Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 76

Weed: A Gateway Out Of Addiction?

An animated take on addiction:

Tony O’Neill suggests “the once-taboo idea of using marijuana as a tool for people who want to stop using more dangerous drugs is catching on”:

This Substance.com article by Philippe Lucas of the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) sets out some of the evidence for this “substitution effect;” more research is ongoing. While it’s true that some people can get addicted to marijuana—as with any pleasurable drug or experience, like sex or shopping—the reduced harms here compared with an addiction to alcohol, say, or painkillers are obvious. Most of us who use marijuana in this way don’t get addicted. …

“Certainly, I have clients who use it in this way,” says Dr. Adi Jaffe when I ask for his professional opinion on the pros and cons of using marijuana as a tool to wean off other drugs. Jaffe is a UCLA-trained addiction expert, the man behind All About Addiction and a regular contributor to Psychology Today. He draws from his personal experiences with meth addiction when working with his clients at Alternatives Addiction Treatment in Los Angeles. “When you think about it, this is classic harm reduction methodology,” he continues, “replacing a more harmful and dangerous drug with a lesser one to improve coping while reducing consequences. Harm reduction literature in general supports this idea as a positive step in recovery. If someone struggles with anxiety, they need something to help with it, whether that be neurofeedback, talk therapy or weed.”

Meanwhile, Joe Berkowitz describes how “Nuggets,” the above short film, “succinctly captures the heartbreaking reality of addiction”:

Created by German animation studio, the video begins with an adorable kiwi bird casually strolling along before stumbling upon a golden nugget. The bird’s interest is piqued and so he ingests the liquid inside. It’s instant euphoria, and with it, the kiwi can suddenly fly for a short while. As anyone who’s ever had any golden nuggets of their own can attest, what happens after he finds the next one is not the same. It doesn’t last as long, and the landing is more of crash. Nevertheless, now the bird is no longer casually strolling, but running to get the next hit—with ever-diminishing returns. … [The film] puts into perspective the plight of the addicted person, inviting viewers to feel empathy for them instead of contempt.

A Short Story For Saturday

This weekend’s short story, Virginia Woolf’s “The Legacy,” begins with a hunch that all might not be what it seems:

“For Sissy Miller.” Gilbert Clandon, taking up the pearl brooch that lay among a litter of rings and brooches on a little table in his wife’s drawing-room, read the inscription: “For Sissy Miller, with my love.”

It was like Angela to have remembered even Sissy Miller, her secretary. Yet how strange it was, Gilbert Clandon thought once more, that she had left everything in such order — a little gift of some sort for every one of her friends. It was as if she had foreseen her death. Yet she had been in perfect health when she left the house that morning, six weeks ago; when she stepped off the curb in Piccadilly and the car had killed her.

Read the rest here. For more, check out The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf. Peruse previous SSFSs here.

Kaufman’s Comedic Genius

Matt Besser, co-founder of the Upright Citizens Brigade, chats with Megh Wright about the enduring appeal of cult comedian Andy Kaufman:

[H]e wants to alienate, he wants to fool as many people as possible, and he does the same kind of thing in that Letterman clip [above], which is at one point he says “I don’t know why you’re laughing.” I’m paraphrasing, but he pretty much says “I don’t know why you’re laughing because what I’m saying is serious,” and you can hear the laughter drop out and nervous and uncomfortable tittering, and he does it on both the Letterman clip and that Fridays clip of trying to go into this personal story and it’s all bullshit. I think he talks about his wife in both of them and he doesn’t even have a wife. He’s talking about getting a wife and getting a divorce and on the Letterman bit he’s pretending to be sick, he comes out and he just wants people to believe it, and to me that’s such a weird specific kind of comedy, and part of why you should enjoy this is knowing that other people are not enjoying this.

Besser and Wright further discuss what makes the above Letterman clip so outstanding:

MW: There’s sort of an inverse reaction going on between what the audience laughs at — Kaufman just sitting there awkwardly — and what they don’t laugh at, which is the whole made-up story about his recent divorce and everything. Usually with bits like that there’s a buildup to a big laugh, but it seems more like the opposite with him.

