Tag Archives: addiction

The 12-Year-Olds Drug Dealers

For the past decade, the UK has been horrified by the phenomenon of County Lines – big city criminal groups using kids as young as 12 to take over the drug supply of smaller towns and villages.

It’s taken years for the police to even begin to understand that many of these children are groomed and exploited, rather than just arresting them as dealers. We show how county lines are a direct product of the War on Drugs itself.

We examine the social implications of prohibition worldwide. Any attempt to shut down the trade in drugs such as heroin, cocaine, ecstasy, ketamine or weed invariably sets off a chain of events that just makes things worse, leaving a trail of death, illness, violence, slavery, addiction, crime and inequality across the globe. Everyone loses – except, in a weird kind of way, the drugs themselves.

The Opioid Crisis Sweeping Africa

As the world has been transfixed by the opioid crisis in North America, another crisis, just as serious, has been unfolding almost unreported across Africa.

The addictive prescription painkiller Tramadol has exploded in popularity, used by everyone from workers trying to cope with long hours and grueling labor, to university students looking to have a good time. It’s even the drug of choice for members of Islamist terrorist group Boko Haram, fueling their violence.

Now, governments are threatening to crack down, using the same War on Drugs methods of repression that have failed everywhere else. And meanwhile, as counterfeit pills flood the continent, new research is questioning whether people are even taking real Tramadol at all.

DSKNECTD: Is Technology Changing Us?

Since childhood we’d been promised that the 21st century would bring us dramatic new technologies like flying cars and utopian cities. Instead it bought us the smartphone, social media, virtual societies and online gaming. As it turns out these technologies began to transform society almost as dramatically as the moon colonies we’d been expecting.

DSKNECTD: Is Technology Changing Us? is a sobering and definitive exploration of how digital communication technology has intruded our lives, and changed society in the process. Covering subjects ranging from online pornography and sexting to social media narcissism and gaming addiction, DSKNECTD surveys the changes to the digital landscape that in just one decade have profoundly altered the way we connect to those around us.

Intelligently crafted from groundbreaking new research and the experiences of ordinary people, DSKNECTD examines how these technologies are changing the way we interact and experience each other – for the good and for the bad.