Cocaine Paraphernalia Ads in the 70s
rarehistoricalphotos.com
rarehistoricalphotos.com
https://flashbak.com/cocaine-advertising-of-the-1970s-1980s-... https://dangerousminds.net/comments/magazine_ads_from_the_he...
My mom had almost collected someones "US States" mini spoons set, when someone told her they were coke spoons she lost her enthusiasm for getting the full set. Some truck stop or something had sold them as a promotional thing, coulda been anything but "mini spoons" were a popular utensil right then.
It was also amusing, as a kid in the 80s, when these things would come out at yard sales and such. Pop up with "how much for this?" and watch someone turn deep pink; or alternately get the last bit of someones antique stash that the rest of their family was unaware of.
They're miniature size (e.g. only big enough for doing a bump of coke). Not full teaspoon size.
Does anyone know if there is a term for that kind of "bias" or self-deception?
The odd reflexive impact of that seems to be that today's historians and social sciences people are prone to falling prey to the "bias" and then weaving it into preconceived notions and narratives due to other biases like confirmation bias.
History never has much to do with what actually happened, anyhow.
You see it all the time on Facebook, or reddit, or wherever people post things like 'Did you know <group of ancient people believed> <something utterly ridiculous> without quantifying whether or not this was a common belief, or just a drinking story that they told.
An outsider who isn't careful about this might make a similar claim that modern Americans believe in a heroic lumberjack giant called Paul Bunyan, who has a giant pet blue ox. This is technically correct, but is also utterly useless as a description of modern Americans.
A more interesting phenomenon is where media consumed by a tiny group of well-educated wealthy elites is considered universal or common. There's no way the New Yorker had a bigger circulation than Hustler in the 80s.
edit: according to wikipedia, Hustler's peak circulation in the 80s was 3 million copies a month.
That's probably a consequence of those same elites controlling the media.
In the 1970s (and eighties), people would grow their right pinky nail long.
Even has a Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_rose
https://dangerousminds.net/content/uploads/images/made/conte...
https://archive.org/stream/New_Destinies_06_1988-Winter_Gorg...
Coca-Cola used to have cocaine in it, so a version where the caffeine is removed instead of the cocaine would have made sense:
https://archives.drugabuse.gov/blog/post/coca-colas-scandalo...
"Tiny Snuff Spoon, Metal Micro Scoops Medicine Powder Spoon for Filling Vials, Spoon Pendants Necklace Loop, Set of 6"
The things people do.
https://shopmecarmy.com/products/ei2-titanium-edc-keychain-e...
[1] https://shopmecarmy.com/collections/featured-product/product...
Its similar to those little fake flowers in a glass tube on counters in corner stores which make great crack pipes (same with those short cheap tire pressure gauges). Or the cheap looking socks they oddly sell which are useful for tie off before shooting heroin.
Oh funny, I wondered why they had so many of these at the gas station by the checkout. I bought one and it was terrible for telling my tire pressure. I could not understand why so many people wanted to measure their tire pressure.
Car tyre explosions are pretty deadly...
I.e. ignorance of the drug underworld vs social ignorance of policy makers
To get "true" knowledge (lack of ignorance) on the suffering of drug abuse, one must experience it in some way, so avoiding this experience is the "ignorance" that leads to the "bliss"
Or at least that is my interpretation of the saying :)
The coffee stirrers are for ... stirring your coffee. They look like a small spoon just because that shape works well for stirring the beverage.
The others were listed in a similar article. The small tire pressure gauge was told to me by a friend who at one point had a crack habit and used said items to smoke crack and said it was a well known item to use for such a purpose.
I also think that the cheap socks are just that. But maybe they're popular due to their additional unintended use.
Right?
They steal spark plugs for the ceramic parts too...
They claimed that drug paraphernalia was being sold as "coffee stirrers" (wink, wink) that nobody would actually use for coffee.
That link says people were using actual coffee stirrers to also snort cocaine. Their original intended use was as coffee stirrers, not drug paraphernalia.
There's a gigantic difference.
A small spoon at the end of a modern stirrer would be much more effective, yet I guess people would accuse them of selling drug paraphernalia.
McDonald's was obviously not intentionally trying to manufacture coke spooks for absolutely no conceivable gain, but I bet their packaging designers looked at a lot of random coffee stirrers and tried to make one that looked like the fanciest of those.
"its so insensitive to suggest this person I respected did drugs, how dare you!"
++20 comments of arguing
<toxicology article comes out>: It was fentanyl in their cocaine.
until this aspect of supply chain control gets taken seriously by the government without worrying about acknowledgment equalling condoning, the ignorance is going to keep perpetuating because the education was done so poorly. abstinence-only education doesn't work.
Many frameworks are doing heavy ID data collection in the stores, instead of just glancing at your ID. This makes a lot of people uncomfortable, whether it is an anti-establishment user avoiding the government their whole life, to school teachers or religious leaders, or one of the 20 million Americans working for the federal government let alone someone with a clearance or a federal contract.
Secondly, the cost and punitive taxes are high to many people.
“Background Checks” are the magical non-solution for many problems. Between work, church activities and youth sports, I probably have 6-8 entities running background checks of varying levels of intrusiveness on me annually. I’m sure that information is shared with all sorts of third parties.
"We've gotten a lot of inquiries about the recent Connecticut statement confirming the presence of #fentanyl in a lab-tested cannabis sample. This article breaks this down in a way that we align with, but we have some additional comments.
Regarding the issue of this lab report as a whole: 1. It is unclear why the lab report designates that the sample contained delta-9 THC, marijuana, and fentanyl. We are confused by the separate designation of delta-9 THC and marijuana, since THC is a component of marijuana (along with over 100 other cannabinoids). We will be contacting the lab to inquire further. 2. As elucidated in this article, the circumstances around this test are unclear and we are missing additional information. We are tentatively agreeing that this appears to be a confirmed report of fentanyl in cannabis, but we do not believe that this represents any sort of market trend at this time, and more information is required to determine how and why this might have happened.
Regarding this article, we have some disclaimers about language/content that we disagree with: 1. It is technically possible to "smoke" fentanyl. Fentanyl can be burned and destroyed in direct contact with flame, but it is feasible for fentanyl to be close enough to a flame to vaporize. 2. We're not happy about the choice to say "All it takes is one idiot who thinks it's a good idea to mix fentanyl in marijuana and we can have a cluster of overdoses." People have been speedballing all kinds of drugs for ages. This can be a risky behavior, but we still do not condone calling people idiots - especially when drug education has been made intentionally inaccessible and healthcare is prohibitively expensive and difficult to acquire.
Additional general notes: 1. If someone wanted to intentionally mix fentanyl into their weed, they'd most likely dissolve it in alcohol and spray it on, not just crumble a tiny and possibly lethal dose of it on top of a random part of a nug. 2. You cannot use fentanyl test strips on cannabis (or any other organic material). We are not concerned about fentanyl in cannabis at this time. 3. The risk of cannabis being contaminated with fentanyl remains astronomically low, if it exists at all. Until additional information arises, we can assume that there was indeed fentanyl present in this cannabis. For now, we don't know anything about the how or why. 4. Strong, harsh taste when smoking illicit market cannabis is most likely an indicator that you have picked up synthetic cannabis of some sort. Synthetic cannabinoids are sprayed onto potpourri and other plant matter. It is very unlikely that you would have smoked anything sprayed with PCP (which is virtually nonexistent in the U.S.), and nearly statistically impossible that you would be smoking something containing fentanyl."
