TIME (old) Did Prozac Make Him Do It?

TIME (old) Did Prozac Make Him Do It? Scientology

TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1994 Nov. 28, 1994 Star Trek BEHAVIOR, Page 66 Did Prozac Make Him Do It?

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By Lawrence Mondi--Reported by Gideon Gil/Louisville

On the morning of Sept. 14, 1989, Joseph Wesbecker--an out-of-work pressman--walked into the printing plant of his former employer, the Standard Gravure company of Louisville, Kentucky, and began blasting away with an AK-47. When the shooting was over, 12 people were wounded and nine dead--including Wesbecker, from a self-inflicted pistol shot.

What makes this tragedy different from other mass shootings is that for a month before the incident, Wesbecker, who suffered from depression, had been taking Prozac. In a case being heard by a Louisville jury, survivors and the families of the victims are trying to prove that Prozac--the most widely prescribed antidepressant--triggered the rampage, and they are seeking damages from Prozac's manufacturer, Eli Lilly.

Prozac is the most popular of a new class of drugs that treat depression by increasing levels of the brain chemical serotonin. Doctors have known for some time that raising serotonin levels can positively affect a patient's mood, but they can't always be sure that the drug will have the desired effect.

In this case, the plaintiffs are trying to show that Lilly knew that some patients became suicidal or agitated during clinical trials. Lilly lawyers will argue that Wesbecker's was not a sudden, Prozac-induced rage but rather a carefully plotted attack, and that the plaintiffs' claim lacks scientific merit.

Psychiatrists are keeping a close eye on the Louisville case, the first of 160 civil suits against Lilly to make it to trial. After the shooting, the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, a group founded by the Church of Scientology, tried to capitalize on the Louisville incident as part of an all-out campaign to discredit Prozac and psychiatry.

It hasn't worked. In 1991 the FDA denied a CCHR petition to take Prozac off the market, and an FDA panel found "no credible evidence" of a link between the drug and violent behavior. In 56 criminal cases, defendants who tried the Prozac-made-me-do-it defense have been equally unsuccessful. But a verdict against Prozac might, unfortunately, scare patients off the best available medicine, says Louisville psychiatrist Dr. David Moore. "The courtroom is no place for finding scientific truth."

Copyright (c) TIME Magazine, 1995 TIME Inc. Magazine Company; (c) 1995 Compact Publishing, Inc. --- http://lastliberal.org / I support privatization of religion. Free random & sequential signature changer http://holysmoke.org/sig

"I freed thousands of slaves. I could have freed thousands more, if they had known they were slaves." - Harriet Tubman

<hr> From: desertphile@hot mail. com (David Rice, Esq.)
Subject: TIME (old) Prozac's Worst Enemy
Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2005 01:16:43 GMT
Organization: Church of Crimeatology
Message-ID: <42718b0b@news2.lightlink.com>

TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1994 Oct. 10, 1994 Black Renaissance MEDICINE, Page 64 Prozac's Worst Enemy

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A psychiatrist argues in books and on TV that drugs don't help the mentally ill. His critics say he's crazy

By Christine Gorman--Reported by Alice Park/New York and Dick Thompson/Washington

By some yardsticks, Dr. Peter Breggin seems to be a successful--perhaps even influential--psychiatrist. He has earned impressive academic credentials, published a string of books and shown up on Today and The Oprah Winfrey Show. Many patients rave about the doctor. "He's a wonderful person," says one satisfied customer. "He cares so much about his clients. He gave me the will to get better."

So why are so many other people saying such nasty things about him? The head of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill calls Breggin "ignorant" and claims he's motivated by a lust for fame and wealth. The former director of the National Institute of Mental Health brands Breggin an "outlaw." The president of the American Psychiatric Association says the doctor is the modern equivalent of a "flat earther."

What causes these critics to lose their professional cool at the mere mention of Breggin is his relentless crusade against the conventional wisdom of psychiatry--and his increasingly high profile. What causes Breggin to rail against his profession is its eagerness to embrace technology, from the early zeal for lobotomies and electroshock to the modern reliance on such psychoactive drugs as Thorazine and lithium. In looking for the quick fix, Breggin argues, too many psychiatrists have forgotten the importance of love, hope and empathy in maintaining sanity. The power to heal the mind lies in people, he says, not pills.

For many years no one paid much attention to Breggin, 58, but that was before the dawn of the Prozac Age. The immense popularity of the drug, which is most often prescribed for depression but is gaining a reputation as an all-purpose personality enhancer, has given Breggin his best ammunition yet. In his new book Talking Back to Prozac (co-written with his wife Ginger Ross Breggin), he says the drug is merely a stimulant that does not get to the root of depression and is probably dangerous when used over long periods. He has dumped on Prozac in TV and radio debates with Dr. Peter Kramer, whose best seller Listening to Prozac describes the drug's powers in generally favorable terms. In the process, Breggin has infuriated Prozac's manufacturer, Eli Lilly, prompting the firm to deluge journalists with material intended to discredit the maverick psychiatrist.

Breggin didn't start out to be a renegade. As his book jackets proudly point out, his background is pure establishment: Harvard College, Case Western Reserve Medical School, a teaching fellowship at Harvard Medical School. But early in his career, he became deeply disturbed by the treatment of psychiatric patients, particularly the many long-term residents of mental hospitals who spend their lives in a drugged-out state. In 1971 Breggin declared his rebellion, launching the Center for the Study of Psychiatry in Bethesda, Maryland, as a way to push for reform.

At issue is the very nature of mental illness. For the past few decades, the majority of researchers have worked to show that psychiatric disorders are triggered by chemical imbalances in the brain that can be rectified with medication. Breggin, by contrast, clings to an old-fashioned view: the emotional problems that land a person on a psychiatrist's couch result from traumas caused by outside forces, like sexual abuse during childhood. Drugs can't erase these traumas, he asserts, and aren't even appropriate for such severe conditions as schizophrenia and manic depression. "These are not illnesses," he says. "They are ways people become when they are hurt or frightened. The fact that something is extreme doesn't make it an illness."

This bizarre notion takes no account of mountains of evidence to the contrary. But, like a slick lawyer, Breggin has answers for every argument. Researchers have, for example, observed distinctive physical features in the brains of people with schizophrenia. A study of identical twins found that one portion of the brain was 15% smaller in the person with schizophrenia than in the normal sibling. Breggin says the difference could be the result of brain damage caused by the drugs given to control the disease. Of course, it is difficult to test his hypothesis because that would require studying people with schizophrenia who are deliberately left untreated--a practice that most psychiatrists would deem unethical.

Breggin is also a master of capitalizing on embarrassing lapses in psychiatric research. Several times, scientific teams have trumpeted the news that they have isolated a genetic marker for manic depression. In all cases, the results could not be replicated by others, and the conclusions were withdrawn--something Breggin delights in pointing out at every opportunity. Nor is he impressed by genealogical studies that trace schizophrenia through several generations. "Things run in families," he counters. "Speaking English runs 100% in American families. It's not surprising that being emotionally upset would run in families."

What galls psychiatrists most are Breggin's attacks on the usefulness of antipsychosis drugs. He doesn't content himself with describing possible side effects, such as uncontrollable jerky movements and facial ticks, but claims the drugs rarely have any benefit. He likens lithium, which is used to treat manic depression, to lead and compares Prozac to amphetamines.

Breggin's preachments would be laughable, say critics, if they weren't so dangerous. Though he warns his readers against stopping their psychiatric drugs too abruptly or without medical supervision, at least one schizophrenic man threw away his medications after listening to Breggin on TV. The patient became suicidal and was hospitalized for two weeks. "Breggin reinforces the myth that mental illness is not real, that you wouldn't be ill if you'd pull yourself up by the bootstraps," says Susan Dime-Meenan, president of the National Depressive and Manic-Depressive Association. "His views stop people from getting treatment. They could cost a life."

The psychiatrist's credibility is not helped by the air of flakiness that surrounds his life and work. Lilly regularly links him to the Church of Scientology, which has long been a rabid opponent of psychiatry. Breggin admits that he was once an ally of the group and that his wife was a member. But he insists they both renounced Scientology more than two decades ago. Lilly, meanwhile, has combed through his old books and articles in search of anything embarrassing--just like the conservatives who used Lani Guinier's writings to scuttle her nomination to serve in the Justice Department. In Breggin's case, his opponents found a doozy: the doctor once wrote approvingly of sexual relations between children. "I don't agree with that anymore," Breggin says now, accusing Lilly of character assassination. "That's from a period in the '60s, and I've certainly left that far behind."

Unfortunately, what gets lost in the cross fire is any serious consideration of Breggin's ideas. Amid extremely dubious assertions like the notion that drugs don't help schizophrenics, Breggin makes some points that many psychiatrists would agree with. Among them: too many doctors prescribe drugs for minor depression or anxiety without talking to patients long enough to understand their problems. Too many patients look for pills to smooth out the inevitable ups and downs of everyday life. And powerful psychoactive drugs can indeed be dangerous if used cavalierly.

It would be better if Breggin, the loudest voice making those points, were less shrill and more reasonable. But then, the calmer voices never seem to make it onto Oprah.

"I freed thousands of slaves. I could have freed thousands more, if they had known they were slaves." - Harriet Tubman

<hr> From: desertphile@hot mail. com (David Rice, Esq.)
Subject: TIME (old) Attention Deficit Disorder
Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2005 01:17:38 GMT
Organization: Church of Crimeatology
Message-ID: <42718b41@news2.lightlink.com>

TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1994 Jul. 18, 1994 Attention Deficit Disorder COVER/BEHAVIOR, Page 42 LIFE IN OVERDRIVE

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Doctors say huge numbers of kids and adults have attention deficit disorder. Is it for real?

By Claudia Wallis--With reporting by Hannah Bloch/New York, Wendy Cole/Chicago and James Willwerth/Irvine

Dusty Nash, an angelic-looking blond child of seven, awoke at 5 one recent morning in his Chicago home and proceeded to throw a fit. He wailed. He kicked. Every muscle in his 50-lb. body flew in furious motion. Finally, after about 30 minutes, Dusty pulled himself together sufficiently to head downstairs for breakfast. While his mother bustled about the kitchen, the hyperkinetic child pulled a box of Kix cereal from the cupboard and sat on a chair.

But sitting still was not in the cards this morning. After grabbing some cereal with his hands, he began kicking the box, scattering little round corn puffs across the room. Next he turned his attention to the TV set, or rather, the table supporting it. The table was covered with a checkerboard Con-Tact paper, and Dusty began peeling it off. Then he became intrigued with the spilled cereal and started stomping it to bits. At this point his mother interceded. In a firm but calm voice she told her son to get the stand-up dust pan and broom and clean up the mess. Dusty got out the dust pan but forgot the rest of the order. Within seconds he was dismantling the plastic dust pan, piece by piece. His next project: grabbing three rolls of toilet paper from the bathroom and unraveling them around the house.

It was only 7:30, and his mother Kyle Nash, who teaches a medical-school course on death and dying, was already feeling half dead from exhaustion. Dusty was to see his doctors that day at 4, and they had asked her not to give the boy the drug he usually takes to control his hyperactivity and attention problems, a condition known as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). It was going to be a very long day without help from Ritalin.

Karenne Bloomgarden remembers such days all too well. The peppy, 43-year-old entrepreneur and gym teacher was a disaster as a child growing up in New Jersey. "I did very poorly in school," she recalls. Her teachers and parents were constantly on her case for rowdy behavior. "They just felt I was being bad--too loud, too physical, too everything." A rebellious tomboy with few friends, she saw a psychologist at age 10, "but nobody came up with a diagnosis." As a teenager she began prescribing her own medication: marijuana, Valium and, later, cocaine.

