How to Kill the Meth Monster: NYT opinion

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

How to Kill the Meth Monster

By ROB BOVETT

Published: November 15, 2010

Newport, Ore.

THE latest bad news from the world of methamphetamine is that makers of the drug have perfected a one-pot recipe that enables them to manufacture their highly addictive product while on the move, often in their car. The materials they need — a two-liter soda bottle, a few cold pills and some household chemicals — are easily obtained and easily discarded,often in a trash bag dumped along the highway.

There is, however, a simple way to end this mobile industry — and, indeed, most methamphetamine production. We’ve tried it in Oregon, and have seen how well it works. Just keep a key ingredient, pseudoephedrine, out of the hands of meth producers.

Pseudoephedrine is a nasal decongestant found in some cold and allergy medicines. In 1976, the Food and Drug Administration allowed it to be sold over the counter, inadvertently letting the genie out of the bottle. Afterward, the meth epidemic spread across the nation, leaving destroyed lives and families in its wake.

Sales of products containing pseudoephedrine in the United States now amount to nearly $600 million a year. Yet, according to the pharmaceutical industry, only 15 million Americans use the drug to treat their stuffed-up noses, and these people typically buy no more than a package or two ($10 to $20 worth) a year.

Over the years, Congress and state legislatures have passed laws meant to prevent the diversion of pseudoephedrine to meth production. But such efforts have amounted to only temporary Band-Aids.

In 2006, Congress required pseudoephedrine products to be moved behind the counter, set daily and monthly limits on the amount that can be sold to any one customer and required retailers to keep a log of sales. But meth users quickly learned to evade these controls by making purchases in several different stores — a practice known as “smurfing.”

In an effort to avoid having more stringent controls placed on the drug, the pharmaceutical industry is lobbying Congress to require electronic tracking of pseudoephedrine sales, as some states already do. This makes it harder for an individual smurfer to collect large quantities of the drug. But meth users get around the tracking system by banding together in cooperatives, with each member buying pseudoephedrine products in amounts small enough to evade detection. These group smurfers then contribute their portion to the pot in exchange for cash or a share of the cooked-up meth. Or, in the West, they feed the “super labs” run by drug trafficking organizations in Central California.

In Kentucky, an electronic tracking law that went into effect in 2008 has had no effect on the number of meth labs there, and only 10 percent of them are found by electronic tracking. The number of police incidents involving meth labs has actually increased by more than 40 percent.

The only effective solution is to put the genie back in the bottle by returning pseudoephedrine to prescription-drug status. That’s what Oregon did more than four years ago, enabling the state to eliminate smurfing and nearly eradicate meth labs. This is part of the reason that Oregon recently experienced the steepest decline in crime rates in the 50 states.

Earlier this year, Mississippi also passed a law requiring a prescription to get pseudoephedrine. Since July, the number of meth labs in that state has fallen by 65 percent.

In 2009, Mexico, which had been the source of most of the methamphetamine on the streets of the United States, went further, banning pseudoephedrine entirely. The potency of meth from Mexico has since plummeted. This is great news. But now the ball is back in our court.

These pseudoephedrine prescription requirements apply to only 15 pharmaceutical products and their generic equivalents — medicines like Sudafed 12 Hour, Aleve D and Advil Cold and Sinus. Most cold and allergy medicines on store shelves are not affected, because they contain no pseudoephedrine.

Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon has proposed legislation to require prescriptions for products with pseudoephedrine nationwide, and Congress should enact it without delay. American families, too many already devastated by the meth epidemic, deserve no less.

Rob Bovett, the district attorney for Lincoln County, Ore., was the primary author of Oregon’s anti-methamphetamine laws.

The 60th Birthday Blues: How to become an (overstressed) spiritwalker

When life is so overwhelming

you can not cope,

what happens then?

Well, there is the post traumatic stress disorder response and that can become compounded (see: Judith Lewis Herman's book, Trauma and Recovery). Dissociation/panic "disorder" can become the order of the day.

But what occurs when life conspires to be so

klusterfucked

that your adrenals fail

but

- you MUST keep functioning and cannot afford going insane while being totally victimized -

WHAT THEN?

This is a measure of my life's state and the political reality in which we are living.

I am locating a creative solution to the IMPOSSIBLE in the only way my psyche can find with the resources available. I cannot afford to feel helpless and hopeless.

