Epileptic Seizures, Autism, Dementia/Alzheimer’s, Cannabis … And Coca Leaf Tea?

republished from:

https://panaceachronicles.com/2017/05/31/epileptic-seizures-autism-dementiaalzheimers-cannabis-and-coca-leaf-tea/


Epileptic Seizures, Autism, Dementia/Alzheimer’s, Cannabis … And Coca Leaf Tea?

First, A Short Summary:
Researchers are “just discovering” that Cannabis can control Epileptic seizures (Most recent New England Journal of Medicine)

Researchers have not yet looked at Cannabis for use in Dementia/Alzheimer’s, even though seizures are common and are a leading cause of death in Dementia/Alzheimer’s.

Maybe that’s because while Congress has committed some $5.4 billion this fiscal year to cancer research, about $1.2 billion to heart disease and $3 billion to research on HIV/AIDS, research funding for Alzheimer’s is “only” $566 million. Clearly that’s just not enough for researchers (mostly Big Pharma employees) to look into Cannabis as a treatment.

On a related note, California researchers have just shown that a sleeping sickness drug developed in 1916 can reverse Autism in children; unfortunately, the test group was only 10 kids, and 5 of them were given placebos, and the researchers had to go $500,000 into debt to run the study. Evidently kids with Autism aren’t a big enough deal for Congress. Thoughtful of those researchers to care enough to go ahead though.

And to wrap all this up in a neat little package, I figure it would cost well under $100,000 to show that Coca Leaf can not only control Epileptic seizures (as already well-known and demonstrated in 1881), but probably also Dementia/Alzheimer’s seizures – not even a diagnosed disease in 1881.

So, a drug from 1916 is now “discovered” to cure Autism, after decades of high-dollar research into “new” cures. And Cannabis is discovered to cure Epilepsy, after more decades of research into “new” cures. And an 1881 proven cure for both epilepsy and likely for Dementia/Alzheimers, among many other killer diseases, is illegal. Go figure.

The Full Story

For several years researchers have been zeroing in on Cannabis as a source for potent medicines in treating & preventing epileptic and other kinds of seizures. The latest findings, published May 25, 2017 in the New England Journal of Medicine, showed that @ 40% of those treated with a CBD-based medicine experienced dramatic improvement in seizure intensity and frequency.

So, let’s put this together with an interesting association between seizures and Dementia/Alzheimer’s. There is plenty of research on this association. Here’s just one example.

“Of the degenerative disorders, Alzheimer’s dementia and amyloid angiopathy are known major causes of seizures. Advanced Alzheimer’s disease has been identified as a risk factor for new-onset generalized tonic-clonic seizures in older adults. It is associated with a 10 percent prevalence of seizures, particularly late in the illness. An increased prevalence of seizures also has been documented with other types of dementia.

So I suppose that it would make sense to investigate whether Cannabis-derived medicines, or perhaps the right strain of Cannabis itself, could be useful in controlling or preventing seizures in Dementia/Alzheimer’s, especially in late-stages of the disease when seizures are a known killer.
I’m sure that researchers are already drafting multi-million dollar grants to study exactly that.
So far, so good. In spite of decades of “Killer Weed” propaganda it looks like scientific minds are finally rising above the lies and finding that, consistent with centuries of well-established knowledge, the natural medicine Cannabis can be helpful in dealing with killer seizures better and with less risk of harm than pharmaceuticals.

But wait! If centuries of medical knowledge regarding the efficacy and safety of Cannabis are now appearing as “new findings” in prestigious medical journals, why not take a look at centuries of medical knowledge regarding the safety and efficacy of Coca Leaf in the same area?

Hmmmm. Could it be that a cup or two of Coca Leaf tea a day might be helpful to people with Dementia/Alzheimer’s – at least in preventing seizures, if not in other ways too. Let’s see. Who would know?

Well, there is a little book entitled “Erythroxylon Coca”, written by By W.S. Searle, MD and published in New York in 1881. (Dr. Searles book is included in its entirety in my ebook “Coca Leaf Papers” available on the sidebar of this post.)

Dr. Searles book is only one of many in which the use of Coca to treat and cure epileptic seizures is covered, but here is what Dr. Searles had to say:

“Coca Leaf & Acute Disease”

“The relations of Coca to acute disease are extremely important. As a physician, I would not be without it under any consideration. How thoroughly will every physician, understand me when I say that we are not seldom compelled to stand by and witness the death of patients who are really better of the disease which destroys them than perhaps at any previous time during their sickness. We are unable to support them, and they die from exhaustion of the vital forces.”

“But in Coca we have a powerful agent, whose disturbing influence over physiological processes is so little felt that it neither interferes with recovery from disease by natural course, nor with the action of remedies. And its sustaining power is so marvelous, that I prophesy that by its help we shall hereafter be able to cure many cases of disease which were otherwise hopeless.”

“I am informed by my colleague, Dr. John L. Moffat, of Brooklyn, that he has had very encouraging results from the use of Coca in hay fever in four instances. Of course, its action here is antipathic, or rather, it probably acts simply by its sustaining power, and by its antipathic relations to asthma. But even an efficient palliative, which can do no harm, will be welcomed by those who are annually visited by this plague.”

“It has been affirmed by some English authorities that Coca is valueless in epilepsy. For myself I can report that, in one instance of the fully-fledged disease, occurring in a middle-aged lady, but in whom the paroxysms did not recur oftener than once in six months, an apparent cure has been effected by means of Coca alone. She has now passed eighteen months without a seizure. I have also more striking reports from some of the members of this society, who report very marked results in several severe cases which would yield to no other remedy.”

“It is too early yet, however, to claim for Coca really curative powers in this terrible disease, which has so long been an “opprobrium medicorum”. Still, it is highly probable that the forms of it used by the English physicians in their trials were inert. This is rendered more than likely by the fact that one of the most expert chemists of New York City carefully searched both France and England during the summer of 1880 for good Coca, and was unable to obtain a single valuable specimen.”

“In view of the fact that all the drugs now ranked as anti-epileptic by the allopathic school of medicine are so injurious to the general health, and in view of the results attained by myself and my colleagues, imperfect as yet though they are, I earnestly urge the faithful trial of Coca in epilepsy.”

Well, about 140 years have passed and where are those “faithful trials” of Coca Leaf for Epilepsy – and incidentally for Dementia/Alzheimer’s, Congestive Heart Failure, Diabetes, Obesity, and a couple of dozen other killer diseases? Nowhere in sight.

Researchers with Ph.D’s and major institutions behind them are getting tens of millions of dollars to “study” Dementia/Alzheimer’s, but not a peep out of the research establishment about Coca Leaf Tea.

And, of course, since I’m not in the club I can’t get a grant, even though I could pretty much prove or disprove the efficacy and safety of Coca leaf for Dementia/Alzheimer’s with a few thousand bucks. But as noted, I don’t have a Ph.D. and I’m not a member of the club, so no institution gives a shit what I say.

Hell, maybe I’ll just do a GoFundMe request for a couple of tickets to Bolivia, grab a hundred kilos or so of fresh Coca Leaf, and come home and start handing out Coca Leaf Tea at a church social or two, and maybe a local nursing home. Think I would get past US Customs/DEA? Might actually be a great idea – let them bust me for trying to bring Coca Leaf in for Dementia/Alzheimer’s patients.

I wonder how many members of the US Congress, who make the laws forbidding Coca Leaf coming into the US, have someone in their family with Dementia/Alzheimer’s. (I’m resisting the obvious snide remark here because while it might be accurate it would also be cruel.)

Anyone have any suggestions?

Defeating The Drug War Requires Better Understanding It

prerequisite reading:

http://freedomofmedicineanddiet.blogspot.com/2016/02/points-about-progressive-era-war-of.html

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_Washington_Wiley

Contrary to what is commonly regurgitated, the drug war did not start with Richard Nixon.

Rather, it was the phrase "war on drugs", that came with the re-codification of drug prohibition that occurred under Nixon with the enactment of the 1970 U.S. Controlled Substances Act. This re-codification was necessary following the 1969 Leary case that had the Supreme Court officially find the statutory basis of US drug prohibition since the 1914 - the power to tax - unconstitutional as violating an individual's right against self incrimination. The 1970 CSA would instead base itself upon the power to regulate interstate commerce.

The U.S. drug war dates back to the prohibitions established via the 1937 “Marijuana” Tax Act and the 1914 Harrison "Narcotics" Tax Act regarding “opium or coca leaves, their salts, derivatives, or preparations”.  Accordingly, such substances could only be legally possessed by those registered to pay a special tax, which the U.S. Treasury Department was therefore empowered to set regulations determining who could be allowed to pay the tax.   Thus though based upon the Congressional power to tax, this 1914 Act also relied upon a delegation of regulatory authority.

The stage for this would be set via the 1906 U.S. Food and Drugs Act, and the propaganda campaign used to bring it about.

