pstp bev prohib "The cost of enforcing Prohibition was high, and the lack of tax revenues on alcohol (some $500 million annually nationwide)[citation needed] affected government coffers. When repeal of Prohibition occurred in 1933, organized crime lost nearly all of its black market alcohol profits in most states (states still had the right to enforce their own laws concerning alcohol consumption) because of competition with low-priced alcohol sales at legal liquor stores. Prohibition had a notable effect on the alcohol brewing industry in the United States. When Prohibition ended, only half the breweries that previously existed reopened. The post-Prohibition period saw the introduction of the American lager style of beer, which dominates today. 4 -14http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... Wine historians also note Prohibition destroyed what was a fledgling wine industry in the United States. Productive wine quality grape vines were replaced by lower quality vines growing thicker skinned grapes that could be more easily transported. Much of the institutional knowledge was also lost as winemakers either emigrated to other wine producing countries or left the business altogether.[25] At the end of Prohibition, some supporters openly admitted its failure. A quote from a letter, written in 1932 by wealthy industrialist John D. Rockefeller, Jr., states: "When Prohibition was introduced, I hoped that it would be widely supported by public opinion and the day would soon come when the evil effects of alcohol would be recognized. I have slowly and reluctantly come to believe that this has not been the result. Instead, drinking has generally increased; the speakeasy has replaced the saloon; a vast army of lawbreakers has appeared; many of our best citizens have openly ignored Prohibition; respect for the law has been greatly lessened; and crime has increased to a level never seen before."[26] Some historians have commented that the alcohol industry accepted stronger regulation of alcohol in the decades after repeal, as a way to reduce the chance that Prohibition would return.[27]" pstp ref prohib http://www.nytimes.com/2010... , 7 -29 http://www.pbs.org/newshou... , 1 -20 http://www.cracked.com/article... 11 -27 barley malt mash - Thomas Page

http://fora.tv/2010... - Thomas Page

Law Enforcement Against Prohibition http://www.leap.cc/cms... , http://healthland.time.com/2010... , http://www.time.com/time... , pstp 11 -26 , 12 -16 http://www.metamute.org/en... , 12 -30 http://www.economist.com/blogs... , 1 -9 http://www.nature.com/news... , 2 -19 The Dumbest Thing Ever Said!...by Hillary Clinton, about the Drug War http://www.youtube.com/watch... , http://www.efficacy-online.org/# , 3 -20 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... , 7 -17 Prohibition: Speakeasies, Loopholes And Politics http://www.npr.org/2011... , Drugs and the Meaning of Life http://www.samharris.org/blog... - Thomas Page

PROHIBITION is a three-part, five-and-a-half-hour documentary film series directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick that tells the story of the rise, rule, and fall of the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and the entire era it encompassed. http://www.pbs.org/kenburn... - Thomas Page

1 -12 Alcohol moderated use as food and taste bud cleanser refresher ? Piss poor "drug of choice" long term heavy use. Freedom of choice? Land of the free, home of the sheep - lemmings... Daniel amen on alcohol? http://www.amenclinics.com/brain-s... http://www.quackwatch.org/06Resea... http://www.quackwatch.org/06Resea... http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health... http://www.brainplace.com/ Key Facts About the War on Drugs http://civilliberty.about.com/od... http://dictionary.reference.com/browse... - Thomas Page

1 -12 Binge drinking http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... treatment vs treatment for Alcoholism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... . Problematic for past treatments in US ? , 11 -26 The Science of Your Brain on Alcohol, Animated http://www.brainpickings.org/index... How your GABA receptors keep you gabbing while tipsy. Because glutamate sites become less effective, information flow become slow, - Thomas Page

Innovation and Improvement? Drug War Politics: Governing Culture Through Prohibition, Intoxicants as Customary Practice and the Challenge of Drug Normalisation http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi... This article on the American administration’s war on drugs policy uses an interdisciplinary approach to assess the assumptions of drug prohibition. It applies a historical and contemporary analysis to the issue of drugs in society. It will explore new ways of thinking about drug war politics, aiming to address drugs as a source of political state repression. American foreign policy has sought to use the war on drugs to reduce human suffering; but instead, the age of prohibition has brought financial opportunities for criminal syndicates and clandestine political operations and causes. I will seek to show that prohibition faces serious challenges as a result of changes in contemporary culture and communication. I will argue that prohibition has been concerned with more than drug control and through drug war policy, it has wider ambitions to govern culture through prohibition. The paper explores the growth of drug normalisation and questions whether drugs can be understood as a customary practice across social groups in different communities and asks to what extent the United Nations policy of ‘cultural sensitivity’ can fit alongside an aggressive war on drugs policy. - Thomas Page

