Mapping America"s Worst States For Binge-Drinking This Christmas

Alcohol abuse can result in health problems including memory loss, poor decision making, fetal damage, liver diseases, hypertension and cardiovascular problems... but "tis the season...

As Statista"s Niall McCarthy notes, a recent report by the United Health Foundation found that 18.5 percent of U.S. adults engage in binge or chronic drinking.

You will find more statistics at Statista

Binging is defined as having four or more (for women) or five or more (for men) drinks on one occasion in the past 30 days. Chronic drinking is having eight or more (for women) or 15 or more (for men) drinks per week. The U.S. has an annual average of 87,798 alcohol attributable deaths while 12,460 road deaths were due to alcohol consumption between 2006 and 2010.

An estimated 2.5 million years of U.S. life have been lost due to alcohol abuse between 2006 and 2010. As well as its massive impact on human health, alcohol also has huge financial and economic repercussions. Excessive alcohol consumption cost the U.S. $249 billion in 2010 or $2.05 for each beverage consumed.

The lowest rates of excessive drinking in U.S. states were recorded in West Virginia (11.8 percent), Oklahoma (12.8 percent) and Utah (13.4 percent).

The infographic above shows the 10 states with the highest levels of binge and chronic drinking with Wisconsin on top with 26.2 percent. North Dakora comes second with 25.9 percent while Minnesota rounds off the top three with 22.9 percent.

Americans Are Rapidly Descending Into Madness

Authored by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

I don’t live in an echo chamber, partly because there aren’t enough people out there who think like me, but also because I constantly and intentionally attempt to challenge my worldview by reading stuff from all over the political map. I ingest as much as I can from a wide variety of intelligent sources, picking and choosing what makes sense to me, and then synthesizing it the best I can.

Though I’m certainly grounded in certain key principles, my perspective on specific issues remains malleable as I take in additional information and perspectives. I try to accept and acknowledge my own ignorance and view life as a journey of constant mental, emotionally and spiritual growth. If I’m not growing my capacity in all of those realms until the day I die, I’m doing it wrong. Life should be seen as a battle against one’s own ignorance, as opposed to an obsession with the ignorance of others. You can’t legislate morality, nor can you legislate wisdom. The only way the world will improve on a long-term sustainable basis is if more of us get wise. That’s a personal journey and it’s our individual duty to accept it.

While I’m only in control of my own behavior, this doesn’t mean that the behavior of others is irrelevant to my life. Unfortunately, what I see happening to the population of America right now seems very troublesome and foreboding. What I’m witnessing across the board is hordes of people increasingly separating themselves into weird, unthinking cults. Something appears to have snapped in our collective consciousness, and many individuals I used to respect (on both sides of the political spectrum) are becoming disturbingly polarized and hysterical. People are rapidly morphing into radicalized mental patients.

What’s worse, this environment is providing a backdrop for the most destructive people of my lifetime - neoconservatives and neo liberals - to preen around on corporate media as “the voices of reason.” This is one of the most perverse and dangerous side-effects of the current political climate. As I noted earlier today on Twitter:

What the entrenched political class is doing now, is exactly what the Fed did after the crisis. Posing as saviors to a disaster they created

— Michael Krieger (@LibertyBlitz) August 16, 2017

This is how humans who are dangerous failures stay in power. They claim they"ll help handle a problem of their own doing.

— Michael Krieger (@LibertyBlitz) August 16, 2017

 If in your disgust with Trump, you’re willing to run into the cold embrace of these destroyers of the middle class and the Middle East, you’ll get what you deserve . In contrast, if we really want to deal with our very real and very systemic problems, the last thing we need is a population-level mental breakdown that leads to a longing for the criminally destructive political status quo, yet that’s exactly what seems to be happening.

Ok fine, so everything seems to be rapidly collapsing, but what are we supposed to do? First of all, don’t lose your minds.

As I suggested in February’s post, Why Increased Consciousness is the Only Path Forward:

As noted earlier, Wilber thinks 10% is a key tipping point. In other words, if we can get 10% of the population to center around a yellow second-tier level of thought, which consists of a momentous leap in consciousness, the entire world will change for the better. I agree. I’m not here trying to sell you a seminar on how to expand your consciousness; rather, I think these article can help spark some sort of revelation in the minds of many of you who are already at yellow, or at least at the cusp of such a transformation. Since consciousness can and does regress under conditions of stress and fear, it’s extremely important to be conscious of your consciousness so that you don’t fall back into lower states.

