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Vol. 13 Issue 18…Dedicated to the Dialogue on
Race…May 2, 2010
Bit of History
William Roger Clemens
Born August 4, 1962 in 
mother
married Woody Booher, whom Clemens considered his father. Clemens lived in
Clemens pitched for San Jacinto
College North in 1981. Selected by the New York Mets in the 12th round of the
1981 draft, Clemens refused to sign, deciding instead to attend the University
of Texas, where his impressive pitching earned him the distinction of becoming
the first player to have his baseball uniform number retired at the University
of Texas. In 2004, the Rotary Smith Award, given to
In 1983, Clemens was drafted by
the Boston Red Sox. He made his major league pitching debut on May 15, 1984.
During the 1986 season, Clemens' 24 wins helped his team earn a World Series
berth and earned him the American League MVP and his first of seven Cy Young
Awards. On April 29, 1986, Clemens became the first pitcher in history to
strike out 20 batters in a nine-inning major league game.
From 1997- 1998, he played with
the Toronto Blue Jays, after signing a four-year, $40 million deal. He won the
Cy Young Award in both seasons with the Blue Jays.
Traded to the New York Yankees
before the 1999 season, Clemens helped the Yankees win the 1999 and 2000 World
Series. He won his sixth Cy Young Award in 2001.
Early in 2003, Clemens announced
his retirement, effective at the end of that season. However, Clemens signed
with the Houston Astros on January 12, 2004. He won his seventh Cy Young Award,
becoming the oldest player ever to win this award, at age 42. Clemens' 2005
season with the Astros ended as one of the finest he had ever posted with an
ERA of 1.87. When the Astros declined Clemens arbitration on December 7, 2005,
there was speculation of retirement. On May 31, 2006, it was announced that
Clemens would pitch for the Astros for the remainder of the 2006 season.
The following year Clemens played with the New York Yankees. After aggravating
a hamstring injury during post-season, he was removed from the team's lineup,
ending his major league pitching career.
A number of controversies tarnished the Rocket's reputation. His tendency to
throw close to batters earned him an all-time 9th ranking for hitting batters.
Other controversies included his outspoken comments, the special treatment he
received from the teams that signed him, adultery and accusations of steroid
use.
On the latter controversy, Clemens appeared on February 13, 2008 before a
Congressional committee and swore under oath that he did not take steroids. In
his book, Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant 'Roids, Smash Hits & How Baseball Got
Big, José Canseco alleges that Clemens had expert knowledge of steroids
and probably used them. Clemens' name was mentioned 82 times in the Mitchell
Report on steroid use in baseball. The House committee in front of which
Clemens appeared, cited seven inconsistencies in his testimony and recommended
that the Justice Department investigate whether he lied under oath about using
performance-enhancing drugs. The case is being investigated by the Federal
Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
Clemens is married and has four sons. (Sources: www.answers.com,
http://en.wikipedia.org and www.baseball-reference.com)
By John Burl Smith
The more things change, the more
they stay the same. This is the story across the
Today, dressed up as medication
for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), it was approved by the FDA
in 1996. Now a designer drug up-scale college students gobble down to stay
ahead of the Joneses, Adderall is like steroids for the brain. Students at
elite universities consider Adderall a miracle drug that solves all their study
problems. With no more time wasted on sleep, they can study all night, learn
more, faster and remember twice as well. The feelings of euphoria and
invincibility are the same as when hippies were turning on and dropping out
with LSD.
The major change today is that
academic success in college now includes a steady flow of analeptics
(Dextroamphetamine/Amphetamine). As many as 20% of students use Adderall to
study, write papers and take exams, claims the National Center on Addiction and
Substance Abuse at Columbia University. During interviews, students that
claimed Adderall as their drug of choice made clear the prevailing ethos was
that this was "a legitimate and even hip way to get through the rigors of
hectic academic demands and socializing."
Having already pulled several
all-nighters on a paper, a French test and an exam for her music humanities
class, Angela, a junior, while prepping for a Latin American literature final,
admitted downing a 30 mg. tablet of Adderall, "I don't think I could keep
a 3.9 GPA without this stuff." "The culture here encourages
stimulants use," said Barak Ben-Ezer.