3 -7 -13 Ethnocultural politics: pietistic Republicans versus liturgical Democrats http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... 6 -28 Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers https://www.erowid.org/library... Quite interesting is the history of how hopped beer came into favor, edging out the traditional European “gruit ale” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... favored at the time. Demonized during the Protestant Reformation by religious/political/economic interests for its “unhealthy” narcotic, aphrodisiacal, and psychotropic qualities, the history of gruit ale prohibition — replaced by the hopped beer we know today — strikes a similar resonance to the prohibition of cannabis in American history. - Thomas Page

sort 1 -12 -14 The Good Drug Guide http://www.biopsychiatry.com/ http://www.bltc.com/ 1 -17 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... humanity+ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... http://www.bltc.com/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - Thomas Page

Google+ Announces Drug War Debate via Hangout http://www.readwriteweb.com/archive... - Thomas Page

<bingo) sorry for the repeats trying to add to my discussions still not ^ (posts not always going to comments/my discussions ) Google+ Announces Drug War Debate via Hangout ( March 13 at 7:00 p.m. GMT 12pm pdt ) http://www.readwriteweb.com/archive... , 3 -11 'This Debate Will No Longer be Suppressed': Legalizing Drugs Breaks Into the Mainstream http://www.alternet.org/world... - Thomas Page

IT'S TIME TO END THE WAR ON DRUGS https://plus.google.com/1078416... live streaming http://www.youtube.com/versusd... , 5 -3 http://www.virgin.com/richard... - Thomas Page

End the War on Drugs http://www.facebook.com/endthew... - Thomas Page

Destroying drug cartels, the mathematical way http://www.newscientist.com/article... , VORTEX provides inputs for policy making under integrative science. By integrating different areas of human knowledge we propose models for understanding and facing social challenges. Ensuring global security, demanding governmental efficiency, improving transparency and securing human rights are some of these challenges. http://www.scivortex.com/vortex... ,sort http://www.nature.com/nature... , 11 -8 http://world.time.com/2012... , 2 -10 http://www.booktv.org/Program... - Thomas Page

Smuggling http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... Peter Andreas: "Smuggler Nation: How Illicit Trade Made America" http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows... http://www.youtube.com/watch... , sort http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... , 4 -2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - Thomas Page

"Snake Plissken: Got a smoke? Malloy: The United States is a non-smoking nation! No smoking, no drugs, no alcohol, no women - unless you're married - no foul language, no red meat! Snake Plissken: Land of the free. " , 4 -22 sort No Freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or be disseised of his Freehold, or Liberties, or free Customs, or be outlawed http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... , or exiled, or any other wise destroyed; nor will We not pass upon him, nor condemn him, but by lawful judgment of his Peers, or by the Law of the Land. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... , Negotiable social contracts? The power to DENY NEGOTIATION ? Using political power to impede and corrupt the legislative process of the law of the land? Financial power conversion to political power? Faith - Freemarkets - Statistics - Science - resolving with reason ( 5 -7 http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/the-cur... ) / forms of bad faith * unwillingness to reason / violence -- nonviolence , 7 -28 sort ideologicly flip floping fuckups or seeing the error? , see also immigration forked tongue http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news... - Thomas Page

Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... [[[ Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... firearm economics ? http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs... http://thinkprogress.org/economy... http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... 7 -25 , 100 billion dollars. That is the annual cost of gun violence in America according to the authors of this landmark study http://books.google.com/books... - Thomas Page

Outlawry was a principally pre-Magna Carta phenomenon. It was by virtue of Magna Carta that the legal precepts due process and habeas corpus were concurrently established in 1214 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... thus commencing with their eventual enshrinement in judicial procedures which required that persons suspected of crimes are required to be judged in a court of law before punishment can be legally rendered. However antiquated, forms of outlawry continue to exist. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... , [[[ 10 -9 http://www.esquire.com/blogs... 10 -12 https://www.facebook.com/pages... influence? - Thomas Page

