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September 11, 2016
by panaceachronicles Leave a comment

Our Very Own Turd World Economy

100 million Americans without work? No problem.

Because if you are one of these people you gotta understand – your role is not to work; it is to not work.

Do not work. Got it? And just to make sure you get the message, in case you go looking for it, you aren’t going to find any.

So – chill. And keep your eyes on the screen.

You see, silly rabbit, only by having a Hundred Million people like you (and me) not working is it possible erect huge institutions that employ millions of certified-loyal people to work the system designed to “take care” of you and me.

That system wouldn’t be possible, or necessary, if there were still thousands of productive, growing communities linked together in a network of shared responsibilities and opportunities in America, but that era is over and gone, unless we can somehow reconstruct it. Otherwise it is already sold off, moved out, gone away, so long suckers. Shit happened while you were looking the other way. Here’s a picture of what happened. Nasty looking stuff there at the end, isn’t it?

Well, that’s how it is. Now everything is centralized because Americans have been deliberately left with no other choice – the decentralized network of productive communities that once supported at least a working version of America is gone, except for a few holdout communities. The rest has simply turned to shit.

So, we just have to accept that centralized institutions are there to do everything from feeding us and housing and educating us, to arresting and imprisoning us, to making us sick and then “healing” us only to make us sick again, to keeping us poor with taxes and fines and surcharges, and then finally discarding us when we are husks. All of this takes a lot of institutional jobs in government, banks, schools, military and other “predator class” institutions

And those who work for these predatory institutions do hold on tight to their jobs. Increasingly and of course by design these are the only good-paying jobs available. So people employed by predatory institutions will do whatever it takes to anybody the institution targets – er, serves – to keep their job because they KNOW what not having a job means in America today.

100 Million people not working in the US? That simply means that there are more than 100 Million people working at high-paid jobs to “take care” of those 100 Million not working. And please, I do agree that society needs institutions like firefighters and health clinics but the basic reason that institutions exist is because most people need groups, and wherever there is a group there will be someone, or more than likely several contenders trying to organize the milling throng to serve their personal agenda.

So can we agree that the predator class and its institutions have to keep the non-workers alive and moving around because in addition to their principal job of “not working” they have a very important, in fact absolutely crucial second role as “Consumer”? I think this is a psychic phenomenon that someday will be recorded as a breaking point in American history – the predator class propagandists and mind-control artists have 100 million non-workers proudly calling themselves Consumers, and demanding their rights as Consumers. Exquisite!

Now this sweet little state of affairs didn’t just happen.

The only way to create to massive numbers of people not working is to make their jobs disappear along with their community structures and then to make them dependent on those working to take care of them – and to do all this without creating a revolution. Luckily for the predator class, the behavioral psychology discoveries that exploded simultaneously with mass media in America made it almost easy to accomplish the hollowing out of America in plain view of an entire people being transfixed and programmed while the predators were stealing their jobs, their communities, and their families.

So as long as the 100 million Americans who are not working can be kept focused on their consumer benefits and rights rather than asking where the hell their country went, then then all’s good with the predator class and its governments, churches and banks. Hell, we even keep feeding the institutions with our children while they leer in our face and declare that everything they do is “for the children”.

So, all’s good as long as all the important institutions, government, corporate, religious and social, manage to stay on top of those 100 Million who don’t work and keep them all not only not working but damn proud to be an American.

Those institutions have to make sure that all 100 million people keep on doing all the things that create institutional jobs – speeding, stealing, fighting, having babies, getting high, hating and injuring, and making life miserable for each other. All good. Makes lots of jobs. Just the way it’s supposed to be. There is a balance and as long as the balance holds the rulers rule.

On the other hand, an awful lot of mostly young people did seem to get excited about the ideas of a craggy old Senator from Vermont recently, so maybe the grip of the predator class and its ruling institutions on 100 million Americans isn’t quite as complete as they would no doubt like it to be. I still have some hope for all of us.

