I've heard the theory that the brain can only produce so many neurotransmitters in its lifetime (pleasurable chemicals), but I was referring to the fact the receptors themselves become incapable of reacting to the chemical regardless of how much is present.
I really wish a neuroscientist would chime in her. I'm just working off experiences I've had with some addicts and information related to me through different channels.
Would be nice to get some confirmation either way.
In any case, I would like to reiterate again, that this must be election by the patient with informed consent. If China is using this as a form of punishment to prevent recidivism, then that is a gross violation of human rights.
Being of the type of person who leans more towards 'free will' in this type of discussion
Please don't misunderstand me. At no point was I suggesting this be a forced procedure. It must be the choice of the addict to undergo the procedure with informed consent.
If crimes are committed to support the drug habit, then either prosecute those crimes with appropriate punishments (excluding this procedure), or offer assistance to the addict, which at some point, may include a serious discussion about the procedure itself.
Well, in this case, the patient is just doing it to themselves depending on the situation.
What I understand about meth and brain chemistry is that over time a meth addict is saturating the pleasure center of their brain. The structures that pick up the neurotransmitters actually become damaged or less effective over time.
This is why a lot of meth addicts will say the only way they can feel happiness is with the drug. Recovered meth addicts often complain that they have very serious issues feeling happy anymore.
How long that takes to heal, I dunno.
The end result of disabling the pleasure center may be inevitable. At least doing it in the beginning may be a way to get them stop completely and literally save their lives and increase the overall quality from a health standpoint alone. They may become emotionless, but can still live otherwise.
Just my two cents. I'm not a doctor. Just know some very unfortunate recovered drug addicts that have more in common with Vulcans now than humans.
What the fuck I want to know is why my Internet provider, my natural gas supplier, my power company, etc. needs my fucking SSN for "security" purposes?
My job? I get it. That's for tax reporting purposes. My bank? It's so the government can audit me and they can report as well.
The power company? Whey the fuck do you need my entire social?
It's not for security purposes. It's to have a single UID for the 3 credit reporting agencies that collect more information on US citizens than most companies combined. In fact, a lot of that information is for sale.
It's not the SSN being disclosed that is the problem at all. It's the fact that it is used to aggregate information that should be no one's fucking business in the first place.
If the SSN did not exist, it would just be your driver's license number instead.
This is outright illegal in my country. Don't you Americans have any basic right to privacy?
Welll..... what we fought so hard for, and so many of us have died for, was the idea of freedom. That includes privacy and anonymity. It was not more than a hundred years ago or so that people had real privacy and became pretty upset when somebody violated it. Was considered very rude and improper.
I would say that we have a deep tradition of privacy, that it's a basic human right, and that our Constitution supports it.
However, our current government has clearly said, "fuck all that liberty shit". Whatever information we can get, in any way we can get it, we are going to do in the name of either profit or national security. Pick an excuse.
That's interesting, but it's important to note that bipolar episodes are characterized by depression and mania. Delusions and hallucinations are not part of being bipolar.
Mushroom usage however, is most certainly characterized by hallucinations, and I have not direct experience with it at all. I'm not really sure if delusional behavior is part of it, but if it was, I would assume it to be far more dangerous than indicated.
Brain chemistry is different for everyone. My only real point is that delusions and hallucinations are quite serious and noticeable. We would've come to this conclusion decades ago.
In fact, now talking to you, it reminds me of those ridiculous public service movie shorts like Reefer Madness.
We have six decades and literally billions of instances of pot usage. That's a huge sample pool, in which the effects, would have been noticed if they are as prominent as psychosis. If pot turned 1/1,000,000 people's eyes glowing purple, we would have seen it by now. Sounds like hyperbole, but consider the rest of my statement.
Remember, psychosis is delusions and hallucinations. I've never hallucinated on pot, or had delusions either. I'm not anywhere near a heavy smoker. My usage is less than a 100 times in 30 years. It's been a once in a while thing, mostly on vacations. My experience has led me to conclude it is far less dangerous than pharma drugs, and far far far far less detrimental than Tequila.
