Eliza Ronalds-Hannon describes the unintended consequences of recent law enforcement success in the European war against heroin:
In Norway, users turned to buprenorphine, a semi-synthetic often used to treat heroin addiction, but intoxicating and addictive in higher doses. In Hungary, cathinones gained popularity. That substance – an ingredient in the drug mixes known as “bath salts” in the U.S. – is part stimulant, part opioid. Slovakia, too, went for uppers – there, methamphetamine use surged. In Bulgaria, a mysterious substance known as “white heroin” cropped up; reports vary regarding its makeup. Buprenorphine also swept the country of Georgia, which previously never had much of a heroin problem.
One of the worst replacements is a homemade drug called “Krokodil”:
Krokodil users cook codeine – which can be found in many over-the-counter medicines in Russia – with iodine and other household ingredients to create a powerful homemade high. But the result is so deadly the average life span of a user is under a year. The drug gets its name from the appearance of its addicts; their flesh rots from the inside out, leaving the skin as scaly as a crocodile’s.
“It can totally destroy the nervous system,” said Georgia’s Tamaz Mchedlidze, who explained that in Georgia the Krokodil recipe also includes liquid toilet cleaner, and gasoline. The latter is a controversial ingredient, Mchedlidze noted; “some junkies insist on using Wissol gasoline, while others say you should use Rompetrol,” he said, referring to two brand names of gasoline.
The University of Pennsylvania Health System recently announced that they will no longer hire smokers in any of their Pennsylvania facilities. Harald Schmidt, Kristin Voigt, and Ezekiel J. Emanuel argue that policies like this are misguided:
The broader claim that it is fair to exclude smokers because they are responsible for raising health care costs is too simplistic. It ignores the fact that smoking is addictive and therefore not completely voluntary. Among adult daily smokers, 88% began smoking by the time they were 18, before society would consider them fully responsible for their actions. Much of this early smoking is subtly and not so subtly encouraged by cigarette companies. As many as 69% of smokers want to quit, but the addictive properties of tobacco make that exceedingly difficult: only 3 to 5% of unaided cessation attempts succeed. It is therefore wrong to treat smoking as something fully under an individual’s control.
David Asch, Ralph Muller, and Kevin Volpp are more supportive:
[W]e conducted a randomized trial comparing the use of employer-provided financial incentives for smoking cessation, aided by counseling, with an approach in which the same sorts of counseling programs were made available to employees but no incentives were given — effectively comparing enabling choice (rung 3) with guiding choice through incentives (rung 5). In one sense, the results were dramatic: during 12 to 18 months of follow-up, employees in the incentive group had a quit rate that was approximately three times that in the comparison group.5 But in absolute terms, even the incentive group had an 18-month quit rate of only about 9% — meaning that even with an aggressive system of rewards, 91% of employees who wanted to quit could not. We believe that the severe harms of smoking justify moving higher up on the ladder when lower-rung interventions don’t achieve essential public health goals.
Your reader who complained about having to pay $500/month in alimony “just because he was a man” might not have told the whole story. If I’m wrong I apologize, but it may also have been because he was bailing on the marriage and the wife did not want to divorce. I suppose it depends on which state that was. I was divorced in California, and the divorce was mutually agreed by my wife and I. Part of the divorce settlement was a division of property agreement that we filled out and agreed upon together, and signed and presented as part of the petition. Since the divorce was uncontested, the mutually agreed terms were basically rubber stamped by the judge. In this case, no children were involved either. When children are involved it leads to more judicial intervention.
The case being described by your reader sounds like it was a contested divorce, not an uncontested one with mutual agreement. I may be wrong, but I think a decision like this is likely if the husband wants to divorce but the wife does not, or if the husband and wife can’t agree mutually on a property settlement. So it may have been because he was a man AND because he was unilaterally initiating a contested divorce.
Considering it this way, a prenup is like planning for divorce in advance. Going into marriage without a prenup means you are committed to making it work, unless both can agree on a settlement. I suppose couples who fear they can’t make it work or agree on a settlement, and thus need the protection of a prenup, should think twice, three, four, or more times before marrying.
