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Meow Meow and Estelle
- Thread starter Reni's Mum
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zuiko
Engorged Member
Moreover all the narcotics of the world are controlled by the CIA and the money power themselves. It is one of the highest margin businesses on earth. The amount of money narcotics brings to the powers that be is stupidly incalculable.
Just the comparatively low banking fees on laundering the proceeds of narcotics is in the hundreds of billions of dollars, more than the GDP of some countries. The banking industry in London and New York would suffer huge losses if narcotics suddenly became legal.
It is not surprising that this business is jealously guarded and controlled. Drugs are illegal because the profits are higher when they are illegal.
Just the comparatively low banking fees on laundering the proceeds of narcotics is in the hundreds of billions of dollars, more than the GDP of some countries. The banking industry in London and New York would suffer huge losses if narcotics suddenly became legal.
It is not surprising that this business is jealously guarded and controlled. Drugs are illegal because the profits are higher when they are illegal.
My best friend is an alcoholic and she goes to the pub, parties etc with us. We all drink, she does not because she realises that it is her disease, her alcoholic gene and her decision as to whether she partakes or not. She feels uncomfortable if we don't drink (we tried that a long time ago). She has our full support.
I hardly think that Estelle having the odd joint equates to being unsupportive of a substance abuser/addict.
Sorry, didn't get much sleep last night.
tarn_seiche
Give Us Live Action BB
Not true.
If you look at the use of Opium from 1800 to 1850 (totally legal and available all that time) - in 1800, there was already plenty of anecdotal evidence and a general knowledge that opium lead to early preventable death, although many thought it was deliberate death - especially suicide and infanticide (one infamous panacea, Mrs Windslow's American Soothing Syrup, a mixture of sugar syrup and opium, expressly recommended for the teething infants of the poor, had its creator dubbed 'the baby killer' by 1810 - although opium was a standard cure for many childhood diseases at the time, and as opium decreases appetite and takes away pain, it might also have been used to deliberately hasten or palliate the death of a supernumary infant that was going to starve or freeze to death anyway.)
Likewise, apothecaries knew the demand and addictive qualities of opium, and the resulting obsession and madness, and there were advises published at the time to help apothecaries identify mad men who ordered large doses to end their lives, from regular uses that ordered large doses to keep pace with their tolerance for the drug. Even with this confusion of causes and lack of scientific evidence, the sheer number of people dropping was convincing enough for most nineteenth century people to believe that opium was in itself a cause of deaths ( there was some scientific study, eg. Friedrich Accum, Thomas Wakeley, but medicine was not as strongly evidence based as it is now, nor chemistry as exact a science, and there was also confusion as to what was 'poisoning' and what was 'medicinal', and as much or rather more concern about the possible evils of adulterants in the opium, as its inherent harmful properties and potency, so the data is flawed.)
It is true that there were many people who took opiates as patent medicines without becoming addicted but there were many more people who were addicted to opiates in the ninteenth century. (As it is true that in this modern day, there are many cancer survivors and burns victims who have used morphine regularly for pain relief, acquired a tolerance as a consequence, experienced withdrawal as a consequence, and yet did not go on to use opiates after - although there are also heroin addicts that first acquired their habit as a burns patient or similar.)
The industrial revolution was not what started the demonisation of heroin. The expansion of opium cultivation for the use of a passive bonded working class that would spend eighty hours a week on the factory floor regardless of health or saftey, was an important factor in the rampant expansion of capatalism and its absolute power over the working class before unions were legal or Marx was published. Then, the opium of the people was opium. The first organized efforts to oppose the opium trade were by Quaker groups who were partly motivated by the effects on the health of opium users (not distinguishing medicinal from recreational- that was a feature of the next century.) but mostly campaigned for the abolition of the British government monopoly on the cultivation of opium in India, and to stop the unfair pressure on the Chinese government to force it to trade in Indian opium. So while health was an issue, the main argument was moral - the opium trade was leading to corruption in British government, and overt and covert wars, arms escalation and slavery in India and China. Even that really did not get off the ground until the 1870's, and it was not until the 1900's, when the anti-opium cause became more closely aligned with the anti-asian cause, that the first restrictions came in, along with the White Australia policy and various legislation to prevent Chinese and Indians making money off of white people.
As to its lack of addictive qualities, and lack of harm to health in a pure and legal doses, the evidence shows otherwise.
