Black children had an adjusted 0.73 to 1.41 µg/dL more blood Pb (p < 0.001 respectively) and a 1.8 to 5.6 times higher odds of having an EBLL ≥5 µg/dL (p ≤ 0.05 respectively) for every selected risk factor that was tested. For Black children nationwide, one in four residing in pre-1950 housing and one in six living in poverty presented with an EBLL ≥5 µg/dL. In conclusion, significant nationwide racial disparity in blood Pb outcomes persist for predominantly African-American Black children even after correcting for risk factors and other variables.
Learned about this phenomenon when considering buying a home built prior to 1978.
The highest blood lead levels are seen in children living in denser population areas at or below poverty thresholds. Homes in these largely urban, low-income areas are disproportionately built before 1978 and subject inhabiting children to a significantly higher lead exposure risk. In 2014, it was estimated that 90 percent of all DC homes were built before 1978.
Despite Baltimore leading the charge to inform the public concerning the risks of environmental exposure to lead by banning lead-based paint (but not plumbing or other construction products) in 1951 following a clinical study from Johns Hopkins University, many Baltimoreans, primarily Black, continue to face excessive exposure to lead. The US would not follow Baltimore's example and ban lead-based paint until 1978, because lead lobbyists continued to disrupt regulation efforts.
Lead remediation is an expensive process and even with programs that help or completely cover the costs, many people may not be aware of the programs to take advantage of them.
You can start to see why the problem disproportionately impacts the Black population.
The issue is similar to the asbestos mania. Lead paint is a problem for young children mostly when it peels and gets ingested, or pulverizes and ends up in the air.
Because the strategy is elimination, lead remediation is a huge expense and has driven landlord behavior to embrace incredulous ignorance. There’s actually an incentive to not maintain property in some cases - remediation may exceed the value of the property.
A smarter strategy imo would be to reduce harm. Do stuff like pay landlords to replace windows and paint trim to encapsulate older lead paint. In poor neighborhoods, you could use this to incentivize section 8 enrollment which gives the government more power to drive other remedies for different problems.
I grew up in an 1890s home and live in a circa 1918 home today. There is almost certainly lead present in both the water supply lines and in various painted structures. Because the homes were/are maintained and the water system isn’t run by criminally negligent people, my kids do not have any lead exposure.
I live in an 1820s farmhouse and had some new windows put in a while back. Basically the installers were “You have lead and we’re going to charge a bit more for the necessary procedures” and everyone was fine with that. It’s a matter if not having a bunch of flaking paint. If that isn’t a reasonable answer, even if there isn’t flaking paint, the answer is basically don’t live in an old place if you can avoid it.
In my city, if I pull a permit for any type of work, it triggers a bunch of nonsense including licensed remediation, etc. Depending on the inspector and the contractor, that could be a big deal.
> because lead lobbyists continued to disrupt regulation efforts.
I have genuine, actual trouble maintaining faith in humanity when I hear about people like this existing. It just makes me incredibly depressed and bummed out about life.
I hear you. We’re just more sophisticated chimps. Sophisticated enough to devise ways to kill nearly all life on earth, but not wise enough to take care of the planet and ourselves.
The biggest importer of asbestos is India. Even if they'd already banned Russian asbestos, the only country to have enough asbestos is China, guess the rest.
Gasoline is not big business? They had a "scientist" on staff, that proclaimed that leaded fuel was harmless. Who cares about paint, when there are millions of cars driving around blowing lead dust into the air? The (real) scientist who saw a connection needed years to prove it. By digging into the ice in the arctis he was able to prove, that the high lead levels where a recent phenomenon. The documentary Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey by Neil deGrasse Tyson [0] tells this story much better than i ever could and much more... Highly recommended!
People doing what's best for them can be very evil for others, like the fact that buildings full of lead paint and lead-leaking pipes have not been fixed.
> buildings full of lead paint and lead-leaking pipes have not been fixed.
That’s because a few IQ points in black and poor people is not considered more important than not using tax money to solve the problem.
Arguably, the added IQ points times the number of people affected would most likely have a positive effect on the GDP and would pay for the fix in a couple decades.
That we even think that we’d need to do the math to justify it is deeply depressing.
Yes because the reason they they are prodominantly represented in those neighborhoods just because they were redlined there as a matter of public policy for decades
Yes, even if redlining wasn't occurring and allowed for access to credit so they could lever up on a mortgage in nicer, newer neighborhoods, that would simply
1) alter representation in poorer neighborhoods, as in, black people wouldn't be so heavily represented, but then you would still have the problem of somebody being exposed to lead paint and apathetic landlords
2) the additional demand would wind up pushing people to the bad neighborhoods anyway, some part of me thinks getting right back to square one, but there are a ton of variables there. (Like maybe the higher prices would have incentivized more developers, or even the landlords of bad buildings to renovate)
the outcome that has occurred is still messed up. a lot of race based discrimination in the US against black people has had an economic rationalizing, I wonder if the increased pricing was a factor, alongside more clear cut segregationist idea.
Buying a home pre-1978 is a mess. Every contractor asks "what year is the home". If you state something before 1978 - they wont open a wall, touch old tiles, do roof work, etc. Contractors immediately offer one of their friends to do asbestos removal or lead work. I had water leak in a 1967 home. Just to throw away plaster walls cost a fortune: "hazardous material". It looked like a sci-fi movie people in full outfits, full plastic wrapped rooms, negative pressure systems, air locks. My home insurance wouldn't pay - then dropped me that year.
> In 2014, it was estimated that 90 percent of all DC homes were built before 1978.
Europeans go what? I'm thinking of all my friends and family and out of hundreds of houses I've been in I can only think of a handful that were built after 1978. I'm not sure why lead isn't a problem so much though, maybe phased out earlier? .
It's not just the buildings. It's the soil, and the air. Test the soil next to any major roadway and you'll get highly toxic lead levels. Children like to get into dirt. Construction kicks the dirt back into the air.
I'm surprised they don't control for(or even mention!) fruit juice consumption, which can end up bioaccumulating dangerous amounts of lead and other heavy metals at a surprisingly low daily intake ([0] ~4oz of juice per day). I also very rarely see anyone talking about this source of lead intake - usually it is focused on water pipes or paint chips. Do black children drink more fruit juice than non-black children? If fruit juice consumption is anything like soda consumption(which I suspect it is, but have no proof), then the answer is yes[1]:
> With whites as the reference group, the odds of consuming soda was 3.1 times higher for U.S.-born blacks (95% CI 2.6–3.7), 2.4 times higher for Puerto Ricans (95% CI 1.9–3.0), and 2.9 times higher for Mexican/Mexican-Americans (95% CI 2.0–4.1). Those living in households with income less than 200% of the federal poverty level were more likely (odds ratio [OR] = 1.7, 95% CI 1.4–2.1) to be frequent soda consumers than those in households earning 600% or more of the poverty level.
Based on my experience growing up poor, fruit juice was always more expensive than soda. If you’re living in shitty housing you’re probably not drinking much juice.
The question isn't choosing between fruit juice or soda, it is rather whether parents might be more likely to give their kids fruit juice to placate them, or because they mistakenly think "fruit = healthy".
Cursory research shows that might be the case(regarding lower income consuming more fruit juice):
> By contrast, the highest 100% juice consumption was found among children, racial/ethnic minorities and lower-income groups.
> parents might be more likely to give their kids fruit juice to placate them, or because they mistakenly think "fruit = healthy".
I wouldn't be surprised if people who have difficultly affording/accessing fruit would think juice was "at least some form of fruit". The packaging often seems to be designed explicitly to mislead us into thinking that way.
The shelf life of juice is easily in its favor too. Normally, I have easy access to fresh produce and in our house it's about even odds that fruit will go bad before it's eaten and I don't have the stresses and struggles of a low income household with children that could make that even worse. If I were on a very tight budget it might be hard to justify the expense on something you're likely to throw away.
>examined risk factors; survey years; binary gender; bodyweight; low birthweight; anemia; health insurance coverage; Medicaid/CHIP enrollment; federal Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) supplemental food program enrollment; use of water treatment devices; b age in months; c educational attainment less than 9th grade education; d housing built before 1960 or 1940; e number of cigarettes smoked inside the home per day (1 to 40 or more); f poverty-to-income ratios
I don't see traffic proximity aka urbanicity aka leaded gasoline particulate pollution in there.
Lead plumbing and lead paint are two factors. But there is lead all through the soil and air as well.
Yeah don't even start to read up on lead arsenate sprays in apple orchards through most of the 20th century. That will keep you at night up for a long time when you start to think about it.
It one of the most impactful studies on how lead affects intellectual development, the researcher (who is white) restricted the study to white people only because he assumed (correctly) his results would be ignored if he included African Americans who are disproportionately affected by lead poisoning.
It's been pretty well accepted for decades that this is the case:
>A highly significant association was found between lead exposure and children's IQ (P < 0.001)... There was no evidence that the effect was limited to disadvantaged children and there was a suggestion of the opposite.
Apparently, it's considered to be acceptable by current standards. Despite the fact that babies will obviously touch the bottle (and the paint) and then put their hands in their mouth. I bought glass bottles because I wanted to avoid plastic thinking it'd be safer and I was reassured by seeing that they were manufactured in Germany :(
I think we still have very far to go in terms of toxic substance exposure.
Of course it's considered acceptable, lead doesn't just dissolve when you touch it and it's not like the paint is 100% lead. Our bodies are pretty resilient and you shouldn't be scared of super tiny trace things in the environment. Your baby probably receives much more lead exposure by breathing.
After 3 months of using that baby bottle before I stopped some of the paint flaked off. I'm guessing due to the fact that this bottle is regularly heated up which means it is an issue. If some paint flaked off that means potentially my baby ingested it.
Lead bioaccumulates, it stays in your body until you die, there's no mechanism to remove lead. The scientific consensus is that there is no safe level of lead exposure. See https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27837574/ or even the CDC: "No safe blood lead level in children has been identified. Even low levels of lead in blood have been shown to affect learning, ability to pay attention, and academic achievement. " https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/lead/prevention/default.htm
So, yes, there are a lot of toxic things in the environment and I'm not concerned about most of them but lead is dangerous and has been proven to be. There is also no reason whatsoever for a company to use lead paint (which has been banned for constructions in the 70s) on a product meant to be used for children (a baby bottle).
> Of course it's considered acceptable, lead doesn't just dissolve when you touch it and it's not like the paint is 100% lead.
The FDA didn't care about lead when it was being spooned directly to infant's mouths in the form of their baby food. The standards aren't what they are because of the amount of risk to people's health, or they would never have allowed it. I wouldn't assume something was safe just because it met FDA standards/recommendations.
We didn't have the data yet, then we learned more over time. The standards are what they are because of what we learned. You don't trust the FDA to think that everything is safe unless they say so or they're wrong, you trust them to tell you they know that something is definitely bad. There's a huge difference there.
According to the congressional report that came out last year the FDA knew about the dangers of lead. One baby food company, Hain (HappyBABY), even sent the FDA a presentation telling them that the commercial process of preparing finished baby foods increases their levels of toxic heavy metals, and the FDA still did nothing to limit how much.
The report found that the FDA's inaction and approach "appears designed to be protective of baby food manufacturers." if that's true, then you couldn't really trust them to tell you they know that something is definitely bad
> I was recently horrified to learn that the baby glass bottle I had been using with my baby had lead paint on it.
I felt the same about the amount of arsenic, lead, and mercury, in baby food. Companies have gotten away with having dangerous amounts of them in the food they sell. It wasn't even limited to weird off brands but popular brands I probably ate myself as an infant like Gerber and Beech-Nut.
I don't have much faith n the FDA at this point. I would have thought "No literal poison in baby food" would have been the standard, but turns out the FDA allowed dangerous amounts. A congressional report found that the FDA did nothing to limit the levels of dangerous metals in baby food, and that they appeared to be doing it "to be protective of industry". Now the FDA has said they'll do something about it, but even their plan is called "Closer to Zero" when what we need is an "Essentially zero poison in baby food" standard.
> In 2021, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) ruled that as a consequence of new understandings of nanoparticles, titanium dioxide could "no longer be considered safe as a food additive",
Taken at face value that quote seems like reason enough to at least suspect that there's a possible problem. It also says that by the time they did that France had already banned it.
The fact that a bunch of people evaluated evidence that gave them significant concern doesn't prove that they're right, but it is some reason to believe it's toxic... It's not a lot very strong thing to base that belief on, but it's something. Reading that alone I would try to avoid the stuff until I got the chance to look into what all that evidence was.
That's assuming the article can be taken at face value. This is wikipedia after all. I did notice that there was a prominent statement right at the top of the "Health and Safety" section which says it "is regarded as "completely nontoxic". Maybe that is true, but the citation points to a source from 2006 while the EU decided to ban it 15 years later after "new understandings of nanoparticles".
According to the CDC, "No safe blood lead level in children has been identified. Even low levels of lead in blood have been shown to affect learning, ability to pay attention, and academic achievement. ", so there's no acceptable dose of lead if it is ingested.
Being sure that there's no issues without having done the research is just as ignorant as someone who panics without having done the research. If I'm concerned about something, you can be sure I will read everything to see if it is an actual issue or not.
The Lead Exposure Elimination Project (https://leadelimination.org/) is an organization that's working to solve this problem internationally. I've been giving money on a monthly basis and have been blown away by their progress.
