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Some helpful rules to make family bowling during the holidays safer and more civil…

(From the Grand Sierra Resort in Reno.)

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Sam Quinones, the author of Dreamland, isn’t content to write about the inherent drama of opiate addiction and its consequences. He tries to sell readers on the idea that opiate use and American culture intersect in unique ways. Opium has a long history:

Opium was likely our first drug as agricultural civilizations formed near rivers. Mesopotamians grew the poppy at the Tigris and Euphrates. The Assyrians invented the method, still widely used today, of slicing and draining the poppy’s pod of the goo containing opium. “The Sumerians, the world’s first civilization and agriculturists, used the ideograms hul and gil for the poppy, translating it as the ‘joy plant,’” wrote Martin Booth, in his classic Opium: A History.

The ancient Egyptians first produced opium as a drug. Thebaine, an opium derivative, is named for Thebes, the Egyptian city that was the first great center of opium-poppy production. Indians also grew the poppy and used opium. So did the Greeks. Homer and Virgil mention opium, and potions derived from it. The expanding Arab empire and later the Venetians, both inveterate traders, helped spread the drug.

In the early 1800s, a German pharmacist’s apprentice named Friedrich Sertürner isolated the sleep-inducing element in opium and named it morphine for Morpheus, the Greek god of sleep and dreams. Morphine was more potent than simple opium and killed more pain.

War spread the morphine molecule through the nineteenth century. More than 330 wars broke out, forcing countries to learn to produce morphine. The U.S. Civil War prompted the planting of opium poppies in Virginia, Georgia, and South Carolina for the first time, and bequeathed the country thousands of morphine-addicted soldiers. Two nineteenth-century wars were over the morphine molecule itself, and whether China could prevent the sale on her own soil of India-grown opium.

In 1853, meanwhile, an Edinburgh doctor named Alexander Wood invented the hypodermic needle, a delivery system superior to both eating the pills and the then-popular anal suppositories. Needles allowed more accurate dosing. Wood and other doctors also believed needles would literally remove the patient’s appetite for the drug, which no longer had to be eaten. This proved incorrect. Wood’s wife became the first recorded overdose death from an injected opiate.

In London in 1874, Dr. Alder Wright was attempting to find a nonaddictive form of morphine when he synthesized a drug that he called diacetylmorphine—a terrific painkiller. In 1898, a Bayer Laboratory chemist in Germany, Heinrich Dreser, reproduced Wright’s diacetylmorphine and called it heroin—for heroisch, German for “heroic,” the word that Bayer workers used to describe how it made them feel when Dreser tested it on them.

What makes Americans particularly susceptible to opiate addiction? The author describes how Americans who want to be drug addicts can get monthly cash and free pills via Medicaid. He doesn’t mention that any legal U.S. resident who refrains from work can also get a free house (possibly after a long wait) and taxpayer-funded food (food stamps or SNAP), plus an Obamaphone to call the drug retailers, licit or illicit (see Book Review: The Redistribution Recession). Ancient Egyptians and Greeks could have spent all day every day using opium, but there was no welfare state to sustain them. Isn’t that sufficient to explain why addiction is more common in today’s U.S.? Quinones doesn’t think so:

In heroin addicts, I had seen the debasement that comes from the loss of free will and enslavement to what amounts to an idea: permanent pleasure, numbness, and the avoidance of pain. But man’s decay has always begun as soon as he has it all, and is free of friction, pain, and the deprivation that temper his behavior. In fact, the United States achieved something like this state of affairs in the period this book is about: the last decade of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first century. When I returned home from Mexico during those years, I noticed a scary obesity emerging. It wasn’t just the people. Everything seemed obese and excessive. Massive Hummers and SUVs were cars on steroids. In some of the Southern California suburbs near where I grew up, on plots laid out with three-bedroom houses in the 1950s, seven-thousand-square-foot mansions barely squeezed between the lot lines, leaving no place for yards in which to enjoy the California sun. In Northern California’s Humboldt and Mendocino Counties, 1960s hippies became the last great American pioneers by escaping their parents’ artificial world. They lived in tepees without electricity and funded the venture by growing pot. Now their children and grandchildren, like mad scientists, were using chemicals and thousand-watt bulbs, in railroad cars buried to avoid detection, to forge hyperpotent strains of pot. Their weed rippled like the muscles of bodybuilders, and growing this stuff helped destroy the natural world that their parents once sought. Excess contaminated the best of America. Caltech churned out brilliant students, yet too many of them now went not to science but to Wall Street to create financial gimmicks that paid off handsomely and produced nothing. Exorbitant salaries, meanwhile, were paid to Wall Street and corporate executives, no matter how poorly they did. Banks packaged rolls of bad mortgages and we believed Standard & Poor’s when they called them AAA. Well-off parents no longer asked their children to work when they became teenagers.

