When Portugal took a leap into the unknown in 2000 and decriminalized drugs, people howled. Abuse would soar, they said, and the little nation on Europe’s Iberian coast — already a summer dumping ground for drunken Germans and Brits — would become a haven for drug tourism. “I am against liberalization of drugs,” one conservative opposition leader in Portugal told a documentary maker at the time. “Why?” “Because I am against,” he repeated. “I don’t want the state giving signs of weakness [on] drug policy.” But in 2000, the Casal Ventoso slum in Lisbon — ... Read More
‘Shooting Galleries’ Take Aim at Illicit Drug Market
March 15, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
In a late essay on the Reagan drug war, the Beat novelist William Burroughs gave a surprising statistic. Heroin was freely available by prescription in Britain in 1957, he wrote, so addicts could shoot up from a government stock of junk dispensed by the National Health Service. "There were about 500 addicts in the U.K.," in those days, Burroughs wrote blandly, "and two narcotics officers for metropolitan London." When the U.K. criminalized heroin in 1971, he argued, it lapsed into "the same dreary spectrum as the USA — thousands of addicts, hundreds of drug agents, some of them on the ... Read More
Contending With Afghan Heroin (And How Not To)
March 9, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
One open secret about the war in Afghanistan is that it has led to a flood of pure, cheap heroin in the world’s cities since 2001. “Despite reported decreases in white heroin production in most source countries,” the U.S. Justice Department admitted in 2006, “increased production in Afghanistan has resulted in an overall increase in worldwide white heroin production.” The production of white (or pure) heroin, in other words, had generally receded around the world — but supplies from war-torn Afghanistan more than picked up the slack. Now, according to some estimates, Afghanistan ... Read More
Drug Testing Welfare Recipients in Vogue
February 25, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
State houses across the country have been taking up a controversial proposal the last few weeks to drug test welfare recipients. The Missouri house passed such a bill. West Virginia just voted one down. Kentucky, Nebraska, Oregon and Indiana have mulled the idea as well. Last summer, U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch even floated it at the federal level as an amendment to the jobs bill that extended unemployment. "This amendment is a way to help people get off of drugs to become productive and healthy members of society, while ensuring that valuable taxpayer dollars aren't wasted," the Utah ... Read More
Statins, Lou Gehrig and Big Questions
January 20, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Dr. Greg Burns (not his real name) is a 72-year-old retired radiologist living in Connecticut. Until early last year, he ran with his dog at canine agility meets, skied, ice skated and played 18 holes of golf. He is now unable to walk and is taking a course of medication that will postpone, by a few months, his death. Burns' rapid decline began in December 2007 when he suffered a short-acting stroke from which he fully recovered. His cholesterol level was elevated and so as a preventative measure his doctor prescribed a 20mg daily dose of Crestor, a cholesterol-lowering drug in the ... Read More
Warnings About Statins Grow Louder
January 19, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Statins have been marketed — and widely described in the media — as wonder drugs which help ensure heart health by lowering cholesterol. But as we reported in 2009 ("Cholesterol Contrarians Question Cult of Statins"), an outspoken group of researchers warn their use is too widespread, and their potential dangers underestimated. A study just published in the journal The Cochrane Collaboration suggests their doubts are valid. Researchers from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine reviewed previous studies on the risks and benefits of statins for people at low risk of ... Read More
The Drug Destruction of Mexico, Part I
July 9, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Kristian Beadle underscores the effect drug cartels are having on Mexico’s politics, people and ultimately, its environment. Location: Near the Zona Dorada in Mazatlán, the hub of tourist pleasure. Conditions: The breeze and cool ocean water wash off the hot, muggy air of the city. Someone asked me in California, “You’re writing about the environment in Mexico? I bet people are more worried about the drug war and staying alive.” I would come face to face with this issue once I arrived in the mainland. Like an absurd nightmare, the guy's face appeared everywhere you ... Read More
The Ecstasy and the Agony
August 10, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment
For people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder — an anxiety condition that develops in the wake of extreme psychological stress or fear — often the only way forward is to confront the very memory that triggers the disorder. While group and cognitive therapies have shown promise, exposure-based therapies have become increasingly popular and successful. Exposure means confronting a distressing memory (a near-death experience, the loss of a loved one or a sexual assault, for example) to emotionally process it in a safe clinical environment — either through imagined scenarios or ... Read More
Cholesterol Contrarians Question Cult of Statins
April 13, 2009 • By • 7 Comments
The near-breakdown of the international financial system and the deep recession it helped create has been attributed to many causes. Greed, of course. A lack of rigorous regulation. An everyone's-doing-it mentality in which traders took bigger and bigger risks as they search for bigger and bigger payoffs. Now, a Florida physician proposes an alternative explanation. Perhaps many of those supposedly sophisticated speculators who believed the party would never end were acting under the influence of drugs. Cholesterol-lowering drugs. "There's a damn good possibility it's related!" said ... Read More
Needle Exchange
December 21, 2008 • By • Leave a Comment
Your report, "First, Reduce Harm" (November/December 2008), on drug addiction was the most moving and frightening that I've read in some time. What a dilemma it poses! We in the U.S. can hardly suggest that we are doing it right. Here we have drug dealers with suitcases full of money, policemen and border security corruption being rampant and juvenile dealers and crime on every city street corner. Our system cries for some change and experimentation with alternate methods. Albert J. Kubany Flint, Mich. A Human Rights Violation? "First, Reduce Harm" is based on the skewed concept of ... Read More
