Sunday, March 18, 2012

How 'The System' Causes Addiction


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New World Notes News
Vol. 5, No. 11 -- March 18, 2012

This week in New World Notes, radio program #211, March 20, 2012

How 'The System' Causes Addiction
with Dr. Gabor Mate 


In brief

A good introduction to Dr. Gabor Mate's insights into addiction.

Mate (mah-TAY) shows that addiction is caused not by chemical substances but by the complex interaction of brain, experience, the environment (including society & the economy), and chemical substances. He argues that our stressful, exploitative economic system is a major factor causing addiction. Not just promoting addiction but causing it at the basic, biochemical level.

And since The System's "War on Drugs" does little good and much harm, could its real goals be more sinister than its professed goals?

Mate's insights come from both scientific research and his own clinical experience treating addicts in Vancouver's version of Skid Row.

Notes, credits, & links

Gabor Mate's most recent book is In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction.

This program replays parts of an interview with Mate (January 2010) by Mike McCormick, on Mind Over Matters, and parts of a speech Mate gave in Berkeley in November 2011 (courtesy of the National Radio Project and Making Contact). Many thanks to both sources.

New World Notes is produced under the auspices (Latin for "thumb") of WWUH-FM, a community service of that beacon of light in darkest Connecticut, the University of Hartford.

You can listen to any installment of New World Notes online or else download it (as an mp3 audio file) for later listening. The show is archived at both radio4all.net and (from #90 onwards) The Internet Archive. Either link should get you a reverse-chrono listing of available installments. Or browse the show's Web site: Each installment has a page, and each page has links to the recorded audio. See the gray sidebar on the right ("CONTENTS [Links]") for a table of contents.

Series overview: Political and social commentary in a variety of genres. Exploring the gap between what we want ... and what they're trying to make us settle for.

Coming soon (Tuesday air debut date shown)
  • March 27 -- John Pilger: Power, Propaganda and the Silence of Writers
Catch New World Notes (all times Eastern):

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