February 9, 2016
by panaceachronicles Leave a comment

Plan Colombia – A Forgotten US Atrocity

Maybe this looks & sounds familiar, like maybe Oliver Stone familiar?

Helicopters flown by CIA mercenaries, filled with government troops and US advisors, swoop down on jungle villages at dawn in a tropical country. They come in firing and dropping gas and napalm and they quickly round up everyone in the village.

A few selected villagers are immediately shot “trying to escape”, while the rest are made to stand by while their homes and belongings are burned.

Women and little girls are taken aside for raping, runny-nosed children hide anywhere they can, and old people are beaten with rifle butts for various reasons. There are no young men left in the village to beat, arrest or kill.

Since the villagers obviously are guilty of consorting with the enemy the entire village, or what remains, is taken on a forced march to a government relocation camp, built by US aid.

Meanwhile back at the village aircraft piloted by other CIA mercenaries begin flying low over the landscape for miles around the village dumping hundreds of tons of toxic chemicals that poison the land, water, plants and animals, destroying all possibility of the people ever coming home.

But this is not Vietnam – it is Colombia.

Beginning with the election in 2000 of George Bush and his White House full of would-be foreign policy Machiavellis, and followed by eight years of the Gang Who Can’t Shoot Straight, Americans have had sixteen years of the enormous distractions of Iraq and Afghanistan to keep them from realizing that the US was playing out the Vietnam War all over again in Colombia.

This war has been going on for over sixteen years, and according to the US there is just as much Coca being grown and Cocaine being produced in Colombia in 2014 as there was in 1999. So like most US wars of aggression masked by any of the usual deceits – “War On Terror”, War On Drugs”, or War To Save Democracy” – the war in Colombia accomplished nothing but destroying the lives and the environments of millions of innocent people and further enriching politicians and generals. Per usual.

However, since this particular war was at its most brutal in the beginning, which coincided with the US invasion of Iraq, it was most conveniently overlooked while it was going on, and has since been filed along with yesterdays news by those who control the media in the US. But it happened.

Plan Colombia refers to a One Billion US/year bundle of “programs”, an innocent word for a bunch of deviously-named, US-sponsored state terrorism strategies in Colombia. Beginning in 2000 the US began sending waves of “advisors” to Colombia, accompanied by all the usual military hardware. There these US soldiers hooked up with large right-wing paramilitary organizations and the piddling little Colombian Army and Air Force and began raining violence and death down on millions of people who lived in the Coca-growing regions.

Colombian paramilitary death squads operating under the direct control of the US military would helicopter into a village just before dawn – lessons learned in Vietnam – and begin pulling “suspected guerillas and criminals” from their homes and executing them on the spot, or hauling them to waiting helicopters. Those left behind were told to pack up and move to government “relocation centers” or the soldiers would be back to burn their village and kill them. There were a number of “My Lai” incidents during these raids involving US personnel that were totally suppressed. Nobody has ever been held accountable.

From 2000 – 2003 nearly 2 million people were first sprayed with poison, then bombed with fire, then attacked by soldiers, and then “relocated”. In this same period over 3000 civilians were executed by US-sponsored death squads and many more simply disappeared.

Now in 2016 the villages are mostly abandoned and those that remain are pitiful shells of the prosperity that Coca growing brought them. As part of “Plan Colombia” the US did its usual “lets give the natives another way to make a living” routine and spent millions upon millions building idiotic “aid projects” like Yucca mills in the middle of nowhere that formerly semi-prosperous Coca growers were supposed to keep supplied with Yucca roots, at pennies a kilo, to be ground into flour. Brilliant. Just fucking brilliant.

There are dozens of these monuments to stupidity (or maybe something a bit more sinister) lying around rural Colombia, and meanwhile the Coca growing has moved on to other parts of Colombia, FARC has signed a peace treaty with the government, and the US president has just had a smileyface press moment with the president of Colombia as they celebrate victory in the war on whatever it was.

