wotiwrote

Richard Dawkins has a gloriously barbed piece in this month's Prospect about the way governments are backing the spread of gerin oil, its addictive qualities, and its generally damaging impact on the life of addicts and those around them.

Gerin oil addiction can drive previously sane individuals to run away from a normally fulfilled human life and retreat to closed communities from which all but confirmed addicts are excluded.

Dawkins believes that gerin oil was a primary cause of the attacks in the WTC:

The four doomed flights of 11th September were, in a very real sense, Gerin oil trips: all 19 of the hijackers were high on the drug at the time.

He reserves his greatest anger for those governments that

don't just turn a blind eye to the trade, they grant it tax-exempt status. Worse, they subsidise schools with the specific intention of getting children hooked.

Dawkins relates how he was motivated to write the article in response to the smile of the Bali bomber on hearing he was to be executed by firing squad.

Here we have the archetypal mainliner, doped up with hard, unrefined, unadulterated, high-octane Gerin oil.

Dawkin thinks we need protecting from people like this but that

the problem would not arise in the first place if children were protected from becoming hooked on a drug with such a bad prognosis for their adult minds.

The issue of state-sponsored addiction is one that has great resonance for me at the moment. My son is in the final year of primary school. The closest state school is in walking distance on a continuation of the road on which we live. My son will not be able to go there, however, because we do not attend church of any sort. In the school's prospectus they bang on about Christian morality as the rock on which they base the school's ethos. There is nothing in this morality or code of behaviour that would be alien to any human with a sense of his or her place in the world, of course, and to label it specifically Christian is both bizarre and frighteningly arrogant. For all this emphasis on morals the school is reputed to have a bad problem with bullying and a normal occurrence of issues relating to drugs other than gerin oil.