For The Kids

<u>The Application of Guerilla Warfare in an Academic Setting</u>

It is ironic that Che Guevara’s most famous words, “Hasta la victoria siempre,” would be contrary to his ideas about guerilla warfare. While his cause was Communist economic and social equality his methods of achieving this were based in deception and strategic offense, rarely relying on unity except within the ideals. Guerilla warfare, a revamp of ancient warfare, has become the most modern concept of military tactic in the world and while its methods are taught primarily in a battlefront sense, much like Sun-Tsu’s Art of War, Guevara’s Guerilla Warfare is applicable in a variety of philosophies of conquest, specifically in the hostile political realm. Upon studying his philosophy, I realized that I had already engaged in my own guerilla warfare in my own life, and had been studying it myself for some time.

Ernesto Guevara de la Serna was born June 14, 1928, in Rosario, Argentina, and went on to lead many socialist revolutions with tactics based in guerilla warfare in Argentina, Bolivia, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and most notably, Cuba. To this day, he is one of the most noted revolutionaries of all time; ghetto gang bangers and college students alike can be seen sporting his profile in black and red on a t-shirt. After his successful campaign in Cuba in January of 1959 he published a brief manual called On Guerilla Warfare which he later updated when he published Guerilla Warfare: A Method in May of 1960. Che Guevara was killed leading a revolt in Bolivia October 8, 1967. The execution of Guevara by the Bolivian Army did little to stop Latin American socialist revolutions but did a lot to immortalize Che as a martyr; October 8 is designated “The Day of the Heroic Guerilla” by his supporters.

Guerilla warfare is a fairly simple concept to understand; it’s basically the “hit and run” strategy – the idea that over time a group of less number and supply can defeat a group of greater number and supply mainly utilizing attrition damage counting on victory via fatigue. While Che Guevara’s military experience was in the Central American jungles, he too started out a college student just like myself, and certainly utilized this strategy as I have depending on the environments that we have been placed in. To discuss guerilla warfare, it is best to explain what it is and how it works, and how it differs from other methods of warfare. This is all perfectly described in a quote by Major Harries-Clichy Peterson, USMC-R, from 1963:
“Civil war is a war between two groups of the same nation. Rebellion is open, organized resistance against previously established authority. Revolution is a successful rebellion. Revolt and insurrection are armed uprisings in which the outcome is quickly decided. Bandit warfare is armed fighting to support life by plunder. Partisan or orthodox guerilla warfare is armed fighting by light troops, detached or separately established from the regular army, whose operations they support principally by harassing a common enemy, usually without seizing or defending substantial land areas.”

The greatest difficulty in this age is that we are dealing with independent terrorist groups and not open organized revolutionary armies; the reality is that there are many kinds of terrorism, guerilla warfare being one of them. Any kind of assault designed to cause fear is terrorism, be it daily timed bombing raids or random suicide bombers. Guerilla warfare uses sabotage, though Che points out that “indiscriminate terrorism against groups of ordinary people is inefficient and can provoke massive retaliation,” which explains the state of the United States and the Arab Middle East in the last two decades. It is important to not attack the people that you are attempting to eventually save; without the support of at least some of the people, guerilla warfare is impossible – Che found this to be true in Bolivia, where his goals and attitudes were not accepted by enough of the people there, leading to his death. Guevara continues, saying “…terrorism to repay the cruelty of a key individual in the oppressor hierarchy is justifiable…many feel that once terrorism is used and the oppressor angered, sympathetic communication with the masses with be more difficult. That is true…it all comes down to calculated risk.” This is to say that acts designated to 1) disrupt normal life (industry, economy, infrastructure, supply/trade, power, communication, etc.) and/or 2) cause ordinary people to fear leaving their homes are either last resorts or tactics utilized when the guerilla force is large enough to not care how much of the population opposes it or not. It is important to attack targets in strategic sabotage and not random killing, though it may appear random to the population, thus further causing fear and terror and disrupting the entire system.

The population of whatever given system being attacked is vital as guerillas often have no ability to acquire lines of supply; ordinarily they are citizens of that system that are within the system. Without enough people to supply a revolt or rebellion, revolution is impossible. Industrial revolutions are ineffective in a modern sense; workers’ rebellions are just that – rebellions that go nowhere. The modern age is developing even beyond industry – in the age of microchip surveillance on every street corner, beginning with an urban assault is absurd. Inside an urban area, a group of fighters has nowhere to go, no way of supplying themselves, and is at an immediate disadvantage of being easily surrounded by the authority of whatever system is in place, not to mention all the access to the “normal life” discussed last paragraph. By beginning in the rural regions of a country it is possible to establish both a greater following in the population as well as have a greater effect on smaller numbers of authoritarian resistance as authority dwindles the farther it must go from its main supply (i.e. cities). A guerilla’s supply comes from the poor population in rural areas that desire revolution and will support it, as well as confiscated materials from regular troops (i.e. bandit warfare).

This is obviously a useful tactic for combat situations involving armies and troops and bullets, but that’s not what this paper is about. These tactics have a greater applicability than just a battlefield. My experiences in school politics have been based largely in the concepts of guerilla warfare both in my actions on the Senate floor as well as within the university community itself. My position has always been that of an elected senator, not one appointed by an organization, proving that I have the “local support” necessary to carry out and support my tactics. My most famous act of guerilla warfare was the publication The Society’s Source, an “underground newspaper” of sorts that ran a variety of stories either ignored or unknown to the campus. As the campus already had a newspaper, The Campus Chronicle, so The Source had its fair share of resistance. However, we had the basic rural support of upperclassmen living off-campus, which included myself, and at the same time maintained ties within the campus in dorms, apartments, and offices (both professors and administration) to ensure our distribution was possible.

Our situation parallels Guevara’s concept of the inability to wage war from within a system; had I lived on campus instead of just up the street, I would have been within their jurisdiction and could have lost a housing situation or been subject to rights violations by administrative officials that did not support The Source (e.g. resident assistants and directors). For us, the regular army was The Campus Chronicle, not a system itself but a tool of a system, a system we were not out to destroy or even change, merely expose. Our goal was not revolution but rather renaissance. We had the upper echelons of political support we needed but the popular support was weak because so many people attacked the publication itself, mainly because it offered ideas they didn’t usually think about and had no author or name, similar to a guerilla army; we were just like everyone else, presumably, and that scared a lot of people. I would walk around and hear people talking about what we wrote and then slowly get into the conversation to find out what these people thought about the movement without ever letting them know they were talking to one of the keystone figures of that movement; little did they realize that they had become part of that movement, supporting that movement and saying if they could write for it, they would.

“Absolute secrecy is crucial. The human material must be chosen with care.” Originally, this must always be the case. Until a presence is established it is important to let the message itself spread and not the contractors of that message, lest the message be somehow contaminated in the minds of the people. After we had established ourselves and felt that it was “safe,” we told a few people that it was us who wrote it, though to this day there are loves of The Source who have no idea who wrote it, and as it should be. The information existed to enlighten and empower, not alter or pervert or corrupt, though some people certainly felt that way about it.

