The God of Dreams

Classically, that is, if you were to ask a dictionary, the definition of narcotics are quite simple: any pain relieving and sleep inducing substance – opiates.  Technically opiates have a large tree of descent (everything from morphine and heroin to synthetic opiates like tramadol and naloxone), but the term narcotic is originally reserved for opiates.  These opiates work by binding to the opiate receptors within the human brain, causing pain relief and a sense of euphoria

Opium has been harvested for quite a long time, dating back as early as 1200 BC(E).  Opium is a by-product of the poppy plant, specifically the Papaver Somniferum, a plant native to Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, and parts of Central America.  As long as the poppy plant has been cultivated, its effects have been equally used medicinally and exploited for enjoyment.  If at all a definitive starting point, the third century BC(E) provides documented detail of the poppy plant and its wondrous effects.  Since then, opium has brought sufferers relief and societies chaos.  One of the more prominent problems it brings to a nation is addiction.  This is the case with China, Great Brittan, and the US.  Because of its tendency to make the user feel very relaxed and comfortable, taken in grand enough quantities, the user loses all urges except enjoy themselves.  Furthermore, if addiction is widespread enough, it may cause economic dependence on foreign imports and in turn destabilize a nation’s economy.

Its not exceedingly difficult to see why an individual would become highly addicted to opiates.  The effects of opiates a enormously enjoyable.  I say this not just from having read accounts of it, but from also having been given morphine, demerol, oxycodone, and hydrocodone while suffering from meningitis.  After receiving only medicinal amounts of the substances for week (alternating between morphine and demerol), I had already begun to have a faint “craving” sensation, even without having withdraws.  The relief the drugs had brought me took me from agonizing pain to inexplicable euphoria, despite my medical condition.  If someone were allowed to self medicate with a large supply of opiates, its no wonder it would be hard to resist: opiates are VERY pleasurable.  Aside from that, it doesn’t take much time to build a tolerance or a craving for them.  Its not difficult to see how this can lend itself to be habit forming quite rapidly.  Considering how easy it is for one to get their hands on opiates these days (many are pharmaceutical), its not surprising that opiate addiction is making a comeback.

McKenna (in his book, Food of the Gods) presents an interesting comparison between tobacco and opiates: although tobacco has been shown to be more physically dangerous, opiates are seen as the scourge of society.  I can see his point being quite valid from the medical standpoint, but it seems to be out of context (to a degree) of the psycho-social context.  Just because a substance isn’t as physically bad for you doesn’t mean its less socially dangerous.  The effects brought about by opium usage are considerably more “active” than those of tobacco.  One isn’t impaired in the least while smoking tobacco, although under the effects of a narcotic, by comparison, one is.

For recreational useage, I agree with McKenna: opiates should be viewed as less harmful than tobacco.  But in a nation engulfed with commerce and workplaces, opiate addictions are considerably more damaging than those of tobacco.

For once, I think I just argued that tobacco isn’t as bad as opiates…  strange feeling, but I accept that my yield is in a specific context.

-M.

872,721 joints of weed on the wall! 872,721 joints of weed~

In 2007,  there were 872,721 marijuana related arrests in the United States.

Alone, this is just a number.  It doesn’t say how many second or multiple offender arrests that is, it doesn’t show what punishments were given or fines feed.  What it does show is that almost 1 out of every 300 Americans (including children and the elderly) get arrested every year for something related to marijuana.  However, I don’t even care about that.  What I care about is the amount of man-power behind those numbers: man-power is time, time is money.

Any way you look at it, those ~870 thousand arrests took some effort, paperwork, and in some situations, a warrant and jail time.  This is tax-payer money at work.  Of course, I don’t mean this to sound that “we should legalize all crimes so that way we don’t have to fund arrests, etc.”  What I mean is that for a substance which exhibits properties that cause almost no damage to oneself, one’s surroundings, and the well-being of others, 870,000 is an astounding amount of arrests to fund.

