Category Archives: War On Drugs

China is seemingly at war with us even if it is a quiet war. The conflict stems in part from the Chinese government reportedly hoarding or restricting exports of ventilator parts and personal protective equipment to the U.S. and other countries as the pandemic spread across the globe. That is especially troublesome since, at the time, the U.S. and many nations were faced with medical shortages, health care workers were in danger, and COVID-19 patients were gasping for air. We managed to win that battle and produced our own ventilators and masks, but only after too many lives were lost.

The National Institute of Health's Dr. Anthony FauciAnthony FauciTrump confronted with grim COVID-19 milestone Overnight Health Care: Health officials eye emerging hotspots | CDC cautions against relying on antibody tests for back to work decisions | Fauci says no evidence for hydroxychloroquine The Hill's Campaign Report: Trump ramps up attacks against Twitter MORE and Dr. Robert Redfield, head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), have both told me they have great relationships with Chinese scientists and received valuable information about COVID-19, but what is far more important is the critical information that was withheld from us the ease of spread, the multi-system organ failure and blood clots recorded among patients. Instead of informing us directly or via its tool, the World Health Organization, the Chinese government was busy locking down Wuhan while allowing international flights which spread the virus.

To win this war, we must first recognize it, as we did with the Soviet Union after World War II. Our next great battle is to reposition our supply chain and not respond to threats, even amid a pandemic.

According to the Food and Drug Administration, 13.4 percent of our drug and biologic imports are from China, along with 39.3 percent of our medical devices. The vast majority of our antibiotics, over-the-counter pain killers and generic drugs to treat HIV, diabetes Alzheimers disease and seizures, all originate in China.

We must win this battle of the quiet war to cut this health care supply line and bring drug and medical device production back home. Generic production in India, a trusted ally (and a natural bulwark against China), which already supplies more than a third of our over-the-counter and generic prescription drugs, should be expanded as a backup plan. We must not allow China to further exploit our health care supply vulnerability, especially at a time when we are reeling from the economic devastations of the pandemic, which it brought us.

2019 was a great year for us before the virus hit. American companies, including Apple, were making plans to move production back to the U.S. The car industry announced more than $30 billion in U.S.-based investment. Imports of manufactured goods from Asia were falling, and China felt threatened. We must continue on this road if we are to save our great society. We must rebuild our drug production. Americans will feel more confident knowing a medicine was made here (or even in India) rather than in unreliable China.

We must also win the battle of the vaccine. Not just because China's vaccine industry is infamous for producing defective vaccines, but so that they don't hold us, hostage, to it if they beat us to the punch.

So far, so good on that front: Promising vaccines from Moderna, Oxford University (backed by Astra Zeneca) and BioNTech (a German company backed by Pfizer) are proceeding rapidly through clinical trials.

President TrumpDonald John TrumpTrump marks 'very sad milestone' of 100K coronavirus deaths DOJ: George Floyd death investigation a 'top priority' Lifting our voices and votes MORE's "Operation Warp Speed" is a bold attempt to win the race to the vaccine against China, much as the Manhattan Project beat Germany to the atomic bomb during World War II. This is a much quieter war, but we must win it, too, in order to protect our health care system and save the world once again this time from a lethal virus and the country that wants to use it to exploit us further to win the quiet war.

Marc Siegel, M.D., is a professor of medicine and medical director of Doctor Radio at NYU Langone Health. He is a Fox News medical correspondent. Follow him on Twitter:@drmarcsiegel.

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The battle of COVID in the 'quiet war' on China | TheHill - The Hill

Donald Trump launched a new vaccine war this month, but not against the virus. It was against the world.

TheUnited States and the UKwere the onlytwo holdoutsin the World Health Assembly from the declaration that vaccines and medicines forCovid-19 should be available as public goods, and not under exclusive patent rights. TheUnited States explicitly dissociated itself from the call for a patent pool, talking instead of the critical role that intellectual property plays in other words, patents for vaccines and medicines.

Having badly botched his Covid-19 response, President Trump is trying to redeem his fortunes for the November elections by promising an early vaccine. The 2020 version of Trumps Make America Great Again slogan is shaping up to be, in essence, vaccinesfor us but the rest of the world will have to queue up and pay what Big Pharma asks, as it will hold the patents.

In contrast, all other countries agreed with theCosta Rican proposal in the World Health Assemblythat there should be a patent pool for all Covid-19 vaccines and medicines. President Xi Jinping saidChinese vaccines would be available as a public good, a view shared by European Union leaders. Among the10 candidate vaccines in Phase 1 and 2of clinical trials, the Chinese have five, the United States has three, and the UK and Germany have one each.

Trump has given anultimatum to the World Health Organization (WHO)with a permanent withdrawal of funds if it does not mend its ways in 30 days. In sharp contrast, in the World Health Assembly (the highest decision-making body of the WHO), almost all countries, including close allies of the United States, rallied behind the WHO.

Thefailure of the US Centers for Disease Control and Preventionagainst Covid-19, with nearly four times the annual budget of the WHO, is visible to the world. The CDC failed toprovide a successful testfor SARS-CoV-2 in thecritical months of February and March, while ignoring the WHOssuccessful test kitsthat were distributed to 120 countries.

Trump has yet to hold his administration and the CDC responsible for this criminal bungling. This,more than any other failure, is the reason that Covid-19 infections in the US now number more than 1.5 million, about a third of the global total. Contrast this with China, the first to face an unknown epidemic, stopping it at 82,000 infections, and the amazing results that countriessuch as VietnamandSouth Koreahave produced.

One issue is now looming large over the Covid-19 pandemic. If we do not address the issue of intellectual-property rights, we are likely to see arepeat of the AIDS tragedy.

People died for 10 years (1994-2004)as patented AIDS medicine was priced at US$10,000 to $15,000 for a years supply, far beyond their reach. Finally,patent laws in India allowed people to get AIDS medicineat less than a dollar a day, or $350 for a years supply. Today, 80% of the worlds AIDS medicinecomes from India.

For Big Pharma, profits trumped lives, and they will continue to do so, Covid or no Covid, unless we change the world.

Most countries have compulsory licensing provisions that allow them to break patents in case of epidemics or health emergencies. Even the World Trade Organization (WTO), after a bitter fight, accepted in its Doha Declaration (2001) that in a health emergency, countries have the right to allow any company to manufacture a patented drug without the patent holders permission, and even import it from other countries.

Why is it, then, that countries are unable to break patents, even if there are provisions in their laws and in the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement? The answer is their fear of US sanctions against them.

Every year, the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) issues a Special 301 Report that it has used to threaten trade sanctions against any country that tries to compulsorily license any patented product.

India figures prominentlyin this report year after year, for daring toissue a compulsory licensein 2012 to Natco, an Indian pharmaceutical company, for nexavar, a cancer drug Bayer was selling formore than $65,000 for a year of treatment. Marijn Dekkers, the chief executive of Bayer, was quoted widely that this wastheft, and We did not develop this medicine for Indians. We developed it for Western patients who can afford it.

This leaves unanswered how many people even in the affluent West can afford a $65,000 bill for an illness. But there is no question that a bill of this magnitude is a death sentence for anybody but the super-rich in countries like India. Though a number of other drugs were also under consideration for compulsory licensing at that time, India has not exercised this provision again after receiving US threats.

