Last night a battle cry went out across Facebook, Twitter, Livestream and the rest of the social networking world. Occupy Wall Street was being taken down, protesters kicked out of the park while the sanitation team and police department tried to both literally and metaphorically sweep them away. After an hour or two of staring at our laptops fixated, the opportunity seemed not to be missed. Down at Occupy Wall Street, First Amendment rights were being challenged as we watched the work of our bravest and loudest voices being torn apart.
With subways to the Lower East Side closed in coordination with the police raid, we set off on foot to march from Brooklyn to Foley Square, where hundreds of Occupy Wall Street protesters and their supporters had congregated to regroup and plan the next course of action.
Tribal drums kept the pulse of the crowd steadily beating even after a long emotional night with no sleep. We marched at 9am to an open plaza at 6th Avenue and Canal St. Police in riot gear lined the march every step of the way, mostly blank, unsmiling and unsympathetic faces. Only once did we see a few short-lived smiles as we chanted “N. Y. P. D., it’s us that pay your salary.”
The people’s mic was in fine working order as the next possible moves were outlined. Some would stay and maintain a presence in the new plaza. But the Occupy Wall Street movement now had a court order signed by Judge Lucy Billings, giving us the right to reenter Zuccotti Park.
Off we went, marching again to Re-Occupy Wall Street. Time to test the boundaries between the ‘legal world’ and the ‘real world.’
Feet aching, bladder bursting, throat parched but who could be distracted when history was in the making?
Onwards, through the streets of Manhattan. Passersby stopped to stare and take pictures as we avidly encouraged them to join in. “We are the 99%!”
The energy was intoxicating. “Who’s streets? Our streets!” This, surely would be democracy in action. The will of the people, working peacefully and lawfully to organize and demand their rights. I suddenly became aware of the fact that marching along the street behind an American flag for the past few hours had felt completely natural. Perhaps patriotism isn’t just for Tea Partiers after all. We too have a vision of a better America.
The closer we got to Zuccotti Park, the more important it became to stay vocal. “The people, united, will never be defeated!” The overwhelming police presence was enough to put a damper on this first-time protester’s spirit. “They’re here to protect and serve”, I try to remind myself. So why do they look at us like we’re the enemy?
Yet I can’t help but feel sympathy for our ‘boys in blue’. “You’re sexy, you’re cute. Take off your riot suit!” They’re in the same boat. They too are the 99%. Perhaps at the right moment some of them too will feel emboldened to risk mutiny, joining us on the other side of the barricades. What a day that would be.
I was looking forward to encountering the media upon our arrival, the dismantlement of OWS being by now front page news. Yes, there were video cameras everywhere I looked – more often than not held by men in NYPD uniforms, apparently the only organization allowed to get real and up-close footage of the event. An eery conspiratorial shudder ran down my spine. Suddenly I realized my neighbor’s V for Vendetta mask served as more than just an iconic statement.
Liberty Plaza was before us. We walked up to the police barricades expectantly, copies of our precious court order in hand. But it would seem the laws of this country don’t necessarily apply to everybody. We were not allowed in, and anyone who didn’t keep in motion as we circled the park risked arrest.
And so we continued walking, chanting, talking, drumming, waiting. No, revolution doesn’t come easy. But somehow after today I know that when it does, the taste will be ever so sweet.
For this weary writer, revolution will start again tomorrow. Sleep now beckons, full of dreams of a better world now seemingly within our grasp.
Till Thursday November 17th, the International Day of Action. We will be celebrating two months of Occupy Wall Street, calling upon the 99% to participate in a day of non-violent direct action and celebration. “We are the 99%!” See you there!
For the latest news and streams of the Occupy Movement please visit:
Onwards, with a little inspiration from Charlie Chaplin. “The Great Dictator” was Chaplin’s first talking picture, a controversial film that took on Hitler, fascism, and the Nazis. The speech Chaplin wrote for the end of the film (here edited with different visuals) leaves us with a powerful message that over seventy years later, still resonates deeply.
No better way to start off the new year than with a bit of good old-fashioned American hypocrisy.
The US has denied Bolivia’s request to the United Nations that it’s people be allowed their ancestral practice of chewing coca leaves. Evo Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous president, was petitioning to amend the 1961 UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs which currently makes criminals of those who maintain the coca tradition.
