It diverts all the way to Afghanistan and back....
"Drugs-for-guns traffic troubles police in Mass., Vt.; Cheap firearms from one side of border, opiates from other bring peril" by Brian MacQuarrie | Globe Staff April 28, 2014
Frank Caraballo of Holyoke settled behind the wheel of his car carrying a stash of crack cocaine, his destination a supermarket parking lot in Brattleboro, where he would trade the drugs for a Glock 9mm handgun, prosecutors said.
It was a journey — and a deal — all too familiar to law enforcement authorities who have watched with increasing alarm as narcotics from Massachusetts are ferried to Vermont and swapped for guns that are plentiful and cheap.
And as the case of Frank Caraballo showed, the drugs-for-guns trade can end with deadly consequences: A few weeks after Caraballo purchased the gun in 2011, a woman whom he suspected had stolen from him was shot dead with a Glock 9mm in rural Vermont. Last October, Caraballo was convicted in the killing.
“You don’t know which one came first, the chicken or the egg, but guns are being traded for drugs, and drug dealers are coming here with their product,” said Jim Mostyn, the Vermont agent in charge for the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. “Drug dealers are aware that guns are readily available here.”
It is a trade that is compounding public safety worries on both sides of the state border, as urban authorities in Western Massachusetts battle gun crimes and gang violence and Vermonters cope with the skyrocketing abuse of heroin and other opiates.
“For the drug dealer, it’s a great deal,” said Tristram Coffin, the US attorney for Vermont. “He’s got a commodity that he gets for a wholesale price and then can trade a relatively small amount of drugs for a pretty valuable weapon.”
The market has an express lane, Interstate 91, which authorities call the Iron Pipeline because it gives Massachusetts drug dealers easy access to Vermont, a state awash in firearms and some of the most permissive gun laws in the nation.
Gun-and-drug traffic along I-91 generally links Southern and Central Vermont with Springfield, Chicopee, and Holyoke, said Jim Martin, the ATF agent in charge for Western Massachusetts.
“If you go into the drug distribution areas of Springfield and Holyoke, you will see Vermont plates,” Martin said.
The transactions that occur in those neighborhoods benefit both sides, he said. Inexpensive handguns are readily available in Vermont — from dealers, gun shows, and private sales — and those weapons can fetch twice their price in Massachusetts, where gun laws are much tougher.
And a bag of heroin that sells for $4 on the streets of Springfield — “We have the cheapest heroin,” said Springfield narcotics detective Steve Kent — can command $40 if bought in rural Vermont where supply is not as plentiful.
My jaw dropped when I read that.
From January 2011 through January of this year, ATF officials said, authorities in Springfield recovered 12 guns at crime scenes that they traced to Vermont, more than any other state outside Massachusetts.
If that figure seems low, law enforcement officials cautioned, the total number of guns brought illegally from Vermont to Massachusetts is impossible to quantify. Transactions occur clandestinely.
A thicket of firearms regulations makes it difficult to trace guns. And cars and trucks traveling up and down I-91 cannot be stopped merely on suspicion.
“Through intelligence gathering, interviews, and thorough investigations, ATF offices in Vermont and Springfield, Mass., have consistently seen guns originating in Vermont used as currency in the interstate drug trade,” said Debora Seifert, a special agent in the Boston office of the ATF.
The intersection of guns and drugs is spawning a wide range of related crimes, Mostyn said. Firearms are being stolen in Vermont and then exchanged for some of the more than $2 million in heroin and other opiates that flood Vermont every week, officials said. And addicts desperate for a daily fix are stealing from their families and strangers to pay for it.
On April 19, for example, a Richford, Vt., man stole 32 firearms from a sports shop in Hardwick, Vt., and exchanged many of the guns with another Richford man for money and drugs, federal prosecutors said.
On March 19, a South Wallingford, Vt., woman was pulled over on I-91 in Holyoke, heading north with 1,400 packets of heroin in her vehicle, Massachusetts State Police said.
“This is affecting communities every day in our state,” said Ann Braden, president of Gun Sense Vermont, a gun control organization. “All the discussion at the State House is about drugs, but we need to be looking at guns and drugs and how they interact.”
Despite its reputation as a bastion of liberal politics, Vermont has been awash in guns since Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys seized Fort Ticonderoga in the Revolutionary War.
I sense a gun grab.
The state ranks number one in New England in the rate of gun ownership, with 42 percent of residents owning at least one firearm, according to a 2007 survey. In Massachusetts, by contrast, 12.6 percent of residents own a gun.
