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Chaosophy - autonomous learning

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2) The doctors never have direct access, not only to the<br />

patients, but even to the service.<br />

3) The center has its own police, and a status quo has been<br />

established with the police of the state of New York.<br />

4) After fighting the Center for a long time, the state of New<br />

York finally accepted to subsidize it.<br />

5) A very special use of methadone has been made. Here it is<br />

no longer used as an intensive treatment for several days, as in traditional<br />

treatment, but its administration lasts for years and<br />

constitutes a sort of artificial drug that definitively subjects exaddicts<br />

to "medical power."<br />

But perhaps what is most interesting is the conjunction of gang<br />

activity with this self-management service. It has led not only to<br />

focusing on a system of effective treatment (addicts come staggering<br />

on their own to the Center), but has also to elaborate solutions to<br />

a more general problem, that of drug trafficking. In fact, gangs<br />

took things into their own hands, in truth quite ruthlessly, through<br />

persuasion, or sometimes physically, in order to eliminate "pushers"<br />

(dealers). Some black gangs and movements have become conscious<br />

of the manipulation of the State's power through the<br />

dissemination of drugs. (This became obvious to them when they<br />

discovered that a load of drugs, seized by New York police, had<br />

been replaced by flour and resold by the police on a colossal scale.)<br />

But the pacific examples remain the exception. Violence and<br />

fear, often stimulated by the police, prevail within these gangs.<br />

One couldn't say that such an "experiment" offers a model for the<br />

"quality of life" to us. Typically, more systematic attempts at<br />

organization are combated by the authorities, in particular the<br />

relations which are beginning to be instituted between different<br />

gangs, even between different races (Blacks and Puerto Ricans,<br />

Chicanos, etc.), and the relations between local gangs and nationally<br />

organized movements.<br />

294 !

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