Hamburg, a former Democratic congressman and the state's Green Party gubernatorial candidate two years ago, said he expects similar measures on other county ballots and possibly even a statewide initiative. At his home on the edge of the Coastal Range, Hamburg is "licensed" by local authorities as a caregiver for his mother, who has cancer, and can grow limited amounts of marijuana for her medical use. When he called the sheriff last spring, he wanted deputies to personally approve his small crop. Now, his mother combats nausea from chemotherapy by nibbling on green Rice Krispies squares or butter infused with marijuana.

In spite of the measure's approval by 58 percent of voters, those who promoted it acknowledge non-medicinal pot is still illegal because counties cannot supercede state and federal drug laws. The federal government opposes legalization of marijuana for any use and is challenging medical marijuana initiatives passed in California and several other states. State and federal law enforcement representatives are not saying whether Measure G's passage will prompt closer scrutiny of the area. Nathan Barankin, spokesman for the state Attorney General's Office, said he did not want to "get into hypotheticals" about how the state will respond." The measure is symbolic," he said.

U.S. atty for Eastern District of California Paul Seave declined to discuss the measure at all. In Mendocino County, enforcement won't change, said Norm Vroman, the county's district attorney. "(Marijuana) was illegal before the vote, and it is after," he said. Every season, Mendocino, along with neighboring Humboldt and Trinity counties, draws federal and state authorities who swoop in to eradicate marijuana plants by the ton. Nearly 90,000 plants have been destroyed or seized this year. Right now, Vroman said, he has about 100 marijuana cases pending, but didn't know if any involved possession of 25 or fewer plants. Because of the commercial growers and traffickers that innundate his office, he conceded that the humbler home grower often escapes detection. "We just don't have that kind of personnel," he said. Mendocino County Sheriff Tony Craver, who signed the petition to get the measure on the ballot, is busy these days on talk radio trying to ward off the notion that he supports legalized marijuana. He said he does support letting people vote on the issue and further study that could lead to more effective laws. Craver said he is sworn to uphold state and federal laws, which means he'll still be arresting illegal pot growers. "It's a real heartbreaker for me," he said. "I'm seriously committed to the people of Mendocino County, but this is the law, and I'm afraid that's where it's at." Widely supported by medical marijuana users, the measure also drew support from those who do not smoke pot, backers say. It drew no organized opposition. "We framed it as a personal freedom issue," said Hamburg. "People on the right and left have said they don't want government intruding in their lives. It doesn't mean we want everyone out there smoking dope." Govt helicopters swarming overhead in search of illicit plants are a discordant backdrop to daily life here, said Michelle Staples, as she loaded purchases into her car at a Ukiah drugstore. She is not a user herself, but she said she voted for Measure G because she is convinced marijuana is no worse than legal drugs such as alcohol and that the money spent on enforcement is an embarrassment. "We should be spending that money on our schools," said Staples, 53, who cares for retired racehorses. At a popular coffeehouse on the main drag of Ukiah, 17-year-old Brett Reid tore into a calzone for lunch and considered life in the Emerald Triangle. "I don't think I know of one person who hasn't tried it," he said of his county's cash crop. The measure quickly became fodder for school civics projects, he said. He went to a forum as a homework assignment expecting to walk into a Grateful Dead concert-like setting. But to his surprise, the participants and attendees were as straight as his parents. "There were doctors and lawyers there," he said. At his high school, a poll of seniors in history classes showed 90 percent would support the measure if they could vote, he said. In fact, he said, teachers and students seemed to come together over the issue.It's that kind of place. [ Given the premise that marijuana is a gateway drug, a dubious claim even as allusion and indefensible as a claim by medical science, gates permit passage both ways. There is no drug or intoxicant remotely as well suited for experimenting in order to learn moderation. You can smoke yourself into a stupor and suffer nothing from it more than a lost hour or three. This tremendous potential for establishing self determined constraints is precisely why the national security state was compelled to decree it "Schedule I" lest it jeopardize tyranny by teaching the self-determination required by liberty. ] Pot Panel May Help Turn Over a New Leaf Jamaica commission set to present final recommendations to Parliament on whether to decriminalize ganja 6.2.01   Mark Fineman L.A.Times pA3 KINGSTON, Jamaica   Imagine a lush, tropical land just a few hundred miles off the U.S. coast where marijuana, though illegal, is a cultural icon worshiped by thousands and so plentiful it goes for just $26 a pound. Now, imagine this place when it's legal. That's precisely what Jamaica's govt-appointed National Commission on Ganja has been doing for the last 9 months. Led by the dean of social sciences at Kingston's Univ. of the West Indies, the 7 member commission has heard from more than 150 people & institutions ranging from the Medical Assn. of Jamaica to the Rastafarian Centralization Org., and it has sounded out more than a dozen communities nationwide. This month, the official body will present its final recommendations on whether marijuana should be decriminalized here. An interim report that Commission chair Barry Chevannes presented to Jamaican PM P.J. Patterson in May gave no clear indication whether the commission will endorse decriminalization, a recommendation that would then be put to Parliament for a vote. "It may be deduced so far that most persons & organizations would support the decriminalization of the use of ganja for private purposes & in private spaces," the preliminary report said. "However, there are those who would prefer to maintain the status quo regarding the criminal status of ganja in Jamaica." The Bush admin isn't likely to welcome decriminalization. Even under Clinton, State Dept & DEA consistently expressed concern over Jamaica's large marijuana crop and its exports to U.S. markets.

Drug czar's dirty secret John Walters' Iran-Contra drug connection 5.16.01 & Uri Dowbenko Online Journal John P. Walters, appointed "Drug Czar" by Pres. GWBush is uniquely qualified for his new job. He was actually involved in the Iran-Contra Drug Trafficking Cover-up. In a recent interview, whistle-blower Al Martin, who testified before the congressional Kerry Committee & the Alexander Committee about Iran-Contra, stated that "when Asst Sec.State Elliott Abrams went to Panama to have a meeting with (former Panamanian ruler) Noriega, he took along Dep.Asst Sec.State, Michael Kozak & John Walters, who at that time had been appointed special advisor to State Dept's Office of Inter-American Affairs." Martin says, "They went down to smooth things over with Noriega, who was complaining that he wasn't getting a big enough piece of the pie for allowing Panama to be used as a trans-shipping point for drugs & weapons. We were complaining that he wasn't keeping up his end of the bargain, making facilities secure for the storage of drugs & weapons. His G-2 was pilfering a lot of materiel. Meanwhile Noriega was complaining that he wasn't getting a big enough slice of the pie." This came soon after Oliver North had ripped Noriega off for $5 million dollars in that boat deal with Donald Aronow (Ch.18, The Conspirators Al Martin 2001 National Liberty Press Pray, MT). He was still upset about Ollie taking his money. So the 3 of them went down to have a discussion. They met at the Intercontinental Hotel in Panama on Dec. 10 to smooth things out." "Noriega was promised a bigger cut of the pie, when he said he wasn't making enough money," Martin continues. "He claimed there were a lot of people on his end within G-2 that had to be paid. Abrams tried to tell him that everybody was not getting the cut they had. The price of cocaine was falling so rapidly because we were importing so much of the stuff. Consequently the whole pie had become smaller than before. … His father Vernon Walters got him the position. His father is very, very loyal to the Bush Cabal and had been for years. You don't see Vern much anymore. Vernon Walters was one of the original post-war Military- Industrial Complexers." USArmy Lt.Gen. Vernon A. Walters, CIA Dep.Dir. 1972 -1976 for Nixon. When the Watergate scandal erupted, Walters covered CIA's liabilities.Agency fingerprints were all over Watergate burglary, and prime players, Cubans, Hunt and McCord, were all CIA agents or assets. Later, according to "Silent Coup" author Len Colodny, old friend Gen. Alexander Haig was instrumental in getting Walters translator job for secret Paris talks between Kissinger & N.Vietnamese. Walters was also acting CIA Dir. 1973 between Jas. Schlesinger & Wm Colby. V. Walters appt Amb.-at-Large by Pres. Reagan. Martin's book describes real reason why price of cocaine kept falling in the mid 1980s. Chapter called "Classified Illegal Operations Cordoba and Screw Worm" describes how Oliver North planned to distribute "more cocaine into U.S. than ever imagined before. 'Operation Screw Worm' was last & largest. It envisioned a tremendous expansion of 'authorized' narcotics trafficking." Martin writes, "North had set up the time in May 1986 of the first biweekly policy and planning session of the FDN. Fred Ikley & Donald Gregg were there. The usual cast of characters, Manuel Diaz, Nestor Sanchez. North envisioned a 50,000kg increase per month which absolutely astounded me," Martin continues. Jeb Bush, I think, correctly voiced concerns that had already come into play that the CIA was dealing in so much cocaine that its street value was becoming depressed. This had already happened. In 1985; cocaine was commanding $30,000/kg. By 1986, it dropped to $15,000.kg and was continuing to drop. But North felt it was important to raise the revenues, so there was going to be a tremendous increase in importation," writes Martin (p.65, The Conspirators A.Martin) John P. Walters as head of White House Office of National Drug Control Policy "Drug Czar." His previous job was Dep.Dir. for Supply Reduction, no.2 position under Wm Bennett in Geo.Bush pere admin. According to Wash. Post, "Walters stresses the importance of criminal penalties for drug users and openly opposes the use of marijuana for medical purposes." Walters uniquely qualified by his intimate knowledge of how to cover up US Govt drug trafficking. He has vowed to continue the pretense of the phony War on Drugs. According to Justice Dept, there is $500 billion to $1 trillion of money laundering a year in the U.S. Financing the federal deficit and keeping the stock market buoyed depends on daily reinvestment of laundered monies. A large percentage of that depends on the cash flow from the high-margin profits of narcotics trafficking, govt contract fraud, burgeoning for-profit prison industry and its concomitant slave labor market, all key components of phony War on Drugs." 5.11.01 AP story ironically headlined "Bush's choice for drug czar vows to help addicts." Maybe John Walters will make the price of cocaine drop again.

