#whats really strange is how isolating making these substances illegal are

[jynxlovesluck]

Real character growth is thinking weed is the Worst Drug On the Planet as a kid and growing up going "Actually, while weed itself has both negative and positive effects for different people for different reasons, we should talk about how the substance itself is used to demonize and imprison poor people, and you KNOW it's aimed even moreso at people of color, of Black and Latino people ESPECIALLY, all for your local Senator to get the shit shipped to their house and accept the taxes it brings in by the-"

Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk, Mr. Fucking Anslinger.

[jswdmb1]

Champagne Supernova

“How many special people change?

How many lives are living strange?

Where were you while we were getting high?”

- Oasis

Let me start by saying I don’t celebrate 4/20 as a holiday, but I get the joke, so I’m in on it today too.  Let me follow that with this is not a post about me being jealous.  If I wanted to smoke some dope, trust me it would be happening, and I couldn’t give a shit who thinks I should or shouldn’t.  And, that’s what really bothers me about this whole push to legalize weed, particularly in Illinois where it is just a cash grab.  It distracts from the fact that our entire oversight of “drugs” in this country is so massively whacked and is completely unfair.  To isolate marijuana as the one drug that needs reform is the most stupid as it is probably the least of our worries.

Before we go further, we need education on the root of the problem which is the bullshit classification system used by the federal government.  Here are their definitions of the five different classes (as per Dr. Tim Sams in his book “ABC’S OF PAIN RELIEF AND TREATMENT”:

SCHEDULE 1 (CLASS I) DRUGS  are illegal because they have high abuse potential, no medical use, and severe safety concerns; for example, narcotics such as Heroin, LSD, and cocaine. Marijuana is also included as a Class 1 drug despite it being legal in some states and it being used as a medicinal drug in some states. SCHEDULE 2 DRUGS (CLASS 2) DRUGS have a high potential for abuse and dependence, an accepted medical use, and the potential for severe addiction. These drugs include opiods based on high dose codeine, Fentanyl, and Oxycodone as well as Methamphetamine and the Barbiturates; also included are such drugs as opium, morphine. Adderall is even included in this category under "mixed amphetamine salts". The main difference between a Schedule, or Class, 1 and 2 is whether or not the drug is deemed to have a valid medical application. SCHEDULE 3 (CLASS 3) DRUGS  have a lower potential for abuse than drugs in the first two categories, accepted medical use, and mild to moderate possible addiction. These drugs include steroids, Low-dose Codeine, and Hydrocodone-based opiods. SCHEDULE 4 (CLASS 4) DRUGS have an even lower abuse potential than Schedule 3 Drugs, accepted medical use, and limited addiction potential. These include most of the anti-anxiety medications like the numerous Benzodiazepines, Sedatives, sleeping agents, and the mildest of the opiod type medications like Darvon and Talwin. SCHEDULE 5 (CLASS 5) DRUGS have a low abuse potential, accepted medical use, and a very limited addiction potential. These consist primarily of preparations containing limited quantities of narcotics or stimulant drugs for cough, diarrhea, or pain.

The first question that comes to mind is where are nicotine, caffeine and alcohol on this list?  The answer is nowhere.  All are considered normally occurring substances that all people consume in small quantities through natural means (for examples, tomatoes have some nicotine in them) therefore they cannot be regulated.  That is the biggest load of government crap to ever come out of the back of the truck.  Based on that logic, all opioids should not be anywhere on the list because I can get some of that by eating a poppy seed muffin.  And, marijuana is as natural of a substance as anything, so why is growing and consuming it illegal but not poison mushrooms.  I’m not arguing here about what should be classified as Schedule 1, 2, 3, etc., I’m arguing that the schedule itself is insane and actually immoral.  

What do I mean by that last part?  If you are poor, you are more likely to gravitate to the drugs that are on Schedule 1.  I know that is a generalization, and that all sorts of people use Schedule 1 drugs, but go look up the stats behind who is in jail for drug offenses (seriously, go look it up, I’m done doing your homework for you), and it is overwhelmingly poor and minorities.  It’s awfully convenient to keep marijuana on Schedule 1 to keep that prison economy going and it is equally convenient to let tobacco roam free killing millions a year to keep that industry awash in cash.  Meanwhile a whole segment of our population is brutally oppressed under laws skewed to serve those in power and money.  It is about as un-American as things get, and that is during a time when just about everything that comes out of that sewer hole that we call Washington is un-American.

