AlterNet.org: Personal Health

Are the Young People That Shrinks Label as Disruptive Really Anarchists with a Healthy Resistance to Oppressive Authority?

Bruce E. Levine, AlterNet — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 11:40:00 -0700

Many young people diagnosed with mental disorders have acted on their beliefs in ways that threaten authorities.

Many young people diagnosed with mental disorders are essentially anarchists who have the bad luck of being misidentified by mental health professionals, who 1) are ignorant of the social philosophy of anarchism; 2) embrace, often without political consciousness, its opposite ideology of hierarchism; and 3) confuse the signs of anarchism with symptoms of mental illness.

The mass media equates anarchism with chaos and violence. However, the social philosophy of anarchism rejects authoritarian government, opposes coercion, strives for greatest freedom, works toward “mutual aid” and voluntary cooperation, and maintains that people organizing themselves without hierarchies creates the most satisfying social arrangement. Many anarchists adhere to the principle of nonviolence (though the question of violence has historically divided anarchists in their battle to eliminate authoritarianism). Nonviolent anarchists have energized the Occupy movement and other struggles for economic justice and freedom.

In practice, anarchism is not a dogmatic system. So for example, “practical anarchist” parents will use their authority to grab their child who has begun to run out into traffic. However, practical anarchists strongly believe that all authorities have the burden of proof to justify control, and that most authorities in modern society cannot bear that burden and are thus illegitimate—and should be eliminated and replaced by noncoercive, freely participating relationships.

My experience as a clinical psychologist for almost three decades is that many young people labeled with psychiatric diagnoses are essentially anarchists in spirit who are pained, anxious, depressed, and angered by coercion, unnecessary rules, and illegitimate authority. An often-used psychiatric diagnosis for children and adolescents is oppositional defiant disorder (ODD); its symptoms include “often actively defies or refuses to comply with adult requests or rules” and “often argues with adults.”

Among young people diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), psychologist Russell Barkley, one of mainstream mental health’s leading ADHD authorities, says that they have deficits in “rule-governed behavior,” as they are less responsive to rules of authorities and less sensitive to positive or negative consequences. A frequently used research tool that distinguishes alcohol/drug abuser personalities was developed by Craig MacAndrew, and is commonly called the MAC scale. It reveals that the most significant “addictive personality type” have discipline problems at school, are less tolerant of boredom, are less compliant with authorities and some laws, and engage in more disapproved sexual practices.

I have encountered many people who had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and other psychoses, and who are now politically conscious anarchists, including Sascha Altman DuBrul, author of Maps to the Other Side: The Adventures of a Bipolar Cartographer. DuBrul, several times diagnosed with bipolar disorder, has lived in rebel communities in Mexico, Central America and Manhattan’s Lower East Side, worked on community farms, participated in Earth First! road blockades and demonstrated on the streets in the Battle for Seattle. He reports that many of his anti-authoritarian friends also have been diagnosed with mental illness.

Teenagers, as evidenced by their musical tastes, often have an affinity for anti-authoritarianism, but most do not act on their beliefs in a manner that would make them vulnerable to violent reprisals by authorities. However, I have found that many young people diagnosed with mental disorders—perhaps owing to some combination of integrity, fearlessness, and naïvity—have acted on their beliefs in ways that threaten authorities. Historically in American society, there is often a steep price paid by those who have this combination of integrity, fearlessness, and naïvity.

While DuBrul and his friends have political consciousness, my experience is that most rebellious young people diagnosed with mental disorders do not, and so they become excited to hear that there is actual political ideology that encompasses their point of view. They immediately become more whole after they discover that answering “yes” to the following questions does not mean that they suffer from a mental disorder, but instead have a certain social philosophy:

Do you hate coercion and domination?
Do you love freedom?
Are you willing to risk punishments to gain freedom?
Do you instinctively distrust large, impersonal and distant authorities?
Do you think people should organize themselves rather than submit to authorities?
Do you dislike being either an employer or an employee?
Do you smile after reading the Walt Whitman quote “Obey little, resist much”?

Young people who oppose inequality and exploitation, reject a capitalist economy, and aim for a society based on cooperative, mutually owned enterprise are essentially left-anarchists—perhaps calling themselves “anarcho-syndicalists” or “anarcho-communitarians.” When they discover what Noam Chomsky, Peter Kropotkin, Kirkpatrick Sale, or Emma Goldman have to say, they may identify with these thinkers. These young people have a strong moral streak of egalitarianism and a desire for social and economic justice. Not only are they not mentally ill but, from my perspective, they are the hope of society.

There is another group of freedom-loving young people who hate the coercion of parents, schools, and the state but lack an egalitarian moral streak, and are very much into money and capitalism. Some of them may have been dragged into the mental health system after having been caught drug dealing, and are labeled with conduct disorder and/or a personality disorder. While these young people rebel against they themselves being controlled and exploited, many of them are not averse to controlling and exploiting others, and so are not anarchists, but some have spiritual transformations and become so.

An Underground Resistance for Oppressed Young Anarchists

There are at least two ways that mental health professionals can join the resistance: 1) speak out about the political role of mental health institutions in maintaining the status quo in society; and 2) depathologize and repoliticize rebellion in one’s clinical practice, which includes helping young anarchists navigate an authoritarian society without becoming self-destructive or destructive to others, and helping families build respectful, non-coercive relationships.

If a nonviolent anarcho-communitarian (politically conscious or otherwise) is dragged by parents into my office for failing to take school seriously but is otherwise pleasant and excited by learning, I tell parents I do not believe there is anything essentially “disordered” with their child. This sometimes gets me fired, but not all that often. It is my experience that most parents may think that believing a society can function without coercion is naive but they agree it’s not a mental illness, and they’re open to suggestions that will create greater harmony and joy within their family.

I work hard with parents to have them understand that their attempt to coerce their child into taking school seriously not only has failed—that's why they’re in my office—but will likely continue to fail. And increasingly, the pain of their failed coercion will be compounded by the pain of their child’s resentment, which will destroy their relationship with their child and create even more family pain. Many parents acknowledge that this resentment already exists. I ask liberal parents, for example, if they would try to coerce a homosexual child into being heterosexual or vice versa, and most say, “Of course not!” And so they begin to see that temperamentally anarchist children cannot be similarly coerced without great resentment.

It has been my experience that many rebellious young people labeled with psychiatric disorders and substance abuse don’t reject all authorities, simply those they’ve assessed to be illegitimate ones, which just happens to be a great deal of society’s authorities. Often, these young people are craving a relationship with mutual respect in which they can receive help navigating the authoritarian society around them.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control on May 17, 2013, in “Mental Health Surveillance Among Children—United States, 2005–2011,” reported: “A total of 13%–20% of children living in the United States experience a mental disorder in a given year, and surveillance during 1994–2011 has shown the prevalence of these conditions to be increasing.”

Is there an epidemic of childhood mental illness, or is there a curious revolt? My experience is that many young Americans, feeling helpless, hopeless, bored, scared, misunderstood, and uncared about, ultimately rebel; but given their wherewithal, their rebellion is often disorganized, futile, self-destructive, and appears to mental health professionals as a disorder or illness. Underlying many of psychiatry's diagnoses is the experience of helplessness, hopelessness, boredom, fear, isolation, and dehumanization. Does society, especially for young people, promote:

Respectful personal relationships—or manipulative impersonal ones?
Empowerment—or helplessness?
Autonomy (self-direction)—or heteronomy (institutional-direction)?
Participatory democracy—or authoritarian hierarchies?
Diversity and stimulation—or homogeneity and boredom?

Emotional and behavioral problems are often natural human reactions to a society that cares little about: 1) autonomy—self-direction and the experience of potency; 2) community—strong bonds that provide for economic security and emotional satisfaction; and 3) humanity—the variety of ways of being human, the variety of satisfactions, and the variety of negative reactions to feeling controlled rather than understood. Young anarchists are especially sensitive to American society’s absence of autonomy, community, and humanity—and this can result in overwhelming anxiety and depression.

While giant pharmaceutical corporations promote psychiatry’s authority as a vehicle for increased drug sales, the whole of the corporate state supports psychiatry so as to maintain the status quo. In the old Soviet Union, political dissidents were diagnosed by psychiatrists as mentally ill, then hospitalized and drugged. Even more effective for those at the top of the hierarchy is what now occurs in the United States: diagnosing and treating anti-authoritarians before they have reached political consciousness and before they have created communities of resistance.

One reason that there is so little political activism in the United States is that a potentially huge army of anti-authoritarians are being depoliticized by mental illness diagnoses and by attributions that their inattention, anger, anxiety, and despair are caused by defective biochemistry, not by their alienation from a dehumanizing society. These diagnoses and attributions make them less likely to organize democratic movements to transform society.

In the early 19th century in the United States, a network of secret routes, conductors, and safe houses were used by African Americans to escape from slavery. This network was commonly called the Underground Railroad, organized by runaway slaves, free African-American abolitionists, and white abolitionists. Today, communities of ex-psychiatric patients (see MindFreedom and the Icarus Project) are helping young anti-authoritarians resist their mental illness labeling and coercive treatments. There are also a handful of mental health professional dissident organizations that, while not promoting the social philosophy of anarchism, do oppose dehumanizing diagnoses and coercive treatments (for example, the International Society for Ethical Psychology and Psychiatry).

While there are career risks for modern-day mental health professional dissidents, these are small risks compared with those taken by slavery abolitionists. So as a mental health professional, I find it quite embarrassing that there are so few professionals involved in the current resistance. In American history, there have been several shameful periods where groups—including Native Americans, homosexuals and assertive women—have been pathologized, dehumanized and given oppressive treatments by mental health professionals in an attempt to alter their basic being. Today’s psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, and counselors would do well to recognize that historians do not look kindly on those professionals who participated in institutional dehumanization and oppression.

911 Callers Who Report Overdoses Shouldn't Get Hit with Drug Charges

Tessie Castillo, AlterNet — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 10:28:00 -0700

New laws seek to encourage life-saving 911 calls by protecting people who overdose or call for help from drug charges.

Most people wouldn’t hesitate to call 911 if a loved one was having a heart attack. During those moments of panic and fear, it’s comforting to reach for the phone where a calm voice on the other end assures us help is on the way.

Unfortunately, when it comes to America’s fastest growing public health crisis, drug overdose, calling for help is not always a viable option. Because many, though not all, overdoses involve illicit substances or mis-used prescription medications, seeking help can result in the arrest of both caller and victim for possession of drugs and paraphernalia. Studies show that fewer than half of overdose witnesses call 911 for fear of legal repercussions, and those who do often pay the price behind bars. Many choose not to seek help, hoping the victim will recover without aid. It’s a dangerous game of Russian roulette, one with tens of thousands of casualties annually.

Drug overdose now claims 36,000 lives a year in the United States (more than car accidents and murder combined), and people are beginning to recognize the implications of a dilemma in which the risk of a friend’s death must be weighed against the instinct for self-preservation. In response, 12 states and the District of Columbia have enacted 911 Good Samaritan laws, legislation that grants limited immunity from some drug crimes to people who experience an overdose or call for help. New Mexico blazed the first trail in 2007, followed by a swift succession of laws passed in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island, and Washington. The laws vary in terms of immunities, but the message is the same: saving lives is more important than making arrests.

This year nearly a dozen more states introduced bills; legislation in North Carolina, New Jersey and Vermont emerged victorious, while other bills were strangled by partisan bickering (Missouri, Mississippi and North Dakota), killed in committee (New Hampshire and West Virginia), or simply ran out of time (Hawaii and Texas). Maine’s bill was vetoed by the Governor.

Although the demise of many promising bills is unfortunate, proponents of 911 Good Samaritan laws have collected valuable lessons for future advocacy; namely, build a strong coalition, be ready when the legislative session starts, be strategic about choosing a sponsor, know your opposition and be present at legislative hearings and committees.

Perhaps no state demonstrated strong coalition-building more than New Jersey. Roseanne Scotti, state director of the New Jersey division of the Drug Policy Alliance, headed the efforts to pass a 911 Good Samaritan law in her state. Before introducing a bill in January 2012, Scotti and her team built up a large coalition of drug treatment providers, overdose prevention groups, public health organizations, law enforcement, medical providers, and parents who had lost children to a drug overdose. Each of these groups played a critical role in educating legislators, whether to reassure them that a 911 Good Samaritan bill would not encourage drug use, to demonstrate law enforcement support, or to provide heartbreaking stories of personal loss and a plea that other families be spared such pain. With broad bipartisan support, the bill rolled smoothly through the legislature to the governor’s desk, where it was promptly vetoed.

“We were shocked at Governor Christie’s veto,” says Roseanne Scotti. “He’d never voiced opposition before. He said something about not wanting to give a free pass to drug dealers, but that’s not what this bill is about.”

Disappointed but determined to press on, the coalition launched campaigns in local municipalities urging the governor to reconsider and begged the legislature to override the veto. Over the next few months, letters poured into the capital pleading for a change of heart and parents flooded the state house, passing out red roses with the names of their lost children to stunned legislators.

In the spring of 2013 their work finally paid off. Clearly chastised, Governor Christie selected another overdose-related bill that awaited signature, crossed out a few lines, and wrote in the 911 Good Samaritan language with a pen. He signed the bill into law at a well-publicized event surrounded by tearful parents and even rocker Bon Jovi, whose daughter recently survived a drug overdose.

“We succeeded because we had a strong coalition of affected families,” says Roseanne Scotti. “At the end of the day it’s about enabling legislators to understand the issue at a human level. The parents were saying, my child might be alive if we’d had this bill, but we can still save someone else’s child."

Coalition-building is integral to successful advocacy, but so is being ready when the legislative session starts. Though session lengths vary state to state, most last only a few months, so advocates who aren’t prepared early with coalition members, sponsors and a clear message might run out of time. Such was the case in Texas.

Texas native Joy Strickland, who founded Mothers Against Teen Violence, has pushed for drug policy reform ever since the tragic murder of her son in 1994. She backs 911 Good Samaritan laws as sound policy that “treats addiction as a public health problem, not a criminal one.” Joy helped build a small coalition of medical experts and affected families who worked to create professional fact sheets for distribution at the General Assembly, to practice an “elevator speech” for those quick encounters with busy legislators, and to prepare for potential opposition to the bill. As it turned out, the bill’s only foe was time. On May 9, Joy stayed up late listening to the Texas General Assembly debate bill after bill, praying they would get to hers before the midnight deadline caused all remaining bills to expire. But the clock ran out.

“We did so many things right, but we didn’t have enough time,” says Strickland. “Now that we have a bill that has gone through the process, we will be in a position to get it pre-filed next session so that is has a better chance of making it to the floor for a debate and vote.”

In addition to introducing bills early, another component of successful advocacy is to be strategic about choosing a bill sponsor or champion. A valuable lesson about sponsorship was learned in North Carolina, a state with a Republican supermajority.

“We knew that the bill sponsor would be important,” explains Robert Childs, executive director of the North Carolina Harm Reduction Coalition. “Here in the South, reputation is critical. We had a lot of progressive allies in the legislature who would have been happy to introduce this bill, but we needed someone with a strong conservative voting record to reassure the other representatives that this was not a liberal bill.”

