The brains of aggressive hostile people light up much more under PET scans when exposed to nicotine.
“We call this brain response a ‘born to smoke’ pattern,” said study leader Dr. Steven Potkin, professor of psychiatry and human behavior. “Based on these dramatic brain responses to nicotine, if you have hostile, aggressive personality traits, in all likelihood, you have a predisposition to cigarette addiction without ever having even touched a cigarette.” Study results appeared in the January issue of Cognitive Brain Research.
Potkin and Dr. James H. Fallon, professor of anatomy and neurobiology, gave study subjects standard psychiatric personality exams and separated them into two groups — those with high-hostility personality traits, which are marked by anger, aggression and anxiety, and those with low-hostility traits. Both groups included smokers and non-smokers. The groups were given nicotine patches of strengths of 3.5 or 21 milligrams, or placebo, and later subjected to PET scans to see if the nicotine triggered any responses in brain metabolism of glucose energy.
While the PET scans showed no metabolic changes in the low-hostility subjects, nicotine induced dramatic metabolic responses in the high-hostility group individuals in the limbic system and the cortical and subcortical sectors of the brain. Among members of the high-hostility group, smokers showed a metabolic reaction only to the more powerful 21 milligram nicotine patch, while non-smokers reacted to both patches.
The fact that non-smokers in the high-hostility group showed a significant metabolic response to nicotine provides the first biological evidence that people with high-hostility personalities are likely to become dependent on cigarettes because of their brains’ strong response to nicotine, said Potkin. “In turn, this might also help explain why other people have no compelling drive to smoke or can quit smoking with relative ease,” he added.
It is conceivable that a drug that can make a person less hostile and less aggressive could make it easier for that person to quit smoking.
Another speculation: the association between drug use and crime may in part be due to the fact that the kinds of personalities most prone to become drug addicts are more aggressive in the first place. What would be interesting to know is whether people with high levels of hostility who never try drugs or cigarettes are more or less likely to become criminals than those who do. The answer may depend in part on which drug a hostile person becomes addicted to. Some addictive drugs might even have net calming effects that make a hostile and aggressive person less hostile.
Another interesting question: Suppose people with criminal records who smoke who were trying to stop smoking were studied. Would criminals who have a hard time quitting cigarettes who finally manage to quit become more or less likely to commit violent crimes than they were when they were still smoking?
One complication of studying links between nicotine and crime is that nicotine causes brain damage.
Nicotine causes degeneration in one part of the brain, according to professor of psychology Gaylord Ellison, who announced the finding in the journal Neuropharmacology, and at this year's meeting of the Society for Neuroscience.
Ellison found that nicotine causes selective degeneration of the fasciculus retroflexus, the part of the higher brain that primarily controls the dopamine and serotonin levels in the body.
Dopamine controls movement, emotional response, and the ability to experience pleasure and pain, while serotonin regulates a person's mood.
Suppose a person has a brain that is aggressive and hostile and that person becomes a nicotine addict and basically racks up a bunch of brain damage. Then suppose that person manages to quit smoking. Is that person then even more hostile as a result of the brain damage? Or does the type of damage done have the effect of reducing violent behavior? A similar question can be asked about other addictive drugs because lots of addictive drugs cause brain damage.
There is increasing evidence that the fasciculus retroflexus (FR) represents a 'weak link' following the continuous administration of drugs of abuse. A variety of drugs which predominantly potentiate dopamine, including D-amphetamine, methamphetamine, MDMA, cocaine, and cathinone, all induce degeneration in axons from lateral habenula, through the sheath of FR, to midbrain cells such as SN, VTA, and raphe. For some drugs, such as cocaine, this is virtually the only degeneration induced in brain. Continuous nicotine also selectively induces degeneration in FR, but in the other half of the tract, i.e. in axons from medial habenula through the core of the tract to interpeduncular nucleus. This phylogenetically primitive tract carries much of the negative feedback from forebrain back onto midbrain reward cells, and the finding that these descending control pathways are compromised following simulated drug binges has implications for theories of drug addiction but also psychosis in general.
I am a skeptic on the issue of addictive drug legalization because if the barrier to access to addictive brain-damaging substances is lowered then more people will become addicts and damage their brains. What will be the net result? The legalization advocates can't answer that question. It may depend on the drug. Some drugs might damage circuits that cause hostility. Other drugs might damage circuits that suppress hostility. Also, hostility is not the only factor in play here. Impulsiveness, happiness, anxiety, and other aspects of personality may be enhanced or decreased by the sorts of selective brain damage various addictive drugs cause.
