TresSugar

What's Too Much? Are Safety Kits For Drug Users Worth It?

CitizenSugar — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 13:00:26 -0700

The back page of New York magazine every week is the Artifact feature, where they archive a tidbit of the city - this week was an annotated picture of the kit given by the city to drug users to ensure the safe usage of their substance of choice. I was more than surprised by its. . . thoroughness? I mean I have hobbies, but no government agency has ever given me a kit that contains not only every thing I need to accomplish said extracurricular - down to a nine-step info card of how to do so, but that's just me.

I honestly don't know where to stand on this conundrum, but I have some questions:

If someone is a habitual drug user, what are the chances that they will actually use all of these items as they're intended? The kit contains 10 different doodads, including capsules of sterilized water for mixing the drugs (see, I had no idea this was necessary) itsy-bitsy cotton balls to trap dirt and debris from getting in the syringe, a bottle of bleach, and an empty bottle to use to clean the needles in. Oh, and the needles come from a whole different location. Will the complexity stop these goods from actually getting put to use?
At what point is the line between encouraging drug use by making it so much safer, easier, and government-sanctioned? If drug users aren't exposed as easily to diseases and live longer as addicts, what kind of future societal health problem could we be creating?

I'm just getting started - we haven't even considered money yet. To see the rest, read more.

Then there's the question of harm reduction. Is it more harmful to not provide clean paraphernalia and have drug users potentially spreading more deadly diseases? If drug addicts have to come in to exchange needles, is it a valuable opportunity to also give out education and condoms, aiding the cause even further?
And then there's the money. Preventing people from contracting HIV does save public health money. According to the Lancet if needle exchange had been implemented in early 1997, by 2000, 11,000 fewer HIV infections would have occurred saving over $600 million. But then there's the reason this kit was featured this week: New York's $300 million budget cuts are impinging on the centers that distribute them. Do you spend money to save money?

Is giving out kits like this the answer? How much support is too much? Where do you stand?

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DearSugar Needs Your Help: Is It Bad to Date Someone Who Was a Drug Addict?

DearSugar — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 09:00:00 -0800

DearSugar and Am I Being Naive? Nikki need your help. She likes this guy but is worried about his drug-abusing past. Should she let this affect her decision to date him?

Dear Sugar,

I have a bit of a dilemma. I'm 21 and going to college in Pennsylvania. I met this great guy online through a close friend of mine. We chatted online and totally clicked, and he said he would love to meet me in the flesh so we can get to know each other better. I'm not so worried about the meeting part, but I am concerned with who he was in the past. I'm not perfect and have definitely made my mistakes - who hasn't, right? - but he was diagnosed with bipolar type II disorder and is a recovering drug addict. He's used heroin but has been sober and clean for more than eight months. Right now, he's living at home, working as a bus boy, and attending community college. Is it bad idea to date someone with such a crazy past? One of my friends says that I'm better than that, and why should an ambitious college girl date an ex heroin junkie? I do like him, and I don't want to be judgmental, but I don't know if it would be a bad idea to date him or not. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

-Am I Being Naive? Nikki

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No Re-Gifting Here!

GiggleSugar — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 07:02:00 -0800

This is a little post-season Christmas humor. I love that even though grandma gets this guy drugs, she still doesn't get it right. Grandmas are always so unhip!

Chick Lit Comes in All Different Sizes

TresSugar — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 06:00:12 -0800

As far as I knew, literary characters already came in all different shapes and sizes, but apparently there's a "publishing phenomenon" sweeping America like a fad diet: curvy chick lit characters who fully accept their weight.

The UK Guardian explains that average-sized women want to relate to the heroines they read about - and they don't want the stories to be all about dieting. Titles that fit under the "big chit lit" umbrella include The Wife's Tale, a book about a woman who turns her life around (not by losing weight!) after her universe shrunk "to a well-worn path from the bedroom to the refrigerator," and Last-Minute Proposal, the story of cake-baker Tilly and the man who loves her cozy curves.

Do you think books like these will help women love their bodies more? (And if you're looking for books of any genre to add to your reading list, check out our list of November must reads.)

British Woman Receives Life Sentence For Smuggling Heroin

TresSugar — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 10:05:31 -0700

Samantha Orobator's saga continues. Orobator, a 20-year-old British woman arrested in Laos for smuggling heroin and tried in a country where drug smuggling is punishable by death, has just been sentenced to life in prison.

Officials in London and the Laotian capital of Vientiane agreed to a prisoner transfer last month, but it won’t take place, according to a representative, until the sentence is finalized with no appeals. Human rights lawyers and British officials worked on Orobator's behalf, which must have paid off because the amount she was carrying would otherwise have gotten her the death penalty.

