Culture - The Inquisition against Dopamine, essay from Rifat

[Guigz]

Dr. Alan Wheatley wrote:
The article suggests that addiction results from an increase in dopamine activity: "It is thought that all habit-forming drugs affect the dopamine (DA) system in the brain either directly as DA agonists, or by enhancing DA release, or by acting on other neurons responding to different neurotransmitters, which synapseupon this DA system to activate it."

So Claude Rifat answers:

The generality that dopamine is "the" "culprit" of "drug addiction" is not a
scientific problem but a socio-religious problem which arose in the extreme
form of Protestantism cultivated in North America.

I doubt that Buddhist scientists, for example, would ever have invented this
typically Protestant notion of "drug" and "drug addiction".

Our Judeo-Christian societies have been very keen on inquisition and trying
to authoritatively control the mind and the behaviour of others.

As Dr Thomas Szasz nicely pointed in his book "The Manufacture of Madness" and
Philosopher Michel Foucault in his many books on how human beings enjoy
controlling other human beings, inquisitional behaviours are not extinct.

Just think of an obvious example, in your type of society: President Clinton.

The Spanish Inquisition embodied devilry (diablerie) in a concept called
"witch".

The Nazi Inquisition embodied devilry in a concept called "Jew".

The new "Drug Gestapo" is embodying devilry within the very fabric of our own
synapses through a concept called the "drug addict" and a molecule called
"dopamine".

All these behaviours are inquisitions. The concept under scrutiny changes, but
the behaviour stays the same through the centuries.

All inquisitions have tried to "eradicate" a devilry from the body or the
mind of human beings. Past devilries have been the "witch", the "Jew", the "Gay"
and the last one is the "drug addict + dopamine".

Dopamine is one of the MOST IMPORTANT molecule in our brain because it serves
the purpose to stimulate:

Action
Motivations
Our desire of Freedom

Without dopamine, we could never maintain our structure because we would lose
motivation. We would stop acting in exoreality and become zombies.

Attacking dopamine is like trying to lobotomise people because dopamine is the
ESSENCE of an animal WILL to fight for SURVIVAL.

Dopamine IS the molecule of survival.

So the new Gestapo against dopamine is a highly politically sensitive subject
because controlling dopamine by law is just, simply stated, CONTROLLING THE
SURVIVAL INSTINCT of us human beings.

The Dopamine Inquisitors are the most dangerous Inquisitors ever because, if
they succeeded in their monstrous quest, it would mean that mankind would be
dispossessed of this very molecule which induces Resistance to Tyranny.

No external self-proclaimed "authority" has the right to manipulate our
dopamine activity.

This is a basic freedom which ought to be put in the Declaration of the Rights
of Man.