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The Power Structure Wants the Discussion Circumscribed to Systemic Racism, Not Systemic Inequality
by John Lawrence, June 17, 2020
Let's just talk about systemic racism and not about an economic system in which a few people control all the wealth and the rest get crumbs from the table. The power structure does not want the discussion extended into that area. Let's just integrate black people into the system so that they are not disproportionately poor, only poor proportionally to their percentage of the population. Blacks compose 12% of the American population. 27% of black people are in poverty so the good old American way is to reduce the percentage in poverty to 12%. Then blacks would be proportionately and not disproportionately poor. That's the American way. Don't question systemic poverty and inequality; Confine the discussion to systemic racism.
The American way is to have a few rich people among every ethnic group and then to use this as an example that anyone can get rich in America. So what if the majority are poor. It's more important that you have examples of huge wealth among black people, and that is certainly the case today. American black billionaires on the 2019 Forbes list included American investor Robert Smith with $5 billion, businessman David Steward with $3 billion, media mogul Oprah Winfrey with a net worth of $2.5 billion and American sports executive Michael Jordan with $2.1. There are 615 billionaires in the US; only 6 are black so to be proportionate we'd need about 74 more black billionaires.
Blacks comprised 13.6 percent of the U.S. population according to the 2010 Census, but account for only 1.4 percent of the top 1 percent of households by income. Whites are the overwhelming majority of the top 1 percent of households by income, comprising 96.2 percent. There are 18.6 million total millionaires in the US, but only an estimated 35,000 are black. That may sound like a lot, but the U.S. population of millionaires is 76 percent White. Blacks, Hispanics and Asians make up about 8 percent each. So problem solved if we add another 4% to the black millionaires list. Then they would be proportionately rich at least at the million dollar level.
Many black athletes and entertainers are millionaires or multi-millionaires. Take the NBA, for example, in which 80% of the players are black. The total annual revenue of the NBA is $8.7 billion of which about 50% goes to the players. Since there are 30 franchises with 15 players per franchise, there are 450 active players. That means that the share of NBA revenues going to black NBA athletes is ($8.7 billion)x(1/2)x(.8) = $3.48 billion or an average of $7.7 million per black player. Bingo! The NBA has created way more black millionaires than it has created white ones. That's for sure.
This is the thinking of the power structure, mainly the Republican power structure which is not threatened by having a few more black millionaires and billionaires. However, they are threatened when you talk about everyone, black or white, having a living wage, everyone, black or white having decent housing, medical care and free public education from pre-school through college. They are threatened by talk of taxing the wealthy, taking from the rich and giving to the poor, as it were. That would be socialism much like the People's Republic of France or the People's Republic of Germany or even the People's Republic of Sweden. The power structure can't tolerate that kind of debate. Let's just make black people equal in the number of millionaires, but not change anything else. Then all the poor blacks and whites, for that matter, can aspire to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps as many of their counterparts have done.
Whatever happens we can't change the system to make it inherently more equal, inherently more naturally producing of equal outcomes. Instead, it must produce inherently unequal outcomes so that those who make it in the system will feel like they have really accomplished something and can serve as role models for others to strive harder. Republicans recoiled at all the hippies in the 60s who were having too much fun and not working hard enough. They were even getting free tuition in the California University system and elsewhere. On August 23, 1971, prior to accepting Nixon's nomination to the Supreme Court, Lewis Powell wrote a memo to the US Chamber of Commerce entitled "Attack on the American Free Enterprise System," an anti-Communist and anti-New Deal blueprint for conservative business interests to retake America from the hippies and left wingers. It was based in part on Powell's reaction to the work of activist Ralph Nader, whose 1965 exposé on General Motors, Unsafe at Any Speed, put a focus on the auto industry putting profit ahead of safety, which triggered the American consumer movement. Powell saw it as an undermining of the power of private business and an ostensible step towards socialism.
So they changed the system to criminalize all sorts of behaviors mainly involving drugs so they could incarcerate mainly black people and so they could saddle mainly white people with a ton of student loan debt. Then they would have to work hard paying off their debt instead of partying, surfing, having free love and doing drugs. Well, it certainly has worked. In 2014, African Americans constituted 2.3 million, or 34%, of the total 6.8 million correctional population. About 1 in 3 black boys will have served some time in the penal system during their lifetimes. Profits are up for the private penitentiary corporations and American millenials are buckling at the knees from the weight of $1.5 trillion in student loan debt. So if the percentage of black people in prison gets down to 12%, then this should make the American system non-racist? Wouldn't it be better to eliminate the root causes of incarceration which have to do with poverty and get the incarceration rate down to zero for everyone?
Posted at 02:14 PM in John Lawrence, Billionaires, Black Lives Matter, Debt, Drugs, Equality, Health Care, Inequality, Jobs, Lifestyle, Racism, Republicans, Sweden, Tax the Rich, The 1%, The 99%, The Poor | Permalink | Comments (0)
Bernie, Where Are Ya Now, Buddy?
by John Lawrence, April 21, 2020
Can I take back my vote for Joe Biden? Now that I've lost my job and my employer based health insurance, I don't have a job, and I don't have health insurance. Medicare for All has never sounded so good. This is the situation for so many in this age of pandemic. Fortunately, it doesn't apply to me. I already have Medicare. Fortunately, for the rich, the poor who could profit the most from Medicare for All don't vote in anywhere the same numbers as do the rich. That's why voting by mail is something Republicans don't want. It means more poor people would be voting.
Does anybody care that Medicare for All is a "socialist" program advocated by a "socialist." They only have a similar system in every other developed country and most underdeveloped ones as well. Now that unemployed people have more time off, they will have ample time to think about Medicare for All vs the health care system they have (or don't have) now. Maybe they will come to the conclusion that Medicare for All is really in their best interests despite all the propaganda about it being "socialist." Bernie tried to tell us that health care was a human right not just a right for employed people. It would seem like a better deal now that "we are all in it together" except that we're not really despite all the sugary sentiment. If we were all in it together, people would be as concerned about their unemployed neighbor's health care as they are about their own especially if a sick neighbor is likely to spread the sickness to you which certainly is the case with a very contagious coronavirus.
Bernie's website says:
Today, more than 30 million Americans still don't have health insurance and even more are underinsured. Even for those with insurance, costs are so high that medical bills are the number one cause of bankruptcy in the United States. Incredibly, we spend significantly more of our national GDP on this inadequate health care system—far more per person than any other major country. And despite doing so, Americans have worse health outcomes and a higher infant mortality rate than countries that spend much less on health care. Our people deserve better.
30 million? More like 130 million with a pandemic taking out its vengeance on the American people and in fact the world's people. In an op-ed in the New York Times, Bernie said the coronavirus outbreak has exposed the "absurdity and cruelty of our employer-based, private health insurance system" as "tens of millions of Americans" lose their jobs, incomes and healthcare as a result of the pandemic.Our neighbor to the north takes care of every Canadian citizen. All they have to do is present their health care card to any doctor's office or hospital and they are taken care of, no questions asked and never getting a bill. Some people have questioned the 'waiting times'. They haven't been to an emergency room in the US lately even with health insurance. First you have to wait a couple hours in the waiting room before you're even taken back to a stall in the emergency room. Then, if you need to be admitted to the hospital, you have to wait in the stall for several hours until a room is available. All this time, as much as a day if you're lucky, you're not given anything to eat or drink.
Rich people are afraid that if Medicare for All becomes the law of the land, they will just get the same level of service as the hoi polloi. They needn't worry. Even with Medicare for All they could pay a lot more and get a gold plated policy. This is the arrangement they have in the Netherlands. The rich can always pay more and get treated better, but with Medicare for All everyone is guaranteed adequate medical services at about half the price they are paying now with co-pays, premiums, deductibles and every other way the health care system in America has invented to fleece you. No wonder so many Americans go bankrupt. The health care system is the leading cause of bankruptcy in America.
The American diet consists of junk food, heavily advertised on TV, but guaranteed to give you diabetes and obesity if consumed over a lifetime. All those juicy hamburgers, fries and pizza and a lack of enticing pictures of fruits and vegetables means that you will need insulin and cholesterol medicine at some point. You will end up taking a bunch of pills every day for underlying heart disease and a ton of other diet caused maladies. Then you will pay through the nose to pharmaceutical corporations for the privilege of consuming them. Medicare for All would eliminate the travesty that pharmaceutical companies are perpetrating on the American people.
Wendell Potter was formerly in charge of public relations with Humana until his conscience got the better of him.. His job was to make sure that Americans would not be favorably persuaded by Medicare for All. He wrote: "The industry knows from years of focus group message testing that terms like "socialized medicine" and "government-run health care" scare many Americans and that many of us respond favorably to terms like "choice" and "competition." Based on this knowledge, there were several big lies I helped craft — and that are still in circulation today."
Today those Democratic candidates that wanted a Medicare for All Who Want It option have been shown to be dead wrong. They said "If you like your employer-based plan, you can keep it." Well today many of those that liked their employer-based plan are not liking it so much especially those who are unemployed and without a plan.
Posted at 06:34 PM in Bernie Sanders, John Lawrence, Coronavirus, Democrats, Drugs, Health Care, Medicare for All, Off the Top of my Head | Permalink | Comments (0)
It's Not Just Zantac: American Pharmaceutical Corporations are Importing Tainted Drug Ingredients from China
Tainted blood pressure medications have been traced back to Chinese manufacturers Zhejiang Huahai Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd. and Zhejiang Tianyu Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd. along with Hetero Labs Limited in India. Those companies then sold ingredients to generic drugmakers. I wrote 3 days ago: " FDA inspectors are unable or unwilling to provide appropriate oversight of Chinese manufacturing. In contrast to the robust testing required for approval for new prescription drugs, the FDA only requires that generic manufacturers prove that patients will absorb drugs at the same rate as the brand-name medications they copy." China and India Now Manufacture About 80% of the Drugs Consumed in the U.S. Funny all the articles on the banning of Zantac don't mention the fact that most US pharmaceuticals are manufactured outside the US where US inspection authorities can't get to them.
Even Fox News was worried. They reported:
"I have no doubt that they would consider weaponizing their dominance of the pharmaceuticals market if they felt that that would give them an advantage over us strategically," retired Brig. Gen. John Adams told Fox News. Adams is also president of Guardian Six, a defense research consulting firm.
In a worst-case scenario, experts warn, China could withhold supply of medicines like important antibiotics, or degrade the quality of our medicines -- even put lethal contaminants in them. Even when it comes to treating anthrax, China is the largest exporter of the building block to make ciprofloxacin, an anthrax antidote.
The more probable threat from China, however, is that it could make America's prescription drugs more expensive.
"In five to 10 years, when China has a complete chokehold over the United States and its supply of medicine, it's gonna be telling us how much to pay for our medicine," Gibson told Fox News. "We will lose control over how much we pay. We will be the price taker, not the price setter. And that's devastating."
We've already lost control over how much we pay thanks to the rapacity of the profit seeking American pharmaceutical corporations. Of course what the Fox News article misses is that its not China that is making huge profits. It's the American pharmaceutical companies which take advantage of cheap Chinese labor, then jack up the price on the imported drugs in order to make huge profits. That's why they don't make them here. Their profits wouldn't be as large if they did, and evidently, the American government doesn't really care about the situation or they would ban the import of drugs from other countries so they would have to make them here.
That's why we need Medicare for All and strict government oversight of pharmaceutical corporations.
Posted at 03:53 PM in Bernie Sanders, John Lawrence, China, Corporations, Drugs, Medicare for All, Off the Top of my Head, Pharmaceuticals | Permalink | Comments (0)
China and India Now Manufacture About 80% of the Drugs Consumed in the U.S.
by John Lawrence, March 29, 2020
The US doesn't even manufacture vital drugs like antibiotics anymore, with the last penicillin factory closing in 2004. But who can blame the drug manufacturers? They're in it for the money. Drugs that you use once or twice and then you're cured are unprofitable. They only manufacture drugs that need to be taken once a day every day for life like high blood pressure and diabetes medicine, and then they outsource the manufacture of those drugs to China because that's the most profitable way to do it. FDA inspectors are unable or unwilling to provide appropriate oversight of Chinese manufacturing. In contrast to the robust testing required for approval for new prescription drugs, the FDA only requires that generic manufacturers prove that patients will absorb drugs at the same rate as the brand-name medications they copy.
But who needs robust drug testing anyway? Ronald Reagan said that the nine most terrifying words in the English language are, "I'm from the government and I'm here to help." So who needs the government's help to test drugs? Who needs government's help in a pandemic? Let's get government off our back and let'er rip. And what we surely don't need is government getting into the business of manufacturing drugs themselves and competing with the private sector. That would be socialism!
Many of the generic drugs imported from China are contaminated. So? Caveat Emptor! China is our great friend when it comes to trusting life saving drugs manufactured there, but our enemy when it comes to government sanctioning and disapprobation. We hate their form of government, but we love that we get Chinese laborers to work for a fraction of what Americans make. China and India are now restricting the export of some drugs and medical equipment. That means that Americans will not have the medical equipment and drugs they need due to export restrictions from countries that have a domestic need for those products. They will come first. The US will be last, but that's capitalism!
Big pharma continues to walk away from investment in new antibiotics and there are alarmingly few useful new drugs in the pipeline to deal with the worsening crisis of antibiotic resistance, according to the World Health Organization. So the US has to depend on another country for most of its pharmaceutical needs while at the same time the President is saying negative things about that country. According to him they are not our ally. Not our ally but we're depending on them for life saving medicines ? Does this make any sense? Of course it makes sense because it maximizes profits for private enterprise.
The US wants to have it both ways. They want to say negative things about the Chinese government while at the same time being almost totally dependent on that country for critical medical products as well as tons of other products. It's all about the fact that American corporations want to take advantage of cheap Chinese labor while at the same time the US government feels free to chastise China. The big pharmaceutical companies are not investing in antibiotic research because it is not a lucrative market for them. And BIG Pharma has successfully gotten government off its back because they made sure that in the Obamacare bill, Medicare could not negotiate with the drug companies for cheaper prescription drugs for old people. Score one for the free market! The law states that the secretary of Health and Human Services "may not interfere" in negotiations between pharmaceutical companies and prescription drug insurance plan providers.
At the same time there is much military swagger on the part of the US. China better watch itself in the South China Sea or we will send our mighty aircraft carriers there. "The head of the U.S. Navy warned China that hostile behavior from its coast guard and fishing boats will not be treated any differently from the Chinese navy, the Financial Times reported on Sunday." But what good is the military going to do if the whole world is at the mercy of a virus or a bacteria, if the whole world is brought to its knees except the countries who have invested in the manufacturing of their own critically needed products? Are we going to invade China and demand that they give us the medicine? Yes, we will send our military to make sure that China does not control the South China Sea, but then get down on our hands and knees to beg China to send us critical medicines that are manufactured there. The whole foreign policy regarding China is absolutely nuts.
Agribusiness continues to use antibiotics in animal feed not for the treatment or prevention of disease, but to make them attain higher marketable weights in the quickest possible time. This make more profit for the meat growers and slaughterers. At the same time it decreases the medicinal benefits of antibiotics in humans because the bacteria mutate at a faster rate. Therefore, new antibiotics must be developed, but they aren't being developed. The lucrative drugs are the ones that must be taken every day for life not the ones that, once they have cured a disease, are no longer needed. But we don't want to regulate Agribusiness, do we? We want fewer government regulations because we want to get government off our backs or at least off the backs of private enterprise so they can maximize profits.
For the US to be secure against disease the Federal government must develop the drugs and antibiotics that the pharmaceutical corporations are not developing because they are unprofitable. We can't totally rely on the private sector because the private sector is only in it for the money not for the health of the nation. In a pandemic Reagan's words, "I'm from the government and I'm here to help" are not the most terrifying words in the English language. They're the most reassuring words.
Posted at 08:15 AM in John Lawrence, Capitalism, China, Coronavirus, Drugs, Health Care, India, Manufacturing, Obama Presidency, Off the Top of my Head, Pharmaceuticals, Sanctions, Socialism, The Military, The US | Permalink | Comments (0)
The Solution to High Drug Prices
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) protects the health of all Americans and provides essential human services so why not have them develop, control and sell needed pharmaceuticals to the American public doing away with the private pharmaceutical corporations which have been gouging the American public and raising drug prices by ungodly percentages? What good is Medicare for All if Medicare has to buy drugs from private corporations?
Trump's original spending proposal for fiscal year 2019, released last month, included major cuts to not just to the National Institute of Health (NIH), but the National Science Foundation as well. It is those two publicly funded entities — not Big Pharma — that support the bulk of the country's basic research into diseases and pathways to new treatments.
That's why the cuts were especially unwelcome in the executive suites of drug and biotech companies. Their business models depend on Washington subsidizing expensive, high-risk basic research, mostly through the vast laboratory network funded by the NIH.
Since the National Institute of Health does the research to develop drugs and not the pharmaceutical corporations themselves, why does the American public have to buy drugs from Big Pharma? Why instead can't we buy the drugs directly from HHS or NIH? If we want to cut out the middle man and bring drug prices down, let's have a public option for buying drugs.
But the NIH doesn't get to use the profits from these drugs to fund more research, the way it might under a model based on developing needed drugs and curing the sick, as opposed to serving Wall Street. Instead, publicly funded labs conduct years of basic research to get to a breakthrough, which is then snatched up, tweaked, and patented (privatized) by companies who turn around and reap billions with 1,000-times-cost mark-ups on drugs developed with taxpayer money.
Those companies then spend the profits on executive bonuses and share buybacks, and lavish mass marketing campaigns to increase sales of amphetamines, benzos, opioids, and dick pills.
So Medicare for All? How about public sale of drugs developed by publicly funded research? Why is the government being used as Big Pharma's research and development branch with all the ridiculous profits going to private corporations?
The LA Times reported:
Since the 1930s, the National Institutes of Health has invested close to $900 billion in the basic and applied research that formed both the pharmaceutical and biotechnology sectors, with private companies only getting seriously into the biotech game in the 1980s.
Big Pharma, while of course contributing to innovation, has increasingly decommitted itself from the high-risk side of research and development, often letting small biotech companies and the NIH do most of the hard work. Indeed, roughly 75% of so-called new molecular entities with priority rating (the most innovative drugs) trace their existence to NIH funding, while companies spend more on "me too" drugs (slight variations of existing ones.)
But if Big Pharma is not committed to research, what is it doing? First, it is well known that Big Pharma spends more on marketing than on R&D. Less well known is how much it also spends on making its shareholders rich. Pharmaceutical companies, which have become increasingly "financialized," distribute profits to shareholders through dividends and share buybacks designed to boost stock prices and executive pay.
Take Pfizer. Economist William Lazonick has shown that from 2003 to 2012, it spent $59 billion on share buybacks and $63 billion on dividend payouts — for a total payout to shareholders of 146% of net income. All the while, Pfizer benefited immensely from U.S. government spending on life sciences research and drug development.
Why aren't the Democrats talking about this? The profits should accrue to the American people not to Big Pharma which won't even market a drug which isn't profitable. So drugs which cure an illness with one dose will not even be developed or marketed. They want a profitable drug which must be taken every day for life. The US is so devoted to capitalism that it wants the profits from government research to go to private corporations. The American people are being hoodwinked. If the government sold the drugs developed with taxpayer money to the American public at a reasonable price, that would be socialism. Sorry, if you'd rather be taken.
Posted at 06:00 AM in John Lawrence, Capitalism, Drugs, Health Care, Medicare, Medicare for All, Pharmaceuticals | Permalink | Comments (0)
My Theory of Pain
by John Lawrence, September 30, 2019
Pain is ubiquitous in human life - both mental and physical pain. Being human is to have pain in your life. Coping with pain can take different forms - both positive and negative. The body has natural ways that pain can be alleviated. These involve the secretion of different chemicals like dopamine that cover up the pain or take it away. There are various ways to get these chemicals to activate, the easiest being to ingest some substance like drugs or alcohol. The harder way to do it is by exercise. Runner's high is known to reduce pain. Other forms of physical and perhaps mental activities like meditation can also do it. Running or other strenuous physical activity can induce the body to produce the drugs which overcome pain. The problem is that these activities are painful in and of themselves and require a high form of motivation to get them started and self-discipline to persist.
Continuing major efforts to reduce pain both positive and negative can lead to addiction both positive and negative. The problem with negative addiction is that the ingestion of drugs or alcohol is limited by tolerance. It requires more and more of the substance to get the same beneficial results unless a person is very self disciplined in their consumption. There is only a certain fountain of dopamine available, and this gets depleted as the substances used to release it are taken repeatedly. Less and less dopamine being released means that more and more of the substance used to release it needs to be ingested leading to addiction. Finally, as in heroin addiction, the person is using heroin not to feel better but just not to feel worse.
On the other hand activities which strengthen the mind/body and require self discipline and even pain such as running or weight training result in a release of dopamine which actually makes you feel better when the activity ceases and strengthens the body and that part of the body which creates the dopamine in the first place. The body, which is weakened at first by the activity, builds itself back up to a higher level because of the activity which reduces the source of the pain. As time goes on, pain is reduced not only from the dopamine releasing activity, but also because the body has reduced the source of the pain because it has become stronger.
Negative addiction is so common because it requires no self discipline. Activities which can lead to positive addiction require actual work, and this turns off many people who succumb to negative addiction because it is so much easier to relieve pain that way AT FIRST. As time goes on, however, using substances to overcome pain only makes the pain worse in the long run and reduces the fountain of dopamine which is necessary to overcome it. William Glasser wrote a book entitled "Positive Addiction." According to this article in Psychology Today there are six characteristics of positive addiction:
It is something noncompetitive that you choose to do and you can devote approximately an hour per day;
It is possible for you to do it easily and it doesn't take a good deal of mental effort to do it well;
You can do it alone or rarely with others but it does not depend upon others to do it;
You believe that it has some value (physical, mental, or spiritual) for you;
You believe that if you persist at it you will improve—but this is completely subjective—you need to be the only one who measures the improvement; and
The activity must have the quality that you can do it without criticizing yourself. If you can't accept yourself during this time the activity will not be addicting (emphasis original).
Positive activities require self discipline and even the experiencing of some pain as they are undertaken. They result in the diminution of pain only over the long term. They may or may not result in instantaneous gratification whereas drug use is usually instantaneously gratifying until the dopamine fountain is used up or until tolerance sets in. Tolerance occurs when the person no longer responds to the drug in the way that person initially responded. Stated another way, it takes a higher dose of the drug to achieve the same level of response achieved initially. Tolerance increases with negative addiction, but is reduced with positive addiction. In other words positive addicts increase the body's ability to release dopamine over time, but negative addiction does the opposite.
Nevertheless, if managed properly, addictive substances can be used at least by some persons in a temperate manner without their leading to the worst effects of drug addiction. The jazz musician, Art Blakey, was a heroin user most of his life, and he was also a cigarette smoker. He died at 71 from lung cancer probably from the effects of cigarette smoking rather than from heroin usage. Two of his proteges, Bobby Timmons and Lee Morgan, weren't so lucky however. Both died young and suffered from the ravages of drug addiction. A lot of the negative effects of substance abuse can probably be ameliorated or offset by positive activities as moderate use of drugs doesn't seem to cause people to be dysfunctional or debilitated.
Posted at 08:37 AM in John Lawrence, Drugs, Exercise, Jazz, Lifestyle, Off the Top of my Head, Psychology | Permalink | Comments (0)
Vaping or Cigarettes: Choose Your Poison
by John Lawrence, June 9, 2019
Only in America can you put a product on the market without any testing to see if there are any health risks. It's about testing by marketing to the American people and you find out later whether the product is toxic or not. In Europe they have the precautionary principle where products are tested first before they are released on the public. So who would have thought that a product that was touted as safer than cigarettes would turn out to be far more deadly and debilitating? Cigarettes contain tobacco which when inhaled is thought to be hazardous to your health, but, like a lot of other products, it won't kill you immediately. That will take 30 years or so. Vaping contains a toxic mixture of chemicals which, as it turns out, can kill you in far less time. Hundreds of people across the country have been sickened by a severe lung illness linked to vaping, and a handful have died, according to public health officials. Many were otherwise healthy young people, in their teens or early 20s.
So who would have thunk it? The Food and Drug Administration is warning that there appears to be a particular danger for people who vape THC, the psychoactive chemical in marijuana. So people will just have to go back to smoking marijuana the traditional way - in a bong. Or maybe in a hookah. A hookah is a device for vaporizing nicotine using water instead of a bunch of chemicals. That seems far more healthier. It seems that the chemicals in e-cigarettes congeal in the lungs making their function useless and leading to lung disease. The e-cigarette industry, for whom vaping is extremely profitable, have tried to lay the blame on vaping THC and other street products. They would hate to see their investments go down the drain. However, in 53 cases of the illness in Illinois and Wisconsin, 17 percent of the patients said they had vaped only nicotine products, according to an article published in The New England Journal of Medicine.
So a word of caution to vapers: Get a life! You can smoke marijuana legally in most states now. Vote for a Democratic President, and, most importantly, a Democratic Senate in 2020, and marijuana will probably be legalized at the Federal level. Some so-called "hard drugs" have even been used on a regular basis by some people who have led very successful, even celebrated, lives. Take jazz drummer, Art Blakey, for example. Today he is being lauded for having had one of the most successful bands in jazz history. He is considered to be a legendary drummer. Blakey was a heroin addict, a very highly functioning one, and he introduced many of his sidemen to heroin. One of them was Lee Morgan, considered to be one of the great trumpet players of jazz history. However, Morgan's addiction did not have such a happy outcome as did Blakey's. By 1967 Lee was a junkie who had fallen so low that he was seen sleeping on the street outside Birdland without shoes and committing petty crimes so he could buy drugs. Still his record, "The Sidewinder", whose title tune was written on a piece of toilet paper during a break in a recording session, became Blue Note's best-selling record ever, breaking the previous sales record roughly ten times over.
So a word of caution to Americans: be careful of what you put in your mouth. The American mantra is Caveat Emptor - Buyer Beware. According to the journal article, "e-cigarette aerosol is not harmless; it can expose users to substances known to have adverse health effects, including ultrafine particles, heavy metals, volatile organic compounds and other harmful ingredients." Omigod, you mean that I can't trust American products that I can buy legally on the market more than I can trust street drugs? Well opioids are a case in point. They have been prescribed by legitimate doctors, sold by legitimate pharmacies and the patients have become addicts.
Another note of caution: stay away from Monsanto's Roundup, a pesticide whose main ingredient is glyphosate. The Guardian reports:
Germany has said it will phase out the controversial weedkiller glyphosate because it wipes out insect populations crucial for ecosystems and pollination of food crops.
The chemical, also suspected by some experts to cause cancer in humans, is to be banned by the end of 2023 when the EU's approval period for it expires, ministers said.
Biologists have sounded the alarm over plummeting insect populations that affect species diversity and damage ecosystems by disrupting natural food chains and plant pollination.
"What harms insects also harms people," said environment minister Svenja Schulze, of the centre-left Social Democrats, who warned of a future when fruit could become a luxury.
"What we need is more humming and buzzing," added Schulze, stressing that "a world without insects is not worth living in".
So modern technology is not all it's cracked up to be whether on the chemical level or on the fossil fuel level or on the plastics level. The fact of the matter is that the technology developed in the last couple hundred years since the advent of the Industrial Revolution is ruining the environment on small scales and large scales. Unless there is a change, the earth, let alone the oceans or mundane pollution, will become uninhabitable for humans at least. Probably some insects will survive, but insecticides and pesticides are doing their best to eliminate even those. Probably some day some space travelers will alight on earth only to wonder what happened here that the earth should have become a dead planet.