It is the fear that countries can break patents using their compulsory-licensing powers that led to proposals for patent pooling. The argument was that since many of these diseases do not affect rich countries, Big Pharma should either let go of their patents to such pools, or philanthropic capital should fund the development of new drugs for this pool.

Facing the Covid-19 pandemic, it is this idea of patent pooling that emerged in the recentWorld Health Assembly, WHA-73. All countries supported this proposal, barring theUnited States and its loyal camp follower, the UK.

TheUnited States also entered its disagreementon the final WHA resolution, being thelone objectorto patent pooling of Covid-19 medicines and vaccines, noting the critical role that intellectual property plays in incentivizing the development of new and improved health products.

While patent pooling is welcome if no other measure is available, it also makes it appear as if countries have no other recourse apart from the charity of big capital. What this hides, as charity always does, is that people and countries have legitimate rights even under TRIPS to break patents under conditions of an epidemic or other health emergency.

The United States, which screams murder if a compulsory license is issued by any country, has no such compunction when its own interests are threatened. During the anthrax scare in 2001, the US secretary of healthissued a threat to Bayerunder eminent domain for patents for licensing the anthrax-treatment drug ciprofloxacin to other manufacturers.

Bayer folded, and agreed to supply the quantity needed at a price that the US government had set. And without a whimper. Yes, this was the same Bayer that considers India a thief for issuing a compulsory license.

The vaccination for Covid-19 might need to be repeated each year, as we still do not know the duration of its protection. It is unlikely that a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 willprovide a lifetime immunitylike the smallpox vaccine.

Unlike AIDS, where the patient numbers were smaller and were stigmatized in different ways, Covid-19 is a visible threat for everyone. Any attempt to hold people and governments to ransom on Covid-19 vaccines or medicines could see the collapse of the entire patent edifice of TRIPS that Big Pharma, backed by the United States and major EU countries, have built.

That is why the more clever in the capitalist world have moved toward a voluntary patent pool for potential Covid-19medicines and vaccines. This means that companies or institutions holding patents on medicines, such as remdesivir, or vaccines would voluntarily hand them over to such a pool.

The terms and conditions of such a handover, meaning at concessional rates, or for only for certain regions, are still not clear, leading to criticism that a voluntary patent pool is not a substitute for declaring that all such medicines and vaccines should be designated as global public goods during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Unlike clever capital, Trumps response to the Covid-19 vaccine is to bully his way through. He believes that with the unlimited money that the United States is now willing to put into the vaccine efforts, it will either beat everybody else to the winning post, orbuy the companythat issuccessful. If this strategy succeeds, he can then use his Covid-19 vaccine as a new instrument of global power. It is the United States that will then decide which countries get the vaccine (and for how much), and which ones dont.

Trump does not believe in arule-based global order, even if the rules arebiased in favorof the rich. He is walking out of variousarms-control agreementsand hascrippled the WTO. He believes that the United States, as the biggest economy and themost powerful military power, should have the untrammeled right to dictate to all countries. Threats ofbombing and invasionscan be combined withillegal unilateral sanctions and the latest weapon in his imaginary arsenal is withholding vaccines.

Trumps little problem is that the days of the United States being a sole global hegemon passed decades ago. The United States has shown itself to be afumbling giantand its epidemicresponse shambolic. It has been unable to provide virus tests to its people in time, and failed to stop the epidemic through containment/mitigation measures, which a number of other countries have done.

Chinaand theEUhave already agreed that any vaccine developed by them will be regarded as a public good. Even without that, once a medicine or a vaccine is known to be successful, any country with a reasonable scientific infrastructure can replicate the medicine or the vaccine, and manufacture it locally.

India in particular has one of thelargest generic drug and vaccinemanufacturing capacities in the world. What prevents India, or any country for that matter, from manufacturing Covid-19 vaccines or drugs once they are developed only the empty threat of a failed hegemon on breaking patents?

This article was produced in partnership byNewsclickandGlobetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute, which provided it to Asia Times.

Prabir Purkayasthais the founding editor ofNewsclick.in, a digital media platform. He is an activist for science and the Free Software movement.

Asia Times Financialis now live. Linking accurate news, insightful analysis and local knowledge with the ATF China Bond 50 Index, the world'sfirst benchmark cross sector Chinese Bond Indices.Read ATFnow.

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US declares a vaccine war on the world - Asia Times

In June, you can see new movies from Spike Lee and Will Ferrell, say goodbye to the Full House gang and sign up for a hot new streaming service, as if you didnt have enough content to consume.

You can escape into these worlds and more by streaming new programming in June on Netflix, Hulu and HBO Max, the newest streamer that started this week with all that HBO offers and more.

The following are June highlights among movies and series you can find on those streaming services, which are still attracting more viewers than ever despite more entertainment options opening up.

NETFLIX

Da 5 Bloods: In this new film from Oscar winner Spike Lee, four black veterans from the Vietnam War return to the country in search of the remains of their squad leader (Chadwick Boseman) and possible buried treasure. (June 12)

Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga: Will Ferrell and Rachel McAdams star in this movie full of music and comedy with this synopsis: When aspiring musicians Lars and Sigrit are given the opportunity of a lifetime to represent their country at the worlds biggest song competition, they finally have a chance to prove that any dream worth having is a dream worth fighting for. (June 26)

The Last Days of American Crime: A team of crooks plot a final big-score heist before government officials switch on a devices mind-altering signal that promises to stop people from committing crimes. (June 5)

Athlete A: This documentary follows the journalists who broke the story of abuse surrounding USA Gymnastics and convicted doctor Larry Nassar. (June 24)

Spelling the Dream: A documentary on the 12-year streak for Indian-American students winning the national spelling bee, which also follows four such students as they prepare for the event. (June 3)

Fuller House: The Farewell Season: This time its really the end for this crew that started years ago as a network sitcom ... unless someone decides Fullest House is something people need in their lives. (June 2)

13 Reasons Why season 4: Secrets and difficult choices will define the senior year for the graduating class of Liberty High School. (June 5)

Queer Eye season 5: The group leaves its home base of New York for the Atlanta area for this fifth season. (June 5)

F is for Family season 4: This raunchy animated comedy returns from the mind of comedian Bill Burr, who along with Laura Dern, Sam Rockwell and more provide voices. (June 12)

The Order season 2: Good and evil, werewolves and dark ants, magicians and demons ... its all part of the secret society at Belgrave University in its second season. (June 18)

The Politician season 2: High school was one thing, but now, Ben Platts character is shooting for state senate, as Judith Light, Bette Midler and more join the second season of Ryan Murphys satire. (June 19)

Home Game: This docu-series of eight episodes explores odd and exciting sports from around the globe, like voodoo wrestling in the Congo or roller derby in Texas. (June 26)

Lenox Hill: This docu-series gives an intimate look at the lives of four doctors, as well as their patients, at the New York hospital. (June 10)

Jo Koy: In His Elements: Filipino comedian Jo Koy takes Netflix to the Phillipines for his latest comedy special, celebrating the people and culture of Manila. (June 12)

Eric Andre: Legalize Everything: In his first comedy special for the streaming service, Andre takes on the war on drugs, on sex and on, you know, everything. (June 23)

George Lopez: Well Do It for Half: The comedy favorite makes his Netflix debut with this special filmed in San Francisco. (June 30)

Movie favorites arriving on Netflix in June: Cape Fear; Clueless; E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial; Inside Man; The Silence of the Lambs; Starship Troopers; The Lake House; The Help; The Queen; Twister; V for Vendetta; West Side Story; Zodiac; Lady Bird; Baby Mama.

