#tim barrus on addiction

[timbarrus]

Take notes. I was a teacher to adolescents with HIV. All of them arrived with a long list of medications. Every school district creates rules like a nurse has to administer all meds, and if students are caught taking their own meds, they were expelled. No drugs. Was a fundamental paradigm mainly because we have no idea what to do with sexually active adolescents, some addicted to opiates, and this was not where anything ends. It's the beginning. Methadone. The idea that people can use antiretrovirals and nothing else is a fantasy. It's going to be a cocktail. These are not the fun drugs. It's a soup of chemicals. All of them toxic. Suicide ideation connected these kids. There are reasons why some kids cannot handle medications at home. Abuse would be one. Your mother's boyfriend said you have to be punished by god. If you were gay, you were already being punished by god. It is now a life of punishment. Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors were drugs the entire classroom was on, and these were kids, too, who just needed to talk. So talk we did. I Am Going To Kill Myself came up as a topic. Meds were next. After that, there was a lot of rage over the image that HIV clinics project of themselves versus armed cops walking hallways. When these kids see a cop, they leave. Some kids had twenty different medications. The mom's boyfriend throws all the meds down the toilet. They came to school drained. SRIs took too long. Sometimes suicide ideation became just suicide.

[survivingquarantine]

[timbarrus]

No mention of alcohol and HIV. I was working with adolescent boys with HIV and alcoholism. I have read thousands of these well-written, cogent pieces. But even the mention in this article -- and all the others -- is missing a lot. AIDS means stigma. Alcohol does not block the pain. HIV can be racism on steroids. I don't know where you live, but in my little world, Appalachia, it matters what side of the tracks you live on. Mixing this stuff will kill you. Access is a fantasy. 12 teenage boys is a goodly portion of many tiny American towns that have their own issues. Acting Up was not an option. AIDS did not spare them. Oxycontin did not spare them

It took me a while to comprehend that the addiction to Oxy was causing their medications to become toxic. The problem is alcohol, but secrets come with a toxicity all by their own little selves. It's a demon fix. Let's get real. Their lives depend on our getting real. Now, on to fentanyl. More secrets. More Thunderbird. In a field situated near their school. No drug/alcohol treatment. Doctors are complicit, and have addiction issues themselves. At that time, everyone with HIV was using Sustiva which ran fluidly through Wonderland on a dizzy adventure tour involving the community writ large. Horror stories. All the same story. All the same secrets. A Sustiva trip is the equivalent of LSD. Alcohol, Oxy, HIV drugs, violence from dealers, poverty, alcohol, Fentanyl, school failure, suicide.They kill themselves.The end.

[timbarrus]

Great writing. Great publishing. One big deep dive into the pornography of addiction. This is the awesome stuff brought to you, too, by photography. The light slips in from tree to tree yet the shadows that witch the world are visages given grip to hold beauty in your mammal's hands.  Through rivers of your blood and mine. We seek what. Death threats will start up again if I write this with any authenticity. But these are the stomping grounds of bones. This despair disguised as Place, remains not unlike a movie of your second selves. By Hemingway. Does anyone survive this. It's not addiction. It's murder. Sex and drugs. Michigan's requisite paradigm of intermittent intervention. The maternal caring of a foot. Nick Adams. A cerulean blue in juxtaposition glows gloves. The lives of the diseased are eased but it's a blindness, it is the infected foot of finality. Do not come this way again. My high school friends didn't start killing themselves until after graduation. These suicides were quick with guns. They transcended class and caste. School was a building for a marketplace. We went to the woods to smoke some harmless weed, but we did not go there to live in the forests of our winter as stuck on restraint. Run. Nevertheless, the lady with the foot in frostbite, will lose her balancing act of dominos while the Great Bugabuga is HIV and let's not talk much about that. Or stigma. It doesn't live in woods. It lives in society. A photo can be seemingly prosaic but it will bleed.

[timbarrus]

You will throw up for a couple of days. Then, the shivering. Then, the decision. Get clean or die. I do not make the rules and I do not preach to anyone. Get clean or die. You don’t wanna go to rehab. No. No. No.

