Officials Say Reformulation of OxyContin Has Increased Interest in Abuse of Other Narcotics

From Join Together - now that Oxycontin has been reformulated so that it's harder to abuse, people are just turning toward other narcotics, including heroin.

another life taken by the DEA

a young man, only 24 years old, hung himself today in the spokane county jail after being arrested for smuggling pounds of marijuana into the U.S. by helicopter - arranged by the DEA! entrapment sickens me...

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2008806775_websuicide03m.html


Pot smuggling suspect hangs self in Spokane Jail
By The Associated Press
SPOKANE — Police say a Canadian man accused of smuggling marijuana by helicopter hanged himself in the Spokane County Jail.
The 24-year-old from Revelstoke, B.C., Samuel Jackson Lindsay-Brown, was alone in the cell where he was found Friday hanging by a bedsheet from a light fixture. Sgt. Joe Peterson told The Spokesman-Review police are investigating the death.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Tom Rice says Lindsay-Brown had been charged with possession of a controlled substance with intent to deliver.
He was arrested Feb. 23 unloading 350 pounds of BC bud from a helicopter in a remote spot in the Colville National Forest. The delivery had been arranged by undercover Drug Enforcement Administration agents.

take the handcuffs off the economic recovery

by Eric E. Sterling

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-e-sterling/take-the-handcuffs-off-th_b_137034.html

