The Jerzey Derby Brigade (JDB) was back
on its home track in Morristown last night for a bout against the Dirty Jersey
Roller Derby based in Metuchen, NJ. Dirty Jersey jumped to an early but modest
lead as jammers #3 Babe Brutality, #902 Lady Speedstick, and #21 Jacked Up
showed skill at evading or penetrating firm defenses. Jams by #138 Incindyous,
#3684 Californikate (in her final bout for JDB), and especially a 16 point
power jam by #8 Lil Mo Peep kept the JDB competitive. The game was notable for
a much used penalty bench, which is a common signifier of hard blocking. Blocking
strategies have evolved over the past decade with a 3-wall becoming
commonplace; it is hard to break through and encourages the opposing jammer to
take a particular path around it where the fourth blocker is waiting. Both
teams used the formation a lot, though it can be (and was) defeated by
nimble-footed skaters. The first half ended with the score at 50-87 in favor of
Dirty Jersey.
As is often the case, the second half was
more rough-and-tumble than the first as each team struggled to overtake or maintain
the lead. Takedowns were frequent with #221 Det. Sure-Block Holmes and #63
Raven Rage getting in their usual solid hits. Despite strong efforts by JDB
including a few star passes to #64 Madeleine Alfight, the overall pattern of the
first half continued in the second. Strong jams by Lady Speedstick and Babe
Brutality were only partly offset by similar jams by Lil Mo Peep and Incindyous.
Dirty Jersey expanded its lead with Thiza Glory taking the team over the 100
mark. The lead expanded as the minutes counted down. In the final jam Babe
Brutality as lead jammer, pursued by Lil Mo Peep, ran out the clock. Dirty Jersey won the match with a final
score of 99-175.
MVPs:
Dirty Jersey
#3 Babe Brutality (jammer)
#306 Pink Medusa (blocker)
JDB:
#3684 Californikate (jammer)
#206 Bow Chicka Pow-Pow
[For
regular readers, yes I missed the 5/18 JDB v. Assault City home bout. Sorry about
that. The final score for that game was 134-304 for the Assaulters.]
We
all have had the strange experience of conversing with a seemingly rational and
sane person who at some point expresses some belief that to us seems
unimaginably weird: that transdimensional reptilian aliens killed JFK or some
such thing. Most often the expressed belief isn’t so far outside the mainstream
as that, but even mainstream beliefs can seem inexplicable to those of us who
don’t share them. We like to believe (there’s a variant of that word again)
that we are logical and those other people are not. This is improbable. Even if
we happen to be right, or at least less wrong, the odds are we arrived at our
beliefs first and found reasons to justify them later. This is just the way the
human mind works; those of us with mainstream opinions come by them with few
exceptions the same way the reptilian enthusiasts do.
Michael
Shermer is a founding publisher of the magazine Skeptic. He also writes a column for Scientific American. I’d read numerous articles by him in the past.
Last week I picked up The Believing Brain
in which he explains how people are hardwired to see
patterns and agency in the world. Shermer writes
about the physiology of belief and the effects of priming, anchoring, and
pre-existing expectations. There are good evolutionary reasons for
people to be good at discerning causes, patterns, meanings, and hidden links
where they exist, but also to be just as talented at seeing and believing in them where
they don’t. Those of our primate ancestors who
concluded a rustle in tall grasses meant that leopards were lurking in there
because there was one the last time the grass rustled, for example, most often
were wrong; nonetheless, they were more likely to survive than the primates who
didn’t believe in the connection. Being credulous is less likely to get you
killed and thereby removed from the gene pool. Evolution favors belief based on
shoddy evidence over skepticism. Far from being a barrier to holding
outlandish beliefs, by the way, intelligence actually helps. Shermer argues that intelligent people can convolute,
reinterpret, and interconnect data in creative ways that dimmer bulbs cannot
match. It is especially hard to change
minds when a sense of self is tied to a system of beliefs such as a religion or
political ideology: “our most deeply held beliefs are immune to attack by
direct educational tools, especially for those who are not ready to hear
contradictory evidence.” The
truth, or something approximating it, sometimes can be found, however, and the
scientific method is best way of finding it. It behooves us to recall the
admonition of physicist Richard Feynman:
“If
it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong. In that simple statement is the key
to science. It doesn’t make any difference how beautiful your guess is, how
smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is. If it disagrees with
experiment, it’s wrong. That’s all there is to it.”