[the Mexican immigrant dealers’] greatest innovations was figuring out that a mother lode of heroin demand was now waiting to be mined in these neighborhoods if they’d only offer convenience. The Happy Meal of dope, he called it. Marketed like fast food—to young people. “‘We want what we want when we want it and thus we are entitled to get it,’” he said. “This drug is following the same marketing [strategy] of every other product out there. ‘I’ll give you good heroin at a great price. You don’t have to go to the bad neighborhoods. I’ll deliver it for you.’” In a culture that demanded comfort, he thought, heroin was the final convenience.

[at running a university hospital pain center] Tauben took over for Cahana in 2013. Cahana’s five years at the center immersed him in America’s pain culture wars. The experience had made him something of a philosopher of pain and happiness. Cahana believed that what insurance companies reimbursed for distilled many unfortunate values of the country. “We overtest, perform surgery, stick needles; these people are worse off,” he said. “If we work on their nutrition, diet, sleep habits, smoke habits, helping [them] find work—then they improve. You have to be accountable. If you give a treatment that kills people or makes people worse, you gotta stop. You can’t continue making money on stuff that doesn’t work.

“All of a sudden, we can’t go to college without Adderall; you can’t do athletics without testosterone; you can’t have intimacy without Viagra. We’re all the time focused on the stuff and not on the people. I tell pain patients, ‘Forget all that; the treatment is you. Take charge of your life and be healthy and do what you love and love what you do.’” And he ignored that very advice. Cahana came to Seattle at 260 pounds, and gained forty-five more over the next five years as, stressed and overworked, he battled to rebuild the historic clinic. The clinic won numerous awards, was highlighted as a model. He was on CNN and in People magazine, gave a TED talk, and testified before the U.S. Senate on overprescribing in medicine. He grew fatter all the while. He was taking medications for hypertension, cholesterol, and then more for the side effects from the medication—nine pills a day, fifteen hundred dollars a month in co-pays. “I couldn’t walk two flights of stairs without huffing and puffing,” he said

Readers: What do you think? Are Americans addicts because we don’t need to work or is it something deeper?

More: read Dreamland.

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We have a studio office/apartment here in the boring suburbs that we make available on AirBnB. A young woman wearing sunglasses named “Renata” sent us the following email: “I would like to book your house to invite some friends over and celebrate the New Year’s Eve. Is that possible?” The booking request is for just one night, Dec 31.

Given that our entire suburb (85 percent voted for Hillary) will be in mourning this New Year’s Eve and that this space is only big enough for friends who want to share a desk or a bed, I have to assume that this is a scam. But how can an AirBnB customer scam a host?

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“Columbia Challenges Vote by Graduate Students to Unionize” (nytimes) is about how the faculty and administration at Columbia aren’t sure that a unionized grad student workforce is right for them.

[“Faculty Voter Registration in Economics, History, Journalism, Law, and Psychology” found that registered Democrats outnumbered Republicans at Columbia by 30:1 across a range of five departments.]

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At a suburban ballet school’s performance of the Nutcracker, I noticed that transgenderism was common. About 15 percent of the dancers who had been given a traditionally female first name, presumably corresponding to their birth certificate sex, were identifying as male (i.e., long hair pinned up under caps, traditionally male costume, etc.).

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Merry Christmas!

Helicopter nerds may appreciate this video of Mrs. Claus flying an AStar.

[Scrooge might note that the helicopter is registered in Argentina (“R-“), closer to the South Pole than to the North. A Trump-inspired sexist would also note that the purported female pilot was sitting right seat in an aircraft typically flown from the left seat (unlike most U.S.-designed helicopters, which are flown from the right seat).]

Related:

• Nick Mason, Pink Floyd drummer, and the AStar.

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Mindy the Crippler wishes you a Happy Hanukkah:

(but I still like Christmas better:

)

Related:

• Christmas/Hanukkah calendar study

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The world of plastic airplanes will need to study Mandarin. A Chinese company has purchased most of Diamond Canada, makers of spectacular-handling light airplanes such as the Diamond Star DA40. In other news, Chinese money has finally pushed the Cirrus Jet out the door (first delivery), five years after Cirrus was purchased by China Aviation Industry General Aircraft.

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I love my Trek electric bike, but it has one seat too few to be considered a tandem. In August 2015, in Electric bicycle questions, I asked “shouldn’t tandem bikes all have electric boost? Tandems are already crazy heavy and expensive.” Except for a lame Pedego cruiser there were no electric tandems then. Now there is one from France: Moustache Samedi. It is kind of a mountain bike but can be fitted with hybrid-style tires for road use.

