Our entire supply of illegal drugs contaminated

Our entire supply of illegal drugs contaminated

 It’s time to stop talking about the “opioid epidemic.” We don’t have just an opioid epidemic — and never really did. We have a drug overdose epidemic. Our entire illegal drug supply — except for marijuana and psilocybin mushrooms — is contaminated. That’s causing overdose deaths throughout the illegal drug using population, which I estimate (based on federal drug surveys) at 800,000 to 1 million residents a year, excluding marijuana.

The term “opioid epidemic” — or, even worse, “heroin problem” — has created the false belief that a horrible thing is happening to a defined population of opioid users, especially heroin addicts.

The so called “opioid initiatives” are well-intentioned responses to something real. Opioid users have died and continue to die in extraordinary numbers. And the drug doing the most damage — fentanyl and its analogs — is an opioid. Doesn’t that make what’s happening an “opioid epidemic?” No. Opiate overdoses are a heartbreaking subset of a much larger drug overdose tragedy. The full epidemic needs our attention.

To turn the overdose epidemic around, we must reconsider the idea that throwing law enforcement, treatment and naloxone at opioid users will end an “opioid epidemic.”

Opioid users are a declining share of overdose deaths. Autopsy lab results find cocaine-fentanyl combinations twice as often in the blood as heroin-fentanyl. Have you heard about the “stimulant epidemic?” Did you know more cocaine users than heroin users died last year?

Meth-related overdoses are soaring too. The drug is being cut with fentanyl. Ecstasy, LSD and fake pills (Adderall, OxyContin, etc.) all carry a significant risk of a fentanyl overdose, too. Most users of these drugs lack a tolerance to opioids, putting them at even greater risk of overdose death than a heroin user.

Did you know that fentanyl-laced cocaine is taking a heavy toll on a demographic odd couple: affluent whites who use powder cocaine and inner-city blacks who smoke crack cocaine?  Cocaine users killed by fentanyl-laced cocaine aren’t victims of an “opioid epidemic.” They’d be just as dead if the poison was arsenic or hemlock. They died of contaminated black- market drugs. The contaminant was an opioid, but the victim was using a stimulant — or at least thought so.

The Nation is suffering a drug overdose epidemic of catastrophic proportions. Opioid users are not the “cause” of the epidemic any more than being gay caused HIV/AIDS. The nation needs to focus objectively on who’s dying, why and what can be done.

Drug users don’t want to die. Drug dealers don’t want to kill them. A slaughter is underway because drug users don’t know what’s in the mixtures they are smoking, injecting and snorting. Nothing in the U.S. billion-dollar response is dedicated to helping drug users prevent their own death.

Fentanyl test strips need to be made available free everywhere. (They work like pregnancy tests.) crime labs test more than a million drug seizures a year. Make that information available in real-time on the internet! Drug users and public health authorities need to know the contents of the illegal drug supply.

Let’s create an anonymous service to test illegal drugs in a lab, just like a crime lab analyzing police drug seizures, except nobody gets arrested and nobody dies.

Dennis Cauchon works full time on drug policy reform as president of Harm Reduction Ohio.

Radical Feminists have ‘snake-filled heads’

Radical Feminists have ‘snake-filled heads’

  

It is entirely likely that many Americans both women and men agree with many of the statements made here. The problem being is they are too afraid to say so publicly. This man has more character than most of those that with claws out and attack him!

Courtland Sykes, a Republican who hopes to replace Missouri Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill in the U.S. Senate, says feminists have “nasty snake-filled heads,” in a Facebook post meant to clarify his stance on women’s rights.

“In light of recent questions regarding my views on Women’s Rights, attached is my full statement from September 2017,” Sykes said on his Facebook page.

In the statement, Sykes said he supports women’s rights because his fiancée, Chanel Rion, has given him “orders” to favor them. But that support isn’t free, Sykes notes.

“Chanel knows that my obedience comes with a small price that she loves to pay anyway: I want to come home to a home-cooked dinner at six every night, one that she fixes and one that I expect one day to have daughters learn to fix after they become traditional homemakers and family wives — think Norman Rockwell here and Gloria Steinem be damned,” he said.

