Brains on Drugs: How tinkering with consciousness became a societal sin
thebaffler.com
thebaffler.com
- friends and people you've met who fell off the radar, some came back and now speak negatively about their past drug use
- plenty of homeless drug users in big city streets, clearly in a bad state of mind
- dead celebrities, their path documented by the media
So I have a hard time understanding how these articles downplay the risks and downsides, why they even pop up on HN and are so well received. On Fentanyl the straw man is "carpet bombing Mexico", the only alternative cheaper and more dangerous versions of this drug? That sounds a little tone-deaf.
It's one thing if you are well-established in life and experiment with a mushrooms from a trusted source under expert guidance - may you become a better fin-de-siècle poet. But opening the floodgates to the general public even more? Can't be good.
I feel it takes a certain kind of person to get hooked on stimulants, I just find them rather boring.
Those are also drugs that can be rather subtle, so it’s possible to integrate them into daily life which makes starting an African easy.
Psychedelics on the other hand are much too intense of an experience to take casually, those truly let you tinker with consciousness. Most people will take them a couple of times a year at most and are fine.
There is, puritanical American culture just wont do it. Abstinence only education, whether for sex or drug consumption doesn't work.
It's completely viable to talk to kids about risk factors for different drugs. When I was growing up they acted like marijuana and heroin were the same risk factors.
'Drugs are fun until they aren't' is something kids can understand. We should also talk about how people are different and some people can do recreational drugs and never have a problem and others can do the same amounts of drugs at first and develop an addiction.
0 - https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/...
“The weight of scientific evidence shows these programs do not help young people delay initiation of sexual intercourse,” says co-author John Santelli, professor of Population and Family Health at the Mailman School. “While abstinence is theoretically effective, in actual practice, intentions to abstain from sexual activity often fail. These programs simply do not prepare young people to avoid unwanted pregnancies or sexually transmitted diseases.” [0][1]
Further, abstinence only sex education is positively correlated with teenage pregnancy rates
"After accounting for other factors, the national data show that the incidence of teenage pregnancies and births remain positively correlated with the degree of abstinence education across states: The more strongly abstinence is emphasized in state laws and policies, the higher the average teenage pregnancy and birth rate. "[2]
Informing youth about the realistic outcomes of actions, whether its sex or taking drugs, is going to be a lot more effective than just telling them not to do it.
[0]https://www.publichealth.columbia.edu/news/abstinence-only-e... [1]https://www.jahonline.org/article/S1054-139X(17)30297-5/full... [2]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3194801/
This line gets repeated a lot, with the implied assumption that since X doesn't work the solution must be to invert X.
That's incorrect.
You know how you dramatically reduce teen pregnancy? You increase their socio-economic status.
The fix to drug use is not to teach kids the best way to shoot heroin or how to drug test for fentanyl, anymore than the fix for teen pregnancy is practicing putting condoms on bananas.
(We actually had a wooden practice phallus, but the banana line was funnier.)
You're welcome to find some sources that support your assertion. All the research on the matter disagrees with you though.
At least historically it hasn't been true[1][2]. In fact I had used nicotine gums which are easily available as OTC drug in the past to help cure my smoking addiction.
Obviously I think there are certain kind of junkies who would exploit legalization and do significantly more harm to themselves than good, but they are likely doing it now anyways. Most drug users I know of do consciously care about addiction potential.
[1]: https://www.colorado.edu/today/2023/01/24/gateway-drug-no-mo...
[2]: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/05/portugals-radic...
Look at the size of the average American. They can't handle cheese responsibly. But we're supposed to think that now they'll manage acid?
Your average American that "can't handle cheese responsibly" will try it once, have a terrible 12h and swear off drugs for life. With no long term health effects from one dose.
You severely underestimate how much most people want to escape their lives, even if the experience is negative. It's silly to act like people don't self-harm.
I'm not denying that people will self-harm. But the argument that people will self-harm with LSD needs to ignore that there's plenty of better drugs legalised already
Go to a couple of AA meetings and say that again.
Hey, lets optimize society for human happiness and enjoyment without escapism then...
Moloch: "Now just hold the fuck up, I have some corporations to run"
I don’t thin legalisation would hugely increase use.
This might be anecdotal, but even though they can be fun, but they're also very exhausting and make you introspective and also kinda encourage you to think about improving different aspec of your life. Sure, there's some bad trips that make people psychotic, but I think that legalisation and regulations would help protect those peope, rather than harm them, because there's usually an underlying condition that triggers such an episode. On the flip side, I've had bad trips a few times and they usually taught me a lot about myself, the people around me, and how I lived life at the, which in turn pushed me to change for the better, and improve some aspects of my life.
these arguments never seem to have a separate addictive from non-addictive drugs component.
LSD bonds with something in the brain, such that it causes persistent flashbacks more than any other hallucinogen, sometimes years later. Taking it just once to try it might not have any effect, or might cause flashbacks for the rest of your life. Depends on your personal neurochemistry, the dosage, form of dosing, and your mental state. A friend who had taken LSD described it to me once something like this: LSD sometimes takes any cracks (neurosis or psychosis) in your mind and expands them wide open, forcing you to look into them. If you're aware of them already and they're minor, it can be helpful, sometimes expanding your mind to new capabilities. If you've been unaware or worse, in denial, or they're major, then you get a bad trip that may come back to haunt you over and over again over the years.
Flashbacks that continue to occur after the original drug effects have worn off are a medically recognized phenomenon, which is documented in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) as hallucinogen persisting perception disorder.
Flashbacks typically happen in the days or weeks following ingestion of the drug but can happen months or even years after the drug use has been discontinued.
However the risk from one dose is minimal. If your risk threshold is so close to 0 then we should be banning way more things today.
Not one of us has ever had a single flashback, let alone "persistent" flashbacks. If they were ever really an issue, it was long ago with different/absurdly strong formulations.
A more convincing theory for flashbacks is that they are similar to PTSD. LSD can give really intense and memorable experiences, and in the case of a bad trip, they can be considered traumatic. Symptoms show similarities too. Essentially, flashbacks are just memories, good or bad, and in the worst cases, so bad as to haunt you for years.
Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder (HPPD) is not like flashbacks. As the name suggests, it affects perception, i.e. senses, commonly in the form of visual noise, distinct from what is experienced during a trip. Think something like tinnitus. We know it exists, but the details are unclear.
LSD is not so dangerous per se if you are in good hands. It does leave you discombobulated for 12 hours or so and put somebody into a strange and sketchy city like Amsterdam and some of them will get into trouble. Mushrooms are a little better because the duration is shorter but they still didn't find the problems acceptable. They tried the stimulating and hallucinatory 2C-T2 which is somehow entirely non-cosmic but I think even that failed market testing.
After all these years a pastor I know is providing psilocybin therapy for the terminally ill which they are doing in a tightly controlled
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganzfeld_effect
environment and of course accompanying people for the whole tip.
The problem is we have such a high bar for pyschedelics that isn't applied to other recreational drugs.
