The human cost of California’s water policy p. 22
March 2015—Vol. 47, Issue 2
Published by the Church of Scientology International
PEOPLE
WHO READ
ARE A
DY I N G B R E E D
HOW WILL THE STORY END?
Read any good books lately? Probably not P. 12 One in four Americans didn’t read a single book last year. And more than half of U.S. teens don’t read for pleasure, ever. Meanwhile, research shows that readers are better able to communicate and better equipped to deal with feelings—both their own and other people’s. Exposure to literature also breeds empathy, spurs compassion, and fuels success. So, what’s the story?
[FEATURES]
[DEPARTMENTS] BITTER PILL
Media & Ethics
Does Big Pharma buy trials? The slippery ethics of for-profit clinical testing in Africa, India and much closer to home.
It’s all too easy to find news that caters to our existing opinions. The solution is proactive news consumption.
BY MARTHA ROSENBERG
BY JON SINTON
DON’T DRINK THE WATER
Cecil Murray, Chair of Christian Ethics at the University of Southern California, is a champion of religious community service.
Profile
Taiwan activists hope to clean up drug-tainted rivers, along with the annual music festival that pollutes them.
BY GEORGE MICHELSEN
BY LLOYD FREEMAN
Perspective
HELLO HOLLYWOOD
Christine Chavez discusses her work at the U.S. Department of Agriculture and reflects on the legacy of her legendary grandfather, Cesar Chavez.
A new Scientology information center welcomes Tinseltown’s curious—among them Freedom’s newest staff writer. What he found surprised him, and it might surprise you.
L. Ron Hubbard Essay Learn.
BY MICHAEL BRENNAN
Actual innocence, AstroTurf, and drone mail—oh my! Also, candymakers remove artificial ingredients linked to ADD/ADHD concerns, and Arianna Huffington puts out a call for good news.
HIGH AND DRY
Freedom Magazine
Investigative reporting in the public interest, published by the Church of Scientology International
The crops are withered and the land is fallow, but the people who farm California’s Central Valley are not. They fight to survive, and for a very basic human right: access to water.
6331 Hollywood Blvd. Suite 1200 Los Angeles, CA 90028 previous page: vip2014/getty images
BY DAVID MCKEE
Confusion & the Stable Datum
News Briefs
BY MICHAEL BRENNAN
When a gas explosion reduced a Mexico City maternity hospital to rubble, the Scientology volunteer ministry rushed to help. So did one very brave 11-year-old boy.
Words of Wisdom
Letters from our readers
If Oscar Wilde was right that “it is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it,” what does it mean that few Americans read for pleasure?
SEARCH AND RESCUE
What is Scientology?
Talk Back
FALLING OUT OF FAVOR
BY AJAY SINGH
Editorial
Washington, D.C. Office 1701 20th Street NW Washington, D.C. 20009
Phone: (323) 960-3500 Fax: (323) 960-3508 Phone: (202) 667-6404
info@freedommag.org www.freedommag.org
Comment, question or story idea? feedback@freedommag.org
ON THE COVER:
Photo illustration by Freedom Magazine
DITORIAL
ALK BACK
Words of Wisdom WHAT DO YOU DO when you see injustice? Do
you stand idly by? Many people do. I think it’s because while empathy is easy, compassion requires courage. And it requires action. That’s why Freedom tells the story of California’s farmworkers, who want their human value to put them at the head of the queue, at least ahead of fish, for access to what is becoming an ever more rare commodity: water. That’s why we’re shining a light on the fact it seems nobody in this country reads anymore—unless it’s gossip or kitten quips on a screen, or something they have to. Reading is a way we as human beings discover ourselves, tap our well of potential. It’s how we connect with one another—reach out from the darkness. Empathy kicks-in in that remarkable moment when an inner fire alights at the sudden realization that, at the end of the day, the struggle is the same for all of us—rich or poor, man or woman, beggar or king. And that spark usually comes when we have our nose in a book. I’m not a Scientologist, but given my job as the editor of Freedom, which reflects the values of the Church and the ideals it holds dear, I’m doing my best to parse the philosophy of its Founder L. Ron Hubbard. That’s a work in progress, but there’s one core tenet I get—the simple idea that what is true is what is true for you. Stepping away from nitwitted logical quagmires around self-delusion, I can buy into that. And what’s true for me is that L. Ron Hubbard got this important distinction—what compassion really is, something that’s rooted in doing and requires being brave. I also think Mr. Hubbard understood that, to use a phrase, the struggle is very real. That humanity will sink under the weight of its problems if left untended. That we have many “invitations to hate.” “All are in the same trap,” he wrote, “subject to the same cruel pressures of this universe.” Mr. Hubbard’s Big Idea, I think, was that while some succumb to these pressures—“rave and torture and strut” as he put it colorfully, it is possible to, despite the load, go on, go forward— to even prosper. And that it requires only two things—being true to oneself, one’s own decency, and a way. Scientology, for those who practice the religion, is that way. Scientologists believe that in taking it they are being set free, and they want to share this help they’ve found. So, as you may have seen in a recent Freedom special edition, the Church is expanding the scope and reach of its ministry. One of the newest additions is a Scientology information center in Hollywood, which opened in January down the street 4
from Freedom. It’s there to introduce people to the religion, to tell those who care to know what Scientology is all about. I figured, what better way to report it than to send our newest staff writer, Michael Brennan, to learn for himself—and let his experience there tell the story. Hello Hollywood, and to Michael too. Welcome also to Ajay Singh, another new Freedom staffer. His piece on issues of water, and the human cost it leaks, is—to my mind—a thing of beauty. As good as the writing is, I was knocked to my bottom when I first saw the stunning photographs that accompany Ajay’s story. They were taken by two photographers from the Scientology Sea Organization, its religious order, which also staffs many Church operations. Both trained on a New York Institute of Photography course, courtesy of the Church. One of the biggest surprises I’ve had in this job, and in the peek I get behind the scenes of Scientology, is the remarkable pool of talent in its religious order, and how the Church goes to great pains to train and develop its people. I work alongside them every day, and let me tell you: As an organization, Scientology is profoundly enterprising. When it wants for a means to an end, it makes one—building out facilities and operations to support and further its religious and humanitarian missions. It also reaches out, to gain knowledge and experience in the many different disciplines it must master to carry out its work. Take the case of Freedom’s art department. If you hadn’t noticed, the visuals in this magazine are extraordinary. That is the work of Sea Org staff—who are developing under the mentorship of a legendary talent in the magazine biz, Bob Ciano. Bob has been the art director of Life Magazine, The New York Times, Travel & Leisure, and Esquire, and is a much soughtafter professor at the California College of the Arts. How cool is that? This is just an immediate example from the small corner of Scientology I inhabit. But I’ve seen glimpses of it everywhere in the corridors of this organization. It’s true for me. There’s a lot about Scientology that circulates in the public sphere, but no one—conspicuously—is telling this story. No matter. In keeping with their theology, and with what L. Ron Hubbard would want, the religion and its highest order aren’t bowing to the pressures, always pushing back, making the best of it, and themselves—doing their jobs. They don’t always turn the other cheek—would you?—but they make sure to also turn toward those who need help, people who need a voice. So does Freedom Magazine, and that’s why I’m proud to be here. —Jennifer Johnson-Lankheim Editor-in-Chief
LETTERS to the Editor The Expansion Issue December 2014
“The special edition was outstanding ... I think the most important article was on the Narconon drug rehab programs that are going on around the world that help people recover from drug addiction and substance abuse. A better thinking society is a better functioning society.” R.L., Biloxi, Mississippi
Fukushima: The Disaster Continues January 2015
“As Greg Schwartz’s deeply reported article clearly shows, the PR game by the antiquated nuke industry and its too often sympathetic cohorts in governmental regulatory agencies is a significant public health threat. Major kudos to your editorial and graphic design staff.”
Online Edition “I believe transparency is important, that coupled with honesty… Keep up the fine work and never waiver in your honest commitment to upholding the truth.” D.M., United Kingdom
J.T., Los Angeles, California
Her Name was Silje
Media & Ethics November 2014
J.P., Clearwater, Florida
“I feel [Freedom] is the one publication I can trust to get the truth of what is occurring with current events. I especially enjoy the Media and Ethics articles, as these use hard facts to break apart the façade put out by the so-called ‘sources of information’ we know as the media.”
January 2015
“Reading the article ‘Her Name was Silje,’ I found it quite sad that even after this girl’s death, it took her parents’ activism to bring the government of Norway to bring changes to their mental health care system. The article on Fukushima was equally extraordinary. My compliments to Freedom for some much needed exposure to these incredibly important issues.” A.F., Los Angeles, California Letters may be edited for clarity and length.
Send letters to info@freedommag.org
www.freedommag.org | 5 5
EWS BRIEFS
Love for Justice
Antisocial Media
On Valentine’s Day, Forward Together, a multiracial organization that works with churches and secular civic leaders to promote racial harmony and positive social change, held its annual march in Raleigh, North Carolina. Described as the largest civil rights gathering in the South since the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, thousands of activists and protesters gathered under the theme “Love and Justice.” The event was held under dark rain clouds, and clouds of solemnity as well, as organizers and marchers paid tribute to the lives of three recently murdered Muslim students. Supported by the NAACP, the HKonJ (Historic Thousands on Jones Street) People’s Assembly, and area churches and civic organizations, leaders of the movement say they want to create an alliance of black voters and working-class whites, Latinos and other immigrant communities, in support of civil rights and economic opportunity and fairness for all.
Ever see dozens of glowing reviews of a restaurant you hate, and wonder how everyone got it so wrong? Or maybe you see a sudden flood of posts supporting an issue or politician you’ve never heard of—and start wondering how you missed the boat. You’ve probably been “astroturfed”—the phenomenon of flooding social media with the message of an organization or sponsor and making it appear as a grassroots campaign. Originally practiced in print media, when dozens of letters to the editor would show up with identical messages that appeared to come from different readers, the practice has evolved for the platform of social media. On Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or Pinterest, you’ve surely seen them—you just may not have known it. And just like actual AstroTurf, the messages may look nice, but they’re not organic. In a February 2015 TEDx Talk at the University of Nevada, investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson explained how special interests manipulate and distort media messages through astroturfing. Fabricated messages widely posted across social media sites create a false impression of grassroots support—or condemnation—for an idea, product or political candidate. Astroturfing is nothing new. In October 2013, the state attorney general of New York fined 19 companies for bogus postings to Yelp, Google reviews, Citysearch and similar sites.
Nearly 80 percent of generic herbal supplements from GNC, Target, Wal-Mart and Walgreens contained no trace of the herbs listed on the label, according to a recent investigation commissioned by the office of New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman. The testing, conducted by DNA technology expert James Schulte of Clarkson University, reviewed six herbal supplements sold at stores in New York state. The most egregious findings were at Wal-Mart, with only four percent of its private-label products testing positive for herbs advertised on the label. “At the end of the day, American corporations must step up to the plate and ensure that their customers are getting what they pay for,” Schneiderman said in a press release, “especially when it involves promises of good health.”
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Keeping It Real Candy manufacturers Nestlé, Hershey and Mars have announced plans to remove artificial ingredients from their products. Nestlé’s brand research, as well as a Nielsen 2014 Global Health and Wellness Survey, found that many Americans are concerned that artificial flavors and coloring can contribute to, or cause symptoms mimicking, hyperactivity in children. Illustration by David Stuart
right page: courtesy ucc church, asheville, nc; james willamor; school for conversion (schoolforconversion.org); sanchai yimkhruathong/shutterstock
Supplements without substance
Psychiatric Drug Users Experience ‘Zombie-like State’ According to a new study, patients prescribed antipsychotic drugs often suffer “major disruptive” side effects that “reach into their physical, social and emotional lives, and cause a level of fear and suffering that is difficult for anyone else to fully comprehend,” says Paul Morrison, a professor at Murdoch University of Perth, in Western Australia. Morrison’s research, published in the Journal of Mental Health Nursing, found that 50-70 percent of patients report an average of “between six and seven side effects” that can include severe motor dysfunction, agitation and restlessness, weight gain, sleep disturbances, sexual dysfunction and dizziness. “The most commonly mentioned was sedation,” Morrison says, “which the participants described as leaving them in a zombie-like state.” According to Citizens Commission on Human Rights, a mental health watchdog sponsored by the Church of Scientology, to date there have been 72 warnings against antipsychotics issued by regulators in eight countries, including Australia and the United States.
