[Paleopsych] drugs and alcohol

[Werbos, Dr. Paul J.]

At 05:04 PM 8/23/2004 -0700, Steve wrote:
>I'm not saying the cocaine cartel is
>not dangerous.
>
>Coke, tobacco, and alcohol are all
>poisons that injure or kill people,
>and the people who sell them are
>not nice.
>
>They are more like the guards in the
>death camps of WWII, who killed
>Jews all day and went home to
>dandle their kids at night.
>
>Unfortunately, making drugs illegal
>makes them more profitable, and
>it you could follow the money trail

But dialogue is when people hear what each other say,
and respond
to new verbal stimuli
as such, rather than looking up in an associative memory of standard
beliefs and standard responses. The scripts theory of human
verbal behavior says that's what people always do... yet there was a time 
in the
early part of this country when people may have tried harder to get beyond that
sort of pattern. There are those in the world who say we are becoming a 
nation of robots,
or following the same sort of trajectory that the Romans did. (Some are not 
so kind
about how they say it.) I wouldn't go that far, exactly... yet I think that 
Santayana was right
that we need to think very hard about the lessons of history. Too bad that 
we haven't
really re-invented the twelve tablets movement.

I was not proposing that we pass a new law to make cocaine illegal.
I suppose it's an example where making legal systems TOO simple can cause
major grief.

The MAIN step proposed was to make it "more legal" through state-controlled 
clinics,
which might be compared to the shift from prohibition to "state stores" 
years ago.
The other steps were really just there to create balance and prevent going 
off too
far in the opposite direction.

If always keep lurching between extremes, pure chaos and pure order, anarchy
or reich, pure yang or pure yin, pure thesis or pure antithesis but never 
enough memory or patience
to develop synthesis,... we will in fact disintegrate.

Come to think of it, there have been trends in science like this as well.

--

Notice an underlying technical theme here. There is one kind of memory,
classic associative memory, where people respond to every new thing
as if it were the "closest" past thing or prototype, without noticing the 
current
stimulus. And then there is the kind of memory that a Toynbee tries to
exercise -- where we generalize or learn from the combination of present 
and past
exemplars.




>all the way to the source of control
>you might find that the ultimate
>control is held by very respectable
>people who do not appear to be
>criminals

Certainly the folks who get MANY billions of dollars every year,
and millions of slaves, from the status quo would be opposed to changing it
in a way that would deprive them of a lot of that.
And certainly they have infiltrated governments in the western hemisphere a 
whole
lot more than Al Quieda has!! And come closer to developing nuclear weapons,
chemical weapons and delivery systems. And engaged in larger military actions
in this hemisphere.

Speaking of Al Quieda -- a lot of the black Moslem movement in the US
originated as a reaction to exactly this drug cartel system, and their 
extreme frustration
with the dishwater weakness of our establishment in protecting them from it.
Certainly I worry about THEIR extreme... but we need to remember what 
drives people
over the edge, and not only what it drives them to.


>Steve Hovland
>www.stevehovland.net
>
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