Social Evils

Current issues, news and ethics
kmaherali
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There is a related video linked at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/04/opini ... ?th&emc=th

January 4, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
If This Isn’t Slavery, What Is?
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia

Barack Obama’s presidency marks a triumph over the legacy of slavery, so it would be particularly meaningful if he led a new abolitionist movement against 21st-century slavery — like the trafficking of girls into brothels.

Anyone who thinks it is hyperbole to describe sex trafficking as slavery should look at the maimed face of a teenage girl, Long Pross.

Glance at Pross from her left, and she looks like a normal, fun-loving girl, with a pretty face and a joyous smile. Then move around, and you see where her brothel owner gouged out her right eye.

Yes, I know it’s hard to read this. But it’s infinitely more painful for Pross to recount the humiliations she suffered, yet she summoned the strength to do so — and to appear in a video posted online with this column — because she wants people to understand how brutal sex trafficking can be.

Pross was 13 and hadn’t even had her first period when a young woman kidnapped her and sold her to a brothel in Phnom Penh. The brothel owner, a woman as is typical, beat Pross and tortured her with electric current until finally the girl acquiesced.

She was kept locked deep inside the brothel, her hands tied behind her back at all times except when with customers.

Brothel owners can charge large sums for sex with a virgin, and like many girls, Pross was painfully stitched up so she could be resold as a virgin. In all, the brothel owner sold her virginity four times.

Pross paid savagely each time she let a potential customer slip away after looking her over.

“I was beaten every day, sometimes two or three times a day,” she said, adding that she was sometimes also subjected to electric shocks twice in the same day.

The business model of forced prostitution is remarkably similar from Pakistan to Vietnam — and, sometimes, in the United States as well. Pimps use violence, humiliation and narcotics to shatter girls’ self-esteem and terrorize them into unquestioning, instantaneous obedience.

One girl working with Pross was beaten to death after she tried to escape. The brothels figure that occasional losses to torture are more than made up by the increased productivity of the remaining inventory.

After my last column, I heard from skeptical readers doubting that conditions are truly so abusive. It’s true that prostitutes work voluntarily in many brothels in Cambodia and elsewhere. But there are also many brothels where teenage girls are slave laborers.

Young girls and foreigners without legal papers are particularly vulnerable. In Thailand’s brothels, for example, Thai girls usually work voluntarily, while Burmese and Cambodian girls are regularly imprisoned. The career trajectory is often for a girl in her early teens to be trafficked into prostitution by force, but eventually to resign herself and stay in the brothel even when she is given the freedom to leave. In my blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground, I respond to the skeptics and offer some ideas for readers who want to help.

Pross herself was never paid, and she had no right to insist on condoms (she has not yet been tested for HIV, because the results might be too much for her fragile emotional state). Twice she became pregnant and was subjected to crude abortions.

The second abortion left Pross in great pain, and she pleaded with her owner for time to recuperate. “I was begging, hanging on to her feet, and asking for rest,” Pross remembered. “She got mad.”

That’s when the woman gouged out Pross’s right eye with a piece of metal. At that point in telling her story, Pross broke down and we had to suspend the interview.

Pross’s eye grew infected and monstrous, spraying blood and pus on customers, she later recounted. The owner discarded her, and she is now recuperating with the help of Sina Vann, the young woman I wrote about in my last column.

Sina was herself rescued by Somaly Mam, a trafficking survivor who started the Somaly Mam Foundation in Cambodia to fight sexual slavery. The foundation is working with Dr. Jim Gollogly of the Children’s Surgical Center in Cambodia to get Pross a glass eye.

“A year from now, she should look pretty good,” said Dr. Gollogly, who is providing her with free medical care.

So Somaly saved Sina, and now Sina is saving Pross. Someday, perhaps Pross will help another survivor, if the rest of us can help sustain them.

The Obama administration will have a new tool to fight traffickers: the Wilberforce Act, just passed by Congress, which strengthens sanctions on countries that wink at sex slavery. Much will depend on whether Mr. Obama and Hillary Clinton see trafficking as a priority.

There would be powerful symbolism in an African-American president reminding the world that the war on slavery isn’t yet over, and helping lead the 21st-century abolitionist movement.

I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.
kmaherali
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Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

Post by kmaherali »

There is a related video linked at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/opini ... ?th&emc=th

January 11, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Striking the Brothels’ Bottom Line
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
POIPET, Cambodia

In trying to figure out how we can defeat sex trafficking, a starting point is to think like a brothel owner.

My guide to that has been Sok Khorn, an amiable middle-aged woman who is a longtime brothel owner here in the wild Cambodian town of Poipet. I met her five years ago when she sold me a teenager, Srey Mom, for $203 and then blithely wrote me a receipt confirming that the girl was now my property. At another brothel nearby, I purchased another imprisoned teenager for $150.

Astonished that in the 21st century I had bought two human beings, I took them back to their villages and worked with a local aid group to help them start small businesses. I’ve remained close to them over the years, but the results were mixed.

The second girl did wonderfully, learning hairdressing and marrying a terrific man. But Srey Mom, it turned out, was addicted to methamphetamine and fled back to the brothel world to feed her craving.

I just returned again to Ms. Khorn’s brothel to interview her, and found something remarkable. It had gone broke and closed, like many of the brothels in Poipet. One lesson is that the business model is more vulnerable than it looks. There are ways we can make enslaving girls more risky and less profitable, so that traffickers give up in disgust.

For years, Ms. Khorn had been grumbling to me about the brothel — the low margins, the seven-day schedule, difficult customers, grasping policemen and scorn from the community. There was also a personal toll, for her husband had sex with the girls, infuriating her, and the couple eventually divorced bitterly. Ms. Khorn was also troubled that her youngest daughter, now 13, was growing up surrounded by drunken, leering men.

Then in the last year, the brothel business became even more challenging amid rising pressure from aid groups, journalists and the United States State Department’s trafficking office. The office issued reports shaming Cambodian leaders and threatened sanctions if they did nothing.

Many of the brothels are owned by the police, which complicates matters, but eventually authorities in Cambodia were pressured enough that they ordered a partial crackdown.

“They didn’t tell me to close down exactly,” said another Poipet brothel owner whom I’ve also interviewed periodically. “But they said I should keep the front door closed.”

About half the brothels in Poipet seem to have gone out of business in the last couple of years. After Ms. Khorn’s brothel closed, her daughter-in-law took four of the prostitutes to staff a new brothel, but it’s doing poorly and she is thinking of starting a rice shop instead. “A store would be more profitable,” grumbled the daughter-in-law, Sav Channa.

“The police come almost every day, asking for $5,” she said. “Any time a policeman gets drunk, he comes and asks for money. ... Sometimes I just close up and pretend that this isn’t a brothel. I say that we’re all sisters.”

Ms. Channa, who does not seem to be imprisoning anyone against her will, readily acknowledged that some other brothels in Poipet torture girls, enslave them and occasionally beat them to death. She complained that their cruelty gives them a competitive advantage.

But brutality has its own drawbacks as a business model, particularly during a crackdown, pimps say. Brothels that imprison and torture girls have to pay for 24-hour guards, and they lose business because they can’t allow customers to take girls out to hotel rooms. Moreover, the Cambodian government has begun prosecuting the most abusive traffickers.

“One brothel owner here was actually arrested,” complained another owner in Poipet, indignantly. “After that, I was so scared, I closed the brothel for a while.”

To be sure, a new brothel district has opened up on the edge of Poipet — in the guise of “karaoke lounges” employing teenage girls. One of the Mama-sans there offered that while she didn’t have a young virgin girl in stock, she could get me one.

Virgin sales are the profit center for many brothels in Asia (partly because they stitch girls up and resell them as virgins several times over), and thus these sales are their economic vulnerability as well. If we want to undermine sex trafficking, the best way is to pressure governments like Cambodia’s to organize sting operations and arrest both buyers and sellers of virgin girls. Cambodia has shown it is willing to take at least some action, and that is one that would strike at the heart of the business model.

Sexual slavery is like any other business: raise the operating costs, create a risk of jail, and the human traffickers will quite sensibly shift to some other trade. If the Obama administration treats 21st-century slavery as a top priority, we can push many of the traffickers to quit in disgust and switch to stealing motorcycles instead.

I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.
kmaherali
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January 26, 2009, 9:30 pm

Act of Faith
By Jim Atkinson

Since I began the road to recovery from alcoholism a decade and a half ago, people have frequently asked me how I have changed. I tell them that the process of recovering from an addiction is a kind of moral de- and reconstruction. You tear yourself apart, examine each individual piece, toss out the useless, rehabilitate the useful and put your moral self back together again.

There remains some degree of controversy about whether this process necessitates a spiritual awakening of some sort. But as was pointed out by a fellow contributor to Proof, the author Susan Cheever, no less an authority than the psychologist Carl Jung certainly believed so. And after a decade and a half of sobriety now so do I.

It seems to me that if Americans could understand any addiction, it would be an addiction to alcohol, which is held in almost as high a regard as food in this culture. We’re talking about a substance that must be present at virtually all of the significant passages of our lives: Your birth was probably celebrated with a drink; your death may be. In between, benchmark birthdays, “firsts” such as jobs, raises, homes; marriage, your own children, getting a promotion. Getting fired. All call for a drink, or two, and it seems almost uncivilized not to. In fact, some theological scholars have speculated that wine became part of religious services because the mood alteration it brought on made it easier for the faithful to pray to an unseen deity. Something can’t get much more important than bringing you closer to God.


But our condition continues to be almost pointedly misunderstood by many in what I call the “social drinking majority.” I have pondered the reasons for this pretty much every day for the 16 years that I have been sober, and am still mystified by it. As a rule, Americans tend to be very indulgent of overindulgence. We give a lot of lip service to “eating right,” but that hasn’t stopped two thirds of us from becoming overweight. We still make a lot of noise about being a sexually responsible and moral people, but we continue to have a 50 percent divorce rate and support a multi-billion dollar pornography industry.

It seems that the social drinking majority saves all its moralizing for alcoholics, about whom it ignores the increasingly irrefutable evidence that we suffer from a condition that is, at least in part, nothing more than a chronic disease like diabetes, and choose to adjudge us as morally inferior instead. Perhaps they’re getting back at us for “spoiling the party” for the rest of them by giving drinking a bad name. Or perhaps by labeling us as morally inferior, they are able to feel themselves morally superior—something that’s hard to do in these morally ambiguous times. While the image of those of us who manage to sober up has improved quite a bit since the temperance movement, we continue to be considered “lesser” for having had the problem in the first place.

All of this is kind of moot, though, since regardless of the source of an addict’s problem, it remains his responsibility to get over it. And so, in that sense, his recovery, if not his disease, is a moral matter.

* * *

My own recovery did not require me to become a born-again Christian or a Bible thumper of any sort. But sobering up—and staying that way—did involve a certain tectonic shift in the psyche that had nothing to do with willpower or common sense. In my experience, there are three reasons for this: First, the process of becoming addicted to alcohol involves a kind of twisted leap of faith in itself—coming to believe that all answers and all happiness lay in one more drink—so it only stands to reason that to escape alcohol’s clutches, one must take a similar size leap in the other direction. Second, for me anyway, trying to “reason” my way out of my addiction didn’t work. Talk to any recovering alcoholic and he will tell you about how many times he tried to stop or “manage” his drinking via the left side of the brain and failed. Indeed, it is the inability to control one’s drinking—even in the face of countless rational reasons to quit—that distinguishes the alcoholic from the merely abusive drinker. Finally, under the circumstances, I decided that I had no choice but to try the spiritual route to recovery.

This involved the deployment of two time-honored spiritual tools: surrender to and faith in a power greater than oneself — the often-invoked higher power. For me, surrender—as intimidating a word as it is—was relatively simple. After all, any drunk who decides to go to rehab has made a surrender of a certain measure; he’s saying, “I can’t lick this myself.”

Placing my faith in a higher power to help me with this endeavor was a bit more complicated. It’s not that I’m an atheist; I’m believer enough. It’s just that I’d never had occasion to apply my faith in this specific a way—that is to say, expecting a favorable resolution (losing the compulsion to drink) just for the asking of a favor from some unseen force.

It all felt quite awkward, and frankly, I wasn’t sure I could summon the requisite faith to fully engage the process. But desperation is the mother of many a good recovery, and desperate I was. So I did what I was told: I put blinders on, invested my faith in a higher power and set about the grunt work of recovery—the self examination and soul searching, the forming of a clean and sober and ethical self—with the hope that sooner or later, my compulsion to drink would disappear.

