touching and troubling

2 stories in the NY Times today relating to heroin addictions and the consequences thereof, which i’m posting here following my year last year in a psychology internship working with opiate addicts.  i wrote less than i thought i might about that experience as it was going on – though in retrospect the idea that i would have the energy to write when i got home seems pretty idealistic considering that even doing my schoolwork was extremely challenging.  the year did bring issues of drug addiction much more alive for me of course, leading to strong responses of

1. touching: a one-man show that i really wish i was in new york to see sometime over the next 6 weeks, by a man raised by heroin addicts who both died of AIDS when he was a teenager. we had many discussions in our intern group about working with clients who were struggling to parent while drug-addicted, so the story of a child who grew up in this situation who worked through adversity to recovery through the arts is powerful.  the article mentions a documentary about him, which hopefully i can see since i’m too far from the play performance.

and

2. troubling: a report of heroin use on the rise among affluent teens in new york, as it becomes more accessible, more “cool”, and cheaper than other drugs.  scary.

searching for the good life

Here’s a great piece in the Atlantic (referenced in often-annoying-but-not-this-time David Brooks’ column) about a longitudinal study started at Harvard in the late 30s, still going on today.  The study sought to choose some of the most promising and well-adjusted Harvard undergrads (including JFK) and study them as a model of “the good life.”  Of course the fates of the study subjects diverged significantly, and the resulting data is a testament to the complexity of human experience.

The gem of wisdom to take away from the study:

In an interview in the March 2008 newsletter to the Grant Study subjects, Vaillant was asked, “What have you learned from the Grant Study men?” Vaillant’s response: “That the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.”

oh, ACLU, please save us from this

i don’t know which is scarier: that virtual strip search machines at airports might be happening, or that only 2% of travelers have a problem with it.  sigh.

a random thought

that i am most assuredly not bored with my job right now.

i am so not bored of course that i don’t have time to write about it, but think that the not-boredom in itself is notable, since i have been bored with most every other job i have ever had.  even if the job was in service of doing something that i cared about, the actual day-to-day of the job never worked for me.  and i worried life would just be like this forever.  it is not!  which is highly exciting, and which i thought was worth sharing in a few sentences.  (maybe the excitement is not as apparent for all of you who have not been in my head with me during my other jobs, but if you had been, you would know this is a momentous observation.)

okay, random.

prohibition is an awful flop…we like it

i came on here to put up a link, and laughed to see that my last post was about supporting prop 5 in CA, which sadly didn’t pass.  but the link i was mentioning was to ethan nadelmann’s op ed in the wall street journal today, commemorating the repeal of prohibition on this day in 1933, and urging us to apply the lessons of the prohibition era to current-day drug prohibition.  a good read, and perhaps those of y’all who drink want to raise a glass today in celebration of your freedom to do so.

btw, the title of this post is from a prohibition-era political poem by Franklin Pierce Adams, that i also have always found applicable to our current drug war:

Prohibition is an awful flop.
We like it.
It can’t stop what it’s meant to stop.
We like it.
It’s left a trail of graft and slime
It don’t prohibit worth a dime
It’s filled our land with vice and crime
Nevertheless, we’re for it.

yes on 5, non-violent offender rehabilitation act (NORA)

still in shock about how soon election day is – and i’ve been having some lively conversations about prop 5, which is endorsed by all of the progressive/liberal voting guides that i’ve seen, but i also know a lot of folks are hearing the misleading arguments of prop 5’s many prominent opponents (like the last 5 governors of CA, who coincidentally are in part responsible for how fuct the current system is).  so i wanted to put up some good counterinformation in case anyone is being swayed from supporting this much-needed reform.  prop 5 was designed by the drug policy alliance, with whom i interned while i was in law school, and whose director, ethan nadelman, kind of reminds me of barack obama in his combination of bring really brilliant and inspiring…every time i’ve heard him speak on the vast injustices that the war on drugs have created, i’ve sat there thinking “someone please put him in charge of our national drug policy, please.”  prop 5 takes his ideas and those of many of the best progressive minds in drug policy and criminal justice and puts them to the task of solving CA’s prison crisis.

i especially like this post from arianna huffington, which lays out the important issues, and the problematic motives of the opposition, excellently.  i’d put some exerpts but don’t want to deter anyone from reading the whole thing, which really covers all the bases.  please read, especially if you are undecided on prop 5.  this post follows up huffington’s with some additional info.

prop5-prop36 is a fact sheet explaining how prop 5 works to expand to successes and fill in the holes of prop 36, like adding treatment for youth that is not currently covered by prop 36.  and here is a long list of the supporters of prop 5, and an faq from the yes on 5 website.

please vote yes on 5!  if you have any questions about it please feel free to ask me.

look it’s me

i’m in the new york times!  well, not me specifically, but the collection of many thousands of lawyers and lawyer types who will be out on election day making sure that this year, whoever wins, wins.  i’ll be protecting the vote in las vegas and look forward to a hell of a fiesta next tuesday night .

oh, snap Maverick family!

turns out that the real Mavericks are some badass progressives:

Considering the family’s long history of association with liberalism and progressive ideals, it should come as no surprise that Ms. Maverick insists that John McCain, who has voted so often with his party, “is in no way a maverick, in uppercase or lowercase.”