Other series with past seasons debuting: Garth Brooks: The Road Im On season 1; Hannibal seasons 1-3; DCs Legends of Tomorrow season 5; Pose season 2; How To Get Away With Murder season 6.

HBO MAXHBO Max kicked off this week, and it is the most expensive of the streaming services, but thats because it offers everything you get on HBO, from Game of Thrones and Watchmen to movies and more to go along with legacy programming like all of Friends and The Big Bang Theory, as well as new shows.

New shows debuting on HBO Max

Love Life: Anna Kendrick is the star of this romantic comedy anthology that follows an individual from first love to lasting love.

Legendary: From the underground ballroom community comes this voguing competition full of wild fashions and celebrity judges. From the Queer Eye creative team.

On the Record: This candid documentary features music executive Drew Dixon, one of the first women to accuse Russell Simmons of sexual assault.

Craftopia: An epic kids crafting competition, with YouTube influencer LaurDIY hosting as kids ages 9 to 15 show off their creativity.

Looney Tunes: A new series of comedy shorts from Warner Bros. Animation featuring the classic Looney Tunes characters.

The Not Too Late Show with Elmo: Think of the classic late-night talk show format but with Sesame Streets Elmo as your host, and its not too late.

AMAZON PRIME VIDEOOriginal film: 7500, an action-thriller starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a pilot who is injured by terrorists invading the cockpit and who must figure out how best to keep people safe, stall the terrorists and land safely. (June 19)

Original series: Regular Heroes, a weekly docu-series showcasing the efforts of essential workers across the country, with stories told by guests including Alicia Keys, Kevin Hart, Nick Jonas and more. (May 29)

Recent movies: The acclaimed mystery Knives Out premieres on the service June 12, as does the 2019 reboot of horror series Childs Play on that same date.

State ties: Friday, May 29, is the debut date for Primes original movie The Vast of Night, from first-time feature filmmaker Andrew Patterson of Oklahoma City, about a 1950s radio DJ and a switchboard operator in New Mexico who discover a strange audio frequency in this sci-fi mystery.

HULU

We Are Freestyle Love Supreme: This documentary shows Lin-Manuel Mirandas early days performing with improvisational hip-hop group Freestyle Love Supreme, along with the groups reunion 14 years later that led to a run on Broadway. (June 5)

Love, Victor: If you remember the world of the 2018 teen comedy-drama Love, Simon, you have a sense of what to expect from this series (from the same writers) about another high school student navigating his journey of self-discovery, challenges at home, adjusting to a new city and school, and struggling with his sexual orientation. (June 19)

Taste the Nation with Padma Lakshmi: The Top Chef host takes her audience on a journey across the country to discover the diverse food culture of immigrant people and learn how their dishes have influenced the food that Americans eat today. (June 19)

Other series past seasons debuting: Brockmire, Childrens Hospital complete series, Mike Tyson Mysteries.

Recent theatrical premieres: Tom Hanks as Mister Rogers in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (June 2); the underrated surviving-alligators-during-a-hurricane thriller Crawl (June 18); Alfre Woodard as a prison warden in Clemency (June 22); Kristen Stewart in Charlies Angels (June 25).

Movie favorites arriving on Hulu in June: The American President; Cliffhanger; Dave; Dirty Dancing; Grown Ups; I Still Know What You Did Last Summer; Meet the Parents and Fockers; My Girl; True Romance; Awakenings; Out of Sight; Mission: Impossible Ghost Protocol.

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Here's new movies and shows to stream in June on Netflix, HBO Max, Hulu and Prime Video - Tulsa World

Love can fizzle over time. Its something the Georgia duo Kalen & Aslyn know well and candidly dissect on their debut Back of Our Minds. For a decade, their love was rooted in their musical careers that was predominantly being pulled in different directions. Kalen, longtime vocalist for the band Ponderosa, was always on the road or working on a solo project, while Aslyn was played in Keshas band and releasing her own music (debut, Lemon Love). At one point, Kalen & Aslyn concocted a way to spend more time together in their busy schedulesand tour togetherby dreaming up a synth-pop projectDega in 2018 an releasing a self-titled debut.

Back of Our Minds documents the ebb and flow of their union,offering a glimpse into their relationship woes and the frustration of that fizzle on Girlfriend.

Girlfriend was written about a year and a half after we got married, Aslyn tells American Songwriter.I remember wishing things still felt the way they did when we were dating.Its like at some point we got comfortable and stopped paying attention, but when you love someone and you know they love you too, its easy to take that for granted and reach a point where youre just going through the motions. Before you know it, you feel more like roommates than partners or lovers.

Working with engineerJon Ashley (The War On Drugs), the duo set up shop in their converted studio outsideAthens, GA and molded Girlfriend into the perfect model, a slow churning sultry song aching for the early days of love. Girlfriend speaks to the different roles women are expected to play in relationships and how this can shift over time.

For the most part, the 11-track Back of Our Minds has been on the back of Kalen & Aslyns minds for a decade. These are songs that ended up on the backburner over the years, saysKalen. They never really had a home with any of our other projects, but we both felt connected to them so strongly that we couldnt seem to let them go. In the end, we decided to start a whole new project just so we could finally record them.

Beginning to end, the album tells the love story, and evolution, of Kalen & Aslyn, unraveled in layers of country twang, soulful pop and a consoling California Dreamin sensibility oozing from each track.

It wasnt something we consciously set out to do, but we ended up recording an album that spans our entire journey togetherfalling in love, breaking up, getting married, leaving home, coming back, says Aslyn. Our whole story is in these songs.

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Kalen & Aslyn Narrate and Rekindle Their Love on Girlfriend - American Songwriter

Sixty years ago this past February, a U.S. Navy plane on a routine flight out of Saigon slammed into a low mountain as it neared Hue, killing all three men aboard, including co-pilot Lt. Cmdr. George Wood Alexander, a career Navy man from Glendale. They were among five U.S. military deaths in 1960 tied to the U.S. presence in Vietnam, then numbering 900 troops as growing tensions soon led to open war and mass American deployments. The other two deaths came from an accident and an illness, so none of the five died in combat, yet they still perished as a direct result of their military service. Such is the nature of war the risks soldiers face arent limited to the battlefield.

The practice of formally recognizing those killed in war arose in scattered places around the South at the end of the Civil War, with several of the earliest organized by former slaves and black freedmen recognizing the sacrifice of Union soldiers in ending slavery. In 1868, the grassroots events jelled into Decoration Day, which during World War I expanded from remembering the dead of one war to remembering the dead of all wars (though Congress didnt recognize Memorial Day as a federal holiday until 1938).

About 9 million soldiers died in World War I, nearly 117,000 of them Americans, whose arrival in 1918 tipped the balance and led to the defeat of Germany and its allies. Half of the American deaths werent from bullets or bombs or fire but from illness. That was a much lower total than during the Civil War, when two-thirds of soldier deaths were a result of illness. In fact, World War II was the first war in which more U.S. troops died in battle than from disease and other causes, a testimony to advances in medical treatment.

