Hilarious moment drug gang's GUARD DOG lays down on the ground alongside crooks in Brazil - "This is the hilarious moment a drug gang's guard dog laid down on the ground alongside the criminal as they were arrested in Brazil during a drugs bust. Narcotics cops arrested three men on a ranch in Hortolandia, Sao Paulo state, on Thursday and footage of the raid shows them lying face-down on the floor with their hands cuffed behind their backs. And the gang's massive Rottweiler decided to surrender too and flopped down beside the three suspects."
Limited psychological and social effects of lifetime cannabis use frequency: Evidence from a 30-year community study of 4,078 twins. - "This study suggests that lifetime exposure to cannabis has few persistent effects on mental health and other psychosocial outcomes. The notable exceptions are cannabis use disorder, tobacco frequency, and illicit drug use, for which lifetime cannabis frequency causes small increases"
The Other Side of the Drug Crime Incarceration Debate - "most crime was not a direct result of the drug trade, but of “male drama”... Professor David Kennedy, who worked on the ground with the police implementing anti-crime programs, noted in his book Don’t Shoot that most killings were not related to the drug business... Now 20 percent of the killings being related to drugs is not something we should belittle. But it also means that drug legalization is not going to be some magic cure to the problems of the ghetto. And there are actually ways drug legalization could make things worse. Jill Leovy explains that sometimes drug crimes are used as “proxy crimes” for more violent offenses. The police prosecute the proxy crimes because they cannot get witnesses to talk about the other offenses... If we take away drug arrests as a tool for police, what would we have Officer Coughlin do instead? What is the plan for getting illegal guns off the street, for taking down violent gangs that have scared all the witnesses into silence? Bloomberg journalist Megan McArdle says that she came to a similar conclusion about drug prosecutions after observing court cases... When President Obama commuted the sentences for a batch of prisoners in federal prison, 25% had gun crimes on their record... If there are so many people in federal prison for petty drug dealing, why cannot Obama find any of them to release, instead of releasing those trafficking drugs while armed with a weapon? I also think that we may have the problem of drug enforcement backwards – rather than the predominantly black ghettos being policed too harshly, they may be policed too lightly. In my white suburban town growing up, if a group of young men were to set up an open air drug market on our police corner, they would be reported, shut down, and sent to juvenile court within days, probably hours. It would be unthinkable that open air dealing would be tolerated. Yet in many ghettos, these markets are in fact tolerated, with minimal punishment, for long times... David Kennedy noted in Don’t Shoot that the lack of enforcement means that the people on the street lose respect for the police... Kennedy notes that even the drug dealers are miffed that the police allow them to exist. They are so miffed that they actually think the cops are conspiring against the community for their own dark ends... when Corey Booker was elected mayor of Newark (a black man in a majority black city) he promised residents that he would clean up the disorder. After his election officials credited the first homicide-free month in 44 years to ‘large-scale’ drug sweeps... the drug arrests were used as a way to take down a hot spot of violence and crime. The reason why black men are getting arrested for drug crime (as opposed to white, Wall Street cocaine dealers), is not because white America is racist against black people. It is because open-air dealing in the ghetto is associated with shootings and crime and because mothers do not want their kids walking by drug dealers. The black residents and black mayors often want the police to arrest the dealers and get them off the street. Remember the infamous 1986 Act that imposed much harsher penalties for crack dealing? “Representatives Charles Rangel and Major Owens, two black liberal Democrats from New York not known for their reluctance to play the race card, led the fight to impose the differential…11 of the 21 black lawmakers serving in Congress in 1986 supported the new law.” (source) They wanted the penalties because crack was ravaging black neighborhoods... The paradox is that lax law enforcement can actually create more incarceration. If you allow crime to fester, it becomes more serious, and you ultimately have to put more people in prison, for longer. By nipping things in the bud, you can ultimately have less total punishment. Unfortunately, our public discourse on this seems to be headed the wrong direction, and I fear we will continue to make the problem worse, not better... It is also insane that a drug dealer (like Jaquay Milhouse metioned earlier) can get five convictions that convey no jail time but that prevent him from getting a job. Thus as a result of getting caught dealing drugs, he gets no punishment, he just gets a scarlet letter preventing him from doing something other than dealing drugs. This is bonkers. It would make much more sense to have a stiffer up front penalty, but then expunge the record entirely, and enable him to enter legitimate workforce."
