The 10th Justice

As with all band wagons the opiate epidemic has poisoned public opinion about one of the most useful class of drugs ever discovered: opiates. When John's Hopkins Medical school opened the chief of medicine was Dr. William Osler would not allow any medications to be used in the hospital until they were approved by the pharmacy committee after considering all the scientific evidence of effectiveness, except one - morphine - which he called God's Own Medicine. Morphine was humane. It relieved the suffering of patients in pain no matter what the cause, treatable or not. And it and its cousins still have that ability today. The increased deaths from opiates over the last two decades is a direct result of over prescribing by physicians and the policies of institutions that influenced this prescribing. Beginning in the early 90s hospitals and health care organizations, not physicians, began a program to ensure the humane relief of pain for all patients. Every patient who came into m...

Listening to Michael Pollan read his new book How to Change Your Mind while driving over the Cascade Mountains caused me to break out laughing a dozen times. The book is really funny. Not just his phraseology but his story telling ability about people from my youth like Ram Das, Timothy Leary, and Ken Kesey. I had forgotten how outrageous they all were, and how weirdly bent on gurudom. At Portland State University I saw Leary do his 'turn on, tune in, drop out' lecture. What is a 22 year old to make of that? Around the same time I also went to a lecture by Allen Ginsburg and afterwards asked him if the mind state induced by hallucinogenic drugs was the same as that acquired by years of meditation or other eastern religious practices. He hemmed and hawed and didn't really answer. But Pollan does answer and this brings us to the subject of this book and my take on it. The book is about psilocybin and LSD (psychelics) and the effect they have on the minds of the people who ...