If you’re heading to the “Big Dance” this weekend—that is, the Super Bowl—grab a copy of the local independent weekly and learn how fucked up Florida is.
“As in the 80’s and 90’s cocaine was a big thing, now prescriptions have just exploded,” Sgt. Richard Pisanti of the Broward County Sheriff’s Office told Vanguard correspondent Mariana van Zeller last May.
Or as the New Times puts it in their “Vice Guide: Procuring Party Pills”:
“In Florida, OxyContin and Xanax aren’t the new cocaine; they’re coke plus heroin, pot, meth, and all hallucinogens combined.”
See, the New Times has got you covered. And the great thing about their guide to scoring prescription drugs is that after reading it you can just flip to the back of the paper and find 10 pages of advertisements for the pain clinic/Dr. Feelgoods they tell you supply the pills. You know, 10 pages of ad revenue that help pay for stories like where to get your pills. It’s a beautiful cycle.
I’ll give the New Times credit for at least disclosing some disturbing statistics about Florida’s prescription drug problem:
“In 2008, about half the illegal prescription drugs in this country came from the Sunshine State, according to the Drug Enforcement Agency…Three times as many people here die from prescription pills than from all other drugs combined, according to a Florida Medical Examiners Commission report that was published in 2008.”
But for a better picture of what’s going in the “Colombia of prescription drugs” check out the Vanguard documentary “The OxyContin Express.”
After five memorable years, we are sad to announce that Vanguard’s executive producer Laura Ling will be moving on from Current Media. In a letter addressed to the staff, Laura felt it was time to focus on starting a family and the writing of a book with her sister Lisa Ling about her captivity last summer in North Korea and the bond they shared that helped them get through it.
“Working at Current and leading the Vanguard team has been the highlight of my career.” wrote Laura Ling. “It has been challenging, but thoroughly rewarding; intense, but fun. I’m extremely proud of the Vanguard team, which is working so passionately to raise awareness about some of the most important issues affecting our world. I will continue to be a champion of their work and of Current as a whole.”
In many year-end roundups, it was commented that in the last decade we witnessed China’s coming out party on the world stage. But just as many were giving the country its due for its explosive growth over the last several years, others began predicting dire days ahead for the emerging power.
After a little over a week in China, I feel the only thing I can say for sure is: I have no idea. But fortunately, I was in the region at the same time as some one who might and was thinking about the same things, but actually works on real deadlines.
While in China we met with several environmentalists who like many environmentalists around the world were deflated after the disappointment that was COP 15. So, we asked, what’s on the agenda for the year ahead?
The answer was more or less the same from everyone. Last year, with the anticipation of COP 15, Chinese environmentalists were thinking globally. This year, they’re acting locally. And 2010 will be a critical time in China. This is the year that the central government begins to formulate its next 5-year plan. And many in China are seizing the opportunity to push for China’s 12th 5-year plan to include a transition to a low-carbon economy.
Anyone who’s been to Beijing — and tried to breath there — knows that what’s currently fueling China’s economic growth is unsustainable. Not unsustainable in the way crunchy granolas here speak of it, but in a gas-mask-is-the-new-Beijing-fashion sort of way.
The precursor to the gas mask?
So if China’s political class are as smart as Tom Friedman often gives them credit for, then China’s next 5-year plan could be a game changer, building the critical mass for cleaner fuels and greener technology. And then you can bet that’s where the smart money will be.
The backlash was immediate, but relatively measured, at first. I reported the story three months after the cartoons had actually been published. Here’s where the controversy stood then:
There are about 200,000 Muslims in Denmark, accounting for 3 percent of the country’s population. Soon after the cartoons ran, a few thousand of them took to the streets of Copenhagen in protest. But from there, the reaction snowballed to proportions that [Flemming Rose, the editor who commissioned the cartoons] never anticipated.
At least 11 Muslim countries sent letters of protest to Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen. The Organization of Islamic Conferences, a body that represents 56 Muslim states, put the cartoons on the agenda at its recent summit in Saudi Arabia. And the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights appointed a group of “experts on racism” to investigate the matter. And that’s just the diplomatic blowback.
