Thread by @christineliuart, Addiction researchers often default to the presumption that drug use is maladaptive [...]

Addiction researchers often default to the presumption that drug use is maladaptive - that all observed neural changes are harmful.

This demonizes drug use and can lead to racial injustice in policing.

Read this article by @drcarlhart to learn more: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7328574/ https://twitter.com/BlackInNeuro/status/1288239055285751811

Certainly, there are adverse effects of over-consumption of many drugs, and some drugs have higher abuse potential than others.

But what fraction of drug users actually experience adverse effects and addiction?

Illicit drug use is so stigmatized, it's hard to capture data.

Most people reading this tweet have probably used an illegal drug before and have not become addicted or their lives harmed in any way.

Many people rely on psychoactive drugs - legal or illegal - for their therapeutic or performance enhancing benefits. Like coffee!

The distinction between an illegal drug and a legal drug is extremely arbitrary. Schedule I drugs are the most restricted by the DEA because they have no accepted medical use and have a high risk of abuse.

Cannabis, LSD, and psilocybin are all Schedule I drugs.

This places cannabis and psychedelics as more dangerous and less medically useful than morphine, crack, and cocaine. What's the logic behind this ruling in 1970 that created this hiearchy of drug criminalization?

Quote from Nixon admin official: "We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,"

Ehrlichman said, "We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

Ok so racism was a driving factor in the war on drugs. And the Nixon administration did a pretty great job at targeting Black communities during the "crack epidemic".

Crack and cocaine are basically the same drug. Crack is cocaine after a chemical reaction with baking soda.

But crack is cheaper, was consumed more by Black people whereas cocaine was more expensive and consumed by white people. There are slight differences in how quickly crack gets to the brain than cocaine, but pharmacologically, they act on the dopamine system in identical ways.

So what did the govt do? They created a 100:1 sentencing disparity in crack versus cocaine. Meaning if you had 5 grams (the weight of a nickel) of crack, you'd be imprisoned for a minimum of 5 years. If you had cocaine, you'd need to have 500 grams to receive the same punishment.

There's a lot more to unpack here on the demographics of folks who actually were consuming crack, but basically, Blackness was criminalized under the guise of the war on drugs.

"But that was 50 years ago!" you might say. And you'd be right. In 2010 the Obama admin stepped in...

But they only decreased the sentencing disparity from 18:1. Cannabis, psilocybin, and LSD remain in schedule I despite growing research that they have medical benefit and abuse potential is low.

I mean...33 states have medical marijuana!

The last thing I'll say is how the criminal justice system perpetuates racism and inequity by locking people up rather than treating them. There is a unique incentive in the United States to treat drug users this way, opposed to other countries.

Legalized slavery.

The 13th amendment of 1865 abolished slavery....except as a punishment for crime.

So now we have this industrialized prison labor complex where it's legal to turn people who break the law into slaves.

Watch @13THFilm if you haven't already!

So, when addiction researchers do work in laboratories that frame drug use as solely a harmful behavior, we perpetuate the idea that there's something wrong with using drugs, that perhaps society should intervene through the justice system.

It's unintentional, but still harmful.

While it feels like we don't have much power when we are tracking mice in conditioned place preference tasks, we really do have a lot of power. Rethink your background slides and your translational impact.

Consider a framework where drug use is motivated by more than neural circuits - that perhaps it has to do with being impoverished, alienated, and discriminated against by society.

We have to stop being #NeuroComplicit.
Acknowledge #NeuroRacism.

This thread is brought to you by one of the most destructive and dangerous legal drugs.

Spiked seltzer.

If you're a drug, dopamine, or addiction researcher I'd love to hear from you about the ways that we may be contributing to this narrative and how we can combat it!

#NeuroRacism #NeuroComplicit

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