> Experts suggest that lead paint is now one of the most important current and future sources of lead exposure, as well as the most tractable source to address.
It was one of the 'best' exterior and trim paints available for a time.
Not easy to remove from old window sills or concrete ledges. It only gets removed somewhat during necessary window and door replacements.
So it is ubiquitous in older houses and flats. Doesn't matter if it is 1 million USD, the lead will be somewhere if it is old enough. Particularly attics and basements, or anywhere with grindy old doors or windows -- not safe for children.
The plumbing also has lead, either through lead pipes directly or iron pipes with leaded solder or other high lead content.
It isn't uncommon at all to simply apply new coats of paint over existing ones, rather than sanding and scraping off the old paint.
As long as kids don't eat your walls, it is safer too- the risks from a few chips are much lower than fine powdered dust that lingers around a long time and is even harder to completely remove.
This is 100% true. Even in high regulation states like Massachusetts nobody is required to remove all lead paint, just lead paint that’s at risk of flaking or being ingested, like a door jamb or a window sill, or a non-intact wall.
To put it another way: a child won’t break through your living room wall and ingest that paint. They might scrape flakes off the already flaking window sill, though.
Correct. Though note also that lead paint was being phased out already earlier than 1978, so single-family homes built after 1960 or so are less likely to have lead. That still leaves a lot of dwelling units, particularly those that were not renovated recently (i.e. cheaper places).
Unless it was a 20 year old playground, the playground was probably made in SE Asia. We got miniblinds around 1990 that were manufactured in China, but sold in the US that were recalled due to lead paint.
Besides people melting lead batteries everywhere for recycling, much of the cooking dishes are made from recycled aluminum auto parts. Often laced with lead.
DR Congo has been exploited so much it pains my heart. Sadly in coming years it's probably gonna get worse for them given they have so many minerals and both China/US are gonna tussle over them.
One of the most heartbreaking things I ever learned about was the high levels of lead in Mexican candy. This is apparently mostly due to the inks used in the packaging.
> Our results indicate that more than 15% of the population will experience a decrement of more than 5 IQ points from lead exposure. The analysis also leads us to believe that lead is responsible for 820,000 disability-adjusted life-years for lead-induced mild mental retardation for children aged 0 to 4 years.
Ah crud...in years past I have bought large bags of Mexican candy from Amazon...and subsequently eaten all of it. :(
Does anyone know if there is a test that can tell "historical" levels of lead? It sticks around in the blood right? So if I get a regular lead test will it account for any historical consumption?
Has there also been any research into devising a test to determine if IQ has fallen due to lead poisoning? I guess I don't see a way for this data to be collected after the fact?
Eating a few bags of candy isn't going to do it. It's going to take years and years of constant exposure. People in this thread need to calm down. Even if you did lose 5 IQ points, it's not like Flowers For Algernon here... No one would even notice. The only reason we can is due to large sample sizes over decades and decades.
Small airports have more smaller prop planes, fun fact, they almost exclusively use leaded gas because it gives them more power. So if you live near one, you're getting a dusting of lead everyday. Like this one in the middle of $500k+ homes suburbs: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Chandler+Municipal+Airport...
It doesn't give them more power. As I understand it, small planes last a long time, and a lot of them have old engines that were designed for leaded gas and wear out faster if run on unleaded fuel. Thus, the FAA is reluctant to approve unleaded fuel in those aircraft.
This has been disproven so many times, it is tiring to even try. Small amount, dispersed over huge distances. Current measurements indicate NO more lead in the blood of people near airports than not. It is only heard nowadays from land developers seeking to capitalize on a few acres among "the middle of $500k+ homes"
Don't forget the part about "gives them more performance" which is just an overt lie. They use it because aviation is regulated to high heaven and there are no approved alternatives yet.
Yeah I believe it’s more of an maintenance deal. The leaded gas causes less wear on the cylinders and pistons, so generally makes the plane safer and less risk of a major malfunction during a flight. There aren’t many alternatives with similar characteristics to leaded gas. We used to use it in cars for the same reason, but decided the maintenance/safety/health trade offs were worth banning it.
Not exactly, you can get STC approval to use mogas in most piston engines, it's just a hassle and expense so most people don't do it: https://www.autofuelstc.com/
When land developers finally get their hands on Reid-Hillview, you can be 100% sure of one thing: they won’t offer or be required to do any lead mitigation putting up all those condos.
For context, leaded gasoline phase-out began in 1973, based on the 1970 Clean Air Act. It was largely gone in the US by the 80s but not officially eliminated (except for General Aviation) until 1996. Other countries continued to use leaded gasoline, largely in Africa and the Middle East; the UN started an effort in 2002 to eliminate it in those places still using it. In July 2021, the last stocks of leaded gasoline (in Algeria) were exhausted (probably literally).
GA pilot here. This is true and most of us don't like using leaded gas either. It's nasty stuff that leads to increased wear on our engines, is more expensive, and is increasingly used as justification for closing airports. Plus we're exposed to it when fueling our planes.
However, it's worth mentioning that recently the first unleaded avgas, G100UL, was approved by the FAA. We're trying to move away from 100LL (leaded avgas) and are finally making some progress on that front.
Yeah in the US I recall in 1991 or 92 the pumps had "UNLEADED" in great big letters running up the side of them. My dad's '77 chevy had a gas gauge near the center console that said "UNLEADED FUEL ONLY".
There's been another push to get rid of leaded gas in aviation but studies show that it's virtually undetectable in the environment.
Source? I have no reason to doubt you but would love to see where those data. Most of what I heard is that "lead exposure above zero is significant" and "if you're living near an airport, especially one serving smaller plans, you are being exposed".
This is specific to the reid-hillview county airport, north of san jose. It was in the news last fall. I can't/won't look for the exact broadcast, but the spokesperson for the airport was quick to point out that there's no detectable lead in the air. The FAA is not convinced either and has no intention of shutting down the airport.
I don't work for anything related to aviation or petrol, quite the opposite, and I don't have any interest in it, just was suprised to hear the FAA say that there's no detectable lead in the environment, and then a lead blood level study trying to argue otherwise. In the study they do admit that 25% of the homes in the study were built before 1960 (which I thought was an odd year to pick, as lead paint wasn't banned until almost 20 years later (1978), and I'd wager 65%+ of the homes there were built 1960-1978).
That's about as much time as I have to look down that rabbit-hole. I may be convinced, but there's enough cherry-picked data to make a very gray issue questionable. Looks like nationwide BLL is about 1.50 ug/Dl and in the homes less than a thousand feet directly downwind of the airport it was 1.70, and a child in a typical lead paint home was 1.90
It would have been much more convincing (and conclusive), to me, if there was a measurable amount of lead, particularly downwind, in the areas with the higher blood lead levels. But those readings either were not done, or were absent in the report.
Leaded gas used in general aviation is not jet fuel. Slightly higher octane than "car" fuel, but definitely not jet fuel which is basically kerosene. I could be wrong, but I don't think you could smell the difference between leaded and non-leaded fuel in exhaust.
On one hand, benzene goes much farther than any lead-containing organic compound, and the dispersal is exponential, so it's really much farther.
On the other hand, the thing is literally being dispersed from the high-up, so who knows. It is really a strange result, as one should expect detectable differences even if not large enough to matter. Is water carrying it away?
Jet fuel is kerosene, a close relative to rocket fuel (RP-1) and would probably run in a diesel engine for quite a while if you tried (don't try this). Avgas is.... automotive gasoline with some additives, specifically lead based octane booster. They're very different products.
What has never made sense to me is that the IQ effects aren't equally visible across income/class groups, but we know there are millions of wealthy people living in old housing in Boston and NYC and Providence and so on. Lead levels in those houses must be just as high, right? But those kids aren't experiencing the same IQ effects. Surely this suggests that something else is a bigger factor?
It's only 3 IQ points, 1/5 of a standard deviation so not really massive. Of course there are much bigger effects on IQ such as the factors that cause low income children, and people in poor countries to have low IQs which swamp the lead effect.
I imagine frequency and budget of renovations in older housing influences the degree of lead exposure from paint. Poorer neighborhoods may have housing units with largely original (or old enough to contain lead) paint, whereas richer neighborhoods would have a larger proportion of high quality renovations which would eliminate some of the lead paint
If you have money, and it’s your house then you get the old paint stripped when you repaint. If you are buying a home, and there is lead paint, then you negotiate down on the price to compensate for removal.
Landlords of shitty apartments or houses just slap a new coat of the cheapest possible paint over the old.
99.99% of the time there is zero cost reduction due to the presence of lead paint in a normally maintained home. All old homes have it or are assumed to have it.
Stripping is uncommon and can't remove all lead paint from porous surfaces anyway -- like concrete blocks, walls, or ledges.
Landlords use a special lead blocker paint if required to pass inspections. Otherwise -- who knows.
Eating chunks of intact wall is unlikely, but surfaces like window sills are very risky because they constantly flake. That’s the nuance of lead mitigation. You can be completely compliant and safe for children with some lead paint on intact walls.
Any tenant can force their landlord to remove lead in those high risk areas (at landlords expense!) if there’s a young child but few renters know about this option.
Wealthy people are more likely to have good childcare (nannies, after school activities) where kids spend less time unsupervised and able to, for example, eat paint chips. For that matter, stuff like chipped paint is less likely to be left in a deteriorating state by more affluent owners.
Just as a matter of common sense and gut-check plausibility, what are we talking about when we talk about "eating paint chips?" Does eating a couple flakes lower your IQ in a measurable way? Seems very unlikely. What are we talking about, then? Do we imagine kids to be shoveling paint chips into their mouth day after day? Surely that's a pretty small number of children (if it's any), nowhere near enough to suggest generational, cohort-level effects. So what is it that we really think is happening here?
My personal experience as a landlord: kids putting their mouths on rails and banisters that are at the level of their mouths. Vivid memories of kids standing around just hanging out on the deck (pre-Internet obviously) with their mouth on the rail.
"Does eating a couple flakes lower your IQ in a measurable way? Seems very unlikely."
Like asking about the effect of a little second-hand smoke. Probably not a measurable effect, but many people would not be consoled by the inability of the data to register an effect.
The study in the OP also specifically calls it out:
>Our estimates, based on leaded gasoline consumption, may also have underpredicted high-lead exposures owing to leaded paints and pipes, which tend to aggregate within particular communities (e.g., those with high rates of homes with lead service lines and lead paint in disrepair).
It's from dust on surfaces, toys, and hand to mouth. All toddlers should be tested. There is no surety! Any soils or dust could be contaminated from the heyday of leaded gasoline and paint.
Unemployed people don't need nannies, and they're the poorest. I think you're deliberately avoiding saying that poor people abuse their children, which is true. It's not much about affording anything.
That's because there's this quite "sticky" situation of not every human being being the same. Nobody likes to talk about it and you get shunned or imprisoned for even thinking about it, but the world has actually groups of people with varying levels of intelligence.
That's focused on crime, not IQ/cognition. Crime is not a purely mental phenomenon, so it would likely have a weaker correlation with lead even if the effect is real. The blog post does try to dissemble on the IQ question, but the only evidence presented shows a significant effect of lead (contra the blogger's thesis).
there's this thing about the modern internet era which makes it possible to find a study to debunk (or support) pretty much any idea/theory you want.
specially in the midst of an information/propaganda war
all I'm trying to say is that I have decided not to think in the way you just did e.g. "where's that study which supports what I already believe?". It doesn't seem like a good tactic anymore
This is nothing new, it's a defect of humanity that has existed forever. It's also a problem that has been solved through the scientific method and peer review.
It goes against our nature, so it's a skill that needs to be learned and practiced. This means that the average person isn't going to have those skills, and even people with those skills aren't all going to be experts.
What is new is that the internet is leading every random idiot to believe that they're an expert on everything. So finding a link to a "study" with a title that sounds like it supports your point (without even reading it, and definitely without critically evaluating it) is seen as doing research.
> all I'm trying to say is that I have decided not to think in the way you just did e.g. "where's that study which supports what I already believe?". It doesn't seem like a good tactic anymore
You might be victim to what I described above. Finding a study that already supports what you believe was never a "good tactic". In fact, calling it a tactic makes it seem as if it's an adversarial thing where there's a winner and a loser. It's not. Facts and truths aren't partisan (ignoring them is)
To add, playing a paper like a trading card is essentially an appeal to authority[1].
Readers, you have to build mental a model and use causal mechanism and research studies as evidence, not proof. Accept the models which are stronger than the ones you have, even if they make you uncomfortable or conflict with your preconceived notions. Its ok to flip between conclusions as new evidence presents itself.
> all I'm trying to say is that I have decided not to think in the way you just did e.g. "where's that study which supports what I already believe?".
Hmm.
It looks like you're ascribing to the above comment the thought process: "I'm only looking for studies which only tell me that which I believe." However, the above comment doesn't seem to be saying this. They thought there was more to the story and are querying for the rest of the story.
Meanwhile, you seem to ascribe to yourself the quality of not searching for data that supports what you already believe.
However, it seems to me that searching for more studies (even if you're only looking for data that confirms your bias) is a better outcome than assuming (without more proof) that people who aren't you are thinking "the bad way"TM.
