America’s rush to normalcy has robbed us of the time to grieve our Covid dead


Americans who’ve lost loved ones to Covid-19 say they feel like ‘everyone wants you to get over it’

‘It is harder to have a sense of shared grief, because we are not all sharing it evenly.’ Illustration: Ulises Mendicutty/The Guardian


Iffah Kitchlew
Sun 13 Mar 2022

We have lost a great deal within the last two years. The worldwide Covid death toll has surpassed 6 million lives. In the US, nearly a million people have succumbed to the virus – more than the number of people who died during the civil war. In fact, more lives were lost to Covid in the US last week alone than in the attacks on Pearl Harbor and 9/11 combined.


The Covid cloud is starting to lift – but two years on, its legacy of grief lingers

And now, at the pandemic’s second anniversary in the US, we are watching a terrifying war unfold abroad. The immense cumulative toll on the public’s psyche has felt impossible for many to escape.

“It’s like losing someone in a car accident and being surrounded by car accidents, 24/7,” said Sabila Khan, a 42-year-old from Jersey City, New Jersey, whose father died of Covid-19 in April 2020.

The world is trying to move on: mask mandates are relaxing and quarantine periods are shortening. But this rush to reinstate a sense of normalcy may have inadvertently robbed us of the time we need to process many layers of trauma. It’s important to ask ourselves: have we been given the space to grieve the scale of what we have lost?

“That exposure to so much death on a massive scale is so unsettling to a person’s mental health. It made people realize just how precarious their lives are,” said Holly Prigerson, director of the Cornell Center for Research on End-of-Life Care. “It’s a recipe for a perfect psychological storm.”

If anything lies in the eye of this “psychological storm”, it is grief. This might explain the response to the most recent surge in the pandemic. The flu-ization of the Omicron variant – meaning the push to treat the virus as an endemic illness similar to the flu – has changed the narrative on Covid. Workers are returning to their offices, restaurants are no longer requiring vaccinations, festivals as big as Coachella are heading to get rid of vaccine and Covid testing requirements.

The apparent lack of severity of Omicron’s symptoms and the advent of the Covid vaccine has given people a “false sense of security”, according to Amna Zaki, a psychiatric nurse at St Francis medical center in Trenton, New Jersey. “By fall of last year people’s attitude was ‘We’re done, it’s over,’” she said.

But for those who have seen the worst that it can do, the pandemic is far from over.

“We’re still trying to heal our grief and our heartbreak,” said Jeneffer Haynes, 38, who lost her younger brother to Covid last year. Haynes remembers sitting on a plastic chair, by herself, in a cold, palely lit hallway at Holy Cross hospital’s Covid ward in Germantown, Maryland, watching as he struggled to breathe. After eight days in a small grey hospital room, Haynes’ brother died. He was 30 at the time.

Haynes says she still has not wrapped her head around the events of her brother’s death. And as the world reverts to business as usual, she says people who have experienced a Covid loss like her feel as if their grief is being ignored.

“I feel like an outcast,” said Manisha Patel, a 43-year-old from Pennsylvania whose 76-year-old father died of Covid at the beginning of the pandemic.

Coping with this kind of grief can be particularly challenging because of the circumstances of a Covid-related loss, said Debra Kaysen, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University’s School of Medicine.

“This is a place where normal mourning is interrupted. Where it is hard to finish or to move forward with the grieving process,” she added.

The interruption of mourning traditions can worsen mental health issues for the bereaved. A study on the Ebola epidemic in Sierra Leone found that the disruption to community mourning practices increased the severity of distress among those who had lost someone to Ebola, making it more difficult for them to cope with their grief.

The feeling that everybody else is moving on from the pandemic, then, can complicate this grief.

“As the world is shifting, people may feel like they are being left behind. For them, it’s not back to normal. And it really can’t be,” said Kaysen.

But not everyone has lost loved ones over the last two years. About 9 million people are grieving a Covid loss, an average of nine close relatives have been left bereaved for every Covid death in the US. This also means that there are 291 million people who are not grieving.

“It is harder to have a sense of shared grief, because we are not all sharing it evenly,” said Kaysen. The uneven distribution of Covid losses has created some “tension” between those who want to get back to their lives and those who do not have that luxury, she added.

That disconnect has, in a way, stolen the time and space needed by those who have lost someone during the pandemic to grieve properly. Patel lost her father two years ago; her teenage daughter, the “favourite grandchild”, still has not cried.

For Khan, whose father was already suffering from Parkinson’s disease when he was diagnosed with Covid, his death feels like an “inconvenient statistic” that ruins people’s “rosy-colored picture” of the pandemic’s regression. “Everyone wants you to get over it,” she said.

We cannot assume that people will “just move on and be over it, because that’s not going to happen”, said Prigerson.

In this situation, memorializing those lost to Covid, in a way that the Aids Quilt has done for Aids-related losses, might be a much-needed way to heal from these deaths, said Kaysen. We could create a sense of “shared mourning”, she added.

This is especially important because people are still losing their loved ones to the virus. According to the WHO, half a million people worldwide have died of Covid between the time Omicron was first declared a variant and the beginning of February. About a third of all Covid-caused children’s deaths in the US have happened during the Omicron surge.

“If people could just hear us, from the people who have lost a loved one, to see the severity of this,” said Patel.

However, there might be a silver lining for what people can do for each other in this trying time.

In search of a space that would understand her grief, Khan created a Facebook group based in the US for those who have lost someone to Covid. The group is working to provide access to affordable mental health services for its members as well. Haynes has dedicated much of her time to equitable vaccine distribution in Maryland, where she lives, among disadvantaged and minority communities.

