Progressives Now Want “Psychedelic Medicine”

By: Cliff Kincaid -  Accuracy in Media

So-called “medical marijuana” apparently doesn’t cure all of their ailments. Now the progressives want easy access to “psychedelic medicine,” including LSD and Ecstasy.

Working with the George Soros-funded marijuana movement, which has achieved enormous “progress” in the various states, especially Colorado, a group called the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) is demanding acceptance of “psychedelics,” or mind-altering drugs that create hallucinations, to be accepted as “legal prescription drugs.”

Don’t laugh. Powerful and wealthy supporters of Barack Obama such as the late Ashawna Hailey, a transgender woman, have been among the noted backers of MAPS. She left her fortune to a slew of left-wing groups, including MAPS, Code Pink, and the Soros-funded Drug Policy Alliance.

A report on a MAPS-sponsored conference has just appeared on a left-wing website called AlterNet under the uplifting headline, “The Enormous Promise of Psychedelics for Sustaining Health, Happiness and Sanity.” The conference was actually titled, “Psychedelic Science 2013,” to give respectability to the use of illegal drugs. The Drug Policy Alliance was a “promotional partner,” along with such groups as the Psychedelic Society of San Francisco.

One presentation, “Communicating the Unspeakable: Linguistic Phenomena in the Psychedelic Sphere,” was about drugs which can “enable a broad and paradoxical spectrum of linguistic phenomena,” including “interior dialogues with the Other, whether framed as the voice of the Logos, an alien communication, or communion with ancestors and spirits…”

Bringing the subject back down to earth, their current project is to promote “the healing potential of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy on psychological and emotional damage caused by sexual assault, war, violent crime, and other traumas.” MDMA is another word for Ecstasy, a synthetic drug described as having amphetamine-like and hallucinogenic properties.

The promotion of an illegal drug for its alleged “medicinal” properties is the same scam used to set the stage for the legalization of marijuana in such states as Colorado, where “medical marijuana” is already out of control. Three people were shot during the 4/20 marijuana celebration in Denver.

Don’t think MAPS doesn’t have its friends on Capitol Hill. When the marijuana movement was taking off, then-Massachusetts Democratic Senators Edward Kennedy and John Kerry, in 2007, sent a letter to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) urging the agency to approve a “medical marijuana production facility” that was to be under the sponsorship of MAPS. Later, 45 members of Congress signed a similar letter.

MAPS has now moved on to the “psychedelics.”

Although MDMA is classified as a drug with “high abuse potential and no recognized medicinal use,” CNN has favorably reported on the use of MDMA to treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and quotes MAPS founder Rick Doblin as saying he’s working with the Defense Department in an effort to use the drug on active-duty troops. CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta, who was offered the job as surgeon general of the United States by President Obama, even narrated a story about a woman claiming relief from an experimental PTSD treatment using the drug MDMA.

Shawn Hailey, also known as Ashawna, supported Obama’s campaign for president and was a member of the MAPS Board of Directors. She passed away in 2011 and left $5.5 million to the organization. She made her money through high-tech companies in Silicon Valley and was a co-founder of Meta-Software Corporation, which was sold to Avanti Corporation in 1996.

She was also a strong supporter of the Marijuana Policy Project, the Soros-backed Drug Policy Alliance, Code Pink and the American Civil Liberties Union.

Actually, “she” was once a “he.” Shawn Hailey was born a man, but changed her gender to female and her name to Ashawna.

In total, she left over $10 million to the liberal-left. The Marijuana Policy Project used some of the money she left them to promote passage last November of the Colorado measure to legalize marijuana. I have previously written about all of the damage that marijuana-on-demand is already causing the people of Colorado.

A search of Federal Election Commission (FEC) records shows that under the name “Shawn Hailey,” she donated $20,000 to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in 2008, $4,600 to Obama for president in 2007 and 2008, and $23,000 to the Obama Victory Fund in 2007. Another $30,000 went to the DNC in 2009 under the name “Ashawna Hailey.”

A photo of Hailey and Obama is on her memorial site. “Whether it was a morning board meeting, a lunch at Taco Bravo, a dinner with President Obama, or an all night dance, the sparkle of Ashawna will be missed and cherished by us all,” it says.