Chevannes said the commission is seriously considering the "external consequences" of its recommendation. Beyond a potential U.S. condemnation, they include a possible snowball effect on other marijuana-producing Caribbean islands that have considered decriminalizing the plant in the past. And K.D. Knight, Jamaica's national security minister, said this week that he opposes decriminalization.
The commission chairman cited a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that struck a blow to medical use of marijuana in America as a sign of the times in Jamaica's powerful neighbor to the north. "The U.S., in the kind of mood it is in today, well, this matter will be one for the commission to weigh," Chevannes said. Privately, however, U.S. and Jamaican law enforcement officials say the island's marijuana trade has been eclipsed by a more lucrative role as a transshipment point for Colombian cocaine bound for the United States, a multibillion-dollar industry that is fueling gang wars in Kingston, the capital, and a murder rate that ranks among the highest in the world. Some proponents of decriminalization argue that Jamaican police could focus more resources on combating the cocaine trade if relieved of targeting ganja; last year, police officials say, they seized more than 6 tons of marijuana and destroyed more than 1,000 acres of the plant.

Yet ganja remains plentiful, readily available and cheap; by comparison, a pound of the Jamaican herb that goes for $26 here can fetch more than $1,500 in the U.S. "One opinion on the commission is that [decriminalization] would not significantly increase the use of marijuana," Chevannes said. "Right now, anyone who wants to smoke ganja is virtually at liberty to do so. It is freely available at large gatherings. And, indeed, if police were to arrest everyone who's doing it, tens of thousands would be in jail." Still, he added, police here arrest about 5,000 people on marijuana charges annually, 90% of them for minor offenses. "So, arguably, the only thing the decriminalization of it would be doing is taking the status of a crime off thousands of people," Chevannes said. "And most of them are young people. "Were the commission to recommend decriminalization, it would not seriously change anything here."

Scalia's Originalism
6.17.00   Geo. Will Wash.Post

The amendment was written in the context of the English common law principle that "the eye cannot by the laws of England be guilty of a trespass.'' However, more than the law enforcement officers' eyes were involved in the scan of Kyllo's home that was conducted from the street and took only a few minutes. The question for the court, as Scalia posed it, was: How much technological enhancement of ordinary perception from such a vantage point, if any, is too much? Scalia, joined by Souter, Thomas, Ginsburg and Breyer, stressed that the thermal imaging technology used is "a device that is not in general public use'' and a homeowner has a reasonable expectation of privacy for activities that could not be detected without technologically enhanced eavesdropping. But, then, such eavesdropping is, in a sense, a contradiction in terms.
There often is wisdom in the logic of common language, so notice the derivation of the word that would commonly be used to describe what the government was doing: "eavesdropping.'' The late Justice Hugo Black noted that people surreptitiously seeking information used to lurk in the "eavesdrop,'' in the shadow under a building's eave. This may not have been nice, but neither was it invasive. It was the equivalent of surveillance by the "naked eye''-- in this example, the officers' eyes unassisted by any sense-enhancing technology. Privacy is neither an easily identifiable thing, like the Grand Canyon, nor an absolute value. However, the concern of the Constitution's Framers for protecting privacy began by assuming that privacy of the home is the most precious and most easily defined sort.

In Kyllo's case, Scalia offered this "originalist'' criterion: What preserves the "degree of privacy against government that existed when the Fourth Amendment was adopted''? Scalia and four colleagues concluded, "On the basis of this criterion, the information obtained by the thermal imager in this case was the product of a search.'' Stevens, writing for the three other dissenters, sided with law enforcement, accusing the majority of abandoning "judicial restraint'' as it overturned the Ninth Circuit, the home of liberal judicial activism, which had ruled against Kyllo. Stevens argued that searches of "property in plain view'' are presumptively reasonable. Scalia responded that it is "simply inaccurate'' to say, as the dissenters did, that the thermal imaging did not obtain information about the home's interior, the most protected realm of intimacy. Congress is about to step onto the dark and bloody ground of the judicial confirmation process. Jurisprudential theories, "strict construction,'' "originalism,'' the Constitution as a "living document'' that "evolves'' to meet "new problems''. will be bandied. Some senatorial and other critics of President Bush judicial nominees will portray those nominees as too much like Scalia, and hence too strict in their "originalist'' constitutional construction to understand the applicability of the document to modern conditions. The decision in the Kyllo case should, but probably will not, cause these critics second, or perhaps first, thoughts.

AMA discusses marijuana medical use 6.16.01   APJun 16 2001 CHICAGO   One month after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the medical use of marijuana, the American Medical Association is being urged to endorse the illegal drug as last-resort pain relief for seriously ill patients. At its policy-setting annual meeting starting here Sunday, the AMA also is being asked to endorse a moratorium on executions nationwide, although it rejected a similar proposal last year. The measures are among more than 250 reports, resolutions and proposals conference delegates are asking the nation's largest group of doctors to approve. Whether the historically cautious group will take a more activist role at its five-day meeting remains to be seen as the group struggles for effectiveness amid a worrisome slide in membership. The challenge is to appeal to physicians with divergent political views while at the same time tackling issues relevant to patients. "They don't want to take positions that they're concerned the public would consider not necessarily appropriate for physicians to take,'' said Dr. Jimmy Hara, a sometimes AMA member and co-president of the Los Angeles chapter of the activist group Physicians for Social Responsibility. Desperately seeking to attract new members, the AMA is more likely than ever to stick to middle ground, Hara said. The marijuana question is an example. The Supreme Court's May 14 ruling that it's illegal to sell or possess marijuana for medical use appears to be having little effect in the eight states with medical marijuana laws, and some have even moved to expand marijuana laws despite the ruling. The AMA's current policy opposes use of medical marijuana but says there should be more research on the issue. But a report by an AMA council says the group should support the "compassionate use'' of marijuana while also urging further research. Like all proposals at the meeting, the marijuana report could be altered or withdrawn before being sent to the House of Delegates for a vote on whether to make it policy during the meeting's final three days.

