Bottom-Up Enforcement, Lack of Drug Treatment Preceded Sacramento's Deadly Outbreak Counterfeit pain pills recovered by federal drug authorities and masking dangerous amounts of fentanyl bear close resemblance to a milder medication. In February, when Sacramento County started its new opioid task force to address an emerging public health crisis gaining traction here, the deadly fentanyl outbreak that would eventually kill a dozen locally wasn't yet on the radar. The group's second meeting, on March 21, presented physicians with safe prescription tips for opioids, a constantly expanding class of pain-relieving medications all derived in some way from the highly addictive opium poppy. The well-attended meeting focused on the potential threat of these legal medications, which many say are dreamed up by profit-minded pharmaceutical companies, overprescribed by doctors and blamed for introducing a generation of suburbanites to the transfixing lure of a chemical high. [continues 1581 words]
Sacramento's Deadly Fentanyl Outbreak Underscores Antidote's Access Barriers Presh doesn't remember what it's like to come back from the dead. But her mom sure does. It was about three or four years ago. Jolene (not her real name) got a call from a local emergency room informing her that her daughter was being treated for a near-fatal heroin overdose after paramedics found her unresponsive in the back seat of a parked car. "I didn't even know she was using heroin," said Jolene. "When they found her, she was blue and barely breathing." [continues 1551 words]
28 Overdoses Linked to Fentanyl-Fueled Pills It's the development that public health officials and medical providers dreaded, but with a twist: With the nation gripped by a metastasizing opioid epidemic, 12 overdoses flooded Sacramento County emergency rooms in a two-day span last week. The suspected culprit is a synthetic palliative drug named fentanyl, which is 80 times stronger than morphine and hundreds of times more powerful than heroin, and is increasingly laced with the latter, say harm-reduction specialists. But instead of people coming in blue-faced and unresponsive from fentanyl-laced black tar heroin, this was believed to be something relatively new: fentanyl doctored to look like Norco pain pills and packing a devastating punch. [continues 560 words]
Author Scott Thomas Anderson's new book explores America's appetite for incarceration Journalist Scott Thomas Anderson has stuck his trickiest deadline yet. The author, hard-news evangelist and former SN&R colleague spent the past three years researching and writing his second nonfiction book, The Cutting Four-Piece: Crime and Tragedy in an Era of Prison Overcrowding, a tough work of long-form journalism that pries open the iron gates on America's penitentiary binge. The book is his second stab at crime-centric literary journalism, following his book Shadow People: How Meth-Driven Crime is Eating at the Heart of Rural America. Both books are bruising examinations of a society failing both victims and addicts. But his latest also contains a love letter to a profession in flux, particularly small-town reporters who out-hustled their big-market colleagues in illustrating how California's prison realignment experiment warped their communities. Over pints of hard cider and IPA, Anderson explains the origins of our prison crisis, why he hopes his work resonates with convicts and what he learned from SN&R's most notorious writer. [continues 719 words]
Legislature to Hear Long Overdue Drug Reform Bill Next Month A senate bill going through the state Legislature would treat crack cocaine the same as powdered cocaine. Advertisement State legislators are finally getting around to one of the most racist drug laws on the books. On July 2, the state Assembly Appropriations Committee gaveled through the California Fair Sentencing Act of 2014 on a 12-to-3 margin (with two abstentions). Aided by a bullish review from the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst's Office, the bill will hit the full floor in August. [continues 744 words]
Legislature Poised to Hear Reform Bill in August On Wednesday, the state Assembly Appropriations Committee gaveled through the California Fair Sentencing Act of 2014 on a 12-to-3 margin (with two abstentions). Aided by a bullish review from the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst's Office, the bill will hit the full floor in August. The act, Senate Bill 1010, aims to reverse a drug policy that for years incarcerated people of color for exponentially longer prison terms than white individuals for violating essentially the same law: possession of cocaine for sale. [continues 693 words]