For McDonald's, straws and stirrers are provided gratis, so you aren't succeeding if you raise demand for the stirrer. If a stirrer sold you more coffee, then it was a success. Just like the thicker straw sold more shakes (some of their competitors never figured that out, and one wonders if they ever actually talked to a customer or just sat in smoky meeting rooms bullshitting all day).
However coffee being a stimulant, there is probably some overlap between the two demographics. It'd be hard to track if a lot of stirrers left with a coffee drinker but were unused for coffee. So perhaps in fact they did sell extra coffee to cocaine users and just patted themselves on the back for the increased revenue.
The real industrial product, that these are the "recreational version" of, is the lab scoop or lab spatula. See e.g. https://www.amazon.com/Aozita-Pack-Lab-Spatula-Nickel-Stainl...
If you do your own compounding of supplement powders, nootropics, etc. into gelcaps, you probably own one of these.
Bonus fact: there's a brand of lab scoops with a very fun name — the scoopula (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scoopula). It's so fun to say that that's just what many people call lab scoops, not realizing it's a brand.
"Works great for scientists or people working with small amounts of the powder "
Wow. That and https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-w3Xc47mDO8E/YZvrzIxkirI/AAAAAAAAg... ("solid Honduras mahogany") really hit me.
I wonder what they see 50 years from now and shake their heads about what we squandered. My guess is "wild caught salmon" and atoll beach resorts.
When taken on its own, it's a surprisingly mild stimulant as a nasal snuff, not at all like in the movies. When taken nasally, it has a short half life, low potential for adverse side effects in normal adults, and only causes alcohol like euphoria in the highest doses. I can see why it is still used in medicine, it is highly efficacious, and some day I can see it being tolerated, if not legalized.
It might just be me being old, as we tend to remember the positives more than the negatives, but this was a nice trip down memory lane. It is unfortunate that the hobby has settled/devolved into its lowest element, these days.
You say cocaine in small amounts is a dandy stimulant. I take Adderall for ADHD occasionally, and I've been told by those who have used both that the differences in effect are smaller than one might guess. And while I suppose I could OD by taking a bunch of Adderall pills, I don't have a "drive" to keep on taking more for a short term hit.
My rambling is to say: My impression of cocaine use is that it does long term damage to the body and the nasal cavity, and that its short-term high makes people chase it more and thus is ripe for OD.
So I'm not too shocked that it's a controlled substance vs. something like cannabis.
As mentioned, coke is high on the abuse potential scale due to its rapid onset and withdrawal, short loop between behavior and reward.
> As mentioned, coke is high on the abuse potential scale due to its rapid onset and withdrawal, short loop between behavior and reward.
I wonder if attaching an amino acid (a la Vyvanse) would improve its pharmacokinetic profile to reduce this addiction potential. We'll never know, because its not legal to do research on medical potential for Schedule I drugs.
For weeks after, she would crave and daydream about cocaine. The fact that, despite being able to quit, she missed it that much made me decide to never ever try it. I know people get addicted to games or gambling or whatever else, but it seemed pretty bad.
Sounds like you were just associating with pricks and those pricks happened to use a popular drug.
They all make the same speech but Somehow they never seem to know about it when 7 people in the class got a copy of test in advance and prepared answers. For every student who's bad a cheating and got caught, there is >15 that the teacher never knew about.
For me, it was a chance for me to ask a bunch of questions of people about things I was curious about but were probably none of my business or impolite to talk about, so I suspect to some degree I was guilty of the latter one.
I will say that it was incredibly enjoyable when I took it with the people I was with, which were in mostly safe and contained environments. If the draw to both immediately do more and to seek it out weeks and months later to repeat the experience wasn't so strong, I would recommend it to everyone to try at least once. As it is, I would be cautious if trying for the first time and space out usage if you tend to overindulge and/or aren't one to naturally self-regulate.
I guarantee you these "I tried it a few times and can't stop thinking about it" stories are complete BS.
The effects are very short lived and the more you take the more edgy, nervous and wired you get. It becomes really hard to enjoy.
I guesstimate that 80% of all coke is consumed by completely "normal" people after a few drinks in a bar on the weekends, and that's that. No craving, character changes and all that stuff.
That said, I did coke once(well, twice, but I'm pretty sure the second time was foot powder). It was absolutely serene. I felt crystal clear, dialed in, and perfectly zen. I didn't have a desire to talk, but to just observe. I felt like I had the hearing of a cat. Then again, I probably have unmedicated ADHD. No commercial stimulants have ever made me feel like that though.
Cocaine by itself is a desiccant, it seeks moisture, which is why it gets clumpy in humid areas. When it is used nasally, it dries the nasal mucosa, and triggers a mucous secretion response, which then dissolves it and allows it to pass into the capillaries in the sinuses, throat, and lungs. This cycle of drying repeatedly can cause a sclerosis of the nasal membrane, which can eventually erode the tissues affected by it.
Conversely, when proper hygiene is observed, like with nasal washes, or using liquid cocaine directly, the desiccant properties are eliminated and damage is avoided: this is how ocular cocaine is prepared and used with no adverse effects in medicine - eye surgery, etc.
I take exception to your comment about it being 'bizarre', it doesn't help the conversation to begin with an adversarial tone.
I'm not saying it doesn't have some risks, but I am saying with all other things considered, these are the same risks associated with running, sex, and spirited debates.
Consider this: It's normal for people to do this thing where they feign not being able to function without coffee in the AM but it is somehow not socially acceptable to have a bit of cocaine on some weekends. Let us consider that it's a dual standard for what is essentially the same thing, enhanced attentiveness, a brief euphoria, better focus, and an urge to poop.
If all addictions are equal, isn't the person who can't function without coffee or cigarette the same as people who can't go without a line? So you might ask "I've never seen someone steal to buy coffee, but I've seen people steal to buy coke, why is that?"
My estimate is that it is because one is normalized and one isn't, you simply have a subset of people who are self admittedly okay with breaking 'the law' by doing coke, so naturally they might normalize theft as well since it is a hobby that is so highly penalized only those with the shakiest hold on reality/morality is likely to do it. That distorts the image of it, and we then begin to develop this social stigma.
Ergo, legalize it, you won't have more of this any more than you have coffee-heads who happen to also be thieves.
You neglected to mention that the lethal dose for caffeine is in the same magnitude -- "150-200mg per kg of body weight, or 5 to 10 grams of total caffeine ingested, is considered lethal." [1]
Given that the street price of cocaine in the USA is around $120 / gram [2], it would cost about $780 to overdose. Meanwhile, I can easily and legally order 16 grams of caffeine tablets online (or in any CVS) [3] for $11.49 -- enough to kill two people.
Does this cause you to rethink any assumptions?
Don't forget -- at one time, drinking coffee in public was punishable by death. [4]
[0] https://gracerecovery.com/cocaine-overdose-amount/ [1] https://www.verywellmind.com/can-you-overdose-on-caffeine-21... [2] https://www.statista.com/chart/18527/cocaine-retail-steet-pr... [3] https://www.cvs.com/shop/cvs-health-caffeine-tablets-80ct-pr... [4] https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/was-coffee-ever-illega...
