Will Joe Biden Hand the Marijuana Industry to Big Pharma?

Image source: A 2009 article in Hemp News entitled "Big Pharma Eyes Medical Marijuana." They've had their eye on this market for a while.

by Thomas Neuburger

According to recent reports, Joe Biden's plan for marijuana decriminalization calls for expunging criminal records of those convicted of marijuana use (a good and necessary thing), but it also calls for moving marijuana from the Schedule I drug list, which includes cocaine and heroin, to the Schedule II list, which treats it like penicillin and your asthma inhaler.

The offered reason for the shift is that this would "allow the government to research" marijuana according to a senior Biden campaign official, "who briefed reporters on his plan."

The problem with this proposal is that it hands control of marijuana production and distribution to the same people who control the production and use of all other Schedule II drugs — the pharmaceutical industry.

What could go wrong? Vox writer Cliff Roberts explains:

Would making weed Schedule II—intended only for strictly controlled pharmaceutical drugs, and not recreational nor wellness products, the rubrics under which cannabis is often marketed and sold to Americans—make more sense? It might, but here's the catch: Drugs listed under Schedule II (which include cocaine and methamphetamine as well as prescription opiates like fentanyl) are available legally but only under strict Food and Drug Administration controls. That is, only with a doctor's prescription, only after a lengthy FDA-overseen approval process that can include years of clinical trials (and then sold only via a licensed pharmacy), and only for limited applications.

In other words, there are no Schedule II drugs grown, processed, and sold in the way cannabis is brought to market in the United States, either—so that label, too, is probably inadequate. More to the point, if strictly enforced to the letter, Biden's marijuana policy could rip cannabis away from its current producers and sellers and hand over control of commercial weed to corporate interests instead.

"If the federal government actually enforced the CSA [Controlled Substances Act] Schedule II [on cannabis in a Biden administration], then almost all current state-legal activities would be banned and could be shut down," said Jonathan Caulkins, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz College who has served as co-director of the nonpartisan RAND Corporation's Drug Policy Research Center.

Needless to say, "weed entrepreneurs are worried. Some seemed downright terrified."

Would a Joe Biden administration actually hand Big Pharma total control over the growth and distribution of marijuana? Would he actually give such a large and unpopular gift to corporate America?

Given his extensive record of giving large and unpopular gifts to corporate America, why should anyone think he wouldn't?
  

Pathology, Khashoggi, Capitalism & Climate Change

The sons and daughters of the uber-rich

by Gaius Publius

Capitalism is an economic system that encourages people to act from the most pathological individual motives and promises the best social outcome.

Noam Chomsky said that our current ideology is producing a nation, a world, of psychopaths. From an interview with Rob Kall:

R.K.: Okay, so you have written and I am going to quote you here,

“if you care about other people that’s now a very dangerous idea. If you care about other people you might try to organize or to undermine power and authority. That’s not going to happen if you care only about yourself. Maybe you can become rich, you don’t care whether other people’s kids can go to school or afford food to eat or things like that. In the United States that’s called libertarian for some wild reason. I mean it’s actually highly authoritarian but that doctrine is extremely important for power systems as a way of atomizing and undermining the public.”

Now, since we last spoke I have been doing a series of articles on psychopathy, psychopaths, sociopaths, and narcissists and it sure sounds like you’re describing them when you describe people who don’t care.

