De War on Drugs in Mexico - hier verder

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Op vrijdag 5 maart 2010 14:15 schreef Viajero het volgende:

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Inderdaad, de markt is er en gaat niet weg, dus er zal altijd iemand zijn die die markt in handen heeft. Maar ook als je drugs legaliseert is het probleem niet direct opgelost. Het is een essentiele stap, maar helaas niet de enige.

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Op dinsdag 7 juni 2011 20:23 schreef koffiegast het volgende:

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Ik zeg:

vorm een regeringsorgaan die drugs verkoopt

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Op donderdag 9 juni 2011 13:43 schreef MrVanBraun het volgende:
Ziek ziek..
http://www.realogrish.com(...)ds-thrown-river.html

Ook die ene soldaat..... alsof het 2 voetballen zijn in z'n handen.

Maar wel de realiteit DAAR! Elke dag...
Dus we kunnen wel onze ogen dichthouden maar het gebeurd gewoon..

Amerika of de wereldregering is de oorzaak en laat het allemaal expres gebeuren..

Legaliseer alle shit maar gewoon.

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Russia defies growing consensus with declaration of 'total war on drugs'

Drug dealers are to be "treated like serial killers" and could be sent to forced labour camps under harsh laws being drawn up by Russia's Kremlin-controlled parliament.

Boris Gryzlov, the speaker of the state duma, the lower house, said a "total war on drugs" was needed to stem a soaring abuse rate driven by the flow of Afghan heroin through central Asia to Europe.

Russia has as many as 6 million addicts (one in 25 people). Every year 100,000 people die from using drugs, Gryzlov said in a newspaper. The scale of the problem "threatens Russia's gene pool", he said. "We are standing on the edge of a precipice. Either we squash drug addiction or it will destroy us."

This year, President Dmitry Medvedev said drug abuse was cutting up to three percentage points off economic growth.

Injecting drug-use is also accelerating Russia's HIV crisis because – unlike most other European countries – methadone treatment is banned and needle exchange programmes are scarce, meaning the virus spreads quickly from addict to addict via dirty syringes. An estimated one in 100 Russians are HIV positive.

Under legislation promoted by the ruling United Russia party and now being reviewed in parliament, drug addicts will be forced into treatment or jailed, and dealers will be handed heftier custodial sentences. "The barons of narco-business must be put on a par with serial killers with the appropriate punishment in the form of a life sentence," said Gryzlov, who is chairman of the party.

Activists criticised the idea of putting addicts behind bars, pointing to a growing worldwide consensus that treating drug users as criminals has failed as a strategy.

The Global Commission on Drugs Policy said in a report last week that there needed to be a shift away from criminalising drugs and incarcerating those who use them. Gryzlov, however, claimed that "criminal responsibility for the use of narcotics is a powerful preventative measure".

Special punishments should also be considered for dealers, he added: "Sending drug traders to a katorga [forced labour camp], for example. Felling timber, laying rails and constructing mines – that's very different from sitting in a personal cell with a television and a fridge while you keep up your 'business' on the outside."

While it remains unclear how many of the measures will become law, other leading members of United Russia – which is headed by Vladimir Putin, the prime minister, and which dominates the duma – said they supported the initiative.

The plans follow an admission by Medvedev in April that Russia's fight against drug addiction had failed. He called for radical measures such as mandatory drug tests in schools.

Possession of small quantities of psychotropic substances in Russia carries an administrative fine of up to 15,000 roubles (£330), but Gryzlov indicated it would now result in a jail term. The state should offer narkomany (addicts) a stark choice, he said: "Prison or forced treatment."

That could be a bleak prospect. Some of Russia's detox clinics still use "coding", a controversial therapy in which patients are scared into thinking terrible consequences (such as their testicles falling off) will result if they mix drugs with medicines which are actually placebos.

Several activists condemned Gryzlov's suggestion to "isolate" drug users from society.

"Sending more people to prison will not reduce drug addiction or improve public health," said Anya Sarang, president of the Andrey Rylkov Foundation, an advocacy group for people with HIV which works with injecting drug users (IDUs). "Russian prisons are terrible places full of HIV, tuberculosis and other diseases. Drugs are often even more accessible there than anywhere else."

