April 19, 2008

Are Election Politics (finally) Catching Up with the Drug War? (Personal)


Enough of what’s been happening both at home and abroad since 2001 has paralleled what pot smokers have been (unwittingly) teaching me over the same interval to be downright uncanny. I believe that a major conclusion to be drawn from my study is that human emotions have always played a greater role in our decision making than most of us care to admit. A recent example, one with a particularly interesting twist, was just aired on PBS.   

 The Weekly Political Wrap is a moderated Friday program in which David Brooks and Mark Shields discuss the week’s politics; yesterday’s program elicited seemingly different opinions from the pundits in which each recalled the outcomes of American Presidential elections since 1968.

 I wasn’t surprised by Shields’ annoyance at what he considers the unfair treatment of Obama by Pennsylvania debate moderators. Brooks, whose personality I’ve always found somewhat smarmy and unattractive, justified that impression by opining that the questions directed at Obama were “fair” and that he had "not come off well.” His main conclusion seemed to have been that Obama is being revealed as a (typical) losing Democrat in the mold of Carter, Dukakis, and Kerry.

i was caught a bit off guard by the fury audible in Shields’ response; although ostensibly not directed at Brooks, he clearly saw his double standard. What also gave me some hope for the future of this benighted republic is that Shields was also specific about a couple of sacred cows: super patriot Dick Cheney’s five (count them five) requests for draft deferment in the Sixties, and his citation of an issue fairly close to the drug war: the high incidence of PTSD among Iraq returnees for which the VA has no plan.

What Shields’ anger suggested to me is that our brighter pundits have not missed as much as I feared; they have simply not spoken out because of the usual concerns about being politically incorrect. Thus Shields’ incomplete melt-down may really be a sign of hope that when things get bad enough, the hypocrisy required to sustain our drug war might finally be discarded by enough people to make a difference.

Although not often credited, it's quite obvious that the Great Depression played a role in the Repeal the 18th Amendment.

OTOH, if this nation is frightened enough of the idea of a black president to elect John McCain, we could be in even more trouble than I suspected...

Doctor Tom

 

Posted by tjeffo at 09:17 PM | Comments (0)

April 13, 2008

Questions Never Asked and Dots Still Requiring Connection (Historical)


An original theme of this blog was connecting certain historical dots between today’s huge pot market and the little-known Marijuana Tax Act of 1937. In that connection, one would normally assume that when the product a policy designed to dissuade “kids” from trying has been our most valuable crop for several years, discussion of that embarrassing development couldn’t be kept entirely off limits; especially in the nation claiming to be a world bastion of free speech.

But one would be dead wrong; the relevant questions are never asked, either by- or of- the very professionals who should be wrestling with them. Instead, the policy is fiercely defended by a scientifically ignorant drug czar as absolutely essential to the national welfare. Nor is his claim that without the drug war our drug problems would be even worse even questioned; especially by wonks at the handful of prestigious institutions offering advanced degrees in “Public Policy.”

Policy academics have shown so little interest in Harry Anslinger that not one scholarly biography of the man has ever appeared. For those with short memories, Harry was the bureaucrat the FBN was created for in 1930, and which he ruled with an iron fist until departing abruptly in 1962. During that interval he played a dominant role in protecting and shaping the policy that would become Nixon’s drug war without any meaningful review of its (racist and stupid) basic assumptions. Anslinger was also the driving force behind the 1937 MTA, and authored of the 1961 Single Convention Treaty (now the UN's basis for global drug prohibition).

Given those dubious accomplishments, the absence of a definitive Anslinger biography can only be understood as an avoidance of embarrassment: just enough of his unsavory history is known to make it impossible to construct a bio that wouldn't cast enormous doubt on  drug war legitimacy. Clearly, no one wants to risk that; what academics would risk bringing down federal displeasure on either himself or his institution? That’s why a recent study of the FBN; one providing a detailed, but necessarily oblique, look at Anslinger through the unguarded recollections of ex-FBN agents is worth reading by anyone with a serious interest in drug policy (a predictably small market).