The political newcomer says that he supports women’s rights, but not “mean-spirited radical feminists.”

“I don’t buy into radical feminism’s crazed definition of modern womanhood and I never did. They don’t own that definition. They made it up to suit their own nasty, snake-filled heads,” he said.

Sykes hopes that if he has daughters, they will forgo the traps of “radical feminism” in favor of home life.

“I don’t want them (to) grow up into career obsessed banshees who forego home life and children and the happiness of family to become nail-biting manophobic hell-bent feminist she-devils,” he said.

Theft plagues U.S. union offices: Millions of dollars stolen in hundreds of locations

Theft plagues U.S. union offices: Millions of dollars stolen in hundreds of locations

Phoebe Wall Howard, Detroit Free Press

As the UAW, Fiat Chrysler and federal investigators unravel a scandal over the misappropriation of millions of dollars meant for worker training, federal records show embezzling from union offices is endemic around the country.

U.S. Department of Labor documents obtained by the Detroit Free Press reveal embezzlement from hundreds of union offices nationwide over the past decade. In just the past two years, more than 300 union locations have discovered theft, often resulting in more than one person charged in each instance, the records show.

Two UAW incidents uncovered in 2017, one in Michigan and the other in New Jersey, exceed the $1 million mark, among the biggest labor theft cases in a decade.

Cases involved unions representing nurses, aerospace engineers, firefighters, teachers, film and TV artists, air traffic controllers,

musicians, bus inspectors, bakery workers, roofers, postal workers, machin-ists, ironworkers, steelworkers, dairy workers, plasterers, train operators, plumbers, stagehands, engineers, electricians, heat insulators, missile range workers and bricklayers.

For the UAW, its two biggest cases involved members working handin- hand with corrupt auto industry executives. The UAW says that illustrates its constitution provides the intended checks and balances that essentially require two keys and conspiracy to steal.

In the Fiat Chrysler case in Detroit, money provided by auto companies for worker training was embezzled from 2009 to 2015 by men who were supposed to be working together to negotiate a labor contract rather than divvying up hundreds of thousands of dollars in personal gifts. The case is working its way through the court system, so far resulting in charges against four people.

In the other multimillion-dollar case, charges were filed on Jan. 9, 2017, against a former UAW president in New Jersey accused of hatching a scheme with a health insurance broker to steal $1 million from the union’s self-insured health plan and defraud Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of about $5.5 million.

In addition to the UAW, federal records show the biggest embezzlement cases resulting in criminal charges over the past decade have unfolded in the courts over the past three years:

❚ Laborers Local 657 in Washington, D.C., saw its business manager sentenced to four years in prison in February 2017 for embezzlement and was ordered to pay $1,632,000 in restitution. Two contractors were sent to prison and ordered to pay restitution, too.

❚ The International Brotherhood of Boilermakers Local 154 in Pittsburgh saw its former business manager plead guilty in September to embezzling $1.5 million, plus tax evasion.

❚ A former financial secretary for the International Longshoremen’s Association Local 970 in Norfolk, Va., was sentenced in February 2017 to 41 months in prison after stealing $1,072,669 from the union by making cash withdrawals and using money to buy gas, food, clothing, shoes, toys,entertainment and home improvement supplies.

❚ A former executive director of the Hawaii Painting & Decorating Contractors Association pleaded guilty in May 2016 to embezzling approximately $1,483,800 from the Hawaii Painters Trade Promotion & Charity Fund, which comes out of the hourly wages of Painters District Council 50 in Honolulu.

❚ A former union business manager for Allied Novelty and Production Workers Local 223 in New York and former president of Teamsters Local 810 in August 2016 pleaded guilty to soliciting and receiving kickbacks to influence the operation of an employee benefit plan and commit theft of $1 million.

❚ The founder of Prim Capital Corp., who managed as much as $250 million for the National Basketball Players Association, was sentenced in June 2014 to 18 months in prison for trying to defraud the union of $3 million.

Embezzlement cases are often discovered by unions or during routine audits. The situation may be as simple as a bookkeeper going on vacation and leaving an attentive part-timer in charge who notices irregularity.