Another mission accomplished.

December 12, 2015
by panaceachronicles Leave a comment

Resisting The War On Drugs In Peru’s Coca Valley

The BBC has done it again with outstanding photography and gripping first-person stories of the Mochileros who farm and trade Coca in this beautiful valley deep in the Peruvian Andes. The atrocities that the US Drug Laws and our paramilitary War On Drugs have committed in the communities of this remote valley are well-documented in this excellent photo-essay although the crimes and their consequences are implicit rather than explicit. How the people of this beautiful valley live now is well documented here; how they could be living if not for the criminal insanity of the US is left unsaid.

Coca growing goes back to pre-historical times in this valley but the modern world’s insatiable demand for Cocaine has warped traditional Coca Leaf growing into a dangerous mix of guerillas, drug cartels, government agents, and foreign military/covert operations.

The BBC tells this story with a level of story and graphics that takes you directly into the Mochileros’s world and allows you to walk with them on their dangerous path through the mountains with a backpack full of Cocaine.

As I read this story I couldn’t help but wonder what life could be like in this beautiful valley if the people were free to tap into their Andean heritage to make natural coca medicines for the world instead of being forced to work as human mules.

To read BBC’s “Coca Valley” click here.

November 2, 2015
by panaceachronicles 1 Comment

The War On Drugs: “Let’s Get Real” Accounting

Most readers of this blog don’t have to be convinced that the “War On Drugs” has created more suffering, ruined more lives, and cost more in both money, shattered dreams, and human degradation than all those fearsome fruits of the Poppy, Cannabis and Coca plants combined. You can even throw in the Nazi chemist’s delight – Amphetamines – and any other laboratory creations you can think of, and you still won’t come close to the destruction of human lives and communities caused by the “War On Drugs”.

Even so, I have rarely seen anything approaching an accounting that includes both what the government spends on the “War On Drugs” and the monetized costs of the widespread human damage this so-called war causes to people, families, and communities. I can’t claim any special accounting expertise, but in this series of posts I would like to first review as many of the obvious but rarely aggregated direct costs as possible, and then in the next post I’ll try to point out some of the costs that have been discounted, manipulated and deliberately hidden in order to serve the interests of those who are in the business of profiting from this so-called war- which of course is about as successful as all the other military wars that our dear leaders have waged over the past 50 years or so.

Introduction: The Insatiable Federal Appetite For Drug Money

Even if you don’t have to be convinced that the “War On Drugs” is a total loser, you might still be surprised at the massive herd of Federal pigs that are slurping that the money trough, and the total cost of feeding all that pork.

Let’s begin with the Drug Enforcement Agency. Although this agency is entirely make-work for otherwise unemployable thugs and goons, nevertheless they have managed to stay at the public feed trough for decades.

A quick glance at the “White Budgets” of the DEA reveals that over the course of its existence, 1972-2015, the DEA has cost just over $50,000,000,000 (Billion) in tax money extorted from the American people. I call the figures below the DEA “White Budget” because they reveal only the above-the-table allocations by Congress for this gang of Storm Troopers – not the hidden “Black Budget” which cannot be known, but which is probably at least the equivalent amount. That would suggest a 43 year total cost – just for the DEA – of $100,000,000,000. That’s a lot of living-wage teacher’s salaries, women & child health clinics, orphan diseases research, merit-based college scholarships, and other useless shit that we are continually reminded have to be sacrificed to pay DEA agents and bureaucrats to keep our kids safe from drugs.

So Much For The DEA – What’s The Total Federal WOD Budget?

The Federal government does a fantastic job of hiding and obscuring the amount of money it spends each year on the “Drug Problem” which, of course, it created decades ago in order to create a vast network of highly-paid public “servants” fighting day and night to preserve the American way of life and keep our kids safe. Here is a graphic showing the aggregated annual cost of what Federal agencies admit they are spending. (This graphic says nothing about what State City, County and Local agencies are spending on the WOD, nor does it include the “Black Budgets” of these agencies.) It does show that the total Federal spending on the bogus, useless, destructive “War On Drugs” is costing at least $25 Billion dollars a year (White Budget only.).

