Laigle’s Forum

by Don Hank

The Chinese Daoguang emperor in 1838 tried to oppose the British in their attempt to force opium on the Chinese people. One could say that, in doing so, the emperor was an anti-democratic despot, but he saw that the opium dens were destroying lives and families and turning productive Chinese into blobs of useless humanity — slaves to addiction.

One could also see the British as liberators, but they were anything but: they wanted to force the drug on the Chinese.

This story presents a dilemma for the libertarian because, while they can see the emperor as a despot who should have been overthrown, they can hardly see the British as bearers of the torch of liberty, since they were using force to drug another nation.

Incredibly, today, we have a similar situation. The libertarians have marshaled their forces and vast amounts of money to deceive unsuspecting people into accepting drugs.

The use of deceit is no less undemocratic and despotic than the use of other kinds of force. In fact libertarians decry the use of deceit by the media and major political parties, and they are right to do so. For example, there was a general perception in America after 9-11 that the Iraqis had attacked us. The press had not actually said that, but they implied it by focusing on WMDs and Saddam’s brutality. Libertarians and other thinking citizens cried foul. War based on deceit has left us with a mess in the Middle East.

Yet libertarians use the same deceitful tactics when pushing their pro-drug agenda.

As soon as Holland loosened up its drug laws, libertarians like Gov. Gary Johnson declared Holland to be a model for us all. Yet the truth was that many Dutch were dismayed at the aftermath of this great experiment. Their school kids started to drug themselves and the experiment got out of hand.

http://laiglesforum.com/the-young-pay-the-price-for-dutch-drug-experiment/23.htm

So much so that libertarian leaders backed away from the Dutch model and looked for another. They settled on Portugal, and the libertarian Cato Institute precipitously seized upon a dubious “study” by the Portuguese government that was published a few years into the experiment, claiming that all had worked out fine as planned and drug use was down. Gullible Cato jumped on this without a trace of critical analysis or further research and the world “learned” that drug legalization solves all our drug problems.

It was a lie, and if Cato had wanted to be honest with us, it would have listened to the Portuguese medical doctors who published a study of their own.

http://laiglesforum.com/decriminalization-of-drugs-in-portugal/2666.htm

When any group pretends to be for liberty, but deceives people in order to accomplish its goals, it is doing what the Left and the neocons have always done. Deceit is no substitute for the truth and none of our political parties are actually for freedom.

You, Fellow Citizen, are on your own.

Be careful out there!

Further on drugs:

http://laiglesforum.com/ye-shall-be-deceived-and-deceit-shall-make-ye-free/2969.htm

by Don Hank

 No, actually no such study has made headlines lately. But there is a new study on pot that mediocre students will love.

According to UAB News, Associate professor Stefan Kertesz of the University of Alabama has discovered, in a longitudinal study of over 5000 marijuana smokers aged 18-30 years, that “marijuana smoke is not as damaging to lungs as cigarette smoke.” In fact, the research also supposedly showed that occasionally inhaling small amounts of the combustion products of this dried weed can even enhance lung capacity.

That will be good news for our sons and daughters struggling against the ignorance and superstition of our benighted generation in their efforts to supplement their alcohol intake this semester and do so without guilt.

But for me, after reading through the hype and comparing it with the actual abstract of the study, it looks like just another example of research methodology on campus used to achieve a desired result. I am not necessarily impugning the researcher as much as those who seized upon the report with enthusiasm and an uncanny display of uncritical thought. As I have shown here and here, the scientific method (that is, actually looking at data objectively for the sole purpose of finding out the truth, no matter what that may be) has long been out of favor with the media. But as evidenced by the “Climategate” scandal at the University of East Anglia, it is none too popular even among a surprising percentage of scientists.

With this realization in mind, and also having read, translated and published (here, for example) a report by Portuguese doctors debunking that government’s study fueling a Cato report “demonstrating” that drug decriminalization “works,” and further, having had a pot-smoking friend – who did not use tobacco – die of lung cancer, I immediately smelled a rat.

Now, let me tell you a little about the profession of foreign language translation, which I have plied successfully full-time for over 40 years. In that time, I have translated medical and scientific texts for about 200 clients, including the American Cancer Society (translating reports from various countries in Europe on smoking and its effects in the induction of cancer, emphysema, “smoker’s leg” and other maladies) and a fair number of drug companies (series of reports on assorted drugs). One of my clients was also the NIH (National Institutes of Health). If you guessed that that agency’s assignments were predominantly medical in nature, you are correct. For a few years of my career, reports on medical studies were the main topic. Caution: I cannot operate on your brain or prescribe liver pills for you. But I will tell you with full confidence: I know the methodology of medical studies. And I know when a research report is pulling my leg.

