King of Acid, Owsley Stanley, dead at 76

Owsley Stanley is dead. He was 76. Many years ago the '60s icon of acid escaped to the distant Australian outback, but he could not escape his past. Owsley was never forgotten but then he was a hard man to forget. He left searing flashbacks in his wake. (But only of the healthiest kind.)

You see, Owsley, I never heard him referred to by any other name, was the man behind Owsley acid. Among his creations were White Lightning, Monterey Purple and Blue Cheer. His LSD was the gold standard against which all other acid was measured. One edition of the Oxford English Dictionary defines the noun "Owsley" as "an extremely potent, high-quality type of LSD."

The King of Acid counted among his satisfied customers the Grateful Dead, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Ken Kesey and others from the psychedelic ’60s.

About a year ago, I posted my obit on Digital Journal.  The last time I checked, it was still there and with a bit more art and a linked YouTube video. Follow the DJ link and see if the obit is still online. Worried that at some point it might be taken down, I've reclaimed most of my little piece and reposted it below.

Cheers.
Rockinon!

Oh, two more things. I found a great piece on Owsley in Rolling Stone. Or go here, http://concen.org/forum/thread-47267.html, and do a page search for Owsley Stanley. You will find a picture of Owsley, possibly in his later years.

Obit

Owsley Stanley is dead. He was 76. Many years ago the '60s' icon of acid escaped to the distant Australian outback, but he could not escape his past. Owsley was never forgotten but then he was a hard man to forget. He left searing flashbacks in his wake.

You see, Owsley, I never heard him referred to by any other name, was the man behind Owsley acid. Among his creations were White Lightning, Monterey Purple and Blue Cheer. His LSD was the gold standard against which all other acid was measured. One edition of the Oxford English Dictionary defines the noun “Owsley” as “an extremely potent, high-quality type of LSD.” The King of Acid counted among his satisfied customers the Grateful Dead, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Ken Kesey and others from the psychedelic ’60s. I first encountered Owsley acid in art school in Detroit. My grandfather was a pharmacist and so I grew up with a healthy respect for drugs. I was very suspicious of street chemicals. My friends dropped acid and I dropped them off at home. I was a '60s designated driver — unless the drug being abused was alcohol. I recall a fellow in art school, he looked like Flo from the Turtles, and one day this fellow popped the school pusher's entire stash of acid. He dropped more than a dozen hits and in less than an hour was removed from school by ambulance. He'll be just fine everyone said with quiet confidence, "He dropped Owsley acid." Owsley's product was said to be pure, like the original stuff produced by the Sandoz Pharmaceutical company. The New York Times quotes a rare interview Owsley gave the San Francisco Chronicle in which he said he had set out only to make a product he knew he could take, because its ingredients were known. “And my friends all wanted to know what they were taking, too.” In a short time the California-based chemist's friends expanded to include folk like the drug-taking students at the Detroit art school. It is reported that Owsley may have produced up to 5 million hits of his famous acid before being arrested and eventually jailed. My friend survived his adventure. After a dozen hours or so he came down, tuckered but no worse for wear, as they say. No one was surprised except for his parents. They were sure he had survived a near death drug induced experience. They forced him to cut his hair, dump his bell bottoms and throw out all his tie-dyed attire. He looked every inch a frat boy when he returned to school. There was a reason his friends had not been concerned. They believed Owsley acid was pure, unadulterated. It was the good stuff, the real deal, it made for good trips. Pure acid was thought to be harmless among its devotees. It was impossible to O.D. on Owsley, they said. It was the safe way to open one's mind, to expand one's consciousness.

Ken Wightman

Likes1

A few years later the Consumers Union Report Licit & Illicit Drugs backed them up, saying on page 334: "The lethal dose of LSD is not known; no human fatalities have been recorded." Papers like the Berkeley Barb in California and their counterculture health columnist Dr. HIPpocrates reported on the safety of LSD but what is now called the Main Stream Media reported otherwise. Only recently has it became possible for medical researchers to renew their interest in the powerful hallucinogenic. The Guardian in the U.K. reported that psychedelic drugs are returning as potential treatments for mental illness, holding promise as treatments for depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and schizophrenia and not just closed minds. About his incarceration Owsley told the San Francisco Chronicle: "I wound up doing time for something I should have been rewarded for. What I did was a community service, the way I look at it. I was punished for political reasons. Absolutely meaningless. Was I a criminal? No. I was a good member of society – only my society and the one making the laws are different." Jeff Weiss of the Los Angeles Times put it best when he wrote: "The world has lost another one who was too weird to live and too rare to die." ______________________________________________________________ Much of the world knows Owsley Stanley as simply the chemist behind the famous acid bearing his name, but he had other pursuits. Without knowing, and without taking any drugs, Owsley's genius has touched more folk through his influence on music than through his production of illicit acid. In the mid '60s, Owsley — nicknamed Bear because of his furry, Teddy bear body — linked up with Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, whose psychedelic adventures went on to be immortalized by Tom Wolfe in his book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Reportedly it was Owsley acid powering the pranksters. Through Kesey, Owsley met the Grateful Dead. According to The New York Times, at various times, he served as the Grateful Dead’s financial backer, pharmaceutical supplier and sound engineer. He was responsible for pioneering the practice of taping their shows -- a practice that has preserved practically the entire Grateful Dead catalog. It was Owsley's high-fidelity sound system that made the Dead’s towering "wall of sound" possible. Stanley taped early performances of many important San Francisco area acts. He captured Big Brother & the Holding Company, Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service and Santana among others. Music history from the '60s era and the psychedelic sound owe much to the genius of Augustus Owsley Stanley III.

- See more at: http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/304721#sthash.jAKxeqwA.dpuf

Owsley Stanley is dead. He was 76. Many years ago the '60s' icon of acid escaped to the distant Australian outback, but he could not escape his past. Owsley was never forgotten but then he was a hard man to forget. He left searing flashbacks in his wake.

You see, Owsley, I never heard him referred to by any other name, was the man behind Owsley acid. Among his creations were White Lightning, Monterey Purple and Blue Cheer. His LSD was the gold standard against which all other acid was measured. One edition of the Oxford English Dictionary defines the noun “Owsley” as “an extremely potent, high-quality type of LSD.” The King of Acid counted among his satisfied customers the Grateful Dead, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Ken Kesey and others from the psychedelic ’60s. I first encountered Owsley acid in art school in Detroit. My grandfather was a pharmacist and so I grew up with a healthy respect for drugs. I was very suspicious of street chemicals. My friends dropped acid and I dropped them off at home. I was a '60s designated driver — unless the drug being abused was alcohol. I recall a fellow in art school, he looked like Flo from the Turtles, and one day this fellow popped the school pusher's entire stash of acid. He dropped more than a dozen hits and in less than an hour was removed from school by ambulance. He'll be just fine everyone said with quiet confidence, "He dropped Owsley acid." Owsley's product was said to be pure, like the original stuff produced by the Sandoz Pharmaceutical company. The New York Times quotes a rare interview Owsley gave the San Francisco Chronicle in which he said he had set out only to make a product he knew he could take, because its ingredients were known. “And my friends all wanted to know what they were taking, too.” In a short time the California-based chemist's friends expanded to include folk like the drug-taking students at the Detroit art school. It is reported that Owsley may have produced up to 5 million hits of his famous acid before being arrested and eventually jailed. My friend survived his adventure. After a dozen hours or so he came down, tuckered but no worse for wear, as they say. No one was surprised except for his parents. They were sure he had survived a near death drug induced experience. They forced him to cut his hair, dump his bell bottoms and throw out all his tie-dyed attire. He looked every inch a frat boy when he returned to school. There was a reason his friends had not been concerned. They believed Owsley acid was pure, unadulterated. It was the good stuff, the real deal, it made for good trips. Pure acid was thought to be harmless among its devotees. It was impossible to O.D. on Owsley, they said. It was the safe way to open one's mind, to expand one's consciousness.

Ken Wightman

Likes1

A few years later the Consumers Union Report Licit & Illicit Drugs backed them up, saying on page 334: "The lethal dose of LSD is not known; no human fatalities have been recorded." Papers like the Berkeley Barb in California and their counterculture health columnist Dr. HIPpocrates reported on the safety of LSD but what is now called the Main Stream Media reported otherwise. Only recently has it became possible for medical researchers to renew their interest in the powerful hallucinogenic. The Guardian in the U.K. reported that psychedelic drugs are returning as potential treatments for mental illness, holding promise as treatments for depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and schizophrenia and not just closed minds. About his incarceration Owsley told the San Francisco Chronicle: "I wound up doing time for something I should have been rewarded for. What I did was a community service, the way I look at it. I was punished for political reasons. Absolutely meaningless. Was I a criminal? No. I was a good member of society – only my society and the one making the laws are different." Jeff Weiss of the Los Angeles Times put it best when he wrote: "The world has lost another one who was too weird to live and too rare to die." ______________________________________________________________ Much of the world knows Owsley Stanley as simply the chemist behind the famous acid bearing his name, but he had other pursuits. Without knowing, and without taking any drugs, Owsley's genius has touched more folk through his influence on music than through his production of illicit acid. In the mid '60s, Owsley — nicknamed Bear because of his furry, Teddy bear body — linked up with Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, whose psychedelic adventures went on to be immortalized by Tom Wolfe in his book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Reportedly it was Owsley acid powering the pranksters. Through Kesey, Owsley met the Grateful Dead. According to The New York Times, at various times, he served as the Grateful Dead’s financial backer, pharmaceutical supplier and sound engineer. He was responsible for pioneering the practice of taping their shows -- a practice that has preserved practically the entire Grateful Dead catalog. It was Owsley's high-fidelity sound system that made the Dead’s towering "wall of sound" possible. Stanley taped early performances of many important San Francisco area acts. He captured Big Brother & the Holding Company, Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service and Santana among others.

- See more at: http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/304721#sthash.jAKxeqwA.dpuf

Owsley Stanley is dead. He was 76. Many years ago the '60s' icon of acid escaped to the distant Australian outback, but he could not escape his past. Owsley was never forgotten but then he was a hard man to forget. He left searing flashbacks in his wake.

