You and Betty and the Nancy's and Bill's and Joes and Jane's will find in the study of science

a richer, more rewarding life.

Welcome to Inquiring Minds. I'm Indravis Gontas.

This is a podcast that explores the space where science and society collide.

We want to find out what's true, what's left to discover, and why it matters.

Over the years, we've come back to a number of topics, and one of the topics that we've covered is addiction. Back in 2015,

I talked to Mark Lewis, a neuroscientist and professor of developmental psychology, about

why addiction is not a disease. He wrote a book called The Biology of Desire. Then in 2019,

I talked to my friend Travis Reeder, who's a bioethicist, who went

through his own crisis with opioids and wrote a book called In Pain, tracking the opioid crisis

in the U.S. And now, as we come out of a pandemic, and as the CDC itself has has noted that opioid-related deaths have doubled over the course of the last couple years, I thought it was time to check in once again with another researcher.

Carl Eric Fisher is an addiction physician and bioethicist.

He's an assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at

Columbia, and he works at the intersection of law, ethics, and psychiatry. He also has had his own

struggles with addiction, which he documents in his new book, The Urge, Our History of Addiction.

Carl Eric Fisher, welcome to Inquiring Minds.

Thanks so much for having me.

So a couple of years ago, the last time we covered addiction research on this podcast was

an interview with my friend Travis Reader, who wrote a book called In Pain about the opioid crisis.

And it came out of a personal experience. He's actually a bioethicist himself. And he had

crushed his foot in a motorcycle injury and then had been prescribed opioids. And what he learned

with his experience was that, you know, the medical

...