The 1906 Act which did not specifically prohibit any substances, set up the population for the prohibitions to come, via an overly broad delegation of regulatory authority to the U.S.D.A. Bureau of Chemistry so empowered to ban products sold as foods, that contained what it claimed were dangerous-deleterious to human health ingredients, and hinted at via a grossly inconsistent retail packaging labeling requirement list of substances.

It would not be a true war against dangerous or addictive substances.

It would lump together all cocaine containing products regardless of the potency and hence actual properties, with the effect of effectively banning the relatively safe - re: dilute - products while shifting cocaine availability exclusively to the drug in its most dangerous concentrated forms.

It would give a free pass to substances that were intrinsically the most dangerous and addictive as nicotine containing Tobacco, even allowing such products with a wide range of deleterious additives, more incredibly even unlabeled, as perhaps should be expected.

The 1906 U.S. Food and Drugs Act would be widely lauded as establishing reasonable regulations and regulatory authority to guard over the food and drug supply in interstate commerce.

Yet its inconsistencies and its unbridled regulatory authority to the Bureau of Chemistry of the U.S.D.A. would make it a springboard of authoritarian abuse via a U.S.D.A. allied with commercial interests most notably the American Medical Association and the American Pharmaceutical Association, and in collusion with "muckracker" writers as Samuel Hopkins Adams.

Its seemingly reasonable requirement for the retail product labeling of ingredients would be subverted by its limitation to certain substances that were being politically targeted, and the exclusion of others given a free pass: for instance cocaine had to be labeled but neither caffeine nor nicotine, even regardless of what was inferable from the product's label. Therefore products clearly labeled as "Coca" by name and/or ingredient list were "misbranded" for not listing the presence and proportion of cocaine alkaloid, even that occurring simply naturally in Coca leaf. Yet products were not required to list the caffeine content for instance even if their labels made no mention of Coffee, tea or some other caffeine containing plant- hence fortifying a false notion that cocaine was somehow necessarily more dangerous than caffeine or nicotine regardless of how low the amount, and thus engendering a popular overly broad fear of Coca products.

Its seemingly reasonable prohibition upon "adulteration" was likewise perverted by its empowerment of the U.S.D.A. Chemistry Bureau (Section 4) to make such a determination based upon its opinion of any such ingredient being "deleterious or detrimental to human health" (Section 7 regarding confectioneries and foods): a power given without any actual requirement of scientific backing! The U.S.D.A. Chemistry Bureau could thus exploit this to bring prosecutions against manufacturers of products containing substances it arbitrarily deemed so unacceptable, doing so even those included in the Act's labeling requirement! And it would do so, starting with products sold as "foods' for regular use, rather than as "drugs" sold for more occasional use.

When a 1911 U.S. Supreme Court decision found the 1906 Act failed to confer the degree of regulatory power sought by the U.S.D.A. - namely that "misbranding" referred to a substance's identity rather than its efficacy - it was soon amended. That would thus set the stage for bureaucrats to suppress information about medical alternatives, via empowering them to declare such medical claims as false- even arbitrarily.  This would build upon the Act's already established failure to require scientific backing regarding U.S.D.A. Bureau of Chemistry claims about ingredients, further establishing a medical - agricultural mercantilist scheme for patentable synthetic drugs and Tobacco- the U.S.D.A. after all being initially established in 1862 to promote U.S. agricultural interests.

The drug war after all has always involved markets worth billions, and the U.S.D.A., as an example of this drive for market control, was undeniably concerned about the market threat that Coca posed to Tobacco, as seen in their infamous 1910 Farmers' Bulletin article "Habit Forming Agents Their Sale and Use a Menace to the Public Welfare".  Notably the U.S.D.A. hysteria against cocaine - regardless of actual matters of a preparation's potency/abuse potential - escalated sharply after the U.S. took control of the project constructing the Panama Canal that would significantly reduce transport distances for Coca leaves from the coast of Peru to North Atlantic markets.  Coca leaf is what experts as Dr. Ronald K. Siegel of U.C.L.A. have noted "...stands out among all the stimulants, licit and illicit, as the easiest to control and the one least likely to produce toxicity or dependency."

We know the worst are Tobacco products, particularly cigarettes, actively promoted for decades by American Medical Association figures as "Dr." Morris Fishbein, and now credited by the U.N. World Health Organization with causing some 100 million premature deaths during the 1900s.  We can see how cigarette production spiked in the wake of the successive 1906, 1914 and 1937 U.S. drug control legislative Acts, and can just begin to calculate this rarely acknowledged enormity of public health subversion caused by the war on drugs.  Yet article after article about the drug war can never dare mention any of this, choosing instead to fail to get beyond New York Times promoted fake news from 1914 that cocaine was banned in the U.S. because Black people liked it and that it made them impervious to bullets prompting some police units to adopt larger caliber guns.

U.S. Cigarette production spiked with drug prohibition: 1906, 1914,1937;

coinciding with the crackdowns on Opium, Coca and Cannabis

(p230 Licit & Illicit Drugs Breecher)

Has anyone ever seen a 20th century article about medical 'quackery' include the profession's promotion of Tobacco cigarettes so prevalent in the half century following the 1906 U.S. Food and Drugs Act?

That Act that so empowered the United States Department of Agriculture Bureau of Chemistry over foods and drugs, had cleverly exempted Tobacco products, by cleverly limiting its jurisdiction to drugs listed in the U.S. Pharmacopoeia, which did list Tobacco prior to de listing it the previous year- 1905!

The 1906 Act would effectively grandfather Tobacco with its Section 6:

"That the term “drug,” as used in this Act, shall include all medicines and preparations recognized in the United States Pharmacopoeia or National Formulary for internal or external use, and any substance or mixture of substances intended to be used for the cure, mitigation, or prevention of disease of either man or other animals. The term “food,” as used herein, shall include all articles used for food, drink, confectionery, or condiment by man or other animals, whether simple, mixed, or compound."

Tobacco had been included in the U.S. Pharmacopoeia since at least 1890, yet was deleted in 1905.

Accordingly, "Former [U.S.] SenatorMaurine Neuberger has claimed that the removal of tobacco from the Pharmacopoeia was the price paid to get support of tobacco-state legislators for the Food and Drug Act of 1906. The leaf was thereby removed from the jurisdiction of the FDA (Wagner, 1971: 74)." 

That statement and the timing suggest that the 1905 deletion was done in anticipation of the 1906 Act.

The drug war's lack of scientific quality has a broader purpose.

That would be a campaign not only against opiates and cocaine, but also against the idea of self medication (that is individuals medicating without a doctor's prescription), against medications that were based upon natural substances as herbs and components of herbs, and hence un-patentable, against products that were generally dilute, hence taking more shelf space than concentrates as powders and pills.  That campaign relied heavily upon such code terms as 'nostrums' - see Colliers Magazine cir 1905, as well as  "Patent Medicines' - actually a misnomer used against what were correctly termed 'proprietary medicines' as patent medicines where those that could be patented because they were man made chemicals rather than ones occurring naturally in things as plants- hence the basis for today’s overly expensive and toxic- re side effects - pharmaceutical monopoly medicines.  The U.S. government's years of suppression of knowledge about the potential efficacy of Cannabis in fighting cancer, for instance, is but a part of this subversion of choice, which is a key factor in the crisis of rising health care costs.

The current habit of assuming that the 'war on drugs' simply started with Richard Nixon’s Presidency, and the near universal tendency to only focus upon Cannabis "Marijuana-Marijuana" distracts from the broader picture, serving to further perpetuate the quite costly assault on freedom of medicine and diet.

Also see:

http://freedomofmedicineanddiet.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-evil-prohibition-to-promote.html

http://southmallblogger.blogspot.com/2012/08/drug-war-cigarette-mercantilism.html

End Opioid Prohibition

The media hysterics against opioids, such as The New York Times, ought to be ashamed of themselves!

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/commentisfree/2016/jun/08/opioid-epidemic-drug-mix-overdose-death

Bob Bee- It's prohibition that serves to ensure opioids are more dangerous than they otherwise would be, due to uncertainty of purity and dosage of unregulated, black market drugs. Thus prohibition makes fatal OD's more likely, not less. Opioids should be legalized, regulated, and taxed like tobacco and alcohol. That way, users would know exactly what they were buying and the dosage. Also, opioid legalization would mean good, old, natural opium would be legally available. Users could opt for opium (active ingredients include morphine & codeine. It can be eaten, smoked, or consumed as a tea) as a safer alternative to ultra-potent pharma-junk powders & pills. Opium's safer as it's less concentrated and is harder to fatally OD on. End the counter-productive, hypocritical, unjust, indefensible war on opioids.

http://freedomofmedicineanddiet.blogspot.com/2016/05/opioid-prescriptions-down-deaths-up-ny.html

Cocaine Content of Some Early 20th Century Products

and USDA prosecutions with zero showing of any actual harms from the cocaine content


https://books.google.com/books?id=Z_OQycfkoasC&pg=PA84&lpg=PA84&dq=cocaine+content+soft+drinks&source=bl&ots=mhN0XhP7t2&sig=Pv8LlyLyhd-tG5pQV_jTyJ-V6Tw&hl=en&sa=X&ei=-J4HVeXXMqm_sQSE5ID4CA&ved=0CEUQ6AEwBzgK#v=onepage&q=cocaine%20content%20soft%20drinks&f=false

Cocaine content of beverages in milligrams per fluid ounce

Wiseola        under 1 mg

Celery Cola        under 1 mg

Koca Nola        under 1 mg

Kola Coca        5 mg

Vin Mariani        6-8 mg

Kola Cardinette    9 mg

Maltine with Coca    9 mg

Coca Cordial        30 mg

Metcalf Coca Wine    32 mg

Wiseola- under 1 mg per fluid ounce

Celery Cola - under 1 mg per fluid ounce

http://continuingcounterreformation.blogspot.com/2015/06/20th-century-pharmacratic-inquisition.html

Simply declare cocaine unsafe, without any mention of dilution-concentration factor whatsoever.

