“(B) ADDITIONAL SPECIAL RULE.—Beginning 2 years after the date of enactment of the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, a tobacco product manufacturer shall not use tobacco, including foreign grown tobacco, that contains a pesticide chemical residue that is at a level greater than is specified by any tolerance applicable under Federal law to domestically grown tobacco”
So the tolerance would be zero for DDT, which is banned worldwide, and tobacco products contaminated with that DDT would definitely be in violation of Section 907, because there can’t be any DDT residue at all on US-grown tobacco. There is no tolerance. DDT is totally illegal in the US and in most countries worldwide – except a few like India and Brazil where – surprise – US manufacturers source their cheapest tobacco. That’s where the pesticide chemicals you see in the data below come from, and they are being inhaled by smokers in the US and worldwide every day. Nobody is the least bit aware of this because there has not been a single study for 50 years of off-the-shelf tobacco products to see what pesticide residues smokers are actually inhaling. Until I did this study.
So, no US manufacturer can use foreign-grown tobacco contaminated with DDT, or any of the other pesticide residues you see here like Carbendazim – which is totally banned in the EU. Seems pretty clear – right?
So let’s ask why FDA and all those other complicit Federal agencies allow this illegal and beyond-dangerous exposure to continue, as it has for generations of illness and death, without a single move to intervene? Let’s ask how the Tobacco Cartel and Federal agencies have managed to conspire to get around every law, not just this simple but groundbreaking (if ever applied) Section 907, and how that conspiracy dramatically and tragically impacts the lives of young men and women who are most at risk and most vulnerable to this particular kind of chemical exposure by withholding information that could change their decisions, behavior and life choices.
There can be no doubt that FDA knows that these cancer-causing, fetus-destroying pesticide residues that are known to cause diabetes and inflammatory obesity are totally concealed and unregulated in tobacco products like those you see below, so I’ll ask you to think about why the FDA, CDC, EPA, FTC and every other government agency supposedly committed to public health all refuse to regulate these Tobacco product Xenobiotics – substances hostile to life itself. These xenobiotic substances.
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Who’s smoking those Swisher Sweets? They are heavily and almost exclusively marketed to marginalized, poorly educated, easily manipulated young women and men. Why do you suppose that diabetes, obesity and hypertension are so high among young Black women in particular – the heaviest smokers of Swisher Sweets and the other cheap fruity smokes? Is it the tobacco making them obese and diabetic with failing hearts? The fact, and the truth is that we don’t know anything at all about smoking tobacco because pure tobacco has never been used in researching “tobacco’s” health effects – it’s always been “research” cigarettes and they have all been contaminated with pesticides, so of course the results have showed that “smoking” is dangerous. But smoking tobacco? Never been tested. So maybe it is the tobacco causing all this tragedy and death but we just don’t know, and that’s no accidental oversight either. But here’s the question that has never once been asked at least publicly by any agency or non-profit ‘anti-smoking’ vigilantes – could it actually be the pesticides and not the tobacco? We know for a fact that chronic exposure to every one of the pesticides I found in my “smoke No Evil” tests causes every single one of the ‘smoking-related’ diseases. Search “exposure” along with the name of any of the pesticides in that table above plus any keyword like diabetes, obesity or hypertension and you’ll see what I mean. For example, search (exposure DDT obesity) or (exposure cypermethrin diabetes). Searching almost any combination of pesticide exposure and any of the diseases rampant in Black, Latinx, Native American and API communities will give you similar results. Since all this research isn’t exactly hidden from view it can’t be news to section 907 regulators – right?
As an example of everything that is being hidden and ignored by the regulators, here’s a very recent ground-breaking study that happens to be the first study since 1950 – think about that – studying the link between smoking tobacco products and the blood serum levels of DDT in Black women smokers. I’ll share links to extensive science showing why daily, deep DDT exposure matters below.
“Correlates of organochlorine pesticide plasma concentrations among reproductive-aged black women“
“… prospective cohort study of Black women aged 23–35 years from the Detroit, Michigan metropolitan area (enrolled 2010–2012), examined correlates of plasma concentrations of the following OCPs: dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (p,pʹ-DDE), hexachlorobenzene (HCB), oxychlordane, and trans-nonachlor.”
“Current smoking was associated with 10–19% higher plasma concentrations of all four OCPs, and was highest for current smokers of ≥10 cigarettes/day (% differences ranged from 22 to 29%).”
Young Black women smokers are dead-center in the target market for the DDT-contaminated Swisher Sweets you see in the data above. Could the DDT in their favorite smoke have anything at all to do with their health issues? Could the DDT in their mother’s or father’s cigarettes have anything to do with their health issues? If it does we’ll never hear it from the FDA, EPA or any other Federal or State agency.
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In case this situation has your attention you may be interested in looking into the science further further. Here are some of my recent posts linking to published journal research on exposure to these pesticides individually and as the pesticide “cocktail” we found in every brand we tested. In these posts there’s a strong emphasis on the DDT in Swisher Sweets and quite likely in many other brands when full testing can be accomplished. This emphasis points to a public health crisis that is irretrievably damaging the health and vitality of generations of young Black, Latinx, Native American and Asian-Pacific Islander American women and men – and the entire world of smokers beyond America where 7 million people are dying every year from inhaling pesticides while engaged in what they have been deceived into thinking is “smoking”.
This post offers hard evidence and historic documentation of the conspiratorial role of Federal agencies in concealing the health threat to smokers created by unregulated pesticide exposure
This post offers a look at the historical origins of today’s breast cancer, diabetes and obesity epidemics in the trans-generational impact of DDT and Organochlorine pesticide contaminants in cigarettes 1950-1972, and the current state of DDT in tobacco products in 2021
This post links new hard data on pesticide contaminants in cigarettes with the elevated health risks this creates for Diabetic smokers, and the simple strategy that individual smokers can use to eliminate the threat.
A radical “quit smoking” plan that will probably offend a lot of non-smokers but that could help a lot of Diabetic smokers quit hurting themselves without having to quit.
This post links hard data on DDT in Swisher Sweets brand of little cigars, smoked by millions of young women, with peer-reviewed published research on pre-natal genetic damage to the baby
This post links hard data on hidden fungicides in tobacco brands popular in marginalized communities with peer-reviewed published research that demonstrates that exposure to these same fungicides is strongly associated with testicular cancer
Any exposure to several of the pesticides shown to contaminate tobacco products are proven to have greater impact on babies with Latinx, African American, American Indian and Pacific Island genetics.
Could the unexplained link between smoking and suicide be explained by the known link between pesticide exposure and suicide, once you become aware of the concealed pesticide contamination in cigarettes?