This study is talking about delusions and hallucinations as risk factors for pot usage, after pot usage has ceased. Common sense will tell you that is bullshit. Delusions are defined as believing situations are real when they are not, or believing you are somebody else, or that other people are somebody else. I've never experienced that, or heard of that, due to pot usage. Ever.
To use your example of smoking, you see people develop smoker's cough right? There are many clearly evident signs of heavy smoking usage that you don't need to be medically trained to see, or even feel.
In the last 6 decades have you seen or heard of people walking around with delusional behavior seeing and hearing things that are not there, and that it has been directly traced back to weed usage?
Me either. I've known quite a number of very respectable people, some much older now, that exhibit no signs of psychosis at all.
So my original point stands. We don't need a study to know that these conclusions are complete bullshit because the conclusions themselves would be clearly evident worldwide without training at all.
Perhaps you're right though. There may be long term side effects of regular pot usage. Still, we have senior citizens that been using pot for decades and no medical studies indicating any kind of increased risk factors for major disease that I am aware of.
Delusions and hallucinations, occurring after pot usage has ceased though, are complete bullshit even to the untrained observer.
Funny, but I was extremely careful and only took the recommended dosage at the times prescribed. I'm one of those people that reads the literature accompanying prescriptions and researches contraindications and side effects.
What do you call it when the wind, which some people refer to as an Act Of God, and other such legal mumbo jumbo, are held accountable for it?
They've created a product that migrates on its own, trespasses other people's properties, infects their crops, and then allows a huge corporation with an unfair financial advantage to litigate small farmers to death. All in order to spread their product, which harms biodiversity in the name of huge profits.
I call that terrorism.
What if I created, and patented a DVD feature. This feature somehow spreads through the electrical system, which your DVD cannot operate without, and no reasonably economically viable method exists to filter my feature from the power supply.
How would you feel when my lawyers come by and tell you that you need to pay me $1.99 every time you watch a DVD?
Yeah, I would say terrorism is an apt description and their legal premise is shocking and only serves to illuminate the corruption of the legal system.
Monsanto (which deserves to die horribly) makes it money through legal terrorism, and intellectual property that is difficult to reproduce.
Pharma drugs as well require strict protocols and experienced factories to produce their products, and are not easily knocked off. Sure as heck, not done so without consequences, sometimes lethal.
Weed?
I could grow the plant on my porch and possibly have a higher quality product than what would be available at the pharmacy down the street. Unlike bootleggers, it's a lot easier to hide the fact you are growing marijuana when it becomes legal and the smell itself is not a dead giveaway.
There might be coffee shops that specialize in different "flavors" and famous producers known for quality or attributes. However, it would still remain a product that you could produce at home in enough quantity to satisfy personal needs.
I have direct experience. As a teenager I was prescribed a drug ostensibly for one reason, but it was listed as treating severe anxiety.
After just 48 hours I had a missing day. My friends say that I want basically "insane" and acted like a manic 6 year old. No violence, no aggression, no hostility. Just super goofy and hyper wanting to do everything. Flushed the pills down the toilet.
That guy that shot up the TDK theater, was on psychiatric drugs, as well as the Newton kid.
You cannot overstate that enough. The SHIT is on the side of the boxes people.
I've tried weed several times, and on some vacations, was high morning, noon, and night, for several days. I experienced no delusions or hallucinations. Just the munchies. I did not feel like jumping off a bridge, or doing some crazy shit like you've seen in the Hangover or some teenage craziness movie.
Granted it may be anecdotal evidence, but at my age, just about every weird moment and adult has explained to me did not come from recreational drugs but pharma drugs or severe overuse of alcohol.
The only people more in the closet than homosexuals, are pot smokers. Scientists, judges, cops, doctors, lawyers, dentists, business executives, etc. smoke pot.
Given the sheer amount of pot usage since the 60's I have to reasonably conclude this research is faulty. Otherwise, we would be seeing far more instances of psychosis directly related.
