Food, Drink or Drug Related – education and deconstruction.com

The Acid Queen

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The Book of the Week is “The Acid Queen, The Psychedelic Life And Counterculture Rebellion of Rosemary Woodruff Leary” by Susannah Cahalan, published in 2025.

Rosemary was born in April 1935 in Saint Louis. Her family changed residences frequently through her childhood. At the dawn of her thirties, she made a friend and lover in a high place, in the form of Timothy Leary. Born in 1920, he was famous by then for his advocacy of LSD. He was still married, but separated from his second wife.

In the second half of the 1960’s, wealthy heiress Peggy Hitchcock owned the humungous estate up in Millbrook, New York State, on which Leary led a socialist cult. His purported goal was to educate his disciples in improving their lives by using controlled substances. Those drop-outs from society consisted of tens of upper-middle-class whites who were rebelling against their bourgeois lifestyles.

Leary’s lawyer helped him and Rosemary weasel out of legal trouble with drug possession and tax evasion, in arguing that the drugs were a tool of their religion. In September 1966, they legitimized their religion as a church by completing the legal paperwork, naming it League for Spiritual Discovery. It was monotheistic, urging its parishioners to alter their consciousness with LSD on a weekly basis, and smoke marijuana on a daily basis.

That same month, Leary and Rosemary raised funds by putting on a psychedelic and spiritually uplifting show that involved performance art, special-effects and preaching (of a hybrid Christianity and Buddhism), at a theater in Manhattan for a sold-out audience of more than twenty-eight hundred. Although he was already way older than thirty, Leary appealed to disaffected, countercultural American youths, doing the talk-show circuit on the idiot box, and doing the lecture circuit on college campuses.

In January 1970, the Nixon administration passed an anti-drug law to harshly punish all the kinds of people (those protesting the Vietnam War; employees of communications outlets who were propagandizing about drugs– raising awareness of them, and their uses; and those who believed in a libertarian lifestyle) on the president’s enemies list.

Read the book to learn much more about Rosemary’s life, times and social circle.

Speaking of a president with an enemies list who is harshly punishing all kinds of people: The current one is doing so, but he himself has yet to be punished in a way that fits his decades’ worth of numerous crimes! Here’s a little song that depicts the tip of the iceberg.

THE CRIME GAME

sung to the tune of “The Name Game” with apologies to the Estate of Shirley Ellis and to whomever else the rights may concern.

The crime game.

Tax-cheating! Tax-cheating. Tax-cheating. System-beating. Funny-money. Secret meetings. Oh my. Fines-defeating. Tax-cheating.

Treason! Treason. Treason. Base appeasin’. Spying, lying. All season. Oh my. Justice-teasin’. Treason.

Come on everybody. This is the time. I bet you we can make a list, of a fraction of Trump’s crimes. Committing of the crimes, he vehemently denies. But courts and courts, and courts contain his lies. And then we say the crime, then repeat, then we say a rhyme, then a phrase, rhyme, and oh my. Then we say a rhyme again, and the crime a third time. Then the verse is done. We could do this all day and for all time. And there’s hardly a crime that we can’t rhyme.

Failed coup! Failed coup. Failed coup. Chaos grew. Uncivil drivel. Trump’s nasty crew. Oh my. Hatred ensued. Failed coup.

But all of Trump’s crimes helped him amass power. So he got rich and he makes people cower. Like. No prez. Before. He controls the vast network Fox. Like, everyone should be wary, wary. Together, they’re scary, scary. To truth and justice, he is contrary. Okay?

Now say libel. [libel] Now libel repeated. Now say a rhyme, [rhyme] and a phrase. Now say a rhyme another time, then oh my, and the rhyme another time. Then the crime. And there’s hardly a crime that we can’t rhyme.

Everybody do fraud!

Fraud. Fraud. Court see-sawed. Appeals-deals. Rulings flawed. Oh my. Trump’s base is awed. Fraud. Pretty good.

Let’s do conspiring!

Conspiring. Conspiring. Illegal-firing. Steam-rolling, controlling. RICO hiring. Oh my. Gets tiring. Conspiring. Very good.

Let’s do racketeering!

