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I always look forward to books by Kate Messner. Why? Because I know they will be solid, kid centered and bring something to the table. I had read online that she had recently been disinvited to a school due to the content of her latest book.  I quickly went to my TBR pile and pulled out my copy to give it a go.

Charlie's sister Abby is home from college for the weekend and things aren't going exactly like Charlie had imagined they would.  When she goes to wake Abby up to see if she will come out to look at the lake with her just in case the ice flowers have shown up again, Abby waves her off telling her to just go away. Somewhat chagrinned, Charlie trudges out to the lake only to see that the ice flowers have come back. Her neighbor Drew and his nana are also out on the lake but they are checking the ice for fishing possibilities. Drew tells Charlie about the fishing derby he plans on entering and the prize of $1000 for the biggest lake perch. Since Charlie really wants a new dress for her Irish dancing competitions, she decides to give it a go.

But despite living near the lake, Charlie is scared of its winter ice. So when she joins Drew and his nana, she sticks closer to shore. Soon everyone is landing fish left and right except for Charlie. When she finally pulls one in, it's hardly bigger than the bait she used to catch it. But right before she releases it she hears something. The fish is talking to her. "Release me and I will grant you a wish."

Well, what would you do? Charlie hastily wishes on her crush liking her and to not be afraid of the ice anymore. What harm could wishing on a fish really do?

Anyone who has read a fairy tale knows that wishes can easily go awry. And Charlie's wishes are no exception. While no harm is truly done, Charlie finds herself out on the ice more and more  (since she miraculously is no longer afraid of the ice) with Drew and his nana. Not only is it adding to her feis dress fund, but it's getting her out of the house. It turns out that Abby has changed in ways that Charlie never even imagined. While she was away at school, she started dabbling in drugs which led to a full blown heroin addiction. Who can Charlie even talk to about this? When she thinks about it, she feels ashamed and bewildered. How could Abby, who she had always looked up to, done this?

Kate Messner has written an important book that somewhat gently looks at the fact that anyone can be swiftly taken down by drugs, and specifically by opiates. I live on Staten Island where opiate abuse and heroin are at an all time high.  I commute to Manhattan with my children, and by the time they were 9 and 12 respectively they could tell the difference between someone napping and someone in a nod. They have witnessed police using narcan on people who have OD'd in the ferry terminal. They watched me try to convince the friends of a woman in the throws of an OD to allow me to call an ambulance for her. Kids aren't too young for this story. My kids are living this story everyday they commute. And the brothers and sisters of kids all over our Island are living Charlie's story.  So I would like to applaud Kate Messner for telling this story. It is one I plan on sharing and book talking whenever I get the chance.

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Ten students at two visitors at Wesleyan University have been hospitalized after overdosing on the recreational drug Ecstasy, the result of having received a "bad batch." The incident elicited a conventional statement from the President of the University: “Please, please stay away from illegal substances the use of which can put you in extreme danger."

The post America’s irrational drug policies appeared first on OUPblog.

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Harris Wittels, stand-up comedian, author, writer, and producer for Parks and Recreation -- and generally a person who could make us laugh in these seemingly grim times -- died of a drug overdose at the age of thirty. He joins the list of people who brought pleasure to our lives but died prematurely in this manner [...]

The post Harris Wittels: another victim of narcotics and America’s drug policy appeared first on OUPblog.

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In December 2013, Turkish authorities arrested the sons of several prominent cabinet ministers on bribery, embezzlement, and smuggling charges. Investigators claimed that the men were contributing members in a conspiracy to illicitly trade Turkish gold for Iranian oil gas (an act which, among other things, violates the spirit of United Nations’ sanctions targeting Tehran). The scheme purportedly netted a vast fortune in proceeds in the form of dividends and bribes. Among those suspected of benefiting from the trade was Prime Minister (now President) Tayyip Erdoğan and members of his family. The firestorm from this scandal was initially so furious many feared that Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party would not survive its implications. Yet as of this September, the investigation into this scandal has all but come to an end. The officials involved in propagating and executing the investigation have all been dismissed or transferred. Consequently, virtually all charges related to the case have been dropped.

Most of the analysis of this scandal has focused upon the political implications of the arrests and the subsequent purges of Turkey’s national police force. Events since December have indeed underscored the intense levels of strife within Turkey’s governing institutions as well as the growing authoritarian tendencies of the country’s ruling party. Yet Turkey’s “oil for gold” corruption scandal also illuminates fundamental, yet long-standing, aspects of the relationship between prominent illicit trades and the country’s politics.

