September 2001 (vol. 17, #6)
1601 N Tucson Blvd #9, Tucson AZ 85716
c 2001 Physicians for
Civil Defense
Sarin, soman, and other nerve agents are what the U.S. government emphasizes when discussing chemical weapons. These are, of course, deadly poisons, which could cripple a military force in a small area or terrorize a city.
But Russian war manuals talk about a different objective, one ignored or even suppressed by U.S. intelligence as well as the media: the psychological control of a population. What if a large portion of a population could be rendered incapable of independent thought or action? What if even a few could be turned into agents who would follow orders and then develop amnesia-as in The Manchurian Candidate?
Mind-altering drugs have been extensively investigated by the Soviet Union and China (and also by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency). American POWs in Korea provided experimental subjects of different ethnic and racial backgrounds as well as different intellectual and educational levels. Notably, Korean War POWs behaved very differently than Americans in previous wars: no spirit, no leadership, and no escapes.
In the 1970s, world-class Soviet scientists developed synthetic peptide neurotransmitters, which were mass produced.
But the chemical weapons actually launched by the Communist Bloc against Western civilian populations were narcotics and cocaine, according to Dr. Joseph Douglass, Jr., a national security affairs consultant with 30 years experience in defense policy and intelligence.
This sounds incredible, like something from an espionage novel, stated the interviewer in a report for Zeit- Fragen/Zürich Nr. 10, October 1977 (www.konservativ.de/zf/douglass.htm), a conversation with Joseph Douglass entitled ``Drogen gehörten im kalten Krieg zur kommunistischen Langzeitstrategie-und heute?'' (Drugs were part of the long-term Cold War strategy of the Communists-and today?) But is it true?
The Cold War may be over, but drugs-and the hot War on Drugs-continue to claim victims. Users are killed by the drugs themselves, infections from dirty needles, prison violence, or gunshot wounds. Bystanders may be killed by gang members fighting over turf, in the course of crimes to steal money to support drug habits, or by the police. It is estimated that 62 people died at the hands of police in 1990, and 205 in 1998, the majority of deaths probably related to the war on drugs, some in SWAT team raids that didn't find any drugs (Jim Redden, Snitch Culture, Feral House 2000).
Innocent citizens are victimized by laws passed on the pretext of catching drug kingpins: such as asset forfeitures (in which the seized property has to prove itself innocent); broad, vague charges of ``money laundering''; and vastly expanded surveillance powers for the state. The Reno Justice Department turned the full force of drug laws against physicians for coding errors and ``medically unnecessary'' treatment. This has been extensively covered by the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (see especially AAPS News Oct 1997 and the July/August 1998 issue of The Medical Sentinel on ``The Police State of Medicine,'' www.aapsonline.org).
It is generally assumed that drug trafficking is motivated solely by profit. But if Douglass is right, the motives are much more sinister and the battle far more difficult.
In his book Red Cocaine, first published in 1990 with a second edition in 1997, Douglass provides a unique, extensively documented account of the development and implementation of this major element of the subversion of the Free World. Much of the content was summarized by Douglass in his talk at the 1998 meeting of DDP (available on tape or CD-ROM).
It appears that Soviet knowledge of adverse drug effects on the cardiovascular system predates Western recognition by many years. While American medical personnel identified coronary artery disease in young servicemen in Korea, they attributed this to diet. Soviet doctors noted the additional possible contribution of drug usage, and this captured Khrushchev's imagination. He saw drugs both as a means to cripple the capitalist society and raise money for more revolutionary activities. Drugs could undermine health, morale, the American work ethic, loyalty, and even the influence of religion.
The Communist Manual of Instructions of Psychological Warfare contains an address by Lavrentiy Beria, which states: ``Psychopolitics is a solemn charge. With it you can erase our enemies as insects. You can cripple the efficiency of leaders by striking insanity into their families through the use of drugs.''
The Soviet drug strategy was even more closely guarded than other intelligence. It included developing production techniques and setting up drug trafficking schools, which had trained 25,000 students by 1985. Operations began in 1959 and increased rapidly when Castro ascended to power in Cuba. Special targets included college students, military personnel, high school students, banking officials, and minorities in inner cities. New York drug death statistics correlated well with the availability of Soviet-supplied drugs.
In the 1960s, the Soviets identified cocaine as the wave of the future. Their two jungle factories produced three times as much cocaine as Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia combined.
Douglass relies heavily on information from Jan Sejna, who defected from Czechoslovakia in 1968. Official Washington, seized by detente fever, refused to listen.
While claiming to wage a War on Drugs, government at every level has protected the drug cartels: the illegal drug trade, or global criminal capitalism, is now said to bring in $2 trillion per year. At the same time that its efforts are almost totally ineffectual against the criminal public-private partnership, the U.S. government moves ever closer to a police state.
While a citizen can go to prison for inadvertently failing to report cash transactions that exceed a $10,000 threshold, Douglass notes that the operations of a $500 billion/year business (in 1990) could not occur without the active and knowledgeable assistance of many banks and financial institutions. Spraying crops in Colombia is just a diversion.