The AMA enters this year's meeting leaner, in better fiscal health, and - its leaders maintain - better equipped to tackle ongoing challenges such as membership and managed care reform. In its year 2000 financial report, the AMA reported earning $2.7 million on operations, compared with a $15 million loss in 1999. The turnaround was achieved by reducing or eliminating programs and cutting staff by 14 percent, or 188 jobs. But the AMA lost more than 3,000 members and $4.2 million in revenue from membership dues last year, continuing a slide that began several years ago. That puts membership at 290,357, or only about one-third of the nation's 800,000-plus doctors, residents and medical students. 10 years ago, the AMA had nearly 300,000 members, or about 40 percent of the nation's doctors. "Membership is the most crucial area for the AMA,'' the financial report said, acknowledging that the group's effectiveness and success depends on rebuilding its ranks. The AMA formed an advisory committee after last year's annual meeting to address the problem, and gained insight into possible remedies from a doctors' survey the committee conducted at the AMA's winter meeting in Orlando. Comments included complaints about high dues - ranging from $420 annually for regular members to $20 for medical students. But one respondent told the group the "biggest issue in AMA membership deterioration is public perception that AMA has become a trade union interested primarily in MD income. Many physicians would return to membership if widespread perceptions become that AMA is really 'physicians dedicated to the health of America.' '' Alternative dues packages for residents and fellows and outreach programs targeting young doctors, residents and even pre-med students are among solutions the AMA has implemented or is considering, the committee said in a report to be presented at the meeting. Other proposals at the meeting include:

•   urging the AMA to officially recommend a low-salt diet to all Americans, even those without high blood pressure, "as an effective means of preventing the development of hypertension.''
•   calling for a ban on prescription drug ads to the public to decrease drug costs and improve doctor- patient relationships.
•   calling for the AMA to lobby for mandatory alcoholism screening for all drunken-driving offenders.
•   health of the AMA-sponsored union, Physicians for Responsible Negotiation, also will be discussed in light of a recent Supreme Court decision preventing private-hospital doctors from organizing if they have supervisory duties.

Dr. Says Cat Allergy Cured by LSD  
3.3.01   AP

NEW YORK   Dr. Andrew Weil, best-selling author & longtime proponent of alternative health remedies, says on ''60 Minutes'' that he cured his lifelong allergy to cats by using the hallucinogenic drug. "I took LSD. I was in a wonderful outdoor setting. I felt terrific and, in the midst of this, a cat came up to me and crawled into my lap,'' he says on the CBS show, which airs Sunday. "I did not have an allergic reaction to it and I never did since.'' Weil says he believes some allergies are learned. "That gave me the idea that (taking LSD) would be a great way to teach people to unlearn allergies,'' he says. "If the drugs were legal, I think I would recommend that some patients do it.''

Volunteer in Asthma Study Dies After Inhaling Drug 6.15.01   Lawrence K. Altman NYTimes A healthy volunteer died recently after inhaling a drug in a federally financed asthma study conducted by Johns Hopkins University, officials said yesterday. The volunteer's hospitalization after inhaling the drug led the institution to suspend the research. Officials at Johns Hopkins declined to identify the volunteer or the date of death, or to release anything more than sketchy information about the study and the circumstances surrounding the fatality. They cited not only confidentiality for the volunteer but also the family's request that they not publicly discuss the study itself. An autopsy was performed. But in its brief statement, Hopkins said, "The exact cause of death has not been determined."

lab rat tragedies This photo is a test. It accompanies a very important 6.10.01 San Jose Mercury News story to which it is linked. When the photo no longer appears here, we assume the story is no longer "in the clear" i.e. available on the Net at no charge via basic link.   By 6.10.01, a 1998 Laura Saari article on Orange County CA motel kids was available only for purchase from the Orange County Register despite much public & professional accolade and years in the clear after publication a la Winston Smith's memory hole.

University officials said that as required, they had notified three federal agencies involved in the research, which was conducted at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center in Baltimore. Officials of those agencies said they would look into the death and the circumstances surrounding it, and referred all questions to Johns Hopkins. Risk is inherent in research, although experiments on humans vary widely in their danger, and in design. Clinical trials, for example, are intended to test the safety and effectiveness of an experimental drug that may benefit the volunteers. But the Hopkins study was apparently of a type known as a challenge experiment, testing a theory about how the body responds to various stimuli.

In such studies, a volunteer usually does not stand to benefit directly, though the findings could ultimately contribute to development of a new therapy that the participant might then use. Given the usual lack of direct benefit, ethicists say, these studies require particularly close monitoring, because they can pose a risk to a volunteer's health or life. In recruiting volunteers for asthma and allergy studies, Hopkins says on its Web site that it will compensate participants for their time. Before they are started, all federally financed experiments on humans require ethical review by a committee generally known as an institutional review board, maintained by the researching university. Johns Hopkins said a review board had approved the study in which the volunteer died.
The university described the study at issue as a baseline physiologic test using an inhaled drug, hexamethonium, to determine how the lung protects the airways from narrowing, a development that plays a critical role in asthma. Ethicists and asthma experts not affiliated with Hopkins expressed hope in interviews last night that the university would quickly make public full details of the study. The experts said that protecting the confidentiality of one affected individual was understandable, but that citing such a reason to withhold other public discussion of a federally financed study was extraordinary.

Providing full disclosure "is what you would expect a leading research institution to do," said Dr. LeRoy Walters, an ethicist at the Kennedy Institute at Georgetown University. He said Johns Hopkins's brief statement "is just the beginning of the disclosure I would hope for." In response to a request filed by The New York Times under the Freedom of Information Act, the Office for Human Research Protections released three letters it had received from Hopkins. The office is a unit of the Department of Health and Human Services charged with protecting the safety of volunteers in experiments. The letters sketch a picture of an experiment that went amiss, beginning 24 hours after the volunteer inhaled hexamethonium. On May 7, the volunteer reported dry cough, shortness of breath on exertion, muscular aches and fever. Two days later, the volunteer was admitted to the hospital, and doctors were concerned about a possible reaction to the drug. "This obviously qualifies as a serious adverse event," Dr. Alkis Togias, one of the study researchers, wrote in a letter dated May 9.
In a letter to the federal office dated May 17, Dr. Chi V. Dang, vice dean for research at Hopkins, said that the study had been suspended and that the volunteer remained hospitalized. Dr. Dang noted that before entering the experiment, the volunteer had undergone extensive tests, including those for lung function, and had been found healthy. In a letter dated June 6, Dr. Dang wrote, "It is with deep regret that I report the death of the subject." Dr. Dang wrote that Hopkins was asking a laboratory to test the hexamethonium, which, he wrote, the manufacturer had said was 99.6 percent pure. (The letter did not identify the manufacturer.) Dr. Dang also said tests were being conducted on equipment used in the experiment and to determine whether the volunteer had come down with a a viral infection.

Researchers say the death of study volunteers, particularly healthy ones, is rare, though official registries of the number of humans involved in experiments are not kept. The Hopkins death is one of a small number that have come to public attention in recent years. 2 years ago, Jesse Gelsinger, 18, died in a gene therapy trial at the University of Pennsylvania. Federal officials later cited Penn researchers for numerous violations of safety standards in the experiment. In research in 1996, Nicole Wan, a healthy college student, died shortly after a bronchoscopy, an examination of the breathing tubes in the lung, at the University of Rochester in New York. In 1993, 5 of 15 participants died in a drug trial at the National Institutes of Health that was testing a promising drug for hepatitis B. And in 1999, federal officials temporarily suspended human experimentation at Duke University because of shortcomings in the university's system for protecting volunteers.
Such episodes have led critics to demand that the government strengthen the budgets and roles of review boards to monitor clinical trials, and that academic medical centers police their researchers more strictly. For the study at Johns Hopkins, the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute said, it awarded a $1,553,462 grant to the principal investigator, Dr. Solbert Permutt, to test up to 290 volunteers from Dec. 15, 1998, to Nov. 30, 2002. The volunteers were asked to inhale hexamethonium as part of deep breathing tests so the researchers could observe the effect on relaxing the airways, officials said. "By offering an in-depth understanding of the way in which airway mechanics lead to the manifestations of asthma, the project should answer many questions behind this disease," Dr. Permutt's team wrote in its request for financing.

