-Caveat Lector- <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/"> </A> -Cui Bono?- from: http://www.drugwar.com/euro.htmfrom: Drug War - Covert Money, Power & Policy 670 Page Paperback, 350 Illustrations, Sewn Binding, Not Yet Published Click Here: <A HREF="http://www.drugwar.com/euro.htm">http://www.drugwar.com/e uro.htm</A> ----- Illustrated Summaries of Much Longer Chapters Drug War Covert Money, Power & Policy Mescal The Comanche war shaman Quanah Parker found a more successful path: "Lay down your arms, Quanah Parker. Your solution, as is the solution of all creatures, is personal. Turn your energies toward conquering the self....Only through this will you and your people have a freedom that exceeds the white man's." "I have planted my flesh in the cactus Pioniyo. Partake of it, as it is the food of your soul. Through it you will continue to communicate with Me. When all of those with the skin of red-earth clay are united by pioniyo, then and only then will they once again reign supreme. The white civilization will destroy themselves and the Indian will return to nature, master over himself and at peace with all." Peyotl is Nahuatl, Aztec, for "cocoon," which is simply a description of the shape of the tuberous cactus, which is sliced to make the "buttons." The ancient Huichol First Hunt equates Peyote, Deer and Maize, the ecstatic ingestion of the "hunted" cactus unifying the world, bringing back the First Times. The Gnostic teacher Valentinus said that the search for gnosis begins with three sufferings: "terror, pain, and roadlessness (aporia)." Magpie said: "Other religions teach men what to believe, but in this religion each man learns truth for himself. God has given the mescal to man that through it man might know. There is a word that comes at the end of the mescal songs and that word means 'the road.' Each man's road is shown to him within his own heart. When he eats the mescal he sees the road; he knows; he sees all the truths of life and of the spirit." The mescal, "sweet medicine," is the "balsam" of the Gnostics, though, of course, they used different "plants of truth." A spontaneous Huichol Peyote sung, sung in a ceremony, goes like this: "climbed the blue staircase up to the sky/climbed where the roses were opening, where roses were speaking/heard nothing, nothing to hear, heard silence/I climbed where the roses were singing, where the gods were waiting, blue staircase up in the sky/but heard nothing, nothing to hear, heard silence, silence." In 1888 an Indian Bureau agent named Clark reported this to the central office in Washington, calling Peyote Wokwave, which is close to the generic Comanche word for cactus: "Four or five years ago, a Mexican, named Titcheestoque or Chewowwah, having been a captive of the Commanches and under their training having become equal to them in savage warfare escaped punishment by remaining with the Apaches in New Mexico. He returned to this reservation [Kiowa, Comanche and Wichita] during P.B. Hunt's term of office [1878-85], bringing with him quite a sack full of these opium buttons as I call them, and traded them to the Comanches." "The Indian is supersticious by education. The influence of the Wokwave upon them I think is similar to that of large doses of Chloral Hydrate. It throws a person into a kind of trans, delema or like a dream, seeing or imagining all kinds of things. These visions, after the spell is passed off and the Indian sobers up, he does not consider his mental condition, but he thinks that all he saw and heard while in this condition is reality and that these things were communicated to him through the Wokwave and that they came direct from the Great Spirit." An 1890 BIA directive continued the tradition of pharmacological lucidity so brilliantly established by agent Clark: "It is the duty of the government peremptorily to stop the use of this bean by the Indians. You will direct the police of your agency to seize and destroy the mescal bean, or any preparation or decoction thereof, wherever found on the reservation. The article itself, and those who use it are to to be treated exactly as if it were alcohol or whiskey, or a compound therof; in fact it may be classified for all practical purposes as an 'intoxicating liquor.'" Added the JAMA, no less: "Certain Sons of Belial, taking advantage of the tendency of the Indians to religious ceremonial, have been industriously spreading the word among the tribes that partaking of Peyote enables the addict to communicate with the Great Spirit. It is true that certain Mexican tribes have long had a superstitious reverence for mescal buttons and have used them on occassion in religious ceremonials; and this old superstition gave the commercial dope vendor a great opportunity among the Indians in the United States. This has been carried so far that the 'Peyote Church' has actually been incorporated, the members being devotees, who gather for an orgy of frenzy, far worse than the cocain parties held among the negroes." "The government has investigated the use of Peyote and found its evil effects to parallel the Oriental use of cannabis. The addict