The athletic Bloomgarden managed to get into college, but she admits that she cheated her way to a diploma. "I would study and study, and I wouldn't remember a thing. I really felt it was my fault." After graduating, she did fine in physically active jobs but was flustered with administrative work. Then, four years ago, a doctor put a label on her troubles: ADHD. "It's been such a weight off my shoulders," says Bloomgarden, who takes both the stimulant Ritalin and the antidepressant Zoloft to improve her concentration. "I had 38 years of thinking I was a bad person. Now I'm rewriting the tapes of who I thought I was to who I really am."

Fifteen years ago, no one had ever heard of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Today it is the most common behavioral disorder in American children, the subject of thousands of studies and symposiums and no small degree of controversy. Experts on ADHD say it afflicts as many as 3 1/2 million American youngsters, or up to 5% of those under 18. It is two to three times as likely to be diagnosed in boys as in girls. The disorder has replaced what used to be popularly called "hyperactivity," and it includes a broader collection of symptoms. ADHD has three main hallmarks: extreme distractibility, an almost reckless impulsiveness and, in some but not all cases, a knee-jiggling, toe-tapping hyperactivity that makes sitting still all but impossible. (Without hyperactivity, the disorder is called attention deficit disorder, or ADD.)

For children with ADHD, a ticking clock or sounds and sights caught through a window can drown out a teacher's voice, although an intriguing project can absorb them for hours. Such children act before thinking; they blurt out answers in class. They enrage peers with an inability to wait their turn or play by the rules. These are the kids no one wants at a birthday party.

Ten years ago, doctors believed that the symptoms of ADHD faded with maturity. Now it is one of the fastest-growing diagnostic categories for adults. One-third to two-thirds of ADHD kids continue to have symptoms as adults, says psychiatrist Paul Wender, director of the adult ADHD clinic at the University of Utah School of Medicine. Many adults respond to the diagnosis with relief--a sense that "at last my problem has a name and it's not my fault." As more people are diagnosed, the use of Ritalin (or its generic equivalent, methylphenidate), the drug of choice for ADHD, has surged: prescriptions are up more than 390% in just four years.

As the numbers have grown, ADHD awareness has become an industry, a passion, an almost messianic movement. An advocacy and support group called CHADD (Children and Adults with Attention Deficit Disorders) has exploded from its founding in 1987 to 28,000 members in 48 states. Information bulletin boards and support groups for adults have sprung up on CompuServe, Prodigy and America Online. Numerous popular books have been published on the subject. There are summer camps designed to help ADHD kids, videos and children's books with titles like Jumpin' Johnny Get Back to Work! and, of course, therapists, tutors and workshops offering their services to the increasingly self-aware ADHD community.

It is a community that views itself with some pride. Popular books and lectures about ADHD often point out positive aspects of the condition. Adults see themselves as creative; their impulsiveness can be viewed as spontaneity; hyperactivity gives them enormous energy and drive; even their distractibility has the virtue of making them alert to changes in the environment. "Kids with ADHD are wild, funny, effervescent. They have a love of life. The rest of us sometimes envy them," says psychologist Russell Barkley of the University of Massachusetts Medical Center. "ADHD adults," he notes, "can be incredibly successful. Sometimes being impulsive means being decisive." Many ADHD adults gravitate into creative fields or work that provides an outlet for emotions, says Barkley. "In our clinic we saw an adult poet who couldn't write poetry when she was on Ritalin. ADHD people make good salespeople. They're lousy at desk jobs."

In an attempt to promote the positive side of ADHD, some CHADD chapters circulate lists of illustrious figures who, they contend, probably suffered from the disorder: the messy and disorganized Ben Franklin, the wildly impulsive and distractible Winston Churchill. For reasons that are less clear, these lists also include folks like Socrates, Isaac Newton, Leonardo da Vinci--almost any genius of note. (At least two doctors interviewed for this story suggested that the sometimes scattered Bill Clinton belongs on the list.)

However creative they may be, people with ADHD don't function particularly well in standard schools and typical office jobs. Increasingly, parents and lobby groups are demanding that accommodations be made. About half the kids diagnosed with ADHD receive help from special-education teachers in their schools, in some cases because they also have other learning disabilities. Where schools have failed to provide services, parents have sometimes sued. In one notable case that went to the U.S. Supreme Court last year, parents argued--successfully--that since the public school denied their child special education, the district must pay for her to attend private school. Another accommodation requested with increasing frequency: permission to take college-entrance exams without a time limit. Part of what motivates parents to fight for special services is frightening research showing that without proper care, kids with ADHD have an extremely high risk not only of failing at school but also of becoming drug abusers, alcoholics and lawbreakers.

Adults with ADHD are beginning to seek special treatment. Under the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act, they can insist upon help in the workplace. Usually the interventions are quite modest: an office door or white-noise machine to reduce distractions, or longer deadlines on assignments. Another legal trend that concerns even ADHD advocates: the disorder is being raised as a defense in criminal cases. Psychologist Barkley says he knows of 55 such instances in the U.S., all in the past 10 years. ADHD was cited as a mitigating factor by the attorney for Michael Fay, the 19-year-old American who was charged with vandalism and caned in Singapore.

Many of those who treat ADHD see the recognition of the problem as a humane breakthrough: finally we will stop blaming kids for behavior they cannot control. But some are worried that the disorder is being embraced with too much gusto. "A lot of people are jumping on the bandwagon," complains psychologist Mark Stein, director of a special ADHD clinic at the University of Chicago. "Parents are putting pressure on health professionals to make the diagnosis." The allure of ADHD is that it is "a label of forgiveness," says Robert Reid, an assistant professor in the department of special education at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. "The kid's problems are not his parents' fault, not the teacher's fault, not the kid's fault. It's better to say this kid has ADHD than to say this kid drives everybody up the wall." For adults, the diagnosis may provide an excuse for personal or professional failures, observes Richard Bromfield, a psychologist at Harvard Medical School. "Some people like to say, `The biological devil made me do it.'"

A DISORDER WITH A PAST

Other than the name itself, there is nothing new about this suddenly ubiquitous disorder. The world has always had its share of obstreperous kids, and it has generally treated them as behavior problems rather than patients. Most of the world still does so: European nations like France and England report one-tenth the U.S. rate of ADHD. In Japan the disorder has barely been studied.

The medical record on ADHD is said to have begun in 1902, when British pediatrician George Still published an account of 20 children in his practice who were "passionate," defiant, spiteful and lacking "inhibitory volition." Still made the then radical suggestion that bad parenting was not to blame; instead he suspected a subtle brain injury. This theory gained greater credence in the years following the 1917-18 epidemic of viral encephalitis, when doctors observed that the infection left some children with impaired attention, memory and control over their impulses. In the 1940s and '50s, the same constellation of symptoms was called minimal brain damage and, later, minimal brain dysfunction. In 1937 a Rhode Island pediatrician reported that giving stimulants called amphetamines to children with these symptoms had the unexpected effect of calming them down. By the mid-1970s, Ritalin had become the most prescribed drug for what was eventually termed, in 1987, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Nobody fully understands how Ritalin and other stimulants work, nor do doctors have a very precise picture of the physiology of ADHD. Researchers generally suspect a defect in the frontal lobes of the brain, which regulate behavior. This region is rich in the neurotransmitters dopamine and norepinephrine, which are influenced by drugs like Ritalin. But the lack of a more specific explanation has led some psychologists to question whether ADHD is truly a disorder at all or merely a set of characteristics that tend to cluster together. Just because something responds to a drug doesn't mean it is a sickness.

ADHD researchers counter the skeptics by pointing to a growing body of biological clues. For instance, several studies have found that people with ADHD have decreased blood flow and lower levels of electrical activity in the frontal lobes than normal adults and children. In 1990 Dr. Alan Zametkin at the National Institute of Mental Health found that in PET scans, adults with ADD showed slightly lower rates of metabolism in areas of the brain's cortex known to be involved in the control of attention, impulses and motor activity.

Zametkin's study was hailed as the long-awaited proof of the biological basis of ADD, though Zametkin himself is quite cautious. A newer study used another tool--magnetic resonance imaging--to compare the brains of 18 ADHD boys with those of other children and found several "very subtle" but "striking" anatomical differences, says co-author Judith Rapoport, chief of the child psychiatry branch at NIMH. Says Zametkin: "I'm absolutely convinced that this disorder has a biological basis, but just what it is we cannot yet say."

What researchers do say with great certainty is that the condition is inherited. External factors such as birth injuries and maternal alcohol or tobacco consumption may play a role in less than 10% of cases. Suspicions that a diet high in sugar might cause hyperactivity have been discounted. But the influence of genes is unmistakable. Barkley estimates that 40% of ADHD kids have a parent who has the trait and 35% have a sibling with the problem; if the sibling is an identical twin, the chances rise to between 80% and 92%.

Interest in the genetics of ADHD is enormous. In Australia a vast trial involving 3,400 pairs of twins between the ages of 4 and 12 is examining the incidence of ADHD and other behavioral difficulties. At NIMH, Zametkin's group is recruiting 200 families who have at least two members with ADHD. The hope: to identify genes for the disorder. It is worth noting, though, that even if such genes are found, this may not settle the debate about ADHD. After all, it is just as likely that researchers will someday discover a gene for a hot temper, which also runs in families. But that doesn't mean that having a short fuse is a disease requiring medical intervention.

TRICKY DIAGNOSIS

In the absence of any biological test, diagnosing ADHD is a rather inexact proposition. In most cases, it is a teacher who initiates the process by informing parents that their child is daydreaming in class, failing to complete assignments or driving everyone crazy with thoughtless behavior. "The problem is that the parent then goes to the family doctor, who writes a prescription for Ritalin and doesn't stop to think of the other possibilities," says child psychiatrist Larry Silver of Georgetown University Medical Center. To make a careful diagnosis, Silver argues, one must eliminate other explanations for the symptoms.

The most common cause, he points out, is anxiety. A child who is worried about a problem at home or some other matter "can look hyperactive and distractible." Depression can also cause ADHD-like behavior. "A third cause is another form of neurological dysfunction, like a learning disorder," says Silver. "The child starts doodling because he didn't understand the teacher's instructions." All this is made more complicated by the fact that some kids--and adults--with ADHD also suffer from depression and other problems. To distinguish these symptoms from ADHD, doctors usually rely on interviews with parents and teachers, behavior-ratings scales and psychological tests, which can cost from $500 to $3,000, depending on the thoroughness of the testing. Insurance coverage is spotty.

Among the most important clues doctors look for is whether the child's problems can be linked to some specific experience or time or whether they have been present almost from birth. "You don't suddenly get ADD," says Wade Horn, a child psychologist and former executive director of CHADD. Taking a careful history is therefore vital.

For kids who are hyperactive, the pattern is unmistakable, says Dr. Bruce Roseman, a pediatric neurologist with several offices in the New York City area, who has ADHD himself. "You say to the mother, `What kind of personality did the child have as a baby? Was he active, alert? Was he colicky?' She'll say, `He wouldn't stop--waaah, waaah, waaah!' You ask, `When did he start to walk?' One mother said to me, `Walk? My son didn't walk. He got his pilot's license at one year of age. His feet haven't touched the ground since.' You ask, `Mrs. Smith, how about the terrible twos?' She'll start to cry, `You mean the terrible twos, threes, fours, the awful fives, the horrendous sixes, the God-awful eights, the divorced nines, the I-want-to-die tens!'"

