Buying Sex Should Not Be Legal
DUBLIN — HERE in my city, earlier this month, Amnesty International’s international council endorsed a new policy calling for the decriminalization of the global sex trade. Its proponents argue that decriminalizing prostitution is the best way of protecting “the human rights of sex workers,” though the policy would apply equally to pimps, brothel-keepers and johns.
Amnesty’s stated aim is to remove the stigma from prostituted women, so that they will be less vulnerable to abuse by criminals operating in the shadows. The group is also calling on governments “to ensure that sex workers enjoy full and equal legal protection from exploitation, trafficking and violence.”
The Amnesty vote comes in the context of a prolonged international debate about how to deal with prostitution and protect the interests of so-called sex workers. It is a debate in which I have a personal stake — and I believe Amnesty is making a historic mistake.
I entered the sex trade — as most do — before I was even a woman. At age 14, I was placed in the care of the state after my father committed suicide and because my mother suffered from mental illness.
Within a year, I was on the streets with no home, education or job skills. All I had was my body. At 15, I met a young man who thought it would be a good idea for me to prostitute myself. As “fresh meat,” I was a commodity in high demand.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/29/opini ... pe=article[/b]
Social Evils
OxyContin Is Not for Kids
Montpelier, Vt. — A YEAR and a half ago, I stood up before Vermonters and devoted my State of the State address to speaking about the opiate and heroin crisis affecting my state. Despite our best efforts since, this is not a battle we are winning. Now the Food and Drug Administration is recklessly making the problem worse with its decision to approve OxyContin for use by children as young as 11 years old.
.....
Ms. Lowell, a mother and small business owner, was first prescribed opioid painkillers in 2006 for back pain. According to her, she became addicted almost immediately. As with so many who suffer from addiction, Ms. Lowell became an addict hard and fast, losing her business and watching her life deteriorate before her eyes.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/21/opini ... d=45305309
Montpelier, Vt. — A YEAR and a half ago, I stood up before Vermonters and devoted my State of the State address to speaking about the opiate and heroin crisis affecting my state. Despite our best efforts since, this is not a battle we are winning. Now the Food and Drug Administration is recklessly making the problem worse with its decision to approve OxyContin for use by children as young as 11 years old.
.....
Ms. Lowell, a mother and small business owner, was first prescribed opioid painkillers in 2006 for back pain. According to her, she became addicted almost immediately. As with so many who suffer from addiction, Ms. Lowell became an addict hard and fast, losing her business and watching her life deteriorate before her eyes.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/21/opini ... d=45305309
Sex Assaults on Campus
To the Editor:
“1 in 4 Women Experience Sex Assault on Campus” (news article, Sept. 22) nails down this appalling fact.
Studies have shown that at least half of women and men said they had been drinking before these assaults. More than 1,800 college students a year die of alcohol poisoning and alcohol-related injuries, almost five every day.
Over the last 10 years this has become an epidemic of binge drinking, mostly killing men. What to do?
Most campuses have powerful female students’ resistance groups against sexual violence and rape. There are also less cohesive efforts of administrators to decrease binge drinking. These two movements are rarely, if ever, joined in policy or practice.
Isn’t it about time to have them work together explicitly, women and men, in a unified front that will save our children’s lives?
STEPHEN J. BERGMAN
Newton, Mass.
The writer is a professor of medicine in medical humanities at N.Y.U. Medical School and the author of the play “Bill W. and Dr. Bob” under the pen name Samuel Shem.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/03/opini ... ef=opinion
To the Editor:
“1 in 4 Women Experience Sex Assault on Campus” (news article, Sept. 22) nails down this appalling fact.
Studies have shown that at least half of women and men said they had been drinking before these assaults. More than 1,800 college students a year die of alcohol poisoning and alcohol-related injuries, almost five every day.
Over the last 10 years this has become an epidemic of binge drinking, mostly killing men. What to do?
Most campuses have powerful female students’ resistance groups against sexual violence and rape. There are also less cohesive efforts of administrators to decrease binge drinking. These two movements are rarely, if ever, joined in policy or practice.
Isn’t it about time to have them work together explicitly, women and men, in a unified front that will save our children’s lives?
STEPHEN J. BERGMAN
Newton, Mass.
The writer is a professor of medicine in medical humanities at N.Y.U. Medical School and the author of the play “Bill W. and Dr. Bob” under the pen name Samuel Shem.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/03/opini ... ef=opinion
Addicts in Kyrgyzstan Fight to Break Heroin’s Grip, Armed With Stones
Excerpt:
A surprising number of people speak to rocks here in Bishkek, the capital of the Central Asian nation of Kyrgyzstan, which lies along heroin smuggling routes from Afghanistan into Russia and deeper into Europe. Rocks have become an integral element in a treatment method for heroin addiction called lithotherapy.
At the Nazaraliev Medical Center, a clinic that has pioneered the approach, twitching, tattooed addicts pad about in pajamas, toting their rocks to and from therapy sessions.
Though at first blush all this appears cartoonish — perhaps reminiscent of the Pet Rock fad in the 1970s — treating heroin addiction here and throughout the former Soviet countries has taken on a life-or-death urgency as addiction rates rise.
Doctors at the center found that men from Central Asia’s conservative, Muslim culture were reluctant to admit their addiction in group therapy, a common way to help drug addicts begin to overcome their dependence. But it was discovered that they opened up nicely to rocks.
More...
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/10/21/wo ... .html?_r=0
Excerpt:
A surprising number of people speak to rocks here in Bishkek, the capital of the Central Asian nation of Kyrgyzstan, which lies along heroin smuggling routes from Afghanistan into Russia and deeper into Europe. Rocks have become an integral element in a treatment method for heroin addiction called lithotherapy.
At the Nazaraliev Medical Center, a clinic that has pioneered the approach, twitching, tattooed addicts pad about in pajamas, toting their rocks to and from therapy sessions.
Though at first blush all this appears cartoonish — perhaps reminiscent of the Pet Rock fad in the 1970s — treating heroin addiction here and throughout the former Soviet countries has taken on a life-or-death urgency as addiction rates rise.
Doctors at the center found that men from Central Asia’s conservative, Muslim culture were reluctant to admit their addiction in group therapy, a common way to help drug addicts begin to overcome their dependence. But it was discovered that they opened up nicely to rocks.
More...
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/10/21/wo ... .html?_r=0
Meet a 21st-Century Slave
KATHMANDU, Nepal — WHEN readers hear about “modern slavery” in America or abroad, they may roll their eyes and assume that’s an exaggeration. Slavery? Really? Modern slavery?
If you’re one of the doubters, then listen to Poonam Thapa, a teenage girl I met here in Nepal, where she is putting her life back together after being sold to a brothel.
And if you think, as Amnesty International suggested recently, that the solution is to decriminalize the commercial sex trade around the world, then pay special heed.
Poonam was poor and uneducated when a woman offered an escape in the form of a well-paying job. “You can have a better life,” Poonam remembers the woman saying. “And if you make good money, you will be respected by your father. You can help your family.”
So Poonam, then age 12, ran off with the woman. When Poonam was eventually deposited in a brothel in Mumbai, India, she was puzzled. “I didn’t even know what a brothel was,” she recalls.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/opini ... d=45305309
KATHMANDU, Nepal — WHEN readers hear about “modern slavery” in America or abroad, they may roll their eyes and assume that’s an exaggeration. Slavery? Really? Modern slavery?
If you’re one of the doubters, then listen to Poonam Thapa, a teenage girl I met here in Nepal, where she is putting her life back together after being sold to a brothel.
And if you think, as Amnesty International suggested recently, that the solution is to decriminalize the commercial sex trade around the world, then pay special heed.
Poonam was poor and uneducated when a woman offered an escape in the form of a well-paying job. “You can have a better life,” Poonam remembers the woman saying. “And if you make good money, you will be respected by your father. You can help your family.”
So Poonam, then age 12, ran off with the woman. When Poonam was eventually deposited in a brothel in Mumbai, India, she was puzzled. “I didn’t even know what a brothel was,” she recalls.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/opini ... d=45305309
How the Epidemic of Drug Overdose
Deaths Ripples Across America
Deaths from drug overdoses have jumped in nearly every county across the United States, driven largely by an explosion in addiction to prescription painkillers and heroin.
Some of the largest concentrations of overdose deaths were in Appalachia and the Southwest, according to new county-level estimates released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The number of these deaths reached a new peak in 2014: 47,055 people, or the equivalent of about 125 Americans every day.
Deaths from overdoses are
reaching levels similar to the
H.I.V. epidemic at its peak.
The death rate from drug overdoses is climbing at a much faster pace than other causes of death, jumping to an average of 15 per 100,000 in 2014 from nine per 100,000 in 2003.
The trend is now similar to that of the human immunodeficiency virus, or H.I.V., epidemic in the late 1980s and early 1990s, said Robert Anderson, the C.D.C.’s chief of mortality statistics.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016 ... d=71987722
Deaths Ripples Across America
Deaths from drug overdoses have jumped in nearly every county across the United States, driven largely by an explosion in addiction to prescription painkillers and heroin.
Some of the largest concentrations of overdose deaths were in Appalachia and the Southwest, according to new county-level estimates released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The number of these deaths reached a new peak in 2014: 47,055 people, or the equivalent of about 125 Americans every day.
Deaths from overdoses are
reaching levels similar to the
H.I.V. epidemic at its peak.
The death rate from drug overdoses is climbing at a much faster pace than other causes of death, jumping to an average of 15 per 100,000 in 2014 from nine per 100,000 in 2003.
The trend is now similar to that of the human immunodeficiency virus, or H.I.V., epidemic in the late 1980s and early 1990s, said Robert Anderson, the C.D.C.’s chief of mortality statistics.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016 ... d=71987722
Can Shame Be Useful?
MODERN American culture is down on shame — it is, we are told, a damaging, useless emotion that we should neither feel ourselves nor make others feel. This is particularly the case when it comes to drug and alcohol addiction. The nation’s drug czar, Michael Botticelli, has led a well-intentioned campaign to eradicate feelings of shame in addicted people by, in part, likening addiction to cancer, a disease outside of people’s control.
But in fact, the experience of shame — the feeling that one has failed to live up to one’s own standards — can play a positive role in recovery from addiction, as well as from other kinds of destructive habits.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/24/opini ... 87722&_r=0
MODERN American culture is down on shame — it is, we are told, a damaging, useless emotion that we should neither feel ourselves nor make others feel. This is particularly the case when it comes to drug and alcohol addiction. The nation’s drug czar, Michael Botticelli, has led a well-intentioned campaign to eradicate feelings of shame in addicted people by, in part, likening addiction to cancer, a disease outside of people’s control.
