Drugs

The phrase “opioid crisis” will forever be linked with the US, where the overprescription of these drugs, driven by aggressive marketing campaigns, caused millions to become addicted to painkillers. But the scale of the tragedy in America can overshadow dangers elsewhere. It is not the only country where trouble is brewing over these highly addictive drugs.

Two of those countries are England and Wales, where yearly deaths due to drug poisoning are at their highest since records began. At last count, in 2023, they stood at 5,448. And almost half of those, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), are due to opioids, a growing menace. Deaths from this group of chemical compounds, which includes heroin and morphine as well as synthetic newer versions like nitazene and fentanyl, have doubled in the last decade.

So, maybe the American problem was not caused by overprescription if the same thing is happening in a place without the overprescription?

Not that I know anything in particular but it’s an obvious question to ask, no?

The investigation began in 2020 after police seized 3.2 tonnes of cocaine at the Dutch port of Rotterdam, hidden in a shipment of manganese ore from Brazil. The shipment was destined for a water treatment company in the Belgian port of Antwerp, which is suspected of being used as a front by the traffickers.

There’s so much damn money in this – 10 shipments are said to have made the laddies €500 million* – that yes, why not won a business which relies upon imports from Latin America.

Say – and just ideas – a little steel smelter supply company specialising in Brazilian ferro-niobium. Bananas might be too capital intensive. But, say, Bolivian beef importer? Snigger, Inca nose flutes?

Hmmm….

*Take with salt as with all drug numbers

A British Airways flight attendant was found high on drugs and completely naked in an onboard toilet during a flight from California to London, a court heard.

Haden Pentecost, who was described as agitated, sweating and babbling, had to be stood down by the flight’s manager when he failed to help with any pre-flight safety checks.

After complaining of stomach cramps and saying he needed to change his clothes, the attendant locked himself in one of the plane’s toilets.

A colleague found him there naked and oblivious to the fact he had no clothes on. She had to dress him before moving him into a free seat, the court was told.

The flight attendant was spoken to by the captain before a health professional was called, the magistrate was told.

The court heard Pentecost had dilated pupils, a high heart rate, and had to be checked every 20 minutes until the plane arrived at Heathrow, where paramedics took him to hospital. A blood test later revealed he had methamphetamine and amphetamine in his system.

Right, right. Right.

He has since been sacked by British Airways, and lives with his husband, the court was told.

Gay air steward lives the high life, eg? Who would ever have guessed?

We all know that line that the reason stereotypes exist is because they’re a useful guide to hte world. The difficulty with them is that they’re only a guide not a proof. It isn’t true that all air stewards are gay, nor that all of Teh Gayers use meth or speed and so on. Nor even that all air crew are living the high life.

On the other hand, as a short hand guide to reality, well…..

One of the UK’s biggest waste management companies is battling a plague of fires caused by exploding disposable vapes.

Now the clipboardistas are seeing resistance to their dictats they’re thinking of ways to persuade us:

The problem is widespread and estimated to be costing the waste management industry as much as £1bn per year.

While vapes are not the sole cause of the fires – they can also be caused by other battery-powered items such as some toys and electric toothbrushes – the rate of fires has skyrocketed as vaping rates have increased.

Lies. Vapes have increased as the battery tech has got cheaper – leading to the use of the battery tech in many more things.

Her comments follow a UK-wide ban on disposable vapes that came into force in June.

So, by Nov – say, and about – we’re going to see a signifcant drop in such fires are we?

And here’s the thing. If we don’t then we’re not going to get told that we haven’t, are we? For this is an excuse, not a reason.

chemical sysnthesis of nicotine

That leads me to an AI answer I do not understand.

What I want to know is, how cheap is that synthesis? Anyone?

Emmanuel Macron has denied bringing cocaine onto a train headed to Kyiv for a meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky and Ukraine’s European allies.

On Monday, his office took the unusual step of addressing a video that showed the French president hiding a white object as he sat alongside Sir Keir Starmer and Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor.

The footage went viral over the weekend because of the mystery object’s apparent resemblance to a bag of the class A drug.

Seriously, who the Hell thinks a President carries his own?

Almost 25 tonnes of ketamine were consumed in England last year, up from 10.6 tonnes in 2023.

The drug is now more popular than heroin, with the worst hotspots in Norwich, Liverpool, and Wakefield.

What’s up with Wakefield? The other two, obvs. One’s scouse the other too close to Spud. But what’s wrong with the third that it requires psychoactives to get our of?

Colombia has backed down in a row over migrants with Donald Trump after the US president threatened to hit the South American country with punitive tariffs.