Posted at 07:51 AM in John Lawrence, Addiction, American Culture, Drugs, Europe, Laissez Faire Capitalism, Lifestyle, Marijuana, Off the Top of my Head, Pharmaceuticals, The Environment | Permalink | Comments (0)
'About Damn Time': In First of Thousands of Lawsuits Against Big Pharma, Johnson & Johnson Ordered to Pay $572M for Flooding Oklahoma With Opioids
Published on Monday, August 26, 2019
by Common Dreams
"The opioid crisis has ravaged the state of Oklahoma," a federal judge said Monday. "It must be abated immediately."
by Common Dreams staff
An Oklahoma judge ruled Monday that phramaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson is responsible for its role in perpetiuating the opioid crisis. (Photo: Cindy Shebley, Flickr, cc)
In the first decided case against a corporation accused of contributing to the opioid epidemic in the U.S., personal care and pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson was ordered on Monday to pay $572 million in fines for its role in perpetuating the crisis.
Through contracts with poppy growers in Tasmania, the company supplied 60 percent of the ingredients that drug companies used in opioid painkillers like OxyContin, contributing to the deaths of about 400,000 Americans in the last two decades—including 388 Oklahoma residents just in 2017.
Opioid manufacturers are facing thousands of lawsuits across the country for aggressively marketing drugs like OxyContin, Vicodin, and Percocet as non-addictive and safe for long-term use for chronic pain—even though the drugs are chemically very similar to heroin.
Public health advocates applauded District Judge Thad Balkman for holding the company accountable for its role in flooding Oklahoma with enough opioids between 2006 and 2012 for every resident to have nearly 100 pills each annually in some areas.
About damn time. We can't accept living in a country where Americans are in jail for possessing marijuana—but not a single Pharma exec has spent even a night behind bars for the opioid crisis. The least they can do is pay up. https://t.co/dbWlTHdJBc
— Beto O'Rourke (@BetoORourke) August 26, 2019
This ruling against J&J on fueling the opioid crisis is interesting and significant. Same arguments can be used against gun manufacturers for fueling the gun violence epidemic we all now live with. We must be able to pursue our litigation against them.https://t.co/V0E3HB4xgA
— Fred Guttenberg (@fred_guttenberg) August 26, 2019
"Johnson & Johnson executives made the calculated and coldblooded decision that they were going to produce a mutant strain of poppy, corner the market and supply massive amounts of the active ingredients for other companies to manufacture opioids," said Oklahoma Attorney General Mike Hunter, who brought the case against the company.
JUST IN: Johnson & Johnson has been found liable for fueling Oklahoma's opioid crisis and will pay $572 million pic.twitter.com/YOjSVXXdjk
— Bloomberg TicToc (@tictoc) August 26, 2019
Three executives at Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, were found guilty in 2007 of misleading doctors, patients, and regulators about the addictive nature of the drug, and were ordered to pay $34.5 million in fines, in addition to $600 million paid by the company. But the lawsuit against Johnson & Johnson is the first of about 2,000 pending cases filed in cities and towns across the country where officials and residents want to hold opioid makers and marketers accountable for the damage they did to communities.
"The opioid crisis has ravaged the state of Oklahoma," Balkman said before announcing his verdict. "It must be abated immediately."
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Posted at 09:15 AM in Common Dreams, Corporations, Drugs, Pharmaceuticals | Permalink | Comments (0)
Why Are So Many Black Men Still in Jail for Possession of Small Amounts of Marijuana When Marijuana is Legal in Many States?
by John Lawrence, July 25, 2019
The mass criminalization of people of color, particularly young African Americans, is as profound a system of racial control as the Jim Crow laws were in this country until the mid-1960s. And despite decriminalization of drug laws and outright legalization of marijuana in many states, people of color still languish in jail. The aggressive enforcement of marijuana possession laws needlessly ensnares hundreds of thousands of people into the criminal justice system and wastes billions of taxpayers' dollars. What's more, it is carried out with staggering racial bias. Despite being a priority for police departments nationwide, the War on Marijuana has failed to reduce marijuana use and availability and diverted resources that could be better invested in our communities.
Fifteen states have decriminalized marijuana but not legalized it. In these states, possession of small amounts of pot no longer carries jail or prison time but can continue to carry a fine, and possession of larger amounts, repeat offenses, and sales or trafficking can still result in harsher sentences. In states where marijuana for recreational use has been legalized, criminals buy marijuana there and cross state lines to sell it on the black market in states where it's still illegal for 4 or 5 times the price they paid. Marijuana crossing the southern border has gone down since criminal enterprises prefer to grow or purchase it here and distribute it to the black market even in states where it is legal. Even in states where marijuana is legal, there is still a black market because there are not enough legal dispensaries to supply the public due to the fact that the process of acquiring a license is so slow.
Between 1980 and 1989, the arrest rate for drug possession and use nearly doubled. And although surveys show that whites use drugs as much or more than blacks in the US, black people were arrested for drug-related offenses at five times the rate of whites in the late 1980s and early 1990s. That's because police have concentrated on law enforcement in black communities to a greater extent than in white communities. Marijuana possession is still illegal at the Federal level. Kamala Harris has a plan to fix that. Vox reported:
Harris's plan, one that she's rolling out alongside House Judiciary Chair Jerry Nadler (D-NY), would decriminalize the possession of marijuana at the federal level, an effort backed by many of her fellow 2020 Democrats. Harris's proposal goes one step further, however, imposing a 5 percent federal tax on the sale of marijuana that would be used, in part, to fund grant programs that help individuals who have been disproportionately penalized for marijuana possession in the past.
Black men, even if they're let out of jail have a hard time finding a job or renting an apartment unless their record is expunged from the marijuana offense. In some state this is a lengthy process. There is a move afoot to make expungement automatic since so many fail to fo it and suffer the consequences. When people are arrested for possessing even tiny amounts of marijuana, it can have dire collateral consequences that affect their eligibility for public housing and student financial aid, employment opportunities, child custody determinations, and immigration status.
Due to provisions of the law some black men are still in jail even after pot has been legalized. According to the Intercept:
In the 25 years he has served, Thompson has watched the rise of a bipartisan criminal justice reform movement and knows that his case illustrates its limits. The movement has focused on "nonviolent" criminals — preferably first-time offenders, preferably drug users — in its effort to roll back mass incarceration. But penal codes across the United States have become adept at stacking charges on defendants that legally qualify as violent — even if they didn't commit a violent act — undermining that push. The problem is particularly pernicious as it relates to gun ownership, which is not just legal in the U.S., but fetishized as the pinnacle of patriotism. But when it comes to drug crimes, if a gun is anywhere in the picture — or even anywhere off-screen — the crime instantly becomes violent, and in Thompson's case, as in so many others, the criminal unworthy of clemency. With a nation awash in weapons, the result is predictable.
Justice for black men in the War on Drugs means letting them out of jail, automatically expunging their records and giving them first dibs on starting a legal marijuana business. Those disproportionately affected by the War on Drugs—largely, black and Latino communities—should be first in line to benefit from the Green Boom, whether as business owners or beneficiaries of programs funded by earnings from the business.
Posted at 06:21 AM in John Lawrence, Drugs, Marijuana, Off the Top of my Head | Permalink | Comments (0)
Are Americans Amusing Themselves to Death?
I was waiting for Joe Biden to formalize an agenda, but so far his only agenda is that he is the likeliest candidate to beat Trump. That's not good enough. The next President and vice President need to set a bold agenda. The media likes to label that :progressive." So be it. Perhaps the next President can save the Iran nuclear deal and rejoin the Paris climate change accords. But he or she must do much more. While Trump and the media will try to sidetrack the issues and get everybody concerned with his outrageous tweets, Bernie and Elizabeth will concentrate on informing the American people about the real issues: infrastructure, climate change, universal health care, the growing dichotomy between rich and poor and what to do about it.
Trump and the media want you to take your eye off the ball; they want to distract and confuse. They want the issues to be all about superficial nonsense. Even Chuck Todd on Meet the Press tried last Sunday to distract Bernie, but Bernie always comes back to the real issue no matter what the question asked. The American people have to get used to the fact that a Presidential election should not be a circus. It should not be entertainment, but, of course, the American people have gotten used to the fact that practically everything in American life is about entertainment.
The book by Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business hits the nail right on the head. In comparing Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" to George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four ", Postman said that the contemporary world was better reflected by Huxley's book, whose public was oppressed by their addiction to amusement, than by Orwell's work, where they were oppressed by state control. I would have to agree with him. Postman observed that people medicate themselves into bliss, thereby voluntarily sacrificing their rights. Postman sees television's entertainment value as a present-day "soma", the fictitious pleasure drug in Brave New World, by means of which the citizens' rights are exchanged for consumers' entertainment. The opioid crisis can certainly be seen in that light.
Drugs and entertainment are the hallmark of American society. Reckless lifestyles instead of touch football are pursued with vigor as John Kennedy would say. It's Devil May Care in terms of climate change or any concern for future generations. Sex, Drugs and Rock n Roll are the order of the day. A few people are concerned about bettering their own and other peoples' lives, but not very many. Trump is a manifestation of that. Ronald Reagan ushered in the "Me First" age, and Trump has solidified it.
This is from Wikipedia:
Postman asserts the presentation of television news is a form of entertainment programming; arguing that the inclusion of theme music, the interruption of commercials, and "talking hairdos" bear witness that televised news cannot readily be taken seriously. Postman further examines the differences between written speech, which he argues reached its prime in the early to mid-nineteenth century, and the forms of televisual communication, which rely mostly on visual images to "sell" lifestyles. He argues that, owing to this change in public discourse, politics has ceased to be about a candidate's ideas and solutions, but whether he comes across favorably on television. Television, he notes, has introduced the phrase "now this", which implies a complete absence of connection between the separate topics the phrase ostensibly connects. Larry Gonick used this phrase to conclude his Cartoon Guide to (Non)Communication, instead of the traditional "the end"
In the age of social media, rather than the medium being the message, the newsmaker is the message. We're endlessly distracted by the likes of Jeffrey Epstein and his escapades. Who cares? I guess a lot of people would rather be titillated by a scumbag like Epstein than to contemplate the real issues that Bernie and Elizabeth are talking about. The real issues that all the progressive Democrats are concerned with. The American people, large segments of them, just don't care. They want to get on with their selfish pursuits just like Ronald Reagan and George W Bush told them to do. They are amused by the antics of a clown as President of the US where his every word, no matter how ridiculous, is reported on and televised. America is more concerned with rubbish and entertainment than it is with the real issues facing the country and the world today.
Posted at 08:16 AM in Bernie Sanders, John Lawrence, American Culture, Drugs, Entertainment, Off the Top of my Head | Permalink | Comments (0)
'Spoiler: Because Australia Has Universal Healthcare': Watch Ocasio-Cortez Ask Pharma CEO Why HIV Drug Costs $8 Overseas But $1,780 in the US
Published on Thursday, May 16, 2019
"We the public, we the people, developed this drug, we paid for this drug. There's no reason this should be $2,000 a month. People are dying because of it."
by Jake Johnson, staff writer
"I think it's important that we notice here that we the public, we the people, developed this drug, we paid for this drug," Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said during a House Oversight and Reform Committee on Thursday. (Photo: Alex Brandon/AP)
During a House hearing on Thursday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez asked the CEO of one of America's largest pharmaceutical companies a simple but crucial question: Why does a life-saving HIV drug that costs $8 a month in Australia have a $2,000 price tag in the U.S.?
Gilead chief executive Daniel O'Day declined to comment on the low price of Truvada for PrEP in Australia, but said the reason the cost is close to $2,000—"the current list price is $1,780," he said—in the United States is because the drug has "patent protection."
As the Washington Post reported in March, the development of Truvada as a treatment for HIV was "almost fully funded by U.S. taxpayers."
The U.S. government patented the treatment in 2015, according to the Post, but has "opted not to file an infringement suit to enforce" the patent even as Gilead—which argues the government patent is invalid—rakes in billions of dollars in profits from Truvada.
Ocasio-Cortez highlighted these facts during the House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing on Thursday.
"I think it's important that we notice here that we the public, we the people, developed this drug, we paid for this drug, we led and developed all of the grounding patents to create PrEP, and then that patent has been privatized despite the fact that that patent is owned by the public," said Ocasio-Cortez. "We refuse to enforce it."
"There's no reason this should be $2,000 a month," Ocasio-Cortez added. "People are dying because of it. We own the intellectual property for it. People are dying for no reason. For no reason. We developed this drug."
In a tweet following Thursday's hearing, Ocasio Cortez answered her own question on why Truvada's price is $8 in Australia.
"Spoiler: Because Australia has universal healthcare," wrote the New York congresswoman.
The reason the United States hasn't joined the rest of the industrialized world in establishing a universal healthcare system is not individual drug company executives like O'Day, said Ocasio-Cortez.
"I don't blame you. I blame us. I blame this body," Ocasio-Cortez said during the hearing. "Because every single developed country in the world guarantees healthcare as a right except us. Except the United States. Because we can't get it together. Because we don't have the fortitude to kick pharmaceutical lobbyists [out of] our congressional offices."
.@RepAOC @AOC: "I blame us. I blame this body because every single developed country in the world guarantees health care as a right except us, except the United States, because we can't get it together." pic.twitter.com/9adUIKQlIb
— CSPAN (@cspan) May 16, 2019
Posted at 06:57 AM in Common Dreams, Drugs, Pharmaceuticals | Permalink | Comments (0)
El Salvador Has a Problem: Gangs Started in the US Are Running the Country
Two gangs run El Salvbador: MS-13 and the 18th Street gang. Both gangs were spawned in the US, in Los Angeles to be precise and took root in El Salvador when gang members were deported having been caught as criminals. National Geographics reported: "El Salvador's government says that criminal gangs command an estimated 60,000 active members, and their battle for supremacy has fractured this tiny country of 6.4 million people along an expanding web of invisible fault lines that run red. In 2017 the homicide rate was 61 per 100,000 people, making El Salvador the second deadliest of any country not at war, after Venezuela."
El Salvador is locked in the latest phase of a social conflict that exploded during the 1980-1992 civil war, in which leftist guerrillas rose up against a wealthy elite and the military state that had long dispossessed the rural underclass of land. With the stated aim of stopping communism in its backyard, the U.S. supported El Salvador's right-wing dictatorships with billions of dollars of economic and military aid that prolonged the bloodshed. By the time the war ended, in a stalemate, 75,000 people were dead and more than a million were displaced, hundreds of thousands of whom fled to the U.S. From Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., Salvadoran refugees found employment and community, and they sent money home.
The same old story. The US wants to stop communism which in this case would have helped poor peasants so it "prolonged the bloodshed" which led directly to the creation of the gangs here in the US that then took root back in El Salvador. The US' hands are dirty in this whole situation and should take responsibility for the immigration crisis instead of building a wall to keep immigrants out.
The children who came with them, displaced youths craving identity in a foreign land, created MS-13 on the streets of Los Angeles and swelled the ranks of a rival, 18th Street—a Hispanic gang that formed around 18th Street in the Pico-Union neighborhood of Los Angeles and absorbed wayward refugees from Central America. As gang wars, and the war on gangs, intensified, laws were enacted that made it easier to deport immigrants with criminal records. In the late 1990s the U.S. began exporting thousands of convicts back to Central America each year. In the vacuum of weak governance and poverty in their home country, gang members reproduced their social structures and tactics and multiplied exponentially.
The US created the crisis by meddling in El Salvador's civil war as it has done many times before in Central and South America. "At the margins of the mainstream discursive stalemate over immigration lies over a century of historical U.S. intervention that politicians and pundits on both sides of the aisle seem determined to silence. Since Theodore Roosevelt in 1904 declared the U.S.'s right to exercise an "international police power" in Latin America, the U.S. has cut deep wounds throughout the region, leaving scars that will last for generations to come. This history of intervention is inextricable from the contemporary Central American crisis of internal and international displacement and migration."
The liberal rhetoric of inclusion and common humanity is insufficient: we must also acknowledge the role that a century of U.S.-backed military coups, corporate plundering, and neoliberal sapping of resources has played in the poverty, instability, and violence that now drives people from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras toward Mexico and the United States. For decades, U.S. policies of military intervention and economic neoliberalism have undermined democracy and stability in the region, creating vacuums of power in which drug cartels and paramilitary alliances have risen.
The US has made a mess out of Central and South America and is now ironically reaping the whirlwind: They all want to come here to escape the violence and poverty. Here are some more examples.
1) Brazil experienced several decades of right-wing authoritarian governments, especially after the US-backed 1964 Brazilian coup d'état against center-left social democrat João Goulart undertaken, according to then President John F. Kennedy, to "prevent Brazil from becoming another Cuba". Brazil's return to democracy saw several consecutive right-wing neoliberal governments following the Washington Consensus ending in endemic inequality and extreme poverty, one of the worst in the Continent.
2) After the democratic election of President Salvador Allende in 1970, an economic war ordered by President Richard Nixon. Then the CIA backed the 1973 Chilean coup d'état due to Allende's democratic socialist leanings and installed the murderous military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.
3) After several peasant and workers uprisings in the country against oligarchic and anti-democratic governments, often under the control of powerful American corporate interests like the United Fruit Company, efforts by democratically elected governments were often thwarted by US intervention. Civil war spread with US-endorsed far-right governments in El Salvador facing far-left guerrillas.
4) Peasants and workers (mostly of indigenous descent) revolts during the first half of the Guatemalan 20th century due to harsh conditions and abuse from landlords and the government-supported American United Fruit Company were brutally repressed. This led to the democratic election of left-leaning Jacobo Arbenz. Arbenz was overthrown during the US-backed 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état leading to right-wing US-endorsed authoritarian governments and nearly 40 years of civil war in the Central American country.
There are many more examples of US intervention in Central and South America always on the side of right wing dictatorships and corporations like United Fruit and against the interests of the common people. The US is ever eager to destroy regimes which claim to have the interests of the people at heart and to install regimes favorable to the US model of unbridled capitalism at any cost, the cost usually being born by people suffering from extreme inequality and poverty. The US has tried again and again to make little " USes" out of every country in what it considers its sphere of influence which includes in particular Central and South America but in general the whole world.
Today some 200,000 Salvadorans in the U.S. have temporary protected status (TPS), a designation that allows undocumented migrants deemed at risk because of armed conflict or environmental disasters in their home countries to stay in the U.S. In January 2018, President Donald Trump's administration ordered an end to TPS for Salvadorans. It was set to expire in September 2019, but a U.S. district court halted that plan, allowing Salvadorans to continue to live and work in the U.S. until a final decision is made.
Posted at 08:43 AM in John Lawrence, Capitalism, Central America, Drugs, Foreign Policy, Latin America, Neocon Principles, Refugees, Right Wing, Sanctions, South America | Permalink | Comments (0)
The Sackler Family and the Koch Brothers: Wealthy Americans You Love to Hate
by John Lawrence, March 2, 2019
The Sackler family fortune comes from the production of OxyContin, the prescription drug that is now killing more than 100 people a day in America and has spawned millions of addicts. These addicts will not go to prison, however, like those found with a few ounces of marijuana in their pockets. They'll just die in increasing numbers. The Sackler family owns Purdue Pharma, the maker of the opioid, OxyContin. The family has given generously to arts institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, an effort Robert Reich maintains amounts to "reputation laundering."
The Guardian reported:
"The Sacklers have not been named as defendants but I know several of the firms working on these cases are doing a really deep dive to make that happen, working very hard to break through the corporate veil so they can name the owners," Mike Moore, the former Mississippi attorney general told the Guardian. He's one of the key attorneys in litigation brought by several states against Purdue and other pharmaceutical firms, collectively nicknamed Big Pharma.
"Greed is the main thing. The market for OxyContin should have been much, much smaller, but they wanted to have a $10bn drug and they didn't tell the truth about their product," he added.
The Koch brothers fuel another kind of addiction: the American addiction to fossil fuels. While opioid addiction may be killing 100 people a day, the addiction to fossil fuels has the potential to kill everyone on the planet by making it uninhabitable, at least uninhabitable for human beings. The cockroaches may survive. They survive anything.
The Koch brothers have given hundreds of millions of dollars to institutions such as Lincoln Center and New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and also used their fortune to sow doubt about climate science and undermine the nation's faith in basic science. Now arts institutions are wondering if they should pass up Koch brothers donations in the millions of dollars since the Koch brothers are the driving force behind the political movement that has pulled the United States out of the global fight against climate change.
"Unshackled by the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision and other related rulings," the Times reports, "Koch Industries and Americans for Prosperity started an all-fronts campaign with television advertising, social media and cross-country events aimed at electing lawmakers who would ensure that the fossil fuel industry would not have to worry about new pollution regulations." This led directly to the situation we are in today, with the president of the United States repeating the Koch brothers' talking points, and his supporters denying not just the science of climate change but the moral imperative of thinking globally about the planet's survival.
It is impolite, in critical circles, to link the politics of major donors to the cultural institutions they support. Many of our cherished arts organizations were created by Gilded Age plutocrats, yet are no longer tethered to the Darwinian social views of their originators. But cultural organizations exist in a complicated moral world, in which every dollar they collect is a dollar that isn't being used to ameliorate poverty or cure disease. Most of us tend to deal with this dilemma by arguing that the good done by cultural organizations can't be quantified and thus it is unwise to place it crudely in the balance with other social needs.
So we are supposed to forgive these billionaire ne'er-do-wells because they give generously to arts institutions while contributing mightily to greenhouse gas emissions and opioid addiction? There is a movement afoot to make the Sacklers pay for their "morally abhorrent" promotion and aggressive advertising of OxyContin. But Purdue is sorry:
Purdue Pharma has made statements saying, in part: "We are deeply troubled by the prescription and illicit opioid abuse crisis" and described altering its marketing and putting resources into easing the crisis. This hasn't stopped the lawsuits. New York City sued Purdue and other companies last month, claiming $500m and accusing Big Pharma of "deceptively peddling these dangerous drugs and hooking millions".
Posted at 07:32 AM in John Lawrence, Washington Post, Addiction, Climate Change, Drugs, Fossil Fuels, Global Warming, Off the Top of my Head | Permalink | Comments (0)
A Second Look at Middle Class Morality
by John Lawrence, September 4, 2018
Back in the 60s one of the things we were against, in addition to being against the "system" or the "establishment", was middle class morality. What was middle class morality because I don't think it is a relevant term any more? Basically, it said that you should study hard, get a good job, get married and be faithful to your spouse. In other words, do your job, keep you nose clean, don't fool around with other women and don't leave your spouse when the grass is greener on the other side of the fence. Today you have not only the breakdown of the middle class, but the breakdown of middle class morality and the family.
The idea was put forward that you would have a different partner for different stages of your life. These stages might be a high school girlfriend, a college girlfriend, a wife with possibly a girlfriend on the side and a second wife after the children are grown. This has pretty much led to the breakdown of the traditional family. It has led to a lot of broken families with bad consequences for the children involved. Loyalty to one another and sticking together should be a higher value than sexual freedom especially after a family has been started.
And then there was the guy who said "Turn on, tune in and drop out." "Turn on, tune in, drop out" is a counterculture-era phrase popularized by Timothy Leary in 1966. In 1967 Leary spoke at the Human Be-In, a gathering of 30,000 hippies in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco and phrased the famous words, "Turn on, tune in, drop out". Today that doesn't make too much sense. The hippie lifestyle turned out to be the precursor of homelessness. The drug culture has led to a culture of opioid and heroin addiction leading to death for many. Prescription and non-prescription drugs are the bane of society and leave many children parentless. That's why so many children are being raised by their grandparents.
Rather than dropping out, choose something that you will be comfortable with and enjoy doing rather than something your parents want you to do. This could be something that either requires or does not require a college degree. Not everyone has to go to college. The dominant culture put the screws to the counterculture by increasing college tuitions with the result that people had to go into a lot of student loan debt. This wasn't so in the easy days of the 60s. The dominant culture said as much as "oh so it's so easy and cheap to go to college that you don't even appreciate a college degree so let's just make it tougher for you. Then maybe you'll appreciate it more and not have time to tune in, turn on and drop out."
So in this synthesis of middle class morality and the counterculture, I present to you the concept of right livlihood, a healthy lifestyle and loyalty to family once a family has begun. Other than that sexual freedom is pretty much OK as long as you don't hurt people in the process. That would be the limiting factor.
Posted at 07:59 AM in John Lawrence, American Culture, Drugs, Lifestyle, Manners, Mores, Off the Top of my Head | Permalink | Comments (0)
Opioid of the Masses?
Karl Marx made famous the quotation "religion is the opiate of the masses." If he were alive today and writing in English, he might coin the term "opioid of the masses", but it wouldn't be about religion. Today drugs, themselves, are the "opioids of the masses." Today people go directly to the available drugs to relieve suffering rather than to religion. Drugs, evidently, are more effective than religion in relieving suffering. Drugs seem to be a universal human need. Archaeological evidence shows that humans were taking opium and 'magic' mushrooms as far back as 10,000 years ago. Cannabis has been in use for thousands of years and is believed to have been used in ancient Central and South Asia.
This is from Huffington Post:
"It is generally thought that mind-altering substances, or at least drugs, are a modern-day issue, but if we look at the archaeological record, there are many data supporting their consumption in prehistoric times," Dr. Elisa Guerra-Doce, an associate professor of prehistory at the University of Valladolid in Spain and the author of the review, told the Huffington Post in an email. "As soon as drug plants and fermented drinks were first consumed, there is uninterrupted evidence for such use over centuries, and occasionally, the relationship that began in prehistoric times has continued into the present day."
Drug use seems to be the main recreation and right of adulthood as children are usually forbidden from consuming alcohol, coffee or marijuana. If drug use is so ubiquitous, why is there such a big hue and cry about them? Responsible use of drugs should be taught in schools. All drugs should be legalized so as to take the criminal element out of their trafficking. Already the legalization of marijuana has caused huge financial losses to the drug cartels in Central America. There is no need to smuggle marijuana into the US if it can be legally grown here.
So why isn't the need for drugs being studied in colleges and universities, and I use drugs in the larger sense including nicotine, caffeine, alcohol and even some foods like sugar? Pharmaceutical corporations have profited big time from selling all kinds of drugs and pain relievers. Drugs have the basic property of relieving pain but also of getting one high. So wherever you are on the emotional spectrum, there is a drug for you - either to get high or to relieve pain. Heroin can do both, and is in fact used for both. As an addict uses more heroin the phenomenon of resistance takes place. Initially the drug was taken to get high, Finally, it is just used to keep from getting low.
So why do humans need drugs at all? We are not satisfied with our current state of emotional affairs no matter where they're at. We always want to feel better. That's where drugs come in. They make us feel better at first. As time goes on, it takes more and more drugs to make us feel better, and finally more and more drugs just not to feel worse. Why isn't this phenomenon being studied in colleges, universities and research centers? Probably because there is too much money in exploiting people's ignorance about drugs.
Posted at 07:26 AM in John Lawrence, Drugs, Off the Top of my Head | Permalink | Comments (0)
Trump's Drug Pricing Scam
Trump promised to rein in drug prices. It was his only sensible campaign promise.
But the plan he announced Friday does little but add another battering ram to his ongoing economic war against America's allies.
He calls it "American patients first," and takes aim at what he calls "foreign freeloading." The plan will pressure foreign countries to relax their drug price controls.
America's trading partners "need to pay more because they're using socialist price controls, market access controls, to get unfair pricing," said Alex Azar, Trump's Secretary of Health and Human Services, who, perhaps not incidentally, was a former top executive at the drug maker Eli Lilly and Company.