A month ago, who would have thought that the Bush Administration would order the partial nationalization of the nation's banks to fix credit markets and support the economy? Maybe other innovative, even "radical," ideas are in order. Unless we come up with new ideas to sell cars and durable goods to fire up the economy, collapsing domestic auto sales threaten tens of thousands of jobs.
In addition, the recession will cause shrinking government revenue at every level. Even last spring 18 states were predicting reduced budgets in FY 2009. Unless new revenues are found, we will soon see the furloughs and wholesale firing of teachers, nurses, and emergency first responders; closed schools, libraries and hospitals; crumbling roads unfixed; and broken bridges closed to traffic.
Cliches about the auto industry's problems blame workers' and retirees' health care costs and management for making the wrong kinds of cars. But to sell cars we need to abandon cliches, old myths, and the blame game.
Consider these facts. Last year we had 2.3 million Americans in prison and jail. How many American cars did these men and women buy last year? That's right, none. That 2.3 million is about ten times greater than the 250,000 prisoners in America during the auto industry's glory days of the 1960s and 1970s. There are another 8 million Americans who got a felony conviction for possessing or selling drugs in the last twenty years. With their convictions, these people rarely have jobs. They don't have a legal income and they don't have credit.
The economic effect of more than ten million American adults who can't buy cars, houses, furniture, appliances, or other durable goods is like 9-11, Katrina, and every other hurricane combined. Even with a job, many are without a credit card and are shut out of the marketplace. From Ticketmaster to Amazon.com to the local shore store, American businesses are losing sales. Economically, our criminal justice policies are cutting our throat.
Aside from the economic cost, is imprisonment of all of these 2.3 million Americans good anti-crime policy? Not according to the research. Effective crime fighting uses smart police strategies, adequate mental health care, good schools, recreation for youth, jobs and focused rehabilitation. The criminological consensus is that imprisonment has been responsible for about one-quarter of the crime decline in the past 15 years. Most of those in prison are there for non-violent offenses like drugs or theft, or because they violated probation by committing a "technical" violation like drinking or using drugs. Most of those in prison are there much longer than they need to deter crime, to justly punish them, or to protect society from future crime.
We certainly need to imprison dangerous offenders - to protect us and to punish them. But we need to get a lot smarter about why we imprison and who we imprison. Remarkably, in the last thirty years, the largest increase in imprisonment has been due to prohibition drug policy.
Even though drug enforcement leaders have warned for more than twenty years that "we can't arrest our way out of the drug problem," every year we arrest more people for drug offenses than the year before. Last year we arrested over 1.8 million Americans, more than three times the number arrested for all violent crimes combined. Now about one-quarter of those in prison are serving drug sentences. As the centerpiece of our anti-drug strategy, arrests and imprisonment have failed: high school seniors report that drugs are easier for them to get now than in the 1970s and 1980s.
Scientists and drug treatment specialists - even police chiefs, judges and prosecutors - agree that drug addiction is a disease. But in almost every city it is hard for people to get good treatment for their addictions. Waiting lists - often very long ones - to enter programs are the rule. According to the White House, about 20 million Americans need substance abuse treatment but don't get it. Why put drug addicts in prison for using drugs when what they need, and deserve, is good drug treatment? Why do we tolerate the police arresting drug addicts for using drugs? Isn't the definition of the disease of addiction that you can't stop using drugs? When you think about it, isn't it wrong to prosecute a person because of their disease?
But in fact, most drug users are not addicts, they are adult marijuana smokers. Why do we arrest them? To tell them that marijuana is harmful? To "send a message" to children that they should not use drugs or that drugs are dangerous? Isn't that the job of parents, schools, and public health authorities?
Drowning is the second-leading cause of unintentional injury-related death for children ages 1 to 14 years. The rate of drowning has declined, but we not because we jail swimmers, or swimming pool contractors and operators, to warn children about the hazards of swimming. Of course, in most parts of the country the government hires life guards at beaches and pools to save swimmers in the face of the ever-present danger.
In fact, we don't arrest anyone to warn about most dangerous behaviors. To teach the safer use of dangerous behaviors involving firearms, alcohol, tobacco, automobiles, motor cycles, private airplanes, or ski resorts, we use education, insurance, regulation and taxation to reduce injuries and save lives. With most activities, we recognize that doing dangerous things is not "wrongful" and does not deserve punishment. Why is arresting people a good way to send a message about health and public safety when it comes to drug use?
Almost everyone agrees that our "convict-the-users" anti-drug strategy is a costly failure. According to the government's studies of drug use attitudes and trends, millions of criminal convictions have had little to do with the decline in drug use.
Naturally, a compassionate society has "to do something" about drug abuse, but a century ago we got misled that drug abuse is a crime problem. As we have seen repeatedly in our history, by adopting the prohibition approach we have made it more of a crime problem. Sadly, the idea that the danger in drug use is "bad" and "wrongful," and is therefore fundamentally different from the sometimes lethal dangers of skiing, sky diving, auto racing, hunting or many other activities remains a deeply embedded and very expensive myth. Can we justify why we punish drug users on any terms other than it is against the law? This law is unjustifiable and only survives on the myth that drug use is "bad" as opposed to risky.
It is now time to think about the opportunity cost of this myth. Even in the smallest town or county, drug arrests generate thousands of dollars in police overtime pay. In a big jurisdiction, it costs taxpayers hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars to arrest drug users. About one-third of the time of prosecutors, judges and court personnel is spent handling drug cases. Housing, guarding and feeding 500,000 drug prisoners pays prison employees and contractors. These folks benefit, but for the rest of us, these millions of drug cases mean unemployed workers and lost customers that bleeds our jobs out of the economy.
Police need to focus on violent offenders, child molesters, DUI cases, and the white collar frauds who steal millions. Prison needs to be reserved for the dangerous.
Non-violent drug offenders need to be let out of prison. Those who are addicted need treatment, which is much less expensive than prison. Their drug-related criminal records need to be sealed so they can get jobs. Thieves and burglars who are drug addicts need abstinence-based supervision to prevent re-offending.
Seventy-five years ago, on Dec. 5, 1933, in the depths of the Great Depression, we amended the Constitution to abandon alcohol prohibition to generate jobs and to tax alcohol to fund the government. It's time to end the marijuana prohibition. Non-commercial, home growing of marijuana should be regulated like hunting. Hunters are killed accidentally every year, including minors, but licences are easily obtained, not terribly expensive, and largely self-enforcing. Non-commercial marijuana growing license ought to be sold at garden centers, with prohibitions on commercial sale and distribution to minors. Commercial marijuana growing and selling should be licensed and taxed like alcohol, with its panoply of local regulatory varieties, and evolving cultural controls.
In 2005, federal, state and local taxes collected on tobacco and alcohol totaled $35.1 billion. America's 20 million marijuana smokers paid no taxes on their marijuana. Depending on rates, $5 to $15 billion could be raised from marijuana taxes. America's illegal marijuana sellers are the beneficiaries of both a government subsidy (no taxes) and a government price support mechanism. That's absurd! We need to tax the underground marijuana commerce. As we study state and local budgets that will fire teachers, police and firefighters, reduce care to the ill, the blind, and the handicapped, and shutter hospitals, recreation centers and schools, we can ask if we want to keep throwing away the potential marijuana taxes.
One way we could sell a million American cars is to get drug users out of prison, freed of their crippling criminal records, and back into the economy.
How hard are these choices: Lay off school teachers or stop subsidizing the illegal marijuana business with a billions of dollars in tax breaks? Lay off workers and close factories or let non-violent offenders out of prison and provide treatment to drug addicts?

