Tuesday, January 30, 2018

Were the Say NO to Drugs poster contests successful?

I remember winning an award for a Say NO to Drugs poster contest when I was an elementary school student in the 80s. I made a slot machine with 3 skulls as the jackpots with the headline “Drugs! A LOSING COMBINATION!” When you’re a kid and you have artistic ability it gives you a level up over other kids. I did grow up through school to not use any drugs or even smoke weed until I graduated high school at 17. But then….muah ha ha ha. It’s really hard to even believe that we are hearing Jeff Sessions quote Nancy Reagan’s Say NO to Drugs propaganda with fervor as if it was something that worked. The only difference is that I’m not a 10 year old poster winner anymore, I’m a 41 year old recreational drug user who spent of those 20 years smoking weed. It’s been revealed what hijinx the Reagan administration were actually up to when creating that campaign to distract people from noticing that the government was actually creating crack cocaine to imprison Black people and filling prisons to fundraise for the wars that were happening in Central America. This has been revealed to not be conspiracy but fact. It’s almost like Dejavu. Session’s is even calling marijuana a gateway for opiates! Beyond shaking our heads, we should actually not be surprised. This administration is going to spend money building a wall across the U.S Mexico border when dealers are digging and traversing through tunnels and using U.S passport holders to traffick drugs across the legal border checks. The volunteer militia that patrols the war on illegals with their legal arms is absolutely no match for the desperation that poverty brings and being outnumbered. Trump is hell bent on building his wall and stopping illegal immigrants from bringing in drugs. I agree that this is happening at an alarming rate and the violence that has resulted in cartels running product has resulted in great amounts of death and mayhem in the U.S. In Japan, an island country almost all drugs that one can think of aside from Advil level painkillers are illegal. If you are a Japanese citizen, you will be shamed publicly in media, your parents will have to apologize on TV and you will probably spend months in jail for 1 gram of marijuana. If you are a foreign citizen, you will be banned from returning to Japan for up to 3 years. Women who give birth are not given epidurals (this might be a good thing) and if you have chronic sports injuries or anything else pretty much the only thing that you can get is of the Advil level. But there are synthetics drugs that can be made by streetwise chemists. It’s been confirmed that many of the elements of Fentanyl are made from things that were imported to the U.S from China and Japan. Japan is a limited land mass that has a population that can simply not afford to let immigration slide. The drugs do come in, but in much smaller amounts than the U.S. Drug Violence and Gang wars do not have an impact, guns are not legal here and the social stigma and family burden keeps the people here totally living in fear, working overtime with no pay and no relief, people with legitimate pain that are unable to medicate in any way but alcohol. Trump’s war on drugs is a war on facts totally ignoring the track record of what has been done before because he is set on doing the complete opposite of what has been done before him, except repeating the exact same unsuccessful strategy in preventing drug use and addiction in the 80s. Perhaps marijuana can be a gateway, but in this case the gateway that I see it symbolizing is a gateway to legalization of drugs. I’m honestly not sure what total legalization of all drugs like opiates would end up looking like, as currently it’s not hard to get, doctors were easily prescribing to patients who got addicted and started cutting pills on the street, and it appears that more people are dying than getting arrested. I remember going with one of my boyfriends on his pain pill runs to sell off. He was my driver in between and we’d cut up a pill and snort it before some good sex but neither of us ever got addicted, luckily. Being tough on crime doesn’t help eliminate addiction, but creating strict penalties to the source of the prescription might keep doctors accountable. Being extremely strict on immigration has really helped Japan. This is not only an immigration border issue, but it restricts the ability for an illegal immigrant to survive in Japan. You can’t get an apartment, hotel room or even rent a public computer without showing a passport with a tourist visa or a resident card that is valid. There are no throwaway temporary phones and hardly any under the table cash jobs because the person who breaks the law of illegal hiring or selling a burner phone pays a huge fine. This is how Japan is tough on crime and tough on SHAME! But, their tough on crime doesn't result in filling and building prisons because, again Japan hasn't got the land to do such a thing. I was lucky that I came with my sex work skills but I still didn’t make enough to survive on that alone for very long. Even though I have 2 undocumented adult chosen daughters that I adore and who live relatively straight edge Dreamer type lives in LA, I do think that the U.S can slowly be more effective in siphon off illegal immigration with more success by following the steps that Japan has taken more effectively than building a stupid wall. But because it is possible to millions every day to not only cross the border repeatedly and also eek out a living if you are undocumented in America, it is a systemic and purposely tolerated epidemic with barking dogs like Trump and Sessions to create a distraction of what really will offer no change but break up more families, spend more of the national budget and "alien"ate the relationship between South and North America. Shoot, I brought a marijuana pipe into Canada and I’m practically banned to even drive through or stop over on a passing flight without prior permission from the Canadian consulate so I don’t get detained. I barely want to ever go back to Canada. If someone gets caught illegally crossing the U.S border, they are photographed and dropped back into Mexico. I used to think that a free for all was a good idea, but I think the violence in America in easy comparison to the violence in Japan has changed my mind. Deporting families, border patrols, building walls, filling prisons is not the answer, let's try something new. We already have walls. Our priorities are not in the right order and there could be non violent administrative solutions which can be enforced that would “create more jobs” which is Trump’s favorite idiom but in about 5 ways that would be much easier than building a gigantic border wall. I am curious to see what the legalization of marijuana does to the cartel industry of at least marijuana trafficking, this is one of the main reasons that now even majority Republican support legalization in 2018. Is it possible to change the policies of immigration without affecting the treatment of the millions of undocumented people that live in the U.S today? I used to believe that the borders should be open, but this just isn't an effective national policy because we all live under some government and we don't operate in a cowboy society. I do think that we should change our immigration policy but I don't see anything changing for the better under this administration who is literally taking us back to the 80s, and not in a fun Footloose big hair shoulder pads kind of way.

