A little digging and it appears these ads were in magazines like Hustler, Penthouse and High Times - not the The New York Review of Books or more mainstream titles, which makes much more sense.
The mainstream ads never mentioned what the product was for.
My mom had almost collected someones "US States" mini spoons set, when someone told her they were coke spoons she lost her enthusiasm for getting the full set. Some truck stop or something had sold them as a promotional thing, coulda been anything but "mini spoons" were a popular utensil right then.
It was also amusing, as a kid in the 80s, when these things would come out at yard sales and such. Pop up with "how much for this?" and watch someone turn deep pink; or alternately get the last bit of someones antique stash that the rest of their family was unaware of.
McDonald’s briefly had these small plastic spoons as coffee stirrers in the 70’s. They really looked almost designed for coke. We made a lot of fun about it. By the next year they had switched to a flat plastic stirrer that could not hold anything. I think they heard all the jokes about getting a Big Mac and a Coke.
My regular ice cream truck driver, in the very early 80s when I was maybe 7 years old, also dealt drugs out of the truck and had this long coke nail I was fascinated with. Everybody liked him, and he would front kids ice cream when they were broke.
I am not sure if there is a name for this phenomenon, but it seems to be a frequent issue where, e.g., in this case some probably very limited run ads in obscure magazines only the fringe of society every even possibly saw are now in the future interpreted and assumed to have been seen by everyone, all the time, and were of far greater importance or impact than they really were in reality.
Does anyone know if there is a term for that kind of "bias" or self-deception?
The odd reflexive impact of that seems to be that today's historians and social sciences people are prone to falling prey to the "bias" and then weaving it into preconceived notions and narratives due to other biases like confirmation bias.
All of the magazines mentioned had massive circulations and were available at every 7-11 in the country.
A more interesting phenomenon is where media consumed by a tiny group of well-educated wealthy elites is considered universal or common. There's no way the New Yorker had a bigger circulation than Hustler in the 80s.
edit: according to wikipedia, Hustler's peak circulation in the 80s was 3 million copies a month.
You see it all the time on Facebook, or reddit, or wherever people post things like 'Did you know <group of ancient people believed> <something utterly ridiculous> without quantifying whether or not this was a common belief, or just a drinking story that they told.
An outsider who isn't careful about this might make a similar claim that modern Americans believe in a heroic lumberjack giant called Paul Bunyan, who has a giant pet blue ox. This is technically correct, but is also utterly useless as a description of modern Americans.
In this case, the ads were seen by far more people than understood them. Even those that asked and found out, many of them weren't interested and tuned it out mostly; so its not surprising if they do not remember it decades later.
History never has much to do with what actually happened, anyhow.
It's a pretty weird movie, somehow my stepdad rented it from the local video rental in the 80's and I watched it (at night) before my parents realized what it was about, otherwise it for sure wouldn't have passed the censor.
Thank you, there's a bit of sensationalism in the article and that it wouldn't say where the ads ran was part of that. I was sure it wasn't in Time, and probably not Playboy.
I was curious whether the little spoons are still sold, since until now I had been unaware of the true purpose of those little things. Apparently, as of today they are the first item on Amazon when searching for miniature coke spoons.
"Tiny Snuff Spoon, Metal Micro Scoops Medicine Powder Spoon for Filling Vials, Spoon Pendants Necklace Loop, Set of 6"
Maybe I'm confused, but on [1], is the "fun" the bearing on top is meant to be used for a euphemism for some obscure act of violence, or do they actually just mean it's part pen part fidget toy?
Anyone who wants a weapon would likely just use the nearest available plastic pen, a humble but likely more effective instrument in all cases. However, can you imagine buying a $130 titanium jumbopen only to find out that it doesn't even spin? I would be absolutely livid. Wars have been started over less!
Indeed! If you watch the pen's 30 second video it becomes obvious - immediately - that the pen is a steal at that price. It would still be a bargain when sold at for least $349.00.
I remember all the little "coffee stirrers" with the comically tiny spoon like ends. Of course the explanation was it's for stirring your coffee or adding a little sugar. Though who adds a tiny bump of sugar to their coffee? Turns out it was for coke and they were commonly available everywhere. The McDonalds ones were semi famous for that.
Its similar to those little fake flowers in a glass tube on counters in corner stores which make great crack pipes (same with those short cheap tire pressure gauges). Or the cheap looking socks they oddly sell which are useful for tie off before shooting heroin.
Oh funny, I wondered why they had so many of these at the gas station by the checkout. I bought one and it was terrible for telling my tire pressure. I could not understand why so many people wanted to measure their tire pressure.
Many, many years ago, naive me bought my girlfriend one of those roses at a 7-Eleven, and I still remember her response: "Oh, Honey, you bought me a craaack pipe!" We're not together anymore.
Plenty of people, including me, fill tires with free air at gas stations which gets them in the door. It's not surprising that cheap tire pressure gauges would be sold near the checkout, unrelated to drug use.
They'll surely all allow some kind of measurement, otherwise someone will overfill their tyre, burst it, and then sue for the fact the explosion has left them with brain damage.
If you do your own compounding of supplement powders, nootropics, etc. into gelcaps, you probably own one of these.
Bonus fact: there's a brand of lab scoops with a very fun name — the scoopula (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scoopula). It's so fun to say that that's just what many people call lab scoops, not realizing it's a brand.
The glass rose is definitely for smoking crack. Else why is it ofen sold as a combo with a peice of (also-required) chore-boy. 5 bucks for both. Usually on the same shelf with the round-ended meth pipes which dont seem to require any cover but being called "oil burner"
The others were listed in a similar article. The small tire pressure gauge was told to me by a friend who at one point had a crack habit and used said items to smoke crack and said it was a well known item to use for such a purpose.
Your original comment makes it sound like the main purpose of the small spoon is for cocaine - "Turns out it was for coke". But it's not "for coke", it's for stirring your coffee, and it's just that cocaine users found an alternative use for it. The article makes this pretty clear.
Okay, you convinced me about that one (I haven't heard about this love rose thing before, and I don't live in the US). But my point about the stirrers still stands.
I also think that the cheap socks are just that. But maybe they're popular due to their additional unintended use.
The size of the clientele for many of these things probably would have been much smaller without the illicit uses, and they probably were created without illicit motives. Once there is demand, however, the further use was probably quantifiable as legit vs. off-brand use and even if one maker of glass tubes (for e.g.) stops because they're useful as rock pipes of some kind, someone else would be happy to pick up the slack.
thanks for the link. I have seen full sized roses in plastic tubes at gas stations and I was trying to figure out how those could be used for drugs. These little ones make more sense.
I think I was 15 when I called bullshit on that coffee spoon. I didn't understand what was going on exactly, but part of me knew that was a stupid size for coffee. I may have even joked about it being for cocaine, but I don't think I was serious about that. Nobody where I lived used cocaine, right?
That ugly disposable McDonald's branded spoon doesn't strike me as something that 70s-80s era women would view as being "cool" or "hip". I really doubt a guy like Burt Reynolds would spend a few grand on a small amount of blow and then cheap out on the spoon.
That link actually throughly refutes what the OP claimed.
They claimed that drug paraphernalia was being sold as "coffee stirrers" (wink, wink) that nobody would actually use for coffee.
That link says people were using actual coffee stirrers to also snort cocaine. Their original intended use was as coffee stirrers, not drug paraphernalia.
Indeed, and for all the people scoffing at how they can't possibly be coffee stirrers, most coffee shops nowadays give you tiny plastic or wooden twigs, which are far less effective at actually stirring, and yet still get the job done ok.
A small spoon at the end of a modern stirrer would be much more effective, yet I guess people would accuse them of selling drug paraphernalia.
No, there's an absurdly minor difference. Plenty of "coffee stirrers" were intentionally manufactured as coke spoons, and plenty of earnest coffee stirrers were used instead as coke spoons.
McDonald's was obviously not intentionally trying to manufacture coke spooks for absolutely no conceivable gain, but I bet their packaging designers looked at a lot of random coffee stirrers and tried to make one that looked like the fanciest of those.
Worked 3rd shift for a gas station for a year and a half. Seedy elements would come in and ask for the glass roses regularly, but we didn't sell them because they were known paraphernalia.
The socks are for huffing paint/other solvents. Most junkies won't even need to tie off, and if they do they'll buy the shoelaces that are sold right next to the socks!
yeah a lot of people are dying right now from fentanyl polluted cocaine, and it is fairly obvious from the reports but every thread goes the same way:
"its so insensitive to suggest this person I respected did drugs, how dare you!"
++20 comments of arguing
<toxicology article comes out>: It was fentanyl in their cocaine.
until this aspect of supply chain control gets taken seriously by the government without worrying about acknowledgment equalling condoning, the ignorance is going to keep perpetuating because the education was done so poorly. abstinence-only education doesn't work.
Saw that there is fentanyl laced pot in US states now, especially in Connecticut which is very surprising as Connecticut is a legal state. Articles were all light on details so I wonder where the marijuana is purchased from. I would be surprised if it was a dispensary. If not a dispensary though, why are people buying pot from street level dealers when anyone can just walk into a dispensary and buy lab tested legal marijuana?
> If not a dispensary though, why are people buying pot from street level dealers when anyone can just walk into a dispensary and buy lab tested legal marijuana?
Many frameworks are doing heavy ID data collection in the stores, instead of just glancing at your ID. This makes a lot of people uncomfortable, whether it is an anti-establishment user avoiding the government their whole life, to school teachers or religious leaders, or one of the 20 million Americans working for the federal government let alone someone with a clearance or a federal contract.
Secondly, the cost and punitive taxes are high to many people.
Exactly. Many people are one regulatory change away from alot of problems. Another potential issue is insurance - if your life insurer obtains records that you’re buying marijuana, your family may see their insurance claim challenged if you carry a non-smoker policy.
“Background Checks” are the magical non-solution for many problems. Between work, church activities and youth sports, I probably have 6-8 entities running background checks of varying levels of intrusiveness on me annually. I’m sure that information is shared with all sorts of third parties.
Seems like the cure for all of this is for politicians to get around to making it federally legal. That would involve going against their lobbyists / donors so not sure its going to happen any time soon. Would be pleasantly surprised if it did though.
DanceSafe, a harm reduction focused non-profit, had this to say regarding the recent news about it:
"We've gotten a lot of inquiries about the recent Connecticut statement confirming the presence of #fentanyl in a lab-tested cannabis sample. This article breaks this down in a way that we align with, but we have some additional comments.
Regarding the issue of this lab report as a whole:
1. It is unclear why the lab report designates that the sample contained delta-9 THC, marijuana, and fentanyl. We are confused by the separate designation of delta-9 THC and marijuana, since THC is a component of marijuana (along with over 100 other cannabinoids). We will be contacting the lab to inquire further.
2. As elucidated in this article, the circumstances around this test are unclear and we are missing additional information. We are tentatively agreeing that this appears to be a confirmed report of fentanyl in cannabis, but we do not believe that this represents any sort of market trend at this time, and more information is required to determine how and why this might have happened.
Regarding this article, we have some disclaimers about language/content that we disagree with:
1. It is technically possible to "smoke" fentanyl. Fentanyl can be burned and destroyed in direct contact with flame, but it is feasible for fentanyl to be close enough to a flame to vaporize.
