The television ads are startling:

Hey Del,

What the hell does this mean,

"Of the 65 percent of those people in that dependency category, their primary or secondary dependence is with marijuana."

Where did you get this data? Are you saying that 65 percent of the people in treatment for drugs are in for MJ addiction. Sounds like BS to me. The failure of the commericals that are the subject of your article, and the failure of the article itself has to do with lost crediblity because of distortion and fabrication of facts. It is what the government does when the say that MJ supports terrorism, and it is what you do when you say 65 percent of all addicts in treatment are addicted to MJ.

Opium was already heavily used in China as a recreational drug. The Imperial Chinese court had banned its use and importation, but large quantities were still being smuggled into the country. In 1839, the Qing Emperor, Tao Kwang, ordered his minister Lin Tse-hsü to take action. Lin petitioned Queen Victoria for help; but he was ignored. In reaction, the Emperor instructed the confiscation of 20,000 barrels of opium and detained some foreign traders. The British retaliated by attacking the port-city of Canton.

Thus began the First Opium War, launched by the biggest, richest and perhaps most aggressive drug cartel the world has ever known, the British Empire. The Chinese were defeated. They were forced to sign the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842. The British required that the opium trade be allowed to continue; that the Chinese pay a large settlement and open five new ports to foreign trade; and that China cede Hong Kong to Britain.

Peace didn't last. The Second Opium War began and ended in 1856 over western demands that opium markets be expanded. The Chinese were again defeated. In 1858, by the Treaty of Tientsin, opium importation to China was formally legalised. God-fearing British traders claimed that the hard-working Chinese were entitled to "a harmless luxury"; the opium trade in less respectable hands would be taken over by "desperadoes, pirates and marauders". Soon opium poured into China in unprecedented quantities. By the end of the nineteenth century, it has been estimated that over a quarter of the adult male Chinese population were addicted.

In North America, the initial history of Papaver somniferum was somewhat more peaceful. During the first few centuries of European settlement, opium poppies were widely cultivated. Early settlers dissolved the resin in whisky to relieve coughs, aches and pains.

The plant had further uses. Papaver somniferum produces lots of small black seeds. Poppy-seeds are an ingredient of typical bird-seed and a common garnish on rolls. Poppy-seeds can also be ground into flour; used in salad-dressings; added to sauces as flavouring or thickening-agents; and the oil can be expressed and used in cooking. Poppy-heads are infused to make a traditional sedative drink.

Many distinguished early Americans grew Papaver somniferum. Rightly or wrongly, they would today be treated as felons. Thomas Jefferson cultivated opium poppies at his garden in Monticello. The seeds from its plants, including the poppies, were sold at the gift-shop of Thomas Jefferson Center for Historic Plants until 1991 - when a drug-bust at the nearby University of Virginia panicked the Board of Directors into ripping up the plants and burning the seeds. The cultivation of Papaver somniferum is banned in the USA under the Opium Poppy Control Act of 1942. Amateur horticulturists, however, continue to value the beautiful red, yellow and white flowers as adornments to their gardens.

Until the nineteenth century, the only opioids used medicinally or recreationally took the form of crude opium. Opium is a complex chemical cocktail containing sugars, proteins, fats, water, meconic acid, plant wax, latex, gums, ammonia, sulphuric and lactic acids, and numerous alkaloids, most notably morphine (10%-15%), codeine (1%-3%), noscapine (4%-8%), papaverine (1%-3%), and thebaine (1%-2%). All of the latter, apart from thebaine, are used medicinally as analgesics. The opioid analgesics are of inestimable value because they reduce or abolish pain without causing a loss of consciousness. They also relieve coughs, spasms, fevers and diarrhea.