Advocates recruited one of the more conservative senators in the legislature to introduce the bill, and consequently, it sailed through the General Assembly with little opposition. Leilani Attilio, a nurse and two-deployment veteran who advocated for the bill, recalls, “Sometimes all the legislators asked about was the sponsor. Once I told them, their faces relaxed, and they said they would support the bill.”

North Carolina’s 911 Good Samaritan bill was the first to become law in 2013, and remains the only bill in the nation to pass with an all-Republican sponsorship.

Having a strategic sponsor can relieve negative reactions to a bill, but it’s still important to know the opposition and prepare a response. Opposition can take many forms; law enforcement might push for officers’ rights to make arrests at their discretion, trial lawyers may balk at the elimination of evidence obtained at the scene of an overdose, and legislators might show concern about encouraging drug use or “letting bad guys off the hook.” In most cases the life-saving argument trumps opposition, especially when delivered by a devastated parent who has lost a child, and expert testimony by law enforcement officers, treatment providers and the medical community can assuage most legislators’ fears.

The final piece of advice for aspiring advocates is to be present at legislative hearings and committees. Committee meetings can get out of hand if legislators misinterpret the bill, fear-monger or spin off into weird hypotheticals, so having a knowledgeable advocate present to keep the discussion on point is a huge asset.

Tom Dalton and Grace Keller of Howard Center Safe Recovery in Vermont made sure to show up for every hearing on the 911 Good Samaritan bill in their state.

“We coordinated experts to testify when needed and brought in people with real world experience to tell their overdose stories,” says Grace Keller. “As they spoke you could visibly see legislators change their perspectives and understand 911 Good Samaritan laws at a deeper level.”

Vermont’s bill passed the legislature with broad support and was signed into law on June 5, 2013.

Thanks to strong advocacy efforts, three states have adopted 911 Good Samaritan laws so far this year, but much remains to be done, and not just in the 37 states that have yet to pass overdose prevention laws. Tom Dalton of Vermont points out that it’s important even for successful states to continue to advocate for broader protections for people who call 911. As the drug overdose epidemic worsens and more lives are claimed each year, 911 Good Samaritan laws may prove an integral part of efforts to turn back the tide of deaths. 2013 has been a good year for overdose prevention. Next year can be even better.

10 of the Most Lied About Drugs

Tony O'Neill, The Fix — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 10:22:00 -0700

The hysteria over drugs like Spice, bath salts and kratom is drowning out the facts.

The market for legal—or until recently legal—highs is booming. A recent report by the EU’s drug agency, for example, shows that it is currently monitoring a staggering 280 of them. What exactly are these myriad substances? Thanks in part to the media’s habit of lumping them together into one scary whole—with regular outbreaks of frenzy, such as with Bath Salts last year—they often remain shrouded in mystery and rumor.

To get closer to the truth I decided to ask Jeff Lapoint, MD, an attending physician in emergency medicine and medical toxicology at Kaiser Permanente in San Diego, who is also a former senior toxicology fellow at New York University’s Bellevue Hospital. He’s an expert who both understands these drugs’ complex chemistry and, through his work with New York City’s Poison Control, has hands-on experience of how these drugs can affect users. Despite having seen the dark side of these substances, he retains a cool head when it comes to the future of this market, recognizing that harsher laws will do nothing to help users, and that there’s no such thing as a “bad” chemical. But in their current unregulated condition—with dosing, toxicity, cuts, etc., all a crap shoot—using some of these chemicals as drugs can be very bad indeed.

Legal highs vary wildly in their effects—and have-a-go chemists are constantly developing new compounds. Trying to map such a market isn’t easy, but with Lapoint’s expertise—and some user experiences, including one or two of my own—we’ll make a start.

1. Synthetic Cannabinoids (Spice, K-2, etc.)

“Man has been smoking marijuana for 4,000 years,” says Dr. Lapoint. “That’s a pretty damn good human trial. Compare that to five years of synthetic cannabinoids. We have no idea what the long-term effects of those might be, and that’s scary.” Lapoint concedes that the debate on the medical properties of marijuana is still up for grabs, though “what you cannot argue with is marijuana’s safety.” But he warns that synthetic cannabinoids are an entirely different ball game. In fact, he says, calling this stuff “synthetic marijuana” at all is a fallacy.

Synthetic marijuana briefly took off among users who enjoyed the novelty of a legal drug that actually worked. Experiences ranged from the sublime: “I felt a very familiar sensation of ‘getting high’ exactly as if I had just hit some decent bud,” to the terrifying: “Marijuana is simply lovely. However, I consider Spice to be the lovely Mary Jane's psychotic sister that stays locked in the attic, chained to a pole and wearing a muzzle.”Synthetic cannabinoids have been sold under countless brand names; the more famous include Spice, K2 and Black Magic. As with many legal highs, the ingredients listed on the package usually comprise a selection of allegedly benign legal herbs, but lab testing tells a different story. The psychoactive effects are caused by spraying certain chemicals—most commonly JWH-018,HU-210 and CP-47/497—onto the plant material. Their active ingredients are lab-tweaked variations of THC—pot’s active ingredient—that often “do not even [structurally] look like THC anymore,” says Lapoint. “The only similarity between this stuff and marijuana is that these substances bind to cannabinoid receptors in the brain. This is worrying because we do not fully understand these receptors.” Some synthetic cannabinoids bind to these receptors up to 100 times more effectively than THC, with wildly unpredictable effects, including psychosis and depression.

Last year the US government outlawed many of the more popular synthetic cannaboids, but there is almost no end to the tweaking that can be done to THC’s chemical structure. Chances are, the next wave of “synthetic marijuana” will act even less like pot than the first. Lapoint compares the dangerous boom in these substances to the mass production of dangerous bathtub hooch during Prohibition. “The sad truth is that there is a safer substance that humankind has extensive experience with, yet it remains illegal.”

2. 2M2B

2M2B (2-methyl-2-butanol) is used primarily as a pharmaceutical or pigment solvent but has recently been popping up for sale—usually in doses of five or 10 ml—on legal high sites. It is marketed as a depressant and intoxicant, and the chatter on drug forums suggests that it’s beginning to catch on. “We don’t see it out there a lot, and my comments are purely theoretical,” Dr. Lapoint says, adding that on a purely chemical level 2M2B is a fascinating substance.

Despite these dangers, small groups of 2m2b users are posting enthusiastic reports, its nasty camphor-like taste notwithstanding. They describe an initial rush—“[7.5 ml] feels like 5 shots of vodka. Slightly wobbly, focusing becoming harder” that leads to “somewhere between benzos and ethanol.” While it remains to be seen if this compound will find mass appeal, there are at least five vendors in the UK alone. (In the world of legal highs, Britain and Europe often act as testing grounds for substances that later find popularity in the US.)It acts upon the same GABAa receptor as ethanol—the active ingredient in booze—but has some unique characteristics. “It’s not metabolized the same way that ethanol is,” Lapoint explains. “Ethanol has to be broken down by two specific enzymes in your body. We can actually block those, with Antabuse, for example. By playing with those enzymes you can even make people get an instant hangover when they drink booze.” But 2M2B is broken down differently and has one startling advantage over traditional cocktails: no hangovers. “Imagine if you could get drunk and not pay the piper,” Lapoint says. “That’s what makes it so attractive as a substance of abuse. However, it’s maybe several thousand times more potent than ethanol on the sedative/hypnotic scale, which brings up some serious risks like respiratory depression.” This makes it less booze than barbiturate.

3. Bromo Dragonfly

This extremely potent psychedelic has a small but devoted following of psychonauts. Dave Nichols’ team at Purdue Pharmaceuticals originally designed the chemical behind Bromo Dragonfly to further research the brain’s serotonin receptors, which are the targets of hallucinogenic and some prescription anti-psychotic drugs. Nichols has since expressed his regret that his work inadvertently gave rise to this dangerous legal high. Dr. Lapoint—hardly prone to “drugs are bad, m’kay” hysteria—simply describes this substance, which is sold in powder or blotter form, as “terrifying.”

Bromo Dragonfly made headlines in 2009 when it was linked to at least two deaths and several hospitalizations, after being mislabeled and sold as a different designer drug by a Chinese vendor. Even those who ingest it knowingly are liable to hit problems. “This substance just tends to produce a very gross toxic chemy feeling,” one user reports. “And I could definitely see OD'ing on Bromo Dragonfly being one of the shittiest ways to leave this world. So be safe, fellow travelers.”Users all seem to agree that Bromo Dragonfly takes a long time to kick in—up to five hours. “I dosed the same time [as my friend] took acid, and by the time I was only just starting to peak, [he] was already down from the peak into the plateau,” one user says. Others also report extremely potent psychedelic effects: “I heard drums turning into children’s voices and ocean waves. The real world turned into a mosaic-like grid. Trees were bursting apart into fractals. Walls turned invisible.”

Another potential danger is severe narrowing of the blood vessels and constriction of blood flow. Lapoint mentions an infamous case in Sweden in which a user’s “extremities just died.” He survived, but lost all the fingers on his left hand and several toes. Couple the slow onset with the high potency, and the truth is that it’s incredibly easy to accidentally overdose on this drug. Lapoint warns that “Bromo Dragonfly is probably the scariest thing on this list.”

4: O-Desmethyltramadol

Given the backlash against doctors over-prescribing painkillers, a legal compound mimicking the effects of opioids might be widely seen as a Holy Grail. O-Desmethyltramadol is the active metabolite of tramadol—a prescription analgesic painkiller that is weaker and typically less prone to abuse than the likes of oxycodone. Recreational users are beginning to share their experiences via specialist websites. Some are enthusiastic, while one writes, “It definitely feels like an opioid, but it is very much lacking in that classic opioid euphoria that we all use for.”

I can relate. As a one-time aficionado of opiates, when I was prescribed tramadol I found it a deeply unpleasant experience.Sold as a powder that can be snorted or swallowed, many users report the effects of O-Desmethyltramadol as being on a par with buprenorphine or tramadol. And there, says Lapoint, lies the rub: “Some people love the novel psychoactive effects of tramadol. Theoretically, while Tramadol is an opioid agonist that hits the same receptors as other narcotic painkillers, it also works on the serotonin neurotransmitter—the target of many anti-depressants. Many people find it causesdysphoria—feelings of emotional or mental discomfort.

A tramadol-derived drug also raises an interesting “what if” about unregulated legal derivatives of narcotic painkillers. So far Lapoint hasn’t seen it widely used. “Of course,” he says, “even if they wind up in the ER, finding if someone has used this particular substance versus other opiates will be a game of CSI.”

5. 2C-P

2C-P is a synthetic psychedelic and a close chemical cousin of 2C-B, which briefly thrived on the US club scene until it was outlawed in 2001. Users report that 2C-P—which itself was made illegal in the US last year—causes stronger visual hallucinations and way longer effects: “at least 16 hours of very good visually and mentally tripping,” writes one. As with all psychedelics, the quality of the trip depends a lot on the psychological state of the user. While some praise 2C-P’s “interesting, powerful and enlightening” effects, others find the experience “somewhat disturbing. I wish I had never thought of some of the things I thought of during that long, sleepless night.”

“If you look at Alexander Shulgin’s book PIHKAL[Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved], he gives you a cookbook and a user report on every one of these compounds,” Dr. Lapoint says. “While Shulgin really loved the effect of 2C-P, ever since this compound found its way to the gray market, there have been horrible cases—a recent incident in Minnesota, for example, where people may have actually gotten Bromo Dragonfly.” One teen died and ten others were hospitalized.2C-P is a phenethylamine, a class of chemicals that release high amounts of dopamine and/or serotonin. 2C-P is classified as an amphetamine because it mainly targets dopamine—the brain chemical responsible for stimulant reactions. But it also targets serotonin—the brain chemical behind hallucinogenic effects. In fact, 2C-P’s hallucinogenic effects are more powerful than its stimulant ones.

As with most of these drugs, you rarely know what you’re really ingesting. “If you are Alexander Shulgin and make it yourself, that’s one thing,” says Lapoint. “As far as buying it from some anonymous vendor? That’s always sketchy.”

6. Mephedrone (Bath Salts)

Similar in structure to methamphetamine but tweaked slightly to bypass the law and produce a more hallucinogenic effect, mephedrone—actually a derivative of the Somali drug khat—first found cult popularity in clubs around the world as a cheap, legal upper. It attracted little attention when it first spread to the US. Then in 2012 a Florida man called Rudy Eugene committed one of the most infamous acts of cannibalism since the Donner Party, and a new media menace was born: Bath Salts. By the time Eugene’s autopsy found only marijuana in his system it was too late: Bath Salts had been irreversibly linked to outlandish insanity and violence.

Why is this so with mephedrone, while ecstasy—which also has both stimulant and hallucinogenic properties—is not linked with extreme behavior? Ecstasy—whose active ingredient is MDMA—is an enigmatic and unique substance, Lapoint says. “While MDMA is a substituted amphetamine, it is what we call an empathogen. You don’t hallucinate when you take E. Instead you experience a feeling of being a part of something and a desire to share. However, mephedrone works in a very different way, despite the surface chemical similarities.That’s not to say that mephedron is benign. “These are stimulants that tend to have hallucinogenic properties,” Dr. Lapoint says. “That’s a bad combo.”

“It may not be the worst thing to be a little amped up,” Lapoint concedes. “But when someone who is amped up and hallucinating, it’s a crap shoot. How will they react? Will they get paranoid or violent? There’s an infamous story about a guy in Florida who was arrested in drag after eating his neighbor's goat!”

7. 6-APB (Benzo Fury)

Benzo Fury hit the UK club scene in 2010. Users often call it “a mixture of ecstasy and cocaine,” or simply similar to good-quality E: “feeling blissed out of my mind. With each crisp ocean breeze comes another wave of immense joy and sensual decadence.” 6-APB is structurally similar to MDA—and therefore more powerful than X. However, it’s considerably less powerful in its empathic effects. Negative experiences reported tend to emphasize its “speedy” and jittery side. Since Benzo Fury became popular—partly thanks to tabloid hysteria that helped alert many to its existence—unscrupulous sellers have been packaging a wide variety of research chemicals as “Benzo Fury.” (Again, it's worth noting that this unregulated, “Wild West” aspect of the legal highs market may be its biggest risk.)

Interestingly, in Britain and Australia, its huge popularityseems to be a direct reaction to the “success” of anti-drug initiatives that made good-quality MDMA scarce. The UK has now moved to ban Benzo Fury for 12 months while it is “assessed.” (If the country’s experience with mephedrone is anything to go by, the trade will soon move from the Internet to street corners, where users report that prices have doubled while purity levels have crashed.) “This is a substituted amphetamine, in the same area as Bath Salts or designer amphetamines,” says Dr. Lapoint. “We’re not seeing a lot of it in the US market yet, but so far the big problems associated with this substance seem to be hyperthermia and seizures.”

