Hidden DDT contamination of tobacco products may be a missing link in the equation connecting the Korean Genome, Tobacco product smoking, and the emerging Type 2 Diabetes epidemic in Korea.
Background
First, we have data-based hard evidence from lab tests just completed (12/18) that the American tobacco supply appears to be heavily contaminated (see data below), and we are certain based on this and other data that this reflects the global tobacco supply situation.
There is also this:
1. Solid research (cited below) that shows that exposure during fetal development to specific organochlorine pesticides including DDT leads by now-known genetic pathways to increased risk, and increased rates of Type 2 Diabetes in people with the Korean genome.
2. The connection between smoking tobacco products and Type 2 Diabetes among Koreans (cited below) is also well established, but there is no cross-over understanding of the role of pesticides in smoking-related disease.
Without taking the hidden pesticides in tobacco products into account, the relationship between smoking and Diabetes cannot be fully understood, and the specific genetic vulnerabilities of Korean people cannot be accounted for in making health care decisions. With such knowledge, doctors would be better able to treat patients, and reluctant patients would have new evidence-based smoking quitting motivation showing them the specific pesticides in their specific tobacco product brand choice and what those pesticides are doing to their treatment outcome.
3. Other research (cited below) shows that the damaging effects of DDT exposure persist across multiple generations, and that people of Asian ancestry are disproportionately vulnerable to certain specific genetic damage from DDT exposure in previous generations.
Unfortunately the problem of DDT and Diabetes doesn’t stop with the person who is smoking contaminated tobacco today. It appears that even if a person today is not a smoker, and not being exposed to DDT that way, if their mother or maternal grandmother smoked she was undoubtedly exposed to DDT with every puff, and that effect is now known to reach across generations and put exposed people at higher risk of multiple diseases.
This strongly implies that Koreans with Type 2 Diabetes today whose mother’s mother smoked may have inherited the damaged genes that led to their diabetes from a grandmother whose DNA was attacked by the pesticides in her cigarettes 50 years ago.
4. It’s an open secret that Asian tobacco products are heavily contaminated with pesticide residues including DDT and other organochlorine pesticides. Asian health authorities have been struggling for yearstrying to find a way to stop the tobacco pesticide contamination but the industry has the fix in at every important political and regulatory level in every country including, I’m very sure, in Korea.
5. In this post I will offer links to peer-reviewed research and hard data to demonstrate that this is a possibility worth examining. These pesticides are known contaminants of tobacco productsworldwide.
The Most Compelling Evidence
First, here’s new hard data showing the extent of pesticide contamination of American tobacco products. (Notice the multiple endocrine-disruptors.)
Community Tobacco Control Partners Test Results 12/18
Here’s a startling study linking DDT to obesity and diabetes across generations of people, which given the history of smoking in Korea suggests a link to today’s Korean Diabetes epidemic among others.
Ancestral environmental exposures to a variety of environmental factors and toxicants have been shown to promote the epigenetic transgenerational inheritance of adult onset disease. The present work examined the potential transgenerational actions of the insecticide dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) on obesity and associated disease.
Conclusions
Observations indicate ancestral exposure to DDT can promote obesity and associated disease transgenerationally. The etiology of disease such as obesity may be in part due to environmentally induced epigenetic transgenerational inheritance.
At least some portion of the Type 2 Diabetes epidemic among Korean smokers must be due to their genetic vulnerability to organochlorine pesticides like the DDT hidden in the tobacco products they are smoking.
In our recent tests of off-the-shelf American tobacco products for pesticide contamination, 20% of the samples tested revealed a high concentration of DDT. The following study looked at Koreans only but if this pattern is repeated or amplified among tobacco brands smoked by Asian populations, then smoking OC-contaminated tobacco products represents a hidden danger of increased risk for Type 2 Diabetes. This is due to the unreasonably dangerous exposure of smokers and their immediate households to OC pesticides in tobacco product smoke.
This research also has strong implications for Korean-American and in fact all Asian-American youth who disproportionately smoke thehighly contaminated brandsof tobacco products that are often the only choice available in marginalized Asian-American communities. Obviously Asian youth in America have Asian genomes, which means that they are at heightened risk of transgenerational pesticide-induced disease from smoking contaminated tobacco products.
Another Piece Of The Puzzle
We see that DDT damage crosses generations. Now let’s see what it specifically does to Koreans.
Low-dose organochlorine (OC) pesticides have recently been associated with type 2 diabetes in several non-Asian general populations. As there is currently epidemic type 2 diabetes in Asia, we investigated the associations between OC pesticides and type 2 diabetes in Koreans.
Most OC pesticides showed strong associations with type 2 diabetes after adjusting for age, sex, BMI, alcohol consumption, and cigarette smoking.