Funny you say that because I couldn't have wished for a better trip than roaming Amsterdam with my friends when I tried mushrooms all those years ago. The canals, the architecture.. it was a fairy tale, I remember it dearly.
Yes, and a variety of other psychedelics in my early 20s. I remember spending time on erowid and then seeking out substances. Mescaline, peyote, ketamine, psylicobin, acid, GHB, DXM, others I'm forgetting.
I wish I had never done any of it.
One problem is that you can't get honest information about what is responsable, besides the "all drugs are evil" propaganda. Like you can defenitley smoke weed more often and call it responsable, but for MDMA 5 times is already quite at the edge imo. And people don't realize that easily.
Indeed, but I was speaking of 5 times like 1 LSD 1 mushroom, 1 coke and 1 mdma a year or something, with extremely cautious dosing..
> you can't get honest information about what is responsable
This is really debatable or even not true. There are several website (erowid, r/drugs) with literally thousands of not tens of thousands of reports and experiences of various people, including thoughts on multi-year / multi-decade drug experiences. If you sincerely look for the information there's everything you need
Individual responsibility should apply here. I don't want my rights restricted because other people are fools.
If it's considered acceptable to tell people what they can and cannot put into their bodies because "average" people can't handle it, there's no limiting principle in place to stop our bodies from being controlled by others.
If you say so. I believe prohibition exerts substantial control over our bodies, and also corrodes other aspects of personal freedom (such as the Fourth Amendment in the US).
Not only is possession of any drug for personal use without an intent to distribute not a criminal offence in Spain, neither is consuming said drugs in the privacy of your own home. There is also no legal restriction on growing cannabis or psychedelic mushrooms on private property outside of public view, as long as the amounts are small enough that there is no reason to suspect an intent to distribute it.
I'd like to do that^^.
1. Imagine what would happen to the mafia etc... No more war in mexico for example.
2. Normal people wouldn't just start taking heroine for example
3. Imagine what happens to jails
4. You could use some of the new tax money (which goes to the mafia currently) to hire some medical professionals. That way you could help the really addicted.
5. 100% pure heroin would not destroy the body (it was developed as painkiller). Those junkies are that f*ed up because of the other stuff they pump in their veins. How is that a win for society?
I also believe they were all in error when slavery was legal everywhere.
This is a combination of appeal to authority and appeal to majority.
I don't care if my views are fringe and others choose to not take them seriously as a result. That's outside my control.
People accepting beliefs uncritically is the problem, and that applies equally to nutjob conspiracy theorists as well as people who accept the whatever the current groupthink believes.
A cursory examination of history is all that's needed to know that, at any given point in time, there are many beliefs across society which are just flat out wrong. To think that in 2023 somehow we've finally got it figured out is arrogance.
No, ideas that need to be applied broadly should be judged on a combination of their merits and demerits, and popularity, as there are enforcement and political costs associated with any proposal (as long as the government needs to do make any changes whatsoever).
It would be different if it was a private proposal that will only affect you and immediate family.
To be entirely honest, it seems like you need to rethink this more thoroughly instead of just repeating memorable slogans.
On the other hand, what to do if some people don't act responsibly and get addicted; and then for instance ruin their health or neglect their children. Who should be responsible for helping them go to rehab, fixing their health problems or helping their children? If it means the society has to take care of this, then isn't it also fair that society tries to prevent people from getting addicted in the first place? And prohibiting drugs is one way of trying to do that.
The war on drugs had tried and failed for decades. All it's done is enrich the cartels, fill prisons with minorities, create an oxycodone epidemic, flood the streets with cheap and deadly fentanyl, and countless other problems.
While the same government "protecting" citizens from harm is corrupt the point of the CIA becomeing drug traffickers on the side [1], making the problem even worse like throwing petrol on a fire.
[1] https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/big-whit...
Prohibition has nothing to do with prevention.
Has it succeeded? No.
Criminalizing it often makes it even more difficult to deal with the societal damage of addiction. Dealing with an addict is difficult, but dealing with an addict who is now a criminal is that much harder.
Society has all sorts of tools to help people who are struggling. Our criminal justice system is one of the least effective.
An addict is harming their family whether drugs are legal or not, and it's obvious from our current situation that their legal status doesn't prevent people from using drugs.
An addict who is now a criminal can be forced into treatment at least. An addict who can freely buy their drugs (because we aren't prosecuting dealers either) and do them on the street anywhere will just die faster (especially with fentanyl).
I also don't see why it has to be all one way or the other. I agree that people with dependent children have no business taking risks with drugs. like you say, this creates a mess other people are compelled to clean up.
but what if a person doesn't have children (or successfully raised them to be independent adults)? as long as they pay whatever taxes they owe, why care what they do with their time?
Lets imagine a hypothetical drug so we don't have to argue about the effects of real ones. This drug removes the idea of responsibility from your mind when your on it. This drug creates a paradox in your framework. You dictate that individuals have ultimate responsibility. This drug removes any internal idea of responsibility as a concept leading to bizzare and potential dangerous actions from the user.
Would you agree this drug should be banned then?
But with ethanol we tried that once, didn't work out well as you tend to create a police state to prevent it as it's easy to make.
However they must also bear the cost of any harm done in that state. The problem isn't that someone took a drug, it's that they did X thing to hurt others. Punish X thing, not the drug use.
I acknowledge that this has serious problems because not everyone acts responsibly. But the alternative is to implement a system which removes the basic freedom to control what goes into your own body... and still have people acting irresponsibly anyway.
The alternative is worse.
I agree it's unfortunate.
Most overdoses could be avoided by knowing exactly what you're taking, at what dose, and maybe even under supervision (like at safe injection sites; places that have gone years without a single person dying on premises).
The homeless people thing is a failure of our healthcare and housing systems.
Fentanyl only exists on the black market because drugs are illegal. Fentanyl is kind of a shit high compared to other opioids, it's only a problem because dealers are cutting their illegal drugs with it.
"The homeless people thing is a failure of our healthcare and housing systems."
This is the result of drug addiction not the cause.
"Many (not all) of those things were results of the criminalization of drugs"
Don't agree, alcohol is perfectly legal and one of highest percentage addictions there is. Opioids are a legal prescription and also out of control.
It depends a bit on the drug to be fair. Like you cant "occasionaly" smoke cigarettes, either you are addicted or not. You can occasionaly drink a beer and not become an alcoholic.
The people who become alcoholics almost always have some personal problems / mental health issues as a trigger.
But the world wide drug policy doesnt make any sense, because even a "evil" and highly addictive drug like cocaine is actually less addicting than smoking.
I was an occasional smoker for 20+ years. Could go weeks without a cigarette. Or smoke a few daily when stressed at work. Or smoke an entire pack on a night out.
Recently went through some personal hell and now I'm on 10-15 cigs a day and find it hard to stop. Absolutely because of the recent stress and trauma.
It is without a doubt one of the most pointless drugs in existence.
I think you are a very rare minority then.
Quit smoking is painfull (went through it multiple times). For me it feels so much better since I finally got it.
