Terms Which Have Disappeared

[Paisley]

There's a difference without a distinction if ever there was one.

Don't delude yourself. "Light" drinkers get lightly intoxicated. As a one-time drinker, I know that people feel the drug effect of half a glass of wine or a few sips of beer. They like being in that drugged state. That's why they do it. That's the point of it, just as surely as getting mildly intoxicated is the point of taking a pull or two off a reefer.

I know for certain that there are moderate cannabis users, and occasional cocaine users, and even light opiate users. I'm not here to advocate for any of that. But alcohol isn't in a whole 'nuther category just because drinkers don't wish to accept the plain truth that they are drug users.

Sorry, but no sale. Not everyone likes being intoxicated. I don't drink more than a glass of wine because I don't like how any more makes me feel. I enjoy the taste with certain meals in spite of its other effects. I pay an arm and a leg for Mucinex because I hate being doped up on cheaper antihistamines. While it's not related to alcohol or medication, I've heard many people remark, after making certain dietary changes, how much clearer their head feels. Clearly, there's a portion of the population who enjoys a clear head.

The logical conclusion of what you're saying is people who drink coffee, eat sugar or use certain OTC drugs are drug users just as if they were shooting up and shouldn't kid themselves just because it's a mild effect.

 

[LizzieMaine]

If memory serves, the world was divided into three competing spheres in "1984;" dictatorships need external enemies to justify their existence when things internal don't do so well.

I call dibs on "The Boys!"

 

[Fading Fast]

I call dibs on "The Boys!"

The Boys exist in and sell their services to the government of all three spheres. And all three dictatorships happily buy them. Wasn't Goebbels just an "in-house" Boy From Marketing?

 

[Trenchfriend]

Sorry, but no sale. Not everyone likes being intoxicated. I don't drink more than a glass of wine because I don't like how any more makes me feel. I enjoy the taste with certain meals in spite of its other effects. I pay an arm and a leg for Mucinex because I hate being doped up on cheaper antihistamines. While it's not related to alcohol or medication, I've heard many people remark, after making certain dietary changes, how much clearer their head feels. Clearly, there's a portion of the population who enjoys a clear head.

The logical conclusion of what you're saying is people who drink coffee, eat sugar or use certain OTC drugs are drug users just as if they were shooting up and shouldn't kid themselves just because it's a mild effect.

In old Germany there are so many chocolate-addicted females and men, too. Same problem, the evil stuff is much too cheap.

If heroin is still "white horse" and cocaine is "white pony", then chocolate is just "brown pony". Our mighty beet sugar-industry just got the masses, since some decades.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The Boys exist in and sell their services to the government of all three spheres. And all three dictatorships happily buy them. Wasn't Goebbels just an "in-house" Boy From Marketing?

Goebbels was the Boys' High Priest. He, Edward Bernays, and Ernest Dichter form the Unholy Trinity.

 

[tonyb]

Sorry, but no sale. Not everyone likes being intoxicated. I don't drink more than a glass of wine because I don't like how any more makes me feel. I enjoy the taste with certain meals in spite of its other effects. I pay an arm and a leg for Mucinex because I hate being doped up on cheaper antihistamines. While it's not related to alcohol or medication, I've heard many people remark, after making certain dietary changes, how much clearer their head feels. Clearly, there's a portion of the population who enjoys a clear head.

The logical conclusion of what you're saying is people who drink coffee, eat sugar or use certain OTC drugs are drug users just as if they were shooting up and shouldn't kid themselves just because it's a mild effect.

Oh, so you don't feel the effects of the drug, then?

But you do? But you don't like it? You just drink for the flavor? Not more than a glass of wine? Any more than that you don't like?

Sounds like you don't mind being mildly intoxicated, because if you drink a glass of wine, you surely are.

You misrepresent what I write, by the way. I'm making no false equivalences here. And no, your "logical conclusion" is anything but. Indeed, it borders on the ad hominem. I've already issued a strong warning against injecting drugs, because it's just too damned dangerous. And I not only don't advocate the use of any drug, I often caution against it. But I have a quite well informed perspective on this, and I accept that people like certain drug effects. Any effective strategies for addressing the problems, both personal and societal, wrought by that human tendency which fail to address it are all but certain to fail, or to create more problems than they "solve."