Studies show that many Americans are increasingly sick of the news, because— well—crime, human rights atrocities, economic despair and a lack of human kindness seem to grab all the headlines. Arianna Huffington wants to change that. Shortly after launching the Huffington Post’s “What’s Working” editorial initiative, Huffington shared why she wants to feature good news too. “As journalists, our job is to give our audience an accurate picture—and that means the full picture—of what’s going on in the world,” Huffington wrote in a recent blog. “Just showing tragedy, violence, mayhem—focusing on what’s broken and what’s not working—misses too much of what is happening all around us.” Besides calling violence and destruction-mongering “lousy journalism,” Huffington added that it’s not what people want. She cited a 2013 study by Jonah Berger, author of Contagious: Why Things Catch On, which found that the most emailed New York Times stories in a sixmonth period were positive. “What I’m talking about is consistently telling the stories of people and communities doing amazing things, overcoming great odds and coming up with solutions to the very real challenges they face,” Huffington wrote. “And by shining a light on these stories, we hope that we can scale up these solutions and create a positive contagion that can expand and broaden their reach and application.” www.freedommag.org | 7
How do you link human rights ideals to everyday reality?
EWS BRIEFS
Forget Air Mail. Get Ready for Drone Mail!
The Truth Set Them
Free
Is it a bird? A plane? No, it’s just the sneakers you ordered this morning. No joke. Technology has a way of reinventing how we live. According to a recent survey of 1,400 Americans by a Chicagobased PR and social marketing agency, many consumers believe retailers like Amazon and Google will be making airborne retail deliveries inside of two years. And four in five consumers say drone delivery to their doorsteps within an hour would actually make them more likely to purchase from a retailer. Deliveries could include books, clothing, pet supplies, tools, and household goods. Though FAA regulations currently prohibit such use of drones, new regulations have been proposed to allow (and govern) their commercial use. Amazon Air anyone?
California to review ‘staggering’ number of drugged foster kids
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in the foster care system to be given dangerous psychiatric drugs than previously acknowledged. According to a report released by the Los Angeles Times in February, in addition to 2,300 previously acknowledged children being drugged, another 1,056 cases went unreported. The children were being treated with antipsychotics like Abilify, Seroquel, Risperdal and Zyprexa, drugs known to carry an FDA black-box label warning of the risk of suicidal thinking and behavior in young people. The drugs have also been linked to sudden and severe weight gain, and increased risk of diabetes and movement disorders.
©2015 United for Human Rights. All Rights Reserved.
After reports in the Los Angeles Times, the San Jose Mercury News and other media indicating a “staggering number” of foster children are on psychiatric drugs, the California Senate Human Services Committee is considering policy changes to limit their use in the state. “We’re responsible for the well-being of children ... who are in our care and custody after experiencing abuse or neglect,” says state Sen. Kevin de Leon. “Reports that these children are being prescribed powerful mind-numbing drugs at over three times the rate for all adolescents are very troubling.” Officials in Los Angeles County have admitted to allowing far more children
Convicted prisoners are being let out of jail—and it’s a good thing. Last year, a total of 125 prisoners were exonerated, with about 25 percent of them released from prison based on DNA testing that proved their innocence, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. More than half of those released had cases handled by The Innocence Project, a privately funded national litigation and public policy organization at work since 1989. Since then, The Innocence Project says a total of 325 people have been exonerated based on similar testing nationwide. Of those exonerated, The Innocence Project estimates the wrongly convicted served an average of 13 years in prison and/or on parole. Rickey Dale Wyatt was number 325, having served nearly 31 years of a 99year sentence for a rape conviction based primarily on sketchy eyewitness identification. Prosecutors in Wyatt’s case later admitted to withholding exculpatory evidence. Wyatt, who never stopped asserting his innocence, turned down a proposed agreement that would have had him serve just five years if he plead guilty. After DNA testing eliminated the possibility of Wyatt being the perpetrator, he was released from prison at the age of 56. The Innocence Project is at any time evaluating between 6,000 and 8,000 cases, and receives 3,000 new requests for help every year. Ultimately, they actively pursue exoneration for about 300 cases at a time. Paul Cates, a spokesperson for The Innocence Project, says, “watch for more.”
Digital human rights postsecondary curriculum Program resources include:
•
The Story of Human Rights award-winning documentary film
•
30 public service announcements, each illustrating one of the rights in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
•
The Story of Human Rights booklet, including the full text of the Universal Declaration
And much more…
humanrights.com info@humanrights.com • (323) 661-1144
EDIA & ETHICS
The Challenges of a New Media World BY JON SINTON
NOT THAT LONG AGO, ours was a shared
experience, thanks to mass media. We got our local news from a respected newspaper and our national and world news from one of the three network television evening broadcasts. But beginning in the 1980s with an explosion of new radio formats and hundreds of microtargeted cable TV channels, the media landscape changed. In the 1990s, the Internet crowded the scene with tens of thousands of new content sites popping up every year. Along the way, some network news divisions, never a profit center, came under the authority of entertainment executives. It was only a matter of time before those programmers (who may have been too smart for their own, and our, good) realized that to inform was worthy, but to entertain while informing was profitable. The lines were blurred, and infotainment was born. At the networks, hard news was hard to find. Simultaneously, Internet-based information of every flavor was blossoming, and a new era in information gathering and dissemination was born. The explosion of news content comes not just from traditional operators such as NBC, The New York Times and The Associated Press. There are now hundreds—maybe thousands—of sites where facts may be subtly colored with a not-so-obvious agenda. It is easy to seek out and find the news we want versus the news we need, and human nature being what it is, we are likely to do just that. Instead of becoming informed, we risk having our previously held notions reinforced by news sites that cater to our existing opinions. The solution lies in proactive news consumption. Today we must be our own editors and carefully consider each and every source. It is no longer enough to 10
watch, listen and read passively. Now we must sample many sources and employ a critical eye. The pretty packages and slick production can lull us into a false sense of security. We must avoid staying in our comfort zones and question things as never before. For the providers, the opportunity to reach millions anytime and anywhere is a boon to business and influence. The best ones, new and old, are continuing the important journalistic tradition of remaining detached from the outcome of the stories they’re reporting. A simple rule, really. But, here again, human nature is at odds. We like—we need—winners and losers. It’s hard to tell a story without rooting for a particular outcome, but it’s what great journalists do. It means they let stories carry them to a logical conclusion, or perhaps to no conclusion at all. Among the less scrupulous, nuanced or even outright agendas can be foisted upon the unsuspecting. We all must take responsibility by asking ourselves if the rush to get a story out has compromised its accuracy. (In the last few years even the bigger institutions have fallen prey to the desire to be first: From NPR falsely reporting the death of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords to CNN inaccurately reporting that the Supreme Court had declared the new healthcare law unconstitutional.) This rush-to-publish has been driven by a 24hour cable news culture that is the media Jon Sinton is a writer, media consultant and media entrepreneur working in the radio, television and online industries. He began his professional career at age 17 in the newsroom of WBNS-TV, the CBS affiliate in Columbus, Ohio.
equivalent of the great white shark: It’s always hungry, and it never sleeps. We are witnessing an exciting democratization of reporting. Call it “citizens’ media,” a shorthand description of everything from a blogger in his mother’s basement to CNN’s iReport. Some sites feature both amateur and professional reporting. They may or may not have an agenda. Likewise, not all “professional” sites are motivated to tell a story objectively. The task of differentiating between fact and opinion now falls on the consumer. The newly democratized media remove the middleman from the equation. In fact, middleman is too kind a euphemism. The word for the monolithic media companies is “gatekeeper,” and without one, religious organizations, clubs and groups of all kinds control their own messages. That’s what Freedom Magazine is about: The freedom to say what needs to be said, confident in the knowledge that its words—precisely as they were written—will reach its readers intact. Put another way: The palpable antagonism toward mainstream media derives from public perceptions that newspapers and broadcasting outlets are pushing some agendas and squashing others. Fairness has been replaced by slant. Institutions the media don’t like will be ridiculed and denigrated. Only by having multiple unfiltered voices like this one, and letting people make their own decisions, is truth served. Two generations ago there were many, many mainstream media owners; today there’s a mere handful. Yet everyone now has the ability to become a “publisher.” Mainstream media are disintegrating because they were inherently monopolistic. We have yet to establish a media model that allows many voices to be heard, while at the same time achieving societal agreement on broad issues. But it’s the doing that will create the broad consensus. n Illustration by David Stuart
Only by having multiple unfiltered voices, and letting people make their own decisions, is truth served.
RONT PAGE
Falling Out of Favor by Michael Brennan YOU ARE A MINORITY IN AMERICA.
Not because of the color of your skin, your religion, or your political party. Not because of your income bracket, your occupation or your opinion on hotbutton issues. You’re a minority because right now ... you are reading. Please, continue. While statistics vary, virtually all studies indicate that reading in this country is on the decline. The
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sharpest fall is among young people and students, but across all age and economic groups, the number of people who read for enjoyment, or as a primary source of information, is dwindling. Some say the trend reflects a blighted culture, others call it enlightened—a canny, technology-driven evolution of the way people gather information and learn. Either way, it’s a sign of the times, with no reversal in sight. “I don’t think it’s going away,” says an executive with First 5 California, an agency created to improve young children’s health and education. “I think we’re in a messy place right now.”
Research shows that people who read have a far greater ability to communicate, to understand other people’s emotions and share their own feelings. They have a greater capacity for empathy, for feeling compassion and acting on it. “If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he read.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson
Just over half of us are readers. According to a 2012 study by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), reading for entertainment is on the decline. While the percentage of Americans who read any book not required for work or school has remained relatively stable, the number of Americans who read fiction fell to 44 percent, down from 50 percent just four years ago. While teen phenoms like Hunger Games and Twilight suggest a burgeoning generation of pleasure-readers, there is a much larger market of young adult fiction—more than 30,000 titles a year—put to the shelves. Some publishers, perhaps in an act of self-preservation, assert that reading is as popular as ever. But numerous studies, and simple observation indicate otherwise. Let’s look at who’s reading, and who’s not.
Less of us, overall A decade ago, nearly a third of Americans—29 percent— were categorized as “light” readers, reading between one and five books a year—the largest category of readers in the NEA study, titled “How A Nation Engages with Art.” That number dropped to 23 percent in 2012, with fewer than one in four Americans qualifying as even light readers. The other categories, moderate (6-11 books a year), frequent (12-49) and avid (50 or more) remained steady over the last decade, but all showing significantly lower numbers. And according to the Pew Research Center, nearly 25 percent of Americans didn’t read any books. The Pew study found that one in four Americans had not read a single book in any format—hardcover, paperback, digital or audio—a number that’s tripled since 1978. The NEA study differentiates between readers of all books, and of literature, which it defines as a play, poem, novel or short story. In a broad stroke—fiction, and that’s most on the decline. Fiction reading increased between 2002 and 2008, perhaps providing Americans with a literary escape following the events of September 11, 2001—but those gains have been reversed. 14
The body politic According to the Los Angeles Times, almost half of all Americans don’t realize each state has two senators. More than two-thirds don’t know what the Food and Drug Administration does. “I’m not surprised,” says U.S. Congressman Doug LaMalfa, an elected official for the last 13 years. “When I was running for California State Senate, I had people telling me they hoped I’d win so I could get rid of [U.S. Sen. Barbara] Boxer. I didn’t tell them that she’s in Washington, D.C. I usually just said thank you.” LaMalfa feels that, while the narrow segment of politically active people has widened a little, “in the broad base, the average person a generation or two ago probably knew a little more.” Bryan Caplan, author of The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies, believes absence of knowledge breeds irrationality among voters, who don’t consider issues beyond how they might be personally affected. They take a position of being “informed” only by their personal bias. “The central idea is that voters are worse than ignorant; they are, in a word, irrational,” Caplan writes, “and vote accordingly.”