Racketeering. Racketeering. Lots of smearing. Plugs for thugs. Lots of hearings. Oh my. Trump’s base is cheering. Racketeering.

Saming with defaming.

Defaming. Defaming. Situation gaming. Jeering and sneering. Cruel nicknaming. Oh my. False blaming. Defaming.

The crime game.

Wild Chocolate

The Book of the Week is “Wild Chocolate, Across the Americas in Search of Cacao’s Soul” by Rowan Jacobsen, published in 2024. in this wordy, redundant volume, the author described in great detail, the single-digits 2000’s trend:

In fragmented and complex ways, individuals and families have become the stewards of cacao trees and in environmentally friendly ways, have harvested their beans that are made into high-quality, expensive chocolate sold worldwide. The trend has been comparable to that of microbreweries of the 1990’s. The takeaway was that no one can corner the cacao-bean market anymore.

The author listed just a few different source-countries of cacao trees– Belize, Guatemala, Trinidad, Ecuador, Peru, Mexico, Ghana, and Ivory Coast. He also described just a few of the risks and dangers associated with the numerous steps of the complicated process of how chocolate products are made. Among them:

lack of access to cacao trees (when the kingpins of the cocaine trade are occupying the remote areas of the Amazon rain forest, or Mexico, where the trees grow);
the flooding of a river around the cacao trees;
lack of fermentation and drying sheds to accommodate the amount of beans harvested;
ruination of an entire batch of beans due to mishaps in connection with food chemistry; and
problems caused by animals’ (electric eels, anacondas, crocodiles, and tucanderas, etc.) sharing the same habitat as the cacao trees.

The author visited the Bolivian Amazon rain forest where the Indigenous tribes do slash-and-burn agriculture, growing rice and herding cattle. By the 1990’s, urbanites were deforesting the region for farming. In 1991, Volker Lehmann, a member of the German Volunteer Service (the equivalent of America’s Peace Corps) sought to re-forest the region via the wild cacao tree. He had to talk to the Chiname tribe.

In June 1991 in Bolivia, the Drug Enforcement Administration of the United States raided the cocaine labs in Santa Ana de Yucuma, but the cocaine trade continued, because growing coca plants (and poppies for the heroin trade) was still more lucrative than the alternative crops of bananas, pineapple or hearts of palm, offered by the German Volunteer Service.

Read the book to learn much more about how much time, effort and expense goes into making chocolate products.

ENDNOTE: The author interchangeably used the terms “jungle” and “rainforest” but they are different.

Blind Spots

“The media clapped like seals congratulating the researchers. Reporters amplified the study’s conclusion, even thought they hadn’t yet seen the actual data… the media promoted whatever health authorities said, rarely challenging them or publishing quotes from dissenting experts.”

For decades now, such are the sound bites emanating from communications sources, telling people about alleged medical-research results or medical recommendations; information that is distorted at best, and is even harmful to the population.

The Book of the Week is “Blind Spots, When Medicine Gets It Wrong, and What it Means for Our Health” by Marty Makary, MD, published in 2024. This slightly sloppily edited volume contained anecdotes of wrongheaded messaging of medical “experts” that resulted in numerous needless deaths and ruined lives. Not to mention lawsuits.

In 2000, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) told Americans that an infant should not be fed any peanut butter or products with any peanuts– as the child would develop a peanut allergy. The AAP should have made the opposite recommendation, as their reasoning was backwards.

Makary saw that the AAP’s board of messengers were mostly dieticians and had little or no immunology knowledge! For fifteen years, many pediatricians blindly obeyed the AAP, and told their patients to avoid peanuts. Those patients developed extreme (life-threatening) peanut allergies that had to be treated with exorbitantly priced EpiPens. The experts with whom Makary spoke– who claimed to know what caused a peanut allergy, were later promoted and got awards in their respective careers.

The above happens frequently in the medical industry. For decades, arrogant medical authorities also told people that opioids aren’t addictive. To combat a myth such as this, the author and his colleagues started a website, “Sensible Medicine” but a drawback is that one of the types of people (a closed-minded, cocky medical professional) who could benefit from the site, won’t read it!