My math teacher
back in high school liked to quote Edgar Allan Poe: “Believe nothing you hear,
and only one half that you see.” This is hyperbolic (and of course logically
self-negating), but there is an underlying value to the advice. “Belief comes quickly
and naturally, skepticism is slow and unnatural, and most people have a low
tolerance for ambiguity,” says Shermer. Turning skepticism on ourselves is
especially hard, but in a world increasingly characterized by true believers
(secular and otherwise) and extreme partisanship it is something to be
encouraged.
The Believing Brain is worth a read, as prods to question
ourselves (not just others) and our own belief systems usually are. Thumbs Up.
In general I
prefer horror films and fiction to be free of the supernatural. There are
exceptions, but they have to be…well…exceptional. I’ve always felt the scariest
monsters are all too human and, very likely in their own minds, not monsters. A
novel such as Jim Thompson’s The Killer
inside Me and a movie such as Kalifornia
are frightening precisely because the characters in them are credible. A
recurring figure among all too human screen monsters is the stalker, a
character sometimes motivated by material gain (Wait until Dark), sometimes by sadistic playfulness (Duel), and sometimes by romantic
obsession (Play Misty for Me). For some
reason the stalker genre was especially big in the last two decades of the 20th
century, and Greta (2018), available
on DVD, is a throwback to the style of that era. That is a compliment.
Francis (Chloe
Grace Moretz) is an innocent, but not too innocent, young woman who has
recently moved to NYC where she works as a waitress and lives with a rich young
friend named Erica (Maika Monroe). (Erica’s father gave her a loft as a
graduation present.) Francis is still shattered by the death of her mother a
year earlier and has an uncomfortable relationship with her father in Boston
because, so we learn from their phone conversations, he is moving on. Francis
does not approve. One day Francis finds a purse on the subway and returns it in
person to the owner who turns out to be an older woman named Greta (Isabelle
Huppert). She connects with Greta and they soon develop an ersatz
mother-daughter friendship. Something, however, is off, and when Francis finds
a cabinet full of purses in Greta’s home, she is shaken. How many other
purse-returners have preceded her and what happened to them? Francis tries to
break off the relationship but Greta isn’t ready to let go. Greta stalks
Francis and steadily ramps up her threats, which at first are implicit and
later explicit.
Unlike many modern
productions, the pacing of the film isn’t rushed, which works better for
building suspense. The movie is entirely female driven with men in minor
supporting roles. The director Neil Jordon (Interview
with the Vampire) plainly had fun with this film. By all appearances French
actress Huppert (Elle) did, too. The
final act is a little hard to swallow for reasons I can’t explain without a
major spoiler, but more sensible behavior by a character would have undermined the
necessary climactic tension, so this is not a fatal flaw. The movie is no
modern classic, but does what it does well enough for a Thumbs Up.
How common is
stalking actually? That depends on the definition. Internet stalking is so
common that it barely counts. Unwanted in-person attention is usually what we
mean. This is a disturbing thing to experience despite it having been the theme
of a creepy love
song by (ironically) the Police. Fortunately (if that adverb can
be used at all in this context) for most victims, the activity is far more
often annoying than dangerous, but there are enough cases of the latter to be a
cause for concern. While there already were laws against many of the common
actions of serious stalkers, several high profile crimes – most notably the
1989 murder of actress Rebecca Schaeffer by an obsessed fan – led in the 1990s to
specific laws against stalking per se
being enacted in all 50 states. The anti-stalking law of California, which is both
prototypical and typical, defines a stalker thus: “Any person who willfully,
maliciously, and repeatedly follows or harasses another person and who makes a
credible threat with the intent to place that person in reasonable fear for his
or her safety, or the safety of his or her immediate family.” According to the
CDC 15% of women and 6% of men are stalked at some time in their lives. By a looser
definition of the activity, the numbers are of course higher. The motivation of
the stalker is often a romantic fantasy but there can be other motivations.
Some people just want to be associated with someone famous, for example, and
pursue a connection relentlessly. Revenge for some real or imagined slight is sometimes
a motivation. In any case the goal of the stalker is to elicit fear and/or
compliance. The self-styled romantics can be the most dangerous of the bunch. A
month prior to the murder of Rebecca Schaeffer, her killer Robert Bardo had
written to his sister, “I have an obsession with the unattainable. I have to
eliminate [what] I cannot attain.”
