That I will go it would be great. I'd love I'm with you. I'm with you on that Are you what are you drawing today, Lin? Oh? I'm I'm doing yeah, that's good question This is the main story twitch is the main yeah, okay. Yeah, that's all right. It's a very simple Yeah, it's a very simple silly little drawing. All right. Yeah, I Didn't know if you were gonna flip to one of the top stories or not No, you know, I just I decided to do something just very colorful and fun Yeah, kind of literal and you know, all right. I like it. Can't wait to see it. Yeah, it should be fun Because you're wondering like what are you doing? You said you're not doing anything usually no No, I was actually just wondering which one I'm like well, that's not straightforward. Yeah, that's not I mean, that's not a fun one, but you know, it's it's I've never done anything for twitch And so I figured just do something silly. It's a very colorful. You'll see it. It's very colorful and and fun Cheer by the can I cheer with bits you can cheer with bits. Yes Cheer with the bits wait Jen we can't hear you suddenly. Oh, I saw you saying something Okay, good. Oh, I don't think we've been ignoring you. No, no, I hadn't said much. Don't worry No, the the the creative section of twitch is actually interesting Like sometimes when I'm working I'll put on a live stream of either what Adobe showing off or someone doodling I think yeah, I think this is um, I think this is an interesting thing for them to do Is that what they did with Bob Ross? From my twitch channel and Power Rangers they did that whole Power Rangers marathon that I watched way too much Didn't they do Julia Childs too? Yes, that was how they launched the food section. Yeah. Yeah And the only thing I ever was interested in the food portion was You never got Martin Yan if Yan came Great It was actually funny when he first started out you make all sorts of jokes Like oh, you want to show you how to make an ancient Chinese cabbage roll He takes a head of cabbage and he rolls it off the top Allerious Yan can cook and we can talk. Hey, there we go. I'm gonna hide you guys ready. Yeah We go Daily Tech news show is powered by you to find out more head to Daily Tech news show comm slash support This is the Daily Tech news for Friday, April 21st 2017. I'm Tom Merritt joining me today is Jen Cutter Good to have you back on the show Jen. Oh, it's a pleasure. Please pardon my lovely background here Oh, yeah, if you're watching on the video, she has a lovely binary blanket early early vintage Yep, lots of construction's going on some renovations and then I will get to show off my new space and shoot new videos Forever and it's finally gonna happen Looking forward to that Len Peralta alongside as well to illustrate the show.  Yes Yeah, I'm actually I'm waiting for it to fall and then there's gonna be like a you know, like No, I I don't know I am I don't have anything as nice as Jen It's just more of a mess, but it's you have some excellent original Len Peralta art I do I'm so used to seeing it, but so I guess it's ricks All right, let's we're gonna talk a little bit about twitch's new Streaming programs that will pay you will pay you some money even if you're not a twitch partner But first here's some tech things you should know Qualcomm confirmed that Windows 10 PC is running on snapdragon 835 chips. That's right windows 10 full windows 10 on arm Will arrive in queue for does this interest you Jen real quick? I'm curious if you know battery efficient power efficient windows 10. I was actually gonna ask you What's the market for this are these for people who want a fast machine on the go who aren't doing like heavy kind of work? Yeah, the idea would be Qualcomm could put in one of their ultra-fast LTE modems It'd be super light it'd be always on so you'd never have to boot up It'd be more power efficient basically the benefits of a mobile device, but with full windows 10 I can see my dad wanting one of those. Yeah. Yeah, maybe Sad news. Dr. Harry Husky has died at age 101 Dr. Husky was a member of the team that built any act back in 1946 He also worked on Alan Turing's ace the automatic computing engine So I mean 101 that's I should be so lucky to live in a full life like that and one of the pioneers Now here are some more top stories Samsung and Google announced that Google Play music will be the default music player on Samsung phones and tablets starting with the Galaxy s8 Samsung users will get a free three-month trial of the paid service that includes YouTube red so you'd be no commercials on YouTube You can upload a hundred thousand songs to Google Play music for free if you're a Samsung user Usually you can only upload fifty thousand for free without paying extra storage costs. I'll be honest I know that this probably isn't a big deal for a lot of people but as someone who uses Google Play music. I Found this very attractive. I just really wish phones would let you use deep Let make your own defaults for everything browsers and everything but interesting partnership here. Don't you think? It is and I can't wait to see what happens in Canada because things like YouTube red don't exist here still yet, right? I mean seriously how It YouTube owns the platform I know that they probably had to work out different deals with their advertisers for that but come on It can't be impossible. Yeah, well, we only got Amazon video recently with the launch of the grand tour And until that point like there's like oh it comes in Amazon video. I'm like, well, that's nice doesn't help me What about the SA you guys? I mean at launch today April 21st. Is it is it hot up there? They have been advertising heavily during the playoffs for hockey playoffs. I should be specific I don't know about basketball. So they're going up to the Canadian market. They're not ignoring us this time. Yeah, and I know here It's basically AT&T team. T-Mobile is not usually like I looked at best by today And they didn't have a T-Mobile version of it. Is it is it Rogers and Shaw up there mostly or what? You know, I haven't checked yet. I'm about six months away from needing a new phone And then I'll be hardcore into that and bugging all the time Well yesterday's show Justin Robert Young and I talked about the Report that sources said Google was working on an ad blocking within chrome and we went off I'll be honest We went off a little half cocked about the idea of antitrust and whether this would be a good idea Justin had the prescience to say well, wait a minute What if Google gets together with other companies and I said, well the downside to that would be the other companies Don't need to do this necessarily if it would piss off advertisers turns out Justin was dead on Stu ingus council to the coalition for better ads Told ad age that its members are discussing the adoption of technology that would prevent browsers from displaying ads that don't meet its standards Exactly what the rumor was saying Google was working on for chrome and it's not just Google It would include blocking auto playing video ads pop-up ads ads that flash or change colors rapidly and Coalition for better ads includes Google in its membership But also microsoft the interactive advertising bureau the association of national advertisers So the advertisers would be on board with this and ingus said they Are just starting their meetings about this but they expect a blocking mechanism to be in place in browsers before the end of the year and Said an independent monitoring group would be set up to oversee The project so from yesterday sounding like an impossibility or maybe even a bad idea for google to today Being the ideal which is an industry standard with advertisers on the one hand and browser makers on the other Figuring out how to build in responsible ad blocking that doesn't block all the ads So the companies who want to make money off ads still can but blocks the abusive ads the customers don't like Uh, I I love it. I'm you obviously we need to see it in practice first But like for you me everyone listening and watching right now We probably we're running ad blockers. We know how to protect ourselves. We know how to fix things if things go wrong but We're not everyone on the internet and taking care of those people who may not know how to do this stuff I think is a huge step forward. Yeah, I agree and Privacy tracking would be a good thing and not to get greedy. I'm glad they're doing this much Yeah, but some kind of privacy tracking that says hey, let me decide if it's okay for you to track me across Sites, that's why I run privacy badger because it says hey, we notice these guys are tracking you no matter where you go You may not want that Uh, so you get to control that and I think that would be the next thing after this to look into Hey, the canadian radio television and telecommunications commission or uh crtc for short has ruled that isps can't do zero reading They can't exempt certain types of content from counting towards a data cap The decision stems from a complaint against wireless carrier videotron Which was zero rating music services like spotify? Or google music things like that This is pretty common here in the united states team mobile in particular does zero rating with with without charging anybody for it They just uh zero rate music, but they wouldn't be able to do it in canada gen It's always nice to see cbc story make the news down south Uh, what a lot of canadians want and are very slowly but loudly fighting for We have the lowest data caps of any kind of first world country and introducing zero rating would give all of these Uh, big organizations a way to like for bellig for example They got shot down a couple years ago when they were trying to promote their own services because you know their cable Their internet their music their everything Now with with no zero rating Open media and other organizations of that type are going to be fighting even harder saying okay great now that you can't do this Give us reasonable data caps give us unlimited at least as an option, which isn't it just doesn't exist here Yeah, and that's why it's it's interesting to see