There’s nothing spontaneous if a young smoker loses her baby because the insecticides and fungicides in her cigarettes have interrupted fetal development creating ‘non-viable offspring’ doing to her what they are designed to do to bugs.
When a pregnant woman is exposed to DDT during a critical time window in her female baby’s development that female baby will have 4X greater risk of developing breast cancer if she is Black or Brown-skinned.
Once you know about the hidden pesticides communities can use existing toxic substances laws to ban the most dangerous brands and force compliance by the rest.
32 million Americans are living with diagnosed type 2 diabetes, and 25% of these folks are smokers – about 7,000,000 people. Because they are diabetic, these smokers face aspecial set of severe hazardsfrom deliberately concealed highly bioactive insecticide and fungicide chemicals that every US Agency – FDA, EPA, USDA, CDC, the Surgeon General, FTC – all know are present and are being concealed but refuse to regulate or even inspect for in cigarettes. These are not those mysterious “additives”, or those infamous and ridiculous “7000 chemicals”, or any of the other nasty things we’ve all been told for years are dangers to smokers. These bioactive chemicals are a completely different level of hazard to human health, but you’ve never once heard about them in any anti-tobacco propaganda. They are potent, very dangerous and in some instances banned (but used on tobacco and inhaled with every puff) insecticides and fungicides that are proven Diabetes hazards (see also here and here) that have never once been mentioned in any government ‘smoking & health’ research or in any of the anti-tobacco programs and propaganda. They are doing irreparable harm to every smoker every day and are leading every smoker toward Diabetes, but for a smoker who already has Diabetes, inhaling this concealed witch’s brew with every puff is slowly and severely damaging their organs and nerves far beyond anything else in their life. And this is all completely and easily preventable.
“After reviewing 21 previous studies, researchers found exposure to any type of pesticide was associated with a 61 percent increased risk for any type of diabetes. The increased risk for type 2 diabetes — the most common type — was 64 percent, the investigators found.”
So it’s worth asking – how much of the daily and long-term damage Diabetic smokers are suffering from smoking contaminated tobacco cigarettes, meaning virtually every commercial brand, could be 100% prevented by switching to organic tobacco cigarettes? I wonder what would happen if a Diabetic smoker could eliminate just those pesticides without having to face the often futile struggle of “quitting”? For anyone who might think – “But that’s not a solution! That”s still smoking!” I’ll simply point to the impeccable logic behind needle exchange and condom distribution programs. You deal with the harm you can deal with.
My answer is that the damage from cigarette pesticides is actually 100% preventable and it doesn’t mean that Diabetic smokers have to go through the agonies of quitting tobacco or switch to lettuce cigarettes in order to stop harming themselves. All any Diabetic smoker has to do is switch to organic tobacco cigarettes for a week to begin feeling better than they’ve felt in a long time and see their numbers begin to improve. That’s correct. Once you know that these severely hazardous pesticide contaminants are in the cigarettes you’re smoking, and once you know what they are doing to your health, it’s just common sense to avoid them if you can, and if you do even for a little while you’ll see for yourself.
This is an incredibly easy fix to a horrible, widespread problem. It’s not a total solution, but it’s a good fix for those who need it. Diabetic smokers do not have to quit smoking tobacco to quit damaging themselves with inhaled neurotoxins, mutagens, teratogens, genotoxins, obesogens, and the other classes of highly bioactive insecticide/fungicide chemicals that are concealed as cigarette contaminants with full US government knowledge and complicity. I’ll show you the hard data below on the pesticides in just one common brand, smoked by over Two Million US Diabetics, with links to other equally compelling hard evidence.
Some kinds of change need a nationwide movement, but this revolution in Diabetic health can and should take place one smoker at a time as individual smokers realize that they can take control and help heal themselves without going through the agonies and depressing failures of trying to quit smoking. Equally important is that 20,000,000 pre-diabetic smokers in the US, and untold millions more worldwide, can each acting on their own, have a positive impact on their own health even if they don’t stop smoking. It’s what smokers are inhaling along with the tobacco in the tobacco product they”re smoking that creates this 100% preventable threat to their health, completely separately from the harm that the tobacco itself may or may not be doing. Please let me show you the evidence.
This post and related posts on this blog offer hard data to show that this severe hazard to health that exists far beneath everybody’s level of awareness can be 100% prevented by individual Diabetic smokers making a simple, easy choice that the US Government, the Tobacco Cartel, and the Anti-smoking/Anti-tobacco forces all want to keep them from making. That statement may be hard to believe, so let me offer you the hard evidence that this hazard is real and painfully obvious once it’s seen, and then let me offer the simple painless solution.
Let’s Look At Marlboros
Since Marlboro is most popular US cigarette brand, with a 40% share of all cigarette smokers, I’ll assume there are roughly 2.5 million Marlboro-smoking diabetics. Let’s see what’s happening to all those cowboys.
First, when it comes to Diabetes, let’s all notice that the CDC uses the words “causes Diabetes” in the statement below, which is about as certain as any science-based statement can be, but also notice that it is “smoking” that “causes” Diabetes, not “smoking tobacco” – which is what we are all supposed to assume is meant:
“We now know that smoking causes type 2 diabetes. In fact, smokers are 30–40% more likely to develop type 2 diabetes than nonsmokers. And people with diabetes who smoke are more likely than nonsmokers to have trouble with insulin dosing and with controlling their disease.”
But what no government agency will ever tell these 2.5 million Diabetics who smoke Marlboros, or any other brand, is that they are being exposed with every puff to a ‘cocktail’ of unregulated insecticides and fungicides concealed in those cigarettes many of which on their own, when someone who is Diabetic is exposed, are known to severely complicate Type 2 Diabetes. And the fact also is that there has never once been a study on the health effects of smoking tobacco by itself – no contaminants, no additives, no reconstituted tobacco waste – just pure leaf. Never one research study. There are thousands of research studies of pesticides and human health, but zero on inhaling pesticides from cigarettes. None. There hasn’t even been a study on pesticide contaminants in cigarettes since around 1970 when the Tobacco Cartel realized they had a big problem and chose to conceal it.
You can browse a few examples of the surviving tobacco/cigarette pesticide research that virtually ended in the 1970shere and here and here and here and here. You will not find anything similar in the past 50 years. Neither the Cartel nor the US government want smokers to have a clue. Nothing to see here. Move along.
But before we get to that let’s fact-check that statement on the concealed pesticides in Marlboros and while we’re at it let’s check a few other brands too.
Here are hard data showing the fungicides and insecticides found in Marlboro cigarettes and other brands pulled off-the-shelf from area mini-marts by professional lab staff using randomized selection – I didn’t select the tobacco products to be tested – during 2018 lab tests of major US cigarette brands for my book “Smoke No Evil”. The lab I used is highly qualified to test for pesticide residues on commercial tobacco substrate due to its EU corporate parentage. The choice of USDA certified organic tobacco as the reference substrate was the lab’s decision, as was the inclusion of American Spirit Blues in the product selection. Here’s what the lab found – and here’s what any Federal regulatory agency could find anytime they looked.
