While the United States controls more than 90 percent of the world"s opium supply in Afghanistan, the rate of Americans who are addicted to heroin and who have died from drug overdoses has skyrocketed.
The post Before US Troops Protected Poppies In Afghanistan, There was No Opioid Epidemic in America appeared first on The Free Thought Project.
Focusing on harm reduction instead of punishment and prison profits, San Francisco is seeking to fight heroin addiction with science instead of an iron fist.
The post In a Blow to Drug Warriors: San Francisco To Open Country’s First Heroin Injection Site appeared first on The Free Thought Project.
A new crisis is developing in Canada and it’s not the housing bubble.
A far more sinister one, that is taking the country by storm, as a new wave of fentanyl has washed up on the shores of Canada from an unknown origin most likely China, and has made it onto city streets.
To our friends in the business district of Toronto, be - careful what you sniff - it might contain fentanyl.
Here’s why:
The number of positive tests for fentanyl in samples of heroin seized by law enforcement agencies across Canada have exploded. Health Canada’s Drug Analysis Service (DAS) revealed to CBC News that in 2012 .08% of 2,337 heroin samples tested positive for fentanyl. Fast forward to today and that number stands at 60.1% of 3,337 heroin samples, an astronomical jump visualized below.
Seems as China has turned on the fentanyl spigot in 2016 and 2017…
Over the past five-years of tests, marijuana samples seized by law enforcement agencies contained no fentanyl. But on a more interesting note, cocaine and methamphetamine seized by law enforcement agencies reported an increase. A potential health hazard for the modern day bankers in Toronto…..
The most common drugs the service tests for include marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine, fentanyl, heroin, hydromorphone, oxycodone, MDMA, alprazolam and GHB.
Fentanyl was not identified in any of the marijuana samples tested over the five-year period, while cocaine and methamphetamine saw increases from 0.01 per cent to 1.8 per cent and zero per cent to 1.7 per cent, respectively. Overall, the figures are stark. In 2012, only 217 of the street drug samples tested positive for fentanyl. Just as the number of lives claimed by the deadly opioid has skyrocketed since then, so too has the number of times fentanyl has showed up in samples of illegal street drugs. As of Sept. 30, DAS found fentanyl in 4,568 samples this year – an increase of 2,005 per cent.
According to Dr. David Juurlink, head of clinical pharmacology and toxicology at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto:
“...the exponential increase of street drugs testing positive for fentanyl over the last five years doesn’t surprise.The illicit drug supply has never been more dangerous because of the profusion of fentanyl-related compounds. This is why so many people are dying. They’re dying because the drugs they’re using contain, you know, much more opioid than they thought.”
In fact, Juurlink is right as shown below...
Dr. Michael Krausz, a professor of psychiatry specializing in addiction at the University of British Columbia, explains drug dealers “want to save money or make higher profits”, so fentanyl is mixed into drugs like heroin or cocaine to stretch their supplies.
Krausz also said drug dealers are not skilled enough to keep fentanyl doses in a survivable range while mixing it with heroin or cocaine, which is why many experts believe overdoses are occurring. Simply, the end user is not realizing what he/she is getting and ends up dead.
Juurlink said several factors sparked fentanyl’s rise:
In British Columbia, 80% of the street drugs are laced with fentanyl. Four mothers who have lost their sons to overdoses advocate for state controlled drugs.
The Globe And Mail explains: Fentanyl’s deadly path
China is a key source of illicit fentanyl coming to Canada in response to demand from prescription-painkiller addicts as well as users of street drugs, traffickers are turning to a pharmaceutical-manufacturing giant to produce deadly, black-market versions of fentanyl, according to the RCMP.
Across Canada, police are seizing illicit fentanyl from China - Three examples from 2015: A package of fentanyl declared as a muffler was stopped on its way to Calgary; a man in Brampton, Ont., was charged with importing more than 500 grams of the drug; and a parcel destined for Halifax was found to contain 514 grams, worth about $1-million.
Once the drug is in, it is processed – often in Western Canada - Because illicit fentanyl and fentanyl analogues are so potent, the white powder is cut or mixed with other drugs and fillers, before it can be sold on the street. Most of the 21 clandestine labs dismantled by police since 2013 operated in British Columbia and Alberta, according to a Globe and Mail analysis.
Bootleg fentanyl is highly lucrative - The math works like this, according to Edmonton physician Hakique Virani: A kilogram of pure fentanyl powder costs $12,500. A kilo is enough to make 1,000,000 tablets. Each tab sells for $20 in major cities, for total proceeds of $20-million. In smaller markets, the street price is as high as $80.
Fentanyl has been found in police busts all over the country - The first known fentanyl seizure in Canada was from a clandestine lab in Montreal in April, 2013. Since then, police have busted traffickers in almost every province and the Northwest Territories, for a total of 58 across the country, according to The Globe’s analysis.
Bottom line: China is flooding North America with fentanyl through shipping routes into Canada. The opioid crisis is far from over and its about to kick into hyperdrive. The one question we ask: how will bankers in Toronto and or on Wall Street deal with the very real possibility their blackmarket stimulants could contain fentanyl?
Authored by Mark Thornton via The Mises Institute,
The Washington Post and “60 Minutes” have just peeled back another sordid layer in the War on Drugs by exposing Big Pharma’s role in expanding the Opiod Crisis that has resulted in more than 30,000 deaths per year.
All the disgusting details can be found here, but it is really a straight forward case of legal bribery and corruption in the market for legal opiates — the driving force in this crisis as doctors continue to turn untold thousands of innocent people into opiate addicts.
Opiate medicines have been a Godsend to humanity, but it comes also with scourge of addiction, dependence, and overdose deaths. The Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914 made the situation worse thanks to the meddling of federal bureaucrats who turned regulation and oversight into prohibition.
One of the most demaging side effects of federal meddling in drug markets, however, has been the Opiod Crisis. I have detailed here and here the primary cause as Big Pharma bribing the board responsible for setting pain maintenance guidelines and the resulting explosion of prescriptions for Opiod drugs by doctors.
The newest wrinkle uncovered shows that pharmaceutical drug distributors have paid off select members of Congress to rewrite the enforcement guidelines for the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). A good case in point is Representative Tom Marino who withdrew his name from consideration as President Trump’s Drug Czar.
The new guidelines and their enforcement have effectively neutered any restraint on pharmaceutical producers and distributors. They can sell untold millions of these pills to pharmacies and pain clinics without any constraints. The additional cost of producing these heroin-like pills is virtually zero.
Normally, bribery and corruption of public officials is a good thing because it allows more producers and more consumers to obtain gains from trade from each other. Such is not the case with prescription opiates in this environment.
The problem here is that there is not a functioning marketplace at all when it comes to distribution of prescription opiates. It is a government-granted monopoly in every respect. The products we are examining have not passed the market test and the producers are effectively protected by the government against torts, liability, and claims of misrepresentation.
In addition, pharmaceutical drugs have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and, essentially, the FDA grants monopolies to drug companies for their patented drugs and gives them an FDA seal of approval that the drugs are safe and effective.
Then another government-created monopoly, the American Medical Association (AMA) and its doctor-members have the monopoly on writing the necessary prescriptions to obtain drugs from yet another monopoly the pharmacists.
A doctor’s prescription is essentially another AMA seal of approval that the vast majority of people do not even question or even concern themselves with what they are taking. All of these monopolies are usually protected when consumers die as long as it happened when all the monopoly rules are followed.
Thus, with these products, like Oxycontin and Vicodin, there is no attempt to pass the "market test" by seeking to primarily please consumers. Instead, consumers end up being an afterthought after producers of the drug have catered to the needs and desires of countless regulatory agencies. In real free market competition, an entrepreneur of dangerous products has to assure consumers that the products are safe and effective enough to use compared to the alternatives.