And here in the midst of the coronavirus outbreak, service members continue to be at risk, particularly those living on Navy ships and other assignments that bring soldiers together in close quarters, including the crew of the Theodore Roosevelt aircraft carrier, whose captain was relieved of his command after he put the health of the men and women under him ahead of Pentagon protocol. So even in relative peacetime, the non-combat threats remain.

When it comes to war, we have been lucky as a nation. For the most part during our history, we fought them elsewhere. We mounted a War of Independence around 1776, fought the British again in the War of 1812 (which led to the torching of the White House), fomented countless battles with North Americas native nations in our quest for more territory, wrested 525,000 square miles from Mexico, and survived the fratricide of the Civil War, a hellacious endeavor that involved 3.2 million soldiers on both sides (at least 620,000 died) in a nation that then only numbered 22 million people. Yet during the 20th century, perhaps the most violent century in human existence, the U.S. faced no serious threat of invasion.

So the pain of those wars fell on people in the countries where they took place and on the Americans who fought them, and on their families. We observe Veterans Day in November to honor all those who served, preserving Memorial Day to remember those who died. Having two national holidays devoted to those who fought reflects how much war has come to dominate our culture (we have no national holiday celebrating peace). Over the past few weeks, military jets have done fly-bys in different spots around the nation, including here in Southern California, to recognize front-line professionals working to stifle the pandemic.

Its an odd linkage, a display of military might to honor civilian health and emergency workers. But maybe such homages are a logical extension for a society that describes a medical campaign against disease as a war much as we have declared wars on drugs and poverty. Everything is a war these days, it seems. The war on immigrants. The war on womens reproductive rights. The war on Christmas. The war on science.

Those political metaphors arent wars, of course. Wars are the bloody next step after failed diplomacy, the final resort in imposing the will of one government on another or, conversely, of overthrowing oppression and birthing a nation. Sometimes they are necessary, sometimes they are the result of blundering national leaders, sometimes they are pure folly, But in all, soldiers do what is asked of them, and our cemeteries are filled with the human cost. Today we again recognize that collective debt.

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Editorial: On Memorial Day, we recognize our collective debt - Los Angeles Times

The men head toward the big white van almost as soon as it rolls to a stop in front of Russell Park.

It's just after 3 p.m. on a Tuesday. The park, which stands at the corner of Cabanne Avenue and Goodfellow Boulevard in the West End neighborhood of north St. Louis, consists of a small patch of grass surrounding a large playground in a neighborhood marked by vacant buildings.

Some of the men move with the stiff-legged gait of those who spend their nights sleeping rough, stretched out on concrete or grass.

A tall man nicknamed "Swoop," his hair held together in a series of cascading braids, approaches the van tentatively, his movements halting and cautious as the latest hit of heroin crawls through his veins.

Swoop, 43, says he's been homeless for about nineteen months, and that he uses heroin to self-medicate for chronic depression.

"The depression makes you want to get high," he says. "You have no job. Nobody wants to give you a job because of your appearance and what you're doing."

Occasionally, Swoop earns money from odd jobs in the neighborhood. But when he gets home, it's still the same story, he says.

"We still sitting around," he says. "We get to come back to an abandoned building. We look around, and it's depressing as soon as you walk in the door. So the first thing we do, we got money in our pockets, we get high."

As far as COVID-19, Swoop says he's not worried.

"I'm not really around that many people," he says. "I think God is good. I don't know. I'm just not that concerned about it."

Swoop grabs a brown paper bag from a cardboard box piled high with lunches, then a bottled water from one of the cases left on the sidewalk. He joins the line of other men inching forward to the van.

Standing at the front of the line are Miles Hoffman and Jen Nagel, staff members of the Missouri Network for Opiate Reform and Recovery, or MoNetwork, located at 4022 South Broadway in south St. Louis. MoNetwork owns and operates the van and collects the items it hands out.

Hoffman and Nagel eagerly engage with the men, smoothly reaching for simple black backpacks, known as Harm Reduction Kits, which they fill with a long list of items calculated to keep their customers alive for another week. Alcohol-soaked swabs. Hypodermic needle disposal kits. Small plastic tubes of Naloxone, also known as Narcan, which can be squirted up the nose to reverse a drug overdose.

In recent months, because of the threat posed by COVID-19, other essentials have been added to the bags: hand sanitizer, disposable gloves, face masks.

Hoffman, himself a recovering opiate user, says he wants to bring more resources to north St. Louis residents struggling with drug dependance and homelessness. Which is why he takes the MoNetwork van to the spots around St. Louis where he knows they're likely to find unhoused people.

About the time he went into recovery a couple years ago, Hoffman says, the market for illegal opiates went from prescription painkillers to much more powerful opiates, such as heroin and fentanyl.

"Things have kind of changed ... the supply had changed, and the drugs had changed, but the people hadn't," Hoffman says. "And being able to give people the supplies they need, like Naloxone, to reverse overdoses for their friends and loved ones, to keep people safe and to keep people out of hospitals and to keep people informed, is something I'm really passionate about."

It's impossible to understand homelessness and drug use in isolation from other big-picture issues, such as access to health care and how people interact with police, Hoffman notes.

"And COVID has made that much clearer," he says. "Now we're seeing these issues are being amplified. So people are saying we need to change things and work within the system."

To Nagel, who is also in recovery, the pandemic's impact on drug abuse is a brutal stew that mixes the results of the United States' war on drugs, the lack of resources for treatment and society's efforts to penalize and moralize away addiction.

"And then you get a worldwide epidemic that's showing glaringly, obviously, that our social structure, our social services, our health services, housing, health care it's glaringly obvious how disproportionate it is, and how it is not a good system," she says.

The thing of it is, Hoffman says, the system is doing what it's designed to do.

"Which is to keep people in their place," he explains. "And for right now, what we're doing is just trying to directly help people who are most impacted by this."

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Fighting Addiction and a Pandemic to Keep St. Louis' Unhoused Alive - Riverfront Times

The Nairobi Metropolitan Services has, through the Public Service Commission, recruited 225 health workers.

This follows President Uhuru Kenyatta's May 21 announcement that the national government will hire an additional 5,000 health workers in the intensified war on Covid-19.

NMS Health Services director Josephine Kibaru Mbae told the Star on Thursday that the recruitment will go a long way in addressing the shortage of health workers in Nairobi.

The new workers comprise doctors, nurses and clinical officers. They will serve on three-year contracts.

When we took over from City Hall we noted that indeed there is a shortage of health workers and many hospitals relied on locum. We had to recruit more. NMS has embarked on their distribution so that once they get the letters, they know where they will be reporting to, Mbae explained.

City Hall had on paper 3,300 health workers inclusive of cleaners and drivers at the time health services were handed over to NMS. But the actual number was 2,750.

Health workers had threatened to go on strike citing unaddressed issues of promotion and redesignation by the County Public Service Board.

Mbae said NMS's human resource department is looking into the issues for implementation in the financial year 2020-21.

She said the NMS has distributed personal protective equipment (PPE) worth Sh120 million to health workers.

At 745 Covid-19 positive cases as of Thursday, Nairobi leads other counties in the number of those with the disease.

