Bill Drake
Author Bill Drake lives with his artist wife Lisle in Portland, Oregon. Bill’s first book was “The Cultivators Handbook of Marijuana” (1969), which began life as a little yellow self-published book written and printed in Southern Oregon where Bill lived and grew medicinal herbs. Bill wrote this book intending it to be a revolutionary act to help free people from the oppression of the emerging trans-generational American police state that had long ago discovered drug laws as the path to ultimate power. Some say that ‘Cultivators Handbook” changed the American Cannabis home-growing scene forever by demystifying the process and making it accessible to anyone. After nearly 50 years “Cultivators Handbook” is still in print, although it has been superseded by many, many excellent ‘grow your own’ books by other far more talented writers, especially Robert C. Clarke and Jorge Cervantes. Bill’s “Cultivators Handbook” was followed by a series of books exploring the recreational and medicinal use of Marijuana and the other great natural drugs of mankind – Coca and Opium, and Tobacco. These books include: The Connoisseur’s Handbook of Marijuana” (1971); International Cultivators Handbook: Coca, Hashish & Opium (1976); Marijuana Foods (1984 – co-authored with Lisle Drake); Cultivators Handbook of Natural Tobacco (2010); The Coca Leaf Papers (2012); In Search Of Mama Coca: A Time-Travelers Guide (2018); Cultural Dimensions of Expatriate Life (24 vol.) (2004-2010); Understanding World Cultures Through American Eyes (7 vol.) (2018-19). In 1981 along with his friend and partner Robert Marion, Bill founded the Santa Fe Natural Tobacco Company, creating the company’s flagship brand ‘American Spirit”. After losing SFNT to predatory investors secretly acting on behalf of the Tobacco Cartel, Bill embarked on a second career that incorporated his love for learning how people from different world cultures view life, communicate, make decisions, solve problems, raise children, and work to become fully developed persons in the course of their lifetime. In the early 1990s Bill founded CultureBank, a cross-cultural training firm, working with small and large US, European and Asian companies helping owners, managers and employees in culturally diverse organizations become more familiar with each other’s sometimes wildly different ways of accomplishing the same tasks. Bill’s current series of cross-cultural books, published under the imprint ‘Cultural Dimensions Press”, is entitled “Understanding World Cultures Through American Eyes” This series includes 7 full-length books that have evolved from years of working with people from diverse backgrounds and learning about the key cultural differences that can make teamwork, communication, collaboration, and adjustment to living in another culture so challenging and so rewarding. In 2018 Bill moved to Portland, Oregon to pursue his dream of being able to test off-the-shelf tobacco brands for pesticide and fungicide residues, convinced that these hidden, unregulated chemicals are a major cause of smoking-related disease and death. He worked with a leading Oregon-based international pesticide residue testing lab, conducting scientifically precise investigations of samples of tobacco brands. Results were re-checked multiple times. These investigations revealed concealed contamination and hidden dangers in specific tobacco brands far beyond what even the most ardent anti-smoker might have imagined. As a result of this lab research, which capped a lifetime of investigation, Bill is writing “Smoking Out The Tobacco Cartel: American Spirits Speak”, which will be published in 2019. This book takes new, original hard data from lab tests and combines these findings with published scientific and medical research on the results of pesticide & fungicide exposure – any kind of exposure, even inhaling them in cigarette smoke. The consequences of exposure, especially early in life, are almost exactly what people have been assuming for years are the consequences of smoking Tobacco itself. As Bill says in the introduction “People may not know the whole story yet but they already know the truth”. The truth, as Bill has discovered, is that it’s the pesticides and fungicides that are killing millions of smokers, not the tobacco. To complete the irony, while researchers have been looking everywhere for the secret addictive ingredients, besides nicotine, that cigarette manufacturers use to hook smokers, it turns out that pesticides inhaled in small doses over time are highly addictive. Toxicology research has clearly established that when you inhale a highly toxic substance over and over in small doses your body first adjusts and then actually becomes dependent on continuing exposure. Think about lead poisoning – cigarette pesticide addiction is almost the same process, although it has far worse outcomes. So, the secret power of cigarettes isn’t the nicotine, it’s the hidden pesticides and fungicides that create an unbreakable addiction. That’s why all those nicotine-substitute products barely work – because nicotine addiction is only one small part of cigarette addiction. That is why so many people who desperately want to quit can’t – their addiction is far stronger than nicotine. Many have compared cigarette addiction to heroin addiction but haven’t been able to explain why because nicotine just isn’t that powerful an addictive substance. Pesticides and fungicides are the addictive substances we’ve been looking for. They have been hidden in plain sight for generations. Millions have died unnecessarily because the truth has been kept quiet by the Cartel, by governments, and by anti-tobacco fanatics who just can’t stand the idea that tobacco may not actually be that dangerous or harmful. The question is whether or not the Tobacco Cartel knows about the role of pesticide addiction and whether that has been part of the Cartel’s motivation for suppressing regulation and oversight worldwide. Has there been a conspiracy? Bill believes that this situation could not have arisen accidentally or coincidentally. Bill has written this book to offer people the legal means to bring final accountability to a generations-old criminal conspiracy of monstrous power and proportion.
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