MAPS, the recipient of most of her largesse, sponsored a conference in 1990 featuring Timothy Leary, identified in literature from the event as the “psychedelic research pioneer,” but who was actually a charlatan who devoted much of his life to glamorizing LSD, marijuana, and other drugs. He eventually went to prison on illegal drug charges.

MAPS founder and executive director Rick Doblin once described himself to High Times magazine as an “LSD therapist,” after “having taken LSD rather often.” He took Leary’s advice to “turn on, tune in, drop out,” before going back to college and eventually starting MAPS in 1986. “His undergraduate thesis at New College of Florida was a 25-year follow-up to the classic Good Friday Experiment, which evaluated the potential of psychedelic drugs to catalyze religious experiences,” his bio says. He then completed a Ph.D. at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Indeed, according to a story about the “Good Friday Experiment,” which occurred in 1962, participants took hallucinogenic drugs and then attended a Good Friday worship service. They were later evaluated as to whether the drugs could produce “pseudo-mystical states.”

Doblin’s bio goes on, “His professional goal is to help develop legal contexts for the beneficial uses of psychedelics and marijuana, primarily as prescription medicines but also for personal growth for otherwise healthy people…”

The 1960s “New Left,” which became the Weathermen and the Weather Underground, was an outgrowth of this approach. Members of the Weather Underground were involved in arranging the escape from prison of Timothy Leary.

The book, The Harvard Psychedelic Club, discusses how the escape occurred and members of the Weather Underground “rendezvoused with the fugitive,” kept him hidden, then gave him a disguise and a false identity. “Timothy Leary was now ‘William John McNellis,’ a salesman from Salt Lake City,” the author writes. “After hiding out for a week in a farmhouse near Redding, California Leary made his way down to Utah to meet leaders of the Weather Underground, including Bill Ayers and his wife, Bernadette [sic] Dohrn. They created ‘William McNellis’ with a forged birth certificate, Social Security card, and hunting license-paper that required no preexisting photo.”

After his escape, Leary had released a message through Bernardine Dohrn’s sister urging communist revolutionaries to “turn on” and continue a campaign of violence and terrorism.

Bernardine Dohrn, who praised the drug-crazed Charles Manson gang killers, herself issued a statement on September 15, 1970, saying:

“Dr. Leary was being held against his will and against the will of millions of kids in this country. He was a political prisoner, captured for the work he did in helping all of us begin the task of creating a new culture on the barren wasteland that has been imposed on this country by Democrats, Republicans, Capitalists and creeps.

“LSD and grass, like the herbs and cactus and mushrooms of the American Indians and countless civilizations that have existed on this planet, will help us make a future world where it will be possible to live in peace.

“Now we are at war.”

The Senate Internal Security Subcommittee decided to look into this matter because of the implications for national and internal security and examined evidence that subversive groups played a significant role in the spread of the drug epidemic—both as propagandists and as traffickers.

The subtitle of the Harvard Psychedelic Club refers to how Timothy Leary and his collaborators “ushered in a New Age for America.” It is coming to pass under Obama, thanks to his transgendered backer.

Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism and can be contacted at cliff.kincaid@aim.org.

Technorati Tags: psychedelic medicine,medical marijuana,marijuana,LSD,George Soros Network,George Soros,watch the other hand,wake-up America,drugs,prescription drugs,dumbing down of America,manipulation of the public,MAPS,Colorado,Timothy Leary,Obamaland,George Soros-funded marijuana movement,drug epidemic,Harvard Psychedelic Club,hallucinogenics,Ecstasy

Strassel: Axelrod's ObamaCare Dollars

Emails suggest the White House pushed business to the presidential adviser's former firm to sell the health-care law

WSJ: Rewind to 2009. The fight over ObamaCare is raging, and a few news outlets report that something looks ethically rotten in the White House. An outside group funded by industry is paying the former firm of senior presidential adviser David Axelrod to run ads in favor of the bill. That firm, AKPD Message and Media, still owes Mr. Axelrod money and employs his son.

The story quickly died, but emails recently released by the House Energy and Commerce Committee ought to resurrect it. The emails suggest the White House was intimately involved both in creating this lobby and hiring Mr. Axelrod's firm — which is as big an ethical no-no as it gets.

Mr. Axelrod—who left the White House last year—started AKPD in 1985. The firm earned millions helping run Barack Obama's 2008 campaign. Mr. Axelrod moved to the White House in 2009 and agreed to have AKPD buy him out for $2 million. But AKPD chose to pay Mr. Axelrod in annual installments—even as he worked in the West Wing. This agreement somehow passed muster with the Office of Government Ethics, though the situation at the very least should have walled off AKPD from working on White-House priorities.

It didn't. The White House and industry were working hand-in-glove to pass ObamaCare in 2009, and among the vehicles supplying ad support was an outfit named Healthy Economy Now (HEN). News stories at the time described this as a "coalition" that included the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), the American Medical Association, and labor groups—suggesting these entities had started and controlled it.

House emails show HEN was in fact born at an April 15, 2009 meeting arranged by then-White House aide Jim Messina and a chief of staff for Democratic Sen. Max Baucus. The two politicos met at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) and invited representatives of business and labor.

Reuters:  Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod

A Service Employees International Union attendee sent an email to colleagues noting she'd been invited by the Baucus staffer, explaining: "Also present was Jim Messina. . . . They basically want to see adds linking HC reform to the economy. . . . there were not a lot of details, but we were told that we wd be getting a phone call. well that call came today."

The call was from Nick Baldick, a Democratic consultant who had worked on the Obama campaign and for the DSCC. Mr. Baldick started HEN. The only job of PhRMA and others was to fund it.

Meanwhile, Mr. Axelrod's old firm was hired to run the ads promoting ObamaCare. At the time, a HEN spokesman said HEN had done the hiring. But the emails suggest otherwise. In email after email, the contributors to HEN refer to four men as the "White House" team running health care. They included John Del Cecato and Larry Grisolano (partners at AKPD), as well as Andy Grossman (who once ran the DSCC) and Erik Smith, who had been a paid adviser to the Obama presidential campaign.

In one email, PhRMA consultant Steve McMahon calls these four the "WH-designated folks." He explains to colleagues that Messrs. Grossman, Grisolano and Del Cecato "are very close to Axelrod," and that "they have been put in charge of the campaign to pass health reform." Ron Pollack, whose Families USA was part of the HEN coalition, explained to colleagues that "the team that is working with the White House on health-care reform. . . . [Grossman, Smith, Del Cecato, Grisolano] . . . would like to get together with us." This would provide "guidance from the White House about their messaging."

According to White House visitor logs, Mr. Smith had 28 appointments scheduled between May and August—17 made through Mr. Messina or his assistant. Mr. Grossman appears in the logs at least 19 times. Messrs. Del Cecato and Grisolano of AKPD also visited in the spring and summer, at least twice with Mr. Axelrod, who was deep in the health-care fight.

A 2009 PhRMA memo also makes clear that AKPD had been chosen before PhRMA joined HEN. It's also clear that some contributors didn't like the conflict of interest. When, in July 2009, a media outlet prepared to report AKPD's hiring, a PhRMA participant said: "This is a big problem." Mr. Baldick advises: "just say, AKPD is not working for PhRMA." AKPD and another firm, GMMB, would handle $12 million in ad business from HEN and work for a successor 501(c)4.

A basic rule of White House ethics is to avoid even the appearance of self-dealing or nepotism. If Mr. Axelrod or his West Wing chums pushed political business toward Mr. Axelrod's former firm, they contributed to his son's salary as well as to the ability of the firm to pay Mr. Axelrod what it still owed him. Could you imagine the press frenzy if Karl Rove had done the same after he joined the White House?

Messrs. Axelrod and Messina are now in Chicago running Mr. Obama's campaign. Mr. Axelrod, the White House and a partner for AKPD didn't respond to requests for comment on their role in HEN, the tapping of Mr. Baldick, and the redolent hiring of AKPD. Until the White House explains all this, voters can fairly conclude that the President's political team took their Chicago brand of ethics into the White House.

Write to kim@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared June 22, 2012, on page A15 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Axelrod's ObamaCare Dollars.

Related:

ObamaCare Disarray as 2013 Nears… Beware!

