#also makes more sense why these things (not heroin or cocaine but the substances i did use) aren't much of

[ashleyvbaird]

Podcast Script

I have been slowly but surely working on a final draft of my script for the podcast episode. At this stage I would say I have the majority of it written and confirmed, however, I am giving myself room in that if I start to record it and find that it isn't flowing as smooth as I'd like or if it isn't making sense I can tweak the script to fix any of these issues. I had planned to record it earlier this week but covid has gotten in the way of that ! So I am hoping that by Wednesday I will at least have a short snippet I can submit for my work in progress.

For now, here is the first two or three minutes I have of my script that I will be turning in as my work in progress:

Welcome and Intro:

Welcome in to this week's episode of dropping the F Bomb, hosted by myself, Ashley. Before we get started, today's instalment is brought to you in partnership with the Be Safe Not Sorry campaign, who are taking a stand against the opioid crisis through their many resources and ads. So a big thank you to them and if you're interested in finding out more about their ongoing work, be sure to check out besafenotsorry.co.nz. Now, on to the main event. Actually, another thing I will say before we get into it is that this podcast will be dealing with some pretty heavy topics such as substance abuse, overdoses, addiction, so if anything along those lines is triggering to you, just keep in mind that they will be discussed. Again if you need resources about where you can go for help Be Safe Not Sorry is a great place to start. So, you may have just heard me mention the opioid crisis and if you're thinking ‘well what exactly is that’, keep listening because that is the focus of this episode and I will be explaining this and more.

Start of Main Points:

The opioid crisis, or on a smaller scale the Fentanyl crisis, is the rapid increase we have seen in the abuse and misuse of the class of drugs known as opioids. Fentanyl specifically is a synthetic opioid most comparable to morphine, the main difference being that Fentanyl is 50 to 100 times more powerful than the latter. It is a prescription drug typically used to treat patients with severe pain, however, it is also a drug that is made and used illegally, which is what I will be looking into today. In terms of its physical form, when prescribed by a doctor, Fentanyl can be given through a shot, a patch on the skin or even as a lozenge. In the case of illicitly manufactured Fentanyl, which is made synthetically in labs, its form varies from a powder, to a liquid, but the most common and most deadly is a pill that is often made to look like other common opioids. This last form is the most dangerous and the reason why there has been such a spike in Fentanyl related overdoses and deaths. This is because many people may be unaware they are taking Fentanyl-laced pills, being that it is almost impossible to tell whether drugs have any level of Fentanyl in them unless tested with Fentanyl test strips. Fentanyl is often mixed with other drugs such as heroin, MDMA and cocaine because of its extreme potency and how little of it is needed in order to produce a high. This also means it is much cheaper than alternatives because of how powerful just a small amount can be. That is just the basics of the drug and all of what I've just said explains why it has become such an issue for young people and if it wasn't already clear, it is a very deadly issue.

[gffa]

Do you think one could follow the Jedi Code/Lifestyle in real life as a positive manner of living or do you think it only works in Star Wars? I asked this on r/Mawinstallation and the answers I got were either:

''The Jedi code is oppressive so no'' ( this was the most upvoted answer )

''The Jedi code works but only for the Jedi''

''The Jedi code requires the force to work and since the force doesn't exist in the real world, the code cannot work''

And finally, I got only a single reply that said

''Yes, the Jedi code does work in real life, that's the entire point of Star Wars''.

What is your take on this?

This is going to be sort of a long, roundabout answer, but the short version is: In the finer details, we're not space psychics, but as a general idea? Yes. First of all, what even IS the Jedi Code?  Are we talking about the whole “there is no emotion, there is peace”/”emotion, yet peace” meditation mantra, which we should point out is nowhere in the movies or TV shows, but is entirely in the novels and comics supplementary material?  Are we talking about a more generalized idea of Jedi philosophy?  And what, precisely, does that mean?  I mean, what’s oppressive about it and what scene evidences that that’s what the Jedi taught? Second, there are two talks that George Lucas gave that I think really illustrate this view of emotional navigation and how that impacts Star Wars and the Force: There’s the writers meeting of The Clone Wars where he talks about the light side and the dark side and there’s an Academy of Achievement Speech from 2013 where he talks about joy vs pleasure:     “Happiness is pleasure and happiness is joy. It can be either one, you add them up and it can be the uber category of happiness.     “Pleasure is short lived. It lasts an hour, it lasts a minute, it lasts a month. It peaks and then it goes down–it peaks very high, but the next time you want to get that same peak you have to do it twice as much. It’s like drugs, you have to keep doing it because it insulates itself. No matter what it is, whether you’re shopping or you’re engaged in any other kind of pleasure. It all has the same quality about it.     “On the other hand is joy and joy is the thing that doesn’t go as high as pleasure, in terms of your emotional reaction. But it stays with you. Joy is something you can recall, pleasure you can’t.  So the secret is that, even though it’s not as intense as pleasure, the joy will last you a lot longer.     “People who get the pleasure they keep saying, ‘Well, if I can just get richer and get more cars–!’ You’ll never relive the moment you got your first car, that’s it, that’s the highest peak. Yes, you could get three Ferraris and a new gulf stream jet and maybe you’ll get close. But you have to keep going and eventually you’ll run out.  You just can’t do it, it doesn’t work.     “If you’re trying to sustain that level of peak pleasure, you’re doomed. It’s a very American idea, but it just can’t happen. You just let it go. Peak.  Break. Pleasure is fun it’s great, but you can’t keep it going forever.     “Just accept the fact that it’s here and it’s gone, and maybe again it’ll come back and you’ll get to do it again. Joy lasts forever. Pleasure is purely self-centered. It’s all about your pleasure, it’s about you. It’s a selfish self-centered emotion, that’s created by self-centered motive of greed.     “Joy is compassion, joy is giving yourself to somebody else or something else. And it’s the kind of thing that is in it’s subtlty and lowness more powerful than pleasure.  If you get hung up on pleasure you’re doomed. If you pursue joy you will find everlasting happiness.”  –George Lucas And how I like to compare that to The Hijacking of the American Mind by Robert Lustig, MD, MSL, which is a book about how corporations have hijacked our pleasure centers to make us focused on reward over pleasure.  It talks about the exact same concepts, with only slight word adjustments, but otherwise might as well be verbatim: “At this point it’s essential to define and clarify what I mean by these two words—pleasure and happiness—which can mean different things to different people.     “Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary defines “pleasure” as “enjoyment or satisfaction derived from what is to one’s liking”; or “gratification”; or “reward.” While “pleasure” has a multitude of synonyms, it is this phenomenon of reward that we will explore, as scientists have elaborated a specific “reward pathway” in the brain, and we now understand the neuroscience of its regulation. Conversely, “happiness” is defined as “the quality or state of being happy”; or “joy”; or “contentment.” While there are many synonyms for “happiness,” it is the phenomenon that Aristotle originally referred to as eudemonia, or the internal experience of contentment, that we will parse in this book. Contentment is the lowest baseline level of happiness, the state in which it’s not necessary to seek more. In the movie Lovers and Other Strangers (1970), middle-aged married couple Beatrice Arthur and Richard Castellano were asked the question “Are you happy?”—to which they responded, “Happy? Who’s happy? We’re content.” Scientists now understand that there is a specific “contentment pathway” that is completely separate from the pleasure or reward pathway in the brain and under completely different regulation. Pleasure (reward) is the emotional state where your brain says, This feels good—I want more, while happiness (contentment) is the emotional state where your brain says, This feels good—I don’t want or need any more.     “Reward and contentment are both positive emotions, highly valued by humans, and both reasons for initiative and personal betterment. It’s hard to be happy if you derive no pleasure for your efforts—but this is exactly what is seen in the various forms of addiction. Conversely, if you are perennially discontent, as is so often seen in patients with clinical depression, you may lose the impetus to better your social position in life, and it’s virtually impossible to derive reward for your efforts. Reward and contentment rely on the presence of the other. Nonetheless, they are decidedly different phenomena. Yet both have been slowly and mysteriously vanishing from our global ethos as the prevalence of addiction and depression continues to climb.     “Drumroll … without further ado, behold the seven differences between reward and contentment: Reward is short-lived (about an hour, like a good meal). Get it, experience it, and get over it. Why do you think you can’t remember what you ate for dinner yesterday? Conversely, contentment lasts much longer (weeks to months to years). It’s what happens when you have a working marriage or watch your teenager graduate from high school. And if you experience contentment from a sense of achievement or purpose, the chances are that you will feel it for a long time to come, perhaps even the rest of your life.Reward is visceral in terms of excitement (e.g., a casino, a football game, or a strip club). It activates the body’s fight-or-flight system, which causes blood pressure and heart rate to go up. Conversely, contentment is ethereal and calming (e.g., listening to soothing music or watching the waves of the ocean). It makes your heart rate slow and your blood pressure decline.       - “ Reward can be achieved with different substances (e.g., heroin, nicotine, cocaine, caffeine, alcohol, and of course sugar). Each stimulates the reward center of the brain. Some are legal, some are not. Conversely, contentment is not achievable with substance use. Rather, contentment is usually achieved with deeds (like graduating from college or having a child who can navigate his or her own path in life).       - “Reward occurs with the process of taking (like from a casino). Gambling is definitely a high: when you win, it is fundamentally rewarding, both viscerally and economically. But go back to the same table the next day. Maybe you’ll feel a jolt of excitement to try again. But there’s no glow, no lasting feeling from the night before. Or go buy a nice dress at Macy’s. Then try it on again a month later. Does it generate the same enthusiasm? Conversely, contentment is often generated through giving (like giving money to a charity, or giving your time to your child, or devoting time and energy to a worthwhile project).       - Reward is yours and yours alone. Your sense of reward does not immediately impact anyone else. Conversely, your contentment, or lack of it, often impacts other people directly and can impact society at large. Those who are extremely unhappy (the Columbine shooters) can take their unhappiness out on others. It should be said at this point that pleasure and happiness are by no means mutually exclusive. A dinner at the Bay Area Michelin three-star restaurant the French Laundry can likely generate simultaneous pleasure for you from the stellar food and wine but can also generate contentment from the shared experience with spouse, family, or friends, and then possibly a bit of unhappiness when the bill arrives.       - Reward when unchecked can lead us into misery, like addiction. Too much substance use (food, drugs, nicotine, alcohol) or compulsive behaviors (gambling, shopping, surfing the internet, sex) will overload the reward pathway and lead not just to dejection, destitution, and disease but not uncommonly death as well. Conversely, walking in the woods or playing with your grandchildren or pets (as long as you don’t have to clean up after them) could bring contentment and keep you from being miserable in the first place.       - Last and most important, reward is driven by dopamine, and contentment by serotonin. Each is a neurotransmitter—a biochemical manufactured in the brain that drives feelings and emotions—but the two couldn’t be more different. Although dopamine and serotonin drive separate brain processes, it is where they overlap and how they influence each other that generates the action in this story. Two separate chemicals, two separate brain pathways, two separate regulatory schemes, and two separate physiological and psychological outcomes. How and where these two chemicals work, and how they work either in concert or in opposition to each other, is the holy grail in the ultimate quest for both pleasure and happiness.”                                – Robert Lustig, MD, MSL And then lets add in what Dave Filoni has said about the Force and the core themes of Star Wars:     "In the end, it’s about fundamentally becoming selfless moreso than selfish.  It seems so simple, but it’s so hard to do.  And when you’re tempted by the dark side, you don’t overcome it once in life and then you’re good.  It’s a constant.  And that’s what, really, Star Wars is about and what I think George wanted people to know.  That to be a good person and to really feel better about your life and experience life fully you have to let go of everything you fear to lose. Because then you can’t be controlled.        “But when you fear, fear is the path to the dark side, it’s also the shadow of greed, because greed makes you covet things, greed makes you surround yourself with all these things that make you feel comfortable in the moment, but they don’t really make you happy.  And then, when you’re afraid of something, it makes you angry, when you get angry, you start to hate something, sometimes you don’t even know why.  When you hate, do you often know why you hate?  No, you direct it at things and then you hate it.  And it’s hard because anger can be a strength at times, but you can’t use it in such a selfish way, it can be a destroyer then.        “These are the core things of Star Wars.“  –Dave Filoni So, the core things of Star Wars and the Jedi teachings (because Jedi teachings are basically almost word for word how GL described how the Force works) can very much be a reflection of real world teachings and ways to live by, because all of the above are about how GL viewed the world and what he wanted to put into his movies. Further, Jedi teachings are basically just reworded Buddhism + Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.  And both of those are very livable by our real world standards, if you so choose.  GL was very much about how SW had themes that were meant to be picked up on by the audience and even DF has said this:  “ Jedi have the ability to turn the tide, to make a significant moment, to give hope where there’s none.  That’s their ultimate role to play, to be this example of selflessness.  And that’s what makes them a hero, when no one else can match that heroic thing.  And then our job is to emulate that, to use that example, and further our own lives.” --Dave Filoni Ultimately, the Jedi are specifically focused on disciplining themselves (which GL has said is the only way to overcome the dark side, in that TCW writers’ meeting), probably to a degree most of us wouldn’t have the room to devote to, but that doesn’t mean that the broader strokes aren’t meant to be applicable to our lives or don’t echo real world teachings.

[woundjob]

Hi, anon from the question about the portrayal of drug use in Wolfstar fics here.

I think I worded my ask poorly, because I didn’t at all mean to demonize the use of drugs or alcohol as coping mechanisms or just in general. I completely understand why people use substances to get through the day, especially those who live in situations they can’t escape from, and drugs or alcohol provide comfort or relief. Some people use them for fun, whereas for others it can be a matter of survival.

Montparnasse’s fic “Eclipse and Transit” mentions that Peter suspects Remus of using heroin, and Sirius comments on his own use of cocaine in the story. That was what prompted my ask. I think it makes a lot of sense that people in their situation might use drugs, especially with all the shit happening to them and around them in First War-era fics.

I do think that it’s a subject that needs to be approached carefully, because there’s a huge difference between writing from experience and writing as someone who’s not done any research or is looking at a subject with no understanding of its impact on others. Not exactly the same, but I’m hesitant to read fics that discuss sex work when written by people who have never been sex workers themselves, or at least have a good understanding of the issues that sex workers face in their daily lives, because it’s easy for things to be portrayed in ways that are ignorant or hurtful.