Chick lit There’s a significant gender imbalance among readers, according to the NEA study. Of the 37,000 readers surveyed, nearly 64 percent of women read books, while only 45 percent of men did. The trend traces to childhood—the differences in what boys and girls read, and how frequently they read, is evident as early as the first grade. “Girls are knocking the boys out of the box,” says Sharon Brennan, a higher education consultant with the State University of New York system. The gap could be partially attributed to what’s available to kids, in terms of entertainment. “There’s an awful lot of ‘chick lit’ out there,” observes the First 5 California exec. (He asked he not be named—we’ll Photo illustrations by Peter Green Design
The Pew Research Center found that in a one-year survey period, nearly 25 percent of Americans had not read a single book for pleasure—in any format (print, digital or audio)—a number that’s tripled since 1978.
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“There are many little ways to enlarge your child’s world. Love of books is the best of them all.” —Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis call him Harold.) Boys, he added, used to be heavy comic book readers. He remembers himself as a child waiting for new editions to come out. “But today’s comic book is Call of Glory, it’s a video game, and you’re part of it. “And young women don’t play those games.”
Secret of my success Not surprisingly, the percentage of adults who read increases with level of education and income. Those who attended graduate school, for example, are nearly twice as likely to have read a book in the last year as those whose education ended with high school. Of people earning between $20,000 and $50,000 annually, less than 48 percent read a book in the last year, contrasted with nearly three-quarters of people earning $150,000+.
Retire with a book Americans 65-74 years old are bigger readers than all other grown-ups. While just more than half of adults overall read a book in the last year, 61 percent of golden agers have. “I know why,” Brennan says. “Because they can. “Reading is a leisurely thing to do. You have to have an hour or at least a half-hour. Most people don’t feel like they have time, they have to run from one task to another, work longer hours, both parents are working—available to the boss on weekends and evenings for calls and emails. “Who feels like they can make time to read?”
Digital dwindle While there is growth—with e-books accounting for 27 percent of book sales in 2013—the digital book industry is slowing down. While they once enjoyed double and triple digit annual growth, e-book sales increased less than four percent in 2013. Juvenile e-book sales dropped more than 25 percent in sales that year, according to Digital Book World, which attributes the drop largely to the absence of a Hunger Games redux—seriously. Still, a 2013 report from PlayCollective found that 54 percent of kids who read do it digitally. In 2014 that number was up to 67 percent, compared with 25 percent of U.S. adults who read e-books. For now, it’s a “young people thing.” 16
From birth—and sometimes before even that—reading is part of our lives. Parents read to children long before they can understand the words or the story, introducing us to the rhythm and sound of language. Other than crying, which some might call a monologue, it is the first conversation we have. As children get older, they read to themselves—starting with favorite books they read repeatedly—Dr. Seuss, fairy tales—and then move on to books they are assigned, or find interesting—if they see their parents read. Research shows conclusively that children who don’t read are the offspring of parents who don’t read. According to a recent Common Sense Media study, 53 percent of 9-year-olds read every day. That number drops steeply when surveying teenagers—only 17 percent of 17-year-olds read daily. “Teens don’t read like [when they were younger],” Brennan says. “They don’t have time with all their devices all the time.” Congressman LaMalfa agrees. “They’re texting, they can’t spell words right, they’re busy downloading the latest song,” he says. “Teenagers are spending an unlimited amount of time on their devices, and it’s ruining creativity,” chimes in Harold. “The mind needs time to wander.” But is this really a technology and distraction issue? Older children have always read less than younger ones. With increased homework, social obligations, sports, extracurricular activities, and even jobs, one could argue they too just don’t have the time. Indeed there’s a contingent The two largestthat pooh-poohs the idea that circulation magazines technology aberrates a culture 3x in the U.S. are AARP of literacy and learning, assertThe Magazine and ing instead that it’s a renaisAARP Bulletin. sance. Reading comprehension scores of 9- and 13-year-olds have improved in recent years, lending credence to the idea that literacy actually benefits from this technology. “This is how they learn. [Kids] may not pick up a book, but they’re still learning,” says Lori Rice, an adjunct faculty member at Kaplan University. “They’re learning more than we ever did, faster and better.” Rice, who has taught online coursework for three different colleges, believes concerns bemoaning a decrease in reading are “based on our fear and our ignorance.”
“We have to adapt to the fact that this is how [young people today] want to learn, and that they are going to be the smartest generation,” she says. “There is research that shows not picking up a book is okay. “This is the world we’re living in.”
reading anything. “I go into high schools, and the teachers are assigning them things they’ll already read anyway,” Brennan says. “They’re reading Hunger Games. They’re not telling them to read The Scarlet Letter.” “We’re teaching so much math and science now, but where did humanities go?” asks Harold. Goldie Blumenstyk, the author of American Higher Education in Crisis? also sees a division. “There are “Today a reader, still plenty of really smart kids going to college. The tomorrow a leader.” difference is in how prepared they are,” she says. —Margaret Fuller “More than half of the students at two-year colleges, and nearly 20 percent at four-year universities, are placed in remedial reading and math classes.” That’s not a surprise to Brennan, a former Dean of In bricks-and-mortar classrooms, students are definitely Admissions at Southern Connecticut State University. reading less. “The two biggest problems are that students arrive “Teachers can always tell who the readers are, based on how in high school not knowing how to write, and that they spell certain words in their own papers,” says Rosanne they’re not reading enough.” Welch, Ph.D., a professor at CalPoly Pomona and California State If and when students get to college, they’re reading University at Fullerton. “Best example: the phrase ‘for granted.’ and writing—expanding their horizons, if you will— Students who are readers,” she says, will spell that correctly, “but less and less, says Blumenstyk. non-readers will render it as ‘for granite.’” In researching her book, Blumenstyk found a “My favorite misspelling is ‘Jesus was a profit.’ I tell them report that tested 2,300 students at the beginning, spell-check is not their friend.” middle and end of their higher education. Close “If spelling counts in life,” Welch continues, “reading counts to one-third showed no improvement in what in spelling.” they knew. What students read seems to depend on where they go to “We have a lot of kids right out of high school school. Private schools and prep schools, where parents pay that have no business in college,” agrees Brennan. tuition for their children’s education, still for the most part Indeed, going to college is not the same as assign classics like To Kill a Mockingbird, The Merchant of Venice, graduating—not by a long shot. Brennan cited a The Great Gatsby, and 1984. recent national study that showed the graduation But some public schools seem to be content to have the kids rate at around 52 percent. And that’s after six years. After four years, the graduation rate is just 37 percent. The magazine in third place, Game Informer overtook mainstay Brennan served on a board to create and also the fastest growing, Better Homes and Gardens to win a postsecondary education planning targets the other end of the the spot. guide for students, which discussed the generational spectrum. options of four-year universities, two-year colleges, trade schools, and the military. She also wanted to include going into the family business, or taking a year off. “A couple of the Board members got offended. But I said, well, you have to plan for everyone.” She points out that rarely do high schools encourage students to think of not going to college—especially prep and private schools who want their graduation numbers to reflect a high percentage of college enrollments. “I don’t think that was always the case,” she says. “I went to a private prep school, and everyone didn’t have plans to go to college, because they weren’t all going to go.” “Now, everybody’s supposed to go to college. But not everybody is prepared or www.freedommag.org | 17
“News is what a chap who doesn’t care much about anything wants to read.” —Evelyn Waugh, Scoop
In discussions of reading, most people think of books, but you, right now … are reading a magazine. That puts you among a breed of readers that’s a bit more consistent. Magazine readership has remained fairly steady, down less than two percent from 2011, according to Statista.com, which compiles statistics from 18,000 sources. And it showed a steady increase from 2004-2011, before the minor decline. Considering the number of baby boomers, it’s little surprise that the two largest-circulation magazines in the country are AARP The Magazine, and AARP Bulletin. Each has more than three times the circulation of even the fastest-growing magazine in the industry, which (in stark contrast) is Game Informer, a monthly gamer glossy that just overtook Better Homes and Gardens for third place. When Americans read magazines, they read magazines, not digital copies. Even David Carey, president of Hearst Magazines, who oft touts the virtues of digital reading, admitted in 2013 that only three percent of Hearst’s total subscriber base was digital. Data from the Pew Research Center for Media indicates that when Americans read on a screen, it’s news we’re consuming. Its most recent study showed that nearly 40 percent of people regularly get their news from a mobile device, and the number jumps to more than 50 percent when other online and digital news sources are included. That number is now higher than those who count on any form of television (local, network or
cable), and is far ahead of newspapers (29 percent) and radio (33 percent). The study also found that with the proliferation of mobile and digital content, overall news consumption is up—most markedly among tablet owners 65 and older. A whopping 61 percent surveyed in that age group says that tablet use has upped their news consumption. It seems even the older and wiser generation is turning its back on the book.
“He that loves reading has everything within his reach." —William Goldwin
Reading adds to knowledge, to enjoyment, to understanding. It can be a way in, or a way out. It prepares us for what lies ahead, teaches you what came before, or offers a holiday from the here and now. “Reading is a great escape,” Brennan says. “You’re able to get a balance, and forget about your kids and your work and your house.” To stem the tide of the decline in reading, we must start with ourselves. We must read more. Make the time. Those of us who have children must read to them, with them—and have them see us read. “Two-thirds of kids say that their parents, or one of their parents, is their hero,” according to professor Rice. Researchers from The New School for Social Research have proven, in a paper published in the journal Science, that people who read literary fiction have a more enhanced set of skills and thought processes that are fundamental to social relationships and functional societies. Research also shows that people who read have a far greater ability to communicate, to understand other people’s emotions and share their own feelings. They have a greater capacity for empathy, for feeling compassion and acting on it. People who read are the kind of people you want to be, and want to be around. n
Parents read to children long before they can understand the words or the story, introducing us to the rhythm and sound of language. Other than crying, which some might call a monologue, it is the first conversation we have. 18
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mature enough to go,” Brennan continues. “So many of the kids would benefit from a year or two off.” “It’s amazing to me to see a kid who came to us one or two years out of high school,” she says. “They’re focused. They work hard. They know what they want.” As a former admissions dean, Brennan attributes this to the simple fact that by the time these students “came back” to school, they’d figured out a few things: what fields interested them, what major they wanted, the job they were looking to get. In other words, they read up on the subject—of themselves.
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ROFILE
IN THE LATE 1950S, as a jet fighter raced
down the runway at Oxnard Air Force Base in California, a tire blew just before takeoff. The two-seater plane careened out of control and crashed to a stop, fires erupting. The flight’s navigator managed to crawl out onto the wing through a small hole between the fuselage and the cockpit cover, barely escaping the inferno that, just then, enveloped the aircraft. Just before he jumped down to safety, the navigator spotted his pilot down the wing, his body engulfed in flames. The navigator rushed to the pilot’s aid, 20
Community Leader
CECIL MURRAY BY GEORGE MICHELSEN
throwing him to the ground and rolling him—over and over and over again— until the fire was out, in the process severely burning his own hands. The pilot, with burns on 90 percent of his body, was flown to a special burn unit in San Antonio, Texas. There he made an urgent request to have Cecil “Chip” Murray, the navigator, brought to his bedside—before he died, he had something to tell his rescuer. “I didn’t abandon you,” the pilot whispered. “I was coming to get you when I slipped and fell in the fire.” Illustration by Olivia Wise
Murray, a black man born in Lakeland, Florida, had personally experienced the effects of racial bigotry, hatred and violence. The pilot was a white man from South Carolina; his last words to Murray: “I love you.” Profoundly moved, Chip Murray knew from that moment he was not living for himself alone, but to help others. (To this day, Murray says, he keeps in touch with the pilot’s brother.) Decorated by the Air Force for heroism, after he left the military Murray would continue his dedication to service. He became a First African Methodist Episcopal minister, serving that faith in several cities before arriving in Los Angeles in 1977. As senior pastor of L.A.’s First African Methodist Episcopal Church, he built a congregation of 250 into one of the nation’s largest, 18,000 strong. He also served as a mediator resolving racial conflicts and led dozens of task forces, tackling such issues as homelessness, healthcare, substance abuse, jobs, education, housing, and HIV/AIDS awareness. Murray soon became one of the most recognized ministers and community leaders in Greater Los Angeles. Presidential candidate Bill Clinton and President George W. Bush are among the many national figures who paid visits to Murray’s church and addressed his congregation. After 27 years, Murray left his position leading the L.A. First AME Church, and took a faculty position at the University of Southern California, where he holds the John R. Tansey Chair of Christian Ethics in the School of Religion. He was also named a senior fellow of USC’s Center for Religion and Civic Culture. He also heads the Cecil Murray Center for Community Engagement, which develops projects connecting church communities in L.A. neighborhoods with the resources of the university.
