Poppy Happy Aussy

Painkiller demand drives crop expansion beyond Tasmania

GEOFF HISCOCK, Contributing writer

SYDNEY — Strong global demand for painkillers is underpinning moves in Australia, the world’s biggest legal grower of opium alkaloids, to expand the cultivation of opium poppies.

Consumers around the world spend about $30 billion a year on pain medication, with North America and Europe the biggest markets for codeine, thebaine, morphine and other opiates that go into branded pharmaceutical products such as Panadeine, OxyContin and Roxanol.

From just 10% of the total production area, Australia produces about half of the concentrate of poppy straw (CPS) used by the global pharmaceutical industry, ahead of Turkey (23%), France (21%) and Spain (4%).

Crossing the water

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Narcotic Notice

Importer of Controlled Substances Application: Janssen Pharmaceuticals, Inc.

A Notice by the Drug Enforcement Administration on 01/16/2018

This document has a comment period that ends in 31 days. (02/15/2018)

Publication Date: 01/16/2018
Agencies: Drug Enforcement Administration
Dates: Registered bulk manufacturers of the affected basic classes, and applicants therefore, may file written comments on or objections to the issuance of the proposed registration on or before February 15, 2018. Such persons may also file a written request for a hearing on the application pursuant on or before February 15, 2018.

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Nugan Hand Trick Bank

More CIA Treachery: Nugan Hand Bank Ltd
By Elias Alias, 2015

This latest version of the selected excerpts from Alfred McCoy’s masterpiece on the CIA’s dope dealing escapades is more complete than previous postings. I have typed in passages from pages 461-472 in Alfred W. McCoy’s bombshell book, “The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity In The Drug Trade“, (1991; first edition 1972.)

At 4:00 a.m. on January 27, 1980, a state police officer patrolling a country road west of Sydney, Australia, noticed a late-model Mercedes sedan parked by the side of the road and stopped to examine it. Inside the constable found the body of a middle-aged male slumped forward, still holding the rifle he had apparently used […] Searching his wallet, the police found personal identification for one Frank Nugan, a merchant banker of Sydney, and a calling card from one William Colby, a New York lawyer who had recently retired as director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.

The circumstances of Nugan’s [death] and the bank’s spectacular collapse only six months later have inspired hundreds of press probes, three major Australian government investigations, and a lengthy

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Con Front Nugan Hand

Nugan Hand Bank
By John Simkin, 1997 (updated 2014)

In 1973 Frank Nugan, an Australian lawyer, and Michael Hand, a former CIA contract operative, established the Nugan Hand Bank. Another key figure in this venture was Bernie Houghton, who was closely connected to CIA officials, Ted Shackley and Thomas G. Clines.

Nugan ran operations in Sydney whereas Hand established a branch in Hong Kong. This enabled Australian depositors to access a money-laundering facility for illegal transfers of Australian money to Hong Kong. According to Alfred W. McCoy, the “Hand-Houghton partnership led the bank’s international division into new fields – drug finance, arms trading, and support work for CIA covert operations.” Hand

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Nugan at Hand

NUGAN HAND, THE CIA, AND AUSTRALIA
Project Censored, 2015

An American spy story with more intrigue than James Bond’s best has been unraveling in Australia since 1975 but yet has to grab the attention of our press. While the story is more complex than the proverbial can of worms, it involves:

— CIA involvement in the overthrow of an Australian Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, representative of the Labor Party;

— Pine Gap, a U.S. satellite and communications base in Australia, said to be our single most important installation for monitoring the Soviet Union and Asia’; Prime Minister Whitlam was trying to shut Pine Gap down when he was ousted;

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Pressing Mexico Traffic

COURAGE — David and Goliath in the Age of Internet News Reporting
by Michael C. Ruppert

A meritless New York libel suit, already thrown out of Mexican courts, is more than a mega-Goliath vs. defiant-David epic. It is also more than a case study of the brutality of unlimited criminal wealth tyrannizing unyielding truth. It is a story that, while clearly demonstrating the swelling power of Internet journalism, threatens to further erode and intimidate a not-so-free press at a time when any kind of diversity is instantly targeted for a “final solution.” At the heart of it all is a forty-something veteran journalist named Al Giordano, an iconoclast, bi-lingual, former Bostonian political-beat reporter who prefers a laptop, the Mexican heartland, tortillas and cerveza, along with the company of the “real people” of Latin America to the consumerized, pre-packaged, flavorless thought stream of gringos in the north.