It may be easy to just scan and dismiss that list, especially things labelled “trace”, but please slow down – each one of these pesticides has its own set of impacts on areas of special concern to Diabetics like glucose metabolism, inflammation, neuropathy, and other critical health issues for Diabetics. You can prove this for yourself.
Try this little exercise. Search the name of any of these pesticides plus any diabetic condition or complication together at random – “Azoxystrobin and neurotoxicity” for example, or “Bifenthrin and glucose”, or “Chlorantraniliprole and neurological”, or “ Penconazole and testicular”, or “ Fluopicolide and nephrotoxicity” or “Trifloxystrobin and neuropathy“.
Just poke around with whatever “Name of Marlboro pesticide/Diabetic symptom/condition” combinations interest you. By the way, those are random combinations above – try your own pesticide/condition combinations too, and please keep this research in mind while you browse:
“After reviewing 21 previous studies, researchers found exposure to any type of pesticide was associated with a 61 percent increased risk for any type of diabetes. The increased risk for type 2 diabetes — the most common type — was 64 percent, the investigators found.”
Just poke around in the science. No need to deep-dive at first – you’ll quickly get a sense of how broad this problem really is – and this is just set of pesticides from one brand. Other brands have very different pesticide profiles, and each insecticide and fungicide has very different impacts on Diabetes – much of it not yet studied. But with the search strategy above you can easily browse the already-known effects of exposure to the multiple highly bioactive pesticides that every Diabetic Marlboro smoker is inhaling +/-600 times a day – if they’re just a pack-a-day smoker.
Even more stunning when you think about it – not one doctor treating any Diabetic patient who smokes is aware that they are inhaling this incredible pesticide cocktail every day, because not one research study has ever been published on the subject, and there has never been a medical journal article raising even the possibility that this could be a problem for smokers. Research in this area has been completely absent from the world’s journals for over 50 years – although there is plenty of research on the consequences of exposure to pesticides – exposure to many of these pesticides alone, much less in combination, is known to lead to Type 2 and then if a Diabetic is exposed to make their Type 2 symptoms much worse. There’s plenty of research on that, but nothing on pesticides in cigarettes. Could this be a simple oversight? Oops – missed that one.
Not bloody likely – right? Here are examples of the kind of cigarette pesticide research that suddenly disappeared after the early 1970s, when the Tobacco Cartel realized what it all meant, you can browse a few examples of surviving tobacco/cigarette pesticide research here and here and here and here and here. All the Billions of dollars spent on “Smoking & Health” research and not one single study that simply compares smoking tobacco without pesticide contaminants with smoking contaminated tobacco products. Not even one study anywhere that said – “Hey, just for fun and because it’s dead simple to do, let’s just see what kinds of pesticide residues smokers are inhaling from these brands of cigarettes.” Not once.
This means of course that any complications of Diabetes symptoms due to this 100% preventable pesticide exposure are also 100% hidden from the Doctor’s view and can’t be detected much less diagnosed or appropriately treated. It also means the Diabetic smoker can’t make a fully informed decision about their own options. Very few smokers know there are organic tobacco product options, or why organic tobacco matters dramatically to their health and quality of life. With everything lumped together under “smoking” it’s impossible for a smoker or their doctor to be aware of the potentially hugely important differences between smoking tobacco with and without pesticide contamination – everything else kept the same.
So its also important to note that while we found ten Marlboro fungicides and pesticides above the level of detection, the fact is that in every cigarette brand there will always be dozens of other residues below those levels. (See the section at the end of this post for a long, long list of bioactive insecticidal and fungicidal chemicals known to be widely used on tobacco and known to leave residues.)
So if you’re wondering why its important that there are pesticide residues even below the levels of detection, let’s get a common mis-conception out of the way – that the size of the dose matters. That’s just in case anyone is tempted to say “Oh look here, that’s only a small amount of those pesticides, just a little trace, less than we can even detect. That little bit might kill tiny bugs, but how much damage could that infinitely small amount of pesticide do to a human?”
Please check this link: solid new neurotoxicology science tells us that a trace is all it takes for many new pesticides to perform exactly as designed. They don’t depend on dosage for firepower. They are 100% stealthy by design and even a few molecules on-target on-time will do the job on any endocrine system or any nervous system or any reproductive system of any living creature.Oh, and a blend of those designer supertoxins … what do you suppose they do to human beings when they’re all working together, like they’re supposed to?Nobody knows because nobody has ever imagined that anyone would be inhaling these insecticide/fungicide combinations, at any level.
Toxicology
“Toxic effects of pesticide mixtures at a molecular level: their relevance to human health”
The widely-held message in the toxicology science literature is that many if not most pesticides do their damage at molecular levels, far below the limits of detection, and science has demonstrated in the case of many of these pesticides that the classic dose-response model doesn’t apply, so dismissing pesticide contamination of tobacco products as a minor issue because of dosage is counter-factual.
This also ignores the fact that, for example, even the tiny concentrations of some of these pesticides on the tobacco in the brands we first tested in 2018 FAR EXCEEDED allowable limits on any other consumable food or food product. That Azoxystrobin in Marlboros is way over limits for food, but you don’t inhale broccoli or catfish, right? Besides, your gut can handle a lot more than your lungs, and your gut is set up to protect your body from neurotoxins but your lungs are a wide-open pathway to every vital organ – no barriers.
In fact, you don’t inhale pesticides into your lungs from any other consumer product; contaminated food and drink go through your digestive system and produce completely different outcomes from the same pesticide inhaled. For example, eating DDT isn’t an issue unless it is at very very high levels – almost by the spoonful. But even a trace of inhaled DDT goes straight into your bloodstream where it heads straight for your organs, glands, nervous system and DNA. (No, we didn’t find DDT in Marlboros, but we found enormous concentrations in Swisher Sweets.)
Bottom line – those fungicides and insecticides you see in the data above are severely damaging the health of the 2.5 million diabetics who are smoking Marlboros regardless of any damage the tobacco in those cigarettes may or may not be doing to them too.
Thing is – this damage from the insecticides and fungicides is 100% preventable, simply and easily.
So What Can A Diabetic Smoker Do Besides Quit?
Like almost all cigarette smokers most Diabetics want to quit, but like all smokers most of them who try simply can’t. They’ve tried, many times. It’s just too difficult. So like most non-Diabetic smokers they figure they just have to live with the damage their smoking does, although like all smokers they keep trying to quit or cut down or do something, anything. Nothing seems to work so they keep smoking cigarettes that keep exposing them to these hidden pesticides, that nobody knows are there, that are doing who knows how much of the harm, and causing who knows how much of the suffering, completely independent of any actual “tobacco” that may be in their Marlboro cigarette.
