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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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Margaret Thatcher is famously quoted for saying “The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.” (Snopes) Cambridge, Massachusetts, however, has proved her wrong. The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s houses. The Cambridge Housing Authority provides free apartments with market rents of over $60,000 per year to some families. Others are on a waiting list and receive nothing (rather stark inequality!). Since January 1, 2015, however, even the waitlist is closed.

Where is the Christmas spirit for families who want and/or need an apartment?

[Related: I can’t figure out what the rationale is for free houses plus long waiting list. If a free house is a human right, how can there be a waiting list? There is no waiting list for free food (food stamps). Everyone who is entitled gets food stamps more or less immediately. How can a comfortable taxpayer-funded house be simultaneously a human right and require crashing on a relative’s sofa for 10 years? But if a free house is not a human right, why do taxpaying Americans have to work extra hours every week to fund the millions of existing free houses?]

Also see

• Book Review: The Redistribution Recession (how much less Americans will work when you give them a free house on condition that they don’t earn much)
• Russian welfare: all cash (i.e., we don’t have to turn every part of the U.S. economy into a corner of the welfare system)

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“Flight controller accidentally sends jet on course toward Mt. Wilson after LAX takeoff” (LA Times), especially coupled with this LiveATC recording, might make a good case study for a human-/user-interface class. The controller is trying to steer a Boeing 777 using her voice and two human actuators (the pilots).

Related:

• liveATC “interesting recordings” archive

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In interviewing attorneys and consumers for Real World Divorce, we heard a lot of tragic personal stories of children who’d lost a parent (almost always the father) and parents (almost always the father) who’d lost children in the family courts of America’s winner-take-all states. Dreamland describes parents losing children even when neither parent sued the other:

When it was her turn, Roberts told the gathering that her daughter was a pill addict who had stolen from her blind. Lisa had forced her daughter out of the house. “My daughter,” her colleague said, “is in jail accused of executing three people for their pills.” Half of their coworkers’ kids were addicted. They followed with a description of the pill mills, of the OxyContin barter economy, of the constant overdose deaths. The room was silent. “I remember coming home and being real mad,” Roberts said. “It’s not right that our kids are having their futures and freedom taken from them because they’ve fallen prey to this horrible chemical that steals their soul. Our kids shouldn’t be going to the grave. We sent our kids into the military. After she got clean, my daughter had a better chance of surviving a war than she did of surviving the pill epidemic.”

As the opiate epidemic mangled the middle class, these kids doped up and dropped out. Earlier generations of opiate addicts became self-employed construction workers or painters, because that was all they could manage with heroin, and often jail, in their lives. With the new generation, time would tell how they would do, but it wasn’t looking good. A large subset of these new young addicts had criminal records now. Many were on probation; a good number went to prison. Either way, their parents were realizing that life with a record was as stunted as life with an opiate addiction. Any dreams these kids’ parents once had for them were now improbable. Even qualifying to rent an apartment was hard. With a criminal record, finding a job in the teeth of the great recession was almost impossible.

“For 6 long years I’ve begged, pleaded, screamed, yelled, cried, grounded, took things away, called the police, kicked him out & not to mention the countless hrs feeling guilty & terrified for him,” one woman wrote about her heroin-addicted son who’d just been thrown out of rehab again for a dirty drug test. “And the thousands of dollars spent on rehab, hospital bills & therapist as well as bailing him out of jail. I have prayed prayed prayed & prayed . . . ”

The above-referenced children are the comparatively lucky ones. The unlucky children died from overdoses, sometimes shortly after being declared cured by a rehab clinic. One thing that I learned from the book is that there is no reliable way to cure a person from opiate addiction.

That raises the question of what should parents do upon discovering that a child is addicted to opiates? There does not seem to be any realistic hope that heroin supply will be restricted in the U.S.:

As happened after Operation Tar Pit, the Sánchez heroin cells quickly reconstituted. His networks, and those of his family, are believed to encompass most of the state of South Carolina, including Myrtle Beach, where police have six times dismantled the Sánchez heroin cell, only to see it return each time.

