6 ms·

Breakthrough therapy, huh? Let's remember that the DEA head (John C. Lawn) in the 80's forced a Schedule I classification, ignoring the recommendation of two s

by asteli 9y ago

Breakthrough therapy, huh? Let's remember that the DEA head (John C. Lawn) in the 80's forced a Schedule I classification, ignoring the recommendation of two separate hearings, and a successful federal lawsuit to do so. This was at a time when MDMA was already in burgeoning, but successful, clinical use.

Clubber 9y ago
Yea, the 80s were full of crazy people in government and everywhere. I remember when D&D was honestly considered being a gateway to satanism / Devil worship, and not in jest. And not a short two week news cycle thing, but it went on for years. Oh, and heavy metal too. It all finally started to wind down when the televangelists were exposed as money grubbing perverts. Paradise Lost took place in that era. If you haven't seen the movies, they're disturbing but good. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Memphis_Three https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Memphis_Three You millennials think you have it bad, the boomers were absolutely batshit crazy to GenXers (we were also considered lazy BTW).
- danblick 9y ago
  There's an insane quote from John Ehrlichman about the origin of the war on drugs in the Nixon Whitehouse: https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/ https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/ "The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did." I wonder, is that credible? If so, it's kind of amazing how little has actually changed since those laws were put in place. (Edit: okay, there are some reasons to doubt that quote) https://www.quora.com/Is-John-Ehrlichman-a-credible-source-when-he-claimed-that-the-war-on-drugs-was-intentionally-aimed-at-the-left-and-racial-minorities https://www.quora.com/Is-John-Ehrlichman-a-credible-source-w...
  - wallace_f 9y ago
    >it's kind of amazing how little has actually changed since those laws were put in place. Given there's a lot of bureaucratic inertia and jobs at stake here, and: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" ...is it really so surprising? This aspect of human nature is not isolated to the Drug War. Jaime Escalante was possibly the best teacher in America, and demoted because his success threatened the jobs of others-1 What about the never ending wars for profit? Wolf Blitzer at CNN tells us it's a moral problem for the US to stop funding war because a lot of jobs will be lost-2 The problem is that if we are to truly care about human dignity and equality, we need to fundamentally change the way in which we approve of jobs without critically looking at what they actually produce. This isn't just isolated within the economy of the War on Drugs. 1-reason.com/reasontv/2017/08/22/stossel-government-run-schools-crush-in 2-https://theintercept.com/2016/09/09/wolf-blitzer-is-worried-defense-contractors-will-lose-jobs-if-u-s-stops-arming-saudi-arabia/ https://theintercept.com/2016/09/09/wolf-blitzer-is-worried-...
    - phkahler 9y ago
      "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" We live in a society that puts people on an economic treadmill for their entire life. The government gives incentives for getting into debt - guarantees on student loans, mortgage interest tax break. We have property taxes in most states, so you always have a bill to pay even if you never borrow. Then people come along an propose things like basic income which can't work (I'll do the math for you one of these days since nobody else has). What they really want is to offset the costs of basic existence. I believe those costs could be lowered if the government would focus on that instead of profits and GDP.
      - balfirevic 9y ago
        > I'll do the math for you one of these days since nobody else has Please do.
  - dmichulke 9y ago
- tedajax 9y ago
  As a millennial the one thing I hope I can maintain going forward is a healthy respect for the new, young and different. Watching every new form of media get scrutinized by clueless old people has been endlessly frustrating.
  - DaiPlusPlus 9y ago
    Growing up, you must have known people older than yourself - be they schoolteachers, coworkers, academic professors - who seems to be "with it" who accepted and embraced change. I wondered what made them to be like that compared to the crotchety elders we've known, who are very resistant to change. Is it merely attitude, or does neuroplasticity come into it? I'm not even old yet (at least I don't think so) but I remember my mind being very resistant to adopting git over SVN and TFS because it was so different to what I was using and "if it ain't broken..." but now I love it. That experience has taught me to persevere: to not criticise something until I understand it, but what if I'm unable to understand something in future? Can I maintain a healthy mental state in that situation?
    - lgas 9y ago
      My bet is that to the degree that neuroplasticity is involved at all, it's effects are largely dominated by more mundane effects, such as the fact that as you get older you have kids and other commitments that keep you from spending as much time learning new things as you used to. Likewise an 80 year old that sees themselves as having less than 20 years left might require a higher bar for the payoff for dedicating themselves to learning something new than a 20 year old that sees themselves as having 80+ years left.
      - mmirate 9y ago