But in fact, the experience of shame — the feeling that one has failed to live up to one’s own standards — can play a positive role in recovery from addiction, as well as from other kinds of destructive habits.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/24/opini ... 87722&_r=0
Her Father Shot Her in the Head, as an ‘Honor Killing’
WHETHER it wins or not, the Oscar nominee with the greatest impact — saving lives of perhaps thousands of girls — may be one you’ve never heard of.
It stars not Leonardo DiCaprio but a real-life 19-year-old Pakistani woman named Saba Qaiser. Her odyssey began when she fell in love against her family’s wishes and ran off to marry her boyfriend. Hours after the marriage, her father and uncle sweet-talked her into their car and took her to a spot along a riverbank to murder her for her defiance — an “honor killing.”
First they beat Saba, then her uncle held her as her own father pointed a pistol at her head and pulled the trigger. Blood spewed, Saba collapsed and her father and uncle packed her body into a large sack and threw it into the river to sink. They then drove away, thinking they had restored the family’s good name.
Incredibly, Saba was unconscious but alive. She had jerked her head as the gun went off, and the bullet tore through the left side of her face but didn’t kill her. The river water revived her, and she clawed her way out of the sack and crawled onto land. She staggered toward a gasoline station, and someone called for help.
About every 90 minutes, an honor killing unfolds somewhere in the world, usually in a Muslim country. Pakistan alone has more than 1,000 a year, and the killers often go unpunished.
Watching the documentary about Saba, “A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness,” I kept thinking that just as in the 19th century the central moral challenge for the world was slavery, and in the 20th century it was totalitarianism, in this century the foremost moral issue is the abuse and oppression that is the lot of so many women and girls around the world.
I don’t know whether “A Girl in the River” will win an Oscar in its category, short subject documentary, but it is already making a difference. Citing the film, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif of Pakistan has promised to change the country’s laws so as to crack down on honor killings.
Saba’s story underscores how the existing law lets people literally get away with murder when honor is the excuse. After doctors saved Saba’s life — as police officers guarded the door so her father didn’t return to finish the job — she was determined to prosecute her father and uncle.
“They should be shot in public in an open market,” she told the filmmaker, Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, “so that such a thing never happens again.”
The police arrested Saba’s father, Maqsood, and the uncle, Muhammad, and their defense was that they did the right thing.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/31/opini ... ef=opinion
WHETHER it wins or not, the Oscar nominee with the greatest impact — saving lives of perhaps thousands of girls — may be one you’ve never heard of.
It stars not Leonardo DiCaprio but a real-life 19-year-old Pakistani woman named Saba Qaiser. Her odyssey began when she fell in love against her family’s wishes and ran off to marry her boyfriend. Hours after the marriage, her father and uncle sweet-talked her into their car and took her to a spot along a riverbank to murder her for her defiance — an “honor killing.”
First they beat Saba, then her uncle held her as her own father pointed a pistol at her head and pulled the trigger. Blood spewed, Saba collapsed and her father and uncle packed her body into a large sack and threw it into the river to sink. They then drove away, thinking they had restored the family’s good name.
Incredibly, Saba was unconscious but alive. She had jerked her head as the gun went off, and the bullet tore through the left side of her face but didn’t kill her. The river water revived her, and she clawed her way out of the sack and crawled onto land. She staggered toward a gasoline station, and someone called for help.
About every 90 minutes, an honor killing unfolds somewhere in the world, usually in a Muslim country. Pakistan alone has more than 1,000 a year, and the killers often go unpunished.
Watching the documentary about Saba, “A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness,” I kept thinking that just as in the 19th century the central moral challenge for the world was slavery, and in the 20th century it was totalitarianism, in this century the foremost moral issue is the abuse and oppression that is the lot of so many women and girls around the world.
I don’t know whether “A Girl in the River” will win an Oscar in its category, short subject documentary, but it is already making a difference. Citing the film, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif of Pakistan has promised to change the country’s laws so as to crack down on honor killings.
Saba’s story underscores how the existing law lets people literally get away with murder when honor is the excuse. After doctors saved Saba’s life — as police officers guarded the door so her father didn’t return to finish the job — she was determined to prosecute her father and uncle.
“They should be shot in public in an open market,” she told the filmmaker, Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, “so that such a thing never happens again.”
The police arrested Saba’s father, Maqsood, and the uncle, Muhammad, and their defense was that they did the right thing.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/31/opini ... ef=opinion
‘It’s Genital Genocide’
Like many young girls, Leyla Hussein didn’t learn that she was going to have to undergo female genital mutilation until the day she was cut. She was born in Somalia and raised in Saudi Arabia and Italy but moved back to her homeland, where cutting is common, at age seven. “It was actually my next door neighbor’s daughter that told me when I realized there was a big party taking place in the house,” Leyla says. “She was telling me part of my vagina was going to be taken away. While she’s explaining I could hear this screaming inside of the house, which was my sister being cut.”
Leyla is now a prominent anti-FGM campaigner in Britain, where a documentary film about her crusade, The Cruel Cut, led to a Parliamentary inquiry, and public outrage fueled a requirement that health professionals report FGM cases. She’s also a psychotherapist who founded the Dahlia Project, which counsels women who have been cut. FGM involves removing part or all of the genitals of babies or young girls. It is most common in sub-Saharan Africa and the Arab states, though immigrants and their daughters are often subject to the practice.
Here is an excerpted Q&A with Leyla, edited for clarity.
More...
http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/0 ... 05309&_r=0
Like many young girls, Leyla Hussein didn’t learn that she was going to have to undergo female genital mutilation until the day she was cut. She was born in Somalia and raised in Saudi Arabia and Italy but moved back to her homeland, where cutting is common, at age seven. “It was actually my next door neighbor’s daughter that told me when I realized there was a big party taking place in the house,” Leyla says. “She was telling me part of my vagina was going to be taken away. While she’s explaining I could hear this screaming inside of the house, which was my sister being cut.”
Leyla is now a prominent anti-FGM campaigner in Britain, where a documentary film about her crusade, The Cruel Cut, led to a Parliamentary inquiry, and public outrage fueled a requirement that health professionals report FGM cases. She’s also a psychotherapist who founded the Dahlia Project, which counsels women who have been cut. FGM involves removing part or all of the genitals of babies or young girls. It is most common in sub-Saharan Africa and the Arab states, though immigrants and their daughters are often subject to the practice.
Here is an excerpted Q&A with Leyla, edited for clarity.
More...
http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/0 ... 05309&_r=0
Medicines to Keep Addiction Away
America’s drug crisis, which now kills more people each day than car crashes or gun violence, has challenged the conventional wisdom about recovery. With addiction inside the homes of families who thought themselves immune, we are starting to embrace the idea that addiction is a not a character flaw but a chronic disease requiring long-term management — the subject of last week’s Fixes column.
This week, another idea whose time has come: trying to kick opioid addiction without medicines is as smart as relying on willpower to overcome diabetes or asthma. Medicines greatly increase the chance of success and reduce the risk of death.
More..
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/20 ... d=71987722
********
This child marriage video should enrage you
28 minor girls are forcefully married off around the world every minute.
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/video/news/thi ... lsignoutmd
********
Turkey's People Smugglers
People traffickers in Turkey have boasted to Sky News that NATO warships won't be able to stop the flow of migrants across the Aegean Sea to Europe. They spoke to Sky's Alex Rossi.
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/video/news/tur ... lsignoutmd
America’s drug crisis, which now kills more people each day than car crashes or gun violence, has challenged the conventional wisdom about recovery. With addiction inside the homes of families who thought themselves immune, we are starting to embrace the idea that addiction is a not a character flaw but a chronic disease requiring long-term management — the subject of last week’s Fixes column.
This week, another idea whose time has come: trying to kick opioid addiction without medicines is as smart as relying on willpower to overcome diabetes or asthma. Medicines greatly increase the chance of success and reduce the risk of death.
More..
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/20 ... d=71987722
********
This child marriage video should enrage you
28 minor girls are forcefully married off around the world every minute.
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/video/news/thi ... lsignoutmd
********
Turkey's People Smugglers
People traffickers in Turkey have boasted to Sky News that NATO warships won't be able to stop the flow of migrants across the Aegean Sea to Europe. They spoke to Sky's Alex Rossi.
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/video/news/tur ... lsignoutmd
Slave Labor on the High Seas
Shocking revelations about the international fishing industry’s reliance on slave labor have caused many people to question the origin of the shrimp or tuna they eat. The disclosures have also led the United States to take some important new steps to clamp down on the use of indentured workers and discourage other unlawful activities on the high seas.
President Obama is expected to sign legislation that effectively bans American imports of fish caught by forced labor in Southeast Asia. The bill, passed by Congress this month, would close a loophole in the Tariff Act of 1930 that prohibits imports made by convicts or forced labor but exempts such goods if American domestic production could not meet demand. Now that is expected to end. The president recently signed an agreement allowing officials to deny port services to foreign vessels suspected of illegal fishing.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/21/opini ... pe=article
Shocking revelations about the international fishing industry’s reliance on slave labor have caused many people to question the origin of the shrimp or tuna they eat. The disclosures have also led the United States to take some important new steps to clamp down on the use of indentured workers and discourage other unlawful activities on the high seas.
President Obama is expected to sign legislation that effectively bans American imports of fish caught by forced labor in Southeast Asia. The bill, passed by Congress this month, would close a loophole in the Tariff Act of 1930 that prohibits imports made by convicts or forced labor but exempts such goods if American domestic production could not meet demand. Now that is expected to end. The president recently signed an agreement allowing officials to deny port services to foreign vessels suspected of illegal fishing.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/21/opini ... pe=article
Raise the Legal Age for Cigarette Sales to 21
California could soon raise the legal age for buying cigarettes and other tobacco products to 21, from 18. That change could help prevent many young people from becoming addicted and reduce premature deaths from lung cancer and other tobacco-related diseases.
The California Assembly last week joined the State Senate in passing a package of bills that would raise the age; regulate electronic cigarettes in the same ways as conventional cigarettes, including restricting where they can be used; and allow local governments to impose taxes on tobacco products.
The bills now go back to the Senate for final passage. Gov. Jerry Brown should sign these measures, because they would significantly improve public health. In addition, residents of the state will get to vote in November on increasing the statewide tax on cigarettes by $2 per pack.
