-Caveat Lector- <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/"> </A> -Cui Bono?- >From Dan Russell's book "Drug War" A bit on Joseph Califano.... war FOR drugs intelligence operative; from Vietnam to South Central L.A. Dave Hartley http://www.Asheville-Computer.com/dave -----Original Message----- From: Dan Russell [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Thursday, January 27, 2000 1:45 PM http://www.drugwar.com/ Drug War: Less than a month after the (Kennedy) assassination, Chairman of the JCS Maxwell Taylor was ordering Vietnam commander Westmoreland to "fight the war right, the way we did in France. It’s a big war and we’ll fight it like one. We must bring enough firepower and bombs down on the Vietcong to make them realize they’re finished; only then will they toss in the sponge."2 When Taylor said that, we had only 16,000 troops in Vietnam, most technical support personnel, not fighters. Unless he were planning it, how could he know it was going to be "a big war"? As Prouty puts it, "In the hands of Lemnitzer, NSAM #55 [for whom it was originally intended] meant no more clandestine operations, or at least no more unless there were most compelling reasons. In the hands of Maxwell Taylor, this meant ....the new military force of response, of reaction, and of undercover activity - all summed up in the newly-coined word ‘counterinsurgency.’"3 Taylor’s rosy projections of easy victory, on which Kennedy’s plans for withdrawal were based, were withdrawn at that strange Hawaii conference - 2 days before Kennedy’s death. Johnson was fed a steady stream of grim reality. After many months of unrelenting VC progress, Johnson, despite his best political instincts, was willing to accept that without American troops, South Vietnam would collapse. Withdrawal, if it had ever been, was no longer an option. Maj. Gen. Victor Krulak’s Special Assistant for Counterinsurgency and Special Activities staff was charged with coordinating the inexorable escalation within the Department of Defense. Col. Prouty was Krulak’s lead officer on the SACSA staff: "His contacts in this select circle in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, were such men as Major General Edward D. Lansdale, who was McNamara’s special assistant for all matters involving the CIA and special operations; William Bundy, who appears throughout the Pentagon Papers as one of the key men of the Secret Team and was at that time a recent alumnus of the CIA, with ten years in that agency behind him; John T. McNaughton, another member of the ST and a McNamara favorite; Joseph Califano, who moved from the Office of the Secretary of Defense to the White House...and others."4 Johnson terminated the counterproductive Cuba operation in April of 1964. This interrupted the efforts of Joe Califano. Califano was in charge of overall Defense Department liaison with the Cuban exiles, 1963-64, both before and after the assassination. Lt. Col. Alexander Haig worked under Califano. Joe Trento, in the Wilmington News-Journal, 1/10/81: "Califano and Haig worked hand in hand in keeping the nationalists from the Cuban Brigade happy. They even checked out potential members for the hit teams with older members of the Cuban Brigade." This was confirmed by both Ricardo Canette, a leading member of the hit teams, and a top official of the Defense Intelligence Agency who was Haig’s Marine liaison in 1963-64. Califano reported directly to Secretary of the Army Cyrus Vance. The "older members of the Cuban Brigade" Califano and Haig were so concerned to keep happy included the hard core of Santos Trafficante’s Batistiano assassins, the former leaders of Batista’s secret police.5 When the Cuba operation was discontinued, military intelligence sent Califano to the White House as Johnson’s advisor. Califano is a key to understanding the drug propaganda not only by virtue of an analysis of his intentional sophistry, but by virtue of his covert relationships. Is it a coincidence that a high-level CIA agent who helped run Santos Trafficante’s dope-dealing assassins became the country’s leading antidrug propagandist? I don’t think so. The centers of power responsible for dealing the drugs are the same centers of power disseminating the artificial hysteria necessary for their continued criminalization. That keeps the retail a hundred times higher than the natural value and the trade exclusively in the hands of the muscle. Another name for the muscle is military intelligence. For American military intelligence, the Vietnam War was, to a very large extent, a drug war, and, just as in Cuba, we were the dealers. Oil and other mineral wealth, of course, played a major role, as did the great defense contractor boondoggle. The Vietnam War was worth $240 billion to defense contractors in overt appropriations, and at least another $300 billion in covert and indirect appropriations. The artificial Prohibition-created value of the opium from Laos, Burma and Thailand became, therefore, a major factor in the Indochinese military equation - the means by which our clients could pay for our arms. Drug Prohibition has made the illegal drug trade the economic basis of military power throughout much of the world. Califano’s propaganda tactics for today’s Drug War are identical to those he used to promote the Vietnam War. He pulls the emotional trigger with a staccato barrage of snow-statistics, weeping for the babies that will die if we don’t ESCALATE THE WAR RIGHT NOW! As