Category Archives: Drug War

UPDATED: Shine On Mr. Sheen, You Crazy Diamond

Celebrity, Drug War, Ilana Mercer, Pseudoscience, Psychiatry, Psychology & Pop-Psychology

During an hour-long interview with CNN”s Piers Morgan, Charlie Sheen had some choice words for the addiction industry (Sheen’s clearly an enemy of the Industry.) I loved every minute of it.

SHEEN: “I’ve been around them for 22 years. And they’ve been lying to me for two decades. … I’m a winner and their lives look like they’re — you know, ruled by losers. Just to put it in black and white terms. I don’t want their lives, and they want mine, but they want to criticize the hell out of it. … I don’t believe myself to be an addict. I really don’t. I think that I just ignore or smash or finally dismiss a model that I think is rooted in vintage balderdash, you know? For lack of a better word.”

Lovely.

And about the busybody public Sheen said this: “I wish people would shift that focus on to themselves and their own family and their own friends and just maybe spend a little more time on their home front.” [Transcripts.]

Watch out: The Shamans will be furious. Haven’t the likes of Drs. Keith Ablo and Drew Pinsky labored to create lucrative niches for themselves in the media by medicalizing all manner of misbehavior?

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders started out with some 60 categories of disorders (not diseases). It now sports hundreds for which a biological origin is asserted (with little scientific backing). Good for Sheen for copping only to being a bad boy, not a sick boy in need of the ministrations of prissy prohibitionists.

From “Mel’s Malady, Foxman’s Fetish”:

The Delphic oracles of the disease theory of delinquency (the “experts”) have slapped all manner of misconduct with diagnostic labels. At the root of this diseasing of behavior is the eradication of good and bad. Placing bad behavior beyond the strictures of traditional morality, moreover, makes it amenable to external, “therapeutic” or state interventions.
Liberals first, and conservatives in short succession, have taken to the idiom of disease like ducks to water. Left and right now insist, based on wispy pseudoscience, that just about every human excess is an illness as organic as cancer or diabetes.
A teacher who seduces her underage pupil has to be “sick,” or else she’d not have indulged her fantasies. The same post hoc illogic is applied to the morbidly obese: if you overeat, you’re diseased!
Are you a dad who dotes on his kids when they are around, but fails to mail them child support money when they return to mom? There’s a Harvard professor by the name of Dr. John Ratey who’ll cheerily diagnose you with “Environmental Dependency Disorder”: you remember your kids only when they are present.
And so it goes: the arsonist has “pyromania,” the thief is inflicted with “kleptomania,” and Bill Clinton is not promiscuous, but a “sex-addict.”

From “Addictions Are About Behavior, Not Disease”:

“When it comes to thinking about addiction, opinions converge. Having bought into the addiction industry’s mantra, so-called social progressives and conservatives alike share the same ideological hangover from the Prohibition era, with a twist of AA sadism: all are religious about abstinence, and all accept as bible from Sinai the wisdom of coercing addicts into treatment regimens. But perhaps the greatest error made in the attempt at humane formulations about addiction is to cast as a disease what is essentially a problem of behavior. …

“The rationale for using the disease model to describe addiction even though it is intellectually dishonest is that medical treatment is effective. Yet another deception. An overview of controlled studies indicates that ‘treated patients do not fare better than untreated people with the same problems.’ Of note is a 4500-subject-strong 1996 US epidemiological study conducted by the National Longitudinal Alcohol Epidemiological Survey. Treated alcoholics, it was found, were more heavily alcohol dependent on average than untreated alcoholics. Clearly a behavioral problem cannot be remedied by medical intervention. Addicts are cured when they decide to give up the habit.”

I don’t watch Sheen’s television. But as far as bucking a treatment industry that relies, for the most, on coercing addicts into rehabilitation—I say, Shine on Sheen, You Crazy Diamond.

UPDATE: Contemplationist: Dr. Thomas Szasz is a friend who is featured on these (BAB’s) pixelated pages. Do search for his articles under “BAB’s A List.” Tom has provided praise for my new book, to be released on May 10, 2011. Sign-up for my newsletter, befriend me on Facebook, and follow me on Twitter for updates.

Sniffing For Bones, Not Drugs

Crime, Criminal Injustice, Drug War, Pseudoscience

I’ve long since maintained that drug-sniffing dogs are looking for bones, not drugs. The sight of a working police dog, nose to the ground, looking for whatever it is that humans think the dog is looking for has always seemed ridiculous to me. Sure, dogs have incredible olfactory abilities. But it’s quite a leap to imagine that a dog’s nose can be reliably harnessed to serve human needs.

What do you know? I was right.

As the Chicago Tribune reports, “state data show the dogs have been wrong more often than they have been right about whether vehicles contain drugs or paraphernalia.

