On naked mole-rats.

When Radiohead first toured, their audiences just wanted to hear “Creep.” They were invited to play a show in Israel – everyone just wanted to hear “Creep.” They were invited to tour America – everyone just wanted to hear “Creep.” At festivals, people walked away after they played it. By then the song was several years old. The dudes in Radiohead were sick of it.

To be fair, Pablo Honey was a pretty weak album. “You” is a fine song, but the proffered singles – “Anyone Can Play Guitar” (more ironic in retrospect than it was at the time) and “Stop Whispering” – aren’t very compelling. At the time, nobody knew their new material.

Now, of course, Radiohead is many people’s favorite band – mine too (tied with The Marshall Cloud and anything else my brother makes).

The essayist Eliot Weinberger has also toured on the strength of a hit single. From Christopher Byrd’s 2016 profile in The New Yorker:

In person, Weinberger is genial and self-contained; he smiles frequently and is prone to wisecracks. When I asked him about the essay [“Naked Mole-Rats,” from his 2001 collection, Karmic Traces], he said “In Germany, I’m sort of like one of those bands that had one hit record, and so I give readings and people ask me to read ‘Nacktmull,’ which is the naked mole-rat. It’s their favorite one. This pretty girl said, ‘Last night, I was in bed reading it to my boyfriend.’ And I said, ‘Don’t you have anything better to read?’”

Yet, like Radiohead, Weinberger has released new work every few years – he seems to have been writing constantly ever since he dropped out of college circa 1970 and began translating the poetry of Octavio Paz – and much of it is better than the hit everybody knows. Over the past two months, I’ve had the pleasure of reading all his books – many are stunning. The Ghosts of Birds discuses Adam & Eve, the dreams of ancient Chinese poets, and the authorial voice of George W. Bush’s “autobiography.” I’ve written previously about What Happened Here, a collection of Weinberger’s essays about the Bush years. And Weinberger has written extensively about the political value of poetry. From “The T’ang” (in Oranges and Peanuts for Sale):

…[I]n the last years of the dynasty, warlords ravished the country. One of them, Huang Ch’ao, a salt merchant who had failed the civil service exams, captured Ch’ang-an in 881. A satiric poem was posted on the wall of a government building, criticizing the new regime. (As, eleven hundred years later, the Democracy Movement would begin with the poems that Bei Dao and other young poets glued to the walls in their capital, Beijing.) Huang Ch’ao issued orders that everyone capable of writing such a poem be put to death. Three thousand were killed.

When dudes ask what we’re doing teaching a poetry class in jail, it’s great to have stories like this to relate … or to toss out a quote from Norman Dubie, my co-teacher’s advisor, who says, “If Stalin feared poetry, so should you.”

And yet, I have to admit: Weinberger’s “Naked Mole-Rats” really is a lovely essay.

During the 1970s, evolutionary biologist Richard Alexander gave a series of lectures describing conditions that might spawn eusocial vertebrates. Alexander was a bug guy – the term “eusocial” refers to bees, ants, and termites, where individuals are extremely self-sacrificing for the good of the colony, including an abundance of non-breeding members helping with childcare.

Alexander proposed that a eusocial species of mammal could evolve if they lived in relatively safe underground burrows that could be expanded easily and defended by a small percentage of the colony. The animals would need to be small compared to their food sources, so that a stroke of good luck by one worker could feed many.

An audience member at one of Alexander’s lectures mentioned that this “hypothetical eusocial mammal” sounded a lot like the naked mole-rat and connected Alexander with Jennifer Jarvis, who’d studied the biology of these critters but hadn’t yet investigated their their social structure. The collaboration between Alexander and Jarvis led to the textbook The Biology of the Naked Mole-Rat.

Eliot Weinberger combed through this 500-plus page textbook to produce his 3-page essay. In Weinberger’s words:

As many as three hundred inhabit a colony, moving a ton of dirt every month. They have a caste system …

The medium sized are the warriors, who try to fend off the rufous-beaked snaked, the file snakes, the white-lipped snakes, and the sand boas that sometimes find their way in. … When, by chance, two colonies of naked mole-rats tunnel into each other, their warriors fight to the death.

…

Interbred for so long, they are virtually clones. One dead-end branch of the tunnel is their toilet: they wallow there in the soaked earth so that all will smell alike. They are nearly always touching each other, rubbing noses, pawing, nuzzling.

