May 11, 2008
More on Nargis
The callousness of the Burmese government continues to shock, but today’s description of bloated bodies being ignored by both the government and dazed survivors creates a grim picture. It also confirms that how many were killed by the storm surge will probably never be accurately known, thus it will be impossible to separate them from those still alive, but soon to die of preventable disease or starvation.
The “civilized” world has additional problems: how long should the fig-leaf of national sovereignty continue to protect a government that has kept its nation’s last properly elected chief executive under house arrest for over fifteen years and is devoting more of its resources to a referndum than to desperately needed disaster relief? What is the proper role of world government (the UN) in such dire situations?
Come to think of it, what will it take for our world leaders to finally understand that the dangers now facing our species are unprecedented; if for no other reason than the planet has never been so crowded with at-risk humans.
Do they have a plan?
Doctor Tom
Posted by tjeffo at 04:25 PM | Comments (0)
Cyclone Nargis; some unasked questions...
It’s been a week since Cyclone Nargis surged ashore in Burma’s Irawaddy Delta and, by some accounts, rushed as far inland as twenty-five miles through densely populated, but desperately poor, areas with few reinforced buildings and generally primitive transportation facilities. News coverage has (slowly and hesitatingly) revealed that the shadowy military junta running that nation is responding with the same remarkable combination of incompetence, suspicion, and resentment that has typified every Burmese government since1962 when a military coup ended the fledgling nation’s first attempt at democracy. Military dictatorships have retained power ever since, albeit under several changes of name and organization. The SPDC is merely the most recent, having replaced SLORC, its similarly named predecessor (with many of the same principals) in 1997.
By whatever name they have been known, the military juntas holding power in Burma for well over fifty years have protected the opium growers of the Golden Triangle while successfully shrouding their nation’s internal affairs in nearly impenetrable silence. As usual, press coverage of Cyclone Nargis has assisted them by ignoring logical, but potentially embarrassing connections with American drug policy, Andean Nations, Plan Colombia or Hurricane Katrina. One wonders if the credibility of Burma’s military government, can withstand their current exposure. Five decades of recent history suggest, like the drug war itself, it probably can.
But one can always hope...
Doctor Tom
Posted by tjeffo at 02:36 AM | Comments (0)
May 09, 2008
Seeking Perspective in a Confused World (Personal)
I began blogging in the Summer of 2005 when I finally tumbled to the hostility my three year old ad-hoc study of pot applicants was generating among presumed allies in the Drug Policy Reform movement. Although no longer as overt, that hostility has continued. Ironically, so has the media and electorate indifference towards drug policy issues that the movement has been trying to overcome for years. Just as ironic has been the remarkable global acceptance of drug enforcement failures experienced by UN agencies and nearly all “sovereign” governments attempting to enforce what originally started as a domestic US policy.
In essence, the world and America seem to agree on two “drug-related” issues: some drugs are so “bad” they should be kept illegal; yet the policy's inevitable failures should never even be admitted; let alone frankly discussed.
Back in California, also in 2005, there was an unexpected surge in the number of “pot docs,” some of whom hadn't even started medical school when Proposition 215 passed in 1996. Nevertheless my study has continued, aided to a considerable extent, by a “renewal” provision added when dispensaries were known as “buyers clubs” and their owners wanted to convince skeptical police they were playing by the rules. Of course, the cops soon began using the "requirement" to arrest medical users who were even a week out of compliance; especially after SB 420 passed in 2004.
In fact, the most prominent feature of Proposition 215 since California voters surprised the world by passing it in 1996 has been confusion; mostly as a result of foot-dragging by state and local governments. First the state police bureaucracies required for its implementation wouldn't cooperate with the legislature in creating the usual "enabling" legislation and the California and US Supreme Courts have declined to deal with the glaring jurisdictional conflict produced when the initiative was approved.
All of which has led me to a gradual realization: the chaotic and deteriorating state of the world on the eve of the Bush Administration’s scheduled departure from power is entirely consistent with several of the unexpected revelations about human behavior Proposition 215 had also afforded me. While I’m no longer naive enough to think those revelations are ready for prime time, having had them published and being able to continue the study should help me to further understand them, and perhaps do the same for others.
That's because the one thing that most people can agree on is precisely what they are still afraid to say out loud: the war on drugs has been a total failure. Just imagine what will happen when self-appointed policy "experts" finally accept the superiority of pot in treating the same conditions for which anxiolytics and antidepressants are now being prescribed...
Doctor Tom
Posted by tjeffo at 01:51 AM | Comments (0)
May 07, 2008
Sorry State of the World (Personal)
It’s been a while since I’ve had time to post a new entry; not because there’s been nothing worthy of comment, but because, like everyone else, I’ve been too busy keeping up with the absurd pace of modern life. We humans seem so committed to seeing life as a struggle that we are literally unable to live in harmony with either ourselves or other species. That’s been our history since we began keeping records, but now that we’ve crowded the planet with more of our progeny than ever and are still busy plundering its riches as if there were no tomorrow, it’s starting to catch up with us in a remarkable cascade of bad news that we pretend not to notice.