Koca Nola

This was a syrup for flavoring soda water and similar "soft drinks" put up by a company of the same name at Atlanta, Ga. This "Delicious Dopeless Koca Nola"—as the label had it —was found to contain cocain. Cocain being deleterious to health, was declared an adulteration under the act so that the Koca Nola Company was found guilty on two points: (1) failing to declare the presence of cocain and (2) adulteration. The Government made two seizures and the company was found guilty in each case and a fine of $25 on each count was imposed, making the total $100.—[Notice of Judgment, No. 202.]

Celery Cola

Celery-Cola, marketed by the Birmingham Celery Cola Company of Birmingham, Ala., was another soft drink found to contain cocain and caffeine. The government contended that as cocain was a poisonous and deleterious ingredient, the product was adulterated and as the proportion or quantity of cocain was not declared on the label it was also misbranded.— [Notice of Judgment, No. 326.]

Such prosecutions did not involve excessive dosing.

Koca Nola and Celery Cola for instance each contained under 1 milligram of cocaine per fluid ounce.

Since cocaine was an ingredient required to be listed- how could it be declared an illegal ingredient, its presence automatically constituting "adulteration"?!   Should not the prosecutions as those against Coca Nola and Celery Cola have then been only for "misbranding"?

Whether or not a product even labeled its cocaine content apparently would not shield it from prosecution by Wiley's USDA Bureau of Chemistry- at least for such in food products as beverages, as with the prosecution of the manufacturers of a product named"Dr. Don's Kola":

Dr. Don's Kola

This product, which was sold as a flavoring extract for "soft drinks," was shipped by the Warner-Jcnkinson Company of St. Louis from Missouri to Michigan. When analyzed by the Government chemists, the product was found to be a syrupy liquid consisting essentially of cocain, caffein, phosphoric acid, sugar, flavoring and coloring agents, and water. It contained no substance derived from the cola nut or cola plant. In view of the fact that it contained cocain, a dangerous drug, the stuff was declared adulterated and, inasmuch as it contained no product of the cola nut. it was further declared misbranded. The defendant entered a plea of guilty and a fine was imposed.—[Notice of Judgment, No. 724.]

That prosecution apparently made no mention of any failure to label the cocaine content, being cited for "mislabeling" only insofar as failing to contain its labeled Kola nut.



USDA Prosecutions of Cocaine Containing Products
http://freedomofmedicineanddiet.blogspot.com/2008/03/new-dark-ages-usda-crusade-against-coca.html

Vin Mariani- The Latter Years

Historical accounts of Vin Mariani focus perhaps exclusively upon the years prior to the prohibition era.

Here is a bit of the history following the 1906 U.S. Food and Drug Act that effectively blacklisted cocaine via including it on a list of ingredients that had to be labeled, though not including the other popularly used stimulants of caffeine and nicotine.

1907: Vin Mariani for the U.S. market deleted the cocaine, adding a rear side label- see below.  I don't yet have information if they continued to provide the regular version as an alternative.

GUARANTEED BY MARIANI & Co. UNDER THE FOOD AND DRUGS ACT JUNE 30, 1906; SERIAL No. 448

VIN MARIANI

[MARIANI WINE]

17 PER CENT ALCOHOL BY VOLUME

AN IMPORTED FRENCH BORDEAUX WINE WITH A SPECIAL 

PROCESSING OF LEAVES OF ERYTHROXYLON COCA

PREPARED AND BOTTLED AT OUR NEW YORK FACILITY 

MARIANI AND COMPANY

PARIS, FRANCE: 41 Boulevard Haussman.   NEW YORK: 52 West 15th Street

  "THE STANDARD OF MARIANI PREPARATIONS, established by us in France nearly half a century, ago is based upon the adaptation of Coca as employed by the Andeans during hundreds of years as a force sustainer.  WE HAVE ALWAYS emphasized our use of Coca leaves chosen for AROMATIC and MEDICINAL qualities and, as we have never considered the negligible amount of alkaloid in such leaves essential to our formula, our processing completely eliminates it from our preparation”

That was actually a bad move for it implied that cocaine was something that did not belong in dilute amounts, never-mind that the real problems with cocaine came with it in concentrated forms, and that there was never any showing that cocaine in dilute form was any more "dangerous" than such other naturally occurring stimulant alkaloids as caffeine and nicotine,, both used in dilute form and both likewise poisonous in concentrated forms.

The 1906 Act neither banned cocaine as an ingredient in food or drug products.  It simply required labeling the cocaine content- itself a reasonable requirement, though actually misleading - by not likewise require the labeling of caffeine and nicotine it created a false assumption of cocaine being somehow more dangerous in likewise dilute form.

However the 1906 Act would serve as a means to bring about the deletion of dilute cocaine, via its un-fetted delegation of regulatory power to declare an ingredient unsafe to the Bureau of Chemistry of the U.S.D.A.

That started happening in 1907 with U.S.D.A. prosecutions not only against manufacturers for 'mislabeling' for failing to label the cocaine content, but others for adulteration for containing cocaine- even if properly label, with the U.S.D.A. declaring without basis that such cocaine content was dangerous.  For instance, though Wiley was well known for his "poison squad" experimentations upon food containing various substances used as preservatives, he apparently never conducted any such researching upon beverages that contained cocaine.


Such 'adulteration' prosecutions by the U.S.D.A. were done with products sold as foods.  Never-mind that the 1906 Act's inclusion of cocaine as an ingredient that had to be labeled in food and drug products implicitly meant that it remained legal.

Perhaps as a way of bolstering his authority to ban substances by declaring them unsafe Harvey Wiley initiated a famous prosecution against the Coca Cola Company for containing added caffeine- that is caffeine in pure form as a dilute ingredient- for he not only never targeted Coffee or Tea but actually praised them.

Such prosecutions would only go after products sold as foods, and hence could conceivably be sold as drugs.  However the political campaign being carried out by the U.S.D.A. Chemistry Bureau Chief Harvey Wiley - who was also prominent in the American Medical Association and its allied American Pharmaceutical Association - also targeted cocaine containing medicinal preparations via a massive lobbying effort of 'model legislation' for the individual U.S. States to ban the sale of such outside of a physicians prescription, with such prescriptions being mandated a s"non-refillable".

Political machinations in the 1908 to 1914 period would work upon amending the 1906 Act to outright ban products containing any amount of cocaine and to severely restrict those containing at least above a certain amount of opiates- efforts that culminated in 1914 with the U.S. Harrison Act.  While the particular political fear of cocaine was sold in newspapers as a fear of Negroes in the south, a 1910 U.S.D.A. Farmer Bulletin article more honestly presented the U.S.D.A.'s fear of Coca being sold and used as a "Tobacco Habit Cure".

That Act would exempt products containing below a certain amount of opiates though not of cocaine from over the counter -- that is without a physician's prescription -- from a deceptively innocuous appearing to some tax requirement, to be administered by a U.S. Department of Treasury that was not actually required to honor requests for market participation thus effectively empowering that entity to enact a virtually blanket prohibition.  This delegation of regulatory authority would be upheld by a U.S. Judge who had served in the U.S. Congress from 1909 until his resignation in 1914, and who was present in deliberations regarding amending the 1906 Food and Drug Act leading to the crafting of the 1914 Harrison Act: James Harry Covington.

As requiring non refillable prescriptions for products containing any amount of cocaine effectively made their sale and use impractical -- e.g. by requiring a separate physicians visit for each non refillable prescription -- cocaine containing preparations dissipated from OTC sales, with any such prescriptions effectively confined to a far narrower spectrum of uses, such as the use of the more concentrated  preparations in surgical anesthesia.  Any physician considering prescriptions outside of such a narrow range of uses would likewise soon be effectively cowed by the U.S. Treasury Department's abuse of its delegated regulatory authority to essentially practice medicine without a license.