In Kashmir, thousands of businesses reportedly shut down for a day in early December to protest the cartoons. (A reaction that left most Danes I spoke to perplexed). And according to the Danish Foreign Ministry, the youth group of Pakistan’s largest Islamic party, Jamaat-e-Islami, posted an $8,000 bounty on the lives of the cartoonists.
The dispatch ran on Dec. 22, 2005 and initially received modest attention. A month and a half later, I received an email from the editors at Frontline that the story had suddenly taken off and had received more feedback than any other that had ran up until that time. The snowball was growing out of control.
In early February 2006, protesters in Muslim communities around the world took to the streets. Danish Embassies in Syria, Lebanon and Iran were torched. And over 200 people were reportedly killed in demonstrations in Nigeria, Libya, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
“The decision rested solely on the experts’ assessments that there existed a substantial likelihood of violence that might take the lives of innocent victims,” said a statement from Yale University Press, the book’s publisher.
A number of organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Society of Journalists and Authors, and American Association of University Professors accused Yale of failing to stand up for free speech. Indeed, Yale’s decision seems to be exactly the kind of self-censorship that Jyllands-Posten’s editor Flemming Rose was trying to challenge when he initially published the cartoons. Again, from the initial dispatch:
It was a provocation, Rose told me. A provocation to artists, writers, translators, actors and comedians who, he believes, are intimidated when it comes to addressing issues that some Muslims might find offensive.
“The point was that we have some people who submit themselves to self-censorship,” Rose said. “And they are doing so not out of respect, but out of fear.”
Rose listed several recent incidents to illustrate his point. After the 7/7 bombings in London, the city’s Tate Gallery canceled plans to exhibit John Latham’s “God Is Great,” which featured a Koran (along with the Bible and Talmud) for fear of offending Muslims. And the translator of a new book by Dutch politician Aayan Hirsi Ali, a vocal critic of radical Islam, requested anonymity fearing the reaction of militants. (This is perhaps understandable. Ali previously collaborated on a film about Islam with Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, who was murdered on the streets of Amsterdam by a young Muslim man who claimed the film was blasphemous). But it was the complaint by a Danish childrens’ author who said he couldn’t find anyone to illustrate his book about Mohammed that finally led Rose to take action. Free speech, he felt, was being compromised.
But Yale’s fears of a violent response are not unfounded. Obviously, there is the example of the deadly unrest of four years ago. But just this October, the FBI arrested an American man named David Coleman Headley and an associate for allegedly plotting an attack on Jyllands-Posten. Further investigation into Headley has shown that this might have been more than a crackpot scheme of some misguided radical. The FBI and Indian intelligence services now believe Headley helped plan the terror attacks in Mumbai last year. Federal prosecutors charge that Headley helped identify targets for Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Pakistan-based terrorist group, whose two-day attack on India’s financial capital left 163 dead.
Four years ago, when I pitched the dispatch, I remember discussing with the editor at Frontline whether the cartoon story was too local and whether it had any legs. We decided that at the very least the story would say something about the uneasy relationship between Europe and its growing immigrant Muslim population. “The Cartoons that Shook the World” goes a long way in deconstructing how the cartoon controversy became much more than that.
This week in Copenhagen, negotiations are going on toward producing a pact to fight global warming, a pact that is supposed to be ready for world leaders to ratify at the end of the week. Whether or not the pact will be completed, or will be strong enough to accomplish what people who want to fight global warming want it to accomplish is unclear at this moment. But it does at least show that the world is trying to contradict that famous saying by someone who may or may not have been Mark Twain: “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.”
One of the first pieces that I ever shot for Vanguard, back in the summer of 2005, was a story set up by Adam Yamaguchi, looking at the shrinking of glaciers in Alaska.
What we saw was pretty shocking, in terms of weather changing the landscape of Alaska, but as someone who’s been living in Southern California for many years, the idea that the weather can have a big impact on your life wasn’t actually a novel idea. I’m a native of Michigan, and, growing up, it was always my ambition, to leave and move to southern California, sunny southern California, to get away from weather. Ironically, as it turned out.
