A police officer holds a bag of heroin confiscated as evidence on March 22 in Gloucester, Mass.(Photo: USA TODAY NETWORK) Wisconsin's battle against heroin yielded more grim results in 2015. The death toll rose for the ninth straight year, and the total of 281 deaths was triple the number killed by heroin in 2010. Meanwhile, the number of total opioid deaths -- which includes heroin and prescription opiates -- topped the number of Wisconsin traffic deaths for the third straight year. [continues 1410 words]
A Kenton County jury recommended a 38-year sentence last week for a Covington man who sold heroin five times to a confidential informant with the Covington Police Department, according to the prosecutor's office. Donte Little will be 72 years old when he's released if he serves the full sentence. The 33-year-old was convicted of four counts of trafficking in a controlled substance and one count of complicity to trafficking in a controlled substance. The Covington Police Department's narcotics unit, known as the "D Team," purchased more than 14 grams of heroin from Little on five different days during the fall of 2014, prosecutors said. Investigators testified video and audio recordings were made of the transactions, which totaled more than $2,300. [continues 210 words]
Re: "New toxic drugs add to overdose crisis: coroner," Dec. 20. Is everyone involved in the management (or mismanagement) of this problem ignoring the one solution to this problem that has been effect in England for years? It's called prescribed heroin for certified addicts. It has to be cheaper than all the emergency services that are being flung at it. It would certainly save lives. As yet, I haven't seen or heard of anyone in a position to effect change espousing the advantages of such a program. Surely it's worth a look. Doug Oliver Sooke [end]
[photo] MICHAEL BRYANT / Staff PhotographerCharito Morales, center, with Homequarters and Friends, passes out hot chocolate and candy to those that ask for it at 2nd and Indiana as part of a holiday program on Monday, Dec. 19. The sun gave off no heat and just a flash of orange light as freezing do-gooders sang Christmas carols Monday evening in Fairhill to an encampment of homeless heroin addicts. The singers, many from Home Quarters and Friends, a nonprofit faith-based community group, stood on the edge of the infamous El Campamento, a tent city of 75 to 120 addicts beside the Conrail tracks. [continues 416 words]
[photo] Bonnie Bruce is the mother of a Vermont woman, Tamara, who was found the day after Thanksgiving passed out from heroin in her car with her fiance and their two young children. DORSET, Vt. - The midnight phone call woke them all up. As Bonnie Bruce struggled to understand what the police officer was saying, her 11-year-old grandson, Elias, appeared in her bedroom doorway and walked to her bedside, listening. He knew: It was about his mother. "Wait a minute, what are you telling me?" Bonnie gasped into the phone. The coil of dread lodged hard in her gut for the past 11 years, since her daughter first shot heroin into the soft crook of her elbow, abruptly gave way. "Is she all right?" [continues 3038 words]
Officials, former inmate contrast the emphasis on treatment vs. incarceration When Leola Bivins was first sent away for dealing drugs, she was a 22-year-old high school dropout with a 2-year-old daughter at home. Addiction was the center of the life she knew in East Stroudsburg, where she was born and raised, she recalled recently. Bivins' mother was a heroin addict - she eventually died of an overdose - and seemingly everyone around her was either selling drugs or abusing them, Bivins said. [continues 2766 words]
Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs also suggests supervised injecting rooms to combat rising number of drug deaths Heroin on prescription and supervised injecting rooms are among a range of measures that the government's drug advisers have suggested to reverse the UK's soaring numbers of drug deaths. Responding to a sharp rise in the number of heroin-related deaths in recent years, the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs said maintenance of drug treatment programmes was essential to prevent further increases. [continues 465 words]
[photo] County police have tracked the location of opiod overdoses and fatalities in 2016. (Anne Arundel County Police Department) Heroin overdoses reach new high in Annapolis, Anne Arundel. With less than one month left in 2016, the number of people killed by heroin and opioid overdoses in Annapolis and Anne Arundel has surpassed that of the past two years combined. County police Chief Timothy Altomare provided the latest overdose numbers during a phone interview Friday morning. While Altomare touted County Executive Steve Schuh's multifaceted approach to combating heroin by using public health and educational resources in addition to law enforcement, the police chief conceded that the drug continues to pose a significant challenge in the county. [continues 1070 words]
This Christmas, Dianne Tobin will celebrate one year free of heroin. It will be the longest she's remained off the drug in 40 years. "It's been touchy at times, because I went down [in dosage] so fast," she told the Georgia Straight over coffee in the Downtown Eastside. "It was tough at first, going down so much at one time. But it was working for me." Tobin owes her success at getting off street heroin to an unconventional therapy: since the winter of 2011, a doctor has prescribed her diacetylmorphine, or prescription heroin. [continues 940 words]