“It’s just incredible — the nerve! — to suggest that he’s not part of that Republican herd. Every time we hear it, all my children and I and all my family shrink a little and say, ‘Oh, my God, he said it again.’ ”

“He’s a Republican,” she said. “He’s branded.”

read the whole article for some neato etymology.

APA comes out against torture

freaking finally.  for those who haven’t been following, there has been a fair amount of controversy over the fact that the APA had not banned psychologists from working for the government in positions where their expertise is used to assist in torture.  here’s the APA letter to Bush condemning the human rights violations of this administration, and announcing that psychologists are now prohibited from working at places like guantanamo unless they are hired by the detainees or a human rights organization, or they are employed as therapists for military personnel.  better late than never.

weird nostalgia

Reclining Buddha in Polonnaruwa, Sri Lanka http://student.britannica.com/eb/art-92517

maybe some of you reading this know that i spent a summer living and working in sri lanka while i was in law school. i was working in a constitutional reform NGO, which was great especially since there were 2 or 3 constitutional crises while i was there (back when public officials totally giving the finger to any accountability mechanisms in their government was still a novel experience for me, this was an exciting place to be around). i don’t know how much you may know about sri lankan history and current events, though the country has gotten some more attention in recent years with the global war on terror, since for the past 25 years there has been a terrorism-ridden civil war going on there between the Buddhist Sinhalese and Hindu Tamil populations. i’m writing about this now because i happened to see a reference in the news to the fact that this week marks the 25th anniversary of the week-long genocidal riots that killed 1000 Tamils and started this civil war. here is an article from a canadian paper that summarizes what happened in what is now known as “black july,” and a more personal account from a sri lankan journalism blog.

there is this weird cloud of naivete hanging over the summer that i spent there, which was the summer of 2001, after my first year of law school. i was excited to go somewhere that was different from anywhere else i’d ever been, and though i informed myself about the terrorism situation there i also relied on the assertions of the global law program director at NYU that it had calmed down quite a bit and was pretty safe there. while this was actually true, “calmed down” still meant a visible military presence in the city, a lot more searching than i was used to before going into buildings and tourist attractions, and not the absence of risk but a population that had become accustomed to it. “it used to be scary but things don’t happen that much anymore, and you don’t have to worry so much if you aren’t a public figure that would be specifically targeted,” the friends i made would say. “except july, something almost always happens near the anniversary in july.”

i remember feeling pretty edgy about this…not terrible, and in many other ways i had a really fun summer there, but i still was edgy, and the constant presence of the thought that something bad might happen wore on me. there were all these beautiful paintings on the street in a lot of places, and i often admired them innocently, until discovering about halfway through my time there that the paintings were there to commemorate places where bombs had gone off…and they were all over places that i passed all the time! finally near the end of july, as predicted, something did happen – a suicide bomber destroyed a grounded airplane at night at the airport. it was actually kind of a relief when it happened, because whatever thing was going to happen in july was over with, and the attack seemed to be designed to not hurt anyone but the bomber (still sad since it is not unlikely that this person was someone taken as a child and indoctrinated for this purpose).

when i left sri lanka i was just starting to feel comfortable there, and was sad that i had to leave just when i was getting my bearings and knew enough people to really learn about the culture properly. at the same time, i remember arriving home to new york – my passport says this was on august 20, 2001 – and for the first time fully appreciating the blessing of living in a place where i didn’t have to worry about crazy suicide bombers blowing up airplanes in my city, where it didn’t happen that nonfunctional checks and balances in government would result in judges and presidents being able to ignore their constitution with impunity, where you didn’t have to be uber-searched before going anywhere, and where people were not subject to all kinds of intrusions and civil liberties violations because of their ethnic similarity to members of a terrorist organization.

i feel like writing this is kind of trite except for the fact that i really was having exactly this kind of conversation for a few weeks in the late summer of that year whenever people asked me what i learned on my trip. i think everyone who makes travel a big part of their life collects a bunch of memories of new fruits and dishes and music and landscapes, but also has some place that is the first place that makes them think differently about their home and themselves. so even though i haven’t often kept up with what is going on in sri lanka, and am not still in touch with anyone there, i have this bond with the place as having given me this weird gift of forcing me to be mindful of what it meant to live in america in the last week of august of 2001, which was the last time i would ever have the opportunity to be mindful of quite that version of it.

so all of that is to say that seeing that this week is the 25-year anniversary of the week that changed the sri lankans’ world the way that 9/11/01 changed ours, i thought i’d use this medium to share their story with some people who maybe haven’t heard much of it.

i think literature is a good way to get the real feeling of historical events, and so recommend two books that give a flavor of what sri lanka has been like in the 1980s and since. one is anil’s ghost, which maybe is already well-known, since it is by michael ondaatje, who also wrote the english patient. less well known is funny boy, a novel/collection of related short stories by shyam selvadurai that sets a coming-of-age story of a young boy questioning his sexuality on the backdrop of the 1983 riots. if you pick either of them up, please enjoy.