Marijuana is a Schedule I drug, as defined by the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act: 1) High potential for abuse.  2) No accepted medical use.  3) Lack of accepted safety for use of the drug under medical supervision.  A substance has to meet these standards to be classified as Schedule I.  Does marijuana meet these guidelines?  Part 1 can be questioned: substance abuse in the sense of psychological (“wow I enjoyed that, I’ll do it again”) or physiological (“I need some more to feel normal again”).  Does the abuse consider the danger levels of the substance?  Do any of the schedules? Nope.  I think that alone should be a major qualifier in if a substance should be legally “feared”.  The second point is also questionable.  Some current studies are starting to find medicinal use for marijuana for alleviation of cancer or chemotherapy symptoms.  And finally, point 3, which has been seen as outright wrong.  If marijuana was so potentially life threatening, we’d be seeing a considerable amounts of deaths and hospital trips resulting from its use.  Instead, we see the exact opposite: we see few and far between, even among the “drug” community.

If marijuana were to be categorized in the Scheduling system, the only spot it could potentially fit is… well… it couldn’t even fit any of the categories fully.  Marijuana exhibits marginally low potential for dependence when put in comparison with legal substances like caffeine, alcohol, and tobacco.  My vote: make marijuana an un-scheduled but controlled substance (similar to latter two examples).

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Some nations, such as Canada and the Netherlands, have passed laws to decriminalize the personal use and possession of marijuana (lots of stipulations, can be summarized here).

Netherlands/Canada:

Pros: drug crime rates, addiction rates, rehabilitation rates, and drug misuse rates are lower than most other countries; generates state revenue.

Cons: controversial, may perpetuate “gateway effect”, crime rates from exportation of drugs may increase.

Current model in the US/EU:

Pros: may help prevent “gateway effect” to harder substances, prevents “soft drug” usage and trade.

Cons: funding intensive, rarely achieves desired effect, crime rates higher, higher rates for repeat offender and addiction; emphasis on prevention, not treatment.

I have a rule of thumb that I use to determine whether or not a liberty should be granted: if the act is dangerous to others at a rate which is unacceptable then it should be illegal, otherwise, it should be legal (with respective and according methods of control).

-M.

Sauce, Science, Society

Its been around for ages, with no certain origin or story behind its discovery.  What I speak of, as you could tell from the title, is alcohol.  Historians date alcohol’s earliest origins back to around 8000 BC(E) when the Egyptians fermented honey into mead.  However, modern alcohols, such as beer and wine came around considerably later due to the complexity of their production; beer begins to appear in 3700 BC(E) in Egypt and wine appears around 5400 BC(E) in Mesopotamia.

It wasn’t until the Middle Ages that alcohol took on a new face.  During this time, history receives its first recorded use of alcohol creation for medicinal purposes in Solerno, Italy.  Along side this, we have the Dutch distilling liquor and adding flavor with juniper berries.  Regardless of its intended usage, by the 17th century alcohol was already a social norm, even finding its way aboard the Mayflower voyage, and eventually to the new colonies.

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Although alcohol’s long history may be interesting to some, I regretfully admit that I am not one of those people.  I take interest in alcohol’s psychological and physiological effects.  The active chemical in all forms of alcohol (wine, beer, liquors, and the like) is ethyl alcohol.  Once alcohol enters the human body, it begins to take immediate effect in the stomach.  As much as 20% of the alcohol content is absorbed directly into the blood stream from the stomach while stimulating the stomach’s digestive process.  It is because of this that the majority of the alcohol, the remaining 80%, is processed in the small intestine; the more alcohol consumed, the more the stomach is stimulated, and the faster it moves along the digestive tract.

Once inside the blood stream, alcohol is excreted in one of two main ways: through the lungs or through urine.  Excretion through the lungs accounts for only 5% of this total, but is the reason for “alcohol breath,” the principle in which breathalyzers work.  However, before the body can remove alcohol through urination, it must first be transformed into CO2 and H20.

