"These are guys with the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty. These type of
guys. They come from Connecticut and New York, they come up here, they
sell their heroin, then they go back home. Incidentally, half the time
they impregnate a young, white girl before they leave, which is a real
sad thing because then we have another issue we've got to deal with down
the road."—Paul LePage, Governor of Maine
Scot Nakagawa has criticized William Schneider of MSNBC for using
Asian-Americans—thirty-eight culturally distinct groups—as a model
minority, arguing that Schneider is aiming to shame black people by
comparison. He contends that such labeling conceals the problems—like
sex trafficking and poverty—that afflict some Asian-American
communities.—Ishmael Reed
Do White pundits and TV Producers Have a No-Snitch Policy On Exposing Crises in the White Community?
By Ishmael Reed
The way former Kremlinologists were able to detect trends behind the Iron Curtain was to read the poems of Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Andrei Voznesensky. My white students have been writing poems for years about dysfunctional behavior behind the lesser-known “Suburban Curtain.” They write about absentee white fathers who were “tourists” in their homes or absent parents who gave them money, which they spent on drugs. “Debutantes sniffing cocaine from dirty toilet seats” appeared in my student J. Cody Peterson’s “La Jolla. In 3 Acts,” about one of California’s high-income cities.
Now suddenly, that curtain has been drawn back. Three MSNBC moderators—Tamron Hall, Andrea Mitchell and Luke Russert— were recently shocked to discover that white people use heroin. Hall said white people are not the image that one usually associates with the drug. On April 17, Mitchell said that she came to focus on the heroin epidemic only when the governor of Vermont addressed it in a speech. On April 18, Russert described Connecticut as an “unlikely” zone for heroin use. “Unlikely” because for decades the media have associated heroin with black people. And even when filming addicts in a clinic and concealing the identity of three white men, MSNBC showed the face of a black addict who was seeking help.
Black people and families were first diagnosed with a “tangle of pathologies” in Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s notorious 1965 The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. He said black women were on the way to creating a new species, even though any matriarch on welfare at the time was likely a member of the senator’s own tribe: Celtic-American. Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve, a pop-sociological update on Moynihan’s themes, is also of Scots-Irish descent. Now National Review writer Kevin Williamson, author of a recent article about Appalachia called “The White Ghetto,” cites a tangle of pathologies among white people of Scots-Irish descent.
Why turn this incriminating lens from black people to white people? There have been reports of drug epidemics in white communities since at least 1995, when on March 20 of that year The New York Times reported, “The typical person whose death is related to heroin in the Philadelphia area is likely to be white, employed and living in a middle-class suburb.”
Since the 1990s, the epidemic in white rural and suburban areas has grown. No curtain is big enough to draw across the suffering on display, with 669,000 Americans using heroin in 2012, a 65 percent increase from 2002. A recent film, Gateway to Heroin, quoted a Boston undertaker who had buried “hundreds” of white kids who had died from opiate overdoses. Another filmmaker attuned to the problem of the white underclass is Debra Granik, with her award-winning films Down to the Bone and Winter’s Bone.
Maybe if the pundits and reporters had paid attention in 1995, almost twenty years ago, the problem wouldn’t be as devastating. At the time, a study emerged indicating that all was not well in suburbia. A 1997 SUNY study surprised its authors when their interviews with white women revealed that 92 percent of those interviewed had experienced battering or had seen their mothers or sisters battered. “Domestic violence is not a phenomenon found only in poor and working-class homes,” Weis said in a press release, but is “found widely in very privileged homes as well.” Weis added that the 31 black women respondents were much more open about the violence they saw and experienced. “The white women in the study, on the other hand, were very secretive,” Weis wrote. She speculated that such secretiveness served to protect the popular image of family life in the white community and that shame and secrecy were encouraged by the media focus on demonizing black people.
Do white pundits, reporters and TV news producers have a no-snitch policy on exposing social crises in the white community? While popular culture, novels, film and theater portray the black boogeyman as a threat to women (more so than the mostly white men who deny Medicaid to the poor and send black and Hispanic women to prison for drug crimes), white men’s treatment of white women is rarely discussed. I’ve challenged the white men who finance black boogeyman products to address the issue of domestic violence against white women. Why isn’t Nicholas Kristof on this?
Meanwhile, Scot Nakagawa has criticized William Schneider of MSNBC for using Asian-Americans—thirty-eight culturally distinct groups—as a model minority, arguing that Schneider is aiming to shame black people by comparison. He contends that such labeling conceals the problems—like sex trafficking and poverty—that afflict some Asian-American communities.
