<tt>From:</tt> <tt> "Dan Russell" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]></tt> <br><br> <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"> <HTML><HEAD><TITLE></TITLE> <META content="text/html; charset=windows-1252" http-equiv=Content-Type> <META content="MSHTML 5.00.2919.6307" name=GENERATOR> <STYLE></STYLE> </HEAD> <BODY bgColor=#ffffff> <DIV><FONT size=2> <BLOCKQUOTE style="BORDER-LEFT: #000000 2px solid; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px; PADDING-RIGHT: 0px"> <DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial">----- Original Message ----- </DIV> <DIV style="BACKGROUND: #e4e4e4; FONT: 10pt arial; font-color: black"><B>From:</B> <A href="mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]" [EMAIL PROTECTED]>Dave</A> </DIV> <DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>To:</B> <A href="mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]" [EMAIL PROTECTED]>[EMAIL PROTECTED]</A> </DIV> <DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>Sent:</B> Tuesday, January 18, 2000 1:13 AM</DIV> <DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>Subject:</B> [CIA-DRUGS] Mike Levine's <A href="http://www.expertwitnessradio.com">www.expertwitnessradio.com</A></DIV> <DIV><BR><TT>From:</TT> <TT>"Dave" <<A href="mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]">[EMAIL PROTECTED]</A>></TT> <BR><BR><FONT size=2>Dave Hartley<BR><A href="http://www.Asheville-Computer.com/dave" target=_blank>http://www.Asheville-Computer.com/dave</A><BR></FONT><FONT face="Comic Sans MS">Mike Levine:</FONT><FONT size=2><FONT face="Comic Sans MS" size=3><BR><A href="http://www.expertwitnessradio.com/">http://www.expertwitnessradio.com/</A></FONT></FONT></DIV></BLOCKQUOTE></FONT></DIV> <DIV>Dave:</DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV><FONT size=2><FONT size=3>While Mike Levine is politically interesting, I have not included his site on </FONT><A href="http://www.drugwar.com/links.htm"><FONT face=Verdana size=3><STRONG>Great Links.</STRONG></FONT></A> </FONT><FONT size=3>Explaining why will give me a chance to comment on an empirical analysis weakness I know from your comments that you too have seen too many times on this list - a profound misunderstanding of the evolution and function of inebriative behavior and pharmacology - pharmacophobia. The problem with CIA-Drugs isn't drugs - it's that money is the basis of military power - it's Prohibition. Pharmacophobia plays directly into the hands of the fascist dopers, since the denial of the safe traditional herbs automatically popularizes the profitable-to-smuggle refined alkaloids. </FONT></DIV> <DIV><FONT size=3></FONT> </DIV> <DIV><FONT size=3>Inebriative behavior is evolutionarily, physiologically, related to eating and sex (all rewarded by the pleasurable release of dopamine in the forebrain's nucleus accumbens). It is rooted in oral instinct. There are no tribal cultures known by anthropology or archeology, not one, for whom an inebriative herb wasn't the central sacrament and totem of the culture. Before <EM>oinos </EM>was the Blood of <EM>Christos</EM>, it was the Blood of Dionysos, and before that the Blood of Osiris. <EM>Oinos</EM> is a generic Cretan word for any inebriant. The <EM>Oinos</EM> that was the Blood of Dionysos (<EM>Iasius</EM> - "the Healer"), on Crete in 1500 BC, was what the Romans called <EM>trimma</EM>, wine with potent entheogenic herbs diffused in it. An analogy that will appeal to the anthropo-archeo-logically ignorant is the Native American "Peace Pipe," a profound entheogenic sacrament. </FONT></DIV> <DIV><FONT size=3></FONT> </DIV> <DIV><FONT size=3>Levine says: "<FONT face="Courier New, Courier, mono" size=2>Hard drugs, in my long experience, are relentlessly addictive and life-destroying, while alcohol, as damaging as it is in a small percentage of its buyers, is a long accepted rite of passage that is in most cases survivable. And while Peter Bourne, President Carter�s Drug Advisor was proclaiming cocaine "the most benign of the illegal drugs," Michael Baden, New York City�s Medical Examiner was pointing out before an audience of DEA agents and New York City Detectives, that "Cocaine, 80 percent of our hard-core drug problem, is a poison that kills directly by attacking every vital organ of the body." Only street-wise narcotic officers heard Dr. Baden�s words, while the world media trumpeted the false proclamation of the White House drug expert. </FONT> <P><FONT face="Courier New, Courier, mono" size=2>Not only is there no real comparison between hard drugs and alcohol but the majority of our society does not want hard drugs legalized and have said so loud and clear in every poll�for good reason."