She added: "What we need instead of this harsh drug control rhetoric is greater emphasis on rehabilitation, substitution treatment, case management for drug users and protection from HIV."

HIV prevalence among IDUs in western countries is 1 or 2%, but lack of outreach work and the absence of opiate substitution (methadone) and other "harm reduction" measures mean the figure is 16% in Russia – rising to 60% in hotspots such as St Petersburg.

Denis Broun, the Moscow-based director of UNAids for Europe and central Asia, told the Guardian that Gryzlov's proposals could make matters even worse.

"It has been widely shown that criminalising people using drugs simply drives them underground and makes them much harder to reach with preventative measures," he said. "This is not an effective strategy for fighting HIV. Purely repressive measures do not work."

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Drug dealers are to be "treated like serial killers" and could be sent to forced labour camps under harsh laws being drawn up by Russia's Kremlin-controlled parliament.

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Op donderdag 9 juni 2011 17:39 schreef StormWarning het volgende:

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Nee maar de nadelen van legaliseren zijn veel groter hoor, echt waar!!11

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Op donderdag 9 juni 2011 18:31 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:
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Op donderdag 9 juni 2011 20:10 schreef El_Matador het volgende:

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De Russen "vergeten" even dat hun eigen levensverwachting onder mannen een schokkende 55 jaar (ongeveer, pin me er niet op vast) is. Zouden ze daar niet es iets aan doen?

Bovendien hangt het af van waar je vandaan komt. Nederland met happy hippie drugs als XTC, wiet en paddo's is ietsje anders dan Kirgizie dat de aanvoer van heroine krijgt uit Afghanistan...

Het is voor ons vrij gemakkelijk positief over drugs te denken. Maar dat ligt aan onze soort drugs.

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Mexican peace caravan led by poet Javier Sicilia nears its final stop

Relatives of those killed in drug war led by military want force-based policy swapped for action on poverty and corruption

An anti-violence caravan led by poet activist Javier Sicilia and other victims of the drug wars plaguing Mexico is approaching its culmination in the border city of Ciudad Juárez.

The convoy of buses has travelled through much of the country since leaving Sicilia's home city of Cuernavaca in central Mexico a week ago. At stops along the way the protesters have held rallies designed to bring attention to the personal tragedies contained in the figures: 40,000 dead since president Felipe Calderon launched an offensive against drug cartels in December 2006.

In the city of Zacatecas, six-year-old Francisco stood in front of Sicilia clutching a picture of his father, Fernando Rodriguez, who was found dead wrapped in a blanket a few months ago. Poet and boy hugged each other and cried together as Francisco's uncle said: "We want justice too."

Sicilia's unlikely leadership of the movement sprung out of the murder of his son, whose body was found in an abandoned car in March along with six others. The huge pressure surrounding his case prompted a major operation that last month led to the capture of a drug trafficker who allegedly ordered the killings.

The activists want the government to swap its forced-based strategy for one attacking the poverty that helps the gangs find recruits, and want it to root out the official corruption they say has allowed organised crime to grow. They also want all the victims to be named, and monuments to them to be built in public squares around the country.

In the city of Torreon on Wednesday, the rally was held near where a few hours earlier gunmen burst into a drug rehabilitation centre and killed 13 recovering addicts.

Speakers included a woman called Amparo Castillo who said her son, Jose Manuel, was killed for refusing to become a gunman. "He didn't want to become one of them."

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Op donderdag 9 juni 2011 20:10 schreef El_Matador het volgende:

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De Russen "vergeten" even dat hun eigen levensverwachting onder mannen een schokkende 55 jaar (ongeveer, pin me er niet op vast) is. Zouden ze daar niet es iets aan doen?

Bovendien hangt het af van waar je vandaan komt. Nederland met happy hippie drugs als XTC, wiet en paddo's is ietsje anders dan Kirgizie dat de aanvoer van heroine krijgt uit Afghanistan...

