A drug that removes desire and craving?

Brian Resnick (@B_resnickbrian@vox.com), Vox.com, March 7, 2024; Dhr. Seven, Amber Larson, Pat Macpherson (eds., Wisdom Quarterly

Is Buddhism (or Jainism because this is Mahavira) about hallucinatory drugs? NO! Wake up.

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WWJD? Smoke ganja between healings? No.

People say all "desire" (tanha) is bad in Buddhism. This is inaccurate. Desiring liberation, enlightenment, nirvana, or to be free of desire are desires. Who would knock those ambitions? Can Buddhism be explained in a single post to explain why desire is not all bad yet has a central role to pay in our liberation? Probably not but here's a try.

Brian Resnick introduces findings of a new scientific study that show why we crave and what can be done about it. Hint, it's has a lot to do with the neurotransmitter dopamine has a lot to do with it, and the class of drugs to which Ozempic belongs may be a cure (or for-profit "treatment") for addiction.

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What's with Buddhism and desire (craving)?

Westerners are taught that the Buddha and, therefore, Buddhism oppose desire -- as if, just by wanting not to want we could get our wish. What's wrong with wanting?

As humans we rarely get what we want, and we often get what we don't want. So wanting can't be the key.

The reason for this teaching is that the Buddha discovered Dependent Origination in answer to his quest to answer the question, Why do we suffer?

He found that like all things, "suffering" (dukkha = disappointment, pain, woe, ill, distress, unsatisfactoriness) arises dependent on conditions and not without them.

Dependent Origination is that answer, 12 causal links: This leads to that; when this is, that comes to be; when that is not, that does not come to be. The suffering of this moment is based on causes and conditions rooted in the past.

As he reviewed each of these factors, the links of this causal chain, he asked a key question: How can this be put to an end so that it (suffering) doesn't arise again?

Its antecedents (things that came before) are rooted in the past, and its results come to fruition fortuitously when they meet with the opportunity in subsequent lives. He saw actions (karma) in past lives bearing fruit at a later time, sometimes much later, and in this present moment.

It is because there was this (karma in the past) that that (present results) came to be, and it is because of ignorance that that kind of action (unskillful karma) was produced. What kind? The kind that produces painful results.

Ignorance is the fundamental basis of attraction (craving and clinging, desire and attachment) and aversion (manifesting as hate or fear).

And these three -- attraction, aversion, and ignorance, lobha, dosa, and moha, popularly translated as "greed, hatred, and delusion" -- are the roots of ALL bad karma.

It's only called "bad," not as a moral judgment but because the Buddha -- and anyone who gains the power of knowing-and-seeing -- could see beings meeting the result of their previous and present actions. Edgar Cayce could see it, too. Any rishi can, and anyone who successfully strives can become a seer of such things, directly, independently, not based on anyone else.

One can see these things in this Doctrine and Discipline (Dhamma-Vinaya) because Buddhism is not a faith, and this is not a belief system but a verifiable practice.

In fact, if one does not practice it, one will not be able to know-and-see, to penetrate the Truth and be set free by it. The whole point of Buddhism is the gaining of enlightenment (bodhi, spiritual awakening) and reaching the safety of nirvana (amata, nirodha, moksha, nibbana -- the deathless state, cessation, liberation, complete freedom from all substrates of rebirth and suffering of every kind).

We are here on this side, beset by darkness (ignorance) and in great danger (of old age, sickness, death, desire/thirst/craving, not getting what we want, and getting what we don't want, losing what we love, and being paired with what we hate), to use a simile, and we can see across the water a further shore.

That shore is free of these things, free of danger. But we are here, on this dangerous side, so how do we get to that side?

A Buddha (a supremely enlightened teacher capable of teaching the path to that enlightenment) comes into being, makes known the Teaching (Dhamma/Dharma), establishes the practice and a community of practitioners (Sangha). These are the Three Jewels.

One hears the Dharma from the Buddha or a member of the Sangha who heard it from the Buddha, applies what is heard (puts it into practice rather than making a theory, faith, or belief of it), and comes to know-and-see for oneself.

This knowledge and vision has to do with the true nature of reality. One can be told it, and it can be grasped conceptually, but it won't do much good. What's worse, it may just lead to a lot of thinking or believing, debating and conceptualizing, rationalizing and endless questioning.

At some point the questions have to stop, and with confidence that this path holds promise and is verifiable, the practice of it has to start. There's no other way.

The wandering ascetic Siddhartha was not sitting under a bodhi tree when a bo fruit (tiny fig) fell, hit him on the head, and he instantly became Newton. How then did it happen?