Orobator got pregnant in prison but denies that she was raped. Her baby is due in September, and although she evaded death and will hopefully be in a British prison soon, what a tragic fate for such a young woman and her child.

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Teen Quits High School Rather Than Stop Cross-Dressing

TresSugar — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 11:00:00 -0700

16-year-old Jonathan Escobar of Kennesaw, GA, was told by his high school to dress "more manly," so the teen who expressed himself by donning wigs and wearing makeup decided to drop out rather than put up with the dictates.

I think Jonathan looks like an eccentric Hitchcock heroine, and I don't see how this is any different from a teen dressing up goth or emo. (Would they get away with telling a butch girl to dress more feminine?) What do you think about the school's claim that he was causing a commotion with his looks - are they being too conservative about gender?

Uncovered: Good Books Can Have Bad Covers

TresSugar — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 04:00:00 -0700

And, bad books can have bad covers, as Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan, the authors of Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart B*tches' Guide to Romance Novels know too well. After years of rating romance novels on their blog Smart B*tches, Trashy Books, they understand all the embossing in the world can't make up for a bad romance.

Today's the last installment of our five-part series with Candy and Sarah. We asked them if there is any correlation between cover cheesiness and book quality, and got book recommendations for the Summer.

I was looking through books you rated Fs, and found the Gold Plated Garbage Truck. Looking at the cover, what were you expecting?

Sarah: One thing I've learned about romances is that the authors are not ever in control of their covers. Often they get no say and the cover is miles away from the content - bringing new meaning to, "No, really, we mean it - don't ever judge a book by its cover." Especially a romance novel.

One of the most evocative and powerful romances is Flowers from the Storm by Laura Kinsale, and the original cover has Fabio standing in a windstorm, holding out a handful of wildflowers with a truly bizarre expression on his face. Another book I enjoyed featured the biggest mullet I've ever seen coupled with a woman whose hair was so impossibly curly, I thought electroshock therapy was part of the plot.

With Gold Plated Garbage Truck, I figured there might be a crazy cover hiding a funny or silly plot, but, unfortunately, I was wrong.

Candy: You know, I've learned not to rely on romance covers to provide any kind of rubric of quality. At all. You know how you can surf the web, reading content, and somebody comments on something they see on the page you're on, and you're all "Whut?" and then you realize they're talking about the sidebar ads, which you have completely tuned out? Yeah. It's that way for me. I buy romance novels despite their covers, and I generally tune out the specifics of the covers. That said, the Gold-Plated Garbage Truck was a bit harder to ignore, because the self-identification and self-typing are too aggressive (another example would be Indian romances of a certain sort - usually ones involving savage brown men finding ever-loving bliss and fulfillment in some white chick's magic hoo-hoo). Seeing that book, I would've expected a book about a buncha losers, and going by Sarah's review, that's pretty much what it was.

For someone who wants to read a romance novel but is overwhelmed by the untamable options, where should she begin? To see their suggestions, read more.

If you like historical fiction, Loretta Chase's Lord of Scoundrels is incredible and has been held responsible for allowing even the most determined romance snob to rethink her position.

If you like funny contemporary books with incredible dialogue, Jennifer Crusie's Bet Me features a brave and authentic heroine and total hilarity.

If you like stories with paranormal elements, mythology and fierce intelligent women, look to the Norse mythology at work in Kresley Cole's Immortals After Dark series, especially No Rest For the Wicked. Or, Kelley Armstrong's Bitten, which is about a lone female werewolf living in hiding in Toronto.

Pregnant British Woman Could Face Laos Death Penalty

TresSugar — Mon, 04 May 2009 15:00:00 -0700

Another reminder that carrying drugs to countries with draconian anti-trafficking laws is extremely dangerous: a Nigerian-born woman from London arrested for carrying heroin may face death by firing squad in Vientiane, Laos.

Samantha Orobator, 20, was arrested in August for carrying 1.1 pounds of heroin in the Laotian capital. Anna Morris, a lawyer for Reprieve, a group that uses the law to enforce human rights for prisoners, told CNN that "For that amount of heroin the sentence is normally the death penalty."

On top of her other woes, Orobator became pregnant in prison, and her lawyers worry that she may have been raped there. There is no British embassy in Laos, but the British Foreign Office Minister Bill Rammell said that Laos authorities are aware that the British government is opposed to the death penalty and have dispatched British Embassy officials and the British Ambassador to visit her.

Orobator's trial begins this week.