I’m going to keep this short, because there is not much to say.  Get rid of the fucking schedule of drugs and take a completely different look at how we manage this problem in the U.S.  Stop putting people in jail and get them real help for their problems whether it be pain, addiction, or poverty.  Immediately commute the sentences of anyone in jail for non-violent drug-related offenses and expunge their records.  Then reset how you are going to regulate everything that needs to be regulated.  From my perspective, prohibition of anything seems counterproductive as long as it is not hurting other people, but that also doesn’t mean certain things shouldn’t be controlled.  What should be controlled and not controlled should be decided by people who actually know what they are talking about.  Real doctors who are specialized in such matters should be helping to craft policy.  I know that excludes me, and it certainly includes any politician most of whom I wouldn’t trust to make a cup of coffee never mind handle something as important and technical as this.

So, get a blue ribbon panel together and let’s end the “War on Drugs” and direct our efforts to reengineering this entire process.  And, let’s look at how we can really help the segment of our society that needs it the most instead of shunning them and locking them up.  How will this be funded?  Not a new tax on individuals, but just start siphoning profits from the companies selling cigarettes and prescriptions that are really killing people.  Until that happens, leave me out of the 4/20 celebrations.  Not because I’m bitter that I’m sober now, but because there is nothing to celebrate.  Not while millions suffer with addiction, some in prison, while the power brokers get rich off their misery.  So feel free to light up today, just ponder while you eat your post-smoke box of Twinkies why you really can’t enjoy weed freely and even more puzzlingly why Twinkies are not Schedule 1?  I mean is there anything else that exists that lacks value or is as highly addictive as those little bastards?  That should blow your mind whether you are high or not right now.

Cheers,

Jim

[taffymagazine]

The Psychology and Politics of Drug Addiction in Americans

A response to Bruce Alexander’s Rat Park experiment and why we have ignored it

By Rhayne Batista

A graphic of “Rat Park,” courtesy of Psychology Today (2015).

Before we delve into what Rat Park was and is, here are some statistics to keep in mind, from Lauren Slater’s book Opening Skinner’s Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century (2004).

1. Ninety-five percent of Ontario citizens who use cocaine do so less than once per month.

2. Over an 11 year period, twenty-seven regular cocaine users in San Francisco remained “gainfully employed.”

3. Eleven of the above respondents reported to using addictive drugs daily at some point in their lives, but were no longer doing so.

4. Ninety percent of Vietnam Veterans who became addicted to heroin on the war fields stopped using once they returned home.

5. In 1990, 5.1% of young Americans reported to using crack cocaine once in their life, but a mere 0.4% had used during the month of the interview and less than 0.05% had used it 20+ days in that month.

“It would seem the most addictive drug on earth causes persistent addiction in no more than one user in one hundred” ~Bruce Alexander, PhD (Slater 159).

Bruce Alexander, PhD., was working as an assistant professor at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, when, in teaching and studying heroin-addiction, he began to question the validity of accepted theories as to why people get addicted to drugs. He began to think “that people used, not because they HAD to pharmacologically, but because the substance was one valid way of adapting to difficult circumstances” (Slater 161). The theory then, and the one that remains the most prominent, is that addiction is an inevitable effect of drug use, that drugs “excite that dormant median forebrain bundle [which is the pleasure center of the brain], causing it to crave more and more, the same way scratching a bug bute only ignites the itch” (Slater 164). Alexander doubted this evidence, however, in seeing the deplorable conditions that the rats used to test (and as many claim, prove) this theory, and claiming that “if I lived like that in a cage, I’d get as high as possible, too” (Slater 165). 

Dr. Bruce K. Alexander, PhD.

To test the situational effects on addiction, Alexander and his co-investigators created Rat Park on the premise that “strapping a [mammal] into a seat for days on end, and giving it a button to push or relief, says nothing about the power of drugs and everything about the power of restraints –social, physical, and psychological” (Slater 156). Rat Park was “the rat’s Ritz Carlton,” a paradise for its residents with it’s colors, space, and amenities, much like rehab centers are for humans (Slater 165).