Supervisor MacGlashan's Proposed Ban Would Affect Patient Access My mother recently discovered the joys of marijuana. Diagnosed 18 years ago with multiple myeloma, a cancer that chews up bone marrow, she forsook every Western remedy directed at her by doctors-chemotherapy, radiation, steroids-and instead charted a stridently holistic path that embraced raw foods, yoga and way too many enemas. Nearly two decades later, the jury is still out. She isn't cured, but she isn't dead, either. Which is itself a victory, say myeloma specialists. [continues 327 words]
Dispensary Rules Change-and More Changes Likely on Horizon Colorado and Washington are settling comfortably into their new normals on the marijuana-legalization front, with the feds backing off and Seattle cops even offering helpful tips on responsible pot consumption. (Do eat Doritos. Don't drive while high.) But here in California's state capital, fitful prohibition laws keep the Schedule I narcotic off the tax rolls and in the homes of suspected criminals. During the first week of October, Sacramento County sheriff's officials seized north of 250 marijuana plants from multiple homes, while city police violated two probationers after locating weed and handguns in their residences. [continues 695 words]
Lee Seale made one rookie mistake during his first budget hearing Monday as Sacramento County's new chief probation officer-he forgot to ask for more money. Seale, 41, appointed in April after a career in state corrections, found himself dumped in the deep fiscal end his first week on the job. He acquitted himself well, laying out what he'd like to do with limited resources to affect change in a high-risk, drug-abuser population currently receiving limited supervision by his undermanned department. [continues 169 words]
Eastern District Head Benjamin Wagner Explains That Colorado, Washington Faces Less Fed Intervention Because Laws Are Better Weed 'Free-For-All' Sacramento-based U.S. Attorney Benjamin Wagner drives a minivan. This may seem like a strange choice for the region's top federal prosecutor, handpicked by President Barack Obama to be the scourge of financial fraudsters and marijuana growers alike, but Wagner is nothing if not practical. Defending his office's enforcement of federal marijuana laws during a speaking engagement last week, the Eastern District of California attorney said "loosely described" dispensary operators make up 100 out of every 3,000 indictments in his office. Washington and Colorado, which recently approved recreational use of marijuana, face less federal intervention because their laws are written better, Wagner added, whereas it's a poorly regulated "free-for-all in California." [continues 102 words]
Is Sacramento's Cycle of Bike Crimes and Misdemeanors a Never-Ending Game of Law Enforcement Vs. Tweakers Tag? Christopher Allen Fontaine should be used to taking wrong turns. On probation since Dubya's first term, the hard-luck 28-year-old was grinding his bike down the wrong side of a Rancho Cordova street when a patrol cruiser's piercing squawk signaled that an all-too-familiar humbling was at hand. The hound-eyed probationer, halted for the moving violation on May 22, had his person and possessions searched by two of the Sacramento County's finest. Deputies found a glass pipe in his backpack and a plastic bag containing crunchy crystal meth in the front pocket of his pants. The pipe's spout was caked with white and black residue. [continues 1588 words]
Local Cultivator at Forefront of Next Medical-Cannabis Battle Sven Metour is writing medical cannabis' unwritten future. The veteran grower produces a yearly crop of legal, high-quality medicine for dispensaries in Bakersfield and Southern California out of his two-story Citrus Heights home, tucked away on a cozy suburban street in an idyllic middle-class neighborhood. But medical cannabis is still an industry rooted in an outlaw culture that has only fitfully won political and legal acceptance. So, Metour's effort to open a nonprofit cultivation warehouse in El Dorado County, with his mentor, is quite possibly the next potential salvo in the effort to legitimize the movement. [continues 529 words]
Sacramento's Newly Christened 'Wal-Mart of Weed' Is More Like a 'Hydroponics Home Depot' Sacramento's WeGrow and its Oakland counterpart, iGrow, have successfully billed themselves in media outlets such as High Times and this city's daily paper as the "Wal-Mart of weed." But that's not quite accurate, since the budding hydroponic franchise, which promises additional locations "sprouting" across the nation, doesn't actually sell the sticky icky. Rather, WeGrow traffics (legally, of course) in hydroponic equipment, nutrients and training for medical-cannabis cultivators. More like the "hydroponics Home Depot," if you will. [continues 523 words]
