(8 mins ago)
Here is the application quotes:
Carl shows that the supposedly inevitable negative effects of methamphetamines are overstated—as is obvious from their sharing a chemical structure with Adderall. As for crack, Carl describes in High Price his upbringing in a Miami ghetto prior to the crack epidemic—and how the drug had no substantial effect on the social pathology that predated the drug's appearance.
My argument in Love and Addiction was that people form extremely pathological involvements with a large number of powerful experiences (love and sex being the most prominent examples, but also including gambling, electronic games, eating, et al.). I (and co-author Archie Brodsky) meant by pointing this out that drugs did not have the special quality of "addictiveness." But, instead of recognizing this commonality between things we all know about and drug experiences, advocates for sex and love addiction (e.g., Benoit Denizet-Lewis) affixed the standard 12-step, loss-of-control meme to these other addictions. Rather than normalizing drug experiences, they pathologized non-drug experiences.
By and large, people don't accept Bruce's, Carl's, and my idea that drug responses fall in the range of normal human experiences, or my idea of the equivalency of drug and behavioral addictions (which is now the American Psychiatric Association's official position). (Please don't answer, "You don't mean physiologically addictive." See The Meaning of Addiction.) Americans carry too much cultural baggage to allow those ideas in. Instead, we think drugs—especially narcotics, and most especially heroin, followed by cocaine, crack and meth—are "truly" addictive.