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A blog dedicated to my thoughts and musical discoveries that I wish to spread to positively influence my section of space in our universe.
Monday, May 30, 2011
Saturday, May 28, 2011
Culture for Dollars, Part 2: The Pharmaceutical Industry
The drugs we take are manufactured to relieve symptoms, not cure or solve underlying causes. To increase profits, drug manufacturers engineer drugs to create habitual usage which can lead to dependency. If the true intentions of pharmaceutical companies was to help us, they would create drugs that only need be taken a few times, or even once, to cure the cause of illness. The absurdly long lists of side effects that accompany most drug commercials are also of great concern. A causal chain of side effects keeps drug users in a perpetual state of ingesting new compounds to relieve new side effects. A great example of this causal relationship can be seen with the advent of morphine as a "cure" for opium and alcohol addiction. Alcoholics and opium addicts subsequently became dependent on morphine. Heroin was then isolated from morphine, which was regarded as a "safe" cure for morphine addiction. Users then became addicted to heroin, and in response, Rx companies synthesized methadone which is still widely used today. In many cases, those taking methadone for heroin addiction become addicted to the synthetic opioid due to the physical dependency it causes. One can only assume a "cure" for methadone addiction will soon be synthesized.
This causal relationship is also related to our food industry. Unhealthy food is what is subsidized by our government because it is what creates cheap food, aka fast food, which is consumed by a majority of our country. Detrimental effects to our health as a result of highly processed food creates a need to purchase health supplements and other drugs created by pharmaceutical companies; a chain of profit is thus established. If the food that was made cheap and convenient for Americans was healthy, various health issues would be avoided altogether and buying drugs to combat the defects would no longer be relevant. Examples of these medications include cholesterol-lowering drugs such as Mevacor, Lipitor, Zocor, Pravachol, Lescol, and Crestor; all six of which are simple variations of the first drug and accomplish the same tasks. This points out another issue with Rx companies: do they create new drugs to be innovative and help the masses, or to make more money? One must question the true intentions of the pharmaceutical industry and the drugs they synthesize.
Read more:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2004/jul/15/the-truth-about-the-drug-companies/
http://www.freakonomics.com/2008/01/24/what-dont-we-know-about-the-pharmaceutical-industry-a-freakonomics-quorum/
Friday, May 27, 2011
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Suggested Reading: Daniel Pinchbeck
Daniel Pinchbeck - Breaking Open the Head
Open City editor Pinchbeck's book debut is a polemic that picks up the threads that Huxley's The Doors of Perception, Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters and counterculture idealism left in the culture. Charting his gradual transformation from a cynical New York litterateur to psychedelic acolyte, Pinchbeck uses elements of travelogue, memoir, "entheobotany" ("the study of god-containing plants") and historical research to ask why these "doorways of the mind" have been unceremoniously sealed, sharing Walter Benjamin's melancholy about the exasperating nature of consumerism: "We live in a culture where everything tastes good but nothing satisfies." Pinchbeck travels the earth in search of spiritual awakening through tripping, from Gabon to the Nevada desert. At happenings like the Burning Man festival or a plant conference in the Ecuadorean jungle, Pinchbeck meets "modern shamans" and tells their stories as they intersect with his. In his reporting, he manages to walk a difficult tonal tightrope, balancing his skepticism with a desire to be transformed. He thoughtfully surveys the literature about psychedelic drugs, but the most exhilarating and illuminating sections are the descriptions of drug taking: he calls this visiting the "spirit world," which is "like a cosmic bureaucracy employing its own PR department, its own off-kilter sense of dream-logic and humor... constantly playing with human limitations, dangling possibilities before our puny grasps at knowledge." There's little new drug lore here, but Pinchbeck's earnest, engaged and winning manner carry the book.
Related videos:
Culture for Dollars, Part 1: The Music Industry
A trend in our society today seems to revolve around sacrificing culture for the sake of increasing profits. This is not an isolated event; the music industry, agriculture/food industry, the movie industry, and many other sectors have been affected. During my lifetime, I have personally witnessed the downfall of the music industry. Mainstream music, in my opinion, has progressively lost any shred of musical innovation over the last few decades. If you need specific examples, turn on the radio. It is just disgusting that this is what is deemed "popular" and shoved down the throats of the masses. Most mainstream music is created purely for the purpose of making money and lacks artistic value, lyrically and musically. This is due to the music companies' choice to spend less money to create the music, as to increase profit. In many cases, record labels will simply "remix" an already popular song; allowing them to make more money without actually creating something new.
The way the music industry is structured gives record labels a majority of the profits made by the artists under their name. If music-buyers knew the money they were spending would go directly to the artist (see Radiohead), they would more likely purchase the albums rather than download them for free illegally. I believe this, increasingly lower quality mainstream music, and the availability of online file-sharing services/sites have led to the downfall of the music industry; as indicated by music sales cutting in half since 1999. It's only going to get worse from here if music doesn't return to its state as a pure art form, untouched by greedy businessmen.
Read more:
http://money.cnn.com/2010/02/02/news/companies/napster_music_industry/
http://www.asuherald.com/opinion/mainstream-music-lacks-soul-1.2381202
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
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