Against Drug Abuse Quotes

Once you've seen a solution to the disease that's tearing you apart, relapsing is never fun. You know there's an alternative to the way you're living and that you're going against something you've been given for free by the universe, this key to the kingdom. Drug addiction is a progressive disease, so every time you go out, it gets a little uglier than it was before; it's not like you go back to the early days of using, when there was less of a price to pay. It isn't fun anymore, but it's still desperately exciting. Once you put that first drug or drink in your body, you don't have to worry about the girlfriend or the career or the family or the bills. All those mundane aspects of life disappear. Now you have one job, and that's to keep chucking the coal in the engine, because you don't want this train to stop. If it stops, then you're going to have to feel all that other shit.

Poor women suffer terrible sexual violence that goes unreported. Because of their social class, these women do not have access to therapy or other methods of healing. Their repeated abuse ultimately eats away at their self-esteem, driving them to drugs, prostitution, AIDS, and in many cases, death.

In the United States the legacy of settler colonialism can be seen in the endless wars of aggression and occupations; the trillions spent on war machinery, military bases, and personnel instead of social services and quality public education; the gross profits of corporations, each of which has greater resources and funds than more than half the countries in the world yet pay minimal taxes and provide few jobs for US citizens; the repression of generation after generation of activists who seek to change the system; the incarceration of the poor, particularly descendants of enslaved Africans; the individualism, carefully inculcated, that on the one hand produces self-blame for personal failure and on the other exalts ruthless dog-eat-dog competition for possible success, even though it rarely results; and high rates of suicide, drug abuse, alcoholism, sexual violence against women and children, homelessness, dropping out of school, and gun violence.

EIGHTH AMENDMENT The government shall not “crack down” on drug crime while taking kickbacks from industries and companies perpetuating addiction and abuse. You can’t fight wars on drugs—only on people. The drug war kills people, not drugs. Anytime you hear a politician talk about being tough on drugs but then say nothing about pharmaceutical companies, doctors, or insurance providers needing reform as well, you call them what they are: hacks. And hit them in the fa—we mean, vote against them.

Mental illness doesn’t cause abusiveness any more than alcohol does. What happens is rather that the man’s psychiatric problem interacts with his abusiveness to form a volatile combination. If he is severely depressed, for example, he may stop caring about the consequences his actions may cause him to suffer, which can increase the danger that he will decide to commit a serious attack against his partner or children. A mentally ill abuser has two separate—though interrelated—problems, just as the alcoholic or drug-addicted one does.

The U.S. government has in recent years fought what it termed wars against AIDS, drug abuse, poverty, illiteracy and terrorism. Each of these wars has budgets, legislation, offices, officials, letterhead—everything necessary in a bureaucracy to tell you something is real. —Bruce Jackson Keynote address “Media and War” symposium, University of Buffalo November 17–18, 2003

Amma wanted her daughter to be free, feminist and powerful Later she took her on personal development courses for children to give her the confidence and articulacy to flourish in any setting Big mistake Mum, Yazz said at fourteen when she was pitching to go to Reading Music Festival with her friends, it would be to the detriment of my juvenile development if you curtailed my activities at this critical stage in my journey towards becoming the independent-minded and fully self-expressed adult you expect me to be, I mean, do you really want me rebelling against your old-fashioned rules by running away from the safety of my home to live on the streets and having to resort to prostitution to survive and thereafter drug addiction, crime, anorexia and abusive relationships with exploitative bastards twice my age before my early demise in a crack house? Amma fretted the whole weekend her little girl way away

As every close observer of the deadlocks arising from the political correctness knows, the separation of legal justice from moral Goodness –which should be relativized and historicized- ends up in an oppressive moralism brimming with resentment. Without any “organic” social substance grounding the standards of what Orwell approvingly called “common decency” (all such standards having been dismissed as subordinating individual freedoms to proto-Fascist social forms), the minimalist program of laws intended simply to prevent individuals from encroaching upon one another (annoying or “harassing” each other) turns into an explosion of legal and moral rules, an endless process (a “spurious infinity” in Hegel’s sense) of legalization and moralization, known as “the fight against all forms of discrimination.” If there are no shared mores in place to influence the law, only the basic fact of subjects “harassing other subjects, who-in the absence of mores- is to decide what counts as “harassment”? In France, there are associations of obese people demanding all the public campaigns against obesity and in favor of healthy eating be stopped, since they damage the self-esteem of obese persons. The militants of Veggie Pride condemn the speciesism” of meat-eaters (who discriminate against animals, privileging the human animal-for them, a particularly disgusting form of “fascism”) and demand that “vegeto-phobia” should be treated as a kind of xenophobia and proclaimed a crime. And we could extend the list to include those fighting for the right of incest marriage, consensual murder, cannibalism . . . The problem here is the obvious arbitrariness of the ever-new rule. Take child sexuality, for example: one could argue that its criminalization is an unwarranted discrimination, but one could also argue that children should be protected from sexual molestation by adults. And we could go on: the same people who advocate the legalization of soft drugs usually support the prohibition of smoking in public places; the same people who protest the patriarchal abuse of small children in our societies worry when someone condemns a member of certain minority cultures for doing exactly this (say, the Roma preventing their children from attending public schools), claiming that this is a case od meddling with other “ways of life”. It is thus for necessary structural reasons that the “fight against discrimination” is an endless process which interminably postpones its final point: namely a society freed from all moral prejudices which, as Michea puts it, “would be on this very account a society condemned to see crimes everywhere.

One famous study on the subject found that poor children on average hear thirty million fewer words than rich children in the first four years of their life. Closing that gap is extremely difficult, especially when you factor in all the social ills associated with poverty in America. The poorest Americans have the highest rates of alcohol and drug abuse, violence against children, sexual abuse of children, neglect of children, illiteracy, mental illness, teenage pregnancy, delinquency, incarceration.