The greatest distinction between alcohol and the more demonized of the commonly used intoxicants is that alcohol is "normalized." Its use and marketing is restricted, but it's legal.

Unlike many (most?) cannabis legalization advocates, I strongly suspect legalization will result in greater normalization, and increased usage. That seems almost intuitive, not that intuition is always right. These early state-by-state experiments may well tell us quite a bit, provided we're willing to set aside our biases (to the extent we can) and take a sober look at the data.

I expect there to be problems, foreseeable problems and surprising problems. But dang, we had better learn where the data end and the biases begin, lest we wish to remain in our happy delusions.

 

[Trenchfriend]

Goebbels was the Boys' High Priest. He, Edward Bernays, and Ernest Dichter form the Unholy Trinity.

I'm still happy, that Goebbels didn't wear classic flatcaps to his beige trenchcoats.

 

[LizzieMaine]

He was more the aristocratic type.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Unlike many (most?) cannabis legalization advocates, I strongly suspect legalization will result in greater normalization, and increased usage. That seems almost intuitive, not that intuition is always right. These early state-by-state experiments may well tell us quite a bit, provided we're willing to set aside our biases (to the extent we can) and take a sober look at the data.

This is exactly what most worries me -- it's what I'm talking about most when I criticize the "drug culture," the idea that we as a society will become so inured to the stuff that we blandly overlook the harm it will cause. We do this with alcohol -- and I'm just as opposed to that as I am to anything else -- and for a hundred years we did it with cigarettes, with the Boys keeping up a constant roar to drown out any naysaying, before the realities became too hideously obvious, and too flatly *criminal* to ignore any longer. That's how it usually goes when dollars are involved, and intoxication is one of the biggest-dollar rackets there is.

I just don't see any advantage -- and many *disadvantages* to normalizing yet another intoxicant, especially one which will likely see disproportionate use and abuse among the working class, which already swills down the bulk of the alcohol and sucks in the bulk of the tobacco and the bulk of the opioids, to its detriment. This isn't just an academic debate to me -- these things are harming my people in very real, very substantive ways. We have trouble enough surviving in this world without shackling another hobble to our collective ankle.

 

[tonyb]

Okay comrade. I understand your perspective. Ain't in lockstep agreement, but there's little doubt that such vices tend to disproportionately affect the struggling classes.

My hope is that we learn what the anti-smoking campaigns have taught us. Here's the facts, people. Many will deny them, because that's how people are. But smoking is deadly. Doing it consistently over a period of years will have harmful effects. How dire those effects, and how soon they arise, is pretty much proportionate to how much you smoke. Oh, and you're injuring your kids (and every other innocent bystander) by smoking in their presence.

So we hammer home that point. We ban smoking just about anywhere it might affect others. But we haven't criminalized it.

Will it reach a plateau, below which the numbers of smokers won't fall? I dunno. Let's see.

 

[Trenchfriend]

As far as I know, general-medicine says actual, in reality, the "healthy" portion of red-wine is only the size of a (what you call) "thimble".

And we all know, that quite often, red- and white-wine seems to be the "binge-drinking of academics".

 

[LizzieMaine]

When my mother quit smoking -- cold turkey, after watching her father spend the last ten years of his life hacking up decayed chunks of his own lungs into a chamberpot -- she took up drinking cheap Gallo jug wine. She ended up throwing an ashtray at a cop in the middle of a drunken revel one 4th Of July, and that brought an abrupt finish to her drinking career.

 

[tonyb]

All intoxicants are poison. So are the other drugs. Some are legally available only by prescription, and some aren't legally available at all.

I trust that my physicians have my best interest at heart when they prescribe a medication. (I take five prescription drugs and two over-the-counter potions daily.) None of my meds is for pain, but they are not without their undesirable side effects. So I know what the research says of the bargain I am making by taking these drugs. And I pay attention to the ongoing research.

