<a href="https://www.ideasbeyondborders.org">Ideas Beyond Borders.</a> They're paying Iraqis to translate things to Arabic and expand the Arabic Wikipedia. The idea is to expand the range of aspirations Arabs can cultivate and pursue.
Also, (and I say this as an Israeli): it needs to become easier for Iraqis to land student and work visas elsewhere. The worldwide clampdown in travel and migration, even before Covid it was particularly difficult for Iraqis, and so was keeping them in this pressure cooker.
There has always been cannabis users but druggies would then juice it up by mixing it with Methaqualone.
Drug abuse is a good breeding ground for religious extremism. It's not that hard to convince people that "Western influences" are bad if it means that more people become drug addicts. It's not that hard to convince someone that they should fight for God if they spent the last ten years as drug addicts.
You don't have to be an addict to attend one and it'll help you greatly understand what people are going through.
Addiction is both physical and mental, unlike cancer which is purely physical, and if faith could be weaponized properly to fight it, so be it.
And anyhow, I attended a few meetings and all the discussions were all about personal life troubles due to addiction or otherwise, and people asking and offering help.
In big cities it's very hard because of the variety of religions of people attending, it becomes very awkward to even try and push any one religious talk.
Later generations of anti-depressants are less effective that the MAOIs, but MAOIs fell out use because doctors of that era tended to think newer==better, some MAOIs caused side effects when combined with fermented foods (fine cheese, etc), and patents allowed for a marketing budget for the pharmaceutical companies to promote their latest FDA-approved prescriptions to physicians.
Stimulants do their harm by shredding the mitochondria [0]. My observations are that Cocaine is a much safer stimulant than meth amphetamine.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18211048
Emotional stress is a very important driver of substance abuse. Anything that restores the mitochondria/metabolism helps with stimulant abuse. Most important is helping the person find meaning.
The main difference here is modality of use -- taking something, once per day, in controlled doses, is very very different from taking something until you feel good. With a prescription, you also have a steady supply and no need to commit crimes to keep up your supply. So the societal problems from drug abuse, like overdose, increased criminality, and breakdown of relations don't happen with prescription drugs to the same extent, even if it's the same substance. Look at when the opoid crisis became a crisis -- it was when cheap, easy opioids stopped being available.
Here is an interesting look at the differences between ADHD medications: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/know-your-amphetamines
Taking more doesn't help your performance, it makes it worse, and you get way more side effects, especially mental side effects. These build up with time.
The Iraq route goes Afghanistan -> Iran -> Iraq -> ...
https://cen.acs.org/policy/global-health/Afghanistans-crysta...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephedrine#Recreational_use
https://twitter.com/mansfieldintinc/status/13726706500291092...
How do you address this scourge with legalization beyond a principles based approach and one that deals with the reality on the ground?
I’m for soft drugs legalization, but when it comes to these things that just consume people I cannot see legalization as a viable approach.
So the idea behind legalization is not "it should be easier to do drugs!" but rather:
1. It's already easy to do drugs, so how can we make it safer to do drugs?
2. Precisely because of drugs' illegality, extraordinary rents are collected by some of the worst humans on earth. Can we make drugs legal and repurpose those rents for education, health, and harm reduction purposes?
Legalization doesn't mean you can buy crystal meth at the local 7-11, it just means you don't buy it from a drug lord cum human trafficker.
With illegality there's no hope. With legalisation there's at least a shimmer of it.
2) Those worst humans would still exist, still try to make money out of the drug business. They would undercut prices, do things that ethics otherwise hinder, etc. They will do this by, as today, move drugs outside of the system to avoid taxes, cut the stuff with other substances, etc.
I think the 2) is such a strange argument. Following the 2) argument, are "the worst humans" expected to just stop being the worst humans?
Look at cigarettes. It's legal today, but there are still scum exploiting the situation by black market selling probably dangerous tobacco that doesn't go through QA and regulatory checks etc.
Ok, so I don’t get adulterated drugs, that still doesn’t do anything for the addiction.
Are we then going to actively discourage people from doing drugs? If so how? What effective form does that take?
The most concise counterpoint would be that addiction is not really hampered by criminalization, outside of edge cases like Singapore which is an island. Criminalization doesn't create less addicts it just creates more addicts in jail. Criminalization is also not zero sum, b/c it comes with all the issues of black markets, issues with the police who need extra power to enforce these laws.
Treatment does create less addicts, but less people will be addicted if you fix problems in society in the first place. Which are the real issue. In this example Iraq doesn't have a meth problem because meth is the problem, Iraq has a meth problem because of mass poverty.
EDIT: Also look at alcohol prohibition for what happens when you create a white market out of a black market. Lower potency products, that are safer and actually productive for society.
The article does paint a bleak picture of life in Iraq and I understand how a lot of youth can end up addicts. Taking drugs is something they can do feel better for a while and is something they actually have control over in their lives unlike the rest of the country's problems.
Morally, would it be wrong to ship in tons of anti-depressants and give them away free to make people feel better about their shitty situation?
The idea is that legalization should bring addiction resources, harm reduction, education, and cleaner drugs.
This removes the infamously dangerous "drug deals", "bad batches"/lacing, removes stigma and legal barriers that prevent addicts from recovery, and should make it easier for users to recover.
Highly concentrated and dirty street meth is what the incentive structure of prohibition gives you. It's significantly more potent than regular amphetamine, so it's easier to transport larger quantities. It's also a lot easier to make with off the shelf materials and precursors. Amphetamine isn't really more complex to make chemically but it's harder to make it with materials you can buy from a trip to a regular hardware store. Hell there's a "one-pot" meth synthesis around that you can do in a two liter bottle in a single step if you don't mind a filthy product and a chance of blowing yourself up. There's nothing that easy for amphetamine.
Note that amphetamine is more common in Europe where prohibition is somewhat less strict. In the USA it's all meth. Regular amphetamine is rare.
So, the chemical is probably not the problem. It's also likely methamphetamine performs better for medical use cases. See: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/know-your-amphetamines
EDIT: Otherwise, though, I thoroughly agree with what you are saying here in that having access to smaller, cleaner, time-release doses would do well to curb addiction.
https://www.theonion.com/this-war-will-destabilize-the-entir...
"This War Will Destabilize The Entire Mideast Region And Set Off A Global Shockwave Of Anti-Americanism vs. No It Won’t"
The statistic in this article about under-25 unemployment being 36% breaks my heart. This would've been me now, at my current age, born in a different place at the same time.
I used to live in a major middle eastern country when this was going on. People were outright talking about the Crusader wars and there was a terrible sentiment against anyone with a light complexion.
https://local.theonion.com/soldier-excited-to-take-over-fath...
In 2012 it was as low as it ever had been in 20 years. So what began in 2012? ISIS? Syrian civil war refugees? Completion of U.S. military withdrawal? (All a consequence of the U.S. intervention, to be sure, but knowing that isn't particularly useful in this case.)