Last year, Hawaii became the first state to pass a law to raise the legal age for purchasing tobacco to 21. More than 100 cities and counties, including Boston, New York City and Suffolk County in Long Island have also adopted the policy. Four states — Alabama, Alaska, New Jersey and Utah — set the legal age at 19, and the rest set it at 18. Unfortunately, in January, Gov. Chris Christie vetoed legislation that would have changed New Jersey’s legal sale age to 21.
The biggest reason to raise the legal age to 21 is to reduce young people’s access to tobacco when they are more likely to become addicted and when their brains are still developing. Studies have found that nicotine, the main addictive ingredient in cigarettes, can impair cognition among young people. About 90 percent of adult smokers first use cigarettes before turning 19, and almost all smokers start before age 26, according to an Institute of Medicine study published last year.
The study also found that raising the age to 21 nationwide would reduce access to cigarettes for people under 18, because most children get tobacco from slightly older friends and relatives. Over all, the study concluded that changing the age to 21 should prevent 223,000 premature deaths and collectively add 4.2 million years to the lives of those born between 2000 and 2019.
There is broad public support for making it harder for young people to buy tobacco. Nearly 75 percent of adults surveyed supported changing the age to 21, according to a 2015 paper by researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Big majorities of former and even active smokers support the change.
Some will surely argue that setting a higher age for cigarette sales infringes on young people’s rights. California lawmakers who subscribed to such arguments put in a needless exception allowing active-duty military troops to buy cigarettes and other tobacco products at age 18. But there is a clear public interest in increasing the age for everybody, just as there was a compelling reason to make 21 the legal age to buy alcohol. That policy, adopted state by state over time, helped reduce drunken driving, saving nearly 22,000 lives between 1975 and 2002, according to the Department of Transportation.
California is often at the vanguard of important policy changes. The state’s move toward raising the legal age to buy cigarettes should inspire other states to take similar steps to protect young people.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/06/opini ... 05309&_r=0
******
Heroin Epidemic Increasingly Seeps Into Public View
Excerpt:
With heroin cheap and widely available on city streets throughout the country, users are making their buys and shooting up as soon as they can, often in public places. Police officers are routinely finding drug users — unconscious or dead — in cars, in the bathrooms of fast-food restaurants, on mass transit and in parks, hospitals and libraries.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/07/us/he ... d=71987722
California could soon raise the legal age for buying cigarettes and other tobacco products to 21, from 18. That change could help prevent many young people from becoming addicted and reduce premature deaths from lung cancer and other tobacco-related diseases.
The California Assembly last week joined the State Senate in passing a package of bills that would raise the age; regulate electronic cigarettes in the same ways as conventional cigarettes, including restricting where they can be used; and allow local governments to impose taxes on tobacco products.
The bills now go back to the Senate for final passage. Gov. Jerry Brown should sign these measures, because they would significantly improve public health. In addition, residents of the state will get to vote in November on increasing the statewide tax on cigarettes by $2 per pack.
Last year, Hawaii became the first state to pass a law to raise the legal age for purchasing tobacco to 21. More than 100 cities and counties, including Boston, New York City and Suffolk County in Long Island have also adopted the policy. Four states — Alabama, Alaska, New Jersey and Utah — set the legal age at 19, and the rest set it at 18. Unfortunately, in January, Gov. Chris Christie vetoed legislation that would have changed New Jersey’s legal sale age to 21.
The biggest reason to raise the legal age to 21 is to reduce young people’s access to tobacco when they are more likely to become addicted and when their brains are still developing. Studies have found that nicotine, the main addictive ingredient in cigarettes, can impair cognition among young people. About 90 percent of adult smokers first use cigarettes before turning 19, and almost all smokers start before age 26, according to an Institute of Medicine study published last year.
The study also found that raising the age to 21 nationwide would reduce access to cigarettes for people under 18, because most children get tobacco from slightly older friends and relatives. Over all, the study concluded that changing the age to 21 should prevent 223,000 premature deaths and collectively add 4.2 million years to the lives of those born between 2000 and 2019.
There is broad public support for making it harder for young people to buy tobacco. Nearly 75 percent of adults surveyed supported changing the age to 21, according to a 2015 paper by researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Big majorities of former and even active smokers support the change.
Some will surely argue that setting a higher age for cigarette sales infringes on young people’s rights. California lawmakers who subscribed to such arguments put in a needless exception allowing active-duty military troops to buy cigarettes and other tobacco products at age 18. But there is a clear public interest in increasing the age for everybody, just as there was a compelling reason to make 21 the legal age to buy alcohol. That policy, adopted state by state over time, helped reduce drunken driving, saving nearly 22,000 lives between 1975 and 2002, according to the Department of Transportation.
California is often at the vanguard of important policy changes. The state’s move toward raising the legal age to buy cigarettes should inspire other states to take similar steps to protect young people.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/06/opini ... 05309&_r=0
******
Heroin Epidemic Increasingly Seeps Into Public View
Excerpt:
With heroin cheap and widely available on city streets throughout the country, users are making their buys and shooting up as soon as they can, often in public places. Police officers are routinely finding drug users — unconscious or dead — in cars, in the bathrooms of fast-food restaurants, on mass transit and in parks, hospitals and libraries.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/07/us/he ... d=71987722
A daily glass of wine for better health? Canadian study says it’s too good to be true
WATCH: A new B.C.-led study suggests previous research has exaggerated the health benefits of drinking alcohol, and underestimated its risks. Kylie Stanton explains.
Listen
Plenty of recent research points to how a daily glass of wine could improve your heart health and extend your life expectancy. But in a new study, Canadian scientists say the findings may be exaggerated.
Researchers out of the University of Victoria are poking holes in research about moderate drinking and its so-called benefits for reducing the risk of heart disease, stroke and diabetes. Turns out, “occasional drinkers” – or people who have one drink per week – are the healthiest.
More...
http://globalnews.ca/news/2591337/a-dai ... o-be-true/
WATCH: A new B.C.-led study suggests previous research has exaggerated the health benefits of drinking alcohol, and underestimated its risks. Kylie Stanton explains.
Listen
Plenty of recent research points to how a daily glass of wine could improve your heart health and extend your life expectancy. But in a new study, Canadian scientists say the findings may be exaggerated.
Researchers out of the University of Victoria are poking holes in research about moderate drinking and its so-called benefits for reducing the risk of heart disease, stroke and diabetes. Turns out, “occasional drinkers” – or people who have one drink per week – are the healthiest.
More...
http://globalnews.ca/news/2591337/a-dai ... o-be-true/
Should Prostitution Be a Crime?
A growing movement of sex workers and activists is making the decriminalization of sex work a feminist issue
Last November, Meg Muñoz went to Los Angeles to speak at the annual West Coast conference of Amnesty International. She was nervous. Three months earlier, at a meeting attended by about 500 delegates from 80 countries, Amnesty voted to adopt a proposal in favor of the “full decriminalization of consensual sex work,” sparking a storm of controversy. Members of the human rights group in Norway and Sweden resigned en masse, saying the organization’s goal should be to end demand for prostitution, not condone it. Around the world, on social media and in the press, opponents blasted Amnesty. In Los Angeles, protesters ringed the lobby of the Sheraton where the conference was being held, and as Muñoz tried to enter, a woman confronted her and became upset as Muñoz explained that, as a former sex worker, she supported Amnesty’s position. “She agreed to respect my time at the microphone,” Muñoz told me. “That didn’t exactly happen” — the woman and other critics yelled out during her panel — “but I understand why it was so hard for her.”
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/magaz ... d=71987722
A growing movement of sex workers and activists is making the decriminalization of sex work a feminist issue
Last November, Meg Muñoz went to Los Angeles to speak at the annual West Coast conference of Amnesty International. She was nervous. Three months earlier, at a meeting attended by about 500 delegates from 80 countries, Amnesty voted to adopt a proposal in favor of the “full decriminalization of consensual sex work,” sparking a storm of controversy. Members of the human rights group in Norway and Sweden resigned en masse, saying the organization’s goal should be to end demand for prostitution, not condone it. Around the world, on social media and in the press, opponents blasted Amnesty. In Los Angeles, protesters ringed the lobby of the Sheraton where the conference was being held, and as Muñoz tried to enter, a woman confronted her and became upset as Muñoz explained that, as a former sex worker, she supported Amnesty’s position. “She agreed to respect my time at the microphone,” Muñoz told me. “That didn’t exactly happen” — the woman and other critics yelled out during her panel — “but I understand why it was so hard for her.”
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/magaz ... d=71987722
Drinking by Numbers
Berkeley, Calif. — AT a recent physical, I was surprised by the way the usual questionnaire jolted me with one query in particular: How many drinks do you have a week, on average? There was a time about 10 years ago when I’d have said two a week as a baseline; now it’s more like two a day.
When did two drinks a week become 14? A few things happened between then and now. These days I’m a parent of two young children, whose acute dependency upon me makes socializing around a glass of wine or beer at a friend’s toy-filled house often the best choice. I live in California, where wine is available on tap, and sold in nearly every neighborhood grocery store. I can afford a few bottles in the house, whereas before I’d run out to buy one only before a party or dinner. Heck, I’m a writer.
I live at the place where these circles meet: I am the Venn diagram of drinking as habitual and easy entertainment.
You might say, “Why worry?” Much of the epidemiological research out there is pretty decisive on the benefits of moderate drinking, though the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which recommends a daily limit of one drink for women and two for men, says that recent research on health benefits is inconclusive.
Here’s the thing: At this middle stage of my life, I can easily make out the slippery slope where two a day becomes three; when you split a bottle of wine and open another; when you go out for a special event and three drinks doesn’t do much because you’ve built up a tolerance and it takes four or even five drinks to achieve a celebratory state of inebriation. Perhaps I think more about these borderlands because though my husband is also a moderate drinker, he has a strong family history of alcoholism. For him, the slippery slope is more like a cliff.
But my inquiry is not about the descent into addiction. It’s an attempt to investigate more deeply the middle ground between the poles of addiction and abstinence, at a time when our culture is sending out dueling messages. The first is coated in optimism: “Have some! Alcohol is pleasurable and it’s proven to be good for you.” The second is our puritanical side chiming in: “Watch out! Alcohol is poison and it’s proven that it can kill you.”
We tell people to go ahead and have just a little bit of an addictive substance. Let’s acknowledge that that’s complicated.
Most of us occupy the space between teetotaler and drunkard, but that’s a big span to move along. We measure everything in our modern world, and yet the data we’ve gathered doesn’t tell us what moderation really means. And if we’re somehow in that approved zone, how do we stay there? Is there a useful way to think about it that isn’t as precise as prescribed numbers or as vague as guilt?
