My whole youth the mantra was that weed makes you dumb. Why do you think they call it dope?– I used to think “only anti-weed people call it dope, deuhr” but when I got into AA I discovered that “dope” was the ordinary going term (like “pot” in the ’60s and ’70s and “weed” now)… in the 1980s, and people were still pulling that line in the ’90s and 2000s. They might still be now; people who called weed “dope” in regular life like a Friday the 13th movie have kids now at the age to start smoking dope, and old enough to be constantly warned off it.

But when I land a bag (once every two weeks now) I get more cerebral and ideaa flow more freely. At times like this, when I’m in a generally good, productive mood and have been thinking about thought and language lately in my spare time*, it makes the ideas run the cup over and leads to long stoned-guy-in-the-agora/forum-ranting-at-anyone-who-will-listen posts on Music Babble.

I’ve been reading about the history of medicine. I want to read Hippocrates and Avicenna now. I’ve been skimming from the former. He really was a pivotal figure in world history every bit the equal of Darwin or Columbus, but he’s much less talked about, Galen even less so.

When people quote Hippocrates, they’re really quoting the Hippocratic Corpus, a collection of some seventy medical treatises ranging from the philosophical (the Hippocratic Oath, banning euthanasia and abortion, is here) to the specific (case histories and everything known to Greek medicine on fractures and hemorrhoids) actually written by his followers, not Hippocrates himself, like when people are quoting Socrates they’re really quoting Plato. But as people have no problem quoting a single historical, eighth-century Homer or a twelfth-century Moses, we can quote Hippocrates without being hippocrites.

• “Hippocrates” means “master of horses”, hippos meaning horse (hippos, horses + dromos, racecourse; hippos, horse + potamos, river; philos, fond of + hippos, horses). Kratos “power” as in democracy, autocracy, theocracy.