Suspended Hamilton cop Craig Ruthowsky revealed that he aided a drug dealer to cultivate his trust so he could snare a larger trafficker, his former best friend testified Tuesday. Sgt. James Paterson, who once considered himself Ruthowsky's "best friend," confronted Ruthowsky after he was suspended in 2012 while both were working for Hamilton's guns and gangs unit. "Craig Ruthowsky advised me that the dealer was dangling a bigger fish in front of him that he wanted to get, this major importer Officer Ruthowsky had said 'I was trying to make myself look like a dirty cop so that will trust me more, and he'd give up the bigger fish,'" said Paterson. [continues 118 words]
Plenty of hard work goes into training police service dogs to sniff out illicit substances For the vast majority of the dog population, sitting, shaking their paw and possibly rolling over is more than enough to get a treat, or some time with their favourite toy. For police service dogs Astor and Flint, some of the highest praise comes after sniffing out drugs hidden in a home or a vehicle. The Medicine Hat Police Service is two weeks into training PSD Astor to detect drugs and to notify his handler of any illegal substances he may sniff out. [continues 383 words]
Two people using fentanyl at London's temporary overdose prevention site on the weekend were resuscitated by a nurse after they overdosed, Middlesex-London's medical officer of health says. "These people were inexperienced, and fentanyl is a drug where it's easy to miscalculate how much you are taking. If this had happened in a back alley or stairwell somewhere, it could have easily resulted in death," Dr. Chris Mackie said Sunday. The drug users were resuscitated Saturday using oxygen, he said. [continues 492 words]
Alberta's supervised consumption sites should be permitted to offer drug testing to help users learn what dangers might be lurking in their illicit narcotics, the province's opioid commission recommended Friday. While questions persist about the effectiveness of fentanyl-sensing strips and other testing devices, providing insight to users on what they plan to inject or ingest will undoubtedly save lives, commission leaders said. "Anytime you can give people a bit more understanding than absolutely none about what's in their drugs, I think that's a positive," Elaine Hyshka, co-chair of the Minister's Opioid Emergency Response Commission, told a news conference downtown. [continues 390 words]
You think your taxes are high? For medical marijuana dispensaries in the United States, they can be stratospheric. Cannabis retailers face an effective tax rate of up to 85 percent, and that won't be reduced by the new tax law. Most mainstream businesses pay effective tax rates of about 15 percent to 30 percent. "It's a burden," said Chris Visco, co-owner of TerraVida Holistic Centers, which opened one of Pennsylvania's first medicinal cannabis shops on Feb. 17 in Sellersville. "People think that we're getting rich. It's really not the case. The profit margins are going to be really narrow after taxes. And you have to still pay local and state taxes." [continues 815 words]
The president of the union representing more than 3,000 Suncor workers says they have prepared to bring the issue of random drug testing back to arbitration if the Supreme Court of Canada does not hear their case. The comments came after the Alberta Court of Appeal upheld an injunction against the practice granted by the province's Court of Queen's Bench. In a Thursday morning interview, Ken Smith, president of Unifor Local 707A, said he was confident Canada's top court will hear their case. The union expects to hear a decision by the end of March. [continues 674 words]
The state Cannabis Control Commission split 3-2 Wednesday over whether to automatically disqualify people with trafficking convictions from working with legal marijuana. People with a prior conviction for trafficking in drugs other than marijuana will be barred from working in jobs that include access to the plant in the newly legal marijuana industry, a decision made after about an hour of tense debate among state pot regulators. The Cannabis Control Commission split 3-2 on Wednesday afternoon over whether to automatically disqualify people with trafficking convictions from working with marijuana, adding those convictions to a list of automatically disqualifying issues like being registered as a sex offender, open or unresolved criminal proceedings, violent felony convictions, and felony convictions involving drugs other than marijuana. [continues 727 words]
Victims of bad science at Motherisk Return their children. That's what they want - the parents who saw their kids ripped away based on flawed alcohol and drug hair tests from the now shuttered Motherisk lab at the famous Sick Children's hospital. A report tabled this week examined 1,270 cases handled by the lab going back more than two decades and found 56 clear cases where Motherisk's flawed test results had a "substantial impact" on the decision to remove children - - though critics argue there are far more. [continues 651 words]
Recommendations too late for many families 'broken apart' by flawed drug and alcohol tests The Ontario Motherisk Commission's two-year effort to repair the damage to families ripped apart by flawed drug and alcohol testing has produced sweeping recommendations aimed at preventing a similar tragedy, but in only a handful of cases has it reunited parents with their lost children. Alice, a Hamilton mother whose daughter was apprehended in 2011 after hair testing from Motherisk purported to show she was a heavy drinker, is among the lucky few. [continues 2231 words]
Judge nixes jail for Stones guitarist, orders community service instead More than 40 years have passed since the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had to "slap'' Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards awake at a Toronto hotel so they could arrest him for possession of heroin for the purposes of trafficking. The charge, which carried a minimum of seven years upon conviction, was based on the 22 grams of heroin found on Feb. 27,1977, during a raid of Richards' room at the Harbour Castle Hilton (now Westin Harbour Castle), while he was sleeping. [continues 1149 words]
