the same way as they happen in humans. Addictions are genetic in causation and occur against the conscious will of the addict, in animals and humans. Addictions are caused by a genetic disease that I have named Hypoism that affects a certain part of the brain that directs decision-making and instinctive behavior. http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismhypothesis/ Several hundred genetic alleles of genes we all have working unconsciously overcome the ability of just the people (and experimental animals) with this disease to act in their own best interest which the humans at least are aware of when they are screwing themselves with their addictions and their associated behaviors occurring within the extremely negative context of how addictions are seen today. There is nothing immoral about how addictions occur. The only immoral activity that exists in addictions are the deliberate misinterpretations made by so-called experts like Sally Satel to make addicts look like Satel makes them look to people who don't know better. We need to get people like Satel out of the field of addictions and replace their hateful ideas and activities with the real science of addiction causation, the material I discuss in my book, Hypoic's Handbook.

This is definitive proof that genetics and specific alleles of certain genes cause obesity, something I've been writing about for 16 years. Left to their own devices people with the specified allele of the FTO gene get fat. Many other genetic abnormalities do the same things. In fact, obesity has a very high heritability. It's too bad that the article didn't discuss it, but this shows that the common belief that fat people are to blame for their obesity is just flat out wrong. Fat people are not slobs or irresponsible. Obesity is not willful or a conscious decision. Fat people are victims of their genetics. This is now a solid fact and needs to be known by the general population to stop discrimination against fat people. Body mass is regulated unconsciously by genes that regulate many hormones and neurotransmitters.

This concept holds not just for eating behavior but for every known human instinct. Every known human instinct can be related to observed behavioral addictions. Behavioral addictions all work exactly the same way. I've studied this and devised a brain mechanism that explains all this. I call it the decision-making apparatus or the instinct regulating mechanism. Moreover, all drug addictions originate from this mechanism as well because all addictive drugs are addictive because they are physiological substitutes for the natural neurotransmitters. Two of my major papers explaining all this are: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/thehypoismaddictionhypothesis/ and http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismhypothesis/ . My book, Hypoic's Handbook, discusses all this in detail as well as discussing methods for prevention and treatment of all addictions, drug and behavioral, based on this brain mechanism. This theory has been around since 1992 when I wrote my first paper, Hypoism - A Real Disease, which has evolved into the Hypoism Hypothesis paper. This paradigm solves the problem of all addictions from origin to prevention to treatment to public attitudes and policies. It's too bad the addiction field has ignored this theory because the addiction epidemic could have been ended long ago had they not censored it. Let your readers know about so they can at least use it.

I care deeply about people and this potentially great world of ours. I believe strongly in the concept that when dealing with problems in this world, and we have plenty of problems, the right theory will result in the best solutions more often than the wrong theory. I ask you, what problem that you think needs to be fixed would you rather have fixed by the wrong theory than the right theory or no theory, just gut feelings or unsubstantiated beliefs? Elevators? Airplanes? Medications? Surgery? Drinking water? Building bridges? Etc. Name one. I can't. Who do we want making decisions about these problems, people who look for and use the right theory or people who do what feels best to them for reasons having nothing to do with the right theory, reasons based on superstitious belief, ideology, instinct, delusion, or undisclosed conflict of interest? How does the poll turn out on this question? My guess is that most people would vote for the right theory as opposed to those other things. So, we're in agreement there? OK. We want our decision-makers to use the right theory or at least have real expertise or have access to real expertise (people who know the right theory and how to use it) in the relevant area involved in the problem to be solved. And, we'd like to know the details of that expertise.

When it comes down to reality, however, people don't use or even care about the right theory. They go with instinct and what feels good. Take Palin's speech last night - "This is a man who can give an entire speech about the wars America is fighting and never use the word 'victory' except when he's talking about his own campaign," she said. Now, what's the difference in the method of thinking that leads Palin to the word Victory and Obama to not even use the word and which method of thinking do you prefer? Palin sees a war based on a faulty theory and she wants to win it without any realistic concept of what victory there is. Obama sees a war which in theory we never should have been in to begin with, wants to admit that and get out responsibly. Palin wants to send her own son there and is proud of that. Obama wants all our sons and daughters out of there. Remember, the problem was 9/11. What's the right theory? Or, do we just want to get blind revenge on anyone who looks like the guys who did 9/11? Palin is sending her son to die for what? Obama wants to save her son's life. What's the decision-making method that makes her and the rest of her ilk do that while opposing Obama's policy that saves her son's life? I don't think we're dealing with "right theory" here. In fact, we're not dealing with anything rational or best for our country. This is pure instinctive nationalism (pride) and false pride, things Palin should be against because they (the many forms of pride) are biblical sins of the highest order. Palin and her ilk have a major disconnect here yet she was hailed as a savior last night. Obama is rationally and theoretically correct as well as doing what's best for our country and our kids, yet half the country, all republicans, is against it.

