HIV Babies Become The Latest Chapter In The Tragedy That Is Drug Abuse In Today's Russia. IRKUTSK, Russia - When the special infants' ward in the Infectious Disease Hospital in Irkutsk opened two years ago, the first arrival was tiny Vanya, who had been abandoned by his mother 12 hours after being born. Next was a desperately underweight child whom the nurses called Dima. Then came Vladislav, newborn son of a 15-year-old heroin addict. Now, the roster numbers 18 children between 4 months and 2 years old who share two traits: having been born infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, and having been abandoned by a drug-addicted mother. [continues 663 words]
WASHINGTON (AP) Public hospitals cannot test pregnant women for drugs and turn the results over to police without consent, the U.S. Supreme Court said yesterday in a ruling that buttressed the Constitution's protection against unreasonable searches. Some women who tested positive for drugs at a South Carolina public hospital had been arrested from their beds shortly after giving birth. The justices ruled 6-3 that such testing without patients' consent violated the Constitution even though the goal was to prevent women from harming their fetuses by using crack cocaine. [continues 665 words]
In A Public-Relations Campaign, Contestants Undergo Commando-Style Training BOGOTA, Colombia - Contestants on the television game show Comandos wear camouflage, combat boots and helmets as they crawl through mud, swing on ropes, and run obstacle courses at an army training base. "It's lots of dirty fun," said cohost Andrea Serna, whose own tight T-shirts and pants are definitely not army-issue. "Many people have a fantasy of being in the army - for three days, not three years." But Comandos is more than a game show. Sponsored by a Colombian armed forces that admit to feeling isolated as they fight leftist guerrillas and drug traffickers, the program is also a bit of soft-core propaganda aimed at connecting the military with civilian society. [continues 825 words]
Authorities Say He Was Prescribing The Addictive Painkiller OxyContin. Richard Paolino, 57, a longtime Bensalem physician, was jailed under $8 million bond yesterday on charges that he practiced medicine illegally, freely writing thousands of prescriptions for powerful painkillers such as OxyContin, much of it resold at huge profits on the streets of Philadelphia. State Attorney General Mike Fisher and Bucks County District Attorney Diane Gibbons said Paolino, a doctor of osteopathic medicine, was the source of more than 1,200 prescriptions for OxyContin and the sedative Xanax from Nov. 1 through March 1 alone. [continues 934 words]
Despite Revisions, Some Schools Are Opting Out Of DARE To Try Antidrug Alternatives. For 10 years, Collingswood police officers have stood in the town's fifth-grade classrooms, lecturing about the dangers of drugs and alcohol. And for 10 years, they have followed the same DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) workbook used by 36 million children nationwide, giving 17 lessons on topics such as how to resist peer pressure and different ways to say no. But as the DARE graduates ascended through high school, the local police were still hauling in teenagers for drinking on weekends. A survey indicated that the number of students drinking and using drugs in Collingswood had actually increased in the previous five years. And they were starting earlier, with 28 percent of eighth graders reporting they had been drunk in 1998-99, compared with 11 percent in 1995-96. [continues 991 words]
A drug suspect was kept out of his home while officers got a warrant. They thought he would destroy evidence. WASHINGTON - Police who are convinced that a drug suspect will destroy evidence if left alone may hold the suspect outside the home while they get a warrant, the Supreme Court ruled yesterday. In a second case exploring the balance between law enforcement and privacy rights, the court also heard the arguments of a man arrested after police outside his house used a heat-measuring device to detect a marijuana-growing operation inside. [continues 681 words]
A South Jersey case has drawn local attention to the "immensely popular" OxyContin. A five-year-old pill prescribed for cancer patients and others with severe, chronic pain is appearing on the streets as a new narcotic of choice. When chewed, snorted or injected, OxyContin produces a rush like heroin - and an addiction that can be just as hard to break. Although drug agencies do not have a definitive database of OxyContin-related crime and abuse, an anecdotal map compiled by the National Drug Intelligence Center in Washington shows hundreds of incidents of overdose, armed robbery, prescription fraud and theft in recent months in Western Pennsylvania, Ohio, Maine, Kentucky, Virginia and West Virginia. [continues 1069 words]
It's big. It's popular. It doesn't work. New money and research may improve it. Science may finally replace good intentions as the driving force behind drug and alcohol education in the nation's schools. It's about time. After years of suppressing criticism and resisting change, the omnipresent Drug Abuse Resistance Education program - known better simply as DARE - is rewriting its curriculum. The changes promise a better chance for more kids to avoid the devastating grip of drug abuse. Last year, research shows, one in four of America's 23.6 million teens had used illegal drugs in the previous 30 days. [continues 401 words]
Parents and police met last night in North Philadelphia to discuss what could be done to stem the illegal use of a powerful painkiller by city teenagers. Capt. Robert Trzcinski, head of the 26th Police District, told about 120 parents and teens at district headquarters, at 26th Street and Girard Avenue, that abuse of OxyContin had resulted in fatal overdose for at least four people in the area in the last few weeks. "It's a police problem, but it's also a community problem and a parental problem," Trzcinski said. [continues 354 words]
