Blogger's Choice: Natural Science on Drugs of Abuse

Drug use was talked about in the Blackmore book. The topic was discussed from a physiological frame, giving the reader details about how drugs affect the brain. Since drugs are illegal, the tie-in to the course theme is simple: "are people who use drugs bad?"

The topic came up again during one of the knowledge fairs. Brett was talking about the social and economic consequences that follow women who are street prostitutes. The discussion was quite good; everybody seemed to have an opinion of some sort. One of the consequences that the prostitutes face is drug addiction. If they did not get into selling their bodies as a means to support their addiction, then they soon became addicts simply from associating with addicted people for long enough. If we were to generalize and say that all street walking prostitutes are drug addicts, then the question regarding the course theme could be something like "are drug addicts bad for selling their bodies in order to afford their addiction?" When examining this topic, it is important for us to keep an open mind and do the best we can to see things from the addict's perspective.

A good starting point is to define what drug addiction means:

Addiction is defined as a chronic, relapsing brain disease that is characterized by compulsive drug seeking and use, despite harmful consequences. It is considered a brain disease because drugs change the brain; they change its structure and how it works. (drugabuse.gov)

According to this definition, drug abuse causes a change not only in brain chemistry but also a change in its structure. Most definitely this would fall under the umbrella of natural sciences. Also interesting is that this definition classifies addiction as a brain disease. Think back to the previous post in this blog, the one that examined the case of a pathological liar. I offered the opinion that because the subject of this case study had some mental defect which caused him to lie compulsively, he could not be considered "bad" because he was not truly in control of his actions.


When facts of the pathological liar are compared with those of the drug addict, certain similarities arise. Though the reason for a person to begin using drugs is varied and unpredictable, once the brain is addicted stopping isn't as easy as some people may believe. The intense craving and compulsion drive the person to do things that they would never consider doing under normal circumstances. In the case of the street prostitutes, they were reduced to selling the one thing that was their God given gift as women -- themselves. When faced with going without the drug (and possibly the terrible withdrawal symptoms that accompany it) or debasing themselves to the point of having sex with strangers for money, the latter option was their only choice. Like the pathological liar, the drug addict is not truly in charge of her actions, therefore in some way, they are not responsible for their actions. Accountable? Absolutely. But in terms of motivation, the choice was rather forced.
We could, therefore, offer the opinion that drug addicts are not bad, nor are the street prostitutes who sell themselves in order to pay for their habit.

The 1967 classic song "White Rabbit" by Jefferson Airplane

is an example of a mainstream song which openly speaks about drug use

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Works Cited

Blackmore, Susan J. "Chapter 7 - Altered States of Consciousness." Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford, UK: Oxford UP, 2005.

Murphy, Lyn S. "Understanding the Social and Economic Contexts Surrounding Women Engaged In Street-Level Prostitution." Issues in Mental Health Nursing, 31:775–784, 2010.

Natural Science Knowledge

Our next stop on the Knowledge Express is to examine how the theme "what makes humans bad" can be viewed through the lens of natural sciences. A logical starting point would be to describe exactly what the natural sciences are. Any sciences that are concerned with the description, prediction, and understanding of natural phenomena based on observational and empirical evidence can be considered natural sciences. The natural sciences can be subdivided into two main disciplines: life science and physical science.


Life science is essentially the same thing as biology. This field examines phenomena related to living things. With recent advances in modern technology, the studies of genetics and microbiology have been able to gain significant ground in research. Other fields of life science include zoology, medicine, botany, and molecular biology.






Physical science is concerned only with non-living systems. Within physical science, there are many important subdivisions that are the driving forces behind modern people's lifestyle of enjoying high-technology. To be specific, natural science seeks to explain and predict nature's phenomena based on empirical evidence. The natural sciences rely heavily on the scientific method and demand their findings to be conclusive and repeatable. A few examples of fields within the natural sciences include physics, chemistry, astronomy, and earth science.




During one of our in-class knowledge fairs, the topic of pathological lying was brought up. Such a topic fits well into our discussion about what makes humans bad from the perspective of the natural science discipline because Kevin, our presenter, talked extensively about the neurological connections that are involved when examining case studies of known pathological liars. The article Kevin selected as a basis for his discussion followed a man who was 57 years of age who had become a pathological liar late in life. To engage the reader, the article by Poletti et al. first discussed the subject from a humanities viewpoint in order to make an emotional connection with the audience. The article chronicled how the pathological lying affected interpersonal relationships, both within and outside of the immediate family. It was said that the subject would lie about strange, trivial things that did had no effect on his circumstances -- he would lie just for the sake of lying. Even more strange, the man could not remember telling such lies when later confronted about it.




