UK: Drug fears of all-night raves – November 1996 Drug fears of all-night raves
By thisislancashire - Wednesday 27 November 1996
Copyright: thisislancashire
POLICE are opposing moves by a Darwen nightclub to stage all night "raves" because of fears over drug-taking and drug- dealing.
The owners of Kazy's Bar have applied to Blackburn Council for permission to open all night on Saturdays.
Andy Wright, the Euxton-based owner of the nightspot in Wellington Fold, hopes councillors will give him permission to stay open until 8am on Sunday.
But Blackburn police are making strong objections to the application and have written to the the town hall outlining their concerns.
Inspector Harry Bretherton said in the letter: "From our experience, similar events in the past have attracted large numbers of persons some of whom have a preponderance to take and sell illegal substances.
"This in itself can lead to disorderly behaviour as at similar events of recent times held at King George's Hall." Police pulled the plug on a rave party at the Blackburn hall four years ago at the height of the house craze amid fears of drug taking.
The police are also opposed to the application because they are concerned all night raves will create a lot of disturbance in the area.
Inspector Bretherton added: "These so called 'rave' parties do, by definition, attract large numbers of young persons not only from the locality but also from outlying districts.
"This in itself creates problems in respect of controlling numbers in the premises and the subsequent parking.
"Although Kazy's is situated in the town centre, there is high-density residential property.
"We feel that noise from the event and from persons attending or leaving the party would be unacceptable at such late hours."
The application will be considered at a licensing sub-committee tomorrow.
Any comments from residents and the council's pollution control section will be heard at the meeting.
http://www.thisislancashire.co.uk/
UK: Country rector to lead Nine O’Clock church – May 1996 Nine O'Clock church relaunches raves
By the daily telegraph - Monday April 8 1996
Copyright: the daily telegraph
THE Nine O'Clock service, the Anglican rave movement that collapsed amid allegations of sexual abuse last summer, is relaunching itself under a new guise today by celebrating its first public service for eight months.
Despite doubts over the wisdom of restarting services so soon after what was one of the Church of England's most damaging scandals, today's ceremony will be presided over by the Archdeacon of Sheffield, the Ven Stephen Lowe.
The congregation will be drawn from the remnants of the Nine O'Clock parish, which broke up after revelations that the Rev Chris Brain, 38, its former leader, had been sexually involved with scores of women.
They have devised a new service
Members are keen to distance themselves from the past. They have devised a new service, though one still based on the experimental forms of worship that have been criticised by traditionalist Anglicans. The parish is also seeking a new name, and a chaplain is expected to be appointed this month.
Two weeks ago, members of the congregation and Mr Lowe held a "releasing ritual" at which they placed their hands on a "grieving stone" as a symbolic way of releasing their bad memories of the Nine O'Clock Service. They then threw brochures, posters and other paraphernalia on to a fire.
Jo Mear, a member for 10 years, said: "When I held the grieving stone, I expressed my anger towards Chris and I felt cleansed by it."
Today's Easter Sunday service will take place in a whitewashed chapel rather than the sports centre, with ambient rave music and lasers favoured by Mr Brain, who resigned as a priest after a Church investigation.
http://www.telelgraph.co.uk/
UK: Woman to lead Nine O’Clock rave church – April 1996 Woman to lead rave church
By the daily telegraph - Monday April 29 1996
Copyright: the daily telegraph
A WOMAN is expected to be chosen as chaplain to the Nine O'clock Service, the Sheffield rave church which collapsed last summer amid allegations of sex abuse. A female priest is understood to have been asked to minister to the depleted congregation. But she has not yet formally accepted.
The selection of a woman will be welcomed by the 30 members who are still hurt and angry about their priest's abuse of power. Chris Brain, 38, resigned from the priesthood after admitting to sexual misconduct with more than 30 young female worshippers.
"After all the shennanigans, a woman is the obvious choice to avoid any possibility of future problems," said one member yesterday. Mr Brain attracted up to 600 youngsters to services where he used rave music, laser lights and dry ice in the liturgy.
The Church of England, criticised for not adequately supervising Mr Brain, is now imposing more traditional structures. The Archdeacon of Sheffield, the Ven Stephen Lowe, said the new priest will be named next week. He added: "We are looking for someone who will not be a guru."
http://www.telelgraph.co.uk/
UK: Nine O’Clock church relaunches raves – April 1996 Nine O'Clock church relaunches raves
By the daily telegraph - Monday April 8 1996
Copyright: the daily telegraph
THE Nine O'Clock service, the Anglican rave movement that collapsed amid allegations of sexual abuse last summer, is relaunching itself under a new guise today by celebrating its first public service for eight months.
Despite doubts over the wisdom of restarting services so soon after what was one of the Church of England's most damaging scandals, today's ceremony will be presided over by the Archdeacon of Sheffield, the Ven Stephen Lowe.
The congregation will be drawn from the remnants of the Nine O'Clock parish, which broke up after revelations that the Rev Chris Brain, 38, its former leader, had been sexually involved with scores of women.
They have devised a new service
Members are keen to distance themselves from the past. They have devised a new service, though one still based on the experimental forms of worship that have been criticised by traditionalist Anglicans. The parish is also seeking a new name, and a chaplain is expected to be appointed this month.
Two weeks ago, members of the congregation and Mr Lowe held a "releasing ritual" at which they placed their hands on a "grieving stone" as a symbolic way of releasing their bad memories of the Nine O'Clock Service. They then threw brochures, posters and other paraphernalia on to a fire.
Jo Mear, a member for 10 years, said: "When I held the grieving stone, I expressed my anger towards Chris and I felt cleansed by it."
Today's Easter Sunday service will take place in a whitewashed chapel rather than the sports centre, with ambient rave music and lasers favoured by Mr Brain, who resigned as a priest after a Church investigation.
http://www.telelgraph.co.uk/
UK: MP correct to slam silly Sting – January 1996 MP correct to slam silly Sting
By thisislancashire - Friday 19 January 1996
Copyright: thisislancashire
WHAT'S the message that come across to the kids when a multi-millionaire pop star admits taking the "rave" drug Ecstasy and calls for it to be legalised?
The wrong one, we are afraid - that it's OK to do "E."
How stupid and irresponsible of superstar Sting, then, to demand for this drug to be made legal.
And we say that even though to legalise the drug might take the trade out of the hands of criminals who have no qualms about selling adulterated stuff. For, wherever it comes from, Ecstasy is deadly dangerous, as the needless deaths of some 50 youngsters have shown.
Anyone who invites more of that is a reckless fool.
We join Ribble Valley MP Nigel Evans, who is already waging war on so-called designer drugs, in slamming this silly singer.
http://www.thisislancashire.co.uk/
Mexico’s drugs battle intensifies – Q2 2003 Mexico's drugs battle intensifies
Published by BBC News - Monday 21 April, 2003
Copyright: BBC News
Three Mexican army officers have been jailed for 15 years each for protecting a reputed powerful drug baron, in a case the government hailed as a victory against organised crime.
The convictions follow last month's dramatic capture of the alleged drug baron Osiel Cardenas, for whose capture the FBI had offered a $2m reward.
The latest case was only the second time in Mexico's history that military officers had been tried by a military court on drug charges.
But these apparent successes against the drugs trade were tempered on Wednesday with the discovery of nine bodies - apparently executed with bullets to the head - in two cars near the Texan border.
The killings, the latest violence since the state began its drugs crackdown, appear to be part of the underworld war over leadership of the Gulf drug cartel.
Bloody fight
The cartel is said to ship tons of cocaine worth billions of dollars to the US every year.
Brigadier General Ricardo Martinez Perea, 2nd Captain Pedro Maya and Lieutenant Javier Quevedo were found guilty of encouraging drug trafficking by protecting Cardenas and warning him of anti-drug operations, said the Supreme Military Tribunal.
It was unclear whether the officers - who will be discharged from the army - would appeal.
