Naturalism.org

Marijuana and Teens

Recent surveys, both in Canada and the US, have documented a dramatic rise in marijuana use among adolescents since 1992. This increase has caused much official consternation, and after four years of relative silence on the issue the Clinton administration is mounting a new, 195 million dollar media campaign against drugs, with adolescent marijuana use a major focus.

Neural Materialism

Ordinarily, we don’t suppose that people are to blame for their illnesses. That is, prior to discovery, many diseases develop independently of what the sick person does or thinks. This is why the disease model of addiction, widely espoused in the therapeutic community, is so controversial. Commonsense suggests that a person’s choice to start using an addictive substance is often voluntary, and often made with the knowledge, either vague or specific, of the risks of getting hooked.

I

Introduction: the need for secular justifications

To truly explain consciousness, we must find a convincing place for it in the natural world and ultimately in the scientific description of that world as expressed in physical, biological, and information theory. The default assumption when undertaking an explanation of consciousness should be that there is nothing ontologically special about it, nothing which sets it apart from the rest of nature as we presently conceive it.