The legal definition
of a stalker may be relatively recent but the activity isn’t. History is full of examples such as the relentless pursuit in the 19th century of Lord
Byron by Lady Caroline Lamb or of Cecil Rhodes by (of all people) Princess
Catherine Radziwiłł. Stalkers often are pretty normal and rational in every way
other than their obsession. This is why neighbors and light acquaintances so
frequently are genuinely surprised when they learn of an arrest: “What? Him?” There
is no one single profile but there are some patterns in the numbers.
Unsurprisingly, male stalkers heavily outnumber women but not by so huge a
margin as one might guess: 77% to 23%. Most female victims (61%) are stalked by
someone with whom they had a previous intimate relationship. A mix of casual
acquaintances, coworkers, friends of friends, and complete strangers account
for the rest. Men by contrast are more commonly (56%) stalked by casual
acquaintances or strangers.
What to do if we
experience this? If the activity meets the California definition, definitely tell
the authorities. Even if the activity falls far short of that, tell someone.
Don’t give the stalkers the attention they desire or they (especially the
romantics) will twist your words and actions to give themselves false hope. The
“don’t feed the trolls” advice for dealing with harassers online serves in real
life, too. The good news is that 52% of stalking cases end in less than a year.
The bad news is that the rest don’t. 9% last 5 years or more. The long-lasting
ones overwhelmingly involve intimate exes who have trouble letting go. Commitment
is not always a virtue.
On Friday a white sedan with “County of Morris
Weights and Measures” painted on the doors was parked outside the supermarket
where I most commonly shop. An inspector was likely inside the store checking
the scales. There is also a statewide agency and a national one. Inspectors
from various levels of government in all parts of the world have been performing
much the same job for thousands of years. I’ve seen the car in the parking lot
before, but it caught my attention more than usual this time because of an item
in the news about weight – or, more accurately, mass. This past week the world
got a new kilogram. Regrettably, it isn’t different in value from the old one,
so if you have a metric bathroom scale (which I recommend just because the
number in kilograms is so much lower than the number in pounds) you don’t get
to recalibrate it. The value remains the same but it is calculated differently.
Standard weights and measures existed in Sumerian
times. They were a necessity for trade then as they are now. There had to be
some way of expressing how much of this one would trade for how much of that,
and of course taxes (originally in goods – usually grain) had to be calculated
somehow. Sumerian inspectors, like those of Morris County today, existed to
counter the perennial temptation of traders to tinker with scales. Even after
the invention of coinage in the sixth century BCE, the coins commonly were
weighed when delivered because of the illegal but common practice of shaving gold
and silver coins in hopes of passing them off at full face value while keeping
the shavings. Larceny has never been far from the human heart. Inevitably there
were discrepancies from port to port when measuring weights, lengths, and even
time, since all standards were local. These problems continued into the 18th
century when the need for better standards grew more important not only for
trade and industry but for scientific inquiry. Perhaps the most lasting benefit
to have come from the French Revolution is the metric system adopted in 1795.
The U.S. made the metric system official (yes, it really did) in the Metric Act
of 1866; the English system is not official and never has been even though
Americans cling stubbornly to it in everyday use, but for regulatory purposes
its units are defined by metric conversion factors.
The metric system from the start was intended to be based
on natural properties: the gram, for example, originally was the weight of 1
cubic centimeter of water and the meter was 1/10,000,000th of the
distance from the equator to the North Pole. Physical conditions can affect
these measurements, however, so they were swapped out for physical objects by
the end of the 19th century. The meter became a platinum-iridium bar
and the kilogram until this past Monday was a cylinder of 90% platinum and 10%
iridium sitting in a case in Sèvres. These, too, presented problems. The length
and mass of these objects are not constant but change slightly due to
contamination and oxidation, so in the latter half of the 20th
century an effort was made to define metric units in terms of constants. In
1960 the meter was redefined as the distance light in a vacuum travels in
1/299,792,458 second. But what is a second? It is not enough to say it is 1/86,400th
of a day, because the length of a day varies as earth’s rotation rate varies
with changing sea levels. In 1967 a second was redefined as the
time that elapses during 9,192,631,770 cycles of the radiation produced by the
transition between two levels of the cesium 133 atom, even though this means International
Atomic Time drifts slowly from Universal Time (the common clock based on the
earth’s rotation). The kilogram for a long time resisted efforts at
redefinition since various proposed redefinitions proved to be ultimately
circular. On Monday, however, the kilogram finally got a non-circular
redefinition in terms of the Planck constant. We also got new definitions of
the kelvin, ampere, and mole in terms of natural constants.
