DATELINES
DATELINES PROTECTING THE AURAL MAJORITY CINCINNATI, OHIO Simon L. Leis Jr. is back in the limelight. Leis, the Hamilton County prosecutor who made headlines in the still-unresolved obscenity...
...Furthermore, it is not known how many patients still need glasses after the operation...
...and Mrs...
...However, that report is classified secret and is currently being reviewed for declassification...
...Another good reason to make haste slowly is that more than one promising medical advance has proved useless or downright dangerous when put to the test of time...
...Today, street speed may be had for ten cents to thirty-five cents a hit...
...One key objection was that doctors participating in the study were not members of the KSG, and were therefore unqualified to perform the surgery—an argument with all the internal consistency of a comic opera plot by William Schwenk Gilbert...
...execution took place between 1966 and 1971...
...The "look" is more or less that of a state highways department monthly...
...Radial keratotomy, quite simply, consists of scarring the cornea—the clear "window" of the eye in front of the iris and pupil—with a special instrument capable of making tiny spoke-like grooves...
...But many entrepreneurs have built a huge market by making the drugs look like popular, hard-to-get brand-name amphetamines—real speed, available only by prescription...
...dream of a nice museum for Respectable Western Art...
...When the Office of Naval Research wrote me in June to take back what it had said in May, it enclosed copies of the destruction reports for the shark papers, which I had also requested under the Freedom of Information Act...
...Later, when the time came to face down Eye Institute officials, at a meeting in Bethesda, Maryland, the KSG doctors brought along their own tame member of Congress, a freshman Republican from Greensboro, North Carolina, named Gene Johnston, a self-proclaimed satisfied customer of one of the keratotomists...
...FOR RICH TEXANS WHO CAN READ AUSTIN, TEXAS Although wealthy Texans have always had their way with their state, not until this year have their perquisites included a slick magazine that chronicled and celebrated their lives and interests...
...A 1975 Office of Naval Research report describes such interference: "In a night-recovery training exercise prior to splashdown of Apollo 15, the practice capsule was in the water and . . . personnel were in the process of attaching the flotation collar...
...In addition, they worry that their trademarks are being violated, and that they may be implicated in lawsuits stemming from overdoses and deaths caused by the look-alikes...
...On the one hand, the KSG contended that it takes long study and practice—preferably at the knee of Professor Fyodorov or one of his students—to master the intricacies of the operation...
...I just needed some bucks to get the business off the ground...
...Ultra, the brainchild of two Houston entrepreneurs, began circulation in September among the estimated 70,000 Texans whose incomes exceed $150,000 a year...
...An ironic sidelight is that while those who choose the operation are obviously willing to go to great lengths to avoid wearing glasses, only their nearsightedness will be corrected...
...The travel section isn't called "Travel," it's "Peregrinations...
...Any magazine which seeks as its readership the ruling rich runs certain risks...
...The September cover story, an account of polo as played on the well-kept grounds of San Antonio, Houston, and Dallas, leaves readers with no doubt that Texas rich kids are every bit as tough on the turf as are the sons of the horsy elite of Buenos Aires or Paris...
...Said one maker from Janesville, Wisconsin, "I got into this business because I knew I could make some fast money...
...Elsewhere in the September issue are profiles, quite tenderly done, of Neiman-Marcus founder Stanley Marcus and Fort Worth heiress Ruth Carter Johnson...
...Once its odor and vulnerability to cracking in extreme cold were overcome, sharkskin tested out far stronger than stainless steel fabric...
...If this sort of careful procedure is desirable in the development of a new treatment of disease, it is even more so when the organs in question—in this case, the eyes— are healthy...
...Their own versions of "peashooters," weight-control capsules, contain the same legal stimulants as street speed—and sell for up to five times as much...
...But John Zeh's troubles did not end there...
...The exercise, Project Headgear, got off the ground, as it were, in 1958...
...But when the National Eye Institute earlier this year proposed that the operation be put to the acid test—a standardized five-year series of clinical trials at eight major medical centers—enthusiasts balked...
...As advertising increased, word got out that this speed was not the real stuff...
...But the pharmaceutical industry has its own approach...
...In opposing the Eye Institute's proposal for trials, the KSG said a five-year study costing millions of dollars would be unnecessary and wasteful...
...The Air Force has noted reports that "many of the patients who have had this procedure are bothered by glare at night and experience some fluctuation in visual acuity...
...Already, six deaths have been reported, and physicians fear there may be more...
