US Technological Transformations and the Narcotic-Fueled Genocide of American Workers

Posted on April 24, 2018 by Reid Mukai

By James Petras

Introduction

During his recent visit to New Hampshire on 3/20/18, President Trump declared once again that the US is facing a ‘drug epidemic’. This time he advocated the death penalty for criminal drug dealers as the solution to a national crisis that has killed over 1 million Americans since the 1990’s (when the blockbuster prescription opiate Oxycontin was first released on the market). Trump promised that the Justice Department would develop the most severe penalties for criminal drug traffickers, by which he meant foreigners. He argued that his proposed “Wall” (between the Mexican- US border) would cut the flow of drugs responsible for the ongoing addiction of millions of US citizens – as though the prescription opiate addiction epidemic resulted from a foreign invasion, and not corporate decisions from Big Pharma.

President Trump’s claim that 116 ‘drug deaths’ occur every day (42,000 a year) is a major underestimate. In 2017, alone over 64,000 drug overdose deaths were reported in official statistics (with many unreported cases signed off as natural or undetermined, especially in counties too poor to afford autopsies and expensive forensic toxicology). Another 4 million Americans, at least, are currently addicted to opioids and at risk for overdose.

In comparative terms, more American workers have been killed or devastated by narcotics (mostly via prescription) in 2017 alone, than in the entire decade of the Vietnam War with its 58,000 dead and 500,000 wounded. In 2017, 40,000 Americans died in motor vehicle accidents and another 39,000 by gun violence – and these statistics are not broken down to include vehicular accidents due to drug intoxication or gun violence over drugs. Prescription or illegal opiates, alone or mixed with other sedative drugs, like Valium, or alcohol, are the most prominent and preventable cause of premature death in the United States today.

This pattern is unique to the United States, where the irresponsible medical prescription of highly addicting narcotics has been the primary portal of entry into the degrading life of addiction for millions. Despite President Trump’s claims, the addiction crisis is not a product of urban Afro-American street dealers or Mexican narco-traffickers: This uniquely American crisis has been created and fueled by billionaire-owned US pharmaceutical corporations, which produced, distributed and wildly profited from legal narcotics. They were aided by the irresponsible prescription practice of tens of thousands of doctors and other ‘providers’ who introduced millions of vulnerable patients to the world of narcotic dependency – including youngsters with sports injuries and workers with job-related pain. These are physicians and medical providers who rarely stopped to examine their own responsibility, even when their otherwise healthy patients overdosed or were destroyed by addiction. It is especially outrageous that doctors and ‘Big Pharma’ worked hand in hand for over 20 years to create this epidemic, enjoying wild profits and almost total legal immunity. Few have dared to openly question their irresponsibility and greed. In the poorest and most vulnerable areas of this country, the most irresponsible and unaccountable incompetence has replaced real medical care and created a health care apartheid.

The Federal Drug Enforcement Agency (FDA) and the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) have protected the corporate drug traffickers and ensured the manicured and cultured narco-bosses the highest rates of return on their products. These polished pushers have their names engraved on the walls of museums and opera houses around the country.

The majority of Presidential, Federal, State and municipal candidates from both major parties have received millions of dollars in electoral campaign funds from these huge legal narcotic manufacturers and distributors, as well as from physicians and other representative of the ‘pain-treatment industry’. Over the past decades, politicians have openly or secretly opposed or weakened legislation designed to address this crisis.

Why not just ask President Trump to direct his Justice Department to impose the death penalty on the board of directors of the big corporate narcotic manufacturers or distributors or on the CEOs of major ‘pain clinics’ or on the owners of local rural ‘health centers’ that drove the villagers of West Virginia into their life-destroying downward spirals?

When will the DEA finally storm the medical centers to arrest the over-prescribing ‘providers’ of narcotics and benzodiazepine tranquilizers (a very common deadly combination)?

When will the SWAT teams seize the vacation homes of the CEOs of major US hospitals where the convenient and fake ideology of promising a ‘pain-free’ experience (‘make it Zero on the Pain Scale’) led to the generalized promotion of highly addicting narcotics for minor injuries, arthritic pain, or chronic back discomfort due to work or obesity? Responsible alternatives existed and were used in the rest of the world – largely untouched by this prescription-fueled crisis.

No doubt what President Trump has in mind is something else: the expulsion of Latin American workers under the pretext of going after the drug dealers and the even more massive incarceration of petty street dealers in the African American community.

Trump will then turn to further monitoring and arresting small-scale American marijuana farmers, who earn a basic income from growing a product that many believe is safe, non-addicting, and significantly reduces demand for dangerous narcotics.

As ugly as this all seems, the complicity of the political, economic and the medical elite in exponentially spreading deadly narcotics among the poor, working class and downwardly mobile middle class, points to a deeper and more sinister policy goal: the systematic elimination of millions of American workers made redundant in the new economy. This is a ‘gentler genocide’, where millions of workers die prematurely seeking an escape from pain as they have been replaced by a new technology and a new ideology: Robots, artificial intelligence and digitalization have rendered them disposable, while the out-sourcing of work to low paid overseas laborers and immigrants have guaranteed unimaginable profits for the elite decision makers.

This highly profitable process, benefiting the political, pharmaceutical, financial, police and judicial elites, conveniently blames the victims, a significant proportion of whom come from the poor and working class in this country, including white rural and small town addicts, especially youth, stuck at minimum wage jobs with no prospects of a decent future – injured construction workers, 15% of whom abuse prescription narcotics for work-related injuries, as well as the marginalized petty drug dealers from the urban slums and desperate Latino immigrants forced to accommodate the cartels. These people have little rights and are easily monitored, incarcerated, expelled and just written-off in one-line obituaries.

The narcotic-fueled genocide had grown out of a calculated corporate strategy meant to cull and subdue a huge population of potentially restive marginalized workers and their families, blaming the overdosing victims for their own ‘irresponsible’ choices, their reliance on prescription opiates, their lack of access to competent medical care, and their untimely deaths as though this were all a collective suicide as the great nation marches forward.

The higher the death toll among marginalized Americans, the greater the reliance on political distractions and racist deceptions. President Trump loudly blames street-level retail distributors, while ignoring the links between tax-exempt mega-billionaires who have profited from the shortened life-expectancies of addicted workers (scores of billions of dollars already saved in future pension and health care expenses) and the millions fired for addiction and denied jobless benefits and treatment. Trump has yet to even mention the actions of the legal pharma-medical industry that set this in motion.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party leaders denounce the worker-victims of addiction and their communities as ‘irresponsible and racist’, for having believed the populist rhetoric of candidate Trump. Trump’s most intense rural areas of support coincided with areas of the worst opioid addiction and suicide rates. Trump’s rival, Hillary Clinton wrote off scores of millions of vulnerable Americans as ‘deplorables’ and never once addressed the addiction crisis that grew exponentially during her husband’s administration.

Since the implementation of NAFTA during the 1990’s, scores of millions of American workers have been relegated to unstable, low paid jobs, deprived of health benefits and subject to grueling work, prone to physical and mental injuries. Workplace injuries set the stage for the prescription narcotic crisis. Even worse, today workers are constantly distracted by electronic gadgets at the workplace, with their orders from above arriving digitally. These highly profitable gadgets have created enormous distractions and contributed to workplace death and injuries. The plaything of choice for the masses, the I-phone, has added to the addiction crisis, by increasing the rate of injury. This mind-numbing distraction, produced abroad at incredible profit, has played an unexplored role in the increase in premature death in the US.

The corporate narcotic elites, like the ultra-cultured Sackler clan owners of Perdue Pharmaceuticals, and their allies in the finance sector, support the diverse ideological distractions fashioned by their politician pawns: Eager to please her donor-owners, Hillary Clinton and the Democrats blame the working class for their backwardness and genetic propensity to addiction and degradation. Meanwhile, President Trump and the Republicans blame ‘outside’ suppliers and distributors including Mexican narco-cartels, illegal immigrant traffickers, black urban street dealers and now point to overseas Chinese fentanyl labs – as though the entire crisis came from the outside. Trump’s approach flies in the face of the unquestionable source of most narcotic addiction in the US: Irresponsible prescribing of highly addicting legal narcotics.

No other industrialized country is experiencing this scale of addiction and pre-mature death. No other industrialized country relies on a private, for-profit, unregulated system of delivering medical care to its citizens. Only the US.

Both elite political parties avoid the basic issue of the long-term, large-scale structural imperatives underlying the transformation of the US work places. They refuse to address the marginalization of tens of millions of American workers and their families, made disposable by corporate economic and political decisions.

The US corporate elite are completely incapable of developing, let alone favoring, any policy that addresses the needs of millions of surplus office and factory workers and their family members replaced by new technology and ‘global’ economic policies. The American financial and political elite is not about to support an economic, political and cultural ‘GI’ bill to save the scores of millions shoved to the wayside in their rush to obscene wealth and power.

The unstated, but clearly implemented, ‘final solution’ is a Social Darwinian policy of active and passive neglect, the unleashing of profitable prescription narcotics into the population of vulnerable disposable workers, offering them a convenient, painless way out – the opioid solution to the over-population problem of redundant rural and small town ‘Helots’. The political elite’s willing complicity with Big Pharma, the medical profession, the financial oligarchs and the prison-industrial complex has transformed the country in many ways. Shortened lives and depopulation of rural and small town communities translates into lower demand for public services, such as schools, health care, pensions and housing. This is guaranteeing a greater concentration of national wealth in the hands of a tiny elite. The financial press has openly celebrated the projected decrease in pension liabilities as a result of the drop in worker life expectancy.