The Mexican authorities have arrested key leaders of all five of Mexico's leading drug gangs in the last two years.
The Interior Minister Santiago Creel said the convictions were "another sign of the fight we are carrying out against organized crime, against corruption... Above all we want to show how efficiently a democratic government can work."
The US has long griped that Mexico does too little to stem the flow of drugs over its border.
However, Mexico's efforts to tighten its grip on drug-related crime seem to have had little effect on the cross-border trade - but do appear to have stirred greater violence.
The nine shooting victims whose bodies were discovered on Wednesday appeared to have been tortured before they died.
They were found in two parked cars on the outskirts of Nuevo Laredo, on the Mexican border with Texas.
Three of the four bodies found in one car were wearing the shirts of federal police, state police reportedly said.
"What we are seeing is a power struggle within and among the cartels," said Mexican newspaper editor Jesus Blancornelas, according to the New York Times newspaper.
"It's going to be a bloody one."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/
Sorted on Saturday, sacked on Monday morning – Q2 2003 Sorted on Saturday, sacked on Monday morning
Published by The Guardian - Monday 21 April, 2003
Copyright: The Guardian
Would you pass a random test at work for drugs or alcohol? You might be about to find out, reports Denis Campbell
6.30, Monday morning: Peter doesn't feel too bad, considering. A bit cloudy-headed perhaps, after a weekend with the lads in Barcelona celebrating his mate Jason's 30th, but nothing serious. Maybe that final beer on the flight back last night wasn't a great idea.
9am: after coffee, orange juice and toast, Peter starts perking up. The cobwebs have gone, and just as well. There's a sales pitch to a prospective new client at 2pm, and he's the firm's best talker.
9.30: a tap on the shoulder. It's Derek, head of personnel. 'Morning, Peter. Can I borrow you for a moment?'
Derek takes Peter downstairs to a side-room where a white-coated woman is waiting. 'Peter, this is Caroline, from our health screening company. I saw from the records that you haven't been drug-tested since joining us last year. Everyone's meant to have at least one a year. Won't take long.'
Peter begins worrying. The alcohol will have worn off by now - an hour for every unit consumed, so it shouldn't be a problem - but what about that ecstasy tablet on Saturday night? Sweating slightly now, he hands over his urine sample.
How quickly, he wonders, does E leave the system... 24 hours? Or is it 48? It's a week, actually. Which is why the next day Peter is summoned to his boss's office. 'Sorry, Pete, we love your work but we just don't want drug-users on the staff,' says the managing director in his Stateside drawl. 'Orders from the chiefs in Illinois. Good luck in finding a new job.'
Top salesman or not, Peter is out. When he read his contract he was more interested in what bonuses he'd get and didn't notice that the firm could test anyone during working hours for 'substances of abuse' - and fire without compensation anyone whose sample proved positive.
If Peter's story sounds far- fetched, think again. Random drug and alcohol-testing is well on its way to becoming common practice in British workplaces. An estimated 10 per cent of companies, employing 2.6 million workers, already use them. Scared that the consequences of a mistake made by an employee under the influence of an illicit substance could prove costly, a growing number of firms are insisting that their staff are tested.
Some protest that workers are falling victim to an Orwellian import from America, which is increasingly puritanical and censorious in its attitude to smoking, drinking and drug use, and that civil liberties are being trampled in the process. But that apprehension is doing nothing to halt the drift towards a world where indulgence in your private life could cost you your career.
'It's understandable why more employers are doing this, especially in areas of work where safety is an issue,' says Mike Broad of Personnel Today magazine. 'But it's controversial because they are trying to monitor something that doesn't happen in work time. You may be responsible in your work time, and not drink at lunchtime for example, but this forces you to be responsible in your leisure time as well. These tests are like saying to a member of staff, "on Saturday night you can't smoke a joint or get really trashed or do anything excessive because on Monday morning you may be over the limits set down, fail a test and pay for that with your job".'
Owen Tudor, a health and safety policy officer at the TUC, said: 'It has been quite widespread in the United States since the mid-1980s, but we have noted a trend towards it among both American companies based here and British companies trying to ape their US counterparts.'
British transport company Stagecoach introduced staff drug testing last year after lengthy consultation with its workforce. Now all bus and train drivers can be tested at any time for recent drug or alcohol consumption.
Personnel Today has found that at least one in 10 employers already tests staff like this, and another 30 per cent of British companies are considering following suit.
Pilots, surgeons, air traffic controllers, mechanics, operators of dangerous equipment and those who drive for a living all require mental sharpness, physical dexterity and judgment which could be reduced by the lingering effect of, say, cannabis or cocaine.
Dr Jenny Leeser, clinical director of Bupa's occupational health division, says: 'More and more employers are getting interested in ensuring their employees are in peak condition, and are implementing stricter policies about, for example, alcohol, as a way of ensuring their investment in people is paying off.'
Peter Whittam of Huntingdon-based Mediprotektor UK, which produces diagnostic kits used to detect drug use, says employers' fear at being sued for a blunder by a member of their staff is the main reason for drug testing. 'There's a growing awareness that a firm could be held liable in a court for something an employee has done.' The possible introduction of corporate manslaughter legislation is also concentrating minds.
Random drug testing has become common on the railways since Morris Graham, the driver of a train that crashed at London's Cannon Street station in 1991, killing two people and injuring more than 500, was found to have traces of cannabis in a urine sample he gave after the accident. A Health and Safety Executive inquiry ruled that there was no evidence that Graham failed to apply the brakes properly, but British Rail said the finding of 50 nanograms per millilitre of cannabinoid products would have left him 'unfit for driving duties'.
Two years ago British Airways introduced drug and alcohol spot checks on pilots and cabin crew after a television documentary revealed that pilots were drinking heavily hours before taking charge of aircraft. Doctors and nurses may be next.
Employee drug testing is now one of Britain's boom industries, involving several dozen specialist companies and worth an estimated £200m a year. Medscreen, based in London's Docklands, carries out about 175,000 tests a year at about £65 a time. 'We work with 450 companies, two-thirds of which are in safety-critical sectors like oil, transport and dangerous manufacturing,' says the firm's Lindsay Hadfield. 'We test the obvious people you'd expect, like pilots and air traffic controllers, but also baggage checkers-in and aircraft maintenance crews.'
The tests are mainly intended as a deterrent, but they also identify offenders. 'Around 3-4 per cent of those 175,000 tests come up positive, either for drugs, alcohol or both, and those people are usually the subject of disciplinary action,' said Hadfield.
Rail companies insist that any employee who has a problem should declare it and will receive help. Anyone who fails to do so, and then fails a test, is deemed guilty of gross misconduct and dismissed.
'There are fewer white-collar jobs at the moment where safety issues are as critical, but that's going to change,' said Bupa's Dr Leeser. Bupa conducts 26,000 tests a year and is seeing a 20 per cent year-on-year rise in that figure. 'If you are under the influence, there could be consequences for a whole range of things you do at work,' said Leeser. 'An admin worker, for example, could injure their hand in the office guillotine, be off work as a result, and so cost the company money. People under the influence can easily make errors of judgment because their brain is working too slowly or too quickly, depending on the drug they have taken.'
Random checks will soon become much more common in banking, where a single misplaced computer stroke in a transaction to buy or sell shares could be very costly. 'There's a move towards screening in business-critical and financial-critical jobs, rather than just the traditional safety-critical lines of work,' says Medscreen's Hadfield. Some traders and stockbrokers in the City already undergo such tests.
Workplace drug testing is becoming more common at the same time as the consumption of illegal substances is rising. Numerous studies have shown that smoking a joint or taking an occasional E happens far more often, and is far more socially acceptable.
