Posted on 07/25/2002 11:44:55 AM PDT by logician2u
you'll save money, and at least be getting high...
BTW..My main page is up...I hope it meets with your approval. Here it is
EBUCK
I hate bluegrass BTW!!!
..Just kidding..
EBUCK
EBUCK
Came out funny...Tried to say (and failed miserably) Looks like you put a lot of work into it already.
EBUCK
I saw a great episode on COPS (or some reality cop show) where they stumble upon a basement full of people huffing toluolene, evidently a strong solvent...
It's dark, it's damp, and there's a half-dozen people looking literally like zombies. Completely unlike any other type of 'stoned' behavior I'd ever seen. They were just staring, at nothing. No conversation, just sittin' there, huffing toluolene. The best part was, they cops clear the room out, with cans and cans of empty toluolene littering the room, and as they're just about to leave the room, a cop notices one last person huddled on the ground in a corner. In the 15-20 minutes it took for them to clear the room, NO ONE had noticed this guy. He was awake, just staring blankly... everyone missed him. He didn't say a word, didn't try and run, nothin'.
I have vowed to stay as far away from toluolene as humanly possible.
WHich drugs? HEROIN?
Study Reveals Decades of Despair for Heroin Users
Before you know it, life just passed you up," the man said. "You lose everything. You lose your wife, you lose your family, you lose your friends."
"But after seeing you go back and forth to jail over 10, 15, 20 years," he added, "they just give up on you." He was speaking of his personal war with heroin addiction, a demon he had battled for decades. And like the aging addicts described in a study appearing this month in The Archives of General Psychiatry, the man, in late middle-age, was intimately familiar with the addiction's physical and social costs.
The study, begun in the mid-1970's by researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles, followed male heroin addicts admitted to a court-ordered drug treatment program in California in the early 1960's. The men were interviewed in 1974 and 1975 and again in the mid-1980's. The report presented the findings of a 33- year follow-up, carried out in 1996 and 1997. Of the 581 men in the original study, the researchers found, 284 had died, 21.6 percent from drug overdoses or from poisonings by adulterants added to the drug. Another 38.6 percent died from cancer or from heart or liver disease. Three died of AIDS.
Homicides, suicides or accidents killed 55 of them. Yet as disturbing as these numbers were — the death rates were higher, by several orders of magnitude than those for the general population — the struggles of the men who were still living were equally troubling.
For example, of the 242 subjects interviewed in the 33-year follow-up, at the time in their late 40's to mid-60's, 40.5 percent reported using heroin within the last year and 20.7 percent tested positive for the drug in the urinalysis required for the study.
Abuse of other illicit drugs was also frequent (19.4 percent had used cocaine in the last year; 35.5 percent had used marijuana), as was the use of nicotine and alcohol.
"The striking thing for me is that a good proportion of this group continues using," said Dr. Yih-Ing Hser, an adjunct professor at U.C.L.A.'s Neuropsychiatric Institute and the lead author of the study.
"Ordinarily," she said, "you'd think that when people are reaching old age that they cannot continue to do the things they used to, like hustling for drugs. But that didn't happen."
Among the men in the study who still used drugs, health problems, unemployment, criminal involvement, social isolation and broken family relationships were common, as they were for a similar group of addicted men who took part in focus groups organized by the researchers.
"Some men in the study did manage to attain abstinence, and the difference was striking when they came into the interview," said Dr. Christine Grella, also an adjunct professor at the neuropsychiatric institute and an author of the study. ,
"They were well-functioning and they looked good," Dr. Grella said. "Those who continued to use didn't look good, and they had many physical problems that were hard for them."
Crime gangs feed on Dutch coffee shops
ISSUE 1787 Sunday 16 April 2000
Crime gangs feed on Dutch coffee shops By Justin Sparks in Amsterdam
HOLLAND'S tolerance of soft drugs is creating a backlash of widespread illegal sales by criminal gangs who lure children into their net, according to a leaked report.
A Dutch government report, to be published this week, shows that in the past three years the number of illegal outlets for drugs in towns with a population of fewer than 100,000 has risen sharply.
Viktor Holtes, a Dutch justice ministry spokesman, said: "The increase in illegal sales is in part a consequence of the government's attempt to control the drugs scene by shutting down coffee shops."
