Comment by ChrisMarshallNY
2 months ago
You have to see real compulsive gambling in action. The comparison is not so far off (but still over the top).
2 months ago
You have to see real compulsive gambling in action. The comparison is not so far off (but still over the top).
I know what kind of havok a gambling addiction can cause, and it's no joke. It's powerful enough (for some people, at least) that a comparison to addictive drugs generally is apt, yet the traps are everywhere and usually legal. Exploiting the psychological weakness that underpins gambling addiction is something sought after and optimized for outside of overt gambling, like modern video game mechanics, social media, cryptocurrency, retail stock investment, and so on.
In reflecting on why it's so addictive, I've come to believe there's a sort of feeling of adventure in random outcomes --that people like the entropy as well as the wins.
That said, going back to what I said before, my issue with the title of the article is with invoking crack specifically as some especially scary super-addictive thing, which is an idea that was over-hyped at one time. They could have just said cocaine, or better yet, made a comparison to opiates, but they're playing to an old and incorrect bias.
You have to see real crack addiction in action. It’s not over-hyped at all. It’s just that not everyone gets addicted to it.
People get hung up on physical addiction, but the mental obsession is the real destroyer. Most folks aren’t wired for that kind of obsession. They can get physically addicted to opiates, quit, and never go back. I’ve seen exactly that. I’ve also seen folks become so obsessed with pot, that it makes your worst Central Casting street junkie look tame, by comparison.
True addicts don’t need physical addiction. It’s a mental disorder that doesn’t make sense to most people, but it’s definitely there.
Well I can't say I've known any crack addicts really, only met a couple people who have tried it. I've known some people who got into cocaine and were never quite the same, though. Also some people who started out fairly respectable, got into opiates, may or may not have robbed people and betrayed friends and family in service of the addiction, and then died to it.
But my criticism of the 'crack is scary' meme isn't coming from personal experience, really. From what I've read and from what I understand of the chemistry, and having lived through the era where crack was all over the news, and where possession of the drug got the harshest sentences... I do believe it was relatively over-hyped, and that a big part of what made crack scary is that it was something poor black people in cities did.
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Respectfully, it feels slightly rude to suggest that gambling addiction is due to psychological weakness. Perhaps that's your view, but I don't think it matches the modern medical perspective on addiction.
Well, I didn't mean it as an insult. More along the lines of our innate biases that take work to overcome, or maybe the optical illusions that the human visual system is prone to.