I was curious about your thoughts on the matter because you have interesting perspectives and headcanons about R&S, and I enjoy reading them. I’m sorry that the way I worded my ask was insensitive, and hope that this makes a bit more sense.

its okay!! thanks so much for sending a follow up, i know i can be kind of a bitch when people send me shit thats weird or insensitive from my point of view, so i rlly appreciate the further thought and im sorry for immediately dismissing you <3

in the professional world, ive done a lot of freelance editing for peoples manuscripts. mostly novellas and short stories, but some graphic works and longer novels, too. im a sensitivity reader, meaning (im sure u know but for anyone else reading) i check work about people with my lived experience to make sure its an accurate portrayal. as a person of color and a gay and trans person, this can be anything from kind of weird or cringe stuff to outright harmful stereotyping. the work that i do helps people better portray their characters and gives them an all around better story.

obviously, sensitivity readers and editors dont really exist for fanfiction, unless the writer is really really dedicated. so, you get those fics that portray these sorts of things weirdly or harmfully etc etc. honestly, i think most people are afraid to ask a drug user or sex worker what their experiences are like. can you imagine getting the ask like, hey, whats ur life like? im writing a drarry fic. lmao.

basically, what im saying is, much to your point, if you dont do the research or have experience (or hire someone with the experience) with the subject youre writing, then you arent going to write it well. this goes for sensitive issues like drug use and sex work, but also really anything. heaven knows theres awkward portrayals of gay men out there, but even further, if you werent a fry cook or a business major or a single mom youd have trouble writing with and understanding a character who was one. research is imperative no matter what youre writing, especially with sensitive issues.

that being said, if you ARE doing the research, fics about sex work or drug use etc etc can be really well done. personally im not a fan of fics about addiction, due to my own experiences and my general preference for happy fics, but i can totally see the appeal. as long as a writer is willing to put in the work, i see no problem with this sort of fic. also, im sure i speak for everyone when i say montparnasse’s work is worth it. havent read that fic bc of the infidelity tag unfortunately but i love their work overall. great example of an author who puts thought and time into this sort of thing

anyway i hope that answers ur question at least a little bit. honestly, if ppl arent sure, hire a sensitivity reader! and sorry again for initially writing ur question off <3

[thesessiondc]

Lushfields

Since quitting and deciding to assist others to do the identical I'm continuously requested the hotly contested 'Is hashish addictive?' query. It's a topic that fiercely divides most 'specialists' and even those that spend their total grownup lives inhaling it. So let's try to ascertain whether or not or not hashish is addictive.

Beginning with a 'exhausting' drug simply to make dependancy simpler to determine, learn the next passage and determine for your self for those who assume the particular person is or is not hooked on heroin:

"Once I cannot pay money for heroin or if I do know that I will probably be unable to have any for that night time, I instantly flip into a distinct particular person. I'm indignant and emotional and I really feel so depressed that I wont get that sense of rest and tranquility from the heroin. I actually hate feeling like I want it to make myself really feel higher."

In your opinion, is it affordable to imagine the particular person is hooked on heroin?

In my opinion there is no such thing as a doubt in any way. I would stake my mortgage and life on it!

Okay, re-read that very same assertion however this time the drug has now modified to hashish Lushfields.

"Once I cannot pay money for hashish or if I do know that I will probably be unable to have any for that night time, I instantly flip into a distinct particular person. I'm indignant and emotional and I really feel so depressed that I wont get that sense of rest and tranquility from the hashish. I actually hate feeling like I want it to make myself really feel higher."

With solely the identify of the drug altered is it affordable to imagine that particular person is hooked on hashish?

Keep in mind solely the identify of the drug has modified!

The assertion you might have simply learn is actually REAL and comes from a younger girl who lately contacted me by way of http://www.quitcannabis.web who was clearly determined for assist - not as a result of she was hooked on heroin however hooked on our 'good friend' hashish. I'm not implying hashish is akin to heroin dependancy (after all not!) and even that there are bodily withdrawal signs once we try to stop, however there's nonetheless that sense of desperation and want for hashish when circumstances pressure us to go with out it for longer than we would like. Like when your vendor is nowhere to be discovered and you'll't chill out or discover enjoyment in something you do. That sense of lacking/needing hashish is clearly a symptom of psychological dependancy.

Think about heroin or cocaine as a maximum-security jail and hashish a low-security open jail. Whatever the regime and circumstances discovered contained in the jail, the underside line is; regardless of how skinny and flimsy the partitions are or how weak the safety on the essential gate is, the operate of a jail is to limit freedom. On this case, your happiness and delight of life. Don't fret! When you settle for hashish is addictive it turns into even simpler, no more troublesome to stop!

Hashish also called marijuana, weed, pot or a thousand different names this drug appears to have will be extremely addictive to some individuals who wrestle to give up smoking hashish. How you can give up smoking hashish on this state of affairs depends on an understanding of marijuana and its results in your thoughts and physique. Solely then will you be capable of really feel the advantages of quitting smoking hashish and be capable of keep off weed and never relapse into your dependancy.

Firstly we should perceive there are some misconceptions about hashish dependancy that result in individuals attempting to fairly smoking pot within the incorrect means and may also result in pro-marijuana customers ridiculing the thought of dependancy which is unhelpful to everybody concerned.

Hashish is just not bodily addictive Many research have proven that smoking marijuana is just not like smoking cigarettes the place the chemical substances (nicotine) make you bodily depending on the medication and when starved of it you endure cravings that drive you to smoke once more to be freed from the consequences. This doesn't imply stopping smoking hashish doesn't include its set of cravings however they're usually of a distinct type.

Hashish Withdrawals Affected by hashish withdrawals is frequent when giving up smoking weed however any bodily cravings are very delicate however can embrace:

Vivid goals - I'm not certain what causes these however many individuals coming off hashish utilization usually discover their goals very vivid and generally scary This may occasionally have one thing to do with the chemical THC that stays in your system for weeks after you give up smoking and the way it interacts along with your mind. Anxiousness - Emotions of paranoia and stress will be heightened while you're working the chemical substances out of your system. Insomnia - Some individuals have reported that it turns into troublesome to sleep which once more could also be associated to your physique readjusting. These signs go in time and are normally nothing just like the horrible results of quitting cigarettes, the true cravings come out of your psychological dependence on the drug which has to do along with your wanting it not bodily needing it!

Psychological Dependence A psychological dependence is once you really feel you must smoke hashish within the types of joints, bongs or nonetheless you select since you really feel you want it. This will get complicated and generally you could not know why precisely you're feeling you will need to smoke however for most individuals it's as a result of it has grow to be a behavior to smoke to flee one thing in your individual life. From escaping abuse, poverty, psychological sickness, despair or simply from being bored and unmotivated you possibly can fall sufferer to smoking weed since you want an escape out of your actuality and the excessive you get is a brief time period aid that makes issues bearable for some time. This isn't a long run answer although and the continued smoking usually makes this worse and solves nothing main a spiraling pit of despair, anger and much more dependence on hashish to get by all of it.

How you can give up smoking hashish then? Step one is knowing what you might have simply learn and find WHY you select to make use of marijuana. Solely from there are you able to hope to take motion to stop the drug and acquire the advantages of clearer considering, extra time in your life to alter issues and extra money to make it occur too!

[zekhromss]

i think it’s interesting how we as a Society treat masochism very differently than say, sadism, despite them being nearly the same thing.  also this isnt about kinky shit this is about physically doing harm to yourself/others.

and in part, i know it’s because masochism can manifest in any way, youre not always capable of seeing someone being particularly masochistic.  but i think we should, because it’s not a mindset thats productive for oneself or...anyone.

when we see someone doing any kind of harm to themselves, the immediate response is never “you need to stop”, even if it’s of equal or greater intensity than the harm someone would perform on someone else in the pursuit of sadism.  we think it’s different because this person would know their own limits, would know when enough is enough.  and since theyre doing it to themselves, is it our place to tell them to stop?

but since it’s a subconscious response, is the person in question aware of what theyre doing?  obviously if you saw someone physically cutting themselves, physically causing mutilation like that, youd tell them to stop, or encourage them to do so.  but that’s an action that has direct repercussions; the person in question can see what theyve done and in many cases, regret their decision.

but what about less extreme masochism?  what about the little things, like intentionally cutting off circulation because they enjoy the feeling of “sleep limbs”?  what about drinking too much caffeine because you enjoy the feeling of your heart racing and the sound of blood in your ears?  what about intentionally depriving yourself of sleep, what about intentionally depriving oneself of nourishment (not in excess)?

these things, as theyre not directly causing harm, arent things we ever take seriously.  drinking excessive caffeine is seen as harmless fun (we all need caffeine, dont we?), everyone does sleepless nights, everyone has some kind of issue where we skip meals.  so is it masochism, or is it simply being human?  are all humans predisposed to self-torture?  why?  is it the rush of adrenaline the body gives us when it’s in danger, is it an abuse of your bodys natural response to pain?  are masochists therefore more likely to abuse substances because theyve become dependent on the rush of euphoria that follows temporary inconvenience?  this could be true, as we see people who willingly put themselves into extremely stressful situations and workplaces where denying yourself the pleasures of life in pursuit of monetary gain typically fall onto harder drugs, like cocaine or heroin (speaking specifically on office workers, who are encouraged to outdo everyone else for personal gain).

has society encouraged the rise of casual masochism, which then in turn puts more people at risk?  have we created a world where there’s no other stimulus, and most people arent willing to become sadistic to get out their need for some kind of pain response?  is that why we view these tiny acts of self-harm as admirable or necessary?

human beings are empathetic and kind beings; we have a sense of community and morality which tells us Hurting Others is bad. if you intentionally cause harm to others, youre rightfully shamed from society (excluding CEOs, etc. because theyve long since revoked the title of human imo, also going into propaganda, etc is just gonna bring me off-topic).

but what if we viewed the Self as a separate being?  you are unaware of your subconscious mind, you dont know what it wants, you arent aware of what it’s doing.  most “borderline” masochistic tendencies (even so far as nail-biting until it causes pain), arent conscious actions.  you dont choose to do them; your brain sends an encrypted signal and you just...do it.  so then, is masochism a primitive response?  do we have control over what we do to ourselves?  is sadism, by extension, the same thing?  do they choose to want to harm others?  why is masochism seen as admirable and level-headed, and sadism seen as a conscious decision?  is it just because we know hurting others is morally wrong, and we dont consider ourselves to be counted as an Other to be hurting?

the real answer, obviously, is our impression of empathy.  the existence of consent.  you shouldnt burn someone else, thats a whole other person who doesnt deserve to be put through what youve decided you want to do to them.  you can burn yourself (though you shouldnt), because you have decided that thats...what you want to do.

the reality of the situation is that, comparing masochism to sadism is impossible.  sure, they may be rooted in the mind’s desire for pain, but they are fundamentally different, because one is choosing for others and one is choosing for yourself.  but they should be considered one and the same in spite of this.  

people who are, for lack of a better term, “normal” (rather, neurotypical), would typically never do either.  they dont understand why youd want to hurt somebody else, and they dont understand why youd want to hurt yourself.  sadistic and masochistic tendencies are likely caused by some form of neurodivergence that separates you from your own subconscious mind.  you dont get a rush from normal activities, you need to take out your frustration and feelings of “lack of personhood” to remind yourself youre human, or someone else is human (for masochism and sadism, respectively).

this isnt to say if youre neurodivergent, it’s alright to do either one (because it isnt).  it’s also not to say if you are neurodivergent, youre absolutely going to be inclined to take one of the two paths (or both!).  i suffer from sado-masochistic tendencies, but the only reason i possess either one is...because i either:

1) decide “i” have done something that requires punishment (violence on “other”)

2) decide “i” have a requirement to be punished (violence on “self”),

and this is determined by “who i am” at the time.  it should be noted that since i am still “the same person”, both of these mental decisions could be considered masochistic in nature, regardless of if i feel like i’m doing harm to myself in some cases.

fact of the matter is, we are all prone to masochism.  we do not view it as violence (before it gets excessive and physically mutilating in nature), we view it as discipline.  we view it as self-help (wrongfully).  we dont view it as real harm, because we view it as “they are in control.  they know what theyre doing to themselves”.

but i believe we should all consider ourselves as Others.  if you wouldnt deprive another human of nourishment, if you wouldnt deprive someone of sleep, if you wouldnt file down someones nails until they bled, if you wouldnt junk someone up on caffeine to see what it does to them, what any of it does to them, you should keep an eye open for you doing it to yourself.  because you are still a human, you are still a person, you can have a higher tolerance for pain and still not feel it necessary to provoke that.  you have to be aware of what youre truly craving, and replace the pain response with that.

masochism is merely sadism.  you are sadistic with yourself.  you torture yourself.  you knowingly cause yourself stress and pain, and why?  because you do not feel as though it has repercussions.  but then youre no different from an “actual” sadist who tortures others because they believe it has no repercussions.  you have to view yourself as a person, as someone capable of being severely harmed.  you have to look on your actions and think “would this traumatize someone”, because then youre traumatizing yourself.  nobody even has to do anything; youre triggering a panic response and causing psychological harm.  now you cant trust yourself because youd do something so violent and vile.  but youve done it to yourself, so who’s to blame?  would your brain really make you do something that would cause so much harm?  if your brain does it, then is it really that bad if someone else were to do it to you?  and then rinse and repeat until youre potentially looking for someone else to do it to you, so you can test your own hypothesis.

in conclusion, masochism and sadism are not held to the same terms on account of the context.  but that isnt to say they arent two sides of the same coin; they cannot be rightfully compared, but that does not make them inherently mutually exclusive.  by taking advantage of potential neurodivergence, and acknowledging what a “lack of Self” can do to your brain to make you a target of your own latent abusive tendencies, you can take steps to eliminate that response to panic (inclusive of rage, depression, apathy, dissociation, etc.) and instead focus on what you would do if you had to face yourself as a separate person.  instead of keeping yourself awake for nights on end because “i havent finished this, im too stressed, i deserve to be harmed because i didnt complete this task”, consider the fact that doing that to yourself will have no differing results than if you tortured a colleague and friend with sleeplessness; it will not work, it will only make them less inclined and capable of performing whatever task they (you) didnt initially complete to provoke that reaction.  be kind to yourself.

[bookfreaky]

A Small History of Chemical Beings

An average adult suffering of major depression can present the symptoms of hypersomnia and / or insomnia. During the hypersomnia periods said average adult can sleep for about anything from 12 hours to 3 days without a waking moment, and still feel tired. The depressed brain feels tired because it is overworking to produce your daily dosage of dopamine (a hormone associated with pleasure, joy and motivation) and serotonin (a hormone associated with well-being, satisfaction, and self-esteem), these substances need to be produced because they make you happy. As it happens, being happy is very important for humans, as their enormous brain are in constant search for meaning to add up to their complex ideas that they think that constitute the world in their perspective, such ideas like politics, money, religion, philosophy, arts, and whatever else they create.