        > 20 year old that sees themselves as having 80+ years left Any such 20-year-old is delusional; becoming a centenarian (let alone having good enough health to appreciate it) is not much more common than winning the lottery, at best.
- ekianjo 9y ago
  > Oh, and heavy metal too. To be fair though Heavy Metal has been playing on the Satanist/Gore imagery for years, and not just in graphics, but lyrics too. Not because they are satanists, but it because it sold well.
  - cjslep 9y ago
    Because it sold well, as compared to non-Satanist/non-gore Heavy Metal? Definitely would like to see the data you used to draw that conclusion. And how inclusive your definition of "gore imagery" is.
    - _jal 9y ago
      To be fair, I think Slayer gets a lot more play than Stryper, but I have no data for you. That said, the notion that metal bands are fine-tuning lyrical content to minimax paydays is pretty funny. I think income-maximizers generally gravitate towards different careers. But I like picturing a bunch of corpse-paint MBAs sitting on a conference call: "Nice, Sean, I like it, I like it a lot. What about the next line - I think 'Demons dining on your shame' will sell better than 'Demons know this ain't no game'. How does that grab you?"
      - soundwave106 9y ago
        This is a funny thought. But my guess is that if they were income-maximizers, they wouldn't be writing metal with "satanic" or "gore" content. Slayer certainly has been successful, and have built a nice consistent career. You can do well with niches. But by one statistic, album sales... well, they've never created an album that's gone platinum. (Stryper actually has once!) The "money" to "maximize" in music, if anything, is in pop. A large portion of pop these days is written by teams of people these days. I'm not sure how it goes down personally, but I can easily see conference calls coming up with the best love metaphors for a teen idol to croon. :)
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - 9y ago
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > I remember when D&D was honestly considered being a gateway to satanism / Devil worship, and not in jest. And not a short two week news cycle thing, but it went on for years. Just because D&D is no longer one of the things people with a religious agenda hired to advise law enforcement are pushing as dangerous doesn't mean things are more sane, just the targets have shifted. > You millennials think you have it bad, the boomers were absolutely batshit crazy to GenXers (we were also considered lazy BTW). To be fair to the Boomers, a whole lot of the crazy we in GenX put up with was from the “Greatest Generation”, not the Boomers. (And to be even more fair to the Boomers, they were treated even worse in their youth for their conflicts with the orthodoxy of their elders.)
  - Clubber 9y ago
    Yes, the Greatest Generation were pretty hard core, growing up in a depression of which the only escape was to fight the Nazi and Imperial Japan war machines (and I guess Mussolini too).
    - cmurf 9y ago
      And then taxed themselves like crazy, while building massive private and public infrastructure, and had decades of middle class income growth that was the envy of the world.
      - icelancer 9y ago
        On the other hand, they also expanded into coastal regions and areas rife for economic development and secured first-mover advantages that will last for centuries. It's not all roses.
      - dragonwriter 9y ago
        The “taxed themselves like crazy, while building massive private and public infrastructure, and had decades of middle class income growth” was mostly a combination of the Lost and Silent Generations; the “Greatest” started dismantling that when they became politically dominant and had completely wrecked it by the time the Boomers eclipsed them.
- BurningFrog 9y ago
  > Yea, the 80s were full of crazy people in government and everywhere. 2017 is just as full of crazy people in government and everywhere. They're much easier to spot a few decades later...
  - im3w1l 9y ago
    I don't know... I think the clarity with which we see the past is illusory and that it comes from reading the over-simplified accounts of the victors.
    - BurningFrog 9y ago
      True. Also, like all tales from a culture you haven't lived in, people won't understand that actions that seem crazy today made perfect sense without technology X, Y & Z.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- QAPereo 9y ago
  The government is still full of crazy people...
  - wkearney99 9y ago
    The population in general is full of crazy people. No reason to think the gov't wouldn't be equally represented.
- aidenn0 9y ago
  The first D&D campaign I ran fell victim to this; two of the players were brothers and their mom picked up on that, despite the fact that I attended the same church as them.
- brookside 9y ago
  Some (not all) of these attitudes were religion-based. A reason I don't respect people's faith (superstition) because legitimized magical thinking still has an outsized effect on elections, laws, and policy, with many examples during our lifetimes.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
api 9y ago
Psychedelics and similar drugs for clinical treatment are a genuine example of a suppressed technology.
phkahler 9y ago
>> This was at a time when MDMA was already in burgeoning, but successful, clinical use. I remember seeing it on TV (Dateline or 20/20 or similar) they were talking with practitioners using it for couples therapy. It seemed really remarkable. That was well before it turned into a street drug (tainted with other stuff).