Like us, naked mole-rats are both good and bad. They are cooperative. They are affectionate. They are always touching. Encountering outsiders, they fight to the death. When a breeding female dies, many other females regain fertility and the colony erupts into civil war.

Naked mole-rats care for others. Naked mole-rats are callous toward others.

[The breeding female, of which each colony has only one] has four or five litters a year of a dozen pups. The babies have transparent skin through which their internal organs are clearly visible. Only a few survive, and they live long lives, twenty years or more. The dead babies are eaten, except for their heads. At times the live ones are eaten too.

These details are drawn from innumerable experimental observations. We humans have spent decades investigating the naked mole-rats. But Weinberger ends his essay with the reverse. Naked mole-rats observe us, too:

Sometimes a naked mole-rat will suddenly stop, stand on its hind-legs, and remain motionless, its head pressed against the roof of the tunnel. Above its head is the civil war in Somalia. Their hearing is acute.

Naked mole-rats “are continually cruel in small ways.” But they are outdone by naked apes. After all, the cruelty of naked mole-rats is invariably directed to others of their own kind. Our cruelty embraces ourselves as well as them.

For a research paper published in 2008, Park et al. discovered that being pinched by tweezers causes naked mole-rats pain, but the injection of caustic acid does not:

We tested naked mole-rats in standard behavioral models of acute pain including tests for mechanical (pinch), thermal, and chemical pain. We found that for noxious pinch and heat, the mole-rats responded similarly to mice.

…

In contrast to the results using mechanical and thermal stimuli, there was a striking difference in responses to strong chemical irritants known to excite nociceptors [these are sensory receptors that detect noxious inputs, like pain]. Indeed, the two chemicals used – capsaicin and low-pH saline solution – normally evoke very intense pain in humans and other animals. Injection of either irritant into the skin rapidly evoked intense licking and guarding behaviors in mice.

(In case you’re worried that acid-resistant naked mole-rats might conquer the world: a form of kryptonite exists. Injection of an 11-amino-acid signaling peptide allows acid to hurt naked mole-rats just as much as it hurts mice. Half a dozen animals were subjected to each treatment.)

So, naked mole-rats are selectively resistant to pain. This has inspired some envy in human researchers – after all, chronic pain is miserable, and most of our strategies to dampen pain have a few unwanted side-effects.

But what really gets us humans jealous is that naked mole-rats seem not to age.

Naked mole-rats almost never develop cancer. They should get cancer. After all, their cells, like ours, copy themselves. Over time, each copy is a copy of a copy of a copy… any errors are compounded. And some errors are particularly deadly. Our cells are supposed to stop growing when they touch each other, and they are supposed to commit suicide when their usefulness has run its course. But the instructions telling our cells when and how to kill themselves can be lost, just like any other information. Too many rounds of cell division is like making photocopies of photocopies… eventually the letters melt into static and become unreadable.

So I don’t quite understand why naked mole-rats don’t get cancer … but, in my defense, no one else does either. Tian et al. found that naked mole-rats fill the space between their cells with a particular sugar that acts as an anti-clumping agent. This contributes to their cancer resistance, because cells that can’t clump can’t form tumors… but, although many types of deadly human cancers form tumors, others, like leukemia, do not.

Of course, “cancer” cells – mutant versions of ourselves that would kill us if they could – appear all the time. Usually, our immune system destroys them. Most chemotherapy agents do not kill cancer. Chemotherapy involves pumping the body full of general poisons that stop all cells from reproducing, with the hope being that, if the spread of cancer can be slowed, a patient’s immune system will sop up the bad cells already there.

In addition to anti-clumping sugars, naked mole-rats must have other (currently unknown) virtues that enable their remarkable tenacity.

And, although the little critters seem not to age – they have “no age-related increase in mortality” and remain fertile until death – they do die. The oldest naked mole-rat lived for 27 years in captivity, and seems to have been at least a year old when first captured, based on his size.

He was rutting and eating normally until April, 2002… but then, seemingly without cause, he died. Writing for Scientific American shortly after this duder’s death, David Stipp described him (and naked mole-rats in general) as “a little buck-toothed burrower [who] ages like a demigod.”

But it’s worth noting that he had aged. He had accumulated extensive oxidative damage in his lipids, proteins, and, presumably, his DNA… which is to say, his cells were noticeably rusted and falling apart. He just didn’t let it slow him down. Not until he keeled over.