What about another war we are engaged in, the drug war? The same argument holds. What's the problem? Addictions and their consequences. What's the best solution? Well, it should be based on the right theory, the theory of what causes addictions. Before we can end addictions, if that's at all possible, we need to find the right theory of addiction causation. The drug war is based on the theory that drugs cause addictions. This is called the hijacked brain hypothesis (HBH). Thus, get rid of drugs and that will solve addictions. [In reality, however, this theory and policy are slightly off because most addictions are not caused by the drugs, heroin, coke, speed, and marijuana, the drug war is designed to eradicate. Most addictions are to alcohol and cigarettes, prescription drugs, sex, gambling, etc. So, here's one delusion we're not acknowledging in our choice and use of the drug war] If we agree that right theory is the prime reason behind policy (above), then we should ask, "Is the HBH correct?" When was the last time you heard a debate on that? Never. Except from me and I've been censored. So, the answer is never. No debate on whether the theory we are using to devise the drug war policy is the "right theory." The experts we have picked to help us on that determination say it is right but they are lying. So, again we're contradicting our original premise - to use the right theory when deciding on the best policy. Anyway, the HBH has been proven wrong many years ago and in may different ways. Read my paper on that at: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismhypothesis/ . So, here are two major wars our country is fighting with "victory" as their intended outcome which are based on wrong theory. Both are based on instincts - pride and hate - neither rational. That's why Obama doesn't use the word victory, because no rational person would use such a word when talking about these wars. Victory can be used to describe the war against Bin Laden, a war Obama wants to fight but a war we are not having, so, where does the word victory come to play here? Nowhere. The solution to the addiction problem should be based on the right theory and that theory is Hypoism. What method does Hypoism use to eradicate addictions? Not the drug war. In fact, it is the exact opposite of the drug war. The Hypoism solution (policy) is from the demand side because the theory says addictions are caused by the genetic differences in the brains of those with the disease of Hypoism. Only hypoics get addicted. People without this genetic disease can actually use addictive drugs without getting addicted. Thus, it's not the drugs and fighting drugs makes no sense. Hypoism recovery methods used in kids hypoic kids before they get addicted if the correct policy. This is a policy of real prevention of addictions. When addictions are prevented kids will not be using drugs whether they're available or not. Availability is not the issue. Recovery and real prevention is. That's the difference between the drug war (which, of course, doesn't work anyway) based on the wrong theory of addictions and Hypoism recovery, real prevention, which ends addictions and ends destroys the market for addictive drugs. Hypoism recovery kills the cartels without a shot fired and one more person killed.

People think they know about addictions. It's easy. You just watch them and that's what they are. They drink. They get religious. McCain thinks he knows what an "alcoholic" is because he had a father who was an alcoholic. "I think we can all agree that alcoholism is a sickness, an illness." And what sickness is that? Could you explain it please? "What effect do you think your father's drinking had on you?" McCain, "I'm not sure I can analyze myself, as you know." No answer. I wonder if he understands why he married a drug addict? Just chance? Does he or anyone else know about assortive mating? Look it up. It's in my book about the disease that causes addictions, Hypoic's Handbook. Hypoics marry hypoics. It's unconscious. If he doesn't understand this, then how is it possible for him to understand any decisions he makes? He doesn't know that the disease, the underlying genetic disease that causes addictions, Hypoism, is primarily a decision-making disease. Neither does the rest of the country. He has no idea that all his decisions revolve around this disease. Neither does the rest of the country. "Alcoholism is about drinking. What else is there to know?" McCain knows about AA. That's enough.

The reason people don't understand addictions is articles like this. The reason the APA doesn't understand addictions is the same reason. The experts don't know what addiction is, so why would the APA and even ordinary people? There's nothing in this article explaining what an addiction is, just the same old description of behaviors and associations. "Those of us who do the clinical work, we don't care what you call it. We look at the behavior." No biological explanation, no brain mechanism, nothing about the genetics nor how they might work to differentiate the 97% from the 3%. Why do most people have and enjoy sex while about 3% of them get addicted? What does this mean? Why do people like sex to begin with? It's not here. So, if this information isn't here why would we expect to see meaningful treatment information? There's none of that either, just the opinions of someone who calls herself an expert because she has worked in the field for a number of years. Where are her results of treatment in a peer reviewed journal? Of course, the interviewer asks all the wrong questions (because she didn't do her homework) and thus the expert isn't made to admit she doesn't know the answers, which she doesn't. If she doesn't know the answers then she can't tell the public what sex addiction, or any addiction for that matter, is. But she does anyway. Massive bull.

