I have to travel down to DC in a minute, so I don’t have time to editorialize about this. Just wanted to note it, because it’s important.
Sens. Angus King (I-Maine) and Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) are doubling down on their push to get Congress to pass an emergency spending bill to combat heroin and opioid abuse.
“People in Maine and around the country are losing their lives, communities are being torn apart and first responders and healthcare providers are being pushed to the brink,” King said during a press conference in Maine on Friday, adding that lawmakers “must act quickly and in a comprehensive way.”
Shaheen echoed his comments, saying, “Congress needs to treat the heroin epidemic like the national public health emergency that it is.”
The New Hampshire Democrat introduced legislation late last year that would provide $600 million in supplemental funding for programs within the Departments of Justice (DOJ) and Health and Human Services (HHS).
Their bill would include $225 million for the DOJ to boost spending for state and local initiatives on drug treatment and law enforcement programs, as well as additional money to help drug task forces handle high rates of heroin abuse.
It would give $375 million to HHS including funding for substance abuse and prescription drug overdose prevention, research on drug addiction and programs targeting underage drinking and drug abuse among those aged 12 to 25.
Their press conference comes days after Shaheen sent a letter to Obama, calling on him to increase funding to address substance abuse as part of his fiscal year 2017 budget, which will be released next month.
King sent a similar letter to Obama last month.
I don’t know if you know people who are impacted by this or not. I suspect you do, even if aren’t yet aware of it.
As you know, I do med research. I frequently work with PCORI (Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute), a new semi-public research funder. This is not an NIH institute.
They are funding trials for alternatives to opioids. There is some interest in this area. I missed the opportunity to submit a Letter of Interest (required to submit a grant to PCORI).
http://www.pcori.org/funding-opportunities/announcement/clinical-strategies-managing-and-reducing-lo
ng-term-opioid-use
With your focus on this issue, I’m surprised you didn’t weigh on a new technological development. Basically an implant that dispenses the opioid to a present schedule so you can’t improperly medicate. There are downsides to this obviously such as difficulty calibrating the dosage to someone right away.
http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/01/implant-to-treat-opioid-addiction-gets-green-light-from-fda-a
dvisors/
Anyone remember the heroin epidemic in the late sixties, right around the time that Air America was flying in and out of the Golden Triangle? How about anyone remember how heroin flowed westward through the Bekaa Valley and Beruit during Iran-contra. Or that other flow of cocaine and cocaine derived products from Latin America while our Hasenfuses and Barry Seals flew in and out of the region. No?
Well, the news is that opium production in Afghanistan has exploded since the US moved in.
What amazing coincidences? Yes, we should pass more laws against opioid use. I’m guessing that there will be more laws, and they will fill up more and more prisons.
They ship it in. We shoot it up. They shoot us down. We die. They ain’t catching me long as I can fly.
Information I’ve seen is that the heroin coming into the US today is Mexican. Mexican heroin predominated on the West Coast late ’60s-mid-’70s. Heroin was always less a part of the West Coast drug culture than the East Coast. Don’t know whether the MX heroin supply declined in the mid-seventies or was diverted to the east coast as the Golden Triangle supply dried up. But it is curious to me that it today is meeting the demand and little from the increased Afghan supply is making its way here and being consumed in Russia and Europe. Perhaps with prescription opioids being the gateway drug to heroin Europe/Russian are experiencing a simiilar increase in addiction rates for the same reasons.
Hmmm… ok. Well the CIA doesn’t care who buys their heroin. And true that a lot of heroin sold in the USA has often come via Mexico. Fun facts.
I could be wrong, but I don’t think the CIA is getting much, if any, cut on illegal drug money today. It was much easier to get a toehold (as well as rationalize why being on the dark side was necessary) in such operations during the Cold War.
That was basically a Shackley operation that was passed on after he left the scene. Those guys ran afoul of the top bureaucracy as soon as Poppy had to leave in 1977.
Clines, Singlaub, Armitage, etc., all came out of the Laos operation in the Vietnam War, moved in large part into Iran during the last years of the Shah, then made up the core of Ollie North’s Contra scam, and finished their drug running in Azerbaijan in the early 1990’s, where they also fed mujahideen into the Chechen War meatgrinder.
Armitage was the last of them to have power and his last act was to take down Scooter Libby in an pretty successful anti-Cheney op.
Interesting how these guys can still do good things while being so evil.
The CIA never did any good things. But I don’t think that it’s coincidental that CIA drug operations declined with the end of the Cold War.