I mean, if you had searched for additional proof to discover that what you already thought was true about above commenter (ie they were thinking the bad way) you might have discovered that they in fact were simply looking for additional context due to recalling past events that indicated that there might have been additional context.
> I have decided not to think in the way you just did e.g. "where's that study which supports what I already believe?"
I'm not sure you have if you immediately assume what veltas believes because they're asking to be reminded about another study. Seems like projection.
My personal opinion is that it's less noble to close your ears to new information once you've found the information that you prefer than it is to look for more information when you don't like the information you have.
I'm sort of asking if anyone remembers this as well, was posted on HN, I probably could find it myself but since I don't have the time right now I thought I'd make the comment!
Indeed. One issue we have today is a glut of scientific information, some of which is high quality and some isn't. Also, some will later be shown to be false, and some correct, in any given context.
It's not enough to say simply that a study exists (even if it is a large meta-study); it's necessary to actually read it in full and critically appraise it.
But ain't nobody got time for that.... which is a problem!
If they don't have time to read the paper, they aren't investing in the argument enough, and at that point you know the other person is not open to being wrong, which then you respect and end the conversation.
On a one-to-one basis, that might be one approach.
On a system- or industry-wide basis, this approach fails to address the real issue of the significant time taken for evidence to reach patients. Simply walking away leaves the problem unresolved.
Has widespread use of lead been exclusive to the US ? I'd imagine that there are other countries which still haven't transitioned off lead, and that they can be used as control. Alternately, are there states that never embraced widespread lead use and if they can be used as a control too ?
Some also attribute the removal of lead to substantial decrease in violence over the last few decades.
So, I am not surprised that the effect size here is so large.
Might an impolite question to ask, but is there a known correlation between IQ and propensity for physical violence ? (controlled for socio economics and protected classes of course)
I hope not. This fear of not fitting in with contemporary politics is toxic to science. Social science is already badly broken and is filled with it. If somebody can't be objective because of fear of being labelled a heretic for not deferring to the law to decide which factors must be controlled for, they have no business doing science on that topic. Are you aware that genetic information is a protected class in America, despite the fact that it influences IQ? Why would you arbitrarily control for that, but not for other factors that influence IQ such as maternal care? It's complicated to decide what to control for, but the law is absolutely not the place go to make that decision.
> Has widespread use of lead been exclusive to the US ?
No. Leaded gasoline was used throughout the world. Leaded paint on the other hand was in some cases banned in other countries 50 years before it was in the US.
I really doubt that. While I am aware of shrinking IQ, as far as I know its a thing of the last 30 years, leaded gas in most developed countries was already outlawed.
IQ reduction is totally expected from the moment contraceptive methods became fully available. Common sense seems to be out of fashion these days, but Idiocracy was spot on: the dumber you are the more prone to "unexpected" pregnancies you'll be. The future will not be Star Trek.
you never know. We might be able to hit a critical mass with Authoritarian regimes regulating reproduction, and through gene editing.
Perhaps when we finally translate "unintelligent people" into "vermin" we'll do what many previous iterations of society have done... genocide.
Part of this is literally possible. A big part of made stark to point out that we should be careful in the way our language dehumanizes people of below average intelligence. They're still part of our species, and biological history.
Many things are true simultaneously. Genocide is a moral abomination, and we should be vigilant in guarding against it and its precursors. And folks with below average intelligence are just as human as everyone else, deserving of the same respect and the same rights. And there are many contemporary factors that would seem to make high IQ people less likely to procreate low IQ people--including the high cost (including trade-off costs) of children and the ready availability of contraceptives. And long term downward pressure on IQ would be a disaster for our civilization and a danger to our species.
We can't let the ghosts of eugenicists past scare us away from asking important questions. Avoiding the awful mistakes of the past will require care and diligence, and can be (must be!) done without embracing the easy path of reactionary "moral" ignorance.
> including the high cost (including trade-off costs) of children
I honestly think part of it is like Parkinson's law, but for resources to spend on children -- Children are expensive to rich people largely because rich people spend lots on their children. (too much?) Children mostly thrive in opportunity and resources (so long as it isn't pacifying their desire to achieve for themselves).
On the tradeoffs, this is pure psychology. Generations of people who have shirked social responsibility, and maximized selfishness. "Me" generation + "me me me" generation and all that. Time for people who see society, humanity, and duty as more beneficial than getting a bunch of likes on TikTok for doing something that inconveniences others (like dancing in a crosswalk or something) .
From what I've read the removal of lead from gasoline is partially a factor in the sudden reduction of crime during the latter half of the 20th century, but it's not enough to explain the entire trend... which seems to be a preponderance of factors.
Obviously nothing is monocausal, but it seems like the link with lead here is best supported by evidence among the things you've listed. It holds constant across several countries and cultures where those other factors are quite different. Western Europe wasn't throwing up prisons and enacting 3-strike laws, but saw similar declines in crime. You can find similar counter examples around abortion access as well. Those thing probably contribute, but the effect size of removing lead from the environments seem really large!
The lead hypothesis is supported by particularly strong evidence: there is a natural threshold experiment where school children with blood lead levels over a certain amount are treated to remove lead from their home environment (and their bodies) while other children just below the same lead level were not treated. The difference in later life outcomes are stark.
There is no such natural experiment for abortion. It's just an idea.
The remainder can be explained by bread and games = cheap food and game consoles which kept the kids playing in the house instead of being part of a gang.
But then there's been a huge rise in crime. The murder rate in some cities is dramatically higher than just a few years ago. But it's not like the gas suddenly became leaded again.
This makes me think that we just can't be too certain about these things.
Is this actually true? I've seen a lot of people saying this politically but haven't seen a lot of data to back it up. From what I've seen there's been a slight bump, which isn't too surprising given the state of everything... but it's still massively dwarfed by the decrease in the 90s and 00s
Here property crime was up a little bit but violent crime was way up (50% or so). I personally think it's the stress and anxiety of lost jobs, loss of release valves (going to the office, seeing friends, etc). I believe it's a temporary spike and will fade in the next year or two.
Thanks! this supports the fact that it's still lower than before the 90s decline, and possibly pandemic related. I guess we'll find out over the next few years.
> Despite rising sharply in 2020, the U.S. murder rate remains below the levels of the early 1990s.
> Americans remain far less likely to die from murder than from other causes, including from suicide and drug overdose.
From what I've seen there has been a recent rise in the murder rate. In some places it was at historical highs--but the cities are also much, much larger now. When looking at per-capita data its still historically low.
You're right in that there doesn't seem to be a definitive cause, but quite a few things have changed since Covid started and we're not sure what changes are permanent.
There was not huge rise in crime in general. There were more murders during lockdowns in US, which is in fact to be expected since people were forced to be with close relatives - and most murders are by close people.
Sure but it was an immensely stressful time for lots of people, that is going to drive up crimes of all types. Expect a similar (is not as drastic) drop in crime as well over the next couple of years.
Presumably there's an epigenetic effect from this i.e. having dumber parents would have negative effects on their children. But over time that should improve with the removal of lead from the environment. So we can at least take solace in that things ought to get better:
> Blood lead data were instrumental in developing policy to eliminate lead from gasoline and in food and soft drink cans. Recent survey data indicate the policy has been even more effective than originally envisioned, with a decline in elevated blood lead levels of more than 70% since the 1970s.
Independent of the effect of lead on intelligence isn't it impossible to reduce the IQ of half the population because IQ is a comparative calculation across that population. Ie as intelligence goes down the definition of 100 IQ points changes?
The IQ should be defined for the human race, in a time independent way, not for a specific nation or group. This allows us to make comparisons between different times, between different societies, etc.
Otherwise, if the IQ is redefined to always follow the current mean, it can only be used to classify people between smarter than average and "dumber" than average, which is not so useful.
Auto generate IQ tests, so cannot be learned by trying many times / cannot learn by heart. And have people in the next generation do the same auto generated tests.
This won't be perfect, but, using mathematics, Id think it would be possible to know how (im)precise the comparisons would be (confidence intervals of the differences).
Also, might not work for really bright people (they'd learn how the auto generated tests get generated? They might sort of "disassemble" them and find the answers quickly?)
This doesn't work because of the Flynn effect. Raw IQ scores have been consistently increasing over time. So much so that the average person in the 1920s would be considered mentally challenged today, if you used their raw IQ scores. However, we know that obviously the average person in the 1920s was not mentally challenged in the sense that someone with that same raw score would be today.
This is all a pretty big mystery and suggests we really don't understand this "IQ" thing we are measuring. However, one big consequence is that we definitely cannot meaningfully compare scores across time.
I guess it's useful if your goal is to figure out how to divide kids into separate math classes. I don't think anyone intended ability to rotate blocks and scramble letters as a timeless gauge of the quality of a person.
Don’t conflate intelligence with quality or value. Every human being is inherently valuable independent of their intelligence, and there are plenty of other interesting features besides intelligence that make people unique and interesting. Believing that IQ measures something tangible is not equivalent to ranking people based on their value any more than believing height or weight measure something real.
Yeah sorry, I agree with you in spirit. I was mainly arguing against the idea that "IQ is useful" and "IQ measures the value of humans" have to either both be true or both be false. My reply is to the interpretation of your comment as "IQ doesn't and can't measure the value of humans, therefor it's not very useful," which might not have been your intent.
Think of it from the individual-up. Even if the half of people with affected IQs were spread proportionally throughout the IQ bell curve, they'd have lower IQs than they did before. The other half would raise just as much as the affected half lowered, but the affected half still have lower IQs.
This message feed reminds me of the (excellent) book "Cradle to Cradle". It's about sustainable design/manufacturing and one of the lines that has stuck with me since I read it years ago was (summarizing here), "In the US we regulate how much poison is acceptable per person rather than just outright eliminating the poison!"
A 150 USD RO/DI filter can remove all of this stuff. Black, white, poka dot. Buy one and run your drinking water through it. Also comes in handy when the water goes out. You can turn off from the mains and have clean water. Also pure enough to use in your radiator or water your venus fly trap! Highly recommend.
The EPA is planning on issuing a proposed endangerment finding for leaded avgas in 2023, and there are already a number of unleaded avgas replacements available that can be used in the majority of aircraft (other than some high compression engines).
How does "Thing decreased in half" sound like the effect you'd expect from population independent variables? If, in the last century, the average number of toes had decreased in half I'd have a hell of a lot of questions.
"the average number of toes had decreased in half" is very hard to parse. I have no idea what you intended by this proposition, but here is my interpretation, and yes, I believe you do expect to see one half of the population average a lower number of toes.
Say I measure the average number of toes in the population twice. Once in 1990, and once in 2020, and there is no difference in the average number of toes between these two populations. Now instead imagine, for my second measurement, that I sort the people by how many toes they have, pick midpoint of that list, and take the average number of toes in each group. The average number of toes has now indeed decreased in this half. Mind you, I'm just responding to what you said. I have no idea what you meant.
Is IQ really quantifiable and measurable and is it comparable across different people, different geographies and races? I didn’t think it was, may be I am wrong. How is IQ even defined?
There is a great Radiolab series about this: G. The IQ test is an effort to measure "general intelligence", or "G", but the test has had biases over time with regard to race.
The landmark study by Herb Needleman on the link between lead exposure and IQ only studied white children to reduce any doubts about the validity of its claims [1].
Aye, in twenty years when we fully understand long covid a lot of people are going to regret not putting in the blood sweet and tears to convince ignorant family members that the vaccine is actually a good thing. We're also going to probably look back on the lack of continued remote learning as a dire mistake.
Be careful buying kids toys from china. Many of them contain lead. In fact, it's probably best to not buy anything from a culture of people who hate you.
Also, get a lead test for your child at every checkup, not just the ones where they offer it to you. The finger prick doesn't bother them nearly as much as the vaccinations do.
Perhaps past lead usage in fuels will indirectly lead to collapse of the civilisation:
Lead is known to decrease empathy and increase crime.
I don’t want to generalise an entire generation but boomer generation was heavily poisoned by lead and perhaps this made them more selfish and less emphatic. Maybe this is the primary cause of many current problems? I wonder if humans were supposed to be more emphatic in past before all lead poisoning happened.
Crime rates have fallen historically until COVID. I think it's more likely the post WW2 and post Cold War (perceived) eras were periods of irrational exuberance culturally in the west with uncommon optimism in western lead globalism and its future (What you consider civilization I take it). The last few years were a big time reality check on the collective interest in that future.
The rate of violent crime nearly quadrupled between 1960 and its peak in 1991 in the US. Even with the COIVD bump, rates are comparable to the mid 60s, and aren't tracking the previous climb.
Leaded gasoline consumption rose rapidly in the early 1960s and peaked in the 1970s. As a result, Reuben and his colleagues found that essentially everyone born during those two decades are all but guaranteed to have been exposed to pernicious levels of lead from car exhaust.
To respond to your other comment, homicide rates were falling starting around 1990, and the prison population exploded after that. Something else must be going one here. According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons[1] as of last month 45.3% of the total US prison population is there for non-violent drug offenses. Only 3.1% is for homicide, assault, or kidnapping. In the late 80s and early 90s lots of states and the federal government instituted really draconian sentencing laws.
So yeah, violent crime is WAY down from 1990, drug arrests have been soaring since.
But you agree that it needs an explanation, right? You gloat about a dramatic decrease in crime, yet the number of inmates increased tenfold over that time period.