The ongoing mass genocide by opioids may have started to arouse popular discontent among working people who do not want to continue dying young and miserable! Social services and child protective services for the millions of orphaned or abandoned children of this crisis have been demanding real policies. Unfortunately, the usual platitudes and failed policies prevail. Drug education and ‘opioid addiction treatment’ programs (currently among the largest expense in some union health plans) are pointless Band-Aids when confronted by the larger policy decisions fuelling this crisis. Nevertheless, thousands of health care professionals are beginning to resist corporate pressure to prescribe cheap opioids – and fight for more expensive, but less dangerous, alternative for addressing their patients’ pain. Even if all medical providers stopped over-prescribing narcotics today, there are still millions of addicts already created by past practice, who seek the most deadly street drugs, like fentanyl, to feed their addiction.

Politicians now publicly denounce ‘Big Pharma’, while privately winking at the lobbyists and accepting millions from their ‘donor-owners’.

Public critics in the corporate media are quick to condemn the workers’ susceptibility to narcotic addiction but not the underlying causative imperatives of global capitalism.

Mainstream academics celebrate corporate technological advances with occasional neo-Malthusian warnings about the dangers of millions of redundant workers, while ignoring the profit-driven role of narcotics in reducing the social threat of excess workers!

Finally the role of an elite and respected profession must be re-evaluated in a historic context: In the 1930’s German doctors helped develop an ideology of ‘racial hygiene’ and a technology to demonize and eliminate millions of human beings deemed redundant and inferior, through overwork in slave camps, starvation and active genocide – serving the ambitions of Nazi expansionism and deriving significant profit for select individuals and corporations. US physicians and the broader medical community have less consciously assisted in the ongoing ‘culling of the herd’ of American laborers and rural residents rendered superfluous and undesirable by the decisions of a global oligarchy increasingly unwilling to share public wealth with its masses. There are similarities.

Once prosperous, industrial cities and towns, as well as rural villages, in the US have seen marked declines in populations and a premature death crisis among those who remain.

This must be reversed.

A Tale of Two Americas: Where the Rich Get Richer and the Poor Go to Jail

Posted on January 8, 2018 by Reid Mukai

By John W. Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“It is said that no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones.” ― Nelson Mandela

This is the tale of two Americas, where the rich get richer and the poor go to jail.

Aided and abetted by the likes of Attorney General Jeff Sessions—a man who wouldn’t recognize the Constitution if it smacked him in the face—the American dream has become the American scheme: the rich are getting richer and more powerful, while anyone who doesn’t belong to the power elite gets poorer and more powerless to do anything about the nation’s steady slide towards fascism, authoritarianism and a profit-driven police state.

Not content to merely pander to law enforcement and add to its military largesse with weaponry and equipment designed for war, Sessions has made a concerted effort to expand the police state’s power to search, strip, seize, raid, steal from, arrest and jail Americans for any infraction, no matter how insignificant.

Now Sessions has given state courts the green light to resume their practice of jailing individuals who are unable to pay the hefty fines imposed by the American police state. In doing so, Sessions has once again shown himself to be not only a shill for the Deep State but an enemy of the people.

First, some background on debtors’ prisons, which jail people who cannot afford to pay the exorbitant fines imposed on them by courts and other government agencies.

Congress banned debtors’ prisons in 1833.

In 1983, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the practice to be unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection clause.

“Despite prior attempts on the federal level and across the country to prevent the profound injustice of locking people in cages because they are too poor to pay a debt,” concludes The Atlantic, “the practice persists every day.”

Where things began to change, according to The Marshall Project, was with the rise of “mass incarceration.” As attorney Alec Karakatsanis stated, “In the 1970s and 1980s, we started to imprison more people for lesser crimes. In the process, we were lowering our standards for what constituted an offense deserving of imprisonment, and, more broadly, we were losing our sense of how serious, how truly serious, it is to incarcerate. If we can imprison for possession of marijuana, why can’t we imprison for not paying back a loan?”

By the late 1980s and early 90s, “there was a dramatic increase in the number of statutes listing a prison term as a possible sentence for failure to repay criminal-justice debt.” During the 2000s, the courts started cashing in big-time “by using the threat of jail time – established in those statutes – to squeeze cash out of small-time debtors.”

Fast-forward to the present day which finds us saddled with not only profit-driven private prisons and a prison-industrial complex but also, as investigative reporter Eli Hager notes, “the birth of a new brand of ‘offender-funded’ justice [which] has created a market for private probation companies. Purporting to save taxpayer dollars, these outfits force the offenders themselves to foot the bill for parole, reentry, drug rehab, electronic monitoring, and other services (some of which are not even assigned by a judge). When the offenders can’t pay for all of this, they may be jailed – even if they have already served their time for the offense.”

Follow the money trail. It always points the way.

Whether you’re talking about the government’s war on terrorism, the war on drugs, or some other phantom danger dreamed up by enterprising bureaucrats, there is always a profit-incentive involved.

The same goes for the war on crime.

At one time, the American penal system operated under the idea that dangerous criminals needed to be put under lock and key in order to protect society. Today, the flawed yet retributive American “system of justice” is being replaced by an even more flawed and insidious form of mass punishment based upon profit and expediency.

Sessions’ latest gambit plays right into the hands of those who make a profit by jailing Americans.

Sharnalle Mitchell was one such victim of a system for whom the plight of the average American is measured in dollars and cents. As the Harvard Law Review recounts:

On January 26, 2014, Sharnalle Mitchell was with her children in Montgomery, Alabama when police showed up at her home to arrest her. Mitchell was not accused of a crime. Instead, the police came to her home because she had not fully paid a traffic ticket from 2010. The single mother was handcuffed in front of her children (aged one and four) and taken to jail. She was ordered to either pay $2,800 or sit her debt out in jail at a rate of fifty dollars a day for fifty-nine days. Unable to pay, Mitchell wrote out the numbers one to fifty-eight on the back of her court documents and began counting days.

This is not justice.

This is yet another example of how greed and profit-incentives have not only perverted policing in America but have corrupted the entire criminal justice system.

As the Harvard Law Review concludes:

[A]s policing becomes a way to generate revenue, police start to “see the people they’re supposed to be serving not as citizens with rights, but as potential sources of revenue, as lawbreakers to be caught.” This approach creates a fugitive underclass on the run from police not to hide illicit activity but to avoid arrest for debt or seizure of their purportedly suspicious assets… In turn, communities … begin to see police not as trusted partners but as an occupying army constantly harassing them to raise money to pay their salaries and buy new weapons. This needs to end.

Unfortunately, the criminal justice system has been operating as a for-profit enterprise for years now, covertly padding its pockets through penalty-riddled programs aimed at maximizing revenue rather than ensuring public safety.

All of those seemingly hard-working police officers and code-enforcement officers and truancy officers and traffic cops handing out ticket after ticket after ticket: they’re not working to make your communities safer—they’ve got quotas to fill.

Same goes for the courts, which have come to rely on fines, fees and exorbitant late penalties as a means of increased revenue. The power of these courts, magnified in recent years through the introduction of specialty courts beyond your run-of-the-mill traffic court (drug court, homeless court, veterans court, mental health court, criminal court, teen court, gambling court, prostitution court, community court, domestic violence court, truancy court), is “reshaping the American legal system—with little oversight,” concludes the Boston Globe.

And for those who can’t afford to pay the court fines heaped on top of the penalties ($302 for jaywalking, $531 for an overgrown yard, or $120 for arriving a few minutes late to court), there’s probation (managed by profit-run companies that tack on their own fees, which are often more than double the original fine) or jail time (run by profit-run companies that charge inmates for everything from food and housing to phone calls at outrageous markups), which only adds to the financial burdens of those already unable to navigate a costly carceral state.

“When bail is set unreasonably high, people are behind bars only because they are poor,” stated former Attorney General Loretta Lynch. “Not because they’re a danger or a flight risk — only because they are poor. They don’t have money to get out of jail, and they certainly don’t have money to flee anywhere. Other people who do have the means can avoid the system, setting inequality in place from the beginning.”

In “Policing and Profit,” the Harvard Law Review documents in chilling detail the criminal justice system’s efforts to turn a profit at the expense of those who can least afford to pay, thereby entrapping them in a cycle of debt that starts with one minor infraction:

In the late 1980s, Missouri became one of the first states to let private companies purchase the probation systems of local governments. In these arrangements, municipalities impose debt on individuals through criminal proceedings and then sell this debt to private businesses, which pad the debt with fees and interest. This debt can stem from fines for offenses as minor as rolling through a stop sign or failing to enroll in the right trash collection service. In Ferguson, residents who fall behind on fines and don’t appear in court after a warrant is issued for their arrest (or arrive in court after the courtroom doors close, which often happens just five minutes after the session is set to start for the day) are charged an additional $120 to $130 fine, along with a $50 fee for a new arrest warrant and 56 cents for each mile that police drive to serve it. Once arrested, everyone who can’t pay their fines or post bail (which is usually set to equal the amount of their total debt) is imprisoned until the next court session (which happens three days a month). Anyone who is imprisoned is charged $30 to $60 a night by the jail. If an arrestee owes fines in more than one of St. Louis County’s eighty-one municipal courts, they are passed from one jail to another to await hearings in each town.