In other words, pain medications do not have to be perfectly safe and perfectly effective to be the best alternative choice for people who suffer with pain. However, they have to be reasonably safe and effective. The high potential for addiction, harm to health, and even death would be a “competitive disadvantage” in a real free market.
Just the opposite is the case here.
The government has created and overseen the creation of every step in the development of this crisis. The fact that crony capitalists have taken advantage of the situation should not be a surprise, especially when it is the only way to legally participate in the pharmaceuticals "market."
First published in 2005, updated in January 2015 and April 2017
Author’s Note
Afghanistan’s opium economy is a multibillion dollar operation which feeds the surge of US heroin market which is currently the object of debate and public concern.
In the course of the last few years, there has been a surge in Afghan opium production. In turn the number of heroin addicts in the US has increased dramatically. Is there a relationship?
Afghanistan produces over 90 percent of the opium which feeds the heroin market.
In turn, the US is now sending more troops to Afghanistan. Lest we forget, the surge in opium production occurred in the immediate wake of the US invasion in October 2001.
Who is protecting opium exports out of Afghanistan?
In 2000-2001, “the Taliban government –in collaboration with the United Nations– had imposed a successful ban on poppy cultivation. Opium production declined by more than 90 per cent in 2001. In fact the surge in opium cultivation production coincided with the onslaught of the US-led military operation and the downfall of the Taliban regime. From October through December 2001, farmers started to replant poppy on an extensive basis.” (quoted from article below)
The Vienna based UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) reveals that poppy cultivation in 2012 extended over an area of more than 154,000 hectares, an increase of 18% over 2011. A UNODC spokesperson confirmed in 2013 that opium production is heading towards record levels.
In 2014 the Afghan opium cultivation hit a record high, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime’s 2014 Afghan Opium Survey.( See graph below). A slight decline occurred in 2015-2016.
War is good for business. The Afghan opium economy feeds into a lucrative trade in narcotics and money laundering.
Source: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime’s (UNODC)According to the 2012 Afghanistan Opium Survey released in November 2012 by the Ministry of Counter Narcotics (MCN) and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). potential opium production in 2012 was of the order of 3,700 tons, a decline of 18 percent in relation to 2001, according to UNODC data.
There is reason to believe that this figure of 3700 tons is grossly underestimated. Moreover, it contradicts the UNOCD’s own predictions of record harvests over an extended area of cultivation.
While bad weather and damaged crops may have played a role as suggested by the UNODC, based on historical trends, the potential production for an area of cultivation of 154,000 hectares, should be well in excess of 6000 tons. With 80,000 hectares in cultivation in 2003, production was already of the order of 3600 tons.
It is worth noting that UNODC has modified the concepts and figures on opium sales and heroin production, as outlined by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA).
A change in UN methodology in 2010 resulted in a sharp downward revision of Afghan heroin production estimates for 2004 to 2011. UNODC used to estimate that the entire global opium crop was processed into heroin, and provided global heroin production estimates on that basis. Before 2010, a global conversion rate of about 10 kg of opium to 1 kg of heroin was used to estimate world heroin production (17). For instance, the estimated 4 620 tonnes of opium harvested worldwide in 2005 was thought to make it possible to manufacture 472 tonnes of heroin (UNODC, 2009a). However, UNODC now estimates that a large proportion of the Afghan opium harvest is not processed into heroin or morphine but remains ‘available on the drug market as opium’(UNODC, 2010a). …EU drug markets report: a strategic analysis, EMCDDA, Lisbon, January 2013 emphasis added
There is no evidence that a large percentage of opium production is no longer processed into heroin as claimed by the UN. This revised UNODC methodology has served, –through the outright manipulation of statistical concepts– to artificially reduce the size of of the global trade in heroin.
According to the UNODC, quoted in the EMCDDA report:
“an estimated 3 400 tonnes of Afghan opium was not transformed into heroin or morphine in 2011. Compared with previous years, this is an exceptionally high proportion of the total crop, representing nearly 60 % of the Afghan opium harvest and close to 50 % of the global harvest in 2011.
What the UNODC, –whose mandate is to support the prevention of organized criminal activity– has done is to obfuscate the size and criminal nature of the Afghan drug trade, intimating –without evidence– that a large part of the opium is no longer channeled towards the illegal heroin market.
In 2012 according to the UNODC, farmgate prices for opium were of the order of 196 per kg.
Each kg. of opium produces 100 grams of pure heroin. The US retail prices for heroin (with a low level of purity) is, according to UNODC of the order of $172 a gram. The price per gram of pure heroin is substantially higher.
The profits are largely reaped at the level of the international wholesale and retail markets of heroin as well as in the process of money laundering in Western banking institutions.
The revenues derived from the global trade in heroin constitute a multibillion dollar bonanza for financial institutions and organized crime.
Record Production in 2016. Fake Eradication Program
“Opium production in Afghanistan rose by 43 per cent to 4,800 metric tons in 2016 compared with 2015 levels, according to the latest Afghanistan Opium Survey figures released today by the Afghan Ministry of Counter Narcotics and the UNODC. The area under opium poppy cultivation also increased to 201,000 hectares (ha) in 2016, a rise of 10 per cent compared with 183,000 ha in 2015.
This represents a twentyfold increase in the areas under opium cultivation since the US invasion in October 2001. In 2016, opium production had increased by approximately 25 times in relation to its 2001 levels, from 185 tons in 2001 to 4800 tons in 2016.
Source: UNODCThe following article first published in May 2005 provides a background on the history of the Afghan opium trade which continues to this date to be protected by US-NATO occupation forces on behalf of powerful financial interests.
Michel Chossudovsky, January 2015, August 2017, updated figures for 2016
Global Research, May 2005
Since the US led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, the Golden Crescent opium trade has soared. According to the US media, this lucrative contraband is protected by Osama, the Taliban, not to mention, of course, the regional warlords, in defiance of the “international community”.
The heroin business is said to be “filling the coffers of the Taliban”. In the words of the US State Department:
“Opium is a source of literally billions of dollars to extremist and criminal groups… [C]utting down the opium supply is central to establishing a secure and stable democracy, as well as winning the global war on terrorism,” (Statement of Assistant Secretary of State Robert Charles. Congressional Hearing, 1 April 2004)
According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), opium production in Afghanistan in 2003 is estimated at 3,600 tons, with an estimated area under cultivation of the order of 80,000 hectares. (UNODC at http://www.unodc.org/unodc/index.html). An even larger bumper harvest is predicted for 2004.
The State Department suggests that up to 120 000 hectares were under cultivation in 2004. (Congressional Hearing, op cit):
“We could be on a path for a significant surge. Some observers indicate perhaps as much as 50 percent to 100 percent growth in the 2004 crop over the already troubling figures from last year.”(Ibid)
In response to the post-Taliban surge in opium production, the Bush administration has boosted its counter terrorism activities, while allocating substantial amounts of public money to the Drug Enforcement Administration’s West Asia initiative, dubbed “Operation Containment.”
The various reports and official statements are, of course, blended in with the usual “balanced” self critique that “the international community is not doing enough”, and that what we need is “transparency”.
The headlines are “Drugs, warlords and insecurity overshadow Afghanistan’s path to democracy”. In chorus, the US media is accusing the defunct “hard-line Islamic regime”, without even acknowledging that the Taliban –in collaboration with the United Nations– had imposed a successful ban on poppy cultivation in 2000. Opium production declined by more than 90 per cent in 2001. In fact the surge in opium cultivation production coincided with the onslaught of the US-led military operation and the downfall of the Taliban regime. From October through December 2001, farmers started to replant poppy on an extensive basis.
