Dispatches From The Ultra-Processing of America:

Hyper-potent Pot to Meta & Google on Trial ... recent news has run from grim to encouraging -- and all of it confirms why I wrote a book about tuba players and band directors.

A new study adds more depressing data to the idea that in legalizing marijuana with no limits on potency what we really did was just open the door to youth mental illness.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Health published an analysis of 700,000 health records. (The full study was published in the American Journal of Psychiatry.) Here’s the school’s report on the study:

“The relative risk of young people age 17 and under with cannabis use disorder was 52% higher for schizophrenia, 30% higher for recurrent major depression, and 21% higher for anxiety disorders.”

“The findings highlight the question of whether excessive cannabis use, perhaps more than other substances, might alter brain development of young people, predisposing them to developing a psychiatric disorder. …”

“There are still many unknowns,” said one of the study’s co-authors, “but I would never recommend that teenagers use cannabis, especially not the high-potency cannabis products that are on the market now.”

There, he touches on the sadder point I draw from this study, which is: As a culture we fail so badly when it comes to regulating the sale of addictive and profitable substances and services and the companies that market them with such special energy to the youngest and most economically vulnerable among us.

As if our commercial DNA won’t allow it. As if it’s somehow sacrilegious to suggest that someone making money on an addictive product ought to put public health and public safety before that profit.

No wonder young people view capitalism with suspicion, and seem to embrace socialism. The capitalism they know is predatory, fanged, feeding on them.

Our culture is full today of so much ultra-processed, legal crud that is also addictive. Porn, video games, junk “food,” gambling, smart-phone apps, monster drinks, hyperpotent pot.

It’s the Ultra-Processing of America — and we’ve witnessed it take place in real time over the last two decades. Addictive supply more plentiful and potent than ever.

And people wonder why I wrote a book about tuba players and band directors. The Ultra-Processing of America — that’s why.

Tuba players and band directors are antidotes to all that.

Things were looking grim. Then — what do you know? — Meta and Google’s Youtube lost jury trials this week.

Here’s Reuters reporting that an L.A. jury found Meta and Google “liable for a young woman’s depression and suicidal thoughts after she said she became addicted to Instagram and YouTube at a young age.”

$6 billion in damages.

In New Mexico, a jury “ordered Meta to pay $375 million after finding the company misled users about the safety of its products for young users and enabled the sexual exploitation of children on its ​platforms.”

Both cases shatter the companies’ defense that they’re just platforms and can’t be editors of the content that flows on those platforms.

Both companies say they’ll appeal. Meta responded: “We remain committed to building safe, supportive environments for young people and will defend our record vigorously.”

Remember when these tech titans were scruffy rebels upsetting old norms. Remember when Google’s motto was “Don’t be evil.”

Meanwhile, Netflix raised its prices again this week, reminding me that I’m glad I canceled before their last price increase took effect. I’m looking to untangle from Prime Video since the ads they inject into their movies now make them unwatchable.

Maybe we’ll all soon be back with our commercial-free DVDs.

I’m cheered by the movement to get smart phones out of schools. I wish it had happened 10 years ago. I think we’re beginning to learn, too, that expensive tablets and Chromebooks in schools provided little of the educational enhancements they promised.

So maybe pencils and paper and real books were a key to student success all along.

I suspect the addictive qualities of social media and some of this other stuff might never have grown so acute had Congress or state legislatures acted forcefully some time ago, when we all knew there was a problem.

Why are gambling-app ads allowed on TV if tobacco’s are not?

But Congress becomes beholden to lobbying interests made powerful by the income they earn from addicting their customers. Thus the courts become the sole zone of recourse.

We saw this with tobacco years ago, and lately with the thousands of lawsuits against opioid manufacturers and pharmacy chains. Who knows how many more will follow the Meta and Google lawsuits.

Perhaps we’ll see similar lawsuits within six to ten years against the companies that ultra-process cannabis into these toxic and legal potions of the kind that Johns Hopkins studied.

Would not surprise me to see the gambling-app companies sued, as well.

I think a lot of this is due to the fact that the Ultra-Processing of America has taken place as we have come to a much deeper understanding of the neuroscience of addiction. That free will and rational behavior is often blunted or perverted by products that influence or control the reward pathways in our brains – and that many companies are fine-tuning their products and marketing to do just that.

That our brains have powerful, seemingly unaccountable economic forces arrayed against them and they are pervasive.

I watched part of my first baseball game of the season yesterday.

I’ve always loved the early days of the major-league baseball season because the games are outside, on grass, the sun is shining. It feels fresh and renewing and pure. (I don’t watch baseball played indoors – Tampa Bay, Toronto, Minnesota – and prefer teams with real grass not artificial turf.)

But the first batter I watched, there it was, right next to his batting average last season: The betting odds on his getting a hit that at-bat — +250.

Meaning a $100 bet earns $250 in profit – reflecting a 28% chance of winning. Quite enticing. Except he struck out taking an inside pitch he knew he had no chance of hitting.

I guess nothing is so sweet that corporate finance guys won’t ultra-process its supply in some way or another.

Thanks MLB and ESPN. As apparently we can’t rely on Congress to do much about this, I’ll wait patiently for you to be sued like the Sacklers, Meta, and Google.

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From my `ONE GREAT SONG COLUMN …and The Story Behind It’ column:

Here Comes That Rainbow Again by Kris Kristofferson.

Kol Nidrei, composed by Max Bruch, performed by Janos Starker.

Spanish Johnny by Emmylou Harris and Waylon Jennings.

PHOTO OF THE WEEK: La Gardenia Dance Hall (Alice, TX)