Every morning, Kevin Thompson takes a short stroll from his apartment to the Crosstown Clinic, where he signs in, gets his prescription medicine, then sits in a small room and injects it before heading off to work. He follows this routine up to three times a day and has done so virtually every day for more than a dozen years. The medicine is diacetylmorphine, the medical term for prescription heroin. "It saved my life. No question, it saved my life," Mr. Thompson, 47, says emphatically. [continues 683 words]
Two years after the province abandoned using an Ontario laboratory for drug and alcohol testing in custody cases, a decision by a Sydney Supreme Court justice is casting doubt on whether a Halifax lab is any more reliable. The decision by Justice Theresa Forgeron of the court's Family Division rejected a bid by the Department of Community Services to have the director of the Capital Health Authority's toxicology lab, Dr. Bassam Nassar, give expert opinion evidence concerning urine testing samples from a Cape Breton father. [continues 486 words]
Congressman Pete Sessions used a speech to a group of doctors and other healthcare providers at an opioid epidemic summit Tuesday to suggest that marijuana is the gateway to addiction and as a campaign against the medical and recreational legalization movement. The Republican from Dallas called the rising number of deaths from opioid overdose a "national crisis" and implored those on the front lines of the fight, the scientific and medical communities, he said, to provide solutions he can bring to Congress, saying he will get the appropriate funding added to next month's budget bill. [continues 1053 words]
Earlier this month, front-line health workers in Toronto raised the possibility that part of the city's cocaine supply may be tainted with fentanyl, after a handful of drug overdoses were connected to users unknowingly consuming the deadly opioid while smoking crack. This dismal scenario is common in Canada. Across the country, illicit drugs are being cut with the synthetic painkiller - which is up to 50 times more potent than heroin - because it is cheap and powerful and saves dealers money. During a month-long period in the summer of 2016, 86 per cent of the street drugs tested at Vancouver's supervised injection sitewere laced with fentanyl. [continues 628 words]
Police seize 5.8 kg in January - half of what was seized in 2017 MAKE no mistake: Winnipeg has a meth problem. That's the message city police drove home Thursday at a lengthy news conference, painting a dark picture of a city in the grips of a methamphetamine epidemic and the strain placed on front-line services that are trying to contain the street drug. "The emergence of methamphetamine that we're experiencing in our community is getting to the level where it's starting to keep me awake at night," Winnipeg Police Service Chief Danny Smyth said. [continues 944 words]
Latest stops in northwestern Minnesota show surge of drug traffic into the state. It seemed like an innocuous driving violation: A woman was motoring through Otter Tail County in northwestern Minnesota with an obstructed license plate. Then the observant state trooper discovered she was sitting on packages of marijuana. Troopers seized more than 300 pounds of the weed during the stop last Friday, the latest of several large pot busts the State Patrol has made in the past few weeks and a sign that the surge of large quantities of pot and illegal drugs into Minnesota is continuing. [continues 329 words]
One target drove a Mercedes and lived in a waterfront condo on Boston Street; another was homeless, essentially living out of a storage unit where he kept his money balled up in a sock. One lived with his extended family in a house he bought with a lead poisoning settlement; yet another had a half-million-dollar home on two acres of land in Westminster. The circumstances of the people who were targeted for robbery by the Baltimore Police's Gun Trace Task Force ranged widely, according to witnesses in the federal trial of two of its former members. The sums allegedly taken went from three figures up to six. [continues 1429 words]
Three weeks ago, after Philadelphia announced that it would encourage the opening of a safe injection site, I praised the decision as a bold kind of leadership. It showed that the city was stepping on the national stage in the middle of a life-and-death catastrophe. I still think that. Now the city has to sell it. Sure, it's only been three weeks. But in the absence of an immediate city PR strategy for saving lives - it feels funny even writing that - you can feel myths proliferating. The city cannot simply react to the discourse. It must help lead it. [continues 805 words]
"I believe that nicotine is not addictive." This was the position the CEOs of the seven largest American tobacco companies staunchly stood by while testifying in front of an infamous 1994 Congressional hearing. The scientific evidence at the time rendered their ostensible belief a tragic joke - a term that accurately describes the idea that Canadians should blindly trust marijuana producers and distributors to design their own packaging. Ottawa would do well by having health experts take the lead in ensuring marijuana packaging is transparent. [continues 579 words]
There aren't a lot of concrete answers as to why marijuana transactions are deadlier, but there are theories. The morning Kim Ambers turned 50, her oldest son, Richard Ambers, called to wish her a happy birthday. I love you, he told her. It was a tradition for the Ambers family members to see one another on birthdays, but Kim Ambers' celebration would have to wait. Richard was working and had a Halloween party afterward. The whole family would go out for breakfast the next day, on Oct. 29, 2016. [continues 1106 words]