A good place to start is here.
It’s basically too broad to say that the “CIA” was to blame for this stretch of drug running.
It’s actually a fairly tight knit group of guys who starred at JM/Wave in Miami trying to pull off the Bay of Pigs, got stationed in Laos and got into heroin trafficking, and then started going completely rogue in the mid-1970’s.
Look up Edwin Wilson, Tom Clines, Richard Secord, John Singlaub, Richard Armitage, Michael Hand, Carl Jenkins, David Sanchez Morales, Rafael Quintero, Felix Rodriguez.
These guys come up again and again and again in criminal conspiracies, and it all started pre-JFK assassination.
They are CIA and Air Force support, but they never were synonymous with the CIA.
No, the CIA doesn’t account for its drug profits in congressional reports.
The history is long and disturbing. Peter Dale Scott discusses this in many books. And others:
THE GREAT HEROIN COUP, Krueger.
THE POLITICS OF HEROIN IN SOUTHEAST ASIA.
While you can say that it’s only some people involved in drug importation, it is clear that the rest of the Agency, and the rest of the government, knows not to interfere. (Example: That Huffman Aviation plane busted with 43 pounds of heroin in Orlando while Mohammed Atta was learning how to fly planes into buildings at Huffman.)
For example, in the fifties the CIA supported the Guerini Gang in Marseilles because they snuffed out the Communist dockworkers’ political power there. The Guerinis won and then there magically appeared The French Connection. Before that Lucky Luciano had a similar deal with the army and the OSS.
So it’s not how many people are involved in it, or what specific positions in the government have been influenced by it. (A close reading of his diaries shows that Ollie North was well aware of the drugs moving through his jurisdiction). What matters is that the illegal drug trade corrupts governments, and the CIA is probably the most corrupted institution in US political history.
you’re going all Mad Cow Productions on me, Bob.
You gotta be able to filter out the Alex Jones elements of this stuff to even begin to understand what has really happened.
For example, what happens when a plane lands in Orlando absolutely loaded to the gills with narcotics and it’s been making the same flight pattern for months and months?
What happens to the owner of that plane?
Doesn’t have to have any logical or causal connection to 9/11 pilots. Those guys (or guys with their names) were actually trained at Pensacola Air Force base, which you can basically verify (as I did) by doing a Lexis-Nexis real estate search and seeing when they signed their leases.
But, look over here at Huffman Air!!
Actually, don’t look over there, because the real action is in the design of the 9/11 plot where the identities of legitimate Saudi pilots and support crew were appropriated by the hijackers to make us look bad.
If you have Excel, you can see my work on this.
Things could have changed. I must confess that I don’t have links anymore, but they have been heavily involved in the drug trade in past, including Viet Nam. I had heard/read that the CIA was involved in getting the opium production back up and running in Afghanistan. Perhaps they got the ball rolling and others took over?? Hard to say.
Much too dangerous for the CIA to operate in Afghanistan. The industry was only slightly dormant during the Taliban years and it reemerged once the farmers became too desperate and there was no effective authorities shutting them and the middle-men down. Karzai associates/relatives were very likely getting a decent cut.
No, we prescribe more opioids than the rest of the world combined and probably three times over.
The problem is primarily American.
Obviously, there are people everywhere who get addicted to opioids but it’s way more common when you have doctors giving it to people who have history of drug use and no intention of becoming addicts.
We’re engaged in systematic manslaughter on a scale the size of AIDs.
But how do you explain that the significant increase in Afghan heroin supply is getting sucked up in Russia and Europe and their addiction rates have climbed as well?
Marketing. If the CIA can make money off addicts in Europe and Russia, so much the better.
The opium wars never ended.
Do you think criminal operations in Europe and Russia are undeveloped and need “marketing” assistance from the CIA? You do seem far better informed about the documented and irrefutable history of the CIA and drugs than Martin is, but IMO you’re abstracted too much from that history and applying it to the period beginning somewhere in the mid-90s. Why bother with drugs when there were so many other and easier pockets to pick?
I see no evidence that the elements within the CIA/DEA have backed away from using the drug trade as both a source of income and a means of oppressing sectors of the population. As mentioned above, there is the problem of the same Huffman Aviation that trained Mo Atta and another hijacker to fly planes into buildings was also smuggling heroin into Florida at the same time. And the DEA did not prosecute anyone for the 43 pounds of heroin on the runway at Orlando International. You would think that if someone found out that the folks who were training the 9/11 terrorists also were smuggling in heroin that that would have gotten someone’s attention, but just the opposite happened.
