Illegal drugs, including LSD in the 1960s, heroin in the 1980s and Ecstasy in the 1980s and 1990s,
have long had a uniquely perturbing influence on the public realm, with the dangers and pleasures
inherent in their consumption splitting users and law makers into opposing camps. Mephedrone,
though, was completely legal. The new drug was, according to toxicologists, ‘two chemical tweaks
away from Ecstasy’. Those tweaks were deliberate, and were made to evade drug laws. Mephedrone
upended all prior hierarchies and caused huge confusion among many users who considered, wrongly,
that since it was legal, it was harmless.
Widely available and hugely popular, mephedrone was the first mass-market ‘downloadable’ drug,
in the sense that it was, uniquely for the mass market, originally only available online. It was like a
narcotic viral video, a digital diversion to be shared with the click of a mouse. In every sense, it was
a radically new game-changer. Mephedrone was the fulcrum, the tipping point that took a clandestine
internet drug scene and dropped it, gurning and wide-eyed, right into the high streets of the UK – and
then into the wider world. The swift and protocol-busting ban on the new drug in the UK did nothing
to eliminate it here or in the EU or the US; it simply handed the market to grateful gangsters who
added the drug to their repertoire, and prompted greater innovation in the chemical underground.
Fatima Al Qadiri; Desert Strike
Born in Senegal, Fatima Al Qadiri grew up in a futuristic yet already vintage Kuwait colonized by skyscrapers with lights ablaze round the clock, Japanese manga imagery and shoot ‘em up video games. This was the substrate, against the backdrop of the Gulf War, on which she has developed an advanced mixture of music borrowed and reinterpreted from different cultural contexts and her own unique imaginary. Babak Radboy, artist and creative director of Bidoun Magazine, as well as a long-time friend, met with her to talk about her influences and the way she manages to keep creative control over her original output.
Babak Radboy: Kuwait is so American.
Fatima Al Qadiri: Kuwait is definitely the most American country in the Arab world. Consider the obesity rate alone: after America we’re the number-two fattest country in the world, per capita. There are so many words in the language to describe fat children! Like, six, at least. It’s a real problem in Kuwait: a whole generation of obese children. Kuwait’s rate of consumption is similar to the U.S. but even more absurd.
BR: Kuwait is a crazy mix: a super-affluent country, yet basically a welfare state, though with a super neo-liberal consumer economy.
FQ: We consume vast amounts of everything. Instagram businesses are a big thing in Kuwait.
Read interview @ moussemag.it, hither/
Born in Senegal, Fatima Al Qadiri grew up in a futuristic yet already vintage Kuwait colonized by skyscrapers with lights ablaze round the clock, Japanese manga imagery and shoot ‘em up video games. This was the substrate, against the backdrop of the Gulf War, on which she has developed an advanced mixture of music borrowed and reinterpreted from different cultural contexts and her own unique imaginary. Babak Radboy, artist and creative director of Bidoun Magazine, as well as a long-time friend, met with her to talk about her influences and the way she manages to keep creative control over her original output.
Babak Radboy: Kuwait is so American.
Fatima Al Qadiri: Kuwait is definitely the most American country in the Arab world. Consider the obesity rate alone: after America we’re the number-two fattest country in the world, per capita. There are so many words in the language to describe fat children! Like, six, at least. It’s a real problem in Kuwait: a whole generation of obese children. Kuwait’s rate of consumption is similar to the U.S. but even more absurd.
BR: Kuwait is a crazy mix: a super-affluent country, yet basically a welfare state, though with a super neo-liberal consumer economy.
FQ: We consume vast amounts of everything. Instagram businesses are a big thing in Kuwait.
Read interview @ moussemag.it, hither/
2.0 x-box + research drugs e.g. (shamelessly edited from a much longer blow by metaphorical blow account found online)
10.45: MXE taken.
10.56: Extremities buzzing slightly. Can’t feel my toes.
11.01: Edges are beginning to seem more defined. I have a slight feeling of disassociation with my body. Slightly harder to write.
11.05: Start playing a game. My friend (N) comes onto xbox Live and we discuss playing co-operatively on something else later.
11.15: I switch to the suggested game and begin to play. I feel much more like I am IN the game.
11.29: I’m still here. N comes online and we attempt to set up a party. I find it difficult to speak, but tell him why. He is very unimpressed.
11.44: N leaves in disgust. I continue to spin around in circles and fire at random things.
11.48: Things ripple lazily around me, but apparently “I laugh at the thought of suppressing it with my iron will” (or so I said according to E).
12.15: Still here, but difficult to write.
13.51: The mouse is becoming very hard to move.
16.00: I have a shave, and look in the mirror to see my face looking much more goat-like than I remembered. No, more as if I have a connection with goats and their natural characteristics.
16.10: Leave for the station.
Read the rest of A Lazy Morning: An Experience with Methoxetamine (ID 95067) and other such human chronicles at Erowid Experience Vaults, hither.
