Category: Issues

Abuse of prescription painkiller have reached “epidemic” levels in the US, a government report says.

Overdoses of pain relievers cause more deaths than heroin and cocaine combined, the report has found.

It says sales and prescriptions of the drugs rose sharply in recent years and this was linked to the rise in overdoses.

Narcotic painkillers are prescribed to relieve chronic pain but the drugs can be “highly addictive”, the report says.

The report, published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said fatalities caused by narcotic pain relievers have more than tripled in the last 10 years – equivalent to 40 deaths a day.

Last year, a national survey on drug use and health showed that one in 20 Americans over the age of 12 said they had used painkillers for non-medical reasons.

Named as the fastest growing drug problem facing the US, narcotic painkillers are increasingly used recreationally – for the high they cause.

Surging sales

“Almost 5,500 people start to misuse prescription painkillers every day,” said Pamela Hyde, administrator for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, a federal body.

Sales of the drugs to pharmacies and health care facilities have surged more than 300% since 1999, according to figures from the Drug Enforcement Administration.

But prescriptions of the drug have risen sharply too.

The report says enough medicine was prescribed last year to keep every American adult medicated for one month.

Florida was found to have the highest rate of sales of narcotic painkillers per person, almost three times the rate in Illinois, which had the lowest rate.

Officials believe state health policies can help reverse the trend.

The report recommends tracking prescriptions more carefully and cracking down on “pill mills” (clinics that prescribe drugs inappropriately) and “doctor shopping” (when patients collect prescriptions from several doctors).

“This highlights the importance of states getting policies right on preventing drug abuse,” CDC Thomas Frieden told the Associated Press news agency.

In 2008, almost 15,000 deaths were caused by prescription painkillers, including the death of actor Heath Ledger.

NAIROBI, Kenya — While putting few U.S. troops at risk, the United States is playing a growing role in Africa’s military battles, using special forces advisers, drones and tens of millions of dollars in military aid to combat a growing and multifaceted security threat.

Once again, the focus is Somalia, the lawless nation that was the site of America’s last large-scale military intervention in Africa in the early 1990s. By the time U.S. forces departed, 44 Army soldiers, Marines and airmen had been killed and dozens more wounded.

This time the United States is playing a less visible role, providing intelligence and training to fight militants across the continent, from Mauritania in the west along the Atlantic coast, to Somalia in the east along the Indian Ocean.

The renewed focus on Africa follows a series of recent and dramatic attacks.

In August, a hard-line Islamist group in Nigeria known as Boko Haram bombed the U.N. headquarters in the capital, Abuja, killing 24 people. A year earlier, militants from the Somali group al-Shabab unleashed twin bombings in Kampala, Uganda, that killed 76. And a Nigerian man tried to blow up an airliner over Detroit on Christmas Day 2009 during a flight that originated from Lagos, Nigeria.

Most worrisome to the United States is al-Shabab, an al-Qaida-linked group in Somalia that has recruited dozens of Americans, most of Somali descent.

“If you ask me what keeps me awake at night, it is the thought of an American passport-holding person who transits through a training camp in Somalia and gets some skill and then finds their way back into the United States to attack Americans,” Gen. Carter Ham, the commander of the U.S. Africa Command, said in Washington this month. “That’s mission failure for us.”

U.S. and European officials also worry that AQIM – an al-Qaida group that operates in the west and north of Africa – is working to establish links with Boko Haram and al-Shabab, the Somali insurgent group.

“I think the security threats emanating from Africa are being taken more seriously than they have been before, and they’re more real,” said Jennifer Cooke, the director of the Africa program at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The U.S. is conducting counterterrorism training and equipping militaries in countries including Algeria, Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal and Tunisia to “preclude terrorists from establishing sanctuaries,” according to the U.S. Africa Command.

In Somalia, the U.S. helps support 9,000 troops from Uganda and Burundi to fight militants in Mogadishu, the Somali capital. In June, the Pentagon moved to send nearly $45 million in military equipment, including four drones, body armor and night-vision and communications gear, for use in the fight against al-Shabab.

The U.S. also announced this month it is sending 100 advisers, most of them special forces, to help direct the fight against the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army in Central Africa and efforts to kill or capture its leader, Joseph Kony, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court. In Libya, U.S. fighter planes helped rebels defeat former dictator Moammar Gadhafi.

In the latest attack against Africa’s militants, Kenya deployed troops this month into southern Somalia to fight al-Shabab insurgents. The U.S. says it is not aiding Kenya’s incursion, but America has given Kenya $24 million in aid this year “to counter terrorists and participate in peacekeeping operations,” the U.S. Embassy said.

