Archive for category: Dr. Judith Reisman Commentary

When a star promotes a product in a film, it’s called an “advertorial.” So is the film It’s Complicated an advertorial for smoking marijuana? Jason Silva notes in his review of this movie at the Huffington Post that it shows “successful, cosmopolitan adults enjoying a marijuana joint with no consequences.”[1] Upset that the film received an “R” rating merely because of its potheads, Silva protests, “We should all be proud of director Nancy Meyers, and actors Meryl Streep and Steve Martin for helping solidify marijuana’s entry into acceptable pop culture status.”

Apparently pot is acceptable these days, with starring celebrities toking in feature films such as It’s Complicated, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, and Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Even three years ago The Christian Science Monitor noticed a trend: “Films featuring characters using marijuana have mushroomed.” It is “cinema’s stoned age.”[2] (There’s even a list of the 20 best stoner movies.)[3] Silva happily notes, “Our 10,000-year relationship with cannabis can now exist without shame or rebellion.” (Our 10,000-year relationship with cannabis? The cannabis “relationship” here began in earnest in the 1960s.)

In GQ Mark Healy agrees: By all accounts this should be a golden age for stoners. Weed has never been stronger, more accessible, and less criminal—particularly if you’re wealthy, white, and living in one of the thirteen [now fifteen] states where it’s approved for medicinal purposes.[4]

How did this come about? Healy says, I guess it began the moment medical-marijuana advocates began equating pot with something healthful and people started actually believing them . . . to treat nausea and headaches. . . . You won’t likely hear of pot’s harms,[5] while millionaires like Hugh Hefner and billionaires like George Soros have helped finance marijuana legalization.[6]

Making it “healthy” has made pot seem no more dangerous “than a bottle of spirulina,” says Healy, who complains that pot is now so widespread, it’s no longer cool. How widespread? Silva crows, “There are now more marijuana dispensaries in L.A. than there are Starbucks.” And to date, fifteen states and the District of Columbia have legalized “medical” marijuana. More states are likely on the way. A 2010 Franklin & Marshall poll “found that 81 percent of Pennsylvanians supported making medical marijuana legal—up from 76 percent in 2006,” noted Mackenzie Carpenter in the Pittsburgh-Post Gazette: They’re lighting up joints in Bryn Mawr and Squirrel Hill [Pennsylvania] after putting the kids to bed.

At [Ava Lounge] in East Liberty, pro-medical marijuana activists are recruiting and organizing new members over martinis.[7] What about those medical reasons for marijuana? In California, writes Mackenzie, “otherwise healthy young people with ‘back pain’ are wangling permission from unscrupulous doctors to obtain the drug.”

She quotes Lynn Abraham, Philadelphia’s former district attorney: “Why is it that in California most people using it are 20 to 35 years old? Give me a break. Is this what we want to become in Pennsylvania? . . . A pleasure palace? Yikes. We’re just going to turn into a bunch of spoiled, self-indulgent dope heads.”

Defenders of cannabis legalization, of course, would say Abraham is just wrong.

 

Yemen’s Woes

 

What might a society with widespread drug use over a few generations look like? My interest in this question began in 1978, when I read an article called “Qat’s Cradle” in Human Behavior. It recounted how the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare had paid two UCLA researchers to spend two years in Yemen to ascertain what life would be like “in a total drug culture.” Yemen was a good place for such a study because a large proportion of its population cultivated and used qat (pronounced “khat”), a so-called “mild” narcotic leaf, considered less addictive and less harmful than marijuana.

The researchers reported that Yemenis of all ages used qat: Students chew [the leaves] liberally. . . . Children chew qat starting at seven or eight years of age . . . women … have their own qat parties . . . taxi drivers chew. . . . Politicians chew with politicians; religious leaders and scholars chew with their groups. Qat chewing even plays a role in the highest government circles.[8]

This habit of qat chewing in Yemen is some 400 years old, the researchers reported, citing a 19th-century traveler to Yemen who tried it and commented, “The Yamini can go for several days without food, but not a single day without qat. Men and women and children, they all use it.”[9] The society that engaged in all this qat chewing was described as a lethargic population that endured widespread malnourishment, impoverishment, and infant mortality.