6 -29 Drinking Writers - Writers on Drinking ... [ 11 -20 Pete Hamil , culture insights, control of ,hard knocks [[ Andrew Weil ... 12 -23 Drinking_culture http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - Thomas Page

11 -22 move up to alcohol firearms tobacco post [ firearms as talisman ? [[ boogy man trying to take ? Political tool too good to pass up for good sound policy? [[[ open carry freaks ???? 12 -4 http://friendfeed.com/citizen... - Thomas Page

Folkways 12 -28 corporate beings hand in doing x ... ? http://www.cracked.com/article... - Thomas Page

Days of festivus ect. ... [[[ prescriptions ? prescriptions as a form of prohibition? Freedom to Self Heal (with safeguards - alternative management protocols)? hierarchy of authority for acquisition? ... Trying to put the Kibosh http://www.etymonline.com/index... on all Supplements instead of just the Breaking Bad? Why? [ 1 -3 Physician, heal thyself The moral of the proverb is counsel to attend to one's own defects rather than criticizing defects in others, [2] a sentiment also expressed in the Discourse on judgmentalism. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... http://phrases.org.uk/meaning... ] [[[[ planetary environmental prescriptions for air soil and sea ? 2 -4 http://www.nytimes.com/2013... - Thomas Page

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3 -16 Markets in the hands of the criminal and corrupt? Supply dangerous and unjust? Detriments to the demand? Why? Breakdown in the rule of law? Influence? Shades of evil? - Thomas Page

3 -9 legal pushers of [ someone who encourages others to take ... and who makes money supplying ... - Thomas Page

3 -14 Gastro-Chem 4D http://friendfeed.com/citizen... substance rankings of benefits and harms? [ under self controlled usage? [[ under AI guided expert systems? [[ 3 -15 eating to live ( thrive) vs living to eat ( doped for appeal and addiction ) or ( taste ) ? < edit [[[[[[ sort 3 -16 gombs greens (herbs) onions mushrooms berries beans seeds (spices) Joel Fuhrman - Thomas Page

"Lethal But Legal: Corporations, Consumption, and Protecting Public Health" http://www.booktv.org/Program... http://corporationsandhealth.org/2014... http://www.nytimes.com/2014... http://www.salon.com/2014... Big Tobacco http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - Thomas Page

11 -10 White Elephant Pharma Alcohol Tobacco Firearms [ whose cost, particularly that of maintenance, is out of proportion to its usefulness. - Thomas Page

9 -13 nimby battle axes give city councils the ( word phrase hell , you dam well better do my will or I will get you my pretty and your little dog too ) on demon pot in their community . http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - Thomas Page

CDC-alcohol-kills-10% of US Adults http://www.pbs.org/newshou... [[[[[[ sort Transportation engineering success in reducing deaths, putting a cost on preventable deaths? Cost of seat belts? Nader McNamara ... {[{ cost recovery? Profiteers? Market? Culture? }}}} Land of the Free ? Home of the sheep ... - Thomas Page

12 -5 https://friendfeed.com/citizen... 2 -7 Brewed for 2 drink feeling good healthy and satisfied , Brewed for six pack and wanting Beechwood http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... http://www.latimes.com/food... - Thomas Page

Pharmacological portal (alcohol) to lost past ( neural creations). Dead Ends. Resumption = where you left off not where you started ? 11 -22 Alcoholics [ Types of drinking problems? Metabolisms ? Gastrochem4D [[ Irish Injuns ({[ sort One flew over Chief ... Firewater - Thomas Page

More piss poor drug rant ... [ Cultural-Pharma Alternatives ? - Thomas Page

Types of Trainwrecks ? Detached but shaken , future damage assessment (loss) ? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... ? 11 -26 sort sort sort empathy for perfect storms of pathetic ... paths tragic circumstances ... there for grace ... - Thomas Page

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11 -23 http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2014... - Thomas Page