``Convergence'' was said to be Soviet strategy before the Empire collapsed-and today? The Russian government is said to be controlled by organized crime-and others? Population drug dependence, and government corruption by drug revenue, spell destruction for Western civilization, through chemical warfare of a nonconventional type. Building still more prisons for the casualties, and cancelling more constitutional rights for all, is not a winning strategy for the West.
America is now first in the world in the proportion of its citizens in prison, with more than 2 million persons behind bars, two-thirds for non-violent crimes. Of 150,000 inmates in federal institutions, 60% are there on drug charges-up from 16% of 40,000 in 1986 (Joel Miller, WorldNetDaily 4/20/01). Much of the increase is due to harsh mandatory minimum sentences, among the longest in the world-up to 20 years for possession of an ounce of crack cocaine. The only way to circumvent the long sentences is to snitch on others in exchange for a plea bargain carrying a lesser sentence. Insiders useful to prosecutors may thus be treated better than first offenders, and perjured testimony is rampant (Redden, op. cit.).
One in three American black men in their twenties is under supervision by the criminal justice system. ``If the current trend continues, more African- American children will most likely go to prison than to college when they grow up'' (John Whitehead, WorldNetDaily11/29/00).
Prisons are schools for hard-core crime and breeding grounds for infection. The prevalence of hepatitis C infection, which is much more likely than hepatitis B to lead to chronic liver failure, is at least 10-fold higher in prisoners than the 2% rate for the U.S. as a whole (HEPP News 4/01). The transmis- sion rate of hepatitis and of human immunodeficiency virus in prison is unknown. Potential mechanisms include drugs (which can't even be kept out of prisons) or rape. When queried, the warden at the medium-security federal facility in Tucson said that the rate of sexual assault in prison was not known. However, the frequent rape of the youngest, weakest, and least violent inmates is by no means just an urban legend. A conservative estimate is that about 290,000 men are assaulted behind bars every year (Stephen Donaldson, NY Times 12/29/93).
Most of the people now incarcerated will eventually be released, bringing prison culture and prison infections into the broader community. Leaving aside considerations of basic justice, morality, and human decency, the purely utilitarian trade-off in terms of deterring drug use is not favorable.
In one of the most highly regulated social environments in the U.S.-the military-2,273,998 urine drug tests conducted by the Pentagon in 1999 turned up 12,006 positive for marijuana, 2,839 for cocaine, 809 for methamphetamine, 432 for Ecstasy, and 325 for LSD (Miller, op. cit.).
The conduct of the War on Drugs seems to resemble the VietNam conflict-in which, incidentally, Marlboros adulterated with drugs were used to get American soldiers addicted, Douglass stated. We may be burning villages in order to save them, while the power source is immune from attack.
A report released July 20 by the National Institutes of Health is ``comparable to tobacco company executives conceding that smoking causes cancer,'' writes Cliff Kincaid (AIM Report XXX-15). A consensus report by 38 experts who reviewed 138 studies concludes that:
Joe S. McIlhaney, Jr., M.D., president of the Medical Institute for Sexual Health, stated: ``We are in the midst of an epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases. Approximately 15 million Americans acquire STDs each year; 25% are younger than 20. Some STDs are deadly. Others contribute to infertility or cancer.'' Dr. McIlhaney states that public health personnel have, by promoting condoms, ``lulled [America's youth] into a false sense of security about pre-marital sexual activity.''
Former U.S. Congressman Tom Coburn, M.D. (R-OK) wrote in a letter to HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson: ``This report means that when condom use is discussed, it is no longer medically accurate-or legal for the CDC-to refer to sex as `safe' or `protected'.'' Dr. Coburn told Ceci Connolly of the Washington Post that ``the federal government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to promote an unsubstantiated claim that promiscuity can be safe. We all know now for a fact that that is a lie'' (Kincaid, op. cit.)
AIDS activists condemned the report because it might impede public health efforts to ``make condom use the norm.'' Dr. Jeff Klausner, director of the STD Prevention and Control Services at the San Francisco Department of Public Health stated: ``Condoms are adequate. Condoms do work.'' It was noted that ``no gay approaches to sex were included in the analyses'' (Bay Area Reporter 7/26/01).
While physician groups have promoted the message that ``behavioral interventions'' such as needle-exchange and safe-sex programs work (American Family Physician 8/97), British researchers unexpectedly found that men who participated in a safe sex workshop were more likely to acquire at least one STD during the 12-month follow-up than men in the control group (31% versus 21%) (Imrie J et al, BMJ 2001;322:1451-1456). Authors claimed this to be the ``first such trial in a population of gay men to measure both clinical and behavioural outcomes''-such interventions are based on faith.
The American media has paid scant attention to this NIH statement. Dan Rather did report that Kenyan President Daniel Arap Moi urged his people to refrain from promiscuity for two years in order to ``save a generation from AIDS,'' but without the context of the failure of the ``safe sex'' message.
As Dr. McIlhaney said, ``sex is more dangerous than smoking. Sex hurts them while they're teenagers. Smoking will hurt them later.'' But don't expect ``safer cigarette'' ads competing with the ``clean needle'' and condom promotions. This is war, remember.