Happy Retirement
It’s often said
that the important things in life can’t be measured, such as the value of
freedom, affection, kindness, and contentment – or for that matter hate,
meanness, and anguish. This might not be entirely true. One frequently can
determine a cash value of something like stress or some aspect of freedom by
seeing how much money a person will demand to suffer the former or surrender
the latter. There may well be an exact number. However, there is little doubt
that such measurements are subjective: your dollar figure will be different
from mine, whereas your kilogram is exactly the same as mine. The new
definitions don’t much impinge on my daily routine. I won’t be buying a cesium
atomic clock to tell time; I’ll continue to rely on my $11 watch even though I
need to adjust the hands a little every couple of months. Nor will I be
calculating my mass from scratch in terms of the Planck constant; I’ll step on my
bathroom scale, which is probably off by 1% or so. Nonetheless, it’s nice to
know those things in principle can be done. In a largely subjective and all too
often polarized world, it is reassuring that some things, at least, are
objective.
All unplanned by me, this week’s
scifi dose on screen and page had parallel plot elements:
Replicas (2018)
Despite the star power of
Keanu Reeves, whose John Wick: Chapter 3
– Parabellum is currently raking in box office cash, I hadn’t heard of this
movie until Amazon recommended the DVD to me. I now understand why. Replicas is easily a candidate for a
future Mystery Science Theater 3000
episode.
William Foster (Reeves) is
a scientist at Biodyne where he is attempting to reanimate the dead. His method
is to scan the brain of a recently deceased body, upload the deceased’s personality
and memories into a digital storage device, and then download the whole works
into a robotic body. The experiments do not go well; the robots self-destruct.
Meanwhile his fellow Biodyne scientist and friend Ed Whittle (Thomas
Middleditch) is working on cloning, though so far not on humans. When William Foster’s
wife and three children are killed in a car accident, he scans their brains and
convinces Ed to clone new bodies for them. Foster believes the problem with the
robots is that they are robots; he is betting that if he downloads the scans of
his family into copies of their own bodies everything will be hunky-dory. Ed
has only three handy-dandy cloning tanks, however, so William has to pick by
lot one family member not to bring back: his youngest daughter Zoe. To spare
the others the pain of missing her, he removes their memories of Zoe
because…well, he’s a scientist and can do that. So Ed sets up cloning tanks in Foster’s
garage, and, presto-chango, in just weeks most of the Fosters are reborn. Ed is
so good at his job that the three Fosters come out at the same time all at the
appropriate ages and even with the same haircuts. They don’t even know they
were gone. Uh-oh, Biodyne might be less in the dark about their employees’
extracurricular activities than William imagines.
The dialogue is ludicrous
and there are plot holes big enough to fly an Antonov-225 through. No friend or
neighbor wonders where Zoe is? What happened to the crashed car? The
re-animated family doesn’t notice the changed date? Through all of it Reeves
plays his part with intensely earnest seriousness. The result is
unintentionally hilarious. Rotten Tomatoes reports 10% approval by critics and
37% by audiences along with the remark that it “isn't even bad enough to be so
bad it's good.” I disagree. It is plenty bad enough. One simply ought not go
into it with false expectations of genuine merit. I think the disappointment at
Rotten Tomatoes comes from viewers who hoped for something like The Matrix or John Wick.
It’s not.
Split score: Thumbs down if
judged seriously. Thumbs up for the unintended laughs. (The trailer, btw, fails
to capture the full absurdity.)
**** ****
Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty
In the future minds can be
uploaded into computers and downloaded into clones. The minds of the clones can
be imprinted with false memories and secret directives, but the main point of
the technology is immortality: you keep a spare body in the fridge, and if you
die your consciousness can be downloaded into your spare and you can go on your
merry way. Of course, you’ll be missing a chunk of memory between your last
brain scan and your death, but that is a good reason to update your scans
regularly. Certain social questions arise for which rules have been written,
but rules and ethics are not the same. For example, suppose you committed a
crime between your last scan and your death. Should your next body be held legally
responsible even though the new you has no memory of the crime and, strictly
speaking, didn’t commit it? Future law, according to Lafferty, does hold you
responsible but many moralists are uncomfortable about it.