The distribution (of PPEs) was done based on the needs of the health workers presented and where they are stationed. All workers can access at least two three-ply masks every day, depending on where they are stationed, Mbae explained.

Away from the pandemic, NMS has also managed to keep health facilities open to city residents.

The health facilities are up and running and have drugs worth Sh173.48 million as of March.

The facilities have adequate drugs and we are in the process of doing another distribution between now and June 30th to ensure that before the closure of the financial year our health facilities have adequate drugs, Mbae said.

When NMS took over the health function from City Hall, Director-General Mohammed Badi was handed over documents pertaining the projects' status.

However, under health, the only completed projected was the new 66-bed maternity wing at Mama Lucy Hospital.

Mbae said more than Sh145 million will be needed to fully equip the new wing before it is opened.

The new wing at Mama Lucy is ready for equipping and we have discussed with the Ministry of Health equipping it before the end of June.

The construction of the H-shaped wing started in 2013 but stalled in 2016 due to under-funding.

However, Governor Mike Sonkos administration last year released Sh69 million for its completion.

The six-floor wing also has an ICU, a High Dependency Unit and general wards.

The incomplete projects under the health sector have been rolled over to the next financial year.

NMS has held meetings with staff in the county health facilities and it has been agreed that the projects be carried over to the next financial year starting July. We have budgeted for most of the projects, Mbae said.

While the focus is now on the Covid-19 pandemic, the NMS has assured the public that all health facilities are open for all services.

Mbae stated that outpatient services like immunisation, pre- and post-natal care and comprehensive healthcare services are functioning.

The facilities are operational. The number of patients may have reduced (due to curfew and stay home restrictions) but no one is being sent away, she emphasised.

The NMS has urged the public to show up in large numbers for free Covid-19 mass testing.

The exercise, which commenced last week on Thursday, is a collaboration of the NMS and the Ministry of Health.

- mwaniki fm

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NMS hires 225 medics in heightened war on Covid-19 - The Star, Kenya

Contents

The War on Drugs is a phrase used to refer to a government-led initiative that aims to stop illegal drug use, distribution and trade by dramatically increasing prison sentences for both drug dealers and users. The movement started in the 1970s and is still evolving today. Over the years, people have had mixed reactions to the campaign, ranging from full-on support to claims that it has racist and political objectives.

Drug use for medicinal and recreational purposes has been happening in the United States since the countrys inception. In the 1890s, the popular Sears and Roebuck catalogue included an offer for a syringe and small amount of cocaine for $1.50. (At that time, cocaine use had not yet been outlawed.)

In some states, laws to ban or regulate drugs were passed in the 1800s, and the first congressional act to levy taxes on morphine and opium took place in 1890.

The Smoking Opium Exclusion Act in 1909 banned the possession, importation and use of opium for smoking. However, opium could still be used as a medication. This was the first federal law to ban the non-medical use of a substance, although many states and counties had banned alcohol sales previously.

In 1914, Congress passed the Harrison Act, which regulated and taxed the production, importation, and distribution of opiates and cocaine.

Alcohol prohibition laws quickly followed. In 1919, the 18th Amendment was ratified, banning the manufacture, transportation or sale of intoxicating liquors, ushering in the Prohibition Era. The same year, Congress passed the National Prohibition Act (also known as the Volstead Act), which provided guidelines on how to federally enforce Prohibition.

Prohibition lasted until December, 1933, when the 21st Amendment was ratified, overturning the 18th.

In 1937, the MarihuanaTax Act was passed. This federal law placed a tax on the sale of cannabis, hemp, or marijuana.

The Act was introduced by Rep. Robert L. Doughton of North Carolina and was drafted by Harry Anslinger. While the law didnt criminalize the possession or use of marijuana, it included hefty penalties if taxes werent paid, including a fine of up to $2000 and five years in prison.

President Richard M. Nixon signed the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) into law in 1970. This statute calls for the regulation of certain drugs and substances.

The CSA outlines five schedules used to classify drugs based on their medical application and potential for abuse.

Schedule 1 drugs are considered the most dangerous, as they pose a very high risk for addiction with little evidence of medical benefits. Marijuana, LSD, heroin, MDMA (ecstasy) and other drugs are included on the list of Schedule 1 drugs.

The substances considered least likely to be addictive, such as cough medications with small amounts of codeine, fall into the Schedule 5 category.

In June 1971, Nixon officially declared a War on Drugs, stating that drug abuse was public enemy number one.

A rise in recreational drug use in the 1960s likely led to President Nixons focus on targeting some types of substance abuse.As part of the War on Drugs initiative, Nixon increased federal funding for drug-control agencies and proposed strict measures, such as mandatory prison sentencing, for drug crimes. He also announced the creation of the Special Action Office for Drug Abuse Prevention (SAODAP), which was headed by Dr. Jerome Jaffe.

Nixon went on to create the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in 1973. This agency is a special police force committed to targeting illegal drug use and smuggling in the United States.

At the start, the DEA was given 1,470 special agents and a budget of less than $75 million. Today, the agency has nearly 5,000 agents and a budget of $2.03 billion.

During a 1994 interview, President Nixons domestic policy chief, John Ehrlichman, provided inside information suggesting that the War on Drugs campaign had ulterior motives, which mainly involved helping Nixon keep his job.

In the interview, conducted by journalist Dan Baum and published in Harper magazine, Ehrlichman explained that the Nixon campaign had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. His comments led many to question Nixons intentions in advocating for drug reform and whether racism played a role.

Ehrlichman was quoted as saying: We knew we couldnt make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course, we did.

In the mid-1970s, the War on Drugs took a slight hiatus. Between 1973 and 1977, eleven states decriminalized marijuana possession.

Jimmy Carter became president in 1977 after running on a political campaign to decriminalize marijuana. During his first year in office, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to decriminalize up to one ounce of marijuana.

In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan reinforced and expanded many of Nixons War on Drugs policies. In 1984, his wife Nancy Reagan launched the Just Say No campaign, which was intended to highlight the dangers of drug use.

President Reagans refocus on drugs and the passing of severe penalties for drug-related crimes in Congress and state legislatures led to a massive increase in incarcerations for nonviolent drug crimes.

In 1986, Congress passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which established mandatory minimum prison sentences for certain drug offenses. This law was later heavily criticized as having racist ramifications because it allocated longer prison sentences for offenses involving the same amount of crack cocaine (used more often by black Americans) as powder cocaine (used more often by white Americans).Five grams of crack triggered an automatic five-year sentence, while it took 500 grams of powder cocaine to merit the same sentence.

Critics also pointed to data showing that people of color were targeted and arrested on suspicion of drug use at higher rates than whites. Overall, the policies led to a rapid rise in incarcerations for nonviolent drug offenses, from 50,000 in 1980 to 400,000 in 1997. In 2014,nearly half of the 186,000 people serving time in federal prisons in the United States had been incarcerated on drug-related charges, according to theFederal Bureau of Prisons.

Public support for the war on drugs has waned in recent decades. Some Americans and policymakers feel the campaign has been ineffective or has led to racial divide. Between 2009 and 2013, some 40 states took steps to soften their drug laws, lowering penalties and shortening mandatory minimum sentences, according to the Pew Research Center.