David Lester, a psychology professor at Richard Stockton College in New Jersey, has likely thought about suicide longer, harder, and from more angles than any other human. In more than twenty-five-hundred academic publications, he has explored the relationship between suicide and, among other things, alcohol, anger, antidepressants, astrological signs, biochemistry, blood type, body type, depression, drug abuse, gun control, happiness, holidays, Internet use, IQ, mental illness, migraines, the moon, music, national-anthem lyrics, personality type, sexuality, smoking, spirituality, TV watching, and wide-open spaces. Has all this study led Lester to some grand unified theory of suicide? Hardly. So far he has one compelling notion. It’s what might be called the “no one left to blame” theory of suicide. While one might expect that suicide is highest among people whose lives are the hardest, research by Lester and others suggests the opposite: suicide is more common among people with a higher quality of life. “If you’re unhappy and you have something to blame your unhappiness on—if it’s the government, or the economy, or something—then that kind of immunizes you against committing suicide,” he says. “It’s when you have no external cause to blame for your unhappiness that suicide becomes more likely. I’ve used this idea to explain why African-Americans have lower suicide rates, why blind people whose sight is restored often become suicidal, and why adolescent suicide rates often rise as their quality of life gets better.

When difficulties seem insurmountable, optimists react in a more constructive and creative way. They accept the facts with realism, know how to rapidly identify the positive in adversity, draw lessons from it, and come up with an alternative solution or turn to a new project. Pessimists would rather turn away from the problem or adopt escapist strategies — sleep, isolation, drug or alcohol abuse — that diminish their focus on the problem.9 Instead of confronting them with resolve, they prefer to brood over their misfortunes, nurture illusions, dream up “magic” solutions, and accuse the whole world of being against them. They have a hard time drawing lessons from the past, which often leads to the repetition of their problems. They are more fatalistic (“I told you it wouldn’t work. It’s always the same, no matter what I do”) and are quick to see themselves as “mere pawns in the game of life.

The Libertarian Party platform on which Koch ran in 1980 was unambiguous. It included the following: • We favor the abolition of Medicare and Medicaid programs. • We oppose any compulsory insurance or tax-supported plan to provide health services. . . . • We favor the repeal of the . . . Social Security system. . . . • We oppose all personal and corporate income taxation, including capital gains taxes. • We support the eventual repeal of all taxation. • As an interim measure, all criminal and civil sanctions against tax evasion should be terminated immediately. • We support repeal of all . . . minimum wage laws. . . . • Government ownership, operation, regulation, and subsidy of schools and colleges should be ended. . . . • We support the abolition of the Environmental Protection Agency. . . . • We call for the privatization of the public roads and national highway system. . . . • We advocate the abolition of the Food and Drug Administration. . . . • We oppose all government welfare, relief projects, and “aid to the poor” programs.44 The list went on from there, including ending government oversight of abusive banking practices by ending all usury laws; privatizing our airports, the FAA, Amtrak, and all of our rivers; and shutting down the Post Office.

So-called “battered women’s shelters” have been called “one-stop divorce shops” because they are “extreme militant feminist” operations that exist mostly to separate children from their fathers, even without any demonstration of violence. Erin Pizzey, who founded the first shelter in London in 1971, claims that her movement has been “hijacked” by feminists. Extended investigations by Canada’s National Post and others revealed a violently anti-male agenda, corruption, drug and alcohol use, child abuse, and even, ironically, violence against women. Yet they continue to receive government funding. One woman whose husband “didn’t beat me up or nothing, we just had an argument,” says shelter workers ignored her pleas and pressured her to leave her marriage. “They asked me if I was abused, and I said, ‘No.’ They wanted me to get a lawyer, and I said, ‘For what?’” She maintains shelter employees tried to “trick” her into making incriminating statements about her husband. “Everything negative about him, they wrote it down. If I said something nice about him, they wouldn’t write it down. I kept telling them, ‘No, he didn’t hit me.’” She was offered financial incentives to leave her husband. “They said, ‘If you leave him, we can help you find a place right away.’ But I said, ‘I don’t want to leave him.’ . . . They wanted that so bad. They were trying to break up a family, and I didn’t want that.

It is common to assume that multi-racialism is inevitable, and that racial identity will disappear as races mix. Americans prefer to think that the “tragic mulatto,” welcome in neither community, was either a myth or a reflection of outmoded racist thinking. Research suggests things may not be so simple. A 2003 study of 90,000 middle-school and high-school students found that black/white mixed-race children had more health and psychological problems than children who were either black or white. They were more likely to be depressed, sleep badly, skip school, smoke, drink, consider suicide, and have sex. White/Asian children showed similar symptoms. The principal author concluded that the cause was “the struggle with identity formation, leading to lack of self-esteem, social isolation and problems of family dynamics in biracial households.” The authors of a 2008 study reached the same conclusion: “When it comes to engaging in risky/anti-social adolescent behavior, however, mixed race adolescents are stark outliers compared to both blacks and whites. . . . Mixed race adolescents—not having a natural peer group—need to engage in more risky behaviors to be accepted.” A study of white/Asian children found that they were twice as likely as mono-racial children—34 percent vs. 17 percent—to suffer from psychological disorders such as anxiety, depression or drug abuse. Yoonsun Choi of the University of Chicago found that in Seattle middle schools, a clear racial identity seemed to protect against certain problems. Bi-racial children were the group most likely to smoke, take drugs, have been in fights, hurt someone badly, or carry a gun. Prof. Choi believes mixed-race children suffer because no racial group accepts them. “There is some indication that a strong ethnic identity helps protect kids from these [undesirable] behaviors,” she said.