I have a paper about the disease that causes all addictions including sex addiction and other behavioral addictions. It asks all the right questions and then answers them. It leads to whole new paradigm and a whole new understanding including the derivation of real methods of prevention and treatment that mean something and can be tested. Read it: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismhypothesis/ Now interview the expert and see if she has the answers to the questions I ask at the beginning of my paper. She won't because she has never even thought about what my paper explains. This is the disease that we've been looking for. The addictions aren't the disease. There's a big difference here because just knowing an addiction exists means nothing if you don't know and understand the disease that causes it. Only this disease, I call it Hypoism for biological reasons explained in my paper and book, will give us what we need to know to end the addiction epidemic. My book, Hypoic's Handbook, goes through the whole paradigm and all its implications.

Politically, I could care less that Palin's daughter is pregnant. However, there is an important underlying issue involved here that no one is talking about because no one realizes it. What I care about is why she and a lot of other young women just like her who don't want to get pregnant get pregnant. Not that I'm against under-age sex. I'm not. But, there's something stinky about why she got pregnant. I am for responsible sex. The real question is whether Bristol and her boyfriend had planned this pregnancy and the marriage, or whether it happened for other reasons, reasons no one is talking about. I haven't heard one word about it being a planned event, so I'm going to assume it wasn't. Thus, this pregnancy was a mistake, and no matter how they spin it, it's still a personal disaster for Bristol and her boyfriend who probably had different plans that now have to be severely altered. Of course they can deal with it, but that's not the point. It's not just about, "get over it." It's about something I write about everyday - "wrong theory leads to wrong policy." "Wrong theory - wrong policy" is a concept I write about in the field of addictions where NIDA's hijacked brain hypothesis (HBH), a proven wrong theory, continues to run everything in the addiction field and because of this the addiction epidemic and all its consequences grows. The HBH is maintained for moral and religious reasons not scientific ones and it is ruining the lives of millions of people. The people (NIDA and ASAM and others), who maintain the HBH are responsible for the maintenance of this disaster. The correct theory of addiction causation, Hypoism, could end the addiction epidemic and save the lives of millions of people, but because of the moral beliefs (dressed up with pseudoscience) of the HBH's advocates the public has had no way to know to dump the HBH and its policies, replace it with Hypoism, and end the addiction epidemic.

The same holds for certain social conservative beliefs of people like Palin which negatively impact the lives of millions of people, including her daughter. An example of this is the belief that abstinence, just say no, is the moral way to deal with kids and sex. No sex education. No contraception. What do you call people who believe in and use the rhythm method? Parents. Wrong theory - wrong policy. The same holds for kids and abstinence. This is what this case is about. Abstinence, a social conservative value, has been shown not to work. It doesn't prevent sex. Nevertheless, it is imposed on many kids. My guess is that in this instance it is the cause of Bristol's pregnancy. My guess is that Bristol did not have the opportunity to discuss sex and contraception with her parents or to plan her wedding. In the face of the disaster it caused I would call this child abuse just as I call the HBH addict abuse. Beliefs have consequences if they are imposed on others irresponsibly. I don't want someone in the White House, again, whose absolutist beliefs hurt people. That includes Obama and all the other candidates in regards to the HBH.

Writing articles about the drug war disaster will never solve the addiction epidemic because people don't know there's an alternative that can work. Thus, the drug war must continue irrespective of its consequences. The people say, "What else can we do?" Read #4, the drug war war, at: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/articlesbyandforhypoicspage2/ . As I've written many times, the drug war disaster is caused by NIDA's moralistic hijacked brain hypothesis - HBH- (the theory behind the drug war) and can be cured by the Hypoism paradigm. The HBH says, to prevent addictions, we must go after the drugs while Hypoism says we must instead help get young hypoics (the ones who end up addicted) into Hypoism recovery (so they won't use drugs) before they're addicted - real addiction prevention. The Times is censoring this whole concept and its implications from the public. Why won't the Times acknowledge this, look into it, and write about it?

There's old wine in old bottles, old wine in new bottles, new wine in old bottles, new wine in new bottles, and occasionally new wine in no bottles. Who do want leading you, someone who only makes old wine in old bottles or someone who makes the first four? The Republicans picked a guy who makes old wine in old bottles. In fact, Republican always pick this kind of guy. We know what we're going to get when we do this - the feeling of security. When asked what he'll do about evil he says without thinking or doubt, "Defeat it." The Dems picked one who does all four. We don't know what we're going to get - insecurity. When asked about evil he says, "Let me think about that." McCain wants to win a war we never should have had. (old wine in old bottle) In fact, McCain still wants to win the Vietnam War. (He thinks Iraq is Vietnam - that's a mental illness, one he got as a POW). Obama wants to leave a war we never should have had. (new wine in new bottle). Polling shows the majority of people want us out of Iraq. Polling shows McCain vs, Obama for the presidency is essentially a dead heat. There's a disconnect here. It seems that despite the policy, for the majority of voters, voting for old wine in old bottles wins over voting for a policy you want. Same with the economy. There's no question that if voters voted for the candidate best for them that Obama would poll 98 to 2 for McCain. Despite having just experienced 8 years of old wine in old bottles leading to the biggest mess in the history of the US in all areas the polls show 45 to 45 with 10 undecided. Why is old wine in old bottles more important than the lives of your kids and even your pocketbook? I think it's unconscious. Well, look at the drug war.