The author wrote that Big Pharma shies away from funding research that doesn’t involve intellectual property from which it can make big bucks. Thus, funding was stopped for a non-mRNA technology flu vaccine (one covering many flu strains)– because it wouldn’t have to be administered annually, and wouldn’t pay royalties to anyone.

Meanwhile, the media continue to spout their staged and scripted reality shows of political soap-operas whose issues affect a tiny percentage of ordinary Americans, while America’s broken healthcare system continues to cause the deaths of, and bankrupt numerous people every day.

Read the book to learn of many more healthcare abominations borne of greed, and dogma, and how healthy skepticism is a good thing.

Slow Noodles

The Book of the Week is “Slow Noodles, A Cambodian Memoir of Love, Loss and Family Recipes” by Chantha Nguon, published in 2024. Born around 1961, the author endured the hunger, hard manual labor, bullying from the authorities and other aspects of her decades-long survival struggles through fantasizing about the food her mother cooked for her. Cooking became a life-saving skill later in her life.

In March 1970, Cambodia underwent a regime change. Lon Nol replaced Prince Norodom Sihanouk, and got a lot of financial aid from the U.S. for claiming he was anti-Communist. The new dictator also got military help in the form of American B-52s’ indiscriminately killing people in the countryside. The goal was to rid Cambodia of Vietnamese and non-Buddhist people. The author’s mother was Vietnamese, so the author was considered genetically Vietnamese, too. They were eventually forced to flee to Saigon.

All through the 1970’s, the region of Southeast Asia was particularly hard-hit by genocide, atrocities and torturous practices perpetrated by war criminals who obeyed their respective dictators. As an adolescent, Nguon was subjected to personal hardships, including the deaths of her older sister (who served as her surrogate mother until her mother arrived in Saigon) and her mother.

Nguon, like countless, anonymous hundreds of thousands of other refugees, could have died of disease, starvation, bombings, guerrillas’ bullets, pirates, or land mines, or a combination thereof. On rebuilding Cambodia after Pol Pot’s reign, she wrote, “The big foreign aid groups did their best, but they had no idea how to reshape a civilization from nothing. Who does? Donors, NGOs, and politicians want speedy tangible progress. The natural bias is ‘Hurry up and heal. We have other emergencies to attend to.’ “

Read the book to learn about the kinds of assistance the author provided to her fellow Cambodians, and much more about her food, life and times.

The Face Laughs – BONUS POST

The Bonus Book of the Week is “The Face Laughs While the Brain Cries, The Education of A Doctor” by Stephen L. Hauser, published in 2023.

Born at the dawn of the 1950’s, the author grew up mostly in Bayside, a section of Queens in New York City. He began conducting medical research in the 1970’s, when knowledge and resources were extremely limited. His first drug-study involved 58 multiple-sclerosis patients selected from two hospitals in Boston. He got to know every patient personally.

Around 2010, the author was a small cog in the wheel of a much, much more extensive multiple-sclerosis-drug study that involved 2,500 patients affiliated with more than 300 hospitals on 5 continents. There were data galore from MRI’s, test results from clinicians and blood and spinal fluid, and integrity- monitoring of the whole extravaganza. Nine million pages of information.

Read the book to learn much, much more about the doctor’s experiences with his medical research and the U.S.’s drug-approval process.

ENDNOTE: The author recounted a few medical cases of people who had lost their minds. They turned out to have brain damage from multiple sclerosis.

Regardless of the cause of the inability of the patients to do their jobs– they couldn’t do their jobs competently. When such workers are responsible for leading a sprawling entity, where people’s lives or livelihoods hang in the balance, there can be extracurricular activity because no one is minding the store.

Two particular cautionary tales in the United States come to mind in connection therewith. It is true, no one person, not even the top leader is entirely to blame when things go wrong, but they get blamed because one thing leads to another, due to their impaired brain function.

Authors of personal accounts have documented how Ronald Reagan had reduced brain function in his second term as U.S. president; among them, George Shultz and Lesley Stahl. Peggy Noonan claimed Reagan had a hearing aid that was only sometimes on, so he was blissfully unaware of a lot of events he should have known about. The head of the CIA, Bill Casey was dying of a brain tumor. One subordinate of his, Oliver North, went rogue– played a large role in secretly selling weapons to the Iranians, with the help of Israel and Saudi Arabia!