Naturally, the man's family sought help from the medical community. We discussed the various procedures the subject underwent, including psychiatric assessments, full bloodwork panels, neurological examinations, and technical neuroimaging photos were taken using a machine much like an MRI. After the article made a valid explanation of all the technical medical jargon, it was determined by doctors that the subject had frontal temporal dementia, meaning that he would never gain full control of his brain, and thus he would never be able to control his pathological lying.




I enjoyed the time we spent studying the theme in the context of the natural sciences very much. To take the above example of the man who was a pathological liar, is he bad for chronic lying? I would venture to say no, he is not bad. Natural science showed us that this man is not truly in charge of his actions; he is simply compelled to tell lies because of some unfortunate abnormality within his brain, one which the medical community does not yet understand. The subject, in my opinion, is actually a victim because he is not making a conscious decision to behave outside the realm of what society deems "good behavior."

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Works Cited

Poletti, Michele, Paolo Borelli, and Ubaldo Bonuccelli. "The Neuropsychological Correlates of Pathological Lying: Evidence from Behavioral Variant Frontotemporal Dementia." Journal of Neurology, 258.11 (2011): 2009-2013. 

Social Science Knowledge

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Man is a social animal; Aristotle said that well over two-thousand years ago, and it is a perfect avenue in which to segue our discussion toward the social sciences. Our interactions with other people shape our identities. Social science is an academic discipline that concerns itself with studying the relationships between people within a society. The category of "social science" as a whole has a large number of academic branches; some of these include economics, demography, sociology, history, political science, linguistics, law, and anthropology.

So how do we obtain this "social science knowledge" that the title of this post refers to? Social scientists utilize experimental methodology to better understand society. There are two schools of thought about how is the best way to collect the date social scientists use to make conclusions about people and society. The first method is called positivism; these social scientists use the scientific method, just as scientists in the natural sciences do -- researchers in this group define science in its strict modern sense. The second method is interpretivism and the people who subscribe to this method may utilize social critiques or symbolic interpretation as opposed to constructing empirically falsifiable theories.

By using social science to analyze human behavior, social scientists can predict the outcome of certain situations which enables us to grow on a societal level. One particular article, "Parental Characteristics Associated With Bullying Perpetrating in US Children Age 10 to 17 Years," seeks to find what the connection is between primary school bullies and their parents. This is precisely the type of problem that social science is equipt to handle. Bullying is defined as repeated aggression by a dominant person toward another person who is comparatively weaker. The article described a study in which it was discovered that it the parents of bullies are more likely to be angry and communicate poorly with their children when compared to the parents of non-billies. The study found a positive correlation between the parents of non-bullies and their likelihood to communicate intelligently with their children, helping with homework, or perhaps being supportive of new friendships. As stated earlier, correlation does not imply causation, but this study gave researchers an interesting set of baseline data to work with, provoking new ideas and possibly more experiments in the future. So are bullies bad? Bullies are a product of their environment, and it is not always easy to give yes or no answers to these types of questions.

While our class was studying the academic discipline of social science and how it relates to the theme of the course, we had a guest speaker come to Cal Poly and discuss the interaction she faces with the mentally ill every day at her place of employment. She sided with Locke over Hobbes, electing to believe in the essential goodness of humankind; this is an opinion that we both share. She spoke about how she would begin to feel caught up in her clients lives -- sometimes for the worst. She mentioned one time in particular when a client of her's committed suicide; something of that magnitude would be extremely difficult to cope with emotionally, and she agreed, saying that it can be a challenge to "unplug" from work at the end of the day. I greatly admire her empathy towards those less fortunate than she, as well as gumption to keep it up when presented with challenges.

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Works Cited

Shetgiri, Rashimi, MD, Hua Lin, PhD, Rosa M. Avila, MSPH, and Glenn Flores, MD. “Parental Characteristics Associated With Bullying Perpetuation in US Children Aged 10 to 17 Years.” Parent Characteristics and Bullying. American Journal of Public Health, Dec. 2012. PDF.