The Food and Drug Administration licensed hexamethonium pills in the 1950's to treat high blood pressure and decrease bleeding during surgery. But because the manufacturer withdrew the drug from the market in the 1970's, its use today is considered experimental. Hexamethonium has been used in several studies involving lung physiology at leading academic medical centers without any unexpected adverse events, Johns Hopkins said. All 3 federal agencies notified of the death, the Food & Drug Administration, the Office for Human Research Protections, and the heart, lung & blood institute, said they would investigate the safety of the drug and whether the volunteers had been adequately protected.

§   newsgroup wit
"Geodon, the new atypical neuroleptic from Pfizer (used to treat naturally occuring hallucinations) offers distinct advantages for people who post to this newsgroup. Taken twice daily with food, patients experience less side effects with similar "coverage" as older neuroleptics. This means better posts, more focused ideas, and perhaps, even an intellectual contribution to the methodology of the CIA. Think about it the next time you contact your (mental) healthcare provider; it may raise your status as a target for counterintelligence investigations, and your readers will love your new succinct & focused style !"

history

John Henry, toxicologist and professor at London's Imperial College of Medicine, who was not affiliated with the study, said it was possible that coca leaves, which contain a small amount of cocaine "were smoked by people in Britain in the 17th century." Cocaine itself did not come to Britain until about 1900, but coca leaves, chewed by many Incas in the 1500s, were transported to Europe in the 17th century by Spanish explorers.

Just say yes to Ritalin!
9.25.00   Lawrence H. Diller, M.D. Salon.Com   video & links

Patrick and Sarah McCormack (not their real names) came to my office in a panic last year because a school wanted them to medicate their 7-year-old son. Sarah tearfully explained that the principal and psychologist at Sammy's school in an upscale Bay Area town were absolutely clear that the first-grader should be on Ritalin. An outside private psychologist who had previously tested Sammy did not find any learning problems but concluded that he had ADHD and was defiant of authority. She suggested medication. The school psychologist, in his report on Sammy, was straightforward in recommending "psychopharmacological therapy" for the child. The McCormacks were told, in no uncertain terms, that unless Sammy's behavior changed, he would be transferred to a special class for behavior-problem children at another school or the McCormacks would have to consider alternatives to public education like home schooling.
Patrick and Sarah had few problems with their son at home, though they conceded he was a "handful" and sometimes had problems getting along with other children. They deeply valued his outgoing personality and feared that Ritalin would change him. They also worried about the immediate and long-term side effects of the drug. They acknowledged that Sammy struggled at school but felt school personnel had not done enough and were using the wrong approaches with their kid. They hoped he could continue at the neighborhood school where he had made friends despite his problems. They wanted my opinion and support for their point of view at the school.

When I met Sammy in my office, he was full of life and reasonably focused, chatting at length about activities at home and at school. Though he was in first grade, he could read at a fourth-grade level. I got a better picture of his problems when I met him with his parents. When they were there he acted impulsively, getting up and down from his seat and moving about the room when we tried to have a family conversation. Sammy regularly interrupted his parents and bossed them around, especially Sarah. His lack of respect troubled me, but I felt optimistic that Sammy could be successful without medication, especially after I spoke with his teacher. She was more positive about him than others who had reported on his conduct at school. She felt he had made progress in her classroom but still wondered how she could help him better stay on task. She was open to ideas. I suggested that Sammy be immediately rewarded for good behavior and given chips for finished work that could be exchanged for prizes at the end of the day. She was comfortable with giving him tangible consequences for not meeting her expectations.

I suspected that medication would probably help with Sammy's self-control, but, as I told the McCormacks, it was not absolutely necessary. I told them that children of Sammy's age never become addicted and that the drug's effects on his behavior would last only four hours per dose. But it was more important that they work on their parenting, and I referred them to a counselor. I couldn't say for sure whether changes at home and school would make the difference for Sammy, but I certainly felt it was up to the parents to decide on the medication. I said I would support their decision either way. A year later the McCormacks returned, frustrated and embittered. Sammy had a very good end to first grade, but second grade with an unsympathetic, unyielding teacher had been disastrous. The principal and school district were now insisting that Sammy be on medication if he was to stay in a regular third-grade classroom. The school said it "could not meet the child's needs within the regular classroom setting without medication." He was disrupting the classroom. Other parents had complained about his behavior. A one-on-one aide assigned to Sammy had not worked. Sarah thought the aide was nothing more than a snitch who regularly recorded Sammy's misdeeds for the principal.
If the family refused to give Sammy medication, the boy would be transferred to a different school, a bus ride from their home, to be in a special class with four other "disturbed" children. They could also home-school him or challenge the school's decision in a hearing. Ultimately they could go to court, but a final decision could take years , by then Sammy might be in middle school. The parents were loath to move Sammy to a new school. However, they still were against using medication with their son.

Families like the McCormacks, who reject medication and face a loss of access to conventional public school classrooms, are increasing in numbers. In May, I testified before a congressional subcommittee hearing on ADHD and Ritalin organized by several congressmen who had received letters from distressed parents pressured by their local schools to medicate their children. The pressure has become so intense in some areas that resolutions urging teachers to restrain from recommending medical evaluations and Ritalin for students are under consideration in several states. One passed recently in Colorado. Yet even as the issue of parents' rights is being considered in some areas, the stakes have dramatically increased in others, where schools are seeking the intervention of CPS to get parents to medicate their kids. It is no longer simply an issue of which school or which class a child will attend. Instead, some parents are being threatened with the possibility of losing custody of their children if they refuse to comply with suggested treatment for an alleged medical condition.
Many doctors and educators would agree that withholding medication can be viewed as a form of child abuse or neglect. Dr. Harold Koplewicz, vice chairman of the New York University Child Study Center, said on "Good Morning America" last month that he felt a CPS referral was justified when a family refused to medicate a child for whom a diagnosis of ADHD had been made by an experienced evaluator. "Ritalin is simply the best treatment for this disorder," he said. I can't agree. It is true that the courts have ordered medical intervention when a child's life is threatened. Judges have overruled the wishes of Christian Scientist parents not to give antibiotics to children who face life-threatening infection. Similarly, blood products have been given to children in surgery over the objections of Jehovah's Witnesses. But those situations are quite different from ones in which ADHD is diagnosed and Ritalin is prescribed, according to Dolores Sargent, a former special education teacher now practicing family law in Danville, Calif. "ADHD children and families do not face immediate life-threatening situations," she says, "and ADHD continues to be a 'disease' with multiple causes and no definitive markers. It's unlikely any decision that insists on the use of Ritalin for ADHD could withstand a court challenge."

The existence of effective alternative treatments makes any forced decision to medicate children against parents' wishes both legally and ethically shaky. Yet, the willingness of some CPS workers to pursue families unwilling to dose their children shows how strongly entrenched medication for behavior problems in children has become in our country. A local CPS office cannot demand that a child be medicated , yet , but it can ascertain whether a child is safe in his or her parents' home. Legally, CPS can alert parents that their child's uncontrollable behavior, which puts the child at significant risk of abuse at home, must change. If they feel this advice is not being taken, the agency can remove children from their homes.
What seems to be overlooked in this simplistic, and seemingly convenient, way of dealing with hard-to-handle kids is that alternative strategies to medication exist, from family counseling to short-term respite care. The perceived superiority, rapid onset and inexpensive nature of Ritalin make it a very attractive choice for school administrators, who may pressure parents of students who threaten to drain their beleaguered schools of time or money. As more and more families opt for the Ritalin fix, it becomes easier to insist that other families in similar situations try the drug, even though these families may not want their kids to take stimulants. I still prescribe Ritalin, but only after assessing a child's school learning environment and family dynamics, especially the parents' style of discipline. But I continue to ask questions about Ritalin in a country where we use 80 percent of the world's stimulants. I have no doubt that Ritalin "works" to improve short-term behavior and school performance in children with ADHD; however, it is not an equivalent to or substitute for better parenting and schools for our children.