The U.S. government “has had a burr under its saddle about Somalia” for years, dating to the 1993 downing of two U.S. helicopters over Mogadishu in a battle that became known as Black Hawk Down, said John Pike of the Globalsecurity.org think tank near Washington. Eighteen U.S. troops were killed.

At that time, Washington had deployed thousands of troops to combat a famine, but the mission escalated into a hunt for warlords.

These days, only a handful of U.S. troops are involved directly in Somalia – special forces troops who enter on kill missions. In 2009, Navy SEALs targeted and killed al-Qaida operative Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan in a helicopter raid. The Americans jumped out of the helicopters, grabbed Nabhan’s body from his bullet-riddled convoy and flew off. The corpse – like Osama bin Laden’s two years later – was buried at sea.

Pike, who monitors defense issues, said the Pentagon has ramped up operations in Africa tremendously since the time of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who didn’t see Africa as being in America’s strategic interest.

“The U.S. has really developed an interest in Africa that we just have never seen before,” Pike said.

“Between all the goings and comings in the Horn of Africa and all this snake-eater (special forces) Sahara stuff … it’s all over the place,” Pike said. “Since I think an awful lot of it is being run out of Special Operations Command and out of (the CIA), I think it probably far larger than anyone imagines.”

U.S. drones launched from the Seychelles islands in the Indian Ocean also provide intelligence, and the pilotless planes are capable of being armed.

Al-Shabab counts 31 American citizens among its ranks, a U.S. official in Washington told The Associated Press. They’re mostly American-Somalis who left the U.S. to join the group. The U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence matters, said foreign fighters among al-Shabab’s ranks want to attack Western targets.

Intelligence has revealed sophisticated plans by al-Shabab to attack targets in Europe, the official said, but the operations have been disrupted by the recent stepped-up fighting in Somalia.

Ugandan and Burundian troops fighting al-Shabab militants in Mogadishu as part of an African Union force have pushed back the insurgents in recent months and now control most of the capital. The Kenyan incursion has forced al-Shabab to fight on its southern flank as well.

Though the Kenyan invasion appears to further the U.S. goal of pressuring al-Shabab, U.S. officials say the American military is not providing assistance.

“The United States has supported Kenyan efforts to improve its ability to monitor and control often porous land and maritime borders and territory exploited by terrorists and illicit traffickers, particularly along its border with Somalia,” said Katya Thomas, a spokeswoman at the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi.

But, she added: “The United States did not encourage the Kenyan government to act, nor did Kenya seek our views. We note that Kenya has a right to defend itself against threats to its security and its citizens.”

Some aspects of Kenya’s military adventure appear poorly thought out. Troops moved in just as seasonal rains began and are now bogged down in the mud – a literal reminder of the potential quagmire for countries that intervene in Somalia, whose last nationwide leader was overthrown in 1991.

A paper published by the U.S. Army examining the ill-fated U.S. mission in Somalia in the 1990s concluded that “the chaotic political situation of that unhappy land bogged down U.S. and allied forces in what became, in effect, a poorly organized United Nations nation-building operation.”

It was a 2006 invasion of Somalia by Ethiopia that gave rise to the militants now known as al-Shabab.

“That’s the problem with Somalia, there is just no easy answer,” said Cooke, the analyst. “The problem is so huge and multi-faceted that tackling one aspect of it, i.e., beating back al-Shabab, just can’t fix it. Part of the problem is that the government we have invested in as our key partner in Somalia is a fiction of a government, and so Kenya can try to create some space, but there is nothing to fill that.”

The chairman of the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, told the House Armed Services Committee this month that the U.S. must remain active in Africa because terrorists are networked globally.

“One of the places they sit is Pakistan. One of the places they sit is Afghanistan. One of the places they sit is the African continent,” Dempsey said.

________________________________________________________________________

Associated Press reporter Lolita Baldor in Washington contributed to this report.

Reason Wafawarova

So now Muammar Gaddafi has died; apparently after being incapacitated by the fire power of US drones and French gunship bombers, and left to face a very primitively ruthless death at the hands of the NATO led rebels.

Jurist Special Guest Columnist and international lawyer Curtis Doebbler has indicated that the killing of Gaddafi was a violation of The Third Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War, was a crime of aggression and also constituted the use of excessive force; in as much as it was a clear violation to the right to life, besides being in violation of Resolution 1973 which sought to protect civilians; not to bomb fleeing people as what happened to Gaddafi’s convoy.

To some Barack Obama has emerged as the number one champion of the West’s anti-terrorism war. Ironically Obama has teamed up with Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda to take over Libya, leading to his drones incapacitating Gaddafi from the air so that his Al-Qaeda allies could summarily execute the defenceless and unarmed Gaddafi and his son, among others.