So far this new testing trend has not produced a test case in the High Court, but it can only be a matter of time before an employee sacked for failing a drug test challenges his dismissal by arguing that what he did and took on Saturday night did not affect his performance at work. Lawyers are divided about what will happen when such a case arises. The consensus is that anyone whose contract allows their employer to compel them to be tested probably wouldn't get very far. But sections of the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees a right to respect for private life, may help protect staff who indulge in their leisure time.
The TUC is among those who believe the trend has as much to do with employers' nosiness about what their staff get up to in their spare time as any safety or public liability issues. 'Very often this is just an infringement of people's civil liberties and a way of checking on people's personal habits outside the workplace,' says Tudor.
In the US, companies are used to having much more control over their employees' lives than in Britain. Some American companies' conditions of employment already forbid staff from taking part in risky activities such as skydiving or riding a motorbike. Now we, too, are slowly succumbing to this latest version of the American way of life.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/
Unhappy anniversary – Q2 2003 Unhappy anniversary
Published by The Guardian - Monday 21 April, 2003
Copyright: The Guardian
Forty years ago, Valium was the new wonder pill. Now, with up to a million Britons addicted to tranquillisers, GPs and drug companies are under fire. But as the long battle for compensation is fought out, the suffering continues
Much has changed in Pat Edwards's life in the past 40 years. She has divorced, she has moved from London to the South Coast, she has become a grandmother. But one thing has stayed the same: she is still taking the Valium.
Pat Edwards was 25 when she was first prescribed the drug at the end of 1962, a few months before its official launch the following year. She had become unaccountably weepy after the birth of her second child, a condition we may now recognise as post-natal depression. Her local GP in Hackney gave her four days' supply of Valium, a suitably cautious amount for a new treatment, and four days later, after some improvement, Edwards was given another small supply. The drugs seemed to have an immediate effect, and she made plans to return to her job as a hairdresser. But then something else happened.
'One morning I was on my mum's doorstep crying my eyes out. My mother called the doctor, and he didn't come round to see me but upped the dosage of my tablets. They went up from one tablet of five milligrams to two, so I was on 10 milligrams a day. This went on for another month, until one day I simply couldn't leave my mother's house. My mother thought I was being silly, but I would have terrible panic attacks and start sweating if I couldn't see the front door.'
Agoraphobia was not a well-recognised medical condition in the early Sixties. The doctor was called again, but Edwards says he failed to visit. Instead, the dosage was increased again, to 15 milligrams. He also prescribed Marplan, an anti-depressant. Edwards's condition failed to improve. 'In those days you believed in what your doctor gave you without question. I used to send him a stamped addressed envelope every month and he sent me back a month's supply of tablets.'
Edwards is 65 now, and housebound. She is a heavy-set woman, and looked to me like the actress Kathy Burke plus 30 years. She lives alone in a bungalow in Durrington, a short distance from Worthing in Sussex. Her mother died nine years ago, and her principal support comes from her daughter and her neighbour. She has received disability allowance only for the past eight years, since her osteoarthritis necessitated use of a wheelchair.
'In the past 40 years I haven't had a life,' she says. 'No one can say they've seen me go up the street on my own, or take my children out on my own, or go on a bus. When my daughter was at primary school her teacher told her she couldn't understand why I never came to the parents' evenings. If my mum hadn't been there to look after them they probably would have been taken into care.'
She is still taking the tablets, now prescribed under the generic name diazepam. Her dosage has been greatly reduced in the past few months, but she had a traumatic experience at Christmas after cutting down below five milligrams a day. When she first visited the local surgery in Durrington last summer her new GP greeted her with disbelief. He didn't think the drugs were doing any good. She told him she'd been on them for 40 years. He said: 'You shouldn't have been on them for more than four weeks.'
Valium and similar drugs in the benzodiazepine group are widely considered to belong to a previous generation, replaced in the treatment of insomnia, panic attacks and all manner of modern anxieties by more sophisticated drugs with side-effects of their own. The reality is somewhat different. In the year to March 2002, 12 and a half million prescriptions to benzodiazepines were written in England alone. In the previous year there were 13.028 million. The Department of Health has no indication as to how many patients are receiving repeat prescriptions, or for how long. But Professor Heather Ashton, a specialist in psycho-pharmacology at Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle who ran a withdrawal clinic for more than a decade, believes there are half a million people in the UK who have been taking benzodiazepines for several years. The official guidelines issued to prescribing doctors 15 years ago advises continued use for no more than 28 days. The Home Office has other figures, for the amount of deaths in England and Wales in which drug poisoning is included in coroners' reports. Between 1997 and 2000, cocaine was included in 273 reports, while diazepam and tamazepam - only two generic types out of 17 available for prescription - were included in 795.
Campaigners claim that more than one million people in the UK may be addicted to benzodiazepines, a family which includes anti-anxiety tranquilisers such as Ativan (lorazepam) and Xanax (alprazolam), sleeping pills such as Mogadon (nitrazepam) and anti-convulsive muscle-relaxants such as Klonopin (clonazepam). This is a disturbing statistic for many reasons, not least because it is a problem inflicted by our own health service. Addiction may occur after only two weeks' use, and it is so common that it is often ignored in the big debates about drug policies and the funding of withdrawal treatment. It is an addiction whose victims largely suffer in silence, impeded by the symptoms that first drove them to seek medical help and worsened by long-term use of what should have been a short-term solution.
Most patients in receipt of tranquillisers or sleeping pills do not consider themselves to be addicts until they attempt to reduce their dosage and, like Pat Edwards, find complete withdrawal impossible. It is not hard to find people who have suffered from benzodiazepine use, or people who are happy to talk of their experiences as a warning to others. The several men and women I spoke to tell stories unique only in their early details; their tales of involuntary dependence on their medication all end with a common catalogue of suffering and distress. They all find it hard to understand why this state of affairs has been allowed to exist for so long, and why we ever thought that these drugs would be the answer to our ills.
Part of the explanation lies among the trial papers of an experiment conducted in Sheffield in the late Fifties. Alec Jenner and his colleagues at the United Sheffield Hospital were at the beginning of their careers in psychiatric medicine when they read in a newspaper of a Swiss circus trainer who had found something that would calm his lions and tigers. 'I was intrigued whether this would have any human applications,' Jenner remembers. 'So I phoned up Roche, who produced this series of drugs in Switzerland, and they were already thinking about marketing it for people. They wanted people to do studies which would add to the conviction that it was worth giving to humans. So they jumped on us, really.'
Jenner believes he conducted the first double-blind controlled trial of both Librium and Valium (a trial in which neither the patient nor the doctor knows who's taking what until after the results are compiled). 'Before us, people had published their impressions of it,' he says 'but it was less scientific than ours. The way we did this - and now it looks naive, but then I didn't see it - we gave people two bottles marked A and B, and we told them what was in them without saying which was which. The bottles contained two of three things - either a barbiturate, or a benzodiazepine, or nothing - just chalk pills. They had to say which helped them most.'
Jenner is 73 now, and still lives in Sheffield. He speaks without the benefit of his notes from the trials, and he admits he cannot remember the exact number of patients he studied - he thinks it was about 200. But he is sure of his findings. 'The benzodiazepines came out heavily on top. The improvement of patients on the drugs was the only thing that came out strikingly - the side-effects were unconvincing. They were infinitely safer than barbiturates, which was what people had used to treat anxiety before, and which carried a great risk of fatal overdose. So we were enthusiastic. I myself took enormous quantities to see if there was any toxic effects, but my wife said I was just the same.'
But Jenner did not test his drugs, or those of his patients, over time. 'In those days drug addiction didn't appear to be a problem in Britain at all - I'd never seen a heroin addict, for example. It now seems rather mad that we didn't consider this. One of the most interesting things was that the side-effects experienced by those on the chalk was about the same as those on the drugs.'