2. We're not happy about the choice to say "All it takes is one idiot who thinks it's a good idea to mix fentanyl in marijuana and we can have a cluster of overdoses." People have been speedballing all kinds of drugs for ages. This can be a risky behavior, but we still do not condone calling people idiots - especially when drug education has been made intentionally inaccessible and healthcare is prohibitively expensive and difficult to acquire.
Additional general notes:
1. If someone wanted to intentionally mix fentanyl into their weed, they'd most likely dissolve it in alcohol and spray it on, not just crumble a tiny and possibly lethal dose of it on top of a random part of a nug.
2. You cannot use fentanyl test strips on cannabis (or any other organic material). We are not concerned about fentanyl in cannabis at this time.
3. The risk of cannabis being contaminated with fentanyl remains astronomically low, if it exists at all. Until additional information arises, we can assume that there was indeed fentanyl present in this cannabis. For now, we don't know anything about the how or why.
4. Strong, harsh taste when smoking illicit market cannabis is most likely an indicator that you have picked up synthetic cannabis of some sort. Synthetic cannabinoids are sprayed onto potpourri and other plant matter. It is very unlikely that you would have smoked anything sprayed with PCP (which is virtually nonexistent in the U.S.), and nearly statistically impossible that you would be smoking something containing fentanyl."
Because people actually want to buy fentanyl laced products. I've known people addicted to stimulants that they buy knowing that they are cut with fentanyl just to get that combination with the opioid high.
Do you think that's the case for cocaine? Personally, I have a hard time believing that because of both the type of high cocaine is for and because that seems like a worst case for a mix since mixing fentanyl in a powder seems like it would be error prone to me, but I can't deny that people do crazy shit.
I feel like this is a parable for A/B testing without considering the consequences.
For McDonald's, straws and stirrers are provided gratis, so you aren't succeeding if you raise demand for the stirrer. If a stirrer sold you more coffee, then it was a success. Just like the thicker straw sold more shakes (some of their competitors never figured that out, and one wonders if they ever actually talked to a customer or just sat in smoky meeting rooms bullshitting all day).
However coffee being a stimulant, there is probably some overlap between the two demographics. It'd be hard to track if a lot of stirrers left with a coffee drinker but were unused for coffee. So perhaps in fact they did sell extra coffee to cocaine users and just patted themselves on the back for the increased revenue.
Except that it heavily contributes to supporting foolish policies and the bliss quickly wears off and requires ever increasing amount of ignorance to achieve the same bliss … see today's policies for reference.
I.e. ignorance of the drug underworld vs social ignorance of policy makers
To get "true" knowledge (lack of ignorance) on the suffering of drug abuse, one must experience it in some way, so avoiding this experience is the "ignorance" that leads to the "bliss"
Or at least that is my interpretation of the saying :)
Might take longer than 50 years, but I would bet things go even further to simply "salmon" -- the not-lab-grown variety, that is, and same for other meat.
Nah, all they will eat is salmon, it will be excess from the iron fertilization they use to counteract global warming. They will have to harvest the salmon boom to protect the algae bloom or the albedo will drop and cook everyone.
It's funny that these are marketed as luxury products that sell for under $40. I mean, I know inflation is a thing, but $40 was not a lot of money back then.
As a side note: the 70s saw a particularly high level of inflation. Note that the equivalent price in 1980 was ~$85, so it doubled in one decade. If that level of inflation stayed constant (doubling every decade), then it would be equivalent to about $1,280 today.
many products promoted as "luxury" are about telling middle class people that their products imitate upper class signals, without that actually being true. Thus they're usually expensive for a salaried worker but not beyond affordable - whereas products that the upper class genuinely use to signal are well beyond the balance of wage labourers.
It's so curious that cocaine is still illegal, one could assume purely as a side effect of the nations that produce it and the complications that are involved with those in charge of distributing it, which some might argue is a byproduct of it being illegal in the first place.
When taken on its own, it's a surprisingly mild stimulant as a nasal snuff, not at all like in the movies. When taken nasally, it has a short half life, low potential for adverse side effects in normal adults, and only causes alcohol like euphoria in the highest doses. I can see why it is still used in medicine, it is highly efficacious, and some day I can see it being tolerated, if not legalized.
It might just be me being old, as we tend to remember the positives more than the negatives, but this was a nice trip down memory lane. It is unfortunate that the hobby has settled/devolved into its lowest element, these days.
I have a friend who dabbled in coke for a few weeks. I hung out with her once while she was high, and she was uncharacteristically mean. At some point she decided her life was becoming too focused on doing coke and told me she was selling what she had left. It took a while for her to finally commit to her last dose, but she managed to get rid of the cocaine, largely motivated by the money she would recover.
For weeks after, she would crave and daydream about cocaine. The fact that, despite being able to quit, she missed it that much made me decide to never ever try it. I know people get addicted to games or gambling or whatever else, but it seemed pretty bad.
Everyone I have ever met who is on cocaine has been a complete ass for the duration. Even people that I normally get on with just become utterly intolerable and blind to the damage it's doing to their relationships with people aren't taking.
From my limited experience, it removes filters sort of like being drunk, except without as much debilitation. The mean things being said could have been someone that enjoys being a bit mean (snarky/biting) but refrains from friends, or someone that is sometimes unintentionally insensitive but is more cautious in their speech normally to prevent it, and that caution is lost.
For me, it was a chance for me to ask a bunch of questions of people about things I was curious about but were probably none of my business or impolite to talk about, so I suspect to some degree I was guilty of the latter one.
I will say that it was incredibly enjoyable when I took it with the people I was with, which were in mostly safe and contained environments. If the draw to both immediately do more and to seek it out weeks and months later to repeat the experience wasn't so strong, I would recommend it to everyone to try at least once. As it is, I would be cautious if trying for the first time and space out usage if you tend to overindulge and/or aren't one to naturally self-regulate.
You're clearly projecting in a massive way. I know plenty of people who do coke, some regularly some rarely, and they are among the nicest people I know, primarily because I don't associate with people who aren't generally nice.
Sounds like you were just associating with pricks and those pricks happened to use a popular drug.
just like the teachers who claim to know when students are teaching?
They all make the same speech but Somehow they never seem to know about it when 7 people in the class got a copy of test in advance and prepared answers. For every student who's bad a cheating and got caught, there is >15 that the teacher never knew about.
It’s not exactly free of side effects, but a lot of the adverse affects on mood come from doing it when you already feel bad and from sleep deprivation.
Generally yes. The people I've hung out with while they were doing coke were pushy, mildly aggressive, and would just. not. shut. the. fuck. up. Being sober around cokeheads is not a pleasant experience.
That said, I did coke once(well, twice, but I'm pretty sure the second time was foot powder). It was absolutely serene. I felt crystal clear, dialed in, and perfectly zen. I didn't have a desire to talk, but to just observe. I felt like I had the hearing of a cat. Then again, I probably have unmedicated ADHD. No commercial stimulants have ever made me feel like that though.
Coke's reputation is WAY worse than what it deserves.
I guarantee you these "I tried it a few times and can't stop thinking about it" stories are complete BS.
The effects are very short lived and the more you take the more edgy, nervous and wired you get. It becomes really hard to enjoy.
I guesstimate that 80% of all coke is consumed by completely "normal" people after a few drinks in a bar on the weekends, and that's that. No craving, character changes and all that stuff.
There have been studies that show certain people are far more susceptible to cocaine addiction than others. Same as with alcohol. But for most people, developing a problematic addiction seems very rare.
Some people are just destined to become addicted to something. Anyone who's ever been drunk has an idea of the level of dedication and the massive amount of work that would be involved in becoming an alcoholic. Being drunk constantly is far too much work for most people and becoming a coke addict is exponentially more expensive and less convenient than being a drunk. Every 15 minutes snorting or every 5 minutes smoking cocaine just isn't something most people would ever attempt to do for stretches longer than an evening.
I haven't used it, but I am in principle tolerant of drug use. The three metrics of legalization/safety I have heard are: Level of addiction, Ease of overdose, and long term health impact.
You say cocaine in small amounts is a dandy stimulant. I take Adderall for ADHD occasionally, and I've been told by those who have used both that the differences in effect are smaller than one might guess. And while I suppose I could OD by taking a bunch of Adderall pills, I don't have a "drive" to keep on taking more for a short term hit.
My rambling is to say: My impression of cocaine use is that it does long term damage to the body and the nasal cavity, and that its short-term high makes people chase it more and thus is ripe for OD.
So I'm not too shocked that it's a controlled substance vs. something like cannabis.
Cocaine also induces microischemia - basically constricts your capillaries and starves the neurons/glia of oxygen. This happens slowly over time and is cumulative.
As mentioned, coke is high on the abuse potential scale due to its rapid onset and withdrawal, short loop between behavior and reward.
Alcohol also causes ischemia. Prescription amphetamines also cause ischemia but are legal.
> As mentioned, coke is high on the abuse potential scale due to its rapid onset and withdrawal, short loop between behavior and reward.
I wonder if attaching an amino acid (a la Vyvanse) would improve its pharmacokinetic profile to reduce this addiction potential. We'll never know, because its not legal to do research on medical potential for Schedule I drugs.
Of course it should be legal. But the way you talk about it is so bizarre. Cocaine has ruined so many lives. It's incredibly addicting to some. It can destroy your nose, literally putting holes inside of it.
Misuse of anything is going to have ill effects. People with improper hygiene and care will develop all kinds of adversities from its use. Assuming you checked out the link, there are several devices dedicated to nasal hygiene as evidence that these people exist. Liquid cocaine is popular for a reason, allow me to explain:
Cocaine by itself is a desiccant, it seeks moisture, which is why it gets clumpy in humid areas. When it is used nasally, it dries the nasal mucosa, and triggers a mucous secretion response, which then dissolves it and allows it to pass into the capillaries in the sinuses, throat, and lungs. This cycle of drying repeatedly can cause a sclerosis of the nasal membrane, which can eventually erode the tissues affected by it.
Conversely, when proper hygiene is observed, like with nasal washes, or using liquid cocaine directly, the desiccant properties are eliminated and damage is avoided: this is how ocular cocaine is prepared and used with no adverse effects in medicine - eye surgery, etc.
I take exception to your comment about it being 'bizarre', it doesn't help the conversation to begin with an adversarial tone.
All fair, and I didn't mean that to be 'adversarial'. It was just bizarre in that, I have never seen someone speak so positively about cocaine lol. I was pointing out is I think, when talking about the pros, it might be worth mentioning the cons for some stuff
Other than being illegal, there is not a whole lot wrong with it, relatively speaking. Let's disregard cigarettes and alcohol, those are too easy. Look at food, the majority of my country is eating themselves to their early deaths, and experience all manner of outcomes worse - diabetes, cancers, immobility, sudden heart attacks.
I'm not saying it doesn't have some risks, but I am saying with all other things considered, these are the same risks associated with running, sex, and spirited debates.
Consider this: It's normal for people to do this thing where they feign not being able to function without coffee in the AM but it is somehow not socially acceptable to have a bit of cocaine on some weekends. Let us consider that it's a dual standard for what is essentially the same thing, enhanced attentiveness, a brief euphoria, better focus, and an urge to poop.