Now that we’ve covered the in and out of things, allow me to elaborate more on the processes in between.  Alcohol is very fat soluble, and as such, can pass through membranes with ease (such as the blood/brain barrier and from mother to fetus).  It is because alcohol reaches the human brain with such ease that its effects appear quite rapidly.

Alcohol is particularly dangerous as a recreational substance mainly because of its depressant effects and its ED50/LD50 ratio of only 6.  What the latter means is that the “effective dose” for alcohol isn’t safely far enough from the “lethal dose”.  As a depressant, alcohol can cause the human body to slow normal functioning, impede judgement, and in some extreme situations, cause such levels of toxicity that the consumer dies.  The list of dangers from alcohol consumption are numerous: heat loss, risk of heart disease, risk of liver failure, elevated blood pressure, loss of REM sleep (resulting in non-restful sleep), fetal alcohol syndrome, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, black-outs, hangovers, cognitive impairment, and increased risk of adverse reactions with other drugs.  This list covers only the more common effects of alcohol and fails to fully cover the longer-lasting effects it may have.

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With this said, I feel that alcohol is a plague to our society, not only because of the dangers the substance presents on its own, but because of how our society treats the matter.  Although there is little in the black market of alcohol in the United States (save Absinthe and illegal sales to minors), alcohol has wreaked havoc on our society from its misuse.  Most of the prominent damages caused by alcohol in our society include death by alcohol poisoning and the results of impaired judgement (such as drunk driving).  These two alone should be enough for a reasonable person to condemn its usage, yet alcohol drinking is perpetuated by tradition.

For example, stories of getting “too drunk and blacking out” aren’t very uncommon and are presented in a comical nature, not as a life threatening situation.  Our society’s way of associating alcohol with a guaranteed “good time” and socializing is also considerably dangerous.  Ignorance also plays a role in this: a well educated populace on the dangers resulting from alcohol, would on average, approach its usage much more cautiously and with greater respect for its consequences.  In my own personal opinion, alcohol is most dangerous simply because of how our society co-relates alcohol consumption with positive things without emphasizing its dangers or moderate usage.  In short, we are preached two different messages: alcohol is bad and should never be consumed, and alcohol is fun.  Either side refuses to acknowledge the opposite and no middle comprehensive approach is ever given.

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Alcohol is legal – this is an unignorable fact.  The reasons for it being so, however, are much less solid.  Personally, I feel alcohol is legal simply because of tradition.  Many health studies have been done on ethyl alcohol and a large majority of them have found it to be a considerably dangerous substance (if only just on a physical level, excluding social repercussions).  It is also my personal opinion that we should have the right to consume whatever we so desire, even things that are physically harmful (nobody is stopping us from eating fast food, smoking, or having energy drinks).  However, due to alcohol’s ability to cloud judgement, I find it particularly dangerous within a society who refuses to acknowledge – and act accordingly – to its potentially deadly nature.

In short, I feel that alcohol, as a substance, should be legal, but should our society fail to show its capability to moderate itself – and view alcohol consumption as a grand privilege – the legal status of alcohol should be revoked.

-M.

Indulgence

For the clarity of what is to come, allow me to express what I consider to be a “drug”.  Many think of a drug as those crazy plants or pills people consume to experience a superhuman and unnatural high.  Unlike the social norm, I take a much more broad approach to what drugs are: any substance (chemical or organic) that alters the body or the mind from its normal functioning form.

If one wished to get picky, one could even argue that simply sugar in large amounts can be a drug – a statement I would personally consider valid.  The effect a substance on a human doesn’t have to be very profound or even noticeable, just so long as it has the potential to alter a human on a fundamental internal level is enough for me to consider it a drug.

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You will probably notice that I refer to society quite a bit, almost to the point where it would seem I exclude myself from the group.  I assure you, dear reader, that this is not the case.  For the sake of convenience, accuracy, and fairness, I hope to remove myself and my personal opinions from injecting bias into my conclusions.

