The Global Conversation

Tag: alcohol

  • What the heck are we toasting?

    At 12:19 two lives in my community changed forever.  One 17-year-old dead and another 17-year-old under house arrest, charged with intoxicated homicide while driving.

    Intoxicated.  Tested an hour after the crash and still three times the legal limit.  Allegedly, her step-father gave her the alcohol.  Allegedly, the young man’s grandmother, with whom he lived, was at a club, and his parents lost in their own addictions.

    Men in many countries not considered good businessmen if they don’t go out and drink in the evening.

    The apartment across from me installed their wine refrigerator weeks before they moved their furniture in when I lived in Denmark.

    The examples of how alcohol has become a pillar of many cultures are boundless.

    How can this happen?  What are we doing to ourselves?

    All around the “civilized” world, it is considered not just acceptable, but encouraged; and if one does not drink, you are suspect.

    CWG says that nothing is wrong, only not working, and it is up to us to decide if it is working for us.  God says that one day we will simply choose to not abuse our bodies with drink, drugs and food that doesn’t belong in our bodies.  God also says that if we destroy the world as we know it, the world will still go on…just in a different way.

    The 17-year-olds’ worlds have been destroyed and will now have to go on in a very different way.  Life after life is being destroyed because of alcohol, but why?

    How many beer/alcohol commercials are there during sporting events?  Do watchers not see that this is in direct conflict with the healthy bodies they expect the athletes to maintain?  Why are they surprised and outraged when an athlete gets into a fight in a bar and shoots someone?  Why are they surprised when they take performance-enhancing drugs?  Are they really worse than the legal drug of alcohol?  As CWG says, helping someone who is on their deathbed die with dignity and releasing them from pain is illegal…but killing yourself (and possibly taking others with you) slowly, because it is legal, is perfectly acceptable.  Huh?

    I believe CWG is correct, once again, in saying it is because we do not know who we are, or are not taught it is okay to be who we really are.  I believe it is because we are afraid of our greatness.  If we didn’t medicate and actually faced the world as it is, what might change?  Do you think that we would like what we see?  Do you think that we might choose not to destroy our bodies, and our minds, and possibly our world?

    If we took back our greatness…if we saw ourselves as individuations of the Divine…do you think we might see that we have become part of a collective Stockholm Syndrome?  Will we see we have fallen in love with the very thing that enslaves us?

    What do you think, beyond words, might be done to change this, to influence the collective, by us as individuals?  I will throw out the first ideas…

    Change the channel.

    Or don’t drink…it is a choice, not an addiction, for the biggest majority of us.

    Or write your television station requesting such ads be removed…it worked to remove tobacco ads from TV in the United States.

    There are so many things I can think of that could begin to change this way of being in this world…tell me what ideas you can think of…

    Tell me what you are already doing and how you are already demonstrating your greatness!  Maybe others will follow if they know they are not alone.

    (Therese Wilson is a published poet, and is the administrator of, and Spiritual Helper at, the global website at www.cwghelpingoutreach.com  She may be contacted at:  Therese@TheGlobalConversation.com.)

  • I have AIDS: a journey of awakening and crusading

    I was 11 years old when I contracted HIV, I was diagnosed with AIDS at 16.  The news was a relief, actually, after a couple of years of waiting around to find out and adjusting to adolescence while nursing bleeding ulcers, when my doctors had already known for a year and were just getting their legal ducks in a row before springing the big news. My high school years consisted of nasty infections, a nagging fear that my terrible, shameful secret would be revealed, and a drug regimen toxic enough to bring down an elephant, not to mention my own personal regimen of vodka, acid, and whatever else I could get my hands on to ease the monotony while I waited around to die.

