Attitudes towards Heroin Addicts and Addiction in Inter-War Greece

Abstract

This article concentrates on the ‘drug scare’ caused by the introduction of heroin to Greece in the inter-war period. It will first retrace the story of heroin’s introduction into the Greek drug scene and assess the reasons for its speedy diffusion among drug users. Following this, it will examine some central themes in the discourse on drugs and heroin in particular, such as the actual or projected harm caused to individuals, society, or the nation as a whole. Then the focus will shift to perceptions of heroin and its users, considering broader debates which circulated in Greek inter-war society, for example, the country’s identity and its position within two parallel and interrelated conceptual frameworks: traditional vs. modern and ‘East’ vs. ‘West’. The paper will conclude by addressing drug users’ self-representations that were influenced, to a certain degree, by the prevailing approaches to drug addiction.     

Heroin Use as Everyday Radicalism: Opiate Consumers and the Leftist Counter-Culture in Frankfurt am Main, 1970–80

Abstract

This article details the impact of heroin in the early to mid-1970s leftist scene, with a focus on Frankfurt am Main, but an eye to larger developments in West Germany as a whole. Heroin challenged leftist assumptions about substance use and made a deep impact on the West German counter-culture, student left, and New Left at large. Early heroin users saw themselves as part of the left, and the practices of heroin consumption can be usefully seen as a sort of everyday radical praxis. Heroin users saw in the substance a way to ‘do something’ against a society they deemed oppressive. The wider counter-culture never embraced the drug and, indeed, repudiated its use as reactionary much in the same way that they eventually repudiated the violent activism of West German terror groups. As such, heroin users took part in and helped shape the process of splintering and radicalization that defined the early 1970s counter-culture in West Germany.     

Illicit Drug Production and Supply-side Drugs Policy in Asia and South America

This paper examines the feasibility of current policies of supply limitation as an instrument for the control of dangerous drugs (principally South American cocaine and Asian heroin). The structure of production and distribution is examined, and revenue estimates are made. A range of supply-side policy options are evaluated by means of a simple game-theory approach. In all cases, it is concluded that supply-side policies are likely to prove ineffectual as a means of drug control.     

Problem Drug Use and the Political Economy of Urban Restructuring: Heroin, Class and Governance in Dublin

This paper offers an exploration of problem drug use in the urban environment, connecting with broader concerns about the progress and contradictions of city redevelopment and change. The discussion is situated within some recent theoretical debates about the political economy of uneven development, urban restructuring and neoliberal governance. The empirical discussion is based on studies of economic and social change, conflict and grassroots praxis in the inner city of Dublin, Ireland, wherein a heroin crisis has impacted for the last few decades, affecting in particular working‐class communities disadvantaged by broader patterns of economic restructuring and urban renewal. This provides some important analytical and political insights from a city that has undergone rapid and intense transformation and deepening patterns of inequality over recent decades, alongside the emergence of new forms of urban governance and community organization and contestation. The paper concludes with some considerations about the place and meaning of problem drug use in the city based on the foregoing theoretical and empirical discussion.     

Drug Bodies: Relations with Substance in the Wau Bulolo Valley

Over the past decade, marijuana has become a significant element in the lives of Papua New Guinean youth. While placing them in conflict with community leaders, young men find meaning in marijuana. Used to affect agency, differentiated according to strength and color, and compared to plants once used by their ancestors, the drug is attributed with properties that do in fact change the substance of the body. Contrary to Strathern (1987), marijuana is now seen as transforming the bodies of its users, giving the power to overcome shame, understand ancestral stories, and work without tiring. Non‐users' discourses against use likewise evoke changes in substance, drying the blood of men who smoke it and oversee its circulation. Offspring of such men are characterized by their weak bones and they often die as infants. In this paper, I will examine these competing discourses of marijuana as they emerge in the communities around Wau (Morobe Province, PNG). I examine the way in which this new commodity begins to take on locals meanings and emerges as a powerful substance in the lives of young men and women.     

