- So I started studying drugs
because I got hoodwinked like everybody else.
I thought that drugs were the source of the problems
that we were seeing in our community.
- 'All of us agree that the gravest domestic threat
facing our nation today is drugs.'
- But it turns out, I was wrong.
Sometimes people ask,
"When was the precise moment when you had this epiphany
that, 'Oh, it's not the neurobiology of somebody,
but instead it's the social context
under which they operate?'"
There wasn't a magical moment.
There was a gradual change over many years of studying.
I learned that the vast majority of people
who use drugs like crack cocaine
or heroin did not become addicted.
And these people behaved in ways that were so responsible,
in ways so inconsistent based on anecdote,
based on media reports.
So this dissident caused me to start to shift my thinking.
And then gradually over time,
I realized much of what I had been told
about drugs is pure nonsense.
Between 1990 and 2000,
that is deemed the 'Decade of the Brain.'
There was a lot of money
into studying brain illnesses, brain disease.
There was a lot of money
in terms of learning about the brain.
And during that time,
we are looking for some neural footprint of addiction.
And we thought that once cocaine interacted
with these dopamine neurons,
it just had this almost magical power
over the person's behavior.
We've learned that that's not necessarily the case.
In fact, it's a lot more complicated than that,
and it has a lot more to do
with the psychosocial environment
under which the individual is operating-
like lack of opportunity, lack of education,
lack of healthcare.
All of these issues are with us today,
as they were in the 1980s and 1990s
when I thought that drugs were the source of the problem.
Turns out not only was I wrong,
society was wrong.
One of the ways that we studied the brain
of drug users is through neuroimaging techniques:
so, we bring people into a laboratory
and then we take pictures of their brains.
And if they are, for example, drug addicts,
we would put them in one category
and then we would compare their brains
to people who've never used a drug.
And your pictures, you can say,
"Well, if you look in this area of someone who uses drugs,
you can see that it's not lighting up quite as much
as the same area in someone who doesn't use a drug."
And so therefore, that's evidence
of neuropathology, neuro-damage.
It's a wild oversimplification
because all you're doing is taking a snapshot
of somebody's brain in one moment in time.
And secondly, what we are seeing is
people's brain structures being within the normal range
of human variability.
We have now mischaracterized people as being brain-damaged-
and that's wrong.
So when we think of drug addiction,
it's important for the lay audience to keep the focus
on the person's behavior, and not on the person's brain.
The person's behavior will tell you
everything you need to know.
Are they not showing up for work?
Are they not meeting their obligations at home?
Are they not meeting their obligations in school?
Has the person had multiple unsuccessful attempts
at cutting down or scaling back or quitting their drug use?
All of these sort of signs are important indicators
of whether someone is drug addicted or not.
And notice, I didn't look at anyone's brain,
I'm really looking at the person's behavior.