Whipped Cream Difficulties

The Rational Choices of Crack Addicts

Answer after the jump.

Why, the New York Times, of course. Snark aside, there’s some interesting stuff here:

“Eighty to 90 percent of people who use crack and methamphetamine don’t get addicted,” said Dr. Hart, an associate professor of psychology. “And the small number who do become addicted are nothing like the popular caricatures.”

The good doctor recruited crack addicts, offering them $950 to spend several weeks in a hospital ward:

At the start of each day, as researchers watched behind a one-way mirror, a nurse would place a certain amount of crack in a pipe — the dose varied daily — and light it. While smoking, the participant was blindfolded so he couldn’t see the size of that day’s dose.

Aside 1: I’d really like to know how they procured the crack. “No, really, officer, I’m buying crack for medical experiments!” (Edited to add: it isn’t explicitly stated, but I do get the impression that the crack was made in the hospital; note the reference to “pharmaceutical grade cocaine”. This would allow for better dosage control than buying crack off the streets, but it also raises even more questions. Like, who cooks the hospital’s crack?)

Aside 2: I’d also really really like to see the institutional review board paperwork on this.

But I digress. After they got the first dose of crack, the experimental subjects would be offered more crack throughout the day. But they’d also be offered rewards instead of the crack, like $5 cash money or an equivalent amount in vouchers for local stores.

When the dose of crack was fairly high, the subject would typically choose to keep smoking crack during the day. But when the dose was smaller, he was more likely to pass it up for the $5 in cash or voucher.

Dr. Hart did the same thing with meth:

He also found that when he raised the alternative reward to $20, every single addict, of meth and crack alike, chose the cash. They knew they wouldn’t receive it until the experiment ended weeks later, but they were still willing to pass up an immediate high.

And this:

Yes, he notes, some children were abandoned by crack-addicted parents, but many families in his neighborhood were torn apart before crack — including his own. (He was raised largely by his grandmother.) Yes, his cousins became destitute crack addicts living in a shed, but they’d dropped out of school and had been unemployed long before crack came along.
“There seemed to be at least as many — if not more — cases in which illicit drugs played little or no role than were there situations in which their pharmacological effects seemed to matter,” writes Dr. Hart, now 46. Crack and meth may be especially troublesome in some poor neighborhoods and rural areas, but not because the drugs themselves are so potent.

In other words, are drugs the cause of the problem, or are they symptoms of deeper problems that are harder to solve?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 17th, 2013 at 6:45 am and is filed under Clippings, Economics, Geek, Neuroscience. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.