Rare Blood Types and Border Crossings

This recent article on people with rare blood types and the network of blood donations raises some interesting questions about how embodied materials cross borders.
http://mosaicscience.com/story/man-golden-blood?Src=longreads

How do global networks deal with the complexities of blood crossing borders, especially when rare blood is required to save lives and must be transported quickly?  Thomas, one of the men with a rare blood type who regularly donates his blood, must drive across the Swiss-French border from his home in Switzerland in order to donate, because Switzerland does not have a frozen blood bank to store his blood, so if he donated in Switzerland, the bureaucratic channels necessary to send his blood from Switzerland to France would render the blood no longer viable.  In a world where blood has become a medium of economic exchange and a key material in the global health industry, are our systems of governance inadequate to the task?

Similarly, as bodies draw increased attention in the scholarship of global politics, especially related to questions of mobility and borders, we must reflect on body parts and bodily fluids as key components of the international.  Blood, for example, literally runs through all aspects of global politics; it is that which is required for global health regimes and that which is spilled in the name of security.

What strikes me as most interesting about this article is the reference to the cataloguing of rare blood--after all, there is an American Rare Donor Program that is a database of all rare blood donors in the US.  For individuals with rare blood, their bodily materials are literally the stuff of legend, so rare that it becomes 'the golden blood,' but our global and national systems of regulation of blood mobility don't seem to have caught up with innovations in the medical field.

Your Siblings (and parents and children and...), Your Self; or a little "informed" consent goes a long, long way

I'm catching up on some older issues of Science, and I found this article:
Agency Nixes deCODE's New Data-Mining Plan

There's a lot in this interesting piece about how Iceland's Data Protection Authority is seeking to protect the privacy interests of citizens of Iceland and how deCode Corporation is arguing that the agency is over-reaching.

What struck me as worthy of note is that a little "informed" consent goes a long, long way. Put bluntly, if your close relative agrees to participate in a study involving genetics and it is known that you are a close relative, then your close relative has agreed to disclose information about your DNA.  The company would like to "impute genotypes for ... living and dead relatives."  The company documents refer to "in silico genotypes," that are determined not on the basis of tissue samples, but rather via computational means (using silicon chips).

Don't get me wrong: deCode seeks to improve the human condition (and, appropriately, their bottom line) by doing basic and applied science that leads to improved outcomes for human diseases that have a genetic component.  For example, deCode recently presented results of Alzheimer's research at a conference:

Jonsson and his team of researchers scoured the nursing home database in Iceland. "We identified several coding variants in the Amyloid Precursor Protein. We imputed these variants into the genomes of patients with Alzheimer's disease and control participants and then tested [them] for an association with Alzheimer's disease," he reported.

"To our knowledge, A673T represents the first example of a sequence variant conferring strong protection against Alzheimer's disease," Jonsson said. The researchers estimated that the mutation results in an approximately 40% reduction in the formation of amyloidogenic peptides in vitro (Medpage article).

I am glad that deCode is trying to find a cure for Alzheimers!

Further, I am not raising a critical point about control of information flows just because DNA and computers are involved. Some imputations about genetic factors can be made the old fashioned way, with simple observations of hereditable traits.

And here is a related point: It's not just research that involves DNA that has a potential effect on uninformed, unconsenting people closely connected to informed, consenting subjects.  Consider the informed consent of social science research.  To what extent do the responses of our subjects incidentally disclose information about others who were never asked if they wanted to be part of our investigations?

Our approach to protecting human subjects through the mechanism of the informed consent assumes that an autonomous individual is the subject.  Yet individuals are embodied and embodiment entails hereditable material (and other information) that is shared.  I cannot be fully individual because my body comprises, in part, information (that hereditable material) that I share with close relatives.  I cannot be fully autonomous when my close relatives are able to choose what to do with information about their bodies, because their disclosures necessarily disclose probable information about me. (And vice versa.)

In short, the autonomous individual is a myth, and social institutions and policies that depend on that myth are problematic.

(Insert citations to the feminist literature on this here.)

Aesthetic hegemony?

I am not completely certain that this site is legitimate, and certainly it is sensationalist, but it seems  odd to me that the aesthetic hegemony of the idealized Western woman still maintains its hold.  According to an article on a website, a Japanese woman has undergone multiple cosmetic procedures to look like a French doll.

