Drug Addiction // Current TV

Fjögur Píanó: Mind-Controlled Slavery, Addiction, Drugs and Violent Sex

“Fjögur Píanó” is a thoughtful, haunting short film/music video created by Israeli director Alma Har’el, set to music by the acclaimed Icelandic band Sigur Rós. The band recently asked a dozen filmmakers to each choose a song from its new album, “Valtari.” Given complete creative freedom, filmmaker Alma Har’el produced a seven-minute video that at first appears to be more of a dream sequence than a narrative. “Fjögur Píanó” is a wordless song comprised of four piano pieces that features actor Shia LaBeouf and actress Denna Thomsen in a stormy relationship, caught up in a destructive spiral, possibly revolving around mind-controlled drug addiction, lovesick co-dependence and sordid sexuality mixed with dominance and violence.

It is evident throughout the film that the couple is very confused, not in control of their destiny and hopelessly trapped in a state of virtual imprisonment. Much of the film’s symbolism hints at the concept of Monarch Mind Control. Monarch Mind Control is named after the Monarch butterfly, a genetically programmed insect that begins its life as a worm (representing undeveloped potential) and, after a period of cocooning (biological programming), is reborn as a beautiful butterfly (the Monarch slave).

From this perspective, “Fjögur Píanó” can be viewed as a dark commentary on a world of increasingly abusive totalitarian domination. Every aspect of Shia and Denna’s lives is manipulated by outside forces. Their living environment is controlled and modified by their handlers: they are drugged, blindfolded and forcibly taken on weird, dissociative trips. Attempts to break free from the cruel domination are useless. The couple is utterly powerless when confronted by the world around them, and in the end the only thing Shia can do is cut another bloody tally mark into Denna’s back.

This piece includes photographs and the darkly haunting short film/music video.

http://disembedded.wordpress.com/2012/08/31/fjogur-piano-mind-controlled-slavery-addiction-drugs-and-violent-sex/“Fjögur Píanó” is a thoughtful, haunting short... more

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Portugal's nine-year-old experiment in drug decriminalisation

VIA Kevin Drum, Keith O'Brien reports in the Boston Globe on a new study showing positive results from Portugal's nine-year-old experiment in drug decriminalisation. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, rates of hard- and soft-drug usage in Portugal were soaring, along with hepatitis and HIV rates.

Faced with both a public health crisis and a public relations disaster, Portugal’s elected officials took a bold step. They decided to decriminalize the possession of all illicit drugs—from marijuana to heroin—but continue to impose criminal sanctions on distribution and trafficking. The goal: easing the burden on the nation’s criminal justice system and improving the people’s overall health by treating addiction as an illness, not a crime.But nearly a decade later, there’s evidence that Portugal’s great drug experiment not only didn’t blow up in its face; it may have actually worked. More addicts are in treatment. Drug use among youths has declined in recent years. Life in Casal Ventoso, Lisbon’s troubled neighborhood, has improved. And new research, published in the British Journal of Criminology, documents just how much things have changed in Portugal. Coauthors Caitlin Elizabeth Hughes and Alex Stevens report a 63 percent increase in the number of Portuguese drug users in treatment and, shortly after the reforms took hold, a 499 percent increase in the amount of drugs seized—indications, the authors argue, that police officers, freed up from focusing on small-time possession, have been able to target big-time traffickers while drug addicts, no longer in danger of going to prison, have been able to get the help they need.
Some researchers caution that Portugal's results may be due not so much to tolerance for drug possession as to making more treatment available. But of course these two always go hand in hand, in any harm-reduction strategy for drug use: it's only by decriminalising possession that you get problem users to come in for treatment.

Portugal is far from the only country that's embraced such harm-reduction strategies, and the verdicts everywhere seem to be similar: they may lead to greater usage of soft drugs, they don't seem to lead to significant increases in hard-drug usage, and they significantly reduce the costs of drug addiction to society. That doesn't mean that drug policy disappears from the political agenda in countries that move towards harm reduction. The newspapers in the Netherlands reported today on a very American-seeming scandal: a website set up by an association of heroin users in Amsterdam, intended to provide addicts with advice on health and safe non-infectious usage, could be read as effectively providing how-to advice on how to shoot up, accessible to web surfers of any age. A conservative-leaning Dutch youth expert wants the site to be somehow restricted to those over the age of 12. But it's instructive to read the reaction of a council member from the right-wing, laissez-faire VVD party, which currently leads the Dutch governing coalition:

On the one hand, we must ensure that the lowest possible number of people use that stuff. On the other hand, if they do, they should use clean needles, not borrow them from each other. And they should try to limit the health risks. That's the perspective from which I look at the site.
This is a perfectly rational conservative perspective. And the fact is that Amsterdam's heroin-addict population has been stable or falling for two decades. That's even though, since 2002, the Dutch authorities have been doing something even more radical than Portugal's for heroin users: they've been giving them free heroin, as long as they show up to inject at government-run "safe injection points", under the eyes of police and health staff. Dutch drug researchers now say that the youth population "doesn't relate to hard drugs at all", and that there's no danger that Dutch kids reading the advice site will find heroin use attractive. They're more likely to find it pathetic.

Drug abuse is driven to a significant extent by fashion. If there's one thing government has going for it, it's the ability to make anything unfashionable. This insight into government's jujitsu-like capability to render the cool uncool should be more obvious to conservatives than to liberals. And yet, in America, the very people who are most distrustful of government's ability to do anything right are the ones who are steadfastly opposed to letting the government use its secret power of deadly uncoolness to fight drug abuse. It seems like a huge wasted opportunity.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/01/harm_reductionVIA Kevin Drum, Keith O'Brien reports in the Boston Globe on a new study showing... more