I asked people in the wine industry how they manage the territory when they are exposed to it every day. “When I get to the ‘number of drinks’ question at the doctor’s office, I skip to the next line,” Yoav Gilat, a founder and owner of Cannonball Wine Company, in Napa, told me. He referred to the numbers with a laugh, but his point was serious: There’s a lot we don’t admit about drinking because we’re fearful of being judged. (For what it’s worth, many doctors assume you’re fudging and automatically double the number you give them.)
“Even if you decide to have just one drink, it’s easy to get into the next one,” Mr. Gilat told me. “The third one is calling an Uber and giving the kids to your wife or your husband or your friend. It’s the one that everybody is intimidated by, or afraid to admit that they’re having.”
In “Three Glasses Later,” the photographer Marcos Alberti documents the effects of three glasses of wine on subjects in his studio; the portraits reveal people moving from the stress and sobriety of the after-work hour to, well, a great many moods. “The third glass,” Mr. Alberti notes, “is about mayhem.” It leads you to a place where everything is unreliable, including the decisions you’re capable of making.
So it’s not just about counting the drinks — it’s about the number where each of us becomes untrustworthy. What am I no longer capable of in the shift between one number and the next? We are conditioned to think about that third drink as it pertains to driving, but it goes beyond how we get home. Most of us don’t like to recognize problem drinking as a possibility within our own orbit, or the toll it can take on our emotional, family and work lives. The truth is you don’t have to be a binge-drinking alcoholic for drinking to be problematic.
Numbers have always been key to our understanding of alcohol: The Aztecs called their gods of drinking “centzontotochtin,” or the “four hundred rabbits,” representing the myriad ways intoxication could make a person feel and act. It is entertainment, social lubricant, creative stimulant, sensory experience, delicious beverage. At the end of a long day, it feels like a reward. But at some point — maybe it’s falling asleep at 7 while getting the kids to bed after a couple of beers, or going to work for the third day in a row feeling vaguely muffled — signs start pointing toward too much.
And when it comes to knowing your limits, the baseline is always shifting. Mr. Gilat and others say that the regular reset is how they stay on speaking terms with the limits they started with. “It can mean a couple of days, weeks or months off from drinking to come back to that baseline,” he told me. The pause isn’t a punishment, but a check — a way to remind yourself that you can get by without drinking, that you can still fathom the responsibilities of life as a parent, partner, worker, friend. And that the pleasures of those roles are still palpable.
WE can expect that when it comes to recommended allowances for alcohol, the numbers will continue to change. The public-health pendulum swings frequently in this country, and guidelines vary greatly among countries. France appears to have no government-sanctioned limits. Britain, which has some of the highest rates of heavy drinking in the world, recently revised its limits downward; the government cites an increased risk of certain cancers. And yet, as the American addiction specialist Stanton Peele has observed, “despite being heavily outdrunk by the English, we have almost exactly twice their levels of diabetes, cancer and heart disease.”
Dr. Peele has studied cultural drinking patterns, alcoholism and recovery for decades; his work suggests that we Americans are too concerned with the extremes — binge or purge, all or none. The benefits of alcohol are strongest when you drink moderately, but even if you drink more than is “perfectly” recommended, he argues that it’s “generally better for you than drinking nothing.”
But what we shouldn’t miss, I think, is that nothing is as important as something. Nothing is the reference point from which we can judge all else. The numerical middle is different for everyone, but perhaps that’s the point. Because my number is two and yours may be one and his might be five, the most relevant number to us all is zero.
Maybe the only way to think about drinking by numbers is not to obsess over how much is too much, but to be acquainted with what zero feels like — that is, to come back to zero often enough to understand the relative value of our numbers. The reset helps us see those numbers for what they are. It’s what keeps two from becoming three, three from four, and so on.
I recall my great-grandmother, who lived to a sharp, convivial 99. Most evenings she’d sit down with her shot glass of Johnnie Walker and beckon me for a chat. Did she have one or two? I doubt she worried about it. Lately I’ve been reacquainting myself with zero so I won’t have to, either.
Bonnie Tsui is the author of “American Chinatown: A People’s History of Five Neighborhoods.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/opini ... ef=opinion
Berkeley, Calif. — AT a recent physical, I was surprised by the way the usual questionnaire jolted me with one query in particular: How many drinks do you have a week, on average? There was a time about 10 years ago when I’d have said two a week as a baseline; now it’s more like two a day.
When did two drinks a week become 14? A few things happened between then and now. These days I’m a parent of two young children, whose acute dependency upon me makes socializing around a glass of wine or beer at a friend’s toy-filled house often the best choice. I live in California, where wine is available on tap, and sold in nearly every neighborhood grocery store. I can afford a few bottles in the house, whereas before I’d run out to buy one only before a party or dinner. Heck, I’m a writer.
I live at the place where these circles meet: I am the Venn diagram of drinking as habitual and easy entertainment.
You might say, “Why worry?” Much of the epidemiological research out there is pretty decisive on the benefits of moderate drinking, though the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which recommends a daily limit of one drink for women and two for men, says that recent research on health benefits is inconclusive.
Here’s the thing: At this middle stage of my life, I can easily make out the slippery slope where two a day becomes three; when you split a bottle of wine and open another; when you go out for a special event and three drinks doesn’t do much because you’ve built up a tolerance and it takes four or even five drinks to achieve a celebratory state of inebriation. Perhaps I think more about these borderlands because though my husband is also a moderate drinker, he has a strong family history of alcoholism. For him, the slippery slope is more like a cliff.
But my inquiry is not about the descent into addiction. It’s an attempt to investigate more deeply the middle ground between the poles of addiction and abstinence, at a time when our culture is sending out dueling messages. The first is coated in optimism: “Have some! Alcohol is pleasurable and it’s proven to be good for you.” The second is our puritanical side chiming in: “Watch out! Alcohol is poison and it’s proven that it can kill you.”
We tell people to go ahead and have just a little bit of an addictive substance. Let’s acknowledge that that’s complicated.
Most of us occupy the space between teetotaler and drunkard, but that’s a big span to move along. We measure everything in our modern world, and yet the data we’ve gathered doesn’t tell us what moderation really means. And if we’re somehow in that approved zone, how do we stay there? Is there a useful way to think about it that isn’t as precise as prescribed numbers or as vague as guilt?
I asked people in the wine industry how they manage the territory when they are exposed to it every day. “When I get to the ‘number of drinks’ question at the doctor’s office, I skip to the next line,” Yoav Gilat, a founder and owner of Cannonball Wine Company, in Napa, told me. He referred to the numbers with a laugh, but his point was serious: There’s a lot we don’t admit about drinking because we’re fearful of being judged. (For what it’s worth, many doctors assume you’re fudging and automatically double the number you give them.)
“Even if you decide to have just one drink, it’s easy to get into the next one,” Mr. Gilat told me. “The third one is calling an Uber and giving the kids to your wife or your husband or your friend. It’s the one that everybody is intimidated by, or afraid to admit that they’re having.”
In “Three Glasses Later,” the photographer Marcos Alberti documents the effects of three glasses of wine on subjects in his studio; the portraits reveal people moving from the stress and sobriety of the after-work hour to, well, a great many moods. “The third glass,” Mr. Alberti notes, “is about mayhem.” It leads you to a place where everything is unreliable, including the decisions you’re capable of making.
So it’s not just about counting the drinks — it’s about the number where each of us becomes untrustworthy. What am I no longer capable of in the shift between one number and the next? We are conditioned to think about that third drink as it pertains to driving, but it goes beyond how we get home. Most of us don’t like to recognize problem drinking as a possibility within our own orbit, or the toll it can take on our emotional, family and work lives. The truth is you don’t have to be a binge-drinking alcoholic for drinking to be problematic.
Numbers have always been key to our understanding of alcohol: The Aztecs called their gods of drinking “centzontotochtin,” or the “four hundred rabbits,” representing the myriad ways intoxication could make a person feel and act. It is entertainment, social lubricant, creative stimulant, sensory experience, delicious beverage. At the end of a long day, it feels like a reward. But at some point — maybe it’s falling asleep at 7 while getting the kids to bed after a couple of beers, or going to work for the third day in a row feeling vaguely muffled — signs start pointing toward too much.
And when it comes to knowing your limits, the baseline is always shifting. Mr. Gilat and others say that the regular reset is how they stay on speaking terms with the limits they started with. “It can mean a couple of days, weeks or months off from drinking to come back to that baseline,” he told me. The pause isn’t a punishment, but a check — a way to remind yourself that you can get by without drinking, that you can still fathom the responsibilities of life as a parent, partner, worker, friend. And that the pleasures of those roles are still palpable.
WE can expect that when it comes to recommended allowances for alcohol, the numbers will continue to change. The public-health pendulum swings frequently in this country, and guidelines vary greatly among countries. France appears to have no government-sanctioned limits. Britain, which has some of the highest rates of heavy drinking in the world, recently revised its limits downward; the government cites an increased risk of certain cancers. And yet, as the American addiction specialist Stanton Peele has observed, “despite being heavily outdrunk by the English, we have almost exactly twice their levels of diabetes, cancer and heart disease.”
Dr. Peele has studied cultural drinking patterns, alcoholism and recovery for decades; his work suggests that we Americans are too concerned with the extremes — binge or purge, all or none. The benefits of alcohol are strongest when you drink moderately, but even if you drink more than is “perfectly” recommended, he argues that it’s “generally better for you than drinking nothing.”
But what we shouldn’t miss, I think, is that nothing is as important as something. Nothing is the reference point from which we can judge all else. The numerical middle is different for everyone, but perhaps that’s the point. Because my number is two and yours may be one and his might be five, the most relevant number to us all is zero.
Maybe the only way to think about drinking by numbers is not to obsess over how much is too much, but to be acquainted with what zero feels like — that is, to come back to zero often enough to understand the relative value of our numbers. The reset helps us see those numbers for what they are. It’s what keeps two from becoming three, three from four, and so on.
I recall my great-grandmother, who lived to a sharp, convivial 99. Most evenings she’d sit down with her shot glass of Johnnie Walker and beckon me for a chat. Did she have one or two? I doubt she worried about it. Lately I’ve been reacquainting myself with zero so I won’t have to, either.
Bonnie Tsui is the author of “American Chinatown: A People’s History of Five Neighborhoods.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/opini ... ef=opinion
Can You Get Over an Addiction?
