Why Write?
Part 6: Why Take Prescription Pills Just To Sit Through This Shitshow and Scribble Nonsense?
Your body knows that modern life is bad for you and unnatural. That’s why it sends your brain all these esoteric signals that add up to feeling like shit in some form or fashion. Something seems wrong with the fact we have to deal with that mental interference. We’ve solved so many inconveniences through late-stage capitalism that surely this unsatisfactory aspect of awareness would consider hitting the bricks for a big fat check—or something equivalent. You were born in the West, so you don’t know much about Saṃsāra, but you know what you saw in the pharmaceutical advertisements about occasional sadness. So, you showed up to the psychiatrist like a good little consumer ready to buy your way into happiness. Or at least out of the depression of profound consumer dissatisfaction. The psychiatrist put you on Paxil, but that wasn’t it. Too many side effects. They switched you to Lexapro and even tacked on some Ativan for the added anxiety but that didn’t cut it. They told you they needed to add Abilify—which is actually an antipsychotic, but it found a brilliant new identity on the pharma market as the antidepressant for depressed people already on something for it—to get you over the neurochemical hump. You just need a little jump to make the engine start again. Gotta love all that off-label marketing going on in the expensive restaurants and lounges patronized by big Pharma’s sales department. That’s a pretty forgiving umbrella term for an army of pamphlet-armed thugs whose entire job is to charm their latest mark, but here we are. Let’s not forget the expense accounts filled with blood money that pay for it all. You try to explain how the meds are making you feel off, but they make it hard to articulate your thoughts. It’s often a practically impossible task in the short amount of time it takes for your doctor to do their once-over once a month.
It’s fucked up that most people who enter the mental health marketplace emotionally struggling to the point of seeking professional help often just end up finding themselves on a barely helpful carousel of the most recently marketed psychiatric drugs. For all the pharmaceutical companies have spent in research and development, they’ve been the subject of more horror stories than successful ones. That’s what happens when profit is the only motivation. Read a history book about the various atrocities of our own nation. Hell, look up an article about the history of Valium. Oxycontin was just the sequel to that one. We live and operate in a system where the Sackler family can cause two nationwide drug epidemics and serve no jail time by paying off the right government agencies. In retrospect it seems naïve for me to have ever thought a revolving door of pill bottles prescribed by preoccupied psychiatrists in blink-of-an-eye appointments could ever deliver what they promised, but what do you expect when they got to me so young? I was taking pills for ADHD before even I knew how to swallow them. Picture little four-year-old Prizzy reluctantly chewing up my Ritalin prescription in front of the cafeteria water fountain so I could wash it down as quickly as possible.
Contrary to what you might think, I’m not anti-medication at all. I was for the first few years of recovery because being fucked by the mental health industrial complex my entire life made it hard to be objective—especially when my nerves were so raw. I still think waiting was the right call, even if I waited too long. Not only do I think that there’s value in giving your brain time to heal before you decide to add an outside chemical, but I challenge anybody who’s just kicked benzos, Suboxone, and alcohol to hop into a psychiatrist’s office and end up in a better situation at the end of it all. Don’t actually do that, obviously. The shrinks that post up in drug rehabilitation jobs fucking live for overmedicating the patients. Every meth head they can’t put on Suboxone gets several antipsychotics shoved down their throat before they can even finish the withdrawal. Withdrawal fucking sucks, so addicts will generally swallow whatever they’re told will alleviate their symptoms. I’ve been to rehab with Seroquel zombies so heavily doped up that they were face-planting into full bowls of cereal for minutes before bobbing back up again. This was practically every morning. Here’s a quick little story that can serve as a warning. My first sponsee in AA was a young heroin addict of 24 from New Orleans, and a few months into working with him a doctor almost killed him by putting him on Suboxone for “cravings” after he’d already been clean for months. Giving Suboxone strips to people who aren’t opioid dependent is almost the equivalent of giving them hard drugs. For the average person, the only difference it