What did Al do to deserve the leading role in a Bogartesque tragedy? Well, after cornering U.S. Ambassador to Mexico, Jeffrey Davidow with documentation of his role in aiding the brutal 1970s coup

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Coca Bush Men

 

Jeb Bush, the Mexican Drug Cartel and “Free Trade”. The Bush Family and Organized Crime
By Michel Chossudovsky (2015)

Jeb Bush is a presidential candidate.  

But Jeb is not only the brother of George W. and the son of George H. W. Bush. Jeb Bush also had close personal ties to Raul Salinas de Gortari, brother of Mexico’s former president Carlos Salinas de Gortari.

In the 1990s, Raul the “drug kingpin”, according to Switzerland’s  federal prosecutor Carla del Ponte, was one of the main figures of the Mexican Drug Cartel. Jeb Bush  –before becoming Governor of the Sunshine State– was a close friend of Raul Salinas de Gortiari:

“There has also been a great deal of speculation in Mexico about the exact nature of Raul Salinas’ close friendship with former President George Bush’s son, Jeb. It is well known here that for many years the two families spent vacations together — the Salinases at Jeb Bush’s home in Miami, the Bushes at Raul’s ranch, Las Mendocinas, under the volcano in Puebla.

There are many in Mexico who believe that the relationship became a back channel for delicate and crucial negotiations between the two governments, leading up to President Bush’s sponsorship of NAFTA.” (Prominent intellectual and former foreign Minister of Mexico Jorge G. Castañeda, The Los Angeles Times. and Houston Chronicle, 9 March 1995, emphasis added)

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Jonestown Drugs Program

How Jones used drugs
Narcotics as a control
By Peter King, San Francisco Examiner, 1978

Potential troublemakers or defectors from the Peoples Temple flock in Jonestown were kept under tight control in a special “extended-care unit” where they were heavily drugged, according to former residents of the jungle commune.
There were enough dangerous drugs at the remote compound — thousands of doses of anti-depressants and downers — to treat each of the 900 cultists who lived there hundreds of times.
Although the temple had an official anti-drug policy — some members were ex-addicts who had kicked the habit under Jim Jones’ influence — there were enough drugs at the mission to supply a city the size of Georgetown, Guyana (population 66,000), according to an American pathologist who inspected the scene.
Police and government authorities in Guyana are sorting out documents pertaining to drugs found at Jonestown as their investigation spreads into areas beyond the killings. The drug question has been a low priority up to now.

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Drinking the Kool-Aid

Jonestown survivors talk of concentration camp existence
By Robert James, The Stanford Daily, Volume 175, Issue 1, 29 January 1979

Two members of the Peoples Temple who escaped the Jonestown camp last November addressed a psychology class here last Tuesday. Both Diane Louie, 26, and Richard Clark, 42, made their first public presentation as part of Prof. Philip Zimbardo’s class, “The Human Connection.” Louie and Clark have been active members of the Temple for over six years, they said.

They fled the settlement into the Guyana jungle November 17, the day of the arrival of the late Rep. Leo Ryan (D-San Mateo). The following day, Ryan and his party were ambushed and the mass suicides occurred.

The speakers attributed psychic powers to the group’s leader, the Rev. Jim lones, including the ability to

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Jonestown Genocide

Jonestown: Population Zero
The Jonestown Massacre: CIA Mind Control Run Amok?

Excerpted from 50 Greatest Conspiracies of All Time
By Jonathan Vankin and John Whalen, Copyright © 1995

On November 18, 1978, in a cleared-out patch of Guyanese jungle, the Reverend Jim Jones ordered the 911 members of his flock to kill themselves by drinking a cyanide potion, and they did.

The cultists were brainwashed by the megalomaniac Jones, who had named their jungle village after himself and held them as virtual slaves, if not living zombies. Jones himself was found dead. He’d shot himself in the head, or someone else had shot him. Square-jaw, jet black hair and sunglasses, looking like a secret service agent on antipsychotic drugs, Jones takes his place alongside Charles Manson in America’s iconography of evil.

But was Jones really a lone madman as Americans are so often advised about their villains? Is it plausible that more than nine hundred people took their own lives willingly, simply because he told them to? Or is there another explanation?

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