Yale's Dave Musto Dead at 74

Confirmed Coca and Vin Mariani's safety when asked in 1993, yet wrote numerious Readers' Digest type pieces blurring the history of Coca and cocaine, confusing the issue and thereby helping sustain this destructive criminal mercantilism

From Phillip Smith - Stop the Drug War

http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/2010/oct/15/pioneering_drug_policy_historian

Dr. David Musto, who chronicled the history of US drug policy in 1973's The American Disease: The Origins of Narcotics Control, died last Friday of an apparent heart attack while traveling in China. The Yale University child psychologist and Carter administration drug policy advisor was 74.

Dr. David MustoThe American Disease offered a comprehensive treatment of American drug use and drug policy from the Civil War years to the present and is to this day a key text in the history of US drug policy. In it Musto, uncovered the historical correlation between public and official outrage over certain drugs and their use by feared or hated communities.

After its initial publication in 1973, New York Times book reviewer James Markham wrote that it would "probably become mandatory reading for anyone who wants to understand how we got into our present mess." It was reissued and updated in 1987 and again in 1999.

Upon publication of The American Disease, Musto was named a presidential drug policy advisor. In 1978, President Jimmy Carter appointed him to the White House Strategy Council on Drug Abuse.

Musto also wrote, with Pamela Korsmeyer, The Quest for Drug Control, and was editor of One Hundred Years of Heroin and Drugs in America: A Documentary History.

Musto's historical research led him to adopt nuanced positions on drug policy that sometimes angered drug warriors and sometimes disappointed drug reformers. He was critical of employee drug testing programs, skeptical of the efficacy of needle exchange programs, and supported methadone maintenance for heroin addicts. He also complained about the impulse among the public and officials to seek quick and simple solutions to the complex problem of proper drug policy.

Musto died in Shanghai. He was in China to attend a ceremony honoring the donation of his books and papers to Shanghai University and the creation of the Center for International Drug Control Policy at the university.

Shanghai
China

Here's his bio from Yale:

http://www.yale.edu/history/faculty/musto.html

Dr. David F. Musto is the leading historian of drug policy in the United States. He is the author of four major works on drug regulation in America: The American Disease: Origins of Narcotic Control (Oxford 3d ed. 1999), One Hundred Years of Heroin (Auburn 2002), Drugs In America: A Documentary History (NYU 2002), and The Quest for Drug Control (Yale 2002). He has been a member of the Yale Medical School faculty since 1969. His research has centered on social history, particularly the development of policies involving alcohol, narcotics, AIDS, the family and mental health.

Dr. Musto has investigated many areas touching on history and medicine and has been called upon to serve the nation in various capacities including membership on the White House Strategy Council on Drug Abuse Policy during the Carter administration, membership from 1981 to 1990 on the National Council of the Smithsonian Institution and as historical consultant to the Presidential Commission on the Human Immunodeficiency Virus Epidemic.

Dr. Musto is a charter Fellow of the College on Problems of Drug Dependence, and a member of the alcohol advisory committee of the National Association of Broadcasters. Dr. Musto has published widely in professional journals and is particularly noted for his study of drug policy. His essays on social issues have appeared in the general media such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times and Washington Post and he has been featured as a commentator on social policy by news magazines and television networks. In 1992 he hosted and narrated the NOVA (public television science series) program, "Can You Stop People from Drinking?" Dr. Musto received the B.A. in classical languages in 1956 and in 1963 the M.D. degree from the University of Washington, and the M.A. from Yale in 1961.

Here's Yale's announcemnt of his death:

http://dailybulletin.yale.edu/article.aspx?id=7888

Dr. David F. Musto, the leading historian of drug policy in the United States died Oct. 8 while in Shanghai for a ceremony marking the donation of his books and papers on the history of drug policy to Shanghai University and the establishment there of a Center for International Drug Control Policy Studies.

Musto had been a member of the Yale faculty since 1969. He was internationally recognized as an historian of drug policy, and as a public intellectual interested in the long-term development of social issues, especially the history of controlled substances such as heroin, cocaine, and including alcohol. At Yale he was professor of child psychiatry in the Child Study Center and professor of the history of medicine at the School of Medicine. He was also a lecturer in the Department of History and the Program in American Studies, and a core faculty member in the Program in the History of Science and Medicine.

Musto received a B.A. in classical languages in 1956 and in 1963 an M.D., both from the University of Washington. While a medical student, he was awarded a fellowship by Yale to study the history of science and medicine and received an M.A. from Yale in 1961. Musto interned at the Pennsylvania Hospital, Philadelphia, and then served as a resident physician in psychiatry at Yale, completing his training in 1967. Following residency, he served in the U.S. Public Health Service as special assistant to the director of the National Institute of Mental Health until 1969. He concurrently held the position of visiting assistant professor of history at the Johns Hopkins University.

In his research on the social history of policies involving alcohol, narcotics, AIDS and mental health, he cultivated a vigorous dialogue between past and present. He published widely in professional journals and is particularly known for his path-breaking study of drug policy, "The American Disease: Origins of Narcotic Control," published first in 1973; the volume has been in print (in multiple editions) ever since. His other books explored such subjects as the history of heroin and a documentary history of drugs and alcohol in America. His essays on social issues appeared in the general media such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post, and he was much in demand as a commentator on social policy by news magazines and television networks.