The drug war, a war invented years ago to stop addictions (public safety), is old wine in an old bottle. What is it based on? The hijacked brain hypothesis (HBH), old wine in a new bottle. The new bottle makes no difference particularly because it is a lie. The new bottle is merely a marketing gimmick. Old wine is old wine. How do we know? Because it doesn't work. Addictions are worse than ever. So, why is the public for the drug war? The same reason. Old wine makes them feel secure despite that their kids are dying. Hypoism is new wine in a new bottle - insecure. Hypoism can't do any worse but the belief is that it will be worse. The fact is that it can only be better. Despite that the drug war doesn't work and kids are dying more than ever the public and the addiction establishment still go for the drug war and the HBH; the public because of fear of insecurity, ignorance, and belief of lies; the addiction establishment because of conflicts of interest and fear mongering. They want the drug war to continue. They make lots of money off it. Have you heard otherwise? The small group of people against the drug war want drugs legalized absent any scientific basis - new wine, no bottle. That's just a mess and will never win over the drug warriors. Don't cry over spilt wine. Bottle it.

So, what does the 21st century man do? What is Obama's stance on the drug war? He may well think about it, but he has no basis for rational thinking. He knows nothing about the HBH - Hypoism debate. It's been censored from him. Well, how about someone informing him about Hypoism - the drug war war at: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/articlesbyandforhypoicspage2/ I'd be happy to talk to Obama about this disaster. Maybe the 21st century man can handle this. We'll see.

The article quotes Dr. Pinsky, 'It's an excellent hospital,' celebrity physician says of Pasadena facility where three patients died unexpectedly and one was raped. How does one defend such an experience? This is exasperating! And he'll get away with it.

I've been writing about the lies of the addiction treatment industry for many years. There is no official oversight of addiction treatment as there is with drugs and devices. Dr. Pinsky can say "It's an excellent hospital," with no valid follow-up data about its effectiveness or safety and get away with it. Practically every rehab makes these same claims with no valid follow-up data. Valid data would be 2-5 years of random drug and alcohol testing and follow-up interviews for other addictions and behaviors, not merely the superficial questionnaires or phone calls they all use and use with invalid methods as well. I wanted to do a valid study of rehabs using these criteria for effectiveness - http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismtreatmentresearchproposal/ - with funding from NIDA comparing standard treatment with Hypoism treatment but I could find no rehab, not even a Veterans Administration rehab, to cooperate. They didn't want to get studied. This study would have been a first of its kind.

The fact is that there are no good long term studies of any form of addiction treatments in existence today. The crappy studies that do exist show rehabs are about as effective as chance. Thus, the claims of successful treatments across the board are bogus claims. The public isn't aware of this because the treatment industry is allowed to lie, or, at least, there are no laws against lying, and no one except me puts their feet to the fire. But, they and the media just ignore me even though they have conflicts of interest and I don't.

Thus, the public sends their family members, employees, and others, such as addicted health care workers, to these rehabs and other treatments quite hopeful, and when there's a relapse, they blame the addict. Read the comments on this article. Most of them want Dr. Pinsky exonerated and blame the patient. That's the exact opposite of what they would want if the patient had leukemia instead of addiction. The reality is that the treatment industry is bogus and addicts and their families are being scammed. The reason it's bogus is that the various theories used to devine treatment methods are made up out of thin air. The theories behind them are as bogus as are the treatments themselves. Add to this the high cost of these treatments and the occasional injury or death, things that should never happen, and you wonder why the is no public outcry. But there isn't because we just blame the addict every time.

It's time the addiction establishment and the treatment industry are held accountable for their bogus theories and bogus treatments, and their morbidities and mortalities. Until this is done the addiction mess will just continue as is; the road littered with ruined and dead addicts.