Jenner's work came as a delight to Hoffmann-La Roche. Parallel studies, which also failed to consider the possibility of addiction, did find great uses for Librium and Valium (both drugs have a similar chemical formula, but Valium is five times as potent). In 1961 Roche's researchers in its laboratories in New Jersey published a report stating that Valium had only mild side-effects, including fatigue, dizziness and rash, but these were results based on only seven patients. The results from two other patients were not included because they considered their side-effects too severe to continue on the trial. On average, patients took Valium for only 12-and-a-half weeks.
The drug was launched globally in 1963, and it became, along with LSD, the smallest icon of its generation (taken together, the two drugs signalled a paradoxical age of peace, love and anxiety). By the time the Rolling Stones sang about 'Mother's Little Helper' in 1966, Librium and Valium and the sleeping pill Mogadon had helped Roche to become the biggest pharmaceuticals company in the world. Valium's triumph inspired every large pharmaceutical company to market a benzodiazepine of its own. Upjohn was soon competing with Xanax; Wyeth would grow wealthy on Ativan.
In Sheffield, Alec Jenner remembers feeling glad that his work was having some beneficial effects. 'I had no idea that it was going to be so enormously successful. We were quite excited that we'd backed a winner.' Financially his rewards were scant. 'We weren't offered anything for doing it. They did pay for us to have a camping holiday in Vienna and they gave me money to buy a flame photometer for measuring lithium in blood which must have cost about £50.'
In 1979, about 30 million prescriptions for benzodiazepines were issued in the UK, while the worldwide figure was put at three billion. But by then problems with the drugs had been a regular feature of medical literature for more than a decade. As early as 1968 the Journal of the American Medical Association had noted how a number of psychiatric patients had become suicidal after only a few days' use, and noted how the condition of others worsened when they came off the treatment.
'The problems of addiction took me some time to believe,' Jenner says. 'But after a while it became obvious that that scepticism was not justified.' In the Seventies, Jenner subjected Valium to another trial, though not with Roche. He told 50 or 60 local people to come off the drug without a gradual reduction in dosage. About 30 per cent complained of problems. 'It was becoming obvious that we had been naive about the addiction potential. I was on the Committee on Safety of Medicines for a while, so I was getting more and more information through. One chap made a suicide attempt and we got a long letter from his wife saying, "Put him back on and use this letter as our permission that we feel it's the only way he can go on living." So we went on prescribing it.'
Jenner is now retired, but says he likes to keep in touch with developments in psychiatric care. He is interested in the mental healthcare drugs that followed his work on Librium and Valium, but notes that they too are beset with damaging consequences. (Upjohn's Halcion was banned in Britain in 1991 after many reports of amnesia, depression, and violent behaviour, while Rohypnol still receives adverse coverage for its illicit use as a 'date-rape' drug. The newer drugs such as Prozac and Seroxat target a different receptor in the brain, and despite the fact that one of their chief selling points at launch was that they were non-addictive, many users suffer severe symptoms when they withdraw.)
Jenner regards his researches with a combination of pride and embarrassment. 'I feel naive but not guilty,' he says. 'What seemed so good about the benzodiazepines when I was playing with them was that it seemed like we really did have a drug that didn't have many problems. But in retrospect it's difficult to put a spanner into a wristwatch and expect that it won't do any harm.'
Ten weeks ago in the Terrace Marquee at the House of Commons, Phil Woolas, a Labour government whip and MP for Oldham East and Saddleworth, spoke at a meeting to mark the tabling of an Early Day motion seeking redress for some of the damage of benzodiazepine addiction. 'So what's the scale of the problem,' he asked his audience of MPs, solicitors and current users. 'Statistics show that something in the order of 1.2 million people in this country are still in receipt of repeat prescriptions of benzodiazepines, some 20 or 30 years after the danger of that repeat prescription became well known.'
The motion, which has now been signed by more than 100 MPs, called for a review of the disability guidelines to ensure recognition of benzodiazepine addiction, and for greater support services for addicts. 'We are not just telling people to come off the drugs instantly,' Woolas said. 'Sometimes I have the nightmare that if we do have the breakthrough that we are all campaigning for, whereby the Department of Health were to stop prescriptions, the problems that would cause would be horrendous. The key is phased withdrawal, and treatment and help for people coming off the drugs.'
That was not the first time the issue had been raised at Westminster. Woolas addressed the problem in a debate in 1999, and five years earlier, when he was Shadow Secretary of State for Health, David Blunkett wrote a supportive letter to a patient suffering withdrawal symptoms in which he called the issue of benzodiazepines 'a national scandal'. Since Labour came to power, however, progress has been slow at best, and there is still no specific funding for benzodiazepine withdrawal treatment. 'We shall not give up,' Phil Woolas maintains. 'In my view there's a conspiracy of silence ... I believe the problem exists because at a fundamental level, it is too huge and too horrific for people to cope with and grasp the enormity of.'
As well as political lobbying, redress has been sought through the courts. By the late Eighties 1,700 people had received legal aid to bring a class action against Roche Products Ltd and John Wyeth and Brothers Ltd, the makers of Ativan. Their principal claim was that the companies were aware of the dangers of addiction and other side-effects before making this information available to prescribers and patients. Roche and Wyeth denied this, and the action was discontinued in 1994 after the Legal Aid Board withdrew funding. The majority of the claimants' cases were complicated by the difficulty in proving the harm caused by the drugs as opposed to the psychological problems they may have had before they were prescribed them.
Seventy-five people subsequently tried to pursue their own cases against the companies, but were also hampered by lack of funds and their claims were struck out by the Court of Appeal in 1996. One case, begun in 1993 against Roche by a formerly successful Scottish businessman who claims his life was ruined by Mogadon, is under consideration for trial in the Court of Session in Edinburgh and may be heard in full next year. Another, brought by a woman against Wyeth, is under consideration in Dublin.
Last summer, benzodiazepine addicts did receive news of a legal success, albeit against a new target: overprescribing GPs. Ray Nimmo, the patient involved in the case, and his solicitor Caroline Moore of Keeble Hawson in Sheffield, were also present for the launch of the parliamentary motion in November, and Moore outlined the case. Nimmo was 32 when he was first prescribed benzodiazepines in the mid-Eighties, after an allergic reaction to another drug and stress brought on by illness to his father. He was given 90 milligrams of Valium a day, a prescription that continued at a reduced dosage for 14 years.
'The effects were shocking,' Caroline Moore recalled. 'Ray's personality changed, he became agoraphobic, and he became unable to cope with life. In 1986 he gave up his co-directorship [of a scaffolding company]. Ray and his wife planned to extend their family, but Ray became convinced he was not fit to be a father.'
When another doctor advised withdrawal in 1998, Nimmo underwent the usual problems, from which he believes he is still suffering. His legal action against his GPs, a husband and wife team, was settled out of court in June 2002 for £40,000 plus costs. Success was made possible by reference to a key report issued in January 1988 by the UK Committee on Safety of Medicines. This noted that 'withdrawal symptoms can occur with benzodiazepines following therapeutic doses given for SHORT periods of time' (the report's own emphasis). New guidelines were issued to all GPs. This document, only two pages long, advised clearly that benzodiazepines should not be prescribed for more than four weeks, including a tapering-off period.
Similar guidelines were adopted by the Royal College of Psychiatrists, and were swiftly included in the new literature from Roche. Caroline Moore says that anyone who has been prescribed benzodiazepines for a prolonged period since 1988 who wasn't part of the group actions may be able to bring a claim against their prescriber, although their chances of success may depend on what advice they received regarding addiction and whether they have been offered help with withdrawal.
Moore doubts whether Ray Nimmo's case was the first to reach a successful conclusion, but merely the first not to include a gagging clause. Since his case was made public, she has received many phone calls from people who have similar claims. 'More stories about ruined lives,' she says, 'including one case of a girl who was given benzodiazepines at 13.'
