Please explain Heroin's allure to me.

[marions ghost]

42. Some theories on creativity and addiction:

Addiction as avoidance

In his richly stimulating article on the philosophy of addiction Unhooked Thinking, William Pryor notes, “I was once a heroin addict. I am now a writer, film producer and entrepreneur, fascinated by the very nature of addiction.”

He thinks the “endemic something in the human condition that leads so many to become addicts.. has been called weltschmertz, world-weariness, melancholy and in India, bireh or longing. It is the pain of being human, no more, no less, the pain of having the chaotic self-awareness of human consciousness chained by its attachments to the mundane.”

William Pryor is Director of Unhooked Thinking, and author of the book Survival of the Coolest: A Darwin’s Death Defying Journey into the Interior of Addiction.

Addiction psychologist Marc F. Kern, Ph.D., notes that altering one’s state of consciousness is normal and that a destructive habit or addiction is “mostly an unconscious strategy – which you started to develop at a naive, much earlier stage of life – to enjoy the feelings it brought on or to help cope with uncomfortable emotions or feelings. It is simply an adaptation that has gone awry.”

- See more at: http://developingmultipletalents.com/211/addiction-and-creative-people/#sthash.xYR1l7wG.dpuf
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Is there a link between creativity and addiction?
No. I think the link is not between creativity and addiction per se. There is a link between addiction and things which are a prerequisite for creativity…. We know that 40 percent of a predisposition to addiction is genetically determined, via studies on heritability in families and twins. There's no single addiction gene. We don't even know all the genes involved in conferring addiction risk. But the ones we do know have to do with the signaling of the neurotransmitter dopamine for pleasure and reward.

You don't become addicted because you feel pleasure strongly. On the contrary, addicts seem to want it more but like it less. They feel pleasures more weakly and are more likely to try more to achieve more. This blunted dopamine hypothesis is supported by brain-imaging studies and biochemistry tests in rats and monkeys. It also holds for addictions to food, sex and gambling.

Genetic variants make for a low-functioning dopamine system, specifically D2 receptors. If you carry those variants, you are more likely to be more risk-taking, novelty-seeking and compulsive. None of which are explicitly creative, but they are things that get to creativity. So novelty-seeking might be a spur to creativity. Risk-taking might lead you to go more out on a limb. If you're compulsive, you might be more motivated to get your art, science idea or novel out into the world. These traits that come from having low dopamine function have an upside. These traits can contribute to people having great success in the world, like business leaders.

Genetics is 40 percent, it's not 100 percent—it's not the whole show. It's possible to carry the variants and not be an addict, and it's possible to not carry the variants and still be an addict.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-there-a-link-between-creativity-and-addiction/