Ask yourself this: at a time when crime rates across the country remain at historic lows (despite Sessions’ inaccurate claims to the contrary), why does the prison population continue to grow?

The prison population continues to grow because of a glut of laws that criminalize activities that should certainly not be outlawed, let alone result in jail time. Overcriminalization continues to plague the country because of legislators who work hand-in-hand with corporations to adopt laws that favor the corporate balance sheet. And when it comes to incarceration, the corporate balance sheet weighs heavily in favor of locking up more individuals in government-run and private prisons.

As Time reports, “The companies that build and run private prisons have a financial interest in the continued growth of mass incarceration. That is why the two major players in this game—the Corrections Corporation of America and the GEO Group—invest heavily in lobbying for punitive criminal justice policies and make hefty contributions to political campaigns that will increase reliance on prisons.”

It’s a vicious cycle that grows more vicious by the day.

According to The Atlantic, “America spends $80 billion a year incarcerating 2.4 million people.” But the costs don’t end there. “When someone goes to prison, nearly 65 percent of families are suddenly unable to pay for basic needs such as food and housing… About 70 percent of those families are caring for children under the age of 18.”

Then there are the marked-up costs levied against the inmate by private companies that provide services and products to government prisons. Cereal and soup for five times the market price. $15 for a short phone call.

The Center for Public Integrity found that “prison bankers collect tens of millions of dollars every year from inmates’ families in fees for basic financial services. To make payments, some forego medical care, skip utility bills and limit contact with their imprisoned relatives… Inmates earn as little as 12 cents per hour in many places, wages that have not increased for decades. The prices they pay for goods to meet their basic needs continue to increase.”

Worse, as human rights attorney Jessica Jackson points out, “the fines and fees system has turned local governments into the equivalent of predatory lenders.” For instance, Jackson cites:

Washington state charges a 12% interest rate on all its criminal debt. Florida adds a 40% fee that goes into the pockets of a private collections agency. In California, penalties can raise a $100 fine to $490, or $815 if the initial deadline is missed. A $500 traffic ticket can actually cost $1,953, even if it is paid on time. And so we are left with countless tales of lives ruined—people living paycheck to paycheck who cannot afford a minor fine, and so face ballooning penalties, increasing amounts owed, a suspended license, jail time, and being fired from their jobs or unable to find work.

This isn’t the American Dream I grew up believing in.

This certainly isn’t the American Dream my parents and grandparents and those before them worked and fought and sacrificed to achieve.

This is a cold, calculated system of profit and losses.

Now you can shrug all of this away as a consequence of committing a crime, but that just doesn’t cut it. Especially not when average Americans are being jailed for such so-called crimes as eating SpaghettiOs (police mistook them for methamphetamine), not wearing a seatbelt, littering, jaywalking, having homemade soap (police mistook the soap for cocaine), profanity, spitting on the ground, farting, loitering and twerking.

There is no room in the American police state for self-righteousness. Not when we are all guilty until proven innocent.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, this is no longer a government “of the people, by the people, for the people.”

It is fast becoming a government “of the rich, by the elite, for the corporations,” and its rise to power is predicated on shackling the American taxpayer to a debtors’ prison guarded by a phalanx of politicians, bureaucrats and militarized police with no hope of parole and no chance for escape.

Carl Sagan’s Thoughts On The War on Drugs

Posted on November 9, 2017 by Reid Mukai

cS8BmAg

Since today marks the birthday of the late Carl Sagan, we can remember a lesser-known aspect of his greatness by reading (or re-reading) the following 1969 essay he wrote under the pseudonym “Mr. X” published in 1971 in Lester Grinspoon’s “Marihuana Reconsidered”:

It all began about ten years ago. I had reached a considerably more relaxed period in my life – a time when I had come to feel that there was more to living than science, a time of awakening of my social consciousness and amiability, a time when I was open to new experiences. I had become friendly with a group of people who occasionally smoked cannabis, irregularly, but with evident pleasure. Initially I was unwilling to partake, but the apparent euphoria that cannabis produced and the fact that there was no physiological addiction to the plant eventually persuaded me to try. My initial experiences were entirely disappointing; there was no effect at all, and I began to entertain a variety of hypotheses about cannabis being a placebo which worked by expectation and hyperventilation rather than by chemistry. After about five or six unsuccessful attempts, however, it happened. I was lying on my back in a friend’s living room idly examining the pattern of shadows on the ceiling cast by a potted plant (not cannabis!). I suddenly realized that I was examining an intricately detailed miniature Volkswagen, distinctly outlined by the shadows. I was very skeptical at this perception, and tried to find inconsistencies between Volkswagens and what I viewed on the ceiling. But it was all there, down to hubcaps, license plate, chrome, and even the small handle used for opening the trunk. When I closed my eyes, I was stunned to find that there was a movie going on the inside of my eyelids. Flash . . . a simple country scene with red farmhouse, a blue sky, white clouds, yellow path meandering over green hills to the horizon. . . Flash . . . same scene, orange house, brown sky, red clouds, yellow path, violet fields . . . Flash . . . Flash . . . Flash. The flashes came about once a heartbeat. Each flash brought the same simple scene into view, but each time with a different set of colors . . . exquisitely deep hues, and astonishingly harmonious in their juxtaposition. Since then I have smoked occasionally and enjoyed it thoroughly. It amplifies torpid sensibilities and produces what to me are even more interesting effects, as I will explain shortly.

I can remember another early visual experience with cannabis, in which I viewed a candle flame and discovered in the heart of the flame, standing with magnificent indifference, the black-hatted and -cloaked Spanish gentleman who appears on the label of the Sandeman sherry bottle. Looking at fires when high, by the way, especially through one of those prism kaleidoscopes which image their surroundings, is an extraordinarily moving and beautiful experience.

I want to explain that at no time did I think these things ‘really’ were out there. I knew there was no Volkswagen on the ceiling and there was no Sandeman salamander man in the flame. I don’t feel any contradiction in these experiences. There’s a part of me making, creating the perceptions which in everyday life would be bizarre; there’s another part of me which is a kind of observer. About half of the pleasure comes from the observer-part appreciating the work of the creator-part. I smile, or sometimes even laugh out loud at the pictures on the insides of my eyelids. In this sense, I suppose cannabis is psychotomimetic, but I find none of the panic or terror that accompanies some psychoses. Possibly this is because I know it’s my own trip, and that I can come down rapidly any time I want to.

While my early perceptions were all visual, and curiously lacking in images of human beings, both of these items have changed over the intervening years. I find that today a single joint is enough to get me high. I test whether I’m high by closing my eyes and looking for the flashes. They come long before there are any alterations in my visual or other perceptions. I would guess this is a signal-to-noise problem, the visual noise level being very low with my eyes closed. Another interesting information-theoretical aspects is the prevalence – at least in my flashed images – of cartoons: just the outlines of figures, caricatures, not photographs. I think this is simply a matter of information compression; it would be impossible to grasp the total content of an image with the information content of an ordinary photograph, say 108 bits, in the fraction of a second which a flash occupies. And the flash experience is designed, if I may use that word, for instant appreciation. The artist and viewer are one. This is not to say that the images are not marvelously detailed and complex. I recently had an image in which two people were talking, and the words they were saying would form and disappear in yellow above their heads, at about a sentence per heartbeat. In this way it was possible to follow the conversation. At the same time an occasional word would appear in red letters among the yellows above their heads, perfectly in context with the conversation; but if one remembered these red words, they would enunciate a quite different set of statements, penetratingly critical of the conversation. The entire image set which I’ve outlined here, with I would say at least 100 yellow words and something like 10 red words, occurred in something under a minute.

The cannabis experience has greatly improved my appreciation for art, a subject which I had never much appreciated before. The understanding of the intent of the artist which I can achieve when high sometimes carries over to when I’m down. This is one of many human frontiers which cannabis has helped me traverse. There also have been some art-related insights – I don’t know whether they are true or false, but they were fun to formulate. For example, I have spent some time high looking at the work of the Belgian surrealist Yves Tanguey. Some years later, I emerged from a long swim in the Caribbean and sank exhausted onto a beach formed from the erosion of a nearby coral reef. In idly examining the arcuate pastel-colored coral fragments which made up the beach, I saw before me a vast Tanguey painting. Perhaps Tanguey visited such a beach in his childhood.

A very similar improvement in my appreciation of music has occurred with cannabis. For the first time I have been able to hear the separate parts of a three-part harmony and the richness of the counterpoint. I have since discovered that professional musicians can quite easily keep many separate parts going simultaneously in their heads, but this was the first time for me. Again, the learning experience when high has at least to some extent carried over when I’m down. The enjoyment of food is amplified; tastes and aromas emerge that for some reason we ordinarily seem to be too busy to notice. I am able to give my full attention to the sensation. A potato will have a texture, a body, and taste like that of other potatoes, but much more so. Cannabis also enhances the enjoyment of sex – on the one hand it gives an exquisite sensitivity, but on the other hand it postpones orgasm: in part by distracting me with the profusion of image passing before my eyes. The actual duration of orgasm seems to lengthen greatly, but this may be the usual experience of time expansion which comes with cannabis smoking.