In this exploratory study with small sample, low-dose background exposure to OC pesticides was strongly associated with prevalent type 2 diabetes in Koreans even though absolute concentrations of OC pesticides were no higher than in other populations. Asians may be more susceptible to adverse effects of OC pesticides than other races.
Notice that this study found the effects of OC pesticides even AFTER smoking was controlled as a factor, which means that the effects of the pesticide contaminants in the tobacco products were masked in the data, but would have spiked the results even more if shown.
Unfortunately multiple research studies show that older Koreans strongly tend to continue smoking after being diagnosed with Diabetes, which means that those smokers are continuing to reinforce the cause of their disease while being treated. I have to also wonder about the cross-interactions between all of the pesticides in what they are smoking and the medications that they are taking to treat the disease.
In other words, unknown to them or their doctors, smoking is continuing to expose them to the OC pesticides that caused their diabetes in the first place, which probably effectively cancels out any positive impact treatment may be having.
Younger age, lower economic status, heavier smoking habit, lower Charlson Comorbidity Index and comorbid hypertension were identified as factors associated with continued smoking after the diagnosis of type 2 diabetes.
Older patients and patients with longer diabetic duration were more likely to quit smoking.
Contrastingly, smokers in the lower economic status and heavier smoking habit categories were more likely to continue smoking after the diagnosis.
Conclusion
The economic, social and personal cost burden that the 100% preventable OC pesticide contamination of tobacco products imposes on Asian countries may represent the difference between a viable healthy economy and society and a sickened, low-productivity, low energy society in Asia.
Given the rapidly advancing chemistry of pesticide agents and their increasing impact on the human endocrine system, Asian societies must control this devastating hidden and unregulated poisoning of their people by the international tobacco cartels.
As you can see in these related posts, this issue is by no means confined to people with Asian genomes, not to DDT, nor to Diabetes.
Studies show that 90% of Saudis over age 60 have osteoporosis due to Vitamin D deficiency, in spite of living in one of the world’s sunniest regions. This means that virtually all Saudi women over 60, and most of the men, have this crippling bone disease simply because their body doesn’t get enough sun to make the Vitamin D they need for maintaining natural good health. The reason is simple – women are covered head to toe to protect men from “lustful thoughts”, which of course, also blocks the sun and prevents natural Vitamin D formation. It’s ironic that the same thing happens to many Saudi men – though not, of course, to the elite who only “cover up” when its time for a photo opportunity and otherwise wear Western clothes.
Severe Vitamin D deficiency is not a minor issue, and its effects are not limited to osteoporosis. It is a widespread, very dangerous condition that gives rise to all kinds of crippling, often lethal diseases and conditions. It causes, at any age, impaired immune system function, insulin resistance & diabetes, cancer, multiple sclerosis, hypertension, stroke, heart disease, infant mortality, chronic pain, anxiety and depression, and infertility. The fact that the full-body covering for women demanded by conservative Islam is responsible for the worldwide Vitamin D deficiency in Muslim women is indisputable. See here, and here – just two of many examples.
So, the role of mandatory Islamic dress for women in causing Vitamin D deficiency is well-established. But that is not the topic of this post.
Readers should know that there is another equally insidious, perhaps even more severe health issue caused by the medieval Islamic dress codes for women that has never been discussed in any research that I can find.
Without making any comment on the cultural, religious or moral issues raised by those who oppose women being forced to wear the Burqa by Islamic law, there is another severe health threat created just by those little black full-face masks that women and girls are forced to wear.
Quite plainly, being forced to wear a Burqa chronically exposes Muslim girls and women throughout their lives to highly toxic, potentially crippling and even lethal poison gas.
The mechanism by which this happens should be obvious, even though it seems to never have been studied. Wearing the Burqa traps CO2-laden exhaled breath so that it is continually re-inhaled. A Burqa-wearing woman is never breathing fresh air – she is always re-breathing her own exhaled gasses, heavy with CO2. This increases the level of CO2 and lowers the O2 levels in a woman’s blood all day, every day, to the point that it can endanger her health, quality of life, and longevity, and almost certainly the health of her children.
While the mechanism by which Burqas poison their wearers is obvious, as just pointed out there is not a single piece of medical and scientific research that examines the impact of wearing the Burqa on blood CO2 and O2 levels. Do you find that as odd as I do? Has this research topic simply been overlooked? Or has it been suppressed?
Fortunately, there actually is research on the impact of wearing surgical masks on the blood CO2 and O2 levels of surgeons, and the conclusions are quite straightforward – although, oddly enough, this is also not a well-researched area.
