Opium addiction by Afghan peasants: less harmful then drug war or McDonalds-induced obesity?

Poor Afghan families using Opium as cure-all, to sleep and as remedy. Maybe traditional low dosage natural opium does them better then a US drug war poisoning their fields and destroying their culture. The old ladies in the CNN movie look healthy, not like our inner city drug addicts. Maybe traditional drug use, be it Opium in Afghanistan, or Coca in Bolivia, is not very harmful. Maybe responsible drug usage should be studied scientifically. Certainly marijuana is less harmful then the drug war.

"If I don’t give him opium he doesn’t sleep," she says. "And he doesn’t let me work."

Aziza comes from a poor family of carpet weavers in Balkh province. She has no education, no idea of the health risks involved or that opium is addictive. "We give the children opium whenever they get sick as well," she says, crouching over her loom. With no real medical care in these parts and the high cost of medicine, all the families out here know is opium. It’s a cycle of addiction passed on through generations.  Afghan infants fed pure opium: Generations of Opium Addiction

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Just look at the old ladies in the CNN opium movie. Look much healthier then the McDonalds-fed fat old ladies in the USA. Maybe our obese sedentary culture is more harmful then traditional Opium and Coca use. This is meant as food for thought. We lack the time to do a profound study on drug effects in Afghan peasants. We are not the experts, just go ahead and study and comment.

Read more about unhealthy living, food porn and child food porn. We poison our children, making them fat, obese, unhappy and diabetic. But we obsess about drugs that kill much less then our obesity epidemic, about possession of adolescent nude photos, etc. It is time we start obseesing about problems that kill millions.

2 thoughts on “Opium addiction by Afghan peasants: less harmful then drug war or McDonalds-induced obesity?”

  1. Obesity-hysteria is your weakpoint dude… For every other area you rip BS into shreds. I mean I admire you.

    But when it comes to food-nazi-propaganda, you swallow all the hysteria pretty well.

    A lot of that is overblown. Here’s some reading to do:
    1. Durazo-Arvizu, R, McGee DL, Cooper RS, Liao Y,Luke A. Mortality and optimal body mass index in asample of the US population. Am J Epidemiol.1998;147:739-749.

    2. Flegal KM, Graubard BI, Williamson DF, Gail MH.Excess deaths associated with underweight, overweight,and obesity. JAMA. 2005;293:1861-1867.

    3. Troiano R, Fronqillo EA Jr, Sobal J, Levitsky DA.The relationship between body weight and mortality: aquantitative analysis of combined information. Int JObes. 1996;20:63-75.

    4. Campos P, Saquy A, Ernsberger P, Oliver E, GaesserG. The epidemiology of overweight and obesity: publichealth crisis or moral panic? Int J Epidemiol.2006;35:55-60.

    5. Miller WC. How effective are traditional dietaryand exercise interventions for weight loss? Med SciSports Exerc. 1999;31:1129-1134.

    6. Williamson DF, Pamuk E, Thun M, Flanders D, ByersT, Heath C. Prospective study of intentional weightloss and mortality in never-smoking overweight U.S.white women aged 40-64 years. Am J Epidemiol.1995;141:1128-1141.

    7. Williamson DF, Pamuk E, Thun M, Flanders D, ByersT, Heath C. Prospective study of intentional weightloss and mortality in overweight white men aged 40-64years. Am J Epidemiol. 1999;149:491-503.

    8. Andres R, Muller DC, Sorkin JD. Long-term effectsof change in body weight on all-cause mortality. Areview. Ann Intern Med. 1993;119:737-743.

    9. Yaari S, Goldbourt U. Voluntary and involuntaryweight loss: associations with long term mortality in9,228 middle-aged and elderly men. Am J Epidemiol.1998;148:546-555.

    10. Gaesser G. Thinness and weight loss: beneficialor detrimental to longevity. Med Sci Sports Exerc.1999;31:1118-1128.

    11. Sorensen TI, Rissanen A, Korkeila M, Kaprio J.Intention to lose weight, weight changes, and 18-ymortality in overweight individuals withoutco-morbidities. PLoS Med. 2005;2:E171.

    12. Bacon L, Stern JS, Van Loan MD, Keim NL. Sizeacceptance and intuitive eating improve health forobese, female chronic dieters. J Am Diet Assoc.2005;105:929-936.

    13. Lamarche B, Despres JP, Pouliot MC, et al. Isbody fat loss a determinant factor in the improvementof carbohydrate and lipid metabolism following aerobicexercise training in obese women? Metabolism.1992;41:1249-1256.

    14. Bjorntorp P, De Jounge K, Sjostrom L, Sullivan L.The effect of physical training on insulin productionin obesity. Metabolism. 1970;19:631-638.

    There’s also another study I don’t have at hand that actually showed that the more you try to control people’s food-choices, the fatter they become. That is, the more you tell them they MUST NOT eat certain foods, the more likely they’re to end up obese. Do some reading, challenge everything.

    This is the only area that you don’t seek contradictory evidence to what you already believe man… You want to grow as a person and challenge yourself everyday.

    1. There was no obesity epidemic in the past when children were growing up with physical activity and natural healthy food. So, unless you postulate hormones or some other exotic pollutant, nutritional habits, plus sedentary life style, seem causal to the obesity problem. Of course, obese parents aggravate the situation, from heredity to predisposition, to eating habits.

      Providing healthy life style and eating habits would greatly reduce the obesity problem. We did not have that problem 50 years ago.

      Of course, once every adult eats junk and does not exercise, once all advertising is for junk, all the other kids eat junk and all the cheapest and most convenient food places offer junk: then prohibiting junk might be counterproductive, as you say.

      If the crap food was not even available, then it would not be necessary to control for it. If kids were not becoming addicted to crappy food, it would not be so hard to control it later on. Why are the Americans in the lead, in obesity, and the world follows with a few decades delay?

      The entire system needs to be changed. Working within the system is complex. Losing weight once a person screwed up his/her metabolism, that is a complex science. But, you are welcome to link to sites and pages that offer good solutions. I think my basic points are right, but I am not a specialist on how to fix things once they got as bad as they are now.

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