I asked if [an Anglo who collaborated with the Xalisco boys] ever wondered what became of the boss called Enrique and the drivers who gave him all his dope. Not really, he said. It seemed so long ago. But he felt no rancor. They were nice guys, clean-cut, not killers, just working-class boys trying to get ahead and were probably living back in Mexico somewhere. He marveled that they were the only dealers he’d encountered in forty years doing heroin who didn’t use their product. He was still startled at how organized they were. After Tar Pit, he remembered, there was no dope on Santa Fe streets for exactly one day. That’s how organized they were.

The Scioto County [Ohio] pill mills illustrated how generalized opiate prescribing had become in America. In their last year of operation, 9.7 million pills were legally prescribed in the county of eighty thousand. But even two years after the pill mills were done, 7 million pills were still prescribed there.

What about simply moving the family or at least the child to a place where opiates are not available? Other than a research station in Antarctica, does that exist? If so, where? (Of course I am hoping that none of us reading or writing on this blog will ever need this answer.)

More: read Dreamland.

Related:

• The latest book: Dreamland
• Who funded America’s opiate epidemic? You did.

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I just recently stumbled on “New U.S. overtime rules will bump up postdoc pay, but could hurt research budgets” (Science Magazine):

Shock waves are rippling through the U.S. research community in reaction to a new labor law that will require that postdoctoral researchers be paid at least $47,476—thousands of dollars more than many earn now.

Apparently 10+ years of STEM education does not lead to a big Christmas shopping budget….

Related:

• “Women in Science”

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This December 21, 2016 New York Times article is interesting for featuring the statement “Women have, historically, been short-changed in divorces.” The law professor who makes this assertion doesn’t make any attempt to explain why most divorce lawsuits are filed by women (see the classic Brinig and Allen paper referenced in “Causes of Divorce” as well as this statistical study of a Massachusetts courthouse where 72 percent of the cases were filed by women).

[Separately, I think the University of San Diego law professor is wrong about a prenup barring a woman, at least one whose fertility has not been exhausted, from recovering some of the value that a man realizes from a successful startup. Let’s stick with her home state of California. As explained in California Prenuptial Agreements, for example, a prenup cannot limit an adult’s right to profit from child support. Census 2014 data show that 94 of Californians collecting child support are women. If the female victim posited by the NYT author can have one or more children during the marriage she is on track to collect between 30 and 50 percent of her former husband’s future income (for 18 years) from all sources, regardless of the contents of a prenuptial agreement. (If she can find a man with a lot of intellectual property who won’t agree to marry her, there remains a profit opportunity via selling an abortion or out-of-wedlock child-bearing.)]

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… and then wasted the rest? See DailyMail.com.

(Apologies to W.C. Fields.)

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Dreamland by Sam Quinones talks a little about the economics of America’s opiate epidemic. On one side was the evil Purdue Pharma, which collected tens of billions of dollars in revenue for OxyContin. But who was on the other side? Most drug addicts don’t have a lot of money. The answer turns out to be that you the taxpayer were on the other side:

And so the Medicaid card entered our story. The card provides health insurance through Medicaid, and part of that insurance pays for medicine—whatever pills a doctor deems that the insured patient needs. Among those who receive Medicaid cards are people on state welfare or on a federal disability program known as SSI (Supplemental Security Income). In Scioto County, annual SSI applicants almost doubled in the decade ending 2008—from 870 to 1,600. An untrained observer of Portsmouth’s bleak economic landscape might have understood; jobs, after all, were scarce. People needed money and that check helped. That was true, but by then pills and pain clinics had altered the classic welfare calculus: It wasn’t the monthly SSI check people cared so much about; rather, they wanted the Medicaid card that came with it. If you could get a prescription from a willing doctor—and Portsmouth had plenty of those—the Medicaid health insurance cards paid for that prescription every month. For a three-dollar Medicaid co-pay, therefore, an addict got pills priced at a thousand dollars, with the difference paid for by U.S. and state taxpayers. A user could turn around and sell those pills, obtained for that three-dollar co-pay, for as much as ten thousand dollars on the street.

Combined with pill mills, the Medicaid card scam allowed prolific quantities of prescription medication to hit the streets. The more pills that sloshed around the region, the more people grew addicted, and the bigger the business grew, and the more people died. The Oxy black market might never have spread and deepened so quickly had addicts been forced to pay for all those pills with cash at market prices.