What the available research shows is that wearing surgical masks for an extended period day after day, as surgeons do, significantly increases their blood CO2 and decreases their blood O2 levels.
Here is a brief quote from one of the few papers I was able to find on the topic.
“Carbon dioxide rebreathing in respiratory protective devices: influence of speech and work rate in full-face masks.”
Smith CL, Whitelaw JL, Davies B.
“Carbon dioxide (CO2) rebreathing has been recognized as a concern regarding respirator use and is related to symptoms of discomfort, fatigue, dizziness, headache, muscular weakness and drowsiness.”
Well, that doesn’t sound too bad, does it – unless you are being operated on by a dizzy, weak, fatigued and drowsy surgeon.
But let’s dig a little deeper into the health consequences of prolonged exposure to CO2 at levels above what we would encounter breathing normally, with nothing covering our mouth and nose.
The following table summarizes the results of chronic CO2 exposure at low levels, but in excess of what would be inhaled under normal conditions. It is a reasonable assumption that these consequences are also incurred by women wearing Burqas, particularly since, as you will notice, the length of exposure in the various studies were only a matter of days or weeks of exposure, whereas women wear Burqas for large portions of the day throughout their lifetimes.
After giving us this table, that summarizes over a dozen research studies, the DOE goes on to explain the health consequences of CO2 exposure noted in the studies.
“Lung dead space volume is a volume of air where gas exchange does not occur. The larger the dead space, the less gas exchange, which can be important for those with pulmonary or cardiac problems. Patients with severe CO2 retention (PaCO2 >95 mmHg) are invariably acidotic and will be at greater risk for profound acidosis with elevated ambient CO2 concentrations because they cannot further compensate for elevations in PaCO2, except with limited increases in ventilation. In addition, although the CO2–induced increase in the dead space volume was reported to be reversible in healthy subjects, it is not known if this reversal also occurs in patients with pulmonary disease.”
“Elevated systemic and pulmonary blood pressure is well tolerated by healthy individuals but can exacerbate preexisting systemic or pulmonary hypertension. Increased cerebral blood flow and increased intracranial pressure can put preterm infants at increased risk for intraventricular hemorrhage. Adults with brain injuries, tumors, bleeding, or increased intracranial pressure are also at risk with further increases in intracranial pressure.”
“Slightly decreased bone formation and increased bone resorption in healthy young individuals may have no long-term consequences but may be detrimental to persons with bone disease, such as osteoporosis. Another potential problem is increased blood calcium, which is related to changes in the bone. In guinea pigs and rats, focal renal calcification has been observed with prolonged exposure to concentrations of CO2 ranging from 0.3 to 15% [42-48]. The authors characterized the kidney calcification as an adaptive disease. Studies of humans have not examined calcification in the kidney or other organs.”
Bottom line – neither science nor medicine has paid much attention to the health consequences of daily exposure of health care workers to even slightly increased level of CO2, much less to the life-threatening health issues experienced by millions of Muslim women forced to wear Burqas or be publicly flogged.
If Muslim women are being deprived of Vitamin D and are being chronically poisoned by CO2 as a direct result of how they are forced to dress by the male-dominated religious societies into which they are unfortunate enough to have been born, isn’t this as horrific a crime against humanity as female genital mutilation, another travesty imposed on women by these same male “religious” criminals?
Of course it is. The question is – when is the non-Muslim world going to recognize that an enormous criminal conspiracy, inspired by hatred and fear of women, exists in many if not all Muslim countries, and when are the Muslim leaders of these misogynisticgangs masquerading as religious organizations going to be indicted by the World Court for the genocide they are surely committing?
I’m not very good at Photoshop – but that is a closeup of an asshole where Daffy Don’s mouth used to be. Cheers!
One of the looming tragedies in America is what Daffy Don and his hate-filled followers are about to do to access to health care for poor people.
One part of the tragedy is that so many of the people who oppose Daffy Don’s attack on the poor wind up fighting for the right of poor people to have access to a failed medical system that can do nothing for them but hook them on the products of Pig Pharma without even beginning to treat or cure them of the killer diseases that afflict them.
But an even greater tragedy is that so many of the health conditions that plague poor people especially hard like Diabetes, Obesity, Heart Disease and Depression could be effective treated and cured by a few cups of Coca Leaf tea a day, resulting is far less need for health insurance, pharmaceuticals, or ER and doctor visits.
This isn’t a pipe dream, although it is a dream. I’ve been providing documentation for many years in this blog for the efficacy and safety of Coca Leaf in treating and potentially reversing and curing many of the diseases that maim and kill poor people in the US. I’ve even provided what I believe are cogent arguments for the use of Coca Leaf in treating diseases like Alzheimer’s that afflict and torture people without regard to their economic status.
