Bruce Alexander did the research in the 70′s – but it’s still pretty salient.

Bruce considered that the pathetic, cold, isolated conditions in most lab experiments on rats were analogous to the shitty life that most smack-addicts live, and considered that perhaps it’s not the heroin but the hopeless circumstances that drives people (and rats) to abuse substances.

With a cannula jammed in your brain wouldn't you too become a junkie?

If given the choice of utter boredom, no panky time with girl-rats and just a single button that creates an artificial euphoria, wouldn’t we too sit around all day twiddling ourselves to oblivion?

So why don’t we? Smack ain’t hard to find.

So Alexander created ‘Rat Park’ – a 95 square-foot enclosure with plenty of food, fun running wheels and places to create nests and make little ugly pink blind rat-babies. Rabies! He also included a tunnel that ended with a drinking dish of tap water and one of methodone water that was sweetened with sugar (‘cos smack tastes yuck).

What Alexander found was that given optimal living conditions, the rats would reject the methodone (smack) water in favour of working out on the wheel, preening oneself and making sexy time with sweet-ass, uncannulated rat-chicks.

Even if he forced the rats to drink smack water for 57 days of their life (which is like a college degree in rat-years) the rats would put up with the withdrawal symptoms and go clean once they were introduced into lab-rat utopia.

The study suggests that our current model of addiction is shit, and rather than being the fault of the substance, addiction is much more likely a result of one’s circumstances.

Levitt and Dubner also touch on this in their book ‘Superfreakonomics’ – where a drug cesnsus showed barely 1% of people who have tried smack become addicted.

So perhaps we need a new view on prohibition. Perhaps there is more to rebabilitation than simply trying to make substances less available.

Over 90% of the world’s opium (which turns into smack) comes from Afghanistan. Half comes from the Helmand province alone.

Your soldiers are dying from bullets shot from guns bought with smack.

Smack is sold to junkies on your streets by gangsters who also have guns.

All because the smack is illegal.

Otherwise it is grown by farmers, and sold by shops. No gangsters, to terrorists.

Just junkies with shitty living conditions.

Perhaps we ought focus our attention on the shitty living conditions.

Technorati Tags: addiction, Afghanistan, drugs

A UTV channel in India called Bindass recently released an advertising campaign which appears to indicate that being an atheist is on par with not being serious about one’s career, doing drugs and being a slut.

What does being Bindass mean to you?

http://www.bindass.com/post/utv-bindass-what-i-am/

Thanks to Manushka for the heads up on this issue:

Manushka: Intelligent eye-candy to stop traffic.

She’s a very dear friend who is serious about her career(s), very chaste and abhors drugs. She’s also an avowed atheist – she doesn’t even believe in a single god. She also shared with me a rather interesting article which showed research has linked IQ with Liberalism, Atheism and sexual exclusivity in men (not women). Nicely done!

The point of the campaign appears to be: “Just because I watch this channel doesn’t mean that I’m a reprobate.”

The channel has named itself ‘Bindass’ after the Hindi word for ‘reckless abandon’ or ‘without restraint’

I don’t see anything wrong with ‘doing’ drugs. It’s a personal choice that can affect your life, so like driving cars, drinking booze, masturbation and surfing, they should be approached with caution and moderation proportional to the danger. Some things, like drugs, cars and booze, are dangerous. Others just sap your energy and time.

Alcohol sends many people to their grave, marijuana has never killed anyone in recorded history.

And before you spurt out some apocryphal anecdote about some stoned guy who thought he was a thought and punched a cloud and then ended up dying because he tried to eat a Cadillac, I will reiterate. Marijuana has never killed anyone, but being a complete moron has been killing things forever. Drugs aren’t bad.

Making drugs illegal is reckless.

It looks like the mountains in Afghanistan! (click for stats

Making plants illegal is absurd, it makes people you would call ‘farmers’ become what we call ‘criminals’ and hands a ready income to terrorism and organised crime.

That’s what funds the Taliban. Look at the pretty picture I made to demonstrate my point (diligent, aren’t I?).

In 2000, the Taliban banned opium production, which caused that downy bit in the middle of the graph. They were really successful, the downy bit indicates a drop in production from 3000 tonnes to a measly 135.

With no supply, heroin prices went uppy (there is no graph for that), and junkies started going clean. This was around September sometime…

Then some Saudis crashed some Americans into two of the twin towers causing three of them to fall down (what did happen to building 7?) and the world fell on our heads, and everyone blamed the Afghans (with bombs), destroyed their economy, and the Taliban decided that poppy production wasn’t so haram (evil) and as of 2008, it was back up climbing over 7000 tonnes, helping them buy AK-47′s and food and Korans.