Diagnosing those with ADD without hyperactivity can be trickier. Such kids are often described as daydreamers, space cases. They are not disruptive or antsy. But, says Roseman, "they sit in front of a book and for 45 minutes, nothing happens." Many girls with ADD fit this model; they are often misunderstood or overlooked.

Christy Rade, who will be entering the ninth grade in West Des Moines, Iowa, is fairly typical. Before she was diagnosed with ADD in the third grade, Christy's teacher described her to her parents as a "dizzy blond and a space cadet." "Teachers used to get fed up with me," recalls Christy, who now takes Ritalin and gets some extra support from her teachers. "Everyone thought I was purposely not paying attention." According to her mother Julie Doy, people at Christy's school were familiar with hyperactivity but not ADD. "She didn't have behavior problems. She was the kind of kid who could fall through the cracks, and did."

Most experts say ADHD is a lifelong condition but by late adolescence many people can compensate for their impulsiveness and disorganization. They may channel hyperactivity into sports. In other cases, the symptoms still wreak havoc, says UCLA psychiatrist Walid Shekim. "Patients cannot settle on a career. They cannot keep a job. They procrastinate a lot. They are the kind of people who would tell their boss to take this job and shove it before they've found another job."

Doctors diagnose adults with methods similar to those used with children. Patients are sometimes asked to dig up old report cards for clues to their childhood behavior--an essential indicator. Many adults seek help only after one of their children is diagnosed. Such was the case with Chuck Pearson of Birmingham, Michigan, who was diagnosed three years ago, at 54. Pearson had struggled for decades in what might be the worst possible career for someone with ADD: accounting. In the first 12 years of his marriage, he was fired from 15 jobs. "I was frightened," says Zoe, his wife of 35 years. "We had two small children, a mortgage. Bill collectors were calling perpetually. We almost lost the house." Chuck admits he had trouble focusing on details, completing tasks and judging how long an assignment would take. He was so distracted behind the wheel that he lost his license for a year after getting 14 traffic tickets. Unwittingly, Pearson began medicating himself: "In my mid-30s, I would drink 30 to 40 cups of coffee a day. The caffeine helped." After he was diagnosed, the Pearsons founded the Adult Attention Deficit Foundation, a clearinghouse for information about add; he hopes to spare others some of his own regret: "I had a deep and abiding sadness over the life I could have given my family if I had been treated effectively."

PERSONALITY OR PATHOLOGY? While Chuck Pearson's problems were extreme, many if not all adults have trouble at times sticking with boring tasks, setting priorities and keeping their minds on what they are doing. The furious pace of society, the strain on families, the lack of community support can make anyone feel beset by ADD. "I personally think we are living in a society that is so out of control that we say, `Give me a stimulant so I can cope.'" says Charlotte Tomaino, a clinical neuropsychologist in White Plains, New York. As word of ADHD spreads, swarms of adults are seeking the diagnosis as an explanation for their troubles. "So many really have symptoms that began in adulthood and reflected depression or other problems," says psychiatrist Silver. In their best-selling new book, Driven to Distraction, Edward Hallowell and John Ratey suggest that American life is "ADD-ogenic": "American society tends to create ADD-like symptoms in us all. The fast pace. The sound bite. The quick cuts. The TV remote-control clicker. It is important to keep this in mind, or you may start thinking that everybody you know has ADD."

And that is the conundrum. How do you draw the line between a spontaneous, high-energy person who is feeling overwhelmed by the details of life and someone afflicted with a neurological disorder? Where is the boundary between personality and pathology? Even an expert in the field like the University of Chicago's Mark Stein admits, "We need to find more precise ways of diagnosing it than just saying you have these symptoms." Barkley also concedes the vagueness. The traits that constitute ADHD "are personality characteristics," he agrees. But it becomes pathology, he says, when the traits are so extreme that they interfere with people's lives.

THE RISKS

There is no question that ADHD can disrupt lives. Kids with the disorder frequently have few friends. Their parents may be ostracized by neighbors and relatives, who blame them for failing to control the child. "I've got criticism of my parenting skills from strangers," says the mother of a hyperactive boy in New Jersey. "When you're out in public, you're always on guard. Whenever I'd hear a child cry, I'd turn to see if it was because of Jeremy."

School can be a shattering experience for such kids. Frequently reprimanded and tuned out, they lose any sense of self-worth and fall ever further behind in their work. More than a quarter are held back a grade; about a third fail to graduate from high school. ADHD kids are also prone to accidents, says neurologist Roseman. "These are the kids I'm going to see in the emergency room this summer. They rode their bicycle right into the street and didn't look. They jumped off the deck and forgot it was high."

But the psychological injuries are often greater. By ages five to seven, says Barkley, half to two-thirds are hostile and defiant. By ages 10 to 12, they run the risk of developing what psychologists call "conduct disorder"--lying, stealing, running away from home and ultimately getting into trouble with the law. As adults, says Barkley, 25% to 30% will experience substance-abuse problems, mostly with depressants like marijuana and alcohol. One study of hyperactive boys found that 40% had been arrested at least once by age 18--and these were kids who had been treated with stimulant medication; among those who had been treated with the drug plus other measures, the rate was 20%--still very high.

It is an article of faith among ADHD researchers that the right interventions can prevent such dreadful outcomes. "If you can have an impact with these kids, you can change whether they go to jail or to Harvard Law School," says psychologist James Swanson at the University of California at Irvine, who co-authored the study of arrest histories. And yet, despite decades of research, no one is certain exactly what the optimal intervention should be.

TREATMENT

The best-known therapy for ADHD remains stimulant drugs. Though Ritalin is the most popular choice, some patients do better with Dexedrine or Cylert or even certain antidepressants. About 70% of kids respond to stimulants. In the correct dosage, these uppers surprisingly "make people slow down," says Swanson. "They make you focus your attention and apply more effort to whatever you're supposed to do." Ritalin kicks in within 30 minutes to an hour after being taken, but its effects last only about three hours. Most kids take a dose at breakfast and another at lunchtime to get them through a school day.

When drug therapy works, says Utah's Wender, "it is one of the most dramatic effects in psychiatry." Roseman tells how one first-grader came into his office after trying Ritalin and announced, "I know how it works." "You do?" asked the doctor. "Yes," the child replied. "It cleaned out my ears. Now I can hear the teacher." A third-grader told Roseman that Ritalin had enabled him to play basketball. "Now when I get the ball, I turn around, I go down to the end of the room, and if I look up, there's a net there. I never used to see the net, because there was too much screaming."

For adults, the results can be just as striking. "Helen," a 43-year-old mother of three in northern Virginia, began taking the drug after being diagnosed with ADD in 1983. "The very first day, I noticed a difference," she marvels. For the first time ever, "I was able to sit down and listen to what my husband had done at work. Shortly after, I was able to sit in bed and read while my husband watched TV."

Given such outcomes, doctors can be tempted to throw a little Ritalin at any problem. Some even use it as a diagnostic tool, believing--wrongly--that if the child's concentration improves with Ritalin, then he or she must have add. In fact, you don't have to have an attention problem to get a boost from Ritalin. By the late 1980s, over-prescription became a big issue, raised in large measure by the Church of Scientology, which opposes psychiatry in general and launched a vigorous campaign against Ritalin. After a brief decline fostered by the scare, the drug is now hot once again. Swanson has heard of some classrooms where 20% to 30% of the boys are on Ritalin. "That's just ridiculous!"' he says.

Ritalin use varies from state to state, town to town, depending largely on the attitude of the doctors and local schools. Idaho is the No. 1 consumer of the drug. A study of Ritalin consumption in Michigan, which ranks just behind Idaho, found that use ranged from less than 1% of boys in one county to as high as 10% in another, with no correlation to affluence.

Patients who are taking Ritalin must be closely monitored, since the drug can cause loss of appetite, insomnia and occasionally tics. Doctors often recommend "drug holidays" during school vacations. Medication is frequently combined with other treatments, including psychotherapy, special education and cognitive training, although the benefits of such expensive measures are unclear. "We really haven't known which treatment to use for which child and how to combine treatments," says Dr. Peter Jensen, chief of nimh's Child and Adolescent Disorders Research Branch. His group has embarked on a study involving 600 children in six cities. By 1998 they hope to have learned how medication alone compares to medication with psychological intervention and other approaches.

BEYOND DRUGS

A rough consensus has emerged among ADHD specialists that whether or not drugs are used, it is best to teach kids--often through behavior modification--how to gain more control over their impulses and restless energy. Also recommended is training in the fine art of being organized: establishing a predictable schedule of activities, learning to use a date book, assigning a location for possessions at school and at home. This takes considerable effort on the part of teachers and parents as well as the kids themselves. Praise, most agree, is vitally important.

Within the classroom "some simple, practical things work well," says Reid. Let hyperactive kids move around. Give them stand-up desks, for instance. "I've seen kids who from the chest up were very diligently working on a math problem, but from the chest down, they're dancing like Fred Astaire." To minimize distractions, ADHD kids should sit very close to the teacher and be permitted to take important tests in a quiet area. "Unfortunately," Reid observes, "not many teachers are trained in behavior management. It is a historic shortfall in American education."

In Irvine, California, James Swanson has tried to create the ideal setting for teaching kids with ADHD. The Child Development Center, an elementary school that serves 45 kids with the disorder, is a kind of experiment in progress. The emphasis is on behavior modification: throughout the day students earn points--and are relentlessly cheered on--for good behavior. High scorers are rewarded with special privileges at the end of the day, but each morning kids start afresh with another shot at the rewards. Special classes also drill in social skills: sharing, being a good sport, ignoring annoyances rather than striking out in anger. Only 35% of the kids at the center are on stimulant drugs, less than half the national rate for ADHD kids.

Elsewhere around the country, enterprising parents have struggled to find their own answers to attention deficit. Bonnie and Neil Fell of Skokie, Illinois, have three sons, all of whom have been diagnosed with ADD. They have "required more structure and consistency than other kids," says Bonnie. "We had to break down activities into clear time slots." To help their sons, who take Ritalin, the Fells have employed tutors, psychotherapists and a speech and language specialist. None of this comes cheap: they estimate their current annual ADD-related expenses at $15,000. "Our goal is to get them through school with their self-esteem intact," says Bonnie.

The efforts seem to be paying off. Dan, the eldest at 15, has become an outgoing A student, a wrestling star and a writer for the school paper. "ADD gives you energy and creativity," he says. "I've learned to cope. I've become strong." On the other hand, he is acutely aware of his disability. "What people don't realize is that I have to work harder than everyone else. I start studying for finals a month before other people do."

COPING

Adults can also train themselves to compensate for ADHD. Therapists working with them typically emphasize organizational skills, time management, stress reduction and ways to monitor their own distractibility and stay focused.

In her office in White Plains, Tomaino has a miniature Zen garden, a meditative sculpture and all sorts of other items to help tense patients relax. Since many people with ADHD also have learning disabilities, she tests each patient and then often uses computer programs to strengthen weak areas. But most important is helping people define their goals and take orderly steps to reach them. Whether working with a stockbroker or a homemaker, she says, "I teach adults basic rewards and goals. For instance, you can't go out to lunch until you've cleaned the kitchen."

Tomaino tells of one very hyperactive and articulate young man who got all the way through college without incident, thanks in good measure to a large and tolerant extended family. Then he flunked out of law school three times. Diagnosed with ADHD, the patient took stock of his goals and decided to enter the family restaurant business, where, Tomaino says, he is a raging success. "ADHD was a deficit if he wanted to be a lawyer, but it's an advantage in the restaurant business. He gets to go around to meet and greet."