I do not consider myself a religious person in the usual sense, but there is a religious aspect to some highs. The heightened sensitivity in all areas gives me a feeling of communion with my surroundings, both animate and inanimate. Sometimes a kind of existential perception of the absurd comes over me and I see with awful certainty the hypocrisies and posturing of myself and my fellow men. And at other times, there is a different sense of the absurd, a playful and whimsical awareness. Both of these senses of the absurd can be communicated, and some of the most rewarding highs I’ve had have been in sharing talk and perceptions and humor. Cannabis brings us an awareness that we spend a lifetime being trained to overlook and forget and put out of our minds. A sense of what the world is really like can be maddening; cannabis has brought me some feelings for what it is like to be crazy, and how we use that word ‘crazy’ to avoid thinking about things that are too painful for us. In the Soviet Union political dissidents are routinely placed in insane asylums. The same kind of thing, a little more subtle perhaps, occurs here: ‘did you hear what Lenny Bruce said yesterday? He must be crazy.’ When high on cannabis I discovered that there’s somebody inside in those people we call mad.

When I’m high I can penetrate into the past, recall childhood memories, friends, relatives, playthings, streets, smells, sounds, and tastes from a vanished era. I can reconstruct the actual occurrences in childhood events only half understood at the time. Many but not all my cannabis trips have somewhere in them a symbolism significant to me which I won’t attempt to describe here, a kind of mandala embossed on the high. Free-associating to this mandala, both visually and as plays on words, has produced a very rich array of insights.

There is a myth about such highs: the user has an illusion of great insight, but it does not survive scrutiny in the morning. I am convinced that this is an error, and that the devastating insights achieved when high are real insights; the main problem is putting these insights in a form acceptable to the quite different self that we are when we’re down the next day. Some of the hardest work I’ve ever done has been to put such insights down on tape or in writing. The problem is that ten even more interesting ideas or images have to be lost in the effort of recording one. It is easy to understand why someone might think it’s a waste of effort going to all that trouble to set the thought down, a kind of intrusion of the Protestant Ethic. But since I live almost all my life down I’ve made the effort – successfully, I think. Incidentally, I find that reasonably good insights can be remembered the next day, but only if some effort has been made to set them down another way. If I write the insight down or tell it to someone, then I can remember it with no assistance the following morning; but if I merely say to myself that I must make an effort to remember, I never do.

I find that most of the insights I achieve when high are into social issues, an area of creative scholarship very different from the one I am generally known for. I can remember one occasion, taking a shower with my wife while high, in which I had an idea on the origins and invalidities of racism in terms of gaussian distribution curves. It was a point obvious in a way, but rarely talked about. I drew the curves in soap on the shower wall, and went to write the idea down. One idea led to another, and at the end of about an hour of extremely hard work I found I had written eleven short essays on a wide range of social, political, philosophical, and human biological topics. Because of problems of space, I can’t go into the details of these essays, but from all external signs, such as public reactions and expert commentary, they seem to contain valid insights. I have used them in university commencement addresses, public lectures, and in my books.

But let me try to at least give the flavor of such an insight and its accompaniments. One night, high on cannabis, I was delving into my childhood, a little self-analysis, and making what seemed to me to be very good progress. I then paused and thought how extraordinary it was that Sigmund Freud, with no assistance from drugs, had been able to achieve his own remarkable self-analysis. But then it hit me like a thunderclap that this was wrong, that Freud had spent the decade before his self-analysis as an experimenter with and a proselytizer for cocaine; and it seemed to me very apparent that the genuine psychological insights that Freud brought to the world were at least in part derived from his drug experience. I have no idea whether this is in fact true, or whether the historians of Freud would agree with this interpretation, or even if such an idea has been published in the past, but it is an interesting hypothesis and one which passes first scrutiny in the world of the downs.

I can remember the night that I suddenly realized what it was like to be crazy, or nights when my feelings and perceptions were of a religious nature. I had a very accurate sense that these feelings and perceptions, written down casually, would not stand the usual critical scrutiny that is my stock in trade as a scientist. If I find in the morning a message from myself the night before informing me that there is a world around us which we barely sense, or that we can become one with the universe, or even that certain politicians are desperately frightened men, I may tend to disbelieve; but when I’m high I know about this disbelief. And so I have a tape in which I exhort myself to take such remarks seriously. I say ‘Listen closely, you sonofabitch of the morning! This stuff is real!’ I try to show that my mind is working clearly; I recall the name of a high school acquaintance I have not thought of in thirty years; I describe the color, typography, and format of a book in another room and these memories do pass critical scrutiny in the morning. I am convinced that there are genuine and valid levels of perception available with cannabis (and probably with other drugs) which are, through the defects of our society and our educational system, unavailable to us without such drugs. Such a remark applies not only to self-awareness and to intellectual pursuits, but also to perceptions of real people, a vastly enhanced sensitivity to facial expression, intonations, and choice of words which sometimes yields a rapport so close it’s as if two people are reading each other’s minds.

Cannabis enables nonmusicians to know a little about what it is like to be a musician, and nonartists to grasp the joys of art. But I am neither an artist nor a musician. What about my own scientific work? While I find a curious disinclination to think of my professional concerns when high – the attractive intellectual adventures always seem to be in every other area – I have made a conscious effort to think of a few particularly difficult current problems in my field when high. It works, at least to a degree. I find I can bring to bear, for example, a range of relevant experimental facts which appear to be mutually inconsistent. So far, so good. At least the recall works. Then in trying to conceive of a way of reconciling the disparate facts, I was able to come up with a very bizarre possibility, one that I’m sure I would never have thought of down. I’ve written a paper which mentions this idea in passing. I think it’s very unlikely to be true, but it has consequences which are experimentally testable, which is the hallmark of an acceptable theory.

I have mentioned that in the cannabis experience there is a part of your mind that remains a dispassionate observer, who is able to take you down in a hurry if need be. I have on a few occasions been forced to drive in heavy traffic when high. I’ve negotiated it with no difficult at all, though I did have some thoughts about the marvelous cherry-red color of traffic lights. I find that after the drive I’m not high at all. There are no flashes on the insides of my eyelids. If you’re high and your child is calling, you can respond about as capably as you usually do. I don’t advocate driving when high on cannabis, but I can tell you from personal experience that it certainly can be done. My high is always reflective, peaceable, intellectually exciting, and sociable, unlike most alcohol highs, and there is never a hangover. Through the years I find that slightly smaller amounts of cannabis suffice to produce the same degree of high, and in one movie theater recently I found I could get high just by inhaling the cannabis smoke which permeated the theater.

There is a very nice self-titering aspect to cannabis. Each puff is a very small dose; the time lag between inhaling a puff and sensing its effect is small; and there is no desire for more after the high is there. I think the ratio, R, of the time to sense the dose taken to the time required to take an excessive dose is an important quantity. R is very large for LSD (which I’ve never taken) and reasonably short for cannabis. Small values of R should be one measure of the safety of psychedelic drugs. When cannabis is legalized, I hope to see this ratio as one of he parameters printed on the pack. I hope that time isn’t too distant; the illegality of cannabis is outrageous, an impediment to full utilization of a drug which helps produce the serenity and insight, sensitivity and fellowship so desperately needed in this increasingly mad and dangerous world.

What Country Is This? Forced Blood Draws, Cavity Searches and Colonoscopies

Posted on September 15, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By John W. Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“The Fourth Amendment was designed to stand between us and arbitrary governmental authority. For all practical purposes, that shield has been shattered, leaving our liberty and personal integrity subject to the whim of every cop on the beat, trooper on the highway and jail official.”—Herman Schwartz, The Nation

Our freedoms—especially the Fourth Amendment—are being choked out by a prevailing view among government bureaucrats that they have the right to search, seize, strip, scan, shoot, spy on, probe, pat down, taser, and arrest any individual at any time and for the slightest provocation.

Forced cavity searches, forced colonoscopies, forced blood draws, forced breath-alcohol tests, forced DNA extractions, forced eye scans, forced inclusion in biometric databases: these are just a few ways in which Americans are being forced to accept that we have no control over our bodies, our lives and our property, especially when it comes to interactions with the government.

Worse, on a daily basis, Americans are being made to relinquish the most intimate details of who we are—our biological makeup, our genetic blueprints, and our biometrics (facial characteristics and structure, fingerprints, iris scans, etc.)—in order to clear the nearly insurmountable hurdle that increasingly defines life in the United States: we are now guilty until proven innocent.

Such is life in America today that individuals are being threatened with arrest and carted off to jail for the least hint of noncompliance, homes are being raided by police under the slightest pretext, property is being seized on the slightest hint of suspicious activity, and roadside police stops have devolved into government-sanctioned exercises in humiliation and degradation with a complete disregard for privacy and human dignity.

Consider, for example, what happened to Utah nurse Alex Wubbels after a police detective demanded to take blood from a badly injured, unconscious patient without a warrant.