The bottom line is that all of the hater’s arguments about the costs of ObamaCare could be undercut and rendered pointless if American’s simply had full legal access to Coca Leaf medicines, which they could brew up themselves on their kitchen stoves. I’ll bet that within a year or two of having cheap, daily access to Coca Leaf tea the need for “health care” would decrease so dramatically that even the most hate-filled of Daffy Don’s followers would have to admit that it’s a good idea.
In fact, I am quite sure that many of these obnoxious little Brown Shirts would be clandestinely sipping a few cups of Coca Leaf tea every day for their high blood pressure and sick hearts and who knows – they might even mellow out a bit.
Nah – that’s hoping for too much, and for the wrong people.
But those who are stunned by how this administration is turning the War On Poverty into the War On The Poor ought to get behind medical Coca Leaf with all the energy that they are now, quite rightfully, devoting to the cause of Medical Cannabis. That would take care of a huge part of the problems that poor people have with the so-called health care system in the US.
The Government of Peru is a major buyer of Coca Leaf in the Valley of the Apurimac-Ene-Mantaro Rivers, referred to in ever-charming government acronym style as “The VRAEM”. This Valley lies at the heart of the Andean mountain chain and could easily have been the model for Shangri-la. As it is, the Peruvian government, in league with the US Police State, has turned the Valley of the Apurimac-Ene-Mantaro Rivers into a war zone targeting peaceful Coca growers.
Interestingly the Peruvian government is also a major buyer of the Valley’s Coca Leaf, but the government buyers are well-known as cheapskates. That’s probably because – officially – government buyers and selected foreign buyers like Coca Cola are supposed to be the only buyers in the valley. They figure they’re doing the Coca growers a favor.
Of course, the Cocaine Cartels beg to differ with that, as do a substantial proportion of valley residents. And so there is no peace in the valley.
The Peruvian government owns and controls the non-Cocaine use of Coca Leaf through a monopoly named ENACO. This state-run company produces the official line of Coca tonics, medicines drinks and snacks for domestic consumption.
Peru’s politicians are in the Coca Leaf Remedios business because Coca Remedios are so deeply ingrained in Peruvian society that their use cannot be stopped – oh, and also because it’s a handy way to make some very nice revenue.
However, private entrepreneurs are not allowed to compete with the government monopoly, so Peruvian Coca Leaf products remain stuck with an incongruous “Soviet” look and excruciatingly ho-hum marketing. Too bad for Peru – Bolivian entrepreneurs and government officials are already making creative headway in the world markets for Coca Leaf and Coca Leaf medicines. (Pretty soon some country in Europe like the Netherlands or France is going to open up to Coca leaf entrepreneurs. The US is probably going to keep its Federal asshole puckered but one or two of the states ought to give Coca Leaf legalization a good hard look. )
Meanwhile, back in Coca Valley. At the same time that it low-balls the farmers’ Coca Leaf and makes cheesy Coca Leaf products, the Peruvian government wages war against any “extra” Coca growing by the people of Coca Valley. If they grow more than they are told to by the government, or if they refuse to sell to ENACO because of its ridiculous prices for their precious leaf, GOP burns and poisons their fields and makes their lives as miserable as possible. After all, their bottom-line motive is to satisfy the requirements of the US Police State that wants to be able to show the world that Peru is trying very, very hard to eradicate illicit Cocaine production. Very hard.
But Aha! Peru has come up with a plan! GOP wants the people of Coca Valley to grow only enough Coca to satisfy the government’s requirements, and then to convert to growing crops like bananas and cocoa – assisted of course by friendly “experts” from the US and UN.
Of course if you are a farmer in Coca Valley and your family has been growing Coca for generations and you don’t happen to like the chintzy prices the government is willing to pay, are you going to let the police rip out your Coca plants and make you start over with Bananas? Quite a few Coca Valley residents have not been pleased when approached by men with guns proposing this plan, and a few have gotten downright rowdy. Thrown rocks ‘n stuff. You know – terrorism.
So to complete the farce the Peruvian government declared the VRAEM a war zone a few years back, it ever since has been battling against the quickly shrinking remains of the once-powerful Shining Path rebels – as of late 2015 SL is down to under 100 guerillas, mostly old men and teenagers.
To go after this fearsome band the Peruvian government keeps sending in waves of troops, missiles and helicopters, while the US leaps in with space-based surveillance, military aircraft, dark ops and night raiders, chemical warfare assistance and high tech drones. All this firepower is arrayed against ragtag remnants of what was once a well-organized and very effective rebellion.
These survivors fight on, using the vast forests and jungles of the Coca Valley, an area the size of Switzerland, to hide in.