“In the past three years, we have reached 700 churches and their leadership, pastors and lay leaders,” Murray says. Murray’s eponymous Center runs church-community engagement programs that foster economic self-sufficiency for low income communities; offers training
Murray describes his work as “making differences in underserved communities, being that rising tide that lifts all vessels.”
to nonprofit agencies and businesses in leadership, governance and administration; facilitates faith-based community development; and advocates for public policy supporting neighborhood revitalization. “We take pastors and lay leaders and train them in civic initiatives, reaching beyond the walls of the church, finding a way to say ‘yes’ for those who are in need,” Murray says. Murray also works on the Passing the Mantle Project, which trains clergy from African-American churches throughout
California in effective development and organizing strategy. To bring the many and diverse populations of Los Angeles together on common religious ground, Murray keeps his programs responding to dramatic demographic shifts. With some traditionally black neighborhoods now two-thirds Hispanic, and a Pew study reporting increasing numbers of Hispanics turning to Protestantism, Murray launched the Faith Leaders Institute which trains theological leaders to span ethnic divides. The Cecil Murray Center also conducts, in collaboration with the USC Schools of Law, Business and Social Work, a 12-week community-outreach training course for church leaders. “Participants then go back to their church to undertake the project of community uplift,” Murray explains. “Some will choose to work with the homeless; some will choose to work in foster care. Some will choose to work with those being released from prison so the recidivism rate can be reduced.” Murray has worked with leaders and members of the Church of Scientology on a wide range of community betterment initiatives for decades, including programs to boost learning skills and eradicate illiteracy, drug prevention efforts, and campaigns to curb crime and violence. Bob Adams, a vice president of the Church of Scientology International, leads interfaith coordination efforts with Murray. “He is a man of courage and integrity who respects all religions and people of all faiths.” Murray describes his work as “making differences in underserved communities, being that rising tide that lifts all vessels.” Indeed, to be a positive change agent has long been the goal and the message of Cecil Murray, a man of indomitable courage who has dedicated his life to social betterment by constructive means. “Soul force is greater than sword force,” he says. n www.freedommag.org | 21
ATION
CALIFORNIA’S SAN JOAQUIN VALLEY PRODUCES 25 PERCENT OF AMERICA’S FOOD ON JUST ONE PERCENT OF THE NATION’S FARMLAND. ITS ECONOMY AND ITS PEOPLE DEPEND ON AGRICULTURE. THE REGION IS IN ITS FOURTH STRAIGHT YEAR OF DROUGHT, AND FACING A SECOND YEAR OF ZERO WATER ALLOCATION. IN FEBRUARY, CALIFORNIA’S WATER AUTHORITY DENIED A PLEA TO SEND MORE WATER TO THE PARCHED CENTRAL VALLEY, CITING THE PLIGHT OF SMELT AND CHINOOK SALMON INHABITING THE SACRAMENTOSAN JOAQUIN RIVER DELTA. LOCAL FARMERS, RESIDENTS, AND GRASSROOTS ACTIVISTS ARE AGHAST, ASSERTING THAT “WATER IS A CIVIL RIGHT, A HUMAN RIGHT” AND THAT THE STATE SHOULD BE MORE CONCERNED ABOUT THE LIVELIHOOD AND WELFARE OF ITS PEOPLE THAN WITH THE FATE OF FISH.
AS A BOY GROWING UP on the vast alluvial
plains of California’s San Joaquin Valley in the 1960s, Alan Sano spent much of his free time out in the fields of his small family farm. When the tomato harvester broke down, he was always eager to help. “My father would ask for a wrench, but I didn’t know what a wrench was,” recalls Sano. “I’d bring a screwdriver and my dad would yell at me.” It wasn’t long before Sano mastered the skills he needed to succeed as a farmer in the world’s most productive agricultural region. A third-generation Japanese-American, he dropped out of high school to work with his father, helping expand the family’s agricultural holdings twelvefold—from 328 acres to a little more than 4,000. Despite an auto accident in the 1980s that left him paralyzed from the waist down, Sano, 52, 22
Photographs by Scientology Media Productions
still gets around on the farm: He wheels himself with his bare hands in the dirt, personally supervising the care of crops ranging from tomatoes, cotton and garlic to garbanzo beans, almonds and pistachios. Over the past few years, however, Sano’s kinship with the land has unraveled. California is entering its fourth straight year of drought in 2015. It’s a prolonged dry spell that many deem historic. As many as 25 counties have declared local emergencies, and the water shortage has made farming in the region increasingly difficult. Last year was particularly bad. In January 2014, the Bureau of Reclamation, a federal water management agency best known for building dams, power plants and canals across America’s 17 Western states, enforced a zero water allocation law on California’s entire farming community. 23
Clockwise from left: Fieldworker Angel Cruz; tractor driver Magdaleno Martinez; fabricator and welder Alfredo Jimenez; farmer Cannon Michael.
(On February 27, the bureau decided to allocate zero water for 2015, with the provision that if rainfall and other conditions improve as the year progresses, the restriction might be relaxed.) It was the first time in 47 years—canal water was introduced to parts of the San Joaquin Valley in 1967—that farmers like Sano had to go without any governmentsupplied surface irrigation whatsoever. By contrast, federal authorities allocated 50 percent of the usual supply of canal water for municipal and industrial use statewide. Canal water to support wildlife got 70 percent of its typical share. Like other farmers, Sano compensated for the cutbacks by doing what his father did before spectacular canals transformed irrigation: He pumped groundwater. But after more than a century of exploitation, not to mention contamination, groundwater levels have receded so drastically that Sano was able to irrigate only 65 percent of his crops. What’s more, Sano was dipping into California’s largest source of water storage during drought years. Groundwater is also the only lifeline for many 24
municipal, agricultural and disadvantaged communities, which rely on it for nearly all of their water supply. The long-term environmental effect of pumping groundwater is a geological phenomenon known as subsidence. First detected in the 1920s, it refers to the gradual settling or sudden sinking of land resulting from the movement of underground materials. Although it has various causes, including subsurface mining, more than 80 percent of the subsidence identified in the U.S. is a consequence of the excessive pumping of aquifers and their collapse, according to a 1999 report by the U.S. Geological Survey. Subsidence has many harmful consequences, including migration of rivers and displacement of wetlands. But its most destructive effect during periods of drought is the permanent loss of storage capacity in aquifers, which further depletes accessible groundwater. San Joaquin Valley has some of the world’s worst subsidence—and the problem is spreading. “We found it in a new place recently,” says Michelle Sneed, a hy-
drologist with the USGS. That new place is the town of El Nido, California, where land is sinking as much as a foot every year. “That’ll be 50 feet in 50 years,” says Sneed, summing up the slow-moving geological disaster. “The only place in the world subsiding as fast is Mexico City.” Partly because agriculture without subsidence depends on an uninterrupted supply of surface water, the federal and state governments designed two mammoth water-delivery schemes known as the Central Valley Project and the State Water Project. Both capture and store water in dammed reservoirs for redistribution through rivers and canals, mostly from northern California, which gets 7580 percent of the rain in the state. The projects were meant to offer sustenance during periods of prolonged drought, and have enabled the Central Valley, of which the San Joaquin Valley is the southern two-thirds, to produce about 25 percent of table food for Americans on just one percent of the nation’s farmland. “The early years of subsidence brought about the need for project water to flow
south and to eliminate the region’s dependence on groundwater,” says Gayle Holman, public affairs representative of the Westlands Water District, which covers more than 600,000 acres of farmland in western Fresno and Kings counties, making it the nation’s largest local government entity responsible for providing surface water for agriculture. “But today,” adds Holman, “because of federal regulations that don’t consider impacts on farmers and other people, as well as businesses and those who rely on the agriculture industry, the projects are broken.” One way of looking at California’s water issues, which reflect those in most states across the American West, is as a giant battle between competing stakeholders. “In this particular drought, you could define waste as ‘somebody else’s doing,’” says Jay Lund, director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at the University of California, Davis, and a professor of civil and environmental engineering. “Everybody’s a villain and everybody’s part of the solution.”
The first step in trying to find a way out of the crisis is to understand just how deep it is. “If you step back and look at the southwestern United States—Utah, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, California—what you would find is that for most of the 21st century, every single year a large portion of the Southwest has been in a drought,” says Glen MacDonald, a UCLA professor of geography and an expert on droughts and water resources. Greenhouse gases exacerbate the water shortage, he explains, raising temperatures and causing water to evaporate at higher rates. “If you take a look at 2014, you will find that while rainfall has been low, it wasn’t record-breaking,” says MacDonald, adding: “The drought would not have been so serious if it weren’t for those super high temperatures.” By all accounts, California and much of America’s West are in the grip of a megadrought. “Right now we’re getting a preview of what the 21st century will be like and how we can act upon it so that we can start planning for the future,” MacDonald says. “This drought is a great wakeup call.”
