Drug Trip

From BoingBoing here is a video from the this "research":

Here's some rare footage of an experimental LSD session that I came across doing research for my next book... It's from a television program, circa 1956, about mental health issues. The researcher, Dr. Sidney Cohen, was dosing volunteers at the Veteran's Administration Hospital in Los Angeles.

This was the "snake oil" that Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert of Harvard University were selling back in the mid-1960s. I remember that as a high school student in 1964 reading an article in Scientific America that talked about this "LSD research". This drug ruined so many lives. It gutted the anti-war movement as people decided to "tune in, turn on, and drop out". This drug passivity is what allowed Nixon to walk in and take over and turn the US on the right wing political path it has been ever since. The anger of the working class and middle class over youth throwing away their lives helped fuel a mindless lurch to the right as they tried to clamp down on the indiscretions of youth. The "war on drugs" didn't fix the problem.

You don't solve social problems by legal fiat. It requires a moral commitment on the part of the overwhelming majority to change the heart of a people. The anti-war violence of the late 1960s gave way to the apathy and bizarre drug cults and "self discovery" nonsense of the 1970s. Meanwhile the socially conservative movement got in lockstep and decided to deny modernity by harking back to fundamentalist Christian values. Their fear of change drove them into a fiercely held radical conservatism. Rather than constructively engage in a dialog about facing the future and making the necessary social adjustments to better deal with the future, these people simply rejected it. And so the "culture wars" started.

I have no love for the radical left. They were nuts. They embraced more causes than they had fingers and toes and made a mess of all of them. These people simple-mindedly embraced the outsider and the criminal. They willingly encouraged social dissolution.

I have no love for the radical right. They were fanatics who refused to confront reality. They wanted to press everybody into a cookie-cutter mold whether it fit or not. They had no empathy of the outsider or those who were "different".

Dealing with the real world is really rough. It takes courage. It takes patience. It take subtlty. And it take the long haul. It can't be done in a sound bite. It can't be done with political slogans. And it can't be force marched into existence. It has to come from the ground up. It has to come from people feeling in their guts a common bond and a need to come together to put the society on a sound foundation. In the US it happened in 1776 with a Declaration and in 1787 with a Constitution and in 1862 with a Proclamation and in 1941 with Four Freedoms.

Drugs and their History

Here is a short video setting out the content of a book by Mike Jay entitled High Society: A History of Mind-Altering Drugs:



Sounds like an interesting book. I'll have to keep my eye out for it.

Is This The Direction Needed to Stop Mexico's Descent Into Violence

The spiraling drug violence in Mexico is very, very sad. The story of a 20-year-old woman taking on the job of police chief in an especially violence-prone city is fascinating:



I sure hope Mexico can get control back from the crazies. But I'm afraid that corruption has crept into all layers of society and into all institutions. So it will be very, very hard to get away from the violence.

Mexico: A 'Failed State'?

Here are some bits from a report by David A. Shirk for the Justice in Mexico Project. This report doesn't directly answer the question of whether Mexico is becoming a failed state, but it makes clear that, unless something is done, the trend would imply this conclusion. The author is an academic seeking to affect policy decisions, so he takes a much more moderate tone in his writing. Showing strong emotion -- especially fear and panic -- is not a way to motivate bureaucrats:

Based on available data and current research on drug-trafficking in Mexico, the recent escalation and varied geographic patterns of violence appear to be the result of several immediate factors:

• the fractionalization of organized crime groups;


• changing structures of political-bureaucratic corruption;


• recent government efforts to crack down on organized crime (through military deployments and the disruption of DTO [Drug Trafficking Organization] leadership structures).

In addition, experts speculate that there may be larger macro-level factors contributing to the violence, such as shrinking drug demand in the United States; falling drug prices; increased border interdiction; or growing domestic demand in Mexico. However, it is not clear to what extent any of these larger trends has a significant or direct impact on violence. What is clear is that there has been a dramatic shift in Mexico over the course of the last 30 years. During the early- and mid-1980s, many current top DTO operatives— virtually all of them with roots in Sinaloa—worked within the same loosely knit set of allied organizations that controlled different commissions, or plazas, for smuggling drugs into the United States. At that time, DTOs operated with a level of impunity not seen before (or since) thanks to the protection then afforded to them by corrupt officials at very high levels in the Mexican government.