We have lost a great deal to two years of a pandemic, but we have not lost everything. There is hope for our communities to come together, to become more empathetic, according to Kaysen.

“Folks have learned ways to be more interconnected, even when we are not seeing each other in person. And that has the potential to help us build a sense of community even during times when we can’t be together.”

 ANALYSIS

How Deng Xiaoping set China on a path to rule the world

The Conversation

 / By Tony Walker

Posted Fri 9 Jul 2021 at 4:45pmFriday 9 Jul 2021 at 4:45pm

Deng, a man of diminutive size — he was barely 1.5 metres tall — has had an outsize impact on world economic history.(Wikimedia Commons)

Deng Xiaoping could lay claim to being the most significant political leader of the latter part of the 20th century, and one whose legacy continues to expand.

His record is remarkable.

It is at least arguable, if not certain, that had it not been for Deng's force of personality and his willingness to take political risks, China would not have embarked in 1978 on an accelerated process of economic development.

If the Chinese economy had not achieved staggering rates of economic growth of 10 per cent annually on average in the decades following Deng's political re-emergence in 1977, the world would be a very different place.

In other words, one man of diminutive size — he was barely 1.5 metres tall — has had an outsize impact on world economic history.

Deng's rise, fall and rise again

Born to a landowning family in Sichuan province in 1904, Deng gradually progressed through the Chinese Communist hierarchy as a committed Marxist-Leninist and a tough field commander and political commissar.

Mao Zedong may have prevailed in a bloody revolutionary war against the Nationalists, but it was his one-time protégé who propelled a country containing one-quarter of the world's population into a new era.

History will be a lot kinder to Deng than it will be to Mao, who brought enormous grief to his country in highly destructive political campaigns, culminating in the Cultural Revolution of 1966–76.

Deng himself was a victim of these campaigns. He was banished from the Chinese leadership early in the Cultural Revolution until he was rehabilitated in 1973 by his patron, then-Premier Zhou Enlai. He was purged a second time after Zhou died in 1976.

Mao's death not long after Zhou's and the arrest of the Maoist acolytes known as the "Gang of Four" enabled Deng to assert himself in a series of stunning political manoeuvres that ruled a line under years of revolutionary upheaval.

China's chairman Mao Zedong (left) conferring with Deng Xiaopiong (right) in Shandong province in March 1959.(Reuters)

To get rich is glorious

Deng was, without question, an authoritarian figure who believed in the absolute power of the Chinese Communist Party. His legacy will be forever stained by his authorisation of force against the pro-democracy demonstrators on Tiananmen Square in 1989, in which hundreds are believed to have died, and many more were incarcerated.

Without excusing the excesses of the Tiananmen crackdown, however, the totality of Deng's contribution to his country's transition from economic laggard to modern superpower cannot be overstated.

Deng's extraordinary achievements are too many to list here, but three dates stand out in his efforts to set his country on a path, as he put it, of "reform and opening".

The fact he used both words — reform and opening — summed up his approach to wrenching his country from its revolutionary past to chart another course.

These dates are:

1978: Deng's authority manifested itself at the Third Plenum of the 11th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party.

In modern Chinese history, this event is seen as the starting point for the massive shifts that would loosen up China's economy and dismantle what was known as the "bamboo curtain" that had shielded it from the outside world.

1980: In a speech whose importance is sometimes lost in historical accounts, Deng laid down the "Great Tasks" facing China in the last two decades of the 20th century and beyond.

Among those tasks was the quadrupling of gross national product by 2000, an aspiration that was initially scoffed at. Under the Deng-initiated reforms, which included the de-collectivisation of agriculture and the unleashing of an entrepreneurial business class, China achieved that goal in a canter.

Deng Xiaoping was responsible for opening up China's economy to the world.

1992: Deng, then 90 and in bad health, embarked on what was described as a nanxun, or southern inspection tour, in which he re-energised the reform process after it had fallen into the doldrums following Tiananmen.

The fallout from the massacre included the purging of reformist leader Zhao Ziyang, who was general secretary of the Communist Party and a former premier. A ruthless Deng elected not to protect his protégé.

Historians may well come to regard Deng's nanxun as not simply his last hurrah, but his most enduring contribution to China's surging power and influence.

In all of this, it is important to remember that in 1978, China's economy was about the same size as Italy's. In 2021, China's economy on a nominal GDP basis is the world's second largest behind the United States, and should surpass the US in the next few years. At the same time, China has lifted 800 million people out of poverty. Never before in human history have we seen anything quite like this.

Of course, Deng did not achieve all of this by himself, but he was prepared to embrace what Mao had sought to suppress in a single-minded desire to maintain control over party and country. This was the extraordinary energy and enterprise of the Chinese people.

Deng's various slogans, such as "to get rich is glorious" captured the moment, and indeed helped to unleash the full potential of the Chinese people.

Biding its time no more

None of this is to suggest Deng's legacy will be untroubled, or that China's surging power and influence will continue to build without impediments.

The country's continuing economic transformation resembles a high-wire act as China's leadership seeks to maintain its footing in a world in flux as American power recedes. China's economy is far from having reached a plateau in which consumer demand provides a buffer against ups and downs in its export markets. These are challenging times for the post-Deng leadership in Beijing.

DDeng's various slogans, such as "to get rich is glorious" helped to unleash the full potential of the Chinese people.(Reuters: Reinhard Krause, File)

Deng himself may well have looked askance on the emergence of a personality cult around paramount leader Xi Jinping. In his "Great Tasks" speech of 1980, Deng had warned against this very development.