...It involved the implantation of electrodes in the sharks, in expectation that they could be steered by radio signals...
...But that did not affect demand for the drug in the least...
...Only 3 to 10 per cent of black-market speed contains any amphetamine these days, largely because of a massive Federal crackdown on shady prescription-writing...
...Myopia is not a disease by any stretch of imagination...
...Thus my efforts uncovered little more than a cursory listing of Headgear's dates and participants, and some almost unintelligible photocopied illustrations of gear and facilities...
...We hope people will look forward to reading it," Rochelle told the Associated Press, "because they're not going to find anything in there that's going to be depressing...
...indeed, they organized a lobbying campaign openly designed to thwart the Institute's plans...
...This has not been done with radial keratotomy...
...Ultra's editorial staff cannot be accused of thwarting the desires of their bosses...
...What the increased advertising did do was bring prices down...
...Though they alleged a low enrollment, university officials privately conceded that editorials in each of the city's two newspapers had forced the cancellations...
...His resume includes shutting down Last Tango in Paris, forcing the cancellation of an erotic film festival at the University of Cincinnati, and banishing adult bookstores from the city streets...
...The date they bear is.not 1979 but March 28, 1980—the day I let the Navy know I wished to inspect the shark papers in the first place...
...the former knells its death...
...And, they insist, the thousands of radial keratotomies done over the last few years have amply demonstrated the safety and effectiveness of the operation...
...Ophthalmic surgeons who perform the new procedure, radial keratotomy, do not like to see it described in those terms, of course...
...Thousands of dealers quickly caught on: The look-alikes could be marked up and passed off as the real thing to unsuspecting street buyers...
...Something fishy is going on at the Office of Naval Research...
...Food...
...It probably won't outlast the Laffer curve...
...When I can't get street speed, I buy Dexatrim or one of the other diet pills," said a seventeen-year-old high school student from rural Wisconsin...
...For Project Headgear's final test, though, not enough sharks could be found, and human recruits were substituted in an attempted demonstration swim across a small bay...
...One is the possible accusation from its intended perusers of presumption, of social-overreaching...
...Richard Raskin (Richard Raskin is a free-lance writer and editor in Cincinnati...
...Both papers had ridiculed the course and scolded the university...
...Or so proponents say...
...Its advent is even sort of comforting...
...But it flunked NASA's flammability test...
...If this is an example of the cultural vitality of the Texas plutocracy, the unwashed could effect a revolution with a Punch and Judy show...
...When performed by a capable practitioner, radial keratotomy seems safe, at least in the short run...
...He is co-chairman of the American Society of Access Professionals' legislation committee, which is concerned with the Freedom of Information Act and other sunshine laws...
...On the other hand, the same group has been advertising in medical journals quickie courses (some as brief as a weekend) designed to qualify ophthalmologists to perform of a radial keratotomy...
...The training operation was immediately aborted...
...Johnston, a member of the House Budget Committee, vowed to carry the fight back to Capitol Hill if the Eye Institute did not accommodate the doctors...
...From the other end of the spectrum, that occupied by the twelve million or so Texans who do not make $150,000 a year, may come the condemnation of snootiness, or worse...
...Three days later, a tape of the show arrived in the prosecutor's office, sent by the family of Joseph and Margaret Piatt, whose four children had listened to and recorded the Gaydreams broadcast...
...At this point, the officer in charge . . . noticed that at least six sharks were circling the capsule...
...The committee pointedly observed that fifty-five of the attacks had taken place between 1907 and 1940, and that the suppressed document included an article on "The Shark Situation in the Waters About New York," from the Brooklyn Museum Quarterly of 1916- -Gerald D.Sturges (Gerald D. Sturges, a former legislative aide to Wisconsin Representative David Obey, has been writing about sharks since 1964...
...Dong...
...Dong...
...Zeh suspects the prosecutor wants to show cable and video entrepreneurs entering the Cincinnati marketplace that he will be as tough on what is heard and seen in the home as he has been on commerce on the streets...
...With the cornea thus weakened, the eyeball's natural interior pressure can re-form the organ to a more spherical shape and thus correct the improper focusing that causes myopia...
...An indictment was then brought against the publicly owned station and Zeh on four counts—one for each Piatt child— of disseminating material harmful to minors...
...The adverse aftereffects seen in Japan have not been observed in patients who have undergone the new technique...
...The Navy said the attacks were •classified as a matter of war-time policy, because they identified ship sinkings, revealing names, locations, and dates...
...They pointed to the Platts' deep involvement in right-wing politics, in particular last year's Leis campaign...
...Ultra's president, Harold Farb, an apartment developer, and editor-in-chief Carter Rochelle, a public relations type, say the magazine is intended to convey a sense of lively, upbeat information and advice to the well-heeled...
...thus the painful search for the fussy and the upscale in its various "departments...
...Unfortunately," the Office of Naval Research wrote in May 1980, "all records pertaining to that research were destroyed at the end of last year...
...Meanwhile, the indefatigable Leis has filed for an appeal in the WAIF case...
...Piatt, however, insisted that the children had been recording music, with parental permission, for a party that evening when they happened upon the offending broadcast...
...Gaydreams is still on the air, and a fund has been established for the defense of WAIF and Zeh...
...Simon Leis remains ever in the news, most recently for his admission that he provided political profiles of local judges to the Moral Majority's Ohio chapter...
...Old research documents filed away there, the only known remnants of what were called the "shark papers," reportedly tell of the Navy's five-year attempt to turn the shark into a living torpedo that could ram a ship with a load of explosives strapped to its back...
...Judith Randal and William Hines (Judith Randal and William Hines write about health and science issues from Washington, D.C...
...When they get older and contract a common condition known as presbyopia, they will need reading glasses after all...
...Art is dubbed "Portfolio...
...She's sustaining her daddy's (Amon Carter Sr...
...In June, the Navy changed its tune...
...Having already lost at least one job and one apartment because of his growing notoriety, Zeh learned on September 3 that the University of Cincinnati had canceled a fall course he was scheduled to give on "Sexual Subcultures in Cincinnati...
...TAKING THE JAWS OUT OF FOIA WASHINGTON, D.C...
...My real interest is in home television radar units...
...In addition, he has recruited to his side assistant prosecutor James Applegate, late of the Air Force prosecution team which expelled homosexual Sergeant Leonard Matlovich from the service...
...Practitioners are frank in their desire to have the experimental label removed, thus throwing open the doors to the Fort Knox of health insurance...
...Leis, the Hamilton County prosecutor who made headlines in the still-unresolved obscenity trial of Hustler magazine's Larry Flynt, has made a career out of purging the prurience from this squeaky-clean city...
...Since Ultra assumes as its task the enlightenment of the elite, it must shun the ordinary...
...The present set-to began last January, when John Zeh, an announcer for community radio station WAIF, closed his weekly Gaydreams show by reading from a magazine report on the use of household items as sexual accessories...
...Look under "Victuals and Viands...
...DATELINES EYEBALL TO EYEBALL BETHESDA, MARYLAND Now, for the cost of a mere thirty or forty pairs of spectacles, you can have your eyeballs scarred in an operation whose long-term outcome no one can predict...
...Such.a plan would boot many bootleggers out of the business...
...Fishy...
...But when the National Eye Institute proposed such a trial series, the KSG doctors objected strenuously...
...Buyers, apparently, were satisfied with the high they could get from the look-alikes...
...The Proprietary Association, the mouthpiece of the over-the-counter drug industry, has helped draft legislation now pending in several states that would ban only the counterfeit look of the drugs...
...Soon, young people were paying as much as two dollars apiece for what they thought was an amphetamine pill...
...Don't worry about Ultra...
...Accusing the Institute (a branch of the National Institutes of Health) of attempting to "reinvent the wheel," they called on Congress to block the "wasting of $2.4 million of taxpayers' money" on tests...
...The magazine's photography and graphics have been roundly hooted down for stiffness, a posed quality, a lack of composition...
...Editorial content is similarly constipated...
...the coincidence of their taping a singularly explicit Gaydreams broadcast, and the prosecutor's crusade against "immorality" in media...
...As it happens, sharkskin almost made it to the moon as the patented outer coating of astronauts' suits, boots, and gloves...
...The magazine fairly rings with the bonhomie of the elite...
...Whatever one may think of the Rich, it is difficult to imagine they will accept as their social journal a compendium of sanitized dullness...
...But a study of this nature, to be considered scientifically valid, must be conducted under standardized conditions by people following a single protocol...
...No such judgment can be made for radial keratotomy, simply because the procedure has not been in use long enough...
...But street speed's a lot cheaper...
...The contents of the destroyed papers are anybody's guess...
...Corporate stimulants may be advertised as "weight control capsules," but the youth of America have something else in mind when they down a hit of Dietac...
...Some observers at the meeting could not help noticing that Johnston was squinting...
