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.

Who Gave You Permission to Notice Crimes by the State?

William N. Grigg - Monday, January 17, 2011

 Among the "warning signs" of  Jared Loughner's derangement, Time magazine instructs us, was his criticism of Federal Reserve Notes as "worthless." According to the custodians of acceptable opinion, this isn't a rational assessment of the intrinsic value of the Regime's ever-depreciating fiat scrip; it's a symptom of "paranoia," just like Loughner's reported preoccupation with government mind control.

Only those who are clinically deranged could harbor such anti-social views about the government ruling us --an institution representing the refined essence of benevolence, administered by beings of infinite competence whose digestive by-products emit the pleasant odor of freshly cut daisies. This is why the State's media auxiliaries (including the right-collectivists over at National Review) are largely ignoring Loughner's sociopathic indifference to the rights of other individuals while focusing tirelessly on his alienation from the government.

Perhaps Judy Clarke, Loughner's federally appointed defense counsel, can help cure him of his paranoid political delusions. Clarke is the go-to public defender for people accused of politically sensitive high-profile crimes.

A Time magazine profile of Clarke describes her as "particularly skilled at working with unstable clients who, without careful guidance, run a high risk of self-sabotage in what is a life-and-death situation." 

Clarke's clients have included Timothy McVeigh, so-called "20th Hijacker" Zacarias Moussaoui, and Eric Rudolph. Although McVeigh was executed, Moussaoui and Rudolph are serving life sentences at the ADX Florence supermax prison in Colorado. The same facility houses another of Clarke's notable clients:  "Unabomber" Ted Kaczynski, who killed three people and wounded more than a dozen others during a seventeen-year parcel bomb rampage.

Clarke persuaded Kaczynski to accept a plea bargain based on "mental defect." Although Kaczynski is said to suffer from paranoid schizophrenia, there's compelling evidence that any "mental defect" that afflicts him is the result of his involvement as a test subject in a federally sponsored mind control experiment as a Harvard student in the late 1950s.

By any measure, Ted Kaczynski -- a math prodigy who skipped two grades -- was a brilliant and promising young man. After enrolling in Harvard as a 16-year-old, Kaczynski was lured into acting as a guinea pig in a series of abusive and damaging psychological tests supervised by behavioral psychologist Dr. Henry Murray. 

During World War II, Murray worked with the OSS (which would later become the CIA), developing psychological tests to evaluate potential spies. He also devised methodologies for interrogating POWs. His experiments at Harvard continued seamlessly from his work with the OSS.

Murray's study, which was funded by the Pentagon, the CIA, and the Rockefeller Foundation, was entitled "Multiform Assessments of Personality Development Among Gifted College Men." According to Ted's brother David, this program was not a sterile academic exercise; he describes it as "a conspiracy of psychological researchers who used deceptive tactics to study the effects of emotional and psychological trauma on unwitting human subjects."
 

Dr. Murray, who died in 1988, "was known for his brilliance and grandiosity" in his professional life, continues David Kaczynski. "In his personal life, according to his biographer, he displayed sadistic tendencies. His research on college men bears a certain resemblance to his research on prisoners of war." 

Most of the pertinent details of Murray's experiments are inaccessible: Harvard sealed the files in 2000, insisting that this was necessary in order to protect the "integrity" of the project. There is cause for suspicion test subjects may have been given LSD or other mind-altering substances, given that the CIA had conducted experiments of that kind with other Harvard students. Whatever happened to Kaczynski and Murray's other subjects was sufficiently degrading and harmful to wring a guilty expression of regret from one of the doctor's assistants.

At age 17, the future Unabomber was one of 22  students who were required to submit to Dr. Murray a detailed description of their upbringing, their everyday routine -- including intimate details involving sexual fantasies and toilet functions -- and a description of their "philosophy of life." They were informed that another student would be invited to discuss and debate their moral values and opinions with them. 

Each of the subjects was taken individually into a white, over-lit room, placed in a chair in front of a one-way mirror, and tethered to EEG machines and other monitoring devices. The atmosphere, according to one subject, was akin to what one would expect in an execution chamber. Rather than having an amicable debate with a fellow undergraduate student, each of the test subjects -- perhaps "victims" is a more suitable description -- was subjected to lengthy, abusive harangues by a law school student who had been given a detailed psychological battle plan by Murray. The spectacle was captured on camera, and each victim was required to relive his humiliation on film.

This was sadism in the service of ideological ambition. The specific focus of Murray's academic research, points out environmental journalist (and fellow Harvard alum) Alston Chase, was to develop a science of personality "transformation." Murray "advocated implementing the agenda of the World Federalist Association, which called for a single world government," Chase noted in a detailed survey article published ten years ago in The Atlantic. 

