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Thursday, March 7, 2024

Thursday links [Updated]


 Erik Davis in the Paris Review, an article adapted from his upcoming book,  Blotter: The Untold Story of an Acid Medium, about a museum of LSD blotter paper. 

Republican nominee for governor in North Carolina. 

"Marijuana use is associated with lower odds of subjective cognitive decline." News for older people, but I don't know what to make of this and it may not be the final word. UPDATE: Here is another encouraging study (clickable link for the study Michael mentions in the comments.) 

Conspiracy content at the film festival. 

There's a huge increase in young women taking antidepressants.


3 comments:

michael said...

Re: cannabis as neuroprotective: Here's a study from the year 2000 by a buncha hippies at...(checks source)the National Institute of Mental Health:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10863546/

Don't worry: for every one study like this they've hired 300 other researchers to show how cannabis makes boys grow breasts, drives you insane, leads to heroin, "causes" something called "amotivational syndrome" <---this last thing is SERIOUS: people smoke weed then realize too much of the world is "bullshit" and don't wanna play anymore.

NB: Hate to be PC here like some overactive 19 year old at State College screaming about intersectionality while not reading a book all semester long, but we say "cannabis" because "marijuana" was the term propagandized by Anslinger, who was...well, let's just start with a "racist liar" before we go any further.

Cleveland Okie (Tom Jackson) said...

I thought I was being PC when I didn't say pot! Maybe "marijuana" is an old person's term? I'm old. Point noted.

I've turned the study into a clickable link in the post.

michael said...

I'm probably older than you, but I get it.

Anslinger wanted everyone to link "marijuana" with Mexican people, who didn't work, were lazy and couldn't be trusted. But then I need to give a fuller picture of who he was: he also hated blacks and wanted people to link "marijuana" with blacks who got high and wanted to ball white women. This is only the tip of what a delightful influence he's had on our culture.

Peter Grinspoon's book from 2023, _Seeing Through The Smoke: A Cannabis Specialist Untangles The Truth About Marijuana_ is to be recommended.

On the neurobiology of cannabis and the endocannabinoid system that is probably the master regulatory system in the body: see Cheryl Pellerin's _Healing With Cannabis: The Evolution of the Endocannabinoid System and How Cannabinoids Help Relieve PTSD, Pain, MS, Anxiety, and More_: it's quite readable for the intelligent layperson.

For cannabis and philosophy, I have a heavy bias toward Sebastian Marincolo's _Elevated: Cannabis As A Tool For Mind Enhancement_, put out by Hilaritas, with an Intro by some jackass, but Marincolo's book is da bomb.

Read all three, digest what they have to say, then settle back with a few hits of a hybrid and try not to ponder the amount of BS that the government and industries that felt threatened by weed got far too many people to believe. The data/info/knowledge in those books couldda been common by the 1960s if there was no concerted disinformation program against this plant. (AKA Stanford professor Robert Proctor's term: agnotology: the business of creating un-knowledge) This is no small point: tens of thousands of people have done heavy time in prison for small amounts of what grandma is now scoring from her local dispensary, 'cuz it helps with her arthritis and the side effects are negligible.

Do that for a few minutes, then drop it - cannabis helps you easily to drop this kinda of anger - and just enjoy music, poetry, or movies. Or art, food and sex. Just a thought.