That’s pure tragedy. If they only knew that they don’t have to stop smoking to stop inhaling pesticides, which is even more important for Diabetics than for non-Diabetic smokers. A simple switch to organic tobacco cigarettes or RYO and they wouldn’t be inhaling pesticides when they fired up.
100% 0f the damage to their Diabetic state being caused by hidden, unregulated pesticides in their Marlboros is 100% preventable – they can easily and comfortably switch to organic tobacco cigarettes or organic tobacco RYO and completely eliminate that part of the damage from smoking.
Would that be enough to make a difference? Go back and Google some of those Marlboro pesticide/Diabetes outcome combinations. Check out some of the links. Decide for yourself.
Doctors do know that Diabetics who continue to smoke do worse, and Diabetics are even discovering that vaping pure nicotine instead of smoking seems improve their condition a bit. Both doctors and patients think that’s because the patients aren’t smoking tobacco anymore, confusing tobacco with cigarettes as we’ve all been trained to do, but IMO it’s quite likely because they aren’t inhaling pesticides anymore. But why debate this – why not just try eliminating pesticides in your cigarette smoke and see how you do, for starters.
So Why Not Just Quit Smoking And Start Vaping?
A major ‘real-world’ problem with diabetic smokers substituting vaping for smoking is that vaping a cloud of flavored nicotine just isn’t the same as smoking a cigarette for most smokers. Even those who hate cigarettes and want to quit still actually enjoy the act of smoking, which is one of the strongest reasons so many Diabetic smokers can’t or won’t quit. I have never yet seen a research study that begins with the assumption that people like smoking tobacco and that’s the reason they find it so hard to quit – because they really don’t want to at the same time they really do. So what is it that smokers actually want to quit?
I think many smokers want to quit feeling bad but would like to keep smoking tobacco if they could. I think smokers want a tobacco cigarette that is just tobacco, grown without pesticides and made with only natural flavorings and ingredients. And additives.
Natural additives? Yes of course flavor and aroma additives – just not industrial chemical additives. Natural herbs and fruits and roots and barks and berries – definitely yes. Tobacco has been flavored with those things for thousands of years. The whole FDA thing about “Additives” is a hoax, just like the whole thing about “Warnings” is a hoax. As long as everyone is distracted arguing about mint nobody is going to start asking questions about Azoxystrobin or Penconazole.
Anyone remember the “Tar & Nicotine” hoohah? Anybody ever ask what “Tar” is? The short answer is – no. Technically it’s the condensed smoke of a cigarette, so would that include pesticide residues? If that “Tar” came from Kentucky Reference cigarettes it did, but nobody looked and nobody found, so it remains just “Tar”. Could there be a reason why all that stuff is just lumped together and called “Tar”? Maybe we’re supposed to nod and pass on by and say “Oh yeah, tar.”
For those Marlboro smokers who don’t care to be manipulated a moment longer here’s a simple little experiment – starting tomorow, switch to pesticide-free organic tobacco cigarettes for one month and see how you feel and what your numbers look like. Don’t change anything else you’re doing – just change from whatever cigarette brand you’re smoking to an organic brand.
American Spirit Organic cigarettes are a convenient widely available choice — BUT none of their “natural tobacco” brands are organic tobacco and they are NOT free of insecticides and fungicides. If you decide to free yourself from what pesticides in cigarettes are doing to your health then choose only Americn Spirit organic cigarettes or, better yet, organic American Spirit Roll Your Own (RYO).
So far I have only been able to test one American Spirit brand and while it was less contaminated than several other brands I was able to test, only the American Spirit USDA certified organic tobacco brand is free of pesticides. Calling the other Americn Spirit brands ‘natural’ appears to be a statement of fact but its actually meaningless as far as eliminating your exposure to tobacco product pesticides. Only “USDA Organic” tobacco, no matter what the brand (and I hope there will soon be many choices) is free of those pesticide residues that Marlboro smokers are currently inhaling 600 times a day or more.
Smokers can also buy organic tobacco online and roll their own cigarettes, which is a great way to be able to combine organic tobacco with organic CBD or THC Cannabis, for example, but for a Diabetic smoker who simply wants to try the effects of eliminating inhaled pesticides from their life for a month, pre-rolled American Spirit Organic cigarettes are the obvious choice of convenience.
Turn your back on the propaganda, check out the science, think for yourself and try switching to organic tobacco, and see how you’re feeling in about a week. Then watch your numbers for a month. Then share what you’ve learned with others.
BONUS SECTION
If you really want to deep dive into the connection between Diabetes symptoms and conditions here’s a pretty confidential list (from a private lab) of most or all the pesticides that various US agencies say are OK to use on tobacco – and then never test for at all in any way in cigarettes. Not all of these are currently in use on US tobacco but worldwide there are all these and many more being used on tobacco that winds up in cigarettes. You’ll be hard-pressed to find this list in any US Government agency publication. This is not information that anyone, government or Tobacco Cartel, want you to have.
This table shows two Federal agencies approving of and regulating pesticides used on tobacco crops, but we know they never test tobacco products for those same pesticides to see what smokers are being exposed to. These pesticides are all approved by EPA, USDA and others for use on tobacco in the US, but not a single one was ever tested for its health effects when inhaled prior to or after its approval for use on tobacco crops. Every one of those pesticides you see in Marlboros was approved with ZERO testing of its health impact when inhaled – which is of course the ONLY way that tobacco is used. Oh, right – chewing tobacco. There’s plenty of science on what happens to mucosal tissue when its chronically exposed to pesticides, and of course the pesticides in that chewing tobacco are absorbed very efficiently. They are also absorbed 100% – none have been combusted by smoking, so all the pesticides in a wad of chew are available to enter blood and lymph. And neither smokers nor chewers, nor pipe nor cigar smokers, nor blunt rollers, are never told that they are in danger and have a choice – not a hint, never. The doctors don’t know either – everybody is dead certain, without the question ever being asked, that its smoking tobacco that’s sickening and killing people and they never go one step further.
There’s been a lot of money spent over the years to ensure that nobody ever thinks to take that line of reasoning another step. Of course its the tobacco. Everybody knows that.
Please keep in mind that many of these residues will never show up even if tobacco products are tested for them because they will be present below the limit of detection. However, as the science proves as you saw earlier, and is proving more every day, many of them are highly bioactive at even the molecular level. Still when you Google any of them in combination with any of the main Diabetic conditions I’m quite certain you may very well wonder why this information has never once been investigated in over 50 years of progress in Smoking & Health Research.
