What to write about today? Pitt and Jolie? Naw, though I found it interesting that their bodyguard appears to be a lot older and shorter than the poor photographer that he manhandled. Google's purchase of Youtube? I couldn't care less. North Korea's nuke test? I care about that, though I struggle with why the U.S. has any right to tell a country what they can and can't do, technology-wise. I understand why it's necessary, but I struggle with the justice, and if the justice isn't there, I have troubles with it. I'm kind of a mystic in that regard: something might make perfect sense, but if it defies justice, I think it'll fail.
So, all other things failing, I bring you this. It really has nothing to do with what I typically write about, but I found it fascinating:
A new paper in the journal Social History of Medicine explores attempts by Canadian researchers, beginning in the 1950s, to wean drinkers off the bottle by giving them acid instead. Having noticed that bad acid trips resembled delirium tremens (the DTs), the sometimes-fatal shakes and nausea that accompany severe alcohol withdrawal, the researchers theorized that LSD could speed recovery by simulating the DTs without killing the patients. Of 700 alcoholics given large hits of acid, about half stayed sober for the next six months. The study won government support and endorsement from Alcoholics Anonymous, but opponents of the “psychedelic investigators” attacked their methodology and conducted a more controlled experiment, which involved feeding alcoholics LSD, blindfolding them, tying them up, and refusing to speak to them until after they had come down from the high. (These subjects responded less well.) The debate ended, unresolved, in the late 1960s, as the rise of the counterculture brought LSD into medical disrepute, and feeding alcoholics acid to see what happened ceased to be an acceptable research plan.
