Different people have different ways of measuring success (their own and other’s). There are goals and objectives which aren’t necessarily important in their own right, but are a way of keeping score in the game of life. One of the most popular ways of keeping score is earned income. Our society tends to have a slightly schizophrenic attitude to wealth generation. On the one hand we insist that “money isn’t everything” and “the best things in life are free”, on the other hand our entire society is geared towards making money.

So lets just be honest, wealth is very important. It is one of the most important things in life. It is essential for life. If you don’t have some form of wealth (at least a charitable hand-out) you don’t eat and you die. (Here I’m defining wealth broadly to include all material possessions, so even owning a bowl of rice that’s just been given to you is wealth.) Wealth is one those few things in life, where a bare minimum is necessary for survival and, in general, the more you have, the better off you are.

Of course it’s not the only thing that’s like this. Happiness is another. Without at least some happiness in your life you are very likely to commit suicide. So a bare minimum is necessary and the more you have the better off you are. But you can’t say that happiness is more important than money, this is meaningless. It’s like saying that water is more important than food. Fundamentally the absence of either one will kill you; and which is more important depends entirely on whether you are hungry or thirsty.

However, earned income has an importance to many people that goes beyond it’s value as wealth. To illustrate this consider two people: one who is out of work and getting dole payments, the other is working hard but only earning the same amount. Many would argue that the worker is more “successful” than the person on dole (not everyone would, because some people keep score differently). Many people are more proud, and value more highly, a pay check than a dole check, even if the amounts are the same.

So income is a way of keeping score. You can set goals by it (”I will be earning $70K by the time I am 30″) and you can compare yourself to those around you (”I am the highest paid person my age that I know”). I don’t think this is overly materialistic, I think it’s mostly about striving, about wanting to live a life of achievement. There is nothing wrong with this and it seems likely that 90%, perhaps even 99% of people in our society measure themselves in this way to some extent.

I say “to some extent” because life is a complicated game and just about everybody has multiple ways of keeping score. Anyone who only keeps score with income probably is being overly materialistic, but I’ve never met anyone actually like this. Other score keeping methods include your children’s school grades and the number of people at parties you throw. Like these, there’s nothing inherently wrong with earned income as a score, it only goes bad when you neglect other important aspects of life in order to keep the score up. It has to be remembered that it is not the only score. Another problem is remembering that it is only a score. A paycut because of poor economic times does not mean that a person is not working hard, or is any less successful.

I say all this all this because income is not the way I keep score. I really don’t care about my income other that the wealth it represents. I care about that only because of the things I can use that wealth for (a good book, a nice meal out, etc). But when I say this many people get defensive. I think because of our society’s schizophrenic attitude to money. To not value wealth is seen as somehow morally or spiritually superior, so people who do value wealth (which is most people) sometimes feel threatened by a person who doesn’t.

I am not in any way superior for not valuing income, I’m just unusual. I have my own ways of keeping score. My primary one is probably publication. My goals are about writting stuff that is good enough to be worth reading and my way of measuring this is how often I can get published. At the moment the score is pretty darn low, but I’m working on it and I have time.

The score keeping methods I’ve mentioned so far, are probably equally good. They all suffer from the problem of not necessarily reflecting success accurately (incomes are dependant on the times, publishers can be unfair, school grades can be unfair, and a bad storm can discourage guests) and the problem of only measuring one aspect of you life. As long as a person keeps in mind all that is really important to them, these are a good rough yardstick.

There are bad scores out there that are self-destructive. For example, “how many kilos can I lose” is a potentially fatal score keeping method (this is different from the method of “how close can I keep to my medically ideal weight” which is not a problem at all). Not to mention ones that hurt others such as “how many people can I make cry today” (many bosses seem to measure themselves on this one, I’m not kidding).

So I guess what I’m saying is that people should not be embarressed or feel bad about being proud of their earnings. I think many western societies (and perhaps others) have an unhealthy attitude to money, but I don’t think the answer is to deny the importance of wealth. Lets just be open about this: wealth is extremely important and the amount you have (while not a perfect or the only measure of success) is something to be proud of, or something to work on improving. Greed isn’t good, but that doesn’t mean money is bad.

One of the mental games I enjoy playing is creating extended analogies. That is, an analogy that represents a situation in multiple ways. This is one I came up with the other day.

