Not just in USA. For folks with AD(H)D it's being prescribed to it is, however, barely useful for "having a good time" (unless you count having some kind of predictability on how you focus on tasks to be "a good time", which I guess works for its literal meaning).
During World War One, the government provided cigarettes to soldiers to help ease boredom and reduce stress. Prior to the war, less than 0.5% of American people regularly consumed cigarettes. By the war’s end, approximately 14 million cigarettes were distributed daily.
According to Lukasz Kamienski, a political science professor at the Institute of American Studies and Polish Diaspora, and author of Shooting Up: A Short History of Drugs and War, cocaine also became a drug of abuse on the frontlines. People turned to the drug to boost energy, combat fatigue, and reduce wartime anxiety. It gained popularity when the British army created a drug known as “Forced March,” a combination of cocaine and a cola nut extract. People then began to self-prescribe the drug as a wartime aid.
Many of the soldiers’ wives and girlfriends sent packages of cocaine and heroin purchased from London pharmacists labeled as “useful presents for friends at the front” or sometimes “welcome presents for friends at the front.”
Unless there is hot war with mass death, it's not "world war", despite fantasies to the contrary. It's game theory and diplomacy and sanctions and propaganda and other psychological operations.
Couldn't be further from the truth. War today is fought with currency devaluations (currency wars), financial warfare, cyberwarfare, psychological warfare (propaganda, see the Western media reports on the well-funded Ukrainan and Russian propaganda operations), and more. Most people see war as purely kinetic war, i.e. bombs, but that is far too expensive politically and in terms of lives, and has become a small percentage of wars fought.
Governments today are explicitly endorsing what I'm saying above. The U.S. Los Alamos lab has been wargaming financial warfare for decades, for example.
Yes, that's a/the Cold War. I don't think anyone would deny that the Cold War is continuing, it's just that no one has ever called it WW III, since the terms "WW I" & "WW II" have always explicitly referred to hot wars
It’s an economic war. People die, it’s just that they die of other reasons instead of bullets, and the military isn’t involved much.
It’s much more cost effective to spend some money in helping an incompetent populist become president of a country than it is to invade said country. If you play your cards right, he’ll polarize the civilians so much that they will attack each other (Brazil has an election this week, let’s see how that goes)
It’s also a class war. When your infant mortality rate is increasing but your “too big to fail” companies are getting billions in bailouts, that is an act of war from the rich. It’s just undercover.
There's nothing wrong with anything you are saying but it still doesn't make it WWIII. The tactics you describe have been continuously used for centuries.
Colonialism has been done for millennia, although Europeans "mainstreamed" it in the 18th century.
Neocolonialism (where you don't physically invade a country by using the military, but economic means like forcing them to agree to disadvantageous deals) is a more recent development. This video goes into more detail about that:
The difference in compensation for supervisory and non-supervisory workers (related with their productivity) is huge today, but it was not that big in the 1970s. That is a recent event.
Not just SCP lore, cognito hazards exist within this world too, but it's heretical to label them as such (it doesn't take much thought to reason why). I'm writing this with There Is No Antimemetics Division on my desk.
Wow, this guy is proposing the use of neurotoxins and biological weapons in warfare. Not to affect populations but to alter the thinking of specific individuals (for enhancing soldiers or degrading enemy soldiers, diplomats, and politicians). A lot of what he talks about is vague and no where near realization (nanorobots to alter biology as a weapon, an FMRI helmet worn by soldiers). This seems like an incredible provocation to Russia and China to develop new chemical and biologic weapons. He also seems to think that crypto millionaires are financing this kind of biohacking and chemhacking for terrorism purposes. He suggests that some of these things should not be used, but that some should be assessed for use as weapons. He names a few DARPA programs along these lines that might be considered "dual use".
We had a good one called the geneva protocol that covers stuff like chemical and biological toxins [0]. I vaguely remember Saddam Hussein being accused of using a nerve agent called VX years back and it being a big deal.
> [The book shows] how the entire Nazi regime was permeated with drugs - cocaine, heroin, morphine and methamphetamines, the last of these crucial to troops' resilience and partly explaining German victory in 1940.
> [The author] is explicit that drugs cannot explain Third Reich ideology, but their promiscuous use impaired and confused decision-making, with drastic effects on Hitler and his entourage, who, as the war turned against Germany, took refuge in ever more poorly understood cocktails of stimulants.
49 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 106 ms ] threadThey did not work as well as initially hoped.
During World War One, the government provided cigarettes to soldiers to help ease boredom and reduce stress. Prior to the war, less than 0.5% of American people regularly consumed cigarettes. By the war’s end, approximately 14 million cigarettes were distributed daily.
According to Lukasz Kamienski, a political science professor at the Institute of American Studies and Polish Diaspora, and author of Shooting Up: A Short History of Drugs and War, cocaine also became a drug of abuse on the frontlines. People turned to the drug to boost energy, combat fatigue, and reduce wartime anxiety. It gained popularity when the British army created a drug known as “Forced March,” a combination of cocaine and a cola nut extract. People then began to self-prescribe the drug as a wartime aid.
Many of the soldiers’ wives and girlfriends sent packages of cocaine and heroin purchased from London pharmacists labeled as “useful presents for friends at the front” or sometimes “welcome presents for friends at the front.”
https://recovery.org/addiction/wartime/
Governments today are explicitly endorsing what I'm saying above. The U.S. Los Alamos lab has been wargaming financial warfare for decades, for example.
Countries have "fought" each other using various non-kinetic means for millennia. We are not in WWIII.
It’s much more cost effective to spend some money in helping an incompetent populist become president of a country than it is to invade said country. If you play your cards right, he’ll polarize the civilians so much that they will attack each other (Brazil has an election this week, let’s see how that goes)
It’s also a class war. When your infant mortality rate is increasing but your “too big to fail” companies are getting billions in bailouts, that is an act of war from the rich. It’s just undercover.
Colonialism has been done for millennia, although Europeans "mainstreamed" it in the 18th century.
Neocolonialism (where you don't physically invade a country by using the military, but economic means like forcing them to agree to disadvantageous deals) is a more recent development. This video goes into more detail about that:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35Ax-psPZ1g
The difference in compensation for supervisory and non-supervisory workers (related with their productivity) is huge today, but it was not that big in the 1970s. That is a recent event.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2019/02/25/race-sha...
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Protocol
> Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany - Norman Ohler
> [The book shows] how the entire Nazi regime was permeated with drugs - cocaine, heroin, morphine and methamphetamines, the last of these crucial to troops' resilience and partly explaining German victory in 1940.
> [The author] is explicit that drugs cannot explain Third Reich ideology, but their promiscuous use impaired and confused decision-making, with drastic effects on Hitler and his entourage, who, as the war turned against Germany, took refuge in ever more poorly understood cocktails of stimulants.
https://warontherocks.com/2022/04/new-tech-new-concepts-chin...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Terrain_System
which was being promoted around the same time.
"The Mind Has No Firewall"
Timothy L. Thomas
Digital Object Identifier (DOI) 10.55540/0031-1723.1871
Recommended Citation:
Timothy L. Thomas, "The Mind Has No Firewall," Parameters 28, no. 1 (1998), doi:10.55540/0031-1723.1871.
https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol28/iss1/12/