Ironically, it was the willingness to do anything to sober up—a most pragmatic strategy—that was the linchpin of my spiritual leap of faith. And though there was no single moment when I was “struck sober” in the way one hears some alcoholics claim, slowly but surely the obsession with the stuff slipped out of mind. I wouldn’t call it a miracle, but I would say that, as long as I’ve been sober, I still can’t entirely explain it and honestly, it still kind of surprises me that it worked as well as it did.

But I can double-vouch for its efficacy. Five years after I quit drinking back in 1993, I quit smoking using the same modus operandi. In some ways, tossing away the butts was harder than quitting the sauce. But this time I not only had faith; I had confidence. I not only believed I could quit. I knew I would.

http://proof.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/ ... 8ty&emc=ty
kmaherali
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February 11, 2009
Editorial
A-Rod’s Belated Confession

Is there any star player in Major League Baseball who has not taken performance-enhancing drugs?

The latest to admit to using illegal substances is Alex Rodriguez, the Yankee slugger who is arguably the game’s best player and inarguably its highest paid.

Rodriguez got caught, along with 103 other players, by urine tests given in 2003 to determine the extent of steroid usage. The results were supposed to be confidential but were seized by federal investigators before they could be destroyed. The fact that Rodriguez tested positive was recently made public by Sports Illustrated.

Although he had denied using steroids in the past, Rodriguez promptly staged a televised confessional in which he acknowledged using banned substances (but could not say what they were or how he got them) while playing for the Texas Rangers from 2001 to 2003. He attributed it to youthful naïveté, enormous pressure from his $252 million contract and a “loosey-goosey” culture in which drugs were prevalent. The steroids presumably helped him lead the league in home runs all three years and win most valuable player honors in 2003.

Rodriguez assures us that he has not used banned substances since joining the Yankees in 2004, and he appears to have passed several drug tests in recent years, although Sports Illustrated reports that he was given advance notice of at least one upcoming test. The pernicious consequence of being caught cheating after emphatic false denials is the suspicion that his cheating may continue, perhaps with harder-to-detect drugs.

The sad part is that the supposedly clean Rodriguez was the great hope to surpass accused steroid user Barry Bonds as a home run hitter, thus giving baseball a purer image at the peak of performance. Instead, his career statistics will henceforth be under a cloud, and he will serve as an object lesson that, as President Obama expressed, “when you try to take shortcuts, you may end up tarnishing your entire career.”

Major League Baseball has stepped up its drug testing in recent years, but it would be reckless to assume that it has emerged from a steroid-tarnished era.
kmaherali
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Scientists debunk smoking as stress reliever

Survey finds it does the opposite

By Misty Harris, Canwest News ServiceApril 15, 2009 3:02 AM

Canadians hoping to blow off economic anxiety with cigarettes could get burned, according to new research linking smoking with significantly higher-than-normal stress levels.

Drawing on data from 2,250 adults, Pew Research -- a non-partisan American think-tank -- found half (50 per cent) of all smokers claim to experience frequent stress in their lives, compared with just 35 per cent of ex-smokers and 31 per cent of non-smokers.

Even controlling for basic demographic traits such as sex, age, education, income and parental status, the researchers say current smokers are still significantly more likely than non-smokers and quitters to have self-reported stress.

With a survey showing a quarter of smokers worried about the recession are smoking more, and another 13 per cent are delaying quitting for the same reason, experts say the new report reflects an urgent need to debunk the "mythic relaxation response" of cigarettes.

"Many smokers perceive smoking as a way to calm stress, when, in fact, what they're doing is satisfying nicotine cravings and withdrawal," says Rob Cunningham, senior policy analyst for the Canadian Cancer Society.

"In many respects, smoking -- or the delay in having a cigarette -- is the cause of stress."

Cunningham believes Pew's report supports the need for more educational messages about the link between stress and tobacco use.

According to the Pew report, about a quarter of smokers consider themselves "very happy," compared with more than a third of quitters and nearly four in 10 non-smokers.

When asked about family life, smokers were also less likely to report being "very satisfied:" about six in 10, compared with seven in 10 non-smokers and quitters.

The data, collected by Princeton Survey Research International for Pew Research, is considered accurate within 2.3 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
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Second-hand smoke linked to breast cancer

Finding based on review of studies

By Sharon Kirkey, Canwest News ServiceApril 24, 2009

Parents who smoke are putting their daughters at increased risk of breast cancer, according to an expert panel that has unanimously agreed strong enough evidence now exists to link second-hand smoke to breast cancer.

"Even moderate exposure to passive smoking, such as living or working with a smoker early in life, increases a woman's risk of breast cancer when she is in her 30s, 40s and 50s,"

panellist and University of Toronto public health expert Dr. Anthony Miller says. "That is very important information people should know."

Studies on the possible relationship between cigarette smoke and breast cancer have been inconsistent.

But after reviewing all available evidence--more than 100 studies -- the panel concluded that all women who smoke, particularly young women, are at increased risk of breast cancer, and that even young women who don't smoke are at increased risk if they're exposed to second-hand smoke.

"An estimated 80 to 90 per cent of women have been exposed to tobacco smoke in adolescence and adulthood," says panel chairman Neil Collishaw, of Physicians for a Smoke-Free Canada. "Those women face an increased risk of breast cancer because of that exposure."

"Everyone needs to know that no girls and no women should be exposed to tobacco smoke,"Miller said.

According to the 11-member Canadian expert panel on tobacco smoke and breast cancer risk: - Smoking increases the risk of breast cancer in all women. "On average, it would be about a 50 to 70 per cent increase in risk, depending on how much women smoke,"says Miller, associate director of research at the University of Toronto's Dalla Lana School of Public Health.

One in seven women in Canada will develop breast cancer in their lifetime.

One study of women who carry the genes associated with breast cancer found those who smoked more than one pack a day for five years had double the risk of breast cancer than non-smokers. - Exposure to second-hand smoke increases the risk of breast cancer in younger, primarily pre-menopausal women by 40 to 50 per cent. - There's not enough evidence to judge whether second-hand smoke increases the risk of breast cancer in older women.But Miller says it doesn't make a lot of biological sense to think passive smoking only increases risk in pre-menopausal women. - More research is needed to know how many cases of breast cancer, and deaths, can be attributed to active and passive smoking.

© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
kmaherali
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May 7, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Girls on Our Streets
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
ATLANTA

Jasmine Caldwell was 14 and selling sex on the streets when an opportunity arose to escape her pimp: an undercover policeman picked her up.

The cop could have rescued her from the pimp, who ran a string of 13 girls and took every cent they earned. If the cop had taken Jasmine to a shelter, she could have resumed her education and tried to put her life back in order.

Instead, the policeman showed her his handcuffs and threatened to send her to prison. Terrified, she cried and pleaded not to be jailed. Then, she said, he offered to release her in exchange for sex.

Afterward, the policeman returned her to the street. Then her pimp beat her up for failing to collect any money.

“That happens a lot,” said Jasmine, who is now 21. “The cops sometimes just want to blackmail you into having sex.”

I’ve often reported on sex trafficking in other countries, and that has made me curious about the situation here in the United States. Prostitution in America isn’t as brutal as it is in, say, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Cambodia and Malaysia (where young girls are routinely kidnapped, imprisoned and tortured by brothel owners, occasionally even killed). But the scene on American streets is still appalling — and it continues largely because neither the authorities nor society as a whole show much interest in 14-year-old girls pimped on the streets.

Americans tend to think of forced prostitution as the plight of Mexican or Asian women trafficked into the United States and locked up in brothels. Such trafficking is indeed a problem, but the far greater scandal and the worst violence involves American teenage girls.

If a middle-class white girl goes missing, radio stations broadcast amber alerts, and cable TV fills the air with “missing beauty” updates. But 13-year-old black or Latina girls from poor neighborhoods vanish all the time, and the pimps are among the few people who show any interest.

These domestic girls are often runaways or those called “throwaways” by social workers: teenagers who fight with their parents and are then kicked out of the home. These girls tend to be much younger than the women trafficked from abroad and, as best I can tell, are more likely to be controlled by force.

Pimps are not the business partners they purport to be. They typically take every penny the girls earn. They work the girls seven nights a week. They sometimes tattoo their girls the way ranchers brand their cattle, and they back up their business model with fists and threats.

“If you don’t earn enough money, you get beat,” said Jasmine, an African-American who has turned her life around with the help of Covenant House, an organization that works with children on the street. “If you say something you’re not supposed to, you get beat. If you stay too long with a customer, you get beat. And if you try to leave the pimp, you get beat.”

The business model of pimping is remarkably similar whether in Atlanta or Calcutta: take vulnerable, disposable girls whom nobody cares about, use a mix of “friendship,” humiliation, beatings, narcotics and threats to break the girls and induce 100 percent compliance, and then rent out their body parts.

It’s not solely violence that keeps the girls working for their pimps. Jasmine fled an abusive home at age 13, and she said she — like most girls — stayed with the pimp mostly because of his emotional manipulation. “I thought he loved me, so I wanted to be around him,” she said.

That’s common. Girls who are starved of self-esteem finally meet a man who showers them with gifts, drugs and dollops of affection. That, and a lack of alternatives, keeps them working for him — and if that isn’t enough, he shoves a gun in the girl’s mouth and threatens to kill her.

Solutions are complicated and involve broader efforts to overcome urban poverty, including improving schools and attempting to shore up the family structure. But a first step is to stop treating these teenagers as criminals and focusing instead on arresting the pimps and the customers — and the corrupt cops.

“The problem isn’t the girls in the streets; it’s the men in the pews,” notes Stephanie Davis, who has worked with Mayor Shirley Franklin to help coordinate a campaign to get teenage prostitutes off the streets.

Two amiable teenage prostitutes, working without a pimp for the “fast money,” told me that there will always be women and girls selling sex voluntarily. They’re probably right. But we can significantly reduce the number of 14-year-old girls who are terrorized by pimps and raped by many men seven nights a week. That’s doable, if it’s a national priority, if we’re willing to create the equivalent of a nationwide amber alert.
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Smoking more damaging to women than men

Light smokers still at great risk: study

ReutersMay 19, 2009

Women may be especially susceptible to the toxic effects of cigarette smoking, U. S. researchers said Monday.

They said women who smoke develop lung damage earlier in life than men, and it takes less cigarette exposure to cause damage in women compared with men.

"Overall, our analysis indicated that women may be more vulnerable to the effects of smoking," said Dr. Inga-Cecilie Soerheim of Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and the University of Bergen in Norway.

Soerheim, who presented her findings at the American Thoracic Society meeting in San Diego, said researchers suspected this but until now had lacked proof.

Her team analyzed 954 people with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, which includes lung problems from chronic bronchitis to emphysema. COPD affects nearly 210 million people worldwide.

In the study, about 60 per cent were men and 40 per cent women. Overall, both groups had similar lung impairments. But when they looked at younger people --under age 60--or those who had been lighter smokers, they found women had more severe disease and worse lung function.

"This means that female smokers in our study experienced reduced lung function at a lower level of smoking exposure and at an earlier age than men," Soerheim said in a statement.

Soerheim suspects the differences may be related to anatomy. Women have smaller airways than men, making each cigarette potentially more dangerous, she said. Hormones may also play a role, she said.

"Many people believe that their own smoking is too limited to be harmful-- that a few cigarettes a day represent a minimal risk," she said in a statement. "However, in the low-exposure group in this study, half of the women actually had severe COPD."

© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
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June 16, 2009
Alcohol’s Good for You? Some Scientists Doubt It
By RONI CARYN RABIN

By now, it is a familiar litany. Study after study suggests that alcohol in moderation may promote heart health and even ward off diabetes and dementia. The evidence is so plentiful that some experts consider moderate drinking — about one drink a day for women, about two for men — a central component of a healthy lifestyle.

But what if it’s all a big mistake?

For some scientists, the question will not go away. No study, these critics say, has ever proved a causal relationship between moderate drinking and lower risk of death — only that the two often go together. It may be that moderate drinking is just something healthy people tend to do, not something that makes people healthy.

“The moderate drinkers tend to do everything right — they exercise, they don’t smoke, they eat right and they drink moderately,” said Kaye Middleton Fillmore, a retired sociologist from the University of California, San Francisco, who has criticized the research. “It’s very hard to disentangle all of that, and that’s a real problem.”