has from something like heroin is that it’s much more heavily resistant to Narcan. It can be more dangerous than fentanyl in cases where whoever was taking it had a low tolerance for it. One time, while I was still detoxing in my parent’s house my father found a tiny crumb of Suboxone that I’d dropped on the carpet and touched it to his tongue—I don’t know why; life isn’t a cop show, but he ended up getting fucking slumped. I’m not supposed to know about this, but my mom’s a chatterbox. So am I, honestly. Anyway, I talked my sponsee out of continuing to take the Suboxone—even though he confessed to getting loaded on it several times before he tossed it later on—thank god. I’m happy to report that he remained in recovery. I worked with him for about 9 months, then he went back to New Orleans to go to college for an engineering degree. It’s been almost half a decade now, and we still stay in touch. He just got his 4-year chip and is working his dream engineering job in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
My own path of recovery started off less like a path and more like a series of potholes, roadblocks, and speed traps set up by sneaky cops under their quota. In other words, it was hard. Me to myself just now: God, complain much? Anyway, I stubbornly held on to the concept of taking only one medication through it all. No psychiatrists were called. Gabapentin was something I could easily get from my regular doctor. I’d leafed through the research on its effectiveness for treating the long-term effects of heavy benzo, opioid, and alcohol abuse before I even sobered up. For the first 3 months, I hung on to my relative sobriety by the bleeding fingernails of Gabapentin for the withdrawal symptoms and AA meetings for the ennui. To keep my amygdala busy I was constantly drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, and weed. I was chugging along in a grey world I knew was desaturated by my post-acute withdrawal symptoms and thinking it was the best I could hope for. At least for the time being. I blamed a lot of unpleasant moments of listlessness or lethargy on post-acute withdrawal syndrome until I found myself still mentally struggling a couple years down the road of recovery. Persistent low-grade depression and lack of motivation were slowly egging me on towards a decision to add a medication on their own, but around November of 2020, I suddenly got my shit rocked by a woman hard enough that I almost instantly stopped being so stubborn on the subject.
Ostensibly, it wasn’t much. She was a waitress at this seafood restaurant I’d worked for in St. Louis during COVID, and her long-term relationship had just broken up. You don’t have to tell me it was stupid; I know this. She texted me out of the blue to check up on me after I’d had knee surgery and hadn’t been to work for a month. We kept in touch for a few days, and as they say, one thing led to another. After she returned from a vacation on the lake we immediately started hooking up. Without going into specifics, the sex was incredibly hot and fun. I was certain I would last 2 seconds after being celibate for so long—and I told her as much—but somehow delivered the opposite. We were both pleasantly surprised by my prowess. That’s why you always under-promise. After this explosion of serotonin and oxytocin, I instantly had a completely baseless and overwhelming case of infatuation. We kept seeing each other for a month or so and then she suddenly decided she was going to move to Portland with her cousin. I was fucking crushed. In retrospect, I think I was so upset because I’d been celibate for around four years before we fucked. Half of that time was intentional because I was too busy ruining my health by downing liquor and shooting up. The second half was split into two sections. There was an initial recovery period of 18 months in the lonesome and muggy Mississippi Delta. Nothing going on there at all, and that was also intentional. Eventually, in December of 2019, there was a hopeful move to St. Louis where I had about 3 months of runway to socialize before the pandemic reached the Midwest. Unfortunately, that runway went largely unutilized before all of our lives changed forever. My mind was basically painting wildly unrealistic emotional crescendos based on the fact I was finally getting my cock touched by someone other than myself. When that was taken away suddenly, I was don’t-leave-the-bedroom depressed for well over a month before I’d finally suffered enough to start searching for solutions. I went to a couple of SLAA meetings online at a friend’s suggestion but left unimpressed with the results. The way I saw it, I’d struggled long enough swallowing a handful of supplements every morning that was supposed to do something positive for my mental health but never seemed to do that much. I needed something stronger.