N.C.: Well there is a huge propaganda effort that we are all aware of to try to turn people into psychopaths who don’t care about anyone but themselves. That’s not new actually. They go back a hundred and fifty years, the early days of industrialization in the United States. Working people were bitterly condemning the industrial system that was being imposed, the way it was taking away their freedom, and one of the things they condemned is what they called the new spirit of the age– ‘Gain wealth forgetting all but self,’– Exactly what you’re describing. That’s a hundred and fifty years ago and ever since then there have been enormous efforts to drive these sociopathic attitudes into people’s heads. [emphasis added]

About this, Chris Hedges adds from his personal experience:

At the age of 10 I was sent as a scholarship student to a boarding school for the uber-rich in Massachusetts. I lived among the wealthiest Americans for the next eight years. I listened to their prejudices and saw their cloying sense of entitlement. They insisted they were privileged and wealthy because they were smarter and more talented. They had a sneering disdain for those ranked below them in material and social status, even the merely rich. Most of the uber-rich lacked the capacity for empathy and compassion. They formed elite cliques that hazed, bullied and taunted any nonconformist who defied or did not fit into their self-adulatory universe.

It was impossible to build a friendship with most of the sons of the uber-rich. Friendship for them was defined by “what’s in it for me?” They were surrounded from the moment they came out of the womb by people catering to their desires and needs. They were incapable of reaching out to others in distress—whatever petty whim or problem they had at the moment dominated their universe and took precedence over the suffering of others, even those within their own families. They knew only how to take. They could not give. They were deformed and deeply unhappy people in the grip of an unquenchable narcissism.

I would take statements like that last one literally. We're ruled by people "deformed and in the grip of an unquenchable narcissism." Note: This isn't just Trump he's talking about.

Corporations As Force-Extenders for the Pathology of the Rich

Hedges' observation certainly explains why executives at the Ford Motor Company would use a cost-benefit analysis to decide how much safety to put into the Ford Pinto, a car prone to explode from a simple rear-end collision. As one law student at Wake Forest University bloodlessly put it, "Should a risk/benefit analysis be used in situations where a defect in design or manufacturing could lead to death or seriously bodily harm, such as in the Ford Pinto situation?"

That cost-benefit analysis goes like this: Which is more expensive, to settle lawsuits resulting from death claims, or to upgrade the product so fewer people are killed? Human executives at Ford weighed the options and chose to settle the death claims instead.

See what I mean? Psychopaths.

Hedges generalizes the situation this way: "It is essential to understand the pathologies of the uber-rich. They have seized total political power." He goes on to characterize rule by the super-rich as observed by such varied writers as Aristotle, Sheldon Wolin and C. Wright Mills. "Once the uber-rich take over, Aristotle writes, the only options are tyranny and revolution. They do not know how to nurture or build. They know only how to feed their bottomless greed."

Keep "tyranny or revolution" in mind; we'll come back to it.

In today's world the wealth-producing engine of the super-rich is corporate capitalism. As I wrote some years ago, big corporations loot the wealth of the world so their true owners, the CEO class, can loot their corporations and buy anything else on earth they want or need. When only the rich have money, the whole of the rest of the world is always for sale.

Now that the super-rich have bought the U.S. political system, the last piece, their last lock on power, is in place. Tyranny or rebellion: if the political system can't be recaptured in an orderly, electoral way, nothing but withdrawal of the "consent of the governed" can change course we're on.

The Ubiquity of Assassination

Which leaves us where? Not in a good place. For another example of rule by psychopaths, consider the Khashoggi murder, but from a different perspective:

Tech executives withdrew in scores from a high-profile Saudi investment summit amid the uproar over the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi — but top Silicon Valley companies show no signs they plan to unwind their lucrative business ties with the country.

The oil-rich kingdom, with its long history of human rights violations, is the single largest funding source for U.S. startups — and a financial pipeline for companies like Uber, Twitter and Tesla.

It's not just the Trumps of the world that live by death. Our liberal gods as well are steeped in blood (including the blood of cheered-on, murderous intent). The pathological desire to murder to gain wealth, to kill to retain power, is everywhere we look. To quote an old commercial, we're soaking in it.

The Pathology of the Climate "Debate"

Which brings us round at last to the climate catastrophe we're about to face, the single greatest world-historical issue in the world. As Dave Roberts pointed out here, climate change mitigation and climate change adaptation are not the same, either morally or in their results.

