Teddy Bears Resort to Life of Crime
July 7th, 2009 by Russ
DEA agents and New York City’s finest were shocked last weekend to find yet another segment of society corrupted by the War on Drugs — Teddy Bears. In a raid on a Bronx safehouse, police and federal agents uncovered over 44 lbs of heroin and $150,000 in cash trafficked by the customizable bedtime friends known as Build-A-Bears.
According to one onlooking neighbor at the raid site:
My daughter has one of those toys. I’m very surprised something like that was going on right here and I’m especially surprised it was a Build-A-Bear.
While the news certainly comes as a shock to the community that calls the bears home, one wonders whether we might have seen this coming earlier. After all, these bears are so diverse in the way they choose to live their lives. There are firefighter bears, surgeon bears, even subprime mortgage-lending bears. Is it any wonder that some of these bears turned to the high-risk, high-reward lifestyle of smack trafficking?
In this economy, trying to eek out a living as a high school musical bear or a bear on a military pension just isn’t possible the way that it was in the halcyon days of beardom. A bear has got to make ends meet, just like anyone else.
Some will argue that these bears, as couriers, were just bit players; pawns in a game played by weathered New York City drug traffickers. And every single Build-A-Bear caught up in this mess will have his day in court. But before they go out and summon their fancy lawyer bears and publicity bears, they’ll have to own up to the part they had to play in this operation. Yes, these bears were built for a purpose. They were designed and raised as heroin mule bears. But does your build determine your fate? Does not every bear ultimately choose his or her own destiny?
Perhaps the most famous bear of all, Winnie the Pooh, once said:
People who don’t Think probably don’t have Brains; rather, they have grey fluff that’s blown into their heads by mistake.
Even bears with grey fluff upstairs should have known better on this one. Thanks, Pooh.
Your Great-Grandma Was Hopped Up on Stuff
June 12th, 2009 by Russ
For those of us caught up in the day to day world of drug politics, it can be easy to forget just how new the concept of ‘illegal drugs’ really is. Pharmacy blog, Pill Talk, provided a big dose of historical perspective this week in releasing a collection of old posters and billboards hocking all manner of substances that no upstanding company would affiliate itself with in today’s whitewashed corporate culture.
Most stemming from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the ads feature some truly amazing concoctions.
Miss Winslow’s Soothing Syrup was designed to quiet restless babies especially at the time of teething. Little did babies and their mothers know that the syrup’s secret ingredient was morphine. Those babies were soothed alright. There’s even a terrific vintage testimonial in the New York Times archive lauding the syrup’s ability to quiet entire households of screaming rugrats.
Bayer, the long-time drug manufacturer, experimented with several substances before focusing on wonder drug, aspirin. One such substance was heroin, which, not surprisingly, turned out to be a terrific cough suppressant. As it happens, it also tended to suppress just about everything else, except for the desire to buy more Bayer Heroin, of course.
And finally, there’s the soft drink of lore, Coca Cola. As urban legend (and PillTalk) tells us, the name came from the fact that the drink used to be a simple mix of wine and cocaine. I fail to see how corn syrup and phosphoric acid could ever hope to compete with their far more stimulating predecessors.
British Woman Sentenced to Life in Laos Drug Court
June 4th, 2009 by RussThe tendrils of US drug enforcement reach across borders, over oceans, and even into the legal affairs of foreign nations. When British national, Samantha Orabator was caught concealing a pound and a half of heroin in a Laotian airport last August, her life was nearly forfeited because of a US campaign to toughen drug standards in Asia’s ‘Golden Triangle.’
Only spared execution because she was pregnant, this week’s ruling by a Laotian court imposed the second most stringent possible sentence, life imprisonment. In other words, posession of a pound and a half of a particular opiate extract, nearly cut short the life of a 20-year old girl. Rapists, murderers, and war criminals seem to have better odds of parole in certain parts of the world, than those attempting to profit from unsanctioned substances.
One could chalk up this legal disparity to the oddities of a foreign, facist culture. In actuality, much of the motivation for Laos’ draconian drug policy comes in the form of US dollars. In 1993, Laos was ‘certified for narcotics cooperation ‘ with the US State Department. In return for showing erradication of opium crops and increasing crackdowns on drug trafficking, Laotian officials received training from American drug police as well as millions of dollars to fund the ramping up of their anti-narcotics operations.
In other words, if the Laotian government showed leniency to those convicted of non-violent drug crimes, they could lose an important source of foreign aid.
Meanwhile, the United States drives the demand for about a quarter of the world’s consumed heroin. Instead of acting to reduce demand internally, it has strong-armed, threatened, or outright bribed other nations to impose disastrously incongruous and disproportionate laws that have destroyed tens of millions of lives.
