Amazing how it happens during a heroin epidemic after being tough on pot all these years.
"Some states changing focus in fight against illegal drugs" by Jerry Markon | Washington Post April 06, 2014
WASHINGTON — Someone was with Salvatore Marchese when he died of a heroin overdose, but no one called 911.
So his mother, Patty DiRenzo, a legal aide, began a quest to help make sure that others would not be afraid to make that call. She created a Facebook page, wrote New Jersey Governor Chris Christie nearly every day, and called all 120 members of the state legislature.
The grieving mother accomplished what would have been inconceivable a few short years ago, much less back when the nation launched its war on drugs: She helped pass a bill, signed by a Republican governor, that lets people get away with using drugs for the sake of saving lives.
And medical marijuana is a big deal??!!
The state’s new ‘‘good Samaritan’’ law, which immunizes from prosecution people who call 911 to report an overdose even if they are using drugs themselves, is part of an emerging shift in the country’s approach to illegal drugs.
Life is all a Seinfeld stage.
Four decades after the federal government declared war on narcotics, the prevailing tough-on-drugs mentality is giving way to a more nuanced view, one that emphasizes treatment and health nearly as much as courtrooms and law enforcement, according to addiction specialists and other experts.
Yeah, well, we don't want the whole complex being moved from one institution to another, for one thing.
Second thing is this whole narrative of the benevolent state looking out for you when the leading drug-runners are government agencies and the main beneficiaries are money-laundering banks. That's why we get this new thinking in government newspeak and propaganda.
Third thing, notice the sympathy gushing forth for the poor heroin addicts compared to the unsympathetic, damn condemnation all these years regarding the pot. The agenda-pu$hing pre$$ is all in favor of needle exchange and bedside compassion for the arm-stickers, but catch a whiff of smoke and its blasphemers!
Fourth thing, just leave us all alone whatever it is. I don't even want legal anything anymore so you guys win. Forget the medical that will help suffering people relieve pain and forget the taxes collected from recreational legalization. Let's just call the whole thing off before we become like Colorado. Gimme a prescription for whatever it is. Thank you.
The changes are both rhetorical and substantive, reflecting fiscal problems caused in part by prisons bulging with drug offenders and a shifting social ethos that views some drug use as less harmful than in the past.
Not the heroin, coke, or meth. Those are evil.
Btw, it's the people's voices driving this, way out in front of the politicians, but the corporate press doesn't want you knowing that.
States are driving the trend. At least 30 have modified drug-crime penalties since 2009, often repealing or reducing tough mandatory minimum sentences for lower-level offenses, according to the Pew Charitable Trusts, which works with states and tracks the legislation.
One-third of the states now have a good-Samaritan law, with the majority enacted since 2012.
That is the same year that Colorado and Washington became the first states to legalize recreational use of marijuana. ‘‘There is certainly more momentum than ever before,’’ said Mason Tvert, spokesman for the Marijuana Policy Project, an advocacy group that projects that a dozen or more states are likely to legalize the drug within several years.
Well, that stuff is getting slowed down now.
Change is also afoot at the federal level, where FBI data show drug arrests are down 18 percent since 2006, and the Obama administration tries to avoid the phrase ‘‘war on drugs.’’
They are still fighting it; they just don't want to draw attention to it.
The Justice Department is strongly supporting changes being considered by the US Sentencing Commission that would reduce sentences for most drug offenders, and the Senate Judiciary Committee recently passed a bipartisan bill that would cut them in half for some drug crimes.
No one is suggesting that the fight against drugs is over.
And no one was thinking it was, at least not in these quarters.
Federal agents are still battling traffickers on the southwestern border, and the administration has taken steps against abuse of prescription drugs and other illicit substances.
Backed up by the Court.
Polls show that even as a majority of Americans now favor legalizing marijuana, overwhelming numbers still oppose that step for cocaine and heroin.
OMG, I'm part of the mainstream crowd!
And while many of the drug law changes have drawn bipartisan support, some prosecutors are opposing Attorney General Eric Holder’s efforts to eliminate mandatory minimum prison sentences for nonviolent drug offenders.
Yeah, keep the pot people in jail so rapists and killers can go free.
And they can be biparti$an when they want, 'eh?
The marijuana legalization campaign has also faced resistance from former Drug Enforcement Administration leaders and other critics.
Related: U.S. Government Brings Drug War to U.S. Cities
How about that, huh?
But after a generation of antidrug messages symbolized by the ‘‘Just Say No’’ campaign of the 1980s and enforcement accompanied by martial metaphors, experts say a broad consensus is emerging around a crucial distinction.
That type of thought control and mind manipulation underpins everything found in the ma$$ media. The terminology, self-internalized or not, is deployed through even the most innocuous subjects. Everything is framed in terms of a war.