Mitigation is a collective and widespread effort by a society to lessen climate damage by collectively addressing the causes. Where will the money come from? The society as a whole.

Adaptation, on the other hand, is intensely local: What one town or state will need to adapt to climate disasters will be different, and differently expensive, than what another town or state will need. Where will the money come from? That too will be local.

A program of mitigation is collective and deeply moral; also deeply effective, to the extent that good choices are made, since the force of the tsunami itself, as it were, is lessened. A program of adaptation-only, however, is a program of abandonment, a program of "each to his own and look out below." 

Needless to say, we're on the path of adaptation only, of not really acting until disaster is at the door, and have been for decades. And when the moment occurs when the waters do rise, the super-rich will only protect themselves, the poor being left to fend as best they can. "Who gives a crap about some imbecile?" said the CEO of Home Depot about anyone not like him. You can see this attitude as well in the discussions they have amongst only themselves.

Rule by psychopaths takes us to this place. So long as we're frozen to inaction on our twin disasters, climate and wealth, this is what waits for us. We're ruled by these people until we choose not to be, or events overtake us all.

Exxon On the IPCC Report

But let's not close on that somber note. Let's close instead with a humorous quote, with Exxon's response to the latest IPCC report:

ExxonMobil CEO Depressed After Realizing Earth Could End Before They Finish Extracting All The Oil

..."Just think, one day soon, we’ll all be gone and that oil will still be there in the Earth, never to be removed, [said CEO Darren Woods]. It’s a travesty.” At press time, Woods announced ExxonMobil’s plans to quadruple its oil production in an effort to extract it all from the Earth while there was still time.

Ok, that was the Onion, but they're never really wrong, are they?

GP
 

2017 In Review: A Hell Bound Train Of A Year (Part 5)

-by Noah

When it comes to what people want, I’ve always said that American corporations are just like our Congress; they are the last to know. I started thinking that back during the gas shortages of the 1970s. People wanted smaller, more gas-efficient cars, yet Detroit kept building gas-guzzling cars the size of aircraft carriers. By 1980 or so, with lowering sales dawning on them, Detroit started to notice that Americans might, just might, prefer Japanese cars, even if the suits in the corner offices couldn’t quite figure out why. Along the way, GM and the other major car manufacturers managed to not only get rid of their customers but to fire their few executives that had dared to point out the obvious. Detroit has never recovered. "What’s good for GM is good for the U.S.A.” became “As GM goes, so goes the country."

In late 1976, I began working at what was arguably the biggest and coolest record store anywhere. I measure that on the volume of records sold and the taste of the store’s very knowledgeable customers, regardless of the genres they purchased. The store was part of a larger department store. The store sat in Harvard Square, smack dab in the middle of the highest density college student population in the country. One year later, I was the rock and pop buyer for the main store and its two smaller outlets, one on the campus of M.I.T. and one in Boston itself.

Not long after that promotion, the brilliant and perceptive man who ran the day to day operation of the stores was forced out. Some said he was too old.

The new man was a very corporate type who came from a corporate chain store background. As serendipity would have it, the first night he walked into the record store, I was on duty. He looked around, not at all thoroughly, and asked to speak to the person in charge. “You’re lookin’ at him,” I said. I already knew who he was. You could smell him. Nice crisp, white shirt. Nice tie. I was there in my usual jeans, black t-shirt, and sneakers. You can forget that saying about “opposites attract.”

So, as he stood in what was the usual early evening maelstrom of teens and twenty-something students; he said, “I have one question: where’s the Perry Como section?” He was dead serious, as dead as his 80 IQ eyes.

This clown had an agenda. He just knew we didn’t have a Perry Como section. Ah, but we did! One of the many important things he didn’t know about the record store he was now overseer of was that we prided ourselves in having at least one copy of everything in print, whether it was rock, jazz, classical, country, or 30 years out of date pop. It was a big place. We were also the go-to place for lesbian singer songwriters, avant-garde artists of every stripe, the complete Folkways catalog, Charlie Manson’s one album, and even a group named Country Porn (strictly behind the counter).

