The BS Filter

John Pabon from strategic advisory firm Fulcrum Strategic Advisors joins me to give his perspective on China – business, political and social. John’s an American who currently lives in Melbourne, and spent the last ten years living in Shanghai. We talk about the ol’ Communism v Capitalism debate, the treatment of the Uyghurs, working conditions in factories, IP theft, and how most Chinese view their government. And don’t forget to pick up a new copy of my book, The Psychopath Epidemic, if you haven’t already! The post BFTN 6.5 – China part 5 appeared first on The BS Filter.

In this final episode of our China series, we talk about: How China might weaponize its holdings of more than $1.1 trillion worth of U.S. Treasuries, aka the “nuclear option”The risk of China starting a currency war with the USChina’s current position on IP protectionAnd we finish with a little more discussion about China’s theory on the “Socialist market economy” and Deng Xiaoping Theory HOW TO LISTEN If you’re seeing this message, it means you aren’t logged in as a subscriber. If want to listen to the premium episodes of the series, you’ll need to become one of our Bullshit Fighters and REGISTER NOW for one of our premium accounts. The post 6.4 China’s Economy – Part 4 appeared first on The BS Filter.

There’s been lots of talk in the media about Trump’s trade war with China. One aspect about it that I find interesting is that I never see any talk, in this context, about the fact that China is a Communist country – a Communist country that seems to be a major economic threat to the USA, the world’s leading Capitalist country. Didn’t the West win the Cold War? So over the next few episodes we’re going to be trying to understand what’s going on with China’s economy. Are they Communists? Capitalist? Or something different entirely?  HOW TO LISTEN If you’re seeing this message, it means you aren’t logged in as a subscriber. If want to listen to the premium episodes of the series, you’ll need to become one of our Bullshit Fighters and REGISTER NOW for one of our premium accounts. The post 6.3 China’s Economy – Part 3 appeared first on The BS Filter.

There’s been lots of talk in the media about Trump’s trade war with China. One aspect about it that I find interesting is that I never see any talk, in this context, about the fact that China is a Communist country – a Communist country that seems to be a major economic threat to the USA, the world’s leading Capitalist country. Didn’t the West win the Cold War? So over the next few episodes we’re going to be trying to understand what’s going on with China’s economy. Are they Communists? Capitalist? Or something different entirely?  HOW TO LISTEN If you’re seeing this message, it means you aren’t logged in as a subscriber. If want to listen to the premium episodes of the series, you’ll need to become one of our Bullshit Fighters and REGISTER NOW for one of our premium accounts. The post 6.2 China’s Economy – Part 2 appeared first on The BS Filter.

There’s been lots of talk in the media about Trump’s trade war with China. One aspect about it that I find interesting is that I never see any talk, in this context, about the fact that China is a Communist country – a Communist country that seems to be a major economic threat to the USA, the world’s leading Capitalist country. Didn’t the West win the Cold War? So over the next few episodes we’re going to be trying to understand what’s going on with China’s economy. Are they Communists? Capitalist? Or something different entirely?  HOW TO LISTEN If you’re seeing this message, it means you aren’t logged in as a subscriber. If want to listen to the premium episodes of the series, you’ll need to become one of our Bullshit Fighters and REGISTER NOW for one of our premium accounts. The post 6.1 China’s Economy – Part 1 appeared first on The BS Filter.

How do these shell companies get used? We provide some examples. We also talk about the fallout of the Panama Papers, Operation Car Wash, the murder of Maltese journalist Daphne Galizia, why Americans didn’t show up in the Panama Papers as much as we might have expected, and how some of the world’s largest banks used Mossack Fonseca to profit from “arms dealers, bag men for Third World dictators, traffickers in blood diamonds and other international outlaws”. Follow Cameron on Facebook | Instagram | Twitter Follow Ray on Facebook. HOW TO LISTEN If you’re seeing this message, it means you aren’t logged in as a subscriber. If want to listen to the premium episodes of the series, you’ll need to become one of our Bullshit Fighters and REGISTER NOW for one of our premium accounts. The post Bullshit 5.3 – The Panama Papers (part 3) appeared first on The BS Filter.

After more than a year of analysis, the first news stories were published on April 3, 2016, by SZ and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). Some 4.8 million leaked files were emails, 3 million were database entries, 2.2 million PDFs, 1.2 million images, 320,000 text files, and 2242 files in other formats. Edward Snowden described the release in a Twitter message as the “biggest leak in the history of data journalism”. Some of the earliest stories reported on involved Siemens’ secret $500 million South American slush fund, and billions of dollars of transactions involving Sergei Roldugin, Russian virtuoso cellist… who happens to be the best friend of Vladimir Putin. Roldugin was also recently implicated in a massive money laundering scheme involving Troika Dialog, Russia’s largest investment bank. worth $9 billion US dollars, known as the “Troika Laundromat”. When the German journalists working for SZ started to dig into the leaks, they tried to contact Mozzfon for comment.  Instead they were contact by Burson-Marsteller, the PR / crisis control firm based in NY, now known as Burson Cohn & Wolfe. Another early SZ story was about a major German bank, Commerzbank, who was involved in laundering hundreds of billions of U.S. dollars out of Iran, Sudan and Myanmar, against US sanctions, via Mossfon shell companies. This episode is for Silver subscribers and above. A short clip from the show. Follow Cameron on Facebook | Instagram | Twitter Follow Ray on Facebook. HOW TO LISTEN If you’re seeing this message, it means you aren’t logged in as a subscriber. If want to listen to the premium episodes of the series, you’ll need to become one of our Bullshit Fighters and REGISTER NOW for one of our premium accounts. The post Bullshit 5.2 – The Panama Papers (part 2) appeared first on The BS Filter.

In 2015, journalist Bastian Obermayer from the Süddeutsche Zeitung , a Southern German Newspaper, was approached online by an anonymous source.  He or she provided him with a database from Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca. They are the Panama Papers. Named in the leak were 12 current or former world leaders, 128 other public officials and politicians, and hundreds of celebrities, businessmen and other wealthy individuals of over 200 countries. They made it clear how the world’s elite hides their wealth from the people, avoids paying taxes, and launders their money. Today we start a series about money laundering, offshore shell companies, and how they work. Full shownotes below. A short clip from the show. Follow Cameron on Facebook | Instagram | Twitter Follow Ray on Facebook. HOW TO LISTEN If you’re seeing this message, it means you aren’t logged in as a subscriber. If want to listen to the premium episodes of the series, you’ll need to become one of our Bullshit Fighters and REGISTER NOW for one of our premium accounts. Setting up offshore companies isn’t itself illegal.  People set them up because they want to hide something – from the taxman, their ex-wife, their former business partner or the prying eyes of the public. But they are often used for illegal purposes.  Experience shows that it is usually individuals whose business depends on anonymity who favour the anonymity that shell companies provide. These include gunrunners, people traffickers, drug smugglers and other criminals, as well as investors who do not wish to reveal their true identities and their true intentions, senior politicians who’d like to spirit their wealth abroad (perhaps because they have accumulated it dishonestly) and companies looking to funnel bribes. The list could go on and on. The most obvious use of offshore financial centers is to avoid taxes. Oxfam blamed tax havens in its 2016 annual report on income inequality for much of the widening gap between rich and poor. “Tax havens are at the core of a global system that allows large corporations and wealthy individuals to avoid paying their fair share,” International Monetary Fund (IMF) researchers estimated in July 2015 that profit shifting by multinational companies costs developing countries around US$213 billion a year, almost two percent of their national income. This is usually how it works. Contact is made with a firm like Mossack Fonseca via an intermediary – for example a bank, a lawyer or an asset manager. These are Mossack Fonseca’s actual ‘clients’: they order the product, they handle communications and they pay the bills. The product is mainly an off-the-peg offshore company. Mossfon offered firms in some twenty jurisdictions, most frequently in the British Virgin Islands and Panama, but also in the Bahamas, Bermuda, Samoa, Uruguay, Hong Kong, the US tax havens of Nevada, Wyoming and Delaware and, more recently, Florida and the Netherlands. The newest name is that of the emirate of Ras Al-Khaimah in the United Arab Emirates. The companies are sold from nearly fifty offices worldwide or from Mossfon’s headquarters in the centre of Panama City. Mossack Fonseca isn’t the only provider of shell companies headquartered in Panama. Other major players are also based there, for instance the law firm Morgan y Morgan, probably Mossfon’s great competitor. It is no coincidence that offshore providers have clustered together in this small Latin American state of all places. Panama has always been an extremely dependent country. Having long been a poor province of Colombia, the country gained its independence in 1903 partly because American bankers and industrialists managed to persuade the then US president Theodore Roosevelt to support Panamanian separatists. US lobbies hoped to make money from the Panama Canal, which was under construction at the time. Roosevelt sent troops to occupy parts of the newly independent state and make it clear to Colombia that it could kiss goodbye to its former province. A nation was created by the grace of the United States and the US flag did indeed fly over the Panama Canal Zone, where big business was to be done. Thousands of American soldiers protected the sovereignty that the Panamanian government granted to the USA in 1903 and which was only returned to Panama in 1999. The lucrative business with shell companies is based on a law that came into force on 26 February 1927. This law – Law 32 – guarantees the secrecy of estates, money transfers and, most importantly, company owners, and offers so-called ‘sociedades anónimas’ exemption from taxation. This name sounds more mysterious than it actually is, because an ‘anonymous society’ is actually nothing more than a public limited company. The secrecy afforded by Law 32 has changed very little to this day, with the exception of the odd – largely cosmetic – reform driven by efforts to have Panama deleted from a number of black and grey lists of countries that abet money laundering and tax evasion. The favourable environment for the offshore industry has remained more or less unaffected over the years, and the state also benefits, for example from corporation tax from law firms, their employees’ income tax payments, and fees for setting up companies. Another reason this business is so attractive is because it is as simple as it is lucrative. A standard shell company costs the seller next to nothing and the formalities are quickly dispatched. The buyer has his company in a click of the fingers for only a few hundred US dollars, and can dispose of it again quickly and easily once it has served its purpose. Also, no one will ever find out to whom it belonged, which is ideal for dodgy dealings. When an offshore company is set up in somewhere like Panama, it has a few nominee directors.  People who work for Mossfon – often lowly-paid women.  Secretaries.  They are the directors of the new company.  They sign the incorporation documents.  For example, let’s say we needed to hide our millions of dollars in an offshore account.  We’d set up a fake company – Pulla Sulla Inc.  The directors would be three nobodies – Barry, Stan and Larry.  They all work in Panama for Mossfon, earning $5 a day.  They will sign ANYTHING.  They sign loan documents on behalf of that company, open bank accounts, buy yachts, real estate, weapons, you name it.  For all intents and purposes, they are the owners and directors of the company, should anyone come looking.  But secretly, you and I own the company.  Mossfon runs it on our behalf.  According to a set of instructions from us to our lawyer, and from our lawyer to them, possibly through another couple of intermediaries first, which good luck ever having the patience to find any of that out without a 5 year investigation involving Robert Mueller, the CIA and Sherlock Holmes.  We say to our advertisers, hey, don’t pay us millions, pay Pulla Sulla Inc. in Panama.  Then Pulla Sulla Inc buys mansions in New York and Paris.  And rents them out to us for $1000 a month.  We get paid a simple salary, on which we pay taxes like good citizens.  From the outside, Pulla Sulla Inc is a black box.  The post Bullshit 5.1 – The Panama Papers (part 1) appeared first on The BS Filter.