The other instance involved Bill Paley, who was head of the international corporation, CBS, into the 1980’s. He would come into board meetings with a walker and two nurses by his side. Due to extensive memory loss, he was clueless as to what was going on. Since he wasn’t truly running the company anymore, a rogue department at CBS, having zero experience, decided to try to make movies. That division generated disastrous losses that resulted in layoffs in unrelated departments, causing trauma for all stakeholders associated with CBS.

In both of the above instances, there would have been a lot less trouble had the leader been removed when his incompetence due to reduced brain function became evident. Hint: the 25th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution can be invoked when a president is deemed sufficiently cognitively impaired to warrant his removal.

Brave New Weed

The Book of the Week is “Brave New Weed, Adventures into the Uncharted World of Cannabis” by Joe Dolce, published in 2016. The author interviewed several individuals in various places associated with growing, using and /or selling parts of the marijuana (or cannabis) plant in the medicinal, recreational and entrepreneurial realms, and related his own personal experiences with it. The terms “marijuana” and “cannabis” will be used interchangeably hereinafter, to refer to the whole plant but other terms will be used to refer to specific parts, such as buds.

At the book’s writing, many American states had yet to pass laws decriminalizing or regulating cannabis. Dolce spoke with people who dispensed it for medicinal purposes, legally and illegally. On the latter score, some Americans dispense marijuana to treat medical conditions without proper licensing or credentials. But they aren’t just out to make a buck. They truly care about their patients. They do their homework, experimenting with the chemicals in cannabis, and consulting with others in Israel, Spain, the United Kingdom, Scandinavia, the Netherlands and Czech Republic.

Anecdotally, Dolce was told that cannabis contains double the carcinogen benzopyrene that tobacco does, yet cannabis can be used to allow easier breathing in treating COPD in the short term. He also related that preliminary studies showed that people who were potheads in their youth are turning out to have lower rates of Alzheimer’s disease in their old age, than those who weren’t.

There is still so much secrecy and false information that is disseminated accidentally and / or intentionally about cannabis, that Americans have had difficulty in learning the truth about it. The author attempted to state facts when he found a reliable source of them. One such fact is that cannabis-related scientific research on mice cannot be perfectly extrapolated to humans because humans are an infinitely more complicated life-form than mice. Israel is one place whose laws have allowed extensive marijuana research on humans.

Dolce tried a concentrated cannabis oil illegally dispensed from an individual in California. It made him so ultra-sensitive to all the stimuli around him– the lights, road, sidewalk, other cars, the sky, the car radio, etc.– he was having trouble driving. On a related note, in 2023, in Boca Raton, Florida near State Road 441, drivers would know they were similarly overstimulated when they saw the wording and graphics of a certain billboard. Without explanation, the billboard disappeared in a few weeks.

On a negative note, the places that grow cannabis-buds are extreme electricity hogs– their bills can run into the thousands of dollars monthly after a Colorado state discount is subtracted. All business is done in cash, and the IRS collects a large amount of tax revenue. Further, high-volume consumers of cannabis lose their ability to dream while sleeping.

Nonetheless, the author’s ideal vision for the future of cannabis is one in which Americans spurn Big Agriculture, Big Tobacco and Big Pharma in favor of toxin-free, contaminant-free, and environmentally-friendly products they can use to relieve their suffering; with the profits of such an industry reinvested in the local community. Good luck with that.

It still remains to be seen what kinds of regulation various states will impose, given their current political climates, and how much of a role the federal government will continue to play– given the nature of political donors and lobbyists, voter-demographics, and propaganda wars.

Read the book to learn about: how hemp is different from marijuana; the best way to store buds to extract optimal medicinal benefit; Colorado’s decriminalization of cannabis that began in 2009 and the legalization of dispensing it that began in January 2014; various dispensing businesses there; marijuana’s different forms including oils, sprays and vaporizers; what transpired when, in 2015, Dolce quit cannabis for sixty days; the lingo, the etiquette, dosing, strains, forms, biological effects, and interesting medical factoids including, “Cannabis is so dose specific that large and small amounts create opposite effects.”

