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James Goodman

Charles Shaw: Chasing Amy: Prohibition & the Infantilization Of Addiction - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...my-prohibition-t_b_912044.html

psychology society health addiction criminalization drugs

shared by James Goodman on 01 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • huff.use('threeup', function(t){ t.init({ frame: '#threeup_top_wrapper', content: '#threeup_content', node: '.threeup_entries', left: '#threeup_left_nav', right: '#threeup_right_nav', vertical: 'Culture', entry: '912044', version: '2' }); }) Charles Shaw Author, 'Exile Nation' GET UPDATES FROM Charles Shaw Like 5 Chasing Amy: Prohibition & the Infantilization Of Addiction Posted: 7/31/11 02:00 PM ET React HPFacebookVoteV2.init(912044, 'Chasing Amy: Prohibition & the Infantilization Of Addiction', 'I did not know Amy Winehouse. I never met her, never heard any of her music, and was not a \\\"fan.\\\" None of that seemed to matter when forming an opinion of her. What I did know about her was what I felt I was permitted to know, that she was a prodigious musical talent who, not surprisingly, had an even more prodigious penchant for substances, and her life was a 24-hour train wreck that was parsed out neatly in...', 'http://www.huffingtonpost.com/charles-shaw/chasing-amy-prohibition-t_b_912044.html', 'http:///images/icons/huffpostbigicon.jpg', 'Please join me at <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/">Huffington Post</a>!', 'blog', ["Amazing","Inspiring","Funny","Scary","Hot","Crazy","Important","Weird"]); Amazing Inspiring Funny Scary Hot Crazy Important Weird Read more Amy Winehouse , Addiction , Prohibition , Culture News #news_entries #ad_sharebox_260x60 img {padding:0px;margin:0px} if(typeof ad_overrides == 'undefined' || ad_overrides.spots && jQuery.inArray('sharebox_260x60',ad_overrides.spots) > -1) { htmlAdWH("93315635", "260", "60","f"); var debugadcode = ''; document.write(debugadcode); } if(typeof social_campaign != 'undefined' && jQuery('.print-link')[0].href.indexOf(social_campaign) == -1 ) { var _print_href = jQuery('.print-link')[0].href; jQuery('.print-link').attr( 'href' , _print_href + '&comm_ref=' + social_campaign ) } share this story http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?action=like&api_key=4d965afccc4d86c598dbf5d94fb34a7c&amp
  • This attitude, and paradigm, has got to change if we are ever to get to a saner, more compassionate (and yes, potentially profitable) Post-Prohibition society. The first step, as Amy's friend, the British actor Russell Brand, wrote in the Guardian, is to end the criminalization of use: We need to review the way society treats addicts, not as criminals but as sick people in need of care. We need to look at the way our government funds rehabilitation. It is cheaper to rehabilitate an addict than to send them to prison, so criminalisation doesn't even make economic sense. Not all of us know someone with the incredible talent that Amy had but we all know drunks and junkies and they all need help and the help is out there. All they have to do is pick up the phone and make the call. Or not. Either way, there will be a phone call. Addiction is not "a crime or a romantic affection," Brand concludes, "but a disease that will kill." Let's speak frankly here. Prohibition is as guilty for the death of Amy Winehouse as her addiction. Because when Amy used drugs she wasn't just indulging, she was breaking the law. There's a huge social stigma behind breaking the law, and it usually means unwanted attention, fear, hiding and lying. In The Exile Nation Project: An Oral History of the War on Drugs, Dr. Julie Holland, a psychatrist and emergency physician, explains that the hiding and lying of illegal and prohibited drug use leads to a pervasive feeling of shame, and that shame creates more of the intensely negative feelings and emotional states that lead to self-medication as a means of escape. This cycle is then reinfoirced over and over until it becomes hard-wired. "The way our drug policy is set up," she concludes, "it's turning us into addicts." Now imagine the pressure borne down upon a celebrity of Amy Winehouse's stature, struggling with a very public addiction. How can anyone in her position find the peace and solace, or simply the space, necessary to heal? Addiction takes years to overcome, you can't just stuff someone in rehab for 30 days, and then send them back out on tour, and expect them to be cured. Perhaps we still shove addicts into our collective shadow because we're afraid of addiction and we're afraid of losing control, and as a means of reinforcing control in ourselves, we project this fear onto those who we perceive as having lost control, and thus, are in violation of the social contract and deserving of punishment. We warehouse them so we don't have to look at them, and thus, don't have to look at ourselves.
  • We can stop this from happening. When those who are suffering are finally viewed with the compassion they deserve, rather than with the derision they receive. And when there is no longer any profit to be gained from their immiseration, then we will have taken that final necessary step to break the nefarious back of Prohibition, and move us slowly along into a saner, more rational world, one that would have helped Amy Winehouse and millions like her, instead of recklessly chasing her into her own grave.
James Goodman

