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Drug Wars' Super Sunday
(Bill Berkowitz, AlterNet, January 28, 2004)
This year's fictitious Bud Bowl has a different match-up: Instead of a tussle between animated helmet-wearing Budweiser bottles and its arch-rival Bud Light, the company will be taking on a real world rival – a White House that claims drinking leads to drug use. . . . the National Football League's Super Bowl has become Super Sunday for advertising agencies and multinational corporations. Nearly as remarkable as the game itself are the advertisements which keep some viewers from hitting their remotes . . . Leaving no drug-war advertising opportunity behind, John Walters' White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) will be encouraging people to stay away from the "good stuff" during the premiere of its latest advertising campaign which launches on Super Bowl Sunday; a campaign that for the first time "subtly" makes the connection between drinking and drug use. . . . Ironically, the unveiling of the most recent ONDCP's campaign against marijuana comes on the heels of a recently released study concluding that the White House's anti-drug campaigns have had little impact on American teenagers, its primary target, and news that two employees of the advertising agency Ogilvy and Mather were indicted by a federal grand jury on charges they were defrauding the government in connection with their work for the White House drug office. . . . The report by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) recognized that "there is little evidence of direct favorable [advertising] campaign effects on youth." . . . The new ads appear to be folding Bush's drug wars into his faith-based initiative. Last year, at a press conference surrounded by Christian, Jewish and Islamic community leaders, Walters said: "Faith plays an important role when it comes to teen marijuana prevention. We are urging youth ministers, volunteers and faith leaders to integrate drug prevention messages and activities into their sermons and youth programming and are providing them with key tools and resources to make a difference. . . . At the time, Walters was announcing the launch of a new campaign called "Faith. The Anti-Drug," which indicated that the drug czar was turning down the volume from earlier anti-marijuana ad campaigns focusing on teens that linked the use of marijuana to the funding of terrorist organizations and support for terrorism. . . . congressional critics "have questioned both the ads effectiveness and the use of Ogilvy, which [in 2002] ... settled for $1.8 million civil charges that it over-billed the government for its ad work on the anti-drug account," AdAge.com recently reported. . . . In September, the National Academy of Sciences released a study "that called for the inclusion of alcohol in the anti-drug campaign," according to AdWeek.com. "Parents tend to dramatically underestimate underage drinking generally and their own children's drinking in particular," the study said. "The beer and liquor industries have long opposed any inclusion of alcohol messages in the [anti-drug] campaign, on the basis that responsible drinking – unlike drug use – is legal for adults."

. . . Read more!


posted by LoZo 4:09 PM

 

Kerry's National Security Advisor is a Drug War Zealot
(Sean Donahue, Counterpunch, January 26, 2004)
When Rand Beers quit his job as counter-terrorism advisor to President Bush, and signed up with John Kerry's presidential campaign, he quickly became a hero to Democratic Party loyalists and the "Anybody but Bush" crowd. But Beers, who has become Kerry's top national security advisor and would likely serve as National Security Advisor or Secretary of State in a Kerry administration, has a dark history. Under Presidents Clinton and Bush, he served as Assistant Secretary of State for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, and was one of the chief architects of and apologists for the United States' cruel policies in Colombia. . . . Beers was most closely associated with the disastrous aerial crop fumigation program the U.S. introduced in southern Colombia. The State Department hired DynCorp, a private military contractor, to fly crop dusters at high altitudes over the rainforests of southern Colombia, spraying a chemical cocktail that includes a stronger version of Monsanto's popular and controversial herbicide, Round-Up, over suspected coca fields. Beers was the public face of the fumigation program, defending and advocating for it in Congressional hearings and in the media. . . . Beers played a central role in creating the myth of the "narco-terrorist" which has been used to justify both the fumigations and continued U.S. military aid to Colombia. . . . The program has had no measurable impact on the availability, price, or purity of cocaine in the U.S., let alone the rate of cocaine addiction in this country. . . . Besides being cruel, Beers' attitude ignores the fact that farmers who don't grow coca have been hurt just as badly by the fumigations as farmers who do grow coca. Glyphosate, the active ingredient in the chemical cocktail used in the fumigation program, is a broad-spectrum herbicide that kills any and all green plants. The crop fumigation planes fly at high altitudes, and so their spraying is at best imprecise. As a result, many farmers growing only legal crops have lost everything. . . . Beers went even further in defending the fumigation program when giving a sworn deposition in a lawsuit filed against DynCorp in a U.S. Federal District Court by indigenous tribes in Ecuador who claimed that their health and their crops had been damaged when herbicides sprayed in Colombia drifted over the border on the wind. Desperate to keep the suit from proceeding to trial, he argued that the fumigation program was vital to U.S. national security because it was an essential part of the war against terrorism in Colombia. He then went a step further, stating, under oath, that "It is believed that FARC terrorists have received training in Al Qaida terrorist caps in Afghanistan." . . . Beers' claim was, of course, absurd and unfounded. The idea that Islamic fundamentalists would align themselves with hardline Marxists halfway around the world doesn't meet the laugh test. . . . Beers later recanted his testimony, claiming that he had been misinformed. But his bizarre allegation reflects his fundamental belief that the war on terrorism and the war on drugs are inextricably linked, and that the coca farmers who are forced to make payments to the FARC are legitimate military targets, and their neighbors' legal crops are acceptable collateral damage. . . . If John Kerry lets Rand Beers continue to guide his foreign policy, a Kerry administration will be no better for rural Colombians than a Bush administration. Democrats who believe that Senator Kerry offers a humane alternative to Bush should think long and hard about what Rand Beers would set loose on the world if he were allowed to run the State Deparment.