I was somewhat taken aback by reports of acetaminophen poisoning and how common and potentially deadly it is. It's not such an exaggeration to say that Tylenol and other products containing acetaminophen are taken by the handfuls, with an almost criminal disregard for the dangers. It's an over-the-counter medication, by the way. Loving mothers dispense it to their children.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I had a neighbor that happened to -- she turned yellow, as in jaundice, and by the time she got to the hospital the Tylenol had ripped a hole in her liver.

The Boys did a fine job selling Tylenol as a cure-all after its predecessor, acetanilide -- once the active ingredient in Bromo Seltzer -- was held responsible for any number of deaths in the Era. In the early thirties, Arthur Kallet and Frederick Schlink published an entire book full of indictments of fraudelently-marketed/dangerously promoted OTC drugs called "100,000,000 Guinea Pigs," which summed up how the pharmaceutical industry got away with using the public as its experimental animals. That book was the gunshot that started the consumers' rights movement -- which movement the Boys spent decades trying to discredit as "Communisitic." There are those who believe any restraints on the snake-oilers' ability to wring a buck from the public are a Sinister Attack On Our Sacred Freedom.

 

[tonyb]

What was the neighbor's outcome?

 

[LizzieMaine]

She survived, but she'll have liver problems for the rest of her life. She admitted that she had no idea that chain-popping Tylenol could hurt you -- she thought they were as safe as aspirin.

 

[tonyb]

Wishing her well, but fearing what her condition bodes. Livers aren't optional extras.

 

[Paisley]

Oh, so you don't feel the effects of the drug, then?

But you do? But you don't like it? You just drink for the flavor? Not more than a glass of wine? Any more than that you don't like?

Sounds like you don't mind being mildly intoxicated, because if you drink a glass of wine, you surely are.

From Merriam Webster: "Intoxicate: to excite or stupefy by alcohol or a drug especially to the point where physical and mental control is markedly diminished."

No, I don't drink to the point that I am excited, stupefied or out of control, i.e., intoxicated. And yes, I stand by what I said about enjoying a small amount of wine. Maybe that's unusual in your circle, but it's common for people enjoy a little wine or a cold beer or a cocktail without getting drunk. Again, it's different from recreational drug use, where the whole point is to get high.

I didn't say you advocated shooting up, but that you were lumping things together based on chemical properties instead of common use. But on that subject, for someone who doesn't advocate drug use, you've written an awful lot here suggesting the use of certain drugs (though I'm not clear on which ones) is harmless and doesn't cause any impairment.

 

[Paisley]

In old Germany there are so many chocolate-addicted females and men, too. Same problem, the evil stuff is much too cheap.

If heroin is still "white horse" and cocaine is "white pony", then chocolate is just "brown pony". Our mighty beet sugar-industry just got the masses, since some decades.

Robert Atkins wrote that some of his patients really were chocoholics in that one taste sent them on a binge. His advice: don't take the first bite.

 

[Paisley]

The Boys did a fine job selling Tylenol as a cure-all after its predecessor, acetanilide -- once the active ingredient in Bromo Seltzer -- was held responsible for any number of deaths in the Era. In the early thirties, Arthur Kallet and Frederick Schlink published an entire book full of indictments of fraudelently-marketed/dangerously promoted OTC drugs called "100,000,000 Guinea Pigs," which summed up how the pharmaceutical industry got away with using the public as its experimental animals. That book was the gunshot that started the consumers' rights movement -- which movement the Boys spent decades trying to discredit as "Communisitic." There are those who believe any restraints on the snake-oilers' ability to wring a buck from the public are a Sinister Attack On Our Sacred Freedom.

The snake oilers are still at it: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-damned-lies-and-medical-science/308269/

I had a neighbor whose medication made him paranoid, according to a friend who came by looking for him. I had to tell him his friend committed suicide. My mother's antibiotics made her kidneys fail (though she bounced back after dialysis). My three rounds of antibiotics for an infected tooth messed up my skin and stomach for months, and a decongestant gave me an allergic reaction. Another doctor prescribed me medication I never should have been on long-term due to risks of hip fracture and pneumonia. Even legitimate medication is not candy. Anymore, I stay away from doctors, pills and procedures as much as I can.