White Man Tweak With Forked Tongue

Warrior Tweakers, Good! Citizen Tweakers, Bad!

They’re tweaking again. The military, I mean. It’s not just the throttle jocks, I’m sure, who are popping Dexedrine to stay alert. It’s a war on, man, and if you can’t sacrifice a little sleep to the war effort, then what kind of patriot are you? That’s speed thinking. Compelling, so compelling of course that virtually all of the pilots flying combat missions in Iraq are in an altered state.

An altered state, may I remind you, that in an ordinary citizen is considered illegal in the extreme, a dangerous self-indulgence in a forbidden psychic kick that renders you outré. You’re a meth-head, a dangerous, child neglecting, spouse-abusing, larcenous scab on the body of society, in need of treatment and scorn. As a former prosecutor and criminal defender, I know the depictions are not far-fetched, either. Cranksters can be vile creatures, and meth induces a callousness of character that is definitively anti-social. Delusions of grandeur can feed notions of gangster mystique, and facilitate violence. I once had a client tell me in jail about how he brutally broke the kneecaps on a total stranger after taping him to a chair in his garage, because he had mistaken the poor fellow for some guy who ripped him off. After another tweaker friend came home and informed my client that the fellow was not the ripoff, they put him in the back of a pickup and threw him out in front of the emergency room and sped off. Of course, some meth users merely become weasely thieves, and do not commit mayhem. At all events, it has a corrosive effect on character.

So why do the military rate? Eliminate from your mind first the notion that the drugs are not the same. Dextroamphetamine is what the Air Force hands out to pilots, and they take extras along in the jet to self-administer as desired. Dextro just means the molecule “turns to the right” instead of to the left, but to your brain it’s all the same – left turn, right turn, speed on. To fight fatigue is said to be the reason. But a great side effect is the creation of the callous, anti-social character necessary to drop weapons of mass destruction on fellow humans. It takes a certain distance to do this sort of thing. Speed helps.

It makes me think of the lyrics from “Lucretia,” by the Sisters of Mercy:

“I hear the roar of a thin machine,
Hot metal and methedrine.
Love lost, fire at will,
Dum-dum bullets and shoot to kill,
I hear a dive bomber …
Empire Down …
Empire Down …”

Returning to the question – why do the military get to take speed? Because they need to, we are told. The Iraqis are probably doing speed, too. They’re not stupid. It gives them a little bit of advantage, what with having to stay up all night soldering together bomb-timers, and repairing assault rifles, not to mention keeping a prayer schedule. Speed helps.

Where’s The Money?

The origins of amphetamine are recent. Discovered just before the turn of the century, methamphetamine was synthesized by Smith, Kline & French in 1929. The company filed two trademarks on the trade-name “Benzedrine” in 1936, one as a tablet “medicine for the stimulation of the nervous system,” and another as a decongestant inhaler, citing first use in commerce in 1933. Glaxo, Smith Kline is still the big distributor of Dextroamphetamine for the military, and related stimulants like Adderall, for obnoxious little boys who won’t sit still in school. Merck developed a simplified synthesis during the second world war to fuel the Blitzkrieg. I assume we aren’t holding back from giving infantry their share of the crank. After all, the infantryman and mechanized armor guys have the hardest work. So they’re speedin’ legally, driving humvees, tanks, fuckin’ rockin’ and rollin’ for real, and their commanders don’t mind that they’re listening to death metal with titles like “Cook Your Balls and Eat ‘Em,” ‘cause it’s a new crankin’ Army muthafucka.

War Is Hell, But Peace Is Sooooo Boring!