If all addictions are equal, isn't the person who can't function without coffee or cigarette the same as people who can't go without a line? So you might ask "I've never seen someone steal to buy coffee, but I've seen people steal to buy coke, why is that?"
My estimate is that it is because one is normalized and one isn't, you simply have a subset of people who are self admittedly okay with breaking 'the law' by doing coke, so naturally they might normalize theft as well since it is a hobby that is so highly penalized only those with the shakiest hold on reality/morality is likely to do it. That distorts the image of it, and we then begin to develop this social stigma.
Ergo, legalize it, you won't have more of this any more than you have coffee-heads who happen to also be thieves.
You're completely ignoring the fact that just a couple grams of cocaine can kill a person. It might not be particularly easy to take a lethal overdose of cocaine but consider how easy it is compared to other popular substances: nicotine, alcohol, cannabis, coffee, psychedelics, etc. It's an immediately dangerous substance that can cause serious harm in a short moment of disinhibiton, which I think justifies it's illegality inasmuch as any recreational drug should be illegal.
You're right -- the lethal dosage of cocaine is about 95 milligrams per kilogram of body weight. This translates to about 6.5 grams for a 150-lb person. [0]
You neglected to mention that the lethal dose for caffeine is in the same magnitude -- "150-200mg per kg of body weight, or 5 to 10 grams of total caffeine ingested, is considered lethal." [1]
Given that the street price of cocaine in the USA is around $120 / gram [2], it would cost about $780 to overdose. Meanwhile, I can easily and legally order 16 grams of caffeine tablets online (or in any CVS) [3] for $11.49 -- enough to kill two people.
Does this cause you to rethink any assumptions?
Don't forget -- at one time, drinking coffee in public was punishable by death. [4]
You don't go psychotic and destroy your brain from neurotoxic doses from chronic caffiene abuse. In the past you could take cocaine like you took coffee, but only stimulants were the ones to be pretty much universally controlled. Many countries do not even allow the entire category of stimulants to be prescribed as a medication for ADHD, such as Japan or Germany.
Yup, that's my preferred method of intake. Quick, easy, clean. I don't understand why people bother making lines, or using spoons or whatnot. Sure, the onset is a bit slower, but I'm rarely in that kind of a hurry.
Edit: Interesting that someone would downvote something that is purely subjective.
Insufflation generally makes a compound more bioavailable and gives a higher peak but a far shorter duration. It can take 100mg orally to get a normal bump effect. So people view it as wasting coke, but the effects can last 4-6 hours.
Also one of Thomas Edison's favorite drinks! He's famous for rarely sleeping and working continuously -- I wonder how much of the effects are due to Vin Mariani vs his natural work ethic.
Should we make MDMA, opium, heroin and crack legal to purchase and broadly available for all adults without any form of prescription? After all, Tobacco and Alcohol is legal...
Here is the thing, some highs are much more potent and addictive than others. Growing up in the 90's and having seen the damages of heroin, I'd say no, it doesn't matter whether Tobacco or Alcohol are also legal.
Yes, definitely. If you're talking about instantly killing the fentanyl problem dead, bringing a bunch of people who have marginalized back into the community, reducing property crime, and saving a lot of lives, you couldn't make a better choice.
Legalizing drugs would make drug addicts far more accessible to drug treatment schemes. Regulating the supply would additionally make being a drug addict a lot safer and less dominating for one's life. Heroin is safe. It's the universe of things around heroin that kill. Lots of being murdered, and going to prison; fent ods, MRSA infections, liver failure from Hep C, AIDS; doing crime and betraying everyone you know to get a substance that costs a nickel a dose to manufacture. All of these are symptoms of drug enforcement, not heroin.
I'd hope its clear to most people by now that opioids are viciously addictive in a way virtually no other substances are. Lumping them together with other drugs is disingenuous.
I largely agree with you but I’m not sure MDMA belongs here. You do see people who are addicted to MDMA, I know of someone who goes through a gram every weekend, but in most cases if you use MDMA too frequently it’ll stop feeling special. It’s kind of inherently anti-addictive.
Deeply unpopular opinion here but I can attest to a few friends that sought help for Marijuana addiction. There is a whole community that's helping people get off of Marijuana: https://www.reddit.com/r/leaves/
I am fine with legalization of many drugs but one has to watch out for excess and lack of moderation. And the stench, I smell Marijuana in my apartment complex and it has sort of ruined a beautiful courtyard. I wish it was not so potent and people really need to be courteous (same with Tobacco).
The "addiction" doesn't have anything to do with particular drugs, it's an underlying flaw that can be triggered by more or less anything that's enjoyable enough and meets a few other requirements. Sex, gambling, food, eating one's own hair, huffing glue, cutting oneself, and the list just goes on.
Dependency on the other hand is a tangible scientifically provable phenomenon that can be cured in a matter of days for any drug. Cocaine dependency is no different from caffeine or nicotine dependency and is over after 3 days of abstinence.
I respectfully disagree that it should be legal. In my younger years I went through a month of hard use. It was awful. It makes you act completely out of character-more aggressive, less inhibitions when performing risky activities (e.g., speeding, theft, approaching members of the opposite sex), and you can actually do a lot of damage because, unlike alcohol, you are high functioning the whole time. I don't want to think about living in a society where that's legal.
Respectfully, you learned that it's not for you, but do you think you deserved to go to jail for trying it?
For me, everyone is entitled to make that decision, and if legal, a lot of the problems the black market creates go away, the largest of which is not imprisoning people for a victimless crime.
So you're saying that we should just punish the eventual crime of theft, not the factor that contributed to the theft. I can support that argument.
However, there's also the fact that the substance is basically a harmful addictive poison. We spend so much time building legislation that prevents harmful chemicals from being sold to consumers. We punish companies for selling legal opiates due the harm it causes consumers. Why would we push to legalize a harmful chemical?
> It makes you act completely out of character-more aggressive, less inhibitions when performing risky activities (e.g., speeding, theft, approaching members of the opposite sex), and you can actually do a lot of damage because, unlike alcohol, you are high functioning the whole time.
I find it interesting that all the symptoms you list also result from wealth. Maybe being a billionaire should be illegal too.
Oh gosh, I've seen enough people use cocaine that I wouldn't call it a "mild" stimulant by any stretch of my imagination. It's basically a stronger form of caffeine.
One friend of mine with severe ADHD turns completely normal on it. Everyone else that I've seen use it becomes an asshole. I'm pretty open minded about letting adults choose what they want to do with their bodies, but I don't like being around people using coke.
Edit: If it wasn't for the cardiac issues, I'd wonder if it would make a better ADHD medicine.
> Doesn't a coke habit permanently mess with your dopamine receptors? Literally makes it harder for you to function as a human, even after you stop.
Not really... Your body is really good at adapting and your body will compensate when drugs put it out of homeostasis, when your you stop taking those drugs your body will stop compensating for it. You won't be "permanently" depressed after quitting a coke habit and you won't have "permanently" shrunk balls after quitting steroids etc. etc.
This is actually downplaying it. This would happen to 100% of steroid users, but thank god for the internet: it allowed people 1) to share the science about how to do steroids (and auxiliary drugs) in a way that avoids this, and 2) to order the necessary products from overseas with confidence in their authenticity.
Yep. Same as a regular Ritalin or Adderall habit: when you stop taking them, you have a withdrawal effect. That convinces many that the drugs work. ("Look at what a mess I am without it!")
The withdrawal from a serious coke addiction has got to be much more severe, though.
Are you suggesting that out of every 100 people who consume cocaine on a given night, 5 of them have a heart attack? Even DARE didn't lie that outrageously.
While it's likely a trigger to pre-existing condition it's not really safe at all like many try to paint. Same goes to most drugs really - OD's are very easy to do once you are on a binge.
I'm all in for recreational use, but these problems shouldn't be ignored. Keeping drugs illegal does not help, but having unmarked little baggies and candy all around little ones is very dangerous.
The heart attack stats are likely incorrect. An international WHO study on cocaine[0] concluded:
"A majority of health consequences may not be directly attributed to cocaine use. Cocaine often contributes to or exacerbates the conditions reported, rather than causing them."
"Few experts describe cocaine as invariably harmful to health. Cocaine-related problems are widely perceived to be more common and more severe for intensive, high-dosage users and very rare and much less severe for occasional, low-dosage users."
As a child of the late 1960s, early 1970s, that was a messed up time.
After the assassinations and riots of the late 60s, Kent State, Watergate, the end of the Vietnam war, people were done. The drugs just flowed. I was frequently a designated driver for my trashed friends. A lot of those people that did the most drugs are now some of the most wrapped up conservative ass hats as adults. I can't talk to them, haven't been able to in years. Their excuse is always "It was wrong then, and I'll be damned if I am going to let others make the same mistake." My own kids (Gen Z) were all so much more rational through their teenage years. There is hope for the world as long as the old farts just sit down and shut up. I only speak up because I am sick and tired of my peers. There should definitely be an upper age limit to serving in Public office, and maybe even an upper age limit to voting.
> In 1986, under Ronald Reagan, the Anti-Drug Abuse Act was passed. [...] The act also created the first laws against money laundering or moving illegally obtained money (such as drug sale proceeds) into or out of bank accounts.
The Bank Secrecy Act was enacted in 1970. Money laundering had already been on the books. Reagan’s drug law widened the scope and increased the record-keeping and reporting requirements. I think Nixon is the one who has the distinction of enacting the “first” AML law.
I feel like the thing missing here is which magazines. Just like you can find unlawful/illegal websites before the web were magazines and books. So, were these in mainstream publications or were they in already outlawed publications?
Curiously the website is called "Rare Historical Photos" but the premise under which this is [so] shocking is that these are not rare adverts.
Half the ads say "Find it at your nearest headshop" or something to that effect. These were in stoner magazines and these adverts and products never really went away from that space to be fair.
I belive Husler. I seem to have 70's Hustler graphics stuck in my brain stem? It seemed like all the nudie magazines, except Playboy, and Penthouse, had a lot of drug paraphernalia. (My dad had a stash of Playboys, and the kid down the street's father favored Hustler.)
As a kid, I remember seeing 5000 Sudafed (actually the main chemical ingredient) for $20. I was always confused. Why would anyone want so much cold medicine, and later on--they must be for confusing the drug buyers.
Even with all the advertising, and copious amounts of Sudafed, making meth was an unknown to many drug dealers.
I had a chem teacher in college who liked to tell about the student he had who made meth, and sold it. Forget his name? Anyway, the word was he ruined his eyesight because early on he worked with too much mercury. There was one student who kept her book open during the test. He would walk up/down the isles and couldn't spot her cheating.
Low grade coke was everywhere. I tried it three times in my twenties. I was offered it at parties. All three times off duty cops offered it to me. Yea--probally evidence. I never felt anything though? It was weak, or my constitution was different?
A lot of people smoked cigarettes. Coke was around. Drinking was like today, but one for the road was real. Opiates were only for the down, and out.
Bias and conditioning? There is large and measurable variability in potency, effect, and dependency formation. Anyone with any sense sees the difference between coffee, marijuana, pcp, and heroin.
I'm on three of those right now, two more to boot.
It's the dose that makes the potency and effect.