On Sunday Mr Trump said he would impose the measures on Colombia in an angry response to the South American country blocking migrant deportation flights.

Mr Trump warned the measures, including immediate 25 per cent taxes on Colombian goods among a broad range of sanctions, were “only just the beginning”.

He said tariffs would increase to 50 per cent after one week.

A few hours later, the White House announced it was shelving the tariffs plan after Colombia agreed to accept deported migrants, but other penalties would remain in place.

That’s good then. Don’t want to punish Hunter too hard now, do we?

Compared with the screaming scare campaigns of the 1990s, anti-drugs messaging is thin on the ground these days. So the casual observer may not realise that Britain has, quietly but surely, lost its “war on drugs”. Amid a steep rise in drug poisonings, a particularly striking statistic emerged last week. Between 2022 and 2023, cocaine-related deaths in England and Wales soared by 30%. The figure is now around 10 times higher than in 2011.

And that could be an underestimate. There’s often a time lag of two to three years between drug deaths and the coroner’s assessment on which these statistics are based, says Ian Hamilton, associate professor of addiction at the University of York: current rates are probably even higher. What’s more, not all deaths resulting from cocaine are included. The long-term damage that eventually ends in a stroke or a heart attack will not show up in these reports.

What is going on? One culprit is a precipitous rise in purity, which makes it easier to overdose by accident. Once cocaine was sold in a two-tier market: the cheap, heavily adulterated stuff, and the expensive, purer cocaine consumed by models, city traders and members of the Bullingdon Club. Now, according to the latest United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime report, cocaine in Europe has on average a purity of over 60%, compared with 35% in 2009. Today, even street cocaine rivals the top-end stuff of the 1980s.

Banning stuff works really well. That’s the argument for banning vapes, see?

Justice Bryan, in sentencing, said: “The tragedy that played out on 25 April 2022 is a salutary lesson to all those who peddle the myth that cannabis is not a dangerous drug.

“No one is suggesting that [the murders] were religiously motivated. You never intended to make any sacrifices of your victims. This was simply a symptom of your psychosis.

“You were well aware of the risks to your health of smoking skunk cannabis. You had doubled your consumption of cannabis in the weeks leading up to the killings.

“You may have consumed seven grams of cannabis a day immediately before the killing.”

Dr Nigel Blackwood, a forensic psychiatrist for the prosecution, said the symptoms of manic behaviour displayed were caused by the large amount of cannabis Jacques had consumed.

Jacques had been hospitalised in a psychiatric ward in 2018 and diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

We know – know – that those going nuts will, often enough, self-medicate.

Personally, but not to any level I’d want to have to try and prove, entirely willing to agree that too much (like, say 7 g a day) could turn you nuts. But at any level of proof we’ve not shown that here. Nutter self medicates, or drug consumption makes you nuts?

Obviously, the jury isn;t still out on this but as a more general point, yes, in fact it is.

Both Washington and Jordan were well known to Mizell, who prosecutors said was killed in a business dispute over a lucrative deal to distribute cocaine in Baltimore, Maryland.

Washington was a childhood friend, and Jordan was Mizell’s godson. All of them grew up in the same neighbourhood in the New York City borough of Queens.

In the 1980s, Mizell and his Run-DMC bandmates helped usher hip hop into the mainstream with hits including It’s Tricky and Walk This Way, with rock group Aerosmith.

In their lyrics and stage shows, they were known to advocate against illegal narcotics. The group even recorded a “Just Say No!” anti-drug public service announcement in the late 1980s for the US Drug Enforcement Administration.

Oregon, the first US state to decriminalise hard drugs, is set for a U-turn after addicts took over the streets of major cities.

Police chiefs, district attorneys and city officials are leading demands for Oregon to recriminalise heroin and fentanyl, reversing key provisions of the liberal experiment, which was introduced in 2021.

Underpinning the original initiative, known as Measure 110, was the belief that decriminalising hard drugs would make it easier to get addicts into treatment.

Here in Portugal, which hsa done much the same thing, there’s another layer to this.

If you’re a tourist, an outsider, then the police can and will stop you. Search, find drugs, it’s that choice of treatment or jail. Locals are more leninetly treated.

To the extent that the drug market in Lisbon at least used to have a police presence. To keep order etc. But foreigners trying to use it were intercepted rapidly.

The point being that yes, obviously, there will always be addiction. Best perhaps to have it in the open, monitored, under some sort of control. But stamp down hard on any form of drug tourism.