A new kind of security threat

A new kind of security threat resulting from a certain kind of body:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/omar-borkan-al-gala-is-this-the-man-who-is-too-sexy-for-saudi-arabia-8590104.html

The body thing that Global Political Economy texts don't include

O'Brien and Williams, in their truly excellent textbook, Global Political Economy (which I am teaching this semester), identify the key changes of the 20th century that have transformed the global political economy.  These are:

• the World Wars and the inter-war "economic turbulence,"
• the dominance of the US and the West,
• decolonization and "the struggle for development," 
• the liberalization of domestic and global markets (what I would call the Reagan-Thatcher revolution),
• "the growth of international organizations in governing global affairs" (what I would refer to as the expansion of regimes)
• "a revolution in information technologies and its impact upon social, political economic and military organization."

As I reviewed this material for today's class, it occurred to me that another major revolutionary change of the 20th century was not mentioned here and is not mentioned in any text that I know of:

• antibiotics, vaccines, and other advances in medical science that change humans' relation to the natural world.

(And not necessarily always for the better.)  

And yet one more, as yesterday's the article by Michael Moss in yesterday's New York Times magazine section reminds me:

• the creation of mass produced food, which acts on our bodies in ways that are becoming increasingly apparent.

I have not worked this out yet.  The inkling of an answer that I have has to do with the fact that there can be no global political economy without human bodies (workers, consumers, etc.), and the condition the human bodies are in will of necessity be deeply imbricated with the GPE.  I'll toss it out as a question to the undergrads and see what they think.  (It's a quiet class.)

Anyone have any ideas?

Salon article on David Jacobson's new book

http://www.salon.com/2013/01/05/the_war_on_female_sexuality_is_globalization_to_blame/

Visuality, Corporeality, Grievablity, and Violence

A student in my graduate seminar, Geoff Levin, wrote a great paper in which he turned Butler's notion of grievability upside down and showed how social processes making someone or some group grievable at a distance (across borders) can lead (and has led) to violence rather than peace that Butler expects.

Butler argues that since Iraqi and Afghani lives are not grievable for Americans, we Americans do not resist waging war on them.  Further, she suggests that if they did become grievable for us, we would question and (one hopes) stop the use of violence.  (Did I get that right?)

Geoff argues that in the case of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the fact that Palestinians are grievable to other Arabs and to other Moslems has led to violence and a continuation of violence.  Making Palestinians grievable is yoked historically to the creation of transnational Arab and Moslem identities.  The conflict is fueled by the fact that to Arabs and Moslems outside the narrow confines of Israel and Palestine one group of Semites (Palestinians) is grievable and another (Jews) is not.  He does not go there, but it seems to me that the normative implication of his research is not that the grievability of Palestinians is bad but rather that Palestinians and Jews must be grievable to each other and to their transnational allies for peace to be possible.

So what flips the switch?  Why are some people grievable and others not?

First the obvious: enemies are generally not grievable.  It is no surprise that Israelis & Jews are not grievable in the Arab world; it is no surprise that Palestinians and other Arabs are not grievable in Israel.  Once an Other takes on the identity of a Schmittian enemy, there is no grief.  (Note that people in Turkey -- not Arabs and therefore not, at least initially, enemies -- are grievable to Israelis, as evidenced by rescue teams sent by Israel when Turkey suffered an earthquake.)

But sometimes, estwhile enemies do become grievable.  How?  One of my mentors, the late Edward E. Azar, and other scholar-practitioners like social psychologist Herbert Kelman used "contact groups" to make influential representatives of groups that are enemies to each other come to have empathy for each other.  Empathy and grievability, I think, are closely related (if not the same).  Contact groups bring people together, their physical presence with each other makes them real in ways that words on page do not.  When confronted with each other's humanity (with each other's Face, in Levinas' terms), the possibility of empathy emerges.

Yet pictures also may make the ungrievable grievable and restore the enemy population's humanity.   I am reminded of Kim Phuc, "the girl in the picture," captured on film fleeing naked from a napalm strike on her Vietnamese village.  Her corporeality, made visual through the picture, restored her humanity and by extension the humanity of the North Vietnamese.

