FAITH & SCIENCE | AL GORE | CHEAP VS. EXPENSIVE WINES
THE HUFFINGTON POST MAGAZINE
Obama’s Flawed Prescription for Pot
FEBRUARY 24, 2013
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02.24.13 #37 CONTENTS
Enter POINTERS: Pistorius’ Plea ... Michael Jackson’s Son Makes a Big Move JASON LINKINS: Looking Forward in Angst
ON THE COVER: CGTEXTURES (SMOKE); SHUTTERSTOCK / STEPAN KAPL (JOINT); THIS PAGE FROM TOP: AP PHOTO/JEFF CHIU; TECH. SGT. DAVID MCLEOD/ARMY.MIL
HEADLINES MOVING IMAGE: The Week in Photos DATA: Where Faiths Really Fall on Science Q&A: A Man on Girls
Voices AL GORE: The Decade of Strategy Behind the Tea Party
MARIJUANA MESS How Obama botched his pot promises. BY RYAN GRIM & RYAN J. REILLY
JUDITH NEWTON: Coupling for Life With My Gay Ex-Husband QUOTED
Exit BEHIND THE SCENES: When Stars Are Weaker With Their Powers Combined TASTE TEST: Cheap vs. Expensive Wines STRESS LESS: 21 Things to Stop Losing Sleep Over
COLLATERAL DAMAGE The toxic costs of war. BY LYNNE PEEPLES
TFU FROM THE EDITOR: Dangerous Substances
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
HUFFINGTON 02.24.13
Dangerous Substances HIS WEEK, Lynne Peeples puts the spotlight on one of the rarely discussed dangers facing soldiers in war zones: exposure to contaminated environments. After years of skepticism about the effects of those environments on soldiers’ health — a skepticism partly driven by insurance companies — the tide is turning. New medical studies and environmental statistics show that soldiers’ exposure to a complex mix of environmental threats is compounding the more obvious dangers of war zones. “Even when not engaged directly in combat,” Peeples writes, “servicemen and women — typically without protective masks or other
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simple precautions — live and work amid clouds of Middle Eastern dust laden with toxic metals, bacteria and viruses, and surrounded by plumes of smoke rising from burn pits, a common U.S. military practice of burning feces, plastic bottles and other solid waste in open pits, often with jet fuel.” Growing awareness of these dangers has resulted in an acknowledgment, in the medical and military fields, that we can be doing much more to protect our soldiers. As Dr. Anthony Szema, an assistant professor at
Join the conversation on Twitter and Facebook
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
Stony Brook University School of Medicine, put it, “There are lots of dangers of war. But at least some of them are preventable.” We meet former U.S. Army Spc. Candy Lovett, who arrived in Kuwait in 1991 during Operation Desert Storm as a healthy 29-year-old, but now suffers from lung disease, sleep apnea and terminal breast cancer. “At one point,” she said, “I was on over 50 pills.” And former Air Force Tech. Sgt. Tim Wymore, who was deployed to Iraq in 2004, and has suffered from extreme weight loss, among other ailments. “Everyone,” he says, “has the same things.” Elsewhere in the issue, Ryan Grim and Ryan O’Reilly wade into the battle over medical marijuana against the backdrop of our nation’s decades-long and disastrous drug war. Their reporting centers on what is known as the “Ogden memo,” in which Deputy Attorney General David Ogden told federal law enforcers that they should not focus federal resources on individuals complying with existing state marijuana laws — a missive that led to a medical
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marijuana boom in states like Montana and Washington. But as Grim and O’Reilly write, “the Ogden memo was not the beginning of the end of the war on pot. Instead, it kicked off a new battle that still rages.” The Obama adminThe Obama istration, for its administration part, has given has given out out mixed signals mixed signals on on recreational recreational pot, pot, and mariand marijuana juana policy has policy has split split the Justice the Justice Department into Department into dueling factions. And as Steve dueling factions.” DeAngelo, who opened Harborside Health Center in 2006, the most prominent medical marijuana dispensary in the country, put it: “The only way I’ll stop doing what I’m doing is if they drag me away in chains. And as soon as they let me out, I’ll be back doing it again.”
ARIANNA
STEPHANE DE SAKUTIN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
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OSCAR 1 PISTORIUS SAYS HE SHOT HIS GIRLFRIEND BY MISTAKE
POINTERS
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South African track star Oscar Pistorius said in an affidavit Tuesday that he accidentally shot and killed his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, because he thought she was a robber, the AP reports. The prosecutor charged Pistorius with premeditated murder, which could put him in jail for life. The case took a strange turn on Thursday, when news surfaced that lead investigator Hilton Botha is facing attempted murder charges. Botha has been dropped from the case, the AP reports.
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PROTESTERS TO OBAMA: TAKE ACTION ON CLIMATE CHANGE
An estimated 40,000 people from 30 states turned out on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., this weekend for what organizers called the biggest climate change rally ever. Bill McKibben, founder of environmental activist group 350.org and one of the rally’s organizers, said a major issue driving the crowds was “everybody’s desire to give the president the support he needs to block this Keystone pipeline.” The Obama administration delayed the decision on whether to approve the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline until after the election.
CHAVEZ RETURNS HOME
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After more than two months of treatment for cancer in Cuba, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez returned home this week, the AP reports. He will continue treatment at a hospital in Caracas, where dozens gathered to celebrate his return, chanting, “he’s back!” But details about Chavez’s inauguration, which was delayed after he was reelected in October, remain unclear.
ROBIN ROBERTS BACK ON GMA
Good Morning America co-host Robin Roberts made her big return to TV this week. “Hi it’s Robin and I have been waiting 174 days to say this: Good Morning America,” she said to open the show. The beloved anchor was gone for more than five months to get treatment for the blood and bone marrow disorder myelodysplastic syndrome. “I keep pinching myself, and I realize that this is real,” she said. “This is actually happening.”
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PLANNED PARENTHOOD OF WISCONSIN SHUTTERS 4 CENTERS
Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin said that it plans to close four family planning health centers, forcing approximately 2,000 patients to drive long distances to get reproductive health care elsewhere. Gov. Scott Walker (above) and the Wisconsin legislature slashed public funding for Planned Parenthood in a 2011 budget to provide services to uninsured and low-income patients because some of the centers perform abortions. “We are doing all we can to ensure that women get the care they need, but in some instances the resulting barriers to care will make health care access very difficult,” said Deb Bonilla, vice president of patient services for Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin.
MICHAEL JACKSON’S SON LANDS SURPRISING NEW GIG
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Prince Jackson made his debut this week as a special correspondent on CBS’ Entertainment Tonight. “I’m looking to become well-rounded as a producer, director, screenwriter and actor,” Jackson told the show. For his first assignment, he interviewed the director and two stars from the film Oz the Great and Powerful, scheduled for release early next month. The 16-year-old thanked the King of Pop for his maturity: “That was all thanks to my dad. He raised me right.”
THAT’S VIRAL REUNITED, AND IT FEELS SO GOOD
A selection of the week’s most talked-about stories. HEADLINES TO VIEW FULL STORIES
NEVER THOUGHT THESE TWO WOULD BE FIGHTING
A MOMENT OF BRAVERY ON THE SUBWAY
CHARITY. BREAST. SQUEEZE.
STEP AWAY FROM THE MANATEE!
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LOOKING FORWARD IN ANGST
BY JASON LINKINS
HUFFINGTON 02.24.13
CHIP SOMODEVILLA/GETTY IMAGES
CHUCK HAGEL CONFIRMATION IDIOCY IS NO HOUSE OF CARDS S I AM perpetually two years behind whatever is cool and zeitgeisty on the teevee, I’ve not been watching this new Netflix joint, House Of Cards. Which is probably to my detriment. Our own Howard Fineman has been watching, and he describes an artful and innovative
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depiction of “the competition for power for its own sake.” Just this weekend, I was at a party where an old friend of mine spoke thrillingly of byzantine plots and cagey backstabbing — Washington as the setting for the polite bloodlust of brilliant political chess masters. Which must be why so many people in Washington are into this show: For the escapist fantasy! In reality, we have the House
Chuck Hagel testifies before the Senate Armed Services Committee during his confirmation hearing to become the next secretary of defense.
Exit of Senate, and there’s no way of describing those people’s machinations without briefly wondering if the word “moron” is strong enough. They are on recess now, having ended their current session by simultaneously refusing to appoint former Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) to the position of secretary of defense and making it clear that Hagel is definitely going to be appointed to the post. The senators who oppose him, Republicans all, simply want to leave town and have themselves a good, long tantrum for 10 days or so, because that’s what actually passes for political genius these days. The Democratic senators, who support Hagel in lockstep, have to be feeling a little rooked right now. Back when Obama first put Hagel’s name forward as Leon Panetta’s replacement, it was greeted with a “Feh, okay, that wouldn’t be so bad we guess,” but I don’t think Democrats envisioned they’d actually have to spend multiple weeks going to the mattresses for the guy. Hagel, himself, seems barely interested in waking up in the morning and facing the day, let alone playing along with this nomination process, so where the Democrats are getting their esprit de corps
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from is anybody’s guess. Frankly, I couldn’t even tell you what it is about Hagel that made him an attractive candidate to Obama in the first place. What makes him sort of interesting is that he wised up early on and recognized the Iraq war, which he voted for, as a money-sucking quagmire, earning the enmity of his GOP colleagues and making him an outcast figure in the Beltway me-
Most of the same people who seem to just want to do another week of handwringing admit that Hagel is going to end up getting confirmed.” dia. Part of me thinks, “Well, it sure would be fitting for someone who was right about Iraq to finally be rewarded.” But another part of me realizes that being right about Iraq is a really low bar to clear, not much higher than basic human cognition. But Hagel’s outspokenness about his dislike for that military misadventure has made Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) the most spirited (or at least the most televised) of the Hagel haters. McCain, in classic fashion, has flipped and
Exit flopped all over the place in answering how he’ll finally decide to vote on Hagel’s nomination. He ended last week on the “no vote” side of the fence, telling Neil Cavuto he’s mad that Hagel once “attacked President Bush mercilessly and said he was the worst president since Herbert Hoover and said the surge was the worst blunder since the Vietnam War.” Since then, McCain has said that Hagel, while not “qualified,” should not be “held up” any further, and he reckons the confirmation will, in the end, happen. McCain also said he won’t vote for Hagel, but still considers him a “friend.” And no, I don’t think any of that is actually meant to make sense. Proudly not making sense is sort of the point, here. Remember, the Senate Republicans’ very next trick, after filibustering Hagel, was to insist that they did not, in fact, filibuster him. Sure, they used the filibuster process and exploited the filibuster rules, but they were actually doing something completely different. Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) attempted what passes for an “explanation” in this town when he suggested that it was vitally important for everyone to get
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more information about Hagel and more time to consider his nomination, but that those urgent matters could wait until the Senate got finished with one of its regularly scheduled vacations. Remember, there’s no twist ending here. Most of the same people who seem to want to do another week of handwringing admit Hagel is going to end up getting confirmed. There is, I suppose, the
As the joke goes: ‘Say what you want about McCarthyism, at least it’s an ethos.’” strain of opposition working the paranoiac beat against Hagel, like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and his mutterings of sinister foreign conspiracies, fueled by weaker and weaker sauce. But, as the joke goes: “Say what you want about McCarthyism, at least it’s an ethos.” So, enjoy your House Of Cards. Thrill to the idea of a Beltway set capable of intricate designs and complicated plots. Try not to worry about the fact that in the real world, the same people are losing rounds of rock-paperscissors to themselves.