8. Salvia

A few years before the Great Bath Salts Scare, there was the Salvia Terror of 2010, with young users posting YouTube videos of themselves tripping after smoking this herb (which is actually related to mint). When the media rang the alarm, its use skyrocketed. The frenzy hit its peak later that year when a video of pop princess Miley Cyrus allegedly smoking salvia hit TMZ. The fact that Hannah Montana was now using the stuff caused enough of a political freak-out that some states rushed to have Salvia banned as a Schedule I drug, like heroin or cocaine. But as the media’s attention waned so did the politicians’, and this psychedelic herb—smoked by shamans throughout history—has sunk back into semi-obscurity. It remains legal in most of the US.

Smoking salvia causes a short, intense trip that is primarily dissociative in nature. I smoked it once and found it interesting, but not an experience I was eager to repeat. Unlike drugs that flood the brain with serotonin, or classic psychedelics that fully derange the senses, salvia is a pretty shallow experience—one step up from poppers or whippets. The real danger, as with most perception-altering substances, is the immediate impairment. Disorientation and confusion are common, and it was salvia’s unintended comedic aspects that fueled the Youtube craze.Salvia is classified as a hallucinogen. However, its mechanism of action in the brain is entirely different from synthetic hallucinogens like LSD. It is extremely potent, but it is not toxic. In lab tests animals have been exposed to huge doses without harm.

Dr. Lapoint says that salvia isn’t the demon drug it was once portrayed as, although, “We don’t see a lot of salvia cases in Poison Control. Maybe it’s an issue of misdiagnosis—if someone comes into the ER hallucinating, often the doctors will just assume they’re on PCP. If you get sick and it’s a stimulant, they will assume it’s coke. New York is classically a heroin or cocaine town and I think we miss a lot of these new drugs because of that old-school mentality.” Still, Lapoint says that salvia’s short-acting nature makes it way less dangerous than some of the other substances on this list.

9. Methoxetamine (Mexxy)

A chemical analogue of ketamine and PCP, it is, like them, classified as a dissociative anesthetic type of hallucinogen. Methoxetamine has been sold since 2010 and found massive popularity on the European club scene. Mixmag says the drug is sometimes called “rolfcoptor,” as well as its street name “Mexxy.” Sold as pellets or a powder that is usually snorted (though sometimes IV’d), user reports tend to emphasize that this is not a drug to be taken lightly: “Overall the trip was enjoyable, there were a few parts which could easily have been scary such as thinking I was going to die but they passed rather quickly.” A number of people have reported that the drug creates an urge to compulsively take more, leading to some terrifying overdoses: “I began having severe stomach upsets, with alternating diarrhea and vomiting. The diarrhea looked strange and red, as if there was blood in it, as did the vomiting. I was overcome with the idea that this night would be my last.”

Dr. Lapoint notes that methoxetamine use is still in its infancy in the US. But the story of how methoxetamine came to be a drug of abuse is indicative of the futility of lawmakers’ current approach. “It’s a shell game between those who create these substances and those who seek to ban them,” he says. “Tweak the formula and you have a brand-new substance with users completely unaware of how they will react to it and what the long-term effects are.” In the case of methoxetamine, the process of chemical substitution has created a legal high that some have compared to high-dose DXM (the active ingredient in many over-the-counter cough medicines).

10. Kratom

The kratom plant (Mitragyna speciosa) has long been used as a stimulant and painkiller and remains legal in many countries, including the US. First favored by laborers in Thailand, who have chewed its leaves for centuries, it has recently become more widely available via the Internet. It is most often sold as a powder. Users make tea from it, or it is “tossed and washed”—a teaspoonful of the (reportedly) foul-tasting substance is placed on the tongue and washed back with water. Fans describe kratom as a benign herb that mimics the effects of low-dose opiates without the risk of addiction. Some posters in the thriving online community of kratom advocates describe kicking debilitating painkiller habits by using kratom as a tapering agent.

Kratom has the “most hopeful” prospects for medical use, Dr. Lapoint says. It mostly hits the kappa-opiod receptors, like traditional opiates. But unlike them, kratom doesn’t cause respiratory depression. So in theory a painkilling drug could be derived from kratom that has all of the positive effects of, say, codeine, but no risk of overdose. “I think kratom has tremendous potential as a tool to treat the epidemic of opiate addiction in the US,” says Lapoint.When taken orally, kratom causes a mild euphoria effect, along with a mild stimulant effect often likened to a cup of espresso. But kratom’s mildness hasn’t stopped it from being lumped in with more dangerous drugs.

Yet despite this promise, drug companies are hardly rushing to investigate. In fact the typical response so far has been some half-hearted attempts at whipping up a media scare and a handful of opportunistic politicians threatening to ban it. (The Seattle-based alternative weekly, The Stranger, has a clear-eyed report on the rush to outlaw this potentially helpful herb.) “The fact that this is a leaf traditionally chewed by indigenous people makes it harder for the medical establishment to swallow,” says Lapoint.

Supreme Court Says Human Genes Cannot Be Patented, Striking Down Breast and Ovarian Cancer Gene Patents

Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 10:12:00 -0700

The Court's unanimous decision is a major public-interest victory.

Human genetic sequences cannot be patented, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Thursday in an unexpected decision that is a tremendous public interest victory.

“Myriad [Genetics] did not create anything,” the Supreme Court held, in a lawsuit that challenged the firm’s monopoly on two gene sequences used in expensive tests that reveal whether women have an inherited risk of breast and ovarian cancer. “To be sure, it found an important and useful gene, but separating that gene from its surrounding genetic material is not an act of invention.”

The immediate impact gives other biotech firms the go-ahead to develop less-expensive DNA-based tests for the genetic risk of breast and ovarian cancer. Looking down the road, the ruling will force biotech companies to rethink their business models that have been based on ‘owning’ the building blocks of life.

“The Court rightfully found that patents cannot be awarded for something so fundamental to nature as DNA,” said Daniel B. Ravicher, Executive Director of the Public Patent Foundation, which lead the suit challenging two patents awarded for gene sequences tied to breast and ovarian cancer. “Bottom line, diagnostic genetic testing is now free from any patent threat, forever, and the poor can now have their genes tested as freely as the rich.”

Women’s health care advocates immediately hailed the Court’s decision, saying it put patients' health and scientific research ahead of private corporate profits.

“This ruling makes a huge and immediate difference to those with a known and suspected inherited risk of breast cancer,” said Karuna Kagger, executive director of Breast Cancer Action. “It is a tremendous victory for all people everywhere. The Supreme Court has taken a significant stand to limit the rights of companies to own human genes by striking down Myriad’s monopoly.”

“The Court struck down a major barrier to patient care and medical innovation,” said Sandra Park, senior staff attorney with the ACLU Women’s Rights Project, which was a co-counsel in the lawsuit. “Myriad did not invent the BCRA [breast and ovarian cancer] genes and should not control them.”

The public interest attorneys challenged two patents issued to Myriad Genetics, saying they created a monopoly that not only prevented women from getting less-costly breast and ovarian cancer tests and second medical opinions, but also restricted scientists from doing additional research on the gene sequences. Their lawsuit was filed on behalf of researchers, genetic counselors, patients, breast cancer and women's health groups, and medical associations representing 150,000 geneticists, pathologists, and scientific laboratory professionals.

The patents allowed Myriad Genetics, a Utah-based company, to control access to the genes, known as BRCA1 and BRCA2, which limited others from doing tests or research. The patents also allowed Myriad to set the terms and cost of testing. The firm argued that it needed the patents to protect hundreds of millions of dollars in research that lead to its tests. That argument was also made by other biotech firms, saying that without such monopolies that it would inhibit scientific research and medical breakthroughs.

The Court’s unanimous ruling, written by conservative Justice Clarence Thomas, found that the patents on human genes are invalid. That represents a major shift in law and overturns the current policy of the U.S. Trademark and Patent Office, which has issued more than 40,000 patents tied to genetic material since 1984. Delving into gene science, the Court found that patents on complementary DNA, or cDNA, however, are patent-eligible. But scientists can provide genetic testing without relying on cDNA, which lifted the patent obstacle to offering genetic diagnostic testing.

“Because of this ruling, patients will have greater access to genetic testing and scientists can engage in research on these genes without fear of being sued,” Park said.

The patent-based restrictions on examining the BRCA genes have had devastating results.

The public interest lawyers pointed to women such as Kathleen Maxian of Buffalo, N.Y., who is suffering from late-stage ovarian cancer that she believes could have been found and removed if Myriad’s patents did not stop labs for routinely looking for the cancers.

Lisbeth Ceriani, a breast cancer survivor and plaintiff, was faced with having to pay over $4,000 for Myriad’s testing to determine if she carried a genetic mutation associated with hereditary ovarian cancer because Myriad had refused to enter into a contract with her insurance company. She was forced to wait 18 months before being able to raise the funds to pay for the tests, at which point she learned she did indeed carry a mutation.

“I’m relieved that no other women will have to go through what I went through,” said Ceriani. “I’m so glad that the Supreme Court agrees that women deserve full access to vital information from their own bodies.”

Harry Ostrer, a medical geneticist who also was a plaintiff in the case, called the ruling “thrilling” and predicted that it would cut costs for breast and ovarian cancer screening, especially for low-income women and the uninsured.

“Ensuring equal access to genetic testing is one of the key aspects of this ruling,” he said.

The case was the first challenge brought to human gene patents in the U.S.

What's the Real Story on How Much Obamacare is Going to Cost?

Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 12:02:00 -0700

Early calls on costs may be premature, especially given rising corporatization of healthcare.

Loyal Dems were over the moon with reports from California that the costs provided by insurers of various levels of plans on state exchanges were coming in under CBO estimates, as well as below prices on the current small-group market. The early huzzahs survived an effort to claim otherwise by Avik Roy at Forbes; his creative footwork with numbers was shredded in the blogosphere (although still curiously repeated by Reuters).

A bit more serious challenge to claims of early success on the cost front comes from Ohio, where Republican officials brayed that premium increases next year would average 88%. The analysis appears a bit sus, since it included some pretty crappy plans in the baseline. But while more detached commentators weren’t happy with how Ohio officials ran the numbers, they didn’t appear able to debunk the idea that costs would be higher for most people than before, even though the higher costs might indeed result from plans providing more comprehensive coverage.

One big issue is that the Republican-led states are doing a good job of throwing sand in the gears of implementation, which means it’s likely that consumers there will indeed have reason to be less satisfied. These states have refused to implement state health exchanges, throwing the task on the Federal government, and also nixing Medicaid program expansion, which will leave a lot of low-income people out in the cold.

But reader martha r has been poking around the information in her state, Vermont, which is now being touted for coming in with lower-than-anticipated cost forecasts, like California. But the plans don’t strike her as affordable for locals. She writes:

Newly up on the website for the Vermont implementation of ACA:
http://healthconnect.vermont.gov/tax_credit_calculator
I’ve queried them on whether one should enter one’s gross or net income. But you can play with different numbers and see how it comes out.
A not at all uncommon salary among my neighbors–I live in a condo community with many single women living alone, social workers, teachers, nonprofit directors, and the like– in this area is $35K.
That may seem shockingly low, and for many it is not tenable, so after they try to make a go of it in Vermont they decide to leave and seek better paying work elsewhere.
But for the hard core who get Vermont into their blood and can’t bring themselves to leave, this low a salary is not at all unusual. Hopefully, one also has benefits–but not always.
So you might try entering $35 or $40 or $45K and see what these lower-middle income people are going to get.
For a single person, the cutoff seems to be $46K–at $46.1K, you get zero subsidy. at $46K you get $77 per month–the minimum subsidy. Here’s how that plays out:
For a single person, at S46K gross on a salary (not self-employed with a home office deduction and the like), or $3833 per month before taxes, who can afford $370 per month? Perhaps those who have paid off their mortgages or nearly so?

I admittedly only have a personal datapoint, but in New York, which has to be a higher cost state, my current plan is a bit better than silver (plus I have some very valuable features, like coverage anywhere in the world, plus no network or primary physician gatekeeping, and external appeal to New York State) and my costs are markedly lower than the silver plan cost in Vermont. And I’m over 50.

A new article by Karen Higgens at Alternet gives some other reasons why the cheerleading is overdone. For instance:

Wellness” programs that enable businesses to transfer more healthcare costs to workers with “unhealthy” factors like smoking or high blood pressure or cholesterol levels are rapidly spreading, actively encouraged by the ACA which offers premium discounts to participating employees. However, health disorders are as likely to derive from chronic or genetic conditions as “life style choices” and economic factors which have a disproportionate impact on the poor. The cost reductions also fall far short of the hype. The federal government apparently buried a report it mandated for the ACA from the Rand Corporation on wellness programs which showed the overall savings are, at best, modest. The programs make insurance unaffordable for some workers, and “keep the sickest workers from affording the care they need,” said Alan Balch, vice president of the Preventive Health Partnership, an alliance of the American Cancer Society, the American Diabetes Association, and the American Heart Association.

And we warned earlier of the growing corporatization of health care:

If Massachusetts is the political model of the ACA, the industry model is Kaiser Permanente by combining the roles of insurance company and medical provider with its network of hospitals and clinics. As ACA implementation nears, Kaiser has stepped up practices once associated with the worst abuses of HMOs. These include delaying medical appointments, restricting hospital admissions, and rapid discharge of patients from the hospital care to other settings. These include sending people home where the care burden is placed entirely on family members, or to outpatient facilities or nursing homes that have fewer regulations and fewer, typically lesser skilled, lesser paid staff where the patients receive less care than in hospitals. Other industry giants hope to follow this path, enrolling new members who are required to buy insurance, while they are more directly able to control their expenditures for care and can more easily slash spending. The ACA encourages care cutting practices through several mechanisms, including financial penalties for hospital re-admissions, an incentive to keep people out of the hospital, and rewarding providers who divert patients to outpatient clinics.

And of course, Obama will be gone from office before all these corporate-enriching chickens will have come home to roost. Nicely played.

Do Women Have Less Fun Than Men?

April M. Short, AlterNet — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 13:42:00 -0700

A new study shows a leisure-time gender gap that favors men.

Men spend an average of 34.7 hours per week on leisurely activities like watching TV, playing games, participating in sports and a series of other recreational enterprises, while women spend only 29 hours on the same activities according to a Pew Research Center analysisof pooled data from the American Time Use Survey of 2003 to 2011. The gender gap in leisure is about five hours per week.

The analysis reveals that while women work 10 paid hours less than men each week, women spend about six hours more than men in household work and about three additional hours in child care, bringing the total work time to 45.6 hours per week for men and 45.2 hours for women.

Among working parents in particular the difference in leisure time is slightly smaller, but working fathers spend three more hours of official relaxation time than working mothers each week—28 and 25 hours, respectively.

As the Pew analysis shows, women are less likely to spend their time between activities on leisure, so the gap among couples with children could be explained by the ways in which parents of each gender spend their free time. According to the analysis, mothers’ free time is often interrupted, which might make it more difficult for them to relax during that time.

