As we head into the season of indulging on favorite foods surrounded by family and friends, I’ve begun reflecting on meals I’ve shared with our team in Vanguard. As I’ve gotten to know my colleagues over the years, I’ve fondly begun to associate certain flavors and foods with certain people. I know correspondent Laura Ling digs spicy food and packs beef jerky for every shoot. Producer Lauren Cerre fantasizes about the ultimate savory granola bar. Correspondent Mariana Van Zeller makes a mean omelet and Editor Yasu Tsuji comes to every meeting well armed with Pocky.
Of course, no blog posting about food would be complete without mentioning correspondent Adam Yamaguchi, famous for his intrepid appetite. I’ve had the pleasure of working with Adam on several stories including the infamous Penis Restaurant pod. Adam’s poise under pressure is made even more remarkable if you know the backstory. He wasn’t actually supposed to be the only diner at the table sampling the house specialty. Our field producer had arranged for other men to join Adam so they could discuss the supposed Viagra-esque properties as they sampled the meal. But, at the last minute, those eating companions failed to materialize. As they say, the show must go on and, boy, did it. Adam bravely feasted alone and ended up giving a culinary critique that would have given Anthony Bourdain a run for his money.
There usually isn’t a lot of time to for proper meals when we’re out in the field. Lunch is often a handful of gorp and a sad, melted Cliff Bar. Dinner is whatever bland offerings you scrounge up back at the hotel when you roll in exhausted after a long day of shooting. But, a wonderful exception to the typical shoot fare happened this summer when I went to Italy to produce the upcoming “Cocaine Mafia” with Christof Putzel. I hate to stereotype but it’s absolutely true that Italians take their food very seriously. I remember being in the car when a heated discussion broke out between members of our Italian production crew. Christof and I looked at each other, wondering if something had gone wrong. Did an interview fall through? Were we being threatened? No, it was a matter far more urgent. There was a big controversy over where to get the best pizza in town.
It was a real treat working with Christof, not least of all because he’s a gourmand who loves to share his discoveries of all things good to eat. The afternoon before we left Italy, we tracked down some fresh burrata, a mozzarella cheese with cream inside. I never had it before but I took his recommendation and decided this was one souvenir I’d take back with me. The shopowner warned us, “It must be eaten within 24 hours or else.” Or else, what? I wasn’t quite sure but I took his words seriously. I secured the cheese in a cold-insulated bag and asked stewardesses to stow it in the fridge. Delays upon reaching Dulles made me nervous—it was like traveling with a time-sensitive organ waiting to be transplanted. A close call: a beagle at customs came towards me but then found something more interesting to investigate. I made it to San Francisco but truthfully it took a little bit more than 24 hours. My husband and I decided to risk it and devoured the round of cheese with a nice bottle of red at 2AM. It was an absolutely wonderful way to cap off a successful summer of Vanguard production.
Adam Yamaguchi and I are making a presentation next week to a group of public information officers for large institutions on the topic of why Vanguard is great and worth co-operating with. Which, as we prepare for it, forces us to confront the question: Are we?
One of our ambitions for being in the Vanguard is to tell you about important stuff that you ideally didn’t know too much about, if at all. Think of the new episodes that we’ve put up this season, and the worlds that Mariana and Adam and Adrian have entered to show you things that you should know. We sometimes like to think of ourselves as sometimes serving as an early warning for issues that later will become prominent—hence our name. But for you to heed what we’re telling you, you have to trust that we know what we’re talking about, that we’re not exaggerating, or misunderstanding, or misrepresenting the situation at hand.
Why should you trust us?
The same question pervades what we do in producing Vanguard. A lot of what we do behind the scenes involves talking with various individuals and institutions and asking them to cooperate for free with us in putting together one of our documentaries. Imagine that you’re minding your own business and I call you up, say my name and the name of this network, name some subject or another that I’m researching, and launch into a series of questions. If I were calling on behalf of some more recognizable entity—such as MTV or the Newshour on PBS, which I have—it still requires a leap of faith for you to engage me. What if I’m lying? I could be: 1) a prankster; 2) an identity thief; 3) a salesperson; or 4) a nut. When you add to that dynamic the fact that I work for a new series, Vanguard, on a new network, Current, that average person might not yet know about, then it’s even more amazing how the vast majority of people respond cooperatively. Sometimes I’m overwhelmed by how nice people can be and feel like blurting out into the phone: “Thank you sir/madam for not hanging up on me!” But that would probably make the person on the other end of the line suddenly wonder if I was 4) a nut.