Warning: humans should know that the world is actually made out of earth, water, air, some other gases, and living carbon species. But somehow, they insist on the money thing.

The problem with a brain that cannot produce the right amount of dopamine and serotonin is that human brains generate a stupid association of pain and illness with sadness, and happiness with well-being and health. So, depressed people actually feel pain. That’s their brain telling their body that they are really fucking sad because they must be really fucking sick or wounded. Probably, when our ancestors were hurt by a lion or something, their brain learned how to make this association, because it doesn’t make fucking sense to be happy while attacked by a lion. That’s why today, when you’ve been 6 hours watching Big Brother without moving in the dark of your room, sometimes it feels like you’ve been hurt by some carnivorous animal.

This association between hurt and comfort, pain and health, sadness and happiness that human brains do make people crave for another substance, one that is much littler, but very addictive. Endorphins. Endorphins are a hormone associated with pain-relief and immediate pleasure, that’s the substance you get when you eat a chocolate bar. But there are things that can produce much more endorphins than a fucking chocolate bar: drugs. Humans love drugs. And there are a lot of options for drugs. Like for example, nicotine has a 200.5 concentration of endorphins per minute; while cocaine has a 700.6 concentration per minute; and methamphetamine has a 1001.1 concentration per minute. While food has mere 75 concentration for minute. Endorphins are cool because they offer a temporary relief to pain and sadness, but since it is temporary your overloaded brain asks for a next hit of it as soon as it stops working, that’s what we call addiction.

Generally, humans deem addictions to be bad thing, which really sucks because humans tell each other that drugs are a good thing. Contradictory. Addictions can be socially acceptable depending on their legal status, their price, and their association with certain ethnical groups and cultures. Some drugs take a slower burn in your body, those are more well accepted mostly: like weed, alcohol, coffee, nicotine, painkillers. The other ones, the heavy drugs are normally considered bad because they generate such a flow of endorphins in your brain that they can cause addiction in a short usage, fucking up your brain’s ability of producing happy hormones on its own, making you waste all your money on them, lose your job, sell your house and end up on some charity rehab – oh, here’s the money thing again. – Yes, heavy drugs such as coke, synthetics, heroine and crack aren’t only addictive, they are also very profitable.

Okay, it’s clear now that a shitload of endorphins isn’t exactly the most plausible solution to our poor depressed, dopamine/serotonin deprived, brain. So, humans, the smart ones I guess, invented other drugs, the controlling drugs. Sometimes it’s difficult to tell the difference, like heroine was used as an anti-psychotic for many years, and we all know how it went. The controlling drugs are used not to inject a substance in your brain, but to assist on its production or maybe block the excessive production of hormones (that can also fuck you up). There are many of them in the market and they are quite expensive: Prozac, Xanax, Carbonated Lithium, Paroxetine, Sertraline, Clonazepam, Haloperidol, Seroquel, Lorax, Lamitrol, Sumatriptan, Tegretol, Lexotan, so on, so on. They usually work with a right combination of them along with a healthy sleeping cycle and frequent exercising.

The shit thing about them is that they are also addictive, most them at least. That’s why is so important to keep visiting your doctor. In a way, they are like your drug dealer but they are a little more concerned about your mental health, or at least they should be. Unfortunately, for chronic cases of mental illness, which they are various: major depression, dichotomic depression, generalized anxiety disorder, social anxiety disorder, bipolar affective disorder, anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, obsessive compulsive disorder, schizophrenia, schizoid-paranoid disorder, craziness, craziness, craziness. For most of these cases the solution will be one or two of these drugs, allied with a lot of therapy. Psychotherapy is basically two or more people talking but one of them is trained and charges you money for it.

Still even, it’s not uncommon that our little depressed brains, although with a lot of therapy and a lot of drugs (the right ones, duh!) still relapse, collapse, break-down forever and eventually die because that two substances are not in correct balance. And there’s no explanation, no real data that determines the criteria for telling which of these sad brains that will get happy, and which will remain sad. Excuse me, though. Looking back in evolution, natural selection has given us another powerful little tool that can help us.

Oxytocin. This is the hormone associated with love, physical contact, childbirth, breastfeeding, it is the hormone that is produced when humans commune, when they share food, when they have sex, when they kiss, dance, play or do whatever it is together.

When the first mammals started to walk together in small groups, they realised that they had better chances of surviving than if they’re alone. The problem is that living together often sparks aggressiveness due to a competition for food, reproductive partners and whatever. So, their little primitive brains started to produce a hormone that would not just cause joy, but affection. Affection is any manifestation of emotion, but normally used in the meaning of the manifestation of love. Human females discharge a huge amount of oxytocin during labour, and also during lactation, so the baby human is involved in this hormone. Oxytocin is responsible to our ability to form life-long bonds, this is not fucking endorphin, I’m talking life-long bonds.

Whenever oxytocin is produced the brain also produces levels of dopamine and serotonin which causes pleasure, calmness, butterflies in the stomach, and a basic sensation of being loved. It’s proved that just by looking at the smiling face of some you love can make a healthy brain produce oxytocin. Yes, no need to swallow it down, to smoke it, to drink it, not even touch it. Of course, touching makes it much better, hugs, kisses, cuddles, caresseses in general are great oxytocin deliverers. Sex is the up-most oxytocin deliver, but not any sex, only good fucking sex. That’s the reason why humans can’t stay around each other having sex for too long or they fall in love.

Perhaps the secret solution to our depressed brain isn’t just stabilizers of dopamine and serotonin, moderation in your intake of endorphins, but also a little oxytocin production every now and then. A little company must help.

[raggedyblue]

THE SEVEN-PER-CENT SOLUTION

In the collective imagination Holmes wears a deerstalker (not true), wears a cape (maybe), uses a magnifying glass (often), smokes a pipe (very willingly), is a heartless machine (only at a first glance ) and is a drug addict.

His habit of drugs, consolidated in the Canon, often, probably in order not to offend current morals, has been neglected by subsequent adaptations that have become fossilized on stereotyped and even not completely true characteristics.

The attitude towards drugs has changed over the past 130 years, to tell the truth, it has also changed during the course of the Canon itself. Sherlock Holmes will stop his vicious habit at some point.

You can’t even blame Doyle for having started it, substances such as morphine and coacaine, recently synthesized (1803 morphine, 1855 cocaine) were used in the medical field, were also given to children, and for voluptuous purposes. The same heroine, the last born, sees the light in the pharmaceutical field in the Bayer company. Toning drinks whith cocaine were common, the same CocaCola contained it in its first formulation. Cocaine was above all much appreciated by intellectual circles as it gave the feeling of being able to open the mind and stimulate mental processes. No wonder if a man like Sherlock Holmes may have wanted to linger in such a vice.

However, the negative effects of drug intake were gradually more evident. A doctor like Doyle couldn’t ignore the course of events and Watson's position on drugs became rigid, even Holmes himself gave up on this practice (MISS).

The use of drugs wasn’t seen as pathological, a traumatic cause wasn’t sought in the habit of indulging. So wanting to see something more behind Holmes's addiction could just be, perhaps, a distortion by what we know and feel now. However, even in the Canon the use of drugs is associated with a sense of abandonment and the consequent search for comfort (SIGN).

This is one of those rare glimpses in which the mask of Holmes slips and he appears as a sensitive man. Ignoring his habit takes away a chance to make the detective a creature less chilly and more human, imperfect. No wonder then that the two adaptations that for first tried to see Sherlock Holmes as the human being behind the detective didn’t leave out this habit and tried to suggest that there was something more behind it. I'm talking about The private life of Sherlock Holmes and The Seven-Percent Solution. But both adaptations, I must say, make promises they don’t maintain. We don’t know much more about Sherlock Holmes' private life after seeing the film (I have not read the book), it is suggested that between him and Watson there is more than a friendship, or at least that Holmes would like more, but then they missed tyself in a maze of international plots, fatal woman  and submarine. But The Seven- Percent Solution is perhaps, in my opinion, even a greater disappointment.

Spoilers under the cut.

The assumptions are excellent, brings together Holmes' drug habit, which appears much more obvious and out of control, and Sigmund Freud. A step not too bold. The alienist himself had suffered from cocaine addiction and had lost a friend for the same reason. So if at the beginning he had praised the virtues, using it for his patients, he had come to recognize the danger of it. It seems therefore possible , if not probable, a connection between the two minds. Fascinating meeting considering a similar approach to the method and a complete difference in the result. Freud uses  to probe the inner world the same techniques that Holmes uses to navigate the surface and untangle the nodes of sensitive reality. The rational man meets the man who "invented" the unconscious and the reason for their encounter is cocaine. Potentially dynamite. But if attention is paid to detoxification, little is told, if not hastily and superficially (a few lines) of the reason that may have prompted Holmes to indulge in a potentially deadly vice. In the book as in the movie attention is diverted by a case and if in the book it sees a woman at the center of a political intrigue that heralds the great war  ( east wind), in the movie is further simplified and reduced to an operetta show, with barons, pasha, and a beautiful woman whom Holmes eventually falls in love with (sigh). In the book Watson shows a sincere affection for Holmes and Holmes despite his difficulties, is sensibly moved and obviously in need of his friend. There is Mary Morstan but, to the delight of the wary reader, she refers to Watson always (and many times, too many) calling him Jack. Particularly in a text in which Watson admits to having tampered with and falsified some of his work is a rather sugary detail. Watson saves Holmes' life by trickery, dragging him to Vienna to meet Freud. It doesn’t pass unnoticed, however, that the necessity of saving his life comes to light because Holmes' drug habit has considerably worsened since the doctor married. In the movie all this is less obvious, between the two it is difficult to see a real bond. Holmes seems, throughout the movie, a thinking machine (in the grip of delirium induced by cocaine, but still anaffective), we see he melt and soften only at the end while he smiles at the beautiful woman who they have decided to match to  him (do you understand that I'm nervous?). Given that he has just turned away from Watson without any thought, on the part of both to be true, Watson seems more concerned about his readers who will remain without adventures, it is definitely annoying.

But I'm also annoying because I'm talking about all this without explaining the plot. Actually there are elements in the book, and partly also in the movie, terribly interesting from "our" point of view. I think one of the funniest elements of what we're doing here, is digging to find all those little details, steps, that, possibly, brought the Moffits to do what they did, how they did it. And I think this book / movie, like The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, was a huge inspiration (maybe they even said it, I'm not good at keeping track of anything, even less interviews). And perhaps this character of incompleteness that combines the two works has been a stimulus.

The book opens with a preface by the author who pretends to have come in possession of a ( another) unpublished Watson’s script. A text dictated to a complacent typist when, at the end of his life, the doctor found himself alone, dead Holmes for ten years, in a nursing home (and here we can all cry crying in a corner). In the typescript Watson tells what really was behind the Final Problem. He also promises to tell the background to The Empty Houses, but unfortunately this is another promise he doesn’t keep. We are told that Holmes, left alone by Watson, has lost himself in an abyss of drug binges. A worried Mrs Hudson asks Watson for help, being afraid to enter Holmes' rooms, evidently prey of delirium. In the movie we can see him locked in home, room in an absolute disorder, nervously brandishing a gun in his hand. (say hello to Billy).

Apparently Holmes is totally obsessed with a certain Professor Moriarty, whose name Watson had heard only a few times and always when Holmes was high.

Holmes says that this gruesome individual is behind every crime perpetrated in recent years, the spider in the center of the web, the Napoleon of crime etc, etc.

Back home, Watson finds Moriarty in person waiting for him. He turns out to be a poor little man, former tutor of mathematics of the young Holmes. The man is worried because Holmes pursues him, following him physically and threatening him by  letter. He admits at the same time of being attached to the two Holmes, that his time in their home was pleasant, until the moment of the tragedy. However, he refuses to elaborate  the subject.

Watson then has proof that his friend is just  about to lose his reason first, and his life then.

He find, the same day, thanks to the incomparable Stamford to which he had the good sense to ask for help, a newspaper article that talks about a certain Dr. Freud expert in disorders related to cocaine.

He therefore decides that at all costs he must induce Holmes to reach Vienna. Not being able to come up with a valid plan, he turns to Mycroft who has the "brilliant" idea of ​​convincing Professor Moriarty to go to Vienna so that Sherlock is induced to follow him (it took a genius for a plan so elaborate ... .but again, we want things to be smarter than they are). Holmes in his ravings had thrown out of a vanilla extract in front of the professor's house, in this way he’s now able to chase, with the help of trusty Toby, the traces of Moriarty from London to Vienna ...

Once in the Austrian capital Holmes discovers the deception and is taken care of by Freud, who through hypnosis takes care to make him overcome the physical difficulties of addiction to cocaine. Holmes is obviously enraged with Watson who stoically endures all kinds of insults. Until the day when, to calm his friend, he hits him so hard that he loses his knowledge.

Once detoxed Holmes falls into a depressive state, from which he’s recover only thanks to his violin and a new case. Despite being in the house of Freud we never facing with the demon behind the vice, let alone the tragedy  referred by Moriarty, that apparently never is mentioned.

The story then follows the development of the case, ending  with a spectacular pursuit in a train. Pleasant, but seeing Freud used to shovel coal and not know anything about Holmes is a bit frustrating. In the movie is even worse, the case is silly, there is a ridiculous scene in which the three are attacked by a pack of dressage horses completely out of control (why, how!? ... maybe there is a Freudian allusion behind that I don’t want to investigate, or at least I hope) or another improbable in which the woman leaves as a trace to follow lilies from the very long stem. Holmes takes a while to notice the first, and a dumb Watson  wonders if by accident they have accidentally escaped from the woman's hair. I'll not dwell on the scene in a brothel where Holmes continues to have to draw the attention of Watson who was drooling around with an imbecile expression.

At the end of both cases, Freud as a reward for the assistance provided, asks to hypnotize for the last time Holmes. Finally in this circumstance he ask about the famous tragedy that has disturbed Holmes' childhood by making  that his future fixations was shaped on Professor Moriarty. It turns out that Holmes's mother had betrayed his father, which is why he ended to kill her and her lover. In the movie in a more simplistic, but also more direct, it is revealed that the mother's lover was none other than the tutor of the boys, Moriarty. In the book the path is more tortuous, Moriarty is guilty only of having told what had happened, to the young Sherlock. He becomes the scapegoat of his trauma, although he participated in a tangent way, probably in the absence of the real protagonists. This episode would also be the cause of Holmes's distrust of women.