This was born of his own experiences at the hands of a tyrannical Mao. In that speech, Deng had emphasised collective leadership in the knowledge that untrammelled power corrupts.

What has certainly been left astern is Deng's advice that China should "keep a low profile" or "bide its time" — tao guang yang hui — as its power and influence grows. The use of this phrase has been variously interpreted over the years as either a warning from Deng that China should avoid throwing its weight around or a ruse in which Beijing stealthily accumulates power without making it too obvious.

Under Xi's brand of Chinese nationalism, the approach has been discarded. This may have been inevitable as China becomes more powerful, but it is at least debatable whether a shrewd Deng Xiaoping would have countenanced an approach that risked antagonising much of the rest of the world.

Tony Walker is a Vice-chancellor's fellow at La Trobe University. This piece first appeared on The Conversation. 

THEY STILL DO
Opinion | Poison Pills and Deadly Powders: When Presidents Ordered Assassinations

Amid calls to target Putin, it’s worth recalling why the U.S. has stopped trying to kill foreign heads of state.


President Eisenhower at his desk on March 16, 1959. | Bob Schutz/AP Photo

Opinion by STEPHEN KINZER
03/13/2022 
Stephen Kinzer's new book is Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control.

America’s rage at a foreign demon has rarely been as intense as our current fixation on Vladimir Putin. He is this generation’s Mao or Castro, its Gadhafi or Saddam or Khomeini, the rampaging and perhaps deranged foreign tyrant who personifies everything we hate and fear. Many in Washington see last month’s invasion of Ukraine as entirely his doing. Some believe the world will never be at peace as long as he lives and rules. From there it’s a short step to wishing him “sawed off” — as Dwight Eisenhower put it when he ordered Fidel Castro’s assassination in 1960.

“Is there a Brutus in Russia? Is there a more successful Colonel Stauffenberg in the Russian military?” Sen. Lindsey Graham mused recently. “The only way this ends is for somebody in Russia to take this guy out.”

In some circles it might be considered imprudent for a leading political figure to urge the murder of a foreign leader. Graham, however, was only expressing publicly what some of his colleagues may wish privately. The reasoning is simple. If Putin is the problem, “eliminate” Putin and the problem disappears.

Such open calls for political murder are rare. The Fox News host Sean Hannity jumped aboard, reasoning that “You cut off the head of the snake and you kill the snake. Right now, the snake is Vladimir Putin.” Others are less explicit about their wishes for Putin’s death or overthrow. When a spokesman for British Prime Minister Boris Johnson was struck by an attack of honesty and admitted that sanctions on Russia are intended “to bring down the Putin regime,” she was quickly corrected. Yet when senators including Graham, Cory Booker, Marco Rubio and Amy Klobuchar co-sponsor a resolution accusing Russia of “flagrant acts of aggression and other atrocities rising to the level of crimes against humanity and war crimes,” they are clearly putting a target on his chest.

Two deep fallacies undermine this argument. First is the premise itself — that a different Russian leader might seek an accord to withdraw troops from Ukraine. No one who hopes to secure power in Moscow, however, could ever accept Ukraine’s entry into NATO or the presence of hostile troops on Ukrainian soil. Any Russian president who did so would be seen as exposing his country to mortal danger and quickly deposed. Removing Putin would not alter Russia’s determination never to tolerate an enemy army on another of its borders.

The second and more illuminating argument against killing foreign leaders is the poor record we have in past attempts. We’ve tried it repeatedly. Often we have failed, but even when we seem to have succeeded, the long-term consequences have been terrible. An order from the Oval Office to assassinate a foreign leader would not break a taboo. It would only be the latest in a series of self-defeating blunders.

So far as is known, Dwight Eisenhower was the first president to order such assassinations. He began by targeting Premier Zhou Enlai of China. During the 1950s, Eisenhower and nearly every other policymaker in Washington considered the “Red Chinese” to be maniacal fanatics bent on world conquest. When Zhou announced in 1955 that he would travel to Bandung, Indonesia, for a momentous conference of Asian and African leaders, the CIA saw a chance to kill him. Zhou chartered an Air India jet for his flight to Bandung. It exploded in midair, killing 16 passengers. But Zhou had not boarded. China called it “murder by the special service organizations of the United States.”

After Zhou landed safely on another flight, CIA Director Allen Dulles decided to try again. He directed the chief of the CIA’s chemical division, Sidney Gottlieb, to prepare poison. Gottlieb made one that would kill Zhou 48 hours after it was dropped into his rice bowl — presumably after he was back home in China, giving the Americans plausible deniability. This plot was aborted at the last moment when Gen. Lucian Truscott Jr., then serving as a deputy CIA director, learned of it and exploded in anger. Fearing that CIA involvement would become known, according to his biographer, he “confronted Dulles and forced him to cancel the operation.”

Gottlieb destroyed all his files upon leaving the CIA in 1973. As a result — and because of the tradition that assassination orders must never be explicit — no details of the Zhou Enlai plot have been discovered. It was the strict policy of the CIA, however, never to embark on something as serious as assassinating a head of government without presidential approval.

Evidence ties Eisenhower more directly to other plots. During the summer of 1960, he was preoccupied by political murders. His main target was the demon who would obsess American leaders for generations and still does today, even though he is dead: Fidel Castro. On May 13, 1960, after receiving a briefing from Allen Dulles, he ordered Castro “sawed off.”

