On a placid Thursday in November, the phones started ringing at the Radnor Township Police Department as Sgt. Sue Cory had never heard before, with reports of a fight and guns drawn outside the Genuardi's supermarket in St. Davids. Radnor police officers jumped in their cars, sirens as loud as could be. But when they got to the store, they were flashed aside by a more imposing set of badges: the FBI's. "A club-drug bust," Cory said. "They were doing a buy, and we had no idea." [continues 1334 words]
Mayor Street Lauds Operation Safe Streets, But He Will Not Discuss Figures. A City Official Put The Amount At Millions. While Operation Safe Streets appears to be having a dramatic impact on Philadelphia crime, it is also dramatically driving up Police Department costs. The 10-week-old program is costing the department more than $4 million a month, according to a city official who asked not to be identified. And the City Controller's Office said yesterday that overtime costs for uniformed police went up $2.9 million in May and $4.6 million in June, compared with the same months a year ago. [continues 569 words]
In the midst of the heated debate over school vouchers and the Pledge of Allegiance, it is easy to overlook the significance of the United States Supreme Court's recent decision to permit states to conduct random drug testing of high school students involved in extracurricular activities. The typical response to this decision seems to be that the ends justify the means: Forced testing may not be a good idea, but if it keeps one child off drugs, it is worth it. Although keeping children off drugs certainly is important, it is not worth stripping students of their privacy rights in school. [continues 449 words]
LONDON - Joining other European countries' more tolerant approach toward drug use, the British government said yesterday that it would effectively decriminalize the possession and use of marijuana. Home Secretary David Blunkett told Parliament that police would no longer arrest people smoking cannabis, as the drug is known here. Possession of a supply of the drug for personal use will also be ignored. Cannabis will still be considered an illegal drug, however, and selling it will remain an arrestable offense. Blunkett and his boss, Prime Minister Tony Blair, defended the policy change, arguing that it would give the police more time and resources to go after violent crime and the use of hard drugs such as heroin. [continues 451 words]
Chimore, Bolivia - Bolivia's remarkable victories in the war against drugs may be at risk in presidential elections today. The South American nation, which once led the world in cultivating the plant from which cocaine is made, has eradicated 85 to 95 percent of its coca plants in the last four years. But political turmoil threatens to undermine the controversial anti-coca efforts. Opinion polls suggest that no candidate is likely to win a majority of today's vote. If that's the case, the Bolivian Congress would have to pick a president, and a weak coalition government likely would result. [continues 466 words]
Mexico City - After years of dismissing cocaine as a U.S. problem, Mexicans are finding that it's their problem, too. Government drug-treatment clinics that saw 3,000 abusers a year in the 1990s now see 50,000. Abuse used to be largely confined to the northern Mexican states from which U.S. smuggling operations were launched; now it has seeped south to such big cities as Mexico City and Guadalajara. There, high-priced powder cocaine has given way to $2-a-rock crack, so cheap that it's luring street kids away from sniffing solvents. [continues 822 words]
A remorseless Richard Paolino, the Bucks County doctor who trafficked in OxyContin to ease the pain of bankruptcy, was sent to prison yesterday for at least 30 years. For Paolino, 59, it was essentially a life term, barring a successful appeal or an extended run of good health. "He will die in prison," prosecutor Gary Gambardella predicted after Judge David W. Heckler sentenced Paolino in Bucks County Court. Smiling broadly, Gambardella called it "an absolutely great sentence," adding that Paolino had "earned every day of it." [continues 747 words]
Dealers, Buyers And Dangerous New Substances Are Right Here In The Suburbs A strange thing happened across the nation in the last few years. While many suburban residents were busy pointing fingers at the urban drug centers and feeling smug about being away from it all, the whole drug scene changed - the substances, the dealers, even the location of the sales. You could say it all changed before our very eyes, but, more accurately, it changed right behind our backs. Until only a few years ago, suburbanites typically traveled to big cities to buy their drugs of choice - heroin, cocaine, and crack. Today that old scenario has been turned upside down. Although the old standby drugs are still being dealt in the big cities, newer and more dangerous drugs have become available in recent years in suburban communities all around the country. These newer drugs, known as designer drugs, are becoming the suburbanites' drug of choice. [continues 608 words]
A Colombian rebel leader wanted by U.S. law enforcement authorities on drug-trafficking charges has been arrested in Suriname and flown to the United States, the Drug Enforcement Administration said yesterday. U.S. authorities identified him as Carlos Bolas, a leader of the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC). He will be arraigned in U.S. District Court, the DEA said. "For the first time we have not only indicted a member of a terrorist organization involved in drug trafficking, but we have also arrested him," said Asa Hutchinson, the DEA director. [continues 125 words]
Richard G. Paolino, the Bensalem doctor convicted of trafficking in OxyContin and other prescription drugs, was sentenced today in Bucks County Court to a 30- to 120-year prison term. "It was a great sentence," prosecutor Gary Gambardella said afterward. "He will die in prison." Unrepentent to the end, Paolino, 59, pledged to appeal his conviction and sentence. As he was taken away in handcuffs, he told reporters to tell his former patients "that I love them and wish I could still be there to treat them." [continues 291 words]