Before COVID-19 hit, I was more or less in denial about the majority of my depression symptoms. Some of the time I spent locked in quarantine posting memes and contemplating solitude was also spent learning about certain pertinent aspects of my ADHD like emotional regulation problems. I hadn’t realized that they affected my relationships with other people so deeply, and every time it really hit me, I’d sit there and sob. I don’t know how it is today, but by watching other people around my age speaking out on the subject I found out the theme of “nobody likes the ADHD kid” was much more common than I originally thought. For most of my life, I thought I was the problem. I was just lazy—not ADHD and depressed, and could fix it if I wanted. Anyone who experienced that level of rejection and didn’t become a Buddhist monk can tell you those scars stay with you until the casket drops. I wouldn’t cry for my present self who was barely flinching at 3 months of almost total isolation, but for the 5-year-old child who was ostracized and had no fucking idea what was going on. I didn’t really realize how much pain I was writing off. I’d come from the living hell of active addiction, which more or less makes anything look like a step up. Plus, I’m an alcoholic so my natural response to problems is to ignore them until they force me to stop. By the time I finally tapped out of being almost completely unmedicated I’d been through two major surgeries, a global catastrophe, and getting my heart broken. You know it’s the heartache that was humbling. Always is. When someone fucks that heart up there’s always the possibility it will hurt bad enough that you start asking yourself some of the hard questions. You know, the ones that under normal circumstances you’re always avoiding. It sucks how many years I wasted trying to cover up a crushing sense of worthlessness with a carousel of self-destructive distractions, but you can’t change the past, so thinking about it is pointless.
Or maybe it isn’t always how bad something hurts that drives you to finally look inward, but the echo of how often you’ve felt that empty feeling at the end of all your endeavors that does you in. The fact that it doesn’t even matter if you lose or win. To have the bravery to look deeply into why that is you have to be so done with normal life that everything seems completely joyless. Otherwise, why bother? There’s no drive to seek anything outside of your typical life experience if everything is generally copasetic. I thought I’d reached that point when I started giving my best effort to Alcoholics Anonymous. Unfortunately, after I went through withdrawals my amygdala quickly latched on to lesser vices that were justified by being paltry in comparison to what I’d just come off of. That first year I existed in a constant cycle of rolling up weed, binge eating, chain-smoking cigarettes, and drinking strong coffee. That sustained me until some of them started having physical consequences. I’ve lost a couple of habits since then. I’ve been off all nicotine and coffee for a minute. I’ve quit pot on several occasions since the early days of California sobriety, but after I started experiencing post-surgical chronic pain, I got back on it. A couple of months ago I stopped all social media scrolling. My tendency towards distraction as a salve for restlessness has been based on my ego’s need to try to control how I feel. I’m starting to accept that escapism has actually never really worked for me. Not all the way, not even once. Even heroin isn’t a ticket to temporary serenity because the whole time you’re high you’re also barely conscious. Don’t take that as me being sanctimonious. I usually only stop things well after they’ve gotten way out of control. I’m never looking down on others in this respect, and I only impose restrictions on myself. Also, I only started the road to recovery under the threat of death so it seems insane to expect anyone else to have to go along as well. Nevertheless, my vices have been whittled down to just extreme isolation, binge-watching old RPGs, and smoking a lot of weed since I moved to Las Vegas. I can make my inner demon weaker, but it’s never dead.
My antidepressant quadruple threat is the right meds plus an active lifestyle combined with microdosing psilocybin while practicing mindfulness. It’s hard to train yourself to lean into the pain without being a masochistic freak about it, but I’m trying my best. I’m not saying there isn’t a long way to go, but before I’d actually gotten laid in recovery I was operating from a much larger host of delusions—particularly in regard to romantic love—that could have done with being dispelled. And dispel them the pain of heartache did. If you ask the Buddhist masters, they’d probably tell you that’s what suffering is supposed to accomplish. Interesting that the word “disillusioned” is always used in the pejorative sense when it’s really a positive. I agree with the monks, but I also have a big nihilistic streak and I lowkey think existence is bullshit. Why does being human have to have all the awful appearances of being a pretty raw deal that we then have to learn to see the value in? Why so suspicious? Do you mean to tell me the only way I can have lasting peace of mind in this lifetime is to realize the entire fucking universe including myself is an illusion? Cool. Ain’t that fucking great, I’m 38 and I can barely stop listening to my own inner thought pollution. At some point, I’d like to file an existential complaint about stupid suffering being the agent of growth in this dimension. I vote we change it to something fun but challenging to pull off, like finding a place to get head from your partner at a family reunion. Just my spiritual contribution.