They live with gusto, the naked mole-rats.

For as long as they energy, that is. Several researchers have proposed that naked mole-rats have all these powers because they starve often in the wild.

Caloric restriction – which means, roughly, intentional starvation – is known to extend lifespan in a wide variety of species. It’s been tested in monkeys, mice, flies, and worms. Between two- and ten-fold increases in lifespan have been observed. There are some unpleasant side effects. Hunger, for instance. Caloric-restricted mice spend a lot of time staring at their empty food bowls.

Many humans who attempt caloric restriction on their own find it difficult. Hunger hurts, especially when there’s food nearby. Plus, it’s a rare diet that provides adequate nutrition while still limiting calories. Malnutrition makes people die younger, which defeats the point… unless your goal is simply to make God uncomfortable. Maybe you’ll get a wish!

But naked mole-rats have no choice. Workers tunnel outward, searching for tuberous roots. When they find one, they’ll gnaw it carefully, attempting to keep the plant alive as long as possible, but the colony invariably consumes roots faster than a plant can grow. Although naked mole-rats try to be good stewards of their environment – they are compulsive recyclers, eating their own excrement to make sure no nutrients are lost – their colonies plunge repeatedly into famine.

And they sleep in mounds, hundreds of bodies respiring underground. Anyone sleeping near the center probably runs out of oxygen.

But they survive.

We would not. Most mammals, deprived of oxygen, can no longer fuel their brains. Our brains are expensive. Even at rest our brains demand a constant influx of energy or else the neurons “depolarize” – we fall apart. This is apparently an unpleasant experience. It’s brief, though. At Stanford, my desk was adjacent to a well-trafficked gas chamber. A mouse, or a Chinese-food takeout container with several mice, was dropped in; a valve for carbon dioxide was opened; within seconds, the mice inside lost consciousness; they shat; they died.

A naked mole-rat would live. Unless a very determined researcher left the carbon dioxide flowing for half an hour. Or so found Park et al. – a graph from their recent Science paper is shown below. Somewhere between three and twelve animals were used for every time point; all the mice would’ve been dead within a minute, but perhaps as few as three naked mole-rats died in this experiment.

Human brains are like hummingbirds – our brains drink up sugar and give us nothing but a fleeting bit of beauty in return. And our brains are very persnickety in their taste for sugar. We are fueled exclusively by glucose.

Naked mole-rats are less fussy than we are – their minds will slurp fructose to keep from dying.

Naked mole-rats: the most cooperative of all mammals. Resistant to cancer. Unperturbed by acid. Aging with the libidinous gracelessness of Hugh Hefner. Able to withstand the horrors of a gas chamber.

And yet, for all those superpowers, quite easily tormented by human researchers.

On isolation.

The physicist Richard Feynman was insatiably curious. He was an enthusiastic artist, musician, teacher, biologist, philosopher, lockpicker, epistoler. And he was puzzled by his own mind: it was made of inanimate matter, and yet there he was, thinking. He decided to investigate himself:

I went into isolation tanks and got many hours of hallucinations, so I know something about that.

We now refer to these devices as “sensory deprivation tanks.” Inside the dark, soundless chamber, a person floats effortlessly in densely-salinated, body-temperature water. In theory, all external stimuli vanish: the mind is free to roam as it will.

Within the tank, Feynman surmised, he would be left with only his mind and could reflect upon its workings. He turned his attention toward the phenomenon of human memory, and one day felt he had a breakthrough: he could see clearly that memories were encoded by a long series of linkages, each episode encoded by references to other experiences we’ve had.

I felt pretty good about this discovery … [but] about forty-five minutes after I came out of the tank … I suddenly realized … I hadn’t the slightest idea of how memories are stored in the brain: all I had was a hallucination as to how memories are stored in the brain!

Deprived of the world, Feynman realized, our speculations become unhinged.

The sensory deprivation tank was invented by neurologist John C. Lilly.

Lilly was a provocateur. By now, most scientists are aware that experiments can be difficult to interpret if the researcher is on psychedelics, but Lilly dosed himself and captive dolphins with LSD to test whether the two species could thereby communicate.

For another experiment, Lilly confined a 23-year-old female volunteer in a small facility with a male bottle-nose dolphin. The volunteer was isolated from other humans for a period of ten weeks. In this way, she’d teach the dolphin to talk.