See my other reply[1]. I'm not gloating, simply conveying facts about numbers. The increase in incarceration is mostly due to tougher sentences for non-violent crime.
Then why did Europe, Canada, Australia, and Japan see the same drops in crime? They all lock up a minuscule fraction of their populations by comparison and had larger or similar drops in crime.
The timing is also wrong, the drop in crime started before incarceration ramped up.
Also as I mentioned the plurality of incarceration is for nonviolent crime, a lot of which is simple drug possession.
The Nordic countries[1] all peak around '86-'92. Homicide is down world-wide since 1990[2]. This is a weird argument to make. I've never even encountered anyone who disagreed with this who has even a passing familiarity with criminology, economics, or broad societal trends.
I'm not even sure what you're actually arguing here. You're coming across like a contrarian who is frantically googling for a counter point.
Crime in Germany peaked in 1992[3].
Italy 1991 [4]
Canada also 1991 [5]
The problem is there is no evidence for any crime boom unless you pick the right location and the right beginning year (typically the post war years) or some such contrieved scenario. Even the graph in your second link shows it was completely insignificant.
The whole discussion is about the post war period. But if you look back further, homicide rates where higher. Again I’m not aware of any scholar, police organization, or or anyone really who disputes this. What even are you arguing here?
There's no utopian thinking here, just a recounting of statistics. Crime is a lot lower now in the US an Europe than it was for most of the post war period. In so far as we have data, there's a lot less murder now than at any time for which we have records.
Again these are basic facts. I'm not drawing any conclusions here really.
The whole discussion is about the post war increase, peak, and then decrease in crime. It isn't cherrypicking to have a scope for a discussion. I'm well aware of the long term trend here and mentioned it elsewhere. This matters because the 1990-ish peak is on par with crime levels at the end of the 1800s since people have limited lifespans, a doubling of the homicide rate in a person's lifespan is alarming. It's worth exploring and unpacking the reasons for the increase and decline. Perhaps there are policy lessons to be learned, and moreover there was no guarantee that 1992 would be the peak.
You've simultaneously argued that there is no downward trend, it doesn't matter in the long term, it did happen but because of mass incarceration in the US, and you've just been tossing out contrarian bullshit. You're acting in bad faith, and that sucks.
Yes it is cherry picking. You picked the starting date to make it seem like there was a dramatic rise, while looking further shows a post war dip, and return to "normal".
I argued first with the incarceration, which suggests the opposite.
You also said it happened in all countries, while it in fact didn't.
You ignore the inconsistencies and keep pointing back to that single piece of data that seems to support your position.
There doesn't seem to be any general improvement in behavior, only a decrease in standards.
The Norway peak in 2011 is entirely from the Utøya mass homicide.
Japan follows a similar curve despite starting and peaking later, 70% of those crimes for the whole period are nonviolent petty thefts. My mistake in including Japan doesn’t support either point your tried to make. Neither place has mass incarceration.
I'm not disputing the claim that lead poisoning can lead to violent crime, I'm disputing the claim that the turmoil of the last few years (my guess OP means starting with Brexit/Trump) is due to lead poisoned Boomer brains being less empathetic. Arguably the world is more empathetic than ever if you study history (simple data point: entire economies were built around slavery for most of human existence) and this one data point in isolation is really not a particularly strong one to point to for the claim.
Yeah that link seems reasonably well established. The link between "current problems" (whatever they are) and a generation of lead poisoned boomer brains isn't. I'm also not exactly sure what OP is suggesting and trying to connect the dots from their offhand comment. Probably a waste of time all around so I will exit the discussion.
Yeah that seems tenuous. Declining institutional trust, and the botched handling to trade liberalization in the 80s and 90s coupled with the post 2008 bailouts probably has a lot more to do with current political instability in the west broadly.
Is there any reason to believe that post-boomer generations are more empathetic? If anything, it feels as though empathy has been decreasing across the board amongst all age groups as time goes on, right up until the present. Maybe the Internet is stronger than lead.
> Were Nazi's eating lead for breakfast or something?
German here. The root cause for Nazism was not just a widespread acceptance of antisemitism, but especially the economic hardships following WW1 that gave rise to populism. A poor and desperate population is always liable to fall for a skilled demagogue.
And loss in WWI which was considered unfair along with wish to report it and win this time again. Stab in the back myth, the militarization of all government services and so on and so forth.
The antisemitism was not unique to Germany. It was all around the Europe for centuries.
Whataboutism is not every time someone says “what about X”. It’s when you are asked a question and you dodge it by saying “What about X”. e.g.
“Lead is bad for health”, “sugar is bad for health”, “marijuana is bad for health”. Not whataboutism.
“Mr Senator what’s with your taxpayer funded holiday?”, “What about YOUR broken election promises?”. Whataboutism.
> “Whataboutism or whataboutery is a variant of the tu quoque logical fallacy, which attempts to discredit an opponent's position by charging hypocrisy without directly refuting or disproving the argument” - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
I have a strong worries that our current generation will have a similar huge reckoning with marijuana.
We are already seeing studies that show regular marijuana use is correlated with permanent decreases in intelligence, memory loss, motivation, and mental health. And anecdotally, this seems very apparent in my peer group. And Americans are using copious amounts of the stuff right now, and younger than ever before.
I'm not against legalization by any means, or free of my own vices. But the risk in 50 years of people saying "we should have known better" seems really high.
Marijuana needs to be reclassified off of Schedule I Status in the USA, so it can be more thoroughly studied. Schedule I category shouldn't include recreational drugs like marijuana, which has no overdose possibility and has limited withdrawal side-effects. This wrong classification, going back to ignorant viewpoints of the early-mid 1900's, has heavily limited our scientific understanding of marijuana's effects on health and society.
Imagine if we weren't allowed to study alcohol freely, if we had to jump through a dozen hoops to become qualified to do one of the few alcohol studies. We might not have so much knowledge about alcohol's toxic effects, and we might not have the current picture of "Marijuana is slightly healthier than alcohol" if Marijuana had been as thoroughly studied.
This much is clear. Scheduling MJ is extremely unwise. But I would also extend this to everything in the psychedelic / hallucinogenic category. They do no psychological harm and an increasing body of evidence indicates that they, in all likelihood, do a significant amount of mental good for responsible users.
An acute example of this is a psychedelic called “DMT”. This psychedelic is nearly everywhere in nature, including our own brains. When inhaled, it lasts less than 10 minutes, give or take. After that 10 minutes, a user is completely sober without any indication that they were not, and no physiological side effects. But during that 10 minutes? It is an acute spiritual and existential experience, possibly the most acute non-normal experience possible for a human being. A true exploration of altered states, and possible contact with a different form of life unbound from our reality.
And for some reason, this substance is scheduled. It does no harm to a user, to third parties, nor to society, is short lived, and offers true spiritual experience but it’s scheduled. The scheduling as a whole is archaic, oppressive, and if nothing else, misguided.
This is also in top of the fact that it discourages addicts from seeking real treatment due to fear of being criminalized.
> This is also in top of the fact that it discourages addicts from seeking real treatment due to fear of being criminalized.
Portugal decriminalized all drugs in 2000 and saw a huge reduction in harm associated with drug use, and did not see an increase in usage. They went from among the worst in the EU in terms of HIV infections to among the lowest. [1]
Saying they do no psychological harm is quite am extreme statement and is just blatantly untrue. I tend to agree that these drugs should be dicriminalized, but you're doing the exact same thing thats been done with marijuana where the benefits of the drug are praised while the negatives are ignored.
Lack of guidance and cultural context leads to abuse of all sorts of substances. For all the ills of alcohol, there is at least (in the west) a degree of "acceptable usage" existing in society, something which almost every other recreational substance is currently missing.
My mistake. I meant physiological harm. Will edit.
Edit: cannot edit any longer. While I do not think they do cause psychological harm in the long term (I think they force confrontation with buried psychological issues in order to transcend them), they most certainly can cause short term psychological distress and issues for people unprepared, approaching with the wrong mindset, or using in an otherwise problematic set or setting.
I was going to post something v similar about psilocybin. The war on drugs has had such awful consequences and repercussions and costs, it boggles the mind.
To suggest that there is no potential for psychological harm from psychedelics is naive. I've personally suffered long-lasting psychological harm from a bad mushroom trip and I have at least a couple of friends/acquaintances who have, as well. You can quibble over the details of why and how adverse effects happen but it doesn't change the fact that they do.
I meant physiological harm, definitely a mistype on my end.
That said, psilocybin is highly sensitive to set and setting, especially to other neural nets and especially to others also on it. There is a massive host of issues in partaking with friends or around anyone else for that matter. It will amplify hidden untruths or other sort of otherwise “benign” sober psychological distress and make them acute.
What people call a “bad trip” I call an important lesson. We can choose to react negatively and label it accordingly, or visit it in a sense that a very advanced mindset was indicating a problem. When done this way, bad states cease to exist and it becomes clear the “bad trips” were just bad other things that needed some conscious attention.
All this to say: go get lost in the woods and trip with some plants & with people who hang with that setting, they will take care of you and it is a much better setting to do the work on self.
Your comment was sort of aimed at both me and the GP, but FWIW I'm not saying nothing bad ever happened to anybody on hallucinogenics. My main point is that the war on drugs has stymied our ability properly to study and understand these substances which incontrovertibly have some real benefits.
> It does no harm to a user, to third parties, nor to society,
Except it opens doors in people's minds which allows them to think differently for themselves. This results in them behaving less like sheeple. Why would that ever be scary for society?
My experience is it opens the door to not thinking much at all, but your mileage may vary. Is there anything more "sheeple" like than a bunch of stoned people sitting around not motivated to do much?
Sure, not all mj users may experience it this way, but a lot do! I certainly wouldn't be arguing it opens the door to a bunch of usefully profound thinkers in society.
MJ on its own has certainly ruined some people, especially daily users. I would argue, however, significantly less so than alcohol. It also has a much lower harm fact on others than alcohol.
MJ used more sparingly, and especially when used on someone with exposure to a psychedelic (not simultaneously but maybe the weekend after a trip)? Entirely different ballgame. It can awaken an internal symphony of inspiration and thinking.
Everything can be abused. Eat too much if anything and you will suffer. But when used appropriately, very magical experiences can be had that enable routes of thinking and problem solving that seem to come from out of this world.
In general, my recommendation to anyone is to try these things while simply meditating or hiking a safe & easy trail. Your mileage will vary but when done correctly, you will acquire otherworldly inspiration applicable towards your skilled professions and hobbies.
And if nothing else, even falling short of that result, this possibility should be enough for legality.
To paraphrase Bill Hicks, if you think marijuana/drug use has never had a good effect on society, take all of your favorite music and throw it in the trash. All of the musicians recording that music were "reaaaaalllll fucking high".
By the time Nixon came out with that policy, multiple commissions around the world had concluded that pot was largely harmless and should be decriminalized. People in his own administration - who he ordered to come up with a "damn strong statement" - concluded the same, infuriating him.
Harry Anslinger, the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (an early predecessor of the DEA), was one of the driving forces behind pot prohibition. He pushed it for explicitly racist reasons, saying, "Reefer makes darkies think they're as good as white men," and:
"There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the U.S., and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing result from marijuana use. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others."
The main reason to prohibit marijuana, he said was "its effect on the degenerate races." (And god forbid women should sleep with entertainers!)
-----------------
That tells me all I need to know about this whole situation. We would rightfully cancel/hold accountable someone saying that now. Why aren't we viewing the laws in the same light in which they were made?
I've tried doing deep dives into drug criminalization a few times before, and I've never been able to find a simplistic explanation for it. Keep in mind, this is something that every country in the world went forward with around the same time, even when they were adversaries who couldn't agree on much else. This was also something that nations often did on their own. A lot of these movements start much earlier than people think; look at Mexico's moves against cannabis in the late 1800's early 1900's. Or even the Gin Craze of the 1700's for a precursor.
There seem to be a few threads I've found that are worth pursuing:
1. The general increase in state power in various domains of life .
2. The decline of traditional communities and move toward urbanization creating a disconnected group of people that worried the upper classes.
3. The tendency of geopolitics to follow social trends/fads.
You could take a swing at it and see how it goes. The person you're replying to has said what they believe the cause is. You're free to propose other ones for other countries.
My explanation would be that the US drug war was aggressively international.
He proposes a causal mechanism, it’s fair to point out that it doesn’t explain why other countries are strongly anti-drug, without offering an alternative hypothesis.
The US drug war is international with respect to a few drug producing countries, but had very little influence elsewhere, such as in Asia. In my home country of Bangladesh the recent proposal is to make the death penalty available for drug traffickers and dealers. Nixon had no influence in Bangladesh (and in fact is strongly disliked because he supported Pakistan in the independence war).
Anti-drug sentiment arises out of cultural attitudes. Drug use is viewed as anti-social, because it often makes you less suitable for work, and degenerate. Some cultures are less forgiving of this than others. This is true in America and other highly religious countries, like Bangladesh, Iran, and the Philippines. But it’s also true in certain countries that aren’t highly religious but place a high cultural priority on industriousness, such as Sweden and Japan.
So I suspect you’ve got the Nixon anecdote backwards. Nixon didn’t cultivate anti-drug attitudes out of racism. The harnessed a reactionary sentiment against 1960s liberalism—which included trying to normalize drug usage—to stoke existing Puritan attitudes against drug use. His racism was in treating drug use as an issue especially relating to Black people, as opposed to being a vice common to white people and Black people alike.