Use of addictive and discombobulating drugs (which includes alcohol) and behaviors has stymied humanity for 50,000 years. In fact, all instincts have caused humans a ton of trouble. The ten commandments, an overt attempt at controlling several human instincts, are one of the first cultural signs of this. Ancient stories abound in attempting to warn humans of the dangers of misuse of instincts and drugs. Until recently we have had no idea why they are such a problem. But today we have enough neurobiological information to understand this. My paper, http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/thehypoismaddictionhypothesis/ , goes through the basics of this neurobiology. Instincts are genetically built into the brain and are genetically regulated as well by the same mechanism. This whole system is a gift of evolution and has been present in animal life for hundreds of millions of years to run unconscious behavior. Behavioral addictions originate from this mechanism in certain genetically endowed people. Every instinct has its corresponding behavioral addiction. All addictive drugs interact with this brain machine because they mimic the action of natural neurotransmitters used by this mechanism. Different people have different genetic alleles of hundreds of genes which regulate the use of these instincts and drugs. That's why there are large differences in how different people use these things and how these things affect us differently.

The reason we have no clue how to deal with all these drugs and behaviors is because we haven't yet begun to use the above understanding. We're still using biblical methods like, "you will go to jail," "you will go to hell," "just say no." Personally, I have no idea what the best drinking age is, or if there is one, but I don't think we're going to solve the problems caused by drugs, instincts, and this brain mechanism with methods that don't use the current neurobiological knowledge discussed above. The drug war doesn't work and never will. In fact, we haven't yet acknowledged this brain mechanism even exists, so how do we stand a chance at dealing with it? We're at the same place today in this arena as we were in 1847 when Semmelweis suggested there was a link between dirty hands and infected childbirths. The experts preferred the Miasma theory over Semmelweis's theory, ensuring the suffering and deaths of countless women for years to come.

Groups like MADD don't care about science or reality. I've written them about it to no avail. They abide by the experts and the prevailing paradigm, the drug war, and just want to put bad people in jail. They want to push the biblical methods to their max despite their not working. At least the 123 university deans are capable of acknowledging there's something wrong with the whole college "drinking" system. That's a beginning, but thinking that changing the drinking age will solve the problem is a mistake. The first thing we need to do is teach the public about the brain mechanism that regulates drug use and instinctive behaviors. And we need to learn more about it. Once this has happened smart people will use this knowledge to develop research that will eventually solve the problems we want to solve. Fighting about the drinking age will just waste time and help kill more people. We need a paradigm change. Once this happens the solutions will follow.

With whom would you rather drive, a depressed person on antidepressants or a person on chronic oral opiates? Today's study shows the answer is the latter. Depressed people on antidepressants are impaired. A while ago there was a study on the driving ability of people on chronic oral opiates which showed they weren't impaired compared to drug-free people. The conclusion of that study was, "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." http://www.healthcentral.com/chronic-pain/news-161930-31.html . I'm not aware that doctors or anyone else is considered impaired if they are depressed and taking antidepressants though this data shows they are but I know very well that doctors on chronic oral opiates (addicted and otherwise) are treated like mass murderers, as I was despite no allegations of any patient harm as stipulated by the Health Department of NYS. When I claimed, in my restoration hearings, that I wasn't impaired during the 3 years I was addicted, despite all the evidence for that, I assured myself that I would never get my license restored. Now there's data to prove my case. From this information it is even more clear that the process I underwent was about bias and discrimination and not about public safety. Read "my story" on my web site. http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/thedoctordrugwarwrongandwastefulp1/ . Yes, I'm still pissed off and I demand this discrimination and abuse must be stopped particularly against recovering addicts where monitoring, not the demanded agreeing with panel's biases and prejudices, has been shown to be more than enough to prevent any patient damage, irrespective of the addiction. The hijacked brain hypothesis, the fraudulent moral theory of addiction causation that makes billions of dollars for the addiction establishment but ruins and kills addicts by the millions is responsible for this mess.

Bissinger romantically but ignorantly writes, "I think of tragedy and waste. I think of destructiveness and self-destructiveness. I think of the promise he had, and the failure he had when he did things that were stupid, and the selfishness that must have led to that stupidity. I feel like shaking him by the shoulder pads, slapping him across the helmet and just yelling, �Wake up, Terrence! Wake up! Don�t do this to yourself!�

To describe Kiel's motivation, Bissinger uses worlds like selfishness, self-destructiveness, stupidity, and don't do this to yourself, as if Kiel had consciously and willfully chosen to destroy his life. Why is it that addicts are blamed for their addictions and related behaviors while people with other diseases aren't? We hear this characterization daily about addicts' behaviors. And we handle addicts accordingly - stigmatization, demonization, and ostracism. Why? Because it looks that way. It looks that way the same way it looks like the sun goes around the earth or that the earth is flat or that infections come out of Miasma. The self induced paradigm of addictions is as old as the bible. Leshner, the previous chief of NIDA, even went so far as to codify that paradigm in his paper, Leshner A.: Addiction is a Brain Disease, and it Matters, Science; 278, 45-70, 10/3/97 . This paper says anyone can be an addict when they take drugs voluntarily and willfully because drugs hijack the brain and change it into an addicted brain. Thus, stupidity, selfishness, and self-destructiveness continue to characterize addictive behavior. That paper made everyone happy because it made the volitional theory of addiction, that addiction is a free-willed choice, official. NIDA, today under Volkow, maintains this theory. The public only knows this theory and goes along with these characterizations.

