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Comment by somenameforme | Hacker News Reader

A cynical take on many governments embracing weed is Soma [1].

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soma_(Brave_New_World)

>A cynical take on many governments embracing weed is Soma

The marijuana prohibition of the 20th century was a complete anomaly in practically all of human history, driven almost entirely by US policy. Before that humans had used the plant recreationally and commercially without hassle for thousands of years. We'll be just fine.

We will be just fine. Just like cigarette smoking, eventually weed will become unpopular to smoke.

Unfortunately, it does seem like there is a big uptake in users after legalization, which hopefully will subside.

I don’t think Cigarette smoking became unpopular without heavy regulation. In countries that don’t have such restrictions, smoking is still ubiquitous.

Cigarette smoking stopped looking cool to teenagers and young adults.

Bans and advertising and showing smoking in movies did that.

Absolutely.

The things that did the most to drive down use were raising the price of cigarettes (which fund the healthcare costs) and banning smoking indoors, where it affected even non-smoking workers [1]. When we stop subsidizing harmful behavior, we get a lot less of it.

Especially in places that are super-cold.

[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1155/2012/961724

The data [1] don't really show this. In particular as recently as 2001-2003 35% of young adults (in the US) said they smoked, versus an all-time historical high of 45% across all age groups for some context. By 2019 that figure was down to 10% for young adults. The first bans on advertising smoking went into effect in 1971!

So what happened in the ~2000 era window of time? The internet and social media started exploding in popularity. In fact you'll find that the graph of the decline in teen pregnancy [2] looks roughly similar to the decline in young adult smoking, and probably for the exact same reason.

[1] - https://news.gallup.com/poll/509720/cigarette-smoking-rate-s...

[2] - https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/08/02/why-is-th...

A much more obvious reason for the decline in smoking is the popularization of vapes. If you look at U.S. adults, you'll see that the decline in tobacco smoking is almost entirely made up for by the increase in vaping.

Technically, of course, vapes aren't cigarettes. But It's a bit misleading to say that smoking is unpopular, when it's just been replaced by a doppelganger. Especially since vapes are also deeply detrimental to health [1].

[1] - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7348661/

Indoor smoking bans were passed during that period. This was a time period of major pushes to outright ban smoking. That’s when I saw it actually drop off.

“Throughout the early to mid-2000s, especially between 2004 and 2007, an increasing number of states enacted a statewide smoking ban of some kind.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_smoking_bans_in_the_Un...

Brave New World is actually a utopian story told from the perspective of a weird shut-in who only reads Shakespeare and the Bible.

Isn't it great to live in a world where everybody is entitled to their own opinions, eccentric though they may be.

The (western) world today is incredibly divisive, and differing opinions are not only met with hate but lies are rampant and people in power use this propaganda to keep themselves there, sucking resources from everyone else and cause untold amounts of suffering to satiate their infinite greed.

I’m not advocating for a world where people can’t speak their mind, but it does feel like a stretch to call the current situation “great”.

aren't propagating proprietary agendas the foundational problem, constituting the lies and the fraud that both the hate and it's recipients reactive actions result from, not the other way around?

it looks like it's not even a cycle, though it might look like one because the coal is shoved top down into the boiling boiler room, to reward and insentivize, the business and marketing psychologists and the disseminatora of the algorithms that keep the information flows to the population as separate as necessary. all under the auspice of cultural friction and artifical obstacles to keep the convection rate as limited as is necessary to keep political and social leaders in fear so that they don't even have to come running for advice when (some)one sparks a civil micro conflict.

the older cousin of the "small wars theory" ... a knife attack here, a truck into a christmas market there ... and suddenly people don't need to vote Right, AND their conservative party doesn't have to ruin their image by taking the upRight stance ... the situation demands it, after all, the people need protection

I didn’t understand anything about your comment. Please use capital letters to differentiate sentences—they are useful to help readers parse your ideas, they’re not a stylistic choice. You (seemingly) wrote something full of metaphor and covert examples and made it look like a run-on sentence, which is hard to read.

No. I want hundreds of people down at the docks having drug fueled orgies in broad daylight on the deck of a battleship. (Been a few years since I read it but pretty sure that's how the book ends ..) None of that real danger shit for me thanks.

And in another drug-parable 'The Matrix', Cypher is actually the hero, advocating the acceptance of the blue-pill retreat into synthetic chemical fantasy as opposed to the harsh depressing truth of reality.

His failure ultimately leads to 'system failure' and the deaths of billions of adults unable to mentally deal with their expulsion from the dream-world.

The buddy-cop television series Limitless spin off series is superior to the Bradley Cooper movie of the same name.

The recent Matrix movie is certainly bad, but I strongly believe that a single change would have been cool: in the scenes where it's revealed to the viewer that Neo looks like a different man[1], he should look like Cypher. Someone famous, important, struggling to reintegrate, joylessly chewing on some steak, etc. ...

1. https://assets-prd.ignimgs.com/2021/09/08/46-1631115261242.p...

>Brave New World is actually a utopian story told from the perspective of a weird shut-in who only reads Shakespeare and the Bible.

Moral of the story being that every utopia is, by definition, someone else's dystopia.

Funny how when I read Brave New World it greatly got on my nerves, mainly due to how it's supposed to be a "dystopian" novel. To me it indeed depicted a dream world in so many ways.

[2] - https://github.com/zrm5kfc401t0q1

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