Tuesday, January 23, 2018

#Drinkingtoo, #Drugstoo, #Huggingtoo and #Chickentoo

“What did you put in this anyway?” Bruce said with a smile. “Acid.” I winked and nonchalantly picked up my guitar. He picked up his trumpet and started to play our song but about ten minutes later he asked me again, “You didn’t put acid in my drink did you?” I laughed. “Dude, I would never do that.” A few weeks later he brought me some noodles from a Chinese restaurant and I was really excited but then after I started eating it, I realized there was chicken meat in it. “Dang,” I said,”We go out together all the time and you know I’m not a carnivore.” he laughed. “Just take out the meat!” he chided. I frowned. I know that inadvertently spiking a non meat eater's food with chicken isn’t the same as giving someone drugs without their consent but the theme here is trust and safety. If I was a Muslim or Hindu and eating chicken was against my religious beliefs then I probably would feel more violated or maybe not. We are in an era where non consensual hugging is considered sexual harassment for some, and surely most of us can remember a non consensual hug from someone in our life or could at least imagine how violating it might feel I hope. Consent has been the hot topic since the #metoo and Aziz Ansari scandal of late, so i started to think about all the friends I knew who had been forced to drink or drug when they clearly didn’t want to. The phenomenon of non consensual drugging of drinks at bars which would lead to sexual or other petty theft crimes is a thing but what if it didn’t lead to these things? Is drugging itself assault? Apparently, it is. One of my sister’s friends was drugged to the point that he was vomiting and throwing up on himself for hours but for what gain did that give the perpetrator? We really couldn’t figure it out as my friends asshole and wallet were not touched by anyone while he was ill. Ansari was doing the classic,”Let me just pour you another drink…(to get the panties off)” move during his sexual coercion date (and I'm going to call it that because at the very least it was coercion if not violence). This had a selfish intention towards fucking Grace even when she said she did not want to have sex or feel forced. Boundaries are boundaries and if you have strong vices you hopefully learn that strong boundaries save lives. Things like clean needles, things like respecting sobriety or hard limits, having a caretaker or a shooting buddy to get high with you or someone more experienced who can guide you through your trip when it goes bad. Most of the drug users I know still using have hard lines because they’ve crossed them close to death and have learned from their mistakes or their friend’s deaths. This is why the idea of putting acid in my friend’s drink was probably not even a funny joke, but perhaps it was a funny joke to me because I knew it was something I wouldn’t do, and this particular friend was pretty naive so i chose to fuck with him. I think that we are in a climate where we need to assume that everyone has boundaries that we do not understand until we ask, so we need to check in with them and often so that we can proceed with confidence. Hopefully, you wouldn’t be like Ansari and not respecting a certain safe zone for only a few moments until going for the claw down the throat and panties in the next few moments. But I guess it is naive to think that everyone is going to follow these rules for the sake of your safety. People lie and they don’t even think that they’re being malicious for it! Dealers often cut their drugs with other shit and don’t tell you simply because of profit or ignorance of the consequences as we have seen with the Fentanyl opioid crisis. How many people do you know have accidentally snorted meth when they wanted to do coke (and nowadays, they can accidentally snort Fentanyl and DIE)? And yeah, the consequences are on you if you are awake and pacing for hours beyond the high you wanted or if ends up being a worse gateway to a habit that you kicked years ago. But really, just like Grace and Ansari, both are responsible and hopefully will make lots of corrective behavior adjustments so that they make better choices in the future. But this was a huge media blowup and most of these kinds of bad dates are quiet and unseen and often swept out of memory because of shame, never spoken because of self blame. How many of us were bought a bunch of drinks we didn’t want to drink in hopes that we’d be so drunk we’d fuck? We drank them and had to deal with him grabbing and slobbering all night til we ran away or slammed a door. Sometimes it doesn’t even leave the bar, just shot after shot after until you are throwing up in the parking lot and someone “rescues” you with a ride home in pseudo safety. Alcohol, drugs, hugging and chicken all seem wildly different, but when served non consensually all feel like a gross violation and some lead to major trauma and worse. But what seems like minor should not be ignored because the more you are able to see boundaries as boundaries that should be respected in all aspects of your life, the safer you will be for yourself and for those that are around you. Don’t wait for someone to jump out of the closet holding their dick in their hand, it can be as simple as a coercive drink bought when you are already drunk and we all can use this media momentum to reality check in with ourselves.