Helping the people grow is a big part of guerilla warfare, one The Source had as a #1 priority. Things can happen and sacrifices can be made, but if no one knows they happened, they do not matter. “Carry the campaign to the soldiers, the rural population, the workers; tell them the goals of the revolution, explain why they fought, why their comrades died. Educate them; wipe out illiteracy. Forge the new army into a highly skilled force with a solid ideology and great combat power.” The Cuban revolution, in the beginning, was twelve guerillas and Fidel Castro.

“Supply is the greatest problem of the guerilla. In early stages of fighting, guerillas must share the product of the land with the local population, for conditions will not permit the establishment of regular supply lines…it will not present too difficult of a problem, since natives everywhere have some basic sustenance products…” The supply for The Source was meek to say the least; it started with a staff of two and ended with about fifty to a hundred volunteers and well over 300 supporters. The ideas always came from the campus, from the people, because they were the focus of it all; while few actually wrote for the publication itself, many offered feedback and virtually all our ideas came from outside sources. The Source was called such for that reason – The Society is just a collection of people, of sources, and together those sources became one source and collectively spread the knowledge, just like a Guevara revolution.

The most famous guerilla tactic, called the “minuet,” is an easily executed maneuver that is difficult to defend against. The theory is that one surrounds a group of troops marching, say in two columns of 14 men each; the surrounding members include four groups of four men. Obviously, there is no way for a group of 16 to overtake a group of 28, especially if it’s militia against regular troops. The guerillas take positions at both flanks as well as the front and rear. The right group attacks the right flank of the troops, drawing fire and a few troops their direction, after which they flee but maintain visual contact to give the illusion that they are actually there for a fight. Then the left flank gets hit, which will hopefully take a few more soldiers in that direction towards the guerillas utilizing the same tactic. Assuming there have been no casualties (highly unlikely), the enemy will be spread thinner; maybe now it’s 8 to 20 – still not good odds. The rear hits and retreats followed by the front. The goal is not necessarily to cause major damage but massive attrition. This is to say that when a group of 28 is divided into five different groups, each group is easier to attack in conventional warfare, which may be what happens when the troops are led away from the main hub. A guerilla has a better chance against a regular soldier if the guerilla can find a favorable terrain to fight in, especially when that area is undesirable for the enemy. At the same time, what was once that main hub of 28 men has now decreased to about ten men as they have patrols out looking for who attacked them. Ideally, the guerilla would defeat the squads in four-on-four combat, being able to return and fight the main hub which is less than half what it once was while hopefully suffering minimal casualties yourself. But even if all that fails, the guerilla has achieved his goal of making the enemy tired, paranoid, and wasteful as they will start shooting at anything that moves.

The minuet was a crucial concept for The Source’s survival. On top of publishing essays and thoughts we began one of the craziest advertising campaigns I’ve ever seen. After we received some negative feedback not about our ideas but instead our tactics, like not publishing names of authors or not giving our sources of information, we began to hit back with signs. The signs themselves were nothing special – it had the logo on it along with a short message, normally nothing offensive, like “Smile” or “Don’t take things so seriously” “Is it so bad to have new ideas?” and “Can’t we all just get along?” And we thought ahead, we made them out of light grey cardstock that way it was easier on the eyes to read, wouldn’t blend into all the other white signs around, and would be a real pain to tear apart; we figured they could rip down our signs, but most likely they’d end up on the floor, since they were so hard to tear. What did we care? Our advertisement obviously affected someone enough to attack it and it still exists, lying on the floor, a symbol of martyrdom’s survival. We printed out over two hundred signs having twenty different design layouts; this is to say we had ten signs of each sign. They looked similar, but the messages were slightly different, and were kept off the “main areas” of poster posting. By varying the messages on the signs without changing the message itself, the signs quickly became campus collector’s items, as did copy of The Source itself.

We didn’t put our material on crowded bulletin boards, we’d put it in a hallway, way up in the corner so people had to strain to see it. We’d put copies of The Source under computer lab keyboards. Professors received precopy before anyone else. Each attack we made was in a different direction, and served many purposes. First, it made is near impossible to catch; we were too quick for most people. By the time anyone caught on to what we were doing, we were already done and onto the next thing, attacking and then retreating, then attacking again, until the opposition stopped opposing. Once the enemy realized they couldn’t walk ten feet without seeing a sign of ours nor be able to go into a classroom without hearing, “Did you read the new Source?” Even if they wanted to strike back, who would they strike back? A few knew that I was the leader, but there was nothing they could do to me because I was too far detached from their world. The heaviest support of The Source was on campus with them, no longer off campus with me; we had brought the fight to them and made it stick. Any damage they did would be damaging themselves.

Utilizing an enemy’s style is essential; in order to successfully attack and defeat an enemy, one must utilize the enemy’s tactics. In Vietnam, when militarily-trained guerillas began attacking regular U.S. troops, the troops had to adjust their Marine training to be more like guerillas – not just hunting: stalking. Che agrees, saying “arms should be the type used by the enemy.” The Society saw a hole in the system – a chink in the armor – and that small lesion was unnoticed by the whole and fully attackable by us, but only in the same style. To combat a newspaper one does not start a television program, one starts a publication; bring the fight to the enemy while still remaining in favorable conditions in the battlefield is fundamental.

Guevara recognized that “the propaganda effort should be well-organized and carried out by two staffs: one for the nation as a whole, the other for the guerilla forces. Both of these should be coordinated by one director.” After a short time of The Source being alive, we realized that “the news” wasn’t enough, and that the people wanted more. So we published Volume II, a springboard page with limited availability presumably for poetry, inside jokes, and recent catchphrases/ideas that were being kicked around but didn’t make it into an actual article of The Source. Volume II allowed us to convey more of our message without actually having to spell it all out for our audience; it was customized for our supporters, whereas The Source really existed for our opposition.

It was necessary to constantly monitor what people were talking about and saying around campus, and why. “You can expect the local residents to be a spontaneous source of information.” Sometimes I would hear someone ask a random question while walking around campus (a good question that I knew few people actually knew the answer to – like how the food service contracts actually work) and I would answer the question, sometimes in The Source, Volume II, or in a totally alternate publication. Some were pages long, like the food service information, and only existed in the hands of ten select people told to make sure the knowledge was somehow passed on. We found that one of the best ways to make a demand for something was to make a small quantity of it; the worst thing we ever did with The Source was distribute it in racks.

This method is similar to terrorism in that one uses the system that is in place to destroy the system in place; using what we knew about the school, its staff, and its students, we made a plan of attack that was tailored to at them and based solely within them. If someone outside the school read The Source they probably wouldn’t get it; this would have been similar to Che’s exploits in Bolivia, where he tried to give the same message he gave to other countries, but in a totally different country. Had The Source tried to extend itself to GTCC or UNCG it would have never worked, thus getting back to the idea of keeping a distance but also maintaining a presence. Some of our tactics were based in strict retaliation, just as in any warfare. When we discovered that someone had taken our bamboo distribution racks, we bought kitchen-style garbage cans, filled them up with rocks, and then put them in the exact same spots as where the older two were; totally unmovable, we printed on the inside of the lids, “These racks were paid for by professors,” a slap in the face to many. If you strike a guerilla, it will only make him want to hurt you more; he’s been getting stricken his whole existence – once one has a cause the damage one sustains no longer matters as much.