For example, check here’s one of the first links that come up when you search the first pesticide on the list “methamidophos” along with “diabetes”. You won’t hit every time – not every pesticide has been researched for its impact on Diabetes, and in the pesticide approval process nobody asks that question. Probably just an oversight, right? After all, how many people are going to be inhaling methamidophos along with dozens of others on this list? Where would anyone encounter methamidosphos in a normal everyday environment? Hmmm.
40 million or so American smokers and about a Billion people worldwide, that’s who. Oh, and their children if Mommy smokes, and 25% of women who smoke keep right on smoking through pregnancy. So that’s what – a couple of hundred million children born after being exposed to pesticides 24/7 throughout their development.
So now check out the pesticide cocktail ingredients a one-pack smoker is inhaling 600X a day.
Table I: Percent recoveries for pesticides included in the EPA approved list and USDA monitoring list for tobacco determined using QuEChERS extraction, dSPE cleanup, and GCxGC-TOFMS analysis.
Yes they are, in more than one way. Here’s the story.
A sample of Swisher Sweets little cigars we pulled at random from a local mini-mart and tested in a registered pesticide testing lab turned out to be heavily contaminated with DDT, one of the most dangerous substances on earth, and totally illegal at any level in any product – except tobacco products, which are exempt from all the rules on pesticides like DDT that otherwise protect public health.
The presence of DDT is especially serious wakeup call for millions of mostly young, mostly Black and Latino males who are Swisher Sweets smokers. For those Swisher smokers it will be very bad news for their testicles and sperm, and their eventual children if they don’t somehow get the word. It’s important to say we could only afford to test Swisher Sweets- as soon as we can test more brands I’m confident we’ll find widespread DDT contamination in many other Cartel products including quite likely every little cigar brand.)
The health consequences of exposure to even vanishingly tiny amounts of DDT have now been extensively studied by generations of scientists, but never when that exposure takes place by smoking and inhaling contaminated tobacco products, and now that the impact of DDT at nano-levels is becoming clear, the scope of the damage that smoking DDT has been causing for those 5-7 generations can be seen – if we care to look.
The damage looks especially widespread when you take into account that smokers have been inhaling unseen and unaccounted-for DDT since the 1950s. We know that DDT exposure is a cause of obesity. DDT exposure at nano-levels, well below the limits of detection on a tobacco leaf or in a Swisher Sweet, has been shown to create high risk of obesity and diabetes in an exposed person’s lifetime and we also know that such DDT damage is genetic – it crosses generations to children and grandchildren and can dramatically impact their lives through developmental disorders and dreadful diseases like breast and testicular cancers.
DDT is also one of the most potent obesogens that science has identified. Never heard of obesogens? Neither had I until I really dug into DDT exposure research and found the area of endocrinology research. Obesogens are substances that create obesity that has nothing to do with food/calorie intake. Obesogens are chemicals that in simple terms make you obese and keep you that way regardless of what you eat (caloric intake) or how much or little you eat. There have been around 20 obesogens identified since 2011, and DDT is one of the most potent, and Swisher Sweets are loaded with DDT just like tobacco products have been since the 1950s. You can browse a few examples of the surviving tobacco/cigarette pesticide research on DDT and organochlorine pesticides in cigarettes that virtually ended in the 1970s here and here and here and here and here.
Any guesses how that all might figure into the global obesity and diabetes pandemic? Nobody has connected the dots between DDT and other obesogeic pesticides in tobacco products and the obesity/diabetes because there have never been any studies of pesticides in tobacco products. Does knowing about concealed and unaccounted-for obesogenic pesticides in tobacco products connect any dots in new ways in the obesity and diabetes pandemic picture?
But back to this post on the connection between smoking DDT and developing testicular cancer – what I’m calling cheesy balls which you’ll get when I show you an image of DDT-testicle cancer. Even nanogram-levels of DDT exposure are known to directly and definitively destroy human testicles and sperm and human eggs and developing fetuses as well. DDT is hostile to human life from the very beginning of its development and if just a few molecules of DDT in the mother’s blood and fatty tissues (where it is stored) don’t manage to abort the fertilized egg or then kill and abort the developing fetus then the baby that is born will very likely suffer multiple diseases and conditions that will destroy its life as surely as if it had never been born at all. That’s why DDT is banned worldwide – it is that dangerous at any level.
I’ve linked to the extensive science on what the pesticide contaminants of this and other tobacco product brands are doing to women and girl Sweets Smokers in several recent posts so in this post I want to focus on just one part of DDT’s destructiveness – the sperm damage and testicular cancer that are both established outcomes of fetal DDT exposure as well as lifetime DDT exposure, like through smoking a tobacco product contaminated with DDT. A young guy who starts inhaling the concentration of DDT in Swisher Sweets in his early teens could easily wind up with ‘Cheesy Balls” like these cancerous little nuts shown here in his 20s or 30s.
Think These Young Men Rolling A Blunt Know About What That DDT WILL Do?
Here’s what’s in that blunt the guys are rolling using Swisher Sweets as the wrapper. It’s more than just the DDT that creates a seriously high risk that one or more of these young men will develop that “Cheesy Balls” cancer. The good news is that these guys could just as easily be rolling their Cannabis with an organic tobacco leaf from a dependable online source and – voila – no more risk of cheesy balls and a lot better smoke. But until that happens here’s what they’ll be inhaling.
All the sperm-killing, fetal life-destroying pesticides you see above are all also concealed and unregulated in Swisher Sweets, and since no research scientist anywhere ever thought that people would be inhaling any of them regularly, much less inhaling all of them together, like on contaminated tobacco products, nobody has ever studied what happens. So what we know about what many of these insecticides and fungicides do to human reproductive organs has to be interpreted from what happens to mice and fish testicles and sperm and eggs and babies.
The only real question is – can we take a hint from nature?
Nobody who smokes Swisher Sweets has any idea that they are inhaling a chemical that’s been banned in every country on earth for over 50 years for the strongest possible scientific reasons. That’s why I am so concerned that our private lab tests, the first and only tests of off-the-shelf tobacco products for pesticides since the 1960s, show extremely high 0.816 mg/kg concentrations of DDT in Swisher Sweets, a tobacco product smoked by over 12 million largely young, largely Black, Brown and Native people who we know from a broad universe of studies are disproportionately vulnerable to DDT and the organochlorine pesticides.
If you’re male then even minimal exposure to DDT in your lifetime can destroy your sperm and give you testicular cancer. But your exposure doesn’t have to be from anything you did. Male children whose mothers are exposed to DDT while they are pregnant are also at high risk of testicular cancer in their childhood and teens – along with high risk of damaged sperm, obesity and diabetes. Females exposed to DDT at any time of life but especially while young have multiple kinds of high cancer risk, the most clearly established being breast cancer, as well as high risk of diabetes and obesity. Girls whose mothers were exposed to DDT while pregnant are at very significantly higher risk of obesity and diabetes, as well as at high risk of giving birth to their own boys with damaged sperm and cancerous testicles.