The Pew report further notes: “...mothers tend to spend more time than fathers in multitasking; the additional hours spent on multitasking are mainly related to time spent on housework and child care.

Top 10 Reasons to Legalize Marijuana Now

Carmen Yarrusso, Truthout — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 11:21:00 -0700

Prohibition creates, sustains and handsomely rewards the illegal drug industry while pretending to fight that very same industry.

The following article first appeared on Truthout.org, and is published with permission.

10. Hemp benefits are denied. Hemp can be made into paper, paneling, plastics, clothing and thousands of other useful products. The highly nutritious seeds can be used to make flour, cooking oil and cattle feed.

This environmentally friendly plant grows without herbicides, nourishes the soil, matures quickly and provides high yields. It's the number-one biomass producer in the world - ten tons per acre in four months. It could be an excellent fuel-producing crop.

Hemp, "nature's perfect plant," could bring a bonanza to hurting American farmers while greatly reducing America's dependence on fossil fuels, which could significantly mitigate climate change.

9.Prohibition diverts billions from the needy. More than 50 government agencies feed at the drug war trough. Food stamps and other social programs are being slashed while billions are spent trying to stop adults from using marijuana.

8.Prohibition is clearly counterproductive. Guaranteeing massive profits to anyone on earth who can produce and deliver marijuana to our streets cannot do anything but assure that even more will be produced and delivered.

7.Criminalizing marijuana lacks moral justification. A real crime implies a victim and a perpetrator. Can you imagine being jailed for robbing yourself? As insane as this sounds, our government has done the equivalent by making adult use of marijuana a crime.

Only a depraved, corrupt government could invent a crime you commit against yourself.

6. Marijuana users are not debased human beings. Cultures throughout history - and pre-history! - have altered their minds with a variety of drugs. Billions around the world derive positive benefits from mind-altering drugs (especially from alcohol, nicotine, caffeine and marijuana).

Demonizing and criminalizing some drugs, while approving others without rational criteria, is clearly arbitrary and deceitful. Why are marijuana users criminals while alcohol and tobacco users are not? Why are marijuana dealers demonized, but alcohol and tobacco dealers are not?

5. Marijuana is effective medicine. There's overwhelming evidence that marijuana can safely relieve pain, nausea and vomiting caused by various illnesses. In fact, marijuana is patently safer than many commonly prescribed drugs.

4.Promising medical research is thwarted. The discovery of naturally occurring marijuana-like substances in the human body that activate so-called cannabinoid receptors has opened up vast possibilities for new medicines derived from the 66 or so cannabinoids identified in marijuana. These receptors are not just in the brain, but also found in many other parts of the body including the immune, endocrine and reproductive systems.

3. Billions in potential taxes go to drug cartels. Our cash-strapped states are being cheated out of billions that could be obtained by taxing and regulating marijuana like alcohol.

2.Thousands of prohibition murders occur each year. Mexico is the world's largest exporter of marijuana (most goes to the United States). There were at least 24,000 prohibition-related murders in Mexico since 2006. Thousands more died here, also a direct result of marijuana prohibition.

1.Prohibition denies our most basic human right. Prohibition takes away our right of sovereignty over our own bodies and gives this power to government. Does any other human right make sense if we don't have sovereignty over our own bodies?

There's a word for people who don't have sovereignty over their own bodies: slaves.

The Glaring Truth About the Drug War

The drug war is a blatantly dishonest, extremely expensive, highly destructive, grossly unjust, abject failure of our government.

Despite 40 years and $1 trillion-plus of taxpayer money spent trying to stop - not robbery, not rape, not murder, not even shoplifting - but mostly trying to stop adults from using marijuana; despite draconian punishments; despite jailing millions of nonviolent Americans; despite thousands of prohibition-related murders each year, illegal drugs are cheaper, purer and more readily available than ever.

The drug war is a vast government scam guaranteed to be perpetually futile. Prohibition only pretends to fight drugs. In fact, it guarantees massive profits to anyone on the planet who can produce and deliver prohibited drugs to our streets.

Jailing drug dealers just creates lucrative job openings for more efficient, more ruthless, eager replacements. Only a small percentage of illegal drugs are intercepted, and these are easily and cheaply replaced.

Prohibition creates, sustains and handsomely rewards the illegal drug industry while pretending to fight that very same industry. Like the classic mafia protection racket, our government creates a perpetual problem and then charges us exorbitantly to "protect" us from it.

This abomination continues unabated because our government is addicted to the taxpayer billions it wastes year after year after year pretending to fight an enemy created and sustained by prohibition itself.

Marijuana is the linchpin of the drug war. Legalizing marijuana will sound the death knell for this devastating crime against humanity.

Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.

Did a "Troubled Teen" Rehab Create Murderers?

Maia Szalavitz, The Fix — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 12:46:00 -0700

In a string of horrific crimes, one "tough-love" rehab is the common denominator.

This article originally appeard on The Fix.

The crimes are heinous: murdering a pizza deliveryman for his uniform, then wearing it to shoot down Colorado’s state prison chief; hiring a hit man to kill your parents; stabbing both of your grandfathers to death. Besides the horror, these recent homicides share a surprising common element: In each case, the alleged or convicted perpetrator had been sent to an unregulated tough-love camp known as Paradise Cove.

Evan Ebel, the 28-year-old ex-con who is now notorious for the Colorado killings and the high-speed Texas car chase and shootout that ultimately led to his own death in March, attended at least two such programs, including Paradise Cove. His parents apparently sent him there around age 12 because they were concerned about his destructive behavior and suspicious that he was using hard drugs and alcohol.

But Paradise Cove was anything but paradise for the boys who attended. The Samoa-based camp was part of a “troubled teen” chain—variously known as the World Wide Association of Specialty Programs and Schools (WWASP), Teen Revitalization Inc., and Youth Foundation Inc.—that has had over a dozen of its programs (including Paradise Cove) closed down following reports of abuse. Former participants link at least 11 suicide or overdose deaths as well as three homicides to this particular camp—and many more to the network overall. Although apparently not using the WWASP name these days, the same high-level management is still involved in residential youth programs today, mainly in Utah.

The boys at Paradise Cove slept in straw-roofed huts on mats on a concrete floor. To prevent escapes, fluorescent lights burned all night, attracting mosquitos. Flip-flops were the only shoes permitted—another security measure—but these were rapidly destroyed by the sharp coral beaches where the boys exercised and worked. The cuts that resulted attracted flies and infections. “They’d just swarm on you,” Paul Richards, who attended Paradise Cove in 1997, told me for my book on troubled teen programs, Help at Any Cost.

Breaking any of the program’s strict rules—for example, sitting in the wrong position or talking out of turn—resulted in severe, escalating punishment. Beatings by staff were common. But the worst consequence was “The Box,” a three-foot-square windowless, wooden hut with a concrete floor, where teens were made to stay for days to months, subsisting on rice and water. Sometimes, they were thrown in hog-tied and left for hours. Other times, they were made to kneel or sit in stress positions, which rapidly became agonizing.

“You’d have to sit cross-legged with your hands on top of your head with your elbows sticking out,” says Bill Boyles, who attended Paradise Cove from 1997 through 1999 and is now an activist with theCoalition for the Safe and Ethical Treatment of Youth. “It’s ridiculously uncomfortable on concrete in the hot summer sun in the tropics and they wouldn’t let you take a shower.” (A website calledWWASP Survivors advocates for people who attended WWASP-related camps and serves as a watchdog over the "troubled teen" industry in general. Bill Boyles runs the Paradise Cove Survivorswebsite, which vividly details the brutal, squalid conditions at the camp.)

Unlike Ebel, Boyles had not been sent because of aggressive behavior—he was moody and had refused to go to school, but did not take drugs or commit crime. Paul Richards, who attended at the same time as Boyles, had been a straight-A student and star high school basketball player. In both cases, their main problem had been not getting along with their parents, but Paradise Cove accepted any child a parent labeled as troubled, so long as the tuition was paid.

“Therapy” at Paradise Cove consisted primarily of emotional attacks. “They just circle you up and they all start yelling at you at the same time and say how shitty a person you were…[things like] ‘You’re worthless, you’re pathetic, you’re a piece of shit, you’re a compulsive liar and nobody likes you,’” Richards told me.

“Ebel was extremely quiet, kept to himself,” says another former Paradise Cove resident, “Andrew” (not his real name), who is concerned that media coverage has portrayed teens sent to Paradise Cove as beyond help. “The realistic view is that if one was ‘troubled’ when they arrived in Samoa, they left as a basket case, and if one was a basket case when they arrived, they left as a [disaster],” Andrew says.

Paradise Cove was shut down by the Samoan government in 2000, after a report by the US State Department found “credible” allegations of “beatings, isolation, food and water deprivation, choke-holds, kicking, punching, bondage, spraying with chemical agents, forced medication, verbal abuse and threats of further physical abuse.”

Boyles says that the worst thing about the program was that the constant threat of emotional and physical violence numbed teens to the suffering of others. At one point, for example, a rumor spread that if a boy died, the program would be shut down and all of the boys would get sent home. En masse, the teens decided to cause such a death.

They chose the smallest, youngest boy to be their victim. Although stories differ as to whether they attempted to drown or stab him, the plot was known by dozens of boys and no one tried to stop it. Fortunately, the boy survived—not surprisingly, he later developed PTSD. But the incident showed that the teens involved were so desperate to leave and so accustomed to violence that committing murder seemed a reasonable means of escape.

“I would say not necessarily that it makes you more violent, but when you’re around that level of brutality and violence as a kid, you get inured to it,” Boyles says.

“Ebel was one of us,” Andrew says. “His mind might have been so distorted when he left that there was no path back to sanity. I don't condone his last actions that later led to his demise, but I, and most of us from the Cove, understand his thoughts and empathize with him.”

In the weeks before he died, Ebel sent a friend what has been described as a suicide note, attributing his anger to having spent years in solitary confinement during 11 years in prison for robbery and for attacking a prison guard. The letter, described by the friend who received it, said Ebel felt “ruined” and was “consumed” with rage and a need for “vengeance.” (According to several "alumni," the routine cruelty at Paradise Cove bred in some boys a deep resentment against their parents for sending them there.)

Ebel's history raises questions like, If he had received proper psychological treatment—rather than the abuses of Paradise Cove—would he even have committed the robbery that sent him to prison? And how did his lockdown at Paradise Cove affect his ability to stay out of solitary in prison or endure it once imposed?

Two other recent killings also have links to Paradise Cove. Chris Sutton, a deeply troubled young man from Miami, spent three years in the program after first threatening to kill his parents when he was 16. At 25, he actually hired a hit man to do the job—killing his mother and blinding his father in 2004. He tried to use the abuse at Paradise Cove in his defense, but was convicted in March 2011 and sentenced to life in prison.

Joshua Lambert, a 31-year-old Washington man who attended the camp when he was 15, confessed to stabbing both of his grandfathers to death in 2011. He is acting as his own attorney and claiming an insanity defense (he was diagnosed with anti-social personality disorder), in the bizarre case where he went from one house where he bound his great-aunt in duct tape and killed one grandfather, and then went to his mother’s home to kill the other grandfather.

“It was the worst time of my life,” Lambert said of being at Paradise Cove in his local paper, theWhidbey Times. He added, “It does make it easier to be in jail. I remember being sent to jail when I was 18 and thinking it was so much nicer than Paradise Cove.”

Any abuse the perpetrators suffered—at "troubled teen" camps or in prison—certainly does not excusetheir horrendous crimes. Still, it seems likely that such brutal behavior-modification camps can exacerbate tendencies toward violent crime—in the same way that child abuse, domestic and neighborhood violence do.

For its part, WWASP has always insisted that it is not abusive and that the teens who had bad outcomes are liars who were simply beyond help. WWASP's Ken Kay has called the allegations “ludicrous” and claims that, as of 2010, WWASP existed “only on paper” to defend against related lawsuits.

Although no one knows how many boys did time at Paradise Cove—Boyles estimates around 2,000—the number of homicides, suicides and overdoses that have been reported (the actual number is unknown) is excessive, even among troubled kids sent for treatment.

Two additional factors also make the numbers seem disproportionate. First, like Richards and Boyles, many teens sent to the camp were not involved in crime or drugs beforehand. Second, almost all of the teens had either wealthy or middle-class parents, since tuition ran at least $3,000 a month and boys stayed for at least 18 months. It was not covered by insurance.

US regulators have generally failed to stop tough treatment that is reportedly over the line from being imposed on youth, in part because no reliable follow-up studies have been done to see if these programs actually make people worse or simply don't help. Two Government Accountability Officeinvestigations and two sets of congressional hearings several years ago demonstrated the lack of oversight, fraudulent marketing practices and deadly outcomes that have been reported in connection with many troubled teen programs. But legislation intended to help has never made it through Congress. While a bill to regulate these programs and ban abusive tactics was re-introduced this month by Rep. George Miller (D-CA), it is unlikely to progress given the general gridlock. Previous versions of the bill did pass the House twice, but stalled in the Senate.

If studies proved that these tactics increased addiction, suicide and violent behavior—as seems likely—it would be impossible to argue that any claimed benefits outweigh the risks. Such data could perhaps finally persuade Congress to regulate anyone who incarcerates teens for profit, no matter what they label their "program." And we could finally stop programs like Paradise Cove from preying on American kids and parents.

What the Cellphone Industry Doesn't Want You to Know About Radiation Concerns

Brad Jacobson, AlterNet — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 11:43:00 -0700

A leading expert on health effects from cellphone radiation goes to battle against a multi-trillion-dollar industry.

In her 2011 book Disconnect, National Book Award finalist, former senior White House health advisor and internationally regarded epidemiologist Devra Davis revealed that the cellphone industry is knowingly exposing us to dangerous levels of electromagnetic radiation. No small problem when you consider that of the roughly 7 billion people on this planet, about 6 billion of us now use mobile phones.

In a recent analysis for theHuffington Post, Davis examined the cellphone industry's long-term strategy, devised in the early '90s, to deal with studies showing cellphone radiation damages DNA: "war-game the science." Noted in a 1994 Motorola memo, this strategy, wrote Davis, "remains alive and well" today, the latest example occurring just last month. When the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) published newly detailed documentation for its yearlong 2011 expert review—which declared cellphone radiation a "possible human carcinogen" (same as lead and DDT)—the multi-trillion-dollar cellular industry responded by citing a new dubious report out of Taiwan.

Davis, the founding director of the Board on Environmental Studies and Toxicology of the U.S. National Research Council, pointed out that the online abstract concludes "with some highly unscientific language that sounds as though it was crafted for the PR section of Foxconn, the Taiwanese producer of phones for Apple, Motorola, and Sony:

'In conclusion, we do not detect any correlation between the morbidity/mortality of malignant brain tumors and cellphone use in Taiwan. We thus urge international agencies to publish only confirmatory reports with more applicable conclusions in public. This will help spare the public from unnecessary worries.'"

In a recent phone interview with AlterNet, Davis, founder and president of the Wyoming-based Environmental Health Trust, discussed the cellphone industry's longstanding covert battle against inconvenient science, strategies it has learned from the tobacco industry, our chemical addiction to mobile devices, and simple ways we can limit our exposure without losing touch with civilization.

