Harm Reduction Project News Digest May 7, 2007

News & Opinion This Week 1. A Letter on Rape in Prisons 2. Why Can't Gay Dwarves Get Married In Middle-Earth? 3. A Woman's Brain Hit Harder by Alcohol Abuse 4. Sacrificial Wolfie B Upcoming Conferences and Events C Quote D How To Help E About HRP F Subscription Information ----- I. A Letter on Rape in Prisons By David Kaiser, Reply by Jason DeParle In response to The American Prison Nightmare (April 12, 2007) New York Review Of Books The following letter was received in response to Jason DeParle's "The American Prison Nightmare" in the April 12 issue of The New York Review. To the Editors: Jason DeParle's thoughtful and wide-ranging overview of American incarceration policy and its consequences hardly mentions rape in detention. Yet this is not a rare or trivial part of life behind bars. Neither is it, as some believe, an inevitable one. Prisoner rape has been largely ignored: by journalists, advocates, policymakers, and researchers. The available data therefore, especially on its frequency, are not very good. Still, it is possible to have some notion of the problem's magnitude. Recent studies of prisons in four midwestern states suggest that approximately 20 percent of male inmates are pressured or coerced into unwanted sexual contact; approximately 10 percent are raped.[1] Rates of sexual abuse in women's facilities, where the perpetrators are most likely to be male staff, seem to vary more by institution but are as high as 27 percent of inmates.[2] Since the US now incarcerates more people than any other country, both relative to population and in absolute terms, these percentages translate into horrifying real numbers. The congressional authors of the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003 (PREA), which DeParle does mention (and which is the only piece of federal legislation ever to address the issue), estimate in the bill's "Findings" section that in the twenty years preceding its passage over one million inmates were victims of sexual abuse in American facilities. That number should be recognized as something of a guess; but in the absence of more authoritative studies, it does not seem unreasonable. Prisoner rape is arguably this country's most serious human rights problem. DeParle rightly criticizes the racial and class-based disparities in American sentencing, as well as our policy of incarcerating huge numbers of nonviolent drug offenders. He recognizes that imprisonment affects not only criminals but "the families they leave behind, and the communities to which they return." Such astuteness is all the more reason to wish he'd given greater consideration to rape in prison, which exacerbates and complicates these problems and many others. DeParle notes some consequences of our incarceration policy for public health, and the disproportionate threat posed to minority neighborhoods. But he does not mention that rates of HIV/AIDS are several times higher inside our prisons than outside, just as they are now much higher among black Americans than white. Nor does he mention that sex in prison, which is common, and almost always unprotected, is also often coercive; that as long as imprisonment even on minor charges can mean rape and HIV, it can and sometimes does amount to an unadjudicated death sentence. Discussing the disenfranchisement of felons, he writes that "as with many aspects of criminal justice, the United States is out of step with its international peers." He fails to say that the sexual assault of prisoners, whether perpetrated by corrections officers or other inmates, in many cases constitutes torture under international human rights law—and is, therefore, yet another way in which the US is in violation of such law. One needn't think of prisoner rape in legal or sociological terms to be angry about it, of course. Tom Cahill, a former president of Stop Prisoner Rape, was arrested during the Vietnam War for civil disobedience. An ideologically unsympathetic jailer put him in a cell with known sexual predators, telling them he was a child molester, and that if they "took care of him" they'd get extra rations of jello. For the next twenty-four hours Tom was gang-raped. He has never fully recovered from this. (I should point out, as a member of the board of Stop Prisoner Rape, that DeParle spreads credit for the enactment of PREA too thinly. Advocacy groups led by Stop Prisoner Rape were indispensable to its passage, and Tom was invited to the bill's signing ceremony with President Bush in acknowledgment of this.) To its survivors, rape in prison is often physically and almost always psychologically devastating. Inmates send letters to Stop Prisoner Rape every day recounting the attacks they've suffered and the lasting anguish these have caused. Every one of these stories is terrible. Prisoners are at increased risk of sexual violence if they are gay, transgender, young, small, or mentally ill; also if they have been convicted of nonviolent crimes or if they simply don't seem street-smart—in other words, if they're perceived as relatively unable to defend themselves. (US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, detainees are particularly vulnerable for a different set of reasons, prominent among them the fear of retaliatory