Anyway, what we hope persuades the subjects who agree to help with or be in our documentaries, is the same thing that persuades you to trust our work when you watch it: As much as possible, we approach our stories without a particular angle. We’re not trying to prove a particular point, we’re trying to illuminate a situation so that you can make your own mind up about it. If, for example, Laura makes a Vanguard documentary in which there are both cops and criminals, which she has, then we like to think that she could show the result to both an audience or cops and an audience of criminals, and both groups would feel fairly represented. Ideally, if you cooperate with us when we’re shooting a story, we portray you as you are, without us filtering the information or telling the viewer how to feel about it. And similarly, if you watch one of Vanguard’s documentaries, you shouldn’t get the feeling that we’re manipulating you to react in a particular way. The human spirit rebels when it senses that it is being pressured to abandon independent judgment. Oscar Wilde put it most famously: “It would take a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.” Three quarters of a century later, Andy Warhol used a more laconic version of the same thought: “But that’s what I like about it.” We try our best to bring you compelling stories with important information. We leave it up to you how to react. And we like to think that this makes us trustworthy.
The biggest drug bust in the history of the state of Kentucky took place last week. Aptly named “Operation Flamingo Road,” it was the culmination of a three-year, multi-agency investigation into the bustling “pill pipeline” that stretches from the pain clinics of South Florida to the hills of Kentucky. More than 500 arrest warrants were issued and so far more than 300 people across 34 counties were snared in this sprawling roundup.
A tsunami of pills from Florida is flooding Appalachia but so far it is unclear if any out of state doctors have been charged in this investigation. As Darren, Mariana and I learned shooting The OxyContin Express, it’s much easier for law enforcement to go after addicts and street level dealers than the doctors who prescribe the pills. We had difficulty getting to the doctors too. Mariana endured multiple hang-ups when she called for an interview and none of them would speak to us on camera. We were chased from a clinic within a matter of seconds of attempting to film from across the street.
Producing a story under these circumstance means you sometimes have to get a creative with how you film and report it. In addition to the hidden pen camera, there’s Craigslist. The website is often a useful tool when it comes to finding characters but here it provides a window into the economics behind the pain clinic boom underway in South Florida.
An Ad from Craigslist
It’s hard to believe that most doctors employed by these clinics are making half a million dollars a year for working two days a week, but with the volume of patients seen and the number of pills sold, it’s safe to say that many clinics are flush with cash. A busy clinic can handle up to 60 patients a day, each of whom pays an average of $500 per visit, making Florida’s pain clinics, which don’t accept insurance, cash-only cash cows.
Many states don’t allow doctors to dispense the drugs they prescribe, except in small amounts or in emergency situations, because it creates a medical and financial conflict of interest. But in Florida, where doctors prescribe oxycodone at a rate that is five times higher than the national average, this is legal. Most clinics are equipped with in-house pharmacies and are able to dispense medication onsite, which is why many of the job posts on Craigslist, like this one, are for doctors who have or can obtain a dispensing license.
An Ad From Craigslist
This ad is also interesting because of what it doesn’t mention as a requirement, namely experience in pain management. One former addict we interviewed in Florida said he is the only guy he knows that has been to a gynecologist. This doctor happened to be the physician he saw at a pain management clinic at the height of his addiction. We were also told that clinics often bring a doctor with a DEA number out of retirement to work at a clinic part time, which might explain why many of the ads on Craigslist use the work-to-compensation ratio to attract MDs:
An Ad From Craigslist
Florida is home to the top 50 dispensing physicians of oxycodone in the country and in the last half of 2008 the state’s dispensing doctors prescribed 85% of all the oxycodone distributed by physicians nationwide, primarily through pain management clinics in South Florida.