For neurologist Roseman, the same thing is true. With 11 offices in four states, he is perpetually on the go. "I'm at rest in motion," says the doctor. "I surround myself with partners who provide the structure. My practice allows me to be creative." Roseman has accountants to do the bookkeeping. He starts his day at 6:30 with a hike and doesn't slow down until midnight. "Thank God for my ADD," he says. But, he admits, "had I listened to all the negative things that people said when I was growing up, I'd probably be digging ditches in Idaho."

LESSONS

Whether ADHD is a brain disorder or simply a personality type, the degree to which it is a handicap depends not only on the severity of the traits but also on one's environment. The right school, job or home situation can make all the difference. The lessons of ADHD are truisms. All kids do not learn in the same way. Nor are all adults suitable for the same line of work.

Unfortunately, American society seems to have evolved into a one-size-fits-all system. Schools can resemble factories: put the kids on the assembly line, plug in the right components and send 'em out the door. Everyone is supposed to go to college; there is virtually no other route to success. In other times and in other places, there have been alternatives: apprenticeships, settling a new land, starting a business out of the garage, going to sea. In a conformist society, it becomes necessary to medicate some people to make them fit in.

This is not to deny that some people genuinely need Ritalin, just as others need tranquilizers or insulin. But surely an epidemic of attention deficit disorder is a warning to us all. Children need individual supervision. Many of them need more structure than the average helter-skelter household provides. They need a more consistent approach to discipline and schools that tailor teaching to their individual learning styles. Adults too could use a society that's more flexible in its expectations, more accommodating to differences. Most of all, we all need to slow down. And pay attention.

DO YOU HAVE ATTENTION DEFICIT?

If eight or more of the following statements accurately describe your child or yourself as a child, particuarly before age 7, there may be reason to suspect ADHD. A definitive diagnosis requires further examination.

1. Often fidgets or squirms in seat.

2. Has difficulty remaining seated.

3. Is easily distracted.

4. Has difficulty awaiting turn in groups.

5. Often blurts out answers to questions.

6. Has difficulty following instructions.

7. Has difficulty sustaining attention to tasks.

8. Often shifts from one uncompleted activity to another.

9. Has difficulty playing quietly.

10. Often talks excessively.

11. Often interrupts or intrudes on others.

12. Often does not seem to listen.

13. Often loses things necessary for tasks.

14. Often engages in physically dangerous activities without considering consequences.

SUSPICIOUS SYMPTOMS

Have some of history's top figures had attention deficit? It's hard to say but tempting to speculate.

BEN FRANKLIN: Disorganized and argumentative, he brimmed with endless ideas and imaginative projects.

WINSTON CHURCHILL: Before achieving political prominence, he was a bad student who couldn't concentrate.

ALBERT EINSTEIN: Another poor student, he was distracted, socially awkward, messy and infinitely creative.

BILL CLINTON: With a restless nature, he may be "a pill away from greatness," says neurologist Bruce Roseman.

"I freed thousands of slaves. I could have freed thousands more, if they had known they were slaves." - Harriet Tubman

<hr> From: desertphile@hot mail. com (David Rice, Esq.)
Subject: TIME (old) SCIENTOLOGY'S LARGESSE IN RUSSIA
Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2005 01:18:17 GMT
Organization: Church of Crimeatology
Message-ID: <42718b67@news2.lightlink.com>

TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1992 Apr. 13, 1992 Campus of the Future GRAPEVINE, Page 19 SCIENTOLOGY'S LARGESSE IN RUSSIA

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By Janice Castro/Reported by Wendy Cole

Everyone seems to have a plan to assist the citizens of the former Soviet Union, and the Church of Scientology is no exception. For the past month, journalism students at the 237-year-old Moscow State University have been studying in the newly renovated L. Ron Hubbard Reading Room. Scientology propaganda in dozens of languages lines the walls, and video equipment is available. Pictures of Hubbard decorate the corridors, along with a bronze bust of "The Founder." Students, who have only the vaguest idea who Hubbard is, are impressed by the lavish appointments. But Western scholars in Moscow are outraged that the cult has gained such influence. With an outpost in an established university, Scientologists plan to launch a college of their own in Moscow this summer.

"I freed thousands of slaves. I could have freed thousands more, if they had known they were slaves." - Harriet Tubman

<hr> From: desertphile@hot mail. com (David Rice, Esq.)
Subject: TIME (old) FROM THE MANAGING EDITOR, Page 20
Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2005 01:18:51 GMT
Organization: Church of Crimeatology
Message-ID: <42718b89@news2.lightlink.com>

TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1992 Apr. 13, 1992 Campus of the Future FROM THE MANAGING EDITOR, Page 20

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A few weeks ago, our publisher used this space to boast a little about the string of prizes we've collected over the past year. This week I'm borrowing the space to talk about an award that the publisher herself just won. Lisa Valk, the first woman ever to hold the title of publisher at TIME, has won the 1992 Matrix Award in recognition of her "outstanding career achievement" in the magazine industry. The Matrix, administered by the New York chapter of Women in Communications, is the nearest thing to an Oscar for female magazine executives (past winners include Gloria Steinem, Grace Mirabella, Tina Brown and Helen Gurley Brown). Congratulations, Lisa!

Congratulations are also in order for TIME's photo department, which took more than its share of top magazine honors in the 49th annual Pictures of the Year Competition, sponsored by the National Press Photographers Association and the University of Missouri School of Journalism. In an extraordinary display of strength, TIME photographers snapped up 18 awards--including Magazine Photographer of the Year to Christopher Morris for his coverage of civil war in Yugoslavia and a first-place prize in the Magazine Picture Story category to Anthony Suau for his photo essay on the persecution of the Kurds.

Next week the winners of the prestigious National Magazine Awards will be announced. It is not unusual for one or two TIME stories to be named as finalists. But this year we were nominated in three different categories--three times as many as either of the other weekly newsmagazines. Barbara Ehrenreich was named for three of her TIME Essays. This follows nicely on last year's awards, when her colleague Lance Morrow was nominated in the same category. Senior writer Eugene Linden was singled out for his Sept. 23, 1991, cover story on the knowledge lost when ancient tribes are assimilated into the modern world. And associate editor Richard Behar was cited for his May 6, 1991, expose of the Church of Scientology. We're proud of them all.

-- Henry Muller

"I freed thousands of slaves. I could have freed thousands more, if they had known they were slaves." - Harriet Tubman

<hr> From: desertphile@hot mail. com (David Rice, Esq.)
Subject: TIME (Old) Awards Won
Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2005 01:19:19 GMT
Organization: Church of Crimeatology
Message-ID: <42718ba5@news2.lightlink.com>

TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1992 Feb. 24, 1992 Holy Alliance FROM THE PUBLISHER, Page 16

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Less than two months into 1992, well before the opening of the main season for journalistic awards, and we have already bagged a big one. The American Society of Journalists and Authors has selected associate editor Richard Behar for its Conscience in Media Award, in recognition of his expose of the Church of Scientology in the May 6, 1991, issue. The award, honoring "those who have demonstrated singular commitment to the highest principles of journalism at notable personal cost or sacrifice," has been conferred only seven times previously in the 17 years it has existed. Needless to say, we are delighted and proud.

But not terribly surprised. Awards are very far from anything new here. During 1991, in fact, TIME, its editors, writers, correspondents and photographers received 83 such accolades, more than any of our competitors. Most, of course, were for stories or pictures that appeared in 1990, beginning with the Jan. 1 issue. Its cover story on Mikhail Gorbachev as Man of the Decade was chosen by the Overseas Press Club to receive the Hallie and Whit Burnett Award as best general-magazine article on foreign affairs. The Overseas Press Club also presented its Olivier Rebbot Award for best photographic reporting from abroad to TIME photographer Christopher Morris of the Black Star agency for pictures published on the British poll-tax riots and the Liberian civil war.

Morris and his pictures for TIME won six other awards as well. Nor was he the only multiple winner. Senior editor Nancy R. Gibbs and senior writer William A. Henry III each wrote all or part of stories that bagged four awards.

The Unity Awards in Media from the Lincoln University of Missouri gave Gibbs' stories (one written with associate editor Anastasia Toufexis) first prizes for both economics reporting and reporting of politics. The fall 1990 special issue Women: The Road Ahead won four citations: one as a whole, two for design and one for the story "The Lesbians Next Door." Now maybe we've bragged enough--for the moment. The start we're off to in 1992--well, wait till this year.

-- Elizabeth P. Valk

"I freed thousands of slaves. I could have freed thousands more, if they had known they were slaves." - Harriet Tubman

<hr> From: desertphile@hot mail. com (David Rice, Esq.)
Subject: TIME (old) Too Much Flak Downs a Flack
Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2005 01:19:47 GMT
Organization: Church of Crimeatology
Message-ID: <42718bc2@news2.lightlink.com>

TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1991 Oct. 07, 1991 Defusing the Nuclear Threat BUSINESS, Page 42 MANAGEMENT Too Much Flak Downs a Flack

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Public relations powerhouse Hill & Knowlton boots its overbearing boss in a bid to restore its own sullied image

By Richard Behar

It was the beginning of the end for Robert Dilenschneider when the Hill & Knowlton chief executive rose to give a pep talk to his 30 senior executives at New York City's Lotos Club last winter. "Our women," declared the boss of the largest U.S. public relations firm, had been insulted by bad language used by an executive from McDonald's, a prospective client. As a result, Dilenschneider boasted, he refused to accept the fast-food giant's business, even though he was awarded the account. "We didn't know whether to laugh or cry," recalls a top official who attended the dinner. "It simply wasn't true. We had placed third in a recent bidding for the account. Bob lied straight to our faces."

Five months later, Dilenschneider, 47, was stripped of his day-to-day duties at Hill & Knowlton, whose list of blue-chip clients ranges from Pepsi to Procter & Gamble. Last week he suddenly resigned as chief executive, still denying reports that he had been shoved out. For Dilenschneider, it was a heartbreaking fall, 24 years after he began to climb the company ladder. The man seemed to have a tragic flaw: the more powerful he became, the more he believed in his own greatness.

Long known as a genteel giant, Hill & Knowlton rarely had to hunt for clients. They simply came knocking and stayed aboard for decades, as did the firm's employees. That atmosphere changed when Dilenschneider took charge in 1986 and began to buy up 10 smaller companies. Revenues rose from $77 million in 1985 to $197 million last year. Dilenschneider's goal was to supplant the British firm Shandwick (1990 revenues: $211 million) as the world's largest p.r. firm by creating a one-stop supermarket for clients seeking everything from lobbying and management consulting to research, direct-mail campaigns and traditional public relations.

But his dream got derailed. The recession pared spending by the firm's traditional clients; both sales and earnings are likely to drop in 1991. Yet the pressure for profits has been escalating since 1987, when British magnate Martin Sorrell bought Hill & Knowlton's parent company, the J. Walter Thompson ad agency. Hill & Knowlton is also alienating a growing number of clients, sometimes by overcharging them for mediocre work. "It got to a point where we were trying to sell products to clients whether they needed them or not," says Peter Osgood, a vice chairman who quit earlier this year. "It was a revenue game."

Morale at the firm is so bad that more than 50 top executives have left since 1989. Current and former staff members place much of the blame on Dilenschneider. They describe him as a Machiavellian leader with an oversize ego, a brilliant yet cunning bully who compulsively lied and reneged on promises. Insiders say he was so mistrustful of underlings that he rarely delegated, slept little and was often overextended. "One of his bad habits was not showing up for appointments," complains a leading industry consultant, Edward Gottlieb. "This was an indication of the problems he had keeping the huge firm together." Dilenschneider couldn't be reached for comment.