Even if you don’t email the Dish, you can still add your two cents to the thread:
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An emailer shares a dramatic tale of woe:
I was married when I was 24. It was a bad marriage. I tried to call the engagement off four times, but was coerced back into it each time with threats that she would kill herself if I left. She was generally this awful every day. We were married for two years, which is how long it takes for someone to call someone’s bluff on that threat. When I left, I was shocked by the state of our finances.
I made about $30-35K per year. I believe she made about $75K. I had a car payment and a student loan payment. She had a car payment. Rent was reasonable. There was no reason for any credit card debt.
A few days after I left, she sent me a spreadsheet of assets and debts. Under assets, she listed things of mine like my guitars and a piano that was a gift from my best friend. However, on her side, she didn’t count things like a several thousand dollar ring as an asset. That was the beginning of the fucking-over. She also had over $30K in credit card debt that I didn’t know about. Not only that, without my knowing, she had applied for these cards in both of our names.
She proposed that all of the debt should be mine and all of the assets hers. The way she saw it, the only property I should retain was my clothes. This carried an additional threat of her family having money and mine having none, and she would therefore do everything she could do to give me all of the debt and none of the assets, to cripple me for years.
I saw a lawyer about this. She said that it would cost me at least $10-15K and a lot of stress to properly contest everything. I could barely afford my Corolla, so this was out of the question.
I then realized that the only leverage I could have would be if I left and didn’t divorce her. She wanted to wrap things up and fuck me over quickly while emotion was still involved. I told her I didn’t want to go through with the legal process and was willing to wait two years until she could file for divorce on the grounds of abandonment … unless she met in the middle on the debt that she accumulated (my lawyer said I would be held liable for half, since she put the cards in my name, unless the proceedings were to get really expensive). After a few more days of threats from her, and me not backing down, she agreed to 50% of her debt, and I would get to keep my guitars, piano and iPod. Nothing else. No wedding gifts. Nothing at all. Good enough for me.
Then I went to my lawyer. We went over my finances. This debt she threw on me, in addition to my car payment, put me in an unmanageable position, which forced me into bankruptcy. I reaffirmed the car loan, to save some semblance of a credit rating, but in order to expunge the debt that she accrued, my credit rating dropped from 780 to the cellar. Five years later, it’s finally back up, but that really fucked me over when I wanted to buy a new car or rent an apartment.
If you’re struggling to get by, a prenup can save you. But more importantly, don’t marry an awful person.
A much happier story:
My mom was 68 when my dad died. They had lived modestly in a small town (Dad owned a general merchandise store), but he had made a couple of smart investments during the depression and had held on to those investments for almost 50 years. When he died, his estate was enough that if invested frugally could help support my mom’s lifestyle – modest but comfortable.
When she remarried some 6 years later, my sister and I stayed with her the night before the wedding. As we were sitting at her table talking, she dropped two envelopes on the table which, much to our collective shock, was a prenuptial agreement! I had no idea that mom even knew what a prenup was, much less how to go about getting one and convincing her soon-to-be new husband to agree. When we asked her why, she said very simply, “Your dad and I worked hard to put money away for the two of you and I just want to make sure that if I die first that there is no question about who inherits. And my new husband agreed – for his children as well. We are combining our future income (social security) but the past is different.”
My mom had to leave high school after her freshman year, after her mom died, to take care of her dad and brother but she obviously learned a lot by living and working along side my dad for 47 years. She outlived my stepdad by 12 years and I am still in awe of how smart she was!
Conor unpacks the findings of a recent report on NYC’s surveillance programs on Muslims, which he thinks produced more paranoia than intelligence:
Many regular mosque-goers have decreased their attendance, “and those who attend do so to just pray and leave, looking over their shoulders for eavesdropping spies the entire time. One young woman who is responsible for organizing youth activities in her mosque noted how congregants have internalized the need to self-edit religious Sunday school curriculum: ‘It’s very difficult, it’s very hard, you don’t know what to say, I have to think twice about the sentences I say just in case someone can come up with a different meaning to what I’m saying.'”
