A Controversial New Drug Seems To Stop Addiction Cold The rats in Stanley Glick's lab are junkies. They spend their days and nights lounging around in steel cages, twiddling their claws, waiting for the next hit. Each rat has a small plastic tube protruding from the base of its skull. Once a day, for an hour, each tube is connected to an infusion pump that controls a syringe containing a common addictive substance: morphine, cocaine, nicotine, or methamphetamine. The rats are trained to pull levers for water, but for one hour each day they can use the same system to mainline as much of the drugs as they want. And they want. "Just about any drug that humans abuse, animals will self-administer," Glick says. [continues 1312 words]
When Erdos's mother died, he became quite depressed, and his doctor prescribed amphetamines to improve his mood. Erdos took these for years, even though his friends advised him to quit. Finally a fellow mathematician bet Erdos that he couldn't stop taking the drug, so Erdos stopped, cold turkey, for about a month. When he collected the bet, he said that his output had been drastically reduced during that month and that that time was "lost to mathematics." He then resumed taking speed and his prodigious output returned. [continues 198 words]