>...It "goes back" to Nixon needing a tool to criminalize the anti-war and racial justice movement.
The alleged Ehrlichman quote is brought up every single time drug prohibition is mentioned but it should be taken with at least some skepticism.
The surviving members of his family don't believe he made the quote:
>...Multiple family members of Ehrlichman (who died in 1999) challenge the veracity of the quote: The 1994 alleged 'quote' we saw repeated in social media for the first time today does not square with what we know of our father...We do not subscribe to the alleged racist point of view that this writer now implies 22 years following the so-called interview of John and 16 years following our father's death, when dad can no longer respond.[22]
This is a very explosive quote - if Baum had included it in his book in 1996 I am sure it would have garnered a huge amount of attention for the book. Instead Baum did not include it in his book, but instead would wait for many years before making the claim when Ehrlichman was no longer around to dispute the quote.
If the quote was actually said by Ehrlichman, it isn't a very accurate description of the overall drug polices of the Nixon administration. While Nixon is remembered for "war on drugs" rhetoric, the actual substance of his policies is a bit different than what people think it was:
>...I have been fortunate over the years to discuss the distorted memory of Nixon's drug policies with almost all of his key advisors as well as with historians. Their consensus is that because he was dramatically expanding the U.S. treatment system (by 350% in just 18 months!) and cutting criminal penalties, he had to reassure his right wing that he hadn’t gone soft. So he laid on some of the toughest anti-drug rhetoric in history, including making a White House speech declaring a “war on drugs” and calling drugs “public enemy number one”. It worked so well as cover that many people remember that “tough” press event and forget that what Nixon did at it was introduce not a general or a cop or a preacher to be his drug policy chief but…a medical doctor (Jerry Jaffe, a sweet, bookish man who had longish hair and sideburns and often wore the Mickey Mouse tie his kids had given him).
>..."Enforcement must be coupled with a rational approach to the reclamation of the drug user himself," Nixon told Congress in 1971. "We must rehabilitate the drug user if we are to eliminate drug abuse and all the antisocial activities that flow from drug abuse."
>The numbers back this up. According to the federal government's budget numbers for anti-drug programs, the "demand" side of the war on drugs (treatment, education, and prevention) consistently got more funding during Nixon's time in office (1969 to 1974) than the "supply" side (law enforcement and interdiction).
>Reagan, however, was the one who really ratcheted up the criminalization aspect:
To say Reagan "ratcheted up the criminalization aspect" ignores the structure of the US federal government. The president does not make laws, the president can merely sign or veto laws made by the legislature. Unfortunately the drug policies of the 1980s were a bipartisan affair. The real bipartisan push for harsher penalties in the US came in the 1980s after basketball star Len Bias died of cocaine overdose.
>…Immediately after Bias's death, the speaker of the House of Representatives, Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill Jr., from the Boston area (where Bias had just signed with the Celtics), issued a demand to his fellow Democrats for anti-drug legislation. Senior congressional staffers began meeting regularly in the speaker's conference room as practically every committee in the House wrote Len Bias-inspired legislation attacking the drug problem. News conferences around the Capitol featured members of Congress extolling their efforts to clamp down on cocaine and crack.
>...It became the sole focus of legislative activity for the remainder of the session on both sides of the aisle. Literally every committee, from the Committee on Agriculture to the Committee on Merchant Marine and Fisheries were somehow getting involved. Suddenly, the Len Bias case was the driving force behind every piece of legislation. Members of Congress were setting up hearings about the drug problem and every subcommittee chairman was looking to get a piece of the action...
If you want to go back further, a good person to start with is Harry Anslinger who headed the Federal Bureau of Narcotics:
>...Prior to the end of alcohol prohibition, Anslinger had claimed that cannabis was not a problem, did not harm people, and "There is probably no more absurd fallacy"[15] than the idea it makes people violent. His critics argue he shifted not due to objective evidence but self-interest due to the obsolescence of the Department of Prohibition he headed when alcohol prohibition ceased - campaigning for a new Prohibition against its use.
A difference with Nixon is that he was one of the first to try to greatly expand drug treatment and also reform sentencing in at least a small way:
>...the mandatory minimum sentence in a federal prison for marijuana possession was 2-10 years until Nixon slashed it to 1 year with a judicial option to waive even that sentence. No federal mandatory drug sentence would be rolled back again for 40 years (in the Obama Administration).
>I have a strong worries that our current generation will have a similar huge reckoning with marijuana.
> But the risk in 50 years of people saying "we should have known better" seems really high
The problem with lead was that it was everywhere. Walls, gas, water, air. As long as society chose to use, we all had to ingest it. That's not so much the case with narcotics. I wouldn't expect anymore of a reckoning with MJ as there has been with alcohol.
You’re really not telling the story correctly based on evidence you linked below, to quote:
> Fig. 3 shows that, among adolescent-onset persistentcannabis users, within-person IQ decline was apparent regardlessof whether cannabis was used infrequently (median use = 14 d)or frequently (median use = 365 d) in the year before testing. Incontrast, within-person IQ decline was not apparent amongadult-onset persistent cannabis users who used cannabis in-frequently (median use = 6 d) or frequently (median use = 365 d)in the year before testing.
So more specifically smoking weed while your brain is developing seems to be correlated to a decline in IQ later in life. While those who start smoking, even copious amounts, as adults don’t have a permanent decline.
I am cannot find reference to support your claim that people are consuming it younger than before.
If you’re going to cite studies, you could at least represent the findings honestly. Also, it’s pretty apparent you’re trying to sell a narrative to others to induce fear of marijuana… this is a post about lead poisoning after all. Quite the leap, IMHO, to compare it marijuana use…
I agree with some of this in the abstract, but I think it's worth noting that "regular use" in academic studies of marijuana usually entails dosing lab animals with quantities that a human being couldn't physically consume, or surveying the (much smaller) population of people with psychological addictions to marijuana.
OTOH, and this is anecdotal, I worry about how potent a lot of "normal" marijuana has become and how rapidly we've normalized high-dose delivery mechanisms for it (like waxes and tinctures). It's hard to predict the future given how "primitive" marijuana consumption used to be, in contrast.
I agree 100% with the potency concerns. Many of the studies showing negative impact were using standards like "10 joints a day" which was easy to dismiss as that was an unreasonable amount of weed for most people. Now with wax, tinctures and 20%+ THC strains becoming the normal it seems really easy for many people to be hitting those previously unrealistic dosages.
I'm curious, because I have not heard of wax or tinctures, do you think those are things that more people will use, vs people who would have used some hard drugs anyway?
What I mean is, there will always be some hard drug users, now from the discussion I understand some "hard" THC products exist, will this result in any kind of demographic change like the OP worried about, or is it just a new drug of abuse?
Just because these things exist, I don't think it automatically follows that they will get used by most people, or even more people than would have found some other destructive thing to do in their absence
This is all anecdotal but I have multiple friends who smoke regularly for years. I would consider them heavy smokers, think 5+ joints a day. Once their states had recreational or easily obtainable medicinal marijuana and the retail shops that come with it they quickly started moving into the concentrates and waxes. Now they regularly are going through grams of concentrates and going back to their previously "heavy-use" of 5 joints a day would barely scratch their itch.
The availability of vape pens also makes it REALLY easy to end up smoking way more than you would otherwise and as an easy way to start smoking in general. I smoke and enjoy the convenience of pens but they are perfect tools for increasing cannabis consumption in a population.
It is almost as if flower based cannabis is a gateway drug to these concentrated forms and I think it is really easy to go down that path as an already regular user. It's more economical, potentially better for you (less smoking) and now very easy to obtain.
I think the "overton window" of cannabis use is being shifted to the heavier end. Casual users will probably stay about the same but regular and heavier users will all shift to more or higher potency consumption.
Just anecdota of course, but waxes and tinctures are routinely promoted and offered in discount deals at virtually any legal weed dispensary in the USA. They are IMO increasingly mainstream, as they often work nicely with tools like vaporizers which more and more young people use to consume.
Technology has massively changed how people consume cannabis - many people today may have never rolled or smoked a traditional joint ever. You can buy it in ready to load resin cartridges powered by a LiIon battery. Many of these things produce cold vapor that makes it staggeringly easy to smoke an enormous quantity. At least with a joint, there normally comes a point one's throat will probably not thank you for continuing... The cold vapor from many vaporizers is almost odor free too, meaning people can consume in places they couldn't previously.
They are very common - "vape cartridges" are the preferred intake mechanism for a lot of people because it's much more discrete (almost no smell, can pass for normal vaping) and convenient (small size). And those cartridges can be upwards of 90% THC.
They are pretty heavily in use and available at most locations that legally sell marijuana. Estimate they are 15 to 20% of sales, perhaps more. Even common flower now is 20% thc.
Dude, literally millions of people are dabbing wax and vaping 95% purity THC all day every day in just the US. Millions. Not just in legal states, and not just delta-9-THC. There's all 50 states legal hexahydrocannabinol carts from hemp, delta-8,10 THC and THC-O acetate widely available. Not sure though why an article about lead exposure turned into a Reefer Madness spook campaign. If one were looking for parallels I think one would lean towards something like widespread use of PFAAS chems or something. Smoking plants is up to an individual.
I started smoking pot later than a lot of my peers. All through high school I was cringy and weird and judgemental and adversarial and entitled.
Then I started smoking pot. And I experimented with a ton of hard psychedelic drugs. And it absolutely took a toll on my cognitive abilities. But it had a much more profound effect on my personality. A positive effect. Especially LSD.
It was like a light switch went on in my personality. I suddenly was much more "tuned in" to the world around me. I became mindful and considerate. My judgement faded. My outlook had changed to one that was seriously more healthy. Today I don't drink or do hard drugs. Just Marijuana. And I'm happy with myself.
I don't know what to make of that but I do know that I've seen things and felt things and understood things from perspectives that people who have never taken drugs can literally not imagine. You couldn't even dream the things I've seen.
I believe there could be clinical uses for taboo things like psychedelic drugs. I hate to think that without them I probably would have eventually been red pilled or turned into a fascist. It was that much of an eye opening experience for teenage me.
So while it probably did cost me about 15% of my cognitive ability, it also gave me 100% of my critical thinking ability.
A lot of that could just as easily be attributed to you growing up, though. Teenagers are generally cringy, weird, judgmental, adversarial and entitled, each in their own ways.
I personally had horrible experiences on LSD, and I've seen even worse bad trips and panic attacks as a trip dad, but I know it helps quite a few of my friends figure themselves out. Which is why studies on these drugs is crucial.
It might make more sense to first have a similar reckoning with alcohol. It is a far more dangerous intoxicant and exacts a large toll on individuals and society.
Fluids consume large amounts of shelf space by volume regardless of what fluid it is, not much we can do about this, so a large amount of shelf space does not mean a large percentage of the store's total items, in theory. By percentage of total items, it's likely very small for most supermarkets.
See also the large amount of shelf space typically required to stock bottled water and soft drinks.
The variety of alcohol on offer does seem a tad perverse, in a way that status quo bias renders difficult to perceive. How many brands of bottled water do you usually see? Half a dozen, tops? And much of the volume in that aisle is occupied by huge 16-packs and giant carriers. Meanwhile the average wine aisle has hundreds of different brands, nearly all no more than 75cl, and might even stretch to two aisles in a large supermarket. It dwarfs the available selection of any other category of product. And that's before we get into the bafflingly endless rows of spirits.
Is this a healthy relationship with what is, in the final analysis, an intoxicating drug? If there were an aisle in every supermarket with 10 times as much cannabis as you'd currently find in the average dispensary, would we regard that as equally normal?
Perhaps the difference is I am not baffled; Alcohol is enjoyable in moderation and it is one of the few high margin items in the store. Fluids are popular and take up much more shelf space as noted. As for bottled water, my local Safeway easily carries in excess of 20 brands before we count the huge number of soft drinks too?
I suspect you have not been in a dispensary recently if you think a supermarket would stock 10x as much; the range of products in most US dispensaries is truly enormous now across edibles, waxes, flowers, tinctures etc. I would strongly argue we would see a smaller range of products in the supermarket, should it become legal to sell there. This is exactly like alcohol too, where dedicated booze stores often have a wider range. It would still be significant in size though - lots of people like weed.
I don't think the number of brands on offer has any effect on our relationship with booze. It doesn't matter how many brand of yellow mustard are on the shelf, I'm buying it at the same rate. Where I live now, very few super markets have beer/wine and none have spirits. I know I buy less booze now than I did when I lived in places where you could get beer pretty much anywhere, at gas stations, super markets, convenience stores, etc., and it's probably for this reason.
According to [0] peak marijuana usage was in the 70s. I don't think with a smaller/more stable subset of the population partaking there's going to be many more people saying "we should have known better" than there currently are.
I wasn't there in the 70s, but from what I understand potency of the 70s wasn't nearly what it is today. I have no source for this, but I've been in countless circles with long time smokers who all correlate the same story; that modern day mids was literally the best quality Marijuana you could find in the 70s. So that's probably about 10% THC compared to 30% THC which is not uncommon today.
I don't smoke cannabis nearly as much as I used to. When I was a daily user it didn't have any intellectual effects so much as emotional ones. I would have been baseline mildly depressed and weed made it so much worse. That's not going to be a surprise to any objective observer.