I was surprised to see Surgeon General David Satcher quoted recently as saying that he believes Ritalin is under-prescribed in our country. I participated in last week's Conference on Children's Mental Health sponsored by his office and found that Ritalin is thought to be both under-prescribed and over-prescribed, depending upon the community being assessed and its specific threshold for ADHD diagnosis and Ritalin treatment. Data shows, for example, that African-American families use Ritalin at rates one-half to one-quarter of their white, socioeconomic peers. Asian-American youth are virtually absent in statistics for Ritalin use. I happen to believe that Satcher's comments were intended for these communities and, ironically, will not have any impact on them. Instead, I think, his statement will have perverse impact on white middle- and upper-middle-class families. In some communities, Ritalin use among boys in this group is as high as one in five.
After much agonizing, Sammy's parents decided to put him in a special education class rather than give him Ritalin and, for the moment, things are going well for him. But they plan to move from the Bay Area, largely because of Sammy's school experience. With 4 million children taking Ritalin in America today, there are undoubtedly millions of other parents struggling with the decision of whether to medicate their children. The McCormacks' story demonstrates the dilemmas and pressures many of these families face. Proponents of drug treatment for children's behavior problems applaud those parents who choose Ritalin to improve their children's learning experience. But civil libertarians , and doctors like me , worry about the specter of more families being forced against their will to put their children on psychiatric medication. These families, and their right to make choices for their children, deserve our support and protection.

for women & girls Lawrence Diller on Ritalin risks NYU Child Study Ctr Children & Adults w/ ADHD National Alliance for the Mentally Ill Citizens Commission on Human Rights Ctr for Pediatric Research

First ADHD guidelines issued Schneider Children's Hospital ADHD Ctr Developmental Delay NIMH ADHD Additudemag.com Pro: Effective treatment of ADHD Ritalin as part of MKUltra

Dr. Breeding Dr. Breggin juvenile justice

links Narco News Bibliographia Studiorum Psychedelicorum tuition hostage to 5th Amendment waiver GWU Natl Security archives   DoJ evidence of U.S. as narco-state expunged Shrub cocaine arrest

CIA coke Cele Castillo Giorgio Pelossi Gary Webb   bio "The CIA couldn't even mine a harbor without getting its trench coat stuck in its fly. … it's important to differentiate between malign intent & gross negligence." spelling it out for Jerry Brown on the radio 10.16.99   Eugene OR address The Pariah 9.98   Brad Wilson & Chas. Bowden Esquire "… there are no rules but to complete the mission." Mike Holm, DEA Miami 11.6.98 OCWkly 1.97 CJR