Wubbels refused, citing hospital policy that requires police to either have a warrant or permission from the patient in order to draw blood. The detective had neither. Irate, the detective threatened to have Wubbels arrested if she didn’t comply. Backed up by her supervisors, Wubbels respectfully stood her ground only to be roughly grabbed, shoved out of the hospital, handcuffed and forced into an unmarked car while hospital police looked on and failed to intervene (take a look at the police body camera footage, which has gone viral, and see for yourself).

Michael Chorosky didn’t have an advocate like Wubbels to stand guard over his Fourth Amendment rights. Chorosky was surrounded by police, strapped to a gurney and then had his blood forcibly drawn after refusing to submit to a breathalyzer test. “What country is this? What country is this?” cried Chorosky during the forced blood draw.

What country is this indeed?

Unfortunately, forced blood draws are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the indignities and abuses being heaped on Americans in the so-called name of “national security.”

Forced cavity searches, forced colonoscopies and forced roadside strip searches are also becoming par for the course in an age in which police are taught to have no respect for the citizenry’s bodily integrity whether or not a person has done anything wrong.

For example, 21-year-old Charnesia Corley was allegedly being pulled over by Texas police in 2015 for “rolling” through a stop sign. Claiming they smelled marijuana, police handcuffed Corley, placed her in the back of the police cruiser, and then searched her car for almost an hour. No drugs were found in the car.

As the Houston Chronicle reported:

Returning to his car where Corley was held, the deputy again said he smelled marijuana and called in a female deputy to conduct a cavity search. When the female deputy arrived, she told Corley to pull her pants down, but Corley protested because she was cuffed and had no underwear on. The deputy ordered Corley to bend over, pulled down her pants and began to search her. Then…Corley stood up and protested, so the deputy threw her to the ground and restrained her while another female was called in to assist. When backup arrived, each deputy held one of Corley’s legs apart to conduct the probe.

The cavity search lasted 11 minutes. This practice is referred to as “rape by cop.”

Although Corley was charged with resisting arrest and with possession of 0.2 grams of marijuana, those charges were subsequently dropped.

David Eckert was forced to undergo an anal cavity search, three enemas, and a colonoscopy after allegedly failing to yield to a stop sign at a Wal-Mart parking lot. Cops justified the searches on the grounds that they suspected Eckert was carrying drugs because his “posture [was] erect” and “he kept his legs together.” No drugs were found.

During a routine traffic stop, Leila Tarantino was subjected to two roadside strip searches in plain view of passing traffic, while her two children—ages 1 and 4—waited inside her car. During the second strip search, presumably in an effort to ferret out drugs, a female officer “forcibly removed” a tampon from Tarantino. No contraband or anything illegal was found.

Thirty-eight-year-old Angel Dobbs and her 24-year-old niece, Ashley, were pulled over by a Texas state trooper on July 13, 2012, allegedly for flicking cigarette butts out of the car window. Insisting that he smelled marijuana, the trooper proceeded to interrogate them and search the car. Despite the fact that both women denied smoking or possessing any marijuana, the police officer then called in a female trooper, who carried out a roadside cavity search, sticking her fingers into the older woman’s anus and vagina, then performing the same procedure on the younger woman, wearing the same pair of gloves. No marijuana was found.

Sixty-nine-year-old Gerald Dickson was handcuffed and taken into custody (although not arrested or charged with any crime) after giving a ride to a neighbor’s son, whom police suspected of being a drug dealer. Despite Dickson’s insistence that the bulge under his shirt was the result of a botched hernia surgery, police ordered Dickson to “strip off his clothes, bend over and expose all of his private parts. No drugs or contraband were found.”

Meanwhile, four Milwaukee police officers were charged with carrying out rectal searches of suspects on the street and in police district stations over the course of several years. One of the officers was accused of conducting searches of men’s anal and scrotal areas, often inserting his fingers into their rectums and leaving some of his victims with bleeding rectums.

It’s gotten so bad that you don’t even have to be suspected of possessing drugs to be subjected to a strip search.

A North Carolina public school allegedly strip-searched a 10-year-old boy in search of a $20 bill lost by another student, despite the fact that the boy, J.C., twice told school officials he did not have the missing money. The assistant principal reportedly ordered the fifth grader to disrobe down to his underwear and subjected him to an aggressive strip-search that included rimming the edge of his underwear. The missing money was later found in the school cafeteria.

Suspecting that Georgia Tech alum Mary Clayton might have been attempting to smuggle a Chick-Fil-A sandwich into the football stadium, a Georgia Tech police officer allegedly subjected the season ticket-holder to a strip search that included a close examination of her underwear and bra. No contraband chicken was found.

What these incidents show is that while forced searches may span a broad spectrum of methods and scenarios, the common denominator remains the same: a complete disregard for the rights of the citizenry.

In fact, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Florence v. Burlison, any person who is arrested and processed at a jail house, regardless of the severity of his or her offense (i.e., they can be guilty of nothing more than a minor traffic offense), can be subjected to a strip search by police or jail officials without reasonable suspicion that the arrestee is carrying a weapon or contraband.

Examples of minor infractions which have resulted in strip searches include: individuals arrested for driving with a noisy muffler, driving with an inoperable headlight, failing to use a turn signal, riding a bicycle without an audible bell, making an improper left turn, and engaging in an antiwar demonstration (the individual searched was a nun, a Sister of Divine Providence for 50 years).

Police have also carried out strip searches for passing a bad check, dog leash violations, filing a false police report, failing to produce a driver’s license after making an illegal left turn, having outstanding parking tickets, and public intoxication. A failure to pay child support can also result in a strip search.

As technology advances, these searches are becoming more invasive on a cellular level, as well.

For instance, close to 600 motorists leaving Penn State University one Friday night were stopped by police and, without their knowledge or consent, subjected to a breathalyzer test using flashlights that can detect the presence of alcohol on a person’s breath. These passive alcohol sensors are being hailed as a new weapon in the fight against DUIs. (Those who refuse to knowingly submit to a breathalyzer test are being subjected to forced blood draws. Thirty states presently allow police to do forced blood draws on drivers as part of a nationwide “No Refusal” initiative funded by the federal government. Not even court rulings declaring such practices to be unconstitutional in the absence of a warrant have slowed down the process. Now police simply keep a magistrate on call to rubber stamp the procedure over the phone.)

The National Highway Safety Administration, the same government agency that funds the “No Refusal” DUI checkpoints and forcible blood draws, is also funding nationwide roadblocks aimed at getting drivers to “voluntarily” provide police with DNA derived from saliva and blood samples, reportedly to study inebriation patterns. In at least 28 states, there’s nothing voluntary about having one’s DNA collected by police in instances where you’ve been arrested, whether or not you’re actually convicted of a crime. All of this DNA data is being fed to the federal government.

Airline passengers, already subjected to virtual strip searches, are now being scrutinized even more closely, with the Customs and Border Protection agency tasking airport officials with monitoring the bowel movements of passengers suspected of ingesting drugs. They even have a special hi-tech toilet designed to filter through a person’s fecal waste.

Iris scans, an essential part of the U.S. military’s boots-on-the-ground approach to keeping track of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, are becoming a de facto method of building the government’s already mammoth biometrics database. Funded by the Dept. of Justice, along with other federal agencies, the iris scan technology is being incorporated into police precincts, jails, immigration checkpoints, airports and even schools. School officials—from elementary to college—have begun using iris scans in place of traditional ID cards. In some parts of the country, parents wanting to pick their kids up from school have to first submit to an iris scan.

As for those endless pictures everyone so cheerfully uploads to Facebook (which has the largest facial recognition database in the world) or anywhere else on the internet, they’re all being accessed by the police, filtered with facial recognition software, uploaded into the government’s mammoth biometrics database and cross-checked against its criminal files. With good reason, civil libertarians fear these databases could “someday be used for monitoring political rallies, sporting events or even busy downtown areas.”

While the Fourth Amendment was created to prevent government officials from searching an individual’s person or property without a warrant and probable cause—evidence that some kind of criminal activity was afoot—the founders could scarcely have imagined a world in which we needed protection against widespread government breaches of our privacy, including on a cellular level.

Yet that’s exactly what we are lacking and what we so desperately need.

Unfortunately, the indignities being heaped upon us by the architects and agents of the American police state—whether or not we’ve done anything wrong—are just a foretaste of what is to come.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the government doesn’t need to tie you to a gurney and forcibly take your blood or strip you naked by the side of the road in order to render you helpless. It has other methods—less subtle perhaps but equally humiliating, devastating and mind-altering—of stripping you of your independence, robbing you of your dignity, and undermining your rights.

With every court ruling that allows the government to operate above the rule of law, every piece of legislation that limits our freedoms, and every act of government wrongdoing that goes unpunished, we’re slowly being conditioned to a society in which we have little real control over our bodies or our lives.

Profit Maximization is Easy: Invest in Violence

Posted on September 8, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Robert J. Burrowes

For those of us committed to systematically reducing and, one day, ending human violence, it is vital to understand what is causing and driving it so that effective strategies can be developed for dealing with violence in its myriad contexts. For an understanding of the fundamental cause of violence, see ‘Why Violence?’

However, while we can tackle violence at its source by each of us making and implementing ‘My Promise to Children’, the widespread violence in our world is driven by just one factor: fear or, more accurately, terror. And I am not talking about jihadist terror or even the terror caused by US warmaking. Let me explain, starting from the beginning.

