Daily Archives: May 24, 2020

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

Police Chief of Sistan and Baluchestan province, Second Brigadier General Mohammad Ghanbari, said following intelligence operations, the forces traced a big haul of illicit drugs entering the country from the southeastern borders.

He added that the forces, in a surprise operation, arrested two of the drug traffickers while seizing 924kg opium, 39kg heroin, and 209kg hashish.

He said that the arrested individuals have been handed over to the Judiciary.

The war on drug trade originating from Afghanistan has claimed the lives of nearly 4,000 Iranian police officers over the past four decades while the country has spent more than $700 million on sealing its borders and preventing the transit of narcotics destined for European, Arab and Central Asian countries.

In a letter on Friday, Iran's Permanent Ambassador to the International Organizations in Vienna Kazem Gharibabadi pointed to the Islamic Republics leading role in the global fight against drug trafficking despite the US unilateral sanctions.

In a letter to Executive Director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) Ghada Fathi Waly, Gharibabadi urged the United Nations and its member states to fulfill their responsibilities the fight against terrorism and recognize and support Irans activities in this regard.

He added that the Islamic Republic witnessed a 20% hike in busting illegal drugs last year in comparison to the previous year.

Director of Irans headquarters of the fight against narcotic drugs Eskandar Momeni had earlier noted that Iran has the least international support in its campaign against the drugs.

Despite high economic and human costs, the Islamic Republic has been actively fighting drug-trafficking over the past decades.

MAH/ 4932599

See the original post here:

Police bust over one ton of drugs in SE Iran - Mehr News Agency - English Version

For indispensable reporting on the coronavirus crisis and more, subscribe to Mother Jones' newsletters.

In mid-March, police officers barged into Breonna Taylors home in Louisville, Kentucky, in the middle of the night and discharged a spray of bullets that struck and killed the 26-year-old EMT. More than two months later, leaders in her city are taking steps to make it harder for officers to enter homes without knocking.

On Monday, Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer announced that the police chief will now have to sign off on all no-knock warrants, the type of search warrant officers obtained to enter Taylors home as part of a drug investigation. But its unlikely Taylor will be the last Black woman to lose her life as a result of these warrants: Research shows that Black and Latino people have long been disproportionately affected by these kinds of raids, and tens of thousands more will likely be targeted within the year.

They dont do this in other neighborhoods, Benjamin Crump, a civil rights attorney representing Taylors family, said in a press call last week. Crump has also represented the families of other Black shooting victims around the country, including Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and Ahmaud Arbery. If this was another household in a more affluent community, lightning would strike and thunder would groan if such a warrant were issued, Crump said.

Taylor, 26, and her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, were in bed when they heard the officers enter at around 12:40 a.m. on March 13. According to the search warrant, police believed a suspected drug dealer named Jamarcus Gloverwho did not live with Taylor and had already been arrested elsewherewas keeping drugs or money at her house.

Walker, thinking the plain-clothes officers were intruders, called 911. He then pulled out his gun and fired a shot at one officers leg. The officers responded with more than 20 rounds of bullets that sailed through the kitchen and living room, fatally striking Taylor eight times. Bullets also flew into an adjacent home, where a pregnant woman and a five-year-old child slept. The officers found no drugs on the premises. They promptly charged Walker with attempted murder.

Walker was a legally registered gun owner, and Kentuckys Stand Your Ground law allows people to use deadly force against an intruder at home. But the law doesnt apply when the intruder is a police officer who identifies himself as such. The Louisville officers claim that even with their no-knock warrant, they knocked and announced themselves before forcibly entering Taylors home. According to lawyers for her family, neighbors say they heard no knock.

Neither Taylor nor her boyfriend had a criminal record for drugs or violence, the lawyers say. In a lawsuit filed in late April, they accuse the police of negligence, excessive force, and wrongful death. Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear last week described reports of the killing as troubling and called for an investigation. Responding to Taylors death, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul told the Courier-Journal he thought no-knock warrants should be forbidden.