This ministry becomes something referred to in shamanic circles as

DREAM WALKING or SPIRIT WALKING.

I walk.

I rap

in rhythm and time.

I prophesize.

I read your hand and see who you are.

I'll guess your sign.

I hand you an angel card or a biscuit for your dog.

I ask you to pray.

I dance for your souls.

and why?

It is my "gift" from The Creator.

I have three massive ongoing traumatic issues and I bring them and get damned personal on this blog today as it is my sixtieth birthday and I have every single right to bring up THE TRUTH.

I wanted to have a semi sane dinner with my son tonight; yet instead I ate alone and was threatened with arrest TWICE today for merely trying to explain myself and stick up for my son.

I am burnt out and have become a spiritual entity, while having few REAL social supports to help me out. Yet, I am political and have a message. I am talented and can dance and sing. I dream ... on.

As we say in Minnesota: How come?

I was raised in a mixed race family. My mother (and I AM her daughter) kept my brother, Ronnie at a time such "things" were not the done thing. Despite a violent childhood, my elder brother and I were very close.

My mother was killed by my father, who committed suicide the same steamy day in July. It is my surmise he did this while in a black out. As children we went to live with my grandparents who were ritual abusers. No, they did not wear funny costumes. They were "nice": pillars of the community but people feared my grandfather and no one intervened. I left home at 15, taking my brother out of the end-of-the-line white family as quickly as I possibly could. Ronnie never lived with us.

I was a flower child/hippie during the 1960's. A conundrum I assure you. An original SDSer and I helped found the American Indian Movement, which grew out of the Minneapolis welfare rights movement.

I have been married and lost my eldest son. I've lived in high and low places. I am not going to publish my resume here, though. I just want you to understand the politics of this thang. I am firm believer in communication not CONTROL nor war.

My husband James Simson, Miles and I came to Canada as refugees in 1994 under the War on Drugs - and it took eight years for us to gain admittance, which was resolved as a Humane Compassionate Relief decision. This is the second longest immigration resolution in Canadian history; no NATO country is going to accept another nation's citizens as refugees. Trust me on that. Our final adjudicator was Alex Neve - who I unkindly refer to as Michael Never- who is the head of Canada's Amnesty International.

The "case" went through the appeals process and we lost there, too. By the time our number came up it was decided in Miles' best interest that we remain in Canada. Miles suffered extreme sexual abuse at the hands of his father and it was horrible to be removed from the United States as we had just gotten settled in and were doing really well when turfed out.

We lived in FEAR of the United States ever since. By the time the decision was made, we had been abandoned by my husband, James. This caused Miles to shutdown and resort to drug usage: he smoked tainted pot. Later, he turned to XTC for relief as he feared my death following an accident and he became a paranoid schizophrenic.

What brought us to this state of being summarily kicked out of the United States? I stood up for Leonard Peltier, the native activist to Senator Paul Wellstone. It is my profound belief that he and my ex-husband, Scott Borene, an immigration attorney colluded to have me thrown out. Not everyone wonderfulizes those two.

Two years ago I was given substandard housing by the City of Toronto following a disastrous affair whereby everything was thrown away: my son and I - who have no relatives here in Canada - had everything thrown away.

I took this substandard apartment because I followed the need to get out of the shelter system following a depressive/PTSD episode over this traumatic event. I applied for an immediate transfer two years ago as my chemical sensitivities just could NOT take the environmental impact. At that time I suffered SEVERE fibromyalgia and was overweight, despite having spent years doing yoga and being extremely flexible earlier. Yet, I was saved by a friend who helped me find orthomolecular medicene.

I continued the blogging I had begun: it was mostly on spiritual and health matters and I ran a group that numbered roughly 50 people called Earthlings Anonymous that aimed to find solutions to problems for seven generations in the future.

To my astonishment, an "Anonymous" commentator began to appear with regular "private" comments and I followed the suggestions made to me to the letter.

I was given information on Blackwater, Infragard, war crimes, and all manner of US political information. I followed instructions to the letter. I was a good investigator and found out much and my blog was a smash success many days.

It was suggested to me in the secret comments that I was Canada's newest member of the International Criminal Court and that I should expect deep Canadian support for what I was doing; I was picked because I was "special." I assumed I would go The Hague and have a nice plump salary!! Yeah, right. War crimes HAVE been committed and I do know much about them. But if you saw my life today you'd wonder where I EVER got that idea !!

