Letters to the Editor
Silenced
Published Letters: 1358 Editor's Choice: 75
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Oh gee, Freudian slip
[Read the article: More bad news for Rudy Giuliani]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I must think of Giuliani as someone with a lot of guile. That's probably why I keep spelling his name Guil-iani.
You have to have a lot of guile if you're cheating on a woman with half a brain, right? And his ex-wife has way more than half a brain.
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You know what I wish?
[Read the article: It's easy for soldiers to score heroin in Afghanistan]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I wish I could fax this article back to 1973.
If you want to know why, then look up my other posts on this subject, if they haven't been deleted, that is.
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Just to add my usual point by the way
[Read the article: It's easy for soldiers to score heroin in Afghanistan]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]For soldiers suffering from PTSD, the use of heroin and other illicit drugs is frequently a form of self-medication, and a way to keep their stress and trauma at bay.
I don't know of any research claiming that opiate receptors are involved in PTSD. If they were, then the symptoms of PTSD would likely be very different.
Animal experiments are showing that rodents bred without the gene that expresses the CB1 receptor protein show symptoms of chronic PTSD after very minor negative stimuli (so to speak).
It's highly likely that the active ingredients in cannabis are exactly the right medicine for treating PTSD, while opiates number among the many exactly wrong ones. The Israeli Army is helping to test this idea now.
Afghanistan has a native cannabis culture that goes back thousands of years and is mythologized in the form of a Sufi saint named Baba Ku, who gave ten Afghan tribes the secret of using hashish to cure the plague.
There wasn't enough opium for anyone to write about back before Daoud's coup in 1973. Daoud went on a major cannabis eradication binge, threw thousands of peasant farners in prison, and the DEA opened an office in Kabul.
Sure, Daoud and the DEA got rid of 90% of the cannabis in Afghanistan. But guess what the peasants planted instead?
Ever since 1973, the amount of opium being grown in Afghanistan has steadily risen.
I wonder if people back then would have made different decisions if they'd know how it was going to turn out today.
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By the way again
[Read the article: It's easy for soldiers to score heroin in Afghanistan]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The Bush administration recently announced very proudly that they now have a drug that can reverse a state of cannabis intoxication.
It's called Rimonabant. It's the exact same drug that scientists have used in animal PTSD studies. Giving a rodent Rimonabant causes it to be abnormally susceptible to PTSD, just just like the CB1-knockout rodents.
So the same drug that reverses a state of cannabis intoxication also makes rodents get PTSD.
Rimonabant was almost approved by the FDA as a diet drug, but the clinical trials showed that the side effects include suicidal depression and multiple slerosis.
So the same drug that reverses a state of cannabis intoxication can also apparently trigger a case of MS.
The Israeli Army is testing cannabis extracts for PTSD. Why doesn't the Bush administration feel the same level of curiousity?
Instead we get this very unscientific -- indeed, given the amount of science known now, one could even call it anti-scientific -- treatment where all illicit drugs are lumped together into some dark magic circle of inappropriate self-medication that the light of science can never, ever reach.
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I can tell you why some girls don't get diagnosed
[Read the article: Roundup: Autism in girls, "manny" mania and more]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Looking back on my life, I was a classic case. The kids at my school accused me of reading the encyclopedia for fun at night and they were right. I was fascinated by science and numbers and taught myself high school algebra in the fourth grade.
I never really had social skills and I didn't even really understand what they were.
But when I hit puberty, I sprouted boobs and thighs and my lips got bigger and suddenly I did not need any social skills because people just gave me theirs by projection alone because I was sexually attractive.
It was pretty much a disaster because I had no idea that this kind of attention was not really friendship at all.
To an outsider I am 100% sure I looked just like some typical dumb vacant high school bimbo.
But the truth was, I have a 136 IQ, I was borderline autistic, and my boobs were my only social skills.
Being shy and quiet is accepted as a normal feminine trait, which also contributes to the wrong impression people have about the frequency of autism spectrum disorders among girls.
Not that I'm religious but THANK GOD that someone is finally shedding some light on this topic.
Maybe we can make things easier for women studying physics now?
Maybe the male nerds like Larry Summers will stop telling the female nerds that female nerds don't really exist, for example?
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Wow what is it with you guys these days?
[Read the article: It's always cocktail hour somewhere]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Heroin, crystal meth and now hard core booze?
Meanwhile you've made cannabis completely disappear, to the extent that we can't even use Salon to find out how Congress just voted on medical marijuana, an actual real current event in the news.
You alcohol users just baffle the hell out of me.
Well, you scare the hell out of me too, but that's only because I was raised by two of your kind.
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Are conservatives allowed to whine and play victim these days?
[Read the article: Robert Novak's very sad story]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I thought conservatism was all about taking personal responsibility for whatever misfortune falls your way.
That's what they tell the poor, right? That's what they tell black people and brown people and women and gays and even sometimes people with cancer.
According to normal traditional conservative philosophy, right now he's supposed to be asking God why he deserved this comeuppance and what he can do to atone and bring this punishment to an end.
Right? Isn't that the way conservatism is supposed to work? Aren't those the traditional values that conservatives are supposed to honor and uphold?
I'm a liberal but seeing powerful conservatives act this way is downright creepy. It's like a sign of the Apocalypse or something.