different countries having different attitudes toward this in the united states The attitude towards zero rating is is fairly lax and i think that's because there is The the closest thing to competition in an isp Uh market that that i've seen ever in the united states and all of the major providers in the us are doing unlimited So zero rating is sort of irrelevant even though you're zero rating on t-mobile. It's going to affect very few plans In a situation like you're talking about zero rating picks winners and losers if I only have 10 gigabytes of you know Five gigabytes a month I'm going to use the music service that doesn't eat into that because I want to save that for other things and india Has the same situation whereas on the other hand a lot of african countries are fine with zero rating because They have even lower data caps and they're like well We want we want to be able to use stuff at all so It's that middle ground where either you don't you don't have unlimited But you don't have super low data caps where it seems like people start to turn against it Yeah, I was in buffalo a couple months ago and with my brother We were both just getting angry when we see the advertisements for us cell phone players I'm thinking like well, you know would it cost that much to get a us number and just like you know Get the long unlimited long distance plan and use it up here. Sure. I mean it would be tempting right Especially with somebody like t-mobile that they unlimited does apply to canada Well, I'm sure people up here are already doing it. Yeah Well, that's I do I do feel like when you foster competition when you know When when the governmental role of making sure there's an open playing field works Some of these issues go away. I don't know what that the canadian system Would accommodate that unfortunately the way it's set up Well, the crtc has as a lot of rules I'm not the foremost expert on this but a lot of it is also for protecting canadian content Because we are right next to the states and it's so easy to flood the airwaves So I I kind of wonder if there's going to be any kind of canadian mandate for the zero rating kind of stuff in the future That would be really interesting if the canadian content laws got got mixed in so that a certain percentage Of your data cap had to be made free for canadian content. They could zero rate. I don't know. I don't know There's something there Elon musk told wait, but why dot com that neuro link a company He recently became the main investor in and it sounds like he's going to be the CEO of Will bring a product to market within four years That product would be meant to help people with severe brain injury usually due to something like cancer or stroke And neural link thinks its brain computer interface could be about eight to ten years away To be usable by healthy people now These are not necessarily the neural lace that we talked about that's the ideal where they just put this lightweight Thing inside your brain That requires safe brain surgery, but it could be external interfaces or even minimally invasive electrodes or something like that Jen, do you do you want to be able to control computers with your brain and how much How much cutting into your head? Will you tolerate to do it? Oh, well, I am a hockey player. So head injuries are You're saying you've already paved the way there's a easier access I'm such a cynic when it comes to this kind of stuff The article starts off saying oh, we want to help people who've had these life changing experiences Get access to the technology and then immediately segues to and then everybody will get it like um So are you doing this because you want to control a computer with your mind or because you actually want to help people Let's be clear. I would like to control a computer with my mind And I I think it's smart to do it to help Injured people because that's where it's necessary most and that's where you should should start but eventually, you know I I I don't see any reason why I shouldn't be able to take advantage of that too, right? Well at that point when they when it crosses over into gaming, I'd be like, oh, okay, maybe Yeah, maybe I'll get it. There's always something um Well and Elon musk, you know, he was probably getting bored only running two companies now that he merged his solar panel company into tesla So he needed another company on his plate too Okay, so there's tesla and then spacex and now this one. Yeah, and so so uh solar city went into tesla So now he's got a third one again. Oh great Oh great. He's keeping busy. Yeah, I don't want to see that guy get bored Uh, it's not not to mention the boring company that he has also started to bore a hole between spacex and lax also a true thing Uh the telegraph reports the german company liliam has completed its first test flight in munich of a vertical takeoff and landing jet designed for commuters sort of a flying car in other words The liliam jet is powered by an electric battery with a range of 300 kilometers and can travel up to 300 kilometers an hour So you can travel in it for an hour before it has to land and recharge prototype seats two people but liliam has developed a version they say can seat up to five The idea is to create a ride hailing service that would use these vehicles And they use the example of operating in new york city where they believe they could take people from jfk airport Which is about a 15 five minute ride from downtown new york in manhattan They could take people from jfk airport to downtown new york in five minutes at a cost of six bucks Uber and airbus by the way are also working on vertical takeoff and landing aircraft for similar reasons That's Hard to believe especially the six bucks part Yeah Uh like vertical takeoff always cool. Yes It's hard. It's hard to argue with that. It's nice to see that someone is a big fan of the jet scenes and they're making it work Yeah, and and this uh this video of the the prototype flight is impressive. It looks like it flies well Of course, it's their produced video So they're probably showing the best parts of the flight that the part where it got a little shaky or anything like that but But it sounds like it's a real thing and You know, we talk a lot about autonomous cars on the roads But it looks like autonomous cars in the air Are also doing well, which brings up a whole other host of regulatory issues and and flight paths and things like that For the self-driving cars and now in the air. I have never had more sympathy for lawmakers This cannot be fun or exciting Like it's great for consumers who will eventually get the benefit of this tech But trying to deal with all of like so in my case city provincial Federal and then you've got all of the insurance companies for every kind of insurance Are you walking on the street one of these falls? Does it hit your house? Now what? There is airspace. Let's take new york city that is that is used for helicopter tours and things like that That could be allocated For a certain number of these kinds of services There's definitely space to land That's why people do want to do vertical takeoff and landing because it It makes it easier to find places to park these things because you can use tops of buildings and stuff like that again You can use helipads Uh But as soon as you want more than one company, which is what you would need for this to really reach scale, right? It starts to crowd the air the airspace Well, canada passed much tougher laws on drones. So I look forward to us being 20 years behind when this thing happens in the states We we also have pretty pretty restricted drone usage quadcopter usage And if you suddenly have the jetsons flying back and forth from jfk to downtown New york, again, I totally want this. I'm not trying to be tech negative here, but It's it it raises a lot of issues that need to be worked out. That doesn't mean they can't be worked out I think we will see something like this happen. It's exciting, but it's it's not as simple as it looks Hey, folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in less than five minutes Be sure to subscribe to daily tech headlines dot com. Keep yourself up to date Hey, twitch announced a new affiliate program friday. This is different than the one we talked about wednesday Wednesday, we talked about the fact that they've added a $10 a month and $25 a month subscription option For partnered streamers, but now anybody can become an affiliate Pretty much anybody you don't have to be approved with a partner stream You have to give me approved by twitch. This would not need to be approved You just have to have 500 minutes of streaming within the last 30 days Have had at least three concurrent viewers, which is almost nothing And 50 followers once you're in the affiliate program Your viewers can then buy bits for cheering with bits They're basically little emotes that people can put in chat to have fun with It's something that's existed for partnered streamers now You'll get one as an affiliate and they say more monetization options are coming Things like subscriptions game commerce advertising is all in the works for affiliates as well Invites will start going out to streamers who qualify over the next several weeks They're just kind of slowly rolling this out But eventually anybody who qualifies will be able to get in And to set partners apart a little more They're offering a new verified chat badge to partners So it'll be easier to tell when you're looking at a partner and when you're looking at an affiliate All right. This is a lot. This is a lot of stuff twitch is throwing at people this week and it's all money Jen What what do you make of all this?  