I SHOT heroin and cocaine while attending Columbia in the 1980s, sometimes injecting many times a day and leaving scars that are still visible. I kept using, even after I was suspended from school, after I overdosed and even after I was arrested for dealing, despite knowing that this could reduce my chances of staying out of prison.
My parents were devastated: They couldn’t understand what had happened to their “gifted” child who had always excelled academically. They kept hoping I would just somehow stop, even though every time I tried to quit, I relapsed within months.
There are, speaking broadly, two schools of thought on addiction: The first was that my brain had been chemically “hijacked” by drugs, leaving me no control over a chronic, progressive disease. The second was simply that I was a selfish criminal, with little regard for others, as much of the public still seems to believe. (When it’s our own loved ones who become addicted, we tend to favor the first explanation; when it’s someone else’s, we favor the second.)
We are long overdue for a new perspective — both because our understanding of the neuroscience underlying addiction has changed and because so many existing treatments simply don’t work.
Addiction is indeed a brain problem, but it’s not a degenerative pathology like Alzheimer’s disease or cancer, nor is it evidence of a criminal mind. Instead, it’s a learning disorder, a difference in the wiring of the brain that affects the way we process information about motivation, reward and punishment. And, as with many learning disorders, addictive behavior is shaped by genetic and environmental influences over the course of development.
Scientists have documented the connection between learning processes and addiction for decades. Now, through both animal research and imaging studies, neuroscientists are starting to recognize which brain regions are involved in addiction and how.
The studies show that addiction alters the interactions between midbrain regions like the ventral tegmentum and the nucleus accumbens, which are involved with motivation and pleasure, and parts of the prefrontal cortex that mediate decisions and help set priorities. Acting in concert, these networks determine what we value in order to ensure that we attain critical biological goals: namely, survival and reproduction.
In essence, addiction occurs when these brain systems are focused on the wrong objects: a drug or self-destructive behavior like excessive gambling instead of a new sexual partner or a baby. Once that happens, it can cause serious trouble.
If, like me, you grew up with a hyper-reactive nervous system that constantly made you feel overwhelmed, alienated and unlovable, finding a substance that eases social stress becomes a blessed escape. For me, heroin provided a sense of comfort, safety and love that I couldn’t get from other people (the key agent of addiction in these regions is the same for many pleasurable experiences: dopamine). Once I’d experienced the relief heroin gave me, I felt as though I couldn’t survive without it.
Understanding addiction from this neurodevelopmental perspective offers a great deal of hope. First, like other learning disorders, for example, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder or dyslexia, addiction doesn’t affect overall intelligence. Second, this view suggests that addiction skews choice — but doesn’t completely eliminate free will: after all, no one injects drugs in front of the police. This means that addicts can learn to take actions to improve our health, like using clean syringes, as I did. Research overwhelmingly shows such programs not only reduce H.I.V., but also aid recovery.
The learning perspective also explains why the compulsion for alcohol or drugs can be so strong and why people with addiction continue even when the damage far outweighs the pleasure they receive and why they can appear to be acting irrationally: If you believe that something is essential to your survival, your priorities won’t make sense to others.
Learning that drives urges like love and reproduction is quite different from learning dry facts. Unlike memorizing your sevens and nines, deep, emotional learning completely alters the way you determine what matters most, which is why you remember your high school crush better than high school math.
Recognizing addiction as a learning disorder can also help end the argument over whether addiction should be treated as a progressive illness, as experts contend, or as a moral problem, a belief that is reflected in our continuing criminalization of certain drugs. You’ve just learned a maladaptive way of coping.
Moreover, if addiction resides in the parts of the brain involved in love, then recovery is more like getting over a breakup than it is like facing a lifelong illness. Healing a broken heart is difficult and often involves relapses into obsessive behavior, but it’s not brain damage.
The implications for treatment here are profound. If addiction is like misguided love, then compassion is a far better approach than punishment. Indeed, a 2007 meta-analysis of dozens of studies over four decades found that empowering, empathetic treatments like cognitive behavioral therapy and motivational enhancement therapy, which nurture an internal willingness to change, work far better than the more traditional rehab approach of confronting denial and telling patients that they are powerless over their addiction.
This makes sense because the circuitry that normally connects us to one another socially has been channeled instead into drug seeking. To return our brains to normal then, we need more love, not more pain.
In fact, studies have not found evidence in favor of harsh, punitive approaches, like jail terms, humiliating forms of treatment and traditional “interventions” where families threaten to abandon addicted members. People with addictions are already driven to push through negative experiences by their brain circuitry; more punishment won’t change this.
In line with the idea that development matters, research also shows that half of all addictions — with the exception of tobacco — end by age 30, and the majority of people with alcohol and drug addictions overcome it, mostly without treatment. I stopped taking drugs when I was 23. I always thought that I had quit because I finally realized that my addiction was harming me.
But it’s equally possible that I kicked then because I had become biologically capable of doing so. During adolescence, the engine that drives desire and motivation grows stronger. But unfortunately, only in the mid-to-late 20s are we able to exert more control. This is why adolescence is the highest risk period for developing addiction — and simple maturation may be what helped me get better.
At the time, nearly all treatment was based on 12-step groups like Alcoholics Anonymous, which help only a minority of addicted people. Even today, most treatment available in rehab facilities involves instruction in the prayer, surrender to a higher power, confession and restitution prescribed by the steps.
We treat no other medical condition with such moralizing — people with other learning disorders aren’t pushed to apologize for their past behavior, nor are those affected by schizophrenia or depression.
Once we understand that addiction is neither a sin nor a progressive disease, just different brain wiring, we can stop persisting in policies that don’t work, and start teaching recovery.
Indeed, if the compulsive drive that sustains addiction is directed into healthier channels, this type of wiring can be a benefit, not just a disability. After all, persisting despite rejection didn’t only lead to addiction for me — it has also been indispensable to my survival as a writer. The ability to persevere is an asset: People with addiction just need to learn how to redirect it.
Maia Szalavitz is the author of “Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/26/opini ... inion&_r=0
I SHOT heroin and cocaine while attending Columbia in the 1980s, sometimes injecting many times a day and leaving scars that are still visible. I kept using, even after I was suspended from school, after I overdosed and even after I was arrested for dealing, despite knowing that this could reduce my chances of staying out of prison.
My parents were devastated: They couldn’t understand what had happened to their “gifted” child who had always excelled academically. They kept hoping I would just somehow stop, even though every time I tried to quit, I relapsed within months.
There are, speaking broadly, two schools of thought on addiction: The first was that my brain had been chemically “hijacked” by drugs, leaving me no control over a chronic, progressive disease. The second was simply that I was a selfish criminal, with little regard for others, as much of the public still seems to believe. (When it’s our own loved ones who become addicted, we tend to favor the first explanation; when it’s someone else’s, we favor the second.)
We are long overdue for a new perspective — both because our understanding of the neuroscience underlying addiction has changed and because so many existing treatments simply don’t work.
Addiction is indeed a brain problem, but it’s not a degenerative pathology like Alzheimer’s disease or cancer, nor is it evidence of a criminal mind. Instead, it’s a learning disorder, a difference in the wiring of the brain that affects the way we process information about motivation, reward and punishment. And, as with many learning disorders, addictive behavior is shaped by genetic and environmental influences over the course of development.
Scientists have documented the connection between learning processes and addiction for decades. Now, through both animal research and imaging studies, neuroscientists are starting to recognize which brain regions are involved in addiction and how.
The studies show that addiction alters the interactions between midbrain regions like the ventral tegmentum and the nucleus accumbens, which are involved with motivation and pleasure, and parts of the prefrontal cortex that mediate decisions and help set priorities. Acting in concert, these networks determine what we value in order to ensure that we attain critical biological goals: namely, survival and reproduction.
In essence, addiction occurs when these brain systems are focused on the wrong objects: a drug or self-destructive behavior like excessive gambling instead of a new sexual partner or a baby. Once that happens, it can cause serious trouble.
If, like me, you grew up with a hyper-reactive nervous system that constantly made you feel overwhelmed, alienated and unlovable, finding a substance that eases social stress becomes a blessed escape. For me, heroin provided a sense of comfort, safety and love that I couldn’t get from other people (the key agent of addiction in these regions is the same for many pleasurable experiences: dopamine). Once I’d experienced the relief heroin gave me, I felt as though I couldn’t survive without it.
Understanding addiction from this neurodevelopmental perspective offers a great deal of hope. First, like other learning disorders, for example, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder or dyslexia, addiction doesn’t affect overall intelligence. Second, this view suggests that addiction skews choice — but doesn’t completely eliminate free will: after all, no one injects drugs in front of the police. This means that addicts can learn to take actions to improve our health, like using clean syringes, as I did. Research overwhelmingly shows such programs not only reduce H.I.V., but also aid recovery.
The learning perspective also explains why the compulsion for alcohol or drugs can be so strong and why people with addiction continue even when the damage far outweighs the pleasure they receive and why they can appear to be acting irrationally: If you believe that something is essential to your survival, your priorities won’t make sense to others.
Learning that drives urges like love and reproduction is quite different from learning dry facts. Unlike memorizing your sevens and nines, deep, emotional learning completely alters the way you determine what matters most, which is why you remember your high school crush better than high school math.
Recognizing addiction as a learning disorder can also help end the argument over whether addiction should be treated as a progressive illness, as experts contend, or as a moral problem, a belief that is reflected in our continuing criminalization of certain drugs. You’ve just learned a maladaptive way of coping.
Moreover, if addiction resides in the parts of the brain involved in love, then recovery is more like getting over a breakup than it is like facing a lifelong illness. Healing a broken heart is difficult and often involves relapses into obsessive behavior, but it’s not brain damage.
The implications for treatment here are profound. If addiction is like misguided love, then compassion is a far better approach than punishment. Indeed, a 2007 meta-analysis of dozens of studies over four decades found that empowering, empathetic treatments like cognitive behavioral therapy and motivational enhancement therapy, which nurture an internal willingness to change, work far better than the more traditional rehab approach of confronting denial and telling patients that they are powerless over their addiction.
This makes sense because the circuitry that normally connects us to one another socially has been channeled instead into drug seeking. To return our brains to normal then, we need more love, not more pain.
In fact, studies have not found evidence in favor of harsh, punitive approaches, like jail terms, humiliating forms of treatment and traditional “interventions” where families threaten to abandon addicted members. People with addictions are already driven to push through negative experiences by their brain circuitry; more punishment won’t change this.
In line with the idea that development matters, research also shows that half of all addictions — with the exception of tobacco — end by age 30, and the majority of people with alcohol and drug addictions overcome it, mostly without treatment. I stopped taking drugs when I was 23. I always thought that I had quit because I finally realized that my addiction was harming me.
