Archive for the 'War on Drugs' Category

Sep 23 2007

American Vampire in New York

Published by cyrano2 under War on Drugs, Iraq, Savage Capitalism, Oil

Cyrano’s Journal Online and its semi-autonomous subsections (Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop) would be delighted to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to

blood

But the blood is wasted, splattered on clothes, on walls, on streets, or seeping into sand. There’s so much sand there, all of it rich with iron. “To see hematocrit in a grain of sand, hold hemoglobin in the palm of your hand…”

By Adam Engel

9/23/07

I died for your sins—almost. I never quite died complete. But still. You didn’t notice either way. It’s been a year, more or less. You didn’t call my wife. You didn’t send a card.

I don’t know why I stay on. Something in me clings to this wretched place. I refuse to leave. Perhaps I feel I deserve something. I broke my back carrying the burden of America. They gave me painkillers (pills, not Marines). Oxycontin, oxycodone. Now I’m addicted and must pay and pay and pay for more. Lucky my wife works.

I can’t sleep, but I’m clear, clear in the head. I need blood. I read the articles on the Web. So many writing, nobody doing. I look at clips of children stained with blood, or jetting blood from severed limbs, and think: waste, waste, waste.

All that blood and none for me. Do you think it’s a coincidence, me being a vampire and all, with all this blood around, everywhere I turn, and not drop for me, unless I pay and pay and pay?

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4 responses so far

Aug 02 2007

King Hemp Part 3: We Got Mugged, So Let’s Get Hemp Back

Published by cyrano2 under Media Whoredom, Corporate Perfidy, Capitalism, Corporate Media Lies, War on Drugs, Corporatism

Cyrano’s Journal Online and its semi-autonomous subsections (Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop) would be delighted to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to

smokeofhell

By Rand Clifford

8/2/07

Prohibition of cannabis hemp was a mugging, a twisted and diabolical assault on the rights, health and well-being of Americans unparalleled in our history for sheer scope of lasting impact. Never has brazen self interest cost so many people so much for so long. And the number of entrenched industries with profits threatened by hemp have greatly multiplied in number, and political influence.

You might say the assault was officially set in motion by BULLETIN No. 404, released by the United States Department of Agriculture on October 14, 1916, announcing the superiority of using hemp hurds for making paper of highest quality—and cheaply, once mechanization reduced the labor intensity of hemp harvesting. William Randolph Hearst knew the machinery might be at least 10 years away, knew that’s how much time he had to make sure hemp paper did not crush his paper-making empire. He got right to work.

Lies, propaganda and racism Hearst unleashed upon a gullible population with his chain of newspapers was phenomenally effective. The method was exquisitely simple: Because most people knew cannabis hemp as a wonderful resource, change the name of cannabis hemp to “marijuana” then terrorize relentlessly about this horrifying new threat, marijuana…and when the threat of hemp competition became imminent, kill the hemp industry by strangling marijuana. Phenomenally effective, 70 years and counting.

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11 responses so far

Jul 31 2007

King Hemp: Part 2: Battle Lines: Natural, Or Synthetic…Life, Or Death?

Published by cyrano2 under Depraved Aristocracy, Corporate Perfidy, War on Drugs, Corporatism, Crony Capitalism

Cyrano’s Journal Online and its semi-autonomous subsections (Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop) would be delighted to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to

hemp01

By Rand Clifford

7/31/07

Hemp is about life, renewal and future, power to The People…most everything America’s embedded fascist regime is not about. Government of, by and for corporations (CorpoGov) has us hogtied.

Corporate profits rule the priorities in a globalizing plutocracy (CorpoWorld) where the bottom line is…power to the bottom line. Corporate grip just keeps increasing, squeezing the life out of the biosphere—CorpoWorld truly is making a killing!

CorpoWorld lives by fossil energy, death and decay sucked and scoured from Earth’s burial grounds. Fossil fuels have already so poisoned the biosphere that canned tuna, healthy old protein standby, needs health warnings on the label. Banks of many rivers and lakes are sprinkled with signs reading: DO NOT EAT THE FISH! Common at others are diagrams detailing parts of fish where mercury, PCBs, dioxins, furans, lead and arsenic collect; anatomical maps posted to warn of where CorpoWorld’s toxic fingerprints are concentrating…. Mercury is the premier toxin, pervasive and potent, now piling up around the top of virtually every ocean food chain. The primary mercury dispensers are coal-fired power plants—China is building new ones as fast as they can, expecting to continue bringing another new plant on-line every few days…. And so it goes in the world of hidden costs keeping cheap imports “cheap”. So goes the biocidal foundation of “cheapness”. Nothing synthetic is cheap when all the real costs are accounted for.

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10 responses so far

Jul 23 2007

King Hemp Part I: From DEA Deadly Birdseed, Toward Power to the People

Published by cyrano2 under War on Drugs, Prison Industrial Complex, Crony Capitalism, DEA

Cyrano’s Journal Online and its semi-autonomous subsections (Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop) would be delighted to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to

hemp

By Rand Clifford

7/23/07

America was just starting to crawl, and hemp was such an essential crop that farmers could be fined for not growing it—even jailed during periods of shortage in the mid 1760s. Hemp was legal tender in most of the country until the early 1800s. By 1850, over 8,000 farms of 2,000 acres or more were growing hemp, mostly where slave labor could satisfy the extreme labor-intensity of the hemp industry.

