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I’m going off topic a bit because of the Occupy Wall St (OWS) movement. They say they are 99% of the people who are overly affected by the 1% that hold most of the wealth, and have spawned a counter group referring to themselves as the 53%, the 53% of Americans that pay taxes. The second group seems to think that the first group is asking for handouts and suggests that if they want to occupy something, they should occupy a job. I think they are missing the point.

From what I’ve read, the OWS doesn’t seem to want handouts, but rather is arguing for change in a system that leads to such concentration of wealth. They don’t seem to be complaining about the wealth disparity as much as they are the power concentration that comes from the wealth. I think they would be happy to be in a level playing field with rich people, but are arguing about the playing field not being level. And while I think they may be right and are sort of aiming in the right direction, they haven’t identified the real underlying cause.

It’s not so much the greed of the banks or the greed of Wall St that has caused the problems, but rather it’s the fact that banks control the money supply. It may seem odd to talk about banks not controlling the money supply, but in the history of the country, except for brief periods, the money supply was controlled by the people until 1913 with the creation of the Federal Reserve Bank.

The Federal Reserve Bank seems to be able to create money out of nothing by loaning it to the government. The government then deposits this money in other banks which get the first use of it. These banks, that have a requirement set by the Federal Reserve to keep a certain amount of money in reserve against bad loans, can loan out about 10 times what they have in deposits. This increases the money supply several fold and inflates the economy. In times of inflation people make bad economic choices based on false assumptions. When these bad choices are concentrated by whims of culture they go to extremes and are referred to later as bubbles (tulip, south sea, and more lately, housing). But the source of the bubble is always the creation of more money than would have been created through normal economic means.

Most people don’t see inflation because it happens so slowly, but the bankers have a front row seat. I think that if all of us knew what they knew, we’d probably want big bonuses too. Because they see that the ultimate end of this is that the money they get is worthless, so their normal human reaction is to get as much as possible, as fast as possible, and buy with it things that will retain their value. And the rest of us have been okay with that as long as we’ve been able to get by. But the whole process of inflation has had dire consequences for our thinking and our culture.

While most of us don’t consciously notice it, I think we do at core. While we don’t have the resources to buy a house in the Hamptons, we do have the ability to choose a X-box rather than saving the money. And when the money is losing its value due to inflation, we, like the bankers, will buy things that will seem to hold their value. Inflation makes us all overvalue immediate reward; it has changed our culture.

So rather than the 53% looking at the OWS and saying, “Get a job,” I think we in the 53% need to look at ourselves and ask why we are willing to live with a system that gives the economic power of money creation to banks and bankers. If we got rid of fractional reserve banking and had a truly distributed system such as a free mint gold standard the power would rest with the people, all the people. We’d have a reason to save, and we’d invest our savings carefully. Our economy would grow as it did between 1870 and 1913, some of the greatest growth we’ve ever had.

If you know me, you know that I don’t believe that addiction is any more common now than it was in 1789 when the constitution was written. But if it is, the best possible reason is not a new drug or anything else that most people associate with addiction. If there is more addiction now then when the founders wrote the constitution it is more likely the normal effect on the midbrain reward system of a depreciating money supply. Not surprising that we wouldn’t notice it because everyone alive now has grown up since 1913 (the founding of the Federal Reserve Bank) and most since 1932 (when circulation of gold coin stopped) and even most since 1971 (when the dollar was completely removed from a gold standard). We don’t think of money and wealth in the same way as most of the world has for most of human history. It’s pretty to think that we’re right and they’re wrong, but not very likely.

© Howard C Wetsman MD FASAM

I recently finished reading “Transcriptional and Epigenetic Mechanisms of Addiction” by Alfred J Robison and Eric J Nestler published in Nature Reviews: Neuroscience (vol12,Nov2011,pp623-637). Most of the issue is related to addiction and this is one of four featured papers on the subject. The article outlines the research done on the expression and repression of existing genetics in an individual animal because of chronic drug use. There’s the first problem. The article has a lot to do with the consequences of drug use, but little to do with addiction.

The primary assumption of the article, and of most of the work done in the field today, relates to the chronicity of addiction. As the authors say, “This persistence suggests that drugs induce long-lasting changes in the brain that underlie addiction behaviors.” It never seems to occur to them that perhaps the human illness of addiction is chronic because it isn’t caused by drugs and, in fact, is there before the drugs. If that is the case, we’d never expect it to go away just because the drugs do.

One of the reasons that this does not occur to them is that none of the work is done in humans. The work is done on animal models of addiction rather than humans with the actual illness. Now to be fair, this is as good as it gets. We could never do this work on people. But the fact that the work is done on a model of the illness in other species should suggest to most people that caution is advised when suggesting the focus of treatments and public policy.

Another, related assumption of the article and the field refers to the epigenetic changes seen after prolonged drug use. Again, the authors, “…such adaptations are one of the main processes by which drugs induce highly stable changes in the brain that mediate the addicted phenotype.” There is a subtle difference in this assumption and one that goes to the heart of how we define addiction in our society. The authors refer to addiction as a state that one can be in. Given that the world defines addiction as DSM substance dependence, such a rationale is reasonable. The state of active addiction can stop, when the person stops. However, the illness, without treatment, can and does continue with symptoms which put the person at a great risk of relapse into active use.

What amazes me, beyond the brilliant science contained in the paper and the work behind it, is the lengths that people in the field go to in order to protect the assumptions. Another quote, “Nevertheless, drug relapse can occur after decades of abstinence, a timescale dwarfing even phosphorylated dFOSB’s prolonged turnover rate. It is possible that dFOSB remains stably linked to individual gene promoters for long periods of time or induces long lasting changes to the chromatin structure of individual genes to influence relapse behavior long after total cellular levels of the protein have returned to baseline. These possibilities remain to be investigated in future experiments.” So what they are saying is that there is this “long standing” change brought about by chronic drug use that they think is the reason the illness is chronic. However, the illness is so chronic that it dwarfs the amount of time for which the change is stable. Rather than say, “Well, that can’t be why it’s chronic then,” they say, perhaps it’s even more stable than we think though there’s no evidence for it now. Perhaps future studies will show it. And how much money are we going to spend on the future studies when Occam’s razor suggests we ought to be looking elsewhere.

To be fair, there is no doubt that drugs effect how our genes are expressed. The work behind the paper is brilliant and, I think, will have a lot to offer the human condition. But the work really speaks to the fact that the environment changes gene expression, and drugs are just one example that environment. Limiting the data to drugs does tell us what happens to normal mammal midbrains if they chronically take drugs. The problem is that most other research shows that, left to their own devices, normal mammals won’t take drugs chronically. So rather than look at the changes that come from chronic drug exposure, we should be looking at what changes are necessary to get mammals willing to take drugs in the first place. Then we’ll begin to understand human addiction.

There are three other reviews in this issue of Nature Reviews: Neuroscience. I’ll start working on the next one.

© Howard C Wetsman MD FASAM