The latest shedding of light on the “tangle of pathologies” in the white community is to be encouraged. Better late than never. Maybe no longer will the white community be treated as Lake Wobegon, with the black community as a sort of waste disposal across the tracks for the country’s social problems.
The crazed jihadis (left) are getting their 'fighting spirit' from drugs supplied by the likes of Saudi 'royals' like Saudi Prince Majed Abdulaziz Al-Saud (right) he was recently arrested at an airport in Lebanon with two tons of Captagon pills.
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Drug Crazed Soldiers Complicate Syrian War, As Drug Sales Bring Cash to Combatants
By Phillip Smith
The private jet at the Beirut airport wasn't just carrying a Saudi prince one night in October—it was loaded with two tons of Captagon, the Middle Eastern amphetamine that not only fuels the nightlife in Saudi Arabia, it's also a favorite of combatants in Syria's brutal civil war.
The prince's bust by Lebanese customs officials opened a media window on a Mideast amphetamine habit that is, by all accounts, huge. Manufactured in clandestine labs in Lebanon, and increasingly, in war-torn Syria, the drug is flooding the region, with the UNODC World Drug Report estimating that half a billion Captagon pills flood into Saudi Arabia alone each year.
Captagon has been around for a long time, but it's getting renewed attention for its role in the Syrian conflict. Manufactured since the 1960s, the stuff was banned regionally in the 1980s because of its addictive and anti-social properties. Now, Captagon is little more than a generic name for mixtures of amphetamine and caffeine or amphetamine and ephedrine, but it's still the kind of stimulant drug beloved by fighters who desire the energy, alertness and sense of well-being it brings.
It's "the drug fueling the conflict in Syria," the BBC reported, while the Washington Post called it, with just a touch of hyperbole, "the tiny pill fueling Syria's war and turning fighters into superhuman soldiers."
The Post notwithstanding, Captagon will not turn fighters into the Hulk, but as a stimulant, it can reduce hunger, sharpen focus and allow fighters to keep going for days on end. The problem is, doing speed for days on end tends to make people jumpy and paranoid—not the kind of person you necessarily want holding heavy weapons.
Still, numerous media reports have detailed Captagon use by fighters all on sides in Syria, from government troops to ISIS jihadis.
"So the brigade leader came and told us, 'This pill gives you energy. Try it,'" one ex-fighter told the BBC. "So we took it the first time. You feel physically fit. And if there were 10 people in front of you, you could catch them and kill them. You're awake all the time. You don't have any problems. You don't even think about sleeping. You don't think to leave the checkpoint. It gives you great courage and power. If the leader told you to go break into a military barracks, I will break in with a brave heart and without any feeling of fear at all — you're not even tired."
But Captagon's role in the region's wars is not limited to keeping fighters jacked up. It's also a money maker for the combatants, and it's big business. Lebanese authorities seized more than $200 million worth in one month, the country's top drug enforcement official told Time. Much of it is coming out of Syria, the official said.
When most of America's drug addicts were thought to be black, America's law enforcers and politicians responded with SWAT raids and mass incarceration, while big media gave us scary stereotypes of "crackheads" and "thug" (code word for "black") drug dealers. Now that whites are suffering at alarming rates from heroin and meth-amphetamine addiction - there are finally calls for a "softer" and more "understanding" approach.
In Heroin Crisis, White Families Seek Gentler War on Drugs
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
Courtney Griffin was using heroin, she lied, disappeared, and stole from her parents to support her $400-a-day habit. Her family paid her debts, never filed a police report and kept her addiction secret — until she was found dead last year of an overdose.
At Courtney’s funeral, they decided to acknowledge the reality that redefined their lives: Their bright, beautiful daughter, just 20, who played the French horn in high school and dreamed of living in Hawaii, had been kicked out of the Marines for drugs. Eventually, she overdosed at her boyfriend’s grandmother’s house, where she died alone.
“When I was a kid, junkies were the worst,” Doug Griffin, 63, Courtney’s father, recalled in their comfortable home here in southeastern New Hampshire. “I used to have an office in New York City. I saw them.”
Noting that “junkies” is a word he would never use now, he said that these days, “they’re working right next to you and you don’t even know it. They’re in my daughter’s bedroom — they are my daughter.”