As you can see there’s a lot more to look at in Swisher Sweets than just the DDT, but we’ll start there. Well, I do have to mention that Carbendazim right up front too.
Considering the science below, I’m pretty sure that if young Black and Latino guys who already smoke Swisher Sweets had their sperm tested they would see what is happening to them pretty clearly. Read some of the science below and tell me what you think those young Swisher smokers would find?
High DDT and PCB exposure during adolescence and adulthood is associated with abnormal chromosomes in sperm. Men exposed to certain banned but long-lived chemicals at high levels as teenagers are more likely to have defective sperm later in life, according a new study.
Organochlorine chemicals—specifically DDT and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs)—may affect how testicles mature and function. It is the first study to examine men’s exposure to the chemicals during the teenage years and abnormal sperm later in life, and suggests that the chemicals—banned in the United States but still lingering in soil, water and people—may contribute to male infertility.
NOTE: These researchers clearly don’t know about tobacco products if they think that ‘lingering traces in soil and water’ is what’s frying all those young human testicles.
Interaction between genetic polymorphism of cytochrome P450-1B1 and environmental pollutants in breast cancer risk
CYP polymorphisms, mediated by long term OCs exposure, activate protein dynamics via allosteric regulation of mitochondria’s electron transport and related metabolic pathways. The framework of all known phenotype and disease gene associations, could be indicative of the common genetic origin of many diseases. Colorectal, pancreatic, hepatic, thyroid, breast cancer, renal cancer and sarcoma are involved in the correlation between OCs exposure and carcinogenicity.
The presence of a CYP1A1 MspI (rs4646903) polymorphism associated with OCs exposure may affect spermatogenesis by modifying the metabolism of androgens. It was concluded that increased DDE-DDT (Dichlorodiphenyldichloroethylene-DDT) exposure affects semen motility, concentration and morphology, especially under the existence of CYP1A1 MspI (rs4646903) polymorphism.
Sperm epimutation biomarkers of obesity and pathologies following DDT induced epigenetic transgenerational inheritance of disease
Environmental Epigenetics, Volume 5, Issue 2, April 2019
Gestating F0 generational female rats were transiently exposed to DDT during fetal gonadal sex determination, and the incidence of adult-onset pathologies was assessed in the subsequent F1, F2, and F3 generations.
There was an increase of testis disease and early-onset puberty in the F2 generation DDT lineage males. The F3 generation males and females had significant increases in the incidence of obesity and multiple disease.
The F3 generation DDT males also had significant increases in testis disease, prostate disease, and late onset puberty. The F3 generation DDT females had increases in ovarian and kidney disease.
Unique sets of DMRs were associated with late onset puberty, prostate disease, kidney disease, testis disease, obesity, and multiple disease pathologies.
Negative effects of serum p,p’-DDE on sperm parameters and modification by genetic polymorphisms
Effects of ambient exposure to DDT and its metabolites (DDE-DDT) on human sperm parameters and the role of genetic polymorphisms in modifying the association were investigated.
High DDE-DDT exposure adversely affected all 3 sperm parameters and its effects were exacerbated by the GSTT1 null polymorphism and by the CYP1A1 common alleles.
Reduced Seminal Parameters Associated With Environmental DDT Exposure and p,p′‐DDE Concentrations in Men in Chiapas, Mexico: A Cross‐Sectional Study
Long‐term exposure to small amounts of organochlorine contaminants leads to the accumulation of considerable burdens in animal and human tissues. Other effects may occur in the young, as they seem to be the most vulnerable (Longnecker et al, 2000). Indeed, it is not the amount of DDT to which a mother is exposed during pregnancy that is critical, but rather her lifetime exposure and bioaccumulation that determines the level of exposure of the fetus and breast‐fed infant (Longnecker et al, 2000; Korrick et al, 2001).
Now let me show you briefly what some of the research on other insecticide/fungicide contaminants that Swisher Sweets smokers are inhaling and please remember – they are human beings being exposed to all of these together, not in isolated lab experiments on mice and fish.
The Neonicotinoid Insecticide Imidacloprid: A Male Reproductive System Toxicity Inducer-Human and Experimental Study
Conclusion: Toxic effects to male reproductive system can be considered as an outcome of IMI exposure and infertility problems can be expected in chronically exposed subjects.
MY COMMENT: Sounds pretty definite when they say ‘problems can be expected.’
Reproductive effects consisted of increased vacuolization and decreased weight of the epididymides, decreased sperm counts and motility, and abnormal sperm morphology.
MY COMMENT: translation: crippled puny little guys with no get up and go
Research suggests pyrethroids may inhibit production of an enzyme necessary for the conversion of testosterone to dihydrotestosterone (DHT). DHT is necessary for the proper function of multiple accessory sex glands, including the seminal vesicles and prostate, as well as the epididymedes.
“The evidence generated in lab animals over the last 10 years or so demonstrates rather convincingly that pyrethroids are potent endocrine disruptors and do cause malfunctioning in DHT-dependent organs.”
MY COMMENT: Who has stronger testicles – a stud bull or a teenage boy? And so if a little Bifenthrin in their feed is for big bad bull balls, what is a little bifenthrin in their smokes going to do to even big bad guy balls?
“Considering all the evidence that human male reproduction is exhibiting troubling secular trends (sperm count and quality, hypospadias, cryptorchidism, testis cancer), this is highly troubling,”
MY COMMENT: “Highly troubling” – my guess is that’s putting it mildly in street terms
Carbendazim-induced alterations of reproductive development and function in the rat and hamster
MBC treatment markedly altered sperm morphology, testicular and epididymal weights, and sperm numbers and testicular histology. Fertility, sperm motility, and hormonal levels were altered, primarily in the males with very low sperm counts.
MY COMMENT: Looks like Carbendzim is pretty good at rat & hamster birth control by lowering sperm count. Sounds like it might be kinda tough on those little testicles.
Cypermethrin reversibly alters sperm count without altering fertility in mice
Administration of cypermethrin … caused a significant reduction in epididymal spermatozoa count and an increase in abnormal spermatozoa count when compared to controls.
MY COMMENT: Kinda sounds like you wouldn’t want to ‘administer’ that to yourself doesn’t it?
Reproductive capacity was significantly affected by exposure to the herbicide; a time lag of more than five weeks was observed for egg maturation in contaminated females and high bioconcentrations of pendimethalin were measured in eggs and sperm. Chemical transfer from genitors to offspring via gametes may affect embryo development and negatively impact the early stages of development
MY COMMENT: It goes after both sperm and eggs, leaving ‘high concentrations”. So if I’m inhaling pendimethalin 200-300 puffs a day, that could be quite risky couldn’t it?