Our little cranksterized killers are going to have a hard time adjusting to civilian life. Death metal they’ll still have, but speed will be dearly bought with social ostracism. And they may begin to reflect on the horrors that they committed when the tunes were crankin’ and their reflexes were cleanly, smoothly distributing ammunition among the Iraqis. It seemed like a video game, but after the smoke and heroics are blown away, there is a terrible wound that the heart does not know how to heal. I knew that wound in some of my uncles who were in the infantry during world war two. They drank a lot.
Of course, the speed experience is not all exhilaration. There’s depletion and exhaustion and paranoia. No amount of speed will move the weariness out of bones that have been worked sore, and the business of dispensing ammunition is terribly wearying. I like to shoot my daughter’s .44 magnum lever-action gun, but it doesn’t have a cushion on the butt, and I’ve never shot a whole box of 50 rounds at a time. My shoulder just gets too sore. I’d hate to have to use that rifle in a war. They’d win just because my shoulder would get sore. Speed might help.

This Shit Works!

I wonder if it’s just possible that the policy makers, munitions makers and pharmaceutical makers might have realized how beneficial it would be for them to encourage the use of a drug that makes people more productive, less sensitive, more able to commit mayhem, less concerned with how they feel about what they are doing. Alfred Nobel created dynamite, some nameless chemist created speed. Who did the more powerful deed? Well, certainly their inventions worked hand in hand to make the world a far more detonated place.

Celebrity Cranksters, Celebrity Killers

Genies have a habit of getting out of the bottle, and the meth genie has been out of the bottle for about seventy-plus years now, fueling an expansion of manic energy that has probably resulted in the unnecessary damming of rivers, cutting down of forests, annihilation of entire tribes, species and ecosystems. And the toxic mentality has spread from the top down. Both Adolf Hitler and John F. Kennedy had “Dr. Feelgoods” who injected them with methamphetamine daily. Dr. Theodor Morell was Hitler’s psychiatric physician and constant companion, just as Dr. Max Jacobson was always present to serve as Kennedy’s pharmaceutical nursemaid. Both doctors supplemented the stimulant regimen with downers to moderate the manic effects of speed. It has been observed that Hitler’s mania for annihilating the Jews developed in intensity during the period of Morell’s influence.

Dirty Deeds, Done Dirt Cheap

Hitler’s allies, the Japanese, were also tweaking freely throughout the second world war, as the Imperial government doled out speed to the military and civilian populace alike, to keep up the “war effort.” The Rape of Nanking, a horrific war crime perpetrated by Japanese soldiers against no fewer than 369,366 Chinese men, women and children during 1937-38, was a murderous orgy that continued for months, during which the Japanese troops raped no less than 80,000 women of all ages. Reliable historical reports indicate that the Japanese killed many millions of Chinese during the second world war, although this Sino-Japanese holocaust has received little attention or commemoration. This type of lethal productivity has the feel of a meth-fueled murder nightmare. The suicide pilots of the Japanese air force were given amphetamines to overcome the desire to survive. The Japanese reversed course on their people after the war, made meth illegal in 1952, and arrested over 50,000 people. The country still has a serious problem with intravenous methamphetamine users, who comprise a large proportion of the 2 million meth users in the land of the Rising Sun.

African Children Turned Into Killing Machines

Many of the approximately 100,000 children under arms in the world are manipulated with amphetamines. For example, in Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Burma, and other war-torn nations, children are taken captive, raped, starved, brutalized, and then injected crudely with amphetamines, cocaine, and other drugs, and directed to commit murderous rampages. A Washington Post article by Douglas Farah, published April 8, 2000, quoted international aid sources as follows: “In Sierra Leone, said social workers and the child combatants, taking drugs-especially amphetamines and cocaine-was a regular part of ‘military training.’ Human Rights Watch found in a 1999 report that ‘child combatants armed with pistols, rifles and machetes actively participated in killings and massacres, [and] severed the arms of other children. . . . Often under the influence of drugs, they were known and feared for their impetuosity, lack of control and brutality.’”