The person who is fearless has no use for violence and has no trouble achieving their goals, including their own defence, without it. But fearlessness is a state that few humans would claim. Hence violence is rampant.

Moreover, once someone is afraid, they will be less likely to perceive the truth behind the delusions with which they are presented. They will also be less able to access and rely on other mental functions, such as conscience and intelligence, to decide their course of action in any context. Worse still, the range of their possible responses to perceived threats will be extremely limited. And they will be more easily mobilised to support or even participate in violence, in the delusional belief that this will make them safe.

For reasons such as these, it is useful for political and corporate elites to keep us in a state of fear: social control is much easier in this context. But so is profit maximization. And the most profitable enterprise on the planet is violence. In essence then: more violence leads to more fear making it easier to gain greater social control to inflict more violence…. And starting early, by terrorizing children, is the most efficient way to initiate and maintain this cycle. See ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’.

So, for example, if you think the massive number of police killings of innocent civilians in the United States – see ‘Killed by Police’ and ‘The Counted: People killed by police in the US’ – is a problem, you are not considering it from the perspective of maintaining elite social control and maximizing corporate profit. Police killings of innocent civilians is just one (necessary) part of the formula for maintaining control and maximising profit.

This is because if you want to make a lot of money in this world, then killing or exploiting fellow human beings and destroying the natural world are the three most lucrative business enterprises on the planet. And we are now very good at it, as the record shows, with the planetary death toll from violence and exploitation now well over 100,000 human beings each day, 200 species driven to extinction each day and ecological destruction so advanced that the end of all life (not just human life) on Earth is postulated to occur within decades, if not sooner, depending on the scenario. See, for example, ‘The End of Being: Abrupt Climate Change One of Many Ecological Crises Threatening to Collapse the Biosphere’.

So what forms does this violence take? Here is a daily accounting.

Corporate capitalist control of national economies, held in place by military violence, kills vast numbers of people (nearly one million each week) by starving them to death in Africa, Asia and Central/South America. This is because this ‘economic’ system is designed and managed to allocate resources for military weapons and corporate profits for the wealthy, instead of resources for living.

Wars kill, wound and incapacitate a substantial number of civilians, mostly women and children, as do genocidal assaults, on a daily basis, in countries all over the planet. Wars also kill some soldiers and mercenaries.

Apart from those people we kill every day, we sell many women and children into sexual slavery, we kidnap children to terrorise them into becoming child soldiers and force men, women and children to work as slave labourers, in horrific conditions, in fields and factories (and buy the cheap products of their exploited labour as our latest ‘bargain’).

We condemn millions of people to live in poverty, homelessness and misery, even in industrialized countries where the refugees of western-instigated wars and climate-destroying policies are often treated with contempt. We cause many children to be born with grotesque genetic deformities because we use horrific weapons, like those with depleted uranium, on their parents. We also inflict violence on women and children in many other forms, ranging from ‘ordinary’ domestic violence to genital mutilation.

We ensnare and imprison vast numbers of people in the police-legal-prison complex. See ‘The Rule of Law: Unjust and Violent’. We pay the pharmaceutical industry and its handmaiden, psychiatry, to destroy our minds with drugs and electro-shocking. See ‘Defeating the Violence of Psychiatry’. We imprison vast numbers of children in school in the delusional belief that this is good for them. See ‘Do We Want School or Education?’ And we kill or otherwise exploit animals, mostly for human consumption, in numbers so vast the death toll is probably beyond calculation.

We also engage in an endless assault on the Earth’s biosphere. Apart from the phenomenal damage done to the environment and climate by military violence: we emit gases and pollutants to heat and destroy the atmosphere and destroy its oxygen content. We cut down and burn rainforests. We cut down mangroves and woodlands and pave grasslands. We poison the soil with herbicides and pesticides. We pollute the waterways and oceans with everything from carbon and nitrogenous fertilizers to plastic, as well as the radioactive contamination from Fukushima. And delude ourselves that our token gestures to remedy this destruction constitutes ‘conservation’.

So if you are seeking work, whether as a recent graduate or long-term unemployed person, then the most readily available form of work, where you will undoubtedly be exploited as well, is a government bureaucracy or large corporation that inflicts violence on life itself. Whether it is the military, the police, legal or prison system, a weapons, fossil fuel, banking, pharmaceutical, media, mining, agricultural, logging, food or water corporation, a farm that exploits animals or even a retail outlet that sells poisonous, processed and often genetically-mutilated substances under the label ‘food’ – see ‘Defeating the Violence in Our Food and Medicine’ – you will have many options to help add to the profits of those corporations and government ‘services’ that exist to inflict violence on you, your family and every other living being that shares this biosphere.

Tragically, genuinely ethical employment is a rarity because most industries, even those that seem benign like the education, finance, information technology and electronics industries, usually end up providing skilled personnel, finance, services or components that are used to inflict violence. And other industries such as those in insurance and superannuation, like the corporate banks, usually invest in violence (such as the military and fossil fuel industries): it is the most profitable.

So while many government bureaucracies and corporate industries exist to inflict violence, in one form or another, they can only do so because we are too scared to insist on seeking out ethical employment. In the end, we will take a job as a teacher, corporate journalist or pharmaceutical drug pusher, serve junk food, work in a bank, join the police or military, work in the legal system, assemble a weapons component… rather than ask ourselves the frightening questions ‘Is this nonviolent? Is this ethical? Does it enhance life?’

And yes, I know about structural violence and the way it limits options and opportunities for those of particular classes, races, genders…. But if ordinary people like us don’t consider moral issues and make moral choices, why should governments and corporations?

Moral choices? you might ask in confusion. In this day and age? Well, it might seem old-fashioned but, in fact, while most of us have been drawn along by the events in our life to make choices based on such considerations as self-interest, personal gain and ‘financial security’, there is a deeper path. Remember Gandhi? ‘True morality consists not in following the beaten track, but in finding the true path for ourselves, and fearlessly following it.’

Strange words they no doubt sound in this world where our attention is endlessly taken by all of those high-tech devices. But Gandhi’s words remind us that there is something deeper in life that the violence we have suffered throughout our lives has taken from us. The courage to be ourselves and to seek our own unique destiny.

Do you have this courage? To be yourself, rather than a cog in someone else’s machine? To refuse to submit to the violence that surrounds and overwhelms us on a daily basis?

If you are inclined to ponder these questions, you might also consider making moral choices that work systematically to end the violence in our world: consider participating in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’, signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’ and/or helping to develop and implement an effective strategy to resist one or the other of the many threats to our survival using the strategic framework explained in Nonviolent Campaign Strategy.

Of course, these choices aren’t for everyone. As Gandhi observed: ‘Cowards can never be moral.’

Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is here.

Robert J. Burrowes P.O. Box 68 Daylesford Victoria 3460 Australia

Email: flametree@riseup.net

Websites:
http://thepeoplesnonviolencecharter.wordpress.com (Nonviolence Charter)
http://tinyurl.com/flametree (Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth)
http://tinyurl.com/whyviolence (‘Why Violence?’)
https://nonviolentstrategy.wordpress.com/ (Nonviolent Campaign Strategy)
https://nonviolentliberationstrategy.wordpress.com/ (Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy)
http://anitamckone.wordpress.com (Anita: Songs of Nonviolence)
http://robertjburrowes.wordpress.com (Robert)
https://globalnonviolencenetwork.wordpress.com/ (Global Nonviolence Network)

The futility and corruption of the drug war

Posted on September 5, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Jacob Hornberger

Source: Intrepid Report

I just finished watching the much-acclaimed series “Narcos” on Netflix. What a fantastic program. And what an excellent depiction of the futility and corruption of the war on drugs.

The series is a true-life account of Pablo Escobar, a Colombian drug lord who headed up the Medellin drug cartel, a black-market drug group that smuggled hundreds of tons of cocaine into the United States in the 1970s and 1980s. Smuggling an estimated 80 percent of the cocaine into the United States, Escobar became known as called the “King of Cocaine,” attaining in the process a net worth of $30 billion by the early 1990s. According to Wikipedia, Escobar was the wealthiest criminal in history.

Amidst much acclaim and publicity, the U.S. government and the Colombian government, working together, targeted Escobar with arrest or killing. Escobar retaliated by effectively declaring war on the government, a war that consisted of assassinations and bombings. Every time the DEA (which was operating in Colombia, along with the U.S. military and the CIA) and Colombian officials tightened the noose on Escobar’s operation, Escobar responded with bullets and bombs, killing a multitude of government officials and private citizens.

The logic of the drug-war crackdown was clear: By eradicating Escobar, officials thought they would be eradicating 80 percent of the cocaine being shipped into the United States. So, all the death and destruction resulting from the crackdown on Escobar was considered worth it in the long run.

But that’s not what happened. The more they tightened the noose around Escobar, the more his cocaine competitors—that is, the ones who were supplying the 20 percent, expanded their operations, gaining them a larger market share. Among the principal beneficiaries of the crackdown on Escobar was the Cali Cartel, which, not surprisingly, became the next big target of the U.S. and Colombian drug warriors, with similar results—the more they cracked down on the Cali Cartel, the more their competitors stepped into the breach and gained a larger market share.

In 1993, they finally caught up to Escobar and killed him in a shootout. You can imagine how U.S. and Colombian officials trumpeted that drug-war victory. Another “milestone” in the war on drugs, the term they have used for decades whenever they kill or capture some big drug lord.