This ties in with the myth of people being in prison for non-violent drug offences - they're really in there for more serious things: just recorded as being in for drugs (this also explains the "racist" result that white people who supposedly use drugs at a similar rate to black people aren't imprisoned for it like the latter)
Adam Zivo: B.C. drug policies are 'a joke,' says Indigenous chief who isn't laughing - "Ronnie Chickite, chief of the We Wai Kai Nation, is upset — with good reason. In February, approximately 3,500 diverted safer supply hydromorphone pills were discovered in a drug bust on one his nation’s reserves near Campbell River, B.C. Chickite says although he had previously been aware of safer supply diversion, the discovery of so many pills in his community invoked “shocking disbelief.”... Unlike some Indigenous communities, the We Wai Kai Nation has minimized alcohol and drug abuse among its members with relative success. Rather than “destigmatizing” drugs, the nation’s leadership has invested in recovery-oriented services while restricting the local supply of illicit substances. Gates block access to the main reserves and, although most members are given unique buzzer codes to let themselves or others in, known drug dealers are given a single access card instead, limiting their ability to invite “guests.” After this system was introduced during the COVID-19 pandemic, Chickite saw an immediate impact — the number of cars making daily visits to a local drug house dropped from over 20 to about one. But while the community has found inventive ways to undermine drug dealers, shutting them down entirely has proven onerous. Chickite said it took three years for the RCMP to investigate and raid the house featured in the recent safer supply bust, where fentanyl and meth were also discovered, even though the police were called “tons of times.” And despite herculean efforts, it appears that the community’s addiction issues are slowly deteriorating. Diverted pharmaceutical opioids have been a “huge, huge issue,” Chickite said. For as long as he can remember, some community members have faked illnesses to secure and resell prescription drugs. But while diversion may not be a new problem, safer supply has increased the amount of opioids that can be funnelled into the black market. Discovering 3,500 pills in one house , as happened last month, was previously unheard of. Chickite, who strongly disagrees with politicians and activists who portray pharmaceutical opioids as “safe,” describes B.C.’s drug policies as “a joke.” Members of the We Wai Kai Nation have developed serious addictions due to such pills and, once hooked, many have escalated to using stronger substances, sometimes with fatal results... Community members, including his own daughter, have also told him that youth are increasingly accessing diverted pharmaceutical drugs, including safer supply. It appears that children as young as 12 are using (and overdosing on) diverted opioids, and there are now 16-year-olds in dire need of rehab... The normalization of open drug use has also been difficult to handle. Chickite noted that, when he was younger, adults would drive their kids all the way to downtown Vancouver to show them the horrible effects of drug addiction. “Now I can simply drive right down the bottom of the hill from my house.” “To me,” he said, “it’s kind of crappy that you can get charged for holding an open can of beer, but now you can literally smoke whatever kind of illicit drug you want and you’re OK.”"