American Children Turned Into Substance Abusers

That’s one way to get folks into drugs young, but we are more subtle in the USA, and we use what is called “treatment.” Under the guise of treating ADD and ADHD, two “diseases” that seem to afflict little boys who eat junk food and watch a lot of TV, our little preschool punk rockers are “treated” by school nurses who dole out speed from a jar. Of course, first they started out using “methylphenidate,” aka Ritalin which supposedly “wasn’t an amphetamine.” This label-switching was ordained by the pharma marketing geniuses who started this project to turn kids into cranksters back in the fifties, because the diet pill craze was winding down, and amphetamines, bennies, white crosses, pink hearts, and black beauties had all got a bit of a bad name at the courthouse and in popular literature. The Rolling Stones helped break the bad news about diet pills in their song, “Mother’s Little Helper,” with its pleading refrain “Doctor please, some more of these!” and its jabbing rejoinder, “Outside the door, she took four more!” But the pharma hacks are always good at finding another use for powerful substances, and now, it turns out that Dextroamphetamine, mixed with meth, in a formulation called “Adderall,” is even better than silly old Ritalin. So what good is it to give speed to kids who are speedy?

Thanks for asking. To answer, I must introduce the vaunted “paradoxical effect” of amphetamines on children under some uncertain age. Marvelously, the pharma hacks explain, speed slows down speedy kids! And you know, with proper medical care and monitoring, maybe it is helpful in extreme cases. But in the USA, what’s good can get force-fed down your throat, whether you need it or not. Think lobotomies for excitable mental patients. The same thing has happened to children. Researcher Nadine Lambert recently presented data at the Consensus Development Conference indicating that prescribed consumption of stimulants during childhood predisposed young adults to cocaine abuse. This sort of obvious connection occurred to me when I heard that one of my nephews, a longtime Ritalin-kid, was doing hard time in the penitentiary because he couldn’t stop using meth. Soon, some criminal defense attorneys are going to wake up and realize that when the state gets you addicted to a controlled substance, that should be a defense to criminal possession.

Shockingly, recent medical reports indicate that dosing children with Adderall and Ritalin causes children to hallucinate. What’s shocking is that, after thirty years of giving this crap to kids, the doctors are finally letting this story leak out. That speed makes you hallucinate is no surprise to speed freaks the world over. Moreover, the hallucinations are often quite frightening, which is why seeing them is a sign that a tweaker is “crashing,” and it’s time to gulp a handful of downers and get some sleep. If the can’t knock themselves out with downs, they keep the lights on. With the lights off, during a speed crash, the speeder sees a really horrifying living mosaic of multicolored insects – yep – creepy caterpillars, earwigs, spiders, all in fluorescent colors. Even with the lights on, paranoia plays tricks on the crashing speeder’s perception, causing the sudden lurching glances over the shoulder common in tweaky circles, prompted by the repeat seeing of people who aren’t there, as a coat on a chair, a shadow on the door, or nothing at all, suddenly trigger the feeling that “someone’s there.” This isn’t fun for speed freaks, but it’s at least something they know about and expect. Little kids have no idea, and the experience is probably terrifying or at least terribly disorienting. Now the doctors are admitting that when little Johnny is seeing roaches all over the ground, he’s crashing on his medication. The reports are that this affects 2 or 3 kids out of every hundred, a figure that is probably grossly understated, and is still a high enough number to justify banning the use of these drugs on all children. Given that in 1995, the UN Warning on Ritalin said that 10 – 12% of all American kids are on this drug, there are millions of children hallucinating their way through life for the sake of maintaining classroom discipline and pharmaceutical industry profits.

Houston, We Have A Problem!

Meth has crept into our lives very quietly, and will not leave easily. It may very well explain the extreme bellicosity and hardheadedness of many white American males, who develop a strong loyalty to the drug because of its association with productivity, the work ethic, and a positive, can-do attitude. There is a great false optimism that is brimming over among the nation’s military leaders. We are going to export democracy, uproot tyranny, and kill all the bad guys. With a little crank, it’s all in a day’s work, because speed helps. On speed, we can do more. Somewhere Hitler is smiling.

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Is everybody having fun?