deportation if they complain of abuse, and the poor access provided to watchdog organizations by ICE facilities, which are now part of the Department of Homeland Security.) When the government takes away a person's freedom, it is morally obligated to provide the basic necessities he or she can no longer secure independently: food, clothing, and shelter, and also elementary physical protection. DeParle writes, "Since 1980 the murder rate inside prisons has fallen more than 90 percent, which should give pause to those inclined to think that prisons are impossible to reform." We could similarly reduce the incidence of rape in prison. We know how. To some extent, stopping prisoner rape is simply an issue of better prison management. In facilities where the chief official cares about it, and ensures that his or her subordinates take it seriously, rates of sexual abuse go down dramatically. This is accomplished by, for example, providing vulnerable inmates with nonpunitive protective housing at their request, and establishing confidential complaint systems that encourage inmates to report sexual violence without increasing their risk of future assault or retaliation, from any party. Perhaps the most important thing detention facilities can do is employ classification systems that effectively separate likely rape victims from likely sexual predators. This requires maintaining basic data about inmates; it also requires training staff to accurately assess incoming prisoners' various levels of threat and vulnerability. Prisoners placed in protective custody must be segregated by security level. A maximum-security gang member and a sixteen-year-old first-time offender placed in an adult facility may both require extra protection; that does not mean they should be put in the same cell. Recent innovations in facility design are helpful, particularly the use of pod-shaped configurations of cells rather than the traditional rows. But no matter what the architecture, effective surveillance of inmates is essential, and meaningful rehabilitative programs such as GED courses—leading to the equivalent of a high school diploma—which used to be much more common in American prisons than they are now, have been shown to reduce all sorts of violence. Good chief officials create institutional cultures that encourage communication between inmates and staff and make it clear that the rules apply to all. This can be accomplished even in challenging conditions. The vast and badly overcrowded prison in Tehachapi, California, which houses inmates with a wide range of security classifications, is one example of a men's facility where such progress has been made recently. It is imperative that corrections staff not be allowed to operate under "codes of silence," according to which abuse or negligence goes unreported and unpunished. When it comes to prisoner rape, however, not all facilities have such good leadership. So the government must issue proper directives and incentives —which it is now beginning to do. The National Prison Rape Elimination Commission created by PREA is developing a set of national standards on a variety of topics pertaining to sexual abuse in detention; once these are in place, states that receive federal funding for their prisons will risk losing 5 percent of those funds if they fail to meet the standards. Since this is the government's first such effort, however, more reforms will no doubt be required. Some policies that could reduce prisoner rape need funding. Legislators can help in other ways as well. Overcrowding makes it much more difficult for staff to meet their responsibilities, particularly of supervision. But overcrowding is close to inevitable if we lock people up at present rates. Offering treatment instead of incarceration to nonviolent drug offenders would by itself reduce prisoner rape enormously. In any case, we need laws that increase the independent oversight of detention facilities, and therefore their accountability. And Congress should repeal or at least substantially amend the Prison Litigation Reform Act of 1996, which as DeParle writes "has cut in half the number of inmates filing civil rights complaints," and which makes it especially difficult for inmates to seek redress for sexual abuse. American law already provides means to fight sexual abuse behind bars, from the Eighth Amendment—which the Supreme Court, in Farmer v. Brennan (1994), unanimously found applicable to prisoner rape—to PREA, to the rape and custodial sexual misconduct laws that all fifty states have on their books. Law enforcement authorities should use these legal resources much more effectively than they tend to now: in particular, prosecutors should pursue all substantiated instances of custodial sexual misconduct, sexual assault, or rape in detention. These recommendations[3] are neither complicated nor at odds with common sense. Prisoner rape goes on with appalling frequency, not because it is inevitable or because we don't know how to prevent it, but because we have lacked the will and the resources to do so. And because too many people still fail to recognize that rape in detention is a violation of human rights—that, no matter what a person has done, rape should never be a part of the penalty. Jason DeParle replies: I am grateful to David Kaiser for calling attention to an important problem in prison life. Notes [1] Cindy Struckman-Johnson and David Struckman-Johnson, "Sexual Coercion Rates in Seven Midwestern Prisons for Men," The Prison Journal, December 2000, available at www.spr.org/ pdf/struckman.pdf. See also Cindy Struckman-Johnson, David Struckman-Johnson, Lila Rucker, Kurt Bumby, and Stephen Donaldson, "Sexual Coercion Reported by Men and Women in Prison," The Journal of Sex Research, February 1996, available at www.spr .org/pdf/soc/SexualCoercionReported MenWomenPrison.pdf. [2] Cindy Struckman-Johnson and David Struckman-Johnson, "Sexual Coercion Reported by Women in Three Midwestern Prisons," The Journal of Sex Research, August 2002, available at www.spr.org/pdf/Struckman021.pdf. [3] For these and other recommendations on how to prevent sexual abuse in detention, see "Confronting Confinement," the Vera Institute of Justice report that DeParle reviews, as well as "In the Shadows: Sexual Violence in US Detention Facilities, A Shadow Report to the UN Committee Against Torture, by Stop Prisoner Rape," available at www.spr.org/pdf/in_the_shadows.pdf. For more information on prisoner rape generally, see Stop Prisoner Rape's Web site: www.spr.org. --- 2.| Why Can't Gay Dwarves Get Married In Middle-earth? Video games have been ahead of the real world in accepting same-sex marriage. Why doesn't a new online "Lord of the Rings" game allow it? By Katherine Glover Apr. 28, 2007 | I can vouch for my stepbrother -- he's a big supporter of equal rights for the gay and lesbian community. But when the issue of gay marriage came up at work, he voted against it. Same-sex marriage for U.S. citizens is one thing, but same-sex marriage for gay dwarves in Middle-earth is quite another. Nik Davidson is a game designer at Turbine, the Westwood, Mass., company producing "The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar." The game has been in beta (a test version) since September, and during discussions of new features for the game, which was officially released Tuesday, the design team wound up in a heated discussion over what restrictions should be placed on marriage. They debated not only gay marriage but also marriage between members of different species. Finally, the game's executive producer settled the matter by pulling the entire marriage feature. The controversy over whether hobbits should be able to marry dwarves may be unique to Turbine, but the issue of in-game relationships is not. Most American households have some form of single-player video or computer games; in addition, at least 12.5 million people subscribe to multiplayer online games, going online to interact with other game players in elaborate virtual worlds, many with sword and sorcery themes. Games like "The Lord of the Rings Online" -- often referred to as MMORPGs, or massively multiplayer online role-playing games -- don't just allow players to create life in the form of their characters; increasingly, they take over the lives of the players themselves. Perhaps the quintessential example is "EverQuest," launched in 1999, and so addictive it came to be known as "EverCrack." Once the most popular MMORPG, it has been displaced by "World of Warcraft," which boasts an estimated 8.5 million users. One study estimated that the average player was on "EverQuest" some 20 hours per week; of course, that number is skewed by casual users -- some hard-core gamers spend more like eight to 12 hours per day on the game. Players devoting that much time and energy to their games will naturally want to live part of their life inside the game, and that includes developing committed relationships, sometimes with ceremonies. According to a study by Haverford College student Nick Yee, now a Ph.D. candidate at Stanford University, 23 percent of "EverQuest" players surveyed had role-played at falling in love within the game. Gay players, an increasingly visible demographic in a scene once known as the preserve of young and not necessarily enlightened males, often want the same thing. These players don't want to be shunted off to the side, either, or given "gay" games marketed to gay audiences; they just want to see themselves reflected in the games they play and to have safe spaces within the games, free of the homophobia that comes freely from the other players. Largely due to the uniquely libertarian culture of game design, games are ahead of the real world in terms of acceptance of same-sex marriage -- the first game reported to have allowed same-sex marriage debuted in 1998, two years before Vermont recognized civil unions and six years before Massachusetts became the first state to allow same-sex marriage. Today, the discussion of same-sex marriage in games redraws the battle lines over the issue, making it not a fight over marriage but an issue of the philosophy of video games themselves. Last fall, with "The Lord of the Rings Online" in beta, Turbine did a survey to determine the major reasons people played MMORPGs. It turned out that what players ranked as most important weren't beautiful graphics or compelling storylines. They said they played because their friends were playing. "The relationships that are being formed in-game are more important than anything we