America's 51st State?

Say Hello To Baja Arizona
Ian Power-Luetscher | May 13, 2011 | TPM

It's hard out in Arizona for a liberal. From recently announced deep cuts to health care and education, to the now infamously tough immigration law currently tied up in court battles, Arizona remains one of the country's more reliably conservative states. However, a group of Arizonans from the Tucson area are looking to distance themselves from the more conservative policies of their state, literally, by seceding. Headed up by Tucson attorney and former state Democratic Party Chairman Paul Eckerstrom, SOS or "Start Our State," is calling for the progressive alcove of Pima County, located near the Mexican border, to break off from the rest of Arizona and form the 51st state, tentatively called "Baja Arizona."

It's a daunting task and one with little hope for success, but with a petition drive in full gear, SOS's political action committee has grown from a group of democrats with an idea, to a fledgling movement. "Start Our State," in their own words, aims "to establish a new state in Southern Arizona free of the un-American, unconstitutional machinations of the Arizona legislature and to restore our region's credibility as a place welcoming to others, open to commerce, and friendly to its neighbors."

Baja Arizona wouldn't be the smallest state in the country, it's a fact that SOS optimistically points out via their Facebook home base. They'd be larger than a handful of other states like Connecticut, New Jersey and Delaware, and Pima County's population of of 1,020,200, according to the most recent census, gives it a denser headcount than Montana, Alaska, Delaware, or either of the Dakotas. America's even full of state-split precedents: Maine was an exclave of Massachusetts until 1820 when it was carved off to become the 23rd state and West Virginia broke off from the rest of Virginia after refusing to become part of the confederacy during The Civil War.

That's not to say the quest for statehood is easy though. To even get the idea of "Baja Arizona" on the table, SOS must get 48,000 petition signatures by June of next year. With that, the proposal would go on a 2012 ballot in Pima County to ask voters if they support petitioning Arizona lawmakers for permission to split away, Reuters reports.

According to NPR Eckerstrom and organizers aren't having trouble getting people to sign, but the local ballot, if it's successful, is a non-binding resolution. The ballot would serve to test the waters and measure interest more than anything else, it's the first step in a long and difficult process, involving state legislature, the governor, and ultimately the U.S. Congress.

Also according to NPR, SOS and Paul Eckerstrom remain optimistic, understanding Baja Arizona's slim chances, yet still looking to make a point. "If we do this vote, at least we can send a message not only to the state Legislature but also to the rest of the nation to tell the rest of the nation that not everybody in Arizona is crazy."

Clockwork Orange America

The Media Loves Massacres, Not Foreclosure Stories
By SAUL LANDAU

The Tucson massacre yielded the media and politicians weeks of fodder for their nattering mills. Yes, Americans hate violence and love guns, just as we stand for peace and practice non-stop war. It’s not hypocrisy. We are two nations – at least – living under one crowded flag.

Does anyone think Americans have a gene that produces more mass killers than other nations? When was the last time Portugal, Norway or New Zealand had a gun-driven massacre? In this country we have yearly mass killings – with guns.

Hours after Congresswoman Gifford took a bullet, some Tea Partiers began blaming the victim for “lax security.” Sarah Palin’s speech writers turned the former Alaska governor into the victim: the media had practiced “blood libel” on her. (The media as Jews using her blood – well, words – to conduct a ritual before making matzo?)

Why did no reporter ask her: “How’s that locky loady thing workin’ fer ya now?”

In US politics aspirants’ ambitions often surpasses – by many points – their intellect. Politics is less about issues than name-recognition, or symbolism. “She can’t speak a correct English sentence just like me so I kinda feel she sorta represents me.”

Republicans have built their Party on such pablum and finding candidates with name recognition who can pass the new patriotic tests: love guns, hate taxes on the rich and espouse Christian principles: “Abortion is a sin. So is welfare.”

What did Jesus teach that relates to American reality?

“Screw your neighbor after he gets foreclosed and thrown into the street; don’t share any of your hard-earned (or inherited or stolen) money with him.”

The “good” Republican dismisses talk about high unemployment as liberal myth. The lazy bums should find jobs instead of waiting for the government to give him hard earned tax money to pay his bills.” That’s what the Bible teaches or should teach.

Listening to angry rhetoric about government pissing away our money on welfare cheats who should be working to pay their mortgages, one might forget that in the killing fields of Arizona, “one in every 17 households got a foreclosure filing last year” compared to the national average of “one in every 45 U.S. households.”

In 2010, almost 3 million Americans got eviction notices, “up 1.67 percent from 2009.” In 2010 banks reclaimed about 1 million homes. Many more are in litigation. (Janna Herron, AP Jan 13, 2011)

The Tucson shooting served as temporary cover for more important issues and nastier villains - like bankers who have assumed again their Scrooge positions, preparing to repossess a record number of homes in 2011. Maybe this knowledge would provoke American gun owners to rally against banks: to protect their homesteads? Am I dreaming?