Some researchers say they are haunted by the mistakes made in studies about hormone replacement therapy, which was widely prescribed for years on the basis of observational studies similar to the kind done on alcohol. Questions have also been raised about the financial relationships that have sprung up between the alcoholic beverage industry and many academic centers, which have accepted industry money to pay for research, train students and promote their findings.

“The bottom line is there has not been a single study done on moderate alcohol consumption and mortality outcomes that is a ‘gold standard’ kind of study — the kind of randomized controlled clinical trial that we would be required to have in order to approve a new pharmaceutical agent in this country,” said Dr. Tim Naimi, an epidemiologist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Even avid supporters of moderate drinking temper their recommendations with warnings about the dangers of alcohol, which has been tied to breast cancer and can lead to accidents even when consumed in small amounts, and is linked with liver disease, cancers, heart damage and strokes when consumed in larger amounts.

“It’s very difficult to form a single-bullet message because one size doesn’t fit all here, and the public health message has to be very conservative,” said Dr. Arthur L. Klatsky, a cardiologist in Oakland, Calif., who wrote a landmark study in the early 1970s finding that members of the Kaiser Permanente health care plan who drank in moderation were less likely to be hospitalized for heart attacks than abstainers. (He has since received research grants financed by an alcohol industry foundation, though he notes that at least one of his studies found that alcohol increased the risk of hypertension.)

“People who would not be able to stop at one to two drinks a day shouldn’t drink, and people with liver disease shouldn’t drink,” Dr. Klatsky said. On the other hand, “the man in his 50s or 60s who has a heart attack and decides to go clean and gives up his glass of wine at night — that person is better off being a moderate drinker.”

Health organizations have phrased their recommendations gingerly. The American Heart Association says people should not start drinking to protect themselves from heart disease. The 2005 United States dietary guidelines say that “alcohol may have beneficial effects when consumed in moderation.”

The association was first made in the early 20th century. In 1924, a Johns Hopkins biologist, Raymond Pearl, published a graph with a U-shaped curve, its tall strands on either side representing the higher death rates of heavy drinkers and nondrinkers; in the middle were moderate drinkers, with the lowest rates. Dozens of other observational studies have replicated the findings, particularly with respect to heart disease.

“With the exception of smoking and lung cancer, this is probably the most established association in the field of nutrition,” said Eric Rimm, an associate professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health. “There are probably at least 100 studies by now, and the number grows on a monthly basis. That’s what makes it so unique.”

Alcohol is believed to reduce coronary disease because it has been found to increase the “good” HDL cholesterol and have anticlotting effects. Other benefits have been suggested, too. A small study in China found that cognitively impaired elderly patients who drank in moderation did not deteriorate as quickly as abstainers. A report from the Framingham Offspring Study found that moderate drinkers had greater mineral density in their hipbones than nondrinkers. Researchers have reported that light drinkers are less likely than abstainers to develop diabetes, and that those with Type 2 diabetes who drink lightly are less likely to develop coronary heart disease.

But the studies comparing moderate drinkers with abstainers have come under fire in recent years. Critics ask: Who are these abstainers? Why do they avoid alcohol? Is there something that makes them more susceptible to heart disease?

Some researchers suspect the abstainer group may include “sick quitters,” people who stopped drinking because they already had heart disease. People also tend to cut down on drinking as they age, which would make the average abstainer older — and presumably more susceptible to disease — than the average light drinker.

In 2006, shortly after Dr. Fillmore and her colleagues published a critical analysis saying a vast majority of the alcohol studies they reviewed were flawed, Dr. R. Curtis Ellison, a Boston University physician who has championed the benefits of alcohol, hosted a conference on the subject. A summary of the conference, published a year later, said scientists had reached a “consensus” that moderate drinking “has been shown to have predominantly beneficial effects on health.”

The meeting, like much of Dr. Ellison’s work, was partly financed by industry grants. And the summary was written by him and Marjana Martinic, a senior vice president for the International Center for Alcohol Policies, a nonprofit group supported by the industry. The center paid for tens of thousands of copies of the summary, which were included as free inserts in two medical journals, The American Journal of Medicine and The American Journal of Cardiology.

In an interview, Dr. Ellison said his relationship with the industry did not influence his work, adding, “No one would look at our critiques if we didn’t present a balanced view.”

Dr. Fillmore and the co-authors of her analysis posted an online commentary saying the summary had glossed over some of the deep divisions that polarized the debate at the conference. “We also dispute Ellison and Martinic’s conclusions that more frequent drinking is the strongest predictor of health benefits,” they wrote.

(Dr. Fillmore has received support from the Alcohol Education and Rehabilitation Foundation of Australia, a nonprofit group that works to prevent alcohol and substance abuse.)

Dr. Ellison said Dr. Fillmore’s analysis ignored newer studies that corrected the methodological errors of earlier work. “She threw out the baby with the bathwater,” he said.

Meanwhile, two central questions remain unresolved: whether abstainers and moderate drinkers are fundamentally different and, if so, whether it is those differences that make them live longer, rather than their alcohol consumption.

Dr. Naimi of the C.D.C., who did a study looking at the characteristics of moderate drinkers and abstainers, says the two groups are so different that they simply cannot be compared. Moderate drinkers are healthier, wealthier and more educated, and they get better health care, even though they are more likely to smoke. They are even more likely to have all of their teeth, a marker of well-being.

“Moderate drinkers tend to be socially advantaged in ways that have nothing to do with their drinking,” Dr. Naimi said. “These two groups are apples and oranges.” And simply advising the nondrinkers to drink won’t change that, he said.

Some scientists say the time has come to do a large, long-term randomized controlled clinical trial, like the ones for new drugs. One approach might be to recruit a large group of abstainers who would be randomly assigned either to get a daily dose of alcohol or not, and then closely followed for several years; another might be to recruit people who are at risk for coronary disease.

But even the experts who believe in the health benefits of alcohol say this is an implausible idea. Large randomized trials are expensive, and they might lack credibility unless they were financed by the government, which is unlikely to take on the controversy. And there are practical and ethical problems in giving alcohol to abstainers without making them aware of it and without contributing to accidents.

Still, some small clinical trials are already under way to see whether diabetics can reduce their risk of heart disease by consuming alcohol. In Boston, researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center are recruiting volunteers 55 and over who are at risk for heart disease and randomly assigning them to either drink plain lemonade or lemonade spiked with tasteless grain alcohol, while scientists track their cholesterol levels and scan their arteries.

In Israel, researchers gave people with Type 2 diabetes either wine or nonalcoholic beer, finding that the wine drinkers had significant drops in blood sugar, though only after fasting; the Israeli scientists are now working with an international team to begin a larger two-year trial.

“The last thing we want to do as researchers and physicians is expose people to something that might harm them, and it’s that fear that has prevented us from doing a trial,” said Dr. Sei Lee of the University of California, San Francisco, who recently proposed a large trial on alcohol and health.

“But this is a really important question,” he continued. “Because here we have a readily available and widely used substance that may actually have a significant health benefit — but we just don’t know enough to make recommendations.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/16/healt ... nted=print
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Post by kmaherali »

Beer, spirits may raise risk of cancer by 800%: study
By Charlie Fidelman, Canwest News ServiceAugust 4, 2009

Heavy drinkers of beer and spirits have significantly higher risks of developing multiple cancers, a Montreal study by a group of epidemiologists and cancer researchers shows.

Their findings suggest that people who hit the bottle the hardest boost their chances of developing six different cancers: esophageal, stomach, colon, liver, pancreatic and lung. But abstainers, light and moderate drinkers, as well as wine tipplers, were not affected.

Researchers compared the drinking habits of 3,064 Montreal men who developed 13 types of cancer with 507 who were healthy.

The results were astounding, said biostatistician and study lead author Andrea Benedetti of McGill University.

The heavier the drinker, the greater the risk. The strongest risk was for esophageal cancer at sevenfold, or 700 per cent, and liver cancer at eightfold, or 800 per cent, Benedetti said, while prostate and colon cancers increased by 80 per cent and lung cancer by 50 per cent.

What surprised Benedetti and her co-researchers, Marie-Elise Parent of INRS-Institut Armand Frappier and Jack Siemiatycki of the Universite de Montreal, was the association of alcohol with lung cancer.

The link held up, even after controlling for age, ethnicity, socioeconomic background, diets and smoking, Benedetti explained.

"The effect was the same, whether you smoked heavily or lightly. Alcohol seems to have an independent effect on lung cancer."

Study results were published in the current issue of the journal Cancer Detection and Prevention.

"It looks like the risks are driven by beer and spirits, but not by wine," Benedetti said, although it would not be fair to say wine drinkers are spared. But perhaps wine contains antioxidants, or wine drinkers tend to have healthy lifestyles, she suggested.

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Post by nagib »

This is from 1964, London

The other social habit to abandon for those who have indulged in already, is drinking. There is no doubt that this is one of the most ugly habits which my spiritual children can pick up. This is something which you should stop your family or your children from indulging in. There is no end for this habit, it will not give you any increased worldly happiness and certainly can give you nothing but spiritual sorrow. This is a very unpleasant habit and I condemn it as I condemn smoking, most strongly indeed.
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Post by kmaherali »

Jackson was responsible for own death
By Susan Martinuk, Calgary Herald
August 28, 2009 9:18 AM

Michael Jackson's death has apparently been ruled a homicide. But if the latest information about his death is true, there's no mystery about who dunnit. The culprit is Michael Jackson himself.

He may not have administered the final, fatal dose of anesthetic; but he slowly killed himself over a period of years and through a host of decisions he made regarding his health, his doctors and his medications.

Court documents reveal the coroner's preliminary assessment that Jackson died from a lethal dose of Propofol. This powerful anesthetic should only be administered in a hospital, yet it was repeatedly given to Jackson. On the day he died, Jackson received Propofol in addition to a cocktail of sedatives. All drugs were administered by his personal physician, Dr. Conrad Murray, in a rather unconventional effort to treat Jackson's insomnia. Consequently, Dr. Murray is being investigated and may face legal, or even criminal, charges related to Jackson's death. But is the doctor really the one at fault?

Previous reports have stated that Jackson was heavily addicted to pain killers, and a former employee claimed Jackson routinely took 10 Xanax (an anti-anxiety drug) pills per night. Once, he purportedly took as many as 40. His autopsy showed scarred track marks on his arms and legs.

The picture is clear: Jackson was a junkie. He obtained drugs from multiple doctors, using multiple names and pharmacies.

The public seems horrified at Dr. Murray's irresponsible actions, yet none of this is new in the land of celebrity and cultural icons.

2008: Actor Heath Ledger died of an accidental overdose of prescription drugs. A toxicology report revealed he had ingested two different sleep medications, two potent narcotics and two kinds of tranquillizers. I realize it's not politically correct to blame the junkie, but most thinking adults understand that a good sleep isn't the only consequence of ingesting so many pills.

1977: No one knows for sure how Elvis Presley died, but his death is assumed to be related to prescription drug abuse. In eight months preceding his death, he was prescribed more than 10,000 doses of sedatives, amphetamines and narcotics. In 1981, his doctor went on trial for over-prescribing medications to Presley. He was acquitted--only to lose it in 1995 for over-prescribing to other celebrities.

2007: Anna Nicole Smith died of an accidental prescription drug overdose. The autopsy found nine prescription drugs in her body; eight of which were sedatives. Two doctors and her partner/lawyer were later charged with devising a plan to prescribe drugs for Smith using various pseudonyms.

1976: The death and mental/physical decline of billionaire Howard Hughes was widely attributed to his addiction to painkillers. An autopsy found five glass syringes embedded in his arm for injecting codeine. His doctor was put on trial, but then acquitted without losing his medical license.

These deaths and others put the spotlight on celebrity doctors -- those who cater to celebrities or choose to be exclusively employed by celebrity patients. Obviously, these relationships aren't always in the best interests of the patient or the physician. In too many cases the only difference between the doctor and a drug dealer is the medical license.

Ironically, the biggest hindrance to good medical care for celebrities is money. When in the unaccountable and unsupervised employ of a patient, doctors can easily toss aside their ethics and medical judgment to cater to their employer's will. After all, if they refuse, they could lose their jobs.

Jackson paid Dr. Murray $150,000/month to cater to his medical wishes. Dr. Murray obviously violated his professional obligations to act in Jackson's best interests. He should lose his medical license forever, but there's no need for criminal charges.

If Jackson was calling the shots, he is culpable for his own death. He made the choice to hire an employee to maintain him in a permanent state of pharmaceutical oblivion--and he got exactly that.

Susan Martinuk's Column Appears Every Friday

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Post by kmaherali »

Legalized prostitution doesn't work

By Susan Martinuk, Calgary Herald
October 9, 2009 9:13 AM

Prostitution is a risky business.

