alt Hacker NewsI think a lot of the negative reception to negative anecdotes were because they were often in the context of legalization. "I know someone who went crazy after trying $foo so we should still lock people into iron cages just for the crime of possessing it." Debate tends to get polarized when doors are being kicked down. Academic studies that are disconnected from culture wars don't tend to provoke such responses, probably because they don't tend to reach the general public in the first place.
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Which is a terrible strategy actually. People did the same with marijuana. “Dude it’s medicine lol. Dude it can’t possibly contribute to schizophrenia. Dude weed lmao.”
All this does is create a credible argument that the pro legalization crowd are objectively lying to people and therefore untrustworthy.
> because they were often in the context of legalization. "I know someone who went crazy after trying $foo so we should still lock people into iron cages just for the crime of possessing it."
I think that’s what people thought when reading negative anecdotes, but I definitely didn’t see a lot of suggestions that we lock people up.
The same thing happened for marijuana: Any mention of negative effects would bring downvotes, scorn, and disbelief pre-legalization. Then once it was legal it became acceptable to say that marijuana wasn’t a panacea and using a lot of it was actually a problem.
Before this change, it was common to read highly upvoted anecdotes here and on Reddit claiming everything from medicinal properties to fixing depression to improving driving skills (an actual claim I saw here and on Reddit multiple times). Now it’s widely acceptable that frequent marijuana use is not good for mental health and wellbeing, but that was once a thing you could not say on the internet.