Do you understand what happened in the opioid crisis, and why people are mad at the Sacklers? They weren’t hapless naive actors that didn’t fully understand “the implications” of the drugs they were selling. The effects of opioid addiction were WELL known when oxycontin was introduced, and Purdue Pharmaceuticals deliberately misrepresented critical information about the drugs they sold and had salespeople lie in a wholesale fashion on a massive scale.
It’s reasonable to have suspicion about companies and regulators in this area, but the opioid crisis is such a different situation in context.
> Dr. Janis Phelps, director of the Center for Psychedelic Therapies and Research at the California Institute of Integral Studies, said she and other researchers had been wary of the decriminalization movement. Many in the field had worked for years to remain strictly scientific, hoping to avoid government crackdowns, and to give the U.S. Food and Drug Administration time to fully review the effects of psilocybin before pressing ahead with efforts to make it legal.
> “I have changed my mind,” she said. While she remains concerned that bad actors could try to enter the industry strictly for profit, or try to take advantage of vulnerable people, she has come to believe that the open door in Oregon could advance the use of psychedelics in ways that methodical approaches cannot.
> Dr. Charles Nemeroff, the chair of the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of Texas at Austin, said he continues to be wary. Psilocybin is powerful, with immediate effects lasting for hours, and uncertain outcomes for patients, he said, recalling one patient of his who has experienced protracted psychosis, losing partial connection to reality, after taking doses of mushrooms. The treatments ruined her life, said Dr. Nemeroff, who said he worried about the lack of required medical oversight in Oregon’s program.
Just like the Sacklers, people pursuing psilocybin are fully aware of all of these warnings and problems. And just like Purdue, anyone selling psilocybin right now are willfully misrepresenting the evidence and ignoring medical opinion. Again, Purdue did all of the things they did because they believed they were ultimately helping treat people's suffering.
I am fully aware that time may tell and the concerns may be unfounded. And I get that we are dealing with a completely different drug/mechanism. But one is right and one is wrong only through the benefit of hindsight.
The problem here is that there is no evidence. All the evidence of negative effects so far is anecdotal, which in reality calls for more research in the area [0]. In addition, only about 0.2% report having sought emergency treatment [1] when using psylocibin.
As someone who partakes in psychedelics to a moderate degree, I don’t think it makes any sense at all to dismiss the very many negative outcomes as “no evidence”. Perhaps it’s under-researched, but your comment strikes me as ideological and/or hyperbole.
Like with all treatments, it’s a careful balance of whether the risks are worth the positive health outcomes. But there’s no sense in denying that psychedelics, and thus psychedelic mental health treatment programs, have no evidence of potential issues.
While I agree with what you are saying in principle, I do want to point out that there is a massive difference between anecdotal evidence and _research_. In a purely academic sense, it is not an unreasonable statement to make that there is no evidence. In contrast, in the opioid case there existed scientific evidence of the highly addictive nature of the drugs that was more than just suppressed, they were outright _lied_ about by the pharmaceutical company behind the drug.
> Purdue Pharma created false advertising documents to provide doctors and patients illustrating that time-released OxyContin was less addictive than other immediate release alternatives. Furthermore, they sought out doctors who were more likely to prescribe opioids and encouraged them to prescribe OxyContin because it was safer. They did this because OxyContin quickly became a cash cow for the company. (https://oversight.house.gov/release/comer-purdue-pharma-and-...)
A degree of malfeasance in the same realm as Big Tobacco's denials of the risks and addictiveness of smoking:
I think it is true that it is under-researched. Current clinical research on psychedelics exclude people who are previously diagnosed and/or have a family history of personality disorders, psychosis and bipolar depression. They also control for set and setting. Under those conditions, it seems that the use of psychedelics is very safe, but it doesn't give us a good idea of the risk of recreational use in the general public.
One interesting recent study I've found is this, but it's too small to conclude anything, and it also does not appear to be peer-reviewed yet: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/yzmcj
Yes, you are right, what I should have written was that there is no peer-reviewed clinical evidence of long term negative effects solely caused by the toxicity of psilocybin.
> very many negative outcomes as “no evidence”. Perhaps it’s under-researched, but your comment strikes me as ideological and/or hyperbole.
Very many people have encountered aliens, but there's still no evidence of aliens. Your comment is more ideological hyperbole than the one you're replying to.
I don’t care a nit about Sanbergs personal life either, but I certainly DO care that she can apparently silence news stories from phone calls.
I feel like the content of the story itself is pretty irrelevant here. Are you saying wealthy people abusing their influence and power to contain news stories is fine, as long as you personally view the stories as “immaterial” or “muckraking for clicks”?
How would you feel about a public figure you dislike silencing negative stories from a news organization? What if supporters of that public figure think the silencing is fine, because you don’t need to read that muckraking trash?
We’re saying the same thing really. You want to blame every self-interested elite for manipulating the narrative, which I think is a pointless, thankless exercise in outrage farming, despite it. Whereas I think the onus rests on the media outlet to publish the news they want to publish regardless of who might want otherwise. When this process breaks down it is the media outlet that has failed. Part of this of course involves publishing news you think it is worth suffering for.
You absolutely can separate the two, and it has nothing to do with colonialism. The reason you can is because in a society where freedom of expression is curtailed, there is (and always will be) a difference between what an authoritarian government declares and the opinions of its people, even if many people agree with the authoritarian government. Only the people that agree will reasonably feel comfortable expressing their opinions.
Where does the idea that "criticism of a government is criticism of its people because a government is made up of its people" logically follow? Is criticism of the American government (which I do regularly) criticism of my own American people? What about North Korea?