When I do have it today I make sure to seek out the weakest stuff I can. It's annoying that you might just have one option below 15%. Of course edibles are a far superior option in legal states. Easy dosage and no damage to your lungs. I'd also suspect that the milder (but longer) highs are easier on the brain.
When you smoke with people these days, they only take a couple of hits. In the 90s when we smoked it was joint after joint after joint.
It's basically the cigarette filter thing; people know where they want to get, and they'll keep going until they get there, no matter how weak you make it. Which is what made filtered cigarettes worse for your lungs than unfiltered ones.
The calculus would be different if you were talking about edibles, because they actually sneak up on and can surprise you.
As a long time marijuana user I am leaning towards that view and I've ceased using it but largely "permanent" is wrong and its the same thinking that lead to war on drugs.
In large doses, it can bring about negative effects especially in people with ADD but the bad parts are almost always gone after cessation.
I don't think it
It's that when you are in your teens and you start smoking marijuana, the risk is big but I see many grey markets happy to sell you marijuana to people still going to high school.
I find both sides obnoxious, the Singaporeanesque fear mongering about "permanent damages" based on curated and manipulated data and the Western panacea attitude that it be used for everything.
Trying to tie lead exposure to marijuana is just asinine.
Plenty of ways to use cannabis without smoking (combustion). Examples include edibles, vaporizers, suppositories, and topicals. You’ve heard of the nicotine patch but did you know they have THC patches?
Although certainly any combusted plant will produce tar, and this is well known to cause pulmonary issues which will indeed place more stress upon the heart.
>We are already seeing studies that show regular marijuana use is correlated with permanent decreases in intelligence, memory loss, motivation, and mental health.
I can maybe believe it but I am yet to see a convincing Meta-Analysis or at least a large RCT. In general, people seem to recover from a lot of drug usage if they stop for long enough and weed isn't one of the heavy ones. Can you share what studies you are referring to?
Further, cessation of cannabis use did not fully restore neuropsychological functioning *among adolescent-onset cannabis users*.
They did not find a 6-8 point decline for folks who gave up cannabis if they started later in life. In fact they found no decline in IQ whatsoever for folks who started later in life - both when using it and after stopping.
In contrast, within-person IQ decline was not apparent among adult-onset persistent cannabis users who used cannabis infrequently (median use = 6 d) or frequently (median use = 365 d) in the year before testing.
> There's a lot less known about cannabis at this point, but what we know so far isn't very positive.
... for adolescents. Both your studies only show impact in youth.
I don't think my summary was unfair. I was only asked if there was evidence for persistent effects. There clearly is, even if just for adolescents.
It's also important to point out that for the adult-onset group they only looked at 1 year back. This doesn't preclude the possibility that longer periods as an adult find different results.
Your summary missed a critical piece, which is that it is just for adolescents.
I don't think, even within the marijuana community, that there is any debate that marijuana use in adolescents is harmful. I regularly see /r/trees comments telling teens to stop until they're at least 18 and their brain finishes developing.
Sorry, I took a look at the study and I couldn't tell - what is an adolescent? Like, 10-18? 14-25? I know what the word means, but for a scientific study I assume there's a specific range they're referring to.
I see your point, but just want to draw a line between something you ingest willingly that affects only you, and something foisted semi-secretly on the entire public by a special interest (basically to make cars and/or fuel more marketable) despite their knowing, almost from the beginning, how toxic it was. (One of many great examples of humans using technology because they can, without giving due consideration to whether they should.) I would rather the law protected me from the actions of others, and let me be the one to worry about what I do to myself.
[Edit: Which isn't to say there couldn't be a very persuasive weed marketing campaign or something, that influences people to use it and hides the negative effects. Just as there was a campaign to squelch public debate about the negative effects of tetraethyl lead. Nonetheless, being able to individually decide to reject inhaling lead, like you can with pot, would've been a welcome privilege.]
Not sure what "current" generation means, by the way. I'm currently alive, and currently, I'm in the same generation I've always been in. (I'm not mad, just teasing you a bit.)
True, but this was for tobacco, and the ban was mainly to protect non-smoking workers (and more recently the patrons) in restaurants and bars who started suffering with long term health complications usually attributed to smokers. The lawsuits would have crippled the industry, so the change was largely financial in nature, such is the basis of most public health legislation.
For controls on residential buildings, we would need better standards in shared housing construction and perhaps also we could take a look at better airflow and particulate filtration methods. I expect it will be some time (and perhaps another airborne pandemic?) for that to be addressed seriously.
> I have a strong worries that our current generation will have a similar huge reckoning with marijuana.
There might be such a reckoning, just not at the same level or with the same impact.
Water is simply a necessity, and marijuana is not. Quite literally 100% of Americans ingest water in some capacity and/or means. Also, brain development delay and interference, caused by contaminated water, would be present in children, who are not, by default, marijuana users.
Cannabis will probably never be legalized for children, outside of some extreme medical conditions -- or CBD, which is not psychoactive. It is clear that THC is not good for a developing brain.
It is also likely that cannabis is generally less harmful than alcohol or even acetaminophen, and unlike those, considered fairly non-toxic. Consider that cannabis metabolites can be detected in your body for up to a month after consumption. It's apparently not that high of a priority for your body to purge it. Cannabis does not need to be combusted. The resins will readily vaporize at temperatures well below the point at which the plant matter actually burns.
I no longer consume alcohol, but occasionally consume cannabis. My personal decision comes from a lot of experience with both, the way my body feels after consuming them, and studied risks associated with each. I exercise responsible moderation in my consumption and strongly believe that cannabis is the safer choice.
This conversation is more about the extent to which we need to protect adults from their own adult decisions, and/or protect the antiquated and partially racist underpinnings behind how and why cannabis was initially made illegal. To that end, I'm not sure it bears much, if any, similarity to lead exposure.
When saying things like this, I think you should intuitively consider the corollary of your sentence. If people are using drugs to "escape from reality" presumably because have insufficient money to do nicer things, then the implication is that people who have lots of money would use drugs at a substantially lower rate.
And so this is pretty easy to test. I did a quick search for 'marijuana use by rate by income' and the first paper that I came upon [1] showed there is indeed quite a strong correlation between substance use and socioeconomic status - in other words, the richer or more privileged individuals were (in terms of coming from wealthy family backgrounds), the more likely they were to use drugs.
So unless there is some confounding variable that we may not be considering, it seems fairly easy to reject the hypothesis that people are using drugs because of a lack of money.
>I have a strong worries that our current generation will have a similar huge reckoning with...
I thought that sentence was going to end with "Covid".[1] Research was just published yesterday which indicates that even mild cases have resulted in damage to the brain. Meanwhile, over the last few months we have just accepted that everyone is going to get it eventually. Who knows what the long term impact will be of us all giving ourselves a little brain damage?
EDIT: It is funny that the HN community's commitment to moving on from the pandemic has gotten to the point in which linking to research that suggests maybe getting Covid is bad is downvoted.
To be fair there are also studies showing alcohol has similar effects on the brain. I saw one just yesterday:
"A large study of more than 36,000 high-quality MRI brain scans has found that drinking four units of alcohol a day – two beers, or two glasses of wine – causes structural damage and brain volume loss equivalent to 10 years of aging."
I always said I would never smoke marijuana because my brain is my biggest asset and I wouldn't want to do anything to decrease its value to me. Now it looks like I need to take a good hard look at my alcohol consumption. I just can't square it with my values anymore.
>We are already seeing studies that show regular marijuana use is correlated with permanent decreases in intelligence
When used at very young ages. Important caveat. The other things you mentioned are highly speculative and I typically discount anecdotes as mostly useless.
> I typically discount anecdotes as mostly useless
This is fair. I mention it because it was only in hindsight that it was so obvious how many smokers were getting emphysema and lung cancer, and that these were not actually common diseases.
It seems like the biggest and most present problem with marijuana is that most don't understand that smoking marijuana is just as bad as smoking cigarettes[0]. Of course, that's obvious - smoking anything, even herbal theater cigarettes, are extremely bad for your health[1]. However, after years and years of the pro-marijuana lobby claiming that marijuana has no negative side effects and can't kill you, it would make sense if teens today were confused by the logical contradictions.
Until we transition over to non-smoking marijuana consumption, I don't see an easy for the anti-marijuana lobby to make any claim about marijuana that the pro lobby wouldn't be able to refute by simply pointing to the smoke as the root problem. I agree that the reckoning will come but it will come in the form of anti-smoking ads (in favor of edibles or whatever else) rather than anti-marijuana ads.
> It seems like the biggest and most present problem with marijuana is that most don't understand that smoking marijuana is just as bad as smoking cigarettes[0].
Where in that article does it say that smoking marijuana is just as bad as smoking cigarettes? Marijuana smoke is not good for the lungs and it contains carcinogens, but that doesn't mean it's as bad as tobacco. For example, another source[0] says: "Whether smoking marijuana causes lung cancer, as cigarette smoking does, remains an open question."
>I have a strong worries that our current generation will have a similar huge reckoning with marijuana.
I think "Cannabis" is the prefered term nowadays. The word "Marijuana" has negative cultural connotations which we would do well to escape when discussing this issue.
The problem is that the research into the risks of exposure to both of these substances was/is not exactly at the top of the list due to various factors.
That said, I'd take my chances with a bong over a car exhaust *or drinking water pipe. At least you have some choice over what goes into (and, consequently comes out) of the former.
>> But the risk in 50 years of people saying "we should have known better" seems really high.
Well, we are just about 100 years after alcohol was legalized. We have lots of data on how horrible it is for out bodies, how many accidents and premature deaths it causes. But I hear absolutely nobody in North America talking about curtailing alcohol in any way. (The UK medical bodies have spoken out against alcohol use in recent years.) In fact I see advertisements for alcohol virtually everywhere. So no, I do not believe we will have a reckoning in 50 years about pot.
Anecdotally I know a good amount people that now smoke all day, every day now that we work from home. At least among the people I know, there's no stigma - they tell me it "helps them think". I don't think this is the case with alcohol without a lot of people calling you out for having a "drinking problem".
Consuming cannabis everyday all day will also results in dramatically less consequences in your life than consuming alcohol the same way. The abuse factor of cannabis is really low all things considered and gets even lower if you avoid smoking.
Unless it clearly provides any medium to long term benefit I guess I'm going to avoid it. Plus it is expensive. Same for alcohol amd cigarette, I avoid them as much as I can. The only thing I need is caffeine but I'm tricking myself by drinking decaffeinated most of the time. I hope one day I can remove that too.
The societal risks are the same with additional worse effects for non participants with alcohol and they have been known for a long time. If society is OK with those risks, then I cannot see cannabis being an unacceptable risk in 50 years. Can throw in refined sugar too.
Would you rather deal with someone high on cannabis or drunk on alcohol?
To collect data, visit all the hotels, restaurants, bars, police, security guards, and entertainment venues in your area and ask all the front line employees this question. Or even who you would rather drive around.
I guarantee everyone would rather deal with someone high on cannabis, who might ask for extra snacks or drive slow and be unlikely to go on a belligerent tirade or get physical.
In terms of other societal risks, I have not heard of a cannabis addict beating their spouse or children yet.
It's not even comparable. You an ignore the fact that far more people use Alcohol regularly, that it has countless other deleterious health affects and just look at pure death rates directly attributable to Alcohol. It's just not even in the same universe.
>(I'm pretty sure you'll find studies arguing for both sides, so we can only go on personal wisdom.)
This is blatantly false. Find me 1 study that shows definitively that MJ is worse than Alcohol for society.
I wouldn't contest that more people die from alcohol than marajuana. That wasn't the issue under discussion. The issue is, which is worse for society.
Part of why I find your comment so aggressive is because you're being very sharp with me, but you don't realize you aren't talking about the same thing.
> This is blatantly false. Find me 1 study that shows definitively that MJ is worse than Alcohol for society.
Having worked in academia as a researcher, I don't actually believe studies can reliably be understood by anyone other than those who conducted it and their immediate peers in the field.
A weaker form of that, which I also agree with, would be, "studies are rarely definitive." But you're asking for a definitive study. That doesn't seem fair.
Anyway, it isn't incumbent on me to do the work for you that you are asking me to do.
> Without opinion on the relative damage of both, I'll note that considering this a logical statement is really flawed.
I can't understand what you are saying here.
> You can pretty much always find "studies arguing for both sides" on an issue, but that doesn't mean much in and of itself.
Just trying to cut off the expected "studies show X" comments before they get started. Because if studies aren't definitive, which they rarely are, there isn't any point in raising that. And a simpler way to explain this is "studies conflict."
My point was that you are actually very rarely in the case that studies are in conflict to the point that the best you can do is personal experience. It's the exception, not the rule.
To paraphrase Churchill: science is the worst system we have for understanding these sorts of things, except for all the others.
> My point was that you are actually very rarely in the case that studies are in conflict to the point that the best you can do is personal experience
I didn't make my point very clearly, but my actual view is that only the researchers who perform a study and their immediate scientific peers are able to determine whether a study is reliable and what conclusions can actually be drawn from it. I say this as someone who worked in academic research.
> To paraphrase Churchill: science is the worst system we have for understanding these sorts of things, except for all the others.
