Thoughts on the role of education in addiction prevention and harm reduction

21 November 2025

I wrote countless pages in my journal about this topic. It kept overtaking my daily entries. Whenever something even remotely connected to addiction, understanding, or behavior came up, I was in a trance. After successful detox and finishing therapy, I think every person starts noticing huge flaws in how we teach (or rather, don’t teach) addiction. There are many schools of thought on how to discuss addiction and how to prevent people from falling into it.

Don’t get me wrong — most therapies available today are well designed and, when executed properly, they save lives. But I think they all miss one core element that could save even more lives and make the time after detox dramatically easier.

Without understanding how addiction works, I would not be able to stay clean. And I mean real understanding — biochemical, neurobiological understanding. It sounds complicated, but when the teacher is right, it can be explained using simple analogies so even the not-so-smart people understand it. Yes, I said it — not-so-smart people. I’m not politically correct because I’m not a politician. I say things how they are. There are smart people, there are stupid people, and then there are those on the spectrum between them. I’m one of those on the spectrum. It’s funny because I’m also on the autism spectrum.

I went through a professional rehab program in a real Dutch clinic, deep in the forest of Friesland. Not the bullshit celebrity luxury rehab with Instagram reputation. I mean the real thing. I paid exactly zero euros. I got one month of detox, three months of therapy focused on rebuilding life from scratch, and afterward I was given a protected apartment inside their supported-living complex.

If you read some of my other texts, you’ll know I was homeless for two years after I lost everything due to addiction. I’m not telling that story here — this text is about education.

So… education and understanding.

Why do I think they’re so important? Because for me, understanding is the key to everything. This is not some scientific lecture — this is me talking about the inside of my own brain. When I understood how the reward system works, I realized that the mechanism behind addiction doesn’t change based on the substance or the behavior. We can get addicted to literally anything. It depends on what we like and what hits our pleasure engine.

Pleasure — or, more accurately, the drive toward pleasure — is fueled by dopamine. Everyone knows the word, almost nobody understands the mechanism. Dopamine is not literally “pleasure juice.” Technically, dopamine drives wanting, anticipation, and reinforcement, while the brain’s opioids drive liking. But to keep it simple, I’ll talk about dopamine as the main actor.

Dopamine is released by the reward system and binds to dopamine receptors. These receptors aren’t actual junkies, but they behave like junkies when you flood them with too much stimulation: they downregulate, demand more, and become insensitive to normal levels. So the metaphor stands.

When we do something that triggers dopamine, these metaphorical receptor-junkies get fed. What most people don’t realize is that these junkies are also political beasts. They form the strongest lobby inside the human body.

When the dopamine lobby notices that scrolling YouTube Shorts or MalwareTok hits harder than cleaning the kitchen, they start lobbying for more scrolling and less cleaning. They can’t openly tell the reward center, “We want more scrolling,” because that would go against the justice department in our brain — the one responsible for balance and long-term thinking.

So the dopamine lobby prepares a bribe. And the bribe is a promise.

They promise the subconscious that if she convinces consciousness to trigger the action they want — more scrolling, more sugar, more gambling, more whatever — the lobby will flood the brain with enough pleasure for the subconscious to overpower consciousness.

It’s complicated. The subconscious and consciousness both feed on pleasure. They fight constantly over who gets more. Subconscious wants instant gratification. Consciousness wants sustainable gratification. Subconscious is the pleasure junkie. Consciousness is the wise consumer. And dopamine is the currency.

So yeah — the dopamine lobby gets high on dopamine, and consciousness/subconscious get high on the downstream pleasure. It’s a political circus inside the skull.

This is why we scroll for hours instead of getting up to clean. Every few minutes, consciousness wakes up and says, “This is taking too long, we should clean.” And the subconscious — bribed by the dopamine lobby — jumps in and presents a perfectly rational-sounding justification to keep scrolling. The justification is delivered wearing a consciousness uniform, so we trust it. We take the argument, believe it, and continue.

And before someone jumps to conclusions — I use raw analogies because I don’t treat people like fragile glass. I don’t care who’s smarter than me or who’s dumber than me. Everybody exists on some spectrum of strengths and weaknesses. And I don’t think I’m better or worse than anybody anymore — that whole belief was one of the rotten foundations of my old life. It looked like titanium, but in reality it was just a thin strap wrapped in glossy Temu paper. So none of my opinions are here to put me above anyone. I feel equal to people who think faster than me and to people who think slower than me. I’m not ranking anybody, and I don’t research people’s IQ when I meet them. I don’t give a fuck about that. I sucked at life for 37 years and now I’m finally alive. I suck at math and physics but I can build apps and websites. I’m not a writer but I write. I don’t care if someone is black, white, mocha, male, female, non-binary, bipolar, or an interdimensional being — none of that matters. What I write is not here to provoke or offend; it’s just how I see things. It’s my truth, based on real experience, not on some politically correct performance. If that bothers someone, that’s on them.

This is how I see the black-market politics of dopamine operating under the surface of our official internal institutions.

Now I want to say two things. One: how this understanding actually saved my life when added to therapy. Two: how much the education system around addiction pisses me off.

I had to find this knowledge myself because my therapy never included it. Not even once. Why? No one knows.

When I asked my therapist, I got one of the most ignorant answers I’ve ever heard: “That program is designed for the average John Junkie Doe. Not for smart, not for stupid. For average. And average won’t understand this.”

Bullshit.

It’s not that people can’t understand — it’s that nobody bothers to explain.

And I know my metaphor can reach people way below average cognitive functionality. I’ve seen it. People who didn’t understand anything about their own cravings suddenly understood the whole system because I explained it using characters, lobbies, politics, and language they already use in their own heads.

When I started researching therapy programs and materials around the world, the whole thing gave me a conspiracy-theory vibe. But I’m not going to drill this topic — I’m not that guy. I leave it to Joe Rogan. Joe — please, invite me to your podcast.

Here’s the real point: If even 20% of people in therapy were given this understanding alongside standard sessions, relapse rates would drop. And it would take ONE session to teach.

I want to do something for people recovering from addiction, and for those who still haven’t decided to get clean. I want to share the understanding that helped me recover. Starting a foundation is my dream — not realistic right now, but maybe one day. If I stay clean. If I relapse, I’m dead. That’s the reality I keep in mind every day.

But how did this understanding help me?

Once I understood the mechanics of the reward system and the decision-making loop hijacked by the dopamine lobby, everything shifted. I started noticing — slowly but consistently — the decisions that looked like “my decisions,” but were actually pushed by corrupted internal procedures. I learned to detect them. And once you detect them, you can override them.

And overriding them gave me satisfaction. Real satisfaction — not the cheap, desperate dopamine kind.

That satisfaction is like a panacea. It heals. It stabilizes. It creates internal order.

The satisfaction from avoiding the wrong thing and doing the right thing instead hits softer but lasts infinitely longer. It’s like extended-release medication. It gives you the time to study the corrupted politicians inside you, expose them, fire them, and replace them with the real you. The version of you that was supposed to run the system in the first place.

Only when we let the real self-govern, we survive. Only when we get rid of the corrupted internal black-market scum — only when we stop lying to ourselves — do we finally live in peace with ourselves and with others.

Only when you expose the black-market politics inside your own head can you return to the person you were supposed to be before the addiction lobby staged a coup.

©: 21 November 2025 Heerenveen, NL ● Aleks Dubowski ● The Daydreamverse

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