A Shocking Report Highlighting the Extent of Fife's Drugs Problem Should "Challenge" Everyone Living and Working in the Region, It Has Been Suggested. NHS Fife chief executive George Brechin made the comment after the Fife Alcohol and Drug Partnership (ADP) published new figures which revealed a slight fall in the number of drug deaths over the past three years, yet flagged up the severity of the situation addiction services are faced with on a day-to-day basis. The report confirmed that the number of deaths resulting from a cocktail of illicit drugs dropped from 31 in 2008 to 26 in 2009 and then again to 24 last year-perhaps reflecting the efforts of the ADP and other agencies in trying to tackle the issue. [continues 797 words]
A Total of 135 People Have Died Since the Start of 2005 in Fife Because of Drugs -- and Agencies Working to Stop the Deaths Recognise It Is 135 Too Many. But, while every victim was different in their own way, research by the Fife Alcohol and Drug Partnership has allowed organisations to build up a picture of a "typical" drug user and help identify the areas where further work is needed, in treatment and intervention. A white male aged 32 or 33 living in central Fife, the victim would have started his substance misuse at 16 and left school around then. [continues 283 words]
PARIS -- Albert Hofmann, the mystical Swiss chemist who gave the world LSD, the most powerful psychotropic substance known, died Tuesday at his hilltop home near Basel, Switzerland. He was 102. The cause was a heart attack, said Rick Doblin, founder and president of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, a California-based group that in 2005 republished Dr. Hofmann's 1979 book "LSD: My Problem Child." Dr. Hofmann first synthesized the compound lysergic acid diethylamide in 1938 but did not discover its psychopharmacological effects until five years later, when he accidentally ingested the substance that became known to the 1960s counterculture as acid. [continues 989 words]
BURG, Switzerland - Albert Hofmann, the father of LSD, walked slowly across the small corner office of his modernist home on a grassy Alpine hilltop here, hoping to show a visitor the vista that sweeps before him on clear days. But outside there was only a white blanket of fog hanging just beyond the crest of the hill. He picked up a photograph of the view on his desk instead, left there perhaps to convince visitors of what really lies beyond the window. [continues 968 words]
BURG, Switzerland - ALBERT Hofmann, the father of LSD, walked slowly across the small corner office of his modernist home on a grassy Alpine hilltop here, hoping to show a visitor the vista that sweeps before him on clear days. But outside there was only a white blanket of fog hanging just beyond the crest of the hill. He picked up a photograph of the view on his desk instead, left there perhaps to convince visitors of what really lies beyond the windowpane. [continues 1140 words]
Scientist Calls Drug 'Medicine for the Soul' BURG, Switzerland -- Albert Hofmann, the father of LSD, walked slowly across the small corner office of his modernist home on a grassy Alpine hilltop here, hoping to show a visitor the vista that sweeps before him on clear days. But outside there was only a white blanket of fog. He picked up a photograph of the view on his desk instead, left there perhaps to convince visitors of what really lies beyond the window. [continues 819 words]
EVRY, France, Nov. 8 - Amin Kouidri, 20, has been hunting for a job for more than two years now and spends his days drifting around a government housing project here under the watchful gaze of France's national police. He and his neighbors in one of France's now-notorious housing projects say that they feel cut off from French society, a result of a process of segregation lasting for decades, and that alienation and pressure from the police have now exploded in rage across the country. [continues 1525 words]
ANDAHAR, Afghanistan -- Ali Muhammad, a gregarious opium trader in a flowing brown robe and wrinkled black turban, was delighted by the news on Wednesday that his country's interim government had vowed to ban poppy cultivation, renewing a prohibition imposed under the ousted Taliban government that cut opium production by about 95 percent last year. "We'll be rich," he said, sitting on an electric-blue carpet in one of the dozens of stalls that line this city's bustling opium market. [continues 674 words]
China executed at least 59 people for drug trafficking on Monday and yesterday, the United Nations International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking. Twenty were executed in Kunming, capital of Yunnan province, after a rally where the condemned were sentenced before thousands of people. China has put more than 1,000 people to death since April in a nationwide anticrime drive, according to Western diplomats tracking executions reported in the state media. Not all executions are announced. [end]
