all things are the same

On November 13th, 1931, a child was born in Seattle. They named him Robert Emerson Landsburg, and that’s really all I know about that.

What I know of his story starts many years later, in early 1980. Landsburg was a photographer living in Portland, Oregon. He spent a few weeks, probably starting in late April, making repeated hikes up the tumultuous Mt. St. Helens and photographing the summit. The mountain had started shifting at the end of March, and everyone wanted to see it for themselves.

I don’t know much about that, either. There were a lot of volcanologists in the area, professionals and scientists, studying the pre-eruptive activity. Maybe he was among them. Maybe he just thought it was interesting. Volcanic gas monitoring - how neat!

On May 18th, 1980, Robert Landsburg was setting up to take another shot of Mt. St. Helens. By 8:30 in the morning, his camera was set up on its tripod, pointed at the peak. At 8:32, the entire north face of the mountain suddenly slid away, exposing molten rock. The resulting burst of lava was so fast, it reached the nearby Spirit Lake before the landslide did. Clouds of ash billowed upwards. Raging hot rocks sped down the mountain face at hundreds of miles per hour, obliterating everything in their path.

Robert Emerson Landsburg was perhaps four miles from the summit that morning. Four miles is nothing in terms of mountains and of volcanoes.

I’m a naturally anxious person. I think a lot about what I might do in a natural disaster. Say I’m a few miles away from an erupting volcano and a half-cubic-mile-wide avalanche. Outcome: not so good.

Robert Landsburg saw the eruption, so he took photos. He was in a brand new situation, one he knew he would not survive, and he decided to preserve it as best he could. It’s impossible to know what was going through his head at that moment, but there is a degree of planning there, of premeditation. What we know is that after he took his final photos, he rewound the film, removed the camera from the tripod, and placed it all into his backpack. His wallet was there, too. His ID.

His face and his name and the camera and the film. He wanted to be identified, and he wanted the photos to be safe. Landsburg laid the backpack down on the ground, and then laid on top of it.

His cause of death is listed as asphyxiation. That makes sense to me. After all, it was the ash cloud coming down on him, not the lava. It layered on him thickly, and I guess at some point he just stopped breathing. He was found seventeen days later, under the soft grey blanket of the new landscape. The film was torn, scratched, bubbled and streaked, but still able to be developed. The ID was there, still able to be identified.

His face and his name and the camera and the film. He was 48 years old at the time of death. His photos were published in the January 1981 edition of National Geographic, a year later.

Robert Emerson Landsburg was buried in the Mount Saint Helens Memorial Grove in Washington. Above his name is the inscription “MOUNTAIN OF MEMORIES” - and, above that, an etching of Mt. St. Helens, surrounded by clouds. That seems appropriate. It’s the thing that killed him, and the thing whose history he decided to preserve with his life.

“Eighty to 90 percent of people who use crack and methamphetamine don’t get addicted,” said Dr. Hart, an associate professor of psychology. “And the small number who do become addicted are nothing like the popular caricatures.”

Dr. Hart recruited addicts by advertising in The Village Voice, offering them a chance to make $950 while smoking crack made from pharmaceutical-grade cocaine. Most of the respondents, like the addicts he knew growing up in Miami, were black men from low-income neighborhoods. To participate, they had to live in a hospital ward for several weeks during the experiment.

At the start of each day, as researchers watched behind a one-way mirror, a nurse would place a certain amount of crack in a pipe — the dose varied daily — and light it. While smoking, the participant was blindfolded so he couldn’t see the size of that day’s dose.

Then, after that sample of crack to start the day, each participant would be offered more opportunities during the day to smoke the same dose of crack. But each time the offer was made, the participants could also opt for a different reward that they could collect when they eventually left the hospital. Sometimes the reward was $5 in cash, and sometimes it was a $5 voucher for merchandise at a store.

When the dose of crack was fairly high, the subject would typically choose to keep smoking crack during the day. But when the dose was smaller, he was more likely to pass it up for the $5 in cash or voucher.

“They didn’t fit the caricature of the drug addict who can’t stop once he gets a taste,” Dr. Hart said. “When they were given an alternative to crack, they made rational economic decisions.”

When methamphetamine replaced crack as the great drug scourge in the United States, Dr. Hart brought meth addicts into his laboratory for similar experiments — and the results showed similarly rational decisions. He also found that when he raised the alternative reward to $20, every single addict, of meth and crack alike, chose the cash. They knew they wouldn’t receive it until the experiment ended weeks later, but they were still willing to pass up an immediate high.

