Recent quotes:

During the Vietnam War, the U.S. Army Used Drugs to Build Super Soldiers - The Atlantic

“We had the best amphetamines available and they were supplied by the U.S. government,” said Elton Manzione, a member of a long-range reconnaissance platoon (or Lurp). He recalled a description he’d heard from a navy commando, who said that the drugs “gave you a sense of bravado as well as keeping you awake. Every sight and sound was heightened. You were wired into it all and at times you felt really invulnerable.” Soldiers in units infiltrating Laos for a four-day mission received a medical kit that contained, among other items, 12 tablets of Darvon (a mild painkiller), 24 tablets of codeine (an opioid analgesic), and six pills of Dexedrine. Before leaving for a long and demanding expedition, members of special units were also administered steroid injections.

During the Vietnam War, the U.S. Army Used Drugs to Build Super Soldiers - The Atlantic

Since World War II, little research had determined whether amphetamine had a positive impact on soldiers’ performance, yet the American military readily supplied its troops in Vietnam with speed. “Pep pills” were usually distributed to men leaving for long-range reconnaissance missions and ambushes. The standard army instruction (20 milligrams of dextroamphetamine for 48 hours of combat readiness) was rarely followed; doses of amphetamine were issued, as one veteran put it, “like candies,” with no attention given to recommended dose or frequency of administration. In 1971, a report by the House Select Committee on Crime revealed that from 1966 to 1969, the armed forces had used 225 million tablets of stimulants, mostly Dexedrine (dextroamphetamine), an amphetamine derivative that is nearly twice as strong as the Benzedrine used in the Second World War. The annual consumption of Dexedrine per person was 21.1 pills in the navy, 17.5 in the air force, and 13.8 in the army.

Elon Musk, Amid Tesla Furor, Tells of ‘Most Difficult’ Year - The New York Times

He said he had been working up to 120 hours a week recently — echoing the reason he cited in a recent public apology to an analyst whom he had berated. In the interview, Mr. Musk said he had not taken time off of more than a week since 2001, when he was bedridden with malaria. “There were times when I didn’t leave the factory for three or four days — days when I didn’t go outside,” he said. “This has really come at the expense of seeing my kids. And seeing friends.” Mr. Musk stopped talking, seemingly overcome by emotion. He turned 47 on June 28, and he said he spent the full 24 hours of his birthday at work. “All night — no friends, nothing,” he said, struggling to get the words out.

10 SEALs Set to be Separated from the Service for failing Drug Tests; Investigation Underway - USNI News

“We have a zero-tolerance policy for the use of illicit drugs and as such these individuals will be held accountable for their actions. We are confident in our drug testing procedures and will continue to impress on all members of the command that illicit drugs are incompatible with the SEAL ethos and Naval service.” It’s unclear if the incidents are related. The failure of the drug tests has sparked a Naval Special Warfare Command investigation into the circumstances around the failures. Since he took command of Naval Special Warfare Command in 2016, commander Rear Adm. Tim Szymanski has been vocal inside the community that bad behavior would not be tolerated in the SEAL community. In late 2016, East Coast SEALs took an operational pause to address the drug problem in special warfare after several investigations found a spike in usage “I feel like I’m watching our foundation, our culture erode in front of our eyes,” commander of Naval Special Warfare Group 2 Capt. Jamie Sands said in a closed-door meeting as part of the standdown, according to video obtained by CBS.

The ugly rotten roots of the war on drugs..

I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. “You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

Ketamine's New Shot as a Depression Treatment

Charney, who’d gone on to work for the National Institutes of Health, initiated a replica study with 17 patients. “This was a population that had failed on average six different antidepressants, and some had also failed electroconvulsive therapy, which is generally regarded as a treatment of last resort,” says Husseini Manji, one of Charney’s co-authors, who’s now the global head of neuroscience for Janssen Research & Development, a Johnson & Johnson company. Within a day of getting one ketamine infusion, 70 percent of the subjects went into remission. Since then, scientists at institutions including Yale, Mount Sinai Hospital, and Baylor College of Medicine have performed dozens more studies that corroborate the findings. Additional studies show that ketamine works by producing long-lasting changes in the brain, reversing neural damage caused by stress and depression and potentially decreasing inflammation and cortisol levels.

Environment programs our behavior:: to change the behavior, change the environmental cues

"Once a behavior had been repeated a lot, especially if the person does it in the same setting, you can successfully change what people want to do. But if they've done it enough, their behavior doesn't follow their intentions," Neal explains. Neal says this has to do with the way that our physical environments come to shape our behavior. "People, when they perform a behavior a lot — especially in the same environment, same sort of physical setting — outsource the control of the behavior to the environment," Neal says. […] consider what happens when you perform a very basic everyday behavior like getting into a car. "Of course on one level, that seems like the simplest task possible," Neal says, "but if you break it down, there's really a myriad set of complex actions that are performed in sequence to do that." You use a certain motion to put your key in the lock, and then physically manipulate your body to get into the seat. There is another set of motions to insert the key in the ignition. "All of this is actually very complicated and someone who had never driven a car before would have no ability to do that, but it becomes second nature to us," Neal points out. "[It's] so automatic that we can do it while we are conducting complex other tasks, like having conversations." Throughout the process, you haven't thought for a second about what you are doing, you are just responding to the different parts of the car in the sequence you've learned. "And very much of our day goes off in this way," Wood says. "About 45 percent of what people do every day is in the same environment and is repeated." […] In this way, Neal says, our environments come to unconsciously direct our behavior. Even behaviors that we don't want, like smoking. "For a smoker, the view of the entrance to their office building — which is a place that they go to smoke all the time — becomes a powerful mental cue to go and perform that behavior," Neal says.
During Burrage's initial walk through the complex, she spoke through the microphone to the police officers, frustrated that she didn't recognize anybody in the parking lot. "Nobody," she muttered. "I'm gonna knock on this person's door." Morgan greeted her inside. "What's up?" he said enthusiastically. "Have a seat!" Burrage explained she couldn't stay and asked Morgan where she could score drugs. She said she was working as a middle-man for another buyer interested in the Duke Manor market. Morgan couldn't suggest anyone in the complex that would sell to Burrage. But he admitted he had his own small stash. "I just keep it around the house," he said. "I'll show you what it look like." Inside his bedroom, Morgan showed Burrage drugs that aren't very distinguishable on the video. Morgan had been drinking that day and suggested that Burrage get high with him. She wasn't interested. "I'm not trying to get in trouble," she said, leaving. "Sorry about that, guys," she told the police officers through the microphone as she walked across the parking lot. When she returned to the police truck, she explained Morgan was not a dealer; nonetheless, police sent her back out to score drugs from him. Upon her arrival, Morgan suggested that she buy drugs from someone living on the floor above him. Burrage went upstairs, but the man at that apartment had no drugs to sell her. Burrage returned to Morgan's place. There is no footage of a drug transaction on the video. But when she reunited with the police officers, they searched her and found a bag of crack; she didn't have the $20 they had given her. An SBI analyst later determined that the crack amounted to one-tenth of a gram.