So dear reader, there you are. The entire regulatory apparatus of the US Federal government, that spends tens of billions a year on “smoking prevention” and “research”, has somehow managed to completely ignore this massive assault on people’s health and lives for generations. Zero research. Zero publications. Zero programs. Zero regulation. Could this simply be an oversight? Of course not. It is much more likely that this is an actual, real conspiracy – not a conspiracy theory.
Pesticide contamination of tobacco products causes much if not most most of the 500,000 American deaths and 7,000,000 worldwide deaths not from smoking tobacco but from smoking contaminated tobacco products, and multiple agencies of the US government are fully complicit. They have had institutional knowledge of this situation for over 50 years and have done absolutely nothing. I realize that it is because the Tobacco Cartel has these agencies all completely tied up as far as being able to do anything but agencies like FDA are actually acting as allies of the Cartel. The 2015 lawsuit that forced American Spirit organic cigarettes to put a warning on their pack that organic tobacco does not mean a safer smoke is a deliberate lie, based on ZERO SCIENCE, hatched by an inter-agency conspiracy, that is INTENDED to keep smokers from saving their own health and lives by switching to organic tobacco products. There must be trans-generational accountability in both the US government and the Tobacco Cartel.
This post is to share hard factual evidence connecting hidden and unregulated pesticide contaminants in Swisher Sweets like DDT, Carbendazim, and Cypermethrin, and the multiple terrible birth defects like holoprosencephaly these so-called “Tobacco products” are inflicting on the children and even grandchildren of smokers. I’ll provide more links below to published journal research that connects Black, Brown and Native American birth defects with these hidden and unregulated pesticides in tobacco products. First a brief look at why these pesticides are doing such damage.
One all too-common, pesticide-caused birth defect (1 in 250 embryos) occurs when a developing embryo’s “Sonic Hedgehog Gene” is attacked and damaged by specific pesticides. In spite of its weird name. this gene is a true Mother Gene – it controls the creation of the human body from the time the embryo is only a few dividing cells. It does this by secreting a complex protein called “Sonic Hedgehog” that guides the developing embryo through all the incredibly complex cell divisions it takes for the embryo to become a human being instead of a fish or a cat or a firefly. This Mother Gene secretes just right version of the Sonic Hedgehog protein at the right moment to biochemically message the right cells in the developing embryo – “hey – become two eyes right there”, “OK – make five fingers here and here”, and “Listen up – become a brain stem!” – important little details like that. When it all goes right, a wonderful healthy human baby is born.
When pesticides attack this gene, the crucial Sonic Hedgehog protein is damaged, and some of the cellular pathways to becoming fully human are now destroyed for that baby, who will never be whole even if they are born at all.
When a young girl or woman smokes a commercial cigarette or little cigar, specific pesticides known to attack and destroy the Sonic Hedgehog gene in human embryos flood her system and circulate in her blood. That’s the simple reality. What happens to that developing baby then is pretty straight science, which I’ll show you. First, to set the stage, here are the pesticides in Swisher Sweets and other tobacco product brands known to attack, damage and destroy the Sonic Hedgehog gene.
The Sonic Hedgehog” gene controls human “morphogenesis” – literally the creation, or genesis of the human body. This gene is responsible for creating the body of the baby from the first instant out of those first few cells that start dividing and becoming. We know for sure that the Sonic Hedgehog can be damaged and destroyed by very low levels of the pesticides that we also know for sure are hidden contaminants of Swisher Sweets. Every pesticide listed above attacks and damages the human embryo’s Sonic Hedgehog gene; imagine the impact when they all attack at once, like a frenzied pack of wild dogs, with every puff.
Now The Really Damaging Connection
BUT – its not enough that the pesticides in Swishers attack the Sonic Hedgehog to directly cause this terrible birth defect. Holoprosencephaly also is caused by maternal diabetes – in fact a Mom with diabetes is 200X more likely to have a damaged baby.
And guess what – pesticide exposure is very strongly linked to Diabetes, and smokers have a very high rate of Diabetes. (more links below) So the DDT and Carbendazim and the other hidden, unregulated fungicides and insecticides attack the baby’s Mother Gene directly, and also cause Mom to have Diabetes, which also attacks the Mother Gene. That baby and mother are at totally preventable terminal risk.
“We now know that smoking causes type 2 diabetes.” (CDC)
Notice that CDC says ‘smoking’ not ‘smoking tobacco’ – that’s just a small example of the duplicity of these agencies. Here’s why:
If “smoking” includes inhaling pesticides, then duh. We already know for sure that exposure to pesticides causes Type 2 Diabetes. But CDC never mentions pesticides in ‘tobacco’ products. Never. At all. CDC wants everyone to connect ‘smoking’ and ‘diabetes” without knowing anything about ‘pesticides’ in tobacco products. If smokers did know, then pesticide exposure causing Type 2 Diabetes could easily avoided by switching to organic tobacco products until/if quitting became an option. But CDC evidently wants people to either quit or die.
So here’s what that Diabetic pregnant Mom who loves her Swishers is carefully conditioned by Swisher’s expensive, heavy advertising and their planted street memes to think is coming ….
But here is what may actually be coming. With apologies for the shocking images – do you see any cute little Swisher babies here?
In a Swisher Smokin’ Mommy, DDT and all those other insecticides and fungicides you see in the Swishers data will be circulating in her blood at exactly the right moment to damage her baby’s Sonic Hedgehog. That DDT is bioaccumulative too, so it builds up in her tissues. It will eventually likely cause breast cancer. It is also an obesogen, so it will definitely make her fatter because DDT needs fat cells for storage.
So every young Swisher smoker’s blood is always full of DDT and a dozen other neurotoxic pesticides, all ready to target any new embryo’s Sonic Hedgehog gene. There are @ 2 million young girls and women just in the US who smoke Swishers regularly. Every one is at severe risk. It doesn’t matter if she’s pregnant right now – as long as she keeps smoking, that little Sonic Hedgehog is toast any time it pops up its little head.
Not surprisingly, birth defects associated with exposure of fetal life to neurotoxic pesticides are extremely high in marginalized communities, where high proportions of young women smoke tobacco products like Swisher Sweets, that are highly contaminated with many of exactly the same pesticides known to cause these terribly damaged babies.
Because nobody since roughly 1975 has published research on pesticides in tobacco products, and since my 2018 “Smoke No Evil” data is still unknown, at least one highly probable cause of holoprosencephaly in the children of smokers in these marginalized and exploited communities isn’t realized by anyone and therefore can’t begin to be be addressed. Here’s some pretty simple hard evidence – don’t you think this might be worth some Public Health attention?