ALAN SANO’S FARM
is located in Mendota, a largely agricultural town in the Westlands, roughly halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco. To get to it, you drive east from Interstate 5 toward Firebaugh, a city named (but misspelled) after A.D. Fierbaugh, who established a trading post there in 1854. This is a region of America’s Far West where human enterprise has always been as wide as the sun’s arc. But except for the occasional bark from a dog, there are few sounds here—no voices of yeomen in the nearby fields, and except for the sound of wells being repaired, not even the din of iron against iron and iron against earth. It’s as if the driest January on record, capping a full year of zero project water, has sapped farmers’ energies. Early in 2014, says Sano, he decided to let 1,000 acres of his land sit fallow because of the lack of water. (In a touch of irony, the Colorado River Aqueduct, which transports water 430 miles from northern California to Los Angeles, cuts right through Sano’s land.) But when one of Sano’s six water wells stopped working in the summer, he was forced to fallow another 225 acres. “I just didn’t plant the tomatoes and garbanzos,” he explains, adding that the total loss in seeds and greenhouse tomato saplings amounted to more than $100,000. Sano’s employees were also hit. About a third of the 25 or so tractor drivers and irrigators that he typically employs got pink slips. According to an analysis co-authored by UC Davis professor Lund, as many as 410,000 acres, representing six percent of irrigated cropland in the Central Valley, were fallowed in 2014. The valley is estimated to have lost 14,500 seasonal and fulltime jobs—about 6,400 of them directly related to crop production. The total estimated cost—no less than $1.7 billion, including some $450 million in additional costs of groundwater pumping. The human impact of California’s drought was on stark display during a recent public workshop in Sacramento called by the State Water Resources Control Board (SWRCB), which sets statewide water policies. On February 18, a motley group of www.freedommag.org | 25
farmers, seasonal workers, state senators, city managers, fishermen and environmentalists crowded into the California Environmental Protection Agency headquarters to debate a February 3 decision whereby the SWRCB denied a request by the Department of Water Resources and the Bureau of Reclamation to release additional water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta into the reservoirs of much of the drought-parched state. The extra water would have afforded some room to lift the zero water allocation order affecting farmers. A bipartisan group of legislative and congressional leaders, including U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, opposed the water board’s decision, pointing out that additional pumping had been approved by five state and federal water and wildlife agencies. What appeared to be a typical battle between various government agencies and the competing interests of California’s water empire quickly distilled to a striking, binary issue. As Courthouse News Service, which caters mostly to lawyers and the media, put it: “Water For California’s Farms—or For Fish?” Neither fish nor crops can live without water. But does this really boil down to a conflict between farmers and fish? The answer appears to be yes—and SWRCB Executive Director Tom Howard came down on the side of fish. As the official who had initially rejected the federal and state request to export water from the delta, Howard advised the board to heed his decision to shut the delta’s south-facing gates. “Many fish species are already at historic low levels,” Howard told the board, adding that the 95 percent mortality rate of winter-run chinook salmon, combined with the dwindling numbers of delta smelt, were key factors in his decision not to send any additional water into Central Valley reservoirs. But the farmers, many of them wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the words “Let Water Flow to People, Not Fish,” aren’t about to give up. Accompanied by local politicians and grassroots activists on the south side of the delta gates, they offered testimony after testimony about the drought’s adverse impact on human lives. “I’m sorry if I’m offending any business people, but I believe farmers 26
are more important than fish,” said Alvaro Preciado, a resident of the almost exclusively agriculture-based city of Avenal in the Westlands Water District. “Our community is based on property taxes, but people have been moving out or renting, and we’ve been struggling for the last 10 years to provide water to our community.” Several women, speaking in Spanish translated by interpreters, bemoaned the underemployment in their communities and the difficulty of feeding and taking care of children. “Because of the lack of work in California, I have to go to work in Arizona,” said one speaker, indicating that she spoke for many families like hers. “The heat is immense in Arizona and the children are forced to leave school to help.” An even sharper look at the southof-delta misery index came from Andy Souza, president and CEO of the Fresnobased Community Food Bank, who said that his organization feeds 6,000 to 10,000 people monthly. “We’re serving families that would have never stood in a food line,” he said. Since May 2014, he added, he has observed “a sense of helplessness and hopelessness in the families we serve.” The most blunt criticism came from Maria Gutierrez, a volunteer with El Agua es Asunto Todos, a Fresno-based nonprofit Latino community alliance whose name translates into English as “Water is Everyone’s Business.” The SWRCB’s decision not to add water to Central Valley reservoirs is “a slap in the face of Latinos living south of the Delta,” she said. “People are very angry—we believe water is a civil right, a human right.” These sentiments echo plenty among people on the drive east from Alan Sano’s farm to the town of Mendota, which used to be known as the cantaloupe capital of the world. Along the way, it’s easy to see how the crop patterns have changed— away from so-called row vegetables such as tomatoes to high-value “permanent crops” such as almonds and pistachios. Permanent crops have been criticized for taking years to mature and for being highly water-intensive. For example, farmers must wait four years to get their first crop from an almond orchard (pistachios take seven years), and almond trees require three to four feet of standing www.freedommag.org | 27
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water per acre—enough to supply the annual water needs of six to eight California households. Besides the fact that permanent crops are financially lucrative and help offset the relatively slim profit margins on row crops such as tomatoes, farmers favor them for one other key reason that, paradoxically, revolves around the water cutbacks. “If you don’t have regularly allotted water and you have to buy it from outside sources at exorbitant prices,” explains Holman, “you have to grow high-value crops—and right now the highest-value crop is almonds.” Regardless of the economics—and arguably the ethics—of planting orchards where vegetables used to grow, it’s clear that there aren’t enough fields being planted to keep people working. “If I worked every day in the fields for eight hours a day, I would make about $700 a week,” says Joel Gonzalez, a 33-year-old local resident who came to Mendota from Mexico City when he was 3 years old. He has been out of work for a few months and says he makes ends meet by doing odd jobs such as tile work and carpentry. “Some people go two hours away to find work, in Paramount, Los Banos, Merced—wherever contractors take them,” he says. “They even go to Santa Rosa, up north.” Like Gonzalez, tractor driver Magdaleno Martinez hasn’t had a fulltime job for months—since October 2014, to be precise, when the last crop of melons was picked. Asked how he survives, Martinez, 50, replies that he gets enough from unemployment to rent a $250 one-room apartment, where he cooks his food on a hotplate. About an hour’s drive from Mendota lies Los Banos, a relatively prosperous city with a name meaning “the baths” in Spanish, a term used in the mid-19th century to refer to pools near the source of a local creek. Los Banos is outside the Westlands, in Merced County, and much of the land here is markedly wetter. This is also where, cutting through broad A worker repairs one of the six groundwater wells at the 4,000-acre farm of Alex Sano in the town of Mendota.
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Brothers Alvaro and Ismael Rubalcaba narrowly averted being laid off at the Bowles Farming Company in 2014.
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expanses of farmland on both sides, lies a street named Henry Miller. You would be forgiven for thinking that someone with a decidedly literary mind must have lobbied for that name. In fact the street has nothing to do with the Henry Miller who penned Tropic of Cancer, but the man for whom the street is actually named is the subject of a noteworthy book—a 2001 title by David Igler, a professor of history at the University of California, Irvine. Industrial Cowboys tells the story of two San Francisco butchers named Henry
Miller and Charles Lux. The duo found land in Los Banos and by “monopolizing land, water and other resources provided an insurance policy against the West’s drought and flood cycles and its complex natural environment … ultimately fostering enduring contradictions between the Far West’s natural and social landscapes.” As it turns out, Henry Miller (the rancher) created “one of the first vertically integrated farming operations in California, from manufacturer to seller, up the whole supply chain,” in the words of his greatgreat-great-grandson, Cannon Michael. An heir to a large chunk of the Miller-Lux ranch empire, Michael is president of the Bowles Farming Company Inc. Bowles Farming owns 4,000 acres in Los Banos and leases 7,000 more from other family members. Like a lot of other farms in the San Joaquin Valley, this is a big operation that produces everything from fresh-market tomatoes, onions and carrots, to alfalfa and high-quality cotton. What distinguishes Michael as a farmer, however, is that he maintains a habitat on his land for migrating ducks from Canada. What’s more, his estate sits next to the San Luis National Wildlife Refuge, home to one of the last populations of the Tule elk, a subspecies found only in California. And yet, for all his resources and obvious connections, Michael has been impacted by the drought. “I don’t purport to have the saddest story,” he admits, “but about 800 acres on my ranch is fallow now because of the water crisis.” Michael generally employs about 60 workers on a seasonal basis, but he says he had to cut his labor force by 15 percent last year. And for the first time ever, Michael asserted his historic water rights from the San Joaquin River, thereby depriving other farmers of precious irrigation. A former commercial real estate agent who majored in English and minored in economics at UC Berkeley, Michael is a far cry from the typical farmer in the San Joaquin Valley. Which just goes to highlight the struggle of the common farmer trying to survive in these hard times. “That’s the thing about farming—it’s a very capital-intensive business, and every year is critical to us,” Michael says. “You can’t start and stop—you have to keep going.” n 33
ERSPECTIVE
On Civil Rights CHRISTINE CHAVEZ
AS A LABOR LEADER, civil rights activist and grassroots community organizer, Christine
Chavez has fought for some of the most critical social issues of our time. She is the granddaughter of Cesar Chavez, who founded the United Farm Workers in 1962. Chavez serves as farmworker coordinator for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, a job to which she brings instant name recognition as well as a wealth of experience. My grandfather’s legacy has been about what he gave to other people. It always amazes me how many different people he inspired. Whether I’m in Texas or New York or Florida, people come up to me and tell me that they got involved in some sort of activism because of what they saw, heard or learned about the farmworkers movement. When you reflect on your grandfather’s legacy, what comes to mind?
What’s the biggest issue regarding farmworkers and Latino immigrant laborers these days?
Immigration reform continues to be a huge issue. Some people say that as many as 80 percent of the people who put food on our tables don’t have the necessary documentation to be in this country. It’s an open secret among those who hire these workers and the consumers who benefit from their labor. Yet nobody really wants to do anything to address the matter.
I’m inspired by all the people I’ve met and worked with in the farmworkers movement. And there are some amazing activists on the periphery of the movement as well as outside it who also inspire me. These people enable me to look deeper within and challenge myself to get out there and speak out for the rights of others. What inspires your civil rights activism?
bob daemmrich/corbis
Christine Chavez at the unveiling of a statue honoring the legacy of her grandfather, Cesar Chavez, at the University of Texas at Austin.
How does the United Farm Workers champion the rights of California’s farmworkers?
How are you able to leverage the foundation your grandfather’s work laid to further your civil rights activism?
The board members of the UFW are out there every single day, pressing for reform. Our cofounder, Dolores Huerta, and our president, Arturo Rodriguez, constantly put their necks on the line for farmworkers.
A lot of people come to me and my cousins for help in furthering their cause—and if being arrested with them or being seen in a news photo with us helps them get some press, then of course we’re going to do that. I think my grandfather would probably be upset if my cousins and I chose to not do anything and sit on our hands.
There are so many different programs that the department has for farmworkers, whether it’s grants for people trying to get into farming or providing technical assistance to farmers. We also have a number of internship, housing and nutrition services programs for students. We go around the country, explaining to farmworkers how these programs work and what their benefits are. Two years ago, in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Labor and the U.S. Department of Education, we brought more than 100 farmworker women to learn about all our services. n How do you serve the interests of farmworkers in your position at the Department of Agriculture?
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WHAT
YOU READ
SPEAKS
VOLUMES
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Search and Rescue
p. 38
bitter pill
p. 44
Don’t Drink the Water
P. 50
AND
BY DAVID MCKEE ART BY CHRIS KOEHLER
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top: fernando ramirez/cal sport media; freedom magazine
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t was another routine propane delivery to Hospital Materno search-and-rescue operations. The two groups Infantil Cuajimalpa (Cuajimalpa Maternal Hospital) in also collaborated on disaster relief in Japan, Mexico City—at first. But, at 7:20 a.m., the gas pipe feeding Guatemala, Turkey and the Pemex explosion the hospital’s kitchen ruptured. For at least 15 minutes, three in Mexico City. workers from gas supplier Nieto Express sought to contain At Cuajimalpa Maternal, the Volunteer the leaking fuel. Ministers supplemented their yellow shirts Then something—nobody knows what—sparked the propanewith yellow helmets and descended into what filled air. An earth-rattling boom followed, and a giant plume of remained of the hospital. Their first priority was smoke rose over the hospital. Over half of Cuajimalpa Maternal securing a potentially dangerous piece of medical collapsed, threatening the 110 people inside, many of whom equipment. “An officer from the federal Mexican became trapped beneath the rubble. The official toll would police informed us that there might be an X-ray stand at three killed, 66 injured, many of them the victims of machine on the site that contained cobalt-60, a flying shards of broken glass. radioactive and highly poisonous substance,” Nearby residents were the first to arrive on the scene to render Dellano recalls. aid, and initially mistook the blast for an earthquake. Instead, Rescuers couldn’t take any chances. If the machines it was Mexico City’s third fatal, large-scale gas explosion in two they use to sift through the rubble and remove debris years. One ripped through the headquarters of petroleum firm were to break apart the machine, it could contaminate Pemex, another wiped out motorists on an open highway. the area. “So we were asked by the federal police to In the wake of the Cuajimalpa disaster, some would call for find the machine and secure it,” says Dellano. “It was reconsideration of Mexico City’s heavy reliance on gas-tank very delicate work, as the overall structure was quite and propane deliveries instead of pipelines. weak. Any misstep could have led to serious injury or But that was a question for the future. What was needed death—or accidentally fracturing the device before we now was action—and experienced rescuers. Although relief were able to secure it.” efforts were impeded by heavy traffic, elite search and Three hours into the painstaking search, Mexico City rescue force Los Topos was on its way, accompanied by emergency officials were able to confirm that there was two Scientology Volunteer Ministers, Alex Dellano and not a cobalt-60 machine on the site “which was of course Daniel Gonzales. (It took three hours to traverse the 40 a relief,” remembers Dellano. miles to the site.) “What we did find was almost total destruction of the “I was on my way to work when a number of Volunteer hospital,” he continues. “The site became increasingly Ministers started to send me messages letting me know dangerous as the search and rescue work carried on. There that the incident had occurred,” Dellano recalls. “A few was the risk of total structural collapse, and at one point minutes later I arrived at my office and contacted Hector gas began leaking again,” which caused a secondary fire Mendez to coordinate the meeting point for Topos that took firefighters two hours to contain. and Volunteer Ministers to start the disaster response.” At the peak of the operation, some 2,000 firefighters, That’s no small compliment to the Volunteer Ministers. Red Cross workers, soldiers, police, and volunteers were Los Topos is an elite unit, born out of the September deployed at the disaster scene. “We were working in one of 19, 1985, earthquake that devastated Mexico City. That the worst and most dangerous places,” says Mendez, although day, Hector “Chino” Mendez plunged heedlessly into he shrugs off any suggestion of valor: “We are just another the danger and chaos, searching for his brother (who volunteer group.” would be found alive). Joining forces with other The search for the cobalt had come to an end, but the work bystanders, Mendez dug for hours. He rescued at for Los Topos and the Volunteer Ministers was just beginning. least four people from perishing in the ruins. “Our duty was to support the operation and secure the scene for It was a life-changing experience that impelled other rescuers and workers,” explains Dellano. “Those workers Mendez to form “The Aztec Moles” (Los Topos needed to be taken care of, as they were not specifically trained Aztecas). Now simply Los Topos, they go where in dealing with collapsed structures. It was our task to ensure trouble calls, whether it’s Ground Zero on 9/11 or those people were safe in doing their job.” a demolished cathedral in the 2010 earthquake They worked at it all that first day, then long into the night. in Port-au-Prince, Haiti—where the relationship Temperatures fell to freezing, and they were lightly dressed. Now with the Scientology Volunteer Ministers began. it was the Topos/Volunteer Minister force that would receive During the Haitian disaster, Los Topos some support—from nearby residents who materialized with became acquainted with the yellow-shirted food and coffee. Volunteer Ministers and a mutual admiration Leading the coffee-distribution effort was an 11-year-old boy developed. When Hurricane Manuel struck named Jonathan Tobon Ruiz. Jonathan, a stocky youth with a thick Acapulco in 2013, nearly 100 Los Topos and shock of black hair, lives just down the street from the hospital site, Volunteer Ministers joined forces to perform “in a very humble home,” says Dellano.
