'I was still at school when I had to tell my parents, 'I think Alan is on drugs'. After that I was always breaking terrible news: he's been arrested; he's in prison; he's dead." Schoolteacher Katrina Robinson, now 28, lost her heroin-addicted brother Alan in a drug-related stabbing two years ago last week - March 17, 2008. He was killed as he stepped in to protect a flatmate caught up in a scuffle at the entrance of a block of flats in Glasgow's Shawlands. [continues 1522 words]
Experts are set to warn that the dangerous illegal drug crystal meth could rapidly make inroads in Scotland, with devastating effects on the physical, mental and sexual health of those who abuse it. The drug, methamphetamine in its crystalline form, also known as ice' is usually smoked in a similar way to crack cocaine. As yet its use has been relatively confined to the gay club scene in London, but evidence from other countries has shown how rapidly an epidemic' of the drug can take hold. [continues 1145 words]
Overdoses, Deaths, and Crime Decline At first, there were only whispers. Mourners would gather in Charlestown's churches for funerals of the young, nodding solemnly - and knowingly - when told the family had a history of heart problems. In truth, it was another death by heroin. As the drug seeped across the neighborhood, it caused dozens of overdoses, devastating hundreds of families. Starting in 2003, the signs of crisis were everywhere - the neighborhood parks that addicts colonized, the fast-food restaurants that locked their bathroom doors after finding discarded needles, and on one raw afternoon, the pizza parlor where Michael Charbonnier took his children. As the family settled into a booth, two men at another table pulled out a stash of heroin and prepared to shoot up. [continues 1460 words]
Kit And Training For Heroin Users State health authorities will start supplying addicts next month with a kit containing two doses of a medication that can reverse a potentially lethal overdose within minutes, hoping to reverse a tide of heroin deaths sweeping Massachusetts. The initiative by the Department of Public Health mirrors a similar project in Boston, where at least 66 overdoses have been reversed since the program began a year ago. State Public Health Commissioner John Auerbach, who introduced the Narcan program while leading Boston's health agency, said the results are so impressive that he wants to expand it to four areas of the state grappling with heroin epidemics. That drug and other opiates killed 544 people in Massachusetts in 2005, more than double the number felled by firearms. [continues 933 words]
Battling to reverse an epidemic of lethal heroin overdoses, Boston health authorities are proposing giving drug users emergency kits of a medication that can revive them even as they spiral toward death. City paramedics or hospital emergency rooms now administer the drug, called naloxone (widely marketed under the name Narcan ) to overdose patients. But in a pilot program modeled after campaigns in New York, Chicago, and Baltimore, the Boston Public Health Commission would give addicts a cache of the medication in advance, which they would keep with them in case they took too much heroin or another opiate. [continues 448 words]
To the Editor: The Coalition For ASafe and Drug Free Clay County would like to acknowledge Mr. Matt Rogers, Principal, Hayesville Elementary School, for the successful implementation of the Mendez Too Good For Drugs program during the 2005-2006 school year. Mr. Robb Webb, Assistant Director, Rural Church Division, The Duke Endowment, along with Stephen Smith, Coordinator, and Dawn Wilde, Parent Initiative Leader, Coalition For A Safe and Drug Free Clay County, visited the 4th grade classroom of teacher Jackie Bell at the invitation of Principal Rogers. Ms. Bell was observed using the Mendez Too Good For Drugs program in conjunction with her usual course of studies for her classroom. The children were actively participating in and enjoying the program. [continues 91 words]
A decade-long epidemic of heroin-related deaths reached a new high in 2003, according to a state report released yesterday that offers the newest evidence of the toll exacted by the continued influx of cheap, pure drugs into New England. The study, issued by the Department of Public Health, found that drugs were deadlier than motor vehicles: Narcotics caused 574 deaths, compared with 521 fatalities attributed to traffic accidents. In the last 13 years, drug overdoses have soared six-fold. [continues 653 words]
DPH Testifies That Allowing Access to Hypodermics Would Reduce The Spread of Infectious Disease in State Gov. Mitt Romney last night broke with his own health department and opposed legalizing over-the-counter sales of hypodermic needles, even as top law-enforcement authorities for the first time gave robust support to a measure that aims to prevent infectious disease by putting clean syringes into the hands of drug addicts. The proposed legislation has long been championed by public health advocates, infectious disease doctors, and substance abuse specialists, who maintain that it would reduce the spread of HIV, hepatitis C, and other blood-borne infections. Massachusetts, where 39 percent of HIV cases are linked to sharing tainted drug needles, is one of just three states that do not permit the sale of hypodermics without a prescription. [continues 842 words]