One hardly knows where to begin, but a good illustration of our inconsistency is that while furor over Jeremiah Wright was whipped into a frenzy by repeatedly airing some of his more inflammatory out-of-context remarks, the less rational maundering of a Texas bible thumper were gratefully welcomed by John McCain in March and seem hardly to have been noticed.
It doesn’t stop there; I was shocked the other day when an acquaintance whose judgement in other matters I’d always respected expressed outrage with Obama over the incident and then became testy with me for pointing out that everything I’d read and heard attributed to Wright had been factually correct. On the narrow issue of 9/11, I agree with Wright: Osama bin Laden had received what amounted to carte blanche from the Taliban to operate training facilities in Afghanistan, a country we’d assisted during the Eighties by encouraging the production of opium that was being turned into heroin for the European market, a transition that had quickly propelled Afghanistan from also ran in illegal opium production into world leadership.
Since 1970, Nixon’s drug war, backed by every subsequent administration, has functioned as price support for the world’s criminal drug markets and led to the installation of corrupt governments in both drug producing and drug transporting nations. Has our drug policy been successful in either Colombia or Mexico? Given our role in creation of the world’s illegal drug markets, just raising the subject of Burma should be painful to us, but since we don’t know the relevant history, it goes right over our head
My original interest in the drug war arose from simple curiosity: why was such a grotesque policy failure being endorsed by all the political leaders of the one nation I was (then) confident was the world’s best hope for leading the way to a sane and sustainable way of life based on fairness? What I have learned in the intervening twelve years has replaced that naive belief with the relative certainty that our species has been tragically hobbled by an evolutionary process that has left greed and fear dominant over our emotional centers and thus in control our cognition.
We can both see and feel the power of fellowship and generosity, but at the last minute, it seems, our worst instincts dominate. It’s amazing to me that simple pursuit of curiosity about the drug war should have led to what can only be understood as vindication of suspicions raised eloquently, albeit with a Victorian flair, by R. L. Stevenson in 1868.
Perhaps mid-Fifties cartoonist Walt Kelly said it best when he had one of his characters in Pogo say, “we have met the enemy and he is us.”
Doctor Tom
Posted by tjeffo at 04:45 PM | Comments (0)
May 01, 2008
Coincidence?
Little by little, more informed views about both PTSD and the inadequacy of its treatment at the hands of the VA are making their way into public consciousness. A measure of the pathetic state of smaller newspapers is that I couldn't find any reference to the trial reported by the NYT in today's San Francisco Chronicle.
Guess where it's being held?
On the other hand, a clinical study reporting the positive effects of cannabinoids in volunteers, apparently mediated by the amygdala and in which a VA Hospital paricipated was also reported.
Will wonders never cease?
Doctor Tom
Posted by tjeffo at 08:44 PM | Comments (0)
Neuroscience 2 (Personal)
Among the many scientific issues attracting attention after World War Two, those concerned with the brain’s role in human behavior stand out. That curiosity now seems more appropriate than ever, given that our numbers quadrupled in last century and are estimated to have since increased another 10%. We are also in a weather-related crisis because of petroleum consumption, the world’s poorest nations are experiencing food riots, and terrorism is increasing in the Middle East in what is essentially a reprise of the Crusades.
What is in doubt is the ability of our scientific institutions to take an unbiased look human behavior, a subject long obscured by religious thinking. Beyond that lurks a second question: can global political leaders respond effectively to lessons that will probably have to be learned under duress in the midst of multiple crises ?
Among the most respected students of the brain and behavior is Portuguese neurologist Antonio Damasio. Following medical and specialty training in his native Portugal, Damasio distinguished himself in academic appointments in Iowa and San Diego, and was recently chosen Director of USC’s Brain and Creativity Institute. He came to national prominence after publication of two books on consciousness, Decartes' Error (1994 )and The Feeling of What Happens. I read the latter shortly after its publication in 1999 when I wasn’t nearly as focused on the subject as my subsequent encounters with cannabis users would lead me to become. Thus, while greatly impressed by his lucid prose and thinking I’d grasped his message, I now realize I'd missed a lot because I still didn’t know what pot smokers would be telling me between then and now.
