Psychedelics getting research attention

A few years ago, my university sent out a press release announcing that one of its researchers had conducted a study on psilocybin, the hallucinogenic compound in friendly fungi. It was amazing how science-y the press release made the whole endeavor sound, reducing it to a sterile scientific study with few flicks of the wrist. The study explored religious experiences and the effects of psilocybin on long-lasting religious belief. The press release stressed that this study was conducted under the most rigorous scientifically controlled environment, and that its results ought not be duplicated by the casual "dabbler".

In junior high school, we passed around the book "Go Ask Alice," which traumatized me with its horrific descriptions of a young girl's "descent" into drug-addled irresponsibility and eventual death. The book was presented as an actual girl's diary, which revealed the dangers of LSD. I found out in college that it was pure propaganda. Like the Covenant House "books" that came in the mail about runaways and children living in the streets (see the new Maritime Hotel on 9th avenue...which used to be a Covenant House and would freak me out whenever I took the bus past it -- it has portal windows, and I was convinced that bombed out abused and runaway children were hanging themselves in desperation, now it is an expensive hotel, which I simply find unacceptable on so many levels), the early 80s depended on a lot of mass hysteria and invisible threats (such as the word on the street that acid tabs were being handed out to innocent children with cute cartoon characters on the blotters). I recently discovered that my junior high school friend, who teaches in the New York schools, has "Go Ask Alice" available at her school. I am deeply disturbed that this is considered acceptable literature -- at least, without its disclaimer that it's a work of fiction and not a true (and totally ludicrous) story. The narrator dies at the end, even though she's renounced her drugging and sexing ways, because her friend-enemies lace the bowl of popcorn (or nuts or whatever) at the house where she's babysitting.

I tell this nonsequitur seeming story to actually direct your attention to the Alternet article about psychedelics. Although the piece can get a little preachy, the article raises some interesting questions about addiction in American society. In addition, the article points to the vested interests that want to prevent access to and use of psychedelics, even though they may provide important benefits. I once had a student who tried to explore pharmaceutical companies capitalizing on plants and indigenous medicines by re-packaging and distilling the naturally occurring compounds into packaged and processed, and costly, drugs. Though her paper quickly went off the rails, it was an interesting and important question to ask. And the corollary is whether we want to formalize/legalize/sanitize the power of certain compounds that are freely available (or at least, available without the cost of R&D, marketing, litigation and doctors' kickbacks all neatly embedded in the price we pay at the pharmacy). Similarly, the renewed interest in psychedelics concerns me a bit -- pharma is so untrustworthy, and if they can get the FDA to approve dosing everyone, for a solid buck, they will do so happily.

Intellectual fatigue

I realize that I have not offered up much in the way of 1) fieldwork, 2) anthropology, or 3) research, but I am suffering from the malaise of an undirected malcontent.

The usual frustrations with my academic support system continue -- though perhaps they've never been fully articulated here. But more than anything, I'm just tired. That doesn't really seem like a terribly compelling argument to leave academia, but it is awfully tempting. I feel that my methodological approaches to my research are seriously limited, and it's kind of damn late in the game to be doubting foundational bits like methodology.

The main problem with my work is that the topic I'm most interested in -- vaccines -- is designed to be forgotten. Further, it's a one-time (or a few time, given boosters, increased adolescent vaccinations, and the emerging adult vaccination market) event, that's hard to capture in its emphemerality (is that even a word?!). As my advisor pointed out, vaccines have actually radically changed mothers' roles as parents, since the role of nursemaid has been significantly reduced by the fact that many of the more serious childhood illnesses no longer occur (in the U.S., at least). Vaccines have actually altered the types of care mothers have to give their children and demands on mothers' time. So here I am, trying to figure out how to study a thing that exists primarily in its absence.

My primary focus, on the STI that no one knows about, also raises questions of absence. The vaccine created a demand without widespread knowledge about the very thing it purports to protect against. Really, brilliant in terms of marketing -- framing an object that no one even knows they need to be protected against, even though it's incredibly ubiquitous. The virus is something that is very common and can lead to cancer, which in turn can lead to death, but the way in which people are (halfway) learning about it is through the pharmaceutically produced lens.

