ADDICTION experts, substance users and a welfare group have welcomed the release of a medical study which has raised concerns about the controversial anti-heroin treatment naltrexone. The West Australian reported yesterday that a two-year study of 3617 Perth heroin addicts by psychiatrist James Fellows-Smith and GP James Edwards found that untreated addicts were less likely to die than those who dropped out of the naltrexone program. Perth doctor George O'Neil runs a naltrexone clinic in Subiaco. The study - which Dr Fellows-Smith has submitted for publication in a prominent medical journal but has made public beforehand in an effort to stop more preventable deaths - found that addicts on the streets had a one in 100 chance of dying. [continues 295 words]
Gov. Gary Johnson's Proposal To Legalize The Medical Use Of Marijuana Is Heading To The Senate For Consideration The Senate Judiciary Committee endorsed the measure on a 6-3 vote late Wednesday night. "What we're talking about is trying to help people who are quite ill," said Sen. Roman Maes, D-Santa Fe, who sponsored the proposal. Patients with debilitating medical conditions - cancer, AIDS or glaucoma, for example - could be eligible for the program. Health Secretary Alex Valdez said the department would approve patients for the use of medical marijuana - "cannabis," as it's called in the legislation. A physician must first certify the patient as having a medical condition that qualifies for the program. [continues 216 words]
President George W. Bush is taking a properly cautious approach toward U.S. relations with Colombia, a troubled Latin American democracy riven by a vicious civil war tied to the drug trade. His initial message to Colombia is clear: Let's be friends and do more business, but don't try to involve us in your war. After his meeting this week with Colombian President Andres Pastrana, Bush said he would move to renew and expand a regional trade agreement sought by Colombia to revive its moribund economy. The idea is to generate new jobs for workers in the illegal drug trade, from cultivation to distribution. [continues 241 words]
Wellington: A scheme aimed at keeping youngsters off drugs is in financial crisis at a time when statistics show more schoolchildren are smoking cannabis. The police drug education programme in schools, Drug Abuse Resistance Education (Dare), would fold within a year if it did not get more money soon, chief executive Graham Gibbs said. Police education officers who taught the programme in schools were funded by New Zealand Police but Dare supplied all materials to schools and needed an extra $500,000 to survive long-term, Mr Gibbs said. Dare began in New Zealand in 1989. It now runs five different programmes, including one in Maori and one that provides support for parents. [end]
Start Growing Pot For Cash Crop Cow By now anyone with a brain and a pulse knows that marijuana is, and will continue to be, the recreational drug of choice for mainstream America. Legal or not, like it or not. The propaganda condemning pot is as ludicrous as the criminal penalties associated with its use. It's a weed folks, like the ones you pull out of your garden. Now that the tobacco industry is about to be snuffed out (pun intended) by lawsuits that defy gravity, the Carolinas need to take charge of the battle for the normalization and/or legalization of pot. It's the 21st century. It's [going to] happen anyway, sooner or later. The monetary windfall for the Carolinas would be in the trillions of dollars. Fact, not fiction. What do you say governor? I say scratch the lottery (pun also intended) and go for the pottery. Smoke 'em if you got 'em. Joe Fanelli North Myrtle Beach [end]
FRITCH - On Feb. 18, I decided to take a drive to Tulia and meet some people. I have been following the tale of the drug sting that occurred July 23, 1999, and I realize how lucky my family has been. I have a daughter with an addiction problem. She is about the same age as some of the "convicted felons" in the story. If the truth were known, my daughter's story is much worse, yet she was allowed probation - a short probation at that. Three years. [continues 638 words]
JOHANNESBURG - Was William Shakespeare partial to a good deal more than a pinch of tobacco while composing his sonnets? While there is no proof the bard delved into narcotics, clay pipe fragments excavated from his Stratford-upon-Avon home and of the 17th century period show conclusively that cocaine and myristic acid - a hallucinogenic derived from plants, including nutmeg - were smoked in Shakespeare's England. The findings, published in the South African Journal of Science, also show hints of residues of cannabis or marijuana, but this has not been proven. Nicotine, unsurprisingly, was one of the compounds firmly identified. "The cocaine was found in two of the 24 pipe fragments examined, which is really quite remarkable," Francis Thackeray, a palaeontologist at the Transvaal Museum in Pretoria who co-write the article, told Reuters. "The Spanish had access to it at that time in the Americas, but the fact that it was smoked in England at that time is a first. It is quite a find," said Thackeray, who is a distant relative of the the famous 19th century English author. [continues 158 words]
In Which Our Man In Washington Listens To The Drug Czar Babble And Learns Why We Can't Afford Tax Cuts Spent a morning last Tuesday at the Heritage Foundation, listening to the outgoing drug czar, Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey. Heritage billed the speech as, "Is Our Balanced Approach to the War on Drugs Working?" McCaffrey, who prefers assertions to questions, made the title declarative: "Our Balanced Strategy Against Drugs Is Working." Let me admit a bias of my own: Long before I spent time in Santa Fe talking with New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson about how much fun, if arguably counterproductive, it is to get stoned, I felt the drug war's insistence on jailing people for sensory enhancement is a waste of human effort (see "America's Most Dangerous Politician," January). Still, I was surprised to find just what an idiot McCaffrey is in person. [continues 652 words]
TV Show's Bosses Act After Singer's Drugs Blunder POPSTARS singer Myleene Klass landed the squeaky-clean band in controversy after calling for cannabis to be legalised. Her remarks have caused panic among TV and record bosses, who fear a backlash from parents. Her group, Hear' Say, manufactured for ITV's ratings-winning series, have had a carefully crafted image created by executives at London weekend Television and record producer Polydor. Despite hours of media training and warnings not to discuss controversial subjects, 22-year-old Myleene blurted out her views in an interview with trendy magazine The Face. [continues 253 words]
When the Human Rights Act had been passed by Parliament but had still to take effect, the Lord Advocate in Scotland expressed the hope that the English and Scottish courts would never have to use the power in the Act to declare a law incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights. In similar vein, the Lord Chancellor, Lord Irvine of Lairg, talks of the Act as "a strong magnetic field" across English law, emphasising its interpretative rather than its declaratory effect. It is natural enough that the Government's law officers should have such hopes but perhaps more surprisingly that they are shared by eminent human rights lawyers. Lord Lester of Herne Hill, QC, has said in this supplement that the Human Rights Act "will have to be interpreted so as to weave Convention rights into our law, rather than tearing gaping holes in it" if it is to succeed. Elsewhere, he has written of "domesticating" the Convention rights. [continues 717 words]
A MAJOR new report, seen by the Sunday Independent, lays bare in startling terms the culture of alcoholic drink and illicit drugs among Irish teenagers. The report, which will be published on Tuesday, is the first major study in four years of what is now widely regarded as one of the biggest social problems in this country. The main finding is that Irish youths are starting to drink at a younger age, and that the numbers who drink frequently, and have been drunk 20 times or more, is going up. [continues 759 words]
