The New Heroin Epidemic - Page 2

mlurp · #11 (**permalink**) 03-13-2017, 05:43 PM

The more I think about this problem the more what Philippines President Duterte is doing to anyone involved with illegal drugs is the right way to go.

Heck in 20 to 50 years from now as this same drug war is still taking it's toll we might make it legal to kill dopers and dealers.

mlurp · #12 (**permalink**) 03-13-2017, 05:51 PM

Here is an idea that might help some... Just replace "Opioids" with Heroin.

Drug dealers would face manslaughter charges for opioid overdoses under proposed Florida law

Drug dealers would face manslaughter charges for opioid overdoses under proposed Florida law | Fox News

waltky · #13 (**permalink**) 05-21-2017, 12:03 AM

Afghanis growin' more poppies...

Afghanistan's Deadly Poppy Harvest on the Rise Again
May 16, 2017 | WASHINGTON — The world's No. 1 opium-producing country, Afghanistan, is braced for an exploding poppy harvest this year, as farmers are cultivating the illicit crop in areas where it has never grown before.

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“Unfortunately, the narcotics production is on the rise this year,” Javed Qaem, Afghan deputy counternarcotics minister, told international donors in Kabul Tuesday. “We are concerned that narcotics would increase this year, including in areas and provinces where previously we had zero opium production.” A new United Nations survey said Friday the total area under opium poppy cultivation in Afghanistan has increased by 10 percent, from 183,000 to 201,000 hectares, compared to the previous year, leading to a significant rise in the production of illicit opium. The illicit drug is fueling insecurity, violence and insurgency among other problems to discourage private and public investment in Afghanistan, the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime said in its survey report.

An Afghan man walks through a poppy field in the Surkhroad district of Jalalabad east of Kabul, Afghanistan

Qaem's comments come amid growing international concern that the Taliban, who are fighting Afghan government troops in rural areas of the country, are fueling the poppy trade by engaging in trafficking and skimming hundreds of millions dollars in profit to fuel their militancy. Taliban insurgents, according to U.S. officials, net 60 percent of their war chest from narcotics.

Top producer of opium

Afghanistan is thought to produce an estimated 90 percent of the world's heroin. As poppy cultivation spikes, U.S. intelligence officials warn that the war-torn country is likely to see more armed violence this year. “The intelligence community assesses that the political and security situation in Afghanistan will almost certainly deteriorate through 2018, even with a modest increase in [the] military assistance by the United States and its partners,” U.S. Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats said in a Senate hearing last week.

Afghan farmers work on a poppy field in the Gereshk district of Helmand province, Afghanistan

Since 2002, the U.S. has spent more than $8.5 billion on counternarcotics in Afghanistan — about $1.5 million a day, according to the Special Investigator General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR). In addition to war, opium fuels corruption and organized crime in Afghanistan, a country already ranked among the five most corrupt states in the world by Transparency International. Only 13 of the country's 34 provinces were reported poppy-free in 2016, and this number has dropped into single digits this year, Afghan officials say.

Areas of cultivation increase

waltky · #14 (**permalink**) 06-23-2017, 08:40 AM

Treatment, Not Prison, Way to Deal With Global Drug Epidemic...

UN: Treatment, Not Prison, Way to Deal With Global Drug Epidemic
June 22, 2017 — The United Nations reports about 250 million people, or 5 percent of the global adult population, used drugs in 2015, and of those, about 29.5 million suffered from drug-use disorders, including addiction.

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The World Drug Report 2017 launched Thursday by the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) said that opioids were the most harmful drug type, accounting for 70 percent of drug-linked health problems worldwide. It said opioids, including heroin, legal painkillers, such as morphine, and synthetic drugs like fentanyl were responsible for many premature drug deaths. “In many parts of the world, we observe an increasingly complex relationship between the use of heroin and synthetic opioids,” Aldo Lale-Demoz, deputy executive director of UNODC, said. Lale-Demoz said that poly drug use — the use of two or more psychoactive drugs — a common feature of both recreational and regular drug users, “as well as the cross-over between synthetic and traditional drugs pose increasing public health challenges and produce highly negative health and social consequences.”

Injecting drugs

Of the 12 million people who inject drugs worldwide, the report found that 1-in-8, or 1.6 million people, is living with HIV and more than half or just over 6 million are living with hepatitis C, while around 1.3 million are suffering from both diseases. Despite the many health problems afflicting drug users, the report noted that only 1-in-6 people seeking help have access to drug treatment programs. Lale-Demoz observed that many countries preferred to deal with drug problems by throwing users in prison, which he said exposed them to many infectious diseases. “The standard of care, which is provided to those who are incarcerated should be equivalent to the care received by those outside the prison system, with appropriate continuity of care between prison and the wider community,” he said. “Most importantly, we know that alternatives to incarceration for drug offenses of a minor nature actually help reduce the spread and burden of infectious diseases in prison and ultimately within the wider community,” Lale-Demoz added.

