Yesterday, January 1st 2014, marijuana became legally purchasable for recreational use in Colorado. It’s now basically as legal as alcohol and tobacco, at the state level. There’s a story (can’t find the reference right now, so treat is as apocryphal) of a psychologist in the early 70s, back when homosexuality was considered a mental illness. He treated many gay patients, all of whom were pretty screwed up, and he concurred with the popular opinion that homosexuality had serious negative effects. He himself was gay, but he kept it quiet and figured he was an aberration. As pressure was increased to declassify homosexuality as a mental illness he came out to a few of his colleges, confessing that he must be some strange breed of gay. To his surprise, several of them were gay as well, and had thought the same thing. It soon turned out that actually homosexuality didn’t contribute to deviance – they simply had a very skewed sample. Every gay person that he saw was already fucked up some way, or he wouldn’t be coming in to see a psychologist. He perfectly normal, regular gay folk went unnoticed because they were in the closet, and since the psychologists classified their illness on what they could see they didn’t realize the two were unrelated. Even the gay ones were fooled.
Pot Coming Out Day
Pot Coming Out Day
Pot Coming Out Day
Yesterday, January 1st 2014, marijuana became legally purchasable for recreational use in Colorado. It’s now basically as legal as alcohol and tobacco, at the state level. There’s a story (can’t find the reference right now, so treat is as apocryphal) of a psychologist in the early 70s, back when homosexuality was considered a mental illness. He treated many gay patients, all of whom were pretty screwed up, and he concurred with the popular opinion that homosexuality had serious negative effects. He himself was gay, but he kept it quiet and figured he was an aberration. As pressure was increased to declassify homosexuality as a mental illness he came out to a few of his colleges, confessing that he must be some strange breed of gay. To his surprise, several of them were gay as well, and had thought the same thing. It soon turned out that actually homosexuality didn’t contribute to deviance – they simply had a very skewed sample. Every gay person that he saw was already fucked up some way, or he wouldn’t be coming in to see a psychologist. He perfectly normal, regular gay folk went unnoticed because they were in the closet, and since the psychologists classified their illness on what they could see they didn’t realize the two were unrelated. Even the gay ones were fooled.