The way these things work, bundled criminality requires the public servants and their stenographers to ignore drug trafficking and anything connected with it. Reports of Atta and his accomplices snorting cocaine on a SunCruz ship a week before 9/11 requires that we all avert our eyes. Anyone remember the “hostile takeover” of SunCruz?
People forget that the Opium Wars were between the Chinese and the American business critters for the Americans to IMPORT opium into China. Also, if anyone needs to study the business plan just study how the Japanese occupying army in China in the 30s and 40s used the drug trade to both finance the occupation and keep the natives in line, not unlike what has happened to minority and poor communities here in the US.
Never underestimate the immorality of the CIA. It murders, it sells drugs.
Oh well, I guess that proves that Jack Abramoff, the CIA, and UAL and AAL were the masterminds behind 9/11.
I may not be at all satisfied with the official 9/11 narrative, but flights of fancy based on skivvy sourcing drive me nuts. OTOH, I had no difficulty in real time accepting that Gary Webb got the important details of the Contra/CIA drug trade correct. Mostly because it wasn’t exactly hidden in the decade or so before.
Most people have never heard about the Opium Wars. Those that know about them don’t forget and also get it more correct than your comment suggest that you do:
Didn’t say that, but it’s always interesting to see who connects what to each other. UAL = United Airlines? You’ll have to explain that. I think you’re calling me a conspiracy theorist.
But Huffman Aviation had one of their planes busted in Orlando with 43 pounds of heroin at the time that Mo Atta was matriculating at Huffman Aviation. The plane and the heroin were seized, but no one was charged, curiously. Why not, Marie? Mo Atta, who was portrayed in the media, when portrayed at all, as a devout Muslim, was dating a stripper in Florida who told a reporter that Mo and his friends had a big duffelbag of cocaine in his room. And Mo and his friends were on one of SunCruz’s gambling boats a week before the big show. Now, you can be a good little consumer of news and not give a thought that those things are related, but you’d think that someone in the media, if they were actually investigating 9/11, might find that an interesting tidbit that needs looking into.
Your quote about the Opium Wars doesn’t seem to apply to what you’re sneering at. But it is an example of US businessmen who were assisted by the US Navy to push opium in China in the 1800s, so it’s a long tradition. Japan’s use of opium, morphine and heroin to both finance its occupation of China and to keep the natives from being rebellious is well-known, if you study it. Really, look it up. Now some well-eyed conspiracy theorists (like Gary Webb) suggested that the CIA was targeting the black community with crack. I know, that’s crazy.
I’m not sure how you’ve managed to avoid seeing CIA involvement in drug trafficking (with your generous exception of Gary Webb’s findings).
Our government, more specifically, elements of the CIA, are part of illegal drug importation. Henrik Krueger’s THE GREAT HEROIN COUP, written back in the seventies if I recall correctly, discusses the switch of the main spigot heroin importation from the French Connection through Marseilles to the Golden Triangle. THE POLITICS OF HEROIN IN SOUTHEAST ASIA was a long, well-documented book about the protected heroin trade during the Vietnam War.
When Nixon created the DEA he assigned his good buddy E. Howard Hunt to stock the agency with CIA people. You can read about it in AGENY OF FEAR. But I’m sure Hunt chose good people to make sure drugs weren’t imported into the US.
To understand how the system works, you have to understand that it’s not George Bush who packs his luggage with kilos of heroin. But people who NETWORK with him. When Barry Seal was assassinated he had George Bush’s personal phone number on him. And I’m sure that it is merely a coincidence that the federal attorney overlooking Mena, Arkansas when those duffelbags of cocaine came out of the sky was Dubya’s first drug czar, Asa Hutchinson. Just a coincidence.
For example, during Iran-contra, when heroin was manufactured in the Bekaa Valley and moved through Beruit to Europe, the biggest heroin dealer for Europe and the US was Monzer al-Kassar. Curiously, he was connected with the Popular Front For The Liberation of Palestine General Command, between al-Kassar and the PFLP-GC cell in Frankfurt were the first suspects in the bombing of Pan Am 103 (lookee, another airline!). There was a big expose in the Sunday New York Times about the PFLP-GC being the guilty parties in Pan Am 103 within a week or two after the bombing. Al-Kassar’s involvement in the drug business was spelled out in a congressional report a few years later (can’t remember the committee but Charles Schumer was on it, maybe the chair).