You see, Owsley, I never heard him referred to by any other name, was the man behind Owsley acid. Among his creations were White Lightning, Monterey Purple and Blue Cheer. His LSD was the gold standard against which all other acid was measured. One edition of the Oxford English Dictionary defines the noun “Owsley” as “an extremely potent, high-quality type of LSD.” The King of Acid counted among his satisfied customers the Grateful Dead, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Ken Kesey and others from the psychedelic ’60s. I first encountered Owsley acid in art school in Detroit. My grandfather was a pharmacist and so I grew up with a healthy respect for drugs. I was very suspicious of street chemicals. My friends dropped acid and I dropped them off at home. I was a '60s designated driver — unless the drug being abused was alcohol. I recall a fellow in art school, he looked like Flo from the Turtles, and one day this fellow popped the school pusher's entire stash of acid. He dropped more than a dozen hits and in less than an hour was removed from school by ambulance. He'll be just fine everyone said with quiet confidence, "He dropped Owsley acid." Owsley's product was said to be pure, like the original stuff produced by the Sandoz Pharmaceutical company. The New York Times quotes a rare interview Owsley gave the San Francisco Chronicle in which he said he had set out only to make a product he knew he could take, because its ingredients were known. “And my friends all wanted to know what they were taking, too.” In a short time the California-based chemist's friends expanded to include folk like the drug-taking students at the Detroit art school. It is reported that Owsley may have produced up to 5 million hits of his famous acid before being arrested and eventually jailed. My friend survived his adventure. After a dozen hours or so he came down, tuckered but no worse for wear, as they say. No one was surprised except for his parents. They were sure he had survived a near death drug induced experience. They forced him to cut his hair, dump his bell bottoms and throw out all his tie-dyed attire. He looked every inch a frat boy when he returned to school. There was a reason his friends had not been concerned. They believed Owsley acid was pure, unadulterated. It was the good stuff, the real deal, it made for good trips. Pure acid was thought to be harmless among its devotees. It was impossible to O.D. on Owsley, they said. It was the safe way to open one's mind, to expand one's consciousness.

Ken Wightman

Likes1

A few years later the Consumers Union Report Licit & Illicit Drugs backed them up, saying on page 334: "The lethal dose of LSD is not known; no human fatalities have been recorded." Papers like the Berkeley Barb in California and their counterculture health columnist Dr. HIPpocrates reported on the safety of LSD but what is now called the Main Stream Media reported otherwise. Only recently has it became possible for medical researchers to renew their interest in the powerful hallucinogenic. The Guardian in the U.K. reported that psychedelic drugs are returning as potential treatments for mental illness, holding promise as treatments for depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and schizophrenia and not just closed minds. About his incarceration Owsley told the San Francisco Chronicle: "I wound up doing time for something I should have been rewarded for. What I did was a community service, the way I look at it. I was punished for political reasons. Absolutely meaningless. Was I a criminal? No. I was a good member of society – only my society and the one making the laws are different." Jeff Weiss of the Los Angeles Times put it best when he wrote: "The world has lost another one who was too weird to live and too rare to die." ______________________________________________________________ Much of the world knows Owsley Stanley as simply the chemist behind the famous acid bearing his name, but he had other pursuits. Without knowing, and without taking any drugs, Owsley's genius has touched more folk through his influence on music than through his production of illicit acid. In the mid '60s, Owsley — nicknamed Bear because of his furry, Teddy bear body — linked up with Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, whose psychedelic adventures went on to be immortalized by Tom Wolfe in his book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Reportedly it was Owsley acid powering the pranksters. Through Kesey, Owsley met the Grateful Dead. According to The New York Times, at various times, he served as the Grateful Dead’s financial backer, pharmaceutical supplier and sound engineer. He was responsible for pioneering the practice of taping their shows -- a practice that has preserved practically the entire Grateful Dead catalog. It was Owsley's high-fidelity sound system that made the Dead’s towering "wall of sound" possible. Stanley taped early performances of many important San Francisco area acts. He captured Big Brother & the Holding Company, Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service and Santana among others.

- See more at: http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/304721#sthash.jAKxeqwA.dpuf

Owsley Stanley is dead. He was 76. Many years ago the '60s' icon of acid escaped to the distant Australian outback, but he could not escape his past. Owsley was never forgotten but then he was a hard man to forget. He left searing flashbacks in his wake.

You see, Owsley, I never heard him referred to by any other name, was the man behind Owsley acid. Among his creations were White Lightning, Monterey Purple and Blue Cheer. His LSD was the gold standard against which all other acid was measured. One edition of the Oxford English Dictionary defines the noun “Owsley” as “an extremely potent, high-quality type of LSD.” The King of Acid counted among his satisfied customers the Grateful Dead, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Ken Kesey and others from the psychedelic ’60s. I first encountered Owsley acid in art school in Detroit. My grandfather was a pharmacist and so I grew up with a healthy respect for drugs. I was very suspicious of street chemicals. My friends dropped acid and I dropped them off at home. I was a '60s designated driver — unless the drug being abused was alcohol. I recall a fellow in art school, he looked like Flo from the Turtles, and one day this fellow popped the school pusher's entire stash of acid. He dropped more than a dozen hits and in less than an hour was removed from school by ambulance. He'll be just fine everyone said with quiet confidence, "He dropped Owsley acid." Owsley's product was said to be pure, like the original stuff produced by the Sandoz Pharmaceutical company. The New York Times quotes a rare interview Owsley gave the San Francisco Chronicle in which he said he had set out only to make a product he knew he could take, because its ingredients were known. “And my friends all wanted to know what they were taking, too.” In a short time the California-based chemist's friends expanded to include folk like the drug-taking students at the Detroit art school. It is reported that Owsley may have produced up to 5 million hits of his famous acid before being arrested and eventually jailed. My friend survived his adventure. After a dozen hours or so he came down, tuckered but no worse for wear, as they say. No one was surprised except for his parents. They were sure he had survived a near death drug induced experience. They forced him to cut his hair, dump his bell bottoms and throw out all his tie-dyed attire. He looked every inch a frat boy when he returned to school. There was a reason his friends had not been concerned. They believed Owsley acid was pure, unadulterated. It was the good stuff, the real deal, it made for good trips. Pure acid was thought to be harmless among its devotees. It was impossible to O.D. on Owsley, they said. It was the safe way to open one's mind, to expand one's consciousness.

Ken Wightman

Likes1

A few years later the Consumers Union Report Licit & Illicit Drugs backed them up, saying on page 334: "The lethal dose of LSD is not known; no human fatalities have been recorded." Papers like the Berkeley Barb in California and their counterculture health columnist Dr. HIPpocrates reported on the safety of LSD but what is now called the Main Stream Media reported otherwise. Only recently has it became possible for medical researchers to renew their interest in the powerful hallucinogenic. The Guardian in the U.K. reported that psychedelic drugs are returning as potential treatments for mental illness, holding promise as treatments for depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and schizophrenia and not just closed minds. About his incarceration Owsley told the San Francisco Chronicle: "I wound up doing time for something I should have been rewarded for. What I did was a community service, the way I look at it. I was punished for political reasons. Absolutely meaningless. Was I a criminal? No. I was a good member of society – only my society and the one making the laws are different." Jeff Weiss of the Los Angeles Times put it best when he wrote: "The world has lost another one who was too weird to live and too rare to die." ______________________________________________________________ Much of the world knows Owsley Stanley as simply the chemist behind the famous acid bearing his name, but he had other pursuits. Without knowing, and without taking any drugs, Owsley's genius has touched more folk through his influence on music than through his production of illicit acid. In the mid '60s, Owsley — nicknamed Bear because of his furry, Teddy bear body — linked up with Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, whose psychedelic adventures went on to be immortalized by Tom Wolfe in his book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Reportedly it was Owsley acid powering the pranksters. Through Kesey, Owsley met the Grateful Dead. According to The New York Times, at various times, he served as the Grateful Dead’s financial backer, pharmaceutical supplier and sound engineer. He was responsible for pioneering the practice of taping their shows -- a practice that has preserved practically the entire Grateful Dead catalog. It was Owsley's high-fidelity sound system that made the Dead’s towering "wall of sound" possible. Stanley taped early performances of many important San Francisco area acts. He captured Big Brother & the Holding Company, Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service and Santana among others.

- See more at: http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/304721#sthash.jAKxeqwA.dpuf

Owsley Stanley is dead. He was 76. Many years ago the '60s' icon of acid escaped to the distant Australian outback, but he could not escape his past. Owsley was never forgotten but then he was a hard man to forget. He left searing flashbacks in his wake.

You see, Owsley, I never heard him referred to by any other name, was the man behind Owsley acid. Among his creations were White Lightning, Monterey Purple and Blue Cheer. His LSD was the gold standard against which all other acid was measured. One edition of the Oxford English Dictionary defines the noun “Owsley” as “an extremely potent, high-quality type of LSD.” The King of Acid counted among his satisfied customers the Grateful Dead, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Ken Kesey and others from the psychedelic ’60s. I first encountered Owsley acid in art school in Detroit. My grandfather was a pharmacist and so I grew up with a healthy respect for drugs. I was very suspicious of street chemicals. My friends dropped acid and I dropped them off at home. I was a '60s designated driver — unless the drug being abused was alcohol. I recall a fellow in art school, he looked like Flo from the Turtles, and one day this fellow popped the school pusher's entire stash of acid. He dropped more than a dozen hits and in less than an hour was removed from school by ambulance. He'll be just fine everyone said with quiet confidence, "He dropped Owsley acid." Owsley's product was said to be pure, like the original stuff produced by the Sandoz Pharmaceutical company. The New York Times quotes a rare interview Owsley gave the San Francisco Chronicle in which he said he had set out only to make a product he knew he could take, because its ingredients were known. “And my friends all wanted to know what they were taking, too.” In a short time the California-based chemist's friends expanded to include folk like the drug-taking students at the Detroit art school. It is reported that Owsley may have produced up to 5 million hits of his famous acid before being arrested and eventually jailed. My friend survived his adventure. After a dozen hours or so he came down, tuckered but no worse for wear, as they say. No one was surprised except for his parents. They were sure he had survived a near death drug induced experience. They forced him to cut his hair, dump his bell bottoms and throw out all his tie-dyed attire. He looked every inch a frat boy when he returned to school. There was a reason his friends had not been concerned. They believed Owsley acid was pure, unadulterated. It was the good stuff, the real deal, it made for good trips. Pure acid was thought to be harmless among its devotees. It was impossible to O.D. on Owsley, they said. It was the safe way to open one's mind, to expand one's consciousness.