Beginning in the late 1980s, however, the relative tranquility that existed among the first generation of major Mexican drug traffickers began to erode. Following the murder of DEA agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena in 1985 and the arrest of Miguel Angel Félix Gallardo in 1989, the subsequent breakdown of the central mechanisms of protection and coordination was accompanied by greater coordination and violence among DTOs. Félix Gallardo’s protégé, Héctor Luis “El Guero” Palma Salazar, was among the first to come into conflict with other traffickers, including his former mentor. The murder of Palma’s two children and his wife (whose severed head was reportedly sent to Palma) was one of the first salvos in a new era of violence among Mexican DTOs, including the so-called Tijuana, Juárez, and Sinaloa cartels.

Here is the "politically correct" conclusion of the study:

Whether or not H.R. 2134 is approved, developments in Mexico in 2010 will no doubt play a significant role in the ongoing debate over the effectiveness of current U.S. drug policy. Given the extraordinary number of drug-related killings, 2009 was a year of unprecedented, high-profile violence in Mexico. Since recent blows against key DTOs may produce more turmoil over the ensuring months, the toll of drug-related violence remains high at the start of the new decade. Such violence must be taken in context, since drugrelated killings are heavily concentrated in a few key states and very few members of the general population are casualties of this violence. However, the number of drug-related killings has clearly increased to unacceptable levels and creates serious concerns for both Mexican policy makers and citizens. While the problem of drug-related violence should not be exaggerated, it must be addressed. Identifying the best pratices and strategies for both the short and long term must be a top priority for both Mexico and the United States.

This is far too temperate a conclusion. Especially when you note that the current elections in Mexico have ended in a crescendo of violence as reported by The Christian Science Monitor:

A leading gubernatorial candidate is gunned down by suspected organized criminals disguised as soldiers. A severed head is dumped near the house of a mayoral candidate. Voters wake up to four bodies found hanging from bridges. Candidates arrive to cast their ballots in bulletproof vests accompanied by security entourages.

Welcome to Mexico's election, in which drug violence has intimidated front-runners and decreased voter participation in Sunday's races to replace 12 of the nation’s 31 governors.

...

Voter turnout differed depending on the state, but came close to a standstill in areas where cartel violence spread to the elections.

In the border state of Tamaulipas, where suspected cartel hitmen assassinated gubernatorial candidate Rodolfo Torre Cantu on June 28, only 38.6 percent of voters cast their ballots. Torre Cantu’s brother ran in his place, arriving at polling stations with heavy security detail.

Reports of unidentified gunmen circling polling stations also kept voters away. Voter participation in the crime-plagued border city of Juarez was only 20 percent, the local La Jornada newspaper reported.

Before the Hippies

Before the Hippies of the 1960s discovered drugs and got high, there was the US Military high on the idea that drugs would let them control people's minds.

Here is a US military document entitled Experimentation Programs conducted by the Department of Defense That Had CIA Sponsorship or Participation and That Involved the Administration to Human Subjects of Drugs Intended for Mind-Control or Behavior-Modification Purposes prepared in 1977 by the General Counsel of the Department of Defense and released on May 6, 2010 after a Freedom of Information Act request.

Go read this document to find out how the hard-earned taxpayer dollars were spent on schemes to let the military "take control of your mind" and turn you into a zombie.

Sadly, this document doesn't cover the human tragedies created by these programs, i.e. the people killed, driven crazy, families wrecked, etc. You can get a taste of that by using Wikipedia to look up some of these programs and get some details: MKULTRA, MKDELTA, MKNAOMI.

Michael Specter on Science Denialism

Here's a video of Michael Specter giving a talk at a TED conference:



Watch for this comment "we don't believe a bunch of documents giving us government data". This is in the context of the autism & vaccination controversy. People denying the research that states that the vaccines are safe. He is talking about Jenny McCarthy selling her pseudo-science prejudice.

I love his attack on those crazy people who fear GMO (Genetically Modified Organisms).

The Size of the Problem

I can't understand "the war on drugs". Seems to me Prohibition was a test case that proved that such "wars" only established big strong drug gangs. So why has the US been in a 30 year losing "war on drugs"?

Here is a bit from a posting by Tomas Kellner and Francesco Pipitone on the TomDispatch.com blog:

As the Mexican cartels expanded their control over the drug supply chain, revenues exploded. There are no precise historical figures describing the size of the business. But, by any account, there was an enormous amount of money to be made. In 2002, former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft described the size of the U.S. drug market, reporting that Americans spent $62.9 billion on drugs in 2000. More than half ($36.1 billion), was spent on cocaine -- of which an estimated 90 percent transits through Mexico. In 2009, the U.S. National Drug Intelligence Center estimated that Mexican and Colombian drug trafficking organizations generated somewhere in the range of $17 billion to $38 billion annually in gross wholesale proceeds from drug sales in the United States. By comparison, Google’s worldwide revenue in 2009 was $23.6 billion.