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In the immediate aftermath of the accident, the boy “ran to help, telling his mother he had to do something to help the babies at the children’s hospital,” according to Dellano. “The boy got to the scene before the police, and when officials did arrive, he led them to where he had heard cries and insisted they dig into the rubble, where they found and rescued two small children.” Dellano and Los Topos later followed up with Jonathan, learning that he was the “man of the house,” helping his single mother to raise his two younger sisters. “His mother told us that the night of the explosion, Jonathan wanted to bring us coffee because he admired us,” says Dellano. “She said that before her son went to bed that night he prayed for us, asking God to watch over us, to keep us warm on such a cold night, and for the walls and the rubble of the collapsed hospital not to fall on us.” “I was moved to tears,” Dellano says, “and had to step outside to collect myself.” Hector Mendez asked Jonathan to be an honorary member of their team, and presented the boy with a Los Topos jersey. (Jonathan was later gifted scholarships in recognition of his extraordinary service.) Back at Cuajimalpa Maternal, the sun came up on the day after the disaster. By late morning on that second day, all the people reported missing in the accident had been accounted for and the rescue force began to thin out, ultimately dwindling to 20 or so Los Topos and Volunteer Minister workers and a few stragglers from other rescue teams.
A few hours later, a crew of about 200 workers arrived to remove rubble and commence cleanup of the scene. The force was made up of general laborers who had no training or experience dealing with unstable structures or any kind of accident site. “This left them very vulnerable,” says Dellano. “What remained of the hospital structure was very weak, and it was difficult and dangerous to move around the scene because of all the debris.” “We were the only trained rescuers still left on the scene, or anywhere near the area,” Dellano continues. “We felt it was our moral duty to support the workers, advise them where we could on how they could carry out their work with better safety, and just generally look after them.” Scientology Volunteer Ministers stayed at the site with the clearing crews for two more grueling days. In rare downtime—resting at night or breaking for meals—they took time to counsel the workers, helping them cope with the emotional difficulty of combing through a scene of mass destruction. They also counseled nearby residents traumatized by the explosion and the subsequent chaos. It was well worth it. “During these three days, people living in the area, people from other rescue teams on site the first day—even policemen—approached us and thanked us for risking our lives to help people we didn’t even know,” Dellano says. Where disaster strikes, it’s a fair bet that Los Topos and the Volunteer Ministers (who number 1,000 in Latin America) will be there—and perhaps one day little Jonathan Tobon Ruiz will be among their ranks. n
T
hat was the message James “Rocky” Robinson, commanding officer of the Bedford-Stuyvesant Volunteer Ambulance Corps in New York City, received in January 2010 from the Scientology Volunteer Ministers. Robinson was trying to get a rescue crew to Haiti in the days after the devastating earthquake, but his efforts had run into a wall of red tape. “They carry hope, they carry peace and they carry love,” says Robinson of the Volunteer Ministers force. More practically, the Volunteer Ministers chartered four flights and a former Coast Guard vessel for Robinson’s Bed-Stuy ambulance corps and other relief workers. Once on the ground, the Volunteer Ministers helped distribute water, stock medical supplies, unload cargo and provide shelter for victims of the quake. This was no short-term commitment: The “yellow bolt of hope,” as they became known, eventually established a permanent presence in Petionville, Haiti, where their work continues to this day.
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For these efforts, the Volunteer Ministers were recognized by the Haitian American Nurses Organization with a humanitarian award. Established in 1976, the Volunteer Ministers have a presence in 120 countries and a global network of affiliates. The September 11 attacks and 2005 Hurricane Katrina (which saw 900+ Volunteer Ministers mobilized) are only the highest-profile of the group’s many and ecumenical relief efforts. Volunteer Ministers also conduct outreach to establish a yellow-shirt presence in isolated areas where aid missions don’t yet exist. “Extreme pioneer tours” carry help to areas as isolated as the far northern reaches of Australia, Burkina Faso and the deepest rainforest regions along the Amazon (aboard the Church’s very own river boat). Rather than wait for trouble, the Volunteer Ministers are a proactive force, one that’s styling yellow as the color of hope.
bottom: david romero vara/cal sport media; freedom magazine
“We’re going to help you get to Haiti.”
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ORLD
THE PATIENT WAS KNOWN as No. 6587-0069. She was
Bitter Pill Third-World drug trials profit Big Pharma, but put vulnerable populations at risk. by Martha Rosenberg
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10 years old, lived in Nigeria and had succumbed to a raging meningitis epidemic. But instead of receiving care from Doctors Without Borders, which was operating a treatment center in the Nigerian state of Kano, she received care from Pfizer researchers who were also operating in the stricken state— testing their new antibiotic Trovan. The day after receiving Trovan, one of the girl’s eyes froze in place. Two days later, patient No. 6587-0069 was dead. No one can know if the experimental drug Trovan, withdrawn from the market soon after approval, cost the little girl her life. What we do know is she was in a private-sector experiment in a poor country and alternate treatments were available. We also know that Pfizer paid millions to the Nigerian government and state of Kano, which charged that the drug giant “unlawfully conducted a clinical trial without obtaining a valid clinical trial certificate” and failed to obtain required approvals and consent from the patients. According to Wikileaks documents, Pfizer tried to extort Nigeria’s former attorney general to drop the lawsuits before paying the settlement in 2011. And, after a 15-year legal battle, the parents of Nigerian children who died after being given Trovan received payments of $175,000 each from Pfizer. Sadly, the Trovan deaths are not the last time overseas drug trials have raised questions. More recently, Seattle-based Program for Appropriate Technology in Health (PATH) conducted trials of Merck’s Gardasil and GlaxoSmithKline’s Cervarix—human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccines—on hundreds of Indian women and children, after which seven children died. Now judges in India’s Supreme Court are demanding answers. Though the jury is out on whether the deaths were related to the vaccine, the verdict is in on the ethics of for-profit drug companies testing medicines that may not be of use, or even available, to people in poor countries: questionable. “Unethical PATH trials on poor, tribal, ill-informed children were possible because of the active involvement and encouragement by civil servants,” says Dr. Chandra M. Gulhati, editor of Monthly Index of Medical Specialties. “The 72nd report of the Parliamentary committee has exposed the nexus between foreign entities and Indian civil servants. Hopefully in the future civil servants will think twice before allowing foreign entities to use poor Indian tribal people to enrich themselves.” Other questionable clinical trials have been conducted in India, an increasingly popular country for drug testing. Earlier
Photographs by Scientology Media Productions
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this year, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) recommended suspension of drugs approved on the basis of trials conducted at GVK Biosciences in Hyderabad, due to questions raised by on-site inspection. A progression of drug research scandals has inspired India’s Central Drugs Standard Control Organization to amend the country’s pharmaceutical laws so that individuals harmed by drug trials or their families are compensated. Conducting drug trials in poor countries presents a host of ethical questions. Do the subjects understand the risks? Even if they do, are impoverished people really in a position to turn down the promise of money or medical care? What about ill effects down the road, after the research is concluded and the drug company has moved on to a new study and a new country? Is follow-up care available? Arthur L. Caplan, Ph.D., director of the Division of Medical Ethics at the New York University Langone Medical Center, says there’s definitely a moral yardstick that can be applied here. “No one should conduct studies of drugs on people who don’t need or won’t be given the drugs,” he said. “Only if the drug will be made available free or for a reasonable cost for a significant period of time are such studies ethical.” Caplan consults for the World Health Organization. Caplan also believes patients would be better protected if informed consent were videotaped instead of recorded in writing, to ensure consent is really consent. Even in poor countries “people have cell phones and tablets,” he points out. It will take changes in almost all aspects of overseas clinical trials to protect human subjects, says Gulhati. “Local regulations on approval, informed consent, conduct of trials, involvement of middlemen such as contract research organizations, responsibility of investigators and Institutional Review Boards must be tightened and brought at par with best practices of U.S., European, British and Australian regulations. In addition [a] robust system of determination of cause of injury/death and compensation should be incorporated.” comIT’S NO SECRET THAT drug research and development is
mercialized. “Technology transfer” and for-profit partnerships have turned universities into pill development factories for the drug industry. Northwestern University, for example, made $700 million by developing the anti-seizure medicine Lyrica and selling it to Pfizer. The windfall “validated the nearly 15year process from invention to market launch in 2005,” reads a Northwestern press release.
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Clearly these partnerships do a lot more for the partners than they do for the advancement of knowledge and public health. “In addition to distorting the research agenda, there is overwhelming evidence that drug-company influence biases the research itself,” writes Marcia Angell, M.D., former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, noting that academic researchers are enlisted to “carry out studies for almost entirely commercial purposes.” Clinical trials also have been commercialized, posing clear risks to human subjects and driving their export overseas. Whereas human drug testing was once linked to and protected by medical or academic institutions, it has become a for-profit industry run by corporations called contract research organizations (CROs) hired by drug companies. CROs are experts at the clinical testing “game,” providing drugmakers services stem-to-stern: trial design, subject recruitment, enrollment and consent administration, regulatory compliance assistance and preparation of final submission-for-approval packages to the FDA. CROs will even do marketing and branding of new drugs. The largest U.S. CRO is North Carolina-based Quintiles Transnational, boasting 23,000 employees in 60 countries. By relieving Big Pharma of the need to maintain its own staff and streamlining the approval process and timeline, CROs are cost-efficient. CRO staff are often low paid, but doctors supervising CRO clinical trials can make as much as $300,000 a year for four or five trials. Per the U.S National Research Act of 1974, drug trials must be overseen by an institutional review board (IRB) composed of medical professionals, laypeople and sometimes ethicists. IRBs are charged with monitoring human safety in clinical research. But like for-profit trials conducted by CROs, IRBs themselves are on the payroll. “The problem is that commercial IRBs are paid in full by the very companies conducting the research,” according to a Public Library of Science (PLOS) article, the same objection leveled against stock-rating agencies like Moody’s. “Research participants who are worried that they may face death or injury in a study sponsored by a pharmaceutical company are unlikely to feel more secure knowing that their safety has been entrusted to a panel of paid experts whose financial livelihood depends on a company paycheck.” For example, some of the clinical trials conducted by SFBC International, a large U.S. CRO, were approved by a for-profit IRB owned by the wife of an SFBC vice president. The owner of
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another CRO, Fabre Research Clinic, which has since been shut down, founded a private IRB with his business partner and lawyer as board members. “Anyone who can bring together five people, including a community representative, a physician, a lawyer and an ‘ethicist,’ can set up” an IRB, says the PLOS article, making IRBs— like CROs—nothing but proprietary arms of drug companies. Just as global companies outsource labor to poor countries, outsourced clinical trials offer many advantages to Big Pharma. Regulations are less strict and sometimes nonexistent, and the risk of injury lawsuits is nil. Subjects tend to be compliant, and many believe they are being treated for a disease or receiving needed medical care and so are grateful. Subjects in foreign countries, especially poorer ones, are also desirably “drugnaïve”—they are palates untainted by the antibiotics, statins and sleeping pills that are de rigueur in industrialized countries. From 1990 to 2008, the number of U.S. drug trials conducted overseas leaped from 271 to 6,485. China (1,861) and India (1,457) are top trial venues, with Romania (876), Thailand (786), Ukraine (589) and Peru (494) also popular. There are a few rules in place for overseas drug testing—drugs must have FDA Investigational New Drug applications, for example—but preapproval isn’t required for studies, and on-site inspections are almost unheard of. There is no mandatory public record of the results of overseas drug trials, so unsuccessful trials can simply be buried. Yet in a twist of regulatory largesse, if the studies succeed, they are admissible to the FDA as part of the drug’s approval package, a win-win for Big Pharma. In another convenient loophole, the FDA in 2008 replaced its requirement that researchers abide by the World Medical Association’s Declaration of Helsinki with a fuzzier “good clinical practice” mandate. Even when they occur in this country, clinical trials seeking quick FDA approvals can be unsavory. Trovan, for example, was part of a troika of risky antibiotics, all of which were quickly approved and even more quickly withdrawn or severely restricted for safety reasons. Anne Kirkman Campbell, M.D., went to prison after “testing” the antibiotic Ketek on her entire medical staff, members of her family, and one percent of the town she lived in, Gadsden, Alabama, making $400 a head. Ketek manufacturer SanofiAventis replaced the domestic data corrupted by Campbell with overseas trial data and Ketek was approved over the safety concerns of FDA researchers. The overseas data included a trial with 4,000 infants and children, some as young as six months.