Rogue Elephant   Kent Heiner Drug trade, Kennedy assassination & Vietnam war No matter how much honest work is done at the CIA, however, the fact remains that for more than 50 years it has served as a front for what is now the most powerful drug-trafficking organization in the western hemisphere. During the time period currently under discussion, the faction referred to resided mostly in the Agency's Directorate of Operations and consisted of unofficial "agents" and "assets" as well as career officers. … from Watergate to the Chilean assassinations to the Nugan Hand banking scandal to Iran-Contra, and in many of the scandals in between, the JMWAVE Cubans were always there. … CIA-trained Cuban exiles became prevalent among traffickers; in one major bust, seventy percent of those arrested were members of Operation Forty. By the early 1970s, American organizers had supplanted the Corsicans in the heroin trade (Krüger 1980). During the mid-1950s, the CIA and mafia fought a heroin turf war against the French in far-away Saigon; … Corsicans used their intelligence connections as a cover for their heroin trafficking, and the French used the trade as a way to fund their war in Southeast Asia, … U.S. had been carrying the majority of the financial burden of the French Indochina war in the early 1950s and had also supplied hundreds of advisers. One such advisor was the CIA's Colonel Edward G. Lansdale. Lansdale had been the American most responsible for the victory of Ramon Magsaysay over President Quirino in the Philippines; the CIA man had bolstered his client's popularity with the use of "psychological warfare" and counterinsurgency campaigns. . Lansdale and Magsaysay had staged mock attacks and liberations on Philippine villages. The destruction was real, but the deception lay in the fact that the attacks were not initiated by the Communist guerillas but by the same faction who heroically came to the villagers' "rescue." (Prouty 1992:35) … On an investigative tour of Indochina in the summer of 1953, Lansdale flew to the Plain of Jars in Laos, where he learned some of the details of the French opium operations, including the fact that General Salan, the Commander in Chief of the French Expeditionary Corps, had ordered his officers to buy up the 1953 opium harvest subsequently shipped to Saigon for sale overseas (McCoy 1991:140) Eisenhower January 8th National Security Council meeting, "The key to winning this war is to get the Vietnamese to fight. There is just no sense in even talking about the United States forces replacing the French in Indochina. If we did so, the Vietnamese could be expected to transfer their hatred of the French to us. I cannot tell you how bitterly opposed I am to such a course of action. This war in Indochina would absorb our troops by divisions!" (Prouty 1992:51) Sec.State John Foster Dulles proposed that the U.S. should carry on guerilla operations against the Viet Minh in the event of French defeat. The Council decided that Allen Dulles was to develop this contingency plan. On the 29th of January, the President's Special Committee on Indochina met (in the absence of the president himself) to discuss possible aid to the desperate French. "At the end of the meeting," writes Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty, "Allen Dulles, then the director of central intelligence, suggested that an unconventional-warfare officer, Col. Edward G. Lansdale, be added to the group of American liaison officers that General Henri Navarre, the French commander, had agreed to accept in Indochina." (Prouty 1992:38-39,349) The absence of the President for this critical decision was not atypical of the administration's Southeast Asia policy (Scott 1972). The battle at Dienbienphu was lost by May 1954. Because the U.S. would not become directly involved, the conflict was taken to the conference table, and a peace settlement was reached that year in Geneva, creating separate administrations in northern & southern Vietnam. The north was to be Communist, led by Ho Chi Minh, and the south non-Communist, until an all-Vietnam election in 1956 could unify the country. The elections never took place; Ngo Dinh Diem, the president of South Vietnam sponsored by the U.S. and managed by Lansdale, declared that the terms of the Geneva Accords were unacceptable and that there would be no elections as therein specified. [ NatSec replaces democracy's advocacy ] Vietnamese Binh Xuyen organized crime syndicate, controlled Saigon. By the time fighting broke out between Diem's forces and the organized- crime-supported United Front in March 1955, the U.S. and France had already chosen opposing sides. In fact, the two sides were "pawns in a power struggle between the French 2eme Bureau and the American CIA." Diem's forces prevailed after a month of skirmishes and six days of heavy and destructive fighting; the Binh Xuyen were pushed back into the swamp areas from which they had come. In retaliation, some of the French started a terrorist bombing campaign against Americans in Saigon. This ended when Lansdale determined "who the ringleaders were (many of them were intelligence officers) [and] grenades started going off in front of their houses in the evenings." (McCoy 1972:119-25) After Castro took over Cuba and closed the island to mafia activity, the Dominican Republic became a staging point for a CIA-sponsored invasion of Cuba, as well as a new transit point for Trafficante's narcotics traffic. … Trujillo … assassinated in May 1961, just after the CIA's failed invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. … As one of the CIA-connected men who had supplied Castro with arms before he came to power and subsequently fell from favor with the U.S., Ruby is thought to have negotiated Trafficante's release from Castro's prison (Giancana 1992:279; Marrs 1989:394-98). … In 1947, an FBI staff assistant in Congressman Richard Nixon's office wrote a memo asking Ruby to be excused from testifying before congress on the grounds that Ruby was "performing information functions" for the Congressman's staff (Marrs 1989:269). … Ruby was able to give his FBI handlers valuable tips while eliminating his own criminal competition. … At a midnight press conference at Dallas Police headquarters twelve hours after the assassination, he shouted out a correction to a statement identifying Oswald as a member of the "Free Cuba Committee," an anti-Castro organization. Ruby called out, "That's [the] Fair Play for Cuba [Committee], Henry," identifying Oswald with the pro-Castro organization in the name of which Oswald had distributed leaflets and made television appearances in New Orleans that summer (Scott 1993:161). Johnson who derailed the Texas investigations into the President's murder by forming a presidential commission to handle the matter. … In New Orleans in the summer of 1977, CIA and military personnel were discovered using offshore oil rigs to smuggle drugs into the U.S. in cooperation with the Marcello crime family (Ruppert 2000). Some of the rigs were owned by George H. W. Bush's own Zapata Offshore company (Bush was CIA director until 1977) and were serviced by Brown and Root, the Houston-based contracting company which sponsored Lyndon Johnson's political career. Brown and Root is currently owned by Halliburton, for which current Vice President Dick Cheney was CEO. … At a White House reception on Christmas eve, a month after he succeeded to the presidency, Johnson told the Joint Chiefs: 'Just get me elected, and then you can have your war.'" (Scott 1993:32) … in January 1965. That year, Ed Lansdale went to Vietnam as Senior Liaison Officer of the U.S. Mission to South Vietnam. The years 1965 and 1966 were enormous landmarks for CIA involvement with Southeast Asian heroin. The CIA-mafia alliance moved many of its former Cuba operatives to Southeast Asia. By 1965, a power- hungry Laotian general named Ouane Rattikone was "on a big move . . . to consolidate the opium business" and had cut the Corsican transport pilots out of the picture, leaving Air America as the only alternative (McCoy 1972:301,362-63). The CIA headquarters for secret operations in northern Laos came to share the city of Long Tieng with a heroin-refining laboratory which General Vang Pao opened in 1970 (McCoy 1972). … Richard Nixon cited business with Pepsi-Cola as being the reason for his presence in Dallas on the day of President Kennedy's murder, but his alibi did not check out (Marrs 1989:270) Ted Shackley had been the CIA's JMWAVE station chief in Miami from 1962-65 and had directed the Cuban Bay of Pigs veterans against Castro; … Deputy Chief of Station in Laos 1965 … Associate Deputy Director of Operations (an office with Agency-wide responsibilities to which he was appointed by Director George Bush) before officially retiring from the CIA in 1979 … A Special Forces colonel who was in Laos in early 1965 told Journalist Daniel Hopsicker that up until that time, the opium bought from the Laotian hill tribesmen was disposed of in a monthly bonfire. He noted that the arrival of Ted Shackley, Oliver North, and Richard Secord coincided with a change in procedures; orders were given to store the opium for removal to another site instead of burning it. Secord sent his Air Force planes to bomb Vang Pao's rivals. Barry Seal at some point became a part of the Southeast Asian enterprise, piloting personnel and contraband (Hopsicker 2001:183-88). … Michael Hand, a CIA agent from Long Tieng, had founded the bank with four Air America officials. Although his reappointment of CIA Director Allen Dulles and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover were Kennedy's first official acts as President, … After the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961, … Kennedy fired the top leadership responsible for the invasion, including Director Allen Dulles, his deputy Charles Cabell, and Dick Bissell, the deputy director in charge of the CIA's covert action wing. On June 28, 1961 Kennedy signed National Security Action Memoranda (NSAMs) 55,56, and 57, which placed the responsibility for covert operations, traditionally the CIA's, in the hands of the Defense Dept and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. … In its final months, with NSAM 263, the Kennedy administration announced its plans to withdraw 1,000 military personnel from Vietnam by the end of the year and to have the bulk of the approximately 15,000 such personnel out of Vietnam by 1965. … prosecution of Willis Bird, who had been charged with the bribery of an aid official in Vientiane. But Bird never returned to the U.S. to stand trial (Krüger 1980:130; see also McCoy 1991:168-69). … CIA agent Richard Case Nagell … Dick Russell's The Man Who Knew Too Much. … Howard Hunt, close associate of David Atlee Phillips, with whom he worked in the both the CIA's Guatemalan campaign of 1954 and the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961. Hunt would later be arrested for his role in the Watergate affair. … In one of Hunt's libel suits, one Marita Lorenz gave sworn testimony that Lee Harvey Oswald, American mercenaries Frank Sturgis and Gerry Patrick Hemming, and Cuban exiles including Orlando Bosch, Pedro Diaz Lanz, and the brothers Guillermo and Ignacio Novo Sampol, had met one November midnight in 1963 at the Miami home of Orlando Bosch and had studied Dallas street maps. She also swore that she and Sturgis were at that time in the employ of the CIA and that they received payment from Howard Hunt under the name "Eduardo," … They arrived in Dallas on 21 November 1963, and stayed at a motel, where the group met Howard Hunt. Hunt stayed for about forty-five minutes and at one point handed an envelope of cash to Sturgis. About an hour after Hunt left, Jack Ruby came to the door. Lorenz says that this was the first time she had seen Ruby. By this time, she said, it was early evening. In her testimony, Lorenz identified herself and her fellow passengers as members of Operation Forty, the CIA-directed assassination team formed in 1960 in preparation for the Bay of Pigs invasion. She described her role as that of a "decoy." … (Lane 1991). … In the middle of Richard Nixon's second term as president, Ford was appointed by Nixon to replace Vice President Spiro Agnew due to legal proceedings against Agnew. When the Watergate cover-up caught up with Nixon, he resigned and left Ford to take over the office; Ford immediately pardoned Nixon in advance of any Watergate-related charges which might be brought against the ex-president. 15 months after Nixon's resignation in August 1974, Gerald Ford chose George Bush to head the CIA. It was in these circumstances that the National Security Council, over which Ford had direct oversight, made a deliberate and secret decision to use drug profits to fund the arming of the Kurds. As part of this program, the CIA used offshore oil rigs, some of which were owned by Bush's Zapata Offshore company, to smuggle the contraband past U.S. Customs (Ruppert 2000) … At the time of DeMohrenschildt's 1977 death, his address book contained George Bush's name with the words "Zapata Petroleum Midland" (which places the entry at a pre-1959 date), and George's college nickname, "Poppy" (Tarpley and Chaitkin 1992). … "Skull & Bones" society, organization founded in 1833 by a member of the Russell family, which owned the largest opium-trading company in U.S. … the "old China trade" … presidency of Zapata Offshore (1959), the U.S. House of Representatives (1967), the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee (1972), the directorship of the CIA (1976), the Vice Presidency (1981), and finally the Presidency (1989). … 1963 FBI memo informs us that "George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency" was briefed by the FBI on the reaction of Cuban exiles to the assassination of President Kennedy. … Seal was Ferrie's successor as manager of the CIA's Louisiana air fleet after Ferrie's 1967 murder during the prosecution of Clay Shaw, a New Orleans businessman who ran the International Trade Mart, where Seal is known to have had an office in 1969 (Hopsicker 2001) … Congressman Hale Boggs, … disappeared on a plane flight in 1972. (Groden and Livingstone 1989:116; Marrs 1989:562). … summarily deported by Robert Kennedy to Guatemala in 1961. Marcello, after what he described as an ordeal in a remote Guatemalan jungle, flown by Dave Ferrie back to the states. Ferrie was with Marcello in court on the day of the assassination and had to make a hasty trip to Dallas, where he and Barry Seal are reputed to have flown getaway planes for the conspirators (Hopsicker 2001: 164-65).

