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A Political Ecology of Ohio’s Opiate Crisis

“After moving here to the east side of town, after living on the west side my whole life, I had really really bad dizzy spells, which I was admitted for time after time, and which they called it Pot’s disease, where the blood pressure bottoms out. But I was never sick … I don’t remember ever being sick at all until we moved to where we are.”

These are the words of Connie, a 40-something grandmother and church pastor. Connie, by her own admission, does not look the part of a stereotypical heroin addict: she is five feet tall, with short bright red hair and a big personality. She talks openly about her love for Christ and family. Connie is a recovering heroin addict who has now been clean for two years. She has struggled with illness over the past two decades, having many surgeries performed. Her doctors prescribed a variety of opiates over this time to help her cope with her illness. Eventually, one day, she tells me that her opiate addiction led her to try heroin:

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Salt, Seeds, and Flamingos: On the Politics of Infrastructural Ecology in Turkey

In June of 2017, as I prepared to leave Izmir, my friend Esra gave me, as a gift, two jars of sea salt mixed with herbs and finely ground sun-dried vegetables. Handmade labels indicated this was salt from the Gediz Delta (a large river delta on the Bay of Izmir) and that “Zeytinci” Fadime had prepared the mix. Esra herself, she told me, helped her friend Fadime abla, an experienced organic farmer who lives in one of the former Greek Orthodox villages at the edge of the Gediz Delta, not far from the city of Foça. The vegetables were from Fadime’s garden, and the salt from the delta’s saltpans, Çamaltı.