I recently began reading Feeling again and was pleased to discover a greater degree of concordance than I would have guessed. At the same time, I was also forced to admit I hadn’t appreciated the complexity of the process Damasio was describing in his unique dissection of consciousness, or the significance of his statement that before we can come to grips with emotions, we must first understand how we experience them. To quote Damasio, consciousness can be thought of as a “movie (with)in the brain.” A wide variety of things— physical objects, people, animals, states of mind, or scenes from our past— in short, anything we are able to remember— can be stored for later recall as what he sometimes calls “images” and other times “objects.” The important concept is that three separate entities are intrinsic to the process: the organism (observer), the memory itself (image/object) and the phenomenon by which it's recalled. Time doesn't permit a complete exposition of these concepts; nor could I do Damasio justice at this point. But I can recognize clearly how his formulation and my clinical input compliment each other. His is a a neutral, incisive description which is completely biological, based on solid clinical experience, and seemingly free of the usual religious preconceptions. As fellow neuroscientist William Calvin says in his review, "Damasio’s 'autobiographical self' is always under reconstruction."
Even so, it resonates with what I have learned about “human nature” by treating thousands of admitted cannabis users as patients who had been self-medicating for a mix of somatic and emotional symptoms, rather than considering them to be criminals because of the demands of a silly policy or in the preferred NORML/ASA/MPP mold of "valid" medical users (former recreational users with a "legitimate" ilness).
When Damasio’s and my narratives are combined, they portray a species that is quite different from the long accepted default image of divinely created beings aspiring to a heavenly afterlife. Rather, we are more easily seen as highly evolved mammals whose unique cognitive abilities encourage us to engage, often unfairly, in certain competitive behaviors which are, in turn, greatly influenced by conflicting functions located separately in our brains, probably by virtue of their asynchronous evolution.
Ironically, most of the conflicts driving the events of our modern world can be more readily understood by invoking a more realistic view of “human nature.” We should also become both safer as a species and more content as individuals if we can use our knowledge to change certain established behavior patterns that are clearly detrimental to our well being.
More later...
Doctor Tom
Posted by tjeffo at 07:17 PM | Comments (0)
April 30, 2008
What is “Human Nature?” And how did we get into this mess? (Personal)
The burning questions with which we humans have been grappling since different clusters of our ancestors hit independently on writing are: what does it mean to be human and why are we here? Recent studies of various “higher” mammals, most notably primates, elephants, and certain marine mammals may have cast doubt on whether humans are the only species with a language function, but that we are the only ones to record our abstract thoughts in writing now seems well established. Certainly we are the only species to use literacy to effectively manipulate the global environment.
Yet for all that cognitive prowess, we have recently been kept as busy with problems that seem to have resulted from our scientific triumphs as we are adding more triumphs. We are also shockingly far from consensus about how to manage the problems. In fact, a case can be made that despite our unprecedented ability to communicate, we are furthest from agreement at the very time global cooperation is most urgently needed.
What, you may ask, does this line of thinking have to do with pot use? The connection is really quite basic, although it requires a willingness to think further outside the box than most are willing to venture. For all our cognitive abilities, we humans are also highly evolved mammals with similar survival and emotional needs. We may now have reached a point in our cultural evolution (itself enabled only by our cognitive abilities) where it’s possible to analyze how we got here. But, ironically, because analytic ability for its own sake is rarely welcomed within established human hierarchies, correct analyses are usually dismissed as nonsense or heresy long before they are taken seriously.
Even then, the ones that are finally acknowledged and responded to are usually watered down at first. A convenient example, one very much in the news, is how America has dealt with slavery, a national tragedy produced by the implicit repudiation of its stirring revolutionary manifesto by those who wrote its Constitution a mere eleven years later.
In fact, it may be precisely because acceptance by whatever group we aspire to be part of is such a dominant human need that individual inductive (bottom up) reasoning is usually discouraged by human societies. In other words, a highly unlikely, but reassuringly omniscient, anthropoid “god” is still our preferred source of truth. Until we are able to shed the millstone of religion from our cognition, our ability to think ourselves into trouble may continue to overwhelm our ability to think ourselves out of it.
Do I really need add that the drug war is a nearly perfect example of top-down deductive (religious) logic? That it has survived so long as policy is a disgrace to all who have had a hand in protecting it.
Doctor Tom
Posted by tjeffo at 07:46 PM | Comments (0)
April 29, 2008
How Much Longer Will this Emarrassing Lttle Twerp be Taken Seriously?
As this is written, I'm watching CNN’s usual melange of ads for advertisers mixed in with their own self promoting ads for coming programs mixed with a dollop of “news.” One of the events being awaited is a brief press conference with the nation’s prez who will allegedly report to a beleaguered nation on urgent plans to alleviate our unprecedented housing debacle. Since it’s all interspersed with even more urgent weather news from all over, but in a setting of the unprecedented tornados that struck Virginia overnight, I’m forced to wonder when the polity will finally notice the disastrous record of his administration.
Oh, I see; it’s all been the fault of Congress and will be solved by finding more oil and building more refrineries... unfortunately, I don’t have time to stick around for the usual softball questions and the inevitably fatuous answers.
More later...
Doctor Tom
Posted by tjeffo at 03:43 PM | Comments (0)