A World Bank report issued in 2007 corroborates the picture painted by the UCLA researchers. Titled “Yemen: Towards Qat Demand Reduction,” this report states that “until the 1960s, qat chewing was an occasional pastime, mainly for the rich,” but that in the last half-century, it has become much more widespread, with “trend” data showing increasing use by children as young as five years old. The report shows how qat use has been “linked to widespread child malnutrition and household food insecurity” and numerous other problems. It states:

The adverse health effects of qat . . . include high blood-pressure, underweight children (when pregnant women chew qat), cancer (from consuming pesticide residues), and dental diseases. Consumers spend, on average, nearly 10 percent of their income [on qat]. . . . [Qat is] inimical to the development of a productive work force, with as much as one-quarter of usable working hours allocated to qat chewing.[10]

 

A Universal Problem

 

Yemen is not unique. “Joints” and various hallucinogens have long been with us. In his book The War on Drugs, James Inciardi, an authority on drugs and crime, writes that references to marijuana appear in early Persian, Hindu, Greek, Arab and Chinese writings [and the] chewing of coca had already been in Inca mythology for centuries.[11]

Though surrounded by rich national resources, most indigenous peoples in Central Mexico, Costa Rica, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Morocco, Egypt, Yemen, Jamaica, Colombia, Peru, Brazil, and Fiji live in dire poverty with culturally accepted use of drugs filtering down to children.

Marijuana and betel nut are common in most of Egypt and Asia. The Cree Indians of North America brew and chew calamus or “rat root,” while farther south, from Central Mexico to Costa Rica, hashish and thle-pela-kano (“Leaf of God”) keep the inhabitants hooked. Opium, heroin, hash oil, and hashish are indigenously Asian. Hashish abounds in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Lebanon, and Nepal. Like other Third World countries, Nepal’s life expectancy hovers at about 51 years of age, in sync with its annual per capita income of about $1,010.[12]

Widespread consumption of indigenous drugs often correlates with poverty, early mortality, and illiteracy, and it may explain a general condition of apathy or lethargy called amotivational syndrome.

Adult use often leaves children vulnerable to neglect or abuse, by their parents or others.

 

Kick it!

 

What do the people of Yemen think about their qat habit? The World Bank report states: Most users believe that qat is bad for them. More than 70 percent of the respondents describe qat chewing as a “bad habit” that is also bad for the economy and bad for the nation’s image. Users want to “kick the habit” but they cannot. Either because of social pressures, or because of the psychological dependency resulting from prolonged use, users do not feel that they can stop using qat on their own. Some 53 percent of all male and 61 percent of all female respondents declare that Government intervention is necessary to address the qat problem.[13]

They want government help to quit? Do any of the legislators from the fifteen U.S. states that have legalized marijuana know about Yemen? They should. Meanwhile, back at the Huffington Post, Jason Silva concludes his story about our new marijuana culture thus: One thing is certain. It’s Complicated does a good job of showing something not so complicated: marijuana can make you giggly, hungry and maybe even hyper-philosophical . . . but it doesn’t make you a couch-dwelling, pizza-eating sloth or criminal.

There probably is little danger that rich Hollywood elites like Meryl Streep and billionaires like George Soros will become sloths, whether or not they smoke pot or chew qat leaves. And even if they did, their wealth would mitigate the ensuing problems for themselves and their families. But what about poor and working-class citizens? Take Detroit, about which Matt Labash wrote last fall in the Weekly Standard: “[T]hat’s exactly what a city with 15 percent unemployment that’s as chronically crime-ridden and dysfunctional as Detroit needs: more drugs.”[14]

Michigan did approve “medical” marijuana, and up to 900 people a day were applying for marijuana use when Labash wrote: A state court of appeals judge recently lamented in a decision, “Michigan will soon have more registered marijuana users than we do unemployed—an incredible legacy for the Great Lakes State.”