The investigators administered two experiments to see whether environment, restraints and lack-thereof, had any effect on the rates of addiction in a population. The first experiment was the seduction: sixteen lab rats were housed in Rat Park, while sixteen others were housed in cages like the ones used in previous addiction experiments, and both populations were given a choice between sugary morphine-laced water and regular water. It was found that “the cramped and isolated caged rats loved the morphine-laced water,” while “the rat-park residents, however, resisted drinking the narcotic solution, no matter how sweet the researchers made it,” and furthermore, “when the researchers added Nalaxone [a substance that negates the effects of opioids but spares the sugary taste of the conduit] to the morphine-laced water in the rat park, the rat-park rats reversed their aversion to the narcotic water and drank it” (Slater 166). These findings affirmed Alexander’s beliefs by showing that, “at least in rodents, opiates are actually, in favorable situations, distinctly undesirable, which is a far cry from our understanding of them as inherently tempting.” 

In order to resist the nay-sayers of the experiment, who would claim that “in the real world, people are more vulnerable, and they may begin to use at a bad point in their lives, and once they’ve started an addictive pursuit, they cannot stop,” Alexander and his co-investigators conducted a second experiment to test whether favorable circumstances would not only prevent addiction from starting, but also stop it from continuing (Slater 168). In the second experiment, the researchers divided up the eight addicted rats between the cages and rat park, both settings again having both plain and narcotic water options and found that “the caged group continued to partake in the morphine [while] the rat-park group, even when already addicted, however, did not choose the morphine solution regularly and in fact decreased their morphine use despite withdrawal” (Slater 168). This compelling evidence that “addictions [and their continuation] are in fact quite subject to free will” and circumstance, was ultimately ignored by the media, pharmaceutical companies, politicians, and the masses.

Graphic of a caged rat choosing to drink narcotic water over regular water, from MTV News.

The topic of addiction has mainly arisen in my life amidst debates on the decriminalizing and legalizing of marijuana, wherein I fight against the argument that the substance is addicting. I have often said that marijuana is only addicting in so far as anything can be addicting –i.e. how a show like My Strange Addiction exists; if you can be addicted to eating tape or cheesy potato skins then you can surely be addicted to smoking pot, just not in the same chemical way that one can be addicted to crack or heroin. Furthermore, I have shared my belief (emphasis on “belief”) that in order to be addicted to something, one requires an addictive personality, and held this against the argument that “marijuana is a gateway drug.” I have held that for many people with non-addictive personalities, non-addictive drugs like marijuana, or no drugs at all, are satisfying enough, but for people with addictive personalities, a non-addictive drug is not satisfying and they thus would psychologically require harder more addictive drugs. I can’t, however, think of any way to prove this other than the personal experiences of people I know. My claims adhere to the widely accepted view that “drugs are addictive…[as] the media and medical establishment have repeatedly told us it is so,” as the general rule, of which marijuana is the exception (Slater 158). 

Never before had I ever considered that there was an alternative theory that addiction really isn’t as real as we think it is, and that’s what was so striking about Rat Park. Looking at the title of the chapter dedicated to Rat Park in Slater’s book, I was expecting to read about an experiment that could possibly affirm my beliefs, not one with the conclusion that addiction is innately a psychological hoax. I found Alexander’s claims that “we, like rats in cages, turn to [drugs], not because the [drugs] are alluring in and of themselves, but because our circumstances are deficient, we without our gods” to be completely compelling and sensical (Slater 175). The experiment and its findings were so convincing to me that I was not hesitant in reforming my own views: the addictive personality arises out of circumstance, it arises when life does not provide you with the satisfaction that we humans need and desire, when there are chunks missing from Maslow’s hierarchy of need, thus causing the whole pyramid to collapse, and what we find ourselves proverbially “addicted” to may not be drugs, it could be drinking nail polish or making out with cars, à la My Strange Addiction, but most of the time, almost always, it is those substances which alter our perception of reality, that very reality which is so unsatisfying.

Nathaniel, 32, is “addicted” to making love with his car.