In 2010, Congress passed the Fair Sentencing Act (FSA), which reduced the discrepancy between crack and powder cocaine offenses from 100:1 to 18:1.

The recent legalization of marijuana in several states and the District of Columbia has also led to a more tolerant political view on recreational drug use.

Technically, the War on Drugs is still being fought, but with less intensity and publicity than in its early years.

See more here:

War on Drugs - Timeline in America, Definition & Facts ...

Long before CBD had become a trendy wellness elixir found in juice and moisturizer and ice cream and dog treats; before corporate chains like Walgreens and Sephora had decided to sell it; and way before Kim Kardashian West had thrown a CBD-themed baby shower, a ragtag crew of activists, doctors, writers and marijuana farmers met up on an early winter evening in 2011. They sat in a circle at a house in the hills a few hours north of San Francisco where wine country becomes weed country to discuss the therapeutic potential of CBD, and how to get people to take it seriously.

Several studies in rodents and in cell cultures had suggested that CBD, a nonintoxicating compound from the cannabis plant more formally known as cannabidiol, could protect the nervous system, modulate blood flow, slow the growth of cancer cells and provide relief from seizures, pain, anxiety and inflammation.

We were talking about, What can we do with this? recalled Samantha Miller, who hosted the event at her split-level house, wedged between redwoods and a creek below. A headstrong biochemist, she had been growing marijuana since the age of 14 and had just quit a six-figure job to start her own cannabis testing lab.

After two years of tracking down high-CBD pot plants and building momentum, the group began to devise ways to persuade more farmers to grow strains with CBD which had largely been bred out of American pot since it doesnt get you high. In addition to convincing marijuana dispensaries to widely carry CBD, they wanted to educate the public about its promising benefits.

As the group of ten or so brainstormed, a balloon of vaporized pot was passed in one direction and a bong in the other.

There was a strong sense that this was really going to be something, if when people use these strains they have any kind of experience like the mice did in the laboratories, said Martin Lee, a writer who at the time had been finishing a book about the social history of marijuana for Simon & Schuster.

Near him was Stacey Kerr, a physician with flowing silver hair who served as treasurer of the Society of Cannabis Clinicians, as well as Wade Laughter, a soft-spoken man in glasses who had started cultivating pot for his glaucoma in the mid-90s. Mr. Laughter and Lawrence Ringo, an old-school hippie grower, were some of the first Americans to intentionally cultivate plants higher in CBD than in THC the compound that does get you high. Both pledged to keep their strains available for other growers at cheap prices. (Mr. Ringo said he would sell his seeds for as little as $5.)

Finally, there was Fred Gardner, a writer who had recruited almost all of these people to the CBD cause. A Harvard-educated former antiwar activist, now 78, Mr. Gardner had been writing about CBD since the late 1990s for publications like Synapse, the U.C. San Francisco weekly. For years, hed been determined to connect the nascent CBD research he heard about at symposiums abroad with the medical marijuana movement in California. And with this group, finally, it seemed to be coming together.

Ms. Miller spent the months after this meeting leading hundreds of CBD seminars for farmers; Dr. Kerr began informal patient surveys to track how CBD made people feel; and as he finished his book, Mr. Lee often traveled around with Mr. Laughter and Mr. Ringos high-CBD plants and seeds, spreading the gospel at pot shops across the West.

I was aware that this was a pretty special moment, Dr. Kerr told me, talking about the night at Ms. Millers. That it was the beginning of something big, and we were there to see it.

At the time of Samantha Millers summit in 2011, THC was the sole chemical face of the plant. Cannabis containing significant amounts of CBD was still rare. Police raids and federal prosecution of medical marijuana businesses were still common. And because CBD doesnt get you high, it was easy to miss; hardly anyone outside of pharmaceutical companies and academia had heard of it.

In the nine years since that night in the woods, one of the groups biggest goals has clearly been accomplished: People know about CBD.

Jennifer Aniston loves beauty products made with it. The N.F.L. star Rob Gronkowski sells it. Mike Tyson offers a cannabidiol-infused water called DWiiNK. On Instagram, #cbd is four times as common as #resist. Last year, the investment bank Cowen estimated that the U.S. CBD industry will be worth $16 billion by 2025. And e-commerce sales of CBD have grown this year amid the coronavirus pandemic.

But the CBD landscape of 2020 looks nothing like what the activists and scientists intended. Thats because the federal governments insistence that cannabis has no legitimate use as a medicine created two enormous problems: the proliferation of fake CBD products and the nonsensical separation of CBD from THC.

Clinical studies have shown that CBD is most effective when paired with at least some THC, even if it is not enough to cause a high. However, the United States considers cannabis with THC to be a Schedule 1 drug which puts it in the same category as heroin, indicating a high potential for abuse and no accepted medical use. This makes further research very difficult to do, and causes sick people in many states to be treated as criminals.

Cannabis that is high in CBD but extremely low in THC was made legal at the end of 2018. But finding an easy, affordable test that is able to distinguish cannabis with THC from cannabis without THC has been prohibitively difficult for farmers and crime labs alike. So federal agencies have been slow to regulate the booming industry leading to a deluge of tinctures, smoothies and lotions that trusted tests have shown contain no CBD at all.

In the absence of oversight, the push to get more patients access to cannabis medicine and bona fide CBD has been co-opted by a push to make as much money as possible off the next big wellness fad. At a certain point, it had a life of its own, Ms. Miller told me.

Now, the CBD industry promises a miracle drug but is often selling a placebo: cannabidiol products with zero cannabidiol inside. As a result, the compound is often caricatured as snake oil, a scam, even as promising research into the full potential of CBD is starting to pick up.

The compounds reputation is a microcosm of what it means to be in America right now: a thing that some of us consider a hoax and others praise as the solution to everything. But CBDs rollicking journey from the international underground to cultural ubiquity proves that, as usual, the truth lies somewhere in the middle.

As marijuana use increased in the 1960s and 70s, and the Nixon administration criminalized drugs to vilify what one aide described as the antiwar left and black people, the more science-minded side of the government began funding some basic cannabis research. A man named Carlton Turner helped establish the governments Marijuana Research Project at the University of Mississippi. After that, he became President Ronald Reagans drug czar, helping to expand the War on Drugs.

But all the while, Mr. Turner was in touch with a Brazilian scientist named Elisaldo Carlini who had done small-scale human studies showing CBD reduced seizures: All the early work on CBD was Carlini in Brazil, Mr. Turner told me this past summer. We were in communication for many years.

For decades, Dr. Carlinis research was not replicated, in part because so few people had access to the compound: Both the pot held at the nations sole government-sanctioned marijuana lab at the University of Mississippi and the illegal pot being smoked around the country had only trace CBD content. (Mr. Turner even tested several kinds of cannabis sent by a legendary pot grower, a writer for High Times named Mel Frank. To no avail: none of it contained much CBD.)

In those years, emissaries of Californias counterculture were often traveling the world looking for unique strains of cannabis. The most influential of these collectors was a man named David Watson. In the early 70s, Mr. Watson sold his possessions and began hitchhiking from Morocco to India, befriending local pot growers along the way.