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Smart B*tches, Trashy Books Defend the Romance Novel

TresSugar — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 02:00:00 -0700

Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan have helped romance readers discern the good smut from the bad for years with their blog Smart B*tches, Trashy Books. And now with their book Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart Bitches’ Guide to Romance Novels, they offer a guide through the heady world of the $5.99 novel and defend it with wit and intelligence. First they told us who really reads these things, and today we ask why romance novels deserve respect and what they tell us about society, and Candy and Sarah make the genre sound like the college course we all missed out on!

What do romance novels tell us about women, relationships, and society? Why do they deserve more respect?

Sarah: Romances are a billion dollar industry of women writers working to produce narrative fiction for an audience largely comprised of women. No, nothing feminist or subversive about that at all. The industry and the genre are long overdue for critical attention, especially because the whole of the genre's history parallel major shifts in the social and political status of women in the US. Romance novels represent an anthropological history of women through fictional narrative, exploring professional status, sexual agency, self-empowerment, self-actualization, and achievement of autonomy. I think that's the part that surprises new readers the most - the heroine always wins. To see Candy's answer, read more.

Candy: I think more than any other genre, romance novels are about finding emotional stability at the family level and nurturing hope. It's part of why they're so appealing, and why they've been selling like gangbusters in this economic downturn. But I really hesitate to make any kind of generalization about the overall message of romance, because the authors are every bit as diverse as the readers, and consequently, the books run the cultural gamut, from espousing fundamental Christianity to displaying a deep suspicion of religion, from endorsing authority to urging the readers to question it, from displaying a deep-seated (and oftentimes largely unconscious) homophobia to centering around gay love stories.

Romance novels deserve more respect because they're the whipping boys for no goddamn reason that I can see other than a societal fear of and disdain for squishy emotions. They're no better and no worse than any other genre out there, but there's this incredibly strong stigma attached. In many ways, I think my desire to see romance stop being the Rodney Dangerfield of publishing has more to do with my desire for the deeply-buried societal disdain for femininity to go away and stop wrecking our sh*t already. Romance authors are still, by and large, seen as a "damn mob of scribbling women," though they're a much bigger mob now than poor Hawthorne could've dreamt of in his philosophy.

I don't necessarily agree with Sarah - that romances as a billion-dollar industry written by and for women are feminist and subversive - because a lot of what's out there is conservative. I hesitate to say that a lot of them reinforce or are supportive of the dominant paradigm and of patriarchy, because honestly, that's the cultural medium we inhabit, and it's difficult, if not outright impossible, to step out of it completely while we're still in it. Patriarchy stll informs the fabric of our experiences, and that includes the fiction we read and write.
Ultimately, market forces are shaped by society at large, which means that the romance market as a whole tends only to be as feminist or subversive as the society as a whole. That's not to say that there aren't many wonderfully subversive feminist romances, because there are. I'm just not convinced the genre as a whole is. Romance authors are still, by and large, seen as a "damn mob of scribbling women," though they're a much bigger mob now than poor Hawthorne could've dreamt of in his philosophy.

First Recipient of US Face Transplant Speaks

TresSugar — Wed, 06 May 2009 12:10:00 -0700

Connie Culp, the recipient of the first US almost-total face transplant spoke to the media for the first time.

The 46-year-old mother of two had the middle section of her face shot off by her husband in 2004. Surgeons in Cleveland, OH, replaced 80 percent of her face with that of a dead female donor in a 22-hour operation, and it seemed that her appearance before the media was in large part to thank the donor's family. The transplant is only the fourth to be carried out.

Because of her injuries, Culp had no bone support and was unable to eat or to breathe without a tube in her windpipe. Surgeons used donor tissue to replace her nose, mouth, lips and chin.

Experts say that face-transplant recipients may feel remorse, grief, and guilt toward the donor, but my first thoughts were about how radically Culp's husband's violence has altered her life. Our faces, for better or worse, are integral to how we're seen and treated in the world. This story reminds me of an autobiography Lucy Grealy wrote about having part of her jaw removed due to cancer. To get a sense of how wrenching her experience was, read more.

Diagnosed with a rare form of jaw cancer at age 9, Lucy Grealy spent the rest of her brief life dealing with reconstructive surgeries (a third of her jaw had to be removed) and a world which seemed to privilege physical beauty above all.

In Autobiography of a Face, Grealy, who went on to attend Sarah Lawrence College and discover a love of poetry (apparent in this lyrical memoir), explores what it meant to have an unideal face in such a world. Although she seemed to come to some kind of peace with her situation, after her final reconstructive surgery, she became addicted to OxyContin, and eventually heroin, and died of a presumed accidental overdose in 2002.

Our best wishes to the brave Connie Culp. With the love of her two kids and family, and her sense of humor - she joked with reporters, "Here I am, five years later . . . I got me my nose" - she's got a new lease on life.

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