Monopolists: Drugwar.com

The Monopolists-

Comments on US federal Court of Appeals May 24, 2002 ruling against Jon Gettman and High Times magazine keeping marijuana as a Schedule 1 controlled substance, and Drug War's 'Monopoly' Chapter Excerpt

by Dan Russell

10/1912- "Harvey Wiley, an Anti-Saloon League temperance fundamentalist, was the Chief Chemist of the Department of Agriculture. He also served as president of the A.M.A.-A.Ph.A. U.S. Pharmacopeial Convention, the purpose of which was to draw up the legally official U.S. Pharmacopeia, on which the U.S. Dispensatory is based." - from "Drug War- Covert Money, Power, and Policy" by Dan Russell

June 14, 2002

"The D.C. Circuit rejected the appeal on May 24, 2002, holding that Mr. Gettman and High Times Magazine lack standing to appeal under the United States Constitution."- (from DEA press release June 6, 2002- High Court Upholds Marijuana As Dangerous Drug)

Note that the pharmacological issues never got objective judicial review - the political prostitutes in DEA got the chance, once again, to have the final word, and then the circuit court simply rejected the qualification of High Times and Gettman to raise the issue.

There is no legal way to force a jury trial of the actual transparent pharmacological bull peddled by DEA. These administrative precedents, which are as unconstitutional as separate but equal, were written into the law by the same cold hustlers who wrote that racism into the law - at the same time.

This pharmacological sophistry started as a street fight beteween a fledgling organized medicine and the herbal bottlers for control of the vast over-the-counter pharm trade. Organized medicine's man at the head of the USDA was Harvey Wiley.

"Wiley’s crowning triumph, the Food and Drug Act of 1906, is a great advance in medical monopoly and a modest advance in truth in labeling. Many over the counter proprietaries made absurd claims and refused to reveal their contents, which often were poisonous. The act, however, doesn’t require content disclosure, even for poisons, and doesn’t challenge absurd claims; it only mandates truth in content labeling, should the manufacturer care to disclose the contents.

Content disclosure was mandatory only for those drugs specifically listed under regulation 28, the most popular medicines in the country. Corrosive acids, poisonous metals and toxic minerals could all continue to be packaged without being listed. Only ten of the most commercially valuable medicines required listing, along with the percentage of their content, including gum opium, marijuana, coca leaves, 'or any derivative or preparation thereof.'

Wiley’s police force within the USDA was then given unilateral power to decide what percentages were 'poisonous,' thereby requiring the manufacturer to label his product as 'poison.' When the USDA forced a poison label on a safe medicine, the manufacturer couldn’t take it to court with evidence of medical safety, because the evidence was inadmissable. The law specifically stated that a dangerous drug was anything the USDA said it was. President Roosevelt called this 'purposeful ambiguity.' It is, in fact, a standard device of inquisitorial law - it’s in Justinian’s Code and the Malleus Maleficarum, and it’s the law today. All pharmacological evidence is inadmissable in drug cases, which is the legal equivalent of saying that all forensic evidence is inadmissable in murder cases.

The Supreme Court threw out all the evidence regarding marijuana that Stephen Gaskin brought into court in 1973 without reading it. This included the reports of every major presidential, parliamentary, military and municipal commission over the past hundred years, and the opinions of the National Institute of Mental Health, today’s AMA, the American Bar Association and a host of other reputable expert groups.

The Court’s rejection automatically confirmed the Tennessee Supreme Court, which also didn’t bother to read the evidence. Instead, it simply insisted that 'the General Assembly of Tennessee presumably acted in the exercise of sound discretion and with adequate knowledge when it dealt with marijuana…[as a] dangerous drug or harmful substance.' Presumably? Isn’t the purpose of a trial to 'discover the facts'? The Supreme Court told Gaskin what it told Daniel Webster in 1833 when he challenged 'no-license' - 'majority rules' - regardless of the facts.

In 1915, an important Wiley ally, Dr. Oscar Dowling, President of the Louisiana State Board of Health and the Southern Medical Association, a member of the AMA’s governing Board of Trustees, wrote in Harper’s that 'So called patent and quack medicines, if allowed to be sold and distributed many years longer, will undermine the health of America and in this contribute to the ultimate deterioration of the nation. I am not stating the case too strongly when I declare that the use of patent medicines is perhaps the greatest curse of the nation today.'

Not structural poverty, rampant disease or lack of access to medical care, but access to medicine. All day long on TV you can see 'Drugs,' 'McGruff,' 'Let’s Take a Bite Out of Crime,' 'Just Say No,' 'Frying Egg Brains,' 'Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,' the 'Junkie Werewolf,' 'Silence is Acceptance,' 'I Wasn’t Tough Enough,' 'The Benjamin Rush Center' - and not one word about an effective national sweat-equity antipoverty program that would put real capital in the hands of poor folk, thereby eliminating the pain so many need to escape. The U.S. has the highest rate of child poverty in the industrial world, 22%. The Economist, 5/25/96: 'One in five American children lives in poverty, more than double the rate in Germany or Britain.'

The medical monopolists, instead, insisted that the problems were pharmacological, having to do with the improper use of herbs and isolates that only they were qualified to prescribe. This, of course, gave their industrialist allies one more way to sic the police on the unionists."