You are all predictable lefty daftiness. All contributors and the editor himself offer the same-old, same-old liberal-to-radical chic. The fact that no one engages, much less criticizes, another’s views means that no one has the wit or the will to admit and address real problems or propose thoughtful solutions. It is not the Ashland thing to do. So have fun, feel good, pleasure yourself–all in smug left-righteousness.

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Tibetan Buddhism blows up from Carreon articles.

Hi,

I’ve been reposting the whole of the Carreon-ABOL articles about the abuses in Tibetan Buddhism. This is eliciting a strongly voiced silence from the Tibetan hierarchy at ARBT, (alt.religion.buddhism.tibetan). The small community of Tibetan Buddhists in the West can verily not handle this kind of flak for their small group, and is just folding up like a house of cards. This is indicative, though, because Tibetan Buddhism has always been the head of world Buddhism through the sponsorship of Chinese Khans and Emperors that still continues with the new Red Emperers of Red China. So, the Carreon abuse-reports are really bringing world Buddhism to it’s knees and rightly so, in my opinion, seeing it’s just getting the change for it’s coin; the result of it’s own deeds. Tibetan Buddhism carries in it’s self the announcement of it’s own downfall in various predictions,…. and the real practise that it predicts in future times, is just Kalachakra and that alone.

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Re: Is everybody having fun?

Malcolm Canmore wrote:

You are all predictable lefty daftiness. All contributors and the editor himself offer the same-old, same-old liberal-to-radical chic. The fact that no one engages, much less criticizes, another’s views means that no one has the wit or the will to admit and address real problems or propose thoughtful solutions. It is not the Ashland thing to do. So have fun, feel good, pleasure yourself–all in smug left-righteousness.

Thank God, an Enemy!
Chas

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Re: Tibetan Buddhism blows up from Carreon articles.

Geir Smith wrote:

The small community of Tibetan Buddhists in the West can verily not handle this kind of flak for their small group, and is just folding up like a house of cards. This is indicative, though, because Tibetan Buddhism has always been the head of world Buddhism through the sponsorship of Chinese Khans and Emperors that still continues with the new Red Emperers of Red China.

Thanks for the props, G.

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Re: Tibetan Buddhism blows up from Carreon articles.

The Carreons’ articles about abuse in Tibetan Buddhism are heavy-duty. Grass won’t grow back after them, like grass didn’t grow back under Attila’s horse-hooves once he had devastated the West. The Carreons will save the soul of Tibetan Buddhism because, they at least, are sincere and compassionate, I think. I’m sure actually, at that.

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Fierce Grace Review

Been down that road too ~ almost hooked
into believing a ‘hip’ guru ~~ only to find they’re as empty and delusional as thin air. Now I doubt anyone who even suggests that they ‘know’ or poseess some exclusive keys of the way to bliss,satori, nirvana …blah,blah blah … just saying /implying it is reason enough for disbelief. And anyway
~ I don’t care about their ‘way’ anymore … I only care about my decisions,my words and my action.
Thanks for your story and the review,Charles

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: White Man Tweak With Forked Tongue

The battle for rationality is a one-mind-at-a-time campaign. The reward is the liberation of each subjective battlefield in succession. When we hit critical mass we all will consider it common sense to avoid the poison of dogmatism, in whatever sweetmeat it is disguised. Piety is mental slavery.
Chas

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wtf with american-buddha

I dont know what the fuck this site has to do with american-buddha.com, but if I felt like taking the time out of my day to correct this fucking idiots ideas of life and “creation”, which being more atheistic than ANY religion, I would with only a high school diploma. Since I didn’t open a new window, I have to remember things to talk about, so I’ll just go with a few. Proposed intellectualism by spelling out DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) is an indicator of a need to be revered. Basically my one line is his or her (or her or his, I really don’t fucking care) statement of atter not being created by the thought processes of an all powerful being, but merely light slowing down into energy. Since I’m not up on the latest in creationary THEORY I would just like to say I was under the impression that light was emitted by matter, mostly as a reaction to electrons changing positions in their paths,(shells in the outdated Bohr’s model). Basically, if in fact matter does arise from deaccellerating light waves, one would have to come first. And the deaccellerating light waves would be more in line with a theory supporting an almighty g-d, as it was put. I don’t think I’ll be visiting that site in the near, or distant, future.