That's why our society discourages girls from making it a career choice, and encourages prostitutes to pursue an alternate line of work.

But rather than working to get women out of this dangerous business, an idealistic law professor and his students from Osgoode Hall have decided to help prostitutes by joining forces with three women (a dominatrix, a former sex trade worker and a working prostitute) and pushing for the full legalization of prostitution in Canada.

Under our current laws, it's illegal to run a bawdy house, communicate for the purposes of prostitution and live off the avails of prostitution. The Osgoode Hall elites believe this amounts to a legal failure to uphold a prostitute's right to liberty and security.

They reason that if we get ladies off the street and onto soft mattresses, they won't be exposed to the "horrors of predatory killers." By legalizing communication so they can sell their services, prostitutes can have meaningful conversations with prospective clients and accurately ascertain if they're upstanding citizens who aren't given to hitting women or violent sex. By legitimizing transactions using money made from "the avails" of prostitution, women can use their earnings to hire security guards.

Right. That's the first place the money will go. Right after the pimp and the drug dealer.

These women are being horribly misled if they believe that creating laws to sanction the buying and selling of human beings will give them more liberty or security. It's like men on the Titanic protecting women by throwing them into the water and telling them to hang onto the side of the ship. In either case, it's not hard to figure out the final result.

Evidence from countries that have already taken this step make it abundantly clear that legalizing prostitution won't enhance anyone's liberty and security-- it will only enhance sexual exploitation and human trafficking.

In 2000, The Netherlands fully legalized prostitution. It wanted to bring the profession out of the shadows of criminal activity and protect the sex workers. Sounds like our noble, altruistic Osgoode Hall plan but, as they should note, it didn't work and is now being reversed.

Seven years later, Amsterdam's infamous red light district had spread decline throughout the city. No longer a hot tourist destination, it degenerated into the stomping grounds for organized crime, money laundering and drug abuse. It became a prime destination for human trafficking for sexual exploitation (for about 7,000 women per year).

The dream was that legalization would eliminate pimps and turn prostitutes and brothel owners into honourable, taxpaying citizens. But officials say the industry remains dominated by organized crime and sex slaves. About 96 per cent of prostitutes are working illegally, 80-85 per cent of prostituted women are of non-Dutch origin, and 70-75 per cent have no legal papers to live or work in The Netherlands.

Australia didn't fare much better. It legalized prostitution in 1999 for the same reasons as the Netherlands, yet a just-released report by the University of Queensland Working Group on Human Trafficking shows legalization has been an abject failure in reducing organized crime and bettering the lives and conditions of sex workers.

A decade later, only 10 per cent of the industry operates in legal brothels; the other 90 per cent is still mired in underground sex markets that use human trafficking victims and forced prostitution. Even women in licensed brothels say they experience exploitation and coercion. Organized crime and human trafficking have both increased significantly. In short, conditions for prostitutes have never been worse.

Oops. That didn't work.

According to Dr. Michael Horowitz of the Hudson Institute, an American think-tank, resolving the problem of prostitution is more complicated than establishing, "ergonomic standards for mattresses and minimum wages."

It's true that approximately 300 sex workers have gone missing from Canada's streets over the past two decades, and that's why the Osgoode lawyers were quick to play the highly emotional Robert-Picktonserial-killer card.

But before we let fear determine our course of action, we should remember that this violence doesn't stem from the laws governing the occupation--it's inherent to the occupation itself. As long as we allow people to sell their bodies for money, buyers will always be under the impression that they own that body and can do whatever they want to it.

The only way to really protect women is to stop the evil of that transaction.

susan martinuk's column appears every Friday.

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June 28, 2010
Bill Wilson’s Gospel
By DAVID BROOKS

On Dec. 14, 1934, a failed stockbroker named Bill Wilson was struggling with alcoholism at a New York City detox center. It was his fourth stay at the center and nothing had worked. This time, he tried a remedy called the belladonna cure — infusions of a hallucinogenic drug made from a poisonous plant — and he consulted a friend named Ebby Thacher, who told him to give up drinking and give his life over to the service of God.

Wilson was not a believer, but, later that night, at the end of his rope, he called out in his hospital room: “If there is a God, let Him show Himself! I am ready to do anything. Anything!”

As Wilson described it, a white light suffused his room and the presence of God appeared. “It seemed to me, in the mind’s eye, that I was on a mountain and that a wind not of air but of spirit was blowing,” he testified later. “And then it burst upon me that I was a free man.”

Wilson never touched alcohol again. He went on to help found Alcoholics Anonymous, which, 75 years later, has some 1.2 million members in 55,000 meeting groups, while 11,000 professional treatment centers employ the steps.

The movement is the subject of a smart and comprehensive essay by Brendan I. Koerner in the July 2010 issue of Wired magazine. The article is noteworthy not only because of the light it sheds on what we’ve learned about addiction, but for what it says about changing behavior more generally. Much of what we do in public policy is to try to get people to behave in their own long-term interests — to finish school, get married, avoid gangs, lose weight, save money. Because the soul is so complicated, much of what we do fails.

The first implication of Koerner’s essay is that we should get used to the idea that we will fail most of the time. Alcoholics Anonymous has stood the test of time. There are millions of people who fervently believed that its 12-step process saved their lives. Yet the majority, even a vast majority, of the people who enroll in the program do not succeed in it. People are idiosyncratic. There is no single program that successfully transforms most people most of the time.

The second implication is that we should get over the notion that we will someday crack the behavior code — that we will someday find a scientific method that will allow us to predict behavior and design reliable social programs. As Koerner notes, A.A. has been the subject of thousands of studies. Yet “no one has yet satisfactorily explained why some succeed in A.A. while others don’t, or even what percentage of alcoholics who try the steps will eventually become sober as a result.”

Each member of an A.A. group is distinct. Each group is distinct. Each moment is distinct. There is simply no way for social scientists to reduce this kind of complexity into equations and formula that can be replicated one place after another.

Nonetheless, we don’t have to be fatalistic about things. It is possible to design programs that will help some people some of the time. A.A. embodies some shrewd insights into human psychology.

In a culture that generally celebrates empowerment and self-esteem, A.A. begins with disempowerment. The goal is to get people to gain control over their lives, but it all begins with an act of surrender and an admission of weakness.

In a culture that thinks of itself as individualistic, A.A. relies on fellowship. The general idea is that people aren’t really captains of their own ship. Successful members become deeply intertwined with one another — learning, sharing, suffering and mentoring one another. Individual repair is a social effort.

In a world in which gurus try to carefully design and impose their ideas, Wilson surrendered control. He wrote down the famous steps and foundations, but A.A. allows each local group to form, adapt and innovate. There is less quality control. Some groups and leaders are great; some are terrible. But it also means that A.A. is decentralized, innovative and dynamic.

Alcoholics have a specific problem: they drink too much. But instead of addressing that problem with the psychic equivalent of a precision-guidance missile, Wilson set out to change people’s whole identities. He studied William James’s “The Varieties of Religious Experience.” He sought to arouse people’s spiritual aspirations rather than just appealing to rational cost-benefit analysis. His group would help people achieve broad spiritual awakenings, and abstinence from alcohol would be a byproduct of that larger salvation.

In the business of changing lives, the straight path is rarely the best one. A.A. illustrates that even in an age of scientific advance, it is still ancient insights into human nature that work best. Wilson built a remarkable organization on a nighttime spiritual epiphany.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: June 29, 2010


An earlier version of this column stated that Alcoholics Anonymous has professional treatment centers, but the centers only employ the organization's program without being run by it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/29/opini ... ?th&emc=th
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Post by kmaherali »

July 14, 2010
Seduction, Slavery and Sex
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Against all odds, this year’s publishing sensation is a trio of thrillers by a dead Swede relating tangentially to human trafficking and sexual abuse.

“The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” series tops the best-seller lists. More than 150 years ago, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” helped lay the groundwork for the end of slavery. Let’s hope that these novels help build pressure on trafficking as a modern echo of slavery.

Human trafficking tends to get ignored because it is an indelicate, sordid topic, with troubled victims who don’t make great poster children for family values. Indeed, many of the victims are rebellious teenage girls — often runaways — who have been in trouble with their parents and the law, and at times they think they love their pimps.

Because trafficking gets ignored, it rarely is a top priority for law enforcement officials — so it seems to be growing. Various reports and studies, none of them particularly reliable, suggest that between 100,000 and 600,000 children may be involved in prostitution in the United States, with the numbers increasing.

Just last month, police freed a 12-year-old girl who they said had been imprisoned in a Knights Inn hotel in Laurel, Md. The police charged a 42-year-old man, Derwin Smith, with human trafficking and false imprisonment in connection with the case.

The Anne Arundel County Police Department said that Mr. Smith met the girl in a seedy area, had sex with her and then transported her back and forth from Washington, D.C., to Atlantic City, N.J., while prostituting her.

“The juvenile advised that all of the money made was collected and kept by the suspect,” the police department said in a statement. “At one point, the victim conveyed to the suspect that she wanted to return home, but he held her against her will.”

Just two days later, the same police force freed three other young women from a Garden Inn about a block away. They were 16, 19 and 23, and police officials accused a 23-year-old man, Gabriel Dreke-Hernandez, of pimping them.

Police said that Mr. Dreke-Hernandez had kidnapped the 19-year-old from a party and had taken her to a hotel room. “Once at the hotel,” the police statement said, Mr. Dreke-Hernandez allegedly “grabbed her around the throat and began to choke her. Hernandez then pushed her head against the wall several times before placing a knife to her throat and demanding that she follow his commands.

“The female further advised that all of the money made was collected and kept by the suspect. At one point, she indicated that she would not prostitute any longer and the suspect subsequently pulled her into the bathroom and threatened her again with a knife.”

Police officials did not release details about the 16-year-old and 23-year-old, though they said customers for the teenager had been sought on the Internet.

There’s a misperception in America that “sex trafficking” is mostly about foreigners smuggled into the U.S. That exists. But I’ve concluded that the biggest problem and worst abuses involve not foreign women but home-grown runaway kids.

In a typical case, a rebellious 13-year-old girl runs away from a home where her mother’s boyfriend is hitting on her. She is angry and doesn’t trust the police. She goes to the bus station in hopes of getting out of town — and the only person on the lookout for girls like her is a pimp, who buys her a meal, offers her a place to stay and tells her he loves her.

The next thing she knows, she’s having sex with four men a night and all the money is going to her “boyfriend.” If she voices reservations, he puts a gun in her mouth and threatens to blow her head off.

Her customers, often recruited on the Internet, may have no inkling that her actions are not completely voluntary. Some mix of fear, love, hopelessness and shattered self-esteem keep her from trying to run away.

No strategy has worked particularly well against human trafficking, and commercial sex may well exist 1,000 years from now. But a starting point is for law enforcement to go after pimps rather than the girls. That’s the only way to break the business model of forced prostitution.

Sweden offers us not only the summer’s top beach paperbacks, but also a useful strategy for dealing with trafficking. The Swedish model, adopted in 1999, is to prosecute the men who purchase sex, while treating the women who sell it as victims who merit social services.

Prosecution of johns has reduced demand for prostitution in Sweden, which in turn reduces market prices. That reduces the incentives for trafficking into Sweden, and the number of prostitutes seems to have declined there. A growing number of countries are concluding that the Swedish model works better than any other, and it would be wise for American states to experiment with it as well. It’s not a panacea, but cracking down on demand seems a useful way to chip away at 21st-century slavery.




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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/15/opini ... &th&emc=th
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It's no wives' tale -- polygamy harms society
By Daphne Bramham, The Vancouver Sun
July 20, 2010

Increased crime, prostitution and anti-social behaviour. Greater inequality between men and women. Less parental investment in children. And a general driving down of the age of marriage for all women.

These are some of the harms of polygamy (or more correctly, polygyny, since it is almost always men marrying more than once) that are outlined in a 45-page research paper by noted Canadian scholar Joseph Henrich, filed Friday in B.C. Supreme Court.

Henrich is uniquely qualified to look at polygamy's harm. He's a member of the departments of economics, psychology and anthropology at the University of British Columbia and holds the Canada Research Chair in Culture, Cognition and Coevolution.

But he'd never really thought about it until this year when Craig Jones approached him. Jones is the lead lawyer in the B.C. government's constitutional reference case, which will be heard in November by B.C. Supreme Court Chief Justice Robert Bauman.