This is another of those stereotypical characteristics that are given to Sherlock Holmes that although almost never expressing appreciation for the female gender, has at heart their health and happiness, in its own way, much more than most of the men who trample this land. He simply doesn’t love them, but this is not called misogyny, it's called homosexuality.

At the end of the story Holmes decides not to return to London with Watson, but to allow himself time to heal better. His intention is to earn a living with the violin under the false name of Sigerson. Perhaps even to deepen the knowledge of what it really is, but this is something that will happen,maybe, off the screen.

And maybe that's what the Moffits are trying to do is show what this book / movie, despite having courageous premises, didn’t know / wanted to do.

Meyer, the author, in fact, as a good Sherlockian, had, ably bringing forth the Great Game, putting together theories already circulated among Holmes fans.

The idea of ​​child tragedy, of mother's betrayal, is taken by Trevor Hall who in 1969 theorized it in the Holmes-Ten Literary Study. Even the idea of ​​paranoia from cocaine, which causes hallucinations on an innocent Professor Moriarty is taken elsewhere. Fred Musto in 1968 theorized that the figure of the criminal genius Moriarty was nothing more than a paranoid hallucination of Holmes while trying to detox himself (paranoia moriartii).

Moreover, the difference in "thickness" between the normal villains of Sherlock Holmes and the others of the Canon is so abysmal that no one can blame the man for thinking about it.

Extrapolating from TFP it seems even evident. (x)

"You have probably never heard of Professor Moriarty?" he said. "Never." "Aye, there's the genius and the wonder of the thing!" He cried. "The man pervades London, and no one has heard of him. "

Wanting to study the man behind the detective seems to me sensible to have been inspired by such premises.

Sherlock's dependence throughout the series is shown in an escalation that can’t be random. It starts from simple patches of nicotine, which could be the equivalent of cocaine used as medicine, to ended in real binges of drugs.

The hypothesis of a Sherlock who, in the grip of a delirium, an allegorical (x) delirium induced by drugs, perhaps so serious that it may have even left him in a coma, retraces moments of his life making to play to more or less innocent characters the part of villains seem to have deeper roots than they seem to appear.

Parts of the book and the movie seem already seen (or better, reviewed) in Sherlock.

From Mrs. Hudson asking John for help,

Sherlock closed in 221b in the grip of delirium whit a gun,

Moriarty who suddenly appears in the detective's thoughts, replacing something that already frightened him: the mastiff in THOB and in the movie when during one of the dreams in which Holmes falls prey during detoxification, Moriarty's face overlaps that of the SPEC snake.

Watson hits Holmes with more force than he wanted.

Another interesting idea is the scene in which, always during the detox, a ferocious mastiff leaves a closet.

 I don’t know if there may be any subtext here, even if I suspect that dogs were related to homosexuality in the Canon itself, but it is a cue from which the Moffits may have departed.

A curious case about dogs is also the choice of Toby's "interpreter". Dog not of breed both in the Canon and in the book, in the movie it has this aspect and is perhaps the living being towards which Holmes demonstrates greater affection.

Holmes the first time he finds himself in front of Freud accuses him of being just Moriarty disguised with a beard and a ridiculous operetta accent. Even in TFP we have someone disguised (this time for real) as a psychoanalyst and with a ridiculous operetta accent.

Another interesting fact is that Holmes speaks of Moriarty as the snake of Eden. Plausible considering that in the movie they make him the lover of the mother, but it is something that we also see in Sherlock.

So it's safe to ask who our Moriarty really could be. Too young to be the lover of the mother, or of the  father if the clues collected by @sagestreet lead us to the right direction. Moreover here is the mother to become "incredibly monstrous". Mathematic genius is also the mother.

We know nothing about Moriarty, they do not give him any background. In Doyle we know his origins, his studies, his career and his profession. In Sherlock we only know from TFP that he has a brother of whom he has always been jealous and who was responsible for the death of Carl Powers. We only know that he is a criminal genius, not why or how he became like this. More or less the same things we know about Sherlock Holmes in the Canon.

@possiblyimbiassed @ebaeschnbliah @gosherlocked @sarahthecoat @sagestreet @loveismyrevolution

[have-a-little-laith-xx]

Quintessence

Day 4 : Prompt 4 || Quintessence

I didn't know what to do with this prompt so take Keith and Pidge bonding over science.

Quintessence, according to Pidge, had no accurate description. The Princess, during their ‘what is quintessence?’ lesson, had said that it is primarily a form of energy. Raw quintessence could be refined into standardized fuel requirements for the Galra.

But, there were different types of quintessence, and their descriptions could range from a pure substance, to the essence of a thing in its purest and most concentrated form, to the alchemic fifth element after earth, air, fire, and water.

It could be described as a two sided coin; on one hand it creates. It could make you better, stronger, faster, healthier. On the other hand, it destroys and corrupts. Like earth drugs, such as heroin, cocaine, or ecstasy, it was equally as, or even more so, addicting.

Examples of the stark contrast between quintessence could be found right before them. Honerva became Haggar because of quintessence, whereas Voltron was created using quintessence. Voltron gained abilities using quintessence, whereas it turned Lotor into a raving lunatic, and whereas it almost turned the Paladins bloodthirsty and murderous.

There’s a delicate line between using just enough quintessence, and going overboard on it’s usage. And it is pretty easy to tell which is which.

So that's why Keith sits in front of Pidge with his hand hooked up to wires connected to the last Altean healing pod, Shiro's healing pod, which, in turn, is connected to her computer. The encounter with the druid and the quintessence had spooked him. Memories of the fight with Macidus has been haunting him, making him paranoid, and he isn't about to go screwing around with Quintessence if it's as dangerous as Allura keeps insinuating. That's why he needs to know what's wrong with him.... with his reactions to quintessence. He needs to know his limit.

“So,” Pidge says, “You have quintessence traces in your hand somehow remaining from years ago, Keith. How did that happen?”

Pidge has always been easy to talk to. They both have the same personality and sense of sarcasm, but she's better at detecting jokes than him, and this is something Keith would never admit he's embarrassed by.

“Remember the collection and extraction mission?” He asks.

“When Shiro lost Allura?” Pidge scoffs, “Of course I do!”

A small, wry laugh escapes Keith. He's certainly never thought of it as “when Shiro lost Allura.”

“Yeah, that mission,” he says, after his laughter dies out, “I got into a fight with a druid. Macidus. The same druid we fought a few days ago.”

“Oh,” Pidge gapes in understanding.

“In the fight, he managed to cut my hand. Then, he threw me up against these vials of quintessence. One broke and some got on my hand, and the wounds healed really fast,” Keith clarifies, “So I just want to know what I'm dealing with.”

Pidge nods and sets to work. Chatter about Voltron's victories as well as those of the Blade of Marmora and coalition gossip fill their comfortable silence as Pidge runs her tests, jotting down notes at random.

Finally, they wait for the results of the last scan.

“Okay, so,” Pidge's eyebrows furrow together as she reads and analyses her data, “The scans and tests don't indicate any abnormalities. The only giveaway that there was any ever quintessence on you is the slight recolouring of your hand, which is amazingly invisible to the eye. It only shows up on the scan, in several spots where the quintessence would have splashed on you. That said, it is pretty cool to see how the quintessence has stayed on your hand.”

“Like a burn mark, maybe?” Keith asks.

“Exactly like that. Along with Allura's information, I've managed to put together theories,” Pidge pushes her glasses up the bridge of her nose.

“We know that the Galra purposely.... remodel body parts to be use quintessence to make them stronger, better. And we also know that they build their ships to use quintessence as some sort of fossil fuel. They basically use quintessence as a part of their daily lives,” she looks at him with concern, “Which brings me to my conclusion that Galra are sensitive when they come into contact with it. Like you've said, it heals. I'm going off topic here, in ordinance with the the fact that Galra use quintessence infused body parts, then I think that that's how Zarkon remained alive. He used quintessence. That's why Haggar is like that. The result of using quintessence varies by person, as well as their traits and tolerance. In Zarkon, Haggar and Lotor's case, the more they took, the more corrupt they became.”

Keith gasps.

“So it's safe to say that you should be very, very careful with the types of quintessence you come into contact with, Keith,” Pidge says, “There shouldn't be any crucial changes because your human side is neutral towards it, but still, you should be careful.”

He knows that she doesn't mean it in a dark, ominous way, but it sounds.. frightening, to say the least.

“Thanks, Pidge,” He sighs.

Pidge observes him, their team leader. He looks fine, but up close, she can see the heavy purple bags under his eyes. He looks as though he's been awake for a while, or as though he hasn't been able to rest easy. His lips are dry and cracked, and his skin is pasty, hair greasy, as if it hadn't been washed in a while

Stressed would be a light way of putting how he looks. And since they had nothing to do but float around in space all day, then....

“Hey,” she smiles at him, “C'mon. Forget a this Paladins nonsense and play some Killbot Phantasm with me for a while.”

“But, routine—" Keith stresses.

“Dude, you're stressed. And it wouldn't kill you to break routine for a couple of vargas,” Pidge's glasses glint, almost terrifyingly, “Besides, we can beat Lance's high score.”

Keith takes the bait.

His answering smile makes up for the little part of her that felt guilty about baiting him and beating Lance in the first place.

[accidental-drug-overdose]

Preventing Accidental Drug Overdose

Drug overdose accounts for nearly 75,000 deaths every year (NIDA). Since 1999, drug overdose became the number one cause of death for people in the United States under 50 years old. That’s not a comforting statistic, especially if you or someone you care about is currently struggling with a substance addiction. You might feel quite alone in the fear that one day you yourself could end up in the corner of a room pronounced dead from an accidental drug overdose. Or maybe you’re someone who already knows what it’s like to lose a friend or family member to an accidental drug overdose that could have been easily prevented.

Even if you don’t personally know someone who’s died too young from an accidental overdose, it’s not uncommon to turn on the news and see famous idols like Mac Miller, Amy Winehouse, or Prince ending their careers early through drug overdose– whether intentional or accidental, we might never know.

The death-by-drugs epidemic has been called a National Overdose Crisis for nearly twenty years now. But it’s simply one of the sad (and deadly) side effects which result from the overall addiction problem in our country. Chances are, you know someone personally who faces drug addiction and likely knows what it’s like to experience affliction.

Why Have So Many Americans Died from Drug Overdose?

There are several reasons why drug overdose happens so often. One of the leading reasons behind overdose is irresponsible drug use or improper dosage. Other reasons, like a rise in tolerance, impurity of the type of drug, or mixing substances can also cause fatal consequences that lead to overdose.

Whether “drug culture” or personal preference is to blame, many drug users like to push the envelope when it comes to seeing how much is enough just before too much. For example, look at drinking in social settings or parties. Often it’s encouraged to consume more alcohol as a means of looking cool or appearing stronger than someone else. But this mentality of “do more” until the body can’t take it anymore can lead to a lifestyle which breeds the risk of overdosing.

Even new drug users or experimenters can fall into the trap of trusting someone with a higher tolerance offer advice on dosing. Instead of starting small to feel it out, someone may succumb to peer pressure and take something they hardly know about, leading to a total lack of harm reduction in many situations. The rise in popularity of raves, music festivals, and a partying lifestyle that might seem luxurious has been a giant hub for all kinds of dangers with little harm reduction strategies in place.

Why Don’t People STOP Using Drugs?

This is a tricky question. Many people who have an addiction don’t operate in a way where they can simply “stop” one day and refuse drugs on their own. A substance abuse disorder trains the brain to literally depend on the substance(s) of choice– in a sense, it becomes a “life or death” situation to the addict. Addiction becomes a sort of instinct to the drug user, which makes life complicated when it comes to coping with normal daily tasks.

How Accidental Overdose Became So Common

Since the 1990s, or even starting much earlier, drugs have become more accessible and popular among the general population. Even kids in high school knew where to easily get their hands on Adderall, weed, oxycodone, and other potentially dangerous drugs for recreational, emotional numbing, or “academic” purposes.

Prescription drugs have become an ever-increasingly surge for medical emergency of all sorts, as well. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows a rise in chronic illness and injury which often results in opioid prescriptions. Ironically, unnecessary opioid refills lead to addiction time and time again.

Over the past 20 years, even new prescription opioids have entered the medical market and therefore we continue to see a rise in the abuse of them.

Illicit Drugs Have Evolved

Illicit drugs are obviously still one of the major risk factors that lead to an accidental overdose. Because illegal drugs like meth or synthetic opioids aren’t regulated, people are left to their own guesstimates when dealing, buying, and consuming these substances.

What goes into a lot of common illegal drugs has changed over the years, too. Now, it’s pretty well-known in party culture that buying drugs from any random dealer at an event is actually pretty dumb. Many popular party drugs like cocaine, MDMA, ketamine, and even some psychedelics are sometimes made with dirty ingredients or fillers which can lead to illness, seizures, or simply a really horrible experience.

Heroin used to be considered a sketchy opioid that only hardcore drug users were known for. But now, we can see heroin in the hands of teenagers, homeless communities, housewives, and everywhere in between. Fentanyl, one of the most dangerous and easily-overdosed drugs in the world right now, is also being given to people of all walks of life as a means to avoid the high costs of heroin or other opioids.

Things have definitely changed over the course of twenty years, but one thing remains for sure: drug overdose death is a harsh reality we face in every community. And it needs to end.

How To Tell If Someone is Having an Overdose

It’s important to remember that not all overdoses end up causing death. Sometimes one drug overdose can look different from another. Some accidental overdoses can look like intentional suicides, and sometimes we’ll never know what exactly caused the overdose if a mixture of substances is present.

Different types of drugs also result in different physical reactions leading to an overdose. Of course, if you do end up using, it’s always crucial to know what exact drugs you’re taking, what dosage, and how the drug could react in your body. Perhaps the single most common mistake that can cause an overdose is ignorance about drugs themselves.

So how can we tell if an overdose is happening? There are a few common warning signs and symptoms to look out for:

Loss of consciousness after consuming any substance.

Bluish or purple tint to the fingernails, lips, or skin (especially with opioids and amphetamines).

Uncontrollable muscle spasms or bodily seizures

A dramatic increase or decrease in pulse or other vital signs

Pupils change: pinpoint pupils for opioids; dilated pupils for stimulants and many hallucinogens.

Vomiting, choking, foaming at the mouth, or a gurgling sound

Delerium, psychosis, paranoia, hallucinations

Loss of control over organs or kidneys

Excessive sweating

Heart attack, coma

Depression in breathing  or trouble gasping for air

Lack of motor control, the body may become limp

Remember, different substance cause difference overdose symptoms so be sure to know what overdose signs look like for specific drugs.

What Can You Do if You Witness an Overdose?