Historically, police officers executing a warrant were supposed to knock, announce themselves, and wait before entering a persons home. But in the 1970s and 80s, as the war on drugs ramped up, many officers argued that drug dealers would take advantage of the warning to destroy evidence or arm themselves. Judges began approving more no-knock warrants, along with quick-knock warrants, another type that requires officers to knock but allows them to barge inside seconds later. Around the country, no-knock and quick-knock drug searches surgedfrom around 3,000 in 1981 to at least 60,000 annually in recent years, according to Peter Kraska, a professor at Eastern Kentucky University who studies these raids. In many cities, its rare for a judge to deny an officers request for a no-knock warrant, partly because its easy to argue a suspect will be dangerous when you consider that 4 in 10 American adults live in a home with a gun.

As the number of raids increased, so did the toll on Black families. The war on drugs has always been predominantly prosecuted against minority communities, so the bulk of no-knock raids are executed against those same people, says Kraska.

The officers who killed Taylor wore plain clothes. Usually, no-knock raids are carried out by trained SWAT or drug tactical teams with military-grade gear. In 2014, researchers at the ACLUstudied more than 800 SWAT raids by law enforcement around the country. In total,they found that 42 percent of people affected by search-warrant raids were Black, and 12 percent were Latino.Nearly two-thirds of the raids were drug searches.Taken together, Black people and Latinos accounted for 61 percent of the people targeted by SWAT drug raids.And SWAT teams found contraband in only about a third of these cases, meaning that many innocent people were raided unnecessarily.

Others were killed or injured. In 2008,SWAT officers opened fire into the home of Tarika Wilson in Lima, Ohio. They were hunting for Wilsons boyfriend, a suspected drug dealer, but instead they fatally shot Wilson, who was cradling her 14-month-old son. (Bullets hit the baby in the left shoulder and hand, but he survived.) In 2014, Georgia police threw a grenade into the crib of a 19-month-old toddler during a SWAT raid, burning the boy so badly he was placed into a medically induced coma; the officers, who said they hadnt realized there were children in the home, were not charged.

In 2010, as portrayed in this Mother Jones investigation, Detroit police who entered the wrong apartment during a no-knock raid and killed 7-year-old Aiyana Stanley-Jones as she slept on the couch. Between 2010 and 2016, at least 81 civilians and 13 officers died in forcible-entry SWAT raids around the country, according to a New York Times report. And Kraska, the professor, has documented about 330 no-knock or quick-knock raids in the past two decades that led to a killing or serious injury. This is such an extreme, inherently risky, and violent approach, he says. It doesnt make any sense to use this highly militarized approach for potential low-level drug possession or low-level dealing.

While the Louisville police department will now require the police chiefs sign-off on no-knock raids, Kraska worries its a pretty meaningless attempt at reform because its contingent on the chiefs sensibilities. If you have a progressive police chief who is concerned about citizens wellbeing, thats a good idea, he says, but if you have a chief who thinks [raids] are the best way to fight the drug war, you could have a complete mess.

Mayor Fischer acknowledged that the policy change was just a first step. We know there needs to be more conversation on the use of these warrants, he said Monday. (Quick-knock warrants will still be allowed without the police chiefs approval.) He added that the police department would expand its use of body cameras, which had not been worn by the officers who killed Taylor.

It may not have been the kind of justice Taylors mom, Tamika Palmer, imagined for her daughter. I want them to say her name, Palmer said in a recent interview with the Washington Post. Palmer says Taylor was scheduled to work a hospital shift the morning after she was shot. Theres no reason Breonna should be dead at all.

Read more from the original source:

Breonna Taylor Is One of a Shocking Number of Black People to See Armed Police Barge Into Their Homes - Mother Jones

Published: 5/20/2020 6:20:10 AM

An estimated 1.7 million hospital patients acquire infections in the United States each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control, and 99,000 of them die.

That sobering data came to light before the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, and it does not include lives lost to infections in doctors offices, nursing homes and assisted-living facilities. This year the number of deaths due to infections is expected to soar. Elderly people are particularly vulnerable, but there are reasons for hope.

To me one of the most compelling images of hope in America is something you see everywhere copper piping. There is a wealth of evidence about the attributes of copper, an antimicrobial metal, that could be used on hard surfaces in hospitals and other facilities to reduce the spread of infections.