The environmental problem that faces humanity is similar to that of an ape falling through a forest of thorns. (Stop laughing, it IS, you’ll see.)

Imagine an ape that has lost it grip on a high branch and is falling through the thick canopy. There are lots of branches it can grab, but in this forest the trees are all covered with thorns, so a hurried grab will result in injury, especially with the momentum from the fall.

This is our situation. There are solutions to climate change and other environmental problems, but most of them will be painful in some way, involving a cost to our lifestyle or economy. As we fall, we pass up opportunities for solutions because we are afraid of the thorns. Of course, intellectually we know that the scratches will be less hurtful than the eventual hard stop at the end, but we find it hard to summon up the will regardless. Besides, we keep hoping for the miraculous thorn-free branch, or at least one with less thorns.

To some extent  this is sensible. We have to grab some branches, but we may as well grab the ones with the least thorns. The trouble is that the further we fall, the higher our momentum gets (the problems are worse) and so the more the thorns are going to hurt. Also, we can’t see exactly where the ground is so we don’t know how much leeway we have. It may be that we have to smash through a few branches to slow ourselves down. Perhaps even if we grab the last few branches, regardless of how nasty the thorns are, they won’t be enough to stop the plummet. In fact it’s possible that we are already at that point, that even every branch from here won’t be enough. General scientific opinion is against this. The overall consensus is that we have more branches, but they are going to hurt.

A final tangential thought: What would the miraculous thorn-free branch look like? To me I guess it would be what I think of as the “technical fix”. A technological solution to the problem. A new invention that will allow us to keep our lifestyles and economy largely intact while reducing environmental impact. Other than the fact that this will be a number of small branches, rather than one large one, this isn’t necessarily all that far-fetched. There have already been a number of technological innovations that have done this in various ways, and there are others proposed that may do so.

A popular sentiment is that, to survive we will have to undergo radical changes in society and philosophy to become more aware of the consequences of our actions. To the extent that this happens I welcome it. But frankly that’s a very thorny branch and I just don’t see us grabbing it all that tightly. Though we may (and to some extent already have) brush it on the way down.

Any look at human reactions to previous falls (we’re a fairly clumsy ape) will show the general shape of a human solution. It will align with social forces already in power or rising, it will involve minimal philosophical change and a surprising degree of innovation. To me it seems that the likely course of events is clear. A few nasty disasters that wake us up (already had some but expect a few more), the adoption of an ecological standpoint by powerful and rising social forces (starting to happen), a solution found that is far from perfect but somehow seems to work just enough, and a burst of innovation to satisfy a general desire to mitigate the costs of the solution. Oh, and maybe a few lessons learning along the way, but don’t expect any epiphanies.

I had two experiences recently where I was easily able to find out information that should not be readily available. One was amusing, but the other was a little creepy. And what was scary was that both involved a simple Google search.

I’m aware that when talking about this sort of thing (especially over the web) you should avoid giving details so as not to give the wrong people ideas. However, in this case the processes were so simple that they were the first thing that occurred to me.

The first experience was a call for my wife which I took while she was out. They must have had some policy about giving details because they were reluctant to leave any message, even their name. I was curious, so after the call I looked at my caller ID. A google search of the number brought their name and company straight up and even let me know what they had been calling about.

Now that may not be a big deal, but the implications of the second incident were little more serious. We are borrowing someone’s car while they are away and they’d left the key with a neighbour and given me the neighbour’s number. Unfortunately I managed to loose the piece of paper I’d written the number on. I did remember the address, but the White pages online doesn’t allow you to search by address (for good reason as you’ll see). A quick Google search of the address brought up the phone number and the name of the neighbour (it was on a document the local council had made public). When I rang the place a child answered and told me that her parent was out picking up her little brother and would be back in half an hour.

In other words with no more information than an address I was able to establish that a child was alone in a house and roughly how much time before an adult returned. This is not information that just anyone should be able to get! It certainly made me think that I’m going to teach my child quite strictly what information they are allowed to give out over the phone.