The study found most students obtained their drugs from students with
prescriptions, who sold or gave away their excess pills, but no one is going to
jail. Libby, a writing major, who received a diagnosis of ADHD in first grade,
is a typical drug dealer. She sells her 10 mg. tablets to strangers for $5 or
barters with friends for meals. Hundreds of thousands of children who were
diagnosed with ADHD and attention deficit disorder (ADD) in the early 1990's
are now entering college and bringing their drugs with them.
The down side as Libby puts it, "It really messes with my head. In the
past the pill has intensified my obsessive-compulsive behavior." Sean, a
19-year-old motion picture major from
Robert, 21-year-old
Bryan Page,
Drugs that kill the most people
aren't heroin, cocaine or crystal methamphetamine the Florida Medical Examiners
Commission (2007) reported. "Fatality rates caused by legal, prescription
drugs were three times that of all illegal drugs combined." Reminiscent of
Edward Bernays slick advertising campaign which convinced women that when they
lit up a cigarette in public they were lighting "torches of freedom,"
students are being told taking performance enhancing drugs are a "safe
no-risk" means to get better grades. Like female smokers, who now are
among those with the highest lung cancer rates, students are making a false
choice to be geniuses today that may lead to addiction and a life and death
scenario tomorrow.
The Adderall Cost: Side Effects
John Burl Smith
Researchers at
Psychology professor Rick Hoyle at Duke said of the study, "We only
learned how students believe using ADHD medication affects them. How students
are actually affected -- whether it truly helps them do better academically or
whether it contributes to the use of other substances -- cannot be determined
from our results."
The Journal of Attention
Disorders online edition gauged students' responses to Adderall's adverse
reactions and 23.9% said "it 'always' reduced their appetite, while 15.6%
said the drugs 'always' made it difficult to sleep. More than 7% reported that
the drugs "always" made them irritable. Despite the side effects,
more than 70% believed that using ADHD medication without a prescription was
harmless.
Dr. Robert A. Winfield, director
of University Health Service at the
As in the case of most drug users, students only admit those things that
justify their behavior. Jack M. Gorman, M.D., professor of psychiatry at
Other side effects include mental or psychiatric problems such as new or worse
behavior and thought problems, new or worse bipolar illness, new or worse
aggressive behavior or hostility. In children and teens, Adderall is associated
with new psychotic symptoms such as hearing voices, believing things that are
not true, and suspicious or new manic symptoms.
On June 23, 2009 the Food and
Drug Administration (FDA) alerted medical professionals and patients regarding
the side effects of stimulant medications including Adderall on cardiovascular health.
The FDA cited preliminary data suggesting Adderall use increased the risk of
sudden deaths in children, slower growth, seizures, mainly in patients with a
history of seizures, eyesight changes or blurred vision, headaches, decreased
appetite, stomach pain, trouble sleeping, nervousness, weight loss, mood
changes, dry mouth, dizziness and rapid heart rate.
Adderall XR was pulled off the market in
The onset of amphetamine-induced
anxiety disorder can occur during amphetamine use or withdrawal, according to
Kaplan and Sadock's psychiatry text, Synopsis of Psychiatry, "Amphetamine,
as with cocaine, can induce symptoms similar to those seen in obsessive
disorder, panic disorder, and phobic disorders."
Schizophrenic-like states in children on prescribed doses of stimulant, such as
Adderall, have occurred, according to The Journal of the American Board of
Family Medicine. Moreover, regarding adults, the Synopsis of Psychiatry states,
"High doses and long-term amphetamines use are associated with erectile
disorder and other sexual dysfunctions."
A Schedule II controlled substance, Adderall has dependence, tolerance and
withdrawal issues. It is possible to build up a tolerance to amphetamines,
which means the user needs larger doses to achieve the same effect. Over time,
the body might come to depend on amphetamines and will crave the drug to
function normally. Users' psychological dependence can make them panic if
access is denied, even temporarily.