Now, Henrich's conclusions form part of the intellectual and evidentiary underpinning for the province's argument that even if outlawing polygamy breaches the constitutional guarantees of religious freedom and freedom of expression, it's justified.

In addition to Henrich's paper, the government has filed or will be filing affidavits from other specialists in the history of western polygamy, Islamic law, psychology and medicine.

Fifteen former fundamentalist Mormons have provided video testimony about their experiences growing up in polygamous communities in Canada and the United States.

Among them is Truman Oler. He is the 28-year-old brother of James Oler, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints bishop in Bountiful, and the nephew of Winston Blackmore, the former bishop who now heads a breakaway sect.

But for James Oler and Blackmore, there would be no court case. Both men were charged with polygamy in 2009. But after those charges were stayed, Attorney General Mike de Jong asked the B.C. Supreme Court to rule on the law's constitutionality.

To illustrate the harm, Henrich provides the court with an example of polygyny's cruel arithmetic.

In a hypothetical society of 20 men and 20 women, 12 men with the highest status marry 12 women. (It's always only the highest-ranking men in polygynous societies that get multiple wives.)

Then, the top five take a second wife and the top two men take a third. Finally, the top guy takes a fourth.

The result is that 58 per cent of the marriages are monogamous.

But -- and this is the big deal -- it means 40 per cent of the men remain unmarried.

Yes, 40 per cent.

And Henrich's example is conservative. Blackmore has more than 20 wives. FLDS prophet Warren Jeffs, who is in jail in Utah, has more than 80.

And the studies Henrich cites -- from historical, frontier-American research to contemporary work done in countries where polygamy is legal -- indicate that groups of unmarried men create havoc.

"For males, getting married (monogamously) is a prophylactic against engaging in crime, social disruption and other socially undesirable activities," he writes.

In India and China, where male-biased sex selection has resulted in more men than women, researchers found "bachelor bands that compete ferociously and engage in aggressive, violent and anti-social activities."

China's one-child policy resulted in the number of "surplus" men nearly doubling . . . along with the crime rates. In a recent study, researchers there concluded that for every 0.01 increase in sex ratio, property and violent crimes rise by three per cent.

In India, the state of Kerala's murder rate is half that of Uttar Pradesh. The reason? Kerala's male-to-female ratio is 97:100; Uttar Pradesh's is 112:100.

Another social harm that Henrich says is consistent regardless of whether researchers use data from 19th-century Mormon communities or contemporary African societies is that children from polygynous families have considerably lower survival rates. It seems polygynous men, rather than investing in their offspring, use their money to add wives.

"Monogamy seems to direct male motivations in ways that create lower crime rates, greater wealth (GDP) per capita and better outcomes for children," Henrich concludes.

But what's more surprising than his conclusions is his speculation that monogamy is at the root of democracy and equality.

He argues that as the idea of monogamy spread through Europe during the 15th century, king and peasant alike had the same rules and the idea of equality gained a foothold -- at least among men.

With reduced competition for women, men began loosening their tight control over wives and daughters.

And with fewer unmarried men, the pool of soldiers that had previously been harnessed by warring rulers was reduced.

Even though this compelling argument goes far beyond the scope of the trial, it may make it even harder for polygamy's advocates to convince the judge that its practice is benign.

Daphne Bramham is a columnist with the Vancouver Sun.
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'Slaves' in impoverished Yemen still dream of freedom
By Jamal al-Jaberi (AFP) – 4 days ago

SANAA — Officially, slavery was abolished back in 1962 but a judge's decision to pass on the title deed of a "slave" from one master to another has blown the lid off the hidden bondage of hundreds of Yemenis.

The judge in the town of Hajja, which is home to some 300 slaves, according to residents, said he had certified the transfer only because the new owner planned to free the slave.

But his decision has triggered a campaign by local human right activists.

A 2009 report by the human rights ministry found that males and females were still enslaved in the provinces of Hudaydah and Hajja, in northwest Yemen -- the Arab world's most impoverished country.

Mubarak, who has seven brothers and sisters, has never set foot outside the village where he was born into a family which was inherited as slaves by their local master.

Sheikh Mohammed Badawi's father had bought Mubarak's parents 50 year ago, shortly before Yemen's 1962 revolution which abolished slavery. Mubarak has known no other life except that of a slave.

"Whenever I think of freedom, I ask myself, 'Where will I go?'" he told AFP as he stood outside a hut which serves as home for him and his family.

Black-skinned Mubarak does not know his birthday but he knows he has been a slave from birth 21 years ago. He has two children with a wife who was also a slave until she was emancipated by her master, a few years before they married.

"Sometimes I wonder what the fate of my children will be, having a slave father and an emancipated mother," he said.

Mubarak and his family are just one case among many.

"We are still in the process of trying to count the numbers of slaves," the coordinator of rights group Hood, Mohammed Naji Allaw, told AFP, explaining that slaves were "owned by title deeds, or inherited within families."

The news website almasdaronline earlier spoke of "500 slaves" across Yemen.

In addition to "slaves whose owner can use them however he wants," the ministry report also refers to other groups subjected to slave-like conditions, although they are not bound by documents.

One group includes "former slaves who have been officially set free, but remain at the service of their former masters, who continue to feed them but never pay them wages," the report said.

Allaw said such people are still referred to as "the slaves of such and such a family, or the slaves of such and such a tribe."

Enslaved groups are descendants of an empire which ruled Yemen in the 11th and 12th centuries, with their origins in ancient Ethiopia, across the Red Sea from Yemen. They were enslaved after their empire was defeated.

Under Yemeni law, slavery carries stiff penalties.

"Whoever controls another human being" can face 10 years in prison under the penal code, said Allaw, who complained of state negligence and lack of social services to such groups.

The authorities do not want to get into a conflict with the powerful tribes, who form the backbone of Yemeni society, over the slavery issue, according to Allaw.

"Local authorities in Hajja are trying to black out this phenomenon, saying it does not exist," he said.

"But these people should be compensated," said the rights activist. "They should be given houses and be rehabilitated, socially and psychologically. They should be saved from their feeling of marginalisation."

Meanwhile, Mubarak dreams of living a normal life, though he doubts being capable of coping with it.

"I dream of living like other people ... (But) I have always known myself to do nothing but work on the farm and tend the cattle," he said.

Ashram, enslaved for 50 years before being freed five years ago by his dying master, appeared to have gone through what Mubarak fears.

"When my master Sheikh Ali Hussein told me 'I have freed you, Ashram,' I was happy," he told AFP. But soon after "I started wondering how to live, where to go, and how to make a living."

Ashram decided to revert to his old life, becoming a "slave of the village," he said. "I carry water daily to the houses from a well. This gives me some assurance that I will not die of starvation."

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/ar ... Y4c7uGQihw
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Post by kmaherali »

Carl Jung, part 7: The power of acceptance

Like the AA movement, Jung believed that acceptance and spiritual interconnectedness were crucial to a person's recovery


Bertrand Russell believed that a happy individual would feel 'part of the stream of life, not a hard separate entity like a billiard ball'. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

In 1931, one of Jung's patients proved stubbornly resistant to therapy. Roland H was an American alcoholic whom he saw for many weeks, possibly a year. But Roland's desire for drink refused to diminish. A year later Roland returned to Zürich still drinking, and Jung concluded that he probably wouldn't be cured through therapy.

But ever the experimenter, Jung had an idea.

Roland should join the Oxford Group, an evangelical Christian movement that stressed the necessity of total surrender to God. Jung hoped that his patient might undergo a conversion experience, which, as his friend William James had realised, is a transformative change at depth, brought about by the location of an entirely new source of energy within the unconscious. That might tame the craving.

It worked. Roland told another apparently hopeless alcoholic, Bill W, about the experience. Bill too was converted, and had a vision of groups of alcoholics inspiring each other to quit. The Society of Alcoholics Anonymous was formed. Today it has more than 2 million members in 150 countries.

I spoke to a friend of mine who attends meetings of Narcotics Anonymous to understand more about the element of conversion. "It's hugely important," he said.

His addictions had been fuelled by a surface obsession with career and money, and a deeper anxiety that nothing was right. "It's the first time I'd been prompted seriously to consider something bigger than myself."

Calling the experience "spiritual" seems accurate too, because a meeting is about more than gaining a circle of supportive friends. "I have friends," my friend remarks, before continuing that the focused intention of a meeting is about something else: their connection to a very powerful force. "I can't picture it, I can't name it," he says, before adding, "I've never given much thought to church." Narcotics Anonymous literature expresses it more formally: "For our group purpose there is but one ultimate authority – a loving God as He may express Himself in our group conscience."

The result is an overwhelming sense that things will be OK because they are as they are meant to be. Though clean, my friend is not cured, and life can still be difficult. But he has the strength to accept what is, to reach out to others, and to trust life. It is moving to see.

Jung believed that we are psychosomatic creatures who must attend to matters of the spirit as well as the body. Further, our psyche is not just our own. It is connected to others, both those with whom we visibly interact, and those who have come before us, via the dynamic he called the collective unconscious. Life goes well when these links are open. Flow brings a sense of purpose. Conversely, blockages can lead to ill-health with possibly physical and psychological manifestations. "A psychoneurosis must be understood, ultimately, as the suffering of a soul which has not discovered its meaning," Jung wrote, in an essay wittily entitled "Psychotherapists or the Clergy".

Other observers of the human condition make similar remarks. Bertrand Russell, who could hardly be different from Jung in terms of his spiritual outlook, nonetheless averred that the happy individual feels himself "part of the stream of life, not a hard separate entity like a billiard ball, which can have no relation with other such entities except that of collision". Such a person knows themselves as a "citizen of the universe".

Jung preferred overtly religious language – instead of the universe talking of the "soul of the world" or anima mundi – and this was more than a question of taste. He believed spiritual connectedness was fundamental to being human and that, wary of religiosity, modern consciousness was struggling to take it seriously. The default image of secular individuality was, indeed, the billiard ball. Notions such as the stream of life, let alone the soul or the collective unconscious, tend to be treated as poetic fictions, at best, with damaging implications for human wellbeing.

But from his earliest days as a psychiatrist, Jung had noticed that "a suitable explanation or a comforting word to the patient can have something like a healing effect". He explained the efficacy as arising from what the doctor conveys, not only what the doctor does. "The doctor's words, to be sure, are 'only' vibrations in the air, yet their special quality is due to a particular psychic state in the doctor." It connects with the other. The patient finds that which "will take possession of him and give meaning and form to … his soul". It's not supernatural but conscious exposure to "a deeper dimension of the real".

Religious traditions have been the custodians of this source, though Jung thought the crucial aspect was to have a religious attitude to life, rather than a particular faith. Like my friend and the AA movement, he argued that the goal is best thought of not as a cure, but as acceptance. "They came to themselves, they could accept themselves, and thus were reconciled to adverse circumstances and events," he wrote of his patients in his Terry Lectures of 1937. "This is almost like what used to be expressed by saying: He has made his peace with God, he has sacrificed his own will, he has submitted himself to the will of God." It sounds passive, though in reality, such acceptance releases a new zest for life because the individual is no longer struggling alone, and is instead tapping "the meaning that quickens".

Just what therapy should provide – cure or acceptance – is still hotly contested. The psychiatrist Anthony Storr agreed with Jung: "I prefer this interpretation of healing to those advanced by other schools of psychotherapy because I believe that it corresponds more closely to what actually takes place in long-term analytic psychotherapy." The success of the philosophy embodied in the family of organisations that has sprung from the Society of Alcoholics Anonymous must weigh in its favour too.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... acceptance
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Post by kmaherali »

November 16, 2011
The Face of Modern Slavery
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Phnom Penh, Cambodia

When I write about human trafficking as a modern form of slavery, people sometimes tune out as their eyes glaze over. So, Glazed Eyes, meet Srey Pov.

She’s a tough interview because she breaks down as she recalls her life in a Cambodian brothel, and pretty soon my eyes are welling up, too.

Srey Pov’s family sold her to a brothel when she was 6 years old. She was unaware of sex but soon found out: A Western pedophile purchased her virginity, she said, and the brothel tied her naked and spread-eagled on a bed so that he could rape her.

“I was so scared,” she recalled. “I was crying and asking, ‘Why are you doing this to me?’ ”

After that, the girl was in huge demand because she was so young. Some 20 customers raped her nightly, she remembers. And the brothel twice stitched her vagina closed so that she could be resold as a virgin. This agonizingly painful practice is common in Asian brothels, where customers sometimes pay hundreds of dollars to rape a virgin.

