Pubdate: Wed, 14 May 2003
Source: San Francisco Bay Guardian, The (CA)
Copyright: 2003 San Francisco Bay Guardian
Contact: http://www.sfbg.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/387
Note: Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who hopes that next time you'll
call 911. Her columns also appear in Metro, Silicon Valley's weekly newspaper.
RIPPER IS A GANGSTER !!!
I'm probably the last person on the Net to pick up on the horrific and sad
Ripper meme. Ripper was the online moniker of 21-year-old Brandon Vedas, a
tech support geek at the University of Phoenix in Arizona. On the evening
of Jan. 12 Vedas logged onto an Internet Relay Chat channel called
"#shroomery," turned on his Web cam, and proceeded to ingest a lethal dose
of prescription drugs as the people in the chat room watched and talked to him.
Somebody saved the logs of Ripper's final chat session, during which the
people on #shroomery debated whether to intervene when they realized
Ripper was overdosing. You can view these logs yourself on the Brandon
Carl Vedas Web site (www.brandonvedas.com/internet.html).
All of the articles I've read about Ripper's death have registered shocked
disgust at the apathy of the people in the chat room with him. We hear
how terrible it was that the denizens of #shroomery egged him on ("Eat
more you pussy!" one person taunted Ripper after he'd taken a huge number
of pills). But this behavior shouldn't be the point. It's not surprising;
it's just part of the colloquial landscape of IRC.
Imagine, for a moment, what it was really like to be on that IRC channel
when Ripper logged on. He's on his Web cam with a bag of pills that could
be anything. They could be Pez or sugar capsules. He's trying hard to
impress: "I got a grip of drugs," he announces. "Tune in. Watch." People
start hassling him. They don't believe the drugs are genuine, or they think
he's just playing when he tells them how many he's already taken. New
people are jumping onto the channel all of the time, and they have no idea
whether this Ripper guy is for real or not, that's why you get Grphish
joking, "Ripper, if you puke? can i eat it? i'll get so high of [sic] that
puke."
Meanwhile, Ripper is being tailed by a bot named Pnutbot, a program that
pretends to be a person but is really just a chunk of code that tries to
spit out semirelevant comments addressed to the #shroomery
community. Pnutbot picks up phrases that other people are saying and then
repeats them in a different context. Every time someone says, "Ripper,"
which begins to be quite frequent as the #shroomery folks get scared that
he's ODing, Pnutbot shrieks, "Ripper is a gangster!!!"
In between frantic requests from Grphish that people try to find Ripper's
real name and address or phone number, Pnutbot keeps surrealistically
shouting "Ripper is a gangster!!!" over and over. Finally, Ripper begins to
nod out. Grphish is trying to get somebody to call 911 or poison control.
Eventually Ripper types his dying words: ----------- shoa I'm fukcin."
Somebody named TheKat, who tells Grphish not to call 911, comments, "You
will never know if he died unless he get [sic] back on here:' The worst
part is that as Ripper wolfed down his "grip" of drugs, he told the group
how to find his real address in case anything bad happened.
So why didn't Ripper's online pals call 911 when they knew he was dying?
Two reasons: they didn't believe it was really happening, and they didn't
trust the authorities. I think the latter problem is the more tragic of the
two. Given the terrifying crackdowns on people who take recreational drugs
in the United States, it's not surprising the #shroomery community was too
scared to call 911 when its friend seemed to be ODing. Because it was
taking place on the Internet, visible only via stuttering Web cam images,
people couldn't physically intervene.
Sure, they should have overcome their fear and called 911 anyway. And
Ripper shouldn't have been acting like he wanted to win a Darwin Award. But
Ripper's death isn't about stupidity or apathy or "peer
pressure." Rather, it underscores one of the most dangerous side effects
of the war on drugs: people who need help won't get it. The people on
#shroomery really did want to save Ripper. They just couldn't imagine that
anything good would come of calling the authorities.
Now their anguish and indecision are written out for everyone to see
Reading the logs, you can see clearly what happens when people live in so
much terror of the authorities that they'd rather watch a friend die than
call 911. Ripper wasn't just a victim of drugs. He was also a victim of the
war on drugs.
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MAP posted-by: Terry Liittschwager