TEENAGERS from lone-parent families are more likely to abuse alcohol, take up smoking and use illegal drugs, according to new research. The findings, made by psychologists investigating bullying will encourage traditionalists, but both researchers and campaigners insisted they should not be used to undermine single parents. The Social Inclusion and Diversity Research unit at York St John College is undertaking long-term research into bullying among young people. They questioned 1832 12 to 16-year-olds about drug and alcohol use and gathered information about their family background. [continues 455 words]
With New England in the midst of an epidemic of heroin use, Massachusetts is on the verge of forfeiting more than $9 million in federal aid for treating drug users, a penalty for three years of reductions in state spending on substance abuse services. Since the 2001 budget year, the state Department of Public Health has cut nearly $11 million from what it devotes to treating drug users and preventing narcotic and alcohol abuse. Governor Mitt Romney is proposing $2 million in additional reductions for the next budget year, although a representative of the governor said those cuts would not imperil essential services. [continues 1019 words]
New Chief Of Enforcement Agency Aims To Shift Focus From Drugs Seizures To Netting Top 100 Criminals SEIZING large quantities of heroin or cocaine on the way into Britain is almost useless in the fight against drugs according to the new head of the Scottish Drugs Enforcement Agency who said police instead needed to tackle the "underlying logic of crime". Graeme Pearson, currently assistant chief constable at Strathclyde Police, will take over from Jim Orr, who retired in January, as director of the agency. [continues 714 words]
Anti-HIV plan is common elsewhere Mayor Thomas M. Menino is championing a campaign on Beacon Hill to permit over-the-counter sales of syringes, a measure other states have adopted in the hope that drug addicts will stop using dirty needles, a leading cause of HIV infection. More than one-fifth of HIV infections in the state in recent years have been linked directly to injected drugs, the second-most common source of the virus. Boston is one of just four cities and towns in the Commonwealth -- the others are Cambridge, Northampton, and Provincetown -- that run needle-exchange programs so that junkies can turn in their tainted syringes for clean ones. [continues 690 words]
Medication Safer Than Methadone Nancy Foster prowled the streets of Boston, New York, and London for 23 years hunting for her next heroin injection. She had tried methadone, the standard addiction treatment since the 1960s, but didn't like the way it made her feel or the 30 pounds she packed on while using it. Soon, she was back shooting heroin, a drug whose use has reached epidemic levels nationally and in Massachusetts, where deaths from the drug and related narcotics rose nearly fourfold in the 1990s. [continues 898 words]
Report Says Lure Growing In Suburbs Deaths from heroin and related narcotics in Massachusetts soared close to fourfold during the 1990s, an increase the state's public health commissioner described yesterday as an emerging health care crisis. A report issued by the state Department of Public Health also found that heroin now ranks as the illegal drug of choice for patients checking into rehab clinics, with 42 percent of patients who received substance abuse treatment this year reporting that they had used the drug recently. That compares with just 19 percent a decade earlier. [continues 782 words]
Cocaine use tripled among Massachusetts middle school students and doubled among high school students in the past three years, according to a report issued yesterday, signaling the resurgence of a drug that counselors believed had been in decline for a decade. The Department of Public Health surveyed more than 3,000 adolescents earlier this year and found that 5.6 percent of middle school students and 5.8 percent of high school students had used cocaine during the preceding month, figures that spurred an immediate reaction from the report's authors. [continues 561 words]
ONE-THIRD of ecstasy deaths in the UK occur in Scotland, and the rate of fatalities caused by the drug is rising more rapidly north of the Border than elsewhere in the UK. New statistics reveal that although deaths from ecstasy quadrupled in England and Wales between 1998 and 2001, Scotland saw a sevenfold increase over the same period. There were 20 ecstasy-related deaths in Scotland last year, compared with 40 in England and Wales. Drug agencies cannot explain why Scottish users make up such a high proportion of fatalities. [continues 145 words]
The man in charge of Scotland's leading charity tackling drug misuse has warned that prescribing heroin to addicts might be the only way to stop the growing number of mystery deaths. "We need to stop people taking the drug, but we can't remove the heroin from the market. If the deaths continue we may have to prescribe extensively across the city and kill the market," said Andrew Horne, regional manager of Turning Point. Health boards, drug agencies and police are still baffled by the spate of unexplained deaths from multiple organ failure among Scottish drug users. [continues 365 words]
Romance In The '90s: Hearts, Flowers And Test Tubes Science and romance -- once considered as firmly divorced as Liz Taylor and her eight husbands -- find themselves united these days in the quest to figure out why we love, why passion ebbs and flows. The answer: It's a chemical thing. Or, at least, that's what researchers increasingly believe, suggesting that some of us are love junkies lusting for a quick fix, looking for someone to renourish the chemical rivers deep inside our brains. [continues 899 words]