Most girls who have been trafficked, whether in New York or in Cambodia, eventually surrender. They are degraded and terrified, and they doubt their families or society will accept them again. But somehow Srey Pov refused to give in.

Repeatedly, she tried to escape the brothel but she said that each time she was caught and brutally punished with beatings and electric shocks. The brothel, like many in Cambodia, also had a punishment cell to break the will of rebellious girls.

As Srey Pov remembers it (and other girls tell similar stories), each time she rebelled she was locked naked in the darkness in a barrel half-full of sewage, replete with vermin and scorpions that stung her regularly. I asked how long she was punished this way, thinking perhaps an hour or two.

“The longest?” she remembered. “It was a week.”

Customers are, of course, the reason trafficking continues, and many of them honestly think that the girls are in the brothels voluntarily. Many are, of course. But smiles are not always what they seem. Srey Pov even remembers flirting to avoid being beaten.

“We smile on the outside,” she said, “but inside we are crying.”

Yet this is a story with a triumphant ending. At age 9, Srey Pov was able to dart away from the brothel and outrun the guard. She found her way to a shelter run by Somaly Mam, an anti-trafficking activist who herself was prostituted as a child. Somaly now runs the Somaly Mam Foundation to fight human trafficking in Southeast Asia: She’s the one who led the brothel raid that I recounted in my last column.

In Somaly’s shelter, Srey Pov learned English and blossomed. Now 19, Srey Pov can even imagine eventually having a boyfriend.

“Before I didn’t like men because they hit me and raped me,” she reflected. “But now I think that not all men are bad. If I find a good man, I can marry him.”

Somaly is creating an army of young women like Srey Pov who have been rescued from the brothels: well-educated and determined to defeat human trafficking. Over the years, I’ve watched these women and girls make a difference, and they’re self-replicating.

In my last column, I described a frightened seventh-grade Vietnamese girl who was rescued in a brothel raid that Somaly and I participated in. That raid in the town of Anlong Veng has already had an impact, for six more brothels in the area have closed because of public attention and fear that they could be next. And the seventh-grade girl is recovering from her trauma at a shelter run by Somaly, where a girl named Lithiya has taken her under her wing.

Lithiya, now 15, is one of my favorites in “Somaly’s army,” perhaps because she wants to be a journalist and has taught herself astoundingly good English. Trafficked at age 9 from Vietnam, Lithiya was locked inside a brothel for years before she climbed over a wall and escaped. Now a ninth grader, she is ranked No. 1 in her class.

Srey Pov, Lithiya and Somaly encountered a form of oppression that echoes 19th-century slavery. But the scale is larger today. By my calculations, at least 10 times as many girls are now trafficked into brothels annually as African slaves were transported to the New World in the peak years of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

So for those of you doubtful that “modern slavery” really is an issue for the new international agenda, think of Srey Pov — and multiply her by millions. If what such girls experience isn’t slavery, that word has no meaning. It’s time for a 21st-century abolitionist movement in the U.S. and around the world.



I invite you to visit my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook and Google+, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.


http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/17/opini ... emc=tha212
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Post by kmaherali »

The science is in: God is the answer

In fact, Miller declares, spirituality, if properly fostered in children’s formative years, will pay off in spades in adolescence. An intensely felt, transcendental sense of a relationship with God, the universe, nature or whatever the individual identifies as his or her “higher power,” she found, is more protective than any other factor against the big three adolescent dangers: Spiritually connected teens are 40 per cent less likely to abuse alcohol or other substances, 80 per cent less likely to engage in unprotected sex and, remarkably, 60 per cent less likely to suffer from depression than adolescents who are not spiritually oriented. Spiritually oriented children, raised to not shy from hard questions or difficult situations, Miller points out, also tend to excel academically.

A 2005 study found that a teen with this sort of spiritual connection—as manifested by statements like “I turn to God for guidance in times of difficulty”—was at least 70 per cent less likely to move from substance dabbling to substance abuse. Again, the key was personal engagement; there was no protective factor at all from going to church or taking part in family prayer when those acts came from obligation rather than conviction.

More....

http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/weekendre ... lsignoutmd
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Post by kmaherali »

Infidelity Lurks in Your Genes

AMERICANS disapprove of marital infidelity. Ninety-one percent of them find it morally wrong, more than the number that reject polygamy, human cloning or suicide, according to a 2013 Gallup poll.

Yet the number of Americans who actually cheat on their partners is rather substantial: Over the past two decades, the rate of infidelity has been pretty constant at around 21 percent for married men, and between 10 to 15 percent for married women, according to the General Social Survey at the University of Chicago’s independent research organization, NORC.

We are accustomed to thinking of sexual infidelity as a symptom of an unhappy relationship, a moral flaw or a sign of deteriorating social values. When I was trained as a psychiatrist we were told to look for various emotional and developmental factors — like a history of unstable relationships or a philandering parent — to explain infidelity.

But during my career, many of the questions we asked patients were found to be insufficient because for so much behavior, it turns out that genes, gene expression and hormones matter a lot.

Now that even appears to be the case for infidelity.

More....

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/24/opini ... 05309&_r=1

****
Response to the article above:

Blame Genes for Extramarital Affairs?

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/28/opini ... d=45305309
Last edited by kmaherali on Sat May 30, 2015 12:39 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by kmaherali »

Surviving an Alcoholic

"Alcoholism is a disease that keeps challenging loved ones after the alcoholic is gone. Surviving spouses don’t hesitate to talk of heart attacks, cancer deaths, car accidents. But other than suicide — and some might argue that alcoholism is a slow suicide — it’s a death laden with shame."

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/20 ... d=45305309
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Post by kmaherali »

As received
========

A Confession - My Journey out of Casual Drinking

I remember the first time I learned that there were some Ismailis who
drank alcohol. I was 6 years old at a family reunion. I still remember
the confusion I felt in the pit of my stomach as I saw my uncles
passing around mugs of Mike’s Hard Lemonade and they told me why I
couldn’t have any. My parents had always told me that alcohol was not
allowed in Islam and that Mowlana Hazar Imam had explicitly disallowed
it – they told me that Ismailisdon’t drink.

Me being me, I didn’t sit there in confused silence but questioned
them openly. When they told me that “everything is allowed in
moderation” and actually that “a glass of wine a day is good for your
heart”, I didn’t swallow it. If your family member is hurting himself
- would you stand by and watch? I railed against them and my siblings
and I actually started crying hysterically. We had to be removed from
the area.

My father never chastised me for speaking my mind to his brothers who
were all drinking. He defended them weakly, saying that “everything is
allowed in moderation” and that God is all forgiving. When I asked him
if this meant that my siblings and I were allowed to drink in
moderation, his answer was just as swift as it was decisive: No. And
he had no answer to the obvious glaring flaw in his logic. I wonder
now if he gave serious thought to the mixed information he was giving
his young children and what it would mean for our lives going forward.
It would be another twelve years before I saw any other Ismailis drink
openly.

**
Due to a mix of personality and circumstance, I had never really
connected with any Ismailis my age until I entered University for the
first time. In my first month at the University I met a whole group of
Ismaili friends that I had never met before and I felt that they
understood me in a way my other school friends just couldn’t. There
were jokes about nandi, serious discussions about who made the best
sukreet, jibes about that strange man in jamat khana who sang off-key
and very loudly. We could attend religious services together and there
was a campus khane too where older students gave recommendations on
which classes to take and helped you figure out where to park. There
was a shared experience that came from growing up in the same
religious community and same cultural background that I had never felt
before - the comfort and familiarity was like family even though we
had just met.

When I turned 18, I went with my Ismaili friends to my first nightclub
- Reds - it seemed as though everybody from post-secondary jamat khana
was there. My closest friends did not drink but I remember two friends
sneaking off to the bar and coming back with a drink each. An entire
group of Ismailis came by and were acting very strangely, “they’re so
drunk” someone laughed. So that was what drunk people were like? It
was the first time I had seen anything like that and the same
confusion I had felt so many years ago in the pit of my stomach came
back. Clearly it was more than just my uncles - other Ismailis drank
too? Somehow it was shocking to me. More and more visits to that and
other clubs turned the initial shock into bewildered familiarity and
finally into tired acceptance. It stopped shocking me as this was the
new normal: fewer Ismailis didn’t drink than did. It brought to mind a
quote from what of Hazar Imam’s speeches (Pakistan, 1976):

I have observed in the Western world a deeply changing pattern of
human relations. The anchors of moral behaviour appear to have dragged
to such depths that they no longer hold firm the ship of life: what
was once wrong is now simply unconventional, and for the sake of
individual freedom must be tolerated. What is tolerated soon becomes
accepted. Contrarily, what was once right is now viewed as outdated,
old fashioned and is often the target of ridicule….

I say that I accepted it but that doesn’t mean that I didn’t question
it. I closely questioned those Ismaili friends of mine who did drink
and they generally fell into three camps: (1) I know it’s bad but I’m
doing it anyways - it’s my personal choice; (2) I haven’t seen any
current farman recently condemning alcohol specifically in moderation
or small amounts; (3) our tariqah is not about dogma but about
intellect and we can use our intellect to make choices for ourselves.

Generally, whatever camp they were in, these conversations descended
into bitter accusations of judgement and so at some point I stopped
questioning people. I was content with my choice and, since the
majority of my friends didn’t drink, there was not a lot of pressure
to do so. A few people would offer me a sip of their cocktail -
including the Ismaili men I dated - but I was never very seriously
tempted. At the time, I didn’t realize how much of that strength came
from my support network of Ismailis who didn’t drink and what it would
mean for me when I left them behind.

**
There are some people who find contentment in life early. They love
their city, they have close friends and family nearby and never want
to leave the comfort of the life and place they found early. I had
more of a restless personality, I wanted to explore everywhere and try
new things and so in 2005 I had the opportunity to move to Europe and
I took it. I went with the motto: I’ll try anything once. If there’s
ox brain on the menu - I’ll try it. If there’s a new band playing -
I’ll go. If there’s a seat sale for a weekend in Bratislava - I’m
there. Allah’s creation is vast and full and I considered it worship
to discover more and more of it.

In the continent where beer and champagne were perfected I founded
myself tempted for the first time. I was surrounded by every kind of
booze known to humanity. The outings were all in bars - even at noon
on a Sunday or five o’clock in the afternoon and my new friends looked
at me like a martian when I ordered a coke. There was beer served in
the cafeteria and kept in the fridge at work. Beer and wine were
served at McDonalds. Beer was imbibed openly on the beach. 7-11’s sold
wine coolers. Every interaction with anyone started with a drink. I
went to a retreat where jägermeister shots were served at the
breakfast table with yogurt and cereal. It sometimes felt like I was
the only tea-toler in the continent. And ironically matters were made
far worse when an Ismaili aunty in my home town told my mother that
her daughter was moving to the little European city where I lived -
Sabrina (name changed for anonymity) and I became fast friends and
when I told her about my doubts she bought me my first cocktail: a
cosmopolitan.

Here is what I told her and my friends when I later justified my
decision: God’s creation is vast and complex and alcohol is and always
has been a part of it. If we truly want to explore God’s creation and
try everything - then alcohol is an experience that’s deeply enriching
to that and it’s a huge part of the experience of living the human
life. Everyone does it! Our faith is not a dogmatic one. Unlike other
faith traditions, our Imam expects us to rely heavily on our intellect
and make judgements for ourselves and he trusts out judgement. He
gives us guidance and then expects us to make an intelligent decision.
Just like children under 16 aren’t allowed behind a wheel - he has
made certain statements about alcohol - but it doesn’t mean that it
applies to everyone all the time. Perhaps it’s really just because
some people would become alcoholics and destroy their families but if
you try it at a certain age and make the decision that you can handle
it, then it’s up to your best judgement. Everything in moderation is
fine. And besides, I’ve heard plenty of farmans about social habits
but that’s probably referring to things like cocaine and heroin -
those are so much worse. There are many worse things that HazarImam
has to worry about than a few people having a drink once in a while
and not hurting anybody. And just one drink doesn’t affect you or hurt
you anyways. I’ve never heard a farman about drinking in moderation
being condemned. Besides, a lot of things are bad for your health -
like ladoo and ghulab jambu and not exercising and excess television -
a lot of people do that! And besides, a glass of wine a day is good
for your heart.

Not only did I say this to her, and to my friends but I also said this
to my young siblings before I bought them their first drinks.

Two days after my first drink with Sabrina, we got drunk in my living
room as she introduced me to three different kinds of wine. So much
for moderation.