Ponder this: Our troops are crawling all over Afghanistan looking for imaginary terrorists hiding in imaginary caves, but are walking straight past real poppy fields.

Poppies are easy to find. Unlike imaginary terrorists, poppies grow outdoors, in the sun, and take up 157,000 of Afghanistan’s hectares, two thirds of them in the Hilmand region alone according UNDOC (PDF). If we burned their funding, the Taliban would suddenly become very hungry and their guns would become very empty, our streets very junkie-less, and our jails quite empty. After all, they produce 93% of the world’s opium (stats), it’s their biggest export (CIA Factbook).

We could kill the war on drugs and the war on terror with a couple of humvees and a flamethrower, but we don’t. Why is that?

Yesterday India’s Border Security Force captured 15kgs of heroin crossing the border from Pakistan. Now it’s on my doorstep.

Drugs aren’t bad. Making them bad is bad. Moving on.

Though I kinda wish you did!

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with sleeping around, either. Well, provided you’re well informed, aren’t hurting anyone, and have studied sexual health in school.

The Bonobo are a relative of the chimpanzee, and where chimps use violence to maintain social order, the bonobo use sex.

They use sex as a greeting, for conflict resolution, to relieve boredom and as a method of maintaining a social hierarchy. They are matriarchal and bisexual, the girls growl out and the boys engage in “penis fencing” (no joke).

And they're great photographers.

When a massive patch of food is found that would cause ordinary chimps to become violent and greedy, the bonobo have a crazy orgy and then feast. They’re also freakishly intelligent, far surpassing their dullard chimp cousins. Be more Bonobo.

India refuses to teach sex education in schools. Many government schooled Indian adolescents still aren’t clear on how babies are made and diseases are transmitted.

A Indian politician shared his view on why India refuses to teach sex ed:

“Europe needs sex education because of its declining population rates.” Nawab Malik NCP MLA (Thanks IndiaUncut!)

You are as wise as you are eloquent Mr Malik. Please don’t deport me for calling your stance reckless.

The Mumbai Mirror’s ‘Ask the Sexpert’ column is always a fascinating read:

My girlfriend swallowed my semen while we were engaging in oral sex. Her menstrual cycles are perfectly normal. However, I was worried and surfed the internet and found information there  that suggested that swallowing semen leads to  cancer. Is this true?

Oral sex with swallowing of the semen is a known and common behaviour among many couples.There are no side effects and it does not cause cancer or any other infections. However, it is illegal in our country.

Ahhh… India. Where sex education and oral sex are illegal.

Ahem. Moving on. I’ll skip the one on career, it’s boring.

Well, there’s no arguing that, is there? I think people don’t believe in enough gods.

I mean, most people believe in only one religion, making them mostly atheist anyway.

And really, what are the odds that out of all the religions there were to chance upon, you happened to be born in the right place to the right parents at the right time to be born into the right one? Believing in only one seems reckless.

India has a lovely inclusive nature to all religions, the taxi that brought me here to the airport had both a crucifix hanging from the mirror above a Lord Ganesh on the dash. I say that’s still not far enough though.

If you had all the gods on your side you’d be so busy not eating things, and not doing things that you’d only barely have enough time left for worshipping things, and there’d definitely be no time left for sinning.

You’d certainly never drink, do drugs, masturbate or have sex. Then you’d be truly religious. It’d be a great insurance policy, you’d pay a premium of never doing anything enjoyable, and as a reward, nothing terrible would ever happen to you.

While the rest of us are beset by natural disasters, pestilence, famine, plagues and holy wars, you’d be fully protected from all that suffering that seems to strike the semi-religious world at random regardless of belief.

Then, you could start worshipping your food before you sacrifice it to yourself, and then worship yourself for being you in the process. You could worship stuff that’s not there and thank it for not being there and getting in your way, and worship the stuff that is there for not being not there. You could worship your thoughts for being thunk, and your toes for not being poisonous. You could start worshiping confusion for being what you are now that you’re not not.

So perhaps we could all be a little less serious, more sexual, less violent, more reasonable, more informed and stop fence-sitting on the religion issue. Then we might learn that we’re all pretty fantastic and sexy smart people.

But we should definitely not be reckless.

Technorati Tags: Afghanistan, atheism, conspiracy, drugs, global warming, logic, politics, rationality, religion, sex