Mexican Researchers Patent Heroin Vaccine

February 24th, 2012

Raw Story

By: Reuters

While Mexico grapples with relentless drug-related violence, a group of Mexican scientists is working on a vaccine that could reduce addiction to one of the world’s most notorious narcotics: heroin.

Researchers at the country’s National Institute of Psychiatry say they have successfully tested the vaccine on mice and are preparing to test it on humans.

The vaccine, which has been patented in the United States, works by making the body resistant to the effects of heroin, so users would no longer get a rush of pleasure when they smoke or inject it.

“It would be a vaccine for people who are serious addicts, who have not had success with other treatments and decide to use this application to get away from drugs,” the institute’s director Maria Elena Medina said Thursday.

Scientists worldwide have been searching for drug addiction vaccines for several years, but none have yet been fully developed and released on the market.

One group at the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse has reported significant progress in a vaccine for cocaine.

However, the Mexican scientists appear to be close to making a breakthrough on a heroin vaccine and have received funds from the U.S. institute as well as the Mexican government.

During the tests, mice were given access to deposits of heroin over an extended period of time. Those given the vaccine showed a huge drop in heroin consumption, giving the institute hope that it could also work on people, Medina said.

Kim Janda, a scientist working on his own narcotics vaccines at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, said that based on some earlier research papers he had read, the Mexican vaccine could function but with some shortcomings.

“It could be reasonably effective but maybe too general and affect too many different types of opioids as well as heroin,” Janda said.

Mexico, a major drug producing and transit country for drugs smuggled into the United States, has a growing drug addiction problem. Health Secretary Jose Cordoba recently said the country now has some 450,000 hard drug addicts, particularly along the trafficking corridors of the U.S. border.

Mexican gangsters grow opium poppies in the Sierra Madre mountains and convert them into heroin known as Black Tar and Mexican Mud, which are smuggled over the Rio Grande.

Every year, the heroin trade provides billions of dollars to gangs like the Sinaloa Cartel and the Zetas. Since 2006, cartel violence has claimed the lives of over 47,000 people in Mexico.

While Mexico grapples with relentless drug-related violence, a group of Mexican scientists is working on a vaccine that could reduce addiction to one of the world’s most notorious narcotics: heroin.

Researchers at the country’s National Institute of Psychiatry say they have successfully tested the vaccine on mice and are preparing to test it on humans.

The vaccine, which has been patented in the United States, works by making the body resistant to the effects of heroin, so users would no longer get a rush of pleasure when they smoke or inject it.

“It would be a vaccine for people who are serious addicts, who have not had success with other treatments and decide to use this application to get away from drugs,” the institute’s director Maria Elena Medina said Thursday.

Scientists worldwide have been searching for drug addiction vaccines for several years, but none have yet been fully developed and released on the market.

One group at the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse has reported significant progress in a vaccine for cocaine.

However, the Mexican scientists appear to be close to making a breakthrough on a heroin vaccine and have received funds from the U.S. institute as well as the Mexican government.

During the tests, mice were given access to deposits of heroin over an extended period of time. Those given the vaccine showed a huge drop in heroin consumption, giving the institute hope that it could also work on people, Medina said.

Kim Janda, a scientist working on his own narcotics vaccines at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, said that based on some earlier research papers he had read, the Mexican vaccine could function but with some shortcomings.

“It could be reasonably effective but maybe too general and affect too many different types of opioids as well as heroin,” Janda said.

Mexico, a major drug producing and transit country for drugs smuggled into the United States, has a growing drug addiction problem. Health Secretary Jose Cordoba recently said the country now has some 450,000 hard drug addicts, particularly along the trafficking corridors of the U.S. border.

Mexican gangsters grow opium poppies in the Sierra Madre mountains and convert them into heroin known as Black Tar and Mexican Mud, which are smuggled over the Rio Grande.

Every year, the heroin trade provides billions of dollars to gangs like the Sinaloa Cartel and the Zetas. Since 2006, cartel violence has claimed the lives of over 47,000 people in Mexico.