**
After my time in Europe, I lived in a number of different cities in
the United States and Canada and I found little to move me from my
newfound position, mired as it was in inconsistencies and logical
flaws. In one city I made friends with some Ismailis who drank and
others that didn’t but nobody really questioned my behaviour or how I
reconciled my deep and abiding love for the Imam I had paid allegiance
to with my occasional drinking. I remember getting tipsy and then
going to morning jamatkhana soon afterwards. In another city I somehow
found no Ismailis who didn’t drink or maybe I made no effort to be
friendly with them. In this city, we would make plans to go drinking
in line for niaz and we’d make jamat khanathe landmark for where to
meet up to go for a drink. At the jamati sports fests, ski trips and
camps friends had to be carried back because they couldn’t stand
without support, I held the hair up of more than one friend while they
vomited alcohol-smelling puke into the toilet from drinking too much.
When my siblings would visit, I took them to the club with all my
Ismaili friends and we’d get raucously drunk - one sibling told me
that they never got so drunk as when they were with me.

When I think back to my drinking moments, I remember a lot of laughs
but I also recall a lot of the stupid and foolish things I did. I
remember tipsy texting or drunk dialing people and then apologizing
for it soon after. I remember saying mean things that just slipped
out. I remember puking in the lobby of a posh hotel and being asked to
leave. I remember losing my purse because I simply lost track of it in
my drunken state. I remember grilling a non-drinking Ismaili and
demanding to know why she didn’t drink and then cutting her off as a
friend afterwards, perhaps because I didn’t like how I felt around
her. I remember kissing more than one someone I should not have
kissed. I remember trying a cigarette and marijuana because it seemed
fun at the time. I remember my friends telling me the next day that
they stopped me from going into an alley with two strange men - I
don’t even remember doing it. One memory in particular sticks out in
my head: my friend had dropped me off in a cab and in the lobby of my
apartment building I met a neighbourwho was just moving in - he
offered to show me his brand new apartment - I happily agreed. At some
point when I was in the apartment of this stranger, a part of my
drunken mind woke up and told me to get out of there - it wasn’t easy
but I made it out and back to my apartment.

**
There were moments when a mirror was held up to my soul and I
questioned if what I was doing was right. They were seldom but
poignant.

I’ve been told that, at didar, Mowlana Hazar Imam looks into the face
of every single murid there and looks into their soul. In 2005 I felt
him look into my soul and felt so much love that I was walking on
clouds for weeks afterwards, filled with the glow of that love. In
2008, my didar experience was very different. When he looked into my
eyes, I felt his disappointment in me and, in the deepest and most
secret part of my heart, I knew why.

**
Years later I started dating an Ismaili man who did not drink but he
never judged or condemned me for drinking and he was always very
accepting. At some point we had a long conversation where I explained
my reasons for drinking. He disagreed with them and mentioned that
there were farmans wherein Mowlana Hazar Imam explicitly condemned any
amount of alcohol consumption. I had heard these claims before but no
farmanic proof had ever been presented so I asked him to prove it. He
was hesitant at first and asked me again if I was truly ready to see
them. I assured him that I was. I was sure that it would be a repeat
of the old farmans I had already heard on not engaging in “social
evils” (in my mind, hard drugs) and negative social behavior and on
the health deficits of alcoholism.

What I read was very different than what I had anticipated:

The document started with a sharp condemnation by early Imams and by
the Qur’an, including: Imam al-Baqirsaid “The drinker of alcohol will
appear on the Day of Judgment with his face blackened, his tongue
hanging out, screaming ‘The thirst, the thirst!’”

“That sounds kind of harsh” I joked uncomfortably. It seemed to me
that this was the kind of tone one takes with children who don’t have
the intellect to know their limits and must be told off lest they
overdo it. We have clearly evolved beyond that time period. But I kept
reading.

Then I came to the words of our previous Imam, Mowlana Shah Sultan
Mohammed Shah where he called it “the greatest of all sins” and said
that it may “seem minor”. And it wasn’t a sentence here or there that
could be taken out of context - the Imam continued at length for the
entire farman. He even called out those murids who would hear his
words and ignore them! My discomfort grew and my cognitive dissonance
was growing. In my head I tried to reconcile the two competing
feelings: one was my belief in the greater judgement of the Imamatand
the second was my belief that alcohol in moderation wasn’t so bad.
Here the Imam’s words weren’t about the health benefits or social ills
of alcohol - he was calling it a sin and I had to admit that his
insight into what is and isn’t a sin is obviously greater than mine.

My discomfort was now growing exponentially. My heart was racing. But
I kept reading.

Another farman of Mowlana Shah Sultan Mohammed Shah followed where he
continued at length to expound on alcohol as the “enemy” which
“approaches you as a friend”. Then he talked about the health problems
of alcohol - here I relaxed a little bit - of course I know it’s
unhealthy for my body but so is ladoo. However the wily Imam had
anticipated my search for a loophole and he continued, saying that it
will not just harm your body but will “kill your soul”. My heart sank.
So much for the ladoo loophole. Then the Imam beseeched his jamat that
if they could not quit at once - to try to quit slowly and he prayed
that we may be able to do so. I started to cry as I heard the concern
drenched in his words echoing back to me from 1953.

I wanted to stop. My boyfriend had asked me before if I was ready and
I had told him that I was… now he watched as I read on and encouraged
me to keep reading, holding my hand tightly and wiping my tears. So I
kept reading.

Another farman of Mowlana Shah sultan Mohammed Shah. I saw the words
in bold and my tears increased. The Imam anticipated the jamat
actually losing faith in him because he “always” tells us not to
drink. I cannot tell you the depth of my despair here. I cannot tell
you the depths of my grief and shame. I am Ismaili. I’m a believer. I
have given my baiyat to the Imam. I have promised him that I will take
his guidance seriously. I have acknowledged that he is the bearer of
the Nur of Allah. He has said that working for the Jamat is the
onlything of real significance he has done in his life. And as an
olympian billionaire who has graduated from Harvard and built up the
largest NGO in the world, that meant a lot. To think that I ignored
his words and instead searched for loopholes hurt more than I can say.

But my hurt would only deepen as I kept reading. Because his next
words were that our Imam’s heart was filled with “grief” and that he
wanted to cry at the thought of his murids drinking.

I started bawling uncontrollably.

My father was born in East Africa, when in the 70s, Idi Amin and other
leaders expelled South Asians from their countries. It was the work of
the Imamat that saved him and many others and brought them to the
West. My privileged existence is a direct result of the intervention
of my Imam. And he continues to work tirelessly for our benefit. I was
raised with a firm appreciation of the gratitude owed to our Imam and
with a knowledge that the entire premise of Shi’a Islam is that the
guidance of Muhammad continues until the end of time in the direct
line of descendants from Imam Ali.

His words made it obvious that alcohol is far more than just a health
or financial issue.

If I was under the impression that the guidance on alcohol ended after
the passing of Mowlana Shah Sultan Muhammad Shah, I was mistaken
because more farmans - this time by our current Imam, Mowlana Shah
Karim al-Hussaini followed. This farman was full of love for the
Jamat, saying that his guidance was only out of his love for the Jamat
and that he knew that certain members of the Jamat were indulging in
this and to stop it. This was stated unequivocally, in no uncertain
terms, with no wiggle room for moderation, with no loopholes allowed,
full stop. Indeed he called it “a sin against Islam.”

More farmans from our current Imam followed as he called it as “silly”
as “cut(ting) off your right hand”.

I was broken.

There were 23 pages of these directives and at page 10 or 12 I broke.

I noticed that he no longer used the word alcohol explicitly but that
the context established by the previous farmans, where he called
alcohol evil, made it obvious what he was referring to in later
farmans when he discussed “social evils”. How could I pretend that I
didn’t know what social evils he was referring to? There was no doubt.

And that was when I quit.

From my early twenties to my early thirties I indulged in this
behaviour and I admit freely that it was wrong and I pray that I will
have the strength to continue to keep myself from going back. But if
you think that, after my epiphany, it has been easy to stay away, you
have a higher impression of my strength than I deserve.

It hasn’t been easy.

I go to parties - with and without Ismailis where alcohol is free
flowing and where I’m questioned more by Ismailisthan non-Ismailis why
I don’t drink. I have friends who’ve made it clear they don’t really
want to spend time with me anymore. I’ve been to Ismaili open-bar
weddings. I went to a bar with Ismailis where one drunk Ismaili
gentleman with two children and a wife kept throwing ice chips at me
and tried to guilt trip me into just having “just one sip”. At that
same bar, another older Ismaili gentleman in his fifties tried to
convince me that Mowlana Hazar Imam is “just another average man like
us.” I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that alcohol is good
for your heart (so is grapejuice people - it’s the antioxidants!) And
sometimes it’s me - sometimes I just miss it: I sometimes miss the
buzz and the feeling of happy brainlessness.

But now when I hear the arguments I used to make, I want to cringe.
- Yes God’s creation is vast and complex and alcohol is and always has
been a part of it. But all kinds of temptation including heroin and
cocaine and murder are a part of human existence but we don’t have to
indulge in them all.
- Yes a lot of people do it - but there was a time when “slavery” was
considered acceptable by the law and there was a time when women were
second classcitizens and not even considered people. Just because a
lot of people do something, doesn’t make it right.

- Yes our faith is not a dogmatic one and many issues are not black
and white. But it’s not one empty of guidance, otherwise there would
be no point in having an Imam or a faith and if there is clear
guidance - it must be listened to. And by the way, even small amounts
of alcohol have a negative impact on your intellect so how can you
claim to use your intellect in this arena? Some things are black and
white - like thou shalt not kill.

- I won’t even bother with that drivers license stuff - I really don’t
think that makes any sense in the context of what the farmans said.

- The social habits farmans, in the context of the previous guidance,
are very clear about alcohol and other habits as well but alcohol is
very obviously included in there.

- Yes there are many things that Hazar Imam has to worry about beyond
people having a drink once in a while and I’m sure he worries about
them too but he’s clearly worried about Ismailis potentially drinking
and it’s hurting him to see it! Especially since drinking is so
ubiquitous and has clearly become insidiously commonplace. The Imam
has even warned us that alcohol can destroy the Jamat.

- Yes there are a lot of things that are bad for your health but the
farmans are clear that alcohol is prohibited for more than just its
health effects.

- Ok this glass of wine is good for your heart thing is stupid because
many things have the exact same effect -- grape juice for example. Is
it really being used medicinally?

I have shown the farmans to my family and I hope that they will come
to a similar epiphany as I did. Even though I wish I could go back in
time and change my former behaviour I pray to be forgiven and I hope
that my story helps others realize that they’re not alone. That there
is a lot of pressure out there (some of it is my fault - sorry) but
there’s room to listen to the guidance that is out there and make a
change. And I hope that you will send my story to everyone you know
and that people will push to have these farmans read out with greater
frequency and to have sessions addressing this. My parents still don’t
know that I ever drank even though I have stopped. So - parents out
there - don’t think this isn’t your issue. I could be your child. I
could be you.
agakhani_1
Posts: 278
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Post by agakhani_1 »

Very interesting story from an Ismaili girl , who stopped drinking! I wish I had her # so I could have personally called her and congratulated her after reading her post and farmans of our imams.
I hope after reading those farmans of our current and past imams: no Ismaili should have to start drinking in theor younget age with their younger freinds,and if they already has started then they have to stop it taking example of this unknown sister.
I like this and more stories liie this kinds which can help readers to stop bad habits.
Admin
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Joined: Mon Jan 06, 2003 10:37 am
Contact:

Post by Admin »

I think you need a lot of courage to write this kind of story and it is nice to see the different steps and thinking leading to her recognizing her priorities and her values.
agakhani_1
Posts: 278
Joined: Wed May 20, 2015 7:57 am

Post by agakhani_1 »

Very interesting story from an Ismaili girl , who stopped drinking! I wish I had her # so I could had personally called her and congratulated her after reading his post and farmans of our imams.
I hope after reading those farmans of our current and past imams all should not start drinking and if at first and if ayone already has started then he/she should stop it.
I like this and more stories liie this.
kmaherali
Posts: 25107
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

Post by kmaherali »

Alcohol’s Unexpected Effect on Memory and Learning

Surprisingly, alcohol is not bad for all types of memory.

Alcohol can actually help some areas of the brain learn and remember.

While it’s true that alcohol is generally bad for conscious memory, it can boost unconscious memory.

This may help explain why alcohol — and other drugs — can be so habit-forming.

Dr Hitoshi Morikawa, an addiction researcher, said:


“Usually, when we talk about learning and memory, we’re talking about conscious memory.