It's a lesson learned but not learned: Huffing can kill.Two years ago, huffing - inhaling chemicals from aerosol spray cans - caused a car crash in which five Delaware County teenagers died.On Friday, the Chester County coroner ruled that Morgan Kelly, 17, of Berwyn, who died when her car hit a tree on Feb. 3, had inhaled aerosol fumes moments before the crash and probably lost consciousness.What young people don't know about the dangers of inhalants is killing them, according to bereft parents as well as coroners and substance-abuse experts."Kids don't have the image that [an inhalant] is illegal or harmful to them," Chester County coroner Rodger Rothenberger said Friday."You can go out and get it at the store, so that means it can't be that bad, or they'd take it off market. [continues 883 words]
CAMDEN - Framed by a dilapidated rowhouse, Chris Anderson stands in the growing darkness and talks about the most profound four days of his life: his half-week of homelessness. Anderson, who grew up in Salem County, had a family, a good job, and an $1,100 paycheck every week. After a house fire and his son's death, however, everything slipped away. He lived in motels for a few months, then found himself on the streets of North Camden, his savings depleted. [continues 463 words]
He became the first head of state in the region to do so. He says traffickers would lose their economic incentive. MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay - This small, quiet, slow-moving nation does not make much news. But Uruguayan President Jorge Batlle has figured out a way to get headlines. He has become the first head of state in the region - and one of the few anywhere - to call for the decriminalization of illicit drugs. Batlle, a blunt free-market reformer, questions the costs and effectiveness of a drug war whose primary theater of battle is Latin America. [continues 877 words]
The Government And Rebels Agreed To Resume Peace Talks, But The Same Difficult Obstacles To Ending The War Remain BOGOTA, COLOMBIA Despite optimism generated by an agreement to resume peace talks in Colombia, the government and rebels face an arduous task in negotiating an end to the nation's 37-year war. After a two-day summit in rebel territory, President Andres Pastrana and Manuel Marulanda, chief of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, pledged Friday to continue the peace talks. [continues 554 words]
PIKEVILLE, Ky. - The robber asked for only one thing when he walked into a pharmacy with a mask over his head and an automatic rifle in his hands: OxyContin. The prescription drug, meant to be a painkiller for cancer patients, is being abused throughout the East, authorities say. In Kentucky, about 200 people were arrested and charged this week in what police say was the largest drug raid in state history. All had allegedly been using or dealing OxyContin. "They'll kick a bag of cocaine out of the way to get to 'Oxy,' " said Detective Roger Hall of the Harlan County Sheriff's Department in Kentucky. [continues 385 words]
Negotiations Toward Ending The 37-year-old Civil War Ended In November. The U.s. Is Watching With Interest. LOS POZOS, Colombia - Trying to resuscitate Colombia's shaky peace process, President Andres Pastrana traveled yesterday to rebel territory, where he was embraced by guerrilla chief Manuel Marulanda. But the friendly greeting belied the challenges Pastrana faces in his quest to end Colombia's 37-year-old war. In his third face-to-face encounter with Marulanda, Pastrana was trying to get the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, to return to formal peace talks it abandoned in November. [continues 463 words]
They Often Cannot Secure The Storage Boxes. Some Students Sell The Drug, Used As Speed By Older Children. When Avis Anderson became a school nurse in 1983, she kept students' prescription drugs in a shoe box. They were mostly antibiotics. Since then, Anderson has seen the amount of drugs she must dispense to her students at Neil Armstrong Middle School in Bristol Township, Bucks County, balloon to fill two large, locked cabinets. The growth is mostly in drugs such as Ritalin - a controlled substance meant to treat hyperactivity and attention-deficit disorder but commonly crushed and snorted by students to achieve a speedlike high. [continues 912 words]
The Study Shows More Money Is Spent On The Problems Created By Addiction Than On Prevention And Treatment. WASHINGTON - States spend billions of dollars cleaning up the wreckage of drug, alcohol and cigarette abuse - about as much as they pay for higher education - but little of that money goes to treatment and prevention programs, according to a private study released yesterday. The three-year, state-by-state study, titled "Shoveling Up: The Impact of Substance Abuse on State Budgets," estimates that states spent $81.3 billion dealing with substance abuse in 1998, about 13 percent of their budgets. Of the total, $7.4 billion was for tobacco-related illnesses. [continues 520 words]
NASHVILLE (AP) - Joe Gilliam, the former Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback, died of a cocaine overdose, the Nashville medical examiner said yesterday. "The cause of Mr. Gilliam's death is cocaine intoxication," Dr. Bruce Levy said. "The manner of his death is accident." Gilliam died on Christmas Day at 49. He had struggled for years after his NFL career with drug problems, living periodically on the streets of Nashville, his native city, where he was lauded as "Jefferson Street Joe" during his heyday as a star at Tennessee State. [continues 156 words]
Janice Hughes spoke with her granddaughter for the last time on Halloween morning. She called from work to tell 16-year-old Heather Morrow where to find the candy, expecting her to empty the bag she had hidden before trick-or-treaters arrived. When Hughes stepped through the door of her Bordentown home that evening, the Snickers bag sat, untouched, on the kitchen table. Hours earlier, Morrow inhaled nitrous oxide from a plastic garbage bag placed over her head. The giddy high might have lasted a few minutes before she passed out. She most likely asphyxiated within five minutes. [continues 1356 words]
It was a gruesome crime scene. The victims had been sprayed with semi-automatics, their bodies sprawled in the dining room. Some were piled atop one another against a door; others were lying on their backs or stomachs. One couple looked as if they were trying to escape - their arms outstretched in an apparent bid to cheat death. Seven people died and three were injured in what authorities are calling a drug-related, execution-style slaughter Thursday night in a boarded-up rowhouse in the Mill Creek section of West Philadelphia. [continues 942 words]