We wrap up our antivax mini-series by looking at another antivax claim: “All vaccines contain a number of toxic poisons and chemicals that are linked to serious neurological damage”. We talk about Robert Kennedy Jr, thimerosal, and the difference between methyl vs ethyl mercury.     Full shownotes below. *Please Note: our weekly news shows are currently available to Silver subscribers and above.    Follow Cameron on Facebook | Instagram | Twitter Follow Ray on Facebook. HOW TO LISTENIf you’re seeing this message, it means you aren’t logged in as a subscriber. If want to listen to the premium episodes of the series, you’ll need to become one of our Bullshit Fighters and REGISTER NOW for one of our premium accounts.   Antivax Claim #5: All vaccines contain a number of toxic poisons and chemicals that are linked to serious neurological damage including aluminum, thimerosal (methyl mercury), antibiotics, monosodium glutamate (MSG) and formaldehyde. Other dangerous substances found in vaccines include antifreeze, lead, cadmium, glycerine, acetone, and yeast proteins. Let’s start this one by going back to something I said in the previous point.  Governments want people to be healthy, working, earning money, driving the economy.  Does it therefore make sense for them to knowingly allow vaccines to make people sick?  Where is the upside in that?  Thimerosal is a big one that I’ve read in a lot of antivax literature. Robert Kennedy Jr is an advocate against it.  Son of Bobby Kennedy.  Lawyer. Activist.  Doesn’t believe Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone shooter. Says his father was “fairly convinced” that others besides Oswald were involved in his brother’s assassination and privately believed the Warren Commission report was a “shoddy piece of craftsmanship.” Critical of U.S. foreign policy Sounds like a decent human being.  Also a licensed master falconer Currently married to actress Cheryl Hines, who played Larry David’s wife on Curb Your Enthusiasm.  His second wife hung herself after their divorce in 2010.  In 2005 he wrote an article about thimerosal which was published in Rolling Stone and Salon.  It claimed that thimerosal-containing vaccines caused autism, as well as that government health agencies have “colluded with Big Pharma to hide the risks of thimerosal from the public. It copped a lot of criticism from the scientific community and both Rolling Stone and Salon eventually amended the story with corrections.  Salon ended up taking the article down in 2011.  He’s also written a book about it.  Thimerosal is a preservative that was removed from vaccines beginning in 1999. Preservatives prevent microbial growth. A preservative is required in multi-dose vials of vaccines. Thimerosal was developed as an anti-microbial agent shortly after World War I. It was soon discovered that it has great anti-microbial properties and was well tolerated when injected into rabbits or rats even at high doses. This made it superior to anything else available at the time. Bacterial contamination was a serious problem for vaccines in the first half of the 20th century. Thimerosal in tiny doses, well below safety limits, proved to be an effective agent for preventing contamination. It contains mercury.  And mercury is very bad for you.  But mercury isn’t mercury.  methyl mercury is the one that’s bad for you.  Thimerosal is ethyl mercury.  Different form.  according to studies done in the UK, referenced by the WHO, the pharmacokinetics – that is, the way drugs move around the body –  of ethyl and methyl mercury are quite different. In particular, the half-life of ethyl mercury is short (less than 1 week) compared with that of methyl mercury (1.5 months). so exposure to ethyl mercury in blood is relatively brief. Ethyl mercury is actively excreted via the gut, whereas methyl mercury accumulates in the body. “A robust body of peer-reviewed scientific studies conducted in the U.S. and other countries support the safety of thimerosal-containing vaccines.” Now the FDA also told us that fat was bad for us and sugar was good for us.  I did read a study that said thimerosal was injected into mice and they showed signs of depression.  Just didn’t want to get out of bed, watched reality TV, listened to Radiohead, voted for Trump.  But these mice were getting 20 TIMES the amount recommended for humans: Our results indicate that higher dose of neonatal thimerosal-mercury (20× higher than that used in human) is capable of inducing long-lasting substantial dysregulation of neurodevelopment, synaptic function, and endocrine system, which could be the causal involvements of autistic-like behavior in mice. Another study concluded: Considered together the present results do not indicate pervasive developmental neurotoxicity following vaccine-level thimerosal injections in mice, and provide little if any support for the hypothesis that thimerosal exposure contributes to the etiology of neurodevelopmental disorders. So in other words, if you gave them normal doses, no problem.  Anyway thimerosal was removed from most vaccines in 1999.  Partly because of ‘theoretical risk’, in other words, science hadn’t found any risk but they just wanted to remove it anyway. but also because they developed new single-dose vaccines that do not require preservatives. All vaccines routinely recommended for children 6 years of age and younger in the U.S. are available in formulations that do not contain thimerosal. Only some flu vaccines still contain it.  It can now only be found in multi-dose flu vaccines (not single dose or live virus vaccines) which are voluntary. In extremely small dosages.  In Australia, thiomersal has been removed from all routine childhood vaccines since 2000. The exception is one type of hepatitis B vaccine which contains a greatly reduced amount of thiomersal.  Even before 2000, the level of thimerosal kids got was well below the World Health Organization (WHO) limit for methyl mercury, the bad kind.  Safety concerns about thimerosal were first raised in the 1970s with increased awareness of the neurotoxicity of mercury. However the dose of mercury in vaccines was orders of magnitude below the levels showing any clinical effect. No safety concerns were raised with thimerosal and vaccines until the late 1990s. At this time Wakefield was raising alarms over the MMR vaccine (which never contained thimerosal) and autism. The core of the anti-vaccine claim against thimerosal was that as the cumulative dose of thimerosal increased so did the incidence of autism. This claim was never scientifically validated. Correlation by itself is weak evidence for causation, and the correlation itself really didn’t hold up. Despite the lack of any convincing scientific evidence, the CDC decided “out of an abundance of caution” to remove thimerosal from the routine vaccine schedule by 2002. This provided an opportunity for a mega-experiment. If the increasing dose of thimerosal caused increasing autism diagnoses, then a decreasing overall dose of thimerosal should cause the incidence of autism diagnoses to fall to pre-1990s levels. The other game that anti-vaxxers were playing was that thimerosal was not really removed by 2002. There were still some vaccines with thimerosal. As autism rates continued to rise, they kept pushing back the date of when thimerosal was removed. Apparently doctors were holding onto their vaccines with thimerosal to the bitter end. Vaccine manufacturers stopped making vaccines with thimerosal (except for some flu vaccines, more on that later) between 1999 and 2001. Vaccines have a two-year shelf life. Even if you take the latest estimates, the thimerosal-containing vaccines were gone by 2004. Not surprisingly, after the thimerosal was removed from all of the vaccines, autism rates continued to rise. I should note that the evidence shows that the increasing rate of autism diagnoses is largely an artifact of expanding diagnosis, diagnostic substitution, and increased surveillance. There may not be any real increase in autism itself. A small real increase is possible, but unproven. evidence is growing that autism is dominantly the result of genetic predisposition. A study found a consistent prevalence of autism of about 1% in all age groups. If autism rates were truly increasing we would expect a lower prevalence in older age groups, but that is not what they found. Studies are suggesting that autism may be detectable at two months – well before kids get any vaccines – and maybe even in the womb.  Multiple studies show thimerosal and autism are not connected.  So this claim gets another FIVE OUT OF FIVE on the bullshit meter and we give up.  The first five claims we’ve examined are completely flawed, so there’s not much point continuing.  Thanks for listening.  The post ANTIVAX 4.6 appeared first on The BS Filter.