Ken Wightman

Likes1

A few years later the Consumers Union Report Licit & Illicit Drugs backed them up, saying on page 334: "The lethal dose of LSD is not known; no human fatalities have been recorded." Papers like the Berkeley Barb in California and their counterculture health columnist Dr. HIPpocrates reported on the safety of LSD but what is now called the Main Stream Media reported otherwise. Only recently has it became possible for medical researchers to renew their interest in the powerful hallucinogenic. The Guardian in the U.K. reported that psychedelic drugs are returning as potential treatments for mental illness, holding promise as treatments for depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and schizophrenia and not just closed minds. About his incarceration Owsley told the San Francisco Chronicle: "I wound up doing time for something I should have been rewarded for. What I did was a community service, the way I look at it. I was punished for political reasons. Absolutely meaningless. Was I a criminal? No. I was a good member of society – only my society and the one making the laws are different." Jeff Weiss of the Los Angeles Times put it best when he wrote: "The world has lost another one who was too weird to live and too rare to die." ______________________________________________________________ Much of the world knows Owsley Stanley as simply the chemist behind the famous acid bearing his name, but he had other pursuits. Without knowing, and without taking any drugs, Owsley's genius has touched more folk through his influence on music than through his production of illicit acid. In the mid '60s, Owsley — nicknamed Bear because of his furry, Teddy bear body — linked up with Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, whose psychedelic adventures went on to be immortalized by Tom Wolfe in his book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Reportedly it was Owsley acid powering the pranksters. Through Kesey, Owsley met the Grateful Dead. According to The New York Times, at various times, he served as the Grateful Dead’s financial backer, pharmaceutical supplier and sound engineer. He was responsible for pioneering the practice of taping their shows -- a practice that has preserved practically the entire Grateful Dead catalog. It was Owsley's high-fidelity sound system that made the Dead’s towering "wall of sound" possible. Stanley taped early performances of many important San Francisco area acts. He captured Big Brother & the Holding Company, Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service and Santana among others.

- See more at: http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/304721#sthash.jAKxeqwA.dpuf

I first encountered Owsley acid in art school in Detroit. My grandfather was a pharmacist and so I grew up with a healthy respect for drugs. I was very suspicious of street chemicals. My friends dropped acid and I dropped my friends off at home. I was a '60s designated driver — unless the drug being abused was alcohol.

I recall a fellow in art school, he looked like Flo from the Turtles, who popped the school pusher's  entire acid inventory. He dropped more than a dozen hits and in less than an hour was removed from school by ambulance. "He'll be just fine," everyone said with quiet confidence, "He dropped Owsley acid." Owsley's product was said to be pure, like the original stuff produced by the Sandoz Pharmaceutical company.

His friends were right not voicing concern. If it actually was Owsley acid dropped by the freaky art student, it was pure and unadulterated LSD. It was the good stuff, the real deal, it made for good trips. Pure acid was thought to be harmless among its devotees. It was impossible to O.D. on Owsley, they said. It was the safe way to open one's mind, to expand one's consciousness.

Owsley arraigned for making 1.25 million plus hits of acid.

The New York Times quotes a rare interview Owsley gave the San Francisco Chronicle in which the famed chemist said he had set out only to make a product he knew he could take, because its ingredients were known. “And my friends all wanted to know what they were taking, too.”

In a short time the California-based chemist's friends expanded to include folk like the drug-taking students at the Detroit art school. It is reported that Owsley may have produced up to 5 million hits of his famous acid before being arrested and eventually jailed.

My friend survived his adventure. After a little more than a dozen hours, he came down. He was tuckered but no worse for wear. No one was surprised except for his parents. They were sure he had survived a near drug death experience. They forced him to cut his hair, dump his bell bottoms and throw out all his tie-dyed attire. He looked every inch a frat boy on returning to school.

The Consumers Union Report Licit & Illicit Drugs confirmed that the faith acid takers had in the safety of LSD was not misguided. The report said this on page 334:

"The lethal dose of LSD is not known; no human fatalities have been recorded." 

Papers like the Berkeley Barb in California and their counterculture health columnist Dr. HIPpocrates reported on the safety of LSD but what is now called the Main Stream Media reported otherwise. Because of all the scare stories associated with acid, it is only recently that it has become possible for medical researchers to renew their interest in the powerful hallucinogenic.

The Guardian in the U.K. reported that psychedelic drugs are returning as potential treatments for mental illness, holding promise as treatments for depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and schizophrenia and not just as treatment for closed minds.

About his incarceration Owsley told the San Francisco Chronicle:

"I wound up doing time for something I should have been rewarded for. What I did was a community service, the way I look at it. I was punished for political reasons. Absolutely meaningless. Was I a criminal? No. I was a good member of society – only my society and the one making the laws are different."

Jeff Weiss of the Los Angeles Times put it best when he wrote: "The world has lost another one who was too weird to live and too rare to die."

(The image of Owsley is from the San Francisco Chronicle and was posted on Wikipedia. I thank them for the image as Wikipedia claimed: "it is believed that the use of this work (is acceptable) to illustrate the subject in question."
_____________________________________________

Much of the world knows Owsley Stanley as simply the chemist behind the famous acid bearing his name, but he had other pursuits. Without knowing, and without taking any drugs, Owsley's genius has touched more folk through his influence on music than through his production of illicit acid.

In the mid '60s, Owsley — nicknamed Bear because of his furry, Teddy bear body — linked up with Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, whose psychedelic adventures went on to be immortalized by Tom Wolfe in his book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Reportedly it was Owsley acid powering the pranksters. Through Kesey, Owsley met the Grateful Dead.

According to The New York Times, at various times, he served as the Grateful Dead’s financial backer, pharmaceutical supplier and sound engineer. He was responsible for pioneering the practice of taping their shows — a practice that has preserved practically the entire Grateful Dead catalog.

It was Owsley's high-fidelity sound system that made the Dead’s towering "wall of sound" possible.
Stanley taped early performances of many important San Francisco area acts. He captured Big Brother & the Holding Company, Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service and Santana among others.

Music history from the '60s era and the psychedelic sound owe much to the genius of Augustus Owsley Stanley III.

Owsley Stanley is dead. He was 76. Many years ago the '60s' icon of acid escaped to the distant Australian outback, but he could not escape his past. Owsley was never forgotten but then he was a hard man to forget. He left searing flashbacks in his wake.

You see, Owsley, I never heard him referred to by any other name, was the man behind Owsley acid. Among his creations were White Lightning, Monterey Purple and Blue Cheer. His LSD was the gold standard against which all other acid was measured. One edition of the Oxford English Dictionary defines the noun “Owsley” as “an extremely potent, high-quality type of LSD.” The King of Acid counted among his satisfied customers the Grateful Dead, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Ken Kesey and others from the psychedelic ’60s. I first encountered Owsley acid in art school in Detroit. My grandfather was a pharmacist and so I grew up with a healthy respect for drugs. I was very suspicious of street chemicals. My friends dropped acid and I dropped them off at home. I was a '60s designated driver — unless the drug being abused was alcohol. I recall a fellow in art school, he looked like Flo from the Turtles, and one day this fellow popped the school pusher's entire stash of acid. He dropped more than a dozen hits and in less than an hour was removed from school by ambulance. He'll be just fine everyone said with quiet confidence, "He dropped Owsley acid." Owsley's product was said to be pure, like the original stuff produced by the Sandoz Pharmaceutical company. The New York Times quotes a rare interview Owsley gave the San Francisco Chronicle in which he said he had set out only to make a product he knew he could take, because its ingredients were known. “And my friends all wanted to know what they were taking, too.” In a short time the California-based chemist's friends expanded to include folk like the drug-taking students at the Detroit art school. It is reported that Owsley may have produced up to 5 million hits of his famous acid before being arrested and eventually jailed. My friend survived his adventure. After a dozen hours or so he came down, tuckered but no worse for wear, as they say. No one was surprised except for his parents. They were sure he had survived a near death drug induced experience. They forced him to cut his hair, dump his bell bottoms and throw out all his tie-dyed attire. He looked every inch a frat boy when he returned to school. There was a reason his friends had not been concerned. They believed Owsley acid was pure, unadulterated. It was the good stuff, the real deal, it made for good trips. Pure acid was thought to be harmless among its devotees. It was impossible to O.D. on Owsley, they said. It was the safe way to open one's mind, to expand one's consciousness.

Ken Wightman

Likes1

A few years later the Consumers Union Report Licit & Illicit Drugs backed them up, saying on page 334: "The lethal dose of LSD is not known; no human fatalities have been recorded." Papers like the Berkeley Barb in California and their counterculture health columnist Dr. HIPpocrates reported on the safety of LSD but what is now called the Main Stream Media reported otherwise. Only recently has it became possible for medical researchers to renew their interest in the powerful hallucinogenic. The Guardian in the U.K. reported that psychedelic drugs are returning as potential treatments for mental illness, holding promise as treatments for depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and schizophrenia and not just closed minds. About his incarceration Owsley told the San Francisco Chronicle: "I wound up doing time for something I should have been rewarded for. What I did was a community service, the way I look at it. I was punished for political reasons. Absolutely meaningless. Was I a criminal? No. I was a good member of society – only my society and the one making the laws are different." Jeff Weiss of the Los Angeles Times put it best when he wrote: "The world has lost another one who was too weird to live and too rare to die." ______________________________________________________________ Much of the world knows Owsley Stanley as simply the chemist behind the famous acid bearing his name, but he had other pursuits. Without knowing, and without taking any drugs, Owsley's genius has touched more folk through his influence on music than through his production of illicit acid. In the mid '60s, Owsley — nicknamed Bear because of his furry, Teddy bear body — linked up with Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, whose psychedelic adventures went on to be immortalized by Tom Wolfe in his book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Reportedly it was Owsley acid powering the pranksters. Through Kesey, Owsley met the Grateful Dead. According to The New York Times, at various times, he served as the Grateful Dead’s financial backer, pharmaceutical supplier and sound engineer. He was responsible for pioneering the practice of taping their shows -- a practice that has preserved practically the entire Grateful Dead catalog. It was Owsley's high-fidelity sound system that made the Dead’s towering "wall of sound" possible. Stanley taped early performances of many important San Francisco area acts. He captured Big Brother & the Holding Company, Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service and Santana among others. Music history from the '60s era and the psychedelic sound owe much to the genius of Augustus Owsley Stanley III.

- See more at: http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/304721#sthash.jAKxeqwA.dpuf

Owsley Stanley is dead. He was 76. Many years ago the '60s' icon of acid escaped to the distant Australian outback, but he could not escape his past. Owsley was never forgotten but then he was a hard man to forget. He left searing flashbacks in his wake.