Prouty puts it, "...alumni of the intelligence community - a service from which there are no unconditional resignations. All true members of the Team remain in the power center whether in office with the incumbent administration or out of office with the hard core set. They simply rotate to and from official jobs and the business world or the pleasant haven of academe."6 In 1930, years before fen-phen, The Literary Digest reported that the fluid from blisters raised on the heroin user and injected was a promising new treatment of interest to the AMA.34 In 1931 Scientific American reported that the standard rabies treatment worked well on these mad dogs.35 In 1932 two Cornell researchers reported that "washing the brain" with sodium rhodanate would help "thin the thickened blood cells of the addict."36 In 1933, the year of repeal, three anesthetists reported that intravenous injection of grain alcohol was useful.37 In 1935 Drs. Klingmann and Everts revived the Towns-Lambert method, with an emphasis on the scopolamine.38 In 1940 two geniuses reported "curing" addiction with "frozen sleep."39 In 1957 the Naval Medical Field Research Laboratory at Camp Lejeune spared an addict "the distressing symptoms of withdrawal" by severing his frontal lobes from the rest of his brain.40 Today’s Quack Commander in Chief, promulgating today’s update of this same pharmacopropaganda, is the "progressive" Joseph Califano, Carter’s Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, and now founder and president of Columbia University’s Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse. Califano helps to channel a torrent of public money into 1930’s-style politicized research, and coercive, Lambert-style "treatment." Califano’s CASA is one of McCaffrey ’s major tools for coordinating national propaganda. For Califano all drug use is a "disease," an "epidemic," to use his words, which, not so coincidentally, are the same as those used by the Pope in 1484 in The Malleus Maleficarum about "witches’ medicines." Like so many Roman lawyers before him, the man is a genuine anthropological ignoramus. Not once in the psuedo-scientific Radical Surgery (1994) does he mention the origins of human inebriative behavior, tribal culture, or a single significant pharmacologist, anthropologist, ethnobotanist or psychoanalyst, although he insists that "substance abuse and addiction...is - the most devastating health pandemic threatening our people."41 Apparently it’s uniquely contemporary, like computer fraud. There’s not a single scholarly annotation in the whole book, which is written on a tenth-grade sound-bite level. In fact, he quotes prosecuting attorneys as anecdotal medical authorities. According to Califano, the absurd artificial value Prohibition gives inebriants, and the criminalization of people for simply trying to medicate themselves, in the absence of any sympathetic curanderismo, isn’t the cause of today’s street war. It’s the act of self-medication per se, despite the fact that the leading sociologists insist, and can prove, that safe herbal inebriants, in cultures which teach their traditional uses, cause no social problems whatever. Califano will wring his hands about collegiate "binge drinking" and never once mention an empirical expert on alcoholism. His idea of an expert is "the [unnamed] president of one of the nation’s top Jesuit colleges."42 Califano prescribes legal coercion to force all users trapped by the law, about 5% per year of the total of about 30 million,44 into a huge brainwashing bureaucracy, attached to the court system, that will pummel them until they submit. He plausibly advocates treatment over incarceration, accurately pointing out that "$1 invested in treatment saves $7 in crime, health and welfare costs."45 But his "progressive compassion" is just as vicious as Lambert’s. He says he knows that "Addiction is a chronic disease, more like diabetes and high blood pressure than like a broken arm or pneumonia, which can be fixed or cured in a single round of therapy."46 But he then suggests that "Instead of across-the-board mandatory sentences, keep inmates with drug and alcohol problems in jails, boot camps or halfway houses until they experience a year of sobriety after treatment."47 He adopts Dr. Leshner’s mainstream disease model, as he must to be plausible, but then advocates precisely the opposite therapy advocated by Dr. Leshner. Do we keep diabetics in boot camps until the diabetes goes away? Cigarette addicts? White man speak with forked tongue. This nasty hypocrite tells us that addiction is a chronic condition, and then proposes punishment for its sufferers, as the mainstream of drug abuse experts most certainly do not. For Califano, addiction is really a "turpitude" to be corrected, not a symptom of a real medical condition requiring continuing pharmacotherapy. His medical compassion is simply a necessary pose. He repeats, as if it were a medical prescription, the Bush-Bennett National Drug Control Strategy: "That doesn’t mean we should soften up the toughness required to get them to quit, such as threat of dismissal from a job or incarceration upon repeated relapse or violation of drug laws."48 Just what an addictive personality needs - the stress of unemployment and the threat of incarceration. That’s sure to promote sobriety. However one defines "addiction," I know of no physician who thinks denial of pain killers to those in pain, or imprisoning diabetics and denying