11 -21 Public Safety ... Health ... Freedom ... [ 1 -? }The Likely Cause of Addiction Has Been Discovered, and It Is Not What You Think http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-... It is now one hundred years since drugs were first banned -- and all through this long century of waging war on drugs, we have been told a story about addiction by our teachers and by our governments. This story is so deeply ingrained in our minds that we take it for granted. It seems obvious. It seems manifestly true. Until I set off three and a half years ago on a 30,000-mile journey for my new book, Chasing The Scream: The First And Last Days of the War on Drugs, to figure out what is really driving the drug war, I believed it too. But what I learned on the road is that almost everything we have been told about addiction is wrong -- and there is a very different story waiting for us, if only we are ready to hear it. If we truly absorb this new story, we will have to change a lot more than the drug war. We will have to change ourselves. I learned it from an extraordinary mixture of people I met on my travels. From the surviving friends of Billie Holiday, who helped me to learn how the founder of the war on drugs stalked and helped to kill her. From a Jewish doctor who was smuggled out of the Budapest ghetto as a baby, only to unlock the secrets of addiction as a grown man. From a transsexual crack dealer in Brooklyn who was conceived when his mother, a crack-addict, was raped by his father, an NYPD officer. From a man who was kept at the bottom of a well for two years by a torturing dictatorship, only to emerge to be elected President of Uruguay and to begin the last days of the war on drugs. I had a quite personal reason to set out for these answers. One of my earliest memories as a kid is trying to wake up one of my relatives, and not being able to. Ever since then, I have been turning over the essential mystery of addiction in my mind -- what causes some people to become fixated on a drug or a behavior until they can't stop? How do we help those people to come back to us? As I got older, another of my close relatives developed a cocaine addiction, and I fell into a relationship with a heroin addict. I guess addiction felt like home to me. If you had asked me what causes drug addiction at the start, I would have looked at you as if you were an idiot, and said: "Drugs. Duh." It's not difficult to grasp. I thought I had seen it in my own life. We can all explain it. Imagine if you and I and the next twenty people to pass us on the street take a really potent drug for twenty days. There are strong chemical hooks in these drugs, so if we stopped on day twenty-one, our bodies would need the chemical. We would have a ferocious craving. We would be addicted. That's what addiction means. One of the ways this theory was first established is through rat experiments -- ones that were injected into the American psyche in the 1980s, in a famous advert by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America. You may remember it. The experiment is simple. Put a rat in a cage, alone, with two water bottles. One is just water. The other is water laced with heroin or cocaine. Almost every time you run this experiment, the rat will become obsessed with the drugged water, and keep coming back for more and more, until it kills itself. The advert explains: "Only one drug is so addictive, nine out of ten laboratory rats will use it. And use it. And use it. Until dead. It's called cocaine. And it can do the same thing to you." But in the 1970s, a professor of Psychology in Vancouver called Bruce Alexander noticed something odd about this experiment. The rat is put in the cage all alone. It has nothing to do but take the drugs. What would happen, he wondered, if we tried this differently? So Professor Alexander built Rat Park. It is a lush cage where the rats would have colored balls and the best rat-food and tunnels to scamper down and plenty of friends: everything a rat about town could want. What, Alexander wanted to know, will happen then? In Rat Park, all the rats obviously tried both water bottles, because they didn't know what was in them. But what happened next was startling. The rats with good lives didn't like the drugged water. They mostly shunned it, consuming less than a quarter of the drugs the isolated rats used. None of them died. While all the rats who were alone and unhappy became heavy users, none of the rats who had a happy environment did. At first, I thought this was merely a quirk of rats, until I discovered that there was -- at the same time as the Rat Park experiment -- a helpful human equivalent taking place. It was called the Vietnam War. Time magazine reported using heroin was "as common as chewing gum" among U.S. soldiers, and there is solid evidence to back this up: some 20 percent of U.S. soldiers had become addicted to heroin there, according to a study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry. Many people were understandably terrified; they believed a huge number of addicts were about to head home when the war ended. But in fact some 95 percent of the addicted soldiers -- according to the same study -- simply stopped. Very few had rehab. They shifted from a terrifying cage back to a pleasant one, so didn't want the drug any more. Professor Alexander argues this discovery is a profound challenge both to the right-wing view that addiction is a moral failing caused by too much hedonistic partying, and the liberal view that addiction is a disease