Aug 31, 2009

Troops exit temple complex - Phnom Penh Post

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Cambodia's Defence Ministry says government has halved deployed troops at Preah Vihear but warns that forces remain prepared for any future hostilities.
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Photo by: Tracey Shelton
Soldiers walk down the mountain near Preah Vihear temple last month. One brigade left the area this week following Hun Sen’s promise to reduce troop numbers around the disputed temple.

Troops stationed at the Preah Vihear temple complex near the Thai border completed their redeployment over the weekend, a Royal Cambodian Armed Forces commander told the Post on Sunday.

Srey Doek, commander of RCAF Division 3, said Prime Minister Hun Sen on Saturday met soldiers from Brigade 11 during their redeployment to their base in Kampot province.

"[Hun Sen] welcomed them as they travelled near Siem Reap and offered them each 50,000 riels [US$12], and the prime minister's wife offered them gifts of fruit," Srey Doek said.

Srey Doek said the money and fruit were given to nearly 1,000 RCAF soldiers as expressions of gratitude for their service at the front line, adding that troops from other brigades from Siem Reap as well as members of Hun Sen's personal bodyguard who were also redeployed over the weekend did not meet the prime minister.

Meanwhile, an official at the Defence Ministry said Sunday that forces at the border have now been halved.

"We have pulled out 50 percent of the troops from Preah Vihear temple," said ministry spokesman Chhum Socheat.

"This shows that the situation at the border is really getting better, and that both countries have a mutual understanding of peace," he added.

Hun Sen declared last week that the 13-month standoff with Thailand over the disputed Preah Vihear temple complex, which claimed more than seven lives and left hundreds homeless, had effectively ended following a bilateral withdrawal of troops announced during a meeting on August 24 between the head of RCAF, General Pol Saroeun, and his Thai counterpart, General Songkitti Jaggabatra of the Royal Thai Armed Forces.

Troops still on guard
Despite a thaw in relations, Cambodian military officials last week were quick to point out that troops would still be necessary to guard the integrity of the border and the sovereignty of the nation.

Defence Minister Tea Banh said some troops would remain at the border.

"We do not need too many soldiers there now. We are currently adjusting the numbers to achieve the right balance for the situation," Tea Banh said last week.

Chea Dara, RCAF deputy commander in chief, echoed this sentiment Sunday, saying the border's security remained a vital concern and downplaying the impact of the withdrawal on Cambodia's ability to secure its border with Thailand.

"It is not a problem for our soldiers to defend the nation, even as their numbers have been reduced by the withdrawal," he said Sunday. "We have kept enough of our troops in place."

He said if Thailand "shows a softer manner" Cambodia could cut troop numbers further. "However, if anything happened, our troop mobility would be very swift."

Thailand in June reignited the row over the temple when it asked World Heritage body UNESCO to reconsider its decision to formally list the temple in Cambodia.

Cambodia and Thailand have been at loggerheads over the land around Preah Vihear temple for decades.
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Junta briefs KIO on Kokang war - Mizzima

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Monday, 31 August 2009 20:55
Chiang Mai (Mizzima) – The Burmese military junta has taken pains to explain to the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO) that its recent war on the Kokang armed group was to nip in the bud production of narcotic drugs and arms and ammunition by the ethnic ceasefire group.

A junta delegation led by Col. Thet Pone from Northern Military Command Military Affairs Security (MAS) met ethnic Kachin leaders on August 29 in Laiza Hotel in KIO’s headquarter in Laiza. Col. Thet Pone told them that the Kokang ethnic group led by Peng Jia Xing was into manufacturing arms and traded in drugs.

On the KIO’s side, the Strategic Command Commander Brig. Gen. En Banla, Vice Chief-of-Staff Col. Guan Mau and Secretary Dr. Laja attended the meeting.

"They made out that the Kokang group led by Peng Jia Xiang fired first at them, when they wanted to inspect their arms manufacturing unit and search for narcotic drugs. After which they had no option but to occupy the area," a Kachin officer said on condition of anonymity.

The military government's mouthpiece the 'New Light of Myanmar' reported that in the three-day clashes between the junta's forces and the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA), 11 were killed and 31 injured on the Burmese Army’s side. Besides 15 policemen were killed, 13 injured and eight bodies of Kokang soldiers were also found, the news paper reported.

But according to a statement issued by Peng Jia Xiang's, about 200 civilians were killed in the two-day battle and three Chinese civilians were killed in artillery fire from government troops.

The statement added that the junta had threatened ethnic armed groups which had rejected the 2008 constitution. The regime was trying to divide and weaken them.

Military observers in the region said that about 800 Kokang troops were still moving along the Sino-Burma border. Some of them crossed into China and surrendered their arms to Chinese authorities.

A KIO officer felt that the junta had deliberately created a rift among Kokang troops.

"The SPDC (junta) launched the war, while rival Kokang groups were fighting for power, which was created by SPDC. As soon as the new administrative body was formed they set up the Border Guard Force (BGF). If Peng Jia Xiang had gone to that meeting, the junta would certainly have arrested him for interrogation," he said.

The junta backed the breakaway group led by Vice-Chairman Bai So Cheng leading to the clashes.

The SPDC has been putting pressure on all ceasefire ethnic armed groups to disarm and transform into the Border Guard Force. There is concern that there would be similar war against other ceasefire groups which refused the junta's proposal on BGF.

Four ceasefire groups the 'United Wa State Army' (UWSA), 'Kachin Independence Organization' (KIO), 'Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army' (MNDAA) and Maila group or 'National Democracy Alliance Army' (NDAA) formed a military alliance.

The allies, however, did not pitch in, in the war against the Kokang group. The Kachin people are concerned with the clashes between junta’s forces and Kokang forces.

The local military command in Kachin State, the Northern Command, has tightened security in the region.

The military command has restricted movement near Bala Min Htin bridge in Sitapu Ward, Myitkyina August 29 night and announced that all those who violate the restriction will be dealt with.

It has ordered closure of the Myitkyina night market after 10 p.m.
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VOA News - Burma Refugees in China Head Home as Fighting Dies Down



31 August 2009

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Refugees that fled to China to escape fighting in Burma are beginning to head home after Burmese authorities said the situation has returned to normal. But analysts say more fighting could break out as Burmese forces try to consolidate control ahead of next year's elections.

Kokang refugees walk with their belongings after returning to the China-Burma border town of Yanlonkyaing, Burma, 29 Aug 2009
Kokang refugees walk with their belongings after returning to the China-Burma border town of Yanlonkyaing, Burma, 29 Aug 2009
Hundreds of refugees left China's Yunnan province Monday for home in Kokang, the mainly ethnic Chinese region of Burma's northeastern Shan state.

More than 30,000 people from Kokang had fled across the border to China to escape weeks of fighting between Burma's government forces and a local militia that controls the region.

Burma's state media reported more than 30 people were killed in the clashes but that the fighting in Kokang, which broke the region's 20-year ceasefire, had stopped.

Ian Holliday is dean of social sciences at the University of Hong Kong and researches Burma politics. He says Burma's military government is looking to take back control of the country's several militia-controlled areas in time for the 2010 elections.

"Ahead of that election, the junta is extremely keen to really pacify the entire territory and bring it under political control," said Holliday. "So, instead of having this rather gray area of a ceasefire deal which enables ethnic militias to control parts of the territory, the government now wants to make sure that its control extends across all of Burma. And, to do that, the government is upping the ante in its long standing struggle with these militias."