MB: It’s great. My favorite moment maybe out of all these clips is the one where, I think it’s the Letterman one, but it’s the one where he’s talking about getting a divorce and then he turns to the audience and goes “I don’t know where you guys are coming from,” and he’s incredulous like “What’s wrong with you people? I’m telling you about my divorce and you’re laughing at me?” It goes against every comic instinct to tell an audience to stop laughing, and that’s just fucking hilarious.

In an earlier post, Josh Jones also praised Kaufman’s Letterman appearances:

Kaufman sends Letterman into a fit of stammering “uh, oh… ums” and the audience into fits of laughter by looking like he’s just stumbled in from a psych ward and isn’t sure exactly where he is or why. When he finally opens his mouth to speak, at nearly two minutes into the interview, he seems lost, dazed, almost childlike. Which everyone thinks is hilarious, because, well, it’s Andy Kaufman. It must be performance art, right? No matter which Andy Kaufman appeared before an audience, they always had the sense there was another one, or several, underneath, whether they knew his act or not. But you could never know if you’d hit bedrock. …

One might say Andy Kaufman invented trolling, the art of riling people up by impersonating idiots, crazies, and abrasive jerks. And he got away with it for one simple reason; he was authentic—all of his characters had some kind of endearing vulnerability, even at their most deranged.

Mental Health Break

Tour a Tahitian graffiti festival:

Medical-Grade Merde, Ctd

Emily Eakin covers the increasing popularity of fecal transplants. The logic behind them:

It’s possible that no Americans have gut microbiomes that are truly healthy. Evidence is mounting that over the course of human history the diversity of our microbes has diminished, and, in a recent paper, Erica and Justin Sonnenburg, microbiologists at Stanford, argue that the price of microbial-species loss may be an increase in chronic illness. Unlike our genes, which have remained relatively stable, our microbiome has undergone radical changes in response to shifts in our diet, our antibiotic use, and our increasingly sterile living environments, raising the possibility that “incompatibilities between the two could rapidly arise.”

In particular, the Sonnenburgs stress the adverse effects of a standard Western diet, which is notoriously light on the plant fibre that serves as fuel for gut microbes. Less fuel means fewer types of microbes and fewer of the chemical by-products that microbes produce as they ferment our food. Research in mice suggests that those by-products help reduce inflammation and regulate the immune system. Noting that rates of so-called Western diseases—including heart disease and autoimmune disorders, all of which involve inflammation—are thought to be much lower in traditional societies, the Sonnenburgs write, “It is possible that the Western microbiota is actually dysbiotic and predisposes individuals to a variety of diseases.”

Currently, OpenBiome, “a nonprofit stool bank founded last year by graduate students at M.I.T., ships more than fifty specimens each week to hospitals in thirty-six states.” But that might not last:

In the past year, orders for OpenBiome’s stool have increased at a rate of about eighteen per cent a month. Its success has unnerved biotech companies that are developing stool-based enemas and capsules—or, as they’re known in the field, “crapsules”—for eventual sale on the commercial market. “OpenBiome is selling an unapproved drug without any kind of F.D.A. clearance, so in my opinion they’re breaking the law,” Lee Jones, the C.E.O. of Rebiotix, a company in Minnesota that is developing an enema for the treatment of C. difficile, told me. “They may parade as a nonprofit, but what they’re doing is selling a product to be used on patients.”

When, in a year or two, Rebiotix submits its enema to the F.D.A. for approval, it will have spent tens of millions of dollars on research and trials—costs that are typically factored into a drug’s retail price. OpenBiome charges two hundred and fifty dollars for a treatment, which just covers its costs. “This is a highly unusual situation,” Peter Safir, the lawyer, said. “There’s no question that in the United States we want our drugs approved. We want the F.D.A. to say a product is safe, effective, and is manufactured according to good practices, and that costs a lot of money. But here you’ve got an almost identical competitor that is virtually giving it away, without F.D.A. approval.” Once a company like Rebiotix obtains approval to sell its stool therapy, he went on, it could pressure the F.D.A. to shut down OpenBiome.

