What To Do If Your Friend Turns Blue? Try Narcan. Jewels tells his overdose story to anyone who will listen. He hobbles back and forth along an asphalt pathway in Tompkins Square Park, wearing battered cowboy boots and a CBGB T-shirt held together with safety pins. Friends slouch on a bench nearby, taking turns gulping from a bottle of Colt 45. Few bother listening; they've already heard this story too many times. "I OD'd on the same dope," Jewels, 35, says, referring to rumors that a bad batch of heroin might have caused the deaths of six people, including two college students who died in an apartment six blocks away. "They brought me back [to life] four times. Twice here, once in the ambulance, and once in the hospital. When I left the hospital, I was still high." [continues 510 words]
Pot for patients may run into trouble with the Supreme Court, but the issue is gaining here at home When Assemblyman Richard Gottfried proposed a bill legalizing marijuana for sick people in 1997, his odds of success seemed slim. State Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno, a Republican, vowed to defeat Gottfried's bill. And even Gottfried, a Democrat from Chelsea, admitted that turning his bill into law would be "an uphill battle." Back then, only two states permitted sick people to smoke pot legally. [continues 1265 words]
The Remeeder Houses make up one of the poorest blocks in Brooklyn. Six-story buildings rise from the rectangular patch of land between Sutter and Blake avenues, and between Georgia and Alabama avenues in East New York. More than 50 percent of the project's residents live below the poverty line. Unemploymentis rampant. Run-down, overcrowded apartments are the norm. By another measure, though, this block is one of the priciest in the city. Last year, five residents were sent to state prison, at an annual cost of about $30,000 a person. The total price tag for their incarceration will exceed $1 million. Criminal-justice experts have a name for this phenomenon: "million-dollar blocks." In Brooklyn last year, there were 35 blocks that fit this category--ones where so many residents were sent to state prison that the total cost of their incarceration will be more than $1 million. [continues 1665 words]
One Mother's Unlikely Education in New York's Rockefeller Drug Laws Cheri O'Donoghue usually spends her days inside an office in Manhattan, working as an editor at a glossy magazine. But last Wednesday, the mother of two took the day off from work and, at 7:30 a.m., she boarded a bus to Albany. Almost every passenger on the bus had a family member who had been imprisoned for a drug crime. Cheri settled into a seat near the back. [continues 905 words]
How the Lingering Effects of a Massive Drug Bust Devastated One Family in a Small Texas Town TULIA, TEXAS-Only a few years ago, Mattie White liked to sit on the front porch of her one-story house. In the park across the street, young people played basketball and hung out on the swings, their shouts echoing through the neighborhood. These days, though, Conner Park is quiet. Many of the people who once gathered there are now in prison. In Tulia, a dry town without a bar or nightclub, Conner Park was a favorite hangout for the town's black youth. Today, it has become a symbol of the community's devastation. For Mattie and many others, the park is a lonely sight, a constant reminder of all the friends, neighbors, and relatives who are gone. [continues 2398 words]
The Woman Who Bailed Out a Drug Defendant Tells Her Story Paula Thomson never could have predicted that she would someday crusade on behalf of an accused drug dealer. But on May 8, there she was, standing on the back of a pickup truck outside Governor George Pataki's office in midtown Manhattan, shouting about overzealous cops and indifferent jurors. Thomson was a star speaker at a rally marking the 28th anniversary of New York's so-called Rockefeller drug laws. [continues 1458 words]
A Stand-Up Comedian Fights The Drug Laws By Working The Media When Randy Credico is feeling bored or angry or anxious, he stands outside Brooklyn State Supreme Court and hollers at strangers. "Read about the racist Rockefeller drug laws!" shouted Credico, who is white, on a recent afternoon, waving photocopies of newspaper stories. "Spread the word! They're taking black children out of your neighborhood and putting them in Attica! This is a modern-day slave auction block!" When he is not holding one-man protests outside courthouses, Credico is trying to build a movement to publicize what he believes are the injustices of New York's drug laws. For three years, Credico, a 45-year-old comedian, has been the project director of the William Moses Kunstler Fund for Racial Justice. Despite having no full-time staff and an annual budget of only $50,000, he has managed to start a small but scrappy movement of drug prisoners and their relatives. [continues 2514 words]
Prisoners' Relatives Assess Pataki's Drug Law Reform Plan The good news rippled down the aisle of the bus as it headed along the highway from Albany to New York City on January 3. Drug prisoners' relatives had boarded the bus outside the state capitol, where they had spent the day rallying against New York's strict drug laws. Now everyone was talking about governor George Pataki's state of the state speech and his promise to reform New York's so-called Rockefeller drug laws. The activists, it seemed, would soon have something to celebrate. [continues 758 words]
