Drugs

Cocaine and heroin worth £17,500,000 million seized from van at Channel Tunnel

From a regular reader.

£260 k’s worth per man, woman and child in the country.

British Virgin Islands premier arrested on cocaine charges in US sting operation
Andrew Fahie is charged with conspiring to import drug into the US and money laundering by the Drug Enforcement Agency

Or was it Turks and Caicos last time? Yes, yes, that was it. PM owned the refuelling plant at the airport, was filmed stuffing bundles of $ into his pocket for refuelling someone in the middle of the night, wasn’t it?

Using Viagra could lead to blindness, study finds

It’s not about using it solo…..

Police have arrested a man said to be a drugs kingpin involved in smuggling cocaine from Colombia for 30 years.

Florentino Fernández, also known as Don Carlos, was surrounded by police as he drank coffee at a bar in Marbella on the Costa del Sol.

Or are Marbella and Malaga separate places?

The study also found that heroin users are much less likely to engage with health services, which meant they are twice as likely to die from chronic health problems such as cancer and heart disease than from an overdose.

Compared with people of the same age in the general population, those who use heroin are three times more likely to die due to cancer, and four times more likely to die from heart disease, with homelessness, poverty and mental health problems being a factor.

Imagine the research that had to go into finding that out.

Ryno’s Hay Fever and Catarrh Remedy was 99.9 per cent pure cocaine.

New Zealand has announced it will outlaw smoking for the next generation, so that those who are aged 14 and under today will never be legally able to buy tobacco.

New legislation means the legal smoking age will increase every year, to create a smoke-free generation of New Zealanders, associate health minister Dr Ayesha Verrall said on Thursday.

“This is a historic day for the health of our people,” she said.

Someone needs to start looking at those cocaine subs and whether they can get from Indonesia to NZ.

Tackle the causes of drug addiction

Humans like getting blitzed. And?

Reduce social inequalities: the demand for drugs is greatest in neighbourhoods where young people grow up feeling they are already life’s losers.
Create accessible and stable housing in the same neighbourhoods: this is the foundation for recovery in many drug users.

Ah, should have guessed. Everyone to be equal in council houses. Sure dealing with North Korea’s meth problem, innit?

Mr Johnson said: “Drugs are a scourge on our society, fuelling violence on our streets which communities across the country are forced to endure. That’s why, to cut crime and truly level up across the country, we must step up efforts to wipe out the vile county lines gangs who are blighting our neighbourhoods, exploiting children and ruining lives.

“Backed by record investment, the strategy we’re setting out will attack supply and break the county lines model which sees criminals profit from people’s misery. Those who break the law will have nowhere to hide.”

Of course most don’t think as I do – which is that if folks want to get blitzed then why the hell not?

Even, that the violence to be done here to a free society is worse than the problem they’re still not going to be able to solve.

‘It’s devastating’: how fentanyl is unfolding as one of America’s greatest tragedies
More than 100,000 people died from overdoses in a single year – driven primarily by one drug

The narrative is that the Sacklers, with their Oxycontin, made America into a land of opiate addicts. Then, when that supply was cut off, they went to fentanyl.

So, yah boo sucks to billionaires, right?

An alternative interpretation is that humans just love opiates and the Sacklers just happened to be legal purveyors for a time. I go with the second myself but that’s never going to win out as the public story. Because it’s today’s insistence, no individual is ever at fault, it’s always “them” who force us. Used to be the Joos, now it’s the capitalists, but it’s always them not us.

Possibly even out by an order of magnitude:

Nearly three tonnes of heroin with a street value of $2.7bn (£2bn) from Afghanistan have been seized from a western Indian port in a major bust, officials said.

That’s $900 per gramme at street value.

The UN (OK, old figures but what the hell) has street value in UK at $90 per gramme or so. At least as far as I know the UN is already compensating for cutting, purity etc.

Journalists and numbers, eh?

Going to be difficult:

Selling it for its psychoactive effects was made illegal with the Psychoactive Substances Act in 2016, but it is not currently a crime to be caught in possession of the drug.
….
while the canisters can also be legitimately bought for whipped cream dispensing.

Legal to possess, but illegal to possess for a certain use?

Toughie.

Couple of years back every bar here sold “balloons” filled from industrial/medical containers behind the bar. That’s now stopped, whether police action or the manufacturers I’m not sure. I do know that in the UK the manufacturers won’t sell the big jobbies without evidence that you are a dentist etc. For I looked into it, would it be possible to have a “hot dog stand” kinda retail operation in a bar area?

You know, just for research purposes.