And since then my behaviour regarding other drugs also got a lot better, because you dont have that "hunger" to take s.th. from smoking.
> It is without a doubt one of the most pointless drugs in existence.
It doesnt even make you high lol.
I don't know about this one. Cigarettes specifically certainly have enough chronic downsides to outweigh their upsides for me, but nicotine in general serves as a pretty good, light dopamine hit, with relatively few acute downsides. You don't intoxicated, it doesn't take long to ingest, and it's available enough to not become life-consuming. It's not a coincidence that it's a very common habit.
I say this as someone who used to use cigarettes, but took up vaping nicotine instead when I realized it didn't make my clothes reek and scratched the same itch. Everybody has habits around dopamine management. Some people snack, some people spend too much time on social media, some people gamble (in casinos or in brokerages). Personally, I'm prone to snacking, and I eventually realized I could either smoke and be attractive, or snack and get fat. It was an easy enough choice.
I don't think there's any factual evidence for this at all. I occasionally smoke cigars (like 1-2 times a year) and I'm not addicted to them. Multiple friends/family members do the same.
"Yes, but often the root issue of addiction is mental health issues (and not only the drug itself)."
Agree, but not everyone who has mental illness issues resorts to drugs for help so there are many other factors to consider.
What is the root of addiction? This is the best book on it.
"Hungry ghosts" is exactly it (as I've learned / come to view the meaning), speaking from personal experience with drives at various times morphing into the ... unhealthy.
Humans have all sorts of axes - behaviorally, environmentally, genetically. It's interesting to look at these, and look at how traits complement and contrast ... how subtle tweaks and changes in parameters can be the difference between, say, a high-performing researcher with a solid career, and a ... someone who falls off the map to greater or lesser degrees [1].
One thing I am quite familiar with, these days, is: the very traits that set people up for "(very) high performance", also set people up for addictions and other issues. AA and other related groups are quite enriched in, in my experience, high performers (as well as very interesting / idiosyncratic / "exceptional" people*) of various types. The tendency to get sucked into things ... to become obsessive, to push boundaries, "openness to experience", etc. easily contribute to someone becoming a "star" and/or a "strung-out junkie".
The Buddhist, AA (rooted in "Oxford Group" / "early Christian" ideas), etc. ideas about "spirit" and a sort of "middle way" and all of that, provide practical guidance (and practices) that can really help balance out the serious negatives that can come out of some traits / mixtures of traits.
I'll look into this book further when I have a moment. Thanks for pointing it out!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Forbes_Nash_Jr. - not necessarily the best example, here, but, apt enough and what comes to mind this moment ... representing, to some extent, disparate outcomes in one individual (take that, dualism!)
* Note: none of this should be taken as any kind of "value judgment" - specifically, 'positive' or 'negative' ... these terms can be quite positive or negative, as reflected in almost anyone I've met, as well as myself
>This is the result of drug addiction not the cause.
Not always: lose job, lose house, get offered cheap accommodation, meet some people...seen it happen.
Rent has gone up almost double in the city I live in (a small city you won't think of) and nobody's jobs decided to double their pay, so there's a lot of people who literally can't afford just to have a legal place to sleep.
Where'd you get that? Studies I've seen of homeless addicts show that a simple majority were not addicted when they became homeless. Certainly it's a common cause of homelessness but still only accounts for a minority.
It's DEFINITELY not a minority. They don't just randomly end up on the streets from some random cause and then turn into addicts. That rarely happens, there are too many opportunities in this country to just become completely homeless from bad luck.
The only way to do a study on this would be to ask. They're not tracking people throughout their lives to see if they're suddenly becoming homeless and turning into drug addicts afterwards.
Use some critical thinking please. Just because some media outlet says it's so doesn't make it true.
alcohol consumption is perfectly acceptable, very well-regulated, “safe”, and alcoholics receive plenty of support and sympathy from public health, yet that doesn’t stop alcoholism ripping through society with countless victims (and victims of victims).
You can even make the argument that many alocholics wouldn’t be so if alcohol was less normalised in society
By 1926, according to Prohibition, by Edward Behr, 750 New Yorkers perished from such poisoning and hundreds of thousands more suffered irreversible injuries including blindness and paralysis. [0]
[0] https://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28...
Most of the methanol poisonings were from poorly "re"natured fuel alcohol.
This simple fact is the greatest argument for distillation having much higher legal barriers than the simple brewing involved in beer/wine/mead.
Poking around the web, it seems as if making liquor at home has become popular among booze nerds. That's great and all, but I wouldn't call it moonshine, and I'd be very hesitant about how much I reasoned based on what well-informed people do today about the practices of a century ago, or indeed about the practices of today among those for whom making moonshine is more a family tradition than a hobby.
The vast majority of moonshine stills were just churning out unaged corn whiskey from animal feed corn. There is no risk of methanol poisoning in that scenario.
So why was methanol poisoning common during the Prohibition? Renatured fuel alcohol. To stop people from drinking fuel ethanol, the government poisoned the supply with methanol. People tried to come up with jerry-rigged solutions to remove the methanol, and more often than not failed. Some less scrupulous experimenters sold their results anyway, where it worked its way into the black market supply chain.
I lost a mother to alcohol and a brother to heroin. Both are technically quite safe when used appropriately and lethal when not. And they're going to be used regardless of legality, so let's make it safer for those that do as well as stop funding the cartels.
But my point stands: people are going to do it regardless of the law, so let's stop criminalizing it. Being overweight is unhealthy too, should we arrest every fat person in the country "for their own good"?
We shouldn't ban alcohol because it's a hamfisted way to reduce alcoholism and harms from alcohol abuse. However, the 1910s didn't exactly have functioning rehabilitation programs.
Again, it came at a cost of organized crime. It was not a win.
Didn't American and European prohibition vehemently disprove this theory?
At the end of the day human vice isn't going away.
In today's market, 10% of the drinkers consume 90% of the alcohol. So the efforts of the 10% and the people serving the 10%, and the efforts of law enforcement to stop them, resulted in many very high profile, violent events, which made it seem like it wasn't worth the effort.
Full disclosure, I'm an alcoholic in recovery and I'd be fine with alcohol being illegal. My main beef is that the laws are not internally consistent: THC is by far a milder drug than alcohol but alcohol is legal while THC is still mostly illegal in the US (federally).
Either legalize THC completely or ban alcohol if you want to be consistent.
Also worth noting, THC (at less than 0.3% which is plenty for gummies) and many very very close, but naturally occurring (in infinitesimal amounts) are technically legal federally and companies like 3CHI are exploiting those loopholes. You can buy a vape containing things like HHC, THC-P, THC-O, etc which is virtually indistinguishable from Delta-9 THC, so obviously the days of THC being illegal are numbered.
It's the wild west but across the US. How is this possible, and will it be open until it's legalized federally?
"Why even get a license" is the incentive this creates.
