A very special anniversary celebration

Here at the Institute for Nixon Studies we take our milestones seriously. The president's birthday. Alex Butterfield's Senate testimony. The release of the "smoking gun" tape. So naturally it has been champagne all around today as we celebrate the 47th anniversary of RMN's resignation. Let me encourage you to raise a glass in honor of our weirdest president and have a look back at Jonathan Schell's 1973 article in The New Yorker, "Blowing the Whistle on Watergate." Here's a timely excerpt:

Something that must be faced is that the public, like the President, was not much aroused by the Watergate case for a full ten months. The public had not ruled out the possibility that high Administration officials were involved in planning and then in covering up the incident. Rather, a large portion of the public believed these things to be true, but, in a striking reversal of its traditional response to governmental corruption, it did not care to pursue the matter any further. This was, one hopes, the nadir of public opinion as an institution in our national life. When public opinion has lost the will to compel a thorough investigation into the apparent subversion of a Presidential election by officials of the Administration in power, it has been neutralized as a voice in the basic affairs of the Republic.

“I would call this ‘How to Create an Addict’ education.”

How long did it take for the AMA to cut its financial ties with opioid manufacturers? About as long as it took it to cut its ties with the tobacco industry. Way too long, in other words. Julia Lurie explains in Mother Jones:

The American Medical Association’s new training on pain management arrived in the midst of a burgeoning crisis. It was September 2007, and doctors were prescribing enough opioid painkillers each year for every American adult to have a bottle of the addictive pills. Overdoses were at a historic high and showed no signs of slowing down. Just four months earlier, executives at Purdue Pharma had pleaded guilty to felony charges for misleading regulators and physicians about the dangers of OxyContin.

In light of this news, one might have expected the AMA—the prestigious organization that bills itself as the “unified voice” of America’s doctors dedicated to “the art and science of medicine and the betterment of public health”—to bring attention to the crisis in its newly updated continuing education course on how to treat pain.

Instead, the 12-module training suggested that doctors were still too tentative about prescribing narcotics. “The effectiveness of opioid therapy may be undermined by misconceptions about their risks, particularly risks associated with abuse and addiction,” read materials from one session. The class included ideas like “pseudoaddiction,” referring to when pain patients seem “inappropriately drug seeking,” but aren’t truly addicted—rather, they just needed more pills.

For young children who were unable to verbalize their pain, materials encouraged prescribers to use the “Poker Chip Tool”: lay out four poker chips in front of a child, explain that the chips are “pieces of hurt,” and ask how many pieces of hurt the child has. The course instructs, “Do not give children an option for zero hurt.”

Thousands of physicians took the course, which was first released in 2003 and updated periodically over the next decade. Recently, I asked Dr. Roneet Lev, chief medical officer to the Office of National Drug Control Policy from 2018 to 2020, to take a look at the modules. She concluded, “I would call this ‘How to Create an Addict’ education.”

Perhaps that shouldn’t come as a surprise: Down in the fine print, the AMA-branded course materials reveal that the training’s development and distribution was made possible by an educational grant from Purdue Pharma.

"I trust in the people who are advising President Gabel. We've got great minds thinking about this."

Yeah, well. I wonder which Great Mind will step up to take the credit for planning to hold an "in-person convocation ceremony for several thousand new students indoors at 3M Arena at Mariucci" in September, rather than at an outside venue.

Regardless of where the convocation is held, the U is facing a problem when students return in the fall. Here is what the Star Tribune says:

A growing number of University of Minnesota professors and staff are calling for the state's flagship institution to require COVID-19 vaccinations this fall as the delta variant fuels a surge in new COVID-19 infections.

With the start of the semester only a month away, many faculty members say they are growing increasingly anxious about returning to the classroom without a vaccination mandate and other safety measures. More than 500 people have signed a letter in support of a vaccination requirement for U students and employees, and a faculty group on Wednesday discussed steps it would take to pressure the university.

There is "broad frustration and deep anger among faculty at Twin Cities that has been building over the summer about the unsafe reopening policies put forward by the administration," the University of Minnesota chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) wrote in a statement Thursday.

The U is among just a handful of colleges in the Big Ten Conference that are not requiring COVID-19 vaccinations. Minnesota's other public college system, Minnesota State, is not requiring vaccination, either, but nearly a dozen private colleges in the state and hundreds of institutions nationwide are.

The university implemented a mask mandate at its five campuses this week, but it does not currently plan to enforce social distancing policies or require students to undergo regular COVID-19 testing.

Several dozen faculty chapter members emerged from a Wednesday meeting in agreement that the university should mandate vaccinations and require those who cannot be vaccinated or seek exemptions to be tested for COVID-19 regularly. The university's AAUP chapter also expressed desire for greater teaching flexibility to accommodate employees with large classes, health conditions or children too young to be vaccinated.

While U faculty got to choose whether to teach in person or online in the previous academic year, those wanting to teach remotely this fall must seek approval to do so. The university is planning for a return to normalcy, with about 80% of fall classes at the Twin Cities campus slated to be taught in person.

Twin Cities faculty members say they are planning to write newspaper op-eds and work with student organizations to increase pressure on the university, hoping the public scrutiny will give administrators cover to change their policies before the semester starts Sept. 7. The faculty chapter said a local news report suggesting U professors were threatening a work stoppage was not true, however.

"It's not that faculty don't want to be in the classroom, it's that we want the university to make our classrooms safe so that we and our students are safe," said U political science Professor Teri Caraway, treasurer of the AAUP chapter.

Caraway questioned why U leaders have not held an open forum with students and employees to discuss possible COVID-19 safety measures. "They would rather just sit in a closed room with their hand-picked advisers," she said. 