In a letter to his friend and counselor Lewis Mumford, Murray wrote: "The kind of behavior that is required by the present threat [of nuclear war] involves transformations of personality such as never occurred quickly in human history." Through the marriage of psychiatry and sociology, Murray hoped to beget a hybrid discipline that would eventually create a New World Man suitable for citizenship in the World State he envisioned.

It is indisputable that Murray's Harvard experiments were a continuation of his work with the OSS.  Substantial evidence suggests that Murray's program was part of the CIA's MK Ultra program, in which test subjects -- often college-age men -- were used in experiments involving "sensory deprivation, sleep learning, subliminal projection, electronic brain stimulation, and hallucinogenic drugs to study various applications for behavior modification," recalls David Kaczynski. "One project was designed to see if subjects could be programmed to kill on demand. Experiments were conducted in penal institutions, mental institutions, and on university campuses." 

A 1967 internal CIA assessment documented that hundreds of professors on more than 100 college campuses were involved in clandestine experiments connected to MK Ultra.

For drawing a link connecting Ted Kaczynski's crimes with what he suffered under the ministrations of Dr. Murray, David Kaczynski might be accused of engaging in special pleading on behalf of his brother, who admitted to murdering three people. 
 
The same cannot be said of Sally Johnson, the forensic psychologist hired by the U.S. Bureau of Prisons to evaluate Ted Kaczynski during his 1998 trial. 

While Johnson doesn't directly implicate Murray's experiments, she did conclude that Kaczynski's self-appointed mission as an apostle of "revolutionary violence" was triggered by something he experienced at Harvard. 

A psychological evaluation of Ted Kaczynski conducted prior to his experiences under Dr. Murray found no signs that he suffered from schizophrenia. It's reasonable to surmise that the "mental defect" invoked by his defense counsel was induced, rather than innate. 

Furthermore, there was nothing defective in Kaczynski's perception of the malign nature of the system as he had experienced it. His frequently expressed concerns "about the possibility of mind control," as Chase points out, were not "paranoid delusions. In view of Murray's experiment, he was not only rational but right. The university and the psychiatric establishment had been willing accomplices in an experiment that had treated human beings as unwitting guinea pigs, and had treated them brutally."

Murray's program was discontinued in 1962, the same year that Kaczynski graduated from Harvard. That year was a busy one for those employed by the academic wing of the Military-Industrial Complex, as they continued to toil away at various esoteric projects exploring the use of applied psychology to build the Total State.

At Yale,  Stanley Milgram was conducting his notorious  pseudo-electroshock experiments on obedience to authority. At MIT, Lincoln P. Bloomfield finished a report -- funded by the US State Department on behalf of the Institute for Defense Analyses -- entitled A World Effectively Controlled by the United Nations: A Preliminary Study of One Form of a Stable Military Environment. (Bloomfield's report didn't envision a foreign takeover of the United States through the UN, but rather the creation of "supra-national institutions, characterized by mandatory universal membership and some ability to employ physical force" -- something akin to the vaguely UN-centered "coalition of the willing" approach used by Washington it is war against Serbia in 1999 and in its continuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.) 

Bloomfield's report contained the provocative and telling observation that building the world order he described would require "a grave crisis or war to bring about a sudden transformation in national attitudes sufficient for the purpose.... [T]he order we examine may be brought into existence as a result of a series of sudden, nasty, and traumatic shocks." This would have meant subjecting the population at large to the same  kind of "transformative" psychological trauma that Dr. Murray had prescribed to create the New World Man on an individual basis. 
 

Three days after Bloomfield submitted his report, General Lyman Louis Lemnitzer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, filed a memorandum for Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara outlining "Operation Northwoods." That document outlined the use of various potential false-flag terrorist incidents that could be used to provide a pretext for war with Cuba. In his book Body of Secrets, intelligence analyst James Bamford observes that the bogus Gulf of Tonkin incident used to justify the Vietnam War was a variation on the Northwoods strategy.

The Northwoods memo offers a variety of potential provocations involving staged terrorist attacks.

"We could sink a boatload of Cubans en route to Florida (real or simulated)," wrote Lemnitzer, casually spit-balling proposals that would result in the death of  innocent people. "We could foster attempts on lives of Cuban refugees in the United States even to the extent of wounding in instances to be widely publicized. Exploding a few plastic bombs in carefully chosen spots ... would be helpful." Lemnitzer's most audacious proposal -- which is especially noteworthy in the post-9/11 era -- involved the staged shoot-down of a civilian jetliner.

 The Northwoods memo was a battle plan for psychological warfare against the American population -- a menu of options for inducing the "sudden, nasty and traumatic shocks" necessary to bring about a desired political transformation. This was just one of several projects of its kind underway at the time. And Ted Kaczynski was just one of hundreds -- perhaps thousands -- of people whose minds were being weaponized by the CIA's academic assets.