Oh, I want a lighter especially when you're on that data cap. Yeah, exactly Uh, so there are more than just cosmetic differences between affiliates and partners Now twitch is always going to get the better end of the deal that they themselves create But something like bits and cheering It's kind of been a mixed bag for people who don't quite get why it's important for people Because if I donate money to you through paypal, I can charge it back and you're going to get dinged on the fees if you buy uh bits to cheer with from twitch and charge it back twitch is not going to penalize the stream that those bits were donated to It's a little more secure in terms of accepting donations from your fans who do want to support you, which is awesome Does it work well enough for small? Uh audiences that was the thing I thought is that when you have a big twitch following the chat room Kind of educates itself people understand like oh, that's why that's cool I want to buy those so I can do that too if you've only got a handful of people though Are people really going to want to cheer with bits? I I've been kind of stymie. There are some really nice family friendly streams out there that aren't huge because it's a smaller audience of people who are watching with their kids or trying to find kid approved streams and it's like Oh, I want to support this. I have no way to support this other than telling my friends that this exists It's it's sometimes nice because not everyone wants to set up a patreon or any kind of go fund me thing So to do all of this native to the app that works between mobile and pc and mac whatever It's kind of nice to have It it's becoming bit of a walled garden, but it is nice to have the option And twitch's pitch in this is sort of an easier way to get people into the partner program They're saying, you know, this this helps you build that audience because they can start supporting you earlier I don't know if I buy that so much the ability to to support is great Especially if like one of those family streamers that you're talking about you've got a small But dedicated audience doesn't mean that audience will end up growing any faster, though No, but it is a bone to that community. It's been People haven't really felt that twitch has only been talking to the partners only concerned with the partners and all of the people who make up That whole vast community just felt ignored and this is a huge thing to make them feel like oh, wait, we are valued They do want us here. This is a place that is welcoming Even if it doesn't grow at least you have these options available to you You still shouldn't you know apply for the partner program if you've only got you know, 20 viewers and two concurrent But at least you're closer to the affiliate. You've got this nice middle ground and granted Covering this why I mean that this is you know a much much larger number of people that will be brought into the affiliate program So it's not cost-free for twitch to roll this out. They have to monitor all of this now But they also make more money than they would if they didn't include all of these people I am likely to buy more bits as a result of this change once all the imitations go out That's what they want to hear. That's all they were waiting to hear And yeah once affiliates get to uh to choose rolling out ads as opposed to like some autoplay ads Like I finally broke down and got twitch prime because I was tired of every time I checked out a new channel I had to sit through this 30 second ad driving me nuts So once prime became more useful in canada. I was like, all right great. I'm buying prime I'm never going to watch another ad on twitch again So twitch definitely has the lead especially for video game streams Does this does this uh, how do how do you think this affects things like beam or youtube gaming? well It's hard to get big on youtube gaming the discovery is very hard A lot of people that I know on youtube gaming tend to simulcast To kind of just try to get as many people on whichever program they they can And then beam has done a really big push in integrating their because of they're tied with microsoft So on xbox one and on windows 10 Streaming is like a two-click process You don't even have to sign up because they've done some name reservation voodoo on their own And beam does have a partnership program Now beams partnership program has gone the other way from uh from the way twitch has made their affiliate program more widespread Because beam used to be like oh if you have like what was it here? Let me scroll down and find it So 300 viewers and uh 300 followers 30 concurrent viewers. I feel it's a reasonable Yeah, that's not for for getting access to beams partnership thing Uh, there is a three month grace period for people who are existing beam users who are aiming for partnership If you are a new beam user, which I think a lot of people will be new as the dashboards and windows 10 updates are rolled out You kind of have to aim for 10k followers and at least 50 concurrent viewers That's a big jump. It is like a 50 concurrent concurrent viewers. I get 10k followers is a huge leap 10 10k followers should almost guarantee 50 concurrent viewers like that's a ridiculous ratio Even if you aren't consistent like if sometimes you're in the morning Sometimes you're in the night as as your stream schedule. I really feel that's that's doable I hope it's not encouraging the wrong kind of thing where you just sign up for all these accounts Because botting is a problem on twitch. They're working on this is just asking for it on beam Yeah Well, and and the other thing is this also may bring in a few more of those non-video game streamers The twitch is actively courting by opening up what you can stream on twitch with its talk shows and food and and creativity Uh categories So if it's easier to get in and start making money then more people may decide to choose it Yeah, and the big of the base for twitch the more data amazon gets from all of us and they're happy too. Yeah, absolutely Uh, well, thanks to everybody who participates in our subreddit helps us come up with these great topics You can submit stories and vote on them yourself. Go join in the fun at daily tech news show dot reddit dot com On to a few emails before we're out of here. Uh, first of all greg Wrote in and was one of the many people who corrected us We were we had a misimpression about google homes New user accounts and we under emphasized one of the benefits the misimpression was that you couldn't use a google home account Or a google home You couldn't ask a google home something if you didn't have an account now That's not true and one the thing that we under represented was what greg's talking about he says first of all Keep up the great work. I continue to love the show and be a proud patreon supporter Thank you for starting with a positive greg based on what i've seen with my google home and the multi user setup process I don't think this was intended to prevent people who aren't set up as a user of google home from using it google's 33 second video focuses on allowing the home to now return results specific To each user's accounts. I'm not sure if this is limited to telling you what's on your calendar Or might affect media playback the google home multiple users help article mentions the guests or housemates who haven't linked their google account To the home can still listen to music cast and control home controlled devices google could be clearer on this point I did some testing using an online text to speech tool after training my home to recognize my voice And my home responded to the english uk female voice for the trigger word Both to who is the president and what is a whopper as a male from ohio My voice should be pretty different uh from the english uk female voice I was using on the voice to the text to speech translator and based on this I don't think this feature will prevent tv shows or even podcasts from triggering a google home So thank you greg uh for clearing that up now on to voice activated devices and whether they should or should not be limiting How they're triggered uh mark writes if the companies are actually concerned with accidental triggering Why not allow customers the ability to customize their trigger words? Then every person in the house only needs to know the word that activates that individual device I'm thinking that this would be important when things like voice activated lights or practical appliances are connected to the system in your house If you have to get a voice print before you could turn on the lights that could cause Some problems. So yeah, if so taking what greg was saying about google home still works for guests Even for things like controlling lights that means a bad television commercial could control your lights conceivably but if you could customize the trigger word to be like Hey frog man Then it's not going to work because everybody's gonna have different trigger words Doesn't that make sense? I do you even use any of these kind of devices jen? Oh, I disabled siri in cortana is my first move But in terms of this customizing thing, I love it. I'm stunned that this isn't an option You know, we tell people do not use password. Do not use default anything for every other device Why wouldn't you do this for this always on connected thing? It's genius and also, you know that video game and anime fans are going to name their boxes For things that make them happy and I kind of like that too I'm sure it's about performance that if you limit the number of trigger words that can be used Then you make sure that you've trained your ai to always respond to the right word Whereas if everybody can customize it you might get some things that don't trigger quite quite as nicely As they do now But at some point that trade-off is going to be acceptable and the voice recognition is getting better and better To where it's probably not that big of a deal I like it. I hope they're working on it. Yeah, if anybody has a good reason why you shouldn't offer customizable trigger words in these Let us know Regarding amazon finally coming to australia nick writes as a consumer I'm really happy about this because we've gotten a rather raw deal not just on pricing as tom mentioned But also selection I've been using amazon and other us and japanese-based websites that ship to australia since around the year 2000 Because while australian retailers may technically stock a line like hasbro's collector oriented transformers generations toy line There's no guarantee they'll stock