(And let this be my first statement that ALWAYS get real evidence before you ever believe anything, as the evidence clearly does not support that anonymous assertion. A similar claim was made to me via International Clearinghouse online by this same poster that my "case" regarding my illegal expulsion from the United States was being investigated by the Department of Justice.)

During this entire time, my house was being regularly invaded by stalkers and a mysterious person(s) who took things at night. I thought that it was some sort of alphabet souper (ya know, CIA, CSIS or something) - but it was cigarettes, bras, and then LARGE sums of money that would disappear. Sometimes I would have to go over to my son's house to get supplies and walk many miles. I socially as I knew I was being followed and surveilled, particularly by Blackwater.

Last year, things got SO fraught that I tried to commit suicide on my birthday because the walker I had been promised was taken away and not one single birthday card arrived. This resulted in my THIRD near death experience - a phenomena that adds import to what is to follow.

Fortunately, my son and an online friend caught it and my life was saved.

Meanwhile the psychiatric reports and specialist opinions continued to pour in that I NEEDED to move out of this unhealthy environment. I was in physical pain and I dissociated.

During this entire time, my house was being regularly invaded by stalkers and a mysterious person(s) who took things at night. I thought that it was some sort of alphabet souper (ya know, CIA, CSIS or something) - but it was cigarettes, bras, and then LARGE sums of money that would disappear. Sometimes I would have to go over to my son's house to get supplies and walk many miles. I would go to the police and complian long and hard.

In my son's police district I spoke to them about prosecuting George W. Bush and spoke to the District Attorney about it not knowing that this approach had been tried before.

I walked the streets handing out cards about my blog to get support.

I was promised help getting to the Andover War Crimes Conference by my local MP's office. I sold hundreds of copies of the Bugliosi book: yet since I could not raise $20,000 to set up an office and meet our needs I have never received much more than a few paltry donations and no commission on the sale of the book. I invited them to come to a Town Hall I had to put on myself after other arrangements fell through at my own expense. Peculiar, I have NEVER met the local MP yet.

However, this town hall never materialized. I had spent my own money trying urgently to get a town hall preparation meeting in order through the local Native Friendship Centre. However, at the last minute on TWO occasions they were abruptly cancelled. This was to provide funds for me and another law student to travel to Massachusetts. I was threatened by the head of the Centre, a Mr. Larry Frost. There is a key to the blog which could net the native community money AND the sales of the book at the event would have added to their coffers.

In the end one of my fellowship friends helped me get the money by saying I had moved into her apartment and I went to Andover alone.

When I got there I was shocked that Jordan J. Paust did not attend. I was sure he knew about my blog. I believed "testing" was NOT W. Richard West and he was not going to attend. I still do not know who that individual is; but I assure you that the assertion that my "back is covered" is certainly not true. The Robert Jackson Conference was extremely important and I am proud that I attended. But as a nonregistered participant I get no updates and none of the materials.

Instead when I came back, the crap began hitting the fan. My son was in a hospital and the police would not tell me where he was. Since then, he has been in three hospitals and none of them the correct one !! He has been formed, arrested and I have been humiliated publically by these hospitals and I could not get anyone to help me sue them for their misconduct.

I have been in total distress. I have been attacked physically five times in the past six months.

The man who claimed to be a Special Forces officer and an ally turned out to be the local crack dealer and he has threatened me on several occasions. No one arrests HIM, but they do my son.

Yes, I have even called Centre for the Victims of Torture for help. I have asked for therapeutic support. Even from senior's groups. None of it is forthcoming. It's been six months of attrition of anything approaching normalcy or legality !!

The disability people have treated me horribly and I went without electricity for a long time. My neighbors have thrown my belongings away !! My friends are horrified at the conditions in my apartment and don't come back.

Due to the theft of all my property two years ago and the fact that the US did not mail back my passport after I applied, the blog cannot accept donations even if they are made.

I have not gotten my $14,000 plus in back US taxes nor the nearly $2,000 I paid out in cab fares back so I am stuck in the apartment with the mouse shit even now !!

I have called the local City Councillor numerous times about my problems; he does nothing and I have filed an official complaint against the local police department.

I have found out James has died so there is no way to appeal to him for assistance. Further, my law suit against Scott has failed because I cannot prove he owes me money, but he does.