The idea of morale is crucial in warfare, and it is the guerilla’s job to exploit that concept at all times. By constantly chipping away at the whole of an enemy it is possible to eventually bring that enemy down. In boxing, people say “Stick and move” alluding to hitting one’s opponent with one or two punches and then moving away so that the opponent must give chase to attack. A missed punch causes greater fatigue than a blocked punch; even if guerilla troops are few in number and shooting smaller bullets in number and caliber, the regular military will use more firepower and not kill anything, which is extremely discouraging. Losing a few men from a battle is alright if the enemy was killed; getting punched in a boxing ring is alright as long as you’re able to hit the guy back. “Only high morale, strict discipline, and deep faith in ultimate victory will sustain the forces.” This is the heart of the guerilla – wear the enemy down by whatever means necessary because there is just no other way.

Che makes it explicitly clear that all avenues of politics must be exhausted before armed revolt can occur, otherwise the people will not support it. We tried getting our ideas in The Campus Chronicle to no avail, so when the opportunity arose to rise up, we did. By scooping the regular news and reporting on things they had no idea about, they could never keep up with us; in fact, it got to the point where their entire second page was all about The Source because we were the news and they had nothing better to talk about (which was why we were writing The Source in the first place).

Che stresses sabotage as “one of the invaluable weapons of guerilla warfare,” and I must admit that there was talk after our Source racks were taken/destroyed whether or not Chronicle racks should suffer for the damage. It was a hard decision, one that Che Guevara probably would have made the opposite of my own; knowing that whoever vandalized our rack was a supporter of The Campus Chronicle, could we in good conscience attack The Chronicle. The rules of guerilla warfare suggest the affirmative, as does most other conventional rules of warfare. However, as we had no direct proof that The Chronicle had any part of it, we did nothing to them directly; we instead made new racks that were impossible to ignore or injure, let alone destroy.

After not too long The Society grew to the point where The Source could never be stopped by any other newspaper or even by any group of students – it was too big and too loved by too many. The actuality is that things worked out about the same as in most revolutions; the rebels don’t really win, they just end up bringing about reforms. This year the Chronicle is much better and it’s harder to find things to talk about. We have also broken one of Che’s rules – becoming too disconnected from the people, The Society. This year we published a pathetic two issues, though still asked by many “When is the next Source coming out” that have turned into “What ever happened to The Source?” These people never really understood what it was all about. What they read wasn’t The Source; it was The Society’s Source: the people made it what it was. Too quickly it went from a collaboration of ideas to “Joe Fritz’s and Sam Closic’s Rant Page,” which was never what we wanted – we would rather have seen it dead. So we took another look around and saw that we had made a difference and had exposed a Society that anyone could be a part of if they opened their minds. Our goals were accomplished, so there was no more reason for us to fight; this is not to say we couldn’t talk about things that people ask us to talk about, we just don’t care about them or that anymore because our goals were accomplished. Too often this is what happens in revolution, starting by claiming it wants to help all people when in reality it’s just like every other political organization – it just wants to help itself.

Once a band of guerillas make a large enough impact on a society, they change it, thus accomplishing their goals. Sometimes there is no decimating victory as Che Guevara might like there to be; sometimes the people prefer compromise. There are still those who say they want more of The Source, and it may well return, I don’t know. Our revolution was one of desire, not necessity; we were not being oppressed, we actually saw others were oppressed and didn’t even realize it or, if they did, never did anything about it. We existed to show people they could do something. “People with such notable devotion and firmness must have an idea that sustains them in the adverse conditions that we have described. This ideal is simple, without great pretensions, and in general does not go very far.”

According to the ideals of a free society, that which is done by the individual that does not harm others is legal. At the same time, when an individual does something that does harm another, it is considered illegal. If a government attempts to hinder what an individual does without showing how it causes harm to others, there must be a change made in the law. Our government is based in this concept, and yet it has great difficulty holding up to it sometimes.

Marijuana was originally made illegal in 1937, along with most other illegal drugs, when the FDA was created and the first drug laws were passed. Interestingly, marijuana was not seen by most people as a drug because they knew it by the name “cannabis,” which refers to the whole plant and not only the leaf that is smoked. In the mid-1930s, hemp cannabis was the second-largest textile industry in America next to cotton, with cotton products slowly declining as better quality hemp products were produced. Half of the imported fabrics contained cannabis hemp that was made illegal after marijuana was scheduled (as “smokable marijuana” must have at least 1% THC, but this was not discovered until the 1970s – most hemp has far less than 1%, but this did not stop the government from destroying countless hemp crops and imports). This, coupled with the knowledge that marijuana was an intoxicating substance, led the government to make it illegal. It is referred to as a “Schedule I” drug, meaning is has no medicinal value, being in the same category as opiates, cocaine, LSD, etc.

After it was made illegal, the cotton industry boomed, and the government began was is known as the “Reefer Madness” campaigns, based on a propaganda film of the same title, similar to current anti-drug advertisements by the government. The ads depicted youth smoking marijuana and behaving in “bad” ways; the argument was that marijuana led one first to immorality and then to criminality. As it happened, after the Marijuana Tax Act was passed in 1937, so few people knew that marijuana was also hemp that Popular Mechanics published an article in 1938 claiming that cannabis would save the American economy.1 “Nothing to fear except fear itself” being the slogan of the time, it is peculiar that so many people were so terrified by drugs, as if the government had somehow deflected the problem of the Depression and following recession and subtlety attributed the pains of society to substance abuse, which is amazing since, eighteen years earlier, the outlawing of an intoxicant helped to bring about said Depression.

Alcohol prohibition is a great way of viewing American freedom. At the time of the depression, it was legal to ingest anything into one’s body, despite the outcome. Americans made and sold every drug that was available at the time, including many that are illegal today. In 1919, there was enough public outcry to make a Constitutional Amendment banning alcohol, mainly from religious groups and feminists who saw alcohol as the greatest scourge in America. How it was passed is beyond me, since what followed obviously defeated any argument that could have been made by prohibitionist groups (other than alcohol causing lots of problems which it still did). Instead of husbands getting drunk and abusing people, then getting arrested for it, the same guys got just as drunk and abusive, only the money went into the black market instead of “good citizens” or the government. It took ten years for the government to realize that having poor quality drugs readily available was worse than quality drugs, and far less people killed people over bottles of booze when there wasn’t a law against it. Prohibition allowed citizens to be poisoned from bad cocktails and at the same time helped build organized crime in America. When one criminalizes things that aren’t crimes, one still creates real criminals.