</FONT></P> <P>Levine's pharmacology, though not his demographics, is completely unempirical. And, as MacArthur said, "You can't hit em where they aint if you dont know where they are." Street cocaine is poison because it is poison, not pharmaceutical-grade cocaine. And street cocaine is popular because coca leaf products are illegal. It takes 2000 pounds of coca leaves, a very healthful tea leaf, to make about 10 pounds of cocaine. Cocaine is relatively dangerous only because it is a synthetic concentration. <FONT face=Palatino size=3><FONT face=Arial>There are far more dangerous compounds in potatoes, tomatoes, celery and fava beans, all of which are perfectly safe to eat.</FONT></FONT> </P> <P>But if you legalize coca leaf products, and make it legal for doctors to prescribe cocaine, you make smuggled cocaine worthless as a source of military funding. <FONT face=Palatino size=3><FONT face=Arial>Artificially inflated, cocaine accounts for more than 50% of Peru�s foreign trade. In 1995, the United Nations Drug Control Program estimated that Peru produced more than 500,000 kilos of cocaine. That�s more than 600 tons, with a wholesale value in New York of more than $30 billion. The <I>legal</I> value of that cocaine would be about $3 billion. </FONT><FONT face=Arial>No one who doesn�t support that trade, <I>and cocaine�s continued illegality</I>, will rise to control of the Peruvian military, because without <I>illegal</I> cocaine the Peruvian Army couldn�t pay for weapons. That would lead to widespread campesino control of the voting process,<FONT face=Palatino size=3><FONT face=Arial> and, God forbid, a populist government in Lima. That�s why <I>Sendero Luminoso</I> wants to collapse the price of cocaine with controlled legalization. It would end the fight for Indian land.</FONT></P></FONT></FONT></FONT> <P><FONT face="Courier New, Courier, mono" size=2>"...there no real comparison between hard drugs and alcohol..." </FONT>The analogy between alcohol addiction and heroin addiction is, in fact, very strong. In fact, the rate of addiction to use is identical.</P> <P><A href="http://www.drugwar.com">Drug War:</A> <FONT face=Palatino size=3></P> <P>Between 1893 and 1895 the British <I>Opium Royal Commission</I> produced three twelve hundred page volumes of expert notarized testimony concerning the use of opium in India. British politics made any attempt to exclude negative witnesses impossible. The commission's only requirement was verifiable expertise on some aspect of the subject. One English missionary, who knew of no "hardier, thriftier or more careful people than the Punjabis,"<FONT face=Palatino size=3> insisted regular opium use "seems to interfere neither with their longevity nor with their health." That was the overwhelming majority opinion of the hundreds of physicians, civil servants, merchants, missionaries and working people recorded by the Commission. </FONT></P><FONT face=Palatino size=3> <P>Small amounts of opium produce a pleasant and energetic bodily lightness conducive to work and mental activity. Opium was used as a pre-battle stimulant by the Punjabis, and no British soldier wanted to face them. Larger amounts produce a dreamy reverie, "an aid to music composers" as one 1912 <I>New York Times</I> article had it. </P></FONT><FONT face=Palatino size=3> <P>Smoking opium sap is not analogous to injecting morphine or heroin. Dr. Brecher in <I>Licit & Illicit Drugs</I>: "Only about 10% of the morphine [5-15% of commercial opium by weight]...enters the vapor, and only a portion of the morphine in the vapor enters the human bloodstream when inhaled; there are no �tars� or other carcinogens to cause cancer. The so-called �opium-smoker� is actually a vapor inhaler. At a very rough estimate, a smoker would have to smoke 300<FONT face=Palatino size=3> or 400 grains of opium to get a dose equivalent to the intravenous injection of one grain of heroin [diacetylmorphine]."