...But in Japan, where the procedure was pioneered, it has been abandoned because of complications, some resulting in blindness...
...But then, the Navy has been playing "lockjaws" for a long time...
...They say that the painless procedure, done in the doctor's office in two sessions of fifteen to thirty minutes each, frees the mildly to moderately nearsighted from the tyranny of eyeglasses or contact lenses...
...They may have revealed experimental attempts to cope with sharks menacing classified underwater demolition missions...
...One of the promotional gambits of radial keratotomists is directed at patients whose uncorrected myopia disqualifies them for training or licensing as aviators...
...But neither the Air Force nor the Navy nor the Federal Aviation Administration will grant flying status to anyone whose eyes bear the telltale scars of radial keratotomy...
...Ultra's premier issue, for example, included two full-page color ads for the International Gold Bullion Exchange—one of them a back cover...
...Whatever the contents of the missing papers, the Navy made clear its intention to keep them a secret...
...all the necessary groundwork has been done through thousands of cases by the group's own membership...
...The procedure costs between $1,000 and $1,500 per eye...
...A number of local media voices have expressed their sympathy and support...
...But kids would go on buying speed as usual...
...Although a magazine for the very rich sounds marketable, the execution, by Ultra, is remarkably bad...
...The chemicals would still be legal...
...Stay tuned...
...Some suspected that Leis's office had set up the Piatt family in advance to monitor the show...
...The latter objection merely serves Ultra's cause...
...The rest of the street trade in stimulants is mostly in peashooters...
...Cindy Bogard (Cindy Bogard is an editorial intern at The Progressive...
...Dong...
...All of this has the corporate drug-makers on edge...
...at most it is an aberration shared by about ten million adult Americans...
...In any event, the indictment was dismissed in August on the grounds that the broadcast had not been specifically aimed at minors...
...FAT PROFITS FROM DIET PILLS MADISON, WISCONSIN Major pharmaceutical companies seem to have taken a sudden interest in drug abuse among the young—at least, when the drug being abused is street speed...
...The normal way to standardize a procedure is to conduct controlled clinical trials, from which an objective judgment of safety and efficacy can be made...
...Rod Davis (Rod Davis, former editor of The Texas Observer, teaches English at the University of Texas in Austin...
...The usual ingredients of street speed, or "peashooters," are all perfectly legal over-the-counter stimulants—caffeine, ephed-rine sulfate, and phenylpropanolamine...
...Last spring, when I made a Freedom of Information Act request for classified documents on these comings and goings, the Navy was quick to reply that they were no more...
...At any rate, Leis has given Cincinnati's customarily placid gay community a cause around which to rally...
...Svyatoslav Fyodorov in the mid-1970s...
...He's keeping busy, even in retirement...
...A refinement of the Japanese method was popularized in the Soviet Union by Dr...
...But it is not at all clear that it is free of delayed problems—precisely those reported in Japan...
...More than a year ago, ads began appearing in High Times, the trade magazine of the illegal drug business, offering pills or capsules that looked like real amphetamine for $125 per 1,000, or 12.5 cents apiece...
...The "officer or individual authorizing destruction" is the man I contacted...
...Or perhaps they discussed shark interference with the space program...
...I grossed over a million dollars last year, so if the bill [regulating look-alikes] passes, I'll get out...
...The lobbying drive included a letter-writing campaign sparkplugged by something called the National Myopia Surgery Alliance of Orlando, Florida...
...one even called Zeh, who had taught two such courses before, a "cuckoo passing as an academician...
...Fyodorov has become the patron saint of a Keratotomy Study Group (KSG), made up of about forty practitioners who now do most of the radial keratotomies in the United States, an estimated 5,000 this year alone...
...Industry giants see the bootleggers un-derpricing them and picking up a sizable share of a lucrative market...
...The magazine goes out free each month to the target audience and is not to be seen on newsstands—an exclusivity based not so much on fear of tainting by the masses as on eagerness to appeal to a select group of advertisers...
...One report on shark research was not destroyed," it admitted...
...Barry Diskant, an emergency room physician at an Albuquerque hospital where three of the victims died, has called for laws taking the stimulants off the market completely, citing "study after study" showing them ineffective for long-term weight control...
...In the main, health insurance policies do not cover it because it is still regarded as experimental...
...In 1958, the House Government Operations Committee examined, through "Father of the Freedom of Information Act" Representative John Moss, a still-secret 1944 report describing sixty-nine shark attacks on humans...
Vol. 45 • December 1981 • No. 12
