Humanity's Back Up Plans, and Marijuana Legalization

Good morning,

Before I get into today’s weekly, I’d like everyone to join me in pouring one out for the great Jimmy Buffet, who created a billion dollar brand all about drinking on the beach. He passed away at the age of 76 this weekend.

If you haven’t seen his incredibly brief cameo in Jurassic Park, it’ll bring a tear to your eye.

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On Back Up Plans

One issue we humans share is an inability to think beyond our own lifetimes. We’re shortsighted, typically focused on maximizing the time we ourselves have on earth, and not looking beyond our years spent here. That can lead to problems of course, as if we are all only thinking 30, 40, maybe even 80 years ahead, then who will be thinking about generations after us?

Luckily, there are those among us who are thinking beyond the present day, planning for the future, and ensuring we have a few back up protocols should this whole humanity thing turns south.

In the spirit of back up plans, I’d like to highlight today a few ways humans are planning ahead, and planning beyond our own short, blip of a time spent here.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault

Want to read a crazy sentence? High above the Arctic Circle, on a cold and rocky archipelago called Svalbard lays a vault filled with the seeds and genetic material of over one million different plants.

It’s called the Global Seed Vault, and its a fascinating agricultural back up plan for a potential loss in genetic biodiversity, or worse, massive regional collapses in agricultural populations. You see, across the globe exists a large network of nationally funded gene banks. Many countries invested in their own gene bank initiatives as a means of conserving the genetic materials of plants, animals, and even humans who make up the country. These biorepositories are themselves their own form of a back up plan against the wave of agricultural biodiversity loss our planet has seen in recent decades due to climate change.

But these gene banks are scattered across various borders, and for many years there existed little centralization for the storage of the genetic information for our planet’s expansive agriculture. That was until 2004, when a conservationist named Carey Fowler approached the Norwegian Government with the idea for a back up back up plan for a global seed biorepository.

The Seed Vault, built into the cliffs of the Norwegian islands of Svalbard, officially opened its doors in 2008, and has since grown to be an international endeavor. Ireland provided 32 varieties of potatoes from Ireland's national gene banks in 2019. The US contributed 20,000 new samples from the U.S. Agricultural Research Service. In 2015, many representatives from Middle Eastern countries began sharing samples from their own regions as well.

The name itself, Global Seed Vault sounds like something out of a science fiction story. But regardless, it’s a fascinating and thoughtful plan that has quietly been built up in the far northern reaches of our globe.

And don’t worry if you prefer organic. The vault contains only the non-GMO variety of plants.

The Lunar Library

If the concept of a Global Seed Vault piqued your interest, then you’re in luck, I have a wonderful follow up back up plan to share: humanity’s Lunar Library.

That’s right, nestled on the surface of the moon after making a crash landing in 2019, is a 30 million page long digital novel containing a massive trove of historical documents, photographs, Wikipedia, and perhaps most intriguing, maps of the human genome.

It was a project created by the Arch Mission Foundation, a non-profit whose goal is to “create multiple redundant repositories of human knowledge around the Solar System, including on Earth.”

Beyond just hosting the digital files, this library even includes instructions for decoding the messages contained through “a series of documents that teach the technical specifications, file formats, and scientific and engineering knowledge necessary to access, decode and understand, the digital information encoded in deeper layers of the Library.”

It’s not the first such transcription of humanity to be launched in space. All the way back in 1977, Both the Voyager 1 and 2 space probes famously included The Golden Record; a hopeful message of sorts, blasted into the far reaches of our solar system on the very slimmest of chances something else is out there and hears.

I often hear people question why we don’t pour all our collective attention and resources into solving certain problems. And while yes, we facing some pressing challenges right now, but I also believe one of the beautiful parts of humanity is that there are eight billion of us, meaning we can afford at least a handful of us to focus on thinking beyond our own lifetimes.

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Progress Towards Cannabis Legalization

It’s the year 2023, and at this point, you could throw a dart at a map of the US and land on a state whose population overwhelming supports marijuana legalization.

It’s perhaps one of the few (mostly) universally agreed upon policy topics conservatives and liberals share from the last ten years, so it remains damning that marijuana remains federally illegal and classified as a drug that is more dangerous than meth.

There’s a lot I could write about on this topic, and a lot that already has been written on the long history of cannabis criminalization, the unfathomable incarceration rates this criminalization has led to, and the impact criminalization has had on those who could greatly benefit from it in a medical setting, but today I’d like to highlight a fair bit of progress:

Senior Officials in the Biden Administration just took perhaps the largest step towards federal legalization in recent history.

On August 30 this past week, Health and Human Services (HHS) Assistant Secretary of Health Rachel Levine wrote in a letter to the DEA recommending that marijuana be reclassified from a schedule I drug, to a schedule III drug. Now, this may appear like a small and trivial move, but White House officials don’t write open letters like this unless there is tangible internal planning and advocacy towards eventual legalization.

And its about time.

According to polling conducted by the Pew Research Center in November of 2022, a record share of the U.S. (88%) say that marijuana should be legal for medical and/or recreational use by adults (59%) or that it should be legal for medical use only (30%). That is beyond a supermajority of the population, and demonstrates the breadth of the ramifications the long-since-lost War on Drugs and ongoing lobbying have had on progress.

Its a policy and social viewpoint that also coincides with some massive demographic shifts around the views of consumption of alcohol vs. marijuana. According to Bloomberg, alcohol consumption is dropping dramatically among Millennials and Gen Z.

As health and wellness awareness among younger demographics continues to rise, so has awareness of the health implications of long term binge drinking behaviors. This has led to alternative, perhaps healthier, vices rising in popularity.

On the political front, bureaucracy unfortunately grinds ever slowly, but it does still grind. This letter indicates the White House has eventual legalization on their mind, which means political leaders are definitely discussing this in Congress. This letter further indicates to relevant agencies like the DEA that its high time (ha!) for a change.

I want to call out this quote, which spells out the evaluation conducted, and the steps the DEA will take to review the classification:

“As part of this process, HHS conducted a scientific and medical evaluation for consideration by DEA. DEA has the final authority to schedule or reschedule a drug under the Controlled Substances Act,” a spokesperson for the agency said in a statement. “DEA will now initiate its review.”

I sure hope that scientific evaluation involved some personal experimentation.