Other nations would adopt such polices, though for a time some exempted dilute cocaine products as Vin Mariani.  Conceivably, Vin Mariani was produced in different versions for different market jurisdictions, though such information so far remains elusive.

http://freedomofmedicineanddiet.blogspot.com/2008/03/us-state-departments-opium-convention.html

1938

1938

1946- this shows the classic Vin Mariani bottle

1938

According to an article by Walter Helfland, Vin Mariani was sold in some form until 1963.

DPF Denied 1997 Opium-Coca Panel

a re-post from 1997 about the Drug Policy Foundation's denial of a proposed panel on Opium and Coca for their conference that year in New Orleans, Louisiana.

The Drug Policy Foundation (DPF) was the predecessor organization to the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA), that was created in 2000 with the DPF's merger with the Lindesmith Institute that was headed by Ethan Nadelmann- current DPA Executive Director.   The President of the DPA's Board of Directors, Ira Glasser meanwhile served on the Board of Directors of the DPF.  The DPA had been founded by Kevin Zeese from the National Organization to Reform Marijuana Laws (NORML), with Dr. Arnold S. Trebach of American University in 1986, who had left the organization in 1997.

The Drug Policy Foundation, and the Drug Policy Alliance have been advised through the bro bono program of Covington & Burling, Washington D.C.'s leading corporate food, pharmaceutical and Tobacco industry law firm founded by an instrumental figure in establishing the 1914 Harrison Act, since at least 1988; and since about 1993 or 1994 started receiving funding from George Soros.

---

DPF SAYS NO TO HOGSHIRE/OPIUM & COCA PANEL?

*From a recent -- May 25th 1997 -- article from The New York Times, regarding the legal persecution of Jim Hogshire, author of the book "Opium for the Masses"

"To opponents of the drug war, the case showed how drug policy could clash with other American values. 'The guy was being persecuted because of the fact that he wrote a book,' said Arnold Trebach, founder of the Drug Policy Foundation, a Washington D.C. group that seeks alternatives to the drug war. 'A book! In America! Have we totally lost our sense of who we are?'"

Indeed, have we totally lost our sense of who we are?!?! Like others, I was heartened to hear Dr. Trebach's words of support for Hogshire, and applauded his efforts at educating the public.

Inspired by professor Trebach's words of support for "controversial" approaches to solving the problem of the Drug War, I made this formal proposal to the DPF for a panel at this year's annual conference. I thought the subject would have been of intense interest to both activists and scholars involved in drug war politics. Along with Coca leaf, Opium was outlawed by the so-called Harrison "Tax" Act of 1914, which aimed at the issue of "habit-forming" drugs, banned the citizen's right to purchase or possess Opium and Coca, or any of their various components like morphine or refined cocaine. This prohibition effectively stopped the trade in the plant products, while making the trade in potent white powder derivatives - heroin and cocaine hydrochloride -- immensely profitable. With the dominance of the latter modes of "hard" drugs, we need independent scholar working to enlighten the public about the uses of natural plant versions of the now illicit drugs- in short a look at how drugs are more likely to be consumed WITHOUT the twentieth century drug war, particularly that substance called "God's Own Medicine" -- opium. Professor Trebach's 1982 book, The Heroin Solution, suggests the need to talk seriously about opiates, particularly their use in pain control and patients' access to relief. My panel would give D.P.F. conference attendees just this forum to hear about the therapeutic potential of the PLANTS targeted by twentieth century "drug" prohibition, giving us the chance to avoid the canard of "hard drugs" and focus on a realistic approach to drugs and drug use.

--- Below is my Proposal ---------

PLENARY PANEL/WORKSHOP PROPOSAL

Tinctures of Opium, Wines of Coca, etc:
Popular, Pre-prohibition Uses of Natural Plants
Perverted by Drug Prohibition into today's "Hard" Drug Plague

11th International Conference on Drug Policy Reform,
October 15-18, 1997
Douglas A. Willinger, moderator
Submitted to the Drug Policy Foundation. Speakers that it is proposed that the Drug Policy Foundation formally
invite:

Jim Hogshire, author, Opium for the Masses
Dr. Andrew T. Weil, author Chocolate to Morphine
Dr. Lester Grinspoon
Cynthia Cotts, writer, National Law Journal
Dr. Ronald K. Siegel, UCLA, author Intoxication (1989)
Michael Montagne, Boston College of Pharmacology
Dr. John Morgan

"Hard" drugs - e.g. "heroin" and "cocaine" -- have evoked great fears, leading people to advocate or acquiesce to more repressive and expensive drug laws and drug law enforcement, as if these molecules were necessarily pernicious. Yet prior to prohibition, opiates and cocaine were widely used as safely as aspirin and caffeine are now. Because we are so conditioned to react to the powder forms of these drugs, we forget that these more direct modes of ingestion -- sniffing, smoking and injecting -- were formerly a relatively rare phenomenon. Prior to the twentieth century's "war on drugs," most people using these drugs took them in dilute form, whether as raw plant material, or plant preparation of comparable potency. Such plants and their popular preparations, were widely recognized medicinal agents, worldwide. These substances have long and positive histories predating their criminalization by U.S. federal statute via the 1914 Harrison "Tax" Act and successive laws, and were used throughout the medical community as effective, cheap, and safe treatments for a variety of ailments. Opium poppies have been taken medicinally for thousands of years, taken topically, smoked (and even brewed as a tea, as suggested in Hogshire's "Opium for the Masses.") "Cocaine" -- or more accurately, Coca just had many uses. The Extra Pharmacopoeia (the British counterpart to the U.S. Pharmacopoeia) cited Coca as a "nervine and muscular tonic, preventing waste of tissue, appeasing hunger and thirst, relieving fatigue, and aiding free respiration ... useful in various diseases of the digestive and respiratory organs.... " Meanwhile, the Wine of Coca, , became the most widely praised plant preparation of the time. ’s creator, Angelo Mariani was hailed by Pope Leo XIII as a "benefactor of humanity" for making Coca available around the world- after 40 years of Coca wine distribution." All of this of course, prior to prohibition. Any honest program of harm reduction in drug use must go beyond the narrow-minded discussion of today's "hard drug problems": heroin and cocaine hydrochloride, to look at Opium and Coca, to reveal the drug war's most intense effects upon drug abuse -- shifting markets to the infinitely more dangerous concentrated substances, while the natural forms are virtually forgotten.

--- My proposed panel would fill this serious void in the conference. NONE of the other panels allow a direct venue for either Opium or Coca although I am convinced many people -- including Dr. Trebach -- would be interested in hearing about these subjects. Jim Hogshire could do double duty and speak about his legal difficulties on the panel, The First Amendment – The Next Target of the War on Drugs.

Besides Hogshire, this proposed panel has a good list of speakers of interest to the conference attendees. Dr. Lester Grinspoon would make an excellent speaker about both Opium and Coca. So would Cynthia Cotts, drug reporter for a number of publication now on the staff of the National Law Journal; as well as Dr. Ronald K. Siegel of UCLA, who has long researched the psychotropic plants, and gave a good presentation at my 1995 DPF conference panel COCA '95: A Necessary Drug Policy Alternative From Abroad, that I moderated on October 21, 1995 in Santa Monica. Dr. Andrew Weil would certainly make an interesting presentation.

Given his background, I find it incomprehensible the DPF has not featured him as a conference speaker in seven years! All of my proposed speakers have indicated their interest in appearing on DPF panels, so the problem isn't lack of suitable material or interesting speakers. And I doubt the problem is lack of intellectual curiosity by Trebach and other DPF members.

So how come the DPF doesn't seem to be able to walk the walk -- after all, it certainly talks the talk!

Just who makes the decisions regarding conference panels?

Maybe Arnold Trebach doesn't know what his underlings are doing with his organization, which seems to be playing it so cautiously it's hard to distinguish between them and some of the drug warriors. Did this panel proposal: Tinctures of Opium, Wines of Coca, etc -- Popular, Pre-prohibition Uses of Natural Plants Perverted by Drug Prohibition just slip between the cracks amidst DPF staff changes? If the cause is political fear of "controversial", non-establishment ideas on promoting and end to Drug War mayhem, I am not alone in thinking that kind of compromise is fatal -- and should be fatal -- to any movement that pretends to advocate for people's rights. What if civil rights workers of the 1950s and 1960s had, rather than challenge segregation as wrong (and stick to their guns) instead chosen to meekly apologize for the color of their skins and an oppressive government policy? Does anyone out there have any advice about how can we get through to the right people within the D.P.F. [main phone 202 537 5005; fax 202 537 3007, web site with chat rooms and forum boards,http://www.dpf.org], for them to recognize the very fallacy of NOT pointing out how twentieth century prohibition is morally WRONG, and thus the need to attack the very dogma of the State Party line that [certain] drugs are evil? As the D.P.F., after all, was initially founded to help educate the public about the issues of drug policy, it would be a shame for it to lose its sense of what it was.

Douglas A. Willinger
Tinctures of Opium, Wines of Coca, etc:
Popular, Pre-prohibition Uses of
Natural Plants Perverted by Drug Prohibition
Into today's "Hard" Drug Plague

                                                                                  ---

This is all a pity.