Here is the thing, some highs are much more potent and addictive than others. Growing up in the 90's and having seen the damages of heroin, I'd say no, it doesn't matter whether Tobacco or Alcohol are also legal.
Legalizing drugs would make drug addicts far more accessible to drug treatment schemes. Regulating the supply would additionally make being a drug addict a lot safer and less dominating for one's life. Heroin is safe. It's the universe of things around heroin that kill. Lots of being murdered, and going to prison; fent ods, MRSA infections, liver failure from Hep C, AIDS; doing crime and betraying everyone you know to get a substance that costs a nickel a dose to manufacture. All of these are symptoms of drug enforcement, not heroin.
Legalized and taxed drugs make them safer for all and reduce the amount of deaths we see from overdoses.
Edit: Interesting that someone would downvote something that is purely subjective.
Please correct me if I'm wrong.
The withdrawal from a serious coke addiction has got to be much more severe, though.
Not really... Your body is really good at adapting and your body will compensate when drugs put it out of homeostasis, when your you stop taking those drugs your body will stop compensating for it. You won't be "permanently" depressed after quitting a coke habit and you won't have "permanently" shrunk balls after quitting steroids etc. etc.
0. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23764075/
1. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
I am fine with legalization of many drugs but one has to watch out for excess and lack of moderation. And the stench, I smell Marijuana in my apartment complex and it has sort of ruined a beautiful courtyard. I wish it was not so potent and people really need to be courteous (same with Tobacco).
Dependency on the other hand is a tangible scientifically provable phenomenon that can be cured in a matter of days for any drug. Cocaine dependency is no different from caffeine or nicotine dependency and is over after 3 days of abstinence.
Something like 5% get heart attacks from it.
Imagine going to a bar and 2-3 people just dying that night, every night.
"A majority of health consequences may not be directly attributed to cocaine use. Cocaine often contributes to or exacerbates the conditions reported, rather than causing them."
"Few experts describe cocaine as invariably harmful to health. Cocaine-related problems are widely perceived to be more common and more severe for intensive, high-dosage users and very rare and much less severe for occasional, low-dosage users."
While it's likely a trigger to pre-existing condition it's not really safe at all like many try to paint. Same goes to most drugs really - OD's are very easy to do once you are on a binge.
I'm all in for recreational use, but these problems shouldn't be ignored. Keeping drugs illegal does not help, but having unmarked little baggies and candy all around little ones is very dangerous.
For me, everyone is entitled to make that decision, and if legal, a lot of the problems the black market creates go away, the largest of which is not imprisoning people for a victimless crime.
However, there's also the fact that the substance is basically a harmful addictive poison. We spend so much time building legislation that prevents harmful chemicals from being sold to consumers. We punish companies for selling legal opiates due the harm it causes consumers. Why would we push to legalize a harmful chemical?
I find it interesting that all the symptoms you list also result from wealth. Maybe being a billionaire should be illegal too.
Sure seems like it would be handy to have in a first aid kit, if it weren't for that pesky euphoria!
One friend of mine with severe ADHD turns completely normal on it. Everyone else that I've seen use it becomes an asshole. I'm pretty open minded about letting adults choose what they want to do with their bodies, but I don't like being around people using coke.
Edit: If it wasn't for the cardiac issues, I'd wonder if it would make a better ADHD medicine.
"The drugs you consume fund an international racket of abuse. Why not display it with the abuse of animals?"
The Bank Secrecy Act was enacted in 1970. Money laundering had already been on the books. Reagan’s drug law widened the scope and increased the record-keeping and reporting requirements. I think Nixon is the one who has the distinction of enacting the “first” AML law.
Curiously the website is called "Rare Historical Photos" but the premise under which this is [so] shocking is that these are not rare adverts.
As a kid, I remember seeing 5000 Sudafed (actually the main chemical ingredient) for $20. I was always confused. Why would anyone want so much cold medicine, and later on--they must be for confusing the drug buyers.
Even with all the advertising, and copious amounts of Sudafed, making meth was an unknown to many drug dealers.
I had a chem teacher in college who liked to tell about the student he had who made meth, and sold it. Forget his name? Anyway, the word was he ruined his eyesight because early on he worked with too much mercury. There was one student who kept her book open during the test. He would walk up/down the isles and couldn't spot her cheating.
Low grade coke was everywhere. I tried it three times in my twenties. I was offered it at parties. All three times off duty cops offered it to me. Yea--probally evidence. I never felt anything though? It was weak, or my constitution was different?
A lot of people smoked cigarettes. Coke was around. Drinking was like today, but one for the road was real. Opiates were only for the down, and out.
No difference between cocaine and caffeine or alcohol. They’re all drugs if you remove your bias and conditioning.
The drug prohibition made it difficult to know how many people use drugs responsibly. It is linked to legal weed actually: it is being legalized not because research showed it is not too dangerous (we knew it for a while), but because more and more people become aware that you can totally use weed and remain a respectable member of society.
For me it is a question of personal freedom. Everything has risks. Going hiking in mountains can kill you, for example, or almost any outdoor activity really. And some people die there pretty much every day. But I really don't want the state banning it just because some people fuck up.
Have I heard about diabetics refusing to change their diets and dying, yes.
Does that mean we should outlaw sugar? Probably not, plenty of people struggle with obesity and sugar is a major contributing factor, but there's plenty of responsible adults that can consume sugar in moderation.
I also imagine there are a non-zero number of people that begin using more pure forms of caffeine in ways that are damaging to their relationships, health, and careers.
It's the dose that makes the potency and effect.
The dose available to the end-user is determined from the drug itself and the supply chain, since it is unregulated. If it were regulated, the individual doses would be more controlled, allowing for less habitual redosing, and less acute mental and physical dependency.
Imagine you want a beer but hafta volumetrically dose it from 100% grain alcohol and cider. It'd be easier to become an alcoholic. Similarly, it is harder to "responsibility" enjoy heroin/fent or coke/meth because every time I want a small amount, I have to stare at a weeks worth for a brief moment.
The illegality of drugs itself becomes tautologically entwined with the reasons they are illegal. It is becoming more difficult to diffuse as our culture leans to polarity on drug issues.
- Short term health risks (ease of overdose)
- Level of addiction
using those three metrics, there are some very large differences between cocaine, THC, tobacco, caffeine, alcohol, and say, heroin.
The first published report of caffeinism — essentially an anxiety disorder based on chronic high caffeine consumption — appeared in 1967 and described the case of a woman thought to have an anxiety disorder until it was determined that she was consuming 15 to 18 cups of brewed coffee per day. She showed rapid improvement when her caffeine intake was drastically reduced.
One day after I had started drinking coffee a friend wanted to go to Starbucks. They were excited that I finally started drinking coffee and we could go for a walk and grab a cup. I had heard Starbucks was pretty awful coffee but the coffee was a side point, so I went and got a cup of coffee.
I was wildly caffeinated the rest of the day. My brain had made an incorrect association that "awful coffee" == "weak coffee" so I got the largest one because I was a bit tired. That was WAY TOO MUCH caffeine, a Venti coffee at Starbucks has 225mg of caffeine and the standard cup I was brewing at home / in the office was closer to 90mg.
That was a difficult afternoon at work, unable to sit still, agitated, but I learned a good lesson. Starbucks didn't get rich from flavor, they did it the old fashioned way, massive quantities of addictive substances, caffeine and sugar.