every figure in the line or even order sufficient quantities leaving the shelves bare at times However, as i'm a retail worker in a regional town in one of australia's already struggling nationwide retailers I'm also fearful of amazon's arrival because I can see them being the final nail in the coffin for my job And and he went on to say he hopes that he'll be able to interview with amazon in one of their fulfillment centers Do you remember a time before amazon came to canada? Uh, I remember Having anything ordered online being very difficult to get in canada when the dot ca appeared I was happy it did cut down on my shopping and In store and then stores like future shop used to be a big thing up here Eventually they merged with best buy and then future shop went goodbye and closed all those stores Yeah, there's not there are a couple things for tech that I will still buy in person Especially I have a costco membership and that is the best place to buy tech when they have what you want Yeah, I I think uh, I think nick's right There's it's a double-edged sword one You don't have to pay the big shipping cost to order from across the ocean, especially horrible in australia But if you're working in the retail sector, this is a big challenge It's something at walmart in the us is even they just bought jut.com because they're trying to figure out how to compete with amazon And walmart dot ca is really good shipping too. I have used that in the past and the in store pickups kind of nice I think more hybrids like that are going to become popular as as both online and brick and brick stores try to find their relevance in this world Well, that is it for today's show. Thank you gen cutter as always For joining us if people want to find out more about what you're doing. What should they do? Well, my twitter is at gen cutter, which will have everything that's gen with two ends And there will be a redesign for gen cutter.com and open alpha.tv rolling out in the next couple of weeks I'm very very excited about all this and all of that cool stuff happening behind your blanket Yes, that will also be revealed. It will be pretty here. I promise Uh speaking of pretty lemper alt has been doing some artwork. What do you got for us? Len? Oh, you know, thank you so much. I appreciate that. I wanted to do something very spring-like with a lot of spring colors um This also shows my age as well because I I'm like I don't Fully understand twitch and I think that's because I'm an old man But I do understand um money streams and revenue streams and that's what I was getting at here You know, you're riding. I think that twitch is what I want people to do is ride and monetize that twitch stream And that's what this little gentleman is doing hand full of cash riding the stream saying wahoo And you know, that's what it's all about, right? Making the money getting the money out the twitch stream You know riding the stream, right? That's a water slide park. Yeah, that's what the kids say these days. I think Yeah See now I'm totally wondering if anybody has done a live stream with a gopro at a water park going down a slide I might kind of watch that I would cheer with my bits for that I would that sounds um, is that not how you say that? You got it nailed it. I'm always cheering with my bits. I know you are Yes, well, no, this is fantastic. I love I love this little kid with the huge eye too. Thank you Yeah, we just try he's trying to be twitching. That was the whole point but um Yes, so yeah, you can actually look at this right now at my online store lemperaltestore.com You can actually download it too as a digital download. It's uh, that's that's right there Or you can back me at patreon patreon.com for it slash len and you can actually get this as a digital download as well Every one that I do during the month Uh, uh, you'll get as a high res image. So there you go Have hey speaking of patreon. Thanks to everybody who gives a little value back to this show for the value They get from it. That's that's the only way we work We do this because we hope you get something out of it And if you do we just ask you to give a little bit of something back Uh, like william done away did or wade minard or tom fannis and the many many more 4500 plus people join them at patreon.com Slash d t n s our email address is feedback at daily tech news show dot com We're live monday through friday 4 30 p.m Eastern at alphakeek radio dot com and diamond club dot tv and our website is daily tech news show dot com We will be back on monday with baronica belmont. See you then Was part of the frog pants network get more at frogpants.com Good show It was fun as always. Thank you. I agree Yeah, loud. You're always so happy It's always fun to be doing this stuff. I've spent like the last months Moving and going through all kinds of nonsense. So it's really nice to stream from the new place and That'll all starting up again. That's great Yes You just have a happy voice. It's so happy to listen to Thanks Roger we can't hear you. I think roger's trying to tell us some titles And now he is and now he's gone. He has raged with his browser No cheering. I'm not I'm not cheering with my bits for him there Can you hear me now? Yes, we can I think len just uh expressed what I think will end up being the title but What did he say? He said I would cheer with my bits for that Okay Did you like that one? I we don't have to go with that but so we brought the bacon today So everything's bacon has that on our on showbot.tv. So I like that I like that. What else you got that that you like on there Roger though? um Twitch is twitch's bits pitch The new twitch pitch sounds very rick and morty somehow must go in my mind. I love that show scratch that twitch Let's go ratch that twitch Yeah, that's pretty much it little island. I guess little modes not to knock it in the mic um, they weren't that many I only have Seven. Yeah, um, I would cheer with my bits for that twitch is bits pitch Twitch pitch is bits. It's like a doctor. It's hard. It's hard not to go wrong say of that Yeah, you know, it's uh, yeah I remember the hesitation. No, I remember a time before amazon was like Was doing stuff before roger craftily changes So They changed the subject over That was a good move. Sorry. I called to touch it to it. It was just so good That's what you do, right? I learned from the best. Yeah, there you go. I watch press conferences. I see how they work their magic Pivot pivot Yeah, I was talking about uh, uh, uh, national this uh, you know, you guys have problems with your underwear just riding up tonight What we're gonna introduce a new law Um Now I was thinking about the Australian thing. It's kind of weird like, um On the weekends you get you a retail. I'm not sure if all retail think all retail and service workers get, uh Get additional pay for working the weekends, right for saturday sundays Going in Australia, right? Because yeah, like if you work if you don't if you work Beyond the week and that's a week familiar to me. Yes They call them penalty rates. I think I'm not I don't remember too much because I also remember that your pay was Your your your minimum pay wage was also dictated by your age like if you As soon as you moved up to a certain age bracket, it would go up But that was a while ago. I'm not sure if that's still the same I just remember bits and pieces From my from my old girlfriend I cheered with a lot of things Tom including little plastic nunchucks I have a pair of those you brought me from japan. I know Remember I was like, how am I gonna get you? I'm stuck in japan. Well, I'm stuck in japan. I'm in japan It's like let me let me go to the let me go to Osaka and then Find sports gear for the opposing team at their local stadium and see how well everyone likes that And apparently it was fine because they paid and they left me alone. I'm molested One of my favorite memories of being in japan last year was it being in Hiroshima Uh, and the Hiroshima carp We're about to clinch the the the playoffs And we went into this mall Is basically, you know, they have these all over japan's train stop, but it's also a huge mall, right? Oh, yeah, and we just went into this grocery store to find some snacks and it was just filled with people dressed in their carp gear You know, there was even like there was a woman in in like a geisha outfit Except it was all said Hiroshima carp and had baseball bats on it. There was a woman dressed as a carp Like an actual fish The whole like mascot look. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah Uh, and then of course there were most people just had hats and you know jerseys on for their favorite players and stuff But it was just such a cool feeling because I'm like, man, these people are so excited for something I'm barely aware is happening because I looked it up online their logo is pretty awesome The uh, well the the sea is just like the Cincinnati Reds, but right now. I'm looking at this little kid Oh, yeah, the little Hiroshima carp guy. Yeah, that's awesome I'd wear that They were so excited. They were pumped. Oh, yeah. Yeah, because This is cool to be around that green hair green hair. That's a cool logo Carp They have a mascot too. Look at that. Was it there another fish team? Oh, no, that's right. That's the um Fuku, not Fukuoka Hawks. I think maybe it's Osaka. There's the puffer fish There's a there's a there's a pup team that has a puffer fish as their thing Interesting I don't know what it's called. There used to be a Japanese hockey team that had a teddy bear logo that I loved Too hard to get a jersey over here and now I can't find it online, but oh, that's too bad It was a great jersey. That's great. It's so weird buying clothes that don't normally have like lxl. It was just Small medium and free Free free rare, that's the size I got you free was just basically Anything should like a one size fits all yeah, I should fit any normal Japanese person I don't think it would fit any me at this point in my life Going clothes shopping in japan is one of the most depressing things ever I I found a large Hiroshima carp t-shirt in the uh in the department store that I bought Oh, did you did you go to one of those multi-tiered department stores where they have people that direct traffic? Yeah Directly they have they have traffic wards inside the department store to help people go which which is the escalators You know don't walk down this aisle because everyone's coming the opposite direction Who are you supporting in the playoffs jen? Well, I was actually going to have my Toronto Maple Leafs a blanket behind me, but it was white and basically see-through I guess that makes sense. You're near Toronto But I'm also thrilled that the penguins clinch are moving on. Uh, I love the preads. They're doing well I'd like to see the the blues go on too. Thank you. That warms my heart to hear you say that Are you cheering? You're not a basketball fan. You said you're you cheering on the raptors? I'm happy for them, but it's not a sport that I watch.  