Drug War: Covert Money, Power & Policy: Fake Science

Sci.Amer.,1/1931; Sci.News Ltr.,2/23/1957

After the November 1996 elections, when Californians and Arizonans voted to allow a medical defense for marijuana possession under state law, the Clinton administration's Drug Control Policy point man, Gen. Barry McCaffrey, was all over the tube repeating his two favorite lies. First, insisted the General, marijuana is a stepping stone to hard drugs.

When an expert team of medical scientists from the New York Academy of Medicine issued the 1944 "LaGuardia Report," which the mayor had commissioned six years earlier, they concluded that: "The use of marihuana does not lead to morphine or heroin or cocaine addiction. ...The instances are extremely rare where the habit of marihuana smoking is associated with addiction to these narcotics."

That has been the conclusion of every single major study since then, including the greatest clinical trial ever done on pot decriminalization, known as Holland or The Netherlands. The Dutch Minister of Health, quoted above in "Propaganda," can be left to explain the official Dutch disrespect for McCaffrey's mythical "gateway theory." The Dutch have proven, and offically assert, that the criminalization of this mild herbal painkiller causes addiction to the potent alkaloidal painkiller.

Secondly, insisted McCaffrey, over and over again in every interview, no major national medical organization has endorsed marijuana for medical use. This apparently excludes the American Public Health Association, the Physicians Association for AIDS Care and the Lymphoma Foundation, three of the most expert physician groups in the country.

The American Public Health Association officially endorsed medical marijuana in November of 1995. It is the oldest and largest organization of health care professionals in the world, with over 50,000 members, and has been a major force in public health policy since 1872. Their November, 1995 Resolution 9513, written exclusively by distinguished physicians, demands legal "Access to Therapeutic Marijuana/Cannabis."

Between 1978 and 1996, 36 state legislatures legally recognized marijuana's medical usefulness. These measures ranged from the establishment of state-sponsored therapeutic research programs to amending state law to allow physicians to prescribe marijuana for specific illnesses.

Marijuana, official from 1850 to 1942 in the U.S. Pharmacopeia, were it legal today, would be official for glaucoma, high blood pressure, migraine, anorexia, depression, sleep disorders, multiple sclerosis, spasticity disorders, chronic pain, AIDS wasting syndrome, asthma, motion sickness, depression, mood disorders, pruritis, menstrual cramps, the effects of cancer chemotherapy and epilepsy. This list, by the way, comes mostly from the official position paper of The American Public Health Association, written exclusively by experienced physicians.

Reacting to the success of the 1996 medical marijuana initiatives, Gen. McCaffrey, flanked by HHS's Donna Shalala and Attorney General Janet Reno, outlined his battle plan. The administration will try to strip doctors who recommend or prescribe marijuana, or any other Schedule 1 drug, of the federal registration they need to prescribe any drug. Rep. Solomon's "Medical Marijuana Prevention Act of 1997," and its senatorial equivalent, Sen. Faircloth's "Medical Marijuana Deterrence Act of 1997" were designed to effect this. McCaffrey also promised to try to strip those doctors of their inclusion in Medicare and Medicaid.

The Attorney General then declared that the Department of Justice will work "to limit the states' ability to rely on these and similar medical use provisions." That is, to disenfranchise the citizens. We literally have the spectacle of the Green Beret General who led the sickening Contra war and coordinated the Guatemalan and Salvadoran genocide, legally dictating medical practice to America's physicians, in contravention of the wishes of the electorate. Pass the pot, I'm gonna puke.

The "Drug Medicalization, Prevention and Control Act," as Arizona's 1996 Prop 200 was called, allows doctors to prescribe any Schedule 1 drug, not just marijuana, if they have a second physician's opinion and can show "documented scientific evidence" of potential benefit. This will, hopefully, mean heroin for the terminally ill. Heroin, in Britain, is the first choice of physicians dealing with the agony of terminal cancer. Physicians in this country have to go with second best, a real crime. Since physicians are computer-monitored by the DEA, which can lift their license to prescribe, "The undertreatment of pain in hospitals is absolutely medieval," according to Dr. Russell Portnoy of the Pain Service of Sloan Kettering Memorial Hospital.

The sickening, deranging and relatively ineffective synthetic Demerol (meperidine), derived from a pepper alkaloid, is regularly given in U.S. hospitals instead of heroin, morphine or codeine. The famous Libby Zion case, which saw the meperidine-induced 1984 death of a healthy 18 year old, is a study in pharmacological politicization.

Libby showed up at New York Hospital's emergency room suffering from flu-like symptoms, complicated by her prescription for the monoamine oxidase inhibitor (MAOI) phenelzine sulfate, another "anti-depressant" concocted from industrial solvents (phenethyl chloride and hydrazine hydrate). This contributed, as the Physicians' Desk Reference clearly warns, to a "hypertensive crisis."