What Pigs Besides DEA Are Feeding On The “Drug Problem?

Finally, here is a list of pigs at the WOD trough and the money they are slurping down that (foolish me) could have been spent on real education, real tax reduction for working people, real disease prevention, treatment and cures, bridges that won’t fall down and roads that won’t kill you.

Some of the agencies on this list may surprise you – they did me, until I realized that when there is a load of money the size of the pile generated by the “War On Drugs” everybody wants to dive in and gulp down as much as they can. And they do.

OK – I’ll stop here for Part One.

Coming next in Part Two – costs that have nothing to do with the budgets of bloated, useless US Federal programs and agencies. For example, I’m going to try to calculate the lifetime costs to society of having 5-7 million children a year ripped from their parents because those parents are in prison for “drug crimes”. And as you’ll see, there’s more to this accounting – much more.

August 14, 2015
by panaceachronicles 1 Comment

Coca & The Curing Of Drug Addiction

In this short passage from “The History of Coca” by Dr. William Golden Mortimer, MD (1901), we have a compelling summary of what was known at the time by physicians in the US and Europe regarding the use of Coca Leaf as a remedy/cure for a range of diseases and conditions. Although only mentioned briefly here, the use of Coca Leaf infusion (tea) as an effective support for addicts withdrawing from both alcohol and the opiates (opium, morphine and heroin) make me wonder this treatment is not available. With the deputy director of the DEA announcing a “crackdown” on prescription painkillers and intoning the terrible toll of 120 people a day being killed by these opiate-analogues as well as by good old heroin itself (a gift of the Chinese as part of their drug warfare against America), I have to think that there is a serious disconnect between those who want to treat the suffering and those who want to punish the sufferers.

And as an aside, I don’t see the DEA “cracking down” on the cigarette industry which is killing over 1000 people a day – do you? Now that’s not an epidemic – it’s an atrocity. But a few thousand deaths a year is termed an “epidemic” as a way to justify a bloated, out-of-control drug bureaucracy and make scary headlines designed to herd parents of young children further into the “Just Say No” world of fantasy terrors. Here is what the Washington Post had to say about this “epidemic”: ” State and federal officials have pressed their campaign against prescription drug abuse with urgency, trying to contain a scourge that kills more than 16,000 people each year. The crackdown has helped reduce the illegal use of some medications and raised awareness of their dangers. But at the same time that some pain medications have become less available on the street and pricier, many users have switched to cheaper heroin, since prescription pills and heroin are in the same class of drugs and provide a comparable, euphoric high.”

16,000 people a year? Of course every life has value, but numbers matter too. Is all the suffering and disruption that the DEA is causing doctors and their patients really justified by these numbers, compared with other preventable deaths caused by industrial criminals?

People who are part of the community that wants to see effective treatment in support of addicts ought to be rising up and demanding that Bolivia be allowed to export her Coca Leaf medications to the US where they should be freely allowed for use in the treatment of addictions of all kinds.

Here is what Dr. Mortimer had to say – over a hundred years ago.

“Perhaps one of the most valuable as well as wonderful properties of Coca is the facility with which it meets and extinguishes the craving for opium in the victims to that fearful habit. Professor Palmer, of the University of Louisville, Kentucky, has an article upon this subject in the Louisville Medical Journal, for 1880, and he therein narrates three cases in which he found the Coca a complete and easy substitute for the opium or morphine which had been habitually taken. One sufferer had been in the habit of taking thirty grains of morphine daily, and yet abandoned that drug wholly, and at once, and without the slightest difficulty, by resorting to the fluid extract of Coca whenever the craving attacked him. Nor can this be considered simply an exchange of masters, since the uniform testimony of even those who have used Coca for a long time, and continuously, is that abstention from its employment is perfectly easy, and is not accompanied by any feelings of distress or uneasiness whatever. Were Coca of no other use than this it would be a boon to afflicted humanity such as no one who has not been bound hand and foot in the slavery of opium can appreciate.”