Alcohol diminishes our ability to hold on to pieces of information like your colleague’s name, or the definition of a word, or where you parked your car this morning.

But our subconscious is learning and remembering too, and alcohol may actually increase our capacity to learn, or ‘conditionability’.”

Dr Morikawa and colleagues reached this conclusion by exposing mice to alcohol and examining synaptic plasticity in key areas of the brain.

They found that with repeated exposure, the plasticity increased — indicating learning.

The unconscious, though, is learning more than just that drinking feels good.

It is learning a whole constellation of behavioral, environmental and social triggers.

For example, it is learning that particular music, people and places are linked to a surge of pleasure.

Neurobiologically, this means the brain is releasing dopamine, says Dr Morikawa:

“People commonly think of dopamine as a happy transmitter, or a pleasure transmitter, but more accurately it’s a learning transmitter.

It strengthens those synapses that are active when dopamine is released.”

As the drinking is repeated again in the same context, the brain becomes more sensitive to this situation.

In other words: it learns to enjoy the drinking more and more.

Treating alcoholism, and other addictions, is partly about picking apart this web of situations and emotions.

Dr Morikawa said:

“We’re talking about de-wiring things.

It’s kind of scary because it has the potential to be a mind controlling substance.

Our goal, though, is to reverse the mind controlling aspects of addictive drugs.”

The study was published in The Journal of Neuroscience (Bernier et al., 2011).

http://www.spring.org.uk/2015/06/alcoho ... arning.php
kmaherali
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Post by kmaherali »

When Prostitution Is Nobody’s Business

Moral and political philosophers distinguish among different forms of privacy: physical, informational and decisional. When it comes to sex, we tend to have a strong expectation that we’ll be granted all three.

Physical privacy involves having access to a space, on a permanent or temporary basis, where we are permitted to do things, sexual or otherwise, without being viewed by others. Informational privacy grants a reasonable amount of control over who has access to our personal information, including information about our sexual lives, habits and partners. Decisional privacy is having freedom from undue interference from others in the decisions we make about our lives, and people commonly want to make decisions about their sexual activities and relationships without such interference from family members, friends, co-workers or governments.

By contrast, other social relations, such as market transactions, come with different expectations of privacy. Commerce typically takes place in public venues, and we expect there to be informational transparency about the goods and services we purchase. We often want market transactions to be scrutinized or regulated by third parties in order to insure that they are fair and equitable, especially when full transparency is not available, as in the cases of pharmaceuticals, health care and real estate. So for the greater good, all three types of privacy are limited during market transactions in ways that would be unreasonable in regard to private sexual activity.

But when sex and commerce meet, the rules regarding sexual and market privacy quickly get murky. For example, should exchanges of sexual services for monetary gain take place with guarantees of privacy or transparency? If the former, then we expect them to be free from the intrusion of others. If the latter, then we expect them to be subject to social regulation. But where, exactly, is the border between the private exchange of money or gifts and the impersonal profit-making of the market?

When sexual partners exchange money and gifts between themselves, we generally see this as a private exchange. However, what do we do if a person has several sexual partners, and regularly receives money and gifts from each of them? Traditionally, a woman who had more than one sex partner from whom she received various forms of material support was likely to have been regarded as a “public woman,” that is, a prostitute, whore or sex worker. Although there has been significant social tolerance historically for men who have and support multiple mistresses, moral disapprobation for women who have multiple lovers has resulted in laws in which women who have several sex partners from whom they accept gifts can face arrest for prostitution.

Can we really draw a bright line between a person who has casual sex, in private, with various lovers, and a person who has sex in private, with various short-term and long-term lovers, from whom she accepts monetary support?

Having multiple, casual or ongoing partners from whom one receives monetary support is not the same as running a brothel, or setting up a home business that advertises publicly and accepts customers based on their ability to pay. Yet the line between these kinds of activities may be hard, at times, to make out. For example, should a person who is, say, polyamorous, and has multiple lovers who economically support her, have a right to physical, informational and decisional privacy in regards to her sex life?

Consider the case of Brandy Britton, a former university professor and mother who was separated from her abusive husband. Britton sought dates and accepted gifts from men whom she entertained in her home, with a goal of staving off the foreclosure of her house. In 2006, she was subject to an undercover arrest and charged with four counts of prostitution. A week before she was to be tried in court, she committed suicide.

Or consider that some young women today choose to seek “sugar daddies,” typically well-off men who can help them pay their college tuition and living expenses, by using online dating sites. In exchange, the women offer these men companionship and other forms of intimacy. Should the activities of these women, or Britton, be treated as a form of prostitution, which is a criminal offense in the United States?

Laws and customs in America have evolved to the point where fewer consenting adults are charged with a crime when they privately engage in nonmarital sex. Laws against adultery have mostly been repealed or are unenforced. Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972) recognized the right of unmarried people to have access to contraception, and therefore to engage in nonprocreative sex. Lawrence v. Texas invalidated state anti-sodomy statutes that targeted private, consensual, same-sex intimacy between adults.

Can we really draw a bright line between a person who has casual sex, in private, with various lovers, and a person who has sex in private, with various short-term and long-term lovers, from whom she accepts monetary support? Dating couples often exchange money and gifts. Such exchanges of money do not transform their relationships into business transactions.

Anita Allen has argued that when people belong to groups that have been socially stigmatized, they often find it more difficult to defend and demand respect for their privacy, particularly in courts of law. For example, women, African-Americans, lesbians and gay men, the disabled, the poor or working class, and especially people at the intersection of two or more of these categories often lose in court when their privacy rights have been violated. Promiscuous, unmarried women and girls are often publicly shamed as “sluts,” and denied their rights to privacy when others morally disapprove of their lifestyle. Although men also perform sex work, they are rarely subject to arrest or detention, or in other words, invasions of their sexual privacy.

When we describe the activities of someone like Britton or the dating “sugar babies” as “selling sex” or performing “sex work,” we place their activities in the public sphere. While these women may have sexual relations with a number of short- and long-term boyfriends or girlfriends who give them gifts of money, they are not formally employed as sex workers in a commercial establishment, nor are they running a business. Services provided in the home or other private spaces are typically understood differently than labor performed in spaces designated for commerce or under contract with an employer. Why should this be different when sex is involved?

In a liberal, democratic society, our basic right to privacy and equal treatment under the law should protect people like Britton when they do not harm others and are not a public nuisance.

If the state were to stop prosecuting women who provide intimate companionship for their one or many lovers, who in turn pay their bills, it does not follow that the state would then have to grant licenses to businesses offering sexual companions on a commercial basis. Commercial and publicly visible exchanges of personal sexual services present different kinds of moral issues. Would such businesses be of value to society, and could the rights of all involved and uninvolved parties be protected? With informal arrangements in our home, where we have a legitimate expectation of sexual privacy, these questions are less relevant.

Moreover, if the state were to stop prosecuting people like Britton for socializing with a flow of lovers in private, this does not entail that we should tolerate people having sex in cars, on the streets or in other public places. People can relieve themselves in a variety of ways in private, which we do not allow in the street. Whether anyone would want to live next door to a person like Britton is a different matter than whether her lifestyle should be criminalized. Surely she could be subject to the same nuisance laws, community rules and norms of politeness as anyone else. This should be sufficient to keep relations among neighbors peaceful and respectful. Some people have swinger parties in their homes without provoking the ire of their neighbors. But if they do offend, complaints are usually handled in a civil, rather than criminal, context.

In a liberal, democratic society, our basic right to privacy and equal treatment under the law should protect people like Britton when they do not harm others and are not a public nuisance. Such a change in our response to private, sexual activities would align our policies with those in Britain and other countries that have adopted the British model, where providing sex for money and offering money for sex are not crimes, as long as these activities take place in private.

This is a different model than the Swedish one, which criminalizes offering money for sex, or the Dutch “harm reduction model,” which permits and regulates commercial sex work establishments. These models have had mixed success in protecting the safety and dignity of sex workers, or in stopping trafficking and nonconsensual sex work.

This week, participants in an Amnesty International council meeting in Dublin are considering a proposal to endorse the decriminalization of consensual paid sex between adults. The proposal has elements of the both the British model, which rests on the idea that consensual sex between adults should be protected from state interference, and the Dutch model, which is based on the idea that criminalizing paid sex generates more harm than good. The policy draft I read emphasizes the organization’s longstanding commitment to end trafficking, and to insure that, where paid sex exists, it is voluntary and safe.

Yet some prominent feminist groups have organized to oppose Amnesty International’s proposed policy and to endorse the Swedish model of prohibition. Their opposition is based on the assumption that acts of paid sex are inevitably coercive and that the state should intervene in private sexual acts between adults to protect vulnerable people.

The first assumption has been strongly challenged by many sex worker civil and labor rights groups, and the second assumption is subject to the objection that it is overly paternalistic toward adult women. Moreover, opponents to Amnesty International’s proposed policy overlook the fact that it remains neutral on the question of whether there should be public establishments for the purpose of buying and selling sex.

Amnesty International’s proposed policy, like the British model, offers an intermediate step that recognizes that an act, such as sex exchanged for monetary support, can have different meanings depending on its context.

Either of these policies, if implemented, would change the way we respond to cases of people like Brandy Britton and the women seeking sugar daddies through online dating, whose activities deserve protection under contemporary moral and legal understandings of “privacy.”

While we might believe that having sex for money is neither wise nor good, democratic and free societies now allow adults—married or unmarried—to make their own choices regarding why and with whom they have sex. It’s time to stop policing the private, consensual sex lives of adult women who support themselves in morally unconventional ways.

Laurie Shrage is a professor of philosophy and women’s and gender studies at Florida International University. She is currently a visiting fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/20 ... ef=opinion
kmaherali
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Post by kmaherali »

ISIS Enshrines a Theology of Rape

QADIYA, Iraq — In the moments before he raped the 12-year-old girl, the Islamic State fighter took the time to explain that what he was about to do was not a sin. Because the preteen girl practiced a religion other than Islam, the Quran not only gave him the right to rape her — it condoned and encouraged it, he insisted.

He bound her hands and gagged her. Then he knelt beside the bed and prostrated himself in prayer before getting on top of her.

When it was over, he knelt to pray again, bookending the rape with acts of religious devotion.

“I kept telling him it hurts — please stop,” said the girl, whose body is so small an adult could circle her waist with two hands. “He told me that according to Islam he is allowed to rape an unbeliever. He said that by raping me, he is drawing closer to God,” she said in an interview alongside her family in a refugee camp here, to which she escaped after

The systematic rape of women and girls from the Yazidi religious minority has become deeply enmeshed in the organization and the radical theology of the Islamic State in the year since the group announced it was reviving slavery as an institution. Interviews with 21 women and girls who recently escaped the Islamic State, as well as an examination of the group’s official communications, illuminate how the practice has been enshrined in the group’s core tenets.

More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/14/world ... d=45305309
kmaherali
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Post by kmaherali »

Clashing Views on E-Cigarettes

A British government agency has issued a bullish assessment of the value of electronic cigarettes in helping people to quit smoking. It found that e-cigarettes can reduce the health risks of smoking by 95 percent because they deliver nicotine to satisfy an addiction, but far fewer harmful chemicals than regular cigarettes. It also found little evidence that large numbers of consumers who had never smoked were taking up e-cigarettes. That seemed to challenge the notion that e-cigarettes would be a gateway to more dangerous products.

But the study is hardly definitive; experts in America have drawn different conclusions on usage and on the gateway issue.

The British assessment, commissioned by Public Health England and conducted by academic experts, was cautious in its claims. It noted that the best results are obtained when e-cigarettes are used in combination with professional counseling and smoking-cessation medication.

In the United States, according to the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, e-cigarette use by young people has grown more rapidly than in Britain. The user population includes many children who have never smoked and thus may be vulnerable to being hooked by nicotine and later moving to traditional cigarettes.

By coincidence, a day before the British study was issued, a study tracking more than 2,500 students at 10 Los Angeles schools who had never smoked tobacco, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, came to the opposite conclusion. It said ninth graders who had tried e-cigarettes were far more likely than other students to start smoking “combustible tobacco” (cigarettes, cigars, hookahs) within a year.

Strong regulation is needed in Europe and the United States to protect young people from advertising and promotions designed to lure them into trying e-cigarettes and perhaps getting hooked on them. America’s Food and Drug Administration needs to issue rules it proposed last year and make them even stronger by banning flavors that appeal to youngsters.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/24/opini ... 05309&_r=0
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