My interest in this is the connection between materiality (corporeality in this case) and information.  In both the face-to-face contact groups and the image, content ("I am human; you are human; if you were me right now you would feel pain.") flows from a source (Kim via the photographer's photo; the influential participants in the contact group) to recipients (those seeing the photo; the "enemy" members of the contact group).

I'm offering no conclusion.  Just an observation.  Back to grading.

New Life After Death?

Should one's death end one's ability to procreate?  Should others be allowed to make that decision for you?

New life after death?

Dead Certain?

Science Magazine reports on new a new study that examines deaths and causes of deaths, a topic important for Global Studies as well as Global Public Health:

How Do You Count the Dead?
Gretchen Vogel Understanding how many people die of which causes is invaluable for designing effective public health programs, global health experts say. But most of the world's deaths occur in places with few or no hospitals or doctors to record deaths and their causes, forcing scientists to extrapolate from survey data, incomplete records, and research studies. Various groups use different statistical methods, sometimes resulting in very different numbers that are hotly debated. Now the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation is conducting the most massive study of deaths and disease ever undertaken, which aims to assemble the cause of 1 billion deaths worldwide going back to 1980. It will be published in a series of papers later this year and is likely to trigger new debates. Some say that's necessary and healthy. Others worry that the sharply diverging estimates and the bickering will erode policymakers' trust in science.

Full Story at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/336/6087/1372?sa_campaign=Email/sntw/15-June-2012/10.1126/science.336.6087.1372 

Sorry, it's by subscription.

I don't have anything particularly insightful to add here, but I thought that this article has a certain resonance with our Embodied World theme.  So, too, does this article, also available by subscription:

• Michael Spagat, 
• Andrew Mack, 
• Tara Cooper, 
• and Joakim Kreutz

Estimating War Deaths: An Arena of ContestationJournal of Conflict Resolution December 2009 53: 934-950, doi:10.1177/0022002709346253

The idea that death counts are highly contested is not considered enough in IR.  We don't really know how many people die as a result of conflict. Counts of bodies on the battlefield are not reliable; eye witnesses differ.  The concept of "battlefield" is hopelessly dated in today's warfare, anyway.  People die, too, not as a direct result of fighting, but rather as a consequence of the destruction wrought by fighting.

Studies of war that operationalize war in terms of N of battle deaths are flawed in my view.  (Correlates of War and Behavioral Correlates of War are widely used datasets that do just that.)  It never made sense to me to say that 999 battle deaths is "only"  a "militarized interstate dispute" (assuming it's interstate), while 1000 battle deaths makes the conflict a war.

And then there is "structural violence," a term introduced by Johann Galtung to refer to the years of life lost as a result of negative socio-economic conditions.  A problem for analyzing structural violence is it is difficult to see the act of violence on the body of the victim. There is no smoking gun nor any other obvious weapon to be seen if someone's life is cut short because of impoverished circumstances that came as a result of structural adjustment policies. No one has a "structural adjustment entry wound."

Fertility: emotions, ethics, efficiency?

What kinds of fertility interventions can/should be legal?  What kinds should be covered by insurance? Europe is not united on this issue...http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/story/2012-04-13/Europe-fertility-bans-limits/54250984/1

There are interesting things to consider here: the angst of the barren woman, a harsh term; the opportunities created by medical science advances; the costs of new medical technologies; the ethical and social issues (who deserves to have a child?); the commodification of reproduction.

And I'm reminded of a passage from Isaiah -- and my haftarah: "Rejoice of barren, you who have not given birth.  Break into a song and cry aloud,you who have not been in labor.  For the children of the abandoned are more numerous than the children of the married wife, says God."  Sorry, Isaiah and sorry God.  That's poppycock.  Even at 13 I knew that the woman who wanted children but could not have them would not rejoice.

But now that we have technologies that overcome some of the limits of an individual woman's body, should we put limits on those technologies?  There is a lot I find completely unproblematic -- unqualified good things.  I do find myself feeling rather squeamish about the commodification aspects -- rented wombs, in particular.  And when the provision of reproductive bodily service involves differences of class, ethnicity, and even nationality, I begin to think about the colonized female body...

How dead is dead?

I came across this interesting article on the determination of brain death, beating heart cadavers, and organ donation:
What You Lose When You Sign That Donor Card by Dick Teresi in the Wall Street Journal online.