You see, Owsley, I never heard him referred to by any other name, was the man behind Owsley acid. Among his creations were White Lightning, Monterey Purple and Blue Cheer. His LSD was the gold standard against which all other acid was measured. One edition of the Oxford English Dictionary defines the noun “Owsley” as “an extremely potent, high-quality type of LSD.” The King of Acid counted among his satisfied customers the Grateful Dead, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Ken Kesey and others from the psychedelic ’60s. I first encountered Owsley acid in art school in Detroit. My grandfather was a pharmacist and so I grew up with a healthy respect for drugs. I was very suspicious of street chemicals. My friends dropped acid and I dropped them off at home. I was a '60s designated driver — unless the drug being abused was alcohol. I recall a fellow in art school, he looked like Flo from the Turtles, and one day this fellow popped the school pusher's entire stash of acid. He dropped more than a dozen hits and in less than an hour was removed from school by ambulance. He'll be just fine everyone said with quiet confidence, "He dropped Owsley acid." Owsley's product was said to be pure, like the original stuff produced by the Sandoz Pharmaceutical company. The New York Times quotes a rare interview Owsley gave the San Francisco Chronicle in which he said he had set out only to make a product he knew he could take, because its ingredients were known. “And my friends all wanted to know what they were taking, too.” In a short time the California-based chemist's friends expanded to include folk like the drug-taking students at the Detroit art school. It is reported that Owsley may have produced up to 5 million hits of his famous acid before being arrested and eventually jailed. My friend survived his adventure. After a dozen hours or so he came down, tuckered but no worse for wear, as they say. No one was surprised except for his parents. They were sure he had survived a near death drug induced experience. They forced him to cut his hair, dump his bell bottoms and throw out all his tie-dyed attire. He looked every inch a frat boy when he returned to school. There was a reason his friends had not been concerned. They believed Owsley acid was pure, unadulterated. It was the good stuff, the real deal, it made for good trips. Pure acid was thought to be harmless among its devotees. It was impossible to O.D. on Owsley, they said. It was the safe way to open one's mind, to expand one's consciousness.

Ken Wightman

Likes1

A few years later the Consumers Union Report Licit & Illicit Drugs backed them up, saying on page 334: "The lethal dose of LSD is not known; no human fatalities have been recorded." Papers like the Berkeley Barb in California and their counterculture health columnist Dr. HIPpocrates reported on the safety of LSD but what is now called the Main Stream Media reported otherwise. Only recently has it became possible for medical researchers to renew their interest in the powerful hallucinogenic. The Guardian in the U.K. reported that psychedelic drugs are returning as potential treatments for mental illness, holding promise as treatments for depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and schizophrenia and not just closed minds. About his incarceration Owsley told the San Francisco Chronicle: "I wound up doing time for something I should have been rewarded for. What I did was a community service, the way I look at it. I was punished for political reasons. Absolutely meaningless. Was I a criminal? No. I was a good member of society – only my society and the one making the laws are different." Jeff Weiss of the Los Angeles Times put it best when he wrote: "The world has lost another one who was too weird to live and too rare to die." ______________________________________________________________ Much of the world knows Owsley Stanley as simply the chemist behind the famous acid bearing his name, but he had other pursuits. Without knowing, and without taking any drugs, Owsley's genius has touched more folk through his influence on music than through his production of illicit acid. In the mid '60s, Owsley — nicknamed Bear because of his furry, Teddy bear body — linked up with Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, whose psychedelic adventures went on to be immortalized by Tom Wolfe in his book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Reportedly it was Owsley acid powering the pranksters. Through Kesey, Owsley met the Grateful Dead. According to The New York Times, at various times, he served as the Grateful Dead’s financial backer, pharmaceutical supplier and sound engineer. He was responsible for pioneering the practice of taping their shows -- a practice that has preserved practically the entire Grateful Dead catalog. It was Owsley's high-fidelity sound system that made the Dead’s towering "wall of sound" possible. Stanley taped early performances of many important San Francisco area acts. He captured Big Brother & the Holding Company, Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service and Santana among others. Music history from the '60s era and the psychedelic sound owe much to the genius of Augustus Owsley Stanley III.

- See more at: http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/304721#sthash.jAKxeqwA.dpuf

Owsley Stanley is dead. He was 76. Many years ago the '60s' icon of acid escaped to the distant Australian outback, but he could not escape his past. Owsley was never forgotten but then he was a hard man to forget. He left searing flashbacks in his wake.

You see, Owsley, I never heard him referred to by any other name, was the man behind Owsley acid. Among his creations were White Lightning, Monterey Purple and Blue Cheer. His LSD was the gold standard against which all other acid was measured. One edition of the Oxford English Dictionary defines the noun “Owsley” as “an extremely potent, high-quality type of LSD.” The King of Acid counted among his satisfied customers the Grateful Dead, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Ken Kesey and others from the psychedelic ’60s. I first encountered Owsley acid in art school in Detroit. My grandfather was a pharmacist and so I grew up with a healthy respect for drugs. I was very suspicious of street chemicals. My friends dropped acid and I dropped them off at home. I was a '60s designated driver — unless the drug being abused was alcohol. I recall a fellow in art school, he looked like Flo from the Turtles, and one day this fellow popped the school pusher's entire stash of acid. He dropped more than a dozen hits and in less than an hour was removed from school by ambulance. He'll be just fine everyone said with quiet confidence, "He dropped Owsley acid." Owsley's product was said to be pure, like the original stuff produced by the Sandoz Pharmaceutical company. The New York Times quotes a rare interview Owsley gave the San Francisco Chronicle in which he said he had set out only to make a product he knew he could take, because its ingredients were known. “And my friends all wanted to know what they were taking, too.” In a short time the California-based chemist's friends expanded to include folk like the drug-taking students at the Detroit art school. It is reported that Owsley may have produced up to 5 million hits of his famous acid before being arrested and eventually jailed. My friend survived his adventure. After a dozen hours or so he came down, tuckered but no worse for wear, as they say. No one was surprised except for his parents. They were sure he had survived a near death drug induced experience. They forced him to cut his hair, dump his bell bottoms and throw out all his tie-dyed attire. He looked every inch a frat boy when he returned to school. There was a reason his friends had not been concerned. They believed Owsley acid was pure, unadulterated. It was the good stuff, the real deal, it made for good trips. Pure acid was thought to be harmless among its devotees. It was impossible to O.D. on Owsley, they said. It was the safe way to open one's mind, to expand one's consciousness.

Ken Wightman

Likes1

A few years later the Consumers Union Report Licit & Illicit Drugs backed them up, saying on page 334: "The lethal dose of LSD is not known; no human fatalities have been recorded." Papers like the Berkeley Barb in California and their counterculture health columnist Dr. HIPpocrates reported on the safety of LSD but what is now called the Main Stream Media reported otherwise. Only recently has it became possible for medical researchers to renew their interest in the powerful hallucinogenic. The Guardian in the U.K. reported that psychedelic drugs are returning as potential treatments for mental illness, holding promise as treatments for depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and schizophrenia and not just closed minds. About his incarceration Owsley told the San Francisco Chronicle: "I wound up doing time for something I should have been rewarded for. What I did was a community service, the way I look at it. I was punished for political reasons. Absolutely meaningless. Was I a criminal? No. I was a good member of society – only my society and the one making the laws are different." Jeff Weiss of the Los Angeles Times put it best when he wrote: "The world has lost another one who was too weird to live and too rare to die." ______________________________________________________________ Much of the world knows Owsley Stanley as simply the chemist behind the famous acid bearing his name, but he had other pursuits. Without knowing, and without taking any drugs, Owsley's genius has touched more folk through his influence on music than through his production of illicit acid. In the mid '60s, Owsley — nicknamed Bear because of his furry, Teddy bear body — linked up with Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, whose psychedelic adventures went on to be immortalized by Tom Wolfe in his book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Reportedly it was Owsley acid powering the pranksters. Through Kesey, Owsley met the Grateful Dead. According to The New York Times, at various times, he served as the Grateful Dead’s financial backer, pharmaceutical supplier and sound engineer. He was responsible for pioneering the practice of taping their shows -- a practice that has preserved practically the entire Grateful Dead catalog. It was Owsley's high-fidelity sound system that made the Dead’s towering "wall of sound" possible. Stanley taped early performances of many important San Francisco area acts. He captured Big Brother & the Holding Company, Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service and Santana among others. Music history from the '60s era and the psychedelic sound owe much to the genius of Augustus Owsley Stanley III.

- See more at: http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/304721#sthash.jAKxeqwA.dpuf

Priests for Life, maybe, but certainly not Priests for Truth

Should Baby Joseph have been given a tracheotomy by the London Ontario hospital and returned to the care of his parents? Or would another medical approach all together have offered the infant life instead of the almost certain death of simply being taken off the ventilator?

These are not questions that I can easily answer. But now that the baby has been airlifted from London to St. Louis Missouri where he will receive alternative care, these questions will have an answer. Maybe.

But what was clear if you followed the Twitter tweets and Facebook posts was that many people distrusted the doctors at the London Health Sciences Centre (LHSC). But if the reportedly terminally ill child has left London, the cloud of mistrust and controversy remains.

Priests for Life, based in Staten Island NY, posted a statement boasting "Father Frank Pavone of Priests for Life Leads Covert Mission to Rescue Baby Joseph." The story says the mission was accomplished "under cover of darkness."

Covert? So how did the fathers disguise their operation so as to not alert hospital security and  under the cover of darkness secretly spirit Baby Joseph away?

The short answer: They didn't.

The London hospital cared for Baby Joseph right up until the American medical team in an air ambulance took over. There was no covert operation. And it certainly was not conducted under the cover of darkness. The transfer may have been done at night but those Canadians are quite advanced; they have lights!

End-of-life decisions are difficult, especially ones involving infants. Such decisions are hard on everyone involved: mothers, fathers, other family members and on the doctors, nurses and other hospital staff providing medical treatment to the failing child.

When I read the claim by Father Pavone that Baby Joseph needed "a hospital that cherishes life over the bottom line," I shook my head. That is just what the dying child had in the LHCS. I know this for a fact from my own personal experience.

Also, as a former newspaper photographer I've spent a lot of time over the years taking pictures of children receiving treatment at the Children's Hospital at London Health Sciences Centre. The hospital, its doctors, nurses and staff do not deserve the nasty, uninformed attacks they have taken since this matter went viral on the Internet and in the American media. They certainly should not be subjected to phone and e-mail threats as has been happening.