Mr. Watson ultimately settled in Amsterdam to examine his thousands of kinds of cannabis at his own Dutch state-licensed company, HortaPharm BV. He brought in a friend, an American botanist named Robert Connell Clarke to help. When Mr. Watson and Mr. Clarke heard about the CBD research Dr. Carlini had done in Brazil, the pair identified and then bred CBD varietals. This led to a discovery.

It attenuates the high, Mr. Clarke told me over breakfast in Los Angeles. That came strictly from anecdotal stoner evidence.

Meanwhile, after multiple sclerosis patients in England became more vocal about how cannabis helped their symptoms, the country allowed a small pharmaceutical company led by a British physician named Dr. Geoffrey Guy to develop plant-derived cannabis medicines; GW Pharmaceuticals licensed varietals bred from Mr. Watson and Mr. Clarkes collection of cannabis and got to work.

Within a couple of years, they figured out a 1:1 combination of a high-THC chemovar and a high-CBD chemovar presented the greatest latitude of effects and prevention of side effects, said Dr. Ethan Russo, who worked with GW Pharmaceuticals from 1998 to 2014.

As Mr. Watson and Mr. Clarke had discovered, having CBD in the mix reduced THCs more uncomfortable effects: sedation, inebriation, a faster heart rate. And though a few outliers responded well to CBD alone, GWs data showed that for relieving pain and inflammation, helping with sleep and alleviating seizures and spasms, most patients got the most benefit from an equal mix of CBD and THC a drug the company called Sativex. But the research wasnt enough. Although the drug has been approved for use in around 30 countries, the F.D.A. has yet to approve Sativex in the United States.

Mr. Gardner, the writer whose CBD advocacy eventually inspired the 2011 summit at Ms. Millers house, closely followed these developments. If only there were some way, he thought, for Californias outlaw weed farmers to determine whether their plants had CBD, then pot shops could offer a product similar to Sativex. Alas, Mr. Gardner wrote in 2005, that would require access to expensive testing equipment.

Enter, three years later, one of Oaklands pioneering pot entrepreneurs, a medical marijuana impresario with pigtail braids named Steve DeAngelo. Mr. DeAngelo, who had been in contact with Mr. Gardner about the urgent need to institute better testing, agreed to help fund a cannabis analysis lab, Steep Hill, which began its operations in 2008.

Mr. Gardner came by frequently, chatting and checking in to see if Steep Hills founders had discovered the elusive compound. And at last, in February 2009 a dual peak on a testing graph appeared, indicating the presence of CBD.

I remember the moment, said David Lampach, one of the labs funders and co-founders. Seeing the dual peak and realizing it was real, and running it like five times to make sure.

By the summer of 2009, the lab had identified five strains with significant CBD and THC. Mr. Gardner was elated, and began referring to his efforts as Project CBD alongside other supporters, including Mr. Lee, the writer. Right away the thought was: What is the government going to say about this? How can they be against something thats nonintoxicating? Mr. Lee said.

In June of 2010, the host of the 2011 summit, the biochemist Ms. Miller, opened her own lab, Pure Analytics. A few months later, she called Mr. Ringo, the hippie grower, to let him know a pot sample he sent in was a strain with a lot of CBD as much as 11 percent.

Hes in the trim room on speaker, and this big whoop goes up, she said, remembering his staffs excitement.

In the fall of 2010, a Project CBD website was set up where anyone could look through studies organized by disease or condition. Mr. Lee took charge of running it and it began to attract an audience. A few months later, the network of early CBD advocates met up at Ms. Millers house in California to coordinate their evangelism. And by the middle of 2011, word of cannabidiol had permeated the population that would become its most potent promotional engine: the chronically ill, people with cancer, with ALS, with serious disorders that werent responding to prescription drugs.

As stories about CBDs power spread, demand increased and prices rose. Sick people often relied on the generosity of growers like Mr. Ringo, his son Dakota told me.

Id go up there and see people dying of cancer hanging out with him, and hed be hooking them up with oil he made in his house, the younger Mr. Ringo said. Mike Hyde, whose son was suffering from brain cancer, spent months driving around Colorado and the West Coast looking for CBD in late 2011, before connecting with Mr. Ringo at a restaurant.

Id never met this guy before, and he brought us literally probably $30,000 worth of oil for this CBD that no one could even get, Mr. Hyde explained. For free.

CBDs big launch into the mainstream came when the world saw evidence of what Dr. Carlini had discovered in Brazil, back in the 1970s: the compounds ability to quell seizures. Unlike a reduction in pain, this was something any politician or camera crew could easily see. It wasnt a stoner scam.

First, in December 2011, an epileptic child used CBD on the Discovery Channels Weed Wars, a show featuring the co-founder of the Steep Hill lab, Mr. DeAngelo. The following year, the parents of an epileptic boy in San Francisco bought CBD from a pot shop. Then, looking for a better quality product, they contacted GW Pharmaceuticals the British company that had licensed the cannabis collection of those globe-trotting 20th century cannabis collectors, Mr. Watson and Mr. Clarke, and which conducted the research in the 90s that spurred Mr. Gardners CBD advocacy. The company developed a 98 percent CBD drug for the boy and others like him.

Perhaps the most critical turning point for CBD came in August 2013, when a CNN special hosted by Dr. Sanjay Gupta profiled a 6-year-old girl in Colorado, Charlotte Figi, who used CBD to treat her epilepsy, as well as the brawny brothers who grew her CBD, the Stanleys. Hundreds of families witnessing the power of CBD enhanced by cable news production values moved to Colorado to gain access to the Stanleys CBD oil, called Charlottes Web. The Stanleys told me their wait-list peaked at 15,000 names. And because of public demand, the F.D.A. fast-tracked clinical trials of GW Pharmaceuticals 98 percent CBD drug, Epidiolex.

Suddenly, everyone wanted CBD, even though no one quite understood it. In the confusion, there was money to be made. Mere weeks after the CNN documentary aired, the spike in CBD interest prompted the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority to issue an investor alert on marijuana stock scams: As the F.D.A. would later show, many online CBD products contained little or no CBD whatsoever.

In 2020, CBD is available three ways: over the counter; at state-licensed marijuana dispensaries; or if you have certain forms of epilepsy, from GW Pharmaceuticals. Most Americans encounter CBD in the first and most unreliable way at, say, a bodega in Brooklyn or a health food store in Indiana. A consultant hired to do an investigation by a corporate chain recently told me that the percentage of over-the-counter CBD products that contained the amount on the label was in the single digits.

As if CBDs back story couldnt get any weirder, the path to this glut of phony CBD was paved by, of all people, the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell.

Unrelated to the brouhaha on the West Coast, tobacco farmers in Kentucky were seeking a new cash crop. In 2011, James Comer won the race for Kentucky state agriculture commissioner by promising to legalize industrial hemp.

That raised a lot of eyebrows, including in McConnells office, Eric Steenstra, a hemp lobbyist, told me. They saw the winds were shifting.

Along with Representative Jared Polis, now the governor of Colorado, Mr. McConnell included a hemp pilot program in the 2014 farm bill for research. In the legislation, hemp was defined as cannabis containing less than 0.3 percent THC an arbitrary threshold, not a scientific distinction: Nothing in the Farm Bill, in case law, or in the Controlled Substances Act seemed to say anything about CBD. So entrepreneurs interpreted this research-oriented pilot program as the de facto legalization of cannabidiol.