I am not sure what I think about this yet.  My response must be contingent on the truth value of the empirical claims (does blood pressure really increase in response to the scalpel used on the organ donor?) and an ethical question of whether the answer might not matter in the absence of cognition.  But is cognition actually absent?  Another empirical question.

Comments?

More on organ transplants

A post from the Washington Post "On Parenting" blog by Janice D'Arcy

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/on-parenting/post/the-ethics-of-childhood-organ-transplants-how-would-you-decide-who-becomes-a-recipient/2012/01/17/gIQAZyTA7P_blog.html


Stefanie Fishel and I have a paper (still needs to be finished) on global rules regarding organ transplantation.  The rules are mostly about appropriate donations and donors.  The recent discussion of whether a child with mental disabilities can receive a donated organ raises questions. I realize I might be pushing this too far, but consider for a moment: Humans can share organs because we have interchangeable parts.  What are we saying about the nature of our human-ness when we decide that some are not eligible to receive organs?  In some cases, are we saying that someone is not human enough? Do we see flaws of the body (Fragile X syndrome, for example) as diminishing an individual's worth? This is not just a concern about children, some of whom have intellectual disabilities.  It is also a concern about the elderly.  What happens to our worth when our bodies become frail?

PETA.xxx? Using human bodies to protect animal ones?

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has apparently decided to launch a porn site in the new .xxx top level domain. See an article about this here. The decision from the domain name registry about whether the site is approved should come in November.

This is waaaaaaaaayyyyyyy to good to be true for a scholar whose work includes studies of the body in global politics, Internet governance, and global political economy.

Where to begin?

For those who aren't immersed in the minutia of Internet governance, a top level domain (TLD) is the part of a web address that comes at the end: .com, .edu, and the like, and now .xxx. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, a nonprofit corporation, charted in California, that was initially formed at the behest Clinton Administration, is in charge of determining what new TLDs are added to the global Internet. (And if that sounds weird -- that a California nonprofit determines global Internet policy -- believe me, you are not even seeing the half of it! It's workings are much more bizarre: ICANN is arcane.) Back to our story: ICANN decided in March of 2011 that .xxx was a worthwhile addition to the virtual real estate that is the Internet. ,

This new TLD is a "sponsored" TLD (sTLD), which the .xxx registry, ICM defines this way:

The Sponsored Community consists of individuals, companies and organizations that have voluntarily determined that a system of self-identification would be beneficial and have voluntarily agreed to comply with all IFFOR Policies and Best Practices Guidelines. The Sponsored Community also includes those who provide Adult Entertainment intended for consenting adults and those who provide talent, products or services to the adult industry.

In other words, .xxx is something of a virtual, global red light district, and its supporters argue that it provides a way to both keep the young from accessing porn and to create a more law-abiding online porn industry. To be able to have a .xxx website, you have to provide evidence that you are not going to steal your customers' money, that you are not dealing in kiddie porn, etc.

Best Business Practices

Developed by the International Foundation for Online Responsibility (IFFOR), all .XXX registrants will be obliged to follow a set of practices to be drawn up to provide effective self-regulation by the adult industry.

In particular they must:

Safeguard children from being marketed or targeted online
Defend customer privacy
Oppose fraudulent, anonymous and unsolicited bulk SPAM advertising adult entertainment
Combat the use of unlawful malicious codes and technologies (e.g., spoofing)
Use and promote accurate labeling and meta-tagging allowing .XXX to be blocked more easily by parental controls
Ensure clear and accurate disclosures, security of transactions and contact information
Protect intellectual property rights. IFFOR will preserve the credibility of these practices through regular revisions and updates to accommodate developments in technology and in keeping with the current views of the general Internet using public.

Enter PETA. PETA thinks its message needs to be heard by the porn consuming public, which apparently includes most males and a large proportion of females. (For example, consider the study of Danish adults ages 18-30 by G.M. Hald. It can also be found online here.

