The new drug situation:
As I have pointed out before, the topic of kinship and demographics gets into all kinds of stuff, including drug use. It seems pretty obvious. If people don’t have a rewarding social life – which simply has to be something traditional – then they are going to seek gratification elsewhere. And the false gratification of some drugs has the convenience that it can be bottled and sold.
I have seen elsewhere that heroin abuse is on the rise. It had fallen a lot. And there is more to the new drug challenges than that. (Emily Underwood, A New Drug War, SCIENCE vol. 347 no. 6221 January 30, 2015 page 469) It turns out that there’s this stuff serotonin that tickles your nerve endings in an agreeable way. It’s part of the normal wiring of the body. It lies at the heart of the effectiveness of certain analgesics. There are a couple of mechanisms that can increase the serotonin effect at nerve endings. And of course if you could find one that was not addictive you’d make a fortune.
So drug companies pour enormous amounts of money into research. They find something that seems to remove pain, test it for addictiveness, find that it is the devil’s own brew, publish and go look for another. So somebody looks through the literature, finds a new and hitherto unknown addictive compound, which of course is quite legal, phones a commercial chemical plant and orders a ton, drops it into capsules or whatever and sells it quite legally. So the drug lords have figured out how to keep people hooked faster than laws can be passed against us. And our political overlords evidently can’t figure out how to write a law that says, “If it’s known to be addictive, you can’t own it, carry it about, sell it or do anything else with it unless it’s on this list of prescription-only meds.” From time to time I find evidence that humans in power are becoming ever more stupid. The good families have bright kids who marry out and lose their fertility.
Marijuana is becoming ever more accepted. When people claim that it is not so deadly as alcohol I just mumble that alcohol is quite deadly enough, but the issue is clouded by the fact that these hideous (and I wont go into the details so gory; read the article) drugs seem a lot of them to be related to cannabis.
Oh well. It’s beyond me. If we can get people understanding their mating strategy, maybe they’ll feel better.
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