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Re: Tibetan Buddhism blows up from Carreon articles.

Posted the full American Buddha Carreon articles to the ARBT Buddhist newsgroup. People quoted on that site contact me for further concerted actons to blow the lid off the scandals in Tibetan Tantric Buddhism; and bring purity, truth and real true faith into it, getting rid of all the frauds and quacks. I’m ready for that.

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Good Grades and Headaches

This posting, by a 17 year old who has taken Adderall XR (20 mg) daily, is from the Erowid website

LYRATyME wrote:

In the fifth grade my parents took me to get a test done to find out whether or not I had ADHD. I answered the questions and my parents submitted it to my psycologist. About a week later before school my mom told me that I had been started on a new medicine that would help me to focus more in school. The medication I was administered was a 10 milligram oral dose of adderall(amphetamine, d-amphetamine salts).

Without any experience with mood altering substances I thought to my self ‘yeah right this tiny thing is supposed to get me some better grades’. About an hour after taking I realized I had an unusual feeling of well-being, and a strong sense of motivation, in addition to having my appetite completely diminished. I have always been a bit chubby.

When I returned home I realized that what I had felt earlier that day was beginning to wear off. That night I was very angry and agitated and it was noticed by everyone else who came around me. I proceeded to take my Adderall for the remainder of the fifth grade. That year I recall having numerous fights and arguments with my parents that often were the result of something insignificant.

When summer arrived I ceased to take my medication and began to gain back my old emotions in addition to gaining back my weight. I was my normal self again. Summer ended and I began the 6th grade and had still discontinued my medication. Later on that year my parents received many phone calls about my impulsive behavior. Their solution was to start me back up on my medication.

The results were the same as they were a year prior, but this time I was well aware that these feelings were a direct result of my medication. At the same time the thought of abusing it never crossed my mind. I still ‘thought’ I had never used a drug in my lifetime. My medication was again discontinued at the start of summer vacation.

When I began seventh grade I noticed that people around me took my hyperactivity along with being fat as a nuisanse. A week later I asked my mom if I could begin taking my medication again she was very hesitant about it because she recalled the many occasions where I would come down and go into rages. She agreed to let me try it for a few days and see what happened. I still had came down at about noon and got in conflicts two out of three days of taking my medicine therefore it was decided I would no longer take it.

About a week later I began to start sneaking the pills out of the medicine cabinet. I then realized that I was using this drug to get ‘high’ not to focus in school. After I used up the remaining pills that were left in my prescrption I made a deal to purchase the drug illegaly at school. This was somehow discovered by the principal and I admitted to making the deal. Since the deal was never completed, and I had no illegal substances with me I was suspended rather than expelled.

When my parents were notified of this they asked me why I had done that. I lied to them and said it was to make better grades in school. They bought my story and I was prescribed time released methylphenidate. I began taking this and realized the effects were dull, as I was on a low dosage.

I began to crush up the tablets therefore causing the time release to not work. I also purchased Adderall a few more times for recreational use. I stayed clean for the summer. In the beginning of the eighth grade I met a friend who had a prescription for Adderall and would willingly supply me with it. A month later I went on a binge and didn’t eat or sleep fro 4 days. The last night I realized I had a problem.

I was hooked on speed. I told my parents everything about my use and was evaluated and put in an outpatient program. I did not stop using though so I was removed from the program and sent to a residential program in Florida for 25 days. Following that I attended twelve step meetings and stayed clean for four months followed by a one week relapse.

I came clean with my parents and gave twelve step meetings another shot. The point I am trying to make is that even tough Adderall and other ADHD medicine may not seeem like a big deal. Look where it got me. I went from having no interest in drugs to making drugs the main focus of my life.