Nelson Police Chief aims to educate public and those vulnerable to overdose The numbers are terrifying. Nelson Police Chief Paul Burkart has the B.C.Coroners Service annual report sitting on his desk, as well as alarming Interior Health statistics that show fentanyl has come to the Kootenays. In 2016 there were 914 overdose deaths in B.C.,a record number for the province and more than double the total for 2015. "It certainly does scare me," Burkart told the Star. [continues 1045 words]
The Haldimand- Norfolk Health Unit wasn't exaggerating last year when it warned about the threat of illegal street drugs cut with powerful synthetic opioids. Norfolk paramedics responded to 37 drug overdoses in all of 2014. This rose to 59 in 2015. In 2016, the total was 90. "These are only the number of calls that were specifically dispatched as drug overdoses and do not account for other primary problems associated with overdose that the crews were sent to such as vital- signs- absent, unconscious-unresponsiveness, seizures, respiratory problems or behavioural-psychiatric occurrences," Sarah Townsend, Norfolk's manager of emergency medical services, said Jan. 6 in an update on opioid occurrences. [continues 366 words]
[photo] Bruce Brandler is chief federal law enforcement officer for a sprawling judicial district that covers half of Pennsylvania. (Matt Rourke / Associated Press) The phone at Bruce Brandler's home rang at 3:37 a.m. It was the local hospital. His 16-year-old son was there, and he was in really bad shape. A suspected heroin overdose, the nurse said. Brandler didn't believe it. Erik had his problems, but heroin? It seemed impossible. Nearly 10 years later, the nation is gripped by a spiraling crisis of opioid and heroin abuse -- and Brandler, a veteran federal prosecutor recently promoted to interim U.S. attorney, suddenly finds himself in a position to do something about the scourge that claimed his youngest son's life. [continues 778 words]
[photo] Heather Skorinko had hoped to grow industrial hemp on her North Whitehall Township farm, but the state's restrictive pilot program will lock out most family farms, she said. (APRIL BARTHOLOMEW/THE MORNING CALL) Industrial hemp returns to Pennsylvania in 2017. So why are advocates so riled up? Too often in recent years, Heather Skorinko has struggled to make money growing corn and soybeans on her North Whitehall Township farm, which has been in the family for more than 120 years. [continues 1839 words]
Narcotics suppression police question Francis Mukwamba, a Zambian passport holder whose real nationality is uncertain, at a hotel room in Sukhumvit area of Bangkok on Dec 26. (Photo taken from the Narcotics Suppression Bureau Facebook page) Two foreign nationals were arrested after 4kg of cocaine were found in their bags when they arrived at Suvarnabhumi airport from Africa and a third, their alleged contact, was later apprehended at a city hotel. Pol Maj Gen Sommai Kongwisaisuk, acting commissioner of the Narcotics Suppression Bureau, said Johnny Halop Sajulga, a Filipino, and a Vietnamese woman, Chao Thi Thuong, 37, arrived from Ethiopia on Flight ET 628 on Dec 26. [continues 159 words]
Police took down a Sydney crime syndicate and made 'the largest cocaine seizure in Australian ... history' [photo] An Australian investigator unloads cargo from a seize boat, December 2016. Australian Federal Police Australian police dismantled a major cocaine smuggling ring after a two-and-a-half-year multi-agency operation undertaken with Tahiti, Australian authorities announced on Thursday. Operation Okesi, which began in July 2014, culminated in a Christmas-night seizure of 500 kilograms of cocaine in New South Wales in eastern Australia. [continues 648 words]
Thomas Elias writes the syndicated California Focus column, appearing twice weekly in 93 newspapers around California, with circulation of over 2.2 million. As a United States attorney in Alabama serving under President Ronald Reagan in 1986, the 39-year-old Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III was charged with enforcing civil rights laws. But he said then that he didn't have much of a problem with what the Ku Klux Klan stood for, musing that he thought the KKK was "OK until I found out they smoked pot." [continues 640 words]
Ismael Gonzalez-Gonzalez was supposed to be deported nine years ago, but Cuba wouldn't take him. Instead, he wound up in Louisville and, police say, emerged as a local boss directing the flow of drugs in the Louisville area and beyond for a Mexican cartel. It's unclear how Gonzalez, a convicted felon who was arrested in a surprise drug raid last summer, first entered the United States before he ended up in Louisville, where he settled into a house in Jeffersontown. Many details about his case remain hidden in sealed federal court records. [continues 769 words]
WASHINGTON (AP) - No one knew what was in the baggie. It was just a few tablespoons of crystalline powder seized back in April, clumped like snow that had partially melted and frozen again. Emily Dye, a 27-year-old forensic chemist at the Drug Enforcement Administration's Special Testing and Research Laboratory, did not know if anyone had died from taking this powder, or how much it would take to kill you. What she did know was this: New drugs were appearing in the lab every other week, things never before seen in this unmarked gray building in Sterling, Virginia. Increasingly, these new compounds were synthetic opioids designed to mimic fentanyl, a prescription painkiller up to 50 times stronger than heroin. [continues 2297 words]
Around 40 parents and youth attended a recent community street drug trends presentation at Fox Run School. Organized by the Sylvan Lake RCMP the presentation aimed to equip parents with skills to allow recognition of street drugs and theparaphernalia associated with drug use. Sylvan Lake RCMP School Resource Officer,Constable Michael Lee in partnership with Constable Kevin Lintott of the Organized Crime and Intelligence Unit out of the RCMP's Red Deer City Detachment provided information to parents on various street drugs including cocaine, heroine, marijuana,methamphetamine and MDMA. In addition, the officers also touched on the impact fentanyl is having in North America and Central Alberta. [continues 420 words]
