How Iraq’s crystal meth epidemic is ravaging the nation
independent.co.uk
independent.co.uk
<a href="https://www.ideasbeyondborders.org">Ideas Beyond Borders.</a> They're paying Iraqis to translate things to Arabic and expand the Arabic Wikipedia. The idea is to expand the range of aspirations Arabs can cultivate and pursue.
Also, (and I say this as an Israeli): it needs to become easier for Iraqis to land student and work visas elsewhere. The worldwide clampdown in travel and migration, even before Covid it was particularly difficult for Iraqis, and so was keeping them in this pressure cooker.
There has always been cannabis users but druggies would then juice it up by mixing it with Methaqualone.
Drug abuse is a good breeding ground for religious extremism. It's not that hard to convince people that "Western influences" are bad if it means that more people become drug addicts. It's not that hard to convince someone that they should fight for God if they spent the last ten years as drug addicts.
You don't have to be an addict to attend one and it'll help you greatly understand what people are going through.
NA/AA meetings aren't meant to offer help to any one individual, rather group support to help those who want to better themselves make the right decisions, or to simply vent in-person out to others who won't judge them.
You are correct, NA and AA are primarily social clubs, and there's no harm in that. But if the point is to recover from addiction, keep looking.
no one claims attending a meeting with a few random people and talking is a "recovery program" by any stretch of imagination. they're completely different things.
In my experience that is a false claim: AA/NA proponents frequently assert that they can help you recover from addiction.
Their religion-based system has about the same probability of helping you recover from addiction as not going to AA/NA.
Not this again. We know for a fact that treatments which encourage people to be a part of AA fellowships result in a significantly higher rate of abstinence from alcohol. [1]
See Ycombinator discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22545557
This doesn’t mean AA is for everyone, but it does show that Alcoholics Anonymous is quite helpful for a significant subset of alcoholics.
[1] John Kelly, et. al. “Alcoholics Anonymous and other 12‐step programs for alcohol use disorder” Cochrane 2020 PMC7065341 (open access, no paywall: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7065341/ )
1) We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.
2) Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3) Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
4) Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5) Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6) Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7) Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8) Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9) Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10) Continued to take personal inventory, and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.
11) Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12) Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
Like, there's a few good things in there, but you can say that about most cults.
It's still "culty" in the sense that they're explicitly seeking out desperate people. If you have an evidence-based way to manage your consumption of alcohol, by all means do it. Such routes help a ton of people, and they have no need of AA.
AA is for people who "hit rock bottom" after having tried everything else. It's that mechanism that appeals to nonbelievers: you realize that you can't trust yourself and are so desperate you'll try anything because the alternatives are worse (dying, or living in agony).
That won't work for everybody, either. It probably works no better than placebo. But if that's the placebo that works for you, then you've found something.
Not everyone in AA sees it as I've just described it. AA brings out the worst in some people. Going there is a choice you should take only when you're willing to risk that. But you do at least have some control over what meeting you find. Large cities especially will have lots of different meetings, and you keep looking around until you fine one that works for you.
I do need to put in a caveat: I'm not an alcoholic and I know AA only through people who are close to me. My description is secondhand at best. But it's a view that makes sense to me: it helps who it helps, and for those for whom it doesn't, find something else. Unlike other cults, it's not demanding your money or your recruitment efforts. (That's something they're very clear on regardless of the meeting; anybody evangelizing AA to any except the absolute most desperate is doing it wrong.)
I know some people have great experiences with these orgs, but I'd also caution people about how there are sometimes people with agendas exploiting the trust and vulnerability within these groups.
Addiction is both physical and mental, unlike cancer which is purely physical, and if faith could be weaponized properly to fight it, so be it.
And anyhow, I attended a few meetings and all the discussions were all about personal life troubles due to addiction or otherwise, and people asking and offering help.
In big cities it's very hard because of the variety of religions of people attending, it becomes very awkward to even try and push any one religious talk.
Later generations of anti-depressants are less effective that the MAOIs, but MAOIs fell out use because doctors of that era tended to think newer==better, some MAOIs caused side effects when combined with fermented foods (fine cheese, etc), and patents allowed for a marketing budget for the pharmaceutical companies to promote their latest FDA-approved prescriptions to physicians.
Stimulants do their harm by shredding the mitochondria [0]. My observations are that Cocaine is a much safer stimulant than meth amphetamine.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18211048
Emotional stress is a very important driver of substance abuse. Anything that restores the mitochondria/metabolism helps with stimulant abuse. Most important is helping the person find meaning.
Taking more doesn't help your performance, it makes it worse, and you get way more side effects, especially mental side effects. These build up with time.
The main difference here is modality of use -- taking something, once per day, in controlled doses, is very very different from taking something until you feel good. With a prescription, you also have a steady supply and no need to commit crimes to keep up your supply. So the societal problems from drug abuse, like overdose, increased criminality, and breakdown of relations don't happen with prescription drugs to the same extent, even if it's the same substance. Look at when the opoid crisis became a crisis -- it was when cheap, easy opioids stopped being available.