They just got owned Hey, well Edmonton lost like seven nothing to the sharks and then came back the next game to win Anything is possible. Like the calves came down 26 They overcame a 26 point deficit to win the game against indiana last night And what happened to you know, what the you mentioned the preads the prets are On fire right now Columbus to be fair had a ton of injuries of like big name players Yeah, but I love the prets. I think they're a good team fun to watch and of course, you can't go wrong with pkc then I'm just happy to see that they knocked off the black walks also a plus I love Johnson tapes, but everybody else can just forget it. I'm glad. Oh, I feel like I'm among friends I was like, wow, I didn't really expect to see that apologies chicago fans. Yes, sorry There was one time I cheered for the blackhawks because I was in chicago at a hockey game with my chicago friends And they were playing the red wings and I'm like, well, I actually hate the red wings a tiny bit more So I guess I'll cheer for the black you must have been thrilled when they lost the play Uh, didn't even make the playoffs then. Yes Yeah, I I don't feel bad for the for the for chicago because if if the blackhawks are doing bad The bulls are actually doing really well. So well in the cubs and the cubs, right? The cubs have now cursed every other chicago team. Yeah. Yes, maybe interesting So so when when you start streaming, are you going to be streaming on twitch gen? Yeah, most likely that that's where I tend to spend the most time I've tried watching like there's also hitbox.tv which gets pushed out because the they partnered with the zubu So they're going to relaunch something maybe later this year that's going to be very competitive gaming focus and that i'm waiting to see because I know that You know the big e-sports corporations would love a stream that they could control a bit better and give a better viewer experience while also pushing more ads I'm I'm really looking forward to whatever they come up with to give it a shot. I'm familiar with hitbox But I don't know is zubu They were one of the early like legal legends streams if you wanted to watch league of legends You had to go there and like certain csgo events are only there Those are that anything league of legends is outside of my experiential zone Unfortunately because I'm old I do know the rules of bingo though because I'm old. I think that's what lau roman was going for in the chat room Oh, yeah They call a number you market, right? Yeah, and then if you get all five in a row That's right bingo.  It's like I used to play bingo at home My my you know, it was like just a my parents would just play bingo You have like a roller for the balls and everything Uh, I can't remember what I think it was just a jar that they just pulled You should play kino up in um rino when I was in grade school And I played real bingo at the church when I was growing up, but I don't I don't think I played bingo since Yeah, working bingo was you had to do that when the my kids went to the uh to the school And I hated working bingo because you came home and you smelled like nicotine and You smelled awful smell like everyone who was in the bingo hall Yeah, exactly when I walked into the house, I just went straight down to the laundry room and threw everything in the whole They knew when I came home because I smelled so bad. You smell like winnings Not even close I still have fantasies of driving up to vegas just to play a round of um black check Hmm or roulette do it this weekend roger I'm not even good with gambling, but I remember garret remember garret funabiki I dragged him to take my old job at tech tv so I could get the newer cooler job at tech tv um He won like 500 bucks on roulette.  My he's a really nice guy though like he was he's still he's still a nice guy. He hasn't passed away My uh, my my uncle uh went to vegas and was just what he doesn't really gamble he walked through The the casino and they had those huge slot machines that you just pull He won like $15,000. What? He just pulled it and then like he won his money. It's like what? My my aunt was really cheese because she was playing slots at which hotel She didn't win anything But then she came back to that same hotel the same roll of slots and some guy won like the 12 million You know because it's uh, what do they call it cumulative? You know, um score is like, ah, I've only played three more hours It's like you would have played three more hours. I like maybe I guess It's supposed to meant to be 12 million dollars is not yours. It's that guys Just remember he has to pay half of it in taxes And then all his friends that he's never met will call out of the woodwork All right folks, uh, we are published. Thank you again for hanging out with us. Have a lovely weekend I'll see you later. That's right. It's Friday. Yeah


This is Mises Weekends with your host Jeff Deist. I'm on the road this weekend, so we thought we'd share with you the first episode of a fantastic new Mises Institute podcast series entitled Historical Controversies. It's narrated by one of our summer fellows, Chris Colton, and it applies to Rothbardian Lens to various events in US history. The first episode deals with the war on drugs, and I think you're going to like it very much. So, stay tuned for a great historical narrative on the United States drug war from Chris Colton, and have a great weekend. Welcome to the inaugural episode of the Mises Institute podcast, Historical Controversies. We stole this title from the book Economic Controversies, which is a collection of Murray Rothbard's economic essays, and we thought the title was so great that we needed to use it again, but this podcast will be devoted to looking at history from the perspective of libertarianism and Austrian economics. My name is Chris Colton, and I'll be hosting this podcast. So we decided to start off with a topic near and dear to the heart of every libertarian, the war on drugs, which we'll be devoting a handful of episodes to here in order to kick off this podcast because the drug war is a lot of terrible things, but it's never boring. So in this episode, we're going to look at the origins of drug prohibition and how the major three drugs, cocaine, opium, and marijuana, gained a presence in the United States and then became stigmatized enough to lead to their criminalizations. So where did the stigma against these drugs come from? For most of the 19th century, there was very little stigma against drugs other than the temperance movement against alcohol, which was really the big one that obviously led to prohibition in the 1920s. And the big three, the cannabis, cocaine, and opium, which is the basis for heroin and morphine and was also smoked very commonly back then in its opium form, they were just coming into use in the mid-19th century. So morphine and cocaine could be purchased in the Sears catalog, for instance, just to give you an idea of how common these drugs were, not common, but accessible these drugs were at the time. And cannabis was added to the U.S. pharmacopoeia in 1850, and it had already been added to various British pharmacopoeias even before that. In fact, when marijuana was made illegal in 1937, it was still in the pharmacopoeia and stayed there until the early 1904. I don't remember the exact year they took it out. I think it was like 1942. So it was still in the pharmacopoeia for a few years after its criminalizations. So all three of these drugs were used as painkillers at a time when available and effective painkillers were really few and far between. So starting with cannabis, for instance, this was just an absolutely wonderful drug for the poor when they couldn't afford doctor's fees because cannabis was so inexpensive and you could buy it just at your basic pharmacy or in just about any grocery store at the time. So it's like I could go to Kroger and purchase some cannabis extract or something else that would help just treat basic pain very, very inexpensively. And it was also so widely useful that some doctors just began all treatments with a small dose of cannabis. One British physician, a Sir John Russell Reynolds, used cannabis on patients through most of his professional career, and he highly recommended beginning any medical treatment with a small dose of cannabis and to gradually increase the dose over the course of a few days. So he wrote, just to give you an example here, he wrote, with these precautions, I have never met with any toxic effects and have rarely failed to find, after a comparatively short time, either the value or the uselessness of the drug. So he's saying that we might as well just start by giving all of our patients a little bit of cannabis and we're either going to find out that at worst it's useless and at best it's helpful, but that there were no real negative side effects that he noticed. So he was a big advocate of cannabis use in medicine. Now cocaine had two popular forms. It had it had its patent preparations and its ethical preparations. So the patent preparations were the stimulating tonics. This would be like Coca-Cola. We all know that Coca-Cola had cocaine in it when it was first created. Another really common one at the time, the most