A recent study finds drug addiction is on a “spectacular” rise in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian land since the regime began its onslaught in Gaza last year in October.
According to the study, which the Israel Center on Addiction conducted in November and December on a representative sample of 1,000 Israelis one in four Israelis have increased their addictive substance use since the war began on October 7.
The study highlighted that in 2022, before Israel’s devastating war on Gaza began, one in seven Israelis struggled with drug addiction.
It added that there is a link between indirect exposure to the October 7 events and an increase in addictive substance consumption of about 25 percent.
“The closer individuals were to the trauma on October 7, the higher the risk” of addictive behaviors, it found.
I’m reminded how Frantz Fanon describes, at length, how the colonial situation could produce many comorbidities in his patients. He treated both indigenous Algerians and French settlers, and he had a lot to say about both. I think there was one instance where he was responsible for treating a torturer, who could continually hear screaming whenever he tried to sleep.
He went to great lengths to describe how the colonial situation dehumanizes the colonizer and the colonized.
I think about that whenever Israel comes up.
The yanks had well-documented problems with substance abuse related to their war against Vietnam, probably also from other atrocities. The Nazis were infamous for doing Pervitin, although I don’t know where the historical truth stops and the urban legends begin with that one.
Atrocity-related substance abuse is a real thing.
reminds one a little bit of “Havana Syndrome”: CIA ghouls drinking heavily (or other self-destructive behaviors) to silence their guilt
Same with the widespread use of methamphetamine among the armed forces of the third Reich. One part was about keeping them awake and altert over long stretches of time, another was about smothering their humanity so they could do all that mass murdering without much fuss. The side effects were brutal of course, but as Parenti once so aptly wrote: Fascist governments treat their soldiers like bullets, they don’t care about lasting effects on them. The soldiers get used and then thrown away.
Every time I think about Usonian soldiers with PTSD I think how el Che or Castro were always perfectly good even though they had killed people. It’s because they never enjoyed the violence applied on the imperialists, it was driven by a desire for freedom.