By this tortured logic, if other nations allow drug companies to charge whatever they want, U.S. drug companies will then lower prices in the United States.
This is nonsensical. It would just mean more profits for U.S. drug companies. (Revealingly, the stock prices of U.S. pharmaceutical companies rose after Trump announced his plan.)
While it's true that Americans spend far more on medications per person than do citizens in any other rich country – even though Americans are no healthier – that's not because other nations freeload on American drug companies' research.
Big Pharma in America spends more on advertising and marketing than it does on research – often tens of millions to promote a single drug.
The U.S. government supplies much of the research Big Pharma relies on through the National Institutes of Health. This is a form of corporate welfare that no other industry receives.
American drug companies also spend hundreds of millions lobbying the government. Last year alone, their lobbying tab came to $171.5 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
That's more than oil and gas, insurance, or any other American industry. It's more than the formidable lobbying expenditures of America's military contractors. Big Pharma spends tens of millions more on campaign expenditures.
They spend so much on politics in order to avoid price controls, as exist in most other nations, and other government attempts to constrain their formidable profits.
For example, in 2003, Big Pharma got a U.S. law prohibiting the government from using its considerable bargaining clout under Medicare and Medicaid to negotiate lower drug prices. Other nations with big healthcare plans routinely negotiate lower drug prices.
During his campaign Trump promised to reverse this law. But the plan he revealed Friday doesn't touch it. Trump's plan seeks only to make it easier for private health insurers to negotiate better deals for Medicare beneficiaries.
In reality, private health insurers don't have anywhere near the clout of Medicare and Medicaid – which was the whole point of Big Pharma's getting Congress to ban such negotiations in the first place.
In the last few years, U.S. drug companies have also blocked Americans from getting low-cost prescription drug from Canada, using the absurd argument that Americans can't rely on the safety of drugs coming from our northern neighbor – whose standards are at least as high as ours.
Trump's new plan doesn't change this, either.
To put all this another way, when Americans buy drugs in the United States, they really buy a package of advertising, marketing, and political influence-peddling. Consumers in other nations don't pay these costs. Which explains a big part of why drug prices are lower abroad. Trump's so-called plan to lower drug prices disregards this reality.
Trump's plan nibbles at the monopoly power of U.S. pharmaceutical companies, but doesn't deal with the central fact that their patents are supposed to run only twenty years but they've developed a host of strategies to keep patents going beyond then.
One is to make often insignificant changes in their patented drugs that are enough to trigger new patents and thereby prevent pharmacists from substituting cheaper generic versions.
Before its patent expired on Namenda, its widely used drug to treat Alzheimer's, Forest Labs announced it would stop selling the existing tablet form of in favor of new extended-release capsules called Namenda XR. Even though Namenda XR was just a reformulated version of the tablet, the introduction prevented generic versions from being introduced.
Other nations don't allow drug patents to be extended on such flimsy grounds. Trump's plan doesn't touch this ploy.
Another tactic used by U.S. drug companies has been to sue generics to prevent them from selling their cheaper versions, then settle the cases by paying the generics to delay introducing those cheaper versions.
Such "pay-for-delay" agreements are illegal in other nations, but antitrust enforcement hasn't laid a finger on them in America – and Trump doesn't mention them although they cost Americans an estimated $3.5 billion a year.
Even after their patents have expired, U.S. drug companies continue to aggressively advertise their brands so patients will ask their doctors for them instead of the generic versions. Many doctors comply.
Other nations don't allow direct advertising of prescription drugs – another reason why prices are lower there and higher here. Trump's plan is silent on this, too. (Trump suggests drug advertisers should be required to post the prices of their drugs, which they're already expert at obscuring.)
If Trump were serious about lowering drug prices he'd have to take on the U.S. drug manufacturers.
But Trump doesn't want to take on Big Pharma. As has been typical for him, rather than confronting the moneyed interests in America he chooses mainly to blame foreigners.
Posted at 09:26 AM in Robert Reich, Drugs, Pharmaceuticals, Trump | Permalink | Comments (0)
Democrats Who Approved 'Greedy Big Pharma CEO' for HHS Secretary Should Be Ashamed: Critics
Published on Thursday, January 25, 2018 by Common Dreams
"Shame on every Senator who voted to put pharma exec Alex Azar, who has a long history of putting profits over people, in charge of regulating the health care industry."
by Jon Queally, staff writer
"Shame on every Senator who voted to put big pharma CEO Alex Azar, who colluded to triple the price of insulin, in charge of regulating the health care industry," said Alex Lawson, executive director of Social Security Works, in response to the confirmation on Wednesday. (Image: Social Security Works)
The U.S. Senate on Wednesday, with the help of crucial votes by Democrats, confirmed former Eli Lilly executive Alex Azar to become the nation's top healthcare administrator, provoking ire among progressives and healthcare advocates.
Shame on every Senator who voted to put pharma exec Alex Azar, who has a long history of putting profits over people, in charge of regulating the health care industry: https://t.co/b4Gqxvwedv pic.twitter.com/DMAwR2l6Bw
— SocialSecurityWorks (@SSWorks) January 24, 2018
Notable on the rollcall list, and the source of ire among critics, was the fact that five Democratic Senators—Doug Jones of Alabama, Tom Carper of Delaware, Joe Donnelly of Indiana, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, and Joe Manchin of West Virginia —joined with Republicans and voted in favor. With the addition of Sen. Angus King, the Indepedent from Maine who caucuses with the Democrats, that gave Azar the needed support to be confirmed.
Democrats provided the margin of victory for Azar, would have been 48-50 if Dems all voted no https://t.co/UFH9GRsf9n
— David Dayen Pass-Through Vehicle LLC (@ddayen) January 24, 2018
US Senate voted 55 to 43 to make @LillyPad CEO Alex Azar head of @HHSGov.
Which Democrats helped Repubs approve this greedy #BigPharma CEO?@SenatorCarper - DE@ChrisCoons - DE@SenDonnelly - IN@SenatorHeitkamp - ND@GDouglasJones - AL@Sen_JoeManchin - WV#WeWantBetterDems pic.twitter.com/LgCt0hhw6S
— RoseAnn DeMoro (@RoseAnnDeMoro) January 25, 2018
President Donald Trump nominated Azar after his first Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price was forced to resign last year following revelations he was using taxpayer money to charter private plans for unnecessary trips.
While opponents of his nomination, including advocacy groups like Public Citizen, mounted an aggressive campaign to block Azar's confirmation, in the end it was not enough.
"Shame on every Senator who voted to put big pharma CEO Alex Azar, who colluded to triple the price of insulin, in charge of regulating the health care industry," said Alex Lawson, executive director of Social Security Works, in response to the confirmation. "If Azar's record of corruption is any indication of his future behavior, his tenure will be even shorter than his predecessor Tom Price."
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Posted at 08:20 AM in Drugs | Permalink | Comments (0)
'This Is Not a Drill': Attorney General Sessions Coming for Nation's Legalized Pot
Published on Thursday, January 04, 2018, by Common Dreams
"Red alert," warns Drug Policy Alliance, "Attorney General Jeff Sessions is going after legalized marijuana."
by Jessica Corbett, staff writer
Attorney General Jeff Sessions will reportedly rescind the policy that has enabled states to make their own rules about marijuana use. (Photo: Valerio "Dokka" D'Introno/flickr/cc)
This is a developing story and this post may be updated.
On the heels of a California law legalizing recreational marijuana use, which took effect Monday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions is planning to rescind the federal policy that has enabled Americans to grow, sell, and use cannabis in places where it has been legalized, without federal intervention, the Associated Press reported Thursday.
"The move will leave it to U.S. attorneys where pot is legal to decide whether to aggressively enforce federal marijuana law," the AP noted, a move that will likely "add to confusion about whether it's OK to grow, buy, or use marijuana in states where it's legal, since long-standing federal law prohibits it." The report cited anonymous sources with knowledge of the decision.
"RED ALERT!" the Drug Policy Alliance tweeted in response to the report. "This is not a drill. Attorney General Jeff Sessions is going after legalized marijuana."
In California—which was the first state to legalize medical marijuana—state officials have, according to the Los Angeles Times, "issued dozens of permits for retailers to begin recreational sales this week, expanding a market that is expected to grow to $7 billion annually by 2020."
California is the sixth state to introduce the sale of recreational cannabis, following Alaska, Colorado, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington. In response to ballot measures from the 2016 election, Maine and Massachusetts are expected to start sales later this year—despite protest from state leaders like Maine Republican Gov. Paul LePage, who in November vetoed a law that would have regulated the state's marijuana sales.
Several states have passed legislation or ballot measures to relax statewide policies of marijuana use for medicinal and, increasingly, recreational purposes. The Marijuana Policy Project, which lobbies in favor of cannabis-friendly laws, tracks the state-by-state rules on its website:
Sessions is a long-time opponent of the nationwide push to legalize recreational and medicinal use of marijuana. Journalist and former lawyer Glenn Greenwald used the news to offer the analysis that "Conservatives' self-professed belief in federalism was always a huge fraud," tweeting:
Conservatives' self-professed belief in federalism was always a huge fraud. It never extended to any state policies that they disliked, and still doesn't: https://t.co/t3XHLN2tQb
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) January 4, 2018
Opioid Plan Called 'Band-Aid on Gunshot Wound': Trump's New and Unimproved War on Drugs Predicted to Fail
President's remarks on opioid epidemic little more than a collection of Reagan-era "just say no" talking points
Jake Johnson, staff writer
Used syringes are viewed at a needle exchange clinic where users can pick up new syringes and other clean items for those dependent on heroin on February 6, 2014 in St. Johnsbury, Vermont. (Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
"There's a danger that this president will use an emergency declaration as an excuse to ratchet up the war on drugs."
—Grant Smith, Drug Policy Alliance
With remarks immediately slammed as a collection of recycled Reagan-era "just say no" tropes and war on drugs rhetoric, President Donald Trump officially declared America's opioid epidemic a "public health emergency"—a designation accompanied by proposals critics said are akin to "putting a Band-Aid on a gunshot wound."
"President Trump's declaration today amounts to a drop in the bucket compared to what the White House and Congress should be delivering to address this crisis," said Grant Smith, deputy director of national affairs at the Drug Policy Alliance. "We need to end drug criminalization and stop incarcerating people who are struggling."
Ahead of Trump's speech, reports emerged that the president would not declare the epidemic a national emergency as he had previously promised. Doing so would have "immediately unlocked billions of dollars of federal money." Instead, no new federal funds will be allocated to combat the crisis that kills tens of thousands of Americans a year.
Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey, a Democrat, argued in a statement following the presidents remarks that without any new funds, Trump's "plan" is "woefully inadequate to address the challenges we face."
"Our communities need federal funding and resources to fight this epidemic," Healey added. "Fire and police departments are struggling to afford overdose reversal drugs. Schools and health centers need to expand prevention education to all students. Families need expanded access to substance use treatment. These are actions we can take right now. And this announcement does little to support any of them."
"A national strategy on opioids must include a plan to rein in the corrupt abuses of the pharmaceutical industry, or it likely will fail."
—Peter Maybarduk, Public Citizen
In the place of substantive policy moves, Trump floated proposals ranging from a "really tough, really big" advertising campaign aimed at convincing the public that "drugs are bad" and that people shouldn't take them, to a "law-and-order" style crackdown on "criminals who peddle dangerous drugs to our youth."
These remarks show "there's a danger that this president will use an emergency declaration as an excuse to ratchet up the war on drugs with more funding for locking up more people and harsher sentencing laws," warned Grant Smith of the Drug Policy Alliance.
Also absent from Trump's speech was any mention of the role the pharmaceutical industry has played in perpetuating the opioid crisis.
"A national strategy on opioids must include a plan to rein in the corrupt abuses of the pharmaceutical industry, or it likely will fail," said Peter Maybarduk, director of Public Citizen's Access to Medicines Program, in a statement following the president's speech.
As an alternative to Trump's fact- and substance-free remarks, the Drug Policy Alliance highlighted its "Public Health and Safety Plan to Address Problematic Opioid Use and Overdose," a 17-page document (pdf) outlining proposals that reach beyond "the status quo policy of criminalization."
"We need a well thought out plan from the Trump administration that resolves the many obstacles people face trying to access medication-assisted treatment and naloxone to save lives," Smith concluded. "We need new funding from Congress to fix our broken treatment infrastructure and boost public health capabilities to end this crisis. We need to implement proven strategies that have not been tried yet in the U.S., like supervised injection facilities to prevent overdose deaths and reduce opioid-related harm."
Posted at 08:49 AM in Drugs, Trump | Permalink | Comments (0)
Diseases of Despair
by Chris Hedges, from truthdig, September 3, 2017
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, New York Times best selling author, former professor at Princeton University, activist and ordained Presbyterian minister. He has written 11 books.
Individual Americans and their society are suffering a deep malaise rooted in lack of opportunity, hopelessness and capitalist exploitation.
The opioid crisis, the frequent mass shootings, the rising rates of suicide, especially among middle-aged white males, the morbid obesity, the obsession with gambling, the investment of our emotional and intellectual life in tawdry spectacles and the allure of magical thinking, from the absurd promises of the Christian right to the belief that reality is never an impediment to our desires, are the pathologies of a diseased culture. They have risen from a decayed world where opportunity, which confers status, self-esteem and dignity, has dried up for most Americans. They are expressions of acute desperation and morbidity.
A loss of income causes more than financial distress. It severs, as the sociologist Émile Durkheim pointed out, the vital social bonds that give us meaning. A decline in status and power, an inability to advance, a lack of education and health care and a loss of hope are crippling forms of humiliation. This humiliation fuels loneliness, frustration, anger and feelings of worthlessness. In short, when you are marginalized and rejected by society, life often has little meaning.
[Pope John Paul II] attacked the idea, fundamental to capitalism, that work was merely an exchange of money for labor. Work, he wrote, should not be reduced to the commodification of human beings through wages. Workers were not impersonal instruments to be manipulated like inanimate objects to increase profit. Work was essential to human dignity and self-fulfillment. It gave us a sense of empowerment and identity. It allowed us to build a relationship with society in which we could feel we contributed to social harmony and social cohesion, a relationship in which we had purpose.
"When life is not worth living, everything becomes a pretext for ridding ourselves of it … ," Durkheim wrote. "There is a collective mood, as there is an individual mood, that inclines nations to sadness. … For individuals are too closely involved in the life of society for it to be sick without their being affected. Its suffering inevitably becomes theirs."
White men, more easily seduced by the myth of the American dream than people of color who understand how the capitalist system is rigged against them, often suffer feelings of failure and betrayal, in many cases when they are in their middle years. They expect, because of notions of white supremacy and capitalist platitudes about hard work leading to advancement, to be ascendant. They believe in success. When the American dream becomes a nightmare they are vulnerable to psychological collapse. This collapse, more than any political agenda, propelled Donald Trump into power. Trump embodies the decayed soul of America. He, like many of those who support him, has a childish yearning to be as omnipotent as the gods. This impossibility, as the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker wrote, leads to a dark alternative: destroying like the gods.
In "Hitler and the Germans" the political philosopher Eric Voegelin dismissed the myth that Hitler—an uneducated mediocrity whose only strength was an ability to exploit political opportunities—mesmerized and seduced the German people. The Germans, he wrote, voted for Hitler and the "grotesque, marginal figures" surrounding him because he embodied the pathologies of a diseased society, one beset by economic collapse, hopelessness and violence. This sickness found its expression in the Nazis, as it has found its expression in the United States in Trump.
Hannah Arendt said the rise of radical evil is caused by collective "thoughtlessness." Desperate to escape from the prison of a failed society, willing to do anything and abuse anyone to advance, those who feel trapped see the people around them as objects to be exploited for self-advancement. This exploitation mirrors that carried out by corrupt ruling elites. Turning people into objects to be used to achieve wealth, power or sexual gratification is the core practice espoused by popular culture, from reality television to casino capitalism. Trump personifies this practice.
Plato wrote that the moral character of a society is determined by its members. When the society abandons the common good it unleashes amoral lusts—violence, greed and sexual exploitation—and fosters magical thinking. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus called those who severed themselves from the moral and reality-based universe idiotes. When these idiotes, whose worldview is often the product of relentless indoctrination, form a majority or a powerful minority, the demagogue rises from the morass.
The demagogue is the public face of collective stupidity. Voegelin defined stupidity as a "loss of reality." This loss of reality meant people could not "rightly orient his [or her] action in the world, in which he [or she] lives." The demagogue, who is always an idiote, is not a freak or a social mutation. The demagogue expresses the society's demented zeitgeist. This was true in Nazi Germany. It is true in the United States.
Continue reading "Diseases of Despair" »
Posted at 09:01 AM in Capitalism, Drugs, The US | Permalink | Comments (1)
Sanders Takes on Pharma Greed With Rule Aimed at Ending 'Price Gouging'
Published on Tuesday, August 01, 2017 by Common Dreams
"Sanofi and the rest of the pharmaceutical industry cannot be allowed to make huge profits on the backs of working class Americans."
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), ranking Democrat on the Senate Budget Committee, speaks at a news conference. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
In a move characterized as an effort to prevent large pharmaceutical companies from "goug[ing] American consumers after taking billions in taxpayer money," Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Monday introduced a new rule that would require drugmakers to agree to set reasonable prices before being granted exclusive rights to produce vaccines and other life-saving drugs.
"Americans should not be forced to pay the highest prices in the world for a vaccine we spent more than $1 billion to help develop."
—Sen Bernie Sanders
Sanders was joined by Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) in crafting and unveiling the rule, which the pair of lawmakers "first proposed two decades ago with bipartisan support." The rule currently has 21 co-sponsors.
In the face of new developments, Sanders said in a statement, a rule addressing soaring prescription drug prices is as necessary as ever.
While the new rule would have broad implications, Sanders specifically takes aim at Sanofi, a French pharmaceutical giant that the U.S. Army has offered an exclusive license to develop a vaccine for the Zika virus.
"American taxpayers have already spent more than $1 billion on Zika research and prevention efforts, including millions to develop a vaccine. The Department of Health and Human Services gave Sanofi $43 million to develop the vaccine with $130 million in federal funding still to come," Sanders' office said in a statement. "But Sanofi has refused to agree to sell the drug back to Americans at a fair price. Without a fair pricing agreement, the company can charge Americans whatever astronomical price it wants for its vaccine."
Sanders, who spent much of his 2016 presidential campaign railing against the greed of the pharmaceutical industry, called such an arrangement "simply unacceptable."
"Americans should not be forced to pay the highest prices in the world for a vaccine we spent more than $1 billion to help develop," Sanders said. "Sanofi gets more than one-third of its roughly $34 billion in revenues from the United States alone, and its CEO made nearly $5 million in salary last year. Yet they have rejected the U.S. Army's request for fair pricing."
Sanders continued:
Sanofi and the rest of the pharmaceutical industry cannot be allowed to make huge profits on the backs of working class Americans, many of whom cannot afford the medication they are prescribed. The days of allowing Sanofi and other drug makers to gouge American consumers after taking billions in taxpayer money must end. That is why I am introducing legislation to demand fairer, lower prices for the Zika vaccine and for every drug developed with government resources. This is a fight that we cannot afford to lose.
An analysis (PDF) of the rule by the Congressional Budget Office found that the rule would save the federal government $6 billion over the next decade.
As Sanders often points out, the United States spends far more on pharmaceutical drugs—and on healthcare more broadly—than other industrialized nations.
(Image Source: Mic/OECD)
Posted at 08:19 AM in Bernie Sanders, Drugs | Permalink | Comments (0)
Trump Cuts Antibiotics Research 18%
I just watched a Frontline special about the dismal prospects for antibiotics research at a time when superbugs are increasingly resistant to drugs already on the market. Already we're in an era where people unfortunate enough to contract one of these bacteria have no treatment whatsoever available to them. We are in an era where the plague could strike again and we'd be no better off than medieval Europeans were when plague wiped out a third of the population.
Antibiotics are a class of drugs which need continual research and development because the bacteria are always evolving. Major pharmaceutical corporations have dropped their antibiotics research efforts because antibiotics, unlike cholesterol or erectile dysfunction drugs, are unprofitable. Why? Because the drug, when used properly, only needs a few doses and then the problem is solved. Other medications are meant to be taken for life and are hugely profitable.
Even Pfizer, which opened a facility dedicated to antibiotics research, the last company to do this kind of research, shut the facility out of consideration for the bottom line. This left government and the National Institute of Health as the last resort. Unfortunately, this is where Trump came in and cut the budget to the NIH.
The San Diego Union reported:
Salk Institute President Elizabeth Blackburn, a Nobel Prize winner, said reducing NIH funding will leave people vulnerable to emerging threats.
"In a world facing unprecedented health challenges, from the rise in the numbers of people with Alzheimer's to the spread of antibiotic-resistant superbugs, now is the time to prioritize foundational scientific research, not reduce funding," Blackburn said. "We are in a golden age of science, thanks to the groundbreaking research that's come before. To drastically reduce funding now is to squander that legacy and to undermine the legacy we leave future generations."
These superbugs are already showing up in American hospitals and many have already been exposed to them and died. Thank Mr. Trump, if this becomes an epidemic.
Letter to Senators Re OPEN Act
Congress is always passing legislation to benefit the pharmaceutical industry at the expense of average Americans who have to pay ridiculously high prices for drugs and medical insurance. The OPEN Act is one example. Big Pharma then only pursues the development of drugs that have a high profit potential. The provisions of Obamacare that need to be repealed and replaced are those which provide no cost containment for drugs. Following is a letter from socialsecurityworks.com.
Dear Senator
We are writing to express our strong opposition to the Orphan Product Extensions Now (OPEN) Act.
Social Security Works fights to improve the economic security of all Americans by protecting and
expanding Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid and lowering drug costs. With an email list of 1.3
million engaged activists and key organizers in targeted states and districts, we fight to fundamentally
restructure the pharmaceutical industry from one based on high prices and profits for the drug corporations
to one based on justice.
The OPEN Act contains policies that continue to allow pharmaceutical corporations to charge patients
absurd amounts of money for life-saving prescription drugs, for longer periods of time. It is estimated that
this new law would cost patients and taxpayers up to $11.6 billion over 10 years –ensuring that Americans
continue to pay the highest drug prices in the world.
Former Congressman Henry Waxman, an author of the 1982 Orphan Drug Act said, "We're seeing the
Orphan Drug Act used in ways that we never anticipated when the law was adopted. In the way people use
the word 'orphan status' it's almost becoming a synonym for a monopoly price."
This piece of legislation should not pass as a standalone bill or as part of the User Fee Reauthorizations.
Members of Congress should focus on legislation that reins in abuses by drug companies, and assures that
Americans have affordable and accessible healthcare.
We believe lowering prescription drug prices, especially for Americans with rare diseases is a bipartisan
issue. We are hopeful that you will join us in standing up for patients and rejecting yet another giveaway to
billion dollar drug corporations.
Please vote "NO" on the OPEN Act. We look forward to working with you to lower prescription drug
prices.
Alex Lawson
Posted at 07:50 AM in John Lawrence, Drugs | Permalink | Comments (0)
How the Food and Drug Companies Ensure that We Get Sick and They Make Money
Published on Monday, July 24, 2017 by Common Dreams
by Paul Buchheit
"It seemed all the large health organizations were encouraging people to eat the very foods linked to the diseases they're supposed to be fighting against." (Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
Another reason for single-payer health care: The documentary What the Health shows how the lives and health of human beings are considered insignificant, and in many ways threatened, by the pursuit of profits in the meat and dairy and drug industries.
The corporate disdain revealed by this film is nearly beyond belief. And our 'trusted' watchdog agencies, both non-profit and government, are beholden to the biggest companies, accepting money in return for their silence about the dangers of animal and pharmaceutical products.
Some of the contentions in the documentary have been disputed, most notably the implication that sugar is not a major factor in diabetes, and that dairy is. Indeed there may be flaws in the documentary. But it clearly reveals the damaging behavior of the businesses and organizations that are contributing to human suffering.
Despicable: Corporate Profits at the Expense of Our Health
According to the documentary (and other sources), the World Health Organization and other major health groups have labeled both processed and red meats as carcinogenic. Yet powerful lobbying efforts have kept America near the top of the world in meat consumption. The drug and chemical industries do their part by providing pesticide-filled GMO corn and soy, fed mostly to dairy cows, and with most of their antibiotic products going to fatten up the animals most of us eat.
Hypocritical: Our Watchdog Non-Profits on the Payroll of Big Ag
At the time of the documentary, beef and/or dairy menu items were promoted on the websites of the American Diabetes Association (ADA), the American Cancer Society (ACS), the American Heart Association (AHA), and the Susan G. Komen Foundation, prompting the narrator to say, "It seemed all the large health organizations were encouraging people to eat the very foods linked to the diseases they're supposed to be fighting against."
It all started to make sense when some of the health organization funders were discovered: Kraft Foods, Oscar Mayer, Tyson Chicken, Dannon and Yoplait Yogurts, Pizza Hut, KFC, Taco Bell, Subway, Domino's, and the beef and dairy industries themselves. Not a single one of the four health organizations was willing to be interviewed.
It gets worse. ACS, AHA, and ADA are accepting millions of dollars from pharmaceutical companies that are making BILLIONS of dollars from the diseases the health organizations are supposedly trying to combat. That includes Pfizer, Merck, Lilly, Johnson & Johnson, Abbott, and others. These Big Pharma firms HAVE A VESTED INTEREST IN OUR SICKNESS. A Time report explains the diabolical 'cascading' of drugs through our lives: "If you become addicted to painkillers, there are pills to help you stop taking the pills, by reducing the symptoms of withdrawal. And if you take too many pills, there's a pill for that too."
Continue reading "How the Food and Drug Companies Ensure that We Get Sick and They Make Money" »
Posted at 07:06 AM in Drugs, Food | Permalink | Comments (0)
Why Do Americans Take Drugs That Are Killing Them?
Powerful Drugs Are Flooding America
from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Opioids killed more than 33,000 people in 2015. Drug overdose is the leading cause of accidental death in the US, with 52,404 lethal drug overdoses that year. Opioid addiction is driving this epidemic, with 20,101 overdose deaths related to prescription pain relievers, and 12,990 overdose deaths related to heroin. Heroin and prescription pain killers are leading the way for providing an early death for thousands of American citizens. Many start off with prescription pain killers and then turn to cheaper street heroin when their prescriptions run out. Why do so many use drugs? The question should actually be how does anyone get along without them? Drugs are touted as the privilege of adulthood starting with caffeinated beverages, nicotine, alcohol, increasingly legal marijuana. Why do adult humans need drugs in order to function or in some cases to become dysfunctional? Is life so painful or boring that we need to be zonked out of everyday consciousness in order for it to be tolerable?
There are other options for dealing with pain and boredom. Some of them require actual effort or work which doesn't appeal to a lot of people if they think that all they have to do is swallow a pill to solve their problems. That takes no effort. According to WebMD, some of them are exercise, acupuncture, massage, yoga, hypnosis. Oh, but exercise requires some effort. Americans have been taught culturally that life shouldn't require any effort. Didn't they abandon all their 19th century farms in order to get office jobs? Wasn't that "moving up in the world"? Getting high doesn't require any effort in order to attain a state of nirvana. It's just that there's a price to be paid down the road. Nature will exact that price, and then you'll be more miserable than when you started the drug using adventure.
Americans are taught that any problem can be solved by swallowing a pill. TV ads reinforce that.