Julie Colon never planned on becoming an activist. But two years ago, when her mother sent her a newspaper clipping from prison about a new group for drug offenders' relatives, Julie, then 20, decided to check it out. She discovered that prisoners' families were trying to repeal New York State's strict drug laws by holding protests around New York City, and so she began attending their rallies. Carrying a poster with her mother's photo--and surrounded by other inmates' relatives--Julie imagined her efforts might help repeal the so-called Rockefeller drug laws. [continues 801 words]
The good news rippled down the aisle of the bus as it headed along the highway from Albany to New York City on January 3. Drug prisoners' relatives had boarded the bus outside the state capitol, where they had spent the day rallying against New York's strict drug laws. Now everyone was talking about governor George Pataki's state of the state speech and his promise to reform New York's so-called Rockefeller drug laws. The activists, it seemed, would soon have something to celebrate. Over the last three years, these mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, and children of drug prisoners have built a small but scrappy movement. [continues 761 words]
Stun Shields, Stray Cats, Buck-Fifties, Boofing: The Top Brass's Tour of America's Largest Penal Colony Roaming Rikers Inside and Out: A Two-Part Special Report on Prison and Its Aftermath This year, the United States achieved a dubious distinction: It surpassed Russia as the world leader in imprisonment, with one in every 130 people living behind bars. The U.S. prison population has soared above 2 million, and most of those inmates are locked up for nonviolent crimes. People are also leaving prison in record numbers; in 2000, an unprecedented 600,000 prisoners will return home. The imprisonment boom, fueled largely by the nation's war on drugs, has generated new industries and jobs. It has also devastated neighborhoods, fractured families, and created a new class of stigmatized people who will one day return to society. To explore the human cost of America's growing punishment industry, The Village Voice is publishing a two-part special report. This week: an in-depth portrait of the nation's largest penal colony. Next week: one ex-con's struggle to rejoin her family. [continues 7164 words]
Stun Shields, Stray Cats, Buck-Fifties, Boofing: The Top Brass's Tour of America's Largest Penal Colony Roaming Rikers [ continued from part 1 which is at http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00.n1874.a07.html ] A Visit To Rosie's By now, summer classes at the Rosewood High School had ended. The girls in the Rose M. Singer Center, or "Rosie's," where Rikers houses its female inmates, had to entertain themselves. So on this humid morning, four girls crowded around a table playing spades and swapping stories in a room with bare walls, one fan, and a long window looking onto a guards' station. The ringleader in cell block "6 Upper" was Mona Lisa, a saucy 17-year-old from Harlem. [continues 8352 words]
New York's War on Drugs Held Her Hostage for 16 Years. A Story of Prison, Politics, and One Woman's Pride. By the time the sheriff's van lurched into the parking lot, she no longer cared if anyone noticed her wet cheeks and swollen eyes. Tears had been rolling down Elaine Bartlett's face for two hours—the entire drive from Albany to Westchester County—and she struggled to wipe them away with handcuffed hands. Locked up for the last four months in an Albany jail, Elaine had heard plenty of horror stories about her new home, ugly rumors that swirled through her head. The women at Bedford Hills will attack you, rape you, steal all your stuff. [continues 5924 words]
Malone, New York- The homes for the town's newest residents arrived last summer atop 14-wheel tractor trailers. Each tiny, prefab dwelling came furnished with two beds, a mirror over the sink, and steel-reinforced walls. With a photo and caption, the Malone Telegram heralded these new homes: "prison cell blocks arrive." evidently, prison building qualifies as good news in Malone, New York (Pop. 14,297), where concrete cages are not merely houses for criminals. To locals, they are also an answer to chronic underemployment, a magnet for luring new retail stores, and the best hope of recapturing malone's boom years. [continues 5174 words]
An Unlikely Group of Prisoners' Relatives Battles the Rockefeller Drug Laws One is a Wall Street stockbroker. Another attends fourth grade. A third serves lunch in a high school cafeteria. And a fourth was once a street cop in queens. What draws these New Yorkers together is that each has a relative in state prison serving time for a drug crime, and all have recently transformed their private anger into political activism. The four joined the daily protests held last week to mark the 26th anniversary of the so-called Rockefeller drug laws, which were named after their creator, Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller. For years, the war over these laws belonged to politicians and drug-policy activists. But now those most directly affected by the laws8B drug prisoners and their families8B have added their voices to the debate. [continues 1561 words]
The Dubious Drug-Education Program Takes New York Thirty sixth-graders begin to shout as a police officer enters their classroom at P.S. 20 on the Lower East Side. "Good morning, Officer Carla!" they call out to their favorite teacher. Officer Carla is Carla DeBlasio, 35, a one-time transit cop who teaches weekly classes as part of the NYPD's Drug Abuse Resistance Education program, known as DARE. On a recent Wednesday, the officer strides into the classroom clutching DARE's mascot, a fuzzy stuffed lion named Daren. [continues 3063 words]
