Just how many astroturf groups did tobacco fund?

Thanks to the Tobacco documents we've learned how tobacco companies have secretly funded astroturf organizations like junkscience.com, secretly paid for think tanks to run political campaigns for them, and even created their own astroturf scientific journal. The latest pile of astoturf to be uncovered is detailed in a new paper by Anne Landman, Daniel Cortese and Stanton Glantz:

Reading Up On the Drug War

RUSSELL W. RAMSEY

Maria Jimena Duzan is a journalist with El Espectador (The Spectator) of Bogota, a splendid newspaper aligned generally with the Liberal Party. Her Death Beat, translated from the Spanish in 1994 by Peter Eisner, is simply the best book of our times on crime reporting. With hair follicles tingling, the reader wonders how an attractive, well-educated woman got close enough to the murderous subjects she investigated--Colombia's infamous cartel lords--with her objectivity and her life intact. In 1989, Guy Gugliotta and Jeff Leon of the Miami Herald staff produced the still relevant Kings of Cocaine: Inside the Medellin Cartel, focusing upon druglord Carlos Lehder. Again, the odor of exploding dynamite, the grins of the payoff goons, and the screams of the syndicate's torture victims all come alive, with lots of facts that stand up to later discovery. Max Mermelstein was the evil brain behind the Medellin cartel during that era. He spilled his guts about the infamous Ochoa brothers, Juan David and Fabio, to adventure author Robin Moore, who published the tale in 1990 as The Man Who Made It Snow. Arturo Carrillo Strong was a narcotics agent in the southwestern United States during the 1970s, when hard drugs of Latin American origin were becoming a plague. His memoir, Corrido de Cocaina: Inside Stories of Hard Drugs, Big Money, and Short Lives, appeared in 1990 and gives the reader a chilling longitudinal awareness of the street drug culture in the United States.

Drug May Counteract Down Syndrome

From http://www.sciam.com/



Researchers may have finally found a drug candidate for reducing the
mental retardation caused by Down syndrome, which afflicts more than
350,000 people in the U.S. Researchers gave low doses of a human drug
to mice bred to mimic the learning and memory problems in people with
Down syndrome. After as little as two weeks, the impaired mice
performed as well as normal ones in learning tests, and the improvement
lasted for up to two months after treatment ended.

The Young Liberals: 05/01/2005 - 05/31/2005

The Young Liberals: 05/01/2005 - 05/31/2005: "Imagine that you just learned that your two sons are drug addicts. Now imagine that one of them is a chronic alcoholic, the other is a heroine addict. Clearly you know that both of your children need the same kind or at least a similar kind of help, and you, being a good parent, would undoubtedly want to get them into the best possible treatment programs that you could possibly afford. Unfortunately, that may not be possible in the future, because of Draconian legislation from Representative Jim Sensenbrenner (Republican, 5th District Wisconsin). That's right, dear readers: thanks to yet another imbecilic move from the far right, you might only be able to obtain treatment for one of your sons, the one who is using society’s legal drug of choice. The other could be sent to prison--and you with him.

As a part of the Orwellian named “SAFE ACCESS TO DRUG TREATMENT AND CHILD PROTECTION ACT,” family members who learn that their loved ones have drug problems may well be required to turn their loved ones into the police within 24 hours of learning that the problem exists. Moreover, the act, if passed might well require you to take an active part in obtaining information on your loved one, perhaps even going so far as to wear a wire tap as you entrap your family member. At the very least you would be required to testify against your loved one in a court of law. Failure to report the alleged abuse could result in a two year, minimum, mandatory sentence: not for the addict in question, but for you as a parent or for other family members for not snitching on your family!"