Not saying we should legalise meth as it seems to be one of the nastier drugs around. But the war on drugs does seem to create problems itself. By moving the drugs into the criminal zone you're creating a lot of crime around it. It's not the right way IMO. For example supplying unrecoverable addicts with seized drugs stops them from having to steal. It was a success in Europe.
It's kinda ironic that this policy comes from the US which learned a valuable lesson during its prohibition period.
Turns out it was actually a thing.
It still is, too.
“People have completely forgotten that in 1972 we had over nineteen hundred domestic bombings in the United States.” — Max Noel, FBI (ret.)
(Some of those graphs -- especially the first one -- probably have interesting stories behind them, which may or may not relate to fiat currency. But all we get from that page is a Hayek quote structured to suggest he too would love Bitcoin so...)
I’m not assuming you wrote the article, but I want to ask to try to gain insight. If this is true, why is it that business institutions, that have a lot to lose from social upheavals, require 4-year degrees for professional positions, from these leftist institutions?
The Birth of a New American Aristocracy: https://outline.com/4BXcWS
The thing it says about education is that it’s harder to get into a college now than before. That is a change, but it can occur with or without also acting as a retirement home for “the shock troops” that was mentioned in GPs article.
The first half reads like it would be an amazing epic series, if it were written from the perspective of the complex anti-hero protagonists. I knew about Tupac's family link, and one of my high school teachers was among the white feminist women who were a part of the black liberation movement and told us stories about it, but to write about it as a history of before hiphop, before gangs, and before blacksploitation, after civil rights, this shit was real.
The second half about the mechanisms of right/left conflict is spot on, and describes undercurrents today very well.
I had never heard anything about the Puerto Rican separatists though. That's some crazy. Thanks a bunch for the link! The supposed analysis at the end is absurd though and can be effectively skipped. The author does not understand anything about the institutions that hold power now, along with a whole lot else.
Not unless you narrowly restrict the latter to refined cocaine, while not restricting the former to (say) refined THC.
The history of cannabis use is not orders of magnitude longer than the history of coca leaf use.
A friend sold car stereos in the 80s, he would get tips in coke. He was paid a lot to cut a early projection tv in half so it could fit in his airplane and be taken back to South America.
Ken worked for what was then a first-tier Japanese hifi company. At the time -- it was the eighties -- companies exhibiting at CES gave shit away. Shirts, pens, calculators... you know: trade show crap. Rather than have his giveaway get lost in that sea of crap, my friend decided to give out pocket-sized mirrors, each encased in a blue silicon sleeve emblazoned with the company logo. His Japanese masters said "Ken-san, why you give away small mirror. We don't understand." And Ken-san said "trust me, they'll love it." And they did, because a) it was the eighties, and 2) while some preparatory activities are best done on a cardboard record jacket, others require an unyielding surface. I should add that the notion of including a single-edge razor blade in the package crossed his mind, but was rejected as being too on-the-nose.
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/04/how-m...
Some of these products seem pretty nice, I'd buy a couple of them if I did cocaine.
This phrasing seems to suggest that something else displaced cocaine as "the drug of choice for the wealthy."
If something did, what was it?
And if nothing did — i.e. if young-rich-people parties just shifted away from being drug-fueled — then what caused that? Because that feels like a very surprising shift; drug-fueled parties were a staple of decadent wealth for hundreds of years as of that point. I wouldn't expect that a single drug losing its perception of "classiness" would lead to a wholesale abandonment of drug use by an entire class of people.
That said, I'm not sure I believe cocaine ever lost favor with the wealthy. Maybe they just shifted from open semi-public use to more private and small groups doing it within the whole? Instead of open use in the big common room, maybe people just split off into side rooms in small groups that are interested to do it and rejoin the main group later.
So it's likely that over time more and more not so rich people entered the market and coke lost its cachet. But I'm sure the rich remained quite fond of it.
In his bio Keith Richards says he quit all that stuff when the quality when down. All those 80s bands that were fueled by coke ... you don't get that anymore. Basically because it's not that "nice" of a drug anymore.
In S-America from what I've heard is that all the posh party people take mdma to go out and coke is more for the low to middle class. So it's definitely less classy there, probably not in the least because of all the horrible crime associated with it (something that's out of sight for Westerners).
There's a difference between wealthy-wealthy and wealthy-enough to retire early and live like a 19-year-old until they "retire" properly: The latter category I would imagine is not the kind to do Coke on holiday versus some pills.
(a) In general It is unlawful for any person—
(1) to sell or offer for sale drug paraphernalia; (2) to use the mails or any other facility of interstate commerce to transport drug paraphernalia; or (3) to import or export drug paraphernalia.
(b) Penalties
Anyone convicted of an offense under subsection (a) of this section shall be imprisoned for not more than three years and fined under title 18.
(c) Seizure and forfeiture
Any drug paraphernalia involved in any violation of subsection (a) of this section shall be subject to seizure and forfeiture upon the conviction of a person for such violation. Any such paraphernalia shall be delivered to the Administrator of General Services, General Services Administration, who may order such paraphernalia destroyed or may authorize its use for law enforcement or educational purposes by Federal, State, or local authorities.
(d) “Drug paraphernalia” defined
The term “drug paraphernalia” means any equipment, product, or material of any kind which is primarily intended or designed for use in manufacturing, compounding, converting, concealing, producing, processing, preparing, injecting, ingesting, inhaling, or otherwise introducing into the human body a controlled substance, possession of which is unlawful under this subchapter. It includes items primarily intended or designed for use in ingesting, inhaling, or otherwise introducing marijuana,[1] cocaine, hashish, hashish oil, PCP, methamphetamine, or amphetamines into the human body, such as— (1) metal, wooden, acrylic, glass, stone, plastic, or ceramic pipes with or without screens, permanent screens, hashish heads, or punctured metal bowls; (2) water pipes; (3) carburetion tubes and devices; (4) smoking and carburetion masks; (5) roach clips: meaning objects used to hold burning material, such as a marihuana cigarette, that has become too small or too short to be held in the hand; (6) miniature spoons with level capacities of one-tenth cubic centimeter or less; (7) chamber pipes; (8) carburetor pipes; (9) electric pipes; (10) air-driven pipes; (11) chillums; (12) bongs; (13) ice pipes or chillers; (14) wired cigarette papers; or (15) cocaine freebase kits.
(e) Matters considered in determination of what constitutes drug paraphernalia In determining whether an item constitutes drug paraphernalia, in addition to all other logically relevant factors, the following may be considered:
(1) instructions, oral or written, provided with the item concerning its use; (2) descriptive materials accompanying the item which explain or depict its use; (3) national and local advertising concerning its use; (4) the manner in which the item is displayed for sale; (5) whether the owner, or anyone in control of the item, is a legitimate supplier of like or related items to the community, such as a licensed distributor or dealer of tobacco products; (6) direct or circumstantial evidence of the ratio of sales of the item(s) to the total sales of the business enterprise; (7) the existence and scope of legitimate uses of the item in the community; and (8) expert testimony concerning its use.
(f) Exemptions
This section shall not apply to— (1) any person authorized by local, State, or Federal law to manufacture, possess, or distribute such items; or (2) any item that, in the normal lawful course of business, is imported, exported, transported, or sold through the mail or by any other means, and traditionally intended for use with tobacco products, including any pipe, paper, or accessory.
https://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?_nkw=snuff+snorting+kit&_s...