The dose available to the end-user is determined from the drug itself and the supply chain, since it is unregulated. If it were regulated, the individual doses would be more controlled, allowing for less habitual redosing, and less acute mental and physical dependency.
Imagine you want a beer but hafta volumetrically dose it from 100% grain alcohol and cider. It'd be easier to become an alcoholic. Similarly, it is harder to "responsibility" enjoy heroin/fent or coke/meth because every time I want a small amount, I have to stare at a weeks worth for a brief moment.
The illegality of drugs itself becomes tautologically entwined with the reasons they are illegal. It is becoming more difficult to diffuse as our culture leans to polarity on drug issues.
If that's the criteria then we still have an inconsistency: tobacco and alcohol should be banned. The alternative is to be consistent in the other direction (which to some that are after "freedom" sounds more appropriate).
Yeah, there's a logical inconsistency. So what? Just because our society has so far failed to ban two addictive, harmful drugs, does not mean we must legalize every other addictive, harmful drug.
I see it differently: despite alcohol having absolutely horrible safety profile the vast majority of people manage to use it responsibly and don't let it ruin their lives. We all know that some people become alcoholics and yet it stops virtually nobody from enjoying Friday beer.
The drug prohibition made it difficult to know how many people use drugs responsibly. It is linked to legal weed actually: it is being legalized not because research showed it is not too dangerous (we knew it for a while), but because more and more people become aware that you can totally use weed and remain a respectable member of society.
For me it is a question of personal freedom. Everything has risks. Going hiking in mountains can kill you, for example, or almost any outdoor activity really. And some people die there pretty much every day. But I really don't want the state banning it just because some people fuck up.
To me, there is obviously a tension between the right of individuals to take calculated risks and the responsibility of the society to protect its members from harm. I don't think it's reasonable to say that individuals have an absolute right to take any risks they please, irrespective of the wishes of their society, because the society will end up bailing them out when the outcomes of their risky behavior get bad enough. Mountain-claimbing is actually a great example: if you get yourself caught in a ravine, there are crews of highly trained, well-equipped rangers who will fly in and spend enormous sums of money, as well as put their own lives in danger, to save your life. All this despite the fact that the risk was taken without consulting them at all. Because of this, mountain rangers have every right to mark certain dangerous trails closed to the public. It is a reasonable infringement on personal liberty, given that they're on the hook for other people's risky decisions.
How about sugar? Sure it seems innocuous enough, but some people get effectively addicted to it, developing diseases and conditions that can prevent them from working their chosen profession or die and "destroy" their family unit.
Have I heard about diabetics refusing to change their diets and dying, yes.
Does that mean we should outlaw sugar? Probably not, plenty of people struggle with obesity and sugar is a major contributing factor, but there's plenty of responsible adults that can consume sugar in moderation.
I also imagine there are a non-zero number of people that begin using more pure forms of caffeine in ways that are damaging to their relationships, health, and careers.
I want to agree but my area is rather "methy" and contributes so much to crime and bad behavior. In an ideal world people would be able to do whatever they want as long as they don't bother anyone else. Unfortunately it is a daily occurrence around here of meth addicts breaking into peoples yards and houses trying to steal stuff, aggressive behavior etc.
But meth is already illegal, and your neighborhood is still in that situation. That sounds awful, but not really like a reason for sticking with the current policy.
In fact most of the crime around it would be a result of it being illegal. High prices, marginalisation etc.
Not saying we should legalise meth as it seems to be one of the nastier drugs around. But the war on drugs does seem to create problems itself. By moving the drugs into the criminal zone you're creating a lot of crime around it. It's not the right way IMO. For example supplying unrecoverable addicts with seized drugs stops them from having to steal. It was a success in Europe.
It's kinda ironic that this policy comes from the US which learned a valuable lesson during its prohibition period.
It is quite uncommon and usually doesn't devolves into a life destroying situation but it exist :
The first published report of caffeinism — essentially an anxiety disorder based on chronic high caffeine consumption — appeared in 1967 and described the case of a woman thought to have an anxiety disorder until it was determined that she was consuming 15 to 18 cups of brewed coffee per day. She showed rapid improvement when her caffeine intake was drastically reduced.
I will say that I didn't read the directions on some new freeze dried instant coffee I got and was accidentally brewing 2x the recommended concentration and felt like I was losing my mind for months until I figured it out.
I didn't start drinking coffee until well into my 20s, just never developed a taste for it.
One day after I had started drinking coffee a friend wanted to go to Starbucks. They were excited that I finally started drinking coffee and we could go for a walk and grab a cup. I had heard Starbucks was pretty awful coffee but the coffee was a side point, so I went and got a cup of coffee.
I was wildly caffeinated the rest of the day. My brain had made an incorrect association that "awful coffee" == "weak coffee" so I got the largest one because I was a bit tired. That was WAY TOO MUCH caffeine, a Venti coffee at Starbucks has 225mg of caffeine and the standard cup I was brewing at home / in the office was closer to 90mg.
That was a difficult afternoon at work, unable to sit still, agitated, but I learned a good lesson. Starbucks didn't get rich from flavor, they did it the old fashioned way, massive quantities of addictive substances, caffeine and sugar.
I read your article, and it seems like the primary thesis is that large institutions (primarily universities) act as a sheltering mechanism for leftist radicals who promote violent social change.
I’m not assuming you wrote the article, but I want to ask to try to gain insight. If this is true, why is it that business institutions, that have a lot to lose from social upheavals, require 4-year degrees for professional positions, from these leftist institutions?
I read THAT article, and found that it neither affirms, nor refutes the claim that universities shelter violent revolutionaries.
The thing it says about education is that it’s harder to get into a college now than before. That is a change, but it can occur with or without also acting as a retirement home for “the shock troops” that was mentioned in GPs article.
That's a fun article but also so ridiculously, obviously biased that it's difficult to take the details seriously. The author really does the subject a disservice because of that, although at least the are being open about their bias.Because it really is an interesting part of US history. And although I'm not that old and I already knew about most of it, minus some interesting details, like supporting the murder of Sharon Tate, I would imagine he is right when he points out that a lot of people do not remember or know of this history. Especially considering how dangerous people think our society is nowadays.
I had never heard anything about the Puerto Rican separatists though. That's some crazy. Thanks a bunch for the link! The supposed analysis at the end is absurd though and can be effectively skipped. The author does not understand anything about the institutions that hold power now, along with a whole lot else.
Arbitrary knees in exponentially-growing metrics lined up with the introduction of fiat currency due to carefully chosen Y-axis scales by someone who makes money when you invest in Bitcoin.
(Some of those graphs -- especially the first one -- probably have interesting stories behind them, which may or may not relate to fiat currency. But all we get from that page is a Hayek quote structured to suggest he too would love Bitcoin so...)
Hadn't read this before, thank you. Mind blown. It's the missing articulation of why some of this stuff today is so serious.
The first half reads like it would be an amazing epic series, if it were written from the perspective of the complex anti-hero protagonists. I knew about Tupac's family link, and one of my high school teachers was among the white feminist women who were a part of the black liberation movement and told us stories about it, but to write about it as a history of before hiphop, before gangs, and before blacksploitation, after civil rights, this shit was real.
The second half about the mechanisms of right/left conflict is spot on, and describes undercurrents today very well.
I've always been fascinated by the depiction of the 70's in media: an era of excess and debauchery. the linked article (thanks!) reinforces the notion "truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; truth isn't." Each rabbit hole feels more bewildering than the former.
In more industries than not, it's still a thing. There is a lot of companies (that I've worked with at least) where coke usage is still happening at relaxed events, especially when it's a "management-only" event.
As a software consultant for many different industries, from materials, real estate, industrials, fashion and everything in-between. Usage seems the same across all of them.
It’s very much alive, the war on drugs is a racket.
A friend sold car stereos in the 80s, he would get tips in coke. He was paid a lot to cut a early projection tv in half so it could fit in his airplane and be taken back to South America.
I don't think I understood the extent until I watched a Studio 54 documentary - iconic, super popular NYC nightclub where everyone did loads of cocaine out in the open all night.
The cocaine culture and the disco culture were very much intertwined. Maybe it was not as much in the open as at Studio 54, but it wasn't limited to just NYC.
Definitely not comparing to coca leaf use. To your point though, refined THC in the form of hashish has a much longer history than refined coca leaves. As has breeding for more THC.
Hashish does not actually have to be "refined" at all. There's zero chemical process involved. You're just taking the resin glands off the surface of the plant. Refining cocaine is starkly different from this, of course.
Not sure about magnitude. Well, maybe Cocaine yeah magnitude, but when it comes to Coca, I'm pretty sure tribes in South America have been using them for as long as people been using Cannabis. At the very least, the Incas were using Coca back in the day.
My dad [0] was a technology columnist in from the 80s to mid 00s, and related this story:
Ken worked for what was then a first-tier Japanese hifi company. At the time -- it was the eighties -- companies exhibiting at CES gave shit away. Shirts, pens, calculators... you know: trade show crap. Rather than have his giveaway get lost in that sea of crap, my friend decided to give out pocket-sized mirrors, each encased in a blue silicon sleeve emblazoned with the company logo. His Japanese masters said "Ken-san, why you give away small mirror. We don't understand." And Ken-san said "trust me, they'll love it." And they did, because a) it was the eighties, and 2) while some preparatory activities are best done on a cardboard record jacket, others require an unyielding surface. I should add that the notion of including a single-edge razor blade in the package crossed his mind, but was rejected as being too on-the-nose.
Of course, you can still buy drug paraphernalia. For example there are plastic Roses in a glass vase sold at gas stations that are really crack pipes. And there are lots of shady "tobacco shops" out there.
Some of these products seem pretty nice, I'd buy a couple of them if I did cocaine.
> While traditionally cocaine was a rich man’s drug (due to the large expense of a cocaine habit), by the late 1980s, cocaine was no longer thought of as the drug of choice for the wealthy.
This phrasing seems to suggest that something else displaced cocaine as "the drug of choice for the wealthy."
If something did, what was it?
And if nothing did — i.e. if young-rich-people parties just shifted away from being drug-fueled — then what caused that? Because that feels like a very surprising shift; drug-fueled parties were a staple of decadent wealth for hundreds of years as of that point. I wouldn't expect that a single drug losing its perception of "classiness" would lead to a wholesale abandonment of drug use by an entire class of people.
Coke never went away but the quality went down substantially, not aided by the fact that it's all produced in the jungle under some guys plastic boots who just eyeballs the reagents used to make the end product. So you'll never get "pure" stuff like you would meth or mdma.
In his bio Keith Richards says he quit all that stuff when the quality when down. All those 80s bands that were fueled by coke ... you don't get that anymore. Basically because it's not that "nice" of a drug anymore.
In S-America from what I've heard is that all the posh party people take mdma to go out and coke is more for the low to middle class. So it's definitely less classy there, probably not in the least because of all the horrible crime associated with it (something that's out of sight for Westerners).
If something replaced cocaine, my guess would be pills, both repurposed medical grade ones and things like ecstasy. Being completely manufactured allows for an arbitrary distinction in quality based on packaging, and that's obviously something people like to buy into.
