Crowdfunding comics: Brisbane trio drawing support from fans

TK

This looks like a fantastic project. A couple of suggestions: 1) Please get your draft reviewed by a scientist working in this area in order to check for technical accuracy. 2) Please cover the recent work on "environmental enrichment" and drug addiction (if you can't access journal articles, just email one of the authors). This is a hot area of research. See, for example, and maybe ask the authors of this study (free full text, Solinas et al 2008 PNAS): http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18955698 3) Please focus on scientific facts and the future rather than complaining that Rat Park was suppressed. It is always difficult to get research grants. It is very difficult to publish in Nature or Science -- no shame in not being accepted in there. The Rat Park study was published in Psychopharmacology, a completely respectable specialty journal. 4) If you are talking with scientists, it can be easy to get lost in the technical details (neurobiological mechanisms? specific conditions? works for all drugs?) Try to stick to the main point: Prohibitionists have argued that "drugs" are inherently "addictive", pointing to use by laboratory animals as proof, but in these studies the animals are kept alone in tiny cages, and animals kept in more stimulating and social environments are much less interested in using cocaine, heroin, sugar, other addictive substances. By analogy, problematic drug use in humans is often a symptom of social and emotional stress -- stigmatizing and harassing drug users is thus cruel and counterproductive. 5) There are so many directions to explore regarding humans. One thing you might mention: Giving homeless alcoholics a place where they can live, with dignity as an adult with few "rules" (OK to drink alcohol if they want), saves money on healthcare and actually reduces alcohol use. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=homeless-project-residents-drink-less 6) Another possible thing to mention: The "myth of the Chinese opium plague" is central to the drug prohibition narrative, which views drug use as a contagious disease that anyone could "catch" by having access to drugs or by associating with a drug user (hence sale of drugs must be banned -- ignoring that this creates a dangerous black market -- and drug users must be "quarantined" away from society -- see the far-out but influential views of Nils Bejerot), rather than as a social/emotional problem affecting a minority of people. According to the UNODC 100 years of drug control report, use of all recreational drugs has increased under prohibition (cocaine and heroin were sold over the counter 100 year ago, with lower rates of use than today), except for opiates because of the apparent decrease in Chinese opium use. http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/commissions/CND/one-hundred-years-of-drug-control.html But actually most use of opium in China was for medical reasons (no aspirin, no antibiotics) or non-problematic social use. The extent of problematic opium use in 19th century China has been greatly exaggerated for various reasons by Christian missionaries, then Chinese Nationalists, then ambitious US drug prohibitionists. Use of opiates in China decreased more because of availability of new medicines and because of changing cultural fashions, rather than prohibition efforts. See the scholarly book Narcotic Culture, or read the summary: http://www.frankdikotter.com/publications/the_myth_of_opium.pdf