S&F Off-Message Rants & Screeds Du Jour

Wonder Drug

When I was a kid (I'm talking pre-teen years), I was terrified of dying due to one sort of fatal disease or another, and even more terrified of some of the treatments then available. In my terror, I fantasized that aspirin was a kind of magic drug that would either protect against or cure any disease known to man. As I grew older, a remnant of that fantasy persisted — persisted in sufficient force that in my early twenties I began taking aspirin regularly — two a day — as a non-specific prophylactic against...whatever. Many years later came the discovery that a mere 80mg dose of aspirin a day (the standard aspirin tablet dose is 325mg) was amazingly prophylactic against fatal coronary events. Today, there appeared this:

[P]atients who took aspirin regularly for a period of several years were 21 percent less likely decades later to die of solid tumor cancers....

[...]

As part of [a] new study, published online Monday in the [British medical] journal Lancet, researchers examined the cancer death rates of 25,570 patients who had participated in eight different randomized controlled trials of aspirin that ended up to 20 years earlier.

Participants who had been assigned to the aspirin arms of the studies were 20 percent less likely after 20 years to have died of solid tumor cancers than those who had been in the comparison group taking dummy pills during the clinical trials, and their risk of gastrointestinal cancer death was 35 percent lower. The risk of lung cancer death was 30 percent lower, the risk of colorectal cancer death was 40 percent lower and the risk of esophageal cancer death was 60 percent lower, the study reported.

I'm not in the least surprised. I've known that for decades.

RTWT here.

Fact Or Merely Wishful Thinking?

Sometime in the mid-'90s, there appeared in print an article we wrote on Sigmund Freud (we can't remember exactly when, and our only copy of the printed piece is long gone, but which piece was reprinted in full here on S&F in August 2004) wherein we recount an episode of the Charlie Rose show on which the now-famous Harvard cognitive neuroscientist Steven Pinker expressed openly and antagonistically and with no punches pulled his utter contempt for Freudian theories of mind. In response, we wrote, in part:

No wonder Dr. Pinker was so huffy. Perhaps I'd have been a bit huffy too were I a cognitive neuroscientist, and bet the whole farm, my new BMW and solid-gold Rolex on the hard science of this [then] new discipline [cognitive neuroscience], and then heard someone academically credentialed, and therefore to be paid attention to [another of the show's guests, Dr. Peter J. Gay, Emeritus Professor of History at Yale University, cultural historian, Freud biographer, a graduate of Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis, and the author of the introductory commentary for W. W. Norton & Co.'s paperback edition of The Standard Edition of Freud's complete works], give credence to the strange theories of some soft-science guy who 100 years ago worked on some of the very same problems I was now working on.

As I said [i.e., above, in the original article], a good explanation [of Pinker's antagonism), but somewhat short of reasonable.

But then, Dr. Pinker was himself being somewhat short of reasonable. More reasonable, it seems to me, would have been for him to have remembered the lesson of history that teaches that world-transforming discoveries about the nature of man and the cosmos were, by intuition, first adumbrated by poets, philosophers, and other thinkers of genius using the same sort of metaphorical language Freud was compelled to use in order to make his revolutionary theories comprehensible.

More reasonable, also, would it have been for him to have held it no more than prudent to acknowledge that it's never wise to give short shrift to the intuitions and insights of genius, and to have taken Freud's theories as a working guide in his new research, and centered one small portion of that research on seeking out possible neurobiological analogues of such things as the unconscious, repression, Oedipal strivings, psychic determinism, libido, id, ego, superego — the whole psychoanalytic menagerie.

As regular readers of S&F have probably long ago surmised, I'm an informed (as laymen go) and convinced Freudian, and believe that, in the large, Freud got most of it right first time out of the box. And it now appears that, based on their hard-science researches, even cognitive neuroscientists will be forced to begin to do a chagrined 180 on their thinking concerning Freud's insights into and metaphorical explanations of the human mind and how it functions. At least, if what Jessa Crispin (she of Book Slut fame) reports is right.