taking place in a chemically hijacked brain. In fact, he argues, addiction is an adaptation. It's not you. It's your cage. After the first phase of Rat Park, Professor Alexander then took this test further. He reran the early experiments, where the rats were left alone, and became compulsive users of the drug. He let them use for fifty-seven days -- if anything can hook you, it's that. Then he took them out of isolation, and placed them in Rat Park. He wanted to know, if you fall into that state of addiction, is your brain hijacked, so you can't recover? Do the drugs take you over? What happened is -- again -- striking. The rats seemed to have a few twitches of withdrawal, but they soon stopped their heavy use, and went back to having a normal life. The good cage saved them. (The full references to all the studies I am discussing are in the book.) When I first learned about this, I was puzzled. How can this be? This new theory is such a radical assault on what we have been told that it felt like it could not be true. But the more scientists I interviewed, and the more I looked at their studies, the more I discovered things that don't seem to make sense -- unless you take account of this new approach. Here's one example of an experiment that is happening all around you, and may well happen to you one day. If you get run over today and you break your hip, you will probably be given diamorphine, the medical name for heroin. In the hospital around you, there will be plenty of people also given heroin for long periods, for pain relief. The heroin you will get from the doctor will have a much higher purity and potency than the heroin being used by street-addicts, who have to buy from criminals who adulterate it. So if the old theory of addiction is right -- it's the drugs that cause it; they make your body need them -- then it's obvious what should happen. Loads of people should leave the hospital and try to score smack on the streets to meet their habit. But here's the strange thing: It virtually never happens. As the Canadian doctor Gabor Mate was the first to explain to me, medical users just stop, despite months of use. The same drug, used for the same length of time, turns street-users into desperate addicts and leaves medical patients unaffected. If you still believe -- as I used to -- that addiction is caused by chemical hooks, this makes no sense. But if you believe Bruce Alexander's theory, the picture falls into place. The street-addict is like the rats in the first cage, isolated, alone, with only one source of solace to turn to. The medical patient is like the rats in the second cage. She is going home to a life where she is surrounded by the people she loves. The drug is the same, but the environment is different. This gives us an insight that goes much deeper than the need to understand addicts. Professor Peter Cohen argues that human beings have a deep need to bond and form connections. It's how we get our satisfaction. If we can't connect with each other, we will connect with anything we can find -- the whirr of a roulette wheel or the prick of a syringe. He says we should stop talking about 'addiction' altogether, and instead call it 'bonding.' A heroin addict has bonded with heroin because she couldn't bond as fully with anything else. So the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. It is human connection. When I learned all this, I found it slowly persuading me, but I still couldn't shake off a nagging doubt. Are these scientists saying chemical hooks make no difference? It was explained to me -- you can become addicted to gambling, and nobody thinks you inject a pack of cards into your veins. You can have all the addiction, and none of the chemical hooks. I went to a Gamblers' Anonymous meeting in Las Vegas (with the permission of everyone present, who knew I was there to observe) and they were as plainly addicted as the cocaine and heroin addicts I have known in my life. Yet there are no chemical hooks on a craps table. But still, surely, I asked, there is some role for the chemicals? It turns out there is an experiment which gives us the answer to this in quite precise terms, which I learned about in Richard DeGrandpre's book The Cult of Pharmacology. Everyone agrees cigarette smoking is one of the most addictive processes around. The chemical hooks in tobacco come from a drug inside it called nicotine. So when nicotine patches were developed in the early 1990s, there was a huge surge of optimism -- cigarette smokers could get all of their chemical hooks, without the other filthy (and deadly) effects of cigarette smoking. They would be freed. But the Office of the Surgeon General has found that just 17.7 percent of cigarette smokers are able to stop using nicotine patches. That's not nothing. If the chemicals drive 17.7 percent of addiction, as this shows, that's still millions of lives ruined globally. But what it reveals again is that the story we have been taught about The Cause of Addiction lying with chemical hooks is, in fact, real, but only a minor part of a much bigger picture. This has huge implications for the one-hundred-year-old war on drugs. This massive war -- which, as I saw, kills people from the malls of Mexico to the streets of Liverpool -- is based on the claim that we need to physically eradicate a whole array of chemicals because they hijack people's brains and cause addiction. But if drugs aren't the driver of addiction -- if, in fact, it is disconnection that drives addiction -- then this makes no sense. Ironically, the