I remember one device in particular, it was a small metal cylinder, shaped like an overgrown bullet, designed so that you could fill the main chamber with powder, screw the top on, then by rotating a smaller cylinder inside, deliver one snort into the upper chamber with an opening at the top for pressing against your nostril. It allowed you to snort almost using just one hand, with no chance of spillage. I'd still have one, but I gave it to a friend a long time ago.
Our widespread and normalised alcohol abuse is one of the things crossing my mind, and I wonder if many ads related to vaping, smoking and alcohol will look like this for us in a few years.
Edit: To clarify, what I mean with normalising alcohol abuse is not getting a bit of a buzz with a few glasses of wine or beer in a social setting. It's how we've normalised getting completely hammered every weekend, and even celebrate people who can drink a lot.
Lightly abusing some red wine goes back some ways.
Some people like to get fucked up, it’s irritating when I encounter opinions that shame it or otherwise imply that it needs to be stopped. Let those who want it have it.
If someone in your life is negatively affecting you consider changing who’s in your life.
We are only responsible for ourselves.
Parents can also abuse emotions, marijuana, etc. Haven’t seen anyone advocating to curb marijuana here yet.
You don't think a drug that's illegal in large parts of the world and for which legalization is a highly controversial topic is curbed?
Also, the parent comment clearly took children as an example of people who's live can be drastically worsened by someone else consuming alcohol. Drivers and and passerbys endangered by drunk drivers would be another good example.
I know its the state/corpos wish that we are all interchangeable people-toner easy to pack into cartridges, easy to produce, easy to consume, but some of us cling to the old ways and others.
Sorry. Clingy, sticky, nasty, humans. The new man, you want to go towards will surely not have this flaws. What a marvellous ideal sociopath that will be.
Not when your actions have consequences, which they do. Violence following alcohol abuse, or loss of family members due to alcohol abuse, is a thing.
Great idea! Now how do I get drunk people off of the roads?
And then heavily advertise it to those who don't. I'm not in favor of a return to prohibition, but it's strange how massive alcohol advertising is.
I’d still fight for both to exist regardless of my beliefs.
Not a sarcasm, last week there was a person fully seriously that alcohol is as addictive as heroin. I am not exaggerating and it did not seemed as wink wink trolling either.
Personally, alcohol is related to some traumatic experiences so I don’t like feeling remotely drunk. I definitely had a problem when I quit.
On one hand, America has counties where you can't buy alcohol at all, laws banning 20-year-old adults from buying alcohol, planning laws keeping pubs away from where people live, and even had a national alcohol ban at one time.
On the other hand, apparently the age laws are widely flouted? And everyone knows it but turns a blind eye? And drink-driving is so common that even if you kill someone, it's barely punished?
In my experience, it perfectly describes Europe too. Maybe not drink-driving being common in all countries, but age laws being ignored is something I find normal.
If anything, in USA they make much much bigger deal over age laws then in Europe.
I think the dynamics and beliefs are similar between the two: your primary exposure to alcohol could be having fun with it and friends, or it could be from growing up in an alcoholic family. You could grow up thinking guns are just a normal, if somewhat dangerous, tool (like a lawnmower), or most exposure could come from salacious gun news stories. It will all color how you feel about the topics.
(stats from memory, but I think order of magnitude correct). 30k gun deaths a year, of which 20k are suicide. Self-inflicted death from alcohol dwarfs 20k, and deaths to others from, e.g., drunk driving are comparable to gun homicides. Then you have the splashy things like school shootings, which I think are roughly comparable to driving a car through a Christmas parade while intoxicated.
They came with a warning that read: "Do NOT dissolve and leave on a cool cupboard for 21 days or it would turn it into wine".
It would be impossible to outlaw alcohol today. You can make alcohol out of anything.
Just imagine the people that have to pee in bottles, being abused on daily basis by their boss, by their customers, and then they cant take drugs? for how long?
The facebook moderators, or the call center oberators..
As bad as it is, without some real changes, alcohol is almost mandatory.
ps: I don't drink, but most of my friends drink.
pps: what i think will sound absurd is the horrific ways of industrial animal farming.
I’m personally not religious, I drink and so on, but it has me thinking that maybe some of the things society tells us to value are greatly misguided.
The incredible amount of sugar that we eat and give to our kids. There is already a clear trend of "hiding" sugar from the ingredients. The label "No sugars added" gives a really positive meaning. But most processed foods are still chock-full of sugar. I guess in 20 or 30 years sugar products will be labeled with scary labels like tobacco is today.
As for alcohol, I don't think so. People will still want to get wasted, even knowing that it is bad for the health.
I think its because they were purchasing the cheapest "juice" they could find, but my friends joked that they were trying to give people diabetes to increase business.
https://www.fda.gov/food/new-nutrition-facts-label/how-under...
It was never about sugar content, but how sweet something is.
Overly sweet things can be unpleasant to an adult palate, or one accustomed to a culture of less sweet things. In simpler times, sugar content was a somewhat reliable metric of sweetness (of course it can be balanced by acid, tannins, salt etc.), so you could select a product without needing to taste it first.
In simpler times, there were no labels to judge sugary content. The regulation in USA came in 2011. In simpler times, you bought the thing and did not cared about sugar at all. Later on, you engaged in culture war whether calories should be on labeling or whether such regulation is nanny statism.
Plus, I will go out and say that amount of people who would regularly check packages to learn how sweet it is and thus estimate taste before buying was super low. It is not a great proxy in the first place.
I still rely on it. Fruit juices touting how natural they are, but bulking out on sugar via apple or orange juice, is really common. You learn to watch out for it in various snacks for toddlers too.
In a better world we'd have a good substitute for alcohol that had similar effects but much less serious health concerns. This should be a major research target, but for stupid political reasons it isn't.
You are thinking about self administration of GHB, but people need to be really careful because 2 mL is a recipe for a fun night, whereas 7 mL will get you in ICU.
Bur vis-a-vis alcohol it has big advantages. No liver problems, no kidney problems, no clogging of arteries, no cardiomiopathy or inflammation...
But again people need to be paranoid before its use, in order to diligently respect the quantities.
The administration at a party would be a gig for companies, because you'd need the same level of professionality as say the security services for a VIP party.
But it's the same thing with regular alcohol, isn't it? Half a bottle of liquor is a fun night, whereas three bottles surely will kill you. As long as it is diluted in practical quantities it doesn't seem like a big deal.
That said, they'll pry my saturday evening glass of scotch from my cold, dead hands.
Plus unlike G you are not involved in the preparation, a better comparison would be having a substance called super-duper-liquor that you'd have to dilute yourself with water in order to make sure that it's indeed 3 bottles of liquor needed to send you in ICU.
If you screw up the dilution of the super-duper-liquor you can end up in ICU after just a sip, and you'd not notice because it doesn't have a taste or a smell.
Plus let's face it, humans were never made to deal with liquid quantities in mL , we were made to deal in liters or even deca-liters, because that's the measuring unit of the most important liquid for humans: H2O
Few mL of water aren't good for anything.
We have that in Norway, hjemmebrent, we just call it 9 6 (96%), aka moonshine.