by asteli 9y ago

Clubber 9y ago

Yea, the 80s were full of crazy people in government and everywhere. I remember when D&D was honestly considered being a gateway to satanism / Devil worship, and not in jest. And not a short two week news cycle thing, but it went on for years. Oh, and heavy metal too. It all finally started to wind down when the televangelists were exposed as money grubbing perverts. Paradise Lost took place in that era. If you haven't seen the movies, they're disturbing but good. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Memphis_Three https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Memphis_Three You millennials think you have it bad, the boomers were absolutely batshit crazy to GenXers (we were also considered lazy BTW).

danblick 9y ago
There's an insane quote from John Ehrlichman about the origin of the war on drugs in the Nixon Whitehouse: https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/ https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/ "The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did." I wonder, is that credible? If so, it's kind of amazing how little has actually changed since those laws were put in place. (Edit: okay, there are some reasons to doubt that quote) https://www.quora.com/Is-John-Ehrlichman-a-credible-source-when-he-claimed-that-the-war-on-drugs-was-intentionally-aimed-at-the-left-and-racial-minorities https://www.quora.com/Is-John-Ehrlichman-a-credible-source-w...
- wallace_f 9y ago
  >it's kind of amazing how little has actually changed since those laws were put in place. Given there's a lot of bureaucratic inertia and jobs at stake here, and: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" ...is it really so surprising? This aspect of human nature is not isolated to the Drug War. Jaime Escalante was possibly the best teacher in America, and demoted because his success threatened the jobs of others-1 What about the never ending wars for profit? Wolf Blitzer at CNN tells us it's a moral problem for the US to stop funding war because a lot of jobs will be lost-2 The problem is that if we are to truly care about human dignity and equality, we need to fundamentally change the way in which we approve of jobs without critically looking at what they actually produce. This isn't just isolated within the economy of the War on Drugs. 1-reason.com/reasontv/2017/08/22/stossel-government-run-schools-crush-in 2-https://theintercept.com/2016/09/09/wolf-blitzer-is-worried-defense-contractors-will-lose-jobs-if-u-s-stops-arming-saudi-arabia/ https://theintercept.com/2016/09/09/wolf-blitzer-is-worried-...
  - phkahler 9y ago
    "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" We live in a society that puts people on an economic treadmill for their entire life. The government gives incentives for getting into debt - guarantees on student loans, mortgage interest tax break. We have property taxes in most states, so you always have a bill to pay even if you never borrow. Then people come along an propose things like basic income which can't work (I'll do the math for you one of these days since nobody else has). What they really want is to offset the costs of basic existence. I believe those costs could be lowered if the government would focus on that instead of profits and GDP.
    - balfirevic 9y ago
      > I'll do the math for you one of these days since nobody else has Please do.
- dmichulke 9y ago
tedajax 9y ago
As a millennial the one thing I hope I can maintain going forward is a healthy respect for the new, young and different. Watching every new form of media get scrutinized by clueless old people has been endlessly frustrating.
- DaiPlusPlus 9y ago
  Growing up, you must have known people older than yourself - be they schoolteachers, coworkers, academic professors - who seems to be "with it" who accepted and embraced change. I wondered what made them to be like that compared to the crotchety elders we've known, who are very resistant to change. Is it merely attitude, or does neuroplasticity come into it? I'm not even old yet (at least I don't think so) but I remember my mind being very resistant to adopting git over SVN and TFS because it was so different to what I was using and "if it ain't broken..." but now I love it. That experience has taught me to persevere: to not criticise something until I understand it, but what if I'm unable to understand something in future? Can I maintain a healthy mental state in that situation?
  - lgas 9y ago
    My bet is that to the degree that neuroplasticity is involved at all, it's effects are largely dominated by more mundane effects, such as the fact that as you get older you have kids and other commitments that keep you from spending as much time learning new things as you used to. Likewise an 80 year old that sees themselves as having less than 20 years left might require a higher bar for the payoff for dedicating themselves to learning something new than a 20 year old that sees themselves as having 80+ years left.
    - mmirate 9y ago
      > 20 year old that sees themselves as having 80+ years left Any such 20-year-old is delusional; becoming a centenarian (let alone having good enough health to appreciate it) is not much more common than winning the lottery, at best.
ekianjo 9y ago