Certainly, in my adopted state, I can barbeque in my backyard on New Year’s Eve more easily than one can in Michigan—I tried it last New Year’s at my father-in-laws, when it was 10F, and it’s doable, though bracing. But, as it turns out, cold and snow aren’t necessary the kind of weather that can have a big impact on your life.
Here’s where the irony comes in: It stopped raining yesterday in Los Angeles, much to the relief of the people living in my canyon, because the rain ended before the mudslides began. There was a danger of mudslides because the side of the canyon 400 yards from my house was entirely denuded by fire this past August—one of the early fires in what turned out to be nearly a two month siege of them, including the Station Fire, the biggest fire in the recorded history of Los Angeles County. The fires came because it’s been so warm and sunny—and dry.
The fire came into my canyon as I was driving home early from work on what seemed like a pretty great day—as I was driving Laura Ling and Euna Lee were in the air, en route home to LA from North Korea in Bill Clinton’s plane. I saw a plume of smoke from the freeway, and thought to myself, “on this good day, someone else is having a bad one,” and pulled into to my canyon to hear sirens. At first I couldn’t see anything, but then a car with fire department officials pulled in front of me, and four officials got out and looked up at the hillside where there was perhaps a fifty foot wide fire. I drove on into my driveway, and said to me wife, kind of casually, ‘there’s a fire in the canyon.” We stood on our front driveway watching it, and within minutes it was half a mile wide, and very loud—it was crackling like a fireplace in a Christmas commercial. We ended up calling out kids and telling them not to come home, then evacuating our photo albums, dog, turtle, rabbit, guinea pig, my son’s guitars and my daughter’s harp. The next day, we returned—and fortunately no homes in our canyon were hurt. But ever since, the majestic pine in my neighbor’s yard looks like a potential torch of death.
All of which is a long-winded way of saying that in my native Michigan, I felt annoyed and persecuted by the weather, but in my adopted southern California we are sometimes obliged to be afraid of the weather. And that seems to be what they’re debating in Copenhagen, whether or not the world as a whole, in general, should start being afraid of the weather, and, in contradiction of Mark Twain or whomever’s observation, start doing something about it.
As anyone who follows or friends me has seen, my online profiles have been consumed with links, messages and posts about everything Vanguard the past few months.
Some had Current TV’s investigative documentary series confused with a club in LA of the same name. Others were excited to see what in the heck this Vanguard show was. And a handful let me know they’d become fans in part from all my posting.
While my experience as the Vanguard Intern here at Current TV could be summed up through countless wall posts, group messages, PR emails and excessive tweets, the most important thing I’ll be taking away is the relationships forged through helping a ragtag team get their show out there.
There was much transcribing, plenty of logging tape, a lot of research and I can’t forget the music cue sheets.
It was a weird time to be here, but I think it was the best time.
I met Laura Ling and Euna Lee after their release from captivity in North Korea.
I experienced the hardships of company layoffs firsthand.
And I even helped the Los Angeles Current team pack their bags, er, boxes and move from West Hollywood to downtown LA. From shared space splitting the company into four separate offices to a much roomier professional office space with everyone under one roof.
Three days a week since September I schlepped all the way from the Inland Empire to Los Angeles, fumbling around LA public transportation to find my way to the appropriate offices.
I biked to the Metrolink, which I took to Union Station, where I transferred to the the underground Red Line all the way to Hollywood&Highland, and now, Pershing Square.
And, like at any TV network, I got to meet a bunch of mini celebrities. The guys from InfoMania chumming around the office, and all the correspondents and producers I’d watched on Vanguard tool all around the globe in search of a story.
And while they continue to search for the stories that aren’t being told and captive the young adult audience with something other than “truthiness”, I depart on my own quest of self fulfillment. Also known as the next to impossible task of finding work in journalism while unemployment is at an all-time high and the newspaper is completely out of fashion.
Hopefully there’s a next time and future for me in this space. Like figuring out how to have Vanguard live and thrive more effectively online. But for now, this is Vanguard Intern Dan Ucko signing off!
Hey everybody, sorry I have been absent for a few weeks, I was shooting a story in Colombia about some new developments in Narcotrafficking. It was a wild adventure. We are still in the middle of production on the story but look for it in next seasons Vanguard.