But we also can self-administer, in large part because you can see how strong a drink is, right on the package.
I think GP is suggesting that, absent the lobbying power of the alcohol industry, you might see commercial development of safer ways of dosing alternatives.
If you could go to the store and buy a sealed bottle with 0.5mg ghb that might be compelling for some folks?
Well yes, substances are like religions, and alcohol is like Christianity.
Nobody knows how or why it emerged, maybe one of the reason is that you could ballpark doses and unless you really screw up or have a deathwish you'd be able to survive and reproduce.
Same thing for Christianity, there is not a whole lot of stuff in there that prompts people to get in harms way.
Whatever the reason, it's now grandfathered in and it will be really hard to change this.
The fact that the alcohol lobby tries to fight alternatives, and also the fact that there is an alcohol lobby at all...is somehow embedded in society.
I honestly don't know why we are managing to get rid of cigarettes which were similarly grandfathered in and are much lower risk than alcohol
Being around a drunk person maybe also statistically unhealthy given the increased risk of falls, accidents, psychological damage?
I don't know, it's one of those things where I can't point which was the reason.
If I had to guess, maybe it was babies, kids and pregnant women. People don't get shitfaced around those categories but they had to endure passive smoke.
And the reduction in cigarette consumption is to be ascribed to that, plus society being less and less fond of stimulants due to risk averseness (this includes nictoine and also cocaine consumption which are both way down compared to the 70s-80s-90s)
The vast majority of people who drink aren't drunk, and not everyone who is drunk is unpleasant; everyone who smokes is putting out irritating smoke.
While it's pretty hard to kill yourself with alcohol, but very easy using GHB. Even experienced users mess up with GHB, as it matters how much you are taking over time, and how much is being absorbed.
At bars you get pretty consistent pours, bartenders are watching for overconsumption and often for potential DUIs. And you don't, typically, have to worry about a bartender spiking a drink with something else.
All of that helps make alcohol consumption with strangers safer.
A lot of the drug safety education for alcohol boils down to knowing how much alcohol is in each drink, and that there's nothing else intoxicating in it.
A lot of drug saftey education for anything boils down to knowing how much of it is in each serving, and that there's nothing else surprising in it. Knowing your drugs are important whether that's ibuprofen, alcohol, MDMA, etc. Obviously, much more risky with recreational drugs with people looking to spike with other things for the pizzazz or cutting costs, or buying pharma drugs from less than reputible sources.
However, there were a rash of people getting sick/hurt from receiving alcohol from bars at resorts in Mexico. So edge cases are always going to be there.
In the Netherlands, the percentage of people that relapse after rehabilitating from GHB is the highest of all drugs, including alcohol.
Humans love alcohol-like feelings, so the comparison is vis-a-vis against alcohol.
Alcohol relapse statistics are on a much higer sample given how widespread it is, whereas for G the sample is much smaller.
Also among the people who don't relapse are also included in those who die or have their bodies so screwed up that have no alternative but quitting if they want to keep living. Alcohol does that to a whole lot of people who technically don't relapse....but don't breath anymore either.
G doesn't cause any liver, heart, kidney, cardiac, valvular, stomach, arterial, testicular damage, so of course people will come back for more.
If the only negative effects are psychological then it's a testimony to the amazing proprieties of the substance.
Also in science the standard practice is that if you can't measure it then there is no point talking about it or even discussing it.
We don't know what happens inside our brains, the mechanisms of addiction and so forth.. we can only evaluate the effects.
Some humans love the feeling of being in an inebriated state commonly brought on by the use of alcohol. The amount of people addicted to other drugs shows it is not just the drunkeness of alcohol people are after. However, the simple fact that alcohol is legal and readily available means that's the thing people use to achieve this inebriated state. Allow other substances to be legal and destigmatized the way alcohol has been, and you will see numbers change.
Alcohol is legal because people love to be inebiated more than they like being stoned or on a paranoid coke binge, or nodding off due to heroin
Majority rules , and so the preference with regards to the feeling of being inebriated + collective risk tolerance of society + the variability of alcoholic beverages + the low cost of the substance made it so that alcohol emerged .
Does that imply we can never compare smaller data sets with larger ones? GHB is becoming a huge issue in the Netherlands to the point that there aren't enough rehab spots. So I would assume the amount of data is not insignificant and can therefore be compared.
> Alcohol does that to a whole lot of people who technically don't relapse....but don't breath anymore either.
So does GHB.
> G doesn't cause any liver, heart, kidney, cardiac, valvular, stomach, arterial, testicular damage, so of course people will come back for more.
You retort to my argument was that the data set for GHB was much smaller. How does that not matter with your argument?
Also, GHB is associated with cognitive changes and potential brain damage. So you might come back for more, but you won't be the same person:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/10/181008104628.h...
> Also in science the standard practice is that if you can't measure it then there is no point talking about it or even discussing it.
Which part can't you measure? You can measure relapse percentages. You can measure addiction rates. You can measure the length of an addiction. You can measure the physiological and metal impact of an addiction.
And it's not like nobody is doing that either.
No, the only way to die via GHB is to overdose on it. Alcohol instead sets you body on fire with inflammation and such inflammation attacks all tissues including vital ones which I mentioned and will repeat: heart, liver, kidneys, arteries, pancreas...
> You retort to my argument was that the data set for GHB was much smaller. How does that not matter with your argument?
Because we know that the cause for all that damage is inflammation, between alcohol and G only the former causes inflammation.
> Also, GHB is associated with cognitive changes and potential brain damage. So you might come back for more, but you won't be the same person:
Leave aside the brain, except for physical phenomenons such as blood, plaques, cancer....we really don't know what happens in there or why. We can't even predict our own thoughts 10 seconds from now..leave alone complex things such as cognition on a general scale and most importantly the ability to measure it.
Also let's assume we did know, say all that we know today is effectively what happens in the brain. Given that premise we also have to take for good the data that we have about the depression/anxiety epidemic, which is very widespread according to today's research.
Today research also tells us that prolonged anxiety/depression causes damage to the body, reduces cognition and IQ and trims years off a person's life.
Well, considering all the above...both alcohol and G seem a better alternative than becoming subject to the depression epidemic which causes both a reduction in quality of life, as well as a reduction in quantity of life. Alcohol is superior in terms of quality of life, unfortunately it also shortens quantity of life, but G has them both beaten because it prevents depression AND doesn't cause inflammation to tissues, so G is better for both quality and quantity of life.
Of course if you are a person who is naturally on cloud 9 all the time and essentially immune to the depression epidemic (meaning that you are essentially clueless about the world), then you are better off not taking anything.
But at that point you are also better off not leaving the house because leaving the house also has risks, and why would you take risks if you are essentially a buddha who is always on cloud 9 and perfectly happy and content the way things are and everything else is pushing on a string?
So even if we allowed for a perfect knowledge of our brains, if we take into consideration the median urban Western citizen who is always on the brink of depression then G is better than alcohol and all the other drugs used to solve depression, both prescribed (benzo, SSRIs...) and those used for self-medication purposes (alcohol, cocaine, MDMA, crack, weed..)
My partner is legally prescribed it for narcolepsy (Xyrem), and takes 4.5mL twice a night.
Plenty of homeless drunkards in the streets, alcoholism is rampant.
> G is not safe
Side effects of GHB overdose include death by central nervous system depression + consequent respiratory arrest.