With all that in mind, I walked this rolling duffus over to the Perry Come section. He didn’t know whether to be happy or disappointed. I managed to show him the price tags on the Perry Como albums. The store had not sold a Perry Como album in 11 years, but, we had ‘em. Ya never know!

My meeting with the new guy was not the beginning of a beautiful friendship. We each despised what the other stood for but, thanks to the customers, and my attitude, my side prevailed, for a while. Once I was gone, it didn’t take too long for him to destroy the record store, but I had a life to live, as did my fellow employees who all also left one by one as a once great place became stiff, stale and corporate.

What was once a trend-setter, and a major source of income for both the owners and every record label in existence was rendered culturally and financially meaningless. That’s the corporate mindset for you.

************

I wrote the above to provide context. It was my introduction to the corporate world. I went on to a reasonably meaningful and successful career in the music business. In that time, I worked for four corporations, none of which, when it came down to it, had any more vision or foresight than the Perry Como fan or General Motors did in the 1970s. In my career, I had a ton of contact with people who worked for other corporations in other businesses. In nearly every case, they all had stories to tell that amounted to this basic truth: All corporations are fucked. They’re just fucked differently. The differences, however, are all just permutations of the same things; things like shortsightedness, a distrust of innovation or the new, insecurity, a CYA mentality, arrogance, and, sometimes, drug-induced paranoia.

I also learned that the problems don’t just lie with American corporations. After all, in this day and age, most corporations have, to greater or lesser extent gone multi-national. In my time, in no particular order, I worked for a corporation that started out as American (with alleged deep mob connections) and became, briefly Japanese, briefly Canadian, and finally French. Two other corporations were English controlled. The remaining one started out as American but ended up being owned by a Japanese corporation being run by the Brits, after a temporary partnership with some Germans. I have feelings about all four. Some of those feelings are even good, but, like I said, they’re all fucked, basically by choice, too.

Let me just say about the last one that if, in 1941, the Japanese had hired the British to plan Pearl Harbor, the Pacific War would never have happened. You see, the way I see it, based on my personal experience, the bombers would have taken off from the Japanese aircraft carriers in the wrong direction, ended up flying around in circles and spiraling into the sea, lost and out of gas, before ever reaching Pearl Harbor. Yeah, I know, that outlines one of those silly alternate history scenarios. But, here’s the punch line. What causes wars? Corporate greed and corporate arrogance. The belief that everything you do is genius. The shear lunacy and lust for money and power. People just don’t matter. More often than not, corporations are like that scene in the great movie The Hospital, where the doctor, played by George C. Scott, says of a patient, “Let’s get him out of here before we kill him!” He also, at one point, asks the chief of all the nurses if she trains her nurses at Dachau, such is their incompetence.

Enter United Airlines. They win the prize for corporate lunacy and arrogance in 2017. On April 9th, at Chicago’s O’Hara Airport, United Airlines decided that a ticket, a paid for ticket, to board an airplane and fly the friendly skies, is not a ticket. United claimed that the flight was oversold but they had seated the passenger on the plane. Oversold? Who’s fault was that? It even turned out that United wasn’t really oversold. They just wanted the passenger’s paid for seat for a free flight for, you guessed it, a corporate employee. In fact, United wanted four seats for four employees. Three passengers were not in a hurry to get where they wanted to go, so, they gave up their seats and accepted a voucher. But, the fourth one was in a hurry. How dare he be.

So, what would any airline do? They called the police and had the randomly selected passenger knocked around, bloodied, and removed. No one goes against the corporation! No. One! People don’t matter. It’s all very Ayn Rand/Paul Ryan-esq.