So this is the threat – a hundred tired rebels who are definitely at the end of their Shining Path. Can you imagine, a hundred guys getting together in the mountains almost anywhere else in the world and the central government spending $250 Million a year to try to get rid of the rebels and eradicate a few thousand hectares of croplands at the same time – and failing?
“The Peruvian government’s (2014) counternarcotics strategy includes ambitious goals for eradication, interdiction, and alternative development, and addresses associated issues such as the control of precursor chemicals, organized crime, money laundering, and the rule of law. The Humala Administration increased its counternarcotics budget from $220 million in 2012 to $256 million in 2013. For the first time, Peru contributed $11.6 million towards eradication efforts and concomitant aviation support, which historically has been funded by the United States.” US Department of State
OK, so the Peruvian government spends $256 Million of mostly US money a year to – what – combat terrorism and cocaine trafficking and deal with other related dangers to the children, like free speech? And the US is right there helping out with money, technology, guns and manpower, just like the US was when the Fujimori government, funded by US foreign aid money, forcibly sterilized hundreds of thousands of Indian women in the 1980s in so-called “population control” programs.
Speaking of terrorism, let’s look at the terrorist activities of the Shining Path guerillas that are being used to justify all this government-initiated violence a little more closely.
So, how big a threat to the peace and tranquility of Peru is the Shining Path, actually? Here’s the US Department of State list of every one of the terrorist incidents involving the Shining Path in 2014. (Don’t worry – it isn’t a real long list)
On April 9, Peruvian police arrested 28 leaders of the Movement for Amnesty and Fundamental Rights – a front organization that advocates for the release of imprisoned SL founder Abimael Guzman. Those arrested included two of Guzman’s long-time lawyers, Afredo Crespo and Manuel Fajardo. The 28 were charged with terrorism and terrorist financing using narcotics revenue. On August 4, the National Anti-Terrorism Court, citing lack of evidence, ordered that the 28 be released from pre-trail detention. Although the court ordered the detainees released, it did keep the charges intact so the trial can move forward.
A May 16 clash between security forces and the SL in the Junin region left one SL guerilla dead and another wounded. The rest of the column was able to escape, but soldiers recovered weapons, ammunition, and communication equipment.
On June 17, a combined Peruvian military and police force killed three SL terrorists in the VRAEM emergency zone. The joint patrol recovered a number of weapons, including a heavy machine gun that SL fighters reportedly stripped from a Russian-made Mi-17 helicopter they shot down in a 2009 attack that killed three soldiers.
In August, security forces rescued six adults and three children from a work camp in the VRAEM used by SL to provide food and logistic support for its members.
In August, police officers in the UHV arrested Oscar Silva, who is believed to have been the second-in-command to “Comrade Artemio,” who was captured in February 2012.
In September, soldiers rescued 11 people, including six children, who were being forced to work for SL in Junin’s Satipo district.
On November 2, security forces announced the arrest of Filemon Huillcayaure, considered one of the top financiers of SL in the VRAEM.
OK – there you are. That’s the Peruvian government’s 2014 body count in the US-sponsored War On Narco/Terror in Coca Valley. The totals include: 0 soldiers dead or wounded; 4 SL terrorists killed, 1 wounded; and 20 people including children rescued from slave labor for the Shining Path.
And that’s after a full year of running around this valley the size of Switzerland with thousands of troops, helicopters, attack jets, tanks, HumVees, guns and rockets, and the latest ground, air & space-based surveillance technology courtesy of the US. All this technology and manpower chasing approximately 100 Shining Path guerillas (now minus 4) as they shake down Coca growers, take pot shots at soldiers, hide in the jungle, enslave the occasional villager, and make Coca Base to generate an income.
So, now that we all know how well the “War On The Gang Of 100 Terrorists” is going – how about the “War On Coca Plants”?
“Peru remained the world’s top potential producer of cocaine for the third consecutive year, and was the second-largest cultivator of coca, with an estimated 50,500 hectares (ha) of coca under cultivation in 2012, the most recent year for which data is available. The majority of cocaine produced in Peru is transported to South American countries for domestic consumption, or for onward shipment to Europe, East Asia, and Mexico via private and commercial aircraft, and land and maritime conveyances. Peru is a major importer of precursor chemicals used for cocaine production.
“ President Ollanta Humala dedicated substantial resources to implement Peru’s 2012-2016 counternarcotics strategy. The strategy calls for a 200 percent increase in the eradication of illicit coca by 2016. The Government of Peru remains on pace to meet its ambitious targets in this area, and in 2013 eradicated in the Monzón River Valley, a hostile area with little state presence, for the first time in decades. Sendero Luminoso (SL or Shining Path) operating in the Apurimac-Ene-Mantaro River Valley (VRAEM) relied on cocaine trafficking for funding, and killed and wounded several police and military personnel during counternarcotics operations.”