The dolphin did not learn to speak. The dolphin did use non-verbal communication to request a sexual relationship with the human volunteer. Eventually, she offered manual release.

In total isolation, we change. Our brains atrophy. Our inhibitions wane. Kept constantly indoors, our eyesight goes.

The hand job she gave was reluctant, but, after weeks away from humanity, must have seemed reasonable enough.

Neither of these experiments – drop acid with cetaceans – confine a woman and dolphin for two and a half months together – would be approved by contemporary IRBs. Applying for funding would be a nightmare – several members of a grant reading committee soberly considering a proposal that states in this way we’ll teach dolphins human speech, a goal ten or twenty years away.

For scientific experiments, a wide variety of social animals are kept in isolated cages. These housing conditions seem to affect their minds. When Dr. Harry Harlow and colleagues took infant rhesus monkeys away from their mothers and housed them in isolation, the animals developed strong attachments to the blankets in their cages. These blankets were their only friends; the babies became extremely agitated when the blankets were removed.

Dr. Bruce Alexander and colleagues dosed rats with morphine and then housed them in either isolation or in social environs. The animals who lived in open playgrounds with toys and other rats subsequently decreased their consumption of morphine-laced liquids. The animals living alone, in cages, drank more. From the research publication:

A possible explanation for the environmental effect is that for the isolated rats the reinforcement value of morphine ingestion was enhanced by relief of the discomfort of spatial confinement, social isolation, and stimulus deprivation.

Opiates are highly addictive. But opiate use is also correlated with other troubles. Our nation’s current opiate epidemic is linked to the economic crisis.

And among the rats? These are social animals. Isolation is painful for them. They’ll attempt to numb that pain with drugs when given the chance.

Confining social animals in isolation is a form of torture. Juan Mendez, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, has argued that prisoners should not be extradited to the United States, as the U.S. routinely holds prisoners in solitary confinement.

After 15 days in solitary confinement, much of the psychological damage caused by solitary confinement becomes irreversible. Mendez argues that solitary confinement for over two weeks is clearly torture.

In the United States, attempts to change prison policy such that solitary confinement not be used for over 90 days have made little progress. Throughout the country, many people have been held in solitary confinement for years at a time. For some, decades.

Large protests have been held outside of prison walls. Inside, inmates have refused to eat, hoping to draw attention to their plight. Guards are authorized to pin these men to the ground, shove long lubricated tubes into their nostrils, and pump nutrients directly into their stomachs.

Many of the men in my classes have been held in solitary. One, a teddy-bear-shaped guy whom the others invariably describe as “humble,” was put in for nine months. “I get through it okay. I got myself a system. This much time I spend thinking, this much time I spend walking in place. I get to the point, I don’t even want to go nowhere for the exercise.”

“But dude,” I said, “you need the sun!”

“Oh, yeah yeah yeah, if I’m out I go outside, I’m outside all the time. But for rec time? You can’t see the sun no how. You just in a different box.”

According to ex-CIA officer Ray McGovern, “You can’t get reliable information from torture. But torture works beautifully if you want unreliable information.”

A young Muslim man named Syed Fahad Hashmi was held in solitary confinement by the United States for three years before his trial. Per his constitutional rights – innocent until proven guilty – he was an innocent man. He was decidedly un-dangerous.

From Jeanne Theoharis’s essay, “Torture of a Student,”

The charges against him stemmed from allowing a friend, Junaid Babar, to use his cell phone and to stay for two weeks in his London student apartment with luggage containing raincoats, ponchos, and waterproof socks (the “military gear”) that Babar later allegedly took to an Al Qaeda leader in Pakistan. Subsequently picked up, Babar became a cooperating witness for the government in numerous terrorism cases in exchange for a reduced sentence, and is now a free man.

Torturing an innocent man before his trial seems ethically suspect. Theoharis:

Citing extensive research on the health impacts of prolonged solitary confinement and the impact these conditions imposed on Fahad’s ability to participate in his defense, the defense requested a set of modest changes. The judge was unmoved, stating for the record that the measures were “administrative not punitive” and therefore constitutional.

But the torture is often “successful,” if we define success by the number of people whom we are able to lock away:

These conditions of prolonged isolation are designed to induce acquiescence. Because the government holds control over the defendant’s conditions and the courts have been loath to intervene, the SAMs [special administrative measures, which can include solitary confinement, censoring of mail & all reading materials, etc.] rig the contest, weakening a person’s ability to participate in his own defense. The number of plea bargains in the Justice Department’s roster following years of prolonged pretrial solitary confinement suggest the success of these practices.

