Leaving the fold

The New Neo Posted on by

The process of political change, aptly described by Ace:

It’s called a paradigm shift. It’s going to seem a little weird and scary at first, but it will also be thrilling and ultimately liberating.

A lot of things that have bothered you for…years — which haven’t seemed to make sense to you, because your brain was screening the truth from you — are suddenly going to make a lot of sense indeed. And you’re going to be kicking yourself for not seeing it sooner, like an optical illusion that suddenly changes from a lady’s face to a candle.

I think it’s a great description of a process I know well. But Ace, what’s with this “lady’s face to a candle” business? I always thought it was either two faces to a vase:

Or maybe a young lady to an old crone:

But you get the picture.

ADDENDUM: If you want to view more optical illusions, go here. This is a great one I’ve never seen before. Close up, it’s Albert Einstein. But back away a few feet from your computer and—well, you’ll see:

So, what did Einstein and Monroe have in common, besides this picture? The easy answer is that they were both Jewish, Einstein by birth and Marilyn by conversion.

But wait, there’s more. Letters a rabbi who supervised her conversion wrote that [emphasis mine]:

…Marilyn[‘s] desire to become Jewish was self-motivated, although her relationship with Arthur [Miller] was clearly an influential one.

“She indicated that she was attracted to Judaism by being impressed with Jewish people that she knew, especially Mr. Miller,” the rabbi writes. “She said that she was aware of the great characters that the Jewish people had produced and that she had read selections from Albert Einstein’s Out of My Later Years… She indicated that she was impressed with the rationalism of Judaism — its ethical and prophetic ideals and its concept of close family life.”…

She often identified with the ‘underdog’ and at the same time had an enormous respect and admiration for intellectuals. … besides Arthur, her ‘hero’ was Albert Einstein … [who] represented for her the great scientist-humanist-Jew-Socialist-dissenter … “

So that Einstein-to-Marilyn-and-back-again portrait isn’t quite as odd as it seems after all.

Revisiting Al Durah: the father’s wounds

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: commenter “expat.”]

Remember the Mohammad al Durah case? There’s a new court ruling with an angle I’d not heard much about before:

The [French Supreme Court] vindicated a doctor who was sued by al-Dura’s father for saying the wounds he claimed to have suffered on the day of his son’s death were not the result of Israeli fire…

This case stemmed from Jamal al-Dura’s claims he had been wounded during the firefight between Palestinian Authority gunmen and Israeli soldiers in an incident at the Netzarim Junction near the border between Israel and Gaza on September 30, 2000. An Israeli doctor, Dr. Yehuda David, took issue with the elder al-Dura’s claims his scars were the result of wounds inflicted in the shooting, arguing instead they were clearly the result of tendon surgery he had performed on the father years earlier. Al-Dura sued Dr. David and won a judgment in a French court, but France’s Supreme Court has now overturned the decision and validated the Israeli’s argument.

But if you watch the following video, you’ll see that the irony is even greater than Jamal al-Dura blaming Israeli soldiers for inflicting gunshot wounds on him that were really the result of an Israeli doctor operating to save his arm six years earlier—and that’s because the original damage to Jamal was actually inflicted by ax-wielding Palestinians:

It makes one wonder whether Jamal al-Dura was in some difficulty with his fellow Palestinians, and if his cooperation in the shooting incident and its aftermath was a way to get them off his back.

[NOTE: Those interested in the topic, and unfamiliar with my previous writing on it and coverage of the France2 trial, go here and scroll down to find the earliest articles. You can also read Richard Landes’ fine work on the subject of the al Durah incident, here and here.]

Companion pieces: Millay and others

The New Neo Posted on by

When I hear a song or read a poem, other songs and poems often spring unbidden into my mind. They have some relation to the first, as a sort of harmonic vibration or echo.