DATA
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Where Faiths Really Fall on Science When it comes to evolution and Big Bang cosmology, there’s less conflict between the faith and science communities than you might think. While there’s been no shortage of controversies between the two camps — with disputes about
the science curriculum in U.S. public schools a relatively current one — only 11 percent of Americans belong to religions that openly reject evolution or Big Bang cosmology. Scroll through the graph below to see where each religion stands.
RELIGION VS. ORIGINS SCIENCE FAITH COMMUNITY
SOURCE: MAX TEGMARK/THE MIT SURVEY ON SCIENCE, RELIGION AND ORIGINS
(% OF U.S. POPULATION)
SCROLL FOR ADDITIONAL CONTENT
NO CONFLICT
INSUFFICIENT INFORMATION
POSSIBLE CONFLICT
CONFLICT
Q&A
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Alex Karpovsky of Girls on ‘Dropping the L-Bomb’ “My feeling is he [Ray] did mean it, but it’s just very difficult for him to say. He can’t really look at her in the eyes, he can’t really say it without saying it with anger. That’s just the way he rolls.”
Above: Ray (Karpovsky) and Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet) in season two of Girls. Below: Karpovsky wrote, directed and stars in Red Flag, a film out in limited release on Feb. 22.
FOR THE FULL INTERVIEW, VISIT HUFFPOST LIVE
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AL GORE
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The Decade of Strategy Behind the Tea Party A NEW STUDY funded by the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health reveals that the Tea Party Movement was planned over a decade ago by groups with ties to the tobacco and fossil fuel industries. The movement was not a spontaneous populist uprising, but rather a long-term
strategy to promote the anti-science, anti-government agenda of powerful corporate interests. The two organizations mentioned in the report, Americans for Prosperity and Freedomworks, used to be a single organization that was founded by the Koch brothers and heavily financed by the tobacco industry. These organizations began planning the Tea Party Movement over 10 years ago to promote a com-
Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin speaks at a Tea Party rally held by Americans for Prosperity at the Wisconsin State Capitol in April 2011.
Voices mon agenda that advocated market fundamentalism over science and opposed any regulation or taxation of fossil fuels and tobacco products. The disturbing history of links between market fundamentalists, the tobacco industry and the Tea Party movement is part of an even larger trend that I describe in my new book, The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change. Following the era of Progressive and New Deal reforms that restrained corporate influence in American politics following the infamous Robber Baron Era, market fundamentalists were once again motivated and radicalized by the social turbulence of the 1960s. In 1971, a prominent lawyer for the tobacco industry, Lewis Powell, wrote a memorandum for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that presented a comprehensive plan aimed at shifting the balance of political power in favor of corporations. President Nixon appointed Powell to the Supreme Court just two months later. Guided by the Powell Memo, market fundamentalists have pursued a comprehensive strategy to dramatically increase corporate influence in American politics. Powell himself worked with other pro-corporate justices to interpret
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laws in ways that were favorable to corporate interests, most importantly expanding the precedent of corporate personhood. As a direct result, corporate lobbying exploded, increasing from $100 million in 1975 to $3.5 billion in 2010. Corporations also used increasingly voluminous campaign contributions to promote the election of pro-corporate politicians at all levels of government. Wealthy donors
Reducing corporate influence in American politics and reinvigorating reasonbased decision-making is vital to the sustainability of our democratic system.� founded conservative think tanks to influence public opinion in favor of market fundamentalism. The Tea Party is a clear extension of Powell’s strategy to promote corporate profit at the expense of the public good. Our democracy has been hacked by this expansion of corporate power, preventing meaningful action on several crucial issues. The climate crisis is an instructive example. The strategic goal of the market fundamentalists to “reposition global
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Voices
warming as theory not fact” has created enough false doubt around the issue to hinder progress. The potential consequences of climate change have never been clearer than they are today. Consider what we saw in America just last year. 2012 was the hottest year in American history and 60 percent of America experienced drought. Extreme weather events, like Superstorm Sandy, caused over $110 billion of damages. Yet Congress remains paralyzed, with many lawmakers even refusing to acknowledge the validity of climate science. The future of our planet demands that
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The Tea Party is a clear extension of Powell’s strategy to promote corporate profit at the expense of the public good.” we put the sustainability of our planet before corporate profit. We must reclaim control of our destiny. Reducing corporate influence in American politics and reinvigorating reason-based decision-making is vital to the sustainability of our democratic system. Al Gore is chairman of Generation Investment Management and The Climate Reality Project.
Tea Party member Susan Clark rings a bell as Obamacare supporters shout slogans in front of the U.S. Supreme Court in March 2012.
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JUDITH NEWTON
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MARTIN GEE
Coupling for Life With My Gay ExHusband
I
MET HIM IN GRADUATE SCHOOL during the early 60s. He was the kind of smart, studious man I’d always been drawn to but never managed to date. He was so funny that being in his company felt like having a childhood for the first time. He knew music, wrote poetry in a serious way and was, in my eyes, the smartest person in our circle. We only saw each other in a group, but we began to rest in each other’s company, to draw close without touching. ¶ In the spring of our second year, he had a series of anxiety attacks, and that summer he left graduate school to teach. He also entered therapy. Two years later he returned, giving me a passionate kiss upon arrival. In November, he said to me, “I think I love you.” ¶ I told my friend, “He is the only man I’ve ever wanted. I’ll do anything to have him.” ¶ In December, he and I were standing on a corner waiting for the light to change. An older man walked past, suddenly swiveling his head to follow a young man wearing jeans that fit like paint. The only man I’d ever wanted took my arm.
This piece is based on Judith Newton’s memoir, Tasting Home: Coming of Age in the Kitchen, now available for pre-order.
COURTESY OF JUDITH NEWTON
Voices “I have something to tell you.” “What is it?” “If it weren’t for you I’d be homosexual.” “Is that why you went into therapy?” “Yes, in part.” “Couldn’t you just get more therapy?” It was the middle-60s, homosexuality was still widely regarded as a neurosis, and my own ignorance was profound. But most importantly, I wanted to believe that therapy would be the “cure,” because I felt with him what I had longed to feel for most of my existence — happy, valued, loved, secure, at home. We went full steam ahead — married and moved east for our first jobs. Then things began to fall apart. This time it was I, not he, who needed therapy. I broke down, developed odd rigidities and lost my libido. He had insufficient lust to make up for my sudden lack of it. He had been my best friend, lover, husband, mother, father, brother, twin. I had merged with him so fully that, in the course of therapy, I began to feel I couldn’t become a stable person unless I put some distance between us. I rented an apartment near our home and planned to spend a few
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nights there each week. One year later, while we were still living separately and together, I took a month-long trip to think things out. The day I returned, we made arrangements to meet for dinner. I’d slept with someone else while out of town, and my guilty conscience plunged me into panic about whether he had, too. “Dick, did you see other people while I was away?” “Yes.” “Did you sleep with someone?” “Yes.” “A woman?” “No.” The swelling in my head began to fade. I was still the only woman in his life. “I admire your courage,” I said and meant it. It was the beginning of the gay rights movement, and I saw his sexual venture as an act of personal politics. Somehow, I felt we
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Dick and Judy in 1968.
Voices hadn’t left each other. That evening, he wrote in his journal, “Judy I love you desperately and completely. I feel great hope for our future. Now life really begins again.” Like swans, we’d coupled for life. After he began his sexual journey, we both fell in love with other men. Within two years, we were living as roommates and would continue to do so for the next 10 years. “Home” was where the two of us could be together, no matter the terms. He met another man; I did, too. Mine came to live with me. And Dick. I married my new man — with many second thoughts — and the three of us moved to a three-story Victorian house, ideal for sharing. I was married to one man with whom I would have a child, but it was the sound of Dick’s step on the stair that filled me with a sense of home. In getting ready for a baby, I made little of the fact that Dick was having unexplained bouts of illness. After a mysterious seizure, his doctor suggested I attend Dick’s medical appointment with him. We sat in the office holding hands through a tangle of tubes attached to his arm when the doctor said, “You have full-blown AIDS.” “What can we do?” I asked. It
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was the early 80s. I didn’t know if this was fatal. The doctor told us of some drug trials at the National Institutes of Health. Dick entered NIH, stayed six weeks, and came home in July. Bouts of illness, trips to NIH and home continued through summer and fall. In late
Perhaps the story of our love belongs to the 1960s, when everything seemed possible, a spirit we never lost.” November, he slipped into a semicoma. On Thanksgiving morning, as we held hands, he died. He was 46. Perhaps the story of our love belongs to the 60s, when everything seemed possible, a spirit we never lost. Had we come to each other in the 70s, our marriage might never have taken place because the lines between gay and straight were strictly drawn. In the 2010s, who knows? Anything is possible. In honor of him, I want to celebrate the many kinds of love that are in the offing — if we are creative enough to make them work, and open to possibility. Judith Newton is a professor of women/gender studies at UC Davis.