However, science was invented to test theories that look obvious and self-evident. The self-evident flat earth theory and the geocentric theory have both been disproven as has the Miasma theory of infections. What does science say about the hijacked brain hypothesis (HBH)? Believe it or not, science had already disproven the HBH before Leshner wrote his paper. My 1992 paper, Hypoism - A Real Disease, that evolved into http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismhypothesis/ did that. My 1996 book, Hypoic's Handbook, did that. So did Hiroi's 2005 paper, Genetic susceptibility to substance dependence, Molecular Psychiatry (2005) 10, 336�344, by N Hiroi and S Agatsuma, do that. Hiroi clearly showed that there are two groups of drug users, the majority which use drugs and don't get addicted and the minority which is genetically coerced to use drugs and get addicted because of the same genetics. Thus, addiction is genetic which means it is unconscious, involuntary, and against the will of the addict. That's what the valid science shows. This is diametrically opposite to the HBH and has important implications on prevention and recovery as well as public attitudes and policies. The HBH is dead and should have been buried long ago but because this paradigm supports a multibillion dollar addiction business supported by the government, where the addict is a commodity, including the drug war and all its offshoots, the real science of addiction causation has been ignored and censored.

Kiel was killed by the censorship of the real science of addiction causation from the public, not by self-destructiveness or selfishness. He was killed by a disease, Hypoism, he didn't know he had or what to do about it which is all explained in my book. Maybe if Bissinger knew this before he wrote this op-ed he's have written an op-ed railing against the lies of the current addiction establishment that killed Kiel instead of making Kiel and all the other millions of addicts look like stupid jerks.

Shawn: I don't know if you're really interested in an answer to your question, but there is answer. It's simple. Yes. But not because of what you might think. There's a more relevant question and the answer to this question answers your question and a lot more. The question is, "What makes us believe the drug war is the answer to the addiction problem?" Or, asked another way, "What causes addiction and what's the best way to prevent and recover from addiction and stop all the problems caused by drugs and addiction?"

The drug war was invented as an attempt to stop the problems of addiction and the consequences of addiction. At the time the drug war was instituted it was believed that addiction was caused by the introduction of drugs into the body and their automatic effects on the brain. It was believed that drug use was volitional, willful, psychological (psychobabble), and immoral, and that anyone could get addicted because drugs were the cause of addictions. The obvious answer to addictions was to interdict drugs and punish users - the drug war. In fact, in 1997 Alan Leshner, then chief of NIDA and fanatical drug warrior, wrote a paper codifying this theory of addiction causation and called it the Hijacked Brain Hypothesis (HBH). Leshner A.: Addiction is a Brain Disease, and it Matters, Science; 278, 45-70, 10/3/97. Read it. This paper gave the country a scientific justification for the drug war and everyone was happy despite the difficulties mentioned in your article caused by the drug war. If addiction was as Leshner says it is then the drug war is the only answer and we just have to put up with the side effects of the drug war. There was a slight problem with all this, however. His paper was categorically wrong. It is a lie and a deliberate. It never should have gotten past peer-review but somehow it did. By the time Leshner wrote his paper it was well established that not anyone who used drugs got addicted. In fact, only between 4 and 32 percent of users, depending on the drug, got addicted. Epidemiologic studies showed that only people with the right genetics get addicted. In other words, there was something peculiar about the users, something genetic, unconscious, and against their will, that caused addictions, not the drugs. The entire scientific argument disproving the HBH is available in my paper, http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismhypothesis/ and in Hiroi's paper embedded in my paper. Read them. These papers show addictions are caused by an inborn genetic disease I have named Hypoism for reasons discussed in my paper, web site, and book, Hypoic's Handbook, and the implications of this are the very opposite of the HBH and the drug war. Prevention and recovery must focus not on the drugs and punishment of addicts but on helping the people with Hypoism deal with their genetic disease as kids before addictions happen and even after they happen - prevention and treatment based on the right addiction theory. Using the drug war on addicts is no different from making laws against having cancer or diabetes. In fact, unless we use this paradigm we will fail to be successful with any addiction, something that is actually the case. Thus, the drug war is not only murderous and useless but baseless as well. The HBH is the biggest medical scandal of all time and the cause of the perpetuation of the addiction epidemic. It is responsible for the deaths of countless law enforcement people, innocent bystanders, and millions of addicts besides a massive waste of money. So, it's not whether or not the drug war is worth any loss of life, obviously not, but why aren't the perpetrators of the HBH and the fraudulent drug war in jail instead of running everything in addictions in our country? Simply because people hate drugs and addicts and don't want to know the HBH is a scientific lie or that Hypoism is the true addiction paradigm. They hate drugs and addicts more than they love their children. It's like a religion. Everything we do and think about addictions is based on the HBH and there is a massive financial and religious bias in its favor. Because of this Hypoism has been ignored and censored since my first paper on it in 1992 even though it solves all the problems caused by addictions. There are world class addiction experts who agree with me on all this but are afraid to do so publicly, in my opinion, because of fear of retaliation from NIDA and the government.