Clearly, the problem is "stigma" and we need to provide even more free drugs and even less judgment
‘Absolutely frustrating’: B.C. minister disappointed with drug use injunction extension - “It is absolutely frustrating. It is unbelievable that courts can say, ‘We can regulate tobacco, we can regulate cannabis, we can regulate alcohol, but we can’t regulate where hard drugs are used,’ that’s just nuts and, in my view, completely out of touch with the general public”
Why B.C. ruled doing drugs in playgrounds is a Constitutional right - "the entire decision was premised on Section 7 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In essence, Hinkson ruled that B.C.’s attempt to restrict open drug use in public areas was a violation of “the right to life, liberty and security of the person.” This, in turn, was premised on Hinkson accepting the assertion by the plaintiff — the Harm Reduction Nurses Association — that any restriction on drug use in public areas would prompt “lone drug use” and increase the number of British Columbians dying from fatal overdoses... Kelowna led a public lobbying campaign for its playgrounds and parks to still remain subject to the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act. The 30 members of the Lower Mainland Local Government Association passed a resolution calling on the province to pair its decriminalization plans with a ban on open drug use. Port Coquitlam rushed through an updated bylaw banning drug use in public places. But a B.C. government bill encoding the amendment — passed in November — was notably lenient in how it enforced the ban on drugs in child-centred areas. If a police officer thought someone was “consuming an illegal substance” in a playground or other prohibited area, they were instructed to “direct the person” to either “cease consuming” the drug, or to “leave the area or place.” Only if this direction was ignored could the officer arrest the user or destroy the drug — although the offender still wouldn’t be slapped with criminal charges."
Rob Henderson on X - "humans...have a fundamental need for status/esteem...stimulant drugs have the capacity to promote feelings of confidence, high self-esteem, and power that arguably are attractive subjective states because of their role in signaling high social status"
The Oxford Handbook of Evolution and the Emotions
B.C. to give 'safe' fentanyl to minors. And parents won't have a say - "In what constitutes a clear trampling of parental rights, British Columbia recently authorized the provision of “safer supply” fentanyl to youth across the province, regardless if parents are informed of, or agree to, this measure... the new protocols are full of red flags, including a jarring near-absence of safeguarding measures when giving fentanyl to minors, to say nothing of the obvious ethical issues around underage consent... A number of addiction experts have criticized this as deeply inadequate. Dr. Leonora Regenstreif, a Hamilton-based addiction physician, said she found it hard to imagine that two doctors or nurses working in the same clinic would significantly challenge each others’ prescribing decisions. The protocols do not provide a minimum age for when youth can receive recreational fentanyl. When I asked the BCCSU whether a minimum existed, they did not reply. The documents also make absolutely no mention of the rights and roles of parents of drug-addicted minors... The BCCSU did not respond to these queries, despite generally answering other emails of mine over the past year. If the province is going to dole out recreational fentanyl to minors, it should probably have strong evidence backing this decision — but apparently it doesn’t. The protocols clearly state that, “To date, there is no evidence available supporting this intervention, safety data, or established best practices for when and how to provide it.” In fact, “a discussion of the absence of evidence supporting this approach” is actually required for securing informed consent from patients. It seems that parents will actually be powerless to stop the government from supplying their children with fentanyl, as safer supply technically counts as a health-care intervention and youth have substantial control over their own medical decisions in Canada... it is hard to imagine any scenario where a drug-addicted minor would be capable of providing informed consent for safer supply fentanyl, given that addiction hijacks the brain and inhibits rational decision-making. While adults have extensive rights to personal self-determination, which permits them to make impaired or self-destructive decisions if they so choose, it is hard to see why this same freedom should be extended to youth when it comes to using hard drugs. It is true that many drug-addicted youth are in foster care or estranged from their parents, and that, for them, securing parental consent is near-impossible. Yet making an exception for this subpopulation, and permitting them to receive free fentanyl, could incentivize other underage drug users to cut ties with their families and run away from home to secure free drugs. As parents are often a youth’s greatest asset for recovery, any safer supply system that undermines child-parent relationships is harmful. In a sad twist, the same laws that allow the government to give recreational fentanyl to kids without parental consent also prohibit parents from sending their children to involuntary addiction treatment — in other words, the government won’t help you force your kid to get clean, but they will give them unlimited “safe” drugs against your will. As I argued in my MLI report, “By reframing the provision of unlimited recreational fentanyl as medical care, the provincial government may inadvertently turn itself into a parent’s worst nightmare — an unstoppable drug dealer with endless supply and unrestricted access to their child.”"