His obsession with growth at any cost sometimes infuriated important clients. In 1987 he persuaded chemical conglomerate Monsanto to scrap its entire in-house p.r. staff and turn the work over to Hill & Knowlton. The move ultimately failed after causing severe dissension inside Monsanto. Meanwhile, rival Du Pont, a Hill & Knowlton client for decades, was so irate at the conflict of interest that it pulled its account.

Dilenschneider's reign may be remembered most for the long list of dubious and controversial clients he took on, from China and Kuwait to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and its antiabortion campaign. One of his biggest clients, the Church of Scientology, paid the p.r. firm more than $5 million since 1987. Hill & Knowlton canned the account following a TIME cover story last May on the notorious money cult.

Yet perhaps Hill & Knowlton's most infamous relationship was with the Bank of Credit & Commerce International, which began after the bank's indictment for money laundering in 1988. The firm and its client got so close that top Hill & Knowlton official Robert Gray became a director at B.C.C.I.-controlled First American Bank in Washington. At a Senate hearing in August, former Customs Service Commissioner William von Raab said U.S. officials failed to pursue B.C.C.I. more aggressively because of the "incredible pounding that they were taking by the influence peddlers in Washington."

The new man in charge at Hill & Knowlton is Thomas Eidson, 47, a well-respected insider who knows that any p.r. firm worth its salt does not try to draw unnecessary attention to itself. One of his first tasks will be to improve the firm's public image by avoiding bad associations. "Our client list is the most precious asset we possess," he says. "We should only take clients that the people of Hill & Knowlton can be proud of." That would go a long way toward boosting in-house spirits as well.

PROMINENT CLIENTS... American Airlines Atlantic Richfield Boeing First Boston Georgia-Pacific IBM Johnson & Johnson Mazda Monsanto Procter & Gamble U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops Warner-Lambert

AND FORMER ONES... Bank of Credit & Commerce Church of Scientology Du Pont ITT Kellogg Lockheed McDonnell Douglas RJR Nabisco Stanford University

--- http://lastliberal.org / I support privatization of religion. Free random & sequential signature changer http://holysmoke.org/sig

"I freed thousands of slaves. I could have freed thousands more, if they had known they were slaves." - Harriet Tubman

<hr> From: desertphile@hot mail. com (David Rice, Esq.)
Subject: TIME (old) FROM THE PUBLISHER, Page 18
Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2005 01:20:13 GMT
Organization: Church of Crimeatology
Message-ID: <42718bdb@news2.lightlink.com>

TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1991 May 27, 1991 Orlando FROM THE PUBLISHER, Page 18

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For the past four months, TIME has had a special guest. Unlike most guests, however, he's had to work hard during his stay. Since early February, Geoffrey Colvin, a member of the Board of Editors at FORTUNE, has been sitting in as editor of TIME's Business section. His visit is part of an exchange among the publications of the Time Inc. Magazine Co., intended to give selected editors a taste of new environs.

Colvin has made the transition to TIME with ease and elan, overseeing the Business section during an especially busy period. Two cover stories--on the nuclear-power industry and on the Scientology cult--appeared on his watch. He edited two major stories on shady dealings at the Bank of Credit & Commerce International as well as perceptive articles on the rebounding housing industry and on Wal-Mart, the nation's largest retailer.

"I've had a terrific time," says Colvin. After 12 1/2 years at FORTUNE, he admits that TIME's different style and approach required some adjustment. The two magazines, for example, are aimed at largely different readerships. "FORTUNE's readers are managers," he says, "while TIME's readers are consumers." TIME's more hectic, weekly schedule also took some getting used to. "I'm impressed with the speed with which things happen around here," he says. His staff was equally impressed with Colvin's speed at adapting. "He handled an unusually heavy crunch of covers and major breaking stories without missing a beat," says associate editor Janice Castro.

A native of South Dakota, Colvin, 37, majored in economics at Harvard. While still in school and just afterward, he worked as a disk jockey for classical-music radio stations. (He still puts his radio voice to good use, as a commentator on business for CBS Radio.) Colvin spent three years as a ghostwriter for CBS Inc. chairman William S. Paley's autobiography, As It Happened, before joining FORTUNE as a reporter. An editor there since 1984, he has worked on virtually every kind of story the magazine covers, though his primary responsibility is the Managing section.

As his TIME assignment nears an end, Colvin is not leaving without some regrets. Says he: "Four months is enough time to feel like you know the job." It was enough time for us to feel like we know the guest--and to realize that we'll miss him.

-- Robert L. Miller

"I freed thousands of slaves. I could have freed thousands more, if they had known they were slaves." - Harriet Tubman

<hr> From: desertphile@hot mail. com (David Rice, Esq.)
Subject: TIME (old) The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power
Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2005 01:20:42 GMT
Organization: Church of Crimeatology
Message-ID: <42718bfa@news2.lightlink.com>

TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1991 May 06, 1991 Scientology SPECIAL REPORT, Page 50 The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power

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Ruined lives. Lost fortunes. Federal crimes. Scientology poses as a religion but is really a ruthless global scam--and aiming for the mainstream.

By Richard Behar

By all appearances, Noah Lottick of Kingston, Pa., had been a normal, happy 24-year-old who was looking for his place in the world. On the day last June when his parents drove to New York City to claim his body, they were nearly catatonic with grief. The young Russian-studies scholar had jumped from a 10th-floor window of the Milford Plaza Hotel and bounced off the hood of a stretch limousine. When the police arrived, his fingers were still clutching $171 in cash, virtually the only money he hadn't yet turned over to the Church of Scientology, the self-help "philosophy" group he had discovered just seven months earlier.

His death inspired his father Edward, a physician, to start his own investigation of the church. "We thought Scientology was something like Dale Carnegie," Lottick says. "I now believe it's a school for psychopaths. Their so-called therapies are manipulations. They take the best and brightest people and destroy them." The Lotticks want to sue the church for contributing to their son's death, but the prospect has them frightened. For nearly 40 years, the big business of Scientology has shielded itself exquisitely behind the First Amendment as well as a battery of high-priced criminal lawyers and shady private detectives.

The Church of Scientology, started by science-fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard to "clear" people of unhappiness, portrays itself as a religion. In reality the church is a hugely profitable global racket that survives by intimidating members and critics in a Mafia-like manner. At times during the past decade, prosecutions against Scientology seemed to be curbing its menace. Eleven top Scientologists, including Hubbard's wife, were sent to prison in the early 1980s for infiltrating, burglarizing and wiretapping more than 100 private and government agencies in attempts to block their investigations. In recent years hundreds of longtime Scientology adherents--many charging that they were mentally or physically abused--have quit the church and criticized it at their own risk. Some have sued the church and won; others have settled for amounts in excess of $500,000. In various cases judges have labeled the church "schizophrenic and paranoid" and "corrupt, sinister and dangerous."

Yet the outrage and litigation have failed to squelch Scientology. The group, which boasts 700 centers in 65 countries, threatens to become more insidious and pervasive than ever. Scientology is trying to go mainstream, a strategy that has sparked a renewed law-enforcement campaign against the church. Many of the group's followers have been accused of committing financial scams, while the church is busy attracting the unwary through a wide array of front groups in such businesses as publishing, consulting, health care and even remedial education.

In Hollywood, Scientology has assembled a star-studded roster of followers by aggressively recruiting and regally pampering them at the church's "Celebrity Centers," a chain of clubhouses that offer expensive counseling and career guidance. Adherents include screen idols Tom Cruise and John Travolta, actresses Kirstie Alley, Mimi Rogers and Anne Archer, Palm Springs mayor and performer Sonny Bono, jazzman Chick Corea and even Nancy Cartwright, the voice of cartoon star Bart Simpson. Rank-and-file members, however, are dealt a less glamorous Scientology.

According to the Cult Awareness Network, whose 23 chapters monitor more than 200 "mind control" cults, no group prompts more telephone pleas for help than does Scientology. Says Cynthia Kisser, the network's Chicago-based executive director: "Scientology is quite likely the most ruthless, the most classically terroristic, the most litigious and the most lucrative cult the country has ever seen. No cult extracts more money from its members." Agrees Vicki Aznaran, who was one of Scientology's six key leaders until she bolted from the church in 1987: "This is a criminal organization, day in and day out. It makes Jim and Tammy [Bakker] look like kindergarten."

To explore Scientology's reach, TIME conducted more than 150 interviews and reviewed hundreds of court records and internal Scientology documents. Church officials refused to be interviewed. The investigation paints a picture of a depraved yet thriving enterprise. Most cults fail to outlast their founder, but Scientology has prospered since Hubbard's death in 1986. In a court filing, one of the cult's many entities--the Church of Spiritual Technology--listed $503 million in income just for 1987. High-level defectors say the parent organization has squirreled away an estimated $400 million in bank accounts in Liechtenstein, Switzerland and Cyprus. Scientology probably has about 50,000 active members, far fewer than the 8 million the group claims. But in one sense, that inflated figure rings true: millions of people have been affected in one way or another by Hubbard's bizarre creation.

Scientology is now run by David Miscavige, 31, a high school dropout and second-generation church member. Defectors describe him as cunning, ruthless and so paranoid about perceived enemies that he kept plastic wrap over his glass of water. His obsession is to attain credibility for Scientology in the 1990s. Among other tactics, the group:

-- Retains public relations powerhouse Hill and Knowlton to help shed the church's fringe-group image.

-- Joined such household names as Sony and Pepsi as a main sponsor of Ted Turner's Goodwill Games.

-- Buys massive quantities of its own books from retail stores to propel the titles onto best-seller lists.

-- Runs full-page ads in such publications as Newsweek and Business Week that call Scientology a "philosophy," along with a plethora of TV ads touting the group's books.

-- Recruits wealthy and respectable professionals through a web of consulting groups that typically hide their ties to Scientology.

The founder of this enterprise was part storyteller, part flimflam man. Born in Nebraska in 1911, Hubbard served in the Navy during World War II and soon afterward complained to the Veterans Administration about his "suicidal inclinations" and his "seriously affected" mind. Nevertheless, Hubbard was a moderately successful writer of pulp science fiction. Years later, church brochures described him falsely as an "extensively decorated" World War II hero who was crippled and blinded in action, twice pronounced dead and miraculously cured through Scientology. Hubbard's "doctorate" from "Sequoia University" was a fake mail-order degree. In a 1984 case in which the church sued a Hubbard biographical researcher, a California judge concluded that its founder was "a pathological liar."

Hubbard wrote one of Scientology's sacred texts, Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, in 1950. In it he introduced a crude psychotherapeutic technique he called "auditing." He also created a simplified lie detector (called an "E-meter") that was designed to measure electrical changes in the skin while subjects discussed intimate details of their past. Hubbard argued that unhappiness sprang from mental aberrations (or "engrams") caused by early traumas. Counseling sessions with the E-meter, he claimed, could knock out the engrams, cure blindness and even improve a person's intelligence and appearance.

Hubbard kept adding steps, each more costly, for his followers to climb. In the 1960s the guru decreed that humans are made of clusters of spirits (or "thetans") who were banished to earth some 75 million years ago by a cruel galactic ruler named Xenu. Naturally, those thetans had to be audited.