The Drug Policy Foundation that was founded by Zeese and Trebach had done a relatively good job during the organization's early years, into the early 1990s- something I can attest to having attended all of their major conferences since 1989.

But starting in 1993 they have become increasingly timid with a tunnel vision focus more upon drugs in their more dangerous feared forms rather than the broad context of how such drugs - namely opiates and cocaine -- became perverted by prohibition, nor the potential benefits of the banned substances, as well as the rippling effects of the market distortion created by the 20th century "progressive" policies as the drug war.

To wit: where are the DPA panels spotlighting the use of Cannabis Oil to treat-cure cancer?

http://freedomofmedicineanddiet.blogspot.com/2015/11/nadelmann-ignores-economic-reasons.html

http://freedomofmedicineanddiet.blogspot.com/2015/07/drug-policy-alliance-covington-burling.html

Hoffman LaRoche Supports Pharma Protectionism At The Expense of Human Rights

the manufactures of anti depressants and sleeping pills want a "drug free" society to have people arrested and incarcerated for having cannabis

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Hoffmann-La_Roche

How Big Pharma Lobbyists Are Bringing Mandated Drug Tests To A State Near You

by Nicole Flatow Posted on April 8, 2013 at 12:50 pm Updated: April 8, 2013 at 2:12 pm

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2013/04/08/1833421/how-big-pharma-lobbyists-are-bringing-mandated-drug-tests-to-a-state-near-you/

In the Nation, Isabel Macdonald has an excellent long read on the history of U.S. drug testing, beginning with a government program to test returning Vietnam War veterans and the drug-testing provisions in President Ronald Reagan’s Drug Free Workplace Act as part of the misdirected War on Drugs. Even then, the medical community dismissed the Act’s provisions requiring all federal grantees to test employees as “chemical McCarthyism,” as well as unscientific and discriminatory, since it was more likely to capture days-old marijuana use than frequent consumption of cocaine or alcohol. But the movement nonetheless grew from an anti-drug campaign into an industry with its own trade association, after several moneyed interests like Hoffman-La Roche, the maker of Valium and sleeping pills, got into the business:

The company established one of the first major drug-testing labs in America and won an early urine-testing contract with the Pentagon, leading to $300 million in annual sales by 1987. The following year, Hoffmann-La Roche stepped up its sales efforts with the launch of a major PR and lobbying campaign to “mobilize corporate America to confront the illicit drug problem in their workplaces.” The drug manufacturer called its new campaign “Corporate Initiatives for a Drug-Free Workplace.”

Before long, with the help of a New Jersey–based lawyer named David Evans, Hoffmann-La Roche was organizing workshops around the country to convince employers to set up drug-testing programs. In an interview with The Nation, Evans likened his role to that of “a doctor coming in to talk about how to set up a medical device.” During that first campaign, 1,000 employers signed up.[…]

The drug-testing industry took aim at lawmakers as much as employers. Hoffmann-La Roche, for instance, worked “with federal and state government officials,” according to a press release issued by the PR company hired to market the campaign. Lerner told the press that the drug company also envisioned a “grassroots strategy” to prevent states from passing laws to decriminalize marijuana.

By 2006, 84 percent of American employers were reporting that they drug-tested their workers. Today, drug testing is a multi-billion-dollar-a-year industry. DATIA [Drug & Alcohol Testing Industry Association] represents more than 1,200 companies and employs a DC-based lobbying firm, Washington Policy Associates. Hoffmann-La Roche’s former consultant, David Evans, now runs his own lobbying firm and has ghostwritten several state laws to expand drug testing. Most significant, in the 1990s Evans crafted the Workplace Drug Testing Act for the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), of which Hoffmann-La Roche was a paying member. Laying out protocols for workplace drug testing, the bill—which has been enacted into law in several states—upheld the rights of employers to fire employees who do not comply with their companies’ drug-free workplace program.

Over the past decade, lobbyists like Evans have focused on what a DATIA newsletter recently dubbed “the next frontier”—schoolchildren. In 2002, a representative from the influential drug-testing management firm Besinger, DuPont & Associates heralded schools as “potentially a much bigger market than the workplace.”

Because this drug testing tends to capture marijuana more than other drugs, proponents of the movement have increasingly demonized marijuana use most of all. Robert Dupont, who served as drug policy director under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, had advocated decriminalizing marijuana and its use a “minor problem” before he became a “drug-testing management” consultant. Then in 1978, he declared marijuana “in many ways” the “worst drug of all the illegal drugs,” later explaining in a PBS special that, “I realized that these public policies were symbolic—all that really mattered was you were for [the decriminalization of marijuana] or you were against it…. I think about it as a litmus test.”

Now, with fewer and fewer employers implementing drug tests because they have shown “no demonstrable return on investment,” the industry has turned to another lucrative market: those receiving public assistance and unemployment benefits. Several recently passed state laws that require public benefits applicants to take drug tests have been struck down by courts, but that hasn’t stopped other states from moving forward with random drug-testing provisions. In South Carolina in 2012, with unemployment still above 9 percent, state legislators pushed three different bills to drug-test the unemployed. And several other states have done the same in the wake of a federal provision that authorizes the tests. Of course, these laws propose testing for drugs consumed illegally without a prescription. So if those consuming marijuana for stress or trouble sleeping happen to turn instead to prescription use of another federally legal drug, such as Valium or sleeping pills, Hoffman-La Roche just happens to have profited twice over from the process.

April 1, 2015 Confessions of Herbert Kleber
http://freedomofmedicineanddiet.blogspot.com/2015/04/confessions-of-herbert-kleber.html

Confessions of Herbert Kleber

Herbert Kleber under the influence of buprenorphine?

I have to get this off my chest.

I have been a total shill for the status quo.

I twist science in order to make it fit just as those would do in the old USSR to conform to that state's failed economic policies.

Consider this.  I make a living bashing Cannabis, in order to support massive human rights violations required for keeping it illegal.

Yet when have I ever called for such prohibitionist polices towards alcohol?

I am as bad as all of these police unions.  They know how any times they are called to deal with alcohol related violence, and how rarely if ever anything related to Marijuana, asides perhaps from that which has been adulterated with something like PCP.  yet all they care about is their police overtime, busting, excuse me, kidnapping and stealing hapless drug dealers, excuse me, non officially approved pharmacist merchants, and being able to get away with shooting the family pet to death.

And I also make a living serving as a consultant for large pharmaceutical corporations, specifically regarding opioid pain medications- pills.  In particular, Purdue Pharma, which makes OxyContin, Reckitt Benckiser, which makes Nurofen), and Alkermes, which makes Zohydro. Sure we can coat the pills and add binders etc to control the rate of absorption, which is key to thwarting abuse.  But let's face it, a pill is intrinsically abusable because it so easy to take more then the recommended number of pills.

Back in the old days, rate of absorption was controlled by, amongst other things, dilution.  In other word by not presenting an opioid or cocaine as a pill but by a bulky dilute tonic- aka beverage.

But the medical establishment does not like that.

Bulky tonic beverages cost more to ship.

Cost more to stock in terms of shelve space.

Why use laudanum when we can distill that into morphine, heroin or something even more potent, and then attempt to mitigate that by using tiny amounts within pills with all sorts of binders and fillers to control the absorption?

But yes of course it's so easy to simply abuse such 'compact' medications by taking way more than the recommended amount.

That's why I have lacked the chutzpah to recommend moving away from Opioids as pills and to some bulky beverage format.

Likewise muchly with cocaine.  We love to bash cocaine, never-mind that it is no more dangerous when used exactly as caffeine and nicotine- that is in DILUTE form.   It's the concentration of cocaine dosage that radically multiplies its reinforcement-attractiveness; and it's the concentrated forms of dosing that bypass its anesthetic inhibitor effect that it has in dilute oral doses- IOW its numbing effect serves to slow the rate of drinking which is partially why oral preparations as Vin Mariani had a good reputation even amongst those wary of regular alcoholic beverages.  Perhaps we should not only move cocaine use back to this oral - dilute model, but even apply that to Opioids via bulky oral solutions, perhaps even with small amounts of Coca-cocaine or even Novocaine to give a feeling of drinking fullness and serve to discourage excessive drinking.

The bashing of cocaine started in the 1880s following the 1884 introduction of the drug in its most concentrated forms.  Because it is also an anesthetic, cocaine was experimented with by anesthesiologists as a nerve bloc- that is INJECTED directly into a nerve, thusly producing extreme levels of intoxication far greater than even injecting it subcutaneously, let along simply sniffed or taken infinitely more diluted in a coca product.   Within that field of medicine, certain anesthesiologists developed a strong bias against cocaine resulting from such attempts at cocaine injections as a nerve block.