Preaching to the choir, there. I'm not arguing against science.
> But the risk in 50 years of people saying "we should have known better" seems really high.
Is there any evidence this happens with alcohol and if there is what was societies response? I suspect it alcohol does similar damage and we tolerate it due to the perceived benefits.
I doubt SHS would ever cause the effects described, unless the exposure was truly massive. The complaint about marijuana affecting intelligence re: brain development hinges on the central effects of THC itself, while lung cancer from SHS typically involves DNA damage caused by contaminants in the smoke (ranging in size from nitric oxide to benzopyrene). DNA damage is typically considered with a linear-no-threshold-model[1] because any incident of DNA damage can have long-term effects on cancer risk, but neurotransmitters likely do have a threshold for long-term damage, because the rate of neuronal receptor activation has a natural range of variation, and disturbances within that range are unlikely to cause any kind of long-term effect, because they simulate the natural conditions.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model - I should add that the way we deal with the LNTM in radiation protection is quite similar to the neuron model I just laid out: we look at the natural variation of radiation exposure and don't worry (much) about exposure less than that range.
I was at my 3rd grader's outdoor field trip and saw a puff of vape come up from a trio of kids. Someone had gotten a small juul cartridge and they were puffing away on it. The dispenser makes it much easier to hide, but it is not a new phenomenon. My mom started smoking cigarettes when she was 10 years old.
Way bigger problem of super obese food-addict children who don't even have a chance to play normally and develop self-efficacy. High predictor of depression later on.
I’m against legalization. I thought it was just going to be a humane alternative to putting people in jail. But instead we’ve just broken down the social norm against drug use. Parts of DC now smell strongly of weed during the middle of the day.
If anything broke down the social norm against drug use it was the heroin and opioid epidemics.. Which started shortly after Afghanistan.
Probably the trillions of dollars pumped into feeding terrorism instead of going on free school lunches and the like pushed people into drug use as well.
Seriously, I don't know how people can miss the mark this far. Yet apparently many in DC do, and it's getting REAL OLD.
It makes me angry to think of how wreckless the generations before millenials were. Lead's risks and damages were well-known long before 1996. And they still didn't ban it until then.
Same goes for sugar. We know the dangers it poses, we are also seeing how much it increases risk of death due to covid.
I don't think we should be surpsied, as much as pushing to regulate this garbage.
As an aside, Michelle Obama's campaign when Obama was in office was about improvement children's health. Her focus was going to be on nutrition (lunch food). Shortly thereafter Coke and Pepsi came in with "donations" and the whole thing became about exercise, no focus on nutrition.
There should be no surprise that capital takes precedent over health in our current system / culture.
Arguably, we should care more about sugar than we do about covid.
> As an aside, Michelle Obama's campaign when Obama was in office was about improvement children's health. Her focus was going to be on nutrition (lunch food). Shortly thereafter Coke and Pepsi came in with "donations" and the whole thing became about exercise, no focus on nutrition.
My kids school lunch now is all packaged sugary crap. Corndogs, cinnamon buns for breakfast, Trix yogurt, etc. Even the milk is gross - lowest bidder swill that tastes like wax.
The hot food items are all oven-baked, in plastic wrappers. It’s essentially the same crap that you would see in a university vending machine.
Process is much easier to change then changing people. Its why the government deducts taxes from you, instead of you paying at the end of the year (both because you'd spend it all, and you'd be pissed doing a bulk sum payment).
Likewise we have levers, should we be selling soda / pop with outrageous amounts of sugar in them without some sort of healthcare tax? I don't mind sugar being available, but right now its subsidized by our health care fees. My insurance is more expensive because of diabetes, heart disease, etc.
Except that presumably includes the current generation, instead of everyone pre-millenial. There is certainly not any real consensus or meaningful action being taken in regards to sugar. It is as prevalent now as it ever was.
Indeed. Added sugar and high fructose corn syrup is in everything. I have to go out of my way to find a brand of bread that doesn't have added high fructose corn syrup. It's ridiculous.
I havent bought bread in probably 4 Years now. Investing half an hour of work (distributed over the day) every other week for a 2kg Bread. Half of it goes in the freezer.
Also buying fresh vegtables and cooking instead of buying ready made dishes helps.
You're probably right, but that's still a lot better than manufactured foods. Also the funny thing with fruit and veg is that the opposite can happen, with the "Red Delicious" as the leading example, bred for looks and lost all the taste.
Even without human interference, fruit can actually be bad for you if you eat it at the wrong time and in the wrong quantities - fructose has the same effect as sugar - but now we are basically getting into nutrition more generally which is a tricky subject. Fruit still comes with many other nutritional benefits compared to sugary manufactured snacks, and even fibre that make it worth while (note that orange juice, as minimally as we are processing the fruit, still allows you to consume it in unnatural quantity and concentration, which can be very bad).
Not really. That's exactly when I had in mind when I said "vast majority of people". The biggest problem is access to a cooking fire and some sort of refrigeration you can rely on for most of the year.
It does require spending a little time cooking and probably to shop around rather than getting everything from a (possibly overpriced) supermarket depending on how much you can spend. So it's strictly an inconvenience, it requires stretching the argument really thin to view it otherwise.
I have a simple rule: If it has processed sugar in the ingredient list _anywhere_ I don't buy it.
If everyone did this, less processed sugar would be in our food supply. (corn syrups especially but also weird stuff like stevia, sneaky stuff like maltodextrin, etc..)
Everything is a choice to some extent. You could have gone and lived in the middle of a forest to avoid the lead poisoning.
The problem is there are far too many pollutants for everyone to be able to educate themselves about every one, and take steps to avoid them. Instead, it's the role of government to decide in each case whether to allow, ban, tax, inform or restrict each type of pollutant.
Between the marketing for children, the many "sugar holidays" (Valentines, Easter, Christmas, Halloween, etc), the widespread use of processed foods in children's diets, the fact that every single grocery store in America puts sugar products on loud display, and that some restaurants only serve sugar based drinks, I would argue that it is not possible for American children to avoid sugar.
An adult can choose to eat it or not (I'm ignoring the addictive nature of concentrated sugar), but our public health establishment has been foolishly stupid (combined with industry marketing) at making people think that fruit juice is natural or healthy. It's about as natural as cocaine is. Sure, it comes from a plant, but it gets refined and concentrated into levels that are unheard of in nature and toxic to the body.
Virtually my entire extended family are working class people, and they all were feeding their kids apple/orange juice on a regular basis without diluting it. When I showed my sister that she could literally do a 5% solution of apple juice in water, and it still tasted sweet, she was blown away. I'm pretty sure most members of the laptop class know that juice is bad for kids (gatorade too), but that message hasn't filtered to most of the population. And these kids are too young to know how toxic it is for them.
> public health establishment has been foolishly stupid (combined with industry marketing) at making people think that fruit juice is natural or healthy.
Can you cite specific examples of the public health establishment pushing juice as healthy? I got a minor in nutrition over a decade ago and back then, public health officials were very quick to call out the juice industry for its predatory tactics on kids and false equivalencies. This doesn't match my experience in university at all.
You're exactly right. Public health in general has not pushed juice, but what I should have stated is they have been complicit in not condemning it and pushing for prominent labeling on juice. They've sat back and allowed it to be marketed aggressively, to a point where the mayor of NYC exempted fruit juices from the proposal for a sugar tax. The general public thinks juice is healthy. That's easily remedied with public health messaging, but we all know why it hasn't: farmers/USDA/lobbyists.
Sugar is bad, but it's only one part of the picture:
"Evidence-informed dietary priorities include increased fruits, nonstarchy vegetables, nuts, legumes, fish, vegetable oils, yogurt, and minimally processed whole grains; and fewer red meats, processed (e.g., sodium-preserved) meats, and foods rich in refined grains, starch, added sugars, salt, and trans fat."
This might seem far fetched, but I think it's pretty accurate.
When tobacco was at it's height most people didn't really think it was bad for you - which gradually turned into a denialistic "yeah but it's not that bad" - it took a long time for society to come to terms with just how harmful it is.
The quantity of sugar in every day food has increased dramatically over time, and our attitude to it has been similar to the denialistic phase for tobbaco - "yeah it might hurt my waistline a little bit but it tastes too good" - Making people think if they aren't fat then it's ok, when really the consequences are far worse, sugar is pretty much poison for our bodies, it's bad for every single part of it (melts teeth, causes gum disease which poisons your bloodstream, ages skin, causes inflammation, causes heart disease, causes diabetes, affects the immune system, messes with cognition, makes you more hungry by sharply switching off ketosis, and finally displaces nutritional food making your body even more susceptible to aforementioned ailments).
I wish I understood this better when I was growing up. Thankfully I had a parent who never encouraged sugary food, and put in the effort to cook good meals... but many people don't and are at the mercy of what super markets sell, which is increasingly extremely sugary food.
If there is a single leading harmful substance that is as prevalent as leaded petrol was - i think it's probably sugar (in the west at least).
One major aspect that makes sugar a category of its own is that there is a safe dose, and the safe dose isn't small. It's very easy to count how much you consume and not all cultures suffer from overconsumption.
Same for industrial seed oils. We know it's dangerous.
But monied interests and some vegetarians who think all things that come from plants must be good for you, prevent this from being shoved into near all packaged foods.
>As an aside, Michelle Obama's campaign when Obama was in office was about improvement children's health. Her focus was going to be on nutrition (lunch food). Shortly thereafter Coke and Pepsi came in with "donations" and the whole thing became about exercise, no focus on nutrition.
Well also, the right-wing culture war machine decided Michelle Obama was taking everyone's children's freedoms away.
> Coke and Pepsi came in with "donations" and the whole thing became about exercise
You know, I wouldn't mind this as long as the scale of the donation was big enough. If they donated $1000 per american to the US government, who could use it to reduce taxes or improve life for americans more than the sugar decreases quality of life through illness and poor health, that would be great.
But they didn't. I bet their donation was $100k or so, or less than 1 cent per american.
I don't think it helps to make this a generational warfare issue. Especially since it's not like every person in a particular generation had a say in these decisions.
It's also too easy to cast judgement backwards in time, given the lack of context and the benefit of hindsight. Better to look forward.
As true in 1888 as now, Froude: "Each age would do better if it studied its own faults and endeavoured to mend them, instead of comparing itself with others to its own advantage."
Those that ignore history are doomed to repeat it.
We saw it with tobacco/lead/etc, so it's only natural/right to apply that experience to other things. Theorizing that sugar/THC could also fall into the same model is not wasting of anyone's time. If evidence is found that it is bad, then good can come from that knowledge. If evidence is found that it is not bad, then party on Wayne. But the studies should be conducted. Let's look forward to having actual knowledge rather than just blindly carrying on in the dark with no flashlight to guide.
We should definitely move away from leaded gasoline and housing should not be allowed to develop near airports. Phrasing the conversation around "showering it over the land below" is to the point of fearmongering. The airplanes burning 100LL today consume gasoline at the same rate as an old pickup truck - they go about 12 miles per gallon. Lead pollution today due to aviation is a fraction of what it was in the past and is unlikely to even be the largest environmental exposure for most children.
yeah i live under the flightpath of a lot of flight school traffic and this weighs a bit on my mind. pretty busy flight area too. Who knows the damage really? are there tests you can take?
yeah the area overhead is very literally a training path where they do a lot of circling stuff in small planes. they do have a decent amount of jets flying very high though.
I agree that people have been reckless with population safety in past, but your comment seems to imply that the Millenial generation are somehow flawless with regards with this subject. While safety is now more stringent than in the past, I very much doubt that this is the case.
Physical safety is more stringent. You can't swing a dead cat without a horde of people with safety vests and clipboards writing you up for it.
However, the planet is arguably the most ideologically polluted it's ever been. First world cultures have developed an aversion to individual and organization/group responsibility. Democracy is not doing great. Many institutions are bankrupt. Hardship is looming. We're in for a wild ride.
Both are a product of the same process of privileging of commodity production for profit over overall collective well-being.
And yes, I'm aware that said commodity production produces wealth which also improves well-being. But there's a contradiction there in our economic model that is not serving us well.
EDIT: I should add to my point above that what's common with both these is one overarching world altering product that has completely transformed the world: the automobile.
Ribbons of tarmac lace the earth (it wouldn't surprise me if this is a long term environmental problem, too), even in some of the most remote sections of the planet.
Cities are built around them, privileging automobile use above a bunch of other aspects of quality of life.
Road transport is 75ish% of global CO2 emissions.
And, yeah, leaded fuel poisoned our bodies, minds, and the environment for decades.
Economics has a term for this: negative externalities. A buys a snowblower from B, gaining 4 health for not shoveling and reducing everybody's health by 3 from pollution. B buys a leaf blower from C, gaining 4 health from not raking and reducing everybody's health by 3 from pollution. C buys a lawnmower from A, gaining 4 health from not scything and reducing everybody's health by 3. Each seller gets 4 health from the money. Every trade is beneficial to both parties by 1 health unit, but now, everybody is worse off by 1 health unit than they would be had the trades not happened. In practice, we're usually D-Z, who participated in no trades and get a net reduction in health of 9.
The way it usually goes is "everyone is +5, except the village that shares the watershed with the mine"
On anything but the shortest timeline things like like wealth, health and productivity are fungible at the societal level.