Ian Gillespie, a columnist with The London Free Press, addressed this very issue in a recent column. He spoke with Lisa Cann, a mother with a 14-year-old son who must struggle to live. Her boy has help with his health struggles - the LHSC.

Cann told Gillespie:

During the past nine years she and her son have made 25 visits to the emergency room, more than 100 pediatric medical day unit visits, 55 radiology visits, more than 50 visits to a gastro-intestinal clinic, more than 450 weekly pediatric appointments, at least seven calls to 911 and close to 20 extended hospital stays. This week, they went back for yet another surgical procedure.

And through it all, Cann says she’s seen nothing but top-notch care and compassion.

LHSC kept Baby Joseph alive for months. He was under their care from October on and it was months before they recommended removing the boy's breathing tube. They ran every test and explored every option. This is not the conduct of a hospital more interested in saving money than saving lives.

Whether you agree with the Canadian hospital's decision or not, there is widespread support for their position in the medical community throughout the world. This is not just according to the hospital but according to the father of Baby Joseph. Moe Maraachli spoke to me of the frustration of trying to find a hospital to take his son. "I've talked to doctors throughout Canada, the United States and Europe . . . ," he said, then stopped and shook his head. He was unable to finish.

The parents of Baby Joseph sought the medical opinion of physicians at the Children’s Hospital of Michigan in Detroit. Physician experts at the hospital wrote the LHSC:

"We do not feel that we have anything to offer Joseph that has not already been given to him under your care” and "there is nothing that the Children's Hospital of Michigan has to offer Joseph that has not already been done for him in Ontario".

When Priests for Life present themselves as major players in the success of finding a suitable hospital prepared to accept little Joseph, they are not lying. It is clear that they work with a rather unique hospital in SSM Cardinal Glennon Children's Medical Center of St. Louis.

What I find so disturbing is the angry and very nasty tone of much of the discourse, especially that coming from the Priests for Life. Many distrusted the Canadian hospital; I distrust the highly charged statements released by this religious group. I find their statements self serving and worse I find them dishonest.

It is time for the priests to stop the posturing. It is time for the Fathers to work at getting out the truth. Stoking fiery emotions of hate, anger and misunderstanding, emotions already glowing red hot when it come to this issue, is not the right response; It may not even be Christian.
______________________________________________________________________

Baby Joseph myths

Fox News in the States has done a good job of politicizing this story with fabricated facts. They put enough spin on the story to make any viewer dizzy. LHSC put together a page dispelling some of the false and misleading information being spread by groups such as the Priests for Life and Fox News.

Read Just the Facts on the LHSC website.

When I watch a video featuring the Fox News Medical A team I can't help but think of George Owell's Ministry of Truth in his novel 1984.

I support the Canadian health care system.

I'm dying, but let's be honest, so are you. The difference is that I keep trying to die sooner than later. If my body were a car, I'd be recalled. No wait, I'd be repaired and restored and I guess that's just what's happening.

When I read stories about the awful health care in Canada, I shake my head. The stories are so simplistic and so wrong. Health care is a problem all around the world, not just in Canada. But there are also health care solutions and they too are appearing all over the world.

Health care is expensive and it's getting more and more expensive with each passing year. When I was born mitral valve heart repair didn't add a cent to health care costs. Why? The procedure hadn't yet been done. The first successful mitral valve repair wasn't performed until 1948. That lucky dude had his sternum cracked open and his rib cage spread in order to give surgeons access to his damaged heart. Trust me on this, I bet he considered himself very lucky.

da Vinci at work.

Eight years ago I had my badly leaking mitral valve repaired robotically right here in London, Ontario. I did not have to have my sternum split; I have no huge scar. All it took was a little incision hidden in a fold under my right nipple, some little surgical tools, a talented surgeon and one big robot: a million and a half dollar da Vinci surgical robot. I consider myself very lucky.

I came upon an article by Michelle Meadows on the SurgicalTechSuccess site that said: "complete robotic heart surgery, which is commonly done in Europe and Canada, is considered experimental in the United States."

It was an article from 2002, it was written almost a decade ago, and yet I was surprised. I had thought the U.S. had always led the world when it came to robotic surgery. But when I looked into the history of my robotic operation I learned that some of  "the first minimally invasive mitral valve surgery using Aesop (was done) in Austria and South Korea and the first robotic mitral valve surgery using DaVinci (was done) in England, India, Italy, and Thailand."

I don't want to get into a "who-was-first" argument. My point is that medical advances are being made all around the world. Clearly, more is being done in India than just running call centres and more is being done in Thailand than shrimp farming.

Hospitalized in California

Last summer, seven years after I had my heart repaired, I suffered a V-tach event in California. My heart raced to 300 bpm and I was rushed to emerg where doctors hit me with 200 joules, jolting my heart back to reality. One could say they "rebooted" my pump.

Once you have a V-tach event there is a good chance that you will have another. These events can kill you in minutes. This does not leave much time to get help. A few weeks ago Dr. James White at the Robarts Research Institute at Western in London used a high-tech 3-Tesla MRI to discover why I suffered the runaway heart event. My pump is badly scarred, possibly because of a relatively rare type of heart disease, leaving it electrically unstable.

It was clear I needed an ICD — an implantable cardioverter defibrillator — and I needed one soon. Just weeks later I have one. I no longer need to go to emerg to have my heart rebooted. I carry a micro defibrillator in my chest. The battery is good for seven years and maybe longer.

My ICD not available in U.S.

An ICD isn't cheap. I gather from what I read on the Web that implanting one can easily cost from $65,000 to more than $100,000 in the States depending on the sophistication of the device. The high price may be part of the reason that less than 40% of U.S. patients in need of an ICD receive one according to Dr. Kenneth Stein, chief medical officer for Boston Scientific's cardiac rhythm management division.

I found an interesting article How Much Will We Pay To Save A Life? by Douglas P. Zipes, MD. This American doctor warned: "In the final analysis, many medical decisions are based on how much money society is willing to spend to save a life." He wrote, "Some therapies are inexpensive and others are not, and society has to make difficult choices about how to use our limited resources."

If having an ICD implanted in the States can cost in the six figures, how much did mine cost to have implanted in Ontario? I don't know but I bet the Canadian approach saved money, coming in at the low end of the scale. My ICD was implanted in an outpatient setting. I entered the hospital at ten in the morning and left by mid-afternoon. The operation itself took a bit more than an hour. I was home for dinner.

My ICD, a Medtronic Protecta, is also used in Europe but it has not been approved in the States. I got something that, for the moment, is not available in the U.S.

If we, as a society, plan on offering everyone high quality health care, we've got to perfect methods of delivering such care at reduced cost. Whether it's European socialized medicine, the Canadian single-payer system or the very mixed approach in place in the United States, every health system must address the issue of climbing costs.

• Methods of doing more with less must be developed. Cutting the time spent in the hospital cuts costs dramatically.
• Encouraging manufacturers to develop sophisticated equipment that cuts costs by increasing efficiency. This is a balancing act, of course, the additional expense must be offset by greater efficiency. The 3T MRI unit used to diagnose my heart condition is one example. I ran up a $25,000 hospital bill in California and yet the cause of my V-tach event went undetected. One scan in a high-powered 3T MRI could have answered all the questions that were swirling about my heart.
• We must take advantage of technological breakthroughs. Robots, controlled by experienced surgeons, may very well work better and quicker than surgeons on their own. Minimally invasive surgery performed robotically can cut hospital stays dramatically and speed patient recovery.
• Careful patient selection is important, and we may have to make some tough, unpopular choices when it comes to medical treatments that are covered.With limited resources, only those with a good chance of benefiting from a medical procedure should be considered. And some procedures are very expensive and yet have very poor track records. I know a person who was so desperate to lose weight that they longed to have their stomach stapled. OHIP refused to cover the cost and no Canadian hospital was interested in performing the operation. This person was told that the procedure they sought would be very risky for them and that in the end they might well put back all weight they lost following the surgery. The person turned to a hospital in the States. The U.S. hospital performed the operation for a fee and today, four years later, this person has ballooned right back to their former obese size. They needed a new attitude toward food and not a new, smaller stomach.

And maybe all hospitals don't have to have the latest and greatest equipment to enjoy some benefits from advancing technology. There are indications that the original da Vinci robot may be getting a little long in the robotic tooth. Children's Hospital Boston demonstrated a tiny surgical robot at TEDMED that put the size of tools used by da Vinci to shame. Maybe smaller hospitals can pick up a used da Vinci robot on the cheap.

As I recuperate from my ICD operation, it'll be a month before I can lift my granddaughter again, as the wire lead screwed into my heart must heal firmly into the heart muscle. I wouldn't want to tug it free. I will follow all my doctors' orders faithfully.

I am going to use some of my free time to rewrite my will, add a codicil. I'm leaving something to LHSC and to the Robarts Research Institute. Our health system has earned my support.

Supporters want Baby Joseph sent home

Showing support for the family, dozens turned out Saturday to rally beside Moe Maraachli to protest LHSC's refusal to perform a tracheotomy on Maraachli's young son before releasing him into his family's care.

Baby Joseph is dying. On this both the Canadian hospital and Baby Joseph's parents agree. The dispute arises as to where the infant will die. Will it be in the hospital or at home?

Saturday dozens of supporters protested the hospital's refusal to perform a tracheotomy on the little boy before sending him home to face certain death.

Moe Maraachli is Baby Joseph's dad.

The 13-month-old son of Moe Maraachli and Sana Nader of Windsor Ontario, known to the world as Baby Joseph, was admitted to Victoria Hospital in London Ontario last October. 

The family was on the way home from Toronto, not quite halfway to Windsor, when their infant son developed life-threatening breathing difficulties. They rushed the boy to emergency in Ingersoll and from there he was taken to the London Health Sciences Centre's pediatric critical care unit. 

It is now March and the little boy is still being cared for in the Southwestern Ontario hospital. The doctors have determined he is dying of the same progressive neurodegenerative disease that claimed his sister, Zina, eight years ago. 

The doctors would like to remove the breathing tube keeping the little boy alive. His parents want the doctors to perform a tracheotomy and let them take their son home to die, as was done with Joseph's sister. She lived six months with a tracheotomy before succumbing to the fatal genetic disease.

For more on this story see the Digital Journal post.

Protesters supporting the parents of Baby Joseph lined Commissioners Road and Wellington Road at the busy intersection near the large hospital complex.

Stop fluoridation, London audience told

Dr. Paul Connett, who co-authored The Case Against Fluoride, speaking Wed. in London.