Previous Dish on fecal transplants here.

Sea Creature Of The Day

Meet the Black Seadevil, an elusive anglerfish recently captured on film for the first time:

If the anglerfish’s toothy jaw and dead-eyed stare creep you out, take some comfort in the fact that this female fish is just three and a half inches long. Its dainty size, plus its preferences for the dark deep-sea, helps explain why sightings are so rare. “This is the first time we’ve captured this fish on video in its habitat,” says senior scientist Bruce Robison of the Monteray Bay Aquarium Research Institute in a statement. “Anglerfish, like this Melanocetus, are among the most rarely seen of all deep-sea fishes.”

There are more than 200 species of anglerfish, and while some can grow longer than three feet, most are less than a foot, reports National Geographic. The females of all species, however, carry a fishing-pole-like spine topped with a glowing “lure” made of flesh. This feature earns the fish its name, as it uses the lure to attract prey close enough to be snatched up its toothsome jaw.

Erin McCarthy offers a clarification about the sometimes brutal sex lives of anglerfish:

You may have heard how some anglerfish reproduce via the males fusing their bodies to the females’ until they essentially become one; the male loses his eyes, fins, teeth, and some internal organs and, from that point forward, lives off of the female, providing sperm when she’s ready to spawn. Those fish “are members of the suborder Ceratioidei, [or] deep sea anglerfishes, in which some species are known to reproduce by that means,” [American Museum of Natural History curator John] Sparks says. Still, that’s not the norm for those fish—scientists have so far only found parasitic males in 5 of 11 ceratioid families, according to Sparks—and it’s probably not what happens when humpback anglerfish mate, either. “That has not been found—yet—in this species,” Sparks says. “In the family this species belongs to, only loosely attached, non-parasitic, males have been found on females—they still retain their teeth, etc.”

Browse a gallery of other odd-looking anglerfish here.

Stay Weird, Internet

Alexis Madrigal thinks niche social networks can survive the age of Facebook:

Social networking is not, it turns out, winner take all. In the past, one might have imagined that switching between Facebook and “some other network” would be difficult, but the smartphone interface makes it easy to be on a dozen networks. All messages come to the same place—the phone’s notifications screen—so what matters is what your friends are doing, not which apps they’re using. Take a look at the rise of apps that exploit the desire for anonymity, ephemerality, and the unknown—roughly the opposite of Facebook’s founding desire to connect real people (under their real names) on the Internet. … “I think we’re shifting in a weird way to one-on-one conversations on social networks and in messaging apps,” says Shani Hilton, the executive editor for news at BuzzFeed, the viral-media site. “People don’t want to perform their lives publicly in the same way that they wanted to five years ago.”

Taken together, these trends pose a direct challenge to Facebook’s supremacy. After all, Facebook is built around a trade-off that it has asked users to make: Give us all your personal information, post all your pictures, tag all your friends, and so on, forever. In return, we’ll optimize your social life. But this output is only as good as the input. And it turns out that, when scaled up, creating this input—making yourself legible enough to the Facebook machine that your posts are deemed “relevant” and worthy of being displayed to your mom and your friends—is exhausting labor. These new apps, then, are arguments that we can still have an Internet that is weird, and private. That we can still have social networks without the social network.

“Elvis Presley With A Social Conscience”

Ryan L. Cole reflects on the persona that led Bruce Springsteen to fame and fortune:

His 1973 debut album, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., and its follow-ups, The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle (also 1973), and Born to Run (1975), featured songs about Jersey boardwalks, open roads, slamming screen doors, and other assorted bits of romanticized American life, written with a verbosity that would make Bob Dylan tip a leopard-skin pillbox hat … . But around the time of his fourth LP, Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978) … the songs increasingly turned to blue-collar angst, and the singer was progressively positioned as the culmination of rock ’n’ roll: Elvis Presley with a social conscience.