them insulin, is medically indicated. "The grim reality, shrouded for too long in our self-denial, is that any effort to provide all Americans health care at affordable cost is doomed to fail unless we mount an all-fronts attack on abuse and addiction involving all substances - cigarettes, alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, crack, heroin, PCP, hallucinogens, sedatives, tranquilizers, stimulants, analgesics, inhalants, and steroids."49 So far as I can tell from his book, that’s his idea of all substances. Califano neither distinguishes herbs from concentrates nor use from abuse, even in the vast majority of cases that involve no abuse. A positive test automatically means "addiction to witchcraft." It is precisely this indiscriminate idiocy that popularizes the street alkaloids and cigarettes. The Secretary tells us that his personal model for all drug use is his compulsive, 28-year tobacco addiction, up to 4 packs a day when he was busy telling Lyndon Johnson victory is just around the corner in Vietnam.50 Why wasn’t he thrown into a halfway house? Califano is apparently, or conveniently, unaware that the average marijuana user smokes one cigarette for every pack consumed by a tobacco addict, and that addiction to marijuana is medically unknown. Dr. John Morgan: "Of course, a ‘heavy’ smoker of marijuana consumes 3 or 4 cigarettes per day, while a heavy tobacco smoker may consume 40 or more cigarettes per day. This probably explains the rarity of reported carcinoma in marijuana smokers."51 Califano sophistically equates pot with tobacco, and then insists that pot escalates cancer costs. He dreamily insists that all traditional inebriative herbs are equally dangerous, and that all herbs are, magically, so to speak, as dangerous as the most dangerous isolates and artificial compounds. All inebriants, therefore, deserve no policy distinctions. This is also the official position of the U.S. State Department. Califano makes no connection between the unavailability of safe traditional herbs like marijuana, coca leaf and opium sap, which he never once mentions, and the wild popularity of relatively dangerous, but profitable to smuggle, street alkaloids like cocaine and heroin. Nor does he associate the unavailability of safe herbs with the popularity of poisonous crap like glue and PCP. On the contrary, he equates the herbs with the poisons. Here is part of the official end-of-year report from the Dutch Ministry of Welfare, Health and Cultural Affairs, 1995, signed by the Ministers of Health, Justice and Interior: "The view held by some that the use of cannabis products alone causes a physiological or psychological need to use hard drugs as well - what is known as the stepping stone theory - has been belied by actual developments in the Netherlands. Dutch young people who use soft drugs are perfectly well aware of the greater dangers of using hard drugs such as heroin and have no desire to experiment with them. In the Netherlands the percentage of soft drugs users who also go on to use hard drugs is relatively low. In light of these findings the stepping stone theory should be regarded as one of the many myths in circulation about the use of drugs, though one which under certain circumstances could become a self-fulfilling prophesy: by treating the use of cannabis products and hard drugs such as heroin and cocaine in the same way may in fact make it more likely that cannabis-smokers will come into contact with hard drugs. Moreover, equating the one with the other undermines the credibility of the information provided about drugs to young people." The average age of Dutch heroin addicts is over thirty, that is, this policy, which has been in place for more than twenty years, has succeeded in radically reducing the use of heroin among the young. Holland now has less than one-seventh our rate of alkaloid abuse, and crime. "The fact that there are virtually no young people under 20 using heroin or cocaine in the Netherlands is extremely gratifying…" By refusing to distinguish herbs from either natural or artificial concentrates, Califano is actually engineering widespread concentrate use. And that, like it or not, is an historical function of military fascism, which has always been financed by the Yakuza, the Mafia. Remember Califano’s other domino theory, the one about Vietnam? We could have bought the Vietminh for a tenth of the price we paid to lose to them. Do we really want to take national policy cues from one of the engineers of the worst strategic disaster in American history? The Dutch know what they’re doing. With this evidence in hand, The European Parliamentary Commission on Civil Liberties and Internal Affairs recommended to the full European Parliament, 1/29/95, continent-wide marijuana decriminalization, insisting that the legal equation of soft and hard drugs caused hard drug use.54 The U.S. pulled out all the stops to prevent this political humiliation at the hands of the EP, which usually accepts the recommendations of its official commissions. Califano is peddling his "devil-drug" for all it’s worth, wringing his hands, crying in his beer for all those "crack babies." This talented propagandist, a master at hyping "new studies" designed to induce artificial hysteria, constantly repeats the phrase "pediatric pandemic," a great alliteration.55 Fascism is always maudlin. Dan Russell [EMAIL PROTECTED] Kalyx.com P.O. 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