The success of Afghanistan’s 2000 drug eradication program under the Taliban had been acknowledged at the October 2001 session of the UN General Assembly (which took place barely a few days after the beginning of the 2001 bombing raids). No other UNODC member country was able to implement a comparable program:
“Turning first to drug control, I had expected to concentrate my remarks on the implications of the Taliban’s ban on opium poppy cultivation in areas under their control… We now have the results of our annual ground survey of poppy cultivation in Afghanistan. This year’s production [2001] is around 185 tons. This is down from the 3300 tons last year [2000], a decrease of over 94 per cent. Compared to the record harvest of 4700 tons two years ago, the decrease is well over 97 per cent.
Any decrease in illicit cultivation is welcomed, especially in cases like this when no displacement, locally or in other countries, took place to weaken the achievement”
(Remarks on behalf of UNODC Executive Director at the UN General Assembly, Oct 2001, http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/speech_2001-10-12_1.html)
In the wake of the US invasion, shift in rhetoric. UNODC is now acting as if the 2000 opium ban had never happened:
“the battle against narcotics cultivation has been fought and won in other countries and it [is] possible to do so here [in Afghanistan], with strong, democratic governance, international assistance and improved security and integrity.”
( Statement of the UNODC Representative in Afghanistan at the :February 2004 International Counter Narcotics Conference, http://www.unodc.org/pdf/afg/afg_intl_counter_narcotics_conf_2004.pdf, p. 5).
In fact, both Washington and the UNODC now claim that the objective of the Taliban in 2000 was not really “drug eradication” but a devious scheme to trigger “an artificial shortfall in supply”, which would drive up World prices of heroin.
Ironically, this twisted logic, which now forms part of a new “UN consensus”, is refuted by a report of the UNODC office in Pakistan, which confirmed, at the time, that there was no evidence of stockpiling by the Taliban. (Deseret News, Salt Lake City, Utah. 5 October 2003)
In the wake of the 2001 US bombing of Afghanistan, the British government of Tony Blair was entrusted by the G-8 Group of leading industrial nations to carry out a drug eradication program, which would, in theory, allow Afghan farmers to switch out of poppy cultivation into alternative crops. The British were working out of Kabul in close liaison with the US DEA’s “Operation Containment”.
The UK sponsored crop eradication program is an obvious smokescreen. Since October 2001, opium poppy cultivation has skyrocketed. The presence of occupation forces in Afghanistan did not result in the eradication of poppy cultivation. Quite the opposite.
The Taliban prohibition had indeed caused “the beginning of a heroin shortage in Europe by the end of 2001”, as acknowledged by the UNODC.
Heroin is a multibillion dollar business supported by powerful interests, which requires a steady and secure commodity flow. One of the “hidden” objectives of the war was precisely to restore the CIA sponsored drug trade to its historical levels and exert direct control over the drug routes.
Immediately following the October 2001 invasion, opium markets were restored. Opium prices spiraled. By early 2002, the opium price (in dollars/kg) was almost 10 times higher than in 2000.
In 2001, under the Taliban opiate production stood at 185 tons, increasing to 3400 tons in 2002 under the US sponsored puppet regime of President Hamid Karzai.
While highlighting Karzai’s patriotic struggle against the Taliban, the media fails to mention that Karzai collaborated with the Taliban. He had also been on the payroll of a major US oil company, UNOCAL. In fact, since the mid-1990s, Hamid Karzai had acted as a consultant and lobbyist for UNOCAL in negotiations with the Taliban. According to the Saudi newspaper Al-Watan:
“Karzai has been a Central Intelligence Agency covert operator since the 1980s. He collaborated with the CIA in funneling U.S. aid to the Taliban as of 1994 when the Americans had secretly and through the Pakistanis [specifically the ISI] supported the Taliban’s assumption of power.” (quoted in Karen Talbot, U.S. Energy Giant Unocal Appoints Interim Government in Kabul, Global Outlook, No. 1, Spring 2002. p. 70. See also BBC Monitoring Service, 15 December 2001)
It is worth recalling the history of the Golden Crescent drug trade, which is intimately related to the CIA’s covert operations in the region since the onslaught of the Soviet-Afghan war and its aftermath.
Prior to the Soviet-Afghan war (1979-1989), opium production in Afghanistan and Pakistan was directed to small regional markets. There was no local production of heroin. (Alfred McCoy, Drug Fallout: the CIA’s Forty Year Complicity in the Narcotics Trade. The Progressive, 1 August 1997).
The Afghan narcotics economy was a carefully designed project of the CIA, supported by US foreign policy.
As revealed in the Iran-Contra and Bank of Commerce and Credit International (BCCI) scandals, CIA covert operations in support of the Afghan Mujahideen had been funded through the laundering of drug money. “Dirty money” was recycled –through a number of banking institutions (in the Middle East) as well as through anonymous CIA shell companies–, into “covert money,” used to finance various insurgent groups during the Soviet-Afghan war, and its aftermath:
“Because the US wanted to supply the Mujahideen rebels in Afghanistan with stinger missiles and other military hardware it needed the full cooperation of Pakistan. By the mid-1980s, the CIA operation in Islamabad was one of the largest US intelligence stations in the World. `If BCCI is such an embarrassment to the US that forthright investigations are not being pursued it has a lot to do with the blind eye the US turned to the heroin trafficking in Pakistan’, said a US intelligence officer. (“The Dirtiest Bank of All,” Time, July 29, 1991, p. 22.)
Researcher Alfred McCoy’s study confirms that within two years of the onslaught of the CIA’s covert operation in Afghanistan in 1979,
“the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands became the world’s top heroin producer, supplying 60 per cent of U.S. demand. In Pakistan, the heroin-addict population went from near zero in 1979 to 1.2 million by 1985, a much steeper rise than in any other nation.”
“CIA assets again controlled this heroin trade. As the Mujahideen guerrillas seized territory inside Afghanistan, they ordered peasants to plant opium as a revolutionary tax. Across the border in Pakistan, Afghan leaders and local syndicates under the protection of Pakistan Intelligence operated hundreds of heroin laboratories. During this decade of wide-open drug-dealing, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency in Islamabad failed to instigate major seizures or arrests.
U.S. officials had refused to investigate charges of heroin dealing by its Afghan allies because U.S. narcotics policy in Afghanistan has been subordinated to the war against Soviet influence there. In 1995, the former CIA director of the Afghan operation, Charles Cogan, admitted the CIA had indeed sacrificed the drug war to fight the Cold War. ‘Our main mission was to do as much damage as possible to the Soviets. We didn’t really have the resources or the time to devote to an investigation of the drug trade,’ I don’t think that we need to apologize for this. Every situation has its fallout. There was fallout in terms of drugs, yes. But the main objective was accomplished. The Soviets left Afghanistan.’”(McCoy, op cit)
The role of the CIA, which is amply documented, is not mentioned in official UNODC publications, which focus on internal social and political factors. Needless to say, the historical roots of the opium trade have been grossly distorted.
(See UNODC http://www.unodc.org/pdf/publications/afg_opium_economy_www.pdf)
According to the UNODC, Afghanistan’s opium production has increased, more than 15-fold since 1979. In the wake of the Soviet-Afghan war, the growth of the narcotics economy has continued unabated. The Taliban, which were supported by the US, were initially instrumental in the further growth of opiate production until the 2000 opium ban.