As said, it is strange that Americans would be so apt to make drugs illegal, except for the obvious. At the time, less than 10% of the population used drugs that were found on the Federal list of illegal substances, so there was no real voting power against it; that coupled with alcohol being readily available for the first time in over a decade prompted most Americans to not care at all about making a bunch of things illegal that they don’t use. And, after it became illegal, use stayed about the same, just like with alcohol prohibition. The difference this time was that those that did not use drugs were suddenly made to fear them, especially marijuana, since it was the most readily available, America having fields of natural cannabis. The other change was with the Italian mafia, who had run the alcohol industry during prohibition, generally didn’t like drugs, despite the excessive profit involved. The availability of drugs stayed the same as it had before it was made illegal, but more people were afraid of it.

In the 1940s and 50s, white Americans began to do what they had done in the earlier part of the century. When immigrants came to America and took over a neighborhood, “old-blooded” Americans would settle in a new place. At the same time, those neighborhoods grew to having a predominant ethnic base, which continues today. White people kicked the Indians off their land, so it was only a matter of time until a group came to uproot the whites from where they were. In this case, it was minorities, specifically black and Hispanic people, which moved into the areas. As the Civil Rights Movement hadn’t happened yet, they were all still very oppressed and poorly represented, especially in the media. The hyperreality of the “dark-skinned urban male” set in and people started freaking out. Dark-skinned people took over the neighborhoods, which turned to ghettos, and white people moved to the suburbs where they could be safe from all the evil drugs.

The whole idea of drugs being “bad” is interesting. Drugs should certainly not be illegal, but really, when one really gets down to it, this has all been about morality since the beginning. Tobacco kills over 440,000 people each year, alcohol claims 50,000, and marijuana has yet to kill anyone in the history of documented literature. The Canadian Cancer Society states, “some [studies] estimate smoking 3 to 4 marijuana cigarettes per day is roughly equivalent to smoking 20 tobacco cigarettes.” While this statement is highly ambiguous as to the chemical makeup of marijuana, it does base marijuana in simpler terms. Marijuana, while having some carcinogenic chemicals, has far less than tobacco, making it’s long-term effects less than tobacco; however, marijuana is rarely smoked with a filter, unless smoked in a water pipe (however, it is speculated that by using a water pipe one filters tar as well as THC, ergo one must smoke more), and the smoke has a better ability to coat the lungs than a filtered cigarette . Unfortunately, the fact is that marijuana, medically, is no more harmful than many legal substances in the United States. The nicotine contained in a single cigarette when eaten can kill a baby. The nicotine contained in five cigarettes can kill a healthy adult. The caffeine in about a hundred cups of coffee, taken in pill form, is lethal. A liter of whisky in one night can kill an adult. A tube of sleeping pills can cause liver failure. Swallowing about fifty aspirin tablets will lead to unstoppable stomach bleeding that can be fatal. By comparison, an adult would have to smoke two pounds of marijuana to run a risk of a fatal overdose. So, it isn’t because marijuana causes medical risks, despite the government saying it has no value, it has similar value to legal substances only without the detrimental affects, which I puzzling to say the least. The DEA claims that the reason marijuana is illegal is because things that are smoked have no accepted medical value, therefore a drug called Marinol was invented.

In 1976, the government stopped all research of marijuana except for one group, which was given millions to concentrate the active ingredient in a worthless plant and market it as a pill. Dronabinol is synthetic THC, and is a Schedule III drug, meaning it is a controlled pharmacological substance, similar to general painkillers or antibiotics .. Solvay pharmaceuticals, the group that was funded to make the pill, is the only company that markets dronabinol in America, with no generic alternatives that are available in countries that have decriminalized marijuana. Cannabis, the plant that holds the THC, has no value, and yet the THC itself does when it is not within the plant. What is most interesting is the side-effects of Marinol, having a history of not working or only working for a short amount of time. Some doctors speculate that the appetite-stimulant/pain reliever that dronabinol is used for is ineffective because a user needs the other 400 chemicals also found within the plant for the THC to work properly. Some that have tried Marinol have become paralyzed based on usage, but the death counts remains at zero, even with the concentrated versions of THC being available.

Now is where marijuana myths are laid down, and there are a lot of them. The actual effects of marijuana are varied but closely-knit. For example, some will smoke weed and it will relieve nausea, and others will vomit from it. Some people relax and others get extremely tense. What must be understood about marijuana, not merely THC, is that it is a hallucinogen, meaning it changes one’s perceptions, sometimes dramatically. Full-on hallucinations can occur or absolutely nothing can happen; the drug itself is very dependant on the user as far as how it will affect the body (which explains dronabinol’s occasional ineffectiveness). The effects, regardless of what they are, usually last less than a few hours and rarely extend over four. For most users, cannabis causes a mood lift, release of tension, mild sedation, increase in appetite, and a greater sense of awareness. Negative effects are generally mild and wear off quickly, including coughing, fatigue, muscular tension, increase in respiration, increase in heart rate, and anxiety.

Now “The Number Myths,” which are aggravating. Research done in the field of marijuana is garbage, for the most part, especially considering the government outlawed virtually all of it in 1976. As we saw from the effects, it is difficult to buckle-down exactly what marijuana does; the isolation of the active ingredient into pill form has done little for the drugs medical explanation, since the plant has all the effects that the pill does. This is when rhetoric comes into play. For example, when asked if drugs should be illegal in America, 82% of the population says “yes.” But when asked if the War on Drugs is effective, 76% say “no.” The Partnership for a Drug Free America is the headliner of the modern rhetorical statistic. On the “Children’s Section” of their website, they show that less than 20% of high school students smoke weed frequently, a statistic designed to make the youth not feel pressured into using the drugs; then, in the “Adult’s Section,” they state that over 60% of high school seniors have smoked weed, a slightly different statistic with a much larger number attached in hopes that parents will be so worried about the problem that they will talk to their kids about using. According to government statistics, twenty million Americans smoke weed every day, and 100 million have tried it. Making all this easier to read, 5% of America smokes every day, and a quarter of the nation has tried it; 20% of high school seniors smoke every day, and almost three quarters of them have tried it.

This brings us into the next point, going back to an older point, about how readily available drugs are. The fact that drugs are illegal has, if anything, made more traffic for the substances, since some of it is confiscated. Heroin, a substance virtually no one advocates use of, is over sixty times as pure today as it was thirty years ago. Interestingly, people try to use the same argument in making marijuana seem dangerous – that the potency of cannabis has gone up since the 1960s. In order for cannabis to be considered marijuana, it must have at least 1% THC present in it. Hemp (the stuff that was competing against cotton), used in making clothes, paper, and such rarely gets above .1% High quality leaf can have up to 25% THC by volume. The laws of nature have not changed in the last fifty years, and the same holds true; capture of plants, however, has changed. Before 1978, the average THC content of confiscated marijuana was between .3% and .7%; after 1978, when the government realized it was seizing lots of legal plants, the numbers rose to the point that, in the early 1980s, as the “War on Drugs” got into full swing, marijuana looked extremely frightening at 5% THC, even though that is still considered low-quality weed.