An Internal Revenue Service ruling in 1967 stripped Scientology's mother church of its tax-exempt status. A federal court ruled in 1971 that Hubbard's medical claims were bogus and that E-meter auditing could no longer be called a scientific treatment. Hubbard responded by going fully religious, seeking First Amendment protection for Scientology's strange rites. His counselors started sporting clerical collars. Chapels were built, franchises became "missions," fees became "fixed donations," and Hubbard's comic-book cosmology became "sacred scriptures."

During the early 1970s, the IRS conducted its own auditing sessions and proved that Hubbard was skimming millions of dollars from the church, laundering the money through dummy corporations in Panama and stashing it in Swiss bank accounts. Moreover, church members stole IRS documents, filed false tax returns and harassed the agency's employees. By late 1985, with high-level defectors accusing Hubbard of having stolen as much as $200 million from the church, the IRS was seeking an indictment of Hubbard for tax fraud. Scientology members "worked day and night" shredding documents the IRS sought, according to defector Aznaran, who took part in the scheme. Hubbard, who had been in hiding for five years, died before the criminal case could be prosecuted.

Today the church invents costly new services with all the zeal of its founder. Scientology doctrine warns that even adherents who are "cleared" of engrams face grave spiritual dangers unless they are pushed to higher and more expensive levels. According to the church's latest price list, recruits--"raw meat," as Hubbard called them--take auditing sessions that cost as much as $1,000 an hour, or $12,500 for a 12 1/2-hour "intensive."

Psychiatrists say these sessions can produce a drugged-like, mind-controlled euphoria that keeps customers coming back for more. To pay their fees, newcomers can earn commissions by recruiting new members, become auditors themselves (Miscavige did so at age 12), or join the church staff and receive free counseling in exchange for what their written contracts describe as a "billion years" of labor. "Make sure that lots of bodies move through the shop," implored Hubbard in one of his bulletins to officials. "Make money. Make more money. Make others produce so as to make money...However you get them in or why, just do it."

Harriet Baker learned the hard way about Scientology's business of selling religion. When Baker, 73, lost her husband to cancer, a Scientologist turned up at her Los Angeles home peddling a $1,300 auditing package to cure her grief. Some $15,000 later, the Scientologists discovered that her house was debt free. They arranged a $45,000 mortgage, which they pressured her to tap for more auditing until Baker's children helped their mother snap out of her daze. Last June, Baker demanded a $27,000 refund for unused services, prompting two cult members to show up at her door unannounced with an E-meter to interrogate her. Baker never got the money and, financially strapped, was forced to sell her house in September.

Before Noah Lottick killed himself, he had paid more than $5,000 for church counseling. His behavior had also become strange. He once remarked to his parents that his Scientology mentors could actually read minds. When his father suffered a major heart attack, Noah insisted that it was purely psychosomatic. Five days before he jumped, Noah burst into his parents' home and demanded to know why they were spreading "false rumors" about him--a delusion that finally prompted his father to call a psychiatrist.

It was too late. "From Noah's friends at Dianetics" read the card that accompanied a bouquet of flowers at Lottick's funeral. Yet no Scientology staff members bothered to show up. A week earlier, local church officials had given Lottick's parents a red-carpet tour of their center. A cult leader told Noah's parents that their son had been at the church just hours before he disappeared--but the church denied this story as soon as the body was identified. True to form, the cult even haggled with the Lotticks over $3,000 their son had paid for services he never used, insisting that Noah had intended it as a "donation."

The church has invented hundreds of goods and services for which members are urged to give "donations." Are you having trouble "moving swiftly up the Bridge"--that is, advancing up the stepladder of enlightenment? Then you can have your case reviewed for a mere $1,250 "donation." Want to know "why a thetan hangs on to the physical universe?" Try 52 of Hubbard's tape-recorded speeches from 1952, titled "Ron's Philadelphia Doctorate Course Lectures," for $2,525. Next: nine other series of the same sort. For the collector, gold-and-leather-bound editions of 22 of Hubbard's books (and bookends) on subjects ranging from Scientology ethics to radiation can be had for just $1,900.

To gain influence and lure richer, more sophisticated followers, Scientology has lately resorted to a wide array of front groups and financial scams. Among them:

CONSULTING. Sterling Management Systems, formed in 1983, has been ranked in recent years by Inc. magazine as one of America's fastest-growing private companies (estimated 1988 revenues: $20 million). Sterling regularly mails a free newsletter to more than 300,000 health-care professionals, mostly dentists, promising to increase their incomes dramatically. The firm offers seminars and courses that typically cost $10,000. But Sterling's true aim is to hook customers for Scientology. "The church has a rotten product, so they package it as something else," says Peter Georgiades, a Pittsburgh attorney who represents Sterling victims. "It's a kind of bait and switch." Sterling's founder, dentist Gregory Hughes, is now under investigation by California's Board of Dental Examiners for incompetence. Nine lawsuits are pending against him for malpractice (seven others have been settled), mostly for or thodontic work on children.

Many dentists who have unwittingly been drawn into the cult are filing or threatening lawsuits as well. Dentist Robert Geary of Medina, Ohio, who entered a Sterling seminar in 1988, endured "the most extreme high-pressure sales tactics I have ever faced." Sterling officials told Geary, 45, that their firm was not linked to Scientology, he says. But Geary claims they eventually convinced him that he and his wife Dorothy had personal problems that required auditing. Over five months, the Gearys say, they spent $130,000 for services, plus $50,000 for "gold-embossed, investment-grade" books signed by Hubbard. Geary contends that Scientologists not only called his bank to increase his credit-card limit but also forged his signature on a $20,000 loan application. "It was insane," he recalls. "I couldn't even get an accounting from them of what I was paying for." At one point, the Gearys claim, Scientologists held Dorothy hostage for two weeks in a mountain cabin, after which she was hospitalized for a nervous breakdown.

Last October, Sterling broke some bad news to another dentist, Glover Rowe of Gadsden, Ala., and his wife Dee. Tests showed that unless they signed up for auditing, Glover's practice would fail, and Dee would someday abuse their child. The next month the Rowes flew to Glendale, Calif., where they shuttled daily from a local hotel to a Dianetics center. "We thought they were brilliant people because they seemed to know so much about us," recalls Dee. "Then we realized our hotel room must have been bugged." After bolting from the center, $23,000 poorer, the Rowes say, they were chased repeatedly by Scientologists on foot and in cars. Dentists aren't the only ones at risk. Scientology also makes pitches to chiropractors, podiatrists and veterinarians.

PUBLIC INFLUENCE. One front, the Way to Happiness Foundation, has distributed to children in thousands of the nation's public schools more than 3.5 million copies of a booklet Hubbard wrote on morality. The church calls the scheme "the largest dissemination project in Scientology history." Applied Scholastics is the name of still another front, which is attempting to install a Hubbard tutorial program in public schools, primarily those populated by minorities. The group also plans a 1,000-acre campus, where it will train educators to teach various Hubbard methods. The disingenuously named Citizens Commission on Human Rights is a Scientology group at war with psychiatry, its primary competitor. The commission typically issues reports aimed at discrediting particular psychiatrists and the field in general. The CCHR is also behind an all-out war against Eli Lilly, the maker of Prozac, the nation's top-selling anti depression drug. Despite scant evidence, the group's members--who call themselves "psychbusters"--claim that Prozac drives people to murder or suicide. Through mass mailings, appearances on talk shows and heavy lobbying, CCHR has hurt drug sales and helped spark dozens of lawsuits against Lilly.

Another Scientology-linked group, the Concerned Businessmen's Association of America, holds antidrug contests and awards $5,000 grants to schools as a way to recruit students and curry favor with education officials. West Virginia Senator John D. Rockefeller IV unwittingly commended the CBAA in 1987 on the Senate floor. Last August author Alex Haley was the keynote speaker at its annual awards banquet in Los Angeles. Says Haley: "I didn't know much about that group going in. I'm a Methodist." Ignorance about Scientology can be embarrassing: two months ago, Illinois Governor Jim Edgar, noting that Scientology's founder "has solved the aberrations of the human mind," proclaimed March 13 "L. Ron Hubbard Day." He rescinded the proclamation in late March, once he learned who Hubbard really was.

HEALTH CARE. HealthMed, a chain of clinics run by Scientologists, promotes a grueling and excessive system of saunas, exercise and vitamins designed by Hubbard to purify the body. Experts denounce the regime as quackery and potentially harmful, yet HealthMed solicits unions and public agencies for contracts. The chain is plugged heavily in a new book, Diet for a Poisoned Planet, by journalist David Steinman, who concludes that scores of common foods (among them: peanuts, bluefish, peaches and cottage cheese) are dangerous.

Former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop labeled the book "trash," and the Food and Drug Administration issued a paper in October that claims Steinman distorts his facts. "HealthMed is a gateway to Scientology, and Steinman's book is a sorting mechanism," says physician William Jarvis, who is head of the National Council Against Health Fraud. Steinman, who describes Hubbard favorably as a "researcher," denies any ties to the church and contends, "HealthMed has no affiliation that I know of with Scientology."

DRUG TREATMENT. Hubbard's purification treatments are the mainstay of Narconon, a Scientology-run chain of 33 alcohol and drug rehabilitation centers--some in prisons under the name "Criminon"--in 12 countries. Narconon, a classic vehicle for drawing addicts into the cult, now plans to open what it calls the world's largest treatment center, a 1,400-bed facility on an Indian reservation near Newkirk, Okla. (pop. 2,400). At a 1989 ceremony in Newkirk, the Association for Better Living and Education presented Narconon a check for $200,000 and a study praising its work. The association turned out to be part of Scientology itself. Today the town is battling to keep out the cult, which has fought back through such tactics as sending private detectives to snoop on the mayor and the local newspaper publisher.

FINANCIAL SCAMS. Three Florida Scientologists, including Ronald Bernstein, a big contributor to the church's international "war chest," pleaded guilty in March to using their rare-coin dealership as a money laundry. Other notorious activities by Scientologists include making the shady Vancouver stock exchange even shadier and plotting to plant operatives in the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and Export-Import Bank of the U.S. The alleged purpose of this scheme: to gain inside information on which countries are going to be denied credit so that Scientology-linked traders can make illicit profits by taking "short" positions in those countries' currencies.

In the stock market the practice of "shorting" involves borrowing shares of publicly traded companies in the hope that the price will go down before the stocks must be bought on the market and returned to the lender. The Feshbach brothers of Palo Alto, Calif.--Kurt, Joseph and Matthew--have become the leading short sellers in the U.S., with more than $500 million under management. The Feshbachs command a staff of about 60 employees and claim to have earned better returns than the Dow Jones industrial average for most of the 1980s. And, they say, they owe it all to the teachings of Scientology, whose "war chest" has received more than $1 million from the family.

The Feshbachs also embrace the church's tactics; the brothers are the terrors of the stock exchanges. In congressional hearings in 1989, the heads of several companies claimed that Feshbach operatives have spread false information to government agencies and posed in various guises--such as a Securities and Exchange Commission official--in an effort to discredit their companies and drive the stocks down. Michael Russell, who ran a chain of business journals, testified that a Feshbach employee called his bankers and interfered with his loans. Sometimes the Feshbachs send private detectives to dig up dirt on firms, which is then shared with business reporters, brokers and fund managers.

The Feshbachs, who wear jackets bearing the slogan "stock busters," insist they run a clean shop. But as part of a current probe into possible insider stock trading, federal officials are reportedly investigating whether the Feshbachs received confidential information from FDA employees. The brothers seem aligned with Scientology's war on psychiatry and medicine: many of their targets are health and biotechnology firms. "Legitimate short selling performs a public service by deflating hyped stocks," says Robert Flaherty, the editor of Equities magazine and a harsh critic of the brothers. "But the Feshbachs have damaged scores of good start-ups."