If you or someone you see has signs of a drug overdose, make sure you call 9-1-1 for emergency help right away. Don’t be afraid of getting in trouble– The Good Samaritan Law is effective in many states. This is a law that protects your privacy and situation where law enforcement is required to save a life instead of getting you in jail. Many people prevent calling for help when there’s an overdose because they fear the legal consequences– but don’t hesitate to get emergency help right away, as it could save a life.

If you’re someone who sees an overdose happen in someone else, you’ll want to wait with the overdose until authorities show up. Try to give the ambulance or medical examiner as much information as possible. This includes what drugs were consumed, how much, what the person’s mental state was, and what time drugs were taken.

You may want to call poison control, too (800-222-2222) in the case of toxic substances or illegal drugs.

Make sure aftercare is sought for whoever survived the overdose– it could take time for the mind and body to recover from any immediate or permanent damage.

Preventative Measures

Narcan

Naloxone– or Narcan– or other medications can be given to a patient if necessary. There are meds that prevent opioids from binding to brain receptors or temporarily reverse the “high”, which can save a person’s life in the case of an overdose. Narcan is a nose spray that quickly goes into effect to reverse the side effects of many opioids, like heroin, Fentanyl, and even some prescriptions. Some states even give it with prescriptions in case of emergency so you can keep some at home.

Awareness is Key

The surest way to prevent an accidental drug overdose is, obviously, to refrain from drugs use, period. But if addiction is present, this is highly unlikely, so second to the best way of prevention is this: BE AWARE OF DRUGS, EFFECTS, and DOSAGES.

When you’re aware of what is possible with drugs you consume, you’re better off knowing what not to do which can lead to overdose. This is not only true for yourself but any friends or loved ones who also partake in drug use or abuse. Teach others and stay as safe as you can in all situations. Remember to reach out for help if your drug use is unmanageable in any way.

Drug Test Kits

There are test kits that are available for as cheap as $25 which can prevent all kinds of drug overdoses. These kits test for the purity and quality of specific drugs– as mentioned before, many drugs these days are garbage. People mix them with “fillers” or things like bath salts, rat poison, or even meth to make for cheaper production of the substance.

Again, the safest way to 100% avoid any risk of overdosing is to quit using drugs completely. Help is out there for anyone even if you feel lost or hopeless. Recovery is possible. Reach out for help, as there are millions of resources around the country and professionals who strive to help you overcome addiction.

Dealing With Loss After a Drug Overdose

Overdose deaths involving any type of substance can wreak havoc on families, communities, relationships, and the nationwide drug crisis. What is one to do after the devastation of a loved one dying by overdose?

Although nothing can replace the human life and relationship lost, there are ways to continue on with life and grieve through the process in order to heal.

Join a support group (like GRASP or Al-Anon)

See a therapist who specializes in loss

Take time to grieve and let yourself cope with the pain

Avoid self-destructive patterns– sadly, many people in the drug scene who lost friends or family to drug overdose end up turning to drugs themselves.

Make sure to care for yourself well! Don’t neglect your needs

Stay close to your connection to the outdoors. Nature is extremely healing.

Look into resources in your local community for people who have lost loved ones to drug overdose and take part in events, shares, and fundraisers to help improve the lives of others.

There is Still Hope

Addiction can be a complicated disease which can require compassion. Sometimes there is nothing you can do except try to encourage them to get the treatment they need. Remember, addiction is a disease that is out of the person’s control to manage on their own. Sometimes it might require detaching from the situation or person because ultimately it can be difficult to witness someone destroy themselves.

Recovery is possible, so if you yourself deal with addiction, reach out for help as soon as possible. People of all walks of life enter into a successful recovery journey and learn how to live drug-free, fully thriving without risk of a drug overdose.

If you or a loved one needs help, call us at 949-617-1211.

[im-fairly-whitty]

Hi Whitty! Do you have any ideas and suggestions for @muyguapemusician's (with a tiny tiny partially edit from me) Fame AU? For example, how does Miguel and Hector get along together and what should the main conflict be and mooooooore? We will LOVE ANY addition headcanons from you guys!!!!!!

First off, the Fame!au you and @muyguapomusician have created is extremely interesting to me for a couple reasons. The main reason being that the entire AU revolves around a very dark twist in Hector’s character that I don’t think I’ve seen anywhere else: What is he really did leave his family behind for a life of fame like Imelda thought he did?

Because Hector’s main redeeming quality as a character, and indeed the whole point of the movie, is that he didn’t, I think first you have to establish why he did to find the main conflict of this AU.

But Hector would never leave his family right? That’s literally the core of who he is, his greatest strength as a person is his unfaltering and (literally) undying love and devotion to his wife and child. It’s this love that drives him to go on the road with Ernesto in the first place to provide for them, it’s what makes him try to leave Ernesto when he realizes it would be better for Imelda and Coco if he was home with them, it’s why Imelda asks “how many times must I turn you away” because he’s tried to come back to her so many times, it’s why he has increasingly desperate plans every year to try to cross the marigold bridge to return to Coco.

We know Hector I determined, he’s creative, and he would do anything for his family.

So what would have to break him so completely that he would leave them behind?

Well, let’s take a look at his weaknesses.

Hector is non-confrontational. He’s grown up his whole life under Ernesto’s wing, meaning that he’s used to being domineered over and directed by someone else. For better or for worse, you can see that reflected in his marriage to Imelda, whose fiery personality completely rules the home. He’s so used to cozying up to a more dominant friend that can be bold and forceful for him, that he unconsciously sought out the same headstrong and controlling qualities in a spouse. 

Of course Imelda and Ernesto are different, Imelda’s pride is the kind that takes care of others, while Ernesto’s only takes care of himself, but it speaks to the fact that when push comes to shove, Hector would much rather be shoved than push. Even when he confronts Ernesto at his mansion in the movie, Hector says he doesn't care about getting credit for his songs, that’s a fight he never even tried pursuing, he just wants to get home. 

We also see how easily he’s swayed by Miguel in the movie, letting Miguel convince him to travel with a living run-away living boy to find his old friend he hasn’t talked to in decades, to let Miguel play in a talent show their whole plan hinges on even after saying he’s never performed before, ect. Hector rarely pushes back on Miguel's hothead decisions, only when he realizes that Miguel has a family to return to does he try to put his foot down. 

Hector will do a whole lot to avoid fighting or pushing or even being direct, instead opting to find a way to sneak around his problems and obstacles to achieve his goals. 

Hector’s emotional, but he also avoids confronting his problems (otherwise he would have picked up on the red flags Ernesto had been dropping long before he was poisoned,) which leads me to beleive that Hector’s downfall would have been triggered by his inability to say no to something that would start to paralyze his driving ability to feel love and concern for his family.

In the year 1920, Mexico established a law that more tightly controlled the import and distribution of drugs such as Cocaine, Opiates and Marujana because the drug problem in the country had reached a level of national concern. But we all know that a heavy law against a substance often has the unfortunate side effect of creating a thriving market for that very substance.

It’s terrible, it’s awful, but opium drugs are also the perfect way for Hector’s personality and priorities to have changed to fit the Fame!AU. 

While on tour Ernesto realizes he’s going to have to do something drastic to keep Hector from returning home, but he doesn’t want to kill Hector. That would be stupid, he’d never be able to get anymore songs from his musico partner, and besides, Hector’s his hermano. Ernesto could never kill him. 

But Ernesto is still getting desperate, so he seeks out a poison anyway. But this time it’s not arsenic, this time it’s opium. A poison of the mind instead of instant death.

Hector’s done a lot of stupid things over his life long friendship with Ernesto, a lot of hilarious, fun, risk-taking things that boys always get up to. So one night when Ernesto brings a small pouch of powder heroin back to their inn room, and won’t leave him alone until he’s tried just a little, it starts a drastic downward spiral that Hector’s never able to climb back out of.

Are you cringing yet? Good. Because that’s the awful reality of drugs.

A few symptoms of opiate use? Boredom, feeling detached from self, loss of interest or pleasure in activities, or nervousness.

Hector’s still performing, he’s still writing songs, but that underlying sense of needing to see his family again is drowned out by the omnipresent detached feeling that looms over him. His need to see Imelda is smothered in his even greater anxiety that he can’t quite pin down, but seems to ease when he sticks close to Ernesto (who of course makes sure to get Hector his next fix whenever he needs it.) 

Memories of Coco and Imelda, hopes of seeing them in the near future, those are all thoughts that are lost as Hector’s brain chemistry alters around his growing dependence on his drug addiction. Addicts dont think about the past and they don’t think to the future, they think about the now. Because they need another hit now.

Hector doesn’t realize how much he’s changed of course, addicts rarely do, but Ernesto keeps him on a tight leash and continues to feed his partner anxious lies about how he’s got to keep performing if he’s going to provide for his family, that it hurts but but it’ll hurt more if he leaves, that the only smart thing to do for Imelda and Coco’s sake is to always, always be performing with him as they continue to claw thier way to sucess (and of course they suceed with Hector’s brilliance.) And Hector never, never sees through these lies on his own all those years because he no longer has the mental capacity to see through the hazy anxiety that now rules his life.

He always wanted to go home of course, but he just…he just was never really able to…right?

Ernesto of course never touches the stuff. Oh no. That’s just for Hector.

Hector of course writes his daughter whenever he can, he still loves her, but now the looming detachment of the drugs that have riddled his mind creates a kind of untouchable barrier between them that he just can’t manage to get over. He keeps meaning to visit, keeps meaning to come be his daughter’s father, but things are just always so busy, and he can never really manage to think ahead far enough to make it happen. Especially since Imelda has stopped speaking to him after being truly abandoned all these years, only accepting the rich paychecks he continues to send home for Coco’s sake.

And Hector and Ernesto make it big, they become huge stars on the silver screen together, a wildly successful duo. But of course Hector dies before Ernesto when his opiate strung out body gives up on him one night, unable to take it anymore.

Ernesto suffers a tragic stage accident shortly after, and the two performers are reunited in the land of the dead, much to the delight of the thousands of fans on the other side who eagerly put them up in a mansion of their own, excited to have their two favorite performers back together.

And so it begins again. The caged life that Hector was trapped into in life is also the same numbing cycle he now performs in death. It’s all he knows at this point anyway. 

And so is the life and death of an addict.

That’s all the time I have left this morning to expound on this, but I hope it makes you as ill inside as it makes me. Even the very best of people can be brought to the lowest of lows doing things they’ve never do otherwise when their brain chemistry is shoved around. It’s a grim AU, but drugs are grim stuff. You can’t mess around with them lightly, and Ernesto knew that all too well. 

Does this whole thing reek with regret and broken promises and half-finished plans?

Oh, you bet it does.

And that’s why the Fame!AU is such a captivatingly dark one. 

[Side note: this post also comes with the experience of my having worked professionally with addicts, it’s really not a pretty sight. Drugs can kill a person you love much more effectively than arsenic.]

[gffa]

I genuinely love the mythology of Star Wars and some of the core foundations of it, especially when George Lucas talks about the nature of the dark side and the light side of the Force, the duality and choice that is within all of us.  But one of my other favorite talks he gave is the duality of pleasure vs joy:      “Happiness is pleasure and happiness is joy. It can be either one, you add them up and it can be the uber category of happiness.      “Pleasure is short lived. It lasts an hour, it lasts a minute, it lasts a month. It peaks and then it goes down–it peaks very high, but the next time you want to get that same peak you have to do it twice as much. It’s like drugs, you have to keep doing it because it insulates itself. No matter what it is, whether you’re shopping or you’re engaged in any other kind of pleasure. It all has the same quality about it.      “On the other hand is joy and joy is the thing that doesn’t go as high as pleasure, in terms of your emotional reaction. But it stays with you. Joy is something you can recall, pleasure you can’t.  So the secret is that, even though it’s not as intense as pleasure, the joy will last you a lot longer.      “People who get the pleasure they keep saying, ‘Well, if I can just get richer and get more cars–!’ You’ll never relive the moment you got your first car, that’s it, that’s the highest peak. Yes, you could get three Ferraris and a new gulf stream jet and maybe you’ll get close. But you have to keep going and eventually you’ll run out.  You just can’t do it, it doesn’t work.      “If you’re trying to sustain that level of peak pleasure, you’re doomed. It’s a very American idea, but it just can’t happen. You just let it go. Peak.  Break. Pleasure is fun it’s great, but you can’t keep it going forever.      “Just accept the fact that it’s here and it’s gone, and maybe again it’ll come back and you’ll get to do it again. Joy lasts forever. Pleasure is purely self-centered. It’s all about your pleasure, it’s about you. It’s a selfish self-centered emotion, that’s created by self-centered motive of greed.      “Joy is compassion, joy is giving yourself to somebody else or something else. And it’s the kind of thing that is in it’s subtlty and lowness more powerful than pleasure.  If you get hung up on pleasure you’re doomed. If you pursue joy you will find everlasting happiness.”  --George Lucas You can see how this influences the foundations of the light side and the dark side, which at its core is about selflessness vs selfishness, about compassion vs greed, in that it’s about the pursuit of joy rather than pleasure.  It’s not that you can never experience pleasure, but you can’t get hung up on it, because pleasure is not sustainable long-term, only joy is. And that always strikes me whenever I pick up The Hijacking of the American Mind by Robert Lustig, MD, MSL a book about how corporations have specifically targeted our joy centers to make us so focused on reward--at the expense of content--through various means, which includes this as one of the foundations you need to understand: “At this point it’s essential to define and clarify what I mean by these two words—pleasure and happiness—which can mean different things to different people. “Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary defines “pleasure” as “enjoyment or satisfaction derived from what is to one’s liking”; or “gratification”; or “reward.” While “pleasure” has a multitude of synonyms, it is this phenomenon of reward that we will explore, as scientists have elaborated a specific “reward pathway” in the brain, and we now understand the neuroscience of its regulation. Conversely, “happiness” is defined as “the quality or state of being happy”; or “joy”; or “contentment.” While there are many synonyms for “happiness,” it is the phenomenon that Aristotle originally referred to as eudemonia, or the internal experience of contentment, that we will parse in this book. Contentment is the lowest baseline level of happiness, the state in which it’s not necessary to seek more. In the movie Lovers and Other Strangers (1970), middle-aged married couple Beatrice Arthur and Richard Castellano were asked the question “Are you happy?”—to which they responded, “Happy? Who’s happy? We’re content.” Scientists now understand that there is a specific “contentment pathway” that is completely separate from the pleasure or reward pathway in the brain and under completely different regulation. Pleasure (reward) is the emotional state where your brain says, This feels good—I want more, while happiness (contentment) is the emotional state where your brain says, This feels good—I don’t want or need any more. “Reward and contentment are both positive emotions, highly valued by humans, and both reasons for initiative and personal betterment. It’s hard to be happy if you derive no pleasure for your efforts—but this is exactly what is seen in the various forms of addiction. Conversely, if you are perennially discontent, as is so often seen in patients with clinical depression, you may lose the impetus to better your social position in life, and it’s virtually impossible to derive reward for your efforts. Reward and contentment rely on the presence of the other. Nonetheless, they are decidedly different phenomena. Yet both have been slowly and mysteriously vanishing from our global ethos as the prevalence of addiction and depression continues to climb. “Drumroll . . . without further ado, behold the seven differences between reward and contentment:

Reward is short-lived (about an hour, like a good meal). Get it, experience it, and get over it. Why do you think you can’t remember what you ate for dinner yesterday? Conversely, contentment lasts much longer (weeks to months to years). It’s what happens when you have a working marriage or watch your teenager graduate from high school. And if you experience contentment from a sense of achievement or purpose, the chances are that you will feel it for a long time to come, perhaps even the rest of your life.

