Pineapple Express: Review

3.5 stars out of 5

7.4 stars out of 10

Directed by David Gordon Green

Staring Seth Rogen and James Franco

For personal reasons, I wanted this movie to be amazing. And it was, for at least the first half. I love any movie in which all of the paranoid pot derived delusions of the protagonists are spot on and keep them one step in front of the bad guys. I couldn’t begin to keep track of all the quotable moments, since they were so rapid fire that the laughing from one blended into the laughing at the next. I really loved seeing this on imdb: “In the scene where Dale and Saul are beating up Red in his house, Red's cold sore first appears, then disappears, then appears again”. Extra half a star for a disappearing cold sore whether it was make-up or brought to the set by the actor Danny McBride.

But somewhere at the halfway point, the quick witted pot-talk went stale and the action scenes turned into boring shoot outs in which no one seems to say down. By the time the fourth assumed-to-be down bad guy was reanimated, I had checked out. I must blame this on the direction of David Gordon Green who’s other films include the critically acclaimed and Roeper’s hot pick ‘Snow Angels’, a film that has been on my “to see” list for a while. His lack of experience with the action genre killed this movie and is making me reconsider my unquestioning love for anything attached to the producer, Judd Apaptow. It was good to see old friends, Seth Rogen and James Franco, pair up on screen. It takes me back to the good old days of “Freaks and Geeks”, the Apatow directed short lived TV series. My recommendation is then to see this film written by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg IF you can pay matinee prices and be high as balls.
Call me if you need anything.

Why Drugs Are Addictive: Part 1

The Dopamine Hypothesis and Reward System

The dopamine system involves a complicated network of intercellular and intracellular mechanisms involved in regulating, receiving, and producing signals involved with reward learning. The reward system is the neural network of interactions that allows us to interpret relevant, survival affirming actions. Learning to do a simple action, such as eating, involves a number of small steps. Using this example, one must first learn to predict the reward associated with food, to want food, to take action to obtain it and to eventually consume it. These steps are regulated and promoted by neurotransmitters, such as dopamine, which influence responses to natural rewards such as eating and sexual pleasure (Hyman, 2006). Dopamine is important in the process of learning how to ‘want’ or ‘desire’ an object or action that has previously been determined to be ‘liked’ (Berridge, 1998). Thus, dopamine is important in learning motivational behaviors with the aim of obtaining a given reward (Hyman, 2006). Dopamine is a necessary component of the reward system because it insures that behaviors which promote the obtainment of the reward are learned.

Addictive drugs are diverse in nature but most are analogous in their ability to increase dopamine in key areas of the brain (Hyman 2005, Hyman 2006,Shultz 1998). It is because drugs such as cocaine exploit the dopamine system that the act of taking these drugs is easily learned and difficult to extinguish. By way of its molecular messenger, some addictive drugs have the ability to interact with the dopamine system, which regulates such basic parts of reward learning as evaluation of rewards and reward-associated memories (Everitt et al., 2003). When any environmental condition, such as the ingestion of drugs, affects the dopamine system, the very act of learning itself will be altered in potentially destructive configurations. Continued drug use yields a decrease in dopamine D2 receptors as well as a decrease in the release of dopamine (Volkow et al., 2004). The possible effects on learning are considerable. The reward circuits are less sensitive to stimulation by naturally occurring rewards, and the addict experiences a decrease in the motivational salience of non-drug related stimuli (Volkow, 2004). The result is an under-stimulated addict with a larger drive to use, in an attempt to activate these desensitized reward circuits (Volkow, 2004). When an addict’s cravings are satiated the learning cycle is complete, the cycle of drug dependence is propagated.

Dopamine is a universal message because it is not specialized to any specific type of reward behavior. Because dopamine does not discriminate between different rewards, anything that affects dopamine levels can affect the learning and the reward system. Addictive drugs are no different. Not only do they send trigger signals in the brain that encode pleasure, they infringe on a system that normally processes relevant stimuli for pavlovian incentive reinforcement learning (Volkow, 2004; Fenu, 2003).