Questions of this type figure
into the events aboard a peculiar type of sublight generation starship en route to Artemis. The passengers are
to remain in hibernation the whole flight, but the crew of three women and three men must
stay on the job. They are to live out repeated lives on the long trip by growing
clones. Each downloads into a new cloned body when he or she dies. One day all
six wake up in their cloning chambers only to find their previous six violently
dispatched bodies floating around. Someone (perhaps the last or next to last
survivor) had activated the emergency system to awaken the new clones. Having
no memories since their last scans, the crew has no idea what happened.
Presumably one of them is a murderer, but why? And will the same person strike
again?
Of course I won’t reveal the
resolution to the murder mystery. I will say, however, that the events strike
me as having been instigated by (given the scale of the action) petty motives,
but humans can be petty, so this doesn’t too seriously undermine a novel that
otherwise is well plotted and presented.
Thumbs Up. Not way up, but
up.
**** ****
The downloading of
individual minds into new bodies, whether robotic or biological, has been a
staple of science fiction at least since the 1950s in literature, movies, and
TV. (Of the many 21st century examples, my first pick would be Cory
Doctorow’s 2003 Down and Out in the Magic
Kingdom.) Why does the idea recur so often? In the short-lived (but very
good) TV series Dollhouse (2009-2010), the scientist Topher, as he downloads
an electronically stored mind into a young new body, is asked, “So, we can give
you life after death?” Topher answers, “Only if we really like you.” Inherent
in the exchange is both the central fantasy and the central concern. The
fantasy is, of course, to cheat death. (Whether a “download” really achieves
that or just makes a totally different person/machine think it is you is usually
an unaddressed question.) The concern is over who will be manning the toll
booth. The fantasy is not going away, so I have no doubt there will be abundant
scifi to come with the same plot device. I’ll bet money on that. Should the
technology ever become real, I also have no doubt there will be a very pricey
toll booth operated by all the wrong people. As for the chance of it becoming
real…well… I wouldn’t bet money on that.
Like
many – perhaps most – Americans my handle on my direct ancestors reaches as far
back as the ones who arrived in the United States. Beyond that, things get a
bit murky. Mine straggled over between 1850 and 1920. I know from what towns
the emigrants hailed (Greifenhagen [presently Gryfino], Pressburg [Bratislava],
Budapest, and Glasgow) and in a couple of cases the names of a few of the
relatives they left behind, but that is about it.
For
those who are interested in their family histories, traditional genealogical
research can fill out family trees to varying extents. There are problems with
this approach, however, quite aside from the expense in time and money. There
is a high likelihood of omissions due to missing (or sealed) documentation. There
is also an inescapable degree of uncertainty on the paternal line. Late 20th
century DNA tests done for medical research purposes showed that in Western
countries including the U.S. more than 5% of men listed as fathers on birth
certificates were misidentified; the rule among the researchers was, and
still is, to not reveal this information to the cuckolded fathers. There is no
reason to believe the percentage was any lower in earlier times. This indicates
a better than even chance of deviation from a nominal family tree in a handful
of generations. DNA tests in the late 20th century were expensive
and slow, but of course that is no longer the case. DNA testing is now cheap
and easy. Nowadays it is the usually the first step for people interested in
learning more about their ancestry.
DNA
sampling companies such as 23andMe and Ancestry are wildly popular as many
people are keen to learn more about themselves. Identity crises are the special
domain of adolescents, according Erik Erikson, which ideally we resolve by the
time we are adults, but, needless to say, we don’t live in an ideal world. “Who
am I?” is a question asked by adults as well as by adolescents, and DNA tests
promise a limited answer – very limited. Dr. Michael Zwick at Emory
University's Departments of Human Genetics and Pediatrics explains, “What most
companies offer today is a measure of ancestry that maps to a geographic
region. The basic data consists of genetic variants (alleles) that are at
different frequencies in different geographic regions.” Given past migrations
of individuals and of whole populations, this tells us less than we might
imagine. The DNA tests are excellent, however, at something for which they were
not initially designed: revealing contemporary family connections to other
people who have taken the test. The tests have turned up previously unknown relatives
and revealed biological parents of adoptees. They also have been a boon to law
enforcement. Ever increasing numbers of criminals who have left DNA at crime
scenes have been caught thanks to these tests, even when they themselves didn’t
take the test. It was enough that a cousin did. A partial DNA match to a cousin
will give the police the family of the perp and from there it is easy to narrow
down the suspects. Within five years some 90% of Americans should be
identifiable through DNA in this way. Assuming a particular test-taker has no cause
for concern from law enforcement, he or she still should be prepared for the
possibility of some unwelcome surprises: revelations from test results could (and
sometimes do) include deep family secrets such as adoptions, half-siblings,
parental affairs, incest and more.