In June, Burmese forces attacked Karen rebels, who control territory on Burma's border with Thailand, forcing thousands of villagers to flee into Thailand.

Holliday says more fighting is possible in the coming weeks in other areas of Burma that are outside of government control.

But, he says the fighting in the Kokang region should stay quiet as China, one of Burma's few backers, is very concerned about stability on its western border.

"We are talking about something which goes right into Chinese security on a border which the Chinese themselves are very worried about," he said. "We have seen Tibet last year, we have seen Xinjiang this year... So, the last thing that they want is anything that might be destabilizing on a frontier like that.

Holliday says China has more leverage on Burma than any other country in the world and that it will use every means to prevent the spread of the conflict. But, he adds Beijing is facing an extremely nationalistic military government in Burma that does not like to take orders from anybody.
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Aug 30, 2009

Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption - The New York Review of Books

Resized image of Ritalin-SR-20mg-full.png; squ...Image via Wikipedia

By Marcia Angell

Side Effects: A Prosecutor, a Whistleblower, and a Bestselling Antidepressant on Trial
by Alison Bass

Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 260 pp., $24.95

Our Daily Meds: How the Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves into Slick Marketing Machines and Hooked the Nation on Prescription Drugs
by Melody Petersen

Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 432 pp., $26.00

Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness
by Christopher Lane

Yale University Press, 263 pp., $27.50; $18.00 (paper)

A Note to Readers

Recently Senator Charles Grassley, ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, has been looking into financial ties between the pharmaceutical industry and the academic physicians who largely determine the market value of prescription drugs. He hasn't had to look very hard.

Take the case of Dr. Joseph L. Biederman, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and chief of pediatric psychopharmacology at Harvard's Massachusetts General Hospital. Thanks largely to him, children as young as two years old are now being diagnosed with bipolar disorder and treated with a cocktail of powerful drugs, many of which were not approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for that purpose and none of which were approved for children below ten years of age.

Legally, physicians may use drugs that have already been approved for a particular purpose for any other purpose they choose, but such use should be based on good published scientific evidence. That seems not to be the case here. Biederman's own studies of the drugs he advocates to treat childhood bipolar disorder were, as The New York Times summarized the opinions of its expert sources, "so small and loosely designed that they were largely inconclusive."[1]

In June, Senator Grassley revealed that drug companies, including those that make drugs he advocates for childhood bipolar disorder, had paid Biederman $1.6 million in consulting and speaking fees between 2000 and 2007. Two of his colleagues received similar amounts. After the revelation, the president of the Massachusetts General Hospital and the chairman of its physician organization sent a letter to the hospital's physicians expressing not shock over the enormity of the conflicts of interest, but sympathy for the beneficiaries: "We know this is an incredibly painful time for these doctors and their families, and our hearts go out to them."



Or consider Dr. Alan F. Schatzberg, chair of Stanford's psychiatry department and president-elect of the American Psychiatric Association. Senator Grassley found that Schatzberg controlled more than $6 million worth of stock in Corcept Therapeutics, a company he cofounded that is testing mifepristone—the abortion drug otherwise known as RU-486—as a treatment for psychotic depression. At the same time, Schatzberg was the principal investigator on a National Institute of Mental Health grant that included research on mifepristone for this use and he was coauthor of three papers on the subject. In a statement released in late June, Stanford professed to see nothing amiss in this arrangement, although a month later, the university's counsel announced that it was temporarily replacing Schatzberg as principal investigator "to eliminate any misunderstanding."

Perhaps the most egregious case exposed so far by Senator Grassley is that of Dr. Charles B. Nemeroff, chair of Emory University's department of psychiatry and, along with Schatzberg, coeditor of the influential Textbook of Psychopharmacology.[2] Nemeroff was the principal investigator on a five-year $3.95 million National Institute of Mental Health grant—of which $1.35 million went to Emory for overhead—to study several drugs made by GlaxoSmithKline. To comply with university and government regulations, he was required to disclose to Emory income from GlaxoSmithKline, and Emory was required to report amounts over $10,000 per year to the National Institutes of Health, along with assurances that the conflict of interest would be managed or eliminated.

But according to Senator Grassley, who compared Emory's records with those from the company, Nemeroff failed to disclose approximately $500,000 he received from GlaxoSmithKline for giving dozens of talks promoting the company's drugs. In June 2004, a year into the grant, Emory conducted its own investigation of Nemeroff's activities, and found multiple violations of its policies. Nemeroff responded by assuring Emory in a memorandum, "In view of the NIMH/Emory/GSK grant, I shall limit my consulting to GSK to under $10,000/year and I have informed GSK of this policy." Yet that same year, he received $171,031 from the company, while he reported to Emory just $9,999—a dollar shy of the $10,000 threshold for reporting to the National Institutes of Health.

Emory benefited from Nemeroff's grants and other activities, and that raises the question of whether its lax oversight was influenced by its own conflicts of interest. As reported by Gardiner Harris in TheNew York Times,[3] Nemeroff himself had pointed out his value to Emory in a 2000 letter to the dean of the medical school, in which he justified his membership on a dozen corporate advisory boards by saying:

Surely you remember that Smith-Kline Beecham Pharmaceuticals donated an endowed chair to the department and there is some reasonable likelihood that Janssen Pharmaceuticals will do so as well. In addition, Wyeth-Ayerst Pharmaceuticals has funded a Research Career Development Award program in the department, and I have asked both AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals and Bristol-Meyers [sic] Squibb to do the same. Part of the rationale for their funding our faculty in such a manner would be my service on these boards.

Because these psychiatrists were singled out by Senator Grassley, they received a great deal of attention in the press, but similar conflicts of interest pervade medicine. (The senator is now turning his attention to cardiologists.) Indeed, most doctors take money or gifts from drug companies in one way or another. Many are paid consultants, speakers at company-sponsored meetings, ghost-authors of papers written by drug companies or their agents,[4] and ostensible "researchers" whose contribution often consists merely of putting their patients on a drug and transmitting some token information to the company. Still more doctors are recipients of free meals and other out-and-out gifts. In addition, drug companies subsidize most meetings of professional organizations and most of the continuing medical education needed by doctors to maintain their state licenses.

No one knows the total amount provided by drug companies to physicians, but I estimate from the annual reports of the top nine US drug companies that it comes to tens of billions of dollars a year. By such means, the pharmaceutical industry has gained enormous control over how doctors evaluate and use its own products. Its extensive ties to physicians, particularly senior faculty at prestigious medical schools, affect the results of research, the way medicine is practiced, and even the definition of what constitutes a disease.

Consider the clinical trials by which drugs are tested in human subjects.[5] Before a new drug can enter the market, its manufacturer must sponsor clinical trials to show the Food and Drug Administration that the drug is safe and effective, usually as compared with a placebo or dummy pill. The results of all the trials (there may be many) are submitted to the FDA, and if one or two trials are positive—that is, they show effectiveness without serious risk—the drug is usually approved, even if all the other trials are negative. Drugs are approved only for a specified use—for example, to treat lung cancer—and it is illegal for companies to promote them for any other use.

But physicians may prescribe approved drugs "off label"—i.e., without regard to the specified use—and perhaps as many as half of all prescriptions are written for off-label purposes. After drugs are on the market, companies continue to sponsor clinical trials, sometimes to get FDA approval for additional uses, sometimes to demonstrate an advantage over competitors, and often just as an excuse to get physicians to prescribe such drugs for patients. (Such trials are aptly called "seeding" studies.)