popular one in fact at the time was not Coca-Cola. It was a French Coca wine produced by a man named Mariani. So it was Mariana's Coca wine. And this wine was actually endorsed by Pope Leo the 13th and Pope Pius the 10th. In fact, the first known purchase of Coca wine in the United States was made by Abraham Lincoln in 1860, just a month before he was elected president. He purchased Mariani's Coca wine. Ulysses S. Grant, in fact, when he was writing his memoirs, Mark Twain urged Ulysses S. Grant to write his memoirs of the Civil War. And while he was doing this, he was suffering from throat cancer. And so they sought the help of Mariani, who encouraged him to drink his Coca wine. And Ulysses S. Grant actually credited the use of the Coca wine as helping him get through the memoirs while he was suffering from cancer. The other form of cocaine at this time period were ethical preparations produced by pharmaceutical companies. And they were sold as treatments for just any number of things. The toothache drops were some of the most common ones. They were used to treat hemorrhoids, dyspepsia, weight loss, just a whole host of problems that cocaine was being used to treat. And then, of course, the other one would be morphine, which is the refined form of opium, the least potent refined form of opium. I should say heroin didn't come about until 1898. And it's just a more refined form of opium. So morphine is actually considered class one heroin. And then there's class two, class three and class four heroin. And class four heroin is the purest form. And that's actually usually what we find in the black market today. But morphine really at the time, it was a miracle drug of the 19th century. And most of this was because of the Civil War. So it was just substantially more effective as a painkiller than cannabis and cocaine, and it was used heavily to treat the injured soldiers on both the Union and Confederate sides. So opium was grown in many states, both in the Union and the Confederacy and the largest opium producing states. Of course, we're in the South, they were Virginia, Tennessee, South Carolina and Georgia just produced a ton of opium at this time. Opium itself in its unrefined form was used to treat dysentery, which was quite common among Civil War soldiers, but it was refined into morphine to treat pain. So this was the first time that we had a war where we actually had something that could take the edge off of a gunshot wound or amputations.  I mean, it's an incredibly painful thing. So having morphine for these people is like it was like a godsend to them at the time, right? I mean, even with morphine, that's still very painful. But it was far more tolerable with this drug. So it was used very heavily and hardly needs to be explained why opium was so important in the 19th century. So these are the these are the good effects in the 19th century that made these drugs popular in the first place. But the stigma still came about in the late 19th century for most of these drugs. And you got to wonder where did this come from? Well, of course, with opium, it's the easiest to identify because it was really a double edged sword in the Civil War. It was an important painkiller, but it was also addictive. We know that opium was addictive, obviously. That's not not questioned today. And because morphine was new to the world, people were taking it in very high doses because they weren't aware of these addictive properties at first. So they were partly taking it in high doses because you just had such a need for it with the Civil War. But you also didn't know of the negative side effects and they didn't know of the addictive properties at the time. So they were overusing it. So morphine addiction was so common among soldiers that it became known as soldiers disease. So soldiers disease was opium addiction following the Civil War. And a similar phenomenon actually took place in Europe. So British soldiers had soldiers disease from the Crimean War and both the French and Prussian soldiers developed opiate addictions in the Franco-Prussian War. So it was common in Europe, common in the United States. So after the Civil War, more than 63,000 soldiers continued to take opium for gastric upsets. And many of them continued to use morphine, which was injected, of course. And so Horace Day published a book called The Opium Habit in 1868 that noted the effect the war had on creating addicts. He wrote, the events of the last few years being the Civil War have unquestionably added greatly to the number of addicts maimed and shattered survivors from 100 battlefields diseased and disabled soldiers released from hostile prisons. Anguished and hopeless wives and mothers made so by the slaughter of those who were dearest to them have found many of them temporary relief from their suffering and opium. So it's interesting to note here that he acknowledges not just the opium addiction among the injured soldiers, but also people who were dealing with grief caused by the war. More than a century after Horace Day wrote this, there was a Holocaust survivor who is a physician. I believe he's still alive. If not, he died very recently. He was survived the Holocaust when he was just an infant. He didn't remember it, but his his mother helped smuggle him out of Germany at the time when he was a baby. His name is Gabor Matei. I think I'm pronouncing that right. And he's a physician working out of Vancouver who works with heroin addicts there, and he started doing addiction studies there and identified the emotional trauma is one of the most common roots of heroin addiction. So when the opium habit was published and he says that it's many of these wives and mothers made so by this made opium addicts by the slaughter of those who were dearest to them, they're really identifying something that that still causes a lot of or at least according to Gabor Matei's research, causing a lot of heroin addiction in people today, which is just this deep emotional trauma. It wasn't just used to treat physical pain even back then. And it's also important to note that shortly prior to the Civil War in 1853, Dr. Alexander Wood perfected the hypodermic syringe. So you had syringes for a few centuries before this, but he's the one that really made it widely usable in a good medical setting in the 1850s and injecting a drug is by far the most potent way of consuming it. So just when you're when you're looking at drugs for the most part with some exceptions, ingesting it orally is the least potent way of taking it. Then smoking, then snorting and then injecting each become increasingly more potent. So by perfecting the syringe, Alexander Wood was making opium ingestion substantially more potent. It's essentially the equivalent to finding a new way of refining it in higher pureties because it's so much stronger that way. Marijuana, by the way, would be the exception to that. And I'll get to that a little bit later in the episode.  But it's it's the exception to the rule. Everything else pretty much follows the the rule of thumb. But injecting is always the strongest, if that's possible. So he effectively made opium more powerful. So in an 1870, another British physician started warning people about the dangers of ejecting morphine. And I'm going to write an excerpt of an article that he wrote. He said, Injected morphia seemed so different to swallow, swallowed morphia. No one had any experience of ill effects from it. And we all had the daily experience of it as a means of peace and comfort. While pain, on the other hand, was certainly the forerunner of wretchedness and exhaustion, gradually. However, the convictions began to force itself upon my notice that injections of morphia, though free from the ordinary evils of opium eating, which was actually causing some of the gastric upsets that they were trying to to treat at the time, he said, they might nevertheless create the same artificial want and gain credit for assuaging a restlessness and depression of which it was itself the cause. In this case, he's talking about the withdrawal symptoms. So he goes on to say, if this be so, we are incurring a grave risk in bidding people to inject whenever they need it and in telling them that the morphia can have no ill effects upon them so long as it brings with it tranquility and well-being. So he's noticing one that the injecting injecting the morphium actually helped with some of the stomach problems that eating opium was causing, which was the gastric issues. So these guys were eating opium. It was causing gastric upsets. And then to treat the pain of the gastric upsets, they just continued to eat morphine, to eat opium, excuse me. Once they started injecting morphine, it avoided the stomach problems caused by eating opium. But then, of course, you had the addiction. So if you stopped using it, you would get these flu-like symptoms, which are what heroin withdrawals are essentially the same symptoms you get with the flu. You get that. And so they treat those withdrawal symptoms by injecting more morphine, which is, of course, is just feeding the addiction. And so he was noticing this in 1870. So here we see one of the earliest acknowledgments of the addictive qualities of opium. And he was correct in noting that people were using it to essentially treat the withdrawal symptoms caused by the addiction itself. So when heroin was developed in 1898 by a German chemist working for Bayer, this is the same Bayer that you would buy, you know, a seed of metaphine from or something like that. They came up with heroin in the 1898. It was advertised as a non-addictive miracle drug that made you feel heroic. So the name heroin sounds like hero intentionally. It was the German word is like hero-ish or I don't know how to pronounce it. But that's because it made you feel heroic. They named it heroin to describe that. And so it was very heavily marketed at the time. And it was even marketed and sold as a cure for morphine addiction. And the reason that they thought it did that, of course, was the same thing as the use of morphine to treat the withdrawal symptoms. It made you feel better when you