Much of the answer has to do with cultural values and the pharmaceutical industry. The pharmaceutical industry has long sought the "killer" drug, one that would have to be taken on a daily basis for life. That's where the real money is. Drugs for hypertension, cholesterol, erectile dysfunction produce whopping revenues whereas drugs that will cure a malady after just taking a few pills don't increase the bottom line unless exorbitant sums can be charged for them. Usually, in such cases the malady is life threatening.
Painkillers such as opioids are the answer to the pharmaceutical corporations' dreams because they lead to a "drug cascade" or in other words a vicious cycle. The doctor prescribing opiates will often at the same time prescribe a drug that reverses the effects of an overdose. Police and first responders have stocked up on these drugs just in case. Then, since opioids have a side effect of constipation, the user must also take another drug to reverse the effects of constipation. This is a growth industry if ever there was one.
Continue reading "Why Do Americans Take Drugs That Are Killing Them?" »
Posted at 08:06 PM in John Lawrence, Drugs | Permalink | Comments (0)
Drugs -The Human Dilemma - Part 2
Part 1 can be found here.
Why Are Some People Always Happy and Others Not So Much?
One might ask is there a balanced way to live so that the chemicals released by the brain which produce feelings of well being and happiness can happen without addiction to drugs or exercise? For some people these endorphins seem to produce enough good feelings naturally without their having to do anything. For some the "happiness gene" seems to be turned on at all times regardless of what happens in the events of their lives. For others there is a deficiency that leads to a tendency for them to become alcoholics or drug addicts or junkies of other kinds. A person's natural energy level seems to have something to do with it. High energy people need to release that energy in non-sedentary pursuits or mitigate the effects of it like so-called ADHD with drugs.
From Psychology Today:
[There is] a cutting-edge theory among psychologists: that we are genetically coded for a "set point" of happiness from birth, maybe even during the embryonic stages. Various proteins, hormones and brain neurotransmitters are thought to form a biochemical predisposition that interacts with one's unfolding life.
Recent research has shown that no matter what the life event -- scoring in the stock market or losing your most precious loved one -- you will return to a certain level of well-being within six months to a year. Money, education, social class, marital status, race, gender and age seem to have little to do with it, these studies conclude.
[T]he set-point theory may help explain why some people just seem naturally cranky, even when life is full of good fortune -- and why others seem content despite constant hardship.
"I made a sort of smart-aleck remark in a research paper that trying to be happier is like trying to be taller," said David Lykken, professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota and leading proponent of a happiness set point. "It got a lot of media play. Now I would like to recant the claim. Many personality traits will in fact develop from your unique human experiences, though it is all still elicited from your genetic makeup."
In a book to be published early next year, Lykken argues that although we have permanent hard wiring for happiness, we can adjust our level of contentment by knowing what keeps us happy and what brings us down. He suggests that simple pleasures such as gardening, reading novels and baking bread can stretch one's happiness potential. Taking pride in work is another highly effective strategy.
Ed Diener, a psychologist and researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is another pioneer of the happiness set point. He estimates that 50 percent of happiness is genetic and the other half is "modifiable within limits" by one's life situation.
Life Is Not Fair So What Else Is New?
If some people are naturally always happy due to their genetic inheritance, then this is just another indication that Life Is Not Fair. Where does this leave those who are naturally unhappy or grouchy? As potential drug users in order to reclaim a modicum of happiness? The phenomenon of tolerance has to do with the fact that there is only a finite supply of endorphins or other happiness producing chemicals in the body at one time. It's not the drug itself that produces the "high"; it's the drug's ability to release the endorphins already stored in the body. Once the drug (including exercise) releases the endorphins, then there is only a diminished supply left until the body builds them back up again. The addict thinks, "Wow, that felt good when I put that drug in my body and now the effects have worn off so I'll do it again."
However, it now takes more of the drug to induce the same effect because there are fewer endorphins left until the use of the drug is stopped so that the endorphins can build up again. So a sensible drug user would allow for this fact, but the junkie keeps trying to induce the same effect until there are no endorphins left. That's why hard core heroin addicts are just injecting the drug, not to get high, but to keep from getting lower or keep from getting sick. This is why a balanced use of any drug allows time for the body to build its supply of endorphins back up again before the drug of choice is again ingested. Such balanced use would probably allow any drug user to lead a normal, functional life, and many have.
The phenomenon of withdrawal takes place after a drug is used and the body is in the process of replenishing the endorphins. This is somewhat painful and balances with pain the pleasure already experienced from the drug high. Withdrawal provides an incentive for taking the drug again to overcome this pain, but the experience of taking the drug again only contributes to more pain further down the road and eventually to addiction. It seems that one must be willing to tolerate the pain associated with withdrawal in order for the body to recover and not slide downhill to addiction. This is what a hangover is all about.
Doctors are prescribing opioids as pain killers. Opioids are natural or synthetic chemicals that bind to receptors in your brain or body. Common opioids include heroin and prescription drugs such as oxycodone, hydrocodone, and fentanyl. When the prescription runs out, many people are turning to street drugs like heroin which accomplishes the same result and is actually cheaper. The United States is in the midst of a prescription opioid overdose epidemic. In 2014, more than 28,000 people died from opioid overdose, and at least half of those deaths involved a prescription opioid. Many more became addicted to prescription and illegal opioids. Heroin-related deaths have also increased sharply, more than tripling since 2010. In 2014, more than 10,500 people died from heroin.
The musician, Prince, died of an opioid overdose—specifically from fentanyl, a synthetic opioid often prescribed to people who have built up a tolerance to oral opioids. Fentanyl is more potent than powerful drugs like OxyContin and is most commonly administered via a patch. Prince suffered from debilitating hip and knee pain and got his drugs from his doctor, not a dealer. Some doctors are using alternative therapies and staying away from opioids. Doctors are trying alternative regimens that include nonnarcotic infusions and injections, ultrasound guided nerve blocks, laughing gas, even "energy healing" and a wandering harpist. Drug companies, however, are pushing doctors to continue prescribing their expensive drugs.
Learning to Live Without Drugs
In order to live without drugs, people need to learn to live a more natural life. This includes avoiding too much sedentariness. We are all physical animals. We need to be physically active more than we need to sit. The sitters compensate for their many ailments by taking drugs which allow them to tolerate a sedentary existence. Physical exercise not only strengthens the body; its strengthens the reservoirs of endorphins and other pleasure inducing chemicals in the brain. Therefore, when they need to be drawn upon to overcome pain and just for normally feeling good, they are there. Drug addicts overdraw these finite resources thinking that the source of their pleasure or relief from pain is the drug itself rather than the drug's ability to release the body's naturally occurring pleasure inducing chemicals.
The most important thing is moderation in all things as the Greek poet Hesiod said in 700 BC. The Roman comic dramatist Plautus (c.250–184 bc), also said 'moderation in all things is the best policy.' Voltaire said, "Let us tend our gardens." A few centuries later Professor Lykken quoted above said the same thing: "simple pleasures such as gardening, reading novels and baking bread can stretch one's happiness potential." We have to be willing to tolerate some bit of pain if necessary and not succumb to the temptation to use drugs under the false assumption that we can feel good at all times.
Voltaire wrote in Candide that one must "tend their own gardens" in order to avoid a life of either misery or boredom. The enlightened playwright and social critic Voltaire (1694-1778) concluded his satirical tale Candide (1759) with the observation that the violence and plunder of kings could not compare with the productive and peaceful life of those who minded their own business, "cultivated their own garden," and traded the surpluses with their neighbors:
Candide, as he was returning home, made profound reflections on the Turk's discourse. "This good old man," said he to Pangloss and Martin, "appears to me to have chosen for himself a lot much preferable to that of the six kings with whom we had the honor to sup." … "Neither need you tell me," said Candide, "that we must take care of our garden." "You are in the right," said Pangloss; "for when man was put into the garden of Eden, it was with an intent to dress it: and this proves that man was not born to be idle." "Work then without disputing," said Martin; "it is the only way to render life supportable."
Can so-called negative addictions be replaced by positive ones? We seem to have cases that show that they can as well as cases that start out as positive addictions and end up being negative ones. Is everyone diagnosed with ADHD mentally ill? Only within the confines of a social situation they are not cut out for. Should everyone go to college and sit at a desk job all day? Thom Hartmann says no if you are a "hunter" rather than a "farmer." People need coaching with life situations including those who cannot afford a "life coach." This should be one of the services the public education system provides so that society does not end up with an overload of misfits, drug addicts and inmates. Those who are naturally high due to their genetic endowment are indeed among the most fortunate. Those not constructed in that way should know there are alternatives and strategies including the moderate use of drugs that can alleviate a lot of their pain and put them on a better course through life. But for most people pain is an inevitable part of life. Need I say it again - life is not fair.
Drugs - the Human Epidemic - Part 1
by John Lawrence from the San Diego Free Press
Americans are using drugs of various kinds at an increasing rate. Of course drugs have been around for a long time, since the beginning of time in fact. In 5000 BC the Sumerians used opium. The earliest record of alcohol production was in Egypt in 3500 BC. Tea in China was used in 3000 BC. Humans have used various substances to manipulate and alter their mood levels for millenia.
In the category of drugs I include any mood altering substance such caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, cocaine, heroin, marijuana, prescription drugs such as opiods and other pain killers, amphetamines etc. According to Wikipedia, a drug is any substance other than food that, when inhaled, injected, smoked, consumed, absorbed via a patch on the skin or dissolved under the tongue, causes a physiological change in the body. Addiction occurs when a person feels the need to continue using the drug on a regular basis and can't quit. This doesn't allow the body to recuperate whereas moderate use of any drug can produce more sustainable results because the body does get a chance to recuperate.
Food, sex, and exercise addiction are not considered to be included in drug addiction although they work in a similar way to release chemicals in the brain that then flood the body and produce pleasurable sensations. Food addiction can have the most undesirable consequences including obesity. Addiction to work, workaholism, on the other hand, can have very desirable consequences including increased financial well being although it may wreak a toll on human relationships. Sex addiction can have the negative consequences of promiscuity, adultery, excessive masturbation and porn addiction. Exercise addiction such as runner's high is considered to be positive addiction since the major effects are increased good health. But even with exercise, the addiction can be taken too far producing enervation and fatigue.
Obviously, some drugs are considered basically harmless at least in terms of their negative social consequences. People drink coffee regularly throughout their whole lives without negative consequences. People smoke cigarettes over their whole lives without negative consequences except that their lives are probably shortened by lung cancer, emphysema and other diseases. This makes for not a pretty end of life picture. Alcohol use if excessive can lead to drunken driving, lowered inhibitions of anger leading to violence and eventual health consequences such as cirrhosis of the liver. Moderate alcohol use seems to have beneficial effects.
Addiction to powerful drugs can lead to job loss, criminality such as robbery and theft to support the drug habit and other social malaise. Not all drugs are bad, not all addiction is bad. Moderation or the lack thereof is the key to determining if drug use is bad. Some people function extremely well with moderate use of drugs including even so-called "hard" drugs. Caffeine perks up the mind and can be beneficial for long distance truck drivers or students studying for final exams. One of the keys to understanding drug use is understanding whether the drug use is a consequence of the user's social situation such as poverty and hopelessness or mental health issues or is it a part of an otherwise productive and functional life?
Positive Addiction Can Be a Good Thing, But...
Exercise addiction led to participation in three Olympics by middle distance runner Suzy Favor Hamilton. In her autobiography, Fast Girl, she details how she started running as a child and noted the pleasurable sensations running produced after she stopped. To boot she found that she was also good at it. So she got into competitive athletics as a runner. This had both good and bad consequences. The good was that in addition to the "runner's high" running produced, she got acclaim and fame when she won races. Her Olympic career ended at her third Olympics when the expectation that she would win produced so much pressure that she performed poorly and would have ended in last place if she had not deliberately fallen in order to avoid that shame.
After her running career ended, the adjustment to life without running produced another crisis: what to do with all the energy she had expended while running? As it turned out, that energy went into sex including excessive masturbation and eventually a career as a prostitute in Las Vegas where she became the second highest paid escort in town earning more than $600 for an hour's work which was also extremely pleasurable for her. Amazingly, her husband stood by her throughout her career as a high class call girl. She would fly to Vegas from Wisconsin a couple times a month, enjoy her avocation and come home with big bucks. Eventually she was "outed" by a client and her career as a call girl was over.
Suzy sought medical help for her addiction and was prescribed psychotropic drugs. It's interesting that what had originally been a positive addiction became something that eventually had to be treated with an ingested chemical drug. The book ended with the drug treatment having finally quieted her mind and stabilized her situation. What's happened to Suzy since then we don't know. According to the book, she's teaching yoga, doing public speaking, seeing her psychiatrist who diagnosed her with bipolar disorder and running, but not competitively.
Michael Phelps was also diagnosed with ADHD as a child. He couldn't concentrate in class and was given Ritalin for several years. His mother was told he would never amount to anything. Then he found swimming. Now he is the most decorated Olympic athlete of all time. Is it that some people were never cut out to sit still in class? That doesn't mean, however, that they can't excel in other endeavors. The problem now for Michael, as it was for Suzy, is what does he do with his energy once his Olympic career is over. My prescription would be to go on swimming, but not competitively.
The 1940s and 50s singer and movie star, Betty Hutton, tells in her book, Backstage, You Can Have, how she was effectively addicted to performing. She was known for the prodigious amount of energy she expended when on stage. She was unable to retire and just be a mother and housewife. She eventually became addicted to pills including amphetamines which enabled her to keep going and do her explosive act. After having made 19 films and $10 million in the Hollywood film industry, probably the equivalent of $100 million today, she eventually became homeless not even being able to afford a weekly motel bill. Homelessness can happen to anyone even Hollywood movie stars. She was befriended by a Catholic priest, Father Maguire, for 12 years until he died. She lived out her years in Palm Springs with the help of two gay guys who looked after her and fought with her over her pill addiction. She is buried in Desert Memorial Cemetery in Cathedral City next door to Palm Springs where many other movie stars and celebrities including Frank Sinatra and Sonny Bono are buried.
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) always seemed to me to be a misnomer. Some people have high energy and can just not sit still in a classroom or at a desk job. Human beings, especially males, evolved to be physically active and shouldn't be sitting all day; many should be involved in some physical activity instead. Naturally, if a person can't sit still, they have an attention deficit because they can't pay attention until they can can release their pent up energy and relax. Then they can pay attention, but our society values people who can sit at a desk all day whether in school or at a job. Those people usually end up with health problems due to their sedentariness. People who do manual labor and whose jobs involve physical movement usually live longer and have fewer health problems, but our society does not value their work as much. There is even a stigma associated with lack of a college education and associated desk job. It's the blue collar vs white collar syndrome.
Students like Michael Phelps who are diagnosed with ADHD are sometimes given a drug like Ritalin to calm them down. Again a drug is administered when a more healthy prescription might be exercise. Overloading the body with drugs to solve every problem is what is making the pharmaceutical companies rich while leading everyone to believe that the solution to every problem is a drug. Luckily, Michael Phelps figured this one out for himself and became a swimmer instead of a drug user.
Some Are Hunters; Some Are Farmers
Thom Hartmann proposed the hunter vs. farmer theory to explain ADHD and AADD (Adult Attention Deficit Disorder). He theorized that human beings evolved to be hunter-gatherers and as such ADHD was a useful strategy. Then later when societies became agricultural, farming involved more sedentary activity. His thesis involves the consideration of farmers vs hunters as an explanation why some people can tolerate sedentariness better than others, but he always assumes that ADHD is a natural phenomenon that shouldn't be looked at as something deviate which should be treated with drugs. Thom has a point, but anyone who has ever been around farmers knows that a farmer's life is anything but sedentary.
Why is it that ADHD and AADD have only recently become a problem? This is the question Hartmann, former psychotherapist, asked. He then drew a logical conclusion, that ADD and ADHD are a result of natural adaptive behavior:
Like some other alternative ADHD theories, this originated from a child getting the ADHD diagnosis and the parent thinking, "My child does not have a disorder." Thom Hartmann's son was diagnosed and that got him to look at the ADHD controversy seriously. His conclusion was, "It's not hard science, and was never intended to be." ADHD is only a list of symptoms, with no criteria directly connected to any cause or disorder.
According to this theory, humans were nomadic hunter-gatherers for thousands of years, but as people started farming and living settled lives other personality traits, more suitable to a sedentary life, developed. The ADHD person is then someone who has retained some of the older hunter-gatherer characteristics. So-called "normal" people are the "farmers."
This theory has been validated by a number of studies of people living traditional tribal and nomadic lifestyles. Those tribes' people who continued their traditional lifestyles had no problems with their ADD and ADHD, but members of the same tribe living in towns had ADHD problems like those in western society.
The people that are covered by this theory have an ADD or ADHD personality. They do not have a disorder, but need to find their niche in our modern western society. A part of this adaptation is finding a career that suits their personalities and not, as is so often the case, fit themselves into a career considered a "good career" for the average individual.
The hunter has to be aware of signs of their prey, dangers, and make quick decisions. This is a stimulating experience, where impulsivity and hyperactivity, two symptoms of ADHD, are beneficial. For such a child, sitting in a classroom and forced to do some boring or repetitive work, will heighten every distraction from the classroom and even from outside. This is the reason for their distractibility.
The errors many leading ADHD researchers make is to assume that only one way of thinking or learning is "normal" and a child thinking or learning another way is a "disorder." There are many learning styles, which are personality traits. These academics have arbitrarily defined "normal" behavior as behavior most suitable in the conventional classroom.
The average school classroom environment is not a natural environment for a young child. Children are not designed to sit still for hours doing tasks that may be perceived as boring. This is not normal, and the reactions of ADD and ADHD children through various hyperactive or daydreaming behaviors are their coping strategies.
Many Olympic athletes struggle with everyday life after their Olympic careers are over. A recent article in the Washington Post, Olympians struggle to adjust to life beyond the rings, says the following:
Each of the 11,000 athletes who competed at the Rio de Janeiro Olympics over the past two weeks endured some measure of meticulous preparation, all building to a single competition when the world's focus is most intense. Just beyond their medals and the post-Olympic exhibition tours and commemorative cereal boxes looms a hurdle they don't see coming: everyday life.
There is now, though, a heightened awareness about what awaits Olympians when they return home. Many athletes here said they have discussed potential pitfalls with teammates. Swimmer Allison Schmitt won three gold medals, a silver and a bronze at the 2012 London Olympics, but she fell into such a deep depression over the ensuing two years that she and her coaches believed it was unlikely she would compete at such a level again.
With help, Schmitt overcame her problems. She came to Rio with the goal of not only helping the Americans to a medal — which she did, gold in the 4x200-meter freestyle relay — but to, as she said, "de-stigmatize the negativity around mental health." Schmitt said before she left Rio that she plans to travel, that she knows she must keep busy. But she also knows that understanding her past experiences doesn't mean she is better prepared to deal with what's to come.
"I'm more aware of it," she said. "I don't know exactly how much more prepared I am for it. I would like to say I am."
Stay tuned for Part 2 in next week's San Diego Free Press.
Of Rotten Apples and Rotten Systems
Martin Shkreli, the former hedge-fund manager turned pharmaceutical CEO who was arrested last week, has been described as a sociopath and worse.
In reality, he's a brasher and larger version of what others in finance and corporate suites do all the time.
Federal prosecutors are charging him with conning wealthy investors.
Lying to investors is illegal, of course, but it's perfectly normal to use hype to lure rich investors into hedge funds. And the line between the two isn't always distinct.
Hedge funds are lightly regulated on the assumption that investors are sophisticated and can take care of themselves.
Perhaps prosecutors went after Shkreli because they couldn't nail him for his escapades as a pharmaceutical executive, which were completely legal – although vile.
Shkreli took over a company with the rights to a 62-year-old drug used to treat toxoplasmosis, a devastating parasitic infection that can cause brain damage in babies and people with AIDS. He then promptly raised its price from $13.50 to $750 a pill.
When the media and politicians went after him, Shkreli was defiant, saying "our shareholders expect us to make as much as money as possible." He said he wished he had raised the price even higher.
That was too much even for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, Big Pharma's trade group, which complained indignantly that Shkreli's company was just an investment vehicle "masquerading" as a pharmaceutical company.
Maybe Big Pharma doesn't want to admit most pharmaceutical companies have become investment vehicles. If they didn't deliver for their investors they'd be taken over by "activist" investors and private-equity partners who would.
The hypocrisy is stunning. Just three years ago, Forbes Magazine praised Shkreli as one of its "30 under 30 in Finance" who was "battling billionaires and entrenched drug industry executives."
Last month, Shkreli got control of a company with rights to a cheap drug used for decades to treat Chagas' disease in Latin America. His aim was to get the drug approved in the United States and charge tens of thousands of dollars for a course of treatment.
Investors who backed Shkreli in this venture did well. The company's share price initially shot up from under $2 to more than $40.
While other pharmaceutical companies don't raise their drug prices fiftyfold in one fell swoop, as did Shkreli, they would if they thought it would lead to fat profits.
Most have been increasing their prices more than 10 percent a year – still far faster than inflation – on drugs used on common diseases like cancer, high cholesterol, and diabetes.
This has imposed a far bigger burden on health spending than Shkreli's escapades, making it much harder for Americans to pay for drugs they need. Even if they're insured, most people are paying out big sums in co-payments and deductibles.
Not to mention the impact on private insurers, Medicare, state Medicaid, prisons and the Veterans Health Administration.
And the prices of new drugs are sky-high. Pfizer's new one to treat advanced breast cancer costs $9,850 a month.
According to an analysis by the Wall Street Journal, that price isn't based on manufacturing or research costs.
Instead, Pfizer set the price as high as possible without pushing doctors and insurers toward alternative drugs.
But don't all profit-maximizing firms set prices as high as they can without pushing customers toward alternatives?
Unlike most other countries, the United States doesn't control drug prices. It leaves pricing up to the market.
Which enables drug companies to charge as much as the market will bear.
So what, exactly, did Martin Shkreli do wrong, by the standards of today's capitalism?
He played the same game many others are playing on Wall Street and in corporate suites. He was just more audacious about it.
It's easy to go after bad guys, much harder to go after bad systems.
Hedge fund managers, for example, make big gains from trading on insider information. That robs small investors who aren't privy to the information.
But it's not illegal unless a trader knows the leaker was compensated – a looser standard than in any other advanced country.
Meanwhile, the pharmaceutical industry is making a fortune off average Americans, who are paying more for the drugs they need than the citizens of any other advanced country.
That's largely because Big Pharma has wielded its political influence to avoid cost controls, to ban Medicare from using its bargaining clout to negotiate lower prices, and to allow drug companies to pay the makers of generic drugs to delay their cheaper versions.
Shkreli may be a rotten apple. But hedge funds and the pharmaceutical industry are two rotten systems that are costing Americans a bundle.
Posted at 08:46 AM in Robert Reich, Capitalism, Drugs | Permalink
Congress Passes New Law: Obama Forbidden to Mention Climate Change
God Bless Our Fossil Fuels
In addition to repealing Obamacare for the 457th time, Congress has been busy with a new agenda. HR 4031 will officially make it illegal for President Obama to attend any more climate change conferences. In fact he won't even be allowed to mention climate change in his upcoming State of the Union (SOTU) speech. As part of the Fossil Fuel Enhancement Act of 2015, Governor Jerry Brown of California will be forced to abandon his plan to decrease greenhouse gas emissions. Instead he has been ordered to increase greenhouse gas emissions and to give subsidies to automobile manufacturers as long as they don't convert to electric engines. As part of the Act, subsidies have been increased to ExxonMobil by $5 billion to further encourage them in the fine work they're doing promoting and selling fossil fuels.
The Fossil Fuel Enhancement Act of 2015 would insure that fossil fuels will always be used to generate electricity in the US. The Act specifically forbids any state or other jurisdiction from installing any solar or wind farm apparatus and mandates that any so installed at the present time shall be dismantled. Senators and Congressmen, when asked for a comment, chimed in together that we can't afford to have the American oil industry taken down by a bunch of environmentalists because that would entail losing so many jobs that we would never recover. Also Wall Street, which has invested heavily in fossil fuels, said that without them they might require another bailout. In short it is not worth the threat to our economy to proceed down the line of eliminating the production of energy with fossil fuels. Fossil fuel generating plants are the most reliable and dependable facilities when it comes to providing the American economy with the energy it needs to keep it humming. They keep going even when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine. So there.
Mass Transit a Socialist Plot?
Congress has reduced monies for mass transportation as a socialist plot to take away our individuality as expressed in our cars. The American way of life is predicated on the internal combustion engine, and cars are an indispensable part of the American lifestyle. They express our individuality and freedom. The open road beckons - not the transit station. That's the European socialist way of life, and we don't want no part of it.
What would America be without Nasscar and drag racing which are a testament to the glory of the internal combustion engine? How could we be Ford Tough with an electric engine powering our pickups? Or how could a pickup with an electric motor be built Like a Rock. Only an internal combustion engine can give you that thrill of excitement as you accelerate from 0 to 60 or pull an excruciatingly heavy load through mud, ice and snow? We want to discover the Guts & Glory of what makes Ram Trucks so tough. We want tough pickups with internal combustion engines not those namby pamby electric cars.
Mass Murders are as American as Apple Pie
In acknowledgement of the fact that there is more than one mass murder a day in the US, Congress will soon pass a bill regulating mass murders and gun control in the US. With regard to mass murders, the official response will be "thoughts and prayers" only if tomorrow's mass murder involves more than 7 killed. Less than seven and there will be no official response whatsoever. That's the new normal.
Regarding gun control: after every mass murder, a subsidy will be given to gun shops so they can increase advertising and give discounts to all those who will increase the demand for firearms just in case their Second Amendment rights might be taken away. The idea is that every man, woman and child in America should possess at least one gun and hopefully many more. It is suggested by the gun lobby that one room in every house be devoted to the storing of armaments and that every home have at least one rocket launcher and several grenades. That room should always be locked securely so that toddlers cannot gain access and shoot grandma .
Since terrorists are using cookbooks found on the internet to construct pipe bombs and other remote controlled devices, in order to combat this insidious development, the government will issue free of charge the appropriate literature that will allow every American family to construct their own pipe bombs and remote controlled devices on the grounds that the best defense against terrorists is a good offense in which every red blooded American plays a part. Let's face it: we're all part of a well regulated militia so let's get regulated! A well armed constituency will take out any would be terrorist before they can even think about perpetrating a heinous act. We need to fight fire with fire.
Donald Trump tweeted that every time there's a mass murder his poll numbers go up. He has put a new plank in his platform that, if he's elected President, more, not fewer, gun show loopholes will be opened up so that we can all exercise our Second Amendment rights without any noisy interference from the Federal Gubment.
In addition to Trump's sanguine assessment of mass murders, manufacturers of firearms have told Wall Street and billionaire investors that mass murders are good for business:
Behind closed doors, makers and sellers of firearms in the U.S. have told investors and Wall Street analysts that mass shootings are opportunities to make lots of money.
How does this happen? "Following a mass shooting, there is talk of gun control, which the National Rifle Association and other gun advocates attack as an assault on the Second Amendment," writes Lee Fang at The Intercept. "Notably, gun and ammunition manufacturers often donate, either directly or as a portion of each sale, to the NRA. The fear of losing gun rights leads to panic buying, which brings greater profits to gun retailers, gun companies and their investors."
So the sale of guns and ammo is a profit center essential to increasing GDP and supporting the capitalist way of life.
In other news all those on the 'no fly' list will be encouraged to buy more guns just in case a Democratic Congress far in the future might close the loophole and prevent those 'no flyers' from owning guns.
