Ask Me Anything!

by | Sep 17, 2009


Have a question for a heroin addict, acne sufferer, or bank robber? Then head over to Reddit’s IaMa (“I am a…”) community, where this past week has seen some excellent Ask Me Anything threads.

Of course, these being the Internets, there’s no knowing whether felonius monk really spent five years in prison (mostly uneventful “if you carried yourself correctly”) for being a getaway driver (much less like being a rally driver than he’d hoped/expected), or whether bumpygirl truly has spots and scars covering 80% of her body. But that’s part of the fun.

And if he is a troll, smackjunkie12 has clearly done his research…

Of course I know about rectal administration, and it is my favourite way to take codeine, and also an enjoyable way to take oxycodone + acetaminophen formulations (such as Percocet) after a cold water extraction. I don’t think I’d use this route with heroin, though. It’s simply much too enjoyable to take it intravenously.

On topic for Global Dashboard is Hoo-rah’s kind offer: “I just got back from my 3rd deployment in Afghanistan. I lost count after I killed 15 human beings. AMA.” Hoo-rah’s mission was to stop Afghan farmers producing the heroin on which smackjunkie12 and his brethren are hooked – a job that is a far cry from traditional war fighting:

Nearly everyone I have killed has been someone who was trying to kill me during combat. I say nearly, because I do believe I may be responsible for a few civilian deaths, though it was never confirmed. We did a lot of raids and a lot of times shit got crazy really fast. The poppy farmers had a habit of keeping their family in the same place as their drugs, which sometimes lead to civilian deaths.

And would we be better off if we sent an army of doctors, engineers, etc? No. The main problem is the poppy farms. We were doing what needed to be done. However, Obama has recently changes tactics. He’s setting up programs to persuade farmers to grow other crops, which we should have been doing all along. As opposed to going in and burning them.

After the jump, Hoo-rah’s response to being asked for the funniest story from his deployment. Be warned, though, some of you may think it’s NSFW:

I was once in the middle of a firefight and had to shit so bad I thought I was going to die from that long before a bullet could ever take me out. So I slowly crawl my way over to a large boulder and attempt to take an emergency dump. It was the best/worst shit of my life.

Anyway, a few minutes later we actually find ourselves pretty outnumbered and we’re starting to fall back. Well all at once the enemy goes all out and starts hitting us with everything they’ve got. One of my best friends is sitting there beside me and before I know it he’s running towards the big rock to take cover… before I have a chance to say anything I hear him scream.

“Fuck man, are you hit!,” I scream at him. He looks up at me with a disgusted look and says, “I just landed in your shit man. Seriously, I didn’t sign up for this. Fuck you.”

So after about 30 more minutes the enemy stops and we back off some more. I finally get close to my friend and his entire upper body is completely covered in my shit. From that day on he always asked me if my previous location was “safe”.

Author

  • David Steven is a senior fellow at the UN Foundation and at New York University, where he founded the Global Partnership to End Violence against Children and the Pathfinders for Peaceful, Just and Inclusive Societies, a multi-stakeholder partnership to deliver the SDG targets for preventing all forms of violence, strengthening governance, and promoting justice and inclusion. He was lead author for the ministerial Task Force on Justice for All and senior external adviser for the UN-World Bank flagship study on prevention, Pathways for Peace. He is a former senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and co-author of The Risk Pivot: Great Powers, International Security, and the Energy Revolution (Brookings Institution Press, 2014). In 2001, he helped develop and launch the UK’s network of climate diplomats. David lives in and works from Pisa, Italy.


More from Global Dashboard

Let’s make climate a culture war!

Let’s make climate a culture war!

If the politics of climate change end up polarised, is that so bad?  No – it’s disastrous. Or so I’ve long thought. Look at the US – where climate is even more polarised than abortion. Result: decades of flip flopping. Ambition under Clinton; reversal...