But the other interesting thing about Monzer al-Kassar, aside from the great parties he threw in Marabella, Spain, was that al-Kassar was also one of the arms suppliers during Iran-contra. So we have a drug dealer exposed in a congressional report who also was moving weapons for the Reagan Administration, and who was the first suspect in supplying the bomb to the PFLP-GC. Small world, but let’s not get hasty and suspect that his drug-smuggling had anything to do with his relationship with the CIA and supplying weapons to the Middle East.
Also on Pan Am 103 were the McKee Team, a group of US intelligence operatives stationed in Beruit, who, according to the Interfor Report, were violating orders about coming back to the US. What were they in Beruit for? Why did they leave? Was the bombing of Pan Am 103 connected to them? Let us not let our minds wander.
And let us not get into all those failing S&Ls that were laundering drug money and had CIA connections to them. Maybe you missed that too.
So, gee, I’m sorry to be so suspicious about the corruption and criminality of the CIA.
Funny, “flights of fancy”.
Will have to read and respond to what you’ve written tomorrow as I’m too tired at the moment. But I assure you that my tin-foil hat isn’t on the fritz and has yet to fail in picking up real signals. Although a couple of times it did mistake interference for real signals.
Boy, look at this thread. People do not want to stay with what you’re talking about. Getting lost in the CIA rabbit hole is soooo much sexier, thus a well-developed mental muscle for Frog Pond denizens. You can claim whatever you want when you’re down that hole; who can prove you wrong?
Getting Congress to interrupt the pipeline from Big Pharma to physicians to patients is what you’re trying to bring us back to, if I’ve got it right.
Marie pretty much thinks that the Cold War is over and the CIA/DEA isn’t smuggling in drugs.
Why?
Because she’s seen no proof of it.
Read somewhere that the same ratlines used to move Nazis all around the globe to hide them after WWII are used to move drugs.
I’m not saying at all that the CIA is the lone mover of drugs around the world. As Peter Dale Scott described it in Deep Politics twenty years ago, there is a market for, say, heroin coming from Mexico. There are too many different importers to bust them all. Plus, the drug smugglers have money to buy cops, judges et al. Eventually, for a small cut, police turn their backs on favored smugglers and the favored smugglers tip off law enforcement about their competitors. An alliance between favored drug smugglers and law enforcement. The favored may actually get informant status and protection for ratting out their competitors. Scott used as his example the heroin smuggling milieu in Texas around Jack Ruby in the late fifties, early sixties.
Mexico switching to poppy as M becomes uneconomical for them. Our home-grown is better quality. Mexico is also doing refining–not brown anymore.
You’re correct that it was brown in the late ’60s-70s from MX which was probably undesirable on the east coast.
I feel a need to point out that Europe and Russia have much lower rates of opioid prescription and use, because the doctors there have not been targeted by Pharma in the same way as they have in the US. Which translates to fewer people being provided the gateway drug to move on to heroin from. I don’t have numbers for addiction rates there, though.
The US consumes the vast majority of the world’s prescription opiates. As an example, if Movantik (the opioid-induced constipation drug with the cartoon opiates in their tv ads) hd not been approved in the US, Astra Zeneca would not have pursued approval in Europe and elsewhere, because it would not have been financially viable.
I’m too lazy to look it up, but I know I read reports that one of the first things that happened in Afghanistan when Team USA! USA! USA! marched in was that the spooks got the War Lords to begin poppy planting and opium/heroin production back on line STAT! The Taliban – for all of the many other glaring faults – had pretty much shut down opium/heroin production.
CIA wasn’t gonna let that nifty, cash-cow, supply train stay shut down forever.
Between BigPharma pushing pills to the docs, who, in turn, push them on their patients, we then have the Alphabets following along behind pushing street drugs on all the nifty addicts out there.
Well, it’s one way to make a buck.
The track record on treatment efficacy for opioid/heroin addiction isn’t that great and it’s not inexpensive.
Legalizing marijuana would be more directly and quickly effective in stemming the opioid epidemic than slowly expanding the not so effective number of treatment centers.
In addition to pot being a substitute narcotic painkiller, it keeps people out of the underground drug market and away from easy access to prescription opioids.
Canada has just opened its second safe injection site. Better would be to supply the drugs as well.