Coffee shops operate legally in Holland and sell a range of soft drugs including leaf marijuana, cannabis resin and "magic mushrooms" on condition that children under 18 are not admitted and that no hard drugs are offered for sale. The police, however, have found it difficult to monitor their activities.
Mr Holtes said: "Due to the logistical problems of policing coffee shops, they have become part of the drugs problem rather than the solution. That is why in 1995, the government decided to reduce their number and limit the amount of drugs each customer could buy to five grams rather than 30."
While the number of coffee shops has fallen from 1,200 to 840 in the past five years, the illegal drugs trade has expanded, the report discloses. It shows a substantial rise in the use of soft and recreational drugs among secondary school children. Wim Van de Camp of the centre-Right Christian Democrats party said: "The current policy is not working. Coffee shops are not the answer and simply reducing the number of them solves nothing. It would be better to close them all down."
According to Mr de Camp, the Dutch have been misled by politicians into accepting a romanticised view of soft drugs as a harmless pastime. He said: "Holland is the leader for drugs consumption and distribution throughout Europe. Unofficial estimates set the annual value of soft drugs exported from Holland at around 19 billion guilders [£5.5 billion]."
The government's coalition partners, the Liberal Democrats, say that the law plays into the hands of criminal organisations. Mr de Camp said the shops are forced to buy their supplies illegally "which simply strengthens organised drug rings". Britain's Police Foundation report, whose recommendations on changes in the drugs laws were rejected by the government last month , proposed that the possession of cannabis should not be an arrestable offence. The inquiry conceded that the legislation was circumscribed by international convention but that there was scope, as in Holland, for keeping cannabis illegal while creating a regulated market for small-scale supply.
A former drugs welfare worker in Amsterdam said: "We've been implementing a policy of tolerance toward soft drugs for more than 20 years. They still aren't fully legalised and it still needs a lot of work. Any country attempting to adopt the Dutch policy should be wary."
Justice comes in discrete units, applying itself to one incident at a time, it cannot be an aggregate function. You cannot justify 'some injustice' in order to create a (largely theoretical) 'larger justice'.
He was ecstatic about the possibility of socialized medicine.
Since he had retired from the Army, where he treated mostly dependents who had little choice as to where they would go for medical help, he probably viewed a national health-care program as merely an extension of the military system of which he had been a part. If it worked for the Army, it ought to be OK for the civilian population, too.
When I say argument, that's really an overstatement. Here's what transpired in our little conversation, as best as I remember it.
The good doctor, who could hardly contain his glee that Clinton was elected and would soon give the American people the kind of treatment they deserved, made a tactical error in describing the perfect universal health-care system. When I asked how it should be managed, he instantly suggested that "the Dutch model" was what was needed, where everyone gets full coverage for everything from childbirth (his specialty) to Alzheimer's and everything in between . . and they live happily ever after.
To which I reply, "Well, I don't know much about the Dutch health care system. I do know they have legalized certain "soft" drugs in Holland and that seems to be their claim to fame.
"But tell me, Richard, when was the last medical breakthrough, or the last wonder drug to come out of Holland, with its socialized medicine? Or does it rely on those greedy capitalists in the U.S. to keep patients alive?"
To which I got only a blank expresssion in response. Obviously this former Army doctor knew only one side of the medical picture and had not stopped to figure out that there wouldn't be much new in the way of treatment without incentives and the profit motive. Shortages and rationing always result when a commodity is underpriced, as "free" medicine is.
BTW, this was before the Dutch "involuntary release" scandal hit, where patients were sent home to die so others could be admitted to hospital. I almost sent the doctor a clipping on that, but decided not to rub his nose in it.
No, I don't think the Dutch experiment with marijuana is one this country would want to emulate -- any more than their socialist medical system.
It is corrupting nations, governments and economies. THAT is the real problem with the WOD, not the 'police state' or the 'gang shootings' -- it is the melding of worldwide organized crime, governments, and covert powers.
One trillion is laundered 'right out in the open' more or less through our banks. Government is a tick on an elephant when it comes to cracking down on this.
It is entrenched, our economy and Wall Street are now dependent on this illicit money flow.
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