Monday, January 15, 2018

Alternatives to Withdrawal and Death

I’ve been learning a lot about Fentanyl since I posted my friend’s interview. It didn’t even dawn on me that Prince was killed by a Fentanyl overdose until after I started to research the topic. The typical story is that a patient is prescribed an opioid painkiller and cannot handle the withdrawal from it, so starts to resort to any means necessary to obtain something to relieve their pain which include taking higher risks and paying higher prices. In Prince’s case, there was a prescription for Oxy in someone else’s name, and pills containing synthetic opioids including Fentanyl labeled WATSON 385. To add to this, Prince weighed in at 112lbs. I can’t even remember the last time I weighed 112lbs, maybe junior high school. His private plane made and emergency landing in Illinois and Narcan was administered to Prince at that time. The situation was clearly becoming dire in the weeks leading up to his death.

So what are some alternatives to crawling the streets when your skin starts to crawl?? One of my peers was in a terrible car accident with gory Facebook pictures and was very public about the painkillers and the withdrawal that he went through. His friends in the holistic and coaching community had some wonderful advice that I think some of you could benefit from. Take it along with the rest of the advice that you get from the internet, but I feel that a lot of these folks are speaking from experience and right intentioned advocates of healthy holistic alternatives.

Physical addiction sets in after a week or two, it feels like a cold. Kratom, a natural leaf based remedy, can also be addictive, but users say it mirrors coffee withdrawal, nothing as bad as opiate withdrawal. Kratom has 80% success rate at getting folks off Heroin. Kratom is addictive but the withdrawal is infinitely easier than dope... easily worth it esp. If you still have pain. Insomnia is the worst part (If you have a job it gets rough. Lasts Exactly one week) and runny nose and eyes and some complain of restless leg. My experiments found the important thing was to actually use really really hot water! A full 211 degrees if you can, which will also sterilize these not certified by anyone for anything (but pesticide free anyways, cause they're natural pesticides) leaves. If you brewed it at 180, it may have been that you weren't extracting everything. You also have to stir really well. And you have to brew twice to get everything. 3rd boil has almost nothing left. Maple syrup is my favorite sweetener with it. Also agmatine is the best supplement for reducing tolerance to this and nearly any other addictive substance. Agmatine with or shortly before kratom almost lets you half your dosage. And if one flat teaspoon has you actually feeling good, maybe 2/3 of a teaspoon is enough to be sort of pain free? Just gotta calibrate when you’re treating pain to look for the pain to go away and not for the warm glowy blanket feeling. At a teaspoon a day a lot of people claim there is no withdrawal but it’s just subtle. As dose gets higher withdrawal gets more real but it’s still always more mild than the comparable opiate withdrawal. Brew the leaves at a full boil, stir for at least thirty seconds, then sweeten and add the milk of your choice. The powder should settle to a bottom so you don’t have to filter. You can brew the same kratom leaves twice, the second boil of the same leafs is about 1/4 strength compared to the first steeping.

There was even a kratom party on Facebook to try to support the legal access of the leaf and two websites recommended for cheaper acquisition: kratomforcheap.com and ensobotanicals.com

Chai hu mu li long gu!! (a chinese herb) was quoted as having “No symptoms at all. Best formula for narc especially.” Aleve and a natural sleep aid made it relatively easy to middle through the insomnia. Aleve supposedly helps w the restless legs. Also Black Seed Oil takes the edge off. Study up on Black Seed Oil in general. Worthy herb...