Brad Jacobson: You've written that the cellphone industry's long-term strategy for responding to studies showing its products damage DNA is to "war-game the science." What exactly does this strategy entail?

Devra Davis: The example in the 1990s, which is documented in my book, was that [University of Washington researchers] Henry Lai and Narendra N.P. Singh found significant evidence of DNA damage caused by cellphone light radiation comparable almost to the damage you would get from X-rays, which is ionizing. At the time, it was generally believed by some people that non-ionizing radiation, which comes from a cellphone, could not possibly be physically damaging because it was so weak.

Well, it's true that non-ionizing radiation lacks the power to have damage. But its damage seems to come from its modulated signal. So every 900 milliseconds, if you have a cellphone in your pocket, it's getting half of that radiation which is getting into you as it seeks the signal from the tower.

So the industry understood this could be of enormous consequences, so they did three things. First, they wrote to the university and tried to get the scientists fired for violating the rules of the contract that they were working under at the time. They then wrote to NIH [National Institutes of Health]—and all of this has been documented in my book and there's been no lawsuits filed about any of the statements I'm making to you—and they accused the scientists of fraud for misusing funds to do the study. Then, when that didn't work they actually had somebody meet with the journal editors to try to get the article accepted for publication unaccepted.

After those three things didn't work, they also hired a scientist named Jerry Phillips to try to show they could not replicate their work. Fortunately for history, Phillips was an honest person. He replicated their work and when he insisted on publishing his work both he and Lai effectively stopped working in this field. They were no longer funded to do any more work in the field.

In case all of that wasn't enough, as the coup de grace, a memo was written from Motorola to its PR firm saying we think we sufficiently "war-gamed" the science. [Direct quote from the 1994 memo Jan/February 1997, p. 13: "I think we have sufficiently war-gamed the Lai-Singh issue…"]

Where it gets really interesting now is that President Obama just nominated the guy who ran the CTIA [Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association] at the time this was going on to become the head of the Federal Communications Commission. His name is Tom Wheeler. He's been a huge fundraiser for Democrats and Republicans, more Democrats than Republicans. And under his leadership at the CTIA (which has been written about by [research scientist] George Carlo in his book about this industry) a $27 million joint program was run to study health effects of cellphones. And that study, according George Carlo, was shut down when they started to produce positive results.

And that's all in Carlo's book, written with Marty Schram, who's an investigative journalist.

BJ: What ever happened to Lai?

DD: He's still a scientist [at the same university], just no longer working in that field. And if you Google his name and Seattle magazine, there's a 2011 expose article that he gave them. He's still courageous enough to speak about it.

BJ: What are the typical flaws you've found in examining industry-touted studies, many of which are also industry-funded?

DD: Well, first of all, you have to separate epidemiologic studies from experimental studies. Epidemiologic studies tend to be studying people for a short period of time who have not used phones a lot. So of course they don't find anything.

So, for example, 700,000 people started to use cellphones in 1993 to 1995 in Denmark. And you throw out from your study 250,000 of them because they were business users and your study can't be sure whether the business users might have shared their phone with somebody. So you throw them all out. Then you basically leave in your study all the people who use phones very little back in 1993, when phones and the use of phones cost more than $1000 a year. And you look at all of those people who use phones and you compare them to people who started to use phones later on and you don't see any difference in their brain cancer rate. And you conclude their phones are safe? That's an example of a study that's been widely cited as showing that cellphones are safe.

The average studies of cellphones and brain cancer have studied people who have used cellphones for five years or less. Sometimes eight years. Every study that has actually examined people who have used phones for 10 years or more, and is well designed, finds a 50 percent to an 800 percent increased risk. So that is why the Israelis, the Finnish, the French governments have all issued warnings.

But in fact focusing on cancer has been a brilliant part of the strategy for industry. Because it's not [just] about cancer that we have to be concerned. Cancer is one of the issues. But a much more important issue than cancer is reproductive damage, on the nervous system, on the brain and on sleep. Many of the negative studies that have studied people are only looking at cancer and not looking at these other things.

Studies done by the Cleveland Clinic and other organizations around the world have found clear evidence of human sperm damage, taking sperm from one man and putting it into two different test tubes and exposing one test tube to cellphone radiation and the other not. And guess what? The cellphone exposed test tube—those sperm died three times faster with three times more damage to their mitochondrial DNA.

With respect to experimental studies, it's much easier to get negative results because all you have to do is study the wrong cell type. Younger cells are more vulnerable than older cells. So if you study adult cells—and really, effects are mostly in neural stem cells, very young baby cells—then you're not going to see an effect. Because older cells, more mature cells, are more resistant to damage. The younger a cell, the faster it grows, the more vulnerable it is to damage.

I'm releasing a study next week in Thessaloniki, Greece, done with researchers in Brazil, where we have modeled exposure, and we show that the exposure of a cellphone gets all the way through the brain of a 2-year-old or 3-year-old. And yet people are giving cellphones to toddlers for educational devices and not turning off their connection to the Internet. So we are very concerned about children's exposure and the greater exposure as well.

BJ: What are the current U.S. safety standards for cellphone radiation exposure based on?

DD: They're based on the assumption that cellphones can only do one thing, which is produce heat. That's number one. They're based on an 11-pound head of a 220-pound man talking for six minutes [a day]. They do not take into account the possibility of any biological impact that has nothing to do with heat. And yet there's growing evidence that that is the case. There's damage to sperm, there's damage to embryos that are growing, there's a whole bunch of things that go on that are not taken into account.

So current standards are outdated, outmoded, and one thing that the FCC has in common with the cicadas is that they take 17 years to change themselves. [The Federal Communications Commission announced in March that it would reevaluate radiofrequency radiation standards for cellphones for the first time since they were originally established in 1996.]

And of course with this new person designated to take over the FCC, I think what it will probably mean—I hope what it will mean—is that the FCC cannot be allowed to set standards for cellphones. How could you have someone who for 10 years masterminded showing there was nothing wrong with cellphones be in charge with setting up the new standards?

BJ: Why has the cellphone industry moved glacially to produce phones with lower radiation emissions while simultaneously generating a never-ending stream of new technological bells and whistles?

DD: Because they can. Because people are ignorant about these things. And because—here's one of the dirty secrets about cellphones—we know that drugs, sex and rock and roll stimulates something called dopamine in the brain. So do videogames. Dopamine is something that we crave. We get dopamine in the brain when we like something a lot. Well, cellphones stimulate dopamine, too. So it really is the case that there are some people who are pretty addicted to these devices.

But once you understand it, you can do something really radical, which is turn your phone off and reclaim your private life.

BJ: But with such a ubiquitous product, so ingrained in our lives it's difficult now to imagine living without them, what are some basic recommendations for how people can limit their risks when using cellphones?

DD: First of all, get in a habit of putting it on airplane mode, except when you want to be interrupted. Get your life back. Get your private time back. Say no to being on-call 24/7 unless you are an emergency responder. Use a speakerphone, use a headset. Get in the habit of never putting the phone next to your brain or body unless it's a true emergency. When the signal is weak, the phone is working more, you drain the battery faster, so only use a phone when the signal is weak in a true emergency.

People have got to get to realize that. If it's a true emergency, then you can use it with a weak signal. But otherwise the weaker the signal, the more radiation it's putting into you. And that's one of the reasons why in Sweden and Israel researchers found that where people are using phones in rural areas their risk of brain cancer is higher than in urban areas. We think because the radiation is being dumped into their bodies more.

On our website, people can go to Resources and see the Doctor's Advice—we have 250 million copies of this that have been given out. It's two sides, one piece of paper, and explains why you need to be concerned, what the science shows you and how you can protect yourself.

BJ: In your book Disconnect, you wrote: "The need for research in this field is one fact upon which all have usually agreed. The absence of research has become part of the rationale for making no changes in the meantime. The history of what little research has been conducted in the United States on radio frequency radiation shows a remarkable pattern of science lost and found repeatedly."

Can you elaborate on this passage?

DD: Well, Allen Frey, when he was a young investigator for the Office of Naval Research, first did studies showing that cellphone-like radiation weakened the blood-brain barrier. Now remember, when he was doing his research there were no cellphones. This was back in the 1970s. And he was doing research on something called radar. Radar, of course, is what cellphone radiation is exactly like. It can be a similar frequency, it's just much weaker power.

He tells a story, which I quote in my book, that when he produced his findings showing that just a little bit of exposure to this pulsed digital signal, which is now a cellphone signal, could weaken membranes of the brain. But he was visited by a team of researchers who said this is really fascinating work and if you want to get funded, you'll stop doing it. So there are old examples of that.

There's the example of [German EMF scientist] Franz Adlkofer, the chapter in my book called "The Doctor Who Danced With the Devil," which talks about how they went after this guy [after he produced research showing cellphone radiation unravels DNA], who fortunately for all of us wasn't easy for them to do in. But for everybody like Adlkofer who can stand up to these guys, unfortunately there are many more who never survive. Larry Lessig, Professor Lawrence Lessig at Harvard Law School, held a seminar on ethics last year about what happened with Adlkofer [beginning in 2008]. [View it here.] And he had me and Adlkofer there talking about the history of how the industry had gone after him, tried to discredit him, because they could not afford to have those results go unchallenged. So recently that's what's gone on.

I myself have been producing work on analyses of brain cancer in the United States, which shows an increasing incidence of brain cancer in young people. And we've had a great deal of difficulty in getting that work published.

The fact is, this industry has set up—and you may quote me on this—a quarter of a billion dollar fund for the sole intention of war-gaming the science, of creating media responses. So the moment an article comes out saying there's a problem, they have scientists ready to come up with another one saying, "Well, we're not really sure." And the manufacture of doubt and the magnification and exaggeration of uncertainty is a huge business.

David Michaels had a wonderful book called Doubt Is Their Product. [The title] is based on a memo from the tobacco industry. ["Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the 'body of fact' that exists in the minds of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy," wrote a cigarette executive.] As long as they can raise doubt in the public mind about the science, which is how most people think of cellphones today—"well, I'm not really sure, I've heard things, maybe there's something wrong, but, you know, it's probably okay because if there was something wrong they would tell us"—as long as you can maintain doubt, people will keep doing what they're doing because these things do have a lot of attraction.

BJ: What's the source for the quarter of a billion dollar figure?

DD: This admission was made at a London briefing that included members of the [international] Mobile Manufacturers Forum, and the Association of Telecommunications and Value-Added Service Providers, which represents most of the German providers in this field. I do not know whether CTIA was involved directly, but I know that these groups work closely together on such matters. [According to Davis, someone living in England who attended the briefing revealed this admission to her off-the-record.]

I thought to myself, "If this industry is spending a quarter of a billion dollars, then this is really validation for what we've been doing."

BJ: Similar to the decades-long struggle to get U.S. regulatory agencies to definitively link smoking with cancer and declare them a dangerous carcinogen, how does cancer's long-term characteristic manifestation and prevalence work in the cellphone industry's favor and pose another future public health nightmare?

DD: Because cancer can take a long time to develop and necessarily has multiple causes. If you focus only on cancer, you don't bring attention to things that can take nine months or less to develop. For example, birth defects or learning disabilities or possibly autism. And keeping the debate focused on long-term issues, for which there are legitimate questions, you take the public focus away from the more serious short-term issues.

For example, there is apparently an epidemic of tinnitus in younger people. Tinnitus is ringing in the ears and it can be disabling. Tinnitus is associated with cellphone use. There's an increase in serious weight disorders from cellphone use. And people who don't sleep have serious other consequences for their health that can be associated with it. There may be as well increases in problems with their memory. And all of those things are not as sexy and don't demand as much attention as cancer, but they can be very, very important from a public health point of view.

BJ: To prove causality regarding cancer in a court of law is very difficult. One of the industry's main arguments for why cellphones are safe is to point out that people have been using them for years now but there's been no proven correlating epidemic of brain cancer. Is that a legitimate argument?

DD: That's absolute nonsense. Because the reality is, the way we've used phones and the amount that we've used phones has changed radically in the past five years. When phones were first marketed in the 1990s, it cost, for car phones, $3000 to buy a phone and the average person did not use it that much. They were very, very expensive. The data that we have on cellphone use and brain cancer comes from that long ago period of time. And by the way, that's only 20 years ago. Brain cancer has a latency in the population of 40 years. We know that because when we studied the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there was no increase in brain cancer to those who were exposed to the ionizing radiation from the bomb until 40 years after that exposure took place. So are we really going to say we should wait 40 years, see how much cancer happens and then try to protect others from getting as much?

In my book The Secret History of the War on Cancer, I discuss at some length how the whole idea of what is evidence for causation in epidemiology cannot be separated from the whole debate on tobacco. Simply cannot be separated. It was because the tobacco industry understood that if they could raise doubt about how you could conclude something caused cancer, that they put so much effort into getting so many receptive public health authorities to say, "Well, causation requires that these five things be met." So that is, in fact, nonsense. If you are a physician and someone comes to see you with an absolutely incapacitating headache or a swollen arm, you don't tell them, "Come back in 10 years when I've completed my study and I'll see what I can do for you."

And we have lots of things right now for which we do not have explanations and we have good reasons for concern, concerning behavioral changes in our children, serious problems with hearing difficulties, increases in thyroid disease. Where there's a lot of reason for concern and we need to start to take precautions to reduce exposure. That is what the governments of France and Israel and Finland and India are doing now. Even Canada.

BJ: How did the FDA come to approve cellphones for widespread public use without any safety testing?

DD: That's an interesting story that's also in my book Disconnect. The fellow who oversaw the approval of the cellphone with no safety testing at all—as soon as that was done at the FDA—went on to a very lucrative career at Motorola for 20 years afterwards. He argued that the only health effect from a cellphone was heat. Since cellphones don't produce a measurable change in heat within six minutes, which at the time was the only standard, they said, "OK, they're safe."

BJ: The cellphone industry appears to have learned many lessons from the tobacco industry. To get the industry off the ground, the Federal Telecommunications Act of 1996 essentially prevented local authorities from weighing any health concerns when deciding where to install cellphone towers.

Apart from the often-overlooked safety warnings accompanying new cellphones, are there other actions the industry has taken to indemnify itself from potential future liability. Does any legislation, for example, exist or is there any in the works you're aware of that would indemnify them from future mass lawsuits?

DD: I know that the strategy is to argue, "If the phone was in compliance with existing law, then we should not be faulted."

Do you have an iPhone? [She emails me a screenshot of iPhone's safety warnings, which are located in the phone.] This is a screenshot of the safety warnings that are buried six levels in within the iPhone. And because of the screenshot, you can make it bigger and you can do things with it. But in the iPhone itself, it's the only thing that cannot be magnified or copied. But I outsmarted it by making a screenshot of it.

BJ: Another tactic the cellphone industry appears to have learned from the tobacco industry is to target young users as early and often as possible. We even see plenty of commercials here in the States that depict a tween or teen schooling their parents on the necessity of purchasing the latest cellphone model. Why is cellphone radiation more dangerous to children and teenagers?

