Pharmaceuticals turning up in streams and rivers have made headlines in recent years. Now for the first time in the U.S., researchers have shown that such drugs may come directly from plants that manufacture them. Research published in Environmental Science & Technology (DOI 10.1021/es100356f) documents that treated sewage effluent from drugmakers can deliver to streams concentrations of painkillers that are as much as 1,000 times higher than levels in effluent from other sewage plants.

Until recently, scientists have assumed that the primary source of drugs in rivers was excretion by humans. Although the federal government does not regulate discharges of pharmaceutical ingredients, industry scientists have argued that tight control of production processes and the great value of the drugs would ensure that only minor amounts of active substances would escape the factories, says Joakim Larsson, an environmental scientist at the University of Gothenburg.

But in 2007, Larsson found that a treatment plant in India that receives drug factory waste was discharging as much as 31 mg/L of antibiotics in effluent, a concentration that is orders of magnitude higher than is typically found in U.S. waste water. He found the antibiotic ciprofloxacin at concentrations higher than recommended human blood levels.

To begin to check whether the same issues might occur at the nearly 3,000 drug manufacturing facilities in the U.S., researchers from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) compared effluent from two New York state treatment plants serving drug manufacturers to 24 treatment plants not receiving pharmaceutical-plant waste in 12 states. Referring to the plants serving drugmakers, Dana Kolpin, a research hydrologist at USGS and a coauthor of the new study, says: “When we scanned the effluent samples using capillary gas chromatography/mass spectrometry, we noticed large peaks due to unknown substances.” Comparing GC/MS scans of known drugs to scans of the unknown samples allowed the researchers to determine that the unknowns were seven opiates and muscle relaxants that are among the most frequently prescribed medications in the U.S., he says.

Effluent samples from across the country showed evidence of the drugs, but concentrations were all less than 1 µg/L. However, the New York plants that serve drugmakers released the seven painkillers in concentrations ranging from 3.4µg/L to 3,800 µg/L. The highest concentration was for the muscle relaxant metaxalone.

“The concentrations coming out of effluent are much higher than we would ever have thought,” says Patrick Phillips, a USGS hydrologist and lead author of the study.

The researchers also detected the seven drugs in a drinking-water reservoir 30 km downstream of one of the New York plants.

Despite the different conditions and stringent regulations in the U.S., says Christian Daughton, an environmental toxicologist at the EPA, Phillips’s and Kolpin’s study found broadly similar results to Larsson’s study in India. However, Daughton cautions against drawing nationwide conclusions from sampling only two plants receiving pharmaceutical waste.

Still, Chris Metcalfe, an environmental toxicologist at Trent University, thinks the research should change views of drug manufacturing. “Hopefully, this study will lead to pharmaceutical companies taking ownership of their discharges,” he says.

Soldiers stand next to a detainee and seized packages of marijuana in Tijuana, northern Mexico. Photograph: Rodrigo Abd/AP

The Mexican president, Felipe Calderón, said today he would consider a debate on legalising drugs, as his government announced that more than 28,000 people have been killed in drug violence since he launched a crackdown against cartels in 2006.

The director of country’s intelligence agency, Guillermo Valdes, also said the authorities had confiscated about 84,000 weapons and seized $411m (£258m) in US currency and $26m worth in pesos.

Valdes released the statistics during a meeting with Calderón and representatives of business and civic groups, where attendees explored ways to improve Mexico‘s anti-drug strategy and called on the government to open a debate on legalisation.

Calderón said he has taken note of the idea of legally regulating drugs in the past. “It’s a fundamental debate in which I think, first of all, you must allow a democratic plurality [of opinions],” he said. “You have to analyse carefully the pros and cons and the key arguments on both sides.”

Three former presidents – César Gaviria of Colombia, Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico and Fernando Cardoso of Brazil – urged Latin American countries last year to consider legalizing marijuana to undermine a major source of income for drug cartels. Mexico’s congress has also debated the issue.

But Calderón has long said he is opposed to the idea, and his office issued a statement hours after the meeting saying that while he was open to debate on the issue, he remains “against the legalisation of drugs”.