Since drug companies don't have direct access to human subjects, they need to outsource their clinical trials to medical schools, where researchers use patients from teaching hospitals and clinics, or to private research companies (CROs), which organize office-based physicians to enroll their patients. Although CROs are usually faster, sponsors often prefer using medical schools, in part because the research is taken more seriously, but mainly because it gives them access to highly influential faculty physicians—referred to by the industry as "thought-leaders" or "key opinion leaders" (KOLs). These are the people who write textbooks and medical journal papers, issue practice guidelines (treatment recommendations), sit on FDA and other governmental advisory panels, head professional societies, and speak at the innumerable meetings and dinners that take place every year to teach clinicians about prescription drugs. Having KOLs like Dr. Biederman on the payroll is worth every penny spent.

A few decades ago, medical schools did not have extensive financial dealings with industry, and faculty investigators who carried out industry-sponsored research generally did not have other ties to their sponsors. But schools now have their own manifold deals with industry and are hardly in a moral position to object to their faculty behaving in the same way. A recent survey found that about two thirds of academic medical centers hold equity interest in companies that sponsor research within the same institution.[6] A study of medical school department chairs found that two thirds received departmental income from drug companies and three fifths received personal income.[7] In the 1980s medical schools began to issue guidelines governing faculty conflicts of interest but they are highly variable, generally quite permissive, and loosely enforced.

Because drug companies insist as a condition of providing funding that they be intimately involved in all aspects of the research they sponsor, they can easily introduce bias in order to make their drugs look better and safer than they are. Before the 1980s, they generally gave faculty investigators total responsibility for the conduct of the work, but now company employees or their agents often design the studies, perform the analysis, write the papers, and decide whether and in what form to publish the results. Sometimes the medical faculty who serve as investigators are little more than hired hands, supplying patients and collecting data according to instructions from the company.

In view of this control and the conflicts of interest that permeate the enterprise, it is not surprising that industry-sponsored trials published in medical journals consistently favor sponsors' drugs—largely because negative results are not published, positive results are repeatedly published in slightly different forms, and a positive spin is put on even negative results. A review of seventy-four clinical trials of antidepressants, for example, found that thirty-seven of thirty-eight positive studies were published.[8] But of the thirty-six negative studies, thirty-three were either not published or published in a form that conveyed a positive outcome. It is not unusual for a published paper to shift the focus from the drug's intended effect to a secondary effect that seems more favorable.

The suppression of unfavorable research is the subject of Alison Bass's engrossing book, Side Effects: A Prosecutor, a Whistleblower, and a Bestselling Antidepressant on Trial. This is the story of how the British drug giant GlaxoSmithKline buried evidence that its top-selling antidepressant, Paxil, was ineffective and possibly harmful to children and adolescents. Bass, formerly a reporter for the Boston Globe, describes the involvement of three people—a skeptical academic psychiatrist, a morally outraged assistant administrator in Brown University's department of psychiatry (whose chairman received in 1998 over $500,000 in consulting fees from drug companies, including GlaxoSmithKline), and an indefatigable New York assistant attorney general. They took on GlaxoSmithKline and part of the psychiatry establishment and eventually prevailed against the odds.

The book follows the individual struggles of these three people over many years, culminating with GlaxoSmithKline finally agreeing in 2004 to settle charges of consumer fraud for $2.5 million (a tiny fraction of the more than $2.7 billion in yearly Paxil sales about that time). It also promised to release summaries of all clinical trials completed after December 27, 2000. Of much greater significance was the attention called to the deliberate, systematic practice of suppressing unfavorable research results, which would never have been revealed without the legal discovery process. Previously undisclosed, one of GlaxoSmithKline's internal documents said, "It would be commercially unacceptable to include a statement that efficacy had not been demonstrated, as this would undermine the profile of paroxetine [Paxil]."[9]

Many drugs that are assumed to be effective are probably little better than placebos, but there is no way to know because negative results are hidden. One clue was provided six years ago by four researchers who, using the Freedom of Information Act, obtained FDA reviews of every placebo-controlled clinical trial submitted for initial approval of the six most widely used antidepressant drugs approved between 1987 and 1999—Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, Celexa, Serzone, and Effexor.[10] They found that on average, placebos were 80 percent as effective as the drugs. The difference between drug and placebo was so small that it was unlikely to be of any clinical significance. The results were much the same for all six drugs: all were equally ineffective. But because favorable results were published and unfavorable results buried (in this case, within the FDA), the public and the medical profession believed these drugs were potent antidepressants.

Clinical trials are also biased through designs for research that are chosen to yield favorable results for sponsors. For example, the sponsor's drug may be compared with another drug administered at a dose so low that the sponsor's drug looks more powerful. Or a drug that is likely to be used by older people will be tested in young people, so that side effects are less likely to emerge. A common form of bias stems from the standard practice of comparing a new drug with a placebo, when the relevant question is how it compares with an existing drug. In short, it is often possible to make clinical trials come out pretty much any way you want, which is why it's so important that investigators be truly disinterested in the outcome of their work.

Conflicts of interest affect more than research. They also directly shape the way medicine is practiced, through their influence on practice guidelines issued by professional and governmental bodies, and through their effects on FDA decisions. A few examples: in a survey of two hundred expert panels that issued practice guidelines, one third of the panel members acknowledged that they had some financial interest in the drugs they considered.[11] In 2004, after the National Cholesterol Education Program called for sharply lowering the desired levels of "bad" cholesterol, it was revealed that eight of nine members of the panel writing the recommendations had financial ties to the makers of cholesterol-lowering drugs.[12] Of the 170 contributors to the most recent edition of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), ninety-five had financial ties to drug companies, including all of the contributors to the sections on mood disorders and schizophrenia.[13] Perhaps most important, many members of the standing committees of experts that advise the FDA on drug approvals also have financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry.[14]

In recent years, drug companies have perfected a new and highly effective method to expand their markets. Instead of promoting drugs to treat diseases, they have begun to promote diseases to fit their drugs. The strategy is to convince as many people as possible (along with their doctors, of course) that they have medical conditions that require long-term drug treatment. Sometimes called "disease-mongering," this is a focus of two new books: Melody Petersen's Our Daily Meds: How the Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves into Slick Marketing Machines and Hooked the Nation on Prescription Drugs and Christopher Lane's Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness.

To promote new or exaggerated conditions, companies give them serious-sounding names along with abbreviations. Thus, heartburn is now "gastro-esophageal reflux disease" or GERD; impotence is "erectile dysfunction" or ED; premenstrual tension is "premenstrual dysphoric disorder" or PMMD; and shyness is "social anxiety disorder" (no abbreviation yet). Note that these are ill-defined chronic conditions that affect essentially normal people, so the market is huge and easily expanded. For example, a senior marketing executive advised sales representatives on how to expand the use of Neurontin: "Neurontin for pain, Neurontin for monotherapy, Neurontin for bipolar, Neurontin for everything."[15] It seems that the strategy of the drug marketers—and it has been remarkably successful—is to convince Americans that there are only two kinds of people: those with medical conditions that require drug treatment and those who don't know it yet. While the strategy originated in the industry, it could not be implemented without the complicity of the medical profession.