Under the new paradigm, they said, traffickers engaged in the business of drugs will still face long prison terms, while lower-level users will increasingly be viewed as addicts with a treatable illness.
‘‘States in particular are starting to make much bigger distinctions between personal use and commercial activity,’’ said Adam Gelb, director of Pew’s Public Safety Performance Project, who pointed out that some states have recently toughened penalties for large-scale drug sales while relaxing them for drug possession.
Douglas Berman, a law professor at Ohio State University and an expert on criminal sentencing, called the new landscape a strategic shift rather than a ‘‘retreat’’ from the antidrug war.
Now it is an "anti" drug war. It's the propaganda pre$$ spin that is making me dizzy, not any illegal drug.
(It is at times like this that the blog editor looks back on his life and mourns the lack of experimentation in youth, times that are now lost forever)
It was June 1971 when President Richard Nixon sent a special message to Congress and targeted drugs as America’s ‘‘public enemy number one.’’
Wasn't that right about when he was looking at a one-term presidency?
It was the start of the war on drugs, which emerged as a reaction to fear of crime.
The crackdown rose in the 1980s under President Ronald Reagan as Congress, with bipartisan support, established mandatory minimum sentences for marijuana and other drugs.
Yeah, both parties are guilty for constructing the prison-industrial complex and profiting by it while helping to destroy freedom and liberty.
The first stirrings of reform came in a few states in the 1990s, and concern grew nationwide about perceived racial disparities in enforcement of drug laws.
Not saying it was right; however, the whole issue being mentioned now and then proves it was another distraction for the times so the war machine could go forward and the looting at the time continue apace. You need to start looking through the corporate pre$$ pri$m in a different way.
Congress in 2010 passed a law reducing disparities in sentencing practices.
What was that, 20 years later? We have to wait 50+ years before government admits its war crimes, and 20 years for them to do this? No wonder the country is so f***ed up.
The measure also repealed a mandatory minimum sentence — for crack possession — for the first time since the Nixon years. But states and localities have led the way, including in the development of good-Samaritan laws.
And then the subsequent federal regimes have come in and threatened in subtle ways about straying from national orthodoxy.
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Now how you going to pay for that heroin addiction treatment?
"Heroin users seeking treatment may hit insurance barriers" by Meghan Barr | Associated Press April 07, 2014
Shouldn't be under Obummercare.
NEW YORK — As the ranks of heroin users rise, increasing numbers of addicts are looking for help but are failing to find it — because there are no beds in packed facilities, treatment is hugely expensive and insurance companies will not pay for inpatient rehab.
Some users overcome their addictions in spite of the obstacles. But many, like Salvatore Marchese, struggle and fail.
In the course of Marchese’s five-year battle with heroin, the Blackwood, N.J., man was repeatedly denied admission to treatment facilities, often because his insurance company would not cover the cost.
Then one night in June 2010, a strung-out Marchese went to the emergency room seeking help. The doctors shook their heads: Heroin withdrawal is not life-threatening, they said, and we can’t admit you. They gave him an IV flush, and sent him home.
Marchese, then 26, and his sister called multiple inpatient clinics only to be told: We have no beds. Eventually, Marchese found space at a facility but was released 17 days later when his public funding ran out. Less than three months later, Marchese was found dead of an overdose in his mother’s car.
‘‘Heroin is life-threatening,’’ said his mother, Patty DiRenzo. ‘‘We’re losing kids every day from it.’’
Not that I'm happy this kid died, far from it; however, I also recognize the poster-boy quality of the agenda-pushing propaganda.
Of the 23.1 million Americans who needed treatment for drugs or alcohol in 2012, only 2.5 million people received aid at a specialty facility, according to the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
Heroin addicts are a small slice of overall drug users, but their numbers nearly doubled from 2007 to 2012, to 669,000. The number treated for heroin also increased, from 277,000 to 450,000.
Are the wars being funded? Did Wall Street get paid? Corporations get their subsidies? Israel's aid check in the mail? Then stop bothering me with unhappy things. Life is fine, life is good.
At issue is whether these addicts are getting the treatment they need to successfully beat their habits. Advocates say they are not, partly because the insurance industry has not come to grips with the dangers of heroin withdrawal and its aftermath.
It is true that, unlike withdrawal from dependencies on alcohol or benzodiazepines like Xanax, heroin withdrawal does not kill. But it is so horrible — users feel like their bones are breaking and fluids leak from every orifice — that many are drawn back to the drug, with fatal consequences.
Even if addicts survive withdrawal, they often relapse if they fail to make it into treatment. That’s when many overdoses happen, because they try to use as much heroin as they did before, and their newly drug-free bodies can’t handle it.