</FONT><FONT face=Palatino size=1>2</FONT><FONT face=Palatino size=3> Smoked, all 39 of opium�s alkaloids are delivered in concert, slowly and in minuscule doses, CNS exciters right along with the depressants. The most harm an opium smoker can do to himself is put himself to sleep.</P> <P>Morphine, on the other hand, opium�s major alkaloid, is a powerful CNS depressant, especially in conjunction with alcohol, and hypodermic injection makes absorption immediate and irreversible. But that, again, reduces to a question of dosage, expertise and public policy, not toxicity. As Jonathan Ott, the great entheobotanist and chemist, wrote to me: "So-called opiate overdose [overwhelmingly caused by anaphylaxis or toxicity of adulterants, as opposed to true overdose] results from respiratory, not cardiac, arrest, <I>via</I> a relaxant effect on the respiratory muscles, there�s virtually no other toxicity at these dose-levels...morphine is one of the least-toxic drugs in the pharmacopoeia, and deaths from medicinal administration, also of heroin in Britain, even if from intravenous administration, are almost unknown, since known dosage and purity are givens."</P></FONT></FONT></FONT></FONT><FONT face=Palatino size=3> <P>That is, you can get into trouble with morphine if it is a) adulterated, b) mixed with alcohol, or c) given in overdose. You can�t overdose on the smoked sap. Alkaloids are more dangerous than herbs <I>when criminalized</I>, because: a) they are easier to adulterate; b) amateurs are untrained in concentrate dosage and administration; and c)<FONT face=Palatino size=3> concentration and toxicity of unlabeled street alkaloids is unknown. </P> <P>But the 1909-1914 criminalization of the safe sap automatically popularized the refined alkaloid, since it�s far more profitable to smuggle. This was the conclusion of the official USPHS study conducted by Kolb and Du Mez in 1924. Prior to 1914 gum opium was favored by regular users, after 1914 the gum had been almost totally replaced by heroin and morphine.</FONT><FONT face=Palatino size=1>3</FONT><FONT face=Palatino> </FONT><FONT face=Palatino>As Professor Trebach pointed out, this substitution process repeated itself after WW II when American drug law was foisted on a supine world. Hong Kong, North Europe, Japan, Germany, Singapore, Thailand, Borneo and Turkey all found their opium smokers using the only available substitute - heroin.</FONT><FONT face=Palatino size=1>4</FONT><FONT face=Palatino size=3> Professor McCoy repeatedly makes the same point.</P></FONT></FONT><FONT face=Palatino size=3> <P>Is regular morphine or opium use "addiction" simply because it is regular? All genuine addiction experts agree that opiates do no physiological damage to the user at all - they do not damage liver, central nervous system, stomach, muscles, kidneys, glands, heart or brain. The most famous example of this is Dr. William Stewart Halsted, a clinical founder, chief of surgery, of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Halsted injected morphine, or a combination of morphine and cocaine, every day for the last thirty years of his life and, simultaneously, was renowned as the greatest technical surgeon alive,<FONT size=3> "the father of modern surgery." He died at seventy, still operating.</FONT><FONT face=Palatino size=1>5<FONT face=Palatino size=3></P> <P>How then does one define "addiction." Is the word just an epithet? Halsted was a productive genius who <I>used</I> drugs. And the major "drug" he was using was the botanical version of a naturally-occurring human neurochemical. <FONT size=3>The body�s basic painkillers are a family of peptides known as endorphins, which is short for endogenous morphines.