“In that period of history, its meaning would have been clear,” Richard Bissell, then the CIA’s covert action chief, testified years later. “Eisenhower was a tough man behind that smile.”

Eisenhower’s order set off a wild series of assassination attempts. For more than three years, CIA planners considered plots ranging from a sniper shot to an exploding seashell. The most elaborate ones involved toxins or devices designed by Sidney Gottlieb. They included, according to a later Senate report, “poison pills, poison pens, deadly bacterial powders, and other devices which strain the imagination.”

While waiting for news of success in his plot against Castro — which never came — Eisenhower ordered another assassination. His victim was to be Patrice Lumumba, a defiant nationalist who was elected prime minister of the Congo in May 1960. Eisenhower feared Lumumba’s challenge to Western power in a huge African country that controls vast mineral riches.

On the morning of Aug. 18, 1960, Allen Dulles received an electrifying cable from the CIA station chief in the Congo, Larry Devlin. “Embassy and station believe Congo experiencing classic Communist effort takeover government,” it said. “Anti-West forces rapidly increasing power Congo and therefore may be little time left in which take action to avoid another Cuba.” Dulles took the cable to the Oval Office.

From 11:10 to 11:23 that morning, according to Eisenhower’s official calendar, he held an “off the record meeting” with Dulles and other CIA officers. After hearing their report, the note-taker wrote, the president “turned to Dulles and said something to the effect that Lumumba should be eliminated. There was stunned silence for about 15 seconds, and the meeting continued.” Senate investigators later pinpointed this moment as the point when Eisenhower “circumlocutiously” ordered Lumumba’s assassination.

What does a president do after giving such an order? Eisenhower posed for a photo with the departing Ecuadorian ambassador, had lunch, and then decamped to Bethesda for an afternoon of golf at Burning Tree Club. In case anyone missed the point, he sent his national security adviser, Gordon Grey, to the next meeting of the CIA’s covert action “special group” with instructions to convey “top-level feeling in Washington that vigorous action would not be amiss.”

A couple of weeks later, Devlin received a cable from CIA headquarters telling him to expect a visit from an officer who would identify himself as “Joe from Paris.” When the officer arrived, Devlin recognized him as Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA’s poison-maker. Gottlieb handed him a packet containing a vial of liquid botulinum and told him he was to use it to kill Lumumba.

“Jesus H. Christ!” Devlin cried. “Who authorized this operation?”

“President Eisenhower,” Gottlieb told him. “I wasn’t there when he approved it, but Dick Bissell said that Eisenhower wanted Lumumba removed.” Then he helpfully added: “With the stuff that’s in here, no one will ever be able to know that Lumumba was assassinated.”

Devlin managed to organize a coup in which Lumumba was overthrown but not killed. He remained immensely popular both at home and abroad. Devlin’s efforts to penetrate his security ring and poison him, including an attempt to slip him a tube of tainted toothpaste, all failed. That didn’t discourage Allen Dulles. “We wish to give every possible support in eliminating Lumumba from any possibility of resuming government position,” he wrote in one cable. At one point Devlin and his officers considered using a “commando type group” to capture him. Then they asked if a sharpshooter with a “high powered foreign made rifle” could be found.

“Hunting good here when light’s right,” one CIA officer observed in a cable to headquarters.

The CIA’s poison ultimately went unused, but Devlin found another way to complete his mission. On November 27, Lumumba slipped out of the home where he was being held under Congolese and United Nations guard. Devlin set out to find and capture him. His key partners were intelligence officers from Belgium, the former colonial power, which had become fabulously wealthy by exploiting the Congo’s mineral wealth. Together, they had Lumumba tracked, seized, tortured and delivered to his most murderous local enemies. A Congolese squad executed him under watchful Belgian eyes. No American was present.

Years later, an interviewer asked Allen Dulles if he regretted any of his operations. “I think that we overrated the danger in, let’s say, the Congo,” he replied. Devlin agreed.

“None of us had any real concept of what he stood for,” Devlin later wrote of Lumumba. “He was simply an unstable former postal clerk with great political charisma, who was leaning toward the Communist bloc. In Cold War terms, he represented the other side. The fact that he was first and foremost an African nationalist who was using the East-West rivalry to advance his cause was played down by the Belgians, who greatly feared him.”

When Eisenhower left office in January 1961, he could count one successful assassination — Lumumba, in concert with the Belgians — and two failures: Zhou Enlai and Castro. His successor, John F. Kennedy, focused intently on Castro. Especially after the spectacular failure of the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, he absorbed Eisenhower’s view that Castro must be “sawed off.”

“There was a flat-out effort ordered by the White House, the president, Bobby Kennedy — who after all was his right-hand man — to unseat the Castro government, to do everything possible to get rid of it by whatever device could be found,” former CIA director Richard Helms later told congressional investigators. The Kennedy administration sought relentlessly to kill Castro, even as it sent peace feelers to him through secret channels. On the very day President Kennedy was assassinated, a CIA officer in Paris passed a poison device to an operative who was to use it to kill Castro.

Kennedy also embraced another of Eisenhower’s Caribbean plots, aimed at the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo. Both presidents detested Trujillo and feared that his brutal rule might produce a Castro-style revolution. In July 1960, while Eisenhower was in office, the CIA delivered 12 “sterile” rifles with telescopic sights to anti-Trujillo plotters. Nine months later, with Kennedy in the White House, it delivered three carbines. The plotters carried out their tyrannicide on May 30, 1961. Democracy emerged a couple of years later, but the United States decided it could not tolerate that democracy because President Juan Bosch seemed too leftist and sympathetic to Castro. That led the United States to launch its 1965 invasion of the Dominican Republic and to stage-manage the election of a former Trujillo ally, Joaquin Balaguer, who went on to dominate the country for much of the next 30 years.