> Is criticism of the American government (which I do regularly) criticism of my own American people?
of course? how does this _not_ logically follow? if you're going to extol the virtues of being able to select your own leaders you damn well ought to feel responsible for inflicting bad leaders on the world. you literally mentioned this yourself. civilians of authoritarian countries have far more claim to a pass than Americans.
You're missing the point. 70% of Americans voted for the president in the last U.S. election. Regardless of whether or not my candidate won out, I don't view criticism of my government's policy as a personal assault on myself as an American.
Let's say you have a valid, blistering disagreement with an element of American foreign policy. Do I view this as criticism of my government? Yes. Might I disagree? Sure.
What I don't do is claim that criticism of my government's decisions and myself personally cannot be separated (as the original poster argues) or claim that others are "inciting inter-cultural contempt" as the article cites.
> The reason you can is because in a society where freedom of expression is curtailed, there is (and always will be) a difference between what an authoritarian government declares and the opinions of its people, even if many people agree with the authoritarian government.
This is very abstract. Can you give a real world example of what you mean? What country should China closer resemble in your ideal world?
This is the thing. I'm not claiming to have an "ideal" version of China, or claiming that I have an understanding of what all Chinese people "really want". It's a country with over a billion people, within which I'm sure there is a vast spectrum of opinions.
I would agree you if you argue it would be condescending to claim for any given issue that while the CCP argues X, people in China disagree and want Y. However, I think it's equally as condescending to claim that the opinions, behaviors, and ideologies of the CCP are fully condoned and endorsed by all of the Chinese people (and THEREFORE, criticism of one is criticism of the other). Conflating a government and its people in this way is specious for any country, but especially problematic for those where public criticism of government is unequivocally risky.
> However, I think it's equally as condescending to claim that the opinions, behaviors, and ideologies of the CCP are fully condoned and endorsed by all of the Chinese people
You can empirically test this. Harvard University did, and found that upwards of 90% of the Chinese people support their government. And why wouldn't they? QoL has skyrocketed for hundreds of millions of Chinese over the last 40 years.
So what? George W. Bush's approval rate was even higher after 9/11, is each American personally responsible for his legacy?
10% of the Chinese populace is still over a hundred million people, am I to judge each of them as people according to the actions of their government (since apparently the two cannot be separated)?
I'm on a 15" macbook pro and also only see ads below the fold. Is it difficult to imagine that most users around the planet aren't working with 27" monitors or whatever size it is you have?
Strangely enough, my introduction to this brilliant poem came from Dennis Hopper’s coke fueled rendition of an excerpt in Apocalypse Now. I wonder why Coppola chose If.
It's quite a decent poem and it lends itself to being read out loud. You can fiddle with the rhythm, volume and all sorts. Basically, it is extremely malleable, which is probably not a Eng Lit term but it works for me.
Don’t you see that an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind? Hey you know what, at least we can both criticize the West’s atrocities and not fear being disappeared by an authoritarian government.
In what way did George Floyd not disappear? Blackness isn't even an outspoken geopolitical position, yet significantly more African Americans have disappeared, whether literally, or effectively in prisons, than Chinese dissidents. I don't want to suggest your white and middle-class, but the world really is only politically safe for what is actually a global minority, namely the white middle class.
But it's way, way worse than that. At the most surface level there's Julian Assange, he's not even from the country that he'll be disappeared in. But deeper than his case are the cases that he actually highlighted, US war crimes. The US with formal support from Europe has had a decades long foreign policy of violently destroying communism (see the history of South America and South East Asia). Communism has its fair share of evil, but like it or not, it is a fundamentally valid criticism of the West's capitalism. 10s of millions of innocent well-meaning communist supporters have been killed whether directly or through Western support, by the West.
China is not good, but it's just not comparable in scale to the West's evils. Indeed I believe it shows a profound, albeit typical, ignorance of history to think that China is a comparable threat to the world.
Yeah bro, there were kings and feudal lords and chieftains and emperors (like Rome) all over the rest of the world for thousands of years too. To say that the Chinese are incapable of democracy because being ruled by an autocrat steadily increasing his own power is their "way of life" is frankly insulting to the Chinese.
The Chinese are one of the most crowded nations for a long long time, and their dynamics, views, priorities and choices are different. Also they have a much different history on social dynamics and outcomes.
Judging their systems and dynamics from our point of view misses the point in some cases.
There's an eye opening video about "The Social Credit System" from CCC (Chaos Communication Conference). Take a look if you have time:
Respectfully: you bought your house — not the neighborhood around your house, and everything in it. It's true that it's OK to have mixed densities of housing, but I think it's an unrealistic and ungrounded expectation to buy a single family house in a city and expect your neighborhood around it to never change.
There are areas of the country where you can cheaply move to, outside of cities, that will likely never upzone (or land is so cheap you can buy everything around your house to ensure it never changes).
Nope. The far out suburbs. If it wasn’t for my job being near a city, I’d have moved even farther to the rural boonies. Now that remote work is getting normalized it’s tempting. To me, the idea of a SFH in the city is nonsensical. The whole point is getting away from having people everywhere and having your own place you don’t have to share walls, sounds, and drama with strangers.
One of the major considerations for me when I bought was “how likely is it urban development will reach this far out in my lifetime?”
I'd like to ask people who were kids in the 80s and 90s if they are aware how many Vietnam soldiers were addicted to heroin upon returning, and what kind of effect that had.
It’s reasonable to have suspicion about companies and regulators in this area, but the opioid crisis is such a different situation in context.