Who doesn’t like this guy? Fuck off.
In Saddam’s Shadow - Part One
Ten years after the US invasion of Iraq, we return to Baghdad to see how the city is doing. Our guide is Waleed Nesyif, the former lead singer of Acrassicauda. He’s returning home for the first time in eight years, and it’s sure to be a tearful reunion with his family.
In part one, VICE’s Suroosh Alvi hangs with a Baghdadi biker gang who fondly remember the days of Saddam’s rule, and we get a tour of a city that used to be covered nonstop in the American media, but now seems to be somewhat forgotten.
It’s not unusual that a drug has a bizarre and extremely damaging side effect, like stabbing a kind person in his sleep. Drugs have side effects. Some of them are super weird. The drug to cure Restless Leg Syndrome, for example, can contribute to a gambling addiction.
What baffles is that no one I’ve spoken to — as a professor in a college where experimental drug use runs rampant, as I travel the country speaking to young women, their teachers, and rape-crisis counseling staff members, as I consult other journalists who write on sexual assault — no one I have spoken to has heard of a link between flunitrazepam and the commission of violence.
This is where the dangers of the myth become clear. It is possible that we do not know what flunitrazepam does because we think we already know what it does. And while there might be folks who are better informed on the subject than we are, we tend not to value their knowledge base. Flunitrazepam’s criminalization in the U.S. means its distribution is largely limited to the black market. In effect, this relegates its use to the population who may have the most interest in incurring violence, and the least interest in acknowledging any means by which it does so. Under what conditions, besides an already bad roofie-ing scenario gone even worse, would the rest of us have opportunity to question what flunitrazepam really does?