After her address at the House of Commons, Moore was congratulated by Barry Haslam, who also has a case against a former GP. Haslam, a qualified accountant from Oldham, spent 10 years on various benzodiazepines and is the driving force behind a charity called Beat the Benzos. His organisation has many aims, including the reclassification of the drugs from Class C to Class A, which would put them on a par with heroin. He is hopeful that the lead on this may come from the European Parliament. He shows me a report from the Hong Kong Medical Journal which notes a 50 per cent reduction in average yearly prescription of benzodiazepines since they were classified as dangerous drugs in 1992.
When Haslam came off Valium, Ativan and others he says some remarkable things happened. 'I couldn't believe the colour of the sky and the flowers, and the noise was so loud.' But his wonder has now been replaced by anger.
'For me, the Government Ministers are cowards,' he says. 'If they had gone through one-hundredth of what I've gone through then they would have done something about this long ago.
'Why have GPs and psychiatrists been allowed to ride roughshod over the advice of people more qualified to judge the drugs than they are? And why have the Government looked the other way? Why have they allowed so many people to get addicted to a legal drug and not put any money into services to help people?'
These are valid questions, and they are as valid now as they were 15 years ago. Used correctly, for very short periods, benzodiazepines may still provide a respite from common symptoms. But their overprescription has left a trail of misery for which no one will take responsibility and only a few seem prepared to confront.
Roche still makes three brands of benzodiazepine for the UK, but it discontinued its production of Valium last year. In its press release, the company explained how effective the treatment had been, how widely it was available in generic form, and of its pleasure that it was designated 'essential drug status' by the World Health Organisation. In what some may regard as a paradoxical statement, the Swiss firm also claimed it continued to be the second largest foreign investor in healthcare in the UK.
http://www.benzo.org.uk/ Beat the Benzos: (01457) 876 355
http://www.guardian.co.uk/
The police and hard drugs: the Cleveland report – Q2 2003 The police and hard drugs: the Cleveland report
Published by The Guardian - Monday 21 April, 2003
Copyright: The Guardian
The Association of Chief Police Officers will announce next month a new position on hard drugs, advocating the legalisation of heroin. This shift of policy builds on controversial research published two years ago by Cleveland police in the north east of England which was used by Chief Constable Barry Shaw, who remains in charge of the force, to propose a new approach to the "war on drugs". While the proposals were not adopted by Cleveland at that time, they are now set to become the focus of a national debate in the wake of the rapid liberalisation of the debate on policing drugs.
What the Cleveland report says
These are extracts from the Cleveland report. The full report is available from the pro-reform pressure group Transform and can be read here.
Availability
Recreational drugs have been used by humans across the world for thousands of years. Current UK policy (proscription) dates from the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 and is clearly based upon American experience. The UK government is also signatory to international treaties rendering the drugs trade illegal worldwide.
No logic
"It can be argued that there is no logic to the current pattern of illegality. Some drugs (alcohol, nicotine) are freely available despite very clear evidence of their harmful effects. Others such as cannabis are proscribed with their possession being subject to severe penalties, despite the fact that they are perceived by many medical scientists to be less harmful than alcohol. The illogicality of this approach (which seems to be based upon no more than historical accident) leads many young people in particular to level charges of hypocrisy at `the establishment'. This is a very difficult argument to counter".
The failure of prohibition
"There is overwhelming evidence to show that the prohibition based policy in place in this country since 1971 has not been effective in controlling the availability or use of proscribed drugs. If there is indeed a `war of drugs' it is not being won; drugs are demonstrably cheaper and more readily available than ever before. It seems that the laws of supply and demand are operating in a textbook fashion ...
Members may wish to ask themselves whether we have learned the lessons from alcohol prohibition in the United States in the 1920's, from Gandhi's civil disobedience campaign in India in the 1940's and from the Poll Tax here in the UK in the 1980's. If a sufficiently large (and apparently growing) part of the population chooses to ignore the law for whatever reason, then that law becomes unenforceable. A modern western democracy, based on policing by consent and the rule of law may find itself powerless to prevent illegal activity - in this case the importation and use of controlled drugs."
Drugs and crime
The report considers the links between drugs and crime, arguing that "as a result of this illegality their market price is very high indeed, as the suppliers carry significant risks".
Organised crime
The report quotes government assessments that the illegal drugs trade is worth £400 billion - 8% of all international trade - and is as big as the global trade in oil and gas. "The profits to be made are truly enormous - the pharmaceutical price of heroin is less than £1 per gram, but the street price in the UK is about 80 times higher. At these sort of profit margins it is well worth while buying a gun to protect your investment - and a third of all firearms incidents committed in Cleveland in 1998 are demonstrably drug related. Organised crime gangs are every bit as difficult to stamp out as are terrorists, once they have taken root, and provided the market continues to exist. The best example of this is the mafia in the USA whose development was given an enormous boost by alcohol prohibition."
Commission of crime
"Many prohibited drugs are very strongly addictive, as well as expensive. A serious heroin user needs to find say £50 per day to fund their habit, in cash. This sort of money is difficult to obtain by legitimate means, so they have to turn to crime. Nationally about 30% of persons arrested by the police are dependant upon one or more illegal drug, and about 32% of the proceeds of crime seem to be geared to the purchase of heroin, cocaine or crack. .... The main crimes committed are shoplifting (by far the greatest), selling drugs and burglary. One research project has shown that 1,000 addicts committed 70,000 criminal acts during a 90-day period prior to their intake for treatment. It is clear that the very high cost of drugs is caused by their illegality, and that these high costs are causing large amounts of acquisitive crime. Is this acceptable?"
Criminalisation
"Most drug users seem not to commit significant amounts of crime - their only offence is to choose to use a drug which is technically illegal. The best example of this is cannabis (the UK has the highest rate of cannabis use in Europe, higher even than in the Netherlands which has a tolerance policy). The illogical pattern of proscription causes people who abuse alcohol or nicotine to be treated purely as victims, whereas those who abuse cannabis become criminals. If caught they face a criminal record and social exclusion.
Alternatives
"There is only one serious alternative to the proscription policy - the legalisation and regulation of some or all drugs. Any debate about such an approach must raise and then deal with fundamental questions about the societal effects. What would be the health and social impact? Would the use of drugs increase or decline? What would be the impact on crime? The potential consequences are very significant indeed - are they to be countenanced?"
The report argues that "since legalisation and regulation for the currently proscribed drugs has never been tried properly anywhere in the world there is little hard evidence available", although lessons can be learnt from the regulation of legal drugs like nicotine and alcohol, and from liberalistation
"Some European cities (notably Geneva and London) have experimented with radical solutions by issuing heroin under prescription. A number of studies have now demonstrated crime reductions as a result (in some cases startling ones). Heroin users previously caught up in a cycle of drugs and crime started to lead reasonably stable lives, some holding down jobs and a `normal' family life. These experiments (whose results have not always been clear cut) have not been continued largely because they were to the detriment of maintained methadone programmes which are the currently `approved' method of reducing addiction.
There is also contrary evidence. Defacto legalisation is in place in parts of South America where the drugs trade is out of any control. The effects are quite frightening. However this is without any effective regulation, and without the health improvement and harm reduction programmes which seem to have been so successful in the UK (even in the limited fashion seen to date).
Conclusions
· A number of tentative conclusions can be drawn from the available evidence:
· Attempts to restrict availability of illegal drugs have failed so far, everywhere
· There is little or no evidence that they can ever work within acceptable means in a democratic society
· Demand for drugs seems still to be growing, locally and nationally. The market seems to be some way from saturation
· There is little evidence that conventional conviction and punishment has any effect on offending levels
· There is, however, growing evidence that treatment and rehabilitation programmes can have a significant impact on drug misuse and offending
· There is some evidence that social attitudes can be changed over time, by design. The best example available to date is drink-driving, but success has taken a generation to achieve
· If prohibition does not work, then either the consequences of this have to be accepted, or an alternative approach must be found
· The most obvious alternative approach is the legalisation and subsequent regulation of some or all drugs
· There are really serious social implications to such an approach which have never been thought through in a comprehensive manner, anywhere
http://www.guardian.co.uk/
Youth are targets of US drug war – Q2 2003 Youth are targets of drug war
Published by BYU - Monday 21 April, 2003
Copyright: BYU
Attorney General Mark Shurtleff is attempting to take the rave out of Utah's rave scene. Shurtleff has released a multi-media CD called "Club Drugs - Nothing to Rave About," in an effort to teach law enforcement officers and parents of the signs and dangers of the club drug culture across the state.
