Year: 2013

Fighting PTSD With Pot

Phillip Smith points out how difficult it is for veterans to get medical marijuana:

Despite mounting evidence that medical marijuana can help with PTSD, only a handful of medical marijuana states have approved its use. According to Americans for Safe Access, only California, Connecticut, Delaware, New Mexico and Massachusetts would allow for its use for PTSD, and as we have seen above, it’s still up in the air in the Bay State. … In states that do have medical marijuana laws, but don’t allow it to be used for PTSD, they are criminals, too — unless they hide what they’re actually using it for.

Noting that a major roadblock to approval is the lack of research showing the efficacy of cannabis in treating the condition, Smith fumes:

PTSD sufferers are not waiting for peer-reviewed, clinically-controlled studies to tell them what works. PTSD is a real and growing problem, and medical marijuana appears to do some good. The scientific studies that would satisfy legislators and state review boards need to be done, and that is happening, albeit too slowly, but in the mean time, people are suffering because the government they served at risk to life and limb is now obstructing the research that would legitimize their treatment.

Watergate’s Home Movies

Paul Myers spotlights Our Nixon, a documentary composed of Super 8 footage shot by H.R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman and Dwight Chapin, three top Nixon aides who were convicted in the cover-up:

Super 8 was the iPhone camera of the day, so it’s not difficult to see these reels as sort of extended Vines from inside what was arguably the most secretive presidency ever. They also raise questions of privacy and presidential transparency that are as relevant in our post-Wikileaks times as they were in the Daniel Ellsberg era depicted here. “These guys were the original over-sharers,” says [filmmaker] Penny Lane, “And of course, there’s an irony to that, because that’s ultimately why they all had to resign and go to prison. But over-sharing is a completely natural impulse when you’re part of this really cool thing [the White House], so they wanted to document it and show people what it was like.”

That kind of over-sharing is definitely over:

After Nixon, Congress and the private lawyers of subsequent administrations debated the nature of public and private ownership of such materials. That climate has created an air of self-consciousness affecting everything from White House emails to Barack Obama’s personal Blackberry, taken from him on his first day as president.

“Prior to the Nixon Presidency,” says [co-filmmaker Brian L.] Frye, “the standard practice had been to assume that any papers or materials produced by the president or any member of the president’s staff in the White House were treated as the personal property of that president. That changed after Watergate. Now, as you can imagine, knowing that the materials will eventually go into the public record alters what they do and don’t record and or choose to preserve.”

Why Has Homelessness Declined?

Frum passes along some good news:

The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development reported that the number of the chronically homeless declined by 30% between 2005 and 2007. You might have expected the numbers to spike again when the financial crisis hit but no. Since 2007, the number of chronic homeless has dropped another 19%.

He gives Bush’s “housing first” program credit:

In 2002, Bush appointed a new national homeless policy czar, Philip Mangano. A former music agent imbued with the religious philosophy of St. Francis of Assisi, Mangano was seized by an idea pioneered by New York University psychiatrist Sam Tsemberis: “housing first.” The “housing first” concept urges authorities to concentrate resources on the hardest cases — to move them into housing immediately — and only to worry about the other problems of the homeless after they first have a roof over their heads. A 2004 profile in The Atlantic nicely summarized Tsemberis’ ideas: “Offer them (the homeless) the apartment first, he believes, and you don’t need to spend years, and service dollars, winning their trust.” …

“Housing first” worked. It worked from the start, and it worked fast. It worked so well that the Obama administration has now claimed the approach as its own…

Fact-Checking The Führer

Thomas Weber shoots down oft-repeated myths about Hitler, including the claim that he actually was Jewish:

The idea that the nemesis of the Jews of Europe was, according the logic of his own Nuremberg laws, a ‘quarter-Jew’ himself dates back to the attempt of some of his opponents to prevent Hitler from coming to power. As Hitler’s father was born out of wedlock, the claim was that Hitler had been fathered by the head of the Jewish household for which Hitler’s grandmother Maria Anna had worked for a while.