A mensch, a liar, a monkey and a pathological vaudevillian

 That's how Tom Waits described Chuck E. Weiss, the inspiration for the Rickie Lee Jones classic, “Chuck E.’s in Love.” His obituary is here.

Drone warfare whistleblower Daniel Hale gets 45 months in prison

Chris Hedges explains in Salon:

Daniel Hale, a former intelligence analyst in the drone program for the Air Force who as a private contractor in 2013 leaked some 17 classified documents about drone strikes to the press, was sentenced on Tuesday to 45 months in prison.

The documents, published by The Intercept on Oct. 15, 2015, exposed that between January 2012 and February 2013, U.S. special operations airstrikes killed more than 200 people. Of those, only 35 were the intended targets. For one five-month period of the operation, according to the documents, nearly 90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets. The civilian dead, usually innocent bystanders, were routinely classified as "enemies killed in action."

The Justice Department coerced Hale, who was deployed to Afghanistan in 2012, on March 31 to plead guilty to one count of violating the Espionage Act, a law passed in 1917 designed to prosecute those who passed on state secrets to a hostile power, not those who expose to the public government lies and crimes. Hale admitted as part of the plea deal to "retention and transmission of national security information" and leaking 11 classified documents to a journalist. If he had refused the plea deal, he could have spent 50 years in prison. 

Here are excerpts from Hale's handwritten letter to the judge:

"Not a day goes by that I don't question the justification for my actions," he wrote. "By the rules of engagement, it may have been permissible for me to have helped to kill those men — whose language I did not speak, customs I did not understand, and crimes I could not identify — in the gruesome manner that I did. Watch them die. But how could it be considered honorable of me to continuously have laid in wait for the next opportunity to kill unsuspecting persons, who, more often than not, are posing no danger to me or any other person at the time. Never mind honorable, how could it be that any thinking person continued to believe that it was necessary for the protection of the United States of America to be in Afghanistan and killing people, not one of whom present was responsible for the September 11th attacks on our nation. Notwithstanding, in 2012, a full year after the demise of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, I was a part of killing misguided young men who were but mere children on the day of 9/11." 

He and other service members were confronted with the privatization of war where "contract mercenaries outnumbered uniform wearing soldiers 2 to 1 and earned as much as 10 times their salary."

"Meanwhile, it did not matter whether it was, as I had seen, an Afghan farmer blown in half, yet miraculously conscious and pointlessly trying to scoop his insides off the ground, or whether it was an American flag-draped coffin lowered into Arlington National Cemetery to the sound of a 21-gun salute," he wrote. "Bang, bang, bang. Both served to justify the easy flow of capital at the cost of blood — theirs and ours. When I think about this, I am grief-stricken and ashamed of myself for the things I've done to support it."

Keep off the grass

What's running through my head this hot Minnesota morning.

A Minnesota physician's articles on Parkinson's Disease have been retracted after he failed to disclose his business interests in the treatment

 Which is all great, of course -- except what about the gazillion other published papers out there that remain untouched after it has been revealed that the authors have failed to disclose their financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry?

But I digress. Here is what the Star Tribune has to say:

For more than 20 years, Dr. Martin C. Hinz has been an advocate and researcher in the use of nutritional products and urinalysis for people suffering from Parkinson's disease, depression and other maladies.

The 67-year-old Duluth native claimed in his most recent paper that the costly amino-acid treatments he says he invented work better than gold-standard therapy prescribed by neurology specialists.

But questions about that work have surfaced in recent months after the owner of Dove Medical Press, an academic publisher of peer-reviewed scientific and medical journals, retracted all six of Hinz's articles on Parkinson's. The six were among 20 papers on various diseases and lab techniques retracted because Hinz and his co-authors failed to produce raw data and medical ethics paperwork after not fully disclosing his and his family's business interests in sales of the costly pills.

It isn't the first time Hinz's theories and methods have drawn scrutiny and criticism.

In 2005 and 2011 he received warnings from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for marketing untested nutrients as drugs. Last year, the Minnesota Board of Medical Practice reprimanded him for false advertising, unethical conduct and fee splitting. The board restored Hinz's Minnesota medical license to full standing in November after he paid a $7,188 civil penalty.

Hinz, who lives in Florida, maintains his journal articles were stricken from the record on a technicality — a missed deadline by a co-author — and that his underlying scientific conclusions remain valid.

"I think that every reader is allowed to come to their own conclusion," Hinz said, defending his work. "The peer review was never attacked. The science that we put on paper was never attacked. … With these papers, I don't think we did anything wrong."

Hinz's most controversial claim is that carbidopa — a component of the prescription Sinemet, the mainstream treatment for Parkinson's — is associated with greater death rates from the disease.

He continues to stand behind the claim, as shown in a May 2021 pamphlet provided to the Star Tribune. His tone has shifted to reflect the FDA's insistence that nutritional products costing hundreds per month can't be sold as "treatments" without first doing a clinical trial.

"We treat nothing," Hinz wrote in an e-mail. "We claim to treat nothing with nutrients."

One doctor familiar with Hinz's work said the decision to retract the articles points to a longstanding problem — Hinz has never run a randomized clinical trial to prove his claims.

"I have seen no evidence, nor does my ... understanding of Parkinson's explain to me why [Hinz's] protocol would work," said Dr. Matthew Markert, a neurologist and researcher with Stanford University. But "to fail to provide the opportunity for a potentially superior treatment to undergo the scrutiny of randomization and blindedness is a tragedy, and harmful to all the people who would benefit."

Asked about Hinz's current business activities, an FDA spokesperson declined to comment, saying, "The FDA does not comment on ongoing investigations."