Gabor Maté: Why We're a Culture of Addicts | Spirituality & Health Magazine - 0 views

spiritualityhealth.com/...C3%A9-why-were-culture-addicts

psychology culture spirituality health society politics

shared by James Goodman on 28 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Addiction, says Maté, is nothing more than an attempt to self-medicate emotional pain.
  • The only difference between the identified addict and the rest of us is a matter of degrees.
  • Maté points to a host of studies that clearly show how neural circuitry is developed in early childhood. Human babies, more than any other mammals, do most of their maturing outside the womb, which means that their environment plays a larger role in brain development than in any other species. Factor in an abusive, or  at least  stressful, childhood environment and you’ve produced impaired brain circuitry – a brain that seeks the feel-good endorphins  and stimulating dopamine that it is unable or poorly able to produce on its own. A brain that experiences the first rush of heroin as a “warm, soft hug,” as a 27-year-old sex trade worker described it to Maté.
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  • It’s the adversity that creates this impaired development, says Maté, not the genetics emphasized by the medical community.
  • And our response to addicts – criminalization, marginalization, ostracism – piles on that adversity, fueling the addictive behavior.
  • “[Prevention] needs to begin in the crib, and even before then,” Maté writes in Hungry Ghosts, “in the social recognition that nothing is more important for the future of our culture than the way children develop.”
  • What’s more, Maté, unlike many of his medical counterparts, factors into our potential for recovery – even transformation – “something else in us and about us: it is called by many names, ‘spirit’ being the most democratic and least denominational.”
  • The Illusion of choice We’d like to think that addicts have a choice, that they can just choose to stop—even if it’s hard. But Maté insists that the ability to choose is limited by the addict’s physiology and personal history.
  • “The more you’re driven by unconscious mechanisms, because of earlier defensive reaction to trauma, the less choice you actually have,” he says. “Most people have much less choice in things than we actually recognize.”
  • But, he writes, “I’ve come to see addiction not as a discrete, solid entity – a case of Either you’ve got it or you don’t got it – but as a subtle and extensive continuum.” Unless we become fully aware of the drivers of our addiction, he says, we’ll continue to live a life in which “choice” is an illusion.
  • “All addictions, whether to drugs or to behaviors such as compulsive sexual acting out, involve the same brain circuits, the same brain chemicals and evoke the same emotional dynamics,” he says. “Behavior addictions trigger substances internally. So (behavior addicts) are substance addicts.”
  • Or, as he writes in Hungry Ghosts, “Passion creates, addiction consumes.”
  • Compassion for the addict — and ourselves Responding to addiction requires us not only to care for the body and mind but also the soul, Maté says. The spiritual element of his practice is critical, he says, not only to understand the  hard-core street addict but also our own struggle.
  • “We lack compassion for the addict precisely because we are addicted ourselves in ways we don’t want to accept and because we lack self-compassion,” he says. And so we treat the addict as an “other” – this criminal, this person making poor choices – to whom we can feel superior.
  • “Compassion is understanding,” he says. “And to understand is to forgive.” We need, he says, to turn compassion into policy. “To . . . point the finger at that street-corner drug addict who’s in that position because of that early trauma is blind to say the very least,” Maté said in a 2010 talk at Reed College. “I think that if we developed a more compassionate view of addiction and a more deep understanding of the addict and if we recognized the similarities between the ostracized addict at the social periphery and the rest of society and if we did so with compassion both for them and for the rest of us we would not only have more efficient, more successful drugtreatment programs, we would also have a better society.”
James Goodman