Naloxone has seen a meteoric rise in use in British Columbia as an opioid overdose antidote. As of mid-December more than 755 people had died from overdoses, including 128 in November alone, according to the B.C. Coroners Service. Naloxone, however, has become a first-line response for drug users, first responders and others who witness an overdose. Here is a primer on what naloxone is, what it does and doesn't affect, and how prevalent it is in B.C. [continues 310 words]
Homicides, shooting linked to groups bringing drugs, guns into Regina Police believe at least two Regina homicides and a shooting in a crowded restaurant are among the fallout from an increasingly violent threat posed by outsiders bringing guns and drugs into the city. The Mounties and Regina Police Service joined forces to roll out the unwelcome mat for the unwanted guests, recently concluding a 90-day project targeting drug trafficking as well as the weapons and shootings that accompany the trade. What it revealed is that many of the 60 people arrested on 443 charges, including trafficking, possession of stolen property, and multiple weapons offences, aren't from here. They dropped in from locales such as Edmonton, Fort Saskatchewan, Fort McMurray and Toronto. [continues 526 words]
Ottawa has tabled a bill aimed at easing restrictions on the facilities, a 'good sign' according to one Toronto city councillor Municipal politicians in Canada's two largest cities are optimistic that new legislation aimed at clearing the path for more supervised consumption sites means they will finally be able to offer the harm-reduction service next year. Ottawa on Monday tabled Bill C-37, which would overturn yet another piece of Conservative era legislation and advance the Liberal government's plan to approach drug use as a public health issue. [continues 775 words]
Defending the government's classification of marijuana as one of the most dangerous drugs, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration declares on its website that pot causes mental illness and lung cancer and leads youths to heroin and cocaine. But an advocacy group says the DEA, in a legal filing in August, said it found no evidence to support any of those conclusions. The group, Americans for Safe Access, has asked the agency to remove discredited claims from its Web page. [continues 522 words]
As drug-related deaths rise in B.C. and opioids continue to spread nationwide, government seeks amendments to Harper-era bill Ottawa will introduce a bill Monday that is expected to reduce barriers to opening and operating supervised drug consumption sites in Canada. The move comes days after B.C. announced it would open several "overdose prevention sites" without federal approval as an emergency measure to counter the province's highest death toll on record due to illicit drugs. As well, carfentanil - a powerful synthetic opioid many times more toxic than fentanyl - has now been detected in three provinces and is beginning to fuel another surge in overdoses, creating a new sense of urgency. [continues 589 words]
B.C.'s top court says officer lied about being under threat to help smuggler Invoking a rarely used investigative procedure, B.C.'s top court has caught and hammered an airport security officer-turned-drug trafficker who pulled the wool over the eyes of his trial judge. The Court of Appeal said the offender sold Provincial Court judge James Bahen a load of hokum about a mysterious, threatening "Mr. X" and the extent of his own regret. Having set about to "deceive the sentencing judge, his assertion of genuine remorse rings hollow," it found, concluding Gurvinder Singh Pahl hadn't received his just desserts. [continues 727 words]
CHARLESTON, S.C. - After three tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, C. J. Hardin wound up hiding from the world in a backwoods cabin in North Carolina. Divorced, alcoholic and at times suicidal, he had tried almost all the accepted treatments for post-traumatic stress disorder: psychotherapy, group therapy and nearly a dozen different medications. "Nothing worked for me, so I put aside the idea that I could get better," said Mr. Hardin, 37. "I just pretty much became a hermit in my cabin and never went out." [continues 1276 words]
On a summer morning in 2013, Octavian Mihai entered a softly lit room furnished with a small statue of Buddha, a box of tissues and a single red rose. From an earthenware chalice, he swallowed a capsule of psilocybin, an ingredient found in hallucinogenic mushrooms. Then he put on an eye mask and headphones and lay down on a couch. Soon, images flew by like shooting stars: a spinning world that looked like a blue-green chessboard; himself on a stretcher in front of a hospital; his parents, gazing at him with aching sadness as he reached out to them, suffused with childlike love. [continues 1358 words]
On April 14, 2016 the B.C. Ministry of Health announced the number of drug-related overdoses in the province had become a public health emergency, citing 474 preventable overdose deaths in British Columbia in 2015. In the six months that followed, they collected more data about overdoses (both fatal and non-fatal) and tried to proactively warn people about risks. During that same period, hundreds more died of illicit drug overdoses - 622 in the first 10 months of 2016, with at least 60 per cent of those directly linked to fentanyl. [continues 528 words]
Therapists treat study patients on pure form of ecstasy Several Vancouver psychotherapists behind a head-turning Canadian drug study may not be raving ecstatically or blissed out. But after wrapping up Canada's first-ever trial treating trauma using the drug MDMA - the pure form of what's popularly called ecstasy - they are nonetheless optimistic, Metro has learned. According to psychiatrist Dr. Ingrid Pacey, the study's principal investigator, the MDMA assisted psychotherapy trial showed promising results for its six patients with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) so severe that no previous treatments had worked. [continues 610 words]