What about the poisonous fentanyl being added to it?
Because withdrawal is not directly deadly, most insurance companies will not pay for inpatient rehab, said Anthony Rizzuto, a provider relations representative at Seafield Center, on Long Island. They either claim that the user does not meet ‘‘criteria for medical necessity’’ — that inpatient care would be an inappropriate treatment — or require the user first try outpatient rehab.
‘‘Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the time, we hear ‘denied,’ ’’ Rizzuto said. ‘‘And then we go to an appeal process. And we get denied again.’’
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Don't look for treatment or help in Boston:
"Boston’s only public methadone clinic may shut; City would shift care from its methadone unit" by Brian MacQuarrie | Globe Staff April 07, 2014
Boston health officials are poised to close the city’s only public methadone clinic at a time when heroin overdoses, which methadone is used to combat, are rising dramatically across the state.
Shutting the clinic, which has offered methadone to opiate addicts for 40 years, would mean that hundreds of clients served every day at the Frontage Road site and at a separate counseling center in the South End would be treated by private providers, possibly as soon as July 1.
Except insurance won't cover it.
Barbara Ferrer, executive director of the city’s Public Health Commission, said that operating the clinic, which costs $2.4 million a year, “is not necessarily what the health department should be doing with scarce resources.”
I'm surprised Boston can't afford it.
Didn't the legislature just come up with $20 million for late night T service to supports bars?
Ferrer cautioned, however, that the city would not end the service if officials are unable to reach agreement with a high-quality provider. “We have no intention of ever signing off on anything that would compromise our ability to offer a great service,” she said.
The city wants to redirect the clinic’s budget to Mayor Martin J. Walsh’s proposed Office of Recovery Services, health officials said. The mayor, a recovering alcoholic, made strengthening the city’s support network for substance abusers a cornerstone of his campaign.
That's why he is against medical marijuana -- but for casinos!
In a statement, Walsh said that advances in addiction treatment, as well as the emergence of more providers, have given city officials a chance to reconsider funding priorities and strengthen services that no other provider can offer.
“By opening an Office of Recovery Services,” Walsh said, “we’ll be able to strengthen coordination and collaboration among our partners to improve access to care, identify barriers to treatment, and increase outreach efforts to the people that need it most.”
Last month, Governor Deval Patrick declared a state of emergency to combat the escalation of opiate abuse in Massachusetts.
Related:
"Nonetheless, Patrick deserves the benefit of the doubt, given the extent of prescription drug abuse in the state, and the clear link between overuse of opioid painkillers and heroin addiction. As a temporary measure, the ban is warranted. Abuse of prescription painkillers has contributed to a public health crisis in Massachusetts, creating a challenge the state’s robust pharmaceutical sector should embrace."
That's one of the few times they make the connection.
The proposal to shut the clinic was approved in March as part of the health department’s preliminary budget for the next fiscal year. A final vote is scheduled April 17. Talks are continuing with private providers to explore whether the city’s clients can be absorbed elsewhere. One of those providers is Bay Cove Human Services , a large nonprofit that serves a wide array of needs at more than 160 locations in Boston and southeastern Massachusetts.
Despite assurances that methadone treatment will be uninterrupted if the city clinic closes, the possibility of a shutdown has raised fears among current and former staff that uninsured and indigent clients will be set adrift.
Mimi Vitale, a nurse who retired in 2011 after 22 years at the clinic, called the proposal “a bad decision.”
“It just makes me really sad because a lot of these people are homeless, and the only person they see is the nurse that day,” Vitale said. “Most patients go every day. They have been to detox probably 50 to 100 times, they always relapse, and they have to find something.”
Methadone is a synthetic narcotic that has been used for decades to reduce the craving for opiates, such as heroin, and their withdrawal symptoms. Treatment is sometimes needed for years to help prevent a relapse. The cost of treatment varies, because different patients can require different doses of the medication.
One current clinician, who asked not to be named for fear of retribution, said he is concerned by the timing of the proposal and its potential consequences.
“We’re in the middle of a heroin epidemic,” the employee said. “The clients are unraveling because they’re not sure if their insurance will cover the treatment.”
The city’s methadone clinic on Frontage Road serves more than 400 clients every day of the year. The program also offers individual and group counseling on nearby Albany Street.
Four private methadone clinics, plus one run by the Department of Veterans Affairs, exist in Boston.
Bill Sprague, president of Bay Cove Human Services, said that discussions about absorbing some of the city’s methadone clients have begun between staff at the Bay Cove clinic and the city facility. “We have some capacity to expand,” Sprague said.
Ferrer said the city wants to make sure that uninsured patients are protected, and she said a private clinic would have to accept state funding that the city now receives for its uninsured clients.
Aaaaaaahhh!
