Posts by Peter Ashby
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@Andin
Always with the negative. While yer lungs and liver say no, yer brain says yes much much louder. <Sarc over>
Dennis Potter come back, I loved watching him smoke on the tele talking about death Oh so calmly and with great dignity.Speak for your self. My brain once presented with the evidence finds it very hard to say yes to the things I describe. I am also a distance runner and whether its the not wanting to deal with the drag that the drink the night before induces or that the endorphins are enough for me but my desire to drink is much less than when I am sedentary.
I can be calm and dignified when talking about death, we all have to go sometime. As a biologist I have done my share of dealing it as well and I know well the smell of it in the morning when something bad happens in the mouse house overnight. That doesn't mean you have to get all fatalistic about it and embrace it any earlier than you have to either.
And before you accuse me of not knowing what pleasure is and being all ascetic I have a cupboard full of single, including single cask malt whisky, I am a real ale freak known to brew his own and I love a nice Sauvignon, Blanc or Cabernet. But pleasures you take every day tend to drive you towards wanting more. That sort of phenomenon is what we physiologists call habituation, your body adapts to what is always there. So one glass of a good Sauvignon no longer hits your pleasure centres like it used to when you have it every evening, so you have two instead. I am simply in control of my pleasures, they are not in control of me. I have even managed to kill my 20 year caffeine addiction, I still drink and enjoy coffee, its just that I don't have to any more. I consider that a Good Thing, YMMV.
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@Sacha
Anyone who's smoking enough cannabis for that [to be as bad as tobacco] to be true has other problems.
Except that we know that cannabis smokers breathe the smoke in more deeply and hold it in the lungs longer than tobacco smokers do. Add in that few reefers are filtered or low tar equivalent and a reefer can equal several ciggies in terms of harm done to the lungs.
I agree on the frequency bit, I suppose its the difference between killing your liver with a half bottle of a nice Sauvignon every night and a whole one at the weekend or with binge drinking.
For the record I have never indulged (athlete, mode of consumption contra-indicated) but would not say no to a herb muffin or scone (gluten free please) and am as sickened by the counter productive 'war on drugs' as the next person. Legalise, regulate, quality and dose enforce, tax the hell out of them, ensure the young can't get hold of, easily, and use the taxes to ensure there is an ambulance at the bottom of the cliff like there is for alcohol or tobacco as well as lots of warning signs on the fences at the top. Then leave responsible, informed adults to do what they want within the usual strictures wrt things like driving and being in charge of the kiddies etc.
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@Richard
As a long time subscriber to New Scientist I know what you mean about their physics and cosmology coverage. Even as a biologist I can tell they are plumbing the ever more wild extremes of hypothesis purely to put a supposedly interesting article together. I have ceased to read many of those articles. My position is 'tell me about it when they can prove it'. I want some data please, not ever more fanciful String Theory derived wanderings in fantasy land.
Mind you the recent article which claimed that massive lateral gene transfer down amongst the protists challenged Darwinian Evolution without noting that it was absolutely and utterly consistent with Dawkins's Selfish Gene Theory suggests they the rot is entering the biology coverage too.
Unfortunately this is all driven by an increasingly desperate search for sales in a declining market. People are not buying magazines any more, instead they are going on the net. So NS are heading ever more into the realm of sensationalism to try and increase sales. Unfortunately this merely serves to alienate their loyal readership like you and me.
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One of the reasons I would never think of walking along the street drinking or in possession of an open bottle is that I like my beer in a glass, with a head on it. Ditto wine and spirits (though generally without the head). Walking away from an establishment with a glass is stealing and I don't tend to drink in the sort of place that has plastic glasses, I left University a long time ago.
Which brings me to a recollection, one of the nice things about Dunedin in the summertime is that the pubs in the North End would serve using actual glassware.
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Hey Chris, how were the cops to know your group were tourists? Part of your outrage is based on that, but exactly how are the cops to tell?
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@Chris
Here in Dundee Scotland you cannot drink in public either in much of the city. In the US there is the hypocrisy of bottles in brown paper bags. I think it is quite civilised in both UK and NZ, I don't see the point of laws that are not enforced. That encourages too much discretion in the police which leads to arbitrariness in the application of the law and the opportunity for corruption.
I don't know where you are from, but I wouldn't think of walking a street carrying an open bottle of alcohol.
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@Stephen Judd
Thanks a bunch for the link to Rat Park, I was unaware of it. I agree that if you are happy then you can easily reject drugs. I have always been perfectly happy in my own skull. I don't even like being drunk, I stop at 'fairly merry'. That doesn't make me censorious of others who do decide to indulge. I am after all addicted to my own endorphins as distance runner (though that is not the prime reason for running).
I don't understand those who go out of a Fri or Sat night with the express intention of getting rat arsed. I have worked with people who consider a night they have little memory of to have been a good one and I do not exaggerate.
I have gradually over the years come to agree that drug prohibition is the biggest source of harm wrt drugs. Bigger than the harm done to addicts because it makes those harms much worse.
As to the idea that we cannot experiment with society, not even when some aspect can be shown not only to be ineffective and even counter productive but actually, demonstrably harmful?
When he have the Dutch experience and for eg Swiss shooting galleries for heroin users showing that harm reduction works I think we then have a moral responsibility to at least trial them carefully. It can't be any worse than legalising prostitution. Harm reduction was the raison d'etre there, so why not wrt drugs?
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@Sofie Bribiesca
Many of the problems with heroin are secondary to it being illegal. Doctor addicts with access to pure diamorphine had none of the problems smack heads face.
1. Overdose: due often to no or false information as to strength/concentration of the drug. Legalise and this goes away. Addicts also die of overdose while trying to give up, when they fall off the wagon their tolerances have decreased but they go back to what they used to use.
2. Purity: heroin is, famously, golden brown but diamorphine is a white powder. Now add in all the crap, and other drugs that can be cut into heroin as it passes down the line. These are what produce the classic junkie look and health problems. Legalise with pure drug and those disappear.
3. Inconsistent supply: which produces desperation and great risk taking.
4. Disease: at last count about 7 heroin addicts have died here in Scotland recently from Anthrax contracted due to contaminated smack.
Etc, etc.
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@Giovanni
Men also get breast cancer. I have read pieces about how hard it can be to be the only man sitting in the waiting room at the Breast Cancer Clinic and the looks you get when your name is called.
'Man Boobs' are an object of, often female, ridicule yet it seems like all the phytoestrogens, pthalates etc we are exposed to in modern life, along with overweight, does give men, real actual breasts that no amount of iron pumping will remove once developed. Which would be fine, if they were not then a source of constant shame.
But then men don't get to complain about their boobs since they are modern and women have had to put up with theirs for millienia. I'll stop channelling Julie Bindel there I think.
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There has been on the CiF discussion boards where I hang out a strong suspicion for some time now that the Graun deliberately has provocative pieces simply to get their page impressions and comment numbers up for the advertisers (I use several ad blocking servers, so I don't see many of them anyway).
Question if an advert appears on the internet and nobody clicks on it, does it truly exist?