Now I feed myself with most delicious poison. – William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra (I,v)
It’s fascinating how different themes which appear in various columns will pop back up later in combination with other themes. I especially notice it when I’m doing an update column; though each story usually hearkens back to one column most clearly, some items give me several options and this one in particular gave me four. Like “A Tale That Grew in the Telling” (April 2nd) it demonstrates how myths grow by distortion and exaggeration of statistics; like “The Eye of the Beholder” (May 11th) it provides an example of behaviors which, even if they disgust us, are none of our business; like “Because We Say So” (June 8th) it provides an example of cultural imperialism on the Indian subcontinent, and like “New Reviews for June” (June 18th) it looks at the difficult lives of Bangladeshi prostitutes. These four major threads weave together with several minor ones to produce something new, yet familiar; the story actually appeared last summer, but I discovered it only recently and haven’t seen the issue discussed elsewhere:
The use of…Oradexon, a steroid commonly used to make cows fatter, is so widespread amongst prostitutes in Bangladesh that the UK charity, ActionAid reports approximately 90% of the country’s commercial sex workers are addicted to the drug. Why is a steroid meant for cows so popular amongst prostitutes in Bangladesh? Hundreds of thousands of girls, some as young as 9-14 years of age, are sold into the commercial sex trade business every year. Oradexon is favored by many brothel madams as a way to mask the real age of their younger child prostitutes while making their figures more voluptuous. But the drug also conveniently serves as a cheaper substitute for food. In a country as impoverished and with as high malnutrition rates as Bangladesh, one can get 100 Oradexon pills for less than a $1.
Despite the popularity of the drug, the majority of the country’s estimated 200,000 sex workers remain unaware of the dangerous side-effects of the drug which include heart disease, kidney failure, osteoporosis and heart failure. The drug is also highly addictive and has intense withdrawal symptoms such as skin rashes and chronic migraines. According to AFP sex workers in Bangladesh are owned by brothel madams and have to repay their “purchase cost.” Sex workers themselves want to use Oradexon because the plumper they are, the more clients they get, and the closer they become to buying their freedom. “The drug is a sex worker’s only ticket to early freedom as it makes her attractive and helps her to get as many clients as possible,” Rokeya, a former sex worker told AFP.
So how can we get the drug off the market and out of the reach of these madams and their prostitutes?…AFP reports that despite legally needing a prescription for the drug, it is readily available in the teashops that populate Bangladeshi cities, and is often even cheaper than a cup of tea. In demand with madams, prostitutes and clients? Looks like the presence of Oradexon in the commercial sex scene of Bangladesh will not be wiped out anytime soon.
OK, let’s get this part out of the way so we can get on to my main point: this story literally made me feel weak. Drug addiction disgusts me and governments which allow parents to sell their children into slavery disgust me even more. But anyone who thinks that life isn’t cheap, dirty and dangerous for the vast majority of people in Bangladesh is living in a fantasy world. Instead of putting pressure on the government to outlaw slavery, clean up its licensing procedure and carry out periodic inspections for underage girls, Western “rescuers” blame prostitution for this evil system, which is rather like trying to dig up a huge tree by its roots instead of just sawing off the diseased branches. The cultures of the Indian subcontinent do not view prostitution in the same way as moralistic Westerners do, and the trade is as reasonable a choice for the poverty-stricken women there as it is for many women anywhere else.
Which brings us to the issue of agency; rational adult humans must be free to make their own choices, even if others don’t like what they choose. The problem here isn’t that people are using a dangerous drug; people do that all over the world, every day, for far less pressing reasons than survival and the possibility of freedom. The problem here is that some people, many of them minors, are being compelled to take the drug by others. It’s the compulsion that’s the issue, not the drug itself, yet paternalistic Westerners want to compel them in a different way; the author asks, “how can we get the drug off the market and out of the reach of these madams and their prostitutes?” as though “we” have the right to make the decision for them, like a parent taking a dangerous object away from a small child. Obviously, we oh-so-evolved Westerners know so much more about how to handle drug abuse than these poor, stupid brown folks; perhaps the author would advocate widespread no-knock raids, shooting old people and dogs and locking up a large percentage of the Bangladeshi population? Rational adults, even impoverished ones in the Third World, have the right to make their own decisions, even if others (myself included) think those decisions are unwise.