(Additional reporting by Jorge Lebrija; Editing by Anthony Boadle)

For The Full Story Go To Raw Story

Brace for Abrupt Dollar Collapse

October 18, 2011

Beacon Equity Research

By Dominique de Kevelioc de Bailleul

Outpacing former U.S. Comptroller General (1998-2008), David Walker, the indefatigable Peter Schiff has markedly stepped up his appearances, interviews and overall visibility of the past year with his dire message to investors: prepare for an “abrupt” dollar collapse.

Though a thorn in the side of Wall Street’s behemoth banking cartel, broker-dealers and the financial media that serves them, Euro Pacific Capital’s CEO Schiff strips away the tired rhetoric, massaged sentiment building, shameless hype, obfuscation and outright rumor spreading of CNBC’s broadcast, all characteristic of an old guard desperately clinging to power though its control of a highly sophisticated media-driven propaganda campaign deployed to hide the foreshadowing symptoms of a coming economic collapse.(1)

Speaking with SeekingAlpha’s contributing writer, Garrett Baldwin, Schiff deploys his own version of the truth, which he sees as an endgame for dollar hegemony manifesting in future sharp declines in U.S. Treasuries.

“I do believe that it [the decline in U.S. Treasuries] will be very abrupt,” said Schiff. “I think when the dollar collapses, it will happen very rapidly. When the bond bubble bursts, the air is going to come gushing out. It’s not going to give a lot of people time to reverse their position.”

And like the Nasdaq and housing bubbles, both pricked into collapse, the U.S. sovereign debt bubble, too, has “a lot of pins” out there grasped by powerful invisible hands; and “it’s [Treasury market] going to find one eventually.”

Peter, the son of famed tax protestor Irwin A. Schiff, has demonstrated that his message to investors can be trusted as pure, no less than uber-American patriot U.S. Congressman Ron Paul’s plea to revamp the global monetary system and phase out the Federal Reserve during his presidential 2012 bid.

While unabashedly speaking truth to power about the dollar’s ultimate worthlessness void of its artificial props, Schiff offers real solutions to what former U.S. Comptroller Walker has metaphorically stated is a “burning platform”—not in the sense of how best to put out the fire (though Schiff tried in his bid for U.S. Senator for his home state of Connecticut), but how investors can profit from an inevitable Roman Empire-like decline.

Schiff’s decade-long message to investors who seek protection from the coming colossal collapse, which he originally saw coming as far back as 2000, is to own gold. His advice back then rewarded investors with a 700%+ return in nominal terms and much more in real terms when compared with the contrasted performance of more widely-held assets, such as real estate and the S&P500. The S&P still trades below its 2000 level while home prices continue to fall.

When the subject of gold’s breathtaking drop in late 2008 and early 2009 was broached, Schiff defended his record, talking about the performance of the gold price within a larger context of the overall bull market in the metal since its $255 price tag low of 1999.

“In 2008, gold prices went down, but they’re double what they were now – then,” Schiff explained. “So people still made money on precious metals. And of course if they bought precious metals, years earlier, had they bought them in 2002, 2003, 2004, even though 2008 was a down year – or at least the second half was. They’ve more than recouped that.”

Schiff continued, “So, people have been able to profit, certainly from the advice to get out of the dollar. The dollar is quite a bit lower than it was when I first started telling people to get rid of it based on these forecasts. Even though it’s higher than it was a month ago, it’s much lower than it was years ago. And the dollar will continue to fall.”

To expound on Schiff’s strategy for survival of the mother of all currency crises he sees on the horizon, investors may want to refer to the lifelong work of Princeton Economics’ founder Martin Armstrong, a man whose study of market cycles may shed more light on the coming years’ volatility in the gold market.

Though Armstrong’s personal life is controversial, his brilliant work with market cycles led him to advise the Reagan White House on how best to handle the aftermath of the 1987 stock market crash—which developed into the infamous Working Group of Financial Markets, more popularly referred to today as the PPT (Plunge Protection Team). Twenty-three years later, the eccentric Armstrong strongly suggests that the volatility we now see in all markets across the globe will increase dramatically into the year 2016.