No lawuist has gone up against Sunnybrook nor St. Joseph's hospital, who are guilty under Canada's Mental Health Act of violating both Miles and my rights.

I now suffer extreme traumatic arthritis from the physical attacks I took from Miles and the crack addict.

I have become extremely interested in the symptomology that the war crimes have produced here in our cities, though.

The synthesis of urban decay, military keynesianISM, the fiscal crisis and people's responses is key. We must be prepared for what is ahead and Dmitri Orlov has said it best. People must not self medicate with drugs and alcohol to avoid facing what is going to happen very soon in our suburbs and urban areas.

But there are solutions and I have been proposing them to everyone that I can. These include using Shipping crate container buildings/solar energy to rebuild our city housing; this will eliminate the homelessness. And our spaces must be better utilized. To this end I say I will run against our local City Councillor during my "raps": it only costs $200 to run. And I could pay it all in pennies. But Dreamwalkers make horrible politicians although we have our fingers right on the pulse. I feel I have become an urban minister, but the pay is zilch and the energy expended enormous, but I had to do something while I cannot get get Miles released !!

Would I really run for office? I'd have to get Canadian Citizenship and to my surprise I don't have it and only found out when applying for a Canadian passport.

HOPES AND DREAMS

Instead of being a member of the International Criminal Court, I might become a participant in Voices from the Street, if I am fortunate. I certainly understand the issues of mental health, addiction and homelessness in a very deep mannner. I do wish I could have capitalized on some celebrity coming up to Toronto, particularly Vincent Bugliosi, but this never materialized.

So my three traumas: getting Ontario Disability to live up to their mandate and give me my cab funds; getting Toronto Housing to get me transferred and give me a hearing which is now two months overdue; and then to get the police department and Toronto City Housing to due its duty against CRIMINALS. Miles is owed $100,000 in back social security and the doctors don't let him out to collect it nor even get his disability allowance money !! So we live in dire straights which is totally INSANE.

Find housing with social supports and a chance to grow things, have a dog and go back to school if Voices does not work out.

I want my eldest son to realize he is NOT recovering and that the restraining order he put out on me after not seeing me or his brother for fourteen years is mean and cruel. I want to meet my grandchildren. I worked very hard to give him the opportunities and blessings that make his life extremely comfortable financially. I have post traumatic stress and am not a "mental case" as he insists.

Is it too much to ask??? I think I have at least another 30 years to accomplish some of this.

* S * P * I * R * I * T *

W * A * L * K * I * N * G

I am your sister.

Please treat me as such.

You would not want your sister treated this way.

Don't take the spirit out if spirituality.

I ride the Zuvuya for you.

Remember: what happened to me could happen to anyone who faces an orphaned existence.

How many tears can this old woman cry?

Yet only kindness to others can help me out.

Widowed, orphaned and homeless now.

Knowing we are all ONE fellowship, really.

My name is Virginia:

remember my name.

How can they arrest my vulnerable son and yet let the real criminals go free?

Megweetch for reading

This was the saddest birthday I have ever had, really.

I want my son restored to sane living and a chance to have real therapy not poison thrown down his throat .

I want to have sane, deep social contacts outside that horrible building.

Your friend,

Many Rivers
Dharam Kaur

Who dances the message into your palm:

Mitayake Oyasin

Is an International Financial Conspiracy Driving World Events? By Richard C. Cook