were dealing with morphine withdrawals, because, of course, it fed the addiction because it was just a more powerful, more refined form of opium than morphine was. So by 1900, reports were being published about the dangers and addictiveness of heroin. In 1906, when the Council of Pharmacy and Chemistry of the American Medical Association added heroin to their annual publication, which was called New and Non-Official Remedies, they added the warning that the habit is readily forming and leads to the most deplorable results. So we can see, obviously, how quickly and why heroin and opiates in general started becoming stigmatized. But with the stigma in place, the medical use of opiates started to decline by 1910. So heroin wasn't criminalized until 1914, but it was already on the decline without the government having to regulate it. So regardless with public sentiment moving against opiates, there was very little resistance to the legislation regulating it in 1914. But it doesn't really look like the legislation was necessary because the physicians and the Medical Association were already moving in that direction voluntarily. So in addition to the fear of addiction that was starting to surface, we'll also see, and I'm going to talk about this in another episode, really not so much in this one, but we'll also see that racism against the Chinese also played a very significant role in the criminalization of opium. And but I'm going to devote an episode on heroin specifically. And I want to talk about that there because it's it's a pretty big aspect of the criminalization of opium at the time. So cocaine was very similar. Much of the scare of cocaine came from the stigma against opium. So that was related actually both to cocaine and cannabis. Most cocaine users were either consuming it in a drink, which is much more comparable to caffeine than snorted cocaine. Because as I said before, when you ingest it orally, it's just going to be a lot more innocuous. And the doses in the drinks were usually very mild. So it was almost like drinking a cocaine or I'm sorry, a caffeine drink. Then it was like snorting cocaine that we think about today. So doctors in dentists were also a major source of cocaine abuse due to its use as an anesthetic. The use I mentioned earlier about patent preparations was the first popular version of cocaine, but it truly exploded in popularity in the 1880s after an Austrian doctor named Karl Kohler used cocaine to numb the surface of an eye. There was an American ophthalmologist in Vienna at the time who observed this. And he wrote a letter about Kohler's use of cocaine as a local anesthetic to the New York Publication Medical Record. That's what it was called. Ophthalmologists across the country started adopting cocaine as an anesthetic very rapidly and before long, other doctors started using it as a local anesthetic as well. So most notably, this would be dentists who still use a synthetic version of this, novocaine, which we're all pretty much familiar with today. It wasn't long before physicians started noticing some negative side effects of using cocaine as a local anesthetic. The 1880s and 1890s saw a great interest in the danger of cocaine poisoning. They were worried about the toxicity of cocaine. And this was despite the fact that cocaine related deaths were essentially non-existent. I think there might have been a couple, but they pretty much didn't exist. But the therapeutic Gazette gave an early list of symptoms as general intoxication, nausea, and vomiting lasting an entire day. Stumbling, gay, syncope, pallor and sweating, loss of consciousness and convulsions as just a full list of the dangers of using cocaine in their publication. So it appears that the part of the problem arose from the fact that physicians and patients did not have a clear idea of the time of the appropriate dose to use. So one Texas surgeon, Dr. DS Booth gave cocaine to a patient with the instructions to inject half of the solution. But the patient, and I'm quoting Booth's testimony here, the patient led by the general belief that if a little does good, the more will do better injected the entire solution. So they're overusing it just like they overused opium. So the negative aspects of cocaine use in medicine quickly revealed themselves and physicians adjusted accordingly, all without government regulations governing them. Many physicians stopped using cocaine altogether and at least one pharmaceutical company owned by Edward R. Squibb, who is a member of the American Medical Association and the American Pharmaceutical Association, he stopped selling cocaine based products just entirely. Other physicians started moderating the use of cocaine in their medical practices more consciously, trying to retain the beneficial aspects of it while reducing the negative side effects. But there were rare cocaine maniacs, as they were called. And they did inject the drug recreationally, which is, again, a much more potent way to consume it. And the injection made it recognizably similar to morphine in the minds of the masses, because all you're seeing is the injection itself, of course. So if anybody is a fan of the Sherlock Holmes stories, you may already be familiar with his depiction as a cocaine addict who injected both cocaine and morphine. And the sign of four published in 1890. The opening scene depicts this. I'm going to read a paragraph from it because it's interesting. Watson is narrating. He says Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantelpiece and his hypodermic syringe from its neat Morocco case. With his long, white, nervous fingers, he adjusted the delicate needle and rolled back his left shirt cuff.  Finally, he thrust the sharp point home, pressed down the tiny piston and sank back into the velvet-lined armchair with a long sigh of satisfaction. So obviously, this is kind of a negative depiction. And in this case, he was injecting cocaine. He was injecting a seven percent solution of cocaine. But when Watson asks about it, he admits that he alternates between cocaine and morphine and that he uses the drugs when he's bored from not having a case to solve. So these were the images of cocaine use that people became familiar with through popular culture, even though cocaine use in this form was relatively uncommon at the time. And like heroin, the social stigma that was generated against cocaine was enough to bring about a decline in usage without government intervention. Coca-Cola, for example, they removed cocaine from their drink in 1903, which was three years before the Pure Food and Drug Act was passed, which was the first federal law regulating cocaine. Cannabis, I think the history of cannabis in the stigma against it is far more interesting and more complicated. And it actually became stigmatized even before opium and cocaine, but it was not used widely enough to garner a significant amount of attention at the time. So in the mid 19th century, cannabis use was popular among certain writers who consumed it as hashish, which is a type of cannabis paste that you ate by the spoonful. In Paris, there was actually a club called the Hashish Eater's Club that existed for most of the 1840s. I think it was 1844 to 1849, if I remember, and it was just a bunch of writers and artists who got together in a room and would take a spoonful of hashish and then he'll hallucinate off of it. So it was a recreational activity didn't last very long, though. And unlike other drugs, eating cannabis actually makes it more potent because your liver metabolizes the THC into another compound that is more effective in crossing the blood-brain barrier. So the high is about four times as potent than it is when it's inhaled. The first American writer to document his experience with cannabis was Bayard Taylor, who tried it while he was in Egypt. And his experience, his first experience was wonderful. He wrote in his 1854 publication, A Journey to Central Africa. I'm going to read an excerpt here. He says, the sensation it then produced were those physically of exquisite lightness and airiness, mentally of a wonderful keen perception of the ludicrous in the most simple and familiar objects. I noted with careful attention, the fine sensations would spread throughout the whole tissue of my nervous fibers, each thrill helping to divest my frame of its earthly and material nature till my substance appeared to be no grosser than the vapors of the atmosphere. And while sitting in the calm of the Egyptian twilight, I expected to be lifted up and carried away by the first breeze that should ruffle the Nile. So he really enjoyed it his first time around. And it seems similar to any other descriptions you hear of cannabis. I'm sure nobody who's listening to this podcast has ever used illegal substances, but if you read about it, very similar sensation that people have. His second dose of Hasseigh, though, was substantially more powerful and his experience was much less positive. He wrote about this in his 1855 work, The Land of the Saracens, or pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily and Spain, a good 19th century overly long title.  And he described his hallucination in which his tears turned into loaves of bread, and then he was burning up from the heat and water could not quench his thirst. And when he tried to cry out for help, blood poured out of his mouth and ears, it was just a horrifying, horrifying experience for him. And he genuinely believed that he was lucky to have survived the incident at all. And he warned people who might experience with Hasseigh to be careful to avoid overdose. So he believed that you could overdose on cannabis, which is effectively impossible. We know that today, but he didn't know that at the time, of course.  