Reward is visceral in terms of excitement (e.g., a casino, a football game, or a strip club). It activates the body’s fight-or-flight system, which causes blood pressure and heart rate to go up. Conversely, contentment is ethereal and calming (e.g., listening to soothing music or watching the waves of the ocean). It makes your heart rate slow and your blood pressure decline.

Reward can be achieved with different substances (e.g., heroin, nicotine, cocaine, caffeine, alcohol, and of course sugar). Each stimulates the reward center of the brain. Some are legal, some are not. Conversely, contentment is not achievable with substance use. Rather, contentment is usually achieved with deeds (like graduating from college or having a child who can navigate his or her own path in life).

Reward occurs with the process of taking (like from a casino). Gambling is definitely a high: when you win, it is fundamentally rewarding, both viscerally and economically. But go back to the same table the next day. Maybe you’ll feel a jolt of excitement to try again. But there’s no glow, no lasting feeling from the night before. Or go buy a nice dress at Macy’s. Then try it on again a month later. Does it generate the same enthusiasm? Conversely, contentment is often generated through giving (like giving money to a charity, or giving your time to your child, or devoting time and energy to a worthwhile project).

Reward is yours and yours alone. Your sense of reward does not immediately impact anyone else. Conversely, your contentment, or lack of it, often impacts other people directly and can impact society at large. Those who are extremely unhappy (the Columbine shooters) can take their unhappiness out on others. It should be said at this point that pleasure and happiness are by no means mutually exclusive. A dinner at the Bay Area Michelin three-star restaurant the French Laundry can likely generate simultaneous pleasure for you from the stellar food and wine but can also generate contentment from the shared experience with spouse, family, or friends, and then possibly a bit of unhappiness when the bill arrives.

Reward when unchecked can lead us into misery, like addiction. Too much substance use (food, drugs, nicotine, alcohol) or compulsive behaviors (gambling, shopping, surfing the internet, sex) will overload the reward pathway and lead not just to dejection, destitution, and disease but not uncommonly death as well. Conversely, walking in the woods or playing with your grandchildren or pets (as long as you don’t have to clean up after them) could bring contentment and keep you from being miserable in the first place.

Last and most important, reward is driven by dopamine, and contentment by serotonin. Each is a neurotransmitter—a biochemical manufactured in the brain that drives feelings and emotions—but the two couldn’t be more different. Although dopamine and serotonin drive separate brain processes, it is where they overlap and how they influence each other that generates the action in this story. Two separate chemicals, two separate brain pathways, two separate regulatory schemes, and two separate physiological and psychological outcomes. How and where these two chemicals work, and how they work either in concert or in opposition to each other, is the holy grail in the ultimate quest for both pleasure and happiness.”

                                -- Robert Lustig, MD, MSL This is further reflected in what Dave Filoni says about the dark side:      "In the end, it’s about fundamentally becoming selfless moreso than selfish.  It seems so simple, but it’s so hard to do.  And when you’re tempted by the dark side, you don’t overcome it once in life and then you’re good.  It’s a constant.  And that’s what, really, Star Wars is about and what I think George wanted people to know.  That to be a good person and to really feel better about your life and experience life fully you have to let go of everything you fear to lose. Because then you can’t be controlled.         “But when you fear, fear is the path to the dark side, it’s also the shadow of greed, because greed makes you covet things, greed makes you surround yourself with all these things that make you feel comfortable in the moment, but they don’t really make you happy.  And then, when you’re afraid of something, it makes you angry, when you get angry, you start to hate something, sometimes you don’t even know why.  When you hate, do you often know why you hate?  No, you direct it at things and then you hate it.  And it’s hard because anger can be a strength at times, but you can’t use it in such a selfish way, it can be a destroyer then.         “These are the core things of Star Wars.“  --Dave Filoni As well as one of my favorite essays from Star Wars Psychology: Dark Side of the Mind, Faith and the Force where that duality is once again touched on:      “People with an extrinsic religious orientation, that is, those who participate as a self-serving way to gain social rewards, like meeting people or obeying their parents (extrinsic motivation), express more prejudice. They hate more. Extrinsically motivated, the Sith use the power of the Force to benefit themselves and manipulate or hurt others.      To people with intrinsic religious orientation, on the other hand, spirituality itself is part of their self-concept and their religion’s teachings give them guidance in life. They value religion for its own sake (intrinsic motivation). Intrinsically religious individuals show less prejudice and less self-serving biases, at least when their religious teachings encourage tolerance and do not directly promote discrimination. Just as Jedi get in tune with the Force, those who are intrinsically spiritual come to appreciate the great variety of life and endeavor to serve others.” -- Dr. Clay Routledge Ph.D All of this paints a fascinating picture to look at the way people work and how the mythology of Star Wars works, how the dark side isn’t just the occasional moment of pleasure or moment of anger, but about the embracing of it, the refusal to turn back from those things that can destroy you.  If you try to sustain pleasure at a constant, it just won’t work, you’ll be sending yourself into this really awful cycle. That’s why the Jedi teach that the dark side is part of all of them (which is one of their foundations, because Qui-Gon says that they taught all that in the creche during Master and Apprentice) and it’s to be guarded against, that’s why they teach that you don’t suppress your emotions, you control them before they control you, that’s why it’s so easy to find moments of them being angry (Obi-Wan during the fight with Maul, when Anakin nearly shirks his duty at the end of AOTC, on Mustafar, when Maul kills Satine, when Yoda confronts Sidious he’s clearly angry as well, when Mace fights Sidious he’s going through a riot of feelings, his ENTIRE COMIC, Jedi of the Republic, is about him coming to terms with his anger and controlling it before it controls him, even Anakin’s constant anger issues never get a “you’re not allowed to feel that”, but a “you need to get a grip” when it starts becoming dangerous) because those things can lead to the dark side, but it’s never been that you’re supposed to be inhuman.  You just gotta watch it and find balance within yourself.  Even Yoda specifically says it himself, it’s a lifelong challenge not to bend fear into anger. These dualities within ourselves and how we discipline ourselves against those things that, should we embrace them, are at the core of Star Wars and this is why they can be so incredibly meaningful.

[daisy71109]

Mandatory Minimums

This was a paper I wrote about mandatory minimum sentencing laws in the United States and the impact they have had for a class final. It is written in APA format, which is why there are parentheses with sources at the end of some sentences. there is also a list of resources that I used at the bottom. Yes, it is long, it was ~6.5 pages long w/ a double-spaced 12 pt. Times New Roman font.

Laws exist to keep people from doing whatever they wish to keep everyone living in society safe and happy, and people have been arrested for breaking those laws since they were created around the 22nd century BC. Although the nature of some of those laws has changed, many of them still stay the same–don’t murder, don’t assault people, don’t steal, just to name a few. However, the punishments for such crimes look much different from what we see today. While some places here in the United States still have the death penalty, many states have abolished it–largely because many see it to be a cruel and unusual punishment, something prohibited by the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution–and mostly it is only carried out if the person has committed murder or treason, or something of a nature similar to those, which differs greatly from long ago (aclu.org). In many ancient cultures, people who committed theft and were caught could face a public beating, or even death, while today they would be sentenced to time in jail or prison. 

Jails and prisons are a way to keep criminals who have been convicted of a crime off the streets. It houses every type of criminal, some violent–like people who have committed murder, assault, or rape–and some not so violent–people who have committed theft or are found to be in possession of drugs. However, the United States has a problem. The United States holds about 4.2% of the world’s population, but it also holds at least 20% of the world’s prisoners. There are around 2.3 million inmates being housed in around 7,147 state and federal prisons, jails, correctional facilities, detention facilities, and many other facilities like those across the United States and its territories (Sawyer and Wagner, 2020). According to the U.S. Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics, in 1979, there were 313,731 inmates across state and federal prisons in the United States, a number that increased by over 15,000 by 1980, following an upward trend in the number of inmates across the country (Kalish, 1981). By 1985, the number of sentenced prisoners was 481,616 (Minor-Harper, 1986), and by 1996, that number had skyrocketed to over 1.1 million–1,138,984 to be exact, according to Alfred Blumstein and Allen J. Beck’s Population Growth in U.S. Prisons, 1980-1996 (Blumstein and Beck, 1999). That number continued to increase, reaching around 2.3 million in 2020. The large increase in inmates was caused by a few policies implemented during the mid-to-late twentieth century–specifically around the 1970s and 1980s–that have continued to this day. Throughout the latter decades of the twentieth century, the United States heavily focused on the war on drugs, which eventually leads President Reagan to sign the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, which appropriated $1.7 billion to fight the drug war (NPR, 2007). However, that was not the only thing that the bill did. It also implemented mandatory minimums for drug-related offenses.

The Criminal Justice Policy Foundation states that “Mandatory minimum sentencing laws force a judge to hand down a minimum prison sentence based on the charges a prosecutor brings against a defendant which result in a conviction -- usually a guilty plea” (CJPF.org, paragraph 1). There are mandatory minimum sentences for a variety of different crimes–sex offenses, identity theft, illegal ownership or use of a firearm, and drug trafficking or possession. The minimum sentence given to someone found guilty for drug trafficking depends on what type of drug they had, how much of it they had, and whether they had been convicted of any prior drug felonies. In theory, giving different punishments for different situations makes sense, but in reality, the mandatory minimum policy in place has created a system that has allowed for thousands of people, especially people of color, to be locked away in prisons for years, and in some cases, for life.

Of the 2.3 million people currently incarcerated in the United States, around 450,000 of them are there because of drug-related charges (prisonpolicy.org). About 19.5% of people incarcerated in the United States are there because of drug-related charges, and that number will not be going down anytime soon unless something is done about it. Police across the United States make over 1 million drug possession arrests a year, many of which lead to prison sentences. And of course, because of the mandatory minimums, people of color, who disproportionately tend to be in the lower social classes, are largely the group who ends up going to prison for these drug-related crimes. Crack-cocaine and powder-cocaine are relatively similar, but with a few key differences. Powder cocaine was seen as a status symbol in the 1980s–it was seen as the fancy drug, the drug that rich people used–but crack cocaine was seen much differently–it was, and still is cheaper, and as a result, was used more by the lower classes. Because of this differing view, the mandatory minimum sentences differ, disproportionately affecting lower-income people.

For powder cocaine, you need 500 grams in order to get the mandatory minimum sentence of five years–unless you have previously been convicted of a drug felony, in which case the minimum is ten years. However, for crack cocaine, only 28 grams is needed for a person to get the mandatory minimum. And those are only the minimum sentences. People with no prior drug felonies who have the five-year minimum sentence also have a maximum sentence of 40 years, a number that increases to life imprisonment if someone has been convicted of a prior drug felony (United States Sentencing Commission, 2017). And as was mentioned previously, crack tends to be used by people of lower socioeconomic status–who are disproportionately people of color–because it’s cheaper, which leads to more and more people of color ending up in prisons with sentences of at least five-to-ten years. And while the mandatory minimum sentencing laws being discussed here are federal, states weren’t far behind in adopting their own versions. Mandatory minimum sentences, along with countless other policies and biases across the country, perpetuate a cycle of racist ideology that has lasted for hundreds of years. 

Another major issue with these mandatory minimum sentencing laws is that they took the sentencing power away from the judges–who are arguably the most neutral party in the courtroom–and given it to prosecutors. The Criminal Justice Policy Foundation states:

“The justice system has been distorted by removing from judges the power to decide the proper sentence in their cases. The sentencing process now involves the rote consideration of a matrix of impersonal data dominated by often irrelevant drug quantities and other circumstances that can be shaped by the prosecutor's charging choices. The elimination of judicial discretion in sentencing has allowed prosecutors to acquire excessive power to impose sentences.”

The problem is, overwhelmingly, most of the elected prosecutors in the United States are white and male (Reflective Democracy Campaign, 2015 & 2019). And most isn’t just a slight majority here–as of 2019, 95% of elected prosecutors are white and 73% are male. And because the United States has a tendency to be racist–shown by these mandatory minimums, no matter how much people like to deny that they are racist–these prosecutors are going to be more likely to ask for harsher sentences, are going to attempt to place more charges onto the defendant, and get them sent to prison for longer. With these mandatory minimums, we focused more on sending people to prison, especially people of color, instead of rehabilitation–getting people who are addicted to these drugs off of them so they can hopefully go on and have a more successful life. 

When mandatory minimums were first implemented, the United States was amid the war on drugs and was in an era where the stance of being tough on crime was normal. However, as previously mentioned, this war on drugs had heavy racist undertones, something confirmed in 1994 by former President Nixon’s counsel and assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs John Ehrlichman when he said:

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” (eji.org, 2016)

However, just because something is broken, and has been broken for a long time, doesn’t mean that it cannot be fixed.

For starters, there is H. R.7194, also known as the Mandatory Minimum Reform Act of 2020, which was introduced to the House of Representatives by Representative Maxine Waters of California's 43rd congressional district on June 11, 2020 (congress.gov). In the bill's text, there is a sentence reading, “To eliminate mandatory minimum sentences for all drug offenses,” and also included is a list of amendments to a variety of sections of the Controlled Substances Act. Representative Waters isn’t the only one calling for the reform, or outright elimination of mandatory minimums. The American Civil Liberties Union, the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation, among many other groups are all in favor of reforming or eliminating mandatory minimum sentences. Alongside that, there have been some calls to release the people who were convicted of nonviolent drug offenses back into society, due to people knowing the reason behind the existence of the mandatory minimum, the fact that some drugs–marijuana in particular–are no longer being villainized like they used to, and that more people are understanding addiction and realize that sending people to prison doesn’t have the effect of stopping drug use people thought it did. 