URL of this article: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8450

Global Research, March 27, 2008

"They make a desolation and call it peace." -Tacitus Was Alan Greenspan really as dumb as he looks in creating the late housing bubble that threatens to bring the entire Western debt-based economy crashing down? Was something as easy to foresee as this really the trigger for a meltdown that could destroy the world's financial system? Or was it done, perhaps, "accidentally on purpose"? And if so, why? Let's turn to the U.S. personage that conspiracy theorists most often mention as being at the epicenter of whatever elite plan is reputed to exist. This would be David Rockefeller, the 92-year-old multibillionaire godfather of the world's financial elite. The lengthy Wikipedia article on Rockefeller provides the following version of a celebrated statement he allegedly made in an opening speech at the Bilderberg conference in Baden-Baden, Germany, in June 1991: "We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time magazine, and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during these years. But the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government which will never again know war, but only peace and prosperity for the whole of humanity. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in the past centuries." This speech was made 17 years ago. It came at the beginning in the U.S. of the Bill Clinton administration. Rockefeller speaks of an "us." This "us," he says, has been having meetings for almost 40 years. If you add the 17 years since he gave the speech it was 57 years ago—two full generations. Not only has "us" developed a "plan for the world," but the attempt to "develop" the plan has evidently been successful, at least in Rockefeller's mind. The ultimate goal of "us" is to create "the supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers." This will lead, he says, toward a "world government which will never again know war." Just as an intellectual exercise, let's assume that David Rockefeller is as important and powerful a person as he seems to think he is. Let's give the man some credit and assume that he and "us" have in fact succeeded to a degree. This would mean that the major decisions and events since Rockefeller gave the speech in 1991 have probably also been part of the plan or that they have at least represented its features and intent. Therefore by examining these decisions and events we can determine whether in fact Rockefeller is being truthful in his assessment that the Utopia he has in mind is on its way or has at least come closer to being realized. In no particular order, some of these decisions and events are as follows: The implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement by the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations has led to the elimination of millions of U.S. manufacturing jobs as well as the destruction of U.S. family farming in favor of global agribusiness. Similar free trade agreements, including those under the auspices of the World Trade Organization, have led to export of millions of additional manufacturing jobs to China and elsewhere. Average family income in the U.S. has steadily eroded while the share of the nation's wealth held by the richest income brackets has soared. Some Wall Street hedge fund managers are making $1 billion a year while the number of homeless, including war veterans, pushes a million. The housing bubble has led to a huge inflation of real estate prices in the U.S. Millions of homes are falling into the hands of the bankers through foreclosure. The cost of land and rentals has further decimated family agriculture as well as small business. Rising property taxes based on inflated land assessments have forced millions of lower-and middle-income people and elderly out of their homes. The fact that bankers now control national monetary systems in their entirety, under laws where money is introduced only through lending at interest, has resulted in a massive debt pyramid that is teetering on collapse. This "monetarist" system was pioneered by Rockefeller-family funded economists at the University of Chicago. The rub is that when the pyramid comes down and everyone goes bankrupt the banks which have been creating money "out of thin air" will then be able to seize valuable assets for pennies on the dollar, as J.P. Morgan Chase is preparing to do with the businesses owned by Carlyle Capital. Meaningful regulation of the financial industry has been abandoned by government, and any politician that stands in the way, such as Eliot Spitzer, is destroyed. The total tax burden on Americans from federal, state, and local governments now exceeds forty percent of income and is rising. Today, with a recession starting, the Democratic-controlled Congress, while supporting the minuscule "stimulus" rebate, is hypocritically raising taxes further, even for middle-income earners. Back taxes, along with student loans, can no longer be eliminated by bankruptcy protection. Gasoline prices are soaring even as companies like Exxon-Mobil are recording record profits. Other commodity prices are going up steadily, including food prices, with some countries starting to experience near-famine conditions. 40 million people in America are officially classified as "food insecure." Corporate control of water and mineral resources has removed much of what is available from the public commons, and the deregulation of energy production has led to huge increases in the costs of electricity in many areas. The destruction of family farming in the U.S. by NAFTA (along with family farming in Mexico and Canada) has been mirrored by policies toward other nations on the part of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. Around the world, due to pressure from the "Washington consensus," local food self-sufficiency has been replaced by raising of crops primarily for export. Migration off the land has fed the population of huge slums around the cities of underdeveloped countries. Since the 1980s the U.S. has been fighting wars throughout the world either directly or by proxy. The former Yugoslavia was dismembered by NATO. Under cover of 9/11 and by utilizing off-the-shelf plans, the U.S. is now engaged in the military conquest and permanent military occupation of the Middle East. A worldwide encirclement of Russia and China by U.S. and NATO forces is underway, and a new push to militarize space has begun. The Western powers are clearly preparing for at least the possibility of another world war. The expansion of the U.S. military empire abroad is mirrored by the creation of a totalitarian system of surveillance at home, whereby the activities of private citizens are spied upon and tracked by technology and systems which have been put into place under the heading of the "War on Terror." Human microchip implants for tracking purposes are starting to be used. The military-industrial complex has become the nation's largest and most successful industry with tens of thousands of planners engaged in devising new and better ways, both overt and covert, to destroy both foreign and domestic "enemies." Meanwhile, the U.S. has the largest prison population of any country on earth. Plus everyday life for millions of people is a crushing burden of government, insurance, and financial fees, charges, and paperwork. And the simplest business transactions are burdened by rake-offs for legions of accountants, lawyers, bureaucrats, brokers, speculators, and middlemen. Finally, the deteriorating conditions of everyday life have given rise to an extraordinary level of stress-related disease, as well as epidemic alcohol and drug addiction. Governments themselves around the world engage in drug trafficking. Instead of working to lower stress levels, public policy is skewed in favor of an enormous prescription drug industry that grows rich off the declining level of health through treatment of symptoms rather than causes. Many of these heavily-advertised medications themselves have devastating side-effects. This list should at least give us enough to go on in order to ask a hard question. Assuming again that all these things are parts of the elitist plan which Mr. Rockefeller boasts to have been developing, isn't it a little strange that the means which have been selected to achieve "peace and prosperity for the whole of humanity" involve so much violence, deception, oppression, exploitation, graft, and theft? In fact it looks to me as though "our plan for the world" is one that is based on genocide, world war, police control of populations, and seizure of the world's resources by the financial elite and their puppet politicians and military forces. In particular, could there be a better way to accomplish all this than what appears to be a concentrated plan to remove from people everywhere in the world the ability to raise their own food? After all, genocide by starvation may be slow, but it is very effective. Especially when it can be blamed on "market forces." And can it be that the "us" which is doing all these things, including the great David Rockefeller himself, are just criminals who have somehow taken over the seats of power? If so, they are criminals who have done everything they can to watch their backs and cover their tracks, including a chokehold over the educational system and the monopolistic mainstream media. One thing is certain: The voters of America have never knowingly agreed to any of this. Richard C. Cook is a former U.S. federal government analyst, whose career included service with the U.S. Civil Service Commission, the Food and Drug Administration, the Carter White House, NASA, and the U.S. Treasury Department. His articles on economics, politics, and space policy have appeared on numerous websites. His book on monetary reform entitled We Hold These Truths: The Promise of Monetary Reform is in preparation. He is also the author of Challenger Revealed: An Insider's Account of How the Reagan Administration Caused the Greatest Tragedy of the Space Age, called by one reviewer, "the most important spaceflight book of the last twenty years." His website is at www.richardccook.com.