Even thebaine, though without analgesic effect, is of immense pharmaceutical worth. This is because it can be used to produce semi-synthetic opioid morphine analogues such as oxycodone (Percodan), dihydromorphenone (Dilaudid), hydrocodone (Vicodin) and etorphine (Immobilon). Classes of morphine analogue include the diphenylpropylamines (e.g. methadone), the 4-phenylpiperidines (e.g. meperidine), the morphinans (e.g. levorphanol) and 6,7-benzomorphans (e.g. metazocine). Although seemingly structurally diverse, all these compounds either possess a piperidine ring or contain the critical part of its ring structure. Etorphine, for instance, is a very potent analogue of morphine. On one occasion a team of researchers, working in the 1960s under Professor Bentley of Macfarlan Smith and Co, drank mid-morning tea that had been stirred with a contaminated rod. They were soon laid out. The scientists had unwittingly drunk a drug later developed as etorphine. Etorphine is over 1000 times more powerful than morphine; it is used in dart-guns as Immobilon to subdue elephants and rhinos. Fortunately the scientists recovered.

Morphine was first isolated from opium in 1805 by a German pharmacist, Wilhelm Sertürner (1783-1841). Sertürner described it as the Principium Somniferum. He named it morphium - after Morpheus, the Greek god of dreams. Today morphine is isolated from opium in substantially larger quantities - over 1000 tons per year - although most commercial opium is converted into codeine by methylation. On the illicit market, opium gum is filtered into morphine base and then synthesized into heroin.

(snip)

Early optimism about morphine's non-addictive nature proved sadly misplaced. Women in particular came to be seen as especially vulnerable to opiate dependence. The most likely candidate for addiction, according to American doctor R Batholow, was... "...a delicate female, having light blue eyes and flaxen hair, [who] possesses, according to my observations, the maximum susceptibility..."

Racist stereotypes, rampant xenophobia and lurid images of white slave-traders abounded too. In the 1850s and 1860s, tens of thousands of Chinese had emigrated to the USA to help build the western railroads and work the California mines. Opium-smoking was an integral part of Chinese culture; and its effects offered a merciful relief from dirty and backbreaking work. But the medical tide was turning. Dr Hamilton Wright, newly appointed US opium commissioner, blamed "the Chinese vice" for corrupting the nation's youth.... "One of the most unfortunate phases of the habit of smoking opium in this country [was] the large number of women who have become involved and were living as common-law wives or cohabiting with Chinese in the Chinatowns of our various cities..." Meanwhile Dr John Witherspoon, later President of the American Medical Association, exhorted the medical community to...

"...save our people from the clutches of this hydra-headed monster which stalks abroad through the civilized world, wrecking lives and happy homes, filling our jails and lunatic asylums, and taking from these unfortunates, the precious promise of eternal life..."

So the search began for a powerful non-addictive alternative to opium and morphine. In 1874, English pharmacist C.R. Alder Wright (1844-1894) had boiled morphine and acetic acid to produce diacetylmorphine, C17H17NO (C2H3O2)2. Diacetylmorphine was synthesized and marketed commercially by the German pharmaceutical giant, Bayer. In 1898, Bayer launched the best-selling drug-brand of all time, Heroin.

America needs to get up from the Arm chair and proclaim their goverment the ultimate terriost.

Over the past century you can clearly see and with the goverment's loose termonlogy of terriost.

They dared to praise you now in tearful

terms.

The Kissingers, the Doles and Clinton too.

Forgetting how you fed our young to

worms

And made it hard to tell the false from

true.

Your minons broke in the Watergate

To tap the phones, the phones of your

election foes.

You kept a list of those you learned to hate

And added dirty tricks to all our woes.

You set the stage for death on Blanket Hill

And brought the war in Asia home at last.

You tried to smash our protesters' voices

still

Untill your bleak and ugly reigh was

Passed.

The blood, the lies, the hate. This trilogy

Is now your only proper eulogy.

You can find more articals and stories about this most wonderful human: "William Moses Kunstler" (1919-1995) at http://www.may41970.com

And

A few days ago I received a letter from Todd McCormick and he wrote that he has an appeal set and oral arguments are to take place on May 6th. At this time that is all the information I have, but I am still trying to get a copy of the appeal text. If anyone out there comes across this information, please post it here and I will do like wise.

I raised my kids to be cynical about the U.S. government. Trusting our (s)elected representatives to do the right thing is naive, at best, and occasionally suicidal.

Expecting the police to behave in an honest(read "legal") and humane manner is just asking to get hurt, killed, or imprisoned.