That said, I'm not sure I believe cocaine ever lost favor with the wealthy. Maybe they just shifted from open semi-public use to more private and small groups doing it within the whole? Instead of open use in the big common room, maybe people just split off into side rooms in small groups that are interested to do it and rejoin the main group later.
I remember learning this fun fact from a Netflix documentary. Nominal prices for coke have remained stable since the 70s. So adjusted for inflation, it's gotten progressively less expensive. I've witnessed 5his personally. A gram in the 2000s would run about 70 bucks in my area, and that's still the case today.
So it's likely that over time more and more not so rich people entered the market and coke lost its cachet. But I'm sure the rich remained quite fond of it.
I take it to mean that the primary cultural association with cocaine was no longer “rich person drug,” while not saying anything at all about the drug of choice for the wealthy.
I also share this doubt, however I can believe that people who are wealthy but not wall street types, have moved on to pills like MDMA etc.
There's a difference between wealthy-wealthy and wealthy-enough to retire early and live like a 19-year-old until they "retire" properly: The latter category I would imagine is not the kind to do Coke on holiday versus some pills.
I’ve seen ads on Facebook for Etizolam ( and other thienodiazepines which are nearly identical in effect to Xanax ) as well as ads for products that contain 4-fluoromethamphetamine and other amphetamines analogs. I took screenshots if anyone is interested. So honestly this doesn’t really shock me at all. Back then it was at least paraphernalia. Now you can find drug suppliers through mainstream ads. Not to mention the plethora of ads for SARMs and other performance enhancing drugs ( to which some of them are actually non regulated anabolic steroids, not SARMs )
You might want to leave contact info in your bio so people don't have to post in public for the images. If you have a place to put them up you probably should.
(1) to sell or offer for sale drug paraphernalia;
(2) to use the mails or any other facility of interstate commerce to transport drug paraphernalia; or
(3) to import or export drug paraphernalia.
(b) Penalties
Anyone convicted of an offense under subsection (a) of this section shall be imprisoned for not more than three years and fined under title 18.
(c) Seizure and forfeiture
Any drug paraphernalia involved in any violation of subsection (a) of this section shall be subject to seizure and forfeiture upon the conviction of a person for such violation. Any such paraphernalia shall be delivered to the Administrator of General Services, General Services Administration, who may order such paraphernalia destroyed or may authorize its use for law enforcement or educational purposes by Federal, State, or local authorities.
(d) “Drug paraphernalia” defined
The term “drug paraphernalia” means any equipment, product, or material of any kind which is primarily intended or designed for use in manufacturing, compounding, converting, concealing, producing, processing, preparing, injecting, ingesting, inhaling, or otherwise introducing into the human body a controlled substance, possession of which is unlawful under this subchapter. It includes items primarily intended or designed for use in ingesting, inhaling, or otherwise introducing marijuana,[1] cocaine, hashish, hashish oil, PCP, methamphetamine, or amphetamines into the human body, such as—
(1) metal, wooden, acrylic, glass, stone, plastic, or ceramic pipes with or without screens, permanent screens, hashish heads, or punctured metal bowls;
(2) water pipes;
(3) carburetion tubes and devices;
(4) smoking and carburetion masks;
(5) roach clips: meaning objects used to hold burning material, such as a marihuana cigarette, that has become too small or too short to be held in the hand;
(6) miniature spoons with level capacities of one-tenth cubic centimeter or less;
(7) chamber pipes;
(8) carburetor pipes;
(9) electric pipes;
(10) air-driven pipes;
(11) chillums;
(12) bongs;
(13) ice pipes or chillers;
(14) wired cigarette papers; or
(15) cocaine freebase kits.
(e) Matters considered in determination of what constitutes drug paraphernalia
In determining whether an item constitutes drug paraphernalia, in addition to all other logically relevant factors, the following may be considered:
(1) instructions, oral or written, provided with the item concerning its use;
(2) descriptive materials accompanying the item which explain or depict its use;
(3) national and local advertising concerning its use;
(4) the manner in which the item is displayed for sale;
(5) whether the owner, or anyone in control of the item, is a legitimate supplier of like or related items to the community, such as a licensed distributor or dealer of tobacco products;
(6) direct or circumstantial evidence of the ratio of sales of the item(s) to the total sales of the business enterprise;
(7) the existence and scope of legitimate uses of the item in the community; and
(8) expert testimony concerning its use.
(f) Exemptions
This section shall not apply to—
(1) any person authorized by local, State, or Federal law to manufacture, possess, or distribute such items; or
(2) any item that, in the normal lawful course of business, is imported, exported, transported, or sold through the mail or by any other means, and traditionally intended for use with tobacco products, including any pipe, paper, or accessory.
Yet you can buy a huge bong in any headshop in the country. They still sell this stuff. It's not going to say "For Cocaine use only" or anything like that obviously.
When I was a kid I'd order things from magazine ad's whenever I could, usually gags and gimmicks, etc. It would take forever from the time you sent in the order form and money. It was always so exciting the day the package arrived and your goods were finally in your possession.
The last photo in the article comes from the UK Daily Mail according to the credits:
`Photo credit: David Wilfert / The World’s Best Ever / Daily Mail UK`
In the late 1970s, I worked in a record store (selling new vinyl records), we had a display case at the register with many of these same products available (as well as pipes and bongs), it wasn't that unusual in the U.S. Even today, I suspect most smoke/vape shops have similar items, although powder cocaine does not seem as common today as it was back then.
I remember one device in particular, it was a small metal cylinder, shaped like an overgrown bullet, designed so that you could fill the main chamber with powder, screw the top on, then by rotating a smaller cylinder inside, deliver one snort into the upper chamber with an opening at the top for pressing against your nostril. It allowed you to snort almost using just one hand, with no chance of spillage. I'd still have one, but I gave it to a friend a long time ago.
My sentiments as well. It gives the impression of a society where the only sentiment not scoffed at is satisfying one's urges and impulses. It's so hollow and empty.
Many times I think "what today will sound absurd in the future?".
Our widespread and normalised alcohol abuse is one of the things crossing my mind, and I wonder if many ads related to vaping, smoking and alcohol will look like this for us in a few years.
Edit: To clarify, what I mean with normalising alcohol abuse is not getting a bit of a buzz with a few glasses of wine or beer in a social setting. It's how we've normalised getting completely hammered every weekend, and even celebrate people who can drink a lot.
The incredible amount of sugar that we eat and give to our kids. There is already a clear trend of "hiding" sugar from the ingredients. The label "No sugars added" gives a really positive meaning. But most processed foods are still chock-full of sugar. I guess in 20 or 30 years sugar products will be labeled with scary labels like tobacco is today.
As for alcohol, I don't think so. People will still want to get wasted, even knowing that it is bad for the health.
> As for alcohol, I don't think so. People will still want to get wasted, even knowing that it is bad for the health.
In a better world we'd have a good substitute for alcohol that had similar effects but much less serious health concerns. This should be a major research target, but for stupid political reasons it isn't.
There's a whole zoo of recreational drugs that are safer to do in moderation than alcohol is to do consistently. Rather than replace alcohol, I think we should just get better at educating:
- when is it safe to use a given drug?
so we can get to the business of exploring:
- which drugs are best paired with which intentions, moods, environments, etc?
> There's a whole zoo of recreational drugs that are safer to do in moderation than alcohol is to do consistently
Which ones are you thinking of? Are any of them similar to alcohol in effects? (Light euphoria, increased socialisation, mild confidence boost, pleasant method of application?)
> In a better world we'd have a good substitute for alcohol that had similar effects but much less serious health concerns
You are thinking about self administration of GHB, but people need to be really careful because 2 mL is a recipe for a fun night, whereas 7 mL will get you in ICU.
Bur vis-a-vis alcohol it has big advantages. No liver problems, no kidney problems, no clogging of arteries, no cardiomiopathy or inflammation...
But again people need to be paranoid before its use, in order to diligently respect the quantities.
The administration at a party would be a gig for companies, because you'd need the same level of professionality as say the security services for a VIP party.
GHB is a horrible alternative to alcohol. I really don't understand why you think that is not the case. GHB is highly addictive, dosing is hard, it's really unhealthy with long term use and is nearly impossible to stop doing once you're addicted.
In the Netherlands, the percentage of people that relapse after rehabilitating from GHB is the highest of all drugs, including alcohol.
> In the Netherlands, the percentage of people that relapse after rehabilitating from GHB is the highest of all drugs, including alcohol.
Humans love alcohol-like feelings, so the comparison is vis-a-vis against alcohol.
Alcohol relapse statistics are on a much higer sample given how widespread it is, whereas for G the sample is much smaller.
Also among the people who don't relapse are also included in those who die or have their bodies so screwed up that have no alternative but quitting if they want to keep living. Alcohol does that to a whole lot of people who technically don't relapse....but don't breath anymore either.
G doesn't cause any liver, heart, kidney, cardiac, valvular, stomach, arterial, testicular damage, so of course people will come back for more.
If the only negative effects are psychological then it's a testimony to the amazing proprieties of the substance.
Also in science the standard practice is that if you can't measure it then there is no point talking about it or even discussing it.
We don't know what happens inside our brains, the mechanisms of addiction and so forth.. we can only evaluate the effects.
>Humans love alcohol-like feelings, so the comparison is vis-a-vis against alcohol.
Some humans love the feeling of being in an inebriated state commonly brought on by the use of alcohol. The amount of people addicted to other drugs shows it is not just the drunkeness of alcohol people are after. However, the simple fact that alcohol is legal and readily available means that's the thing people use to achieve this inebriated state. Allow other substances to be legal and destigmatized the way alcohol has been, and you will see numbers change.
Alcohol is legal because people love to be inebiated more than they like being stoned or on a paranoid coke binge, or nodding off due to heroin
Majority rules , and so the preference with regards to the feeling of being inebriated + collective risk tolerance of society + the variability of alcoholic beverages + the low cost of the substance made it so that alcohol emerged .
> Alcohol relapse statistics are on a much higer sample given how widespread it is, whereas for G the sample is much smaller.
Does that imply we can never compare smaller data sets with larger ones? GHB is becoming a huge issue in the Netherlands to the point that there aren't enough rehab spots. So I would assume the amount of data is not insignificant and can therefore be compared.
> Alcohol does that to a whole lot of people who technically don't relapse....but don't breath anymore either.
So does GHB.
> G doesn't cause any liver, heart, kidney, cardiac, valvular, stomach, arterial, testicular damage, so of course people will come back for more.
You retort to my argument was that the data set for GHB was much smaller. How does that not matter with your argument?
Also, GHB is associated with cognitive changes and potential brain damage. So you might come back for more, but you won't be the same person:
> Also in science the standard practice is that if you can't measure it then there is no point talking about it or even discussing it.
Which part can't you measure? You can measure relapse percentages. You can measure addiction rates. You can measure the length of an addiction. You can measure the physiological and metal impact of an addiction.
No, the only way to die via GHB is to overdose on it. Alcohol instead sets you body on fire with inflammation and such inflammation attacks all tissues including vital ones which I mentioned and will repeat: heart, liver, kidneys, arteries, pancreas...
> You retort to my argument was that the data set for GHB was much smaller. How does that not matter with your argument?
Because we know that the cause for all that damage is inflammation, between alcohol and G only the former causes inflammation.