Oops. It looks like even with hundreds of millions of dollars, armadas of military-scale technology, thousands of heavily armed soldiers and police, and humungous firepower applied year after year, you still can’t (or conveniently don’t want to) deal with 100 guerillas operating in an area the size of Switzerland, and at the same time in spite of this all-out War you also still have the distinction of being the world’s top potential producer of cocaine for the third consecutive year, and you were the second-largest cultivator of coca in 2014.
This whole US-promoted War On Drugs/War On Terror thing really isn’t working for you is it?
Respectfully, I have a suggestion to offer.
Peru has a world-class renewable natural resource in the Coca plant and the people who have grown it for centuries. Why not go with what you have instead of playing a losing game in return for Yankee dollars? Why not just tell the US to go home, make peace with the Cartels and let them make and export all the Cocaine they want as long as they pay taxes, work with the indigenous people to build a Coca Leaf-based economy throughout the country, build a health industry based on Coca Leaf treatment at spas scattered throughout the mountains, and allow private enterprise to apply the entrepreneurial spirit to development and global sales of Coca-based medicines?
Next, pay off Shining Path and let them go home for God’s sake – including those you are holding in prison. I imagine that $50-$100K per SL guerilla would do it – a total of $5-10 Million (one-time investment) to get the whole hundred of them to lay down their weapons, for which they receive amnesty and a piece of land to grow Coca. And the SL in prison who agree to go home and live peacefully ought to get the same deal.
So Government of Peru, instead of spending hundreds of millions every year on a couple of wars that are going nowhere and aren’t even yours, plus terrorizing whole communities of your People, why not lead the world and declare that Coca is a gift from nature and that the Peruvian government will no longer stand in the way of those who wish to make their living by growing and making products from it – including Cocaine. What the rest of the world thinks shouldn’t matter.
I mean, hey there, government of Peru – don’t you have better things to do than chase 100 members of the Gang Who Can’t Shoot Straight, a bunch of peaceful Coca growers, and gangs of very determined Cocaine makers? Didn’t that US-sponsored clown Fujimori bring down enough evil on Peru to make the government finally decide to work for rather than against the People? If everybody’s happy in Coca Valley who cares what the US thinks?
It can happen. The US isn’t so tough anymore. Just ask your neighbors in Bolivia.
“The Intercept” has just run an excellent piece outlining the lobbying efforts of the Opioid Manufacturing sector of the Pharmaceutical Industry to scuttle new Federal regulations that would attempt to make it harder for doctors to prescribe Opioid drugs like Oxycontin. The major manufacturers involved in the lobbying are Purdue, Cephalon, Endo, and Janssen (a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson).
The efforts of these parasitical manufacturers to maintain open season on the wholesale addicting of new “patients” while at the same time keeping up the flow of millions of tablets of these drugs that somehow manage to leak into the street market ( who, us?), is symptomatic of the thug-like nature of virtually the entire pharmaceutical industry.
When you look at the numbers you see that pills are the main “Opioid” killers, not Heroin, not Morphine, and certainly not Opium from the Poppy, and for all the hype about synthetic Opium pills like Oxy, the job they do of relieving pain is no better than a pipe of good opium. Of the 47,000+ drug overdose deaths counted by the CDC in 2014, 8800 were due to Heroin, which leaves +38,000 due largely to pills.
The single justification for the “Opioid” pill industry’s existence is that their products are claimed to be safer than natural Opium, Morphine, or Heroin. If you want to find the reason for the industry’s panic at the increase in Opioid pill deaths, look at the ratio between deaths from the dreaded slayer of youth Heroin and the supposedly safe if used as directed wonder pill.
If a huge part of your industry’s claim to fame is that your product is safer than the juice of the poppy then you have to be pretty upset when people are finally realizing that your pills are killing users nearly 5:1 compared to the fruits of the little flower.
Consider for a moment two possible tracks for our society – the one we are on and the one that could have been, and yet might be.
The track our society has taken is to turn our health, just like we’ve turned most of the other key aspects of our lives, over to highly intrusive institutional management. Most of us no longer have any management role in our food, our children’s education, our family and community security, our finances, or our privacy. One of the results of our capitulation to pervasive institutional management of our lives is that the exponentially-growing health industry, always quick to spot (or make) an opportunity, responded by creating vast numbers of expensive, enormously profitable drugs for all those astounding new diseases of modern society that patients are required to take by their doctors who give no natural options in place of the medical management system’s proprietary pharmaceuticals.