Sonnets are a particular form of poetry I happen to love, and of course songs are—well, most of us are very drawn to songs. Here’s a post of mine in which I not only describe sonnets and what it feels like to try to write them, but offer a sonnet of own in praise of them. It goes like this:

I write some poetry from time to time,
And gravitate to forms, I must confess.
I crave some meter and a bit of rhyme.
Free verse can be illusory progress.
The sonnet with its prescribed fourteen lines
Presents a special challenge to be met,
A game that Frost, my hero, thus defines:
No point in playing tennis with no net.

Ah, freedom! It’s a lofty modern goal.
And rules? Meant to be broken, don’t you see?
Let’s shed the last vestiges of stiff control
And revel in a life and art that’s free!
But rules are guides, not just constraints or chains.
Throw all out, and mere anarchy remains.

I can’t think of a song that reminds me of that one. But the following sonnet by Edna St. Vincent Millay, one of the foremost practitioners of the sonnet form in the 20th century, sure has that effect:

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply;
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in the winter stands a lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet know its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone;
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.

Here’s the song, by the McGarrigle sisters:

Then there is this pairing—again, a pensive sonnet by Millay (video of Tyne Daly reading it can be found here; the video can’t be embedded, unfortunately):

Only until this cigarette is ended,
A little moment at the end of all,
While on the floor the quiet ashes fall,
And in the firelight to a lance extended,
Bizarrely with the jazzing music blended,
The broken shadow dances on the wall,
I will permit my memory to recall
The vision of you, by all my dreams attended.
And then adieu,””farewell!””the dream is done.
Yours is a face of which I can forget
The color and the features, every one,
The words not ever, and the smiles not yet;
But in your day this moment is the sun
Upon a hill, after the sun has set.

The song is by Leonard Cohen (of course!):

[NOTE: Millay had a pretty raucous sex and love life, as you might imagine. I’ve written about her politics here; another interesting change story.

And then there’s this, about Millay’s voice.]

Rent control in the Big Apple

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a column by George Will that tackles New York’s very odd rent control/stabilitzation laws—which have been in effect in one form or other for far longer than my lifetime, and which are being challenged in court:

The tenants in the Harmons’ three rent-controlled units [in their owner-occupied building] are paying an average 59 percent below market rates. The Harmons would like to reclaim one apartment for a grandchild, but because occupants of two of the units are over 62, the Harmons would have to find the displaced tenant a comparable apartment, at the same or lower rent, in the same neighborhood.

In addition to rent control’s random dispersal of benefits ”” remember, half of the Harmons’ apartments are uncontrolled ”” rent control is destructive because it discourages construction of new apartments and maintenance of existing ones.

Here are more details about the Harmon case.

I must confess that, even were I the beneficiary of these laws, I would have to (reluctantly) acknowledge their basic unfairness. Of course, life is unfair, but the law should strive to be as fair as possible, and rent control seems extraordinarily arbitrary, a sort of squatter’s rights to rental real estate at greatly reduced prices, and the subsidy of some renters at the expense of the others who happen to have come later.

The question is: what’s the remedy? Is the law really unconstitutional? Remember, it’s a state law at this point (see the details and the history here).

Will’s argument for its unconstitutionality is the Fifth Amendment:

Rent control is unconstitutional because it is an egregious and uncompensated physical occupation of property. The Constitution says that private property shall not “be taken for public use, without just compensation.”

A property right in a physical thing is a right to possess, use and dispose of this thing. Because government-compelled possession of property by a third party is an unambiguous taking, the Harmons’ property right has been nullified.

Of course, these apartments were not “taken.” If the government had commandeered the Harmons’ brownstone and forced them to convert it to apartments and take in tenants, that would be the case, but the Harmons (or their parents and/or grandparents) seem to have freely decided to take on these tenants (or their parents; rent-controlled apartments in NY can be inherited) before the current stabilization law went into effect. So it’s hard to see this as a government taking exactly, since the government did not take over the units entirely, and the Harmons still own the building and can sell it if they want.

The “public use” part of the law, though, would probably apply, because it has been liberally interpreted to mean practically anything that’s arguably in the public interest or to promote the public good, and rent control laws were originally intended to do that.