Eric E. Sterling, president of the non-profit Criminal Justice Policy Foundation in Silver Spring, MD, was counsel to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, principally responsible for anti-drug legislation, from 1979 to 1989.

u-district needle exchange

the brilliant dominic holden wrote another excellent article for the stranger today about the u-district needle exchange run by the people's harm reduction alliance, of which i'm a board member. (still looking for raffle donations!)

http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Content?oid=621925&hp

July 16, 2008 News
Shot Up
Funding Cuts Threaten Growing Needle-Exchange Program
by Dominic Holden

On a recent evening in a University District alley, two men in sunglasses sat behind a card table loaded with red bins of alcohol swabs, hypodermic syringes, and other supplies for shooting up drugs. Every few minutes, someone would wander up the alley to turn in used needles, take a few items from the bins, and move on.
The table is King County's last privately operated needle-exchange site. But its clientele is growing faster than at any other site in the county.
The syringe exchange in the alley used to be operated five days a week by another group, Street Outreach Services (SOS), until SOS lost county funding last year for failing to submit an audit on time. After SOS went away, the People's Harm Reduction Alliance (PHRA) took over the exchange and expanded it to seven days a week. "We felt [drug users] needed more access in the north end," PHRA director Shilo Murphy says. The group now operates the table 365 days a year with the help of about 25 volunteers. By the end of the year, PHRA predicts it will have increased syringe exchanges by one-third to one million syringes—a 10 percent increase overall from last year for the entire county.
"My hope is that when drug users make the choice to be sober, that they can do it without having HIV or hepatitis C, which would affect them for the rest their of lives," Murphy says.
Spurred by the AIDS epidemic, the national movement for syringe exchanges started in Tacoma in 1988. The next year, the model was emulated by activists in Seattle, who operated an exchange from a table in front of Tower Records on University Way.
According to King County, where 2.1 million syringes were exchanged in 2007, the cities that implemented needle exchanges early in the HIV boom lowered infection rates among intravenous drug users. For example, in cities such as New York and Miami, which were late to adopt the once-controversial practice, the HIV rate among injection drug users hovers between 40 and 60 percent. In Seattle, it's 2 to 4 percent.
Nevertheless, only a fraction of the injection drug users here use clean needles consistently. Michael Hanrahan, who runs the county's needle-exchange program, says 20 million syringes would have to be exchanged annually to ensure a clean needle for every injection. "If our objective is to facilitate a clean, single use of equipment, the market penetration is about 10 percent of what the need likely is," he says.
The community-based University District group seems more nimble at reaching the target population than the five county-managed exchange sites, which operate under more restrictive rules. For instance, the county requires users to trade one dirty needle for each clean one—rules Hanrahan says are designed as an incentive to get old, dirty syringes out of circulation. The independent needle exchange, in contrast, allows users to bank and trade syringes, enabling more users to take as many syringes as they need.
However, the group struggles to stay afloat. It depends on donations from users who come to the table, and its supplies are provided by the county, which is facing a $68 million deficit. Countywide, syringe-exchange programs cost King County just under $1 million a year. In October, County Executive Ron Sims will send a funding proposal to the council that will reduce public-health appropriations by 33 percent a year for three years—eventually cutting the county's contribution to public health to zero [In the Hall, Erica C. Barnett, June 11]. King County Council Member Larry Phillips, who chairs the council's budget committee, says it's too soon to guess whether the needle-exchange program will be impacted, but he hopes to maintain it. "It has proven to be a tremendous public-health aid in King County," Phillips says.
As the syringe-exchange services strive to stay afloat, SOS has morphed into a new organization, Harm Reduction Advocates, which is building support to fund needle exchanges and allow anti-overdose programs. Executive director Tara Moss says the group was "getting to the point, with restricted funds, [that] it makes sense to advocate for the programs rather than provide services."
dominic@thestranger.com

dr. ecstasy

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/30/magazine/30ECSTASY.html?ex=1264827600&en=edb29c075c8aceed&ei=5090
great article on alexander shulgin. excerpt:
It was an acquaintance of Shulgin's named Humphry Osmond, a British psychiatrist and researcher into the effects of mescaline and LSD, who coined the word ''psychedelic'' in the late 1950's for a class of drugs that significantly alter one's perception of reality. Derived from Greek, the term translates as ''mind manifesting'' and is preferred by those who believe in the curative power of such chemicals. Skeptics tend to call them hallucinogens.
Shulgin is in the former camp. There's a story he likes to tell about the past 100 years: ''At the beginning of the 20th century, there were only two psychedelic compounds known to Western science: cannabis and mescaline. A little over 50 years later -- with LSD, psilocybin, psilocin, TMA, several compounds based on DMT and various other isomers -- the number was up to almost 20. By 2000, there were well over 200. So you see, the growth is exponential.'' When I asked him whether that meant that by 2050 we'll be up to 2,000, he smiled and said, ''The way it's building up now, we may have well over that number.''
The point is clear enough: the continuing explosion in options for chemical mind-manifestation is as natural as the passage of time. But what Shulgin's narrative leaves out is the fact that most of this supposedly inexorable diversification took place in a lab in his backyard. For 40 years, working in plain sight of the law and publishing his results, Shulgin has been a one-man psychopharmacological research sector. (Timothy Leary called him one of the century's most important scientists.) By Shulgin's own count, he has created nearly 200 psychedelic compounds, among them stimulants, depressants, aphrodisiacs, ''empathogens,'' convulsants, drugs that alter hearing, drugs that slow one's sense of time, drugs that speed it up, drugs that trigger violent outbursts, drugs that deaden emotion -- in short, a veritable lexicon of tactile and emotional experience. And in 1976, Shulgin fished an obscure chemical called MDMA out of the depths of the chemical literature and introduced it to the wider world, where it came to be known as Ecstasy.
In the small subculture that truly believes in better living through chemistry, Shulgin's oeuvre has made him an icon and a hero: part pioneer, part holy man, part connoisseur. As his supporters point out, his work places him in an old, and in many cultures venerable, tradition. Whether it's West African iboga ceremonies or Navajo peyote rituals, 60's LSD culture or the age-old cultivation of cannabis nearly everywhere on the planet it can grow, the pursuit and celebration of chemically-induced alternate realms of consciousness goes back beyond the dawn of recorded history and has proved impossible to fully suppress. Shulgin sees nothing strange about devoting his life to it. What's strange to him is that so few others see fit to do the same thing.