Copper is a pretty miraculous material. Used on doorknobs and bed and IV frames and other hard surfaces, copper kills viruses, influenzas and bacteria like E.coli. When the coronavirus lands on most hard surfaces, it can live up to four or five days. But when it lands on copper or a copper alloy like brass, it begins to die within minutes, and is undetectable within hours. Copper disables viruses and bacteria, and it can drastically decrease the spread of infections.

The evidence of coppers value to public health is striking. A 2015 study compared infection rates at three hospitals and found that when copper alloys were used on fixtures, infection rates fell by 58%. Another study conducted the following year inside a pediatric intensive care unit showed a similar result.

Why do some health care facilities want to deny the advantages of copper and copper alloys? The cost of switching to copper fixtures would be negligible in comparison to the cost of lives lost.

Coppers antimicrobial properties were recognized long ago. Thats why copper is used for pipes that carry water into homes, because it kills viruses and bacteria that are resistant to drugs. The use of copper boomed during the 1920s when it became popular for fixtures in bathrooms and kitchens. But it was subsequently pushed out of many building applications by a wave of new (and cheaper) materials that were favored by architects and designers stainless steel, aluminum, tempered glass and plastics.

Now is the time to bring copper back. Increasing the use of antimicrobial surfaces wont eliminate the need for hand-washing and sanitary cleaning. But if recent history is any guide, the adoption of antimicrobial surfaces in hospitals and nursing homes could go a long way toward reducing infections and the spread of deadly pathogens.

(Virendra Mathur is professor emeritus in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of New Hampshire.)

More here:

My turn: Three cheers for copper in war on pandemics - Concord Monitor

DONALD TRUMP launched a new vaccine war this week, but not against the virus. It was against the world. The US and Britain were the only two hold-outs in the World Health Assembly on the declaration that vaccines and medicines for Covid-19 should be available as public good, and not under exclusive patent rights.

Having badly botched his Covid-19 response, he is trying to redeem his electoral fortunes in the November elections this year by promising an early vaccine. Trumps Make America Great Again is vaccines for us, but the rest will have to queue up and pay what big pharma asks, as they will hold the patents.

In contrast, all other countries agreed with the Costa Rican proposal in the World Health Assembly that there should be a patent pool for all Covid-19 vaccines and medicines.

President Xi Jinping said that Chinese vaccines would be available as a public good, a view also shared by European Union leaders. Among the eight vaccines in phase 1 and 2 of clinical trials, the Chinese have four, the US two, Britain and Germany one each.

Trump has a given an ultimatum to the WHO of a permanent withdrawal of funds if it does not mend its ways in 30 days. In sharp contrast, almost all countries including close allies of the US rallied behind the WHO. The failure of the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) against Covid-19 with four times the annual budget of the WHO is visible to the world.

The CDC failed to provide a successful test for the SARS-CoV-2 even after two months of the WHO distributing successful test kits to a large number of 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 the US numbers for Covid-19 are now more than 1.5 million and about one-third of all global infections. Contrast this with China, the first to face an unknown epidemic, stopping it at 82,000 and what countries such as Vietnam and South Korea have done.

If we do not address the intellectual property rights issue in this pandemic, we are likely to see a repeat of the Aids tragedy. People died for 10 years as patented Aids medicine was priced at $10-15,000for a years supply, far beyond their reach.

Finally, it was Indian patent laws that till 2004 did not allow for such patents that helped people to get Aids medicine at less than a dollar a day, or $350 for a years supply. Today, 80 per cent of the Aids medicines in the world comefrom India. For big pharma, profits trumped lives, and they will continue to do so unless we change the world.

Most countries have compulsory licensing provisions that will allow them to break patents in case of epidemics or health emergencies. Even the WTO, after a bitter fight, accepted in its Doha Declaration (2001) that countries, in a health emergency, have the right to allow any company to manufacture a patented drug, 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 WTOs Trade Related Intellectual Property agreements (TRIPS)? It isUS bullying. Under US domestic trade actsit issues special reportsthreatening any country with trade sanctions that tries to compulsorily license any product.

India figures prominently each year, for daring to issue a compulsory license in 2012 to Natco for nexavar, a cancer drug which Bayer was selling for $65,000 a year.