Let’s look at another two antivax claims: that the very first vaccine was a disaster and that vaccines are highly profitable for pharmaceutical companies and the health care industry. Full shownotes below. *Please Note: our weekly news shows are currently available to Silver subscribers and above.    Follow Cameron on Facebook | Instagram | Twitter Follow Ray on Facebook. HOW TO LISTENIf you’re seeing this message, it means you aren’t logged in as a subscriber. If want to listen to the premium episodes of the series, you’ll need to become one of our Bullshit Fighters and REGISTER NOW for one of our premium accounts.   We start with antivax claim #3: The very first vaccine was a disaster. Vaccine safety and effectiveness is a created myth, strongly embedded in Americans’ psyche and reinforced by the health care system.The history of small pox vaccines demonstrates that the first vaccine resulted in an increase in the disease and created additional serious health consequences including syphilis and deaths. Physician groups met repeatedly to discuss the “vaccine problem” and concluded that as long as vaccines remained profitable, they would be impossible to eliminate, in spite of the evidence against them. Nothing has changed since this time. The polio vaccine was another one linked to serious health consequences, including cancer and AIDS. Statistics were manipulated to try and prove this vaccine’s effectiveness. With each new vaccine has come new health damage and created illness. See Small Pox Vaccine: Origins of Vaccine Madness. “strongly embedded in Americans’ psyche”  Ah duh, Americans aren’t the only people who vaccinate, dummy.  Did the introduction of the smallpox vaccine result in an increase in the disease?  Hard to get worldwide figures.  But found this one from Boston.  The smallpox vaccine was first used in Boston in 1800.  Before then, hundreds or thousands of people per hundred thousand died whenever there was a smallpox outbreak.  For over a year, from the spring of 1721 until winter 1722, a smallpox epidemic afflicted the city. Started when a British ship arrived in Boston Harbor from the West Indies, carrying the disease. Out of a population of 11,000, over 6000 cases were reported with 850 dying from the disease. They started using the inoculation method mentioned earlier, brought back to England from Turkey.  Cotton Mather a New England Puritan minister is thought to have introduced it to the American colony.  He’s best known for his involvement in the Salem witch trials He first learned about inoculation from his West African slave Onesimus, writing, “he told me that he had undergone the operation which had given something of the smallpox and would forever preserve him from it, adding that was often used in West Africa.’’ Anyway, after the actual vaccine was used in Boston in 1800, the disease pretty much disappeared.  So much for it causing an INCREASE.  The only quotes I’ve found that suggest an increase in smallpox in England after vaccinations, all come from books written by the same guy.  Trung Nguyen I took a quote from one antivax article. “Smallpox attained its maximum mortality after vaccination was introduced.” And every book that I can find that quotes that are written by the same guy – with other co-authors.  Same with another quote “Vaccination was made compulsory by an Act of Parliament in the year 1853; again in 1867; and still more stringent in 1871. Since 1853, we have had three epidemics of small-pox, each being more severe than the one preceding.” At least FIVE identical books, written by Trung Nguyen and different coauthors.  Who, btw, are all dead antivaxers from the late 19th and early 20th century.  I found references to them in a 1967 edition of the Bulletin of the History of Medicine: In the 1850s, opposition to vaccination arose, largely from the irregular physicians, the advocates of unorthodox medical theories. For example, Dr.  Joel Shew, adherent of the Vincent Priessnitz water cure, Dr.  Russell T.  Trall, founder of the New York Hygeio-Therapeutic College, and Dr.  C. C. Schiefferdecker, the owner and manager of a Philadelphia hydropathic infirmary, were the leading anti-vaccinationists of the 1850s. Calling vaccination “the greatest crime that has been committed in this last century, ” Schiefferdecker set out to prove scientifically that the Jennerian method was mere “nonsense before reason.” Using the scientific method, he called upon the world’s most highly respected authority, the Bible, to prove the inadequacy of vaccination. Another guy that Nguyen uses is William Tebb, a British radical liberal in the late 1800s.  Vegetarian, abolitionist, a pacifist and anti-imperialist. Sounds like a cool guy But a major anti-vaxxer  he opposed vaccination on the grounds of personal liberty.  So let’s talk about personal liberty  When you live in a society, you agree to certain things.  There is no such thing as complete liberty in a society.  You live in a society because you want to take advantage of the benefits of living with a large group of people.  Otherwise you would be living like a hermit, out in the middle of nowhere, where nobody is going to give a flying fuck if you vaccinate your kids or not.  But if you choose to live in a society, then there are certain things you can’t do.  You can’t murder.  You can’t rape.  Even if you’re a Catholic Priest.  You can’t drive over the speed limit.  You can’t drive while intoxicated.  You can’t steal things.  Regardless of what your religion says about those things.  Regardless of whether or not you agree with them.  And the nature of a society is that the majority get to determine the laws.  At least in theory.  While, hopefully, protecting the basic human rights of the minority.  but here’s the thing If you’re in the minority, you should have the right to choose how you live – UNLESS, in doing so, you are infringing upon the rights of others.  So if you’re in a minority by believing your god wants you to rape little children in your church, that’s not okay.  We don’t protect that right.  And the same is true of vaccinations.  If you don’t get your children vaccinated, you are putting the health and lives of others at risk.  And you don’t have the right to put others at risk.  I don’t care what your personal beliefs are.  We draw the line at your personal beliefs infringing on the basic human rights of others.  That said, in most countries, vaccinations are NOT mandated.  Because we believe that we have high enough levels for herd immunity to be effective.  Let’s talk about herd immunity for a minute.  Because antivaxers like to say it doesn’t work.  What is it?  It’s about maths.  The idea is that, when you have a contagious disease, you can disrupt chains of infection if enough people in the herd have immunity.  Basically, it’s less likely to spread.  The term was first used in a 1923 paper looking at vaccination of mice.  It found that even vaccinated mice could be susceptible to the disease if they were surrounded by enough unvaccinated mice.  The immunity of the HERD, not just the individual, was important.  For very infectious diseases, like measles, they say you need to have 95% of the population vaccinated to have herd immunity.  With other diseases, like diphtheria, the rate needed for herd immunity can be lower and still be effective.  And yes, it takes into account that fact that vaccinations don’t work 100% of the time on 100% of the people.    Anyway back to the 1800s. Smallpox vaccinations did start to decline after the 1840s, but not really because of the arguments of the antivaxers The widespread use of vaccination in the early years of the nineteenth century had rendered the population immune to smallpox, and as the memory of the disease slowly receded into the past, vaccination fell into disuse. People just decided they didn’t need to be vaccinated, since smallpox had disappeared from view keep in mind that we didn’t much acceptance of the germ theory of disease until the late 19th century So this point gets a FIVE for bullshit      4.Vaccines are highly profitable for pharmaceutical companies and the health care industry. Strong financial incentives exist to continue this practice, not effectiveness. You cannot trust brochures on vaccines provided by pharmaceutical companies because they are corporations with a profit motive. Their objective is NOT to protect health but to sell vaccines.   On the surface this one makes some sense.  Yes, pharma companies make money from selling vaccines.  But they also sell lots of other products.  Do antivaxxers take ANY pharmaceutical products?  Panadol? Ibuprofen? Asprin? Statins for lowering cholesterol.  According to market research firm Technavio, The global human vaccine market is predicted to reach a size of more than USD 47.5 billion by 2022. But vaccines are less than 2% of the overall pharma market.  Still big.  Also more complicated to develop, because new strains come out all the time.  But you only need to make Viagra once.  So R&D is higher and cuts into the profit margins.  You know who else makes money out of selling things?  EVERYBODY.  Herbal medicine manufacturers make profits out of selling their products, so I guess you can’t believe anything they say either.  Homeopathic medicines – if you can call them that – too.  It’s not enough to say ” You cannot trust brochures on vaccines provided by pharmaceutical companies because they are corporations with a profit motive.” Because that’s the entire world.  Outside of Communist countries, I guess.  Here’s the other problem with this argument.  How much do pharma companies sell a dose of the MMR vaccine for?  According to the CDC, the private sector cost is $75.04 per dose But

We’re still breaking down antivax claim number 2 from last time and dealing with the claims that “Whenever the outbreaks are examined more closely, the data show that the majority of those suffering have been vaccinated for the disease. Disease charts show that diseases were mostly eliminated prior to the creation of vaccinations. What is truly responsible for most communicable disease elimination is clean water and improved sanitation.”   Full shownotes below.   *Please Note: our weekly news shows are currently available to Silver subscribers and above.    Follow Cameron on Facebook | Instagram | Twitter Follow Ray on Facebook. HOW TO LISTENIf you’re seeing this message, it means you aren’t logged in as a subscriber. If want to listen to the premium episodes of the series, you’ll need to become one of our Bullshit Fighters and REGISTER NOW for one of our premium accounts.     Last time we dealt with immunity.  Let’s talk about measles. The measles virus is one of the most infectious diseases known to man. A person with measles can cough in a room and leave, and hours later, if you’re unvaccinated, you could catch the virus from the droplets in the air the infected person left behind. No other virus can do that. According to the CDC, as many as one out of every 20 children with measles gets pneumonia, the most common cause of death from measles in young kids. About one out of every 1,000 children with measles will develop swelling of the brain, which can lead to convulsions and leave the child deaf or with an intellectual disability. For every 1,000 children who get the disease, the CDC estimated one or two will die from it. According to the CDC: Very few people—about three out of 100—who get two doses of measles vaccine will still get measles if exposed to the virus. Experts aren’t sure why. It could be that their immune systems didn’t respond as well as they should have to the vaccine. But the good news is, fully vaccinated people who get measles are much more likely to have a milder illness. And fully vaccinated people are also less likely to spread the disease to other people, including people who can’t get vaccinated because they are too young or have weakened immune systems. Before the measles vaccination program started in 1963, about 3 to 4 million people got measles each year in the United States. Of those people, 400 to 500 died, 48,000 were hospitalized, and 4,000 developed encephalitis (brain swelling) from measles. In 2018, in the USA, do you know how many cases were reported?  349. Down from 3-4 million in a half century ago.  But numbers are on the rise again. A few years ago there was a measles outbreak in California connected to Disneyland. This is one case that antivaxxers like to point at. 125 people infected. Or 131. Or 159. I’ve read different numbers.  100 from California.  The leading theory is that measles was introduced in Disneyland by a foreign tourist. According to the CDC: Among the 110 California patients, only 49 (45%) were unvaccinated; So wait – that means that 55% of the people who got measles, the majority, were vaccinated? Not quite.  5% had 1 dose of the measles vaccine.  2 is recommended for maximum immunity.  So that means 50% were either unvaccinated or didn’t have enough vaccinations.  Only 7% of the people who got measles had 2 or more doses. What about the other 42%? They had unknown or undocumented vaccination status.   So only 7% of the people who contracted the disease were known to be fully vaccinated.  In 2011 there was an outbreak of measles started by someone who was fully vaccinated. So it can happen.  but this was a very big deal because it was the first time it had ever been reported as happening! According to the CDC:  During 2011, a provisional total of 222 measles cases were reported from 31 states. Most patients were unvaccinated (65%) or had unknown vaccination status (21%). So this argument that “Whenever outbreaks are examined more closely, the data show that the majority of those suffering have been vaccinated for the disease” is not supported by the evidence I saw.  Five on the BS meter.    BTW, there’s a measles outbreak happening in the US at the moment.  the number of new cases has climbed to its highest level in 25 years. about 700 cases have been reported Even Trump is telling people to get vaccinated.  And he’s made antivax type statements in the past.  most heavily affected are Orthodox Jewish communities in NY, in which vaccination rates tend to be lower. only 72.9 per cent of people under 18 have been vaccinated against measles The outbreak began in the Rockland County of NY area when seven unvaccinated travellers diagnosed with measles entered the county last October. There have been nearly 200 cases reported to date. But the authorities there think the actual number is likely higher. “Not all cases are being reported, which is unfortunate.” Health officials in Rockland County have issued an emergency declaration to combat the measles outbreak. Rockland County has barred unvaccinated children from public places for 30 days. Rockland residents are already getting knocks on the door and delivery of notices that say unvaccinated people exposed to measles must stay away from indoor and outdoor public places for 21 days or face $2,000 fines. But a judge put the ban on hold, agreeing with parents of unvaccinated children at a particular school, Green Meadow Waldorf School, claimed that missing school was causing them financial hardship and no cases of measles had been discovered at their particular school based on the Waldorf curriculum making waldorf salads Steiner One of the parents in the lawsuit: “We are NOT against vaccinations. We believe that GOD created the body, and it should remain untainted by man.” Another parent: “Since for us the blood is the carrier of the soul, injections of vaccine-substances, often animal or embryo derived, are strictly forbidden.” I think this new emergency declaration gets around the judge’s ruling because the original emergency declaration expired.  There have also been hundreds of other cases around NY.  In NY, Mayor Bill de Blasio declared a public health emergency that would require unvaccinated individuals living in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to receive the measles vaccine. The mayor said the city would issue violations and possibly fines of $1,000 for those who did not comply. People there also tried to stop it via the courts, but this time the judge ruled in favour of the city.  Also linked to the ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities and is associated with travelers who brought back measles from Israel, where the disease is spreading. Apparently a slick 40-page booklet being distributed throughout the Orthodox communities in New York and New Jersey about the dangers of vaccines. The booklet was created by a group called PEACH, or Parents Educating and Advocating for Children’s Health. The booklet is directly aimed at the Orthodox community, partly written in Hebrew and filled with snippets from the Torah, or Old Testament. Yet local Orthodox Jewish leadership has made it clear that there is nothing in Jewish law that prohibits vaccinations. In fact, it’s the opposite. It says in the Torah that a person must guard their health. also ongoing measles outbreaks in Washington, New Jersey, and California. According to the CDC, all of these outbreaks are linked to travelers who brought measles back from other countries such as Israel, Ukraine, and the Philippines, where large measles outbreaks are occurring. While vaccines are required for school children across the country, almost all states allow exemptions for families who say it’s against their religious beliefs, and 17 states allow a parent to opt out for philosophical or personal reasons. Measles is on the rise in Europe.  In 2018, Europe recorded more than 82,000 cases, a record high in the post-vaccine era. In 2017, measles killed 110,000 people worldwide, mostly children under age 5.   SANITATION Let’s look at this argument about clean water and sanitation.  they are great things Improved socioeconomic conditions have undoubtedly had an indirect impact on disease. Ray – nobody knows more about medicine that you explain the difference between bacteria and virus bacteria – single-celled microorganisms mostly good 1% bad virus invades some of your cells and takes over the cell machinery It’s like a nanobot designed to make you sick my turning your cells into something else Unlike bacteria, viruses can’t survive without a host. They can only reproduce by attaching themselves to cells. In most cases, they reprogram the cells to make new viruses until the cells burst and die. In other cases, they turn normal cells into malignant or cancerous cells. Throughout history, millions of people have died  from both bacteria and viruses eg bubonic plague or the Black Death, is caused by Yersinia pestis bacteria smallpox is caused by the variola virus In recent times, viral infections have been responsible for two major pandemics: the 1918-1919 “Spanish flu” epidemic that killed 20-40 million people, and the ongoing HIV/AIDS epidemic that killed an estimated 1.5 million people worldwide in 2013 alone. You treat bacterial infections with antibiotics B for Bacteria and Biotics  You pre-emptively treat viruses with vaccinations V for Virus and Vaccination Once you get a virus, there’s isn’t much you can do about it Bacterial and viral infections can cause similar symptoms such as coughing and sneezing, fever, inflammation, vomiting, diarrhea, fatigue, and cramping — all of which are ways the immune system tries to rid the body of infectious organisms. So back to why people started getting less diseases  Better nutrition, not to mention th