can provide to them," says Jeff Anderson, Turbine's CEO. Erin Davison, a veteran game player from San Diego, says some of her oldest friends are people she met in a text-based online fantasy game in the 1990s. "I was a military child," she explains. The game was a way for her to stay in touch with the same people as she moved from place to place. One of the people she met in that game is now her husband; they've been married for six years. Even that game -- "NannyMUD," a fantasy-based game that Davison describes as "basically like 'EverQuest,' but no pictures" -- had methods of coupling. "There are lockets that tell you when your other person is logged on, and wedding rings that glow when the other person is logged on," Davison says. "Virtual worlds have always had marriage," Anderson says, "whether it's people staging an event in a town, or whether it's people meeting online and then getting married in real life." But over the years since "NannyMUD" and other similarly primitive games premiered, gaming demographics have changed. It still skews male, for example, but not as male as it did even six years ago, when Yee's study showed that only 16 percent of "EverQuest's" players were female. Some of the games that are currently popular, like "The Sims," actually skew female. "Gaming has become more socially acceptable. It's not just the bastion of geeks and nerds anymore," says Alexander Sliwinski, who writes about gay issues in video games for In Newsweekly and Joystiq. There isn't a whole lot of information about the gay gaming demographic, but Flynn De Marco, aka Fruit Brute, the editor of GayGamer.net, says his site gets between 12,000 and 15,000 visitors a day. De Marco and some friends started GayGamer.net last summer to provide a site where gay gamers could congregate and talk about their obsession. "Most game sites," De Marco says, "while they're great, they are definitely heavily slated towards the straight male: lots of pictures of scantily clad girls and lots of that kind of thing." And the atmosphere in a lot of these sites' forums, De Marco says, is "extremely homophobic." Last year the first survey on sexual orientation and video games was launched at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, directed and independently funded by former student Jason Rockwood. "My research suggests that gay gamers don't want games that are made for a 'gay audience,' Rockwood says. "They simply want to be able to play games that everyone else is playing, but they want to have inclusion; they want the option to have gay characters." Rockwood says some gay players were upset about his survey because they were afraid it would lead to companies targeting the gay demographic by creating ridiculously stereotyped characters. "Gay gamers do not want 'Queer Eye for the Straight Guy: The Video Game,'" Rockwood says. Rockwood posted the survey online and got responses from almost 10,000 people. Two-thirds of the respondents -- gay, straight and bisexual gamers -- said they felt the gaming community was either somewhat hostile or very hostile toward gay people. Eighty-eight percent of respondents said that during online game-play chat, other players had used the phrase, "That's so gay." Eighty-three percent had experienced other players using "gay" or "queer" in a derogatory fashion, and 52 percent felt that the depiction of homosexual characters in games was stereotypical. It was this kind of hostility that in January 2006 led Sara Andrews to create an LGBT-friendly guild within "World of Warcraft." She wanted a space where people, queer or not, could play without having to contend with insults like "fag" being tossed around by other players. But a moderator at Blizzard Entertainment, "WoW's" manufacturer, gave Andrews a warning, saying the guild violated the company's harassment policy by mentioning sexual orientation. Andrews fought back, gaining media attention and prompting others to write letters in support of the guild. Blizzard quickly issued Andrews an apology and said it would review its harassment policy. The new policy bans only language that refers to any aspect of sexual orientation "insultingly." Representatives for Blizzard didn't respond to a request for comment on the issue. Game players often improvise their own weddings in games that have no official "marriage" commands embedded in the game, and some of those unions, of course, have been same-sex. The first known game to deal with the issue of same-sex marriage head on, and officially allow it, was "Fallout 2," a role-playing game set in a post-apocalyptic America that was released in 1998. Timothy Cain, then a designer and producer with Interplay, the maker of the game, says the idea to allow players the option of a same-sex marriage was his. "A big part of the 'Fallout' series was that we wanted it to be as open-ended as possible," Cain says. "We had no way of knowing whether you were going to be a man or a woman, so we decided to write all the different dialogue combinations." Asked whether he was concerned that the core audience for role-playing games would be turned off by the possibility of a same-sex marriage within "Fallout 2," Cain was dismissive. "I've always kind of said I made the games for myself and didn't think too much of the