The autocratic response to OWS - Occupy Wall Street - Salon.com - 0 views

www.salon.com/...ows_bloomberg_hickenlooper

society politics economy wall street OWS Occupy Wall Street protests non-violent

shared by James Goodman on 22 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • Back on the East Coast, it was much the same, as His Majesty King Michael Bloomberg issued a decree stating that as a benevolent despot, he would “allow” his Manhattan subjects to occupy Wall Street (as if the mayor has the power to grant — or withhold — democratic rights). But then King Mike quickly sent his police force in for mass arrests, standing down only after a wave of outrage from the larger serfdom watching on television.
  • Alas, it’s a predictable situation. Horrifying economic inequality has prompted the bottom 99 percent of income earners to finally exercise their constitutional rights to protest. In response, the nobles in the top 1 percent are demanding their political puppets make clear that such dissent will not be tolerated — and they expect their demands to be followed. This country’s landed gentry, after all, spent a lot on campaign contributions to make sure their hand-picked autocrats were installed in governors’ and mayors’ offices, and now they’re having those autocrats engineer a whole new kind of bailout.
  • As opposed to merely cutting a check to the bankers, this bailout is all about resource allocation. It has the kings preventing law enforcement from being deployed on financial criminals who destroyed the American economy. Instead, those finite law enforcement resources are being funneled into arresting more than 1,000 protesters and abrogating the vassals’ First Amendment rights to “peaceably assemble and petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
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  • With such extra-judicial authoritarianism now being used against dissidents all over America, Denver and New York’s responses are indeed serving as a “model,” as King John himself predicted. And because of that, the United States is now emulating the very autocracy we originally waged our founding revolution against.
  • Ultimately, that’s why this historical moment is so important. Whatever you call the spontaneous uprisings against oligarchy — Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Denver or simply “We the People” — they prove that the only savior in these neo-feudal times is continued protest. Without it, the future of the economy and our freedoms are clearly at risk from King John, King Mike and every other self-styled monarch now waging war on the fundamental principles of American liberty.
James Goodman

Occupy Wall Street's 'Political Disobedience' - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...streets-political-disobedience

