This article was originally published in April 2008, anonymously on a friend’s website. It generated hundreds of comments and tens of thousands of visitors (mostly from reddit). The website it was published on is now defunct, so I thought I’d re-post the article here on my blog.

Enjoy…

When I was in elementary school, during the “Just Say No” days, I remember hearing about drugs and being utterly confounded by the message. If drugs are so bad, I thought, why the heck (I didn’t say hell - it was a bad word) did so many people risk their lives just to get high? Something didn’t make sense.

In sixth grade, I was confronted with marijuana for the first time when a friend of mine tried it. Still believing the propaganda, I was very concerned and nearly turned him in “for his own good.” After all, he couldn’t be thinking straight… could he? Well, yes, he could. Contrary to my expectations, my friend was perfectly happy, did well in school, and did not start hanging out with the wrong crowd. Something didn’t make sense.

In high school, things started to get heavier. People I knew were not just smoking pot; they were snorting coke, dropping acid, and more. Being the straight kid, I even acted as a trip sitter on a few occasions.

Finally, I saw some of the negative impacts drugs could have. Of course, the reality of the negative impacts were nothing compared to what anti-drug propaganda would have had me expect. Upon smoking pot, eating shrooms, rolling on X, or whatever - none of my friends went crazy, had their life destroyed, or any such nonsense. The vast majority of the time, all they got was a good time.

Things started to make sense. Kids do drugs because they realize that adults have lied to them about it. If they are to discover the truth, they have only one course of action: Do drugs.

Yesterday I heard a story on NPR in which children were asked what they thought about drugs. Each child parroted back, with conviction, all the same false information I believed at their age. They said things like “you’ll die” and “you’ll lose all your friends.”

What will these kids do when they find out it’s not true? Drugs. When it is discovered first-hand that drugs aren’t so bad what, then, will these kids do? More drugs.

Duh.

Don’t get me wrong. I did see a few who “crossed the line” and actually abused drugs. However these kids had a lot of problems, drugs being only one of them. Unfortunately for them, the stigma of drug use would prevent them from seeking help even after they realized they had a problem. Making matters worse, “help” would often put the focus of treatment in the wrong place; they were treated for drug use when the focus should have been more holistic. Even if they got sober, they still tended to be depressed and self-abusive - just without drugs.

So what is the War on Drugs really accomplishing? Or, rather, is it being waged effectively?

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Recently I signed up for Geni, a family tree building website, after reading an article about it on TechCrunch.

Coincidentally, TED released a video at around the same time, which I just caught today:

This talk is by one of my favorite scientists, Spencer Wells, who wrote The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey, which is also a National Geographic video.

At the end of the TED Talk, I was pleasantly surprised to hear that it’s possible to actually participate in the Genographic Project by ordering the participation kit which “will reveal your deep ancestry along a single line of direct descent (paternal or maternal) and show the migration paths they followed thousands of years ago.” Impressive.

I have added this to my list of interesting and creative gifts for holiday shopping ‘08.

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This technology will change the world. Amazing.

Currently the inventors of this technology are looking to give the power of speech to the vocally disabled. However the possibilities for us all are endless… from a new way to hold a private conversation to changing the channel on your TV without lifting a finger. Imagine being able to tap your thoughts into the internet for instant research – that would be useful for way more than trivia night at Mellow Mushroom.

I am blown away.

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Two weeks ago I saw I Am Legend, the movie. Last week I read I Am Legend, the novella.

After reading the book, I was surprised my the dissimilarities between the stories. The movie is so different from the book that it may as well have had a different name. There are some common elements, but not many. In both stories, the main character is named Robert Neville, and in both stories Neville must hide from humans infected with a disease at night so that they don’t kill him. And that’s pretty much it.

The movie was good, though I found it disappointing. In essence, the story was a good one that could have been told better. There were too many too-obvious special effects. People in makeup would have been far scarier (and realistic) than the slightly over-the-top and over-stylized CG creatures with super-human powers. A more gritty approach would have brought out more intensity and emotion, which seemed dulled. At several points in the movie I felt “almost but not quite” happy or sad or otherwise empathetic for the main character. Additionally, I felt like something was left out of the film – like some subplot had been eliminated in editing that would have given the film a boost. The movie is rated PG-13, which makes me think that an R rated Director’s Cut would make an excellent DVD purchase, if there ever is one. We’ll see.

The book was also good, but also disappointing in that it gave away the ending way too soon. I’ll go ahead and summarize (err, spoil) it: Neville, out of necessity, kills the infected during the day and sleeps at night only to discover in the end that he himself has become the “vampire” of a new nocturnal society; thus he becomes “legend.” This is a good theme that emphasizes perspective and necessity, but half way through the reader is all but told the “moral of the story” straight-out and given little room to think about it for himself. The second half therefore had me thinking “yeah, yeah, get on with it…” since I pretty much knew the ending and was reading out of self-imposed obligation.

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Today I went to Amazon.com to do a little holiday shopping and the home page was a note about a new gadget called Kindle.

This thing looks so cool!

You can purchase books right from the device without WiFi, read blogs, and look up words you don’t know. The display is about as paper-like as you can get without actual paper and can be easily read in sunlight, just like a regular book. What’s really nice is that there are no subscriptions or fees for network access – it comes with the device!

If I don’t get one for Christmas (hint, hint), I think I’ll get one for myself…

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