He thought that he narrowly escaped death by this overdose on cannabis. So this established early on this idea that cannabis could be very dangerous, but it was mostly just based on this ignorance and anecdotal experience. There was another writer named Fitzhugh Ludlow, who discovered medical Hasseigh in the United States at around the same time. And like Taylor, Ludlow had a horrifying experience during his first use of Hasseigh, but when he came down from the high, even though it was terrifying to him, he was fascinated by the experience. So his curiosity drove him to try it again. And his second attempt was much more pleasant. He wrote that his experience ended in, and I'm quoting here again, a delirium which unlike all that had preceded it was one of an alter, unutterable calm, excuse me, clarifying of all thought and the flowing in of the richest influences from the world around me without the toil of selecting them. I looked at the stars and felt kindred with them. I spoke to them and they answered me. I dwelt in an inner communication with heaven. While he was attending the College of New Jersey, which is now Princeton, he continued to experiment with higher doses of Hasseigh. But after another bad experience, he eventually swore off the drug entirely, but it wasn't long before he broke that vow and when he started using again, he convinced himself that he was addicted. So with Taylor, we established the misconception that you can overdose and die from cannabis and with Ludlow, we established the belief that it can be addictive and a lot of this later on would also be related to the addictive qualities of opium and cocaine or we're just kind of assuming by nature that all these things are addictive, even though there wasn't real scientific research that demonstrated such. So he believed that he was addicted and it probably was true in a sense because we do know of psychological addictions like a gambling addiction. So there are those elements to it. We just know that marijuana is not chemically addictive, but he probably did have what we would recognize as a psychological addiction. So so we don't want to dismiss it too out of hand. So in 1856, Ludlow found an article that Taylor had written for Putnam's monthly magazine entitled The Hashish Eater, which Taylor had published anonymously. Ludlow wrote to the magazine and got the name of the author and he started a correspondence with Taylor and Ludlow asked Taylor for advice on breaking his habit and they developed a friendship and with Taylor's encouragement, Ludlow wrote his own article for the same magazine entitled The Apocalypse of Hashish and in the next year in 18 so that article was written in 1856, the same the same year, not not very far after Taylor had written his article. In fact, so in 1857, Ludlow wrote his memoirs entitled The Hashish Eater, being passages from the life of a Pythagorean. So Ludlow was convinced that men of genius such as Pythagoras were drawn to Hashish and in his memoirs, Ludlow describes Hashish in almost religious terms. They remind me more of Timothy Leary's description of LSD a century later when he was proselytizing LSD usage after being fired from Harvard than the typical marijuana experience. So Ludlow claimed, for example, that cannabis use proved the existence of the soul. So it's a very, very religious tone almost through this. Just here's why all these geniuses are drawn to it and I'm drawn to it too, because I'm kind of a genius in Ludlow's view. So he kind of saw himself along the same lines as Pythagoras in these memoirs. And the book was popular enough to make Ludlow a very famous writer. So this started his is fame. And in 1868, after opium had exploded in usage, Ludlow wrote another article called The Opium Habit. And in this article, he claimed that cannabis extract was useful for mitigating the withdrawal symptoms of opium addiction. And there's actually a great deal of evidence today to corroborate this. So he's probably right about that. So even though Taylor and Ludlow pinned early writings, warning of the dangers they believed were associated with marijuana, the popular attention it received was for Ludlow's glorification of it. After Ludlow's success, cannabis showed up more often in popular literature and it often was portrayed positively. However, there were some publications that presented a darker narrative of cannabis to try to make quick sells, essentially. So one example, I've got two examples here. One example was in 1876. There was a tabloid journal that printed what I think is an apocryphal report entitled Secret Discipation of New York Bell's Interior of a Hashish Hell on Fifth Avenue. So it has this very ominous tone, this title that wants to grip people in this horror story. And the article describes five upper class women passed out in a sleazy Hashish house. So it's trying to look these rich white women were just. They started using Hashish and look how it upset their dignity.  And there was a similar article that was titled A Hashish House in New York City, the curious adventure of an individual who indulged in a few pipefuls of the narcotic hemp, which was written anonymously by a doctor named H.H. Kane. And this told the story of wealthy individuals of both sexes smoking cannabis in oriental outfits and like oriental masks. And they were obviously playing on the anti-Chinese sentiments that I'm going to talk more about in the heroin episodes, because these kinds of scenes actually generally took place in opium dens. There was a lot of fiction or exaggeration about the opium dens in the United States that was used to try to drum up anti-Chinese hostility in the during the Gilded Age in the United States. So these stigmas were unique to the US at the time. In Britain, cannabis was not really used recreationally very often. It was much more pervasive just as a medicinal product. But in the 1890s and into the 1900s, recreational hashish users did pop up and it became most common among people who were interested in the occult. So among the occult interested hash users was Alastair Crowley, who eventually wrote a two-part article. And the first part was titled A Pharmaceutical Study of Cannabis Sativa, the herb dangerous. So again, we have this very gripping ominous title, even if you viewed it positively, but I guess it was part of this occult mentality, and this was published in 1906. And other occult writers followed and they focused their message of hashish being psychologically addictive or the phrase, psychical invasion. So they're seeing it in their view as a cult members, essentially, as this being a positive thing. But of course, it was just terrifying to to people that weren't familiar with it. And it was being associated with these seedy characters who were interested in the dark arts and all this very, very demagogic stuff that helped drum up sentiment against cannabis. And even before this, as early as the 1870s, because of the opium wars between Britain and China, the British government started questioning whether or not Indian hemp caused insanity. And in 1871, they officially investigated Indian cannabis use and concluded that there were no distinguishable consequences of cannabis use. So all the official studies, and we'll see this in the marijuana episode, all the official studies that pretty much ever been published even into the 20th century and the present pretty much say that it's a harmless substance and it shouldn't be criminalized and it's all it always just goes ignored. It's a common pattern we're going to see over and over again throughout the history of marijuana. They commissioned another study in 1877 and came to similar conclusions. But the administrators in the British colony of India continued to push against cannabis because they believed it made their sepoys lazy, a sepoy being the Indian employees of the British who were, for all intents and purposes, they were slaves. That's how a lot of historians will describe them. They were paid for their work, but they were kind of coerced. They really have a whole lot of option in this. So don't think of them as free market employees. They were exploited in the libertarian sense. And the British thought that they were lazy because they were using cannabis. And so this led to a very famous commission called the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission of 1893, which questioned more than a thousand witnesses about the effects and dangers of cannabis. This was doctors. They questioned native farmers. They even questioned Christian missionaries in India about this. So this commission yielded a 3,500 page report. And the report came to three conclusions. One, cannabis use was actually a lot more widespread than they previously thought. Two, there was no evidence at all of it being dangerous or of it causing crime or insanity, as had been claimed. And three, banning cannabis in India would lead to civil unrest, especially because cannabis was used in some religious traditions at the time. But the stigma was established. The push against it, even though the all three of these commissions pretty much concluded that cannabis use was very innocuous. The stigma had already been generated. And with the association of these seedy occult groups, the public sentiment was turning against cannabis, especially in recreational use in Britain and the US by the early 20th century. And we'll we'll go into some more of the, you know, the racist elements that went into criminalizing these drugs and that the other episodes devoted to cannabis and cocaine and opium. There was racist elements and there were also political motivation. So this isn't the only thing, but it is the environment that made it very easy to pass through criminalization laws with very little resistance. So we will look at that in future episodes. We're going to look at the four drugs individually, marijuana, cocaine, heroin and LSD also all just deserve their individual episodes. LSD mostly not because it's super important, but because it's just a very interesting, very amusing history. So you're really going to enjoy that episode. And we're also going to look at the political aspect of the war on drugs for the 20th century. So this will end the first episode of the Mises podcast. Historical controversies. I hope you like it. We hope to hear some feedback and do subscribe to this podcast so you can hear the rest of the episodes on the war on drugs and the other topics that we will be coming after this. Thanks for listening.