However, just doing one, and not the other fails to completely solve the problem. If you release non-violent drug offenders but keep the mandatory minimums, the cycle is just going to continue, and hundreds of thousands of people, especially people of color, are going to be put back into prisons due to low-level drug offenses. If you get rid of the mandatory minimums but don’t release non-violent drug offenders, you still have hundreds of thousands of people who are serving potentially life sentences for just possessing drugs. Focusing on rehabilitation instead of sending people to prison would help to combat the system that has been in place for decades–a system that criminalizes people for needing help but not being able to get it. Not only would this help to reverse some of the damage done by racist policies that were put in place under the guise of being tough on crime, and it would also alleviate some of the tax burden on Americans or would allow for more money to be spent on social programs like drug rehabilitation programs. As of 2017, the United States allocated over $7 billion dollars to the federal prison budget, which exceeds the $5.5 billion allocated to care for all the homeless people in the United States (cjpf.org).

Another option–although it has a much lesser impact–is just to reform the mandatory minimum laws and not release anyone who has been previously convicted of a non-violent drug crime. Reforming the mandatory minimum laws would look more like changing the amount of a drug that is required to reach the mandatory minimum threshold or reducing the minimum sentence instead of just completely getting rid of them. The problem is, you would still have hundreds of thousands of people in prison for nonviolent drug offenses, and you would still allow a system to exist that disproportionately negatively affects people of color.

Overall, mandatory minimum sentencing laws negatively impact poorer people and people of color the most, causing hundreds of thousands of them to be sent to prison for years for what is, for many, just a nonviolent drug offense. People are being separated from their families and sent to prison, some for life, over policies that were created under the guise of being tough on crime, but were in actuality just inherently racist and playing off of the fears of white Americans, something that has been admitted by several people who worked in various presidential administrations or campaigns over the years. These laws need to be repealed, and the people who were convicted of nonviolent drug offenses need to be released in order for the United States to move forward and atone for its racist past. Without repealing the laws and releasing those people, we are allowing for a racist system that has profited off of people of color to stand and continue.

References

Blumstein, A., & Beck, A. J. (1999). Population Growth in U. S. Prisons, 1980-1996. Crime and Justice, 26, 17–61. https://doi.org/10.1086/449294

Bureau of Justice Statistics , & Kalish, C. B., Prisoners in 1980 (1981). Washington, D.C.; U.S. Dept. of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Bureau of Justice Statistics, & Minor-Harper, S., State and Federal prisoners, 1925-85 (1986). Washington D.C.; U.S. Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics .

The Case Against the Death Penalty. American Civil Liberties Union. (n.d.). https://www.aclu.org/other/case-against-death-penalty.

Covington, J. (1997). The Social Construction Of the Minority Drug Problem. Social Justice, 24(4 (70)), 117-147. Retrieved April 26, 2021, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/29767045

House Judiciary and House Energy and Commerce, & Waters, M. [Bill], Mandatory Minimum Reform Act of 2020 (2020). Washington D.C.

Justice For All: Who Prosecutes in America? Reflective Democracy Campaign. (2015, July). https://wholeads.us/research/justice-for-all-report-elected-prosecutors/.

Legal Information Institute. (n.d.). Eighth Amendment. Legal Information Institute. https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/eighth_amendment.

Mandatory Minimums and Sentencing Reform. CJPF.ORG. (n.d.). https://www.cjpf.org/mandatory-minimums.

Netflix. (2016). 13Th. https://www.netflix.com/watch/80091741?tctx=0%2C1%2C%2C%2C%2C. (I highly recommend watching this on Netflix, it is very good)

Nixon Adviser Admits War on Drugs Was Designed to Criminalize Black People. Equal Justice Initiative. (2021, March 19). https://eji.org/news/nixon-war-on-drugs-designed-to-criminalize-black-people/.

NPR. (2007, April 2). Timeline: America's War on Drugs. NPR. https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9252490.

Sawyer, W., & Wagner, P. (2020, March 24). Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2020. Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2020 | Prison Policy Initiative. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2020.html.

Tipping the Scales: Challengers Take on the Old Boys Club of Elected Prosecutors. Reflective Democracy Campaign. (2019, October). https://wholeads.us/research/tipping-the-scales-elected-prosecutors/.

United States Sentencing Commission, Mandatory minimum penalties for drug offenses in the federal criminal justice system9–64 (2017). Washington D.C.

Wagner, P., & Bertram, W. (2020, January 16). "What percent of the U.S. is incarcerated?" (And other ways to measure mass incarceration). Prison Policy Initiative. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/01/16/percent-incarcerated/. 

[jswdmb1]

Shine

“Let 'em get high Let 'em get stoned Everything will be alright if you let it go”

- Mondo Cozmo

John Boehner wants to you smoke dope.  Think about that.  This is a man who was a very conservative republican, and not just any republican. He was speaker of the house.  Not 30 years ago but less than 5.  The same guy who was “unalterably opposed” to marijuana legalization in 2015 wants you to be able to buy your weed with the same ease and legality as a six pack of beer.  Oh, and he’ll take your money while you are at it as a board member of Acreage Holdings, a company that cultivates, processes and dispenses cannabis in 11 states.  I mean, why give that money to the kid at the used record store when there are so many out-of-work former speakers of the house out on the market (don’t worry, Paul Ryan, there is plenty wacky tabacky for you to go out and sell too).  

Now, this may sound like I’m picking on old John, but I’m not.  There are way better things to pick on him about and besides, isn’t it a bit quaint to pick on a guy like that compared to what we have now?  In any event, I’m just using him as an example of how the tide of bong water has turned on this subject.  More and more folks realize that maybe there is a problem with criminalizing a relatively safe substance (compared to other drugs including alcohol) that may have some medicinal benefits.  Maybe things could be a bit better for someone with chronic pain, glaucoma, or just had a bad day if the stuff could be easily and safely purchased.   In very simple terms, it makes a lot of sense, but like everything, it is way more complicated than that.

The first problem is that marijuana is listed as a schedule I drug by the federal government.  Without getting too technical, that means it has no medicinal value and is not acceptable to be possessed for recreational use under any circumstances.  Drugs like heroin and cocaine are on this list along with many others (if you need a real education on this just watch a Cheech and Chong marathon).  The problem is that many drugs that have questionable value or are far more abused are not on the list.  As a matter of fact, your doctors, insurance companies, and anyone who is trying to make a buck off the drug wants you to have these in quite large quantities at very affordable prices.  The drug that first comes to mind for me is Ativan.  Ativan is a drug commonly prescribed for anxiety, sleep, and basically to calm you down.  It’s Valium for the millennial age.  It works like a charm but is quickly habit forming.  It is also incredibly dangerous when mixed with alcohol.  If you want to party like a rock star (and maybe die like one) wash your Ativan down with some bourbon and let the fun begin (none of which you’ll remember, trust me).

I know all of this because I’ve had my share of substances.  Please do not take this next paragraph as any sort of bragging.  For starters, I know people who have done WAY more than me.  Anyone who knows me knows that and that I always managed to stay off the edge when it came to too much (very subjective there, but let’s go with it).  Also, it really is nothing to brag about. Certainly not when the use turns into abuse and your jobs, health and relationships are at risk.  That being said, I don’t see anything wrong with sharing the experiences of using drugs and I think that puts my eventual conclusion to this post in context.  So, my story in a few sentences is that I drank for about 30 years, smoked pot for about half that time, and supplemented with a host of prescription medications throughout.  Some were relatively harmless like the range of antidepressants I have been on (though one I took in the 90’s turned out to possibly cause a fatal liver problem, but hey what the hell we all make mistakes!).  Others, like Ativan were addictive and more problematic when combined with other drugs. By the time I got sober, I had mostly phased out pot, but was hitting alcohol and prescription drugs pretty hard.  I haven’t had anything stronger than a cup of coffee or non-alcholoic beer in just over six months.

With that background, my position on the legalization of marijuana is surprising.  I’ll start with the statement that legal or not, everyone should get high at least once in their lives.  When done right, and in the proper setting, it puts you into a state of mind that is truly liberating.  It is no accident that so many creative endeavors have been fueled by the stuff. I also see how it could benefit in a number of ways as a medicinal agent.  But, just because pot may be a great experience and possibly even helpful, should it be legal?  Should it be available next to the Jack Daniels and the pharmacy where they are dishing out the Ativan?  My question to John Boehner and anyone else who has pivoted to supporting legalization is why now?  What has changed that makes it the right time?  Why marijuana and not cocaine?  Why not go the other way and explore prohibition of alcohol again?  

My point is that whether it is legal or not, it doesn’t fundamentally change the morality of doing drugs.  I have never understood why one drug is fine (we can drink wine at church!) and others are explicitly immoral (satan wants you to smoke dope!)  I find nothing immoral about using any drug any more than I would find it immoral to sit and eat a pound of bacon (done it – separate post). It may not be a good decision, especially when done in a way that harms yourself and others, but we make lots of bad choices that aren’t regulated and I don’t see why marijuana is singled out along with a few other drugs.  So, if there is nothing “wrong” with smoking pot, why not make it legal?  Heck, why not make everything legal?  A true libertarian (which I am not) would say hell yes it should all be legal.  Someone with an open mind, but with a logical fear that wide open may be too much, may say how about we think about it a little more.  I am in that camp.  I just don’t get the rush to legalize at this point.  If you want to smoke dope, you can do it just about anywhere.  It’s already been decriminalized or outright legalized in terms of small recreational use in many parts of the country.  Go to one of those places, find a dealer (or get yourself a medical card), and have a blast.  Who gives a shit if the federal government cares or not.  They certainly are looking the other way when you accumulate your 72 assault rifles and stash of 10,000 rounds of ammunition (is that a lot? I have a no idea but I wanted to sound very dramatic so I hope it is). I really don’t think it matters if you smoke a joint around the campfire this summer.

I guess the bottom line for me is that we have bigger fish to fry and I am pretty indifferent at this point if it is ever legal or not.  Right now, I am not interested in the stuff at all, but that may change as I explore my mental and physical health in this state I’m in of abstinence. If and when that happens, I’ll have my next dance with Mary Jane with or without Uncle Sam on my side.  If he’s with me though, I certainly will pass the joint along.  The poor boy sure seems like he needs it after the year we’ve had.  And if any of you are around, you can join us.  Even if it’s your first time, you are welcome. Just remember to inhale.

Cheers,

Jim

[dxmedstudent]

Hey there! I'm a student on pneumology rotation (is this how it's said in English? Maybe lung diseases ward? Anyway) and I'm shocked to see that so many smokers come to get visited and wants release from their symptoms but refuse to stop smoking... today I had a pt who smoked 40 cig/day and had a mixture of emphysema and severe fibrosis, with a doubt of cancer and still refused to even consider stopping smoking. How do you deal with patients like this?

Hello! Medicine’s weird because it’s never just about medicine. It’s sort of a window into the human condition. We learn a lot about human nature through our patients, and our rotations as students are usually where we first see that things are never straightforward. People frequently come in with things that you could, if you wished to, describe as ‘self inflicted’. Personally, I think the term is meaningless, because much of what we deal with in medicine is a result of personal decisions, and because we have a duty of care to everyone, not just the people leading exemplary lives. I didn’t promise to only care for people who do everything right, I vowed to do my best for everyone. Distributive justice is central, here; whilst we might deny a treatment to someone whose body won’t withstand it, or who we clinically feel won’t benefit from it, we do not deny treatments from people as a punishment for their personal choices. But you’ll notice that people will come in, suffer from symptoms that result from something like drinking excessively or smoking, or poorly controlled diabetes, and you’ll do your best to control their symptoms. But sometimes people still lapse. Mistakes happen, but not all lapses are mistakes; sometimes people are genuinely struggling to quit. Sometimes people see little reason to. Yes, people lapse, and their condition gets worse, and sometimes it feels like people aren’t listening to medical advice and don’t want to help themselves. But that’s never entirely true. They aren’t doing it to spite medical professionals or their families or themselves. Usually people know that medically it’s the best decision, but that’s not the only thing going on in their lives. Sometimes smoking or drinking, or biscuits etc is the one slightly nice-feeling thing in their entire life. People will often tell you that they have very little to look forward to in life, and lots of problems, and just the stress of cutting out the one thing that brings them any enjoyment; lots of people would struggle with that.  Which is why medicine is really a job for people watchers, people who want to understand humanity. When you find out about people’s lives and the problems they face, it all starts to make much more sense. And when you treat them as people, not as failed addicts, and not as failing livers or lungs, then they open up to you and you see how much suffering goes on all around us. You really can’t imagine the stories you’ll be told. The secrets people share with you when you make them feel safe. And just how much most people struggle with their entire lives. It teaches us to reserve judgement, because the more people you meet, the more we realise how little we know about their lives. Quitting smoking is so hard. It’s one of the hardest things to do. Addiction, in general is really hard, but some habits are easier to kick than others. Smoking is one of the difficult ones.  I have colleagues who smoke; they know how bad it is, but staying smoke-free when you’re as stressed as we are can be really hard. It’s not something we can truly understand if we’ve not been there. So I think as medics we should try to be as understanding as we can. Which isn’t easy because society sets us up to demonise things, and in medicine it would just be so much easier if people weren’t addicted to things and people behaved in predictable, understandable ways and followed doctors’ advice. But unfortunately, that’s not what humans are like, and the only thing we can do is either spend our entire working lives bitter about it, or just try to understand people as best as we can, rather than judging them. It’s not easy, I think it’s an outlook we have to actively cultivate, but it’s also much more rewarding to see things through this kind of lens. The thing I have trouble with is the concept of social smoking. Like, you deliberately, from a position of not being addicted at all, choose to smoke a small amount of a highly addictive and harmful substance with friends on a fairly regular basis but insist you ‘aren’t addicted’? And this is a common practice amongst people who otherwise don’t drink particularly excessively or ‘do drugs’? Nicotine is more addictive than alcohol and most illegal drugs, and third only to heroin and cocaine in terms of addictiveness when you compare it to most drugs. I fear that  a lot of people who ‘smoke socially’ are in complete denial about their relationship to nicotine. Because there’s a stigma to admitting you’re addicted to something, and claiming that you have control of it and are choosing when to use it is more socially and personally acceptable. It’s just such an incredibly risky move to make, and as a healthcare professional, it goes almost without saying that if you’re not already smoking, I would not recommend starting to, in any way shape or form. Because I know how difficult smoking is (and I grew up with a now ex-smoker parent), and I have friends who smoke from a young age, and that’s pretty understandable because they started through things like peer pressure when they were practically children, and it’s so, so hard to stop. And that makes sense; most people take up smoking or drugs at a young age because we’re particularly vulnerable to peer pressure then.  Because of my history, I hate smoking with a passion (there are literally no benefits, if I could magic away the tobacco industry and people’s dependence on it with a wand, I’d probably do it), but I can understand how difficult it is to stop. But I know close friends who started in their mid/late 20s because their friends were smoking socially, despite knowing very well how bad it is for their health. And I just can’t think of a single sensible reason why anyone would do that at our age. I’m still struggling to understand what causes people to do that. I guess it goes to show that people are still hard to predict or understand sometimes.The only thing that I really, really struggle with, though, is when parents who smoke don’t try to stop smoking after their asthmatic child ends up in ITU. I fully get that it’s an immensely difficult battle. But in my view, if there’s one good reason to try,  saving your child’s life is that reason. If your kid keeps on ending up in ITU with their asthma, you could potentially kill them if you keep smoking. It doesn’t matter if you ‘smoke outside the house’, the particles still get on your clothes and still end up being breathed in by your child.