If sex oppression is real, absolute, unchanging, inevitable, then the views of right-wing women are more logical than not. Marriage is supposed to protect them from rape; being kept at home is supposed to protect them from the caste-like economic exploitation of the marketplace; reproduction gives them what value and respect they have and so they must increase the value of reproduction even if it means increasing their own vulnerability to reproductive exploitation (especially forced pregnancy); religious marriage—traditional, correct, law-abiding marriage—is supposed to protect against battery, since the wife is supposed to be cherished and respected. The flaws in the logic are simple: the home is the most dangerous place for a woman to be, the place she is most likely to be murdered, raped, beaten, certainly the place where she is robbed of the value of her labor. What right-wing women do to survive the sex-class system does not mean that they will survive it: if they get killed, it will most likely be at the hands of their husbands; if they get raped, the rapists will most likely be their husbands or men who are friends or acquaintances; if they get beaten, the batterer will most likely be their husbands—perhaps 25 percent of those who are beaten will be beaten during pregnancy; if they do not have any money of their own, they are more vulnerable to abuse from their husbands, less able to escape, less able to protect their children from incestuous assault; if abortion becomes illegal, they will still have abortions and they are likely to die or be maimed in great numbers; if they get addicted to drugs it most likely be to prescription drugs prescribed by the family doctor to keep the family intact; if they get poor—through being abandoned by their husbands or through old age—they are likely to be discarded, their usefulness being over. And right-wing women are still pornography just like other women whom they despise; and what they do—just like other women—is barter. They too live inside the wall of prostitution no matter how they see themselves.

Jamie guessed he wasn’t sure if calling it a homeless shelter when it was filled with homeless people was somehow offensive. He’d had two complaints lodged against him in the last twelve months alone for the use of ‘inappropriate’ language. Roper was a fossil, stuck in a by-gone age, struggling to stay afloat. He of course wouldn’t have this problem if he bothered to read any of the sensitivity emails HR pinged out. But he didn’t. And now he was on his final warning. Jamie left him to flounder and scanned the crowd and the room for anything amiss.  People were watching them. But not maliciously. Mostly out of a lack of anything else to do. They’d been there overnight by the look of it. Places like this popped up all over the city to let them stay inside on cold nights. The problem was finding a space that would house them. ‘No, not the owner,’ Mary said, sighing. ‘I just rent the space from the council. The ceiling is asbestos, and they can’t use it for anything, won’t get it replaced.’ She shrugged her shoulders so high that they touched the earrings. ‘But these people don’t mind. We’re not eating the stuff, so…’ She laughed a little. Jamie thought it sounded sad. It sort of was. The council wouldn’t let children play in there, wouldn’t let groups rent it, but they were happy to take payment and let the homeless in. It was safe enough for them. She pushed her teeth together and started studying the faded posters on the walls that encouraged conversations about domestic abuse, about drug addiction. From when this place was used. They looked like they were at least a decade old, maybe two. Bits of tape clung to the paint around them, scraps of coloured paper frozen in time, preserving images of long-past birthday parties. There was a meagre stage behind the coffee dispenser, and to the right, a door led into another room. ‘Do you know this boy?’ Roper asked, holding up his phone, showing Mary a photo of Oliver Hammond taken that morning. The officers who arrived on scene had taken it and attached it to the central case file. Roper was just accessing it from there. It showed Oliver’s face at an angle, greyed and bloated from the water.  ‘My God,’ Mary said, throwing a weathered hand to her mouth. It wasn’t easy for people who weren’t exposed to death regularly to stomach seeing something like that.  ‘Ms Cartwright,’ Roper said, leaning a little to his left to look in her eyes as she turned away. ‘Can you identify this person? I know it’s hard—’ ‘Oliver — Ollie, he preferred. Hammond, I think. I can check my files…’ She turned and pointed towards the back room Jamie had spotted. ‘If you want—’ Roper put the phone away.

Kaffman (2009) described childhood victimization as a "silent epidemic", and Finkelhor, Turner, Ormrod, and Hamby (2010) reported that children are the most traumatized class of humans around the globe. The findings of these researchers are at odds with the view that children have protected status in most families, societies, and cultures. Instead, Finkelhor reports that children are prime targets and highly vulnerable, due principally to their small size, their physical and emotional immaturity with its associated lack of control, power and resources; and their related dependency on caregivers. They are subjected to many forms of exploitation on an ongoing basis, imposed on them by individuals with greater power, strength, knowledge, and resources, many of whom are, paradoxically and tragically, responsible for their care and welfare. These traumas are interpersonal in nature and involve personal transgression, violation and exploitation of the child by those who rely on the child's lesser physical abilities, innocence, and immaturity to intimidate, bully, confuse, blackmail, exploit, or otherwise coerce. In the worst-case scenario, a parent or other significant caregiver directly and repeatedly abuses a child or does not respond to or protect a child or other vulnerable individual who is being abused and mistreated and isolates the child from others through threats or with direct violence. Consequently, such an abusive, nonprotective, or malevolently exploitative circumstance (Chefetz has coined the term "attack-ment" to describe these dynamics) has a profound impact on victim's ability to trust others. It also affects the victim's identity and self-concept, usually in negative ways that include self-hatred, low self-worth, and lack of self-confidence. As a result, both relationships, and the individual's sense of self and internal states (feelings, thoughts, and perceptions) can become sources of fear, despair, rage, or other extreme dysphoria or numbed and dissociated reactions. This state of alienation from self and others is further exacerbated when the occurrence of abuse or other victimization involves betrayal and is repeated and becomes chronic, in the process leading the victim to remain in a state of either hyperarousal/anticipation/hypervigilance or hypoarousal/numbing (or to alternate between these two states) and to develop strong protective mechanisms, such as dissociation, in order to endure recurrences. When these additional victimizations recur, they unfortunately tend to escalate in severity and intrusiveness over time, causing additional traumatization (Duckworth & Follette, 2011). In many cases of child maltreatment, emotional or psychological coercion and the use of the adult's authority and dominant power rather than physical force or violence is the fulcrum and weapon used against the child; however, force and violence are common in some settings and in some forms of abuse (sometimes in conjunction with extreme isolation and drugging of the child), as they are used to further control or terrorize the victim into submission. The use of force and violence is more commonplace and prevalent in some families, communities, religions, cultural/ethnic groups, and societies based on the views and values about adult prerogatives with children that are espoused. They may also be based on the sociopathy of the perpetrators.