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During the same time period, the antibiotic Raxar was tested at the Tucson facility of Vivra Asthma & Allergy where FDA inspectors on a site visit found enrollment pressure on subjects and failure to inform them of risks. Vivra staff told investigators that trial results were falsified, that they were not “doubleblind,” and that subjects who had no interest in participating in clinical trials were screened for trials without their knowledge. One principal investigator at Vivra literally plucked people out of the parking lot in order to get the lucrative fees paid for recruiting clinical trial subjects, reported to be in the thousands per head, charged a whistleblower at the facility. And patients who had pre-existing conditions that would put them at risk during the trials were brazenly used anyway. Raxar was withdrawn soon after Trovan was linked to 13 deaths. The Vivra debacle is just the tip of the iceberg, according to recent research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Of 78 published reports of drug trials in which FDA inspections uncovered significant violations, only three mentioned the objectionable conditions or practices in the articles. “No corrections, retractions, expressions of concern, or other comments acknowledging the key issues identified by the inspection were subsequently published,” writes Charles Seife, a journalism professor at New York University. Even when the fraud appeared to invalidate study findings, drug claims were not altered, according to Seife, misleading patients, doctors and journal editors alike. The reason for the lack of transparency? The FDA calls the material “proprietary” and also says it does not want to “confuse” patients. There are a number of forces responsible for the lack of truthfulness, Seife told Freedom. “The public and Congress greatly value getting new drugs and devices to market, but they don’t seem to care as much about when the FDA manages to block an unsafe or ineffective one... except when a particularly bad one gets through, and then the FDA gets some bad press.” These priorities mean there are incentives “to push things through the approval process quickly” and raising concerns about the process “seems to be disincentivized.” Since it is more or less a “given” that drug companies “aren’t making money solely on the basis of the quality of their products,” the public’s skepticism is justified, says Seife. “Something has to be done to shake up the culture of the agency—incentivizing whistleblowers and people who are acting in the best interest of the public, rather than shutting them down.” n
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ORLD
Do t
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14.007
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't Drink e Water Story by Lloyd Freeman Art by Shelly Chen
EACH APRIL, THE ANNUAL SPRING SCREAM music festival draws
more than half a million music fans to Kenting National Park on the southern tip of Taiwan. The festival is promoted by the Taiwan Ministry of Foreign Affairs as “the most prolonged and highly praised local cultural asset in Taiwan … an art and music adventure that enables liberation, excitement and inspiration.” Spring Scream also attracts drug use. Scientists are now detecting ketamine, ecstasy and other illegal drugs in nearby rivers. An annual drug-level spike in the river waters coincides with Spring Scream, environmentalists say, impacting local ecosystems and posing long-term health concerns. The American Chemical Society’s Environmental Science & Technology Journal published the findings (partly funded by Taiwan’s Ministry of Education) in December 2014, describing the festival as “notorious for the problems of drug abuse and addiction.” The study tracked daily drug levels in the river and concluded: “The highest mass loads discharged into the aquatic ecosystem corresponded to illicit drugs/controlled substances such as ketamine and MDMA, indicating the high consumption of ecstasy during Spring Scream.”
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WHO IS REACHING
52
19,000,000 CHILDREN WITH THE TRUTH ABOUT
DRUGS?
DRUGS are robbing our children of their future. Every 12 seconds, a school-age child experiments with an illicit drug for the first time. One in three meets dealers right in the hallways of campuses of their schools. Prescription drug abuse has soared by 800%— exceeding heroin, cocaine and ecstasy combined. Millions of dollars are spent on programs
everlong, wikimedia commons; freedom magazine
The rivers near Taiwan’s plan to double that number at Kenting Park are among the 2015 event. many drug-tainted water bod“We really want to take back ies around the world. In Italy, the rock festival so it is the cocaine dirties the Po River, musical adventure it should and the Sarno River is conbe—without drugs,” Tsai says. taminated with cocaine, morAt the core of the Scientolphine, heroin and cannabis. ogy-supported Truth About And an array of pharmaceutiDrugs program are a dozen cals—from antibiotics to anbooklets explaining the ill tidepressants—flows in many effects of commonly used American rivers and streams. drugs. The aim is to provide In addition to environmenyoung people with the straight tal and water safety issues, dope—facts they can use to drug use at Spring Scream has make informed decisions for long concerned parents and themselves, explains Tsai, addlaw enforcement. As the 2015 ing that when kids are given event approaches, there’s a the lowdown on drugs—what growing call to bring the ramthey are and what they do— pant drug abuse at the festival usage rates drop. “That’s why under control. we get the ecstasy booklet into The Taiwan chapter of Founas many hands as possible at dation for a Drug-Free World Spring Scream,” she says. says the effort must begin with The Truth About Drugs cameducation. The nonprofit had paign around Spring Scream a visible presence at the 2013 is just one of the efforts of and 2014 Spring Scream fesTaiwan’s Drug-Free World tivals, distributing anti-drug chapter. Their year-round miseducational materials, and sion is tackling the broader iswill be back at the 2015 event sue of drug abuse in the state. to carry on the work. Government reports in 2012 “We started by visiting many identified the most-abused shopowners and policemen in drugs: heroin, methamphetthe Kenting area and telling amine, ketamine, Zolpidem them about our campaign to (a prescription sleep aid) and reduce the drug abuse during ecstasy. Heroin topped the the festival,” says Emily Tsai, list for the sixth straight year, a Drug-Free World volunteer while ketamine abuse doubled leader. “They all appreciated from 2011 to 2012. our plan and our work and As part of this effort, Truth lent us great cooperation and About Drugs volunteers run support.” drug education programs in Tsai’s group enlisted support schools. One such program, from a Kenting elementary Foundation for a Drug-Free World activities in Taiwan include concerts, “Drug-Free Day,” debuted school that provided space rallies and drug-free pledge-signing events. The group also distributes in June 2014 at 18 primary, for an outdoor stage, where Truth About Drugs educational booklets on university campuses and at middle schools and high Drug-Free World put on its primary schools. schools in Kaohsiung, Pingown, clean concert. Tung City and other Taiwanese The Drug-Free World volunteers also recruited university municipalities. Roughly 7,000 students attended assemblies students in southern Taiwan to distribute the program’s Truth featuring drug education presentations, where they received About Drugs booklets and encourage other young people to take their own set of Truth About Drugs booklets and pledged to a drug-free pledge. Some 150 students—from Fooyin Science live their lives drug-free. University, Wenzao Language College, Nanhua University Truth About Drugs campaign activities also include art shows, and Tatung Technology Institute—joined the work. Under the concerts and drug-free pledge-signing events—all aimed at campaign banner “Rock Only. Drugs Out,” the student-volunteers young people. “Our goal is to reach kids with the Truth About passed out 40,000 copies at last year’s Spring Scream, and they Drugs before drugs reach them,” says Tsai. n
to reach kids, with little or no impact on teen experimentation. And all of it while drug-related crime continues to escalate, threatening lives and the safety of communities. That’s why the Church of Scientology sponsors the largest and most comprehensive nongovernmental drug-education campaign on Earth: the Foundation for a Drug-Free World.
the CHURCH of
scientology.org/howwehelp © 2015 CSI. All Rights Reserved. The Foundation for a Drug-Free World logo is a trademark owned by the Foundation for a Drug-Free World and is used with its permission.
CIENTOLOGY NEWS
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WALKING TO MY DESTINATION
on a typically gorgeous, Los Angeles winter day, I pass boutiques and bars, restaurants and stars (on the sidewalk, along the celebrated Walk of Fame). There are distractions aimed at every sensibility along the way. Whether your appetite is for fashion or fortunetellers, shopping or sex, tacos or tarot cards, it can be fed on Hollywood Boulevard. The mix of stores, offices and restaurants is as eclectic as the blend of people on the street. An African souvenir shop is two doors from “The Oldest Pizzeria in Hollywood” and up the road from Musso and Frank, the 95-year-old red-boothed steakhouse, sometimes called the genesis of Hollywood. A hundred yards from my target is a Tattoo and Smoke Shop. Three doors down is Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre, celebrating its 93rd anniversary. And then I see it.
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Across the street from where the sidewalk holds the stars of Walt Disney, Betty White, Liberace and Doris Day, and catty-corner from Frederick’s of Hollywood (Store Closing Soon!), at the intersection of North McCadden, I see the 40-foot-tall SCIENTOLOGY marquee—silver with letters on a background of bright baby blue. The sign, and the uniformed staff member on the sidewalk outside the new Church of Scientology Los Angeles information center, invite me to step inside. There is a constant stream of foot traffic outside the building and a consistent flow in. Some enter having a familiarity with the religion, and a specific intent: to buy a book, take a class or get counseling.
Others, like me, enter with nothing but curiosity. As a new reporter for Freedom, and a non-Scientologist, I am set to write a story about the new information center, which opened in January 2015. It’s located in the former Christie Hotel, commissioned in 1920 as the first “modern" luxury hotel in Hollywood. At eight stories, with arched peaks and top-floor balconies, it was one of the city’s first “skyscrapers,” featuring 100 guest rooms, each with its own bathroom—a rarity back then. Since then, the hotel has been bought and sold a few times, and operated under different names, including The Drake and The Hollywood Inn. In 1974, the Church of Scientology bought the white stone and red brick building. Today, and after extensive remodeling, the first floor and basement house the new Scientology information center. The former guest rooms upstairs are now apartments for Church staff members.
The lobby is bright and open, with high ceilings, large windows, and stylized decorative lighting. Numerous shelves and kiosks are neatly stacked with hardcover books, audiobooks and books on film—all in multiple languages, and all the work of Scientology Founder L. Ron Hubbard, certified by Guinness World Records as the most translated author. (Today his work is available in more than 100 languages.) There are also several of his inspirational quotes artistically displayed on the walls. The lobby has several stateof-the-art video displays, and benches in front of each, allowing visitors to sit and watch an assortment of short films introducing Scientology concepts and programs. In the center of the room, toward the front, is a welcome desk, with two or three staff members in smart blue and white uniforms. The eight-story Georgian Revival building that’s home to the new Scientology information center was considered Hollywood’s first skyscraper when it opened in 1922 as the Christie Hotel.
Photographs by Scientology Media Productions
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The new Scientology public information center opened its doors on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame in January 2015.
They say “Hello” and “Welcome” as I enter, but don’t rush to meet me until I’ve walked around on my own a little. A pretty mid-20s blond with long curly hair greets me as I approach the desk. “Hi, I’m Denise. Welcome. What brings you here?”