The Drug Enforcement Administration disagreed, but couldnt stop the tidal wave of CBD production. In 2018, over 60 percent of the hemp crop in Kentucky was grown for CBD. Then, long after the country was already flooded with CBD products both dubious and legitimate, Mr. McConnell inserted language into the 2018 Farm Bill explicitly making hemp federally legal.

Many of the Californians who plotted at Ms. Millers house in 2011 have watched in frustration as the CBD industry flourished, divorced from THC, and fake CBD misled consumers.

On his deathbed in 2014, Mr. Ringo insisted to friends and family that the Stanleys used his seeds to develop their famous strain Charlottes Web. Joel Stanley told me the genetics for Charlottes Web were a cross of wild hemp with an industry genetic. Critics of the Stanley brothers in the cannabis industry have grown annoyed by their prominence and push for patents. Their company has been valued at over half a billion dollars.

Ms. Miller, who still runs a cannabis testing lab, told me that in the years since the 2011 summit, she has become disillusioned as people shed thought had earnest intentions in spreading CBD turned out to just want to get rich. Mr. Gardner feels the same way.

There has been a slight uptick in clinical research around the compounds relation to anxiety, schizophrenia and opioid use disorder. In September, the National Institutes of Health approved $3 million in small grants for studies of cannabidiol and other non-THC cannabis compounds. Nevertheless, the government-enabled ham-handed rush to profiteering has seriously, and unduly, undermined CBDs medical reputation.

Even Dr. Turner, Mr. Reagans drug czar, said there is far more evidence for the benefits of Sativex, the half-CBD, half-THC drug, than for unregulated CBD online.

There havent been enough clinical trials and there never will be, said Mr. Clarke, the cannabis seed collector. Theres no vested financial interest in anyone doing it. Big Pharma is most invested in medications that they can control, that they alone can patent.

Still, some of the states with legal cannabis have implemented robust testing standards, and bona fide CBD can be found at many marijuana dispensaries, both on its own and in a variety of ratios with THC. Ms. Millers lab, and other responsible actors, are supposed to ensure products that hit legal pot shop shelves contain exactly what they claim to contain. But without stringent federal oversight, few in the CBD business will voluntarily opt-in to tests of their product labelings accuracy.

When I asked Dr. Russo, who oversaw much of GW Pharmaceuticals research, how he feels about it all, he sighed. You do something, and other people run with it, and it turns into something else that you dont recognize, he said. Im always concerned, but what I like to dwell upon is: What is the real potential here?

Amanda Chicago Lewis (@msamandalewis) is an investigative reporter, focusing on drug policy. She has written for Rolling Stone, The Wall Street Journal, GQ Magazine and other outlets.

Read more:

A Hidden Origin Story of the CBD Craze - The New York Times

Tim Burkes piece this week about his thoughts on a possible return to campus in the fall is well worth reading. Burke works at Swarthmore, a wealthy and elite residential liberal arts college near Philadelphia, so some of his reflections are based on that setting. But the larger issues he raises transcend that setting.

The piece revolves around an unhappy recognition that every possible solution to the question of returning to campus is unsatisfactory, in both practical and moral terms. Its the moral argument that captured my attention. Notice the word choice in his framing:

If we cant all stay home and work on laptops -- and plainly we cant -- there is part of me that thinks that we should all be on the same frontlines, in the same foxholes, enduring the same bombardments. After all, [w]artime means shared sacrifice, shared danger, shared risk. There should be solidarity in the inescapability of threat.

Burke is thoughtful enough to see some of the dangers in the war metaphor. As he notes, correctly, the metaphor has a pull, offering the thrill of solidarity and a sort of valor, against the gray reasonableness of prudential calculation. He ends the piece torn between head and heart, with his heart clearly siding with group solidarity against what is likely to be the first of many natural enemies.

Burkes candor is admirable; my rejoinder here is in the spirit of suggesting that a good and thoughtful writer missed the mark in a particular piece. But its absolutely a discussion worth having. Im grateful that he wrote it.

War metaphors have a long history. William James coined the term the moral equivalent of war in a speech at Stanford in 1906, published as an essay in 1910. James piece was an attempt to explain the paradox that such an ugly and barbaric enterprise as war draws its appeal, in part, by drawing on the best qualities of the people who fight in it. Soldiers need courage, loyalty, strength, and dedication. (James refers to manliness, which is another essay entirely.) When James wrote of a moral equivalent of war, he was trying to find a non-military project that would call out the best in people for positive ends. Seven decades later, when Jimmy Carter invoked James phrase, he was trying to do much the same thing.

In both cases, the efforts failed. There is no moral equivalent of war, because war is an atrocity. The War on Poverty, the War on Drugs, the War on Terror: all failed. They got war wrong.

The narrative of shared sacrifice, danger, and risk covers many sins. We fight wars now with independent contractors -- what, in a less refined age, were called mercenaries -- and drones, raining hellfire on people thousands of miles away while most of us forget its even happening. Sacrifices in war are wildly uneven, even comically so. Many actually prosper. As Randolph Bourne put it, echoing Hegel, war is the health of the state. Leaders in political trouble know that one of the easiest and most effective ways to gain support is to rally around a common enemy. And it works precisely in the way James noted. Some sacrifices are so deep and severe that they command respect, which is used as a cudgel against those who ask why the sacrifices were necessary in the first place.

Returning to the verdant campus of Swarthmore is about as far as an 18 year old can get from being drafted. The sacrifice Burke offers in his piece is of people his own age. The 18 year olds will likely shake off the virus if they get it; he might not. But solidarity beckons.

No. No, it doesnt.

The point of staying away from campus is not to romanticize the people on the front lines. Its to prevent needless contagion and sacrifice. You dont stop the virus by throwing your body on it like a live grenade; that would just help it spread. You stop the virus by depriving it of hosts and of chances to spread, at least until a vaccine comes along. That may seem like the opposite of valor, but think it through: if I go out there, catch it, and spread it, who am I helping? Im not diluting it; viruses reproduce. If I die from it, will I have advanced the cause? Or will I just leave my friends, colleagues, wife, and kids with a hole in their lives, and possibly with nasty infections of their own? What would be the point?

Sharing sacrifice requires ensuring that theres enough to go around. The goal should be to reduce the need for sacrifice at all. My gesture of solidarity is wearing a mask when Im in public. Im sacrificing a haircut and a raise. Thats far more useful than throwing myself into crowds could be. I respect the folks in public-facing jobs by doing my best not to get them sick. And in making political choices likelier to prevent future outbreaks from reaching this level in the first place. That, too, is another essay entirely.

This perspective can be a hard sell when youre young and impatient. I see it at home every day, as The Boy paces his cage. He wants out. He feels the loss. He feels the sacrifice. He doesnt like it. I dont blame him. But this is what we need to do.

James invocation of a moral equivalent of war may have been awkward or premature, but it was based in recognizable truth. War persists because it calls on our best qualities, even as it uses them for destructive ends. This isnt a war. Its a pandemic. Applying war logic, or war metaphors, gets it wrong. You dont fight contagion by jumping into a crowd. We who want to educate the young need to lead by example, even when its uncomfortable. Or too comfortable.

Continue reading here:

War Metaphors and the Return to Campus | Confessions of a Community College Dean - Inside Higher Ed