It started with trans mania, but it won't end there
B.C. injunction against law banning public drug use disappointing, say police chiefs - "The Restricting Public Consumption of Illegal Substances Act was passed by the legislature in November, allowing fines and imprisonment for refusal to comply with police orders not to consume drugs in places including parks, beaches, sports fields and near business entrances and bus stops. It had yet to come into effect when the injunction was imposed last week by Chief Justice Christopher Hinkson."
Conservatives overwhelmingly embrace the ‘Alberta model’ of tackling addiction - "The Alberta model is often presented in sharp contrast to the B.C. government’s approach, which has embraced “safe supply” policies to help combat the province’s long-standing and deteriorating rate of addiction. While “safe supply” has been praised by the B.C. government and federal Liberals as a viable strategy, the rate of addiction and drug-related deaths in the province has only increased since “safe supply” policies were enacted... In 2022, B.C. once again broke its record for annual drug-related deaths, after already breaking that record in 2021. Other cities like Toronto and Edmonton have been experiencing their own cases of rising homelessness and often fatal addiction."
Former drug addict begs government to stop safer supply - "Concerns about safer supply were recently outlined in an open letter to Ya’ara Saks, the federal minister of mental health and addictions, from 17 Canadian addiction experts. Diverted hydromorphone has been “flooding our streets,” leading to rising addiction, the letter stated. “We are regularly seeing and hearing in our practices that diverted hydromorphone is causing harm to both adults and children.” The addiction specialists are calling upon the government to either supervise the consumption of safer supply hydromorphone or cancel the programs altogether. Mark’s experiences were consistent with these physicians’ observations, and with reports from over 25 other addiction experts I have interviewed in the past year."
Pointers From Portugal on Addiction and the Drug War - The New York Times - "Many people point to Portugal as an example for the United States to emulate in dealing with illicit drugs. But Portugal’s experience is often misunderstood. Although it decriminalized the use of all illicit drugs in small amounts in 2001, including heroin and cocaine, that’s different from making them legal. And it did not decriminalize drug trafficking, which would typically involve larger quantities. Portugal’s law removed incarceration, but people caught possessing or using illicit drugs may be penalized by regional panels made up of social workers, medical professionals and drug experts. The panels can refer people to drug treatment programs, hand out fines or impose community service. A lot of the benefits over the years from Portugal’s policy shift have come not from decriminalization per se, but in the expansion of substance-use disorder treatment... It’s important to note that we don’t know what would have happened in Portugal had the 2001 drug reforms not occurred, so findings should be taken with a grain of salt. Some of the observed changes could result from trends predating the change in laws"
So much for "stigma" being the problem. Of course, in the US they keep talking about "harm reduction" and ending "stigma", but what they mean by this is just enabling drug use, e.g. in San Francisco
How Europe’s heroin capital solved its overdose crisis - "One of Portugal's most important innovations has been its network of "dissuasion commissions." Anyone caught with a “personal” amount of drugs — up to 10 days’ worth of a substance — can be ordered to appear before a health department official like Nuno Capaz. He's the sociologist who heads up the Lisbon commission... In Portugal, every health district in the country has outreach teams that visit addicts every day and get to know their stories and needs... While Lisbon still has places users frequent to buy and use drugs, the open drug market that once characterized parts of the city is gone. And the worst neighbourhoods that had the highest death rates no longer see many drug fatalities. Vancouver, meanwhile, has struggled to reduce overdose deaths for more than 20 years."
