No promises.
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Oh, I believe it! You’ve always got something clever to say!
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The author discussed in Gladwell’s article had an opinion piece in the NY Times recently:
Spoiler alert: it’s similarly blarg.
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Can’t vouch for this source, uncovered as it was through a thorough ~15 second google search, but a cursory scan does seem to suggest Mr. Gladwell is hardly the impartial truth seeker he strongly implies to be, and specifically that he has collected a lot of money through speaking fees to the pharma industry over the years.
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I agree. I don’t use it, I don’t like the smoke that I’m more and more coming into contact with, and stoned people are boring. That said, I voted to support it in CA because it was illogical for pot to be illegal, while cigarettes are alcohol were legal.
So, long as it’s regulated like other low level drugs and I don’t have to have it in my face, I’m 100% fine w/ it being legal and I’m hoping that the new governor will pardon/commute all stand-alone, non-violent weed offenses. We should get those folks out of jail AND clear their record.
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That grown marijuana is a schedule 1 narcotic in the U.S., while pharma companies sell synthesized THC (that the FDA says has no adverse effects), is one of the clearest examples of how much big pharma controls everything in this country related to drugs (legal and otherwise)
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I wrote a piece in response because initially it seemed that the only people against Gladwell’s article were in the ‘pot cures cancer’ camp.
I played it safe and stuck with what I knew and could easily find given my limited time, but his misuse of statistics and outright exaggeration was so blatant I couldn’t simply stand by. It was an offense on truth and the intellect, IMO.
medium.com/@mashafalkov/more-reefer-madness-isnt-what-we-need-today-409025335fd2
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Precisely, it’s the same argument. If people behave illegally on something, prosecute & punish THAT behavior. These dopes are 1 noun swap away from the massive, obvious failure that was alcohol prohibition.
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@reactionabe? Thoughts?
[ETA] FYI, one of the founders is Mark Ames, who went to Russia with Matt Taibi after the end of the Soviet Union and set up a paper called the eXile during that sort of wild west period… But he’s also come under criticism for creepy behavior towards women. I don’t know much about the other founder Yasha Levine, though.
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I first read about this guy in Mother Jones, and was not impressed that they gave his “my wife works with scary insane criminals who are also all pot smokers, which led me to realize that reefer madness is real” thesis internet airtime.
Maybe pot use does act as a risk factor for developing schizophrenia and/or other conditions for a small segment of the population. What then? Do we need to compile all the health issues demonstrably and verifiably caused by (legal drugs) cigarettes and alcohol? Because I don’t have the kind of time a list that long would take.
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The truth? Boring people are more boring when stoned. Maybe try hanging out with writers, artists, or makers.
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You’ve had to sit through that ‘teamwork’ training video too, huh?
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We were specifically instructed during wood shop safety orientation in art school not to use the power tools while high. Then the supervisor told us about the time he had a job in a lumber yard, went to work high, and almost took a self-inflicted chainsaw to the junk.
I’m not sure if that makes hanging out with high people boring or potentially way more exciting than I can handle.
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That is the most idiotically targeted (for clarity, against smokers) rebuttal I’ve ever heard. Makers are capable of refraining from smoking while working, as are many other people.
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It… wasn’t supposed to be a rebuttal? It was an experience I thought was funny at the time because we were all uptight graphic designers. Maybe I wasn’t clear that “ability to safely use power tools” isn’t a measure of interesting-ness and should have provided more context that I was making a joke. But cheers!
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Sorry, it appeared to be backing up the first posted statement.
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I had just commented on this the other day. The research project seemed to have a very anti-pot agenda, i.e. instead of investigating all of the claims of positive health benefits, they went out of their way to find a drawback – in lab rats, and then in much-too-small group of humans. Flimsy at best.
I’ve been laboring under the impression that alcohol causes people to become moronic, psychopathic, DC lobbyists, and that cigarette smoking makes people smell more like ass. I’m going to start a GoFundMe.
Well, I guess we’ve just discovered other activities we ought to refrain from when we’re high.
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This is What Gladwell Does. He very often takes some factoid or anecdote and just runs with it, all the way to the end of the field, through the parking lot, and into the suburbs. Malcolm Gladwell will talk to a nuclear physicist and then write a piece as if he knows something about nuclear physics.
In this case, he happens to be “against pot”, but had the winds shifted or a dewdrop fallen a different direction, he could just as easily have written a gloriously enraptured piece on the unalloyed benefits of pot.
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When it comes to cannabis, the best-case scenario is that we will muddle through, learning more about its true effects as we go along and adapting as needed—the way, say, the once extraordinarily lethal innovation of the automobile has been gradually tamed in the course of its history.
This is just one of the absurd lines from the article… He makes it sound like people are dying from smoking weed. Meanwhile that “tamed” innovation the automobile killed 40k people last year alone.
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