Labeling GMOs Would Just Confuse People
Congress has also taken up the GMO issue. The Safe and Accurate Food Labeling Act will prevent all states, cities, counties, and other jurisdictions from passing any law that results in the labeling of GMOs. It is thought that this will increase GDP because people will stop growing their own vegetables and raising their own chickens or even bartering for produce with local farmers. Let's make every transaction a cash transaction because that's the only kind that adds to GDP. If you raise your own chickens instead of buying them at the super market, GDP will go down and this could drive the economy into recession. So by all means buy, buy buy. This will expedite commerce and make sure that large agribusiness will be able to keep their share values up. Labeling GMOs as such would result in a downgrading by financial analysts with a resulting drop in stock prices.
Price Gouging is as American as Apple Pie
Congress has also given much thought to the issue of prescription drug prices which are skyrocketing. They have passed another bill which will make it much harder for generics to compete with patented prescription drugs and to increase the time limit for which patents are in effect from 20 to 50 years. At the same time, they have forbidden any governmental agency from informing the public when a cheaper version of a patented drug is available. It also prohibits the Department of Veteran Affairs, which heretofore could negotiate for lower drug prices, from doing so. This brings it in line with Medicare which was forbidden from negotiating lower drug prices in 2006.
A Congressional spokesman said that price gouging is as American as apple pie, and we can't afford for Big Pharma's profits to recede. If they did, their stock price would suffer and this would possibly lead to a sell-off in the stock market which could induce a repression if not a depression. Although European countries do negotiate with Big Pharma and end up paying half of what Medicare pays, they are socialists who are not doing their part to support research. They're merely parasites living off the noble efforts of US drug companies which have to resort to inversions like Pfizer did when it moved its headquarters to Ireland and merged with Allergan in order to avoid US taxes. Thanks to Americans who pay at least twice as much for drugs as Europeans, the US will lead the world in drug research.
Congress is set to repeal Obamacare for the 876th time next week. Obamacare has become too costly mainly because Medicare can't negotiate for lower drug prices. It must pay whatever the price gougers choose to charge. Congress has further strengthened this law to the extent that there can be no cheaper substitutions for drugs that doctors prescribe even if cheaper drugs are available. Doctors have been known to accept speaking fees and other perks from drug companies who encourage them to prescribe their non-generic drugs. Therefore, Medicare will end up paying through the nose even when cheaper drugs are available.
This was all music to the ears of Martin Shkreli and others who have raised the price of their drugs - in Shkreli's case from $13.50 a pill to $750. a pill for Dariprim. If doctors prescribe it, Medicare must pay for it. Shkreli became known as 'the most hated man in America' for his price gouging prowess. "I believe drugs should be priced relative to the value they confer," he said. The value Dariprim confers is staying alive for those who need it. After much outcry, Shkreli said he would reduce the price of Dariprim, but then later backed off from that promise. Shkreli said that he should have raised the price even higher because his first duty was to make money for his shareholders.
Republican Congress Puts Presidential Decorum on Agenda
Congress will also next week take up the matter of Obama's dress in the Oval Office. In the 2015 Presidential Appropriate Attire and Decorum Act (PAADA), the President will be forced to wear a coat and tie at all times when he is present in the Oval Office. He will be forbidden from putting his feet up on the desk or from eating snacks. If they could do it and some say it is possible within the framework of the Constitution, they would forbid Obama from taking a shit in the Presidential bathroom which is just off the Oval Office. This is in light of the fact that a past President, a Democrat in fact, was involved in illicit activities there and a future Republican President should not have to have his hands sullied by wiping his ass in such a place. In due respect for future Republican Presidents, it is a known fact that people of Kenyan descent carry a type of germ that is very difficult to wipe clean off a toilet seat even with the use of the strongest disinfectants. Hence the President Forbidden to Use Presidential Bathroom Act of 2015.
Trump in his quest to protect us from Muslims wondered aloud today why Tashfeen and Farook, the San Bernadino shooters, escaped detection as they were posting on Facebook their radical views for two years before the incident. The fact that they weren't on some terrorist list is beside the point. Doesn't the FBI, the CIA and the NSA have the capability of searching for the word "jihad" wherever it might appear on the internet?
On another note Trump said that, if he is elected President, the first thing he'd do is to give the American Medal of Freedom to Charles and David Koch for their tireless devotion and service to the nation.
Posted at 07:33 PM in John Lawrence, Climate Change, Drugs, Global Warming, GMO, Guns | Permalink
A Greedy Capitalist Gets His Comeuppance
Price Gouger Martin Shkreli Becomes Known as 'Most Hated Man in America'
Turing Pharmaceuticals chief Martin Shkreli will face new competition for Daraprim, the drug he recently hiked 5,000 percent in price, after competitor Imprimis Pharmaceuticals said it would market a similar drug for just $1 a tablet. Daraprim is used mainly to treat toxoplasmosis, a parasitic infection that's common in AIDS and HIV patients, as well as cancer sufferers.
Greedy buttwipe Martin Shkreli, the hedge fund guy that bought the drug Dariprim and then raised the price from $13.50 to $750. a pill will actually lose his ass on this venture. At these prices the estimated annual cost of treatment for toxoplasmosis, for the pyrimethamine component alone, would be $336,000 for patients who weigh less than 132 pounds, and $634,500 for those who weigh more than that. Daraprim is given for at least six weeks to knock out the infection, and then often for a year or even indefinitely to help the immune-compromised patient keep the parasite at bay.
The problem for Shkreli, that he didn't take account of in his lust for speedy profits, is that Dariprim is actually a generic. It's been around for 62 years. That means that anybody can manufacture it. That's exactly what one San Diego drug company did. Moreover, Imprimis intends to come up with cheap versions of other drugs that some businesses sell for far above their manufacturing costs. The trick for Imprimis was to combine pyrimethamine with another generic drug, leucovorin, thus giving it the right to operate as a compounding pharmacy and to avoid a lengthy approval process by the US Food and Drug Administration.
There goes Shkreli's profits right out the window. Adios you greedy bastard. You and your company Turing Pharmaceuticals are going to lose your shirts. In particular you're going to lose all the money you paid for Dariprim. Turing Pharmaceuticals acquired the drug from Impax Laboratories in August 2015 for $55 million. Shkreli can kiss that $55 million good-bye.
Imprimis CEO Mark Baum said he hopes his company's action provides a market based answer to exorbitant drug pricing. Yeah, go get him Mark! I love it when the market slays another marketer in the interests of the shell shocked public of whom the weak and vulnerable are being price gouged out of existence. Who but the rich could afford $750. a pill for a life saving drug?
Shkreli: 'I Believe Drugs Should Be Priced Relative to the Value They Confer'
From Alternet:
Shkreli expressed regret that he had been a "flippant jackass" instead of carefully explaining the price increase, although he told another Reddit user he didn't understand how raising the price to $20, for example, might have been more reasonable than a 5,500 percent hike.
"I believe drugs should be priced relative to the value they confer," he said.
Of course, if somebody sticks a gun to your head and says "Your money or your life," you're going to give him all your money because the value that that confers is sparing your life. Shkreli operates in accordance with the same principal: if you want to go on living and you have a terrible disease for which you need a drug that only Shkreli can supply you with, you're going to give him all your money. There's no difference from the situation in which a gun is put to your head. And that, my friends, is the ethics of capitalism.
But there was one flaw in Shkreli's plan to bilk sick people out of their money. And that is that the drug is a generic. Shkreli has no patent rights over it. But he probably figured that any other company that wanted to market the drug would have to undergo a lengthy approval process with the FDA. The decision to sharply increase the price for an old, generic drug — in other words, a drug that any other pharmaceutical company could also manufacture — is based on a gamble that no other company will be nimble enough to immediately get FDA approval for a generic competitor for Daraprim. That would give Shkreli time enough to make a killing before the other drug came on the market.
There is one other angle that Shkreli is fully prepared to use. He was gearing up to bilk not only individual customers but Medicare itself. The 2003 Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act contains legislation that forbids Medicare from negotiating drug prices. That legislation, signed into law by George W Bush, introduced a market opportunity for scumbags like Shkreli. Medicare is forced to pay whatever Shkreli decides the price should be for Dariprim since Medicare Part D is required to cover approved cancer drugs. So even though Shkreli has graciously (no, not really) offered to give the drug away free to certain individuals, he intended to have Medicare pay the full freight thus ultimately putting taxpayers on the hook.
Pharmaceutical costs are a top reason that health insurance companies justify raising their policy rates, and society at large ends up paying for it with more expensive insurance plans, or by contributing a bigger percentage of their paychecks to cover health care costs. And I guess his plan now is to have doctors prescribe his pill, Dariprim, instead of the generic version that Imprimis is making. I hope no doctor falls for this. And Medicare should be on full alert not to pay for Dariprim at $750. when a generic from Imprimis is available for $1.
The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry. Shkreli didn't figure on Imprimis being able to avoid the lengthy FDA process by setting up a branch that could be a compounding pharmacy and start marketing the drug immediately. Both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have spoken out on the ridiculousness of a market system that lets some whippersnapper like Martin Shkreli price gouge needy and vulnerable people. He's become known as "the most hated man in America." Hillary tweeted: "Price gouging like this in the specialty drug market is outrageous. Tomorrow I'll lay out a plan to take it on."
Other vulture pharmaceutical companies have pulled the same scam as Shkreli. Daraprim is not the only fairly old drug that's seen astronomical price increases recently. The price for cycloserine, a medicine used to treat drug-resistant tuberculosis, increased to $10,800 for 30 pills from $500 in August. Two heart drugs owned by Valeant Pharmaceuticals, Isuprel and Nitropress, saw their prices increase by 525% and 212% respectively this year. Even everyday drugs like antibiotic doxycycline have been affected, with its price rising to $1,849 a bottle in April 2014 from $20 a bottle in October 2013, according to a Congressional report.
A new cholesterol drug on the market from Regeneron, for those for whom statins don't suffice, costs more than $14,000 a year. The drug's name is Praluent. Regeneron CEO Dr Leonard Schleifer, another scumbag, gives the same old "they need the money to do research" crap. It's BS. They sell the same drugs in foreign countries for half what they sell them to Americans for. They're just banking on the Republican 2003 legislation that requires Medicare to cover drugs but forbids Medicare from negotiating a lower price. I wonder whose lobbyists got that legislation passed. Not the lobbyists for We the People. That's for sure.
Wall Street Loves Greedy Profit Maximizing Bastards
Wall Street loves Valeant with its shares hitting an all time high last August. Valeant is something of a role model for Shkreli. They created a network of "phantom pharmacies" to steer potential customers toward their more expensive drugs instead of lower priced alternatives. Valeant bought smaller drug developers and then hiked prices on the medicines developed by those companies. It's profits skyrocketed as it slashed research into new drugs. They and Shkreli justify their price hikes by saying that they need the money to "do research." The truth is they have no intention of doing research. The only approval they are looking for is from Wall Street which will facilitate their stock prices soaring. Money is the only criterion here even if it means price gouging the sick and vulnerable.
The name Turing Pharmaceuticals was no doubt taken from the name of the great mathematician and cryptologist Alan Turing who most famously broke the Nazi codes during the Second World War. Turing's name has been unfortunately besmirched by being taken for the company name of a scam artist and profiteer. He's probably rolling over in his grave.
I hope jackass Shkreli loses his shirt on these machinations. And I hope the stupid idiots in Congress will allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices with the companies that provide them. Otherwise, the Shkrelis, Valeants and Schleifers of the world will seek to profit by raising prices for life saving drugs. Either we as individuals, if we are unfortunate enough as to have one of these life threatening diseases, will pay their outrageous prices or we will pay through increased health insurance costs and increased taxes to cover Medicare's skyrocketing costs which pay for these price gougers' arbitrarily set prices. But they will be laughing all the way to the Wall Street banks. They and Wall Street could care less about people's misfortunes. They only care about money. Greedy bastards!
But a shout out to Imprimis Pharmaceuticals, the company that's going to eat Shkreli's lunch by supplying the equivalent of Dariprim for $1. a pill. I like to give credit where credit is due. See, I'm not totally anti-corporation; just those who are Wall Street toadies who only care about money and not a whit about alleviating the suffering of the unfortunate. Good guys like Imprimis CEO Mark Baum deserve a pat on the back. Hats off to ya, Mark.
Posted at 09:31 AM in John Lawrence, Capitalism, Drugs, Profits, Wall Street | Permalink
HSBC: A Criminal Enterprise Too Big To Jail
The bank, HSBC, has been involved in criminal enterprises from dealing with terrorists and drug dealers to advising clients how to escape paying taxes. Yet no HSBC banker has gone to jail. Dealing with drug dealers is nothing new for HSBC also know as the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation. They have always been associated with drugs. Founded in 1865, HSBC became the major commercial bank in colonial China after the conclusion of the Second Opium War. That's the war in which European powers forced the Chinese to legalize the drug trade.
If you or I got caught with a few stems or seeds of marijuana, we would go to jail. HSBC laundered money for the Sinaloa drug cartel, but yet they had to pay only a small fine and got off the hook. The fine, $1.9 billion, is about five weeks of income for the bank. Their executives had to partially defer their bonuses as well. This made some publications such as Rolling Stone apoplectic with rage:
And not only did they sell out to drug dealers, they sold out cheap. You'll hear bragging this week by the Obama administration that they wrested a record penalty from HSBC, but it's a joke. Some of the penalties involved will literally make you laugh out loud. This is from [Assistant Attorney General] Lanny Breuer's announcement:
As a result of the government's investigation, HSBC has . . . "clawed back" deferred compensation bonuses given to some of its most senior U.S. anti-money laundering and compliance officers, and agreed to partially defer bonus compensation for its most senior officials during the five-year period of the deferred prosecution agreement.
Wow. So the executives who spent a decade laundering billions of dollars will have to partially defer their bonuses during the five-year deferred prosecution agreement? Are you fucking kidding me? That's the punishment? The government's negotiators couldn't hold firm on forcing HSBC officials to completely wait to receive their ill-gotten bonuses? They had to settle on making them "partially" wait? Every honest prosecutor in America has to be puking his guts out at such bargaining tactics. What was the Justice Department's opening offer – asking executives to restrict their Caribbean vacation time to nine weeks a year?
The Department of Justice said it didn't want to upset the international banking system. Well, they could have jailed just those individual bankers involved in the scam who later quit HSBC anyway, but it failed to do so. They just proved themselves to be the biggest hypocrites in the world capable of prosecuting the little guy for a fraction of the criminal activities HSBC was involved in, but unwilling to prosecute bankers who bought a plane for the cartel to smuggle drugs with.
Matt Taibbi reported in Rolling Stone:
The deal was announced quietly, just before the holidays, almost like the government was hoping people were too busy hanging stockings by the fireplace to notice. Flooring politicians, lawyers and investigators all over the world, the U.S. Justice Department granted a total walk to executives of the British-based bank HSBC for the largest drug-and-terrorism money-laundering case ever. Yes, they issued a fine – $1.9 billion, or about five weeks' profit – but they didn't extract so much as one dollar or one day in jail from any individual, despite a decade of stupefying abuses.
The bank also moved money around for organizations and states that had official sanctions against them like Al Qaeda and Hezbollah. They helped countries like Iran, the Sudan and North Korea evade sanctions. And just to round out their criminal and gangster rap sheet they aided countless common tax cheats in hiding their cash.
"They violated every goddamn law in the book," says Jack Blum, an attorney and former Senate investigator. "They took every imaginable form of illegal and illicit business."
So why and how does HSBC get away with this stuff? It turns out that prosecutors thought that by punishing HSBC, they would pull down the whole world banking system. "Had the U.S. authorities decided to press criminal charges," said Lanny Breuer at a press conference to announce the settlement, "HSBC would almost certainly have lost its banking license in the U.S., the future of the institution would have been under threat and the entire banking system would have been destabilized."
Yeah, sure. Believe that and I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. Many of the individuals involved have left the company anyway and the institution has still survived. If it could survive without them, it could have survived without them while they were sitting in jail cells.
While no individuals at HSBC were punished, plenty of lowly everyday Janes and Johns have been. Two top executives of JM2 Auto Sales of Orlando, Florida, got 40 months and 72 months in jail after they sold the Sinaloa cartel two automobiles. They were convicted for money laundering.
In 2013, a Mississippi woman named Bridget Michelle Bland was sentenced to 60 months in prison for laundering drug proceeds by setting up a trucking company. In 2014, a California truck driver named Adolfo Pulido was sentenced to 50 months in prison for transporting $1.5 million in cash the old-fashioned way across the border from Mexico.
While these guys paid a stiff price, no one at HSBC spent a day in jail after they helped the Sinaloa cartel buy a plane which they used to fly drugs over the border. What's more is that $1 billion in cash was moved by HSBC from the cartel's Mexican hometown of Culiacán to New York between 2006 and 2008.
Other people were prosecuted as tax cheats after they believed HSBC who had advised them about how to escape paying taxes. These cases would never have come to light except for the fact that there was a whistleblower - the "Edward Snowden of HSBC." While these clients and, as it turns out, dupes, of HSBC went to jail, no one at HSBC ever did.
The DOJ went after the little guys while letting the big fish off the hook. That's how they do business. DOJ aggressively prosecuted private citizens such as a New Jersey businessman who was lured into a tax scheme by HSBC and a Virginia doctor who sought to avoid paying taxes on money his deceased mother had stashed in a secret HSBC account in Switzerland.
HSBC and its executives were never so much as named in court papers and proceedings. Even as the doctor, Andrew Silva, pleaded guilty to tax evasion in June 2010, the government termed HSBC only as "the International Bank." The DOJ is afraid to call a spade a spade even for a non-US bank. They could easily have revoked HSBC's US license, but, evidently, it is more important not to prosecute a foreign criminal bank than it is to prosecute - to the full extent of the law - low level US citizens.
A New Jersey businessman named Sanjay Sethi also received probation after pleading guilty in June 2012 to a tax-evasion scheme that court papers say was conceived and proposed by HSBC—which again was named only as "the International Bank."
The criminal complaint charges that the bank "marketed offshore banking services for U.S. citizens of Indian descent," encouraging them "to open undeclared bank accounts in India."
Sethi opened such an account in India in 2001. He received a call the following year from someone identified in the complaint as U.S. Banker A, a senior vice president at the New York office of the International Bank.
U.S. Banker A allegedly set up a meeting between Sethi and someone identified as U.K. Banker A, a London-based "high-ranking executive of the International Bank" who headed a division "focused on developing and serving clients worldwide with ties to countries in south Asia."
Not long afterward, Sethi met with U.K. Banker A in the International Bank's New York offices and discussed opening another undeclared account, this one in Switzerland.
"U.K. Banker A told Sethi that the undeclared account would allow Sethi's assets to grow tax-free and that the bank secrecy laws in Switzerland would allow Sethi to conceal the existence of the account," the complaint says.
Sethi proceeded to stash $3.4 million in an HSBC account in Switzerland. Neither he nor the bank could have foreseen that an HSBC computer analyst turned whistleblower in Switzerland would hack into the bank's computers in 2008.
HSBC is clearly an outlaw, criminal, renegade institution and not even an American one, but the Justice Department under Eric Holder was a bunch of fools who couldn't even correctly assess who and what to prosecute. Their only consideration is that by prosecuting some individuals, the whole world wide banking system would collapse. This is sheer and patent nonsense to anyone who has any inkling of common sense or rationality concerning the banking system.
The DOJ probe which resulted in criminal information against HSBC was signed by the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District, Loretta Lynch, who is now the nominee to become the next attorney general. So it looks like we're in store for more of the same mealy mouthed DOJ prosecutions - get the little guy, let the big guy go. That is if Loretta Lynch can ever get herself confirmed. She's been waiting for over four months while Republicans do everything they can to gum up the works for an Obama appointee. A top Senate Democrat accused Republican leadership of treating the would-be first African-American woman attorney general like a second-class citizen, having to wait at the back of the bus. Lynch has waited longer for a vote in the full Senate than the past five nominees to the post combined.
Outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder said: "I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are hit with indications that if you do prosecute, if you do bring a criminal charge, it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy." Holder will go down as an aider and abettor of criminal institutions such as HSBC while presiding over prosecuting little guys to the max.
Holder will leave office with a perfect record of not having busted a single senior banker. Will Loretta Lynch do the same or will she try to prove that the office of the AG has some real teeth to it?
Senator Elizabeth Warren was notably outraged when she found out about the Deferred Prosecution Agreement. "The new allegations that HSBC colluded to help wealthy people and rich corporations hide money and avoid taxes are very serious, and, if true, the Department of Justice should reconsider the earlier deferred prosecution agreement it entered into with HSBC and prosecute the new violations to the full extent of the law," she said.
Posted at 11:00 AM in John Lawrence, Banking, Drugs | Permalink
Corporate Deserters Seek to Continue Doing Business in the US While Paying Taxes to Foreign Governments
Corporations are relentless about setting up tax avoidance schemes and finding new and improved ways of getting out of paying taxes. One method is to set up a corporate subsidiary in the Cayman Islands which doesn't require any taxes to be paid. This works well for collecting royalties on patents because the patents can just be transferred to the subsidiary, and, voila, no taxes need be paid at all. Other companies which do a great deal of selling abroad have money piling up in foreign jurisdictions. US law requires them to pay taxes on this money when they bring it back into the US. So these companies like Microsoft, Apple and Qualcomm are always lobbying for a "tax holiday", which would allow them to bring this poor, lonely money home without paying taxes on it. Corporations are people, remember, and money is their Mother's Milk.
Other industries like fast food operations make most of their money in the US. They have been stumped until recently as to how to get out of paying taxes on it. But now they have discovered an ingenious new way. The latest wrinkle is called inversion. A US corporation merges with a corporation in a foreign country and then for tax purposes lets its headquarters be located there. Nothing changes as far as US operations are concerned. Executives continue living in the US and US operations continue as usual. The corporation pays taxes to the foreign government which has a lower tax rate while leaving the US high and dry. Such a scam is being perpetrated by Burger King which is merging with a Canadian corporation called Tim Hortons. Burger King will cut its tax obligations in the US, pay a reduced tax bill to Canada and continue in the US with business as usual. No physical change of headquarters is necessary. No executives need move to Canada. As an added bonus, money made in Canada doesn't require begging for a tax holiday. It moves freely here with no strings attached.
Congress could eliminate the tax loophole which makes this possible, but Congress is in the business of creating loopholes not eliminating them. They are all for expanding loopholes instead of contracting them. Actually, Congress is the "Loopholes R Us" guys. Expect even more not fewer loopholes in the future.
Dick Durbin, Democrat from Illinois, blasted the deal. He said he was disappointed in Burger King's decision to renounce its US citizenship. They have effectively renounced their US citizenship for the purposes of paying taxes but not for the purposes of making profits. And Wall Street demands that they and all corporations maximize profits. Else they will be downrated and their stock might lose value. One of the chief ways they maximize profits is to minimize taxes. So Wall Street, who is their Big Daddy, cheers when corporations get out of paying taxes, and corporations dutifully listen to their Big Daddy and do what he says. Or else they'll be taken to the woodshed of lower stock values and sell orders. Investors will not be pleased.
Inversions let companies which earn money outside the US transfer money to the US without paying additional monies to the US. No need for a tax holiday. So don't be too surprised if Qualcomm or Apple decides to merge with a company in southeast Asia which would allow it to bring all the money, that has been sitting there waiting for a tax holiday, back to the US without further ado and with no additional taxes. So for money generated in the US, taxes are paid to the foreign government and for money generated outside the US that money gets to come home tax free. More and more companies are going to ditch Uncle Sam, and companies that are thought to be quintessentially American are going to be unAmerican when it comes to paying taxes. This means a greater tax burden on the middle class or perhaps it means that the Fed will just print more money. Inversions could cost the US $20 billion in lost tax revenues over the next decade.
In the last two decades more than 75 American companies have moved their official addresses abroad. The consulting firm Price Waterhouse Coopers moved its corporate address to Bermuda in 2002. Underwear manufacturer Fruit of the Loom moved its corporate address to the Cayman Islands in 1998. Sara Lee merged in 2012 with DE Master Blenders which has corporate headquarters in the Netherlands. Chiquita Bananas and medical device manufacturer Medtronic will both move their corporate headquarters to Ireland this year which brings up an interesting anomaly. Will the US government continue to pay millions in Medicare and Medicaid money to a corporation which in return pays taxes to a foreign government?
Bugger King says that Tim Hortons offers a real good business synergy since Tim Hortons is breakfast oriented while Bigger King specializes in lunch and dinner, but that's no reason why the corporate structure needs to be such that Buegher king is the subsidiary of Tim Horton. Bugger King is making itself subservient to Tim Horton to get out of paying US taxes pure and simple. The US loss is Canada's gain. Wow, Canada has free health care and what used to be US tax revenues. What's wrong with this picture?
The US stands alone among major nations in taxing on a residence basis instead of letting taxes be collected where the money is made. If your corporate headquarters are in the US, then you must pay corporate taxes on all the money you earn anywhere in the world to the US. Tim Hortons is resident in Canada so it pays taxes in whatever jurisdictions its money is earned. If they make money, for instance, in Britain, they pay taxes on that money to Britain not to Canada. So it's not just the fact that the US corporate tax rate is higher than Canada's. It's the fact that other modern industrialized nations pay taxes in whatever jurisdictions they operate in to those jurisdictions while US based companies pay taxes to the US wherever they make money anywhere in the world.
Burgher King is not the first corporation to pull this stunt. Walgreen's, the largest US drugstore chain, thought about it too. While pondering the move, Walgreens came under pressure from Democratic lawmakers and activists to remain headquartered in the United States. Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, took a shot at Walgreens' folksy motto, writing, "Is 'the corner of happy and healthy' somewhere in the Swiss Alps?" Such a move might have cost U.S. taxpayers $4 billion over five years. There were calls for a national boycott. After announcing that it would not locate its corporate headquarters in Switzerland, Walgreen's stock went down. Shareholders were not amused that Walgreen's was giving money away by not locating there.
ThinkProgress reports:
At the same time, Walgreen is currently considering merging with European drugstore chain Alliance Boots and move to Switzerland as part of a plan to dodge up to $4 billion in U.S taxes. The company that gets almost a quarter of its $72 billion in revenue directly from the government through Medicare and Medicaid is trying to reap even more profits while leaving taxpayers holding the bag.
Walgreen isn't the only one. Pfizer, the pharmaceutical company, tried merging with the smaller U.K.-based AstraZeneca earlier this year and switch its address, where the tax rate is lower. It was estimated the move would save them at least $1 billion a year in tax obligations to the U.S. (the deal ultimately didn't go through). Medtronic, a medical device company, plans to move its corporate address to Ireland, a tax haven, to avoid paying U.S. taxes on $14 billion. Chiquita, the banana distributor, is also heading to Ireland after acquiring Fyffes. These tax dodges, as Fortune magazine calls them in this week's issue, are "positively un-American."
Huffington Post reported:
In May, Senate Democrats introduced the Stop Corporate Inversions Act of 2014, which recommends, among other things, forcing a large portion of a merged company's management and workforce to relocate to the new overseas location if the company wants to dodge U.S. taxes.
The bill "allows corporations to renounce their corporate citizenship only if they truly give up control of their company to a foreign corporation and truly move their operations overseas," Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who backed the bill, said last month.
Congress has the power to solve this problem. They merely need to change the rules so that the level of foreign partnership changes from the current 20% to 50% which would effectively make the corporation a foreign owned entity. But since our American method of governance is by corporate lobbyists, Congress will do the right thing only if it benefits corporations and right now that would be the status quo which allows corporations to do most of their business in and extract most of their propfits from the US while paying taxes to a foreign government.