No idea of why you quote the word. Alcohol consumption is demonstrably unsafe. The estimate is that alcohol kills around 140 000 people per year in the USA. It's just legal because criminalisation was tried and proven to be not only useless but actually more harmful to society through its side effects, a situation similar to the one we are still having with all the other drugs which are still illegal basically.
Legalization (or decriminalization) is a possible pathway to supporting people, but the current method of helping people with myriad issues stay in their current state in life (or worse, encourage more to enter it) is one of the biggest public health disasters facing urban areas. Major cities are being gutted by this failed line of thinking.
It's no different than "banning abortions to reduce the amount of abortions". It doesn't work that way in reality, and rather than face reality, they dig in deeper, stick fingers in their ears and go LALALALA CAN'T HEAR YOU. Except that NiMBYism goes strongly across both major political parties.
Though there's plenty to say about "affordable housing", many have argued we just need drastically more housing rather than a lot of government regulated housing prices. We're just not building enough in places people want to live, specifically because zoning (looping back to NiMBYism). [Andrew Price](https://andrewalexanderprice.com/blog20210125.php) and Strong Towns have plenty to say about this.
The reason cities are struggling with homeless populations isn't because "treat them like people with dignity" doesn't work, but rather that there are MOUNTAINS more homeless people than most cities fund helping. This is exacerbated by housing being stupidly more expensive than it has been in the past in cities. Homeless people don't have a home. Plenty of them have jobs they are desperately trying to keep. But when the average income in your city is less than the average housing cost, you inevitably get way more homeless people.
Also, the point of decriminalization of drugs is just to reduce unnecessary harm, since our justice system sees anyone in it as expendable and unwanted. If you want to actually help homeless people get off the street and back into society proper, you need to fund enough shelter beds for them, enough social workers such that they know these people by name and have the time to actually work for them, and some sort of jobs or education or enrichment programs.
I’m all for affordable housing and work programs and other things that allow those who have fallen on hard times ways to help themselves out. I’m also for psychiatric care for those who have mental health issues that won’t be able to help themselves. None of that involves safe spaces for recreational drug use. That only keeps people on their state or drags them down and provides incentive for others to follow (as evidenced by Seattle, Portland, SF, LA, etc.).
There are lots or organizations that will give people a place to stay, especially woman and children. The good ones will also have educational help and employment services as well. None of that needs to include trip sitters, needle exchanges, narcan, or paraphernalia vending machines.
Last time I checked San Francisco spends something like $50,000 per year per homeless person. It's not a lack of funding in some places.
Still, we allow plenty of dangerous things to go unregulated, or far less regulated than drug use. Alcohol use is a glaring example, but you could go through a litany of things that US society legally allows that are very risky: guns, motorcycles, chainsaws, BASE jumping, various chemical cleaners and solvents, all kinds of sexual behavior, and so forth and so on.
Yes there are some that develop serious drug problems from use per se, but most do not, and those that do often (although not always) tend to be polyusers in the sense that if you look at their problems, it's often difficult to attribute it to a specific substance. So empirically there's a stretch to go from any use, to use of a specific substance, to such irreparable harm that it should be made illegal.
There's also many other mechanisms society has for regulating drug use, like revocation of rights due to incompetence in decision making (legally speaking), and so forth.
This isn't even getting into our hubris in uncertainty about potential benefits of substances, as manifested by changes in public discourse around psychedelics over the last century.
Seen from this perspective, the article might have a point about drugs being treated differently, as if by absence of discussion, the author is implicitly asserting that risk management is not actually the issue. But I still think the article would have been more effective by making that argument explicitly.
Then again maybe the author just thought public health risk management was a different, additional issue.
do you have some sort of stats in relation to successful ones?
The author argues that all drugs should be decriminalized. The TL;DR argument: going to jail is the worst thing the state does to a person so it needs to have an explanation of why. No rationalization can be given for the case of putting a person (user or "in possession of a drug") to jail.
https://www.versobooks.com/products/1795-legalize-this
This doesn't argue that doing drugs is a good idea, but we certainly, as a society, should not put people to jail (or even give fines for that matter).
I also think that advertising any of them (including alcohol and tobacco) should be banned. Allow, but don’t encourage.
People like escapism and excitement and feeling good in the moment.
People like to think they’re special and they’d never suffer the negative consequences.
And, truthfully - most of them do escape the negative consequences. Either by reading and not doing, or by doing and not being the problem cases, or by being lucky. How many/what proportion varies by the activity of course.
And so People click on it. And hence articles get read. And journalists write more articles, and the Overton window shifts.
Eventually, societal backlash occurs, or it becomes normal, or it gets boring and folks find something else novel to chase.
You have not said they should be criminalized, but too often the idea "Drugs can be harmful" is followed by "Drug use should be criminalized".
Another point is that not all drugs are the same. Fentanyl is a very different drug than, say, psychedelics, and should be treated as such. A lot of that is also part of the culture of criminalization, where we treat all "illegal" drugs as the same thing, consumed by the same dehumanized "criminals" for the same hedonistic purposes. Which is totally different than "momma's little helper" that some billionaire convinced her doctor to prescribe her.
By the same token, Adderall is a different drug than MDMA, but somehow one of them I'll definitely go to jail for possessing, the other I can get a doctor to prescribe to me.
I've been reading a lot of literature from the late 19th/early 20th century over the past few years. The sheer breadth of ideas that were being casually discussed in magazines that regular, educated people subscribed to is astonishing. Drugs, hypnosis/mesmerism, meditation, trance, new religious movements, weird fasting regimens, transcendental experiences in nature, mysticism. That stuff has disappeared from public discourse today, along with many other radical ideas that could apparently just be talked about over coffee back then, without anyone batting an eyelash.
Where are the meditation groups that aren't beholden to some religion or cult? Where are the online forums where people discuss their experiences that aren't overrun with New Age cranks? Where are the meditation instructions that don't reference "Buddha nature", "divine light", or similar supernatural ballast?
I'd say the absence of those indicates that there is in fact an implicit taboo attached to practicing meditation for the sake of meditation itself.
Why is it a taboo unless you totally secularise it? I’m not following. Meditation comes from a religious context, and I don’t see why it’s a taboo just because that context remains
Further, the secular mindfulness and meditation movements are huge, and there are many serious secular oriented meditation books (TMI, MCTB, etc. tho I’m not personally a fan of them)
I have seen no evidence of this. Many religious practices involve meditation. But they also commonly involve song; it doesn’t follow that singing comes from a religious context.
If you look for the oldest written songs, they’re invariably religious. The evidence used to establish meditation as religiously derived is sufficient to prove the same for song.
In fact, with the evidence at hand, I could just as easily argue that all religion derives from meditation. Secularly speaking, that is a simpler hypothesis than the inverse.
> all modern meditation comes from religious sources
I said modern organised practices of meditation come from religious sources. That caveat is as big as the difference between organised religion and sprituality, generally.
> The earliest written records of meditation come from the Hindu Vedas around 1500 BCE (Sharma, 2015). The Torah also contains a description of the patriarch Isaac going to “lasuach” in a field, a kind of Jewish meditation most likely practiced around 1000 BCE (Kaplan, 1985).