This was partially due to them being unfamiliar with cocaine in normal dilute form as a delightful alternative to caffeine and nicotine, and hence introduced to cocaine as a drug to be injected.  A bad idea.  For cocaine or any stimulant.  When was the last time that you heard of someone injecting caffeine or nicotine?  Or amphetamine?  Remember JFK?  He had that beautiful wife, yet had to have all those other women.

And partially because some had become too detached from reality largely by their own experimentation with anesthetic drugs- those designed to numb one from reality, resulting in anesthesiologist with an exceptionally poor understanding of the human condition tending to view everything within a simplistic disease model while poo pooing spirituality as mere fable, and expressions of such to be belittled.

Or both sloppy and too prideful.  Look at Sigmund Freud.  He starts out by suggesting "coca" or "cocaine" - he used the terms loosely and interchangeably  though he was suggesting oral dilute cocaine, namely 50 mg of the hydrochloride in a 8 ounce glass of water.

Then he figures, if dilute cocaine works good, than injected cocaine must be great.  So following Bentley's lead with oral Coca extract for treating Opium addiction, he advises his friend Fleischl to inject cocaine to break his addiction to injected morphine.

Then he gets all embarrassed and never writes about coca or cocaine again.

It's unclear if he ever used commercially available coca products such as Vin Mariani, or was strictly using the hydrochloride, though he ultimately quits using cocaine.  Yet he foolishly consumed cigars of Tobacco, refusing to quit those, and gets this horrific mouth cancer.

All of this ties into the larger phenomenon, namely the confusing of the dangers of a natural drug made into an ultra concentrated chemical by modern science, and the coming rejection of herbs and herbal based preparations in favor of the products of modern science of all new molecules synthesized from petro chemical black tars ultimately as FDA approved synthetic chemical.  You then got people who would have this disdain for Opium, Coca leaves etc as horrible, yet fall hook line and sinker for all sorts of 20th century chemical creations.

We see the first part of this with the confusion of dilute and ultra concentrated forms of natural drugs.  Various historians love to bash the use of "cocaine" to treat Opiate addicts, though what they overlook is that was with dilute cocaine via Coca, and not concentrated cocaine via sniffing or way worse injecting.  We even have those who claimed that the physicians who pioneered this use of combating addiction, Bentley used concentrated cocaine for treating opium addiction during the late 1870s, a few years BEFORE its introduction- go figure.  However the value of Coca to get people through withdrawal from other substances, with withdrawal from Coca itself non existent is quite real.  Try going without Coffee.  One will likely have severe headaches by late afternoon.  Then try drinking Coca tea, and no withdrawal.  And then after a few days, try drinking only water, and no withdrawal.

In any event, cocaine bashing was soon picked up due to its market threat to nicotine- IOW the market threat of Coca to Tobacco.  What a better way to distract from the addictiveness of nicotine by harping on the so-called 'addiction' to cocaine, which is actually not physically addictive by confusing at is properly called the toxic-mania of extreme dosing as pioneered by anesthesiologist during the 1880s.  Tobacco is a long established crop in Europe and the U.S.  Coca is a tropical plant that can't stand frost.  Taking Coca safely alleviates Tobacco withdrawal as it does Coffee withdrawal.  But big Tobacco can't stand for that bit of information to get wide circulation.  Think of the millions or billions in market share that would be lost!

Meanwhile, cocaine provided an excellent scapegoating for 'modern' medicine.  Sure cocaine is a dangerous drug for being quite likely to abuse in concentrated form.  But are not many modern medicines in fact concentrated drugs?  If people knew the whole story of cocaine they might look at modern medicine more suspiciously.  they might insist upon whole herbs and bulky preparations made form such.

So we got this tobacco-medical alliance.

Anyone researching the history of organized medicine in this country can see for themselves the great harms created by the infamous AMA-APhA-USDA political alliance, with officials in those private organizations likewise holding high level positions in that government entity.  To it: Harvey Washington Wiley, who headed the USDA Bureau of Chemistry starting in 1883, and was also a member of the AMA-APhA who founded their "Council on Pharmacy" in 1905 to establish what was supposedly legitimate medicine, and what was supposedly not.

It was and is all about ripping off the general public.

Just go back to the very beginnings of the AMA.

The American Medical Association was founded in 1847.  It's purpose?  To serve the interests of its members- over everyone else.

It worked to undermine competitive pricing in medicine and even had it made illegal to advertise medical rates despite there being a 1st Amendment.

It worked to restrict the supply of physicians making a permanent shortage in order to inflate rates.

It worked to rid the profession of relatively inexpensive herbal based medicines, by going after proprietary medicines which were falsely labeled "patent medicines when in fact that was which they ere working to protect PATENT medicines which are that because they are patentable.

We created a whole propaganda empire against the natural herbs- smearing them with code words and phrases as 'snake oil', nostrums, and of course 'quackery'.

And we did it via the emerging 20th century 'Progressive' political movement- of granting more government centralization in the name of serving the public interest.

Some of what was accomplished legitimately did that.

But much of what was done didn't, and in fact caused tremendous harms

Yet guess what - we are the quacks.  Yes that's right, the AMA!

The anti proprietary medicine/fraudulent anti patent medicine campaign against herbs lead to intrinsically more dangerous drugs, as anyone can see with all of the side effects of actual patent drugs/modern pharmaceuticals..

The lying through their teeth campaign about the supposed dangers of soft drinks combination cocaine or caffeine, while slyly saying nothing about nicotine likewise would be a cover for making the world safe for smokable Tobacco products!

They got all bent out of shape over Coca's market threat to Tobacco.  Both the AMA and of course the USDA were especially concerned over the use of Coca as a Tobacco habit cure.  Calling it a 'habit forming menace'.

Yet the same officials were OK with Tobacco laced with arsenic?

And they have that attitude right at the time that Tobacco cigarette sales began their big upturn in popularity right after the enactment of the 1906 U.S. 'Pure' Foods and Drug Act.

Was that any wonder?

The 1906 Act was a scam.

It established the idea of bureaucrats deciding what supposedly constituted legitimate medicine and diet.

Drug and particularly food products could be banned from interstate commerce if containing dangerous or deleterious ingredients.

Sounded OK.  Yet was not because it lacked any requirement for any scientific basis.  Something was simply dangerous or deleterious because the Bureau of Chemistry of the USDA merely said so.  That Bureau of course being headed by Harvey Wiley

Wiley clearly abused the 1906 Act with prosecutions for "adulteration" against products sold as foods for containing supposedly dangerous or deleterious ingredients that the Act hardly banned, as it required such ingredients as Opium and cocaine to be labeled.   Of course a manufacturer of a beverage sold as food could have labeled the cocaine content, but that hardly would guarantee that Wiley's USDA would not bring about a prosecution for "adulteration.  The labeling requirement was somewhat reasonable- should not the public know the presence and proportion of ingredients, particularly those that are classifiable as drugs?  But it was inconsistent.  If Opium and cocaine had to be labeled than so should caffeine and of course nicotine.  Requiring only the labeling of the former but not the latter would present the idea that the former were of concern but not he latter, and hence that the former were more dangerous then the latter.  So many manufacturers opened themselves up to mislabeling prosecutions for failing to label the opium or cocaine content, while others got scared and eliminated such from their formulations- all serving to fuel the false idea that such drugs were somehow unacceptably dangerous as dilute ingredients.

But Wiley primarily or entirely had reserved such "adulteration" prosecutions against products sold as foods rather than as drugs.  Thus for the latter, the American Medical Association and the American Pharmaceutical Association addressed such drug products via 'model legislation for the various States to make such available by a physician's prescription only, and as well requiring such prescriptions to be non-refillable- thus over riding medical independence.

Marking their particular "concern" over Coca's market threat to Tobacco were a pair of AMA and USDA articles in 1910  that cited Coca's use as a Tobacco Habit Cure.

The former, published that January 1, 1910 in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) 'Pharmacology' review (at pp 63-64 of Volume LIV, Number 1), was “Coca Bola and Oxy-Tonic: Two Nostrums Exposed by the Chemists of the North Dakota Agricultural Experiment Station” by E.F. Ladd, a chemist at the North Dakota Agricultural Experiment Station, attempted to discredit such a use.

The latter, published April 20, 1910 in the USDA's Farmer's Journal, was, "Habit-Forming Agents: Their Indiscriminate Sale and Use A Menace to the Public Welfare" by L.F. Kebler:

Both included baseless statements against cocaine in any amount.  The latter even argued against de-cocainated coca or the mere use of the word coca as if somehow triggering drug addicts to resume their former distributive habits.

Though both articles, particularly the AMA article targeted coca as a Tobacco habit Cure, they contained no acknowledgment of what the AMA's L.F. Kebler, the author of that AMA article had acknowledged before a US Congressional Committee, that Tobacco often contained dangerous levels of arsenic.

Now that's an ironic name "Kebler" when my name is "Kleber".

So the AMA and its hack L.F. Kebler was OK with arsenic laced Tobacco being protected from Coca leaf.  How nice.  Arsenic laced Tobacco not even mentioned as a 'habit forming menace' despite the enormous loss of life and monetary costs of Tobacco induced illnesses.