Not only is this stance hypocritical, as the US currently has exceptions to its own laws for native peoples within the US to use (otherwise illegal) psychoactive plants (ie. peyote) for religious purposes; it is blatantly denying the indigenous peoples of other countries their rights.
With many nations, including most of those in South America, having explicitly supported Bolivia’s proposal to the UN – it is the US that has blocked the way.
Maybe we should start by asking why the coca leaf was ever criminalized in the first place. Coca has been used ritually and medicinally by cultures of the Andes and Amazon for millennia. Archaeologists have found evidence that coca leaves were being chewed in Peru at least 8,000 years ago.
The coca leaf itself has many uses, whether cultural, medicinal or spiritual. As Morales rightly notes, coca leaf chewing “helps mitigate the sensation of hunger, offers energy during long days of labour and helps counter altitude sickness. Unlike nicotine or caffeine, it causes no harm to human health nor addiction or altered state, and it is effective in the struggle against obesity, a major problem in many modern societies.” Not to mention the fact that the coca leaf only contains 1% of the alkaloid used to make cocaine.
The US justifies its stance on the grounds that coca is the raw material for making cocaine. This would seem to imply that American policy should take precedent over native Bolivian culture, even in Bolivia.
All this as President Obama finally signs the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which is meant to protect ‘cultural heritage, traditional knowledge and traditional cultural expressions.’ The US stance on this is discriminatory, given that coca use is so deeply rooted in the indigenous culture of the Andes.
As the Daily Transmission is on a summer hiatus, here are a few not-to-be-missed headlines that should keep those juices flowing:
‘Why do we so willfully cover up the failure of the war on drugs?’ asks Angus Macqueen in The Guardian. Macqueen has just completed a documentary series for Channel 4 called ‘Our Drugs War’ which is a well-needed examination of the global ‘War on Drugs’. (Save for another time a discussion of what exactly constitutes a ‘drug’ in the first place… possibly the ‘War on Drugs’ belongs in the same failed category as the ‘War on Terror’?)
For further evidence of failed drug policy look no further than ‘Mephedrone found not guilty, but the next legal high may be a killer’ from former Lib Dem MP Evan Harris. We’re on a road to nowhere, attempting to ban each new pharmaceutical ‘high’ that comes out of a lab. It seems the recipe that got MDMA banned still works: Take tabloid headlines, scare stories and incomplete research, mix in some panicked political bravado, season with a bit of ignorance, and bam! You got yourself a mephedrone ban.
And for a shining example of where rational thought ends and politics begins, Sky News reports on why legalizing prostitution works (in Australia) – but ends telling us why prostitution laws in England are not likely to be changed any time soon:
There are not many votes to be won by decriminalisation and, potentially, many votes to be lost if it sparked a moral crusade by opponents of reform.
But that’s why we elect politicians, isn’t it? So they can get in power and ignore what they think is right in order to ensure getting re-elected?
Last night I had the pleasure of attending UK ex-chief drug advisor David Nutt’s lecture here in London at the Hub Islington, one of a dozen such Hub communities that bring together people working for social change across the globe.
David Nutt was fired for standing up for scientific evidence that showed, for example, that ecstasy, cannabis, and LSD are less dangerous than alcohol. Or that more people die falling off horses every year than taking ecstasy (see his article on Equasy vs Ecstasy.) But it didn’t take long for Professor Nutt to get back on his feet: he’s just started the new Independent Council on Drug Harms with some of the top scientists in the field, which will rival the government’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs.
The most crucial data that the government doesn’t want to deal with appears in the graph below, from the 2007 Lancet article ‘Development of a Rational Scale to Assess the Harm of Drugs of Potential Misuse’:
The paper, co-authored by Prof Blakemore and Prof David Nutt, et al. , ‘presents a scale of harms based on three scales – physical harm, dependence and social harm – which were independently assessed by two groups of experts from the fields of chemistry, pharmacology, forensic science, psychiatry and other medical specialties.’
There was a surprisingly poor correlation between drugs’ class according to the Misuse of Drugs Act and their actual harm scores. Alcohol, ketamine, tobacco, and solvents (all unclassified at the time of assessment) were ranked as more harmful than LSD and ecstasy (class A drugs).
It’s obvious that something’s wrong here.
