CDR: Re: Whipped Europeans

David Marshall marshall at athena.net.dhis.org
Sun Sep 3 13:17:46 PDT 2000


Sampo A Syreeni <ssyreeni at cc.helsinki.fi> writes:

> On Fri, 1 Sep 2000, David Marshall wrote:
> 
> >Not to mention that there exists a certain peptide, the name of which
> >escapes me at the moment, which is naturally occuring in the
> >brain. It is five amino acids long, and exerts an effect about 5000
> >times stronger than that of Heroin. There are far more where that came
> >from. 
> 
> Of course. Just as there is anandamide, the transmitter which hemp compounds
> mainly mimic. Only you do not easily get such substances into the brain
> without using a needle - proteins generally do not get through the
> blood-brain barrier absent active transport. So you would need proteins
> which, after somehow having been delivered in the blood stream whole, are
> actively transported (this means extra 'handles' so that the molecule is
> recognized) across the barrier, then we probably need a working mechanism
> which then processes (cleaves, oxidises etc.) to obtain a final active
> compound. All in all, you do not easily deliver proteins to the brain.

Yes, I know that. The point, though, was that the war on drugs is
futile and is about to be made worse. If you think our freedoms are
compromised for the War on (some) Drugs now, just wait fifteen years. 

On the topic of the blood-brain barrier, another example is compounds
such as cocaine, which exist in charged and uncharged forms. Normally,
the ratio is something like 99:1, so it takes some time for the entire
dose to actually get into the brain where it can do something. Crack
cocaine is made using a relatively simple procedure which changes that
equilibrium to where almost all of it blows into the brain at
once. This is why crack cocaine is considered worse than the "regular"
powder. 

Societies -- and American society in particular -- seem to loathe
actually fixing problems. We find secondary or tertiary (or worse)
symptoms, and try to treat those. This is partially because fixing the
real roots of the problem also affects other things, makes some of the
American people accept responsibility for some things, and is suicide
to a politician. This doesn't work, of course. It's like giving
someone with chronic headaches, vertigo, and dementia some asprin and
psychoactive drugs; it masks the symptoms, but doesn't fix the
problem, which might be a brain tumor.







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