> Also, GHB is associated with cognitive changes and potential brain damage. So you might come back for more, but you won't be the same person:
Leave aside the brain, except for physical phenomenons such as blood, plaques, cancer....we really don't know what happens in there or why. We can't even predict our own thoughts 10 seconds from now..leave alone complex things such as cognition on a general scale and most importantly the ability to measure it.
Also let's assume we did know, say all that we know today is effectively what happens in the brain. Given that premise we also have to take for good the data that we have about the depression/anxiety epidemic, which is very widespread according to today's research.
Today research also tells us that prolonged anxiety/depression causes damage to the body, reduces cognition and IQ and trims years off a person's life.
Well, considering all the above...both alcohol and G seem a better alternative than becoming subject to the depression epidemic which causes both a reduction in quality of life, as well as a reduction in quantity of life. Alcohol is superior in terms of quality of life, unfortunately it also shortens quantity of life, but G has them both beaten because it prevents depression AND doesn't cause inflammation to tissues, so G is better for both quality and quantity of life.
Of course if you are a person who is naturally on cloud 9 all the time and essentially immune to the depression epidemic (meaning that you are essentially clueless about the world), then you are better off not taking anything.
But at that point you are also better off not leaving the house because leaving the house also has risks, and why would you take risks if you are essentially a buddha who is always on cloud 9 and perfectly happy and content the way things are and everything else is pushing on a string?
So even if we allowed for a perfect knowledge of our brains, if we take into consideration the median urban Western citizen who is always on the brink of depression then G is better than alcohol and all the other drugs used to solve depression, both prescribed (benzo, SSRIs...) and those used for self-medication purposes (alcohol, cocaine, MDMA, crack, weed..)
You mention GHB, but as you mention to dosing in ml I expect you actually mean GBL.
It's really not as safe as you make out, as the dose needed to OD isn't much more than a recreational dose. When you overdose on GHB you can become aggressive, lose consciousness, lose all short term memories; and worse case fall into a coma and even die. The margin of error is just too small!
If you take GHB for a long time you can build up a tolerance and become dependant one it. The withdrawal is terrible and depending on how dependant some os can result in post acute withdrawal syndrome, in which case you can't just stop taking it as the result could be fatal.
> need to be really careful because 2 mL is a recipe for a fun night, whereas 7 mL will get you in ICU.
But it's the same thing with regular alcohol, isn't it? Half a bottle of liquor is a fun night, whereas three bottles surely will kill you. As long as it is diluted in practical quantities it doesn't seem like a big deal.
That said, they'll pry my saturday evening glass of scotch from my cold, dead hands.
The problem is that it's really really hard to gulp down 3 bottles of liquor.
Plus unlike G you are not involved in the preparation, a better comparison would be having a substance called super-duper-liquor that you'd have to dilute yourself with water in order to make sure that it's indeed 3 bottles of liquor needed to send you in ICU.
If you screw up the dilution of the super-duper-liquor you can end up in ICU after just a sip, and you'd not notice because it doesn't have a taste or a smell.
Plus let's face it, humans were never made to deal with liquid quantities in mL , we were made to deal in liters or even deca-liters, because that's the measuring unit of the most important liquid for humans: H2O
In the US, 95% ABV Everclear is readily available in most states. 75.5% ABV Everclear is available in even more. It's the easiest way to get near azeotropic food safe ethanol for making extracts.
We often choose to consume alcohol in a setting with trained, paid drug administrators. There's some safety features to that.
But we also can self-administer, in large part because you can see how strong a drink is, right on the package.
I think GP is suggesting that, absent the lobbying power of the alcohol industry, you might see commercial development of safer ways of dosing alternatives.
If you could go to the store and buy a sealed bottle with 0.5mg ghb that might be compelling for some folks?
While it's pretty hard to kill yourself with alcohol, but very easy using GHB. Even experienced users mess up with GHB, as it matters how much you are taking over time, and how much is being absorbed.
Are you calling bar tenders trained paid drug administrators making it sound like they have medical training? I want to go to the bars you visit. Of all the bar tenders or waitstaff that I have ever met, the closest to medical training were from the ones attending med school and working at the bar to pay for it. I don't think that qualifies.
It's more that I've known friends who think it's appropriate to put 3oz vodka in lemonade and call that a single drink, or they don't measure at all and one drink has 1oz of vodka and the next has 2.5.
At bars you get pretty consistent pours, bartenders are watching for overconsumption and often for potential DUIs. And you don't, typically, have to worry about a bartender spiking a drink with something else.
All of that helps make alcohol consumption with strangers safer.
A lot of the drug safety education for alcohol boils down to knowing how much alcohol is in each drink, and that there's nothing else intoxicating in it.
>A lot of the drug safety education for alcohol boils down to knowing how much alcohol is in each drink, and that there's nothing else intoxicating in it.
A lot of drug saftey education for anything boils down to knowing how much of it is in each serving, and that there's nothing else surprising in it. Knowing your drugs are important whether that's ibuprofen, alcohol, MDMA, etc. Obviously, much more risky with recreational drugs with people looking to spike with other things for the pizzazz or cutting costs, or buying pharma drugs from less than reputible sources.
However, there were a rash of people getting sick/hurt from receiving alcohol from bars at resorts in Mexico. So edge cases are always going to be there.
> I think GP is suggesting that, absent the lobbying power of the alcohol industry, you might see commercial development of safer ways of dosing alternatives.
Well yes, substances are like religions, and alcohol is like Christianity.
Nobody knows how or why it emerged, maybe one of the reason is that you could ballpark doses and unless you really screw up or have a deathwish you'd be able to survive and reproduce.
Same thing for Christianity, there is not a whole lot of stuff in there that prompts people to get in harms way.
Whatever the reason, it's now grandfathered in and it will be really hard to change this.
The fact that the alcohol lobby tries to fight alternatives, and also the fact that there is an alcohol lobby at all...is somehow embedded in society.
I honestly don't know why we are managing to get rid of cigarettes which were similarly grandfathered in and are much lower risk than alcohol
Alcohol is naturally occurring and ridiculously easy to make. Squeeze some fruit juice and let it sit, and it will ferment just from the wild yeasts on the fruit skins. All kinds of animals like alcohol, and will get drunk from fermenting fruit fallen from trees. There's no mystery here.
I think a helpful contributing factor is that cigarettes are immediately annoying and unhealthy to the people around the user so you had the non users motivated to stop the users.
Being around a drunk person maybe also statistically unhealthy given the increased risk of falls, accidents, psychological damage?
I don't know, it's one of those things where I can't point which was the reason.
If I had to guess, maybe it was babies, kids and pregnant women. People don't get shitfaced around those categories but they had to endure passive smoke.
And the reduction in cigarette consumption is to be ascribed to that, plus society being less and less fond of stimulants due to risk averseness (this includes nictoine and also cocaine consumption which are both way down compared to the 70s-80s-90s)
I can think of few stranger things that I have experienced in my life than being around a group of G hounds. It's like the Twilight Zone, and no, G is not safe and the effects are quite different than alcohol. It would never be widely popular to do a drug that so easily creates lapses in short-term memory... I think it is well-known why that is.
Plenty of homeless drunkards in the streets, alcoholism is rampant.
> G is not safe
Sure. Side effects of alcohol overdose include death by alcohol poisoning.
Side effects of GHB overdose include death by central nervous system depression + consequent respiratory arrest.
Side effects of Tylenol overdose include an excruciatingly painful, multi-day death from multiple organ failure.
See the pattern?
Both drinking and GHB are capable of causing memory loss.
> The effects are quite different than alcohol
This is subjective. To me, it feels exactly like "More euphoric alcohol, without the stupidity/reduced cognitive facilities drinking brings, and not toxic-feeling on my body."
It takes a whole lot of alcohol to get the equivalent of that G zombie look. And the latter can easily kill you. GHB is not a panacea. It can turn people into animals.
I think cannabis will eclipse alcohol once enough states legalize, and the federal winds shift in response.
It has no hangover. Its long term effects are not understood (a boon vs alcohol where they're known and bad.) It's edible and drinkable. And it makes your patrons buy food. The bar of tomorrow will serve cannabis infused cocktails alongside alcohol. From the moment of federal deregulation it will only take a few years, like the arrival and commoditization of boozy seltzers. Today's cannabis manufacturers in legalized states are already building the infrastructure to hit the ground running.
You can definitely produce different highs with alcohol, getting drunk from vodka is different to wine is different to beer. In the end one is drunk, yes, but feeling is still quite distinct.
So pretty much the same as with pot, where you can have vastly different highs but in the end are just that: high
Not my experience at all. Give weed to 10 different people, and they'll experience 12 different reactions to it. With alcohol, it's more or less roughly the same for everyone.
One contributing factor could be social stigma. The soccer moms of the world were brought up to "say No to drugs" where cannabis was one of those drugs. You can pry their glass of wine out of their cold, dead hands but I've personally seen them very nervous about a low dose edible. Perhaps some time and federal legalization will change that.
The current breeding techniques have produced varieties that are not conducive to the socialization (i.e. sativa vs indica). After legalization the market will need to have the marketing for sativas/socialization strains that will drive the development of happy/euphoric/uplifiting strains that do not promote sleep.
I wonder if the economics will align to make this attractive to bar owners. When I go to the bar I will usually spend around $50-100 on drinks depending if I am drinking cocktails or wine.
Given that THC seems to be hard to precisely dose, I am not sure that a bar could figure out how to make cocktails or edibles that give a sufficiently small amount to encourage patrons to buy multiple items.
Also, alcohol works in a few minutes, but THC takes a lot longer. I wonder if we would see an increase of over consumption because people are impatient to get their buzz.
Fwiw, I like THC is small quantities from time to time, but I consume at home and watch a movie. Being in a loud public space which high seems like a nightmare to me.
Either way, it will be interesting to see what the future holds.
Interesting, I was not aware of that. I have noticed that drinking mushroom tea as opposed to eating dried mushrooms does have a quicker onset, so that makes sense to me. (Sadly, it is also consistent in making me vomit.)
One negative consequences of the "no sugars added" is that it makes it harder to see how sweet something is because now instead of sugar its all artificial sweeteners in many things that don't need them at all.
What about the labels that doesn't list the sugar in the facts but lists Aspartame in the ingredients? It says it has a sweetener but doesn't say how much. Funny enough Aspartame doesn't appear anywhere on the page you linked to.
From the comment you first replied to: harder to see how sweet something is
It was never about sugar content, but how sweet something is.
Overly sweet things can be unpleasant to an adult palate, or one accustomed to a culture of less sweet things. In simpler times, sugar content was a somewhat reliable metric of sweetness (of course it can be balanced by acid, tannins, salt etc.), so you could select a product without needing to taste it first.
> In simpler times, sugar content was a somewhat reliable metric of sweetness (of course it can be balanced by acid, tannins, salt etc.),
In simpler times, there were no labels to judge sugary content. The regulation in USA came in 2011. In simpler times, you bought the thing and did not cared about sugar at all. Later on, you engaged in culture war whether calories should be on labeling or whether such regulation is nanny statism.
Plus, I will go out and say that amount of people who would regularly check packages to learn how sweet it is and thus estimate taste before buying was super low. It is not a great proxy in the first place.