audience," Cain said, "but even though the primary demographic is males, it's also young males, and I would like to think this isn't an issue for males in their 20s anymore." Cain says the same-sex marriage in "Fallout 2" didn't even receive much attention, and he's not surprised by that -- he thinks the option of a same-sex marriage is a natural thing in a role-playing game. He draws a distinction between role-playing games, which he thinks should be as open-ended as possible, and an adventure game, in which a character's actions are more carefully proscribed. "To me, it's not surprising that a role-playing game would do this," he says. "A role-playing game, you invent your character at the beginning, so you should get to determine what they do, and if we're going to put any romantic element in, we should cover all the bases." That's what Cain did when he moved to the now-defunct Troika Games, which he co-founded. He tells Salon that all three of the games Troika produced had some element of a same-sex relationship in them. Most notable was "The Temple of Elemental Evil," an adaptation of a 1980s "Dungeons & Dragons" game, which allowed players to marry a gay pirate named Bertram if they chose. That option did attract some attention, which Cain says he was surprised by, given that "Fallout 2" had already had the option. He adds that Wizards of the Coast, which owns the rights to "Dungeons & Dragons," had asked him to remove the option for same-sex marriage from the game, as they did other elements -- such as a brothel and alcohol -- that might keep the game from getting a T (Teen) rating. "I told [Wizards of the Coast] I'd remove [the same-sex marriage] if they gave me something in writing explaining their reasons for removing it," Cain says. "That one seemed so ambiguous as to why they wanted it removed, so I asked for clarification in writing." After that, Cain says, Wizards of the Coast dropped their request that the same-sex marriage be removed. However, despite its predecessors, and perhaps because of its wider reach, the game often credited with breaking down the barriers to same-sex relationships in gaming, is "The Sims." Originally released by Electronic Arts in 2000, the game allowed players to manage, with few restrictions, the day-to-day activities of one or more virtual characters. Included in that was the option for relationships, including same-sex relationships. "The Sims" became the best-selling PC game of all time, a feat widely attributed to its attraction for women, a largely underserved segment of the market that has exploded since "The Sims" debuted. Up to 60 percent of "Sims" players are female. When "The Sims 2" came out in 2004, it allowed characters to marry and again did not discriminate between heterosexual and homosexual marriage. "Players should be able to do whatever they want within their own game, and it's not our business to stop them," Rod Humble, head of the Sims Studio, says, explaining Electronic Arts' decision. "If you have two regular plastic dolls, you wouldn't expect someone to come along and tell you what positions you could and couldn't put them in. That's generally our philosophy." "Fable," released in 2004 by Lionhead Studios, also incorporates same-sex marriage. The designers never intended to create this feature, according to a 2006 interview in Gamasutra. "It was not so much a question of overt inclusion as a reluctance to remove something that occurred naturally in the course of creating our villagers' artificial intelligence," Dene Carter, "Fable's: creative director, told Gamasutra at the time. "Our villagers each had a simple concept of 'attraction to the hero.' We'd have had to write extra code to remove that in the case of same-sex interactions. This seemed like a ridiculous waste of time." "Second Life," the popular user-run virtual world, also allows gay marriage. Joyce Bettencourt, known in "Second Life" as Rhiannon Chatnoir, owns a cathedral within the game and performs marriage ceremonies there for all kinds of couples. Bettencourt says there isn't as much stigma online as in the real world. She met a lesbian couple within the game and found out months later that one of them was a man. "People can pick what they want to be, or even if they want to be human," Bettencourt says. Catherine Smith, the director of marketing for Linden Lab, which produces "Second Life," says the decision to allow players the option of same-sex marriage came out of the game's generally libertarian philosophy. "Environment and tools, that's what we provide," Smith says. "We're not legislating anything." The question of same-sex marriage within "Second Life" wasn't completely separated from the political realities of the outside world, however. Smith noted that the Linden Lab press release announcing the feature that allows players to marry proudly proclaimed, "Can't be married in real life? Try Second Life." Actually, other than that, the message from the makers of these games is nearly identical: They see their mission as providing space for users to create what is, in essence, their own reality. Within that mission, the question as a game is developed is not what users will be allowed to do but what they'll be stopped from doing. "I think for us the general message is, as a