Hi, I'm Severin de Wit, host of the TrustTalk podcast, where we dive deep into the fascinating world of trust. With a genuine passion for understanding the foundations and nuances of trust, I am dedicated to uncovering its secrets and sharing compelling stories that illuminate its profound impact. Join me on this captivating journey as we explore the transformative power of trust. Subscribe now and become part of the TrustTalk community
Hi, I'm Severin de Wit, host of the TrustTalk podcast, where we dive deep into the fascinating world of trust. With a genuine passion for understanding the foundations and nuances of trust, I am dedicated to uncovering its secrets and sharing compelling stories that illuminate its profound impact. Join me on this captivating journey as we explore the transformative power of trust. Subscribe now and become part of the TrustTalk community
That is the core view of Carl Hart, Professor of Behavioral Neuroscience at Columbia University, New York. In this 37the 37th episode of TrustTalk, he talks about the “responsible drug user” and describes the negative societal effects of vilifying drug use.
Drug Use and Criminalization
Answering the question of whether drugs use leads to criminalization, he replies:
that is the wrong way of looking at it. But let’s just say people are concerned about, I don’t know, people who sell drugs illegally. They worry that those people may engage in some abhorrent behaviours, like killing people. We have laws against that sort of thing, number one and number two, that’s a pure function of having drugs be illegal. If drugs were legally regulated, then you wouldn’t have those kinds of issues where someone who sold drugs or what have you is fighting for territory or they’re on trial for doing so illegally and now they kill someone. So that’s a function of how we are banning these substances and not regulating them.
About the advantages of legal regulation of drugs:
I think that legal regulation certainly would take care of a lot of problems. It would certainly take care of having drug adulterants be introduced into the model, into the market where people die from contaminated drugs. It would also deal with the issue of the legality of the sales and what regulates people who actually sell the drugs. So yeah, I don’t think of, I don’t think it would be a panacea for problems that are in a society. And so that’s one of the things we have to be careful about, because if you regulate drugs, then you also now you have a different set of problems, and those problems, of course, are common to all human endeavour. And so I don’t want people to think that all of a sudden all your problems go away. That’s not how the world works when humans are involved.
Can we trust drugs not to lead to addiction?
Drugs certainly can be addictive, that’s absolutely true. Just like sexual behaviour, just like some types of food. I mean, there are a number of things that activities in which humans engage can be addictive, but it’s important for people to understand that drug addiction itself has very little to do with drugs. You quoted the stat earlier, where we have 70 to 90 percent of the people who use drugs, they aren’t addicted. When you have the vast majority of drug users of any drug not becoming addicted, then that tells you have to look beyond the drug to figure out where the addiction problem is because it doesn’t lie in the drug only, or the drug itself. It’s it has to do with a number of psychosocial barriers, variables and a whole range of other issues, and we tend to stop at the drug.
For the full interview visit the TrustTalk podcast or on any major podcast platform or go to the “podcasts” in the menu above, or listen here:
Our drug policies have resulted in the wildly disproportionate imprisonment of Black Americans. As Hart argues, the drug war has in fact succeeded, not because it has reduced illegal drug use in the United States (it hasn’t), but because it has boosted prison and policing budgets, its true, if unstated, purpose. In his last book, “High Price,” Hart described his evolving views on drugs and those who use them, a gradual rejection of the overly simplistic idea that drugs are inherently evil, the destroyers of people and neighborhoods.
and, about his research findings (again, New York Times’ review by Casey Schwartz)
“I discovered that the predominant effects produced by the drugs discussed in this book are positive. It didn’t matter whether the drug in question was cannabis, cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine or psilocybin.” The positive effects Hart cites include greater empathy, altruism, gratitude and sense of purpose. For Hart personally, coming home and smoking heroin at the end of the day helps him to “suspend the perpetual preparation for battle that goes on in my head,” he writes.
In this 33rd episode of the TrustTalk podcast, we interview Professor Paul Zak. He developed the Immersion Neuroscience Platform, a wearable, and software that uses heart rate to measure oxytocin, the hormone released as people experience feelings of emotional resonance. He found that building a culture of trust is what makes a meaningful difference. Employees in high-trust organizations are more productive, have more energy at work, collaborate better with their colleagues, and stay with their employers longer than people working at low-trust companies. They also suffer less chronic stress and are happier with their lives, and these factors fuel stronger performance.
Oxytocin and his neuroscience research into trust
“So the idea was that there must be some signal, not perfect because evolution doesn’t give us perfection, but something that’s good enough that says this person saved this person not or this person appears to be trustworthy. I can interact with him or her, and if someone is not. And so there was a rich animal literature starting in the late 1970s, showing that a particular neurochemical called oxytocin signals to group living rodents that another rodent appeared to be familiar or safe. And I thought, gosh, that seems like the signal I’ve been looking for to understand how individuals and organizations benefit from having high levels of trust. And so the difficulty there was that in animals, you drill into this skull to sample the chemicals in the brain. I don’t know a lot about humans, but I’m guessing the humans weren’t going to be super excited about me drilling into their heads. So essentially, I’m a tool guy, so I developed a tool or a protocol to measure the human brain, acute production of oxytocin. And then we designed experiments that we thought would induce the brain to make this neurochemical.”
The tool to measure oxytocin, leads to the question: how far can it be pushed? How much stimulus do you need for your brain to make oxytocin? So when you hug someone that will generally cause your brain to release oxytocin or do something nice for you. During the research, Paul and his team started looking at videos and they wonder if you just watch a short ad or video, could oxytocin actually be used to predict what people would do? And the short answer is no, that there’s a host of other neurochemicals and a larger network in the brain that activates, so that allows us to predict when people have a social stimulus, could be a movie, could be a personal interaction, could be a message on Twitter. How will people respond? Can we predict that? In research by Paul and his team, they found this neurologic state he calls immersion, which is a state in which I’m attentive to what’s going on, and oxytocin gives me this emotional connection to it.
About the power of Storytelling
So storytelling is somehow part of our deep human nature, and it is the most effective way to communicate information. And so it’s like the scales fall from your eyes. When you run these experiments, you go, oh holy moly, this is a really effective way. It’s much better than PowerPoint slides or words. Put it on a human scale story with authentic emotions, and then people will care. And I think Severin, that’s about us as social creatures. We are fascinated by other humans. And because of that, if you tell me a story about what humans are doing, fiction or nonfiction, I’m interested. If you can convey that in a way that is interesting to my brain and story structure is about the most effective way to do that.
See also Paul Zak’s article ” The Neuroscience of Trust, Management behaviors that foster employee engagement” in Harvard Business Review (Feb. 2017)
Below is the transcript of the full interview. In the interview, you can read the sentence: “
We looked at a whole bunch of different kinds of content, and we found is that the sort of classical story structure and narrative arc for the well-versed listeners? It’s called the Freitag’s triangle rising action crisis resolution that is almost the most effective way. Almost, I’ll take the almost out. It is the most effective way to induce the brain to actually care about a piece of content. So story structure, storytelling, is somehow part of our deep human nature, and it is the most effective way to communicate information.
For those not familiar with Freytag’s Pyramid: this is how that looks like:
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