How can anyone have blind faith in such a medical 'professions'.

Coca as a Tobacco Cure was a major but hardly the only labeled claim that incensed Wiley's market control clique.

So to further increase his drug market control clique's power, Wiley then further abused the 1906 Act with 'mislabeling' prosecutions for products that made therapeutic claims, never-mind the long established histories of such product's ingredients for such therapeutic uses.  Wiley was establishing the idea of a government bureaucracy monopolization upon what supposedly constituted acceptable medical practices, and doing so with the full collusion of the American Medical Association and the American Pharmaceutical Association.  He would lose on this misuse of the 1906 Act in a 1911 U.S. Supreme Court case, as he was simply inventing 'law'.

The U.S. Congress would subsequently pass the Shirley Amendment banning fraudulent claims that were made intentionally.   However, the cause of medical monopolization required something more, namely the centralization of the bureaucratization in declaring what constituted legitimate medicine on the Federal- National level.   This lead to a further path of amending the 1906 Act, bringing about that disaster that was enacted in 1914- the Harrison 'Narcotics' Tax Act.

Ostensibly, that was merely a taxing provision for the distribution of certain substances, to wit Opium, Coca leaves and their derivatives, with anyone so involved this requiring a license to do so legally.   Though promoted as a 'narcotics' act, it notably did not even necessarily apply to all Opioids, as it exempted products containing low levels of Opium, morphine or heroin, though notably not for anything containing any amount of cocaine alkaloid, which is a stimulant and anesthetic and not a narcotic.  So anyone seeking any use of any cocaine containing product or a product containing above a certain amount of recognized Opioids would then have to visit a doctor for a prescription.

There was some questioning of this Act as it was being debated in the U.S. Congress, being recognized as a way to require physician visits and prescriptions for what was previously over the counter, and even as weirdly hypocritical for excluding Tobacco, with one Senator then noting its severe toll on health and even its link to cancer- which many pretend was not recognized until later.

But it was a slyly worded Act, designed to bring about this centralization of bureaucratization in declaring what constituted legitimate medicine.  It did this with a pair of provisions, restricting anything containing cocaine and anything containing about a certain amount of Opioids to "professional practice only", while leaving the determination of what that definition to the U.S. Department of Treasury.

 "Nothing contained in this section shall apply . . . to the dispensing or distribution of any of the aforesaid drugs to a patient by a physician, dentist, or veterinary surgeon registered under this Act in the course of his professional practice only." ⁶

" That the Commissioner of Internal Revenue, with the approval of the Secretary of the Treasury, shall make all needful rules and regulations for carrying the provisions of this Act into effect."

Notably the 1914 Act continued to allow over the counter preparations containing low amount of opiates, but not those containing any amount of cocaine.

That the provisions of this Act shall not be construed to apply to the sale, distribution, or giving away, dispensing, or possession of preparations and remedies which do not contain more than two grains of opium, or more than one-fourth of a grain of morphine, or more than one-eighth of grain of heroin, or more than one grain of codeine, or any salt or derivative of them in one fluid ounce, or, if a solid or semi-solid preparation, in one avoirdupois ounce, or to liniments, ointments, and other preparations which contain cocaine or any of its salts or alpha or beta eucaine or any of their salts or any synthetic substitute for them: Provided, that such remedies and preparations are sold, distributed, given away, dispensed, or possessed as medicines and not for the purpose of evading the intentions and provisions of this Act. The provisions of this Act shall not apply to decocainized coca leaves or preparations made therefrom, or to other preparations of coca leaves which do not contain cocaine.

That of course was owing to the fear of Coca-dilute cocaine as competition to Tobacco.

And with the power granted to the U.S. Department of Treasury, this drug market clique had its tool to thereby effectively criminalize physicians from prescribing such products by establishing regulations requiring such prescriptions to be non-refillable.

One such regulation was T.D. 2309 disallowing refillable prescriptions.

It would be challenged in the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia case United States ex rel George B. Ashley, relator, vs. William H. Osborn and W. G. McAdoo, respondents

That regulation and thus the regulatory power of the Treasury Department would be upheld in that case by the U.S. District Chief Justice, who had served as a U.S. Congressman from 1908 until resigning in 1914 to take that judicial position, and who later became a law professor at Jesuit Georgetown University, and in 1919 co-founded what became perhaps the largest law firm for pharmaceutical, food and Tobacco industries: James Harry Covington.

His firm Covington and Burling would have as its first client the Grocery Manufacturers Association, and for decades was the nexus of the Tobacco-cigarette industry's legal strategies.

The firm would be so involved with food and drug regulatory matters to even be involved in the drug liberalization-legalization movement, with its pro bono division in 1988 taking on the charity of adopting the Drug Policy Foundation as an advisee client, then appointing an attorney known as an insurance, food and pharmaceutical industry specialist the "primary responsibility for advising the Foundation".  And of course, so far the DPF now DPA fails to answer any questions about this relationship, or say bring that attorney to one of their conferences as a panelist to discuss this Covington & Burling pro bono program.

Subsequently the firm has also participated in various law suits on behalf of various victims of the drug war, perhaps most notably Angela Raich, in the landmark case Raich v Gonzales.  That was the case  which upheld the 20th century drug market control scheme over medical freedom under the U.S. Constitution's Commerce Clause.  That would be in spite of the herbal medicine being grown and consumed upon Raich's private property.  It would rely upon the 1943 Wickard v Filmore case that upheld regulations upon wheat production and consumption upon like localized circumstances, with the Covington legal representation arguably sabotaging the case by at the onset conceding such a regulatory power and without making a strong human rights argument, thus resulting in a decision failing to adopt any balancing of individual freedoms with government interests.

Of course the propaganda campaign to demonify "Marihuana"  to enact and maintain its prohibition was and is without merit.  It is an infinitely safer substance than alcohol, let along Tobacco.  And it was primarily made illegal because in small doses allows people a clearer perspective upon things.  It is as if the Black Pope (Jesuit Superior General) at the time, Wlodimir Ledochowski took a few hits and became terrorized about the general public seeing through his political manipulations on behalf of the Continuing Roman Empire geo politics, particularly the Continuing Counter Reformation wars in Europe.  So he figured it was better to scare people away from Marijuana, and keep them numbed out on alcohol and pharmaceuticals as tranquillizers and anti depressants, even though Opioids would actually be safer.

The 1937 U.S. prohibition of Marijuana would be based upon the taxing power, as were the 1914 effective prohibitions upon Opioids and Coca-cocaine.  That would be the claimed legal basis for these prohibitions, until the 1969 case Leary v United States, which declared such a scheme unconstitutional, for violate the 5th Amendment's prohibition upon self incrimination.  Perhaps such an argument had not been made before Judge Covington, or in any of the subsequent cases that upheld the 1914 Harrison Act.

Subsequently the Commerce Clause would be adopted as the 'legality' for the continuing 20th century established drug market control scheme, under its re-codification under the 1970 U.S. Controlled Substances Act.

Of course this was all bullsh*t, as it was already recognized that the U.S. Congress lacked such a power.  And it was noted most blatantly with the means to which recreational alcoholic beverages were banned- via by a Constitutional Amendment, plus a subsequent one for its repeal. Such a set of amendments would appear to acknowledge a reality that the federal government actually lacks the power to so prohibit substances, making their mere creation and possession wholly on private property into criminal acts punishable by fines and imprisonment.

But what could be expected with a scheme upheld by a Judge who had served as one of the Congressmen who had played a role in concocting such a scheme?

Subsequently, James Harry Covington's decision would be effectively upheld in other cases.

With regulations as TD 2309, refillable and even non refillable prescriptions could be made into criminal acts, with the U.S. Treasury Department regulatory power so unencumbered it could disallow prescriptions for addiction maintenance as such was subsequently declared to not be a disease, and doctors could be arrested for writing prescriptions thus no longer recognized as valid.  Under such a pharmaceutic inquisition, doctors quickly learned not to supply opiates to addicts. In the case United States v. Doremus, 249 U.S. 86 (1919), the Supreme Court ruled the Harrison Act as constitutional, and in Webb v. United States, 249 U.S. 96, 99 (1919) that prescriptions could not be issued for narcotics solely for maintenance.

Of course all of this would be lionized in the major newspapers and magazines as essential for supporting public health.

Never-mind the gross disregard for human rights and that regarding the severe double-standard regarding Tobacco products, particularly cigarettes.  Never-mind the behavior of such AMA self styled "quack-busters" as Morris Fishbein, who advised that industry on how to better advertise their coffin nails in medical publications as The Journal of the American Medical Association.  And that of other publications as The New England Journal of Medicine, which to this day, resorts to historical revisionism lying about the relative effects of 'illicit' drugs.

Opioids had to be banned for being 'habit forming' and supposedly for being debilitating - this at the time of the explosion in the use of cigarettes!  Jheez!

Yet this Quack AMA-USDA pharma-Tobacco market protection scheme would not make the now banned drugs entirely dissappear.