(See UNODC http://www.unodc.org/pdf/publications/afg_opium_economy_www.pdf)
This recycling of drug money was used to finance the post-Cold War insurgencies in Central Asia and the Balkans including Al Qaeda. (For details, see Michel Chossudovsky, War and Globalization, The Truth behind September 11, Global Outlook, 2002, http://globalresearch.ca/globaloutlook/truth911.html)
The revenues generated from the CIA sponsored Afghan drug trade are sizeable. The Afghan trade in opiates constitutes a large share of the worldwide annual turnover of narcotics, which was estimated by the United Nations to be of the order of $400-500 billion. (Douglas Keh, Drug Money in a Changing World, Technical document No. 4, 1998, Vienna UNDCP, p. 4. See also United Nations Drug Control Program, Report of the International Narcotics Control Board for 1999, E/INCB/1999/1 United Nations, Vienna 1999, p. 49-51, and Richard Lapper, UN Fears Growth of Heroin Trade, Financial Times, 24 February 2000). At the time these UN figures were first brought out (1994), the (estimated) global trade in drugs was of the same order of magnitude as the global trade in oil.
The IMF estimated global money laundering to be between 590 billion and 1.5 trillion dollars a year, representing 2-5 percent of global GDP. (Asian Banker, 15 August 2003). A large share of global money laundering as estimated by the IMF is linked to the trade in narcotics.
Based on recent figures (2003), drug trafficking constitutes “the third biggest global commodity in cash terms after oil and the arms trade.” (The Independent, 29 February 2004).
Moreover, the above figures including those on money laundering, confirm that the bulk of the revenues associated with the global trade in narcotics are not appropriated by terrorist groups and warlords, as suggested by the UNODC report.
There are powerful business and financial interests behind narcotics. From this standpoint, geopolitical and military control over the drug routes is as strategic as oil and oil pipelines.
However, what distinguishes narcotics from legal commodity trade is that narcotics constitutes a major source of wealth formation not only for organised crime but also for the US intelligence apparatus, which increasingly constitutes a powerful actor in the spheres of finance and banking.
In turn, the CIA, which protects the drug trade, has developed complex business and undercover links to major criminal syndicates involved in the drug trade.
In other words, intelligence agencies and powerful business syndicates allied with organized crime, are competing for the strategic control over the heroin routes. The multi-billion dollar revenues of narcotics are deposited in the Western banking system. Most of the large international banks together with their affiliates in the offshore banking havens launder large amounts of narco-dollars.
This trade can only prosper if the main actors involved in narcotics have “political friends in high places.” Legal and illegal undertakings are increasingly intertwined, the dividing line between “businesspeople” and criminals is blurred. In turn, the relationship among criminals, politicians and members of the intelligence establishment has tainted the structures of the state and the role of its institutions.
This trade is characterized by a complex web of intermediaries. There are various stages of the drug trade, several interlocked markets, from the impoverished poppy farmer in Afghanistan to the wholesale and retail heroin markets in Western countries. In other words, there is a “hierarchy of prices” for opiates.
This hierarchy of prices is acknowledged by the US administration:
“Afghan heroin sells on the international narcotics market for 100 times the price farmers get for their opium right out of the field”.(US State Department quoted by the Voice of America (VOA), 27 February 2004).
According to the UNODC, opium in Afghanistan generated in 2003 “an income of one billion US dollars for farmers and US$ 1.3 billion for traffickers, equivalent to over half of its national income.”
Consistent with these UNODC estimates, the average price for fresh opium was $350 a kg. (2002); the 2002 production was 3400 tons. (http://www.poppies.org/news/104267739031389.shtml).
The UNDOC estimate, based on local farmgate and wholesale prices constitutes, however, a very small percentage of the total turnover of the multibillion dollar Afghan drug trade. The UNODC, estimates “the total annual turn-over of international trade” in Afghan opiates at US$ 30 billion. An examination of the wholesale and retail prices for heroin in the Western countries suggests, however, that the total revenues generated, including those at the retail level, are substantially higher.
It is estimated that one kilo of opium produces approximately 100 grams of (pure) heroin. The US DEA confirms that “SWA [South West Asia meaning Afghanistan] heroin in New York City was selling in the late 1990s for $85,000 to $190,000 per kilogram wholesale with a 75 percent purity ratio (National Drug Intelligence Center, http://www.usdoj.gov/ndic/pubs/648/ny_econ.htm).
According to the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) “the price of SEA [South East Asian] heroin ranges from $70,000 to $100,000 per unit (700 grams) and the purity of SEA heroin ranges from 85 to 90 percent” (ibid). The SEA unit of 700 gr (85-90 % purity) translates into a wholesale price per kg. for pure heroin ranging between $115,000 and $163,000.
The DEA figures quoted above, while reflecting the situation in the 1990s, are broadly consistent with recent British figures. According to a report published in the Guardian (11 August 2002), the wholesale price of (pure) heroin in London (UK) was of the order of 50,000 pounds sterling, approximately $80,000 (2002).
Whereas as there is competition between different sources of heroin supply, it should be emphasized that Afghan heroin represents a rather small percentage of the US heroin market, which is largely supplied out of Colombia.
US
“The NYPD notes that retail heroin prices are down and purity is relatively high. Heroin previously sold for about $90 per gram but now sells for $65 to $70 per gram or less. Anecdotal information from the NYPD indicates that purity for a bag of heroin commonly ranges from 50 to 80 percent but can be as low as 30 percent. Information as of June 2000 indicates that bundles (10 bags) purchased by Dominican buyers from Dominican sellers in larger quantities (about 150 bundles) sold for as little as $40 each, or $55 each in Central Park. DEA reports that an ounce of heroin usually sells for $2,500 to $5,000, a gram for $70 to $95, a bundle for $80 to $90, and a bag for $10. The DMP reports that the average heroin purity at the street level in 1999 was about 62 percent.” (National Drug Intelligence Center, http://www.usdoj.gov/ndic/pubs/648/ny_econ.htm).
The NYPD and DEA retail price figures seem consistent. The DEA price of $70-$95, with a purity of 62 percent translates into $112 to $153 per gram of pure heroin. The NYPD figures are roughly similar with perhaps lower estimates for purity.
It should be noted that when heroin is purchased in very small quantities, the retail price tends to be much higher. In the US, purchase is often by “the bag”; the typical bag according to Rocheleau and Boyum contains 25 milligrams of pure heroin.
(http://www.whitehousedrugpolicy.gov/publications/drugfact/american_users_spend/appc.html)
A $10 dollar bag in NYC (according to the DEA figure quoted above) would convert into a price of $400 per gram, each bag containing 0.025gr. of pure heroin. (op cit). In other words, for very small purchases marketed by street pushers, the retail margin tends to be significantly higher. In the case of the $10 bag purchase, it is roughly 3 to 4 times the corresponding retail price per gram.($112-$153)
UK
In Britain, the retail street price per gram of heroin, according to British Police sources, “has fallen from £74 in 1997 to £61 [in 2004].” [i.e. from approximately $133 to $110, based on the 2004 rate of exchange] (Independent, 3 March 2004). In some cities it was as low as £30-40 per gram with a low level of purity. (AAP News, 3 March 2004). According to Drugscope (http://www.drugscope.org.uk/ ), the average price for a gram of heroin in Britain is between £40 and £90 ($72- $162 per gram) (The report does not mention purity). The street price of heroin was £60 per gram in April 2002 according to the National Criminal Intelligence Service.
We are dealing with a hierarchy of prices, from the farmgate price in the producing country, upwards, to the final retail street price. The latter is often 80-100 times the price paid to the farmer.
In other words, the opiate product transits through several markets from the producing country to the transshipment country(ies), to the consuming countries. In the latter, there are wide margins between “the landing price” at the point of entry, demanded by the drug cartels and the wholesale prices and the retail street prices, protected by Western organized crime.
In Afghanistan, the reported production of 3600 tons of opium in 2003 would allow for the production of approximately 360,000 kg of pure heroin. Gross revenues accruing to Afghan farmers are roughly estimated by the UNODC to be of the order of $1 billion, with 1.3 billion accruing to local traffickers.