Crack Cop FBI documents link an ex-Laguna cop and drug runner to an Irvine executive with ties to the CIA 7.13.01   Nick Schou OCWeekly The CIA has always denied it used drug traffickers to raise cash for Ronald Reagan's 1980s war against the Nicaraguan Sandinista government. But FBI documents recently released to the OC Weekly show that a former top agency official met throughout that period with Ronald J. Lister, an ex-Laguna Beach cop who claimed to be the CIA's link between the South American cocaine trade, the Nicaraguan contras and LA's most notorious drug trafficker. The FBI documents, 5 heavily censored pages released in response to the Weekly 's 1997 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the CIA, concern Lister and William Earl Nelson, a vice president for security with the Irvine-based construction giant Fluor Corp. Nelson's previous job: deputy director of operations for the CIA. Nelson retired from the CIA in 1976 amid heated controversy over its ill-fated forays into Chile & Angola, clandestine operations that Nelson supervised from his office at the CIA's Langley, VA headquarters. Lister's relationship with the Fluor executive began in 1978. How they met isn't clear, thanks to government censors. But the documents do show that Nelson told FBI agents he met with Lister three to four times per year until 1985 and discussed various business ventures, including one in Central America. It's unclear from the documents what became of that project, FBI censors blocked out the details, arguing that revealing them might compromise U.S. national security. But independent sources suggest the deal probably involved Lister's mysteriously well-connected security company, Newport Beach-based Pyramid International Security Consultants Inc. a big CIA contact Lister's jump from police work in Laguna Beach, the Mayberry of Orange County, to life as a security advisor in war-torn Central America is just as strange as it sounds. In 1969, he served as a military policeman, interrogating captured North Vietnamese soldiers. Then, after a few years with the Maywood Police Dept, Lister joined the Laguna Beach PD, where he worked as a burglary detective. In 1979, a year before Lister quit the Laguna Beach force and just months after he first met Nelson, he launched Pyramid to carry out private security work. There's no question that Pyramid was involved in some highly unusual business in Central America. According to a 1998 U.S. Justice Dept Inspector General report, the company was investigated by the FBI at least 5 times between 1983 & 1986. "In Sept. 1983, Lister's company, Pyramid International Security Consultants, was listed as the subject of a neutrality violation investigation involving the sale of weapons to El Salvador and the loan of money from Saudi Arabia to the Salvadoran govt," the report states. "Lister was also alleged to be attempting to sell arms to several other countries." El Salvador circa the early 1980s was not open for business to just anybody. The entire region was wracked by civil wars & coups d'etat; El Salvador's military-led govt was engaged in a systematic campaign of torture & murder against anyone branded a communist or subversive. But in a 1996 interview with San Jose Mercury News reporter Gary Webb, former Pyramid employee Christopher Moore (another ex-Laguna Beach cop) claimed Lister shrugged off the dangers of doing business there. Lister reportedly told Moore he had "a big CIA contact" at an Orange County company and both Pyramid and its employees would be protected while in El Salvador. "I can't remember his name, but Ron was always running off to meetings with him, supposedly," Moore told Webb. "Ron said the guy was the former deputy director of operations or something, real high up there. All I know is that this supposed contact of his was working at the Fluor Corp. because I had to call Ron out there a couple of times." Moore said he traveled to El Salvador on Lister's behalf, accompanied by a Spanish-speaking man who said he worked at the Salvadoran consulate in Los Angeles. Once in the capital city of San Salvador, Moore says, he met face to face with Roberto D'Aubuisson, a former Salvadoran army intelligence officer, drug and weapons dealer, and leader of the right-wing ARENA party. But D'Aubuisson's legacy is darker still: he was the architect of El Salvador's paramilitary death squads, a Hitler admirer, and a sociopath reputed to have personally authorized the 1980 murder of Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero. "That was probably the highlight of my life at that point," Moore told Webb. "There I was, a reserve police officer who'd only been in the country for a couple of days, and I was sitting in this office in downtown San Salvador across the desk from the man who ran the death squads. He had a gun lying on top of his desk and had these filing cabinets pushed up against the windows of the office so nobody could shoot through them." The timing of Moore's trip to El Salvador coincides with a 1982 Pyramid contract proposal to provide security to the Salvadoran Ministry of Defense; narcotics detectives found the paperwork in a 1986 raid on Lister's home. The contract, written in Spanish and running more than 30 pages, shows Pyramid boasted the services of numerous (but unnamed) former CIA physical security officers and surveillance experts. Intriguingly, the document suggests that Lister was negotiating directly with Defense Minister General José Guillermo García, linked by El Salvador's Truth Commission to the 1981 massacre of more than 800 villagers in El Mozote. A close ally of D'Aubuisson, García was one of the most powerful members of the right-wing military junta that took control of El Salvador in 1979. One of Lister's partners in the venture, San Diego SWAT team weapons maker and government supplier Tim Lafrance, told the Weekly in 1997 that Pyramid was a "favored corporation" used by the CIA to help smuggle weapons to the Nicaraguan contras. Lafrance said he traveled to El Salvador with "2 giant boxes full of machine guns and ammunition", goods Lafrance said returned with him at the end of the trip. "The whole idea was to set up an operation in El Salvador that would allow us to get around U.S. laws and supply the contras with guns," he explained. "The smart way to do this was to find a military base. It's much easier to just build the weapons down there." [ concurs with govt methods recounted by Terry Reed, auth. Compromised ] While in El Salvador, Lafrance claimed, he manufactured weapons for Nicaragua's CIA-backed rebels known as the contras inside a mass-transit center run by the military. The weapons were airlifted by helicopter to contra training bases in Honduras, on Nicaragua's northern border. Lafrance also asserted that Pyramid's employees were guests at the well-appointed barracks of the elite, U.S.-trained Atlcatl battalion, the unit that carried out the massacre in El Mozote. The Pyramid security contract offers further evidence of Lister's CIA connections. On its cover page, the contract lists Richard E. Wilker as the firm's "technical director." Wilker is identified in corporate papers as an employee of another Newport Beach company, Intersect Inc. Wilker's current whereabouts are unknown, but two founding members of Intersect, both former CIA agents, told the Weekly they knew Lister. Although both nervously denied the CIA ever employed Wilker or Lister, the firm's vice president, John Vandewerker, said Wilker once traveled to El Salvador on business and mysteriously had to flee the country. "It was kind of touchy … as far as getting out of the country and all that kind of stuff," he said. Vandewerker also said that either Lister or Wilker had once helped him apply for a job with Nelson at Fluor Corp. "For a while, I tried to get a job at Fluor when I stopped working, and I know Rich [Wilker] was trying to sell something to Fluor," he said. Nelson seemed to be a potential source of employment for many former CIA agents, an irony, given that one of his final acts as a deputy director at the CIA was to recommend the agency terminate full-time jobs for CIA agents who were "marginal performers." "We owe these people a lot," Nelson wrote then-CIA director George Bush in a 1976 memo. "But not a lifetime job." Hundreds of CIA agents left the agency's payroll that year, including Vandewerker and Nelson himself, who said he was retiring for personal reasons. During his FBI interrogation, Nelson claimed Lister had applied for a job with Fluor. "He was never offered a job," states the FBI memo. The next sentence was censored by the FBI, but the memo continues, "Nelson thought Fluor might be able to use his [Lister's] company"— an apparent reference to Pyramid. "Nelson said [Lister] started traveling overseas, Lebanon and Central America, and he always had some scheme that never materialized." 'a dumb thing' The Lister-Nelson-D'Aubuisson connection is only one strand of Lister's life story. But the FBI documents also appear to allude to another: Lister's claim that he was simultaneously running cocaine with the support of the CIA. Nelson told his FBI interrogators that during a March 1985 meeting with Lister, the former Laguna cop begged Nelson for help. "I did a dumb thing because of greed," Lister reportedly told Nelson. What Lister meant is unclear, the next 7 lines of the FBI memo are blacked out. But Nelson's response is intact: he told the FBI he informed Lister there was no way the Agency could help him. Perhaps Lister was talking about the activity that earned him the most money, and ultimately the most trouble, in the 1980s. In 1982, the same year Lister first traveled to El Salvador for Pyramid, and while meeting regularly with Nelson, Lister hit upon a lucrative business scheme: running cocaine to raise cash to support rebels in neighboring Nicaragua. Despite their close ties to the CIA, the rebels had a problem: their reputation on Capitol Hill. Among many U.S. lawmakers, they were known as terrorists, more likely to murder Nicaraguans than liberate them. The U.S. Congress fought the Reagan administration's requests to fund the contras and then, in 1984, banned any U.S. military aid for the rebels. 2 years later, a federal investigation known as Iran-contra revealed that the Reagan administration had illegally sneaked around the ban, selling weapons to Iran for cash it transferred to the Nicaraguan contras. There was also evidence the contras were selling drugs in the U.S. to finance their operations. Among others, Lister would later claim that he helped in the fund-raising. He hooked up with Danilo Blandon, a drug-dealing Nicaraguan exile then living in Los Angeles. According to voluminous law-enforcement documents, Blandon and Lister established a vast cocaine network throughout California. The network was especially strong in South Central. Blandon would later testify that Lister's job was money laundering and security. Lister kept Blandon well- stocked with surveillance gear & high-tech weapons: Mack 10s, police scanners, Uzis, even grenade launchers. Blandon said he passed the equipt on to his South-Central LA connection, "Freeway" Ricky Ross. Using Lister's gear to avoid police detection, Ross emerged as the region's most notorious cocaine trafficker. He would later recall that one of his favorite entertainments was to use his police scanners to eavesdrop on cops raiding rival drug rings while he and his buddies counted the cash from their latest deal. Even as the FBI investigated Lister on weapons export charges, narcotics agents were zeroing in on the Blandon- Lister-Ross network. A separate FBI report from the same period shows that while its agents were interviewing Nelson, they were also investigating Lister's purchase of a Mission Viejo home for $374,000 in cash. The FBI memo also shows that while the bureau was investigating Lister, Nelson had been coaching him on his upcoming grand-jury testimony. "He [Lister] then told of his meeting with the FBI and that he had been subpoenaed before the grand jury in San Francisco," the FBI memo states. "He told Nelson he was terrified. Nelson said go. . . . [Lister] admitted being stupid and that he had done a dumb thing. Nelson said [Lister] left and then called back after his grand-jury appearance and said he really did well." Whatever else Lister told Nelson about his testimony is a mystery because the FBI censored the next three lines, again citing national security considerations. The FBI memo reveals that, seeking to help Lister in his trouble with the FBI, Nelson made telephone calls to at least one other former CIA agent, a strange action assuming the CIA never had any relationship to Lister. "Nelson told [Lister] no one could help him, including the CIA," the memo states. "Nelson told [Lister] he had discussed his problem with another retired CIA agent and that no one could help him until he cleared himself with the FBI. Nelson said he told [Lister] he no longer cared to continue their relationship and he has not heard from him since." Nelson described Lister as a "blowhard" and a "name dropper who always had a get-rich scheme." He added that Lister "did have some good ideas, such as a laser-sighting device, but could never get it off the ground. [Nelson] knew of no intelligence activities by [Lister]." That last claim was & is clearly disingenuous. First, the source of the claim is a retired CIA official who admitted he spoke with other former agents on Lister's behalf while the latter was being investigated by the FBI. Second, whatever Lister and Nelson were up to in the 1980s, it is important enough to remain classified as "vital to U.S. national security" today, nearly 2 decades later. 'a major Central American cartel' Nelson retired from Fluor in 1985. Within a year, Lister was in deep trouble. Although the FBI never prosecuted him for his international arms sales, his drug dealing finally caught up with him in October 1986. After spending months on the case, a multi-agency narcotics unit led by LA County sheriff's detectives raided dozens of houses and apartments belonging to various members of the Blandon-Lister-Ross drug ring—including Lister's mountain retreat in Crestline, which police suspected was a drug warehouse.

