I would not conclude that stoners have these atributes because they are stoners, I would say they have them because they result from the same elements in their personality that result in their willingness to use pot. For the sake of ease, though admittedly with some loss to precision, I will refer to two basic personality types, “uptight” and “laid back”. People who have never smoked the pot get along rather well with their parents because they are uptight. People who do smoke pot get along better with their peers and have more active lives because they are “laid back”.

These are gross generalities, but I think they convey the basic idea well. Essentially, if pot smoking were encouraged by society and everyone did it, I don’t think that all the kids would have the personality traits that the stoners do. I think that everyone would be basically the same as they are now because pot use is more indicative, rather than determinative of personality.

While on the surface, sex between teens was discouraged, it was also rampant because of the number of farm animals providing examples for young men and women to emulate. I knew about procreation and death by the time I was five or six years old from watching the barn cats.

Because of the large amount of available, unobserved space, it was easy to get away from busy parents. There was one caveat, though, and I cannot mention this too strongly (it was enforced socially by threat of death, actually in some cases.) If a girl got pregnant, she was married to the father (or a willing substitute who wasn’t worried about the pregnancy) before she exhibited signs.

In a few cases, young women would leave the area and come back four or five months later, but, to tell the truth I don’t remember a case in which anyone I knew did this–it was always marriage.

Pretty good custom, actually. It taught you that sex was necessary for life and lots and lots of fun. It also taught you that you had to take responsibility for your actions. At the time, the known major sexually transmitted diseases were curable by penicillin. The girl in my Nightmoves article and I were fifteen and sixteen when we lost our virginity together.

I also had a buddy who was gay from birth. He was a bit of an outsider, but never in any real physical or mental danger from any of the other students, to the best of my knowledge. By the time we reached HS in the mid/late 60s, he had a bevy of the less-popular girls that went shopping with him.

Tom

I’ve often thought the “isn’t this subject so important that it should be left to parents?” argument is inadequate. The level of importance of a subject is not an argument either way for where something ought to be taught. Some things are really important to know that are taught in school, some are taught at home. The relevant question (and this helps to answer where religion ought to be taught, as well as other sorts of morals/values-based issues) is how personal a particular subject matter is, and to what degree we should let parents impart their values on their children before we want the schools to present some alternative, more socially normalized point of view.

For example, it was rather uncontroversial in my school (and I imagine everybody else’s) to teach that the civil rights movement of the 1960s was a largely good thing, and that racism is a bad thing. We celebrated Martin Luther King Day, we read books like To Kill a Mockingbird, etc. Obviously this point of view will conflict with SOME parents’ personal values. But we teach it anyway b/c an anti-racist perspective is such a socially normalized viewpoint that we want to make it part of the curriculum in the hopes of maintaining a cohesive culture.

I think that the perspective that if you have sex, you should be safe, is on the borderline between what is and is not a socially normalized point of view that we should want to make part of the curriculum. Because it is borderline, and because I can see reasonable arguments that are alternative to mine, I think it makes sense to allow parents to opt their kids out of sex education classes (without having to go to the lengths of home-schooling their kids). But I think enough of society wants their kids to be learning about this stuff, and does not feel equipped to teach about this stuff themselves, that schools should teach it.

I also think any responsible parent would not opt their kids out of those classes, but that’s sort of a separate debate.

Tom

I’d bet on low serotonin for the first three groups as a generality. One of the methods by which low serotonin teenagers used to compensate (smoking cigarettes) has been removed from our society to a large extent. I wonder if this has changed the frequency of employment of the other methods of raising endorphin levels.

Kofi, so help me, I’m going to ask a Dick effin’ Cheney question next week.

To answer your snide question:

1) Programming the means of production and services

2) Repairing the means of production and services

3) Shooting means of production and services that have gone rogue.

Simple enough, really, if one has an imagination. I figure in less than twenty years, they’ll be able to install one in you.

Tom

On your first point, I think you’re right, but I don’t know why that makes the study misleading or manipulative. I wasn’t trying to argue that smoking pot is helpful, only that it isn’t harmful (in these particular ways). The first sentence of the article on the study is, “A study of more than 5,000 youngsters in Switzerland has found those who smoked marijuana do as well or better in some areas as those who don’t, researchers said on Monday.” “As well or better” is not a manipulation of language, just a statement of what the study finds. What’s the big deal?