OITNB Season 1 Episode 8 is about:

* Alex Vause (Laura Prepon) up and Larry Bloom (Jason Biggs) down.

Larry's article about Piper comes out in the NYT (it was called "One sentence, two prisoners"). Larry reads Piper the story over the phone and his perspective about her prison time starts to expose the difference between the person Piper (Taylor Schilling) sees herself as and the person that Larry sees when he looks at her.

* Continuing backlash towards Piper from Sam Healy (Michael Harney) from her end-run (pun intended) around his authority that resulted in the track being reopened.

The important thing to remember here is that Healy literally thinks that any woman he can't control or understand must be a lesbian (because to him lesbian means "a woman beyond men" or an "unnatural" woman). As long as Piper remains the person Healy wants her to be, she remains protected but if she diverts from his idea of who she should be, she is immediately banished and punished.

* Red's ongoing war with Mendez (Pablo Schrieber) over his desire to use her kitchen smuggling connection to get his drugs into Litchfield (more on this in a bit). Also, FYI, Moscow Mule is a name Mendez calls Red later during the episode.

* The escalating war between Doggett (Taryn Manning), Alex, and Piper.

5. "Is There a Doctor in Here?"

Maria Ruiz (Jessica Pimentel) has gone into labor and when she asks "Is there a Doctor in here" she gets the response, "no, but there is a nurse."

In Michigan, as I mentioned once before, there is almost never a Doctor on call. One of the many ways that Prisons save money is by having Doctors "on staff" but rarely "on call."

God forbid an actual emergency happens and a Doctor needs to be present. Generally, an ambulance is called, and it gets there when it gets there. Usually, the "emergencies" are the result of terrible acts of violence when time is of the essence.

On the good side, if you have something serious and treatable, they will take you to an expert outside of the prison (to avoid lawsuits). One of the guys in my cube had a serious eye injury and was taken to a specialist for surgery at U of M Hospital.

But sadly, for most prisoners, their health problem is either something chronic or withing the acceptable purview of the mostly invisible facility Doctor. What it means in practice is that most of your care comes from a nurse practitioner.

Dental care is the worst, you are supposed to be able to get one cleaning a year but it is based on a waitlist and I was at a facility for well over a year and never got a cleaning. In addition, if you need anything other than a filling, the default is to pull the tooth. They actually see teeth as elective.

Psychology and Psychiatry in prison are a mixed and upsetting bag. Prisons and jails treat the vast majority of our nation's mentally ill population.

If you are mildly depressed or have been placed in programming, the assigned psychologists can be good or bad. I was lucky, all but one of the psychologists I came into contact with seemed competent.

In general, they prescribe SSRI's and anti-psychotics like candy in the hopes that it will keep the prisoners in line but the treatment varies greatly depending on the competence of the therapist. In addition, many inmates will not avail themselves of psychological services because they believe the parole board will use treatment as a reason to deny parole. There is also a stigma "on the yard" if you are going to therapy.

However, for the mentally ill, prison is an incomprehensibly awful place.

Many of the emotionally hardest things I personally saw in prison were as a result of mistreatment and neglect of the mentally ill.

Unless you have been to prison, you just have no idea how badly people inside are treated. I met people who spent YEARS in solitary. I met people whose treatment was to be doped up and locked down. I listened to women crying all night in jail after being tied to chairs and left to detox.

For the sane, jail and prison is a brutal place that can make you lose sanity. For the mentally ill, it seems, to me, to be a system full of never ending cruel and unusual tortures

I have said it before and I will say it again, nothing I saw in my entire time in jails and prisons made me as ashamed to be an American as seeing the "treatment" of the mentally ill.

No amount of distance will ever wash away my feeling of disgust at seeing the things that I saw.

4. Stockpiling Meds From Commissary

There is a flu epidemic going around Litchfield and Nicky (Natasha Lyonne) mentions that she "never gets sick" because she stockpiles meds from the commissary.

First of all, there are not "meds" on commissary there are pain relievers and cough drops. Medicine treats your symptoms while pain relievers and cough drops suppress your discomfort. So, if Nicky took those "meds" she would be sick she just would suffer less than someone without "meds."

However, she is right about the value in stockpiling pain relievers and cough drops. The prison will not give you pain relievers when you are sick because they expect you to purchase your own. I had multiple bottles of aspirin, ibuprofen, acetaminophen, and naproxen stockpiled in my locker for emergencies.

The way I looked at it, it was better to have pain relievers and not use them than need pain relievers and not have them.

Oh, I also stockpiled Vitamin C for winter (which can be preventative).

Sick, however, is sick. Aspirin doesn't stop you from getting sick.

3. "Russians Don't Play Baseball"

Officer Mendez forces Red to keep Tricia's withdrawal quiet after he loses the ability to smuggle new drugs into the prison. He correctly fears that if the prison administration finds out that long-term inmates are in withdrawal that they will know the drugs came from someone inside the prison.

Red decides to force Tricia (Madeline Brewer) to go to the prison administration and admit that she has been using and is in withdrawal (in essence, exposing that drugs are getting into Litchfield). Basically, Red decided to expose the drugs and put all of the pressure from the administration on Mendez. This obviously doesn't go over well with Mendez who furiously starts to try to turn Red's allies in order to find out how she gets contraband into Litchfield.

Nicky is obviously not thrilled either that Red is forcing her bunkie, Tricia to turn herself in (which probably means getting sent to real prison and having new charges added to her jacket). As an addict herself, she also knows that punishing someone for using in the hopes of bottoming them out is insanity. She says to Red:

"It's not personal it's chemical."

And, in my opinion, this is 1000% correct.

Recovery and sobriety happen as the result of a process of retraining your brain after a long period of becoming aware of the relationships between your triggers and acting out behaviors. The terrible pseudo-science behind "tough on addiction" messaging has done little to help addicts recovery and, often, at massive costs to those addicts.