Another “Reefer Madness” campaign was launched at the end of the 1970s (which grew into the Partnership for a Drug Free America in in an attempt to change the sway in public opinion about weed brought about by the 50s Beatniks and 60s hippies. In 1971, Richard Nixon said, “America’s public enemy number one, in the United States, is drug abuse.” Not the countless citizens getting shot in Vietnam, but the potheads running around our streets. The propaganda did its job well – “voodoo pharmacology,” as it is called, as never been to scare those interested in the drugs, but to make those who are weary of the drugs more afraid, both of the substance and the user. In 1971, Nixon led the first drug initiative, spending 350 million to eliminate the threat of drugs. With the creation of the Drug Enforcement Agency in 1973, that number went through the roof, resting today at about ten billion dollars a year. That means that the government spends $1,000 on every frequent user of marijuana on the streets of the United States, locking up 723,626 of them each year. Of that total of marijuana arrests, 641,108 charges are for simple possession, leaving 82,518 dealers, traffickers, and cultivators; at a little over $20,000 per year per inmate of any given prison, $12.8 billion of taxpayer’s money goes to jailing marijuana users.

The worst part about the laws is the variance. Federal Law regarding marijuana is fairly tight – possession of any amount is a year, and goes up as offenses increase. Dealing less than 50 kg (110 pounds) is five years in jail and a fine of $250,000, jail time and financial penalty going up significantly (up to $4 million) as the amount of weight increases. The law has mandatory minimum sentences for all convictions with conditional release for first time offenders. On top of these laws, they are also extremely strict about selling within school zones, arcades, parks, swimming pools, or to children in general. While possession laws vary from state to state, and this obviously being one of the problems involved in the dispute over marijuana laws, they all do have penalties for the possession, sale, and cultivation. While some of these laws are fairly rational (California lets possession of less than an ounce off with a $100 fine) others are much less (any amount less than two pounds in Rhode Island is a mandatory year in jail, and it gets much worse), which means that a standardization of law is needed. The reason for marijuana’s illegality is simple – while the synthetic THC is controlled by pharmaceutical companies (who, in turn, are controlled by the government), grown marijuana is controlled by private citizens; companies can be controlled much easier than individual people. This is a euphemistic way of saying the government likes those that are rich and would like to keep them rich; they also like the poor to stay exactly where they are. It is within this premise that marijuana law is what it is. However, state-by-state, laws differ slightly, especially where it counts – mandatory minimum sentences and conditional release programs for first time offenders.

Seventeen states support mandatory minimum sentences and thirty support conditional release for first time offenders. Of the thirty that support conditional release for first time offenders, only eight also support mandatory minimum sentences, meaning a fifth of the country that have mandatory imprisonment do not parole if the infraction is a first conviction while almost half have disagreed with federal scheduling and have, at least somewhat, decriminalized marijuana.

The greatest irony of both the illegality of marijuana and all Schedule I drugs is the amount of usage since they because illegal. Virtually no one smoked marijuana before 1930, and most that did found it growing wild or grew it on their farm along with hemp. Since that time, the increase in users of drugs has gone up; since 1992, marijuana arrests alone have increased over 110%, from about 350,000 to 725,000. At the same time, usage is up amongst teens, not amongst habitual users, but amongst occasional smokers, which shows that marijuana is getting more and more mainstream acceptance. This also shows that people, especially our generation, is listening to less of what the government says and more of what actual facts say. People know that marijuana doesn’t lead to heroin any more than tobacco leads to cocaine, unless one looks at exposure, in which case keeping marijuana illegal merely forces ordinarily good citizens to seek drugs in places where other drugs are, exposing them to worse things. No one goes into a doctor’s office for Attention Deficit Disorder and walks out with a prescription for Oxycontin; if all controlled substances were simply on the same list, regulated the same way, then all kinds of problems would stop.

The final fact that brings it all together is simple. In nine states, medical marijuana is legal – which is to say almost a fifth of the country has recognized that the cannabis plant has medicinal value. This puts it in a category with virtually every other drug that is illegal in the United States – doctors are trusted by the federal government to handle opiates (morphine and heroin, as well as the synthetic codeine), amphetamines, tranquilizers (ketamine, xanyx, valium), and cocaine (as well as its synthetic derivatives, Novocain and Procaine), but they still don’t trust them with marijuana. In 1978, the year Marinol was invented, the U.S. government began a program to supply its citizens with medical marijuana. Not the new pills they wanted so much, since the cannabis plant had no medicinal value but the pills did, but actual plant material grown by the government to be smoked as medicine. At its peak, the government supplied thirty people with over a pound each, every week, until the day they die, based on a federal prescription that will never expire. Each of the seven people left today would die if not for smoking marijuana – the pills do not work for them, just like many other people. In 1992, George Bush ended funding for the program, stopping any new federal prescriptions from being issued.

Our society doesn’t make laws based on what people can do to themselves, we make them based on what they can’t do to others. American crimes include things like sexual assault, burglary, fraud, arson, assault and battery, holding illegal weapons, counterfeiting, homicide, sabotage; these are crimes that actually hurt the government and its people. No one arrests a homeless person for being homeless, and no one arrests people for being intoxicated (unless they’re causing harm on others). Drugs do not inherently harm – used properly, all drugs have a purpose that can be utilized by our culture, medically or recreationally. The problem is that more people do drugs now than ever, but there is a record low crime rate for violent crime.
We have to stop treating drug users as criminals, because we are all users of drugs. We have to start reorganizing our drug policy and put all drugs, grown or stamped, under the same guidelines. The government and society will only gain from it – take the $10 billion given to the DEA each year and give an extra two million to each state to put into their justice system to prosecute more of the crimes that we’re worried about, like those in the previous paragraph. Americans fear criminals, and even when a person is not a criminal, his/her association with criminal elements leads people to that conclusion of fear. The irony is that some get so afraid that they go to their doctors and get prescribed something for it, wearing an American flag on their lapel in an effort to save the country.








Works Consulted

Eastman, Peggy. New, Improved Medical Marijuana Drug Readied For Testing. Oncology Times, Volume XX No. 5 p. 75, May 1998.

Gasnier, Louis J. Reefer Madness. Fox Home Entertainment, 1936.

Gieringer, Date. Marijuana Smoke Study Demonstrates Waterpipes To Be Ineffective. National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Law official statement, October 26,1995.

Mann, Ron. Grass. Public Media, Inc., 1999.

Marijuana Arrests For Year 2001 Second Highest Ever Despite Feds' War On Terror, FBI Report Reveals. NORML Magazine, October 28, 2002.

Marijuana Law Reference Guide. www.norml.org

New Billion-Dollar Crop. Popular Mechanics. February, 1938.

Turner, John, Ph. D. Lecture notes, October 3, 2000.

US Code Collection, Title 18 – Crimes. Cornell University Website. http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/

I have never claimed myself a journalist – I write what I write to entertain, not inform – the fact that my material has educational value is insignificant to my desire to simply write what I think and feel. Recently, however, I was watching Bill Maher on CNN, who mentioned something about how the leading contributors to the Partnership for a Drug Free America had their own agendas. I went to their official website and found a list of their corporate sponsors, and was so repulsed by my findings that I am compelled to inform you of them.

