A friend emailed me the link to this: an interview with Mutulu Shakur, an acupuncturist/activist (who is also the step father of Tupac Shakur) that is in prison now for allegedly robbing an armored truck. The interview is especially interesting to me because it demonstrates exactly how dangerous “health” is to the status quo.

Announcer: So, it sounds like you’re talking about a whole type of medical wing of the liberation movement, almost. Like the various collectives that you were talking about. And I know here in Chicago they had a brother who was involved in starting up a health clinic etc. A whole new concept of medicine, medical care and how care should be provided.

MS: Really the principal of providing medical care wasn’t new because if you remember the Black Panther Party publicized people’s health clinics. They publicized it from the ’60s to the early ’70s. But, and I mean, the media publicized it. Other formations in the Libya movement in Cleveland and various nationalist formations in New York and Chicago and Mid West and South, were doing certain type of healthcare. And the voter registration campaign, they were doing certain things. But the significant part about this was that we had also caught them red-handedly providing a chemical addiction to a people that they alleged were trying to detoxify, to clean up the drugs. So it wasn’t only that we were providing medical care, we were providing medical care and exposing chemical warfare. We were not only providing medical care and exposing chemical warfare, we were challenging western occidental medicine to eastern medicine and natural healing. So all the fads and the health foods stores and all of the reflexology clinics and all of these things that allow to function today would not exist if revolutionary men and women did not fight tooth and nail to spread the possibilities of another form of healthcare system to the third world grassroots community.