Anyway, one of the positive changes that came car-crashing out of all that self-deception was that I started taking Wellbutrin. I’ve been taking 300 mg of Bupropion every morning for a little over a year now, and it’s definitely helpful for both my ADHD and depression. What made seeking help after my post-pandemic mini-meltdown different than every other time in my life I’d been filled to the brim with existential dread? This time, I had no patience or money for sitting in some overpriced psychiatrist’s office to listen to someone who may or may not have my best interest in mind tell me what chemicals to put in my fucking head. I did my own research, then set up a Plushcare appointment online and asked my screen for the prescription I wanted instead. When you’re suicidally depressed, every moment counts, so I really didn’t have time to fuck around with their guesses. As anyone would, I just wanted to feel better. That’s why all those sleepy professionals still largely informed by the theory of chemical imbalance got completely sidestepped. I’m not saying all of y’all are like this but, but I purposefully ran into puh-lenty of shady motherfuckers with medical degrees when I was still on drugs. Or less purposefully when I was a depressed teenager. Or completely helplessly when I was a small child. But as an adult, I’ve scored prescriptions for Adderall, Ambien, Xanax, Seroquel, Klonopin, and Suboxone. There could be others. If you know who to go to and what to ask for, psychiatrists can be a fantastic plug. You look for the ones that are cash-only, lax on the drug tests, and barely mentally present enough to look up from your chart for the whole appointment.
I trust as the theory of chemical imbalance continues to fall out of fashion, the mental health industry will respond by latching on to promoting the next popular mode of treatment as the last piece of the puzzle that's going to make you perfectly able to cope with life. For a price, of course. This is capitalism, after all. I’ve heard a lot of talk about groundbreaking treatments coming through the pipeline that have many thought leaders in the field excited. Well, I think most mental health professionals who have any stature are completely out of touch with the class divide. In America, it’s pretty much a guarantee that the newest treatments aren’t covered by the insurance the indigent can pay for. That puts all your bright stars of hope in the hands of the affluent only. I’m not looking forward to or counting on new treatments that most people can’t access or afford. Make it cheap enough for a minimum wage budget and we’ll talk about me being on board. That’s why I just get my psilocybin mushrooms from a guy I know. They send a half or quarter ounce in an unassuming package via the post office, then I grind them up and split them into micro-doses. It’s something to do, I suppose. It replaces an activity like crocheting in little moments when I’m bored.
We all go through bouts with the darkness. How the fuck could you not? Inside every one of us is a relentless horde of shitty thoughts. I guess it’s an essential part of being alive for some dumb reason I just do not get. I don’t even think a lobotomy would get you out of it, honestly. Kurt Vonnegut wrote “Life no is way to treat an animal.” in A Man Without a Country, and I’m inclined to agree wholeheartedly. Regardless, in the age of the iPhone, no one is trying to hold your hand and commiserate about it. Don’t get me wrong, it’s easy to find endless simulacra of emotional bonds. That can seem like enough for a while, but it’s a lonely feeling to not often be able to find someone capable of forming enough of a bond with you to just drop the fucking charade. It’s a trite personality trait, but I’ve never had much patience for small talk. As a neurodivergent ADHD person, for me being authentic is almost neurological. I want people I talk with to stop bullshitting with the script they wrote in their heads about themselves to sound interesting or smart. This involves authentically sharing the sorrows and the happiness of their heart. I get it’s a big ask which is why I don’t bother. I’m thinking of my new friend Carlos, the doctor from Nicaragua. He rode up to me on a small bike a few weeks ago while I was on a solitary walk just after dawn. At first, I was on guard. He countered my sour attitude with a jolly disposition, and in between broken sentences, he was laughing a lot. That was disarming even though I didn’t understand what he was saying. I started to laugh too at the absurdity of the situation. Even though he barely speaks English, he proceeded to tell me how most of his family was “in the sky” within five minutes of us trying to have a conversation. That’s why I smoked him out without hesitation. We started using Google Translate to communicate, and that'll have to do until I fire up Duolingo.