It is medically defined as:
Psychosis is a loss of contact with reality that usually includes:
False beliefs about what is taking place or who one is (delusions)
Seeing or hearing things that aren't there (hallucinations)
I would assume the researchers are not talking about behavior while under the influence, but effects that last long after usage has terminated. Delusions and hallucinations are quite prominent and not easy to hide. Not as easy to hide, as say, an functioning alcoholic. Which, by the way, alcohol is listed as a cause and risk factor for psychosis as well, and DTs are because of withdrawal.
It's not difficult at all for me to change my views regarding "weed". As long as it is presented with proper science, and not conclusions that are refuted with such ridiculous ease with only common sense and experience in the last six decades.
Netflix was down for over 24hrs due to a nationwide failure in the Amazon EC2 infrastructure. It came back up slowly in different places, but my area was dead last. Netflix even had their help page 404'd because of how many people were calling in.
Wasn't Netflix the one who came out with the platform to stress test your cloud infrastructure? ChaosMonkey? All that testing and disaster readiness did not seem to help all that much. Hard to make a difference when Amazon is down nationwide.
I might chalk it up to a one-off, but this is not the first time that regionally distributed cloud systems have failed with Amazon.
For a company charging that much money for cloud services that are supposed to be that reliable, meaning serious uptime and redundancy, especially when you are handing over serious cash for regional redundancy, this stuff is just plain embarrassing and not a good selling point.
I can't even begin to imagine the fallout for Netflix, which admittedly could be smoothed over by some credits and a letter.
However, in a serious business like insurance (GEICO, Progressive), finance, 12 hours of downtime during the day can mean millions of dollars in losses.
I seriously have to question if the savings of a cloud infrastructure are worth it when millions of dollars are on the line. It's not like you can't run your own "cloud" in a couple of data centers with open source stuff.
As far as those savings go, Amazon does not give you huge savings vs running it yourself. Not really.
Send semen filled cookies to a bunch of soldiers deployed in Afghanistan. No chance at all of them being impossibly pissed off, statistically one of them being mentally unbalanced due to the stress of war, and no chance at all of them being angry enough to seek revenge.
All of them stateside at some point, with expensive military training, access to weapons, and a reason to come find you and beat the living shit out of you.
Not to mention, as a whole, soliders seem to be the most homophobic. Personal opinion, I might be wrong.
Ohhhh, and soliders tend to have solider friends. Some of them might be stateside already.
Hehehe Hhehehe Heheheh........
Yes. Sleep soundly. Nothing to worry about at all.
Or you could, you know, not do anything with the system that would give the feds a reason to be banging on your door.
More, and more, just living free and being vocal about others living free, and god forbid, helping others living free, is more than enough reason to have the feds banging down your door .
Let's not forgot that moron FBI guy that took out hundreds of companies in a data center because he could not understand how hundreds of different companies and legal entities could cohabitate in the same space.
At this point just being innocent and never doing anything wrong is not protection enough to be raided by the feds.
If Windows notifies programs about suspends/shutdowns (not sure it really does), TrueCrypt needs to dismount immediately and do whatever it needs to do to protect its key.
I run Windows 7 Pro 64-bit for some dev work, and annoyingly, it forces some windows updates on occasions. When it resumes, all the TrueCrypt volumes are dismounted, and whatever programs that were running and accessing the data complain about the loss of the drive.
Whether or not TC is protecting the key in memory, destroying it, whatever, I don't actually know.
Slashdot Mirror
I've heard the theory that the brain can only produce so many neurotransmitters in its lifetime (pleasurable chemicals), but I was referring to the fact the receptors themselves become incapable of reacting to the chemical regardless of how much is present.
I really wish a neuroscientist would chime in her. I'm just working off experiences I've had with some addicts and information related to me through different channels.
Would be nice to get some confirmation either way.
In any case, I would like to reiterate again, that this must be election by the patient with informed consent. If China is using this as a form of punishment to prevent recidivism, then that is a gross violation of human rights.