Please support Global Research Global Research relies on the financial support of its readers. Your endorsement is greatly appreciated

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Centre for Research on Globalization. To become a Member of Global Research The CRG grants permission to cross-post original Global Research articles on community internet sites as long as the text & title are not modified. The source and the author's copyright must be displayed. For publication of Global Research articles in print or other forms including commercial internet sites, contact: crgeditor@yahoo.com www.globalresearch.ca contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available to our readers under the provisions of "fair use" in an effort to advance a better understanding of political, economic and social issues. The material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving it for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material for purposes other than "fair use" you must request permission from the copyright owner. For media inquiries: crgeditor@yahoo.com © Copyright Richard C. Cook, Global Research, 2008

I have nightmares about this ...

May 29, 2007 at 17:08:44 PACIFIC OCEAN PLASTIC STEW ENTERING OUR FOOD SYSTEM by Allen L Roland http://www.opednews.com

See Photo: http://blogs.salon.com/0002255/2007/05/29.html

A dead Ocean bird from a dying Pacific Ocean garbage patch that is growing and is now twice the size of Texas ~ and could well be contaminating our food chain : Allen L Roland

This is a must read story for it has dire implications for all human beings and especially mothers and newborn infants.

This story is a wake up call to the world that we must help and cooperate with one another, especially pursuant to polluting our oceans, if we are to survive as a human species.

Next time you look out at this beautiful Pacific ocean, as I often do, realize that there is a garbage patch of discarded plastic twice the size of Texas a few hundred miles away and its growing !

Then we add this stunning announcement last week from The Center for American Progress ~ which should not be a surprise.

ENVIRONMENT / POLLUTERS FLOURISH UNDER THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION:


"Environmental enforcement efforts by the U.S. EPA and the Justice Department have plummeted over the last five years, resulting in a 38 percent decline in criminal fines and a 25 percent drop in civil penalties, according to a new report from the nonprofit Environmental Integrity Project (EIP)."

Susan Casey and photographer Gregg Segal will lead you on this journey through a man made hell.

Allen L Roland http://blogs.salon.com/0002255/2007/05/29.html

Our oceans are turning into plastic...are we?