So I could ask why are these findings so non-compelling to the masses? What was the reason that “no one paid much attention [to the experiment] then or now” (Slater 169)? Why were “the papers rejected” (Slater 170)? But I have some theories for that, too. Slater explains how “in no other segment of psychology do you get, perhaps, such conflicting answers than in drug studies, where politics and science do not so much inform as infuse each other” (Slater 164-165). The word to really focus on there is “politics.” In most every debate I have ever witnessed or entered on the subject of marijuana and whether or not it should be legalized, some party has related it back to race, and justifiably so; the illegality and criminality of drugs and substances, woven into our American societal ethos with the notion that addiction is an inevitable result of drug use, has very real ties to the systematic oppression of minorities in this country. If we accept that marijuana and cocaine are dangerous on the basis of addiction (and that basis is important, and separate from the medical basis, which would affirm that yes, cocaine is dangerous, and no, marijuana is not) then we grow opposed to the Central and South American immigrants who culturally celebrate and cultivate the plants which these drugs are made from, and the privileged white politicians (predominantly Republican) can create a reason to restrict immigration, a “reason” apart from their own bigotry, that immigrants from such countries will bring drugs across the border and get our patriotic and god-fearing Americans addicted! And further, if we accept that addiction to drugs exists in all circumstances inevitably and pharmacologically, and not just in the circumstances in which our lives are lacking, then those same privileged white politicians can convince us that African-Americans are more prone to addiction and drug use biologically, and we can all happily ignore the possibility, the fact, that when the members of this populace turn to drugs, it is most often because of the systematic oppression they face everyday in the Protestant-White (sometimes White Supremacist) society of the United States, much like the caged rats seeking an escape from their reality. The Republican-funded drug war is, underneath, the modern-day race war, in favor of our caucasian citizens.

Then Republican presidential-candidate, Donald J. Trump, speaking on Mexican Immigration, June 2016.

Furthermore, the complete rejection of Alexander’s findings by the media, politicians, and pharmaceutical companies not only speaks volumes on white privilege, but says a lot about the economic interests of those in power. The modern Republican party is very different from what it was in its origin, but holds onto one fundamental tenet: a small and limited government. The difference is that a small government used to be seen by the party as a way to favor the individual, the freedman and the suffragette, whereas today that limited government has come to favor private business and corporations; the party has undergone a paradigm shift from allegiance to civil rights to allegiance to the economy, and the politics of drug/addiction psychology feed into that. If Alexander’s findings were to be accepted that would have an important impact on our economy. 

Slater explains how “Alexander found that addiction rates seem to grow not as drug availability increases, but as human dislocation, the inevitable result of a free-market society, becomes commonplace….[and that] a free-market society treats people as its products, to be uprooted, moved, altered, according to economic need” (Slater 175). And don’t get me wrong, I have no problem with Republicanism (in its purest form, aside from the alt-right and white supremacists and nazis, Donald Trump, etc.), and although I don’t believe in it myself, I cannot deny the validity of those beliefs (I, however, do not have the privilege of benefiting from being Republican); I have a problem with how it has come to make American citizens pawns of the free market, to the point where we will whitewash and ignore science if doing so benefits our economy over civil rights and political freedom. 

“The welfare queen was coined by Ronald Reagan while running for president in the 1970s to refute social policies advanced following the civil rights movement.”

If we ignore Alexander’s findings, ignore the very compelling and real possibility that addiction is purely circumstantial rather than inevitable, mecha-free-market Republicans (and obviously not all Republicans are the same! There’s a whole wide political compass with a multitude of varying ideas) can have an excuse to funnel funds away from things like welfare, on the basis of claims like “if we give these people money that they don’t earn then they can just sit around getting high all day and becoming vegetables at the government’s expense!” As someone who grew up on welfare and food stamps I can tell you that only a small portion of people on welfare are going to go that route, and only because of the deplorable circumstances of poverty and the systems of oppression that keep poor people poor (i.e. the projects) that make it seem as if there’s no way of getting out, the only remaining  way of escape being getting high (in my case, my mother used such programs as a supplement to help us get out of the homeless shelter and then projects where I lived as a young child, to which we now live in a nice neighborhood without the help of these programs –and we are not unique). If we gave attention to Alexander’s findings, funded further experiments to really prove his conclusions, if you’re not convinced already, that would eliminate a very prominent reason (of which I can vouch for, in being part of the Junior Statesmen of America where this reason has arisen time and time again in debates I have witnessed and been a part of) to focus funds on external trade rather than internal and civil programs like welfare, that do benefit people, and do not make people lazy (when you are impoverished you absolutely do not have the luxury of being “lazy”). 

