Exactly that. I strongly believe that those who /do/ use drugs like this are self-medicating to escape the seemingly/maybe actually intractable social issues for which there is no single easy answer or method of escape.
Compared to /trying/ to get a good job somewhere and trying to find housing that isn't outrageously over-priced and trying to more or less win the lottery game that is presently life in western society... it's so much easier to "treat" the issue with a "magic pill"/bottle (or other form of ingesting the drugs).
I strongly feel that if this particular drug weren't an option they'd drink alcohol or smoke...
There is an easy answer though. You do what successful humans have done for thousands of years:
- educate yourself
- join or form a community that supports each other
- fight for your survival like every ancestor in your genetic tree did before you.
Life isn't easy. But you also aren't naturally weak. Unfortunately, once you start doing drugs, you risk corrupting the source code of the machine you rely on.
Man who has never experienced extreme poverty or the absolute depths of American society attempts to provide easy answer to something he's never been through.
Let’s be clear, this “kill the poor” precarity is mostly an American problem (maybe to a lesser extent in the UK and Canada). There are huge swathes of western society (i.e. European social democracies) that don’t fall prey to this insane ideology.
We've banned this account for using HN primarily for ideological battle and ignoring our requests to stop. We ban accounts that do this, regardless of their politics, as I've explained many times (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...). Would you please not create accounts to break HN's rules with?
Yup, this article should put the use into context of other legal and abused drugs like alcohol and opoids etc, as well as illegal drugs. I would bet that substance abuse is increasing across the board in the US due to the stagsperity of our current economics.
So any society below those 22 on the "Satisfaction with life index" is "deeply broken"? I think you're missing the point; I'm not saying that the US is the most super awesome society in existence, I'm saying that we're much better off than most, and we're _obviously_ much better off than most historical civilizations.
The term "deeply broken" implies that the whole thing needs to be upended and reformed. A more reasonable and informed observer would note that there remain issues to be addressed, but we have seen incremental improvements for quite some time now and there's no good reason for e.g. revolution.
I vehemently disagree, we should absolutely revolt.
Show me the non-technological incremental improvements.
The US is not a democracy, legislative power is sold to the highest bidder. Legally.
Couple that with unregulated capitalism and things are looking quite bleak.
Inequality is on the rise and there is no reason to think that trend will reverse.
But at least we have iPhones.
We're very young as a species. Our current structures of power are not intentionally constructed but inherited. There is no reason to think this is the best we can do as a species. Why don't we put the same level of effort into designing our social structures as we do into literally everything else we develop as a society? Where is the rigor?
Now look me in the eyes and tell me everything is fine.
>I vehemently disagree, we should absolutely revolt.
You would make things worse.
>Show me the non-technological incremental improvements
Civil rights, LGBTQ rights, women's suffrage, the rise of the middle class, worker's rights... I could keep going.
>Couple that with unregulated capitalism and things are looking quite bleak
We don't have unregulated capitalism. Not even close.
>Inequality is on the rise and there is no reason to think that trend will reverse.
There is every reason to believe that it will if you even have a basic understanding of history. This stuff is cyclical and, in modern times, shows a constant upwards trend (i.e. trending toward economic equality and equality of opportunity).
>We're very young as a species. Our current structures of power are not intentionally constructed but inherited
Well you had better back that up because a lot of more knowledgeable people would disagree with you there. You are making a broad claim about human behavior without any evidence. I don't think you understand the gravity or far reaching consequences of that argument.
>Now look me in the eyes and tell me everything is fine.
I never said that. I said that most things are fine, in fact better than ever, and we should continually strive to improve those areas which aren't. You seem to think that 'equality' is something that we can impose by fiat, yet we have reams of evidence to the contrary.
Your appeal to history being cyclical is a statement of blind faith.
The past is not necessarily a good predictor of the future - corps have an unprecedented amount of power over our government.
I'm making a rather specific argument as to why things are going to keep getting worse. I do not accept your general appeal to history as a counter argument to this - we are in new territory.
Why specifically should we expect the trend of increasing corporate power over our legal systems to reverse?
> Civil rights, LGBTQ rights, women's suffrage, the rise of the middle class, worker's rights... I could keep going.
LGBTQ is the only recent development, no corporate interest to fight there and it was still a ridiculous struggle.
I think that the kernel of my disagreement with you is that your argument is rooted in appeals to history. And I think the kernel of my disagreement with this notion is simply that we suck at government.
All of the modern amenities we enjoy ultimately came out of a very effective way of finding things out about the world: empiricism and the scientific method. Until we bring that to bear on systems of governance, I will not be satisfied by any appeal to our current knowledge of how these things work. Because we don't know shit.
The aviation industry is my favorite example of how much we can accomplish with empirical systems engineering. The industry has collectively achieved an absolutely ridiculous standard of safety by carefully analyzing accidents at a systems level. From mechanical failures to user interfaces to pilot training - they consider each level on its own and how they interact. And the result is absolutely incredible.
We could bring these same techniques to bear on our societies. But we don't.
With that framing, you're omitting the most important part of the article:
All of the most powerful, most predatory actors in that society are gearing up to make that drug more widely available, experiment with its potency, and capitalize on the notion that it is "the least harmful."
I'm grateful they quoted a Stanford professor speaking truth: "We’ve learned enough about capitalism to know that’s very dangerous."
> I feel like we are repeating similar mistakes we made with the tobacco industry.
Pot is so much less addictive and damaging to health than tobacco and alcohol, that it makes perfect sense to have it legal and as readily available as those things.
I think that based on the evidence we have you are right about the relative risks. However I 1) think that if we had a do-over, we should outlaw tobacco but keep nicotine legal and 2), based on anecdotal experience I think we will end up finding in 30-40 years the true health/mental health outcomes of cannabis since it will be more easily studied 3) my big worry is less the legalization and more of the perverse incentives companies will have to promote its use through industry funded health studies, advertisements, etc...
GP is empathising with pot users. It’s a comment on the unreasonable stresses of life for a majority of people in modern society, and the taboo on medication and drugs policy.
