Love this ‘evolution of addiction’ illustration! Designed by Benjamin Ritter for our mag story on whip-its:

Addictions to thrills, drugs, and alcohol result from an imperfect compromise between something very old (dating back hundreds of millions of years, long before humans existed) and something new (dating back no more than a few hundred thousand years, an eye blink in evolution).

What’s old is our reflexive systems. For most of human prehistory, short-term thinking was practically the only thing that mattered: Predator or prey? Fight or flee? Early hominids that made snap decisions like that effectively survived; those that didn’t perished.

Much newer is a different system, one that deliberates and reflects. The trouble is that reflexive systems, because they are older, tend to dominate. If we see a chocolate cake, we eat it, no matter what we might have said at New Year’s about dieting.

[Newsweek]

Today in awesome vintage Newsweek covers that need to be posted just because, c/o cleaning out my email: LSD. May 6, 1966. The horror!

For more vintage newsmagazine hilarity (and seriousness), follow our sistertumblr, nwkarchivist.

Andrew Sullivan explores:

If you believe, as I do, that we are at root children of God, trapped, as Pascal put it, between being angels and beasts, then there will be moments in our lives when we are closer to being angels and closer to being beasts. In my view, our beastliness, as it were, is a function of our contingency as evolving primates, having to tackle a terrifying world of death, disease, war, hatred, and fear with intelligence and self-control and self-defense. This is the world of the first half of Hobbes’ Leviathan.

But we are also more than that, as Jesus taught us. We are children of God. Our alienation is because something deep within us yearns to come home, a home we do not remember, but we know exists. What psilocybin seems to do is remove the veil from seeing and accepting this wondrous, difficult truth. It does not add something to our consciousness that isn’t already there. It simply calms the noise around it so we can hear what is already within us. Hence the parallels between brains in deep meditation and brains on psilocybin.

Go on…

As a general anesthetic, propofol acts on the brain’s GABA receptors, which cause inhibitory neurons—those that quiet other circuits—to fire; that’s how it induces unconsciousness. Propofol also increases levels of the feel-good neurotransmitter dopamine, triggering a sense of reward not unlike sex or cocaine. Some patients experience euphoria, sexual disinhibition, and even hallucinations, followed by a feeling of calm and an upbeat mood. Since propofol is so widely used—it revolutionized ambulatory anesthesia, allowing a physician to knock someone out in seconds to perform, say, a colonoscopy, and have them up and about after only 10 minutes—scientists have had no shortage of subjects able to describe the experience. About one third don’t remember a thing, and another third say they dreamed, but don’t recall specifics. The rest experience “vivid, strange dreams, sometimes of a sexual nature.

 Sharon Begley, describing the effects of Propofol in “The High That Killed the King of Pop” for Newsweek.

Depressing this isn’t the least bit surprising. 

(Source: joshsternberg, via capitalnewyork)

The majority opinion acknowledged that the decision dealt an “unfortunate hand” that “makes little sense” to those who were harmed by generic drugs and are unable to sue the drug makers.

Really makes you feel warm and cuddly inside when the Supreme Court acknowledges their ruling that benefits generic drug manufacturers and screws the harmed consumer “makes little sense.”

I mean, perhaps we should just declare this “Marijuana Monday.” But really, check out these designs from Mother New York and Pentagram in our High Concept gallery—and then let’s all wonder why we aren’t in this business already.

Think you can do it better? Show us: nwktumblr@gmail.com.

kryanjones:

“In 1980, I was at a pool party and this guy dropped a vial of coke. It broke and the coke started dissolving in the water around the pool. The guy started crying. It was hilarious!”

Thanks, Dr. Rosenberg!

Are you sure Dr. Rosenberg wasn’t a 1980s newsmagazine editor? Cause, man. The stories we’ve heard.