WAY OFF:Re: Urban Legend (one more reason to be paranoid)

[M Holmes]

Max Wilcox writes:

>         File this story with the "they always put strychnine in LSD

Tell me about it. The UK Mensa magazine has just run two drugs articles.
One is modelled after the standard Student Handbook style of "This is
the drug, this is what it does. This is what's bad."

Except of course it's riddled with various innacuracies such as
strychnine in LSD and people jumping out of windows because they believe
they can fly.

Worse still there's a second drugs article in the same issue. It'd be
hilarious if it wasn't so pathetic. It's quite clearly written by
someone who abhors drugs and has never taken any (well bar chocolate,
nicotine, alcohol and caffeine possibly). It amounts to an almost
juniour high school essay of someone trying to work out why all these
naughty people take drugs. They speculate that after one dose the drugs
begin to affect the reasoning abilities of the user in such a way as to
prevent them calculating that it would be a bad idea to take them again.
The of course the "vicious spiral" continues. It's startlingly obvious
that it's never occurred to them that people might do this because it's
fun.

I'd be tempted to write an article to throw a little light to these
benighted heathens but sometimes ignorance is so pervasive that it's
just too disheartening to try. Given the number of articles on the
paranormal in this magazine, it looks rather likely that this is one
such place.

Just goes to show that intelligence doesn't necessarily abolish ignorance.

FoFP