The PDFA has fifty-two corporate partners – fifty-two companies that contribute money to free America of drugs. Of these fifty-two businesses, there are only six common fields, one of which being philanthropy. I believe the final five are linked very closely, and I hope to explain why a little bit better later. These industries are automotive, investing firms, business consultant firms, medical suppliers/manufacturers, and pharmaceutical companies. Two of the automotive businesses were GM and GE, which also made up two of the medical suppliers/manufacturers. I had a rather difficult time understanding exactly why business consultant and investment firms had a common interest in drugs until one realizes why the firms exist – money. A significant amount of stock held by Merrill Lynch or Morgan Stanley Dean Witter is medical, more specifically pharmaceutical. Half of the businesses listed as the ten top holdings of the Fortune 500 as of August 31, 2003, donate money to the PDFA; two of them make drugs, two make medical equipment, one distributes oil, and one is an electronics developer.

What is peculiar is that Pfizer and Microsoft are at about the same growth rate, although Microsoft is obviously a bigger company, Microsoft doesn’t even pledge 10% of what Pfizer gives to the PDFA. In fact, the top seven non-philanthropic corporate partners are as follows: the Bristol-Myers Squibb, Consumer Healthcare Products Association, Eastman Kodak, Johnson &amp; Johnson, Pfizer, Proctor and Gamble, and the Schering-Plough Corporation. All except Eastman Kodak researches, manufacturers, and markets drugs. Kodak, while known best for cameras and film, is only slightly less well-known for their medical and dental supplies. After a slightly more extensive study of the PDFA’s corporate “Cool Book,” I found that about 30% of partners were pharmaceutical companies and another 8% were medical suppliers/manufacturers. This 40% of the Corporate Partnership donates over 75% of the money seen by the PDFA through corporate sponsorship, which begs the question, why?
I am sure if the partners could be here to write their answer it would look something like, “We, as multinational corporations, care deeply about the safety and wellbeing of the citizens of the United States. In an effort to show this care, as we know how bad drugs are for people, we are giving money to an organization to spread propaganda about illegal drugs in America.” It’s obvious why the drug companies are giving money to the PDFA – they wanted to buy the organization into their control – any time money is given from one party to another, something is bought by that party. After browsing through the PDFA’s website, where I found their corporate sponsorship in the first place, I happened upon a variety of rhetoric and propaganda that disturbed me; though manufactured drugs are seen as potential threats, they are brushed under the rug (or at least out shadowed) by the Big Bad Illegal Drug Problem. The Frequently Asked Question section featured fifty-three questions, ten dealing with marijuana, seven dealing with ecstasy, three with ketamine, two with cocaine, and only one dealing with manufactured drugs, in this case OxyContin. OxyContin is commonly called synthetic heroin and is recreationally abused throughout America; while it is meant to be eaten as a pill, it can be snorted or injected. And instead of giving a three paragraph answer like they did when listing marijuana’s negative effects, they simply mention that the effects of OxyContin are similar to that of other opiates and therefore the problems are usually the same as well.

So I have a hard time believing that fifteen drug companies, out of the kindness of their hearts, have decided to pledge lots of money so their business can be taken out by a seventeen-year-old non-profit organization. I have a much easier time believing drug companies use the PSFA to spread propaganda about “street drugs,” more recently marijuana. Apparently everyone agreed that the effects of marijuana were more important to stop than the effects of any other drug, or all drugs put together for that matter. Interestingly enough, PDFA does not list any positive aspects to any illegal street drugs, so I am forced to break it down for everyone. Use of cannabis may cause: mood lift, relaxation, pain relief, a greater appreciation of art, increased philosophical thinking, increased appetite, decrease in speed, tiredness, facial tension, reddened eyes, dry mouth, increased heart rate, dizziness, dependence, and/or memory problems. Based on the positive aspects of marijuana, one might ascertain that those with the most to gain in the elimination of cannabis would be those who compete against it. And, as it happens, McNeil Consumer Healthcare, Bristol-Meyers Squibb, Wyeth Consumer Healthcare, and Bayer all contribute between $25,000 and $49,999 each year to the PDFA; each is the manufacturer of Tylenol, Excedrin, Advil, and Aspirin, respectively. So what is the recent increase in advertisements or, as they would call them, public service announcements, due to?
According to the PDFA, there was a dramatic decline of marijuana use among teens in the 1980s followed by a slightly less dramatic incline in the 1990s. This isn’t a difficult statistic to believe if one believes that the PDFA effects drug usage, which they love to claim as often as possible. They claim that there has been a 71% increase in adolescent use of MDMA since 1999, which is outrageous in compared to the 12% increase in marijuana usage over the previous six years. The PFDA would have us believe that, by telling kids to not smoke weed, they stopped smoking weed; unfortunately, their ad campaigns for ecstasy were short-lived not because of the effectiveness of the advertisements, but because ecstasy died as a drug in the late 1990s, just before it blew up again in the millennium, which is where they get an outrageous figure like 71% from. Instead of mentioning how the rave scene dropped off and the amount of X available went down (perhaps one caused the other – I don’t know), they just make it look like nothing happened and now all-of-a-sudden there’s a problem. This is their game – The Propaganda Game – the one I play now to get you to agree with me instead of them.

Let’s be honest, ads or PSAs or whatever is only so effective on the masses – they hit a lot of snags with people like me and virtually anyone who has said, “That’s totally not real…” to the television after watching this dreck. I can remember about ten (maybe fifteen) years ago, the PDFA ran an ad that showed a father confronting his son with pot he found in his closet or something, and the kid breaks down and says he does it because he saw his father do it. Now we have an ad that depicts a group of severely stoned, and all-black, if I recall correctly, kill a little girl on training wheels as they burn out of a parking lot. While I’d like to mention the obvious racial stereotype here, I won’t, I’ll just mention that I have never seen anyone peel out of a drive-through window while so stoned they don’t have the reaction time to avoid the child on the bike. My all-time favorite, however, is the one that came out about a year ago, which I believe starts off with a girl getting tucked into bed by mommy and daddy. The girl soon gets up, dresses up like a whore, steals her father’s car, goes to a party, begins drinking alcohol, later smokes some pot, then passes gets raped at the party in the middle of the living room. Marijuana…harmless…….?

Thank God we are a smarter people than that, right? All propaganda aside, the PDFA probably did help to decrease the usage of ecstasy in the late 90s, but it was more thanks to connections getting put in jail and kids we know having near-death experiences while rolling that made people stop doing it. All modern anti-ecstasy ads do now is tell old horror stories of candyflipping for six weeks straight and then going into a coma they never woke up from. But at least that’s effective, to a point. You can only care us so much before we stop taking you seriously, let’s face it. This are the same people that brought is Reefer Madness, kids, we can’t trust them. You want to know why you can’t trust them? Here, back to my rhetorical ranting!