Columnists Brent Stafford and Garth Mullins battle over the issues of the day. The Duel Prescription heroin for addiction treatment in B.C.? It's about time As hundreds die from fentanyl overdoses, Health Canada has ended Harper's ban on prescription heroin. And it's about time. There's a fatal overdose every 12 hours in B.C. Over the years, I've had to resuscitate four people and known dozens who've died. For people deep in addiction, medical treatment with heroin is much safer than adulterated, often-lethal street drugs. It reduces harm to the community too. [continues 342 words]
The Duel This Week's Topic: Should prescription heroin be made available for addiction treatment in B.C.? Why does the left always fall in favour of making drugs more widely available to society? Social conservatives are certainly not the ones clamouring to legalize marijuana, drown citizens in more booze or readily handout heroin. What is it about the left? The only conclusion one could come to is the left's political and social agendas are somehow advanced by promoting a dulled, inebriated and wasted constituency. This is how the left prefers its voters. [continues 335 words]
WASHINGTON - Across the nation, while public concern about heroin addiction is the highest it has been in years, the same can't be said about attention on the national political stage. Searches about "heroin" peaked last week for the third time this year at the highest level in the past five years, according to data from Google Trends, with the exception of a spike in interest in February 2014 when actor Philip Seymour Hoffman died of a heroin overdose. Drug overdoses from heroin tripled between 2010 and 2014, and more people died from drug overdoses than car crashes in 2014, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. [continues 87 words]
WASHINGTON - The Justice Department is preparing to launch a renewed strategy to address the unrelenting scourge of heroin and opioid addiction, in part by placing greater emphasis on identifying links between over-prescribing doctors and distribution networks across the country. The plan, outlined by Attorney General Loretta Lynch in an interview with USA TODAY, is part of an eleventh-hour push by the Obama administration against a public health crisis that continues to claim nearly 100 people each day in the United States. [continues 53 words]
Re "In praise of heroin" (Dr. Gifford Jones, Aug. 27): I am currently fighting my fourth and (unfortunately) final battle with cancer. And, believe me, it scares me to think I will be refused heroin when the time comes that I need it. And all because some so-called minister of health for Ontario has decided, in his wisdom, that doctors can no longer prescribe high doses of opioids to terminal cancer patients or addicts. Further, the statement by an official that "the vast majority of palliative patients will not be impacted by this policy" leaves me wondering why he holds this position, when we all know the first requirement to being a good doctor is having a heart for people. Shame on this unnamed minister of health for Ontario. He should be drummed out of office, post haste. Stella Mazzacato Mississauga (Turning a blind eye to drug use by prisoners while denying heroin to terminally ill patients for pain makes no sense. This policy needs to be reversed) [end]
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]
Midwest health officials worried this would happen. It's why they brought together a tri-state coalition - Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky - to talk about the dangers, and it's why they issued a stern, desperate warning last month to first responders and addiction counselors who patrol the front lines of the opioid war every day. They said the situation was "dire." One Ohio coroner told users they were "literally gambling" with their lives. But their public plea could not prevent the heroin on their streets from being cut and sold with a new opioid analog 100 times more potent than fentanyl and 10,000 stronger than morphine. [continues 826 words]
A Plea for Descheduling Cannabis NOT LONG AGO, I wrote about the slight, slim chance that the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) would reschedule cannabis from Schedule I to Schedule II [Cannabuzz, July 6]. You remember what Schedule I is-it's the list of drugs defined as having "no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse." Along with cannabis, some of the other drugs listed as Schedule I are heroin, LSD, ecstasy, peyote, and Quaaludes. Not exactly respectable company. [continues 689 words]
Supporters of a saner marijuana policy scored a small victory this week when the Obama administration said it would authorize more institutions to grow marijuana for medical research. But the government passed up an opportunity to make a more significant change. The Drug Enforcement Administration on Thursday turned down two petitions - one from the governors of Rhode Island and Washington and the other from a resident of New Mexico - requesting that marijuana be removed from Schedule 1 of the Controlled Substances Act. Drugs on that list, which include heroin and LSD, are deemed to have no medical use; possession is illegal under federal law, and researchers have to jump through many hoops to obtain permission to study them and obtain samples to study. Having marijuana on that list is deeply misguided since many scientists and President Obama have said that it is no more dangerous than alcohol. [continues 485 words]