The number of clinics in the southern part of the Sunshine state more than tripled in 2008 and in Broward County alone there are over 100 “pill mills” operating out of strip malls, former travel agencies and even the occasional refurbished fast-food restaurant.
If you’re not a doctor, you can still get in on the boom because you don’t have to be a physician to own a clinic. A clinic in Palm Beach County is going for $120k and can be fully staffed and operational in three months. Serious inquires only though and you better act fast. I just called the number listed in the ad and I was told that an offer has been made.
Today’s big economic news is a report showing the US Gross Domestic Product grew 3.5 percent from July through September, the first GDP growth in over a year. Wall Street was happy. Stocks on the Dow Jones average rose nearly 200 points. The Obama Administration’s $787 billion stimulus program, combining tax cuts and government spending got some of the credit. At the same time, another report this week showed that American consumer confidence is down, partly due to unemployment continuing to climb. It’s almost at 10 percent now, while wages are mostly flat and home prices remain low, 401Ks are not recovered, blah, blah, blah…
If you’ve looked at a newspaper, or TV screen, or the Internet in the past 18 months, you’ve seen all the dismal stats.
So now that the GDP is growing again, which way are things going for you? Not in the next six months, but in the next six years. What kind of economy is going to emerge from the greatest economic decline since the 1930s? That’s the big question, and it points out one of the big dilemmas of journalism. You would think that the really important stuff would be stuff that you would want to pay closest attention to but the important stuff — the average American’s position in the economy — often builds over a lot of time, sometimes over many years, in the way that you’re supposed to boil a lobster, starting with the water at room temperature, so that by the time he or she is cooked, he or she doesn’t notice (so they say). So although this present recession seemed to start abruptly, the factors behind it kind of crept up on us. And that’s what’s tough to cover, and tough to follow.
As I’ve said before, at Vanguard we try to look forward. In May, we did a documentary mini-series in which we tried to look at the economy that we’ve had in the US since the 1980s, against the backdrop of its collapse. Laura Ling went to Las Vegas, formerly the fastest growing place in the US, for “Lost Vegas.”
Adam Yamaguchi went to China’s manufacturing center for “Outsourcing Unemployment.”
Basically, we were looking at what kind of economy will emerge from this present downturn. Will we manage to go back to the system we’ve had since the 1980s? There we had tremendously high levels of consumer spending on cheap stuff — cheap because we’ve outsourced many of our manufacturing jobs to places where wages are lower. And our wealth creation came from real estate, stock, and equity inflation — essentially a series of bubbles. Or we could go back to the system we had in the ‘50s through the ‘70s, where there wasn’t so much economic separation in the US — we were essentially middle class — and wage growth was the key to economic improvement.
As we travel around the world, there is also another model that we see in globalized economies: Those economic engines of the developing world, like China and India, where the “developed” portion of the economy, the economy that we see and which looks like ours, doesn’t include all the population, or even most of it. Many, or most citizens, in these countries are invisible in economic terms. In fact, when Tracey Chang interviewed the COO of Infosys, the poster child of India’s high-tech development, in Bangalore India, he pointed out to her that India’s growth was not including most people.
So where are you going to emerge? Right now there seem to be three directions.
I wasn’t going to write about Afghanistan this week. It’s all over the news, it’s certainly the topic du jour, and I was feeling a little Afghan-saturated.
But then I woke up this morning to a headline that announced that with the death of 11 more soldiers (including three DEA agents) that this was the deadliest month yet for American forces in the country. It also struck me personally because I lost 11 of my good friends from the service on June 28th, 2005, in a helicopter crash. When I was in Afghanistan, I became pretty good friends with some other DEA agents working counter-narcotics in the country. And, finally, hitting unbelievably close to home, my good friend LT Dan Cnossen stepped on a land mine in early September within 36 hours of getting on the ground. He lost both legs above the knee.
So this morning’s news, coupled with thinking constantly about Dan, reminded me about how volatile Afghanistan really is, and the imperative to figure out a cogent strategy in regards to a rapidly deteriorating situation.
I can’t help but feeling that we are at an inflection point in the war in Afghanistan. The public dissatisfaction is becoming more and more tangible, and there are more opponents on both sides of the political spectrum questioning our goals and methods. The American public has a long historical track record of being quite averse to American casualties, and you cant help but think that as Obama is considering McChrystal’s request for more troops, that this month’s death toll is going to influence that decision.
People have been asking me constantly about my thoughts on Afghanistan. Should we be there? Should we send more troops? Is it winnable?
I don’t claim to have the policy solution in Afghanistan, but I do tell one story that maybe in an anecdotal way can help us think about Afghanistan with regards to the long view of history.
In 2007, I was writing my masters thesis on economic alternatives to poppy production in the rural areas of Afghanistan. I had to go to Bagram Air base about three hours outside Kabul in order to conduct some interviews.
As you drive into the main gate of Bagram air base, you see a line of hundreds of big semi-trucks waiting to get through security to get on base. The trucks are filled with construction materials — concrete, wood, steel, etc… Then you drive around Bagram and you see those materials being put to work. There is massive construction erecting hangars, buildings, even gyms for recreation. But if you look closely you notice that we are building a lot of those structures on the rubble of the Taliban buildings from when they were in control of Bagram prior to the US invasion. Interesting, we destroyed them, and are now rebuilding the same buildings.
But perhaps more interesting is that if you look closer, you see the Taliban buildings are built on top of the Russian buildings from when the Russians invaded Afghanistan. The Russians built on top of the old British buildings, and so forth and so on. And what you begin to realize is that Bagram has been a base of some foreign power since Alexander the Great. And if you do what I’m calling — for lack of a better term — a sedimentary analysis of Bagram, you begin to see like a geologist examining layers of rock formations, layers of political empires that have come and gone in Afghanistan. Finally, as you are looking at these layers of different powers who have failed to tame, conquer, pacify, socialize, democratize (insert your own ideology here), you begin to seriously question the feasibility of US goals in the country.
Then as you leave and see the hundreds of millions of dollars of construction being done at Bagram, and around the rest of the country, you cant help but wonder: Are we just the next layer of rubble?
Over the years, I’ve worked on a number of environmental stories that have taken me from one part of the globe to another — from Madagascar to China and all the way to Greenland.
For me, this entire journey has been a bit accidental. I’d never really considered myself to be truly “green” in any one way, but when I came to Current, I committed myself to doing stories of large global import. As I began mapping out the big stories that I felt needed to be told, many of them have happened to point back to the health of our planet.
This led me to the realization that everything is somehow tied to the environment. By simply paying attention, we can see and understand how most every action we take, nearly every product we consume, has an effect somewhere else in the world. That reaction may not be within sight – conveniently, it often isn’t – but somewhere, you can bet there’s a cost.
I began tossing around ideas about how best to illustrate that idea. Examples abound – like plastics accumulating in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, electronic trash burning in an e-waste wasteland in China, or sushi’s acceptance as a global cuisine leading to an emptying of our oceans. My colleague found an unexpected, nearly grotesque example.
Ecstasy.
A few months ago, Joanne Shen and I traveled to Cambodia to see how the global demand for ecstasy was helping drive the destruction of what was amongst the most pristine, intact rainforests in Southeast Asia. It’s a great example of how the demand for various goods can, and often has, massive, reverberating effects halfway around the world. These ‘ecstasy hunters’ are burrowing deep into the forest to obtain safrole oil, the precursor to MDMA, or ecstasy. This is the crucial ingredient for the drug.
In “The Forest of Ecstasy” you’ll see me trudge through the rainforest in search of a rare tree that’s being cut down for its high quantities of the essential oil. And we came across safrole oil ‘factories’ in the middle of the forest, extracting and refining the oil before it’s sent out to become the ecstasy pill. The damage doesn’t end there. As the guys create roads into the forest, they’re paving the roads open for poachers looking for the wildlife bounty inside. It’s a chain reaction caused by club kids looking for a good time.