> I have seen no evidence of this.
That doesn't imply no evidence. In fact, there is tons of evidence that meditation originated from a religious context. It is not even controversial.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/meditation/about...
I really like the website/app called Waking Up by Sam Harris, I think it fits your description.
Culadasa's The Mind Illuminated is detailed, non-mystical and seems to have a solid following with an active /r/TheMindIlluminated subreddit. /r/streamentry subreddit seems to also be pretty focused.
Rob Burbea and Shinzen Young have also written a bunch of non-vague, non-mystical stuff and seem to be well regarded.
Do we need a let me Google Scholar that for you? Meditation is intensely researched by serious people not beholden to pseudoscience.
Here is a hospital promoting meditation:
https://healthy.kaiserpermanente.org/health-wellness/mental-...
Journal on mindfulness:
https://www.springer.com/journal/12671
Meditation research group Harvard:
https://meditation.mgh.harvard.edu/index.html
Also: consciousness is the core part (equivalent to God) of Hinduism (where a lot of Eastern meditative traditions originate from) and hence it is intertwined with religion.
Email me if interested (address in profile).
It's all over the place on social media. What gives you the sense that is has disappeared?
That's a far cry from the scientific, serious, mainstream approach that was common for those topics 120 years ago.
The practitioners (i.e., not academics) back then (Milton Erickson, Dave Elman, Henry Munro, and many others) were much more knowledgeable and interested in studying the phenomena they were investigating and applying than are today's practitioners, who seem instead much more interested in fooling people and making easy money than in advancing the discipline and making new breakthroughs.
I just pulled out of my library the book "Suggestive Therapeutics" by Munro, and it is, however naive in parts, a serious and passionate investigation of hypnotic phenomena. It is evident, even just by reading the text, that these were serious people who thought they could make a huge difference in the lives of others.
Can we say the same about today's practitioners?
This just sound like you need to follow better social media circles. There's a bourgeoning scene around people such as Gwern, Nick Cammarata, Aella with a lot of high-quality discourse on the topics you mention.
I am more astonished with the banality and closed-mindedness of the society I live in.
As these concepts became popular in the west past few years, they became very commercialized. For eg. Yoga was always about mindfulness, it became more about stretching and poses. All of these concepts metamorphised into something else. As the transition happened, the value got diluted. As it because diluted, it became taboo and sometime butt of jokes (for eg. Crazy yoga lady was thrown around quite often).
Overloaded with the pretense of it more likely, for the benefit of tourists who go there in search of a quick pseudo-mystical high.
> As these concepts became popular in the west past few years
That's a common misconception. Mysticism and related experiences actually have a history in Western culture going back thousands of years. In the Middle Ages, it was completely normal and in fact encouraged for young people to seek unity with God through direct mystical interaction, and the many mystical writings from that time (most of them authored by ordinary monks/nuns and priests) are a testament to that.
I recommend the 1915 book Practical Mysticism by Evelyn Underhill as an example of what modern Western mysticism can look like. It's available on Standard Ebooks in a high-quality, free edition[1]. The author, who wrote during WWI, considers mysticism a natural part of everyday life, without ever feeling the need to reference "The East" or other New Age tropes.
[1] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/evelyn-underhill/practical...
But it’s interesting to note how these practices have evolved to meet new cultural circumstances. It feels like more of it is motivated by goals of productivity and status on one side, and distrust of authority on the other, new age, side.
It’s all still absolutely mainstream and in public discourse. But of course, it’s changed. We shouldn’t expect cultural practices to not have evolved since the turn of the 20th century. After all, the culture has changed a LOT since then. These cultural practices exist to meet the needs of people and communities. Those needs change, the practices will change with them.
I think you need an edit. Here:
> This phenomenon goes far beyond drugs. Contemporary society has explicit or implicit taboos on anything related to expanding or altering the human condition.
To use eugenics as an example. Those who speak about it always, without exception end up isolating a single group that they believe is inferior. These people often hold adjacent beliefs that make the lives of other humans significantly harder, to say the least.
I'm having trouble understanding where this slippery slope is coming from. It's one thing if you were talking about assisted suicide, I can see the argument there, but eugenics is something that is forced upon the population. And no, having to watch two people of the same gender kiss on TV is not forced.
An extremely large proportion of the US population would not agree with this if you include polygamy in "whatever non traditional arrangements they want".
I'm quite averse to that because I believe that myself and significant portion of other people tread a very fine line on the edge of sanity and I wouldn't want to risk anything that might tip us over the edge.
Old favorite: https://www.stilldrinking.org/the-episode-part-1
"Die Traumdeutung" (Interpretation of dreams) is one of the best books I've read. Its really philosophical masterpiece. I mean the ~500 site book, not the small one.
You are not going to have the same discussion in print that you have electronically and on social media. It doesn't matter what the subject is.
"Public discourse" really doesn't even mean the same thing to compare today with a 100 years ago.
A 100 years ago the person batting an eyelash would have simply not bothered to consume the media.
You also can't forget that we were a deeply religious society a 100 years ago and all those subjects listed had the appeal of forbidden fruit. That might even be a bigger change than the medium.
Dependency (on anything) is clearly bad but a gentle dabble in order to explore our world, our brains and the relationship between them seems to me to be necessary, healthy and ...well, fun.
Better question: Is it possible to escape this rat cage, and if so, how? If I am the universe experiencing itself, how do I perform a sufficiently perfect playthrough against the gradients that constitute its walls?
Nevermind drugs. Let's get BCI -- the end-all, be-all of humanity -- properly off to the races. Invasively or not, get these thoughts out of the rotting confines of our skulls.
If it doesn't work out, whatever. It's not like that's a different outcome than the rest.
For what (ultimate) purpose? What's the end goal here? The brain already is a computer. What do you think moving its contents to a different type of computer will accomplish?
Besides kicking off just another "think even faster", "calculate even better", "remember even more" rat race, that is.
Wouldn't a sober study of the universe and history be more effective?
Once upon a time, people painted with oil paints as closely as they could to still life reality. But something was missing. Cue impressionism. After impressionism, an increasingly vanishingly small proportion of the art world tried to paint still life as an arts career and be taken seriously.
The state of the art, quite simply, had moved on.
And as it is with consciousness.
FTFY
With study vs drugs, the goal is still the same: find out why we're here. Since there isn't a goal change, it's not clear there should be a strategy change.
(No offense to photographers.)
Not all of life is about being more effective and efficient all the time. Sometimes it's worthwhile to see things in a different way, and to open up new ideas.
Our experience of consciousness is entirely our own. If we don’t vary it against a constant background, how do we know what sobriety even is?
Put another way: is the “sober” view of a person with schizophrenic hallucinations truer than that after they’ve taken an antipsychotic?
But I'm not sure that's useful for answering the question of why we exist, why the universe exists.
I’m not advocating for or against the use of mind-altering substances. But a scientist with two microscopes is going to have an edge over one who dogmatically subscribes to their one and only favourite. Even something as simple as observing the sky turns on knowledge of the failure of our neuro-optical pathways qua optical illusions.
