I love your perspective on cause and effect, particularly your perspective as a professional who knows a lot about what science can’t (or can’t yet) tell us about the mind and the brain.

I’m a little bit off on a sidetrack, wondering if another reason why people cling to brain-chemical explanations for mental illness is because it reduces society’s drug stigma. We’re often conditioned to believe that ‘drugs are bad,' except in extraordinary circumstances when we absolutely must have them.

So if Ritalin, as in the popular imagination, actually addressed a root cause of ADHD, increasing dopamine levels or doing whatever else in the brain it was supposedly doing, it’s not a drug it’s medicine.

I understand there’s no difference between those two words to a medical professional, but there can be a huge difference to the layman.

Isn’t that similar to how people try to defend recreational marijuana use by coming up with all sorts of ways for why it’s a medicine and not a drug?

I’m not saying that marijuana isn’t ever helpful for people. I know it can be, often because it can help people relax and enjoy being in the moment of visual art or music or making love. It can help people enjoy eating food that has become boring to them.

But culturally, we’re not supposed to think those are good reasons, are we? Drugs do things like that, and we want marijuana to be a medicine instead, so we can feel good about using it.

It should be good enough to say that taking Ritalin is important because it helps people. Just like sometimes using marijuana responsibly is important because it helps people.

But I think important parts of our society don’t want to face thinking about drugs as useful in that sort of simple way, because that would overturn a lot of entrenched paradigms.