Free Republic

Government IT projects have a tendency to fall on their rear ends more often than not. After the miserable debacle that was Healthcare.gov last October, I made the case for why the larger than life public face of Obamacare had zero chance of succeeding in original form. Fast forward six months, and after some contractor firings and a public about face consisting of a "tech surge", the website is finally working at nominal levels. That's not to say no one didn't take the fall for the mess of this bungled IT project gone haywire. The former head honcho of the...

The intelligence agency’s irregular forces have been key to the fight against the Taliban since 2001. Now they’re being withdrawn—just as a bloody fighting season heats up. KABUL, Afghanistan—The CIA is dismantling its frontline Afghan counterterrorist forces in south and east Afghanistan, leaving a security vacuum that U.S. commanders fear the Taliban and al Qaeda will fill—and leaving the Pakistan border open to a possible deluge of fighters and weapons. “The CIA has started to end the contracts of some of those militias who were working for them,” said Aimal Faizi, spokesman for outgoing Afghan President Hamid Karzai, a longtime...

Our View: Opiate abuse epidemic is a national nightmare Beyond sharing the status of commonwealth, Massachusetts and Kentucky don't seem to have too much in common. But the commonwealths share a dubious bond that has only recently come out of the shadows: Both are epicenters of the opiate addiction epidemic sweeping the nation. Now Massachusetts and Kentucky are collaborating in efforts to fight back. Beyond sharing the status of commonwealth, Massachusetts and Kentucky don’t seem to have too much in common. But the commonwealths share a dubious bond that has only recently come out of the shadows: Both are epicenters...

State and federal lawmakers are working ...painkiller Zohydro ER permanently shelved, even as the head of the Food and Drug Administration defends the agency’s decision to approve the powerful opiate some critics call “heroin in a capsule.” Since its approval in Oct.... has come under scrutiny from members of Congress, state attorneys general, doctors and addiction specialists who have worked to block the pill from being sold in the U.S. FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg strongly defends the agency’s approval, arguing that Zohydro’s benefits outweigh the negative consequences. Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., say the agency should rescind its approval of the...

<p>As the departure date for U.S. forces in Afghanistan draws near, the number of high-profile attacks by insurgents has skyrocketed, according to a Pentagon report released Wednesday.</p> <p>A former commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan said Wednesday that corruption, not the Taliban, is the worst threat to the future of the war-torn country.</p>

Heroin production hits record levels in Afghanistan - study America’s war on drugs is failing in Afghanistan, with opium production at record levels, despite spending $7.5 billion to tackle the problem. Over 200 thousand hectares is used to grow opium, an increase of 36 percent, according to a US report. The report, which was commissioned by SIGAR, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction makes grim reading, with opium poppy cultivation increasing by over a third, while the country now has about 1.3 million heroin users. This is a ten-fold increase compared to 2005, when around 130,000 people were using...

The latest figures on heroin show the number of first time users in this country has increased by 60 percent over the last decade to 156,000. Addiction experts say once hooked, heroin addicts have a tougher time than many other addicts getting clean and sober. Are you going to pay $30.00 for an OxyContin pill or are you going to pay a couple of bucks for a bag of heroin?" Heroin can be far more dangerous than prescription pain pills. Dr. Wajda added... Heroin overdoses accounted for more than 400 calls by Fresno's American Ambulance last year. Narcan or naloxone...

The authorities in the Seychelles said Tuesday that they had determined that a combination of heroin and alcohol was responsible for the deaths of two former members of the Navy SEALs working as guards on board a container ship in February. The two, Jeffrey Reynolds and Mark Kennedy, in their 40s, were found dead in a cabin aboard the Maersk Alabama, the cargo ship that became famous in 2009 after Somali pirates attacked it and took the captain hostage. After autopsies determined the men had died of respiratory failure and possible heart attacks, officials in the Seychelles, a small Indian...

by Jacob SiegelApr 24, 2014 6:13 am EDT The State Department paid out $4 billion to rebuild Afghanistan. Some $2.5 billion of that went to a single firm with a bad, bad past. The State Department paid out $4 billion to rebuild Afghanistan. Some $2.5 billion of that went to a single firm with a bad, bad past. For over a decade, the State Department gave 69% of its funding for Afghanistan to a single company—a company with a particularly checkered history. Recruits of the Afghan National Army practice to fight, near Kabul, Afghanistan. (Ulrich Ladurner/laif/Redux) DynCorp, one of the...

Mohamed and his companions are nervous. The poppy field they have tended for the past six months is almost ready for harvesting, the small, bright flowers waving in the breeze. Inside the plant's pod is a sticky-white substance: raw opium. When harvested it will net each of them $2,850. Poppy cultivation takes off Opium has been consumed in Egypt since antiquity, but the growing of poppies is a recent development. Joseph Hobbs, a professor of geography at the University of Missouri and the author of the only scholarly work on the Sinai's opium culture, says that poppy cultivation there began...

