Is 'Gerin oil', a powerful, highly addictive drug, the root of all evil???

[krsna]

A professor blames this drug for history's major atrocities... clever readers will spot the anagram

 

By Steve Bloomfield

 

Published: 25 September 2005

 

It is a powerful, highly addictive drug openly peddled on street corners and in purpose-made buildings across the country. Suicide bombers get high on it and governments encourage its use. It can be hallucinogenic, destroys lives and, in its strongest doses, start wars.

 

In an article in this month's respected Prospect magazine, Professor Richard Dawkins, one of Britain's leading scientists, paints an apocalyptic vision of a world addicted to Gerin oil - a drug which works its way into the central nervous system and can cause "dangerous delusions" if used regularly.

 

Professor Dawkins, who was voted Britain's top public intellectual last year, blames Gerin oil for most of the major atrocities in history, from the Salem witch-hunts to the attacks on 11 September.

 

He also accuses governments of subsidising schools which have "the specific intention of getting children hooked". The drug does not feature on the Home Office's list of banned substances and is, Professor Dawkins claims, freely available without prescription.

 

Drug experts have never heard of Gerin oil, nor its scientific moniker, geriniol. And nor should they. Because there is one fact Professor Dawkins fails to mention: no such drug exists. The editor of Prospect magazine, David Goodhart, admitted yesterday that Gerin oil is actually an anagram for religion - something Professor Dawkins, Britain's most well-known atheist, has long railed against.

 

But Mr Goodhart revealed that he himself was confused by Professor Dawkins' anagram. "He mentioned that there was some kind of anagram when he sent the piece, but I was too thick to get it to begin with," Mr Goodhart said. "Driving in my car the next day it suddenly came to me - 'he's a militant atheist, it must be religion'.

 

"It has already generated a lively debate. We have had lots of letters on it - quite a few have been from people who feel religion has a legitimate place in the world." One letter writer has turned the tables on Professor Dawkins, referring to him as "Dr Dick Rainwash".

 

In his article, Professor Dawkins said his inspiration for writing about the "drug" was the reaction of the Bali bomber, Amrozi bin Nurhasyim, on hearing he was to be put to death. "This beatific smile, looking forward with unalloyed pleasure to the firing squad, is the smile of a junkie," wrote Dawkins. "Here we have the archetypal mainliner, doped up with hard, unrefined, unadulterated, high-octane Gerin oil."

 

The article is reminiscent of Chris Morris's satirical Channel 4 programme, Brass Eye, which once convinced politicians and celebrities that a dangerous new drug, "cake", was about to hit Britain. Tory MP, David Amess, was so taken in he asked a question about cake in the House of Commons.

 

Professor Dawkins - who has written many books on evolution and science, including, most famously, The Selfish Gene - is no stranger to attacks on religion. After the tsunami which hit the Indian Ocean on Boxing Day killed some 300,000 people, Professor Dawkins argued that if there is a God, "he is a terrorist". He pointed out that far more people died in the tragedy than were killed in the attacks on New York and Washington.

 

He first wrote about Gerin oil in an American secular humanism publication, Free Inquiry, in December 2003. At the end of the article, which appeared in this month's Prospect, the magazine dropped a hint to their readers, pointing out that Professor Dawkins is a "committed atheist". Mr Goodhart said he was confident his readers were clever enough to understand it.

[krsna]

Gerin Oil

by

 

Richard Dawkins

 

 

 

First published in Free Inquiry 24(1), 9-11, 2004.

 

 

 

Gerin Oil (or Geriniol, to give it its scientific name) is a powerful drug that acts directly on the central nervous system to produce a range of symptoms, often of an antisocial or self-damaging nature. It can permanently modify the child brain to produce adult disorders, including dangerous delusions that are hard to treat. The four doomed flights of September 11, 2001, were Gerin Oil trips: all nineteen of the hijackers were high on the drug at the time. Historically, Geriniolism was responsible for atrocities such as the Salem witch hunts and the massacres of native South Americans by Conquistadores. Gerin Oil fuelled most of the wars of the European Middle Ages and, in more recent times, the carnage that attended the partitioning of the Indian subcontinent and of Ireland.

