Navigating an Addictive World: Anna Lembke, MD on the Plant Yourself Podcast
Channel: Sick to Fit | Plant Yourself Podcast
Date: 2022-08-30

In one of life's great ironies, when Anna Lembke began practicing as a psychiatrist, she told her colleagues not to refer anyone with an addiction. They were too hard to help, and besides, she had received virtually no training in medical school in dealing with the problem.


Plus, addiction wasn't a medical condition; it was a social problem, better dealt with by policy and social service agencies.


It didn't take long for Lembke to see that addiction was rampant. In her patients. In society. In herself.


When you apply the 4 C's definition of addiction (Compulsion, Craving, Consequences, and Control), you begin to realize that none of us is immune, or spared.


Whether it's illicit drugs, alcohol, weed, doctor-prescribed pain killers, or pornography, work, or social media - we live in the most addictive age in history.


And unless we understand how addiction happens, and what sustains it, we're all going to be living less engaged and joyful lives.


Dr Lembke is the author of two incredibly important (and really well-written, by the way!) books: Drug Dealer, MD: How Doctors Were Duped, Patients Got Hooked, and Why It’s So Hard to Stop, about the opioid crisis, and Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence, about the modern addiction epidemic that leaves no one unscathed.
In our conversation, Dr Lembke and I go over the mechanism of addiction, and why we're evolutionarily prone to it in our current environment of abundant sources of pleasure.
We cover the role of dopamine, and the body's constant search for homeostasis, and we're "cacti in the rain forest" in the face of smart phones, "druggified" foods, and increasingly potent strains of cannabis.
We also tackle the debate over the nature of addiction, and the arguments about AA as an effective intervention for an actual disease or a cult that asks members to trade one addiction for another.
We also talk about how capitalism must reform itself if we are to thrive as a species.
Enjoy!