It's almost like addicts are self-medicating and we should give them a legal, prescribed supply of medication.
> Look at when the opoid crisis became a crisis -- it was when cheap, easy opioids stopped being available.
What? In high school (20 years ago, Central PA) I knew zero people who used opiates. A few years later I knew people who made trips to Philadelphia. Now they're available everywhere. Perhaps the flow of pill scripts slowed, but fentanyl filled that gap.
Here is an interesting look at the differences between ADHD medications: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/know-your-amphetamines
The Iraq route goes Afghanistan -> Iran -> Iraq -> ...
https://cen.acs.org/policy/global-health/Afghanistans-crysta...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephedrine#Recreational_use
https://twitter.com/mansfieldintinc/status/13726706500291092...
How do you address this scourge with legalization beyond a principles based approach and one that deals with the reality on the ground?
I’m for soft drugs legalization, but when it comes to these things that just consume people I cannot see legalization as a viable approach.
So the idea behind legalization is not "it should be easier to do drugs!" but rather:
1. It's already easy to do drugs, so how can we make it safer to do drugs?
2. Precisely because of drugs' illegality, extraordinary rents are collected by some of the worst humans on earth. Can we make drugs legal and repurpose those rents for education, health, and harm reduction purposes?
Legalization doesn't mean you can buy crystal meth at the local 7-11, it just means you don't buy it from a drug lord cum human trafficker.
Ok, so I don’t get adulterated drugs, that still doesn’t do anything for the addiction.
Are we then going to actively discourage people from doing drugs? If so how? What effective form does that take?
Also consider places like the Netherlands or various states in the US where cannabis is legally available. What you see there is that other drug use shifts to cannabis which is relatively safer than alcohol or opioids. You also see declining rates of use among teenagers as it become less mysterious and dangerous but rather common and uncool.
Those who understand addiction, either first-hand or through research, understand that the root problem is not the drug/habit; the drug/habit tends to be the addict's best known way to sooth immense psychological pain. Shame drives addiction in deeper. So to actually help addicts, one needs to destigmatize the conversation, allow people to say "Hey, I'm in a bad place and I need help" with minimal fear of being judged (the addict tends to already hate their self pretty profoundly). And given how human nature works, destigmatization depends on legality.
Stopping addiction isn't about judging addicts; it's about understanding the root cause of their problem (which tends to be intense emotional trauma) and giving them empathic help to start building healthy relationships.
Also, trauma is not always a cause for addiction. Lots of people suffer trauma and don’t get addicted, conversely we also have people with little trauma who get addicted.
It isn't a 1:1 causal link--virtually nothing is. But there's very strong evidence that unprocessed trauma is one of the core drivers of addiction.
It's constructive to think of drugs and addictive behaviors as emotional crutches. You don't help people with problems walking by making crutches illegal; you do so by focusing on treating the root cause, which may include taking the crutch away in a properly supportive therapeutic environment.
I'd also point you to the experiments dubbed "Rat Park" (https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/what-does-rat-park-tea...). Addiction is ultimately a social/emotional disease; the drug/habit is the symptom.
However, sometimes there is no root cause other than “Hyacinth had me try sniffing some glue and I got hooked”.
Sure, some kids can say “no”, but many give in to peer pressure and after a few times there is no going back.
I do agree with a good therapeutic environment, but relapses are common, so it takes vigilance and follow up and so on.
In 200 years history of drug suppression literally everything has been tried.
And yet, even in a high security prison, drugs are highly available.
If it can't be done in a max-security prison, how do you think it can work for a whole society?
What method of restricting supply has not been tried. The US has literally invaded other country to try to destroy supply bases. The military as whole division, billions spent on intercepting submarines.
Absurd high cost have been put on a dealer that is captured.
What is your solution to actually restrict supply in a meaningful way?
Making drugs legal means that one can control the points and conditions of distribution. So one could require licensing, education, or even controlled application. Sure, you can take good, cheap, heroin, but you have to take it here.
Of course, the more onerous the path the get legal drugs, the more appealing illegal drugs become, so there's a safety -maximizing point somewhere along that integral.
"Of course, the more onerous the path the get legal movies, the more appealing illegal downloads become, so there's a profit-maximizing point somewhere along that integral."
We've all witnessed the war-on-piracy that the powers-that-be have been pursuing a few decades ago, and we've all seen it fail spectacularly. Similar to the drugs story, by going after the Napster-type filesharing systems, they created a much more lucrative black market where criminals made millions by being the first to crack protection schemes.
What reduced the problem to a manageable level? Apple Music/Spotify/Netflix. By making it legal to do entertainment in the confines of their own home, the harm to society at large was much reduced. And even better, because everything is legal now, production companies have much better insights into their market, and can better produce content that their users actually want.
The experiences of Portugal and The Netherlands show otherwise:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2011/07/05/ten-years-a...
https://drugpolicy.org/blog/america-take-note-three-lessons-...
yes, addiction is bad. fix the root cause of drug use instead of pretending you can fix the world with inefficient laws.
As for actively discouraging people, we are actively discouraging people from using tobacco. And it seems to be working pretty well.
