Drugs And Happiness

Is pleasure the key to happiness? And if so, how does the addicting world of drugs and hedonism mesh with it? My paper seeks to understand the link between the three, as well as demonstrate why people turn to drugs for happiness, but why it is not a pathway to happiness, as it does not bring about true happiness. To prove this, texts will be presented that focus on the studies and the links between pleasure and happiness, which confirms the connection that exists, but also that that connection makes people try desperate habits to obtain both. Other texts are used to show several happiness theories, as well as the effects drug use has on a person's happiness which are used to show how intense both subjects could be, and what makes the search

James Olds and Peter Milner were the two psychologists in charge of said experiment.. They inserted electrodes into the brains of the animals. These electrodes would give a jolt of stimulus to the part of the brain that scientists believe deal with pleasure, the septum and the nucleus accumbens (Olds, Milner). But then they gave the rats a lever, to control when they received the electrodes. The rats would repeatedly press the lever up to 2000 times per hour, bringing them so much pleasure they even resisting having basic necessities, like food and water (Olds). Olds and Milner had discovered the pleasure center in the brain. But what their research also proves is the desperation that can be faced to try to obtain this pleasure, how they will ignore all else for it, and how it can intensly be craved. So how then is happiness tied in to pleasure and at what point does the seeking of pleasure, or happiness, turn into something that is no longer truly pleasurable? Happiness can be arguably thought of by most as consisting of two fundamental aspects: hedonia and eudaimonia. In contemporary psychology these aspects are usually referred to as pleasure and meaning (Akrill), showing that pleasure is usually thought of as being fundamental to