A "Moonshot" Against Cancer is Misguided; Better America Discover a Vaccine Against Heroin/Cocaine Addiction

This Blogger was taken with President Obama, in his 2016 STATE OF THE UNION address, proclaiming a MOONSHOT against Cancer, an attempt to eradicate the dreaded disease, with Vice President Biden as his ramrod in this effort.

The American Council on Science and Health was not overly impressed

“Early on in his final State of the Union address, President  Obama advocated for a “moonshot” campaign to “cure cancer once and for all.” And now while this is an admirable and lofty goal, the plain, unadulterated truth is that completely eradicating this disease is simply unachievable.

“Last year, Vice President Biden said that with a new moonshot, America can cure cancer. Last month, he worked with this Congress to give scientists at the National Institutes of Health the strongest resources that they’ve had in over a decade,” the president said. “So tonight, I’m announcing a new national effort to get it done. And because he’s gone to the mat for all of us on so many issues over the past 40 years, I’m putting Joe in charge of Mission Control. For the loved ones we’ve all lost, for the families that we can still save, let’s make America the country that cures cancer once and for all.”

As the president said, the idea to make curing cancer America’s next “moonshot” first came from Biden, who envisioned it shortly after the tragic loss of his son, Beau, to brain cancer last May at age 46. The VP personally lobbied for the biggest increase in cancer research funding in a decade in the budget deal struck in December — $264 million for the National Cancer Institute, a division of the NIH.

The effort Obama proposed, with Biden the designated head of “Mission Control” — …. would be the second federal campaign to reduce the toll of cancer, …. In 1971, President Nixon also declared war on cancer via the National Cancer Act, which markedly increased federal funding for cancer research….ACSH.”

This Blogger believes that the Moonshot against Cancer, crafted by President Obama, Speaker Paul Ryan and  Vice President Biden, all three galvanized by the tragic death of Biden’s son from cancer, is a misapplication of resources, and a misguided effort.

Cancer is a universal scourge of Nature, killing people in Japan, South Africa, Brazil, Russia, Britain, Germany, Egypt, all over the globe. Scientists in very nation on Earth are trying to find a cure, either with government assistance or on their own private volition. Cancer is natural.

The death of Beau Biden from Cancer, should not blind America from its proper allocation of resources. The American Disease which needs to be conquered, and fairly expeditiously, is addiction, specifically heroin and cocaine addiction.

Both heroin and cocaine were invented by mankind; and now, here and now, those man-made chemical compounds are ravishing American society.

Let us muster our resources and find a vaccine which can halt the diseases of heroin and cocaine addiction. If mankind  can create heroin, certainly Mankind can find a vaccine to end its addictive properties.

Heroin was first synthesized by Dr. Charles Romley Wright of London, England in 1876; it is a 19^th Century, Victorian invention. It was suppose to be a non-addictive alternative to morphine.” He boiled anhydrous morphine alkaloid with acetic anhydride over a stove for several hours and produced a more potent, acetylated form of morphine, now called diacetylmorphine, also known as heroin.”

The Cocaine alkaloid was first isolated in 1855 by the German chemist Friedrich Gaedcke. In 1859, Albert Niemann, a student in Germany, developed an improved purification process. Cocaine is a German concoction from Victorian times.

Readers, ponder this, in 2016, in the 21^st Century, our beloved American society is being RAVISHED, savaged, and gutted by two 19^th Century Chemical concoctions,  and yet Americans are helpless.

That helplessness is defeatist, unacceptable, and unconscionable.

It is incomprehensible that American Science, American Medicine, American Chemistry, with all those American Nobel Laureates, cannot discover a vaccine which will immunize Americans from the addictive powers of two Victorian chemical compounds, created by two 19^th Century chemists with a primitive knowledge mere steps above alchemy. The creators of these compounds worked without computers or vast libraries of science, medicine and chemistry, yet Millennial Genius cannot mitigate their alchemy?