Utah's drug culture has snatched the Latter-day Saint motto CTR and morphed it from "Choose The Right" to "Choose To Rave."
Many in Utah Attorney General's office have concluded that Latter-day Saint youth are becoming the target of a local drug war ranging from club drugs to over-the-counter medications.
"Two years ago we noticed that the jewelry that the kids wear featured things like 'PLUR', which is the rave motto - peace, love, unity, and respect," said Tracey Tabet, community relations director in the Utah Attorney General's office.
Paul Murphy, spokesman for the Attorney General's office added that the Choose to Rave catch phrase has also been seen on jewelry.
Dealers of many of the rave oriented drugs in the state are cashing in on the state's relatively wealthy LDS youth.
"They (rave organizers) really preach inclusion and acceptance, so for a young person who is looking for a place to fit in, they will find it there," Tabet said. "Ecstasy creates a tremendous euphoria where you love everything and everybody. So you'll see kids who would never ever fraternize with each other in the hallways, hanging out at a rave, just because of the environment the drugs create."
Murphy said many of the drug dealers target LDS youth because the kids "look at these drugs and they think, 'well, they're not tobacco, you don't smoke them, you don't snort them up your nose, and you don't shoot them up your arm'. They try to pass them off as being vitamins."
Murphy added, "A lot of them justify it. Many of them don't consider them real drugs."
Leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have long clarified that the Word of Wisdom includes dangerous drugs. President Spencer W. Kimball re-emphasized this standard in a letter to the Church in 1981. President Gordon B. Hinckley has spoken specifically on the topic of drugs and even specified rave parties as "a dead end."
Elder Neal A. Maxwell of the Council of the Twelve spoke out against the rave culture two years ago in the Church's General Conference.
"Ecstasy should read misery; Rave is really a mournful mutter emanating from sensuality gone amok. For instance, some participants foolishly think a little lewd dancing is harmless. These individuals do not 'sin ignorantly.' By imitating and by underestimating the enemy, they end up compromising themselves, while confusing and disappointing their friends!"
Though the church is opposed to club drugs, dealers continue to target LDS youth by rationalizing these drugs into no more than herbal enhancers and energy drinks like Red Bull.
"The pill really eases the anxiety for first time users verses handing them a joint or a cigarette because so many of these kids are LDS and have always been raised to see smoking as particularly repugnant," Tabet said. "One problem is that these club drugs are gateway drugs that seem very harmless at first, although they are definitely not."
The Attorney General's office reported one young girl who went from using ecstasy to using methamphetamine and cocaine within six months.
Dr. Bruce Woolley of BYU's Physiology and Developmental Biology Department said ecstasy is probably the most popular club drug in Utah.
"It (ecstasy) is wildly popular with young, educated Caucasian men, which describes a vast majority of the state," said Barry Jamison of the Federal Drug Enforcement Administration.
But other drugs are quickly establishing a nasty reputation in the state as well. GHB, one of the more common date rape drugs, is becoming a serious problem.
Woolley said it, like all synesthetic drugs, creates a dream like state, but is more serious because of its deadly toxology.
GHB incapacitates its users and frequently causes amnesia as well as major damage to the central nervous system. Rohypnol, nitrous oxide, and ketamine, which is actually an animal tranquilizer, are also gaining popularity in Utah, said Sgt. Guy of the Utah County Drug Task Force.
"Both GHB and Rohypnol have a tendency to relax the gag reflex, so if someone wants to vomit and they are laying on their back they could drown in their own vomit," Woolley said.
Although most people typically pay for these drugs, it is not uncommon for attractive young woman to get their drugs for free.
"Date rape is a risk that is always present at these parties. Whether you ingest the drug accidentally because someone slipped it into your drink or because you try it just for the first time, or you are just a regular recreational user, you are putting yourself at risk for serious sexual assault," Tabet said.
Last week, the Partnership for a Drug free America released a report that kids who had attended a rave are seven times more likely to try ecstasy.
Besides the club drugs, however, officials at the Attorney General's office stressed that not going to raves does not protect children from the drug scene.
One growing problem in Utah is the abuse of pain suppressants like OxiContin, which mimics the effects of heroine and stays in the body for a long time.
"Pharmacies across the state have begun posting signs saying that they don't have OxiContin to avoid being burglarized," Jamison said.
Tabet said other common over-the-counter drugs are also becoming a problem in utah.
"Over-the-counter cold medications like Robitussin and Coricidin are being taken in doses of 20- 30 pills at a time, and I don't think parents have a clue. Coricidin is just a few bucks in the grocery store. Kids have described the sensation as feeling like you're walking through Jell-o," Tabet said.
http://newsnet.byu.edu/
The CRACK den next door – Q2 2003 The crack den next door
Published by The Guardian - Monday 21 April, 2003
Copyright: The Guardian
Police policy towards neighbourhood drug dealers is hopelessly inadequate and needs a complete overhaul
The oddest thing about living next door to a crack den is how boring it becomes. After a while, the screaming rows, the urine-soaked steps and abuse from users become predictable and depressing rather than disturbing. I was scared when addicts tried to enter my home and wept with frustration when I had to scrape human faeces away from my front door. But I was largely inured to these problems until I turned the corner of my road one morning and saw the Crimestoppers posters.
"Don't let London suffer the side effects of crack," the adverts thunder, urging us to shop dealers. At that point, anger took over.
Well, I have shopped and shopped and shopped, and so have most of my neighbours. We have shopped so enthusiastically we make Elton John look frugal. We have sung like a choir of canaries, offering times, dates and vehicle number plates.
Six months on, the crack house is thriving and pensioners are still scared to go out on their own. Hardly surprising, since crack dealing is associated with aggression, violence and theft. Users spend almost twice as much on their habit as heroin addicts - £478 a month, on average - which might explain why they are so keen to get into our homes.
For all these reasons, I welcome the Home Office's new plans to tackle the problem. Bob Ainsworth, the drugs minister, has promised extra cash for 37 crack-ridden communities, including mine in London; overall, the government will beef up its anti-drugs budget by £500m to £1.5bn by 2005.
It has issued new guidelines for those fighting drugs and has promised to improve policing, tailor services for addicts and support vulnerable young people to stop them falling prey to the drug in the first place. Police forces are targeting markets and officers have closed down three dens in my neighbourhood alone.
All of this sounds terrific, and much of it might help. Perhaps, with luck, "our" crackhouse will be the next to go.
The good news is that crack can still be controlled; it is not (yet) an epidemic. According to last year's British Crime Survey, only 0.2% of 16- to 59-year-olds had taken it in the last year.
Dealing is heavily concentrated in deprived areas like mine. But it is not an inevitable consequence of poverty and there are measures that can - and must - be taken while broader issues are addressed. The question is whether a 34-page plan will succeed where common sense has so far failed. The inadequacies of existing practice are blindingly obvious to anyone who has encountered crack use.
First, we need prompt action. We know that police resources are stretched, but crack must be a priority. I say that not just because it is in my back (or front) yard, but because the longer dealing is allowed to continue, the more entrenched it becomes.
Suppliers and their customers become increasingly brazen; dealers have time to find vulnerable people whose homes they can use when existing crack houses are closed. Worst of all, users become addicts.
Forget the myths. No one gets hooked on crack from a single hit. It takes time to de velop a habit, which is why we need to disrupt that process as soon as possible.
For the same reason, we need to target users as well as suppliers. Dealers are smart enough to sell crack in small quantities so that customers take it at once.