In this case as well, our government won. Syed Fahad Hashmi was tortured before his trial on behalf of all United States citizens – which is to say, on my behalf – and he broke. One day before his trial began… one day after his judge granted the government’s request that this man – who allegedly aided & abetted the transport of ponchos & raincoats! – be tried before an anonymous jury… he accepted a plea.

After three years of torture, during which time he constantly proclaimed his innocence – are we confident, beyond a reasonable doubt, that he knew there were ponchos in his friend’s luggage? Are we confident, beyond a reasonable doubt, that he knew these ponchos were bound for Al Qaeda? – he “confessed” that he was guilty of “conspiracy to provide material support.”

He was sentenced to 15 years of solitary confinement in ADX.

ADX – full name, “United State Penitentiary, Administrative Maximum” – is in Florence, Colorado. Some four hundred men are held there, tortured by the most brutal isolation of any prison in the United States.

A former warden referred to ADX as “a clean version of hell.”

Jesse Wilson – who received a five year prison sentence at the age of 17 – is now at ADX. This dude, shunted into a world of extreme violence while still a child, quickly conformed to the expectations of his environs. He “misbehaved” and was moved from prison to prison until reaching the worst in the state of Mississippi, where he got into a fight and killed a man who was being held on death row.

That’s when Wilson received a life sentence and was transferred to ADX. From his essay describing the place:

We as a country are blind to the reality of our prison system.

It has become normal. And we the inmates are voiceless. Our voices are not heard. If they are heard, the things we say are thought of as lies. I heard the head of the Bureau of Prisons testifying in Congress (on radio), saying they do not have insane inmates housed here. This is what should be thought of as a lie. I have not slept in weeks because of these nonexistent inmates beating on the walls and hollering all night. And the most non-insane smearing feces in their cells.

This place is horrific with the solitary, and the lack of communication outside these walls. I’ve been in prison without release for more than twelve years, and eight of them I’ve been in a cage walking around in circles. So I am pretty in tune with the concept of solitary. Prison. Cages and craziness.

Out my window I see into a concrete yard surrounded by red brick walls. There is a drain in the middle of it and out of it weeds are growing. I thought they were weeds until a few blossomed into these beautiful yellow and brown flowers.

Every now and then a pair of owls roosts on the security lights. This spring they had two babies. We watched them grow up and fly away. On any given day the sky here is breathtaking. The beauty out my window stays in my mind. I look around this cage at plain concrete walls and steel bars and a steel door, a steel toilet, and I endure its harshness because I am able to keep beauty in my mind.

The window helps greatly.

I’m in the hole so there is no TV. Books help me escape better than my words could ever explain. But most of all it’s the love of my family, the memories of beauty, and the knowledge of humanity.

Loneliness is a destroyer of humanity.

The essays by Theoharis and Wilson – and many others – appear in Hell Is a Very Small Place: Voices from Solitary Confinement, edited by Jean Casella, James Ridgeway, and Sarah Shourd.

You should read this book.

If you are human, you will cry.

If you are a citizen of the United States, you should know: we’re doing this for you. The men and women whose essays appear in Hell Is a Very Small Place are being tortured on your behalf.

Mayhaps you should do something.

On pain.

Recently I heard a man read a beautiful poem. The first half of his poem was a slangy narration of an evening out. Then the piece turned, brutally, into a crystal clear description of his lover’s death by overdose. Though he was not a user, he’d taken some of her shot, worried she might overdo it. His fraction was enough to put him under, but not enough to save her. He woke beside her body, cold.

When he finished reading, everyone in the room was still. He was asked to read his poem again – it’s difficult for me to follow a poem aloud the first time I hear it, and I assume this is hard for other people, too – at which point he opened his mouth to speak. Several seconds passed. No sound came out. Tears rolled down his face. He shook his head.

No, he could not read the poem again. He handed it to me and I read it aloud a second time for our class.

It was difficult for me to read. My voice is squeaky and might well crack at the best of times. And I’ve lost an uncle to overdose; nearly my namesake, too. But I’ve lost less than the men in jail.

When I finished, several more were crying.

Habitual drug use ruins lives. But the War on Drugs ends them.