London - Fluoride is hardening more than teeth in London Ontario. In this Southwestern Ontario city it is also hardening positions. The battle to remove fluoride from the city's tap water appears to be gaining strength.

The talk by Dr. Paul Connett at the downtown Central library in London Ontario filled the 370-seat Wolf Performance Hall, forcing organizers to close the doors and turn many away who had hoped to attend the well promoted event.

Connett heads a New York state anti-fluoridation group called the Fluoride Action Network. These American activists have found Canadians receptive to their arguments against the decades old practice. Politicians in two major Canadian cities, Calgary in Alberta and Waterloo in Ontario, have voted to remove the chemical from their municipal water.

Connett said, "the evidence of benefits is very weak."

Connett challenged Dr. Bryna Warshawsky, associate medical officer of health for the Middlesex-London Health Unit to tackle his arguments publicly. "I want her to tell me where I'm wrong."

The anti-fluoride group believes support for the tap water additive is crumbling in North America, especially in Canada.

"They've got to admit," says Connett, "fluoridation is a huge mistake and has got to stop."

The gauntlet has been thrown down: "I don't say fluoridation is the biggest threat (to our safety) but it is the easiest one to correct." Connett clearly hopes London will be another victory in the battle to remove fluoride from our water.

Read more: http://digitaljournal.com/article/304245

Detroit: Send a poet, not a reporter

The Michigan Central Station is a sad reminder of  Detroit's former glory.

Detroit — It wasn't so many years ago that Detroiters called their booming town "The Third City." They proudly bragged that when American cities were listed in order of greatness Detroit had a firm hold on third place after New York and Second City (Chicago). And those Detroiters would have been right. Back then Detroit was also known as "the Paris of the Midwest". But that was then and this is now.

It is all too sad. And, for me, it's an eye-opener. As a child I wondered how the Roman Empire, so big and so powerful, could collapse so quickly and so completely. It was unfathomable. From my perspective, so many centuries after the fact, it seemed to have happened almost overnight.

Today I have the answer. The urban fabric is fragile. For proof, I simply look at Detroit. It was the perfect city of my youth. It offered something for everyone. It was, in the words of today's city planners, one big example of placemaking.

An abandoned dental office in Detroit.

What makes Detroit stand out is the utter collapse of its economic underpinnings. Proud buildings were abandoned essentially over night, and with no money to demolish them they were left to slowly decay.

Along with the economic collapse, there was a vast upheaval in the social fabric of Detroit itself. As jobs left, the upper and middle class left. Poverty and the problems associated with poverty became the blight.

Detroit neighborhoods suffering from the blight rotted and died. And the blight was infectious; It spread into adjacent neighbourhoods. Hardly a neighbourhood was spared.

On the 25th anniversary of the Detroit riots, The London Free Press sent a reporter and me to Motown to discover what had changed with the passing of two and half decades. The reporter didn't have a feel for the Detroit of the past. He didn't share my sense of loss. It was an assignment for a poet and not a reporter. He missed the story.

I took this shot back in the mid '60s in Detroit.

Please take a look at the posted pictures from a new book, The Ruins of Detroit. Read about the authors in this The New York Times post. The accompanying NYT slide show is good but it duplicates some of the shots from the first link. Or read Ruin with a View, a NYT review of two books examining the collapse of a Detroit: The Ruins of Detroit and Detroit Disassembled.

Quoting the last paragraph of the NYT review:

"Ruins are a loaded subject, one that puts metaphor within easy reach. Marchand and Meffre show us a flag lying on the floor of a deserted church. The images here constitute a requiem for an American empire in a state of precipitous decline. Both books feature the same clock on a classroom wall, its frozen hands and melted face right out of a Dalí painting — as if time in Detroit had ticked to a halt, distorted, when in fact, with our gridlocked government and blind faith in our own exceptionalism, time is passing us by."

London train station build in1886-7 and demolished in 1937.

Truth be told, most of us don't have to look as far as Detroit to see the fragility of our civilized world. We only have to look at our own cities and towns. Try to recall what has been ripped from your city's fabric over the years. I warn you this can be tricky; We have very short collective memories.

Documenting my own city's disappearing heritage is far harder than documenting Detroit's. In some ways it is even harder than documenting the losses suffered by ancient Rome. In London, Ontario, we tear down and replace and then tear down again. The station pictured above stood at the south-east corner of Clarence and Bathurst Streets and was designed by F. H. Spier, a famous Detroit architect. It was demolished in the '30s.

Waiting room of '37 station

After the loss of this little jewel, CNR built a passenger station nearby in 1937. The new station had "broad landscaped station grounds extending from Clarence to Richmond streets. It has a semi-circular concrete driveway and walkway approach to the main entrance. It has shrub-topped terraces . . . "

This new jewel didn't last three decades. It was replaced by a couple of structures, one being the 10 storey CN Tower Building, which has now also been demolished.

Today London has a new station, and it has already undergone changes since its opening. Few remember the now gone food counter which graced the new station on its opening, even fewer recall the rich history of prior railroad stations. I doubt many passengers realize the underground route to the VIA trains is a last, lingering memory of the long gone '37 station.

On the bright side, the newest London station, although possibly influenced by fast food restaurant design, is a better train station than many found in Canadian cities.





One last note: This post sat queued, forgotten and unposted for many weeks. I have to thank a Montreal reader for jogging my memory. This reader sent me a link to the Quebec blog Ma Revue. Many of the photos of Detroit shown in that Ma Revue post are ones I had linked to earlier. Thank you D.N.

Deadlines in the 140 character world

While reading The New York Times op-ed columnist Maureen Dowd, I thought about the similar constraints affecting newspaper writers, Twitter posters and Internet bloggers. All face the constraints of time and space.

With the Internet there is a great push to get it, whatever it is, out there immediately. There is a rush to publish. Newspapers suffer from this same pressure. Newspapers have even given this rush to publish a name: The deadline. Putting out a paper is no different than putting out any other product from a highly automated plant. To deliver the product on time, in this case the newspaper, one must meet deadlines.

Dowd quotes Nicholas Carr, author of “The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains.” Carr claims technology amplifies everything, good instincts and base. While technology is amoral, he says, our brains may be rewired in disturbing ways.

“Researchers say that we need to be quiet and attentive if we want to tap into our deeper emotions,” he said. “If we’re constantly interrupted and distracted, we kind of short-circuit our empathy. If you dampen empathy and you encourage the immediate expression of whatever is in your mind, you get a lot of nastiness that wouldn’t have occurred before.” 

One would never describe newsrooms as quiet spots of gentle contemplation. The best newsrooms are high energy places, pressure-cookers for ideas. Dump ideas in, turn up the heat, and serve almost immediately. The results may not be perfect but the system is fast and what is served, the daily news, is amazingly "nutritious" for a "fast food."

Now add the constraint of space to the constraint of time and you have the ingredients for a serious problem. If you have every found yourself hamstrung by the 140 character limit imposed by Twitter, you have gained a small insight into the problem newspaper writers face daily.

On returning from a story a reporter may be told, "Quick. We're ten minutes from deadline. Give me seven inches. Maybe we can expand your story for City." (But reporters know that editors can only redo a limited number of pages for City. If the other pages are more important, the original seven inches will be it. So, reporters must do the best job they can in eight minutes. A few minutes must be left for editing and placing the copy on the page before being released to the back shop.)

I often hear folk talking about the 24-hour news cycle. Just last night I had a guest for dinner who works in the media industry and he blamed the 24-hour news cycle for a lot of the problems facing the industry today. Maybe, maybe not.

He also said how once something is up on the Internet is there forever. Maybe, maybe not. When I left The Free Press I started a blog that I soon took down and it is gone. Not even I can bring it back. It has vanished from the blogosphere.

Today newspapers should enjoy a 24-hour addition and correction cycle. Deadlines should be dead. Post just the minimum and then "Think." The Internet is always open to revision.

Unfortunately, many newspapers have not realized this fact and once they post something, even if it later proves to be balderdash, they feel they are stuck with it. They aren't. Newspapers can keep a record of changes made to a story, and I suggest this is a good idea. But truth and accuracy should have a path to the top.

As for the uncalled for nastiness that sometimes creeps into copy, enabled by too little time spent thinking and before speaking, maybe the years of meeting deadlines have rewired the brains of newsroom folk. Maybe its time for some new wiring, some new thinking, in the newsroom.

Dowd ended her piece:

"Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic, recalled that when he started his online book review he forbade comments, wary of high-tech sociopaths.

" 'I’m not interested in having the sewer appear on my site,' he said. 'Why would I engage with people digitally whom I would never engage with actually? Why does the technology exonerate the kind of foul expression that you would not tolerate anywhere else?' "

When it comes to my newspaper, I am sometimes appalled by the nastiness I find there. Why would I engage with people over my breakfast table who voice the kind of foul, angry expression that I would not entertain anywhere else?

Who is Eric Duhaime, freelance editorial writer for The London Free Press?

Today's Free Press carries an editorial on the Comment page: "Right-wingers aren't the scary ones." It was written for the paper by freelancer Eric Duhaime.

I've been suspicious of right wing-left wing labeling since watching Mort Sahl on the family black and white television decades ago. I sat transfixed, sitting on our patterned faux carpet, it was actually linoleum, while watching Sahl explain and clarify the right-left political divide using his trademarked blackboard.

Saul would quickly scribble a name above a line representing the political continuum, placing the name to the left or right of centre as demanded by the person's stated political beliefs. As I recall, the simple exercise soon expanded past the boundaries of the original blackboard and two more boards were brought on stage to handle the overflow. (Maybe Glenn Beck could be hit for copyright infringement.)

In the end, the names written on the far left and far right of the original board appeared more central after the addition of the two extra blackboards, one to the right and one to the left of the original board.

To add to the chaos, as Sahl recalled more statements from well known politicians he would erase their names and reposition them. Sometimes Sahl found it impossible to simply place a person on one point on his line. For these folk Sahl wrote their names on the political continuum line in several places. On this issue they were right but on this one left and on this one they were really on the extreme right.

I decided to google Eric Duhaime.

I discovered that Eric Duhaime is not a Londoner. He's a Montreal-based writer. The Toronto Star says "Duhaime is currently a political consultant and columnist for Quebecor’s papers." I wondered why The Free Press didn't say so.