The slavery issue changed after 1865…but by the 1930s, hemp-harvesting machinery was coming out that drastically reduced labor demands. Popular Mechanics magazine ran a cover story, February, 1938, hailing hemp as “The New Billion-Dollar Crop”. Imagine the wealth a billion dollars meant in 1938. Imagine the wealth William Randolph Hearst had amassed by 1938. Twenty years earlier, Hearst had seen hemp looming on the horizon as a threat to his paper-making empire. As soon as new machinery made superior hemp paper competitive, Hearst, as well as Pierre Dupont, owner of patents for the sulfuric-acid process for making paper from wood pulp, both stood to loose vast profits to hemp. Through connections to the very core of American politics, their stealth campaign of sensational lies and propaganda, manipulation, racism and even terrorism, culminated with an illegal tax law essentially outlawing hemp in 1937—yes, the year before Popular Mechanics published their “New Billion-Dollar Crop” article lauding hemp. Talk about stealth! Imagine the chagrin of all the people involved in our domestic hemp industry in 1937 when they suddenly learned that hemp had been banned in America because of “The Killer Weed from Mexico”. Except for during the reprieve of several years in WWII, under the government’s “Hemp for Victory!” campaign, not a single acre of hemp has been legally grown in America since 1937.

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28 responses so far

May 30 2007

New Opium Crops - In Iraq

Published by cyrano2 under War on Drugs, Iraq, Afghanistan

By Rowan Wolf

5/30/07

One would have thought this would have been big news, but somehow it has largley escaped the U.S. corporate media. Patrick Cockburn, however, writes Opium: Iraq’s deadly new export. While apparently in the beginnings of cultivation, the poverty and chaos which has enveloped Iraq is spawning opium fields in southern Iraq. Iraq has historically been one of the opium highways for Afghanistan’s trade.

Now Iraq is turning to opium cultivation for the same reason that Afghanistan returned to it - poverty, profit, and chaos:

As in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban in 2001, these conditions of primal anarchy are ideal for criminal gangs and drug smugglers and producers. The difference is that Afghanistan had long been a major producer of opium and possessed numerous laboratories experienced in turning opium into heroin. The Taliban, on the orders of its leader, Mullah Omar, had stopped its cultivation by farmers in the parts of Afghanistan it controlled. Farmers near the southern city of Kandahar grubbed up cauliflowers and planted poppies instead as soon as the US started bombing.

The one factor currently militating against criminal gangs organising poppy cultivation in Iraq on a wide scale is that they are already making large profits from smuggling drugs from Iran. This is easy to do because of Iraq’s enormous and largely unguarded land borders with neighbouring states. Iraqis themselves are not significant consumers of heroin or other drugs.

There are well established links between the illicit drug trade, U.S. foreign policy, and global financial institutions. While the discussions of these are intricate and complex, the summation of them is not. The CIA - and more recently Special Forces - have utilized the heroin and cocaine trades to finance “black ops.” Corporations have equally benefited by laundering vast amounts of drug money through financial institutions and Wall Street.

One of the implicit “benefits” of massive instability resulting from conflict and poverty is the encouragement of drug production. The desperation created in nations such as Afghanistan and Iraq fuels the increase of illicit drug manufacture. It has been argued by some that the reason for the U.S. Southeast Asia intervention (Vietnam War) was to control the “Golden Triangle. Certainly, once the Taliban stopped virtually all of the opium production in Afghanistan, Myanmar/Burma once more emerged as the leading source of opium. The invasion of Afghanistan, and removal of the Taliban, has seen opium production in Afghanistan grow each year - it is now at record highs. It is hardly likely that this is simply coincidence.

It is no surprise then that Iraq would join the opium trail. The business is “good” for all “interests.” Crime rings, war lords, and extremist groups get a massive surge of resources. The CIA and Special Forces get funding for illicit operations. Arms dealers (including the U.S. which is the world’s largest arms dealer) are assured ongoing demand. Corporations get massive infusions of cash to extend their operations and line their pockets. Meanwhile, the “war on drugs” facilitates a growing militarized police state. With the privatization of jails and prisons, the growing populations of those incarcerated in the “war” creates a profitable labor force, while tax payers pay the bill for the whole thing. This was detailed in the case of Iran/Contra by Gary Webb in his series in the San Jose Mercury News and then in his book “.”

Tangled webs that ensure future conflict - and profit. So goes Iraq.

Other Related Articles

From The Wilderness Archive: CIA and Drugs

The Bush-Cheney Drug Empire. Michael Ruppert, 10/24/2000.

CIA, Drugs, and Wall Street. Michael Ruppert, 6/29/1999.

U.S. : Afghan poppy production doubles. Reuters, 11/28/03.

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