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sometimes i feel the urge to buy printed media…

like on paper and so…you remember?

what i found in the german news magazine DER SPIEGEL last week made me really wanna go out and puke…no joke.

it´s an article about an exhibition of ernst ludwig kirchner paintings in the sprengel museum in hannover/germany.

and i always thought…why these weird colors???…now i can guess why…

DER SPIEGEL writes that these girls named

fränzi and marcella have lived in dresden

and that the painter group of expressionists

ernst ludwig kirchner, erich heckel and max pechstein

did spend some summers around 1910 with these two girls [ !!! ].

after research who these girls might have been

the age of the girls might have been around 10

and the other one around 15 years old , plus/minus…

i try to give you a translated version of one part of the article in DER SPIEGEL (this is not an exact word to word translation) :

the youth of the models feeds the debate about a possible pedophilia of kirchner.  for example :the artist wrote a letter to his colleague  heckel and talked about marcellas body, from ” suggestions, that make one insane. better than in older girls”!

read this and then my question: nouveau art movement of the last century…inspired by this new cough med?

Victorian Altered Art Collage Humorous Art Print of Woman Shooting Heroin

A hundred years ago Heinrich Dreser made a fortune from the discovery of heroin and aspirin – but he may have ended his days as an addict. RICHARD ASKWITH reports on a chemist who prescribed heroin for coughs

Between 1897 and 1914, Heinrich Dreser worked for Bayer, the former dye factory that was to become the first of the world's pharmaceutical giants, in Wuppertal, north-west Germany.

Friedrich Engels was born there. While Dreser made less of a mark on history, you could argue he had the greater influence on the 20th century. As head of Bayer's pharmacological laboratory, he was responsible for the launch of two drugs that have shaped the way we live: aspirin, the world's most successful legal drug; and heroin, the most successful illegal one.

Aspirin, of which the world now consumes 40 billion tablets a year, was launched 100 years ago next February. A fanfare of publicity will mark the centenary.

The centenary of heroin is more ambiguous: it was launched in November 1898 but was registered as a trademark in various countries from June that year, most lucratively in the US in August. But whenever the centenary falls, Bayer won't be celebrating.

This is understandable; but the stories of aspirin and heroin are intertwined, not least through Dreser.

Born in 1860, in Darmstadt, the son of a physics professor, he showed promise as a chemist from an early age. After receiving his doctorate from Heidelberg University, he worked in various laboratories before becoming a professor at Bonn University in 1893. Four years later he joined the Bayer Company, where he was in charge of testing the efficacy and safety of new drugs.

Dreser was admired for his thorough, methodical approach, and for his innovations in testing (he was, for example, the first chemist to use animal experiments on an industrial scale). The credit for originating new products for Bayer belonged, strictly speaking, to the researcher Arthur Eichengruen, but Dreser had the power to decide which new products would be developed. He had also negotiated a special deal which guaranteed him a share of the profits from products he launched.

In 1897 the Bayer chemist Felix Hoffmann, acting on Eichengruen's instructions, discovered a new process for modifying salicyclic acid (a remedy for fever and inflammation which unfortunately has excruciating digestive side effects) to produce acetylsalicyclic acid (ASA).

This compound, later to be named Aspirin, had been isolated before and the healing powers of salicylates (derived from willow bark) had been known for centuries. But Hoffmann had created a reliable process for making it.

Eichengruen enthusiastically recommended ASA to Dreser in 1898. Dreser, after cursory consideration, rejected it. Ostensibly, his objection was that ASA would have an "enfeebling" action on the heart. "The product has no value," he pronounced confidently. But the real problem was almost certainly that he had another product on his mind whose impending success he was anxious not to jeopardise. This was heroin.

Like aspirin, the drug that Bayer launched under the trademark Heroin in 1898 was not an original discovery. Diacetylmorphine, a white, odourless, bitter, crystalline powder deriving from morphine, had been invented in 1874 by an English chemist, C R Wright.

But Dreser was the first to see its commercial potential.Scientists had been looking for some time for a non-addictive substitute for morphine, then widely used as a painkiller and in the treatment of respiratory diseases. If diacetylmorphine could be shown to be such a product, Bayer - and Dreser - would hit the jackpot.

Diacetylmorphine was first synthesised in the Bayer laboratory in 1897 - by Hoffmann, two weeks after he first synthesised ASA. The work seems to have been initiated by Dreser, who was by then aware of Wright's discovery, even though he subsequently implied that heroin was an original Bayer invention.

By early 1898 was testing it on sticklebacks, frogs and rabbits. He also tested it on some of Bayer's workers, and on himself. The workers loved it, some saying it made them feel "heroic" (heroisch). This was also the term used by chemists to describe any strong drug (and diacetylmorphine is four times stronger than morphine). Creating a brand name was easy.