While The Strength of the Wolf  (Douglas Valentine, Verso, 2004) can't deliver on its subtitle’s claim to be “The Secret History of America’s War on Drugs,” it is, nevertheless, a rare, solidly researched, and historically helpful study of an era that remains shrouded in imposed ignorance. Ironically, it was Valentine's own (understandable) ignorance of American drug policy history that induced him to shift his intended focus from the early CIA to the FBN during an era of great historical importance: the immediate aftermath of World War Two. In his Introduction, Valentine explains the switch: early in his research, he learned that a number of mid-level FBN agents had sought lateral transfers to other federal agencies to preserve their pensions. Several had gone to the CIA, a hated former rival in its early days, but the one favored to prosper during the early Cold War. Generally loyal to Anslinger, neither the ex-agents nor Valentine  ever question the wisdom of prohibiting drugs, but their accounts, as collected and assembled by a  competent investigative reporter, provide a riveting picture of what was essentially a rogue agency that repeatedly broke the law by conducting grotesque experiments in a search for the (non-existent) drug that would allow "mind control" to become a key Cold War weapon. In that connection, Valentine's descriptions of  the antics  of George H. White are particularly telling.

Time doesn't permit a detailed account of Valentine's main contribution: clarifying key interactions between FBN, FBI, and CIA in the aftermath of World War Two. The bottom line is that our whole government became so obsessed with opposing Communism that it engaged in tactics that were little different than their opponents. The game was then as now: all about "winning," with little concern for long term consequences to either planet or species.

The picture of Anslinger that emerges is one of an insecure mediocrity whose greatest skill was bureaucratic infighting and greatest concern was the protection of his bureau. The main emphasis within the FBN was on “making cases” (gaining key convictions) despite the limited budgets and scarce manpower necessitated by the Great Depression. After World War Two, as it gradually became clear that "narcotics" enforcement would play second fiddle to the CIA's mission, it seems that FBN agents eventually accepted that need, even as they chafed at having to honor it. Ironically, Nixon's drug war, declared after Anslinger's departure and shortly before his death in 1975, would lead to creation of the DEA, the FBN's most obvious successor agency,


Once one realizes the degree to which protection of its mindless policy, always a driving force behind America's drug prohibition bureaucracy,  has contaminated the entire federal government, the political sanctity of the drug war becomes readily understandable. The same is true of "reform," which as designated representative of the "drug menace," has become so necessary to preservation of the prohibition myth, apparently without realizing it.

Ironically, it’s quite likely that when a very sick old Anslinger died in 1975, he had no more idea of where the drug war he'd helped create was headed than did Nixon himself. The same goes for an already-senile Gipper who dusted it off after Nixon's disgrace at the urging of his spouse  to “just say no.” Then came Poppa Bush who invaded Panama to arrest its president for drug trafficking on behalf of his CIA, and  Bill Clinton who never inhaled, but did appoint Barry McCaffrey drug czar and accepted a bribe for pardoning a notorious drug criminal on his way out the door. 

Then we come to the present incumbent, whose administration has set new records for incompetence and dishonesty in its zeal to prove Dubya is more forceful than daddy. The really sad part is that this admittedly inflammatory rant is far more accurate than alternative and more widely believed scenarios because it's based on data collected systematically from drug users. Even sadder is that it's data that's been readily available in California to anyone willing to ask the right questions for at least seven years.

Thus several big dots are still there to be connected.

Doctor Tom

 

Posted by tjeffo at 05:47 PM | Comments (0)