becomes indolent, immoral and worthless. The great difficulty in suppressing this habit among the Indians arises from the fact that the commercial interests involved in the Peyote traffic are strongly entrenched, and they exploit the Indian, even as similar interests exploiting morphin addicts are strongly entrenched. Added to this is the superstition of the Indian who believes in the Peyote Church. As soon as an effort is made to suppress Peyote, the cry is raised that it is unconstitutional to do so and is an invasion of religious liberty. Suppose the negroes of the South had a Cocain Church!" ===== Inquisition In Germany and Scotland, in the sixteenth century, midwives were burned alive for easing the pain of childbirth. The ostensible reason was that the pain was God's punishment for Original Sin, and so to interfere with it was heretical, causing great pain and hurt to Our Saviour (fascism is always maudlin). The real reason was that these shamans challenged the psycho-medical monopoly of the military-industrial theocracy. Puritan Governor John Winthrop of Massachusetts plainly asserted as much in 1648, explaining why Margaret Jones had to be hung: "she practising physic, and her medicines being such things as (by her own confession) were harmless, as aniseed, liquors, etc., yet had extraordinarily violent effects." Other accusations included an understanding "beyond the apprehension of all physicians and surgeons" and "some things which she foretold came to pass accordingly; other things she could tell of (as secret speeches, etc.) which she had not ordinary means to come to the knowledge of." She sounds like a powerful shaman. "Pregnancy," declared Dr. John Vaughan of Delaware, was "a diseased state" requiring - guess what - bleeding, emetics and cathartics, that is, chemical poisons. That was the overwhelming regular medical opinion taught in the schools and advocated by the leading regular physicians of the first half of the nineteenth century. Dr. Evory Kennedy, in the Lying-In Hospital in Dublin, prescribed "tartar emetic," antimony and potassium, for hundreds of women as a substitute for the official ergot to "relax the pelvic muscles," which it did by causing violent vomiting, something no midwife in her right mind would ever consider; it also, incidentally, poisoned the baby and prolonged the labor, the exact opposite of what ergot does. Antimony and potassium are so poisonous that they are used today as insecticides. Kennedy's procedures were brought across the Atlantic. Due to the lack of aseptic conditions in many hospitals, something called "child-bed fever," rare in home births, killed thousands of infants. Semmelweiss demonstrated in the 1860's that this was due to the exposure of the new-borns to the contagious diseases in the hospital, but asepsis and segregation weren't effectively practiced in most hospitals until the 1900's. There were some famous exceptions, like New York Maternity Hospital, but well into the twentieth century many hospitals treated new mothers to a high incidence of infant death and serious uterine infections. The very worst of the patent medicines contained the metallic and mineral poisons that were, or had been, official with the regular doctors. These included Chloro-Phosphide of Arsenic, Sulphur Compound Lozenges and Storey's [calomel] Worm Cakes. "Calomel" is mercurous chloride, mercury and chlorine, the toxic metal found in thermometers and the mineral base of WW I's poison gases and many insecticides. De Valagin's Mineral Solution was arsenious acid in dilute hydrochloric acid, and Donovan's was iodide of arsenic and mercury; strychnine was also popular. Obviously, the best of the regular physicians, and there were many, bitterly opposed bleeding and poisoning. Robert Bentley Todd, in the 1850's, treated his patients to the traditional roast beef, brandy and opium, without the poison, and no doubt did a great deal of good, but not nearly as much as an experienced herbalist could do. Bleeding and poisoning lost ground as American pharmacology became more sophisticated, and that sophistication was due largely to Native American herbalism, popularized over-the-counter. As Bourke's old comrade Buffalo Bill proved, the reputation and mystique of Native America was worth a fortune back East. Below, Bill with Sitting Bull, who liked the medicine-show man. Doc Healy and Texas Charlie Bigelow's Indian Medicine Company, in the 1880's, had seventy-five Indian stage shows on the road at one time. They peddled Kickapoo Oil, Kickapoo Salve, Kickapoo Cough Cure and Indian Prairie Plant for Female Complaints. Today's prohibitionist cliché is that this was all bunk, an empty hussle. The actual fact is that many of these patent medicines were sophisticated herbal recipes. Kickapoo Oil was a masterpiece of composition; it contained ether, camphor, capsicum, clove oil, sassafras oil and myrrh. It smelled sweet, tingled going on, felt hot, and got you good and happy, which is the best, usually, that the regular docs could do with most complaints; the soothing salve did a lot more good than harm. In these days before regulation, of course, many