[FRIAM] The Insurrection Index

[Steve Smith]

On 1/7/22 11:14 AM, glen wrote:
> Thanks for that validation. I think SteveS' conception is rooted in 
> the US' typical puritanical approach to everything. I admit I'm 
> ignorant of the history of HR. But my sense is that non-US regions 
> have a richer cultural approach to handling drugs. Even China, which 
> we often ridicule as totalitarian, has lived with opium use for a much 
> longer time.
>
> Here in the US, the puritans will steal any and every thing and warp 
> it to their narrative, including HR. I think SteveS is a victim of 
> that narrative.

I heard your conception as one of your own proverbial "Just So" stories, 
and recognize my own experience of *other's* conceptions (from whom I 
first encountered HR)  as a complementary "Just So! Oh No!" story.   
Wishful/Wistful thinking vs negative Paranoiac thinking perhaps.   I 
feel that my own apprehension is pretty muddled in the middle.  I'm not 
busy worrying that drug users (legal or illegal, prescribed or 
self-medicating) will be harmed by that behaviour...  It is mostly 
outside of my concern (except when I might be consulting with someone 
trying to distill their own spirits).   Clearly there are lots of people 
who seek chemical alteration and seek a society that elaborately helps 
them explore that to the extreme whilst there is another (bimodal?) 
faction (prohibitionists/puritans) which seeks to quash all of that 
behaviour.   I'm muddled in the middle, enjoying having friends who are 
much more experimental in those domains than I ever will be while also 
wincing at some of the self/other harm that seems to go with (at least 
the) illegal substances/activities as well as wincing at all the 
puritanical need to decide for others what their goals in life and risk 
envelopes while pursuing them should be.

I am a mild victim of many narratives I suppose.

- SteveS