The internet has made all sorts of data much more available, which is good thing in many ways. However, a result of this is that we need to be careful about what information gets out there. Especially since it’s often a combination of seemingly harmless details that can be used, and this is hard to predict. We do need to be mindful of anything we write down. As I see it the danger doesn’t commonly come from hackers getting into secured databases (though this can happen). The far more likely risk is a few publicly available details from different sources being put together for a use you don’t expect and would not condone.

Looking through some of the thoughts I’d jotted down in the past I came across this one. Wow, teenage angst central.

Warning: Contains depressing material

I Want To Weep Because

I want to weep because I’m sad. No I’m not.

I want to weep because I’m stressed. No, that doesn’t feel right either.

I want to weep because life is hard. No, it’s broader than all of those.

I want to weep because of life. No, broader than that even.

I want to weep because. Just because.

If you broaden the reason enough it becomes no reason. Zero and infinity. I’ve always (well, for a long time) thought that they are very similar. Mathematicians will tell you that neither is really a number. You can’t quantify nothingness and everythingness (for want of a better word). Zero and infinity are the places that numbers can’t go.

I’m not sure what my point is here, but I feel I may be digressing from it. I will just say that you can’t divide by either of them and any number multiplied by them merely becomes one of them. Adding or subtracting them gets you nowhere (or perhaps everywhere [that’s my pathetic attempt at a joke!]).

I am digressing. They’re not numbers, but philosophical concepts and here I am applying mathematical rules to them. It’s my analytical mind. Maybe it’s all right for you, you might be one of these people who feels emotions and thinks nothing of it. But I’m more logical than that.

I’m sorry, I’m managing to sound both like a snob and a victim. I’m also being very depressing. That’s not what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to say that… I don’t feel real. I have to think of myself as more than just a logical being. I have to have emotions. Without them I feel two-dimensional, insubstantial.

Music is my drug of choice. Why? Because it can bring out emotions. Strong emotions make me feel real. Anger is a strong emotion. No, all emotions are strong. Anger is easy to bring out. But I don’t like being angry. Besides it’s too close to aggression, which isn’t really an emotion (Psychologists will agree with me. No, God that’s conceited, I agree with psychologists on this. That’s better.)

Hope and hate are emotions but they are hard to bring out. (I will avoid using love as an example because love has been talked about too much already. Like Shakespeare, there’s been too much said, just enjoy it.) An emotion that is easy to bring out is depression. Not self-pity, but a bleakness of outlook on the world.

Of course if you are depressed you can make others depressed. So I try to indulge in depression when I’m alone. I should probably put a warning at the top of this that it is depressing. Yes, I’ll do that now. Of course, you’ve already seen the warning now that I’ve written it ( kind of like time-travel, don’t get me started on time-travel). So you’ll only be reading this if you wanted to read something depressing.

I’m still not sure what the point of all this is but I think perhaps it was comfort. To all of those who are like me, who enjoy experiencing depression (or perhaps some other emotion) because it gives their life… no, it makes them feel like their life has substance. You are not alone.

And to those of you (lucky or unlucky, I don’t know which) who read this an say “nope, that’s not me at all.” When you see a friend playing, say, Metallica’s “Until it Sleeps” at high volume with a look of intense sorrow on their face and their eyes closed. Maybe this has helped you come a bit closer to understanding what makes them tick.

On the other hand, maybe I’m rambling. Maybe I’m just spewing pseudo-philosophy. But I hope you got something out of reading this, even if it was only a chuckle or a single contemplative thought. And just remember that it’s better to be an optimist, because the world either seems or is a better place. And regardless of whether is seems or is nicer, you’ll be happier if you’re an optimist. Ha, I’ve just spent two pages writing about depression and I consider myself an optimist, now that’s bleak.

A little silly to blog about blogs, but it’s just that I was struck the other day by the realisation that the blog is a really interesting written format. Sometimes a writing format is discovered/invented and it changes the way people write. The novel did that. It fostered the development of social satire and transformed the place of fiction in our society. I’m not sure that the blog is on par with the novel as a writing form. But it’s definitely got some similarities. Like the novel it’s very flexible, a small number of simple rules define it (the novel has chapters, the blog has posts and comments). Also, like the novel it is being used in a broad range of writings. By contrast, think of the sonnet, which is primarily used for romantic poetry. Blogs get used for all sorts of writing: news and current opinions, creative writing, diaries, education. I’m guessing that it won’t be many generations (maybe even the latest one) before, as with the novel, it becomes hard to imagine what the world was like without that format available.