patent medicines were worse than useless, especially those containing the chemical poisons of the regulars. Few of the herbal medicines were dangerous, but virtually all made absurd claims and refused to reveal their ingredients. The most famous of the bracers was Lydia E. Pinkham's Vegetable Compound For Female Complaints. Due to constant advertising and massive sales, it was said that, aside from Queen Victoria, Lydia Pinkham was the most famous woman of the nineteenth century. Although a commercial superstar in later life, Lydia did indeed originally compound her compound on her Massachusetts farm. Her formula, diffused in 18% alcohol, included gentian, black cohosh, unicorn root, liferoot, pleurisy root, dandelion, chamomile, licorice and Jamaica dogwood. All had been official or semi-official in in the U.S. Pharmacopeia or the U.S. Dispensatory for various female ills. A 1958 chemical analysis confirmed the estrogen content and the quality of the herbal extracts. So far from being bunkum, Lydia Pinkham's Vegetable Compound was probably the best female tonic on the market, although Lydia did go a bit overboard in claiming to cure all female ills, and in advising customers to "write Mrs. Pinkham," avoid doctors altogether and just guzzle Compound. At the turn of the century 75% of the births in St. Louis were home births attended by midwives, and in Chicago the figure was 86%. 78% of Maryland's midwives were Black. Not only was culture a factor, but the midwives' nominal fee, usually $15, including follow-up visits, was deeply resented by many regulars. The first federal drug law in American history is aimed specifically at midwives, and the zeitgeist and legal language come straight out of the Inquisition. A sanctimonious Connecticut Congregationalist named Anthony Comstock joined the New York City YMCA's campaign against obscenity in 1868. Financed by powerful Puritan merchants and supported by leading Doctors of Divinity, Comstock was appointed to head the Y-connected New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. In 1873 Comstock engineered An Act for the Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, obscene Literature and Articles of immoral Use - "The Comstock Law": "That whoever...shall sell...or in any manner exhibit...or shall have in his possession...any obscene book, pamphlet...or other representation...or any cast, instrument or otherarticle of an immoral nature, or any drug or medicine...for the prevention of conception, or for causing unlawful abortion, or shall advertise the same for sale...shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor...and on conviction thereof, he shall be imprisoned at hard labor in the penitentiary for not less than six months nor more than five years for each offense..." Comstock was made a special agent of the Post Office Department with the power to open the mail. His New York Society served as an army of private deputies. Comstock's language and asumptions can all be found in the Malleus Maleficarum, the official handbook of the medieval Inquisition. As Pope Innocent VIII put it, in 1484, in pharmaco-shamanic language, "...applying potent remedies to prevent the disease of heresy and other turpitudes diffusing their poison to the destruction of many innocent souls..." Does that sound like the Drug War to you? "Drug" "addiction" is a "plague," an "epidemic," a "scourge" of "poison"; all that comes straight out of the Malleus Maleficarum, which admits it's all really a "turpitude." In 1878 Comstock went to Madame Restell, a famous Cockney midwife established at 52nd & 5th in Manhattan for years. Although she was 67 and retired, she took pity on Comstock, who entrapped her by posing as a distraught husband whose hysterical wife was unable to sustain yet another pregnancy. On receiving medication, Comstock made his drug bust and threw the old lady in the Tombs. Facing a certain five years at hard labor, the distraught old woman cut her own throat. Comstock proudly told the papers she was the fifteenth midwife he had driven to suicide. Comstock's last case was his most famous. In 1915 he arrested Margaret Sanger, below, for publishing her own magazine, Woman Rebel ("No Gods, No Masters"), which dealt explicitly with female medicine, sexual repression, labor organization and strike tactics. She was charged on nine counts of obscenity, a possible 45-year sentence. When Sanger got specific about gonorrhea, The Call was banned from the mails: "It was at this time that I began to realize that Anthony Comstock was alive and active. His stunted, neurotic nature and savage methods of attack had ruined thousands of women's lives. He had indirectly caused the death of untold thousands. He and a weak-kneed Congress, which, through a trick, in 1873 had given him the power of an autocrat, were directly responsible for the deplorable condition of a whole generation of women left physically damaged and spiritually crippled from the results of abortion. No group of women had yet locked horns with this public enemy. Women in far western states who had fought for the sacred privilege of the ballot and won it