The Yemenis might warn us about our grand experiment in medical marijuana. Are we in any state to listen?

 

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Endnotes

[1] www.huffingtonpost.com/jason-silva/its-not-that-complicated_b_415332.html.

[2] www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/Movies/2008/0516/p15s01-almo.html.

[3] http://movies.popcrunch.com/the-20-best-stoner-movies-of-all-time.

[4] www.gq.com/entertainment/humor/201001/pot-culture-stoner-culture.

[5] www.ncfamily.org/FNC/0901S2.html.

[6] http://cannabisnews.com/news/20/thread20166.shtml.

[7] www.post-gazette.com/pg/10192/1072041-51.stm.

[8] Kennedy, J. and R. Hurwit, “Qat’s cradle,” Human Behavior (October 1978),pp. 38–39.

[9]Ibid.

[10] www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSContentServer/ WDSP/IB/2007/06/26/000090341_20070626112355/Rendered/INDEX/397380YE.txt.

[11] James Inciardi, The War on Drugs (Mayfield Publishing, 1986).

[12] www.who.int/countries/npl/en.

[13] Op. cit.

[14] www.weeklystandard.com/articles/gone-pot.

Alfred Kinsey’s ongoing sexual anarchy campaign has no end in sight.

Matt Barber, associate dean of the Liberty University School of Law, and I attended the “B4U-ACT” pedophile conference Aug. 17. To eliminate the “stigma” against pedophiles, this growing sexual anarchist lobby wants the American Psychiatric Association (APA) to redefine pedophilia as a normal sexual orientation of “Minor-Attracted Persons.”

Adhering to the Kinsey principle of lulling “straights” into a false sense of security, pedophile dress was largely conservative – short hair, jackets, some ties and few noticeable male ear piercings.

Matt Barber and I sat in the back of the meeting room among roughly 50 activists and their “mental health” attending female enablers. “Pedophilia, Minor-Attracted Persons, and the DSM: Issues and Controversies,” keynoted “Fred Berlin, M.D., Ph.D., as founder, National Institute for the Study, Prevention and Treatment of Sexual Trauma; Johns Hopkins Sexual Disorders Clinic.”

However, the sex clinic was initially founded by John Money, Ph.D., to give judges “leeway” to keep child molesters out of jail. Money (deceased), a pedophile advocate, also called for an end to all age-of-consent laws. Dr. Berlin was his disciple.

In 1973, our “post Kinsey era,” a small APA committee of psychiatrists, quite terrified by homosexist public harassment, agreed to rely on Kinsey’s fraudulent human sexuality “data” to redefine homosexuality as normal, removing it from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of mental disorders.

The APA decision was hyped in college textbooks, law journal articles, judicial rulings, and by 1974 pitched as high-school sex education. Soon the homosexist lobby would sail into primary schools and kindergartens by agitating recurring AIDS “prevention,” “bullying” and “hate” panics.

To redefine homosexuality as a normal “orientation,” nature not nurture, researchers were told to ignore all data of early sex abuse or other trauma. This hoax was followed by the 1999 U.S. Department of Justice data that found 64 percent of forcible sodomy victims to be boys under age 12.

For after claiming 10 percent to 37 percent of men were sometime homosexual, Kinsey also said children are sexual from birth and so deserve to have sex with adults or youths (taught as a 1974 Planned Parenthood sex ed doctrine).

The APA path to pedophile norms follows the success of the homosexual anarchy campaign. Arguably, the pedophile media lobby directed the passionate boy-boy kisses on the TV series “Glee,” to enable fellow “Minor-Attracted Persons” to increasingly be seen as a boy’s sex “friend.”

B4U-ACT claims to “help mental health professionals learn more about attraction to minors and to consider the effects of stereotyping, stigma, and fear.” While the group claimed they want to teach pedophiles “how to live life fully and stay within the law,” no one suggested how to stop their child lust or molestation.