When the nation’s long-running war against drugs was defined by the crack epidemic and based in poor, predominantly black urban areas, the public response was defined by zero tolerance and stiff prison sentences. But today’s heroin crisis is different. While heroin use has climbed among all demographic groups, it has skyrocketed among whites; nearly 90 percent of those who tried heroin for the first time in the last decade were white.
And the growing army of families of those lost to heroin — many of them in the suburbs and small towns — are now using their influence, anger and grief to cushion the country’s approach to drugs, from altering the language around addiction to prodding government to treat it not as a crime, but as a disease.
“Because the demographic of people affected are more white, more middle class, these are parents who are empowered,” said Michael Botticelli, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, better known as the nation’s drug czar. “They know how to call a legislator, they know how to get angry with their insurance company, they know how to advocate. They have been so instrumental in changing the conversation.”
This is how the various "drug enforcement" law agencies make sure they have big budgets and a job to do.
By John Temple
The feds could choke off the supply of pills flooding American streets tomorrow. Instead, they let Big Pharma crank out 151 tons of it last year.
The federal government is actively fueling a killer drug epidemic behind closed doors.
The Drug Enforcement Administration—tasked with fighting the war on drugs—has for the past two decades approved ever-greater quantities of controlled substances like oxycodone for manufacture and sale in the U.S. by pharmaceutical companies.
In 1993, the DEA allowed pharmaceutical companies to manufacture 3,520 kilograms of oxycodone. In 2015, the DEA authorized production of 137,500 kilograms of oxycodone. That’s a 39-fold increase in 22 years, the equivalent of turning two Buicks into four Boeing 737s. Either Americans are in 39 times more pain than we were 20 years ago, or something else is wrong.
In 2012, Medicare's massive prescription drug program didn't spend a penny on popular tranquilizers such as Valium, Xanax and Ativan.
The following year, it doled out more than $377 million for the drugs.
While it might appear that an epidemic of anxiety swept the nation's Medicare enrollees, the spike actually reflects a failed policy initiative by Congress.
More than a decade ago, when lawmakers created Medicare's drug program, called Part D, they decided not to pay for anti-anxiety medications. Some of these drugs, known as benzodiazepines, had been linked to abuse and an increased risk of falls and fractures among the elderly, who make up most of the Medicare population.
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The Doctors and Drugs in Medicare Part D
Our Prescriber Checkup tool has been updated
with 2013 data
from Medicare, including controlled substance
prescribing
for each provider. Explore the App
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But doctors didn't stop prescribing the drugs to Medicare enrollees. Patients just found other ways to pay for them. When Congress later reversed the payment policy under pressure from patient groups and medical societies, it swiftly became clear that a huge swath of Medicare's patients were already using the drugs despite the lack of coverage.
In 2013, the year Medicare started covering benzodiazepines, it paid for nearly 40 million prescriptions, a ProPublica analysis of recently released federal data shows. Generic versions of the drugs — alprazolam (which goes by the trade name of Xanax), lorazepam (Ativan) and clonazepam (Klonopin) — were among the top 32 most-prescribed medications in Medicare Part D that year.
And it appears these were not new prescriptions.
IMS Health, a healthcare analytics company that tracks drug sales nationwide, logged only a tiny increase in all benzodiazepine prescriptions, including those covered by Medicare, from 2012 to 2013. That probably means Medicare paid mostly for refills of existing prescriptions, said Michael Kleinrock, director of research for the IMS Institute.
That millions of seniors are taking Xanax, Ativan and other tranquilizers represents a very real safety concern, said Dr. Brent Forester, a geriatric psychiatrist at Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass.
The drugs are popular because they are fast-acting — working quickly, for example, to quell debilitating panic attacks. But they can be habit-forming and disorienting and their effects last longer in older patients. For that reason, the American Geriatrics Society discourages their use in seniors for agitation, insomnia or delirium. The group says they may be appropriate to treat seizure disorders, severe anxiety, withdrawal and in end-of-life care.
Forester said he and others who specialize in geriatric psychiatry don't use benzodiazepines as a "first-, second- or third-line treatment because we see more of the downside than the good side."
In 2013, Medicare covered more prescriptions for benzodiazepines than for antipsychotics.
"At the end of the day," Forester said, "in terms of risk, the risk with benzodiazepines seems so much worse to me … There's significant danger and there's no spotlight."
A spokeswoman at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services declined to answer questions about Medicare's suddenly soaring tab for benzodiazepines.
Some doctors who ranked among Medicare's top prescribers of the drugs said any risks were outweighed by their benefits.
