Mother-Of-Three Has Heroin Overdose at Age 41 Despite Warnings to Authorities That She Was Drugged Out In February last year Tracey Brannigan, long-time drug addict and convicted dealer, partied with her lover in a highrisk cell at Sydney's Dillwynia women's prison. The next day she was found dead of a heroin overdose. Engineering student Boyan Slat is seeking funding for his ocean clean-up contraptions. Brannigan's tragic story unfolded during an inquest this week, revealing a series of failures by prison authorities including the last, final, mistake of not heeding warnings that the 41-year-old mother-of-three was bombed out of her head. [continues 619 words]
In a forum held in Garrison, former opiate addicts share their paths to recovery to instill hope to substance abusers. Getting arrested was a blessing for Michelle. In 2007, she was high on heroin headed to a methadone clinic at Hudson Valley Hospital Center in Cortlandt when some 17 motorists called the police to alert them about her erratic driving, she recalled. It was the third time the mother and special education teacher was caught driving under the influence, she said. [continues 891 words]
The News Journal Begins A Three-Day Special Report On Heroin's Impact In Delaware And Across The Nation. Delaware's Heroin Crisis Delaware has for years lost a dozen residents each month to overdoses of booze and drugs, including prescription drugs such as Percocet. During the past eight months that number has risen to 15, and there's a high probability that heroin laced with the powerful painkiller fentanyl is killing more people. The average age of the deceased is 41.3, but many have yet to hit their 30th birthday. In each case a family is shattered - be it rich or poor, suburban, inner city or rural, black, white or brown. [continues 1864 words]
FAMILIES, FRIENDS OF USERS ARE COLLATERAL DAMAGE IN FIGHT AGAINST DRUGS AND ADDICTION Sitting on the couch in her grandmother's Brookside home, Danielle Eby looks like any other tween girl. When her eyes aren't glued to the game on her iPhone, she's in the kitchen hunting for a snack or chasing one of the family's three dogs. But at 10 years old, Danielle knows more about Delaware's drug culture than many adults. She knows what heroin looks like. She knows where people buy it. She knows how people act when they take it - lethargic, sluggish, like they're floating outside of themselves. [continues 2457 words]
Narcotic Can Be Hidden on Greeting Cards, Child's Drawings There's a drug making its way into local jails - one that can be camouflaged on children's drawings, greeting cards or postage stamps. The Metropolitan and Sandoval County detention centers in the past year have deployed new techniques aimed at stemming the flow of the drug Suboxone, a fairly new narcotic used to treat opiate addiction. The jails no longer allows crayon drawings or greeting cards, and require letters to be written on white paper. [continues 676 words]
Pain Pill Epidemic Doubled Number of Tampa Bay Patients on Methadone in Just 4 Years TAMPA - The lobby starts filling up before dawn in the nondescript office building on Columbus Drive. Young adults, middle-aged, men, women, some poor, some not, some employed, some not, they wait patiently in the dark and as the sun breaks over the horizon and the June day heats up. Amidst their varying demographics, they share a few notable characteristics. They're addicts. They want to break the habit. [continues 1278 words]
Naloxone Is Saving Lives by Quickly Reversing an Opioid Overdose. but It Is Not Readily Accessible Outside the glass doors of VANDU, the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users, a welcoming, if rag tag, band of community members mills on the sidewalk, exchanging jocular asides, faces crinkling with warm smiles. Anyone who comes through these doors, with few exceptions, is going to be treated as family. The storefront on East Hastings has been part community centre, part health resource and part home to drug users in Vancouver since 1998. As people bustle in and out the front door, pull chairs into rooms for meetings, check in at the front counter and gather in the lobby, only a few things make this space look different than any other community centre: a bulletin board with a notice for a pot luck, for example, also has a notice warning about fentanyl-laced heroin. [continues 1440 words]
A plague of heroin addiction is upon us. Another plague. Heroin was the crisis that prompted Richard Nixon to launch the war on drugs in 1971. Time marched on. Cocaine and then crack cocaine and then methamphetamine overtook heroin as the drugs of the moment. Now heroin is back - and badder than ever. The war on drugs also grinds expensively on, an estimated $1 trillion down the hole so far. Amid the triumphant announcements of massive drug seizures and arrests of the kingpins, heroin has never been more abundant or so easy to find, in urban and rural America alike. [continues 474 words]
A London one-stop pot shop has gone up in smoke less than a month after opening its doors. Touted as the first of its kind in Canada, Options Health Care was set up to assess patients and dispense authorizations for them to buy medical marijuana from the roughly one dozen federally licensed commercial producers. Patients were supposed to also pick up the pot from the clinic. The clinic sent an e-mail Thursday to clients informing them it's closed. [continues 281 words]
Providence Health Care will be allowed to prescribe heroin for a clinical study until a decision is rendered after a court trial sometime next year A PROVIDENCE HEALTH CARE program to give 202 addicts prescription heroin to compare the drug's affect to replacement medication has been given the green light by the courts. Providence Health Care's controversial prescription heroin study can proceed once again after an injunction was approved by the B.C. Supreme Court Thursday. That means the study's 202 patients can apply to Health Canada for Swiss-imported prescription heroin until a decision is made in a trial in which the federal government and local health authorities are expected to clash. [continues 294 words]