Police also raided Lister's Mission Viejo home. They found him there, unshaven, still drinking his morning coffee. Because both of Lister's properties were clean, police suspected he had been tipped off about the raid. Clad only in a bathrobe and looking wild-eyed, Lister boasted that he knew he was being watched by police and claimed that he did business in South America and worked for the CIA. Inside his house, detectives found what might have seemed evidence to support that assertion: military training films, photos of Lister posing with Nicaraguan contras, an array of sophisticated surveillance gear, a copy of the 1982 Pyramid contract, even his notes listing Nelson & D'Aubuisson as business contacts. All that, but no drugs. Lister wasn't arrested. Just days later, most of the paperwork seized from Lister's home mysteriously disappeared from the LA Sheriff's Dept evidence room.

Unperturbed, Lister continued to deal drugs. In 1988, he tried to sell 2 kilos of cocaine to a prostitute he met at a Newport Beach boat party. The woman turned out to be a Costa Mesa police informant, and Lister ended up behind bars for the first time since he began dealing drugs with the contras. Two kilos was enough to land Lister in prison for years; instead, he walked out of jail after only two days. Having signed a deal with the Orange County district attorney's office, Lister had become a narc. But his new career as an informant was short-lived. The following year, DEA agents arrested Lister again, this time in connection with a San Diego-area cocaine distribution ring. Two years later, a jury convicted Lister on drug-trafficking charges; he was sentenced to 97 months in prison and 60 months of probation. Lister appealed, asserting that while an informant, he had testified before two federal grand juries about a "major Central American cartel" and his "activities in Central America concerning certain key figures from Nicaragua alleged to have been involved in the Iran-contra scandal."

In establishing grounds for a softer sentence, Lister told the court he had certainly run drugs, but he had also cooperated with the government. He claimed he gave prosecutors thousands of pages of documents and notes regarding his work for the CIA "from 1982 to 1986 and beyond, and I did it in detail, location, activity," he said. "I gave them physical evidence, phone bills, travel tickets, everything possible back from those days—which most people don't keep, but I do keep good records—to assist them in this investigation. They were excited about it." It's not clear what happened to the notes Lister says he gave investigators or to his testimony about his work with a "major Central American cartel." What is clear is that he put on quite a show. In 1998, the U.S. Justice Department noted, "An FBI special agent was convinced that Lister [and] Blandon . . . were connected to the CIA."
Lister's appeal was successful in erasing a conviction on tax evasion charges. After completing a drug-treatment program, he walked out of prison in 1996, three years early. His whereabouts are unknown, and he has refused repeated offers to share his story with the press. Nelson, Lister's "big CIA contact" at Fluor Corp. in Irvine, died six years ago in Corona del Mar. Fluor officials refused to comment for this story but have previously told the Weekly the company had no business in El Salvador in the 1980s. That would suggest that Nelson's "Central America" meetings with Lister had nothing to do with Fluor and everything to do with Pyramid—and perhaps Nelson's former employer, the CIA.

Tom Crispell of the CIA's public-affairs office said the agency has already denied any involvement with Lister. "This individual [Nelson] had been retired from the agency for a number of years, and we're not in a position to comment on his private life or conversations he had in his private life," Crispell remarked. But Crispell's claim runs headfirst into the facts, chief among them: the CIA refused for years to release any documents on Lister and, when it finally did so, released them in heavily redacted form citing national security concerns. "Now we know that Lister was meeting with Nelson and that the grand-jury investigation was somehow tied into this," responded Gary Webb, who left the Mercury News shortly after his editors backed away from his Dark Alliance series focusing on the CIA- contra-crack connection in May 1997. "What we don't know is how Lister even knew Nelson, why Nelson would continue to meet with [a man dismissed as] a bullshit artist, and why anyone would even consider helping Lister once he cleared himself with the FBI."
The documents are mute on one other, particularly chilling mystery: What kind of top-secret "business"relationship could Nelson, a retired CIA deputy director, possibly have with Lister, a drug-dealing, gun-running "security consultant" and D'Aubuisson, the leader of El Salvador's death squads?

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