[Mb-civic] From Donuts To Heroin

Thu Dec 9 22:08:25 PST 2004

>From Donuts To Heroin

By Jacob Sullum, Reason
 Posted on December 8, 2004, Printed on December 9, 2004
 http://www.alternet.org/story/20696/

An online gourmet food shop calls its Maple Cream Cookies "truly delicious
and addictive." In John Banzhaf's view, that description should be treated
not as a selling point but as a warning.

Banzhaf, a George Washington University law professor who never saw a
problem that couldn't be solved by suing someone, argues that food sellers
have a legal duty to warn consumers about the dangerous deliciousness of
high-calorie products such as ice cream, cheeseburgers, and potato chips.
"Bet you can't eat just one!" presumably wouldn't count.

Banzhaf cites "growing evidence...that eating some fattening foods can cause
addictive reactions in the brain just like nicotine," evidence he says is
sufficient "to warrant at least a warning about possible addictive effects."
He advises food companies that such warnings would help shield them from
liability  very sporting of him, since he is a leading advocate of suing
them for making people fat.

Banzhaf's latest evidence is an article in the December Psychology Today
that likens overeating to drug addiction. "Like addicts," it says,
"overeaters may be compensating for a sluggish dopamine system by turning to
the one thing that gets their neurons pumping... It's a mark of changing
times  and more sophisticated science  that the head of the National
Institute on Drug Abuse is thinking about doughnuts as well as heroin."

Perceiving a threat to personal responsibility, conservatives tend to reject
such comparisons as outlandish exaggerations. Surely donuts  a familiar
product that most of us consume in moderation, if at all  are nothing like
heroin, which everyone knows is the most addictive drug around. (Except for
crack. And methamphetamine. And nicotine.)

But such scoffing reflects a misunderstanding of drug addiction, which is
neither inevitable nor inescapable. The government's own statistics indicate
that the vast majority of people who use drugs  even such reputedly
powerful substances as heroin and crack  never become addicts. Those who do
often manage to stop or moderate their use. There are about as many former
smokers in this country as smokers, for example, and they typically quit
without formal "treatment."

It's hard to deny the parallels between overeating and drug addiction:
People find eating pleasurable, often eat more than they initially intend,
regret their overeating, and have trouble cutting back to lose weight
despite the health risks and social costs of being fat. Most striking is the
ambivalence, the conflict between short-term and long-term interests that
creates the appearance that people want to change their behavior but can't.

The mistake lies in accepting that appearance at face value. People do,
after all, shed pounds when their reasons for eating less outweigh their
desire to eat more. Just as important, people can avoid overeating in the
first place, no matter how "truly delicious and addictive" the food they
encounter.

By focusing on brain scans and analogies to drugs widely (though wrongly)
believed to be irresistible, activists like Banzhaf obscure the possibility
of self-control. As the psychiatrist Sally Satel observed at a 2003
conference on obesity, "virtually every pleasure we encounter is associated
with surges in dopamine," and brain images "cannot distinguish between an
irresistible impulse and an impulse that is not resisted."

Yet anti-vice crusaders continue to cite such research as evidence that
people cannot reasonably be expected to control themselves, and the tendency
is not limited to activists on the left. At a recent hearing convened by
Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), Judith Reisman of the California Protective
Parents Association testified that "pornography triggers myriad kinds of
internal, natural drugs that mimic the 'high' from a street drug. Addiction
to pornography is addiction to what I dub erotoxins."

In Reisman's telling, the conscious mind plays no role in people's reactions
to pornography. She called the effects of sexually explicit material "brain
sabotage," warning that "pornographic visual images imprint and alter the
brain, triggering an instant, involuntary, but lasting, biochemical memory
trail, arguably subverting the First Amendment by overriding the cognitive
speech process."

This is the sort of choice-negating reductionism, leaving no room for
tastes, values, or learning, that conservatives usually reject when it comes
to, say, fast food ads. All experiences "imprint and alter the brain." That
fact tells us nothing about how people respond to those experiences 
whether with disgust or enthusiasm, moderation or excess.

Reisman and other critics of pornography say it's dehumanizing, reducing
people to genitals. The same could be said of a behavioral theory that looks
at people and sees only biochemicals.