Speaking with King World News this past week, Armstrong said the volatility will be, frankly, frighteningly breathtaking.

“We’re going to increase volatility by 50% over the next two years, and then, going into the latter part of 2016 it will double again,” he told KWN’s Eric King. “It’s the way markets move.”

“Boil a pot of water. When it gets to the boiling point, you’ll see all of a sudden the water juts burst into bubbles,” Armstrong explained. “That’s the way the market is. And that final end is when you get that doubling effect. And when you see that, sometime it can be more than double, but when you see that, that’s the time when you are getting into the final top. So we haven’t seen anything like that yet.”

And to hammer home the point made by Messieurs Schiff and Armstrong, gold investors must focus on the endgame and not the extreme volatility in the gold market. To keep it simple, the old stead hand of financial markets, Dow Theory Letter’s Richard Russell, said about gold in a roundtable discussion with Financial Sense Newshour in 2003, “I think it’s a bull market [in gold]. The bull will always try to shake you out, go up with the least people as possible.” Russell suggested that investors should not look at the gold price anymore than they look at the market value of their houses on a day-to-day basis. Instead, the 87-year-old veteran of the markets said, “You buy and take a position in gold, and that’s it.”

Footnote:

(1) Today’s early-morning c update on CNBC featured a roundtable discussion session, including the establishment’s most sycophantic shill of television, Steve Liesman, a 20-year and enabling CNBC veteran Joe Kernen, another of Wall Street apologist guest, and the 34-year-old Andrew Sorkin. As Sorkin began to hit home the salient points behind the reasons for OWS’s growing uprising—now sprouting worldwide—Liesman, abruptly stepped on Sorkin and began the 3-man gang up operation on the young Gerald Loeb Award winner.

Click Here For The Full Report From Beacon Equity Research

20 Tons of Pot Found Near Tunnel by US Border

January 25th, 2011

AOL News

By: Julie Watson

Federal authorities in San Diego have made one of the largest marijuana seizures in the United States, confiscating 20 tons of pot near an underground tunnel connecting warehouses on either side of California’s border with Mexico, officials said Wednesday.

Mexican authorities seized another four tons of pot from the warehouse on their side of the border.

In total, between 25 and 30 tons of marijuana were seized from both sides – worth more than $20 million if sold on the streets of San Diego, said U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director John Morton. The bricks of pot were packaged for sale.

“This is obviously the work of a cartel,” said Morton, who held a news conference outside the warehouse in an industrial park near the Otay Mesa truck crossing, across from Tijuana.

Officials said the lightening-speed, 12-hour operation started Tuesday night when U.S. authorities watching a warehouse under surveillance followed a tractor-trailer as it left the building.

ICE agents called in the California Highway Patrol, whose officers stopped the rig near Temecula, Calif., about 60 miles way. Authorities say they found 10 tons of marijuana inside the tractor-trailer. The driver, a U.S. citizen, and his Mexican wife were arrested and will be arraigned in San Diego on Thursday.

Authorities quickly obtained a federal search warrant to enter the warehouse, where they discovered 10 to 15 more tons of marijuana, Morton said.

They also found the opening to the tunnel, which ran the length of six football fields under the border and ended at a warehouse in Mexico, Morton said. The tunnel had lighting, ventilation and a rail system to send loads of illegal drugs into California.

The clandestine passageway was too low to stand up in and was believed to be in operation for only a brief time, Morton said.

Officials said the seizure was the largest ever in California and was believed to be the second-largest in the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents seized 33 tons of marijuana in Oregon in 2008, DEA special agent Ralph W. Partridge said.

Wednesday’s announcement comes a little over a week after Mexican officials made their largest marijuana seizure ever, confiscating a massive 134 tons believed to belong to the powerful Sinaloa cartel.

Morton said officials haven’t determined whether the two major busts were from the same group of traffickers.

Click here for the full report from AOL News