Tripping on Utopia

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The Book of the Week is “Tripping on Utopia, Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science” by Benjamin Breen, published in 2024. This book documented the circumstances that led several “scientists” in America to experiment with psychedelic drugs from the 1940’s through the 1970’s.

In 1920’s Munich in Germany, psychotherapists tested mescaline on schizophrenic patients. Ditto in 1930’s London, England. In 1933, funded by government or university grants, the thirty-one year old Margaret Mead, along with her male or female lover of the moment (She had a series of them through her life), practiced “salvage anthropology.” She tried to salvage information about exotic cultures that were dying due to colonialism and war.

In the 1930’s, Mead did fieldwork with the Native-American Omaha tribe in the Great Plains. They, and her research subjects in Bali used peyote, a psychedelic drug, for ritual purposes. She theorized about sexual identity and wrote best-selling books.

Mead and her scientific colleagues discussed how Hitler used hypnotism to control the subconscious thoughts of his fellow Germans. He didn’t need psychedelics! Starting in 1939, she and her then-husband studied human nature to help propagandize for the war effort. In 1941, “The members of the Committee for National Morale saw themselves as a shield protecting freedom, democracy and diversity from the weaponized manipulative forms of applied science emanating from Nazi Germany.”

The American federal agency, Office of Strategic Services (OSS) began to study truth serum and hypnosis for the purpose of getting prisoners-of-war to talk, improving the health of traumatized soldiers, and analyzing enemy psychology.

In 1944, since Mead and her husband, Gregory Bateson, had insiders’ knowledge and experience of tribes’ cultures in Asia, they were allowed to play adolescent-boy spy games, thinking they could make the Japanese surrender. In late 1944, Bateson volunteered to go to Burma on perilous missions. In reality, as evinced by kamikazes, and their guerrilla warfare all over the South Pacific theater, the Japanese would never, ever surrender. They would actually fight to the last man. Mead, Bateson, and other spies were fooling themselves. Their big egos led them to risk their lives for nothing.

After the war, the CIA began a series of research projects called MKULTRA. Most of those conducting the LSD, mescaline and psilocybin Cold-War Era studies didn’t know the CIA was providing funding. The Macy Foundation and the Department of Defense were the CIA’s fronts. The operation was a desecration and perversion of legitimate scientific research, as it scrapped the scientific method. In one experiment, a spy posing as a “scientist” slipped LSD into the alcoholic drinks of his unknowing friends and acquaintances at social gatherings.

Further, many of the research described in the book sounded unscientific— lacking rigor (amateur, James-Bond wannabes were conducting them), lacking a statistically significant amount of data, and lacking a regard for chemical interactions of the psychedelics with alcohol!

In the 1950’s– about two decades prior to the outlawing of psychedelics– the “scientific” community (comprised of psychiatrists, pop psychologists and spies, not to mention profiteers) around Stanford University especially, had the arrogant notion that perhaps LSD could accelerate the rate by which global culture could not only become one big, peaceful, happy family with no starvation– but also become more tolerant of otherness, different lifestyles, sexual orientations and gender identity.

It appears that in trying to solve the world’s problems, politicians nowadays are a little less naive than they were in the mid-twentieth century. However, reducing social ills requires multi-pronged approaches– legislation and social programs. Ironically, instead of eliminating social ills, introducing psychedelics to society caused social ills to multiply exponentially.

Anyway, read the book to learn about the evolution of research on psychedelics, including various shameful episodes in which people, dolphins and Siamese fighting fish were harmed or died; one of which involved a prestigious institution (whose main character was, by 1960, described thusly: “Approaching forty, he had alienated most of his colleagues back in Berkeley, was nearly bankrupt, and had no income despite his extravagant multimonth family vacation [in Spain and Florence, Italy].”).

Tangled Vines

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The Book of the Week is “Tangled Vines, Greed, Murder, Obsession, and an Arsonist in the Vineyards of California” by Frances Dinklespiel, published in 2015. The moral of this book’s main story is “Lawsuits followed and winemakers like Viader made mental notes never to be cavalier about the disposition of fire-damaged wine.”

According to the author, as of 2013, Americans drank the largest quantity of wine, 13% of all the wine of all the countries in the world.

