Smack my bitch up

What with it being poppy season in England, plus the resent media attention on the high society train wreck surrounding Eva Rausing's death apparently from a heroin overdose, it seems a good excuse as any to broach this subject. Then I came across this Dispatches documentary on YouTube, first aired on Channel 4 over ten years ago. I recommend everyone and their dog watch it.

I have casually used heroin in the past, many years ago, but heroin 'chippers' are not great headline-grabbing fodder for moral panic so I'll spare you the boring details other than to say that I have never resorted to mugging, burgling, defrauding or stealing from anyone as a consequence. I had a decent job in IT at that time, and I would spend far more money on my car, buying records and going out to overpriced clubs and bars than I ever did on heroin. In hindsight I should have spent all that money on lead, timber and bronze for boat building and I would have a small galleon to live aboard by now but c'est la vie...

It is an ingrained meme in our society that drug addiction is a Very Bad Thing, which is only somewhat justified. The main problems of addiction to heroin  primarily relate to those of illicit supply, and of social stigma and exclusion. It is by those means that we create the 'drugs menace'.

Heroin itself is easily produced. Papaver somniferum will grow pretty much anywhere, although the highest yeilds are in climates where there is a cool spring followed by a warm, dry summer. Opium is extracted from the poppies, and from there the opium yields morphine base with use of simple and readily available chemicals, and this morphine then processed into heroin using acetic anhydride. It is not a complicated or particularly skilled process; it is done sucessfully everyday by some of the world's poorest people in rundimentary conditions the mountains of SE Asia and Afghanistan. There is no real practical problem with offering the heroin addicts a cheap and clean supply of heroin if there was the political will to do so.

It seems obvious that the reason why opium is rarely available for consumption outside the poppy growing regions is that the perverse incentives created by prohibition drive the growers to process a relatively mild, non-injectable opium stereotypically beloved of 19th century poets and chinese immigrants into heroin. It is no co-incidence that when opium prohibition was taking hold in the first half of the 20th century, heroin use grew and opium use declined. In the black market traffickers tend towards a small bulk and high value product; from the weaker 'natural' substance to stronger 'chemical' substance and finally to dangerously unreliable and adulterated substance once the resulting street heroin is 'stepped on' at the other end of the chain - bulked up with glucose, synthetic opoids, benzodiazepines, barbiturates, quinine, anything to line the pockets of the dealers.

I don't think it's desirable for anyone to have an all consuming dependence whether it's on a drug or whether it's gambling, sex, emotional validation, etc. What I am left wondering though is how certain forms of dependence became transformed from a personal or medical problem into a criminal issue detached from proportionality and cascading into all kinds of new social ills created by that very process of criminalisation. Is there some hypocritical puritanism in our culture that leads to the kneejerk repression of the very human desire to chemically alter one's state of being? The sort of mentality that used to tell schoolboys that wanking upsets Jesus and will make them go blind? I would prefer to believe that it's down to a pathological cultural idiocy than believe it's a multi-faceted conspiracy by criminal cartels to maximise profits, by governments to exercise arbirary control over their citizens (in particular ethnic minorities and youth who often get harrasment from the police under the guise of fighting the 'drugs war'), and by chest thumping politicians wanting to look 'tough on crime'. Stupidity is usually the more viable explaination for a set of circumstances than conspiracy, but in the case of the demonisation of heroin it is probably a little bit of both.

Does self-immolation look good on your CV?

With the current 'clampdown' on the benefits system it was only a matter of time before this sort of thing happens:

Man sets himself on fire outside Birmingham jobcentre

The company that would have been contracted by the DWP to assess this man's fitness for employment is called ATOS Healthcare. I have had dealings with them myself, and the bloke I saw even told me off the record that they routinely disenfranchise almost everyone they (non-medically) assess from receiving incapacity benefit/ESA, and that the sucess rate of appeals against ATOS's assesments are in the region of 80%. Of course the appeals process is long and drawn out, with the sort of routine communications that someone on Jobseeker's Allowance enjoys being pretty much non-existant when dealing with an ESA claim. Being forced by unfortunate circumstance to have to deal with the perverse motivations and spin of parasitic companies like ATOS or Action4Employment is enough to make someone sick if they weren't sick enough already.

Having said that, the government are in an unenviable position. They have to maintain the status quo by selling the delusions of a mid 20th-century style economic growth paradigm in spite of an economic, social and ecological reality that increasingly can't sustain it. So when the chips are down what should we do? Why, put the boot in on society's most vunerable whilst make a few quid in the process of course, and who better to do that than a bunch of old Etonian millionaires?

autistic atheists are naughty!

Bieng a contrarian bastard I love to pick holes in things. Recently this youtube video has got my goat:

Aside from the author's strange idea that the label 'autism' is stick to hit people he dislikes over the head with (a bit like how 'spastic' was a common playground insult back in my day), he seems to have some contradictory ideas about god and karma. Not suprising really, it often happens when people believe they are being singled out for preferential treatment by an omnipotent being, they must be doing something right!

The actual meaning of the word 'karma' is action. That's it. Even what we might think of a non-action (ie; sitting around watching innane youtube videos) is a form of action. This is the sort of mess we are stuck in. Thanks god.

If I was to do a global study in the attractiveness of the belief in 'karmic law', I bet the believers would disporportionately made up of economically privaledged hippies. After all, if your situation happens to be that you have been born in Uganda to a HIV positive mother who was raped by militiamen, it would be a bitter pill to swallow knowing that it's all your own fault, that you must have been very naughty in a past life and that god clearly hates you.

The same selective view of reality applies when you beleive that not only did you in some way karmically earn your good fortune, but that god is personally making sure you don't get bitten by poisonous snakes. Warbles makes a good point regarding the Pope's assortment of armed guards and bombproof vehicles as an example of failure to live up to the christian god belief. However, this does not make the pope a 'behavioral athiest', it makes him a hypocrite. If the pope was a true 'behavioral atheist' there would be no problem as he wouldn't be going around actively obstructing public health initiatives and birth control as a direct result of his theistic ideological beliefs. In other words he would keep it to himself.

Presumably in the woods where Warbles walks around barefoot, the snakes god is protecting him from are brownsnakes (Pseudonaja textilis), very poisonous but luckily they are also shit scared of human beings, and like all snakes they can sense a large animal's approach from a long way off through the vibrations that footsteps make in the ground. You are unlikely to see them in the wild apart from the unfortunate ones that get squashed flat while trying to cross the road. Non-human animals have every reason to be terrified of us, not least because we have god on our side.

Well he does have a roundabout point if god made them to have a timid nature, but the behavior of poisonous snakes has little to do with the balance of Warble's karmic current account. I doubt Warbles relies on god to pay his rent or wash his dishes, but then dealing with a pile of mouldy plates is not as exciting as protecting aging hippies from dangerous animals so prehaps that is why god can't be arsed to put on his marigolds.

In my humble yet infallible opinion this sort of god belief is a projection of one's ego onto the chaos of reality, it's the same old story since we realised we are not alone in our heads and freaked out about it. Prehaps god made autistic atheists for a purpose, maybe god is an autistic atheist himself.