When I hung up the phone that night I had a wet face and a broken heart. The lack of compassion I witnessed every day had finally exhausted me. I looked around my crowded office, at the stacks of records and papers, each pile filled with tragic stories, and I suddenly didn’t want to be surrounded by all this anguish and misery. As I sat there, I thought myself a fool for having tried to fix situations that were so fatally broken. It’s time to stop. I can’t do this anymore. For the first time I realized my life was just full of brokenness. I worked in a broken system of justice. My clients were broken by mental illness, poverty, and racism. They were torn apart by disease, drugs and alcohol, pride, fear, and anger. I thought of Joe Sullivan and of Trina, Antonio, Ian, and dozens of other broken children we worked with, struggling to survive in prison. I thought of people broken by war, like Herbert Richardson; people broken by poverty, like Marsha Colbey; people broken by disability, like Avery Jenkins. In their broken state, they were judged and condemned by people whose commitment to fairness had been broken by cynicism, hopelessness, and prejudice. I looked at my computer and at the calendar on the wall. I looked again around my office at the stacks of files. I saw the list of our staff, which had grown to nearly forty people. And before I knew it, I was talking to myself aloud: “I can just leave. Why am I doing this?” It took me a while to sort it out, but I realized something sitting there while Jimmy Dill was being killed at Holman prison. After working for more than twenty-five years, I understood that I don’t do what I do because it’s required or necessary or important. I don’t do it because I have no choice. I do what I do because I’m broken, too. My years of struggling against inequality, abusive power, poverty, oppression, and injustice had finally revealed something to me about myself. Being close to suffering, death, executions, and cruel punishments didn’t just illuminate the brokenness of others; in a moment of anguish and heartbreak, it also exposed my own brokenness. You can’t effectively fight abusive power, poverty, inequality, illness, oppression, or injustice and not be broken by it. We are all broken by something. We have all hurt someone and have been hurt. We all share the condition of brokenness even if our brokenness is not equivalent. I desperately wanted mercy for Jimmy Dill and would have done anything to create justice for him, but I couldn’t pretend that his struggle was disconnected from my own. The ways in which I have been hurt––and have hurt others––are different from the ways Jimmy Dill suffered and caused suffering. But our shared brokenness connected us. Paul Farmer, the renowned physician who has spent his life trying to cure the world’s sickest and poorest people, once quoted me something that the writer Thomas Merton said: We are bodies of broken bones. I guess I’d always known but never fully considered that being broken is what makes us human. We all have our reasons. Sometimes we’re fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we’re shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion. We have a choice. We can embrace our humanness, which means embracing our broken natures and the compassion that remains our best hope for healing. Or we can deny our brokenness, forswear compassion, and, as a result, deny our own humanity.

Sometimes the effects of frugal simplicity may be the reverse of what is intended or expected. For instance, although frugality is said to foster humility, some of the ancients who practiced it took pride in their austere lifestyle and came to see themselves as superior to others. Diogenes is a case in point; no one ever accused him of humility. On one occasion at a banquet he supposedly trampled on Plato’s rich carpets, saying, “Thus do I trample on the empty pride of Plato,” to which Plato responded, “With quite as much pride yourself, O Diogenes.”23 Spartan austerity, monastic self-discipline, bucolic naturalness, and working-class frugality may carry positive associations, but other associations are also possible. Monasteries sometimes became rife with religious narcissism and intrigue. Peasants may live close to nature, but they have also enjoyed a long-standing reputation for being ignorant, greedy, and cunning. Struggling against economic adversity may foster virtues such as resilience, self-sufficiency, and solidarity with one’s community, whereas prosperous leafy suburbs may be hotbeds of smug, self-serving complacency; but poverty can also be a breeding ground for crime, alcoholism, drug addiction, child abuse, delinquency, and depression, while a privileged upbringing can sometimes instill moral integrity and an impressive sense of social obligation—the emperor-philosopher Marcus Aurelius being a case in point. The general point here is that the link between living frugally or simply and practicing the moral virtues is not a necessary connection. A frugal lifestyle is no guarantee of a virtuous character.

Garlock, you might have thought, had taken the Christian opposition to Rock as far as anyone could: “Bringing racism into his attack, Garlock noted that rock had its roots in the music of Africa, South America, and India, places he said where voodoo, sex orgies, human sacrifices, and devil worship abounded. Garlock linked some rock performers with Satan.”17 Yet, even further excesses of abuse on the theme of Rock-as-Satanic have followed as the years have passed. Possibly the craziest is Jacob Aranza’s claims that “75 percent of the rock and roll today (top 10 stuff!) deals with sex, evil, drugs, and the occult.” And that this is all part of a decades’ long, four step plan, “Satan’s Agenda”, to “pronounce rock stars as messiahs”.18 Jeff Godwin took this even further: “The Lord has also revealed to some Christians that incarnate demons from the netherworld actually are members of some of the most popular bands.”19 Converts are famous for their zeal, and as early as 1957 one celebrated rock’n’roller turned on the music that had propelled him to fame when he found religion. Richard Wayne Penniman, better known as Little Richard, stopped playing rock’n’roll and began to preach against it: “I was in the eighth grade at San Diego Adventist Elementary School, his conversion touched my life. Little Richard arrived at our school with an entourage of about three black limousines and a staff of personal assistants in black suits. He spoke in chapel, then preached Sabbath morning in a local church (probably San Diego 31st Street), then spoke and sang in the afternoon for a standing-room-only Associated MV (AY) meeting at the old San Diego Broadway church.

