Q&ACHHPdrugs&selfdiscovery/paradox of Education: ~


'AS ONE BEGINS TO BECOME CONSCIOUS, WE BEGIN TO EXAMINE A SOCIETY IN WHICH WE ARE BEING EDUCATED: The straight glass pipe filled with ethereal white smoke. It was thick enough to see that it could be a good hit, but it still had the wispy quality that distin-guishes crack cocaine smoke from cigarette or marijuana smoke. The smoker was 39, a black man who worked as a street bookseller ~

He closed his eyes & lay back in the battered leather office chair, holding his breath to keep the drug in his lungs as long as possible & eventually he exhaled, a serene smile on his face, his eyes closed to savor the bliss. About 15 minutes later, the computer signalled an other hit was available. 'No thanks doc,' he said, raising his hand slightly: he hit the space bar on the Mac in the way he was trained to press it to signal his choice. Although I couldn't know for sure whether he was getting cocaine or placebo, I knew the experiment was going well! Here was a middle-aged brother, someone most people would like to label a "crackhead," a guy who smoked rock at least 4 or 5 times a week, just saying no to a legal hit of what had a good chance of being 100% pure pharmaceutical-grade cocaine. In the movie version, he would have been demanding more within seconds of his first hit, bug-eyed & threatening ~ or pleading & desperate!!

Nonetheless, he'd just calmly turned it down because he preferred to receive $5 in cash instead! He'd sampled the dose of cocaine in a session earlier: he knew what he would get for his money. At $5 for what I later learned was a low dose of real crack cocaine, he did prefer the cash. Meanwhile, there I was, another black man, raised in one of the roughest neighbourhoods of Miami, who might just as easily have wound up selling cocaine on the street. Instead, I was wearing a white lab coat & being funded by grant from the federal government to provide cocaine as part of my research into understanding the real effects of drugs on BEHAVIOR & physiology. The year was 1999. In this particular experiment, I was trying to understand how crack cocaine users would respond when presented with a choice between the drug & an "alternative reinforcer" ~ or another type of reward, in this case, cash money! Would anything else seem available to them? [Mor is just being curious & trying 'to understand': reading & writing gaat mij beter af 'woord voor woord' @ myDi!!]



21 jun 2014 - bewerkt op 05 jan 2015 - meld ongepast verhaal
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Asih, man, 80 jaar
   
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