I’m going to write about sleep deprivation because I am deprived (and depraved, but no amount of rest will fix that). Something I realised when I was doing the topic on sleep in a neuropsych unit, was that it is possible to sleep more efficiently.

To explain: Sleep involves a number of stages which can be distinguished by looking at brain activity. Stage I is very light and people woken from it may not even realise that they were asleep. The stages get progressively deeper with less and less activity until Stage IV, where people will usually be quite groggy if woken. But after that something strange happens: REM sleep. Named after the Rapid Eye Movements that occur, during this stage the brain activity suddenly jumps up to levels that look like Stage I or even consciousness. What’s even more interesting is that this appears to be when all the important bits of sleep happen. This is when you dream, and when you get, literally vital, rest (rats deprived of REM sleep die, rats deprived of the same amount of non-REM sleep do not). If you don’t get enough REM sleep you actually accrue a “REM-debt” where your body tries to make up the lost REM sleep next rest.

Sleep follows a roughly 90 minute repeating pattern of reducing brain activity through the stages, a sudden jump for REM sleep before dipping just as quickly down again and gradually rising back up to stage one. You only spend a small fraction of sleep in the REM stage. However, this cycle alters when sleep deprived. Your brain will progress more quickly into REM stage and will stay there longer. This means that a REM debt gets paid off quickly and even long periods of sleep deprivation can be recovered from within a relatively short time of healthy sleeps. (If only my financial debts worked this way!)

When I learned about this change it occurred to me that it might be possible to train yourself to get more REM sleep. People can train themselves to change many body rhythms when made aware of them (e.g. heartbeat rate, on a biofeedback machine anyone can quickly learn to alter their heart-rate at will). Unfortunately, since you are, by definition, asleep at the time it’s difficult to implement training. My thought was that if a machine was programmed to give a pleasant sensation (intracerebral drugs?) as long as you were in REM it might be possible to train the body to stay in REM stage longer. Effectively sleeping more efficiently. Of course there might be hitherto unknown necessities in non-REM sleep (sleep is not a well understood phenomena), but we can only know by trying, right? (-:

Unfortunately, lacking such a machine there is only one way to increase sleep efficiency and that is with deprivation. Although I only got 90 minutes sleep last night (deliberately timed it to give myself a full sleep cycle, which I’ve found is a great way to get the most out of a small amount of sleeping time) tonight I will have recovered most of my REM debt and therefore slept at nearly 200% of normal efficiency.

So last night I was not “burning the midnight oil” nor was I “pulling an all-nighter”. Instead I was “working on my sleep efficiency”.

I was just now struck with a what I think is a great way to begin a novel I’ve had kicking around in my head for a while. A short story I wrote a few years ago sparked the idea. I was trying to add depth to the short story by giving history and background, and it was pointed out to me that a novel was possible from the background I’d hinted at. I may put up the short story at some point, but for the moment, here is the opening page of the novel. (Those with a knowledge of mythology may recognise the main character.) All comments (criticism or praise) are welcome.

The Sorcerer’s Tale

They say I born of a witch’s consorting with a demon. I never knew the truth of that. By the time I was nine I had heard my mother tell so many different stories of my parentage that I knew only one truth: my mother was a liar, and not to be trusted.

Trusted no, but respected, definitely. Because I saw how my mother’s lies gave her power. (It was a technique I learned early, and good that I did. Before my twelfth birthday, it would save my life.) My father was one of her favourite lies. If she wanted sympathy, he was a rapists or her lost true love. If she wanted respect, he was a powerful lord who continued to watch over his bastard son and secret lover. If she wanted mystery, he was not to be spoken of, except for dark hints. And if she wanted fear, well then he was demon.

Whatever the truth about my father, my mother was most definitely a witch. And not one of the nicer kind. A lot is said about witches, and it’s all true. Not the details of course. The rituals talked about in taverns usually bear far more resemblance to the listeners’ wishes and desires than to any truth. But the essence of the tales are true. That they are healers who respect balance, or that they are ruthless women who ally with darker side of the world. Both are true, because witches are people. There is a power that comes from witchcraft and different women will use it for good or ill, by their natures. In my childhood I saw only the darker side.