But it’s the rare opportunity to see a tall tale in the process of growth which is the most interesting aspect of the story. The author writes that “Hundreds of thousands of girls…are sold into the commercial sex trade business every year,” even though she also states that the total prostitute population of Bangladesh is only 200,000 (0.24% of the female population, which seems much too low an estimate for an impoverished country). Furthermore, one of the articles she links says that there are only 17 licensed brothels in Bangladesh, and the other says that the largest of these has 900 workers. Even if they were all nearly that large, the total number of brothel girls comes to about 15,000, which is to say 7.5% of the estimated total; presumably the rest are streetwalkers, workers in unlicensed brothels and independent prostitutes working from home, but neither this story nor those to which it links tells us anything about them except for the claim made by one of the sources that 90% of them are addicted to this horrible steroid. The other source, however, says that it’s 90% of brothel workers who are addicted to it, which seems much more believable than 90% of all prostitutes, especially considering that ActionAid, the charity quoted in the story, can’t tell us anything else about them. In other words, none of these numbers seem trustworthy; there is no correlation between them and they more closely resemble wild guesses than demographic estimates. How, then, are we to know that this “90%” figure is any more reliable than the claim that “hundreds of thousands of girls each year” enter an industry whose total size is supposedly only 200,000?
It’s tragic that so many people in this world live in poverty, that human beings have to make desperate choices that those more fortunate than they cannot even comprehend, and that those who hold power in some countries cannot be bothered to enforce laws designed to protect the vulnerable, while governments of other countries spend billions enforcing laws designed to subjugate the innocent. But none of these problems can be solved by lying, exaggerating and distorting the truth, nor by outsiders infantilizing adults and reducing them to chattel with no more control over their own lives than the adolescent brothel-slaves of Bangladesh.
Another excellent column, Maggie! I’m always skeptical of claims made about the supposed ill effects of drugs that people choose to consume without doctor supervision. However, oradexon (generic name dexamethasone) does appear to have some nasty side effects, though it’s not clear from what I’ve read what fraction of people experience any or all of them.
This knee-jerk reaction of government types (and their many sycophants), that anything that could be bad should be banned, has got to be checked before we wake up one morning and find that everything is either mandatory or forbidden. We’re already well down that road and it’s not clear to me whether “progress” will be checked before we reach the end. People like you, Maggie, at least put another view in front of the public, should anybody be looking for it.
Thanks, JdL! Though I have no doubt that Oradexon causes serious problems (because steroids are notorious for that), some people claim that many of the foods I eat are almost as bad. Who sets the bar? Who decides how “dangerous” is too dangerous? We’ve got lunatics out there trying to ban everything from meat to bean sprouts, and it’s impossible to buy anything nowadays which isn’t plastered with ridiculous warnings about how it can kill somebody. It’s long past time for the government to wash its hands of the whole thing, say “you’re on your own” and be done with it, but that won’t happen because of A) the immense pleasure busybodies derive from telling others what to do, and B) the fact that people have ceded control over their health to government bureaucracies in many countries and are trying to do so in the United States as well. Once the government is paying the bills, it has the right to forbid its dependents from doing anything which might potentially raise the costs. What amazes me is that though I first predicted this eminently-predictable governmental behavior in a paper I wrote on socialized medicine back in 1990, everyone else seems surprised every time a government abridges personal freedom under the excuse of controlling rising health care costs.
Once the government is paying the bills, it has the right to forbid its dependents from doing anything which might potentially raise the costs.
Yes, and that’s one of the main reasons why I want the government to butt OUT of “paying” for anything I need to consume. I put the word in quotes because, in the end, there’s no entity called “government” that creates wealth to distribute; it’s all stolen money. Steal our money, then dole little bits of it (after at least half is consumed by the thugs who stole it, to pay for their unproductive lives) back to the people it was stolen from, along with ridiculous mandates and prohibitions. What a deal! That anybody puts up with this nonsense is a source of constant amazement to me.
“and it’s impossible to buy anything nowadays which isn’t plastered with ridiculous warnings about how it can kill somebody”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1534504/No-dragons-were-used-in-making-these-sausages.html
Quote from the arcticle
Powys council said: “The product Welsh Dragon Sausage was not sufficiently precise to inform a purchaser of the true nature of the food.
“I don’t think anyone would imagine that dragon meat was being used but we would not want vegetarians to buy the sausages believing they were meat-free.”
What???
No-one on the Powys council got the Welsh-Dragon connection???
Come on! Y Ddraig Goch!
Come now, Jason, that would require critical thought, which is not the strong suit of a bureaucrat. And nanny-state bureaucrats in particular are paid to assume that everyone else is even stupider and less capable of critical thinking than they are.