By Randall Parker at 2004 February 14 02:04 PM Brain Addiction | TrackBackOn drug use and crime - I'm not buying that personality indicator thing. You can go back and look at the drug use / criminal correlation in times when drugs were legal, and I'll bet that, lo and behold, there wasn't one. Make drugs illegal, and only criminals use drugs. (Ditto for alcohol, or anything else...)
Reason
Founder, Longevity Meme
Betting on one's assumptions is one thing. Digging up the actual data like Randall does is quite another.
Reason,
You can not go back and look at data from that period to tease out the relationships because no one was collecting data at the level required to do the analysis. There were no reliable tests of personality type, no PET scans, and simply put, not much in the way of systematic social social with large quantities of collected data. We need to collect the data now.
As for "that personality indicator thing". What are you not buying into? That there are personality types that are predisposed to be criminals? Or that there are personality types that are predisposed to be drug addicts? Or that drug addiction damages the brain? Or that brain damage must cause alterations in behavior?
I'm not buying that there is a correlation between criminal behavior and drug use based on differences in the brain when a) "criminal" has been defined to mean "drug user," and b) there are enormous social and economic incentives for people who are already predisposed towards breaking the law to become involved in the drug industry.
I think you have to far more carefully define what you mean by "criminal" here.
Reason
Founder, Longevity Meme
Reason,
Why don't you expect brain damage to alter behavior?
Reason,
Or is it that you don't think that drug addicts commit non-drug crimes at a different rate than non-addicts?
This part of the main post is what I'm commenting on:
"Another speculation: the association between drug use and crime may in part be due to the fact that the kinds of personalities most prone to become drug addicts are more aggressive in the first place. What would be interesting to know is whether people with high levels of hostility who never try drugs or cigarettes are more or less likely to become criminals than those who do. The answer may depend in part on which drug a hostile person becomes addicted to. Some addictive drugs might even have net calming effects that make a hostile and aggressive person less hostile."
I'm attempting to say, in my rather scattered, drive-by way, that the semantics of "criminal" and current definition of "criminal" as "drug user," coupled with the inventives for those biased towards breaking the law in the first place to become involved in drugs, make this sort of speculation rather futile. I read the above and see an implicit "drug users are criminals because they are inherently aggressive" - which completely ignores the fact that present day laws classify all drug users as as criminals, and prohibition serves as an enormous economic incentive to push people predisposed to breaking the law into the drug industry. In other words, existing selection effects are a far more likely answer. Or were rampaging gangs of aggressive opium using housewives common back when that substance was legal? How about replacing "drugs" with "alcohol" in the context of the prohibition era US?
Reason
Founder, Longevity Meme
Reason,
I'm confused. Are you suggesting alcohol is not a drug? Or that alcohol abusers are no more criminal than the general population? Or that nicotine use defines criminality? Or that opiate addicts in the 1800's were more law abiding than opiate addicts today?
The housewife drug abusers I have known seemed to have rather hostile personalities; although, I admit my method is rather subjective and informal.
One can find examples of high functioning drug addicts from times past. One can find those today if one looks for them. However, the regular drug abusers I have known have exhibited criminality that was totally unrelated to the abuse. I cannot think of a single current or former drug abuser I have known who had great respect for the law. Whether they exhibit their disrespect by driving under suspension, by poaching game out of season or by theft, they have universally acted with disregard for laws.
Reason, PET scans and DNA tests are beginning to provide clues as to who is more likely to be violent and more likely to be criminal. So I do not see why why selection effects can't be controlled for with a rigorous enough methodology that controls for enough factors to tease out separate causes. You seem to be arguing that some things are not knowable because there are too many factors influencing behavior. Well, to quote Zelazny from Lord Of Light (I think it was either Yhamma-Dharma the Death God or Soul-Eyed Sam):
The four points of the compass be logic, knowledge, wisdom and the unknown. Some do bow in that final direction. Others advance upon it. To bow before the one is to lose sight of the three. I may submit to the unknown, but never to the unknowable. The man who bows in that final direction is either a saint or a fool. I have no use for either.