creativity tool, we've never forced any kind of relationship or marriage on any of our players," Humble says. "We just allowed it, and people who aren't interested in it would never think to do it." That philosophy is echoed by Rockstar Games, the controversial makers of such games as the "Grand Theft Auto" series and "Bully," which allows users to play the character of a teenage boy dropped into a boarding school gone wrong. Before it was even released, "Bully" was already the subject of much heated discussion; more fuel was added to that fire when users discovered last year that Rockstar had allowed gamers the option of same-sex kissing. Rodney Walker, a spokesman for Rockstar, says the Rockstar team thinks of their games not like films, with static storylines, but as worlds that allow players to make their own choices, and Rockstar tries to shut down as few of those choices as possible. "If you're planning to take a vacation to California, you don't say to yourself, 'Where am I not going?'" Walker says. "When people talk about what's allowed in a video game, it's not about permission, it's about experience ... The thing that's so exciting about video games, which is why we think the medium is so popular right now, is because ... you can have an actual individual experience." The difference for "The Lord of the Rings Online," according to Nik, is that for Turbine the idea was all about keeping Middle-earth, the world in which the story takes place, authentic. The team at Turbine is serious about staying true to the source material. Several Turbine employees can speak Elvish, Tolkien scholars have been hired as consultants, and Nik was even asked to do research on Middle-earth plants and minerals so that clothing colors in the game could correspond to available dyes. When fans complained on the message board about an erroneous squirrel color, Turbine promptly corrected the mistake. Turbine had released a screen shot of a forest scene featuring a gray squirrel, but Tolkien once wrote in a letter that he hated gray squirrels. Authenticity isn't Turbine's only concern, though, according to CEO Jeff Anderson. "We don't want to just create something that's truly authentic and no fun," Anderson says. "Our main goal is making a great game." In order to make something fun and build on the online relationship trend, Turbine's design team came up with a pedigree system whereby a player can offer to "adopt" another player. "Tom" can become "Tom son of Jonathan," in the spirit of Tolkien's original "Gimli son of Glóin" and "Aragorn son of Arathorn." The team had also originally planned to introduce a way for characters to marry other characters -- within certain guidelines. "The rule that we tried to follow across the board was: if there's an example of it in the book, the door is open to explore it," Nik says. "Very rarely will you see an elf and a human hook up, but it does happen; the door is open. Dwarves don't intermarry with hobbits; that door is shut ... Did two male hobbits ever hook up in the shire and have little hobbit civil unions? No. The door is shut." More than that, Nik says, it seemed as if same-sex marriage would simply not have fit with Tolkien's vision for the worlds he created. "Tolkien was a conservative Catholic," Nik says. "He went out drinking with C.S. Lewis every night, and the two of them had a worldview that was -- well, let's just say it clashes a little bit with the sensibilities of East Coast liberals who make up the largest population of Turbine." Brenda Brathwaite, a game designer and a professor at the Savannah College of Art and Design who wrote the book "Sex in Video Games," says she doesn't think a desire for authenticity gets Turbine completely off the hook for its decision. Brathwaite says a video game, by its nature, sacrifices some authenticity because of its interactivity. "Players are still creating their own experience," Brathwaite says. "In a video game, it's about abdicating authorship and letting a player explore a world." The concerns Brathwaite raises, not to mention the development philosophy of the other game developers, were raised internally at Turbine. When the "Lord of the Rings Online" design team released its patch notes to the entire development team, Nik says, the restrictions caused a shouting match in the office, and opposition to the decision to restrict in-game marriage came from some surprising quarters. Nik says there were a couple of conservative Christian people on the team who oppose gay marriage in real life but argued in favor of allowing same-sex marriage within the game. Their opposition grew out of that libertarian streak in game design. "They felt that we should be removing interaction barriers, just as a design philosophy," Nik says. Jeffrey Steefel, the game's executive producer, says he hasn't ruled out introducing marriage into the game at some point in the future. "I just couldn't figure out how to get it all done with all the other things we had to get finished," he says. "I think we're waiting to see how the players react." --- 3. A Woman's Brain Hit Harder by Alcohol Abuse 04.27.07, Forbes FRIDAY, April 27 (HealthDay News) -- Alcohol abuse chips away at intelligence more in women than in men, even when less alcohol is consumed over fewer