At the end of the journey: the risks of Cold War thinking in a new era1

This article examines the justification for the existence of nuclear weapons. For many they were the saviour that brought an implacable foe to its knees in 1945 and held another at bay for nearly a half‐century. The belief that superior technology brought strategic advantage, that greater numbers meant strong security, and that the end of containment justified whatever means were necessary to achieve them prevailed. The author was an adherent to this point of view for several years. But these beliefs, Lee Butler contents, have proved dangerous. They account for the most severe risks and most extravagant costs of the US–Soviet confrontation; they intensified and prolonged an already acute ideological animosity; and they continue to entail enormous costs and expose humankind to unconscionable dangers. The author discusses how his convictions have evolved, and concludes that we have no greater responsibility than to bring the nuclear era to a close.     

La mobilité forcée des personnes utilisatrices de drogue par injection et inhalation en situation d'itinérance à Montréal

This article focuses on the various actors in the urban setting who contribute to the increase in the forced mobility of homeless injection drug users and crack smokers in Montréal, Canada. The objective is to analyze who these actors are and how they contribute to increasing this forced mobility from the perspective of homeless injection drug users and crack smokers in relation to three needs : basic needs, acquisition of financial resources, and drug use. One hundred and six semi-structured interviews were conducted among this population. The results indicate that various actors—police officers, community organization, peers, municipal administration, storekeepers, and residents—contribute to the forced mobility of this population in their daily activities. As for their needs, it is when they use drugs, sleep, or loiter that they are more likely to experience events of forced mobility. Police officers are by far the actors who contribute the most to this, often in a repressive way. The role of the municipality is also a determining factor in the daily activities of homeless injection drug users and crack smokers.     

Drug delivery systems

Abstract

Drug delivery systems have an important role to play in the administration of drugs, vaccines, and diagnostic agents. Systems based on biodegradable polymers can be especially advantageous for use as implants that provide a slow, steady release of a pharmacological agent. Materials include poly--hydroxy acids, polyanhydrides, and polyphosphazenes. The products of biotechnology in the form of peptides and proteins are challenging compounds that are difficult to deliver. Novel methods of delivery include polymeric microspheres and microcapsules. Polymers can be used to deliver antigens in order to obtain improved responses after injection. Nanoparticles based on polymeric materials can be employed to deliver drugs to specific target sites, especially via the bloodstream or lymphatic system. Natural polymers also have an important role in drug delivery, for example chitosan is of special interest for its ability to interact with mucosal surfaces and to provide a bioadhesive effect that will retain drugs at target sites.     

Lost in the Mail: the Inherent Errors of Mapping Australia Post Postcodes to ABS Derived Postal Areas

It is now common practice, by users of geographic information, to link data held at the postcode level to that obtained from the national census. This paper examines the relationship between Australia Post (AP) postcodes and Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) derived postal areas — which are an approximation of the former based on aggregated census collection districts (CDs). A group of adjacent ABS postal areas in northwest Melbourne was compared with the true AP postcode areas they purported to represent and the discrepancies were investigated. Firstly, shape mismatches were studied and their potential impacts upon resource allocation decisions were assessed. Next, comparisons of areas were undertaken. It was found that, in established inner city urban areas, the two sets of boundaries were highly correlated. However, outer suburban neighborhoods were identified as being particularly prone to major areal discrepancies. The implications of mismatches between these two key boundary data sources may be severe, given that management decisions and the allocation of public and private resources are often based on spatial statistical analyses which use these data sets. The authors acknowledge ABS efforts in providing information at the levels of aggregation that society demands. The introduction of ABS postal areas data has undoubtedly facilitated the use of demographic data in many sectors; it has, however, also caused some problems, for instance, when users assume that ABS postal areas are identical to AP postcodes. These issues could easily be avoided with the inclusion of more comprehensive metadata documentation accompanying ABS data. Research is continuing to develop a method by which agencies may derive common boundaries for their administrative units, yet still meet their own individual data and sampling requirements.     