So, if you're interested in helping solve the addiction and drug war mess, and get a Pulitzer prize, let me help you do a story on all this.

Read the article. Replace the word depression with addiction as well as different genes (reward cascade genes) and their low activity alleles, and you have a new paradigm for addictions - Hypoism. I did that in 1992 in my first paper called Hypoism - A Real Disease. This paper has evolved over the last 16 years to the paper called Hypoism Hypothesis - http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismhypothesis/ . This paradigm is defined and described in my 1996 book, Hypoic's Handbook - The Hypoism Paradigm of Addictions. Conceptually this is exactly the same as Beck's conceptualization of depression. So, where's the APA? The media? Nothing. Completely ignored. 16 years wasted. How many more years and millions of lives need to be wasted?

The problem here isn't John Edwards. It's journalism and journalists. Journalists want to be celebrities rather than finders of truth. They want to be the story rather than telling the story. They want to be friends with the high and powerful rather than discoverers of the truth which usually has the opposite effect. We'd have better journalism if journalists were anonymous and they just did their jobs, investigating stories and informing the public in an unbiased and objective manor.

Journalists are making these same mistakes in their reporting on the field of addictions. Since 1992 I've been trying to inform the public about the biggest health scandal of all time about the biggest health problem our country faces - the true cause of addictions and why we are having no success in dealing with them. There are articles every day about the ravages of various addictions with no evidence of any success in handling them. Addictions just get worse and nothing seems to work yet journalists writing these stories keep going to the same sources (the so-called experts) for their information and opinions. The scandal is that the addiction experts are lying (deliberately misinforming) to the journalists about the science of addictions, and because they are considered experts, without any evidence or proof of that in itself no less, the journalists write what these experts tell them. An medical expert is not just someone who has been working in the field for a long time but someone who knows the truth about the malady, uses that truth to successfully treat the malady, and admits when they don't know the truth, not someone who pushes a known untruth and has no documented success in treating the malady. Addiction experts today are not real experts yet journalism treats them as such. Addiction experts are still using the hijacked brain hypothesis for theory, prevention, and treatment, everything, while it has been completely disproved many years ago. My 1996 book goes through this. Read: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/hypoismhypothesis/ Of course they won't read or investigate this because in their biased minds it has to be nonsense and wrong so there's no use reading it. Just a waste of time. How could the whole field of addictions be wrong and Umanoff be right. That's impossible. So, there you go. Yet addictions get worse every day. I think something's wrong with this logic.

Our journalists don't investigate any of this. They don't ask the right questions. They don't read the science themselves or get unbiased opinions about it from people who are capable of reading it. They are not doing journalism. They give the "experts" a "free pass" while they ignore and censor me without reading and investigating my writings. Why give a free pass to a completely failed and proven wrong area of science and medicine? I have no idea and it makes no sense, but they do, day in and day out.

I've been writing critiques of the science of addiction since 1992. This has had no impact because the addiction field is biased against my interpretation of this science even though it's been confirmed by others in the field (see Hiroi's article embedded in my paper). The field won't publish my papers. So, to help inform the public about all this I have gone to the press but the press won't even look into my allegations no less actually read and investigate what I'm talking about. They won't investigate it. It's not because of me. It's because of them. They have no journalistic integrity. They're not doing their job. So, the mess continues. 16 years of a massive and deadly mess that never should have been, thanks to the journalists not doing their job, but believing they have.

