TcheQuevara

As someone who dreams with one day having a UNICAMP PhD in my area, it's a little weird knowing about that!

I remember, from when I was a little kid, when tobacco advertising wasn't prohibited in Brazil yet, of that absolutely wonderful Marlboro ad, with the cowboy riding over the fields with that music of pure freedom on the back ground. Not only I keep going back to cigarettes because they make me feel cooler and more confident - once, when relapsing, the first cigarette I smoked was a red Malrboro and I could feel the freedom and that marvelous song playing on the back of my head.

Smoking tobacco was once cool (still is? I'm cool, right?). Using marijuana is obviously very cool right now, among certain circles. Do you worry that, in a few decades, people will criticize how cool marijuana seemed for this generation, and the people who contributed to make it cool? Will the marijuana industry one day be viewed as we currently see the tobacco industry? Are we being unfair to the tobacco business?

That's awesome. Today, UNICAMP is the biggest reference in the study of theatre and acting, specially clowns and physical acting. Maybe I'll study there one day too!

Hi, sir! Two questions!

First: Missionaries had been very important for linguistics AND anthropology over History. However, a lot of modern anthrolopological concepts, like methodological relativism, exist as a response to what today as seem as bad anthropological practices of missionaries.

I think your personal story is a very ironic twist on usual one, but still, you are a researcher with a missionary background. What's your take on relativism, the epistemologic concerns of getting involved, etc?

Second: did you ever watch the Chomky vs Foucault debate? Who did you think have won? Seriously, though, is there such a thing as human nature?

I honestly admire your ability with arguments. It must have been a bit of a challenge. I hope your employer's seeing this. This is Don Draper level shit.

Of course neither of us have anything about the poor wretched tobacco users. They fell for it when it was credible tobacco wasn't just fine, it was positive, had something to do with a right attitude to life. I'm also pro legalization, specially because we're all sick of Americans financing violent drug entrepeuners who behead and torture people across the border, but also because I understand marijuana is comparable to alcohol, which is manageable both at a personal and social level. Not to mention the medical effects.

However, I do know people who've spent years of their lives in very bad patterns of depression and lack of motivation which one can't help but relate to their constant use of marijuana. All those people I know had a certain pride in it, and they were absorbed in "cannabis culture". I'm not talking about delirant, racist prejudices of people smoking a joint and killing their families, but about this pride and identification that goes beyond the effect and experience of the psychoactive itself. That's the parallel with tobacco and handsome cowboys. But you guys are going even further - you are promising a contribution in some sort of political or social liberation, and we all know from where you took it, from the counterculture that, while extremely rich artistically (I'm a fan myself, PM me for prose poetry), was part of the very damaging personal choices that led my friends to where they were for so much time, or where they dwell to this day.

They all started young, of course. Of course it's very silly for anyone to believe they'll be smarter or more political or not a sheeple if they smoke a joint, but it's the kind of bad reasoning we have when we're kids. And you are selling hemp candy.

The key word could be "hype". The tobacco "hype" got us so deep we're still hyping it and thinking we're the Marlboro cowboy years after regulations where introduced. You are hyping marjuana right now, marketing a psychoactive like it's a sneaker, adding to the product qualities that are not present in itself. You talked that you should be leaders in the industry - do you doubt that in 30 or 50 years, the industry PR people will be saying "we should have been more responsible back them, we should not encourage use the way we did, we should abide to notions of user responsability in every communication", etc? If you are leaders in your industry and if your industry is not the tobacco industry, shouldn't you be starting to market with responsability right now? Or you gonna wait for regulations and documentaries exposing the marijuana injustry?