SEPARATION,RETALIATION AND SUICIDE: MOURNING AND THE CONFLICTS OF YOUNG TIWI MEN

This paper describes some Tiwi conceptions of death, linking an important myth of the origins of death to an interpretation of the dynamics of Tiwi mourning. It argues that one part of the myth describes the psychological dangers of human responses to loss, in particular the dangers of destructive rage and self-destructive withdrawal, suicide. The mourning ceremonies facilitate the overcoming of these dangers and the re-integration of the individual into collective life in the course of a drawn-out process, a patterned dramatization of reactions to grief in collective action. The collective process of mourning is central to processes of psychological and social integration in Tiwi life. The paper then discusses a case of pathological mourning which led to the suicide of a young man, and sketches the impact of this death on a number of the younger male kinsmen of the deceased. The suicide was followed by a number of suicide attempts by these men. These attempts can be seen partly as manifestations of individuals' conflict with their surroundings, but also as manifestations of the collective process of adjustment to the death, in a sense as the culmination of the history of mourning in a family-group extending over more than twenty years. In conclusion, the paper briefly summarizes recent changes in Tiwi social life which have contributed to the precariousness of integration of young men, and to the emergence of the historically new pathological forms implied by the contemporary rise in the number of instances of suicide.     

Fringe explosions: risk and vulnerability in Canada's new in‐between urban landscape

This article argues that a new landscape of urbanization takes shape in Canadian cities. In‐between the old downtowns and the new suburbs of urban Canada, a hitherto underexposed and under‐researched mix of residential, commercial, industrial, educational, agricultural and ecologically protected areas and land uses has become the home and workplace, and increasingly also the playspace of most people in Canada. The article examines this new landscape through the lens of the specific risks and vulnerabilities experienced by its inhabitants and users. Using a propane gas explosion in Toronto in the summer of 2008 as an example, we demonstrate that the ‘in‐between city’ is a space of great complexity, which has grown haphazardly and in a contradictory fashion, where, in contrast to the archetype of inner city and suburb, no clear spatial imaginary has been guiding urban development. This leads to always uncomfortable and sometimes dangerous proximities between various and competing uses and social practices. This is nowhere as clear as it is in the splintered urban infrastructures that service this landscape or use the in‐between city's space to service other adjacent or distant purposes.     

‘The Men Have Come’: Gender and Militarisation in Kampala, 1966–86

This article explores the gender implications of the militarisation of the Mengo neighbourhood of Kampala. It analyses how the hyper‐militarisation under post‐colonial regimes, particularly those of Milton Obote and Idi Amin, marked a significant gender reversal. The military presence in Mengo emasculated civilian men, who were attacked and abused by soldiers, and led women to assume the roles of ‘protectors’ who safeguarded men, children and their homes. Women volunteered for the most dangerous tasks at the household and community levels and faced constant dangers, including rape, violence and other forms of abuse. Using oral histories collected from the residents in Mengo in 2014, I examine this reconfiguration of gender roles and its reverberations in contemporary Mengo. Interviews with the women and men from Kampala describe the various ways women protected people and spaces and at the same time stress men's vulnerability. This article therefore challenges popular conceptions of women as weak and vulnerable and in need of men's protection in militarised situations.     

The Atlantic burden‐sharing debate—widening or fragmenting?

The Atlantic burden‐sharing debate during the early part of the twenty‐first century is shaping up to be very different from those of NATO’s first fifty years. The resources needed for direct defence of western Europe have fallen sharply, and further cuts are possible. The gradual strengthening of European cooperation means that the EU is becoming an actor in its own right in many international regimes. Debates about which countries are pulling their weight internationally are also taking into account contributions to non‐military international public goods–financing EU enlargement, aiding the Third World, reducing emissions of climate‐damaging pollutants. In this new multidimensional debate, it becomes more apparent that states that contribute more to one regime often do less than most in another. Germany, for example, is concerned about its excessive contribution to the costs of EU enlargement, but it spends considerably less than France and the UK on defence. European countries contribute three times as much as the United States to Third World aid, and will soon pay almost twice as much into the UN budget. Yet they were dependent on the US to provide most of the military forces in the 1999 Kosovo conflict, and would be even more dependent in the event of a future Gulf war. This widening of the burden‐sharing debate contains both dangers and opportunities. It could lead to a fragmentation of the Atlantic dialogue, with each side talking past the other on an increasing number of issues, ranging from global warming to Balkan peacekeeping. In order to avoid such a dangerous situation, the US and European states should maintain the principle that all must make a contribution to efforts to tackle common problems, whether it be through troops in Kosovo or commitments to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Yet there should also be some flexibility in defining who does how much. The preparedness of some countries to lead, by doing more, will be essential if international cooperation is to have a chance to work.     