I’m not suggesting we stop doing all the things we do in any given day, or stop consuming the things that have become ‘necessities’ in our lives. But a greater level of awareness just might make you think a bit more about the choices you have to make.
The world is far more connected than you might imagine.
The “Forest of Ecstasy” airs tonight Wednesday, Oct. 28 at 10/9c on Current TV. For more information, visit Vanguard on Current.com.
Last Thursday, I was going to tell you about how the neighborhood around Vanguard’s Hollywood production office is the unofficial transgender street hustler capital of Los Angeles County, but instead I wrote about the narco war in Mexico, and its possible spill over into the US—or not. But the next afternoon, just to show you that I wasn’t exaggerating about the street hustlers, I came back to the Vanguard office from an offsite meeting and my colleagues Benita Sills and Lauren Cerre informed me that, while I was away, an SUV had pulled into my parking spot so that a street hustler could perform an sexual act on a customer.
And this allows me to repeat that, in Vanguard, we like to think one part of our mission is to give you a heads up as to what might be coming in the future. We’re not fortune tellers, but if we can point to stuff that’s out there that you might otherwise not hear much about, when something does happen, it’s not such a shock because, ideally, it’s more understandable.
So instead of writing about street hustlers today, I’ll encourage you to watch a story that Adam Yamaguchi, Tracey Chang, and I shot three years ago this month in Pakistan.
We shot this story during a trip across Pakistan, in which we drove through the Khyber Pass in the militant-infested Tribal Areas along the country’s western border with Afghanistan—the place where all the fighting has been going on this past week in the Pakistani Army’s offensive against militants. Now, the instability has spread, and foreigners can’t even get up the Khyber Pass, even with a Pakistani soldier in their car, as we had.
But while we gave you a heads up on that situation, that’s not what I want to point out. While we were on our trip, a bomb went off a few hundred yards from us and killed seven people in the city of Peshawar, a few miles outside the Tribal Areas. Three years ago, such a bombing in Peshawar was rare. Now bombings have become common, not just in areas near the Tribal Areas, but across Pakistan. And that’s what I wanted to point out.
If you notice, the story I’ve put up, “Pakistani India Envy,” wasn’t shot in or near the dangerous Tribal Areas, but all the way across Pakistan, in the bustling city of Lahore, in the Punjab, near Pakistan’s border with India. If you don’t watch the piece, the point is that there are militants like the ones hiding in the Tribal Areas (backed by the tribal people there), but there are also militants throughout Pakistan because the government used to back those who were deemed useful in Pakistan’s decades-long struggle against its much larger and stronger neighbor, India. But now that the militants in the Tribal Areas want to terrorize the rest of Pakistan, they’re able to turn to these other militant networks, which were only supposed to fight against India, on Indian soil.
Which means that now they’re a problem for Pakistan. It’s somewhat similar to the lesson that the US learned with its first involvement with Afghanistan, in the 1980s. At the time it gave hundreds of millions of dollars in weaponry to some members of the anti-Soviet resistance in Pakistan, which included a broad collection of groups and individuals, some of which later founded militant organizations like Al Qaeda and the Taliban. The lesson seems to be that militants pose the danger of staying militant, even when the assignment you gave them has ended. And, if that analysis proves to be correct, we told you so three years ago.
Anyone notice a popular wave of coverage about 2012? According to the Mayan calendar and the I Ching centuries ago, plus a growing mass of conspiracy theorists, purported scientists, astronomers, and futurists, there’s an alleged end of the world coming December 2012. They predict massive flooding thanks to celestial alignment, subsequent pole shifts, and solar flares. I won’t at all persuade or dissuade you as to the theory’s validity, I have zero clue if it’s real or not. I’m just calling out the upswell of focus on it recently that’s somewhat alarming.
There’s a movie coming in 3 weeks, 2012. The film’s site has created its own virtual community where potential moviegoers can vote for the next leader of the post-partem world. And there’s even a fake survival lottery to enter. Again, this is all for the movie, not any real election or lottery going on here.