years earlier had never raised their voices against the Comstock laws. Their own shallow emotions had not yet grappled with so fundamental an issue as sex." The shallow women to whom Sanger refers are the doughty prudes of the WCTU and the more prohibitionist-minded of the Suffragettes, whose roots were in the old Rush-inspired Temperance movement. Their anti-sacramentalism was firmly rooted in the Hundred Years War. Insisted Mary Livermore, president of the Massachusetts Union: "no Catholic should hold office in our country whose political allegiance is to the Pope, first. It is high time there was agitation." Working with Anthony Comstock, the WCTU got obscenity laws in most states which criminalized the teaching of real sexual biology and contraception, even by physicians. They helped Comstock criminalize Sanger. The church ladies even acquiesced when the AMA engineered midwifery licensing tests in most states and then refused to test qualified midwives. Below is the comment of The Masses, September, 1915, "Your honor," says Comstock, "this woman gave birth to a naked child!" ===== Monopoly 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. In 1903 he set up a government lab to publicize the contents of the patent medicines, making much of their use of the only effective solvent and preservative they had, alcohol. During AMA testimony for alcohol Prohibition, the docs, taking "an active part in the propaganda against drink," as the Time s put it in 1918 - lying through their teeth - swore that alcohol "has no scientific value" in therapeutics. Alcohol was the standard battlefield disinfectant of the American army since the Revolutionary War, and the basic emergency anesthetic of the backwoods. The 1918 U.S. Dispensatory had it official as a germicide and surgical disinfectant, anesthetic, heart stimulant and "The purer forms of alcohol, whether strong or diluted, are employed almost exclusively in pharmacy; as in the preparation of medicines, such as ether, into the composition of which they enter; for the preservation of organic substances; in the extraction of the active principles of drugs, as in tinctures..." Wiley didn't want no more Lydia Pinkhams. Wiley's crowning triumph, the Pure 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. Wiley completely ignored mercury, chlorine, antimony, sulphuric acid and the many other real poisons then in wide use. 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 knew perfectly well that these "substances" were not only not "poisonous," but were the most widely prescribed medicines in the country - and that, of course, was the real point. As Dr. David Macht, Instructor in Clinical Medicine and Lecturer in Pharmacology at Johns Hopkins University put it in 1915, in the Journal of the AMA no less: "If the entire materia medica at our disposal were limited to the choice and use of only one drug, I am sure that a great many, if not the majority, of us would choose opium; and I am convinced that if we were to select, say half a dozen of the most important drugs in the Pharmacopoeia, we should all place opium in the first rank." Wiley knew that opium sap was the safest and most effective herbal painkiller, febrifugue, sedative, hypnotic and antispasmodic on the market, official for these purposes, and that easy access to it was essential to the poor. Nonetheless, he led the propaganda campaign - from his bully pulpit in the Department of Agriculture and from his regular column in Good Housekeeping - that advertised opium as a baby killer when not dispensed by the hand of a licensed personage. Opium's demonic image, pounded in decade after decade, is assumed to be reality today by the vast majority of people. The 1918 U.S. Dispensatory: "Although capable of fulfilling all the indications for which morphine [one of opium sap's 39 alkaloids] is employed (above), when used as an analgesic or somnifacient, the alkaloid is usually preferred because of its lesser ability to disturb digestion. On the other hand, in diarrhea and spasmodic colic the whole drug is superior to the alkaloid. Opium is frequently a valuable remedy in diabetes mellitus. How it acts is uncertain, but the whole drug is to be preferred to any of its alkaloids. Because of its peculiar power in dilating the vessels of the skin opium tends to increase the sweat and is therefore useful in minor infections, such as colds, grippe, muscular rheumatism, and the like." The legally official guide of organized medicine claimed, word for word, what the patent medicines claimed for opium; the entry for it is the longest in the dispensatory, nineteen pages. Unlike the Dispensatory he helped to write, however, Wiley made no legal distinction between the herbal sap and Bayer's souped up refined morphine, heroin. When a baby died of whooping cough or pneumonia, if it had been given an opiate to reduce the fever, stop the hacking cough and let it sleep, Wiley, in Good Housekeeping, attributed the death to the medicine. Given the lack of effective antibiotics and vaccines, opium was a great life-saver; many a baby owed its life to opium, as Professor Macht indicated. The