This being said, it is undoubtable that society has been altered by drugs.  To elaborate on this with my definition of what a drug is would be to venture though history and digress into contemplation of how some king’s cholesterol ridden diet may have made him cranky and thus strove headlong into war.  For the sake of argument, I will assume the definition that a drug is a “substance used to treat an illness, relieve a symptom, or modify a chemical process in the body for a specific purpose” (Thank you Wiktionary).  Drugs have brought splendors and plagues to our society: medicine has extended the life of people worldwide and illicit drugs (and some licit drugs too) have shortened lives or have worsened the human conditions.

Not all affects have been negative.  Drugs have brought entire societies together, or at minimal, forced societies to recognize the effect they have.  Substances such as marijuana, ecstasy, and alcohol have formed innumerable subcultures and have been the source or topic of many forms of entertainment for a populace at large.  Like most progress, it comes at a price.  Misuse of drugs has caused heartbreak and sorrow for many as they watched their loved ones overdose, wither away, or die as a consequence of another’s drug use.  Our own United States has been polarized on the topic.  Some choose the side of freedoms, others choose the side of morals and ethics.  It is indeed impossible to avoid or ignore the effects drugs have had on our society, our economy, and our ways of living.

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This is where you might out-right assume that I’m a hippie or a libertarian or a pot-head.  If that is the taste this leaves in your mouth, that’s fine by me, but at least hear me through:

I do not condone anything illegal, nor do I condone anything irresponsible.

I do, however, feel that drugs* usage** should be legalized***.

*: See first definition of “drug”.

**: This includes consumption, trade, and manufacture.

***: See the following paragraph.

There is a reason I added quite a few “catch-22s” on that statement.  There is quite a lot I wish to explain about my standpoint on the issue that cannot be summed up so briefly.  “Legal,” in the sense that I used it, doesn’t mean “free-for-all get drunk and take bong hits till you pass out while shooting up on heroin” and getting away with it.

Cigarettes are legal.  Alcohol is legal.  Sugar is legal.  Dietary supplements are legal.  Each of these I would classify as a drug, and each of these have their own control measures for “usage”.  Let drugs be integrated into our society, but not irresponsibly.

Substances would have to undergo clinical tests (as most drugs already do through the FDA) and then be categorized (similar to drug scheduling) and have certain laws, stipulations, and warnings attached to them.

I will use alcohol as an example: to consume or purchase, one has to be at least 21 years of age.  To sell and manufacture alcohol, one must have expressed government permission and adhere to all laws and regulations that apply.  Even the usage of alcohol is controlled: one cannot be drunk while driving, one cannot be drunk at work (or maybe they can, they’d have to check with their boss), one cannot be drunk in public, and so on.  Alcohol (should, not does) warns the imbiber that the substance can be potentially harmful when mixed or taken in substantial amounts.

I feel that this sort of control should be exercised on all substances.

Opinions may vary, results not typical, consult a medical professional before arriving at a conclusion.

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If drugs were legal in the sense that I have described above, I may find myself quite predisposed to sample some of them.  I chose the word “sample” because it quite accurately described my attitude: I would choose to indulge in a substance if I found its usage to be beneficial to myself in some way, whether it be some form of self-enlightenment or just to be able to say “been there, done that, its not worth it/over-hyped/enjoyable”.

There are quite a few ways one can screw up their life, and over-indulgence is one of the more expedient ways to do so.  Although I would find myself sampling drugs, I would hopefully have the will power (as I assume I do) to resist becoming addicted or dependent on them.  Even if a substance presented no physical repercussions for dependence, I’d rather it not damage my societal life in any way; I’d like not to lose a job over “Drug X” addiction, and I would sure hate to spend all of my money on it too.

In short, I’d sample it, but only out of sheer curiosity, and I would do so with the utmost of precaution and responsibility.

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I’m not a pot-head, I’m a scientist.

-M.