Most people seem willing
to take the chance of uncovering family skeletons in order to learn more about
their heritage, but one should be forewarned about taking the results too
seriously. Given the halving of genetic ancestry at each generational step back
in time, within very few generations our ancestors have little more in common
with us genetically than do random strangers. Being told what percentage of our
ancestry is of what ethnicity is, as British geneticist James Rutherford puts
it, “something that is at best trivial and at worst astrology.” Ethnicity
always has been a loose notion whether we claim it for ourselves or are
categorized by it by others. Even more dubious is the identification of ethnicity
with culture. As Sarah Zhang said in The
Atlantic, your DNA “is not your culture.” As an example, none of my own direct ancestors (so far as I
know, what with that 5% uncertainty thing) was in the Americas at the time of
the Revolution or the Early Republic but The
Federalist Papers are still culturally relevant to me.
People always divide
themselves into “us” and “them” for all sorts of reasons (religious, economic,
ideological, etc.) and fight viciously over them, but for the past few
centuries ethnic nationalism has been the single biggest killer: a source of
war and brutal oppression. To be sure, there is nothing wrong with social camaraderie
based on some commonalities of experience and background; this is called
harmless “granfallooning” in Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle. But such camaraderie couples all too easily with hate
of an out-group. This is not just dangerous but intellectually unsound. Throwing
rocks at out-group members is ill-advised not only because we all live in glass
houses, but because in a larger sense it is always our own house. Our ill-defined
ethnic distinctions do not really run so very deep into any of our ancestries. Everyone with a European ancestor somewhere in
the past 10 generations, for example, is descended from Charlemagne. Genghis
Khan has nearly as ubiquitous a presence in the ancestry of modern mainland
East Asians. Going deeper, it is mathematically necessary that all living
people share at least one direct common ancestor 3000 years ago. Science journalist Steve Olsen with the
help of statisticians and computer specialists calculated that every person now living is descended from every
person who was alive in the world in 5000 BC who left an intact line. Even the
tiniest rate of infiltration over the steppes, the deserts, and the seas
ensures this result – and migration was often anything but tiny. If you come face to face with an ancient
Egyptian mummy or one from the Tarim Basin in China who left an intact
bloodline, you are almost certainly looking at an ancestor. This is regardless
of from where we consider our families to have “originated.” We may not think of ourselves as descending from
farmers on the banks of the Chang Jiang River, herders on the grasslands of East Africa, and haulers of
stones at Giza all at the same time, but we are. Our ancestors very likely
included both besiegers and besieged at Troy.
We may not all be brothers and sisters, but we
are at least cousins. Regrettably, cousins are apt to squabble. It’s in our DNA.
A
recent conversation with someone dealing with a particularly old-fashioned substance
issue brought to mind how fashions come and go in such matters, but never go
completely.
There
are fads in intoxicants and fads in moral panics over them. There always will
be another one because users and abusers of intoxicants, faddish or otherwise,
are a constant. Author of Brave New World
Aldous Huxley, writing about the fictional “soma,” had no doubt about how
popular it would be if it were real: “Today alcohol and tobacco are available,
and people spend considerably more on these very unsatisfactory euphorics, pseudo-stimulants
and sedatives than they are ready to spend on the education of their children.”
Most
people like a chemically assisted bump in happiness from time to time (alcohol
still being the first choice) while some find life intolerable without it. These
latter are people whose rest state is unhappy: that is to say they are unhappy
unless fun things are happening, as opposed to mellower folks who are happy
unless bad things are happening. We all know people who are uncomfortable in
their own skins in this way, and they are the most likely to be substance abusers.