So my mother had power from her witchcraft and her lies. (And her lies were part of her witchcraft, since witches make no distinction between truth and lies; the healing properties of a plant are the same as the healing properties of a person’s belief in the plant, they both work.) But it was a small kind of power, though it seemed large to me then. A whole village under sway, expertly manipulated to give her what seemed like wealth in comparison to the other villages.

Some say that all lies are eventually revealed, and I agree. For I have studied witchcraft (as much as a man can) and come to this conclusion: when a lie is found out, all this means is that someone has been given the opportunity to make it a truth, and has failed. When one such opportunity came to me, it defined the rest of my life.

I comment on a blog I regularly read (http://thecatsmeow.freeblogit.com/) got me thinking about the issue of “who should pay?”. Many regulatory changes involve shifting a cost. For example: work place injury compensation involves shifting cost of injuries from worker to employer. Another example: pollution controls shift the costs from the local community (costs such as asthma treatment) to the factory (in the form of expensive pollution prevention measures). And another: banning farmer land clearing shifts the cost to the community of biodiversity loss, to the individual farmer land-owner through reduced productivity.

Whenever issues like this come up the fundamental question is “Who should pay?”. This apparently simple question needs to be examined closely because it’s often miscontrued. The “who” and the “should” parts are often not subjected to clear thought.

First of all, dealing with “who”. People often talk about government paying or industry paying, but in reality these two entities never pay. They pass on their costs. In the case of governments this cost is passed on to taxpayers. In some cases the cost may be passed to the community as a whole through reduced services, i.e. the government pays the cost by cutting down services (e.g. health care or education) and diverting the saved money. However, regardless of this taxpayers are still footing the bill so they are the ones who pay (but it is worth keeping in mind that particular parts of the community, often the most needy, may suffer).

In the case of industry the cost is generally passed to consumers through increased product prices. There may be some cost to owners from reduced profits, but usually the whole or the large majority of the cost is factored in to pricing.  Of course there is the issue of business viability. If the increased cost causes a company to be non-viable then the owners do suffer. However, two points need to be kept in mind: Firstly, consumers will not go elsewhere if all companies increase prices. So if workplace laws mandate the businesses compensate for injury then sensible financing will mean that all businesses increase prices in order to put aside money to cope with employee injuries. Secondly, if consumers simply do not want to pay the added cost then perhaps the business shouldn’t be viable. If consumers don’t pay for workplace injuries involved in their product then this is, in effect, a subsidy of the product.

So, there are in reality three groups who can be the “who”: taxpayers, consumers of the relevant pruduct, and affected individuals.

Next looking at the “should”. This is often taken to be a moral issue. Usually people talk about what is “fair”. However, although we should avoid injustice where possible, considering what is fair usually leads to an impasse. Often the cost is no-one’s fault. Take the case of environmental regulations on farmers. When the farm was first set up, perhaps a hundred years ago or more, the owner didn’t know about biodiversity. Nor did taxpayers, or the consumers of the farm’s products. Everyone will say, perhaps rightly, that it’s not fair for them to pay, but there is a cost that needs to be paid. Somebody has to do it.

Considering what is fair only gets us so far. After that we can only consider what works best. Usually this means asking who pays the least if they pay. In the case ofworkplace injury, employers can, relitively cheaply, institute OH&S to keep injuries down. So the cost to the consumer is less than an individual would have to pay for treatment or taxpayers for compensation. In the case of environmental regulations it may be the government who is best placed to do the research on the most sustainable farming method, or it may be the farmer who can implement new methods most cheaply.

To best consider the “should” we have to assign costs fairly, but often no assignment is particularly just, and at that point the fairest assignment is to charge the group that will end up paying the least or who can best afford to pay.

In a nutshell, statements such as “it’s not fair to expect the company to pay” and “it’s not right that government should pay” show a lack of clear thinking. The question of “who should pay” does not refer to entities but to different groups of people and is not usually about morality but practicality. It might be more clear to ask: “Which group of people is best placed to pay?”