The best remedy would probably be repeal of the law by the NY state legislature, or for New York to opt out at the city level. Neither of those things is likely to happen, although legislators in the state have been slowly watering the rent control and rent stabilization laws down over the years. Repeal would have the virtue of being clear, but it wouldn’t answer the question of the constitutionality of such laws.

Why am I writing about all of this? Well, as an ex-New Yorker, I’ve long known about the city’s strange rental situation. But it’s part of a larger issue which has reared its ugly head lately: class warfare. The city’s rent-control laws were originally intended to protect the poor from the allegedly rapacious rich, and although they’ve long ceased to have any real relationship to that, if you read the comments on message boards about rent control issues, you’ll see that that’s what’s driving the discussion.

It’s a lot like the sort of thing we’ve become familiar with during the Obama administration, and in the Republican primary as well. At stake is the direction the country will take vis a vis capitalism and free markets. How unfettered should they be? Do people need protection from exploitation, and if so who, and from whom, and how can it best be accomplished without gumming up the whole works? Even those who advocate and support rent control laws must recognize the unintended consequences for the entire housing market, if they’re being honest.

Funny thing—I set about to write this post because I’m so tired of the primaries, and I wanted to tackle something completely different. But in the end it’s not so different after all, is it? It all comes down to how much the government should intervene to control our financial lives—and even our lives in general.

Attack of the attack ads

The New Neo Posted on by

The Republican primaries seem to have ground down to a war of the attack ads.

Most (if not all?) are the work of PACs, so it’s a bit hard to tell how involved the candidates are. It would be naive to think there is no connection, and it would be equally wrong to imagine the candidates responsible for everything said in their name and on their behalf, whether it be though PACs or the ubiquitous anonymous “advisers.” Candidates are, of course, far more responsible for the words that come out of their own mouths, and for the ads that are officially in their name and approved by their campaign.

But let’s face it: attack ads are used because they work. Yes, sometimes they backfire, and/or sometimes they just don’t gain traction. But very often they undermine the attackee and benefit the attacker, and that’s why they’re so common in political campaigns.

At the beginning of this primary season, when there were so many candidates jockeying for position, things were a lot more polite. There was no one focus for negativity, and the way to stand out was to be more articulate and forceful in debate than the others. But with the narrowing of the field, sequential one-on-one rivalries have broken out, and with them the negative ads.

That’s to be expected. But I think the term “attack ad” is overused. Although I’m using it in a very general manner here, I’d much prefer to see its use confined to ads that distort or lie about the candidate targeted, rather than those that merely criticize him or her. When there are glaring flaws in a person’s record, it would be wrong for a rival not to raise a red flag, wouldn’t it? That’s fair game.

Trouble is that it’s hard to distinguish lies from the truth. And perhaps an even greater difficulty is that, in a primary as opposed to a general, a very negative ad campaign can—and I predict will—come back to bite the eventual Republican nominee, whomever he may be.

Some say that all this nastiness would have happened anyway, and I agree. Obama has shown himself (or those “surrogates” of his) to be a ruthless campaigner. But the groundwork is being laid by Republicans themselves. Will the public grow weary of the charges and will that make Obama’s attacks more toothless when they come, as some have hopefully alleged? Only if the charges have been successfully rebutted; otherwise all the repetition will probably serve to drive the negative perceptions deeper into voters’ minds.

Jennifer’s abs

The New Neo Posted on by

This must-read (not!) article, putting down the recurrent Jennifer Aniston pregnancy rumors, refers to the 43-year-old actress’s “amazing rock-hard abs.” And lest you think this focus on Aniston’s abs is unusual, here’s another article that does the same.

Here’s the photo that seems to have prompted all this ab-worship (it’s in GQ, and has some other eccentricities that seem to have gone unremarked, although I assume the plot of the new movie being promoted would reveal just why Aniston is leading co-star Paul Rudd around on a makeshift leash):

Hey, I’m not impressed. Forty-three is practically childhood, especially in a woman who hasn’t given birth, and who can devote hours a day to maintaining those abs because it is her livelihood.