I would prefer to have the weapon in case a heroin addict attempts theft.
Most guns in Vermont are carried for hunting and sport, authorities said. Permits are not required to own a gun and there is no registration.
Firearms can be carried openly or concealed without state or local approval. And although guns bought from licensed dealers are subject to federal background checks, Vermont does not regulate private transactions between neighbors or even strangers, said Stephanie Dasaro, spokeswoman for the Vermont State Police.
However, one restriction comes from the federal Gun Control Act, which states that sellers “may not knowingly transfer a firearm to someone who falls within any of the categories of prohibited persons,” such as a felon or drug addict.
So now the drug war is being used to justify a gun grab; better tell Holder to stop running guns to Mexican drug cartels. He should be Slow and Reserved rather than Fast and Furious about it.
But if sellers do not ask, they might not know.
To Braden, the system allows criminals from Massachusetts to easily bypass detection. Instead of undergoing a federal background check, they arrange for a Vermonter to make straw purchases from a dealer, steal a firearm, or buy a gun through a private sale.
“Basically, it’s like setting up two security lines at the airport and letting the criminals choose which line to go through,” Braden said.
In Holyoke, the first sizable city that Vermonters encounter off I-91 in Massachusetts, Police Chief James Neiswanger acknowledged that an influx of firearms from the north is a major worry for a community struggling to curb gangs, drug use, and violence.
“We see the plates,” said Neiswanger, who added that “years ago, we rarely saw guns from Vermont and New Hampshire. Now, it’s much more commonplace.”
Neiswanger said that illegal guns have become his top law-enforcement priority in Holyoke. And in Springfield, the detective who heads the night narcotics unit said the city sometimes seems awash in firearms.
“There are more guns out there than at any time I’ve been here,” said Kent, a detective sergeant who has been on the force for 22 years.
I never go near Holyoke.
A task force of local police, ATF agents, and State Police has been assembled in Western Massachusetts to combat problems posed by guns and drugs. John Rosenthal, cofounder of the Newton-based Stop Handgun Violence, said the task force’s work would be helped by national, mandatory background checks on all gun sales.
Such checks, he said, “would include private gun sales by individuals at gun shows, on the Internet, and out of their homes, backpacks, and car trunks, all of which is perfectly legal in Vermont.”
To many Vermont gun owners, however, such checks infringe on the state Constitution, which stipulates “that the people have a right to bear arms for the defense of themselves and the state.”
According to 77-year-old Bob Scudero of Underhill, Vt., who walked among thousands of firearms at the Central Vermont Gun Show in February, selling a gun should be “no different than selling my lawnmower.”
But to Chelan Brown of Springfield, a community activist who lost two cousins to murder last year, the Iron Pipeline is more than just a catchy nickname for a ribbon of interstate highway.
“It’s been a problem up and down I-91 for a while, a huge problem,” Brown said. “About a year ago, we were out doing some work on a street with known gang activity, and there was a van that pulled up with Vermont plates. We thought they were selling T-shirts.”
Instead, she added, “they were selling guns.”
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Maybe you want to walk the thing?
Related: R.I. seeing more drug-dependent babies
It must have gotten off an exit and gone east.
"Deadly opioid Fentanyl confirmed in Boston overdose" by Brian MacQuarrie | Globe staff April 30, 2014
A synthetic drug linked to dozens of overdose deaths in the Northeast in recent months has been found for the first time in a batch of heroin used in Boston, health officials said Tuesday.
Laboratory tests confirmed that fentanyl, a powerful man-made opioid, had been mixed with heroin used by a Boston addict who survived an overdose in March, said official of the city’s Public Health Commission. The drug was discovered by State Police chemists who tested a sample taken from the overdose scene, health officials said.
Can you trust state chemists these days, and is that where the stuff is coming from?
In response, the Public Health Commission issued a warning Tuesday to physicians, emergency workers, and the public to “exercise increased vigilance in promptly identifying suspected overdose patients and taking appropriate action.”
Fentanyl, which is used to relieve severe pain and is often given to end-stage cancer patients, can be as much as 40 times more powerful than heroin and 100 times more powerful than morphine. That added potency, if mixed into an addict’s normal dose of heroin, can put users at substantially greater risk of overdose and death.
But for some users, the extra potency makes fentanyl more attractive, substance-abuse counselors said.
Rita Nieves, the city’s director of addiction services, said the discovery could be a troubling sign that fentanyl-laced heroin is spreading among users in Boston and elsewhere in Massachusetts.