I don't understand the fascination with drugs. But I don't understand the US government's role. To an outsider it appears that the US has a vested interest in making the problem bigger not smaller. I don't see any positive progress and I certainly don't see any honest assessment of how badly things have gone nor do I see any admission that a new direction needs to be taken. Bizarre.

And the incompetence and corruption of Mexican authorities is incredible:

Outside of Aguascalientes, ordinary Mexicans have tried peaceful tactics as a way of standing up to violence. In May 2009, an armed group kidnapped a 17-year-old Mormon youth, Erick Le Barón, in the town of Galeana in the state of Chihuahua, and demanded a $1 million ransom. It was the eleventh kidnapping the Mormons had endured in just eight months. (The community, which numbers some 1,000 members, was perceived as relatively well off, which made it a target.) They decided to push back. Led by Erick’s outspoken older brother, Benjamin, they marched to Galeana’s central square and demanded that the state authorities find and free Erick. The Mormons were joined in their public protest by local Mennonites, another religious group that has suffered from extortion and violence. Together, several thousand people spent the night protesting on the square. They publicly declared that they would not pay the ransom. Erick was released several days later, without any money being paid. But such examples of public bravery are rare and their outcome far from certain. Two months later, Benjamin was taken from the home he shared with his wife and five children, along with his brother-in-law. They were both shot and killed.

As I read this sordid story about drugs and Mexico, I can't help thinking of the growth of piracy off the coast of Somalia. The US and other major nations have not responded. Instead, they allow a culture of piracy and violence to fester and deepen. Why?

One wonders how deep the culture of corruption is inside the police and judicial authorities in the US are to allow this situation to develop:

Despite the proximity to the United States, the Obama administration has been providing only modest support to its southern neighbor. Mexico will largely have to make do with $1.4 billion in funds over three years appropriated under the so-called Merida Initiative, a program launched by President George W. Bush aimed at buttressing border, maritime, and air control from the U.S. southern border to Panama. But some officials are concerned that this will not be nearly enough.

In October 2009, former drug czar McCaffrey told Congress that Merida, was “a drop in the bucket.” “The stakes in Mexico are enormous,” McCaffrey said. “We cannot afford to have a narco-state as our neighbor... It is not inconceivable that the violent, warring collection of criminal drug cartels could overwhelm the institutions of the state and establish de facto control over broad regions of Mexico... [The Mexican government] is not confronting dangerous criminality -- it is fighting for survival against narco-terrorism.” Indeed, most of the Merida funds earmarked for Mexico have yet to find their way there. Instead, they have ended up funding American defense and security contractors -- who have refused to disclose how they are being used in the drug interdiction program.

Houston, We Have a Problem

From an article by Alfred W. McCoy on the TomDispatch.com blog:

At a drug conference in Kabul this month, the head of Russia's Federal Narcotics Service estimated the value of Afghanistan's current opium crop at $65 billion. Only $500 million of that vast sum goes to Afghanistan's farmers, $300 million to the Taliban guerrillas, and the $64 billion balance "to the drug mafia," leaving ample funds to corrupt the Karzai government in a nation whose total GDP is only $10 billion.

Indeed, opium's influence is so pervasive that many Afghan officials, from village leaders to Kabul's police chief, the defense minister, and the president's brother, have been tainted by the traffic. So cancerous and crippling is this corruption that, according to recent U.N. estimates, Afghans are forced to spend a stunning $2.5 billion in bribes. Not surprisingly, the government's repeated attempts at opium eradication have been thoroughly compromised by what the U.N. has called "corrupt deals between field owners, village elders, and eradication teams."

Go read the whole thing to discover the interesting "coincidence" that the growth of heroin production overlapped with CIA "involvement" in this area of the world:

Although this area had zero heroin production in the mid-1970s, the CIA's covert war served as the catalyst that transformed the Afghan-Pakistan borderlands into the world's largest heroin producing region. As mujahedeen guerrillas captured prime agricultural areas inside Afghanistan in the early 1980s, they began collecting a revolutionary poppy tax from their peasant supporters.

Once the Afghan guerrillas brought the opium across the border, they sold it to hundreds of Pakistani heroin labs operating under the ISI's protection. Between 1981 and 1990, Afghanistan's opium production grew ten-fold -- from 250 tons to 2,000 tons. After just two years of covert CIA support for the Afghan guerrillas, the U.S. Attorney General announced in 1981 that Pakistan was already the source of 60% of the American heroin supply. Across Europe and Russia, Afghan-Pakistani heroin soon captured an even larger share of local markets, while inside Pakistan itself the number of addicts soared from zero in 1979 to 1.2 million just five years later.