"The CIA's mind experiment program was vast," notes investigative reporter Alexander Cockburn. "How many other human time bombs were thus primed? How many of them have exploded, with the precipating agent never identified?"

Interestingly, Gen. Lemnitzer helped ensure that those questions wouldn't be answered. In 1975, six years after he retired from the military, Lemnitzer was appointed by Gerald Ford to participate in the President's Commission on CIA Activities Within the United States, commonly known as the Rockefeller Commission. That body -- like its ancestor, the Warren Commission, and its descendant, the 9/11 Commission -- was intended to filter out any consideration of the most important questions, thereby banishing them from polite conversation. 

Whatever its clinical definition might be, the term "paranoid" as employed by the custodians of polite opinion refers to someone who notices things without official permission. People meeting that description might take impermissible notice of the curious fact that the same defense attorney who quietly ushered Ted Kaczynski off the stage is now being called on to perform the same service with respect to Jared Loughner -- and be prompted by that fact to ask some similarly unacceptable questions.

Toxic U.S. Political Debate Shows No Sign of Abating

by Mitch Potter
Tuesday, January 11, 2011 by The Toronto Star

WASHINGTON—America’s toxic political divide gaped wide as ever in the aftermath of the tragedy in Tucson as the country’s noisiest talking heads engaged in unrestrained blamestorming, each side accusing the other feeding hatred.

With the motivations of accused assassin Jared Lee Loughner still unknown — the 22-year-old college dropout was arraigned in an Arizona courtroom Monday, having yet to utter a single word to his interrogators —recriminatory politic rhetoric filled the void.

After a weekend of speculation linking the Saturday rampage to aggressive, gun-themed rhetoric of conservative firebrand Sarah Palin and the Tea Party movement, the American right lashed back, accusing Democrats of politicizing pain caused by a lone lunatic.

Ultra-Conservative radio star Rush Limbaugh, widely regarded as a bellwether of right-wing debate, denounced Democrats as “ghouls” who are effectively “accusing a majority of Americans of being accomplices to murder.”

Fox News host Glenn Beck branded Loughner “not just a nut-job, but a left-wing nut-job.” Any reports to the contrary, said Beck, show that the American left is “desperately using every opportunity to convince you that somehow Sarah Palin is dangerous. Anything to shut her down, shut me up, shut Fox New down,” he said.

President Barack Obama, who led a minute of silence for the victims of the shooting spree targeting Arizona lawmaker Gabrielle Giffords, hailed the heroics that ended the rampage, thereby averting a greater tragedy than that which cost six lives and injured 20 others.

Describing how a Giffords intern rushed in to administer medical aid credited with helping save her life, Obama said, “Part of what that speaks to is the best of America even in the face of such mindless violence.”

Gifford remains in critical condition but is conscious and responsive to simple commands. Her University of Arizona medical team on Monday renewed hope for her eventual recovery, saying the congresswoman’s prospects entail “the full range of possibility.”

Accounts from former schoolmates and neighbours of Loughner added to the portrait of instability — an impression buttressed Monday night with the release of police mug shot taken after his arrest, showing Loughner with shaved head and a mercurial smile spread across his face.

But nothing in the emerging resume of a disturbed loner suggests coherent political leanings, one way or another.

In the absence of evidence, the blogosphere convulsed with argument over the backdrop of overheated rhetoric, debating the power of language in seeding violence. Many, like presidential historian Douglas Brinkley, warned against baseless politicization, denouncing those who would use the tragedy “as an opportunity to humiliate anybody in the Tea Party movement.”

Others, however, pressed the argument that even in the absence of a direct connection, the steady American drumbeat of incendiary, confrontational rhetoric contributes to a toxic political environment that helps, rather than hinders, the likelihood of violence from the mentally unstable.

“Conservative firebrands like Sarah Palin have performed the moral equivalent of yelling fire in a crowded movie theatre in this matter,” said Boston University social scientist Thomas Whalen, blogging at Politico.com. “And yes, I feel some of the blood is on their hands.”

Even in the face of such direct accusations, Palin has maintained an uncharacteristic silence since Saturday, when she issued a statement of condolence for the Tucson victims and their families. Over the weekend, Palin’s political action committee removed several items from its web site, including a campaign document that used crosshairs to signal the targeting Democrats in 20 districts in the run-up to the 2010 midterm elections, including that of Giffords.

Palin’s fellow Fox News contributor Beck, however, offered a hint of Palin’s reaction, disclosing excerpts of an email exchange the two shared over the weekend, in the aftermath of Tucson.

Beck opened the exchange, urging Palin to “please look into protection for your family. An attempt on you could bring the republic down.”

He then quoted from Palin’s response, saying the former Alaska governor emailed back saying, “I hate violence. I hate war. Our children will not have peace if politicos just capitalize on this to succeed in portraying anyone as inciting terror and violence. Thanks for all you do to send the message of truth and love and God as the answer.”