image: Max Pixel
#1 THE ECOLOGY OF THE BRAIN
Drug overdoses are the leading cause of death for Americans under 50 and are killing people faster than cars and guns combined. WFUV's Strike A Chord series looks at the addictions underpinning those deaths. In the first part of this series: How the brain came to addiction.
"...You're a caveman and and you're about to hunt bison or something (and the bison could kill you) because you have very primitive weapons and you're scared, but you can also happen to have had bison meat before... Now, you're more likely to go take a risk than other people to go hunt."
#2 DRUG, SET, SETTING
America is experiencing a huge spike in the number of drug overdose deaths. Over 64,000 in 2016. WFUV's Strike A Chord series is looking at the addictions that underpin these deaths. In the second of five mini-features: What is addiction anyway?
"Dr. Samuel Kelton Roberts says, "We'd like to know if there’s one thing or at least a constellation of a small number of things which predictably will cause said health condition. That as far as I understand is not the case with this thing called addiction."
image: Max Pixel
image: Max Pixel
#3 WELL... HOW DID WE GET HERE?
As more and more people die from drug overdoses every year, the only thing that they all have in common is a substance that eventually overwhelms the body. WFUV'S Strike A Chord series is looking at the addictions that underpin these deaths. Part three: Americans Love Pills. So much so that we spent over 373 billion dollars filling more than 4.3 billion prescriptions in 2014.
"America has shown itself to have an insatiable appetite for psychoactive drugs. It's our history, right? But not just opioids, you know it's really important that we don't lose sight of this being about drugs, not opioids and opioids are driving the conversation. The data, the deaths."
#4 CRISIS AND STIGMA: HARM REDUCTION
175 people a day die of drug overdose in America. More than gun deaths and car accidents combined. WFUV's Strike A Chord series looking at the addictions that underpin these deaths. In Part Four, Harm Reduction and Stigma.
"I think harm reduction is a way to engage people that are not in treatment and, if you think about it in the sense that any given moment in time, probably somewhere between 5 and 15 percent of all active drug users, are actually engaged in an abstinence based treatment program That means minimally, 85 percent of drug users are not."
image: Max Pixel
image: Max Pixel
#5 THE FUTURE OF TREATMENT
From the first record of a brewery on Egyptian papyrus in 3500 BC to the earliest historical evidence of opium use in Switzerland in 2500 BC, humans have been getting high. And overdoing it. Sometimes it seems like science and civilization hasn’t found an answer to the problem of addiction. But there are new, promising interventions that might help push back against the waves of addictions and overdoses. WFUV's Strike A Chord series this week is exploring addiction.
"Dr Michael Kaplitt is one of those guys that if you start listing his jobs, posts, publications, honors and titles, we would run out of space. Suffice it to say, he’s a brain surgeon. "