I went looking for a list of claims antivaxxers use NOT to vaccinate. Today we’ll look at the first two. Claim #1. Vaccines have never been proven safe or effective.Claim #2. Vaccines do NOT work.   Full shownotes below.   *Please Note: our weekly news shows are currently available to Silver subscribers and above.    Follow Cameron on Facebook | Instagram | Twitter Follow Ray on Facebook. HOW TO LISTENIf you’re seeing this message, it means you aren’t logged in as a subscriber. If want to listen to the premium episodes of the series, you’ll need to become one of our Bullshit Fighters and REGISTER NOW for one of our premium accounts.     So to get started, I went looking for a list of reasons NOT to vaccinate. Careful not to get the list of sites that are PROVAX, to make sure they aren’t spinning the real issues. I found these two sites. Funnily enough, they both have the exact same list of talking points. https://vactruth.com/2014/12/12/10-reasons-not-to-vaccinate/ https://www.naturalnews.com/048151_vaccination_dangers_children_Big_Pharma.html Claim #1: “Vaccines have never been proven safe or effective. Vaccine studies funded by pharmaceutical companies compare vaccine “side-effects” from one vaccine to another. True, scientific, double-blind placebo studies have never been conducted on vaccines to determine their safety. Effectiveness cannot be determined unless one is then knowingly exposed to the disease entity following vaccination. Only antibody production is measured.” Some definitions: double-blind: neither the subjects nor the experimenters know which subjects are in the test and control groups during the actual course of the experiments placebo: Some definitions say: an inert substance used especially in controlled experiments testing the efficacy of another substance. But others say: A placebo is a substance as similar as possible to the active drug except it has no therapeutic effect. It does not need to be ‘inert’. The best placebo is one that mimics the active therapy as much as possible. This is because the ‘placebo effect’ is a powerful phenomenon and to truly measure the effect of an active product it important that all recipients are equally as likely to think they received the “real deal’. So let’s break this statement down to its elements. So the first thing that jumps out at me about this complaint is that it’s an argument about the scientific process. They are first making a claim – that the NO vaccines – that’s implied – have ever been PROVEN SAFE The second point is that double-blind placebo studies have NEVER been conducted on ANY vaccines. again, implied. Third point is that you can’t know if a vaccine is effective unless you expose someone to the disease after they have been vaccinated. So I guess we need to tackle these statements one at a time and see how they hold up. First: NO vaccines have ever been PROVEN to be safe. Well I’d first ask what the definition of “proven to be safe” is. How does one PROVE something is SAFE? Lots of wiggle room in there But of course, it’s like saying “no-one has proven God doesn’t exist”. While that is true, we can comfortably say that there is no empirical evidence that a god who intervenes in the world, breaking the laws of physics, exists. On the contrary, we have enormous evidence that the universe operates according to physical laws. So we can’t PROVE God doesn’t exist, we can say with certainty that we have no evidence that God does exist, and no reason to believe he exists. Apart from the ramblings of some fervent believers. How does that apply to science? Well here’s a tip. Whenever you hear somebody saying something about science not PROVING something, that’s your first tip that this person knows nothing about science. Or is trying to bullshit you. Because science isn’t about PROVING anything. Nowhere in the scientific method will you find the word PROVE. Let me explain my understanding of the scientific method. And you know nobody knows more about the scientific method than I do, Ray. The scientific method is a process by which we try to work out which theories are likely to be correct from those that are likely to be incorrect. It’s my old bucket story. Big bucket of things that MIGHT be true. How do you figure out which things go into the very small bucket of things that are LIKELY to be true? You need a process. There are various ways you can go about it. You can just believe whatever you want to believe. You can believe those things that make you happy. Or the things your parents told you to believe. Or the things your friends believe. Or the things a priest tells you to believe. Or a book written 2000 years ago tell you to believe. Or you can use some kind of rational process that can look at all of the theories and the available evidence and see which theories hold up under examination. So that’s what the scientific method does. You take a theory. You read all of the available studies done. You come up with your own study. You run the test. You evaluate the results. You write a report on the results. And then – this is important – you PUBLISH your results in a credible scientific journal and get other people in your field to bullshit filter your results. They will try to replicate your test and see if they get the same result. And if lots of people replicate the test and get the same results – and this theory hold up better than any other theory – then science will say this: This theory is the best theory we have right now. Based on the evidence we have, and the tools we have. But you know – if we have better tools and better models and different evidence a year from now, or 10 years from now, then rock n roll. At least in theory. Of course people are flawed – they like to hold to their theories – careers are built on them. Businesses are built on them. Ideologies are built on them. So people like to cling to bad ideas. But here’s the great thing about science. Eventually young scientists will come up who AREN’T attached to the old ideas. and they will call bullshit on them Because that’s how you make your bones in science. By calling bullshit on old ideas. Science is built on calling bullshit on old ideas. Science factors in the fact that people are flawed and like to cling to old ideas. So it rewards people who overturn them. That’s who gets the Noble Prize. Not people who agreed with everyone else. People who upset the apple cart. That doesn’t happen in religion. Or anything that is based on ideology.   So when you say SCIENCE HASN’T PROVEN IT IS SAFE I reply “well no, that is not how science works.” Science says “based on the data we have, and the tools we have, and the evidence we have, we believe this is safe.” So this claim immediately gets a FIVE out of five on my bullshit meter. Top marks. The statement itself is bullshit.   And who is best positioned to determine if vaccines are safe? The World Health Organization? The WHO position on vaccines: Vaccines are safe. Any licensed vaccine is rigorously tested across multiple phases of trials before it is approved for use, and regularly reassessed once it is on the market. Scientists are also constantly monitoring information from several sources for any sign that a vaccine may cause an adverse event. Most vaccine reactions are usually minor and temporary, such as a sore arm or mild fever. In the rare event a serious side effect is reported, it is immediately investigated. A 2011 report from the National Academy of Medicine reviewed more than 1,000 vaccine studies and concluded that serious reactions to vaccines are extremely rare. In the academy’s first comprehensive review of vaccine safety in 17 years, a committee of experts formed by the Institute of Medicine analyzed more than 1,000 research studies. They concluded that benefits outweigh the risks, which are rare and usually not life-threatening. In a 667-page report released Thursday, the 16-member committee found convincing evidence that vaccines can cause 14 health problems, including seizures, brain inflammation, rashes and fainting, but said those complications appeared to be very uncommon. The Institute of Medicine has reviewed the safety of vaccines 11 times at the request of Congress since it enacted the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act in 1986, with the last review occurring in 1994. I immediately found a report from 2014 that a group of researchers, from the RAND Corporation, searched databases of scientific literature for vaccine-related studies, turning up 20 ,478 in total. This included studies of childhood vaccines as well as adult vaccines such as flu shots. Then they boiled this number down to 166 controlled studies in order to directly compare the effects of being vaccinated with the effects of getting a placebo injection or no vaccination. They found that the vaccines commonly administered to both kids and adults in the US are all safe and effective. So thousands of studies on vaccines, including hundreds of controlled studies, which the WHO, National Academy of Medicine and the RAND Corporation all declare that they are safe, most of the time, for most people. So as far as safety is concerned, I think we can say the science is in – they are safe. So again the claim that aren’t safe gets a five on my bullshit meter. The second point is that double-blind placebo studies have NEVER been conducted on ANY vaccines. again, implied. This one is easily shown to be false. Gardasil was assessed in Double Blind Randomised Placebo Controlled Trials that used the fully formulated vaccine and compared it with two different placebos, the aluminium adjuvant and a saline solution. What is an adjuvant? “Adjuvant” is derived from the Latin “adjuvare” which means to help. Adjuvants are added

On this episode we take a look at the History Of Vaccinations & the story of Andrew Wakefield.   *Please Note: our weekly news shows are currently available to Silver subscribers and above.    Follow Cameron on Facebook | Instagram | Twitter Follow Ray on Facebook. HOW TO LISTENIf you’re seeing this message, it means you aren’t logged in as a subscriber. If want to listen to the premium episodes of the series, you’ll need to become one of our Bullshit Fighters and REGISTER NOW for one of our premium accounts.   The post ANTIVAX 4.2 appeared first on The BS Filter.

Today we start a short series on THE ANTIVAX MOVEMENT. On the first episode we have a discussion about why people believe what they believe. Where do we get our knowledge? What sources do we trust? In other words, it’s all about epistemology and heuristics.    The post ANTIVAX 4.1 appeared first on The BS Filter.