Funny, it was US "involvement" in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam war which create a sudden explosion of drugs coming from that region. And the secret military involvement in South America in the 1970s and 1980s coincided with a sudden rapid growth of drugs from that area. What an amazing series of "coincidences"!

Entrepreneurship is Alive and Well in the USA

Here's an interesting article in the LA Times about a Xalisco-based drug dealer network that is growing quickly in middle-class

Immigrants from an obscure corner of Mexico are changing heroin use in many parts of America.

Farm boys from a tiny county that once depended on sugar cane have perfected an ingenious business model for selling a semi-processed form of Mexican heroin known as black tar.

Using convenient delivery by car and aggressive marketing, they have moved into cities and small towns across the United States, often creating demand for heroin where there was little or none. In many of those places, authorities report increases in overdoses and deaths.

Immigrants from Xalisco in the Pacific Coast state of Nayarit, Mexico, they have brought an audacious entrepreneurial spirit to the heroin trade. Their success stems from both their product, which is cheaper and more potent than Colombian heroin, and their business model, which places a premium on customer convenience and satisfaction.

Users need not venture into dangerous neighborhoods for their fix. Instead, they phone in their orders and drivers take the drug to them. Crew bosses sometimes call users after a delivery to check on the quality of service. They encourage users to bring in new customers, rewarding them with free heroin if they do.

And there is a side benefit from this new approach to drugs: less petty crime:

In Portland and elsewhere, competition among Xalisco dealers and the resulting lower prices changed the nature of the heroin trade. No longer were burglaries and holdups the measure of a city's heroin problem. Junkies could maintain their habits cheaply. A spike in overdoses was the mark of black-tar heroin's arrival.

"The classic picture of a heroin addict is someone who steals," said Gary Oxman, a Multnomah County Health Department doctor who conducted the study of overdoses. "That disappears when you have low-cost heroin. You could maintain a moderate heroin habit for about the same price as a six-pack of premium beer."

It was the same in other cities where Xalisco dealers settled. In Denver, addicts say the cost of a dose of black tar has dropped as low as $8.

In the Utah County suburbs of Salt Lake City, it was more than $50 a dose in the early 1990s.

...

Black tar is cheaper than pain medications. Xalisco dealers exploited that advantage and pushed relentlessly for new customers. Addicts in Columbus say they offered rewards for referrals to new users: eight or 10 free balloons of heroin for every $1,000 in sales an addict brought in.

I have no love for drugs, never used them, never will, but the US's "War on Drugs" strikes me as Prohibition all over again which fed big money to criminals leading to corrupted police and judiciary in all the major cities of the US. This "War on Drugs" has done the same, but the American electorate has never caught on and allows this disaster to keep unrolling. Sad. But at least this new "Walmart of drugs" is pricing stuff so cheaply that addicts can maintain their addiction and their job so the petty crime isn't as bad. But this tradeoff means that addiction is spreading.

Death Panels

Here is an interesting blog posting on rabies. The words "death panel" jogged me. The writer was making fun of Sarah Palin and the goofy Republican "talking points" machine that worked so hard to defeat health care reform in the US. But the comment on "death panel" points out that we make cost/benefit decisions on life and death every day.

Meanwhile, here's an interesting post on rabies in which I've highlighted the "death panel" comment:

The mysteries of rabies

by Maggie Koerth-Baker

One day, towards the end of summer, I walked into my living room and found my cats playing "Secret CIA Prison" with a bat. He was alive, but just barely. He lay on my floor twitching, his wings torn to Swiss cheese. The cats looked up at me as if to say, "We do good work, yes?" I locked them in the bedroom and called the vet. Fortunately, the cats were all up on their shots. Unfortunately, I couldn't tell the vet how the bat had gotten into the house, nor how long he'd been there.

"You should maybe call your doctor," she said.

On average, 55,000 people worldwide die from rabies every year, but only two or three of those cases happen in the United States, thanks to widespread vaccination of domestic animals and availability of post-bite treatment for humans. Today, when Americans die of rabies, it's usually because they didn't realize they'd been bitten until it was too late—which is to say, when they first noticed symptoms.

See, we know how to prevent rabies, but we have absolutely no idea how to cure it. In fact, we don't even really know how it kills people. Despite (and, perhaps, because of) its status as one of the first viruses to be tamed by a vaccine, rabies remains a little-understood disease.

It's a mystery that makes doctors understandably nervous. Just a week before I found my bat, some friends of mine in St. Paul had woken up to find a bat in their bedroom. Being asleep is one of those times when tiny bat teeth could bite you without you being aware of it. My friends had to get post-exposure prophylaxis, a treatment designed to neutralize any rabies virus in your system before it has a chance to reach your brain and develop into a full-blown infection.