Canada to Conduct Research for Heroin Replacement
June 4th, 2009 by Rick
Free heroin is planned to be given to over 300 addicts in the Canadian cities of Vancouver and Montreal, as part of a three year project called Study to Assess Longer-term Opioid Medication Effectiveness, research designed to find drug replacements to the highly addictive opiate.
In the first stage of the study, researchers plan on injecting some addicts with Dilaudid — a prescribed painkiller that derives from the same opioid family while a control group receives heroin. In the second stage they plan to give the addicts a pill form of Dilaudid and heroin — eliminating the need for nursing assistance.
Trish Walsh, executive director of the InnerChange Foundation, an advocacy group for addicts that funds drug research, said:
We have the potential to revolutionize treatment on an international basis. [...] It gives addicts the opportunity to move from a very unsafe, back-alley drug to taking an oral tablet.
Dr. Martin Schechter, who works at the the School of Population and Public Health at the University of B.C. said the Canadian Institute of Health Research is going to fund the research costs for the study, while the Vancouver Coastal Health and the Quebec Ministry of Health are to fund the clinical costs of the study.
U.S. Fails to Slow Down Afghani Opium
May 26th, 2009 by Rick
You’d think that after invading a country known for it’s opium trade (90% of the world’s supply,) that the opium supply coming from that country would be severely crippled — especially with military intelligence, special forces and even the CIA stationed there, eradicating crops they come across.
That’s just not the case in Afghanistan, according to Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, when he talked before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee:
We have had almost no success in the last seven or eight years doing that, including this year’s efforts.
Apparently the Taliban controls the opium trade, pulling in as much as a $100m a year. They then in turn use that money to buy weapons for the insurgents. The majority of the opium comes from the southern area of Afghanistan, where the Taliban are the strongest. One of the ways they attempted to curb the opium trade was to give Afghan farmers an alternative to harvesting opium.
We’ve got to have a concerted effort, not only the United States, the international community, to displace it (opium crop) and to do it in a way that makes sense.
The troops are are now leveling the playing field however, with a change of the rules.
Recent rules of engagement have allowed us to go after labs, people associated with labs. That’s a step in the right direction but until we are able to execute a comprehensive agricultural strategy, it’s going to be very difficult to really have a strategic impact on that.
President Obama has already ordered an additional 21,000 U.S. soldiers there, with most being deployed directly to the south.
Weekend Roundup: Drug Related Arrests
May 11th, 2009 by Rick
- 34-year-old, Joshua Lee Colvin of Kansas City, MO, was arrested and charged with possession and intent to distribute, after he accepted a package from California containing fourteen pounds of marijuana.
- 21-year-old Jervious O. Robinson and 22-year-old Antwoine M. Gilchrist of Fort Pierce, IN, were arrested and charged with felony drug charges when an undercover operation uncovered 70 small bags of pot in their home.
- 20-year-old, Cornell L. Benison from Canton, OH, was arrested and charged with endangering children, marijuana trafficking and possession when police found almost a dozen bags of pot and two infants in his motel room.
- 48-year-old, Ramon Pineda of Holyoke, MA, was arrested and charged with possession of cocaine and heroin with intent to distribute.
- A 37-year-old Afghan was sentenced to life, for his role in a major drug ring operating in Iran, Oman and the UAE.
Afghan Chief Gets Life in U.S. Prison
May 4th, 2009 by Rick
Check out the new scapegoat poster child for the U.S.’s war on drugs.
Bashir Noorzai, 45, a once powerful Afghani Tribal leader, was ordered by an American judge to pay a fine of $25,000 and spend the rest of his life in a federal prison for conspiring to import, manufacture and distribute $50m worth of heroin.
Before his 2005 arrest, Noorzai had aligned himself with his old friend Mullah Mohammad Omar and the Taliban, formed his own army and was at the helm of a heroin empire involving some of his tribe and a million people in southern and western Afghanistan and Pakistan. At that time he was one of the most powerful and dangerous narcotics traffickers in the world.
In 2005, he came to the United States after being invited to speak with government officials. He was interviewed by investigators for 11 days, at a hotel near the former World Trade Center site and then arrested.
Flair’s Son Caught Up in Charlotte Smack-Down
April 29th, 2009 by Russ
Richard Fleihr, 21, son of WWE Hall of Famer, Ric Flair, was arrested Sunday when officers found heroin inside his car. Apparently Fleihr was setting up for his patented double-axe handled syringe-injector suplex, when a Charlotte police officer executed a dramatic wrist lock immobilizer.
Though this was Fleihr’s first recorded smack-related arrest, he had been booked on a DUI less than two months ago, and was driving without a valid license. When the arresting officer pointed this out, Fleihr raised his hands to an invisible crowd and shouted “Wooooo!”
He sure has a lot of his father in him.
