(Aug. 21) “Contrary to popular belief, it is not the low prices and ready availability of drugs that increase drug addictions. Instead, that precise moment when someone decides to take drugs coincides with a specific and rare event that person’s life”. The latest edition of “Scientific Reports”, dedicated to interdisciplinary sciences and branch of “Nature”, presents the research done by Luciani Pietronero, director of the Complex Systems Institute at the Italian National Research Center (Isc-CNR), in collaboration with Riccardo Di Clemente, doctoral candidate at Lucca’s IMT. The two are developing a new model to control and prevent drug addiction. The project is part of the “Prevo-Lab” national program, head of which is Riccardo Gatti, from Milan’s ASL, which aims at analyzing and monitoring the phenomenon in Italy. “Our goal is to develop a quantitative description of human behavior, which is one of the main goals of complex science in any case”, explains Pietronero. “Our method is inspired by the ‘agent models’ used in statistical physics, where objective parameters are set but it is possible to extract implicit behavior relating to specific aspects of people’s lives – that is, deducting parameters from the empirical observation of what is real. Information concerning dependencies is extremely variable, there are medical files, admissions into rehab centers and psychological reports. These are heterogenic and show great fluctuations, since they relate to the individual. If we stabilize some parameters, it is possible to extrapolate the characteristics holding less objective information. Indeed, to do as much means to follow each individual case thus allowing us to plan a course of action for prevention and control. The model virtually analyzes the political responses to the phenomenon: it is thus our hope to see the model used in a specific social network.”