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“ Hurricanes. Tornadoes. Riots. Terrorists. Gangs. Lone criminals. These are perils we are sure to face — not just maybe. It’s not paranoia to buy a gun.”
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“ People wonder why Dorner is becoming a folk hero to so many? Anyone who has ever had to deal with an abusive, corrupt or racist cop is cheering him on.”
—HuffPost commenter athiesttoo on the Denver police not being charged in Alexander Landau’s beating in 2009
— Wayne LaPierre,
CEO of the NRA, wrote in a commentary published by The Daily Caller
“ By funding Chris Christie, he’s funding the war on women.”
—Becky Bond,
CREDO political director, on Mark Zuckerberg’s fundraiser for the New Jersey governor
“ Unfair to say Trump came from a line of orangutans. Orangutans are gentle, intelligent creatures.”
—HuffPost commenter MrJoyboy
on Trump’s “orangutan” lawsuit
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“ The american right is starting to make the Taliban look moderate to me.”
—HuffPost commenter Randall_ Roberts_y2k on the NFL greats’ gun control video
I showed side boob. I don’t need to show ass. You get one or the other. You don’t get both.
—Mila Kunis
said in an interview with Allure on her skin-baring limits
“ These are angry people.”
— Pat Robertson said of Islam on his show The 700 Club
“ Those tricky voters. Passing a proposition that you personally oppose. What’s next, Democracy or something?”
—HuffPost commenter Magnaturd
on the former White House drug czar advisor saying “trickery” led to Colorado legalizing marijuana
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FEATURES BLOWING SMOKE COLLATERAL DAMAGE
BLOWING SMOKE
OBAMA’S FLAWED PRESCRIPTION FOR POT
“ IT’S A MUMBO-JUMBO MESS.” By RYAN GRIM and RYAN J. REILLY
PREVIOUS PAGE: JAMES WORRELL/GETTY IMAGES
OAKLAND, CALIF. —
IN THE SUMMER OF 2007, the owners of Harborside Health Center, then and now the most prominent medical marijuana dispensary in the U.S., were reflecting on their rapid rise. Steve DeAngelo had opened the center with his business partner in October 2006, on a day when federal agents raided three other clubs in the San Francisco Bay Area. “We had to decide in that moment whether or not we were really serious about this and whether we were willing to risk arrest for it,” DeAngelo said. “And we decided we were going to open our doors. And we did, and we haven’t looked back since. The only way I’ll stop doing what I’m doing is if they drag me away in chains. And as soon as they let me out, I’ll be back doing it again.”
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DeAngelo, looking at his desktop computer during an interview that summer, threw his hands up and shouted, “Yes!” Hillary Clinton, campaigning for president in New Hampshire, had just told a video-camera-wielding marijuana-policy activist that, if elected, she would end federal raids on pot clubs in California. That meant that all three leading Democratic candidates — including the ultimate winner — had vowed as president to leave DeAngelo and
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his business alone. Within a year of opening, the shop was bringing in $1 million a month in sales. President Barack Obama made good on his campaign promise shortly after taking office. “What the president said during the campaign, you’ll be surprised to know, will be consistent with what we’ll be doing in law enforcement,” Attorney General Eric Holder said in March 2009. “What he said during the campaign is now American policy.” In October, the Department of Justice followed up with what became known as the “Ogden
Harborside Health Center Executive Director Steve DeAngelo listens to deliberation at an Oakland, Calif., city council meeting on taxing marijuana.
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memo” — a missive from Deputy Attorney General David Ogden telling federal law enforcers that they should not focus federal resources “on individuals whose actions are in clear and unambiguous compliance with existing state laws providing for the medical use of marijuana.” Steph Sherer, the head of Americans for Safe Access, a California-based medical marijuana group, was thrilled when she
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people] was, ‘OK, we’re all in the clear, it’s time to expand our businesses and bring in outside investors,’” Sherer said. Encouraged by the Ogden memo and DeAngelo’s public assertions of his million-dollar monthly revenue, medical pot shops flooded Montana, Washington, and other states. Legislatures in 18 states, plus the District of Columbia, have now approved marijuana for medical purposes. Twelve, includ-
“ THIS IS ONE BATTLE OF A BIG WAR, AND THERE’S THOUSANDS OF BATTLES GOING ON ALL OVER.” saw the Ogden memo. The group quickly put out a press release touting it. “We were so beside ourselves in so many ways that we were finally recognized by a government agency, that our press release was victorious,” Sherer said. “What our nuance was, we said, ‘Great, we have an administration that will have a dialogue with us, this is a major step forward.’” Some members of the medical marijuana industry, however, took a less nuanced view. “Instead, the reaction [from cannabis industry
ing D.C., have laws allowing dispensaries. Local officials in California’s Mendocino County and in towns like Chico moved forward with plans to regulate medical marijuana as well. Before 2009, there were roughly 1,000 pot shops across the country. Today, there are 2,000 to 2,500, according to Kris Hermes, a spokesman for Americans for Safe Access. “Nobody can argue that the number of medical marijuana shops in California and Colorado didn’t grow at an exponential rate directly because of this” Ogden memo, said a former senior White House official who worked on drug policy and, like other for-
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mer and current members of the Obama administration, requested anonymity in order to speak about internal debates. The Ogden memo, however, was not the beginning of the end of the war on pot. Instead, it kicked off a new battle that still rages. Since the memo, the Department of Justice has cracked down hard on medical marijuana, raiding hundreds of dispensaries, while the IRS and other federal law enforcement officials have gone after banks and landlords who do business with
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them. Fours years after promising not to make medical marijuana a priority, the government continues to target it aggressively. The war has played out not just between federal authorities and the pot industry, but between competing factions within the federal government, as well as between local and state officials and the more aggressive federal prosecutors and drug warriors. As officials in Washington fought over whether and how to continue the war on pot, U.S. attorneys in the states helped beat back local efforts to regulate the medical marijuana industry, going so far as to
General David Ogden (right) after being sworn in as the deputy attorney general by Attorney General Eric Holder in 2009.
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threaten elected officials with jail. The willingness of elements within the Department of Justice, including its top prosecutors, to use their power in brazenly political ways is, in many ways, the untold story of Obama’s first-term approach to drug policy.
‘THE LANDSCAPE HAS CHANGED’
As president, Obama did his best to laugh off questions about marijuana. His own experience with weed had been positive, having spent his high school years hanging out with the “Choom Gang,” a bunch of his stoner buddies in Hawaii. A young Obama coined the term “roof hits” to describe the act of sucking in pot smoke floating near a car roof, and was known to hog extra hits from a joint by jumping around a circle of smokers, snatching the weed and saying, “Intercepted!” The Drug Enforcement Administration and federal prosecutors, however, found nothing funny about it. “I believe there’s this notion out there that the marijuana industry is just full of organic farmers who are peacefully growing an organic natural plant and that there’s no harm associated with that,” U.S. Attorney Melinda
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Haag told San Francisco public radio station KQED last March. “And what I hear from people in the community is that there is harm.” Marijuana, Haag said, could stunt brain development in children and act as a gateway drug to other substances. It may also, she warned, lead to armed robberies at dispensaries and grow operations, putting innocent bystanders at risk. Federal authorities were determined to keep up the fight against pot legalization in any form, medical or recreational. Fighting that political battle often meant carrying out high-profile raids in the midst of legislative debates. In March 2011, agents swept through Montana, seizing property and arresting owners as part of a nationwide crackdown on medical marijuana. They timed the Montana raids to coincide with a legislative debate and votes in the state legislature over the future of medical marijuana, using law enforcement to shift the debate in their favor. The raids led to images on the evening news of guns, drugs, and men in handcuffs. It imbued medical marijuana with a sense of criminality — even though it was legal under state law — and soured the political climate against it. Before the raids, state lawmakers had been debating two
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approaches: Repeal the voterpassed medical marijuana law altogether, or create a system of state-regulated and controlled dispensaries. The raids disabused Montanans of the notion that the federal government would allow states to regulate marijuana policy as they saw fit. The bill to sanction dispensaries was a casualty of the crackdown. Instead, the Montana legislature voted to repeal the law, but Democratic Gov. Brian Schweitzer vetoed it — burning a branding iron through it at a public event. Lawmakers sent him a new bill leaving the law in place, but strictly curtailing it, and disallowing dispensaries. He allowed it to become law without his signature. People who felt they’d been baited into the business by the federal government cried foul and began fighting to stay out of prison. The team defending Chris Williams, a Montana medical marijuana provider who was arrested and charged with drug trafficking, reached out to a Huffington Post reporter, who had broken the news of Holder’s announcement that he would lay off medical marijuana, asking him to
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testify. “Case law in our circuit indicates we may be able to introduce evidence concerning entrapment, such as quotes by govt. officials in news articles, if the writer of the article can testify to the authenticity of the statements,” said an investigator. The judge in the case, however, ruled that defense attorneys could
“ A LOT OF PEOPLE INVESTED A LOT OF MONEY BASED ON THAT GUIDANCE AND PUT THEIR NECKS ON THE LINE, AND SOME OF THOSE PEOPLE ARE NOW BEING SENT TO PRISON …” in no way mention the federal policy — either Holder’s statement or the Ogden memo. Williams was convicted and faces a mandatory minimum of more than eight decades in prison, though the judge has ordered mediation on the sentence overseen by a different judge, an unusual step. In a separate case now in court, former University of Montana quarterback Jason Washington, a hometown hero, was fingerprinted by the FBI while in the process of setting up a dispensary, apparent-
FROM TOP: AP PHOTO/ARIC CRABB, BAY AREA NEWS GROUP; AP PHOTO/JEFF CHIU, FILE
ABOVE: Harborside Health Center sales associate Jess Bradley helps customer Cindy Smith (right) with a marijuana purchase. BELOW: Medical marijuana patient Douglas Klann (left) is shown bags of weed by clerk Jason Matthys at the same center in Oakland, Calif.
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ly as part of an effort to rationalize the growing industry. Washington’s lawyers hoped the FBI’s documented cooperation with the establishment of the business would undermine the effort to imprison its owner. In January, however, Washington was convicted, and faces two mandatory minimum sentences of five years each. Federal officials in Washington state ran the same play that had worked to such effect in Montana. As state lawmakers debated legislation to license dispensaries, federal prosecutors said they felt excluded. “There didn’t seem to be a recognition that the use and sale of marijuana is against federal law,” Michael Ormsby, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Washington, complained to The New York Times. “No one [in the legislature] consulted with me about what I thought of what they were going to do and did I think it ran afoul of federal law.” In early April, Democratic Gov. Christine Gregoire, anticipating the bill’s passage, wrote a letter to the Justice Department asking what the federal response to the law would be. Ormsby and the other U.S. attorney with jurisdiction in Washington sent back
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a fire-breathing letter threatening to prosecute anyone involved with the dispensaries, asserting — falsely — that the Ogden memo was strictly limited to “seriously ill individuals,” when in fact it referenced any individual who followed state law. A week after the legislature passed the bill and sent it to Gregoire to sign, the DEA carried out coordinated raids on dispensaries in eastern Washington. The next day, on April 29, Gregoire vetoed the licensing bill. “The landscape has changed,” she explained. “I cannot disregard federal law on the chance that state employees will not be prosecuted.” In Rhode Island, a U.S. attorney fired off a similar letter to Independent Gov. Lincoln Chafee that same month, as the governor considered whether to create staterun medical marijuana dispensaries, which the state legislature had authorized in 2009, before Chafee took office. the governor scrapped the planned “compassion centers.” “Federal injunctions, seizures, forfeitures, arrests and prosecutions will only hurt the patients and caregivers that our law was designed to protect,” Chafee said. Similar scenarios played out in Arizona and Hawaii, with raids and federal intervention followed
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by state officials backing off attempts to regulate dispensaries. The New York Times, rarely quick to ascribe motives to law enforcement on the news side, noted federal authorities’ timing. “As some states seek to increase regulation but also further protect and institutionalize medical marijuana, federal prosecutors are suddenly asserting themselves,” the newspaper wrote that May. For federal officials, the crackdown was necessary because things had accidentally gotten out of their control, said a former White House official. “If you read the memo, with the exception of a few words you maybe could’ve worded better, it’s really not that different from current law,” he said. “It took us by surprise, I will tell you, the way it was received in the beginning, and then the media ran with that narrative, that this was a change in policy and Obama’s gonna allow medical marijuana shops. The smart legalizers ran with that too, even though the really smart ones knew, when you read that memo, there really wasn’t much of a change from the Bush administration. All of a sudden, it took on a life of its own.”
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Another official contended promarijuana legalization groups “distorted” the Ogden memo, a characterization the groups dispute. “The distortion certainly wasn’t on our side,” Steve Fox, director of government relations for the Marijuana Policy Project, told HuffPost. “The Ogden memo said it wasn’t going to be a priority of the Department of Justice to prosecute individuals who were acting in compliance with state law. It was pretty straightforward, and a lot of people invested a lot of money based on that guid-
Washington state governor Christine Gregoire with President Obama in 2008.
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ance and put their necks on the line, and some of those people are now being sent to prison by the Department of Justice after that memo had been issued in 2009.” Still, the consequences of the Ogden memo were unequivocal. Sherer traveled to Montana just before the crackdown to train owners on “raid preparedness.” She asked rooms full of pot shop owners how many had opened their doors because of the Ogden memo. Nearly all raised their hands, she recalled. Pushing the memo, she thought, as she stared out at the crowd now in dire legal jeopardy, had been a mistake.
A FIGHT FOR CLARIFICATION
The Ogden memo, despite the press coverage — including here at HuffPost — held loopholes an aggressive prosecutor could drive a battering ram through. “Nor does this guidance preclude investigation or prosecution,” it reads at one point, “even when there is clear and unambiguous compliance with existing state law, in particular circumstances where investigation or prosecution otherwise serves important federal interests.” One of those federal interests
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was the continuation of current pot laws. Pushed by political appointees, the Ogden memo, even with its loopholes, faced stiff internal resistance from career Justice Department prosecutors. “That’s just not what they do,” said a former Justice official. “They prosecute people.” “One of the challenges is that condoning lawlessness is not okay,” another former DOJ official involved the medical marijuana discussions told HuffPost. “On the other hand, you’ve got the reality of resources and priorities. You just don’t go off and make cases just to make a point.” With the 2011 crackdown underway, federal prosecutors needed some legal justification, some clarification to the Ogden memo. “Their argument was, look, anytime we go to anyone and try to say we’re going to crack down on you, they say, ‘Well, look at the Ogden memo. You can’t.’ They’d get that thrown back in their face,” one former Justice official told HuffPost. Even supporters of the Ogden memo acknowledged it wasn’t a permanent fix, given the contradiction between state and local laws. But federal officials were surprised by how quickly states moved, writing laws around the
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Ogden memo. U.S. attorneys led the rebellion with support from the DEA. Benjamin B. Wagner, a U.S. attorney in Sacramento, Calif., who is currently prosecuting medical marijuana distributor Matthew R. Davies, was particularly pushy, according to officials involved in the discussions. Ogden’s memo, the federal prosecutors argued, created uncertainty. They wanted a memo they could use to push state officials to crack down on their own. The Ogden memo, or at least the public perception of it, stood in the way. “There was a fight to get a clarification,” said one White House official. Despite its name, the key players behind the Ogden memo were then-Associate Deputy Attorney General Ed Siskel and then-Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General Kathy Ruemmler, according to two people involved in the discussions. As two of Ogden’s top associates, they took the lead in drafting the memo. By the time the push for second memo started, both had already been promoted to the White House. Working in the White House Counsel’s office, they had
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no say as their replacements at DOJ drafted a memo many contend undermined the Ogden memo. “There was nowhere to hide. They had to get on the bandwagon,” said the White House official involved in the process. The politics around drug policy do not move in a linear, upward direction like, say, civil rights is-
THE RAIDS LED TO IMAGES ON THE EVENING NEWS OF GUNS, DRUGS, AND MEN IN HANDCUFFS. sues. As civil rights are expanded, the politics become reinforcing, as people become normalized to the new equality and reject the old intolerance as immoral. It’s by no means a smooth transition, but, for instance, the more gay weddings that are held, the more people come to accept the concept of gay marriage as uncontroversial. But drug politics move in both directions. Drugs of all kinds — cocaine, heroin, speed — were fully legal at the turn of the 20th century, then banned over the next several decades. The pendulum swung back in the 1970s, with more than a dozen states decriminalizing marijuana. Then back again toward
FROM TOP: JUSTIN SULLIVAN/GETTY IMAGES; ROBYN BECK/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
ABOVE: Medical marijuana advocates protest a raid on a dispensary in front of the Phillip Burton Federal Building in San Francisco, Calif. BELOW: Steven Butcher (right) expresses his anger to a LAPD officer at the end of a raid of a dispensary by DEA agents.
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criminalization. Drugs are not like gay or interracial couples, where familiarity breeds acceptance. More drugs can lead, instead, to a public backlash. Nearly everywhere that medical marijuana shops have proliferated, beginning in San Francisco in the early 1990s, there has been some negative public reaction. In the early communities, the public outcry was followed by a moratorium on new dispensaries and tight regulations on how they could operate. Well-regulated shops have by and large been accepted where they have been allowed. It’s that pregnant moment in between that the shops are most vulnerable. After 2009, the shops expanded faster than cannabis movement and industry organizers could keep up with. “People were telling themselves what they wanted to hear,” namely that the Ogden memo provided immunity from raids, said Sherer. “The proliferation got really out ahead of advocates.” She watched the tragedy unfold. In the 1990s and 2000s, her group organized patients and others sympathetic to marijuana, and as soon as a shop was raided, the owner would immediately notify Ameri-
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cans for Safe Access, which would then send text messages to all its nearby activists. Before the evening news trucks could get to the scene, a throng of protesters would be outside the shop, often joined by local officials, denouncing the DEA. The resulting images in the media were a major blow to the feds. The DEA, Sherer said, signed up for Americans for Safe Access text alerts and would begin leaving the scene of a raid as soon as one went out. But that momentum was broken when the industry exploded. The way to guard against a raid, said Sherer, had been to talk with neighbors, attend city council meetings, respond to complaints, and generally become a part of the community. “Make sure your community wanted you,” Sherer said she advised businesses. “I’ve been training people for 10 years that the number one reason people get raided is community complaints. The telltale sign of federal activity is the local community rejecting the dispensary.” Medical marijuana shops’ protection had never been the law, it had been public opinion. With the perception in some local communities that the pot industry had gotten out of control, the DEA and U.S. attorneys were left with an opening.
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AP PHOTO/RICH PEDRONCELLI
THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK
The drug warriors who had dug in at the DEA and Justice Department won their rear-guard action. The result was a new memo, issued by Deputy Attorney General James M. Cole, in June 2011. “The second [memo] was kind of like The Empire Strikes Back,” a former DOJ official told HuffPost. “All the people who had been beaten the first time worked for several years to win one, and they won a round in the second one.” Officially, DOJ took the position they were only further clarify-
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ing the Odgen memo, rather than throwing the guidance overboard. Its subject line promised it was merely “Guidance Regarding the Ogden Memo.” Practically, however, the Cole memo gave U.S. attorneys more cover to go after medical marijuana distributors. The U.S. attorneys, “in unison, were saying, ‘We’re going to shut these down, this is the law.’ Holder could’ve said stop, but he didn’t,” said the White House official. In August 2011, Justice officials told their local government leaders in the town of Chico, Calif., that they could personally be jailed if they went forward with
Benjamin B. Wagner, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of California, is currently prosecuting a medical marijuana distributor.
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legislation to regulate medical cannabis. Under criminal conspiracy laws, “all parties involved would be considered, including city officials,” city manager David Burkland wrote in a report on their meeting with U.S. Attorney Benjamin Wagner. “Staff and Council’s involvement in implementing the marijuana ordinance could be interpreted as facilitating illegal activity associated with marijuana,” Burkland wrote. “U.S Attorney Wagner also stated that although the DOJ may lack the resources to prosecute every case, it intends to prosecute more significant cases to deter the activity of marijuana cultivation and unlawful distribution. In those cases, staff or elected officials will not be immune from prosecution under conspiracy or money laundering laws.” In October 2011, four California-based U.S. attorneys held a remarkable joint press conference effectively declaring war on medical marijuana. “We were all experiencing the same thing, which is that everyone was saying … the U.S. attorneys are not going to take any actions with respect to marijuana in California because of the
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2009 Ogden memo,” U.S. Attorney Haag told KQED. “So it’s fair game. We can have grow operations, we can have dispensaries, we can do anything we want with respect to marijuana. … That was incorrect.” Haag said she launched her crackdown because she heard Oakland officials were preparing
“ THE REALLY SMART ONES KNEW ... THERE REALLY WASN’T MUCH OF A CHANGE FROM THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION.” to license and regulate the industry, and allow large-scale growing operations in warehouses, which she opposed. “What was described to me was that they were going to be quote ‘Walmart-sized.’ And I was hearing that everyone believed that would be okay, and that my office would not take any action. And I knew it isn’t okay. It is a violation of federal law,” Haag said. “If you actually read the so-called Ogden memo from 2009 from the Department of Justice, what it says is that U.S. attorneys will not ordinarily use their limited resources to bring actions against seriously ill individuals or their
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A client enters Sunset Junction medical marijuana dispensary in Los Angeles.
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caregivers. That’s the direction we were given.” Whatever the authors of the Ogden memo had in mind, the actual words they used said that resources should not be used to target “individuals whose actions are in clear and unambiguous compliance with existing state laws.” “I didn’t think it was fair to stand by, be silent, let people pull licenses in Oakland, put millions of dollars into setting up a grow operation in a warehouse and then come in and take an enforcement action,” Haag said. The prosecutor’s pursuit of fairness also took her to Mendocino County, where local officials had established an effective “zip tie program” to regulate its medical marijuana trade. Growers, after paying a licensing fee and submitting to police inspection, were given zip ties by the sheriff. Police officers who found bags of pot cinched by those ties then had reason to believe the product had been grown legally. Just before the county board of supervisors planned to vote on making the program official and permanent, Haag traveled to the county and, in a meeting with county counsel Jeanine Nadel,
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threatened the supervisors with legal action if they moved forward, according to a report by California Watch. The board decided to squash the program, but Haag’s pursuit continued. She empaneled a grand jury and subpoenaed information from the county about its program, looking for the names of people who had registered as growers, as well as all financial information related to it. Mendocino has so far refused to provide the information and is fighting the subpoena in court. Dan Hamburg, a former member of Congress who’s now a Mendocino supervisor, said that his fellow board members were well aware that if they created an ordinance, they’d be putting themselves at legal risk. “The Board of Supervisors knew the possibility that we could be charged by the U.S. attorney with aiding and abetting criminal behavior, or even a criminal conspiracy,” he said. “However, my worry was, and remains, the possibility of forfeiture.” Under forfeiture laws, the federal government can seize money and valuables connected with criminal activity. The feds have demanded to know how much money the county has made registering cannabis growers, which Hamburg and
AP PHOTO/ERIC RISBERG
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others suspect means they have their eye on it. Hamburg said it was just short of a million dollars, far more of a hit than the county budget, with “deteriorating finances,” could withstand. “Our county doesn’t have a million dollars to turn over to the feds,” Hamburg said. Hamburg had opposed the initiative, and opposed publicizing it, arguing that it would put a target on Mendocino and draw the ire of the federal government. Now that he’s been proven right,
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he’s backing his colleagues in defending it. Just as pot policy split the Justice Department into factions, it pitted local cops against each other as well. The sheriff strongly supported the zip tie program, but some below him had a hard time countenancing what they saw as sanctioning criminal enterprise. Hamburg said that Haag saw there were local law enforcement concerns with the program and exploited those divisions. The tensions are evident in a 2011 county audit report. The zip tie program “is by far the program that causes the great-
California resident Jim Hill inspects the marijuana he grows for medical purposes at his farm in Potter Valley.
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est chasm of disagreement within the department,” reads the audit. Critics “believe the program is illegal, runs counter to overall crime prevention in Mendocino County, is potentially criminal friendly, reduces morale, and is poised to bring more crime to the County and potential corruption to the department.” The U.S. and Mendocino are scheduled to go to court on Jan. 29. Hamburg said he’s optimistic, but the fight is draining county resources. “The president said he has bigger fish to fry than Washington and Colorado legalizing marijuana,” Hamburg said. “But apparently his government doesn’t have bigger fish to fry than stopping Mendocino from attempting to regulate its marijuana situation.”
SO WHAT’S LEGAL?
While the Justice Department escalates its fight against medical marijuana, the country is moving beyond it. In November, voters in Washington and Colorado approved initiatives legalizing the recreational use of marijuana. Recent polls show majority support for legalization of pot for any adult, sick or not.
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At a recent congressional hearing, DEA head Michele Leonhart was nearly laughed out of the room for refusing to say that marijuana was less dangerous than heroin. A new HuffPost/ YouGov poll found just one in five people thought the drug war has been worth it. Having lost the public, where does the Justice Department go from here? Where will Obama let it go? “We have two states that legalized it for even recreational use. So you tell me what Obama’s policy is,” John Pinches, of Mendocino’s Board of Supervisors, told HuffPost. “It’s a mumbojumbo mess. It’s time for the federal government to come up with a reasonable policy.” Complicating things further has been the Obama administration’s mixed signals on recreational pot. In theory, it shouldn’t matter whether states want to legalize marijuana for medical purposes or recreational ones. But DOJ officials considered proposed recreational marijuana laws as fundamentally different from those regulating medical marijuana. States that passed medical marijuana laws were making a narrow judgement on medical use. DOJ officials believed, however, that states that legalized mari-
AP PHOTO/BEN MARGOT
DEA agents remove marijuana plants from a dispensary in San Francisco.
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juana were declaring full-on war with federal law. Holder highlighted the contrast in 2010 as California voters prepared to vote on a ballot measure, Proposition 19, legalizing marijuana for recreational use. Just weeks before the election, Holder wrote a letter stating that the feds would “vigorously enforce” federal law “against those individuals and organizations that possess, manufacture or distribute marijuana for recreational use, even if such activities are permitted under state law.” Prosecuting medical marijuana wasn’t supposed to be a federal priority. Prosecuting recreational marijuana cases was. The public had supported Prop 19 for much of the race, but the measure ended up failing, 53 percent to 47 percent. Holder’s intervention may very well have tipped the balance against it. It was a different story in 2012, when Holder kept quiet about legalization initiatives in Washington, Oregon and Colorado, a move one former Justice official said showed how quickly the politics were moving on marijuana legalization. An adviser at the White House at the time said that drug
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policy officials worried about tipping the electoral balance against Obama in Colorado, a swing state in 2012, and so declined to intervene in either Washington or the Mountain State’s pot legalization initiatives, both of which passed by stronger margins than Obama won. “He was not as active as in 2010,” the official said of Holder. “People were genuinely worried about Colorado. And you couldn’t talk about Washington without talking about Colorado.” Walsh, the U.S. attorney in Colorado, was less concerned about the electoral stakes. His crackdown on medical marijuana shops that were fully compliant with state laws came in the heat of election season. Obama campaign officials feared a backlash would send likely Obama supporters into the camp of Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson. The Obama administration never publicly backed Walsh’s effort, nor did it intervene in the election. Obama won Colorado handily — though 50,000 more people voted to legalize pot than voted to reelect the president. The implications of that margin were lost on nobody. The feds elsewhere didn’t keep completely quiet. They just waited until after the election. Jenny Durkan, the U.S. attorney
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for the District of Washington, warned residents the day before her state’s law went into effect in early December that marijuana remains illegal under federal law. “Regardless of any changes in state law, including the change that will go into effect on December 6 in Washington State, growing, selling or possessing any amount of marijuana remains illegal under federal law,” she warned. California stands as an example of what may happen in other states if they continue with plans to legalize pot. In the spring of 2012, Richard Lee, Prop 19’s primary funder, came under attack. The feds raided Oaksterdam University, a school he founded in Oakland, Calif., to teach industry skills, as well as his home. “This is one battle of a big war, and there’s thousands of battles going on all over,” Lee told HuffPost after the raid. “Before he was elected, [Obama] promised to support medical marijuana and not waste federal resources on this. … About a year and a half ago, the policy seemed to change. They’ve been attacking many states, threatening governors of states to prevent them from signing legislation to allow medical
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marijuana. They’ve been attacking on many fronts.” In July 2012, the hammer came down on Harborside. The Justice Department served Harborside’s landlords with commercial property forfeiture proceedings on the grounds that it violates federal law. The city of Oakland backed
“ THERE DIDN’T SEEM TO BE A RECOGNITION THAT THE USE AND SALE OF MARIJUANA IS AGAINST FEDERAL LAW.” Harborside, and the dispensary fought back in the court of public opinion, bringing forward sympathetic patients who would be harmed by the federal government’s actions. One of them was Jayden David, now 6, who lives with a rare form of epilepsy. In his short life, he’s taken two dozen different medicines and has been rushed to the hospital in an ambulance 45 times. The boy’s condition, however, slowly began to improve when he started using medical cannabis to ease his chronic pain and seizures. “He sings and smiles like a normal child now,” DeAngelo told
AP PHOTO/ELAINE THOMPSON
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HuffPost, claiming the child has seen an 80 percent reduction in his symptoms and can now spend twice as much time at school. Harborside helped develop a specialized cannabis tincture for Jayden that doesn’t have the same “high” side effects marijuana is commonly known for, he said. Because DeAngelo is an activist first and a shop owner second, his willingness to go to prison has enabled a firmer stand against the feds. And he’s winning. In Decem-
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ber, a state Superior Court judge delivered a sharp rebuke to the federal government: It could not enlist landlords in its drug war. In January, in a second victory, a judge ruled that Harborside’s landlords could not order it to stop selling pot. The city of Oakland, on the happy end of more than $1 million in tax revenue from Harborside last year, filed suit against the federal government, demanding that it cease its prosecution of Harborside. The Justice Department may respond to the legalization of recreational marijuana in Wash-
Jenny Durkan, the U.S. attorney for the District of Washington.
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ington and Colorado in several ways. One option would be to go after low-level marijuana users as scapegoats and seek a court ruling that would declare federal law trumps state law. One of the more extreme options, which officials acknowledge is currently being weighed by the department’s Civil Division, would be to preempt the laws by suing the states in the same way the feds sued Arizona over its harsh immigration law. Federal authorities could sue Washington and Colorado on the basis that any effort to regulate marijuana would violate the federal Controlled Substances Act. “The question is whether you want to pick that fight,” a former Justice official said. Washington Gov. Jay Inslee and Attorney General Bob Ferguson met with Holder in January, but the U.S. attorney general declined to say whether the Justice Department would fight Washington’s new marijuana law. Inslee said the state will move forward implementing the law. States have traditionally taken the lead when it comes to prosecuting low-level drug cases. Just 1,414 defendants across the country faced a lead charge of misde-
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meanor drug possession on the federal level in 2009, compared with 28,798 individuals who faced federal drug trafficking charges. Absent a massive influx of resources, the DEA, prosecutors and federal courts don’t have the capacity
“ THE DISTORTION CERTAINLY WASN’T ON OUR SIDE.” to handle small-time possession cases. The feds have to rely on their state-level counterparts. But beyond the practical considerations about enforcement, several former Justice Department officials contended the feds will have little choice but to preempt legalization laws because they represent a massive encroachment on an issue of federal importance. The officials said they didn’t see how the government could allow a law that so directly contradicts the will of Congress to stand, regardless of political implications. Whatever the Justice Department ends up deciding might matter less than whether the prosecutors choose to follow instructions. Regardless of memos emanating from Washington, it appears the prosecutors are the ones truly calling the shots.
C O L L A T E R A L D A M A G E
T H E
T O X I C
C O S T S
O F
W A R
By LYNNE PEEPLES
PREVIOUSPHOTO PAGE: TOM OR ILLUSTRATION STODDART/GETTY CREDIT IMAGES TK THIS PAGE: GILLES BASSIGNAC/GAMMA-RAPHO VIA GETTY IMAGES
IN 1991, AS PART OF OPERATION DESERT STORM, former U.S. Army Spc. Candy Lovett arrived in Kuwait a healthy 29-year-old eager to serve her country. Two decades later, she’s accumulated a stack of medical records more than five feet high — none of which relates to injuries inflicted by bullets or shrapnel. “It’s just been one thing after another,” said the veteran, who now resides in Miami and whose ailments run the gamut from lung disease and sleep apnea to, most recently, terminal breast cancer. “At one point,” she said, “I was on over 50 pills.” PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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Former Air Force Tech. Sgt. Tim Wymore, who was deployed to Iraq in 2004, suffers from an array of health problems that mirror Lovett’s. “Everyone has the same things,” said Wymore, who has inexplicably shed 40 pounds in the last few months. “It’s just weird.” Wymore and Lovett — and countless others who served in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere in the desert region over the past three decades — have struggled to understand this, but they share one nagging conviction: These ailments are tied to service in a war zone. Their suspicions — long rebuffed by insurance companies — are now getting support from some doctors and environmental health researchers, who suspect that American soldiers are being unnecessarily exposed to heavily contaminated environments while serving overseas. Even when not engaged directly in combat, they say, servicemen and women — typically without protective masks or other simple precautions — live and work amid clouds of Middle Eastern dust laden with toxic metals, bacteria and viruses, and surrounded by plumes of smoke rising from burn
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pits, a common U.S. military practice of burning feces, plastic bottles and other solid waste in open pits, often with jet fuel. Research published in December 2012 raises the possibility that in some instances, soldiers may have been exposed to airborne cocktails that included low levels of a deadly chemical warfare agent, the nerve gas sarin,
“ WHAT THEY ARE SUFFERING FROM IS MEDICALLY UNEXPLAINED, BUT VERY REAL.” which wafted hundreds of miles from U.S.-bombed Iraqi facilities. “I knew something strange was happening,” said Dr. Anthony Szema, who recalled returning from summer vacation a few years ago to find that his typically older, overweight clientele had been eclipsed by throngs of apparently sturdy 20- to 25-year-old non-smokers wearing uniforms. His subsequent investigation concluded that new asthma diagnoses among Long Island, N.Y.-based forces were far more common among soldiers who deployed to war zones than those who had stayed state-side.
COURTESY OF TIM WYMORE
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“There are lots of dangers of war,” said Szema, an assistant professor at Stony Brook University School of Medicine. “But at least some of them are preventable.” Overall, the military has seen rates of neurological, respiratory and cardiovascular disorders rise 251 percent, 47 percent and 34 percent, respectively, according to a USA Today analysis of military morbidity records from 2001 to 2010. Still, connecting any particular
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exposure to a disease is extremely difficult, and federal officials suggest it is too early to jump to conclusions. “There is concern that there could be long-term effects” of dust and burn pit exposures, said Dr. Paul Ciminera, director of the Post-9/11 Era Environmental Health Program at the U.S. Dept. of Veterans Affairs. “Right now, there is insufficient evidence.” That’s slowly changing. Dr. Cecile Rose, director of the occupational and environmental medicine clinic at National Jewish Health, said that while investiga-
Former Air Force Tech. Sgt. Tim Wymore made frequent truck trips to a burn pit on base, recalling the “unbelievable” smell and taste.
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“TO BE HONEST, I’D RATHER HAVE HAD AN ARM OR LEG BLOWN OFF.” tion of these exposures are in their infancy, she is seeing a number of returning troops who suffer from respiratory diseases — virtually all of whom say they experienced substantial exposure to dust storms and burn pits while overseas. “The more we do this,” she said, “the more compelling it is that there is a problem.”
SOURCES OF ILLS
A thin crust of sand naturally covers the Middle Eastern desert landscape. But once that protective layer is crushed, say, by a tank or caravan, the fine grains are vulnerable to being swept up into the air. Research has found that military activity can raise the likelihood of dust storms five-fold, and that the annual number of dust storms has been on the rise in the Middle East since the Gulf War. Navy Capt. Mark Lyles, chair of health and security studies at the U.S. Naval War College’s Center for Naval Warfare Studies, speaking as a private citizen, speculated
that the smoking gun for many of the diagnosed and undiagnosed diseases may well be this ubiquitous dust, which can linger in the air for days after a dust storm and gets continuously kicked up by boots, wheels and gusts of wind. The microscopic dust particles can be “great delivery vehicles” for toxins, Lyles said, because they “bind to everything” yet are small enough to sneak past the body’s natural defenses into the lungs and other tissues. With high temperatures and low humidity, a soldier tends to breathe through the mouth rather than the nose, especially when wearing heavy armor and exercising. “That opens the door for larger particles to penetrate deeper into the lungs,” explained Lyles. “If you’re riding behind a vehicle or lying on the ground or just following someone on foot,” Lyles added, “the exposure level goes way up — let alone any wind pickup or dust storm.” In samples of Middle East dust, Lyles has identified aluminum, lead and other metals that have been linked to conditions affecting
AP PHOTO/DAVID LONGSTREATH
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the neurological, respiratory and cardiovascular systems. Lyles has also found what he considers “significant levels” of bacteria, fungi and viruses in the dust particles. Szema, too, is finding metals including titanium in biopsies of veterans’ lungs and in samples of Middle Eastern dust. “And the dust is sharp,” he said, comparing it to asbestos. Mice exposed to the dust as part of Szema’s research developed lung inflammation and suppressed T cells, key soldiers in the immune system’s invader-fighting arsenal. He is testing a novel drug
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that he believes will protect the body from these effects. “It would not surprise me at all if we identify organisms associated with illnesses found in various personnel,” said Dale Griffin of the U.S. Geological Survey, who has also worked on analyzing dust samples. Others are more skeptical. “It’s to be expected that veterans link what they see, smell, taste and feel to diseases. Our job is to identify and quantify what is going on,” added Dr. Michael R. Peterson, a post-deployment health consultant with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. “But science changes,” Dr. Bernard Rosof, on the board of direc-
An Iraqi tank rests near a series of oil well fires in northern Kuwait on March 9, 1991, during the Gulf War.
MARK RANKIN/ HTTP://WWW.ARMY.MIL/
A transport plane flies through a column of smoke caused by open burning at a trash pit at Bagram Airfield.
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tors at Huntington Hospital in N.Y., told HuffPost. “And we can’t negate the possibility that we might find something in the future.”
‘UNEXPLAINED, BUT VERY REAL’
In early January, a subcommittee of the Institute of Medicine’s Committee on Gulf War and Health published a report suggesting that chronic multisymptom illness, a broadened definition of what has commonly been called Gulf War illness or syndrome, may be affecting soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan — in addition to one in every three veterans of the 1991 conflict. “We are beginning to see similar complaints,” said Rosof, chair of the subcommittee. “We can’t yet say that it meets the level of what we’ve seen with the Gulf War, but we have every expectation that it will.” Chronic multisymptom illness was defined by the Institute of Medicine committee to include medically unexplained symptoms in at least two of six categories: fatigue, mood and cognition issues, musculoskeletal problems, gastrointestinal problems, respiratory difficulties and neurologic issues that last for at least six months.
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The committee concluded that there is no standard treatment approach for these veterans, and that the cause or causes of chronic multisymptom illness may never be found. “What they are suffering from is medically unexplained, but very real,” added Rosof. “We need to give it the attention it deserves.” It’s not yet clear whether the new report will push the VA to broaden the group of veterans who qualify for Gulf War benefits to include those who’ve served in more recent conflicts. The VA held its first meeting to respond to the IOM report on Jan. 30. “There are no recommendations and the group cannot comment on the expansion and its effect on benefits at this time,” Meagan Lutz, a spokesperson for the VA, told The Huffington Post. Sometimes, however, doctors do succeed in pegging some of a soldier’s symptoms to an illness. The diagnosis that stands out most to Rose in her practice at National Jewish Health is an extremely rare, incurable and progressive lung disease called constrictive bronchiolitis, often misdiagnosed as asthma. The disease, which narrows the airways with inflammation or scarring, has been associated with organ transplants, viral in-
AP PHOTO/JOHN MOORE
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fections and certain conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis. It’s also been linked to exposure to toxic fumes. Other researchers are seeing cases as well. The asthma medication Szema prescribed to his growing number of patients wasn’t doing the trick for half of them. And in a study published in 2011 in the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Robert Miller found that of 49 previously healthy soldiers with unexplained asthma-like symptoms, 38 had biopsy samples showing constrictive bronchiol-
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itis. The disease shares symptoms with asthma yet doesn’t respond to asthma treatment — or any treatments, for that matter. Severe cases require lung transplants. A biopsy is generally needed to get a definitive diagnosis of the disease. And the diagnosis, said Miller, can significantly raise a veteran’s disability rating — a key to securing a lifetime of health benefits. He added that many veterans with the condition can’t hold down a job and depend on those benefits. “A lot of these people are significantly disabled,” said Miller, a lung specialist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. “They
Soldiers caught in the middle of a sandstorm in the desert near Karbala in 2003.
TECH. SGT. DAVID MCLEOD/ARMY.MIL
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get short of breath climbing one flight of stairs. They can’t play with their kids.” Yet Miller said that military doctors don’t typically perform these biopsies. And the Army, he added, has made it difficult for patients to seek his help. Cynthia O. Smith, a spokeswoman with the Department of Defense, said that there is “no specific effort to stop referrals of soldiers with respiratory conditions from going to Vanderbilt University Medical Center or any other civilian medical facility,”
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but added that the department “has a duty to our taxpayers to care for our soldiers within our military health system.” One of those soldiers is former Army Capt. Leroy Torres, who spent four years in the Middle East before being laid low — and forced into early retirement before he turned 40 this past fall — by a complement of respiratory, cardiovascular, neurological and gastrointestinal issues. After two years of shuttling from doctor to doctor, Torres was finally diagnosed by Miller in 2010 with constrictive bronchiolitis. “I’m the father of three kids, and I struggled to get benefits,”
Oil well fires blaze outside of Kuwait City in 1991, during the Gulf War.
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Torres said, though he added that he knows other soldiers who have it worse. “My good friend is on four liters of oxygen, 24 hours a day,” Torres said. Asked about his service in the Middle East, Torres immediately recalls his time in Iraq between 2007 and 2008 — and the clouds of thick smoke and wind-blown powdery dust in which he trained. “It was just nasty, dirty,” he said. “But we figured someone was looking out for us, so we just didn’t think about it.”
SETTING SIGHTS
Government and academic researchers are continuing the look for answers. Federal legislation passed in January requires the secretary of Defense to “issue guidance to the military departments and appropriate defense agencies regarding environmental exposures on military installations.” Smith noted that Congress is asking the Department of Defense to develop tools such as devices that soldiers can affix to their uniforms to detect and measure chemical, biological or radiological agents, and to identify markers that can be measured in soldiers’ blood to determine levels of exposure.
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New legislation also opens a Department of Veterans Affairs burn pit registry to track the medical history of those exposed. “Just because we haven’t found anything, that doesn’t mean there’s nothing out there,” said Lyles. He added his belief that it was a “mistake” to limit the registry to burn pit exposures, and that it should be broadened to include things like desert dust. Meanwhile, as the institute was working on their report, Dr. Rob-
“ DOGMA HAS BEEN THAT IF IT’S NOT ENOUGH TO KILL YOU, IT WON’T HURT YOU. BUT NOW WE KNOW THAT’S NOT TRUE.” ert Haley of the University of Texas Southwestern was in the process of unveiling new evidence of the role of plumes of nerve gas in the illnesses of several thousand veterans of the first Gulf War. In a study published in December, Haley described how weather conditions during a January 1991 bombing raid on an Iraqi ammunition facility propelled a sarin gas plume more than 350 miles, exposing U.S. troops to low levels of the gas over the next several days. Arguments against a nerve
CRAIG F. WALKER/THE DENVER POST VIA GETTY IMAGES (PENYAK); LAURENT VAN DER STOCKT/GAMMA-RAPHO VIA GETTY IMAGES (SOLDIERS)
ABOVE: Tank Commander Sgt. Darrell Penyak uses a bandana to protect his face during a sandstorm in northern Kuwait in 1991. BELOW: Soldiers from the 4th U.S. Marines Regiment advance on Baghdad in 2003 after a sandstorm that lasted all night.
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gas link with Gulf War illness had generally rested on the proposition that nerve gas could not carry that far, and on the lack of casualties — in particular, there were no known deaths on the ground in between the bombed facilities and U.S. military bases. But Haley found evidence that the chemical fallout traveled hundreds of miles atop a protective boundary layer of air before dispersing and descending on the troops at lower concentrations. Sarin gas is a close chemical cousin of organophosphate insecticides, disrupting normal muscle and gland function in a similar, albeit more potent, way. However, according the the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s website, nerve agents — unlike some organophosphates — have not been linked with neurological problems lasting more than one to two weeks after exposure. “In the past, dogma has been that if it’s not enough to kill you, it won’t hurt you,” said Haley. “But now we know that’s not true. Low-levels of nerve agents are dangerous.” In a separate study, Haley showed that the more often a soldier heard nerve gas alarms on a
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base, the more likely that soldier would be to suffer later from the chronic symptoms of Gulf War illness. As he explained, nerve gas alarms often went off after a sonic boom or scud missile explosion — things that could mix layers of air. When asked about the new studies, Smith pointed to investigations by the Presidential Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans’ Illnesses in 1997 and the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee in 2000. Both studies, she said, found the “sarin gas cloud claims” unviable. Anthony Hardie, a Gulf War Army special ops veteran, remembers hearing those nerve gas alarms. He also remembers an oil well fire, breathing dirty air and taking anti-nerve agent pills — which some studies have previously associated with Gulf War illness. “I had about as many exposures as a Gulf War veteran could have,” said Hardie, now an advocate on Gulf War and other veterans’ issues since being forced into retirement with chronic multisymptom illness. While Hardie doesn’t believe that there is one single culprit behind veterans’ illnesses during any Gulf War era, he said he does think that Haley is “on to something.” He also thinks that, should Haley be right, it could have “profound im-
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AP PHOTO
plications for homeland security.” “Think about what could happen in Syria,” Hardie suggested, referring to the widespread concern that Syria has one of the largest chemical weapon stockpiles in the world. “A plume of toxins could drift and cause longterm health effects in tens, hundreds, even thousands of people.”
‘FRIENDLY FIRE’
Question 14 of the Post-Deployment Health Assessment that
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former U.S. Marine Sgt. Tom Sullivan filled out in March 2005 asked about his frequency of environmental exposures while serving overseas. In boxes next to sand dust, smoke from burning trash, tent heater smoke and pesticidetreated uniforms, the returning Marine marked “often.” “My brother’s docs never looked at that for any explanation for his illnesses,” said Dan Sullivan, noting the chronic widespread pain, swelling and severe inflammatory bowel issues that Tom later suffered. Instead, unable to point a finger at what was causing his
The U.S. forces medical evacuation team on an exercise in the Saudi Arabian desert during Operation Desert Storm in February 1991.
ALICE DANIEL
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body to deteriorate, Dan recalled, his brother’s physicians referred him to psychiatric counseling. He even received art therapy in the last months of his life. “It seems pretty clear that almost all of it could be explained by various toxic exposures,” said Dan. “The sad thing about it, Tom died not knowing that. And he
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died thinking that he was alone.” After Tom’s death in February of 2009, Dan recalled how he and his parents began running across other veterans with “strikingly similar illnesses.” They went on to found the nonprofit Sergeant Sullivan Center in an effort to raise awareness, research and education on the complicated plight of sick soldiers returning from the Middle East. Alice Daniel has been on a simi-
Army Staff Sgt. Austin Daniel returned from Iraq in 2005. He died four years later after battling lymphoma.
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lar mission herself, working with efforts such as the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors. She said her son Austin came home in September 2005 from Camp Victory, Iraq, “without a scratch.” The Army staff sergeant got sick three years later. And in September 2009, at the age of 33, he died, leaving behind a 27-year-old wife and 22-month-old daughter. “I love the military. I consider this akin to friendly fire. Things happen during war. But we need to figure out how to stop this from happening, just as we try to avoid friendly fire,” said Daniel, who is hopeful about the opening of the burn pit registry. “We can’t do research until we have people.” For now, burn pits continue to be used, although to a lesser extent, according to Smith of the Department of Defense. She said that there are no requirements that soldiers use regular respiratory protection, with the exception of individuals engaged in certain occupations. But she added that the DoD and the VA “have taken a number of steps to assess whether exposures to these agents pose a long-term health risk to our service members and veterans.” The situation is more straight-
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forward to some sick veterans. “We were inhaling all that crap,” said Lovett. “A lot of us are dying off. And they are doing the same things in the newer wars that they were doing in the Gulf War.” While Lovett said it never dawned on her to ask for a mask, Wymore remembered stopping by an equipment facility on base one particularly dirty day. “I asked if they had any masks and they said no,” Wymore re-
“ THERE ARE LOTS OF DANGERS OF WAR. BUT AT LEAST SOME OF THEM ARE PREVENTABLE.” called. “Then I asked if I could use the gas mask with my chem-suit. They said no, that the filters cost too much to replace.” Wymore has been diagnosed with constrictive bronchiolitis, among a number of other problems that he couldn’t fully list in an interview. “Every morning I throw up film from my stomach,” he said. “And they don’t know what is causing it.” “To be honest, I’d rather have had an arm or leg blown off,” added Wymore. “At least then I’d know what was wrong with me.”