He rightly questions super-nanny Bloomberg’s reputation as a defender of free speech and religious freedom:
Suffice it to say that the NYPD’s surveillance program significantly affected the lives of its targets for the worse, making them frightened, paranoid, mistrustful of one another, less willing to participate in the civic process, and more inclined to practice their religion in isolation. If Catholics or Jews were targeted by a municipal police department in this way, utterly changing the dynamic of their faith communities for years on end, Americans would be outraged, doubly so if the surveillance produced zero leads and no evidence of averting any serious crime.
$4 to $6 trillion, according to a new study. This does not count the uncountable human loss, or the brutal toll of PTSD and suicide among the survivors. Last year saw more military suicides in America (349) than military combat deaths in Afghanistan (295). The post-war is becoming more deadly than the war. Yglesias adds:
What should really strike fear into your heart is [professor Linda Bilmes’s] finding that “the largest portion of that bill is yet to be paid.” That’s because equipment lost or destroyed in the wars is going to have to be replaced, interest on the money borrowed to finance the wars is going to have to be paid, and most of all because health care and disability benefits are going to have to be paid well out into the future.
Spencer blames the cost on America’s overreaction to terrorism:
Money, ultimately, is power. In context, it would take a nuclear strike on the United States to inflict the kind of economic damage that the wars have reaped. The only nations capable of inflicting such damage are disinclined toward doing so; and no non-state actor will plausibly obtain the capability to match such a threat. All of that damage is the result not of what bin Laden or Saddam Hussein or the insurgencies that began in their wake did to America, but because of how American strategiests chose to respond. As Radiohead once sang, you do it to yourself, and that’s why it really hurts.
(Photo: Army veteran Brad Schwarz walks through the garage of the home he rents with his girlfriend on May 3, 2012 in Hanover Park, Illinois. The tattoo on Schwarz’s back, a quote from William Shakespeare’s Henry V, is a tribute to friends he served with in Iraq.
Schwarz uses a service dog to help him cope with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) related to his 2008 tour in Iraq. In addition to suffering from PTSD Schwarz has memory loss related to Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) and he must walk with a cane because of vertebrae and nerve damage in his back and legs.
Ten days before he was scheduled to rotate home from a 15-month deployment in Iraq, his second, the Humvee in which he was riding was struck by an Improvised Explosive Device (IED). Of the 5 soldiers riding in the vehicle, which caught fire after the explosion, Schwarz was the only one to survive. By Scott Olson/Getty Images.)
Tatum saying “I’d have sex with [Clooney]” has been a sort of macho way for younger straight men to indicate they’re comfortably and confidently hetero for over a decade now. I, at least, remember starting to hear it in college at the end of the ’90s. It might date to this classic scene from the Tarantino-penned movie True Romance. It’s sort of a hyperbolic way of re-affirming straightness: “I can express my admiration for that man’s good looks and charm without compromising my own straight, masculine self-image only by doing it in this over-the-top way.” We “self-confident” straight men no longer feel the need to add Clarence’s qualifier from the movie: “I ain’t no fag, but…”. We obviously aren’t that insecure.
Update from two readers:
There is a movie scene that predates True Romance’s by 14 years, in the 1979 musical Hair.
One of the characters is asked by an Army recruiter if he is attracted to men and answeres, “Well, I wouldn’t kick Mick Jagger out of bed, but I’m not a homosexual, no”, which then leads to the hit song “Hair” being performed. Here’s the scene on YouTube.
So give credit where it is due; it started with the ’60s freedoms, where men chose to grow their hair long while still being masculine, at a time when much of the general population could mistake you for being a female if you wore your hair long.
I actually used that Mick Jagger line myself for a few years afterwards, when I was living in a smaller Midwest college town. It was more to throw a curve into other’s persons assumptions that most everyone was straight. It allowed me to be part trickster, playing with their minds a bit, and suggesting and planting the seed in their mind for a few seconds that I might actually be gay – or that others might be gay. The effectiveness of this declined as more and more people actually came out as being gay.
Another:
While Hair is a good earlier example of the phenomenon, it goes deeper. To me the classic expression of male-on-male adulation comes from 1942’s Casablanca. Claude Raines’s Inspector Renault explains to Ingrid Berman’s Ilasa Lund that “He (Bogart’s Rick) is the kind of man that – well, if I were a woman and I were not around, I should be in love with Rick”. Maybe it just serves as characterization of Vichy French turpitude, but the character of Renault is portrayed as an inveterate skirt chaser whose real kinship rests with Rick Blaine.