Carbohydrates have been shown in Ireland ever since I can remember, at least 30 years. For many things - drinks especially - carbohydrates is a straight proxy for sugars.
I still rely on it. Fruit juices touting how natural they are, but bulking out on sugar via apple or orange juice, is really common. You learn to watch out for it in various snacks for toddlers too.
Artificial sweeteners effect your health. It would be nice to know how much is in there. The information would help a person to avoid the food combinations with Aspartame that decrease the rate of metabolism. But yea I guess a person could just read the label and just believe whatever it tells them.
The sad thing is that sugar is everywhere, not just in candy. I was in the local hospital for surgery, and the "juice" they gave me to drink when I was recovering was so sweet that it could have doubled for syrup. The first 2 ingredients were 2 different kinds of sugar.
I think its because they were purchasing the cheapest "juice" they could find, but my friends joked that they were trying to give people diabetes to increase business.
The book "The Dorito Effect" goes into this a lot. Basically, the sugar substitutes are often discovered in food labs by accident (someone didn't wash their hands and licked their fingers, ew). These substances are tens of thousands of times more sweet than sugar, allowing for "zero" amount in the final product.
Especially in US, I don't think people realise how bad they have it there in terms of sugar. Even pizzas tasted sweet when I was in a random fast food place...
> As for alcohol, I don't think so. People will still want to get wasted, even knowing that it is bad for the health.
Alcohol advertising is already highly regulated compared to past decades. Smoking even more. Even professional magazines in the 60s and 70s used to have alcohol and cigarette ads every few pages. Not to mention that alcohol use was much less frowned upon at the workplace, especially in certain fields.
I have tried doing this a few times but always ended up stumped and eventually gave up. It’s difficult to find processed foods (e.g. yogurt, cereal, peanut butter) without sugar and so easy to mistakenly get foods with sugar on accident. Baked goods of almost all kinds have sugar by necessity, so they’re generally out. This doesn’t even account for the natural sugars in fruits and the like.
How committed are you to no sugar and how have you addressed all that? I’d love to try again with some better strategies.
> I’d love to try again with some better strategies.
In my case I have found it helpful to not quit sugar cold turkey, but gradually. First I stopped buying and using refined sugar at all (putting it in coffee, yogurt, etc.) This is quite easy. Then, avoid buying products whose ingredient list starts with sugar, like marmalade, "milk" chocolate, cereals and the like. This is a bit harder since it requires to pay attention to most products you buy, but still quite feasible. Then, once I was used to spot sugar at the beginning of the ingredient list, I began to read the whole list of ingredients, and avoid products that contained any sugar at all. For example: pre-cut carrots with lemon and ciboulette? whole wheat bread loafs? what on earth can be healthier than those things? Yet both of them contain sugar, in all the brands that I checked!
I started this "program" about three years ago and now I feel slightly healthier, nothing spectacular, but still. The thing is that now I notice immediately when something is too sugary. To the point of it being disgusting. For example, I have real trouble finishing a piece of cake in a birthday party (after fighting my urge to be a jerk about it and refuse it altogether).
I was only able to do this by also doing intermittent fasting. I replaced sugar with some more blood sugar friendly substitutes like stevia and some erythritol. (I like to go light on this stuff though)
I eat very low carb compared to most Americans. (Not keto just low carb)
Why are we treating all sugars as the same? They are not the same.
Some baked goods have sugar in order to feed yeast, rather than humans... Pizza dough, bagels, croissants. Yes these all come in dessert varieties, but it's not the default option.
Especially when you start getting to dumping on fresh fruit, it's like, no, please don't commit yourself to a bland beige life like that! Plants are masters of poisons and trickery, e.g. capsaicin (what makes peppers spicy) makes our mouths burn, but not the mouths of birds—who spread their seeds. Plants use fructose specifically because it's not dextrose and therefore it's hard for bacteria to digest: because they want us to eat this fruit and scatter the pit. Indeed they make the fruit sweet rather rapidly, “now now, it's ready now!”, to signal an optimal “it’s not poisonous! now you-scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-yours” moment to us.
Plants even look out for our longer-term health, those bright colors that we find so attractive are usually signaling to us these really important antioxidants that we need. As long as we don't freeze or puree the cell walls into oblivion, the resulting fiber traps some sugars and feeds it not to us but to our gut bacteria, who then don't starve and eat our GI linings...
“let's not eat foods that I know are healthy, to satisfy arbitrary rules I made up to keep myself healthy”... really?
So if zero tolerance is out, what remains?
• Set a low sugar target, “no more than 10% of my calories from sugars.”
• Prefer stuff with a shelf life. If it has an expiration date rather than a nutrition label, great!
• Don't worry about the natural sugar in yogurt, the lactose, unless you're lactose-intolerant. But don't buy the flavored versions as they are sugary enough to classify as desserts for breakfast. Instead do what the Dutch do—buy the plain stuff and cut the sour yourself with added whole grains and fresh fruit.
• “Don't even let it in your house” the other stuff. Guilty pleasures for me include chocolate and jam, I try to make sure that I don't have these in-stock...
• The grocer is a pilgrimage. What I mean is, it's tempting to zigzag your way through and see everything, and this is also why shopping takes forever! But pilgrims usually make a big walk around a structure before diving into the middle for a brief flirtation/unveiling of divinity. A good grocery run too walks around the aisles at the edges, fresh fruit and veg, fresh baked goods, meat and poultry, dairy... And it makes targeted trips into the middle only for things that it needs. You've got a list of the things you'll dip into the middle for, after all, and if your grocery trips are short then if you miss something, you can take another short grocery trip later in the week and still save time and money. Small batch sizes, lean manufacturing!
I quite seriously suspect that answer will be "24 hour electricity and grocery stores where you can buy food from anywhere in the world"
> Our widespread and normalised alcohol abuse
Until pandemic we've lived in a fairly teetotaling era. I suspect for the next decade we'll see an increase in casual drinking, becoming more similar to the 1950s. If you watch any films from that era very strong cocktails are basically a standard for just about any social occasion, any time of the day. The pandemic has instantly changed peoples views on alcohol and other drugs, what's coming the immediate future will likely continue this trend.
The immediate future generations will likely look back on ours as a bizarre blend of incredibly wasteful prudes. A generation of people who gluttonously destroyed the planet while at the same time being too timid to let themselves enjoy it. I think the reaction will be a large one of revulsion "you destroyed the planet and you didn't even let yourself have fun doing it? you lived at work for what?"
I’m curious what you’ve been seeing that’s given you the view that drug and alcohol use has increased a lot post-pandemic. I assume you mean in the US context?
I truly hope the answer isn’t 24 hour electricity, given how cheap it is to produce. That would represent a major backslide in human capability. I’m not fully against other drawdown strategies, but surely we can leave the lights on.
And yes, we are simultaneously so destructive and so unhappy. What a terrible waste.
Alcohol is like the oil of the giant social machine, I believe everything will crumble without it. How many of the jobs that keep the world running can be done if people don't drink to forget?
Just imagine the people that have to pee in bottles, being abused on daily basis by their boss, by their customers, and then they cant take drugs? for how long?
The facebook moderators, or the call center oberators..
As bad as it is, without some real changes, alcohol is almost mandatory.
ps: I don't drink, but most of my friends drink.
pps: what i think will sound absurd is the horrific ways of industrial animal farming.
Come to Utah if you want to observe that reality because most of the locals don’t drink alcohol. You’ll find safe, perfectly manicured suburban neighborhoods where young kids ride bikes in the street, a fast growing economy, and the highest birth rate of any US state.
I’m personally not religious, I drink and so on, but it has me thinking that maybe some of the things society tells us to value are greatly misguided.
It’s not just the jobs, it’s also the awareness of what we’re doing to the planet and our future. When you get seized by the panicky feeling that we’re on track to end it all, one solution is to say “fuck it” and get drunk. I do it. I’m sure I’m not the only one.
There are many reasons to not drink, including personal convictions, family history of alcohol abuse, health reasons, religious/belief reasons, not enjoying the feeling of being drunk, or simple lack of interest in drinking in the first place. Do not assume that parent is somehow trying to elevate themselves over anyone, you or drinkers in general.
Not just mammals, either! Wasps aren't averse to getting lit up when it's late enough in the season for fruit to have fermented. Sometimes they get too wasted to fly home, like the bald-faced yellowjacket I found sleeping it off on one of my porch windows a few months back - there's a fig tree in my side yard with some branches too high to reach, and it was very popular with her and her sisters for a while this year.
A decent chunk of those appeal to fundamental desires that (for better or worse) are a part of the human condition and I can't imagine them disappearing any time soon.
I really do hope we move away from an economy that relies on advertising to produce consumer demand at an unhealthy scale, though.
The only thing I disagree is "Body modification and tattoos". If any they will pick up a lot from here, with implantable technology. We will want to break free from our meat hardware, and body modifications is a step towards that.
I think we'll break the association between sex and gender, and we'll create contexts of more-than-two human genders, but types are too popular a feature in programming languages for me to believe that genders will ever find their way out of human languages--they both provide useful ways to reduce uncertainty while making concise references.
If everybody is a "they" then pronouns become less useful. Maybe we'll go through a stage like that while we rebel against binary-only gendered thinking, but eventually we'll want useful pronouns again and we'll reinvent gender.
I'm not sure you're aware of the future we're facing right now.
Continued unchecked growth coupled with increasing consumption is heading us towards an ecological catastrophe that quite seriously threatens the possibility of extinction, and at the very least looks like complete collapse of industrial civilization.
There is nothing worse you can do for the environment than bring another life into the world, especially if you live in the developed world.
Not sure what exactly you mean by this, but having more than you need and showing off is basic human behavior, and I don't see a reason that will change.
3. Bonfires and fireworks
Bonfires are fun and so are fireworks. They have some downsides, but not more than many other fun things we allow.
4. Anonymity
There will always be places where you can act anonymously or pseudo anonymously. See 4chan and bitcoin for example.
5. Air, noise, and light pollution
There will always be the next kind of not-yet-illegal pollution, and the person to profit from inflicting it upon the rest of us.
6. Having more than 2 kids
Most people will have 1-3 kids, some will have more. Nothing absurd about reproducing.
8. Buying new stuff all the time
See 1
12. Golf
Might be less popular, but why absurd?
13. Body modification and tattoos
Basic human desire to control your body and what you look like. If anything it will be more popular as technology improves.
15. Running unaudited code
With the halting problem on one hand (making automatic auditing impossible) and the high value of software on the other, I don't see any way around this anytime soon. Maybe some AI based solution.
16. Non-tailored medicine
One prediction I fully agree with! Especially many invasive examinations we consider standard today.
17. Tribal politics
Human nature...
20. Burial
Also human nature. Not the American style burial with the huge casket and embalming and whatnot. But some kind of burial will always be the norm.
21. Men standing to pee
???
23. Tipping
24. Advertizing
Human nature...
31. Automotive fatalities
Maybe on the road. But what about space fatalities?
OMG - what a coincidence is the timing of this thread as I happen to re-watch Demolition Man last night. Fun movie from 1993 that touches on the absurdity of both things we allow and things we don't allow.
Re body modification, I’m sure you’ll appreciate that people have been doing all manner of terrible things for centuries and many of those remain acceptable, even increasingly so. The pendulum may yet swing the other way. I’m betting on this one becoming viewed the same way we view testing in production.