What’s more, I’m a lot older than 43, and I’ve got rock-hard abs too. You’ll have to take my word for it, though, because I’m not posting a photo on this blog. I’m not posting that photo for 2 very good reasons: modesty, and the fact that my rock-hard abs are a bit, shall we say, under wraps. They’re in there all right, somewhere; I just know they are. But I would have to lose about twenty pounds for them to be visible.

A woman can actually have very strong stomach muscles, but if there’s even a bit of fat on top of them—something most women naturally possess, young or old, whether they’re strong or not, unless they’re very very thin—then you won’t see those abs no matter how rock-hard they are. I’ve got nothing against Aniston’s abs, but there’s nothing special about them except for the fact that her fat percentage is so low that they’re right out there for all the world to see and admire.

I also remember a time when we weren’t quite so ab-centric as a society. For example, this was thought to be a very lovely abdomen indeed:

Bardot, Cannes, 1953, before she became a blond. She’s certainly very slender—at least as slender as Aniston, if not more—but the abs are still under a tiny bit of cover.

[ADDENDUM: And I call BS on this sort of article, so ubiquitous that, serendipitously, that one appeared on Yahoo’s main email page today. The only way to get rid of belly fat and have a flat middle is to lose a ton of weight, have a ton of liposuction, or to have genes that mean it’s not deposited there in the first place. And the latter only works when you’re pretty young; even the leanest-bellied among us have a tendency to get at least a small paunch when older, unless literally starving.]

Turnout and the primaries

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m one of those people who takes voting very seriously, so much so that I think I’ve voted in every general election and midterm as well. The only ones I’ve ever skipped are the off-years with just the very local candidates who are mostly running unopposed, or who are shoe-ins. I also have voted regularly in primaries or caucuses, at least when I’ve lived in states where they’re held.

And all of this was true even before I became so political. My attitude has been that voting is a great and solemn privilege, one people have died to protect, and that if you don’t vote you don’t get to complain about the results.

And it was complaining that I mostly engaged in, because in my voting life only three presidents I’d voted for got elected. This is not necessarily a record of which I’m inordinately proud, but we’re talking about Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush’s second term. But that’s not to say that any of the members of this particular triumvirate were my first choices as their party’s nominee, or that I unequivocally supported them. I’ve never been all that happy with my choices by the time the general election rolls around, but I vote.

The times I’ve voted in primaries, or imagined what my vote would be in primaries, the choices were often a bit better, mostly because there were more people involved at the start. But a lot of the time they haven’t been so great.

This year is no different, except that the election seems more important and the choices seem a bit worse. But they’ve often (although not always) been fairly bad:

2008: McCain, Romney, Huckabee
2004: Bush was the incumbent
2000: Bush, McCain, Alan Keyes (originally running but early dropouts were the likes of Gary Bauer, Steve Forbes, Orrin Hatch, Lamar Alexander, Elizabeth Dole, John Kasich, and Dan Quayle).
1996: Bob Dole, Pat Buchanan, Steve Forbes
1992: incumbent George H.W. Bush was primaried by Pat Buchanan
1988: VP George H.W. Bush (one of the few VPs running in recent years), Bob Dole, Pat Robertson
1984: no challenge to incumbent Reagan
1980: Reagan, George H.W. Bush, John Anderson (an interesting primary in which Reagan was hugely popular and his nomination a foregone conclusion, based on his showing in 1976 when he primaried incumbent Gerald Ford and did well).

So in quite a few of those years the slates weren’t much better than today. I don’t know what the turnouts were back then, but this year turnout is down even from 2008, despite the extreme importance of this election.

The apathy of the voters in the Republican primaries has surprised me. There’s been an awful lot of shouting in the comments sections of blogs, but when it comes to actual voting, we haven’t gotten all that much.