Unfortunately, I see many people regressing at the moment, and I see the media as an intentional force in trying to get people to lower their consciousness. A perfect way to tell if someone is operating at a low level of consciousness is if they’re constantly placing tens of millions of their fellow citizens into an outside group they subsequently demonize. It’s perfectly fine and healthy to harshly criticize the system itself and the many powerful individuals doing awful things within it, but once you start dehumanizing large swaths of the population as a matter of your worldview, you are most certainly on a very counterproductive path that will lead to merely a blackhole of nothingness for society.

Beyond maintaining one’s sanity, it’s imperative that conscious humans create systems and communities that have as little connection as possible to the existing and rapidly disintegrating paradigm. This will create “anti-fragile” units of strength within the collapsing Potemkin village socio-economic structure that dominates our culture right now. Some of these projects need to be local, while others can be global. Community farming/food production is a great example of a local initiative, while Bitcoin (and cryptocurrencies in general), represent global initiatives to replace the hopelessly corrupt and archaic entrenched financial system. While crazy, power-obsessed tribes focus on taking over the hopelessly corrupt centralized government in Washington D.C., we need to continue to build separate, decentralized paradigms — and there isn’t much time to waste.

Fortunately, there are plenty of very decent, very conscious people out there. I want this piece to provide encouragement to those of you already engaged in this invaluable work, as well as inspiration for those of you looking for an outlet for your creative and intellectual energies. It’s never been more important to keep our heads steady and not permit ourselves to be sucked into the mental sickness infecting so many of our fellow humans. It’s imperative that we vigilantly guard our wisdom and consciousness, because the best solutions will only come from a place of spiritual and mental health. If you descend into the gutter with everyone else, your output will also end up looking like trash. That’s the last thing we need.

Stay strong and stay conscious.

North Korea Is A Major Opium Producer (Making It A Prime Target For The CIA)

Authored by Whitney Webb via TheAntiMedia.org,

When the U.S. overthrew the Taliban in the wake of 9/11 as part of its newly launched “war on terror,” it set the stage for the explosive growth of Afghanistan’s dying opium industry. A few short months before the invasion took place, the Taliban made headlines for having “dramatically ended the country’s massive opium trade” after the leader of the fundamentalist group had declared the substance to be un-Islamic. At the time, Afghanistan’s opium was used to produce 75 percent of the world’s heroin.

But despite being squashed by the Taliban, the opium market made a dramatic comeback immediately following the U.S. invasion in October 2001. Not only was the opium trade restored, it surged drastically – rising from a production level of 185 tons under the Taliban (before the production ban) to 3,400 tons in 2002.

Over a decade later, the amount of opium harvested annually continues to rise. Afghanistan’s opium is now used to produce 90 percent of the world’s heroin. This increase has been directly overseen by U.S. forces, who openly guard Afghanistan’s poppy fields. Indeed, during that same time, the U.S. government claims to have spent $8.4 billion on counternarcotic programs within Afghanistan.

The dramatic increase in opium production in post-invasion Afghanistan has sparked speculation regarding the motives behind the aggressive action that the U.S. has recently taken towards North Korea, which is also a major opium producer.

While government-sanctioned opium production took a hit after Kim Jong-un assumed power in 2011, things have changed drastically in recent months, largely due to Chinese sanctions that were announced in mid-February. The sanctions, created in response to a North Korean ballistic missile test, led China to refuse imports of North Korean coal. Coal represents 40 percent of North Korea’s exports to China.

That drastic hit to the North Korean economy has apparently forced Kim Jong-un’s hand, as opium production has once again picked up. Kang Cheol-hwan, a North Korean defector and president of the North Korea Strategy Center, told the Yonhap News Agency that “the North is cultivating poppy fields again for drug smuggling as a way to secure funds to manage its regime.”

While North Korea’s opium production is small compared to that of post-invasion Afghanistan, it is still significant. North Korea, according to the Chosun Ilbo, produces around 40 tons of opium annually — comparable to Pakistan’s opium industry. Most of its opium is smuggled into and sold in China and cannot be targeted by sanctions, since it is hard to trace on the black market.