 

Gerin Oil intoxication can drive previously sane individuals to run away from a normally fulfilled human life and retreat to closed communities of confirmed addicts. These communities are usually limited to one sex only, and they vigorously, often obsessively, forbid sexual activity. Indeed, a tendency towards agonized sexual prohibition emerges as a drably recurring theme amid all the colorful variations of Gerin Oil symptomatology. Gerin Oil does not seem to reduce the libido per se, but it frequently leads to a preoccupation with reducing the sexual pleasure of others. A current example is the prurience with which many habitual "Oilers" condemn homosexuality.

 

As with other drugs, refined Gerin Oil in low doses is largely harmless, and can serve as a lubricant on social occasions such as marriages, funerals, and state ceremonies. Experts differ over whether such social tripping, though harmless in itself, is a risk factor for upgrading to harder and more addictive forms of the drug.

 

Medium doses of Gerin Oil, though not in themselves dangerous, can distort perceptions of reality. Beliefs that have no basis in fact are immunized, by the drug's direct effects on the nervous system, against evidence from the real world. Oilheads can be heard talking to thin air or muttering to themselves, apparently in the belief that private wishes so expressed will come true, even at the cost of other people's welfare and mild violation of the laws of physics. This autolocutory disorder is often accompanied by weird tics and hand gestures, manic stereoptypies such as rhythmic headnodding toward a wall, or Obsessive Compulsive Orientation Syndrome (OCOS: facing towards the east five times a day).

 

Gerin Oil in strong doses is hallucinogenic. Hardcore mainliners may hear voices in the head, or experience visual illusions that seem to the sufferers so real that they often succeed in persuading others of their realitiy. An individual who convincingly reports high-grade hallucinations may be venerated, and even followed as some kind of leader, by others who regard themselves as less fortunate. Such follower-pathology can long postdate the original leader's death, and may expand into bizarre psychedelia such as the cannibalistic fantasy of "drinking the blood and eating the flesh" of the leader.

 

Chronic abuse of Geriniol can lead to "bad trips", in which the user suffers terrifying delusions, including fears of being tortured, not in the real world but in a postmortem fantasy world. Bad trips of this kind are bound up with a morbid punishment-lore that is as characterstic of this drug as the obsessive fear of sexuality already noted. The punishment-culture fostered by Gerin Oil ranges from "smack" through "lash" to getting "stoned" (especiallly adulteresses and rape victims), and "demanifestation" (amputation of one hand), up to the sinister fantasy of allo-punishment or "cross-topping", the execution of one individual for the sins of others.

 

You might think that such a potentially dangerous and addictive drug would head the list of proscribed intoxicants, with exemplary sentences handed out for pushing it. But no, it is readily obtainable anywhere in the world and you don't even need a prescription. Professional traffickers are numerous, and organized in hierarchical cartels, openly trading on street corners and in purpose-made buildings. Some of these cartels are adept at fleecing poor people desperate to feed their habit. "Godfathers" occupy influential poisitions in high places, and they have the ear of royalty, of presidents and of prime ministers. Governments don't just turn a blind eye to the trade, they grant it tax-exempt status. Worse, they subsidize schools founded with the specific intention of getting children hooked.

 

I was prompted to write this article by the smiling face of a happy man in Bali. He was ecstatically greeting his death sentence for the brutal murder of large numbers of innocent holiday-makers whom he had never met, and against whom he bore no personal grudge. Some people in the court were shocked at his lack of remorse. Far from remorse, his response was one of obvious exhilaration. He punched the air , delirious with joy that he was to be "martyred", to use the jargon of his group of abusers. Make no mistake about it, this beatific smile, looking forward with unalloyed pleasure to the firming squad, is the smile of a junkie. Here we have the archetypal mainliner, doped up with hard, unrefined,unadulterated, high-octane Gerin Oil.

 

Whatever your view of the vengeance and deterrence theories of capital punishment, it should be obvious that his case is special. Martydom is a strange revenge against those who crave it, and, far from deterrring, it always recruits more martyrs than it kills. The important point is that the problem would not arise in the first place if children were protected from getting hooked on a drug with such a bad prognosis for their adult minds.