The state Department of Public Health channeled $291,000 to the city’s clinic in fiscal 2013, but those funds did not cover all costs associated with the uninsured, said Nick Martin, spokesman for the Boston Public Health Commission.
Uninsured? In Mass?
*******************
Low-income residents with insurance through MassHealth are covered for methadone treatment, said Julie Kaviar, spokeswoman for the state Executive Office of Health and Human Services.
The city’s health department is scheduled to present the results of its discussions with private providers at the April 17 meeting of the Board of Health. At that time, the mayorally appointed board will vote on the budget and the proposal to close the methadone clinic, Martin said.
Maryanne Frangules, executive director of the Massachusetts Organization for Addiction Recovery, an advocacy group, said she is withholding judgment on the possible closing until more details emerge.
Methadone, she said, “is one of many effective options. We need to keep as many options out there as possible.”
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Related: City’s methadone funds could cover broader addiction plan
They must be high on something!
"S.C. mother sentenced in baby overdose" by Jeffrey Collins | Associated Press April 05, 2014
SPARTANBURG, S.C. — A judge sentenced a South Carolina woman to 20 years in prison Friday for killing her 6-week-old daughter with what prosecutors say was an overdose of morphine delivered through her breast milk.
A prosecutor said Stephanie Greene, 39, was a nurse and knew the dangers of taking painkillers while pregnant and breast feeding, instead choosing to conceal her pregnancy from doctors so she could keep getting her prescriptions. She lost her nursing license in 2004 for trying to get drugs illegally.
Greene’s lawyer said she was only trying to stop debilitating pain from a car crash more than a decade before and is still overwhelmed with grief from the loss of her child.
The 20-year sentence was the minimum after a Spartanburg County jury found Greene guilty of homicide by child abuse Friday. Her lawyer said she will appeal.
A toxicology report from the baby’s autopsy found a level of morphine in the child’s body that a pathologist testified could have been lethal for an adult, the prosecutor said.
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She's now a heroin addict.
At least the pharmaceuticals are cracking down:
"Blue Cross cuts back on painkiller prescriptions; An 18-month effort targets opiate abuse" by Brian MacQuarrie | Globe Staff April 08, 2014
The state’s largest health insurer has cut prescriptions of narcotic painkillers by an estimated 6.6 million pills in 18 months as part of a campaign to curb abuse of the powerful drugs, according to executives from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts.
This is going to affect profits and revenue, right?
That estimated reduction appears to bolster the argument made by many health workers that these narcotics have been overprescribed and too easy to obtain. The drugs are cited as a gateway to heroin, which has plagued the state recently amid a startling succession of overdoses and deaths.
The dramatic decline in prescribed opiates such as Percocet and Vicodin followed the insurer’s decision to limit the quantity of narcotic painkillers that its members could obtain without prior approval by the insurance company, said Andrew Dreyfus, president of Blue Cross Blue Shield, who described the decrease in an interview.
Faced with concerns about a rise in opiate abuse, Blue Cross implemented changes in July 2012 that have reduced prescriptions by 20 percent for common opioids such as Percocet and 50 percent for longer-lasting drugs such as OxyContin, Dreyfus said.
The insurer released the figures after a review of the first 18 months of its program, which company executives said is the first of its kind in the state and possibly the country. “We’re one of the few, if not the only one, doing this,” Dreyfus said.
************
Dr. Anton Dodek, associate chief medical director for Blue Cross, said the mindset has changed among doctors. Prescription painkillers for problems as minor as sports injuries have led to abuse of the pills and later to devastating addictions to opiates such as heroin, which is currently cheaper to buy on the street than Percocet.
And gives a better high.
“We’re trying to cut off that pipeline,” Dodek said.
A federal study showed that a growing majority of heroin users reported having abused powerful pain relievers before turning to illicit street drugs.
Last month, Governor Deval Patrick declared a state of emergency to combat the rise in opiate overdoses.
The Blue Cross campaign is attempting to head off abuse by warning physicians when patients have received powerful painkillers from three or more prescribers within six months.
Case managers also are working among Blue Cross’s 2.8 million members to enhance access to pain-management specialists and to explore, when needed, nonnarcotic alternatives to treat pain.
Other insurers in Massachusetts said they also have safeguards to fight painkiller abuse. Computer algorithms raise red flags if a patient’s prescription activity ventures into a worrisome area, he said, followed by mailings or a call to a pharmacy....
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So no more Vicodin after the wisdom teeth have been removed or lower-back injury prescriptions for Percocet.
Related: Judge hits state on painkiller ban
Guess you can go get your prescription.
Also see:
Officials urge residents to turn in unneeded prescription drugs
Drugmaker’s dual role as friend, foe
Who goes there?
