ONE of the more interesting revelations of the Addictions Foundation of Manitoba's recent study of Winnipeg street kids is that, actually, not many of them sleep on the street. About 30 per cent, or 43, of the 142 people aged 14 to 25 surveyed, said they stayed overnight on the street "often." Most of the respondents interviewed at a youth centre found some sort of shelter, although the survey did not canvas all of them as to where they might sleep. [continues 340 words]
Armed with little more than red berets and a drive to cut down street crime, a local chapter of Guardian Angels will be on Calgary streets by November. The interview process is underway, but there is still first aid and self-defence training to be done before the six-member patrols can begin walking the beat, said the organization's Canadian director, Lou Hoffer. When Angels founder Curtis Sliwa arrived in Calgary in May, he said he expected to have his red berets on the streets by August. [continues 520 words]
Our position: Adding another drug court judge is not the best fix for clogged dockets. At first glance, there are plenty of reasons why adding a judge to split the caseload of the Marion County Superior Court's drug felonies court appears to be a good idea. The drug court, after all, accounted for 37 percent of the superior court's open caseload of major felonies last year -- three times more cases than the next largest court. Each drug court judge averaged 422 open cases, more than the total caseload for Court 6. And the court has more inmates than any other awaiting trial in the Marion County Jail. [continues 356 words]
Canadians are fortunate to live in a country where the rule of law prevails and crime is an anomaly. In societies plagued by anarchy, murder, robbery and assault are everyday occurrences that often go unreported and unresolved. But in Canada, such crimes are rare deviations from public order that disturb our peaceful communities. Criminal acts violate the code of conduct Canadian legislators have put in place to govern public behaviour. For this reason they are newsworthy. Most Canadians appreciate that they live in a place where murder is still front-page news and not merely a notation on a police blotter. [continues 579 words]
Re: Up In Smoke, Philip Slayton, July 27. Mr. Slayton's musings about the use of marijuana in Canada are remarkably superficial. Decriminalizing marijuana would imply decriminalization of the variety of drugs with which marijuana is often found to be infused. Methamphetamine is fairly a common one, but Ecstasy, LSD and PCP are among the many other drugs marijuana is sometimes laced with. The flaw in Mr. Slayton's plan is the same one that dogs the steps of so many who would draft or change laws based on conclusions drawn from superficial analyses and/or tunnel vision: unintended consequences that are potentially horrific. Ken Lane Victoria, B.C. [end]
KABUL, Afghanistan -- Anti-drug police from Colombia have been touring Afghanistan to advise it on how to combat its booming illegal drug trade, officials said Tuesday. A five-member team from Colombia, the world's leading producer of cocaine, has spent 10 days meeting counternarcotics police and officials around Afghanistan, the top heroin-producing nation. Colombian Interdiction chief Lt. Col. Oscar Atehortua, listens for a question during a press conference in Kabul, Afghanistan on Tuesday, Aug. 1, 2006. Anti-drugs police from top world cocaine producer Colombia have been touring top heroin producing nation Afghanistan, to advise on how the lawless country can combat its booming drugs trade, officials said Tuesday. (AP Photo/Musadeq Sadeq) (Musadeq Sadeq - AP) PHOTOS [continues 253 words]
KABUL, Afghanistan --Anti-drug police from Colombia have been touring Afghanistan to advise it on how to combat its booming illegal drug trade, officials said Tuesday. A five-member team from Colombia, the world's leading producer of cocaine, has spent 10 days meeting counternarcotics police and officials around Afghanistan, the top heroin-producing nation. Lt. Col. Oscar Atehortua, the chief of the Colombian team's drug interdiction unit, said they had been sharing their "expertise and experience" from 30 years of battling drugs and terrorist groups involved in the illicit trade, and may help train Afghans in the future. [continues 210 words]
Raids on July 6 targeted 11 San Diego cannabis dispensaries. Owners of some of the dispensaries not raided that day were heard to say that they were spared because they were running proper establishments. As if the DEA made such distinctions! On July 21 the remaining clubs were visited by law enforcement and told to close or else. They have all complied. "Two DEA agents accompanied by one local cop went around to the clubs," says organizer Dion Markgraff. "They didn't have search warrants. They threatened to arrest everyone if they didn't shut down. Places that let them in had all their medicine stolen. One or two places didn't let them in. Two or three others got word and shut down before they came around. At one of those places the DEA called the landlord and pressured him to make sure they wouldn't re-open." [continues 1404 words]
A pilot scheme in Oxfordshire which resulted in thousands of pounds worth of drugs being seized in police raids is to be rolled out across the UK. Police told of their success using information from the Thames Valley Crown Prosecution Service antisocial behaviour audit, when Attorney General Lord Peter Goldsmith visited Oxford yesterday. Lord Goldsmith came to Blackbird Leys Leisure Centre to hear about the audit's results. People in Blackbird Leys, Oxford city centre and Adderbury, near Banbury, were interviewed for the survey, which aimed to raise awareness of the CPS and to help tackle antisocial behaviour. [continues 275 words]
Torrance business licenses will no longer be granted to medical marijuana dispensaries -- or any establishments that breach federal law, a unanimous City Council ruled Tuesday night. In doing so, Torrance becomes the first South Bay city to declare co-ops, which provide medicinal pot for specific ailments, unwelcome within its boundaries. Though about 20 medical marijuana supporters spoke out against the ordinance and urged the council to simply regulate local dispensaries, council members said most residents did not want these facilities in their community. [continues 550 words]
