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Feed Your Head |
High Hopes: Why People Get WastedA Documentary in Development Humans spend a lot of energy attempting to escape, or at least ‘heighten’ their reality. Is this just fun? Or is this an effort to 'transcend' in a spiritual sense? Is there a difference? In times of depression, the people who make money are the ones who provide the booze, drugs, sex, music, games, and movies: all forms of escape. What are we running from? Many of our friends and family members have struggled to maintain control over some kind of addiction. In the best schoolyards right across the country, kids are smoking all kinds of things. They're trying to get wasted. We all are. Meanwhile, some kids are at greater risk than others. Many Innu adolescents in Natuashish, Labrador sniff gas and other solvents in an effort to get wasted. Their community has been tormented by alcohol and drug abuse for three generations. Innu teenagers are 12 times more likely to commit suicide than kids in any other place in Canada. Of the 31 tribal groups on the edge of extinction around the world, the Innu are the only ones in North America. The aborigines of Australia are on Survival International's 'edge of extinction' list as well. Sniffing gas for its psychoactive effects has become so prevalent in some Aboriginal communities that mothers are using rags soaked in the fuel to soothe their babies to sleep. A federal government report says that Aboriginal mothers 'dip rags in petrol and tie them onto babies' jumpers.' These kids are the canaries in our coal mine of self-destruction. Having few real-life role models, and knowing that they’ll never have access to the Canadian/American dream - as seen on TV — they just want to escape, and they'll use whatever's handy. An interesting and often overlooked point is that animals get high, too. All the evidence points to getting high as another kind of instinct, alongside eating, sleeping, and mating. Throughout the animal kingdom, this tendency to self-medicate obviously has its advantages. In this documentary we will meet a number of folks who will elucidate those advantages. By consulting medical and tribal experts in equal measure, we will make a film that asks and possibly answers the question: why do people get wasted?
© Conceptafilm
2010 |