Police say there is no point in "attending" because the evidence has disappeared by the time they arrive. But that can hardly be the case when they are called in the middle of a large delivery.
Second, we need better coordination. Information is not filtering through organisations, never mind reaching other agencies. You can report an immediate problem to police, but that does not mean that their colleagues will know about it the next day or even the next week. They complain about a lack of help but squander what they are given.
Coordination also means thinking about long-term consequences, ensuring that users are rehoused in new areas and are not replaced by vulnerable people who are likely to fall prey to dealers.
Third, action must be sustained. At one point the police camped out on my street for four days, intercepting addicts on their way to the crackhouse. Glorious peace reigned... for four days; the morning after they left, the users returned.
Most of all, we need help for addicts. Users must be offered help at the first opportunity and must continue to be offered support even if - more probably when - they reject it or relapse.
Heroin addicts get methadone; crack users lack even that imperfect substitute, so need treatment such as therapy rather than a drug-based regime.
The government's most important promise is to think creatively, and to ensure early appointments and low waiting times.
That crack addicts are among the drug users most reluctant to seek treatment is more, not less, reason to focus on helping them. My neighbour and his customers are not bad people. They are desperate. So are those of us who have to live with them.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/
Girls’ addiction risks different from boys: US study – Q2 2003 Girls' addiction risks different from boys: US study
Published by Reuters - Monday 21 April, 2003
Copyright: Reuters
WASHINGTON, Feb 5 (Reuters) - Girls and young women who use alcohol and drugs are more likely than boys and young men to attempt suicide, according to a study on Wednesday.
Girls also can get hooked faster than boys, even when using the same or smaller amount of a particular substance, according to the study released at a briefing by Columbia University's National Center for Addiction and Substance Abuse, known as CASA.
Participants in the briefing included Columba Bush, wife of Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and sister-in-law of President George W. Bush. Her daughter, Noelle, has had several run-ins with the law because of drugs.
"My heart goes out to all those saddened parents across America whose daughters have sunk into substance abuse and addiction," said Bush, a CASA board member.
CASA head Joseph Califano, who was President Jimmy Carter's secretary of health, education and welfare, said the study underscored the need for different approaches to prevention and treatment for girls and young women.
"Unisex prevention programs -- largely developed without regard to gender, often with males in mind -- fail to influence millions of girls and young women," he said.
The study, which covered the years from early adolescence to age 22, found, for instance, that girls are at particularly high risk if they are depressed, stressed, or victims of physical or sexual abuse.
Girls who have eating disorders are also at high risk, as are girls who start puberty early or whose families have moved frequently.
The research also found a possible link between coffee consumption and substance abuse. Girls and young women who drink coffee are significantly more likely to smoke and drink alcohol, and to start at an earlier age.
Among the lawmakers at the briefing was Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, a New York Democrat, who proposed legislation to target the growing problem of abuse of legal prescription drugs, including painkillers, stimulants and tranquilizers.
http://www.reuters.com/
Survey reveals US teen use of ECSTASY, other illegal drugs declined in ’02 – Q2 2003 Survey reveals US teen use of Ecstasy, other illegal drugs declined in '02
Published by Yahoo News - Monday 21 April, 2003
Copyright: Yahoo News
The number of American teens who tried the club drug Ecstasy last year dropped slightly, but experts warn that the drug still has a dangerous level of popularity, particularly among teens who attend all-night dance parties called raves.
A report released today shows that 2.6 million teenagers have tried Ecstasy at least once. The drug produces an intense high, but it can also lead to kidney and brain damage.
The 2002 Partnership Attitude Tracking Study surveyed 7,084 teens in grades 7 through 12 across the country and found that overall drug use among teens has declined since 1997.
In 2002, 48% of teenagers, or 11.1 million kids, reported trying an illicit drug, down from 53% in 1997. Those findings mirror the Monitoring the Future survey, a report released late last year that also found an overall drop in teen drug use.
The survey, sponsored by the New York-based Partnership for a Drug-Free America, shows that teens are more likely to view certain drugs as dangerous, an attitude that experts say usually corresponds with a downturn in substance abuse.
In fact, the survey found that 76% of kids said there is great risk in using Ecstasy regularly. Yet many teens felt there was no harm in trying the drug: The survey found that one out of nine children in America had tried the drug.
''That is frightening,'' says Scott Swartzwelder, a drug and alcohol researcher at the Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C. He says Ecstasy is a powerful neurotoxin that can damage the learning centers of the brain after regular use.
The new survey also found that kids attending raves were seven times more likely to use Ecstasy. It is a stimulant and allows users to dance all night long.
The survey also found:
* Marijuana remains the most widely used illicit drug; four out of 10 teens reported using it at some point. But the survey found that like other drugs, marijuana use has dropped in recent years.
* Inhalant use by teens has declined significantly since 1995. This year's survey found that 10% of teens said they had abused inhalants in the past year, down from 16% in 1995.
Inhalants are household products such as glue that produce a high when sniffed.
* LSD use declined in 2002 as 8% of teens reported use of the drug at some point in their lives, down from 10% the previous year.
Parents can play a big role in making sure a child stays drug-free, Swartzwelder says. He suggests a frank talk about the dangers of drugs like Ecstasy.
''The best drug education happens around the dining-room table,'' he says.
http://news.yahoo.com/
Under the noses of the Israeli police – February 2003 Under the noses of the Israeli police
Published by Ha'aretz - Monday 4 February, 2003
Copyright: Ha'aretz
Drug use in East Jerusalem is rising steadily. Residents of the Palestinian city do not trust the Israeli police to efficiently combat the problem, but in the absence of enforcement institutions of their own they are helpless.
Drug dealers in East Jerusalem operate almost openly, say social workers and residents who are trying to combat the phenomenon. They claim that very often the dealers operate right under the noses of Israeli police officers - beside the branch of the Interior Ministry in East Jerusalem, in the vicinity of Damascus Gate, near the Flower Gate, in the Ras al Amud neighborhood beside the police headquarters and in the Christian Quarter of the Old City, right on the route taken by students on their way to school.
One does not need particularly sharp eyes to distinguish the pair of youths acting secretively in a corner and afterward hurriedly exchanging a handful of bills for something hidden in clenched fist. One does not have to be an expert to figure out that the youths on the corner of Sultan Suleiman St. are dragging on a hash or marijuana joint and not on a regular cigarette.
People in East Jerusalem can tell you that during the Christmas and New Year period, the drug of choice is LSD and that it is easy to obtain. That doesn't mean that it is hard to obtain heroin. One social worker who deals with addicts says a gram of heroin costs $70-80 in Jerusalem markets these days, compared to $200 a few months ago. The laws of the free market economy work - the price drops when supply rises.
Addicted at 16
Once only the Shuafat refugee camp and the Old City were stigmatized as "drug dens." Today, says Wisam Jawhan, who works in a Palestinian institute that advises and assists addicts and their families, drugs are everywhere. They have entrapped young people from all types of homes - religious and secular, rich and poor, refugees and the children of established Jerusalem families. Jawhan has also encountered young Palestinian women who use ecstasy and marijuana.
Each year the addicts Jawhan is asked to treat are younger and younger. If a 16-year-old is already an addict, one can only guess at what age he began using light drugs.
The high rate of drug users and addicts in East Jerusalem is another clear indication of the creation of a huge Palestinian slum in the Israeli capital. This symptom is joined by the tremendous extent of poverty (municipality statistics indicate that 66 percent of the Palestinians in Jerusalem live below the poverty line - more than anywhere else in the state), the blatant neglect of development and infrastructure, housing density that is among the highest in the city, building violations (for whatever reason) to the point of endangering lives, street gangs that control territory practically unimpeded, political-religious alienation between the authorities and the residents.
