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April 07, 2009
Path Dependence, Continued
The last entry suggesed that the time may have come for humanity to take a more species-oriented approach to its intrinsic problems; particularly those that have evolved past a point that threatens its (our) existence. I also implied that a reasonable first step would be standardization of an analytical method that would allow a clear understanding of how several of our more vexing contemporary problems have actually evolved. The concept known as Path Dependence was identified as a reasonable candidate because its core concept is well suited to the analysis of any evolving process. Also, thanks to Google and the internet, we may now possess the data management tools such a process would need to eventually become fast, accurate, and transparent enough to be taken seriously.Given our worsening global financial crisis and the slowly dawning awareness of its long term implications, a good subject for an early study might be our own dishonesty, a trait that was clearly one of the current economic panic's more important, yet frequently overlooked, causes. That individual humans lie and cheat is obvious; nevertheless, our large organizations–– both governments and successful businesses of a certain perceived importance–– are normally able to exempt themselves from such suspicions. Major exceptions to that general rule are times of extreme crisis.
Current events also illustrate, often dramatically, how a combination of deception by an accomplished cheat and denial by his victims, when undetected for long intervals, can do enormous harm. Were it not for the market crash in December ‘08, Bernard Madoff’s epic Ponzi scheme might still be paying the modest regular dividends his socially prominent victims had come to expect. Many of those victims were themselves reputed to be canny investors (just as many Madoff-ruined charities had been assumed to be well run). In the face of such evidence, our failure to recognize that both dishonesty and denial are intrinsic human behaviors, capable of becoming major problems for our species, should be unlikely. Unfortunately, examples of that same phenomenon abound, both in history and in the daily press.
My structured interviews of pot smokers were not what led me to see dishonesty as a key human flaw; rather it was the unwitting serial revelations of federal agencies charged with defending the drug war against medical marijuana in California, in combination with the almost-reflex denial exhibited by so many of the activists who had worked so hard to place Proposition 215 on the ballot.
The arrogance of the drug war bureaucracy is consistent with its uninterrupted dominance of American (and global) drug policy and the success of its central dogma (fear of addiction). Although one can hardly blame them for using tactics that have been successful since modern Pharmacology was in its infancy, one can certainly blame modern pharmacologists, other scientists, and knowledgeable scientific popularizers, all of whom have been tacitly endorsing drug war rhetoric with their silence since (at least) 1975.
Polls now show that “medical marijuana” has even greater voter appeal than when Proposition 215 surprised the world in 1996; however, data provided since then by users who had been self-medicating with pot in the face of considerable personal risk have been ignored by both sides of the political argument, neither of which ever had access to similar data, and both of which have their own doctrinaire agendas.
In any case, I’m quite sure a majority of the applicants I’ve interviewed have given honest answers to most of my questions. My reasons are:
1) The remarkable internal consistency of their data; not only do family backgrounds coordinate well with generational age (YOB data), drugs tried, and other information not usually obtainable in more restricted settings; so do racial/ethnic backgrounds.
2) Applicants who had received recommendations from other screening physicians (none of whom ask my questions) turn out to have similar profiles when those questions are asked.
The most striking feature of a comparison of my data with federal assertions about cannabis is the complete lack of agreement on almost every aspect of pot use, a difference that can best be accounted for by realizing that the government position is based a combination of unproven assumptions and clinical ignorance. There has not been a comparable period since 1967 when physicians could take histories from admitted pot users who weren’t also being categorized as either "druggies" or criminals. The situation becomes even more implausible when one considers the near total lack of congruence between my study and those published thus far by other “pot docs” in California after what is now over twelve years of possible clinical contact.
This essay only scratches the surface of the role human dishonesty has played, and still plays, in our problems as a species. Once one sees that dynamic from the required perspective, good examples become almost too common to list and the most critical question then becomes, how do we deal with it?
Doctor Tom
Posted by tjeffo at April 7, 2009 05:09 AM