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.
““The closer individuals were to the trauma on October 7, the higher the risk” of addictive behaviors, it found.”
Aa yes, the trauma of the people they were brutalizing for years upon years fighting back.
Or, more likely, they are trying to find refuge from the last vestiges of human conscience that remains to them in the wake of the genocide they are [at best] complicit in.
After a long day in the most moral army in the world, defending the only democracy in the middle East against a new holocaust, you really need to pop some Panzer chocolate to make those children’s screams go away so you can sleep.
Unlimited cirhossis of the liver on the Zionist Entity!
Hope they find relief by redacted
Cheers! As always it would be best if the western nations (and the genocidal settler-impositions like Isntreal- and like most of the Anglosphere) chose peace, chose the path of human decency.
But if not, as has been the case for 500 years and shows little sign of changing- then I can only hope for their complete ruination; where the contradictions continue to pile up, and all ills imaginable fester, worse and worse still, until they are dragged kicking and screaming into reality, equality, and decency with the rest of humanity.
I used to be anti-accelerationist; I still remain explicitly so. But this isn’t accelerationism; just as hoping that the Nazi system would implode on itself sooner than later would not have been accelerationism. We’re talking about a system which at this point is returning back to industrial genocide- which is going about the world, couping and seeking puppets who are willing to kill themselves and their people, essentially seeking out the next Ukraine- about a system which only has terrorism left to offer the world, or even to offer its own people in the imperial cores, and which is actively seeking out and provoking what likely will be WW3.
To hope they can continue the status quo now- with how dire things are, more than they have been in a long while- but also with how optimistic they also are, with the better world right around the corner, with multipolarity and global democracy right around the corner- is the real accelerationism. The fascists, and there is now genuinely and finally no distinction between the western maniacs in charge and historical fascism, will continue to receive their metaphorical (and entirely self-inflicted) beatings until morale improves, that is, until they become decent human beings, or die in the process. Over 90% of humanity- the proletarian masses of the west as well, if they can get their heads out of their asses to realize it and recognize the urgency of the situation- is united against a ticking time bomb of nuclear-armed genocidal destruction.
The west (and western diaspora like Isntreal) can either cease the settler-ism, cease the genocides, cease the forever wars, accept the equality and rights of the Palestinians (who are the cousins of, and more indigenous by far than the European Jewish peoples) and work together in making a decent, humane, prosperous world for all- or they can keep trying to shove their boot down the rest of the world’s throat, and if so then I hope (and it will come to pass, one way or another, till they learn their lesson) that all manner of self-inflicted horrors come to pass till they learn their lesson. And I say that as someone living in an imperial core myself; anything else at this point is accelerationism, hemming and hawing about maintaining the system through bandaids and just keeping the worldwide system of genocide and racism around a “little while longer,” while industrial genocide and a march towards WW3 is ongoing is accelerationism.
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