By Nickie Nick and Gabe Barnow

"Spring-time is the time of the liver,” says my acupuncturist as I sip on my liver detox tea. What does that even MEAN? I exclaim through my modern science teacher lens?  She replies calmly, as if a sheer fact, "the emotion tied to the liver is anger."

"Just as the sap of a tree reverses its directional flow upwards, our emotions also find their way to the surface and may explode forth more easily in the spring than at any other time of year." –Acupuncture.com

I'm angry just thinking about the possibility of being angrier. Here's the deal y'all: Yang energy is all up in everyone's business in the spring when flowers are popping and qi (pronounced: chee) is swirling like mad making everything and everyone want to do the nasty or beat something up.

Do you make your own calendula balms and take a weekly trip to the acupuncture clinic? Do you also take that series of antibiotics when the MD says so? I like to take in all types of medicine. The mystical ones and the scientific ones. My dad said that the location of the "meridians" (dots/lines on a person) in Chinese acupuncture come from the rivers in China and thus must be a bogus ancient practice—my dad clearly doesn't know much. So why am I obsessing over Spring and Yang and the liver?? Hepatitis C.

hcv

Hepatitis C, also known as HCV is an infectious disease that affects the liver primarily. HCV is contracted by blood-to-blood contact, often through intravenous drug use, sharing tattooing needles, or even through un-sterilized nail salon equipment. (Make sure your next mani-pedi is at a nail salon that uses an autoclave to sterilize their equipment!) Click here for information on HCV and tattooing.

A San Francisco Needle Exchange friend recently told me that prisoners have a very high incidence (up to 40% of detainees!) of hepatitis C, due to the intravenous drug use and/or tattooing that goes on inside. Of course it is illegal to have sex, do drugs and get a tattoo in prison, therefore safe needles, condoms and sterilizing tattoo accouterment is not available to inmates. Among other horrific emotional and physical scarring, inmates often come out of lock up with a screaming case of Hep C that may turn into cirrhosis or liver cancer. Then, they might spread the "silent killer" some more. Swiss and German prisons provide access to clean needles for drug use because they obviously truly care about the health of their homeland citizens. Silent killer, you say? Yes indeed. HCV is often asymptomatic and therefore goes unnoticed for years before developing into something much more serious and potentially deadly. Furthermore, prisons do not test for Hep C. If they did, there would be pressure to treat it. Seeing as prisons are just part of the giant industrial complex that benefits corporations and targets black and brown folks to uphold racial segregation, they aren’t putting too much energy into taking care of their prisoners.tatoogun1a

Treating HCV is possible but it takes time, money, and of course access to health care, which many folks don’t have. The course of treatment can take a year, and involves taking pills twice a day and weekly injections. Side effects are like those associated with chemotherapy—nausea, exhaustion, depression, debilitating aches and pains—and the cure only works about half the time.

Introducing The Big Enormous Problem: Prison. Did you know that you can't get anything decent into a prison? I am thinking: sterile ink, sterile needles, some medical supplies (like this here kit). Sure, drugs get in easy, but nothing for safety. I once sent a yoga poster to a delightful, humanitarian leaning buddy stuck in women's prison on marijuana charges (people, PLEASE...it is a PLANT for god-sakes). My illustrated poster was not accepted because it was deemed to be pornographic! Through this experience, I found that one cannot mail in anything that is glued, glittered or stapled—so pretty much anything worth mailing. Officers read personal letters, and information in those letters can be used against the recipients socially and otherwise.

BTDubs -  Correctional facilities make up a sick otherworld that shares our same time and space, but is separate. I can only think it is like sleep over camp at a bad public school with bars, guns and batons.  Have you thought of sitting in a cell, in a "community" of strangers for your entire life?  You are told what to do all day by some douche bag - FOR LIFE. I always think that to take that kind of treatment, one must get to enlightenment real quick. That, or go absolutely bat shit crazy. I occasionally write with prisoners and they are just like anyone else. Looking for love, connection, humanity, freedom, and focused on the future. Drug possession, prostitution, property theft, etc. Really? Being locked up in a terrible, cold place is our best response to that?

Crime rates in the U.S. today have decreased below those in other countries, yet we boast the highest incarceration rate in the entire world! Our incarceration rate is 6 to 10 times higher than that of other industrialized nations. Not only are our rates the highest, we have the most racially disproportionate prison system. While white youth are more likely to be involved in drug crimes, young black men are the ones who are targeted. If the current trend continues, one in three young African American men will serve prison time. We won't get into the special state-sponsored abuse of trans folks thrown in prisons....it's real bad. 

Forget all you know. And then look again. Through groups like Black and Pink, Critical Resistance, and Transgender, Gender Variant, Intersex Justice Project (TGIJP)—and of course Orange is the New Black—I learned some horrific ways that people are manipulated in prison to serve the officers, and the larger f-ed up system in which we all live (and participate unknowingly). It's not rehabilitation—can we at least all agree on that?

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I know what you’re going to say. You are going to say that I am so riled up because of spring. My yang is imbalanced. My liver is acting up again. I need more citrus in my diet. That may be true, but I also have reason to be angry. HCV is running rampant through our prisons and nothing is being done about it. That's where you come in:

Educate yourselves about HCV and the prison industrial complex (PIC) and how it affects all of us. And then take action.

Here are some ways you can get involved...