"You think about flu, that's a very quick virus. You develop symptoms in a couple of days. In a week, it's passed. But rabies incubation is very long," said Zhen Fu, DVM Ph.D., professor of pathology in the College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Georgia. "It may be weeks or even months before you develop an active infection. So we have enough time after a bite to immunize with normal vaccine and bring up the immune system."

That means five doses of vaccine, over the course of 28 days, according the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. If there's also an obvious bite, doctors will clean the wound and apply rabies antibody serum to the site. The antibodies are basically the key part of a lock-and-key system that tells your immune system to destroy anything the key fits. The idea is that antibodies will help destroy most of the virus at the site of entry, while the vaccine will train your body to knock out any strays it finds elsewhere. The CDC also recommends a shot of antibodies, separate from the vaccine, even if there is no obvious bite.

This one-two punch is almost 100% effective, provided you get it in time. How fast is "in time"? Nobody really knows. The CDC says that, as long as a bite victim isn't yet symptomatic, they should get the prophylaxis. Dr. Fu said that the window of opportunity can vary in length, depending on how close the bite is to the person's central nervous system. Without post-exposure prophylaxis, rabies is fatal. By the time symptoms--fever, confusion, partial paralysis, difficulty swallowing--appear, it's too late. There's not much doctors can do after that, because they aren't even sure what the virus is doing to you.

"We don't know how rabies kills people. There are some unproven hypotheses, but that's it," Dr. Fu said. "One idea is that, once the infection reaches the neurons in the brain, it blocks the transmission of messages from the brain to the rest of the body. If that's the case, it could explain many of the phenomenon we see in humans and animals, such as end-stage paralysis. That could even be why humans die, because of paralysis of muscles in the heart and lungs."

Given the lack of information and the risk of death, it's not surprising that even a situation like mine, where a bite was extremely unlikely, ended with a referral to a nearby hospital for post-exposure prophylaxis. But, after several conversations between the emergency room doctor and the Minnesota state rabies hotline, I ended up not getting it. Turns out, sneak-attack bites don't really happen to wide-awake, sober, cognitively normal adults in the middle of the day. The chance that I or my husband were actually bitten by the bat before the cats set upon it was so small that, on the advice of medical professionals, we decided that it wasn't worth the pain, potential side-effects, or cost of treatment.

That's right. I am my own death panel.

But on the off-chance that I do come down with symptoms—there've been cases of rabies incubating for up to a year—is there really no hope? Well, sort of. Maybe. Ish. Researchers have been experimenting with a treatment that they think could save the lives of people with full-blown rabies. Called the Milwaukee Protocol, it involves putting the patient into a coma and also giving them antiviral medication. The idea is that the human immune system—with some help from antivirals—can fight off a rabies infection, while the coma limits damage to the brain that seems to be a common cause of rabies death. In 2004, a teenage girl who received this treatment became the first person—ever—to survive symptomatic rabies without having received the vaccine either before being bitten, or before symptoms appeared.

The problem: We still don't know whether the Milwaukee Protocol actually works. It's been tried—and failed—at least 13 times since 2004, according to a 2009 paper published in the journal Current Infectious Disease Reports. There are two reported successes, but in one of those the patient received the vaccine before her she became symptomatic. The other success is very recent and there aren't many details available yet.

So why did the first girl survive? Again, nobody knows. It's possible that either she had a particularly hardcore immune system, or the variant of the virus she contracted was particularly weak, or both. When she was diagnosed, she had rabies antibodies in her cerebral spinal fluid—something that would indicate the presence of rabies in her brain—but doctors weren't able to isolate any actual virus—suggesting that her body was already on its way to winning the fight before the Milwaukee Protocol was used.

Unfortunately, any effort to really conquer rabies may be hampered by the fact that the vaccine works so well, Dr. Fu said.

"Treatments haven't been successful because we don't know what it's doing in the brain," he said. "We need more research but, usually, once you have a good vaccine the funding for the research goes away."

New England Journal of Medicine: Survival After Treatment of Rabies With Induction of Coma
Current Infectious Disease Reports: Update on Rabies Diagnosis and Treatment

American Madness

Here's an interesting interview with a retired police chief of Seattle who points out that the "drug war" is an insane policy that has run for 36 years and cost $1 TRILLION and utterly failed since drugs are available everywhere, at lower cost, and better quality than when the "War on Drugs" was announced by Nixon in 1971. This video is from this Reason TV webpage: