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Dominicans mull shooting drug-laden boats, planes
Published: 10/30/08, 7:25 PM EDT
By RAMON ALMANZAR
SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic (AP) - Legislators are debating a proposal that would let Dominican authorities shoot at drug-laden planes and boats that refuse to land or dock when ordered, despite threats from the U.S. to suspend anti-drug efforts if the law is approved.
[Wendy’s .02¢ Worth on this matter: I don’t know who thinks they are bull shitting who here, but unless I’m badly mistaken, the Dominican Military is known for blowing aircraft, that are suspected of hauling dope, out of The sky BEFORE that aircraft has a chance to escape from their sovereign air space.
Likewise when it comes to sending any vessel, suspected of hauling dope, to the bottom of the deep blue sea BEFORE it can escape from their territorial waters… and I don’t think that they get in any too big of a hurry to go looking for any drug smugglers that might have survived either Boo.]
The proposal received preliminary approval late last year and senators are expected to debate it by year's end. Congress leader Julio Cesar Valentin urged lawmakers to approve the law and accused the United States - whose forces fire on suspected drug boats and flights - of “meddling” when it sent letters warning them of the consequences.
[I wonder if anyone has bothered to question ‘why’ the United States would be meddling in Dominican affairs to start with? Could it possibly be because those same boats and aircraft, that are loaded with dope, actually belong to the powers that be who run our so-called war on drugs here in America and the Dominicans are fucking up their drug traffic?]
“Legislators should not cower under those threats, since the assistance that the Dominican Republic receives from the U.S. government to fight drug trafficking is minimal,” he said.
[or that it just might be a Rev. Jessie Jackson style shake-down of the American government by the Dominicans for a bigger piece of the pie?]
The U.S. has provided Dominican authorities with equipment and training, and helped carry out drug operations in recent years, according to a State Department report, which did not provide a monetary value.
[I’m going with a JJ style shake-down here.]
The Caribbean country is among the top 20 nations that the State Department considers major producers of, or transit sites for, illegal drugs. Last year, Dominican authorities seized about 5 tons of cocaine, 227 pounds of heroin and made nearly 13,000 drug-related arrests.
[Here I would encourage the reader to check into the 13,000 arrested people and inquire as to what their sentences for dealing drugs in the Dominican Republic was.]
In a visit to the Dominican Republic earlier this year, U.S. drug czar John Walters urged legislators to drop the proposal because it could endanger the lives of innocent people.
[Drug dealers aren’t innocent people, neither is anyone riding with them.]
“We have been very clear in our recommendation that such force should not be used,” the director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy said.
However, the U.S. has authorized such force in the past and continues to do so.
[ Now if that ain’t a case of the pot calling the kettle black. Yep… another case of the Rev. Jessie Jackson’s and Rev. Al Sharpton’s impeccable logic… “do as I say fool, not as I do.”]
In 2001, the U.S. pulled out of interdiction program flights in Peru and Colombia after a CIA-operated surveillance plane misidentified a possible drug flight. A 35-year-old woman from Michigan and her 7-month-old daughter were killed when a Peruvian warplane shot down their aircraft.
[ God bless the CIA… those rascals will even kill their own, without batting an eye or giving it a second thought when they have even the slightest reason to believe that their lawless activities are about to be exposed to the public… and we, the tax paying citizens, gladly pay for it all. ]
The U.S. resumed interdiction program flights in 2004 in Colombia.
More recently, the U.S. Coast Guard fired at the engines of a suspected drug smuggling boat near Colombia over the weekend, injuring one man.
[ has anyone confirmed whether the man injured was actually a dope smuggler… are was this report simply thrown in to make the average bleeding heart citizen bitch a little louder about what the Dominicans are doing?]
It is the fifth time since the late 1990s that shrapnel injuries have been reported following 63 interdiction cases in which a U.S. Coast Guard helicopter fired to damage a boats' engines.
Authorities said they would review the case to ensure all safety procedures were followed.
“The U.S. Coast Guard and its counter drug partners take extraordinary steps to avoid injuring smuggling suspects,” the statement said.
[ OK, I believe that the USCG is doing their job within the idiotic military constraints that have been placed on them by Congress.
However, I also believe that ALL of those constraints that they are having to operate under were actually put in place by Congress in an attempt to minimize the amount of CONGRESS’S DRUGS THAT WERE SEND TO DAVY JONES’S LOCKER and to allow for the quick release of CONGRESS’S drug runners, but only after having spent several million tax payer dollars giving them their, so-called, due process instead of simply putting a bullet through their death dealing heads.]
******
God I hate posting all of this political sounding crap Boo. *NOT!*
♥ Wendy
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I have got to admit that the article I posted below *pointing down* is like “So last year”, however, that story is still playing out today, some eight or nine years AFTER AstraZenica’s patent on Prilosec expired.
First comes the link, one that should actually work, to the page where I blog napped this material from. Although I didn’t see a © anywhere, I have no doubt that this stuff is copyrighted by someone. So the credit for everything written in black or red goes to whoever holds that copyright. I hold the copyright to everything written in murple.
The Inside Story of Nexium
By Neil Swidey
Gertrude was sitting with her husband in their Lowell living room, watching the nightly news, when the man on the moving cliff found her during a commercial break.
"I'm every man," the serious, gray-haired guy said, nodding confidently. "And every woman," continued a blonde standing on the adjacent cliff, "whoever suffered from frequent, persistent heartburn." Over the course of 60 seconds, waves crashed, sunlight pushed through an overcast sky, and rock formations reconnected hydraulically. A dozen cliff-top baby boomers of every race spread the word about Nexium, as capsules of "the new Purple Pill" rained from the heavens.
Like most of the TV commercials for prescription drugs that keep Brokaw, Rather, and Jennings on the air every night, the Nexium spot ended with the suggestion "Talk to your doctor." But Gertrude didn't have to. Her primary care physician had already brought up Nexium with her at her last visit. "Hey, that's the drug my doctor just switched me to," she told her husband. "It must be pretty good."
The 79-year-old, who didn't want her last name used, is a longtime sufferer of serious heartburn. So she's among the many who hail the miracle powers of the original Purple Pill, Prilosec.
That drug stripped misery from the lives of millions and became the world's best-selling prescription drug - and the number one medication prescribed for seniors - taking in $6 billion a year. Prilosec is so good, and patients so attached to it, that doctors jokingly call it "purple crack."
It's an expensive habit, about 4 for each daily pill, or $1,500 a year. General Motors alone spent $55 million on Prilosec for its workers last year. The drug has been the ultimate cash cow for its maker, AstraZeneca.
But by now the cow should have run dry. The main patent on Prilosec expired more than a year ago. Under normal circumstances, that would have triggered the arrival of a generic version on the market, followed by a host of generic rivals. With so much low-cost competition, we would all be enjoying lower drug costs. But that didn't happen.
Through lawsuits, the makers of Prilosec have managed to keep the generics at bay while unleashing a half-a-billion-dollar marketing blitz to move people off Prilosec and onto Nexium, their costly, patent-protected new Purple Pill, which even their own studies show to be barely more effective than the original.
How and why AstraZeneca has been able to keep the purple profits flowing sheds more light on the nation's prescription drug crisis than reams of policy papers and congressional testimony. The same tactics are being used by just about all the big pharmaceutical companies, which are under intense shareholder pressure to maintain their best-in-business profits as the patents on about 20 blockbuster drugs expire over the next couple of years.
That explains the ads for the new drug Clarinex that are everywhere, right down to the white CVS bag your last prescription came in. Schering-Plough has been feverishly working to move the itchy-eyed onto Clarinex and off its omnipresent Claritin, whose patent expires this month. Ditto for Forest Laboratories' new antidepressant, Lexapro, the spawn of Celexa, whose patent is set to expire at the beginning of 2004.
But given the sheer numbers involved and its still-evolving nature, the Purple Pill may be our best case study of the forces driving up prescription drug costs. It's the story of a wondrous medical advance that brought relief to millions and significantly reduced the need for surgery.
But it's also the story of the steroid-injected marketing muscle that has ensnared, among others, Boston's most respected hospitals and the exhaustive legal maneuvers that have delayed competition, helping to drive up costs for you, me, and Gertrude.
"This is a locomotive that's barreling down the tracks, and you either get out of the way, get on board, or get squished," says Dr. James Richter, a Boston gastroenterologist.
First things first: This prescription drug crisis you hear everyone squawking about - it's really so avoidable.
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We Americans are on pace to spend nearly $200 billion on our meds this year. That's more than the federal government paid last year for education, agriculture, transportation, and the environment combined.
It matches the highest prediction of what it would cost to topple Saddam Hussein with a full-scale attack on Iraq. Talk about a war on drugs. In any rational world, , that sum would not just cover our current pill habit but would also allow us to pick up the drugstore tab for all those senior citizens paying out of pocket for their high blood pressure and arthritis pills. We could spare them the indignity of those Greyhound-bus narc-runs to Canada to score their cut-rate Cardizem and Celebrex.
Who's responsible for the fact that prescription drug spending continues to rise 15 to 20 percent a year, doubling every five years?
The big pharmaceuticals have certainly lost much of their "best and the brightest - making life better for you" luster. That's perhaps inevitable when you pour more money into peddling your newest product than Nike does its sneakers. But there's plenty of blame to go around. The government allows drug companies to control the testing of new drugs, designing trials to suit their interests, not the consumers'.
HMOs and hospitals, under their own bottom-line pressures, make deals that help the drug manufacturers move patients to new, expensive drugs when cheaper, older ones might do fine. Doctors operate in a world where drug maker freebies like Red Sox tickets, Four Seasons dinners, and Arizona golf outings somehow seem normal instead of the outrageous graft they are.
Now go to your bathroom and look in the mirror. There's a good chance that you're one of those shareholders demanding higher profits from the pharmaceutical companies, even if you don't know it. (Think about those pharmaceutical-dense mutual funds you're counting on to pay your kid's college tuition.) Now open the medicine cabinet.
Do you see a bottle of Clarinex? Or maybe there's a vial of Vioxx, the new drug you pressed your doctor to prescribe for your arthritis, because it did wonders for Dorothy Hamill. ("Look how easily she can lace up her skates now!") Forget the fact that several studies have questioned whether it's any more effective than over-the-counter Advil. Or maybe there's some Viagra on the shelf. And let's just say you're half Bob Dole's age and haven't been treated for prostate cancer.
"We're in this perfect storm of forces that conspire to make it a very expensive time," says Dr. Thomas Lee, medical director for Partners Community HealthCare, the largest physician network in Massachusetts. He ticks off some of the factors driving up costs.
First, all that research after World War II didn't begin to bear fruit until the 1980s and 1990s. Now we have effective medicines for all kinds of conditions, including ways to treat impotence and depression that don't involve a couch.
Second, we've got all these baby boomers passing through middle age and either getting chronic disease or doing everything to avoid it. "Baby boomers don't want to accept that they will ever die," says Lee. Just since 1995, his Partners group has seen a nearly one-fifth increase in the number of patients taking medication regularly. And last, we've got pharmaceutical companies trying to get the maximum market for the drugs they spent so much to develop. "They're not interested in fine-tuning to make sure the people who get the new expensive drugs are those who will really benefit from it," Lee says. "They want everyone for whom there is a reasonable justification."
This is how it used to be: The boss would keep four bottles of Maalox in his desk. Every three hours, he'd grab one from his bottom drawer and take a swig. Short of surgery, there wasn't much else he could do to treat his heartburn, which is the main symptom of gastroesophageal reflux disease.
Food travels from the mouth, down the esophagus, and through a sphincter muscle to get into the stomach. Because the stomach is filled with acid potent enough to take the rust off your car, the sphincter is supposed to relax only to let food and drink in. But for the 25 million Americans who suffer chronic heartburn, the muscle relaxes way too often.
So the acid regularly flows up into the esophagus, causing a noxious burning in the upper abdomen and lower chest, especially after eating that third slice of deep-dish pepperoni pizza.
In 1977, the Tagamet revolution began. Whereas the common antacids like Maalox and Tums neutralized acid, prescription Tagamet blocked it. It made a huge difference. Still, there was a group of people who needed something more powerful than Tagamet and its successors, included in a class of drugs that came to be known as H2 blockers.
In 1989, that power came in spades and in the unforgettable shade of purple. Prilosec was the first proton pump inhibitor, or PPI. H2 blockers stop acid at one of three possible sites in the cells of the stomach, but PPIs block it at the final site of production. They're a fail-safe means of turning off the stomach-juice spigot before it backs up into the esophagus. "Prilosec gave physicians a sense of power, a sense that we can cure you," recalls Dr. James Reichheld, an Andover gastroenterologist.
Still, Prilosec was really just a niche drug when the Swedish company Astra AB (it later merged with the British firm Zeneca) teamed up with the US firm Merck to launch it in the United States. The US Food and Drug Administration approved it for just two indications, or uses, for which there was a particularly limited pool of customers. Heartburn wasn't one of them. And there were fears, later shown to be unfounded, that the drug might have cancer risks.
As most drug manufacturers do, Astra continued clinical trials to win approval for new indications to put on the Prilosec label - it eventually reached eight - and increase its customer base. (Remember, Viagra was originally developed to treat angina; that whole erection thing was just a pleasant surprise.)
Prilosec continued to grow. Then, in 1997, the FDA tied a bow on a big fat gift to the pharmaceutical industry: relaxed rules for drug advertising. It's not that direct-to-consumer advertising was a new phenomenon.
Back in 1708, Boston apothecary Nicholas Boone bought the first patent-medicine ad, announcing in the News-Letter that he would be selling Daffy's Elixir Salutis for four shillings and sixpence a bottle. It's just that, prior to 1997, drug makers were required to disclose so many side effects on their ads as to make TV spots unworkable.
The new FDA rules allowed them to make their claims unimpeded, as long as they offered a phone number or Web site or referenced a magazine ad where consumers could get the fine print.
Prilosec was the perfect drug to market on TV. Millions of people have gastric problems, and many were no doubt feeling the pain right as the commercial flashed on the screen in front of them. Here was this incredibly effective new medication waiting to change their lives. And when they later found themselves sitting on a doctor's padded exam table, they didn't even have to recall the drug's name. All they had to remember was its color.
Soon, Purple Pill ads were everywhere - on TV, on the Web, even on the floor of New York's bus terminals. Hall of Fame pitcher Jim Palmer was telling anyone who would listen how the drug had saved his broadcasting career. All those forces helped catapult Prilosec to the top. In 1998, it became the first drug ever to hit $5 billion a year in worldwide sales, and it didn't stop there.
Here's the thing: Unlike many hyped drugs, Prilosec is a wonder drug that actually deserves its title. In dozens of interviews for this article, even critics of the purple juggernaut got around to saying: "It's a very good drug." But that doesn't mean a slew of people couldn't do fine on something much cheaper.
Prilosec's success prompted several competitors to come forward with their own PPIs: Prevacid (TAP/Abbott), Aciphex (Eisai/Johnson & Johnson), and Protonix (Wyeth). And, of course, Prilosec me-too'ed itself last year with the launch of Nexium.
It's probably not surprising that me-toos have become so irresistible. Trying to come up with genuine breakthroughs is a lot harder, riskier, and more expensive. A recent study from Tufts University's Center for Drug Development found that it costs an average of $802 million to develop and win approval to bring a new drug to market in the United States.
Why so much? Take a drive out to Waltham to AstraZeneca R&D Boston, the company's new three-winged structure of Minnesota limestone. Throughout four floors of bright, impeccable labs, sneaker-clad scientists in white coats are on the hunt for genuinely novel medicines - not me-toos - to treat cancer and infection. In a field that has come to be dominated by talk of profits and patents, the vital work going on behind these glass walls - testing and retesting compounds, replicating DNA - puts some of the inspiring sheen back on the pharmaceutical industry.
I ask Hans Nilsson, the Swedish native who oversees the Waltham site, why it's so hard to hatch a new drug. He walks up to the white board in his office and makes a series of drawings: enzyme, membrane, cell, tissue, organ, mouse, cat, dog, monkey, human, cluster of humans.
Drug discovery, he says, is the attempt to make a series of increasingly complex connections to get to the finish line. If the connection works from, say, cell to tissue, you can move on. More often than not, it won't, so you have to return to an earlier step. Even at the end, when you've shown a compound to be effective and safe in thousands of humans, you might get one whose liver fails because of toxicity caused by the drug. So you start again.
The vast majority of attempts will never get to the approval stage. The trick is knowing how long to stick with it or when to pack it in. Research on omeprazole, the generic name for Prilosec, "started in the late 1960s," Nilsson says. "It was launched 20 years later. Twenty years. You never know how close you might be."
Boston Globe November 17, 2002
And that is just a little tip of the problems that face us in the world we live in today.
But not to worry, 2012 and the end of an earth cycle is just around the corner..., no not the end of the world, just the end of the world as you know it to exist today Boo.
♥ Wendy
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Reductil sibutramine is categorized as an appetite suppressant weight loss drug. Reductil was approved by the FDA in 1997 as a prescription only weight loss drug. Since then Reductil sibutramine has helped number of obese people to effectively lose weight and lead a more healthy life.
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I live in the United States with my family. I live with four other people. I write, make art, photograph things. I like creepy things, but real gore scares me. I'm pretty open-minded to many things. Most of my friends revolve around the things I despise (drugs, sex, alcohol, etc.), but they're great people despite what I consider flaws. My creative expression is mainly what I care for in life. Without it, I'm good as dead.
Piercings, tattoos, body modifications, physical conditions, etc. = interesting as fuck. I'm going to be doing the same when I get old enough. I'm getting tons of piercings and some tattoos. I'm going to be corset training and seeing how small I can get my waist. And I'm a training contortionist (people with EXTREME flexibility due to joint-popping & loads of stretching). I like the weird looks from others and I adore the attention, whether bad or good.
I am straightedge (no promiscious sex, no illegal drugs/tobacco use, no alcohol). I find it pointless. I would prefer to give my virginity to someone I truly love instead of indulging my natural sex drive to a random person. I do not want to risk any bodily harm by using drugs/tobacco, plus I'm a penny pincher, so a little for that much money is a total NO! And I just don't like the idea of drinking yeast piss...oh, excuse me, flavoured yeast piss >_> I will talk to you if you do those things. Most of my best friends are druggies anyway XD
First impressions mean everything to me. Bad one, not much of a chance that I'm going to continue association with you. Good one, we could end up buddies ^^ & that's all I feel like telling about myself for now.
Anyway, back to the things that will fill these pages:
Things that make or break my day
Daily inspiration
Astrology
An alphabet section
Pop star updates
Skanky dresses of the days
Music reviews
Piercings & tattoos
Style inspiration
Website reviews
Icon Spotlights
Innopropiate jokes
My favorite celebrity bad boys/girls
Mixtape lists
My personal discoveries
Rants
Things related to my boyfriend
Intriguing things I ran into
Random shit about sex
and FAIL moments
plus anything other subjects that I adore..
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I think of my blogs as magazine articles hahah. XD
Keep your eye out for this ;D
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