I know, I know: people are dissatisfied with the slate. I am, too. But as I’ve tried to say here, that’s really no excuse for not voting.

The low turnout has the effect of skewing the election results more to the fringes and/or the extremes. In primaries if only the most fanatical and dedicated tend to come out, then the eventual nominee will reflect that. And though you may think it’s a good thing if that happens—if your favored candidate wins, for example—it can be a very bad thing for the general.

It’s my impression that this year a lot of voters are making choices out of petulance and/or pique. That’s not usually a process that leads to good decisions. Perhaps it’s inevitable right now, when three years of Obama combine with an uninspiring slate of candidates and lingering anger at McCain/2008 to make an electorate that is unusually dispirited and sullen.

But that’s no way to win elections. And winning this election remains very important to most on the right. Perhaps, once this seemingly-endless primary season is over, people will unite behind the eventual nominee. I have my doubts, after all the bitterness, but one can hope—because so far, the person who seems to have gained the most from this primary season has been President Obama.

On Valentine’s Day, let’s talk about Groundhog Day—again

The New Neo Posted on by

In recent discussions of the film “Groundhog Day” on this blog, I’ve noticed a couple of people questioning why the Bill Murray character would find Andie McDowell’s Rita deserving of all those years of his devotion and energy. For example, “…[W]hat, exactly, made the lovely but, let’s face it, vapid Rita worthy of Phil’s centuries of effort?”

My answer is that he discovered love. Yes, Rita was beautiful, and a good human being with many excellent qualities. But of course she was imperfect, and over the years (centuries? millennia?) Phil no doubt had learned just about all of her flaws. Still, it didn’t matter to him because it wasn’t about Rita, exactly—it was about the fact that, somewhere along the long path of his transformation to wisdom, he finally understood that every person in town, including the ones he couldn’t tolerate at the beginning, was worthy of his attention—and of something one might call “love,” in its broadest sense.

And somewhere along the line to that knowledge, Phil’s efforts in “Groundhog Day” stopped being about getting into Rita’s pants or even getting her to love him, although that certainly took up a larger percentage of his time (and the movie’s length) than some of his other pursuits. But he probably spent at least as much time learning to play the piano (a form of love, too), or to carve ice sculptures, or to become skilled at some of the more mindless and meaningless tricks he mastered, or learning details about the life of almost everyone in town.

Was the old derelict, whose life Phil tried to save over and over and over, “worth it” either? Such questions no longer mattered to him, because the gesture and the effort were worth it, and every life was worth something to him.

Rita, of course, had always been physically attractive to Phil. But as the film (and time) wore on—and on—she became the object not just of eros, but of agape as well. By the end of the movie, I think that Phil had come to appreciate the idea of the theme and variations versus the symphony, which I wrote about here:

And, although walking repeatedly in the same place is very different from traveling around the world and walking in a new place every day, is it really so very much less varied? It depends on the eye and mind of the beholder; the expansive imagination can find variety in small differences, and the stunted one can find boredom in vast changes.

And I submit that love is like that, too. Some people spend a lifetime with one love, one spouse; plumbing the depths of that single human being and what it means to be in an intimate relationship with him/her. Others go from relationship to relationship, never alighting with one person for very long, craving the variety.

It would seem on the face of it that the second type of person has the more exciting time in love. But it ain’t necessarily so. Either of these experiences can be boring or fascinating, depending on what we bring to it: the first experience is a universe in depth, and the second a universe in breadth. But both can contain multitudes.

Towards the end of the film (SPOILER ALERT, if there’s anyone on earth who hasn’t seen the movie yet), right before Phil is liberated from the seemingly endless loop of the repeating day, he makes it clear that he has given up the pursuit of Rita entirely, and immersed himself in his love for her instead. Is this what finally frees him?