Occasionally a Scientologist's business antics land him in jail. Last August a former devotee named Steven Fishman began serving a five-year prison term in Florida. His crime: stealing blank stock-confirmation slips from his employer, a major brokerage house, to use as proof that he owned stock entitling him to join dozens of successful class-action lawsuits. Fishman made roughly $1 million this way from 1983 to 1988 and spent as much as 30% of the loot on Scientology books and tapes.

Scientology denies any tie to the Fishman scam, a claim strongly disputed by both Fishman and his longtime psychiatrist, Uwe Geertz, a prominent Florida hypnotist. Both men claim that when arrested, Fishman was ordered by the church to kill Geertz and then do an "EOC," or end of cycle, which is church jargon for suicide.

BOOK PUBLISHING. Scientology mischiefmaking has even moved to the book industry. Since 1985 at least a dozen Hubbard books, printed by a church company, have made best-seller lists. They range from a 5,000-page sci-fi decology (Black Genesis, The Enemy Within, An Alien Affair) to the 40-year-old Dianetics. In 1988 the trade publication Publishers Weekly awarded the dead author a plaque commemorating the appearance of Dianetics on its best-seller list for 100 consecutive weeks.

Critics pan most of Hubbard's books as unreadable, while defectors claim that church insiders are sometimes the real authors. Even so, Scientology has sent out armies of its followers to buy the group's books at such major chains as B. Dalton's and Waldenbooks to sustain the illusion of a best-selling author. A former Dalton's manager says that some books arrived in his store with the chain's price stickers already on them, suggesting that copies are being recycled. Scientology claims that sales of Hubbard books now top 90 million worldwide. The scheme, set up to gain converts and credibility, is coupled with a radio and TV advertising campaign virtually unparalleled in the book industry.

Scientology devotes vast resources to squelching its critics. Since 1986 Hubbard and his church have been the subject of four unfriendly books, all released by small yet courageous publishers. In each case, the writers have been badgered and heavily sued. One of Hubbard's policies was that all perceived enemies are "fair game" and subject to being "tricked, sued or lied to or destroyed." Those who criticize the church--journalists, doctors, lawyers and even judges--often find themselves engulfed in litigation, stalked by private eyes, framed for fictional crimes, beaten up or threatened with death. Psychologist Margaret Singer, 69, an outspoken Scientology critic and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, now travels regularly under an assumed name to avoid harassment.

After the Los Angeles Times published a negative series on the church last summer, Scientologists spent an estimated $1 million to plaster the reporters' names on hundreds of billboards and bus placards across the city. Above their names were quotations taken out of context to portray the church in a positive light.

The church's most fearsome advocates are its lawyers. Hubbard warned his followers in writing to "beware of attorneys who tell you not to sue...the purpose of the suit is to harass and discourage rather than to win." Result: Scientology has brought hundreds of suits against its perceived enemies and today pays an estimated $20 million annually to more than 100 lawyers.

One legal goal of Scientology is to bankrupt the opposition or bury it under paper. The church has 71 active lawsuits against the IRS alone. One of them, Miscavige vs. IRS, has required the U.S. to produce an index of 52,000 pages of documents. Boston attorney Michael Flynn, who helped Scientology victims from 1979 to 1987, personally endured 14 frivolous lawsuits, all of them dismissed. Another lawyer, Joseph Yanny, believes the church "has so subverted justice and the judicial system that it should be barred from seeking equity in any court." He should know: Yanny represented the cult until 1987, when, he says, he was asked to help church officials steal medical records to blackmail an opposing attorney (who was allegedly beaten up instead). Since Yanny quit representing the church, he has been the target of death threats, burglaries, lawsuits and other harassment.

Scientology's critics contend that the U.S. needs to crack down on the church in a major, organized way. "I want to know, Where is our government?" demands Toby Plevin, a Los Angeles attorney who handles victims. "It shouldn't be left to private litigators, because God knows most of us are afraid to get involved." But law-enforcement agents are also wary. "Every investigator is very cautious, walking on eggshells when it comes to the church," says a Florida police detective who has tracked the cult since 1988. "It will take a federal effort with lots of money and manpower."

So far the agency giving Scientology the most grief is the IRS, whose officials have implied that Hubbard's successors may be looting the church's coffers. Since 1988, when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the revocation of the cult's tax-exempt status, a massive IRS probe of church centers across the country has been under way. An IRS agent, Marcus Owens, has estimated that thousands of IRS employees have been involved. Another agent, in an internal IRS memorandum, spoke hopefully of the "ultimate disintegration" of the church. A small but helpful beacon shone last June when a federal appeals court ruled that two cassette tapes featuring conversations between church officials and their lawyers are evidence of a plan to commit "future frauds" against the IRS.

The IRS and FBI have been debriefing Scientology defectors for the past three years, in part to gain evidence for a major racketeering case that appears to have stalled last summer. Federal agents complain that the Justice Department is unwilling to spend the money needed to endure a drawn-out war with Scientology or to fend off the cult's notorious jihads against individual agents. "In my opinion the church has one of the most effective intelligence operations in the U.S., rivaling even that of the FBI," says Ted Gunderson, a former head of the FBI's Los Angeles office.

Foreign governments have been moving even more vigorously against the organization. In Canada the church and nine of its members will be tried in June on charges of stealing government documents (many of them retrieved in an enormous police raid of the church's Toronto headquarters). Scientology proposed to give $1 million to the needy if the case was dropped, but Canada spurned the offer. Since 1986 authorities in France, Spain and Italy have raided more than 50 Scientology centers. Pending charges against more than 100 of its overseas church members include fraud, extortion, capital flight, coercion, illegally practicing medicine and taking advantage of mentally incapacitated people. In Germany last month, leading politicians accused the cult of trying to infiltrate a major party as well as launching an immense recruitment drive in the east.

Sometimes even the church's biggest zealots can use a little protection. Screen star Travolta, 37, has long served as an unofficial Scientology spokesman, even though he told a magazine in 1983 that he was opposed to the church's management. High-level defectors claim that Travolta has long feared that if he defected, details of his sexual life would be made public. "He felt pretty intimidated about this getting out and told me so," recalls William Franks, the church's former chairman of the board. "There were no outright threats made, but it was implicit. If you leave, they immediately start digging up everything." Franks was driven out in 1981 after attempting to reform the church.

The church's former head of security, Richard Aznaran, recalls Scientology ringleader Miscavige repeatedly joking to staffers about Travolta's allegedly promiscuous homosexual behavior. At this point any threat to expose Travolta seems superfluous: last May a male porn star collected $100,000 from a tabloid for an account of his alleged two-year liaison with the celebrity. Travolta refuses to comment, and in December his lawyer dismissed questions about the subject as "bizarre." Two weeks later, Travolta announced that he was getting married to actress Kelly Preston, a fellow Scientologist.

Shortly after Hubbard's death the church retained Trout & Ries, a respected, Connecticut-based firm of marketing consultants, to help boost its public image. "We were brutally honest," says Jack Trout. "We advised them to clean up their act, stop with the controversy and even to stop being a church. They didn't want to hear that." Instead, Scientology hired one of the country's largest p.r. outfits, Hill and Knowlton, whose executives refuse to discuss the lucrative relationship. "Hill and Knowlton must feel that these guys are not totally off the wall," says Trout. "Unless it's just for the money."

One of Scientology's main strategies is to keep advancing the tired argument that the church is being "persecuted" by antireligionists. It is supported in that position by the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Council of Churches. But in the end, money is what Scientology is all about. As long as the organization's opponents and victims are successfully squelched, Scientology's managers and lawyers will keep pocketing millions of dollars by helping it achieve its ends.

"I freed thousands of slaves. I could have freed thousands more, if they had known they were slaves." - Harriet Tubman

<hr> From: desertphile@hot mail. com (David Rice, Esq.)
Subject: TIME (old) The Scientologists and Me
Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2005 01:20:59 GMT
Organization: Church of Crimeatology
Message-ID: <42718c08@news2.lightlink.com>

TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1991 May 06, 1991 Scientology SPECIAL REPORT, Page 57 COVER STORY The Scientologists and Me

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Strange things seem to happen to people who write about Scientology. Journalist Paulette Cooper wrote a critical book on the cult in 1971. This led to a Scientology plot (called Operation Freak-Out) whose goal, according to church documents, was "to get P.C. incarcerated in a mental institution or jail." It almost worked: by impersonating Cooper, Scientologists got her indicted in 1973 for threatening to bomb the church. Cooper, who also endured 19 lawsuits by the church, was finally exonerated in 1977 after FBI raids on the church offices in Los Angeles and Washington uncovered documents from the bomb scheme. No Scientologists were ever tried in the matter.

For the TIME story, at least 10 attorneys and six private detectives were unleashed by Scientology and its followers in an effort to threaten, harass and discredit me. Last Oct. 12, not long after I began this assignment, I planned to lunch with Eugene Ingram, the church's leading private eye and a former cop. Ingram, who was tossed off the Los Angeles police force in 1981 for alleged ties to prostitutes and drug dealers, had told me that he might be able to arrange a meeting with church boss David Miscavige. Just hours before the lunch, the church's "national trial counsel," Earle Cooley, called to inform me that I would be eating alone.

Alone, perhaps, but not forgotten. By day's end, I later learned, a copy of my personal credit report--with detailed information about my bank accounts, home mortgage, credit-card payments, home address and Social Security number--had been illegally retrieved from a national credit bureau called Trans Union. The sham company that received it, "Educational Funding Services" of Los Angeles, gave as its address a mail drop a few blocks from Scientology's headquarters.

The owner of the mail drop is a private eye named Fred Wolfson, who admits that an Ingram associate retained him to retrieve credit reports on several individuals. Wolfson says he was told that Scientology's attorneys "had judgments against these people and were trying to collect on them." He says now, "These are vicious people. These are vipers." Ingram, through a lawyer, denies any involvement in the scam.

During the past five months, private investigators have been contacting acquaintances of mine, ranging from neighbors to a former colleague, to inquire about subjects such as my health (like my credit rating, it's excellent) and whether I've ever had trouble with the IRS (unlike Scientology, I haven't). One neighbor was greeted at dawn outside my Manhattan apartment building by two men who wanted to know whether I lived there. I finally called Cooley to demand that Scientology stop the nonsense. He promised to look into it.

After that, however, an attorney subpoenaed me, while another falsely suggested that I might own shares in a company I was reporting about that had been taken over by Scientologists (he also threatened to contact the Securities and Exchange Commission). A close friend in Los Angeles received a disturbing telephone call from a Scientology staff member seeking data about me--an indication that the cult may have illegally obtained my personal phone records. Two detectives contacted me, posing as a friend and a relative of a so-called cult victim, to elicit negative statements from me about Scientology. Some of my conversations with them were taped, transcribed and presented by the church in affidavits to TIME's lawyers as "proof" of my bias against Scientology.

Among the comments I made to one of the detectives, who represented himself as "Harry Baxter," a friend of the victim's family, was that "the church trains people to lie." Baxter and his colleagues are hardly in a position to dispute that observation. His real name is Barry Silvers, and he is a former investigator for the Justice Department's Organized Crime Strike Force.