December 23, 2007

The CIA and the Drug War: a lesson in denial

As so often happens, the best topics to blog about are often suggested by the day’s news or by items airing on TV. Saturday (yesterday) was no exception: the History Channel ran The True Story of Charlie Wilson, which it billed as an authentic version of the same story told in the a just-released movie starring Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, and Phillip Seymour Hoffman. I’d already been quite familiar with that plot since I first heard a discussion by George Crile of his book in 2003; but my information had come from a quite different source: Alfred McCoy’s earlier and studiously neglected Politics of Heroin originally published in 1974 over the objections of the CIA, and later updated by McCoy himself to include the Agency’s involvement with the illegal drug trade in Central America and Afghanistan during the Eighties. So, although I saw, Crile’s book as a very readable addition to the story first reported by McCoy, it seemed that by emphasizing the defeat of the Soviet Union as a blessing and the CIA as buffoons who hadn’t seen the the benefits implicit in arming the Mujihedeen, Crile himself, had appeared willing to tell only part of the truth. Unfortunately, he has since succumbed to pancreatic cancer at the age of 61. Beyond that, one of the phenomena that had struck me most about the appallingly dishonest Dark Alliance episode had been the obdurate refusal of the three pillars of American Journalism that eventually drove Gary Webb to suicide never once referred McCoy’s very credible account. As with so many similar episodes of feigned blindness, it’s the failure to mention the obvious that becomes so incriminating. If one is struck by the frequency with which certain themes have been recurring in the history of the CIA since its creation from the OSS in 1947: graft, corruption dishonesty, incompetence, and the often devastating unintended consequences of earlier “success” (Blowback), one also has also to be struck by the degree to which the same characteristics have been shared by the war on drugs and the frequency with which both agencies have interacted in ways the rest of the government, the press, and many of our key institutions seem intent on not noticing. In other words, the CIA-ONDCP interaction which has been steadily evolving into a never-ending Conspiracy Theory since the end of World War Two has also required a massive suspension of disbelief by many of the same institutions we rely on for protection of our financial markets, our ecology and our health. The key questions then become: to what degree is man’s penchant for denial of obvious cognitive dissonance an intrinsic part of our nature; and to what degree has it already set our species up for disaster? Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 07:44 PM | Comments (0)

December 15, 2007

Components of the Emergent Pot Market 2 : patients


Note to chronic readers: this blog is, like everything else, evolving; hopefully in a useful direction. What I hope to do in the future is identify topics I’ve already written about with italics, which can then serve as search terms those interested in more detail.

California’s huge gray market for marijuana, like so many other phenomena dependent on our feckless drug war, is seen quite differently by different observers. In many respects, the old parable of the blind men and the elephant is the most apt description; unfortunately, the disability in this instance isn’t simple blindess.

Rather, it’s the bias that prevents most humans from recognizing or admitting that an earlier judgment, which may have built their reputation and rewarded them with wealth may have also been wrong. That’s especially true of the drug war, which began as a purely intellectual formulation, and has been failing for decades around the world, but is still staunchly defended by most authoritarians as essential public policy. In essence, the greater the error, the longer it has dominated human thought, and the more vigorously it has been defended, the more difficult it becomes to criticize consructively, let alone change.

In the case of the drug war, which, despite lacking either coherence or supporting evidence, has co-opted so many of our important institutions: criminal justice, health care, and  education, for starters; the problem is enormous— especially for those on the wrong side of conventional wisdom.

The backlash against the excesses of the youthfully idealistic “hippie" movement that seemed to spring up suddenly in the mid-Sixties was immediate and intense. Unfortunately; because the counterculture also reinforced the latent fear of youthful rebellion that exists just below the surface in many (perhaps all) societies, the backlash against it has also proved quite durable. As I’ve been emphasizing, the first white people to use pot in a way that attracted notice were members of the “Beat Generation” who were older than the baby boomers they influenced, and would provide the youthful counterculture with substance, purpose, and pot, which unquestionably became (one of) the psychotherapeutic agents that critically enhanced their behavior.

In many respects, the Sixties represented a perfect storm in which America’s largest-ever generation, through no fault of its own, become recipients of affluence and conveniences derived from winning World War Two without any real memory of the pain and sacrifice winning had required. In much the same way, most other nations going through the same war had experienced more pain over a longer interval and would thus be understandably ambivalent toward the lucky Americans who, because they had  suffered less, were in a position to bail them out with unprecedented largess in the post war period...and so oon.

Nevertheless, what the survivors of wars in Viet Nam and Iraq are learning in common, is that the stresses of war can produce an anxiety syndrome (PTSD) and that its symptoms yield to pot in many cases. It was essentially the same lesson that American High School kids have been learning since the early Seventies.

All of which brings me to the points I’d like to leave behind: over half of American adolescents have been trying pot since the late Sixties. A surprisingly large percentage have remained long term users for indefinitely long intervals. Such use isn’t “recreational” (do we risk arrest or career destruction for fun?) and it certainly isn’t addictive (pot smokers find it far easier to give up pot on short notice for cause than to ever quit cigarettes). The available evidence from California is that after 215 let the genie out of the bottle, our commercial natures have created market forces with the power to (perhaps) frustrate the enormous legal advantages of both the DEA and the local cops. Even if they succeed in their short term goal of driving distribution back to the street, the war on pot will never be the same.

