News Stories Which Highlight the Structure of the System

[Telarus]

The whole article is really really worth reading, but I'll highlight some of the things that jumped out at me.

http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/the-rush-to-prohibit-kratom/Content?oid=13321119

The Rush to Prohibit Kratom
A leaf that might be able to wean people off opiates without serious withdrawal symptoms has entered the market. So why are officials who haven't studied the science yet scrambling to ban it?
by BRENDAN KILEY
April 10, 2012

Kratom is a leaf from Southeast Asia that produces opiatelike effects, though it is not itself an opiate. It has been chewed or brewed into a tea for generations, and in the past five years, it's broken into the US market. When you find it at head shops in Seattle, it looks like loose-leaf tea or powder (sold either in a plastic bag or packed into capsules). The common wisdom is that snorting it and smoking it don't work as well as oral ingestion, though some people have been known to inject the extract, too.

Kratom was first documented as an opiate substitute—a kind of herbal methadone—in Asia in the early 1800s. It's often used by people who want an alternative to opiates, either because they're trying to break an addiction or because they want some way to manage chronic pain without opiate-based drugs.

Every few months, a new intoxicant that isn't technically covered by US drug-prohibition laws pops up on the market and policymakers, acting on very little information, freak out over it. Unfortunately for kratom, it has appeared in the immediate wake of the "bath salts" hysteria. (The hysteria was not entirely unjustified, as the active ingredient of "bath salts," a chemical called MDPV, was held responsible for long-term psychiatric damage and several deaths.) Kratom is already in the early stages of the same cycle.

That cycle goes like this: Clever entrepreneurs find an intoxicant not covered under current law and begin selling it. People get excited about it and chatter online. Some user winds up in the emergency room—for reasons that may or may not be serious—and says its name to a doctor who's never heard of it. The doctor calls the poison control center, and the public-health bureaucracy scrambles to figure out what this exotic new drug is. Someone talks to a reporter, and soon newspapers and TV stations are all over it, breathlessly warning parents about a "dangerous new high" threatening their children. Lawmakers see a chance to score some points by being tough on drugs and ban it. The drug fades away. A clever new entrepreneur finds a new drug, and the whack-a-mole cycle begins again.

...

Boyer and his coauthors noticed online mentions of kratom at low levels starting in late 2004 and spiking in April of 2005. A current Google search for kratom will pick up almost three million hits—oxycodone, by contrast, picks up 22.2 million—and pages of online vendors. And, over the past few years, the new-drug cycle has begun to unfold.

The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) began putting out warning bulletins about kratom as early as 2005, saying it's used "by young Thai militants... to make them 'more bold and fearless and easy to control.'" The DEA warning also mentions "several cases of kratom psychosis" where kratom users "exhibited psychotic symptoms of hallucinations, delusions, and confusion." The bulletin doesn't cite its sources, but its key data on addiction rates is identical to Dr. Suwanlert's seven-page gloss from 1975. (Suwanlert's study is also the only mention I have found in the scientific literature of "kratom psychosis." He says he observed psychiatric disturbance in five kratom users who wound up in an outpatient hospital: One was a 55-year-old who'd been using kratom for 30 years and was experiencing "clouding of consciousness," and two of the others were schizophrenics.)

Suffice it to say, the DEA's claims aren't based on robust research.

...

In the wake of these DEA warnings and overheated news stories, US legislators have begun toying with the idea of banning kratom. This year, Louisiana state senator A. G. Crowe is sponsoring a bill that would add kratom to the list of schedule-one drugs, or drugs that are legally classified as having no recognized medical value. That would put kratom in the company of marijuana, LSD, ecstasy, peyote, and heroin.

A story last month in the Baton Rouge Advocate reported that "the committee advanced [Crowe's] legislation without objection despite several committee members' unfamiliarity with kratom... Sen. Robert Adley, R-Benton, scanned the committee room for law enforcement officials with knowledge of how much of a problem the substance is becoming. Adley's search came up empty." (Senator Crowe's office did not respond to requests for comment for this story. Incidentally, the Washington Post reported last week that Senator Crowe is also backing a bill to allow discrimination against gays and lesbians in charter schools.)

In Iowa, state representative Clel Baudler began moving to ban kratom just two hours after he first heard of it. "We have to get ahead of this thing before it gets out of hand," he was quoted as saying in a story on WOI-TV.com, which reported that kratom is "a hallucinogen, addictive, and can be life-threatening."