Part THIRTY-TWO, the final episode of our series on the WAR ON DRUGS – “Prop 215”. HOW TO LISTEN If you’re seeing this message, it means you aren’t logged in as a subscriber. If want to listen to the premium episodes of the series, you’ll need to become one of our Bullshit Fighters and register for one of our premium accounts. Show Notes: On July 28, 1992, the biggest of journalistic guns swiveled on the Drug War. The New York Times put the failure of the War on Drugs on page one for the first time: SOME THINK THE ‘WAR ON DRUGS’ IS BEING WAGED ON THE WRONG FRONT. As part of a series on George Bush’s record as president, reporter Joseph Treaster wrote that “Mr. Bush has poured more and more money into tactics that over the last 20 years have repeatedly failed to change the course of the campaign against drugs” Then Bill Clinton got elected in 1992. He was a child of the rock and roll generation. The drug generation. He admitted he smoked pot but didn’t inhale. Just one of many lies he would tell while in office. And people on the other side of the drug war were hopeful. Everyone knew that marijuana — not crack, cocaine, or heroin — was politically the most important illegal drug. It doesn’t kill people who use it, spawn gun battles in city streets, enrich foreign drug lords, or inspire women to abandon their babies Without the marijuana ban, the country’s “drug problem” would have been tiny. There wouldn’t be 11 million regular users of illegal drugs in the United States, there would be 2 million. Of those, about 350,000 use cocaine every day. Along with the country’s half million heroin addicts, these hard-core users are the real “drug problem”: tragic, resistant to solutions, but statistically minuscule. Heroin and cocaine are the scary drugs that keep the Drug War’s home fires burning, but vastly more people are touched personally by a war on marijuana that yields few benefits. Lives aren’t saved. Violent criminal organizations aren’t disrupted. Instead, a lot of harmless potheads — and the generally peaceful growers who supply them — go to prison at enormous expense to the taxpayer. But a thick critique of Bush’s drug policy issued just prior to the election by Democratic senator Joe Biden’s Judiciary Committee was published. It was called “The President’s Drug Strategy: Has it Worked?” No, Biden answered – but only because Bush didn’t spend enough money on law enforcement, wasn’t tough enough on those addicted to drugs, didn’t give the military enough power and money to fight illegal drugs. It never mentioned “racism,” “AIDS,” “poverty,” “tobacco,” or ”civil liberties.” Not in nearly 200 pages. Clinton’s first drug budget duplicated precisely Bush’s heavy emphasis on law enforcement. On Pearl Harbor Day 1993, Joycelyn Elders, Clinton’s surgeon general, gave an hour-long speech to the National Press Club about AIDS, teen pregnancy, and other matters of public health, concluding that the country faced many difficult choices. During questions, legalization activist Eric Sterling asked if legalization isn’t “one of the difficult choices we must face to fight violence.” Elders answered. “I do feel that we would markedly reduce our crime rate if drugs were legalized,”  “But I don’t know all the ramifications of this. I do feel that we need to do some studies.” The White House sided with Elders’s many critics. “The president is against legalizing drugs,” press secretary Dee Dee Myers said, “and he’s not interested in studying the issue.” For good measure, a New York congressman introduced a bill “to prohibit federally sponsored research pertaining to the legalization of drugs.” Eight days after Elders’s comment, Arkansas police arrested Elders’s son Kevin for his role in a two-gram cocaine deal they’d known about for seven months. Though it was his first offense, he faced a ten-year mandatory sentence without parole. Still, the surgeon general came back in early January saying she’d studied up on legalization and now “realized I probably made a more honest, aboveboard statement than I knew I had made.”* I think it’s important to understanding why the Democrats wouldn’t budge on drugs. It’s probably NOT for the same reason as the Republicans. Not at THIS stage, anyway. For the Republicans, it’s about stopping the minorities from voting – because they probably aren’t going to vote for the GOP. For the Democrats, it’s because they don’t want to appear soft on drugs. But also – remember that the big money behind both parties is intrinsically interested in maintaining the status quo. They don’t want blacks and Jews in the country club. There’s an inherent racism in America’s white elite. In 1994, Elders was invited to speak at a United Nations conference on AIDS. She was asked whether it would be appropriate to promote masturbation as a means of preventing young people from engaging in riskier forms of sexual activity, and she replied, “I think that it is part of human sexuality, and perhaps it should be taught”. This remark caused great controversy and resulted in Elders losing the support of the White House. White House chief of staff Leon Panetta remarked, “There have been too many areas where the President does not agree with her views. This is just one too many”. In December 1994, Elders was forced to resign by President Clinton. Of course, if she’s said “only when it’s a President masturbating one of his young female interns with a cigar in the Oval Office”, she probably would have kept her job. Actually my friend Constantine said he took a tour of the West Wing recently and the incident happened in a nook in a corridor. In HER nook … in a nook. In a corridor. Up her corridor. In her nook. I don’t know. And then, in 1996, 66 years after Harry Anslinger went rogue, things started to change. But it wasn’t any thanks to Bill Clinton. First the state of California voted to legalise medical marijuana. Arizona went further, forbidding the imprisonment of first- or second-time nonviolent drug possessors (requiring mandatory probation and treatment instead), permitting the medical use of marijuana, and opening the door to medical use of heroin and LSD as well. The vote there — in an overwhelmingly Republican state —was 65 to 35 percent. The Clinton administration lost their shit. Drug Czar General Barry McCaffrey – who is best known for Operation Desert Storm and being the guy who commanded the Highway of Death – said he was ready to send the DEA to California and Arizona to make marijuana arrests those states wouldn’t. But considering how the public might react to televised images of federal agents hauling skeletal patients off to prison, the drug czar had to switch tactics. Doctors, not patients, would be the enemy, he said; the DEA would revoke the prescription license of any doctor who recommended marijuana. And Bill Clinton supported him. Then the New England Journal of Medicine blasted the Clinton administration for resisting the will of the people of California and Arizona. Columnists and commentators praised the initiatives, and legislators from Texas to Maine said they would try to get similar laws passed in their states. “We can’t let this go without a response,” huffed Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch of Utah – who is currently the longest-serving Republican U.S. Senator in history BTW Being the only legal source of marijuana in the country, the federal government could either provide pot to patients, turn a blind eye, or resist the initiatives with force. But either supplying marijuana or allowing the initiatives to stand unchallenged would slay the central myth of the War on Drugs: that marijuana is a lethal, addictive destroyer of souls with no medical value. For if marijuana is such evil, how could our government make peace with it? And if it is not, then how do we justify confiscating pot smokers’ houses and sending non-medical users to prison for five years? McCaffrey appeared everywhere on television, warning that the initiatives in California and Arizona were the narrow edge of the legalization wedge. It may turn out he was right. The California and Arizona campaigns provide new models for reform activists. In California, a broad-based coalition was slowly and noisily built during five years, with local initiatives in San Francisco and Santa Cruz preceding the statewide fight. Twice the legislature passed medical-marijuana bills only to have them vetoed by Gov. Pete Wilson. By the time the initiative reached the ballot, the issue was familiar to California voters and had widespread grassroots support. Arizona’s campaign was the mirror image of California’s. A small cadre of elites — retired Sen. Barry Goldwater among them — organized themselves privately and then pounced with a huge media blitz that introduced voters to the issue as it sought to sway them. And then – In the US, Colorado and Washington state in 2012 became the first two states to legalize marijuana for recreational purposes. Several states, from Alaska to California to Maine, have since followed. Globally, more countries are considering legalization. Uruguay became the first country to legalize pot in 2013. Canada became the first wealthy nation to do so in 2018. Think of the states as dominoes lined up one by one. When the first domino topples, it leads to a chain reaction that causes most, if not all, of the others to fall. That’s what has happened, and continues to happen, with state legalization of marijuana. The timeline for marijuana legalization in the U.S. shows how those dominoes keep falling. And it affects other countries as well. Once we see it happen in the U.S. – and once the U.S. stops brow-beating other countries into following them on the issue – they start to fall. So how did it all happen? One group we haven’t talked abo

Part THIRTY-ONE of our series on the WAR ON DRUGS – “The Sentencing Project”. HOW TO LISTEN If you’re seeing this message, it means you aren’t logged in as a subscriber. If want to listen to the premium episodes of the series, you’ll need to become one of our Bullshit Fighters and register for one of our premium accounts. Show Notes: Georgia Gospel Choir https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2wCBAdT6FI We finished up last time In 1989 Mass murderer George HW Bush is President. May he get anally raped for eternity by the hundreds of thousands of civilians who were murdered on his watch. Percentage of high school seniors who said cocaine is “easy or very easy” to get in 1980: 48. Percentage who said the same thing in 1990: 59. So despite a fortune being spent on the war on drugs during the Reagan years, the “problem” is getting worse. What’s that old saying about doing the same thing and expecting a different results? Sounds like me and podcasting. In 1988, the chief administrative judge of the DEA, Francis Young, recommended the DEA reclassify marijuana to a less restrictive classification. He called it “one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man”. He quoted scientific evidence and medical studies. The DEA in 1990 ignored him. In the spring of 1991, Harvard University researchers surveyed a third of the country’s oncologists, and of the thousand who responded about half said they would prescribe marijuana if it was legal. Of those, almost all said they’d done so anyway, telling at least one patient that, though illegal, marijuana can fight the debilitating nausea of chemotherapy. The survey, published in May, seemed to discredit the DEA’s contention that marijuana has “no accepted medical use.” Meanwhile the AIDS epidemic was going into overdrive. Since Bush’s inauguration, the number of drug-related AIDS cases had jumped from 12,000 to 16,000. A third of all the country’s AIDS cases were believed to have originated with a dirty needle. The obvious solution was to provide clean needles for drug users. Pharmacists didn’t want junkies coming into their stores to buy needles. Parks and sanitation workers didn’t want to handle discarded and potentially lethal syringes. Requiring addicts to bring their needles back provided an opportunity for counseling, health care, even addiction treatment. New Haven, Connecticut, launched a needle exchange program in 1990. They had a van that drove around handing out needles. If you brought back your old needles, you got clean ones in return. In the first few months, two out of ten needles that were handed were returned to the van – and 68% contained the AIDS virus. Two years later, some seven in ten were coming back, and the percentage of those testing positive was down to 44. one of every six addicts participating had gone into drug treatment But the Bush administration’s position on drugs was “zero tolerance”. They convinced Congress not to fund a nationwide needle exchange program. Because FUCK people dying of AIDS. Bush actually said “Here’s a disease where you can control its spread by your own personal behavior. You can’t do that in cancer.” Because no-one can help it if they smoke a pack a day. According to the Washington Post, by 1990, U.S. Customs Service agents had confiscated more than $50 million using sniffer dogs at Border crossings and airports, most of which has been forfeited to the government. Did you know that if a sniffer dog smells cash tainted with cocaine on your person, the police can confiscate the cash? Trained dogs sniff cash, and if they bark, that’s taken to mean the money is contaminated with drugs and is therefore “drug money” and seizable. A guy from the ACLU said: “Everything the dog does, no matter what it is, the police claim it’s a hit. If the dog barks, it’s a hit. If the dog sits down, it’s a hit. If the dog fell over dead, they’d probably claim the scent of cocaine killed him.” The Pittsburgh Press found in 1991 that virtually all currency in the United States is tainted with enough cocaine to trigger a dog’s response. Two different private labs tested currency from banks in eleven cities and found as much as 96 percent of it showing traces of coke. In one study, they tested more than 135 bills from seven U.S. cities and found that all but four were contaminated with traces of cocaine. Clean money put in the same drawer as “dirty” money will later make a dog bark. Police and federal agents don’t clean or destroy drug-tainted cash they seize. They deposit it in the bank, to be put into circulation — perhaps to be seized — again. Baum 317 And then, in 1992, the tide started to turn. The Sentencing Project, a tiny liberal nonprofit organization, had been tracking big increases in incarceration since 1981, issuing a series of reports that quickly disappeared into obscurity. But then they stumbled onto wording that worked in the media. “America has more black men in prison than in college,” they wrote. “One in four are under control of the criminal justice system —jail, prison, probation or parole.” And suddenly – the country began talking about the racial implications of its War on Drugs. Across the country, small papers were carrying front page stories about how blacks were arrested more often, offered fewer opportunities for bail, and sentenced to longer stretches than whites. USA Today did a national story, DRUG WAR FOCUSED ON BLACKS, that led off: “Urban blacks are being detained in numbers far exceeding their involvement” in the drug trade. Local Bar Associations — notably in Boston and Rochester, New York — issued thick reports on the waste, racial disparities, injustice, and futility of the Drug War. Judges started speaking out too, about the disparity in how many minorities came into their courtrooms for drug offences versus whites. Norman Lanford, a criminal-courts judge in Houston, who considered himself a law and order Republican, did the math. More than 2,500 people from the county had been sent to prison in 1991 for holding less than a gram of cocaine. Most drug convicts held half that much. Threequarters of them were black, even though blacks constituted less than a fifth of the county’s population. Average sentence for a minor drug possessor in Houston that year: eight and a half years. Lanford figured it cost Houston’s taxpayers almost $22 million in 1991 to imprison all the people convicted of holding less than half a gram. He identified 2,113 people imprisoned in Houston that year for possessing — among them — seven ounces of cocaine.  “We’re occupying a 25-year space in prison for a guy [about whom] all we can prove in his entire criminal career is ownership of $40 worth of crack.” The comment cost Lanford his judgeship. When he came up for reelection in early 1991, an assistant district attorney hammered him for being “soft on drugs” and knocked him out of the primary. The mayor of Baltimore in the late 80s argued that drugs should be decriminalized. His name was Kurt SCHMOKE. I kid you not. He ran again in 1991, still pushing against the war on drugs, and won with a bigger margin than he had in 1987. The post War On Drugs 3.31 – The Sentencing Project appeared first on The BS Filter.