I remember being in a car in the 1990s with some friends including a troubled and
chronically unhappy young lady who had just left the Limelight disco in NYC.
“Some guy gave me this Ecstasy,” she said while holding a pill twixt thumb and
index finger. “Just throw it away,” I said. “You don’t know what that is.”
Instead she popped it her mouth, entirely willing to take the risk rather than
face the risk of feeling normal. By dumb luck, whatever it was did her no obvious
harm that night, but the choice she made (however stupid) was not so very
uncommon.
The
poor results of attempting a law enforcement solution to intoxicant abuse during
the moral panic over alcohol in the 1920s apparently taught us nothing about
how to respond – or rather not respond – to later moral panics. In my youth the
faddish panic was over psychedelics. It was followed in turn by ones over
cocaine, PCP, crack, and meth. The current one is over opioid addiction. Don’t
get me wrong. All these stuffs do real and sometimes deadly harm to the people
who use them. Even leaving aside (which I don’t) the right of free people to
make bad choices, however, it’s pretty clear that Prohibition isn’t working any
better today than it did 90 years ago with alcohol. Our tendency is to get
worked up politically about one substance at a time, so the current focus on
opioids has diverted attention from the return of meth, use of which in the US had
declined a decade ago after a crackdown on kitchen laboratories temporarily reduced
supply. (One wonders how much Breaking Bad
had to do with that.) The supply is once again bountiful since (as always
happens after domestic crackdowns) foreign criminal cartels stepped in to meet
the unfilled demand. Usage is back up.
Meth,
Ecstasy, Bennies, et al. are all closely related and are at bottom
amphetamines. Chemist Gordon Alles synthesized amphetamine in 1929 and tested it
on himself. He was looking for an asthma treatment. It wasn’t effective on
asthma, but it did make him feel alert and better. (It turned out Alles wasn’t
the first to synthesize the substance, but he was the first to claim medical
value for it and he received a patent for that.) It was marketed as treatment
for mild depression, for which it works in the short term, though in practice
it was mostly used recreationally for the euphoria. As a pep pill it also was
far more effective than coffee; it became popular for this reason in the ‘30s
with college students cramming for exams. In World War 2 the militaries on all
sides of the conflict provided amphetamine to soldiers and pilots to keep awake
and alert. After the war it became one of the go-to recreational drugs
(especially in inhaler form) of the Beat Generation. It was much beloved by the
likes of Kerouac and Ginsberg. It sped up metabolism (hence “speed”), which also
gave it popularity as a diet pill. By 1962, when the U.S. population was little
more than half of what it is today, 8 billion amphetamine pills were sold
domestically annually by legal manufacturers. Though usually prescribed (quite
freely) for various reasons (mild depression still being a big one), most continued
to be used recreationally as uppers even if many of the users denied it.
By
the mid-60s, the addictive nature of the drug was impossible to ignore. So were
the deleterious mental and health effects of amphetamine abuse. Blood pressure
related illnesses including heart attacks were among the risks; paranoia was a
common effect of large doses and there were cases of full-blown amphetamine
psychosis. Ginsberg changed his mind about the drug at this time, saying in
1965, “Speed is anti-social, paranoid making, it’s a drag, bad for your body,
bad for your mind.” Nevertheless, while it wasn’t the preferred drug of
hippiedom, it was still present. Speed freaks weren’t well regarded in 60s
counterculture but were definitely in the mix. In 1971 amphetamine was
classified as a Schedule II drug along with opium, cocaine, and morphine. Yet
it keeps making a comeback in one form or other thanks to its short-term
feel-good effect. For regular users that’s enough. As Lenina says about soma in
Brave New World, "Was and will
make me ill, I take a gramme and only am."
I
offer no “solution.” I don’t think there is one. (On a societal scale, I mean; individuals always have a chance of cleaning up their acts.) As long as large numbers of people
want to get high (which is to say always), mitigation of harm is the most for
which we have a realistic chance. The Portuguese have done a better job than we
at reducing the harm to the users and also to the rest of society by legalizing
hard drugs as well as soft. They thereby eliminated much organized and petty crime
at a stroke of the pen. There has been no increase in addiction rates. This
approach is a tough sell in most of the world. The U.S. is still fitfully
coming to terms merely with marijuana. Nonetheless, it is a model worth noting.