These findings made Dr. Hart rethink what he’d seen growing up, as he relates in his new book, “High Price.” It’s a fascinating combination of memoir and social science: wrenching scenes of deprivation and violence accompanied by calm analysis of historical data and laboratory results. He tells horrifying stories — his mother attacked with a hammer, his father doused with a potful of boiling syrup — but then he looks for the statistically significant trend.

Yes, he notes, some children were abandoned by crack-addicted parents, but many families in his neighborhood were torn apart before crack — including his own. (He was raised largely by his grandmother.) Yes, his cousins became destitute crack addicts living in a shed, but they’d dropped out of school and had been unemployed long before crack came along.

“There seemed to be at least as many — if not more — cases in which illicit drugs played little or no role than were there situations in which their pharmacological effects seemed to matter,” writes Dr. Hart, now 46. Crack and meth may be especially troublesome in some poor neighborhoods and rural areas, but not because the drugs themselves are so potent.

“If you’re living in a poor neighborhood deprived of options, there’s a certain rationality to keep taking a drug that will give you some temporary pleasure,” Dr. Hart said in an interview, arguing that the caricature of enslaved crack addicts comes from a misinterpretation of the famous rat experiments.

“The key factor is the environment, whether you’re talking about humans or rats,” Dr. Hart said. “The rats that keep pressing the lever for cocaine are the ones who are stressed out because they’ve been raised in solitary conditions and have no other options. But when you enrich their environment, and give them access to sweets and let them play with other rats, they stop pressing the lever.”

Drug warriors may be skeptical of his work, but some other scientists are impressed. “Carl’s overall argument is persuasive and driven by the data,” said Craig R. Rush, a psychologist at the University of Kentucky who studies stimulant abuse. “He’s not saying that drug abuse isn’t harmful, but he’s showing that drugs don’t turn people into lunatics. They can stop using drugs when provided with alternative reinforcers.”

A similar assessment comes from Dr. David Nutt, a British expert on drug abuse. “I have a great deal of sympathy with Carl’s views,” said Dr. Nutt, a professor of neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College London. “Addiction always has a social element, and this is magnified in societies with little in the way of work or other ways to find fulfillment.”

So why do we keep focusing so much on specific drugs? One reason is convenience: It’s much simpler for politicians and journalists to focus on the evils of a drug than to grapple with the underlying social problems. But Dr. Hart also puts some of the blame on scientists.

I mean. Not everything is logical, but as an estimation* it’s a better option than the other two.

[Candela

Garnet

Korra

Ahsoka / Sabine

Beyoncé

Gina Rodriguez

my Black + brown friends];

White men and women in colonial times considered brown women - e.g. in India - as inhumanly strong and created entire aesthetics of frailty, purity, and paleness to oppose the image of the laboring Black and brown woman. The concept of the British Woman was formulated directly through the acts of colonization and slavery. And the strengths assigned to especially Black women were done so in order to justify the labor placed on Black women slaves in the Americas and Caribbean and resist empathy.

The colonial - political, legal, medical, social - view of Black and brown/indigenous bodies as having strong physicality is centuries old and continues to be used in opposition to / as a goal for whiteness in modern (post-1900) medicine:

“The most significant proponent of that view was Georges Hébert, who, from the early years of the twentieth century, had asserted the superior physique of dark-skinned colonial subjects whose lives had allegedly remained closer to a natural state. The problem with modern man was that he had lost the physical edge that a simpler, ‘primitive’ life, without the comforts of modernity, would have preserved. His advocacy of exercises such as walking, running, and jumping was founded on the conviction that the uncivilized specimen demonstrated ‘perfect and complete muscular development acquired without method.’”

Remaking the Male Body: Masculinity and the uses of Physical Culture in Interwar and Vichy France by Joan Tumblety

White wlw have a history of taking specifically Black lesbian + other wlwoc terminology, dance, and style while rejecting credit and their presence in lbpq spaces. White wlw prey on and sexualize us in specific ways, fetishizing the violence that we experience as woc and mapping that on our bodies - making us out to be violent and destructive while using old colonial tactics of dehumanization in a way they think will flatter us into submission. Our expression of gender and sexuality is always violent and frightening and alien, and in ways that have historically been tied to transmisogyny in the above examples.