The Forty-Year Quagmire: An Exit Strategy for the War on Drugs

(This weeek) marks the fortieth anniversary of the infamous speech in which President Nixon committed to waging “a new, all-out offensive” against drug abuse, which he declared “public enemy number one.” This moment is widely regarded as the unofficial launch of America’s spectacularly unsuccessful and costly global war on drugs.

If ever there was a time to consider exit strategies from a war, this is it. The war on drugs has cost roughly $1 trillion. It has resulted in tens of millions of arrests, put millions behind bars and driven the growth of a massive prison-industrial complex that now lobbies for the perpetuation of this failed war.

It has precluded the sorts of public health policies that might have prevented hundreds of thousands of people in this country from dying of AIDS and other infectious diseases as well as overdoses. […]

An Exit Strategy for the War on Drugs

Revisiting the Reagan Nightmare

“Now that he is safely dead, let us praise him.” poet Carl Wendell Hines wrote of Martin Luther King Jr., after his assassination. Ronald Reagan has been “safely dead” for just under seven years, but the economic impact of his policies remain with us.

In a sense, it’s highly appropriate that the centennial of Reagan’s birth falls upon us in the midst of a economic nightmare from which it is uncertain when — or if — the nation will awaken. Though we will be inevitably awash in conservative praise and hagiography of Reagan, his 100th birthday is also an occasion to remember how America’s long economic nightmare began.

It’s a story told many times, but it bears telling again, and again, as David Johnson did last year when he explained how the “Reagan Revolution” came home to roost. He even told it in charts.

As Dave said in his post,. take a look at a chart of almost anything, and you’ll notice that right around 1981 things take a sharp turn in the wrong direction — that is, for just about everyone but the wealthiest 1%.

Conservative policies transformed the United States from the largest creditor nation to the largest debtor nation in just a few years.

And it started with Reagan. Anyone who’s wringing their hands about America’s debt and China’s ownership of it has Reagan to thank. […]

{The Republicans & the Corporate-Controlled Media have been feeding us lies about Ronald Reagan for 30 years. Most people in America now believe that Reagan was a good president, when the facts show otherwise. Reagan was a horrible president. It’s up to us to spread the Truth.}

Possible Cure for HIV Found

Timothy Brown, a forty-two year old American man living in Berlin, Germany was given a bone marrow transplant in 2007 to treat leukemia.  The transplant — which treats leukemia by essentially rebooting the body’s immune system and creating new white blood cells —also had the benefit of wiping out the HIV infection.

Just following World AIDS Day, and three and a half years later, the patient remains HIV-free, which suggests he is cured of the disease, the researchers said.

“I’m extremely excited about the result,” said Jerome Zack, a researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies HIV infection and was not involved in the study. “It suggests that at least in this one individual, there’s a long-term benefit to this approach.”

In the transplant, the patient received bone marrow, which contains blood stem cells, from a donor with a rare mutation. The mutation essentially prevents the most common form of HIV from getting inside certain immune cells. Afterward, the virus appeared to stop replicating in the patient’s body, and he no longer needed HIV antiretroviral medication.

The findings for Brown’s case were published in the journal Blood this week where the study’s author Kristina Allers writes, “Our results strongly suggest that cure of HIV has been achieved in this patient.”

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