Brain Science | British Columbia—Drug Decriminalization, Addiction | Mental Health | AR
In July, British Columbia had 192 drug-related deaths, around 6.2 per day and a 31% increase from June. This put the death rate at 42 per 100,000, doubling what it was in April 2016, when the province declared drugs as a public health emergency, with a death toll more than 10,000 since, mostly because of impurities, in street drugs.
There are supervised drug consumption or drug overdose prevention sites, where they have reported no deaths. Some advocacy groups sell drugs to provide to users without impurities.
Vancouver was first in North America to have a supervised injection site, the Vancouver SIS or INSITE, in 2003 to taper the spread of diseases. The model has since spread to other parts of Canada.
The United States had the first SIS, just recently, but other cities continue a back and forth, for now, regarding the model.
British Columbia would also be the first to decriminalize small amounts of drugs from January 2023, so that some can use in safe quantities.
The thing with drug addiction is not reward or pleasure, but the gear—or what it means keep doing it, recklessly, unheedful of the consequences, or risks.
What makes it so, or how does the memory prepare the highway for speed and totality of substance abuse?
What decides the experience to crave, feel-like, desire, want something or be prompted?
Why is a certain thing wanted at some point, and not at other times? What makes it change? Why are there limits and extents for desire and what makes those ignored at times?
The memory decides all experiences by what it stores. All hormones and neurotransmitters construct or build memory for experiences. A hormone could decide for certain functions, but the overall memory determination could make it final or not. Appetite is by the hormone, ghrelin, but been busy, or worried may not make it prioritized, so eating is ignored. Leptin is for satiation, but seeing something craved for a long time, without access, could lead to consumption, ignoring satiety.
This is similar to sleep, and other bodily functions, where other factors not just the hormones or neurotransmitters deciding. It applies to intakes or consumptions, regardless of what. They submit to memory overall. It is how they play within that space that determines how much they do.
A nice consumption maybe subject to mood, and may or may not make any difference. Another [unexpected] consumption may change a bad mood to good, or vice versa. This is similar to how temperature, an environment, a kind of light, sound, posture, or anything else, may or may not change experience, based on how they are accepted to, and relay in memory locations.
This is the same for drugs. The experience of doing, wanting, returning, risking and everything are overalls of memory.
So how can memory be displayed to show users that this is how it works, in basic terms, to understand why one drills in?
Memory—Concept of it as a Construct
The memory has a large store for cravings. This store has different sides or slices containing aspects including timing, location, extents, limits, substance [version] types and so on.
This store for cravings has some parts that have feel-like [or what it means not to be in a situation but to know what it means, or how it feels]. Though feel-like could be its own large store, but there is a part of it with cravings, or a part of cravings large store that rebounds to feel-like, when it touches it.
There are also slices for promptings, desires, wishes and similar, in the cravings large store.
If anything would be craved, it has to touch the store, though at what part may determine to what degree. There are small stores that travel in sequences across memory locations to large stores, to determine what is experienced.
Sequences can also determine to what side stores go, which is why there maybe a specific way something is craved, not just however. It could be a prior way the small store went to the large one, or how the split of the small store went.
There are several stores where everything that represents the experience goes, for completion. Sometimes, it may miss one or some, and bring just that part to bear. Sometimes one thing in the set changes, without cravings and others.
There are brain molecules said to be involved with cravings, but they construct memory for experience, making their actions subordinate to the collective build.
Just like the cravings large store in memory, there are large stores for consequences, hate, love, risks and so on. They all have sides with properties that experiences reveal.
Usually, there could be cravings, but the small store bounces to the large stores first of risks, then for consequences, to know what would happen then to not do so at that time. This is common with calculation in moments, which mammals do for prey and against predators, which is a small store going around to large ones, in memory.
Memory has large and small stores—all storing thoughts, which are versions of senses in the external: small for the smallest possible unique information on anything, large for similarities between two or more small stores. Small stores can be in prioritization or in pre-prioritization. Large stores have a principal spot they go.
Addiction
There are times that something is used, the small store [bearing the thought version of it] goes to a large store for delight or feel good. It may go to a side of it, for expanded or limited experience, which then sends to actual feelings destination for the elated feeling, with reaction.
The large store picks up what it is and how, and stores it. A sequence also develops for how the small store relayed across large stores for that experience.
One of the large stores that the [transient] small store may have bounced to—is cravings. Later, the [resident] small store in memory [containing the most unique information on the version] of that substance, may bounce to the cravings store and make it wanted.
A transient small store could also bounce there, when it is sensed [converted to thought and sent to the small store], and bring cravings to bear.
Most times, the sequence of relays of small to large stores may not go to risks or consequences, so it is possible to use substances and just go on.
It is also possible that a small store goes to the risk or consequences large store, but to a weakened part, so while it is known that these are the risks, the individual carries on.
There could be an early split of the resident small store that goes through the sequence, for what makes the addiction wanted, then it induces cravings to want the rest to follow.
There are other cases where continuity means seeking a side of the delight large store, to begin the best feeling, or bounce to where the best feeling would be switch in, or to seek the right sequence from a prior one and so on.
There could also be the self-loathe large store [or for some even the desire for ruin], to keep going and not care.
Summary
It is this sequential transport of small to large stores in memory that decides using or doing recklessly.
Large stores in the memory are like an old telephone with rotary dial, with sides that determine degree of need or experience, when touched by small stores. There are parts that bounces off to other parts of other large stores and there are some that linger.
How the brain works is by its constants, not subjective experiences or substances.
Cells and molecules are constant, but submit to an overall build of thought and memory, constant and directly linked to experiences.
Thought, theoretically, emerges as the uniform identity of sensory processing or integration in the thalamus and the olfactory bulb [smell only]. It is thought that gets relayed to the cerebral cortex for interpretation—which is knowing, feeling and reaction.
Knowing is memory, feeling is a destination predicated on the action of memory, while reaction to feelings can be parallel or perpendicular.
Displaying these, explaining the brain by constants of thought and memory, to those with the disorder and loved ones, could be important in shaping the future for advanced personal pre-harm reduction, in B.C. and beyond.