Some lower-level criminals have been known to sniff cocaine before going out on a hold-up, to boost their nerve; in popular lore this has been transferred, very inaccurately, to the heroin addict. In fact, a shot of heroin would probably induce the mood to lie around in his pad and postpone the robbery indefinitely (or until he needs money for another fix). Similarly, cocaine abusers are often irrationally violent and attack their friends, or total strangers, without apparent motive. (This is because they know that the victim has actually been plotting against them.) Heroin addicts are about the most nonviolent citizens around outside of the Quakers.

As we discussed briefly in Chapter 4, federal law currently prohibits landlords from discriminating against prospective tenants who have had a felony conviction for drug use (as drug abuse is seen as a disability and is therefore covered under Fair Housing Laws), but not drug sales or manufacturing.

The United States schooled Latin American soldiers throughout the late twentieth century in warfare and anti-insurgency tactics at the infamous School of the Americas in Georgia and at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. When the manuals given to Latin American students were declassified in 1996, they sparked outrage. Printed only in Spanish, the instruction books explained the use of psychological warfare to break insurgencies. One particularly controversial manual entitled Handling Sources instructs Latin American officers on how to use informants. In cold, clinical terms, it details pressuring informants with violence against both them and their families.

Drugs literally dominate the brain because the brain doesn’t have an adequate defense against drugs.

Their parents had been progressive by nature.  They had taken their daughters with them to the Far East on a business trip with the intention of letting the girls see other cultures.  The trip had ended in disaster.  Their parents had been killed by local thieves, somewhere in the suburbs of Shanghai.  The girls had been taken and sold to the Yakuza.  Because their bodies had not been found, and they were not seen after the death of their parents, it was assumed the girls were dead and buried.  That women were still not as important in the culture of their home country had sped the closure of their case. Edith Cromwell spent a lot of sleepless nights that first week wondering about the psyches of the males she worked with each day.  Were they capable of the sort of crimes against women that these poor girls had endured?  The suspicions, the fears that this line of thought provoked could end in alcoholism, drug abuse, even suicide.  Edith decided that she had best just leave it well enough alone.  If not, she would never be able to work with any man ever again.

Red Eyes Come and see Where are we This everything On my knees To beat it down To get to my soul I guessed my way Anyone can tell it's you coming But baby, don't mind Leave it on a lie Leave it your own way Come and ride away It's easier to stick to the earth Surrounded by the night Surrounded by the night And you don't go home But you abuse my faith Losing every time but I don't know where You're on my side again So ride the key wherever it goes I'll be the one, I can't, whoo! You're all I've got to wait You're running in the dark When I come to my soul Try and see it through the dark It's coming my way Well we won't get lost inside again babe Am I right? no one sees you, anyone, around here waiting They don't mind, they don't hear; I hear For the best way-oh, you're mine, against it I would keep you here, but I can't Oh, I am trying to see the right, right way, And I don't see it anywhere I go, yeah... woo! She's on my side again The easy way I come to my soul Walking in the downtown Talk to my soul They won't get lost inside again On my way I can see it the darkness coming my way Well we're here Don't get lost inside Yeah you won't get lost inside at all You're on my way Woo!

Poppies in Afghanistan: The Taliban and the Heroin Trade Harvesting opium in Afghanistan Ghaffar Baig/ Reuters/Corbis Most Americans knew little about Afghanistan or the Taliban prior to September 11, 2001, but those who follow the heroin trade have focused on Afghanistan for decades. Afghanistan has long been a major area of opium production, but the “golden triangle” of Southeast Asia (Burma, Laos, and Thailand) historically dominated opium production. By 1999, though, Afghanistan had become the undisputed world leader in opium production despite being an Islamic state ruled by the Taliban, which publicly opposed opium use. In 1999, the Taliban representative to the United States, Abdul Hakeem Mujahid, said, “We are against poppy cultivation, narcotics production and drugs, but we cannot fight our own people” (Bartolet & Levine, 2001, p. 85). Even before 9/11, the United States accused the Taliban of profiting from opium and heroin production, and using those profits to fund terrorist activities. Under pressure from the United Nations, the Taliban announced bans on poppy cultivation in 1997, 1998, and 2000, but there was little evidence of any decreased production. In 2001, though, a ban was put into place that apparently really did reduce poppy production. Cynics have pointed out that the Taliban was simply trying to increase prices by temporarily cutting the supply; whatever the reason, when the Taliban lost control of Afghanistan, the poppy made a comeback. In this war-ravaged and economically depressed nation, growing opium is one of the few ways that farmers can make a living. Afghan President Hamid Karzai has urged his people to declare jihad (holy war) on drug production, but opium farming still accounts for nearly half of the domestic economy, and Afghanistan supplies nearly 80% of the world’s heroin (Office of National Drug Control Policy, 2013). In recent years, opium production has declined in Afghanistan, but a close relationship between heroin traffickers and the insurgency continues to create difficulties for that country’s reconstruction process (Office of National Drug Control Policy, 2013).

I stood in shock as I looked at the devil himself. The man who molested, raped, and abused me my entire childhood. This is the same man my mother sold me to, to settle her drug debt. Now he’s in her house and answering the door.