Getting to know Santorum

The New Neo Posted on by

Rick Santorum’s surge doesn’t puzzle me. It’s his turn at being the non-Romney frontrunner. By saying that I don’t mean to put him down, but it’s hard to avoid the pattern that’s been emerging: Romney is the supposed “annointed one” by the “Republican establishment,” with each other candidate taking his (or her; remember Bachmann?) turn in the limelight as his foil, only to be replaced after a while by the next in line.

One of them may end up having staying power, because Romney doesn’t seem to be catching on. Or, Romney will manage to remain as the last man standing. None of this bodes well for November of 2012. But it also remains true that a lot more will be happening before then that we cannot foresee, and which is bound to affect the outcome.

But back to Santorum. I prefer him to Gingrich, but Santorum’s own problem in the general is obvious: he is an extreme social conservative. Santorum actually has said things that indicate he does want to get into your bedroom: for example, it’s hard to see how this sort of thing would be well-received by most American voters.

Santorum tries to make it clear in the following interview that his anti-contraception stand is a personal choice, and that he would not try to impose it on the country. But he goes on and on at such length about how contraception is bad for people (not just himself) that it’s difficult to believe views like this wouldn’t alarm most listeners:

There are other problems with Santorum that I described in this post. But if I’m looking at him and evaluating him as an ABO candidate (which I am), it’s the extremity of his social conservatism that really raises the alarm for his chances of winning a general election against Obama. He’s provided the opposition with a field day of sound bites to be used against him.

Addiction and choice

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “uncleFred” writes about addiction:

“There for the grace of God”¦”

Not so much. Drug abuse is not like getting hit by a meteor, or struck by lightening, it is a choice. Go to an AA meeting. Sit for a couple of hours and listen. Talk with someone who has been sober or clean a while. (AA meetings these days have as many drug addicts as alcoholics because of the high percentage of dual addiction).

The ones who recover, literally to a man or woman, all tell you the same thing. There came a day when they DECIDED to quit, and then they found help to do so. They’ll admit that it was a choice to start, a choice to keep abusing their drug of choice, and it was a choice to stop. Most of them can’t even tell you why they decided to quit or what was different on that day from the day before. The most common answer is “I just got done”.

On the radio someone said that “Whitney lost her battle with ”˜her demons”, as if some evil force reached out and seized control of her life. I bear her no ill will and think her ending is sad, but the tragedy here is that the story that is front and center and larger than life is one spun by a PC media and not focused on the truth of addiction.

UncleFred is correct that it is a choice—unless, of course, someone held Whitney (or any other addict) down and force-fed (or injected) her with drugs in order to get her accustomed to the habit. We can safely assume that didn’t happen to her, and rarely if ever happens in general. So yes, it is most definitely a choice every single step of the way from first use to continuing use to sobriety.

But by far the best choice to make is not to start.

That is because, once the hook is in, the difficulty of choosing to stop—and sticking with that choice, day after day for a lifetime, which is what it takes—requires enormous strength and constant self-control. I am referring to the physical cravings as well as the psychological ones, especially for physically addictive drugs in the initial stages of rehab. In the end, though, the psychological “demons” are the ones that are hardest for most addicted people; after all, life ordinarily presents a host of stresses and problems, and the addict must learn to weather those without the tried-and-true method that has long cushioned the blows.

Not everyone becomes addicted. I’m not so sure that those who do are weaker than others, but they often have an extra physical vulnerability to their drug of choice: for example, alcohol. I have a number of friends who are alcoholics, and I’ve been impressed by how these seemingly strong people can go weak in its presence, and what a powerful pull it exerts for them. For me, on the other hand, it has no pull at all. I don’t even like it, so it takes no strength of character for me to resist it because there’s really nothing to resist.

But for those who become alcoholics or addicts after their initial exposure to the substances and their decision to invite them into their lives, it is at least in some ways as though an evil force comes and takes control of them, and they must battle it with every ounce of their beings. Such people often state that, right from their first ingestion of the substance, they love what it does to them and for them.