[redorblue]

The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt

Boy was I hyped for this book. I read The Secret History in September (twice) and had to keep myself from making a shrine to Donna Tartt, so when I finally got my hands on The Goldfinch (which is a Pulitzer Prize winner no less) I was very, very excited. Which, as I keep forgetting, is not a good way to start a new book. So... It’s not like this book was a waste of time, and who am I to criticize a Pulitzer book anyway, but to me it’s definitely not as good as The Secret History, and at times I found it very hard to keep going.

Let’s start with what I liked though. I like how Donna Tartt writes relationships. I read an interview with her the other day where she says that she’s less interested in writing romance than other kinds of relationships. So far I’ve read two of her three novels (and at least in those two it’s very obvious that she doesn’t find romance all that interesting) and I’m very grateful to come across an author who doesn’t treat romance as the end-all-be-all. Granted, her depiction of friendship and family, and really her books in general, are rather dark and I dare say pessimistic, but still, it’s refreshing and superbly done. The main friendship here is the one between the protagonist and narrator, Theo, and his childhood friend Boris whom he meets a few weeks after his mother’s death in a terrorist attack (not committed by Islamists. Thanks, Donna). They soon become the only fixed point in each other’s lives in a solitary world of neglectful and violent fathers and absent/dead mothers. Objectively speaking, neither one is a good influence on the other: Boris is an alcoholic at the tender age of 13 and introduces Theo to a whole lot of other disreputable substances, as well as petty crime, and Theo’s self-destructive behaviour only exacerbates Boris’ tendency toward recklessness. But despite all that they form a strong friendship (with some romantic subtext here and there) based on a deep understanding of the other’s character, and morals aside, it’s really beautiful to see how far they would go for the other. I’d still say that they’re bad for each other and that their relationship is destructive at its core, but not because it’s a bad friendship - rather because their respective personal issues inadvertently make the other’s worse and also have a negative impact on their environment. Actually I think that’s true for most of Donna Tartt’s characters: They’re not really bad people (by whatever standards), and their issues don’t make them bad people either; it’s more the specific combinations in stressful situations that produce bad outcomes for them and others.

Another important relationship in The Goldfinch is the one between Theo and several parental figures: his mother (dead, which leaves him deeply scarred), Mrs Barbour who takes him in for a while after his mother’s death, his father (a relationship that haunts Theo his entire life), and Hobie, his guardian. It’s a rather tired trope to kill the protagonist’s mother in order to induce personal trauma, but I think in this case it’s very well executed and although we only meet her for a few short pages, she feels like a real, layered person instead of some sacrificial lamb meant only to create manpain. Her death, and specifically the manner of her death (the terrorist attack, during which Theo is also injured) leaves a huge hole in his heart and causes a whole bunch of mental health issues, but the reason for that is that we know first hand what a great person, and great mother, she was, and that’s what makes Theo’s pain over her death so relatable. (spoilers) His father, on the other hand, remains rather one-dimensional although he gets a lot more screen time. The only thing I know about him now is that he’s an abusive, unreliable coward, and honestly that’s enough, the less said about him the better. What’s really interesting is not him as a character, but his relationship with Theo, specifically how Theo recognizes (or thinks he recognizes) his father in his every action and urge and how it contributes to his self-loathing and carelessness about his destructive impulses.

So Theo’s biological parents are abusive and/or deceased, which is why he turns to other parent-aged people, namely Mrs. Barbour and Hobie. Especially Theo’s relationship with Mrs. Barbour becomes a bit obsessive, to the point where he mainly agrees to marry his girlfriend (Mrs. Barbour’s daughter) in order to please Mrs. Barbour, but in general they have a positive influence on Theo’s life. Theo has severe mommy/daddy issues and is very insecure toward them since subconciously he always thinks they’ll kick him out, even when he’s financially independent and an adult himself, so he always does his very best to hide his inner torment from them. Of course this is not a good thing in general, but it forces Theo to keep up appearances, to keep it together at least superficially, and I’m pretty sure it’s the only thing that keeps his drug addiction from escalating so much that it impairs his ability to function. They don’t know enough about what’s going on inside him, maybe also turned a blind eye a bit too often in an effort to see what they hoped to see and respect his privacy, but at least he didn’t end up as another body in the gutter, dead from heroin overdose, which would very likely have happened without them.

Lastly, there’s the romantic relationships, if you can call them that. The one with Kitsey (the woman he almost marries) is not really romantic; if anything, Theo’s in love with the idea of being in love with her, and the sense of normalcy that comes with it. It’s quite obvious that he doesn’t really know her, and she doesn’t really know him, and they’re both not remotely interested in changing that since it would mean letting their facades of a normal life without emotional trauma drop, and they’re both not ready for that. Not with each other anyway. They get along well enough when they’re alone although they don’t seem to share any interests, but they’re definitely not marrying for love but rather for convenience.

Theo’s relationship with Pippa, on the other hand, is the complete opposite. I dare say it’s not so much love but obsession that binds him to her, stemming from an emotional connection because of shared trauma (she was a survivor of the same terrorist attack that killed Theo’s mother and left him injured). Theo knows a lot about Pippa, they can talk to each other and they share interests - which would be perfect if in his mind she wasn’t so inextricably linked to his guilt complex about the loss of his mother, and if she reciprocated the feeling. Which thankfully she doesn’t (to that extent, at least; it leaves her enough reason to see things as they are) because she understands very well that what they both need in their lives is not another unstable person. She doesn’t cut ties with him entirely because after all they share many experiences and mean a lot ot each other, but she continually makes it clear that she doesn’t want to be with him - which doesn’t stop him from developing a more or less respectful, but very unhealthy obsession about her. However, while I don’t see anything remotely romantic or cute in this kind of relationship, I like how Donna Tartt executes it. Theo’s relationship with Pippa could very easily be turned into something that the reader is supposed to find romantic - the lonely, broken man pining for his childhood sweetheart - but it’s not. It’s shown for what it is: unhealthy, obsessive, damaging to both of them, a curse rather than a blessing. Which for me makes it all the more interesting, if painful, to observe.

So. Obviously, I liked the interactions between the characters and how they all make so much sense considering their personal backstories. What I didn’t like was mainly the length of it. For the entire 800+ pages the reader is stuck in Theo’s head, and let me tell you, it’s not pleasant in there. On the one hand, descriptions of drug abuse are simply not my thing, I don’t like spending a lot of time in the head of someone who’s constantly on alcohol, painkillers, cocaine and what have you. It’s doubly not my thing if the character in question is 13 years old. The part in Vegas dragged so much I was seriously tempted to put the book down, which goes against my every principle as a bibliophile. It got better when Theo was grown up because the problems of a twenty-something are more interesting to me than those of a teenager - but not much better. Because Theo keeps making the wrong choices (only one wrong choice, really) over and over again, and worse, he keeps whining about all the missed turns. Yes, it makes sense in terms of his character, someone who’s so cagey about personal information doesn’t just walk up to his guardian one day and tells him that he accidentally stole a 65 Mio. Dollar painting - but on the long term it’s so frustrating I kept wanting to shake some sense into him. Theo isn’t a take-charge character (even in the end it was thanks to Boris that the painting finally got back where it belonged), he’s someone who just floats along while wistfully looking at all the missed chances, but there’s only so much I can take of such an approach to life. And it’s definitely less than 800+ pages.

[ana-volunteerlove]

Adults!, I thought. Why does everything have to be so confusing? Should giving be pleasurable or painful? Giving Center makes the giving experience both easy and pleasurable! That complicated and ambivalent relationship with giving is just a sign of all the other complicated ways humans pursue pleasure. Pleasure is a central motivator in our lives; after all, if we didn't find things like food, water, and relationships rewarding we would not survive and pass our genetic material to the next generation. Furthermore, most experiences in our lives that we find transcendent-whether illicit vices or socially sanctioned ritual and social practices as diverse as exercise and meditation activate an anatomically and biochemically defined pleasure circuit in the brain. Orgasm, learning, highly caloric foods, gambling, prayer, dancing 'till you drop, and playing on the Internet: They all evoke neural signal that converge on a small group of interconnected brain areas called the "medial forebrain pleasure circuit" in which the neurotransmitter dopamine plays a crucial role. It is in these tiny clumps of neurons that human pleasure is felt. This dopamine-using pleasure circuitry can also be co-opted by some, but not all, psychoactive substances like cocaine, nicotine, heroin or alcohol. That connection to pleasure I witnessed looking at the "Give Til It Feels Good" banners made more sense as I began to examine new development in brain research that might help us all better understand what motivates charitable giving. One set of studies was conducted by William Harbaugh, a professor of economics, at the University of Oregon, and his colleagues. The goal of their study was to figure out how the brain's pleasure circuit responded to differing approaches to giving and paying taxes.One theory holds that some individuals give to charity out of altruism. They feel satisfaction from providing a public good, like assistance to the needy, and they care only about how much benefit is offered and not the process by which it occurs. This model implies that these individuals should get some pleasure even when such a transfer of wealth is mandatory, as in taxation.A second theory, called "warm glow," holds that people like making their own decision to give . They derive pleasure from the sense of agency, in much the same way that people highly prefer to roll their own dice while playing craps and pick their own lottery numbers. In this model, mandatory taxation is not expected to produce a "warm glow."A third theory proposes that some people take pleasure in charitable giving because of its enhancement of their social status . They enjoy being regarded as wealthy or generous by their peers. Of course, these theories are not mutually exclusive. Someone could be motivated by altruism and the warm glow of agency and the desire for social approval. Dr. Harbaugh and his team designed their experiment to address the first two theories, but not the third. They recruited nineteen young women from the area around Eugene, Oregon, and had them perform various economic transactions in a brain scanner. They were instructed that no one, not even the experimenters, would know their choices. (This was true: Their decisions were written directly to computer disk and machine-coded prior to analysis.) Presumably, the design of this experiment removes enhancement of social status as a motivator. Each subject received $100 in an account, which would then be allocated in various amounts to a local food bank. In some of the trials, the subjects had the option to donate, in others they had no choice-they were "taxed." In other trials, they received money with no conditions. The way the study was carried out was as follows: The subjects first were presented an amount of money on a video screen, say $15 or $30. A few seconds later, they learned the status of the trial: This sum was either a gift to them, an involuntary tax on their account, or an offer to donate to charity, which they could either accept or decline by pushing one of two buttons. The brain scanning results showed over the entire population that, just like receiving money, both taxation and charitable giving activated nearly overlapping regions of the pleasure circuit. However, on average, charitable giving produced a stronger activation of this pleasure center than did taxation. These results support both "pure altruism" and "warm glow" models as motivators of charitable giving. Of course, this doesn't mean that these same subjects are smiling as they write their checks to the IRS, which supports many programs that may be less appealing than a food bank. It also doesn't mean that everyone's brain responds precisely the same way in such conditions. About half of the subjects in the study had more pleasure center activation from receiving money than from giving it, while the other half showed the opposite results. Not surprisingly, those who got more pleasure from giving did indeed choose to give significantly more to charity than the other group. A philosophical question arises from these findings: If giving-even mandatory, anonymous giving-activates the brain's pleasure centers, does that mean that "pure altruism" doesn't really exist? In other words, if we catch a pleasure buzz from our noblest instincts, does that make them less noble? It's worth noting that motivations for prosocial behavior have been a topic of intense interest in many philosophical and religious traditions. Kant, for example, wrote that acts driven by feelings of sympathy were not truly altruistic, and were thereby undeserving of praise, because they made the actor feel good. And this is not just a chilly Northern European notion: A similar idea is found in the Buddhist concept of dana, or pure altruism, giving divorced from even internal reward, a key attribute of the enlightened Bodhisattva. Harbaugh's experiments would suggest that utterly pure altruism, giving without pleasure, is a very unnatural and difficult thing to achieve. So what does this mean in the real world, where social interactions and reputation are critical, as fund raisers seek to motivate people to give? All of our behavior is embedded in a social context, and this social context powerfully influences our feelings and decisions. Studies have shown that even mild social rejection can activate the emotional pain centers of the brain. Does this mean that positive social interactions can activate pleasure centers as well? For that, it is useful to turn to a study by Norihiro Sadato and his coworkers at the National Institute of Physiological Sciences in Japan, who sought to figure out whether the brain got more pleasure from improving one's social status and reputation - such as by generous charitable giving - or by receiving a lot of money that could be used any way a person wanted. Subjects in a brain scanner chose one card of three on a video screen and received different sums. The strongest brain activations were produced by the largest monetary payouts. When the same subjects returned for a second day of testing, they took an extensive written personality survey and recorded a short video interview. Then they entered the scanner, where they received social feedback in the form of evaluations of their personality that had supposedly been prepared by a panel of four male and four female observers. To further the deception, they were shown photos of these observers and were told that they would meet them at the end of the experiment. The feedback took the form of a photo of the subject's own face with a single-word descriptor underneath. Some of the descriptors were positive, such as "trustworthy" and "sincere," while others were rather neutral, like "patient." Of course, these descriptors were all generated by the experimenters and presented in a randomized order. The main finding was that the most positive social reward descriptors activated portions of the reward circuit-most notably the nucleus accumbens and the dorsal striatum-that substantially overlapped with those activated in the monetary reward task. This finding suggests that there is, quite literally, a common neural currency for social and monetary reward.So what can we learn from all of this brain science? Don't worry about being a Bodhisattva- it's OK to catch a pleasure buzz from an internal warm glow, a sense of agency or the approval of others- just give ‘til it feels good! Giving Center can help you do that!