When sold in Western markets at a heroin wholesale price of the order of $100,000 a kg (with a 70 percent purity ratio), the global wholesale proceeds (corresponding to 3600 tons of Afghan opium) would be of the order of 51.4 billion dollars. The latter constitutes a conservative estimate based on the various figures for wholesale prices in the previous section.
The total proceeds of the Afghan narcotics trade (in terms of total value added) is estimated using the final heroin retail price. In other words, the retail value of the trade is ultimately the criterion for measuring the importance of the drug trade in terms of revenue generation and wealth formation.
A meaningful estimate of the retail value, however, is almost impossible to ascertain due to the fact that retail prices vary considerably within urban areas, from one city to another and between consuming countries, not to mention variations in purity and quality (see above).
The evidence on retail margins, namely the difference between wholesale and retail values in the consuming countries, nonetheless, suggests that a large share of the total (money) proceeds of the drug trade are generated at the retail level.
In other words, a significant portion of the proceeds of the drug trade accrues to criminal and business syndicates in Western countries involved in the local wholesale and retail narcotics markets. And the various criminal gangs involved in retail trade are invariably protected by the “corporate” crime syndicates.
90 percent of heroin consumed in the UK is from Afghanistan. Using the British retail price figure from UK police sources of $110 a gram (with an assumed 50 percent purity level), the total retail value of the Afghan narcotics trade in 2003 (3600 tons of opium) would be the order of 79.2 billion dollars. The latter should be considered as a simulation rather than an estimate.
Under this assumption (simulation), a billion dollars gross revenue to the farmers in Afghanistan (2003) would generate global narcotics earnings, –accruing at various stages and in various markets– of the order of 79.2 billion dollars. These global proceeds accrue to business syndicates, intelligence agencies, organized crime, financial institutions, wholesalers, retailers, etc. involved directly or indirectly in the drug trade.
In turn, the proceeds of this lucrative trade are deposited in Western banks, which constitute an essential mechanism in the laundering of dirty money.
A very small percentage accrues to farmers and traders in the producing country. Bear in mind that the net income accruing to Afghan farmers is but a fraction of the estimated 1 billion dollar amount. The latter does not include payments of farm inputs, interest on loans to money lenders, political protection, etc.
(See also UNODC, The Opium Economy in Afghanistan, http://www.unodc.org/pdf/publications/afg_opium_economy_www.pdf , Vienna, 2003, p. 7-8)
Afghanistan produces over 70 percent of the global supply of heroin and heroin represents a sizeable fraction of the global narcotics market, estimated by the UN to be of the order of $400-500 billion.
There are no reliable estimates on the distribution of the global narcotics trade between the main categories: Cocaine, Opium/Heroin, Cannabis, Amphetamine Type Stimulants (ATS), Other Drugs.
The proceeds of the drug trade are deposited in the banking system. Drug money is laundered in the numerous offshore banking havens in Switzerland, Luxembourg, the British Channel Islands, the Cayman Islands and some 50 other locations around the globe. It is here that the criminal syndicates involved in the drug trade and the representatives of the world’s largest commercial banks interact. Dirty money is deposited in these offshore havens, which are controlled by the major Western commercial banks. The latter have a vested interest in maintaining and sustaining the drug trade. (For further details, see Michel Chossudovsky, The Crimes of Business and the Business of Crimes, Covert Action Quarterly, Fall 1996)
Once the money has been laundered, it can be recycled into bona fide investments not only in real estate, hotels, etc, but also in other areas such as the services economy and manufacturing. Dirty and covert money is also funneled into various financial instruments including the trade in derivatives, primary commodities, stocks, and government bonds.
US foreign policy supports the workings of a thriving criminal economy in which the demarcation between organized capital and organized crime has become increasingly blurred.
The heroin business is not “filling the coffers of the Taliban” as claimed by US government and the international community: quite the opposite! The proceeds of this illegal trade are the source of wealth formation, largely reaped by powerful business/criminal interests within the Western countries. These interests are sustained by US foreign policy.
Decision-making in the US State Department, the CIA and the Pentagon is instrumental in supporting this highly profitable multibillion dollar trade, third in commodity value after oil and the arms trade.
The Afghan drug economy is “protected”.
The heroin trade was part of the war agenda. What this war has achieved is to restore a compliant narco-State, headed by a US appointed puppet.
The powerful financial interests behind narcotics are supported by the militarisation of the world’s major drug triangles (and transshipment routes), including the Golden Crescent and the Andean region of South America (under the so-called Andean Initiative).
Table 1
Opium Poppy Cultivation in Afghanistan
Year Cultivation in hectares Production (tons)
1994 71,470 3,400
1995 53,759 2,300
1996 56,824 2,200
1997 58,416 2,800
1998 63,674 2,700
1999 90,983 4,600
2000 82,172 3,300
2001 7,606 185
2002 74 000 3400
2003 80 000 3600
Source: UNDCP, Afghanistan, Opium Poppy Survey, 2001, UNOCD, Opium Poppy Survey, 2002. http://www.unodc.org/pdf/afg/afg_opium_survey_2002.pdf
See also Press Release: http://www.unodc.org/unodc/press_release_2004-03-31_1.html , and 2003 Survey: http://www.unodc.org/pdf/afg/afghanistan_opium_survey_2003.pdf
Notice the dip in 2001
The Opioid epidemic is spreading across the heartland of America. The number of drug overdose deaths from both prescription (e.g., Oxycontin) and black market (e.g., heroin) opiates exceeded 30,000 in 2015. Initial estimates for 2016 indicate yet another new record of deaths. It is such an enormous problem that I taught a special class on it at our undergraduate instructional conference, Mises University, which you can listen to here.
Recently the Commission on Combating the Opioid Crisis issued a preliminary report and recommended that the president declare a national emergency.
From 2002 to 2015 the number of such deaths has increased by 280%. The chart below shows that prescription opiates were the main contributor from 2002 to 2011. Illicit opiates have been the main contributor since:
It is vitally important that we understand what is causing this epidemic and even more important, how do we solve it. Plus, we need to avoid becoming a victim of it. In the past, most people ignored the issue of drug overdoses as merely an urban “junkie” problem, but this epidemic is hitting ordinary Americans such as coal miners, teachers, and high school football players.
The Washington Post asserted that the problem arose because of “aggressive marketing” on the part of the pharmaceutical companies that sell opiate painkillers. Others on the left think it is an arbitrary explosion of demand. They make it sound like market failure, but the “aggressive marketing” was not slick TV commercials. Rather, the drug companies targeted doctors, not consumers. They provided many lucrative carrots to doctors and spent resources lobbying to change regulations and pain prescribing guidelines in order to rig the FDA/AMA system in their favor.
In terms of solutions, leftists advocate spending lots of more money on just about everything they can think of, especially drug addiction treatment programs, but such programs are both extremely expensive and ineffective.
Conservatives tend to think of the cause of the epidemic in terms of the evil Mexicans and Chinese, along with street dealers and drug gangs. The Trump administration thinks that building the Mexican wall will help. They have also advocated for policies that have been demonstrated to be failures, such as expanding minimum mandatory prison sentences and asset forfeiture programs. They think expanding the D.A.R.E. program will help solve the problem, but several government-sponsored reports have discredited the effectiveness of the Drug Awareness Resistance Education program.
The real cause of this epidemic is various government policies and the real solution is the dismantling of those same policies, in perpetuum.
Let us start with drug prohibition which dates back to the Harrison Narcotic Act of 1914. Drug prohibition results in a black market where illegal products are not commercially produced and where suppliers are not constrained by the rule of law and product liability law. The result is that illegal drugs are more dangerous than legal drugs. Potency varies greatly from batch to batch and products often contain dangerous impurities and substitute ingredients. Opiate overdoses often occur when an addict is unaware that a particular dose is highly potent or contains Fentanyl, a pain medication that is 50 to a 1,000 times more potent than morphine.