No doubt, being visited by a team increases "stigma"
Julian Somers: Our study found ‘safe supply’ isn’t safe. We were smeared for our work - "Fifteen of the 19 papers we identified were from B.C.. Previous reviewers reported in 2020 that they found no evidence demonstrating either the safety or effectiveness of “safe supply.” Our results reached the same conclusion: ‘safe supply’ wasn’t safe or effective. We introduced the term “Public Supply of Addictive Drugs” (PSAD) to avoid implying evidence of safety. Our review summarized alternative interventions that have helped people at high risk for drug poisoning, including results from high-quality randomized trials demonstrating large reductions in crime and medical emergencies. We raised basic questions regarding PSAD’s risks and benefits, including potential adverse reactions, drug diversion, estimated costs, expected duration and exit strategy. Recovery from addiction is achievable and should be the clear and obvious end point of any plan to intervene. Otherwise we are simply building a bigger and more expensive revolving door as Portland, Vancouver and other places grimly illustrate. Days following our review’s submission to the Alberta government, the B.C. Centre on Substance Use (BCCSU) issued a letter to media claiming that our work was flawed and should be disregarded “primarily due to its problematic search strategy.” The letter’s signatories didn’t mention that they were the authors of the papers we reviewed or that they received funding linked to PSAD. Crucially, they agreed with our primary finding that no evidence supported PSAD. They attempted to minimize the importance of this fact... Remarkably, the BCCSU then wrote to conference organizers urging them to uninvite me from planned keynote addresses. Some of the recipients of those messages contacted me, shocked by such blatant attempts at censorship. Funders withdrew over $500,000 in annual support for our work advancing recovery from addiction, citing the need to steer clear of conflict with the province. By accepting the BCCSU’s attacks at face value, media contributed to the impression that criticism of PSAD is political rather than substantive and that few alternatives exist... Policy makers and researchers must explain why evidence from randomized trials is essential before introducing drugs including vaccines, but not for the off-label dispensing of addictive drugs to people who are homeless, unemployed and mentally unwell. And Canadians need to consider that the drug mortality crisis is perpetuated by continuously replacing people who are at risk."
Drug harm reduction programs bringing plenty of harms to neighbours | Toronto Sun
Rationalizing Modern Drug Prejudices - "Depending on which weights are changed in the sensitivity analysis, alcohol, heroin, crack cocaine and tobacco all vie with each other in the position of overall most harmful drug. But some familiar patterns appear to be constant across all sensitivity analyses. No matter how many variations in weighting procedures were used by these scientists, alcohol always came out as significantly more harmful than marijuana, and staggeringly more harmful than LSD and magic mushrooms. While it’s probably not a large surprise to many that marijuana isn’t considered as harmful as alcohol, the nearly non-existent harm score attributed to the psychedelics LSD and magic mushrooms is an eyebrow raiser. Years of misreporting by the mainstream media have imprinted a particularly negative image of these drugs that has little correspondence to reality... a medical review in Neuroscience & Therapeutics found no example of an LSD overdose death in recorded medical history. When one follows up on stories like this reported in the mainstream media, very often you will find the injury attributed to psychedelics is actually the result of some other factor or a mixture of factors... the medical literature stresses that no case of toxicity poisoning has ever been recorded from magic mushrooms and that it would be almost humanely impossible to consume enough mushrooms (17kg in fact) to reach toxicity... scientists agree on four basic things about psychedelic drugs that seem to hold outside of extreme circumstances: you cannot die of an overdose of them, they cause no physical damage to bodily organs, they are not addictive, and they do not seem to attend any net deterioration in mental health in a population of users (they perhaps attend an improvement). On all four of these measures, alcohol towers above the psychedelics as an addictive, lethal chemical that attends overdose, cancer, organ failure, heart attack, stroke, psychological damage and death via withdrawal (delirium tremens). And that’s only half the picture: alcohol’s negative impact in road fatalities, violence, emotional abuse and community breakdown are unparalleled in the drug world. For these reasons, scientists carrying out the multi-criteria analysis give magic mushrooms one-tenth the harm score of alcohol. In the United States... possibly the safest of all psychoactive drugs is classified as the