Ms. Crispin, in a piece for Drexel University's The Smart Set, writes:

I think we are entering a new Freudian era. This struck me as I was recently reading some stories in The New York Times Science Section: Depressive disorders may have a beneficial mechanism behind them; dreams may be meaningful after all; and hysteria — now called conversion disorders, and by which they mean the physical expression of emotional trauma — may actually exist.

[...]

For decades, Freud has been slowly discredited until his name is more a punchline [sic] than a scientific reference. But the more science wades into the murky territory of the mind, the more we see that we have to look backward to move forward.

By our linking the above Smart Set piece, we do not mean to even so much as imply that we consider Ms. Crispin in any way competent or qualified to pass comment on any of this. We link the piece merely, and solely, because we get the sense that the articles she refers to might be a first hint that perhaps what we suggested in the last above quoted graf of our '90s print piece may at last now be beginning to take place in the hard-science world of cognitive neuroscience.

But perhaps that's just wishful thinking on our part.

And Speaking Of Being As Mad As Hell...

And speaking of being as mad as hell, the ferocious onslaught against the prime cultural demons du jour, tobacco and smoking, is fast reaching fever pitch, but mostly quietly so that its impact will hardly be felt except by those of us devoted to the pleasures of tobacco and smoking (and don't even think of substituting the pejorative, incendiary code word "addicted" in place of "devoted"; tobacco is NOT addictive in the only meaningful sense of the term; i.e., physically addictive as is, for instance, heroin, never mind the mountain of tendentious and massaged "scientific" studies to the contrary).

Ever since the early '90s, at long last empowered by the publication by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) of a fraudulent, statistically "cooked" 1993 study that declared so-called "second-hand smoke" (Environmental Tobacco Smoke, or ETA) to be a public health hazard, the rabid anti-smoking zealots among lawmakers, local, state, and federal, have managed to do everything short of proposing a Constitutional amendment to prohibit smoking and the sale and use of tobacco products; something they would have done years ago had they not the gruesome example of the effects of the Eighteenth Amendment to dissuade them from embarking on such a rash and foolhardy enterprise. Yet they've managed to accomplish the very same ends by other, more surreptitious means, even to the extent of the passing of laws in some cities that prohibit apartment dwellers from smoking in their own homes.

And what's the lawmakers' most powerful weapon? Draconian taxation. You need money? Tax tobacco and smokers — punitively. No one other than the tobacco interests and smokers — a decided if fairly large minority — will object. In fact, people will think you're doing good and a good thing. Why, not only are you helping to protect the public from lethal second-hand smoke, you're actually helping to save the lives of smokers themselves who are simply too stupid or too trapped by their addiction to realize the dangers they're exposing themselves to, never mind the public.

And just how draconian are these punitive taxes?

As recently as ten years ago, we were paying $10.00 per 150g tin of roll-your-own cigarette tobacco (real, no-additive, 100% tobacco leaf, not the junk, adulterated tobacco scraps found in commercial cigarettes); enough to roll the equivalent of a full carton of commercial, manufactured cigarettes which was then selling for something on the order of $50.00 per carton. Today, that same 150g tin costs upwards of $25.00, and in some localities, as high as $46.00, 100% of the price increase due taxes imposed on the product and the sale. Our custom, English-blend pipe tobacco sold ten years ago for $23.00 a pound. Today, the price is $65.00, again, 100% of the increase due taxes imposed on the product and the sale.

And we smokers are helpless. There's absolutely nothing we can do to change any of this. Our best hope today is that a thriving illegal industry will emerge to significantly undersell the still legal market. Beyond that, all we can do is rant and rave in impotent rage against uninformed public opinion, public stupidity, and the rabid zealotry of the anti-smoking powers that be. Ergo, this rant.

That is all.

As you were.