If you want to try the pharmaceutical that's indicated for opiate withdrawal, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clonidine is unscheduled and cheap and your doctor should be happy to prescribe it for minor opiate withdrawal. It's also magical in its own right, but we're just starting to explore some of the strangeness of the pharmacology of the imidazoline receptor.

Sunday, January 7, 2018

Tino Fundraising for Strips

Tino,is a harm reduction outreach friend that I met once in person outside of the Sex Worker Cabaret in NYC that I performed at. Since then, we have been Facebook friends following each other for possibly 7 years since that event. Though we never saw each other again in person, I was inspired to chat with him online about his latest project fighting the fentanyl opioid crisis through one on one outreach as far as his feet can travel. He purchases ph testing kits that use the residue of street drugs mixed with water to test for the synthetic opioid fentanyl. The first fentanyl lab, according to Tino was discovered in the mid 90s in Kansas City but he thinks that now much of it comes from Mexico and possibly from China. Indeed, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, illegal drug labs are concocting fentanyl from scratch,and authorities have raided several labs in Mexico that were receiving chemicals from China and Japan to create the drug, according to the DEA. The quantity needed to create a drug that is 50-100x stronger than morphine is much less cargo to smuggle, and someone with basic knowledge of chemistry, pharmaceuticals and the dark net can start a booming business. "Drug dealers are in the business of making money and I've heard it's very easy to make, so that means they can save money [by doing it themselves]," he says. "I wouldn't be surprised if there were real Walter Whites out there. Chemists and pharmacologists can turn to the dark side, just like in Breaking Bad. Tino has traveled to places well known for opioid crisis like Ohio, Philly, and DC, with his strips and naloxone kits. Everything in Ohio tested positive for Fentanyl. Dealers are trying to phase out heroin and bring in Fentanyl. Tino has tested samples of crystal meth, cocaine, and even pressed Xanax pills and found Fentanyl in them. This means that casual recreational drug users that most of us know could also now be affected by overdoses when they thought that they were doing the "safer" drugs. This means most sex workers who party with clients are also at risk! The biggest difference between heroin and fentanyl is that a person can stop breathing within 1 minute and die. That is why the epidemic is what it is exploding to on the news, as well as he said that its affecting a lot of white folks in ways that it hasn't in years before.
Fentanyl was an opioid originally developed for the terminally ill person. It is a quickly administered pain killer, that comes in the form of lollipops, patches and other forms like sprays and lozenges. The formula was discovered as cheaper and easier to make than heroin and it soon became one of the most dangerous and profitable street drugs responsible for more overdosing deaths in 4 states than the U.S had seen in years before. To make matters worse, the war on drugs is being multiplied with Sessions and Trump, who as a team are hell bent on reversing California's newest win of statewide legal marijuana the same as every class of drug. So the hope for new money to help fund harm reduction supplies or safe injection sites is not likely in this administration's mindset, considering that in October Trump declared addiction a "public health emergency" not a "State of emergency" intentionally. Trump's declaration, which will be effective for 90 days and can be renewed, will allow the government to redirect resources in various ways and to expand access to medical services in rural areas. But it won't bring new dollars to fight a scourge that kills nearly 100 people a day. "It's a lot cheaper to have a safe injection house than it is to fund Emergency Room services for an overdose. A safe injection site would supply testing strips, clean needles and help the user access treatment if that's what they wanted. They would be monitored so that they wouldn't overdose and die. Canada has a few and pop up ones.
"Nobody should die because they use drugs. Where at one time it wasn't a white suburban mom's problem, suddenly a loved one dies and now it becomes their problem. Harm reduction like testing strips is not a solution, its just giving someone another day of life."
Tino has reverse overdosed over 100 people, none of whom he knew personally outside of a few that were clients of agencies he had jobs with. "Its about educating people about how to do drugs better...test a small amount for the strength first, get off in pairs; watch each one person for five minutes, have naloxone on hand after getting trained on how to administer the life saving anti-overdose medicine which now comes in a nasal spray that requires no needles at all to use. All it takes 6 to 10 grains, (like a grain of salt)of Fentanyl to kill you. Part of the work that Tino does is educating users about better and safe drugs use. It isn't about prevention or prohibition, to him, it is about saving lives. You can support Tino's work by contributing here.