I can tell you with all sincerity that the media reports on Stefan Kertesz’ studies on marijuana are misleading, and that is being overly generous. Sadly, the report on these studies in UAB News, a publication generally touting successes of persons affiliated with the University of Alabama, is also misleading to say the least. (Which is not necessarily to say that the researcher himself is at fault in this regard).

The headline proclaims: “Marijuana Smoke not as Damaging to Lungs as Cigarette Smoke.” Now, did you immediately assume that the study shows equal amounts of marijuana smoke to be less damaging than equal amounts of tobacco smoke?

I did. Well, I didn’t, but I would have if I had trusted such studies on illegal drugs since I read the Cato report and its thorough rebuttal by the Portuguese MDs who have studied the issue hands-on and met the actual patients (drug users). I have yet to see such a pro-drug study that is not a wide-eyed attempt to justify a bad habit generally endorsed by libertarians and political leftists – who righteously declare drug use of any kind to be a human right that is trampled by most governments generally recognized as legitimate (they think banning anything they like to do is unconstitutional).

So I decided to get a scientific report on the study. Not being a member of AMA, I am not privileged to download articles from JAMA.

However, I was able to obtain for free an abstract of the study from their site.

And lo and behold, what did I find that did not surprise me in the least?

It seems the author has come up with a creative new concept for measuring marijuana smoke exposure. He calls it the “joint year,” and he defines a joint year as 365 joints or filled pipe bowls. He calls this a “moderately high use level.”

Now, of course, in the course of his study, Kertesz no doubt encountered a few subjects who smoked more than these 365 joints per year. But you can see from this definition of a “joint year” that the assumption was for many subjects to have smoked about one joint a day, give or take a few.

One media report quoted the Associated Press as saying that the study:

“…has concluded that smoking cannabis once a week or even more does not harm the lungs.”

The term “even more” is not defined and is therefore meaningless, except as propaganda. But aside from that, if only smoking cannabis once a week is to be compared with what smokers ordinarily do, then the conclusion trumpeted in UAB News (“marijuana smoke is not as damaging to lungs as cigarette smoke”) does not fly. (Most cigarette smokers smoke more than one cigarette a day. You probably knew that).

Of course, there is an outside chance that Kertesz actually did compare the results of smoking 1 joint a day for year-long periods with the results of smoking 1 cigarette a day for year-long periods, but I found no evidence of that. And I can’t imagine where he would have gotten those one-a-day smokers as test subjects.

But here is the most serious flaw in the report that cannabis is less harmful than cigarette smoke: What do we fear most about smoking? Why, cancer, right? Now, the most convincing studies done by cancer researchers are longitudinal studies done on people over a period long enough to induce cancer. Most are seniors when they are stricken–not in the range of 18-30 as used in the Alabama study. In the papers I translated from the Cancer Society, the most feared carcinogen (cancer causing agent) in cigarette smoke was always said to be benzo(a)pyrene.  Mice whose shaved backs were painted with the stuff got cancer. So if marijuana smoke contains benzo(a)pyrene, then it is carcinogenic, right? Well, to find out, I did a search. One of the sites I brought up was run by people who liked to experiment with drugs. It showed a study by the Institute of Medicine and Health.

It showed results of a chemical analysis of cigarette and marijuana smokes. You’ll never guess which smoke contained the most benzo(a)pyrene.

No, not cigarette smoke, which prompted the government to sue the cigarette industry for billions. It was the smoke that Bill Clinton said he never inhaled. Here are the results:

benzo(a)pyrene

marijuana: 31 ng

tobacco: 22 ng

Gee, marijuana contains about a third more of the chief carcinogen than cigarettes and our University of Alabama news letter declares marijuana smoke to the “less damaging.”

I predict that sometime in the not-too-distant future, after all this hype about the harmlessness of marijuana has taken its toll, persuading legions of gullible young people to indulge in this “safe” habit, someone in medical science with high powers of observation and the courage to swim upstream will do a study on marijuana smokers and cancer and discover that the older heavier users are getting lung cancer right and left. 