If the net cumulative effect of the externalities wasn't smaller than the benefits of the progress then the progress wouldn't happen because more people would be worse off and things would grind to a halt because the gains would be more than offset.
Not only is it not naive, but avoiding these scenarios woth market regulation is one of the main purposes of modern government. Hence, vaccination policies and CFC regulation. Libertarians like to believe that negative externalities and other market failures don't exist, that the invisible hand is always benevolent, but examples abound for those who do not follow a religion that forbids them from noticing.
>Not only is it not naive, but avoiding these scenarios woth market regulation is one of the main purposes of modern government. Hence, vaccination policies and CFC regulation. Libertarians like to believe that negative externalities and other market failures don't exist, that the invisible hand is always benevolent, but examples abound for those who do not follow a religion that forbids them from noticing.
It's still naive, or maybe obtuse. Repeating the "negative externality" buzzword doesn't give you a blank check to peddle your preferred ideology (government intervention/regulation) while crapping on the other team.
Without regulation we get lithium batteries and a couple dozen poisoned watersheds.
With regulation we get slightly more expensive batteries and fewer poisoned watersheds.
Regardless of how you or I or anyone else feels about regulation it's somewhere between farcical and deceitful to pretend that the economic activity in both of those situations doesn't help more than it hurts. If it didn't work this way progress would grind to a halt because the increased material wealth of having the batteries would be more than cancelled out by the problems that poisoned watersheds create, to run with the existing example.
Examples where most people are worse off are easy to think of. I gave an example where everybody is worse off because it is an interesting scenario. I made no claim about how often that situation occurs. There is no reason for overall progress to grind to a halt — the Nash equilibria for a game can be arbitrarily bad. There is only the obvious conclusion that governments should get involved to fix these problems when they occur, including regulating lead use, given that we see plenty of governments that have not and have suffered the consequences.
As of 2021, out of 432 members in the house of congress, a scant 31 are millenials. In the senate, just 1.
Millenials are -not- the ones responsible for disastrous policies (yet). They haven't been around long enough yet. It's mainly boomers, some gen x, and a few silents.
edit: Added "(yet)" because it's not obvious, I suppose. My point here is that the actual policymakers in congress, right now, are majority "not-millenials". So stop blaming millenials and/or gen-z when they're not the ones currently writing legislature...
Correct. I've no doubt that the new generation will also make some terrible calls thanks to lobbying being legal. I believe the environment will be much more prioritized, but we'll have to see.
However, I'm tired of silents/boomers/gen-xers making comments about and blaming millenials as if it's somehow our fault the boomers and silents in congress are out of touch. A quick look at voting demographics and the demographics of congress dispels that notion (for now, as of 2022).
Edit: That struck a chord with millenials, ha! Tell your friends that bitching does not help, voting does. Boomers seem to understand this and so they have a disproportionate amount of influence. You want it to stop? VOTE.
> Edit: That struck a chord with millenials, ha! Tell your friends that bitching does not help, voting does. Boomers seem to understand this and so they have a disproportionate amount of influence. You want it to stop? VOTE.
There is, still, a statistical bump in the boomers, hence the baby boom.
There is just more of them, and they vote. They've only just started dying in big numbers.
Plus the older voters get the more they tend to vote, for various reasons.
It's my understanding that millenials and gen-z make up 31% [0], as of -2020-. Boomers and older still make up 44%. So sure, go ahead and blame millenials and gen-z for policies made in 2020 and onward.
We are just as dumb. Processed meat causes cancer, micro plastics are doing all sorts to us: arguably, we are dumber, because we know all about the harm that lead and cigarettes cause and yet… we haven’t applied that lesson. Do you eat meat?
It didn’t even stop then. My own city (Portland) has been regularly exceeding EPA lead action levels since 1998[1].
All they need to do is treat the water to raise ph like every other city with a large lead solder install base, but they’ve been dragging their feet for literally decades while the people they serve get lead exposure.
People didn't wear seatbelts in the 1950's. Infant mortality was 10% before the age of 1 in 1910. At the same time, homeless children would roam the streets of cities and orphanages were common. The #1 form of surgery back then was amputation.
To make such a statement implies how little perspective one might have for how hard life was, the risk and tradeoffs being made, especially when there were unknown - and especially for 'how good we have it now'.
I'm not even that old, but I have the lived experience from my grandparents who were born on farms without electricity and I believe without a doubt that we have crossed the line into 'civilizational wealth'. We are really rich for the first time in history. Unequal, yes, but even lower-middle class people have access to vast material bounty: actions, travel, decorative clothing, choices, opportunity, education, amazing produce throughout the year, entertainment, technology, delivery, amazing health care innovations. Heck .... people are even less afraid of getting shot these days because we know how to stabilise and save people. Getting 'shot' used to mean 'pretty much going go die'. Even 'heart surgery' is now done on an outpatient basis these days like getting an oil change.
'Millenials' have already let loose Facebook and other completely destructive technologies, and are taking absolutist views on necessarily complicated things like gender identity (and more) and I'm 100% certain that history will come back like a wrecking ball on at least those things, of course it's already happening with Social Media.
The issue with lead is hard to fathom, it's still a bit grey, I'm wondering what the effect of some other things are going to be i.e. micro plastics, and the steroids they use on livestock etc..
I'm not 'organic' by ideology but I'm wary that there's a lot of risk in those kinds of things.
And it goes further: lighting in the cities all night, and noise pollution in the city and with our gadgets. It should be mostly dark and quiet at night.
That comment seems to blame a large group of people for something a small group did. The problem with lead is the same problem it always was and still is, a small group of people benefit and are able to make everyone else suffer. We clearly need to fix that, probably with specific measures to limit undue influence in congress. We should focus on those specific measures instead of divisive generalizations.
I hate that everything has to devolve into some kind of "this generation sucks" debate. Whether or not we can blame boomers does not matter, at least not until we have a time machine to go remedy stuff. The fact is that the decisions have been made, the damage is done, and we need to figure out what to do now, regardless of whose fault it is.
It seems like so many of these conversations end at the "who is responsible" part, without the understanding that we really shouldn't care.
I wouldn't complain if they were already unable to do anything, but many of them are actively preventing further improvements. Often due to it coming at a cost for them. Their unwillingness trickles down to other generations both in teachings and in pressuring the next generation what can and can't be done, and how to respond. Most of late gen X has also thrown in the towel, leaving the future generations to solve it themselves.
This despite the fact leaders are overwhelmingly at/past middle age, as is wealth required to make moves as an individual.
Sure, but I think that it's needlessly divisive to pin it on a generation, particularly when I can find counterexamples for each.
I have no issue whatsoever with complaining about individuals who are destroying the world right now [3], I'm certainly not going to sit here and defend basically any fossil fuel executive, but I think saying it's a generational thing is needlessly reductive and doesn't buy us anything. I don't think Noam Chomsky [1] or Bernie Sanders are destroying the world [2], and I don't think millennial/gen-z bozos like Charlie Kirk are helping it.
[1] I realize he's older than a boomer, but I think my point still fits.
[2] At least not advocating for stuff that's destroying the planet. I am not trying to take a directly political stand.
It's pretty insane. I was born in 1981, and near as I can tell, I'm likely a bit luckier than most other Americans my age because I grew up in such a sparsely populated, rural area. Still, there's no question that even people living in areas like me were impacted since most of the population drove old trucks, including my family.
It's crazy to think about having a lower IQ than I was capable of having for something that could have been solved a few decades previously.
There are a lot of things wrong with this take that others have pointed out, but for some reason no one noted that as the article points out, the people most impacted by this were born in the late 60s and 70s, and those people are Gen X. We didn't choose this, we just suffered for it. Someone born in 1976 didn't vote until 1994.
Recreational marijuana and JUUL is very much a millenial/gen Z hobby, and it is being pushed with a fervor that glosses over serious studies any potential health risks.
IMO weed will be in 50 years where "big tobacco" is right now.
Smoking something is obviously bad for your health, I don't need a study to tell me that, you are literally inhaling smoke. Followed by masses dying of cancer.
Eating marijuana can have some negative cognitive effects but its pretty obvious it doesn't do anything terrible looking at all the old hippies.
For one thing, has anyone actually looked at all the old hippies? And if they have, the old hippies probably didn't have access to anything as potent as we do, and I'm assuming today's edibles are (or eventually will be) full of all sorts of nonsense additives, because that's what we do.
I'm not saying I know either way, but this seems like an easy thing to be wrong about.
I mean we're not talking about additives, there are additives in lots of stuff that makes it harmful. And yes the old hippies didn't have as strong of weed, and there may be some threshold at which bad things happen more frequently, but just looking at the big picture it doesn't look all that dire.
It definitely hurts parts of cognition, and is linked to certain mental illnesses, there are other odd and end health concerns that pop up rarely. Overall marijuana is pretty gentle when ingested, you can just tell from your own health when consuming it.
When I smoked cigarettes I felt terrible all the time, and when I stopped it was night and day. Consuming edibles I feel pretty darn good actually, less stress, better sleep, and when I get off them I don't feel like I've been harming my body. This opinion is shared by pretty much everyone I know
Speaking as a millennial, don't praise us too soon. We haven't really gotten the reins of power yet, so it's easy to claim that we'd do it better. In reality I imagine we'll still succumb to various corrupting forces just like every other generation.
Granted I still think we have a more enlightened perspective on some issues as a generation just due to better education overall, but at best we might manage a marginal increase in overall quality of life for people.
Plus the basket of crises we've faced starting with the Great Financial Crisis has allowed many to blame external factors for their situation and not take personal responsibility, even when they clearly should. I've met plenty of unwise/stupid millennials who could do more to better their situation, but are happy to just sit still and bitch about everything but their self-destructive habits.
It's like how the Boomers got associated with Woodstock/the hippies/counter-culture, but in reality most Boomers didn't rebel all that much. Boomers elected Reagan, and he ran in part as an anti-counter-culture figure.
Fantastic answer. In 30 years time we have no idea how the youth then will view our race for urban living, yoga, tech hustles and high inequality, juice and vegan diets, electric cars, open concept houses, social media, tech surveillance and screen addiction and various other things which are less cutesy and more sinister.
One thing that already gets me thinking of future generations looking down on us will be this quest for travel and high living especially for social media glamor and the new keeping up with Jones'. This increases more flights, polluting untouched places and how bad it is for the climate.
similarly, the second leading cause of death is cancer, and yet we willingly bask in cancer-causing substances all the time. future generations will probably look back and think, wtf?
It's easy to point the finger at boomers, but where they maybe killed us with lead, we're killing the next generation with plastics. Sure, plastics were started in earlier generations but we're showing no signs of slowing down in usage.
So is fluoride’s neurotoxicity[1], especially for developing brains, and we still insist on using it, to just give one example. We’re no less reckless than prior generations and our children will be just as baffled looking back at us as we are now.
Yes I’m aware that idiots are also fixated on fluoridation. That doesn’t make the science wrong though.
Neurotoxicity appeared to be dose-dependent , and tentative benchmark dose calculations suggest that safe exposures are likely to be below currently accepted or recommended fluoride concentrations in drinking water.
That the authors felt the need to pack four weasel words into the sentence saying maybe it’s ok doesn’t indicate that they believe it’s safe.
The fortification properties afforded by fluoride are entirely topical, meaning that fluoride-containing toothpaste can be considered beneficial. You use it and then spit it out. Drinking fluoridated water can hardly be considered helpful. Most of the fluoride content of water goes directly into the stomach where its effects are strictly not studied, and if you know anything about the fluoride ion, the effects are most likely detrimental, and possibly horrendous.
Thanks for taking the hit from the "HN isn't about politics" crowd, this is something that needs to be said again and again.
Right wing conservatives and their followers - aka Republicans - are the number one threat facing the world today, hands down. Beyond their abhorrent legislative agenda based on their shared hatred for various parts of society, their complete disconnection from reality and traitorous attacks on democracy itself have essentially disqualified them as a legitimate political party.
In terms of lead's influence: My assumption has been simply that lead and mercury in the air caused a minor, yet statistically significant, impairment of cognitive ability which has robbed Boomers and much of GenX of their ability for both empathy and critical thinking. This has led to a swath of the population who is more susceptible to totalitarian messaging which always include intense hatred of others, conspiracies and wild accusations.
To paraphrase an old cliche: All Republicans are NOT lead-poisoned racist sociopaths that think Putin is a great leader, the virus is a hoax, the election was a fraud, etc. However, the reverse, is obviously quite accurate.
That's one hard to parse sentence there... or maybe I've been exposed to too much lead as a child :)
In all seriousness, IQ is an important component of intelligence, mainly "fluid intelligence" that correlates well to learning speed in science and technology field, so for anyone that needs to do lots of learning/unlearning and career/domain hopping like we're all going to do more and more in the future it matters a hell of a lot!
I a world where someone could pick a job/domain and stick to it for life, IQ would matter but less... but it's not the world we're living in, everything is accelerating and our kids are likely to go through quite a few career changes / professional re-conversions etc.
Seems a reasonable assumption that lowering IQ is a decent proxy for other damage lead does to the brain, right? It would be weird if it just damaged the bits associated with doing well on IQ tests, and left the rest alone.
E.g. it happens that IQ is something we measure, and EQ much less so. That lead leads to measurable reductions in IQ is strong evidence that it damages EQ too. (As its association with crime would suggest.)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7084658/