“Even though we had heard from active users that it’s out there, now we have this first test,” Nieves said. “We hope that doesn’t mean that there is now more.”
Although Tuesday’s announcement marked the first official confirmation of fentanyl’s presence in Boston, Massachusetts health workers and police had suspected for months that the drug might be linked to an alarming spike in overdose deaths in the state.
In Rhode Island, fentanyl has been detected in at least half of the 90 people who have died from apparent overdoses since Jan. 1, said James Palmer, spokesman for the Rhode Island Department of Health.
Between November and late February, more than 185 deaths from suspected overdoses of opioids — the name for both man-made drugs and those made from poppies — have been recorded in Massachusetts, State Police said. However, that figure does not include deaths in Boston, Worcester, and Springfield, where local police lead their own investigations and where overdose deaths since November have yet to be confirmed by toxicology tests.
Nieves said the confirmation of fentanyl in Boston supports what outreach workers have been hearing on the streets.
“Anecdotally, because we work with people who are active users, we do get to hear what’s going on,” Nieves said. “And we have heard that people were reporting that fentanyl was out there in the city, but we were not able to get it confirmed.”
Boston police Sergeant Michael McCarthy, a department spokesman, said his agency has sought State Police tests on additional drug samples obtained through undercover purchases.
The potentially lethal drug already had been found on Cape Cod, which has been hard hit by overdoses. Some clients in treatment programs have tested positive for fentanyl during their regular drug tests, said Max Sandusky, director of prevention and screening for the AIDS Support Group of Cape Cod.
“It’s been here for a while, and it’s certainly been in New England since the beginning of the year,” Sandusky said. “When it’s mixed with heroin, the initial high is very intense, and the opioid effects are very intense in terms of the danger it poses to somebody who is using it. Even individuals with a tolerance for opiates are at a greater risk because of that potency.”
Like many other areas of the state, Boston has been struggling to contain what Governor Deval Patrick called a public-health crisis when he declared a state of emergency last month.
Heroin overdoses increased by 76 percent in the city between 2010 and 2012, according to the figures from the Public Health Commission.
By April 22, Boston emergency workers had administered Narcan, a drug that reverses overdoses, 158 times since the beginning of the year, compared with 131 times for the same period last year.
Nieves said the health commission will distribute fliers to drug users alerting them to the discovery of fentanyl in Boston and carrying warnings about how to remain safe. The users will be advised to never take opiods while they are alone; to always carry Narcan; and to have a companion call 911 after an overdose.
The state’s Good Samaritan law protects people who report overdoses, even if drugs are present at the scene.
The signs of a fentanyl overdose, the flier says, are consistent with other opioid overdoses and include unconsciousness or unresponsiveness, slowed or stopped breathing, vomiting, and pinpoint pupils.
Nieves said the significance of finding fentanyl in Boston will take time to assess.
“Obviously, it’s concerning,” Nieves said. However, she added, “It’s hard to tell if this means that there’s more fentanyl or that they just happened to catch something.”
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And no one has a clue as to where it is coming from as the crisis has somewhat faded from the headlines and concern.
What is a concern at all times:
"Marijuana can alleviate MS symptoms; But research says it does not help relieve other neurological diseases" by Deborah Kotz | Globe Staff April 28, 2014
With medical marijuana dispensaries set to open later this year in Massachusetts, a review of the latest research suggests that it can help alleviate multiple sclerosis symptoms such as pain, overactive bladder, and muscle stiffness.
I've reached the point where I don't want them here. Thanks, Globe.
But the review, conducted by specialists convened by the American Academy of Neurology, found that marijuana does not help relieve the uncontrollable limb spasms that result from a drug used to treat Parkinson’s disease. And it concluded that there is insufficient evidence to know whether the drug reduces symptoms caused by neurological diseases such as Huntington’s disease, Tourette’s syndrome, or epilepsy.
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Study coauthor Dr. Gary Gronseth, a professor of neurology at the University of Kansas Medical Center in Kansas City, and his colleagues recommended that doctors consider potentially serious side effects before certifying patients to grow or buy the drug. Mood changes, depression, hallucinations, or suicidal thoughts occurred in about 1 percent of patients who used marijuana for medical purposes, according to the review of 34 studies published Monday in the journal Neurology, Other side effects included nausea, increased weakness, dizziness, fatigue, and feelings of intoxication....
And apparently paranoia that the NSA is spying on you (btw, I watched about 10 minutes of the deadpan bit, and not funny).
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