Addiction Pills
You could argue that part of what makes us human is our latent rebellion against stability and purity.
We romanticize ideals like balance and perfection, but we're at our most "us" when demonstrating flaws and eccentricities; when we color outside the lines, break with canon and dogma, and generally muck things up in interesting ways.
We tend to like the idea of "perfection," then—defined using all sorts of elaborate, unattainable metrics—perhaps in part because it's so permanently out-of-reach.
Periodically folks (often with outlier personalities or cognitive setups) tiptoe up to the line of (for instance) perfect recall or perfect pitch or the capacity to perfectly capture visual reality using nothing but #2 pencils, but these instances of "perfect" are exceptions, not norms, and that's part of what makes them interesting (many of us, given the opportunity to swap our complex and diverse collections of human experience for something more focused and perfection-capable would likely—at the moment of decision—not do so; the trade-offs are often significant).
So our collective sense of this capacity to do something without evident flaw is a sort of arm's-length awe: we think it's amazing and cool and worthy of celebration (look at what humans did!), but we would also be unlikely to want to accept the costs associated with becoming some kind of savant, even if that savantism can evoke such a positive response and net us the rewards sometimes granted to those who can perform such feats.
One of our many human imperfections is that we're not great at moderating our intake. Our brains and bodies push us to gorge on delicious foods, stimulate ourselves with pleasure chemical-flooding substances, and buy anything that promises to solve our problems or turn us into more appealing peacocks.
There's evidence that suggests, though, that a drug called semaglutide (often reported-upon under the trade-name "Ozempic") which has historically been prescribed for diabetes patients, and which has more recently been approved for folks who want to lose weight, might also help those who use it control other addictions and urges—nail-biting, drinking, smoking, and even shopping.
This is a developing collection of stories, and the degree to which this drug is effective for broad-based urge-control is still being sorted out (it'll be a while before we have access to all the data being collected, currently, and it'll be a while before that data is focused on this aspect of early patients' experiences, rather than on their weight-loss data), but early numbers and anecdata suggests a substantial number of folks taking the drug didn't just have an easier time eating only what their bodies need, they also no longer felt compelled to engage in addiction-related behaviors that had nothing to do with food.
The experts working in this field have been trying to figure out the mechanism via which this drug works (not an uncommon situation for drugs, by the way: over-the-counter painkillers we've used for decades are similar), and they now believe it doesn't just effect the pancreas (the original theory was that it moderated blood sugar ebbs and flows, while also slowing the passage of food through the stomach), but also reaches directly into the patient's brain, binding with receptors and thus fiddling with the knobs on some of their dopamine pathways.
What that means, in practice, is that the reward system (do this thing the brain wants you to do and it’ll make you feel good) is adjusted in some way by this drug, and that leads (in some cases at least) to folks not being rewarded (or being rewarded less) for addiction-related behaviors they were previously rewarded for—so they can more easily stop doing those things (such rewards are often what hook people on these behaviors in the first place).
Researchers are warning (as is prudent) that this won't work the same way for everyone, as everyone's bodies and brains are different, and addictions have multiple pathways (some are more reliant on ritual and habit than dopamine pathways, for instance), but there's a chance this category of drugs, especially if recalibrated and optimized for this use-case, could prove a boon to those of us who want to reduce or eliminate addictive triggers, compulsions, and behaviors.
Which could lead to an interesting recalibration in our perception of such things.
How many great artists, for instance, are celebrated for and seemingly fueled by their extremes (especially harmful extremes) and flaws?
How many of us are defined, at least in part, by our deviations from the rational, idealized norm—most identifiable (and maybe even lovable) for our rough edges?
I personally think it's fantastic that we may have a new tool in our societal toolboxes to help us manage and diminish harmful behaviors, even if those behaviors are the consequence of our human-ness, rather than some other outside factor.
But I also think we could see some significant social adjustments and norm-resettings as a consequence of this kind of pharmaceutical impact: many of them positive, some of them negative, and most of them just a bit weird (and even unsettling, in the way any big change can be unsettling) for a generation or so.
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