In a telephone interview with The Stranger, Representative Baudler said he first heard about kratom on a radio show where he'd heard from a medical examiner that "the effects were not good—not good at all." He said his push to ban it, via an amendment to another bill, had passed the state house "unanimously" but was now in the senate, where it was sitting in a committee run by "an ultra-liberal," and that he'd been working hard all week to make sure it passed.

When asked why he was describing kratom as "a hallucinogen" and "life-threatening" when researchers and the medical literature directly contradicted these claims, he responded: "I absolutely disagree with you. It is banned in the two countries where it's grown and banned in a whole bunch of European countries, like Australia [sic]. And it has absolutely no medical value."

But kratom has been considered of medical value—for treating problems as small as diarrhea and as huge as drug epidemics—since the 19th century. As we were talking, I was sitting inches away from studies contemplating its medical value. (And an atlas.) And once a drug is banished into schedule one—i.e., is legally considered to have no medical value—it's much more difficult to secure grant funding to research it. (According to Sanho Tree, a drug-policy expert at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC, once a drug becomes schedule one, there are "infinitely more hoops you have to jump through and you're basically at the mercy of the DEA" to do any research.) And research is precisely what kratom needs.

Given all that, could Representative Baudler point to any actual scientific studies supporting his charge that kratom is a "life-threatening" "hallucinogen" with "absolutely no medical value"?

"No," he said. "They're all at my office in Des Moines, and I'm at home." Could he remember even one study? Or the name of the medical examiner he'd heard on the radio who'd instantaneously inspired his crusade? "No."

The campaigns of Representative Baudler and Senator Crowe to shove kratom into the schedule-one category are not based on reason or research. But they are telling. The next time you wonder why drug-prohibition laws in this country are such a destructive mess, just think of all those politicians who hear "drug" on the radio and rush toward prohibition without knowing the basic facts—just to score easy political points. Saying something has "no medical value" before looking into it is not rational. It's knee-jerk prohibitionism. And the facts have proven knee-jerk prohibitionism to be a catastrophe across the western hemisphere.

[Telarus]

http://news.cincinnati.com/article/20120613/NEWS/306120096/-Crippled-girl-gag-Crime-free-speech-issue-

Forest Thomer walked up to a small group of people at a May 23 Party in the Park event, pointed to a slight, wheelchair-bound woman next to him and asked, "Do you want to laugh at the crippled girl?"

The politically incorrect question wasn't intended to demean Ally Bruener and her battle with Congenital Muscular Dystrophy but to promote her next gig as a comedian. After Thomer asked the question, Bruener wheeled her chair up to the group, told them a joke and where she was performing next.

Thomer's guerrilla marketing, though, erupted into such a to-do that he was arrested by Cincinnati police and charged with disorderly conduct, punishable by up to 30 days in jail. Now, Thomer (pronounced Toe-mer) and Bruener insist they are in a free speech fight.

MORE

[P3nT4gR4m]

His own stupid fault for saying things which do not appear in the Land of Free Speech Lexicon of Approved Phrases 

[Telarus]

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/06/neverseconds-shut-down/
9-Year-Old Who Changed School Lunches Silenced By Politicians

For the past two months, one of my favorite reads has been Never Seconds, a blog started by 9-year-old Martha Payne of western Scotland to document the unappealing, non-nutritious lunches she was being served in her public primary school. Payne, whose mother is a doctor and father has a small farming property, started blogging in early May and went viral in days. She had a million viewers within a few weeks and 2 million this morning; was written up in Time, the Telegraph, the Daily Mail, and a number of food blogs; and got support from TV cheflebrity Jamie Oliver, whose series "Jamie's School Dinners" kicked off school-food reform in England.

Well, goodbye to all that.

This afternoon, Martha (who goes by "Veg" on the blog) posted that she will have to shut down her blog, because she has been forbidden to take a camera into school.

MORE

[P3nT4gR4m]

Caught this on the local news this morning. Kid's given the bureaucrats a stiff kick in the teeth by all accounts. Well played! Notice the photo that's gone cover-story is obviously one of the shitty meals from the start of the blog. Apparently the school board responded by improving the quality of the food served but no one is looking at those pics

[Junkenstein]

This has been making the rounds here too. The strange thing is apparently the more recent meals were rated 10/10, compared to 0-2/10 that the blog started with. A remarkable PR own goal really. It would have taken a day to smile and nod at the child. Instead you've thrown out a demand and created negative media attention on what could easily have been a huge success story.

Various people claiming that it violates some human rights rules or EU regulation. No idea on the veracity of this but if true this council have really fucked themselves. 