DD: A young child's brain has a thinner skull and the brain contains more fluid. The more fluid or fat in any material, the more it absorbs microwave radiation. In addition, the earlier in life you can get children hooked into needing this stimulation, the stronger the tie they will have to these devices.

BJ: What types of legislation in other countries have already either passed or have been introduced to outlaw advertising or selling cellphones to children and teenagers?

DD: In particular, recently Belgium has banned the sale of a cellphone to a 7-year-old. Turkey has banned ads and advertising to children. So has France for children under 12. India has bans in certain areas. In Bangalore, you cannot sell a cellphone to someone younger than 16. So in different parts of the world, they've taken different steps. You can go to our website and click on Worldwide Advisories to see what other countries have done.

But the reality is, cellphones have to be used safely. They are today like cars and trucks—we can't live without them, but we certainly wouldn't give a car or truck to a toddler to drive. Why are we thinking it's perfectly okay to give a device that the World Health Organization has said is a "possible human carcinogen" to infants and toddlers, and for that matter, schoolchildren?

My colleagues and I just published a paper where we conclude, based on new evidence published since the WHO did its assessment in 2011, that cellphone and other wireless radiation should be classified as a "probable human carcinogen." Now, engine exhaust and lead and DDT are classified as "possible" human carcinogens and based on that, governments have policies all over the world to restrict exposure, particularly for children, but for everybody.

BJ: What is the most difficult obstacle you've found in trying to bring more public awareness to this issue?

DD: The close-mindedness of my scientific colleagues has sometimes been utterly astonishing. That the most prominent scientists, very respected people, are so close-minded because they are also human and addicted to these devices. That's been the most difficult thing to deal with. But we're winning on the science because we're not making this stuff up.

Filipino Seniors in U.S. Looking to Return Home—with Medicare

Sluggo Rigor, New American Media — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 10:47:00 -0700

Immigrants are appealing to Congress for "Medicare portability" so they can receive benefits overseas and save the program money.

While the U.S. Congress deliberates over proposed changes in the nation’s immigration laws, one group of immigrants who became naturalized citizens and who retired and have grown old in this country are seeking a congressional change that is the reverse of what most immigrants want.

Baby boomers, war veterans, widows and retirees originally from the Philippines are hoping welfare assistance and entitlement benefits they have earned would follow them should they decide to return to the land of their birth. Many are World War II veterans who fought under U.S. command and were promised federal compensation only partly provided since then. Advocates believe the United States could save money were it to permit the seniors to return home with their benefits, especially for Medicare.

Understandably, the accessibility of health insurance at this time in their lives is a major consideration as they dream of making their “giant leap” back home. Medicare recipients must be at least 65 or be disabled.

WWII-Era Seniors Assess Their Future

In Seattle’s Filipino-American community, aging WWII veterans and widows meet twice weekly at a senior center where they frequently share meals subsidized through the Older Americans Act. At these gatherings they assess their hopes and future plans.

Veteran Tomas Villanueva, 90, and his wife Esther, 87, have lived in a subsidized senior housing facility in downtown Seattle for the past 21 years.

During World War II, Villanueva served in Guam as a Philippine Scout recruit of the U.S. Army. Following the war, he returned to his home province in Southern Luzon where he served as a constabulary officer. He and Esther decided to emigrate to the U.S. in 1991.

After securing their American citizenship in 1994, the couple filed petitions for some of their six adult children to receive visas enabling them to join their parents in Seattle. The Villanuevas were especially hoping that as they grow old, two of their daughters would provide them a family safety net.

Eventually, the U.S. government approved four visas for the Villanueva children—but they have remained on the waiting list in the Philippines since 1994, because of tight annual numerical immigration quotas the U.S. sets for some countries.

Two of the Villanueva children eventually lost interest in emigrating to the U.S. And the two daughters, still determined to join their parents, learned that worldwide demand for U.S. family visas was so large in 2010 that the demand triggered a retrogression rule, effectively freezing visas and adding several years of wait time to the backlog of applicants.

According to the National Visa Center, the agency that releases visas for all approved applications processed by the U.S. Customs and Immigration Service (CIS), such a rule applies when the number of visa applications exceeds a given threshold. As of June 2013, CIS is processing applications filed as far back as 1992, two years before the Villanuevas petitioned for their daughters. Based on the past experience of petitioners, a delay of five or more years may be likely in this case.

As they waited, the aging couple needed medical attention. Medicare covered Esther’s pacemaker in 2008, and she has elevated blood pressure. Tomas, once active as an officer in Seattle’s Filipino war veterans’ association, has shown symptoms of dementia and oncoming diabetes.

Esther has been debating whether to keep waiting for her daughters to arrive, or to return to the Philippines for good. Keeping her Medicare coverage has been the single, most important factor, she said.

Care Unaffordable in U.S.

“But whether or not Medicare will be accessible to us in the Philippines, there is no other choice but to go back home because we cannot afford caregiver services or retirement home expense in the States,” she explained. Experts say that despite Medicare coverage, uncovered out-of-pocket costs for seniors in the U.S. are now close to 20 percent of their income.

Esther continued, “The long delay of our daughters’ coming has made us decide to go home. We will be nearer to them if we need help.”

An unofficial survey conducted by a coalition of Filipino organizations and community groups across the U.S. shows that about 100 Filipino American professionals retire every day.

While they can take their Social Security retirement benefits and savings anywhere in the world, it is a different story for their Medicare coverage overseas. Until Medicare extends coverage to them outside the U.S., they will need private medical insurance.

Elderly couples in Washington State whose combined income does not exceed $18,000 a year are entitled to a monthly average of $500 in Supplemental Security Income (SSI). Esther and Tomas qualified for SSI and receive a combined monthly supplemental income of $800.

Esther also receives a monthly pension of $100 after retiring as an employee of Volunteers of America. Because Tomas receives a military pension only from his military service with the Philippine Constabulary, equivalent to $120 a month, he is entitled to SSI benefits as a senior residing in Seattle.

If retirees return to the Philippines, they receive 75 percent of their Social Security pension. For Esther it will be a meager $75 per month. If veterans choose to reside in the U.S., they receive burial benefits and each widow receives an average lump sum of $9,000, with the amount partly depending on a departed soldier’s rank.

Medicare Portability

"Filipino-American war veterans and their widows are leading the way in the campaign for Medicare portability. In the 65-and-above age group are 200,000 Filipino elderly in the U.S.," explained Eric Lachica, organizer of U.S. Medicare Philippines, a nonprofit advocacy organization based in Washington, D.C.

Lachica conducts monthly teleconferences among advocates of the movement based in key American cities, from Honolulu to Boston.

A seasoned lobbyist in the U.S., Lachica spearheads the campaign for Medicare portability, an extension that will allow retired Filipino-American immigrant professionals access to their Medicare benefits at internationally accredited hospitals and health care providers in the Philippines.

The campaign by Filipino-American community advocates and elderly leaders for Medicare coverage for retirees wherever they decide to live has been bolstered by a study published in May by the journal Health Affairs.

According to the study, immigrants in recent years contributed about $14 billion more per year to Medicare than they received from the program. As a result, foreign-born U.S. residents produced a $115 billion surplus from 2002-2009, while the rest of the population created a $28 billion deficit over that same period.

The study points out that the aging U.S. population was sucking money from Medicare faster than it could replenish those funds, and immigrants helped cover the shortfall.

South of Seattle, Filipinos in Tacoma who are officers and members of the Filipino-American Physicians of Washington (FAPWA) take a differing view and are skeptical about the proposed Medicare portability.

Change Unlikely, Say Some

Former FAPWA president Nic Panlasigui believes that Medicare “is simply too big an institution that it would take time for Congress and CMS [Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services] to formulate any significant change.”

Panlasigui, a physician who is also a noncommissioned colonel in the U.S. Army and does work at nearby Fort Lewis, explains his view: “Because U.S. Medicare will demand higher standards of performance, any official extension to so-called Third World countries would entail extensive work. There are concerns about quality of facilities in overseas hospitals, physicians’ credentials, equipment, support functions and the ever-present concern over fraud.”

He continued, “20,000 Filipino doctors and 200,000 Filipino nurses practicing in countless medical centers across the U.S. know the score and we would be the first to wish that such benefits work their way to the native land to help retirees and old folks.”

Following weeks of deliberation and earnest discussions among seniors at the nutrition site about the immigration reform bill pending in the U.S. Congress and Medicare, Esther decided to bring home Tomas.

The old soldier had started to wander about the halls of the housing facility in the wee hours and this has alarmed Esther. After informing her daughters about her decision, she and Tomas flew home on May 21.

Her parting words to friends: “If the immigration reform bill will bring my daughters to the U.S., well and good. But the safety net we need as we age is not certain. Back in the old village, the caring family network I know can always take the place of Medicare.”

Pro-Fracking Greens Called Out in Ecologist Sandra Steingraber's New Manifesto

Jeff Biggers, YES! Magazine — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 08:05:00 -0700

In a statement, ecologist Sandra Steingraber denounced Illinois’ new fracking regulations and described the need for a movement dedicated to abolishing fracking nationwide.

A new salvo has been fired in the national battle against fracking.

Within hours of the Illinois General Assembly's vote on its controversial bill on hydraulic fracking last Friday night, the AP's headline rippled across nationwide newspapers: "Illinois lawmakers approve nation's toughest fracking regulations."

With New York readying to rescind or keep in place that state's temporary moratorium, and high stakes battles taking place across the nation about whether to regulate fracking or place moratoriums on it, Steingraber and a network of citizen groups have viewed Illinois as the staging ground for a fracking rush that will have an extraordinary ripple effect. Not so fast, says Dr. Sandra Steingraber, the renowned scientist whom Rolling Stone has called the " toxic avenger." She returned to her native Illinois last week to join a growing citizens uprising against gas drilling and sand mining operations she defines as "an accident-prone, inherently dangerous industrial process with risks that include catastrophic and irremediable damage to our health and environment."

Once hailed by the Sierra Club as the "new Rachel Carson," Steingraber denounced Illinois’ bill as "the result of closed-door negotiations between industry representatives and compromise-oriented environmental organizations." She testified in front of a last minute committee hearing of the Illinois House of Representatives, protested with sit-in activists, met with bill negotiators, and was even tossed out of the Illinois General Assembly for speaking out (see video at the bottom of this article).

With Gov. Pat Quinn's signature imminent, Business Insider gushed that Illinois “could become the epicenter of America's next oil boom."

Not under their watch, says Steingraber and the Illinois anti-fracking shock troops.

Issuing a "Fracking Manifesto," she has thrown down the gauntlet on Illinois' regulatory fallout as a cautionary tale for citizens groups, environmental organizations and frackers across the nation.

"We call for a mobilization that brings fracking realities to the rest of the nation," the manifesto declares. "If our elected officials refuse to visit the fracking fields, then we will bring the fracking fields to them—in the form of science, stories, photographs, film, lectures, hearings, and journalism. If elected officials refuse to defend our land, water, air, and health against those who would despoil them for their own profit, then we will do it ourselves, using peaceful, non-violent methods."

The full document is below.

A Fracking Manifesto

from Sandra Steingraber and the people of Illinois to the nation

We know that high-volume horizontal hydraulic fracking, or HVHF, is an accident-prone, inherently dangerous industrial process with risks that include catastrophic and irremediable damage to our health and environment.

We know that HVHF and its attendant technologies:

contribute to groundwater contamination, including 219 cases in Pennsylvania alone;
turn massive amounts of fresh, drinkable water into massive amounts of briny, poisonous flowback fluid for which there is no failsafe disposal solution;
vent hazardous air pollutants that are associated with cancer, asthma, heart attack, stroke, and preterm birth;
release radioactive substances—including radon, which is the number two cause of lung cancer—and benzene, which is a proven cause of leukemia—from deep geological strata;
fragment forests in ways that decimate birds and wildlife, sabotage natural flood control systems, and pour sediment into rivers and streams;
industrialize communities in ways that vastly increase truck traffic, noise pollution, light pollution, stress, crime, and the need for emergency services;
offer jobs that are dangerous, toxic, and temporary, with a fatality rate seven times that of other industries; and
leak prodigious amounts of methane, a potent heat-trapping gas.

We know these problems cannot be prevented by any set of rules or government office, let alone state agencies like those in Illinois, which have been cut to the bone by budget cuts and cannot be counted on for regulatory enforcement.

We have heard the warnings of our brothers and sisters living in the gas fields of Pennsylvania and Ohio, whose children, pets, and livestock are sick, whose property values are ruined, whose water is undrinkable.

We have heard the pleas of our neighbors in Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota, where strip-mining for “ frac sand” has devastated communities, destroyed landscapes, and filled the air with carcinogenic silica dust. We are aware that our own beloved Starved Rock State Park is already threatened by industrial mining of silica sand used for fracking operations and that the pressure to strip-mine Illinois for sand will only increase with every well that is drilled and fracked.

We assert that fracking is a moral crisis. In a time of climate emergency, it is wrong to further deepen our dependency on fossil fuels. In a state such as Illinois, where chronic drought and water shortages are already forecast for our children’s future, it is wrong to destroy fresh water resources in order to bring new sources of climate-killing gas and oil out of the ground.

We reject the legitimacy of Illinois’ fracking regulatory bill, which was the result of closed-door negotiations between industry representatives and compromise-oriented environmental organizations. Responsible only to their funders and their members, these environmental groups do not represent us nor are they empowered to negotiate on our behalf. We consider the fracking regulatory bill to be a subversion of both science and democracy. Throughout its creation, no comprehensive health study or environmental impact study was ever commissioned. No public hearings or public comment periods ever took place. And yet it is the public that is being compelled to live with the risks sanctioned by this bill. It is an unjust law.

Knowing that our own government has abdicated its responsibility to protect the safety and well-being of the citizenry, knowing that no one is coming to save us, we declare our intent to save ourselves from the ravages of shale gas and oil extraction via HVHF. We declare our intent to join together in a fracking abolitionist movement.

As such, no longer shall national environmental organizations based far from impacted realities make decisions that will have life-changing impacts on the people living in impacted zones. We will call out organizations that betray core values and integrity. We will openly inform their membership and their funders and reveal the truth of where they stand and at whose expense.

We call for a mobilization that brings fracking realities to the rest of the nation. If our elected officials refuse to visit the fracking fields, then we will bring the fracking fields to them—in the form of science, stories, photographs, film, lectures, hearings, and journalism. If elected officials refuse to defend our land, water, air, and health against those who would despoil them for their own profit, then we will do it ourselves, using peaceful, nonviolent methods.

We hereby commit ourselves to building a powerful movement that will protect Illinois’ children—and safeguard the living ecosystem on which their lives depend—for generations to come. In short, we declare our intent to take the future into our hands. And that future is unfractured.

Sign on and join our movement.

Dr. Sandra Steingraber

Springfield, Illinois

Jeff Biggers wrote this article and shot these videos for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas and practical actions. Winner of the David R. Brower Award for Environmental Reporting, Jeff is the author of Reckoning at Eagle Creek: The Secret Legacy of Coal in the Heartland, among other books. His website is www.jeffbiggers.com.