The part that boggles my mind is that they presume vegetarians are so impenetrably dense that they don’t know that sausages contain meat, when in actuality most people with unusual dietary preferences tend to be obsessive about reading ingredient labels.
That’s like banning the name “Bald Eagle Sausages” because they don’t contain bald eagles or “Uncle Sam Meats” because it doesn’t contain meat from Uncle Sam. It’s an insult to the Welsh nation.
I have a friend who is vegetarian and she collects lists of products that are vegetarian… and we like to point out when things aren’t vegetarian… after she takes a bite. >:-)
I’m lactose intolerant myself and I’m always checking labels for dairy-based ingredients, but I do like it when milk is bolded in the ingredient list or there’s a label that lists common allergens in the package.
Oh, and you can find Welsh Dragon Pork Sausage here.
Oradexon, a brand name of the drug dexamethasone (as JdL has pointed out), has legitimate medical uses. I hope that the very real cases of abuse (by which I mean abuse of people) don’t get this useful molecule banned. This sort of thing has happened before {insert my standard rant about LSD and MDMA}.
And it will happen again, and again, and again until people stop allowing armed busybodies to dictate what they can see, hear, consume, do with their own bodies and even think.
+1.
It is always sad to see that because their COULD be a bad side effect, it is prohibited from use by all. The government takes so much from us, all I am asking to keep is my personal being. My own body. Let me decide what to do with it, and what to consume with it. IMHO, once you educate someone, you must allow them to choose.
I’ll add my voice to your rant on LSD and MDMA. I’ve tried them both, and didn’t care for MDMA (ecstasy), but of course would not claim, “I don’t like it, so it should be BANNED.” LSD I tried just once many years ago. What a trip! I’ll do it again if I can ever get my hands on some.
@jdl… just pointing out MDMA is not always ecstasy. Ecstasy often has adulterants mixed in that are not found in MDMA or what they refer to as “pure Molly”.
This is true. Some of the so-called “ecstasy” out there has no 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine at all. But just as with prostitution, this is because of the illegality. After all, it’s not like you can call the cops on somebody who sells you bad e.
Ecstasy and acid are both molecules I’m interested in. Someday I will try them. May even candyflip. Fortunately, M.A.P.S. is doing some research into therapeutic use.
Didn’t know that. I think what you’re saying is that what’s sold as ecstasy isn’t always MDMA. *sigh*. Thanks to the criminalization of making one’s own decisions about what to put into one’s own body, the market for such substances is fraught with fraud, which can’t be reported to authorities because to do so would be to invite arrest.
In a way it’s worse than the criminalization of prostitution (Maggie, please don’t take offense! 😉 ) because with prostitution, the “product” is pretty clearly genuine Girl, but with drugs, that white powder could be 100% baby laxative.
No offense taken, JdL, though I might point out that the criminalization of prostitution does allow thieves, extortionists, blackmailers and other shady types to pass themselves off as honest whores.
One would think… 🙂
Let the buyer beware… 😉
“It’s tragic that so many people in this world live in poverty, that human beings have to make desperate choices that those more fortunate than they cannot even comprehend…”
Dead solid perfect. I have a lot of blogs under a “human rights” section of google reader but it is only on a couple of them that I read (as opposed to skim) every post. “The Honest Courtesan” is one of them.
I’m very flattered, Waffle; I’ll do my best to keep deserving the high opinion you and my other readers have of me. 🙂
Very well stated, Maggie. Clearly the government needs to do a better job educating this population about the dangrs of this drug.
One thing confuses me. Steroids, such as Prednisone, do make you gain water weight. This makes the skin puffy and very easy to indent, which must seem weird to most people. At the same time the skin becomes pale and over time becomes paper thin. Even if the drug enlarges their breasts, this still wouldn’t make them attractive.
Maybe they work in total darkness.
I suspect this one must be different, since it’s used to fatten cows and mere water weight wouldn’t be desirable in beef cattle.
Fair or even pale skin has been considered attractive in the subcontinent for ages. Just like white people try not to look literally white by getting a tan, people in India, Pakistan & Bangladesh try to avoid the sun as much as possible in order not to get tanned and not literally look brown. So it makes your boobs bigger AND your skin lighter? That’s a two for one deal! Get it ASAP!
Personally I don’t see the point as long as your skin is clear & you’ve got good features, but I will admit that a lot of people (both white & brown) look prettier just because they’re fair. Club those same features with darker skin and you’ve got a buffalo (not that buffaloes aren’t pretty but ya know)