I just want to push myself farther to ascend my own ordinary consciousness, but exactly how are you supposed to open the doors within yourself that you locked long ago? Doors you spent decades fortifying with blast-resistant components? My heart feels like Mother Base and my mind like Big Boss. There he is gravelly grunting something insane about war and the glory of soldiers and holding down the fort of my daily surroundings with a SOCOM pistol and grenade launcher. No, Stinger missile. In this metaphor, there’s also a phalanx of gun-toting genome soldiers blindly loyal to Big Boss and ready to go at a moment’s notice on the side of the opposition. Opening up to others feels even harder to do if you took your lumps young, which I did. Being robbed of a feeling of safety as a child has no doubt been a pretty common thing since the dawn of civilization, but that doesn’t make the scars it leaves behind less enduring or difficult to process. Having your stability constantly disrupted either by not developing consistent emotional bonds with peers and adults throughout formative years and/or varying degrees of neglectful and abusive behavior perpetrated by toxic parental figures is a recipe for a future hot mess. It doesn't have to happen in the home, however. Community members that take advantage of positions of trust always leave some deep cuts. Just ask Father so-and-so from the diocese of wherever-the-fuck. You can even be robbed of your own autonomy between your own neurons as American pharmaceutical companies rapaciously cajole gullible adults into forcibly drugging you for profit. Maybe less so now than in the 90s when I grew up, but I doubt it. Then there’s the school bullying carried out by the cruelest hellspawn of the close-minded rednecks that overpopulate rural areas like the Mississippi Delta where I grew up. By the time I was a young adult, it had all left my psyche feeling a deep craving to be loved. By the time I was in my early 20s, my experiences had told me I was too soft for this world to ever be unguarded and whatever I took refuge behind ought to be very huge and sturdy because it would be doing the lion’s share of the work in protecting me from the emotional harm of others. I felt like I wanted my heart to be permanently flatlined like an antisocial personality type and still be able to function. It was a childish notion of overcorrection, but I was young. Plus, my dysfunctional upbringing didn’t leave me with much to go on so what do you expect? The way I see it, being young is like being an exposed oral nerve desperate for the dentin and enamel of falling in and out of love with whichever relatively attractive and tolerable people you regularly interact with. That, of course, has the inevitable consequence of romantic disappointment. As a neurodivergent drug addict desperate for some sort of tangible proof they were loveable, I didn't handle those situations well. Just think dried vomit on your ugly oversized shirt and shower crying over someone you met less than 5 months ago and you get it. The level of suffering those misadventures in young love caused my rejection-sensitive mind might make an otherwise rational person look at a syringe full of heroin like “I bet that could be nice…”
I know that dishonesty and self-absorption have always been problems for people for the most part. Still, the Information Age hasn't done the authenticity lobby a single solid since its soft launch by the likes of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and whoever is responsible for America Online. I remember one of their slogans was “Life needs less clutter. Life needs AOL.” Now here I am in 2022, and every e-mail, phone call, and text message is almost guaranteed to be some type of bot. What kind of clutter did you clean up, exactly? It's a fucking tragedy what the combination of Big Tech’s dominance plus the popularization of half-grasped DSM-5-based language has done to the natural social infrastructure of human communities. Everyone is either too self-absorbed to be a shoulder to lean on or terrified of being a bother when their own trauma is caving their skull in with a cinderblock. Now it’s normalized to pay a stranger with some kind of nonsense certificate a bizarre amount of money to listen to your problems twice a month for half an hour. I’m not saying professional help hasn’t ever done anything positive for anybody, but I’ve heard more horror stories than Hollywood romcoms where everything eventually works out. Do you know how sometimes in horror stories children will get snatched up in the middle of the night and taken to a scary building where horrible things go down? That happens in real life, and the places are called mental hospitals—sometimes rehabilitation centers. Don’t get me started on the psycho parents who pay crazy Christian cult members to kidnap their children. Imagine being hogtied in the middle of the night and shipped off to be imprisoned in some organized torture program in the middle of nowhere run by deranged adults with no explanation at all. Anyone who believes their god would have them harm kids is psychotic, no matter how difficult the little squirts are. I know someone in particular whose mother sent them to many horrific places like that, and do you know what? She’s a fucking psychologist.