Perhaps the better question to ask, then, is not “why were Alexander’s findings so apparently un-compelling?,” but “who benefits from ignoring this study?”

You can read more about the Rat Park experiment here.

[diablesses]

From Quarantine Beach, with Love: A .GIF Story

I’m embarrassed, to say the least. My body has outrun my spirit and I am not the child I remember, a child feigning patience with their sandcastle. I’m embarrassed when I go to the beach to build sandcastles because they stare

                                                  yet

they can’t see me for what I feel, for whom I feel to be. I go there when I can because it keeps me sane; putting my mind to it, shelving the isolation and its demons—

I’m not ready to name them here;

that would award them a substance better dedicated to the sand, the tide and its many gifts of debris.

The practice of building sandcastles is a precarious one, in that you can only really count on its precarity. Don’t build a sandcastle if you want things to last. Don’t build a sandcastle if you can’t afford to lose, if you can’t afford to grieve.

When the night comes, so does the tide. And when the night comes, so do the crabs.

They outnumber the tourists and they don’t complain when the shore gets eaten up. I don’t know if sandcastles left ashore are built on crab tunnels. I don’t know if crabs hop the fence, trespassing these delicate remains. I don’t know if crabs live in the ruins. I don’t know if crabs mate in the ruins. I don’t know if crabs die in the ruins. I don’t know because the sea doesn’t tell me and, out of respect, I would never dare to ask. I don’t question the sea’s behaviour because it is unconditionally generous. Its capability is known, from splash to storm. I know the crabs come with the night because I’ve seen them and they’ve seen me. The sea tries to hide this fact just as it hides the spoils of the day. 

When day returns to the beach, I try too. I try because I’m curious of the remains. I try because there’s something to be said about visiting the remains of things that were never meant to survive. I try because it helps me to figure loss and grief into my life in ways that are both nurturing and reparative.

A helpless commitment to memory, my archive of sandcastles boasts a material inventory of casuarina castoffs, sea-glass, shell fragments, urchin spikes, driftwood, palm husk, twigs of nameless varieties, Shak-Shak, coconut shell crescents, sea-grape leaves, mahogany pods, seaweed, wet and dry sands, grit from the shoreline, dead corals, concrete refuse and—I can’t remember the rest.

                                None survive in the ways I leave them.

But don’t worry. This is the game we play; I build with the day, the sea builds with the night. The night and sea enjoy an elegance with sand I can neither know nor envy. To see what the night and sea have left behind, to see what they have made, I return with the day. The silhouette of each castle is melted to a soft bump of sand. The heavier concrete and corals protrude from the surface like ancient ruins while all the foliage and shells are nowhere to be seen. I can’t ever know what I am inheriting with the day; I can only know that it takes the shape of loss while leaving something else in its place. If melancholia means to grieve what I can’t know I have lost, then what does it mean to grieve an unknowable inheritance? If I can indeed mourn the known loss of a sandcastle, what is to be done with the unknowable inheritance of its remains?

You cannot bury or entomb a sandcastle; you can only destroy it further. Or, to put it differently, you cannot restore a sandcastle; you can only build, from its remains, anew.

                                I’m embarrassed to say I am grieving.

When the responsibilities and policies of social distancing came to be, I awoke with the day to a practice in shambles. And I keep reawakening to that day, trying to make sense of dead corals, disappearing leaves and soft melts of sand. The story I kept telling myself of my practice—a practice of complicated comings-together, joys and intimacies—had already come undone in front of me and I didn’t—I still don’t really—know what to do. Josh Gabert-Doyon reads me with a mirror when speaking of this particular rupture, “the old world before the disease becomes irretrievable […] it seems hard to believe we’ll be able to make it through without abandoning some of our old selves.” It’s difficult not to take offence when a well-said, too real and too relatable truth clocks you so viscerally; perhaps being read to filth still also means being seen.

I’m embarrassed to say I am grieving what felt like a fixed and stable, yet already always momentary, form of practice I didn’t anticipate losing. I felt like the tiniest queer in the world and my practice felt like a sandcastle left overnight. For a moment—and perhaps still even now—this unanticipated inheritance of its remains has stayed illegible, irreparable and unforgivable.