Fall River, Mass., psychiatrist Claude Curran wrote more than 11,700 prescriptions for benzodiazepines (including refills) in 2013, ranking him behind only four other doctors, all from Puerto Rico. He said the drugs worked well for his patients, many of whom are trying to kick addictions to narcotics but struggle with anxiety and depression.
"First of all, they're reliable," he said. "Second of all, they're cheap because they're all generic … They tickle the brain in the same way alcohol does."
Without benzodiazepines, he added, patients in recovery often need higher doses of methadone, which carries significant risks of its own. "Anyone who's ever had a panic attack is sympathetic to the use of the benzos," Curran said. "Anyone who has never had a panic attack doesn't understand it."
Notes: Counts include initial prescriptions and refills dispensed. Retail price includes patients' out-of-pocket costs but does not reflect drug maker rebates. Average prescriptions per patient, per provider has been adjusted to give more weight to doctors who treat more patients. (The unadjusted average is 5.7).
The vast majority of Curran's Medicare patients were younger than 65 and qualified for coverage based on a disability. Disabled patients made up about a quarter of Part D's 35 million enrollees in 2013, but used benzodiazepines disproportionately, accounting for about half of all prescriptions.
Miami psychiatrist Rigoberto Rodriguez also ranked high among Medicare prescribers of benzodiazepines, writing 9,900 prescriptions in 2013, but most of his patients were seniors. Many, he said, are Cuban immigrants who experienced traumas that left them with lingering anxiety, and they have been taking the drugs for years.
Rodriguez readily acknowledged the risks of the drugs for elderly users — recently, researchers found that the longer a person took benzodiazepines, the higher his or her risk of being diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease. The drugs' labels say they are generally for short-term use but many patients take them for years.
Rodriguez said he has been working to reduce his benzodiazepine prescriptions in light of emerging research. He expects that when Medicare releases data for 2014 and 2015, his totals will be lower.
"This is fresh information coming out in the last couple years … telling us that benzos are probably not good and you should try to avoid them," Rodriguez said. "I totally agree with that."
Roberto Hernando, another Miami psychiatrist who wrote high numbers of benzodiazepine prescriptions in 2013, said he intends to review his prescribing after a reporter told him his totals.
"Some people may need it; some people may not," he said. "You're bringing to my attention something that I wasn't even aware of."
When Congress created Medicare's drug program in 2003, there wasn't much discussion about whether it should cover benzodiazepines.
They were on a larger list of drugs excluded for coverage, along with barbiturates, fertility drugs, and drugs for weight loss and cosmetic purposes. The list mirrored one from a law years earlier allowing states to voluntarily exclude certain drugs from Medicaid programs for the poor. (Medicare now also pays for barbiturates.)
Andrew Sperling, director of federal legislative advocacy for National Alliance on Mental Illness, said it's unclear why Congress made the exclusions mandatory for Medicare when they had only been voluntary for Medicaid. He believes it was a drafting error.
IMS Health data suggests that while the Medicare ban was in effect, seniors and disabled patients paid for benzodiazepines in other ways. Many paid out of pocket for the relatively inexpensive drugs, which can cost less than $10 for a 30-day supply. Some, particularly those with disabilities, qualified for state Medicaid programs, which continued to cover the drugs even though they didn't have to. Another set of patients chose Medicare Advantage plans that offered the drugs as an added benefit.
Dr. Michael Ong, an associate professor at UCLA, co-authored a 2012 paper concluding that many patients continued using benzodiazepines after Congress banned coverage in Medicare Part D and that some turned to more powerful psychiatric drugs.
"Just mandating something and saying we're not going to pay for the benzodiazepines is probably not the right type of policy solution to change the behaviors of both the providers who are providing these medications and also the patients who are using them," Ong said.
A worrisome aspect of the newly released data is that some doctors appear to be prescribing benzodiazepines and narcotic painkillers to the same patients, increasing the risk of misuse and overdose. The drugs, paired together, can depress breathing.
ProPublica found that this pattern was most common in southeastern states, which struggle with opioid abuse and overdoses. In 2013, 158 doctors in Florida wrote at least 1,000 prescriptions each for opioids and for benzodiazepines, tops in the nation. Alabama, Kentucky and Tennessee also had unusually high numbers of doctors who often prescribed both narcotics and benzodiazepines. The data does not indicate if the prescriptions were given to the same patients, although that prospect worries experts.
Dr. Leonard J. Paulozzi, a medical epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, co-authored an analysis showing that benzodiazepines were involved in about 30 percent of the fatal narcotic overdoses that occurred nationwide in 2010.
