Wednesday, July 11th, 2012
CINDY CHANG, - The Times-Picayune (New Oreleans)
Stephan: Texas has the worst healthcare, Mississippi is the most violent. Now we have this about Louisiana. Do you see a pattern here? Red value states enact policies which produce notably inferior social outcomes. Forget about politics, this is about facts. And the privatization of the American Gulag is the most morally corrupt manifestation of these policies. It constitutes a new American slavery, and it is already larger in absolute numbers than the slave population at the time of the Civil War.
Louisiana is the world’s prison capital. The state imprisons more of its people, per head, than any of its U.S. counterparts. First among Americans means first in the world. Louisiana’s incarceration rate is nearly five times Iran’s, 13 times China’s and 20 times Germany’s.
The hidden engine behind the state’s well-oiled prison machine is cold, hard cash. A majority of Louisiana inmates are housed in for-profit facilities, which must be supplied with a constant influx of human beings or a $182 million industry will go bankrupt.
Several homegrown private prison companies command a slice of the market. But in a uniquely Louisiana twist, most prison entrepreneurs are rural sheriffs, who hold tremendous sway in remote parishes like Madison, Avoyelles, East Carroll and Concordia. A good portion of Louisiana law enforcement is financed with dollars legally skimmed off the top of prison operations.
If the inmate count dips, sheriffs bleed money. Their constituents lose jobs. The prison lobby ensures this does not happen by thwarting nearly every reform that could result in fewer people behind bars.
Meanwhile, inmates subsist in bare-bones conditions with few programs to give them a better shot at becoming productive citizens. Each inmate is worth $24.39 a day in state money, […]
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STEPHAN A. SCHWARTZ, Columnist - Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing
Stephan:
Socrates said of medicine, ‘This ‘medicine’ this philter, which acts as both remedy and poison
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JULIAN BROOKES, - Rolling Stone
Stephan: One has to ask: Given the objective evidence on what basis can the War on Drugs be allowed to continue? It has become absolutely clear that the only people who benefit from prohibition are those whose maintain it. For the rest of us, even if we never see or use a leave of marijuana, this prohibition is one of the great destroyers of international wellness.
The war on drugs isn’t just a huge, bloody, and counterproductive waste of money and lives. Turns out it’s also the ‘main reason’ HIV/AIDS is still spreading around the world.
That’s the blunt assessment of the gold-plated Global Commission on Drug Policy, an all-star team of former presidents and assorted luminaries who call in a new report for big changes in the way governments tackle drugs.
‘The global war on drugs is driving the HIV pandemic among people who use drugs and their sexual partners,’ says the report. ‘Repressive drug law enforcement practices’ – drug seizures, arrests, criminal convictions – ‘force drug users away from public health services and into hidden environments where HIV risk becomes markedly elevated.’ Mass incarceration, another mainstay of the drug war, also plays a role, says the report, noting that as many as 25 percent of Americans infected with HIV may pass every year through correctional facilities, where prevention and treatment measures leave a lot to be desired.
The result: HIV is bigger than it needs to be in countries like the U.S. and is growing in certain regions and countries, thanks mostly to injection drug use.
The commissioners — they include six former presidents and other assorted big […]
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Stephan: Think of the Earth as the giant house in which we live. The alarm bell in the bedroom down the hall just went off. Do we ignore it, or pay attention?
SYDNEY — Oceans’ rising acid levels have emerged as one of the biggest threats to coral reefs, acting as the ‘osteoporosis of the sea
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RICHARD LUSCOMBE, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: Further evidence that red value politicians produce policies that are literally dangerous to your health.
Health officials in Florida hastened their closure of the nation’s only dedicated tuberculosis hospital on cost-cutting grounds as one of the worst outbreaks of the deadly disease in 20 years was taking a grip on the state, it has been revealed.
At least 3,000 people in Jacksonville may have been exposed to the highly contagious respiratory illness that claimed 13 lives in the city and left another 100 sick in the last two years, a report from the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) concluded.
But news of the severity of the outbreak never reached Florida’s politicians, who voted in March to bring forward the closure of the 100-bed AG Holley state hospital in Lantana by six months to July 2.
As a result, patients once deemed too sick for contact with the public were released into the community and others newly diagnosed with the disease, mostly from the homeless population, are being put up in local motels in an effort to keep them on their medications.
‘The high number of deaths in this outbreak emphasises the need for vigilant active case finding, improved education about TB, and ongoing screening at all sites with outbreak cases,’ states the report written by Robert […]
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