GREENSBURG (KDKA) — Greensburg City police are expected to file charges as early as Tuesday against a woman from Youngwood who was leading two lives at Excela Health Westmoreland Hospital. She was not immediately identified by name. She was not only a patient at the hospital, but she was allegedly selling heroin from her hospital room. Jennifer Miele, Excela’s Vice President of Marketing, said staffers in the ICU saw numerous visitors coming and going, spending only a moment or two with the patient before leaving. “What the staff was noticing in our Intensive Care Unit, was that many visitors were...

The Palestinian Authority continues to disseminate a modern form of blood libel against Israel—by claiming that Israel deliberately distributes drugs to harm Palestinian Arab society. Adnan Al-Damiri, the official spokesman of the PA Security Forces, reiterated this libel in February, stating that Israel “has spit up and vomited a shocking amount of drugs onto our land,” according to Palestinian Media Watch. He explained that the PA had even seized a lab “turning marijuana into heroin.” …

Friends and family will be able to take the first step to save a loved one from an overdose of heroin or powerful painkillers called opioids. The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday approved an easy-to-use device that automatically injects the right dose of an overdose antidote named naloxone before an ambulance arrives. Doctors could prescribe it for family members or caregivers to keep on hand, in a pocket or a medicine cabinet. Opioids include legal prescription painkillers, such as OxyContin and Vicodin, as well as illegal street drugs like heroin. …

The number of chronic marijuana users—defined as those who used it on four or more days in the past month—increased 84.3% between 2000 to 2010, according to a RAND Corporation report commissioned by the White House. “In January 2012, the U.S. White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) asked RAND to generate national estimates of the total number of users, total expenditures, and total consumption for four illicit drugs from 2000 to 2010: cocaine (including crack), heroin, marijuana, and methamphetamine (or meth),” says the report, What America’s Users Spend on Illicit Drugs: 2000-2010. …

The drug has followed prescription painkillers into new neighborhoods, forcing police and parents to confront an unexpected problem. In the upper left, a nurse shows off a container of naloxone, a drug which can reverse the effects of a heroin overdose. NEWBURYPORT, MASS. Ana was a good student in middle school. She got above-average grades, seemed poised and self-possessed, and, like many of her friends in her charming coastal town north of Boston, was on a probable path to college. Then, during her freshman year...One night she got very drunk with some friends and loved it. She says it made...

Not only has President Obama officially represented himself as "My Brother's Keeper," in his latest program to somehow encourage young Black and Hispanic Men to become more respectable in society, the President, Homeland Security, and Eric Holder have also become more protective of illegal aliens, many of whom, are  nothing more than drug mules supplying a gigantic network of heroin users in the United States. The President and Democrats have taken extraordianary (illegal) measures to add illegals to the Dem voter rolls, despite the fact that they have helped heroin use to become the latest national drug epidemic. Regardless...

Once rare, heroin use on the rise More people seek help; police seeing more on street The number of people seeking treatment for heroin addiction has exploded in Allen County in the last five years, according to figures from the Drug and Alcohol Consortium of Allen County. In 2009, of all the people seeking treatment for addictions, less than 1 percent, or about 15 people, were addicted to heroin. That number fell in 2010 to only half a percent of all people with addictions, or less than 10. By 2012, the number of people with addictions who were addicted to...

THE NEW NEXUS OF NARCOTERRORISM: HEZBOLLAH AND VENEZUELA By Vanessa Neumann December 2011 Vanessa Neumann is a Senior Fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute and is co-chair, with FPRI Trustee Devon Cross, of FPRI’s Manhattan Initiative. PDF Version of bulletin. (4 pages, 91K PDF) Press stories, as well as a television documentary, over the past two months have detailed the growing cooperation between South American drug traffickers and Middle Eastern terrorists, proving that the United States continues to ignore the mounting terrorist threat in its own “backyard” of Latin America at its own peril. A greater portion of financing...

Heroin Has Impacted Every Home Added by Brandon Duringer on March 12, 2014. Saved under Brandon Duringer, Drugs and Alcohol, Health, Heroin, Opinion Tags: heroin In two weeks and a day, it will have been a year since Oliver Chase Peabody left this worsened world from an overdose of heroin. He was only 28 years old and yet, he had cultivated a whole life’s worth of infectious love for those fortunate to know him. Since his untimely passing, thousands of others have succumbed to the same tragic fate. Not long ago the DEA divulged that 3,038 people perished in 2010...

Stephanie Predel is off heroin. But the Bennington, Vt., area, where she lives, is in the throes of an epidemic. BENNINGTON, Vt. — Stephanie Predel, a stick-thin 23-year-old freshly out of jail, said she was off heroin. But she knows precisely where she could get more drugs if she ever wanted them — at the support meetings for addicts. “I can get most of my drugs right at the meeting,” she said. “Drug dealers go because they know they’re going to get business.” She added, “People are going into the bathroom to get high.” Bennington, a pre-Revolutionary town of 17,000...