It seemed a bit of a cop-out digging into the archives for my first post so I figured this next one had to be new. Of course it’s not completely new since I had the actual idea a little while ago, but other than some quick notes in my organiser I haven’t put this one “on paper” (an odd phrase in this digital context). I worked out this idea in a debate with my wife and a colleague of hers. A lot of my ideas develop this way; in a conversation something someone says sparks a notion so I say it. Usually people disagree, or are at least sceptical, and so in defending my new idea, I work out it’s details. Moments like that are a major reason why I like conversations so much. But I digress, to my idea:

The study of mental illness is a relatively new field. Although people have always had mental illnesses and so there have always been attempts to cure them, the actual systematic study essentially started with Freud. This is very recent when compared with the systematic study of physical illnesses (eg the basics of recognising infection were set out in Ancient Greece). Interestingly, like the early medicine, clinical psychology is almost entirely symptom based. Theories of underlying causes are mostly absent or pure speculation.

What I mean is that up until the discoveries of bacteria and viruses, many illnesses had been categorised based on symptoms, and risk factors for contracting them had been to some extent identified, but the actual causes such as bacterial infection were not known. This meant there could be no final certainty of diagnosis and was a substantial limitation on research. Currently mental illnesses are in that situation, creating similar difficulties for the science.

Some may argue that there is no psychological equivalent to bacteria, but I would respond that since the concept of bacteria was inconceivable to ancient medicine, it may well be that an equivalent currently inconceivable discovery is yet to be made for clinical psychology. However, arguing that something exists but we just can’t understand it, is a fairly lame argument. (The same criticism could be levelled at most theologies, but that’s an issue I may get back to some other time.) So, I’ll give an example of the sort of thing that may be an underlying cause.

In the final chapter of the book “The Selfish Gene” by Richard Dawkins (a fascinating and very influential book) he coins the concept of “memes“. It’s a little difficult to explain the concept briefly but I’ll do my best.

Genes are self-perpetuating chemical patterns, their forms cause the animal they are part of to exhibit certain physical characteristics and those characteristics have a survival value. Similarly, memes are self-perpetuating mental patterns, their forms cause the person they are part of to exhibit certain mental characteristics which have a survival value. Memes are replicating ideas and can be as mundane as a tune that gets stuck in people’s heads, or as important as a new religion or philosophy that sweeps across the world.

So perhaps certain memes are responsible for mental illness. For example, helplessness and hopelessness are regarded as characteristic of depression. Perhaps an underlying pattern of thinking and ideas, a meme, is responsible for this mental state. Or perhaps several different memes are responsible. What we now know as “depression” may in the future be regarded as a set of distinct illnesses with similar symptoms (in the same way that “falling sickness” in ancient times included a range of disorders that caused fainting or seizures).

This is what I mean be purely symptom based clinical science limiting research. Unless we have some method of certain and objective diagnosis, we may not really know what we are dealing with. Psychopathology is rife with the potential for this. Two examples: the range of different symptoms in schizophrenia may indicate that there are separate illnesses present; the high-co-morbidity of personality disorders may be because they are different expressions of the same illness.

I’m not saying that memes necessarily are the underlying cause of mental illness. I’m giving them as an example to show that an underlying cause is possible. Although psychology usually seems like a fully fledged dicipline, in my opinion it is an area of knowledge still in its infancy and the identification of some objectively verifiable underlying cause for mental illnesses would be one way for it to take its first steps as a mature field of study.

[Note: Wrote this a number of years ago when a few people I knew were using. My attitude today is a little more laid back, but at the time I found the situation frustrating; as you will probably be able to tell.]

“Pedestrian”, it can mean boring, conservative, or concerning the everyday. I guess that’s how I must look to the users, the Human Traffic, flashing past me in their little glitzy, pill-induced, Ferrari-style realities. The film Human Traffic dealt with many of the issues and experiences of those who choose to chemically alter their night-life. But it left out one thing (interestingly enough it’s predecessor Trainspotting did not leave this out), non-user friends.

The non-using friend is put in a difficult position, one they didn’t ask for and have very little control over. Your good friend, someone you’ve known for years, decides to do something illegal, unhealthy, and dangerous. What are you supposed to do?

Inside you an unresolvable battle between two different moralities starts. Both of them come down to the same basic principle; you want to do the right thing by your friend. Any time a friend does something you think is stupid you always have to make a choice between letting them do what they think is right or trying to stop them. In most situations it’s a pretty easy choice. If they’re going to commit suicide, you stop them. If they’re about to go out with the wrong person, you stand by to pick up the pieces.