Side effects of Tylenol overdose include an excruciatingly painful, multi-day death from multiple organ failure.
See the pattern?
Both drinking and GHB are capable of causing memory loss.
> The effects are quite different than alcohol
YMMV.
It's really not as safe as you make out, as the dose needed to OD isn't much more than a recreational dose. When you overdose on GHB you can become aggressive, lose consciousness, lose all short term memories; and worse case fall into a coma and even die. The margin of error is just too small!
If you take GHB for a long time you can build up a tolerance and become dependant one it. The withdrawal is terrible and depending on how dependant some os can result in post acute withdrawal syndrome, in which case you can't just stop taking it as the result could be fatal.
It has no hangover. Its long term effects are not understood (a boon vs alcohol where they're known and bad.) It's edible and drinkable. And it makes your patrons buy food. The bar of tomorrow will serve cannabis infused cocktails alongside alcohol. From the moment of federal deregulation it will only take a few years, like the arrival and commoditization of boozy seltzers. Today's cannabis manufacturers in legalized states are already building the infrastructure to hit the ground running.
I suspect it's that alcohol and socialization go well together, while cannabis doesn't so it's better to enjoy it at home than at a bar.
Plus, there are people out there who don't experience euphoria from alcohol, it instead throws them into a depressive spiral.
Given that THC seems to be hard to precisely dose, I am not sure that a bar could figure out how to make cocktails or edibles that give a sufficiently small amount to encourage patrons to buy multiple items.
Also, alcohol works in a few minutes, but THC takes a lot longer. I wonder if we would see an increase of over consumption because people are impatient to get their buzz.
Fwiw, I like THC is small quantities from time to time, but I consume at home and watch a movie. Being in a loud public space which high seems like a nightmare to me.
Either way, it will be interesting to see what the future holds.
It's certainly more processed than homemade weed brownies, but much more reliable and much quicker (minutes for effect vs hours).
- when is it safe to use a given drug?
so we can get to the business of exploring:
- which drugs are best paired with which intentions, moods, environments, etc?
Which ones are you thinking of? Are any of them similar to alcohol in effects? (Light euphoria, increased socialisation, mild confidence boost, pleasant method of application?)
I'm interested as to where you got the idea of "stupid political reasons" blocking research, he literally released a good substitute this year.
From the article you link to: "Nutt is also campaigning for a change in UK drug laws to allow for more research opportunities".
How committed are you to no sugar and how have you addressed all that? I’d love to try again with some better strategies.
Why are we treating all sugars as the same? They are not the same.
Some baked goods have sugar in order to feed yeast, rather than humans... Pizza dough, bagels, croissants. Yes these all come in dessert varieties, but it's not the default option.
Especially when you start getting to dumping on fresh fruit, it's like, no, please don't commit yourself to a bland beige life like that! Plants are masters of poisons and trickery, e.g. capsaicin (what makes peppers spicy) makes our mouths burn, but not the mouths of birds—who spread their seeds. Plants use fructose specifically because it's not dextrose and therefore it's hard for bacteria to digest: because they want us to eat this fruit and scatter the pit. Indeed they make the fruit sweet rather rapidly, “now now, it's ready now!”, to signal an optimal “it’s not poisonous! now you-scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-yours” moment to us.
Plants even look out for our longer-term health, those bright colors that we find so attractive are usually signaling to us these really important antioxidants that we need. As long as we don't freeze or puree the cell walls into oblivion, the resulting fiber traps some sugars and feeds it not to us but to our gut bacteria, who then don't starve and eat our GI linings...
“let's not eat foods that I know are healthy, to satisfy arbitrary rules I made up to keep myself healthy”... really?
So if zero tolerance is out, what remains?
• Set a low sugar target, “no more than 10% of my calories from sugars.”
• Prefer stuff with a shelf life. If it has an expiration date rather than a nutrition label, great!
• Don't worry about the natural sugar in yogurt, the lactose, unless you're lactose-intolerant. But don't buy the flavored versions as they are sugary enough to classify as desserts for breakfast. Instead do what the Dutch do—buy the plain stuff and cut the sour yourself with added whole grains and fresh fruit.
• “Don't even let it in your house” the other stuff. Guilty pleasures for me include chocolate and jam, I try to make sure that I don't have these in-stock...
• The grocer is a pilgrimage. What I mean is, it's tempting to zigzag your way through and see everything, and this is also why shopping takes forever! But pilgrims usually make a big walk around a structure before diving into the middle for a brief flirtation/unveiling of divinity. A good grocery run too walks around the aisles at the edges, fresh fruit and veg, fresh baked goods, meat and poultry, dairy... And it makes targeted trips into the middle only for things that it needs. You've got a list of the things you'll dip into the middle for, after all, and if your grocery trips are short then if you miss something, you can take another short grocery trip later in the week and still save time and money. Small batch sizes, lean manufacturing!
In my case I have found it helpful to not quit sugar cold turkey, but gradually. First I stopped buying and using refined sugar at all (putting it in coffee, yogurt, etc.) This is quite easy. Then, avoid buying products whose ingredient list starts with sugar, like marmalade, "milk" chocolate, cereals and the like. This is a bit harder since it requires to pay attention to most products you buy, but still quite feasible. Then, once I was used to spot sugar at the beginning of the ingredient list, I began to read the whole list of ingredients, and avoid products that contained any sugar at all. For example: pre-cut carrots with lemon and ciboulette? whole wheat bread loafs? what on earth can be healthier than those things? Yet both of them contain sugar, in all the brands that I checked!
I started this "program" about three years ago and now I feel slightly healthier, nothing spectacular, but still. The thing is that now I notice immediately when something is too sugary. To the point of it being disgusting. For example, I have real trouble finishing a piece of cake in a birthday party (after fighting my urge to be a jerk about it and refuse it altogether).
I eat very low carb compared to most Americans. (Not keto just low carb)
Alcohol advertising is already highly regulated compared to past decades. Smoking even more. Even professional magazines in the 60s and 70s used to have alcohol and cigarette ads every few pages. Not to mention that alcohol use was much less frowned upon at the workplace, especially in certain fields.
Us painting all sorts of phantasies using crypto and meta-things will be very funny to look back upon. Give it 5 years. Oh the naïveté.
Adtech and addiction machines will be another two (partially related) areas that we’ll be shaking our heads at.
incarcerating people for little weed
I don't think alcohol will ever be banned, man has been using alcohol for more than 10k years[0] and according to some theories[1] it was the consumption of alcohol and protein that favored brain development
(disclosure: I come from an Italian region that has the use and abuse of alcohol as one of cornerstones of society, so maybe I'm biased)
Lawns. We spend an unnecessary amount of money, time, energy, chemicals and water on a plant that does not produce food nor any benefit other than it is visually pleasing. It is totally dumb.
* A place for my kids to play
* Friends and family gather there
* There are a few raised garden beds, so I get tomatoes, peas, peppers, and lettuce
* It isolates me from the wooded area near me. Mice and other pests generally stay over there and not in my house. * It isolates me from the wooded area near me. Mice and other pests generally stay over there and not in my house.
The original complaint should be amended to state something like, lawns in places where lawns can't be sustained by natural means. Lawns in places like arid regions are terrible. But a good portion of the USA has a climate capable of maintaining large lawns with little more than mowing.