soothing syrups, like Parke Davis' Cocillana, or the tonic wines like Vin Mariani, were perfectly safe and healthful; they were effective medicine, and that was the point. Sanger worried about access to medicine, birth control and free clinics for the poor. Wiley worried about exactly the opposite: restricting access to the commercial interests he represented, criminalization of birth control, and the monopolistic domination of medical fees. In 1899 the AMA was taken over by a brilliant medical hustler named George H. Simmons. Between 1899 and 1924 Simmons was Editor of The Journal of the AMA, Executive Secretary, General Manager, and Chief of the Council on Pharmacy and Chemistry. The two posts he held longest, Editor of the Journal and Chief of the Council on Pharmacy, were the two most powerful positions in the organization. Simmons' medical career began in Nebraska in the 1880's, operating a massage parlor and abortion clinic as a licensed homeopath. In his ads in the Lincoln papers he claimed to be a "licentiate of Gynecology and Obstetrics from the Rotunda Hospitals, Dublin, Ireland." Actually, the only regular medical degree he ever got in his life came from an unaccredited mail order diploma mill called the Rush Medical College of Chicago (apt name) in 1892. The prescription records in Lincoln proved that while "studying" in Chicago, Simmons was actually practicing in Lincoln. These facts came out in sworn testimony before a Senate committee in 1930 investigating the AMA's "practices in restraint of trade." The ophthalmic surgeon Emanuel Josephson was so infuriated by Simmons' behavior that he carefully catalogued the case against him in his 1941 book, Merchants in Medicine. Without approval from the AMA's Council on Pharmacy and Chemistry no new drug could advertise in The Journal of the AMA or in any other major journal or paper. Through kick-back advertising contracts and truth in advertising laws which recognized only official AMA opinion as the truth, Simmons' Council on Pharmacy achieved enormous power. Harvey Wiley, while head of the USDA, was a member of the AMA's Council on Pharmacy. Dr. Henry Rusby, Dean of the College of Pharmacy of Columbia University and an intrepid botanical explorer (academic discoverer of Bannisteriopsis rusbyana, ayahuasca), recounted this story to Dr. Josephson: In 1913 Simmons had refused to approve the new radium line of Joseph Flannery, president of the Standard Chemical Company of Pittsburgh. Madame Curie herself had pronounced Flannery's radium up to standard, but Simmons adamantly refused to put it in his list of New and Non-Official Remedies, without offering any explanation. Flannery complained to his old friend Rusby that the rejection could cost him a fortune, whereupon Rusby told him to try bribery. After Flannery paid Simmons a hefty sum, the "analysis" department of the AMA's Council on Pharmacy and Chemistry endorsed Flannery's radium line. But one of his products, a solution of radium salts for drinking, was highly toxic. With official AMA endorsement this "Radium Drinking Water" killed quite a few people before the USDA reacted. Another of Simmons' big winners was dinitrophenol, a lethal airplane glue approved by the Council on Pharmacy for weight reduction. Simmons' substitution of blackmail for medical analysis was standard AMA procedure, as Parke-Davis, Loesser and Abbot laboratories testified in court and before Congress. It was this Council on Pharmacy that Congress went to for the basic pharmacological definitions that are the standing legal precedents of today's drug laws - and they are a tissue of overt empirical lies. The AMA and APhA wanted one thing only from The Pure Food and Drug Act and The Harrison Act - complete commercial control of the most valuable medicines. At the turn of the century, an alcohol extract of whole coca leaves, mixed with good French wines, was the best-selling tonic wine in the world, Vin Mariani. It was happily lauded to the skies in Mariani's full-page ads by the likes of Thomas Edison, Jules Verne, Pope Leo XIII, Queen Victoria, Sarah Bernhardt, Emile Zola, Charles Gounod and Bartholdi, sculptor of the Statue of Liberty. Mariani used a traditional alcohol infusion of whole coca leaves. He never used isolated cocaine. Mariani was world famous as a connaisseur of coca leaves. Their distinctions in the Andes were as sharp as the distinctions between French wines. Many of Mariani's imitators, of course, just added refined cocaine and sugar to cheap wine. This helped organized medicine to engineer a legal monopoly on the enormous tonic wine business. They were enabled to define the leaf, in law, as dangerous as the alkaloid, and therefore available only by prescription. It takes a ton of coca leaves to make 7 pounds of cocaine - there is no medical analogy between the two, any more than between potato and its trace alkaloids. Below is one of Mariani's many imitators, Sears, Roebuck, from their 1897 catalog. <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soap-boxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. 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