The dogs are trained to dig or sit when they smell drugs, which triggers automobile searches. But a Tribune analysis of three years of data for suburban departments found that only 44 percent of those alerts by the dogs led to the discovery of drugs or paraphernalia. For Hispanic drivers, the success rate was just 27 percent.”

[SNIP; or is it SNIFF]

To make a bad situation worse, sniffer dogs are racist too.

UPDATED: Reeducating Occupied Afghanis

Drug War, Foreign Policy, Iraq, Propaganda, Terrorism, War

The American people are not the only dupes to be patronized and bullied by the Empire’s congressional-military-media complex. According to RawStory.com, “A report (PDF) from the International Council on Security and Development (ICOS) shows that 92 percent of Afghans surveyed had never heard of the coordinated multiple attacks on US soil on September 11, 2001. It also shows that four in 10 Afghans believe the US is on their soil in order to ‘destroy Islam or occupy Afghanistan.'”

As the report would have it, these silly people simply don’t understand that the entity we call NATO, but is really the US, needs to be in Afghanistan for their own good; the good of the Afghan people. For example, to destroy their only source of income: the poppy fields.

And so a reeducation program must commence. “‘We need to explain to the Afghan people why we are here, and both show and convince them that their future is better with us than with the Taliban,’ ICOS lead field researcher Norine MacDonald said in a statement.”

Remember “Radio Sawa”? You should. If you are a tax payer, you pay for it. Part of the neocon’s democratic deal in Iraq was that we got to pipe into Iraqi ears pro-American propaganda interspersed with J. Lo’s caterwauling and Jay-Z’s gutter grunts. The idea was to make them both love us and want to be like us.

Why don’t we do the same for the Afghans? We could buy them all little radio transistors, and pipe “Radio Sawa” type propaganda into their long-suffering ears.

But first, let them get high on opium. Where I do agree with the think tank is in its proposal “that Afghanistan license the growing of opium.”

In December 24, 2001 I advocated, “Freedom and choice – not prohibition, incarcerations and coerced treatment – are the best salve for a people that has been infantalized and brutalized for too long. In a country with a poor infrastructure, the ‘relatively stable value of opium and its nonperishability means that it can also serve as an important source of savings and investment among traders and cultivators.'”

UPDATE: For those of you who are new to my opinion on America’s foreign policy, please read up on the term “Reeducation.” After you have searched my Articles Archive under the relevant categories, of course.

The Blond Squad & The Economcis of Contraband

Conservatism, Crime, Drug War, Economy, Free Markets, Gender, Intelligence, Regulation

Brains are a hindrance to advancement in the age of the idiot; being a lightweight blond is helpful. Heredity is handy too.

Margaret Hoover “is an American political commentator, political strategist, and blogger. She is the great-granddaughter of former President Herbert Hoover,” a factor which probably explains her popularity on Fox News, for it is certainly not humor, originality or cerebral agility that explain the ubiquity of the Blond Squad (BS) on Fox News. O’Reilly especially prefers his women guests to be his inferiors.

In any case, the Blond Squad brainiacs–also called Culture Warriors (comprising MH and another compromised blond)—were bitching in unison about one of Obama’s praise-worthy initiatives. (The first of which was not doing squat about the Iranians’ revolt. I’ve documented the others in successive posts.)

This particular rare good news story the BS was condemning was the decision by the Obama administration to cease “criminalizing cancer and AIDS patients for using a substance that is (a) prescribed by their doctors and (b) legal under the laws of their state. …”

When I told Sean the reason Hoover gave for her objection to decriminalization, he rolled his eyes. I’m sure you will too. According to this woman’s calculus, once you decriminalize a drug, criminal enterprise corners the market.

Babe, it’s exactly the opposite. I know, it’s a hard concept, but the section “THE COSTS OF ILLEGAL MARKETS” in “Addicted To The Drug War” may help (on the other hand…):

“Prohibition—not drug use—is responsible for the current crime and chaos. Prohibition makes the price of drugs far in excess of their cost of production. The production costs of common drugs are low. These chemicals are derived from hardy plants. A poppy is not an orchid. Neither is cannabis a particularly fragile plant. As with other illegal commodities, the price is pushed up by the high costs of circumventing the law as well as by the reduced supply brought on by prohibition. The price of pure heroin for medicinal purposes is a fraction of its street price. The difference amounts to a state subsidy for organized crime. … When supply is reduced … prices shoot up. And what happens when prices go up? The potential profit causes a renewed influx of dealers into the trade, resulting in more crime. In the war on drugs, success is failure. A free market in drugs, however, will bring prices down drastically, inclining fewer pushers to enter the trade.”

Blonds would be more fun if idiots were not so scary.