As for the semantics of "criminal": There are plenty of activities that are widely agreed upon to be criminal. If we leave out drug dealing or drug using we can still study the behavior of drug addicts and compare them to non-addicts to look for differences in behavior. If we do longitudinal studies of people starting at an age before they start using drugs we can compare the behavior of people who are similar in terms of measurable tendency toward impulsivity, hostility, and other factors and see if the ones who use various drugs become more or less likely to be violent or criminal in various other ways as compared to those who do not use drugs.
You seem to be resistant to the idea that drugs that cause brain damage (many many illegally used drugs do cause brain damage) and drugs that cause lasting changes in neural wiring patterns such as changes in numbers of connections and numbers of receptors (again, many illegally used drugs do this) would cause changes in behavior including changes in the rate of criminal behavior. Or you are rsistant to the idea that drug-caused changes in behavior could be proven by science. It is not clear to me exactly what you resist in my argument other than the fact that I point out that drug legalization would likely increase the amount of brain damage and, hence, the amount of behavioral change caused by brain changing drug use.
To amplify a comment you made earlier, Randall, the behavioral change might increase or decrease criminality depending on the drug in question and on the specific changes to the brain.
From family accounts, my father has been incorrigible since the age of four--long before he ever consumed any drug. (My grandmother is a teetotaler--an enabler but a teetotaling enabler--so he was not exposed to any drugs in the womb.) Who can say whether he would have been more or less criminal had he never consumed any drug?
That he is criminal is a fact. I have known him to break innumerable laws and rules. He revels in it. He has been caught and convicted for some of them, but I know of at least a 100 infractions for every conviction.
That he is an addict is a fact. He has abused alcohol since before I was born and has abused prescription drugs (librium) since I was a small child.
His doctor--I am sure--would argue the prescription drugs have saved his life and reduced his criminality, and his doctor might even be right. The manufacturer of the drug notes that it is a highly addictive narcotic that should never be used for longer than about three weeks, and my father has now taken it continuously for longer than three decades. He also disregards the instructions for use sometimes skipping doses so he can take multiple doses at the same time for a better high etc.
However, I suspect the librium has reduced his predeliction to violence if not to criminality and quite possibly his criminality as well.
I'm not arguing that drugs cause or don't cause brain chemistry changes, nor am I arguing that we can't tease out effects. I'm arguing that it seems really strange to immediately jump on brain chemistry as a meaningful root cause of criminal behavior for drug users given the economic/legal elephant of prohibition in the room.
In my experience of drug users, sadly extensive given my subcultures of choice when younger, law breaking is largely a consequence of prohibition. If your drug of choice is cheap and legal, you have no economic (in the broadest human action sense) incentive to perform criminal actions. When your drug of choice is expensive and illegal...
In the UK, where I grew up, everyone drowned themselves in alcohol while in college. It's normal. Everyone does it. In prohibition america, this would have all the same associated economic inventives to be criminal, associate with criminals and take criminal actions that regular use of cocaine now has.
Reason
Founder, Longevity Meme
But what about the correlation between nicotine addiction and criminal behaviour? That can hardly be blamed on prohibition. Likewise the correlation between the mental changes induced by alcohol and criminal behaviour (even when alcohol is totally legal) are too well known to bother disputing.
On the other hand, a study by Queensland Rail revealed that marijuana use by Railroad employees in isolated outback locations resulted in REDUCED criminal behaviour (except for the illegal nature of the drug itself). Their reasoning was that when they couldn't get dope, they would proceed to drink, and that lead to violent and distructive behaviour. Whereas after a few tokes the guys would just sit back and relax.
Thought you might want to know that Alcatraz inmates (the most violent criminals in the country) were given higher allotments of cigarettes than any other prison.
Perhaps they knew something even without any scientific evidence.
I am sure if you each tested your ideas you might each verify your positions.
I always like to observe again that the world's explorers are not known for teetotalism but guts and assertiveness (e.g. sailors and soldiers)whereas those who come afterwards write the rules. If drugs destroy brain and drug users are "bad to the core" and the objects of "serve them right" tautologous legislation then gentle honest researchers are the guiding light. Has anyone researched the smoking habits of the corrupt persons who actively promote drug use?
We are not ready yet with a final solution paradigm to settle the score and thus are not ready to arrive at a correct method of befriending those we are currently alienating