Despite the widespread consumption of porn, porn certainly raises issues of sexual exploitation of women and others, despite the IFFOR best business practices. There is a debate about the extent to which women, either by overt coercion or because of a lack of other options, are forced into prostituting themselves. There are further questions about the misogyny and racism that plays out in the content of the porn. See, for example, an article by D.M. Hughes in the Journal of Sexual Agression. Other analyses differentiate between those who are forced into the pornography industry and/or prostitution and those who choose to be "sex workers." R. Weitzer, in Politics & Society (see also here), for example, carefully makes this differentiation and demonstrates the factual inaccuracies of the "moral panic" over sex trafficking.

In any case, though, porn websites have at best moral ambiguity attached to them. So, why peta.xxx?

Given the problematic elements of porn, PETA is definitely opening itself up to the charge that it really does not care at all about one kind of animal: the human kind. The PETA site, judging from news reports, will feature actors and models who have chosen (no coercion!) to arouse (sorry) interest in the protection of animal rights by (mis?)using their own bodies.

PETA has not shied away from using fetishized naked (male and female) bodies in its campaigns before, though such campaigns are more artsy than pornographic, in large measure because the organization seeks public outlets for them. In a Ron Jeremy ad, the art form leans toward satire, veering in the direction of sarcasm, with a well-known (and rather pudgy) porn star encouraging spaying and neutering pets because "too much sex is a bad thing." He says this in bed, nude and draped with a sheet. How silly is that?

It seems like PETA is trying to do two things: make the case that violations of animal rights are more "pornographic" than porn and show the public that being anti-meat and anti-fur does make the organizations' members stodgy fussbudgets. OK. We get it: animal cruelty is wrong and PETAns are cool. We also get that PETA makes a clear distinction between animals and humans and privileges the dignity of the animal over that of the human. And we get that PETA is trying to take advantage changes in Internet porn delivery through the .xxx sTLD.

But peta.xxx? Really, what are the odds that an .xxx surfer looking for some good, racy porn is going hang out on the PETA.xxx site and take PETA's political message to heart?

How to sell yourself, literally | Marketplace From American Public Media

An overview of what's considered legal . . .

How to sell yourself, literally | Marketplace From American Public Media

Humanizing animals and research rules

Just a few musings on a news article:

"New rules urged on hybrid animal-human experiments," by Ben Hirschler on the Reuters website summarizes a a report from Britain's Academy of Medical Sciences on the use of animals containing human material.

But Martin Bobrow, a professor of medical genetics at the University of Cambridge, who led the Academy's working group, said there were three areas of particular concern.

"Where people begin to worry is when you get to the brain, to the germ (reproductive) cells, and to the sort of central features that help us recognize what is a person, like skin texture, facial shape and speech," he told reporters.

His report recommends that government should put in place a national expert body, working within the existing system for regulating animal research, to oversee such sensitive areas.

There are a lot of interesting aspects to this -- from the idea that regulation is needed in advance discovery, to the idea that humanizing animals will (necessarily?) lead to creating monsters, at least if a certain kind of humanization happens. Privileged here are: brain cells, germ cells, and that other category: "central features that help us recognize what is a person." So, something hidden, like pancreatic islet cells, might be transferred to from a human to an animal for the purpose of research without raising the problem that the animal might resemble a human too much. The potential problems seem to be: animals thinking, looking, or sounding like humans; or animals having human(-like) babies.

As odd as this sounds, speculating and even regulating in advance of discovery may be necessary. But once again, the boundary between "us" and our animal relatives is brought into question.

Dangerous bodies

The TSA is Now My Dermatologist - http://pulse.me/s/GoLu

Goldberg's description of the 'security theater' that surrounded TSA's evaluation of a cyst on his leg reminded me oddly of the Bible's description of the Hig Priest's evaluation of suspected leprosy lesions...

Zombies or Cyborgs? Unnatural body metaphors for IR

I haven't read Dan Drezner's new book on Theory of International Politics and Zombies yet, but I do love Charli Carpenter's response to it.

But Charli's amusing, thought-provoking, & arch response aside, how are we threatened by the unnatural body that is the cyborg? And how much artificial material can be added to the human body before it becomes a cyborg? Night vision goggles enhance vision beyond the "natural" ability of the human eye. Do these goggles make the wearer "slightly cyborg?" And is that a good or bad thing?

Cristina Masters examines "Cyborg soldiers and militarised masculinities."* She writes:

Increasing military interest in the body cancels the transgressive potential of the cyborg. Where humans become the weakest link in contemporary warfare, the cyborg represents a desire for total masculinist control and domination.