The “Sonic Hedgehog” was named by the quirky scientists who discovered it in the early 80s. This gene basically regulates key processes in the developing embryo all the way from when it’s deciding whether to become a frog or a human and then when it’s deciding how many fingers and eyes to grow and where to put them, and so on. The Sonic HedgeHog gene does all this by sending coded biochemical messages to all the millions of cells whose growth has to be coordinated so they become that first cute little baby you see above – the mythical “Swisher Baby”.
Not all Sonic Hedgehog damage is terminally tragic – since 1 in 250 human embryos experience some level of damage there are many babies born who go on to lead their lives while carrying the burden laid upon them before they were born. Like these young people. Do any of them or their brothers and sisters in victimhood live in your community? Would you like to see this tragedy end? There is a simple solution. Force tobacco product manufacturers to remove pesticide residues from their products. That’s it. Forget any issues with tobacco, nicotine, or smoking. Deal with the pesticides first, then see what happens to young people who smoke pesticide-free tobacco. I have a pretty good hunch what we’ll find.
And as you and I cringe at the images and try to deal with the idea that this is being done to children every day in order to extract money from them, we have to remember that this massive lifelong suffering is the consequence of the reckless act of profit-hungry manufacturers acting with certain knowledge that their product is contaminated with these pesticides. By virtue of their industry position, and their membership in CORESTA, they either know or ought to know the consequences of inhalation of the pesticides that contaminate their tobacco products. They ought also to be aware that the genetics of Black, Latinx and Native American people are particularly vulnerable – and of course, they are. The Tobacco industry calls young Black and Brown kids “replacement smokers” and that’s exactly what they are – replacements.
This is an industry so ready for accountability – once there is even a little crack in their dam of silence it will explode with worldwide genocide trials and global confiscation of assets that will reach into some of the wealthiest families and institutions in the world. After all, Tobacco wealth built America and much of the rest of the “modern” world. Those massively wealthy families are still there, invisible, protected – they think. I may not see it, but their time of accountability will come. The evidence is just too strong and too vast, although still too hidden with vast cleverness in plain sight. When the world can see the extent of the Tobacco wealth built on a hundreds of years of the exploitation, suffering and death of smokers then literally trillions in hoarded Tobacco treasure will be surfaced and can be reclaimed for the public good. It is wasted, unproductive privately held and stoutly protected wealth, supporting the indulgent worthless lives of largely incompetent unproductive people with love only for themselves. This ill-gotten gain, going back decades, has left a trail of evidence in spite of its very very best efforts. It’s the 50 year total gap in research that gives away the Tobacco industry’s screaming nightmare concern. It was around 1975 when the lid was clamped on hard and universally on cigarette pesticide research, around the world and not just in the US. And boy are those early studies out of NCSU an eye-opener on what pesticides smokers were inhaling in the 1950s and 60s. These are the same folks who, if they haven’t yet died of “smoking related disease”, are dying now from all those years of inhaling what you see in these long buried old reports. You can browse a few examples of the surviving tobacco/cigarette pesticide research that virtually ended in the 1970s here and here and here and here and here.
Every organochlorine in the book was present in cigarettes of the period, and the organophosphates were coming on heavy then too. (Remember that in 1960s detection technology was not well-developed.) The level of contamination has only gotten worse in the years since the industry clamped down on research, and my “Smoke No Evil” tests in 2018 strongly suggest.
Then after the mid-1970s – nothing. It all stopped – the data, not the pesticides. There had been dozens of studies from the early 1950s through the 60s at NCSU and elsewhere documenting high concentrations of these incredible supertoxins – and suddenly oops – that all stopped. That’s the smoking gun – no research on pesticides in cigarettes anywhere on earth since the industry realized what the data actually showed. It showed neurotoxic, carcinogenic, genotoxic levels of multiple pesticides, dozens of them in fact, that smokers were inhaling every puff. Not one more study, when the tobacco industry continued to be the largest user of pesticides per acre of any crop on earth. Nada. That says pure, coordinated, global conspiracy to me – how about you? In case you missed this earlier, you can browse a few examples of the surviving tobacco/cigarette pesticide research that virtually ended in the 1970s here and here and here and here and here.
I hope that I’ve been able to help bring a reckoning to those at the top of this cold, inhuman conspiracy. I have only a few treasured illusions, like for instance that you, dear reader, may be in a position to pick up the phone and make something begin to happen. Maybe a nice little class action lawsuit on behalf of any one of the very identifiable classes of people whose lives have been irreparably damaged by the conspirators. And by the way, responsibility and accountability for this slow-rolling, trans-generational atrocity includes all the Federal agencies who have known the cold, hard facts since the research was shut down – they’ve chosen to lie, dissimulate and keep silent for decades, either out of fear or greed – hard to say. Their only “Report” on tobacco pesticides in the early 2000s was a puke on American smokers and their families, designed to shield the tobacco industry, period. I’m just an old guy sitting at a little desk early on a cold morning in Portland Oregon writing these words that I hope will be heard like the prayer they are meant to be. So thank you dear reader for picking this up and reading it all the way to the end of the line. May God welcome Roy Orbison who gave voice to so many souls.
Hello! This blog post is now part of my newly published ebook “Smoke No Evil“, which is published on Amazon but its available free for the asking to visitors like you – see below.
I here’s nothing wrong with smoking Tobacco. It’s as safe as wine, beer, or cheeseburgers. It’s the Tobacco Cartel’s products that sicken and kill. “Smoking-related Death” has nothing to do with Tobacco. Many people understand the truth, but don’t know the whole story.
Just click here to request your free review copy of “Smoke No Evil”. After you read it, I hope that you’ll add your voice to those demanding investigation and accountability for the Tobacco Cartel. My hope is also that the knowledge in this book can be life-changing for smokers who are trapped in addiction to commercial Tobacco Cartel products, and life-affirming for those who already understand and smoke or vape only organic tobacco whenever possible.
Whether you smoke, vape, or chew tobacco this book destroys the myth that tobacco is going to harm you. Using data and hard evidence, this book proves that it’s not tobacco killing millions of smokers every year, and it never has been. You’ll see how the “science” used to prove that Tobacco is a killer is pure fraud and deception on the part of the Tobacco Cartel, and pure hypocrisy on the part of regulators and anti-tobacco propagandists.
My hope is that the knowledge here can be life-changing for smokers who are trapped in addiction to commercial Tobacco Cartel products, particularly people who are members of oppressed minority communities where the damage from pesticides in cheap tobacco products is magnified by genetic vulnerability.
My hope is that the knowledge here can be life-changing for smokers who are trapped in addiction to commercial Tobacco Cartel products.
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?
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