And there’s another issue in addiction: over time, drugs and alcohol do not leave people exactly as they found them. They often change the person under their influence, so that making those good choices while still using (and the decision to quit must occur while a person is still using) can be very hard because of those changes. The person is no longer quite in his/ right mind, or at least not in his pre-drug/alcohol mind, but it is necessary to start recovery while in that altered state (unless there’s a forced deprivation of the substance, such as can occur in prison, for example).

Unlike Odysseus, a person in the real world can’t be tied to the mast to resist the siren song:

For some people, that call can be so strong that, in the end, it’s all they hear and all they care about.

[ADDENDUM: There is evidence that, at least for some people, the very first drug experience changes them physiologically, especially if it’s crack . See this:

Crack is inhaled and rapidly absorbed through the lungs, into the blood, and carried swiftly to the brain. The chances of overdosing and poisoning leading to coma, convulsions, and death are greatly increased. Crack’s rapid rush – 5 to 7 minutes of intense pleasure – quickly subsides, leading to depression that needs to be relieved by more crack. This cycle enhances the chances of addiction and dependency. Because of the brief high, users are constantly thinking about, and devising ways to get more crack. Psychologically, the drug reduces concentration, ambition, drive, and increases confusion and irritability, wreaking havoc on users’ professional and personal lives. Habitual use may lead to cocaine psychosis causing, paranoia, hallucinations, and a condition known as formication, in which insects or snakes are perceived to be crawling under the skin…

Once an individual has tried crack, they may be unable to predict or control the extent to which they will continue to use. Crack is probably the most addictive substance that has been devised so far. Crack addicts must have more and more crack to sustain their high and avoid the intense “crash” or depression that follows their binges. They become physically and psychologically dependent on crack, which is often a result of only few doses of the drug taken within a few days. This dependence can lead to addiction.

All to often, the process of crack addiction goes something like this: The “soon to be addict” takes their first hit. Upon inhalation of this powerful drug, the users body instantly begins the addiction process. The individual’s mental and emotional being is soon to follow, but for now just their body suffers from the initial stages of crack addiction. After the first few times using the drug, their mind slowly starts the addiction process. This grows stronger and stronger until, mentally, the addict believes that they cannot live without the drug. They now are entangled in a full fledged crack addiction. Shortly after this occurs, crack takes complete control over their emotions.

Once the individual’s emotions have been overridden by cocaine, they no longer feel normal without being intoxicated. When this occurs they feel the need to use more crack just to feel normal. In order to get high they have to take an immense amount of the drug. Their crack addiction has infiltrated all areas of their life. They can no longer function physically, emotionally, or mentally without crack. This cycle of addiction continues until the individual either quits using or dies…

The use of crack alters the processes of the brain by causing a change in the way neurons in the brain communicate. Nerve cells, called neurons, communicate with each other by supplying the brain with chemicals called neurotransmitters. These neurotransmitters allow information in the form of electrical impulses to be passed through the body. This process works by neurotransmitters attaching themselves to certain areas in the brain. One of the neurotransmitters affected by crack is called dopamine. Dopamine is released by neurons in the part of the brain that controls feelings of pleasure and well-being. This area is in the limbic system of the brain. Normally, once dopamine has transferred to a nerve cell’s receptors and caused a reaction in a cell, it is transferred back to the neuron that released it.

Crack cocaine causes damage to this system and blocks the process of transfer. Dopamine then builds up in the gap synapse between neurons. As a result, for crack cocaine users, dopamine keeps affecting a nerve cell after it should have stopped. That’s why someone who uses crack cocaine feels an extra sense of euphoria and pleasure. Although crack cocaine may bring on intense feelings of pleasure while it is being used, crack cocaine can damage the ability to feel pleasure in the long run. Research suggests that long-term crack cocaine use may reduce the amount of dopamine or the number of dopamine receptors in the brain. When this happens, nerve cells must have crack cocaine to communicate properly. Without crack cocaine, the brain can’t send enough dopamine to the receptors to create a feeling of pleasure.

I challenge anyone to read that site and not be almost overwhelmed by how difficult the task of quitting a drug like that must be.]