And as Charli Carpenter points, out, the cyborg elements of modern warfare make it possible for a woman to "fight like a man."

*Cristina Masters, "Cyborg soldiers and militarised masculinities," Eurozine
May 20, 2010, online at http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2010-05-20-masters-en.html, accessed April 5, 2011.

When a body chews coca leaves . . .

This is NOT a pro-substance abuse blog. Substance abuse is REALLY bad idea.

In 2009, Bolivia requested that the UN remove the provisions regarding coca leaf from the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs. If no other government objected by the end of January 2011, the ban on coca leaf would have been rescinded. However, at the 11th hour, the US, UK, and Sweden entered there objection. See Bolivia's response here.

Here's the back story: Cocaine can be extracted from coca leaves, but chewing coca leaves has long been a traditional practice of Andean communities. It apparently acts like a mild stimulant. I have been unable to find any actual explanation of harm to the body that chewing coca leaves causes. Even the 1950 UN report on the dangers of coca leaf says:

II. DANGER OF CHEWING

The leaves of the coca plant contain cocaine. In the present state of knowledge the indications are that the effects produced by chewing coca leaf are to be explained by the action of cocaine.
III. NATURE OF CHEWING

It does not at present appear that the chewing of the coca leaf can be regarded as a drug addiction in the medical sense.

And:

IV. HARMFUL EFFECTS OF CHEWING

Briefly the harmful effects of chewing coca leaf, from the point of view of the individual and of the nation, are the following:

It inhibits the sensation of hunger and thus maintains, by a vicious circle, a constant state of malnutrition;

It induces in the individual undesirable changes of an intellectual and moral character. This is especially clear in exceptional cases, and it is much discussed how far this is general. It certainly hinders the chewer's chances of obtaining a higher social standard;

It reduces the economic yield of productive work, and therefore maintains a low economic standard of life.

V. NUTRITIVE VALUE OF COCA LEAVES

Coca leaves contain, as do other green leaves, vegetables and fruits, most of the known vitamins, especially B 1, B 2 and C in significant quantities. In spite of this fact it would by no means be advisable to supply these vitamins in the form of coca leaf chewing i.e., together with the toxic substance cocaine. In no way can the chewing of coca leaves therefore be regarded as a substitute for an adequate diet.

Frankly, the "harmful effects" sound an awful lot like "Demon Rum." I wish I could have found a reliable, evidence-based source of more recent origin that would actually say whether chewing coca leaves is harmful. The Bolivian government thinks there's nothing wrong with chewing coca, but I don't see the evidence either way.

Khat is perhaps an analog (completely different drug, though). Nasir Warfa and co-authors suggest that studies "suggested a weak association between khat usage and mental illness, with no evidence of causality." What they do see, however, is something of a "moral panic" that skews the discussion of whether there is harm.* I suspect the same thing is happening with coca leaves.

Because cocaine and crack cocaine are so harmful, anything associated with them must be harmful as well, or so the thinking goes. The body is seen as weak flesh, subject to the ravages of poisons. Coca leaf then becomes even more insidious because of its apparent innocuousness.

Now I am definitely opposed to harmful drugs and I am opposed to breaking the law. I have never used marijuana in any form (this is actually true), and I don't intend to chew coca leaves unless (a) they become legal and (b) scientific evidence shows they are not harmful and (c) scientific evidence also shows there is some benefit to them. I doubt this would happen soon, and I do reasonably well with coffee and other forms of caffeine as my stimulant of choice.

Nevertheless, I can't help but wonder about the insistence that coca leaves be placed on the same "schedule" as cocaine, oxycodone, and opium.

I'm thinking about this because of tomorrow's lecture on illicit flows of "bad" goods: illegal drugs, in this case. One of the assigned readings was a chapter by Silvia Rivera Cusincanqui on coca use in Northern Argentina, just over the border from Bolivia.** She makes a strong case that people do not see coca leaf chewing as bad or illicit -- even when it is illegal.

Nevertheless, the US, the UK, and Sweden still insist on framing coca leaves as as significant a threat to the body as other controlled substances that may have much more harmful effects. Moreover, many uncontrolled substances (or minimally controlled substances -- alcohol where there's a minimum drinking age) may have worse effects on the body than coca leaves.

