And now:Ish <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: "*Noquisi* (Day Starr)" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> : Mitch Cohen wrote: > Beware The Violence Initiative Project -- > Coming Soon to an Inner City Near You > > by Mitchel Cohen, of the > Brooklyn Greens / Green Party of NY, > & the Red Balloon Collective > > "It is proper to focus on blacks and other minorities as they are > over-represented in the courts and not well studied." > -Gail Wasserman, Ph.D., from her funding proposal to establish a > "behavioral disorders" center at Columbia University's Department of > Child Psychiatry. > > "Unemployment runs in the genes just like bad teeth." > - Richard Herrnstein, Princeton University, and co-author of The Bell > Curve. > > As late as the 1980s, a number of U.S. and European scientists were > still claiming that Black people, Latinos and American Indians are less > intelligent than Caucasians. (Asians were left out of the mix.) > Intelligence, they said, ran in the genes along racial lines. Some > scientists are now proposing that violence is an hereditary > characteristic of Black and Latino people and, unlike the case with > genetic intelligence, something can be done about it. Scientists, they > say, can control the alleged "genetic predisposition" to committing > criminal acts of violence by medicating Black and Latino children > before > aggressive behavior and violence occur. > > Under the aegis of the federally-funded Violence Initiative Project, > Gail Wasserman, a professor in Child Psychology at Columbia University, > and Daniel Pine, a medical doctor associated with the same institution, > are picking up where the utterly discredited racially-based intelligence > theories of Jensen, Herrnstein, Eysenck, Shockley and Murray leave off. > The new proponents of genetic racism lead a team of researchers in > performing numerous experiments, partly funded by federal dollars, on > children as young as six years of age. > > In one "study" at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, 34 healthy > boys, aged six to ten, were administered the drug fenfluramine, the > primary ingredient in the diet drug fen-phen which had been banned by > the U.S. government.(1) The boys were all from impoverished families; 44 > percent were African-American and 56 percent were Hispanic. > > The boys were made to fast for 12 hours prior to beginning, and during > the test were allowed only water. An intravenous catheter was inserted > and designed to remain in place for five and one half hours. During that > period an oral dose of the drug fenfluramine hydroxide was administered > (10mg/kg). Blood was drawn hourly. > > Scandal swirled around the sale of fen-phen in the mid 1990s, as > Federal Drug Administrations studies showed that the drug caused severe > heart-valve damage in as many as 30 percent of the adults who took > it.(2) Fenfluramine was also shown to cause a fatal heart condition > known as pulmonary hypertension.(3) Effects of a single dose of > fenfluramine, writes the Albany-based Disability Advocates, Inc., > "frequently included anxiety, fatigue, headache, lightheadedness, > difficulty concentrating, visual impairment, diarrhea, nausea, a feeling > of being 'high,' and irritability."(4) Ninety percent of adult subjects > experienced side-effects from a single dose of fenfluramine. And studies > done on rodents and monkeys have shown that a single dose of > fenfluramine caused microscopic damage to brain cells. Despite the fact > that the dangers had been well-established, the NY State Psychiatric > Institute proceeded with administering fenfluramine to children in doses > 8 times higher than the amounts causing damage to monkeys' brains, even > after the drug had been banned in September, 1997. > > In using that drug, the clinicians hypothesized, they could counter the > alleged racially inherited genetic predisposition to aggressive behavior > and violence by increasing serotonin levels in the brain. Some > scientists have correlated lower than average serotonin levels with > aggressive behavior. (Whether decreased serotonin levels cause > aggression or are effects of it is a distinction conveniently fudged by > researchers, for reasons we'll get to near the end of this report.) By > increasing serotonin levels through medication, the researchers are > claiming they could prevent the kids from committing future acts of > violence, despite the fact that most of the children had not committed > any acts of violence at all. > > The children were selected because they each had an older sibling who > had been ruled a delinquent by Family Court. The children's names and > addresses, which are supposed to be confidential and sealed, were (and > continue to be) culled by government officials at the Department of > Probation and the New York City Board of Education and passed along to > Wasserman and Pine. The involvement of public officials became known due > only to exposes in local newspapers.(5) > > Forced to reply, the NYC Board of Education denied that students had > been referred for the purpose of participating in research, which would > have been illegal. But the documents indicate that that is precisely > what happened. In fact, writes Newsday, the Board's Committee on Special > Education "worked closely with the researchers from the beginning."(6) > And, as the Department of Probation itself has written, "We are > participating in a Research Project being conducted by Professor Gail > Wasserman, of Columbia University, regarding younger brothers of male > offenders, in a [sic] effort to identify early predictors of anti-social > behavior."(7) > > Pine, Wasserman and other researchers from the New York State > Psychiatric Institute, have been experimenting on young minority > children since 1992. Similar experiments have been going on at Queens > College and at Mt. Sinai School of Medicine in New York, and at > facilities throughout the United States, under the rubric of the > national Violence Initiative Project, supervised and funded through the > National Institute of Mental Health. > > And the money is pouring in. By claiming genetic predisposition, > psychiatrists are able to tap into the hundreds of millions of dollars > available for genetic research * the latest claim for why people do > anything: commit violent crimes, engage in homosexual or heterosexual > behavior (with the latter still, illogically, seen as the norm even with > an alleged genetic basis for a variety of sexualities), come down with > certain cancers, even commit murder * it's in the genes. The money, in > turn, has fueled all sorts of similar "projects," including new methods > for genetically frisking prisoners for "bad DNA," and for screening > workers and denying them insurance. Some companies have fired workers > because, they've been told, they suffer from genetic predisposition to > certain diseases such as sickle cell anemia or breast cancer (even > though the whole "breast cancer gene" panic of the last two years is > utterly fraudulent). Far less in public resources are allocated towards researching the effects of toxic byproducts of industrial production and the chemicalization of agriculture in causing cancer, lead-poisoning and other immune-compromising "diseases". Instead, funding * and thus, blame -- is shifted to an individual's (or ethnic/racial grouping's) biological makeup. In such a framework, the widespread social and environmental causes are ignored and the victim becomes targeted as the culprit. It's their own fault. Or, if not their "fault," the more liberal version goes, it's still "in their genes, poor souls." Thus, we see, today, psycho-surgery, lobotomies, and electroshock making a comeback, as well as medicalization of what are fundamentally socially or environmentally-caused ailments and behaviors. New and dangerous genetically-engineered drugs are being tested on prisoners, soldiers and mental patients institutionalized in asylums or warehoused in impoverished inner-city slums, Indian reservations, and Third World countries. To the giant pharmaceutical corporations as well as to the government, these areas provide a necessary surplus of human guinea pigs. The Violence Initiative Project experiments on Black and Latino children are simply reheated Nazi experiments, with an American accent. -- Back To The Blanket Journal: http://www.angelfire.com/biz/BackToTheBlanket Heroine Mu Gui-Ying http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Pagoda/7111 &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& Tsonkwadiyonrat (We are ONE Spirit) Unenh onhwa' Awayaton http://www.tdi.net/ishgooda/ &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