Here’s a reminder of why “sponsored content” should be anathema to a free and independent press: E.B. White’s letter to Xerox after the company sponsored content in a 1976 issue of Esquire:
A funded article is a tempting morsel for any publication—particularly for one that is having a hard time making ends meet. A funded assignment is a tempting dish for a writer, who may pocket a much larger fee than he is accustomed to getting. And sponsorship is attractive to the sponsor himself, who, for one reason or another, feels an urge to penetrate the editorial columns after being so long pent up in the advertising pages. These temptations are real, and if the barriers were to be let down I believe corruption and abuse would soon follow.
Not all corporations would approach subsidy in the immaculate way Xerox did or in the same spirit of benefaction. There are a thousand reasons for someone’s wishing to buy his way into print, many of them unpalatable, all of them to some degree self-serving. Buying and selling space in news columns could become a serious disease of the press. If it reached epidemic proportions, it could destroy the press. I don’t want IBM or the National Rifle Association providing me with a funded spectacular when I open my paper. I want to read what the editor and the publisher have managed to dig up on their own—and paid for out of the till. …
The funded article is not in itself evil, but it is the beginning of evil, and it is an invitation to evil. I hope the invitation will not again be extended, and, if extended, I hope it will be declined.
At the time, the NYT covered the uproar over the Xerox-sponsored content:
The article by Mr. [Harrison E.] Salisbury, former associate editor of The New York Times, provoked editorials around the country and protests from writers who feared that it would set a precedent for encroachment by advertisers into the traditionally independent editorial side of journalism. Under the arrangement, Xerox paid Esquire to commission Mr. Salisbury to write “Travels Through America,” a 23-page article that took six months to complete. Mr. Salisbury was paid $40,000 plus $15,000 in expenses. Esquire in turn received a contract for a $115,000 advertising package from Xerox for one year.
The agreement stipulated that Xerox would not interfere with or have any influence over the article, but would run full-page ads at the beginning and the end of the article. If the corporation did not like the essay, Esquire would be free to publish it, without returning Xerox’s money, but without identifying it with Xerox in any way. “It was an experimental idea and since the big corporations sponsor television specials and other cultural enterprises, I saw nothing wrong with it,” said Mr. Salisbury yesterday to Mr. White’s criticism. He added that “magazines are suffering from lack of funds to pay their writers. “I’ve had no bad feedback from the article and if it is done just like our arrangement, that’s fine,” he said. “It worked like a charm.”
The NYT is prepping a report on this phenomenon, which is now spreading like wildfire in online media and in danger of becoming the norm. It’s a rare moment when the press has covered this issue – perhaps because the NYT is one of the few media brands self-confident enough to take it on, without worrying it will need to go there in the near-future.
“I find the opportunism of the Clintons – who did more substantive harm to gay people in eight years than any other administration – more disgusting than the fundamentalist hostility.” OK, I can go along with “more disgusting than fundamentalist hostility,” but I would describe Bill Clinton’s behavior in 1996 as cowardice more than opportunism. It was an eternity ago in terms of public opinion, and DOMA passed the House 342 to 67 and the Senate 85 to 14. To buck that would have required great courage. (Hillary’s more recent statements when a senator are far worse.)
But worst of all was 2004, where Rove, the GOP, and the right-wing propaganda machine aggressively targeted gay people to get out the vote in state after state. What makes their behavior so much worse was that cowardice was NOT a factor; on this issue, the GOP was not threatened with a challenge from the left. They maliciously ginned up fear and hatred solely to get a few more voters to the polls.
Another:
You keep repeating this assertion about Clinton, and I have to say it doesn’t ring true. I’d argue Reagan, in his disregard for AIDS, was clearly more responsible for not just “harm” but a quantifiable number of deaths. DADT happened because Clinton overreached, in his first months in office, on trying to fully lift the restrictions on gays in the military. DOMA was considered to be a sop to homophobes in an area (gay marriage) that was inconceivably distant.