war on drugs actually increases all those larger drivers of addiction. For example, I went to a prison in Arizona -- 'Tent City' -- where inmates are detained in tiny stone isolation cages ('The Hole') for weeks and weeks on end to punish them for drug use. It is as close to a human recreation of the cages that guaranteed deadly addiction in rats as I can imagine. And when those prisoners get out, they will be unemployable because of their criminal record -- guaranteeing they with be cut off even more. I watched this playing out in the human stories I met across the world. There is an alternative. You can build a system that is designed to help drug addicts to reconnect with the world -- and so leave behind their addictions. This isn't theoretical. It is happening. I have seen it. Nearly fifteen years ago, Portugal had one of the worst drug problems in Europe, with 1 percent of the population addicted to heroin. They had tried a drug war, and the problem just kept getting worse. So they decided to do something radically different. They resolved to decriminalize all drugs, and transfer all the money they used to spend on arresting and jailing drug addicts, and spend it instead on reconnecting them -- to their own feelings, and to the wider society. The most crucial step is to get them secure housing, and subsidized jobs so they have a purpose in life, and something to get out of bed for. I watched as they are helped, in warm and welcoming clinics, to learn how to reconnect with their feelings, after years of trauma and stunning them into silence with drugs. One example I learned about was a group of addicts who were given a loan to set up a removals firm. Suddenly, they were a group, all bonded to each other, and to the society, and responsible for each other's care. The results of all this are now in. An independent study by the British Journal of Criminology found that since total decriminalization, addiction has fallen, and injecting drug use is down by 50 percent. I'll repeat that: injecting drug use is down by 50 percent. Decriminalization has been such a manifest success that very few people in Portugal want to go back to the old system. The main campaigner against the decriminalization back in 2000 was Joao Figueira, the country's top drug cop. He offered all the dire warnings that we would expect from the Daily Mail or Fox News. But when we sat together in Lisbon, he told me that everything he predicted had not come to pass -- and he now hopes the whole world will follow Portugal's example. This isn't only relevant to the addicts I love. It is relevant to all of us, because it forces us to think differently about ourselves. Human beings are bonding animals. We need to connect and love. The wisest sentence of the twentieth century was E.M. Forster's -- "only connect." But we have created an environment and a culture that cut us off from connection, or offer only the parody of it offered by the Internet. The rise of addiction is a symptom of a deeper sickness in the way we live -- constantly directing our gaze towards the next shiny object we should buy, rather than the human beings all around us. The writer George Monbiot has called this "the age of loneliness." We have created human societies where it is easier for people to become cut off from all human connections than ever before. Bruce Alexander -- the creator of Rat Park -- told me that for too long, we have talked exclusively about individual recovery from addiction. We need now to talk about social recovery -- how we all recover, together, from the sickness of isolation that is sinking on us like a thick fog. But this new evidence isn't just a challenge to us politically. It doesn't just force us to change our minds. It forces us to change our hearts. Loving an addict is really hard. When I looked at the addicts I love, it was always tempting to follow the tough love advice doled out by reality shows like Intervention -- tell the addict to shape up, or cut them off. Their message is that an addict who won't stop should be shunned. It's the logic of the drug war, imported into our private lives. But in fact, I learned, that will only deepen their addiction -- and you may lose them altogether. I came home determined to tie the addicts in my life closer to me than ever -- to let them know I love them unconditionally, whether they stop, or whether they can't. When I returned from my long journey, I looked at my ex-boyfriend, in withdrawal, trembling on my spare bed, and I thought about him differently. For a century now, we have been singing war songs about addicts. It occurred to me as I wiped his brow, we should have been singing love songs to them all along. The full story of Johann Hari's journey -- told through the stories of the people he met -- can be read in Chasing The Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, published by Bloomsbury. The book has been praised by everyone from Elton John to Glenn Greenwald to Naomi Klein. You can buy it at all good bookstores and read more at www.chasingthescream.com. - Thomas Page

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crying in the rain - Thomas Page

Good Cheer Ads drink to be happy, the more the merrier [ sorry promise i'll lighten up. not sorry i'll probably lighten up. Budweiser sucks [[ Mega Bev [[[ Law [[[[[[ 2 -7 Brewed for 2 drinks feeling good healthy and satisfied , Brewed for six pack and wanting what's in the Beechwood http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... http://www.latimes.com/food... - Thomas Page