Professor Nutt talked about politicians feeling the pressure to be tough on drugs – but it turns out that at the time cannabis was reclassified as a Class B drug, two thirds of the public wanted cannabis to remain Class C or less. Maybe one of the answers is that we the public need to be more vocal in our desire for drug policy reform.
During the lecture at times I believe many of us didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, like when we read MP Vernon Coaker’s statement that “We look for evidence to support our policy decisions.” Surely it should be the other way around?
Last but not least is media bias. Scottish graduate Alasdair J M Forsyth wrote his PhD having looked at every single newspaper report of drug deaths in Scotland from 1990 to 1999 and then compared them with the coroners’ data. Check out the results below:
Out of the 2,255 drug deaths that decade, only certain drugs tended to attract media attention. 1 out of 265 involving paracetamol, 1 out of 72 involving morphine, 1 out of 48 involving diazepam – the media were clearly not interested in these drugs. They were more interested in cocaine (8:1), amphetamines (3:1) and heroin (5:1). But unbelievably, out of the 28 deaths from ecstasy in ten years, 26 were reported, meaning a near 1:1 ratio. An astounding bias.
Professor Nutt also pointed out that cannabis is not on this chart because cannabis doesn’t kill – you cannot die of a cannabis overdose. Of course alcohol is also missing off that list. Alcohol alone will have killed between 2000-3000 people in Scotland in that same decade – the same as all the other drugs combined. Makes you wonder why it is we consider alcohol in a separate category from the drugs we classify due to their potential harm.
One final example of how even some scientific reporting about drugs is biased. A study that made front page headlines claiming that ‘ecstasy fries your brain’ was later quietly retracted when the researchers realized they had given their subjects methamphetamine instead of ecstasy. Oops!
‘Distorted? a quantitative exploration of drug fatality reports in the popular press’
A Forsyth
International Journal of Drug Policy, Volume 12, Issue 5, Pages 435-453
♥ Let’s start with a story of trivial magnitude that I still found fairly unbelievable: ‘Oshkosh Police Arrest Las Vegas Woman For Prostitution After Viewing Posts For Services On Websites’. Maybe it’s just because I’ve been living in the UK too long. But the idea of government money spent on an ‘undercover operation’ to arrest a single independent woman advertising sexual services on the internet seems unreal to me. No excuse of stopping trafficking, coercion, soliciting – just good old-fashioned moralizing on the exchange of cold hard cash (versus presents and dinner?) for sex. She was only living in Oshkosh, Wisconsin temporarily – a pretty harsh wake-up call to the fact that our Dorothy wasn’t in Las Vegas anymore!
I have no idea how common these kind of police operations are, tracking working girls on the internet. If you have any further info, please feel free to post in the comments below.
♥ On to some discrimination on a much larger scale. Queerty has been bringing CBS’s ridiculous hypocrisy to the public eye with regards to it’s Superbowl ad choices.
First we hear that ‘The Super Bowl Welcomes $2.8 Million Ad Buy From Hate Group “Focus on the Family”‘. Which is fair enough, until you remember CBS’s own policy that does not allow any ad that “touches on and/or takes a position on one side of a current controversial issue of public importance”. This quote is from a letter to the United Church of Christ, whose ad campaign of inclusiveness (“Jesus Didn’t Turn People Away. Neither Do We.”) was rejected for broadcast in 2004. So much for CBS’s ‘long-standing policy of not accepting advocacy advertising.’ No one’s seen the Focus on the Family ad spot yet, but from what the group has said publicly, it is going to be very clearly pro-life.
♥ Next, to the BBC reporting on how ‘Sanitary pads help Ghana girls go to school’. “Schoolgirl absenteeism in Ghana could be cut by half by providing free sanitary towels, a study has shown.” So easy to take things like that for granted in life. Somehow I think this is the kind of study that only gets done when it’s women on the research team!
♥ The NY Times had an interesting article called ‘Many Successful Gay Marriages Share an Open Secret’ on the number of gay partnerships that are open sexually, and how they negotiate that understanding. I find it fascinating not just in itself, but as a model for straight couples as well. There needs to be a certain amount of trust, lack of jealousy, etc. – but these are things that often make relationships stronger. Some studies show that open gay relationships last longer than closed ones. As Joe Quirk, author of the relationship book “It’s Not You, it’s Biology”, put it: “If innovation in marriage is going to occur, it will be spearheaded by homosexual marriages.” Here, here!
