Allegra Kirkland, AlterNet

Would you ever pay money for pills containing crushed-up houseplants, powdered rice or fragments of psychiatric medications? If you’re one of the tens of millions of Americans who take dietary supplements, the answer could very well be an unknowing yes.

We are currently experiencing a “renaissance” in psychedelic research, as Michael Pollan writes in a recent issue of The New Yorker. Hallucinogenic drugs like psilocybin can be used to treat a range of mental health disorders, from anxiety and addiction to depression, and researchers at the nation’s leading medical schools are intent on discovering their full therapeutic potential.

For a country so taken with the idea of “family values,” the United States does a remarkably terrible job at helping people start families. We are the only industrialized nation that doesn’t have a law guaranteeing that new mothers receive paid maternity leave, and only 12 percent of women are granted paid leave by their employers. In most workplaces, paternity leave remains unheard of. Though it is technically illegal to fire workers after learning they are pregnant, it is very difficult to prove the cause of termination, and discrimination against pregnant and nursing employees persists. Nationwide Insurance employee Angela Ames, who was fired last year for taking time to pump milk during the day, was told by her supervisor, “just go home to be with your babies.” Yet in a mind-bending perversion of gender equality, Ames recently lost a sex discrimination lawsuit because judges pointed out that men can lactate too.

Like most heroin users, Ory Joe Johnson’s addiction began with a perfectly legal prescription. After a bad car accident in which he broke his nose, jaw, collarbone and ankle, the Wyoming native was prescribed Vicodin for the pain. The meds eventually ran out, but his dependence on them remained. To fuel it, Johnson began dealing drugs, starting with crank (a low-quality powdered form of meth), and as the years passed and his addiction metastasized, eventually moving up to heroin. At the peak of his dealing career, Johnson was funneling drugs to a network of local college students and his reach extended to a constellation of southern Wyoming towns.

The superrich have no shortage of opportunities to drop vast sums of money, but one of their favorite ways to do so is purchasing real estate. From Bel Air mansions to beachfront villas, lavish homes do double duty as solid investments and ostentatious displays of wealth. But unfortunately for their neighbors, building these dream homes requires many months of noisy, disruptive construction and in some cases, the final products occupy formerly public land. More obnoxiously, these houses are often secondary or tertiary residences, where the person commissioning them may only spend a few weeks out of the year. The neighbors getting up in arms at the construction are usually quite wealthy themselves—after all, billionaires aren’t going to settle down just anywhere—but here are six cases that stretch the boundaries of acceptability.