Why are They Converting to Islam? - Op-Eds - Arutz Sheva One of the things that worries the West is the fact that hundreds and maybe even thousands of young Europeans are converting to Islam, and some of them are joining terror groups and ISIS and returning to promote Jihad against the society in which they were born, raised and educated. The security problem posed by these young people is a serious one, because if they hide their cultural identity, it is extremely difficult for Western security forces to identify them and their evil intentions. This article will attempt to clarify the reasons that impel these young people to convert to Islam and join terrorist organizations. The sources for this article are recordings made by the converts themselves, and the words they used, written here, are for the most part unedited direct quotations. Muslim migration to Europe, America and Australia gain added significance in that young people born in these countries are exposed to Islam as an alternative to the culture in which they were raised. Many of the converts are convinced that Islam is a religion of peace, love, affection and friendship, based on the generous hospitality and warm welcome they receive from the Moslem friends in their new social milieu. In many instances, a young person born into an individualistic, cold and alienating society finds that Muslim society provides  – at college, university or  community center – a warm embrace, a good word, encouragement and help, things that are lacking in the society from which he stems. The phenomenon is most striking in the case of those who grew up in dysfunctional families or divorced homes, whose parents are alcoholics, drug addicts, violent and abusive, or parents who take advantage of their offspring and did not give their children a suitable emotional framework and model for building a normative, productive life. The convert sees his step as a mature one based on the right of an individual to determine his own religious and cultural identity, even if the family and society he is abandoning disagree. Sometimes converting to Islam is a form of parental rebellion. Often, the convert is spurned by his family and surrounding society for his decision, but the hostility felt towards Islam by his former environment actually results in his having more confidence in the need for his conversion. Anything said against conversion to Islam is interpreted as unjustified racism and baseless Islamophobia. The Islamic convert is told by Muslims that Islam respects the prophets of its mother religions, Judaism and Christianity, is in favor of faith in He Who dwells on High, believes in the Day of Judgment, in reward and punishment, good deeds and avoiding evil. He is convinced that Islam is a legitimate religion as valid as Judaism and Christianity, so if his parents are Jewish or Christian, why can't he become Muslim? He sees a good many positive and productive Muslims who benefit their society and its economy, who have integrated into the environment in which he was raised, so why not emulate them? Most Muslims are not terrorists, so neither he nor anyone should find his joining them in the least problematic. Converts to Islam report that reading the Koran and uttering the prayers add a spiritual meaning to their lives after years of intellectual stagnation, spiritual vacuum and sinking into a materialistic and hedonistic lifestyle. They describe the switch to Islam in terms of waking up from a bad dream, as if it is a rite of passage from their inane teenage years. Their feeling is that the Islamic religion has put order into their lives, granted them a measuring stick to assess themselves and their behavior, and defined which actions are allowed and which are forbidden, as opposed to their "former" society, which couldn't or wouldn't lay down rules. They are willing to accept the limitations Islamic law places on Muslims, thereby "putting order into their lives" after "a life of in

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” —C.S. Lewis   With a belief in the goodness of people, I offer the facts regarding CPS. You can do what you like with these facts, but to ignore them for the sake of comfort is to turn your back on what is right. From the horrific effects of foster homes, to the financial incentives to remove children from their parents, from the Drug War that is pushed forward more by CPS than it is by the DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency), to the destruction of families—the good intentions of caseworkers cannot repel these bad consequences of a system that does very little to help those who need it the most.   What Is Child Protective Services?   Child Protective Services (CPS) is the name of the U.S. government agency that responds to reports of child abuse or neglect (3). Not every state calls this agency CPS. Other

No, Michael Bloomberg. The face of gun control isn’t a wealthy PR executive from Monsanto that you lured into fronting an extremist [hate] group against law-abiding moms. The faces of gun control are rapists. Drug dealers. Gang members. Car jackers. Muggers. Abusers. By working to disarm women—and men—you’re encouraging them.

What’s going to happen to Wes?” She lifted her eyes steadily to her brother’s, but she didn’t answer at once. “I don’t know. He’s admitted himself into a drug treatment program.” “Why?” Bud asked. Again she paused. “For drug treatment. It’s not unusual for some of those traders to get hooked on... You know... Uppers?” It was stated as a question. And Preacher thought, it was meth. It wasn’t a little bitty innocent drug. “And you couldn’t do anything about that?” “Like what, Bud?” she returned. “I don’t know. Like help him with that. I mean, what did you have to do?” Paige put down her fork and glared into her brother’s eyes. “No, Bud. I couldn’t help with that. It was completely beyond my control.” Bud tilted his eyes toward his lettuce, stabbed a piece with his fork and muttered, “Maybe you could’ve kept your stupid mouth shut.” Preacher’s fork went down sharply. And Preacher, who rarely used profanity and only in the most heated moments, said, “You’re fucking kidding me, right?” Bud’s eyes snapped up to Preacher’s face. His jaw ground and he scowled. “She tell you she had six thousand square feet and a pool?” Preacher glanced at Paige, Paige glanced at Preacher and then swiveled her eyes slowly to Bud. She spoke to Preacher while she looked at Bud and said, “My brother doesn’t understand. The size of the house you live in has nothing to do with anything.” “The hell,” Bud said. “I’m just saying, there are times to keep your mouth shut, that’s all I’m saying. You had it fucking made.” It took every red blood cell in Preacher’s body to stay in his chair. He wanted to shout, He beat her up in the street in front of me! He killed their baby with his foot! He was squeezing and releasing his fork with such tension, he was unaware he was bending it. It wasn’t his right to speak out; he was a guest. He didn’t see himself as Bud’s guest, he was Paige’s guest. He got a sick feeling in his stomach at the thought he could’ve dropped her here for a visit, alone. He felt his blood pressure going up; his temples were pulsing. “Bud, he was abusive.” “Jesus Christ, you had a few problems. The guy was loaded, for Christ’s sake!” Preacher thought he might explode, his heated blood was expanding so fast. He could hear his own heartbeat. And he felt a small, light hand on top of his coiled fist. He raised his eyes and met the dull, nervous stare of Paige’s mother, pleadingly looking at him from across the table. “Bud doesn’t mean exactly that,” she said. “It’s just that we’ve never had a divorce in the family. I raised the kids to understand, you have to try to get beyond the problems.” “Everyone has problems,” Gin said, nodding. Those same eyes. Begging. Preacher didn’t think he could do it. Sit through it. He was pretty sure he’d never get to the steak without shoving Bud up against the wall and challenging him to keep his mouth shut through something like his fists. The struggle was, that was like Wes. Get mad, take it to the mat. Beat the living shit out of someone. Someone you could beat into submission real easy. “They weren’t problems,” Paige said insistently. “He was violent.” “Aw, Jesus Christ,” Bud said, lifting his beer. A