Rather it would shift opioid use from bulkier products to ultra concentrated forms, and while doing so, split users into 'licit' RX and illicit black market camps.  For the former, coming up with more and more powerful new chemical versions of Opioids in order to preserve such for the PATENT MEDICINE aka pharmaceutical markets, and thereby enhancing profits.   For the latter, removing any protections of product consistency and from unwarranted adulteration, while radically driving up market prices to popularize infinitely more efficient and dangerous modes of administration, namely injection.

It would do much similarly with cocaine though less towards outright injection as cocaine by such a route is immensely distracting and brief, and simply with the creation of the illicit market as a licit market for RX controlled dose cocaine would threaten the market for the amphetamine family.

And on the broader picture would shift drug use not only away from Coca and Opium to concentrated cocaine and heroin, but as well to Tobacco-cigarettes, as obvious from a production graph appearing on page 230 of Breecher's Licit and Illicit Drugs, and an outright health disaster.

By any measure the prohibited drugs are as safe or safer than the protected drugs in like contexts.

That is as infusions or other plant perpetuation.

Even caffeine can be deadly when abused as a powder.  So we get the phenomenon of someone unintentionally killing themselves by eating say a few tea spoons of caffeine powder totally oblivious to the danger because caffeine is a legal drug.

Likewise we have the countless overdose deaths by alcoholic beverages, particularly in college fraternities all owing to the popular underestimating of the dangerous of alcohol because it is legal.

The whole idea of illegal drugs really is a mass deception and distraction from the actual relative safeties of different drugs and different forms of drugs.

That is likewise why caffeine powder is sold over the internet WITHOUT poisoning labeling.

And it is why the government recently approved concentrated POWDER alcohol.

Yet meanwhile, outside of perhaps only Bolivia beverages with any amount of cocaine are strictly illegal, with even a country as intelligent in so many ways as Germany getting bent out of shape over some batches of energy drinks with a minute amount of cocaine.

If the drug statutes had any sense they would be based upon actual pharmacokinetics, rather than a criminal Vatican directed market scheme.  Harvey Wiley after all said almost nothing about Coca and cocaine during his first 20 years as head of the USDA Bureau of Chemistry.  It was only by about mid 1904 that he adopted the political campaign at demonifying cocaine without regard to dosage or concentration factors, which was mere months after the 2nd and final time the Vatican summoned Coca wine entrepreneur Angelo Francois Mariani to award him a gold papal medal as a benefactor of humanity for making coca available to the world- the same award seen in the movie Godfather III.  Obviously there was some falling out between Mariani and the Vatican, and the drug war was their response.

And it is not simply a matter of promoting more dangerous recreation drugs over safer one and perverting safer ones into infinity more dangerous forms as with opium and coca, thus driving the need for overpriced 'drug treatment'.

Its a perversion of medicine itself starting by stigmatizing God given herbs as so called quackery, while protecting and promoting synthetic PATENT MEDICINES for bloated pharmaceutical corporation profiteering.

Of course such PATENT MEDICINES have to go through the FDA process as they have no history of use, and are generally far far more toxic.  That's why they have so many side effects.

The side effects can be quite scary and may outnumber and be well more significant that the effect desired by taking the substance.

But that is an important part of the medical-pharmaceutical racket, as such leads to so much added work.

Just think about all of the extra work in surgery for correcting problems brought about by prescription pharma toxicity, such as colon operations to remove precancerous lesions caused by such drugs.   

Or extra work in psychiatry and even face lifts from those dependent upon FDA approved anti-depressants with their side effects of anesthetizing themselves from empathy and vastly prematurely aging faces such as by relaxing their lower facial muscles- practices that become even worse with the off label use of surgical grade pharmaceuticals used as recreational relaxants.


Just take a look at the half century of medical journals following the 1906 and 1914 substance control acts to see how the emerging 20th century medical quackery was all about maximizing profits including by creating new problems..  Full of advertisements for Tobacco cigarettes featuring models dressed as white coated physicians!

That caused a huge spike in cancer.  And the medical-quackery industry loves racking in the money "treating" but not necessarily curing cancer.  It's really a huge money maker.  And they really hate all of these medicinal Marijuana stories, especially those of people indeed children being successfully treated with Cannabis Oil, that FDA approved PATENT MEDICINES fail at doing.

THAT seriously undermines the medical-pharmaceutical money making process, not only with that but potentially with a re popularization of proprietary herbal based medicinal preparations in general.

Such explains the actions of U.S. Presidents Richard Nixon and his successor Gerald Ford in this regard.

Look at what they did.

The Schaeffer Commission recommended legalizing Marijuana.  Yet Nixon, a perverse 'puritan' that admired Russia with its vast protectionism of hard alcohol (Vodka) and Tobacco cigarettes,  ignored that.

Ford, that complete tool, attempted to have it proven that Marijuana must cause lung cancer because it is smoked as are cigarettes.  Yet when the clinical studies showed otherwise- not that it simply did not cause cancer but in fact cured it, Ford has the results suppressed.

Think of all the costs in monetary figure and human misery.

Think of all of those pitches for cancer research- about all of it going to big pharma to figure out expensive new patent medicine schemes to bilk the public out of billion for remedies that really don't work.

The last thing they want is a cure for cancer, especially one that is not even a PATENT MEDICINE, but rather a plant that anyone can grow and which can be easily synthesized into a life saving oil taken orally or topically.  They hate that as they can make only a relatively small mount of money on that.

It is all about bilking the public.  Just look at the history of the AMA- dedicated since its 1847 founding to maximize its interest's profits.  It was the AMA that worked against competitive pricing.  Against advertising rates, as if customers should not know what something is going to cost before becoming committed.  And for reducing the number of doctors to drive up rates, all serving to make health care way more expensive.

And it was the AMA and its clique that received the support of the so called 'Progressive' political movement, as if that was a decision made by intelligent people discussing and debating the issues out in the open rather than being manipulated like puppets on a string by the elites?!

So why do you think that we have this great crisis in health care costs?

Just look at the massive over-charging of patients in my own backyard: that very hospital associated with my Columbia University, Columbia Presbyterian, which is that massive complex overlooking the south side of the George Washington Bridge.

Guess what they charge per day for their intensive care unit?   The actual cost is about $6,200 daily.  But we charge, get this, $112,000.00 daily!  Think about that!  A brand new 691 hp Tesla PER DAY, upon a 2000% profit!

People complain about doctor's fees, but those may be by far the most reasonable.  One can spend $35,000 on surgeon fees for an open chest procedure.  Yet Columbia Presbyterian gets $25,000 just for the use of the operating room!

Hospitalization that should cost no more than $100,000.00 total ends up costing nearly $1,000,000,000.00.  ONE MILLION DOLLARS.

Hopefully for the patient's sake, he or she does not get a second heart attack from receiving the bill.

Many don't because much of the public is hoodwinked.  As they see it, it's almost entirely paid by Medicare or Medicaid, so who cares?

Never-mind that they can go after you house and other property once you die.

It is as if political figures as Hillary Clinton sold their souls to some sort of brotherhood that protects them and advances their careers with some sort of Black magic to intellectually anesthetize much of the general public.

It is under such a situation that we now have this whole push for health care insurance, whether as Hillarycare, Obamacare or even Romneycare: both the Ds and the Rs are bought and paid for,.

Why after all that such deliberations crafting such held secretly?  Why did not Hillary Clinton INSIST that her meetings with the pharmaceutical and insurance industry representatives be TELEVISED.  God, we could use an excellent pharmaceutical and insurance attorney from somewhere to blow the lid on this charade.

We could sure use a proper use of such intellectual muscle for changing this situation.

We must free all the prisoners of the drug war, and award each monetary compensation for the unjust deprivation of their liberty.

We could sure use a shake up of the U.S. Supreme Court.

FIRE that Papist Pig 'Justice' Scalia.  And if the NSA can offer up some incriminating communications of his, perhaps taking orders from the Vatican or its interest, have him prosecuted.  And if not, deport his ass back to Vatican City to which he owes his loyalty.

And sooner than later, encourage that false Jew as Ruth Bader Ginsberg to retire.  She makes no sense for strongly supporting the drug war with her belief that the total sum of medical liberty is abortion.  Give her a one way ticket to Vatican City, as it's the Roman Catholic Church that gave us this utterly immoral drug war.

Ending the drug war, providing restitution to the victims is essential!

And so is having the U.S. Justice Department throw the book at the American Medical Association.  Never has there been such a harmful organization of quacks imposing their perverted will upon and getting over upon the general public.  That organization is a major economic vampire.

Just imagine a scheme to get people to buy overpriced coal tar rather than natural food- just is the essence of our scare campaign against things as Cannabis in favor of all sorts of synthetic PATENTABLE chemicals from Ritalin to whatever we can come up with that has far greater toxicity, side effects and costs!

Until then there can be no cost effective way of addressing our health care crisis, and fixing our economy.