</FONT><FONT size=1>15</FONT> They cluster in various parts of the brain and spinal cord, and are designed to interact with human neuroreceptors. They have structural similarities to opiate alkaloids. Mammalian bodies also produce morphine, codeine and thebaine, also found in opium poppies.16 </P> <P>Of course, opium has more than three dozen alkaloids, including morphine, the most prevalent, and the body can perhaps do better than that.<FONT size=1>17</FONT> This is a complex and technical biochemical mystery, but there is no doubt that the body produces opiate alkaloids, including some virtually identical to morphine and codeine, and that these bond to the brain�s chemically-specific opiate receptor mechanisms.</P> <P>Halsted was practicing psychopharmacology, to be sure, but to great advantage. The same can be said of a very long list of wildly productive contemporary geniuses, including some of our greatest novelists, filmmakers, songwriters, astronomers, physicists and entrepreneurs. Jonathan Ott, the entheobotanist taught at universities worldwide, publishes fluently in Spanish, German and English. He is one of the most powerful and productive scholars alive. And he has been a very active pharmacophile for decades. He tells me that my use of the word "pharmacoshaman" is a "pleonasm," a redundancy.</P> <P align=justify>Prohibition, then, has very little to do with scientific pharmacology and its related disciplines, and much to do with the <I>politicization</I> of pharmacology. As Professor Alfred Lindesmith put it in the introduction to his 1947 classic <I>Addiction and Opiates</I>: "alcohol is addicting in approximately the same sense that heroin is...the fact that marijuana, cocaine, and heroin and other opiate-type drugs are covered in the same anti-narcotics legislation is a fertile source of confused thinking because it obscures the facts that the use of marijuana is totally unlike heroin or morphine addiction and that alcoholism...actually has very much in common with opiate addiction."</P> <P>Alcohol, heroin and cocaine all show approximately the same ratio of addicts or abusers to users, 10% or less, hardly a proportion requiring mass hysteria. Cigarettes produce a rate of addiction higher than 50% in occasional users.<FONT size=1>6</FONT> Cigarettes kill 400,000 American a year. Alcohol kills 150,000. All illegal drugs combined kill about 6,000.<FONT size=2> <FONT size=3>Skiing or bathroom accidents kill more people. The hysteria about drugs is PROPAGANDA. </FONT></FONT></P> <P><FONT face=Arial><FONT face=Palatino size=3>Nearly all the empirical research supports the conclusions of Dr. Marie Nyswander, the popularizer of the politically acceptable "methadone maintenance": "There is a pattern of self-limitation or restraint in opium smoking in countries where it is socially acceptable. It is common for natives in these countries to indulge in opium smoking one night a week much as Americans may indulge in alcoholic beverages at a Saturday night party.... families who accept opium smoking as part of their culture are mindful of its dangers much as we are mindful of the dangers of overindulgence in alcohol."</FONT><FONT face=Palatino size=1>15</FONT><FONT face=Palatino size=3> </P> <P>Describing the high rate of opium or heroin "addiction" in Hong Kong in 1970, Professor McCoy stresses that "Most of the addicts were poor wage laborers who lived in cramped tenements and sprawling slums, which many social workers considered ideal breeding grounds for addiction."</FONT><FONT face=Palatino size=1>16</FONT><FONT face=Palatino size=3><FONT face=Palatino size=3> That is, it is the poverty that fosters the escapism, not the escapism the poverty. But of course, to acknowledge that politically would mean that public funds would start to flow <I>out</I> of police programs and <I>into</I> social programs. </P> <P>Sociologists at the City College of New York in the early 1940�s were astonished by the alcohol admission statistics of New York City�s<FONT face=Palatino size=3> public hospitals, which then kept records by ethnicity. 25% of all admissions for alcohol-related problems were of Irish background, but only � of 1% were of Jewish background. On examination of other measures, they found that the same ratios held true. Alcoholism among Jewish Americans was one-fiftieth the rate of alcoholism among Irish Americans.