He was a member of the White House Strategy Council on Drug Abuse Policy during the Carter administration, historical adviser to the U.N. Commission on Narcotic Drugs from 1978 to 1980, a member of the National Council of the Smithsonian Institution from 1981 to 1990, and historical consultant to the Presidential Commission on the Human Immunodeficiency Virus Epidemic. He also served on the National Advisory Committee of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's program to combat drug and alcohol abuse, was a charter fellow of the College on Problems of Drug Dependence and was a member of the alcohol advisory committee of the National Association of Broadcasters.

At Yale he was a fellow of Davenport College, a member of the editorial advisory committee of the Yale Editions of the Private Papers of James Boswell, an active member of the Beaumont Medical Club, and curator of historical scientific instruments at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History.

Musto's passions ranged from the Sherlock Holmes Society (a Baker Street Irregular, he presided over a talk each year at Yale that would relate Holmes to some larger issue, followed by a film screening, usually starring Basil Rathbone), to the preservation of the Grove Street Cemetery. He was known as a gifted storyteller with a dry sense of humor, who was admired by both his colleagues and the students in his popular Yale College lecture course, "Alcohol and Other Drugs in American Culture." He was a member of the Standing Committee of the Grove Street Cemetery, where he will be buried.

Musto is survived by his wife Jeanne. Their four children include: Jeanne-Marie Musto of Sewanee, Tennessee; David Musto, wife Katie and children Kyle, Jonah and Hazel of Philadelphia; John Musto and wife Francesca of New York City; and Christopher Musto, wife Moriah and child Callum of Boston.

A memorial service will be held at noon on Dec. 18 in Dwight Chapel, 67 High St.

Jesuitical Drug Policy Treason

From my unpublished manuscript "Coca Forgotten Medicine"

A Foreign Military Order's Un-Constitutional Rule & Treason to Humanity through the Jesuit Order Run Georgetown University, the U.S. State Department and the National Institute [for promoting] Drug Abuse

The allegiance to the drug control status quo was prevalent from the onset throughout the Clinton Administration’s bureaucracies, as has been the case with either the Democrat or Republican Parties throughout the 1900s. I found it typified by two Washington, D.C. meetings held on successive days in July 1993, some 6 months into the then new Clinton Administration, with the official presentations and responses at the Q&A sessions indicating how truth was beholden to this false ideology.

The first of these events was a plenary panel organized by the U.S. State Department and the like-wise Jesuit Order run Georgetown University Center for Strategic and International Studies. The second one was a workshop panel held during the multi-day conference by the National Institute of Drug Abuse (N.I.D.A.).

The State Department-Georgetown University event was titled "Multilateralism and Drugs", and was held July 15, 1993 at the Rayburn U.S. House of Representatives Office Building. Its speakers included Yale University’s David Musto, and Timothy E. Wirth, U.S. President Clinton’s appointee as Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs.

David Musto

At this event, Musto admitted a fact that he would leave out of his Readers' Digest style articles: that dilute cocaine alkaloid containing Coca beverages such as Vin Mariani, were not problematic.

Tim Wirth

Wirth, previously a U.S. Representative and later a Senator from Colorado, was described as the Clinton Administration’s point man on everything from refugees to global warming, and described in glowing terms by newspapers such as The Washington Post, as a “reformer”, was there to give a speech titled “New Approaches to Global Drug Problems”. So I figured that he would be a good person to ask about the Coca issue, which I did at that panel’s Q and A period:

Douglas Willinger- Question: Sir, you mentioned crop eradication -- Coca eradication -- as the solution but have you consider the alternative. Instead of crop substitution, why not cocaine conversion- that is, remove the things creating this bad situation, having coca tea in supermarkets rather than crack in the streets. Indeed, sir, what about Bolivia's recent proposal to review the effects of Coca, and adjusting the laws accordingly if need be?

Timothy Wirth- Answer: Did I talk about crop eradication? Do I have to answer that? You sound like one of those Hemp people! Next question.

The NIDA event, a workshop panel Update on Drugs- Cocaine and Stimulants, was held at the second day of the U.S. N.I.D.A. National Conference on Drug Abuse Research and Practice; An Alliance for the 21st Century. It featured a number of speakers, including a Dr. Millwood, all testifying to the dangers of cocaine. One of the presenters spoke about brain damage with combined cocaine and alcohol use, including its metabolization of cocaethyline. All in all, while their prognosis upon cocaine was negative, I heard little to no mention of actual doses. From memory, as NIDA is uncooperative with public requests for such transcripts:

Douglas Willinger- Question: Question of dosage and paradigm. You speak of the dangers of cocaine and alcohol, but could you please elaborate as to the dosages? What stimulant would not be harmful in such does? Is cocaine itself anymore toxic as asides from the concentrated forms as developed under prohibition.