But it’s equally possible that I kicked then because I had become biologically capable of doing so. During adolescence, the engine that drives desire and motivation grows stronger. But unfortunately, only in the mid-to-late 20s are we able to exert more control. This is why adolescence is the highest risk period for developing addiction — and simple maturation may be what helped me get better.
At the time, nearly all treatment was based on 12-step groups like Alcoholics Anonymous, which help only a minority of addicted people. Even today, most treatment available in rehab facilities involves instruction in the prayer, surrender to a higher power, confession and restitution prescribed by the steps.
We treat no other medical condition with such moralizing — people with other learning disorders aren’t pushed to apologize for their past behavior, nor are those affected by schizophrenia or depression.
Once we understand that addiction is neither a sin nor a progressive disease, just different brain wiring, we can stop persisting in policies that don’t work, and start teaching recovery.
Indeed, if the compulsive drive that sustains addiction is directed into healthier channels, this type of wiring can be a benefit, not just a disability. After all, persisting despite rejection didn’t only lead to addiction for me — it has also been indispensable to my survival as a writer. The ability to persevere is an asset: People with addiction just need to learn how to redirect it.
Maia Szalavitz is the author of “Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/26/opini ... inion&_r=0
Pakistani social media star strangled in apparent "honor killing" - police
Pakistani social media celebrity Qandeel Baloch was strangled in what appeared to be an "honor killing," police said on Saturday, shocking the South Asian nation where she was viewed as a controversial figure.
Baloch's raunchy social media photos challenged social norms in Pakistan, a deeply conservative Muslim country where women are often repressed by their family members or the community.
Punjab Police spokeswoman Nabeela Ghazanfar told Reuters Baloch, whose real name is Fauzia Azeem, was killed in her family home in Multan, a large city in the Punjab province.
"Her father Azeem informed the police that his son Waseem has strangled Qandeel," Ghazanfar said. "Apparently, it is honor killing but further investigations would reveal the real motives behind this murder."
Police were now looking for Waseem, who had disappeared, she added.
Reuters was not immediately able to reach the family.
Local media reported Baloch had struggled to reconcile her family's conservative values with her social media stunts and received frequent threats from the public.
More than 500 people are killed in Pakistan each year in so-called "honor killings," usually carried out by members of the victim's family meting out punishment for bringing "shame" on the community.
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/pak ... li=AAggNb9
Pakistani Social Media Celebrity Dead in Apparent Honor Killing
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/17/world ... d=71987722
Extract:
Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has vowed to strengthen laws intended to prevent such killings, but critics say no concrete steps have been taken yet.
In most cases, the honor killings take place within the family, said Syeda Sughra Imam, a former senator from Punjab who has pushed for legislation against the practice.
“The accused and the complainant are from the same family and they forgive each other,” Ms Imam said. “No one is ever prosecuted.”
Ms. Imam’s proposed legislation calls for eliminating a “forgiveness clause” in Pakistani law that allows families to reach a financial settlement or to forgive the killer.
“This killing with impunity has to stop,” Ms. Imam said.
Pakistani social media celebrity Qandeel Baloch was strangled in what appeared to be an "honor killing," police said on Saturday, shocking the South Asian nation where she was viewed as a controversial figure.
Baloch's raunchy social media photos challenged social norms in Pakistan, a deeply conservative Muslim country where women are often repressed by their family members or the community.
Punjab Police spokeswoman Nabeela Ghazanfar told Reuters Baloch, whose real name is Fauzia Azeem, was killed in her family home in Multan, a large city in the Punjab province.
"Her father Azeem informed the police that his son Waseem has strangled Qandeel," Ghazanfar said. "Apparently, it is honor killing but further investigations would reveal the real motives behind this murder."
Police were now looking for Waseem, who had disappeared, she added.
Reuters was not immediately able to reach the family.
Local media reported Baloch had struggled to reconcile her family's conservative values with her social media stunts and received frequent threats from the public.
More than 500 people are killed in Pakistan each year in so-called "honor killings," usually carried out by members of the victim's family meting out punishment for bringing "shame" on the community.
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/pak ... li=AAggNb9
Pakistani Social Media Celebrity Dead in Apparent Honor Killing
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/17/world ... d=71987722
Extract:
Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has vowed to strengthen laws intended to prevent such killings, but critics say no concrete steps have been taken yet.
In most cases, the honor killings take place within the family, said Syeda Sughra Imam, a former senator from Punjab who has pushed for legislation against the practice.
“The accused and the complainant are from the same family and they forgive each other,” Ms Imam said. “No one is ever prosecuted.”
Ms. Imam’s proposed legislation calls for eliminating a “forgiveness clause” in Pakistani law that allows families to reach a financial settlement or to forgive the killer.
“This killing with impunity has to stop,” Ms. Imam said.
Qandeel Baloch's family barred from 'forgiving' son
Pakistani authorities barred the family of murdered social media celebrity Qandeel Baloch from legally "forgiving" their son, who is accused of strangling his sister, sources said.
A police source told the Reuters news agency on Monday that the government in Punjab, in a rare decision, has barred the family forgiving their son after he confessed to murdering 26-year-old Baloch on Friday.
"It was done on the instructions of the government. But it happens rarely," a Punjab police official told Reuters.
The practice of 'forgiving' is a common legal loophole that sees many honour killings go unpunished in Pakistan.
Baloch was found dead in her family home, having been strangled by her brother, Waseem Azeem, who later said he had "no regrets" and confessed to killing his famous sister for violating the family's honour by her provocative social media posts.
It was not immediately clear if the Punjab government's decision would lead to any meaningful reforms.
More...
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/qan ... lsignoutmd
Pakistani authorities barred the family of murdered social media celebrity Qandeel Baloch from legally "forgiving" their son, who is accused of strangling his sister, sources said.
A police source told the Reuters news agency on Monday that the government in Punjab, in a rare decision, has barred the family forgiving their son after he confessed to murdering 26-year-old Baloch on Friday.
"It was done on the instructions of the government. But it happens rarely," a Punjab police official told Reuters.
The practice of 'forgiving' is a common legal loophole that sees many honour killings go unpunished in Pakistan.
Baloch was found dead in her family home, having been strangled by her brother, Waseem Azeem, who later said he had "no regrets" and confessed to killing his famous sister for violating the family's honour by her provocative social media posts.
It was not immediately clear if the Punjab government's decision would lead to any meaningful reforms.
More...
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/qan ... lsignoutmd
These 37 Celebrities Never Drink Alcohol
When most people think about the lives of celebrities, champagne-soaked parties usually come to mind. What, with all of the parties, after-parties, and hotel lobbies, it’s not crazy to think that all celebrities get their drank on most days of the week. However, a surprising amount of celebrities don’t drink, which is actually pretty cool.
I gathered as much publicly available information as I could from the web to compile this comprehensive rundown of celebrity teetotalers in one place. From Jennifer Hudson to James Franco, here are 37 celebrities who never drink.
Slide show:
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/health/wellnes ... Nb9#page=1
When most people think about the lives of celebrities, champagne-soaked parties usually come to mind. What, with all of the parties, after-parties, and hotel lobbies, it’s not crazy to think that all celebrities get their drank on most days of the week. However, a surprising amount of celebrities don’t drink, which is actually pretty cool.
I gathered as much publicly available information as I could from the web to compile this comprehensive rundown of celebrity teetotalers in one place. From Jennifer Hudson to James Franco, here are 37 celebrities who never drink.
Slide show:
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/health/wellnes ... Nb9#page=1
The 4 Traits That Put Kids at Risk for Addiction
Drug education is the only part of the middle school curriculum I remember — perhaps because it backfired so spectacularly. Before reaching today’s legal drinking age, I was shooting cocaine and heroin.
I’ve since recovered from my addiction, and researchers now are trying to develop innovative prevention programs to help children at risk take a different road than I did.
Developing a public antidrug program that really works has not been easy. Many of us grew up with antidrug programs like D.A.R.E. or the Nancy Reagan-inspired antidrug campaign “Just Say No.” But research shows those programs and others like them that depend on education and scare tactics were largely ineffective and did little to curb drug use by children at highest risk.
But now a new antidrug program tested in Europe, Australia and Canada is showing promise. Called Preventure, the program, developed by Patricia Conrod, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Montreal, recognizes how a child’s temperament drives his or her risk for drug use — and that different traits create different pathways to addiction. Early trials show that personality testing can identify 90 percent of the highest risk children, targeting risky traits before they cause problems.
Recognizing that most teenagers who try alcohol, cocaine, opioids or methamphetamine do not become addicted, they focus on what’s different about the minority who do.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/04/well/ ... 87722&_r=0
Drug education is the only part of the middle school curriculum I remember — perhaps because it backfired so spectacularly. Before reaching today’s legal drinking age, I was shooting cocaine and heroin.
I’ve since recovered from my addiction, and researchers now are trying to develop innovative prevention programs to help children at risk take a different road than I did.
Developing a public antidrug program that really works has not been easy. Many of us grew up with antidrug programs like D.A.R.E. or the Nancy Reagan-inspired antidrug campaign “Just Say No.” But research shows those programs and others like them that depend on education and scare tactics were largely ineffective and did little to curb drug use by children at highest risk.
But now a new antidrug program tested in Europe, Australia and Canada is showing promise. Called Preventure, the program, developed by Patricia Conrod, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Montreal, recognizes how a child’s temperament drives his or her risk for drug use — and that different traits create different pathways to addiction. Early trials show that personality testing can identify 90 percent of the highest risk children, targeting risky traits before they cause problems.
Recognizing that most teenagers who try alcohol, cocaine, opioids or methamphetamine do not become addicted, they focus on what’s different about the minority who do.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/04/well/ ... 87722&_r=0
‘A cancer in our society’: Pakistan stiffens penalty for ‘honour’ killers
ISLAMABAD — Pakistani lawmakers on Thursday passed a law that stiffens the penalty for convicted “honour” killers and closed a loophole that often allowed them to go free, in a move aimed at stemming the growing number of such killings.
The bill was passed after a raucous debate that lasted nearly four hours, with some of the loudest opposition coming from hard-line Islamist lawmakers. They wanted the Islamic Ideology Council, a body of conservative Muslim clerics, to weigh in on it before becoming law.
Supporters of the bill flatly refused, saying the council, which once ruled it was permissible for a man to “lightly” beat his wife, routinely vetoes legislation aimed at protecting women.