In November 1898, Dreser presented the drug to the Congress of German Naturalists and Physicians, claiming it was 10 times more effective as a cough medicine than codeine, but had only a tenth of its toxic effects. It was also more effective than morphine as a painkiller. It was safe. It wasn't habit-forming. In short, it was a wonder drug - the Viagra of its day.

"What we don't recognise now," says David Muso, professor of psychiatry and the history of medicine at Yale Medical School, "is that this met what was then a desperate need - not for a painkiller, but for a cough remedy".

Tuberculosis and pneumonia were then the leading causes of death, and even routine coughs and colds could be severely incapacitating. Heroin, which both depresses respiration and, as a sedative, gives a restorative night's sleep, seemed a godsend.

The initial response to its launch was overwhelmingly positive. Dreser had already written about the drug in medical journals, and studies had endorsed his view that heroin could be effective in treating asthma, bronchitis, phthisis and tuberculosis. Now mailshots and free samples were sent out by the thousand to physicians in Europe and the US. The label on the samples showed a lion and a globe. (There is a notorious brand of Burmese heroin, Double Globe, that uses remarkably similar packaging today.)

By 1899, Bayer was producing about a ton of heroin a year, and exporting the drug to 23 countries. The country where it really took off was the US, where there was already a large population of morphine addicts, a craze for patent medicines, and a relatively lax regulatory framework. Manufacturers of cough syrup were soon lacing their products with Bayer heroin.

There were heroin pastilles, heroin cough lozenges, heroin tablets, water-soluble heroin salts and a heroin elixir in a glycerine solution. Bayer never advertised heroin to the public but the publicity material it sent to physicians was unambiguous. One flyer described the product thus: "Heroin: the Sedative for Coughs . . . order a supply from your jobber."

"It possesses many advantages over morphine," wrote the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal in 1900. "It's not hypnotic, and there's no danger of acquiring a habit."

But worrying rumours were surfacing. As early as 1899, researchers began to report patients developing "tolerance" to the drug, while a German researcher denounced it as "an extremely dangerous poison". By 1902 - when heroin sales were accounting for roughly five percent of Bayer's net profits - French and American researchers were reporting cases of "heroinism" and addiction.

The bandwagon took time to stop. Between 1899 and 1905, at least 180 clinical works on heroin were published around the world, and most were favourable, if cautious. In 1906, the American Medical Association approved heroin for medical use, though with strong reservations about a "habit" that was "readily formed".

But with the accumulation of negative reports and the steady encroachment on the market by other manufacturers, it was clear heroin would never deliver the riches that Dreser had yearned for.

Had heroin been his only pet project, this disappointment could have spelt career disaster. Dreser had the kind of personality that needed commercial results to lend it plausibility. With his unfashionably formal clothes and his habit of dragging an overweight dachshund to work with him, he was seen as an eccentric loner, a "difficult" man whose ready sarcasm and autocratic manner meant he did not want for enemies.

Luckily, although his first "baby" was showing signs of turning into a monster, Dreser had belatedly adopted another: aspirin. Eichengruen, refusing to accept Dreser's rejection of ASA, had continued to investigate it and to lobby for its development. Eventually, Dreser recognised which way the wind was blowing, tested ASA on himself (as well as on his laboratory of rabbits), and finally published an enthusiastic scientific paper recommending it, particularly for the treatment of rheumatism - but omitting to mention the contributions of Eichengruen and Hoffmann. In February 1899, the brand name "Aspirin" was registered, and in June, Dreser presided over its launch.

Like heroin, aspirin more or less sold itself. As a painkiller without undesirable side effects, it was - and remained for decades - unique. By the end of 1899 it was being used all over Europe and the US, and by the time the heroin bubble burst, aspirin had more than filled the gap. Bayer was on its way to becoming an industrial giant. Hoffman and Eichengruen do not seem to have received any special compensation for their efforts. For Dreser, though, the rewards were spectacular.

In 1913, Bayer decided to stop making heroin. There had been an explosion of heroinrelated admissions at New York and Philadelphia hospitals, and in East Coast cities a substantial population of recreational users was reported (some supported their habits by collecting and selling scrap metal, hence the name "junkie"). Prohibition seemed inevitable and, sure enough, the next year the use of heroin without prescription was outlawed in the US. (A court ruling in 1919 also determined it illegal for doctors to prescribe it to addicts.)

But Dreser was now earning, on top of his "substantial" salary, more than 100 000 marks a year (about

By 1914 Dreser was an exceptionally rich 53-year-old - so much so that he decided not to renew his contract at Bayer. When war broke out he moved to Dusseldorf as honorary, unsalaried professor of his own pharmacological institute at the new Medical Academy.

