Wow, will wonders never cease; Mark Morford has an interesting little "compare and contrast" piece in today's SFGate in which he looks at the evils of the pharmaceutical industry by comparing a legal drug, Lyrica, recently approved to "treat" (for some measure of treatment) fibromylagia (even though no one understands its etiology), against the resistance to using MDMA to treat conditions like PTSD because, well, MDMA is fun and nobody owns a patent on it, and therefore can't make any real money off it (I'm not sure this is entirely true, as Sandoz originally formulated MDMA back in the early 20th Century, but had not idea what it was good for - we owe a huge debt to Alexander Shulgin for figuring that one out).
The thing that makes this so remarkable is that, after the great anti-Ecstasy and rave hysteria of the early 2Ks, almost nobody was willing to come out and say that they thought Ecstasy was a good thing, and, in fact, I sorta blame the anti-Ecstasy forces for helping the growth of meth and cocaine use among clubbers. But you know, as sloppy and messy as it gets sometimes when you're around a bunch of rolling Marina chicks, I'll take those old days at 550 Barneveld, with everybody rolling their asses off, over the coked-out little scenes that are going on every Friday and Saturday night these days. Bring back the E, maybe it will help shift the attitude of this city in a direction that has less to do with money and fame, and bring back a little of that empathetic positivity.
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