The assassination that most tormented Kennedy was one that he set in motion but did not realize he had ordered. In a jumble of diplomatic missteps, and without a direct presidential command, the Kennedy administration authorized the overthrow of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem. On Nov. 1, 1963, assured of U.S. support, plotters carried out their coup and then assassinated Diem.

“Kennedy leaped to his feet and rushed from the room with a look of shock and dismay on his face which I had never seen before,” General Maxwell Taylor, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, later wrote of the moment when news of Diem’s death landed in the Oval Office. “He had always insisted Diem must never suffer more than exile, and had been led to believe or had persuaded himself that a change in government could be carried out without bloodshed.” This killing, the historian Staley Karnow wrote, “haunted US leaders during the years ahead, prompting them to assume a larger burden in Vietnam.”

Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, embraced covert action, as have all modern American presidents, but did not emulate his two predecessors by authorizing assassination. The day after Kennedy was killed, he showed a visitor a portrait of Diem and said, “We had a hand in murdering him. Now it’s happening here.” Later Johnson wondered if Kennedy’s assassination was “divine retribution.” He also expressed disgust for the plots against Castro and Trujillo: “We were running a goddamn Murder Inc. in the Caribbean.”

Americans are impatient by nature. We want quick solutions, even to complex problems. That makes killing a foreign leader seem like a good way to end a war. Every time we have tried it, though, we’ve failed — whether or not the target falls. Morality and legality aside, it doesn’t work. Castro thrived on his ability to survive American plots. In the Congo, almost everything that has happened since Lumumba’s murder has been awful.

Our record in carrying out regime change short of murder is hardly better. The CIA-directed overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953 cast Iran into a political whirlwind from which it still has not escaped. A year later, the CIA coup against President Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala aborted a ten-year democratic experiment and set that country on a path toward civil war and genocide.

Soon after the Guatemala coup, Eisenhower invited Allen Dulles and other CIA officers to the White House for official congratulations. They presented an elaborate account of their operation, complete with charts, slides, and film clips. Eisenhower had one question.

“Why the hell didn’t you catch Arbenz?” he asked.

“Mr. President,” came the reply, “that would have set a very dangerous precedent for you.”

Oregon’s psychedelic mushroom regulators accused of conflict of interest

Chair of board advising on legalisation of psychedelic mushrooms resigns after being accused to standing to profit from own rules

A vendor bags psilocybin at a pop-up cannabis market in Los Angeles. In 2020, after a landmark US-first vote, Oregon legalized the therapeutic use of psilocybin. \Photograph: Richard Vogel/AP

Mattha Busby

Sun 13 Mar 2022 

The chair of a board advising on the legalisation of psychedelic mushrooms in Oregon has resigned after being accused of standing to profit financially from the potentially $1bn industry he is helping to shape.

In 2020, after a landmark US-first vote, Oregon legalized the therapeutic use of psilocybin. But the ructions at the board could throw the whole industry into disarray.



Will the magic of psychedelics transform psychiatry?

The state governor appointed an advisory board to help implement the trailblazing reforms, for rollout in January next year.

According to local media reports, however, some members of the board have allegedly announced or indicated their plans to invest in the industry.

Former chair Tom Eckert, who led the campaign to pass the psilocybin ballot, has created a company to train magic mushroom therapy facilitators.

Other members also admitted recently that they were intending to pursue business ventures, after it was agreed personal and financial conflicts of interest would be formally disclosed. The board makes non-binding recommendations to health authorities.

Responding to questions from the Guardian ahead of his resignation, Eckert – whose wife, Sheri, with whom he had campaigned for years, died in late 2020 of cardiac arrest, defended his actions.

“In many cases, our perspectives and experiences relate to industry involvement, which was known when we were appointed and is known, through our disclosures, by the board, the public, and the [Oregon health authority]. I have disclosed my projects, as have others on the board. I supported the updated policy and will continue to comply with that policy.”

He argued that individual board members use their contacts to help connect “useful people and resources’” to the board. “It is in the board’s interest to seek out and integrate the best information out there, from multiple perspectives, so that we can optimally support the Oregon health authority in building the best statewide program possible.”

But as the risk of bringing the reputation of the board into disrepute grew, he resigned. “As my life continues to change, with more relationships taking shape, I am mindful of appearances. I do not want anything to distract from the earnest work of this advisory board,” he said in a statement first reported by Marijuana Moment.

“It feels like the right time to orient my energies to the next stage of the journey. I look forward to supporting the development of Oregon’s psilocybin infrastructure in new and different rules.”

Oregon’s cautious experimentation comes as evidence grows of the beneficial effect of magic mushrooms on mental health. A handful of other US states have since moved towards rolling back psychedelic drug prohibitions and providing a legal framework for psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy.

Campaigners, experts and business people in Oregon – many of whom are passionate about the potential of psilocybin to address the country’s mental health crisis – have been tasked with helping to create the rules.

Potential conflicts of interest are, in that sense, unsurprising, say some industry sources. “This volunteer advisory board was specifically chosen because folks are involved in populating the eventual [psilocybin therapy] ecosystem with organizations,” said one company insider. “It’s a trade board in that sense.”

But David Nickles, an expert on the nascent psychedelic industry, said the “personal and professional conflicts of interest” of the chair raise significant questions.