“Dr. Bauduy, of St. Louis, early called the attention of the American Neurological Association to the efficiency of Coca in the treatment of melancholia, and the benefit of Coca in a long list of nervous or nerveless conditions has been extolled by a host of physicians. Shoemaker, of Philadelphia, has advocated the external use of Coca in eczema, dermatitis, herpes, rosacea, urticaria and allied conditions where an application of the Fluid Extract of Coca one part to four of water lends a sedative action to the skin.”

“The influence of Coca on the pulse and temperature has suggested its employment in collapse and weak heart as recommended by Da Costa, and it has been favorably employed to relieve dropsy depending on debility of the heart, and for uraemia and scanty secretion of urine. In seasickness Coca acts as a prophylactic as well as a remedy. Vomiting of pregnancy may be arrested by cocaine administered either by the mouth or rectum. In the debility of fevers Coca has been found especially serviceable, and in this connection Dr. A. R. Booth, of the Marine Hospital Service, at Shreveport, Louisiana, has written me that he considers cocaine one of the most valuable aids in the treatment of yellow fever.”

“By controlling nausea and vomiting, as a cardiac stimulant, as a haemostatic when indicated, to hold in abeyance hunger, which at times would be intolerable but for the effect of cocaine. One who has seen a yellow fever stomach, especially from a subject who has died from “black vomit,” must have been impressed with the absolute impossibility of such an organ performing its physiological functions. Dr. Booth makes it an inflexible rule, never to allow a yellow fever patient food by the mouth until convalescence is well established. In cases of fine physique he has kept the patient without food for ten or twelve days, and in two cases fourteen and fifteen days respectively, solely by the judicious administration of cocaine in tablets by the mouth. Of two hundred and six cases of yellow fever treated in this manner there was not one relapse. A similar use is made of cocaine to abate the canine hunger of certain cases of epilepsy and insanity, as well as to appease thirst in diabetes.”

“The Peruvian Indians employ Coca to stimulate uterine contractions and regard it as a powerful aphrodisiac. Leopold Casper, of Berlin, considers Coca one of the best of genital tonics, and many modem observers concur in this opinion. Vecki says that cocaine internally to a man aged fifty-six invariably occasioned sexual excitement and cheerfulness. The Homoeopaths who have long regarded Coca as a valuable remedy, employ Coca in sexual excesses, especially when dependent on onanism. Allen has given a “proving” of Coca that covers twelve pages, and Bering’s Materia Medica gives provings by twenty-four persons, and recommends Coca in troubles coming with a low state of the barometer. Hempel says: “I have found a remarkable aversion to exertion of any kind in consequence of nervous exhaustion frequently relieved with great promptness by Coca.””

“But it is not my intention to here enumerate the various symptoms for which Coca is regarded as a specific. I have only space to briefly suggest its possible application as a remedy. A resume of the various conditions in which Coca has commonly been found serviceable, and its relative employment as classified from the experience of several hundred physicians, correspondents in this research, will be found tabulated in the appendix. Coca may be given in doses equivalent to one or two drachms of the leaves three or four times a day, either as an infusion or as a fluid extract or wine; the latter especially being serviceable for support in acute disease as well as an adjunct indicated in those conditions where its use may tend to maintain the balance of health.”

June 12, 2015
by panaceachronicles Leave a comment

Are We Citizens, or Serfs?