Think of how much easier it might have been if Reform had just been able to abandon their misplaced commitment to the “sick and dying”  and see pot smokers as the symptomatic patients I have found them to be. It's another case for the coulda, shoulda, woulda file.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 09:05 PM | Comments (0)

October 23, 2007

Questions Seldom Asked (political)


No, I haven’t been on vacation (what are they?), but I have been wrapping up a long project I hope to report on in the near future. In the meantime, I’ve found a bit of time for the following short entry.

Just under 10  months ago, Jon Gettman’s estimates of the value of American marijuana production caused a ripple of commentary from a gamut of drug policy experts ranging from academics to the DEA. Most accounts almost immediately raised the usual questions about “legalization” or compared pot and alcohol as intoxicants. Either omitted, or buried in the middle of most reports, was compelling evidence from government sources and also cited by Gettman, that the illegal pot market has been growing steadily since at least 1980. Also notably absent were three obvious questions Gettman’s conservative estimates should have given rise to:

1) When did that huge illegal market start to grow?
2) Why did it begin expanding when it did?
3) Why has its growth been so steady despite a determined “war” on drugs for the past four decades?

After six years spent profiling the pot market’s customer base and attempting, with little success, to interest people claiming drug policy expertise in my findings, I’m been forced to add two more questions to the ones listed above:

4) Why are humans so averse to factual descriptions of their own behavior?
5) Can our species, survive its own cognitive success?

It should be no surprise that now, after coming up with tentative answers to those questions, it’s easier to answer all five in reverse order:

5) The jury is still out on possible human extinction, but current evidence suggests that so long as our emotions can provoke us into destructive wars and mindlessly expanding our numbers, the odds favor human extinction in relatively short order, at least on a geologic time scale.

4) We humans have particular difficulty in applying scientific principles to the “Behavioral Sciences” because denial usually kicks in. Michael Shermer discuuse that problem quite lucidly in the October Scientific American.

3)The illegal pot market has continued to grow steadily because a significant fraction of those who tried it as adolescents have continued using it on a regular basis; almost certainly because it is a safer and more effective psychotherapeutic agent than those intrioduced by Big Pharma since the Fifties.

2) The pot market began expanding right after inhaled pot was introduced to white adolescents in the mid-Sixties by a combination of East Coast “Beats” and West Coast “Pranksters” who, between them,  created a youth-based "counterculture" in opposition to that being directed at post war baby boomers by Madison Avenue advertisers entranced by the brand new medium of Television.
 
1) The nation's pot market had remained dormant from 1937 until the mid-Sixties when pot became known to members of the multiple protest movements inspired by the Civil Rights Movement and eventually spread to unruly demonstrators against American involvement in what had been a smoldering post-colonial war in “French” Indo-China.

The truth is, as usual, both messier and more complicated than we imagined, but government demands that its drug policy be driven by a myth rigorously protected against unbiased examination may yet create the biggest mess of all.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 05:37 AM | Comments (0)

February 03, 2007

Blowing Smoke



 The last entry on smoking made two important points which I'd gleaned from data supplied by cannabis applicants: the first, and historically more important, was that the rapidly developing popularity of cannabis with adolescent and young adult baby boomers in the mid Sixties was what had frightened a majority of Americans then over thirty into accepting Richard Nixon's invidious war on drugs.

 The second point was that it was the rapid onset of pot's anxiolytic properties that occurs only when it is inhaled, which had made it so popular with that era's young people who, until that time, had only alcohol and tobacco as readily available psychotherapeutic agents with which to self-medicate.

 Those two concepts are basic; they also raise several other implications which challenge critical assumptions accepted on behalf of the drug war over the past forty years, assumptions which can now be seen as reflecting the blatant bias of a policy that has always placed a higher value on self-defense than on truth.