Part THIRTY of our series on the WAR ON DRUGS – “Tautology”. HOW TO LISTEN If you’re seeing this message, it means you aren’t logged in as a subscriber. If want to listen to the premium episodes of the series, you’ll need to become one of our Bullshit Fighters and register for one of our premium accounts. Show Notes: Things continued to get worse under Reagan. Social services were cut, and the hardest hit turned to drugs. Reagan took the money from social services and put it into drug enforcement. Putting lots of young black men – who probably weren’t going to vote Republican – into jail. So they could never vote again. The George HW Bush ran on a crime and drug campaign in 1988 and won. Like Nixon, Bush discredited the suggestion that social pressures such as poverty and racism play a role in creating crime, and promoting the notion that, like all other social problems, crime is entirely the fault of bad people making bad choices. At this point, the United States had been fighting its War on Drugs for twenty years. Despite the billions spent, the millions imprisoned, and the loss of liberties to both drug user and nonuser alike, drugs were cheaper, more potent, and used by younger children than when Nixon started the war. The drug cartels were wealthier and more sophisticated than ever. The number of cocaine dependents had grown. Drug violence, unheard of at the start of the Drug War, now terrorized poor neighborhoods. Drug combatants died daily; just the number of slain innocent bystanders had tripled in the two years prior to Bush’s inauguration. Rather than evaluate the efficacy of the War on Drugs and the wisdom of pursuing it, Bush shuffled the deck one more time. Under Nixon, heroin was the big bad drug. Halfway through Carter’s reign, marijuana nudged it aside. As the public’s passion to fight marijuana waned, cocaine was thrust forward to draw fire. Then crack. The Drug War front shifted endlessly too, from the border to the streets to Bolivia to the money-laundering banks to the suburbs and back to the border again. One new development in Bush’s years was his administration’s decision that drugs would no longer be mentioned as a health problem. Which is strange because the physical damage of drugs – while always highly over-rated – was the whole point of the war on drugs up to this point. But now it just came down to morality. Right and wrong. If drugs are a health problem, then addicts are sick, and that portrays them in a sympathetic light. If you base prohibition on drugs’ health effects, what do you say to the millions of occasional users who convincingly claim to be uninjured by the drugs they took? The biggest problem with basing a prohibitive drug policy on the health risks, though, was the invitation to comparisons. The year Bush became President, tobacco killed some 395,000 Americans — more than died in both world wars. Alcohol directly killed 23,000 and another 22,400 on the highways. Cocaine, on the other hand, killed 3,618 people that year. Heroin and other opiates killed 2,743. And no death from marijuana has ever been recorded. In terms of crime, booze was implicated in violent crime to a much greater degree than any illegal drug. The Justice Department found that half of those convicted of homicide in 1989 were using alcohol at the time of the killing, while fewer than 6 percent said they were on drugs alone. Bush relied on a neat bit of tautology: marijuana, heroin, and cocaine are immoral because they are illegal. Why are they illegal? Because they are immoral. End of story. A guy called Paul McNulty WTF DID I DO? From the Justice Department, said: “Now that the government has spoken to the subject that drugs are unlawful, a person who disobeys the law has made a moral choice and should be dealt with appropriately.” The media kept playing their part in spreading disinformation. In the late 80s, their favourite stories were about crack babies. By 1989 scientists had had four years to study the phenomenon of “crack babies” and some were backing off from their initially alarming reports. Ira Chasnoff, the Chicago doctor whose 1985 article in the New England Journal of Medicine started the crack-baby panic, now cautioned that crack was only a small part of the problem for small, undernourished, and sickly babies. Pregnant women are sixteen times more likely to use alcohol than crack, he wrote, and unlike cocaine, alcohol has proven fetus-damaging effects. Poor women have always birthed smaller and sicker babies, and the sharp increase in the number of poor, uninsured women was certain to boost the number of ailing newborns. Prenatal care — and the insurance to pay for it — was and is a better predictor of a newborns health than whether the mother smokes crack. “In the end,” Florida health officials concluded in 1985, “it is safer for a baby to be born to a drug-abusing, anemic, or a diabetic mother who visits the doctor throughout her pregnancy than to be born to a normal woman who does not.” Researchers of human “crack babies” furthermore found that the effects of cocaine wore off within a few months and that such babies who were well fed, loved, and properly stimulated could recover completely. Yet the myth of the “crack baby” grew ever larger. Because the media thrives on fear mongering. Nothing like a scary story to drives sales. Charles Krauthammer writing in the Washington Post dismissed “crack babies” in 1988 as a “biologic underclass whose biological inferiority is stamped at birth.” The following year he wrote “[t]heirs will be a life of certain suffering, of probable deviance, of permanent inferiority.” Boston University president John Silber criticized “spending immense amounts on crack babies who won’t ever achieve the intellectual development to have consciousness of God.” The New York Times declared “crack babies” unable to “make friends, know right from wrong, control their impulses, gain insight, concentrate on tasks, and feel and return love.” Even Rolling Stone condemned “crack babies” as “like no others, brain damaged in ways yet unknown, oblivious to any affection.” Reporters sent out to write “crack baby” stories sometimes got their facts right without knowing it. After forty-odd inches of horror stories of low-income women giving birth to “crack babies,” the Wall Street Journal, in a typical July 1989 front-page article, let drop that “their mothers aren’t all low income. Linda, an impeccably dressed 34-year-old, now looks more like the accountant she once was than a recovering addict who once had a $2 000-a-week crack habit.” Turns out, the Journal reported, “her son was born healthy.” No explanation was offered as to why a woman smoking $2 000 worth of crack a week can give birth to a healthy baby. And no connection was made to the fact that, unlike every other mother in the article, Linda is an impeccably dressed accountant who likely had health insurance and proper care. “USERS ARE BUMS,” declared the Readers Digest in an article with that title in June 1989, “whether they are doorway junkies, trendy weekend consumers or once a month dabblers.” A month later, America’s biggest-selling magazine was back with another drug article, saying that because attacking “the supply side of the drug crisis has failed miserably. . . let’s get tough with drug users!” Percentage of the nation’s sixteen- to thirty-five-year-old black men arrested during 1989: 35. Percentage of black men who said in 1980 they could earn “more on the street doing something illegal than on a straight job”: 44. Percentage who said the same thing in 1989: 66. Federal funds paid to drug informants in 1987: $35 million. In 1989: $63 million. which was half again as much as it did to operate the Office of Management and Budget. A lot of this money went to small-time crooks. Some of it went to big-time crooks. In one legendary case, a convicted drug dealer who was flat broke upon his release from prison in 1984 became a multimillionaire by 1990 — all on government snitch payments. The War on Drugs made the criminal justice system one of the top growth industries during the eighties and nineties. Police jobs at all levels of government swelled by 36 percent and prison jobs by 86 percent during the Reagan years alone, while overall government employment rose by only 16 percent. Number of Americans arrested in 1990: 1.1 million. Number arrested for marijuana possession: 264,000. The post War On Drugs 3.30 “Tautology” appeared first on The BS Filter.