Unless you read this letter and seriously deal with what I'm talking about (the science of addiction causation) you are being irresponsible journalists and just helping perpetuate exactly what you're article complains about. The country has been lied to about what causes addictions and blindly believes these lies. They don't know better because my writings about this science has been ignored and censored by the addiction field and the media since 1992. Patti Davis has no clue about any of this as well and because of this misses the whole problem. The problem is not about how drug war laws are enforced. It's about the entire basis of the drug war being fraudulent and a medical-science scandal. The lie is the addiction causation theory known as the hijacked brain hypothesis, a deliberate misinterpretation by NIDA (invented by Alan Leshner, the previous NIDA chief and drug war zealot, fanatic, and addict-hater in 1997 and maintained for unknown reasons, possibly political ass-kissing seeing that she is a political appointee, by Nora Volkow, current chief of NIDA) of the science of addiction causation. I didn't write this letter because I want to smoke pot legally like most anti-drug war people, which I don't, or because I'm a libertarian which I'm not or because it's my opinion the drug war is a failed and harmful policy which it is, but because I'm an addiction theorist and addict activist and advocate and the hijacked brain hypothesis, the supposed scientific basis for the drug war, is scientifically wrong. The implications of this wrong theory is that 1) the whole field of addictions is approaching all addictions completely wrong and injuring and killing addicts by the millions as well as their families, and 2) deriving wrong policies based on this wrong theory. Only the correct theory can solve the addiction epidemic and end all the problems caused by addictions and drugs (including legal drugs) as well as those caused by the policies themselves. My goal is to correct all this, not just end the drug war. The correct addiction theory will do all this if it allowed to be known by the public.

I have been railing about the abuses of addiction theory since 1992 when I wrote my first paper on it. If you are against the addiction epidemic and its consequences and want to do something real about them, please thoughtfully read and publish this letter. The drug war has a pseudo-rational basis the vast majority of the public believes. These beliefs are that: 1) addiction is responsible for immeasurable harm to the public. 2) drugs cause addiction. 3) addicts get addicted by voluntary and willful use of drugs - addicts cause these harms via willful and anti-social misbehavior - immorality. These beliefs have been accepted by the public for over 2000 years (it is basically the same as the biblical theory of addiction). This argument is called the hijacked brain hypothesis (HBH) by Leshner - Leshner A.: "Addiction is a Brain Disease, and it Matters," Science; 278, 45-70, 10/3/97 . Because of these beliefs and their believed validity (agreed to by addiction experts including NIDA and ASAM) our country has passed laws attempting to stop addictions and punish drug users. The public has elected officials who also believe these things for one seemingly good reason - to stop addictions and the harm they do. These public officials pass the drug laws at the public's behest. Thus, like it or not, the public through their ignorance, not their fault however, is responsible for the existence of the drug laws which make up the drug war. The public is responsible for the drug war and all the rest of the addiction related laws. So, assuming all this is true, how is it possible to end addictions without the drug war? Assuming this argument is true it seems like we just have to put up with the occasional abuses and deadly mistakes these laws cause.

However, I have good news for all of you, none of this is true. The above argument is categorically scientifically wrong and has been known to be wrong by the addiction experts for many years, at least since my first paper about it in 1992, a paper that was censored from the addiction literature for non-scientific reasons. Today is 8/10/08 and my persistent writings about this have been consistently ignored and censored by the addiction experts as well as by the media. Again, not for scientific reasons, but because my work disproves the entire pseudoscientific argument for the drug war based on the HBH. My work could have ended the drug war as well as the addiction epidemic in 1992 if it hadn't been ignored and censored. The question is whether the public which has made such a vociferous outcry against today's story will use this information to do something about all this, or, will they just continue to go along with the lying addiction experts and the government these experts support (at your behest) despite the existence of a contradictory and diametrically opposite scientifically valid addiction theory that will, if used, end the addiction epidemic and the drug war? A paper I wrote about this quandary is #4 "drug war war" at: http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/articlesbyandforhypoicspage2/

The addiction establishment is not going to change anything on its own because of massive financial and other conflicts of interest based on the PIMMPAL complex - see:http://www.nvo.com/hypoism/15replacingalanleshneristheonlywaytoendthedrugwar/ - an old article that still holds today under Volkow. The addiction experts are basically bought and paid for by NIDA and other governmental and private funding programs (grants) which impose the HBH on us all. There is no money behind or made by the Hypoism theory. In fact, Hypoism is basically free of charge, including all it prevention and recovery methods. I make no money on any of these methods.

Only the public can make the necessary changes by learning the Hypoism theory and getting their legislators to learn and use it. It's the theory that decides policies. Wrong theories yield wrong beliefs and wrong policies. That's why we have made no progress in the arena of addictions after all these years. That's why things that happened in today's story happened. Wrong theory - wrong policy. Once Hypoism replaces the HBH there will be no more drug war and no more raids because addictions are not caused by drugs (we won't need to chase drugs and their pushers) or immoral people (we won't need to chase users) but by a genetic and unconscious brain disease which acts against the will of addict-to-be. Massive prevention and recovery deals with the whole epidemic from the demand side of the equation. Getting hypoic children into hypoism recovery, real prevention, ends the addiction epidemic and ends the need for a drug war from the demand side. My book, Hypoic's Handbook, goes through all this in detail. Read the articles and book. If you need help understanding and using all this call me. It's a lot simpler than you might think. All we have to do is do it. So, let's do it already.