But what do you do when they start popping E? If you try and stop them they’ll hate you, but if anything happens you’ll hate yourself. The retort from the Human Traffic, as they wizz by, is: “Nothing’s going to go wrong.” Then they spout some statistics (usually got from another user) about how there are no recorded OD’s on E, and how many accidents occur due to alcohol. These people, despite what some may say, are not stupid. They can mount a cogent argument.

The trouble is that there are many dangerous things that you would not stop them from doing: drinking, smoking, getting into a car. With road accident statistics being what they are it’s very difficult to prove that anything is more dangerous than driving. A further complication is that while the statistics they are quoting might be dodgy, yours may be as well. In the past, and thus possibly now, the authorities have falsified, or at least taken the most negative view from, the evidence. It is difficult to accept even a scientific journal article’s findings when there is such a clear anti-drug bias evident in the writing.

Besides all this, arguing with your Human Traffic friend is futile. The saying goes “Win an argument, lose a friend” it’s true, and they still won’t stop using the drugs. The only course of action that will actually make any impact is so extreme that it will almost certainly destroy the friendship, so few are prepared to use it. That is, dobbing them in to the police (their parents will usually be as powerless as you are to stop them so telling them is ineffective).

So, unless you are prepared to destroy the friendship, there is nothing you can do except worry. This worry can gradually turn to resentment and destroy the friendship anyway. Of course long before this happens the effects that the drugs are having on the person may turn them into someone you don’t really like anyway. No wonder Human Traffic didn’t deal with Pedestrian friends, it is unlikely that a user will be able to keep non-using friends. No, that’s going too far. A friendship can be maintained but it takes careful management on both sides, and the relationship is always fragile.

Now even if you are the sort of person who can take the attitude that if there’s nothing you can do there’s no point worrying, there still may be a moral difficulty. There is a significant minority, perhaps even a majority, of people who think that taking drugs is morally wrong. (This objection could be religious or could just stem from the belief that it is wrong to be a criminal no matter how much the law interferes with your enjoyment.)

Normally if a friend is behaving in a way that you have serious moral objections to they don’t stay your friend for long. But you may want to stay their friend. You’ve been friends for years and it is very hard to just throw all that away. Of course this is not the users problem, it’s the non-users problem, it’s their moral objection they should deal with it. And I think this is the point of what I’ve written. All the problems reside with the non-user, while the user blissfully dances the night away. The Human Pedestrian, through no action of their own, is saddled with a worry they can do nothing about and a moral dilemma they cannot resolve.

There is one further thing, the criminal aspect. In this jurisdiction (indeed in most) it is a crime not to report anyone who has been involved in the supply of even a non-commercial amount of drugs. I don’t think there are many users out there who haven’t sold a pill to a friend. Maybe it was for cost price or below but that still counts as supply of a non-commercial amount of drugs. As soon as the Traffic mentions to their Pedestrian friend that they have done this then the friend must choose between turning them in or committing a criminal offence. Of course the chances of actually being convicted of this are zero but I have mentioned above that many have a moral problem with being friends with a criminal, even more have a moral problem with being one.

As well as the moral problem, there are also situations where there may be practical consequences. The police will question those friends who are with the user at the time. And even if the legal consequences are unlikely there are other problems. One example is the career consequences if it is found out that you knew of a work-mate’s habits. There are many possible situations where your friend, just by being a user, puts you in trouble. Or, to put it another way, just by being the person’s friend you put yourself in trouble.

This is what it all comes down to; the difficulty of remaining friends with Traffic. If the Pedestrians try to stop them, they lose a friend, and if they don’t, they will probably lose a friend anyway and have to deal with difficult internal dilemmas while risking serious consequences. The Pedestrian’s disapproval of the drugs doesn’t come from intolerance, they are just desperately trying to stay friends.

So when the Pedestrian, doesn’t like to talk about the drugs, or tries to talk the Traffic out of taking drugs, or just seems upset about the whole situation, it’s not that, as most users claim, they don’t understand the effects of the drugs. On the contrary, they understand one effect of the drug very well: one way or another, chances are, they’re going to lose a good friend.