The next cause is called the Iron Law of Prohibition, a phrase first used by Richard Cowan to describe the phenomenon that when drug law enforcement becomes more powerful, the potency of illegal drugs increases. One of the effects of enhancing prohibition enforcement is that suppliers will produce a higher potency drug. For example, during alcohol prohibition in the 1920s suppliers switched from producing beer and wine to highly potent spirits, such as gin and whiskey.
A second result of more rigorous prohibition enforcement is that suppliers will switch from lower potency drug types to higher potency drug types. For example, during Ronald Reagan’s “war on drugs” during the 1980s, smugglers switched from bulky marijuana to highly concentrated cocaine and domestic suppliers turned much of this cocaine into crack cocaine, resulting in the crack cocaine epidemic. The Iron Law of Prohibition explains why we see more and more dangerous drugs on the black market and why we see decreases in overdoses in states that have legalized cannabis.
Government intervention in the economy is a largely unrecognized cause of addiction. Intervention has at least two distinct channels of creating addicts. The first is war. War creates addicts through both painful physical injuries and painful emotional and psychological disorders, such as Post Traumatic Stress Disorders. The second cause is the general impact of widespread government intervention in the economy. Much of government interventionism results in the creation of privileges and monopoly power. For example, licensing requirements provide members of a profession, such as medical doctors, with monopoly profits by restricting the number of practicing physicians. This enriches licensed doctors and impoverishes potential doctors who must find work in another profession. These excess potential doctors thereby suppress wages in other labor markets. Given the pervasiveness of government intervention, this creates two classes in labor markets — the advantaged and the disadvantaged and addiction tends to develop in disadvantaged labor markets where people are more likely to be despondent and lack hope and economic resources.
The three above causes have been around for a long time creating the environment for drug overdoses, but at much lower levels than we see today.
The final cause has only been around for a couple of decades, but it is now responsible for the majority of deaths. Alluded to above, Big Pharma undertook “aggressive marketing” in order to encourage doctors to write massive numbers of prescriptions for opiate painkillers and to change to pain prescribing guidelines in order to sell more of these heroin-like pills.
As a result, doctors began prescribing drugs such as Oxycontin and Vicodin, which are similar to opiates, such as morphine and heroin, for ordinary injuries and minor surgeries. The problem with this is that if you take these pills for 30 or 60 days, there is a distinct possibility that you will become physically addicted to them. The doctor is not going to write you refills for the prescription once the injury has healed.
This leaves the addict with three bad choices.
One, you can enter a drug addiction rehabilitation program, but these programs are expensive and are not necessarily effective.
Two, you can go cold turkey. However, detoxification comes with a slew of physical and psychological symptoms and can result in suicide and death.
Three, you can go into the black market and buy illegal Oxycontin and Vicodin pills. The problem with this option is that such pills are expensive and have an unstable supply. What happens if you choose this option, but run low on money or have trouble acquiring the pills? Well, very often the drug dealer who sold you the pills can also sell you heroin or tell you where to buy it. Heroin is often cheaper per dose and has a more stable supply. This is how people who would never even consider entering a room in which heroin was present become heroin addicts. This process is what has caused the major surge in drug overdoses.
The solution to the epidemic is to legalize drugs. Doctors should be able to put their patients on drug maintenance and recovery programs. Commercially produced opiates would be pure and relatively safe. Addicts could go about their lives, attempting to recover physically, psychologically, socially, and economically without having to worry about how to obtain and pay for their drugs. Drug addiction is often a multi-faceted problem that simply cannot be fixed with a 30 day rehab experience. Addicts that are successfully detoxed, but without solving more basic problems, often relapse and die because the dose they take is now too strong for their detoxed body.
Legalizing cannabis would also be a key to solving the epidemic. Legal cannabis improves the epidemic through two channels. First, medical formulations of cannabis can be a potent, but non-addictive pain killer. Therefore, legalization leads to a reduced level of opiate use, abuse, and mortality and there are several peer-reviewed studies that confirm this. Second, because cannabis reduces pain and anxiety, and improves sleep and appetite it is very helpful for those who are trying to beat their heroin addiction.
The Opioid epidemic is killing more than 30,000 Americans a year. For most experts, the epidemic is a mystery with regard to its cause and solution. A little progress has been made, but to really eliminate the problem we need to legalize drugs, reduce the size of government, and increase freedom in our lives. We also need to find an answer for the pain epidemic which has shackled too many Americans to Big Pharma and the medical belief that every symptom requires another prescription!
Earlier this month, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions unveiled a plan to go after doctors and pharmacies suspected of healthcare fraud by oversubscribing opioids. America’s opioid epidemic killed 33,000 people in 2015 making it the worst drug crisis in our history. Last week, President Donald Trump declared the opioid crisis a national emergency allowing the executive branch to direct funds towards treatment facilities and supplying police officers with naloxone.
As a socio-economist on the front lines of the opioid crisis in Baltimore, Maryland, I am about to take you through an opioid experience like you’ve never seen before. We’re going to travel into the inner city of Baltimore and interview current and former addicts of opioids and heroin. Some of these individuals used heroin 15-minutes before the cameras started rolling.
These individuals have never been given the chance to tell their story until now. Baltimore’s mainstream news is not allowed to share this because it breaks the narrative that everything is awesome. It turns out that Baltimore could have the largest methadone clinic in the United States called Turning Point Clinic. Each of the interviewees are current and past patients of the clinic and speak very negatively about it. A similar description of Baltimore is heard from each of the interviewees of a hellacious city with decades of deindustrialization, drug abuse, and violent crime.
In the first video, three women who are current or past addicts of opioids tell the story of clinics, doctors, and pharmacies flooding the street of Baltimore with opioids. Gina mainly speaks about the Turning Point Clinic - how a preacher who operates the facility went from “nothing to now wearing $1000 gators, flying private jets, and driving Bentleys”. As described by one of the women, it looks like ‘zombie-land’ outside of the clinic.
In the second video, Gina speaks about her addiction to opioids and how she overcame the troubles through a strong-will. The next women to speak is Wanda, who is currently in pain management at Turning Point Clinic and speaks about how the opioid crisis is destroying America’s youth. I then ask the question about record number of homicides in Baltimore, and Wanda says opioids are a big part of that.
In the third video, ‘John Doe’ shot up on heroin 15-minutes before giving us the interview. He is an active patient at the Turning Point Clinic and describes it to be the largest methadone clinic in the United States with 6k-10k patients per day. The illegal activity and the corruption around this clinic is highlighted in the video via ‘John Doe’ statements, along with truth bombs that will not disappointment.
We now have an understanding that opioids are big business in the hood. You’re not allowed to know about this, because only a select few in our society are allowed to prosper from it. It’s unfortunate that drug trade is the most prevalent type of good flowing around low income areas across the United States. We wouldn’t expect nothing else after 50-years of deindustrialization and the bottom 90% of Americans left to rot.
America’s inner cities have to change or the collapse of an empire is on the horizon. Doesn’t help when 96 million Americans are out of the workforce.
On August 10, 2017, President Donald Trump declared the opioid crisis a national emergency in a move that many speculated he wouldn’t make. Only 2 days before the announcement, Trump vowed to “win” the fight on painkillers and heroin, but stopped short of declaring an emergency. [1]
On August 8, following a meeting with Trump, Health and Human Services secretary Tom Price said that such a declaration was unnecessary, but said that all options were on the table, including a declaration of emergency. [2]
It is unclear what sparked the reversal.
Speaking at his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club, Trump said:
“The opioid crisis is an emergency, and I’m saying officially, right now, it is an emergency. It’s a national emergency. We’re going to spend a lot of time, a lot of effort and a lot of money on the opioid crisis.” [1]
The President called the crisis “a serious problem the likes of which we have never had.”