If you are looking for an answer that makes sense in relation to your specific context, your life, your consciousness, then drugs might be useful.
What does “effective” mean in this context?
It's probably the most effective, since we're biased towards being capable of analyzing data from those wavelengths, and the atmosphere is transparent to them.
But why would that imply that we can't use tools that let us view how the universe looks with different wavelengths of light to effectively discover new things we otherwise wouldn't?
If not, why would doing a drug make us transformationally better at finding the answer to why we're here?
AFAICS, the only new thing we can learn about the universe by doing drugs is how our brain reacts to drugs.
Each individual human doesn't know everything that happens, consciousness + culture just makes it look like they do, as demonstrated in numerous comments in this thread, and all other threads, on TV, in conversation, etc. Reality itself is composed of various mirages.
Your brain is the most powerful filter we've discovered in the universe. You can take immense amount of noise and separate information from it. The issue with these filters is most of the time you don't realize you have them. How you were raised, the people you're around, the culture you're in can all present bias filters that are impossible to see around since you don't even realize they exist.
It may not be 'figuring it all out', but sometimes just having a filter lowered for a bit letting you realize there is another part of the world exists behind it can be a breakthrough.
But on second thought, we certainly are experiencing some kind of phenomenon of consciousness, even if it's purely an emergent phenomenon of the physical world. And tweaking the experiencing of that consciousness will tend to expose the boundaries of it, even if just at the level of running a fuzzer on a C program or blowing up a balloon too far.
I'm reminded of a quote from the TV series "Weeds". A bit on the nose, I know, but when discussing peyote in the show, one character said, "It's like 30 years of psychotherapy in one night".
In the real world, the scientific community's recent renaissance around the use of psychoactive drugs like psilocybin or MDMA in therapeutic settings is further proof that "substances" can be good.
I guess your point is that psychoactive drugs can speed up thinking about these questions. I guess I could see that. It sounds a bit like how Adderall can speed up people's programming ability.
But do psychedelic drugs help? If I want to write code, would a psychedelic drug help there? If not, why would a psychedelic drug help in finding why I exist?
We all have heard the reports of people losing their minds on drugs and worse.
The subtle dangers are starting to believe that the fun is in the drug.
Drug enthusiasts often glue together the beliefs formed when under the effects, with the pill and chemical reaction itself.
It's not always as explicit as the hippie who preaches a transcendent drug. Often people start to glue together the internal experience of fun, with the drug, unconsciously.
Unfortunately it can subtly dull your day to day life, if you accidently over-allocate associations of fun with chems.
This is what consousness tinkering with drugs is like.
If you could take a backup of our brain from then it would be a common recommendation to take a backup before driving.
If you think along those lines, you could end up concluding that you shouldn't do anything fun or explorative if there's any significant risk at all.
I find out for most things I’m able to do them without drugs: introspection, joy, shamelessness, behavioral changes, appreciative for small things, etc.
Yesterday, I just “randomly” texted some of my friends that “I loved them” (they thought I was high). Similarly, when I’m in a club I can dance for 5 hours straight —- almost as if nobody was there. I feel (light) depression sometimes but appreciate that it’s a part of life. Etc.
Maybe the thing I’m missing is an out of body experience or completely “losing control”? But what is the value prop for me is something I can’t answer yet.
Another question I have, If the experience is short-lived, what is the point?
Many human activities are short-lived mood alterations.
The experience itself might be a value prop. But I’m more interested in things that can improve my “normal” life. For context, psychedelics sounds interesting to me cause people say they can affect/improve normal life.
> Many human activities are short-lived mood alterations.
Like a vacation I imagine?
Why does there need to be a value prop to it? imo the point (of recreational drug use) is experiencing said beauty for the sake of.
And this is why animal life went extinct... because what's the point of the orgasm.
They've expressed that the experience has lessened the fear for them, and they're better able to do those things (to a small extent at least) without drinking, but would never have been able to so without the initial nudge.
FWIW, I've got a friend that sounds exactly like you - he's pretty much always sober, but is super outgoing, dances all the time, and talks to anyone enthusiastically. He's sometimes been asked to leave clubs we've been at as bouncers assumed he was high on something, and been refused alcohol as bar staff thought he'd had too much already.
It’s fun.
We experience reality filtered through our senses and our own concept of "self," which is an incredibly limited view of the world. Imagine being able to see/experience a less filtered version of reality, if only for a short period of time.
Or imagine expanding the frequencies of visible light you can see. That alone could certainly be a catalyst to change your perspective on many things.
It's not so much "losing control" as it is "losing unconscious bias." Loss of control is not the goal.
It's also one of those things that you have to experience to understand, and even then, sober you won't completely understand.
But done right, these experiences can be incredibly important to people. If it's not for you, fine, but it's funny how many people with zero experience with these substances think there can't be anything worthwhile there.
I think this is the root of the social calamity. It’s an unwillingness and inability to be candid about the entire process that perpetuates the situation.
Why did that person lose interest in aspects of life that other people find perplexing? Haircuts or hard shoes, for example.
We can’t advance until we’re willing to address and enhance the wax wings.
This was very helpful thanks.
I agree with you. I've always thought the drug problem should be a medical matter handled by doctors and that the law, drug enforcement and cops ought to keep out one's lives when it comes to drugs, but things are never that simple.
The range of drugs is phenomenally broad from essentially harmless to extremely dangerous—some drugs you're never going to OD on to others such as Fentanyl that kills thousands evey year.
How one controls all this and brings order to it in a modern complex society seems overwhelming complex. You can't blame non-drug using people for not wanting intoxicated people driving or in charge of machinery etc. And there are just so many variables involved, the problem seems almost insurmountable.
For example, the effect on those who are around a drug user, family, friends, etc. can be devastating. About a year ago a colleague and friend of mine died from long-term alcohol abuse. What made matters worse he was an organic chemist and he knew what the alcohol was doing to him. We couldn't stop him drinking and many of us tried. Yes, he had the right to do with his life what he wished but at the same time we, his friends and colleagues, had to suffer too by watching him deteriorate.
Essentially, drug taking is not a thing people can do in isolation, drug takers are not decoupled from society, their actions flow-on to the broader community in very complex ways.
I don't have a solution, but I certainly know that banning drugs and treating drug users as degenerates and criminals as we have been doing for over 100 years is stupid and very counterproductive.
So true - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Portugal
Or produce the necessary items on your own. Growing things isn't difficult.
Chances are, someone you already know can hook you up with psychedelics. Try talking to your best friend about it. If he doesn't know, try another friend. You won't need to ask a third friend.
Some of their best wisdom made its way into books that are still around today. If you read these books, you may find throughout they have something to say about the meaning of life and drug use, if only indirectly. You may find their ideas about the meaning of life have nothing to do with drugs.