In October 2005, a majorly evil crime was committed at the Wines Central warehouse on Mare Island in Vallejo. An assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern district of California– an expert in wine fraud and arson, and an agent from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives assessed the damage and investigated the site. The latter used an acceleration-detection canine, also called an arson dog.

The perpetrator committed: mail fraud (for shipping wine across state lines under a false name), interstate transfer of stolen property (because it wasn’t his wine to sell), arson, and tax evasion.

Fire destroyed millions upon millions of dollars’ worth of wine (stored in the warehouse) of mostly mom-and-pop wineries. As is usual in such instances, insurance claims of winemakers whose wine was covered, were denied, because the insurers contended that the wine was “in transit.”

In the single-digit 2000’s, Bill Koch of Koch family fame, didn’t spare a dime in finding out how he had become the victim of wine fraud. He employed investigators in various fields: ex-FBI agents, ex-Sotheby’s workers, a glass historian, and experts in cork and adhesives and labels. He sued the auction house and original seller of the wine.

Read the book to learn about the kinds of people who are passionate about making and selling wine, how they became victims of one especially bad actor, and a few other incidents in the life of the California wine industry.

The Longest Race

[Please note: The word “Featured” on the left side above was NOT inserted by this blogger, but apparently was inserted by WordPress, and it cannot be removed. NO post in this blog is sponsored.]

The Book of the Week is “The Longest Race, Inside the Secret World of Abuse, Doping, and Deception on Nike’s Elite Running Team” by Kara Goucher with Mary Pilon, published in 2023.

Born in 1978, the author grew up in New Jersey and the Duluth, Minnesota area. Goucher became a professional runner. Like many of her fellow athletes, the author– who experienced an early childhood trauma– found at a young age that competing in footraces is cathartic.

Goucher focused on her training and reaching the finish-line first, rather than getting all worked up about the numerous stressful situations she endured in everyday living. However, she rationalized away some of the wrongs committed against her, because speaking out against them would ruin her career, her marriage, her friendships, etc.

In the United States, the way runners go professional is to convince a corporate, non-governmental sponsor to pay them to race. Goucher and her husband both signed contracts with Nike, the monster-sized corporation best known for making athletic shoes. The company provided her and her fellow runners in her working group with the best, cutting-edge scientifically and technologically advanced resources for winning races.

However, the Gouchers’ status with Nike was as independent contractors, so they had less legal recourse than that of employees with regard to any illegal goings-on in their field of work. Their coach and immediate boss was the celebrity runner Alberto Salazar. In the single-digit 2000’s, he led the “Oregon Project” which was an attempt to help Americans win races again around the world; their victories had been woefully plummeting for years.

Salazar did boost Kara’s confidence and helped her perform better than she thought she could. But, his behavior and many of his training practices were inappropriate and illegal. He and his colleagues (an alleged psychotherapist and medical doctor) wielded a lot of power over the Gouchers, who owed their careers to their sponsor. Salazar’s underlings hewed to his training methods through fear and force. “He [Salazar] got testy when called out for having a third drink. I could only guess how he would react to being called out about sexual harassment.”

As a female, Kara had to deal with Nike’s double standard of suspending her pay when she ran an insufficient number of races in a specified time period pursuant to her contract. Male runners were punished this way when they got caught in doping scandals or had injuries. She was subject to those same conditions, but she couldn’t race because she was pregnant. In connection with exploring her career options, Kara wrote, “… I found myself again and again in rooms of male executives explaining women’s running to me. There seemed to be more interest in how I would look on a poster than in how the sport could evolve.”

Fighting “City Hall” in so many different areas of life is difficult. Anyone who attempted to do so in professional running in the single-digit 2000’s would have to deal with Nike. It held a near-monopoly with overwhelming power and influence over regulators. Whistleblowers would suffer doxing and death threats.

BUT, it is an age-old truism that when more and more courageous people come forward with firsthand information about wrongdoing by an institution or a particularly powerful individual– the less the harm that will be done in the future because the collective mood of the community will shift against the wrongdoer. Eventually.

Read the book to learn lots of additional details of the Gouchers’ experiences in their professional running careers– their trials, tribulations and triumphs.