Het is voor ons vrij gemakkelijk positief over drugs te denken. Maar dat ligt aan onze soort drugs.

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Op donderdag 9 juni 2011 20:31 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:

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Er is niets mis met goede heroïne

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Op donderdag 9 juni 2011 22:29 schreef waht het volgende:

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Er is van alles mis met goede heroine.

[ afbeelding ]

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Op donderdag 9 juni 2011 21:59 schreef StormWarning het volgende:

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Onzin, hier hebben we ook heroine, en in Rusland kennen ze ook heus wel xtc.

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Op donderdag 9 juni 2011 23:08 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:

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Je kan prima oud worden met een heroïneverslaving. Je gaat dood aan slechte heroïne of het junkenbestaan.

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Op donderdag 9 juni 2011 23:08 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:

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Je kan prima oud worden met een heroïneverslaving. Je gaat dood aan slechte heroïne of het junkenbestaan.

SPOILER

Om spoilers te kunnen lezen moet je zijn ingelogd. Je moet je daarvoor eerst gratis Registreren. Ook kun je spoilers niet lezen als je een ban hebt.

SPOILER

Om spoilers te kunnen lezen moet je zijn ingelogd. Je moet je daarvoor eerst gratis Registreren. Ook kun je spoilers niet lezen als je een ban hebt.

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Op donderdag 9 juni 2011 23:09 schreef waht het volgende:

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Moderatie is de sleutel ja. Maar kennelijk is dat bij heroïne dus het moeilijkst.

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Op donderdag 9 juni 2011 23:59 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:

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Maar alleen omdat het verboden is.

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Op donderdag 9 juni 2011 23:59 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:

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Maar alleen omdat het verboden is.

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Op vrijdag 10 juni 2011 00:03 schreef waht het volgende:

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Niet alleen, dat draagt er aan bij. De chemische eigenschappen van heroïne zorgen ervoor dat het lichamelijk en/of geestelijk verslavend is.

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Pharmageddon: how America got hooked on killer prescription drugs

White House declares prescription drug abuse in US 'alarming' as thousands flock to Florida – the home of oxycodone pill mills

The Kentucky number plate on Chad's pick-up truck, parked round the back of a doctor's clinic in Palm Beach, Florida, reveals that he has just driven a thousand miles, 16 hours overnight, to be here – and he's not come for the surfing.

"It's my back," he says, rubbing his lower vertebrae. "I'm a builder. I fell off the roof and hurt my back."

That's odd, as we have just watched him run out of the clinic and over to his truck without so much as a limp. He's clutching a prescription for 180 30mg doses of the painkiller oxycodone.

Chad is one of thousands of "pillbillies" who descend on Florida every year from across the south and east coasts of America. Some come in trucks bearing telltale number plates from Kentucky, Georgia, Tennessee, even far-away Ohio. Others come by the busload on the apocryphally named Oxycodone Express.

It's a lucrative trade. Chad tells us he has just paid $275 (£168) to the doctor inside the clinic, or pill mill, as it is pejoratively called. The doctor, who can see up to 100 people in a sitting, can make more than $25,000 in a day, cash in hand.

For Chad the profits are handsome too. He will spend $720 at a pharmacy on his 180 pills, giving him a total outlay of about $1,000. Back in Kentucky he can sell each pill for $30, giving them a street value of $5,400 and Chad a clear profit of more than $4,000. If he goes to 10 pill mills in Palm Beach on this one trip he could multiply that windfall tenfold. But then there's the other cost of the oxycodone trade, a cost that is less often talked about, certainly not by Chad or his accommodating doctor.

Every day in Florida seven people die having overdosed on prescription drugs – 2,531 died in 2009 alone. That statistic is replicated across the US, where almost 30,000 people died last year from abusing pharmaceutical pills.

It's an American catastrophe that has been dubbed pharmageddon, though it rarely pierces the public consciousness. Occasionally a celebrity overdose will attract attention – Anna Nicole Smith, Heath Ledger, Michael Jackson – but they are specks in a growing mountain of human mortality.

