Serbian Mental Institutions

 

According to recent reports, Serbian mental institutions are being run inhumanely. Mental patients are not seen as important members of society and are extremely mistreated. There is no therapy in Serbian mental institutions, just medication. Children are tied to their cribs for years, most of them developing growth deficiencies. A twenty-one year old man was tied to his metal crib for eleven years, which makes him appear to be a weak young child. This is due to his lack of movement for most of his life. Some 17,200 children and adults receive this kind of torture in mental hospitals across Serbia. Many of the patients have spent their whole lives in the institutions. The worst part of it is, after the war in 1999, Serbia acquired foreign aid to help build these institutions. So these are clean, new buildings that are basically used as torture chambers.

 

This article has a lot of logos and pathos. Detailed descriptions of the environment enlighten us and horrify us. Serbia wishes to become part of the European Union, and as EU reviews these cases, they cannot help but deny this membership. The state of affairs in Serbian mental hospitals is enough to take away the country’s credibility. It will be long until the effects of these hospitals are overturned, and long before Serbia is inducted into the union. This is the kind of expository headline that nobody knew about until the information was made public. Not even the executive ruler of Serbia knew what lay behind the walls of all of these mental institutions. The information, or “logos” is enough to inspire a strong feeling of pathos in the audience.

A Vaccine Against Drug Addiction

A professor at the Scripps Research Institute has dedicated the better part of his life to an incredible project that many have not even imagined. For thirty-seven years Kim Janda has been working on a vaccine for drug addicts that might someday free a substance abuser from their drug of choice. This doctor calls the process “simplistically stupid,” because it works a lot like other vaccines: a small amount of the foreign substance is introduced into the blood stream, which causes antibodies to go after it. However, the molecules of substances like nicotine and meth-amphetamines are too small for the bloodstream to detect, so he attaches the substance to a “larger protein that acts as a platform.” The last part of the vaccine is called an “adjuvant,” which is a cocktail of chemicals designed to attract attention, making antibodies go after a substance that usually would pass unnoticed. In the end, the main purpose is to blunt the effects of the drug so that it doesn’t have the same effect. For instance, a coke user, after receiving the vaccine, might say that the coke they are doing is “dirty” or “not worth their money,” because it ceases to have the same effect.

However, the article did introduce a number of ethical problems that I need to address. For instance, the vaccine is supposed to be administered to those already suffering from drug addiction, but what if it were used as a preventative? If you were a kid about to be sent off to college, how would you respond to your parents deciding to get you a drug vaccine? Also, the platforms in the vaccine are detectable for up to three months after it is administered, but the drug itself only stays in the system for a few days. So, conceivably your work could test for those platforms to see if you are a recovering drug addict, and possibly not hire you. Another thing that the doctor touched lightly upon is that even if this is someday developed and it works, it is not necessarily a cure for addiction. People who are addicted will look for any kind of high, so who is to say that if one drug stops working for them, they won’t try another? Addiction may end up being a much more complicated puzzle than we thought, and deadening the effects of one drug may not help.