Melody Petersen, who was a reporter for The New York Times, has written a broad, convincing indictment of the pharmaceutical industry.[16] She lays out in detail the many ways, both legal and illegal, that drug companies can create "blockbusters" (drugs with yearly sales of over a billion dollars) and the essential role that KOLs play. Her main example is Neurontin, which was initially approved only for a very narrow use—to treat epilepsy when other drugs failed to control seizures. By paying academic experts to put their names on articles extolling Neurontin for other uses—bipolar disease, post-traumatic stress disorder, insomnia, restless legs syndrome, hot flashes, migraines, tension headaches, and more—and by funding conferences at which these uses were promoted, the manufacturer was able to parlay the drug into a blockbuster, with sales of $2.7 billion in 2003. The following year, in a case covered extensively by Petersen for the Times, Pfizer pleaded guilty to illegal marketing and agreed to pay $430 million to resolve the criminal and civil charges against it. A lot of money, but for Pfizer, it was just the cost of doing business, and well worth it because Neurontin continued to be used like an all-purpose tonic, generating billions of dollars in annual sales.

Christopher Lane's book has a narrower focus—the rapid increase in the number of psychiatric diagnoses in the American population and in the use of psychoactive drugs (drugs that affect mental states) to treat them. Since there are no objective tests for mental illness and the boundaries between normal and abnormal are often uncertain, psychiatry is a particularly fertile field for creating new diagnoses or broadening old ones.[17] Diagnostic criteria are pretty much the exclusive province of the current edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which is the product of a panel of psychiatrists, most of whom, as I mentioned earlier, had financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry. Lane, a research professor of literature at Northwestern University, traces the evolution of the DSM from its modest beginnings in 1952 as a small, spiral-bound handbook (DSM-I) to its current 943-page incarnation (the revised version of DSM-IV) as the undisputed "bible" of psychiatry—the standard reference for courts, prisons, schools, insurance companies, emergency rooms, doctors' offices, and medical facilities of all kinds.

Given its importance, you might think that the DSM represents the authoritative distillation of a large body of scientific evidence. But Lane, using unpublished records from the archives of the American Psychiatric Association and interviews with the princi-pals, shows that it is instead the product of a complex of academic politics, personal ambition, ideology, and, perhaps most important, the influence of the pharmaceutical industry. What the DSM lacks is evidence. Lane quotes one contributor to the DSM-III task force:

There was very little systematic research, and much of the research that existed was really a hodgepodge—scattered, inconsistent, and ambiguous. I think the majority of us recognized that the amount of good, solid science upon which we were making our decisions was pretty modest.

Lane uses shyness as his case study of disease-mongering in psychiatry. Shyness as a psychiatric illness made its debut as "social phobia" in DSM-III in 1980, but was said to be rare. By 1994, when DSM-IV was published, it had become "social anxiety disorder," now said to be extremely common. According to Lane, GlaxoSmithKline, hoping to boost sales for its antidepressant, Paxil, decided to promote social anxiety disorder as "a severe medical condition." In 1999, the company received FDA approval to market the drug for social anxiety disorder. It launched an extensive media campaign to do it, including posters in bus shelters across the country showing forlorn individuals and the words "Imagine being allergic to people...," and sales soared. Barry Brand, Paxil's product director, was quoted as saying, "Every marketer's dream is to find an unidentified or unknown market and develop it. That's what we were able to do with social anxiety disorder."

Some of the biggest blockbusters are psychoactive drugs. The theory that psychiatric conditions stem from a biochemical imbalance is used as a justification for their widespread use, even though the theory has yet to be proved. Children are particularly vulnerable targets. What parents dare say "No" when a physician says their difficult child is sick and recommends drug treatment? We are now in the midst of an apparent epidemic of bipolar disease in children (which seems to be replacing attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder as the most publicized condition in childhood), with a forty-fold increase in the diagnosis between 1994 and 2003.[18] These children are often treated with multiple drugs off-label, many of which, whatever their other properties, are sedating, and nearly all of which have potentially serious side effects.

The problems I've discussed are not limited to psychiatry, although they reach their most florid form there. Similar conflicts of interest and biases exist in virtually every field of medicine, particularly those that rely heavily on drugs or devices. It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of TheNew England Journal of Medicine.

One result of the pervasive bias is that physicians learn to practice a very drug-intensive style of medicine. Even when changes in lifestyle would be more effective, doctors and their patients often believe that for every ailment and discontent there is a drug. Physicians are also led to believe that the newest, most expensive brand-name drugs are superior to older drugs or generics, even though there is seldom any evidence to that effect because sponsors do not usually compare their drugs with older drugs at equivalent doses. In addition, physicians, swayed by prestigious medical school faculty, learn to prescribe drugs for off-label uses without good evidence of effectiveness.

It is easy to fault drug companies for this situation, and they certainly deserve a great deal of blame. Most of the big drug companies have settled charges of fraud, off-label marketing, and other offenses. TAP Pharmaceuticals, for example, in 2001 pleaded guilty and agreed to pay $875 million to settle criminal and civil charges brought under the federal False Claims Act over its fraudulent marketing of Lupron, a drug used for treatment of prostate cancer. In addition to GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer, and TAP, other companies that have settled charges of fraud include Merck, Eli Lilly, and Abbott. The costs, while enormous in some cases, are still dwarfed by the profits generated by these illegal activities, and are therefore not much of a deterrent. Still, apologists might argue that the pharmaceutical industry is merely trying to do its primary job—further the interests of its investors—and sometimes it goes a little too far.

Physicians, medical schools, and professional organizations have no such excuse, since their only fiduciary responsibility is to patients. The mission of medical schools and teaching hospitals—and what justifies their tax-exempt status—is to educate the next generation of physicians, carry out scientifically important research, and care for the sickest members of society. It is not to enter into lucrative commercial alliances with the pharmaceutical industry. As reprehensible as many industry practices are, I believe the behavior of much of the medical profession is even more culpable.[19] Drug companies are not charities; they expect something in return for the money they spend, and they evidently get it or they wouldn't keep paying.

So many reforms would be necessary to restore integrity to clinical research and medical practice that they cannot be summarized briefly. Many would involve congressional legislation and changes in the FDA, including its drug approval process. But there is clearly also a need for the medical profession to wean itself from industry money almost entirely. Although industry–academic collaboration can make important scientific contributions, it is usually in carrying out basic research, not clinical trials, and even here, it is arguable whether it necessitates the personal enrichment of investigators. Members of medical school faculties who conduct clinical trials should not accept any payments from drug companies except research support, and that support should have no strings attached, including control by drug companies over the design, interpretation, and publication of research results.

Medical schools and teaching hospitals should rigorously enforce that rule, and should not enter into deals with companies whose products members of their faculty are studying. Finally, there is seldom a legitimate reason for physicians to accept gifts from drug companies, even small ones, and they should pay for their own meetings and continuing education.

After much unfavorable publicity, medical schools and professional organizations are beginning to talk about controlling conflicts of interest, but so far the response has been tepid. They consistently refer to "potential" conflicts of interest, as though that were different from the real thing, and about disclosing and "managing" them, not about prohibiting them. In short, there seems to be a desire to eliminate the smell of corruption, while keeping the money. Breaking the dependence of the medical profession on the pharmaceutical industry will take more than appointing committees and other gestures. It will take a sharp break from an extremely lucrative pattern of behavior. But if the medical profession does not put an end to this corruption voluntarily, it will lose the confidence of the public, and the government (not just Senator Grassley) will step in and impose regulation. No one in medicine wants that.

Notes

[1]Gardiner Harris and Benedict Carey, "Researchers Fail to Reveal Full Drug Pay," The New York Times, June 8, 2008.