Obama now commands a remarkably bloody record – killing thousands of civilians in Afghanistan, killing Arch Terrorist Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, arming and backing Al-Qaeda-affiliated Libyan rebels all the way from Benghazi to Sirte, via Tripoli; killing over 50 000 Libyan civilians in the process, grazing down Sirte and Bani Walid so they submit to the Al-Qaeda thugs calling themselves the National Transitional Council; and subsequently getting himself the trophy of Gaddafi’s battered body.

Now the global witch-hunt for terrorists has reached remarkably impressive levels, with Gaddafi’s death eliciting cheers for Obama and his sidekicks from brainwashed and hapless global citizens. It is somehow hard not to cheer the smart and fast speaking Obama even when he is announcing a murder act under his command. The man comes across like a genius.

The brainwashing of the global masses is so deep that a heartless and hell-hailing monster like France’s Nicolas Sarkozy can also boast of admirers. This writer treats the barbaric murder of Gaddafi and all other callous and murderous Western schemes as purely satanic; apparently exposing the maggoty and inherently evil forces behind Western imperialism and white supremacy. No apologies.

The manhunt for Gaddafi was clearly not part of effecting a no fly zone, the pretext by which Western powers entered Libya, ostensibly to protect civilians they baselessly said were about to be wiped out by Gaddafi. The manhunt was undoubtedly orchestrated by the same people who founded and executed slavery on us Africans, the very people who occupied our continent by the power of colonial conquest, the people who brought to humanity two world wars, the people who helped create a murderous Zionist Israel, and the very people who today preside over a predatory imperialistic system.

The whole NATO operation in Libya cannot be separated from the work of those who founded the American constitution, and the so-called American exceptionalism. This is why Hillary Clinton brazenly bragged about her role in ordering the murdering of Gaddafi, declaring with a cruel laugh “We came, we saw, and he died.”

The she-devil could have aptly put it like “We came, we bombed, and he died.” Dear reader, you have to understand the language of this piece in the context of the invasion of a sovereign country that has suffered so much loss of civilian lives at the hands of foreigner aggressors reputed with a murderous history based on racial supremacy.

There are a number of reasons that makes it impossible for this writer to join the celebration over the death of Col Gaddafi, and supporting the man himself is not one of them. Col Gaddafi courted Westerners in the last years of his reign, and the revolution of Zimbabwe was not served well by this rather treacherous behaviour. In fact Gaddafi had as many admirable traits as he had deplorable ones, like supporting liberation movements, while trying the Arabisation scheme in Sudan, or supporting the British-sponsored Idi Amin in Uganda, even when the dictator was waging a war against Tanzania.

He is the same Gaddafi who helped train our own freedom fighters during Zimbabwe’s war for independence, and the same Gaddafi who turned Libya into one of the richest countries on this planet from the second poorest country when he took over power. Talk of 42 years of massive economic progression and tightly controlled political monopoly of power.

The first reason I cannot and will not celebrate the death of Gaddafi is perhaps the fact that I am a cynic and somewhat a political pessimist by nature. Secondly, I hail from an international relations training background, and also from a media background. As such I am what you would charitably call an expert in the knowledge of how brainwashed this world is.

It is not easy to make someone like this writer an easy target of mass deception tactics; often sugar coated in humanitarianism; the rhetoric on democracy, liberties and freedoms; or any of the hoopla around which rivals and enemies of Western politicians are derided and denounced. This writer is a discerner and not only a listener to Western political voices.

The third reason is I am an ideological creation that is allergic to imperialistic values and whatever they are meant to stand for. No sane person from the African continent can admire imperialism. Simply put, I believe monopoly capitalism practised at the expense of weaker nations is a program designed from the depths of hell, and by its very nature it is the number one crime against humanity.

It is imperialism that breeds devil incarnates like Nicolas Sarkozy, and it is imperialism that deceives humanity to the point of elevating such a heartless murderer to the level of a liberator. Dear reader, if your idea of democracy has got anything to do with the actions of NATO in Libya over the last eight months, then this writer has got bad news for you. You are simply confusing sugar-coated imperialistic aggression for democracy and such an error is fatalistic by definition.

If your source of information over Libya has been the BBC “world service” or any of the mainstream Western media, again this writer has bad news for you. You have been lied to, misled, deceived, manipulated, cheated, brainwashed; and you have to work extremely hard to sieve the information so as to differentiate grain from chaff.

As a matter of principle and by the definition of personality this writer did not cheer American forces when they announced they had killed Osama bin Laden, and neither does he cheer them for ending the life of Muammar Gaddafi.