Bayer CEO Marijn Dekkers was quoted widely saying that this was theft, and We did not develop this medicine for IndiansWe developed it for Western patients who can afford it.

This leaves unanswered how many people even in the West can afford a $65,000 bill for an illness. But there is no question that this would be 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 US threats.

It is the fear that countries can break patents using their compulsory licensing provisions 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 in such patent pools, or philanthropic capital should provide the additional funds for developing new drugs for this pool.

It is this idea of patent pooling that has been backed by all countries in WHA, barring the US and its loyal ally Britain.

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.

The US, 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 health issued a threat to Bayer under eminent domain for patents, for licensing ciprofloxacin to other manufacturers.

Bayer folded, and agreed to supply the quantity and at a price that the US government was demanding without a whimper the same Bayer which considers India as a thief for issuing a compulsory licence.

The vaccines 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 it will provide a lifetime immunity like the smallpox vaccine.

Unlike Aids, where the patient numbers were smaller and could be stigmatised 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 medicineswill see the collapse of the entire patent edifice of TRIPS that Big Pharma backed by the US and major EU countries have built. That is why the cleverer partsof the capitalist world moved towards a patent pool for Covid-19 medicines and vaccines.

Unlike clever capital, Trumps response on the Covid-19 vaccine is to simply bully his way through. He believes that with the unlimited money he is now willing to put into the vaccine efforts, the US would either beat everybody else to the winning postor buy the company that is successful.

If he succeeds, he can then use his Covid-19 vaccine as a new instrument of global power. It is the US that will then decide whether a country gets the vaccine.

Trump does not believe in a rule-based global order, even if the rules are in the favour of the rich. He is walking out of various arms control agreements and has crippled the WTO.

He believes that the US, as the biggest economy and the most powerful military power, should have the right to dictate to all countries. Threats of bombing and invasions can be combined with unilateral sanctions; and the latest in his imaginary arsenal, withholding vaccines.

His problem is the days of a sole global hegemon are long over. The US has shown itself as a crumbling giant and its epidemic response has been shambolic. It has been unable to provide virus tests to its people in time, and stop the epidemic, which a number of other countries have done.

China and the EU have already agreed that any vaccine developed by them will be regarded as 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.

In India, as in many other countries, we have the scientific capability. We also have one of the largest generic drug and vaccine manufacturing capacities in the world.

What prevents us, or any country, from manufacturing vaccines or the drugs once they are developed? Only the empty threat of a failed hegemon on patents? Or the belief that in the US-China vaccine war, we need to be on the US side?

This article is adapted from Peoples Democracy http://www.peoplesdemocracy.in.

More:

The US has declared a vaccine war on the world - Morning Star Online

Joe Biden became the presumptive Democratic nominee in the 2020 election by running as a moderate unifier, hoping to win over voters with the promise of business-as-usual politics from the pre-Trump era.

Now the COVID-19 pandemic has led him to rethink his platform of a return to the days of bipartisan consensus, and his campaign is seizing the opportunity to offer what the Los Angeles Times described as "bold change" on such issues as climate change, health care, social welfare, and infrastructure.

But it's worth remembering that in his 44 years in the Senate and then as vice president, Biden repeatedly took advantage of moments of crisis to push through policies that have exacerbated some of the most critical problems afflicting American society.

Biden has been a prominent figure in the bipartisan War on Drugs for decades, he helped the Clinton administration pass disastrous crime and immigration bills, he laid the foundation for the PATRIOT Act, he assisted the George W. Bush administration in making the case for the war in Iraq, and then as vice president he oversaw the deportation of a record number of people.

Aside from his policy record, several women have accused Biden of inappropriately touching them in public, and now his campaign is in crisis because of a sexual assault allegation by a former staffer.

But the terrible choice put forth by the two major parties in 2020 isn't just about sexual misconduct or character. Joe Biden's greatest political liability is his legacy as a lawmaker and vice presidenta legacy that laid the groundwork for the Trump administration's most draconian policies.

On crime, drugs, civil liberties, surveillance, immigration, and foreign policy, Biden's record serves as a cautionary tale about bipartisanship and "bold" thinking in response to perceived crises going all the way back to the '70s.