He added:
“You know when I was growing up they had the LSD and they had certain generations of drugs. There’s never been anything like what’s happened to this country over the last four or five years. And I have to say this in all fairness, this is a worldwide problem, not just a United States problem.”
Source: MPR NewsKeith Humphreys, an addiction specialist at Stanford University who worked in the federal Office of National Drug Control Policy under Barack Obama, explained that 2 major actions will result from the national emergency declaration. [2]
“First, it lets states and localities that are designated disaster zones to access money in the federal Disaster Relief Fund, just like they could if they had a tornado or hurricane.”
Source: The Huffington PostAccording to Humphreys, the declaration will allow states and cities to request disaster zone declarations from the White House. In turn, these localities would be able to use federal funds for drug treatment, the overdose-reversal drug Naloxone, and other tools.
Humphreys said:
“Second, declaring an emergency allows temporary waivers of many rules regarding federal programs. For example, currently Medicaid can’t reimburse drug treatment in large residential facilities (16 or more beds). That could be waived in an emergency.”
Under the Obamacare replacement proposals backed by Trump, Medicaid funds for opioid addiction treatment would have been drastically cut.
The United States is undoubtedly in the grip of an unparalleled drug epidemic. In 2015, opioid overdoses killed nearly 35,000 people in the U.S., according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). [1]
By contrast, a study published August 7, 2017, found that mortality rates were 24% higher for opioids and 22% higher for heroin than had been previously reported. [2]
However, proponents of a public health-centered approach to the crisis epidemic worry about the potential ramifications of what powers an emergency declaration would grant an administration that favors tough-on-crime law enforcement tactics.
Grant Smith of the Drug Policy Alliance said:
“We need to be cautious about the intentions of this administration. An emergency declaration can be used for good. It can help free up federal resources, help prioritize responses by the federal [government], help give the administration leverage to request legislation from Congress.”
Or, in the worst case scenario:
“…all of those things I just mentioned could be used to further the war on drugs. It could give the administration leverage to push for new sentencing legislation. Or legislation that enhances [drug] penalties or law enforcement response. It could give [Attorney General Jeff] Sessions more leverage to push the agenda that he has been pushing,” Smith warned.
In 2016, as part of the 21st Century Cures Act, Congress approved $1 billion in funding over 2 years for state grants to tackle the opioid epidemic. Nevertheless, recent federal estimates suggest opioid overdoses increased last year, even as opioid prescriptions decreased.
Sources:
[1] NBC News
 | Julie Fidler is a freelance writer, legal blogger, and the author of Adventures in Holy Matrimony: For Better or the Absolute Worst. She lives in Pennsylvania with her husband and two ridiculously spoiled cats. She occasionally pontificates on her blog. |
The world is edging closer to the final moments after which everything will be forever changed. Grand delusions, perpetuated over decades, will finally hit the limits of reality and collapse in on themselves.
We’re over-budget and have eaten deeply into the principal balances of all of our main trust accounts. We are ecologically overdrawn, financially insolvent, monetarily out past the Twilight Zone, consuming fossil fuels (as in literally eating them), and adding 80,000,000 net souls to the planet’s surface -- each year! -- without regard to the consequences.
Someday there will be hell to pay financially, economically, and ecologically as there simply isn’t any way to maintain these overdrafts forever. Reality does not renegotiate. Its deal terms aren"t compromisable.
For those who have the neural plasticity to actually see what"s happening around us, the changes are already here, blatant and frightening. Younger folks, with their fresher eyes and fewer ties to the past, can see them a lot easier than their elders.
The prosperity enjoyed by the past few generations -- especially the Baby Boomers -- was stolen from future generations. All the while, they pretended as if their borrowing-heavy standards of living were the result of sheer genius and intelligence; like trust fund babies who mistake being born on third base for hitting a triple.
Young people have sussed this out; and are now pulling back from many of the principal occupations of their forebears -- like marriage, babies and buying homes and cars. This perplexes older folks, who are beginning to find themselves increasingly at odds with the generations following after them.
Humans can be very very smart, but the flip-side of our ingenuity is our capacity for self-delusion. We’ve very consistently preferred to look past our faults. That can work for a while, but eventually an incomplete view will lead to a complete disaster. For example: depleting our topsoils today to grow more eventually leads to a collapse of our food system tomorrow. Similarly, increasing societal complexity ultimately drains the resources out of an empire, until it withers and fails. Such is what we can learn from history. Each of these examples is rooted in the self-delusion that today"s actions don"t have real consequences.
Monetary printing experiments like those currently being run by the world’s central banks are the ultimate form of self-delusion. Money is the most potent form of social communication, underlying all contracts and agreements. Violate those and literally everything falls apart, as we are seeing happen in real-time in Venezuela right now.
Money printing and its other historical debasement equivalents, serve to cover up (barely) critical signals. Derelict ideas that should die a quick death, instead, persist. Mis-priced money leads mal-investment (e.g., Italian junk debt selling with the same yield as ten year US Treasury debt!!). Extremely unfair redistributions of wealth from the bottom to the top result. Every. Single. Time. This time is no different.
If you cannot see this madness in the chart below, I strongly suggest you keep staring at it until you can. It shows the exploding balance sheet of the central bank of "the floating retirement colony" known as Japan:
The Japanese money printers have gone hog-wild over the past decade. And they"ve had company. The other major central banks of the wold have been printing $trillions and $trillions, too, over the same time period. What will the repercussions be? The world is about to find out.
But it’s actually far worse than that. For those who can bear to look, the signs of illness are as startlingly obvious as gangrene on a necrotic limb. Species are going extinct at an unprecedented rate. Glaciers are fast disappearing. Frogs and insect populations are mysteriously collapsing. Massive destruction of the landscape as we chase the last low-EROEI fuels remaining (tar sands, and shale wells). Miles-deep mining efforts. Enormous human migrations away from economically and ecologically ruined areas (see: the MENA region).
But the average citizen remains largely blind and/or numb to these. Again, much of this has to do with self-delusion that broken signals enable. People worry less as long as the stock markets are showing higher values, which is precisely why we don’t trust them anymore – they have become the most important signaling devices for The Powers That Be. They are far too important to leave to the vagaries of investors, and must be rescued/controlled/manipulated so that the “right” outcomes can be achieved.
If we’re lucky when these financial delusions finally break, we’ll hopefully avoid a global war. That’s the usual route by which the politicians and bankers seek to avoid having to be held accountable for the colossal mistakes they made in the past. They drag everyone to in a manufactured confrontation, whooping up the populace into a fever pitch by inventing hobgoblins -- exactly as has recently happened in the US with the recent rash of Russia-phobia; a case study in how easily public perception can be manipulated (as well as proof-positive that critical thinking skills are no longer requirements for today"s journalists).
But if we’re unlucky, war may destroy much of what we take for granted and hold dear. Living standards will drop. The veil covering today"s massive financial deception will be yanked off, revealing the shriveled, cold promises of past decades as being wholly incapable of meeting their obligation to fund millions of promised retirements.
And if we’re really unlucky, that war could involve some horrendous new weapons that could cripple our nation"s electrical grid (e.g., EMP, cyber attack). In which case, all of our individual attention and effort in the northern hemisphere will focus down to one simple task: surviving the first winter.
In ways conscious and subconscious, we"re becoming aware of the signs of growing instability around us. Like a flock of sheep catching the scent of an unseen predator, right now we’re collectively becoming increasingly nervous and stressed. People’s tempers are short with each other, criticisms fly easily, and stances are becoming hardened to ludicrous levels.
Many don’t know why they"re unhappy. And because they"re unable to identify the source, they blame themselves. Instead of acting out, they act in.