I wanted to write today about some of my friends at Doctors Without Borders. Quite frankly Doctors without Borders (known more commonly as MSF) is an invaluable organization for us to collaborate with here at Vanguard. The reason is two-fold. One, MSF acts as the front line eyes and ears for the journalism community. In difficult situations where sometimes the ground truth is obscured by distance, uncooperative governments, nefarious actors, and apathy, MSF is often a great source of unadulterated truth in a land of agendas. I sympathize with them because their agenda is really to provide aide not get sucked into local politics. I’ve seen this time and time again in places like Yemen and Colombia. The second factor is that often we (Vanguard) couldn’t go to the places we go, without the assistance of MSF. Its often too remote and too dangerous. So naturally when you are sleeping in a small MSF house in a place like Yemen and sharing meals of dubious nutritional value, a lot of bonding occurs. I still maintain contact with some of the doctors I have worked with overseas, and I can tell you they are the most committed and noble group of individuals I have ever encountered in the face of abject difficulty and despair. However, even the most stoic of these doctors can’t help but be impacted by the circumstances they find themselves in.
If you are interested in the life of a humanitarian volunteer, I highly recommend you check out this film called Living in Emergency, a critically acclaimed independent documentary that interweaves the stories of four MSF doctors in war-torn Congo and post-conflict Liberia.
I think the film gives an amazing portrayal of the difficulties facing these kind of humanitarian volunteers as they battle disease, destitution, violence, and poverty.
I grew up hearing about Colombian drug cartels dumping huge amounts of cocaine into the United States to feed America’s insatiable craving for the fine white powder that made entertainers and socialites feel amazingly cool. Our government went to war against drugs with billions of dollars and helicopters, social programs and guns. Eventually, for lots of reasons, cocaine use trailed off in the United States. In recent years the drug lords have seen their trade route through the Caribbean produce fewer mansions, private armies and the lifestyle of kings. But they found a new market.
In recent years, Europe has been consuming more cocaine than anywhere else in the world. So I headed there to find out how all that coke was getting into Europe.
Unlike the US, where coke was associated with high rollers and the rich and famous, cocaine today is the European everyman’s drug. We found it in pubs in England, public bathrooms in Italy and wherever young people gather to have a good time. The UK, Italy, and Spain have become the largest consumers of cocaine in the world. The bulk of it still comes from South America, but the trade route has changed. In order to meet their growing demand, South American drug lords use West Africa as their crucial transit point to get the drug into the European Union. With chronic poverty, rampant corruption and loose borders, parts of West Africa have proved to be willing partners in flooding Europe with drugs.
I tracked the drug at one point to a South American drug trafficker who’d settled in Guinea Bissau, but I had to find out where it was going from there. My producer, Joanne, and I traveled to southern Italy, where we heard smugglers gained easy access to the European continent. When we reached the tiny town of Castel Volturno, one of the largest cocaine trafficking hubs in Europe, we felt as if we had stumbled into an African slum.
Castel Volturno is a notoriously lawless town, overwhelmed with poor immigrants and controlled by the local mafia. I’ve reported from a lot of hot spots in the world, but Castel Volturno oozes with a special eeriness. We were searching for a drug trade that was practically invisible, but all the time we could feel the watchful eye of the Camorra, the local mafia, whenever we moved. People were often afraid to talk to us about cocaine or who was running the place, but we pursued every angle we could while our unseen targets watched us.
Yesterday morning, outside the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, I stood in a long line for two hours with thousands of other people. We were all braving a pretty cold morning for Southern California, but we weren’t lined up for tickets. The line was over half a mile long, and ended in a big circus-style tent. Inside, amidst many helium filled balloons, 50 nurses were dispensing H1N1 vaccines. Lots of little kids were crying. “It’s just like the county fair,” I observed to my son, “except with shots.”