wall street politics society economy

shared by James Goodman on 14 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • Our language has not yet caught up with the political phenomenon that is emerging in Zuccotti Park and spreading across the nation, though it is clear that a political paradigm shift is taking place before our very eyes. It’s time to begin to name and in naming, to better understand this moment. So let me propose some words: “political disobedience.”Occupy Wall Street is best understood, I would suggest, as a new form of what could be called “political disobedience,” as opposed to civil disobedience, that fundamentally rejects the political and ideological landscape that we inherited from the Cold War.
  • Civil disobedience accepted the legitimacy of political institutions, but resisted the moral authority of resulting laws. Political disobedience, by contrast, resists the very way in which we are governed: it resists the structure of partisan politics, the demand for policy reforms, the call for party identification, and the very ideologies that dominated the post-War period.
  • Occupy Wall Street, which identifies itself as a “leaderless resistance movement with people of many … political persuasions,” is politically disobedient precisely in refusing to articulate policy demands or to embrace old ideologies. Those who incessantly want to impose demands on the movement may show good will and generosity, but fail to understand that the resistance movement is precisely about disobeying that kind of political maneuver. Similarly, those who want to push an ideology onto these new forms of political disobedience, like Slavoj Zizek or Raymond Lotta, are missing the point of the resistance.
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  • One way to understand the emerging disobedience is to see it as a refusal to engage these sorts of  worn-out ideologies rooted in the Cold War. The key point here is that the Cold War’s ideological divide — with the Chicago Boys at one end and the Maoists at the other — merely served as a weapon in this country for the financial and political elite: the ploy, in the United States, was to demonize the chimera of a controlled economy (that of the former Soviet Union or China, for example) in order to prop up the illusion of a free market and to legitimize the fantasy of less regulation — of what was euphemistically called “deregulation.” By reinvigorating the myth of free markets, the financial and political architects of our economy over the past three plus decades — both Republicans and Democrats — were able to disguise massive redistribution toward the richest by claiming they were simply “deregulating” when all along they were actually reregulating to the benefit of their largest campaign donors.
  • This ideological fog blinded the American people to the pervasive regulatory mechanisms that are necessary to organize a colossal late-modern economy and that necessarily distribute wealth throughout society — and in this country, that quietly redistributed massive amounts of wealth to the richest 1 percent. Many of the voices at Occupy Wall Street accuse political ideology on both sides, on the side of free markets but also on the side of big government, for serving the few at the expense of the other 99 percent — for paving the way to an entrenched permissive regulatory system that “privatizes gains and socializes losses.”
  • The central point, of course, is that it takes both a big government and the illusion of free markets to achieve such massive redistribution. If you take a look at the tattered posters at Zuccotti Park, you’ll see that many are intensely anti-government and just as many stridently oppose big government.Occupy Wall Street is surely right in holding the old ideologies to account. The truth is, as I’ve argued in a book, “The Illusion of Free Markets,” and recently in Harper’s magazine, there never have been and never will be free markets. All markets are man-made, constructed, regulated and administered by often-complex mechanisms that necessarily distribute wealth — that inevitably distribute wealth — in large and small ways. Tax incentives for domestic oil production and lower capital gains rates are obvious illustrations. But there are all kinds of more minute rules and regulations surrounding our wheat pits, stock markets and economic exchanges that have significant wealth effects: limits on retail buyers flipping shares after an I.P.O., rulings allowing exchanges to cut communication to non-member dealers, fixed prices in extended after-hour trading, even the advent of options markets. The mere existence of a privately chartered organization like the Chicago Board of Trade, which required the state of Illinois to criminalize and forcibly shut down competing bucket shops, has huge redistributional wealth effects on farmers and consumers — and, of course, bankers, brokers and dealers.
  • The semantic games — the talk of deregulation rather than reregulation — would have been entertaining had it not been for their devastating effects. As the sociologist Douglas Massey minutely documents in “Categorically Unequal,” after decades of improvement, the income gap between the richest and poorest in this country has dramatically widened since the 1970s, resulting in what social scientists now refer to as U-curve of increasing inequality. Recent reports from the Census Bureau confirm this, with new evidence last month that “the number of Americans living below the official poverty line, 46.2 million people, was the highest number in the 52 years the bureau has been publishing figures on it.” Today, 27 percent of African-Americans and 26 percent of Hispanics in this country — more than 1 in 4 — live in poverty; and 1 in 9 African-American men between the ages of 20 and 34 are incarcerated.
  • On this account, the fundamental choice is no longer the ideological one we were indoctrinated to believe — between free markets and controlled economies — but rather a continuous choice between kinds of regulation and how they distribute wealth in society. There is, in the end, no “realistic alternative,” nor any “utopian project” that can avoid the pervasive regulatory mechanisms that are necessary to organize a complex late-modern economy — and that’s the point. The vast and distributive regulatory framework will neither disappear with deregulation, nor with the withering of a socialist state. What is required is constant vigilance of all the micro and macro rules that permeate our markets, our contracts, our tax codes, our banking regulations, our property laws — in sum, all the ordinary, often mundane, but frequently invisible forms of laws and regulations that are required to organize and maintain a colossal economy in the 21st-century and that constantly distribute wealth and resources.
  • In the end, if the concept of “political disobedience” accurately captures this new political paradigm, then the resistance movement needs to occupy Zuccotti Park because levels of social inequality and the number of children in poverty are intolerable. Or, to put it another way, the movement needs to resist partisan politics and worn-out ideologies because the outcomes have become simply unacceptable. The Volcker rule, debt relief for working Americans, a tax on the wealthy — those might help, but they represent no more than a few drops in the bucket of regulations that distribute and redistribute wealth and resources in this country every minute of every day. Ultimately, what matters to the politically disobedient is the kind of society we live in, not a handful of policy demands.
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