Dr. Millwood- Answer: About 1 ¼ gallon of vodka and an eight ball of pharmaceutical grade cocaine hci snorted in one night. Well, uh yes, we just don't think it's that important, let's change the subject, okay?!

In other words, cocaine was a highly toxic-addictive drug in doses dangerous with any stimulant. They had no showing that it was anymore toxic then other naturally occurring stimulants caffeine and nicotine, in like contexts. Cocaine, Caffeine and Nicotine are all alkaloids that serve as CNS stimulants found in minute amounts in such plants as Coca, Coffee and Tobacco.

As licit drugs, they are taken through the use of the parent substance, or in isolated form in a mode of delivery of a pharmaceutical preparation, e.g. caffeine as No Doz or Vivarin tablets largely consisting of mannitol, and more recently various nicotine chewing gums and patches.

As an illicit drug under a prohibition of Coca leaves and cocaine, with penalties based upon the contraband’s gross weight, the amount of cocaine use is significantly reduced, but the amount of cocaine taken per dose may be higher, with the concentration definitely far higher in doses of the type more akin to produce the big bang favored by these drug law’s economics, with prohibition driving up concentration and prices hence promoting the justification for the price- e.g. spending $50 or $100 for a chewing gum package sized foil of white powder is more justified by the pronounced effects of doses that are more dangerous in every way: larger more concentrated and more direct.

And this is popularly supported as somehow fighting drug abuse!

Such a drug policy regimen that suppresses a safer substance for the sake of a one intrinsically dangerous, that is the adulterated, misbranded cigarettes undeniably benefited by this criminal mercantilism, underwent no visible criticism within the room where Mr. Wirth brushed aside my question. This was also so in the room where Dr. Millwood would answer my question about the amount of cocaine needed to produce the toxicities he discussed, but not answer my second question about the silence in the drug abuse research industry over maintains the drug control policy that stops Coca while promoting concentrated cocaine. One could only imagine if either Wirth and Millwood, nor the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services N.I.D.A. had even given any thought about whether such anti-Coca leaf policies were reconcilable with any stance respecting either the public's health, let alone the human rights of the millions of Andeans who consider Coca eradication an infringement upon their individual and their cultural rights, in this day and age of moral certainty. I suppose they simply care less for that then appeasing their masters that gave them their jobs.

Georgetown University's Jesuit Order's Underappreciated 20th Century Role

David Musto's Over Simplicity

From my unpublished manuscript "Coca Forgotten Medicine"

Yale University's Over-Simplistic Accounts of History

The standard explanation of cocaine's volatile reputation at the time, portrayed it as a simple repeat of the events a century earlier, when Americans had seen cocaine favorably before experiencing its dark side and learned its lesson. Such was how it was defined by "the country's leading researcher on the cyclical history of American drug epidemics," Yale University professor of psychiatry and the history of medicine -- as described by the November 24, 1986 People magazine -- David Musto. As that article showcasing this mass-media popular conception of the history of the nation's relationship with cocaine elaborated:

"While the recent infatuation with drugs, especially cocaine may seem unique in the nation's history, Musto points out that what we are seeing is actually a repeat performance."

He goes on to say that "the recent discovery of cocaine's dangers were but a rediscovery, with recent history largely a mirror of the discoveries of cocaine's dangers a century previously, when the perception of cocaine was often favorable. For it was during the 1880s that numerous companies began supplying cocaine in various ways, enthusiastically promoting it almost as a panacea, and brewing up a storm of controversy. Advocated for a variety of ailments, "cocaine" was reportedly safe, effective, or a downright dangerous (and perniciously seductive) poison, depending upon who you read.

For me, this explanation had too many loose ends to suffice. Surely anti-cocaine sentiment came from viewing its abuse- such as the epidemic of crack.

But Musto's hypothesis was too simplistic; it did not explain a volatile reputation's evolution that was hardly linear: though it could be said that cocaine was first seen as good before being seen as bad, it was equally true that cocaine was seen favorably, and continued to be seen favorably by many others afterward: a reality not only in the 1970s when seemingly "recalled" in favorable terms, but during the preceding century.

Though condemned during the later 1880s, particularly in the disasters of Sigmund Freud's friend who became severely addicted, suffering horrible effects of cocaine poisoning, praise concerning the drug was not necessarily so short-lived; in fact, this praise extended twenty years earlier and later with the cocaine-containing products so available since the 1860s, specifically the wine of coca seen favorable including amongst the most prestigious, for the half century leading to 1914.

Said praise emanated throughout the medical profession, and amongst government officials. Not one, but two Popes -- Leo XIII in 1898, and Pius X in 1904 -- awarded a gold papal medal to the entrepreneur most responsible for popularizing a wine containing it as a "benefactor of humanity"- Angelo Francois Mariani. Was Musto's explanation more a reflection of history, or rather, the popular conceptions of the "historian's" day?

Reading between the lines of these accounts -- pun intended -- revealed why cocaine's reputation was so volatile: the wide variety of forms and modes of its use; each of these being most dissimilar in the consequences and likelihood of their misuse, with opinions of "cocaine" so correlating with its form and mode of use.