By Richard Behar

"I freed thousands of slaves. I could have freed thousands more, if they had known they were slaves." - Harriet Tubman

<hr> From: desertphile@hot mail. com (David Rice, Esq.)
Subject: TIME (old) Foul Weather for Fair Use (Bare-faced Messiah)
Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2005 01:21:30 GMT
Organization: Church of Crimeatology
Message-ID: <42718c29@news2.lightlink.com>

TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1990 Apr. 30, 1990 Vietnam 15 Years Later LAW, Page 86 Foul Weather for Fair Use

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A wave of copyright suits puts scholars on the defensive

By R.Z. Sheppard--With reporting by Andrea Sachs/New York and Gavin Scott/Chicago

It was a perfect day for bananafish, but inclement for scholars and publishers. On Jan. 29, 1987, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York City, ruled that the reclusive author J.D. Salinger could prevent quotation of his unpublished letters by a biographer. The decision (which the U.S. Supreme Court refused to review) went further. The biographer, Ian Hamilton, could not even describe the correspondence in such a way that it caught the spirit of Salinger's writing. Hamilton found himself, in the words of the court, with "no inherent right to copy the `accuracy' or the `vividness' of the letter writer's expression." Rewritten and finally published in 1988, In Search of J.D. Salinger was less a solid biography than a stylish tour de force about Hamilton's troubles with copyright law.

Similar pitfalls await other writers and publishers who help themselves to unpublished sources. This month St. Martin's Press recalled reviewers' galleys of Saul Bellow: A Biography of the Imagination after Bellow objected to portions that were partly based on his letters, including some he wrote to author Ruth Miller. "I'm having a little trouble with that one," the Nobel laureate told the Chicago Tribune, referring to the book. So is Miller, a friend of the novelist for more than 50 years.

Russell Miller (no relation) was a bit luckier. His Bare-Faced Messiah, a damning portrait of the late L. Ron Hubbard, founder of the Church of Scientology, remained in bookstores only on a technicality. Although the court agreed with the complainant, New Era Publications International, a Danish company with Scientology connections, it found that New Era had taken too long to bring suit over Miller's use of Hubbard's letters and diaries.

Copyright law permits reasonable use of limited portions of published works. But such "fair use" is severely restricted for unpublished materials. Identical bills were recently introduced in the U.S. Senate by Paul Simon of Illinois and in the House by Robert Kastenmeier of Wisconsin that would, with a simple word change, apply the fair use doctrine equally to unpublished and published works. Hearings have yet to be scheduled, but eventual passage is considered likely.

In the meantime, the fallout from Salinger and New Era has had what is usually described in literary circles as a "chilling effect." Publishers are cautious about acquiring new books that may cause long delays and legal expenses. Writers who have devoted years and heavy expenses to a project can suddenly find their efforts wasted. After two decades of research for his biography of Malcolm X, Bruce Perry, a scholar formerly on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania, is eliminating major portions of his book. They include extensive paraphrasings from Malcolm's autobiography--a work, incidentally, that was written by Alex Haley. Ron Nessen, former presidential press secretary to Gerald Ford, sued the Washingtonian and his ex-wife for $50 million after the magazine ran an article by the former Mrs. Nessen that contained his letters to her.

The widow of Richard Wright took action against both Warner Books and Wright biographer Margaret Walker, who used excerpts from letters sent to her by the author of Native Son. Meta Carpenter Wilde was enjoined from using all but a fraction of the billets-doux she received from William Faulkner during the 16 years of their on-again, off-again affair. The new trustee of the James Agee estate disapproved of a planned book about the film critic and poet and withdrew permission granted by her predecessor. But scholar Victor Kramer, a professor of English at Georgia State University, has filed suit against the Agee trustee.

Passage of the Kastenmeier/Simon bill would address the immediate problem but would not mean that friends or former lovers of the famous could publish their mail freely. The stationery may belong to the recipients, but the words on it do not. Courts would still have to weigh the purpose, the nature, the amount to be quoted, and the effect of the use on the potential market value of the copyrighted work.

In any case, copyright law would remain a balancing act, with judges making case-by-case decisions. Owning a copyright is not the same as owning a house. In order to encourage creativity, Congress granted long-lasting copyright monopolies (currently 50 years after the death of the author); but the law is also intended to promote the public good by disseminating art and knowledge through secondary uses.

Including unpublished material in the fair use section of the copyright law would expand this utilitarian view, which received an eloquent boost in last month's Harvard Law Review by Judge Pierre N. Leval of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. "All intellectual creative activity is in part derivative," said Leval, who made no brief for the pending legislation. "There is no such thing as a wholly original thought or invention. Each advance stands on building blocks fashioned by prior thinkers."

"I freed thousands of slaves. I could have freed thousands more, if they had known they were slaves." - Harriet Tubman

<hr> From: desertphile@hot mail. com (David Rice, Esq.)
Subject: TIME (Old) NarConon mentioned
Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2005 01:22:13 GMT
Organization: Church of Crimeatology
Message-ID: <42718c53@news2.lightlink.com>

TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1993 July 26, 1993 The Flood Of '93 DRUGS, Page 56 Choose Your Poison

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While the government boasts that drug use has fallen, the range of intoxicants has increased, ensnaring a new generation

By JILL SMOLOWE--With reporting by Ann Blackman/ Washington, Massimo Calabresi/New York and Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles

In New York City's Spanish Harlem, the highs come cheap. To create a "blunt," teenagers slice open a cigar and mix the tobacco with marijuana. To enhance the hit, they fashion "B-40s" by dipping the cigar in malt liquor. In Atlanta, police observed 100 teenagers and young adults at a rave party in an abandoned house--the rage among middle-class youths everywhere with money to burn--and their rich assortment of hooch: pot, uppers, downers, heroin, cocaine and Ecstasy, a powerful amphetamine. In Los Angeles, Hispanic gangs chill out by dipping their cigarettes in PCP (phencyclidine, an animal tranquilizer), while black gangs still favor rock cocaine. Some of the city's Iranians go in for smoking heroin, known as "chasing the tiger," while Arabs settled in Detroit prefer khat, which gives an amphetamine-like high and is also the drug of choice in Somalia.

The high times may be a changin', but America's drug scene is as frightening as ever. Last week the University of Michigan released a survey showing a rise in illicit drug use by American college students, with the most significant increase involving hallucinogens like LSD. Meanwhile a canvas of narcotics experts across the country indicated that while drug fashions vary from region to region and class to class, crack use is generally holding steady and heroin and marijuana are on the rise. Junior high and high school students surveyed by the government report a greater availability of most serious drugs. Law officials and treatment specialists on the front lines of the drug war report that the problem transcends both income and racial differences. "When it comes to drugs, there is a complete democracy," says Clark Carr, executive director of Narconon Professional Center in North Hollywood, California.

The government paints a much brighter picture. According to the 1992 Household Survey on Drug Abuse, released last month by the Department of Health and Human Services, the nationwide pattern of drug abuse is in decline. The study shows an 11% dip in illicit drug use by Americans 12 years or older, from 12.8 million in 1991 to 11.4 million in 1992. The drop is pronounced in all age groups except those 35 and over, who use drugs at a rate comparable to 1979 levels. Yet the number of hard-core abusers remains unchanged. And a smorgasbord of nouvelle intoxicants is being served up to a new generation of users.

The frenetic '80s infatuation with stimulants has become the mellower '90s flirtation with depressants. Heroin, which has a calming effect, is gaining on crack, which produces high agitation. Some drug experts sense a sociological sea change. "It's really relevant that in the '80s the drug of choice was one that the second you did it, you wanted more," says Carlo McCormick, an editor at a culture and fashion monthly who was the host of LSD parties in New York City in the '80s. "At this point with the current crop of drugs, you're set for the night." Others have a wider perspective. "If you look historically at a large population that has been using a stimulant like cocaine," says James Nielsen, a 26-year veteran with the Drug Enforcement Administration, "they will then go on to a depressant like heroin."

Ironically, the heroin surge also reflects a new health consciousness on the part of drug abusers. Youthful offenders, scared off by the devastation of crack, are dabbling in heroin instead, while chronic crack addicts are changing over to heroin because of its mellower high and cheaper cost. Among both groups, fear of HIV transmission has made snorting, rather than injection, the preferred method of ingestion. "The needle is out, man," says Stephan ("Boobie") Gaston, 40, of East Harlem, a 26-year abuser. "All they're doing is sniffing." Even so, the risks remain high. Heroin-related incidents jumped from 10,300 during a three-month period in 1991 to 13,400 during a comparable period in 1992, according to a Federal Drug Abuse Warning Network survey of hospital emergency rooms. Heroin-treatment admissions have also increased over the past year.

The turn toward heroin is coupled with a sharp recognition among youthful abusers of the dangers of crack. Anthony M., 13, who is detoxifying from a marijuana habit at the Daytop Village Bronx Outreach Center in New York City, estimates that 20 or so of his 200 classmates use heroin or other drugs, but among them, only one goes in for crack. "That kid wanted others to do it too," he says, "but the other kids were like, `Nah,' because some of the kids, their parents had died because of crack."

Other hard-learned lessons seem not to affect young people today. LSD use among high school seniors reached its highest level last year since 1983, according to an annual study by the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research. In the rave clubs of Los Angeles, $2 to $5 buys a teenager a 10-to-12-hour LSD high. "LSD may be a prime example of generational forgetting," says Lloyd Johnston, principal investigator for the study. "Today's youngsters don't hear what an earlier generation heard--that LSD may cause bad trips, flashbacks, schizophrenia, brain damage, chromosomal damage and so on."

Marijuana, usually the first illegal drug sampled by eventual hard-core abusers, is also back in vogue. Of the 11.4 million Americans who admitted to using drugs within a month of the 1992 Household Survey, 55% referred solely to pot; an additional 19% abused marijuana in combination with other drugs. "Cannabis is the drug that teaches our kids what other drugs are all about," says Charlie Stowell, the DEA's cannabis coordinator in California. He says today's marijuana is considerably more potent and expensive than the pot of the '60s because the amount of THC--the ingredient that provides the high--has risen from 2% or 3% to 12%.

The '90s has also ushered in some drug novelties. Since the turn of the dec ade, gamma hydroxy butyrate, known as GHB, has been used illegally in the body-building community to reduce fat. Recently, however, youths have begun to abuse the drug to achieve a trancelike state. In New York City kids concoct a "Max" cocktail by dissolving GHB in water, then mixing in amphetamines. A different mix resulted in several overdoses in the Atlanta area in the past few months. Manhattan's hard-core sex community has also turned on to "Special K," or Cat Valium, an anesthetic that numbs the body.

The Administration appears to be pursuing several drug strategies simultaneously. The President has asked for a 7% rise in the budget for law enforcement as well as $13 billion for drug-control programs, an increase of $804 million over the current year. Last month Lee Brown, the Administration's drug czar, told a Senate subcommittee that the drug-control programs would now emphasize "demand-reduction programs" would now emphasize young people. Attorney General Janet Reno has also adopted a high profile on drugs, campaigning for a "national agenda for children" that would attack the root causes of drug abuse and violence.

Meanwhile the daily challenge of containing the drug epidemic falls largely to local cops and DEA field offices. Ingenuity is the name of the game. In California, where 19% of the state's marijuana is grown indoors to evade detection, the DEA tracks purchases of illicit equipment, such as high-pressure sodium lights, to pick up the trail of growers. Minneapolis police have grown more sophisticated in tracking crack dealers who no longer keep cars, residences or bank accounts in their own names. "We've begun using financial records and become more knowledgeable in accounting and the flow of money," says Lieut. Bernie Bottema, supervisor of the city's narcotics unit. "We've had to rise to the level of our competition." It appears that level is not going to drop off anytime soon.

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