Part TWENTY-NINE of our series on the WAR ON DRUGS – “DeLorean”. HOW TO LISTEN If you’re seeing this message, it means you aren’t logged in as a subscriber. If want to listen to the premium episodes of the series, you’ll need to become one of our Bullshit Fighters and register for one of our premium accounts. Show Notes: If you don’t know the story of DeLorean He worked at GM where he invented the Pontiac GTO, the first muscle car, in the early 60s. He then developed the Pontiac Firebird which became the Trans-Am, The Bandit’s car and KITT. He left General Motors in 1973 to form his own company, the DeLorean Motor Company. And of course the car he produced was the DMC-12 – the Back to the Future car. Unfortunately it took 8 years to get the car to market. And when it did, the U.S.economy was in a downturn. And the car got average reviews – it looked sexy as hell but it was expensive and had lower horsepower than other sports cars on the market. The company ended up not being able to sell many cars and was saddled with $175 million in debt and went into liquidation. DeLorean was already mired in legal problems by the time Robert Zemeckis chose a DMC–12 to serve as Marty McFly’s time machine in “Back to the Future.” In an early script, the time machine was a refrigerator, and Marty would need the power of an atomic explosion at the Nevada Test Site to return home. Zemeckis was concerned that children would accidentally lock themselves in refrigerators, and felt it was more useful if the time machine were mobile. The DeLorean DMC-12 was chosen because its design made the gag about the family of farmers mistaking it for a flying saucer believable. AND THEN… On October 19, 1982, DeLorean was charged by the U.S. government with trafficking cocaine following a videotaped sting operation in which he was recorded by undercover federal agents agreeing to bankroll a cocaine smuggling operation. The $25,000 automobile hit the market just as the world recession sent most car companies into a tailspin, and sales were slow. compared with $10,000 for the average car and $18,000 for a souped-up Corvette. On the day of DeLorean’s arrest the British government, which had lent his company more than $160 million, closed his factory in Northern Ireland. The FBI set him up with more than 59 pounds (27 kg) of cocaine (worth about US$6 million) in a hotel near Los Angeles International Airport after arriving from New York, and the FBI stated DeLorean was the “financier” to help the financially declining company in a scheme to sell 220 lb (100 kg), with an estimated value of US$24 million. If convicted on all counts, he could have been sentenced to 67 years in prison and fined $185,000. The government was tipped off to DeLorean by confidential informant James Timothy Hoffman, a former neighbor, who reported to his FBI superiors that DeLorean had approached him to ask about setting up a cocaine deal; in reality, Hoffman had called DeLorean and suggested the deal (which DeLorean then accepted) as part of Hoffman’s efforts to receive a reduced sentence for a 1981 federal cocaine trafficking charge on which he was awaiting trial. Hoffman (whose name was redacted on the original indictment) also stated that he was aware of DeLorean’s financial troubles before he contacted him, and had heard him admit that he needed US$17 million “in a hurry” to prevent DMC’s imminent insolvency. Taken together, these two elements allowed DeLorean to successfully defend himself at trial with the procedural defense of police entrapment. DeLorean’s lawyers successfully argued that the FBI and DEA had unfairly targeted and illegally entrapped DeLorean  when they allowed Hoffman (an active FBI informant who only knew DeLorean casually) to randomly solicit DeLorean into a criminal conspiracy simply because he was known to be financially vulnerable. Another factor was DeLorean’s lack of criminal history, whereas Hoffman was a career criminal who stood to directly benefit if he was able to convince DeLorean to incriminate himself on tape. The DeLorean defense team did not call any witnesses. DeLorean was found not guilty on August 16, 1984,  but by then DMC had already collapsed into bankruptcy and DeLorean’s reputation as a businessman was irrevocably tarnished. The attorney who successfully proved entrapment in John DeLorean’s cocaine case noted, “There’s rampant paranoia among the criminal defense lawyers, and it’s there with good purpose.” When asked after his acquittal if he planned to resume his career in the auto industry, DeLorean bitterly quipped “Would you buy a used car from me?” On suspicion alone, the Supreme Court ruled that summer, an international traveler into the United States may be strip-searched and then held incommunicado until he or she defecates into a wastebasket. Customs agents in Los Angeles had done that to Rosa Elvira Montoya de Hernandez, a Colombian citizen arriving from Colombia, because they suspected —rightly —that she was carrying cocaine-filled balloons in her digestive tract. After almost twenty-four hours locked in a room with only a hard chair to sit on, and denied permission to call an attorney, Ms. Montoya de Hernandez was taken in handcuffs to a hospital and put through a forcible rectal exam that revealed a cocaine filled balloon. Over the course of the next four days, she excreted eighty-eight more such balloons under observation, and was charged with smuggling drugs. A federal appeals panel had overturned her subsequent conviction, questioning the “humanity” of such a procedure. A study at the time revealed that for every woman apprehended this way, five innocent women were put through the degrading experience. But Justice William Rehnquist reversed the lower court on July 1, 1985, saying the freedom to control one’s own bodily functions is a justifiable sacrifice to “the veritable national crisis in law enforcement caused by smuggling of illegal narcotics.” To strengthen his point, he listed some of the freedoms he had likewise helped diminish: “first class mail may be opened without a warrant on less than probable cause… Automotive travelers may be stopped … near the border without individualized suspicion even if the stop is based largely on ethnicity … and boats on inland waters with ready access to the sea may be hailed and boarded with no suspicion whatever.” For Justice William Brennan, who had the year before declared the Courts victory over the Fourth Amendment “complete,” the ruling was a disgrace. In a bitter dissent, Brennan compared the Customs agents to kidnappers. Furthermore, Brennan wrote, “Neither the law of the land nor the law of nature supports the notion that petty government officials can require people to excrete on command.” On November 29, 1985, crack cocaine made page one of the New York Times for the first time. What Egil Krogh learned in Vietnam held true again. The government, putting pressure on marijuana, helped make cocaine more attractive to smuggle and sell. When the government pressed hard on cocaine, dealers found it worthwhile to boil it down into a smaller and more potent form. Users in turn found it cheaper and easier to smoke cocaine instead of snorting it. Newsweek was running articles saying “Crack is the most addictive drug known to man right now,”. Technically, this was untrue. Cocaine does not create a physical need the way heroin does. Cocaine is, however, powerfully reinforcing. In other words, a cocaine high makes the user want more. In about a sixth of the people who use cocaine regularly this desire is so strong that it is a kind of psychological addiction. Crack, bypassing the narrow blood vessels of the nose by being smoked, is said to be even more reinforcing than cocaine. It may be one of the most reinforcing of all known drugs. But if crack is “instantly addictive,” then everybody who tried it once would be in trouble, and that is far from the truth. Among high school seniors in 1987 (the first year they were asked about cocaine), 4.1 percent had used crack in the past year. Less than a third of those had used it in the past month, and a fortieth of those who had tried it were using it every day. The proportions have remained about the same since then as overall crack use has declined. The numbers actually indicate that nicotine is more reinforcing than crack. In 1987, fully 65 percent of the high school seniors who smoked cigarettes at least once a month smoked them every day, in most cases half a pack or more. the 1984 figures showed cocaine killing fewer people than either aspirin or the flu. Cocaine was “mentioned” in 604 deaths in 1984. That doesn’t mean cocaine killed that many people, just that the drug was present in the bodies of 604 people who died suddenly from substance abuse. You might get mugged while crossing the street, but if you have coke in your system, it counts to that total. It was a threefold increase from 1981, but hardly the biggest health crisis facing the country; five times as many Americans died choking on food and ten times as many died from ulcers. To say nothing of stroke, heart disease, auto wrecks, handguns, and other causes of preventable death. “There is simply no question,” Newsweek wrote in “Kids and Cocaine,” “that cocaine in all its forms is seeping into the nation’s schools.” In truth, however, only one senior in eight had tried cocaine by 1987. Fewer than half of those were using it every month, and only about 1/26 of them — or 0. percent of all high school seniors — were using it daily. Cocaine deaths among children were almost nonexistent. The total number of Americans under eighteen who died from cocaine in 1984 was eight. That issue of Newsweek, with a cover photo of a teenager snorting coke on a suburban home’s carpeted stairway, sold 15 percent more copies than that year’s aver

Part TWENTY-EIGHT of our series on the WAR ON DRUGS – “Bubble Boy”. HOW TO LISTEN If you’re seeing this message, it means you aren’t logged in as a subscriber. If want to listen to the premium episodes of the series, you’ll need to become one of our Bullshit Fighters and register for one of our premium accounts. Show Notes: In 1985, a new drug hit the market – MDMA. Short for Methyl ene dioxy methamphetamine In general, MDMA users report feeling the onset of subjective effects within 30–60 minutes of MDMA consumption and reaching the peak effect at 75–120 minutes, which then plateaus for about 3.5 hours.  The desired short-term psychoactive effects of MDMA have been reported to include:     Euphoria – a sense of general well-being and happiness     Increased self-confidence, sociability and feelings of communication being easy or simple     Entactogenic effects – increased empathy or feelings of closeness with others  and oneself     Relaxation and reduced anxiety     Increased emotionality     A sense of inner peace     Mild hallucination     Enhanced sensation, perception, or sexuality     Altered sense of time Sounds downright HORRIBLE. It was first synthesized in 1912 by Merck chemist Anton Köllisch in Germany. Merck wanted to find a substance that stopped abnormal bleeding to compete with a similar product made by Bayer. MDMA – 3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine – was an intermediate compound during production of the actual substance. But it wasn’t until 1970 that it appears to be used recreationally in the US. It was probably manufactured as a substitute for a similar drug – methylenedioxyamphetamine (MDA) – a popular psychedelic  which had just been banned in 1970. American chemist and psychopharmacologist Alexander Shulgin started producing it in the late 60s and by the mid 70s he was testing the psychoactive effect of the drug on himself and others and giving talks about it at conferences. They found that it reduced people inhibitions and thought it could be useful for therapy. Shulgin occasionally used MDMA for relaxation, referring to it as “my low-calorie martini”, and gave the drug to friends, researchers, and others who he thought could benefit from it. One such person was Leo Zeff, a psychotherapist who had been known to use psychedelic substances in his practice. Zeff named the drug “Adam”, believing it put users in a state of primordial innocence. Psychotherapists who used MDMA believed the drug eliminated the typical fear response and increased communication. Depression, substance abuse, relationship problems, premenstrual syndrome, and autism were among several psychiatric disorders MDMA assisted therapy was reported to treat. According to psychiatrist George Greer, therapists who used MDMA in their practice were impressed by the results. Anecdotally,   was said to greatly accelerate therapy. According to David Nutt – no relation to Lefty Nutt from our earlier episodes, this guy is actually a British neuropsychopharmacologist specialising in the research of drugs that affect the brain and conditions such as addiction, anxiety, and sleep –  MDMA was widely used in the western US in couples counseling, and was called “empathy”. Only later was the term “ecstasy” used for it, coinciding with rising opposition to its use. In the late 70s and early 80s, ADAM was being used by psychotherapists, psychiatrists, users of psychedelics, and yuppies. Hoping MDMA could avoid criminalization like LSD and mescaline, psychotherapists and experimenters attempted to limit the spread of MDMA and information about it while conducting informal research By the early 1980s MDMA was being used in Boston and New York City nightclubs such as Studio 54 and Paradise Garage.   Into the early 1980s, as the recreational market slowly expanded, production of MDMA was dominated by a small group of therapeutically minded Boston chemists. Having commenced production in 1976, this “Boston Group” did not keep up with growing demand and shortages frequently occurred. Perceiving a business opportunity, Michael Clegg, the Southwest distributor for the Boston Group, started his own “Texas Group” backed financially by Texas friends.   In 1981,  Clegg had coined “Ecstasy” as a slang term for MDMA to increase its marketability.   Starting in 1983,  the Texas Group mass-produced MDMA in a Texas lab  or imported it from California  and marketed tablets using pyramid sales structures and toll-free numbers. MDMA could be purchased via credit card and taxes were paid on sales. Under the brand name “Sassyfras”, MDMA tablets were sold in brown bottles. The Texas Group advertised “Ecstasy parties” at bars and discos, describing MDMA as a “fun drug” and “good to dance to”. MDMA was openly distributed in Austin and Dallas-Fort Worth area bars and nightclubs, becoming popular with yuppies, college students, and gays. By 1984, the media had started covering the recreational use of MDMA, and so the DEA decided to make it a schedule 1 drug. But they got a lot of push back from psychiatrists. Which took them by surprise. They had no idea it was being used for therapeutic reasons. n response to the proposed scheduling, the Texas Group increased production from 1985 estimates of 30,000 tablets a month to as many as 8,000 per day, potentially making two million ecstasy tablets in the months before MDMA was made illegal. By some estimates the Texas Group distributed 500,000 tablets per month in Dallas alone. According to one participant in an ethnographic study, the Texas Group produced more MDMA in eighteen months than all other distribution networks combined across their entire histories. By May 1985, MDMA use was widespread in California, Texas, southern Florida, and the northeastern United States.   According to the DEA there was evidence of use in twenty-eight states  and Canada. Urged by Senator Lloyd Bentsen, the DEA announced an emergency Schedule I classification of MDMA on 31 May 1985. The agency cited increased distribution in Texas, escalating street use, and new evidence of MDA (an analog of MDMA) neurotoxicity as reasons for the emergency measure. The ban took effect one month later on 1 July 1985 in the midst of Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign. As a result of several expert witnesses testifying that MDMA had an accepted medical usage, the administrative law judge presiding over the hearings recommended that MDMA be classified as a Schedule III substance. Despite this, DEA administrator John C. Lawn overruled and classified the drug as Schedule I. Later Harvard psychiatrist Lester Grinspoon – the guy who the Aussie rock band is named after – sued the DEA, claiming that the DEA had ignored the medical uses of MDMA, and the federal court sided with Grinspoon, calling Lawn’s argument “strained” and “unpersuasive”, and vacated MDMA’s Schedule I status. Despite this, less than a month later Lawn reviewed the evidence and reclassified MDMA as Schedule I again, claiming that the expert testimony of several psychiatrists claiming over 200 cases where MDMA had been used in a therapeutic context with positive results could be dismissed because they weren’t published in medical journals. No double blind studies had yet been conducted as to the efficacy of MDMA for therapy. Of course, as you’d expect, once the government had banned MDMA, the use of it exploded. And the quality of it declined. It became popular in the dance clubs of Ibiza, then spread to the rave culture in the UK. And then to Europe and the US. Since the mid-1990s, MDMA has become the most widely used amphetamine-type drug by college students and teenagers. After MDMA was criminalized, most medical use stopped, although some therapists continued to prescribe the drug illegally. “Molly”, short for ‘molecule’, was recognized as a slang term for crystalline or powder MDMA in the 2000s. According to David Nutt, when safrole was restricted by the United Nations in order to reduce the supply of MDMA, producers in China began using anethole instead, but this gives para-methoxyamphetamine (PMA, also known as “Dr Death”), which is much more toxic than MDMA and can cause overheating, muscle spasms, seizures, unconsciousness, and death. People wanting MDMA are sometimes sold PMA instead. According to dancesafe.org, In the vast majority of cases of MDMA-related deaths, where no other drugs were found in the person’s bloodstream, the deceased had taken a dose within the normal range for appropriate therapeutic or recreational use. By far the most common cause of MDMA-related medical emergencies and death is heatstroke, where MDMA was only one of a number of factors involved. A normal dose of MDMA raises body temperature about one degree and also inhibits the body’s natural thermoregulation. This increases the risk of heatstroke, especially when other factors are involved, like aerobic dancing in a hot environment and not drinking enough water. Another new drug to hit the market in 1985 was called basuco or bazooka. a smokable form of cocaine Basuco is derived from the Spanish word for trash (basura), literally meaning “little dirty trash” (of cocaine), referring to the paste left at the bottom of a barrel after cocaine production. Basuco is mostly smoked, either rolled like a cigarette with tobacco or cannabis, or more commonly from selfmade pipes. “Freebase,” a smokable form of cocaine that was lovingly — and dangerously — manufactured by using highly flammable ether, had been around for years, and had become famous when comedian Richard Pryor immolated himself making it in 1980. Its use had tapered off, though. And nobody had ever called it “basuco”. Another thing that hit in 85 was crack cocaine. Crack is little rocks of cocaine You smoke it like freebase, but it’s cooked with water and baking soda instead of ether, so it’s m