Being of the type of person who leans more towards 'free will' in this type of discussion
Please don't misunderstand me. At no point was I suggesting this be a forced procedure. It must be the choice of the addict to undergo the procedure with informed consent.
If crimes are committed to support the drug habit, then either prosecute those crimes with appropriate punishments (excluding this procedure), or offer assistance to the addict, which at some point, may include a serious discussion about the procedure itself.
Then as a patient it would be kind of stupid to elect to have the surgery. At no point was I supporting surgery without patient election.
My only point was that from my understanding the pleasure center of the brain was going to die anyways, at least in the cases of meth addiction.
Well, in this case, the patient is just doing it to themselves depending on the situation.
What I understand about meth and brain chemistry is that over time a meth addict is saturating the pleasure center of their brain. The structures that pick up the neurotransmitters actually become damaged or less effective over time.
This is why a lot of meth addicts will say the only way they can feel happiness is with the drug. Recovered meth addicts often complain that they have very serious issues feeling happy anymore.
How long that takes to heal, I dunno.
The end result of disabling the pleasure center may be inevitable. At least doing it in the beginning may be a way to get them stop completely and literally save their lives and increase the overall quality from a health standpoint alone. They may become emotionless, but can still live otherwise.
Just my two cents. I'm not a doctor. Just know some very unfortunate recovered drug addicts that have more in common with Vulcans now than humans.
What the fuck I want to know is why my Internet provider, my natural gas supplier, my power company, etc. needs my fucking SSN for "security" purposes?
My job? I get it. That's for tax reporting purposes. My bank? It's so the government can audit me and they can report as well.
The power company? Whey the fuck do you need my entire social?
It's not for security purposes. It's to have a single UID for the 3 credit reporting agencies that collect more information on US citizens than most companies combined. In fact, a lot of that information is for sale.
It's not the SSN being disclosed that is the problem at all. It's the fact that it is used to aggregate information that should be no one's fucking business in the first place.
If the SSN did not exist, it would just be your driver's license number instead.
This is outright illegal in my country. Don't you Americans have any basic right to privacy?
Welll..... what we fought so hard for, and so many of us have died for, was the idea of freedom. That includes privacy and anonymity. It was not more than a hundred years ago or so that people had real privacy and became pretty upset when somebody violated it. Was considered very rude and improper.
I would say that we have a deep tradition of privacy, that it's a basic human right, and that our Constitution supports it.
However, our current government has clearly said, "fuck all that liberty shit". Whatever information we can get, in any way we can get it, we are going to do in the name of either profit or national security. Pick an excuse.
Posting AC, as my Christmas "present" due to an internal reorg was my ass tossed on the street, so having to play this game.
Those fucking people deserve a place in the Special Hell.
I had two friends in the last 4 years fired the week before X-Mas. I mean, seriously, who the fuck comes up with that idea?
And porno includes all ages.
You might want to reword that.
That's interesting, but it's important to note that bipolar episodes are characterized by depression and mania. Delusions and hallucinations are not part of being bipolar.
Mushroom usage however, is most certainly characterized by hallucinations, and I have not direct experience with it at all. I'm not really sure if delusional behavior is part of it, but if it was, I would assume it to be far more dangerous than indicated.
Brain chemistry is different for everyone. My only real point is that delusions and hallucinations are quite serious and noticeable. We would've come to this conclusion decades ago.
In fact, now talking to you, it reminds me of those ridiculous public service movie shorts like Reefer Madness.
We have six decades and literally billions of instances of pot usage. That's a huge sample pool, in which the effects, would have been noticed if they are as prominent as psychosis. If pot turned 1/1,000,000 people's eyes glowing purple, we would have seen it by now. Sounds like hyperbole, but consider the rest of my statement.
Remember, psychosis is delusions and hallucinations. I've never hallucinated on pot, or had delusions either. I'm not anywhere near a heavy smoker. My usage is less than a 100 times in 30 years. It's been a once in a while thing, mostly on vacations. My experience has led me to conclude it is far less dangerous than pharma drugs, and far far far far less detrimental than Tequila.
