By Arthur Delaney (Huffington Post) A Republican member of the Indiana General Assembly withdrew his bill to create a pilot program for drug testing welfare applicants Friday after one of his Democratic colleagues amended the measure to require drug testing for lawmakers.
“There was an amendment offered today that required drug testing for legislators as well and it passed, which led me to have to then withdraw the bill,” said Rep. Jud McMillin (R-Brookville), sponsor of the original welfare drug testing bill.
via Welfare Drug Testing Bill Withdrawn After Amended To Include Testing Lawmakers.
By Brian Maass (CBS4) Former Arapahoe County Sheriff Patrick J. Sullivan Jr. has been arrested, suspected of trafficking methamphetamine, a controlled substance.
Sullivan, 68, was the elected Arapahoe County Sheriff for 19 years. He retired in 2002 and went on to become director of safety and security for Cherry Creek Schools. He was a nationally-regarded law enforcement figure and in 2001 as the National Sheriff Association named Sullivan “Sheriff of the Year.”
Authorities say Sullivan agreed to meet a male informant and provide the man drugs in exchange for sex. That’s when Investigators and members of the South Metro Drug Task Force arrested Sullivan. The former sheriff is being held on $250,000 bond as of Tuesday evening.
Ironically, Sullivan will be jailed in the Arapahoe County Jail, which was named for the legendary sheriff — The Patrick J. Sullivan Jr. Detention Facility.
via Former Arapahoe County Sheriff Arrested On Drug Charge « CBS Denver.
(AllGov) Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles is refusing to grant a liver transplant to a cancer patient because he used medical marijuana, which not only is legal under California law but also was prescribed by a Cedars doctor.
Diagnosed with inoperable liver cancer in 2009, Norman B. Smith, 63, has been treated at Cedars-Sinai by oncologist Steven Miles, who approved medicinal marijuana in part to help his patient cope with the effects of chemotherapy. Smith became eligible for a liver transplant last year, but was removed from the list in February after testing positive for marijuana.
By Adam Bernstein (Washington Post) Loren R. Mosher, 70, who died of liver cancer July 10 at a clinic in Berlin, was a contrarian psychiatrist and schizophrenia expert who was dismissed from the National Institute of Mental Health for his controversial theories on treatment.
While chief of NIMH’s Center for the Study of Schizophrenia from 1968 to 1980, Dr. Mosher decried excess drugging of the mentally ill. He eventually established small, drug-free treatment facilities that were more akin to homes than hospitals.
Creating Soteria House in the early 1970s, he said, caused lasting trouble with the psychiatric community. After showing studies of patient recovery that matched traditional treatment with medication, the project lost its funding amid a strong peer backlash. So did a second residential treatment center in San Jose.
via Contrarian Psychiatrist Loren Mosher, 70 (washingtonpost.com).
By Kristen Gwynne (AlterNet) The NYPD has been under fire in recent months for illegal searches resulting in thousands of low-level marijuana arrests, mostly of people of color. As corrupt as this practice is, testimony from Stephen Anderson, a former NYPD narcotics detective, shows it’s just the tip of the iceberg.
According to Anderson, who testified at trial Wednesday, New York City police regularly planted drugs on innocent people to meet quotas. Anderson should know. He was arrested in 2008 for planting cocaine on four men in a bar in Queens. His statements are the first glimpse into a culture of set-ups at the Brooklyn South and Queens Narc squads where eight corrupt cops were arrested.
Anderson says his own stunt was a tactic to help officer Henry Tavarez meet his buy-and-bust quota. But the incident was not limited to a handful of men. According to Anderson, “It was something I was seeing a lot of, whether it was from supervisors or undercovers and even investigators.”
Anderson’s case suggests the set-ups are a response to the pressure bosses force on police to make drug arrests.
via Former Detective: NYPD Planted Drugs on People to Meet Drug Arrest Quotas | Drugs | AlterNet.
By James B. Kelleher and Cynthia Johnston (Reuters) An 87-year-old Indiana man was arraigned on drug charges in federal court in Detroit on Monday after police found 228 pounds of cocaine worth an estimated $2.9 million in his pickup following a routine traffic stop.
via Indiana man, 87, nabbed with 228 pounds of cocaine, police say – chicagotribune.com.
(WSJ) More than 10,000 petitions have poured in since the new initiative was announced last month in a bid to bring government closer to the people. And issues like massive federal deficits, two wars and high unemployment don’t appear to be on the people’s minds.
The Top Ten Petitions
- Legalize and regulate marijuana in a manner similar to alcohol — 57,239 signatures
- Call an investigation into allegations of prosecutorial and judicial misconduct in the case of Sholom Rubashkin — 37,877 signatures
- Forgive student loan debt to stimulate the economy and usher in a new era of innovation, entrepreneurship and prosperity — 29,819 signatures
- Abolish the TSA, and use its monstrous budget to fund more sophisticated, less intrusive counter-terrorism intelligence — 26,328 signatures
- Allow industrial hemp to be grown in the U.S. once again — 18,021 signatures
- Edit the Pledge of Allegiance to remove the phrase “under God” — 17,964 signatures
- Legalize, regulate, and tax marijuana — 17,490 signatures
- Crack down on puppy mills — 17,236 signatures
- End the destructive, wasteful and counterproductive “War on Drugs” — 16,422 signatures
- Stop interfering with state marijuana legalization efforts — 15,178 signatures
via Dear White House: Please Tell Us the Truth About E.T. – WSJ.com.
By Associated Press (Washington Post) A new study released Tuesday showed that when hundreds of medical marijuana dispensaries were closed last year in Los Angeles crime rates rose in surrounding neighborhoods, challenging claims made by law enforcement agencies that the storefronts are magnets for crime.
The report by the nonprofit RAND Corp. reviewed crime reports for the 10 days prior to and the 10 days after city officials shuttered the clinics last summer after a new ordinance went into effect. The analysis revealed that crime increased about 60 percent within three blocks of a closed dispensary compared to the same parameters for those that remained open.
“If medical marijuana dispensaries are causing crime, then there should be a drop in crime when they close,” said Mireille Jacobson, a RAND senior economist and the study’s lead author. “Individual dispensaries may attract crime or create a neighborhood nuisance, but we found no evidence that medical marijuana dispensaries in general cause crime to rise.”
(Wikipedia) Rat Park was a study into drug addiction conducted in the late 1970s and published in 1980, by Canadian psychologist Bruce K. Alexander and his colleagues at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada.
Alexander’s hypothesis was that drugs do not cause addiction, and that the apparent addiction to opiate drugs commonly observed in laboratory rats exposed to it is attributable to their living conditions, and not to any addictive property of the drug itself.
He told the Canadian Senate in 2001 that prior experiments in which laboratory rats were kept isolated in cramped metal cages, tethered to a self-injection apparatus, show only that “severely distressed animals, like severely distressed people, will relieve their distress pharmacologically if they can.”
To test his hypothesis, Alexander built Rat Park, an 8.8 m2 95 sq ft housing colony, 200 times the square footage of a standard laboratory cage. There were 16–20 rats of both sexes in residence, an abundance of food, balls and wheels for play, and enough space for mating and raising litters.
The results of the experiment appeared to support his hypothesis. Rats who had been forced to consume morphine hydrochloride for 57 consecutive days were brought to Rat Park and given a choice between plain tap water and water laced with morphine. For the most part, they chose the plain water.
“Nothing that we tried,” Alexander wrote, “… produced anything that looked like addiction in rats that were housed in a reasonably normal environment.” Control groups of rats isolated in small cages consumed much more morphine in this and several subsequent experiments.