Have you ever struggled through a fight but kept pushing on? Kara Tippetts, who is a mother of four had died of breast cancer. She had written The Hardest Peace to show how she was living the best way she could in her situation. She had never expressed any sort emotion that was never any positive feeling. Starting chapter one Tippetts combines both the mind and the heart in her writing. She does not give the reader any way of comparing their life to her story, having to look back on their own. Her book distinguishes many of her hardships that she had before her passing. Abuse, drugs, and broken relationships all lead up to her talk of cancer. Throughout this whole story Tippetts calls her cancer “hard”. She describes her fight with each hard, while demonstrating her feelings of grace. She had never once let her children or husband see her as unhappy. She wanted them to remember her as being this loving wife and mother that cared deeply for them. I feel that this books stands out before all other when speaking of the fight against cancer. Having to always look in the positives shows that you accept what you have. Kara Tippetts has shown that living with happiness, means to enjoy life. When always focusing on the negatives you always feel like you need to please others rather than yourself. Her life, I feel resembles the Catholic Social teaching, “Call to family, community, and participations.” This teaching, I feel resembles her because it shows that marriage and family must be supported and strengthened. Tippetts wanted to show her happiness to her family, wanting to show that she is not in any case, worried. She wanted them to know that she was going to be home soon, meaning with God in Heaven. So what I have taken out of her story is this one thing, “Always keep a positive mind and never show that you are unhappy, for at the end of life there is always a silver lining.

The "model minority" myth is a dangerous drug manufactured and promoted by the Whiteness. It ignores all of our diverse experiences and narratives, eliminates all nuances, and lumps us with a convenient stereotype that always renders us as foreigners. It overlooks the discrimination, bias, and hate experienced by our communities and, perhaps worst of all, uses us, Asian and South Asian immigrants in particular, to launder systemic racism and discrimination against poor Black and Latino communities. Why can't they be "models" like us? Because they are lazy freeloaders who don't take personal responsibility, whine about racism, and refuse to pull themselves up by their bootstraps! The system turns us into enforcers and defenders of Whiteness, promising success and safety in exchange for loyalty and obedience. But it's an abusive, toxic relationship, in which the system has always betrayed us on a whim, without remorse or hesitation. Being a "model minority" doesn't live up to the hype.

We must not fall into the typical shadow defense of our culture’s scientific complex which is to think that to name something means we have some control over it. I’ve heard many, many people say something like, “that’s my money complex—but, I’m doing better at it,” or “that’s my critical mother—but I’m doing better than I used to.” This approach is missing the point of healing and transformation. It is simply causing a new inner battle on a different level. It continues to split us against ourselves, rather than helping us find wholeness and solidity. This error reflects a cultural complex which is that we are taught to live our lives according to the ways of Mars, the god of war and not the ways of Eros, the god of love and relationships. Our society teaches us that war is the way. We declare war on poverty, drugs, cancer, our weight, in fact on whatever symptoms are giving us the most trouble. We declare war on ourselves in this process. And, as far as I can see in my lifetime we rarely, if ever, win these wars. Why don’t we ever win some of these wars, we might wonder? Well, let me suggest an answer on the personal level, because as you know, Jung thought that in today’s world that’s where change must start. Most of the complexes that really trouble us come from problems in Eros, those related to love and relationships. They are wounds of the lack of love, the lack of understanding and personal concern, the lack of affirmation in childhood, and these events founded our complexes. Even wounds of fate, like my mother’s death when I was a child, which was a trauma, brought a wound of Eros because one of its major sources was lost, I was abandoned. Abuse is a betrayal of Eros. There are, of course, many more than I have named. The point I want to make is that you cannot heal wounds to Eros with the techniques of Mars: aggression, suppression and control. Yet that is what we try to do. We want to overcome, defeat our complexes.

Instead of the vulnerable person (who has now disappeared), the illusion of the invulnerable person is created - the person who, by definition, cannot become a victim. No one - not women, drug abusers, people subjected to human trafficking, people living in poverty, illegal immigrants, or even children with no other option but to dig in the trash for food - can be called 'subjugated.' The ideal of the superman/superwoman becomes the natural condition of the human. For whatever this invulnerable person's fate - to be screwed by multiple men per day, take drugs and contract HIV/AIDs at ten years of age, have her body covered in bruises, lie passively and let herself be used, or turn other children into slaves - she is, by definition, an active subject who exercises opposition and control. The only possible violence that can be exerted against her is by calling her a victim. It is worse than any other physical or psychological violation to speak of her as subjugated - only then does she become a victim. A consequence of this belief system is the conviction that if there are no victims, there can be no perpetrators. The unmentionables, the men, are completely exonerated in a highly convenient, imperceptible way.