most severely punishable while one of the most dangerous drugs available is not even scheduled (the other drugs are spread throughout the scheduling system in a seemingly random fashion). While some people see conspiracy theories at play to explain this paradoxical situation, the question that most peaks my curiosity is how defenders of the status quo could attempt to defend drug laws as they currently stand, which seem like historical artifacts rather than the product of a well thought through process... Some people simply refuse to accept that the relative risks of psychedelics or marijuana are not as harmful as other drugs. The DEA implicitly takes this approach by pretending that the question of relativity is incoherent and ignoring politicians who raise it, while others explicitly reject the notion of a relative assessment of harms. Psychiatrist Edward Gogek takes the explicit approach... Nothing on earth is “completely safe.” People have been killed by exploding lava lamps and whipped cream cans, impaled on beach umbrellas, lit on fire by sodium covered seashells and had their skulls crushed by rocks thrown by animals in zoos. No study on anything, anywhere in the world, ought to describe of anything as being completely safe and healthy. But since when did “completely safe” become a sensible criterion for being permitted to carry out some activity in any society? Wouldn’t that obviously cripple a society? And why doesn’t this formula apply to alcohol or tobacco? The question of inconsistency remains open... some harm reduction advocates might bite the bullet and openly assert that anything as dangerous as illicit drugs ought to be banned too. Peter Hitchens for instance has supported the prohibition of alcohol in theory... When asked about the relative danger between drugs and motorbikes Hitchens also confided, “If motorbikes were banned I might well oppose a campaign to legalize them.” Aside from motorbikes, plenty of other activities seem to rival marijuana and psychedelics in terms of risk of injury and death, including football, horse riding, swimming, quad biking, boxing, skydiving, and scuba diving. Believe it or not, there are people who would prohibit these dangerous activities too. “American football is too dangerous and it should be abolished,” wrote The Guardian’s Dave Bry in 2016. “Pools need to be banned. They are way too dangerous,” argues the Australian writer Joe Abi. These harm reduction totalitarians are dead-set serious about banning everything under the sun, and so we can naturally understand why they would also support prohibiting all drugs. While most of us would choose to flee from their bubble wrapped dystopia, here is a group of people with a consistent, straightforward harm reduction policy."
Time for Singapore to ban alcohol, swimming pools and football
SOUND OFF: NDP endorses drug use in our hospitals in leaked memo - "RECENTLY, WE UNCOVERED A SHOCKING MEMO sent to nurses that permits the use of drugs and weapons in hospital rooms. The entire memo is outrageous – under the NDP, illicit drug use and even drug trafficking in hospitals are not just tolerated but endorsed. Bravely, nurses are coming forward with horrifying stories of daily encounters with meth, cocaine, and fentanyl use. One report highlights meth being smoked in a unit just hours after the birth of a newborn. We’ve also heard about a nurse who, just back from maternity leave, was exposed to someone smoking illicit drugs. The exposure was so severe she needed emergency care and was advised to stop breastfeeding because of the risk to her newborn... Under the NDP government, once-safe public spaces like hospitals, Tim Hortons, and public transit have become hotspots for open drug use... We only have to look across the U.S. border to Oregon who recognized the chaos decriminalization was causing and has recently moved to re-criminalize drug possession. Oregon has been cited multiple times by David Eby as a model for the pilot in British Columbia. Yet, he chooses to stick with decriminalization that’s been cancelled in Oregon and is failing British Columbians."
B.C. hospital memo raises safety concerns over patients' drug use - "A leaked memo from a hospital in the Northern Health region advising nurses not to impede patients using illicit drugs raised a firestorm in the B.C. Legislature... A Ministry of Health spokesperson said in a statement that the policy outlined in the memo has since been superseded, and smoking or vaping any substance indoors is prohibited."
Studies on B.C. safer supply emerge, finding different answers to different questions - "One found the program was associated with a reduced risk of death from overdose and other causes among opioid-using participants, while the other concluded the strategy was associated with a significant increase in opioid overdose hospitalizations across the community... there could be multiple explanations, including the diversion of safe-supply drugs onto the illicit market, which the study says could occur "for various reasons, including to purchase unregulated fentanyl.""