REIMAGINING ROMAN PORTS AND HARBOURS: THE PORT OF ROMAN LONDON AND WATERFRONT ARCHAEOLOGY

This paper explores some theoretically informed ways in which to use the rich evidence relating to ports, harbours and other waterfront installations in archaeology. It argues that studies of waterfront structures within the specialisms of nautical/maritime and wetland archaeology are extremely important in their own right, but they could also be used to explore broader issues connected with their use and context. These include the cultural and religious significance of water and its dangers, the symbolic significance of landscape change, the relationship between people and their environment and the negotiation of the land/water interface. Examining the evidence of the port of Roman London as a case study, this paper explores the archaeology in its local setting and addresses a number of subjects relating to both its temporal and spatial position. It focuses on the religious significance of water and the implications of altering waterscapes through artificial construction.     

Taming Space: Drug use,HIV, and homemaking in Downtown Eastside Vancouver

This article explores ideas of home and place making that bear on the narrated realities of 14 women who are drug users living with HIV in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. ‘Taming Space’ refers to the negotiations, transgressions and accommodations they make within particular spatial regimes. As residents of a ‘skid row’ district, research participants work to reconcile personal identities within representations of stigmatized space. As the subjects of epidemiological enquiry, clients of public health services and recipients of harm reduction initiatives, women both resist and acquiesce to the parameters of medicalized space. Housing and social service policies further demarcate spatial orders, especially framing women's options for mobility and homemaking. Finally, as street-involved persons they are subject to the often contradictory socio-spatial codes of street drug sociality. Drawing on the concept of turning points, I analyze the diverse narratives of these women as they flesh out particular dynamics of space and identity within broader structural contexts of colonialism, public health and poverty.     

Food, drink and ritualised communication in the household of Eleanor de Montfort, February to August 1265

This article investigates the use of feasts and gifts of food in the household of Eleanor de Montfort between February and August 1265. In his influential The dangers of ritual, Philippe Buc argued, through a study of early medieval chronicles, that rituals in medieval Europe were regularly targets for disruption and aggressive manipulation either in practice or in the texts reporting the rituals. This article tests Buc’s thesis against administrative records from thirteenth-century England. The evidence from Eleanor’s household accounts is illuminated through a study of contemporary literary sources and didactic texts. It concludes that the administrative records indicate that rituals in practice were less habitually the subject of manipulation and conflict than the literary evidence indicates.     

Developing sustainable cultural policies in Turkey: an investigation of public opinion on the theatre scene

The arts scene in Turkey has been witnessing many discussions with the revealing of the governmental reform agenda on the state support model for the arts that includes establishment of an arts council type institution, the closure of the State Theatres and, the State Opera and Ballet. Nevertheless, despite strong public criticism on this reform agenda, there has never been any comprehensive research to reflect the public opinion. Therefore, this study aims to contribute to recent discussions by providing data on public opinion regarding such a fundamental change, with a particular focus on theatre. Towards this end, a survey was conducted in Istanbul. The findings demonstrate that the majority, including both users and non-users of theatre, value the State Theatres and are in favour of sustaining it. There is also a common belief that in case of the State Theatres’ closure, the private theatres cannot undertake its public mission.     

Quality Quartz: working stone at a bronze age kerbed Cairn at Olcote,near Calanais,Isle of Lewis

This paper discusses an assemblage of worked and smashed quartz associated with a Bronze Age kerbed cairn at Olcote. Most analytical treatments of quartz in Scottish prehistory have been structured around a pervasive dualism: quartz working is either the mundane use of a low quality raw material or the ritual use of a symbolically laden referent. The assemblage from Olcote highlights the dangers of such dichotomous analytical positions.     

Readiness for modal shift in Scotland

This paper examines the readiness for modal shift in Scotland from car use to more sustainable modes of transport. National statistics show the scale of car ownership and the extent of car use in Scotland. Findings from a number of recent studies are used to place car use in the context of other transport mode use, to examine reasons for non‐use of the car or avoiding driving, to distinguish between those car users unable and those unwilling to reduce their car use, and to assess the likely impact on car users of policy measures to encourage modal shift. It is concluded that there is readiness for modal shift amongst substantial segments of car users in Scotland.