Young people are using more smokeless and pipe tobacco and more injection drugs - and their drug use is having an adverse effect on their performance in school. In addition, more 12th graders are engaged in binge drinking. Those are among the findings in the 16th Annual Survey of Alcohol, Tobacco and Other Drug Use by Indiana Children and Adolescents, conducted by the Indiana Prevention Resource Center at Indiana University. The 2006 results were obtained from data collected from 131,017 students in grades six through 12 in both public and private schools in Indiana. [continues 1051 words]
Re: Unintended Consequences, letter to the editor, Aug. 1. Letter writer Ken Lane writes, "Decriminalization of marijuana would imply decriminalization of the variety of drugs with which marijuana is often found to be infused. Methamphetamine is fairly a common one, but Ecstasy, LSD and PCP are among the many other drugs marijuana is sometimes laced with." It makes me wonder what his dealer is slipping into his weed. Even though this idea is not new, does it make any sense for a drug dealer (a black market businessperson) to add more expensive drugs to his weed and not charge for it, let alone not tell his customers about it? [continues 133 words]
Man Convicted Of Assassination Bid Withdrew Dismissal Suit A Surrey man convicted in a political assassination attempt was fired from his job for allegedly bringing to work marijuana-laced Indian snacks that made other employees sick, according to court documents obtained by The Vancouver Sun. Jaspal Singh Atwal, who has approached a series of Lower Mainland MPs for help to get a visa to go to India, filed a wrongful dismissal suit for $10,000 against Don Carr Chevrolet related to his 2003 firing. [continues 518 words]
Charles Clarke can stop agonising. I can assure him it won't make the slightest difference whether cannabis is upgraded back to B or stays where it is at C. He's said to be veering towards alphabetical inaction, substituting instead a public information campaign warning of the risks of the drug. That, I regret to have to tell him, won't work either. I don't know anyone who understood the practical consequences of the demotion of cannabis to the letter C. Did it make possession of the drug legal? In no way, David Blunkett assured us sternly when he was the minister in charge of downgrading. It's just that it wouldn't, well, sort of, be treated quite so, you know, criminally. So were the police now going to ignore it? Not at all, just not pursue possessors as vigorously as before. But they weren't pursuing them vigorously under letter B, were they? So what changed? And so on, in ripples of confusion. [continues 971 words]
After reading your front page article ("Lawmakers from Delta to offer bills to help area," Jan. 6), I could not help but wonder how many more task forces, studies and millions upon millions of hardworking taxpayers' money is it going to take for the people of this state to realize the real problem of the Delta. Too many of our young people are dropping out of school and too many who drop out are using and/or dealing drugs, mainly crack, leading to other crimes. This lowers of the quality of life for all in the area. [continues 67 words]
The Furore Over Pot Masked A UKP16bn Crime Bill For Demonising 'Hard Drugs' The debate on reclassifying cannabis has served the government well in diverting attention from the miserable failure of its entire drug policy. Like an accomplished conjuror, Charles Clarke has created an illusion of concern over young people's mental health while presiding over a policy that is creating mayhem from Bogota to Brixton - drug prohibition. Far from engaging in a debate on the efficacy of continuing a policy that costs the UK UKP16bn a year in drug-related crime, he has become trapped in a meaningless furore over the relative naughtiness of producing, supplying and possessing dope. [continues 446 words]
Inconvenience May Be Worth Safety A nightmare for police officers came true last week in Berkeley County, when two police officers were hospitalized after entering a house used as a meth lab. People who run meth labs produce methamphetamine, which, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, is a synthetic central nervous system stimulant that is classified as a Schedule II controlled substance. It is dangerous, and it is distributed across the nation under the names of "Crystal" and "Speed." [continues 327 words]
And for the First Time, Help Comes From the Doctor's Office, Not the Methadone Clinic The swans that winter near David Alexander's home depend on the couple of hundred pounds or so of goose feed he scatters each day. Only a third of the cygnets, the baby swans, live through their first harsh Connecticut winter. Like the toughest cygnets, Alexander, 56, is a survivor. After years of battling an addiction to painkillers that were prescribed for numerous injuries he suffered while racing motorcycles, Alexander no longer craves the narcotics. [continues 1956 words]
Editor, I am disabled due to bipolar disorder. As an American, I do my best to contribute to our society and try to make things better for those around me. I try to do what the doctors say - I take the Prozac, I try to interact with those around me, and I fight tooth and nail with this illness. Yet most days I am demoralized because I grew up watching people like Ward Cleaver and Mr. Brady go to work, raise kids and buy houses. [continues 431 words]
With the Meth Epidemic Raging, States Try Limiting Access to the Ingredients. Lt. Ron D. Smith of the Nevada County Sheriff's Department has seen plenty of drug users in his time, but nothing quite like the ones tweaked on meth. In his "sleepy little county" in central California, 40 percent of all arrests are meth-related. The crimes, he says, are getting wackier and wackier. "Meth actually makes you crazy," Smith says. That's the scariest thing about methamphetamine, an illegal drug that has reached epidemic status across much of the United States. After it invades the central nervous system to achieve its high, meth turns perfectly normal people into psychotics, often violent ones. [continues 1468 words]