[timbarrus]

Stand by your man. Give him two arms to cling to. Stand. By. Your man.

[timbarrus]

Every study (and there have been hundreds) that looks at education in Appalachia, looks at paradigms and data. I can’t say if that is right or wrong. What I can say is that giving up in a process. It’s not a means to an end. What I see, what I experience is more of a one on one with these kids. I do not know how you evaluate the process of giving up with data. Where does it begin. Where does it end. The numbers are not only staggering, but there are analogies and correlations.

The rate of suicide in Appalachia is also 40% higher than the national average. There are also 40% LESS mental health services in Appalachia than the rest of America. The median household income in Appalachia has remained at $20,000 for a decade. The rate of fatal overdose is TEN TIMES the national rate of deaths from opiates.

Entire families have been wiped out.

Perdu Pharma aggressively targeted Appalachian doctors with a focus on OxyContin.

Appalachia has been viciously exploited by the rest of America. A school dropout rate of almost half the children of Appalachia would suggest that the status quo is one of exploitation where hopelessness is complicit in the relationships between school failure, suicide, poverty, and addiction.

Where the fuck do you even begin to touch these numbers.

I will tell you where.

It will always be one on one with any kid whatsoever.

[timbarrus]

It cannot be easy for parents whose sons end up like this. But your sons have been at war with addiction for a long time. You just didn’t know about it because you do not know your own kid.

[timbarrus]

We seem to have forgotten that HIV is still with us. HIV is still with us. How many times do I have to write it. Now, repeat after me. HIV is still with us.

[timbarrus]

I am not the sex police. I am not the sex cheerleader captain of the rah rah squad either. I am only a subversive survivor. How can we see this social and cultural problem -- young boys choosing to do sex work -- if we are only willing to see it in moral terms. These issues are exactly the same with HIV/AIDS. We conveniently ignore the REAL problem, and it’s called POVERTY. Hunger nips at the heels of the carnivorous monstrosity. Poverty will suck you dry. No 12yo is itching to do sex work. Each one of these boys has a story. These are stories of violence, HIV, homelessness, prison, addiction, hepatitis C, organ failure, school failure, and suicide. Any kid who starts at 12 will NEVER see 22. These are the stories we need you to write about, film, take video of, draw, and talk about. Sex work is not sex. Sex work is about power. Just how much power does a 12yo have anyway. Sex work should be legalized so we do not end up with very young boys embittered, raped, imprisoned, and ruined. We want them to listen to us. But we do not listen to them. It has to work both ways. And we must honestly admit that it all begins in endemic poverty. 

[timbarrus]

Tim Barrus in the New York Times: The Ethics of the Slaughterhouse

I ate meat until I saw what goes on in a slaughterhouse. I cannot write about it. There are laws that prohibit me from putting anything of what I witnessed into any kind of print. These laws prohibiting writers from reporting on what goes on were laws dreamed up as pacts between meat producers and state legislators. One funds the other. The arrangement is immoral and corrupt.

Like killing animals on an industrial scale is immoral and corrupt.

Have you ever read an article in the New York Times that rips the veil off the killing, the sounds, the screams, and the blood. No, you have not. Have you seen the photographs. No, you have not. Did you know that animals get what is happening to them, and I have seen the animals physically oppose the killers. It's shocking. But the animals can fight back. They do not win those confrontations.

Have you ever seen a horse gutted and still screaming as it is being picked up by a metal hook, the horse still kicking. No, you have not.

It is an ethical issue. We have never been killing animals in a humane way. That is simply rhetoric.

You are not supposed to know what goes on in a slaughterhouse. Because you would stop eating dead meat.

I had to stop eating dead meat. But first I had to vomit over what I has just seen.

Dead meat eaters are chemically addicted. Withdrawal in stages does not work. Understanding what slaughterhouses are works in no uncertain terms.

Lambs. You cut them, gut them, and eat the young.

Humans are predators.