DURHAM - Officials with a statewide non-profit dedicated to reducing drug overdose deaths say a law passed by the General Assembly in 2013 has resulted in hundreds of lives saved from drug overdoses. The N.C. Harm Reduction Coalition, a non-profit dedicated to reducing drug overdose deaths, says that since Aug. 1, 2013, naloxone has saved the lives of more than 1,500 people who were overdosing on heroin or other opioid drugs. The agency has partnered with about 40 police departments across the state to train officers and provide the agencies with drug overdose prevention kits. [continues 598 words]
DURHAM -- Long before the overdose death of actor Phillip Seymour Hoffman thrust heroin back into the headlines this winter, the return of the potent narcotic was already known to police and public health officials in North Carolina. Heroin, which emerged in popular culture in the 1940s as an exotic product associated with jazz musicians and later became known as the dead-end drug of junkies in movies and songs, had never gone away. A few dozen people died of heroin overdoses in North Carolina each year since 2000, according to the state Department of Health and Human Services. [continues 1371 words]
DURHAM - Heroin may be a new drug for some who are switching from prescription painkillers. It is not new to April Elizabeth. Elizabeth, 32, is a heroin addict. She grew up in East Durham in a family ravaged by drugs a father she described as a raging alcoholic, a mother hooked on prescription pills and an older brother whose addiction to crack keeps him in and out of prison. At her request, The News & Observer agreed not to use her full name. [continues 495 words]
K2 Is A Legal, Though Possibly Dangerous, Synthetic Cousin To Marijuana. As college students return to school in Charlotte and the Triangle, some are cracking open lip balm-size jars and plastic bags of a legal herb product that mimics the effects of marijuana. K2, or "Spice," is a lab-made leafy green drug that looks and smells like oregano, with hints of blueberry, citrus and other flavors. The designer drug is showing up at tobacco and head shops, misleadingly labeled as "incense." The labels also inform buyers that the contents are not fit for human consumption, but behind closed doors the "incense" is being puffed as a legal alternative to marijuana. [continues 1165 words]
A magazine has hit the streets of the Triangle that discloses privileged information from a federal criminal investigation that sent a man to prison for life. Some say Diamond Resort Magazine, which has sold about 1,000 copies at $10 apiece, is a tool to intimidate potential witnesses from testifying at criminal trials. The magazine reprints court documents including witness interviews and plea agreements, and it refers to "snitching" as violating the "code of the street." "People are already afraid to give information anonymously," said Donna-maria Harris, whose 24-year-old son was one of four men murdered inside a West Durham townhouse five years ago. Harris was appalled when she found out information about her son's death was in the magazine. "Now we have a magazine that's printing information about who comes forward, with their names and pictures. To me it's just one step above kiddie porn. It comes across as an intimidation tactic." [continues 680 words]
RALEIGH - Some state criminal justice advocates say they would welcome an end to the disparity in federal sentences for crack cocaine and powder cocaine crimes. The issue has spawned several fair sentencing bills and received national attention after the Obama administration recently signaled its support, particularly the elimination of harsh penalties for low-level drug offenses. "We wholeheartedly support those proposals," said Katy Parker, legal director of the North Carolina chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union in Raleigh. "There is no medical or scientific distinction in powder cocaine or the base form known as crack. There's no research proving that crack is more addictive than powder cocaine." [continues 310 words]
Local Authorities Say They Don't Know Why Their Counties Were Chosen, Or What To Do You'd expect North Carolina sheriffs to be thrilled when the federal government offers millions of dollars in drug-fighting money. But the windfall loses something when it comes with a "high-intensity drug trafficking area" tag. "I'm not sure why Johnston County was chosen," Johnston Sheriff Steve Bizzell said Friday. "I don't know if it's because the Johnston County Sheriff's Office is very aggressive and proactive about illegal drugs or whether it's because I-95 and I-40 intersect in our county." The feds gave the "high-intensity" designation to 26 counties nationwide on Thursday, and five were right here: Wake, Durham, Johnston, Wayne and Wilson. Authorities say the counties have become hubs of drug activity in part because of the highways that connect the state with the rest of the East Coast. [continues 431 words]
Advocates for Medical Marijuana Use See Him As a Victim of the Government's Policy Medical marijuana advocates in Texas lament the fate of a cancer patient turned federal fugitive who was shot and killed during a drug raid last week at his North Raleigh home. Stephen Scott Thornton, 45, of 5401 Alpine Drive died Friday afternoon from wounds received as sheriff's deputies and Wake County Alcohol Beverage Control officers forced their way into his home that morning to search for evidence of marijuana plants. [continues 430 words]
A Warrant Says a Texas Man Who Was Shot to Death Had 34 Plants, Lights and Soil Additive RALEIGH - A federal fugitive who was shot and killed during a drug raid last week had a full-scale marijuana-growing operation in his North Raleigh home, according to a search warrant made public Monday. Stephen Scott Thornton, 45, of 5401 Alpine Drive died Friday afternoon at WakeMed's Raleigh Campus from wounds received in an exchange of gunfire with sheriff's deputies and county ABC officers who forced their way into his home in a drug raid that morning. [continues 284 words]