Some have speculated that North Korea’s return to opium production has caught the attention of the CIA, as the intelligence agency has a history of involving itself in opium trade and drug-running in general, as evidenced by its well-documented habit of managing drug supplies from Latin America to Asia.

In addition, opioid addiction – in the form of both legal opiate painkillers and illegal drugs – is growing out of control in the U.S., with more opium being consumed within America than ever before. The onset of this epidemic coincided with the U.S.’ occupation of Afghanistan as, between 2002 and 2013, U.S. heroin use jumped by 63 percent, reaching a 20-year high. Heroin overdoses quadrupled in the U.S. within that same timeframe.

The U.S. government’s actions also suggest that it seeks to protect opium production, as has been made clear in its occupation of Afghanistan. For instance, the U.S. vehemently opposes opium legalization efforts and the State Department refuses to acknowledge eradicating opium as a primary goal, despite the billions that have been spent on counternarcotic programs.

With tension increasing on the Korean Peninsula, the U.S. has put “all options on the table” in order  to prevent further missile tests and “provocations” from the Kim Jong-un regime, including warnings that the U.S. may soon find itself in a “major, major conflict” with North Korea.

If North Korea finds itself targeted for regime change, history suggests that the U.S. military may end up guarding its poppy fields as well.

Why New Regulation Banning “Synthetic Marijuana” is Ignoring the Root Issue

Via The Daily Bell

The government’s solution to every problem they create is to just pass more draconian rules on top of the immense pile of crap they have already dumped on Americans.

The Drug Enforcement Agency will publish a new rule on Monday banning five forms of synthetic marijuana, sometimes called “spice” or “K2”.

This action is based on a finding by the Administrator that the placement of these synthetic cannabinoids into schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act is necessary to avoid an imminent hazard to the public safety. As a result of this order, the regulatory controls and administrative, civil, and criminal sanctions applicable to schedule I controlled substances will be imposed on persons who handle (manufacture, distribute, reverse distribute, import, export, engage in research, conduct instructional activities or chemical analysis, or possess), or propose to handle, [five types of synthetic cannabinoids].

Synthetic marijuana is a man-made creation which is said to mimic the effects of marijuana.

Except that sometimes it makes you go crazy and die.

As I am sure you are aware, no death has ever been recorded as a direct result of marijuana–though every once in a while the media claims someone kills themselves after eating special brownies.

“Spice” however, has killed directly, and it is actually chemically addictive. The drug regularly makes users do crazy things, like walk into traffic, pass out in public, slip into comas, and every once in a while, murder their children.

So it may sound like spice should be illegal, (if you think prohibition ever really works).

But one problem is that the DEA already made five types of the synthetic cannabinoids illegal.

In 2011, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) placed five compounds that are commonly found in K2 on its list of illegal substances, to help clamp down on sales. But manufacturers responded by tinkering with the chemicals to sidestep the regulations.

This led to the creation of newer versions of K2 that are even more harmful than early versions, Scalzo said. The newest products on the street can cause low blood pressure and a slow heart rate, and may even result in coma, seizures and kidney damage, he said.

And because the compounds in the drugs can constantly change, their effects on users can be unpredictable and, in some cases, deadly.

Apparently, the DEA will just continue to make compound after compound illegal. That should do the trick… it’s worked so well in the past.

Or We Could Just Try Freedom

Spice has been a legal substitute for marijuana. People smoke it as an alternative to weed.

So wouldn’t the sane thing to do be legalize real marijuana? The risks of real pot pale in comparison to K2. This includes personal health risks due to the actual substance, as well as risks of injuries to oneself and others while using real cannabis.

It is insane that the reaction to an increase in the use of fake marijuana involves no discussion of the regulations which pushed the increase, the original laws which made cannabis illegal!

The same thing happened during prohibition of alcohol in the 1920’s when people turned to dangerous alternatives to commercially produced alcohol.

Legalize weed, and all the issues involving fake cannabinoids will go away. And it might even inadvertently solve a little bit of the opioid crisis–some people are only introduced to harder drugs because the same person who sells them weed also peddles heroin.

Prohibition doesn’t work! People come up with a replacement for whatever is banned, and look where it leads: to people overdosing and harming themselves and others with a far more dangerous alternative.

The only thing which can make you crazier than smoking spice is dealing with United States Government regulations.