1. Send soldiers into Iraq and Afghanistan with rifles engraved with Bible codes that reference passages of the New Testament. You know, so that extremists have real justification for claiming that this is a Holy War. Crusades anyone? Even the Afghan military were given these Bible guns. The Pentagon arms supplier Trijicon claims it has always used New Testament references on its products. Soon after ABC broke the story, Trijicon agreed to stop. But is the damage already done? See Al Jazeera English coverage for more.
2. Hire private security in Iraq from a company whose boss is now being accused by two of his ex-employees of viewing himself “as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe.” There are also claims that Erik Prince, head of Blackwater, “openly and consistently used racist and derogatory terms for Iraqis and other Arabs, such as ‘ragheads’ or ‘hajis’.
Whether or not those accusations are true, thousands of documents show Blackwater guards routinely opened fire in Iraq’s streets, then left the scene without aiding civilian casualties.
3. To top it all off, it surely doesn’t help that the proposed ban on burqas is receiving strong public support in France. I’m all for finding ways to target sexist discrimination, oppression and general misogyny. But we have plenty of that in our western society, even if it’s not as obvious to us as a woman dressed head to toe in black. Sarcozy may think he’s being idealistic, but in reality he is misguided. If he wants to address issues of racism and sexism in French society, there are plenty of places he can start that don’t involve singling out a religious minority that already faces heavy discrimination and difficulty assimilating.
Ex-President George W. Bush once said that the Muslim extremists “hate us for our freedom”. Looking over these headlines, one begins to wonder if some hate us because we won’t give them theirs.
Looks like it’s the beginning of the end. Yesterday’s Independent featured an excellent article by Hugh O’Shaughnessy called “US Waves White Flag in Disastrous ‘War on Drugs’”:
“After 40 years of defeat and failure, America’s “war on drugs” is being buried in the same fashion as it was born – amid bloodshed, confusion, corruption and scandal. US agents are being pulled from South America; Washington is putting its narcotics policy under review, and a newly confident region is no longer prepared to swallow its fatal Prohibition error. Indeed, after the expenditure of billions of dollars and the violent deaths of tens of thousands of people, a suitable epitaph for America’s longest “war” may well be the plan, in Bolivia, for every family to be given the right to grow coca in its own backyard.”
and
“For the lives and sanity of millions, the seeing of the light is decidedly late. The conditions of the 1920s, when the US Congress outlawed alcohol and allowed Al Capone and his kin to make massive fortunes, have been re-created up and down Latin America.”
Highly recommended reading. Are we finally coming out the dark ages? It’s only in the last hundred years that we made it illegal to eat, drink, and/or smoke certain plants. Brainwaving.com has a fascinating history of what happened when drugs were legal and why they were prohibited.
In the face of the UK government’s current drug policy of scare tactics and ignorance, it looks like David Nutt, the ex-chief drug advisor who was fired last year, is making a comeback.
The BBC reported on Nutt’s ‘powerful grouping’, the Independent Council on Drug Harms, to be launched at a meeting in January 2010. Dose Nation was one of the first to praise Prof Nutt’s new drugs group, which will rival the official Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD).
Then Sphere reported on a Telegraph article that slipped under the radar during Christmas. Professor Nutt is working at Imperial College to develop an alcohol substitute that avoids drunkenness and hangovers.
While I’m skeptical about society substituting a valium-type drug for alcohol, it would be an improvement on the fairly dire situation we’re in with alcohol abuse today. More promising is Nutt’s refusal to back down when it comes to providing independent scientific evidence about the effects of drugs. It’s about time someone stood up for the truth.
Knowing Nutt’s public disagreement with the government’s decision to re-classify cannabis as a Class B Drug and not to downgrade ecstasy, change could be in the air.
Someone had to say it, and someone finally did. That someone was David Nutt, the British government’s chief drug advisor, and he got fired for it. Yes, ecstasy and LSD are less dangerous than alcohol. Yes, our entire classification of some substances as illegal, some as prescription only, and some as completely acceptable social lubricants is absolutely nonsensical. More people die falling off of horses every year than from taking ecstasy. Oh whoops, you’re not supposed to say that either. For full discussion, see Allison Kilkenny’s article on the Huffington Post
At least Nutt’s not going quietly. Maybe this will finally trigger the public discussion on substances and prohibition that is so desperately overdue?