Hicks Admits 'Total Mistake' GARNER - Kimberly Hicks admits she shared marijuana and alcohol with her 16-year-old daughter Erica the day before she took a lethal mix of hard drugs last fall, but she says she had no idea her daughter was taking narcotics. But Erica's friends knew. They said the popular cheerleader and varsity softball player had been using cocaine since January 2005. On Monday, Wake County District Court Judge Craig Croom found that a 16-year-old Cary teen who gave Erica Hicks ecstasy was responsible for her death. Medical examiners also found traces of cocaine and methamphetamine in Hicks' body. [continues 749 words]
The Judge Scolds Parents On Both Sides Of The Case Who Tolerated Drug Use RALEIGH - A Cary teen accused of providing a deadly mix of hard drugs to a friend was found not guilty of second-degree murder but responsible for involuntary manslaughter Monday afternoon in Wake County District Court. But Judge Craig Croom, who delayed the teen's sentencing until at least Friday, saved his harshest vocal judgment for the parents of the juvenile and the victim, 16-year-old Erica Hicks. [continues 772 words]
Forum Addresses Prison Overcrowding Describing the war on drugs as "an utter failure, a total failure," a former N.C. Supreme Court chief justice said Monday that the state should consider decriminalizing drug offenses to reduce the need for additional prisons. "What if we decriminalized drugs?" Burley B. Mitchell Jr. asked at a forum on prisons in downtown Raleigh. "If you knock out all the profits, then there would be no more Colombian cartel. There would be no more Mexican cartel. They would be broken." [continues 363 words]
March at Capitol Promotes Medical Uses for Marijuana Manning Kimmel, a bulky 27-year-old warehouse worker, slouched up to a microphone shortly after the annual marijuana march began around noon saturday on the capitol lawn.--"You know what's funny?" Kimmel asked the crowd gathered on the lawn. "I can go to the liquor store and buy a big old bottle of Everclear, drink it all and die. But I can't smoke one joint." For the past four years, the Raleigh-based N.C. Cannabis Association has sponsored the rally and march. Other organizations in attendance at Saturday's event, which drew about 75 people at one point, included Americans For Safe Access, which advocates the medical use of the drug. [continues 524 words]
Advocates of alternative sentencing programs for criminals say their programs lower the inmate population, help people to avoid prison and give them a new start. But several of the alternative programs may face elimination in the legislature this year. Supporters of the programs point to people such as Jessie Battle, who sold drugs to an undercover agent in 1994 and was facing eight years in prison after being indicted in Cumberland County as a habitual felon. Through Sentencing Services -- a statewide program that offers an alternative to prison for low-level criminal offenders -- Battle did not go to prison. [continues 706 words]
Funding Cuts Put Backers On March RALEIGH -- As he stood before a Wake County Superior Court judge in 1991 on a felony larceny charge, Ollie Hooker's life was a mess. A heroin and cocaine addict for most of his life, Hooker had already spent 18 years in prison for thievery and petty drug crimes fueled by a $250-a-day narcotics addiction. "The district attorney was talking about 40 years," said Hooker, who was 40 at the time. But Hooker caught a break. Officials with a prison alternative sentencing program intervened on his behalf, and he was sentenced to a two-year drug treatment program in Winston-Salem. [continues 883 words]
Family, friends tell Dudley's story TARBORO -- Dorothy Lynn Clark last talked to her brother in September, when he called collect from the Wake County jail, where he was being held on trespassing charges. "Dot," he said to his older sister, "I'm coming home." James "Lee" Robert Dudley arrived home in October in a hearse. What police allege happened to him Sept. 30 was a brutal crime that barely registered in the city beyond the neighborhood surrounding the convenience store in Southeast Raleigh where it occurred. It was a "drug-related" crime involving people on the edges of society. [continues 1017 words]
Mexicans Getting Control, Agents Say RALEIGH -- Eduardo Ambario Barrera left a $30 a week job in Mexico and illegally crossed the United States border five years ago in search of work and better opportunities for his young, growing family. He had been in the country just two weeks, picking oranges in Florida, when a casual acquaintance offered him $500, a new suit of clothes and a suitcase to smuggle cocaine to North Carolina. He was arrested a few months later as he arrived at Raleigh-Durham International Airport. Now serving time at Harnett Correctional Institution in Lillington, the stocky 31-year-old is part of a new wave of immigrant drug traffickers flooding local and state criminal systems. When Barrera was sentenced, he was one of about two dozen Hispanics in state prisons for drug-trafficking. [continues 1335 words]
TROY - To outsiders, it may have seemed like a shocking departure from small-town life recently when a man was shot at close range, then pumped with bullets as he lay on the ground. But police and residents of Troy, a town of about 3,400 in southwestern North Carolina, say the homicide -- which police said was drug-related -- was hardly shocking. In fact, it came a week after another shooting on the same street, Faduma Street. The crimes are an indication, law enforcement officials say, of just how much drugs and the problems they bring have spread to small communities that were once refuges from such big city ills. [continues 1443 words]
Police arrested an 18-year-old Raleigh man Thursday and charged him with taking hundreds of dosage units of prescription drugs from a local pharmacy where he worked and giving them to friends, according to court records. Gregory Mark Wootton, of 7114 Broomfield Way, was arrested shortly before 6 p.m. He was charged with felony embezzlement after a lengthy internal investigation by officials with Eckerd Inc., where he had been employed for more than a year, according to court officials and records. [continues 427 words]