</FONT><FONT face=Palatino size=1>17</P> <P></FONT><FONT face=Palatino size=3></P> <P align=justify>Since no biological or psychological differences could be found, the answer seemed to lie in the attitude of the cultures toward alcohol itself. Jewish culture, like many Mediterranean cultures, teaches the sane use of alcohol to its young rather than simply prohibiting it. That is, as Dr. Nyswander says, acculturation is everything. </P> <P align=justify>This same pattern repeats itself worldwide and can be found in completely unconnected cultures. The Vicosinos of Peru, who enjoy ritual and social inebriation as often as the Jews, and who also share sanctioned ritual inebriation with the children, likewise have virtually no alcoholism.</FONT><FONT face=Palatino size=1>18</FONT><FONT face=Palatino size=3> The Irish Catholic pattern is prohibition; even the sacramental wine is forbidden to all but the priest, producing a strong, alienated reaction in the pub. Those cultures that prescribe rather than proscribe don�t have a drug problem. </P> <P align=justify>Professor Charles Snyder: "Where drinking is an integral part of the socialization process, where it is interrelated with the central moral symbolism and is repeatedly practiced in the rites of a group, the phenomenon of alcoholism is conspicuous by its absence. Norms of sobriety can be effectively sustained under these circumstances even though the drinking is extensive. Where institutional conflicts disrupt traditional patterns in which drinking is integrated, where drinking is dissociated from the normal process of socialization, where drinking is relegated to social contexts which are disconnected from or in opposition to the core moral values and where it is used for individual purposes, pathologies such as alcoholism may be expected to increase."</FONT><FONT face=Palatino size=1>19</P> <P></FONT><FONT face=Palatino size=3></P> <P>That is the general conclusion of empirical experts on drug abuse regardless of the inebriant. Polynesia has no problem with kava, Peru none with coca leaf, the Mbuti of the Congo none with marijuana, Yemen none with khat. Prescribing cultures, in which teaching and familial love and acceptance replaces proscription and ostracism, don�t produce the stressful conditions in which inebriative behaviors become the focus of neurotic behavior. </P> <P>The "drug problem," then, is not one of pharmacology, but of public policy. Stress, alienation, pain, promotes the use of euphoriants and pain killers. <FONT face=Palatino size=3>Stress is debilitating, confusing and painful, causing people, instinctively, to reach for whatever painkiller or euphoriant is available. Stress is the number one "gateway" to "abuse," and there is no empirical doubt about that among the mainstream of addiction scientists, even those who have trouble distinguishing "use" from "abuse."</P></FONT><FONT face=Palatino size=3> <P align=justify>Between 1978 and 1988, virtually the entire job base of South Central Los Angeles collapsed as manufacturers and warehouses fled to more stable locations. Unemployment in South Central soared to 60% or more. Reagan cut CETA, Comprehensive Employment and Training Act funds, and eliminated the Job Corps. Los Angeles itself allocated virtually no funds to South Central�s parks or libraries, and actually eliminated the municipal Summer Job Program. There was almost no legal way for many young people in South Central to make a living. LAPD Chief Gates, in April 1988, then announced that the problem was crack cocaine. </P> <P>Gates institutionalized Operation Hammer, massively funded by the Bush administration. Gates rousted the young Black men of South Central for virtually anything at all - dress, hairstyle, curfew. The LAPD, between 1988 and 1992, arrested 75% of all the young Black men in LA. 90% of those arrested were released without charges, but their names went into the counterinsurgency database. I can�t re<FONT face=Palatino size=3>member being more enraged as a kid in the Bronx than when I was rousted for nothing at all on my own home grounds. It was a denial of my right to be there. Daryl Gates was the best recruiter the Crip guerrillas ever had.