Tasmania, Big Supplier to Drug Companies, Faces Changes Now is the sowing season for opium poppies in the Australian state of Tasmania. Tractors chug up and down paddocks, pulling elaborate machinery that drills pairs of adjacent, miniature holes in the dirt, and then drops a dozen tiny kernels of fertilizer in one of the holes and a tiny poppy seed in the other. By November, the fields will be carpeted in pink flowers with an occasional splash of white or mauve. Then the flowers will drop away, leaving behind distinctive, cup-shaped pods packed with tiny poppy seeds along with the opium latex that surrounds them. When the latex dries two months later, the pods are harvested and hauled to factories, where machinery separates the seeds and grinds up the rest to extract the valuable narcotic alkaloids. [continues 2847 words]
HONG KONG -- When helicopter-borne Australian commandos stormed a freighter three years ago after it was spotted unloading 110 pounds of high-grade heroin, the ship proved to be registered in Tuvalu, a tiny island nation in the South Pacific. When a Spanish warship stopped a freighter carrying cement to Yemen four years ago, the cargo vessel turned out to be carrying 15 Scud missiles as well and was registered in Cambodia. The two freighters had something in common: although registered elsewhere, both were owned by North Korea. [continues 977 words]
GENERAL SANTOS CITY, the Philippines - This industrial city on the southern coast of Mindanao Island illustrates how America's various strategic aims in the wars on drugs and terrorism can clash, alienating important allies engaged in battling terrorism. Among leaders of the Philippines' important tuna industry here, resentment is running high over trade legislation now on the Senate floor in Washington. The bill includes a provision to eliminate steep import taxes on canned tuna from Andean nations while keeping taxes in place for other countries like the Philippines. [continues 1154 words]
DETROIT, March 30 -- Concluding a case that drew national attention to GHB, a drug that has been linked to date rapes, a judge sentenced four young men to prison here today for putting what proved to be a fatal quantity of the substance in the soft drink of an unsuspecting 15-year-old girl a year ago. Judge Maggie Drake of the Wayne County Circuit Court sentenced Joshua Cole to 7 to 15 years in prison for involuntary manslaughter in the death of Samantha Reid, a high school freshman from Rockwood, Mich. Mr. Cole confessed to police immediately after the girl's death that he put the drug in the drink at a small party. [continues 300 words]
The Death Of A Michigan Girl Inspires Two Bills To Put It On The Most-controlled Substances List. GIBRALTAR, Mich.-Students from Oscar Carlson High School here say that when they go to parties these days, they try to keep an eye on their drinks at all times, put caps back on bottled beverages between sips and never accept a cup from someone they do not know. The precautions follow the death last January of Samantha Reid, a 15-year-old freshman who drank a glass of Mountain Dew laced with GHB, an increasingly popular recreational and "date rape" drug that is colorless, odorless and virtually tasteless. Samantha's death, one of 49 linked to the drug nationwide since 1990, has galvanized an effort to crack down of GHB, gamma hydroxy butyrate. [continues 833 words]
Los Angeles - Ever since Ronald Reagan's "new federalism" revived the debate over states' rights in the 1980's - and particularly since Republicans took control of Congress in 1994 - power has seemed to be ebbing from Washington. Last year, the Federal Government gave up its six-decade responsibility for welfare. California, like other states, has moved to assert its authority in other areas, voting to side-step the Federal commitment to affirmative action and Federal drug laws on marijuana. The trend may be unmistakable, but devolution, it turns out, isn't revolution. Arid it isn't easy, as advocates of states' rights, particularly in the West, are learning the hard way. They have been angered at recent assertions of authority by the Clinton Administration and the Federal judiciary. [continues 945 words]