Guardian piccie to show the problems of drug taking:

Residents say it’s not unusual to see people affected by drugs in the neighbourhood.

OK, let us assume that it’s not staged.

So, look again. How clean is that trackie? How new those trainers? Actually, how clean the person?

Drugs might well be a problem, a poverty of aspirations even, but poverty of cash might not be one of them.

Spanish police have announced the seizure of a homemade narco-submarine able to carry as much as two tonnes of cargo.

Police discovered the nine-metre (30ft) vessel last month while it was being built in the southern city of Málaga, during a broader international drug operation involving five other countries and the EU crime agency, Europol.

Jeebus:

However, there’s one peculiar caveat to the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine— and to other major vaccine trials, too: none included pregnant women in their clinical trials. Indeed, not one of the vaccines expected to be approved by the FDA in the next couple weeks, including the Pfizer/BioNTech one, have been tested on pregnant women directly, leaving a cohort of people who are vulnerable to COVID-19 with no direct information on how the vaccine will affect them or their fetuses.

“We don’t know anything directly about the safety of the vaccine in pregnant or in lactating persons because they were all excluded from the vaccine trials,” Dr. Melissa Simon, Director of the Center for Health Equity Transformation at Northwestern’s Center at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, told Salon in a phone interview. “The only thing that could have possibly happened, which we won’t know until the data are unblinded, is if any of the participants in the vaccine trials got pregnant during the course of participating in the trial.”

The exclusion speaks to a long-lived trend in America’s healthcare system, in which pregnant women are actively excluded from the clinical vaccine trials and critical research in healthcare.

Correct. We don’t test drugs on pregnant women. Because we don’t know. In fact, drug tests are largely to overwhelmingly upon male subjects because we don’t want to go testing on pregnant women nor women who might become pregnant during the trial. Because – we don’t know.

We’d sorta like to avoid the two deaths for the price of one thing as – and they will at times – things go wrong. That’s when we’re not pondering how the hormonal changes of pregnancy make wider application of lessons learned a tad difficult.

Destiny Rozek, 22, of Holbrook, New York on Long Island has struggled with opioid addiction for the past four years, a struggle she said has worsened during America’s coronavirus pandemic.

Rozek explained that several detox facilities have closed and coronavirus safety protocols have limited the assistance several other facilities once provided. She went to a detox facility several weeks ago, but was discharged after a couple of nights because they needed space in the ward.

“There was no therapy or anything to help me. They didn’t even help me find an outside place to go to after and I was still sick when they let me out but they needed space because it was busy,” Rozek said.

Heroin addict insists it’s all about me, me, me.

I’m shocked, shocked I tell ya.

GNR police have dismantled a major drug trafficking network in the Algarve, which led to the arrest of 19 people and the confiscation of over 24,000 individual doses of drugs – including heroin, cocaine and hashish.

Speaking to national tabloid Correio da Manhã, the head of the GNR operation Carlos Bengala said: “It is one of the biggest (drug) busts in recent years”.

Says CM, the scheme was reportedly led by two Brits.

A couple who run a pub up the road have been arrested tho’.

And there’s a certain selection of doormen at other pubs a little green around the gills at present.

Yes, drugs are decriminalised in Portugal. But they get distressed at foreigners selling, at foreigners buying. Locals are a medical problem, Johnny Foreigner a criminal one.

A Spanish porn star is being investigated on charges of manslaughter after a man died at his house due to the effects of inhaling vapour from the venom of a toad.

The government claims to have temporarily sheltered 90% of Britain’s rough sleepers but many are still slipping through the net – often highly vulnerable people, most of them with long-term mental health and dependency issues. Getting them into a hotel is the easy thing. Keeping them there, looking after them, making sure their needs are met, is another.

Yes,

Many rough sleepers abuse class A drugs, and here they are being evicted over a spliff. Are we really expecting their problems to go away just because they’re isolated in a hotel room? According to one outreach worker, who wants to remain anonymous, the city centre has come to resemble “God’s waiting room”. He estimates there are still dozens of rough sleepers living on the streets, strung out on drugs or paralytic on cheap booze, unable to wash and change clothes.

OK, boozy addicts.

Although the causes of homelessness are varied and wildly complex, the solutions are relatively simple. What homeless people need are homes – homes for life that are secure, affordable and safe.

But you’ve just been telling us that ain’t so.

Police recovered a fake Brazilian passport, 100g of cannabis, 15 mobile phones and a car, as well as cash equivalent to about $800 (£633) in Mozambican and South African currency.

Wealthy man, eh?