A new report called "Choosers or Losers? Influences on Young People's Choices about Drugs in Inner-City Dublin" has departed considerably from previous studies by including within its scope the rationale underlying young people's drug-use. Author Paula Mayock, of the Children's Research Centre at Trinity College Dublin, interviewed many middle-range drug-users (eg cannabis and E), as well as abstainers and very young heroin-users. Much previous research has left these particular groups out, its focus being adult heroin-users. [continues 501 words]
What makes you think it works? China executes hundreds every year for drug dealing, yet it goes on there year in and year out. How has this solved the problem? And what if your grandson had turned to dealing to support his habit? Would you be so sanguine about his execution if he was caught in one of these countries? I truly regret your grandson's death. I too have lost people close to me to overdoses. I believe, however, that more lives would be saved if these people had been able to obtain their medication from doctors, not from street sources of undependable quality. Perhaps there is some middle road that would satisfy both of us - not total legality, but certainly not the death penalty! Steve Gill, Northern California, USA [end]
In his letter in the last issue Mervyn Crampton stated: "I guarantee that hanging for heroin dealing would transform the situation beyond recognition. It works in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and many other countries; so why not here?" What makes you think it works? China executes hundreds every year for drug dealing, yet it goes on there year in and year out. How has this solved the problem? And what if your grandson had turned to dealing to support his habit? Would you be so sanguine about his execution if he was caught in one of these countries? [continues 76 words]
I was 75 on Saturday, the 3rd June. It turned out a much happier birthday than I had expected. My grandson died of a heroin overdose in April. An addict for seven years, he survived his first suicide attempt on the 28th February. His eventual painful demise did not merit even a fleeting reference in the news media. But then, sure why would it? Joe Stalin once described a single death as tragic but a million deaths as a mere statistic. [continues 646 words]
Let's talk about heroin addicts. Yeah, they're the ones who ghost around town looking like death warmed up. Glazed eyes, sunken cheeks, rotting teeth. Hopeless cases most of them, good for nothing except bag-snatching. They rob, they cheat, they lie. And when they've done with that, they rob, they cheat and they lie again. They steal off their mothers. They steal off their lovers. And they steal off their children. If there's something that can be hocked, they'll hock it. If there's something that can be moved, they'll lift it. And to get their own drugs, they'll buy what the proceeds of their latest house-breaking job can drum up for them, slice a bit off the top for their own use, stamp all over the rest with baking powder or talc, and sell the fucked-up adulterated shit they're left with to the children next door. Useless, treacherous, dangerous, screwed-up, shameless, selfish, fucking parasites. Junkies. [continues 973 words]
Three men are murdered in horrific circumstances in the seaside town of Scheveningen in Holland. The descriptions of the torture inflicted on them, and of the final brutal manner of their murder, are harrowing in the extreme. Putty or plaster of some kind, it is reported, had been rammed into the orifices of at least one of them. All three were dowsed in inflammable material and set alight. The bodies are so badly disfigured that they are unidentifiable. To contemplate it, even in the abstract, is enough to stop you in your tracks, to render you speechless at people's unbelievable capacity for evil. [continues 1071 words]
Ballymena, for so long a byword for Politics, Paisley and Prosperity, is having to come to terms with heroin, reports Stuart Clark. Ten years ago Ballymena was pretty much heroin-free. Now, the Antrim town is home to upwards of 500 addicts and ripe for an HIV epidemic. You'd have thought that such grim figures would have brought about a decisive response from the Northern Ireland Office but, nope, the best they've come up with so far is a pounds 5.5 million drugs awareness programme. [continues 1202 words]
- -- Stuart Clark reports on the controversy surrounding 'rape drug' GHB, and asks, in a less sombre note, whether amyl nitrate is still top of the poppers Bill Clinton is the last person you'd expect to be lauded by women's groups, but that's exactly what's happened as a result of him championing the Hillary J. Farias Date Rape Prevention Act. Just signed into American law, the Act addresses Gamma Hydroxybutrate's use as a rape drug by putting it in the same legal category as heroin and cocaine. From now on, anybody convicted of administering it to an unknowing person can be jailed for up to 20 years. [continues 947 words]
Law enforcement agencies are worried it could be the new Ecstasy. Stuart Clark reports on the new breed of super-amphetamines “HITLER’S DRUG SET TO INVADE BRITISH CLUBS" Never mind journalistic zeal, the bloke at The Observer must have been hyperventilating as he penned that particular headline. The story which followed was just as dramatic. South East Asia is being overrun by a super-strength amphetamine that was originally developed by Hitler’s scientists to keep his front-line troops awake. Not content with the millions of pounds that they’re already making, the region’s drug barons are now looking to expand into Europe. [continues 892 words]
I write regarding your recent article about cannabis in Hot Press. On the back cover of the magazine is an advertisement for Marlboro cigarettes. Tobacco is, speaking from my own chemical experience, at least fifty times more addictive than cannabis. So, let's dispense with the false governmental concern that Eoin Ryan so conveniently embraces. The Irish Government is backward and ignorant but not stupid. It knows that cannabis cuts people off from menial and trivial emotional turmoil and struggle, and Fianna Fail is not ready to allow people to be distracted from working like dogs. So people will never know their true worth, shovelled into jobs they hate. Smoking cannabis is a friend to a lonely wandering soul who has to abide by draconian inquisition. [continues 57 words]
They both enjoyed the odd doobie as a student but that’s where the similarities between Mo Mowlam and Eoin Ryan end. While the former Secretary of State for Northern Ireland has hinted that it should be decriminalised, the Government’s new ‘drugs Czar’ is adamant that there will be no relaxation of the cannabis laws while Fianna Fail is in office. His boss, Minister for Justice John O’Donoghue, was even more forthright when he stated that. “As long as I am in the Justice portfolio there will be no watering down of the fallacious distinction between so-called soft and hard drugs. [continues 989 words]