In the seventies, I can remember people talking, not always facetiously about taking 'a bex and a lie down', and old ladies, in their sixties, being in the habit of 'having a powder' with their tea. Until the 1930's, Vincents and Bex powders had been a mixture of morphine and aspirin. After, just aspirin, but opiate habits die hard. There is lots of good scientific evidence available now, that while not everybody who 'ventures into that world' becomes 'trapped in it', there is a much higher likelihood of a person who tries heroin becoming addicted to heroin, than there is of a person who tries alcohol becoming addicted to drinking, or a person who tries nicotine becoming addicted to smoking, or even of a person who tries crack becoming addicted to meth. It is an extremely addictive drug and one that can build a tolerance very rapidly. Even people who are not genetically biased to addiction are more likely to become addicted on exposure to heroin than nicotine (Although if one of your parents was a heavy drinker or an addict, it is very likely you carry genes that predispose you to becoming addicted to drugs, and are 40-60% more susceptible than a person who does not have genetic predisposition.)
As to "People who get a regular supply of clean opiate can function absolutely normally" - look at Micheal Jackson. What do you think killed him? Jackson had been taking a pure, legal, synthetic opiate (Demarol) with medics assisting and auditing his use, since he suffered burns during a Pepsi commercial in 1984. True, spending half your life underweight, depressed, constipated and living in la-la land is not as bad as having amputations due to injecting non-injectable drugs, or spending sixteen hours a day on dialysis due to Hep C, or being found in a sleazy hotel in Thailand three days after you die an excruciating death alone from injected rat-sac courtesy of your trusted drug contacts, but even with a pure supply and medical assistance, Micheal Jackson lived 30 years less than the average American man, and had worse cardiopulmonary health, and just suddenly stopped breathing, the way you do when you are under the influence of drugs that suppress the CNS -the way opiates do.
If you think pure legal opium is not a killer drug, you are kidding yourself.
That said, I do think all drugs should be legal and regulated, and addictive drugs that are known to be harmful to public health should be restricted. It seems insane to me that we sell cigarettes at petrol stations - flammable liquids and smouldering butts, not a good mix. Or that it is legal to smoke cigarettes on high fire danger days. Or that it is acceptable to put our police forces and emergency wards under so much pressure on Friday nights just so nightclub owners can make a bigger profit. We should have a floor price on alcohol and ban service of the stuff between midnight and noon.
And your argument that drugs do not free the mind, is too eloquently evident to contradict.
zuiko
Engorged Member
Opium is an ancient drug.
Well known "addicts" who lived long, fruitful, productive and creative lives exist.
Try William Halstead and Coleridge for example.
The demonisation of opium was shaped with Confessions of an English Opium Eater an autobiographical account of the experiences of using opium. Thomas de Quincey obviously profited from this account to the point he revised the book many years later embellishing it etc.
Opium has no harmful effects on a human being apart from causing constipation.
The reason it is banned is because it causes lassitude in the user preventing participation in the bullshit rituals of society. That threatens the "social fabric". That's it. Otherwise let people do what they will to themselves. What concern is it to you that someone grows a plant in their yard and consumes it themselves?
Well known "addicts" who lived long, fruitful, productive and creative lives exist.
Try William Halstead and Coleridge for example.
The demonisation of opium was shaped with Confessions of an English Opium Eater an autobiographical account of the experiences of using opium. Thomas de Quincey obviously profited from this account to the point he revised the book many years later embellishing it etc.
Opium has no harmful effects on a human being apart from causing constipation.
The reason it is banned is because it causes lassitude in the user preventing participation in the bullshit rituals of society. That threatens the "social fabric". That's it. Otherwise let people do what they will to themselves. What concern is it to you that someone grows a plant in their yard and consumes it themselves?
zuiko
Engorged Member
Honestly, water is a killer drug in that case. Drink 10 litres of distilled water in 10 minutes and see what happens.
Air is also a killer, get yourself a syringe, draw up 10 mLs and inject it into your arm.
We'll wait for your reply after trying either.
tarn_seiche
Give Us Live Action BB
Samuel Taylor Coleridge is not a great example: he was in poverty, partly due to being out of it on opium, had a disastrous marriage, again at least partly due to opium, and a life crippled by depression, anxiety, opium delusions and failed attempts to quit opium. If you have read 'Confessions' you would know that de Quincey made Coleridge a bit of a laughing stock, pointing out scandalous instances of behaviour provoked by his puny attempts to quit, and his whiny excuses for failing to, and for claiming a distinction between his addiction to opium, (which he claimed to take purely as a medicine, for a constitutional complaint) and de Quincy's, which Coleridge claimed had no constitutional source, but was started merely for pleasure, and therefore immoral.
Coleridge died of a sudden stop to his cardiopulmonary function in his early sixties. His wife and family had moved on long before and he was living with a physician who was monitoring his opiate use. He almost certainly died from chronic opiate use.
Halsted kept himself together wonderfully well, considering, and he lived a long life for an opiate addict - nearly made it to seventy. Gall stones and inflammatory disease of the bile duct are linked to chronic opiate use, though, as is the bronchopneumonia, which finally killed him.
The suppression of the central nervous system, the shallower breathing, the sudden cessation of breathing, the failure of the medulla oblongata to react to rising carbon dioxide in the blood and make the body start breathing again - that is more common than constipation, and much more likely to kill an opiate addict.
