Aug. 24th, 2005

sophiaserpentia: (Default)
I say this not because i think drugs are great, but because an examination of it reveals the prejudicial attitudes on which it is predicated, and because i am sickened to see the many lives that have been sacrificed on its altar.

The War on Drugs is predicated on the idea that drug use is indication of a "moral failing." Person X lives a somehow "degraded" life (and we can therefore pity or despise her) and "turns to drugs" to "escape the harshness of her life." Or, alternately, person Y is a bored suburbanite teenager "lured" to drug use, like sailors drawn to the rocks by the siren song, pressured into trying it by his peers ("if it weren't for that kid with funny hair and ex-hippie parents, my child would never have tried them").

This is the way drug use is portrayed by the malestream media, projecting this moralistic analysis from the safety of gated communities far from the 'iniquity' of urban life, and thus, presumably, far from anywhere drugs are commonly used or sold.

It is but one brick in a wall built to disguise an authoritarian kyriarchal agenda, a power grab by the elites of this society predicated on racism, classism and sexism. It is a bandage covering a festering wound and soaking up the pus without allowing efforts to heal it by addressing its cause: oppression and exploitation. The "Drug War" is a way of pretending that oligarchical collectivism and cronyism can exist in a civilized society, by othering the victims and labelling them immoral.

This becomes obvious when we see that the addictions that are tolerated are precisely those that mask people's feelings and thus make people more pliant and/or hard-working. Caffeine and nicotine are more dangerous than THC or opium and are more habit-forming, but they are the "socially acceptable" addictions. Other "acceptable" addictions include several SSRIs and other prescription medications, which can also have more dangerous side effects than THC or opium.

The previous paragraph is not meant to promote pot or heroin, but just to point out that the "Drug War" rationale of protecting people from harmful substances is utter hogwash. Where was this rationale for the 38,000 people killed by Vioxx in four years? Other myriad dangers of drug use are the direct result of efforts to ban them.

Some therapists refer to drug use as "self-medicating," because the main reason people form drug habits is to feel normal. There are exceptions, of course, people seeking pleasure or thrills. But lots of people try many different drugs and don't form addictions because, nice as it may make them feel, they don't need it to correct dopamine-receptor imbalances caused by long-term physical abuse, or to mask emotions they feel required to hide from friends and partners, or to get through long hours of dehumanizing work.

It's long been noted that drug war punishments are disporportionately directed at people of racial minorities. This is a typical "one-two punch" pattern of cannibalistic oppression: to treat the often necessarily drastic and long-term-self-destructive survival tactics of people in oppressed minorities as though they are moral failings, and then punish them.

I touched on this issue a few weeks ago with my post on "options and empowerment." If you have an imbalance of this kind in your life, the solution is not court-mandated therapy, but actual changes to your life and environment. Drug users cannot make the real changes that they need in their lives, because decisions about how we are going to live and survive are not up for democratic discussion. Those decisions are hoarded by those with the power to decide where jobs will be located, with the power to hire and fire.

On another dimension, the "Drug War" is an attempt by authoritarians to control what substances people put into their bodies. Historically, psychoactive substances have sometimes played a role in revolutionary awareness (recognizing this is somewhat of a shift from my previous thoughts on this matter), and guiltless pleasure has the potential to undermine the militaristic tone of an authoritarian culture.

crossposting to my journal and crossposting to [livejournal.com profile] kyriarchy
sophiaserpentia: (Default)
What inspired the last post was a story about a "rapid detox" method being touted as a solution for heroin addiction. The idea that an "anti-addiction treatment" with a 10-15% likelihood of potentially lethal side effects is preferable to just letting heroin users have access to heroin safely is a prime example of the moralistic hypocrisy that underlines our society's approach to this issue.

Internet ads for "ultra rapid detox" using anesthesia promise pain-free withdrawal from heroin and prescription painkillers. But the technique can be life-threatening, is not pain-free and has no advantage over other methods, a new study of 106 patients found.

The study, the most rigorous to date on the method, showed that patients' withdrawal was as severe as those of addicts undergoing other detox approaches.

"Anyone who tells you it's painless can only honestly be referring to the period the person is under anesthesia," said co-author Dr. Eric Collins of Columbia University Medical Center.

ExpandRead more... )

from 'Rapid Detox' May Be Life-Threatening
sophiaserpentia: (Default)
Without discussion or debate humanity has committed itself to the wholesale digitalization of its collective cultural and historical information base. Music, movies, manuscripts, everything from letters between presidents to merchants' financial transactions are currently created and stored in strictly digital form--a development that fulfills George Orwell's prophecy that history would become mutable, now with a few keystrokes. Even more terrifying than the likelihood that the digitalization of history will be abused in the service of tyranny is the certainty that we are setting the stage for the greatest loss of knowledge since the destruction of the Royal Library at Alexandria.

... Files created in WordPerfect, until fairly recently the nation's dominant word processing program, are quickly becoming as irretrievable as ragtime songs recorded on brown wax phonograph cylinders. It is conceivable that a few librarians will keep around some antique Wangs and Commodore 64s in order to access digital archives. And a tiny proportion of data will be transferred and adapted to successor formats. But for most computer users, data created on obsolete software and hardware might as well have never existed.

... Digital data works on the pass/fail basis: it's either all available or it's all gone.

Recordable CDs and DVDs have mostly replaced magnetic storage devices. But those go bad too. CDs and DVDs, explains USA Today tech writer Andrew Cantor, "have two layers encased in clear plastic: a reflective layer and a transparent dye layer. When you 'burn' a disc, your CD or DVD writer fires a laser at that dye to create dark spots that don't let the reflective coating shine through. Your computer reads the dark and reflective spots as the ones and zeros of your data. But some dyes are better than others. After a while those burned-in opaque spots start to get less opaque. The disc fails."

... Paper burns, film disintegrates, canvas molders. But there are two crucial differences between these pre-digital formats and what we're leaving future generations of historians. First, analog isn't pass/fail. You can see, and possibly restore, a stained or faded photograph. Moreover, while the majority of books printed 400 years ago have been destroyed, a few remain. Those survivors provide a tantalizing glimpse into the larger lost history. Had they been stored digitally, however, the loss would have been total: Every word of every last one would have succumbed to data rot.

from A FATE WORSE THAN DEATH

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