Turkey’s black market, by all accounts, is exceeding large and highly lucrative. As a country sitting at a major intersection in global commerce, Turkey acts as a spring, valve and spigot for multiple illicit industries. Weapons, narcotics and undocumented migrants, as well as contraband carpets, petroleum, cigarettes, and precious metals all pass in and through the country’s borders on a regular basis. Official statistics on cigarette smuggling offer a few hints of the extent of smuggling in and out of Turkey. According to Interior Ministry sources, Turkish seizures of smuggled cigarettes grew fourteen fold between 2009 and 2012 (with ten million cigarettes seized in 2009 and over 145 million in 2012). In January of this year, Bulgarian customs officials purportedly confiscated fourteen million cigarettes illegally imported from Turkey in one seizure alone. The numbers of arrests for cigarette smuggling has also climbed precipitously, with over 4000 people arrested in 2009 and over 24000 arrests in 2012.

Organized crime takes other forms in Turkey. Criminal networks, builders, and lawmakers have been known to violate laws governing land sales, usage, building safety, and contracting. Bribes and kickbacks to government officials and regulators historically have been essential elements in the rapid building projects undertaken throughout the country for much of the last century. Charges levied against the managers of Istanbul’s Fenerbahce soccer club stand as an example of the match fixing and extortion scandals that have rocked professional sports in Turkey in recent years. Gangsters and extortionists, known as kabadayı, have been counted among Turkey’s most noted and notorious figures in the public spotlight. All in all, organized criminal trades have generated an untold number of fortunes for a select few and have provided a subsistence living for an even larger number of average citizens for a very long time in Turkey.

If Tayyip Erdoğan and his family did glean a great fortune as a result of illicit doings (which some reports claim to amount to total in the tens of millions of dollars), Turkey’s president joins a fairly sizable host of Turkish politicians who have benefited from organized criminal trades. American officials in the 1950s, for example, secretly suspected that noted members of Adnan Menderes’ Democratic Party had protected major Turkish heroin traffickers. During the 1970s, at least four members of the Turkish Grand National Assembly were official charged with attempting to transport heroin abroad. Other politicians from this era, including one-time Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan, were unofficially suspected of engaging in the drug trade but never charged. Accusations of theft and corruption especially dogged the governments of the tumultuous 1990s. Tansu Ciller, the country’s first female prime minister, was implicated in organized criminal activity both before and after she was first elected to office. Tayyip Erdoğan’s JDP came to power in 2002 with the promise of bringing discipline and respectability to politics. Yet even as recent as last year, a regional JDP chairman was implicated in trading in heroin in the province of Van. The revelations of December 2013 now has many in Turkey convinced that the JDP is as dirty and corruptible as any of the parties that had preceded it.

Erdoğan’s ability to deflect last year’s corruption charges has not put the specter of smuggling and corruption to rest. Local media reports and other studies suggest that the Syrian civil war has stimulated a surge in smuggling along Turkey’s southern border. It is now estimated that fuel, cigarette, and cell phone smuggling has risen by 314%, 135%, and 563% respectively since the war began. The initial efforts to arm and maintain resistance groups in Syria were deeply indebted to Turkey’s smuggling trade. As smuggling continues, it is clear that some groups have attempted to tax trade into and out of Syria (al-Nusrah, for example, purportedly levies a fee of 500 Syrian lira for every barrel of fuel that crosses the border). What this means for the present and future of Turkey’s government is not entirely clear. Suggestions that Ankara has allowed for the passage of large numbers of foreign fighters into Syria has cast doubt over the country’s police and customs officials stationed on its borders (particularly after the official purges earlier this year). Trading schemes and corruption allegations like those revealed in December may yet again manifest themselves considering what international watchdogs call Turkey’s “grey” status as a state with loose embezzlement and money laundering controls. Whether these trends will dent the image of Tayyip Erdoğan or upend JDP control over Turkey remains to be seen.

Headline Image: Turkish flag photo by Abigail Powell. CC BY-NC 2.0 by Flickr

The post Corruption, crime, and scandal in Turkey appeared first on OUPblog.

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Chasing the High: A Firsthand Account of One Young Person’s Experience with Substance Abuse by Kyle Keegan and Howard Moss, MD is both an absorbing memoir and a useful resource for adolescents suffering from substance abuse. Keegan tells us his personal account of overcoming drugs and Moss lends his professional expertise from his position as Associate Director for Clinical and Translational Research with the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, National Institutes of Health. The excerpt below introduces us to Keegan’s struggles.

Looking back on those years I spent barely surviving on the streets as a heroin addict, it’s hard to believe that I’m here now to tell you my story. But I want you to know what it was like, and what a drug addiction really means. I’m going to start not at the beginning, but in a place that stands out in my mind above all others in the haze of my drug using days: Long Beach, California. My experiences there represent my addiction at its very worst. Next I’ll tell you how I ended up there, the son of a loving, hard-working, middle class family, born and raised in a small town in New York State.

Finally, I’ll show you how I was able—with a lot of help—to find my way back to a decent and healthy life. Along the way, I’ll also be giving you an idea of what science knows about addiction in young people—like why teenagers are at higher risk for abusing drugs, and how even a ruthless addiction like mine can be overcome. When people, especially kids, start using drugs, they often don’t understand how dangerous this experimentation can be—even if they’ve been using for a while with no serious repercussions. But I’m going to level with you throughout this book, and the real truth about the worst seems like the best place to start.