(Trying not to sound too sarcastic) Can anyone tell me how this is not just more of the same effing thing we’ve been doing for 50/100 years? Except, of course, that now we are dealing with primarily “upscale” folk. By the time this money works its way through the bureaucracy, a few dribs and drabs will hit the floor, producing negative net outcomes, imho.
Yep, this is just more of the same but, things have changed. The red states have erased what was once considered public health. Google the state health dept of Indiana and compare it to Calif. state dept of health. Oh, and google 12 step program for any state and I bet the first link is to some corporate rehab association and not any of the free self help programs. State grants are not useful any more.
That it is now hitting “upscale” folk is what makes it different in a crucial way. As long as people in slums were the ones getting hooked, it was unlikely that there would be a political response. Now we might have hope that there will be.
I have a sneaky suspicion funding for programs to help Americans with low incomes will continue to be poor, even if programs are broadened and improved for the middle and upper classes.
There’s also a social aspect. There was a time when doctors shied away from opioid prescriptions out of concern for addiction. In recent years the trend has been to err on the side of pain relief. This trend began in the hospice movement but spread from there.
If someone really is at the end of life, it makes sense to not worry about the possibility of addiction. But for everyone else, there should be a balancing of risks and rewards.
The irony is that when my dad was dying last year in hospice, he was given morphine but it was so carefully and cautiously provided to him. A couple of times, I had to get in the face of the hospice staff to up his dosage – I could tell he needed it (it was totally obvious).
I get it that the hospice staff had to tread carefully, and they needed a doctor to approve an increased dosage or an extra dose. But it was kind of crazy. My dad was nearly 95 and clearly dying, but I had to really make a stink to get him an increase in morphine when he needed it.
Yet, as I say in another post here, I have a co-worker who is totally addicted to prescription meds. Seems like it’s been pretty easy for this person to get a “fix.”
The system is flawed, for sure, and often doesn’t make a lot of sense.
It makes sense only if you consider that Big Pharma and other providers can’t make as much money off a 95-year-old than they can extract from a younger person and the insurance providers they may have.
Someone I work with has a very bad prescription drug addiction, mostly to Oxy I believe (started out with Celebrex but moved to Oxy later, I think).
This person claims constant pain, but I’ve heard (on the radio) and read articles that claim that people with constant pain – and often pain that moves around their bodies (which is the case w/my co-worker) – often really don’t get relief from opiates. It just dulls the pain for a while, and then for reasons I don’t understand (not a doc or a scientist) the pain can shift around the body. Perhaps some sort outcome of the addiction process??
My observation is that the US medical establishment is not really treating people effectively. Well, it’s the whole situation whereby the Bean Counters in BigInsurance really don’t let doctors work with patients anymore to resolve issues, which may take TIME… can’t have that. Here’s a quick fix: take this pill and go away. Etc.
My observation of co-worker is that this person has a myriad of other mental health issues that co-worker is “dealing with” by drugging up. This person’s health is now in serious jeopardy. Co-worker doctor and pharmacy shops in order to get higher dosages of meds from different pushers/doctors. It’s possible now that this person may have cancer, which has not been diagnosed due to doctor shopping and covering up pain with meds.
It’s a mess. And it’s a national problem. But how to “fix” a huge number of addicts is the big question. It’s not easy to get off opioids or any other kind of opiates, whether from the street or pharmacy. No easy or cheap solutions, that’s for sure. Takes time in conjunction with therapies, but that costs money.
My sister is an MD in Canada who specialized in treating people with chronic pain. Its a small speciality, most MDs are not trained to deal with such patients. They often just write a scrip for a pain medication (bc thats what the patient ‘wants’), but my sister works with people to design a program that includes counseling, meditation, exercise, and physical therapy sessions, as well as medication. Exercise and meditation can make a huge difference in quality of life for these patients.
Anyone else notice we’re still trying to convince governments to legalize cannabis, and the legal drug companies are basically mass-producing heroin and selling it to everyone and one of their neighbors?
History will not be a kind judge of how we’ve handled substances, and substance abuse as a crime.
OT:
THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW 1/20/16
Snyder e-mails missing key year in Flint toxic water disaster
Rachel Maddow reports on the release of hundreds of pages of e-mails from Michigan Governor Rick Snyder that show the Snyder administration’s awakening to the Flint toxic water crisis, but points out that key decisions about Flint’s water supply happened in 2013, which is not part of the e-mail release
Would much appreciate it if you would copy your comment and the link into a comment in my “Elephant in the Water II” diary for future reference?