Excellent work. You've tried to silence a child journalist writing about a subject that has been in the public eye for a long time.

I'd expect a grovelling statement within the week and a meeting with council officials, the child and a celebrity chef by the end of the month. It's only real food news when Jamie Oliver is involved apparently.

[P3nT4gR4m]

Update: Head of Argyle and Bute Council just ordered the ban lifted.

[Junkenstein]

When's the meeting with Jamie scheduled for?

[P3nT4gR4m]

Probably take a couple of months to get the six part series scripted and production staff mobilised

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Update: Head of Argyle and Bute Council just ordered the ban lifted.

Well, that's good. I just wasted an email full of scolding and shame,  though. 

[Telarus]

http://www.vancouverobserver.com/politics/2012/06/12/harper-government-targeted-artist-her-green-conscience-internal-documents-reveal

Canada's Harper Government retroactively cancels a $5,000 grant to help send a local environmentally focused artist on a European tour along side the Nektarina Non-Profit, an arts organization based in Croatia (all because a couple of her pieces are critical of Harper's oil sands policy). Deciding that's not dickish enough, the administration then proceeds to bad-mouth her to every Canadian embassy in the regions she was set to tour in, and then pressures her largest Corproate sponsor to drop $75,000 in funding. Which they did.


Tour canceled.

I mean, look at this shit. She got on an agenda list alongside Serbia/Kosovo and India/Pakistan last July, labeled as "an inconvenient artist" ("une artiste qui dérange").

[Anna Mae Bollocks]

OK, it's really old news.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing

"Alan Mathison Turing, OBE, FRS was an English mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, and computer scientist. He was highly influential in the development of computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of "algorithm" and "computation" with the Turing machine, which played a significant role in the creation of the modern computer. Turing is widely considered to be the father of computer science and artificial intelligence.

"During the Second World War, Turing worked for the Government Code and Cypher School (GCCS) at Bletchley Park, Britain's codebreaking centre. For a time he was head of Hut 8, the section responsible for German naval cryptanalysis. He devised a number of techniques for breaking German ciphers, including the method of the bombe, an electromechanical machine that could find settings for the Enigma machine."

"Turing's homosexuality resulted in a criminal prosecution in 1952, when homosexual acts were still illegal in the United Kingdom. He accepted treatment with female hormones (chemical castration) as an alternative to prison. He died in 1954, just over two weeks before his 42nd birthday, from cyanide poisoning."

So basically, he laid the groundwork for computers, stopped the nazis from taking over and got chemically castrated for being gay.

FUCK. 

[Cain]

What a surprise, another undercover FBI informant, providing weapons to violent political organizations.

http://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/Activist-Richard-Aoki-named-as-informant-3800133.php

The man who gave the Black Panther Party some of its first firearms and weapons training – which preceded fatal shootouts with Oakland police in the turbulent 1960s – was an undercover FBI informer, according to a former bureau agent and an FBI report.

One of the Bay Area's most prominent radical activists of the era, Richard Masato Aoki was known as a fierce militant who touted his street-fighting abilities. He was a member of several radical groups before joining and arming the Panthers, whose members received international notoriety for brandishing weapons during patrols of the Oakland police and a protest at the state Capitol.

Aoki went on to work for 25 years as a teacher, counselor and administrator at the Peralta Community College District, and after his suicide in 2009, he was revered as a fearless radical.

But unbeknownst to his fellow activists, Aoki had served as an FBI intelligence informant, covertly filing reports on a wide range of Bay Area political groups, according to the bureau agent who recruited him.

That agent, Burney Threadgill Jr., recalled that he approached Aoki in the late 1950s, about the time Aoki was graduating from Berkeley High School. He asked Aoki if he would join left-wing groups and report to the FBI.

"He was my informant. I developed him," Threadgill said in an interview. "He was one of the best sources we had."

[Anna Mae Bollocks]

That's pretty much the job description, isn't it?

And almost as big a surprise as "Texas GOP judges are batshit".
http://dangerousminds.net/comments/dumbshit_gop_judge_in_texas_asks_for_tax_increase_to_fight_back_against_oba

[ñͤͣ̄ͦ̌̑͗͊͛͂͗ ̸̨̨̣̺̼̣̜͙͈͕̮̊̈́̈͂͛̽͊ͭ̓͆ͅé ̰̓̓́ͯ́́͞]

Obama's "emergency appeal" of the indefinite detention ruling reminds me of the way Quebec legislators made use of emergency procedures that allowed them to rush their law through that made it effectively illegal to protest without a permit:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_HeAlJwtkw