Part TWENTY-SEVEN of our series on the WAR ON DRUGS – “The Evil Empire”. HOW TO LISTEN If you’re seeing this message, it means you aren’t logged in as a subscriber. If want to listen to the premium episodes of the series, you’ll need to become one of our Bullshit Fighters and register for one of our premium accounts. Show Notes: Another thing that happened in the U.S. in the early 80s was the dismantling of civil protections regarding search warrants. Keep in mind that the war on drugs has always been fuelled by a combination of two things: a)  disenfranchising segments of society by criminalising the mostly harmless behaviour of a minority of people and b) playing on the fear the majority had of this minority to build up a political and policing infrastructure that strengthened the careers of the men in power. In the 1930s, 40s, 50s, and 60s under Harry Anslinger, it was about targeting the blacks, the Mexicans, and the jazz musicians. In the 70s under Nixon it was about the anti-war demonstrators and the civil rights movement. In the 80s under Reagan it was about cementing his “tough on crime” position. And by the 80s, the Republicans had managed to stack the Supreme Court with right-leaning Justices. In 1983, four of them were Nixon appointees. Reagan, Eisenhower, LBJ, JFK and Ford all had one each. The Burger Court. Sounds delicious. So seven of nine were appointed by Republicans. One of things that was overturned by the Supreme Court in 1984 was the “two pronged” test, or the exclusionary rule. Basically this rule meant that police couldn’t get a warrant to search your property or vehicle or arrest you, based on confidential informant or an anonymous tip. unless they could convince the judge signing the warrant that the informant was reliable and credible. So you couldn’t get a warrant, or make an arrest, based on a completely anonymous tip. The fear was that if you COULD do that, cops would just start inventing anonymous tips and use it to search or arrest anyone they didn’t like and hope it paid off. The Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution provides that “[t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures”. But in 1984, SCOTUS threw that law out. They created something called the “good-faith exception” to the exclusionary rule. Or the “totality of the circumstances” rule. This meant that police could now get a warrant to pull over your car just because they had a suspicion you were doing something illegal. And the court would later decide if the search or arrest was justified or not based on the totality of the circumstances. William Brennan, one of the dissenting Justices, said “The Court’s victory over the Fourth Amendment, is complete.” Meanwhile Senator Strom Thurmond who represented South Carolina from 1954 until 2003, and who switched from being as Democrat to being a Republican in 1964 because he didn’t like the Civil Rights Act, was chairman of the Judiciary Committee. He passed a new crime bill in the Senate that also wanted to get rid of the two pronged rule. His bill passed the Senate three-to-one. Thurmond is famous for leaving office as the only member of either chamber of Congress to reach the age of 100 while still in office. And for the longest filibuster ever by a lone senator, at 24 hours and 18 minutes in length, nonstop, in 1957 to oppose the Civil Rights Act. Six months after Thurmond died at the age of 100 in 2003, his secret mixed-race, then 78-year-old daughter Essie Mae Washington-Williams revealed he was her father and that he’d raped her mother in 1925 when she had been his family’s maid and was aged 15. So Strom’s bill passed the Senate. The vote was 91 to 1. The lone dissenter was Senator Charles McC. Mathias Jr., Republican of Maryland, who opposed uniform sentencing, a provision of the bill, as ”ill-conceived, inflexible and potentially quite costly” because it could add to prison crowding. ‘This is, for the most part, a bill designed to give the American people the impression that the U.S. Senate is doing something about crime.” Earlier, the Senate rejected an amendment that would have made it illegal for Government officials to secretly tape-record telephone conversations. Senator Howard M. Metzenbaum, an Ohio Democrat, said, ”I am beginning to think that there is a lot more secret taping gong on in this Government than we have imagined.” The principal sponsors were Senators Thurmond of South Carolina and Paul Laxalt of Nevada, both Republicans, and Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware and Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, both Democrats. But would it pass the House, controlled by the Democrats? Republican congressman Dan Lungren of California came up with a new trick to force it through. On September 25 he made a motion to attach a brand-new House bill, identical to the Senate bill, to a “must pass” appropriations bill and send it to the full House for a vote. If the House delayed or failed to pass it, federal funding would freeze and the entire government would shut down. It was a 419-page bill, and under House rules only five minutes of debate was permitted. “The American people have shown in the latest poll that this is the number one issue for them!” Lungren exhorted his colleagues. “Do not worry about next week! Do not worry about last week!” Faced with the choice of giving in or leaving the government with no money to run on, the House voted yay. By the time the horse trading was over on October 11, the Omnibus Crime Bill of 1984 gave huge new powers to prosecutors. It was the first comprehensive revision of the U.S. criminal code since the early 1900s. It substantially boosted maximum prison terms for drug crimes. It stipulated that anybody charged with a drug crime that might result in a ten-year sentence is presumed dangerous and can be held without bail. It axed a long-standing program that expunged the records of first-time drug offenders between eighteen and twenty-six who’d served their time. It increased federal penalties for cultivation, possession, or transfer of marijuana. And it opened up civil forfeiture to seize assets of organized crime. Just by getting a warrant – which was easier than ever – cops could seize cash, cars, boats, homes, bank accounts, stock portfolios — anything believed to have been purchased with drug money or equal in value to the money believed earned from drug sales. No charge, indictment, trial, or conviction was necessary, and the burden of proof was placed on the person whose assets were seized. Drug offenses were the target; accused murderers, kidnappers, or rapists were in no danger of losing their assets without trial. And to restore a sense of “poetic justice,” the new law allowed seized assets to be shared among the law enforcement agencies involved in the case. A fund would be created from seized assets, the law decreed, and beginning in 1986 state and local police could apply for a spoonful. By 1991, the fund would contain $1.6 billion, of which state and local police would enjoy more than $265 million. At the time, there were budget cuts and law enforcement was doing it rough, especially at the state level. So this law gave local police a powerful incentive to take their drug cases federal. Worse, it inspired police to make cases solely to bolster their own agencies’ coffers. The age of free-market criminal justice was dawning. One of the impacts of Reagan’s new crime bill that allowed for assets to be seized BEFORE there was any proof of wrong-doing, is that it made it more difficult for the accused to hire legal representation. Can’t hire a good lawyer if you don’t have any money. So they were forced to use overworked public defenders. Imagine you’re a regular Joe, with little in the way of savings and assets, and the cops claim you’re selling drugs. They take your house and your bank account and you have to fight to get them back. As one federal prosecutor said: “Under the Constitution, defendants are entitled to legal advice, not to high-priced advice.” To enforce the new law, defense lawyers could be subpoenaed to tell how much they received as retainer and how they were paid. Defense lawyers, in other words, would now be pressed into service as witnesses for the prosecution. Number of wire tap requests submitted to federal judges by the Justice Department in 1983: 648. Percentage change from 1982: +60. Percentage approved: 100. In the mid-80s, employers started to become active players in the war on drugs. Urine testing was in 1985 a $100 million business. One small urine lab, founded in 1983, posted a 450 percent increase in profits between 1984 and 1985. By 1984, a fifth of the Fortune 500 corporations had some kind of urine-testing program. A year later, a quarter had such a program, and two years later it would be more than half. Carlton Turner said he expected that “every major corporation in the US within the next three to five years will have a pre-employment screening,” and the Wall Street Journal predicted that urine testing would be a $250 million industry by the end of the decade. Actually, it turned out to be $300 million. In his book “Steal This Urine Test: Fighting Drug Hysteria in America” Abbie Hoffman, the political and social activist, called urine testing, “The Gold Rush of the Eighties,” Hoffman also wrote the famous books “Fuck the System” and “Steal This Book”. Employers were firing people who tested positive, even though the testing standards were terrible. The CDC did a nine year study that found most results were inaccurate. At a conference of forensic scientists in Cincinnati, the chief toxicologist for North Carolina’s medical examiner asked, “Is there anybody in the audience who would submit urine for cannaboid testing if his career, reputatio