Barber asked what “age of consent” the group proposed and what role pornography plays as a causative factor in child sex abuse. No one would answer the first question, and all denied any harm from pornography.

Arguably, due to our presence, Dr. Berlin (who sat next to me during the entire event) admitted that occasionally pornography could trigger sexual acting out. He also expressed a personal belief that pre-pubescent children (that is, under about age 10) cannot consent, and that perhaps even teenagers might be sexually vulnerable.

All speakers focused on pedophiles as healthy, normal and unfairly victimized by stigma and mean words. Following repeated assertions that pedophiles never force children, are gentle and loving, one researcher did cite a child “victim” who was raped and sodomized.

One speaker laughingly compared doing an obscene act “on” a child to doing the same obscene act on a shoe. No one protested, and some chuckled. One young female suggested pedophiles might be helped by engaging in “sex play” using naked pictures of pseudo children, allied with some sadism, bridal gowns, etc. This Ph.D. social worker candidate proudly noted her objection to any “repression.”

For their attendance, the pedophile political activists could earn 6.0 units of continuing education credits by the “Maryland Board of Social Work Examiners.” These 12 board members credentialed this pedophile academic farce, giving higher education credits to allow felons and near-felons to advance their child sexual abuse agenda by using bogus and fraudulent research. I would encourage people to complain to the board at this link.

 

 

Committed to quietly monitoring this meeting, I offered a few unwelcome closing remarks. I noted the arrogance of this group’s conclusion that Americans’ fear for child safety is due to a puritanical “sex panic.” Since the Department of Justice found 58,200 children kidnapped by non-family members in 1999, such fear seems well-placed.

Before leaving the issue of stigma and hate speech, note a few excerpts from BOYCHAT April 15 by some of these “social worker” credentialed pedophiles:

“Judith Reisman” is “with the worst of them … dehumanizing hate speech … extreme christian [sic], right wing … alarmist … creating gross distrotions [sic] … no genuine integrity … a harlot. … Judith did, in fact, make [Kinsey’s sexual stimulation of infants and toddlers] sound like horrendously violent, child sexual assault … [she is a] horrible, wretched scumbag … pathetic, sorry excuse for a human being. … The world will become a less wretched place, the second Judith Reisman drops dead [from natural causes, of course, though I’d not complain if she got accidentally ran over by a semi]. … With Love, Stevie-D.”

Love? What was that about stigma and hate speech?

Thanks to state legislator Woody Burton, the Indiana legislature is currently debating whether to defund its famous Kinsey Institute at Indiana University. It is becoming more embarrassing to the people of the great state of Indiana as more people understand that Kinsey’s fraudulent sex research was based on his team’s solicitation and use of child molesters as child sexuality “experts.” These “experts” founded and have largely shaped and directed the entire field of human sexuality since Kinsey and continue to do so.

Today the discredited Kinsey Institute staff and alumni, together with a cadre of admitted pedophiles and pederasts, control the field of sexology through the nation’s several human sexuality “accrediting” agencies. Kinsey’s bogus sex findings are increasingly spread by these disciples, yet on Jan. 30, the Kinsey Institute director, psychiatrist John Bancroft, announced to the Indianapolis Star: “We don’t have a monopoly on sex research” anymore.

True, the expose of the Institute’s history of child sex abuse and fraud has caused concern in the field and thus a shift of the sexology epicenter from Indiana University to less notorious universities. The power of the Kinsey Institute seems to be diffusing as two key new sex research “centers” are in the news more frequently. The first, a more “respectable” branch was the University of Chicago, where Robert Michael, Edward Laumann and former Kinsey Institute staffer and Bancroft buddy, John Gagnon, published their wobbly research, Sex in America (1994). These 1992 data were recycled and appeared in February 1999 as a puff piece on “sexual dysfunction.” The authors tipped their flag in praise of their indispensable cornerstone, Dr. Kinsey when the article on “sexual dysfunction” was published in the respectable Journal of the American Medical Association.