Particularly concerning is the amount of hoopla reputable outlets have given to the theory. The History Channel in particular has hyped it up big time. There’s an entire home page selling all things armageddon. You can order your Nostradamus 2012 DVD describing his links to the theory. Or you can peruse the five other DVDs for sale about Mayan doomsday and related 2012 discussion.
While the 3D models may cause a stir, some are in fact taking warning. You can go to a host of sites to get your survival kits and disaster preparedness in order.
Even Playboy touched upon the subject and followed a Missouri man ready to stick out whatever may come.
The best reporting I’ve seen on the subject is by USA Today that went straight to the source itself, the descendants of Mayans in the Yucatan Peninsula. A village elder’s response to an archaeologist: “If I went to some Mayan-speaking communities and asked people what is going to happen in 2012, they wouldn’t have any idea,” said Jose Huchim, a Yucatan Mayan archaeologist. “That the world is going to end? They wouldn’t believe you. We have real concerns these days, like rain.”
Like I said, I have no clue if the hype is to be believed. I will say this, however, I have at least one friend who shall go nameless who’s already rented a Winnebago for said dates and plans to position himself in high ground near a water source. Crazy or wise? We’ll see in 2012.
I was about to tell you about how Vanguard’s office here in Hollywood is located in the unofficial transgender street hustler capital of Los Angeles County, and about the effect that recession seems to have had on them, when my colleague Darren Foster mailed me this link.
I can switch subjects because even though, in March of 2001, Laura Ling and I shot an hour doc for MTV on street hustlers one block from where my desk at Vanguard now is, Laura and I also shot one last fall on the war among Mexico’s narco-traffickers.
When considering the size of the recent raids around the US against what’s happening in Mexico, one question is why the narco war down there isn’t up here, given how big the narcotics distribution networks here seem to be. The standard answer is that the cartels in Mexico didn’t used to be particularly violent either, until the federal government started to pressure them. In the old days, before the year 2000, when Vincente Fox was elected Mexico’s first president from a party other than the PRI in 70 years, cartels could maintain their position as multi-national corporations pretty much in the way that other multi-national corporations maintain their positions in their host countries—they were too big to fail. But once Fox, and his successor as President, Felipe Calderon, started to act against the web of corruption that bound the cartels to law enforcement and government officials, the cartels were obliged to maintain their positions the old fashioned, Chicago-in-the-1920s way, by shooting it out.
Another view might be that we seem to have just passed out of one of the more violent epochs in American history, the roughly 40-year period from the mid-‘1960s, until just a few years back. And if you look at all the urban homicides we had in that period, and look at how many were related in some way to narcotics, then maybe we already had our narco war. It was simply that, unlike what’s going on now it Mexico, ours wasn’t organized, just low-level dealers and users committing murder, often against each other. And where violence by powerful organized criminal groups can be viewed as a threat to the state, unorganized violence is just a threat to the neighborhood.
On the third hand, we seem to be in an era where globalization brings us all sorts circumstance that we don’t seem to have seen before, and sometimes when you’re in the middle of something, it can be tough to see which way the trend line is moving.
First Big Brother and now Clark Kent’s best friend! What is up with all these D-List celebrities dealing Oxy? Today’s news is that “Smallville” actor Sam Jones III was snagged by the DEA for possessing with the intent to sell more than 10,000 pills of the potent narcotic. That is a crazy number of pills! Yesterday, we did the math on Big Brother winner Adam Jasinski’s pills, and found that he stood to make $55,000 by selling the pills he was allegedly caught with. Well, if we apply the same logic to Jones, he puts Jasinski’s potential profits to shame. By selling his pills Jones could have pocketed $275,000.
But what I find most interesting about his arrest is the fact that in documents filed in federal court, the DEA claims that Jones was the “Hollywood connection” in the illegal distribution of oxycodone. As we reported in “The OxyContin Express”, more people are now abusing prescription drugs than heroin, cocaine and ecstasy combined. But unfortunately, we only seem to hear about it when the drug goes Hollywood.
To those of you who haven’t seen our film, here it is:
