What’s Drugs Got to Do with It?

WRITTEN BY Kyrah Brown

4/20 – An informal, annual “holiday,” acknowledged by non-smokers, but beloved by weed heads, blunt rollers, and junkies alike – waiting anxiously for their next high. Yet, for some, the day is a painful reminder of the raging drug epidemics which have killed off so many of our loved ones.         

A term coined so frequently, yet, the story of its beginnings often go untold; how did the date, 4/20, originate? Over the years, rumors have spiraled in regards to how 4/20 was recognized as the yearly celebration of cannabis culture as we know it. One, possibly a code among police officers for marijuana smoking. Another, slightly more comical and ironic, theory attributed they day with Nazi leader and war criminal Adolf Hitler’s birthday, April 20th. However, Time reports that the most plausible and credited story for the origination of the day begins with a group of five teenagers at a high school in California – San Rafael High School.

Each day, at 4:20 PM, this group of five would meet at the campus’ statue of Luis Pasteur, a famous chemist, for their daily round of passing the joint. Thus, 420 became the new code word for one their favorite after school pastimes. This group of teens, later known as the “Waldos” because they met near a wall, included Steve Capper, Dave Reddix, Jeffrey Noel, Larry Schwartz, and Mark Gravich. How did the phrase spread? Reddix connected with a popular band, Grateful Dead, through his brother, and the band began to call out 420 in reference to their cannabis breaks. Used more frequently and on a wider platform, the phrase launched globally and has been used ever since.

Mary Jane, the Waldos, and the fight for decriminalization of marijuana lives on, but the new drug epidemic that is heavily circulating around America is the use and abuse of opioids. According to CNN, more than two million people in the United States alone have a dependence on these drugs. Opioids are dispensed to patients with acute, chronic pain, due to their ability to replicate the pain-reducing properties of opium. Legal forms of the painkillers comprise morphine, oxycodone, and hydrocodone. Those which are illegal include heroin, banned in 1924 in the U.S., and synthetically-made fentanyl. The statistics are astonishing; opioid prescriptions were 122 million in 1992, and the number increased to a peak of 282 million in 2012 – just a 20-year difference. The number of prescriptions administered has declined, but opioid-related deaths that occurred between 2002 to 2016 have increased to a dumbfounding rate of 533 percent. Painkillers, however, are expensive. Many who become dependent on painkillers turn to the street drug, heroin, which is cheaper. Opioids may pose a more lethal effect on society due to the ease of attainability – they’re legally prescribed drugs, but can doubly be retrieved on the streets. The concern, therefore, falls on who is accessing the drug, and at what dosages.

Amidst the opioid crisis, the abuse of the pharmaceutical industry and physicians should not go amiss in this situation. In 2007, criminal charges were brought by the federal government against manufacturer Purdue Pharma who mislead doctors and consumers that their pill, OxyContin, was a safer and less addictive version than other opioids. Eight years later, in 2015, 280 people consisting of numerous doctors and pharmacists were arrested for fraudulently over dispensing large sums of opioids. The prescription drug bust, deemed Operation Pilluted, is the largest in the history of the DEA. In 2016, the CDC published guidelines for properly administering opioids to patients, but several “pill mills” still exist in the shadows.

These are just a few highlights of the abuses of drug-makers and distributors across the country, but with opioid addiction and fraud on the rise, what has the government accomplished in improving our health care system? In 2016, legislators passed the 21st Century Cures Act, which allotted $1 billion in opioid crisis grants. This funding allows for addiction treatment and prevention programs to expand nationwide. Additionally, the launch of an Opioid Fraud and Abuse Detection Unit within the DOJ was announced in 2017.

The death and destruction opioids have imploded upon families across America cannot be undone. Nevertheless, hope for future generations lay within increased transparency, accountability, and a dose of compassion.

Sources:

http://time.com/4292844/420-april-20-marijuana-pot-holiday-history/

https://www-m.cnn.com/2017/09/18/health/opioid-crisis-fast-facts/index.html

Political art must be better scrutinized for cultural nuances

WRITTEN BY KENNY FREMER

Tamil artist M.I.A. continuously faces critic backlash for misconstrued elements in her music. Marred by slanted writing, her affluent lifestyle is often misinterpreted as a gap in her art’s authenticity.           

There is no better example of how political work in music can be misinterpreted than the discourse surrounding M.I.A. Her music is often written from the perspective of minority groups in third-world countries, and she herself has had to flee her home country to avoid political warfare. At her most contentious, she has written from the perspective of a man driven to war to provide for and protect his family, in the song “Sunshowers.” Perspectives like this make her extremely divisive and a scrutinized performer.

             M.I.A. is no stranger to the problem of struggling to control her public reputation. As a Tamil individual, she has had direct experience with the civil war in Sri Lanka. The war centered around efforts by the majority Sinhalese government to contain a Tamil revolution sparked due to a lack of representation for the Tamil people. In a 2005 interview with EGO Magazine, her perceived association with the Tamil Tigers, a controversial group considered a terrorist organization by the Sri Lankan government, is mentioned. Because she had used tiger-related imagery in some promotional images, many linked M.I.A. to the group. She said “I’m not some manufactured propaganda machine by the Tamil Tigers, but I think people assume that I am. I’m like, hell no! Tamil Tigers f—ed my life up and so did the Sinhalese government. They both f—ed my life up.” Although M.I.A.’s decision to use tiger imagery in promotional pieces was clarified, her reputation as being sympathetic to the Tamil Tigers has not gone away.

             A half-decade later, in a lengthy New York Times Magazine cover profile published in 2010, Lynn Hirschberg paints a distinctly unflattering portrait of M.I.A. as a contradictorily bourgeois outsider to the people she sings about.  Hirschberg writes, “Unity holds no allure for Maya — she thrives on conflict, real or imagined. ‘I kind of want to be an outsider,’ she said, eating a truffle-flavored French fry.” As it turns out, however, that moment in the interview was actually prompted by Lynn, who was recorded pressuring M.I.A. into ordering the expensive fries, guaranteeing that the New York Times would pay the bill. Throughout the interview, Hirschberg takes further issue with M.I.A.’s rich lifestyle, including her relationship with the wealthy Benjamin Bronfman and her purchasing of multiple homes in an affluent, mostly white Los Angeles neighborhood. In this 8,500-word profile, only two lines of music are quoted; the conversation has become no longer about the message, but the artist’s flaws and associations.

             In the interview, Hirschberg even writes that M.I.A. “allied herself” with the Tamil Tigers. Once an artist chooses to take a political stance, their character becomes more open to scrutiny, criticism and discourse – especially when the view they espouse is controversial or easy to take out of context. And especially when the artist is a race other than white, or a gender other than male. We need to be more critical of our own biases when evaluating the political statements of others. Instead of dismissing radical ideas as impossible, or reactionary, we should try to understand where that other person is coming from so that we can better understand everyone around us, absorb other perspectives, and make better art ourselves.