Their meaning-of-life wisdom has existed for a very long time. In a word, it's Lindy. Your meaning-of-life wisdom is untested by time, theirs is. Time is the greatest filter. We can't say with absolute certainty that your ideas about drug use and the meaning of life are wrong relative to theirs, but we can say so with a very high degree of certainty. People have been testing your ideas about drugs and the meaning of life since the 60's. Many would say it's not going so well. Contrast that with people who've been heeding the old wisdom - there's a reason it's survived for such a long time.
You're of course welcome to forego the age-old wisdom on drugs and the meaning of life in favor of your own, but it may not work out too well for you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoned_ape_theory
And you'll find that most of those people writing those books were on something.
I didn't get anything "spiritual" out of them. If anything, it made me realize that spirituality is a complete sham
Hot take, the "spiritual" reason for doing psychedelics is this: they hate their own lives and think that some "transcendental experience" will change that
There's only one legit reason for doing them: to get high. The "spirituality" reason is just a bunch of BS. The people who buy into it are the last ones who should be doing them
I think the biggest issue is that people don't understand what causes addiction.
If we had guidelines like: "Don't do drugs more than 2 times per month", it would let people have drugs safely and without addiction.
Instead we get a 'drugs are bad...mmk?' approach, and we think alcohol is safer than weed, and that if you did illegal weed, why not do all drugs? "Clearly whoever said drugs were bad was lying."
Guidelines on safely taking drugs are needed, and not from some random website either.
I have had something like 5 cigarettes in my life and still get occasional cravings 20 years later. Meanwhile alcohol has almost zero draw for me while I know people that are the opposite enjoying a few cigarettes a year but have a serious alcohol addiction.
My source is the book Power of Habit. Wish I had a more concise way to point to the brain science, but basically how the "basal ganglia" works is what I think we need to teach people.
Or at least give them tangible tips like 'dont do bad habits back to back'
However, there’s a massive genetic component to addiction which drastically changes how addictive various substances are for each individual. As bizarre as it sounds there are casual heroin users out there who have been using for years and a few even last decades.
Well, there seems to be a strong genetic component.
>Research suggests alcohol addiction is about 50 percent heritable, while addiction to other drugs is as much as 70 percent heritable
https://www.rutgers.edu/news/rutgers-researchers-delve-deep-...
For some people there really may be no safe limit. They are just at high risk of addiction.
I know HN users on the whole dislike alcohol while being open minded about other drugs, but it really does make things just a bit more tolerable. It lets me destress after work, actually enjoy my free time, and lets me ignore my problems for a bit.
I’d never drink while working, but the moment work is done? Sure, why not drink the rest of the day? I have to cope with life somehow.
I'm not exactly a drug expert, my experience is limited to a few substances but nothing ever comes close to alcohol. It melts away all the fake constraints(the limits and problems which you only imagine to have) that cause stress and break your flow. All this in moderation of course, being completely drunk doesn't help.
I will be send to oblivion for this but the worst is the weed, it lowers your IQ so much that you think you are so creative for each dumb idea(and you can't have any ideas with depth in that state). Alcohol is not like that, up until a point your mental capabilities(not the reflexes) are intact.
There's this great sketch about being slightly drunk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTSCppeFzX4 And this XKCD: https://xkcd.com/323/
Consider the epistemic quality of the ideas plain old consciousness puts in one's mind, like this perception of omniscience you and many others in this thread are experiencing.
On certain topics, this being one of them, I do my very best thinking when I'm on drugs, though it did take several months to become properly acclimated to the environment.
Do you have adequate experience to judge this realm accurately? How would you know (as opposed to believe)?
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9040115/
Cannabis with a high THC content will have a significant cognitive penalty, which is much reduced/mediated when enough CBD is available. Due to prohibition, a lot of Cannabis has an absuredly high THC content, it's as if all available Alcohol was hard liquor.
> Alcohol is not like that, up until a point your mental capabilities(not the reflexes) are intact.
That point is VERY quickly reached, and I would argue much, much quicker than you care to admit. Even a buzz will tank your cognitive abilities.
The way the comments here put it, it seems like people have got to get wasted/stoned before they are able to be remotely 'happy'...
Now in a more serious way: everybody is different and many people tend to describe their life experiences as if they were universal. Turns out out perceptions are vastly different and therefore it’s up to the (informed) person to take over their life and do what’s necessary to not be miserable.
What if you're right and they actually have a chemical divergence that keeps them from being happy, or counter, your brain has a chemical divergence that keeps you far happier than them.
Would this difference between you and them dictate your ability to deprive them from that happiness you have? "Sorry, you ain't got it, tough luck for you"
“What do you do? Ah, a software engineer. I guarantee you most people in your industry are on it all the time.”
He paints a picture where every highly functional modern worker these days is on a steady diet of CBD and THC products, perfectly calibrated to fit their lifestyle and the demands of their profession.
Thinking about it, this might explain some of the odder Zoom/Slack interactions you may have with colleagues at work.
What I find is many engineers abuse Adderall and similar medications. People at work openly talk about their strategy to get a larger dosage from their doctor.
I am not anti drugs but I can't help but see this as a race to the bottom.
It was never framed as "abuse." It was talked about very casually as a tool to get more work done, and they deliberately sought out an ADHD diagnosis for access.
I'm in no way judging. They DID get a diagnosis and are using it as treatment. The reason it's relevant is because _they_ talked about it as a tool to get more work done, or a way to be "on" after a late night. Not as part of treatment. But there are tons of reasons why that could be, none of which can be assumed.
That said, I have worked for one of the largest cannabis companies in the world (at the time) and I can say, some of the most productive people I know are all day, every day smokers. A lot of them should have been on some sort of adhd meds for sure but if the cannabis is working, and it keeps them off pharmaceuticals then what’s the harm? It really did change my perception of how some people operate while stoned.
All that said, it’s easy to use cannabis as a crutch, it’s definitely not healthy in other ways but there are worse things to be hooked on.
That would have to be stimulants, because all the other kinds are very unpleasant to quit suddenly.
(This is the opposite of the common belief that stimulants are addictive and everything else is safe.)
I don’t use anything to aid in my work, be it Adderall or THC or alcohol or anything else… but if y’all do, what does that say about or society and the pigs who run it?
I've known people who could do it, but nobody I know personally who is a really good developer is doing this? Esp during work hours? Seems counterproductive.
I don't do it often though. It's never like, I need to get high to code. Its usually like, I'm high and some interesting coding thing comes up.
Watch a super intellectual YouTube video that’s at the bounds of my understanding (e.g. Leonard Susskind’s Stanford lectures on quantum physics).
While watching sober it’s intellectually stimulating and I really enjoy it.
While on THC I can’t grasp what he’s talking about and I attribute him to be just spouting bullshit that’s made up.
That convinced me that THC has a negative hit to cognitive function.
However it makes other things feel more awesome and “in flow”: food, music, bedroom activities.
I guarantee you that they aren't. This is the standard occupational bias of someone who interacts with a highly specific subset of the population all day, and then generalizes from that experience. Same as cops who see violent criminals everywhere, even though in reality they make up a tiny fraction of people overall.