[2]Most of the information in these paragraphs, including Nemeroff's quote in the summer of 2004, is drawn from a long letter written by Senator Grassley to James W. Wagner, President of Emory University, on October 2, 2008.

[3]See Gardiner Harris, "Leading Psychiatrist Didn't Report Drug Makers' Pay," The New York Times, October 4, 2008.

[4]Senator Grassley is current investigating Wyeth for paying a medical writing firm to ghost-write articles favorable to its hormone-replacement drug Prempro.

[5]Some of this material is drawn from my article "Industry-Sponsored Clinical Research: A Broken System," TheJournal of the American Medical Association, September 3, 2008.

[6]Justin E. Bekelman et al., "Scope and Impact of Financial Conflicts of Interest in Biomedical Research: A Systematic Review," The Journal of the American Medical Association, January 22, 2003.

[7]Eric G. Campbell et al., "Institutional Academic–Industry Relationships," The Journal of the American Medical Association, October 17, 2007.

[8]Erick H. Turner et al., "Selective Publication of Antidepressant Trials and Its Influence on Apparent Efficacy," The New England Journal of Medicine, January 17, 2008.

[9]See Wayne Kondro and Barb Sibbald, "Drug Company Experts Advised Staff to Withhold Data About SSRI Use in Children," Canadian Medical Association Journal, March 2, 2004.

[10]Irving Kirsch et al., "The Emperor's New Drugs: An Analysis of Antidepressant Medication Data Submitted to the US Food and Drug Administration," Prevention & Treatment, July 15, 2002.

[11]Rosie Taylor and Jim Giles, "Cash Interests Taint Drug Advice," Nature, October 20, 2005.

[12]David Tuller, "Seeking a Fuller Picture of Statins," The New York Times, July 20, 2004.

[13]Lisa Cosgrove et al., "Financial Ties Between DSM-IV Panel Members and the Pharmaceutical Industry," Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, Vol. 75, No. 3 (2006).

[14]On August 4, 2008, the FDA announced that $50,000 is now the "maximum personal financial interest an advisor may have in all companies that may be affected by a particular meeting." Waivers may be granted for amounts less than that.

[15]See Petersen, Our Daily Meds, p. 224.

[16]Petersen's book is a part of a second wave of books exposing the deceptive practices of the pharmaceutical industry. The first included Katharine Greider's The Big Fix: How the Pharmaceutical Industry Rips Off American Consumers (PublicAffairs, 2003), Merrill Goozner's The $800 Million Pill: The Truth Behind the Cost of New Drugs (University of California Press, 2004), Jerome Avorn's Powerful Medicines: The Benefits, Risks, and Costs of Prescription Drugs (Knopf, 2004), John Abramson's Overdo$ed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine (HarperCollins, 2004), and my own The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It (Random House, 2004).

[17]See the review by Frederick Crews of Lane's book and two others, The New York Review, December 6, 2007.

[18]See Gardiner Harris and Benedict Carey, "Researchers Fail to Reveal Full Drug Pay," The New York Times, June 8, 2008.

[19]This point is made powerfully in Jerome P. Kassirer's disturbing book, On the Take: How Medicine's Complicity With Big Business Can Endanger Your Health (Oxford University Press, 2005).

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Ruling party swept away in Japanese election rout - The Australian

29 July 2007 Japanese House of Councillors ele...Image via Wikipedia

JAPAN'S long-dominant Liberal Democratic Party was headed last night for a shattering defeat, losing about two-thirds of the seats it held before Prime Minister Taro Aso called an election six weeks ago.

The new prime minister will be Yukio Hatoyama, whose Democratic Party of Japan last night looked to have added 200 seats to the 111 it held when the House of Representatives was dissolved.

Mr Hatoyama, 62-year-old grandson of the LDP's foundation prime minister, Ichiro Hatoyama, has gained a massive mandate to reform Japan's political and economic system.

From its formation in 1955, the conservative party presided over Japan's rise from a post-war shambles to the world's second-largest and most vigorous economy, a unique security alliance with the US, spectacular financial-political scandals, a devastating collapse of its post-bubble economy from the early 1990s, a lengthy but unsatisfactory recovery from 2002 and finally the plunge back into deep recession.

In that time the LDP lost only one election, in 1993, and was out of government for only 11 months.

Yesterday's defeat comes four years after the LDP, led by its last popular and politically effective prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, achieved its largest ever seat gain.

But three years of political disasters starting within months of Mr Koizumi's retirement in September 2006, three more prime ministers and post-war Japan's worst recession have produced a shattering defeat that calls into question the LDP's very survival as a party.

LDP officials were saying even before polling closed last night that 69-year-old Mr Aso would have no alternative but to resign the party leadership to take responsibility.

The first half hour of counting last night was almost enough to restore the DPJ's losses from its 2005 defeat; it had already taken 171 seats to the LDP's 49, with New Komeito, the coalition partner in the last government, holding nine.

Exit polls by the major news organisations put the DPJ's final tally at between 298 and 324 seats.

At the upper end of the scale, Mr Hatoyama's party is poised to secure a "super-majority", two-thirds of the House of Representatives, which would allow it to override any legislative veto from the upper house.

However, that is an academic consideration now because the DPJ and its small-party allies, the Social Democrats and People's New Party, have controlled the upper house since July 2007 - the election that marked the beginning of the end of the LDP era.

The Social Democrats and PNP have done poorly, as have all the smaller parties bar the Communists, and though the DPJ has undertaken to take them into a governing coalition, they will have no serious influence on policy direction.

Defying an approaching typhoon, Japanese voters queued in unusually large numbers for a general election which wreaked cyclonic damage on the LDP.

Although heavy rains along the heavily populated Honshu eastern seaboard discouraged voters in the final hours polling booths were open, the final turnout was expected to approach 70per cent, the highest in almost 20 years.

The dominant issue throughout the campaign was the Aso government's fitness to continue governing, above the DPJ's lightly detailed promises to sweep away the LDP's iron triangle model of close co-operation politicians, public servants and big business, with the bureaucracy leading policy-making.

"I cast my vote to see a change of power in this country, rather than paying attention to details of each party's campaign manifesto," Norihito Inoue, a house wife told Kyodo news agency.

Mr Hatoyama, a founder and early head of the 11-year-old DPJ, was unexpectedly returned to the leadership only in May when Ichiro Ozawa was forced to stand aside following the revelation of illegal funds being accepted by his office.

Mr Ozawa and Mr Hatoyama, an engineer by training and an MP since 1986, were among the MPs who precipitated the LDP's 1993 crisis by quitting the scandal-racked party.

The main architect of the DPJ's astonishing reversal of fortunes since mid-2005, Mr Ozawa is expected to play the dominant figure in the party and a decisive role in the new government's management.

Expected to become the party's secretary general and with well over 100 personal supporters in the expanded party, a clearly annoyed Mr Ozawa, 67, last night refused to answer questions on his future role.

"We are only here to see the results of the vote-counting," he told an NHK TV interviewer.

"This type of question is precisely the problem with the media."

An exit poll by TV Asahi predicted the DPJ would take 315 seats in the 480-seat lower house, while Tokyo Broadcasting System forecast the centre-left opposition party would win 321 seats. Public broadcaster NHK predicted the DPJ would win between 298 and 329 seats, against a range of 84 to 131 seats for the conservative party.

