Fear is a part of the human condition. To be more precise, it’s part of the mammalian condition. It is most likely, a basal emotion – the emotion that all other emotions grew out of.

People seem to suffer terribly from two basal emotions: anger and fear. I learnt this from working with addicted people and being one myself. But everyone suffers from them, not just addicts.

I learnt to love what I do and do what I love. In doing so I threw material concerns to the wind – and became successful anyway.

Does Carl Jung’s philosophy hold any value for us today? I would say yes. For me, the most pertinent part of his philosophy today, is his theory of archetypes.

When I first heard about Dr. Peterson’s benzo dependency, one thing rankled me. He seemed to be very insistent that this was not a case of ‘psychological addiction’, but only a case of ‘physical addiction’.

In 1988, two Italian researchers called Gaetano Di Chiara and Assunta Imperato showed that regardless of the class of drug, all drugs of abuse released dopamine at the Nucleus Accumbens, an ancient part of the forebrain.

Incentive salience hinges upon the idea that incentives (such as drugs) motivate addicted people because they are perceived to be of the utmost importance to them.

In 1851, a politicized young Russian was driven into exile in a freezing Siberian prison. He was not yet a great writer, but his experiences there would make him one. His name of course, was Fyodor Dostoevsky.

I spent more than a decade of my life street-level snouting for nuggets of crack – what now seems like a lifetime peering vainly into the bottom of empty plastic deal bags and scraping out the spaces between floor boards.

Harm reduction is the drug policy favoured by the UK government and most European governments. You can add Canada, Australia and New Zealand to that list too.