Interesting fellow. Performing human experimentation on himself with a substance he did not understand. Ended up in a Sanatorium. Clever that.
Halsted, together with his students and fellow physicians, began to experiment with cocaine. They injected each other's nerves and showed that cocaine when injected into a nerve can produce safe and effective local anesthesia. Halsted became addicted, and was eventually sent to Butler Sanatorium in Providence, Rhode Island.
"Unaware of the insidious ease and rapidity of cocaine addiction and it's disastrous effects the group used the drug freely and sometimes indiscriminately. "
"By the time the evil effects of cocaine - severe mental and physical deterioration - were generally recognized, Halstead and several colleagues had become addicted. "
The articles go on to detail his battles with addiction, (For some reason he thought it was a bad thing.) and appears to support my argument more than yours. Obviously the man was a Doctor BEFORE he started experimenting with Cocaine, and one wonders what the probability would have been for him to become a Doctor had he experimented with Cocaine prior to becoming one. An example of his writing after addiction, (contained in the article) would indicate to me that he would have failed in such a case.
TallDave wrote:
Drugs don't make you stupid. Using drugs is often a stupid choice,
I think I should disagree with this statement. I count a choice as stupid if a person knows beforehand what the consequences are likely to be, and then makes the choice anyway.
TallDave wrote:
and stupid people often use drugs, but that's no reason to think drug use reduces intelligence, and even less reason to think making drugs illegal will help them (your own data point certainly seems to indicate otherwise)
It wasn't originally intended as a "Data Point." It's original purpose was to irk MSimon et al, just to poke a bit of fun at them.
It has transformed into a "Data Point", because it is now being referred to that way. My original intent was to occasionally put in other examples of drug addled idiocy, (which I expect to occur in the current news that I read) mostly for a laugh.
I suppose if my stupid Bank Robber is to be a data point, then William S Burroughs (Shot his wife in the head while drunk.) and Steward Halstad, (discovered his pleasure button through experimentation with cocaine) can also be data points. So we now have 3.
TallDave wrote:
-- in fact, drugs' illegality may cause up to 90% of the problems addicts experience.
It's a lot easier to function when the thing you really, really, really need isn't overpriced by a factor of 100,000 and doesn't require criminal acts to obtain.
We are talking about Plant toxins evolved to kill or disorient you by manipulating your endocrinal system as being something you "really, really, really, need"?
Isn't alcohol the waste product of bacteria metabolism?
I'm having difficulty understanding how we could "really, really, really need something that is foreign and malicious to our metabolism.