“Honour killings are a cancer in our society. This law is being presented against this cancer,” said Naveed Qamar, a member of the opposition Pakistan People’s Party, a left-of-centre party once led by Benazir Bhutto, who was assassinated in 2007, some say by Islamic militants.
More than 1,000 women were killed last year in so-called honour killings in Pakistan, often by fathers, brothers or husbands. Such killings are bound up with longtime traditions by which a woman’s chastity is vital to the family’s honour — so acts like a woman marrying the man of her choice, meeting a man or even being seen sitting with a man could lead to slayings.
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/world ... ur-killers
ISLAMABAD — Pakistani lawmakers on Thursday passed a law that stiffens the penalty for convicted “honour” killers and closed a loophole that often allowed them to go free, in a move aimed at stemming the growing number of such killings.
The bill was passed after a raucous debate that lasted nearly four hours, with some of the loudest opposition coming from hard-line Islamist lawmakers. They wanted the Islamic Ideology Council, a body of conservative Muslim clerics, to weigh in on it before becoming law.
Supporters of the bill flatly refused, saying the council, which once ruled it was permissible for a man to “lightly” beat his wife, routinely vetoes legislation aimed at protecting women.
“Honour killings are a cancer in our society. This law is being presented against this cancer,” said Naveed Qamar, a member of the opposition Pakistan People’s Party, a left-of-centre party once led by Benazir Bhutto, who was assassinated in 2007, some say by Islamic militants.
More than 1,000 women were killed last year in so-called honour killings in Pakistan, often by fathers, brothers or husbands. Such killings are bound up with longtime traditions by which a woman’s chastity is vital to the family’s honour — so acts like a woman marrying the man of her choice, meeting a man or even being seen sitting with a man could lead to slayings.
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/world ... ur-killers
Women 'nearing equality with men - in alcohol consumption'
Extract:
The team at the University of New South Wales, in Australia, analysed data from people all over the world - although it was massively skewed towards North America and Europe.
They concluded: "Alcohol use and alcohol-use disorders have historically been viewed as a male phenomenon.
"The present study calls this assumption into question and suggests that young women, in particular, should be the target of concerted efforts to reduce the impact of substance use and related harms."
Prof Mark Petticrew, from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said: "Men's and women's roles have been changing over the decades, this is likely to account for some of these trends - but not all.
"The increasing availability of alcohol also plays an important part, as does the way that alcohol marketing is often targeted specifically at women and particularly young women.
More....
http://www.bbc.com/news/health-37751132
Extract:
The team at the University of New South Wales, in Australia, analysed data from people all over the world - although it was massively skewed towards North America and Europe.
They concluded: "Alcohol use and alcohol-use disorders have historically been viewed as a male phenomenon.
"The present study calls this assumption into question and suggests that young women, in particular, should be the target of concerted efforts to reduce the impact of substance use and related harms."
Prof Mark Petticrew, from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said: "Men's and women's roles have been changing over the decades, this is likely to account for some of these trends - but not all.
"The increasing availability of alcohol also plays an important part, as does the way that alcohol marketing is often targeted specifically at women and particularly young women.
More....
http://www.bbc.com/news/health-37751132
Pakistan’s Honor-Killing Law Isn’t Enough
KARACHI, Pakistan — In Pakistan today, it’s a sad reality that regressive societal attitudes toward women label us as commodities, second-class citizens and financial liabilities to our families. This leaves us open to abusive and violent traditions, dictated by tribal codes and enforced by social and religious conservatism: child marriages, forced marriages, bartering of women to appease feuds and the most egregious gender crime, honor killings.
So when Parliament revised its laws this month to stiffen the punishment for honor killings, as well as for rape, it was a bold move away from a patriarchal system that has traditionally left the protection of women up to the arbitrary wishes of men who act as their guardians.
But unless the regressive mind-set of those men undergoes a revolutionary transformation as well, the new laws will be ineffectual eyewash in the face of the misogyny that Pakistani women encounter every day.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/28/opini ... &te=1&_r=0
KARACHI, Pakistan — In Pakistan today, it’s a sad reality that regressive societal attitudes toward women label us as commodities, second-class citizens and financial liabilities to our families. This leaves us open to abusive and violent traditions, dictated by tribal codes and enforced by social and religious conservatism: child marriages, forced marriages, bartering of women to appease feuds and the most egregious gender crime, honor killings.
So when Parliament revised its laws this month to stiffen the punishment for honor killings, as well as for rape, it was a bold move away from a patriarchal system that has traditionally left the protection of women up to the arbitrary wishes of men who act as their guardians.
But unless the regressive mind-set of those men undergoes a revolutionary transformation as well, the new laws will be ineffectual eyewash in the face of the misogyny that Pakistani women encounter every day.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/28/opini ... &te=1&_r=0
The world’s drunkest countries
Many countries drink comparatively little alcohol, usually because of religious or cultural beliefs, but to other nations boozing is not only a recreational activity, it’s a way of life. Here are the top 20 drunkest nations, according to the most recent figures from 2012 and 2013 from the World Health Organization (WHO), based on alcohol consumed per person per country.
Slide show:
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/foodanddrink/f ... b9#image=1
Many countries drink comparatively little alcohol, usually because of religious or cultural beliefs, but to other nations boozing is not only a recreational activity, it’s a way of life. Here are the top 20 drunkest nations, according to the most recent figures from 2012 and 2013 from the World Health Organization (WHO), based on alcohol consumed per person per country.
Slide show:
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/foodanddrink/f ... b9#image=1
Pakistan Has a Drinking Problem
KARACHI, Pakistan — Pakistan was recently mesmerized by a bottle of Scotch whisky. On Oct. 30, as hundreds of supporters of the opposition party Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (P.T.I.) were making their way to the capital Islamabad, with the declared intent of shutting down the city, the police searched the car of a P.T.I. politician and discovered a bottle of Johnny Walker Double Black.
Most Pakistanis had not seen a bottle of whisky in the news in a long time. Although there’s no ban on showing alcohol in the media, the subject rarely comes up in TV news. But this one bottle of whisky, waved around by a policeman, was broadcast on a loop. It became an emblem of the opposition’s immorality.
The politician claimed it contained honey. Yet later that evening, on a current affairs TV show, he put a sobering question to the other guests, “Which one of you doesn’t drink?” Complete silence.
If they said yes, they’d be implicating themselves. If they said no, nobody would believe them. For Muslims in Pakistan, drinking alcohol is prohibited and talking about it is taboo. Drinking and denying it is the oldest cocktail in the country.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/02/opini ... inion&_r=0
KARACHI, Pakistan — Pakistan was recently mesmerized by a bottle of Scotch whisky. On Oct. 30, as hundreds of supporters of the opposition party Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (P.T.I.) were making their way to the capital Islamabad, with the declared intent of shutting down the city, the police searched the car of a P.T.I. politician and discovered a bottle of Johnny Walker Double Black.
Most Pakistanis had not seen a bottle of whisky in the news in a long time. Although there’s no ban on showing alcohol in the media, the subject rarely comes up in TV news. But this one bottle of whisky, waved around by a policeman, was broadcast on a loop. It became an emblem of the opposition’s immorality.
The politician claimed it contained honey. Yet later that evening, on a current affairs TV show, he put a sobering question to the other guests, “Which one of you doesn’t drink?” Complete silence.
If they said yes, they’d be implicating themselves. If they said no, nobody would believe them. For Muslims in Pakistan, drinking alcohol is prohibited and talking about it is taboo. Drinking and denying it is the oldest cocktail in the country.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/02/opini ... inion&_r=0
Inside a Killer Drug Epidemic: A Look at America’s Opioid Crisis
The opioid epidemic killed more than 33,000 people in 2015. What follows are stories of a national affliction that has swept the country, from cities on the West Coast to bedroom communities in the Northeast.
Opioid addiction is America’s 50-state epidemic. It courses along Interstate highways in the form of cheap smuggled heroin, and flows out of “pill mill” clinics where pain medicine is handed out like candy. It has ripped through New England towns, where people overdose in the aisles of dollar stores, and it has ravaged coal country, where addicts speed-dial the sole doctor in town licensed to prescribe a medication.
Public health officials have called the current opioid epidemic the worst drug crisis in American history, killing more than 33,000 people in 2015. Overdose deaths were nearly equal to the number of deaths from car crashes. In 2015, for the first time, deaths from heroin alone surpassed gun homicides.
And there’s no sign it’s letting up, a team of New York Times reporters found as they examined the epidemic on the ground in states across the country. From New England to “safe injection” areas in the Pacific Northwest, communities are searching for a way out of a problem that can feel inescapable.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/06/us/op ... 05309&_r=0
The opioid epidemic killed more than 33,000 people in 2015. What follows are stories of a national affliction that has swept the country, from cities on the West Coast to bedroom communities in the Northeast.
Opioid addiction is America’s 50-state epidemic. It courses along Interstate highways in the form of cheap smuggled heroin, and flows out of “pill mill” clinics where pain medicine is handed out like candy. It has ripped through New England towns, where people overdose in the aisles of dollar stores, and it has ravaged coal country, where addicts speed-dial the sole doctor in town licensed to prescribe a medication.
Public health officials have called the current opioid epidemic the worst drug crisis in American history, killing more than 33,000 people in 2015. Overdose deaths were nearly equal to the number of deaths from car crashes. In 2015, for the first time, deaths from heroin alone surpassed gun homicides.
And there’s no sign it’s letting up, a team of New York Times reporters found as they examined the epidemic on the ground in states across the country. From New England to “safe injection” areas in the Pacific Northwest, communities are searching for a way out of a problem that can feel inescapable.
More...
http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/06/us/op ... 05309&_r=0
Female genital mutilation
Cultural evolution and the mutilation of women
The consequences of FGM for a woman’s reproductive output
http://www.economist.com/news/science-a ... n/NA/email
GENES that increase an individual’s reproductive output will be preserved and spread from generation to generation. That is the process of evolution by natural selection. More subtly, though, in species that have the sorts of learnable, and thus transmissible, behaviour patterns known as culture, cultural changes that promote successful reproduction are also likely to spread. This sort of cultural evolution is less studied than the genetic variety, but perhaps that should change, for a paper published this week in Nature Ecology and Evolution, by Janet Howard and Mhairi Gibson of the University of Bristol, in England, suggests understanding it better may help to wipe out a particularly unpleasant practice, that of female genital mutilation.
