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Our lack of brothers and sisters makes it easier to imagine that we are the epitome of creation, and that a chasm separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom. When Charles Darwin indicated that Homo sapiens was just another kind of
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“Sheriff Joe has built a jail that he refers to publicly as his “concentration camp,” and presidential candidates flock here during election campaigns, emerging full of praise. Anslinger said addicts were “lepers” who needed to be “quarantined,” and so Arpaio has built a leper colony for them in the desert.”
― Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs
― Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs
“If your environment is like Rat Park—a safe, happy community with lots of healthy bonds and pleasurable things to do—you will not be especially vulnerable to addiction. If your environment is like the rat cages—where you feel alone, powerless and purposeless—you will be.”
― Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs
― Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs
“they would have worried for my soul. Pronin calls this phenomenon the “illusion of asymmetric insight.” She writes: The conviction that we know others better than they know us—and that we may have insights about them they lack (but not vice versa)—leads us to talk when we would do well to listen and to be less patient than we ought to be when others express the conviction that they are the ones who are being misunderstood or judged unfairly.”
― Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know
― Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know
“The opposite of addiction isn’t sobriety. It’s connection.”
― Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs
― Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs
“Just as when all legal routes to alcohol were cut off, beer disappeared and whisky won, when all legal routes to opiates are cut off, Oxy disappears, and heroin prevails. This isn’t a law of nature, and it isn’t caused by the drug—it is caused by the drug policy we have chosen. After the end of alcohol prohibition, White Lightning vanished—who’s even heard of it now?—and beer went back to being America’s favorite alcoholic drink. There are heroin addicts all across the United States today who would have stayed happily on Oxy if there had been a legal route to it.”
― Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs
― Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs
Alexander’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Alexander’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
1,469 books
|
67 friends
1,213 books
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12 friends
250 books
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10 friends
1,241 books
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184 friends
777 books
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49 friends
126 books
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91 friends
390 books
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24 friends
176 books
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3 friends
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