quit drinking again...

...it's not for me.
a layman who has chosen to practice this dhamma should not indulge in the drinking of intoxicants. he should not drink them nor encourage others to do so, realizing that it leads to madness. through intoxication foolish people perform evil deeds and cause other heedless people to do likewise. he should avoid intoxication, this occasion for demerit, which stupefies the mind, and is the pleasure of foolish people.
-sutta nipata

Panel encourages legalization of drugs

Panel encourages legalization of drugs
February 14, 2007
By Timothy Mensing
The Daily - University of Washington newspaper
http://www.thedaily.washington.edu/article/2007/2/14/panelEncouragesLegalizationOfDrugs
Leading members from the King County community met last night in the HUB Auditorium to discuss what has been coined the "War on Drugs."
The discussion included socioeconomic and interpersonal effects of current U.S. drug policy.
Those present, other than interested students, included a lawyer, a former Seattle police chief and a Seattle city council member, the three making up the panel.
Students attended in pursuit of a better understanding of the subject, along with the hope that discussions like these would spur alternative paths to current U.S. drug policy.
"[The consequences] of the current state of things is simply not represented enough in the mainstream," said junior Anton Sirotin.
The panel focused on discussing these consequences and providing alternatives. All supported the legalization of drug use with regulation.
Several organizations, including Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR), sponsored the event.
The first to speak was Norm Stamper. With a Ph.D. in leadership and human behavior, Stamper has 34 years of police experience, seven of which consisted of overseeing Seattle law enforcement as Seattle police chief.
His speech began by recalling the beginning of the War on Drugs, enacted and named by former President Richard Nixon.
This War on Drugs came to represent, moreover, "a war on people," without any clear victories to be had, Stamper said.
In a country with 5 percent of the world's population, 25 percent of those incarcerated in the world are housed in U.S. prisons, Stamper said.
Thirty five percent of those jailed are in on charges of drug possession. Along these lines, there are more illegal drugs at cheaper prices now than at any time in history, he said. In the last year, 1.7 million people were jailed on non-violent drug charges.
"What I choose to put in my body is my own decision," Stamper said. "It is only when that decision affects others in a negative way should there be legal intervention."
Larry Gossett, chair of the King County Council, expanded on this idea.
"A 17-year-old goes to jail on charges of possession for 16-21 months and comes out harder than the rock he sold," he said.
Although consisting of only 12 percent of the U.S. population, more than 50 percent of those in jail are African Americans. Of these, 40 percent are there on drug charges, he said.
Rachel Kurtz, deputy director of the King County Bar Association, offered alternatives to the current U.S. drug policy.
Rather than leave the contents of the drug unknown, legalized drugs would offer substance information, she said.
These drugs would share the same laws as alcohol, such as limiting purchasing power to those 21 years old and older.
All panel members supported the idea of diverting law enforcement funds into community programs, such as clinics dealing with addictions.
Audience members resonated Sirotin's sentiment about increasing awareness.
"More people need to hear about the issue," said senior Daren Keck.
Reach contributing writer Timothy Mensing at development@thedaily.washington.edu.

why selling drugs is the worst profession in america

lecture by steven levitt, co-author of "freakanomics."

http://www.glumbert.com/media/gang

thank you tucker carlson

tucker carlson takes on mark souder
http://video.msn.com/v/us/msnbc.htm??f=00&g=9c320267-9311-428a-8ac2-0dc7fe6eb6c3&p=news_comment%20-%20analysis&t=c1152&rf=http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8063292/&fg=&

law enforcement logic

when the only tool you have to work with is a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail.
-harris county (houston) district attorney chuck rosenthal