I don’t say this is a perfect solution however much it accords with my own prejudices (“Wanna get high? Go for it! Die, well, your choice”). Rather, to make the point that such things – as are so many things – are systems. And it’s necessary to have all the moving parts of the system before it works as a whole.

If you’ve got near free drugs on every street then those who want free drugs will move there. And that combination of legal, with outreach and food and tent spaces and so on does make drugs near free. The treatment of locals that way seems v sensible to me – but gotta stop hte migration.

At the height of summer in the beachside restaurants of Alicante in Spain, waiters and waitresses carry endless plates of tapas and trays of sangria to rowdy tourists deep into the night.

But in one busy “chiringuito” there was little sign of tiredness among staff in 2023, thanks to a secret stimulant that could land its managers in jail.

Police swooped on the outlet in Arenales del Sol de Elche to arrest its bosses for tricking employees into taking anabolic steroids to boost their performance.

Waiters and kitchen staff were allegedly told they were merely taking vitamin supplements but were being doped by pills and injections.

Injections?

Blimey. Having done the job – for years, not just as the one summer from uni thing – it’s entirely true that you don’t need to work out as well as be a waiter in a busy place. But I have to admit that taking steroids never did occur to me as a way to do it better.

Stephen Fry: Childhood sweets were gateway to my cocaine addiction

All sorts of people like sweeties. Few develop cocain addictions.

In fact, there seems to be a greater connection between being vastly rich, vastly young, and cocaine – perhaps that’s the reason?

Erectile Dysfunction Medication The Most Seized Drug During Global Crackdown, Interpol Says

Apparently they mean before ingestion.

Police are hunting for a litter picker after a drugs haul washed up on an Isle of Wight beach.

Holdalls containing hundreds of kilos of powder were found by litter pickers near St Catherine’s Lighthouse, on the southernmost tip of the island, on Saturday.

The haul comes after a fisherman discovered others in the sea off St Aldhelm’s Point and Durdle Door in Purbeck, Dorset, on Oct 2.

But police are now trying to track down a member of one litter-picking group who might have knowledge of Saturday’s discovery.

‘We would ask him to get in touch’
Stuart Murray, the Hampshire and Isle of Wight assistant chief constable, said: “There is a member of the litter-picking group, a man in his 60s, who we want to make contact with, as we continue to speak with everyone in the vicinity, and we would ask him to get in touch with us.

“He is of slim build, around 5ft 6in tall and had short grey hair, with a birthmark on the right side of his mouth.

“Possibly sniffing a lot, eyeballs revolving in different directions and incoherent. He could be difficult to recognise

White House evacuated after cocaine found in routine sweep by Secret Service

Why evacuate?

There can hardly be an adult American left who hasn’t had at least some exposure to cocaine.

Anyway, the chatter over there is that maybe Hunter’s not quite as clean as he says Hunter is.

Mexican Pharmacies Are Selling ‘Adderall’ That’s Actually Meth

Think through how screwed the legal drug production system has to be for a stronger and illegal alternative to be cheaper? For it must be cheaper, otherwise why would people be putting meth into Adderall bottles in the hope of profit?

Combat medicine
USAF Pararescue combat medics in Afghanistan used fentanyl lozenges in the form of lollipops on combat casualties from IED blasts and other trauma.[48] The stick is taped to a finger and the lozenge put in the cheek of the person. When enough fentanyl has been absorbed, the (sedated) person generally lets the lollipop fall from the mouth, indicating sufficient analgesia and somewhat reducing the likelihood of overdose and associated risks.[48]

Well done that man who thought that up.

However, the point here:

Europe has been warned that a flood of fentanyl, the synthetic opioid that has killed more than 100,000 people in the United States, is heading this way.

Belgium is on the front line of the new drugs war, as the main entry point for narcotics arriving from Latin America, and its customs chief says that fentanyl is a bigger threat than heroin or cocaine.

I thought the point about fentanyl was that, as a synthetic, it was easy to, umm, synthesise. So, what’s wrong with European industry then?

Or are the precursors difficult to get?

More than 11,000 British Columbians have died from drug overdoses since a public health emergency was declared in 2016. That’s six people a day for six years in this province of just five million people.

It is time for “a monumental shift in drug policy,” Carolyn Bennett, Canada’s addictions minister, said on Monday.

Her provincial counterpart, Sheila Malcolmson insisted: “Substance use is a public health issue, not a criminal one.”

“By decriminalising people who use drugs, we will break down the stigma that stops people from accessing life-saving support and services.”

That harsh calculus. Those who wish to come off will do so, unencumbered by the law etc. Those who do not will be dead. Solved.

They are their lives to waste after all.