I never got anything out of being chronically stoned other than general dysfunction.
I don't think I've ever worked with anyone that did the later.
A lot of drug users just want to work harder and longer.
No, most people aren't on it all the time. And those who are aren't "highly functional". They think they are, but they aren't and it shows. Most of those who are are ridden by mental health issues, and stuck in an endless loop, living a rather boring and average life, with delusions of performance and greatness. Thinking that somehow being a drug addict is hip and goes with the software industry is a little bit daft.
Before then, drugs were widely used by all classes (although not much recreationally). Housewives took "pep pills" to clean longer without getting tired. Airmen were given amphetamines to fly for 36 hours straight. Cocaine was in coca-cola. Laudanum was the West's miracle pain killer and palliative. Cocaine was only made illegal in 1920, and heroin in 1924. And of course I'm completely ignoring alcohol, despite it being the world's most abused intoxicant, with its own share of bizarre social norms and demonizations attributed to social class.
The idea that people use drugs to "alter their consciousness" is intoxicant romanticism. People use drugs because it's a fun distraction. Drugs as a concept have never been a societal sin, they are medicine. It's the association between an unpopular social group and a particular drug that causes the drug to be demonized.
Not sure how someone can be reliant on substance abuse and still find room to criticize others, and think they are the one who "gets it".
Take nearly any traditional way of thinking and realize that in order to have changed it, it began with such commentary like this article .
The fact you call it “substance abuse” is indicative of the problem the article is describing.
Now this is, very, very, anecdotal, I have no research to back it up and I’m sure a million other factors had an impact as well. But along side the ban of alcohol we also seemed to lose the ability to make decisions and simply get things done. Upper management and political leadership became much more risk aware and we lost the “bang in the table, I’ve had enough of this talk, let’s just get it done” decisions. When I later moved into the green energy industry, in an investment bank that turns investor money into profit by building/buying+renovating solar plants and eventually selling them. I saw this “let’s just get this done” attitude again, once again coupled with rampant alcohol consumption.
I think it would be interesting to see if there was any research on the impact substances have on “just getting shit done”, but I’m in digitalisation and I’m never going to do it. I do personally think the work place is a little more boring with the puritan take on substances, but on the flip side, you don’t have to look into many statistics to see how the ban have helped soooo many people to not ruin their lives.
So it's interesting to look at your comment through that lens, because at least in my eyes they seem to align.
> In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.
~ Theodore Roosevelt
Since the post-2000 opioid epidemic and the proliferation of Fentanyl it seems the danger has increased. In Ithaca we are seeing people go to the needle exchange, shoot up right there, and then drop down with an overdose a block or two away on a regular basis. Fortunately there is a lot of narcan and people who know how to use it in that area.
It's scary.
I think we're also going to see concern increasing about behavioral addiction, particularly with gambling. Other parts of the anglosphere were quicker to make sports betting ubiquitous and there is a movement to curtail or eliminate the advertising thereof because it rapidly progresses to seeing nothing but gambling ads for the whole break.
And even then, addiction is likely indicative of larger problems in a person's life, and the problems are getting worse so prohibition doesn't seem to be helping anyway.
Cannabis is less harmful than alcohol but its users dramatically underplay its side effects. Caffeine is only bad for sleep, or in extreme doses.
I don't think either substance is "dangerous", but caffeine is definitely closer to dangerous than cannabis. I also wouldn't say I'm biased against either; I'm a big fan of both substances. I drink coffee about daily and use cannabis about weekly.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say cannabis + driving kills more people per year than caffeine (via overdose or whatever). Therefore cannabis is more dangerous.
People don't really want fentanyl of unknown purity.
They want their heroin. Fentanyl proliferation is an artifact of prohibition.
That's how it played in the Opium wars between the British Empire and China, that's probably a main reason why alcohol and other drugs are prohibited in so many religions, or why they're limited to the leaders of the religion (shamans etc.)
Today you're a productive member of society, seeking pleasure and satisfaction in family, career, hobbies and curiosity, tomorrow you're an absolutely happy wreck in the corner.
No, of course not, it's all stinky emperors trying to maintain dominance.
By that token, anything that could disable a healthy member of society would be a huge problem warranting a war on it.
Cars litteraly killing people fits the description but you don't see governments pannicking. Same way severe disabilities from workspace risks are mostly seen as a business risk and the OSHA won't have half the budget of what is spent on anti-drug efforts.
Er, yes? You might have heard of this whole "healthcare" thing that is war on diseases, for one.
Cars are a bit more complicated, sure they kill ~40k people per year in the states, stealing let's say 30 years of productive life per casualty on average = 1,2M man-years per year.
In order to offset that, they'd have to save 1.2M man hours over the entire US population (let's say 300M) = 35 hours a year per person. I'm pretty sure cars save 6 minutes a day for an average American, compared to any possible alternative, so the bottom lines is that cars are worth it. (Kick me if I stuffed up my maths)
I heard about rising prices of healthcare and how much of a business it is in the US. "war on diseases" would never be how it's qualified, it's more like a "diseases business" at this point.
On cars, the math should not be limited to deaths, any accident that results in a disability would enter the count. I wouldn't try to do such complex calculation, and look at countries that have similar geography but a history of actually caring about the human cost: Canada's average mileage per driver is short of 10 000 miles [0], that's 25% less than US drivers, and Canada already has 25% less cars per capita [1]. The US is at least that far from the equilibrum, with little political will to do something about it.
[0] https://www.mychoice.ca/blog/whats-the-average-mileage-drive... [1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/registered-vehicles-per-1...
Reducing car use and other measures to reduce car fatalities i.e. speed limits are only meaningful in this "productive man-years" dimension if you don't end up stealing more time from people's lives waiting for buses and driving 40kph.
In terms of fighting diseases that reduce productive man-years over say last 80 years, it's a very successful war, and there's little surprise that business is the best way to do it, just like many other things.
Looking at age-at-death, all causes plots for the US [0], where most people die past productive age, one can reasonably guess that the war on disease is in some sort of diminishing returns equilibrium, where saving an extra man-year costs more than one man-year, go figure.
[0] https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/policy-brief/life-ex...
Wearing a motorcycle helmet in a car would instantly make them a lot safer.
Also I drove a car that took 15 seconds to get to 60 throughout high school and it was fine.
Wearing a motorcycle helmet inside a car does nothing for pedestrians, cyclists, etc. Also I would argue there's a loss of utility because it probably interferes with peripheral vision and messes up your hair. But sure, make people wear a helmet, fine by me. The point is that there's room for easy improvement in car safety, and a helmet counts, I suppose.
I highly doubt many felons were high on mj, in a k hole, rolling, or tripping. Alcohol is way more conducive to violence. Some other substances like PCP may also lead to violence. But let's not come up with bs statements like "drunk or high" to tar marijuana with the same brush as alcohol, and let's do consider that alcohol is the most legal and normalized of all these substances. We can consider the societal harms of each substance separately.
Simply put we are continuous chemical reactions being modified by our environments of choice.
And what do you think food does?