FGM, as it is known for short, involves cutting or removing part or all of a female’s external genitalia—usually when she is a girl or just entering puberty. Unlike male circumcision, which at least curbs the transmission of HIV, the AIDS-causing virus, FGM brings no medical benefit whatsoever. Indeed, it often does harm. Besides psychological damage and the inevitable risk that is associated with any sort of surgery (especially when not conducted in clinical conditions), FGM can cause subsequent obstetric complications and put a woman at risk of future infections. All these seem like good reasons why it would harm reproductive output and thus be disfavoured by evolution, whether biological or cultural. Yet the practice persists, particularly in parts of Africa and among migrant populations originating in these places. Ms Howard and Dr Gibson wanted to understand why.
To do so they drew on data from five national health surveys carried out in west Africa (specifically, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Mali and Senegal) over the past ten years. These provided data on the FGM-status—mutilated or otherwise—of more than 60,000 women from 47 ethnic groups. That enabled Ms Howard and Dr Gibson to establish the prevalence rates of mutilation in each of these groups, and to search for explanations of any variation.
They first established formally what common sense would suggest is true—that the daughters of a mother belonging to an ethnic group where the practice is widespread are, themselves, more likely to have undergone mutilation than those of a mother not belonging to such a group. But there was more to the pattern of those results than mere correlation. The average rates of mutilation in the groups the researchers looked at tended to cluster towards the ends of the distribution, near either 0% or 100%, rather than being spread evenly along it.
In the argot of statistics, then, the distribution is U-shaped. This suggests something is pushing behaviour patterns away from the middle and towards the extremes. What that something might be is in turn suggested by the two researchers’ second finding: the consequences of mutilation for a woman’s reproductive output.
For convenience, Ms Howard and Dr Gibson defined a woman’s reproductive output as the number of her children still living when she reached the age of 40. Just over 10,000 women in the five pooled surveys were over this age, and it was from these that the researchers drew their data. Their analysis showed that in ethnic groups where mutilation was common, mothers who were themselves mutilated had more children over their reproductive lifetimes than did the unmutilated. In groups where mutilation was rare, by contrast, it was the other way around. At the extremes, in groups where mutilation was almost ubiquitous or almost unheard of, the average difference amounted to a third or more of an extra child per lifetime. That is a strong evolutionary pressure to conform to the prevailing social norm, whatever it is.
What causes this difference Ms Howard and Dr Gibson cannot say for sure, but they suggest that conforming to whichever norm prevails might let a woman make a more advantageous marriage, and also give her better access to support networks, particularly of members of her own sex. Cultural evolution, in other words, is generating conformity in the same sort of way that biological evolution does when, say, the plumage of a male bird has to conform to female expectations of what a male looks like if that male is to mate successfully, even though the particular pattern of his plumage brings no other benefit.
All this does, though, offer a lever to those who are trying to eradicate female genital mutilation, for unlike genetic norms, cultural ones can be manipulated. The distribution’s shape suggests that, if mutilation rates in societies where FGM is now the norm could somehow be pushed below 50%, then positive feedback might continue to reduce them without further effort (though such effort could well speed things up).
One thing that is known to push in the right direction is more and better education—and not just for girls. That is desirable for reasons far wider than just the elimination of FGM, however. In a companion piece to Ms Howard’s and Dr Gibson’s paper, Katherine Wander of Binghamton University, in New York state, offers a thought inspired directly by the new research. She wonders if fostering social connections between “cut” and “uncut” women in a community might reorganise support networks specifically in a way that reduces the advantages of mutilation.
More widely, the method Ms Howard and Dr Gibson have pioneered, of looking for unanticipated reproductive advantages that help explain the persistence of other undesirable behaviours, might be applied elsewhere. So-called “honour killings” would be a candidate for such a study, as would the related phenomena of daughter neglect, and the selective infanticide and selective abortion of females. On the face of things these might be expected to be bad for total reproductive output. But perhaps, as with FGM, that is not always the case. And, if it is not, such knowledge would surely help in the fight against them.
Cultural evolution and the mutilation of women
The consequences of FGM for a woman’s reproductive output
http://www.economist.com/news/science-a ... n/NA/email
GENES that increase an individual’s reproductive output will be preserved and spread from generation to generation. That is the process of evolution by natural selection. More subtly, though, in species that have the sorts of learnable, and thus transmissible, behaviour patterns known as culture, cultural changes that promote successful reproduction are also likely to spread. This sort of cultural evolution is less studied than the genetic variety, but perhaps that should change, for a paper published this week in Nature Ecology and Evolution, by Janet Howard and Mhairi Gibson of the University of Bristol, in England, suggests understanding it better may help to wipe out a particularly unpleasant practice, that of female genital mutilation.
FGM, as it is known for short, involves cutting or removing part or all of a female’s external genitalia—usually when she is a girl or just entering puberty. Unlike male circumcision, which at least curbs the transmission of HIV, the AIDS-causing virus, FGM brings no medical benefit whatsoever. Indeed, it often does harm. Besides psychological damage and the inevitable risk that is associated with any sort of surgery (especially when not conducted in clinical conditions), FGM can cause subsequent obstetric complications and put a woman at risk of future infections. All these seem like good reasons why it would harm reproductive output and thus be disfavoured by evolution, whether biological or cultural. Yet the practice persists, particularly in parts of Africa and among migrant populations originating in these places. Ms Howard and Dr Gibson wanted to understand why.
To do so they drew on data from five national health surveys carried out in west Africa (specifically, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Mali and Senegal) over the past ten years. These provided data on the FGM-status—mutilated or otherwise—of more than 60,000 women from 47 ethnic groups. That enabled Ms Howard and Dr Gibson to establish the prevalence rates of mutilation in each of these groups, and to search for explanations of any variation.
They first established formally what common sense would suggest is true—that the daughters of a mother belonging to an ethnic group where the practice is widespread are, themselves, more likely to have undergone mutilation than those of a mother not belonging to such a group. But there was more to the pattern of those results than mere correlation. The average rates of mutilation in the groups the researchers looked at tended to cluster towards the ends of the distribution, near either 0% or 100%, rather than being spread evenly along it.
In the argot of statistics, then, the distribution is U-shaped. This suggests something is pushing behaviour patterns away from the middle and towards the extremes. What that something might be is in turn suggested by the two researchers’ second finding: the consequences of mutilation for a woman’s reproductive output.
For convenience, Ms Howard and Dr Gibson defined a woman’s reproductive output as the number of her children still living when she reached the age of 40. Just over 10,000 women in the five pooled surveys were over this age, and it was from these that the researchers drew their data. Their analysis showed that in ethnic groups where mutilation was common, mothers who were themselves mutilated had more children over their reproductive lifetimes than did the unmutilated. In groups where mutilation was rare, by contrast, it was the other way around. At the extremes, in groups where mutilation was almost ubiquitous or almost unheard of, the average difference amounted to a third or more of an extra child per lifetime. That is a strong evolutionary pressure to conform to the prevailing social norm, whatever it is.
What causes this difference Ms Howard and Dr Gibson cannot say for sure, but they suggest that conforming to whichever norm prevails might let a woman make a more advantageous marriage, and also give her better access to support networks, particularly of members of her own sex. Cultural evolution, in other words, is generating conformity in the same sort of way that biological evolution does when, say, the plumage of a male bird has to conform to female expectations of what a male looks like if that male is to mate successfully, even though the particular pattern of his plumage brings no other benefit.
All this does, though, offer a lever to those who are trying to eradicate female genital mutilation, for unlike genetic norms, cultural ones can be manipulated. The distribution’s shape suggests that, if mutilation rates in societies where FGM is now the norm could somehow be pushed below 50%, then positive feedback might continue to reduce them without further effort (though such effort could well speed things up).
One thing that is known to push in the right direction is more and better education—and not just for girls. That is desirable for reasons far wider than just the elimination of FGM, however. In a companion piece to Ms Howard’s and Dr Gibson’s paper, Katherine Wander of Binghamton University, in New York state, offers a thought inspired directly by the new research. She wonders if fostering social connections between “cut” and “uncut” women in a community might reorganise support networks specifically in a way that reduces the advantages of mutilation.
More widely, the method Ms Howard and Dr Gibson have pioneered, of looking for unanticipated reproductive advantages that help explain the persistence of other undesirable behaviours, might be applied elsewhere. So-called “honour killings” would be a candidate for such a study, as would the related phenomena of daughter neglect, and the selective infanticide and selective abortion of females. On the face of things these might be expected to be bad for total reproductive output. But perhaps, as with FGM, that is not always the case. And, if it is not, such knowledge would surely help in the fight against them.
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Kateeeeeeeeee
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Hello everyone, My name is Katiya. I am a Ukrainian who has been retained to launch an Ismaili website. I need some help with content. Therefore i decided to search an Ismaili website to find someone who is an Ismaili and can help with this Project. Once the site has been launched, we will be looking for full time staff in maintaining this world wide website. Please contact me on my email amira.dream13@gmail.com if you are able too assist. Thank you very much Katiya.
Trudeau Unveils Bill Legalizing Recreational Marijuana in Canada
OTTAWA — Fulfilling a campaign pledge, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau introduced legislation on Thursday to legalize the recreational use of marijuana in Canada.
Many nations have either decriminalized marijuana, allowed it to be prescribed medically or effectively stopped enforcing laws against it. But when Mr. Trudeau’s bill passes as expected, Canada will become only the second nation, after Uruguay, to completely legalize marijuana as a consumer product.
“Criminal prohibition has failed to protect our kids and our communities,” said Bill Blair, a lawmaker and former Toronto police chief whom Mr. Trudeau appointed to manage the legislation.
Mr. Blair said at a news conference that the government hoped to begin allowing legal sales by the middle of 2018. While the government’s plan has been broadly shaped by a panel of experts, many issues still need to be ironed out.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/13/worl ... d=71987722
OTTAWA — Fulfilling a campaign pledge, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau introduced legislation on Thursday to legalize the recreational use of marijuana in Canada.
Many nations have either decriminalized marijuana, allowed it to be prescribed medically or effectively stopped enforcing laws against it. But when Mr. Trudeau’s bill passes as expected, Canada will become only the second nation, after Uruguay, to completely legalize marijuana as a consumer product.
“Criminal prohibition has failed to protect our kids and our communities,” said Bill Blair, a lawmaker and former Toronto police chief whom Mr. Trudeau appointed to manage the legislation.
Mr. Blair said at a news conference that the government hoped to begin allowing legal sales by the middle of 2018. While the government’s plan has been broadly shaped by a panel of experts, many issues still need to be ironed out.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/13/worl ... d=71987722
The Spiritual Consequences of Alcohol Consumption
http://gostica.com/spiritual-lifestile/ ... nsumption/
http://gostica.com/spiritual-lifestile/ ... nsumption/