But of course it was all to no avail. Even though they killed Escobar and ultimately smashed the Medellin and Cali cartels, amidst great fanfare and publicity, other suppliers quickly took their places and continued providing cocaine users in the United States with their drug.

In other words, all those people who lost their lives in the drug war on Escobar died for nothing. Absolutely nothing.

There is something else to consider: what the drug war against Escobar did to law-enforcement agents, both American and Colombian. It corrupted them to the core. Frustrated over all the death and destruction that Escobar was wreaking across the country and over their inability to apprehend him, officials began employing brutal and illegal tactics in return, such as torturing prisoners for information and then murdering them so that they couldn’t talk about what the officials had done to them.

Of course, there was also widespread bribery that was taking place within the Colombian police. In fact, that was one of the reasons they had such a hard time catching up to Escobar—his informants within the police and Colombian military would alert him to whatever was going on.

The pathetic thing about all this death, destruction, mayhem, and corruption is that there was a much simpler way to have put Escobar, the Cali Cartel, and all the other black-market drug suppliers out of business, a way that would not have involved assassinations, bombings, torture, and corruption. All that the U.S. and Colombian governments had to do was legalize drugs.

If they had done that, Escobar and the rest of the black-market suppliers would have been put out of business instantaneously. That’s because of the difference between legal markets and black markets.

In legal markets, suppliers compete against each other by providing better goods and services to their customers. Think CVS, Walgreen, and other pharmacies. Notice that they are not out bombing and assassinating each other and other people.

It’s totally different in black or illegal markets. Competitors in these markets deal with each other through violent turf wars that involve murder, kidnapping, bombing, and mayhem. While people like Escobar are able to thrive in a black market, they inevitably go out of business in a legal market because they lack the skills that are necessary in legal markets.

A good example of this phenomenon is alcohol. We don’t see alcohol dealers killing each other to get a larger share of the market. That’s because booze is legal.

But it wasn’t that way when booze was illegal. During Prohibition, there were people like Al Capone involved in the sale and distribution of alcohol, along with killing, mayhem, and corruption.

This same principle, of course, applies today. Notwithstanding all the hoopla to which all of us are subjected when the feds or state drug warriors make a drug bust, the result is no different than it was 20–30 years ago with Escobar. The minute they make the bust, the supplier is replaced by someone else.

There is only one way to eradicate drug lords and illicit drug dealers, along with all the death, destruction, and corruption that comes with them: End the war on drugs by legalizing drugs.

Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.

Dear America: If You Want to Stop Racism, Tear Down the Drug War—Not Statues

Posted on August 23, 2017 by Reid Mukai

We cannot change the future by trying to erase the past. Tearing down a statue is not a solution to racism — ending the drug war is.

By Matt Agorist

Source: The Free Thought Project

On Monday, protesters — reacting to the violence in Charlottesville over the weekend — brought a ladder and some rope to North Carolina and tore down a near century old statue of a Confederate soldier. Unsurprisingly, nothing changed. However, the Durham Police Department and the Durham County Sheriff’s Office announced that they will be seeking criminal charges for those involved in the destruction of the statue.

Watching people wage violence against their fellow human in the name of protecting or tearing down some arbitrary government artifact is as disheartening as it is frustrating. The future cannot be changed by attempting to erase the past.

A statue holds no magical power to make people racists. If anything, the monuments to former racists serve as reminders that the state can and always will be open to the influence of bigotry — and only the state has the power to enforce racism.

An ignorant racist is exactly that — however, if society grants that ignorant racist a political position or a badge and a gun, this ignorant racist now has power over you. Removing or keeping a piece of concrete will never change this.

Jim Crow laws weren’t overturned because people went around town tearing down statues.

Racist government laws were brought to an end because people refused to obey them. Had Rosa Parks used her time and energy lobbying to take down a statue instead of disobeying a racist law, rest assured Browder v. Gayle, which ruled that segregated buses were unconstitutional, would’ve never happened.

Had the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s not organized the Montgomery Bus Boycott, rest assured, desegregation would’ve taken much longer.

Society has the amazing ability to force positive change through nonviolent and nondestructive means. However, all too often, we let emotions rule our thoughts and take to yelling and fighting in the streets and destroying property. This only serves to create more divide and empower the ranks of the racists.

If we really want to put the brakes on a racist system, fighting with other citizens (even if they are devout racists) will never work.

Boycotts, refusal of service, shaming, exposing — these are the tools we as citizens have against other citizens who are spreading hate and racism.

One amazing private solution to racism actually just happened on Tuesday in Washington. Richard Spencer, the ostensible leader of the white supremacists, was forced to hold his press conference in his own house because businesses refused to allow him to rent their hotels. This campaign of public shaming and refusal of service is far more effective than tearing down a statue or attempting to use the government to ban hate speech.

But what do we do when the state is perpetuating a racist system and prolonging the suffering of minorities? Again, the answer to that question is not to tear down a statue, but to realize where the power of this racism rests.

In America, the area of government that is most responsible for maintaining a racist system, allowing racist actors to oppress their targets with impunity, and perpetuating the suffering and plight of millions through the persecution of morally innocent individuals — is the war on drugs.

Without a doubt, the war on drugs fuels the racist system by targeting minorities and the poor. It serves to increase interactions between police—who are often caught joining the force to act out their racist desires—and the citizens.

The drug war, from the police departments to the court systems, unequivocally targets and punishes minorities harder for the same victimless crimes for which their white counterparts receive slaps on the wrist.

As TFTP reported last year, a scathing report in Harper’s Magazine, written by Dan Baum set the record straight and relieved all doubt over the intentions of the drug war. John Daniel Ehrlichman, counsel and domestic policy chief to President Richard Nixon, came clean on the real reason behind the war on drugs — to criminalize blacks and hippies.

According to Baum, he tracked down Ehrlichman in 1994 at his engineering firm in Atlanta, Georgia.

“You want to know what this was really all about?” Ehrlichman bluntly asked Baum of the war on drugs. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

To this day, the racist intentions behind the war on drugs serve to further oppress black communities. The war on drugs is still creating criminals out of otherwise innocent individuals who’re caught in possession of arbitrary substances, removing their opportunity for employment by giving them criminal records, and guaranteeing a difficult future within the working class.

It is no coincidence that the ACLU refers to the drug war as the new Jim Crow.

As Graham Boyd wrote in 2001, in a report in NACLA:

The war on drugs subjects the United States to much of the same harm, with much of the same economic and ideological underpinnings, as slavery itself. Just as Jim Crow responded to emancipation by rolling back many of the newly gained rights of African-Americans, the drug war is again replicating the institutions and repressions of the plantation. And like slavery and Jim Crow, the drug war garners appalling levels of support. Each has its own rhetoric, each its own claims to unassailable legitimacy. The brutality of slavery was justified on economic and paternalistic grounds. Jim Crow pretended that separate but equal treatment sufficed, even as blacks faced daily lynchings and every form of overt discrimination. The drug war claims morality and protection of children as its goals, while turning a blind eye to the racial injustice it promotes. And with all three systems of oppression, much of society sits idly by, accepting the rhetoric that later will seem so unbelievably corrupt. We will one day understand that the war on drugs was a war on people and communities.

If we really want to deal a blow to this racist system we must strike the root. The drug war is one such root. Until we eliminate the cause of this strife, tearing down all the statues in the world will do nothing. Until we realize that we are financing our own oppression and refuse to support the government programs that keep us in the days of Jim Crow, the tyranny will remain.

It is high time we realize this real solution to this real problem before the entire country is so divided that we enter a new American civil war.

Policing for Profit: Jeff Sessions & Co.’s Thinly Veiled Plot to Rob Us Blind

Posted on August 4, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By John W. Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“Laws are no longer made by a rational process of public discussion; they are made by a process of blackmail and intimidation, and they are executed in the same manner. The typical lawmaker of today is a man wholly devoid of principle — a mere counter in a grotesque and knavish game. If the right pressure could be applied to him, he would be cheerfully in favor of polygamy, astrology or cannibalism. It is the aim of the Bill of Rights, if it has any remaining aim at all, to curb such prehensile gentry. Its function is to set a limitation upon their power to harry and oppress us to their own private profit.”— H.L. Mencken

Let’s not mince words.

Jeff Sessions, the nation’s top law enforcement official, would not recognize the Constitution if he ran right smack into it.

Whether the head of the Trump Administration’s Justice Department enjoys being the architect of a police state or is just painfully, criminally clueless, Sessions has done a great job thus far of sidestepping the Constitution at every turn.

Most recently, under the guise of “fighting crime,” Sessions gave police the green light to rob, pilfer, steal, thieve, swipe, purloin, filch and liberate American taxpayers of even more of their hard-earned valuables (especially if it happens to be significant amounts of cash) using any means, fair or foul.

In this case, the foul method favored by Sessions & Co. is civil asset forfeiture, which allows police and prosecutors to “seize your car or other property, sell it and use the proceeds to fund agency budgets—all without so much as charging you with a crime.”

Under a federal equitable sharing program, police turn asset forfeiture cases over to federal agents who process seizures and then return 80% of the proceeds to the police. (In Michigan, police actually get to keep up to 100% of forfeited property.)