To calm her, the inexperienced young intern prescribed "Demerol," meperidine, the morphine-substitute she had been taught to use. Demerol, unfortunately, is a political substitute, not a pharmacological substitute. As the PDR stresses, "circulatory collapse, coma, and death have been reported in patients receiving MAOI therapy who have been given a single dose of meperidine." Libby Zion got her shot of meperidine and went into circulatory collapse, literally poisoned to death.

A New York jury found three of the four doctors involved negligent for prescribing the contraindicated Demerol. Rather than relaxing her with a traditional mood elevator, such as a single miniscule dose of morphine, which would have sent her off to a blissful nap, she was given a patented synthetic that actually increased her anxiety. How utterly incompetent, how unloving.

I've actually had my 93 year old father, in very frail health and considerable pain, and suffering from glaucoma, told that he can have neither pot nor morphine, because the doctor was worried about "habit formation." God forbid the old man should acquire a "habit" in the last few years of his life. The doctor is just reading from the DEA's canon.

All over the country cops are presented in high schools and town councils as empirical experts while the most distinguished physicians, psychopharmacologists, psychiatrists, ethnobotanists, anthropologists, archeologists, sociologists and economists are ignored. "I am reminded of Soviet party-line criticism of science which led to the phenomenon known as Lysenkoism," notes Prof. Grinspoon.

NYT, 1/16/1932

Sanctioned frauds like Heath, Nahas, Kleber and Califano, engineers of today's disaster, are given far more political credence than the likes of Dr. Lester Grinspoon, Dr. Solomon Snyder, Dr. Marie Nyswander, Dr. Vincent Dole, Dr. John Morgan, Dr. Alfred Lindesmith, Dr. Richard Evans Schultes, Dr. Michael Harner, Dr. Peter Furst, Dr. Andrew Weil, Dr. Michael Taussig, Dr. Timothy Plowman, Dr. Anthony Richard Henman, Dr. Marija Gimbutas, Dr. Thomas Szasz, Dr. Arnold Trebach, Dr. Charles Snyder, Dr. Jerome Miller and Dr. Milton Friedman.

Joe Califano's Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia stokes this reefer madness with a steady stream of fake science. CASA is supported by the Carnegie Corporation, the Ford Foundation, the Kaiser Family Fund, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Commonwealth Fund, the superstar professional alcoholic Betty Ford and a host of national and international power brokers and agencies.

CASA hosted the televised AIDS Awareness Day smarmfest on 12/1/95, "Tony Bennett: Here's To The Ladies," broadcast from the White House on CBS. Like many medicine shows, the entertainment was first-rate. Califano then pitched his snake-oil to President Clinton, who proudly accepted the "CASA Distinguished Service Award." In his acceptance speech, Bill Clinton assured us that "25% of AIDS cases are the result of drug abuse." That is political pandering, not empirical science. The fool actually helped to spread the epidemic by following CASA's insane advice and refusing to allow needle exchange programs. Compassionate outreach, Dutch-style, would "send the wrong message."

JAMA: "The news media continue to focus on the hundreds killed in drug wars but give little attention to the tens of thousands dying of diseases spread by IV drug use each year./According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention...from October 1992 through September 1993, 26,033 people...developed AIDS attributable to needles shared during IV drug use. Another 3576...developed AIDS though heterosexual contact with IV drug users. In addition, 397 children of IV drug-using mothers or fathers were diagnosed as having AIDS....Despite this great toll in death and the enormous strain on public health services, many political leaders still strongly oppose needle exchange programs, even though studies show that the programs are effective."

Clinton's 25% figure is sheer fiction, a self-fulfilling prophesy. Even French conservatives support needle exchange. Needle exchange programs produce seroconversion rates near zero. Clinton knew that from the day he took office - that was the conclusion of the 1991 National Commission on AIDS, which criticized Bush's Office of National Drug Control Policy for "neglecting the real public health and treatment measures which could and must be taken to halt the spread."

Clinton's own 1997 AIDS Commission finally shamed his administration into allowing local needle exchange, if the locals were willing to pay for it. But Clinton still prefers to canonize a charter member of Bush's fascist team, Califano, and still continues to fund the ruthless police persecution of people suffering from chronic pain - drug addicts. The result has been massive tragedy, an explosion not only in AIDS, but hepatitis, tuberculosis and other lethal infectious diseases. There isn't an epidemiologist in the country who wouldn't tell you that the best way to spread an epidemic is to drive it underground.

Chicago Herald and Examiner,1926