> Oh, and heavy metal too. To be fair though Heavy Metal has been playing on the Satanist/Gore imagery for years, and not just in graphics, but lyrics too. Not because they are satanists, but it because it sold well.
- cjslep 9y ago
  Because it sold well, as compared to non-Satanist/non-gore Heavy Metal? Definitely would like to see the data you used to draw that conclusion. And how inclusive your definition of "gore imagery" is.
  - _jal 9y ago
    To be fair, I think Slayer gets a lot more play than Stryper, but I have no data for you. That said, the notion that metal bands are fine-tuning lyrical content to minimax paydays is pretty funny. I think income-maximizers generally gravitate towards different careers. But I like picturing a bunch of corpse-paint MBAs sitting on a conference call: "Nice, Sean, I like it, I like it a lot. What about the next line - I think 'Demons dining on your shame' will sell better than 'Demons know this ain't no game'. How does that grab you?"
    - soundwave106 9y ago
      This is a funny thought. But my guess is that if they were income-maximizers, they wouldn't be writing metal with "satanic" or "gore" content. Slayer certainly has been successful, and have built a nice consistent career. You can do well with niches. But by one statistic, album sales... well, they've never created an album that's gone platinum. (Stryper actually has once!) The "money" to "maximize" in music, if anything, is in pop. A large portion of pop these days is written by teams of people these days. I'm not sure how it goes down personally, but I can easily see conference calls coming up with the best love metaphors for a teen idol to croon. :)
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- 9y ago
dragonwriter 9y ago
> I remember when D&D was honestly considered being a gateway to satanism / Devil worship, and not in jest. And not a short two week news cycle thing, but it went on for years. Just because D&D is no longer one of the things people with a religious agenda hired to advise law enforcement are pushing as dangerous doesn't mean things are more sane, just the targets have shifted. > You millennials think you have it bad, the boomers were absolutely batshit crazy to GenXers (we were also considered lazy BTW). To be fair to the Boomers, a whole lot of the crazy we in GenX put up with was from the “Greatest Generation”, not the Boomers. (And to be even more fair to the Boomers, they were treated even worse in their youth for their conflicts with the orthodoxy of their elders.)
- Clubber 9y ago
  Yes, the Greatest Generation were pretty hard core, growing up in a depression of which the only escape was to fight the Nazi and Imperial Japan war machines (and I guess Mussolini too).
  - cmurf 9y ago
    And then taxed themselves like crazy, while building massive private and public infrastructure, and had decades of middle class income growth that was the envy of the world.
    - icelancer 9y ago
      On the other hand, they also expanded into coastal regions and areas rife for economic development and secured first-mover advantages that will last for centuries. It's not all roses.
    - dragonwriter 9y ago
      The “taxed themselves like crazy, while building massive private and public infrastructure, and had decades of middle class income growth” was mostly a combination of the Lost and Silent Generations; the “Greatest” started dismantling that when they became politically dominant and had completely wrecked it by the time the Boomers eclipsed them.
BurningFrog 9y ago
> Yea, the 80s were full of crazy people in government and everywhere. 2017 is just as full of crazy people in government and everywhere. They're much easier to spot a few decades later...
- im3w1l 9y ago
  I don't know... I think the clarity with which we see the past is illusory and that it comes from reading the over-simplified accounts of the victors.
  - BurningFrog 9y ago
    True. Also, like all tales from a culture you haven't lived in, people won't understand that actions that seem crazy today made perfect sense without technology X, Y & Z.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
QAPereo 9y ago
The government is still full of crazy people...
- wkearney99 9y ago
  The population in general is full of crazy people. No reason to think the gov't wouldn't be equally represented.
aidenn0 9y ago
The first D&D campaign I ran fell victim to this; two of the players were brothers and their mom picked up on that, despite the fact that I attended the same church as them.
brookside 9y ago
Some (not all) of these attitudes were religion-based. A reason I don't respect people's faith (superstition) because legitimized magical thinking still has an outsized effect on elections, laws, and policy, with many examples during our lifetimes.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

api 9y ago

Psychedelics and similar drugs for clinical treatment are a genuine example of a suppressed technology.

phkahler 9y ago

>> This was at a time when MDMA was already in burgeoning, but successful, clinical use. I remember seeing it on TV (Dateline or 20/20 or similar) they were talking with practitioners using it for couples therapy. It seemed really remarkable. That was well before it turned into a street drug (tainted with other stuff).