It's Not Just Monsanto's Genetically Engineered Wheat: You May Already Be Eating Rogue GE Crops

Jill Richardson, AlterNet — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 06:50:00 -0700

Can humans control and contain genetically engineered crops? The answer appears to be no.

Of the four major crops grown in the U.S., genetically engineered (GE) seeds are available for three: corn, soybeans and alfalfa. But a farmer growing the fourth major crop, wheat, could not (legally) plant GE seeds even if he wanted to. The biotech giant Monsanto did develop a variety of GE wheat years ago, but never sold it commercially because the wheat industry felt its customers did not want it.

In theory, the last of this GE wheat ever planted in Oregon, where Monsanto carried out some of its field trials, was in 2001. But an Oregon farmer just discovered that same wheat growing in his field this year.

The discovery of the unauthorized wheat has thrown the industry into chaos. Japan and South Korea suspended their wheat imports from the Pacific Northwest. A Kansas farmer is suing Monsanto for harming the entire wheat industry with its negligence. What no one can explain is how the GE wheat got into the farmer's field – although Monsanto assures us that this is an “isolated event.”

But is it?

The discovery of genetically engineered wheat in Oregon poses an important question: Can humans control and contain genetically engineered crops?

Jack Heinemann, a professor of molecular biology at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand and the director of the Center for Integrated Research in Biosafety, says we can’t. “I think there is a way for humans to determine if [genetically engineered crops] are safe enough to be used, which is different from saying that they can be contained,” he says. “There’s no evidence that they can be contained, and there is considerable evidence that we cannot contain them.”

With that, he lists several famous incidents of GE crops popping up where they are not supposed to, like the incident with Liberty Link Rice, a GE rice variety that showed up in rice exported to France in 2006 even though it was never commercialized. Or there’s the StarLink Corn fiasco, when a type of GE corn unapproved for human consumption was found in Taco Bell taco shells. And genes from rogue GE corn have even reached the birthplace of corn: Mexico.

Heinemann is familiar with Monsanto’s escaped GE wheat. Anticipating it would commercialize the GE wheat within a few years, Monsanto had applied to the governments of Australia and New Zealand to approve it in their countries back in 2004. Heinemann worked on a risk assessment for the wheat in New Zealand, until Monsanto withdrew the application. Monsanto ended field trials for the wheat in 2005, and no safety determination was ever made on the wheat.

Here in the U.S., the FDA concluded that Monsanto concluded its GE wheat was safe. Yes, you read that right. (According to the FDA “It is Monsanto's continued responsibility to ensure that foods marketed by the firm are safe, wholesome, and in compliance with all applicable legal and regulatory requirements.”) But now that the escaped wheat has come to light, Monsanto assures us that “The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) confirmed the food and feed safety of Roundup Ready wheat more than a decade ago.”

Clearly, a more honest statement would be “We told the FDA that our wheat was safe and they believed us.”

After the field trials for the GE wheat ended, “This thing should have gone away,” says Heinemann. “For it to appear in Oregon years after [Monsanto] pulled it from development is concerning. Because it says we don’t know how many field trials – and there have been thousands of field trials of genetically modified crops that have never come to market – that might be circulating in the food supply.” Nor do we know if they are safe.

Before farmers can plant any GE crop, the crops undergo years of field trials. If the field trials are successful and the company wishes to go forward, it applies for deregulation – legalization – of its crop. The U.S. government has deregulated a little over 100 varieties of genetically engineered crops. And only a fraction of those are actually grown commercially and sold into our food supply. But these 100 or so deregulated crops represent only a fraction of the genetically engineered crops that are field-tested.

Following the end of field trials, unless a GE crop is destined for commercialization, it is supposed to go away. If Monsanto had intended to take its GE wheat to market, it would have had to develop a test kit to test for the presence of its genes in wheat, and the government would have assessed its impact on the environment and the risk that the wheat could become a “plant pest.” The European Union even requires companies to develop a monitoring plan for crops that are grown commercially. But when a company decides to call it quits on a crop it is field-testing, none of these steps are taken. The crop, essentially, disappears.

Heinemann is worried about the presence of these field-tested-but-never-commercialized GE crops in our food supply. As far back as 2002, a study from the Canadian province of Saskatchewan reported, “Industry sources estimate that in 2000 in the Saskatchewan region of Canada alone, more than 300,000 acres of wheat were planted with unregistered or obsolete plant varieties. Exports by volume are composed of some varieties that have not been, or are no longer, approved for release in Canada. Regionally across western Canada, wheat exports contain 0.6-2.4% of these unregistered or obsolete varieties.”

“Who is monitoring the safety of these products, or the unanticipated crosses that they may make during their long period of recycling in the agroecosystem?” Heinemann asks.

The GE wheat was easy to find because it was engineered to be “Roundup Ready.” That is, it can survive being sprayed with Monsanto’s herbicide Roundup. In fact, the farmer discovered it because he sprayed it with Roundup and it did not die.

“In the case of something like Roundup Ready, the trait is an obvious one that we can detect because we can use a herbicide on it to see it,” says Heinemann. “But in the case of pharma crops [engineered to produce pharmaceuticals] or crops that have been genetically engineered to produce an industrial compound that could be toxic or a crop that was designed to be nutritionally altered, those products are not obvious and you can't detect them and probably would not be obvious until they were causing harm."

Elaborating on his concerns about pharma crops, he quotes a 2007 article in Nature, calling it prophetic. It reads:

“Since 1991, the USDA has approved nearly 400 field tests of crops that produce pharmaceutical and industrial compounds, leaving many concerned that future escapes could have severe consequences for human health. A close call came in 2002, when stalks of corn designed to produce a pig vaccine were found mixed with $2.7-million worth of Nebraska soya beans destined for human consumption. Prodigene, the corn's maker, was fined $250,000 and forced to buy and destroy the soya beans."

Can you believe we were that close to having corn laced with a pig vaccine in our food supply?

Heinemann feels that “a variety that produced a pharmaceutical or industrial compound, or had an alteration to its nutritional qualities that were of concern to some people, would likely never be detected prior to causing harm. And if they were to cause harm, the diagnoses of the cause would likely remain a mystery because of how difficult it would be to both detect the genetically engineered crop and then link it with the effect.”

As history has shown, laws cannot contain GE crops. “They can only punish people for having failed to follow the law,” Heinemann says. “And you can't punish a wheat plant or a corn plant, so the laws don't necessarily have a biological relevance.”

What should we do about the potential for escaped, undetected GE crops? Practically speaking, Heinemann encourages concerned citizens to continue focusing on efforts to require labeling of genetically engineered crops. That won’t solve the problem of containing GE crops grown in field tests, but Heinemann is a pragmatist. “I'm not trying to defend these field trials. But if the community is not focused on one big important project, nothing get accomplished.”

However, in a perfect world, he would recommend suspending field trials “until companies and governments revise their biosafety laws.” The laws, he feels, “are not sufficiently transparent and the risk assessments are not sufficiently robust to achieve the kinds of solutions that have been claimed by the regulators.”

In other words, unless the laws are improved, we’ll continue finding – or not finding – unapproved GE crops in our food supply.

Connecticut Makes History as First State to Pass GE Food Labeling Law

Michele Simon, Eat Drink Politics — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 18:08:00 -0700

Here's how grassroots advocates beat the biotech and food lobbies.

This week, Connecticut won the honor of becoming the first state to pass a law requiring genetically-engineered foods to be labeled. (The governor has indicated he will sign.) It was really only a matter of time. The disappointing defeat of Prop 37 last fall in California (thanks to a massive industry disinformation campaign) sparked a national movement that has resulted in labeling bills getting introduced in about half the states.

But how did the small state of Connecticut make this happen?

I spoke at length with the leader of the effort, Tara Cook-Littman of GMO Free CT, who worked for the past two years as a volunteer. (See the group’s impressive list of coalition partners.)

She said for a long time, efforts to pass labeling bills went nowhere, but things started to change two years ago once advocates formally organized themselves. While at first she and others “were dismissed as a bunch of crazy moms and environmentalists,” things started to pick up last year “when advocates were able to show themselves to be a serious movement with political power.”

What about the opposition? Cook-Littman said it was formidable, and that industry made all the same fear-mongering arguments we heard last year during Prop 37 in California about higher food prices and confusing consumers.

She and others suspect the biotech industry was funneling money through the trade group, the Connecticut Food Association, which represents retailers and wholesalers. Also in opposition was the Grocery Manufacturers Association, the national trade group for food makers, which firmly stated its opposition to Prop 37 last year, calling it the organization’s “single-highest priority.”

In addition, Cook-Littman told me about the front group industry formed to oppose the bill, called: “Connecticut Farm to Food.” (For more about front groups, see my recent report.) This group’s home page claims boldly if inexplicably: “Forced labeling will drive business and science out of Connecticut.” Listed as sponsors are three groups: The Council for Biotechnology Information (a trade group for the biotech industry; its website is:whybiotech.com), the Connecticut Retail Merchants Association, and the previously-mentioned Grocery Manufacturers Association. In other words, two of these three groups behind this “Connecticut” organization are based in Washington DC.

The toughest opposition though, Cook-Littman said, came from the Connecticut Farm Bureau, which claimed the bill would hurt farmers, despite the bill not even being about farming, but rather food products. “They claimed that farmers’ sales of value-added products would be destroyed if they had to be labeled,” she said. But, as a strong counter-weight, advocates had the support of the state’s numerous organic farmers, led by the Connecticut chapter of the Northeast Organic Farming Association, who Cook-Littman called “our truest partner.”

Still, how did this grassroots group fight off such high-powered lobbyists representing at least three major industries – biotech, food retailers, and food manufacturers? She said, “We just got louder.”

What exactly was the turning point for the movement? Cook-Littman said face-to-face meetings with politicians were critical. “We spent a lot of time developing relationships with our representatives. Just spending that time with them was invaluable,” she said.

Also, the group’s social media presence, especially on Facebook, allowed non-paid advocates to engage in less time-consuming ways. “We told our representatives: ‘look at what’s happening on Facebook.’”

And simply showing up in massive numbers when it counted: at two critical rallies, one before the legislative session began, another just weeks ago, along with a huge turnout for the hearing.

Cook-Littman credits the national advocacy group Food Democracy Now! for being a vital partner in the effort. “We could not have done it without them. They always believed in us, while others discounted us,” she said. “They also helped drive more than 40,000 phone calls to the governor’s office and provided strategic advice along the way.”

Dave Murphy, founder and executive director of Food Democracy Now!, told me that another turning point was when Jerry Greenfield of Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream came to the capital to testify in support of the bill. “That gave the issue instant credibility because Ben and Jerry’s is a very successful company. There were politicians who had been against the bill standing in line for ice cream and a photo opp with Jerry.”

Also, there were several times during the process when they thought the bill was dead. But the advocates didn’t give up; another crucial lesson: to hang in there.

Of course, to get any bill difficult bill passed, compromises must be made along the way. While the labeling provisions of the bill are strong, unfortunately, legislators added a “trigger clause,” which requires that four other states in the northeast region enact similar bills before the law takes effect in Connecticut.

Cook-Littman told me that the advocates fought to keep this provision out, but at the end of day, they were advised to take the compromise or else risk the bill going down to defeat, with an uncertain future. She is quite confident that the clause will actually motivate other states to get bill passed. And as a member of the Right to Know Coalition of States, she is determined to help others in doing so. She also hopes the passage helps theWashington State ballot measure coming up for vote this November.

What advice does Cook-Littman have for advocates in other states facing similar opposition from powerful lobbyists? “I told my fellow advocates: ‘Stand in your power as a constituent and let your representatives hear you.’ Too often, we give up our power,” she said. “But once you realize that you can make a difference, that’s when change happens. Also, stay the course and keep fighting.”

Dave Murphy called the Connecticut victory “one giant step for Connecticut and one giant leap for the GMO labeling movement.” He continued: “The grassroots have won the day in Connecticut for a key victory over Monsanto and the biotech lobby. It was inspiring to watch Connecticut legislators supporting GMO labeling stand strong in the face of the biotech industry’s effort to kill the bill.”

Also feeling inspired, Cook-Littman told me: “It truly feels amazing to know that our little state of Connecticut, with its grassroots power, was able to beat back the opposition to get the bill passed. I really do think it is an important step and will encourage other states to do the same.”

I couldn’t agree more. These victories don’t come very often. Let’s savor this one.

Do Psychiatrists Create the Very Mental Problems They Claim to Treat?

Ethan Watters, Pacific Standard — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 14:42:00 -0700

It's easy to blame Big Pharma and the DSM for creating trendy mental illnesses, but the real problem is psychiatry's blindness to culture.

Imagine for a moment that the American Psychiatric Association was about to compile a new edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. But instead of 2013, imagine, just for fun, that the year is 1880.

Transported to the world of the late 19th century, the psychiatric body would have virtually no choice but to include hysteria in the pages of its new volume. Women by the tens of thousands, after all, displayed the distinctive signs: convulsive fits, facial tics, spinal irritation, sensitivity to touch, and leg paralysis. Not a doctor in the Western world at the time would have failed to recognize the presentation. “The illness of our age is hysteria,” a French journalist wrote. “Everywhere one rubs elbows with it.”

Hysteria would have had to be included in our hypothetical 1880 DSM for the exact same reasons that attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is included in the just-released DSM-5. The disorder clearly existed in a population and could be reliably distinguished, by experts and clinicians, from other constellations of symptoms. There were no reliable medical tests to distinguish hysteria from other illnesses then; the same is true of the disorders listed in the DSM-5 today. Practically speaking, the criteria by which something is declared a mental illness are virtually the same now as they were over a hundred years ago.

The DSM determines which mental disorders are worthy of insurance reimbursement, legal standing, and serious discussion in American life. That its diagnoses are not more scientific is, according to several prominent critics, a scandal. In a major blow to the APA’s dominance over mental-health diagnoses, Thomas R. Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, recently declared that his organization would no longer rely on the DSM as a guide to funding research. “The weakness is its lack of validity,” he wrote. “Unlike our definitions of ischemic heart disease, lymphoma, or AIDS, the DSM diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure. In the rest of medicine, this would be equivalent to creating diagnostic systems based on the nature of chest pain or the quality of fever.” As an alternative, Insel called for the creation of a new, rival classification system based on genetics, brain imaging, and cognitive science.

This idea—that we might be able to strip away all subjectivity from the diagnosis of mental illness and render psychiatry truly scientific—is intuitively appealing. But there are a couple of problems with it. The first is that the science simply isn’t there yet. A functional neuroscientific understanding of mental suffering is years, perhaps generations, away from our grasp. What are clinicians and patients to do until then? But the second, more telling problem with Insel’s approach lies in its assumption that it is even possible to strip culture from the study of mental illness. Indeed, from where I sit, the trouble with the DSM— both this one and previous editions—is not so much that it is insufficiently grounded in biology, but that it ignores the inescapable relationship between social cues and the shifting manifestations of mental illness.