President Obama and other Democrats have proposed that any corporation moving its headquarters abroad to avoid paying taxes should not receive any government contracts. "They're technically renouncing their U.S. citizenship," Obama said of the companies. "They're declaring they are based someplace else even though most of their operations are here. You know, some people are calling these companies corporate deserters." But Democrats do not control Congress so anything they want to do is moot. The American way of governance is ineffectual and dysfunctional as long as corporate interests supersede the interests of citizens and taxpayers. That is why a parliamentary democracy would better serve the US citizenry. In that form of government the winning party can get its agenda accomplished with far less interference from other parties.
Posted at 08:02 AM in John Lawrence, Corporations, Drugs, Food, Tax Havens, Taxes | Permalink
Is Colorado's Experiment Becoming Just Another Retail Venture?
by Melissa Hathaway
On a cold January morning, Colorado became the first state to begin the legal sale of marijuana. Over a year since the vote was cast to legalize the drug, thirty seven dedicated shops opened their doors as people began queuing outside, keen to become part of this historic occasion. Whereas many states have endorsed the use of marijuana for medical reasons, Colorado is the first state which has authorized (and taxed) the sale of the already ubiquitous substance. Dubbed by some as 'Green Wednesday', the grand opening found many stores selling out in hours, and eventually having to turn away customers, citizens who were eager to become a part of a shifting attitude towards the use of previously illegal drugs. Despite discrepancies between federal and state laws, Colorado's legalization of the chemical is now an industry which faces a system of regulation and bureaucracy, just like any other.
With recent statistics suggesting that over forty percent of American adults have engaged with marijuana or hashish at some point in their lives, the widespread prevalence of the substance is typically accepted within the American culture. With the majority of grievances and citations made following the complaints of citizens rather than police led investigations, the change in policy is perhaps simply in keeping with the cultural acceptance of cannabis use in the wider society. With many aspects of pop culture now openly discussing the use of marijuana (though under the pretext of its illegality), the shifting paradigm of criticism and denouncement moved towards one of acceptance. With the effects of using now widely known, the use of the drug has become, culturally speaking, just another plot device on our television shows. The change of law in Colorado, the widespread usage (even if it refers to a single occasion) and the existence of marijuana as a cultural norm reflect the changing attitudes of the American public towards the substance, though wide spread calls for extensions of Colorado's policy are still a long way away.
On an administrative level, the shops themselves are now subject to many of the regulations and demands faced by other service and sales industries. Passed with fifty five percent of the vote, Amendment 64 includes a great many parameters for the sale and distribution of the previously banned substance. This includes the maximum possible tax rate and the right of cities and councils to decide whether they should be allowed to include the stores within their regulative limits. Despite the obvious annoyance of the Governor of Colorado - who suggested that "Colorado is known for many great things — marijuana should not be one of them" – the existence of a regulated medical marijuana community before the passing of the law may well have helped to ease the transition in the minds of the voting public. Built on the solid foundation of a dependable and well-administered medical marijuana platform, the acceptance of the viability of recreational sales could well stem from the somewhat experimental implementation of the distribution of the drug for medical use. One of the key aspects for the maintenance and observation of the legal selling is the requirement that each retailer must cultivate their own crop, which will remain in place until October of next year. Whilst this might hinder the growth of the industry and heighten costs, it has helped the government regulate what is a nascent and controversial industry.
Perhaps the biggest challenge for those selling marijuana is finding the right place in the market. As mentioned above, the medical market provided a fine testing water for many of the retail ambitions of the store owners. But with the competition brought by becoming a retail business, rather than a medical one, store owners must attempt to chart untested waters. Should they price the product too low, they face criticism from those who feel they might be encouraging excessive consumption. Too high and they face competition from the illegal dealers who plied their trade before the legislative bill was passed. Despite prices fluctuating, a typical range of $250-$300 for an ounce seems to be becoming the norm. When factoring in sales and state taxes (possibly over twenty five percent), as well as the costs of running the store, the new wave of legal Colorado weed dealers are facing the same challenges as any newcomer to the retail industry, and could well be raising a great deal of money for the state. When it comes to changing public opinions and grand legislative changes, it seems strange that a chemical once deemed so illicit is now subject to the same market pressures as a new candy shop or clothes store. Now that the drug is legal, the next considerations could well focus on the viability and sustainability of these stores as business models, rather than legal experiments.
Posted at 03:49 PM in Drugs, Marijuana | Permalink
More on Pharmaceutical Corporations Gouging Customers
by John Lawrence from San Diego Free Press
Now Doctors are Turning Away Cancer Patients
According to an article in the Washington Post on April 3, 2013, doctors are now turning away cancer patients who can't pay out of pocket. We previously reported how MD Anderson, a leading cancer hospital in Houston, Texas demanded an upfront payment in cash from Sean Recchi before he would even be admitted to the hospital. The patient by the way had health insurance. The admitting agent told him, "We don't take that kind of discount insurance." Fortunately, a family member was able to write the check for $83,900. that was demanded before treatment would begin.
Now doctors are doing the same thing - refusing to administer life saving drugs to Medicare cancer patients using the rationale that they they would be losing money because their payments from Medicare are reduced 2% by the sequester. To hear the doctors tell it, they would be put out of business by the smaller payment. However, a little simple math (something that neither the complaining doctors or the writer of the Post article evidently can do) shows that the doctors would still be making money even with the reduced payment. And since they have a ton of other ways to bill patients over and above the bill for the administration of the drug, they still would be making plenty of money. They are just miffed that they wouldn't be making quite as much money as before so they are taking a page out of the hospitals' book and demanding payment or at least the difference in payment in cash from the patient upfront before administering the drugs.
"If we treated the patients receiving the most expensive drugs, we'd be out of business in six months to a year," said Jeff Vacirca, chief executive of North Shore Hematology Oncology Associates in New York. "The drugs we're going to lose money on we're not going to administer right now."
That's absolute poppycock and here's why. Medicare is subject to a 2% reduction under the sequester. Doctors are paid the average of what the pharmaceutical companies charge for the drug which is outrageous in itself but no skin off the doctor's nose. In addition doctors were paid an additional 6% for storing and administering the drug.
Say a drug cost the doctor $10,000. for one dose (not atypical of today's prices which can be at least double that amount for some drugs). So the doctor would be paid $10,000. + $600. or $10,600. prior to the sequester. After the sequester the doctor is now being paid 2% or $212. less. So the doctor is paid $10,388. The doctor pays the drug company $10,000. and is left with $388. How is this losing money?
However, Vacirca stated that from now on his clinic would start turning away a third of their patients under the ruse that the more expensive the drug, the more money they would lose. But the simple math above belies that fact. In fact the more expensive the drug, the more money Vacirca's clinics make for doing the same thing - administering a shot. It costs the doctor no more time or effort to administer an expensive shot than it does to administer a cheap shot. Moreover, the doctor will receive more money from Medicare for the expensive shot than for the cheap shot because he is paid on a percentage of cost basis. Vacirca, however, wants you to believe that the 2% reduction on the price of the drug swallows up the 6% the doctor formerly made. Not so. As the drug gets more expensive, the percentage the doctor gets for administering the drug also increases so that the final result is that the doctor makes more money not less.
The Post reported: "Doctors at the Charleston Cancer Center in South Carolina began informing patients weeks ago that, due to the sequester cuts, they would soon need to seek treatment elsewhere."
Doctors' advocacy groups are petitioning Congress to lower the amount that the sequester takes out of their payment. Of course if the Federal government wanted to, it could force the pharmaceutical corporations, Big Pharma, to lower prices or to negotiate prices, something that the Bush administration refused to do when they enacted Medicare Part D drug coverage.
So the doctors who can't do simple math (or maybe they can but are just trying to pull the wool over Congress' eyes) are lobbying Congress (who most certainly aren't capable of doing simple math) to come to their aid and increase the amount they get for administering a dose of a life saving cancer drug. The doctors are saying that the hospitals could possibly take on the patients they are rejecting, but we've already seen how hospitals are demanding upfront cash payments from patients so the chances of non-profit (although they make tons of profit) hospitals taking up the slack are about the same as a snowball's chances in hell.
Posted at 09:23 AM in John Lawrence, Drugs, Health Care | Permalink
Pharmaceutical Corporations Gouging US Customers Out of Billions
But Indian Supreme Court Rules Against Big Pharma
America spends about $200 billion a year on prescription drugs. It's becoming part of American culture from preschool, where kids are started on Ritalin for ADHD, to old age where typical seniors are consuming an entire palette of pills for everthing from arthritis to high blood pressure to cholesterol. Drugs are the fastest growing part of the health care bill. In 2002 the average price for the fifty drugs most used by seniors was nearly $1500. for a year's supply. That's for each drug. Most seniors are taking an average of six.
Drug prices are highest for people who are the poorest. That's because they have no insurance, and, therefore, no bargaining power. Drugs are marketed extensively by means of TV ads. Those ads are usually followed by ads for law firms trolling for clients who have been harmed by said drugs.
Drug companies say that they must charge such high prices to pay for all the research and development they do to discover new wonder, lifesaving drugs. The truth is more prosaic. Drug companies' research budgets are dwarfed by their budgets for marketing, advertising and executive salaries. As in the hospital industry (which we discussed here, here, here and here), drug prices have little to do with production costs.
Most R&D for new drugs is performed by academic institutions or by the government at the National Institutes of Health. The vast majority of "new" drugs are not actually new but are slight modifications of old drugs designed in such a way as to extend the life of their patents and fend off encroachment by cheaper generic drugs. There are also the "me-too" drugs, slight variations by different drug companies in order to capture a share of the market. We now have six statins on the market to lower cholesterol all of which are variations of the first to be developed - Mevacor, Lipitor, Zocor, Pravachol, Lescol and Crestor. Such phony tributes to "free choice" are in reality a waste of resources whose sole purpose is to make money for Big Pharma.
Dr. Sharon Levine, associate executive director of Kaiser Permanente Medical Group put it this way: "If I'm a manufacturer and I can change one molecule and get another twenty years of patent rights, and convince physicians to prescibe and consumers to demand the next form of Prilosec, or weekly Prozac instead of daily Prozac, just as my patent expires, then why would I be spending money on a lot less certain endeavor, which is looking for brand-new drugs?" As a result little effort is put into finding effective flu drugs or new anti-biotics because there is little money in it.
An example of the encouragement of chemical dependency of the American people is the marketing of the chemically induced hard-on drugs such as Viagra, Cialis and Levitra. And from the pharmaceutical corporations point of view, it's not enough to condition American males to take a drug every time they have sex, but it was important to transition them to taking the drug on a daily basis so that they they will always "be ready when the moment is right". But Big Pharma's rationale is not hard to fathom - they want American males addicted and dependent on their pill in order to feel confidant enough to have sex. It's a billion dollar industry.
Generic drugs are drugs that are identical to brand name drugs and usually sell for a fraction of the price. They can be sold after patent protection on the brand name drug runs out - usually after 12 years. India is the leading manufacturer of generic drugs selling them to poorer, developing countries. For example, Thailand has imported millions of doses of a generic version of the blood-thinning drug, Plavix (used to help prevent heart attacks), at a cost of 3 US cents per dose, from India. A recent ruling by the Indian Supreme Court ensures that India will be able to continue to manufacture generic drugs and sell them to developing countries. Before it went generic in the US Plavix was costing consumers $200. a month or amost $7.00 a dose.
India exports about $10 billion worth of generic medicine every year. India and China together produce more than 80 percent of the active ingredients of all drugs used in the United States. So why should they adhere to US style patent protections when they are actually making the ingredients for the drugs which are not even manufactured in the US?
A New York Times article states:
"Specifically, the decision allows Indian makers of generic drugs to continue making copycat versions of the drug Gleevec, which is made by Novartis. It is spelled Glivec in Europe and elsewhere. The drug provides such effective treatment for some forms of leukemia that the Food and Drug Administration approved the medicine in the United States in 2001 in record time. The ruling will also help India maintain its role as the world's most important provider of inexpensive medicines, which is critical in the global fight against deadly diseases. Gleevec, for example, can cost as much as $70,000 a year, while Indian generic versions cost about $2,500 a year."
While India has been fighting to produce generic lifesaving drugs cheaply, Big Pharma, on the other hand, has been lobbying for the stricter patent protections (and hence higher profits) that they currently have in the US. The rest of the world is not buying it, fortunately. Now Big Pharma wants the US government itself to lobby other countries for stricter patent protection. And why not? Big Pharma gets its way in the US by lobbying Congress. It would just be an extension of the role of the US government to let itself be used as a lobbying tool with respect to other countries.
India is on to the fact that most US drugs under patent protection are slightly altered versions of previous drugs whose patent protection has run out. Sometimes only one molecule has been altered. India is not buying the fact that these drugs deserve patent protection. The US government though has bought this argument hook, line and sinker. That's why customers in the US pay through the nose for their prescription drugs.
Anand Grover, a lawyer who argued the case on behalf of Cancer Patients Aid Association in India, said that India would prefer to save lives rather than allow US corporations to make higher profits. "What is happening in the United States is that a lot of money is being wasted on new forms of old drugs," Mr. Grover said. Because of the Indian Supreme Court ruling, "that will not happen in India."
A majority of drug patents given in the United States are for tiny changes that often provide patients few meaningful benefits but allow drug companies to continue charging high prices for years beyond the original patent life. Take AstraZeneca, for example, which extended for years its franchise for the huge-selling heartburn pill Prilosec by slightly altering the chemical structure and renaming the medicine Nexium.
Other countries are wising up to the malignant policies of Big Pharma which maximizes its profits by having the ingredients for its high priced drugs made in Asian sweatshops while seeking to charge other countries the outrageous prices it charges its US customers under the veil that it needs to charge these prices in order to continue with research and development on new drugs. But the fact of the matter is that it does little research on new drugs; that is undertaken by academics and the US government. Big Pharma uses its money to advertise on TV and to try and get as many Americans as possible dependent on prescription drugs.
The real question is why US citizens should stand for paying high prices, that have nothing to do with manufacturing costs, to Big Pharma. In some cases these prices are totally extortionary. It's "your money or your life" for cancer drugs in particular. This maximization of profits for lifesaving drugs represents one of the worst excesses of capitalism. It represents one of the worst aspects of the capitalistic ethos that nothing will be or should be done to benefit mankind or society unless it is done for profit. That people will only be helped if there is a profit motive for doing so. This is what Ronald Reagan and Ayn Rand preached - that no good shall be done unless it is done for profit. This is totally contrary to the Christian ethic of helping those in need regardless of profit.
Patent's Defeat in India Is Key Victory for Generic Drugs
By GARDINER HARRIS
Published: April 1, 2013 from the New York Times
NEW DELHI — India's Supreme Court rejected a Swiss drug maker's patent application for a major cancer drug Monday in a landmark ruling that will permit poor patients continued access to many of the world's best drugs, at least for a while.
The ruling allows Indian makers of generic drugs to continue making copycat versions of the Novartis drug Gleevec — also spelled Glivec in Europe and elsewhere — which provides such a miraculous cure for some forms of leukemia that the Food and Drug Administration approved the medicine in the United States in 2001 in record time.
But the ruling's effect will be felt well beyond the limited number of leukemia patients in India who need Gleevec. On the one hand, it will help maintain India's role as the world's most important provider of cheap medicines, which is critical in the global fight against HIV/AIDS and other diseases. Gleevec can cost up $70,000 per year, while Indian generic versions cost about $2,500 year.
"India, being the pharmacy capital of the world, can continue to produce affordable, high-quality medicines without the threat of patents for minor modifications of known medicines," Dr. Yusuf K. Hamied, chairman of Cipla, an Indian generic drug giant, wrote in an e-mail.
On the other hand, the ruling could cost lives in the future. Drug company executives and others argue that India's failure to grant patents for critical medicines -- and Gleevec is widely recognized as one of the most important medical discoveries in decades – is a short-sighted strategy that undermines a vital system for funding new discoveries.
In a televised interview, Ranjit Shahani, vice chairman of Novartis's Indian subsidiary, said that companies like Novartis will invest less money in research in India as a result of the ruling. "We hope that the ecosystem for intellectual property in the country improves," he said.
The ruling is a landmark in one of the most important economic battles of the 21st century, in which rich nations that increasingly rely on the creation of idea-based products like computer programs and medicines require poorer countries to pay for their ideas. But some countries – particularly India, Brazil and China – have begun to challenge the price they must pay, particularly when the ideas-based products are life-saving medicines that their people desperately need now.
The question is how to pay for ideas in ways that maximize their use while encouraging their creation, two sometimes contradictory goals. Poor countries have tended to focus on the immediate issue of access while tending to ignore the more uncertain and far-off issue of innovation, particularly since innovation tends to occur far from their shores.
India exports about $10 billion worth of generic medicine every year, more than any other country. India and China together produce more than 80 percent of the active ingredients of all drugs used in the United States.
In Monday's decision, India's Supreme Court ruled that the patent that Novartis sought for Gleevec did not represent a true invention. The ruling is something of an historic anomaly. Passed under international pressure, India's 2005 patent law for the first time allowed for patents on medicines – but only for drugs discovered after 1995. In 1993, Novartis patented a version of Gleevec that it later abandoned in development, but the Indian judges ruled that the early and later versions were not different enough for the later one to merit a separate patent.
Leena Menghaney, a patient advocate at Doctors Without Borders, said that the ruling is a reprieve from more expensive medicines, but only for a while.
"The great thing about this ruling is that we don't have to worry about the drugs we're currently using," Ms. Menghaney said. "But the million-dollar question is what is going to happen for new drugs that have not yet come out."
Anand Grover, a lawyer who argued the case on behalf of Cancer Patients Aid Association in India, said the ruling had a sweeping effect since it confirmed that India has a very high bar for approving patents on medicines.
"What is happening in the United States is that a lot of money is being wasted on new forms of old drugs," Mr. Grover said. Because of Monday's ruling, "that will not happen in India."
Indeed, the vast majority of drug patents given in the United States are for tiny changes that often provide patients few meaningful benefits but allow drug companies to continue charging high prices for years beyond the original patent life.
In a classic example, AstraZeneca extended for years its franchise around the huge-selling heartburn pill, Prilosec, by performing a bit of chemical wizardry and renaming the medicine as Nexium. Amgen has won such a blizzard of patents on its hugely expensive erythropoietin-stimulating drugs that the company has maintained exclusive sales rights for 24 years, double the usual period.
One result is that the United States pays the highest drug prices in the world, prices that only a tiny fraction could afford in India, where more than two-thirds of the population lives on less than $2 a day. While advocates for the pharmaceutical industry argue that fairly liberal rules on patents spur innovation, academics are far from united in sharing that view.
But as the economies of emerging markets grow, their refusal to pay higher premiums for newer drugs could significantly reduce the money needed for innovation. The drug industry makes nearly two-thirds of its profits in the United States, a dependence that many in the industry fear is unsustainable. And even minor improvements in medicines – making a pill once-a-day instead of twice-a-day – can have significant impacts on patient wellness, industry executives say.
The United States government has become increasingly insistent in recent years that other countries adopt far more stringent patent protection rules, with the result that poorer patients often lose access to cheap generic copies of medicines when their governments undertake trade agreements with the United States.
Drug companies have relied on the American government to lobby on the issue because they have few tools to punish India and other countries. If the companies decide not to introduce high-priced drugs in India, the country could legalize generic copies under international law. And with major drug makers cutting back on research budgets anyway, large investments in research infrastructure may be unlikely even if countries adopt patent laws more amenable to the industry.
Posted at 09:05 AM in Drugs, Health Care | Permalink
Corporate Fraud in San Diego: Victory Pharmaceuticals Implicated in Kickback Scheme
The Washington Post reported on December 27, 2012 that Victory Pharmaceuticals, headquartered in San Diego, was forced to pay $11.4 million to resolve Federal civil and criminal liabilities related to kickbacks to doctors in return for prescribing their drugs. Victory is a privately held company, founded in 2003, and is focused on acquiring, developing and marketing products to treat pain and related conditions. As it turns out, part of the marketing strategy was to offer kickbacks to doctors in return for prescribing its products.
The kickbacks included tickets to professional and collegiate sporting events, tickets to concerts and plays, spa outings, golf and ski outings, dinners at expensive restaurants, giving a doctor money to help make a house payment, paying for a doctor's staff's outing to a strip club including "lap dances" for the female staff and offering a doctor and his staff an all-expense paid trip to Las Vegas. A former sales representative for Victory, Chad Miller, blew the whistle on them and received $1.7 million for his efforts as a whistleblower.
Chad Miller was represented by Boston attorney, Joseph M. Makalusky, who said the following:
"By bribing physicians with cash, concert tickets, tickets to sporting events, dinners and other inducements, Victory Pharma compromised what is supposed to be the physician's independent and sound medical judgment when they prescribe drugs to their patients. The practice of providing these kickbacks, which puts a patient's health secondary to profits, is a clear violation of the False Claims Act. I am proud that my client had the courage to step forward and put an end to this fraud, and I hope that this case and others like it [embolden] would-be whistleblowers to do the same."
Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Stuart F. Delery, in the Justice Department's Civil Division, said kickback schemes "undermine the integrity of medical decisions, subvert the health marketplace and waste taxpayer dollars."
"We will continue to hold accountable those who refuse to play by the rules and provide illegal incentives to influence the decision making of health care providers," Mr. Delery said.
Victory Pharmaceuticals is or was located at 11682 El Camino Real, Suite 250, San Diego, CA 92130. The CEO is Matthew Heck; Executive Chairman, Jim W Newman; Senior Vice President of Trade Relations, Doug Baratta; Chief Compliance Officer and Vice President, Michael Hercz; Chief Accounting Officer, Dan Stokely.
Its products include NAPRELAN tablets for the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis, osteoarthritis, ankylosing spondylitis, tendinitis, bursitis, and acute gout, as well as for the relief of mild to moderate pain and treatment of primary dysmenorrheal and XODOL for the relief of moderate to moderately severe pain.
The Justice Department has made fraud and abuse a key area of focus under the Obama administration, collecting more than $4.9 billion in the fiscal year ended Sept. 30. The Victory Pharma agreement comes on the heels of two high-dollar settlements. Last week, biotech giant Amgen agreed to pay $762 million over its marketing of the anemia drug Aranesp, and drugmaker Sanofi US agreed to pay $109 million to resolve anti-kickback allegations relating to its marketing practices.
Victory Pharma is no longer in business after selling its nine marketed products in July 2011 to Shionogi Inc based in Osaka, Japan. Shionogi Inc paid over $118 million for the products. After paying a $11.4 million fine, Victory Pharma's principals have a nice pile of cash left over. They can laugh all the way to the bank or all the way to Las Vegas. Maybe a few doctors are laughing too.
Posted at 03:59 PM in Corporations, Drugs, San Diego | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
How Not to Get Big Pharma to Change Its Ways
Earlier this week the Justice Department announced a $3 billion settlement of criminal and civil charges against pharma giant GlaxoSmithKline — the largest pharmaceutical settlement in history — for improper marketing prescription drugs in the late 1990s to the mid-2000s.
The charges are deadly serious. Among other things, Glaxo was charged with promoting to kids under 18 an antidepressant approved only for adults; pushing two other antidepressants for unapproved purposes, including remedying sexual dysfunction; and, to further boost sales of prescription drugs, showering doctors with gifts, consulting contracts, speaking fees, even tickets to sporting events.
$3 billion may sound like a lot of money, but during these years Glaxo made $27.5 billion on these three antidepressants alone, according to IMS Health, a data research firm — so the penalty could almost be considered a cost of doing business.
Besides, to the extent the penalty affects Glaxo's profits and its share price, the wrong people will be feeling the financial pain. Most of today's Glaxo shareholders bought into the company after the illegal profits were already built into the prices they paid for their shares.
Not a single executive has been charged — even though some charges against the company are criminal. Glaxo's current CEO came on board after all this happened. Glaxo has agreed to reclaim the bonuses of any executives who engaged in or supervised illegal behavior, but the company hasn't officially admitted to any wrongdoing – and without legal charges against any of executive it's impossible to know whether Glaxo will follow through.
The Glaxo case is the latest and biggest in a series of Justice Department prosecutions of Big Pharma for illegal marketing prescription drugs. In May, Abbott Laboratories settled for $1.6 billion over its wrongful marketing of an antipsychotic. And an agreement with Johnson & Johnson is said to be imminent over its marketing of another antipsychotic, which could result in a fine of as much as $2 billion.
The Department says the prosecutions are well worth the effort. By one estimate it's recovered more than $15 for every $1 it's spent.
But what's the point if the fines are small relative to the profits, if the wrong people are feeling the financial pinch, and if no executive is held accountable?
The only way to get big companies like these to change their behavior is to make the individuals responsible feel the heat.
An even more basic issue is why the advertising and marketing of prescription drugs is allowed at all, when consumers can't buy them and shouldn't be influencing doctor's decisions anyway. Before 1997, the Food and Drug Administration banned such advertising on TV and radio. That ban should be resurrected.
Finally, there's no good reason why doctors should be allowed to accept any perks at all from companies whose drugs they write prescriptions for. It's an inherent conflict of interest. Codes of ethics that are supposed to limit such gifts obviously don't work. All perks should be banned, and doctors that accept them should be subject to potential loss of their license to practice.
Posted at 12:29 PM in Robert Reich, Corporations, Drugs | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Pat Robertson Says Marijuana Use Should be Legal
By JESSE McKINLEY
Published: March 7, 2012 by the New York Times
Of the many roles Pat Robertson has assumed over his five-decade-long career as an evangelical leader — including presidential candidate and provocative voice of the right wing — his newest guise may perhaps surprise his followers the most: marijuana legalization advocate.
"I really believe we should treat marijuana the way we treat beverage alcohol," Mr. Robertson said in an interview on Wednesday. "I've never used marijuana and I don't intend to, but it's just one of those things that I think: this war on drugs just hasn't succeeded."
Mr. Robertson's remarks echoed statements he made last week on "The 700 Club," the signature program of his Christian Broadcasting Network, and other comments he made in 2010. While those earlier remarks were largely dismissed by his followers, Mr. Robertson has now apparently fully embraced the idea of legalizing marijuana, arguing that it is a way to bring down soaring rates of incarceration and reduce the social and financial costs.
"I believe in working with the hearts of people, and not locking them up," he said.
Mr. Robertson's remarks were hailed by pro-legalization groups, who called them a potentially important endorsement in their efforts to roll back marijuana penalties and prohibitions, which residents of Colorado and Washington will vote on this fall.
"I love him, man, I really do," said Neill Franklin, executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, a group of current and former law enforcement officials who oppose the drug war. "He's singing my song."
For his part, Mr. Robertson said that he "absolutely" supported the ballot measures, though he would not campaign for them. "I'm not a crusader," he said.
That comment may invite debate, considering Mr. Robertson's long career of speaking out — and sometimes in ways that drew harsh criticism — in favor of conservative family values. Recently, he was quoted as saying that victims of tornadoes in the Midwest could have avoided their fate by praying more.
But advocates of overhauling drug laws say Mr. Robertson's newfound passion on their issue could help sway conservative voters and other religious leaders to their cause.
"Pat Robertson still has an audience of millions of people, and they respect what he has to say," said Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, which advocates for more liberal drug laws. "And he's not backtracking. He's doubling down."
Mr. Robertson, 81, said that there had been no single event or moment that caused him to embrace legalization. Instead, his conviction that the nation "has gone overboard on this concept of being tough on crime" built up over time, he added.
"It's completely out of control," Mr. Robertson said. "Prisons are being overcrowded with juvenile offenders having to do with drugs. And the penalties, the maximums, some of them could get 10 years for possession of a joint of marijuana. It makes no sense at all."
