Paul Erdős & Drugs

In keeping with my insistence for striving to maintain balanced viewpoint expressions on the PEB web site, I offer this "PEB Opinion" page as a counter to some of the anti - drug rhetoric found in my commentary essay, "Discotheques, Drugs, & The American Dream", as well as in the the proposed anti - drug & anti - suicide PEB stage production.

It is my opinion that the hallucinogenic drug LSD did indeed hold back the progress of the American peace movement of the 1960s. The permanence and the effectiveness of the entire youth culture was impacted by the synthetic drugs that became available during the late 1960s. Thanks to the socially - negative effects of synthesized drugs, countless hours of protests went to waste, and some lives were forever lost, all in the name of the peace cause, and that is a tragic paradox indeed.

Similarly, we today find ourselves as a society at war with synthetic drugs. Meth amphetamines are among the most difficult of drugs to comprehend and apply correctly on a societal level. Let's not fuel large - organization style crime and endless increases in for - profit prison systems; America needs to call a ceasefire in the Twenty - Three year old "War On Drugs".


	The below excerpt from the Wikipedia biography entry for Mathematician Paul Erdos speaks volumes about the reality of substance abuse, and the far end of the spectrum which we, as a society, could reach, were we to properly apply the correct resources - such as education - in the correct amounts and at the correct times for each citizen in our society.

	"...As his colleague Alfréd Rényi said, "a mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems", and Erdős drank copious quantities. (This quote is often attributed to Erdős, but does seem to originate with Rényi.) ^[3] After 1971 he also took amphetamines, despite the concern of his friends, one of whom (Ron Graham) bet him $500 that he could not stop taking the drug for a month. Erdős won the bet, but complained that mathematics had been set back by a month: "Before, when I looked at a piece of blank paper my mind was filled with ideas. Now all I see is a blank piece of paper." The bet won, he promptly resumed his amphetamine habit."
	In keeping with my insistence for striving to maintain balanced viewpoint expressions on the PEB web site, I offer this "PEB Opinion" page as a counter to some of the anti - drug rhetoric found in my commentary essay, "Discotheques, Drugs, & The American Dream", as well as in the the proposed anti - drug & anti - suicide PEB stage production. It is my opinion that the hallucinogenic drug LSD did indeed hold back the progress of the American peace movement of the 1960s. The permanence and the effectiveness of the entire youth culture was impacted by the synthetic drugs that became available during the late 1960s. Thanks to the socially - negative effects of synthesized drugs, countless hours of protests went to waste, and some lives were forever lost, all in the name of the peace cause, and that is a tragic paradox indeed. Similarly, we today find ourselves as a society at war with synthetic drugs. Meth amphetamines are among the most difficult of drugs to comprehend and apply correctly on a societal level. Let's not fuel large - organization style crime and endless increases in for - profit prison systems; America needs to call a ceasefire in the Twenty - Three year old "War On Drugs".