Posts by Russell Brown
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Hard News: Apple Music: Taking a dump on…, in reply to matthewbuchanan,
And it’s not all streaming either — the native mobile apps for Rdio (and I believe Spotify) let you sync actual song files for offline play, which is a nice halfway house.
Allegedly, Apple Music does that too. Just in a really difficult way.
Buying lossless files from Bleep.com seems quite good right now, if much more expensive.
-
Hmmm. Bad bug ...
Just playing an album and several times the track progress has caught up with the stream. At which point, the track stops and the player flips to the next track on the list.
Gah.
-
Hard News: Potency and purity, in reply to B Jones,
Thanks for that clarification. I think your point risks getting lost if you’re trying to compare forced relocation of children and other racist policies to prohibition. There’s a real difference between policies designed to change people’s behaviour and policies designed to wipe out a cultural identity or preserve a social hierarchy.
You'd be surprised. New Zealand's first real drug laws were consciously targeted at immigrant Chinese workers, whose opium use had become a matter of public alarm.
In the US, the story is even starker. Drug laws there were essentially born out of racism – against immigrant Chinese, blacks and Mexicans – and their impact still falls sharply along racial lines.
-
Polity: Gay marriage, weed, and death…, in reply to Lucy Telfar Barnard,
That’s an interesting point. So it basically means that a Republican candidate needs to express an anti-marriage equality position to win the primaries, but a pro-marriage equality position to win the election?
I suspect that if you sat down and did some reading you could find a dozen issues where the same applies.
-
The global reach of the legal highs industry has been laid bare by a UN study that shows new psychoactive substances – as they are officially called – being reported for the first time in countries as far afield as Peru and the Seychelles.
The annual report of the UN’s office of drugs and crime, published on Friday, says that the number of legal highs “with a negative health impact” being marketed around the world increased by a further 20% to 541 substances, up to last December.
-
Hard News: Potency and purity, in reply to Tom Semmens,
They’ve predicted a massive mental health epidemic of depression from the abuse of MDMA for twenty years. However, this seems inconsistent with the lack of observational evidence to support it – AKA The Fermi paradox.
True. There may be long-term (and even irreversible) effects, but they don't seem to be showing up at a clinical level.
-
I think this Pew graph (source) illustrates the problem that Republican candidates face over same sex marriage. The people who vote in their primaries are lagging behind the general population.
-
I find fairly persuasive the argument that this kind of social change has been somewhat accelerated by social media – we are emboldened by seeing that others think alike.
Marriage equality has the virtue (for most people) of being morally uncomplicated compared to euthanasia and straightforward compared to legalising weed. We have a template already for same-sex marriage, while we’re faced with devising ways to handle the other two. And it’s a happy and positive thing, helped if anything by a societal swing back to traditional marriage.
It’s been a little irksome seeing some queer activists dismissing marriage equality. It’s something people have struggled for for decades, something that seemed wild and unreachable for a lot of that time. It should be okay to celebrate a win and then look ahead.
-
Hard News: Potency and purity, in reply to B Jones,
What would work, and how would you define “work” anyway? Fewer psychoactive ED admissions? Fewer alcohol ED admissions if people switch? No increase in hyponatremia, hyperthermia, depression etc? It might not work very well if all you did was switch people from alcohol to alcohol plus MDMA. Would that be a sufficient improvement from alcohol plus whatever the hell else is around, or do we expect some corresponding reduction in booze? That’s a whole other kettle of fish.
All perfectly reasonable questions. For now, I’d be happy with a more enlightened attitude to onsite testing at festivals and the like and a public information system like WEDINOS in Wales.
You don’t want to make a potentially harmful substance available in a way that encourages use. On the other hand, the use of party drugs has been mainstream for 20 years – it’s what people do at festivals and dance parties. The Drug Foundation says around 180,000 New Zealanders have used Ecstasy (or something like it).
But driving out the “original” party drugs has only made things less safe. In addition to the bad experiences reported in the Dom Post and my MoS story recently, there are incidents like this:
The emergence of the NBOMe group of drugs has doctors and nurses at Christchurch Hospital worried, with one of the men now in intensive care with kidney and cardiac complications.
The four men, in their 20s, had taken the synthetic LSD at a party in the city last night and quickly became agitated and confused.
Police were called after they were involved in a violent disturbance and had to be restrained before they were taken to Christchurch Hospital’s emergency department.
One of the men suffered kidney and cardiac complications and remained in a serious but stable condition in the cardiothoracic intensive care unit.
In the years before Operation Ark shut down a huge analogues operation, there was a real problem with mephedrone among kids in Auckland.
My guess would be that more MDMA use would equal fewer problems with alcohol. By contrast, one of the big problems with the then-legal piperazines was that they facilitated binge drinking. On the upside, they don’t appear to have outright killed anyone. But, then, there have been only three MDMA-related deaths in the three decades it’s been available in New Zealand.
It is really complex. I’d just like people to be safer.
-
Hard News: Potency and purity, in reply to Paul Paul,
The UK Advisory Council report the story refers to is here.
This is relevant (emphasis mine):
An extensive systematic assessment of observational data on the recreational use of MDMA by Rogers et al. (2009) examined studies that compared MDMA users versus poly-drug users and MDMA users versus drug-naïve controls with separate analyses for current MDMA users and ex-users. The review found that there was a small but consistent negative effect of ‘ecstasy’ on cognitive and psychomotor function across a large number of controlled observational studies (over 100). The authors considered these effects tended to be ‘small’ in magnitude, noting that the mean scores of ‘ecstasy’-exposed cohorts were commonly still in the ‘normal range’. Former ‘ecstasy’ users frequently showed deficits that matched or exceeded those seen among current users. The statistically significant differences reported were most apparent on memory domains and on focused but not sustained attention. Self-rated measures of performance gave bigger effects than objective measures, which suggests a degree of self-concern in those volunteering for research studies. The authors of the report suggest that such measures could bias research findings (Rogers et al., 2009).
And:
The MDMA findings are rather different from those of studies of methylamphetamine and cocaine users where impulse control, planning and attentional (rather than memory) processes are affected, often to a pronounced and clinically relevant degree (Volkow et al., 2001a and b).
Last ←Newer Page 1 … 312 313 314 315 316 … 2279 Older→ First