“Twenty years ago they were drawing SSDI and full workers’ comp—say, eighteen hundred dollars a month,” said Brent Turner, the commonwealth prosecutor for that part of eastern Kentucky, whose career began in 2000, just as OxyContin became a business for impoverished families across Appalachia. “The checks were higher because they’d go work in the mines and pay into their [SSDI] disability. Now we’ve got people who aren’t working, who are drawing SSI, maybe five hundred dollars a month. We’ve got people who have kids and wives and the whole family trying to survive on five hundred dollars. I’m not making excuses for them. Many haven’t had a job. But it is what it is. When you don’t work, and never have had a job, or paid into the system, you don’t qualify for much. We have boatloads of people who qualify only for SSI. You wouldn’t believe the number of people we see, twenty or thirty years old, have never had a job and are drawing checks since they were teenagers. “That was one of the driving factors when pills exploded. We can talk morality all day long, but if you’re drawing five hundred dollars a month and you have a Medicaid card that allows you to get a monthly supply of pills worth several thousand dollars, you’re going to sell your pills.”

Other families, though, had been unemployed for generations and on government assistance. Up to then, they had resorted to small-time criminal activities, but remained minor irritants in holler life. When Oxy came along, however, the sorriest families were transformed into dominant and unruly forces.

Back home, [the pill dealer] made a killing on the first of the month when the SSI checks arrived in Floyd County.

He watched capable young people get themselves declared “simple” to get SSI and the Medicaid card, and thus access to pills.

The author elsewhere praises liberal Democrats and condemns conservative Republicans, so I don’t think the above passages were driven by a bias against government welfare programs. And in fact the author directly praises anyone working for the government as implicitly altruistic:

As I tried to chart the spread of the opiate epidemic, one thing dawned on me: Other than addicts and traffickers, most of the people I was speaking to were government workers. They were the only ones I saw fighting this scourge. We’ve seen a demonization of government and the exaltation of the free market in America over the previous thirty years. But here was a story where the battle against the free market’s worst effects was taken on mostly by anonymous public employees. These were local cops like Dennis Chavez and Jes Sandoval, prosecutors like Kathleen Bickers, federal agents like Jim Kuykendall and Rock Stone, coroners like Terry Johnson, public nurses like Lisa Roberts, scientists at the Centers for Disease Control, judges like Seth Norman, state pharmacists like Jaymie Mai, and epidemiologists like Jennifer Sabel and Ed Socie

The author lives in California so he is presumably aware that government workers do get paid (examples). He doesn’t explain why a police officer, DEA agent, prosecutor, judge, or prison guard would be upset to have a job, steady paycheck, and pension due to the existence of opiate addicts.

Related:

• The latest book: Dreamland
• Vote to legalize marijuana is a vote to further reduce labor force participation rate?

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Planning a Winter Solstice party? Here are some ideas from Catherine the Great (Massie):

Potemkin tried to distract himself by giving and attending receptions, dinners, and balls. The evening that surpassed anything ever seen in Russia occurred on April 28, 1791, at Potemkin’s Tauride Palace. Three thousand guests had been invited; all were present when the empress arrived. The prince was at the door, wearing a scarlet tailcoat with solid gold buttons, each button encasing a large solitaire diamond. Once the empress was seated, twenty-four couples, including Catherine’s two grandsons, Alexander and Constantine, entered to dance a quadrille. Afterward, the host led his guest through the rooms of the palace. In one, poets were reciting verse; in another, a choir was singing; in still another, a French comedy was being performed.

Maybe you need a bigger house to host this event?

“You should know our mania for building is stronger than ever,” Catherine wrote to Grimm in 1779. “It is a diabolical thing. It consumes money and the more you build, the more you want to build. It’s a sickness like being addicted to alcohol.”

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Follow-up on the Massachusetts rednecks who drove “through the [Wellesley College] campus waving a Trump flag out the truck window and yelling ‘Make America Great Again.'”: “Pro-Trump Babson students cleared in Wellesley incident” (Boston Globe)

I’m wondering if these guys should be classified as performance artists.

Related:

• Oberlin student shuts down campus by placing a “whites only” sign above a water fountain
• Hillary’s anti-poverty achievements (starts with a commencement speech at Wellesley)

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