Ryan to Newsmax: Obama Turning Medicare into 'Piggybank' for Obamacare

What Are The Chances? Obama, Jarrett, and Axelrod, All Connected to Communist Frank Marshall Davis

The 1997 speech that launched Obama – Chapter III

Technorati Tags: ObamaCare,David Axelrod,smoke and mirrors|,Obamaland,Chicago cronies,Team Obama,repeal and replace ObamaCare,lies,ObamaCare Cramdown,PhRMA,HEN,WSJ

Democrats Abandon Donald Berwick's Nomination to Top Medicare and Medicaid Post

According to Politico, President Obama will be forced to abandon his controversial nomination of Donald Berwick as the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Politico reports that “Senate Democrats have given up on confirming Don Berwick as CMS administrator in the wake of a letter from 42 Republican senators opposing the nomination,” as “there's no way for Berwick to get the 60 votes needed to clear the Senate.”

As with his various “czars,” President Obama had previously circumvented the Senate confirmation process (despite having a Democratically controlled Senate) to install Berwick in his post. He had done so by issuing a “recess appointment,” but that appointment expires at the end of this year.

As I wrote last spring, the Berwick nomination is one of the clearest indicators of where we are headed if ObamaCare is not repealed:

As everyone knows by now, Obamacare would raise, not lower, health costs. This is the consensus view of the CBO, Medicare’s chief actuary, and the American people. However, another consensus view — shared by nearly everyone outside of the Obama White House and the Democratic Congress — is that the number one goal of health policy should be to cut costs. So, if you combine a health care overhaul that won’t cut costs, with a pressing need to cut costs, where are we headed?

President Obama’s pick to fill the top post at Medicare and Medicaid provides a strong indication. We’re going down the only cost cutting road that government can travel. More exactly, we’re heading toward a nation-defining fork in the road. In one direction lies repeal; in the other, rationed care. In one direction, liberty; in the other, consolidated power.

President Obama’s pick to head the massive Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Dr. Donald Berwick, is a Harvard doctor with a stated fondness for nationalized medicine. He plainly wasn’t picked for his large-scale executive or managerial experience. He’s currently a professor, a pediatrician, and the CEO of a nonprofit whose website reports it has “a staff of over 100 dedicated and talented people.” No, he was presumably picked because he and President Obama see eye-to-eye: Both share the same academic approach to problem-solving, both think our health-care system should be run through Washington, and both support a strong degree of bureaucratic control over questions of life and death. If confirmed by the Senate, he would become head of an agency with a budget larger than that of the Department of Defense.”

Lest anyone think I was exaggerating, Berwick has written that the British health-care system is “more likely to succeed” than the American one; that he feels “an optimism about the [British] NHS [National Health System] that is hard to find in the UK nowadays”; that he thinks “nationalized health care was a wise choice in 1948 and that it remains so now”; that “the social budget” — the social budget! — “is limited”; and that “[t]he decision is not whether or not we will ration care — the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open.” This is who President Obama wants to have running Medicare, Medicaid, and significant portions of ObamaCare.

It looks like the Constitution’s confirmation process will serve as a bulwark against President Obama’s desires in this instance, although it’s unlikely that his next nominee will hold views that are radically different from Berwick’s or his own. (That new nominee almost certainly will, however, have been more careful about publicly expressing those views). But Obama’s failure to get his Berwick nomination through the Democratic Senate doesn’t change the fact that Obama chose someone like Berwick in the first place, or the fact that he circumvented the usual process to install him in the short-term. Nor does it change what the Berwick nomination tells us about the direction in which Obama thinks ObamaCare would and should take American health care.

Related:

Berwick – Another Radical

Did You Know That???

Do not let anyone tell you that ObamaCare in inevitable!! Yesterday’s wins for Republicans in New Jersey and Virginia and narrow loss, only due to technicalities for the Conservative Independent in the NY-23 Congressional Race prove it and put the program in ever greater peril.

Chris Christie's gutsy win in New Jersey puts the arrogant big spender Jon Corzine in his place. But it is the election in Virginia that probably has more to say to marginal Democratic congressmen considering how to vote on health-care reform.

Obviously, Christie's victory is a body blow to Obama after Corzine outspent the Republican by five-to-one and the president put on a serious push for the incumbent. Corzine's defeat sends a message that the nation is moving sharply against Obama.