The reward center is where ADHD and addiction overlap, which explains why both problems undermine motivation, self-control, and memory. It is no coincidence that about half of those with ADHD also struggle with substance abuse of some kind. The implications have changed the way scientists describe addiction. The pivotal issues seem to be salience and motivation rather than pleasure. In this context, salience means something that stands out against the landscape of life, predominating over all other stimuli. Cues for both pleasure and pain send dopamine coursing through the nucleus accumbens to attract our attention so we can take action to survive. For the developing substance abuser, the overload of dopamine has tricked the brain into thinking that paying attention to the drug is a matter of life or death. “Drugs are tapping into the very core systems that have evolved to mediate survival,” says Robinson. “They activate the system in ways it was never meant to be activated.

Federal law currently prohibits landlords from discriminating against prospective tenants who have had a felony conviction for drug use. Why? Because drug or alcohol abuse is considered a disability. According to the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD): “An individual with a disability is any person who has a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities. The term physical or mental impairment may include, but is not limited to, conditions such as visual or hearing impairment, mobility impairment, HIV infection, mental retardation, drug addiction (except current illegal use of or addiction to drugs), or mental illness.”[ii]

Reading Group Guide  1.   The river town of Hobnob, Mississippi, is in danger of flooding. To offset the risk, the townspeople were offered the chance to relocate in exchange for money. Some people jumped at the opportunity (the Flooders); others (the Stickers) refused to leave, so the deal fell through. If you lived in Hobnob, which choice would you make and why? If you’d lived in New Orleans at the time of Hurricane Katrina, would you have fled the storm or stayed to protect your house? Did the two floods remind you of each other in terms of official government response or media coverage?  2.   How are the circumstances during the Prohibition era (laws against consuming or selling alcohol, underground businesses that make and sell booze on the black market, corruption in the government and in law enforcement) similar to what’s happening today (the fight to legalize and tax marijuana, the fallout of the drug war in countries like Mexico and Colombia, jails filled with drug abusers)? How are the circumstances different? Do you identify with the bootleggers or the prohibitionists in the novel? What is your stance on the issue today?  3.   The novel is written in third person from two different perspectives—Ingersoll’s and Dixie Clay’s—in alternating chapters. How do you think this approach adds to or detracts from the story? Are you a fan of books written from multiple perspectives, or do you prefer one character to tell his/her side of the story?  4.   The Tilted World is written by two authors. Do you think it reads differently than a book written by only one? Do you think you could coauthor a novel with a loved one? Did you try to guess which author wrote different passages?  5.   Language and dialect play an important role in the book. Do you think the southern dialect is rendered successfully? How about the authors’ use of similes (“wet towels hanging out of the upstairs windows like tongues”; “Her nylon stockings sagged around her ankles like shedding snakeskin.”). Do they provide necessary context or flavor?  6.   At the end of Chapter 5, when Jesse, Ham, and Ingersoll first meet, Ingersoll realizes that Jesse has been drinking water the entire time they’ve been at dinner. Of course, Ham and Ingersoll are both drunk from all the moonshine. How does this discovery set the stage for what happens in the latter half of the book?  7.   Ingersoll grew up an orphan. In what ways do you think that independence informed his character? His choices throughout the novel? Dixie Clay also became independent, after marrying Jesse and becoming ostracized from friends and family. Later, after Ingersoll rescues her, she reflects, “For so long she’d relied only on herself. She’d needed to. . . . But now she’d let someone in. It should have felt like weakness, but it didn’t.” Are love and independence mutually exclusive? How did the arrival of Willy prepare these characters for the changes they’d have to undergo to be ready for each other?  8.   Dixie Clay becomes a bootlegger not because she loves booze or money but because she needs something to occupy her time. It’s true, however, that she’s not only breaking the law but participating in a system that perpetrates violence. Do you think there were better choices she could have made? Consider the scene at the beginning of the novel, when there’s a showdown between Jesse and two revenuers interested in making an arrest. Dixie Clay intercepts the arrest, pretending to be a posse of gunslingers protecting Jesse and the still. Given what you find out about Jesse—his dishonesty, his drunkenness, his womanizing—do you think she made the right choice? If you were in Dixie Clay’s shoes, what would you have done?  9.   When Ham learns that Ingersoll abandoned his post at the levee to help Dixie Clay, he feels not only that Ingersoll acted

But my sister has created her own hell. I know all the elements in our lives—the addicted, abusive father; the struggling working mom; the overbearing sister—formed the gaping wounds in my sister, the burning ache that pushed her from guy to guy, party to party, drug to drug. I’m not going to make excuses for my own strong will. Somehow, against the torn backdrop of my own upbringing, my anger and bullheadedness fueled me to keep my grades up and enabled me to push myself to go to college even though I never felt like I belonged there. It was the fire that drove me to overcome the temptations that my sister fell prey to so easily. My mom and I tried to help her in the way every concerned family member tries—spending way too much money (mostly mine) to get her help that didn’t stick.

the naivety and the ignorant certainty of youth made me think the whole world was black and white. Older, wiser, a little more hardened by said world, I understood that very little, in fact, was black and white. Most things existed in varied shades of grey.  Including the motivators that led many down paths others saw as seedy or unsavory. Criminals, addicts, prostitutes. It was never as simple as people wanting to sell drugs or liking being high or enjoying sex. It was crippling poverty, horrid childhoods, abuse, systematic racism, a system stacked against the poor and needy. People did whatever they needed to do to get themselves out of certain situations. Or to escape into the chemical euphoria when they could get away.

Lola Harding, the girl who had lost everything, the one who decided to turn the tables onto those who were used to getting their way no matter what. The men who hunted the drunk girls, the ones who drugged their dates and tried to take them home. Really, I was just cleaning up the streets, you know? Because the police sure as shit hardly took rape and sexual abuse seriously.  Sure, some of the crime was investigated, but even in the courts, it seemed to be stacked against us. If the guy was white, he got off. If he had money, he got off. If he was from a well-respected family or even a small town, he got off. The judge apologized to him, not the girl, not the person that was hurt.