By Susan Casey, Photographs by Gregg Segal May 11, 2007 - 11:45:03 PM

http://www.bestlifeonline.com/cms/publish/health-fitness/Our_oceans_are_turning_into_plastic_are_we_2_printer.shtml

A vast swath of the Pacific, twice the size of Texas, is full of a plastic stew that is entering the food chain. Scientists say these toxins are causing obesity, infertility...and worse.

To Captain Charles Moore

Fate can take strange forms, and so perhaps it does not seem unusual that Captain Charles Moore found his life’s purpose in a nightmare.

Unfortunately, he was awake at the time, and 800 miles north of Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean.

It happened on August 3, 1997, a lovely day, at least in the beginning: Sunny. Little wind. Water the color of sapphires. Moore and the crew of Alguita, his 50-foot aluminum-hulled catamaran, sliced through the sea.

Returning to Southern California from Hawaii after a sailing race, Moore had altered Alguita’s course, veering slightly north. He had the time and the curiosity to try a new route, one that would lead the vessel through the eastern corner of a 10-million-square-mile oval known as the North Pacific subtropical gyre. This was an odd stretch of ocean, a place most boats purposely avoided. For one thing, it was becalmed. "The doldrums," sailors called it, and they steered clear. So did the ocean’s top predators: the tuna, sharks, and other large fish that required livelier waters, flush with prey. The gyre was more like a desert—a slow, deep, clockwise-swirling vortex of air and water caused by a mountain of high-pressure air that lingered above it.

The area’s reputation didn’t deter Moore. He had grown up in Long Beach, 40 miles south of L.A., with the Pacific literally in his front yard, and he possessed an impressive aquatic résumé: deckhand, able seaman, sailor, scuba diver, surfer, and finally captain.

Moore had spent countless hours in the ocean, fascinated by its vast trove of secrets and terrors.

He’d seen a lot of things out there, things that were glorious and grand; things that were ferocious and humbling. But he had never seen anything nearly as chilling as what lay ahead of him in the gyre.

It began with a line of plastic bags ghosting the surface, followed by an ugly tangle of junk: nets and ropes and bottles, motor-oil jugs and cracked bath toys, a mangled tarp. Tires. A traffic cone. Moore could not believe his eyes. Out here in this desolate place, the water was a stew of plastic crap. It was as though someone had taken the pristine seascape of his youth and swapped it for a landfill.

How did all the plastic end up here? How did this trash tsunami begin? What did it mean? If the questions seemed overwhelming, Moore would soon learn that the answers were even more so, and that his discovery had dire implications for human—and planetary—health. As Alguita glided through the area that scientists now refer to as the "Eastern Garbage Patch," Moore realized that the trail of plastic went on for hundreds of miles. Depressed and stunned, he sailed for a week through bobbing, toxic debris trapped in a purgatory of circling currents. To his horror, he had stumbled across the 21st-century Leviathan. It had no head, no tail. Just an endless body.

"Everybody’s plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic." This Andy Warhol quote is emblazoned on a six-foot-long magenta and yellow banner that hangs—with extreme irony—in the solar-powered workshop in Moore’s Long Beach home. The workshop is surrounded by a crazy Eden of trees, bushes, flowers, fruits, and vegetables, ranging from the prosaic (tomatoes) to the exotic (cherimoyas, guavas, chocolate persimmons, white figs the size of baseballs). This is the house in which Moore, 59, was raised, and it has a kind of open-air earthiness that reflects his ’60s-activist roots, which included a stint in a Berkeley commune.

Composting and organic gardening are serious business here—you can practically smell the humus—but there is also a kidney-shaped hot tub surrounded by palm trees. Two wet suits hang drying on a clothesline above it.

This afternoon, Moore strides the grounds. "How about a nice, fresh boysenberry?" he asks, and plucks one off a bush. He’s a striking man wearing no-nonsense black trousers and a shirt with official-looking epaulettes. A thick brush of salt-and-pepper hair frames his intense blue eyes and serious face. But the first thing you notice about Moore is his voice, a deep, bemused drawl that becomes animated and sardonic when the subject turns to plastic pollution. This problem is Moore’s calling, a passion he inherited from his father, an industrial chemist who studied waste management as a hobby. On family vacations, Moore recalls, part of the agenda would be to see what the locals threw out. "We could be in paradise, but we would go to the dump," he says with a shrug. "That’s what we wanted to see."

