assorted hallucinations

Oh PLEASE click HERE for a wonderful music video. In Disney's "Dumbo," nasty circus people have spiked the baby elephant's water with liquor, and he hallucinates the famous Pink Elephants. It's one of the greatest moments of animation, but this remix features the cover by the remarkable jazz musicians from Saturn, Sun Ra and His Arkestra.

Pink Elephants On Parade

from the Walt Disney
animated feature "Dumbo" (1941)

lyrics: Ned Washington

Look out! Look out!
Pink elephants on parade!
Here they come!
Hippety hoppety

They're here and there
Pink elephants ev'rywhere
Look out! Look out!
They're walking around the bed
On their head
Clippety cloppety

Arrayed
In braid
Pink elephants on parade!
What'll I do?
What'll I do?
What an unusual view!

I could stand the sight of worms
And look at microscopic germs
But Technicolor pachyderms
Is really too much for me!

I am not the type to faint
When things are odd
or things are quaint
But seeing things you know that ain't
Can certainly give you an awful fright!
What a sight!

Chase 'em away!
Chase 'em away!
I'm afraid!
Need your aid!
Pink elephants on parade!
Pink elephants!
Pink elephants!

==========

I'm a little long-winded, so maybe The Columbus Dispatch might not run my Letter to the Editor.

Sue me. Read it on Vleeptron.

==============

Letters to the Editor
The Columbus Dispatch
Columbus, Ohio USA

To the Editor:

Of all the tasteless and insensitive things I have ever read in a newspaper, your public humiliation of Professor John Burnham of Ohio State University, by running his column "Former Drug Czars Believe Their War Has Been Won" (30 June), is surely the most shameful.

Professor Burnham is clearly suffering from the most virulent hallucination I have ever witnessed, with or without LSD or liquor's pink elephants. He's convinced 35 years of America's War On Drugs have achieved Victory.

In 1965, when I graduated from high school, I had never met a human being who had ever smoked marijuana. I couldn't have found any marijuana, heroin or cocaine if I'd waved a hundred-dollar bill all over my large city for a week.

Now, with Victory achieved, these substances, plus methamphetamine and ecstacy, are a phone call or a 24/7 open-air drug market away throughout America, at prices to fit any teenager's allowance. (Legal, taxed, government-supervised alcohol is far more difficult for teens to obtain.)

I feel such sympathy for Professor Burnham's inability to notice the reality nearly every American, urban or rural, can see and, by gunshots in the night, hear.

The Nutty Professor looks back on America's 14 years of Alcohol Prohibition and concludes:

"Historians have established that the 1920s experiment in alcohol prohibition was successful and was repealed in 1933 only because of a massive, well-financed propaganda campaign."

In other words, Professor Burnham believes that if America had Done The Right Thing, it would still be a crime for an adult to drink a beer or a glass of wine. Franklin D. Roosevelt was an evil drug legalizer.

America's Drug War has achieved one Victory. Led by these remarkable Drug Czars, a bipartisan political emphasis on police, prosecutors and prisons has made my Land of the Free the world's largest prison system.

When I was growing up, this distinction belonged to the Siberian Gulags of the Soviet Union, and before that, to Nazi-occupied Europe. In 2000, under the leadership of Czar and former Army general Barry McCaffrey, this pathetic Gold Medal passed to the USA, and we now boast 2,300,000 children, women and men behind bars. We're Number One!

Stop shaming this troubled man and enabling his problems. Get the guy -- and the USA -- some help immediately!

Robert Merkin
Northampton, Massachusetts

*******************

Friday 30 June 2006
Columbus Dispatch (OH)
Copyright 2006 The Columbus Dispatch
Contact: letters@dispatch.com
Website: http://www.dispatch.com/
Author: John C . Burnham
Note: John Burnham is research professor of history at Ohio State University, where he specializes in the history of medicine and American social history.

FORMER DRUG CZARS
BELIEVE THEIR WAR
HAS BEEN WON

The United States has won the war against illegal drugs. That was the conclusion of a unique gathering on June 17, which marked the 35th anniversary of the war's beginning in 1971 with the appointment of Dr. Jerome H. Jaffe, a psychiatrist, as the first White House drug czar.

Jaffe was joined at the the anniversary gatheing in by six other former czars, Dr. Robert L. Du Pont, Dr. Peter G. Bourne, Lee I. Dogoloff, Dr. Donald Ian Mac-Donald, Lee Brown and retired Army Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey. Also attending were 20 former staff members and a handful of experts, including me, a specialist historian.

The meeting, sponsored and hosted by the University of Maryland, was held for the purpose of making a historical record.

The seven former czars and former staff members held remarkably unanimous views, though they come from a variety of backgrounds and included Democrats and Republicans who worked for five very different presidents. And what they had to say was often surprising.

The main conclusion that we won the war on drugs was the biggest surprise, because advocates of illegal drugs have in recent years filled the media with rhetoric about "the failed war on drugs." The czars' straightforward conclusion may come as a shock, but, as they outlined what the war was about, what they had to say made a lot of sense.

Thirty-five years ago, the big worry was the veterans who were returning from Vietnam who had been using illegal drugs. And the drug causing overwhelming concern was heroin. A hard-headed public-health approach showed an alarming number of deaths directly related to heroin, not to mention crimes committed by addicts. As the veterans showed that their use did not continue after their return to the United States, and as methadone-maintenance programs came into place, along with enforcement and education, heroin use declined, and even more dramatic was the decline in heroin-related deaths. This was the great victory of the war on drugs. A recent small uptick in illegal drug use is remarkably insignificant compared with the original problem.

Only in the 1980s, when the price of cocaine, in the form of crack, went down did that drug become a significant public-health problem. But what about marijuana? At that time, the serious effects of pot smoking were largely unknown. But in the late 1970s, the parents movement developed parents who had seen what happened when their kids got addicted to marijuana and their young brains got fried. This was a huge group of very angry people, and they were political dynamite.

The main tension in the office of drug czar was between enforcement and treatment. Congress would fund enforcement but did not like treatment, although one czar told of taking a couple of reluctant members of Congress to view a treatment center and see how much money treatment was saving the public as addicts, often under court coercion, were enabled to work productively.

For historians like me, the collective experience of the former czars provides two lessons. The first is unwelcome to extremists of the right and left and their shady commercial allies: Prohibitory laws can work.

Historians have established that the 1920s experiment in alcohol prohibition was successful and was repealed in 1933 only because of a massive, well-financed propaganda campaign.
The leadership of the drug czars in reducing supply and demand of illegal drugs is reflected not only in the public-health statistics. They can also cite public opinion polls. Thirty-five years ago, illegal drugs were usually first or second and no lower than fourth as public concerns. Now the drugs issue trails many other problems.

Everyone at the conference knew that the problem is going to continue for American society, but at a much lower level than 35 years before. That is what laws do: They attempt to control problems, not bring perfection. Laws against murder provide hope to control the problem, not abolish murder.

The second lesson is more subtle. The title czar was ironic, because the appointees had no direct, executive power. Instead, they coordinated the many federal and local agencies dealing with aspects of the drug problem and drug-law enforcement. The czars used persuasion. They got a drug detection and treatment system into the armed services, where the programs served as models for private businesses and other units. When new substances of abuse came along, often the czar was able to get officials and private businesses, especially pharmaceutical companies, to get one substance or another restricted before it became a major problem.

So what if the amusingly designated czars had no real power? They proved that in American government, there can be impressive leadership beyond formal power.