Our culture rarely celebrates the endurance of pain. There are exceptions, of course – professional sports dominates our media, with traffic in many cities tangling for hours on game days, and no one can argue that athletes do not suffer – but for the masses we promote convenience and ease. Such are the advertisements that flicker seductively on our ubiquitous gargantuan TVs.

There’s fast food for whenever you feel hungry. Programmers work round the clock to develop new ways for any interstitial time – stint in a waiting room, stop at a red light, lull in dinnertime conversation – to be filled with pleasurable distraction. Nurses trained near the turn of the century were taught to eliminate pain amongst their wards, since the newest opiates were presumed to be much less addictive than their precursors.

Oops.

In a culture that celebrates immediate gratification & constant ease – and, moreover, does not teach people how to gracefully suffer – painkiller use can easily spiral out of control. Opiates ameliorate both physical and psychological pain; for many who’ve felt perpetually beleaguered by the world, a script after surgery might bring the first flush of mental relief in years.

I am not saying, after all, that Americans do not suffer. Poverty hurts. Through a cascade of cortisol, stress causes physical harm. But our pain & forbearance is rarely celebrated.

Instead, we turn on the TV and see another ad for the latest pharmaceutical.

But there’s a hook. Painkillers do not remove pain, certainly not when the pain is psychological, stemming from structural disconnects between our desires and the world. Painkillers simply act to make pain temporarily bearable. Over time, painkillers aggravate pain.

This was demonstrated with a recent experiment asking opiate users to put their hands in cold water. Pain is necessary – some people are born with unusually high pain tolerance, and these people are exceptionally prone to injury because they fail to extricate themselves from circumstances that ought to hurt. Luckily, most people’s brains are looking out for them. When people take painkillers, their bodies will produce fewer endogenous opiates and the signals reporting pain will scream louder, attempting to be heard over the muffling cloak of chemical numbing.

If a person uses painkillers too long then tries to quit, the body’s efforts to re-sensitize to pain will make every moment agony. Dip a hand into chilly water and it’ll feel unbearable. Our skin is a huge surface, and nerve endings grope throughout our body: when quitting, all scream hurt!

According to William Burroughs, “No one will stand still for junk sickness unless he is in jail or otherwise cut off from junk. The reason it is practically impossible to stop using and cure yourself is that the sickness lasts five to eight days. Twelve hours of it would be easy, twenty-four possible, but five to eight days is too long.”

The sickness can drag on interminably. The agony. Worse, the mind knows all the while that there is a way to make it stop. Another pill. Or, if you can’t afford a pill, then…

Painkillers are known entities, with precisely calibrated dosage, but they are expensive. Even for those with money, they require a prescription. Many switch to heroin, which might be ten-fold cheaper, but the War on Drugs ensures that heroin users face mystery dosage. The product is gravely unstandardized. Here in the Midwest, where the cartels sometimes experiment with new blends, new compounds to cut their product with, no one can anticipate the effects.

Hearts slow, lips turn blue. By forcing everything underground – unregulated, uncontrolled – the War on Drugs prevents users from learning their limits. A safe dose from one batch might kill you from another. Users are well away from medical care.

But there are intimations that, as more and more wealthy, “respectable” people get hooked, the world might change. In Vancouver, Canada, users are provided with a space safe to inject, and one consequence has been a drop in the rate of addiction. It’s easier to quit when you’re not cut off from the world by the stigma of being considered a criminal. And decriminalization would allow addicts to choose safer alternatives – my namesake, who didn’t die, was able to obtain standardized pills.

If it were legal, marijuana could supplant some opiate use. Pot isn’t harmless, but one of the worse side-effects is that it makes people insufferably boring. This seems preferable to making them dead.

Within the depths of addiction, the world looks awful. Many users want to quit. But quitting means suffering through the spell when the body screams, and the mind feels nary better … and we’ve criminalized help.

On the shifting sands of family, specifically: whose counts?

In her fourth year of graduate school, an acquaintance of mine realized that 1.) her project was going nowhere, 2.) she was uninterested in the particular field of developmental biology she’d been assigned, and 3.) she wanted to devote her life to anything but research. She began dragging herself to work later and later each morning, checking out earlier and earlier in the afternoon. In a department where most people worked from ten a.m. till eight p.m., she arrived near noon and left by four.

Her advisor — who at one of our departmental retreats gave a fifteen minute presentation describing the need for a slightly better animal model of the developmental process they were studying, then clicked forward to a slide showing a rare primate cuter than anything I even realized existed and announced his hope that his students would soon be dissecting them — was flush with grant money. He was managing a huge team of students and post-docs. It took months before he noticed her slothful behavior.