Produced, written, and edited by Justin Monticello. Graphics by Lex Villena and Austin Bragg. Research by Regan Taylor. Audio production by Ian Keyser.

Music: Cooper Cannell, Futuremono, Lex Villena, and The Whole Other.

Photos: Andrea Renault/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; AR4/Chris Connor/WENN/Newscom; ARCHIE CARPENTER/UPI/Newscom; Arnie SachsCNP/Newscom; Arnie SachsCNP/Sipa USA/Newscom; Arthur Grace/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Bastiaan Slabbers/Sipa USA/Newscom; Bill Clark/Roll Call Photos/Newscom; CD1/Carrie Devorah/WENN/Newscom; Chris Corder UPI Photo Service/Newscom; Chris Kleponis/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Chris Maddaloni/Roll Call/Newscom; Christopher Morris BlackStar Photos/Newscom; Dennis Brack bs20/Newscom; Dennis Brack/Black Star/Newscom; Dennis Brack/Newscom; Dennis Brack / DanitaDelimont.com "Danita Delimont Photography"/Newscom; Dennis Van Tine/MCT/Newscom; Douliery Olivier/ZUMA Press/Newscom; EDUARDO JARAMILLO Notimex/Newscom; ERIN SCHAFF/UPI/Newscom; Everett Collection/Newscom; FILE PHOTO/Roll Call Photos/Newscom; GREG WHITESELL /UPI/Newscom; GREG WHITESELL /UPI/Newscom; Howard L. SachsCNP/Newscom; Jack Kurtz-POOL/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Jack Kurtz UPI Photo Service/Newscom; John J. Kim/TNS/Newscom; KEVIN DIETSCH/UPI/Newscom; Larry Downing/CNP/AdMedia/Newscom; Lora Olive/ZUMA Press/Newscom; MANNIE GARCIA/REUTERS/Newscom; Mark Reinstein/ZUMA Press/Newscom; MARTIN H. SIMON/UPI/Newscom; MATTHEW HEALEY/UPI/Newscom; Michael Brochstein/Sipa USA/Newscom; Michael Kleinfeld UPI Photo Service/Newscom; MIKE THEILER/REUTERS/Newscom; NATALIE KREBS/UPI/Newscom; PAT BENIC/UPI/Newscom; Pat Benic/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Pete Souza/UPI/Newscom; Ricardo Watson UPI Photo Service/Newscom; Riccardo Savi/Polaris/Newscom; Richard Ellis/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Rick D'Elia/ZUMA Press/Newscom; ROGER L. WOLLENBERG/UPI/Newscom; Roger L. Wollenberg UPI Photo Service/Newscom; Ron SachsCNP/Newscom; Ron Sachs/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Saul LoebPool via CNP/Newscom; Scott J. Ferrell/Congressional Quarterly/Newscom; Scranton Times-Tribune/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; SplashNews/Newscom; SMG/ZUMA Press/Newscom; ST / Splash News/Newscom; STEVE DESLICH/KRT/Newscom; Steve W Grayson. UPI Photo Service/Newscom; Steve Wursta UPI Photo Service/Newscom; TOM PENNINGTON/KRT/Newscom; Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Newscom; Tom Williams/Roll Call Photos/Newscom; Tom Williams/Roll Call/Newscom; WASHINGTON POOL/SIPA/Newscom; White House/SIPA/Newscom; WILL POWERS/UPI/Newscom

Read the original:

Joe Biden's 'Bold' Thinking Shredded Civil Liberties and Destroyed Lives - Reason

US President Donald Trump launched a new vaccine war this week, but not against the virus. It was against the world. The US and UK were the only two hold-outs in the World Health Assembly on the declaration that vaccines and medicines for COVID-19 should be available as public good, and not under exclusive patent rights. The US explicitly disassociated from the patent pool call, 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, Trump is trying to redeem his electoral fortunes in the November elections this year by promising an early vaccine. His Make America Great Again is vaccines for us, but the rest will have to queue up and pay what big pharma asks, as they will hold the patents.

In contrast, all other countries agreed that with the Costa Rican proposal in the World Health Assembly that there should be a patent pool for all COVID-19 vaccines and medicines. President Xi Jinping said that Chinese vaccines would be available as public good, a view also shared by leaders from the European Union. Among the eight vaccine candidates in Phase1 and 2 of clinical trials, the Chinese have four, the US two, and UK and Germany have one each.