At any rate, I will not be advising either of my kids to smoke a joint a day while in college. However, I may tell them to study as hard as they can in a down economy when an alarmingly high percentage of graduates are failing to find jobs in their professions and are saddled for years with college loan payments.

You’d think some researcher somewhere would find the time to study the correlation between not smoking anything at all and not drinking alcohol on student grade levels and chances of graduating from college, as contrasted with a control group of students who indulge in these practices.

I won’t hold my breath for such a breakthrough study. Nor will I expect much improvement in the academic performance of US students over the next few years. At least not judging by their role models on campus.

You can contact Dr. Stefan Kertesz, the author of the Alabama pot report and encourage him to do a study among elderly persons who have smoked pot most of their lives. Tell him you would expect to see a strong correlation between lung cancer and heavy pot use:

skertesz@uab.edu

And you can contact the writer of the above mentioned article on marijuana at U. of Alabama and let her know your thoughts (or send her a link to this article):

jpark@uab.edu

If you like my stuff on here, you may want to be added to my regular list receiving my unpublished commentary and reader responses thereto, which goes out once or several times a day. If so, just email me at: zoilandon@msn.com

Decriminalization of drugs in Portugal

by Manuel Pinto Coelho 

I have seen the national, and particularly the foreign, press trumpet with strange insistence, on the eve of electoral processes in Portugal, the “resounding success” of the decriminalization of drugs initiated in 2001 by the Socialist government, — ignored by all other European countries and to the detriment of the guidelines and conventions of the United Nations to which the country is a signatory.

Respect for the true facts obliges the Association for a Drug-Free Portugal (APLD) to inform the Portuguese of the true consequences of implementing the current policy, independently of party affiliations. Portugal adopted a rather original and undoubtedly questionable solution (?) for managing the scourge of drugs.

The recent articles of the British weekly The Economist and of the Cato Institute in Washington promoted the governmental options. It is a legitimate, perhaps politically correct right. The problem is the rest: the vexing manipulation of the facts and the figures is unacceptable.

1 – [reportedly] In Portugal in 2006, the total number of deaths from overdose did not increase radically relative to 2000 and the percentage of drug addicts with AIDS decreased (from 57% to 43%). Exactly the opposite happened. We are witnessing a worrisome deterioration of the situation. The facts demonstrate this: “with 219 deaths by overdose per year, Portugal has one of the worst outcomes, with one death every two days. Like Greece, Austria and Finland, it is one of the countries registering an increase of more than 30% in 2005,” and “Portugal continues to be a country with the highest incidence of AIDS related to the consumption of injected drugs (85 new cases per million inhabitants in 2005, when the majority do not exceed five cases) and the only one that registered a recent increase, with 36 new cases estimated per million inhabitants in 2005, when in 2004 there were only 30″ (European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction–EMCDDA, 2007). Further, according to the European report, Portugal registered 703 new cases of infection in 2006, corresponding to a rate eight times higher than the European average!

2 — The decriminalization of drugs in Portugal in no way reduced the levels of consumption, on the contrary. In reality, “consumption in Portugal increased 4.2% — the percentage of persons who took drugs at any time in their life rose from 7.8% in 2001 to 12% in 2007 (IDT – Instituto de Droga e da Toxicodependencia / Institute of Drugs and Drug Addiction, 2008).

3 – As for cocaine use, “the new data (found for 2005-2007) confirm the growing tendency registered last year in France, Ireland, Spain, United Kingdom, Italy, Denmark and Portugal” (EMCDDA, 2008). As for the rate of cocaine and amphetamine use, these doubled in Portugal; the confiscations of the latter drug increased seven times between 2001 and 2006, the sixth highest in the world (WDR — World Drug Report, 2009).

4 — with regard to hashish: — “it is difficult to evaluate the intensive consumption trends for cannabis in Europe, but among the countries that participated in both studies in the field, between 2004 and 2007 (France, Spain, Ireland, Greece, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal), there was a mean increase of about 20%” (EMCDDA, 2008).

5 — in Portugal, since decriminalization was implemented, the number of drug-related homicides increased 40%. “It was the only country in Europe to show a significant increase in homicides between 2001 and 2006 (WDR, 2009).

6 — a recent study sponsored by the IDT to the Centre for Opinion Research and Surveys (CESOP) of the Catholic University of Portugal, based on direct interviews on the attitudes of Portuguese relating to drug addiction (which strangely, was never published), reveals that 83.7% of the respondents consider that the number drug addicts in Portugal increased over the last four years, 66.8% consider that accessibility of drugs in their neighborhoods was easy or very easy, and 77.3% said that drug-related crime had increased (“Toxicodependencias” No. 3, 2007).