As well as founding the firm Innertrek to train psilocybin therapists, it emerged that Eckert has also been in a personal relationship with the CEO of a company investing in the Oregon psychedelic industry. The firm, Synthesis Institute, recently bought a 124-acre property in Oregon, to host future retreats that are likely to cost thousands of dollars, as well as facilitator training.

The board has commended Synthesis for the expertise provided to them by its staff. It said Synthesis “has supported nearly 20% of our inaugural psychedelic practitioner training cohort participants” with financial scholarships.

“The chairman’s personal and professional conflicts of interest raise significant questions,” said David Nickles, an expert on the nascent psychedelic industry.

“In what situation is it appropriate for people who are crafting regulations to also profit off of the industry they are regulating? What does it mean to forge undisclosed romantic relationships across lines of industry and regulation? And, even if it’s happened before, do such practices generate or maintain a world in which we want to live?.”

Eckert told a recent board meeting that where there are potential conflicts of interest, “it makes sense for thinking of not voting on those issues”.

Oregon department of justice rules state that appointed public officials serving on a board should publicly announce any conflicts of interest, not participate in any debate on the issue and refrain from voting on it.

Eckert went on to tell the board: “There’s so many grey areas. The expertise is coming in on a lot of those subcommittees because we’re working on stuff, and I’ve been transparent about working on a training programme for example.

“Therefore, I’m interested in understanding how that can happen in all kinds of ways. So [deciding] where that line is is going to be tricky, and I’m very open to defining that a little bit more. We kind of did this on the fly early on.”

Some cannabis regulators have been accused of helping enrich friends who are already established in the industry, by raising barriers to market entry amid the so-called “green rush”. Last year in Florida, John Burnette, a developer who is married to a cannabis company CEO, was jailed for conspiring for former state representative Halsey Beshears “to keep out competitors”. Critics have argued that there is a revolving door between decision-makers and the cannabis industry.

Oregon is under particular pressure to ensure that low-income and ethnic minority communities are not shut out of the potential psilocybin economy.

A state senate committee voted last week to establish a taskforce including representatives of the indigenous community to examine barriers faced by people of colour in starting psilocybin-related businesses.

“We cannot continue the cycle of shutting out the future of medicine to certain communities and we have a rare opportunity here to prevent these inequities from being built into this system in the first place,” said state senator Wlnsvey Campos.

Egypt, 7 Other Countries Request Equitable Distribution of Vaccines, Drugs

Sunday, 13 March, 2022 - 

An Egyptian citizen receives the coronavirus vaccine. (Egyptian Health Ministry)
Cairo - Walid Abdulrahman

Egypt, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Senegal, South Africa and Thailand have urged the international community to promote the equitable distribution of vaccines and medicines across the world.

This came in a joint statement issued during the activities of the 49th session of the Human Rights Council in Geneva.

Egypt’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations Office in Geneva Ahmed Ihab Gamaleldin said the statement underscored the importance of ensuring the fair and equitable access to safe, effective, high-quality and affordable drugs and vaccines.

Less than 15% of the population in low-income countries have received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine so far, Gamaleldin warned.

According to a Foreign Ministry statement, Gamaleldin said this access is critical to confront chronic epidemics such as HIV, malaria and tuberculosis, as well as other diseases.

Cairo called on the international community to create propitious conditions nationally, regionally and internationally, in cooperation with international and civil society organizations, including the private sector, to avoid discrimination and ensure all people’s access to these vaccines and medications.

The joint statement called for enhancing the public health infrastructure and expanding regional and local production by encouraging innovative approaches to global partnerships and technology transfer processes.

It underscored the importance of ensuring people’s immediate access to COVID-19 vaccines, especially to the poor and most vulnerable groups around the world, “to provide safety for all.”

Head of the Human Rights Committee in Egypt’s House of Representatives, MP Tarek Radwan, pointed out that President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi was keen to turn Egypt into a major regional hub for the manufacture of vaccines to ensure Arab and African countries have access to various types of vaccines to confront the virus.

The Health Ministry reported on Friday 854 new coronavirus cases and eight deaths, raising the infection tally to 495,373, including 424,831 recoveries. While the death toll amounted to 24,277 since the pandemic began in March 2020.

Libya: Oil Crescent Residents Renew Threats to Shut Oil Ports

HOW'S THAT NATO NATION BUILDING GOING

Sunday, 13 March, 2022 - 09:30

A view shows El Feel oil field near Murzuq, Libya, July 6, 2017.

 (Reuters)

Cairo - Khalid Mahmoud

The residents of the Oil Crescent Region threatened to shut down oil ports and block exports in protest of the “continued support” of the UN Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL) to the government chaired by Abdul Hamid Dbeibeh.

A statement by the residents said that if the UN mission continues to support the Government of National Unity (GNU), they will shut down oil exports.

The locals called on the international community to support and recognize the new government assigned by the House of Representatives (HoR) and headed by Fathi Bashagha.

They said that this would end the division and stop wasting public money caused by the previous government.

The statement signed by the residents reiterated that the solution to the political crisis in Libya is through presidential, parliamentary elections, based on a constitution that ends the transitional stage since 2011.

The Oil Crescent area is about 500 km east of Tripoli and contains the largest oil reserves and the three largest oil shipping ports, namely Brega, Zueitina, Ras Lanuf, and al-Sidra.

Meanwhile, the National Oil Corporation (NOC) Chairman held talks in Washington with the US Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, Joey Hood.

According to the US State Department, the two reiterated the importance of uninterrupted NOC operations for the benefit of all Libyans.

“Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary Joey Hood met with Chairman Mustafa Sanalla to underline US support for the independence of National Oil Corporation. They agreed on the need to invest in renewables and the importance of uninterrupted NOC operations for the benefit of all Libyans,” reported the State Department.

Lebanese youths abandon education as crisis bites

Author of the article:
Reuters
Laila Bassam and Aidan Lewis
Publishing date: Mar 13, 2022 • 

BEIRUT — Before Lebanon’s devastating financial crisis struck, Faraj Faraj thought university could set him on a path out of a cramped family home in a poor area of Beirut and towards financial independence.

Instead, like increasing numbers of Lebanon’s young people, soaring costs forced the 19-year-old to drop out of studying just over a year ago, before he had finished secondary school.

“I don’t have family who can help me complete my education, and there’s no work,” he said, adding that even though he was at a state school, the cost of transport had become hard to bear.

U.N. research published in January showed that 30% of those aged 15-24 in Lebanon had dropped out of education. More young people are skipping meals and cutting back on health care, the survey showed.

Faraj, his parents, two unemployed brothers and two younger sisters who are still in school sleep between two rooms in a small apartment in Beirut’s Borj Hammoud, a neighborhood with narrow, crowded streets that was damaged by a massive explosion at the city’s port in 2020.

The coronavirus pandemic and the port blast, which still scars Beirut’s seafront, deepened what the World Bank has described as one of the worst economic collapses since the mid-19th century.

Though an elite earning salaries in dollars still throngs bars and cafes in upscale neighborhoods, poverty has risen to 80% and many struggle to afford meals and medicines.

“In the past we could buy things, even though there were difficulties,” said Faraj. “Now with the crisis affecting us more, it’s just food and drink.”

BRAIN DRAIN

Faraj is training to become a hairdresser in a program supported by U.N. children’s agency UNICEF, which aims to help young Lebanese facing soaring unemployment and wages of around $2 per day for those who can find work.

“Once a young person drops out of school at the age of 13, 14, 15, it’s really difficult to get them back into school, and so they enter into a very precarious job market with a serious lack of education and skills,” said Alexandre Schein, head of UNICEF’s youth section in Lebanon.

“The implications are that the skills that are required to rebuild Lebanon and get it out of the crisis won’t exist in the country.”

U.N. and government data also shows a drop in spending on education and in school enrolment for children under 15, as well as a rise in child labor.

Some families have shifted from private to state schools, but those struggled to provide distance learning when the pandemic broke out and were hit by stoppages and strikes over teachers’ low wages after reopening.

Many school and university teaching staff have left their jobs or the country, joining an accelerating brain drain.

The problems are tied to the country’s wider political and economic crisis, Education Minister Abbas el-Halabi said.

“Lebanese youth are gradually losing faith in continuing to live in Lebanon,” he told Reuters.

“It’s true that we’ve seen dropping out or abandonment or a distancing from schools. There are many families who no longer consider education important, but there is also great interest from some Lebanese, since this is the only weapon that they can give their children.”

 (Writing by Aidan Lewis; Editing by Alison Williams)

Putin and Trump have convinced me: I was wrong about the 21st century
Robert Reich

Nationalism is disappearing, democracy is inevitable, nuclear war can’t happen: Ukraine shows old certainties were wrong

Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump shake hands in Helsinki in 2018. 

Photograph: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

Sun 13 Mar 2022 

I used to believe several things about the 21st century that Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and Donald Trump’s election in 2016 have shown me are false. I assumed:


Trump thought US troops were in Ukraine in 2017, ex-ambassador says in boo


Nationalism is disappearing.

I expected globalization would blur borders, create economic interdependence among nations and regions and extend a modern consumer and artistic culture worldwide.

I was wrong. Both Putin and Trump have exploited xenophobic nationalism to build their power. (Putin’s aggression has also ignited an inspiring patriotism in Ukraine.)

Nations can no longer control what their citizens know.

I assumed that emerging digital technologies, including the internet, would make it impossible to control worldwide flows of information and knowledge. Tyrants could no longer keep their people in the dark or hoodwink them with propaganda.

Wrong again. Trump filled the media with lies, as has Putin. Putin has also cut off Russian citizens from the truth about what’s occurring in Ukraine.

Advanced nations will no longer war over geographic territory.
I bought the conventional wisdom that nuclear war was unthinkable. I fear I was wrong

I thought that in the “new economy”, land was becoming less valuable than technological knowhow and innovation. Competition among nations would therefore be over the development of cutting-edge inventions.

I was only partly right. While skills and innovation are critical, land still provides access to critical raw materials and buffers against potential foreign aggressors.

Major nuclear powers will never risk war against each other because of the certainty of “mutually assured destruction”.

I bought the conventional wisdom that nuclear war was unthinkable.

I fear I was wrong. Putin is now resorting to dangerous nuclear brinksmanship.

Civilization will never again be held hostage by crazy isolated men with the power to wreak havoc.

I assumed this was a phenomenon of the 20th century and that 21st-century governments, even totalitarian ones, would constrain tyrants.

Trump and Putin have convinced me I was mistaken.

Advances in warfare, such as cyber-warfare and precision weapons, will minimize civilian casualties.

I was persuaded by specialists in defense strategy that it no longer made sense for sophisticated powers to target civilians.

Utterly wrong. Civilian casualties in Ukraine are mounting.

Democracy is inevitable.