</FONT><FONT face=Palatino size=1>33</P> <P></FONT><FONT face=Palatino size=3></P> <P align=justify>As of early 1994, 1500 Black Americans per 100,000 were behind bars. The figure for Whites was 210 per 100,000.</FONT><FONT face=Palatino size=1>34 </FONT><FONT face=Palatino size=3>As of 1997, the U.S. had an incredible 645 people per 100,000 behind bars, while rates in countries such as Canada, France, Germany, Finland, Sweden and Australia varied from 40 to 125 per 100,000. Our imprisonment rate is higher than the world�s worst police states, literally the highest in the world. 60% of all federal, and 25% of all state prisoners are there on drug charges. </P> <P align=justify>In 1993, 2.3 million Black men were sent to the slammer while 23,000 received a college degree - that�s a hundred to one. <I>That�s</I> what�s fascistic about all that "role model" propaganda - the 1% are "role models" - the 99% are "dealers," "niggers." By mid-1997 there were 100,000 federal prison inmates, 1,060,000 state prisoners and 600,000 in municipal lockups - and 51% of them were Black.</FONT><FONT face=Palatino size=1>35</P> <P></FONT><FONT face=Palatino size=3></P> <P>Blacks comprise about 15% of the U.S. population. We leave millions of ghetto kids unemployed, without neighborhood social centers, to fend for themselves amidst Prohibition-created violence and economics, throw their parents in the slammer for medicating their own pain, hunt them like wolves - and then act surprised when they turn into wolf packs. Some Republican from Kansas, working for the contractor lobby, then gets righteously indignant on the floor of Congress and decides that day-care money would be better spent on more new prisons." </P> <P><FONT face=Arial>There was no "crack epidemic." There was a poverty epidemic, and continues to be. <FONT face=Palatino size=3><FONT face=Arial>The U.S. has the highest rate of child poverty in the industrial world, 22%. <I>The</I> <I>Economist</I>, 5/25/96: "One in five American children lives in poverty, more than double the rate in Germany or Britain." </FONT></FONT><FONT face=Palatino size=3><FONT face=Arial>With her �geo-coded� data base Catherine Fitts was able to demonstrate that defaulted HUD mortgages were concentrated in areas of structural poverty, and that those were precisely the "drug areas" the Prohibitionists were most up in arms about. "Freeway" Ricky Ross� Harbor Freeway, running right through the center of South Central L.A., was a concentrated mass of defaulted HUD/FHA single family loans. Fitts� map of defaults looks quite like a pollution-induced disease cluster centered around the Harbor Freeway. </FONT><FONT face=Arial>Failure to address neighborhood structural poverty results in a pain-filled neighborhood dependent on the default underground painkiller economy. </FONT></FONT></FONT></P> <P><FONT face=Arial><FONT face=Palatino size=3><FONT face=Arial>And failure to accurately analyze the pharmaco-evolutionary realities is as strategically suicidal - from the anti-drug war as well as the pro-drug war perspective - as failure to accurately analyze the Vietminh was in the Vietnam war. </FONT></P> <P></FONT></FONT></FONT></FONT></FONT></FONT></FONT></FONT></FONT></FONT></FONT>Dan Russell<BR><A href="mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]">[EMAIL PROTECTED]</A><BR>Kalyx.com<BR>P.O. Box 417<BR>Camden, NY 13316<BR><A href="http://www.kalyx.com">http://www.kalyx.com</A></P></DIV> <BLOCKQUOTE style="BORDER-LEFT: #000000 2px solid; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px; PADDING-RIGHT: 0px"> <P><FONT size=2></P></FONT></BLOCKQUOTE></BODY></HTML> <hr> <!-- begin ONElist Sponsor --> <center> <iframe width=468 height=60 noresize scrolling=no frameborder=0 marginheight=0 marginwidth=0 src="http://adforce.imgis.com/?adiframe|2.0|2|82050|1|1|ADFORCE;"> <a href="http://adforce.imgis.com/?adlink|2.0|2|82050|1|1|misc=7299;loc=300;" target=_top><img src="http://adforce.imgis.com/?adserv|2.0|2|82050|1|1|misc=7299;loc=300;" border=0 width=468 height=60 alt="ONElist Sponsor"></a> </iframe> <br><font size=1>Please click above to support our sponsor</font><br> </center> <!-- end ONElist Sponsor --> <hr>