Capture — Mouse lemur. See, I told you: incredibly cute.

Eventually, though, he did. At which point he called her into his office, closed the door, and told her sternly, “_____, I don’t even leave that early, and I have a family.”

I’d like to imagine that he meant to say he had school-aged kids.

A few months later, our department hosted a special event for women in science. Invitations were sent to a dozen female post-docs around the country, rising stars who were interviewing for faculty positions. They were wined & dined. There were, as ever, several seminars. The women met privately with various professors to discuss grant writing, laboratory management, that sort of thing.

At a luncheon for these professors-to-be hosted by the two female professors from my department, one of the guests asked, “How many female professors at Stanford have families?”

It’s a pertinent question.

The tenured professor sitting at the head of the table leaned forward and said, chidingly, “________, we all have families.”

The woman who had asked felt too embarrassed to clarify that she’d meant children and so never (officially) received an answer. Personally, I don’t remember the percentage for the university as a whole. Not high.

I do know that neither of the female professors in my department had children. As it happens, this absence was something that the woman who’d leaned forward to answer the question had complained about frequently to her students. And yet she also declined to hire a promising post-doctoral candidate when she learned that the woman had a child (and sternly lectured her students, who had chatted with the woman, that they should’ve reported this bit of espionage back to her sooner so that she wouldn’t have wasted so much time considering a mother), and demoted a hard-working post-doc to effectively “research assistant” status after the woman gave birth. That post-doc, deeply aggrieved, soon switched laboratories and went on to considerable success. Despite her “strange” priorities.

The concept of family can shift and squirm, becoming whatever those in power want it to be.

17275578342_4109c2af85_b — Of course, it’s hard to see the blight from here.

I found myself thinking about this while reading a recent New York Times article titled (on paper) “Violence in St. Louis traced to cheap Mexican heroin.” The article is bleak, as you might expect. The current culture of the United States values instant gratification and devalues suffering, so it’s perhaps unsurprising that there’s been a boom in painkiller prescriptions. But painkillers are addictive. And painkillers are expensive. After people acquire a taste for opiates, many switch to heroin — compared to vitamin V, it’s a bargain!

Heroin is cheaper for consumers than most pharmaceuticals, but it still yields hefty profits for the dudes at the top of the supply chain. Hawkers on the street eke out sub-minimum wage, but they can see the big money at the top and dream the dream. And those hefty profits have lured bad men with guns to the trade. Feel free to read my recent post on Ioan Grillo’s Gangster Warlords here.

So, there’s a lot of money involved. And the product is illegal, which means there are no state-sanctioned protections for that money. Inevitably, this leads to violence. That’s what the Times article was about. Nothing you wouldn’t expect.

What struck me was this line:

“These heroin addicts are daughters, sons, husbands, wives, or, in my case, a brother,” Mr. Slay [the mayor of St. Louis, whose brother was arrested for possession] told reporters last month.

It’s nice that Mr. Slay is able to distinguish these addicts from the addicts of the past, who were all robots, test-tube babies, science experiments gone wrong, and other socially-isolated monstrosities. Or, wait. No. Those heroin addicts were minorities, as opposed to daughters, sons, husbands, wives, or brothers. Which was why they deserved incarceration, as opposed to the treatment options that have been vociferously proposed recently.

And even that was never true. The popular misconception was that most heroin users were black people. But, even when our brutal imprisonment of drug addicts was at its peak, it’s unlikely that more than about 15% of heroin users were black. All the statistics are vaguely suspect — it’s not easy to study criminal behavior — but most data suggest roughly equal rates of heroin abuse across ethnicities.

Black users were over-represented in prisons, but that’s because our criminal justice system (from police officers to district attorneys to judges) views black people’s drug use as scarier than drug use by “these heroin addicts.” The mothers and sons and brothers.

(It’s perhaps worth noting that, although heroin use does not seem to enrich for any particular ethnicity, it is inversely correlated with wealth. People with money can afford prescription painkillers.)

I’m not upset that politicians are finally willing to acknowledge that drug users have families. Or that drug users deserve our compassion and mercy. It’s true. They do.

They always have.

Frank Brown Cloud

Justice through words.

Tag: opiates

On pain.

On the shifting sands of family, specifically: whose counts?