Richard Paolino, once considered the area's top illicit supplier of the narcotic painkiller OxyContin, has been jailed since his arrest in March 2001. The former Bensalem doctor is set to be sentenced today, and he could spend the rest of his life behind bars. But sidelining Paolino apparently has done little to slow the abuse of oxycodone - the active ingredient in OxyContin and similar drugs - which can give a heroin-like high if taken incorrectly. "I don't want to underestimate the impact of his arrest," said Philadelphia Police Inspector Jeremiah Daley, until recently in charge of the city's narcotics division. Paolino "was a huge purveyor, but I also don't want to say that his arrest and conviction ended the problem." [continues 756 words]
Costs Are Mounting For Operation Safe Streets, Which Began May 1. Mayor Street Asked Pa.'S Senators For Help Yesterday. WASHINGTON - With costs mounting for his ambitious crackdown on drug trafficking in the city, Mayor Street came here yesterday seeking money for the program from the Bush administration and Congress. Street spent part of the afternoon huddling with Sens. Rick Santorum and Arlen Specter, both Pennsylvania Republicans, mapping strategy for wringing the funds from Congress during budget deliberations. Both senators promised to push for more money, possibly by establishing a federal pilot program that might serve as a model for other big cities. [continues 697 words]
Residents deserve the benefits and safety that antidrug effort provides. Mayor Street did a poor job of lining up finances when he started the popular - and expensive - Safe Streets program. The effort has committed hundreds of police officers to chasing drug dealers from about 300 street corners. Still, contrary to what cynics predicted, the offensive seems to be working. That's good news for the decent people of those neighborhoods who, for the first time in years, feel the streets belong to them. [continues 691 words]
Operation Safe Streets, the city's crackdown on street drug sales that began last month, is being praised by the most important people - the residents who live in the targeted neighborhoods. The reaction of Elizabeth Bacone, a longtime activist in the Strawberry Mansion section, is typical. "It's a new world here. We are no longer abandoned. We feel safe now for the first time in years," said Bacone. "Since the police began patrolling our neighborhoods three weeks ago, we have not heard any gunshots." [continues 583 words]
Federal, State And Local Police Fanned Out In A High-Visibility Patrol. It Also Marked The County Prosecutor's Farewell. CAMDEN - It was Camden's version of Operation Safe Streets. And it was also a last hurrah for Camden County Prosecutor Lee A. Solomon, who will leave office next week to join the U.S. Attorney's Office, and who had helped to organize many such operations before. Almost 250 state, federal and local police massed along the Camden's waterfront yesterday in the first "high visibility patrol" involving state police since Gov. McGreevey assigned 100 troopers to the city last month. [continues 432 words]
Twenty-three police districts. Twenty-three street parties. One thousand volunteers. That was the goal as Mayor Street and Police Commissioner Sylvester Johnson criss-crossed the city yesterday, launching Phase II of Operation Safe Streets, the city's aggressive antidrug initiative. At the first rally, in the playground of the McDaniel Public School at 21st and Moore Streets, Street and Johnson asked for 1,000 volunteers to join town watch programs and become the eyes and ears of the police. Street said he was looking for 55 volunteers from the first district. [continues 403 words]
This could only happen when a rock star and a former captain of industry team up to check out operations in what is said to be the largest industrial plant in the Southern Hemisphere: Somebody was smoking pot. Irish rocker Bono and U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, touring a Ford Motor Co. plant near Pretoria, South Africa, on Friday, took in whiffs of marijuana smoke. O'Neill had wanted to highlight the 3,500-worker plant for its model plan to test and offer treatment for HIV-infected workers. [continues 96 words]
On May 1, the 34-year-old mother of two got perhaps the first break of her life. She was freed. "You've gotten a second chance," said Jefferson County Circuit Judge Tommy Nail. "Don't blow it." To many, Wilson had become a symbol of the high price of mandatory sentencing. And her release is the latest in a series of events challenging those laws. Intended to target major drug traffickers, many mandatory minimum laws, as they are known, more often have sent addicts, drug dealers' girlfriends, and college students peddling marijuana to prison for long terms. [continues 406 words]
BRISTOL TOWNSHIP - Several 24-by-30-inch "one way" signs are the latest weapons that the local police department is hoping to employ in the perpetual war against drugs in the hardscrabble Bloomsdale-Fleetwing neighborhood. The township's council is scheduled to vote tonight whether to make streets in the small community one-way in an effort to limit the ways potential drug-buying motorists can get into, and out of, the area. Created in the 1970s, the school of thought called Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design, CPTED (SEHP-ted) for short, preaches utilizing urban-planning applications to reduce law-breaking. [continues 585 words]
Men United for a Better Philadelphia aims to complement the current police campaign. Calling it phase two of Operation Safe Streets, scores of community activists yesterday announced the creation of a grassroots organization to sway young men away from the illegal drug trade in Philadelphia. Men United for a Better Philadelphia will go to the city's street corners "not [to] confront young men, but talk to young men," said Bilal Qayyum, executive of the Father's Day Rally Committee, at a news conference in front of the Hank Gathers Memorial Recreation Center at 25th and Diamond Streets in North Philadelphia. [continues 383 words]