This writer does not count Obama a hero of whatever magnitude, just like it is increasingly becoming hard to keep counting Nicolas Sarkozy among humans.

The man is proving to be simply a heartless beast walking on two legs. His British sidekick David Cameron comes along as a beautiful looking angel from the Devil’s kingdom. Libyan atrocities committed by NATO and its Al-Qaeda allies stink to high heavens, and they speak strongly on the characters of Sarkozy and Cameron. Displaying dead bodies in a shopping centre is something that infuriates the Devil himself, yet these

Allah preaching goons reckon its laudable conduct.

These views are figurative descriptions purely based on intellectual opinion from an angered writer. Let us start with Barack Obama, a man fitting so well into Malcolm X’s “house nigger” description, dutifully doing

Uncle Sam’s dirty work at home and abroad.

It is a fact that Obama has not used his eloquence and oratory skills to say anything tangible about racism in the United States, or about the deplorable conditions of the African American. Africa we are one and together we will overcome. It is homeland or death!

Reason Wafawarova is a political writer based in SYDNEY, Australia.

This is because he is smart enough to know that if he did, the white system he pretends to lead from the White House would bump him off or invent scandals that would make him fall from grace.

As once said by one Rap Brown, violence is as American as cherry pie; just like crime against humanity is as Western as the white skin; only shared by a few others on this planet.

The brutal West that once enslaved, colonised and eliminated entire races in the past has not really changed much. Today we see the same people who enslaved our ancestors, colonised our nations, and nearly eliminated Aboriginal people in Australia and the Amerindians in the United States reincarnated with other forms of racism.

If captured alive, Gaddafi would have been the 14th African person to be charged at the ICC, apart from the Kenyan crew currently under trial. Everyone ever interdicted at this criminal court has been from Africa and this is purely by racial profiling; otherwise Tony Blair, George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and Dickey Cheney would be on trial as well, together with the Israeli brutes that routinely order the killing of Palestinians. It is either the omissions are based on racial profiling or the interdictions themselves are. There is really not much difference either way.

One can only explain Hillary Clinton’s bragging about the barbaric summary execution of Gaddafi as something influenced by the colour bar. It is hard to believe that Clinton would ever celebrate the summary execution of a Caucasian person, however condemned. She would not be the US Secretary of State if American voters thought she could.

It is sad that the same people who created a colour bar in the past have now been reborn as fighters for democracy and liberties – the convenient pretext employed to justify Western military aggression on weaker peoples today.

We are told the whole Libya episode is some noble cause in defence and protection of hapless Libyan civilians threatened by a fleeing Gaddafi; and we are labelled foolish if we choose not believe this kind of nonsense.

NATO bombs Sirte civilians in their thousands in the name of liberating them from Gaddafi, a man they are accused of supporting in blissful ignorance and primitiveness. Sirte has defined for the world how NTC leaders will treat their political opponents – not really different from what they accuse Gaddafi of.

We can safely confirm now that Obama is nothing more than the elevation of a partially black guy in a bid to reverse the waning popularity of the United States. He did not start bombing Libya by choice.

Maybe Sarkozy did. Obama is simply a mannequin in a suit shop. He is a thing being manipulated by men of tested criminality – men with no problems whatsoever when it comes to killing.

This essay would be incomplete without mentioning Jacob Zuma’s culpability in the spilling of Gaddafi’s blood. Zuma voted for the bombing of Libya and he cannot sugar-coat this one in any other way.

It was just a murderous vote. South Africa and the two other African countries that voted for Resolution 1973 could have prevented the required simple majority needed to pass this resolution had they abstained or voted against this resolution. Libya could have been saved.

Now Zuma has the temerity, or is it stupidity to tell the world that he wanted a captured Gaddafi and not a dead one.

Teodoro Obiang Nguema must have his head examined. The man tells us that an African Court would have helped prevent the bombing of Libya, and he says the AU is nothing but a negotiating forum with no power whatsoever to change anything in Africa. What a boofhead for a chairman of the African Union!

The AU could refuse to accommodate the NTC in its structures like is the case with Madagascar right now. The AU could have all voted against the NTC’s attendance at the UN General Assembly and that would have made it very hard for this murderous lot to legitimately take over Libya.

The AU could have condemned the NATO attacks on Libya, called for withdrawal of Western war planes, and with spirited such calls the course of events could have been different.

With such absolute weaklings like Nguema leading African countries, who needs enemies?

And to think the ANC that Zuma leads counts Gaddafi as a martyred hero? And to think this Nguema is in power strictly because Zimbabwe thwarted a coup that would have made him face the fate now faced by Gaddafi. Some people!

Africa we are one and together we will overcome. It is homeland or death!

The views are those of the author and not of TalkAfrique.com