Thereafter, the record becomes indistinct. His first wife died, there were no children and, it appears, few friends. There were rumours that he was addicted to heroin himself. Eventually, his health deteriorated. His last years may or may not have been happy. But they were certainly comfortable - which is more than can be said for Eichengruen, who, in his eighties, emerged from a concentration camp to write an unpublished denunciation of Dreser's "discovery" of aspirin.

In 1924, health problems forced Dreser to give up his institute and he moved to Zurich, where he remarried. That year, the US banned the use and manufacture of heroin altogether, even for medical purposes. (In Britain, the medical use of heroin continues to this day, accounting for 95 percent of the world's legal heroin consumption.) The same year, four days before Christmas, Dreser died.

The cause of death was given as a cerebral apoplexy, or stroke. It is just conceivable - had anyone known it - that he could have averted this fate by the simple expedience of taking an aspirin a day. If the rumours of addiction were true, the irony is doubled: Dreser, incorrigible in his misjudgment, had spent his twilight years taking a daily dose of the wrong wonder drug.

Even before its properties as a prophylactic against circulatory disease became known, aspirin changed the lives of millions, reducing the sum of human misery. It also produced untold wealth for, among others, the shareholders of Bayer, which still earns about R4-billion a year from the drug. (Those "others" include the generations of lawyers who acted in an 80-year orgy of litigation in which the original Bayer company, having had its American assets confiscated at the end of World War One, fought to reclaim the right to sell "Bayer aspirin" in the US.)

The impact of heroin is harder to assess. In 1898, there were an estimated 250 000 morphine addicts in the US - a per capita rate roughly twice as high as today's. In Britain, similarly, opium use was widespread, especially in East Anglia, where it was a more or less necessary antidote to the malaria endemic in the Fens. It was also used as a sedative for babies. (In Britain, however, opium seems to have been superseded not by heroin but by other modern drugs - notably aspirin.)

But the appearance of heroin played a crucial role in cementing the link between drug abuse and crime. Pharmacologically, heroin has the same effect as morphine. But you need only about a quarter as much to get the same effect. It is also cheaper, quicker and easier to use. As national and international legislation against opiates gathered force after 1914, addicts who wished to continue their habit inevitably switched to heroin. By 1924, 98 percent of New York's drug addicts were thought to be heroin addicts. With legal channels of supply closed, criminal gangs - first Jewish, then Italian - began to monopolise the trade. By the end of the 30s, the Mafia was inextricably involved.

Today, heroin use in Britain and the US is increasing faster than at any time since the 60s: heroin seizures rose by 135 percent between 1996 and 1997. There are thought to be between 160 000 and 200 000 heroin addicts in the UK, who spend almost R30-billion a year on heroin. And the British government spends R14-billion a year on drug-related policies.

The other great change resulting from Dreser's marketing of a faster-acting and more conveniently consumed opiate has been a change in the profile of the average opiate abuser. In 1898, the typical morphine addict in Britain or the US was a middle-class woman in her forties, whereas today's typical addict is an 18-year-old male.

source:  http://www.opioids.com/heroin/heroinhistory.html

19  21 young people were killed in a stampede in a tunnel at The Loveparade,

with at least 350 500 others injured.

The processing of the tragedy at the loveparade 2010 in Duisburg / Germany began

and it´s getting clearer that there have been massive security holes on the part of the organizers.

The width of the escape routes as well as the area,

which were certified for 250.000 humans excluding only, are first starting points.

It is called further that the city Duisburg and the organizer would have saved further costs

with the Loveparade, which could have prevented a possible disaster.

http://twitgeridoo.wordpress.com/2010/07/25/loveparade-2010-mein-gedachtnisprotokoll/

We see love in action in this video. Some trying to help those in needs.

i´m very sad because this could have been prevented...

it was so unneccessary...

for years and years something like that never happened...

the loveparade was about fun and love and party and dancing to techno music

and in all these past years it has been peaceful

*

here is what CNN says about the loveparade desaster

http://cnn.com/video/?/video/world/2010/07/24/germany.parade.stampede.cnn

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UPDATE july 26 2010

the mayor of duisburg is getting attacked by people, they throw waste after him.

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hundrets of people visit the place in the last days flowers are brought to the tunnel

heartbreaking scenes of crying mothers and traumatized people

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the following four links are videos from german SPIEGEL TV

#1

UPDATE july 27 2010

not 19 but 20 dead people, a young woman died in hospital last night .

*

the history of The Loveparade

The Loveparade first occurred four months before the opening of the Berlin Wall.

It was started by the Berlin Underground under the initiative of Matthias Roeingh aka "Dr Motte"

and his then girlfriend Danielle de Picciotto.

It was held as a political demonstration for peace and international understanding

through love and music.

Until 1996, the parade was held on the Berlin Kurfürstendamm.

Since by then, not only the Kurfürstendamm was overcrowded

but the nearby streets and even railway tracks,

the parade moved to the Straße des 17. Juni in the Tiergarten park in the center of Berlin,

where there was more space.