Every mammalian species in history has had cancer; only Mankind since the wild Victorian  Age has been blighted with the heroin and cocaine addictions.

Cancer kills; everyone in America knows someone who has died from Cancer; but addiction is worst, for it kills the souls of Mankind, and the soul is the living entity which separates Mankind from the amoeba. 

Addiction is turning America's ghettos, barrios, tony neighborhoods,  suburbs, farms, ranches, villages, hamlets, companies, campuses  and armed forces , into a dystopian wasteland inhabited by soulless zombies, willing to do anything for their addiction, anything.

“The face of heroin use in America has changed utterly. Forty or fifty years ago heroin addicts were overwhelmingly male, disproportionately black..... Most came from poor inner-city neighbourhoods. These days,..more than half are women, and 90% are white. 

The drug has crept into the suburbs and the middle classes…..the spread of heroin to a new market of relatively affluent, suburban whites has allowed the drug to make a comeback, after decades of decline. Over the past six years the number of annual users has almost doubled, from 370,000 in 2007 to 680,000 in 2013. .... heroin’s resurgence means that, by some measures, it is more popular than crack cocaine, the bogeyman of the 1980s and 1990s. Its increased popularity in America contrasts strongly with Europe, where the number of users has fallen by a third in the past decade.  Just as the demand side of America’s heroin market was heating up, so too was supply. Though Afghanistan accounts for 80% of global opium production, America gets most of its heroin from Mexico. Historically that has checked consumption, since Mexico has long been a relatively small producer of opium poppies.

In the past few years the Mexicans have upped their game. …. Mexico is now the world’s third-biggest producer of opium, after Afghanistan and Myanmar.

Policy changes in America have given Mexico’s narco-farmers further incentives to focus on opium. Until not so long ago, Mexican traffickers made a lot of their money from cannabis. But these days most of the cannabis in America is home-grown. Nearly half the states have legalised medical marijuana, and four have voted to legalise it outright. Exporting pot to the United States is now like taking tequila to Mexico. Facing a glut in the cannabis market, Mexican farmers have turned to poppies.

The low transport costs faced by Mexican traffickers, who need only drive from Sinaloa to the border, mean that their heroin is far cheaper than the Colombian or Asian sort. A gram of pure heroin in America now costs about $400, less than half the price, in real terms, that it cost in the 1980s. And whereas much of the heroin in the past was of the “black tar” variety, which is usually injected, there is a trend towards brown heroin, which lends itself better to snorting and smoking…...THE ECONOMIST.”

Mexican Drug Cartels are flooding America with cheap heroin; which means America will soon be subservient to the whims, caprices and greed of Mexican drug lords.  However, if America could develop a vaccine against addiction, every America could use any amount of heroin he or she wanted and still not be impaired nor subservient nor soulless. 

The addiction vaccine would make heroin use equal to eating chocolate.

Treatment of addiction is not enough; every America should be immunized to addiction. The shots should be given out with the polio vaccine.

In every aspect of his thinking and governance, President Obama is ossified and calcified, enslaved to degraded liberal shibboleths. His idea to fight addiction is more money spent on education and  treatment....which,translated into Victorian terms, is newer and faster clipper ships around the Horn. A new thinking is required, a paradigm shift. America should not increase spending on building faster ships around the Horn, but building the Panama Canal, by-passing the Horn, a vaccine against addiction.

Even if he is alone, exiled to the wilderness, this Blogger advocates, supports  and endorses  a Moonshot against addiction, a vaccine against addiction, a 21st Century magic bullet worthy of Paul Ehrlich's victory against 19th Century syphilis. That is the proper allocation of American resources.

Once President Obama leaves office, there will be an opportunity for new thinking in the land. Then the nation should launch its moonshot against addiction,a hunt for the magic bullet of addiction immunization.

Once America defeats American addiction by immunization, then it can worry about Globalized Cancer.