------- Forwarded Message Follows ------- Date: Fri, 14 May 1999 09:27:32 -0500 Reply-to: Kettil Bruun Society <[log in to unmask]> From: Richard Wilsnack <[log in to unmask]> Subject: Re: Less publicized tragedies... To: [log in to unmask] At 07:33 PM 5/11/99 -0400, Stanton Peele wrote: >Dr. Wilsnak, do you make this out to be a "alcohol is bad" story, or a >"making people drink illegal, uncontrolled alcohol is bad" story? In >othere words, control alcohol more, or permit more alcohol?< The story about mass poisoning in Bangladesh, apparently from drinking alcoholic beverages containing methyl alcohol, did not prompt either of those reactions. My reaction was more to the "who cares?" aspect, and the past (and probably future) responses of officials hypothetically responsible for preventing such tragedies. The story reinforces my beliefs in three ideas, arranged here from the most to the least obvious: (1) The more simplistic (unqualified, undifferentiated) that policies are for controlling other people's substance use, the more (additional) problems they cause. Where alcohol is supposed to be completely forbidden (e.g., in conservative Islamic regimes), victims of illicit alcohol sales/use get little help. In the US, policies forbidding chronic/dependent opiate use mean that users cannot be given clean needles (thus spreading HIV), and patients in chronic pain cannot be allowed to have enough painkilling medication. (2) Drug policies serve the interests *and* the ideologies of those groups with the power to create and enforce those policies, and not the interests or ideologies of people who lack such power. The Bangladesh bureaucrats do not *have* to do anything about poisoned consumers of illicit alcohol, unless and until the social groups most adversely affected can mobilize in ways that make government inactivity sufficiently costly or embarrassing for the bureaucrats. Over here, the DEA is still a big expensive organization, without any political or fiscal accounting for its cost-effectiveness. (3) The recognition of substance use patterns as "problems" that need counteraction is affected not only by social *construction* but also by social *indifference*. If *indifference* to a particular pattern of substance use is rooted in popular culture and in social structures, this will impede any efforts to get that use pattern recognized and dealt with as a "problem." If most people in and out of Bangladesh *don't care* about poisonings from illicit alcohol, the poisonings will continue and recur. Consider how long any concerted social action against drunk driving was delayed in the US. The creation and reinforcement of collective indifference may have just as much impact on the construction of "social problems" as the creation and reinforcement of collective outrage. Those are some of the messages I get from the Bangladesh poisonings. Richard W. Wilsnack Department of Neuroscience University of North Dakota School of Medicine & Health Sciences Grand Forks, ND 58202-9037 [log in to unmask] ----- To join the KBS-LIST, send the command SUBSCRIBE KBS-LIST YOURFIRSTNAME YOURLASTNAME To signoff the list, send the command SIGNOFF KBS-LIST to [log in to unmask] If you experience difficulties signing on or off, write to [log in to unmask]