***

Psychiatry tends not to learn from its past. With each new generation, psychiatric healers dismiss the enthusiasms of their predecessors by pointing out the unscientific biases and cultural trends on which their theories were based. Looking back at hysteria, we can see now that 19th-century doctors were operating amidst fanciful beliefs about female anatomy, an assumption of feminine weakness, and the Victorian-era weirdness surrounding female sexuality. And good riddance to bad old ideas. But the more important point to take away is this: There is little doubt that the symptoms expressed by those thousands of women were real.

The resounding lesson of the history of mental illness is that psychiatric theories and diagnostic categories shape the symptoms of patients. “As doctors’ own ideas about what constitutes ‘real’ dis-ease change from time to time,” writes the medical historian Edward Shorter, “the symptoms that patients present will change as well.”

This is not to say that psychiatry wantonly creates sick people where there are none, as many critics fear the new DSM-5 will do. Allen Frances—a psychiatrist who, as it happens, was in charge of compiling the previous DSM, the DSM-IV—predicts in his new book, Saving Normal, that the DSM-5 will “mislabel normal people, promote diagnostic inflation, and encourage inappropriate medication use.” Big Pharma, he says, is intent on ironing out all psychological diversity to create a “human monoculture,” and the DSM-5 will facilitate that mission. In Frances’ dystopian post-DSM-5 future, there will be a psychoactive pill for every occasion, a diagnosis for every inconvenient feeling: “Disruptive mood dysregulation disorder” will turn temper tantrums into a mental illness and encourage a broadened use of antipsychotic drugs; new language describing attention deficit disorder that expands the diagnostic focus to adults will prompt a dramatic rise in the prescription of stimulants like Adderall and Ritalin; the removal of the bereavement exclusion from the diagnosis of major depressive disorder will stigmatize the human process of grieving. The list goes on.

In 2005, a large study suggested that 46 percent of Americans will receive a mental-health diagnosis at some point in their lifetimes. Critics like Frances suggest that, with the new categories and loosened criteria in the DSM-5, the percentage of Americans thinking of themselves as mentally ill will rise far above that mark.

But recent history doesn’t support these fears. In 1994 the DSM-IV—the edition Frances oversaw—launched several new diagnostic categories that became hugely popular among clinicians and the public (bipolar II, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and social phobia, to name a few), but the number of people receiving a mental-health diagnosis did not go up between 1994 and 2005. In fact, as psychologist Gary Greenberg, author of The Book of Woe, recently pointed out to me, the prevalence of mental health diagnoses actually went down slightly. This suggests that the declarations of the APA don’t have the power to create legions of mentally ill people by fiat, but rather that the number of people who struggle with their own minds stays somewhat constant.

What changes, it seems, is that they get categorized differently depending on the cultural landscape of the moment. Those walking worried who would have accepted the ubiquitous label of “anxiety” in the 1970s would accept the label of depression that rose to prominence in the late 1980s and the 1990s, and many in the same group might today think of themselves as having social anxiety disorder or ADHD.

Viewed over history, mental health symptoms begin to look less like immutable biological facts and more like a kind of language. Someone in need of communicating his or her inchoate psychological pain has a limited vocabulary of symptoms to choose from. From a distance, we can see how the flawed certainties of Victorian-era healers created a sense of inevitability around the symptoms of hysteria. There is no reason to believe that the same isn’t happening today. Healers have theories about how the mind functions and then discover the symptoms that conform to those theories. Because patients usually seek help when they are in need of guidance about the workings of their minds, they are uniquely susceptible to being influenced by the psychiatric certainties of the moment. There is really no getting around this dynamic. Even Insel’s supposedly objective laboratory scientists would, no doubt, inadvertently define which symptoms our troubled minds gravitate toward. The human unconscious is adept at speaking the language of distress that will be understood.

***

Why do psychiatric diagnoses fade away only to be replaced by something new? The demise of hysteria may hold a clue. In the early part of the 20th century, the distinctive presentation of the disorder began to blur and then disappear. The symptoms began to lose their punch. In France this was called la petite hysterie. One doctor described patients who would “content themselves with a few gesticulatory movements, with a few spasms.” Hysteria had begun to suffer from a kind of diagnostic overload. By 1930s or so, the dramatic and unmistakable symptoms of hysteria were vanishing from the cultural landscape because they were no longer recognized as a clear communication of psychological suffering by a new generation of women and their healers.

It is true that the DSM has a great deal of influence in modern America, but it may be more of a scapegoat than a villain. It is certainly not the only force at play in determining which symptoms become culturally salient. As Frances suggests, the marketing efforts of Big Pharma on TV and elsewhere have a huge influence over which diagnoses become fashionable. Some commentators have noted that shifts in diagnostic trends seem uncannily timed to coincide with the term lengths of the patents that pharmaceutical companies hold on drugs. Is it a coincidence that the diagnosis of anxiety diminished as the patents on tranquilizers ran out? Or that the diagnosis of depression rose as drug companies landed new exclusive rights to sell various antidepressants? Consider for a moment that the diagnosis of depression didn’t become popular in Japan until Glaxo-SmithKlein got approval to market Paxil in the country.

Journalists play a role as well: We love to broadcast new mental-health epidemics. The dramatic rise of bulimia in the United Kingdom neatly coincided with the media frenzy surrounding the rumors and subsequent revelation that Princess Di suffered from the condition. Similarly, an American form of anorexia hit Hong Kong in the mid-1990s just after a wave of local media coverage brought attention to the disorder.

The trick is not to scrub culture from the study of mental illness but to understand how the unconscious takes cues from its social settings. This knowledge won’t make mental illnesses vanish (Americans, for some reason, find it particularly difficult to grasp that mental illnesses are absolutely real and culturally shaped at the same time). But it might discourage healers from leaping from one trendy diagnosis to the next. As things stand, we have little defense against such enthusiasms. “We are always just one blockbuster movie and some weekend therapist’s workshops away from a new fad,” Frances writes. “Look for another epidemic beginning in a decade or two as a new generation of therapists forgets the lessons of the past.” Given all the players stirring these cultural currents, I’d make a sizable bet that we won’t have to wait nearly that long.

With Senator Frank Lautenberg's Death, What Happens to His Crucial Fight to Protect Us from Harmful Chemicals?

Alison Rose Levy, AlterNet — Mon, 03 Jun 2013 10:11:00 -0700

His most enduring legacy should have been the passage of the Safe Chemicals Act that has been squashed by pressure and lobbying by the chemical industry.

When Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) died Monday morning at age 89, the Senate lost its oldest member, (he was also the last WWII veteran), and proponents of toxic chemical safety, gun safety, and other protections lost a champion. His most enduring legacy should have been the passage of the Safe Chemicals Act he first introduced in 2010. But due to pressure and lobbying by the chemical industry, the original version of the bill never made it to the Senate floor for a vote despite Lautenberg’s committed work (in alliance with a coalition of environment groups) to get a vote on it every year from 2010 to 2012.

The American Chemistry Council opposed the bill, and via lobbyists, campaign contributions, and paid advertising for select candidates stalled forward momentum. According to the report Toxic Spendingissued by Common Cause:

Since 1990, the chemical industry has donated $117 million to candidates for federal office. From 2011 through September 2012, (author’s note: the critical window for passage of the Safe Chemicals Act) the chemical industry contributed $10 million to candidates for federal office. From 2005 through September 2012, the industry gave $39 million to candidates for federal office, and from 2005 through June 2012 it spent $333 million on lobbying at the federal level. Since December 2011, the chemical industry has also spent at least $2.8 million on political advertising in at least nineteen different campaigns.

A casualty of the breakdown in government, Lautenberg’s original bill aimed to revise the oldest, most outdated, and most ineffective environmental law on the books, the Toxic Substances Safety Act (TSCA)— which The New York Timesrecently called “a toothless law on toxic chemicals.”

With documented increases in cancer, asthma and spectrum disorders attributable (at least in part) to toxic chemical exposures, Lautenberg’s Safe Chemical Act met the need for vastly improved legislation to study and regulate toxic chemicals. It would have required “testing of all industrial chemicals… [to put)]…the burden on industry to prove that chemicals are safe in order stay on the market. Under current policy, the EPA can only call for safety testing after evidence surfaces demonstrating a chemical is dangerous.”

Though it passed in Senate committee in July 2012, the bill never reached the Senate floor. Two weeks ago, Lautenberg (who had been in declining health at least since early 2013) made his last attempt to get some form of legislation through. His new bi-partisan bill, introduced along with David Vitter (R-LA) was hailed as a compromise, and endorsed by the American Academy of Pediatrics. But the Environmental Working Group (EWG) critiqued the new bill as too much of a compromise, far from the bill that Lautenberg first championed. Vitter, the revised bill’s bi-partisan Republican sponsor, received over $300,000 in paid political advertising from the chemical industry in 2012 alone.

Some background: When the government enacted the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) in 1976, the law aimed at guaranteeing the safety of the over 85,000 untested chemicals in wide use—but it fell far short. Over 35 years later, Lautenberg pointed out that fewer than two hundred chemicals had been studied, with only five chemicals banned. Why the delay? Industry pushback, lawsuits, revolving door regulators, and lobbying hampered the EPA in enforcing it.

Although developing safer chemical formulations may be better for business long term, in the short term, determining a toxic chemical’s human health effects can affect chemical companies’ quarterly bottom lines. If chemicals (or their waste or byproducts) produce undesirable health risks, then manufacturers have to spend millions reformulating them or finding ways to dispose of them. Instead of incurring that expense, it’s cheaper for companies to put scientists on the payroll, followed by an army of lobbyists to persuade Congress, along with public relations firms to sell the public. Government regulators then use “turn and point” science when they point to industry-sponsored scientific claims of safety. The problem is that independent science and “turn and point” science (which David Murphy of Food Democracy Now! calls “cigarette science”) don’t produce the same results.

The Emerging Science of Chemical Harm

When industry chemists developed Bisphenol A (BPA), they completely overlooked what any bona fide biologist would immediately detect: that the chemical structure of BPA (and certain other synthetic chemicals) closely resembles the chemical structures of estrogen.

But Frederick vom Saal, Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of Missouri noticed it immediately. Vom Saal has studied hormones and chemicals of concern for over 20 years. He helped to describe the action of BPA and other substances as “endocrine disruptors” that even at miniscule doses interfere with bodily functioning. He found that, when absorbed into the body, the chemical molecules of BPA readily act on hormonal pathways to mimic estrogenic activity. Since excess estrogenic activity is implicated in cancer, this is undesirable. “Using human breast cancer cells, we were studying estrogen chemicals for their potency. And BPA lit up like a Christmas tree. We said, ‘Holy mackerel. What is it that would ever make anybody think this is weak?’” asks vom Saal. Even at infinitesimal doses, harmful changes happen.

However, when government and industry undertake studies, they tend to use an older model of toxicology. Conventional toxicology investigates: At what dose will a substance kill you? But that research fails to account for the low dose responses that vom Saal and a growing body of scientists have identified. The independent academic science vom Saal and his colleagues undertake is less well funded than industry-funded studies. As a result, this new science uses smaller cohorts, such that it’s findings can be more readily dismissed. The solution is better funding for independent research into the effects of low dose chemical exposures. Under TSCA, no safety studies are required until the government can demonstrate significant evidence for harm.

Will the revamped bill, now called the Chemical Safety Improvement Act, shift the burden of proof as the original bill did? No, says EWG General Counsel, Thomas Cluderay who compared the new compromise bill with the original Safe Chemicals Act.

First, there is the important question of who will pay for independent assessment. “Missing are provisions allowing the EPA to collect fees from companies to help pay the cost of doing safety reviews on chemicals,” Cluderay notes. “In practice, this will ensure that EPA moves at a glacial pace to review the thousands of chemicals already on the market.” Erase the 85,000 backlog? Not much.

Would the EPA be empowered to regulate chemicals if needed?

In the absence of ample funding for independent research, the new bill would require the EPA to show ““substantial evidence” to justify any restrictions it imposes on chemicals that pose risks to public health and the environment.” Also the new bill would “allow chemical companies to take EPA to court over any safety standard it adopts.” Stalled by industry lawsuits? No change there. That’s been going on since ’76. Most significantly, the new bill fails to deliver on Lautenberg’s key goal— shifting the burden of proof to industry.

What about the use of corporate trade secrecy to bar the public’s right to know?

According to EWG, the new bill gives industry greater protections for “confidential business information” – trade secrets about any potentially harmful ingredients in products ranging from “fragrance” to fracking chemicals.

Then there’s the bad news for physicians treating people exposed to fracking or other highly hazardous chemicals.

“In particular, the bill makes it harder for medical personnel to learn the identity of secret chemicals when treating patients potentially exposed to those substances.” If that sounds familiar, it’s because this industry protective provision is in synch with ALEC-model bills like Pennsylvania’s reviled Act 13, which sought to prohibit physicians from disclosing chemicals to patients which were revealed by testing in their blood. (It was overturned as unconstitutional by the PA Supreme Court.)

So, what about newly introduced chemicals? And can the states continue to instate better regulations on the state level?

Yes and no. Yes, the companies are still allowed to market new chemicals prior to proving safety. And no, the individual states would no longer have their current rights to regulate chemicals if they wish to. http://www.ewg.org/enviroblog/2013/05/ten-ways-new-chemical-bill-marks-retreat

So a is it a better bill? The question is better for industry or better for public health?

Commenting on the lack of up to date research on toxic chemicals, Dan Fagin, the director of the Science, Health, and Environmental Reporting Program at New York University told me, “There are good scientific reasons why this is difficult, and there are also political reasons. Both Congress and the regulatory agencies are overly influenced by manufacturers.” Fagin is the author of Tom’s River: A Story of Science and Salvation(Bantam 2013), an in-depth exploration (and cautionary tale) about Tom’s River, New Jersey, where ingrained respect for job-creating industries and lack of knowledge about health impacts enabled hazardous chemical contamination that made the town a childhood cancer cluster with sixty-nine children affected by cancers.

“There are probably quite a number of (cancer) clusters out there that people haven’t noticed but are real clusters,” says Daniel Wartenberg, a Rutgers University epidemiologist who has studied cancer clusters for over three decades. “Even when they are noticed, many clusters aren’t studied because no one has any idea what the exposures are and also because it’s hard for people to get traction with the health department,” he tells Fagin in Tom’s River.

Sadly, while the earlier Safe Chemicals Act contained provisions for more research into toxic chemical “hot spots,” like the one in Tom’s River, the new bill omits that research. It also cuts the creation of a children’s environmental health research program.

Dan Fagin says. “It’s a terrible situation when we ask people to make decisions about whether or not a product is safe for them to use without the right information. It’s the role of government to step in and make judgments.”

That’s what the late Senator hoped to assure when he crusaded for a better law. It remains to be seen whether his passing will increase the prospects of the newly watered down bill. But whatever happens, Lautenberg’s legacy rests on what he fought for throughout his distinguished career.

AlterNet.org: Personal Health

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