Heavy drinking is on the rise:
More U.S. adults are drinking, and more heavily
Aug 9, 2017
The United States has a serious drinking problem. Since 2001, heavy drinking and alcohol use disorder have risen dramatically, according to a new study that surveyed tens of thousands of adults.The numbers reveal “a public health crisis,”the authors say.
The increases were especially large among those 65 years and older, minorities and women, researchers report online August 9 in JAMA Psychiatry. Alcohol is a risk factor for many potentially life-threatening injuries and health problems, including cardiovascular diseases, type 2 diabetes and liver cirrhosis.
In 2012?2013, an estimated 29.6 million American adults reported high-risk drinking, up from 20.2 million in 2001?2002.
(Source)
Alcohol is not enough for some people. Their need to numb themselves to the bleak existence of their lives leads them to opioids, both legal and illegal:
Opioid Crisis: The Awful Arithmetic of America’s Overdoses May Have Gotten Worse
Aug 7, 2017
The deadly drug overdose epidemic that has been ravaging the nation may be even worse than we realize.
A new University of Virginia study says the numbers of deaths due to heroin and opioid overdoses have actually been severely underreported.
Dr. Christopher Ruhm revisited thousands of death certificates from 2008 through 2014 and concluded the mortality rates were 24 percent higher for opioids and 22 percent higher for heroin than had been previously reported.
Ruhm’s awful arithmetic emerged just days after the presidential opioid commission, led by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, urged President Donald Trump to “declare a national emergency” to deal with the crisis.
Nearly 35,000 people across America have died of heroin or opioid overdoses in 2015, according to theNational Institute on Drug Abuse.
(Source)
Records are being broken:
Opioid deaths in US break new record
Aug 8, 2017
The first nine months of 2016 saw a sharp increase in opioid drug overdoses in the US compared to the prior year, according to new data by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS). The government is struggling to respond to the crisis.
Deaths due to drug overdose peaked in the third quarter of last year – 19.7 cases for every 100,000 people, compared to 16.7 in the same period the year before,according to newly released numbers from the NCHS, which is part of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
(Source)
That is a startling rate of increase. 3/16.7 = 18% An 18% increase in one year is profound. What’s going on? We won’t go into the really dark side of this story which is that certain pharmaceutical companies make a ton of money off of addicted people, and those same companies donate a lot of money to the US political system. Suffice it to say that the worship of money and power is so profound that some activities of late cannot really be distinguished from those of a death cult.
For those who are not into opioids other avenues towards relieving the pain exist,
One in 6 Americans Take Antidepressants, Other Psychiatric Drugs
One in six Americans take some kind of psychiatric drugs — mostly antidepressants, researchers reported Monday.
They also found that twice as many white people take those drugs as do African-Americans or other minorities, and fewer than 5 percent of Asian-Americans do. And most people who take them are taking them long-term, Thomas Moore of the Institute for Safe Medication Practices in Alexandria, Virginia and colleagues found.
"Overall, 16.7 percent of 242 million U.S. adults reported filling one or more prescriptions for psychiatric drugs in 2013,” they wrote in the Journal of the American Medical Association’s JAMA Internal Medicine.
(Source)
If one in six Americans is being medicated for depression and/or anxiety, and another significant chunk are checking out via opioid numbing, perhaps we need to consider an alternative explanation for these facts: There’s something wrong with the world these people are inhabiting -- not with the people themselves.
Charles Eisenstein really caught my mind’s attention with a piece he wrote long ago entitled The Mutiny of the Soul. In it he argues that perhaps those most in need of medicinal help are actually those who are most attuned to the actual state of the world. He explains the rise in depression and anxiety like this:
The answer is staring us in the face. When our soul-body is saying No to life, through fatigue or depression, the first thing to ask is, "Is life as I am living it the right life for me right now?" When the soul-body is saying No to participation in the world, the first thing to ask is, "Does the world as it is presented me merit my full participation?"
What if there is something so fundamentally wrong with the world, the lives, and the way of being offered us, that withdrawal is the only sane response?
I have met countless people of great compassion and sensitivity, people who would describe themselves as "conscious" or "spiritual", who have battled with CFS, depression, thyroid deficiency, and so on. These are people who have come to a transition point in their lives where they become physically incapable of living the old life in the old world.
That is because, in fact, the world presented to us as normal and acceptable is anything but. It is a monstrosity. Ours is a planet in pain. If you need me to convince you of that, if you are unaware of the destruction of forests, oceans, wetlands, cultures, soil, health, beauty, dignity, and spirit that underlies the System we live in, then I have nothing to say to you. I only am speaking to you if you do believe that there is something deeply wrong with the way we are living on this planet.
So if you suffer from anxiety, maybe you don"t have a "disorder" at all — maybe the house is on fire. Anxiety is simply the emotion corresponding to "Something is dangerously wrong and I don"t know what it is." That is only a disorder if there is in fact nothing dangerously wrong. "Nothing is wrong, just you" is the message that any therapy gives when it tries to fix you.
I disagree with that message. The problem is not with you. You have very good reason to be anxious. Anxiety keeps part of your attention away from your tasks of polishing the silverware as the house burns down, of playing the violin as the Titanic sinks.
Unfortunately, the wrongness you are tapping into might be beyond the cognizance of the psychiatrists who treat you, who then conclude that the problem must be your brain.
(Source)
Does that all ring a bell of truth for you as it does for me?
Perhaps the sanest response to being in a world that does not merit your full participation is to check out. Drinking, drugs, video games and Netflix binges (while not advised or endorsed) are much more understandable when viewed through this lens.
(Full disclosure, these past few years have not been easy on me, either. I prefer action and constructive motion, so the past few years have been like one of those dreams where you"re desperate to move but your body remains frozen in place. I’ve wanted things to finally come to a head so we can at least begin the process of acknowledging our predicaments and facing them head on. Beneath it all is my dread at the prospect that all these years of delaying and denying will amount to a larger and more painful correction when it comes.)
It really begs the question: What if there’s nothing wrong with the people who are anxious or depressed, but the exact opposite is true; those who are cheerful and chipper are missing the plot?
If you were an astronaut and your one-and-only spaceship was leaking oxygen into the infinite void of Space, would you medicate those expressing concern while rewarding those with positive attitudes and power drills who continue to punch more holes in the hull? Of course not. Why should we think any differently in the case of spaceship Earth?
The truth is that the lifestyle we"re living today is vastly distant from the one humans evolved to value. Sebastian Junger explained to us in a podcast that returning veterans commit suicide at the rate of 22 per day largely because they experience such "emptiness" upon reintegrating into civilian life. Unit cohesion in the military was so much more fulfilling and enriching that the prospect of a permanent return to what we call “US culture” leads many of them to conclude that suicide is the better option. If there"s a more damning indictment of the current culture in the US, I don’t know of it.
The data is clear: in the US, people are as unhappy, overmedicated and overweight than ever before.
Our society"s current plan is just not working. So why not square up to that reality, take charge and fix things while we still can? Why would we agree to persist in this dangerously broken state of affairs?
We, each of us and all of us, have the power to pursue a different path. A better path. We can and we should change everything that needs changing. We must rebel against this state of affairs, and withdraw our consent from a toxic system rather than let that system break us down.
The time for a quiet revolution has arrived. One that begins with, and within, you.
In Part 2: Joining The Quiet Revolution, we explain how the signs of distress detailed above can be used to add urgency in making investments in your life that will make you happier, healthier, more engaged, and prosperous -- both today and tomorrow. The data is telling us that from here, the extreme changes the world is experiencing will only accelerate.
Those who can see this and adapt will fare far better than those who cannot, will not, or won’t.
Some will thrive, some will survive, many will do neither.
Click here to read the report (free executive summary, enrollment required for full access)
