Why cancer patients will suffer to protect the lives of addicts How history repeats itself! Today, politicians are once again ignoring the pain of terminal cancer patients. At the same time they are shooting themselves in the foot by making illogical remarks about pain. This human folly takes me back 37 years. In January 1979, I wrote a New Year's resolution in this column to petition the government to legalize medical heroin to ease the agony of terminal cancer patients. I knew that heroin had been used in English hospitals for 90 years, so why not have this painkiller available in North America? But rather than being applauded for my compassion, all hell broke loose. [continues 581 words]
High-Dose Opiods Ease Dying Patients' Suffering How history repeats itself! Today, politicians are once again ignoring the pain of terminal cancer patients. At the same time they are shooting themselves in the foot by making illogical remarks about pain. This human folly takes me back 37 years. In January 1979, I wrote a New Year's resolution in this column to petition the government to legalize medical heroin to ease the agony of terminal cancer patients. I knew that heroin had been used in English hospitals for 90 years, so why not have this painkiller available in North America? But rather than being applauded for my compassion, all hell broke loose. [continues 626 words]
MEXICO CITY - The drug that killed Prince has become a favorite of Mexican cartels because it is extremely potent, popular in the United States - and immensely profitable, American officials say. Law enforcement and border authorities in the United States warn that Mexican cartels are using their own labs to produce the drug, fentanyl, as well as receiving shipments from China. Then the cartels distribute the substance through their vast smuggling networks to meet rising American demand for opiates and pharmaceuticals. "It is really the next migration of the cartels in terms of making profit," said Jack Riley, acting deputy administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration. "This goes to the heart of the marketing genius of the cartels. They saw this coming." [continues 1293 words]
Health officials in B.C. are applauding the federal government for taking steps to allow doctors to prescribe heroin for certain patients. Health Canada said Friday it will propose a regulatory amendment to allow access to prescription heroin, or diacetylmorphine, under Health Canada's special-access program. "A significant body of scientific evidence supports the medical use of diacetylmorphine, also known as pharmaceutical-grade heroin, for the treatment of chronic relapsing opioid dependence," Health Canada said in a release. Diacetylmorphine is permitted in other countries, including Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark and Switzerland, to support a small number of patients who haven't responded to other treatment options. [continues 343 words]
Health officials in B.C. are applauding the federal government for taking steps to allow doctors to prescribe heroin for certain patients. Health Canada announced Friday that it will propose a regulatory amendment to allow access to prescription heroin, or diacetylmorphine, under Health Canada's special access program. "A significant body of scientific evidence supports the medical use of diacetylmorphine, also known as pharmaceutical-grade heroin, for the treatment of chronic relapsing opioid dependence," Health Canada said in a news release. [continues 388 words]
Health Canada has moved to allow doctors to apply for special access to prescribe pharmaceutical-grade heroin to severe addicts, which would overturn a ban imposed by the previous Conservative government. The federal department said in a statement issued on Friday that a "significant body of evidence" supports the medical use of diacetylmorphine, also known as pharmaceutical-grade heroin. "Diacetylmorphine is permitted in a number of other jurisdictions, such as Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Switzerland, to support a small percentage of patients who have not responded to other treatment options, such as methadone and buprenorphine," the statement said. [continues 274 words]
People with chronic heroin addiction may soon have another treatment option after the conclusion of a groundbreaking study in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. The four-year Study to Assess Longer-term Opioid Medication Effectiveness (SALOME), led by principal investigator Dr. Eugenia Oviedo-Joekes, examined whether hydromorphone, a licensed pain medication, is as effective in treating a chronic heroin addiction as diacetylmorphine, also known as pharmaceutical-grade heroin. The results, which will appear in Wednesday's edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association Psychiatry, show it is. [continues 639 words]
The hits just keep coming for Toronto cops. The already low morale among police officers was dealt another blow Thursday with the news that four of their colleagues are charged with perjury and obstruction of justice. "It's definitely having an impact on morale, but the officers who work in this city will keep doing their job to the best of their ability," Toronto Police Association president Mike McCormack said. He said cops can't help but be concerned about how the public perceives them in the wake of the criminal charges for allegedly planting heroin during a bust and lying under oath at Nguyen Son Tran's trial. [continues 350 words]
WATERLOO REGION - Drug users who think they are buying cocaine or heroin may be also getting bootleg fentanyl, which is being blamed for overdoses across the country. In Waterloo Region, six overdoses were reported in Cambridge and Kitchener from Jan. 23 to Jan. 26. One person died. Heroin is suspected in five of the overdoses, while fentanyl is suspected in at least one. Bootleg fentanyl is often created in a clandestine lab and could be a mixture of heroin, cocaine and crystal meth laced with fentanyl, said Staff Sgt. Shirley Hilton, head of drugs for Waterloo Regional Police. [continues 252 words]