I’m embarrassed to wake to a kanga now too old for this day and these days. Its face bears a since naïve image of two figures kissing in profile, their hurricane eyes, dead in stasis; stares eclipsed in butterflied horror. Its name?

                                “THE WHOLE WORLD IS TURNING”.

Imagining this kanga after Dorian and after the ongoing queering of the climate felt across different trembling frontlines of the world, I had hoped to attend to those strange unlikely pockets of intimacy, kinship, love, warmth, tenderness, empathy, and so on, springing up almost magically after another crisis-oriented queering of our worlds.

An image, like this, of intimate contact harnessed after crisis, seems so tricky and sticky given our present responsibilities and duties of social distancing. I don't know what to make of it in this light. The metaphor collapses and, again, illegible silences find me in new ways.

These conditions of distance remind me of another world; my once world of growing up queer in Barbados, my once world of sandcastles built, of sandcastles left to the mercies of unanticipated presents. Though certainly not the same yet not altogether separate, to be queer in anti-queer spacetime is to be both cautious of and estranged from the joys of social intimacy. Your queer friendship or your love or your sex would have to be quiet and unseen, lest the sight of it mark you for death or exile. So, you kept your love hidden, untouched, unmarked, and you learned to be close in other marooned ways.

With this in mind, to be queered might be to touch and be touched dangerously, to be put out of touch or for touch to be out of the question. I’m surprised—and therefore, embarrassed—to find myself back in this place and time, where intimacy can only be safely harboured through digital screens and windows. My local supermarket has since raised plastic barriers for its checkout staff and so the screen persists in and out of home. For some queered folk, the screen is bittersweet. At times, it is a magic portal, taking you elsewhere and otherwise; the first point of access to your not-so-local community, your distant love, your digital cruise. And at other times, it is a wall that strands you; a mocking horizon that keeps you out of touch and out of time. From intimacy to isolation, it is a pendulum at its cruellest, with queer life dangled at its mercy. At its kindest, it is a way home.

I’m embarrassed to have momentarily forgotten the kindness of screens and the warmth of those faces sat behind them. And I’m embarrassed to have also forgotten where driftwood comes from.

Where does driftwood come from?

                                                              I have no idea but I do know that it ends up on shorelines when building sandcastles. Driftwood and other flotsam have come to feel like unlikely gifts, unlikely tools, unlikely food, offered up or, more accurately, spat out by an indifferent horizon. When I’m embarrassed, forgetting where driftwood comes from, it is to say I’m embarrassed because I’ve also forgotten the generosity of horizons. Whether building sandcastles and staring out to sea, or staring into screens for warmth and company, what is most nurturing and sustaining, it seems, is the generous arrival and reunion of detritus. Finding the right—and that isn’t to say “perfect”—piece of driftwood for a sandcastle always begs the question, “How could you have been thrown away? You’re everything I ever needed.” And I’m again embarrassed to find myself asking that same question about the loveliest of friends; long since queered, long since set adrift on those troubled waters only we could call “home”. Communities of castoffs, castaways, dejected things and people; we have a habit of drifting together and, more than that, we make a habit of keeping each other afloat.

Tiny queers with not-so-tiny love have been teaching me, again and always, how to be close otherwise. And right now, learning to be close otherwise means, as Anne Boyer reminds me, “to see the negative space as clearly as the positive, to know what we don't do is also brilliant and full of love.” Where it had once been a shelter in the isolation of anti-queer spacetime, the screen opens up again with faerie heart circles, digital dance parties and other little gestures to hold many a sad queer from falling apart.

I’m embarrassed to have woken to what looked like a shoreline devastated; stripped of all practice and possibilities for intimacy. I hadn’t even taken the time to properly look, to see that, for the most part, it was still all right there, albeit in tiny, tiny pieces. Even if it’s disoriented, cast out of reach, forgotten its shape or loses its frills to the night, a practice always remains, even if only in remains. For every tiny remnant and speck of sand can build a world of difference. Each livestreamed poetry reading, each smiling webcam, each meal shared with a lover, each phone call with faraway friends or family, each delicate connection and tiny gesture can be, as Audre Lorde assures me, a discreet bit of “ammunition in my arsenal against despair.”