There are few rational explanations for pharmaceutical companies doing what they are doing with the PDFA, and those that I could come up with are as follows:
1. They’re actually looking out for our best interests. Drug companies not only want to destroy drugs in this country just as much as everyone else, but they’re willing to put up almost all the cash to do it, as well. It’s like having the Ku Klux Klan say they want to sponsor a Black Panther rally – you know from the start that someone is not telling the truth, here!
2. They fear that drugs will eventually become destroyed and their types of drugs will follow suit. This is easily stopped by becoming a major player in the organization that has the power to destroy you. Keep friends close and enemies closer and all that mumbo jumbo.
3. They’re in it for the cash. Let’s think…hmm…if I was the four leading pharmaceutical pain killer manufacturers, I would know full-well I don’t have the inability to destroy my competition in the legal world. The easiest thing to do is attack the drug (or drugs) used in the illegal world in the hopes that those that stop using the illegal drugs will be forced to use the pills they provide.

I don’t know which you believe, but I really like the third. Lots of people are probably still having trouble here, so I’ll try to really get down and dirty when it comes to the scum of pharmaceutical companies. First, let’s discuss my theory – I suggest that a select fifteen of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies have come together in support of a non-profit organization whose sole purpose is the elimination of drugs in America. The PDFA love to use the term “illegal drugs” as often as possible because of it’s obvious rhetorical benefit. When a person hears “illegal drugs,” they don’t think of Little Johnny buying two Ritalin on the schoolyard or their nurse mother sneaking “free samples of a new painkiller from the pharmaceutical rep,” they think of a guy with a gun and a kilo of cocaine. They think Tony Montana, because that’s the last bad guy they could ever really identify again. Now the drug dealers wear suits and have business cards, a house in the Hamptons, a big fat 401(k), perhaps.

Now here come the people who want to tell me it’s not the pharmaceutical companies’ faults that people abuse prescribed drugs not prescribed to them. Yet somehow we can blame Pablo Escobar and George Jung. Hey, OK, I’m going all propaganda on you again, let’s get real, here. The fact is, drug companies spend millions of dollars marketing their drugs not only to the general public but also to doctors themselves. About a year ago, I worked as a waiter for a business in Ohio called The Inn at Turner’s Mill. One night we had a party – forty doctors and forty doctors’ wives – hosted by a pharmaceutical company. It was about a four-hour dinner with an hour-long break in the middle to watch a slide-show on the wonders of some new drug that helped people with high blood pressure. The tab was about ten grand. What’s even more frightening is that it was obviously worth it, or they wouldn’t have done it; just to cover their meal each doctor was practically obligated to prescribe it to at least a few patients. What do they care – they’ll bank regardless? And, really, the consumer doesn’t care either because his HMO is covering his pills, at least right now. Nobody notices that the rates for insurance are slowing going up because of all the new research being done to upgrade super-drugs that we already have. Sorry, folks, we don’t need OxyContin, codeine works just fine – I say if you’re in so much pain you think you need pseudoheroin, you need to pass out.

I have a mother in the industry, people, I hear horror stories. "Pharm Reps," as my mom and other nurses called them, would often bring tickets to sporting events and concerts and nonchalantly mention that their drug just passed FDA trails and will be ready to go in a week. How can you tell me that the pharmaceutical companies aren’t guilty? I can accept that they aren’t guilty of everything people, or even myself, say about them, but they do have a lot of stuff that needs work. Face the facts, statistically speaking only 3% of males and 1% of females have ADD and/or ADHD (just trust me on that statistic, please, I promise it’s not rhetoric), and yet there are classrooms in America where every other child is on a pill, most likely manufactured by one of the fifteen groups that supports an organization that claims its main goal is to keep kids off drugs! They claim that if a child or teen doesn’t use drugs before they leave adolescence, their chances of doing drugs later in life decrease dramatically; they also call marijuana a gateway drug. They don’t say anything about the kids I knew who bought Ritalin in 4th grade and upgraded to coke in 9th. What about the fact that almost everyone I know has tried Xanyx and yet none of them are prescribed? Where are these hypocrites now? Hiding behind their rhetoric and propaganda.

Do I blame pharmaceutical companies for kids selling their prescribed Ritalin or people selling their prescribed Xanyx? No, of course not. I’m not even an advocate of drugs, I think drugs are bad, but I will admit to disliking the idea of anyone telling me what I can do with my body (I know the ladies out there feel me on that one). What I do is make some people accountable for things. All the people who think heroin is different from weed is different from Prozac is different from crystal meth is different from cocaine has a lot to learn about drugs. If the PDFA has taught us anything, it’s that drug addiction isn’t specific to one drug – addiction often changes forms into different substance abuses. If you’re going to say that caffeine is a gateway for nicotine which is a gateway for THC which is a gateway for LSD which is a gateway for PCP, or whatever route you wish to take, you must acknowledge the fact that street drugs and manufactured drugs are equally risky. We as a society can no longer sit by as we are told how to live our lives; we must fight back and be heard. It’s up to us, my generation, the new generation. If you’re not twenty-five yet, you’re with me and the rest of us down to about the age of five, deep in the war zone none of us can see.

The war zone is that of misdirection. Harry Houdini was really good at this, as are sports teams and politicians. Misdirection is the art of effectively making you look the opposite way of what you should be looking at without realizing what is going on. Misdirection in relation to drugs is very simple and be seen in this situation with the PDFA a few ways. First, the obvious desire is of the pharmaceutical companies to misdirect the public’s fear of drugs away from manufactured drugs and back into street drugs. By the way, if it wasn’t for our friends the pharmaceutical companies, we wouldn’t have MDMA, LSD, or heroin. Thanks again. Another game of misdirection is used by the PDFA itself within the ads – by making you fear for your life or the lives of others, they are attempting to remove your rationality about the situation. When the mind is exposed to trauma, in this case a little girl getting railed by a car, we look at the joint and think, “Oh no! Marijuana’s not harmless; it just killed that poor little girl! Oh no…what if I was that guy in the car…” Gee, let me think, if I was that guy in the car I wouldn’t have clouds of smoke billowing out of my car while ordering burgers. The only ad I’ve seen that actually scared me was the newest I’ve seen for marijuana in which a man’s younger brother tells of how his older brother lives in the basement and does nothing, as opposed to drop out of school or go to jail or whatever. They’re still going for the fear aspect, but at least the PDFA has wised up and made it something we can really fear though, once we as people use our rational minds, we can understand that the likelihood of any person getting so severely addicted to cannabis that they cease virtually all function is unlikely. By you reading this, your risk has decreased exponentially.