If you are interested in knowing more about Eric Duhaime, here is a link to the Toronto Star article:
Quebec's 'Tea Party" is born

I also found an attack on Duhaime, but it is way more personal than I like. Still, I found one line in the post on Sister Sage's Musings that made me think. I had read: "Eric, in your right winged world, folks are supposed to work for a living, but it helps if there are actual jobs; companies that are hiring."

This brought to mind the more than 250 workers at Le Journal de Montreal who are now well into their second year of a lockout at the hands of the media giant Quebecor that controls The London Free Press

I thought how the largest French language newspaper in North America has been published for the past two years in what many argue is in defiance of the Quebec labour laws in order to maintain a lockout. I understand many in Quebec see Quebecor's use of its QMI news organization as an end run around labour laws written decades ago, before the birth of the Internet.

Click on image to enlarge and view.

If this sounds like a big story, it's not. Or at least, it is not a big story in the eyes of The London Free Press. The Le Journal de Montreal story has gone almost totally unreported in my local paper. I can't help but wonder if this story is dead because of its negative Quebecor connection.

If interested, you can read a recent article in The Montreal Gazette: Péladeau would welcome Labour Code changes to trim union power.

Now, what was it that Duhaime was saying about right-wingers not being the scary ones?

Free Press not accepting any blame for fluoride controversy

One angle to the present fluoridation controversy missing in the recent Patrick Maloney and Ian Gillespie articles is the part played by what is now called the Main Street Media in this whole messy argument.

There are people who  fear fluoride because they get very mixed messages from the media about fluoridation's value and it's dangers. These concerned readers don't have to look farther than the pages of Sun Media and the QMI news group.

According to Canoe health expert and Sun Media columnist Dr. Gifford-Jones, the fluoridation of water is useless and fluoride toothpaste is a dangerous biological poison. This newspaper columnist said in a Quebecor Media distributed story that several studies involving as many as 480,000 children found fluoride provided no protection against tooth decay.

Gifford-Jones even went so far as to raise the spectre of childhood death in his column. He claimed a 3-year-old died after swallowing fluoride at a dental office.

Gifford-Jones argues many European countries do not fluoridate their water and yet have have rates for dental carries that are comparable to ours. He fails to mention that many large European countries fluoridate salt and milk.

Click on image to read.

I'm posting the whole article here as I sometimes find links to Free Press stuff broken. Please click on the image to enlarge. Once enlarged you may have to click on it once again to make legible.

Some of those opposed to fluoridation are extreme; No doubt. But many others are simply people old enough to remember lots of half researched stories in the media which were written in support of stuff that later proved to be bunkum.

If you believe in fluoridation, then you accept the arguments for putting fluoride in tap water. If you are concerned, often the answers do not seem so convincing — especially as the answers keep changing.

According to online information which I downloaded just today and published by the Ontario Dental Association, the maximum acceptable concentration of fluoride in the United States is 4 ppm and in Canada 1.5 ppm. This huge divergence of opinion as to what is safe causes concern in those opposed to fluoridation. (Many would argue that the ODA is wrong, and way on the high side, when they claim 4 ppm is acceptable in the U.S.)

Last month the EPA in the States, along with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), lowered the recommended maximum acceptable level for fluoride in tap water to .7 ppm.

The joint HHS/EPA announcement only fanned the flames of doubt in the fluoridation opposition by stating: "The new EPA assessments of fluoride were undertaken in response to findings of the National Academies of Science (NAS)" in order to avoid the unwanted health effects from too much fluoride.

Moves such as this make fluoride opponents worry that adding fluoride to our water may be a decades old practice but it is still not one that is totally understood. For them this is not good enough.

On giving your head a shake

There are those who believe I don't like newspapers because I often blog on published stuff that I see as downright shoddy. Those folk are wrong.

Recently a columnist for The London Free Press mocking those who use the Internet as a research tool wrote, "if you do more Internet 'research', you'll also discover 'experts'. . ." With less than 10 words and four quotation marks Ian Gillespie mounted a full frontal attack on the perceived foe of the newspaper industry: The Internet. With those quotation marks he questioned the validity of Internet research and the knowledge of those experts found on the Internet — at least the research and experts not in agreement with the clearly well thought out views of reporter Gillespie.

And what is the source of a lot of the information on the Internet? Newspapers. And who are the experts being quoted? Newspaper writers. And because of the way the Internet works, it is not uncommon for the ideas expressed by newspaper writers to be picked up, repackaged and republished online by someone else who may not properly credit the source, but that is a whole other post.

Years ago newspapers flogged what was fanned into a major story: UFFI (urea formaldehyde foam insulation.) I covered a lot of UFFI stories at the time and took a bigger than usual interest in the stories as I had had UFFI blown into the exterior walls of my home.

The media — newspapers, television, magazines — all got the story wrong. They also got the story right. But the correct story was buried in the back pages of papers or hidden in articles in the Home sections of newspapers. (If any reporter wants to argue this point, I still have some of hard copy from those days. Some day I may blog on the UFFI story and run pictures backing up my position.)

One reason why the UFFI story was, and still is, so poorly reported is that papers do not pay enough attention to what is in the newspaper. The well-known investigative journalist I.F. Stone knew this. He broke some very big stories not by having WikiLeaks style informers but by simply reading daily papers very carefully with an eye for the details being missed by what is now called the Main Stream Media (MSM.)

Back in the early '70s I worked at a small, northern Ontario newspaper, the family-owned Sault Daily Star (now called  just the Sault Star.) That little paper had a newsroom of more than 50 editorial employees. Today, thanks to massive cutbacks endured under the ownership of both Sun Media and Quebecor, the mighty London Free Press has a newsroom about the size of the Sault Star's from 40 years ago.

Newspapers are bit full of themselves — puffed up with self-importance. But this is to be expected. How could they function if they didn't have almost unbridled confidence? And, to some extent, their big egos are not misplaced. Newspaper folk, including Ian Gillespie, are awfully bright people.

But sometimes they are blinded by their very own brightness. This is why it is so important to have lots of folk, especially thoughtful editors, working in a newsroom. The Free Press, like so many papers, has slashed the number of editors.

Ian advised those who disagreed with him on fluoridation to "C’mon folks. Give your head a shake." This is what good, feisty editors do to reporters. They give cocky reporters a head-shaking.

A solid library staff is also a prerequisite for a good newsroom. The once incredible Free Press library is now just a memory; It's functions now handled out of Toronto.

Ironically, when Ian Gillespie needs to do some research, he must use the Internet.

An open Letter to the Editor of The London Free Press, a Sun Media newspaper

This is an open Letter to the Editor of The London Free Press.

Click on image to enlarge.

According to Canoe health expert and Sun Media columnist Dr. Gifford-Jones, the fluoridation of water is useless and fluoride toothpaste is a dangerous biological poison. This newspaper columnist went on to say in a Quebecor Media story that several studies involving as many as 480,000 children found fluoride provided no protection against tooth decay.

The QMI "expert" even raised the spectre of childhood death in his attack on fluoridation. I wrote expert in quotation marks to indicate my disdain just as Ian Gillespie did to indicate his disdain for some supposed "experts" in his recent column.

It is time for Gillespie to take his own advice and give his head a shake. The Free Press columnist need not look to the Internet for "ignorant fear-mongering at its worst." I think it is clear from the above that he can find it in the pages of his own news operation — Quebecor Media Inc.
_______________________________________________________

The beauty of the Internet is the free flow of ideas and information. If you can't get a letter to the editor published, post it.

Use enough hooks and someone using Google, or another search engine, will stumble upon your letter. Also put links to your Facebook page and Twitter account in your post. If you get enough hits your blog post will gain importance and may appear near the top of the list returned by a search engine query.

Ian Gillespie asks, "What next? Fluoride killing polar bears?" According to The Free Press, the answer may be young children.

Aiming his well-known wit at the anti-fluoridation folk, Gillespie misses mark.

A recent opinion piece by The London Free Press journalist  Ian Gillespie has further muddied the already murky fluoridated waters.

I was very disappointed by his ad hominem attacks on those with whom he disagrees. Instead of using facts to disprove the anti-fluoride position, Gillespie attacked those holding those beliefs. He painted them as crazy conspiracy believers. And in cases where his opponents based their arguments on expert opinions, Gillespie ridicules those experts as well.

Ian mocks London city councillor Denise Brown for suggesting to The Free Press, "If you do any research on the Internet, you’ll find scientists believe there are health risks.”

Click to enlarge.

Ian's witty retort: "And if you do more Internet 'research,' you’ll also discover 'experts' who argue that aliens hijacked the Voyager 2 spacecraft, Paul McCartney died in a 1966 car crash, Elvis Presley is alive and the Apollo moon landing was a hoax."

And if you, Ian Gillespie, do more research you will find the following published by Sun Media, written by Canoe health expert and columnist Dr. Gifford-Jones, and found on The London Free Press Internet site:

"It's shocking that 25% of North Americans over age 43, and 42% of those over 65 years of age, have no teeth!

"(The doctor featured in the article carried by The Free Press) Dr. Judd also believes that the fluoridation of water and the use of fluoride toothpaste is a useless, dangerous biological poison. He says calcium fluoride seeps into enamel, making it weak and brittle, destroying 83 enzymes along with adenosine diphosphatase.

"I couldn't agree more. (Dr. Gifford-Jones writes.) Look at the warning on fluoride toothpaste. Parents are told to watch children under six years of age while they brush their teeth. To be safe, only a tiny amount of toothpaste is used, and none should be swallowed. That should tell you something! In 1974, a three-year old child had fluoride gel placed on his teeth. The hygienist handed him a glass of water but rather than rising out his mouth, he drank it. A few hours later, he was dead.

"If fluoride toothpaste is the answer to dental decay, why is it that 98% of Europe is fluoride-free? Sweden, Germany, Norway, Holland, Denmark and France stopped using fluoridation 29 years ago. These are not backward, depressed nations.

"The sole argument for fluoridation is that it reduces tooth decay. But several studies involving as many as 480,000 children found no beneficial evidence between fluoridated and non-fluoridated communities.

"Dr. Hardy Limeback, Professor of Dentistry at the University of Toronto, says children under three should never use fluoridated toothpaste or drink fluoridated water, and mothers should never use Toronto tap water to prepare baby formula."

I want to go on record as saying I am not frightened by the amount of fluoride being put into London's water. I believe dangerous concentrations of fluoride are only found in drinking waters contaminated with unregulated, naturally occurring fluorides. London is very conservative when it comes to the amount of fluoride added to our drinking water.

But many people are concerned. As long as papers, such as The London Free Press, are telling them a young child died from a fluoride treatment, some folk will use bottled water rather than tap and try their best to stay clear of all fluoride -- even that found in toothpaste and mouthwash.