The first such assumption was a lame, never-validated ‘gateway’ idea which has never even passed muster as a hypothesis, but nevertheless has been trumpeted as a 'theory' by both the relentlessly self-interested  Robert DuPont and the lay press. It has also been sucking up large amounts of NIDA research money for policy- compliant behavioral 'scientists since 1975.

Significantly; a NIDA-sponsored  summation of those studies, which unwittingly also reveals their emptiness, was published in 2002, the same year a seminal theoretical analysis by Morral, et al demonstrated that some as yet unknown ‘common factor’ could offer a more coherent explanation.

In the next entry, I’ll discuss how the (probable) nature of that common factor can also be gleaned from data supplied by California pot smokers...

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 07:03 PM | Comments (0)

February 01, 2007

Smoking

Timing is important. Yesterday's entry was intended to set the stage for advancing a number of related and somewhat complex ideas  about how the huge modern illegal market got started only after large numbers of baby boomers discovered the benefits of  inhaling pot in the mid-Sixties.

Even after posting that entry, I wasn't quite sure how to proceed until I opened my e-mail and found an item posted to a drug policy discussion forum that solved the problem: it seems a Bay Area pharmaceutical company is developing a drug delivery system for inhaling pain medication that's intended to take advantage of the same type of rapid brain processing that made cannabis an overnight success with American youth in the Sixties. Thus they not only neutralized the drug war's latest rhetorical argument against medical use of cannabis ('who ever heard of a medicine that's smoked?'), they simplified my job as well.

Now all I have to do is cut, paste, and edit last evening's hasty e-mail response to the discussion group: the key to understanding why  pot became such an over night sensation with adolescents in the mid Sixties is that they were the first American teens exposed in large numbers to its inhaled form, thus allowing its powerful anxiolytic properties to be more rapidly experienced and precisely controlled.   Because smoked cannabis is processed by the brain in real time, an experienced user controls dose by simply ceasing to toke after reaching a desired level.

Orally ingesting pot as an 'edible' is how most medicinal use took place before the MTA,  it makes dose much trickier for a user to regulate and also makes cannabis a much less satisfactory anxiolytic, although it may work quite well as an antinocioceptive (pain reliever) either alone, or in combination with an opioid.

In Viet Nam, young draftees discovered pot was effective self-medication for the stresses of a tour in a combat zone and many who returned with the condition later identified as PTSD discovered that inhaled cannabis was effective treatment for that as well.

Once pot became well established in American High Schools (by 1975) there was no stopping it;  the adolescent market has continued to grow despite the displeasure of Congress, as manifested by targeting young users with enhanced penalties. The least well-known market demographic from my study is that over 30% of California applicants for a medical recommendation are now between 40 and 60. Some in their generation have been self medicating with it for thirty to forty years.

 Ironically, all of this came about because American youth finally discovered 'reefer' after a thirty year latent period (1937-1967). The youngest ten year cohort in my applicant population, those born between 1976 and 1985,  first tried (initiated) pot at 14.9 years: the same average age they also tried alcohol and tobacco.

Now that boomers are reaching retirement age, they may be more receptive to the truth about their own pot use, as opposed to the nonsense the feds have been slandering them with recently.

Doctor Tom

Posted by tjeffo at 04:35 PM | Comments (0)

April 20, 2005

About Dr. Tom's Web Log

Personal log of Dr. Tom O'Connell, Researcher.
___________________________________
_____________________

Background: THORACIC SURGERY

Medical School: NEW YORK MED COLL, NYC

Residency Training: LETTERMAN ARMY MED CTR, THORACIC SURGERY

WM BEAUMONT ARMY MED CTR, GENERAL SURGERY

SAN FRANCISCO GEN HOSP M C, FLEXIBLE OR TRANSITIONAL YEAR

Location:
Redwood City, CA 94065

email:
Tom O'Connell tjeffo@drugsense.org

It is my intention to provide this space as a BLOG but also as a forum
for those who may agree or disagree with me so please email your well
thought out replies to my email address above.

This BLOG is arranged with the most current entry at the top of the
page so for a history of discussions scroll to the end
of this page, start there and work your way back up.

Thanks to Michael Krawitz, Matt Elrod and DrugSense for their help in
producing this Web Log.

Posted by tjeffo at 04:20 AM | Comments (0)