The center of the parade was the Siegessäule in the middle of the park,

and the golden angel on top of the column has become

a symbol of the parade.

Rainer Schaller, president and chief executive officer of McFit

and the Love Parade organizing company LopaventMany people from Germany

and abroad travelled to Berlin to take part in the Parade—over a million attended in the years 1997

through 2000 and 800,000 in 2001.

Attendance at the 2001 festival was significantly lower because the date of the parade

was changed with little advance notice.

2002 and 2003 also saw lower figures,

and in 2004 and 2005 the parade was canceled due to funding difficulties.

2004 did however host a scaled-down version which served more as a mini-protest,

and was promoted with the title 'Love Weekend'.

Dozens of clubs promoted the weekend-long event all over the city,

with various clubs staying open for 3 days straight without closing.

In 2006, the parade made a comeback with the help of German exercise studio McFit.

The Love Parade 2007 was planned for July 7, 2007 in Berlin.

However, the Berlin event was cancelled in February as

the Senate of Berlin had not issued the necessary permissions at that time.

After negotiations with several German cities,

on July 21, it was announced that the Love Parade would move to the Ruhr Area for the next five years.

The first event took place in Essen on August 25.

The Parade in Essen saw 1.2 million visitors in comparison to the 500,000 who attended

the 2006 parade in Berlin.

In 2008, the festival took place in Dortmund on July 19 on the Bundesstraße 1

under the motto Highway of Love.

The event was planned as a "Love Weekend", with parties throughout the region.

For the first time the Turkish electronic scene was represented by its own float,

called "Turkish Delights". The official estimate is that 1.6 million visitors attended,

which makes it the largest Loveparade to date.

The 2009 event, planned for Bochum, was cancelled;

a year later, the deaths of 19 attendees at the Duisburg venue prompted the Love Parade's founder Rainer Schaller to declare an end to the iconic festival.

"The Love Parade has always been a peaceful party,

but it will forever be overshadowed by the accident,

so out of respect for the victims the Love Parade will never take place again," Schaller said.

The music played at the events is predominantly electronic dance music:

in this case mainly Trance, House, Techno, and Schranz music.

Attempts to introduce other music styles, such as hip hop, have failed.

Hardcore and Gabber music were part of the parade in early years,

but were later removed.

They are now celebrated separately on a counter-demonstration called "Fuckparade".

The Love Parade is seen to be louder and more crowded than most concerts.

With its water-cooled sound systems on every truck,

the parade produced an extremely loud sound floor.

After the 2001 arrangement, vets at Berlin Zoo blamed the Love Parade for giving more than half

of its animal diarrhea.

Chairman Heiner Kloes said vets told him the heavy bass was to blame for disturbing the animals.

The parade consists of the sound trucks that usually feature local, or important,

clubs and their DJs.

It has become a rule that only trucks that have sponsors from a techno related field,

such as clubs, labels or stores,

are allowed, but advertising space was increased after the 2006 event

to offset the high costs of equipping a truck.

The trucks are usually open on top and feature dancers,

with box-systems mounted on the side or rear.

The Love Parade is a place where some exhibit

and enjoy other people's exhibitionist tendencies.

Some attendees enjoy carrying around toys such as pacifiers or face masks.

Often the crowd is imaginative in terms of clothing (or lack thereof) and appearance.

One famous picture from the Love Parade is people sitting and

dancing on streetlamps, trees, commercial signs, telephone booths,

which gave the event's nickname "the greatest amateur circus on earth".

The Love Parade has been quite peaceful for event of its size, seeing few arrests.

Arrests are usually related to drug crimes and most other incidents feature

mostly people passing out due to dehydration or hyperthermia.

In 2000, after the parade, a girl under the influence of ecstasy was run over by an S-Bahn

after she had been leaning on the door too hard.

The finale of the demonstration is by the so-called "Abschlusskundgebung"

which are half-hour sets of the world's leading top DJs such as

DJ Tiesto, Paul Van Dyk, Carl Cox, Armin Van Buuren, DJ Rush, DJ Hell, Westbam,

Drum Connection, Miss Djax, Marusha or Chris Liebing.

During this time all trucks (usually about 40) are connected to each other

and set online to the statue of victory where the turntables are.

This is one of the few chances a DJ can ever have to play for

a crowd of about one million people.

At the 2010 Love Parade in Duisburg, Germany,

the number of people attending reached 1.4 million,

when the original expectation was around 800,000.

[why did they expect only 800,000 people???]

At least 19 people were killed, and hundreds [more than 300] injured,

in an overcrowded tunnel leading into the festival.

Safety experts and a fire service investigator had previously warned

that the site was not suitable for the numbers expected to attend.

Organizer and CEO Rainer Schaller said they will not continue the festival in the future.

*taken from Wikipedia

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UPDATE july 27 2010