So, back to Long Beach. I ended up there because I’d stolen some cash and drugs while I was living in Arizona. My friends (other addicts I was hanging out with at the time) and I came to the conclusion that we’d better relocate. After acquiring a stolen truck, we headed west to California.

The weeks we spent in Long Beach flew by, but our daily schedule didn’t change much; the routine was getting high and stealing what we needed to survive. Friends and I would meet in front of a laundromat every morning to purchase wake-up shots of heroin. The supply of the drug we planned to save until morning somehow never made it through the night.

I’d been sleeping on a rooftop for several weeks now. I felt there was some kind of security in sleeping above everything. Not that I was safe, of course—it was just as easy to get robbed on a rooftop as it was in an alley, where I also spent many nights. I had a setup on that roof of a few milk crates, an old couch frame, and two cushions that smelled horribly of urine from the prior inhabitants. I kept a small garbage bag containing my possessions nearby. When you’re homeless, the less you have, the less you have to worry about getting stolen or lugging around with you.

Unlike in New York, where drugs had been available at any hour, in Long Beach heroin had to be bought on a schedule: once at night and once in the morning. On this particular night, as I was finishing up a round of shoplifting from some convenience stores in the Korean section of Long Beach, I noticed that I was running a little behind schedule. I quickly made my way to a fence who bought stolen goods, getting enough money to then go and try to secure a relaxing evening of speedballs—heroin mixed with cocaine—on my favorite rooftop. Unfortunately, I was too late. As I rounded the corner, I watched in horror as my fellow junkies scurried off and the dealer’s car sped away.

My first instinct was to catch up with slowest of the receding bunch and ask if I could purchase something to hold me through the night, since the next delivery wouldn’t be until morning. Instead of getting the fix I had hoped for, I was offered a matchhead of cocaine. Against my better judgment, I accepted it and made my way to my roof. You see, though I knew that cocaine without heroin would only make me feel sicker, I was an
addict, and therefore unable to turn down any drug. Once back on my couch overlooking West Long Beach, I quickly fixed up the shot of cocaine.

After about fifteen seconds, the cocaine euphoria began wearing off. This was the part I hated most, and the regrets started to roll in. My mind raced and I panicked. How was I going to make it until morning with no more drugs, when it was barely 8:00 p.m.?

For a moment I thought about my life up until then. My drug addiction had left a trail of destruction in my wake—I’d robbed, stolen, cheated, lied. My family had long since disowned me. I felt more and more overwhelmingly that my days were numbered, and at the rate I was going, something had to give soon. Back on my rooftop, I started feeling something that I would have given anything to avoid. The cocaine had worn off and a sickness was quickly spreading through me. That was bad enough, but when I began to shake violently and to feel as if my body temperature were dropping rapidly, I knew that I had what we called ‘‘cotton fever,’’ an extremely unpleasant physical reaction to the drug I’d just taken.

Caused by a bacterium that infects certain cotton plants and is then injected accidentally through a cotton filter and into the body, cotton fever was maybe one of the worst feelings imaginable. For the hour or two that it lasted I could look forward to every muscle and nerve in my body tensing up to the point of excruciating pain, along with extreme cold and uncontrollable tremors. Add that to the crash I was experiencing from the cocaine, and the heroin sickness from not getting my nightly fix, and I was in for an evening of great misery and despair. And just when I thought that I had finally reached the lowest possible level of physical and emotional agony, I realized it could get worse … I felt the first drop of rain.

I drifted in and out of consciousness for most of the night, not sure where nightmares left off and reality picked up. Several times I hallucinated, thinking someone was calling me from the courtyard down below. I would find myself teetering on a ledge two stories up, yelling into the darkness of the cold rain. If I’d had the nerve I would have just hurled myself off the edge and put an end to this insanity. But the insanity was far from over. Somehow I made it through that awful night and scored my wake-up heroin the next morning. I was at it all over again. You can’t possibly know how bad addiction feels unless you’ve been there. You can read a hundred books, see a thousand movies, even work with addicts every day as a counselor or therapist. You still know nothing about the nature of the beast, the power, the emptiness, the broken heart, the numb mind. That voice that forever speaks in your head. That voice that pushes you, that beats you, that empties you—that voice that, in the end, is your own.

…. How did I get from that rooftop in Long Beach to where I am today, reconciled with my family, happily married with a beautiful child, working at an exciting career doing something that I love? The famous philosopher Søren Kierkegaard tells part of the story. ‘‘A man may accomplish many feats and comprehend a vast amount of knowledge, and still have no understanding of himself,’’ he wrote, ‘‘yet suffering directs us to look inward; if it succeeds, then there, within us, is the beginning of our learning.’’ I had to learn about myself, to look deeper into myself than I could ever imagine, in order to get free of drugs.

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