The White House last month said the abuse of prescription drugs had become the US's fastest-growing drug problem.

Declaring the trend an "alarming public health crisis", it pointed out that people were dying unintentionally from painkiller overdoses at rates that exceeded the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s and the black tar heroin epidemic of the 1970s combined.

At the heart of the disaster is the powerfully addictive painkiller oxycodone, which comes in various brands – OxyContin, Roxicodone and Percocet. It is a legitimate therapy for those in great pain but has spawned a generation of addicts and, in turn, attracted crooked doctors who massively expanded the prescription of the drugs in up to 200 pill mills, most in southern Florida.

The epidemic has affected people of all ages but is becoming more prominent among teenagers and young adults.

Ric Bradsaw, the sheriff in Palm Beach, said: "There's a culture that's taking hold among teenagers that because a doctor prescribes these pills they can't be bad. Kids don't have the fear of pharmaceuticals that they do of illegal drugs."

Eleanor Hernandez was introduced to "oxies" when she was 14. "I had no idea it was dangerous at all. Other people were taking it for pain, so why would I worry about it?"

Her mother had just died and Hernandez found that she felt care-free when she took a pill. "It took the pain away, of my mother's death, and physically too. It numbed you, made you feel like you were in a bubble."

By 15 Hernandez was selling oxycodone from the park across the street, making money to pay for her own habit. It was a downward spiral. She was in and out of rehabilitation clinics, in and out of custody. Then she overdosed twice and was resuscitated both times in hospital.

But Hernandez was one of the lucky ones. Now 20, she works in a treatment centre helping 14 to 17-year-olds beat addiction. "To this day I thank God that I found help because if I hadn't I probably wouldn't be here."

Rich Perry did not find help. He died aged 21 from a cocktail of oxycodone and other prescription and illegal drugs. He began taking prescription pills three years previously, in his last year at high school. He confided in his mother, Karen, that he had a drug problem and went into rehab.

He was clean for a year, but then, without his parents realising, he relapsed, obtaining oxycodone from three separate doctors. He overdosed once but carried on using the drug. The first Karen knew that her son had gone back to the pills was when two officers knocked at her door at 2am to tell her he was dead.

Now, like Hernandez, Perry seeks solace by helping others to avoid her son's fate. She runs the Florida group Narcotics Overdose Prevention and Education – Nope. Together with the American Society of Interventional Pain Physicians it is battling to persuade the state to introduce a monitoring database that would allow police and medical authorities to identify where the oxycodone is coming from, and in turn identify and shut down the pill mills. Though Florida is the epicentre of the oxycodone epidemic, with 98% of all the nation's doctors who handle the drug located here, astonishingly the state has no comprehensive database recording prescription histories.

Even more astonishingly its recently elected governor, the Tea Party favourite Rick Scott, has blocked the introduction of a database on grounds of cost.

That makes Perry see red. "Cost! For heaven's sake! What is the cost of a human life?"

The police are even more baffled. They point out that Florida's lack of regulation has allowed the pill mills to flourish.

Eric Coleman, a narcotics detective in Palm Beach, said the true cost of Florida's oxycodone disaster would surpass that of the database many times over if all costs related to the crisis – state subsidies for prescriptions, policing and incarceration of addicts, hospital visits for those who overdose, autopsies and paupers' burials for the dead – were added up.

The Palm Beach police force has many of the pill mills under surveillance and is steadily shutting them down. Over the past year 33 healthcare professionals have been arrested in Palm Beach alone and several have had their medical licences revoked.

Yet the police know that until a proper monitoring system is in place, the clampdown they are carrying out will only displace the problem. Pill mills are popping up in other parts of Florida, around Tampa and Orlando, as pill mill doctors move to new pastures.

"This crisis is going to get worse before it gets better," Coleman says. "It's heartbreaking to watch all the families ripped apart, the young lives ended, the damage these doctors – that honourable, esteemed profession that we trust to look after us – are leaving behind."

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Op vrijdag 10 juni 2011 01:39 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:

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Maar verslaving is wat anders dan dodelijk.