Did his Justice Department have to ringingly announce it had no constitutional objections to DOMA during the actual hearings? Did his 1996 campaign have to run ads in the South bragging of defending marriage? And it was not inconceivably distant: Hawaii was pushing the envelope. And even if it were inconsistently distant, why wouldn’t that be an argument for his vetoing it – or just letting it pass into law without his signature? Another adds that “in 1996, not only were about 80% of Americans opposed to marriage equality, but roughly half supported outlawing gay sex.” Another:
The whole idea of Lent is repentance and the search for forgiveness, isn’t it? And isn’t Easter about renewal? Which is why your comments on the Clintons, I feel, are wholly out-of-whack with what you’ve said about folks like Rob Portman.
You are falling victim to the vitriol you felt about Clinton’s presidency back in the ’90s and his own blatant opportunism, neither of which I fault you for. I do, however, fault you for castigating the Clintons’ “change of heart.” You recently told a reader:
Even if they are pure opportunists, as a civil rights cause, it shouldn’t matter. What matters is support for marriage equality. Period. Late-comers should be as welcome as the pioneers.
Now granted, you said this about Rob Portman, who suddenly did an about-face on gay marriage strictly because opposition to it harmed his son (he didn’t give a shit when it was other people’s sons and daughters, apparently), but how does this not apply to the Clintons as well?
Let’s say for the sake of argument that the Clintons are nothing but glaring opportunists who did everything they could to keep gays out of normalizing institutions that would allow them to feel like full human beings. I’m willing to buy that argument, because I think DOMA and “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” showed President Clinton to be at best callous and at worst a political eunuch. But just look at Rob Portman’s voting record. He voted YES on an amendment to the United States Constitution banning gay marriage, something the Clintons never did. He voted YES on banning gays from adopting in Washington, D.C. – which the Clintons vehemently opposed.
I welcome president Clinton’s change of heart, just as I welcomed Barack Obama’s and Bob Barr’s. But I am not going to white-wash his or Richard Socarides’ records.
It’s churlish to cavil. If we can forgive Ken Mehlman, we can surely forgive Bill Clinton. And welcome him to the civil rights cause of our time.
But here’s the legacy that Clinton wielded as a Democratic Party president – cited now by countless Foxbots. Clinton didn’t just sign DOMA, he signed the law banning HIV-positive tourists and immigrants, legitimizing the rank bigotry and anti-scientific posture of Jesse Helms. He had plenty of time to prep for the military ban, but his first few months were among the most disorganized and chaotic of any president in recent times. He didn’t just enact DADT, his own Pentagon subsequently doubled the rate of gay discharges from the military.
I’ve praised Hillary Clinton for her breakthrough for gay human rights at State. I’m happy about Bill Clinton’s recent op-ed. But I cannot accept an apology Bill Clinton still refuses to offer. I’m not whitewashing the GOP either (is that the impression you’ve got from the blog on gays and the GOP over the years?). They bear by far the largest share of the blame – especially Rove and Bush and Mehlman who knew better and used our lives and loves as tools for the maintenance of their own power. The Clintons were just cold opportunists – the Frank and Clare Underwood of their time. I’m just not going to pretend they were allies of the gay community, when they weren’t. They like to think they are; but they weren’t. The record is patently clear. I lived through it. And had a front row seat in Washington.
Comparing the budgets of a public defenders’ office to a prosecutors’ office is a false equivalence. I work as a state-level prosecutor in a small county. Public defenders only get involved in a case after someone gets charged with a crime. Prosecutors spend a good part of their day involved in investigations that never lead to charges (things like reviewing search warrants, interviewing witnesses, and discussing cases with officers where we decline to prosecute). The State has substantial discovery obligations in each case, which means the production of hundreds of pages of documents and a support staff to handle those requirements. In only a fraction of cases does the defense disclose anything through the discovery process. Keep in mind that the State has both the burden of proof and production in criminal cases while the defense has none. It’s not uncommon for the State to arrange for and call dozens of witnesses in a case and for the defense to call none. It’s a lot more expensive to build a house than tear one down.