This study is talking about delusions and hallucinations as risk factors for pot usage, after pot usage has ceased. Common sense will tell you that is bullshit. Delusions are defined as believing situations are real when they are not, or believing you are somebody else, or that other people are somebody else. I've never experienced that, or heard of that, due to pot usage. Ever.
To use your example of smoking, you see people develop smoker's cough right? There are many clearly evident signs of heavy smoking usage that you don't need to be medically trained to see, or even feel.
In the last 6 decades have you seen or heard of people walking around with delusional behavior seeing and hearing things that are not there, and that it has been directly traced back to weed usage?
Me either. I've known quite a number of very respectable people, some much older now, that exhibit no signs of psychosis at all.
So my original point stands. We don't need a study to know that these conclusions are complete bullshit because the conclusions themselves would be clearly evident worldwide without training at all.
Perhaps you're right though. There may be long term side effects of regular pot usage. Still, we have senior citizens that been using pot for decades and no medical studies indicating any kind of increased risk factors for major disease that I am aware of.
Delusions and hallucinations, occurring after pot usage has ceased though, are complete bullshit even to the untrained observer.
Funny, but I was extremely careful and only took the recommended dosage at the times prescribed. I'm one of those people that reads the literature accompanying prescriptions and researches contraindications and side effects.
What do you call it when the wind, which some people refer to as an Act Of God, and other such legal mumbo jumbo, are held accountable for it?
They've created a product that migrates on its own, trespasses other people's properties, infects their crops, and then allows a huge corporation with an unfair financial advantage to litigate small farmers to death. All in order to spread their product, which harms biodiversity in the name of huge profits.
I call that terrorism.
What if I created, and patented a DVD feature. This feature somehow spreads through the electrical system, which your DVD cannot operate without, and no reasonably economically viable method exists to filter my feature from the power supply.
How would you feel when my lawyers come by and tell you that you need to pay me $1.99 every time you watch a DVD?
Yeah, I would say terrorism is an apt description and their legal premise is shocking and only serves to illuminate the corruption of the legal system.
Not hardly.
Monsanto (which deserves to die horribly) makes it money through legal terrorism, and intellectual property that is difficult to reproduce.
Pharma drugs as well require strict protocols and experienced factories to produce their products, and are not easily knocked off. Sure as heck, not done so without consequences, sometimes lethal.
Weed?
I could grow the plant on my porch and possibly have a higher quality product than what would be available at the pharmacy down the street. Unlike bootleggers, it's a lot easier to hide the fact you are growing marijuana when it becomes legal and the smell itself is not a dead giveaway.
There might be coffee shops that specialize in different "flavors" and famous producers known for quality or attributes. However, it would still remain a product that you could produce at home in enough quantity to satisfy personal needs.
I have direct experience. As a teenager I was prescribed a drug ostensibly for one reason, but it was listed as treating severe anxiety.
After just 48 hours I had a missing day. My friends say that I want basically "insane" and acted like a manic 6 year old. No violence, no aggression, no hostility. Just super goofy and hyper wanting to do everything. Flushed the pills down the toilet.
That guy that shot up the TDK theater, was on psychiatric drugs, as well as the Newton kid.
You cannot overstate that enough. The SHIT is on the side of the boxes people.
I've tried weed several times, and on some vacations, was high morning, noon, and night, for several days. I experienced no delusions or hallucinations. Just the munchies. I did not feel like jumping off a bridge, or doing some crazy shit like you've seen in the Hangover or some teenage craziness movie.
Granted it may be anecdotal evidence, but at my age, just about every weird moment and adult has explained to me did not come from recreational drugs but pharma drugs or severe overuse of alcohol.
You're ignoring science and rational arguments.
A link between psychosis and pot?
The only people more in the closet than homosexuals, are pot smokers. Scientists, judges, cops, doctors, lawyers, dentists, business executives, etc. smoke pot.
Given the sheer amount of pot usage since the 60's I have to reasonably conclude this research is faulty. Otherwise, we would be seeing far more instances of psychosis directly related.