The latest debate on legalisation was proposed by the historian and writer Héctor Aguilar Camín, who said: “I’m not talking just about marijuana … rather all drugs in general.”

The most recent official toll of Mexico’s drug war dead came in mid-June, when the attorney general said 24,800 had died. Valdes did not specify a time frame for the new statistics.

The government does not regularly break down murder statistics, but leading newspapers who have kept their own counts say last month was the deadliest yet under Calderón: according to the daily Milenio, 1,234 people were killed in July. The Mexican government says most victims were involved in the drug trade.

Some delegates at the meeting criticised the government for lacking consistent statistics on the drug war and an effective way to communicate its successes. They also said the government needs to do more to combat the financial arm of organised crime.

“There’s no systematic policy for investigating or seizing the assets of organised crime,” said José Luis Piñeiro, a security expert at Mexico’s Autonomous Metropolitan University, “nor a system of locating the properties of organised crime”.

[Via: Guardian]

In order to understand our history, the development of our society and political structure, the influence of the large foundations in America is an essential area of research. Their investment into the social sciences and medical establishment shaped their direction for the 20th Century and beyond. Social control and eugenics became a primary directive. These ideas, primarily due to the work of the Rockefeller and Carnegie philanthropies, spread throughout the intelligentsia and elite circles throughout the western world.

Dr. Lily E. Kay’s 1993 book “The Molecular Vision of Life: Caltech, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Rise of the New Biology” documents much of the early history behind the rise of eugenics and life sciences. Kay demonstrates that the drive for social control and eugenics was largely responsible for the emergence and growth of the science of molecular biology. Dr. Kay is a recipient of the Smithsonian Fellowship at the National Museum of American History, and an assistant professor of history of science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Kay’s 2001 obituary from MIT describes her as “…one of the outstanding historians of biology of her generation.”

As Dr. Kay documents, large foundations effectively drew the maps for society to follow. The intelligentsia, trained and schooled under the strong influence of the foundations, closely followed the vision of the elite. This vision extended into the realms of education, politics, religion, and the financial world. As Dr. Lily Kay has painstakingly documented, this influential group set out in the United States to engage in a massive research campaign to discover the inner workings of man and in turn to devise methods of social-biological control. The United States, in turn, became the 20th Century progenitor of eugenics.

Dr. Kay paints a clear picture of the massive influence that the wealthy elite in the United States wields, even to the “…development of culture and the production of knowledge in the United States…” Kay writes,

“Thus by the end of the Progressive Era, even before the large-scale commitment to the “advancement of knowledge” spurred by World War I, the human sciences received considerable support from the large foundations. Their numerous projects and the unprecedented scope of their financial and institutional resources shaped the development of culture and the production of knowledge in the United States. Through education, public opinion, stimulation of specific research agenda, and the promotion of selective categories of knowledge and research, the Foundation played a key role in the creation of a hegemonic bloc; the resources and prestige flowing into those fields relevant to problems of social control were instrumental in the formation of consensus between social and political elites, on the one hand, and academic interests on the other.”

Large foundations – primarily Rockefeller and Carnegie – were investigated in 1915 by the United States Congress, which reported nearly identical findings to the later 1953 Reece Committee, dedicated to the same cause. The 1915 U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations reported that:

“The domination by the men in whose hands the final control of a large part of American industry rests is not limited to their employees, but is being rapidly extended to control the education and social survival of the nation. This control is being extended largely through the creation of enormous privately managed funds for indefinite purposes, hereafter designated “foundations”, by the endowment of colleges and universities, by the creation of funds for the pensioning of teachers, by contributions to private charities, as well as through controlling or influencing the public press…

As Dr. Kay documents, many of the original members of the large foundations and their offshoots were driven by the philosophy that they were the chosen elite. In their minds, moral authority was on their side. They sought to guide the direction of the nation and mold mankind’s development. Frederick T. Gates, a Baptist minister who worked closely with the Rockefeller family and its many initiatives, is quoted as saying,

“…when you die and come to approach the judgment of Almighty God what do you think He will demand of you…? Do you think he will inquire into your trivial sins, your paltry values? NO! He will ask you just One Question: ‘What did you do as a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation?’”