Some 5 million “home-owners” have fallen two or more months behind on mortgage payments. Unemployed people pay the monthlies, and the assessed value of homes has dropped -- often below the size of the loan.

Last September, the bankers got exposed for the true perverts they are. Lawyers hired by those targeted for eviction showed courts the flaws in the banks’ “legal” papers. But bank lawyers “remedied” those legal failings. Bankers have now returned to their foreclosure stampede.

Residents of states where bankers promoted housing booms will suffer most. Over half the foreclosures occurred in Arizona, Florida and California -- some 1.5 million households received “get out” papers -- along with Michigan and Illinois, hit hardest by the recession.

In 2010, one in every 11 Nevada households “received a foreclosure filing last year.” And that was lower than the 2009 rate of repossessions. (Herron )

The media doesn’t chin wag on possible relationships between growing poverty, misery and homicidal madness. Instead, the media speculates about events in Tucson, not foreclosures, rising unemployment or rapidly dwindling public services. A barely reported story indicates some US cities are quickly falling into anarchy.

Congress allocates hundreds of billions for futile wars with little result while Camden New Jersey (population 80,000) “one of the nation's most impoverished and crime-ridden cities,” had to lay off half its cops and a third of its fire fighters.

In 2009, CQ Press used FBI figures to rate Camden, “the nation's second-most dangerous” city with, “ 2,380 violent crimes — more than five times the national average.” The police union warned in a full-page ad that the lay- offs would make Camden a "living hell." (Geoff Mulvihill AP January 18, 2011)

Does Camden loom as a future scenario for other former industrial cities?

Yes, guns don’t kill people, only criminals with guns do that - as well as fanatics, trigger happy “property defenders,” large corporations that make poisonous products and the US military and drones … yawn!

Welcome to Clockwork Orange America – two nations living in fear, the small rich one, the large poor and suffering one, and both in some stage of denial.

Reefer Madness Forever

Califano Tries to Pin Tucson Shootings on Pot
By FRED GARDNER

"Marijuana's Role in the Tucson Shooting" was the extremely misleading headline on an article by Joe Califano that the Huffington Post ran Jan. 21. Why is that supposedly liberal site disseminating propaganda by a leading Drug Warrior? There is no evidence that marijuana had any "role" in the Tucson shooting. Readers who only glance at the story will assume otherwise.

Califano begins by blowing politic kisses towards Barack Obama and John Boehner. Then he changes tone to sneer at "the thousands of pundits, left and right, arguing about the meaning of the tragedy in Arizona," who missed a lesson "as important as any other lesson to come out of this tragedy. It's about the relationship of marijuana use to psychotic illness."

After another shot at commentators preoccupied with laws that allow automatic weapons and super-size ammo clips, Califano makes his pitch: "I haven't seen press reports or talking heads discuss their concern about how easy it has been for this mentally ill young man to get marijuana. And there has been no mention of the potential of marijuana to spark latent psychosis and exacerbate schizophrenia and other mental illnesses."

Califano cites a study in "the British Medical Journal Lancet [The M and the J should be lower case, since he's referring to a piece in the Lancet. Califano or the staffer who writes his stuff must have vaguely remembered a publication called the British Medical Journal and conflated the two] and two other studies suggesting that using cannabis leads to psychotic breaks. Califano does not allow that these studies are considered inconclusive at best by many psychiatrists, including Lester Grinspoon, whose textbook on Schizophrenia has been the standard text.

Califano quotes reports that Loughner once used marijuana; but he ignores other reports that Loughner quit three years ago and that his drug of choice was Salvia Divinorum. Califano wants the question settled: "If the police have any of the hair shaved from Loughner's head, they can easily find out if marijuana was in his system at the time of the shooting. They may even be able to do so from hair that grows back in."

It seems like an easy test to rig if one were so inclined. And we know Joe Califano of old, he has few qualms about manipulating the facts. The following is from O'Shaughnessy's report on the Prop 215 campaign (the ballot initiative by which California voters legalized the medical use of marijuana on November 4, 1996):

In the final weeks of the campaign some leading drug warriors from Back East -stunned that the people of California were on the verge of rejecting a lifetime of their propaganda-decided to step in. Joseph Califano, president of the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, flew out to Los Angeles on Tuesday, Oct. 28 to warn Californians that they did not understand the open-endedness of Prop 215. Califano had hired two pollsters to query 800 residents over the weekend. He must have been very confident of the outcome because arrangements for his press conference were made before the questions had been asked. "It was a push-pull," explains Paul Maslin, a San Francisco pollster. This is a type of survey in which the questioner, after getting an initial response, provides additional information and then asks again, evoking a changed response. Califano announced at his press conference that 46 percent of the respondents supported Prop 215 when first asked, but only 36 percent after its inherent looseness had been pointed out to them. Califano's goal in commissioning the poll, according to Maslin was to make voters think that the "no" side still had a realistic chance on Election Day and to minimize any bandwagon effect that would magnify the "yes" vote.