Springsteen embraced the imagery, iconography, and gestures of the genre. He threw on a leather jacket, sculpted his sideburns, and posed broodingly in Corvettes and Cadillacs. Then he name-checked John Steinbeck and Flannery O’Connor, sang of American decay and inequality, and rebuffed Ronald Reagan, whose reelection campaign had the nerve to assume that “Born in the USA”—a gloomy song about a homeless Vietnam veteran dolled up with a misleadingly anthemic chorus and sold with imagery of Springsteen draped in Old Glory—was actually a statement of patriotism. Which is not to say that Springsteen isn’t a patriot. It’s just that he articulates progressivism’s brand of national pride: America is noble in theory, nightmarish in reality; cool around the edges, but rotten to the core.

Previous Dish on Springsteen here.

The End Is High

Tom Angell points out an international agricultural effort to preserve weed after the apocalypse:

By preserving genetic material in an insulated, underground facility, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault hopes to guard against the permanent loss of plants that humanity relies on for food and medicine. According to a Marijuana.com analysis of Svalbard’s database, there are 21,500 cannabis seeds being held for safekeeping in the vault. That’s more weed seeds than there are asparagus, blueberry or raspberry seeds stored at the facility. There are more marijuana genetics in the “Doomsday Seed Vault” than there are for artichoke, cranberry and pear combined. …

The vault’s location, about 800 miles from the North Pole, was selected because of its permafrost and lack of tectonic activity. That means the seeds will stay cold even in the event of a power failure, and the bunker they’re contained in is unlikely to be cracked open by an earthquake or volcanic eruption. And, because it’s located 430 feet above sea level, the facility will stay dry even if global climate change causes the ice caps to melt.

And You Thought They Just Used Soy Sauce …

Fascinating history!>China Scrapping Its 2,700-Year Old State #Salt Monopoly http://t.co/tjfZP96IkS ht @EatingAsia pic.twitter.com/JOKy7Kzkwn

— Sonny Lê (@sonnylebythebay) November 24, 2014

Keating flags some odd news out of China, which is planning to do away with its 2,600-year-old state monopoly on table salt:

The salt monopoly began during in the Qi state on the Shandong peninsula around the seventh century BC and may have been the first ever state-controlled monopoly. During the third century BC, the Chinese imperial state sold salt at a markup, effectively levying a tax used to pay troops and, perhaps, the early stages of the Great Wall of China.

Several centuries, dynasties, and revolutions later, the world’s oldest monopoly is still in place. Under the policy’s current incarnation, the China National Salt Industry Corp. designates who is authorized to produce salt and is the only entity allowed to sell it to consumers. These consumers often pay three to four times more than what the CNSIC does. The new plan will liberalize the industry and scrap price controls starting in 2016.

Some Chinese netizens, Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian observes, are concerned that opening the salt market will just lead to more food safety scandals:

“There will soon be frequent cases of industrial salt” — far cheaper than table salt — “being mixed with edible salt,” went one popular comment on Weibo, China’s huge, Twitter-like microblogging platform. Another userwrote, “Soon the media will be putting out articles called ‘How to tell industrial salt from table salt.'” The topic seemed to resonate; “salt monopoly abolished” became a top-trending hashtag on Weibo, and one related post on CCTV’s official Weibo account quickly garnered over 1,300 comments. One user commented cynically, “I’ve eaten all kinds of fake products; now I will finally have the opportunity to eat fake salt!”

But Austin Ramzy notes that ending the monopoly might actually help fix this problem:

Some scholars have argued that the state monopoly system actually contributed to the phenomenon of tainted salt, and that overhauling the system while enforcing food quality laws should help improve safety. In a 2010 paper, Sun Jin, Fan Zhou and Qin Li of Wuhan University noted that the monopoly meant that the price consumers paid for salt was three to four times higher than the price the China National Salt Industry Corporation paid for salt from authorized producers.

While the average consumer does not feel the price difference because salt makes up such a small portion of a typical grocery bill, the markup supports a vast and pernicious underground market, the authors wrote. Such salt often does not contain iodine and can have harmful impurities, they noted.