Chester Bernard, who served as president of the Rockefeller Foundation from 1948-1952, was unquestionably a member of the establishment. He saw what the Rockefeller Foundation and much of the scientific community was attempting to do and spoke out against it, but couched his criticism with the assumption of pure motives. Bernard writes in the Rockefeller Foundation’s 1948 Annual Report,

“Inherent in our systematic efforts to promote the welfare of mankind there may be an assumption that… by reason and science we may govern the future of unborn generations in ways that we know are right… Do we mean that because we have learned to navigate the tides we shall also control them? … We have already begun the attempts to regulate local weather. Where do we think we shall stop — with the control of the speed of rotation of the earth, of its revolution around the sun? … Pride goeth before a fall.”

Dr. Kay comments on Bernard’s criticism, stating that, “Given this wisdom, it is paradoxical that Barnard did not hear the dissonance between his poignant words and the Rockefeller Foundation’s agenda in biology, where the primary justification for studying the fundamental mechanisms of soma and psyche was the promise of intervening in the course of human behavior on a global scale.”

This original directive has remained unchanged. However, Dr. Kay concludes by stating that “The eugenic goals, which had informed the design of the molecular biology program and had been attenuated by the lessons of the Holocaust, revived by the late 1950′s… a new eugenics… came to rest in safety on the high ground of medical discourse and latter-day rhetoric of population control.”

Today we see this agenda moving full speed ahead. Foundations are acting more and more like governments. In an interview with the Seattle Times, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon was asked, “Some say the emergence of super rich philanthropies like the Gates Foundation has undermined the effectiveness of the U.N. and its member organizations, like the WHO.” Moon responded,

“On the contrary that is what we really want — contributions from the business community as well as philanthropies. We need to have political support, but it doesn’t give us all that we need. NGOs and philanthropies and many foundations such as Bill Gates Foundation — they’re taking a very important role.”

In 1996 the Rockefeller Foundation supplied grant money for early research on edible vaccines. The $58,000 grant, given to the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research at Cornell University, was aimed at developing and transferring edible vaccine technology to developing countries.

Edible vaccines, according to the Indian Journal of Medical Microbiology, will be a more socioculturally acceptable alternative to needles. In other words, people will be less resistant to eating a mundane banana than taking a shot in the arm. The Journal states that new edible vaccine technology may serve a dual purpose of birth control.

As calls are made for lithium to be added to water supplies world-wide and genetically modified organisms spread throughout the ecosystem, the elite agenda of “…intervening in the course of human behavior on a global scale…” is fast becoming reality.

Source – Old Thinker News

In this video Peter Dale Scott Claims Many banks survived the recent financial crisis by having access to illegal drug money

Heraldo sticks his nose into what is going on over in Afghanistan, here, troops have taken over a small region that grows opium and they all seem itching to destroy the crop, but know that the local population will be “mad” and not work with them, I dont feel they should have the right to destroy any of it, apparently these folks have been getting paid to grow opium, paid well.

The US should start paying them well instead, and use the opium sold to them for legit reasons, many people don’t realize that opium is used to produce a great many helpful pain killing medications.

Another note is that many within the population growing the opium are probably quite physically and psychologically addicted.

Source: Corbett Report

MILAN — Italian news reports say that a military police general was convicted of smuggling drugs during the course of an investigation and sentenced to 14 years in prison.

The news agencies ANSA and Apcom said Giampaolo Ganzer was sentenced on Monday after being convicted of bringing heroin into Italy in the course of two operations led by the carabinieri investigative unit that he headed in Milan.

Prosecutors alleged that a group of officials in the military police unit had organized a drug trafficking ring with the aim of getting rich.

Ganzer was among 14 people convicted in the case, while four were acquitted. In addition to jail time, Ganzer was fined euro65,000 ($82,000).

Source: MSNBC