In these places, you can't have large gravel expanses like you can in the south west, because grasses will naturally overtake it, leaving a nasty looking, patchy mess that can't be mowed without the risk of high-speed projectiles being shot from the mower deck.
So yeah, lawns aren't going anywhere, except in places where they are wholly artificial.
I have a theory that at some stage VOCs (in furniture, carpets, laminated wood products, paints etc) that lead to sick building syndrome will be heavily clamped down on, but nowadays nobody bats an eyelid at new couches laden with formaldehyde or other substances.
This. It's awful in the UK. Non-stop gambling adverts everywhere. They have to have a disclaimer on them and link to https://www.begambleaware.org/ but there's no rules it seems on how short or small the link needs to be. On some ads it literally flashes up for only 1 second at the end.
A lot of that, at least in the US, is due to having houses built more tightly for insulation, which stopped the natural air exchange from drafts that would normally occur. Now the building codes have been revised to mandate that a certain rate of air changes occurs even in houses, usually done using a heat exchanger: https://bcapcodes.org/tools/code-builder/residential/ventila...
Future generations will look back at horror at how we chose temporary indulgence over what makes us most human: caring for each other, especially the helpless and vulnerable, and stewarding nature.
2. Plastic, at least single-use, forever chemicals, and similar chemicals. Soon we will see them like asbestos or marketing cigarettes to kids. Yes, they increase the GDP, but they kill.
Mark my words:
1. Eating meat
2. Valorizing excess
3. Bonfires and fireworks
4. Anonymity
5. Air, noise, and light pollution
6. Having more than 2 kids
7. Proof of work
8. Buying new stuff all the time
9. Suits, ties and other western formalwear
10. Non-synthetic pornography
11. Academic papers
12. Golf
13. Body modification and tattoos
14. Lawns
15. Running unaudited code
16. Non-tailored medicine
17. Tribal politics
18. Daylight savings time
19. Circumcision
20. Burial
21. Men standing to pee
22. Treating 18-year-olds as full adults
23. Tipping
24. Advertizing
25. Imperial units
26. Coffee fetishization
27. Changing your name when marrying
28. Work-or-starve as the two primary options
29. Cosmetic products
30. Gender
31. Automotive fatalities
32. Demarcation between Movies and TV
Unless of course, you're hinting that humanity will go extinct.
Why do you say that? People have been doing it for hundreds of years and in the west it has become completely acceptable.
> 22. Treating 18-year-olds as full adults
In the US this isn't absurd even now!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96tzi#Skeletal_details_and...
I really do hope we move away from an economy that relies on advertising to produce consumer demand at an unhealthy scale, though.
At least 2, 14, 19, 23 and 25.
If everybody is a "they" then pronouns become less useful. Maybe we'll go through a stage like that while we rebel against binary-only gendered thinking, but eventually we'll want useful pronouns again and we'll reinvent gender.
Continued unchecked growth coupled with increasing consumption is heading us towards an ecological catastrophe that quite seriously threatens the possibility of extinction, and at the very least looks like complete collapse of industrial civilization.
There is nothing worse you can do for the environment than bring another life into the world, especially if you live in the developed world.
2. Valorizing excess
Not sure what exactly you mean by this, but having more than you need and showing off is basic human behavior, and I don't see a reason that will change.
3. Bonfires and fireworks
Bonfires are fun and so are fireworks. They have some downsides, but not more than many other fun things we allow.
4. Anonymity
There will always be places where you can act anonymously or pseudo anonymously. See 4chan and bitcoin for example.
5. Air, noise, and light pollution
There will always be the next kind of not-yet-illegal pollution, and the person to profit from inflicting it upon the rest of us.
6. Having more than 2 kids
Most people will have 1-3 kids, some will have more. Nothing absurd about reproducing.
8. Buying new stuff all the time
See 1
12. Golf
Might be less popular, but why absurd?
13. Body modification and tattoos
Basic human desire to control your body and what you look like. If anything it will be more popular as technology improves.
15. Running unaudited code
With the halting problem on one hand (making automatic auditing impossible) and the high value of software on the other, I don't see any way around this anytime soon. Maybe some AI based solution.
16. Non-tailored medicine
One prediction I fully agree with! Especially many invasive examinations we consider standard today.
17. Tribal politics
Human nature...
20. Burial
Also human nature. Not the American style burial with the huge casket and embalming and whatnot. But some kind of burial will always be the norm.
21. Men standing to pee
???
23. Tipping 24. Advertizing
Human nature...
31. Automotive fatalities
Maybe on the road. But what about space fatalities?
At least in Australia (not known for drinking responsibly!), this was already starting to die off in my generation and the death is just accelerating amongst the next.
I wouldn't be surprised if a majority of Aussies born in 2050 didn't regularly drink at all.
https://www.currentmarketvaluation.com/models/s&p500-mean-re...
NFTs? The just is still out.
Which the alcohol lobby is obviously fine with. I watched The Expanse this year, and it's something that stands out - the consumption of alcohol.
I quite seriously suspect that answer will be "24 hour electricity and grocery stores where you can buy food from anywhere in the world"
> Our widespread and normalised alcohol abuse
Until pandemic we've lived in a fairly teetotaling era. I suspect for the next decade we'll see an increase in casual drinking, becoming more similar to the 1950s. If you watch any films from that era very strong cocktails are basically a standard for just about any social occasion, any time of the day. The pandemic has instantly changed peoples views on alcohol and other drugs, what's coming the immediate future will likely continue this trend.
The immediate future generations will likely look back on ours as a bizarre blend of incredibly wasteful prudes. A generation of people who gluttonously destroyed the planet while at the same time being too timid to let themselves enjoy it. I think the reaction will be a large one of revulsion "you destroyed the planet and you didn't even let yourself have fun doing it? you lived at work for what?"
I truly hope the answer isn’t 24 hour electricity, given how cheap it is to produce. That would represent a major backslide in human capability. I’m not fully against other drawdown strategies, but surely we can leave the lights on.
And yes, we are simultaneously so destructive and so unhappy. What a terrible waste.
It's fairly well studied in the medical literature [0, 1] and reported on pretty regularly in popular media as well [2]
0. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7763183/
1. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
2. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2021/09/22/covid-...
Personally, I bought a nice 1.5 l bottle of scotch a week before lockdowns began, but never bought any hard liquor since I got my vaccine.
Uh, I think that's going to be the norm in the future if anything...
The social acceptability of reliance on caffeine has always struck me as a bit odd. The effects aren't as stark, but I regularly have conversations with friends and coworkers who talk about how miserable they are if they don't get their three cups of coffee in the morning. I also feel that I see a correlation between those who feel they have low energy after the work-day and heavy caffeine users.
Things are more disturbing nowadays because people go through violent routes to get their drugs. Its still there and its worse but at least the sensible eyes of the millennial browsing the internet from his brand new M1 is protected. Hooray for the war on drugs.
What?
People seem to buy drugs online with cryptocurrency and receive it in the mail, an option which obviously didn’t exist in the 70s.
I have some friends involved in the treatment/recovery space. It’s actually very challenging because the old technique of cutting ties with the user/dealer social circles is much less effective when reordering drugs online for delivery is just a few clicks away.
As an avid drug user and part of a sprawling social group of avid drug users, we have no f*cking idea what you are talking about.