But Virginia results are the most important. More than 80 Democratic congressmen and 20 senators come from states that John McCain carried in 2008. For them, the sudden switch in Virginia, a swing state that Obama actually carried, heralds tough political times ahead.

New Jersey is the quintessential blue state. If it goes Republican, blue state congressmen needn't worry. Their districts are likely still safe. But when a Republican in Virginia wins by 20 points, it sends a message to red-state Democratic congressmen to take cover.

Polls indicate a declining level of popular approval of the Obama policies (Rasmussen shows his job approval at 46 percent), but to see actual Democrats losing or barely squeaking out victories in solidly blue states sends a far clearer message to the Democrats in Congress.

Until last night, Democratic moderates, the so-called blue dogs, could bask in the light of their candidate's success in 2008. But now they must hear hoof beats behind them. The party discipline on which Obama depends to pass a health-care program that Americans reject by 42 percent for, 55 percent against (Rasmussen again) will only work if beleaguered Democratic incumbents can wrap themselves in Obama's cloak and tough out the popular criticism. But the limits of Obama's drawing power are readily apparent in the Republicans' 20-point victory in Virginia and the race in New Jersey.

In the coming weeks, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will be asking their troops to cast potentially career-ending votes for health-care changes, Medicare cuts, higher taxes and fines on the uninsured. Whether they take that risk depends on their faith in Obama's drawing power.

But the votes in Virginia, in particular, show the limits of Obama's appeal. The winner, Bob McDonnell, won the attorney general's race in the last election by a few tenths of a percent over the same opponent. That he coasted to so huge a victory in the swing state of Virginia now has to send a message to red-state Democratic congressmen: Obama may be able to survive in the deep water into which he is leading his party, but you can't.

Dick Morris, Author of Catastrophe

There were a coupe great interviews by Judge Napolitano and a surgeon and author (The Awakening of a Surgeon), David H. Janda, a representative from the Heritage Foundation earlier today, as well as with Rep Michele Bachmann… will update this when those become available.

Did you know that:

1. In a new survey 45% of physicians say they will leave medicine if ObamaCare passes… add that to between 15 and 30 million additionally insured and you have doctor and quality of healthcare shortages and resources… which means inferior healthcare, rationing (death panels by another name) and there will be cost and tax increases.

2. A Federal Coordinating Council (presently 15 members) and a National Coordinator having access to mandatory records or everyone’s health and financial records and having the power to give the final word on your healthcare (death panels) is already in place. It was planned for and snuck into the Stimulus Bill. No conspiracy? No larger takeover agenda? Transparency?

3. Obama still has hundreds of open government positions that he has never filled; some because they have chosen to appoint radical czars instead that require no confirmation and answer to no one… but partly, they say, because of lack of time… But there has been time to appoint these 16 people to a council that nobody knew existed and will only come into play if allow ObamaCare (or any form of government controlled healthcare) to pass.

4. Why are so many doctor planning on leaving medicine if this passes? Because this plan and withholding care is against their Hippocratic oath.

5. ObamaCare/PelosiCare/HarryCare will require everyone to purchase health insurance (ultimately from the government); which is unconstitutional.

6. There are rumblings that energy legislation and student loan legislation will be attached (snuck through) with ObamaCare… both power grab and tax measures!!!

7. AARP just openly supported the PelosiCare Bill. For any seniors who were still hanging onto some crazy belief that AARP was supporting you… this should be the final sign you need!

8. Everything they kept telling us all summer that wasn't in the bill is in there... or has already been put in place.

9. Every Democratic President (American Progressivism) has tried to put though or extend some form of government HC. To help the American People?? Think Again!!

Get to Washington DC tomorrow at noon or anytime this week and confront your congressman, Senator and Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. If you can’t get there, rally at your representative’s local office and flood Congress and reps and Sen local offices with calls all week and especially between noon and 1PM. Follow up with faxes, emails and snail mail letters!! Tell them: "Keep you hands off my healthcare and uphold the Constitution".

Stop ObamaCare!!!!!!!

Get the Federal Coordinating Council and a National Coordinator revoked

Stop Congress and the WH from sneaking through anymore legislation and fight to remove what they have already forced on us without our knowledge!!

We are in a war!! The greatest fight for our freedom America has ever seen since the 1776!!! The only question is... do we have the courage and fortitude it takes?