    But when I look back on this specific time in my life, some thirty odd years later, I feel nothing but gratitude. I am healthy, stronger than I have ever been, in body, mind, and spirit. Facing the idea of death early on woke me up, showed me the necessity of being fully awake in every moment, to truly be thankful for every breath of life. I am wiser, and more acutely aware of the ugly vices of greed, exploitation and corruption that some in positions of power seem to be able to engage in while not losing even a single night of sleep. I have learned more than I ever wanted to know about human nature, as I hope to explain as I detail the bizarre events that fell into place and allowed for over 10,000 people to be murdered by pharmaceutical companies during the height of the AIDS epidemic.

    I was born with hemophilia, a hereditary blood disorder that inhibits the blood’s ability to clot. The current treatment is a product made from thousands of donors which replaces the specific clotting factor that my blood is missing.

    In the late 1970s through 1985, four pharmaceutical companies knowingly exposed 20,000 Americans with hemophilia to tainted blood clotting products, rather than warn, recall, or quarantine the clotting factor that they knew was contaminated. For at least fifteen years this darkest corner of the pharmaceutical-industrial-complex pumped a myriad of viruses into the veins of anyone who needed a blood transfusion while they amassed vast fortunes that would far outweigh the cost of future lawsuits.

    The CDC began to warn the National Hemophilia Foundation, a highly trusted and, in fact, beloved advocacy group for hemophiliacs, of the risks from infected blood products in the early ’80s, but since it receives most of its money from drug companies, the NHF continued to recommend that hemophiliacs remain on the highly concentrated clotting factor regimens, even though much less risky options were available. My doctor, as well as most across the country, echoed their sentiments. Similar conflicts of interest seemed to apply, most of them were paid consultants for the drug industry at the time.

    When the U.S. Government finally put a stop to these shenanigans, after years of screaming by the hemophilia community as well as the CDC, these companies shipped the contaminated product to China and various Latin American countries rather than throw billions in profit down the drain with a mass recall.

    Drug companies have basically been allowed to regulate themselves in the United States, with a staggering amount of influence in the workings of government through the system of bribery known as lobbying and campaign contributions.  The pharmaceutical industry is the thing that tells the 800-pound gorilla where to sleep.

    In the late ‘90s the lawsuits finally came, no thanks to the NHF, but to the hard work and due diligence of the patients themselves, working with their attorneys, pouring over internal corporate memos until the whole truth had been pieced together. Most hemophiliacs had aged beyond the statute of limitations requirements for a direct lawsuit, so the whole ugly incident was resolved with a $640 million settlement paid by Bayer AG, Baxter Healthacre Corp., Armour Pharmaceutical, and Alpha Therapeutics Corp. This amounted to $100,000 per person and I was one of the lucky recipients of this fabulous cash prize. I had more money than I’d ever seen in my life and these revered and trusted companies, these “angels of mercy,” were required to admit no guilt or criminal wrongdoing whatsoever. Everyone was a winner.

    Sure, most of my friends who had embarked with me on this grueling legal crusade were dead or dying, not to mention the wives and children they unknowingly infected, but surely we got something out of it. The blood supply is a little safer, although the CDC is warning of parvovirus and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease contamination, emerging pathogens, the scrappy up-and-comers to watch out for this season. An outbreak of fungal meningitis has been linked to steroid shots for back pain and has killed hundreds all over the country. Throughout every city and town, fretful Americans are standing in lines for flu shots containing God knows what because their doctors pressure them like a seasoned pusher, hoping for a sweet cash bonus for high patient compliance paid by the altruistic manufacturer of the drug.

    Rather than view these few examples as gross negligence, ominous pandemics, or even sinister conspiracies, just try to see it from the drug company’s point of view, imagine the treatment opportunities!  And we all know, in a culture of greed, exploitation and corruption, “treatment” is just another word for “profit.”

     (Mike Gibson is an artist, musician and writer, whose work has appeared in a wide variety of print and online publications. He currently resides in Palm Springs, California.)

    (If you have a Guest Column that you would like to submit, send it to Lisa@TheGlobalConversation.com.  Not all material submitted is accepted for publication, but we appreciate each submission.)