Since his first encounter with the Garbage Patch nine years ago, Moore has been on a mission to learn exactly what’s going on out there. Leaving behind a 25-year career running a furniture-restoration business, he has created the Algalita Marine Research Foundation to spread the word of his findings. He has resumed his science studies, which he’d set aside when his attention swerved from pursuing a university degree to protesting the Vietnam War. His tireless effort has placed him on the front lines of this new, more abstract battle. After enlisting scientists such as Steven B. Weisberg, Ph.D. (executive director of the Southern California Coastal Water Research Project and an expert in marine environmental monitoring), to develop methods for analyzing the gyre’s contents, Moore has sailed Alguita back to the Garbage Patch several times.

On each trip, the volume of plastic has grown alarmingly. The area in which it accumulates is now twice the size of Texas.

At the same time, all over the globe, there are signs that plastic pollution is doing more than blighting the scenery; it is also making its way into the food chain. Some of the most obvious victims are the dead seabirds that have been washing ashore in startling numbers, their bodies packed with plastic: things like bottle caps, cigarette lighters, tampon applicators, and colored scraps that, to a foraging bird, resemble baitfish. (One animal dissected by Dutch researchers contained 1,603 pieces of plastic.) And the birds aren’t alone. All sea creatures are threatened by floating plastic, from whales down to zooplankton.

There’s a basic moral horror in seeing the pictures: a sea turtle with a plastic band strangling its shell into an hourglass shape; a humpback towing plastic nets that cut into its flesh and make it impossible for the animal to hunt. More than a million seabirds, 100,000 marine mammals, and countless fish die in the North Pacific each year, either from mistakenly eating this junk or from being ensnared in it and drowning.

Bad enough. But Moore soon learned that the big, tentacled balls of trash were only the most visible signs of the problem; others were far less obvious, and far more evil. Dragging a fine-meshed net known as a manta trawl, he discovered minuscule pieces of plastic, some barely visible to the eye, swirling like fish food throughout the water. He and his researchers parsed, measured, and sorted their samples and arrived at the following conclusion: By weight, this swath of sea contains six times as much plastic as it does plankton.

This statistic is grim—for marine animals, of course, but even more so for humans. The more invisible and ubiquitous the pollution, the more likely it will end up inside us. And there’s growing—and disturbing—proof that we’re ingesting plastic toxins constantly, and that even slight doses of these substances can severely disrupt gene activity. "Every one of us has this huge body burden," Moore says. "You could take your serum to a lab now, and they’d find at least 100 industrial chemicals that weren’t around in 1950." The fact that these toxins don’t cause violent and immediate reactions does not mean they’re benign:

Scientists are just beginning to research the long-term ways in which the chemicals used to make plastic interact with our own biochemistry.

Plastic never really goes away ~ discover why and what are its effects on humans ~ here's a short trailer before you read on .

Each of us tosses about 185 pounds of plastic per year. We could certainly reduce that. And yet—do our products have to be quite so lethal? Must a discarded flip-flop remain with us until the end of time? Aren’t disposable razors and foam packing peanuts a poor consolation prize for the destruction of the world’s oceans, not to mention our own bodies and the health of future generations? “If ‘more is better’ and that’s the only mantra we have, we’re doomed,” Moore says, summing it up

Oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer, Ph.D., an expert on marine debris, agrees. “If you could fast-forward 10,000 years and do an archaeological dig…you’d find a little line of plastic,” he told The Seattle Times last April. “What happened to those people? Well, they ate their own plastic and disrupted their genetic structure and weren’t able to reproduce. They didn’t last very long because they killed themselves."

Click on for rest of story ~
http://www.bestlifeonline.com/cms/publish/health-fitness/Our_oceans_are_turning_into_plastic_are_we_2_printer.shtml

OpEdNews columnist Allen L Roland is available for comments , interviews and speaking engagements ( allen@allenroland.com )

Take action -- click here to contact your local newspaper or congress people:

SAVE THE OCEANS

Click here to see the most recent messages sent to congressional reps and local newspapers

www.allenroland.com

Allen L Roland is a practicing psychotherapist, author and lecturer who also shares a daily political and social commentary on his weblog and website allenroland.com He also guest hosts a monthly national radio show TRUTHTALK on Conscious talk radio www.conscioustalk.net

Contact Author