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WHO RULES: THE ISRAEL LOBBY
OR UNCLE SAM?
The answer
at last! Uri Avnery, former Knesset member, assesses the Lobby's
power. "If the Israeli government wanted a law tomorrow
annulling the 10 Commandments, 95 U.S. Senators (at least) would
sign the bill forthwith." But, yes, in the end the dog wags
the tail.Fifty
years ago Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" blew the cobwebs
out of millions of young minds and drove a stake through the
heart of Eisenhower's America. Lenni Brenner remembers Ginsberg
in the East Village.Dr Mengele died in exile, in disguise. Dr Ishii
died rich and recognized, in his own Tokyo home. Christopher
Reed on Japanese WW2 medical tortures and how the U.S. covered
them up.CounterPunch
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Steve Howe died at 48 when his pick-up
truck rolled over in the wee small hours of April 28 in Coachella,
California. Riverside County authorities said he was doing 70
mph. They even drug-tested him in death. The autopsy was inconclusive
but the toxicology report has been sent to a lab for analysis
and one day this summer we'll hear or read a brief item to the
effect that Steve Howe, once the best relief pitcher in baseball,
rookie of the year when he came up with the Dodgers in 1980,
did or didn't have an illegal metabolite in his system.
I liked Steve Howe a lot. I
interviewed him and then hung out with him in 1986, when he was
pitching for the San Jose Bees, a motley collection of rehabbing
ex-major leaguers (including Mike Norris, Ken Reitz, and Derrel
Sconiers), four Japanese prospects who spoke almost no English,
and ordinary D-league professional baseball players.
Howe grew up in Pontiac, Michigan
and his social group was "pretty tough guys." He told
me he didn't do drugs or alcohol as a teenager, although all
his friends did. He laid off because he thought pot might take
the edge off his athletic skills (he knew he was great) and alcohol
reminded him of his dad, whom he did not admire. He first did
coke one night in New York City after pitching against the Mets.
A woman offered him a hit and thought it might be okay for him
because "it reminded me of all the Ritalin I'd done as a
kid. I said, "But you just said you didn't do drugs or alcohol
as a kid." He repeated that he hadn't. Ritalin, in his view,
was "medication" because it had been administered by
a school nurse and prescribed by a physician!
Ritalin is the brand name for
methylphenidate HCl, a form of speed designed by chemists to
be just different enough from amphetamine for exclusive licensing
by Ciba-Geigy, the drug company now known as Novartis. Ritalin
use had flattened in the late 1970s after Peter Schrag and Diane
Divoky published their brilliant expose, The Myth of the Hyperactive
Child; but by the mid-1980s it was being pushed successfully
in the schools, its use justified by a pharmacological falsehood,
i.e., that it had a "paradoxical effect" on the young,
calming them down. In fact Ritalin has the classic effect of
speed --riveting one's attention on whatever is directly in front
of one's face, and causing all the expected side-effects, such
as sleeplessness, loss of appetite and increasing jitters as
it wears off. Ritalin and similar stimulants are now prescribed
daily for five million American kids.
After hearing Howe's story,
I went to the UCSF library and looked in vain for a study correlating
Ritalin use in childhood and cocaine use in adulthood. I contacted
a UC Berkeley psychology professor, Nadine Lambert, who had begun
looking into it. She shared her preliminary findings in what
would become a 30-year longitudinal study: Ritalin use seems
to predispose for stimulant use down the road. It's just common
sense: give a kid a "medicine," the effects of which
are supposedly good for them, then take it away at age 16, and
of course a certain number are going to try to reproduce those
familiar "positive" effects. Lambert got the picture:
Ritalin is a quick fix used with the consent of overwhelmed parents
and for the benefit of overwhelmed teachers. Attention does more
for kids with "attention deficit disorder" than does
Ritalin.
As this is going to press Saturday,
May 6, the San Francisco Chronicle arrives with Nadine Lambert's
obituary. Lambert "died when her car was struck by a dump
truck near campus... Lambert was instrumental in advocating the
view that school psychologists should work with teachers to improve
the classroom environment to help children succeed, a more successful
intervention than simply pulling students out of class for testing
or counseling because the number of school psychologists is so
limited.
"Professor Lambert also
published a controversial study in 1999 showing that children
with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder who were treated
with stimulant drugs such as Ritalin were more likely to smoke
cigarettes earlier and more heavily and were more likely as adults
to abuse cocaine. Her findings -based on a 30-year study of 492
children, half of whom had ADHD- raised questions about the risks
of Ritalin and similar drugs."
When I met him in '86 Howe
had just moved to Whitefish, Montana, which he thought would
be a great place to raise a family. The local Drug Warriors insulted
him in 1999 when he offered to be one of the four coaches on
his daughter's school softball team and the Whitefish Superintendent
of Schools, a man named Dan Peters, turned him down. Howe said
at the time, "I'm kind of dumbfounded by the whole thing.
Right now a lot of damage is being done to these kids and to
the program. And for what reason? I don't know." Howe appealed
to the County Superintendent to overrule Peters' ban. The County
Superintendent ruled that she didn't have jurisdiction because
the appeal wasn't filed with her office within 30 days of the
original dis. Howe and the Whitefish Softball Association (the
other parents) appealed to the State Superintendent who affirmed
that the original appeal had not been filed on time.
So Whitefish wasn't such a
great place, after all. At the time of his death, according to
his obit, Howe was living in Valencia, California. He was driving
home from a business trip to Arizona. The business involved making
and marketing "an all-natural high-energy soft drink."
A drink he himself could have endorsed.
When Howe was telling me the
story of how he first came to use cocaine on a sun-baked diamond
in San Jose 20 summers ago, his lawyer was standing by, smoking
a cigar. At a key point the lawyer cut in with a commentary:
"Okay, you're a kid in New York alone, you've just won the
big game, you're a hero, but you're alone in a hotel room with
nothing to do but read Schopenhauer. A beautiful woman calls
and says, 'Come fuck my brains out.' What would you rather do--you're
a kid in New York--go fuck a beautiful woman or stay home alone
and read Schopenhauer?"
Fred Gardner is the editor of O'Shaughnessy's
Journal of the California Cannabis Research Medical Group. He
can be reached at: fred@plebesite.com
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