So in the course of studying one vaccine -- I found lots of absences and disconnects. People didn't know much about it, and what they did seem to know did not reflect any actual knowledge about the virus, only awareness about the vaccine. And now that I'm moving into broader generalities about vaccines, I'm finding it so hard to figure out how to study what is designed to be forgotten.

And, I guess, I'm not even sure if I am comfortable with the rarefied nature of academia. In some ways, I think I'd feel better about working in a field that I don't care terribly about, but at least pays the bills. I'm just not sure that I'm willing to go the full distance with academia. I'm not good at abandoning my whims and fickle nature to the long-haul of academia.

Burn the armchairs

Oh, this is very exciting. There is apparently a movement of Experimental Philosophers who are looking to branch out beyond the theorizing that, in my opinion, hampers the utility of philosophizing. I've only skimmed the page, but the concept is pretty great. Conversely, as we all know, I'm a huge skeptic of compulsive data collection (ie -- Public Health), and I wonder how similarly this project might end up "defending" its legitimacy by over data-fying the world? I have yet to figure out how one treads between the "compulsive" and the "useful," so I suppose I ought not critique them yet.

Similarly, there's apparently a group of Feminist Philosophers, who have a great post asking whether philosophy has a "woman problem". I read the title, snorted, and then noticed that they had included the "snort" as part of their title. Brilliant. Yes, yes, I think Philosophy might have some issues with gender...whether analytic or continental...though the continentalists (somewhat dismissed by the analytics) tend to be a bit more inclusive.

I do love the burning armchair logo, though! Maybe if I were to get a tattoo, that could be my tattoo.

Future fantasy

I know that I have reduced this blog to bitching about the CDC and public healthians, which perhaps I really ought to cut back on -- yet, such fun for me!

Anyway, working with five different people, who all seem to be on their own erratic timetables (sometimes, the turnaround is expected to be in 15 hours, from 5pm to 8am, othertimes, it's impossible to get a single useful feedback from anyone) and who tend to drag their feet right at the moment when we need to get things out the door. It's baffling going from being a self-directed researcher to having an entourage who has to vet everything or on whom I depend to deal with some of the logistics. In other words, nothing seems to get done, everything is handled at the last minute, and receiving documents with four differently colored track changes makes me crazy. Basically, I want to find myself a benefactor, who will encourage all my outlandish social analyses, and who lets me direct the research as appropriate. I wouldn't mind having my own team, if I could actually make demands on their timetables. I'm in such a liminal position with this project, where I was told that I was in charge, but of course, that's not actually true, and it's a bit confusing to me. I'm not sure when being assertive is productive and when it's destructive. And since our conversations happen over the phone, and rarely do we see each other's faces, it's very hard to know how information is being received.

I was not cut out for modern technologized research teams. I was meant to be boss-supreme in a luddite world of face-to-face interactions and people who adhere to deadlines. I am setting myself up, no doubt, for a lifetime of disappointment. I find that amusing...at least, today.

Science, research, and perhaps a form of self-loathing

I have returned to my habit of listening to "Thinking about Science" podcast, while doing boring gym-exercise tasks, and I listened to a great one with Barbara Duden and Silya Samerski. Of course, I tend to think they're great when they say the stuff I've been arguing about for the last 6 years of my education, which isn't very long in the scheme of things, but is always pleasurable when one comes to an idea on one's own (and in spite of mainstream naysayers), only to find that there is actually a whole world of thinkers who concur. At the end of Duden's part of the podcast, which is about the concept of the gene and the ways in which the "gene" means different things in different contexts (see general Science & Technology Studies theory about scientific objects), the interviewer asks her what is the relevance and application of understanding that there's a cultural perception of the gene and a scientific/researcher perspective on the gene, and that these are very radically different ideas. She sighs, and admits that it doesn't really change anything -- it's a bit of an academic exercise. It excites academics, but what difference does it make if the meaning of the world shifts depending on your perspective? This is not actually a radical or particularly academic understanding of things. And yet, we spend a lot of time, we cultural anthropologists or science studies types, parsing out the different meanings and interpretations of things. But it doesn't "get" us anywhere, it seems. The world of researchers and scientists are not particularly interested in hearing why they've designed something with a specific framework in mind that might be interpreted differently in the world at large. And those who engage with the object or technology, don't really care whether it has a different meaning outside their everyday lives.