Poppy Production Booms As American Appetite for Opioids Grows With her nimble hands, tiny feet and low center of gravity, Angelica Guerrero Ortega makes an excellent opium harvester. Deployed along the Sierra Madre del Sur, where a record poppy crop covers the mountainsides in strokes of green, pink and purple, she navigates the inclines with the deftness of a ballerina. Though shy, she perks up when describing her craft: the delicate slits to the bulb, the patient scraping of the gum, earning in one day more than her parents do in a week. [continues 1616 words]
POSSESSION of all drugs, including heroin and cocaine, would be decriminalised under radical plans tabled by the Liberal Democrats today. The party's push, led by ex-police chief Brian Paddick, will attempt to ambush a Government Bill to ban the sale of legal highs when it is debated by the Lords. Under their proposals, nobody would be arrested or prosecuted for possession of drugs - even the hardest Class A substances. Instead, police 'may' ask the offender to attend a drug awareness course or treatment programme. [continues 415 words]
Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, by Johann Hari, is published by Bloomsbury, priced UKP18.99. A DOCTOR hounded from Britain by the establishment has revealed how he slashed heroin addiction and crime by doling out the drug to addicts. Psychiatrist John Marks now works in Vienna. But in 1982 the South Wales Valleys-raised medic was working in Widnes, in the Wirral. In a new book, Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, he reveals how he became the accidental pioneer of an initiative to give free heroin to addicts and that it worked. [continues 651 words]
KITCHENER - Shawn Emmerson beat the odds and avoided the long arm of the law during an eight-year descent into drug addiction. But as his habit got worse and his life continued to unravel as a result, it finally caught up to him early this year. At the age of 44, with no prior record of any kind, Emmerson was nabbed as one of several suspects in a ring targeting coin machines in apartment building laundry rooms in Kitchener and Waterloo. [continues 293 words]
An addictions expert at the University of B.C. is renewing the argument for prescribing heroin to addicts who have tried and failed to kick their habits. Dr. Martin Schechter says there is a small subset of heroin addicts who have tried to quit but cannot succeed using traditional methods such as detox programs or methadone treatment. Schechter says giving these people access to heroin in treatment, rather than leaving them to find it on the street, is better for them and for society. [continues 200 words]
SIERRA MADRE DEL SUR, MEXICO (AP) - Red and purple blossoms with fat, opium-filled bulbs blanket the remote creek sides and gorges of the Filo Mayor mountains in the southern state of Guerrero. The multibillion-dollar Mexican opium trade starts here, with poppy farmers so poor they live in woodplank, tin-roofed shacks with no indoor plumbing. Mexican farmers from three villages interviewed by the Associated Press are feeding a growing addiction in the U.S., where heroin use has spread from back alleys to the cul-de-sacs of suburbia. [continues 741 words]
Almost 30,000 prisoners addicted to drugs were given a heroin substitute last year to feed their dependence, figures show. The drugs were paid for by the taxpayer and given to inmates in a bid to help them kick the habit. However inmates who are in prison for less than three months do not have time to complete the drug treatment programme, but are supplied with methadone or buprenorphine. The figures were revealed in a request by Andrew Griffiths MP to the Secretary of State. [continues 201 words]
How would I react if I were dying of terminal cancer and none of the current painkillers could ease my agony? Or if I were suffering day after day the pain of crippling arthritis and no medication relieved my misery? And then I read that addicts were granted prescription heroin to treat their addiction. I'd be damn annoyed that this painkiller was available for addicts but not for cancer victims and others dying in pain. Several years ago I wrote that I'd send addicts to chop wood in Northern Canada. That would surely solve their addiction. [continues 595 words]
Legal Narcotics In A Liberal City THE people queuing up at the Providence Crosstown Clinic are pioneers of a sort. They are heroin addicts whose habits have resisted conventional treatment. They hope to become the first in North America to get their fixes legally as part of a treatment programme rather than just for a clinical trial. "It's heroin that you know is good," says one addict waiting outside, who aspires to join the queue. Some European countries, including Germany and Switzerland, prescribe heroin for the most severe cases of addiction. Patients taking heroin are less likely to use illicit drugs and drop out of treatment than those who use methadone, a substitute. Vancouver's eagerness to follow is not surprising. It has long had Canada's most liberal drug policies, and it has a big problem. Addicts congregate in Downtown Eastside, two derelict blocks right next to tourist attractions and the financial district. In the late 1990s the city had the highest rate of HIV infection outside sub-Saharan Africa. [continues 293 words]
How would I react if I were dying of terminal cancer and none of the current painkillers could ease my agony? Or if I were suffering day after day the pain of crippling arthritis and no medication relieved my misery? And then I read that addicts were granted prescription heroin to treat their addiction. I'd be damn annoyed that this painkiller was available for addicts but not for cancer victims and others dying in pain. Several years ago I wrote that I'd send addicts to chop wood in Northern Canada. [continues 595 words]