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For me one of the sadder parts of Dreamland was an example of an immigrant family that thought they’d be better off in the U.S.:

In 1906, a delirious Christian revival roared out of Los Angeles. … The Azusa Street Revival marked the first explosion of the Pentecostal faith. … Among those who embraced it there were numerous Russian immigrant workers. They returned to Russia to preach their new gospel as communist revolutionaries were toppling the czarist government. These Pentecostal pioneers converted thousands in Russia, the Ukraine, and Belarus.

By the time the Soviet experiment ended, seven hundred thousand people, most of them in the Ukraine and Belarus, were fervent Pentecostals. … Tens of thousands emigrated, settling mostly in Sacramento, Seattle, and Portland, Oregon. Among them was a young couple, Anatoly and Nina Sinyayev, from the city of Baksan. Anatoly was a welder. Nina’s father was an evangelist, touring Germany and Israel to preach the gospel. When the Soviet walls tumbled, the Sinyayevs took their two toddler daughters and fled to Portland. Nina’s first baby in America was also their first son, Toviy. From then on, she was always pregnant. The couple had ten more children. Anatoly was always working. … They attended a conservative Russian Pentecostal church, and raised their children in their faith.

But their American dreamland contained hazards they hadn’t imagined. Remaining Christian in America, where everything was permitted, was harder than maintaining the faith in the Soviet Union where nothing was allowed. Churches were everywhere. But so were distractions and sin: television, sexualized and permissive pop culture, and wealth. Leaders turned to the prohibitions that had sustained the faith during the dark decades back home. Girls couldn’t dye their hair, pierce their ears, or wear makeup. Young men and women could not talk, or date. If a man wanted to marry, he went to his pastor, who asked the young woman if the suitor interested her. Russian Pentecostals didn’t associate much with American society, which they viewed as a threat. … The Sinyayevs’ daughters were not allowed to wear nail polish or mingle with Americans. … The Sinyayevs’ second child, Elina, was their most stubborn. A pretty girl with an aquiline nose, Elina raised her siblings while her mother was pregnant and railed at the church teachings that ruled her home. “All they preached was that women should wear long skirts, head coverings, no makeup,” she said. “They never teach you about love. They didn’t want us to know God forgives.” As they moved into adolescence, the Sinyayevs’ oldest children hid their lives from their parents. Elina applied makeup on the school bus each morning, and exchanged her long skirts for pants.

Mostly, though, opiates consumed young people in Portland who had never used them, virtually all of them white. As a group, it appears none fell to it harder than the children of Russian Pentecostals who came fleeing persecution and found U.S. pop culture a greater challenge than anything a Soviet apparatchik could invent. Among them was Vitaliy Mulyar. Born in the Ukraine, Vitaliy grew up in the cocoon of the Russian Pentecostal church in America—first in Sacramento, then Portland. Like his peers, he spoke fluent Russian, and his English carried the hint of an accent from the country he had left when he was two. He, like his peers, found church desiccated and boring. Vitaliy and his Pentecostal friends grew up in their own world. He found work as a mechanic. Cars became his passion, especially his prized sequoia-green 1999 VW Jetta. Then a friend at work offered him a Vicodin. Doctors prescribed them, so how bad could they be? With that, he found a new passion. Soon he migrated to OxyContin and his habit rose to four Oxys a day.

Elina Sinyayev tried heroin the first time with a friend from work, who told her it would relax her. Her sister started with OxyContin. So did Toviy, her brother. Elina lost her job and, desperate for her dope, began dating a Russian Pentecostal heroin dealer, who also got his tar from the Mexicans delivering it like pizza. Elina believed she was the only one in her family using heroin. But one night at home she looked at her sister and brother and watched them nod off and knew the truth. Two decades after Anatoly and Nina left the Soviet Union for the freedoms of America, each of their three oldest children was quietly addicted to black tar heroin from Xalisco, Nayarit.

One afternoon in March 2011, Toviy told his mother he had the flu. He went out with Elina and they returned hours later. He seemed different but Nina had too many kids to pay close attention. The next morning, she found her eldest boy in bed, unconscious and gasping for breath. Paramedics couldn’t revive him. He lasted for three days on life support.

More: read Dreamland.

Related:

• comments on Vetting immigrants for terrorism potential where I noted “The wedding between an immigrant and an American does sound heartwarming. Congratulations to the happy couple. On the other hand, I talked to an immigrant from Eastern Europe just yesterday. He came to the U.S. and worked hard doing skilled manual labor for more than a decade, living frugally, buying a house in a neighborhood with great schools, etc. Then his American wife sued him under Massachusetts family law (see http://www.realworlddivorce.com/Massachusetts ). Between his plaintiff and the lawyers on both sides, he lost everything that he had worked for: kids, house, savings. If he’d stayed in his Civil Law jurisdiction he (a) probably wouldn’t have been sued, and/or (b) wouldn’t have his ex-wife as a long-term adult dependent. (See http://www.realworlddivorce.com/International for how having sex with the richest person in Germany can’t yield more than $6,000/year in child support.)”

 

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