A used needle sits on the ground in a park in Lawrence, Massachusetts, May 30, 2017, where individuals were arrested earlier in the day during raids to break up heroin and fentanyl drug rings in the region, according to law enforcement officials.

Luiz Loures, deputy executive director of UNAIDS, agreed with this assessment noting that “criminalization and health do not go together.” Loures warned that an injecting drug user who is on the police radar would be reluctant to seek treatment for HIV or another illness for fear of being caught. He said this drives the disease underground, which is dangerous. “It does not help for the person and it does not help for society. There is plenty of evidence that when you criminalize, the impact on health is negative,” he said. “In my view, one of the major problems today is exactly this confusion between criminalization and access to health. I think that is really not helping, in fact that is fueling the drug use epidemic globally.” Among its other key findings, the report notes amphetamine use accounts for a large share of the disease burden globally. It said the cocaine market has expanded with the largest number of consumers found in North America and Europe. The report said global opium production had increased by one-third in 2016 mainly due to higher opium poppy yields in Afghanistan.

Thriving business

Chloe Carpentier, chief of the Drug Research Section at UNODC, told VOA that the Taliban was behind this thriving business. “We estimate that about $150 million were made by them only in terms of taxing the drug business in 2016, and their revenue would be between $150 and $200 million per year and the drug business would account for about half of what they make per year,” Carpentier said. Authors of the report concluded that “without the proceeds of drug production and trafficking ... the reach and impact of the Taliban would probably not be what it is today.” The report noted that organized crime groups were reaping huge profits from the multi-billion-dollar drug trade, generating between one-fifth and one-third of their revenues from these illicit sales.

Farmers harvest raw opium at a poppy field in the Zhari district of Kandahar province, Afghanistan.

One of the aims of the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals is to significantly reduce such illicit financial flows. “Drug profits is what drives traffickers and, therefore, identifying the flows related to these profits and the channels where they are invested and laundered can effectively counteract them,” the UNODC's Lale-Demoz said. Ultimately, however, he said drug control was less a law and order issue, and more a matter of personal and public health. “Sending people to jail, punishing people for minor drug offenses has not worked,” he said. “In fact, it is highly detrimental. It only increases the possibility of all sorts of social dislocations — violence, crimes, stigma and also the spread of diseases.”

https://www.voanews.com/a/un-says-tr...c/3911935.html

See also:

Study: Few Opioid-addicted Youth Get Standard Treatment Medication
June 19, 2017 — Only 1 in 4 teens and young adults with opioid addiction receive recommended treatment medication despite having good health insurance, according to a study that suggests doctors are not keeping up with the needs of youth caught up in the worst addiction crisis in U.S. history.

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"Young people may be dying because they are not getting the treatment they need,'' said Brendan Saloner, an addiction researcher at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who wrote an editorial published with the study Monday in JAMA Pediatrics. Researchers looked at records for nearly 21,000 patients ages 13 to 25 from one large insurance carrier, UnitedHealthcare. All were diagnosed with opioid addiction, but only 27 percent were given buprenorphine or naltrexone during 2001-2014, years when addiction was soaring. "The take-home message for parents is: If you have a child struggling with opioid addiction, understand that there are medications that support and sustain recovery,'' said study author Dr. Scott Hadland of Boston Medical Center.

Hadland was following a hunch when he began the study last year. In his practice, he was seeing more young people addicted to opioids. Many already had been through multiple treatment programs and they told him they'd never before been offered treatment medication. Doctors must become more comfortable treating addiction with medications, Hadland said, noting that buprenorphine and naltrexone are recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Buprenorphine is given daily as a pill or film that dissolves under the tongue. It costs about $100 a month. Doctors need special training and a government waiver to prescribe it. A common version of buprenorphine is Suboxone. Vivitrol is a brand-name version of naltrexone. It's a shot given once a month and can be used only with patients who have completely detoxed from opioids. It costs about $1,000 per month. The drugs work slightly differently, but both can ease cravings while patients work on addiction issues in counseling.

In the study, females, blacks and Hispanics were even less likely to receive the medications than males and whites. It's unclear why, but unequal access to care or doctor bias could be to blame. "The treatment gap is bad for everybody and even worse for certain subgroups,'' Hadland said. "Even though all the youth in our sample had access to high-quality health insurance, they may not have had equal access to high-quality addiction care.'' Hadland and his colleagues plan to study access to treatment medications for youth from low-income families covered by government health insurance programs such as Medicaid.

https://www.voanews.com/a/study-show...-/3907501.html

mlurp · #15 (**permalink**) 06-23-2017, 05:15 PM

And as usual the C.I.A. is deeply involved in these poppies fields trying to take control away from the insurgents and dealing it themselves. The C.I.A. has for a very long time been using drugs to make and pay for their black projects and to some agents retirement funds.

With the advent of Castro in taking over Cuba and becoming a commie country the C.I.A. went to the Italian Mob seeking help and got into Heroin profit with the mobs help.