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BEHIND THE SCENES
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When Stars Are Weaker With Their Powers Combined
© 2011 MOVIE PRODUCTIONS, LLC
BY CHRISTOPHER ROSEN
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ILMS STARRING Elizabeth Banks, Halle Berry, Gerard Butler, Josh Duhamel, Richard Gere, Hugh Jackman, Emma Stone, Naomi Watts and Kate Winslet have a combined lifetime domestic gross of more than $10.7 billion. On Jan. 25, Movie 43 — which stars all nine of them, plus recognizable actors like Chloe Moretz, Terrence Howard, Kristen Bell, Jason Sudeikis and many, many more — opened with just $4.8 million in ticket sales. Over the weekend of Feb. 8, only two weeks after its opening, Movie 43 earned $279,717 from 777 venues, giving the film a per-screen average of just $360. Movie 43 is an omnibus or anthology film — a collection of short stories that tie together in a loose fashion. The storytelling technique has been fashionable for Hollywood screenwriters since the 1940s, and yielded such hit films as 1962’s It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, 2003’s Love Actually and 2010’s Valentine’s Day. The films — often comedies, frequently with a romantic slant — bring together a cadre of Hollywood stars with the goal of getting audiences to the theater.
2011’s New Year’s Eve grossed $142 million worldwide, compared to Love Actually’s nearly $247 million in 2003.
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That worked, to a point: After 2009’s He’s Just Not That Into You (which featured Drew Barrymore, Jennifer Aniston, Ben Affleck and Bradley Cooper, among others) and the aforementioned Valentine’s Day (which featured Ashton Kutcher, Anne Hathaway,
MELISSA MOSELEY
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Julia Roberts and, yes, Bradley Cooper, among others) opened with impressive tallies, Hollywood studios seemed eager to recreate the magic. Valentine’s Day director Garry Marshall planned an indirect, all-star follow-up called New Year’s Eve; Lionsgate put together an all-star adaptation of the baby book What To Expect When You’re Expecting; He’s Just Not That Into You star Drew Barrymore was hired to direct and appear in How To Be Single. None, however, hit like Valentine’s Day (the film earned $56 million on its opening weekend and $110 million overall domestically, despite terrible reviews).
BEHIND THE SCENES
New Year’s Eve grossed just $13 million over its opening weekend and $54 million total, half of what Valentine’s Day managed. What To Expect When You’re Expecting (which starred Banks, Jennifer Lopez, Cameron Diaz, Anna Kendrick and Chris Rock) was similarly disappointing with just $41 million in total ticket sales. Barrymore’s film, meanwhile, hasn’t been made yet, and no other stars are currently attached. This is to say nothing of Movie 43, which might be the omnibus’ nadir: Before its release, the film — a filthy comedy as opposed to a cuddly romcom — was a complete washout that even its stars wanted to forget. (As the New York Post reported, A-listers were ca-
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Elizabeth Banks and Ben Falcone star as Wendy and Gary in 2012’s What to Expect When You’re Expecting.
Exit joled into appearing, with many only starring because of relationships with producers Peter Farrelly and Charlie Wessler.) “We now live in a world where star power carries less weight with audiences than ever before and that the concept is truly king,” Hollywood.com box office expert Paul Dergarabedian told The Huffington Post. “Just look at the recent failures of Sylvester Stallone (Bullet to the Head), Arnold Schwarzenegger (The Last Stand), Jason Statham (Parker) and even Mark Wahlberg and Russell Crowe (Broken City). Slapping a bunch of big names together in one giant movie cornucopia is no guarantee of a box office bonanza.” Of course, even without major box office, omnibus films can make sense for studios. For starters, the stars’ salaries are prorated to the amount of time that they work. Bradley Cooper made $15 million to star in The Hangover Part III, but if he works for a few days on the next version of Valentine’s Day, his total pay will be significantly smaller. For stars, the films can represent an easy payday, too: Julia Roberts was famously paid $3 million for Valentine’s Day, a rate that Vulture reported came out to $8,333 per sec-
BEHIND THE SCENES
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ond of screen time. All told, Roberts only worked three days on the film, however, making her salary workable within the film’s $50 million budget. (New Year’s Eve also cost a little more than $50 million; What To Expect When You’re Expecting checked in around $40 million.) It can be cost effective for studios to make an omnibus film; to wit: Movie 43 only cost $6 million, despite its high-wattage cast.
Slapping a bunch of big names together in one giant movie cornucopia is no guarantee of a box office bonanza.” Which is why despite the fact that Movie 43 flopped, the genre isn’t going anywhere. It just might need some readjustment. “I don’t think audiences are rejecting the multi-star format altogether,” Gitesh Pandya of BoxOfficeGuru.com told The Huffington Post, “but they need more on the table than just a bunch of famous names.” Or, as Dergarabedian puts it, “They just want a good movie.”
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Cheap vs. Pricey Wines: Can You Tell Them Apart? BY KRISTEN AIKEN
AVE YOU EVER wondered whether an expensive bottle of wine really tastes better than Three-Buck (formerly ‘Two-Buck’ pre-Trader Joe’s price hike) Chuck? For the layperson, drinking wine can be a psychologically driven experience, influenced by numerous factors: labels, price points, bottle appearance and your peers. But without knowing the price or viewing the bottle, can you really tell the difference between a $65 bottle and a $3 bottle? Here’s how our blind taste test went down: Each taster tried two types of wine side-by-side, not knowing which was which. One was from an expensive bottle, the other an inexpensive version from the same region. We did this with two reds and two whites. Here are the results.
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As always, this taste test is in no way influenced by the brands included. PHOTOGRAPHS BY DAMON DAHLEN
TASTE TEST
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TASTE TEST
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“This is much smoother and rounder.”
“This seems to have more layers of flavor.”
“Less acidic finish than the other.”
“I have no idea which is which! This exercise makes me happy that I don’t spend money on wine, as it obviously would be wasted on me.”
“I like this more than the other, but that makes me think maybe it’s because my palate is unrefined?”
E RIT O FAVRED
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CHEAP RED .
TRADER JOE’S CHARLES SHAW BLEND Cabernet Sauvignon
TASTERS’ VERDICT: Only 38 percent of our tasters correctly identified the more expensive wine, and 62 percent preferred the $3 variety from Trader Joe’s. Surprising, right?
(a.k.a. Three-Buck Chuck) California, 2011 — $3
REDS
Price difference: $62
TAP THE WINE TO SEE THE COMMENTS
WHITES
Price difference: $40
STRESS LESS
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21 WHAT OTHERS SAY Things Looking how to Stop people think I OTHER Losing should look PEOPLE’S LIVES Sleep POLITICIANS! Over — Linda Huebschwerlen
Anything that you can do nothing to change
— Jaki Whyte
— @bgg2wl
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Friends who don’t invest the same amount of effort in the relationship as what you invest
— Kekoa Cambra
— @Fi_Satriastanti
MONDAYS
— @V_Rav
BY AMANDA L. CHAN
IT’S NO SECRET that too much stress is bad. Research has shown that chronic stress — as well as poor ability to deal with it — is associated with heart problems, depression, mood disorders, worse outcomes for cancer patients, and even brain shrinkage. In an effort to try to kick some stress to the curb, we asked you on Facebook on Twitter to think of one thing you’ve given up stressing over. Here’s what you said.
WHETHER ANYONE ELSE BELIEVES IN MY DREAM
— Jackie Leigh
— @SeekWisdomPCW
My flu vaccine failing to protect me from the flu
— Frances Harriet
The little stuff, and it’s all little stuff — Greg Allbee
Getting older. It’s a fact of life, so I decided my vanity isn’t a good enough excuse to stress over it.
money
— Susie Patenode
GOSSIPS/LIARS
— Stevie Bunch
De-cluttering the house when I am the only one it bothers
— @mssackstein
Whatever hasn’t happened yet and the past. Every mistake is a lesson.
— @nygirlMarina
— Niurys Antomarchy
People being selfish
— Sadya Tabassum
Traffic jams
— Vilas Edwards
WRINKLES IN MY KIDS’ CLOTHES
— Allison Wagner Espinosa
FAILED RELATIONSHIPS
— Susan Tucker
My job. If at the end of the day I can say I did my best that is the best I can do.
— @KnKlaus
Cheese-grater abs
— @peterkowalewski
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Navy SEAL Who Shot Bin Laden Left Uninsured
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The Original Document Dissolving the Soviet Union Is Missing
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RUSSIAN FOREIGN MINISTER WON’T RETURN JOHN KERRY’S CALL
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05 20 CIA Prisoners Are Missing
High School Kids Push to Ban LGBT Students From ‘Traditional Prom’
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TFU
STR/AFP/GETTY IMAGES (ROCK BAND); THE SIBERIAN TIMES (CHILDREN IN SIBERIA); GETTY IMAGES/FUSE (CAMERA); AP PHOTO/DARKO VOJINOVIC (MAN IN GRAVE); GETTY IMAGES/IMAGENAVI (SEAFOOD RESTAURANT)
All-Girl Rock Band in Pakistan Forced to Break Up Because Their ‘NonSerious’ Behavior Could Lead to Gang Rape
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Children in Siberia Walk Outside Naked to Learn How to Withstand the Cold
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NEW TV DEVICE WILL WATCH YOU AS YOU WATCH TV … FOR TARGETED ADVERTISING
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10 Homeless Man Has Been Living in a Grave for the Past 15 Years
Seafood Restaurant Fines Those Who Leave Food on Their Plates
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