Withdrawal symptoms can include tiredness, panic attacks, crankiness, extreme
hunger, depression and nightmares. Some people experience a pattern of
"binge crash" characterized by using continuously for several days
without sleep, followed by a period of heavy sleeping. Abrupt cessation of
Adderall and Adderall XR can cause extreme fatigue and severe, even suicidal,
depression in adult patients.
News You
Use
What Parents Need to Know About Adderall
As many as one-in-four college
students misuse ADHD medications according to a nationwide survey reported in
the journal, Addiction. The Partnership for a Drug-Free America found that
one-in-ten kids of middle and high school age use psychiatric drugs such as
Adderall or Ritalin without a prescription. According to MSNBC, alarming
numbers of parents blame ADD for a child's poor performance in school. Parents
visit doctors demanding these drugs for their children, hoping to improve their
children's report cards. The New York Times reports that the prevailing
mind-set regarding Adderall, the drug of choice these days among college
students, is that they are unconcerned about intellectual ethical questions.
A 2007 study reported by www.buzzle.com on misuse and abuse of medication
prescribed for ADHD with nearly 11,000 4th year students from colleges all over
the
Stimulant use for non-medical
purposes is associated with the use of other substances. Such comparisons of
users to non-users are eye opening: cigarette users 67% vs. 24%, frequent binge
drinkers 69% vs. 21%, ecstasy users 19% vs. 1%, cocaine users 17% vs. 1%,
driving after binge drinking 35% vs. 9% and passenger with a drunk driver 66%
vs. 21%. The number one reason for using stimulants according to respondents
was to enhance academic performance.
What about students that do not
have ADD, but have what they feel are some of the same symptoms, especially
attention difficulties? Interestingly enough, many who used stimulants to control
attention deficit disorders reported having increased problems with attention!
Extreme psychological dependence and severe social disability have resulted.
Findings reported here are
important to parents who are anxious about their children getting involved in
stimulant abuse. Here are a few symptoms that parents need to look for.
Symptoms of overdose or excessive use requiring immediate medical assistance
including: Is your child under a lot of academic pressure either to get in
college or to excel? Obsessed with getting into a school or once in, does your
child worry constantly about keeping up and doing well? Check grades! Is he or
she overly stressed and yet their grades are not reflective of his/her efforts?
Has you child lost weight, is irritable and complain of having no appetite? Is
this normal? Finally, does your child seem depressed, complain about attention
problems or abuse other substances?
While the answers to these questions may not be a sure sign that your child is
engaging in non-medical use of stimulants, pay attention to the answers anyway.
You will definitely learn something about what your child is experiencing!
The Emerald Triangle
Where the
According to DEA Special Agent
Javier Pena, who oversaw the region from 2004-2008, "Pot is the money
maker. It's hard to get the young kids to work at fast-food places because
they're out tending these marijuana groves. They're cutting the plants. They're
seeding. They're trimming the buds. They're driving around $40,000, $50,000
vehicles--and it's all because they're helping these marijuana growing
operations."
Nationwide, growing, possessing
and distributing marijuana is illegal, but you would not know it in the Emerald
Triangle, where the cash crop pays handsomely and finances a lifestyle that has
defied the current economic recession. This is rural country with no visible
manufacturing base to support its lavish lifestyle, complete with expensive
cars and trucks, bustling restaurants, escalating rents and plenty of cash.
Evidently, the Emerald Triangle's
marijuana operations are allowed to flourish with the consent of law
enforcement officials. Speaking openly on television about the Triangle's
lucrative marijuana business, no one seems overly concerned about getting
arrested and being carted off to prison to serve long sentences, like the half
a million former urban dwellers currently languishing in prison. In fact, the
region's residents appear more concerned about the possibility of the state
legalizing marijuana than getting busted.
Legalizing marijuana will
increase supply, driving prices down. Since the plant is fairly easy to grow,
individuals could grow their personal supply, eliminating the need for an
industrial grower. The notion threatens the livelihood of residents of the
Emerald Triangle.
The voter initiative to legalize
marijuana in
New Jim Crow: War on Drugs' Permanent Undercaste
By Michelle Alexander
Ever since Barack Obama lifted
his right hand and took his oath of office, pledging to serve the
Obama's mere presence in the Oval
Office is offered as proof that "the land of the free" has finally
made good on its promise of equality. There's an implicit yet undeniable
message embedded in his appearance on the world stage: this is what freedom
looks like; this is what democracy can do for you. If you are poor,
marginalized, or relegated to an inferior caste, there is hope for you. Trust
us. Trust our rules, laws, customs, and wars. You, too, can get to the Promised
Land.