. . . Read more!


posted by LoZo 1:02 PM

 

Drug War Clock Tracking Money and Lives Wasted in a Fruitless Pursuit of Enforced Morality
The above link provides a running account of money being spent and people being incarcerated in the War on People Who Use Non-prescription Medications.
Some examples:
The U.S. federal government spent $19.179 billion dollars in 2003 on the War on Drugs, at a rate of about $600 per second
Someone is arrested every 20 seconds.
In 2000, 46.5 percent of the 1,579,566 total arrests for drug law violations were for cannabis -- a total of 734,497. Of those, 646,042 people were arrested for possession alone.
Approximately 236800 people are expected to be incarcerated for drug law violations in 2004.

. . . Read more!


posted by LoZo 11:49 AM

 

Where the Presidential Candidates Stand on Medical Marijuana
The above link will take you to the Web site of the Granite Staters for Medical Marijuana. On it they provide a detailed description of each major candidate's stand on medical marijuana. Here are their scores:
Carol Moseley Braun - A
George W. Bush - F
Wesley K. Clark - B+
Howard Dean - D-
John Edwards - F
Dick Gephardt - F
Bob Grahm - D-
John Kerry - A-
Dennis Kucinich - A+
Joe Liberman - F
Al Sharpton - B

. . . Read more!


posted by LoZo 11:40 AM

 

What It Costs Drug Companies To Produce Some of the More Popular Prescriptions
Do you ever wonder how much it costs a drug company to obtain the active ingredient in a prescription medication? Life Extension did a search of offshore chemical synthesizers that supply the active ingredients found in drugs approved by the FDA . . . These exorbitant profit margins also provide incentive for drug companies to get their patented molecules approved by the FDA, whether they kill people or not. . . . Take the cholesterol-lowering drug Baychol®, for example, which was removed from the market after killing 100 people. . . . The problem is that no life was saved because of Baychol®. Anyone who may have benefited from Baychol could have obtained the same results from other statin drugs. So when drug companies justify the high price of drugs because of research costs, remember that most of the so-called novel compounds they develop will not save a single life, as they are no different than what is already available. . . . Now that you know the outrageous profit margins on prescription drugs, you can understand why drug companies do almost anything to prevent competition from developing. Large drug companies intensely lobby Congress to pass laws that give them extra time of exclusivity, file lawsuits to delay generic competition, petition the FDA to stop the importation of lower cost medications, and go as far as to pay off generic companies to not compete. . . . Drug companies spend big dollars protecting their illicit monopoly, all of which is reflected in the price consumers pay for their prescription drugs.

Celebrex® 100 mg  $130.27     $0.60          21,712%

Claritin® 10 mg   $215.17     $0.71           30,306%

Keflex® 250 mg    $157.39     $1.88            8,372%

Lipitor® 20 mg    $272.37     $5.80            4,696%

Norvasc® 10 mg    $188.29     $0.14          134,493%

Paxil® 20 mg      $220.27     $7.60            2,898%

Prevacid® 30 mg   $344.77     $1.01           34,136%

Prilosec® 20 mg   $360.97     $0.52           69,417%

Prozac® 20 mg     $247.47     $0.11          224,973%

Tenormin® 50 mg   $104.47     $0.13           80,362%

Vasotec® 10 mg    $102.37     $0.20           51,185%

Xanax® 1mg        $136.79     $0.024         569,958%

Zestril® 20 mg    $89.89     $3.20            2,809%

Zithromax® 600mg 1,482.19     $18.78           7,892%

Zocor® 40mg       $350.27     $8.63           4,059%

Zoloft® 50mg      $206.87     $1.75          11,821%

. . . Read more!


posted by LoZo 7:35 PM