"centuries" undershoots the persistence of tattooing by several millennia. Direct evidence of humans having tattoos dates back to ~3200 BC with the remains of Ötzi "the Iceman".
Some people like to get fucked up, it’s irritating when I encounter opinions that shame it or otherwise imply that it needs to be stopped. Let those who want it have it.
It's about the same magnitude of an issue as with guns, I think. In both cases you have the vast majority of people responsibly partaking, but you can't deny that their presence makes some things much worse.
I think the dynamics and beliefs are similar between the two: your primary exposure to alcohol could be having fun with it and friends, or it could be from growing up in an alcoholic family. You could grow up thinking guns are just a normal, if somewhat dangerous, tool (like a lawnmower), or most exposure could come from salacious gun news stories. It will all color how you feel about the topics.
(stats from memory, but I think order of magnitude correct). 30k gun deaths a year, of which 20k are suicide. Self-inflicted death from alcohol dwarfs 20k, and deaths to others from, e.g., drunk driving are comparable to gun homicides. Then you have the splashy things like school shootings, which I think are roughly comparable to driving a car through a Christmas parade while intoxicated.
The fact that you can’t understand the argument that alcohol and drug abuse can have serious impact on children means that you have serious blind spots in your life.
> Haven’t seen anyone advocating to curb marijuana here yet.
You don't think a drug that's illegal in large parts of the world and for which legalization is a highly controversial topic is curbed?
Also, the parent comment clearly took children as an example of people who's live can be drastically worsened by someone else consuming alcohol. Drivers and and passerbys endangered by drunk drivers would be another good example.
Atomized Individuals Propaganda without any love or attachment to others.
I know its the state/corpos wish that we are all interchangeable people-toner easy to pack into cartridges, easy to produce, easy to consume, but some of us cling to the old ways and others.
Sorry. Clingy, sticky, nasty, humans. The new man, you want to go towards will surely not have this flaws. What a marvellous ideal sociopath that will be.
There is ultra puritanic abstitential strain on HN.
Not a sarcasm, last week there was a person fully seriously that alcohol is as addictive as heroin. I am not exaggerating and it did not seemed as wink wink trolling either.
From a European perspective, America has a strange attitude to drinking, not just HN.
On one hand, America has counties where you can't buy alcohol at all, laws banning 20-year-old adults from buying alcohol, planning laws keeping pubs away from where people live, and even had a national alcohol ban at one time.
On the other hand, apparently the age laws are widely flouted? And everyone knows it but turns a blind eye? And drink-driving is so common that even if you kill someone, it's barely punished?
> On the other hand, apparently the age laws are widely flouted? And everyone knows it but turns a blind eye? And drink-driving is so common that even if you kill someone, it's barely punished?
In my experience, it perfectly describes Europe too. Maybe not drink-driving being common in all countries, but age laws being ignored is something I find normal.
If anything, in USA they make much much bigger deal over age laws then in Europe.
I would say given the age range on here (informally feels like majority ~35-45) there are also probably a lot of reformed alcoholics on HN. I wouldn’t say it’s as addictive as heroin, but is more dangerous in some ways (heroin withdrawal sucks but won’t kill you; alcohol withdrawal will.)
Personally, alcohol is related to some traumatic experiences so I don’t like feeling remotely drunk. I definitely had a problem when I quit.
But it's the same with cocaine and almost any other drug. Alcohol IS a drug by all means.
I agree with you that if someone wants to be fucked up and enjoy themselves, obviously not harming any other individual in the process (driving, getting into a fight etc), they should be free to do it. There should be a full disclosure of what long-term effects can be and regulated enough to avoid scams and shady marketing strategies but beside that...
Lawns. We spend an unnecessary amount of money, time, energy, chemicals and water on a plant that does not produce food nor any benefit other than it is visually pleasing. It is totally dumb.
If anyone reading this is interested in more environmentally friendly ways to maintain a lawn, look into xeriscaping. If you pick good plants it can turn out really well.
Lawns do have a flood control benefit in areas with lots of rainfall or that are prone to intense rainstorms. But so would the same land left to grow wild.
Eh, I'm halfway there. I spend about 45 minutes a week, in the summer, cutting my grass. I don't use fertilizer or weed killer, so a lot of my lawn is actually clover. The benefits of this, for me are:
* A place for my kids to play
* Friends and family gather there
* There are a few raised garden beds, so I get tomatoes, peas, peppers, and lettuce
* It isolates me from the wooded area near me. Mice and other pests generally stay over there and not in my house.
* It isolates me from the wooded area near me. Mice and other pests generally stay over there and not in my house.
Yes, it turns out that lawns serve an enormously practical purposes. Beyond this, they are required by code in certain places, as grasses serve to inhibit soil erosion.
The original complaint should be amended to state something like, lawns in places where lawns can't be sustained by natural means. Lawns in places like arid regions are terrible. But a good portion of the USA has a climate capable of maintaining large lawns with little more than mowing.
In these places, you can't have large gravel expanses like you can in the south west, because grasses will naturally overtake it, leaving a nasty looking, patchy mess that can't be mowed without the risk of high-speed projectiles being shot from the mower deck.
So yeah, lawns aren't going anywhere, except in places where they are wholly artificial.
I don't think alcohol will ever be banned, man has been using alcohol for more than 10k years[0] and according to some theories[1] it was the consumption of alcohol and protein that favored brain development
(disclosure: I come from an Italian region that has the use and abuse of alcohol as one of cornerstones of society, so maybe I'm biased)
1. Flying at a whim, large vehicles, a/c 24/7, and related profligate fossil fuel burning. Today we think we're living at the peak of progress so far and that people in any other time would wish they were us.
Future generations will look back at horror at how we chose temporary indulgence over what makes us most human: caring for each other, especially the helpless and vulnerable, and stewarding nature.
2. Plastic, at least single-use, forever chemicals, and similar chemicals. Soon we will see them like asbestos or marketing cigarettes to kids. Yes, they increase the GDP, but they kill.
Gambling ads across much of Europe. It’s pervasive especially around football ad breaks.
I have a theory that at some stage VOCs (in furniture, carpets, laminated wood products, paints etc) that lead to sick building syndrome will be heavily clamped down on, but nowadays nobody bats an eyelid at new couches laden with formaldehyde or other substances.
A lot of that, at least in the US, is due to having houses built more tightly for insulation, which stopped the natural air exchange from drafts that would normally occur. Now the building codes have been revised to mandate that a certain rate of air changes occurs even in houses, usually done using a heat exchanger: https://bcapcodes.org/tools/code-builder/residential/ventila...
> Gambling ads across much of Europe. It’s pervasive especially around football ad breaks
This. It's awful in the UK. Non-stop gambling adverts everywhere. They have to have a disclaimer on them and link to https://www.begambleaware.org/ but there's no rules it seems on how short or small the link needs to be. On some ads it literally flashes up for only 1 second at the end.
That's an interesting point, although the ancient Greeks only ever drank diluted wine, and they did believe that you could die from drinking wine at full strength. Undiluted wine was given to the helots so that their drunkenness served as a warning to the spartiates, and the death of one of the Spartan kings was partially attributed to madness caused by drinking undiluted wine, a habit which he picked up from the barbarians (although I admit that particular episode lends itself to many different interpretations).
The social acceptability of reliance on caffeine has always struck me as a bit odd. The effects aren't as stark, but I regularly have conversations with friends and coworkers who talk about how miserable they are if they don't get their three cups of coffee in the morning. I also feel that I see a correlation between those who feel they have low energy after the work-day and heavy caffeine users.
>Our widespread and normalised alcohol abuse is one of the things crossing my mind
At least in Australia (not known for drinking responsibly!), this was already starting to die off in my generation and the death is just accelerating amongst the next.
I wouldn't be surprised if a majority of Aussies born in 2050 didn't regularly drink at all.
50 years from now, I'll go with factory farming. I'm guessing that lab grown meat will be our main source of meat for daily cooking and things like burgers, hot dogs, etc. Maybe we'll all get some meat from free roaming animals for special occasions.
There is a reasonable possibility that in 50 years the absurdity will be how taken back by cocaine and it's paraphernalia is if we do go the way of more and more drug legalization. We will look like pearl clutchers or a smug living version of Reefer Madness.
What social circles in which country celebrates binge drinking of alcohol? I would claim there is a huge variance in age groups and global populations of that.
Though alcohol has been normal in western society for 1000s of years, cocaine not really. But yeah booze is awful for people. But I like beer and wine :(
> These vintage ads for cocaine and cocaine paraphernalia show how crazy and disturbing the 1970s were.
Things are more disturbing nowadays because people go through violent routes to get their drugs. Its still there and its worse but at least the sensible eyes of the millennial browsing the internet from his brand new M1 is protected. Hooray for the war on drugs.
> Things are more disturbing nowadays because people go through violent routes to get their drugs.
What?
People seem to buy drugs online with cryptocurrency and receive it in the mail, an option which obviously didn’t exist in the 70s.
I have some friends involved in the treatment/recovery space. It’s actually very challenging because the old technique of cutting ties with the user/dealer social circles is much less effective when reordering drugs online for delivery is just a few clicks away.
The current iteration of the war on drugs is a "Greatest Generation" (Nixon et al.) invention and every generation since has suffered for it, but it goes back way further to prohibition times.
We are not. You can sleep around and no one cares. "Slut shaming" is considered that bad thing. You can be a single mom without that massive stigma or punishment to child. Sex within marriage is considered good thing, unlike Victorian "sex for procreation only" philosophy.
Literally the only thing where it is getting more tight are boss/underling teacher/student relationships. Plus there is more focus on whether both participants agree with whatever is going on. And then again, it is not like that era would be particularly good for victims of harassement or rape.
Nature will take care of all of us for sure ;) A bit off topic but... I am struck by your point of view on various subjects, as if you feel very sure about what Nature is or is not:
- Natural families are natural? where? when? in which species?
- Abortion is not natural, Ok, I got it, but converting planetary biomass into human biomass is less natural and dangerous... lot of human cultures have known this since ever
- Drugs are not natural... Where? When? In what species?
- Anti-children... idem
- Homosexuality... idem
Any of these points is deep as the ocean, but if you are interested in these topics.... Anthropology or Ethology can be your friends ;)
Converting biomass into human biomass isn’t natural?
Humans are just as natural as any other species. Beavers build damns that flood rivers and alter the ecosystem and human build nuclear reactors that alter the ecosystem.
It’s only human judgement that makes that different.
You think beavers weep over all the ecosystem they kill when they flood a river?
Your post has nothing to do with biology; it’s just a set of superstitions, possibly religiously motivated, as it’s suspiciously aligned with Catholic hate speech.
I'm not hating on anybody, just on gay hookup ADS for goodness' sake, it's the ADS. Are even they too sacred for you to allow me to despise them, the friggin ADS?!
Non-practicing bisexual here, looking for a way into the whole gay sex thing. "Gay hookup ads", I've never heard of such a thing. What are they and where can I find them? What ad network should I de-block to see them?
https://flashbak.com/cocaine-advertising-of-the-1970s-1980s-... https://dangerousminds.net/comments/magazine_ads_from_the_he...