At one time, it was believed that fluoride only worked topically. It was said that once ingested, as in drinking water, its ability to fight dental caries was curtailed. That belief is now in question.  But,when I worked at The Free Press the only-works-topically mantra was still being repeated. I chatted with a professor at the Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry at Western University who confided that putting fluoride in water was inefficient as it only works topically. But he would not go on record with such a view. The whole issue was simply too emotionally charged.

My point? The anger, distrust, public ridicule surrounding this issue all work to prevent discussion. Journalists are a big part of this problem. And that is sad. Journalists should be advocates of reason and independent thinking. Instead, all too often journalists are herd animals.

I expect more from my daily paper and I certainly expected more from Ian Gillespie. The Free Press is a paper sadly in need of some thoughtful writing and solid editing. This column of Gillespie's should have been spiked. Wait. The spikes left with the editors.
_______________________________________________________________

As I said, I am not concerned about the amount of fluoride found in London Ontario tap water. Just last month the EPA in the United States lowered the maximum recommended concentration of fluoride for drinking water. London was ahead of the EPA. Our fluoride level is inline with the new proposed U.S. guidelines.

But, and it is a big but, if you are already frightened by fluoride in your water, the recent move by the EPA does nothing to allay your fears. Learning that after decades of use the correct amount of fluoride to be added to drinking water without causing any health problems is still being adjusted is downright worrisome. These people need their fears addressed in an adult manner. Condescension is not called for nor is it productive.

Gillespie quotes UWO professor Tim Blackmore, who teaches media and information studies:

“Ignorance is a lot easier and a lot more convincing than knowledge. Knowledge takes time, it takes thinking and it takes figuring. Ignorance doesn’t take any of those things. It just takes belief.”

Ian, I think the professor may have been talking about you.

Good news, bad news

Some stuff is all good; No taint from bad news at all.

Today I had my annual eye examination. I got some good news and some bad news. The good news was that my exam only cost $35. OHIP picked up the balance of my tab. The bad news is why OHIP stepped up to the plate; my right eye has a serious cataract problems and this made my eye examination eligible for government health care coverage.

Earlier in the day I had another good news bad news bit of news. The good news was that I am getting a full refund for the pain pills I took for my strained back. The bad news was that the reason I am getting my money back is that the pills have been recalled. They might be contaminated with ingredients from other pills.

Tomorrow I go to the hospital to have some blood taken for DNA testing related to all my heart problems. I guess the good news here is that the doctors care enough to do the testing. The bad news is that the tests have to be done at all.

Oh well, Fiona was here when I got home from the optometrist. She was sleeping in her car seat with Yummy Bear sleeping upside down beside her. Yummy may well be one dizzy little bear when the two wake up.

The nice thing about Fiona news is it is always all good. There is no down side to Fiona.

Reluctantly I say: "Take the fluoride out of our water."

Drinking water with fluoride doesn't scare me. I don't get concerned when my young granddaughters drink a glass of London Ontario tap water containing fluoride. Yet, if it came to a vote, I'd vote against putting fluoride in our tap water.

Why would I vote against fluoridating tap water? Because a lot of bright people worry about fluoride in their water and their fears are often supported by stories published in local, and even national, newspapers.

It's sad but the media scares the public and then turns around and attacks those folk it left frightened. Even more common, is the weak support for fluoridation found in the media. Taken together, fear-generating stories plus weak positive stories, it is no wonder there is a big block of readers who do not support fluoridation.

According to an article in The Globe and Mail:

"Scientists now believe that the main protective action from fluoride does not come from ingesting the chemical, with the teeth absorbing it from inside the body, but from direct absorption through topical application to teeth.

This means swallowing water is a far less effective way to fight cavities than brushing with fluoridated toothpaste. That may explain the steep decline in cavity rates observed in industrialized countries since the 1970s, irrespective of whether they fluoridate water. Almost all of Europe does not, and yet has seen a sharp reduction in dental caries."

People read stories like the above and then other journalists react with horror when encountering those who fail to see the pressing need for fluoridation. Hey, they may have read the Globe article.

Until newspapers tell a clear, lucid, fact-based story in support of fluoridation, I cannot feel good about putting fluoride in tap water. No one should be frightened of their tap water. Let's get the truth out, without insulting those who believe the confusing stories found in the media. For another look at this problem, read my response to Ian Gillespie's rant "What next? Fluoride killing polar bears?"

A new take

Shot in 1999 with an Olympus clamshell.

Coming up with a new take on the Eiffel Tower in Paris is bit of a feat. But Straight Dope pulls it off.

Cheers
Rockinon

LFP, Sun Media, Canoe, QMI: All scooped!

In the end, Kinsella got it wrong.

The headline read: "Beware the Culture of Exaggeration." It was a warning from Warren Kinsella of Quebecor Media and I read it on the Comment page of The London Free Press.

At first, I agreed with what Kinsella was saying. He mocked the media overreaction to the recent snow storms and to over-blown winter storm stories in general. "It's February! We live in Canada, people! It snows here," Kinsella wrote.

Somehow he segued from this into a discussion of today's media publishing virtually anything out of fear of being scooped. If it's inaccurate or exaggerated, no matter. The important thing is not to get scooped.

Kinsella called this the 'Culture of Exaggeration.' As an example, the QMI Agency writer mentioned the "widespread claims Fox News owned or controlled the forthcoming Sun News Network." Kinsella pointed to the "Stop Fox News North" petition signed by tens of thousands.

Whoa! I believe Kinsella may just have slipped over the line into the Culture of Exaggeration himself. Oops!

I've read about the Stop Fox News North movement and I have even gotten some mail asking me to join, but it was always clear that attack was against the soon to launch Sun TV News channel. Referring to the Sun TV News channel as Fox News North was a bit of a joke; It was a way to tar Sun TV with the same right-wing brush as is used on the U.S. Fox News channel.

In Kinsella's defence, he was not alone in not getting the joke. Apparently Margaret Atwood didn't see the humour either. "Of course Fox and Co. can set up a channel or whatever they want to do, if it's legal etc.," she told The Globe and Mail in an email. To underscore her point the Globe told us that the literary icon had signed an online petition aimed at keeping a "Fox News North" channel off the air in Canada.

Both Kinsella and Atwood should read the Wikipedia entry on the Sun TV News channel. Atwood especially should read the piece as she got a lot of 'ink' in the Wiki report.

I thought Kinsella would have been on safer ground if he had talked about the alleged luncheon meeting held in New York and attended by Canada's Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and by Chairman and CEO of News Corporation Rupert Murdoch, and by the creator of the Fox Broadcasting Company and the President of Fox News Roger Ailes and by Kory Teneycke, a Harper aide who led the Pierre Karl Peladeau move to launch Sun TV News, the Fox News-style network, in Canada.

I read about the meeting on some Internet blogs and pooh-pooh the story. If true, this would be an amazing story. I searched The London Free Press and drew a blank. It appeared nothing about such a meeting had been reported by The Free Press.

Until I read Kinsella's column today, I hadn't given the Harper-Murdoch-Ailes-Teneycke meeting story a moment's thought. It never happened, right? Wrong! To write this blog, I had to do some research and I discovered that the story is true! The story was broke by Canadian Press investigative reporter Bruce Cheadle.

The London Free Press was scooped! Sun Media seems to have been scooped! Canoe didn't apparently carry the story. Scooped again! But the Calgary Beacon didn't get scooped. Read its story: Harper's Meeting with Rupert Murdoch.

I guess this disproves Kinsella's argument that the important thing today is not getting scooped. But all this does leave me wondering, just what is important to the papers under the Sun Media/Quebecor umbrella? And maybe, "Fox News North" is not a joke.

Addendum:

After writing this post, I got up the next morning and wondered if I googled "Fox News North" and "The London Free Press" if I would discover that the once fine little paper was being unjustly maligned. I had simply used the paper's own search field earlier.

I wasn't being unfair. The meeting of Harper and Murdock, et al., appears not to have been reported and the phrase Fox News North apparently only appears in stories and columns defending the right-wing news organ from criticism.

I did find this little post (Propaganda, Inc.: The Dawn of ""Fox News North") on the blog This Way to Progress by a former intern with the Kingston Whig Standard. And I found lots more online addressing the issue.

Stay alert: keep your baby safe and healthy

I worry about Miss Baby. Oh, I don't mean I lose sleep with concern. I believe the little girl is quite the healthy child. She eats well — hey, any 16-month-old who enjoys chopped black olives on pizza has a healthy appetite. She is never lethargic but when her activity spring unwinds she is not all that difficult to put to sleep. In fact, when tired she will tap my knee and immediately rest her head on my shoulder when picked up and cuddled; She clearly indicates when she wants to go to sleep to take a needed nap.

So, why do I say I worry about the child? Well, she is just so small. She seems so delicate. And sometimes she takes falls that leave me simply aghast. She's pretty good on her feet, and she doesn't have far to tumble, but she does take a tumble now and then. All kids do.

We took down the glass table that sat for years in our living room. The almost invisible top had hard edges that could inflict real damage if a child were to strike their head. The table now sits, disassembled, in our basement.

I know about shaken-baby syndrome and I worry if a child can be seriously injured by a shaking without making actual contact with a hard surface, could a child be injured falling hard and striking their head while simply learning to walk. How much force does it take for a small child to suffer a minor concession? (In the early days of Miss Baby's walking adventures I never let her walk through our tiled foyer. That floor was just too hard.)

What spurred me to post this was a story in the New York Times magazine, Shaken-baby Syndrome Faces New Questions in Court. One thing became very clear to me while reading that piece: One must monitor a child constantly. Watch for anything that seems out-of-the-ordinary. Babies and toddlers can`t tell you when something is wrong; You, the caregiver, must be alert.

Put baby locks on kitchen cabinets.

And in doing a little research for this piece I stumbled upon this on child safety. This piece is a must read. The corollary I took away from the child safety article was that one should not just believe that a baby product is safe because it is on the market. Stay alert. Watch for poorly designed hinges, sharp edged molded plastic products, and the like.

Personally, I believe even socks can present a danger to toddlers just learning to walk. Socks must have sticky bits on the soles. When wearing slippery cotton socks, or footed toddler sleepers, a young child can have their feet simply slip out from underneath them without warning. The child may not have time to raise their hands and protect themselves as they fall.

Am I overly-protective? Gosh, I hope so. (Please check out the link: child safety.)