Such talk was welcomed by some other religious leaders, especially those in African-American communities who have long argued that blacks are unfairly targeted in drug cases.
Iva E. Carruthers, the general secretary for the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference, the Chicago group that represents hundreds of black clergy members and lay leaders, said Mr. Robertson's remarks suggested that he recognized that "if you're a Hollywood exec with money, you're treated differently than if you're a poor kid getting off public transportation and get arrested."
"I would hope and think that it would move the needle for the large constituencies of evangelicals he represents," Dr. Carruthers added.
She said that she personally supported marijuana legalization, as did a growing number of conference members. But whether Mr. Robertson's endorsement would have a lasting impact was unclear, even to Mr. Robertson.
"I think they would agree if they understood the facts as I do," he said of other evangelical leaders. "But it's very hard."
He attributed much of the problem of overpopulated jails to a "liberal mindset to have an all-encompassing government."
Conservative groups that usually align with Mr. Robertson, meanwhile, were largely silent when asked for comment on his stance. For example, Focus on the Family — a Christian group whose disdain for same-sex marriage and support for family values are in line with Mr. Robertson's — declined to respond beyond saying that the group opposes legalization of marijuana for medical or recreational use.
For his part, Mr. Robertson said he was "not encouraging people to use narcotics in any way, shape or form." But he said he saw little difference between smoking marijuana and drinking alcohol, a longstanding argument from far more liberal — and libertarian-minded — leaders.
"If people can go into a liquor store and buy a bottle of alcohol and drink it at home legally, then why do we say that the use of this other substance is somehow criminal?" he said.
Mr. Franklin, who is a Christian, said Mr. Robertson's position was actually in line with the Gospel. "If you follow the teaching of Christ, you know that Christ is a compassionate man," he said. "And he would not condone the imprisoning of people for nonviolent offenses."
Mr. Robertson said he enjoyed a glass of wine now and then — "When I was in college, I hit it pretty hard, but that was before Christ." He added that he did not think marijuana appeared in the Bible, though he noted that "Jesus made water into wine."
"I don't think he was a teetotaler," he said.
And while Mr. Robertson said his earlier hints at support for legalization had led to him being "assailed by those who thought that it was terrible that I had forsaken the straight and narrow," he added that he was not worried about criticism this time around.
"I just want to be on the right side," he said. "And I think on this one, I'm on the right side."
Posted at 01:20 AM in Drugs | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
President Obama's Puzzling Silence on Marijuana Policy
Published on Monday, December 19, 2011 by The Seattle Times
by Neal Peirce
WASHINGTON — "Dance with the One that Brought You" is the title of a well-known song. But the Urban Dictionary offers a deeper meaning: "The principle that someone should pay proper fealty to those who have gone out of their way to look after them."
Barack Obama should pay attention. In 2008, young voters were enthused and turned out for him by the millions.
But now? The campus/youth enthusiasm factor has declined sharply. The deficiency seriously imperils Obama's re-election effort.
There's one issue, though, that might reignite youthful enthusiasm. That issue is marijuana — partly its medical use, but especially Americans' right to recreational use free of potential arrest and possible prison time.
Today's grim reality is that police continue to arrest youth for marijuana possession by the hundreds of thousands. But each arrest is a red flag of danger, threatening life prospects for a young man or woman suddenly saddled with a permanent "drug arrest" record that's easily located by employers, landlords, schools, credit agencies and banks.
Small wonder then that 62 percent of young Americans (ages 18 to 29) now favor legalizing marijuana, as a Gallup poll reported.
And it's not just youth these days. Gallup this year found 50 percent nationwide support for legalizing marijuana use — the most ever, up from a measly 12 percent in 1969 to 30 percent in 2000 and 40 percent in 2009.
A ballot measure to legalize, regulate and tax marijuana received 46.5 percent of the vote in California last year. Parallel measures are likely to be on the 2012 ballots in Colorado and Washington. Odd political bedfellows — Reps. Barney Frank, D-Mass., and Ron Paul, R-Texas — recently introduced a legalization bill and now have 19 co-sponsors. Paul even gets applause advocating legalization in Republican presidential debates.
But what about President Obama? In 2004 he endorsed marijuana decriminalization. He was candid about his early pot use and in 2006 told a group of magazine editors: "When I was a kid, I inhaled, frequently." By his run for president in 2008, he was slipping away from decriminalization but at least talked of a "public health" approach, emphasizing drug treatment instead of prison, giving drug-reform advocates hope for a new day in national policy.
But Obama as president has been a clear disappointment to reform forces. In White House-initiated electronic town halls, respondents — heavily weighted to original Obama supporters — have repeatedly put marijuana at the top of their issue lists. But the White House has either laughed off or provided dismissive retorts.
Obama's Drug Policy Office claims the drug war is over, replaced by a focus on shrinking demand, "innovative, compassionate and evidence-based drug policies." But Obama has not once singled out marijuana — a substance arguably far less harmful to the human body than alcohol — for special consideration. Nor has he spoken to the harm to youth caused by 800,000 yearly arrests. Or moved to stem the billions of dollars a year spent on marijuana-related arrests.
This is clearly not the "change" Obama's enthusiastic supporters of 2008 expected. And it's deeply ironic. Ethan Nadelmann of the Drug Policy Alliance notes that if local police departments had been enforcing marijuana laws as harshly in the early 1980s as many do today, "there's a good chance a young Columbia student named Barack Obama could have been picked up — and not be in the White House today."
Nadelmann suggests that both the White House Drug Policy Office and the Justice Department enforcement divisions have been "co-opted" by holdover appointees deeply invested in anti-marijuana rhetoric and "let's just bust them" drug enforcement.
Facing the 2012 election, Obama is not likely to advocate, suddenly, marijuana decriminalization. But he could announce that it's time for a serious national dialogue on the issue, and that it will be a hallmark of his second term. He could express his dismay that 800,000 people, mostly young (and heavily black and Hispanic), are being arrested each year for marijuana possession — even as 50 percent of Americans favor legalization. He could focus on the massive costs of enforcement, the deep social costs of imprisonment. Let all America, youth included, join in the debate, he could urge.
A new openness to marijuana reform could help to reignite, on campuses and among high numbers of young people, the hope for "change" that really means something. Perhaps even prospects for the president's own re-election.
© 2011 Neal Peirce
Columnist Neal Peirce is chairman of the Citistates Group, a network of journalists and speakers who believe that successful metropolitan regions are today's key to economic competitiveness and sustainable communities.
Posted at 08:54 PM in Drugs, Obama Presidency | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Part 1: Should Drugs Be Legalized in the US?
by John Lawrence, Frank Thomas and Wesley Demarest
This is the first part of a two part article considering whether or not drugs and prostitution should be legalized in the US. Part 2 on the legalization of prostitution can be found here.
A recent documentary by Ken Burns on Prohibition brought to light the harmful effects of trying to outlaw an activity deeply ingrained in human culture - the drinking of alcohol - which was prohibited by constitutional amendment from 1920 to 1933 when the amendment was repealed. Not only did the prohibition of alcohol not diminish the actual drinking of it, nor did it reduce alcoholism, but prohibition opened up previously unavailable opportunities for organized crime. It also produced an epic level of hypocrisy among politicians who disparaged alcohol publicly while indulging in it privately. Revenues due to excise taxes which funded the Federal government for much of its history up till then dried up. Drug use and prostitution are related since many drug users are prostitutes and many prostitutes are drug users. Many people feel that you can't legislate morality so the government should stay out of trying to control people's personal habits. One such person is libertarian and Republican Presidential candidate Ron Paul. Listen to what he has to say.
Politicians, most notably Eliot Spitzer, former Governor of the great state of New York, have been embarassed, scandalized and driven from office over dalliances with prostitutes while rock stars, athletes and entertainers glorify and seemingly get away with drug use and sexual practices somewhat removed from the mainstream. While virtually no one is subjected to harsh jail sentences as a result of prostitution, minor drug offenses lead to jail time. The US has the highest incarceration rate in the world - about 1% of the entire adult population - largely due to minor drug offenses. What amounts to a war is raging on the US Mexican border due to criminal drug syndicates in Mexico which cater to the American appetite for illegal drugs. Of the two - drugs and prostitution - drugs are by far the greater problem due to the illegal importation of them, the killing in Mexico because of rival drug gangs fighting each other for dominance and the large incarceration rate mainly of African-Americans in the US. 9.2% of African-American adults were in prison in 2008. The prisons to house these inmates are costing taxpayers a huge amount of money while the taxes that could be collected on legalized drugs go uncollected in an economy that's in desparate need of revenue.
Jazz singer Anita O'Day in her autobiography "High Times Hard Times" commented about the fact that marijuana, which was legal in the US up till 1933, was made illegal precisely when alcohol was legalized again:
People ask me when I first smoked grass. Well, I smoked it before it became illegal in 1933, although it really wasn't legal for me to smoke anything then. But before going into our dance, George and I would share what we called a reefer. It was no big deal when I was twelve or thirteen. If you lived in the Uptown district, you could buy a joint at the corner store, if not nearer. I never read the newspapers so I didn't know when pot was outlawed and beer became legal. One night I asked George for a hit on a joint and I thought he was going to flip out. 'Do you want to get us arrested?' he hissed. Then he told me what had come down. It didn't make sense. One day weed had been harmless, booze outlawed, the next, alcohol was in and weed led to 'living death.' They didn't fool me. I kept on using it, but I was just a little more cautious.
Other famous jazz musicians such as trumpeter Louis Armstrong were lifelong devotees of marijuana. It didn't seem to hurt his career any. Pianist and composer Thelonious Monk was denied a cabaret card in New York City for many years which meant he could not earn a living playing in clubs, due to a minor drug offense. In some cases musicians were set up and drugs planted on them by police. Habits formed when marijuana was legal were hard to break particularly in the African-American community when marijuana became illegal in 1933. The persistence of cultural patterns of smoking MJ probably has something to do with the large number of African-Americans incarcerated today because of its use. The hypocrisy of a system which makes beer legal one day and marijuana illegal the next does nothing but breed disrespect for the law which is what happened during the Prohibition era.
The history of cocaine has a similar trajectory. Cocaine was perfectly legal in the US up to 1914. In early 20th-century Memphis, Tennesee, cocaine was sold in neighborhood drugstores on Beale Street, costing five or ten cents for a small boxful. In the 1890s the Sears & Roebuck catalogue, which was distributed to millions of Americans homes, offered a syringe and a small amount of cocaine for $1.50. Stevedores along the Mississippi River used the drug as a stimulant, and white employers encouraged its use by black laborers. In 1914, the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act outlawed the sale and distribution of cocaine in the United States. However, the use of cocaine was still legal. Cocaine was not considered a controlled substance in the United States until 1970, when it was listed in the Controlled Substances Act. Until that point, the use of cocaine was open and rarely prosecuted in the US. Since 1970 the jails have filled up with people prosecuted for minor drug use.
From 1898 through 1910 diacetylmorphine, the technical name for heroin, was marketed under the trademark name Heroin as a non-addictive morphine substitute and cough suppressant by the German corporation Bayer. The name was derived from the Greek word for Heros because of its perceived "heroic" effects upon a user. Bayer marketed the drug as a cure for morphine addiction before it was discovered that it rapidly metabolizes into morphine. As such, diacetylmorphine is essentially a quicker acting form of morphine. Contrary to Bayer's advertising as a "non-addictive morphine substitute," heroin would soon have one of the highest rates of dependence amongst its users.
In the USA the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act was passed in 1914 to control the sale and distribution of diacetylmorphine and other opioids, but allowed the drug to be prescribed and sold for medical purposes. In 1924 the United States Congress banned its sale, importation or manufacture. It is now a Schedule I substance, which makes it illegal for non-medical use in signatory nations of the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs treaty, including the United States.
In 1923, the U.S. Treasury Department's Narcotics Division (the first federal drug agency) banned all legal narcotics sales, forcing addicts to buy from illegal street dealers. Soon, a thriving black market opened up in New York's Chinatown.
Today a majority of people in the US favor the legalization of marijuana. At the same time more deaths occurred last year due to prescription drugs than to illegal drugs. These two facts seem to indicate that prescription drugs are a greater problem than marijuana.
On the other hand, Zurich's experience with its "drug park" is a cautionary tale for the liberal tolerance of drug use and its legalization. The following article from the New York Times is so interesting and informative that we reprint it here in its entirety:
After years of steadily rising crime and other drug-related problems, this city once associated more with banking and solid civic virtue than with marauding groups of addicts has ended its innovative experiment with an open drug market in a public park here.
The smashed windows of a Chanel store and a central branch of Credit Suisse, as well as the shooting of an unidentified man on Thursday, betray the sharp tensions that have stemmed from the closing last week of the Platzspitz, a park where the illicit activities of thousands of drug addicts and dealers were tolerated in recent years in a policy of containment of the drug problem.
Andres Oehler, a municipal spokesman, said the City Council had decided to shut the park, now sealed behind 10-foot iron fences hastily erected on the adjoining bridges, because "it was felt that the situation had got out of control in every sense."
But closing the park left several unresolved issues, including the fate of what has become a large international community of addicts in Zurich and the question of what exactly went wrong with an initiative originally aimed at helping drug abusers.
Addicts were drawn from all over Europe in recent years by the Socialist City Council's decision to offer clean syringes, the help of health officials and a large measure of tolerance in the Platzspitz, a once-elegant garden behind the stately National Museum.
The city characterized its approach as an enlightened effort to isolate the drug problem in an area away from residential neighborhoods, curb AIDS and foster rehabilitation. Its policy reflected a strong current of feeling among some European experts that it is the illegal and clandestine nature of the drug business, rather than the drugs themselves, that causes many of the associated problems.
But the situation gradually degenerated. "You give a little finger, and they want the whole hand," said a senior city official who insisted on anonymity. "You turn a blind eye to the small deals, and the big ones come. It was a spiral."
Regular users of the park swelled from a few hundred at the outset in 1987 to about 20,000, with about 25 percent of them coming from other countries. Then, Mr. Oehler said, dealers from Turkey, Yugoslavia and Lebanon moved in last year. Thefts and violence increased, with 81 drug-related deaths in 1991, twice as many as in 1990.
"We were having to resuscitate an average of 12 people a day, with peaks of 40 a day on some days," said Dr. Albert Weittstein, the city's chief medical officer. "Our people were running up around the park blowing oxygen into people's lungs. We started with three doctors, but recently had to put in two more. It has become an impossible strain."
Groups of as many as 50 addicts now gather in the streets adjoining the park, where they are jostled by police officers with orders to disperse them. "This is a crazy decision, we'll be in the whole city now," said one young man, a syringe casually tucked behind his ear, as a policeman pushed him away. He declined to be identified.
On a nearby bench another youth, apparently oblivious to the approaching police officers, calmly tightened a belt around his upper arm before plunging a needle into a bulging vein below his elbow.
Christoph Schmid, a 21-year-old Swiss addict who has been using the park for the last two years, took a measured view of the action. He said the closing and the police crackdown would cause him and others "enormous difficulties" -- heroin has become harder to get and its price has already doubled to about $230 per gram -- but he also said the Platzspitz had recently become too violent. "Too many kids were getting hooked too easily," he added.
The park -- beautifully situated at the confluence of the Sihl and Limmat Rivers, which isolated it from neighbors despite its central location -- is now a monument to vain utopian hope and sordid devastation. "Anarchy is possible," proclaim graffiti scrawled across the National Museum. A bronze statue of a stag has been adorned with the word "Dope" in fluorescent orange paint.
On the ground lie thousands of discarded syringes and syringe packets, now being collected by garbage crews. The rhododendrons that once lined the paths are dead; so, too, are many of the trees. Most of the expanses of grass have been reduced to mud.
Peter Stunzi, the director of the city's parks, said that because the park had become what he called "Zurich's municipal urinal," the soil is such that it will be difficult to plant anything in the near future.
He added that he believed it was right to close the Platzspitz because "Zurich could not be responsible for the drugs of Switzerland and the rest of Europe." But he added, "My worst nightmare is that these people will now have nowhere to go."
The city government wants all those who are not from Zurich to leave. Signs have been posted around the city warning that the authorities will no longer tolerate the public shooting up or handling of drugs or gatherings of groups of addicts. All those not from the city should "go back to the communes, where they will be helped."
Checking for Outsiders
Mr. Oehler, the city's spokesman on drug matters, said that by April hostels in Zurich where addicts are allowed to sleep for about $3 a night will no longer accept anyone who does not have an identity card proving Zurich residency. But he conceded that "the problems will take a long time to resolve."
The city's new measures appear to be coming into force amid tensions in the nine-member City Council. One member, Emilie Lieberherr, who is responsible for social affairs, has protested the action as ill-considered. And there seems to be a general feeling that while mistakes were made, frontal attacks on drug abuse are not the answer either.
"We hoped we could minimize the social costs by creating an open market where people could get help," Dr. Weittstein said. "We thought we'd ferret out the dealers, but we failed, and we did not consider the dynamics of a still illegal business, which meant that dealers and users were attracted from far afield."
He added that the failure of the park did not, in his view, resolve the argument over whether drug prohibition makes matters better or worse. "I believe and most Swiss experts believe, that prohibition does a lot of damage," he said.
Drugs used in the park were still technically illegal. But attempts by plainclothes police officers to clamp down on dealers achieved little.
There are an estimated 30,000 drug addicts in Switzerland, a country whose industrious precision has created enormous wealth and a sparkling order, but also a conspicuous alienation among youths.
About $1.5 million will now be spent on renovating the park, Mr. Stunzi said, and it is hoped that a pristine Platzspitz might reopen by the spring of 1993 at the earliest.
By then, Zurich hopes, its self-created reputation as a drug capital will have faded. But for now, its streets are full of the confused ebb and flow of a disoriented mass of youths. Outside the park's closed gates, when the police move off, hordes of addicts quickly return to try to salvage with spoons some precious white powder that had spilled to the ground.
The lesson here, I believe, is to not create a central location for drug addicts, offer free needles and attract them from all over the world. Zurich effectively created a drug addict's nirvana while their efforts at rehabilitation were insufficient. They more or less said that drug users will inevitably always be with us so let's just herd them into one central location. Intervention as opposed to incarceration might be a better approach. This would mean taking the addict off of the street, denying them access to drugs and then offering them treatment and rehabilitation before letting them go free again. This requires societal resources, but might maximize the probability that a particular addict might stay clean once he or she goes back into society.
The question of drug legalization has to do with which drugs are to be legalized - just soft drugs like marijuana or hard drugs like cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine too. Ron Paul is for legalizing all drugs on the grounds that government should not dictate people's personal habits, and most people would not try heroin anyway even if it were legal. Certainly, legalizing marijuana would cut the cross border illegal trade considerably while doing nothing more than legalizing a substance which had been previously legal in the US up till 1933. The Prohibition era for marijuana would be over as it was for alcohol in 1933. The growing and selling of marijuana could provide jobs for many people in a jobless economy. Taxing marijuana could provide much needed government revenues. The diminution of the prison population would be a social good. I honestly don't see any downside. Probably taxes should be kept low for the first five years so that the crime syndicates in Mexico would not be able to undercut the price, and would be largely put out of business. For hard drugs I would advocate legalization also but very tough regulation and high taxation to make them very expensive. In addition to lowering the prison population, legalization of drugs would reduce the killing in Mexico and the cross border illegal shipments of guns and cash from the US. The border situation with illegal guns, money and immigrants could be normalized. It would be a step in the right direction towards increasing border security.
Along with legalization of drugs, education about the effects of using drugs and addiction in general whether it be drugs, food or sex as well as programs for getting people who want to quit the drug habit off of drugs should be stepped up. Public schools should teach students not only about drugs but other life skills such as how to deal with finances. Sex education is a necessity if for no other reason than US media culture is permeated and saturated with gratuitous sexual messaging. The cultural winds blowing on impressionable minds glorify sex, drugs, violence and consumerism. Public education needs to combat these forces. Perhaps this is why Republicans are dead set on destroying the public education system.
Wesley's Comments
As far as I am concerned if someone wants to indulge themselves with a present day illegal substance, let them. No stigma, but absolute enforcement of laws governing conduct, driving and work place sobriety standards. Give no quarter and make the penalties extremely severe.
I don't give a damn if someone dies of an overdose whether it be drugs or alcohol. If a person has so little self control, or self respect, perhaps society would be better off without them. You use it and end up hooked, you have no one to blame but yourself - suffer the consequences. If the government is involved (which it will be), there has to be a way of recouping expenses besides excise taxes. Those desiring rehabilitation can volunteer for it, and those convicted of non-injurious drug use should be sentenced to a project similar to the CCC or WPA of the Depression era. Anyone convicted of drug use resulting in injury or death of another should be executed.
You and some readers might think me insensitive and unreasonable at the least, and, more than likely, far worse. So be it. It is time our society wakes up to the fact that we, individually, are responsible not only to ourselves, but to society as a whole. It is not mine, nor anyone else's financial responsibility, to support the indulgent behavior of others, and that will be the 800 pound gorilla in the room. More public assistance to the weak willed, over and above the tax revenues collected, is not called for.
In my estimation the only things not eliminated by legalization of drugs are things for which one can be prosecuted due to other infractions of the law not having anything to do with drugs per se. Every other aspect whether legal or illegal should remain the same, but will probably get worse if drugs are legalized because of the additional laws and standards required. Catch 22 comes to mind.
I did not isolate my stand on drugs to MJ. Legalize them all just as it was up to the early parts of the 20th century. Opiates were an over the counter remedy for everything. Hells bells, there were even door to door salesmen peddling the stuff. Addiction, yes there was, but the primary difference today is that people are driving cars at 70 miles an hour. Now, thanks to OSHA, nearly all factory and work place tools and machinery are idiot proof so perhaps a mild buzz could be acceptable. Maybe even a little meth prescribed to senior citizens would speed up their reactions and the little old blue hair ladies that can barely see over the steering wheel can maintain freeway speeds.
I can foresee a definite improvement in traffic flow; and that time distance reaction thing, that is an acquired skill. I should know. I practiced steadily for a number of years with some of Kentucky's finest. Never had or caused an accident while under the influence of the stuff; it was the sober hours that were a problem. Probably a hangover thing and from what I have been told that is not a problem with MJ.
And as I wrote, if you cause injury or death while under the influence of drugs or alcohol, you should face a MANDATORY death sentence. No incarceration, no rehab, no counseling, no appeals. The sentence to be carried out right after being found guilty. NO delay.
End of Wesley's Comments
John's Comment on Wesley's Comments
Wayne, what about a minor injury? Surely you wouldn't recommend putting someone to death for that even if under the influence of drugs or alcohol. I can see it for a head on collision in which innocent people in the other car are killed. There was a case like that here recently. I think the drunk guy who lived got 20-30 years in jail. I am for capital punishment in open and shut egregious cases, but not for those convicted based on eyewitness testimony which is notoriously inaccurate resulting in the incarceration and death of a lot of innocent people. A drunk driver causing an accident, on the other hand, is pretty much an open and shut case.
Frank's Essay:
DUTCH POLICY TOWARDS HARD AND SOFT DRUGS
A country's drug policy evolves slowly and reflects national conditions and culture. As punitive or other model drug laws have evolved in countries over the past century, so have the unique drug policy enforcement solutions pioneered by the Dutch. Their open minded attitudes toward illicit drugs, like toward prostitution, are driven by their peculiar societal values – a realistic, humane approach to social problems like drugs as a health-centered and social well-being matter, not primarily as a problem of the police and judiciary – values that embody:
First, a long history of tolerance and pragmatism.
Second, a strong belief in individual freedom, like deciding about private matters such as one's own health, while also having a strong sense of responsibility for the community's well-being.
Third, a view of drug issues as manageable health and harm reduction matters – as "normal social problems" with real-life, scientific distinctions in relative risks – not an alien threat, a "forbidden fruit" perennially punishable by the criminal prosecution and imprisonment apparatus.
Fourth, a non-absolutist ideological approach to social problems where criminal law is not perceived as enforcing social or religious morality, and government is expected to act with reserve on issues involving religion and moral questions.
Fifth, a belief that hiding or taking a blind eye to negative social problems does not make them go away but only makes them more difficult and costly to control.
What is the Historical Trend in Drug Policy?
Repressive and indiscriminate drug policies adopted under the 1919 Opium Act slowly gave way to very grave doubts as to the effectiveness of that approach. In the 50s and 60s, harsh sentencing practices for drug offenses including cannabis did not deter a notable increase in consumption. So in 1976, the Dutch parliament amended the Act to focus on battling the risks of drug abuse for society and individuals rather than just fighting consumption itself. The pre-1976 policy of prohibition and penal measures paid scant attention to the human, social, psychological, economic fallout of hard and soft drug use and the need to prevent further human suffering and disease.
While the Opium Act criminalized drug possession, cultivation, trafficking, importing and exporting, the 1976 amendments and subsequent amendments have established two classes of drugs: (1) hard drugs deemed to be an unacceptable risk to public health including heroin, cocaine, amphetamines, LSD, ecstasy, hallucinogenic (magic) mushrooms; (2) tolerable traditional hemp-product soft drugs, marijuana and hashish. Dutch drug policy has pragmatically reverted to a new guideline of distinguishing drugs and related punishable acts based on their harm to the individual and to public health – a policy of minimizing the hazards and abuse of drug use rather than just suppressing all drugs … a policy addressing demand and supply that supports a certain degree of tolerance and non-prosecution rather than indiscriminate law enforcement.
The now amended 1976 Opium Act incorporates some unique strategies for reducing the harm of drug use and abuse:
The prevention or alleviation of social and individual risks caused by drug use.
A rational relation between those risks and policy measures, e.g., possessing, dealing in, selling, and producing drugs are criminal offenses with severe penalties for hard drugs. Drug possession for dealing is also more severely punished than possession for personal use which police generally take a soft approach to.
A differentiation of policy measures that considers risks of legal and medical drugs.
A police and judiciary that gives high priority to tackling the large-scale drug trade and production of drugs.
Recognition of the inadequacy of criminal law concerning other aspects (i.e., apart from trafficking) of the drug problem.
Not taking action against possession of small quantities of soft or hard drugs for personal consumption; tolerating (de facto legalizing) under strict conditions the consumption and traffic in soft drugs in youth centers and coffee houses where threshold quantities and the intent to deal determine personal possession, use, and trafficking offenses.
A high law-enforcement priority of cracking down, levying stiff penalties on hard drugs trafficking and production – including exportation and importation, large-scale commercial cultivation of cannabis, ecstasy, amphetamines, and LSD.
A "normalization" policy that treats drug problems as normal social problems, not as punishable deviant behavior only making societal control problems worse; a policy of integration and social rehabilitation of addicts; a policy of low threshold treatment acceptance, minimum paperwork, routine medical treatment services … all to avoid delaying care, marginalizing, stigmatizing, or isolating drug users.
Early focus on health promotion to young people in particular of the benefits of universal drug prevention … through curricular school-based programs such as, "The Healthy School of Drugs" program – comprising lectures in secondary school on alcohol, tobacco and cannabis – and prevention outside school under the, "Going Out, Alcohol and Drugs" program – aimed at reducing health and safety problems among young people using drugs in recreational and party settings. Also, a wide range of support programs are offered to addicts with the goals to prevent and relieve risks of drug use for addicts, their immediate environment, and society as a whole.
What Are the Enforcement Principles and Rules?
The amended 1976 Opium Act still holds the possession of marijuana/hashish to be a petty misdemeanor today. But, even that offense is seldom enforced under the "expediency principle" in Dutch criminal law. This principle gives authorities discretionary powers to refrain from prosecuting certain offenses "on grounds derived from the public interest." It applies to cases involving small quantities for personal use where there's no dealing or other drug-related crime. Thus, cannabis and hashish are technically illegal but "tolerated."