We were all there because swine flu vaccine is scarce, and the Pasadena Health Department was making it available to people who are under 24, over 65, pregnant, or facing chronic health issues. Most of the people standing in the line were not eligible to get the shots themselves, they were parents. There were a lot of strollers. Other people brought little chairs for their toddlers, which they kept moving as the line moved, ala Woody Allen playing the cello in the marching band in “Take the Money and Run.” Kids left the line to play nearby when they couldn’t bear it any longer. My son got a bit restive also, but since he’s in high school, and has a driver’s license, I gave him the keys to my car and 20 bucks, and he left for an hour to get breakfast.
All in all, we were an orderly bunch, and everything went smoothly. And that’s what struck me. Among the many different subjects I’ve covered over the years are disease outbreaks. In April of 2003, I covered the SARS outbreak in Hong Kong and China. And in November of 2005, Laura Ling and I covered Avian Flu in Vietnam—a flu that unlike H1N1, swine flu, never produced a serious outbreak in people.
But what struck me yesterday in Pasadena, and struck me on those previous stories, is that there are some situations which don’t seem like they’ll get better unless government is efficient, and everyone is willing to cooperate in an orderly fashion toward a common goal.
An opinion piece in today’s Wall Street Journal serves up Sri Lanka as an example of the importance of getting the Afghanistan surge strategy right. The editorial concludes that with the defeat of the Tamil Tigers, a designated terrorist organization, Sri Lanka “is closer to resolving its problems than at any time since the Tigers started fighting in 1983. Sri Lanka isn’t exactly analogous to Afghanistan. But the island does demonstrate the benefits of defeating terrorists on the battlefield.”
The one benefit – “the green shoot” — the WSJ highlights is that Sri Lanka’s president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, who called early elections to capitalize on his popularity after defeating the Tigers after 26-years of fighting, is now facing a surprise challenge in a race that he must have assumed was already in the bag. The challenge comes from none other than General Sarath Fonseka, the military commander who also takes much credit for winning the war. The two candidates will likely split the vote among the country’s Sinhalese majority, which means they will have to reach out to Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority, many of whom were on the shit end of Sri Lanka’s military “surge”.
We examined the end of Sri Lanka’s war in the Vanguard piece “Notes from a War on Terror”, including the argument that some security analysts have made that the country provides a case study in how to defeat an insurgency. The Journal is right that “Sri Lanka isn’t exactly analogous to Afghanistan”. But the differences are perhaps more important than any similarities.
First, Sri Lanka is an island. The Tamil Tigers didn’t have a Pakistan to retreat to. Unlike Bin Laden, Mullah Omar or other key Taliban commanders, who are apparently able to slip across an international border, the elusive and charismatic leader of the Tigers, Velupillai Prabhakaran, eventually ran out of real estate. In a scene that a US administration has thus far only been able to dream about, Prabakharan’s body was displayed on national television after he was reportedly killed in a last ditch battle.
Second, the Tamil Tigers didn’t have heroin. When the US and Europe began enforcing anti-terror finance laws after 9/11, the Tigers found much of their funding cut off. With access to 90-percent of the world’s heroin supply, the Taliban probably aren’t too concerned with having their assets frozen by some bank.
Third, and most important, the Sri Lankan military didn’t care about winning hearts and minds. While no one would argue that there aren’t benefits to “defeating terrorists on the battlefield”, the Journal glosses over how the war in Sri Lanka was prosecuted. While “hearts and minds” is central to US counter-insurgency strategy, I never once heard the words uttered while reporting in Sri Lanka. In fact, the Sri Lankan military seemed to employ the opposite strategy, showing not only wanton disregard for Tamil hearts and minds, but also lives and limbs.
With the defeat of a brutal terror organization like the Tamil Tigers its easy to say the end justified the means. But if we’re looking for examples on how to “get it right” in Afghanistan, you can probably forget about Sri Lanka. I don’t think the US or citizens of our NATO allies could ever stomach the brutal and draconian measures that Sri Lanka resorted to in the final weeks and months of the Sri Lankan surge.
And for those few who think that winning “hearts and minds” isn’t important, just ask President Rajapaksa and General Fonseka who’s presidential ambitions now ultimately depend on it.
If you’re heading to the “Big Dance” this weekend—that is, the Super Bowl—grab a copy of the local independent weekly and learn how fucked up Florida is.