I jokingly suggested to HL on the phone today that I am an excellent diagnostician (about certain personal affairs), but not so good at the practitioner side of things -- and I suspect that this extends to all aspects of my life.

I read an article in New Science, about the "science of bad boys," which I am not going to bother linking to because why give them traffic -- and also it's an inane article. I hate all the scientific research that grounds understanding of cultural phenomena in evolutionary theory -- and particularly the gendered way it's usually interpreted. The refusal to ground social behaviors in cultural context irritates the hell out of me. A friend who is gay recently has found himself attracted to F to M transsexuals (women who become men, whether physiologically or live their lives as such) and we were discussing some of the challenges he found with dealing with a female physiology -- which I suggested might be partly due to lack of experience with the female form. He suggested that he just wasn't attracted to certain female parts, but I pointed out that even straight boys I've known over the years have learned to become more comfortable with the female anatomy. The idea that one would intrinsically find the messier parts of physical intimacy attractive seems to be a form of this assumption that we're "programmed" to desire or find interesting all aspects of the sex we're attracted to. I guess what I'm trying to say, connecting my gay friend's newish interest in a different form of male to the bad boys' scientifically proven behavior is that none of these things ought to be analyzed devoid of their cultural context.

Was that a terribly long way of saying something simple?

The self-loathing, by the way, is due to the recognition of what Duden admitted, that maybe all this work and theorizing doesn't add up to much. Yet, how does one become a productive practitioner and not just a diagnostician?

Reflections on love

This is a totally un-fieldwork related post, but forgive the momentary lapse in single-mindedness. I seem to be lacking single-mindedness in general. (My father seems to think I'm hopelessly peripatetic and unfocused...it's just that I'm enthusiastic for variety and newness.) In my half-hearted defense, I did once try to teach a class on love, though it was a total failure, since I was inadequately versed in the scope of literatures. I did have a phase where I was very interested in emotions-theory, and I wanted to remove love from the "emotions" literatures....but that's for another post...or not.

There's an interesting post on Jewcy.com (which I read really really rarely) about monogamy and monotheism, and though I could do without the religious overtones, the part I found most interesting about this article was the dangers of becoming overly dependent on whomever you love for the full sustenance of your well-being. The idea that any one person can provide all the support you need seems to mirror the American attachment to the nuclear family: the loss of community that I think we've suffered both from our (ahem, I am guilty guilty guilty) peripatic ways (we spread out across the country, and don't seem to value or prioritize staying close to our families, usually) and our valuing of self-determination (sometimes called "individualism"), which allows us to disconnect or claim we are "choosing" our new lives. It's always seemed unwise to me that one could expect one's romantic partner to provide the full-scope of support, but it does seem to be a slippery slope.

One of my dearest friends is so very good at maintaining our friendship in spite of the ebbs and flows of our love lives. In some ways, this reflection is as much about the way in which one imagines and values friends as it is about navigating emotional monogamy with partners. Really, one would never expect any one friend to be the full bearer of one's emotional needs, so why would we expect it of our spouses/partners/lovers/whatevers? What I'm trying to say...badly...is that this is more of a post on friendship and the priorities we make for our friends. Over a pitcher of good African reinterpretation of a caipiranhas, a friend and I discussed the perversity of the expectations we place on sexual partners versus the expectations that we expect of our friends. And that we expect of our partners to reciprocate -- perhaps a far more damning phenomenon, to expect sexual partners to treasure us as the primary support. There is a logic to it, it's just not clear to me that the logic is constructive or productive.

I've long been a skeptic of the nuclear family structure, though as my friends marry and have children, it starts to seem more appealling since everyone else is busy with babies' and husbands' demands, it's almost a default choice -- or a choice by virtue of a lack of other options. The analogy of monotheism and monogamy was an interesting way to frame the analysis, though, even if it's not quite the angle I'd have chosen. I do think that this has some relevance to thinking about my own research subjects, and the ways in which Americans imagine and expect their homelife to be structured, given that I work with parents and families.