I recommend watching https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8yYJ_oV6xk to challenge your assumptions on this. (Retired police captain arguing against the drug war.)
It's easier for a 15-yo to buy weed than to buy alcohol (where weed is illegal, I should add).
Here's a good read on how Portugal has handled things (to quite some success): https://time.com/longform/portugal-drug-use-decriminalizatio...
With illegality there's no hope. With legalisation there's at least a shimmer of it.
2) Those worst humans would still exist, still try to make money out of the drug business. They would undercut prices, do things that ethics otherwise hinder, etc. They will do this by, as today, move drugs outside of the system to avoid taxes, cut the stuff with other substances, etc.
I think the 2) is such a strange argument. Following the 2) argument, are "the worst humans" expected to just stop being the worst humans?
Look at cigarettes. It's legal today, but there are still scum exploiting the situation by black market selling probably dangerous tobacco that doesn't go through QA and regulatory checks etc.
I don't believe that's a thing. Look up Research Chemicals when you have a minute. They're variations of existing drugs with pretty much the same properties, but not necessarily illegal, e.g. 1P-LSD. Governments react by making them illegal at some point, but you have quite a while until they actually are. Still, we're not seeing things like 1P-LSD in every household, because, most people don't avoid LSD for legal reasons.
That's why we have all those traffickers and the mafia running super markets and bakeries, they are so good at running business that they can beat any capitalist enterprise.
And if you are simply referring to normal business, that do tax fraud, its the same problem as literally every other business. Are you against all business because people try to avoid taxes?
> are "the worst humans" expected to just stop being the worst humans
No, rather not give them a trade where being the worst nets big profits where there is opportunity for a lot of extra crime because the job is already criminal, so why does it matter.
> Look at cigarettes. It's legal today, but there are still scum exploiting the situation by black market selling probably dangerous tobacco that doesn't go through QA and regulatory checks etc.
What % of the cigarette market is that? Likely less then 0.1%. How many super rich successful black market cigarette millionaires are there?
Highly concentrated and dirty street meth is what the incentive structure of prohibition gives you. It's significantly more potent than regular amphetamine, so it's easier to transport larger quantities. It's also a lot easier to make with off the shelf materials and precursors. Amphetamine isn't really more complex to make chemically but it's harder to make it with materials you can buy from a trip to a regular hardware store. Hell there's a "one-pot" meth synthesis around that you can do in a two liter bottle in a single step if you don't mind a filthy product and a chance of blowing yourself up. There's nothing that easy for amphetamine.
Note that amphetamine is more common in Europe where prohibition is somewhat less strict. In the USA it's all meth. Regular amphetamine is rare.
So, the chemical is probably not the problem. It's also likely methamphetamine performs better for medical use cases. See: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/know-your-amphetamines
EDIT: Otherwise, though, I thoroughly agree with what you are saying here in that having access to smaller, cleaner, time-release doses would do well to curb addiction.
But of course that's not scientific. I'm not sure how many reliable studies have been done. It could be a result of the potency of street meth rather than the chemical.
The most concise counterpoint would be that addiction is not really hampered by criminalization, outside of edge cases like Singapore which is an island. Criminalization doesn't create less addicts it just creates more addicts in jail. Criminalization is also not zero sum, b/c it comes with all the issues of black markets, issues with the police who need extra power to enforce these laws.
Treatment does create less addicts, but less people will be addicted if you fix problems in society in the first place. Which are the real issue. In this example Iraq doesn't have a meth problem because meth is the problem, Iraq has a meth problem because of mass poverty.
EDIT: Also look at alcohol prohibition for what happens when you create a white market out of a black market. Lower potency products, that are safer and actually productive for society.
The article does paint a bleak picture of life in Iraq and I understand how a lot of youth can end up addicts. Taking drugs is something they can do feel better for a while and is something they actually have control over in their lives unlike the rest of the country's problems.
Morally, would it be wrong to ship in tons of anti-depressants and give them away free to make people feel better about their shitty situation?
The idea is that legalization should bring addiction resources, harm reduction, education, and cleaner drugs.
This removes the infamously dangerous "drug deals", "bad batches"/lacing, removes stigma and legal barriers that prevent addicts from recovery, and should make it easier for users to recover.
https://www.theonion.com/this-war-will-destabilize-the-entir...
"This War Will Destabilize The Entire Mideast Region And Set Off A Global Shockwave Of Anti-Americanism vs. No It Won’t"
The statistic in this article about under-25 unemployment being 36% breaks my heart. This would've been me now, at my current age, born in a different place at the same time.
In 2012 it was as low as it ever had been in 20 years. So what began in 2012? ISIS? Syrian civil war refugees? Completion of U.S. military withdrawal? (All a consequence of the U.S. intervention, to be sure, but knowing that isn't particularly useful in this case.)
I used to live in a major middle eastern country when this was going on. People were outright talking about the Crusader wars and there was a terrible sentiment against anyone with a light complexion.
https://local.theonion.com/soldier-excited-to-take-over-fath...