years, new research suggests. Alcohol-related cognition problems affect drinkers' "visual working memory, spatial planning, problem solving and cognitive flexibility," said study corresponding author Barbara Flannery, a senior scientist at the research institute RTI International in Baltimore. But it's not only drinkers' professional lives that may flounder as a result of reduced cognition, Flannery said. Alcoholics may have difficulty behaving appropriately in social situations, she said. "Cognitive flexibility enables you to know how to communicate differently in a business environment than you would with your friends," she added. The study findings were based on a comparison of test results from male and female alcoholics and non-alcoholics from Russia. All alcoholic participants in the study were recruited at the Leningrad Regional Center of Addictions. The tests revealed that non-alcoholics trumped the alcoholics, who had been abstinent for three weeks, in a series of computerized tasks. The tasks evaluated the ability to match patterns in shapes, remember the locations of stimuli, and name colors when confronted with contradictory information. The female alcoholics fared significantly worse in most instances than the male alcoholics, a finding that prompted Flannery to call for a "gender-sensitive public awareness campaign that highlights these cognitive deficits." On average, the female alcoholics in the study had used alcohol for 10.6 years, compared to 14.8 years for the males. The study corroborated previous research that found female alcoholics scored lower than their male counterparts in tests that assessed working memory, visuospatial skills and psychomotor speed. Other studies have shown that female drinkers experience accelerated damage to the liver, heart and muscles, compared with male alcoholics, the researchers said. Flannery's study compared 24 female alcoholics, 78 male alcoholics and 68 male and female non-alcoholics. All were under age 40 to "avoid age effects of cognitive parameters," she said. Flannery acknowledged that the number of female alcoholics was small and a larger participant pool would be desirable for future research. The non-alcoholics were more educated, a factor that might have marginally affected the results, she said. The findings were published in the May issue of the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research. It's not known to what degree and at what period of sobriety alcoholics can recover cognitive impairments, said Flannery. But research on adolescent rats subjected to binge doses of alcohol at Duke University suggests the brain of the alcoholic teen is more adversely affected by memory loss than adult alcoholics. This indicates that teen girls who abuse alcohol may be most vulnerable to long-term cognitive loss. Dr. Matthew Torrington, a substance abuse specialist at UCLA and medical director of an addiction-treatment center in Santa Monica, Calif., said that while each patient is "biologically, psychologically and spiritually different," female alcoholics seem to experience a "tremendous amount of shame and stigma." "The higher percentage of body fat in females means alcohol is twice as toxic," he said, citing World Health Organization's guidelines that define at-risk females as those who consume at least seven drinks a week, and at-risk males as those who consume at least 14. --- 4. Sacrificial Wolfie from the May 14, 2007 issue of The Nation It's not the act itself, it's the hypocrisy. That's the line on Paul Wolfowitz, coming from editorial pages around the world. It's neither: not the act (disregarding the rules to get his girlfriend a pay raise) nor the hypocrisy (the fact that Wolfowitz's mission as World Bank president is fighting for "good governance"). First, let's dispense with the supposed hypocrisy problem. "Who wants to be lectured on corruption by someone telling them to 'do as I say, not as I do'?" asked one journalist. No one, of course. But that's a pretty good description of the game of one-way strip poker that is our global trade system, in which the United States and Europe--via the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization--tell the developing world, "You take down your trade barriers and we'll keep ours up." From farm subsidies to the Dubai Ports World scandal, hypocrisy is our economic order's guiding principle. Wolfowitz's only crime was taking his institution's international posture to heart. The fact that he has responded to the scandal by hiring a celebrity lawyer and shopping for a leadership "coach" is just more evidence that he has fully absorbed the World Bank way: When in doubt, blow the budget on overpriced consultants and call it aid. The more serious lie at the center of the controversy is the implication that the World Bank was an institution with impeccable ethical credentials--until, according to forty-two former Bank executives, its credibility was "fatally compromised" by Wolfowitz. (Many American liberals have seized on this fairy tale, addicted to the fleeting rush that comes from forcing neocons to resign.) The truth is that the bank's credibility was fatally compromised when it forced school fees on students in Ghana in exchange for a loan; when it demanded that Tanzania privatize its