I formed this belief in the early 1990s, when the Soviet Union had imploded and China was still poor. It seemed to me that totalitarian regimes didn’t stand a chance in the new technologically driven, globalized world. Sure, petty dictatorships would remain in some retrograde regions of the world. But modernity came with democracy, and democracy with modernity.

Both Trump and Putin have shown how wrong I was on this, too.

Meanwhile, Ukrainians are showing that Trump’s and Putin’s efforts to turn back the clock on the 21st century can only be addressed with a democracy powerful enough to counteract autocrats like them.

They are also displaying with inspiring clarity that democracy cannot be taken for granted. Democracy is not a spectator sport. It’s not what governments do. Democracy is what people do.

Ukrainians are reminding us that democracy survives only if people are willing to sacrifice for it. Some sacrifices are smaller than others. You may have to stand in line for hours to vote, as did tens of thousands of Black people in America’s 2020 election. You may have to march and protest and even risk your life so others may vote, as did iconic civil rights leaders like the late John Lewis and Martin Luther King.

You may have to knock on hundreds of doors to get out the vote. Or organize thousands to make your voices heard. And stand up against the powerful who don’t want your voices heard.


Lincoln and the fight for peace: John Avlon on a president in the shadow of new war

You may have to fight a war to protect democracy from those who would destroy it.

The people of Ukraine are also reminding us that democracy is the single most important legacy we have inherited from previous generations who strengthened it and who risked their lives to preserve it. It will be the most significant legacy we leave to future generations – unless we allow it to be suppressed by those who fear it, or we become too complacent to care.

Putin and Trump have convinced me I was wrong about how far we had come in the 21st century. Technology, globalization and modern systems of governance haven’t altered the ways of tyranny. But I, like millions of others around the world, have been inspired by the Ukrainian people – who are reteaching us lessons we once knew.


Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com

WELL THAT SETTLES IT THEN

Sunak urged to raise benefits by left- and rightwing economists

Thinktanks say chancellor must act to cushion impact of inflation on the poorest in spring statement

MILLIONAIRE Rishi Sunak faces calls to tackle inflationary pressures in his spring statement. Photograph: Tayfun Salcı/Shutterstock


Toby Helm
Sun 13 Mar 2022 

Chancellor Rishi Sunak faces demands from economists across the political spectrum to increase benefits and the state pension by about 8% in his spring statement next week, in order to help alleviate the worst cost-of-living crisis for decades.

A Resolution Foundation report on the state of the economy on Monday shows that only such drastic action will allow millions of people on low incomes to maintain their living standards at current levels.

Economists from other leading thinktanks – including the right-leaning Centre for Policy Studies – are also urging the chancellor to increase benefits by far above the 3.1% currently planned. This figure was determined last September by the rate of inflation at the time.

While the Bank of England has predicted that inflation will rise above 7% next month, the war in Ukraine and its effect on energy and food prices has led many economists to predict even more pain, with price rises hitting 8%, and affecting the poorest households most.

The Resolution Foundation’s new modelling shows that a single parent living in rented accommodation with one child, doing 20 hours of work a week supplemented by universal credit, will see the effects of all the recently announced government help with energy bills and benefits more than wiped out by the soaring cost of living, leaving them hundreds of pounds a year worse off.

It says, however, that if benefits were to be raised by a further 5% – taking the total uplift to the staggering level of 8.1% – the difference would be made up and living standards for many of those on low incomes would not decline.

The thinktank predicted last week that typical household incomes would fall by 4% in 2022-23, a cut of £1,000 per household, the sharpest annual income fall since the mid-1970s.

Under current plans the state pension will also rise by just 3.1%, meaning an increase of £5.55 a week. If inflation rises to 7.25% in April, as predicted by the Bank of England, this would amount to a real terms cut of more than £7 a week.

Recent analysis by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation found that increasing benefits by 3.1% at a time of soaring inflation would mean that 9 million low-incomes households entitled to means-tested benefits, both in and out of work, would experience an average real-terms cut of £500 a year.

The foundation is calling on the government to increase benefits in line with the Bank of England’s February 2022 monetary policy report forecast of 7% inflation by April as an immediate first step to help keep up with the rising cost of living.

The demands to help those on benefits and state pensions is another headache for Sunak, who is already under intense pressure from Tory MPs to drop or postpone a 1.25 percentage point rise in national insurance due to come into effect in April. The Treasury has indicated it is not willing to move on the increase, which was planned to pay for the NHS and improvements in social care.

If Sunak resists this, most Tories expect he will bring in extra help for low-income families, to help them cope with energy and fuel costs.

A food bank: rising costs are ‘swallowing what’s left of people’s budgets’.

 Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian

Clare Moriarty, chief executive at Citizens Advice, said: “Rising costs are simply swallowing what’s left of people’s budgets. One of our advisers spoke to a parent last week who was having to choose between giving their kids a hot bath at bedtime, or putting on the heating for an hour while they got ready for school.

“These stark choices are only going to get worse from April when energy bills rise again.

“The government must do more. We’d urge them to immediately increase benefits in line with inflation to help people keep pace with costs. And when bills soar further in the autumn they must bring in a support package to stop more households being pushed into hardship.”

James Heywood, head of welfare and opportunity at the Centre for Policy Studies, said benefits should be raised this year by more than the 3.1% planned, and that the increase should be reversed next year. “Benefits are uprated annually by the September measure of inflation, but ministers should consider uprating benefits by more this April to cushion the impact of the cost of living crisis for the poorest households. This should then be offset by reducing next year’s increases. This way the government can help blunt the edges of the cost-of-living hike, without incurring sustained pressure on the public purse.”

TIME FOR