Another agrees that the comparison is “grossly misleading”:
As that final sentence in that post shows, there are private defense attorneys where there is no private prosecutorial function. By definition all criminal prosecution is handled by the government. So even if you have some form of functional parity, you would naturally have more headcount and funding for public prosecutors than for public defenders, because a great deal of total criminal defense work is handled by private attorneys.
I’m not disagreeing that there are serious concerns with staffing and resourcing in criminal justice. In fact, as the husband of a prosecutor, I strongly support increased funding on both sides, and of the court system itself, in the interest of speedy trials and fair justice. Far from favoring prosecution (and here is where my bias may interject), budget and staffing cuts means that prosecutors are constantly walking away from cases they don’t feel as confident about or don’t have the time anymore to pursue. That’s an automatic win for the defense. So to think that lousy budgets only helps prosecution is wrong. Budget cuts means a lot of criminals just don’t go to trial.
That’s just my humble dissent on an issue that hits close to home. I sometimes rankle when people get anti-prosecutor because of the ridiculous implication that they spend all day locking up minorities out of malice or careerism. These are attorneys who are making far less money than their private sector peers to engage in public service. I wish people knew the number of domestic battery, rape, poaching, child porn, child abuse, human trafficking etc. work that these bright attorneys take on. Seeing this evidence is not easy on the prosecutors or the families who support them. But someone has to stand and represent the People, and fight for justice and for the victims. When prosecutors are underfunded, the defense is underfunded, and the courts are underfunded, that doesn’t always happen.
I think “blood phobia” is a misnomer. As described, it seems to be an autonomic neurophysiologic reaction involving activation of the vagus nerve, which slows the pulse and drops the blood pressure resulting in syncope (fainting or passing out). In my youth, I passed out having blood drawn, during dental work and while looking at a photograph of an automobile accident. Fortunately by the time I became a physician, these episodes had stopped. There was never any associated fear, panic or avoidance behavior.
My arachnophobia, on the other hand, is an entirely different kettle of emotions. The very mention of the S-word or visualization of such a creature in life or image produces an intense, screaming panic and avoidance. I once jumped into the back seat from the driver’s seat of a car I was driving when one scurried (ugh!) across the windshield. That’s a phobia.
Another reader:
I’ve done a lot of thinking and researching this topic and thought I’d share my experience with bloody squeemishness.
When I was younger I was always okay with blood. I wanted to be a doctor. I worked as a phlebotomist in college and my mom assured me this was a marketable skill to have. After college I started a research assistantship that involved taking blood from children. One day something changed. I’m sure it was a culmination of factors but seeing children fainting from their experiences sent me in to a panic attack. I thought I too would faint and it wasn’t just about the blood; asthenophobia is the fear of fainting. Soon it became an overwhelming fear, so much so I couldn’t go to work. I always had to be well-hydrated and make sure my blood sugar was up. I started therapy, some medication for anxiety and I have been managing it ever since, 8 years later. I have a great job in the medical field but behind a desk and I couldn’t be happier with it. However, I’ve often thought about what would’ve happened if I couldn’t just give up that dream of being a doctor.
Another:
I have never seen blood phobia described before, but my father has it. Good to see he is not unique. In addition to passing out at the sight of blood – even on screen – he sometimes has convulsions. But it has to be REAL on-screen blood – he can watch a Western or an old James Bond movie, for example, and not react. A documentary or science show, though – watch out!
He can’t give blood. He used to try once in a while, like when one of his students was seriously ill and needed donations. But he passed out every time and caused the doctors too much trouble. And even talking about anything to do with blood or cutting makes him feel faint.
In high school, he once convulsed during a science class movie, kicking over an entire row of bolted-together seats and their occupants. Excused from gory classes after that! As an adult, he was a frequent guest lecturer to archaeological societies. At one pre-speech dinner he sat (unknowingly) between an undertaker and a surgeon. They started talking shop, and he quietly lost consciousness and slid under the table. They had to revive him, so he could give his talk. When one of us scraped our knees in childhood, the refrain was always, “Don’t show it to Daddy! Don’t show it to Daddy!”
(Photo by Flickr user numberstumper, who captions: “The scene: Toby ices Gabe’s finger in the kitchen while Mom and Dad watch All About Eve in the living room, blissfully unaware that their daughter’s fingernail just lost a fight with a paring knife.”)
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