The second track, which might have been, is that all of the medical knowledge gained by doctors, patients and society at large in the 1700s and especially the 1800s regarding three of the great natural drugs – Opium, Coca and Cannabis – might have been kept and nurtured rather than discarded and largely forgotten. Had those three natural medicinal drugs not been demonized and outlawed as part of the warped spiritual movement of the early 1900s that gave birth first to Prohibition and later to the War On Drugs, these three great natural drugs would be available today as a part of the :People’s Pharmacy” just like hundreds of other herbal, natural medicines.
The industrial pharma industry would still have developed, and a lot of people would still be victims of their concoctions, but without the legal framework lovingly erected over decades by authoritarian conspirators there would be a whole segment of the Medical industry devoted to the use of all natural medicines, not just those permitted by the state as part of its role in enforcing the monopoly of Industrial Pharma over medicinal products.
Even more important, a nationwide, community-bases network of natural medicine practitioners would have evolved – people in every community who knew how to grow all of the ancient medical herbs and who utilized the advances of technology to produce ever-more effective but still natural medicines.
Of course we have a great model for this system in the network of Medical Cannabis growers and patients who are finally emerging after the long night of Prohibition – which is still in the very earliest stages of dawning – to point to and see what might have been for ALL the great natural medicines and not just Cannabis, and not just in a few states in the US and a few countries in the world.
In a society where those who wanted any form of any natural drug could grow and prepare it for themselves, or could go to a reputable dispensary or belong to a regulated collective, then we would certainly have some addicts among these people, but they would be able to lead as normal a life as they chose to live without the constant suffering, pain, and jeopardy of addiction to “illegal drugs” and all the horrors that go with that scene.
People with little income would not be driven to prostitute themselves and do violence to feed a drug habit if the drugs they wanted were freely available in safe, natural forms. It is possible, is it not, that given access to natural drugs in a climate free of violence and exploitation many if not most people could use drugs and still lead a normal life even if trapped in circumstances of poverty.
I believe that centuries of recorded experience in societies worldwide shows that the overwhelming problem with addiction is how society treats addicts. If an addict is free to lead an otherwise productive and normal life, many will do so, and those who won’t would have been lost whether drug laws made them criminals or not.
Perhaps what makes addiction so awful for so many people isn’t what the drug does to them, it’s what society does to them as a consequence of their addiction. The popular image of addiction is what is used to sell all the prevention/intervention programs that flourish around addicted people. Human degradation in every form is shown as a consequence of drug addiction, and many people buy that and think no further. But consider the number of people who are technically addicted who lead normal, productive lives in comparison with those whose lives are supposedly ruined by addiction, you begin to realize that plenty of people are addicted to drugs and other substances and don’t descend to street prostitution, emaciation, bleeding scabs and sleeping in alleys. It seems that one begins to see that maybe it is circumstances and not the drugs themselves that determine the direction that addiction takes. Remove all the harsh punishments for addiction and I wonder – what would happen to addiction?
If the illegal status of drugs and the consequences for addiction were removed, at least drug addiction would no longer be part of the trap that ensnares millions of people in the US. Poverty and exploitation would continue in other ways – unless of course (you never know) some kind of new dynamic was released in poor communities by removing the key role of criminalized drug addiction in keeping the iron collar of poverty and exploitation firmly clamped around their necks.
The scientific and medical literature of the 1800s gives us thousands of case studies primarily from Europe, Canada and the US, as well as somewhat limited published research, on the role of Coca Leaf preparations in treating and healing an impressive range of conditions and diseases.
In these case studies Coca Leaf was almost always consumed by the patient as tea (hot water extract) or tonic (alcohol extract), which means that the initial site of almost all the recorded medical action of Coca Leaf on the body was the human gut.
The same has been true for hundreds of generations in the Andes – they chew Coca first to bathe their gut with the healing, balancing juices, and from there the healing influences radiate throughout their muscular, endocrine and nervous systems.
So according to the historical evidence, the healing action of Coca Leaf appears to be centered in the gut.
Fast forward to today.
We now know that it is the health and balance of an individual’s gut microbiome that determines their overall state of health. We know that when that balance is upset gut diseases occur, and we increasingly understand how metabolic and neurological diseases are linked to disturbances of the gut microbiome.
Human adults carry about six pounds of bacteria in our gut, and in this mass of living organisms there are literally tens of thousands of species – most of them still unidentified. However we do know the major players in the human gut, and increasingly we are finding out that changes in the populations of these major players, plus blooms of pathogenic players like klebsiella and c. dificil, seem increasingly likely to be causing serious human illness.