Writing is my psychiatrist when talking to one would just be another costly exercise in being misunderstood profoundly. Besides, I learned enough about them as a small child on Ritalin to get the gist of what they’re all about. And then I received some more education as a teenager when I was put on SSRIs that gave me bizarre side effects including feeling suicidal. Pills like Prozac that I was put on in my formative years have since been proven to be harmful in the long term. As an adult, I only saw so-called mental health professionals in rehab or to manipulate them into putting me on more narcotics. The few times in my twenties that my mental health was in a severe enough downturn that I was desperate enough to actually seek help, I'd reach out to a medical professional with the attitude of someone who was buying a last-ditch ticket for the lottery. You want to say, “Please fucking do something or I’m a goner,” but you would be crazy to say such a thing. Everyone knows why—we’re all too subconsciously afraid we’ll get locked up if we display that kind of raw honesty. How am I supposed to open up to you if I feel like if I say the wrong thing, you’ll turn around and lock me up and throw away the key? Whether I was an emotionally crippled adult or an ostracized teenager, the result at the end of the doctor’s visit was always some kind of a robbery. I'd find myself walking out of another goddamn doctor’s office alongside my chagrin with no answers and another SSRI prescription in my pocket. My consolation prize was usually an uproarious story about the crock of shit I was just told by a grown-ass person with an actual job in psychology. When I was a teenager I went to see a local psychiatrist and in the first session, he proceeded to try and convince me I was a libertarian instead of prompting a discussion about my trauma. Let's not forget that all the while my parent's debit card was being charged. Only they know how many wasted dollars were dropped so I could have the displeasure of participating in this ostensibly clinical-sounding, yet profoundly inconsequential ongoing conversation about my mind on the iconic lie-down couch. And when it didn’t help anything I’d always think I’d somehow done something wrong. Or that I was a permanently lost soul. If you’re having the same thoughts I’ll save you years of trouble with this unequivocal report from the field: That’s not a real thing, and you can always heal if you’re willing to do the work to overcome. Just as important as doing the work is opening your heart to what the work might be for you because it’s always something out of your comfort zone.
I was diagnosed with ADHD before I made it to kindergarten, so all throughout my life, I’ve seen countless mental health professionals. To this day, I've never once had a treatment plan with a psychiatrist that wasn't primarily pharmacological. Y'all don't remember kindergarten Adderall? Y'all don't remember prescribing the profusion of SSRIs that practically everyone I've ever fucking known has been on? Maybe not their whole life, but at one point or another. And some of those who took them longer are looking at potentially lifelong consequences. I'm not gonna even start about how hard they can be to get off. At the end of the day, these pills are commercial products. Psychiatrists are just one of the few individuals licensed to hock them. Aside from the fact I’ve never really been helped by the mental health industrial complex, you’d have a hard time convincing me that any capitalist industry is motivated by anything but profit. How could that ever produce anything truly positive? If these godless doctors were any closer with Big Pharma, they'd have already explored each other's bodies, and their cocks would be docking while they romantically watched the sunrise and sipped their coffee.
I know that consciously maintaining an ongoing creative partnership with the quantum field of consciousness is a large part of what keeps me from killing myself or ending up in a mental hospital. It even assists me in avoiding the need to rely on doctors who bought into a kitten-soft science that has a long history of torturing the mentally ill to the point that they actually got a job in it. An apple a day keeps the doctor away, and a poem a day keeps the psychologist out of my inbox. I'm not saying that there are no mental health professionals out there making positive change, but does it make up for the lobotomy? What about memory loss from electroshock? What about all the money that pushed an entire industry ostensibly centered around "increasing quality of life" into worshipping the DSM-5 like it's the goddamn bible? What about the fact that if you live in America, access to cutting-edge mental health care is mostly reserved for the wealthy and influential? That is, of course, unless you get lucky with some sort of insurance loophole, or you get cut a break by someone with the ability to do so. Are we just sweeping that under the gazebo? Y'all seem to have selective forgetfulness about the fact that advertising prescription medicine as a product is fucking illegal everywhere in the world but this shithole and the microscopic island of New Zealand. Hasn't slipped past me, though. Also, I refuse to go along with the dogmatic belief that having a medical degree turns your opinions into facts like some kind of academic transubstantiation. Getting a second opinion used to be hella common before access to quality medical care for anyone outside of the upper-middle class ground to a screeching halt. Is there an easy answer that would immediately stop all this carnage? Fuck no. And I don’t want to pretend to search for one. I think we just need to all sit with the fact that the mental health industry is like the modern Holy Roman Catholic Church in that it’s been a horrific meat grinder with an incredible PR team all throughout history that has never really been held responsible for any harm it’s caused. They also both have a lot of acolytes that get really pissed off if you say the whole thing is all about money. The word industry is in its fucking descriptor, though. So, excuse me while I refrain from tying this article up in a neat bow. It does a disservice to everyone whose lives were left in shambles by this so-called industry like a degenerate gambler by a bevy of predatory Las Vegas casinos.