If you have visited lately,  you will have noticed that nothing new has been posted. That is mostly due to the time I must devote to my duties as president of the North Carolina Cannabis Patients Network (www.nccpn.org) now that the legislature has reconvened. That it is now controlled by the republicans has increased our work. It has changed the mechanics of the task and made contacting of new legislators urgent, so for now, my concentration will be there. The goal of having more of my other interests for this website will be forthcoming. One of the most urgent is the middle east, where my wife and I spent the first year of our marriage. I worked in Esfahan, Iran beginning in 1977 and returned home to the US to marry my sweetheart on New Years Eve of that year. I then returned to Iran where she joined me six weeks later.

The importance of this subject is to link todays news in Egypt with the time my wife and I spent in Iran during the overthrow of the US backed Shah of Iran. Deja Vu!!

There are so many parallels and we have watched with our friends as things happen at amazing speed with little intelligence on the ground..or so it would appear. This is the kind of calculated approach I would expect from the Obama Administration. To appear to really know what was going to happen would have been, and could still be, the "kiss of death". Any semblance of this being orchestrated by the west will be seen as further meddling in their affairs; something we have always felt compelled to do. The account of that overthrow is in miniature below. Later will be a topic for discussion here.

When the Shah's departure from the country was jubilantly announced in the Kayhan (English newspaper) simultaneously with the Farsi Paper (SHAH RAFT..shah has left) on December 17th of 1978, the government announced the formation of a NEW government with the new President, Sharpour Backtiar, western educated and in many respects like the Egyptian VP. His government lasted about 3 days. Many new government changes were announced in the following days, only to be  replaced within the next few days or weeks.

When that paper came out, we were shocked by our neighbors, many of whom we worked with on the military base. They came out of their homes on that day and said with great anger and emotion...."WE ARE SO GLAD TO BE RID OF THIS AMERICAN PUPPET!!!"

I cannot emphasize the anger in their voices. When I returned to the US later, I began to read the history I had thought so unimportant while in school. I learned that a doctor by the name of Mossedeh, whom the US had supported in his rise to prominence, was overthrown in a plot instigated over the price that his government was receiving for the OIL by British Petroleum and the government of England. It was five cents on the dollar. They wanted the same deal that Aramco was giving Saudi Arabia..50 cents. An argument ensued and we became party to a naval blockade that evetually led to Mossedeh's downfall.

To help the British, General Norman Schwarzkopf, Sr., a 1917 graduate of West Point, had been appointed by President Eisenhower to lead the CIA in to Iran to help over-throw the government of Mossedeh. The plot was at first thought a lost cause, but the military officers friendly to the US eventually made it happen. The 21 year old Reyza Pahlavi would be hurried back to Iran and crowned the "King of Kings"..the "Shah en Shah" ! His White (bloodless revolution) would last for 25 years. That anger is symptomatic of the problem today; our demand for cheap oil. We are part of the problem, as we were then when we lent our military support to subvert the will of the people..This is at odds with our fundamental belief that the majority rules. We only mean it if it is the majority we believe in!

Worse yet, after ousting the legitimately elected government of Mossedeh, Gen Schwarzkopf would stay in Iran to establish and train " SAVAK"..the feared secret police who would keep order for the next 25 years. If you breathed a word against the shah, you would mysteriously disappear. This is the Esfahan we lived in and truly enjoyed until the tanks rolled in around June. Esfahan was the first Iranian city to have martial law declared.

In December, just as the Shah was under siege to leave the country, my wife and I, who had been living under this martial law in Esfahan since June of 1978, decided to return home for a break and to celebrate Christmas. When we arrived in the US, we were shocked to find the US News organizations announcing that a full scale revolution was underway. What had been described by my employer, Bell Helicopter International under a Department of Defense Contract, in Iran was a mini uprising of mostly muslim clerics that would eventually blow over..meanwhile, we were told to "keep a low profile and stay our of public gatherings."

After returning to the North Carolina, I called Bell Helicopter to ask what was going on. I was told that if I did not return to Iran, I would be considered to have abandoned my contract. With our personal belongings still in Iran, including our little French car, I left Gale here and returned to Esfahan.

When I arrived in Munich around New Years, most flights were one way out of Iran. I was flown to Frankfort where I finally found a flight to Tehran. This was the same time that Ross Perot flew his folks privately to Iran to rescue his employees.

When I finally arrived in Tehran, I had to bribe a cab to take me to Bell Personnel Hq. They arranged for me to board a bus with the windows covered by blankets for the 10 hour ride to Esfahan. When I arrived, I went to our house and invited Don Dalton, a friend from college days whom we met in the most incredible small world story you will ever hear, to come and stay at our house. His house had been threatened and a motor-bike burned days earlier. in the next few days, we watched as Ayatollah Khomeini landed in Tehran as millions cheered. The Islamic Theocracy that was formed rules Iran today.

Don and I stayed at the house until late February when we were evacuated our of Iran by military emergency transport, arriving in Athens, Greece at 2 AM March 2nd I think..after a day of harrowing adventures where we had to surrender our passports to authorities while we remained on the bus out by the tarmac and the military C-141s. The passports were returned just before we boarded the transport.

More Later..meanwhile, join us at nccpn as Rep Kelly Alexander guides our attempt to get the Medical Cannabis Act Passed!

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