And that’s very good. If only one person could read this and get off heroin or OxyContin (though I have no idea why they would), or if someone actually goes, “Wow, those pharmaceutical companies really aren’t very nice people,” then I have done my job here, whatever it was. The job is now yours – to take what is here and decide what’s true on your own. Maybe I’m not entirely right, or what’s infinitely more possible, perhaps I’ve missed something here. Regardless, take what I have said and say it to others. Think. Organize. Don’t allow yourself to be misdirected, in whatever form, be it our culture or our anti-culture. Don’t just take what they feed you because it’s on a screen and is endorsed by the government, ExxonMobil, Microsoft, Pfizer, or Hallmark Greeting Cards. At the end of the day they want to do one thing, sell you, and they don’t care how they do it as long as the ink is black. Stay out of the red, my brothers and sisters, and return to the battlefield wiser.

Partnership for a Drug Free America Corporate Partners
$1,305,000+

Lead Support
Five philanthropic organizations
Betty Wold Johnson – Philanthropist and trustee of the Robert Wood Johnson, Jr. Charitable Trust; trustee, Planned Parenthood Association of the Mercer Area.
James E. and Didi Burke Foundation – No info
MetLife Foundation - supporting educational, health and civic and cultural organizations
Robert Wood Johnson Jr. Charitable Trust
The Starr Foundation – founded by insurance entrepreneur Cornelius Vander Starr – It makes grants in a number of areas, including education, medicine and healthcare, human needs, public policy, culture and the environment.

Chairman's Circle ($50,000 and over)
$350000+
Seven Partners: Five pharmaceutical companies, one medical supplier, and one overseer of OTC drugs
Bristol-Myers Squibb Foundation – R&amp;D pharmaceuticals - Excedrin
Consumer Healthcare Products Association – oversees distribution of OTC drugs
Eastman Kodak Company – R&amp;D medical/dental supplies
Johnson &amp; Johnson – R&amp;D pharmaceuticals
Pfizer Foundation, Inc. – R&amp;D pharmaceuticals
The Procter &amp; Gamble Fund – R&amp;D pharmaceuticals
Schering-Plough Corporation – R&amp;D pharmaceuticals

Gold Medallion ($25,000 to $49,999)
$650000max
Thirteen Partners: Eight pharmaceutical companies, three medical suppliers, one investment firm, one beverage company
Bayer Corporation – R&amp;D pharmaceuticals – Aspirin
Bristol-Myers Squibb Company – R&amp;D pharmaceuticals - Excedrin
The Coca-Cola Company – beverage company
The GE Fund – automobile manufacturer – “$8 billion global leader in diagnostic and interventional medical imaging, information and services technology.”
General Motors Foundation – automobile manufacturer – R&amp;D medical equipment
GlaxoSmithKline – R&amp;D pharmaceuticals – dabble in health care
H.J. Heinz Company Foundation – condiments
Kimberly-Clark Foundation Inc. – Kotex, Huggies, Kleenex – medical instrument R&amp;D, medical supplier
Major League Baseball Charity – everyone loves celebrity donors
McNeil Consumer Healthcare – R&amp;D pharmaceuticals - Tylenol
Merrill Lynch &amp; Company Foundation, Inc. – investment firm
Novartis Consumer Health, Inc. – R&amp;D pharmaceuticals - Lamasil
Perrigo Company – largest OTC manufacturer in America
Pharmacia Corp. – recently acquired by Pfizer
Wyeth Consumer Healthcare – R&amp;D pharmaceuticals – Advil, Robitussin

Silver Medallion ($15,000 to $24,999)
$125000max
Five Partners: One oil company, one engineering company, one trucking company, one parcel service, one office supplier
Bechtel Foundation – engineering firm
ExxonMobil Foundation – oil company
PACCAR Foundation – trucking company
The UPS Foundation – parcel service
Xerox Foundation – R&amp;D office supply

Bronze Medallion (5,000 to $14,999)
$105000max
Seven Partners: Two investment firms, one food distributor, one pharmaceutical company, one automobile manufacturer, one phone company, one newspaper
BellSouth Corporation – phone company
The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America – fourth largest mutual life insurance company in the United States
Hershey Foods Corporation – R&amp;D food
Hoffman-La Roche Inc. – R&amp;D pharmaceuticals – Rohypnol, Accutane
Morgan Stanley Dean Witter &amp; Co. – investment firm
Toyota Motor Manufacturing, Kentucky, Inc. – R&amp;D automobiles
Tribune New York Foundation – newspaper – gave about same $ to Arts Connection in NYC

PDFA Partner ($4,999 and below)
$75000max
Fifteen Partners: Three corporate consultants, one investment firm, one data processor, one newspaper, one construction equipment developer, one insurance company, one hygienic supplier, one communications agency, one card and flower distributor, one electronics developer, one university
Automatic Data Processing – data processors and financial advisors
The Buffalo News – Buffalo, NY newspaper
Caterpillar Foundation – R&amp;D heavy equipment
Chubb Foundation – within Chubb Corporation – see Mr. O’Hare c/o H.J. Heinz Co.
Colgate-Palmolive Company – R&amp;D hygienic supplies
Creative Teen Concepts Inc. – no info
Direct Impact LLC. – communications agency
GJF Construction Corp. – no info
Hallmark Corporate Foundation – cards and flowers
Marsh &amp; McLennan Companies, Inc. – corporate consultant
Microsoft – R&amp;D electronics
Ohio National Foundation – investment firm
Omnova Solutions Foundation – R&amp;D chemicals, decorative/building products
RoperASW LLC. – corporate consultant
The University of Pennsylvania – school – huge biomedical research department

Fifty-two Total Partners
Automobiles: 3 (with GM and GE)
Beverages: 1
Cards: 1
Communications: 1
Construction: 1
Consultants: 3
Data Processors:
Foods: 1
Electronics: 1
Engineering: 1
Hygienic: 1
Insurance: 1
Investment firms: 4
Medical Suppliers: 4
Newspapers: 1
Office Suppliers: 1
Oil: 1
Parcel Services: 1
Pharmaceuticals: 15
Philanthropy: 7 (with CTC, Inc.)
Phone Companies: 1
Trucking: 1
Universities: 1

great read shredder.

to me the truth has shown itself with time....it reminds me of when I went to my doctors to get my cannabis prescription,I told him about my carpal tunnel in my right arm and also added some bull about anxiety during stress,and imsomnia...well we know pot helps anxiety but the doctor right away started telling me he could prescribe xanax (which is why I said anxiety in the first place)or valiums etc...but prescribed lorazapam when I mentioned concern of addictive properties of pharmies.
now he could have just told me that cannabis would help my anxiety but he knew my game and was quick to prescribre something I would have to get at a pharmacy.it made me wonder how much he got every time he prescribed pharmies.

and I remember that commercial with the kids at the drive thru....funny as hell...it reminded me of the french fries I would get after school at "jimmies place"(the drive thru they filmed at).they have a big bag of seasoned salted fries for a couple of bucks....memories...and I know my friends ate some of them fries stoned as hell.

Great stuff! I have a tee shirt with him on it from Peru. He was a hero to many people in south america.
There are many legends about him etc.

I went and saw the motorcycle diaries the other day..hits on some pretty interesting topics...that changed how he percieved the world and his belief system that he took to the people...great work in South America.

Check out the movie too..

[Glasshopper]

This is a really great write up ~BUMP~