Flash-forward to the Huffington Post, Jan. 21. Califano concludes: "we should be asking this question: Is Jared Loughner an individual whose psychosis was prompted or exacerbated by the use of marijuana? Whether or not he is, it is important for the press and parents to see this horrendous incident not only as a teaching moment about the easy availability and dangerous potential of automatic weapons, but also as a teaching moment about the easy availability and dangerous potential of marijuana to spark and exacerbate psychosis and schizophrenia in individuals with latent mental illnesses.

"The missing story line in existing news reports and television chatter shows is about the terrible trinity of easy availability of guns, easy availability of marijuana and mental illness. The question for all of us, especially parents of teenagers, to ask is this: Is the media's failure to acknowledge this tragic trinity due to its tendency to overlook or underplay the dangers of marijuana use?

"Joseph A. Califano, Jr., Founder and Chair of The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, was Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare in the Carter Administration, and served from 1965 to 1969 as chief domestic affairs assistant to president Lyndon B. Johnson."

At which time one of his top aides, a Harvard honors grad and future corporate CEO, used to roll amazingly perfect joints with hospital corners. Califano never thought his aide was impaired at work because he wasn't.

Outgrow CBD Opportunism

It's very tempting for those of us who are talking up the medical potential of Cannabidiol to emphasize the absence of psychoactive effects in such a way as to imply that CBD is the good cannabinoid, as opposed to THC, the bad cannabinoid. That is a shortcut to acceptance that we consider opportunistic at best, unethical at worst. Countless scientists have spent countless millions of U.S. taxpayers' dollars trying to establish the harmful effects of high-THC marijuana, and they heaviest they could come up with is bronchial irritation.

To explain what we mean by "CBD opportunism" we quote from an article in the New Scientist by Lady Amanda Neidpath of the Beckley Foundation, a British charitable trust "that promotes the investigation of consciousness and its modulation," and Paul Morrison, a researcher at the Institute of Psychiatry in London.

It's lack of balance that makes skunk cannabis do harm. The effects of cannabis on mental health have attracted much attention over the years. As far back as the 19th century it was recognised that cannabis could induce a transient psychosis which mimics the symptoms of schizophrenia. Despite this, until the last decade or so, most psychiatrists regarded cannabis as essentially benign.

This is the reverse of the truth. "Most psychiatrists" in the UK and the US are Prozac purshers who have accepted cannabis Prohibition without a peep.

...The type of cannabis taken is an important factor. Street cannabis has indeed changed over the years. So-called "skunk" does contain higher than normal concentrations of the main psychoactive compound, a molecule called delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). What is less well known is that another constituent, cannabidiol (CBD), has been eliminated from skunk through selective breeding to increase the THC content.

CBD has been bred down to trace amounts not just in skunk but in virtually all strains grown for psychoactivity.

The elimination of CBD may play a key role in the development of psychosis. Laboratory studies have shown that pure, synthetic THC causes transient psychosis in 40 to 50 per cent of healthy people.

At what doses? Which studies? This is Reefer Madness 2011.

In stark contrast to THC, CBD appears to have an anti-psychotic effect, at least in animals. Studies in humans, though few in number, have produced similar findings.

The elimination of cannabidiol from skunk may play a key role in the development of psychosis. In one human study, published in Neuropsychopharmacology (DOI: 10.1038/npp.2009.184), Sagnik Bhattacharya and colleagues at the Institute of Psychiatry in London used functional MRI brain scanning to study the effects of THC and CBD on the brains of healthy volunteers. They found that THC and CBD acted in opposition; in brain regions where THC increased neural activity from a baseline, CBD decreased it, and vice-versa.

In a further experiment, a group including one of us (Morrison), in collaboration with the Beckley Foundation, compared the effects of a mixture of synthetic THC and CBD (to mimic traditional cannabis) with THC on its own (to mimic skunk). The aim was to find out if CBD offered protection against the psychotic effects of THC. Healthy volunteers were given the molecules intravenously for two sessions.

Two synthetic molecules don't "mimic traditional cannabis," and people don't shoot cannabis. What does this experiment have to do with the real world? Niedpath and Morrison conclude,

The evidence supports the idea that nature knows best, and that the reintroduction of CBD would be beneficial. Two molecules are better than one.

But the whole plant is better by far.