Perhaps greater lies have been
told in the past century, but they can be counted on one hand. Racial caste is
alive and well in
Most people don't like it when I say this. It makes them angry. In the
"era of color-blindness" there's a nearly fanatical desire to cling
to the myth that we as a nation have "moved beyond" race. Here are a
few facts that run counter to that triumphant racial narrative:
*There are more African Americans
under correctional control today -- in prison or jail, on probation or parole
-- than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.
*As of 2004, more African
American men were disenfranchised (due to felon disenfranchisement laws) than
in 1870, the year the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, prohibiting laws that
explicitly deny the right to vote on the basis of race.
* A black child born today is
less likely to be raised by both parents than a black child born during
slavery. The recent disintegration of the African American family is due in
large part to the mass imprisonment of black fathers.
*If you take into account
prisoners, a large majority of African American men in some urban areas have
been labeled felons for life. In the
Excuses for the Lockdown...There
is, of course, a color-blind explanation for all this: crime rates. Our prison
population has exploded from about 300,000 to more than 2 million in a few
short decades, it is said, because of rampant crime. We're told that the reason
so many black and brown men find themselves behind bars and ushered into a
permanent, second-class status is because they happen to be the bad guys.
The uncomfortable truth, however,
is that crime rates do not explain the sudden and dramatic mass incarceration
of African Americans during the past 30 years. Crime rates have fluctuated over
the last few decades -- they are currently are at historical lows -- but
imprisonment rates have consistently soared. Quintupled, in fact. And the vast
majority of that increase is due to the War on Drugs. Drug offenses alone
account for about two-thirds of the increase in the federal inmate population,
and more than half of the increase in the state prison population.
The drug war has been brutal -- complete with SWAT teams, tanks, bazookas,
grenade launchers, and sweeps of entire neighborhoods -- but those who live in
white communities have little clue to the devastation wrought. This war has
been waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color, even though studies
consistently show that people of all colors use and sell illegal drugs at
remarkably similar rates. In fact, some studies indicate that white youth are
significantly more likely to engage in illegal drug dealing than black youth.
Any notion that drug use among African Americans is more severe or dangerous is
belied by the data. White youth, for example, have about three times the number
of drug-related visits to the emergency room as their African American
counterparts.
That is not what you would guess, though, when entering our nation's prisons
and jails, overflowing as they are with black and brown drug offenders. In some
states, African Americans comprise 80%-90% of all drug offenders sent to
prison.
This is the point at which I am
typically interrupted and reminded that black men have higher rates of violent
crime. That's why the drug war is waged in poor communities of color and not
middle-class suburbs. Drug warriors are trying to get rid of those drug
kingpins and violent offenders who make ghetto communities a living hell. It
has nothing to do with race; it's all about violent crime.
Again, not so. President Ronald Reagan officially declared the current drug war
in 1982, when drug crime was declining, not rising. From the outset, the war
had little to do with drug crime and nearly everything to do with racial
politics. The drug war was part of a grand and highly successful Republican
Party strategy of using racially coded political appeals on issues of crime and
welfare to attract poor and working class white voters who were resentful of, and
threatened by, desegregation, busing, and affirmative action. In the words of
H.R. Haldeman, President Richard Nixon's White House Chief of Staff:
"[T]he whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system
that recognizes this while not appearing to."
A few years after the drug war
was announced, crack cocaine hit the streets of inner-city communities. The
Reagan administration seized on this development with glee, hiring staff who
were to be responsible for publicizing inner-city crack babies, crack mothers,
crack whores, and drug-related violence. The goal was to make inner-city crack
abuse and violence a media sensation, bolstering public support for the drug
war which, it was hoped, would lead Congress to devote millions of dollars in additional
funding to it.