The "expediency principle" helps separate to the extent possible the recreational soft drug market – posing a minimal risk to society – from the true hard drug, criminal markets. The goal has been to separate distribution channels thereby greatly reducing the gateway from soft drugs to heroin and cocaine. It is felt this policy and the early educational school programs prevent experimenting youth from getting drawn into the dangerous criminal elements of the hard drug culture.
For the Dutch, drug use is a health matter not unlike the use of tobacco and alcohol. A paradigm of arresting and incarcerating thousands of citizens for minor drug possession or use offenses is not accepted. In stark contrast, Sweden views all forms of drug possession and use, regardless of quantities or drug type, as an abuse – while Portugal has decriminalized ALL drugs with favorable results. Each country must find its own way. For the Dutch, freedom to decide about matters relating to one's own health is fundamental. So a visible, manageable retail market for cannabis was allowed to develop. But, as stated, wholesale dealers, traffickers, and large-scale cultivators of cannabis or hard drugs will be rewarded by the full force of the penal laws.
The Dutch do not see the separation of soft drugs from hard drugs and flexible law enforcement measures as some magical cure-all. The prime aim is prevention of health risks and the negative consequences for society arising from drug abuse. This involves educational measures where a restricted tolerance approach enables authorities to monitor and control better the social phenomena of drug abuse. Abuses are also fought by health measures such as treatment monitoring centers, extensive demand reduction and detoxification facilities, a free methadone supply program for heroin users, a free syringe exchange program, and free testing of ecstasy pills.
The lure of stepping-up to hard drugs is checked by allowing purchase of cannabis in alcohol-free coffee-shops. For evidence shows this separation of the market for illicit drugs means youthful cannabis users are less likely to slip into contact with hard drugs. Also, surveys show the vast majority of Dutch people never try marijuana. Most who do try it don't continue to use it very often, much less hard drugs. Moreover, users know that cannabis is far safer than hard drugs and less addictive than even caffeine, alcohol, tobacco, and many prescription drugs.
Coffee-shop regulations are very strict. Operators are legally and strictly bound to adhere to following rules:
No alcohol or hard drugs may be sold or consumed in a coffee house. Driving under the influence of soft drugs is considered as driving under the influence of alcohol. Police check for this.
No advertising, active promotion, web sites are allowed.
Cannabis can only be sold to people aged 18 or over. No minors are allowed around or in coffee-shop premises.
No sale of large quantities is allowed – the limit is 5 grams to one person in one day. This maximum amount is tolerated, not prosecuted, even though technically illegal.
The coffee-shop must not be causing a public nuisance, e.g., must not be located within 250 meters of a school.
The coffee-shop operator is allowed a maximum level of cannabis stock for selling of 500 grams, but local authorities can impose lower limits. Of course, no selling of hard drugs is allowed.
The decision whether or not to tolerate coffee-shops lies entirely with the local municipalities. Smoking cannabis is banned in public places. (As of 2005, 72% of the 467 municipalities pursued a zero policy with regard to the number of tolerated coffee-shops).
The local mayor is entitled to close a coffee-shop for violating any of the above rules (including being a public nuisance, e.g., disturbing a neighborhood's public order and safety).
Why Drug Decriminalization and Tolerance?
The Dutch have normalized and decriminalized the soft and hard drug problem as a practical compromise between the extremes of an intensified war on drugs and legalization. Drug use is a fact of life. It must be discouraged, and the harm and risks minimized in a flexible, realistic manner. Under the Opium Act during 1919 to 1976, the Dutch learned this lesson the hard way when severe and disproportionate penalization failed to stop a steep rise in drug users and abusers. Continuing an all-out fight risked driving more and more drug users into the fringes of the underworld, making them hidden and beyond reach of any "helping" institution, other than the justice system. In short, a repressive, prohibitive approach led to negative side effects both for the individual and Dutch society.
The amended Opium Act of 1976 relegates criminal law to a relatively minor role in preventing individual drug abuse. However, as noted, cannabis and all other drugs are still statutorily illegal. But the law is not enforced for possession of small amounts for personal use or sale of small amounts in coffee-shops. So over the last 35 years, the goal has been to avoid situations where cannabis consumers suffer more damage from criminal proceedings than from use of the drug itself. A policy of tolerance for selling soft drugs in coffee-shops evolved on grounds it stops many users from contacting drug dealers and experimenting with hard drugs. Facts support this conclusion as the number of convictions, addicts, drug casualties in the Netherlands is one of the lowest in Europe and far below that of the US.
From Dutch perspectives, trying to eradicate drugs or drug addiction by criminal law makes the cure worse than the disease. On the other hand, unilateral formal legalization of soft drugs is not a goal and is unnecessary – not only because cannabis retail prices would drop further thus creating ever more "drugs tourism" – but mainly because Dutch courts have ruled that institutionalized non-enforcement in past years constitutes de facto decriminalization, i.e., a roughly legal regime for soft drugs. One thing is certain, however. Hard drugs are illegal and are unlikely to be legalized, at least in the near future. Some feel that the best argument for legalization is that it undermines outside-the-country drug cartels, often protected by terrorist groups. The Netherlands has never had the massive smuggling industry or a "next door" land route to the heart of drug country like the US has with Mexico. But imported drugs, for example, from Afghanistan to Dutch harbors and then channeled to the rest of Europe do remain a serious problem.
The outright banning of all coffee-shops is also not an option as it will not solve the problems of crime, street-drug trade, nuisance, and health. For the Dutch, it comes down to striking a careful balance between the rights of cannabis consumers and coffee-shop retailers and the Dutch government's responsibility to public health and safety. This means setting fair and very strict limits of what can and cannot tolerated by all concerned.
Over-dramatization, criminalization, or moralization of the drug problem has thus given way to prevention, harm reduction and treatment policies … i.e., the promotion of healthy lifestyles. While comparisons to other countries show the Netherlands' tolerant policy has worked well for decades, the country has its share of drug problems. But these are no more and often far less than many modern democracies which have much harsher drug laws and penalties.
Serious attention is being directed to the nuisance related by cannabis use by "drugs tourism" and by foreign drug addicts residing illegally. Amsterdam and Dutch cities near Germany and France have been under strain from the flow of EU "drugs tourists" who are taking advantage of the Netherlands' more liberal soft drug laws. In Maastricht alone, 70% of the 2 million visitors to Maastricht's 14 coffee-shops come from abroad. This has increased nuisance complaints regarding the hazards of drug runners luring tourists to coffee-shops, petty crime, and the smell of weed smoke. In their constant efforts to correct such policy shortcomings, the Dutch are about to implement nation-wide a "weed-pass" system to contain "drugs tourism."
Coffee-shops will be turned into private clubs requiring proof of membership by a pass issued to adult Dutch citizens for use in one club only. Maastricht has already banned foreigners' access to coffee-shops except neighboring Germans and Belgians … at some economic cost. For example, foreign visitors to Maastricht's or Amsterdam's coffee-shops spend up to €75/day ($100/day) for cannabis compared to €125-250/day ($90-180/day) on shopping, eating out and lodging.
Cannabis Penalization Policies and Penalties
Dutch penalization policy makes a sharp distinction between drug users and drug traffickers. Drug use is seen primarily as a public health, harm-reduction issue poorly addressed by a paradigm of punishment-based prohibition. Adult people can buy, possess or use small quantities without criminal sanctions. Research clearly shows that cannabis is a very safe drug. But possession of this soft drug for commercial purposes is a serious criminal offense, subject to some tough penalties. In 2010, one of the largest Dutch cannabis-selling coffee shops was fined €10 million ($13.5 million) and a 4 month prison term for keeping more than the allowed 500 grams of stock cannabis in the shop.
Today, Dutch cannabis is grown locally and only up to 40% is sold locally – the majority is exported. Producing and exporting cannabis, ecstasy or amphetamines illegally is thus becoming a major Dutch enforcement and penal priority given organized crime's rising interest in the lucrative European cannabis market. Dutch police are under pressure to aggressively pursue, prosecute, and punish large-scale possession, dealing and cultivation of cannabis.
In this regard, decriminalization of soft drugs has brought key manpower and income benefits that can be redirected to healthy and productive public ends: (1) it frees up police enforcement manpower from petty abuses to fight commercial drug trafficking and production; (2) it yields substantial police, judiciary, and detention cost savings, and it generates €400-500 million ($540-675 million) in coffee-shop tax revenues yearly. These funds finance a wide range of drug actions: aggressive prosecution of illegal trafficking and production; a high standard of preventive care, counseling and educational information, medical treatment services for addicts, and special housing for long-term addicts. Little wonder that the number of addicts and deaths by overdose in the Netherlands is near the lowest in Europe and far lower than the US.
Furthermore, the Dutch government has announced it will classify cannabis with a THC level above 15% as a high potency, hard drug. Those coffee-shops selling cannabis with 17-18% THC levels today will have to use milder cannabis variants. This action plus strict regulation of a fast growing number of synthetic drugs; closure of coffee-shops within 250 meters of a school; shutdown of over 400 coffee-shops from 1179 in 1997 to ± 680 today (a 40% decrease) for reasons of nuisance, disturbance and other violations; a "weed pass;" and a stepped-up attack on trafficking and Dutch production of cannabis reflect a determination to adjust the country's drug policy to new market realities – even if that means reversing tolerance policies.
Here's a brief summary of the penalties for drug offenses:
Possessing up to 30 grams of cannabis for personal use is a minor offense with a maximum detention of 1 month (and/or a fine of €2,250/$3,000). But this penalty is not usually enforced.
Possessing more than 30 grams of cannabis, regardless of the quantity, is a criminal offense with a maximum detention of 2 years (and/or a fine of €25,000/$34,000).
Importing/exporting soft drugs is a criminal offense with a maximum detention of 4 years (and/or a fine of €45,000/$60,000). Penalties are increased for repeated offenses.
Buying, selling, producing, transporting soft drugs for commercial purposes is a criminal offense with a minimum detention of 1 month (and/or a fine) up to 8 years (and/or a fine of €45,000/$60,000) depending on the quantity.
Selling more than 5 grams to a client in any one day by a coffee-shop is a criminal offense. Coffee-shop owners or operators risk prosecution and being closed down (and/or big fines) for violating this or other coffee-shop rules as noted above.
What Are the Successes of Dutch Drug Policy?
Ambitious politicians, media, and other "experts" can't resist spreading wildly exaggerated myths, misunderstandings, and misinformation in their disagreement with Dutch drug policy. This is not only dishonest but strange considering more and more global leaders have declared the "war on drugs" to be destructive and a failure. Many countries (and a small number of US states) have moved to various forms of decriminalizing low-level drug possession and adopting health-centered approaches to cut consumption, improve public health, and weaken the power of organized crime.
The pragmatic, pioneering Dutch approach of setting tolerance guidelines that make drug policy more visible are methods adopted by most EU countries. Decriminalizing the possession of soft drugs has not led to a rise in their use. There's ample empirical evidence that removal of criminal provisions for cannabis possession does not markedly increase the prevalence of cannabis or any other illicit drug. Studies by the Trimbus Institute on drug addiction and mental health show that 5% of Dutch citizens smoked marijuana or hashish in the past year compared to an average of 7% in the rest of Europe. Supporting statistics are noted in TABLE 1:
TABLE 1: COMPARISON OF NETHERLANDS AND US PRISON INMATES AND PERCENTAGE DRUG OFFENDERS – 2009
Inmates Per % Drug
100,000 Population Offenders
Netherlands 100 19%
US 760 53% = Federal Prisons
19% = State Prisons
SOURCE: OECD Factbook, Economic, Environmental, Social Statistics, 2010
The US percentage of total marijuana arrests was 52% of total drug arrests with arrests for possession increasing significantly from 34% in 1995 to 46% in 2010. No wonder US prisons are bursting with drug offenders, most of whom would probably not be in prison now if possession of 1 ounce or less had not been criminalized in a majority of states. As one expert said, "The U.S. has 5% of the world's population but 25% of its prisoners."
TABLE 2: COMPARISON OF NETHERLANDS AND US USE OF DRUGS BY PERCENTAGES – 2008
Netherlands United States
Ever Used Marijuana 22.6% 41.0%
Ever Used Cocaine 3.4% 14.7%
Ever Used Heroin 0.6% 1.5%
SOURCE: Wikipedia, EMCDDA, Get The Facts –Drug War Facts. Org., "The Netherlands Compared With The US"
The above demonstrates that de facto legalization to purchase marijuana in the Netherlands has not given rise to marijuana levels of use – nor cocaine or heroin use – significantly higher than those in countries like France, Sweden and the US which pursue repressive drug policies. The Dutch intense policy of prevention and care has made drug addicts healthier and HIV prevalence even lower than in many countries where HIV infections are already very low. The Dutch government reports there are about 25,000 hard drug addicts or 1.6 per 1000 people. This is well below the EU average.
TABLE 3 illustrates the relative drug health treatment intensity for selected countries:
TABLE 3: DRUG USERS ENTERING TREATMENT UNITS, 1998- 2008
(Data on all patients using hard drugs)
1998 2008 Per 100,000
Netherlands 9209 10132 61
US NA 1144000 366
Germany 13967 62835 77
France 25118 43486 66
Sweden 3394 6017 100
SOURCES: EMCDDA Annual Report 2008; Alcohol, Drug Abuse and Resource Center, "Stats on Drug Rehab by Types of Drugs Used," November 14, 2011
US, France, and Sweden have prohibitionist drug regimes for all drugs while Germany and the Netherlands have de facto decriminalization regimes for soft drugs. The US has at least 6 times more drug-user treatments/rehabs per 100,000 people than the Netherlands where HIV infections are also very low. This situation and the US doorway to a gigantic flow of drugs from its close-by neighbor, Mexico, make US legalizing or decriminalizing of drugs more complex and problematic. In contrast, the Dutch produce all of their cannabis consumption needs locally. And the level of hard drug consumption is very low. Another factor is that the Netherlands, third most densely populated country in the world, has 16.5 million people living on a land territory one-fourth the size of New York state (or one-half the size of my state of Maine). This also makes hands-on policy implementation, oversight and control of drugs relatively easier.
Tolerating cannabis use and taxing it works for the Dutch … with the exception of ongoing new market challenges that are causing a rethink of tolerance policies, e.g., drugs tourism, coffee-shops' selling to minors and creating a public nuisance, potentially dangerous ecstasy and synthetic drugs, and illegal export of cannabis abroad.
Dutch success emphasizing prevention and health care shows up in the number of drug related deaths which are very low averaging 120/year or less than .75 per 100,000 people. Deaths related to overdose of cannabis are unheard of. Hard drugs, or synthetic drugs combined with alcohol or prescription drugs can have certain bad medical, even deathly effects. While hard drug users are seldom prosecuted and heroin junkies have vanished from the streets into heroin-assisted treatment centers, potential intensification of health hazards and toxic addiction are key Dutch arguments for sticking by their decriminalized "harm-reduction" policy rather than legalizing all drugs at this time. But, debate and studies of this option live on.
The recent European Centre for Drugs and Drugs Addiction (EMCDDA) 2010 Annual Report on trends in drug use in Europe is a must reading of the facts and progress of EU countries with their reversion to mainly "Dutch-like" health-centered drug policies based on science and evidence. Overall, the report gives the Netherlands' good marks for its drug policies:
"The trend in cocaine and heroin addiction in the Netherlands is stabilizing, even decreasing. One percent of Dutch people aged between 15 and 34 is a recent cocaine user, well below the European average of 2.2%. The number of heroin clients in addiction care and rehabilitation facilities has decreased as well as has property-related crime ascribed to heroin users. But there are signs of an increase of (injected) heroin usage due to an influx of (mainly homeless) Eastern European immigrants."
Rather than wage war on drugs or legalize all drugs, the Dutch have taken a public health approach emphasizing "de facto decriminalization" and "normalization"… aimed at harm reduction, the integration of drug users in society, and the avoidance of stigmatizing, marginalizing, and isolating drug users.
Decriminalization has not resulted in any unusual increase in cannabis and hard drug use or abuse that poses a public threat … as confirmed by a 30-year Dutch experience and a truly excellent 2004 study by Craig Reinarman, PhD and his associates, "The Limited Relevance of Drug Policy: Cannabis in Amsterdam and in San Francisco." However, trafficking, production, importing and exporting of drugs necessitates a relentless police pursuit and judicial prosecution effort.
The Dutch demand and supply approach to reducing the risks and harm of drugs has proven to be sane and successful. Cannabis and hard drugs are better controlled openly in a safe environment rather than in the wilds of the dangerous street-drug trade or in a prison complex.
Since hard drug use is seen as a social and medical issue not punished for the behavior alone, the emphasis is on health risk reduction and treatment. The Dutch government is able to aid about 90% of help-seeking addicts for detoxification programs. Regional and local authorities are responsible for the organization, implementation, and coordination of addiction care. Treatment is mainly delivered by non-governmental organizations on a regional level, followed by private organizations including physicians, hospitals, and private clinics. And treatment costs are at least 6 times less than trying to reduce consumption by mandatory prison sentences .. more enforcement .. higher penalties .. all leading to a dead end.
Finally, there's that very important cash flow from coffee-shop value added taxes and income tax revenues that can be applied to drugs enforcement, prevention and treatment.
REFERENCES : Dutch Policy Towards Hard Drugs and Soft Drugs ______________________________________________________
1. European Monitoring Centre For Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA), Annual Report 2010 – "The State of the Drugs Problem in Europe"
2. Report to the EMCDDA by the Reitox National Focal Point: "The Netherlands Drug Situation in 2010," Dec. 22, 2010
3. "Trends in Drug Usage in Europe," A Response to the EMCDDA 2010 Annual Report, 2011
4. Reaction of Trimbus Institut to the EMCDDA Annual Report 2011, by Margriet van Laar, Head of Drug Monitoring, November 15, 2011
5. "Dutch Reclassify High-Potency Marijuana As Hard Drug," Associated Press, Toby Sterling, Oct. 7, 2011 and World News Netherlands, Oct. 7, 2011
6. Get the Facts- Drug War Facts.Org.: "The Netherlands Compared to the U.S.," 2009
7. "The Limited Relevance of Drug Policy: Cannabis in Amsterdam and in San Francisco," 2004, by Craig Reinaraman, PhD; Peter Cohen, PhD; Hendrien Kaal, PhD., 2004
8. "National Drug Policy: The Netherlands," by Benjamin Dolin of Law and Government Division, Parliament of Canada, Aug. 15, 2001
9. "Dutch Drug Policy: A Model for America?" In press for: JOURNAL OF HEALTH & SOCIAL POLICY, by David F. Duncan, Dr. P.H. CAS, Thomas Nicholson, PhD, 1997
10. "The Dutch Harm Reduction Model of Addiction Treatment," Addiction Services, Amsterdam Wiki, April 3, 2009
11. "Normalization of the Drugs Problem: An Outline of the Dutch Drugs Policy," by Otto Janssen, June 1992
12. "Marijuana: The Myths Are Killing Us," by Karen P. Tandy of DEA, June 17, 2005
13. "The Myths of Drug Legalization," AMERICA, The National Catholic Weekly, March 16, 1996, by Joseph A. Califano, Jr.
14. "Drugs Policy in the Netherlands," by UK Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport, The Netherlands, April 1997
15. "Dutch Drug Policy In A European Context," by Tim Boekhout van Solinge, Journal of Drug Issues – Vol.29, No.3, 1999
16. "Soft Drugs in the Netherlands," By Radio Netherlands Worldwide, Sept. 2009
17. "Honor Thy Promise: Why the Dutch Drug Policies Should Not Be a Barrier to the Full Implementation of the Schengen Agreement,"Boston College International & Comparative Law Review (Vol.23, Issue 1, Article 8)) by Susan H. Easton, Dec. 12, 1999
John's Comment on Frank's Essay:
Clearly, the Dutch methods are working and superior to those in the US. First, effective and thorough studies of the problem reveal what does and what doesn't work. Then Dutch pragmatism and a willingness to implement those policies that are working and reject those policies that are not working lead to a rational solution to the problem. Instead of viewing drug policy as strictly a law enforcement problem, the Dutch have an integrated approach which includes treatment while allowing for the recreational use of soft drugs which under well defined circumstances can even be considered a social good much as the recreational use of alcohol can be considered a social good when used in moderation. At a time when a majority of the American population favors legalization of marijuana, US policy makers should study the Dutch policy on drugs as an example of what works. Last year in the US there were more deaths from the misuse of prescription drugs than from illegal drugs. Drug use in general is a problem that needs to be solved by education, treatment and rehabilitation instead of relying on the criminal justice system while allowing for the moderate use of recreational drugs just as alcohol, caffeine and nicotine when used in moderation have been tolerated for many years. All in all the Dutch approach is intelligent and humane without a lot of moralizing or implementation of preconceived prejudices.
Posted at 06:40 PM in Frank Thomas, John Lawrence, Drugs, Europe, Lifestyle | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Call Off the Global Drug War
Published on Friday, June 17, 2011 by the Minneapolis Star Tribune
by Jimmy Carter
In an extraordinary new initiative announced earlier this month, the Global Commission on Drug Policy has made some courageous and profoundly important recommendations in a report on how to bring more effective control over the illicit drug trade.
The commission includes the former presidents or prime ministers of five countries, a former secretary general of the United Nations, human rights leaders, and business and government leaders, including Richard Branson, George P. Shultz and Paul A. Volcker.
The report describes the total failure of the present global antidrug effort, and in particular America's "war on drugs," which was declared 40 years ago today. It notes that the global consumption of opiates has increased 34.5 percent, cocaine 27 percent and cannabis 8.5 percent from 1998 to 2008.
Its primary recommendations are to substitute treatment for imprisonment for people who use drugs but do no harm to others, and to concentrate more coordinated international effort on combating violent criminal organizations rather than nonviolent, low-level offenders.
These recommendations are compatible with U.S. drug policy from three decades ago. In a message to Congress in 1977, I said the country should decriminalize the possession of less than an ounce of marijuana, with a full program of treatment for addicts.
I also cautioned against filling our prisons with young people who were no threat to society, and summarized by saying: "Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself."
These ideas were widely accepted at the time. But in the 1980s President Ronald Reagan and Congress began to shift from balanced drug policies, including the treatment and rehabilitation of addicts, toward futile efforts to control drug imports from foreign countries.
This approach entailed an enormous expenditure of resources and the dependence on police and military forces to reduce the foreign cultivation of marijuana, coca and opium poppy and the production of cocaine and heroin. One result has been a terrible escalation in drug-related violence, corruption and gross violations of human rights in a growing number of Latin American countries.
The commission's facts and arguments are persuasive. It recommends that governments be encouraged to experiment "with models of legal regulation of drugs ... that are designed to undermine the power of organized crime and safeguard the health and security of their citizens." For effective examples, they can look to policies that have shown promising results in Europe, Australia and other places.
But they probably won't turn to the U.S. for advice. Drug policies here are more punitive and counterproductive than in other democracies, and have brought about an explosion in prison populations. At the end of 1980, just before I left office, 500,000 people were incarcerated in America; at the end of 2009 the number was nearly 2.3 million.
There are 743 people in prison for every 100,000 Americans, a higher portion than in any other country and seven times as great as in Europe. Some 7.2 million people are either in prison or on probation or parole — more than 3 percent of all American adults!
Some of this increase has been caused by mandatory minimum sentencing and "three strikes you're out" laws. But about three-quarters of new admissions to state prisons are for nonviolent crimes.
And the single greatest cause of prison population growth has been the war on drugs, with the number of people incarcerated for nonviolent drug offenses increasing more than twelvefold since 1980.
Not only has this excessive punishment destroyed the lives of millions of young people and their families (disproportionately minorities), but it is wreaking havoc on state and local budgets. Former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger pointed out that, in 1980, 10 percent of his state's budget went to higher education and 3 percent to prisons; in 2010, almost 11 percent went to prisons and only 7.5 percent to higher education.
Maybe the increased tax burden on wealthy citizens necessary to pay for the war on drugs will help to bring about a reform of America's drug policies. At least the recommendations of the Global Commission will give some cover to political leaders who wish to do what is right.
A few years ago I worked side by side for four months with a group of prison inmates, who were learning the building trade, to renovate some public buildings in my hometown of Plains, Ga. They were intelligent and dedicated young men, each preparing for a productive life after the completion of his sentence. More than half of them were in prison for drug-related crimes, and would have been better off in college or trade school.
To help such men remain valuable members of society, and to make drug policies more humane and more effective, the American government should support and enact the reforms laid out by the Global Commission on Drug Policy.
© 2011 Jimmy Carter
Jimmy Carter, the 39th president, is the founder of the Carter Center and the winner of the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize.
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US Guns Lead to Mexican Deaths
The homicide rate from gun deaths in the US is the highest in the world. But wait there's more: most of the drug related murders in Mexico are also caused by American gun sales. Guns are purchased in the US and then smuggled into Mexico where they are used to murder thousands of Mexicans. If you figure the combined homicide rate of gun related murders in both the US and Mexico, you come up with a homicide rate that is astronomical. This is all the more reason why gun control should become more stringent. It would not only cut down on mass murders in the US; it would cut down on drug related murders in Mexico and allow the Mexican police to gain an advantage. This in turn would cut down on the importation of drugs back into the US. Guns and drugs are related, and the fewer guns in society, the less drugs.
The following article points out the fact that US guns are fueling the drug runners in Mexico:
by Meredith Slater December 22, 2010, from change.org
For years the United States and Mexico have wrestled over issues related to the border, and when it comes to U.S. policy, the government places stringent restrictions on what moves north into the country, without much consideration for what travels the other way.
So while agents crack down on the smuggling of marijuana, cocaine and illegal aliens into America, little attention is paid to the firearms and weapons that travel south to Mexico. This problem is proving deadly.
According to NBC News, the drug war between Mexican cartels has claimed more than 31,000 lives since late 2006. Though there are stringent laws in Mexico restricting gun ownership, illegal firearms from the U.S. continue to flow into Mexico, perpetrating the violence. In fact, U.S. firearms agents estimate that 80 to 90 percent of the weapons used by Mexican drug traffickers come from the United States. Most of these guns are obtained through cartel leaders who hire Americans with clean records - "gunrunners" - to purchase the weapons for them.
The U.S. has not only turned a blind eye to the weapons trafficking, but has actually used roadblocks to thwart attempts to stop the smuggling. Under a law passed by Congress in 2003, the identities of U.S. dealers that sell guns seized at Mexican crime scenes must remain confidential. A yearlong investigation by The Washington Post, though, has finally shed some light on just how significant a role U.S. weapons dealers play in arming Mexico.
The investigation shows that the state of Texas and the city of Houston produce more guns seized by police in drug wars in Mexico than any other state or city. It further reveals that "no single independent dealer stands out more for selling guns traced from south of the border than Bill Carter."
Though The Washington Post is quick to point out that there is no indication that the top selling gun stores to Mexico, including two of Carter's four "Carter's Country" gun stores in Houston, are actually doing anything wrong, there is no doubt that their guns have been associated with trafficking, kidnapping and murder. In the past two years alone, more than 115 guns from Carter's stores have been seized by authorities in Mexico.
But Bill Carter doesn't seem to take this problem very seriously.
"Why all the talk about guns going south when so many drugs are coming north that our cows along the interstate are gettin' high off the fumes!" he said recently.
If Bill Carter were to take the distribution of firearms in his stores more seriously, he could help prevent the murder of hundreds of people in Mexico.
Posted at 10:56 AM in John Lawrence, Drugs, Guns | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)