Pixelated Scribbles

I managed to arrive home before 8pm today. Yes, it’s a big deal for me. On a usual Monday night after we’re done at the masjid, we’d usually look for food outside the vicitiny of our homes. Yes, simply put as makan luar. Too much money to burn? Far from it! Our freezer’s been a bit empty as of lately. Class is going to end at 3pm tomorrow, so will definetly do some grocery shopping, insya Allah.

Last week in class, we covered this topic on the different interventions (contingency management) used to treat people with substance abuse (heroine, cocain, tobacco, etc). So, there was this one particular study that have been shown to work. Roughly, the treatment involves the participants turning up to some sort of group therapy at a predetermined date and time (every month? every few months?) and providing urine for a drug test (forgive me if that’s not an appropriate term). Upon their attendance to this meeting, AND evidence of a ‘clean’ urine, they would be entitled to draw from a pool of prizes – similar to the lucky draw concept. So it could be a wide screen TV or money, whatever. So there I was, excited, and thought , “Wow~ If only Brunei knew about this. Maybe they could use this sort of treatment for Al-Islah and the likes of it,” But then I thought, “Is this syariah compliant?” Lucky draw is haram, so is this similar to lucky draws? Would this be haram too?

So. After today’s lecture on Surah Al-Qamar, I managed to ask one of the well knowledgeable brothers (he sometimes replaces the Sheikh for the the Monday lectures) concerning the CM intervention mentioned above. My concern was on the possibility that treatment would be similar to gambling. However, he said that it is not haram, because it’s not gambling. Instead of relying on chance to get the “rewards”, the participants had to actually use their abilities to aqcuire them. In this case, they had to be drug-free, and had to turn up for the group therapy. Hence, the aforementioned treatment is not haram. Wallahualam bisawab. Allah knows what is correct. There’s actually another type of intervention that uses similar principles, but different variables that’s also been found to work.

It’s exciting to learn things could benefit the people back home. Let’s just hope that an opportunity will come that would enable me to make good use of the knowledge, insya Allah.

Forgive me if my latest posts are…boring. Islam, Behaviour Analysis and current issues seem to be the only things that interest me. Yes. I’m old :p