He tried many things, in this life and in many previous lives. And, as in the past, he practiced the absorptions or levels of samadhi (stillness), which temporarily purified the mind, and he attained bliss then peace, but he realized that this was not it, not the highest, not liberation (moksha), not enlightenment, not nirvana (the ultimate).

So he practiced something more that we call vipassana or "insight meditation" on top of that stillness. He practiced the systematic pondering of the Four Foundations of Mindfulness (body, feelings, mind, and mental phenomena), still asking the question, "Why is there suffering?"

He then realized suffering (and everything else, too) was dependently-originated, that is, it was born of causes and conditions. "What were they?" he asked. And he saw that this present suffering depended on, for example, having been born. Why was he born? The karma of the past? Why was there karma in the past? And so on... CONTINUED ON FOLLOWING POST

Is Ozempic an anti-desire drug? Scientists are realizing GLP-1 drugs have the potential to turn down cravings — for more than just food

We look at what we like, fixate on what will stimulate dopamine and/or serotonins, slaves to pleasure, bug-eyed for sugar, fat, and starch (Tim Lahan/Vox).

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Brian Resnick is Vox’s science and health editor and is the co-creator of Unexplainable, Vox's podcast about unanswered questions in science. Previously, Resnick was a reporter at Vox and at National Journal.

Dr. Marco Leyton, Ph.D., assures me the cocaine he purchased was legal. [Likely story, but the Coca Cola company has the legal right, granted by the US government, to see cocaine from processed coca leaves it imports into the US because coke used to be an actual addictive ingredient of Coca-Cola.]

Plus, it wasn’t for him, definitely not. It was for recreational cocaine users who had answered Dr. Leyton’s ad in a local newspaper to do drugs and collect 500 Canadian dollars — risking their nasal passages for science.

Dr. Leyton had jumped through many hoops to get to this point — getting an okay from the Canadian equivalent of the FDA, exempting him from criminal prosecution, and clearing his own university’s ethics approval.

“I wasn’t asking people to bring in their own [illegal] cocaine,” Dr. Leyton, an addiction neurobiologist at McGill University in Canada, tells me. Now that could be unethical. It was all in pursuit of one of the deepest questions that haunts us as individuals:

“Why do we really care about some things and not too much about others?” as Dr. Leyton says.

Really: Why do we want what we want? With the drugs in hand, Dr. Leyton ran a small study for some insight [and valuable medical knowledge].

It involved just eight participants, but it’s noteworthy because it’s a relatively rare human experiment in a field that more commonly tests rodents (which have found similar results as the human studies).

Plus, it’s just wild. I have never read these words in an academic journal before: Participants “were presented with cocaine paraphernalia consisting of a mirror, a razor, [a credit card,] a straw, and a bag with 3.0 mg/kg of cocaine hydrochloride.”

The study took place over four days. And while the cocaine is the eyebrow-raising component of the study, a special protein shake was the actual key.

On any given day, half the participants were randomly assigned to ingest a shake that was missing a key ingredient called phenylalanine, an important amino acid that helps our body manufacture the neurotransmitter dopamine. That’s the chemical released when our brain is expecting, or sometimes demanding, a reward, like a sweet treat or, as here, cocaine.

So if one is like these study participants, fasting before this experiment, and were then only given a food source without phenylalanine, our body chemistry would subtly change.

Dr. Leyton thought the participants who consumed this weird breakfast would have less dopamine available in their brains. After their shake, the participants were then invited to do blow [sugar, snot rocket, Columbian dandruff, the Devil's ashes].

Or as the study plainly states, the participants “used the razor to divide the powder into three equal lines.”

“TOO MANY PEOPLE HAVE BEEN PUT IN AN UNFAIR BATTLE AGAINST THEIR WANTS. THEY’VE BEEN TOLD TO SOMEHOW EXERT WILLPOWER OVER A SYSTEM THEY HAVE LITTLE CONSCIOUS AWARENESS OF AND CONTROL OVER.”

They snorted it. But remarkably, on the phenylalanine-free shake days, Dr. Leyton says, “they decreased their craving for cocaine.”

They said they were less interested in snorting it. But it was more than that: The special shake “decreased the ability of the cocaine itself to produce more desire for the drug,” he says.

And strangely, “it had no effect on the drug-induced euphoria,” Dr. Leyton claims. In other words, they still liked cocaine. They just didn’t want it as much.

While talking to Dr. Leyton about his cocaine study, I wondered, Why isn’t the phenylalanine-free shake The Answer to addiction, to overeating, to similar problems of compulsive consumption?

Well, for one thing, because it’s impractical. Phenylalanine is in just about all protein food sources. So unless someone wants to solely eat specially lab-generated shakes their whole lives, that’s not going to work. More