Just before calling the election, Mr Aso had to quell a rebellion that potentially involved a third of the party's MPs. When the party reconvenes, the survivors who have saved their district seats, many angry at Mr Aso and the conduct of the campaign, will confront senior MPs who saved their skins by being placed at the top of LDP party lists, from its share of 180 seats filled by proportional representation.

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States of Mind: The Idea of Iran - The Nation

Cover of "A History of Iran: Empire of th...Cover of A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind

In the world of celebrity dissidents, Akbar Ganji may be Iran's most famous. A slight man with a tuft of hair atop a mostly bald head, he is perhaps best known for the seventy-three-day hunger strike he endured in 2005, near the end of his six-year detention in Tehran's hilltop Evin Prison. Ganji was born in 1960, and like many men and women of his generation, he agitated against Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi from a tender age. After serving in the young Islamic Republic's Revolutionary Guard during the grueling Iran-Iraq war, he served as an attaché at the Iranian Embassy in Turkey, where, among other things, he was encouraged to spy on restive Iranian students in Ankara. But as he journeyed deeper into Iran's political interior, Ganji grew increasingly disenchanted with what this new Islamic Republic had become. The values for which the revolutionaries had ostensibly fought, from freedom of thought and expression to the freedom to participate in fair and transparent elections, had been smothered. More and more, this regime made it clear that it would not tolerate critics.

The Road to Democracy in Iran
by Akbar Ganji
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A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind
by Michael Axworthy
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The Quest for Democracy in Iran: A Century of Struggle Against Authoritarian Rule
by Fakhreddin Azimi
Buy this book
A History of Modern Iran
by Ervand Abrahamian
Buy this book

Ganji eventually left government and became a journalist. By the mid-1990s he was publishing courageous investigative essays in reformist newspapers, Kiyan and Sobh-e Emrooz the most prominent among them, about the excesses, financial and otherwise, of President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani's regime. Most notable were Ganji's dispatches about a series of ghastly murders of dissident intellectuals during the presidency of Rafsanjani's successor, the incongruously smile-prone and mild-mannered Mohammad Khatami; Ganji's reporting eventually implicated high-ranking officials within the Ministry of Intelligence and other security agencies.

The state Ganji had once defended with his life locked him up in Evin in 2000 on multiple charges, ranging from spreading propaganda against the Islamic Republic to endangering national security. By the fifth year of his sentence, Ganji was penning what he called letters "to the free people of the world." In the second of these letters, dated July 2005, he referred to the country's all-powerful Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, who is more or less elected for life, as a sultan, urging him to step down and calling for a new, secular constitution. That same year, Ganji began his stubborn hunger strike, and soon enough images of the rail-thin prisoner on the brink of a premature death, his eyes rolled back into their lids, landed in e-mail accounts worldwide--including my own. His plight was taken up by various crusaders from the international human rights movement, while the coiners of the phrase "axis of evil" anointed him a hero ("America stands by you," at least one Bush-era White House press release declared). Having served his prison sentence, Ganji left Iran in 2006--supposedly for a short trip. He has not returned, instead joining the growing ranks of Iranian dissidents based in think-tank havens like Washington, DC.

Ganji recently published a slim volume born of his time in prison. Immodestly called The Road to Democracy in Iran, it opens--chillingly--with the words "Today, June 29, 2005, is the nineteenth day of my second hunger strike." The book is not a collection of prison notes, however, but rather a sketch of a future Iranian state, one that would have the most basic human rights principles at its core. This is not Ganji's first prison manuscript. In 2002 he penned the opening notes of his six-part "Republican Manifesto," in which he lamented the trampling of individual rights in contemporary Iran and made his best case for a secular democracy. Ganji's touchstones are Karl Popper and Immanuel Kant. He may owe more to the Age of Reason than to the Koran.

Like many Iranians of his generation, Ganji was at one time an ardent follower of the late Ali Shariati, a fiery and charismatic figure who put forward a reading of Shiism that evoked Marxism and shades of revolutionary Third Worldism. Shariati flourished in the heady climate of early 1960s Paris, as France's turbulent war with its Algerian colony raged. He collaborated with the Algerian National Liberation Front in its revolutionary struggle, was coddled by Marxist scholars, translated Sartre into Farsi and cavorted with Frantz Fanon. He returned to Iran in 1965 and soon thereafter began delivering rousing lectures to budding revolutionaries at Husseinieh-e Ershad, a blue-domed religious institute in central Tehran that has since become inextricably tied to Shariati's image. Shiism, Shariati told his listeners, has a core set of values that stands to resolve many of society's ills. He distinguished this original Shiism from the pernicious faith he saw propagated by the clerics around him, what he contemptuously referred to as "Safavid Shiism," after the Safavids, who established Shiism as Iran's state religion in the sixteenth century. Cassettes of Shariati's lectures were distributed en masse, and Shariati, inadvertently or not, became a primary intellectual architect of the Islamic revolution to come. He was arrested in 1974--accused of being everything from a Wahhabi to a Communist to a SAVAK collaborator. Upon release he traveled to England, where he subsequently died of a heart attack (his supporters believe he was eliminated by the shah's secret police).

The Road to Democracy in Iran testifies to Ganji's movement away from Shariatism toward a firm belief that religion cannot possibly survive as the foundation of a modern democracy. Nor can culturally specific conceptions of rights, whether African, Confucian or Islamic in nature. "We are not relativists," he writes. Rather, a chastened Ganji insists that democracy can only be rooted in a universal recognition of the most basic human rights--perhaps most prominent, the right to shape one's fate. Ganji goes on to ponder the role of the intellectual in bringing about this brave new order ("We must struggle"), but in the same breath he warns that "human rights will not be achieved through academic polemics." He decries the more fundamentalist readings of religion, though he stresses that modernity and religiosity are not mutually exclusive. (Kant's dictum of religion existing only within the confines of reason seems most fitting here.) In one chapter, Ganji singles out for criticism the pains and injuries, both physical and psychological, that women endure in the name of Islamic tradition and history: rape, coerced sexual relations, mandated hijab and even limits on their mobility. Being a Muslim, he insists, "means accepting the essence, and not the historical aspects, of the religion."

Though seductively pithy, Ganji's manifesto occasionally gets bogged down in abstractions, vagaries and clichés. The "West enjoys cultural and spiritual hegemony," he writes in one of many unexplained non sequiturs. Indeed, his habit of invoking clashes between "western civilization" and Islam runs the risk of reinforcing the very polarities he frequently criticizes. He denies that he is an essentialist but then goes on to locate modernity exclusively in the West and reduces Islam to its premodern forms. And though he points out that religion is amenable to myriad interpretations, he doesn't summon any concrete examples of what a progressive Islam could look like.

In one crucial respect, Ganji and the clerics who rule the Islamic Republic today are coevals: both share a firm--and occasionally maddeningly chauvinistic--belief in Iran's unique destiny. "We do not believe that historic change occurs in leaps," Ganji writes. "We must make it clear that we are against war, against foreign intervention in Iran, and against solutions imposed by outsiders." For the clerics, Iran's unique destiny is, at least in part, linked to the country's Islamic lineage. Disenfranchised Iranian monarchists in and around Los Angeles are in the destiny business too: they tend to carry on about how one of the country's first rulers, Darius I, once laid claim to the largest empire the world has known, stretching at its peak from Macedonia into Egypt and east to the Indus River. They point out that despite a procession of Muslim Arab conquests in the seventh century, the Persians managed to hold on to their language, even enjoying a poetry renaissance in the centuries that followed, with Sa'di, Hafez and Rumi among its luminaries. For their part, nationalists of all stripes stress that Iran was the source of one of the most influential critiques of the West--the late twentieth-century intellectual Jalal Al-e Ahmad's concept of gharbzadegi, or intoxication with all things Western. Despite their points of divergence, these stories testify to the remarkable endurance of the very idea of Iran, less a cultural, religious or geographical entity than a remarkably resilient state of mind.

In A History of Iran Michael Axworthy, a former British Foreign Service officer and the author of a laudable biography of the eighteenth-century Iranian leader Nader Shah (sometimes referred to as the Napoleon of Persia), gallops at a brisk pace through 2,500 years of Iranian history. While the more seasoned Orientalist may swear by Richard Frye's The Golden Age of Persia for an authoritative, exhaustive chronicle of Iranian history, Axworthy manages to present a worthwhile introduction to Iran that not only captures the color of its history but also avoids the sweeping generalizations that mark much work on the Middle East. And though his voice can grow pedantic or tiresomely corrective at times--presumably because he assumes the worst of the Western reader, who may know precious little about Iran beyond the well-documented rants of its current president or, say, allegations surrounding its nefarious nuclear ambitions--his account of Iran manages to be a productively nuanced one.

Axworthy begins on the Russian steppes, where the Medes and the Persians lived off the inhospitably rugged land, battled the neighboring Assyrians and finally cobbled together an independent state that would become the basis for modern-day Iran. His tour d'horizon ends with a passing mention of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's ongoing dispute with the United States and other former great powers over nuclear weapons. Occasionally, Axworthy's treatment is uneven (perhaps betraying the interests of an old Foreign Service hand). He devotes many pages, for example, to the Safavids, who ruled Iran from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century from their splendid blue-tiled capital at Isfahan, while giving short shrift to some of Iran's most influential twentieth-century thinkers, such as Shariati, Al-e Ahmad and Ahmad Kasravi, a nationalist turned critic of the clergy. But Axworthy does manage to recount a number of good stories, for Iranian history is thickly littered with the stuff of the best pulp fiction: madmen, feuding families, leaders with legendary sexual fetishes. There is Nader Shah, who in his delusional last years grew convinced that he could conquer the far-stronger Ottomans next door: in the end, his men burst into his harem while he was sleeping and cut off his arm and head. There was, too, an eighteenth-century ruler named Agha Mohammad Khan. Castrated at age 5 or 6 by a rival family, he grew to be a fierce warrior who happened to have a predilection for fine jewels.

From the third through the seventh centuries, Iran under the Sassanids--the final Iranian empire before the coming of the Arabs--was a place of extraordinary treasures. The Sassanid ruler Khosraw sponsored the translation of philosophical and literary texts from Indian languages, Greek and Syriac into Persian. The Zoroastrian religion, today perhaps most readily associated with Freddie Mercury, was thriving. Khosraw also commissioned the compilation of Persian history records and even presided over the drafting of an impressive astronomical almanac. When Islam came around from the Arabian Peninsula in the seventh century, the relationship between this syncretic Iranian culture and an Arab one proved dynamic. The influence of the Sassanids on the Arab Abbasid Empire, for example, was important--whether manifested in the form of administrative models or monumental architecture. Persians even served in the court of the Abbasids in their capital in Baghdad, while some of the more innovative interpretations of Islam were born at this time, influenced in large part by Iranian thinkers. As Axworthy notes, even as late as the fourteenth century, the great North African polymath and traveler Ibn Khaldun observed that the most important hadith scholars (those who study the words of the Prophet) were Persians working in the Arabic language.

In accounting for the famed Iranian distaste for foreign meddling, Axworthy focuses on several episodes. He recounts tales of the Russians and the Persians feuding over competing claims to neighboring Georgia, a part of the Persian Empire for many years. We also learn of an Iranian revolt following an exceedingly generous tobacco concession to the British in 1890: Nasser al-Din Shah, the first modern Persian monarch to visit Europe, handed the British exclusive rights to produce, sell and export Iranian tobacco. (Britain's commercial stake in Iran dates back to at least 1800, when the crown anxiously dispatched the East India Company to Iran just as Napoleon invaded nearby Egypt, nervous that the French monarch might extend the reach of his Eastern holdings.) Bazaars all over the country shut in protest; in 1891 demonstrators revolted in the traditionally protest-prone northeastern city Tabriz, and finally an esteemed ayatollah named Mirza Hasan Shirazi issued a fatwa against tobacco use from his seat in Samarra. It is said that even the Shah's wives in his overfull harem ceased their smoking as a result. The tobacco revolt, in all its forms, is often understood as one of the harbingers of the Constitutional Revolution of 1905.

Among the country's twentieth-century political leaders, it is Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh whose story Axworthy lingers over the most, emphasizing that his sorry fate provides critical insight into Iranians' current sensitivities to the West. In 1951 Mossadegh declared his intention to nationalize Iran's vast oil reserves, sending its British and American patrons into a panic that culminated in a CIA-orchestrated coup in 1953, the bitter memory of which lingers to this day. It is not a stretch to ponder the ill-fated prime minister's influence on Egyptian nationalist Gamal Abdel Nasser some years later, as he lay claim to the Suez Canal, or even on Ahmadinejad, who before the United Nations General Assembly this past fall announced that the American Empire was "reaching the end of its road."

Axworthy depicts Mohammad Reza Shah, Mossadegh's successor, as the most unsubtle of American puppets. The vain Swiss-educated king had embarrassingly epicurean tastes, often traveled around the country by helicopter and encouraged his closest aides--even his prime minister--to kiss the back of his finely manicured hand in public. His delusions of grandeur were epic. In 1971, on the 2,500th anniversary of the Persian Empire, he hosted an extravagant party on the grounds of Persepolis for a smattering of world leaders and celebrities, from Yugoslavia's Tito to Imelda and Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines. Organizers imported special trees and plants from Paris, Maxim's prepared the banquet and Lanvin designed the court's imperial uniforms, complete with fanciful epaulets. The shah was so insistent on privileging royalty in this lavish pageant that while Haile Selassie got prized seating, Georges Pompidou was left with second-rate placement (upon learning of the situation, he sent his prime minister in his stead). The entire affair cost an estimated $200 million (the shah's court insisted that it was a more modest sum). Axworthy also reminds us of the iconic image taken six years later of the shah, while paying a visit to President Carter, wiping his eyes as tear gas is used to dispel demonstrators protesting his reign outside the White House gates, most of them Iranian university students studying in the United States. That image, arresting as it was, offered an unforgettable glimpse of the impossibly vast gap between the leader and his populace that would ultimately spell his demise.

In the scrum of punditry about the democracy deficit in the contemporary Middle East, precious little attention is paid to Iran's Constitutional Revolution (1905-11), which, in addition to ushering in a constitution, brought with it a parliament and the country's first checks on monarchical rule. Although some years before, in the 1870s in Turkey, a group called the Young Ottomans had established a sort of national assembly in hopes of making the Ottoman Empire into something resembling a constitutional monarchy, that experiment died after only a few years. The Iranian Constitutional Revolution would have far longer-lasting effects.