It also can kill an addict when there is an obstruction to the breathing passage - say some half-vomited alcohol or food (because of the suppressed CNS, the urge to rolf is not as strong, so the obstruction just sits there, blocking the airway, and the brain has forgotten to make the addict cough or even remember to keep breathing and there goes Bon Scott.) Another effect of this is when the addict is in a fire or a high carbon monoxide environment - as their respiratory centre can't be bothered with the bullshit ritual of monitoring their need to breathe, opiate addicts are more likely than average to fall asleep with a smouldering cigarette in the bed, and die in a house fire, even when someone else causes it.
de Quincey made money out of the Confessions, both the 1820's and 1850's editions, but he was also getting a semi-regular income as a journalist and essayist for Blackwoods and other magazines. Although he was making just enough to keep up with his habit, and not always that. It is interesting reading the confessions and the changes between the first and second editions. During that time, opium had gone from the brown paste, to laudanum, to better refined laudanum, to morphine, to better refined morphine, to heroin. No surprise that de Quincy too was impoverished and incapacitated by opium use most of his life.
He pointed out that William Wilberforce, and Bishop Porteus and other members of the Society for Suppression of Vice were also chronic opium eaters, but if you look at their health you can see they also were not well people either (not poor though, although if you have the good fortune to be born into a wealthy familiy or supported by wealthy patrons, it is possible to eat opium and be rich) . Same for Byron, although he did not die of opium eating, you can see the anxiety, paranoia, listlessness, ennui, and nightmares about drowning sewn up in a chaff bag were a feature of his life, as was marital strife and problems with his land-lords even when he had enough money - from about 1808 to when he died of fever (probably not opium related, for a change)
All in all, the most destructive aspects of opium eating for the most wealthy and privileged members of early nineteenth century society seemed to be paranoia, falling out with friends, irritable stomach complaints, weakened immunity to the killer epidemics that periodically swept through society, and a tendency to sudden cardiopulmonary arrest.
The "lassitude in the user preventing participation in the bullshit rituals of society" includes rituals like not driving cars into power poles, not letting the baby climb over the banister, and not resting your cheek on the hotplate for too long.
The wonderful, don't give a fuck, warm world that the opiate addict enters has some rituals of its own, too ... waiting for the man, the pins and needles strut, the weird horrible paranoid dreams that can't be distinguished from reality, having to work like a Trojan just to get the wherewithal to get on. Selling your arse, or your childs arse, to get on are not unknown in that world either.
Seriously, opiates do not lead to harmonious dealings with family, friends and neighbours any more than they lead to good health and longevity- mainly because the opiate user ceases to care about anything much except getting on and avoiding withdrawal.
And that is before considering how much worse things get when opiates are illegal.
What concern is it to me that someone starts a war in Iraq or Afghanistan, or that pedophiles can get anything they want in Cambodia, or that al Qaeda is flourishing in the Yemen and Sudan? Let people do what they will do to themselves, and never mind the 'social fabric'.
90% of the worlds heroin is now produced in Afghanistan. Cultivating in back yards for personal consumption is impossible where I live, not just because of the cost of slave-land, or the law, but the climate is all wrong, too.
BTW (now we are so far off topic the forum conventions don't matter anymore) : Who was the hairy biker dude you used to have in your avatar? He looks familiar, but I can't place him.
Coleridge died of a sudden stop to his cardiopulmonary function in his early sixties. His wife and family had moved on long before and he was living with a physician who was monitoring his opiate use. He almost certainly died from chronic opiate use.
Halsted kept himself together wonderfully well, considering, and he lived a long life for an opiate addict - nearly made it to seventy. Gall stones and inflammatory disease of the bile duct are linked to chronic opiate use, though, as is the bronchopneumonia, which finally killed him.
The suppression of the central nervous system, the shallower breathing, the sudden cessation of breathing, the failure of the medulla oblongata to react to rising carbon dioxide in the blood and make the body start breathing again - that is more common than constipation, and much more likely to kill an opiate addict.
It also can kill an addict when there is an obstruction to the breathing passage - say some half-vomited alcohol or food (because of the suppressed CNS, the urge to rolf is not as strong, so the obstruction just sits there, blocking the airway, and the brain has forgotten to make the addict cough or even remember to keep breathing and there goes Bon Scott.) Another effect of this is when the addict is in a fire or a high carbon monoxide environment - as their respiratory centre can't be bothered with the bullshit ritual of monitoring their need to breathe, opiate addicts are more likely than average to fall asleep with a smouldering cigarette in the bed, and die in a house fire, even when someone else causes it.
de Quincey made money out of the Confessions, both the 1820's and 1850's editions, but he was also getting a semi-regular income as a journalist and essayist for Blackwoods and other magazines. Although he was making just enough to keep up with his habit, and not always that. It is interesting reading the confessions and the changes between the first and second editions. During that time, opium had gone from the brown paste, to laudanum, to better refined laudanum, to morphine, to better refined morphine, to heroin. No surprise that de Quincy too was impoverished and incapacitated by opium use most of his life.