Lately I’ve been wondering why so many states are finally recognizing the People’s right to have unrestricted access to Medical Cannabis while the Federal government continues to threaten and attack those same People under state-sponsored terrorism laws feebly disguised as a “War on Drugs”. I realize that I might seem to be Captain Obvious here, but it’s clear to me that the Federal government doesn’t actually consider us citizens anymore whereas at least some of the states still do. Since only citizens have rights of the kind enumerated in those outdated documents the US Constitution and Bill of Rights, once the Feds decided several decades ago that we weren’t citizens (unlike corporations, which do have rights because they are “persons”) then they didn’t have to respect our rights because it turned out that we didn’t have any left. Surprise!

However, in some of our states we are still citizens. This may have something to do with the fact that in most states the Legislators no doubt consider themselves citizens, whereas we all know what happens to politicians once they set up shop inside the DC Beltway. They become untouchable demigods, surrounded by layers of heavily armed goons and protected from upstart former citizens by laws with quaint names like “The Patriot Act” and now the “American Freedom Act.”

This dismissive attitude and well-protected existence enables them to create Federal agencies with names like “Homeland Security”, “Internal Revenue Service”, and “Department of Justice”, whose missions are designed almost exclusively to keep Americans securely under the iron-clad fist of the Federal government.

In contrast, state legislators actually live in the communities that they at least nominally serve, and since most state legislatures meet for only limited periods of time each year these people actually have to live among and interact with the people who make up their communities. This means, among other things, that state legislators, judges and even police have regularly come face to face with friends, neighbors and family members who are suffering from diseases that the medical industry only exploits – hardly ever cures – and who over the past few decades have managed, in spite of the Federal government’s terror squads, to discover that Cannabis helped them where none of the FDA approved poisons of Pig Pharma did anything but drain their bank accounts and make their already painful lives more painful and much shorter. (And Pig Pharma accomplished all this while racking up $400 Billion a year – almost 3% of total US GDP.)

So I’ve come to the Captain Obvious conclusion that the reason that Medical Cannabis has finally become a reality in so much of the US is because we still are (perhaps) a nation of free states more than we are an enslaved Federal “union”. Those of us who have worked so hard to make Medical Cannabis a reality should not neglect this source of our success. We should be as active in the fight to restore State’s Rights as we have been in the fight for legal Medical Cannabis. The two root sources of freedom and liberty are inextricably linked, and it is up to us to strengthen these roots. If we fail to do the tree of freedom and liberty, already withering, will die and the Federal monster will finally completely subjugate us. To the Federal government we are not citizens, but “taxpayers” and “consumers” – in a word, Serfs – and we should never forget this basic difference between our state governments and the odious Feds.

December 28, 2014
by panaceachronicles 1 Comment

Coca Cola Crushes Innovative Coca Leaf Startup

If we allow our imaginations to drift forward a few years it’s possible to envision a time when the health benefits of pure, natural Coca Leaf are so widely understood that there will be strong voices calling for this natural medicine to be legalized just like Medical Cannabis is today.

One source of opposition that will have to be dealt with in the case of legal Coca Leaf that isn’t present with legal Medical Cannabis is an 8000# Gorilla named the Coca Cola Company. (With my apologies for the analogy to all Gorillas everywhere.)

You see, this clan of billionaire hucksters believe that they own the word “Coca” when it comes to naming beverages and a wide range of other types of products, and they have literally an army of lawyers and (no doubt) heavily bribed government officials to help them enforce their grip on the concept.

An excellent case in point is what happened in 2012/13 to s small group of visionary entrepreneurs in Venezuela when they tried to produce a bottled Coca Leaf drink as part of their natural foods restaurant and health spa operation in Caracas. They began by working with a group of indigenous people in Colombia, who are able to grow Coca plants legally as part of their cultural heritage, and developed a carbonated Coca leaf drink named “CocaSek” that took off quickly and soon became quite popular. Nothing on a grand scale, but these young people had a following for their restaurant and for their natural healing center as well as for their “CocaSek” product.

Their vision, according to their now-inactive website:

“The Coca Tea Company is an artisan company (cottage industry) located in Caracas, Venezuela which imports, distributes and manufactures teas, infusions and other products made from the coca leaf including coca flour, coca candy, coca liquor, culinary sauces and other products. Our company imports its products directly from Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador.”