"It increases the possibility of overdoses," he said.
Bill O'Reilly discussing Sean Bergin's suspension.
By Jordana Jarrett
During a debate on marijuana legalization, Fox's
Bill O'Reilly claimed that in "certain ghetto neighborhoods" rampant
marijuana use is "part of the culture– nine-year old boys and girls are
smoking it" (O'Reilly Factor, 7/28/14).
Unfortunately, this kind of stereotyping and demonization of black youth is nothing new (Extra!, 9/13).
Last month O'Reilly and others on Fox News defended racist
remarks about black communities when they supported local New Jersey
reporter Sean Bergin, who was suspended after editorializing that
"broken families" were the cause of the "sick, perverse" anger toward
police that has "contaminated America's inner cities."
Bergin's comments came after interviewing the widow of an
African-American man killed by police after fatally shooting a Jersey
City police officer. The widow, Angelique Campbell, told Bergin that
her husband "should have took more with him" (Breitbart, 7/15/14). (Campbell later apologized–AP, 7/16/14.)
After some viewers complained about the airing of Campbell's views (The Blaze, 7/14/14) Bergin responded on air with his theories about the source of the "anti-cop mentality" he attributed to "inner cities":
We were besieged, flooded with calls from police officers
furious that we would give media coverage to the wife of a cop killer.
It's understandable. We decided to air it because it's important to
shine a light on this anti-cop mentality that has so contaminated
America's inner cities. This same, sick, perverse line of thinking is
evident from Jersey City to Newark and Patterson to Trenton.
It has made the police officer's job impossible and it has got to
stop. The underlying cause of all of this, of course: young black men
growing up without fathers. Unfortunately, no one in the news media has
the courage to touch that subject.
After his suspension, Bergin told Breitbart (7/15/14)
that "replacing husbands and fathers with government checks created
this mess, and that's why liberal media refuse to look at it."
On the O'Reilly program (7/16/14) fellow Fox
host Howard Kurtz supported him, saying that Bergin "knew he was
breaking the rules, but he did a courageous thing by speaking out on a
very incendiary subject."
Similarly, O'Reilly declared the punishment was excessive, and posed
at least one question that hinted towards his support for Bergin,
Part of the report was the blowback from police officers angry that News 12
put a woman on the air, the mother of the murderer who condemned the
police force. That's part of the story. So isn't Mr. Bergin explaining
why that is happening and how dangerous it is? Isn't that a legitimate
explanation?
But journalists aren't just supposed to 'speak out,' and supporting a
racist theory about black men is far from a "legitimate
explanation." The problem is that neither Bergin nor his Fox supporters
offered any evidence linking how New Jersey's black communities feel
about the police to any particular family situation. Major cities,
especially Patterson and Newark, have tremendous histories of police brutality and racial profiling against black and brown youth–which
provide legitimate reasons for distrusting police. To borrow a phrase,
Bergin and O'Reilly may not have "the courage to touch that
subject." And to what would Bergin attribute the actions of those who kill unarmed black males–who are often police officers? Did they, too, grow up fatherless?
Bergin was promoting what Melissa Harris-Perry calls the myth of the "magical black father,"
the incorrect assumption that a present father –rather than the
elimination of racism, police brutality and the school-to-prison
pipeline — is the solution to the black community's problems.
Bergin's analysis relied on damaging stereotypes of broken black families rather than evidence.
What if things had played out differently, and Bergin had linked
decades of police brutality to "anti-cop" attitudes? Would any of these Fox hosts been so quick to defend him? Given the outlet’s history, the answer is likely no.
Jordana Jarrett is a FAIR intern.
Reprinted with permission from Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.
Drug testing in Tennessee, Main, Utah, and Florida finds drug use among people receiving government assistance is 2% or lower — A rate that's much lower than the general population.
Applicants have to answer three questions about drug use to get benefits, and if they answer yes to any of them, they get referred to urine testing. If the result is positive, they have to complete a treatment plan and then take another test. If the second comes back positive, they get cut off from benefits for six months. Those who refuse to take a drug test in the first place can’t get benefits.
In the month since it began, six people submitted to a drug test and just one tested positive out of the 812 people who applied. Four were turned down for benefits because they refused to participate in drug screening. That means a positive rate of 0.12 percent for those who took part in the screening. That compares to the 8 percent of state residents generally who use illegal drugs. Despite stereotypes that the poor people who need welfare assistance use drugs at a high rate, other states have had similar results.