Trump has a given an ultimatum to the World Health Organisation (WHO) regarding a permanent withdrawal of funds, if it does not mend its ways in 30 days. In sharp contrast, in the Assembly, almost all countries including close allies of the US, rallied behind the WHO. The failure of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) against COVID-19, with four times the annual budget of the WHO, is visible to the world. The CDC failed to provide a successful test for the SARS-CoV-2 even after two months of the WHO distributing successful test kits to more than 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 the US numbers for COVID-19 cases are now more than 1.5 million, and about a third of all global infections. Contrast this with China, the first to face an unknown epidemic which stopped it at 82,000 cases and what countries such as Vietnam and South Korea have done.

There is one issue looming large over the COVID-19 pandemic now. If we do not address the intellectual property rights issue in this pandemic, we are likely to see a repeat of the AIDS tragedy. People died for ten years as patented AIDS medicine was priced at between 10,000 to 15,000 dollars for a years supply, far beyond their reach. Finally, it was Indian patent laws that, till 2004, did not allow for such patents, helping people to get AIDS medicine at less than a dollar a day, or $350 for a years supply. Today, 80% of the AIDS medicines in the world comes 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 will allow them to break patents in case of epidemics or health emergencies. Even the World Trade Organisation (WTO), after a bitter fight, accepted in its Doha Declaration (2001), that countries in a health emergency have the right to allow any company to manufacture a patented drug, 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 TRIPS Agreement? It is US bullying and the fear of the country. Under US domestic Trade Act, it issues Special ReportsUSTR 301threatening any country with trade sanctions that tries to compulsorily license any product. India figures prominently each year, for daring to issue a compulsory license in 2012 to Natco Pharma for Nexavar, a cancer drug, which Bayer AG was selling for $65,000 a year. Marijn Dekkers, the CEO of Bayer, was widely quoted saying that this was theft, and We did not develop this medicine for IndiansWe developed it for western patients who can afford it.

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

It is the fear that countries can break patents using their compulsory licensing provisions 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 patent pools, or philanthropic capital should provide the additional funds for developing new drugs for adding to this pool. It is this idea of patent pooling that was backed by all countries in the recent World Health Assembly, WHA-73, barring the US and its loyal camp follower, the UK. The US also entered its disagreement with the final WHA resolution on this issue.

While patent pooling is welcome if no other measure is available, it also makes it appear as if countries have no other recourse aside from charity by big capital. What this hides, as charity always does, is that people and countries have legitimate rights, even under TRIPS, to break patents.

The US, which screams murder if 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 Health issued a threat to Bayer under eminent domain for patents, for licensing ciprofloxacin to other manufacturers. Bayer folded, and agreed to supply the quantity and at a price that the US government demanded for. And, without a whimper. Yes, the same Bayer, which considers India a thief for issuing a compulsory license!

The vaccines 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 it will provide lifetime immunity like the Smallpox vaccine. Unlike AIDS, where patient numbers were smaller, and could be stigmatised 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 US and major EU countries, have built. It is why the more clever of the capitalist world have moved towards a patent pool for COVID-19 medicines and vaccine.

Unlike clever capital, Trumps response to the COVID-19 vaccine is to simply bully his way through. He believes that with unlimited money that he is now willing to put into the vaccine efforts, the US would either beat everybody else to the winning post, or buy the company that is successful. If he succeeds, he can then use his COVID-19 vaccine as a new instrument of global power. It is the US that will then decide which countries get the vaccine, and which ones do not.

Trump does not believe in a rule-based global order, even if the rules are biased in the favour of the rich. He is walking out of various arms control agreements and has crippled the WTO. He believes that the US, as the biggest economy and the most powerful military power, should have the untrammelled right to dictate to all countries. Threats of bombing and invasions can be combined with unilateral sanctions; and the latest in his imaginary arsenal, is withholding vaccines.

His problem is that the days of a sole global hegemon are long over. The US has shown itself as a crumbling giant and its epidemic response has been shambolic. It has been unable to provide virus tests to its people in time, and failed to stop the epidemic through containment or mitigation measures, which a number of other countries have done.