Entrenched addicts who were prescribed heroin as part of a B.C.-based clinical trial will be able to continue receiving the drug while a larger constitutional challenge is before the courts. B.C. Supreme Court Chief Justice Christopher Hinkson released his decision on Thursday, finding risks associated with severe heroin addiction "will be reduced if [the addicts] receive injectable diacetylmorphine (heroin) treatment from Providence physicians." This is the second time since March that the courts have sided with doctors and patients over the Conservative government with respect to controversial medical treatments. [continues 518 words]
Understand that heroin treatment is a treatment VANCOUVER * A group of addicts in Vancouver who were part of a clinical trial examining the use of prescription heroin have won a temporary injunction that will allow them to continue accessing the drug at least until a court challenge is heard. The ruling, issued Thursday by a B.C. Supreme Court judge, is the second time in recent months that courts have interfered with Ottawa's attempt to rein in the medical use of otherwise illegal drugs. [continues 359 words]
Five people filed a lawsuit alleging that Ottawa had violated their charter rights VANCOUVER - A group of addicts in Vancouver who were part of a clinical trial examining the use of prescription heroin have won a temporary injunction that will allow them to continue accessing the drug at least until a court challenge is heard. The ruling, issued Thursday by a B.C. Supreme Court judge, is the second time in recent months that courts have interfered with Ottawa's attempt to rein in the medical use of otherwise illegal drugs. [continues 454 words]
Lawyer found not guilty in heroin overdose of friend An out-of-work Hamilton lawyer who supplied her friend with the heroin that ultimately killed him is not responsible for his death, an Ontario court has ruled. Justice Bernd Zabel found Sarah Jackson, 36, not guilty of manslaughter in the January 2013 overdose death of 36-year-old Ed Cieslik. He made the ruling Friday morning, more than seven weeks after the trial wrapped up. Zabel found the victim was "persistent in his quest to take heroin," and "wore down" Jackson to supply him with the drug. [continues 471 words]
THE B.C. SUPREME Court has granted an injunction that lets doctors give prescription heroin to select patients in Vancouver. According to a 34-page decision, Chief Justice Christopher Hinkson found that risks faced by the opiate addicts acting as plaintiffs in the case would be reduced if doctors were allowed to administer diacetylmorphine (prescription heroin). "I accept that the potential harms facing the personal plaintiffs, and those on whose behalf they apply, are grave and that an award of damages will be of little, if any, assistance to them," Hinkson wrote. "As such, those harms must weigh heavily in the balance, particularly given that the exemption requested by the applicants does not cause any material harm to the government pending the ultimate resolution of this matter at trial." [continues 742 words]
A London one-stop pot shop has gone up in smoke less than a month after opening its doors. Touted as the first of its kind in Canada, Options Health Care was set up to assess patients and dispense authorizations for them to buy medical marijuana from the roughly one dozen federally licensed commercial producers. Patients were supposed to also pick up the pot from the clinic. The clinic sent an e-mail Thursday to clients telling them of the closing. [continues 269 words]
VANCOUVER - A group of addicts in Vancouver who were part of a clinical trial examining the use of prescription heroin have won a temporary injunction that will allow them to continue accessing the drug at least until a court challenge is heard. The ruling, issued Thursday by a B.C. Supreme Court judge, is the second time in recent months that courts have interfered with Ottawa's attempt to rein in the medical use of otherwise illegal drugs. Five people filed a lawsuit last fall alleging the federal government had violated their charter rights by denying access to prescription heroin to treat their addictions. [continues 485 words]
Addicts win right to resume medical access to drug until expected Ottawa legal challenge A group of addicts in Vancouver who were part of a clinical trial examining the use of prescription heroin have won a temporary injunction that will allow them to continue accessing the drug at least until a court challenge is heard. The ruling, issued Thursday by a B.C. Supreme Court judge, is the second time in recent months that courts have interfered with Ottawa's attempt to rein in the medical use of otherwise illegal drugs. [continues 362 words]
A plague of heroin addiction is upon us. Another plague. Heroin was the crisis that prompted Richard Nixon to launch the war on drugs in 1971. Time marched on. Cocaine and then crack cocaine and then methamphetamine overtook heroin as the drugs of the moment. Now heroin is back - and badder than ever. The war on drugs also grinds expensively on, an estimated $1 trillion down the hole so far. Amid the triumphant announcements of massive drug seizures and arrests of the kingpins, heroin has never been more abundant or so easy to find, in urban and rural America alike. [continues 514 words]
A plague of heroin addiction is upon us. Another plague. Heroin was the crisis that prompted Richard Nixon to launch the war on drugs in 1971. Time marched on. Cocaine and then crack cocaine and then methamphetamine overtook heroin as the drugs of the moment. Now heroin is back - and badder than ever. The war on drugs also grinds expensively on, an estimated $1 trillion down the hole so far. Amid the triumphant announcements of massive drug seizures and arrests of the kingpins, heroin has never been more abundant or so easy to find, in urban and rural America alike. [continues 515 words]