This is the pungent Portuguese reality with relation to drugs and drug addiction.

For the Portuguese government, drug addicts are seen essentially as sick people. It is an inexpensive and suicidal attitude for the public treasury. They pretend to be sick and the government pretends to treat them!

Decriminalization of use, possession and acquisition for use means penalization only when another crime is added to the charge of consumption, which almost always has a mitigating effect. Legalizing the crime committed by “drugged” persons (or by “sick people” – sic) does not seem to be the most efficient way to combat crime, as witnessed by the exceptional rate of drug-related homicides compared to other European countries. Facilitating access to the drug will not be the way to reduce consumption or reduce drug addiction and associated criminality.

It is really curious what is happening in Portugal: drug addicts, with the tacit support of the government, invoke their status as “sick people” in order not to be punished for their crimes but then forget that they are “sick” and pose as free responsible persons who decide whether or not to be treated!

To deem the drug addict a sick person and not a criminal, by the route of decriminalization, the state cannot opt to feed the “sickness” instead of curing it, through a policy that prioritizes “harm reduction”!

Resounding success? The results are right in front of your nose!

 Translated by Don Hank

Manuel Pinto Colho, President of the APLD (Association for a Drug-Free Portugal)

Original Portuguese language article:

http://www.joaodefreitas.com.br/descriminalizacao-das-drogas-portugal.htm

The government is waging a war on you, not on drugs

Don Hank

First, if you have an opinion on the legalization of narcotics, let us know at the link below (but please make sure you have read the associated articles on this, and note in particular the article – the first in the Anglo-Saxon world — showing that the “Portuguese model” is based on false reports):

http://laiglesforum.com/ideology-bound-libertarians-look-a-lot-like-leftists/2620.htm

I have not ever seen this much passion, on both sides of an issue, as I am seeing at this site. I want to thank those who participated or will participate. Note: If you are new to the forum, your post will take time for approval (I am not here all the time). Please check back later.

Let me try to sum up my position:

My main thrust is not so much whether we “have a right to do with my body as I please.” That is just too adolescent for me. Sorry.

My position is independent of whether we are winning or losing the “war on drugs.”

My position is that the Left is planning another sneak attack on the West, just as it did in the 60s when it sold us the sexual revolution. As some will recall, the whole “revolution” seemed like a grass roots movement. It was planned to seem that way. But it came off the Left’s drawing board. The Frankfurt school specialized in “education” (read: social Marxist propaganda) was heavily invested in that movement, famously promulgating the slogan “make love, not war.”

The method was Fabian stealth, and if you have investigated the origins of the Fabian Society in London, in the 1880s, you will recall that there was an essentially two-pronged assault:

1— Destroy the Christian roots of the West (that’s been accomplished)

2— Subtly program people to accept Marxian socialism, or in other words, communism (that is right around the corner. Even euroskeptics as a group are not necessarily inclined to oppose socialism as long as it is a national kind. Where have we heard of that before? Oh, yes, Nationalsozialismus. I had almost forgotten).

Then there were academic reports and news items and editorials hyping what amounted to a moral breakdown. Today there are stories like the wholly contrived report of the “successful” Portuguese model as reported by the Cato Institute and later in Scientific American, but debunked by the Portuguese doctors.

Let me suggest that what we are now accepting if we accept legalization of narcotics is in effect a kind of “moral Keynesianism.” Now Keynesianism is the economic teaching that the economy needs government to thrive and, more specifically, needs governments to do things that are counterintuitive and contrary to common sense and logic, such as “stimulating” the economy by spending tax payer money on projects, whether necessary ones or not (John Maynard Keynes once famously stated that if workers were hired by the government to dig ditches and then fill them up again, that would stimulate the economy. That one statement encapsulates all we need to know about this “scholar”).

This idea was tried by FDR, and historians at the time failed to note that it was not the “stimulus” (in the form of war spending) that got us out of the Great Depression but rather a robust and resilient essentially free economic system and strong moral fabric along with a strong manufacturing base thanks to a still-dormant China and finally, a very limited entitlement system. Calculations by a group of UCLA economists show that, far from “getting us out of the depression,” FDR actually slowed the recovery by about 7 years.