China and the EU have already agreed that any vaccine developed by them will be regarded as 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, as many other countries, has the scientific capability. We also have one the largest generic drug and vaccine manufacturing capacities in the world. What prevents us, or any country for that matters, from manufacturing vaccines or the drugs once they are developed? Only the empty threat of a failed hegemon on breaking patents? Or the belief that in the US-China vaccine war, they need to be on the US side?

Original post:

US Declares Vaccine War on the World - NewsClick

Now Playing100 Best Shows: The Best Streaming Shows

June is visible off in the distance, so it's time to start planning out your Netflix queue for the next month. You plan what you're going to watch a month in advance, right? It's not just us? Good. Save these titles for when they release, so you have something to look forward to. Highlights among Netflix's movie and series offerings this month include the return of The Silence of the Lambs to the streaming service, Spike Lee's Vietnam heist movie Da 5 Bloods, two movies starring Edgar Ramirez, and much more.

For a complete menu of options, check out the full list of of everything that's coming to Netflix in June 2020. You can also examinewhat's coming to Hulu in June. If you're looking for even more hand-picked recommendations, take a look at out Watch This Now! page, which has everything we're watching.

Premieres: June 1/June 5June is Hannibal Lector Month on Netflix! Thomas Harris' gentleman cannibal is at the center of these classics, which are among the best movies and shows of their respective decades. The Silence of The Lambs follows FBI agent Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) as she tries to catch a serial killer known as Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine); while the series Hannibal is about a younger version the man-eating psychiatrist (Mads Mikkelsen) and his psychosexual relationship with FBI profiler Jack Graham (Hugh Dancy). You can't go wrong with either of them.

Premieres:June 5It's a tough call to say which movie has the cooler title, this orDa 5 Bloods, but I have to give the edge to The Last Days of American Crime. In this wild-ass graphic novel adaptation, career criminal Edgar Ramirez assembles a team to carry out one last heist before the government starts broadcasting a signal that makes it impossible for anyone to knowingly commit unlawful acts. It's a "one last job" action flick where the last job really is the last job. (Trailer)

Premieres: June 12The latestSpike Leejoint follows four black Vietnam vets Paul (Delroy Lindo), Otis (Clarke Peters), Eddie (Norm Lewis), and Melvin (Isiah Whitlock Jr.) who go back to the country in search of the remains of their squad leader (Chadwick Boseman)...and buried treasure. It's a Vietnam epic like only Spike Lee could do. (Trailer)

Premieres: June 12 Season 2 of this fly-on-the-wall dating show will make you nostalgic for when it was possible to go to restaurants, kiss, or imagine a future. Six new singles will go on dates in New Orleans, and we will watch them. Who will get a second date, and who will drunkenly yell at a woman about how she's a liar and walk out? (no trailer yet)

Premieres: June 12This Polish series is the latest Netflix adaptation of a book by Harlan Coben, following the popular mysteriesThe StrangerandSafe, and stays in those same murky waters of crime and secrets, oh so many secrets! InThe Woods, a man looks for answers about the disappearance of his sister 25 years earlier, when four teens went into the woods and never came out, hoping that she's alive even as bodies and new evidence are being pulled out. -Tim Surette (Trailer)

Premieres: June 19 Acclaimed director Olivier Assayas helms this espionage thriller that's based on a true story about Cuban spies infiltrating exile groups in the 1990s to stop terrorism against the island, at great personal cost to themselves and their families. The glamorous cast includes Penelope Cruz, Wagner Moura, Gael Garcia Bernal, Ana de Armas, and Edgar Ramirez again. (no trailer yet)

Premieres: June 23 Eric Andre, who your weird nephew would argue is the greatest comedian in the world, does his first Netflix special from New Orleans, Louisiana. He's against the War on Drugs, the War on Sex, and the War on Fart Jokes. And there definitely is a War on Fart Jokes. (no trailer yet)

Want to know what else is coming to Netflix? Here's everything that we know is coming to Netflix in 2020.

Read the rest here:

These Are the Best Movies and TV Shows Coming to Netflix in June - TV Guide