Well, I skipped my wine with dinner tonight. I'm up too late and will certainly need my coffee tomorrow. And then I'll probably find a way to ingest my favorite psychotropic food: chocolate. A day without chocolate is like . . .a day without chocolate and that is not a good thing.



*Nasir Warfa, Axel Klein, Kamaldeep Bhui, Gerard Leavey, Tom Craig, Stephen Alfred Stansfeld, Khat use and mental illness: A critical review, Social Science & Medicine, Volume 65, Issue 2, July 2007, Pages 309-318, ISSN 0277-9536, DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2007.04.038.
(http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6VBF-4NW1HF1-2/2/44091ae8ebe50d5fdfc864a67f54acb9)

**Silvia Rivera Cusincanqui, "Here even the legislators chew them": Coca Leaves and Identity Politics in Northern Argentina, in Illicit Flows and Criminal Things: States, Borders, and the Other Side of Globalization, ed. by Wilem van Schendel and Itty Abraham (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005).

Quiz Time! And the Answer is:

Adam Smith in Theory of Moral Sentiments

Who said this? No fair Googling to find the answer:

We sympathize even with the dead, and overlooking what is of real importance in their situation, that awful futurity which awaits them, we are chiefly affected by those circumstances which strike our senses, but can have no influence upon their happiness. It is miserable, we think, to be deprived of the light of the sun; to be shut out from life and conversation; to be laid in the cold grave, a prey to corruption and the reptiles of the earth; to be no more thought of in this world, but to be obliterated, in a little time, from the affections, and almost from the memory, of their dearest friends and relations. Surely, we imagine, we can never feel too much for those who have suffered so dreadful a calamity. The tribute of our fellow-feeling seems doubly due to them now, when they are in danger of being forgot by every body; and, by the vain honours which we pay to their memory, we endeavour, for our own misery, artificially to keep alive our melancholy remembrance of their misfortune. That our sympathy can afford them no consolation seems to be an addition to their calamity; and to think that all we can do is unavailing, and that, what alleviates all other distress, the regret, the love, and the lamentations of their friends, can yield no comfort to them, serves only to exasperate our sense of their misery. The happiness of the dead, however, most assuredly, is affected by none of these circumstances; nor is it the thought of these things which can ever disturb the profound security of their repose. The idea of that dreary and endless melancholy, which the fancy naturally ascribes to their condition, arises altogether from our joining to the change which has been produced upon them, our own consciousness of that change, from our putting ourselves in their situation, and from our lodging, if I may be allowed to say so, our own living souls in their inanimated bodies, and thence conceiving what would be our emotions in this case.

Post your responses as comments . . .

Arizona organ transplant policy and global norms

Reading Marc Lacey's article, "Transplants Cut, Arizona Is Challenged by Survivors," in Sunday's New York Times brought out the contradiction between Arizona's policy and global norms on transplantation.

Arizona has decided to cut Medicaid funding for transplants. That decision in all likelihood affects a lot of potential transplant recipients because if you're that sick, you're probably not working and if you're not old enough for Medicare, that means that you probably end up on Medicaid. In short, if you are blessed with insurance or personal wealth, you can have an organ or tissue transplant in Arizona. If not? Tough luck. Hope you had a nice life.

But the World Health Organization's Guiding Principles clearly proscribe this policy. Guiding Principle 9 is:

The allocation of organs, cells and tissues should be guided by clinical criteria and ethical norms, not financial or other considerations. Allocation rules, defined by appropriately constituted committees, should be equitable, externally justified, and transparent.

To be fair to the State of Arizona, lawmakers received a report from state health officials stating that transplants "were rarely successful." The problem is, that information just isn't correct. According to Lacey's article, "The cure rate for bone marrow transplants cited in the report to the Legislature was either zero or 7 percent . . . But transplant experts put the actual survival rate, based on national studies, at over 40 percent."

I find it morally abhorrent that some bodies (those owned by people lucky enough to have good health insurance) are "deserving" of life saving medical treatments while others (the ones relying on Arizona's Medicaid system) are not.

And on a personal note, I am extremely fond of one particular bone marrow transplant recipient. I am very happy that she's in that 40% of survivors.