If the results of the unethical DNA testing of Hitler’s Austrian and American relatives, carried out a few years ago by the Belgian journalist Jean-Paul Mulders, are to be trusted, we now finally know for certain that the step-father of Hitler’s father was indeed his biological father and therefore Hitler did not have a Jewish grand-father. Yet what may be more important than the question of whether objectively speaking Hitler had a Jewish grandfather is what Hitler himself thought of the matter. It is likely Hitler feared being the grandson of a Jew, as he seems to have commissioned Hans Frank, his chief jurist, to look into the claim that he had Jewish ancestry in 1930.

Quote For The Day

“We are really balanced here on a little precipice, and if this, pardon the pun, goes south, we could be in very serious trouble. If [Immigration Reform] stalls or is killed off by conservatives, we could take the Hispanic community and turn them into the African-American community, where we get 4% on a good day… We could be a lost party for generations,” – Republican media strategist Paul Wilson.

Mental Health Break

Brian Abrams captions:

The last time we saw Cookie Monster cover Tom Waits was almost two years ago with his rendition of “God’s Away on Business” from the blues legend’s 2002 LP “Blood Money.” Now, the guttural “Sesame Street” regular returns, courtesy of YouTube’s cookiewaits channel, with a not-so-PBS-friendly take on Waits’ anti-war jam “Hell Broke Luce.” CM nails it.

The Prejudicial Instinct

Tom Stafford revisits the work of psychologist Henri Tajfel, who devised an experiment to see “what it took to turn the average fair-minded human into their prejudiced cousin.” He arbitrarily divided subjects into groups, maybe by “eye-colour, maybe what kind of paintings they like, or even by tossing a coin”:

Every participant knows which group he or she is in, but they also know that they weren’t in this group before they started the experiment, that their assignment was arbitrary or completely random, and that the groups aren’t going to exist in any meaningful way after the experiment. They also know that their choices won’t directly affect them (they are explicitly told that they won’t be given any choices to make about themselves). Even so, this situation is enough to evoke favouritism.

So, it seems we’ll take the most minimal of signs as a cue to treat people differently according to which group they are in. Tajfel’s work suggests that in-group bias is as fundamental to thinking as the act of categorisations itself. If we want to contribute to a fairer world we need to be perpetually on guard to avoid letting this instinct run away with itself.

And not engage in quixotic, legal attempts to coerce it away.

The Temporary Megacity

RELIGION-HINDU-KUMBH

No, not Burning Man. Kevin Hartnett investigates the holy celebration of Kumbh Mela, “considered the largest migration of humanity on earth”:

It takes place every twelve years at the confluence of the Ganges and Yamuna Rivers, where pilgrims come from all over India to participate in ritual bathing (there are also smaller melas, which take place annually in other parts of India). The scale of the event is staggering. The mela has a steady population of a few million people spread over seven-and-a-half square miles of precisely organized encampment, but on a handful of main bathing days officials estimate the population surges towards 30 million—with as many as 80 million people attending over the 53 days of the festival.

One of the most important qualities of the mela, for researchers, is the speed at which it comes together. The festival site is covered for most of the summer with water from the Ganges, which is swollen by the monsoon rains. The water begins to recede in October, leaving government officials and NGO workers with only a couple of months to build the mela’s infrastructure—the roads, electrical grid, water, sanitation, and hygiene systems that will support those millions of people. During its peak days the mela is the largest city in the world, and it’s built nearly overnight.

Researchers collected data on this year’s mela:

Over the next few months the researchers will be tagging and sorting images, analyzing patient flows at hospitals, breaking down cellphone data, and generally trying to wrestle their mela research into something useful—both for improving the next mela, in 2025, and for understanding how temporary settlements operate anywhere in the world. They plan to release preliminary findings at a seminar hosted by the South Asia Institute in August.

(Photo: Temporary tents for devotees are pictured at dusk at Sangam, the confluence of the Rivers Ganges, Yamuna and mythical Saraswati, during the Maha Kumbh Mela in Allahabad on February 13, 2013. By Sanjay Kanojia/AFP/Getty Images)