It is medically defined as:
Psychosis is a loss of contact with reality that usually includes:
False beliefs about what is taking place or who one is (delusions)
Seeing or hearing things that aren't there (hallucinations)
I would assume the researchers are not talking about behavior while under the influence, but effects that last long after usage has terminated. Delusions and hallucinations are quite prominent and not easy to hide. Not as easy to hide, as say, an functioning alcoholic. Which, by the way, alcohol is listed as a cause and risk factor for psychosis as well, and DTs are because of withdrawal.
It's not difficult at all for me to change my views regarding "weed". As long as it is presented with proper science, and not conclusions that are refuted with such ridiculous ease with only common sense and experience in the last six decades.
Amazon has not been impressing me.
Netflix was down for over 24hrs due to a nationwide failure in the Amazon EC2 infrastructure. It came back up slowly in different places, but my area was dead last. Netflix even had their help page 404'd because of how many people were calling in.
Wasn't Netflix the one who came out with the platform to stress test your cloud infrastructure? ChaosMonkey? All that testing and disaster readiness did not seem to help all that much. Hard to make a difference when Amazon is down nationwide.
I might chalk it up to a one-off, but this is not the first time that regionally distributed cloud systems have failed with Amazon.
For a company charging that much money for cloud services that are supposed to be that reliable, meaning serious uptime and redundancy, especially when you are handing over serious cash for regional redundancy, this stuff is just plain embarrassing and not a good selling point.
I can't even begin to imagine the fallout for Netflix, which admittedly could be smoothed over by some credits and a letter.
However, in a serious business like insurance (GEICO, Progressive), finance, 12 hours of downtime during the day can mean millions of dollars in losses.
I seriously have to question if the savings of a cloud infrastructure are worth it when millions of dollars are on the line. It's not like you can't run your own "cloud" in a couple of data centers with open source stuff.
As far as those savings go, Amazon does not give you huge savings vs running it yourself. Not really.
Yeah, but I think he may be dead and not answering the com signals anymore.....
This year's winner of the Darwin award.
Send semen filled cookies to a bunch of soldiers deployed in Afghanistan. No chance at all of them being impossibly pissed off, statistically one of them being mentally unbalanced due to the stress of war, and no chance at all of them being angry enough to seek revenge.
All of them stateside at some point, with expensive military training, access to weapons, and a reason to come find you and beat the living shit out of you.
Not to mention, as a whole, soliders seem to be the most homophobic. Personal opinion, I might be wrong.
Ohhhh, and soliders tend to have solider friends. Some of them might be stateside already.
Hehehe Hhehehe Heheheh........
Yes. Sleep soundly. Nothing to worry about at all.
It's all well and good until said hillbillies start killing people or getting them killed.
I saw this movie once where the hillbillies did a lot worse than kill some guy. Lesson I learned from it? Anytime you hear banjos, PADDLE FASTER.
Dude. It's the End Of The World Today.
Let's be excellent to each other just today :)
Thank You.
I thought this sounded familiar to an Australian idea being floated around a few years back.
Sure..... Tell me one hospital set up to take Cthulhu in as an emergency patient? :)
Or you could, you know, not do anything with the system that would give the feds a reason to be banging on your door.
More, and more, just living free and being vocal about others living free, and god forbid, helping others living free, is more than enough reason to have the feds banging down your door .
Let's not forgot that moron FBI guy that took out hundreds of companies in a data center because he could not understand how hundreds of different companies and legal entities could cohabitate in the same space.
At this point just being innocent and never doing anything wrong is not protection enough to be raided by the feds.
Or you disable hibernating completely.
If Windows notifies programs about suspends/shutdowns (not sure it really does), TrueCrypt needs to dismount immediately and do whatever it needs to do to protect its key.
I run Windows 7 Pro 64-bit for some dev work, and annoyingly, it forces some windows updates on occasions. When it resumes, all the TrueCrypt volumes are dismounted, and whatever programs that were running and accessing the data complain about the loss of the drive.
Whether or not TC is protecting the key in memory, destroying it, whatever, I don't actually know.