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I tell her that I’m doing a story for Freedom, and that I’d like to learn a little about what people experience when they first make contact with Scientology. Denise tells me that a couple hundred people come in every week—and that 80 percent of them just want to look around. Others come in with questions. “They usually have heard about Scientology, but want to know what it’s all about,” she says. Denise explains that Scientology offers tools that can help people “confront their own problems.”
Denise’s parents are Scientologists, so she grew up in the religion, but the path she’s followed in it is her own. I asked her what would be the first step for someone who walks in wanting to know more about Scientology. She suggested I watch a short film about L. Ron Hubbard.
He was born 104 years ago this month in Nebraska and raised primarily in Montana. I learned of his adventures as the youngest Eagle Scout in American history, his world travels before the age of 16 (his father was a U.S. Navy officer), and his days as an engineering student at George Washington University.
Mr. Hubbard went on to become a prolific writer, penning intrigue, sci-fi, fantasy and even romance stories for books and magazines. After discovering mental blocks that inhibited servicemen from recovering from injuries, the film said, he penned Dianetics. Published in 1950, it became the biggest-selling book ever on the mind. Two years later, he used his doctrines of selfawareness as the foundation for the Scientology religion, which is meant to be studied and applied to daily life, relationships, and personal spiritual development. The short film was impressive. And it left me with questions. As the next step, Denise suggested I take a personality test. As we proceeded to the testing room, she told me another story. A small group of Christian men from the South— Mississippi and Alabama— came into the center the previous week. Their goal was not to learn about Scientology, but to convert Denise to their beliefs. “I wasn’t trying to convert them, but they spent hours trying to convert me,” she says, indicating they got a little resentful when she wouldn’t be swayed. “They came back later that night and apologized,” she adds. “We agreed to disagree. I promised I would read the Bible, and they said they would read Dianetics.” The 150-question test— which took roughly 30 minutes to complete—is called the Oxford Capacity Analysis. It’s designed to identify areas of one’s life that are less than satisfactory.
A few hundred visitors a week stop in wanting to “know what Scientology is all about,” according to one staffer.
After I took it, Jenny, the staff member who reviewed my test, spoke as if she knew me well. I’ll admit to a struggle in a few of the areas where she suggested my scores were lagging, but she was off on one or two others. Still, I felt like the test confirmed a few things I could personally work on. “We can help with those,” said Jenny.
She led me to a senior consultant named David, a handsome, intelligent and personable young man. Based on what Jenny said, he suggested I take the Personal Efficiency Course. The class was three hours long and convenient to schedule, available twice a day during the week, more frequently on weekends. It only cost $50.
Two days later, I went back to take the class. I was greeted again by Denise and by David, who escorted me downstairs to a seminar room outfitted with a video screen and comfortable chairs. The instructor was Victoria, a striking brunette who a year ago worked in a law office in Washington, D.C. Victoria, who is half French and half Danish, was born in Spain, but schooled mostly in the United States. She told me I would be seeing a film version of one of Mr. Hubbard’s most popular books, The Problems of Work. As seminar manager, she would give a quick introduction www.freedommag.org | 59
The 150-question Oxford Capacity Analysis test, which is administered free of charge at the Hollywood center, can help people identify areas of their lives where Scientology might help them.
to each of the film’s eight chapters, lead a brief discussion after each, clarify definitions and collect assignments after some of the chapters. The whole thing would take about two and a half hours, including a 15-minute break. Chapter 1 was all about setting goals to succeed at work, and not relying on luck, family connections or other indirect means of advancement. Other chapters discussed efficiency and coping with being overextended.
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I learned some key fundamentals of Scientology, such as the A-R-C Triangle (Affinity, Reality and Communication). I also learned the Eight Dynamics, which offer insight on how to handle your own personal goals, the desire for sex and family, succeeding in a group, helping the environment and all creatures of the universe, and enhancing spirituality.
The film was well-produced, informative and filled with some great suggestions. Life changing? Perhaps. The course highlights problems many people face every day, and offers intelligent and plausible suggestions for improving yourself and your life.
L. Ron Hubbard’s approach is universally focused, aware of the impact each of us has on the world around us—and how we can improve it—and ourselves. It seems complete. And possible.
L. Ron Hubbard’s works on Dianetics and Scientology are available in the bookstore—in dozens of languages.
Some of his methods require contemplation and a determination to change your life for the better. Others are so simplistically perfect I felt like a fool for not having considered them myself. For example: Do you spend all day in front of a computer, then go home and have trouble concentrating? His suggestion? Take a Walk. That’s not Scientology “code” for anything. It means you should put on some sneakers, get up, and Take a Walk.
Are you arguing with your partner? The film I saw, and the book on which it’s based, suggest that both of you should take a walk—in opposite directions. Breathe. Relax. At some point, the two of you will cross paths ... and then continue walking, until you meet back up again, with a fresh outlook. Simple. Possible. At the end of the course, I met again with David. He told me the next logical step for someone wanting to learn more would be to take a Life Improvement Course addressing whatever areas the person wanted to work on.
Topics include relationships, establishing trust, improving self-confidence, effective time management, marriage, parenting and handling financial stress.
All are 15 to 20-hour courses, which you complete at your own pace, with a supervisor to clarify and track your progress. These longer courses, with individual supervision, cost ... are you ready? Fifty bucks. Total. The Scientology information center in Hollywood is open from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. seven days a week, and everyone is welcome. So if you find yourself on Hollywood Boulevard, why not ... Take a Walk? n
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RON HUBBARD ESSAY
HAS THERE EVER BEEN an instance when
another had some false data about you? Did it cause you trouble? This can give you some idea of the havoc false data can raise. You could also have some false data about another. Separating the false from the true brings about understanding. There is a lot of false data around. Evilintentioned individuals manufacture it to serve their own purposes. Some of it comes from just plain ignorance of the facts. It can block the acceptance of true data. The main process of learning consists of inspecting the available data, selecting the true from the false, the important from the unimportant and arriving thereby at conclusions one makes and can apply. If one does this, one is well on the way to being competent. The test of any “truth” is whether it is true for you. If, when one has gotten the body of data, cleared up any misunderstood words in it and looked over the scene, it still doesn’t seem true, then it isn’t true so far as you are concerned. Reject it. And, if you like, carry it further and conclude what the truth is for you. After all, you are the one who is going to have to use it or not use it, think with it or not think with it. If one blindly accepts “facts” or “truths” just because he is told he must, “facts” and “truths” which do not seem true to one, or even false, the end result can be an unhappy one. That is the alley to the trash bin of incompetence. Another part of learning entails simply committing things to memory—like the spelling of words, mathematical tables and formulas, the sequence of which buttons to push. But even in simple memorizing one has to know what the material is for and how and when to use it. The process of learning is not just piling data on top of more data. It is one of obtaining new understandings and better ways to do things. Those who get along in life never really stop studying and learning. The competent engineer keeps up with new ways; the good athlete continually reviews the progress of his sport; any professional keeps a stack of his texts to hand and consults them. The new model eggbeater or washing machine, the latest year’s car, all demand some study and learning before they can be
competently operated. When people omit it, there are accidents in the kitchen and piles of bleeding wreckage on the highways. It is a very arrogant fellow who thinks he has nothing further to learn in life. It is a dangerously blind one who cannot shed his prejudices and false data and supplant them with facts and truths that can more fittingly assist his own life and everyone else’s.
Learn.
by L. Ron Hubbard There are ways to study so that one really learns and can use what one learns. In brief, it consists of having a teacher and/ or texts that know what they are talking about; of clearing up every word one does not fully understand; of consulting other references and/or the scene of the subject; sorting out the false data one might already have: sifting the false from the true on the basis of what is now true for you. The end result will be certainty and potential competence. It can be, actually, a bright and rewarding experience. Not unlike climbing a treacherous mountain through brambles but coming out on top with a new view of the whole wide world. A civilization, to survive, must nurture the habits and abilities to study in its schools. A school is not a place where one puts children to get them out from underfoot during the day. That would be far too expensive for just that. It is not a place where one manufactures parrots. School is where one should learn to study and where children can be prepared to come to grips with reality, learn to handle it with competence and be readied to take over tomorrow’s world, the world where current adults will be in their later middle or old age. The hardened criminal never learned to learn. Repeatedly the courts seek to teach him that if he commits the crime again he will go back to prison: most of them do the same crime again and go back to prison. Factually, criminals cause more and more laws to be passed: the decent citizen is the one that obeys laws; the criminals, by definition, do not: criminals cannot learn. Not all the
This article was excerpted from The Way to Happiness, Precept 17, “Be Competent.”
orders and directives and punishments and duress will work upon a being that does not know how to learn and cannot learn. A characteristic of a government that has gone criminal—as has sometimes happened in history—is that its leaders cannot learn: all records and good sense may tell them that disaster follows oppression; yet it has taken a violent revolution to handle them or a World War II to get rid of a Hitler and those were very unhappy events for Mankind. Such did not learn. They reveled in false data. They refused all evidence and truth. They had to be blown away. The insane cannot learn. Driven by hidden evil intentions or crushed beyond the ability to reason, facts and truth and reality are far beyond them. They personify false data. They will not or cannot really perceive or learn. A multitude of personal and social problems arise from the inability or refusal to learn. The lives of some around you have gone off the rails because they do not know how to study, because they do not learn. You can probably think of some examples. If one cannot get those around him to study and learn, one’s own work can become much harder and even overloaded and one’s own survival potential can be greatly reduced. One can help others study and learn if only by putting in their reach the data they should have. One can help simply by acknowledging what they have learned. One can assist if only by appreciating any demonstrated increase in competence. If one likes, one can do more than that: another can be assisted by helping them—without disputes—sort out false data, by helping them find and clear up words they have not understood, by helping them find and handle the reasons they do not study and learn. As life is largely trial and error, instead of coming down on somebody who makes a mistake, find out how come a mistake was made and see if the other can’t learn something from it. Now and then you may surprise yourself by untangling a person’s life just by having gotten the person to study and learn. I am sure you can think of many ways. And I think you will find the gentler ones work best. The world is brutal enough already to people who can’t learn. n www.freedommag.org | 63
HAT IS SCIENTOLOGY?
The CHURCH of
SC IE N T O L O G Y
Confusion & the Stable Datum
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in a person’s life add up to a huge confusion. It would be wise, then, to understand exactly what a confusion is and how it could be resolved. A confusion can be defined as any set of factors or circumstances which do not seem to have any immediate solution. More broadly, a confusion is random motion. If you were to stand in heavy traffic, you would be likely to feel confused by all the motion whizzing around you. If you were to stand in a heavy storm with leaves and papers flying by, you would be likely to be confused.
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A confusion is only a confusion so long as all particles are in motion. A confusion is only a confusion so long as no factor is clearly defined or understood. We have, in Scientology, a certain doctrine about confusion. It is called the Doctrine of the Stable Datum. If you saw a great many pieces of paper whirling about a room, they would look confused until you picked out one piece of paper to be the piece of paper by which everything else was in motion. In other
words, a confusing motion can be understood by conceiving one thing to be motionless. The switchboard operator, receiving 10 calls at once, solves the confusion by labeling—correctly or incorrectly—one call as the first call to receive her attention. The confusion of “10 calls all at once” becomes less confusing the moment she singles out one call to be answered. The shop foreman, confronted by three emergencies and an accident, needs only to elect his first target of attention to start the cycle of bringing about order again.
Until one selects one datum, one factor, one particular in a confusion of particles, the confusion continues. The one thing selected and used becomes the stable datum for the remainder. Confusions, no matter how big and formidable they may seem, are composed of data or factors or particles. They have pieces. Grasp one piece or locate it thoroughly. Then see how the others function in relation to it and you have steadied the confusion. And, relating other things to what you have grasped, you will soon have mastered the confusion in its entirety. n
© 2015 Church of Scientology International. All Rights Reserved. Grateful acknowledgement is made to L. Ron Hubbard Library for permission to reproduce selections from the copyrighted works of L. Ron Hubbard. Scientology, Hubbard, the Scientology symbol and Freedom are trademarks and service marks owned by Religious Technology Center and are used with its permission. Scientologist is a collective membership mark designating members of the official churches and missions of Scientology. Narconon is a trademark owned by ABLE International. Printed in USA.
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