This incentive-driven excuse for stealing from the citizenry is more accurately referred to as “policing for profit” or “theft by cop.”

Despite the fact that 80 percent of these asset forfeiture cases result in no charge against the property owner, challenging these “takings” in court can cost the owner more than the value of the confiscated property itself. As a result, most property owners either give up the fight or chalk the confiscation up to government corruption, leaving the police and other government officials to reap the benefits.

And boy, do they reap the benefits.

Police agencies have used their ill-gotten gains “to buy guns, armored cars and electronic surveillance gear,” reports The Washington Post. “They have also spent money on luxury vehicles, travel and a clown named Sparkles.”

Incredibly, these asset forfeiture scams have become so profitable for the government that, according to The Washington Post, “in 2014, law enforcement took more stuff from people than burglars did.” As the Post notes, “the Treasury and Justice departments deposited more than $5 billion into their respective asset forfeiture funds. That same year, the FBI reports that burglary losses topped out at $3.5 billion.”

In 2015, the federal government seized nearly $2.6 billion worth of airplanes, houses, cash, jewelry, cars and other items under the guise of civil asset forfeiture.

According to USA Today, “Anecdotal evidence suggests that allowing departments to keep forfeiture proceeds may tempt them to use the funds unwisely. For example, consider a 2015 scandal in Romulus, Michigan, where police officers used funds forfeited from illicit drug and prostitution stings to pay for … illicit drugs and prostitutes.”

Memo to the rest of my fellow indentured servants who are living through this dark era of government corruption, incompetence and general ineptitude: this is not how justice in America is supposed to work.

We are now ruled by a government so consumed with squeezing every last penny out of the population that they are completely unconcerned if essential freedoms are trampled in the process.

Our freedoms aren’t just being trampled, however. They’re being eviscerated.

At every turn, “We the People” are getting swindled, cheated, conned, robbed, raided, pickpocketed, mugged, deceived, defrauded, double-crossed and fleeced by governmental and corporate shareholders of the American police state out to make a profit at taxpayer expense.

Americans no longer have to be guilty to be stripped of their property, rights and liberties. All you have to be is in possession of something the government wants. And if you happen to have something the government wants badly enough, trust me, their agents will go to any lengths to get it.

If the government can arbitrarily freeze, seize or lay claim to your property (money, land or possessions) under government asset forfeiture schemes, you have no true rights.

Here’s how the whole ugly business works in a nutshell.

First, government agents (usually the police) use a broad array of tactics to profile, identify, target and arrange to encounter (in a traffic stop, on a train, in an airport, in public, or on private property) those individuals who might be traveling with a significant amount of cash or possess property of value. Second, these government agents—empowered by the courts and the legislatures—seize private property (cash, jewelry, cars, homes and other valuables) they “suspect” may be connected to criminal activity.

Then—and here’s the kicker—whether or not any crime is actually proven to have taken place, without any charges being levied against the property owner, or any real due process afforded the unlucky victim, the property is seized by the government, which often divvies it up with the local police who helped with the initial seizure.

In a Kafkaesque turn of the screw, the burden of proof falls on the unfortunate citizenry who must mount a long, complicated, expensive legal campaign to prove their innocence in order to persuade the government that it should return the funds they stole. Not surprisingly, very few funds ever get returned.

It’s a new, twisted form of guilt by association, only it’s not the citizenry being accused of wrongdoing, just their money.

Motorists have been particularly vulnerable to this modern-day form of highway robbery.

For instance, police stole $201,000 in cash from Lisa Leonard because the money—which Leonard planned to use to buy a house for her son—was being transported on a public highway also used by drug traffickers. Despite the fact that Leonard was innocent of wrongdoing, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the theft on a technicality.

Police stole $50,000 in cash from Amanee Busbee—which she planned to use to complete the purchase of a restaurant—and threatened to hand her child over to CPS if she resisted. She’s one of the few to win most of her money back in court.

Police stole $22,000 in cash from Jerome Chennault—which he planned to use as the down payment on a home—simply because a drug dog had alerted police to its presence in his car. After challenging the seizure in court, Chennault eventually succeeded in having most of his money returned, although the state refused to compensate him for his legal and travel expenses.

Police stole $8,500 in cash and jewelry from Roderick Daniels—which he planned to use to purchase a new car—and threatened him with jail and money-laundering charges if he didn’t sign a waiver forfeiting his property.

Police stole $6,000 in cash from Jennifer Boatright and Ron Henderson and threatened to turn their young children over to Child Protective Services if they resisted.

Tenaha, Texas, is a particular hotbed of highway forfeiture activity, so much so that police officers keep pre-signed, pre-notarized documents on hand so they can fill in what property they are seizing.

As the Huffington Post explains, these police forfeiture operations have become little more than criminal shakedowns:

Police in some jurisdictions have run forfeiture operations that would be difficult to distinguish from criminal shakedowns. Police can pull motorists over, find some amount of cash or other property of value, claim some vague connection to illegal drug activity and then present the motorists with a choice: If they hand over the property, they can be on their way. Otherwise, they face arrest, seizure of property, a drug charge, a probable night in jail, the hassle of multiple return trips to the state or city where they were pulled over, and the cost of hiring a lawyer to fight both the seizure and the criminal charge. It isn’t hard to see why even an innocent motorist would opt to simply hand over the cash and move on.

Unsurprisingly, these asset forfeiture scams have become so profitable for the government that they have expanded their reach beyond the nation’s highways.

According to USA Today, the U.S. Department of Justice received $2.01 billion in forfeited items in 2013, and since 2008 local and state law enforcement nationwide has raked in some $3 billion in forfeitures through the federal “equitable sharing” program.

So now it’s not just drivers who have to worry about getting the shakedown.

Any American unwise enough to travel with cash is fair game for the government pickpockets.

In fact, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has been colluding with the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and local police departments to seize a small fortune in cash from American travelers using the very tools—scanners, spies and surveillance devices—they claimed were necessary to catch terrorists.

Mind you, TSA agents already have a reputation for stealing from travelers, but clearly the government is not concerned about protecting the citizenry from its own wolfish tendencies.

No, the government bureaucrats aren’t looking to catch criminals. (If so, they should be arresting themselves.)

They’re just out to rob you of your cold, hard cash.

Think about it for a moment. You pay a hefty fee just to be able to walk free. It’s called income tax. As former presidential candidate Ron Paul recognizes, “The Founding Fathers never intended a nation where citizens would pay nearly half of everything they earn to the government.” And if you refuse to pay any of that so-called income tax, you’ll be severely fined and/or arrested and put in jail.

One more thing: you don’t really own your property. That is, your house or your land. Even when you pay off the mortgage, if you fail to pay your property taxes, government agents will evict you and take your home.

This is not freedom.

There was a time in our history when our forebears said “enough is enough” and stopped paying taxes (a pittance compared to what we are forced to shell out in taxes today) to what they considered an illegitimate government. They stood their ground and refused to support a system that was slowly choking out any attempts at self-governance, and which refused to be held accountable for its crimes against the people. Their resistance sowed the seeds for the revolution that would follow.

Unfortunately, in the 200-plus years since we established our own government, we’ve let the corporate elite and number-crunching bureaucrats pilfer our bank accounts to such an extent that we’re back where we started.

Once again, we’ve got a despotic regime with an imperial ruler doing as it pleases.

But what if we didn’t just pull out our pocketbooks and pony up to the federal government’s outrageous demands for more money? What if we didn’t just line up to drop our hard-earned dollars into the corporate collection bucket, no questions asked about how it will be spent? What if, instead of meekly tolerating the government’s ongoing efforts to rob us blind, we did something about it?

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, if the government can just take from you what they want, when they want, and then use it however they want, you can’t claim to be anything more than a serf in a land they think of as theirs.

It’s up to “We the People” to demand reform.

These injustices will continue as long as we remain silent.

As American journalist H.L. Mencken observed:

The American of today, in fact, probably enjoys less personal liberty than any other man of Christendom, and even his political liberty is fast succumbing to the new dogma that certain theories of government are virtuous and lawful, and others abhorrent and felonious. Laws limiting the radius of his free activity multiply year by year: It is now practically impossible for him to exhibit anything describable as genuine individuality, either in action or in thought, without running afoul of some harsh and unintelligible penalty. It would surprise no impartial observer if … the goddess of liberty were taken off the silver dollars to make room for a bas-relief of a policeman in a spiked helmet. Moreover, this gradual (and, of late, rapidly progressive) decay of freedom goes almost without challenge; the American has grown so accustomed to the denial of his constitutional rights and to the minute regulation of his conduct by swarms of spies, letter-openers, informers and agents provocateurs that he no longer makes any serious protest.

In other words, make them hear you.

And if they won’t listen, then I suggest it’s time for what Martin Luther King Jr. called for when government doesn’t listen: “militant nonviolent resistance.”

	Reid Mukai on Saturday Matinee: Wizards
	Lara/Trace on Saturday Matinee: Wizards
	Lara/Trace on Saturday Matinee: From He…
	lobotero on Saturday Matinee: From He…
	Lara/Trace on Saturday Matinee: The Wicker…

After the Crash

Dispatches From a Long Recovery (Est. 10/2024)

Category Archives: Drug War

Carl Sagan’s Thoughts On The War on Drugs