As by then their need for fund was growing and yet the C.I,A. wasn't a quality organization and Kennedy didn't really trust them so Congress followed suit and their growing need for more funds wasn't happening like it does today.

waltky · #16 (**permalink**) 09-22-2017, 05:58 AM

Sessions gettin' tough on drug gangs...

US Deaths from Drug Overdoses Set Record in 2016
September 21, 2017 - U.S. deaths from drug overdoses set a record of more than 64,000 in 2016, driven by an intractable opioid crisis, U.S. Attorney General said Thursday, citing preliminary government data.

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Provisional data released last month by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) showed that there were 64,070 drug overdose deaths in the United States in 2016, up 21 percent from 52,898 the year before. The NCHS is an arm of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The 2016 estimate "would be the highest drug death toll and the fastest increase in that death toll in American history," Sessions said. "And every day this crisis continues to grow, as more than 5,000 Americans abuse painkillers for the first time."

Opioids such as heroin and the synthetic drug fentanyl were responsible for most of the fatal overdoses, killing more than 33,000 Americans — quadruple the number from 20 years ago. "More Americans died of drug overdoses than died from car crashes or died from AIDS at the height of the AIDS epidemic," Sessions said. "For Americans under the age of 50, drug overdoses are now the leading cause of death." Sessions spoke at an event in Charleston, West Virginia, a state with the highest drug overdose rate in the country. In 2015, West Virginia reported more than 41 overdose deaths per 100,000 people, compared with a national average of 16 per 100,000, according to NCHS data.

A bag of 4-fluoro isobutyryl fentanyl, which was seized in a drug raid, is displayed at the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) Special Testing and Research Laboratory in Sterling, Virginia

Sessions said President Donald Trump's campaign pledge to end the opioid crisis remains a priority for his administration. "I believe that the department's new resources and new efforts will bring more criminals to justice, and ultimately save lives," Sessions said. "And I'm convinced this is a winnable war." In March, Trump named New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a former presidential candidate, to head the newly formed President's Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis.

Last month, the commission urged the administration to declare the opioid crisis a national emergency. "With approximately 142 Americans dying every day, America is enduring a death toll equal to September 11th every three weeks," the commission said in an interim report. Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price said that no declaration was necessary to combat the crisis, but White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders later said Trump was taking the idea "absolutely seriously."

https://www.voanews.com/a/us-deaths-...d/4039683.html

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US Attorney General Warns Gang Members: 'We Will Hunt You Down'
September 21, 2017 — U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions warned gang members on Thursday that they will be huntd down and brought to justice so they can no longer terrorize communities.

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Sessions told law enforcement officials in Boston that they cannot allow violent street gangs such as MS-13 to turn cities into war zones. "We are coming for you,'' Sessions said during a speech at the federal courthouse. "We will hunt you down, we will find you and we will bring you to justice.'' MS-13, or La Mara Salvatrucha, is believed to have been founded in Los Angeles in the 1980s by immigrants fleeing El Salvador's bloody civil war and has grown into one of the largest street gangs in the country, with more than 10,000 members, federal officials say.

The gang, whose motto is "kill, rape, control,'' is known for its use of gruesome tactics, including hacking and stabbing its victims with machetes. It has been tied to a wave of recent violence on Long Island, just east of New York City, and has been linked to brutal killings in other states. Sessions applauded Massachusetts federal prosecutors' dedication to dismantling the gang, pointing to a massive roundup of its members in the state last year. More than 50 members of the gang in and around Boston were indicted in January 2016 on federal racketeering charges, including murder, conspiracy to commit murder and attempted murder.

Protesters gather outside the federal courthouse in Boston where U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions was speaking to law enforcement officials about transnational organized crime

Sessions, a Republican, said gangs are exploiting a program for unaccompanied minors found crossing the southern border by sending members over as "wolves in sheep clothing'' and recruiting in communities. Gregory Chen, director of government relations for the American Immigration Lawyers Association, called that assertion "truly baseless.'' The program aids children fleeing violence in their home countries, he said. "He's trying to inflame public opinion against this highly vulnerable population,'' Chen said.

A few dozen protesters carrying signs with phrases such as #NotWelcome gathered outside the courthouse before Sessions' speech to condemn his views on immigration and law enforcement.Sessions' visit to Boston included a briefing from local officials on MS-13 and a discussion with local police chiefs.

https://www.voanews.com/a/us-attorne...-/4039641.html

mlurp · #17 (**permalink**) 09-22-2017, 11:54 PM

Take these and their backers to any place USA which has one or more MS-13 zones,

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A few dozen protesters carrying signs with phrases such as #NotWelcome gathered outside the courthouse before Sessions' speech to condemn his views on immigration and law enforcement.Sessions' visit to Boston included a briefing from local officials on MS-13 and a discussion with local police chiefs

and leave each in the middle of the zone with

cell phones... Hey we do need to focus on these International gangs..

About time the govt., gets it together on big gangs.

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