Two recently published books, The Quest for Democracy in Iran, by Fakhreddin Azimi, and A History of Modern Iran, by Ervand Abrahamian, portray the 1905 revolution as the natural outcome of years of successive rulers pandering to the West while paying little heed to their populations at home. The humiliation born of Iranian military defeats at the hands of the Russians and the British, amid a Great Game that rendered Iran little more than a piece on the chessboard of Europeans, was not insignificant. For Azimi, a professor of history at the University of Connecticut (and no relation to the author of this review), all Iranian history after 1905 is an attempt to fulfill, partially accommodate or circumvent the ideals of a constitutional movement that placed popular representation at the fore of its priorities. He traces how at various moments public alienation and resentment have been articulated or expressed and finally, how "a culture of confrontation" emerged. His book goes a long way toward recuperating a history of Iranian democracy that has been expunged by Orientalists who wonder aloud if there is something about Muslim lands that makes them inhospitable to democracy or, alternatively, those who have dismissed periods of hectic parliamentary activity as mere chaos.

During the nineteenth century, Iran stagnated under the nepotistic Qajar clan. Vastly out of touch with their population, these hereditary rulers invested little in the country--most of which was rural or pastoral. They ruled through favoritism, bribery and endemic corruption. The Qajars took lavish European trips while the Russians and the British exercised power over the country's natural resources. The 1872 Reuter Concession, which gave the British extensive rights to Iranian natural resources, was, like the concession to the British for tobacco some years later, widely opposed. Slowly, large segments of the population grew emboldened, especially as the Qajar rulers proved incapable of meeting the most basic demands: Iranians' control over their land and a modicum of popular representation.

In 1905 two respected members of the Tehran bazaar were bastinadoed at the order of the governor of Tehran. Their crime was overcharging for sugar. The bazaar shut down after protesters occupied it out of solidarity with the merchants. Led by two clerics, Sayyed Abdallah Behbehani and Sayyed Muhammad Tabatabai, the protesters next sought sanctuary in the shrine of Shah Abd ol-Azim, south of Tehran, and later in the garden of the British legation north of Tehran. The assembled, estimated at 14,000 strong, issued a series of demands, among them the removal of the country's Belgian customs chief. Importantly, the garden was also where protesters made their first demands for a representative house--what they termed a House of Justice.

From there, reformist thinkers, members of the clergy, religious minorities, men and women alike all played a role in a nascent constitutional movement in progress. By August 1906 the increasingly disempowered Qajar ruler, Muzaffar al-Din Shah, caved in to demands for what would become Iran's first parliament. By October of that year an elected assembly convened and drew up a constitution that provided for strict limitations on royal power, an elected European-style parliament with a Majlis-i Shawra-yi Milli (National Consultative Assembly), along with a cabinet subject to confirmation by the Majlis. The shah signed the constitution on December 30, 1906, and died five days later. The 1906 constitution curtailed the powers of the shah and his ministers, granted limited suffrage to adult men and guaranteed a significant degree of freedom of the press.

Enter the Pahlavis, who supplanted the Qajars as Iran's ruling family some two decades later. Azimi's account of gruff Reza Khan, a member of the Cossack brigade who engineered a coup with the aid of 3,000 men and eighteen machine guns, reads like a nineteenth-century Russian novel. Now at the helm, Khan rechristened himself Pahlavi, after the name of the ancient pre-Islamic language that would become modern Persian. He was Iran's very own Atatürk. Though uneducated and of modest stock, he fashioned a modern, centralized bureaucratic state, built up an impressive army, launched a national university system and even went so far as to ban visible signs of traditional life--from head scarves to tribal clothing--in his ardent quest to catapult Iran into the modern age. It was only when he flirted with Nazi Germany that a joint Anglo-Soviet invasion in 1941 replaced him with his son, for the British and Russians were keen on preserving their access to Iran's oil reserves and its critical land corridor. From Azimi we learn a great deal about the nature of governance under the last shah, Reza Khan's son: the court as a theater of deference, cultivated opportunism and duplicity. As the country became a dumping ground for foreign goods and a playground for their manufacturers, Iranians at the bottom of the social ladder suffered. The shah, intensely paranoid, considered some of his ministers his enemies. His own people--immature, unruly, fickle--were an afterthought. Vain and self-obsessed, he was the head of the regime but also its Achilles' heel.

Abrahamian, a professor of history at the City University of New York, does an impressive job of recounting the story of the White Revolution, this last shah's botched attempt at modernization via a series of broad-ranging economic and social reforms in 1963. Though the reforms, from the redistribution of lands held by traditional elites to extending the right to vote to women, were designed to pre-empt a red revolution, they oddly paved the way for an Islamic revolution. Many of those who lost their traditional livelihoods in the land-redistribution schemes ended up in the cities, contributing to the birth of a vast underclass. The clergy, too, were unhappy, as many from their ranks had depended on religious endowments based on landownership for their livelihoods. Some were displeased that women had been afforded the right to vote, while others complained that Iran would be subject to greater foreign influence with these reforms. In 1963 a 61-year-old contrarian cleric named Ayatollah Khomeini was placed under house arrest for publicly criticizing the White Revolution. The shah, it seems, was also unaware that rapid modernization would bring with it a set of fresh demands from the populace. He could not, and simply did not, keep up. Reading Abrahamian, one gains an acute sense of the potent cocktail of factors that finally led to the regime's collapse.

It is Azimi who is best on Iran's past decade, tracing the failures of a reform movement that came of age under former President Khatami in the 1990s, its inability to meet the demands of the chorus of women and young people who voted him into office. The reformers' exalted slogans about civil society, human rights and liberalism grew increasingly anemic, painfully out of step with more pressing needs. Suddenly, the ascendance of the plain-speaking neo-Khomeinist Ahmadinejad starts to make sense. Ahmadinejad's impressively staged campaign films depicting himself as a man of the people (one features him spinning about confusedly in Tehran's baroque mayoral mansion when he was serving as the city's mayor, climaxing with his refusal to live there and his return to his humble home in north Tehran); his narratives about the urgent need to redistribute wealth; and his many trips to far-flung villages throughout the country to open hospitals, cut ribbons at schools and memorialize the occasional martyr all seem seductive, if not sheer marketing genius. But still, just as Tocqueville predicted in the context of another popular revolution, the postrevolutionary state ends up as tightfisted as its predecessor and as mired in clan politics, clientelism and corruption.

In just 100 years, Iran's population has shot up to 69 million, from fewer than 12 million. And Tehran, once a sleepy capital of 200,000, is today an overcrowded, hyperpolluted steel and concrete metropolis of 6.5 million. At the turn of the nineteenth century, one foreign observer wrote of Iran, "There are no cities in Persia, and likewise no slums; no steam driven industries, and therefore none of the mechanical tyranny that deadens the brain, starves the heart, wearies bodies and mind with its monotony." Indeed, in those days the average Iranian's greatest fears were likely to include highway robbers, famine, pestilence, disease and jinn. Today fears are more likely to be kindled by rising unemployment, double-digit inflation, the pressure to get into college or American saber-rattling.

Azimi's book is a thinly veiled call for those millions of Iranians to revisit the central ideas of the 1905 Constitutional Revolution. But such a call should not, he implies, be linked to Americanization, narratives about the end of history or blanket neoliberalism. He is quick to remind us that the Iranian people have risen to the occasion of instigating two street revolutions in the last century. Here, on the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of Pahlavi's peacock regime, it may be useful to remember that both of these revolutions were, in large part, a response to foreign meddling--the culmination of years of Iranian insistence that the idea of Iran, ethereal as it is, is one well worth fighting for.

About Negar Azimi

Negar Azimi is senior editor at Bidoun, an arts and culture magazine based in New York
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