water system; when it made telecom privatization a condition of aid for Hurricane Mitch; when it demanded labor "flexibility" in the aftermath of the Asian tsunami in Sri Lanka; when it pushed for eliminating food subsidies in post-invasion Iraq. Ecuadoreans care little about Wolfowitz's girlfriend; more pressing is that in 2005, the Bank withheld a promised $100 million after the country dared to spend a portion of its oil revenues on health and education. Some antipoverty organization. But the area where the World Bank has the most tenuous claim to moral authority is in the fight against corruption. Almost everywhere that mass state pillage has taken place over the past four decades, the Bank and the IMF have been first on the scene of the crime. And no, they have not been looking the other way as the locals lined their pockets; they have been writing the ground rules for the theft and yelling, "Faster, please!"--a process known as rapid-fire shock therapy. Russia under the leadership of the recently departed Boris Yeltsin was a case in point. Beginning in 1990, the Bank led the charge for the former Soviet Union to impose immediately what it called "radical reform." When Mikhail Gorbachev refused to go along, Yeltsin stepped up. This bulldozer of a man would not let anything or anyone stand in the way of the Washington-authored program, including Russia's elected politicians. After he ordered army tanks to open fire on demonstrators in October 1993, killing hundreds and leaving the Parliament blackened by flames, the stage was set for the fire-sale privatizations of Russia's most precious state assets to the so-called oligarchs. Of course, the Bank was there. Of the democracy-free lawmaking frenzy that followed Yeltsin's coup, Charles Blitzer, the World Bank's chief economist on Russia, told the Wall Street Journal, "I've never had so much fun in my life." When Yeltsin left office, his family had become inexplicably wealthy, while several of his deputies were enmeshed in bribery scandals. These incidents were reported on in the West, as they always are, as unfortunate local embellishments on an otherwise ethical economic modernization project. In fact, corruption was embedded in the very idea of shock therapy. The whirlwind speed of change was crucial to overcoming the widespread rejection of the reforms, but it also meant that by definition there could be no oversight. Moreover, the payoffs for local officials were an indispensable incentive for Russia's apparatchiks to create the wide-open market Washington was demanding. The bottom line is that there is good reason that corruption has never been a high priority for the Bank and the IMF: Its officials understand that when enlisting politicians to advance an economic agenda guaranteed to win them furious enemies at home, there generally has to be a little in it for those politicians in bank accounts abroad. Russia is far from unique: From Chile's dictator Augusto Pinochet, who accumulated more than 125 bank accounts while building the first neoliberal state, to Argentine President Carlos Menem, who drove a bright red Ferrari Testarossa while he liquidated his country, to Iraq's "missing billions" today, there is, in every country, a class of ambitious, bloody-minded politicians who are willing to act as Western subcontractors. They will take a fee, and that fee is called corruption--the silent but ever-present partner in the crusade to privatize the developing world. The three main institutions at the heart of that crusade are in crisis--not because of the small hypocrisies but because of the big ones. The WTO cannot get back on track, the IMF is going broke, displaced by Venezuela and China. And now the Bank is going down. The Financial Times reports that when World Bank managers dispensed advice, "they were now laughed at." Perhaps we should all laugh at the Bank. What we should absolutely not do, however, is participate in the effort to cleanse the Bank's ruinous history by repeating the absurd narrative that the reputation of an otherwise laudable antipoverty organization has been sullied by one man. The Bank understandably wants to throw Wolfowitz overboard. I say, Let the ship go down with the captain. --- B Upcoming Conferences and Events 18th International Conference on the Reduction of Drug Related Harm – "Harm Reduction: Coming of Age"May 13, 2007 - May 17, 2007 Location: GROMADA Conference Centre, Warsaw, Poland More Info: http://www.harmreduction2007.org --- C Quote Abolition of a woman's right to abortion, when and if she wants it, amounts to compulsory maternity: a form of rape by the State. Edward Abbey --- D How To Help The Harm Reduction Project is able to provide services through the support of individuals such as yourself. Please help us make a difference and pledge your support today! PLEASE CLICK HERE TO DONATE or call 801-355-0234 ext 1# for more information. --- E About HRP The Harm Reduction Project works for the enhancement of services available to marginalized populations. HARM REDUCTION PROJECT | SALT LAKE CITY | TEL (801) 355.0234 FAX (801) 355.0291 | 235 West 100 South, Salt Lake City, Utah 84101 HARM REDUCTION PROJECT | DENVER | TEL (303) 572.7800 FAX (303) 572.7800 | 775 Lipan Street, Denver, Colorado 80204 www.harmredux.org