The first hint they had of trouble was that their bottling company – the only one in Colombia – told them that they would no longer be able to bottle their product for them. No explanation – just “Sorry”. Or actually, “Tough Shit.”

So, according to the group’s website they pulled an end run and found a bottling plant in Bolivia that would produce their CocaSek product in 12 ounce cans. They were pretty happy about this because even though Bolivia was further away than Colombia the regulatory authorities were much friendlier and the use of cans instead of glass bottles actually reduced transportation costs a bit in spite of the greater distance.

Unbeknownst to them the Coca Cola Company was not happy that they had failed to strangle the young company by cutting off its bottling resource in Colombia so the gloves quickly came off to reveal the fist of steel. Within a short time the folks producing CocaSek found themselves facing hostile, aggressive hitmen sent from Atlanta not with guns but with briefcases, and very soon they found that all avenues for selling their CocaSek product were closed to them.

The story I am telling here is explained in far greater detail on their own website, which looks like it has been dormant since 2013 but which still offers visitors an astounding set of information resources, especially on their blog which also appears to be inactive.

When you do spend time on their website you’ll find some of the best analysis ever written of the cozy relationship between the Coca Cola Company and the successive US government agencies tasked with criminalizing drugs – the Bureau of Narcotics, then the Bureau of Narcotics & Dangerous Drugs, and now the DEA. David Wright, one of the company founders, is a brilliant researcher who – unlike so many researchers these days – understood that sometimes you have to go and dig through physical records to track down the trail of the bad guys. David spent lots of time at the National Archives and at a university where Harry Anslinger’s memorabilia are archived. David has published original photographs and scans of reams of correspondence between top government officials and top Coca Cola Company representatives that shows unequivocally that Coca Cola did ( and does) have the US government doing its dirty work throughout the hemisphere.

Actually, come to think about it, that was probably more the reason that Coca Cola Company went after little CocaSek than any real concerns over trademark infringement. How dare David Wright make these records public? Well, he did, and the world owes him a great big thank you. If there was ever any doubt, now we know.

From a distance it looks like the Coca Cola Company must have succeeded in killing off this innovative little product before it could gain a foothold in the market. Of course the Coca Cola Company does this all the time. Anyone who tries to develop any kind of product with the word Coca as part of the product name will quickly be paid a visit but the suits from Atlanta. (In fact I kind of wonder where the thugs in suits are now that I’ve published “The Coca Leaf Papers”.)

But the point of this post is to say that somehow the worldwide grip that the Coca Cola Company has on the word “Coca” is going to have to be broken before Coca Leaf medicinal products can be developed and marketed.

However, as an interesting aside, the government of Peru produces and markets a nice line of Coca products – teas, tonics, and other medicinal and nutritional products with brand names like “Mate de Coca” and we don’t see the Coca Cola Company interfering with these products at all. Could that be because the company depends on the importation of a huge tonnage of Coca Leaf from Peru every year in order to make its “secret formula”? So they will cut deals and keep hands off when their own interests are at stake but will fall on and crush anyone not protected by the power of the state.

It seems to me that this highly selective enforcement of their trademark and copyright interests in the word “Coca” might create a legal opening if there were legal minds astute enough to make the case that “Coca” cannot be owned by a company that is only a hundred or so years old when the word itself goes back thousands of years and is, among other things, the name of one of the most important spiritual beings among the peoples of the Andes.

I hope that the people behind the Coca Leaf Tea Company somehow manage to get out from under the claws and fangs of Coca Cola and find a way to begin producing CocaSek again, but given the terrible economic crisis now gripping Venezuela life must be very difficult. I am keeping my eye out for a book being written by one of the company’s founders David Wright – details can be found on the company website.

I encourage readers of this blog to visit the company’s website and find a way to send messages of encouragement to this band of courageous spiritual pioneers.

Hasta pronto CocaSek!