The plan worked like a charm. For more than a decade, black drug dealers and
users would be regulars in newspaper stories and would saturate the evening TV
news. Congress and state legislatures nationwide would devote billions of
dollars to the drug war and pass harsh mandatory minimum sentences for drug
crimes -- sentences longer than murderers receive in many countries.
Democrats began competing with Republicans to prove that they could be even
tougher on the dark-skinned pariahs. In President Bill Clinton's boastful
words, "I can be nicked a lot, but no one can say I'm soft on crime."
The facts bear him out.
Facing Facts...But what about all
those violent criminals and drug kingpins? Isn't the drug war waged in ghetto
communities because that's where the violent offenders can be found? The answer
is yes... in made-for-TV movies. In real life, the answer is no.
The drug war has never been focused on rooting out drug kingpins or violent offenders.
Federal funding flows to those agencies that increase dramatically the volume
of drug arrests, not the agencies most successful in bringing down the bosses.
What gets rewarded in this war is sheer numbers of drug arrests. To make
matters worse, federal drug forfeiture laws allow state and local law
enforcement agencies to keep for their own use 80% of the cash, cars, and homes
seized from drug suspects, thus granting law enforcement a direct monetary
interest in the profitability of the drug market.
The results have been
predictable: people of color rounded up en masse for relatively minor,
non-violent drug offenses. In 2005, four out of five drug arrests were for
possession, only one out of five for sales. Most people in state prison have no
history of violence or even of significant selling activity. In fact, during
the 1990s -- the period of the most dramatic expansion of the drug war --
nearly 80% of the increase in drug arrests was for marijuana possession, a drug
generally considered less harmful than alcohol or tobacco and at least as
prevalent in middle-class white communities as in the inner city.
In this way, a new racial undercaste has been created in an astonishingly short
period of time -- a new Jim Crow system. Millions of people of color are now
saddled with criminal records and legally denied the very rights that their
parents and grandparents fought for and, in some cases, died for.
Affirmative action, though, has
put a happy face on this racial reality. Seeing black people graduate from
Harvard and Yale and become CEOs or corporate lawyers -- not to mention
president of the United States -- causes us all to marvel at what a long way
we've come.
Recent data shows, though, that
much of black progress is a myth. In many respects, African Americans are doing
no better than they were when Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated and
uprisings swept inner cities across
When we pull back the curtain and take a look at what our
"colorblind" society creates without affirmative action, we see a
familiar social, political, and economic structure -- the structure of racial
caste. The entrance into this new caste system can be found at the prison gate.
This is not Martin Luther King, Jr.'s dream. This is not the Promised Land. The
cyclical rebirth of caste in
About
Me: Author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Color-Blindness, Alexander is the former director of the Racial Justice Project
of the ACLU in
By Dot
A comprehensive review of more
than 300 international studies, comprising 20 years of scientific literature,
has found the war on drugs ineffective in reducing drug use and availability.
Instead, in a statement accompanying the release of the 26-page report,
"Effect of Drug Law Enforcement on Drug-Related Violence: Evidence from a
Scientific Review", Dr. Julio Montaner, president of the International
AIDS Society, noted that drug prohibition has created a massive global illicit
drug market with an estimated annual value of 320 billion dollars.
More importantly, the report, which was released at the 21st Harm
Reduction Conference in
According to the review's
co-author Dr. Evan Wood, a researcher at Canada's British Columbia Centre for
Excellence in HIV/AIDS and founder of the International Centre for Science in
Drug Policy, "Prohibition drives up the value of banned substances
astronomically, creating lucrative markets exploited by local criminals and
worldwide networks of organized crime."
As a result of its current war on
drugs, the
Ironically, the report shows that
in more than 80 percent of the studies reviewed, draconian drug law enforcement
activity dramatically increased drug-market violence. It offered the case of
The international network of scientists, academics, and health practitioners responsible for this report are committed to improving the health and safety of communities and individuals affected by illicit drugs. Gerry Stimson, executive director of the International Harm Reduction Association (IHRA) says, "Criminalizing drugs and as a consequence drug users serves as a barrier to public health objectives, and has no other purpose other than to punish." As a consequence of the ineffectiveness of the war on drugs, IHRA is calling for the repeal of laws criminalizing drug.