Horrified passengers filmed United’s idea of darkly novel on-board entertainment and the videos went viral. The public, how dare they, was outraged. In a Class A example of corporate arrogance the next morning United still didn’t get it. “Why is everybody so upset?” They reacted to the negative news coverage by trotting out United Airlines CEO Oscar Munoz, a bozo-matic assclown if there ever was one, who, taking a page from the Donald Trump-Sarah Huckabee Sanders school of utter bullshit, tried to justify his company’s gross actions by commending the crew’s actions for “following established procedures” and referring to United’s brutal action as, get this, “re-accommodating the customers.” You know, sort of like we re-accommodate suspected terrorists to GITMO. Munoz even tried to portray his company as “the victim,” just like poor, abused Señor Trumpanzee is doing now.

This is the corporate mindset. It’s rife within our American society. “Re-accommodating.” Kind of like Congress just “re-accommodated” our tax obligations and now wants to “re-accommodate” Obamacare, “re-accommodate” our Social Security, and “re-accommodate” our Medicare. This corporate mindset goes all the way to the top, whether the top is the politicians or the corporate masters that own them. If they think you might vote against them, they’ll even “re-accommodate” your voting rights.

Just like Washington, the tone-deafness of United Airlines is so far beyond the pale that it breaks the bounds of sanity. No apology. Just justification. The Chicago police statement reeked of things we expect from a totalitarian state. Welcome to Trump’s Amerika. It’s not surprising that people like Trump and other Repugs want to do away with regulations and the Consumer Protection Agency; all the better to “re-accommodate you, my dear.”

At the time of the incident, I compiled a list of new advertising slogans for United; slogans that more accurately fit the company’s attitude towards it customers. Here they are

MY FAVORITE NEW UNITED AIRLINES MOTTOS:

1) United Airlines: We treat you like a King, Rodney King!
2) United Airlines: First Class, Business Class, No Class.
3) United Airlines: Board as a doctor. Leave as a patient.
4) United Airlines: We put the hospital in hospitality!
5) United Airlines: Red Eye and Black Eye flights Available!
6) United Airlines: Now offering window seat with concussion.
7) United Airlines: Neck pillow, or, neck brace with every ticket!

Suppose airlines now just open an emergency door and push you out on the tarmac, tossing your bags after you as the plane pulls away. It doesn’t take much to imagine that now. You’ll be assessed a bag removal charge by the way. The removal of you is free. It’ll be considered a perk by those who run United. You already don’t get food on most flights. You already have to pay extra for the privilege of having a reasonable amount of baggage. What’s next? “In accordance with our policy, passengers are now required to wear these electrodes. The Perma-Taze™ will enable an enjoyable fight for all of those back in the board room.” How about no more bathrooms on the plane? “All passengers will submit to catheterization. If it’s it’s good for astronauts, it’s good for you!”

To be fair, it isn’t just United. It could have been any airline. United just got caught. The passenger had been checked in, given a boarding pass, gone through the multiple layers of security, and seated. Only then, did United decide to attack its customer. Recently, I heard from an acquaintance that paid $200 to upgrade to first class on another airline. He was seated, and then was booted back to coach. When he asked for his $200, he was told he would have to apply for it. This was one week before Christmas. It’s just an airline’s special way of saying “Merry Christmas.”

Like I said, to corporations, people don’t matter. What United did was just a symptom of the corporate mind disease. Remember this the next time some asshole company like Duke Energy deliberately dumps poisonous coal ash into your local fishing stream, you can expect them to say “we are re-accommodating” the fish. Lead in your drinking water? Not a problem! “We are re-accommodating your kid’s learning abilities!” This is pure Trump-speak, 2017.

United CEO Oscar Munoz even won a “PR-Communicator of the year” award from PR Week, a publication that serves as a mouth piece for the corporate mind. The award came a month before Munoz’s corporation bloodied up their customer. Buy your ticket. Actual trip optional.

A week after the United Airlines incident, Adidas commemorated their sponsorship of The Boston Marathon by sending out an email to its email list that was headlined:

“Congrats, you survived The Boston Marathon."