He pointed out that William Wilberforce, and Bishop Porteus and other members of the Society for Suppression of Vice were also chronic opium eaters, but if you look at their health you can see they also were not well people either (not poor though, although if you have the good fortune to be born into a wealthy familiy or supported by wealthy patrons, it is possible to eat opium and be rich) . Same for Byron, although he did not die of opium eating, you can see the anxiety, paranoia, listlessness, ennui, and nightmares about drowning sewn up in a chaff bag were a feature of his life, as was marital strife and problems with his land-lords even when he had enough money - from about 1808 to when he died of fever (probably not opium related, for a change)
All in all, the most destructive aspects of opium eating for the most wealthy and privileged members of early nineteenth century society seemed to be paranoia, falling out with friends, irritable stomach complaints, weakened immunity to the killer epidemics that periodically swept through society, and a tendency to sudden cardiopulmonary arrest.
The "lassitude in the user preventing participation in the bullshit rituals of society" includes rituals like not driving cars into power poles, not letting the baby climb over the banister, and not resting your cheek on the hotplate for too long.
The wonderful, don't give a fuck, warm world that the opiate addict enters has some rituals of its own, too ... waiting for the man, the pins and needles strut, the weird horrible paranoid dreams that can't be distinguished from reality, having to work like a Trojan just to get the wherewithal to get on. Selling your arse, or your childs arse, to get on are not unknown in that world either.
Seriously, opiates do not lead to harmonious dealings with family, friends and neighbours any more than they lead to good health and longevity- mainly because the opiate user ceases to care about anything much except getting on and avoiding withdrawal.
And that is before considering how much worse things get when opiates are illegal.
What concern is it to me that someone starts a war in Iraq or Afghanistan, or that pedophiles can get anything they want in Cambodia, or that al Qaeda is flourishing in the Yemen and Sudan? Let people do what they will do to themselves, and never mind the 'social fabric'.
90% of the worlds heroin is now produced in Afghanistan. Cultivating in back yards for personal consumption is impossible where I live, not just because of the cost of slave-land, or the law, but the climate is all wrong, too.
BTW (now we are so far off topic the forum conventions don't matter anymore) : Who was the hairy biker dude you used to have in your avatar? He looks familiar, but I can't place him.
To be honest, I don't usually read your posts given that I have a short attention span and you sort of write a lot, but from this moment on, I promise to never overlook another one of your posts again in my life!
Those posts were absolute fucking crackers!
While we are off topic, we may as well take it all the way...
If you could perhaps write a few thousand words on why 15% of the worlds population use 94% of the worlds analgesia, even though morphine is ridiculously cheap to manufacture, and work out why our pharmaceutical companies opt not to manufacture a surplus, which resulted in over 80 million people dying in unnecessary excruciating pain last year alone, I would be eternally grateful.
Damn you Palliative Care Pain Management Module!
DAMN YOU TO HELL!
p.s. The avatar he had was the good old 'has been' porn actor Ron Jeremy. Zuiko always says "it's better to be a has been than a never was". I like the fact that he looked familiar to you though, this forum is lacking in dirty girls like us.
Ha!
L
la`cat
Guest
Noooooooooooooooo....I want to do again
ps did I ever mention I have a really bad attitude, and my mother told me I was always doing the opposite of what she wanted or told me to do unless I thought it wasn't really what she wanted but I figured I could play with her head more or make her angrier ??
Noooooooooooooooo....I want to do again
ps did I ever mention I have a really bad attitude, and my mother told me I was always doing the opposite of what she wanted or told me to do unless I thought it wasn't really what she wanted but I figured I could play with her head more or make her angrier ??
Oh alright, you can do it another 56 times, but then that's it, okay?
p.s. I hope you have since learned that life is so much more enjoyable if you face it with a good attitude, a ready smile and sexy knickers.
L
la`cat
Guest
I always think my attitude is good.... I am always smiling, and not the passive agressive one. and I adore sexy knickers or , on occassion , none.
I've been having a bit of a read through that skating forum Estelle was a member of (her username is Bitchin') and found a few posts she made in a thread about drugs (about 3 ½ years ago). I didn't read the whole thread, but I think she's arguing against the drug they're talking about, but also talks about her own usage:
If you want to read from the first page of the thread:
http://www.skateboard.com.au/forum/read.cfm?forum=15&thread=61389&p=1
If you want to read from the first page of the thread:
http://www.skateboard.com.au/forum/read.cfm?forum=15&thread=61389&p=1
S
sylvannest
Guest
I love Meow Meow