I'm just currently operating on a lazyperson's research schedule. I am getting a bit itchy, however, not working as much as I am used to. It's about time, really, to get back to thinking beyond these superficial (half-edited) posts.

More on others' brilliance

I was reading someone else's website, thanks to Google reader, which allows me to half-heartedly follow blogs I find interesting, and got deeply annoyed at her celebration of the idiotic Bonk. It made me wonder whether I should stop reading this woman's blog altogether.

However, my snarky dislike for poorly written "popular" press is not going to keep the 3 people who read this coming back for more. Instead, I'd like to send you to read an article about James Trussell's call for a shift in contraceptive methods. He argued (and I haven't found the original speech, if such a thing actually exists) that the birth control pill is an "outdated" method, advocating for longer-acting contraceptive methods. Trussell has written some very excellent academic articles on women's bodies and contraceptive methods, and I like it when someone challenges standardized practices when it is clear that the methods we depend on are simply out of habit. So much of medical practice comes from "habit," or "that is what we have done for years," rather than actual benefit/efficacy/efficiency.

A number of women I know have gotten an Intrauterine Device (IUD) -- a method which has been improved (purportedly) in the last ten years or so. One by one, friends have told me about their decision (not all of whom have given birth, which used to be the case, you had to have already had a kid to be allowed to have an IUD). The fascinating thing about the IUD is that they don't entirely understand how/why it works. Another example in medical technology in which lack of frequency of use has probably driven the lack of research surrounding it. It's easy to claim that failure to understand technology is due to the impenetrability of the task at hand, but it seems to me that often the failure is due to lack of motivation (such as economic...we do live in a capitalist-driven health world).

I love Alison Bechdel

In another, unrelated, or tangential, post, I will send you to Alison Bechdel's comic about not reading enough, or the right things. She has a wonderful graphic novel called Fun Home about her father's closeted homosexuality, its effects on their family, and general autobiographical tales. Now I have to go back to half-attentionedly reading the New Yorker, for which I feel guilty if I don't read cover to cover.

Refraining from saying what I really think

I've been scrambling to finalize the project I'm consulting on. As with all projects, I suppose, there's all sorts of 25th hour requests, or changes in expectations at the very last minute. The medical director keeps trying to check in with me, to make sure that the design of the study is "useful" to me for my own work. I obviously can't tell her that it's not going to be useful at all, except in the financial gains department. I really want to say, as I'm designing the interview guide (somewhat lazily, I admit), that I don't think providers are actually all that interesting. Yes, they're important from the implementation side of vaccinations -- they're the medium through which kids get their shots -- but from an anthropological perspective, they tend to be a bit dull. It's gotten old to write about instituational medical practices, and interventions are usually quite old school, steeped in hundreds of years of attitudes about the human body and medical authority (cf...duh, Foucault...Donzelot...Canguillhem...etc.).

I had initially interviewed providers for my own dissertation fieldwork, but it just wasn't compelling. Providers generally tell you that they follow guidelines and criteria. It takes a long time to get to know them and to really follow them around in order to capture the humanness of their practice, and this is just not something that public health methods usually makes time for. Further, most of the people who are overseeing the project I'm working on are trained as doctors, and a few of them even continue to practice. I have to tread awfully lightly in the kinds of comments and observations I am making about providers, given that the head researchers (or should I call them the committee of dissent?) are all members of the very community we're trying to study!

Hmmm, I hadn't thought, before, about how important that piece of information actually is to my own criticisms of the experience of designing this project...there's a little meta here, where my fieldwork is as much the execution of the project as watching the process of trying to execute the project in the first place. In fact, the reason I turned to writing on the blog is that I was getting frustrated with the interview guide and the criticisms I've received. I wanted to try to note the ways in which I feel extremely constrained in being critical of the way the project is going -- since I am dependent on it as a financial support mechanism, but my own intellectual interest has totally been killed by the process of designing this. Sad, but true.

Modernizing the stalker

Sociological Images is a blog that explores media images and advertising very deftly that has posted the YouTube video for a cell phone ad. It's so deeply disturbing, yet worth watching to think about what's considered acceptable behavior with current technology.

Clearly I'm neither posting about fieldwork nor doing any fieldwork. So you'll have to forgive the sending you to some other blog.