The second runner up to the Kinsey Institute crown is the unknown Center for Sex Research at California State University, Northridge, dubbed the “Kinsey Institute of the West.” The Northridge Center for Sex Research founder, Vern Bullough, a self-confessed pedophile and editor of the “academic” Journal of Paedophilia, is in the sexology mainstream seeking to legalize adult sex with infants and children.

Northridge University’s Center for Sex Research is continuing the example set by the Kinsey Institute as an academic institution in bed with pedophiles and pornographers. It is a scenario right out of the Godfather: Academics need money and have respectability. Pedophiles and pornographers of the underworld need respectability and have money. The Mafioso-like relationship between academic institutions and pornographers/pedophiles begun at Indiana University continues at Northridge.

To illustrate how this collegial arrangement works between respectable academics and the underworld of pedophiles and pornographers, Northridge University’s Center for Sex Research used its good state supported offices to boldly organize an annual “World Pornography Conference,” August 6-9, 1998. Led by the Center for Sex Research Director, James E. Ellias, pornography industry leaders and performers met together with their “academic” pornography colleagues to share and shape future national pornography and pedophile strategies. In addition to pedophile Bullough, the World Pornography Conference starred Bullough’s self-confessed pedophile colleagues John DeCecco, Daniel Tsang and Wayne Dynes, all professors at other major American colleges and editors of The Journal of Paedophilia.

Among the list of “unique” presenters was Ralph Underwager, Journal of Paedophilia interviewee and child custody “expert,” who insists “Pedophiles can boldly and courageously affirm what they choose … the best way to love,” for an appreciative and growing pedophile audience. Ted McIlvenna, another conference speaker and founder of the Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in northern California, contributed an article back in 1977 on “child sexuality” to Hustler magazine urging legalization of incest and adult sex with children. McIlvenna’s Institute most generously supplied Hustler’s adult users with graphic nude child photographs published alongside the article. The child pornography is published again in an Institute publication entitled “Meditations on the Gift of Sexuality” and published in 1977. A nude professor McIlvenna appears in photographs alongside nude Institute faculty, staff and students in varied combinations of group sexual congress. These groupings, sans academic euphemisms, are more commonly known as orgies. Of the 180 reporters said to have covered the pornography conference, none mentioned the Northridge University’s Center for Sex Research ties to the underworld culture of child abuse associated with pedophiles and pornography.

There is nothing exceptional about the pornography industry’s financial ties to sex science academics. The Kinsey Institute took funds from pornographers for years and pornographers have funded sex research as well as sizable salaries to academicians to serve on their advisory boards or as expert witnesses in courtrooms and legislatures making law and setting dangerous precedents which injure children. Perjury is a stock event in sex “science” history. While quietly collecting pornography payola, Kinsey Institute members falsely told courts and legislatures that they used a “random” sample of Americans and found both pornography and adult sex with children harmless. But Kinsey’s 1,400 male sex offenders, 200 sexual psychopaths and hundreds of radical homosexuals hardly constituted a “random sample” of 1940s American men.

For decades the Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco, led by “academic dean,” Kinsey co-author and sex partner Wardell Pomeroy, made and sold pornography. Pomeroy publicly sought funds from the pornography industry to make child pornography himself. Pornography is part of the academic program of the sexologist. Coarsening and conditioning “Sexual Attitude Restructuring” pornographic films and videos were mandated as course work for sexology students since early 1980. The repetitious viewing of violent and degrading pornography (Sexual Attitude Restructuring), compulsory by 1982 for graduation and accreditation, had “desensitized” over 100,000 sexology students by 1988.

The Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality gives students course credit for class participation in “erotic massage,” “masturbation,” “fantasy,” and similar, uhhh, studies. The products of this grim brainwashing become the faculty who design and teach the sex education curricula for our children, the cultural, political and public policy leaders of our nation. With such sex “education” filtering down from the university to general society — post Kinsey 1948 — is it any wonder that our judges routinely give custody of children to known sexual abusing parents, as law and public policy become more accepting of what pedophiles call the “last taboo,” that is, adults having legal access to our children for sexual purposes?