Drug War Profiteers

Another victim

Of  the war on drugs

There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare -

--Sun. Tzu. "The Art of War"

Philip Seymour Hoffman was a victim of the war on drugs. Instead of treating opioid addiction as a health problem, we choose to handle it as a crime. It is well known and commonly reported that addicts turn to heroin as prescription opioid supplies dry up in government driven crack downs. Huge government subsidies given to for-profit prisons, gun manufacturers and law enforcement, only to be plowed back through lobbyists into the hands of lawmakers. Needless to say there is little incentive to change the current system by any of them.

Many local law enforcement agencies have themselves become dependent on the flow of property and cash that they are permitted to seize from drug activity. This has led in many cases to the corruption of local departments, who illegally seize private property of the innocent, under financial pressures when drug crimes decrease. See : http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/nation-july-dec13-assets_08-19/. 

There was methadone found in Hoffman's apartment, so he was apparently trying to get clean. He went through rehab successfully and stayed clean for many years. The likely cause of his relapse were prescription medications that insidiously overtook his better judgement. What happened next happens to many: drugs lead to loss of control, making his addiction harder to hide from doctors, who feared prosecution for overprescribing pain meds. As the scripts that he could obviously afford became scarce, he turned back to an unclean, unregulated street drug that caused his death. It is sad to consider that this very common chain of events could have been interrupted at several points, if treatment in this country didn't take a back seat to criminal punishment and the press of the drug war. 

Ironically, the enforcement of drug laws has a long history of outright contempt for public health and welfare. In the 1970's, the DEA sprayed marijuana cultivated in Mexico with Paraquat, an herbicide known to cause health problems in U.S. drug users. Going back as far as Prohibition, the government intentionally poisoned liquor with wood alcohol (so called denatured alcohol) even though they knew it was blinding, crippling and killing tens of thousands of people each year.

Dr. Charles Norris, medical examiner and father of modern forensics said when he found the cause of the dramatic rise in methanol deaths in New York City:

"The government knows it is not stopping drinking by putting poison in alcohol..."[Y]et it continues its poisoning processes, heedless of the fact that people determined to drink are daily absorbing that poison. Knowing this to be true, the United States government must be charged with the moral responsibility for the deaths that poisoned liquor causes, although it cannot be held legally responsible." http://sites.inventiveworkshop.com/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_the_United_States.html

The gruesome details of wood alcohol poisoning were well known, and it was even argued that the people who continued to drink it and were poisoned would serve as a deterrent to others. In "The Poisoner's Handbook" it says:  

"As methanol breaks down inside the body, it produces formaldehyde, and then formic acid. This destroys the optic nerve. Vision blurs, and blindness closes in. Meanwhile, the victim suffers acute nausea, then seizures, and descends into a coma."  http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/transcript/poisoners-transcript/?flavour=mobile

Methanol poisoning takes days to kill, as it is only slowly metabolized by the liver. They drank, got drunk, sobered up, then got sick and died. 

Recently in the news there is an eery reminder of how impotent our government is to protect the health of its citizens when monied interests are involved. Along the Elk river near Charleston, WV. A spill of MCMH which regulators were unable by law to prevent, rendered the entire water supply of the state capitol undrinkable for weeks. State agencies then declared the crisis over and the water safe, bowing to pressure from businesses forced to close. Looking for anything to give them some political cover, they went with a report stating that the contaminant was, like methanol, breaking down into formaldehyde. The state restored the drinking ban only after continued hospitalizations, and outcry.  Abandoning responsibility, the state said "individuals had to decide for themselves if the water was safe to use."

While the attention of the public pauses briefly to eulogize the death of Philip Seymour  Hoffman, it is incumbent upon us to remember that he is only one of many thousands, who have similarly passed; cruelly, needlessly, and far, far too soon.   Let us reflect on their deaths, and how we cultivate the murderous profiteering we blithely tolerate in the War on Drugs.

Corporations are People, People are Machines

The Happiness Machines

Apples are being Flown from England to South Africa to be washed, waxed and flown back for sale in England. This is being touted as "Economic" because the price is low.

How is that possible? Because the price is not the whole cost. It doesn't reflect the price supports industrial agriculture is able to get with its political influence. Nor does it reflect cost of throwing local apple farmers out of work, or the fuel spent, or the environmental impact of large scale farming, or the cost of lower wadges it pays in Africa, or the degradation of wages in England... It is a lower price, but a higher cost. It is Economic, meaning profitable, for the owners of industrial agriculture, but inefficient and expensive use of resources for society at large. The consumer gets a lower price, but earns ever less money to afford it. In business, this is called "Externalizing Costs."

So why do we hide the true costs of products from consumers? Because of the Supply and Demand curve, which tells us that as prices go up, demand goes down. In fact, if we were expected to pay a price that captured the real costs to move, manufacture and dispose of a product, most people would buy a lot less, probably only what they need, and that is bad for business.

In my last blog, I recalled that in the early 1920's, business interests were concerned that the abundance brought about by the industrial revolution would end when people had bought all that they needed. Edward Bernays, the father of consumerism, found the solution by marketing to "desires" rather than "needs." His insight was that while a person may have all his/her needs met, desires can be limitless.

"... in 1928 a President came to power who agreed with Bernays. President Hoover was the first politician to articulate the idea that consumerism would become the central motor of American life. After his election he told a group of advertisers and public relations men 'You Have taken over the job of creating desire and have transformed people into constantly moving happiness machines. Machines which have become the key to economic progress.'"

 from the Century of the Self

Here’s an interesting quote from Victor LeBeau, the American Economic Advisor to President Truman in 1946:

"Our enormously productive economy...demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption.... We need things consumed, burned up, replaced and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate."

from "The Story of Stuff" 

And they were absolutely right. Our economy has grown to produce the richest people, the most profitable corporations and the greatest expansion of economic activity in all of recorded history.  But to what end?

Great Wealth is self seeking, and wants to magnify its power by resisting its sharing among the starving masses.  On January 20, 2014, Oxfam announced that global inequality has reached record proportions: 85 of the world's richest individuals now own as much wealth as half of all humanity; 3.5 billion poor.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/01/22/10-startling-facts-about-global-wealth-inequality/

Furthermore, inequality of wealth is greatest in the least regulated countries. 

In the U.S., for example, the average wealth of each adult is in the $250,000-300,000 behind Switzerland and Australia at or just less than half a million. But that's the average. Median wealth is a measure of where half of the people are above or below, and is probably more telling of how most people live. There, Australia leads with $220,000, followed by Luxembourg, Belgium, France, Italy, the UK, and Japan. The U.S. falls way back on this measure (some research says 27th), with a median wealth of just $45,000. Most Americans are worth less than most Italians, Belgians and Japanese!

After accounting for debts, assets of more than $4,000 put a person in the wealthiest half of world citizens. Assets of more than $75,000 put them in the top 10 percent. Assets of more than $753,000 put them in the top 1 percent.

This leads to the most startling figure in the Oxfam report: 

"Our estimates suggest that the lower half of the global population possesses barely 1% of global wealth, while the richest 10% of adults own 86% of all wealth, and the top 1% account for 46% of the total. "

In the end, we have turned ourselves into Bernays' "Happiness Machines" for the sake of a consumer culture from which most Americans do not profit.  In fact, due to over 30 years of wage stagnation, longer hours, less vacation time, and dwindling retirement, it could be argued most Americans have lost ground as the focus of the economy has shifted from being a servant of the public good, to the ideal which the public serves.  Like the Egyptian Pyramids, this global one of inequality was built on the backs of slaves at the pleasure of 85 Pharaohs.