It's hard to imagine that a year has passed since May 21, 2016, when I received the news that is every parent's worst nightmare. I was told over the phone by the RCMP that my only child, Robby, had passed away from an overdose. He was only 24, and a week later we learned from the coroner that he had died from an accidental fentanyl overdose. Losing a child to an overdose is no different than losing a child to a disease such as cancer, or to a vehicle accident, or violence. You have joined a club that you never planned or wanted to be part of. Suddenly, the empathy you have felt for other parents' losses over the years has become a real and tangible thing in your own life. [continues 616 words]
PICKENS - Employees of Pickens County schools will soon have to undergo random drug testing if the school board votes to follow the recommendation of its policy committee. The proposed policy could go to the board for approval at its Oct. 22 meeting. Plans to rewrite the district's drug policy were already in action before Saturday, when two employees were charged with multiple counts of distributing marijuana near a school. The employees were Kimberly Dawn Anthony, 43, and Daniel John Fahey, 48, Fahey resigned from his job as the district's school-to-work program coordinator, said John Eby, spokesman for the school district. Fahey was released from the Pickens County Detention Center Monday on $10,000 worth of surety bonds. Anthony, a computer keyboarding teacher at Gettys Middle School, was at the detention center Tuesday with bail set at $250,000. She is on suspension from the district. [continues 600 words]
Poppy Dreams Bayer's "new wonder drug . . . proved to be an awe-inspiringly powerful painkiller," reports Martin Booth in Opium: A History (St. Martin's, $14.95). It also turned out to be ferociously addictive, like opium and morphine before it. (The same couldn't be said of Bayer's other famous product, aspirin.) Five to eight times as potent as its parent drug, not to mention cheaper, "heroin was an ideal illegal commodity: as a white powder, it was also easily 'cut' or adulterated [and] easily concealed by traffickers. . . . illicit heroin use grew rapidly and became the primary trade drug of the criminal underworld." In the United States, heroin came along at a time when society was clamping down on drug use, making the big H both harder to get and more tantalizing. [continues 1369 words]