So, long story short, Keynesianism is harmful to economies. That is bad news for us today because most US presidents of both parties, and most famously Obama and Bush (who promoted TARP and the bank bailouts), have operated on the premise that shoveling enormous amounts of public money into the economy speeds recovery and is generally beneficial to everyone. European “leaders” did likewise, despite the total lack of evidence that such Keyenesian policies help and the strong evidence (not to mention common sense and logic) showing they are harmful.

In its broadest sense, Keynesianism is a teaching analogous to the old expression “a little hair of the dog that bit you.” This is the belief held by hard drinkers and alcoholics that consuming a little alcohol the morning after will cure your hangover. It is merely an excuse to follow your compulsion to harm your body even more because you don’t have the self discipline to stop. In other words, it is the counterintuitive degradation of any system (body, economy, etc) in the hope of deriving benefit from this degradation.

So in fact, Keynesianism goes far beyond economics and has seeped into our psyche in every area vital to life and to a healthy society. This is because Keynesianism as an academic teaching was only the effect, not the cause, of this widespread belief in doing the wrong thing to achieve a benefit. Moral bankruptcy does not need Keynesianism to proceed. Keynesianism is only a catalyst that speeds the reaction. Not surprisingly, John Maynard Keynes was himself a drug user (BTW, I am not the first to liken Keyenesianism to drug addiction. It’s been done here).

The notion that legalizing drugs will somehow help reduce drug use belongs in the category of moral Keyenesianism.  As I have shown here and  here, while libertarians and the Left present reports of drug models based on legalization (first Holland, and then when that went sour, Portugal) purporting to show legalization of narcotics as beneficial, the reports are patently false – analogously to historical treatises purporting to show that FDR “got us out” of the Great Depression.

Now, let me clarify my position on the War on Drugs.

This is a patently phony war and, like all conflicts in which the US has been involved since WW II, the government does not sincerely intend to win it.

This is as plain as the nose on your face. How in heaven’s name could any nation hope to stop the sale and use of narcotics by keeping open the border with the country through which the lion’s share of these drugs pass into ours? Despite the hype, we have not sincerely tried to close the border. Quite the opposite. While hypocritically condemning the cartels, the US government has in fact opened the doors to them and their product. As reported by Fox News, there are no less than 5 federal lands at the Mexican border that have travel warnings in place to alert travelers of possible violence. From that report:

Dennis Godfrey, a spokesman for the Bureau of Land Management’s Arizona office, said roughly a dozen signs were posted earlier this month along the Sonoran Desert National Monument advising that travel in the area is not recommended due to “active drug and human” smuggling.

It should be abundantly clear that the US government, which so far has not hesitated to spend well over $1 trillion on wars that have failed their mission of bringing lasting peace or democracy to the Middle East, refuses to spend even a fraction of that to build adequate fencing and hire enough border patrol agents and/or national guard personnel to stop the flow of drugs.

Ladies and Gentlemen, please read this carefully:

The US government does not want to stop or slow the flow of drugs into the US. Most lawmakers and presidents (all of them) only want to make a show, do a bare minimum in an effort to placate constituencies.

They are thumbing their noses at their constituents while catering to the corrupt Mexican government and the cartels, which are their main clients in this illegal and immoral enterprise.

And now that their failure is manifest, they are subtly suggesting that, instead of doing the rational thing and closing the border, we need to legalize drugs, thereby expanding the market for their friends, these vicious killers selling a dangerous product that destroys our people and our children.

Here comes the avalanche. Open your eyes before it is too late. Don’t let them flatter you into the thought that legalization was your idea. It most certainly was not.

Finally, for my European readers:

Do you really believe the EU or any European nation wants to stop the flow of drugs into your region? Here in Latin America, it is common knowledge that Spain and Portugal are the portals for drug traffic in Europe. I believe that your airports have so far been successful in preventing terrorist attacks. How is it possible that they are not also stopping the flow of drugs into your country? Here is something to ponder: Portugal is not only a major drug flow artery into Europe, it is also the only nation to have legalized narcotic use. Is there a possible connection here that ought to be explored? That is, if Portugal is winking at drug use, then it may have been winking for many years at drug smugglers passing through their airports. Just a little food for thought.

Again, if you have an opinion on the legalization of narcotics, let us know here:

http://laiglesforum.com/ideology-bound-libertarians-look-a-lot-like-leftists/2620.htm