Kan sipped a fizzy brown potion, disregarding his partner’s scowl. “It makes me stronger.” Riq shouldered his pack without magical help. “Too much of that and we’ll lose you to the Swordwulfen.” Kan shrugged. “Too much rabbit meat can kill me. Doesn’t mean I’d rather starve.” ## ANALYSIS I've been thinking a lot about moderation and addiction lately. I don't have a particularly addictive personality. The handful of times I've taken prescription painkillers or muscle relaxers or been exposed to THC, I was underwhelmed. I don't even drink coffee. While I was growing up, I spent enough time visiting family friends at the local bar for lunch, or hanging out at parties where I wasn't allowed to drink, but the adults were, that I got used to being sober in places set aside for drinking. I can typically count the number of times a year I drink on my fingers. Yet I'm not unfamiliar with addiction: the two men I lived with before I met my husband were an alcoholic and an opiate addict respectively. Still, I didn't spend much time thinking about it because as straightforward as "moderation" and "addiction" are as concepts, they are remarkably complicated in practice and I don't trust myself to ever really understand the underlying mechanisms behind addiction or to find honest data. Still, every now and then I come across information that really makes me think, and last week's newsletter about whether cheese can be addictive was one of those moments. To recap for those who didn't see it, there's a [2015 theory that says foods (like cheese) can be addictive](https://www.mountsinai.org/about/newsroom/2015/study-reveals-that-cheese-triggers-the-same-part-of-the-brain-as-many-drugs) in the same way that alcohol, opiates, and nicotine are. The idea is that policymakers might need to use the same methods we use to treat drug addiction to help with "the obesity epidemic" — which would make more sense if more politicians were in the habit of creating effective policies for lowering addiction rates, but I digress. The flip side of the cheese-addiction newsletter was my piece on [scurvy](https://eleanorkonik.com/scurvy/) %% ( [[2021-06-08 Scurvy]] ) %% back in June. For those who didn't see it or don't remember, the relevant section is about dangerously [lean proteins](https://www.healthline.com/health/protein-poisoning): > Humans can't handle much more than 40% of their diet being protein; more can lead to a syndrome called "rabbit starvation" or "mal de caribou" because those types of meat have too little fat; if you eat a diet of only rabbit meat, for example, you could die even if you eat the organ meat. Some people I've talked to about this think that by "protein" I mean "meat" but, to clarify — you can totally survive on a diet entirely composed of "animal carcass products," because most of the time, animal carcasses have fat and vitamins and minerals in them. As a total aside, the research I did for the _Scurvy_ newsletter has led me to buy a lot more organ meat; while writing _this_ newsletter I actually ate leftover cottage pie made with "ancestral blend" beef mixed with wild boar. Anyway, what's relevant is that even things we need to survive need to be consumed in moderation. Back when I was in college, there was a movement toward making fraternity events safer, so that instead of having a bunch of college freshmen chugging huge amounts of beer and dying, they would just be asked to drink a bunch of water. But [people still died](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/strange-but-true-drinking-too-much-water-can-kill/). Scott Alexander, a psychiatrist who blogs pseudonymously in the rationalist community (which I generally lurk in, also pseudonymously), wrote a really interesting piece called [drug users use a lot of drugs](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/drug-users-use-a-lot-of-drugs) that I haven't been able to get out of my head, even though I don't actually have any desire to do drugs (even the legal ones). The tl;dr is that a bunch of scaremongering about prescription drugs actually comes from data on recreational abusers, who — as he intimates in the title — use _way_ more drugs than prescription doses. Apparently "severe recreational users" of ketamine (which I didn't actually realize _was_ a recreational drug) take about 60,000 mg a month, versus a psychiatric dose of... 280 mg a month. "Mild abusers" of ketamine apparently take about 3,500 mg a month and don't generally experience cognitive problems. The numbers he gives for Adderall/meth (which aren't _literally_ the same thing but... kind of work the same) are pretty similar: the a severe crystal meth addict apparently takes a dosage equivalent to 1000 mg per day, while people taking Adderall generally take about 20 mg per day. What's fascinating is that apparently [melatonin is more effective at](https://lorienpsych.com/2020/12/20/melatonin/) _[smaller](https://lorienpsych.com/2020/12/20/melatonin/)_ [doses than the standard pharmaceutical amount](https://lorienpsych.com/2020/12/20/melatonin/). As someone who doesn't have ADHD, rarely has trouble sleeping, and who probably wouldn't take ketamine even if all it did was make me 10% happier with no noticeable side effects (seriously I'm terrible about remembering to take medicine, I barely manage to eat on a sane schedule), I nonetheless found the whole discussion fascinating. Not only are there a lot of overlaps with stuff relevant to pregnant women (lemongrass and ham are probably fine?), but it's an interesting phenomenon from a worldbuilding perspective. There's this game I play, called [Rimworld](https://rimworldgame.com/) (super fun if you like colony simulators!), that has a drug addiction mechanic. Psychoid leaves can be farmed and brewed into tea, or refined into drugs called "flake" and "yayo" respectively. Psychite tea reduces pain and tiredness while also counting as recreation. Colonists can drink it every 2 days without becoming addicted, unlikely flake and yayo, both of which come with a chance of addiction upon first use. Flake is cheaper to make than yayo, and significantly more impactful, but it is also five times as addictive, and thus more dangerous, because the withdraw symptoms suck. Most players have their colonists drink psychite tea every two days like clockwork, break out yayo in emergency situations, and sell off flake. From what I understand, psychoid is based off of cocaine. Apparently, coca tea is popular in South America. Peruvian coco tea is described as smoother and more pleasant than caffeine, but having a similar effect (which means I'll probably never try it for fear of landing winding up in the hospital with heart palpitations, _again_). People drink it in doses of roughly 4mg. Cocaine users, by contrast, might take roughly 900mg a day. Coco tea is probably fine. 900mg a day of cocaine is ... probably pretty bad for you. Where's the line? I don't know and don't intend to find out. But Kan probably grew up in a zero tolerance household and learned "even one dose can kill you" early on. Riq would probably just shrug and say, "salmonella can kill you too."