So it may not be making too much of a speculative leap to say that it is likely that one of the important things that 19th Century science is telling us is that Coca Leaf helps to maintain, and works to restore a healthy gut microbiome, although of course those 19th Century doctors knew nothing of the gut microbiome. But they did know that Coca Leaf preparations worked on a wide range of diseases – better than almost anything else in their apothecary.
It certainly wouldn’t take a major research project to confirm or to disprove what I believe the 19th Century medical literature so clearly suggests. As part of the work I’m doing in trying to find funding for “Centros de Coca Curación” I intend to include funding for research studies in this and related areas, engaging reputable degreed scientific and medical researchers in Peru, Bolivia and any other country where they would be free to conduct their work and publish the results.
Readers of this blog know that in past posts I have engaged in a lot of speculation on the modern implications what 19th Century science knew about the healing properties of pure, natural Coca Leaf. I believe that the richness of the human experience recorded in those days by people of science and medicine can guide us today, lost as we are in the machinations of the pharmaceutical and allopathic medical “industries”.
Isn’t it time to begin demanding that legislators in states that have legalized Medical Cannabis now move to legalize first the import of fresh Coca Leaf and Coca Medicines and also to legalize cultivation of Coca Leaf in the United States for general consumption as well as medical purposes?
Long-time readers of Panaceachronicles know that the human gut is one of my passions and that I have been an advocate for the use of probiotics as both preventative and healing medicines. A good understanding of the role of probiotics in controlling, treating and even curing inflammatory gut disease is even more important now that in many states patients have access to medical marijuana for relief of symptoms. Combining the symptomatic relief of Cannabis with the right probiotics to help heal the gut and prevent further colonization by pathogens is without doubt the natural path to effective treatment.
It is well-known that there are significant differences in the effectiveness of different brands of commercial probiotics. A quick glance at the labels will confirm the great discrepancies between brands. Since there are important differences in the species of bacteria they provide, the concentrations of each species, the viability of those bacteria, the methods used to culture the bacteria, the sources of the extraction base, and the matrix in which the bacteria are stabilized for human consumption, being an informed probiotics buyer is a critical part of healing yourself.
Probiotics appear to be one of those classes of products where you really do get what you pay for – although a high price is not a guarantee of a more effective medicine. Just because a particular brand is very expensive, or contains an impressive list of species, doesn’t mean that it is the right choice for you. You have to do your homework on your own gut biome, and it is important that the probiotics you choose are tailored to the gaps or weaknesses in your own gut microbes.
If you are serious about getting a hand on an inflammatory gut issue and haven’t yet had your gut biome profiled, you may want to consider participating in the crowd-sourced “American Gut Project”. This project is not limited to people in the US, by the way.
However, this blog post is to alert readers to something new and very important that is emerging in the field of probiotics, specifically that there is now a highly concentrated form of probiotic called “Amanlac probiotics”, that appears to be far more effective against a wide range of inflammatory gut diseases than even the best “commercial” probiotics.
In an article in the June 2012 Journal of Food & Drug Analysis entitled “High Concentrated Probiotics Improve Inflammatory Bowel Diseases Better Than Commercial Concentrations”. The article details Korean research into Amanlac probiotics – it seems that Korean and Japanese microbiologists are far ahead of the west in understanding how specific probiotic configurations can be used to treat specific inflammatory gut diseases. Here is how the researcher’s describe their findings in the article abstract:
“Probiotics have been clinically administered to improve intestinal inflammation in Inflammatory Bowel Disease. In this study we identified that higher concentrations of probiotics called “Amanlac” probiotics protected intestinal tissues with the regulation of cytokine production and the improvement of intestinal injury in mice with dextran sodium sulfate (DSS)-induced Colitis much better than commercial probiotics. Amanlac probiotics significantly ameliorated both gross and pathological scores caused by DSS in a concentration-dependent manner, based on the following mechanisms: inflammatory markers such as IL1-β, TNF α, and COX-2 as well as MMPs and ICAM1 were significantly lower in probiotic-treated mice following DSS treatment compared with DSS-treated control mice, but the overall efficacy of “Amanlac” probiotics was significantly improved over conventional concentration of probiotics. In conclusion, administration of higher concentration probiotics helps to successfully maintain intestinal homeostasis while also improving intestinal inflammation.”
While there may be other “Amanlac” probiotics available, the brand that my wife and I have found to be remarkable in its ability to restore normal, healthy, pain-free intestinal functioning is Dr. Ohhira’s Professional Formula. These probiotics are manufactured in Japan using both traditional and state-of-the-art fermentation methods and incorporate a very wide range of traditional Japanese plants in the base mixture from which the probiotics are fermented and extracted.
If you are using a commercial probiotic and are having limited success you may want to read this research paper in its entirety and consider choosing an “Amanlac” probiotic rather than the one you are currently using.
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