Me.

Whenever discussion of the declining space program comes up (example story about the Mars program, and another about our suspended shuttle program), it makes me sad because I feel like it's one more piece of our nation's love for science that we're leaving behind. It's a sentiment I heard echoed at a sci-fi convention by the friendly science-loving folk who attended, and I definitely can feel it, too.

At the same time, I hear Gil Scott-Heron in my head whenever people are talking about the billions of dollars we ought to be spending on the space program.



So while I'm sad about the fact that we allegedly SUDDENLY can't afford the space program, realistically we haven't been able to afford it for a long time. Unfortunately, that money is going to get used to pay for war and not for the things I'd like us to be dreaming about instead. With the cost of putting a few physically-perfect highly-educated and well-trained professionals into space, what could we do about AIDS? What could we do about malaria? What could we do about cholera? What could we do about ill-funded schools or food deserts?

Makes me upset when the closing down of the space program is framed as a lack in our ability to dream. It probably is, because it'll probably mean more of our money goes to making war. It probably is about us failing to dream big enough or well enough, but it wouldn't have to be, because I think there are far more important things for us to spend our money on.

It's just sad that we probably won't.

Dear people who believe that Big Pharma is keeping marijuana illegal because they are afraid of its panaceic majesty:

Marijuana seems like it has a lot of health benefits and potential for treatment for lots of things, but it's hardly a replacement for pharmaceutical research. For one thing, if you like having things like studies to back up the medical treatments you use before you use them, universities aren't the only people doing those.

Pharmaceutical companies are no less in need of a critical eye than any other company, but the problem is not the drugs they produce (which go through a lot more testing and refinement to prove relative safety and efficacy than any drug I can buy on the street from someone who grew it in their yard or made it in their house). The problem is having medicine be a for-profit industry at all.

I mean, it's not like "alternative" medicine companies are any less excited to squeeze money out of desperate sick people. At least companies whose claims are regularly evaluated by the FDA have some supervision to curb their more callous and ruthless impulses (which is not to say that they don't have them, because they certainly do--otherwise we'd never have needed the FDA to tell them to do things like stop using antifreeze as sweetener in childrens' medicine).

I just worry more about the companies the ones who want sick people's money just as badly as pharmaceutical companies but don't have to jump through ANY of the regulatory hoops that actual medicine needs to be put through.

I know this is sort of a tangent, but just because pharmaceutical companies are run by brutal and callous assholes who think that other people's sickness should be an opportunity for profit doesn't mean that people selling alternatives to medicine are being hocked by people who are terribly different. Those people just aren't required to prove anything about their drugs, because as long as they don't actually make real claims to safety or efficacy they can sell whatever they want and /imply/ that it's safe and effective.

So it's more than big pharma. It's the entire for-profit medical industry. The naturopaths and the homeopaths and the people who want to twist your spine to cure your diabetes and the people who think you can treat cancer by holding a crystal and standing with one foot in a patch of clover while you rub garlic into the sole of the other foot or whatever the heck are all playing the same game, and it's the game that screws people over.

And yet we have people (probably on both sides of the political divide, but I've encountered them most on the left) who are more suspicious of the people who are legally required to disclose the limitations and side-effects of what they sell than the people who can sell whatever they want as long as they do it in entirely-unregulated supplement circles.

But again. Focusing on "big pharma" as though they're some kind of uniquely evil cabal of kitten-eating reptilians from outer space seems short-sighted to me. As the kids these days put it (or perhaps as they used to put it like twenty years ago, I dunno): Don't hate the player, hate the game. I would add that you can hate the player if you want, but at least try and give the side-eye to the other players, too. It's never just one.

Signed,

A person who treats her illness with science, not conspiracy theories or magic.