In 1999 the Arab Thought Forum (ATF), a center for Palestinian research in East Jerusalem, initiated a study of drug addiction among Palestinians in Jerusalem in order to increase anti-drug activity and reduce drug use. Addiction and the widespread use of drugs - with much higher levels than among Palestinian society in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and higher than among Jewish-Israeli society - have been worrying the capital's Palestinian community for years.
Members of the ATF feel this use of drugs indicates the extent of social and personal frustration among the community's youngsters, the disintegration of family cohesion, the demise of social and religious conventions and the apathy of the authorities.
The ATF's study was conducted by sociologist Michel Sayegh, in conjunction with a group of field workers - rehabilitated addicts. The study was published in 2001, six months after the outbreak of the bloody hostilities of September 2000. Sayegh and Jawhan believe the number of drug users has only risen since then.
A livelihood from crime
It is hard to verify the estimates because, among other reasons, the Authority for the War Against Drugs in Israel was unable to provide Haaretz with updated figures on the extent of addiction in East Jerusalem so that they could be compared with the extent of addiction in Israel. The authority, the body that coordinates all the activities in this area also failed to provide information on the rehabilitation facilities available to Palestinians. Haaretz received no response to a list of questions sent to the authority's spokesman, Shamai Golan, on January 6, 2003 and again on January 12, despite assurances that the information would be provided.
Sayegh based his research partially on the 1999 figures published by the authority. The gap between the ratio of drug users among the Jews and Arabs in Jerusalem is similar to the gap in the ratio between poor Jews and poor Arabs (27.8 percent compared to 66 percent). According to the figures published in Sayegh's study, 10,500 Jerusalem Arabs (5.5 percent) used drugs in 1999, compared to 14,434 Jews (3.3 percent). These figures were provided by the Central Bureau of Statistics. Jawhan says that the figures do not portray the severity of the problem and estimates that some 19,000 Palestinians in Jerusalem are drug users and alcoholics.
Sayegh's study found "only" 5,000 Palestinian drug addicts (2.4 percent of the Palestinian population). Statistics compiled by the anti-drug authority in 2000 showed that 6,000 Jerusalem Arabs (almost 3 percent) and 8,000 Jews (about 2 percent) were addicted to drugs. Sayegh also found some not very surprising correlations between socio-personal status and drug use. 94 percent of the fathers of the 250 addicts who participated in the study were unemployed or were not working for other reasons (such as disability, illness or age). Some 60 percent of those surveyed were from single parent families; the fathers of half of them were illiterate; 16.4 percent of the addicts were illiterate themselves, 29.6 percent had attended elementary school and 30.8 percent had completed ninth grade.
Sayegh's research showed that a large proportion of the addicts were young adults, with 32 percent being between the ages of 20 and 22 at the time of the survey and 27.6 between 23 and 25. Most of the rest were older. Some 19.6 percent of those surveyed said their families were helping them financially, 46 percent said they earned a livelihood from theft and other crimes and the remaining 34.4 percent said they worked for a living or subsisted on savings from previous employment.
Frustration, depression
The scourge of drugs in East Jerusalem is worst and has been around the longest in the Christian Quarter of the Old City, according to local residents. The problem began back in the 1970s and was so bad that it was one of the main causes behind the emigration of many Christian families. Former addicts say that even today, any new drug that hits the market appears first in the Christian Quarter. People who are active locally in the war against drugs note that Christian families suffer most from more than one family member being an addict or drug user. On the one hand the Christian families have been more attracted to the modern customs of Western Jerusalem, but on the other, since most of these families are middle class, their ambitions for social and professional advancement, just like those of middle class Muslims, have been blocked in the city expropriated by Israel.
The families can afford higher education, but the Israeli job market was and is closed to Palestinian professionals such as doctors, lawyers and accountants, even though they are residents of Jerusalem. In Christian society, unlike in Muslim society, alcohol is permitted. This removes another important defense against dependency in cases in which personal-family status, frustration, a feeling of being trapped and unemployment lay the groundwork for addiction. And Palestinians in East Jerusalem have many reasons to feel personal frustration and depression, say Sayegh, Jawhan and other community workers like Maha Abu Dia, director of the Center from Women's Counseling in East Jerusalem.
The center serves Palestinian women from the West Bank and Jerusalem, who complain of discrimination and violence both inside and outside the family. Abu Dia noticed that the complaints of violence or abuse in the home are not connected to drunkenness or drug addiction, while those of women from East Jerusalem usually stem from violence against them due to the addiction of a family member.
Many share Abu Dia's impression that despite the poverty, frustration and depression among residents of the West Bank and Gaza, the problem of drug addiction is not as bad there as in East Jerusalem. The Palestinian police told social workers at a Palestinian rehabilitation center in the West Bank, there are about 5,000 addicts in each of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Sayegh and Jawhan note that this is purely and estimate, but agree that the phenomenon is much worse in Jerusalem.
Shin Bet collaboration
One reason for the difference between Jerusalem and the Palestinian Authority (PA) areas is the accessibility of drugs. Jawhan say that the closer a Palestinian community is to the Green Line, the more drug users it will have. Another explanation is that families in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip have a greater tendency to hide addiction from the eyes of society. This may affect the statistics, but it also reduces the friction and the exposure there. The damage caused to the institution of the Palestinian family in East Jerusalem is another reason: even in the Old City social workers have noticed that the exposure to drugs is much lower in the more religious Muslim neighborhoods and families, and it is reasonable to assume that this is true in traditional locales in general.
Another reason is that, contrary to what is happening in Jerusalem, the law enforcement authorities in the PA areas operate with more diligence. They have every intention of fighting the drug trade, all the more so because the drug trade is always linked with collaboration with the Israeli Shin Bet security services. Jerusalemites who are active in political organizations that have been outlawed by Israel say that more than once they have shared a prison cell with drug addicts, also Jerusalemites, who admitted at some stage or other that they have worked for the Shin Bet.
Palestinians in East Jerusalem say that the Israeli police is not doing all it can to halt the drug trade. Moderates say it is clear the police allocates most of its resources and efforts to security operations. Others, however, have the impression that in general more drug users than dealers are caught, and that the while drug sale locations that serve Jews are shut down within a week, those that serve only Arabs are allowed to continue to operate unhindered.
No neglect
Before the hostilities resumed, members of the Palestinian preventative security forces operated almost openly against drug dealers. Today, sources at the Orient House say the if preventative security personnel or any other person from any Palestinian institute, including community workers, try to act against drug dealers, they are liable to be arrested on suspicion of "operating under the auspices of the PA."
On the Mount of Olives, for example, a group of youths decided to beat up another group of youths, drug users and dealers who operated in the area unhindered. Local residents relate that it was the instigators of the beating who were arrested, not the dealers.
The poverty in the Palestinian neighborhoods of Jerusalem, the neglect and the high rate of addiction are fertile ground for the flourishing of theories of conspiracy whereby the Israeli authorities, including the police, are actually interested in the social and moral deterioration that leads to the weakening of the Palestinian community. The Jerusalem police reject this claim out of hand. According to police figures, in the past year there was and 8.3-percent increase in police activity toward preventing drug-related crime in the eastern part of the city.
Of the 545 persons arrested for drug-related crimes in 2002, 255 were Palestinians. Three of the six undercover dealers operated by the police worked in East Jerusalem, leading to the arrest of 66 drug dealers. Last year 400 criminal files were opened in East Jerusalem (some people had two files against them) - 165 for drug-related offenses, 42 for possession of drugs not for consumption and about 60 for drug use. The police add that there is no basis for the claim that places where drugs are sold to Jews are closed down while those selling to Arabs remain open, if only for the simple reason that Jews have stopped buying drugs in the eastern part of the city. The police emphasize that there is no deliberate neglect of the war against drugs.
One thing that the police do not dispute is the willingness of the Palestinian society to assist in catching drug dealers. Palestinians admit that their revulsion to drug dealers and their fear of the spread of addiction outweigh their apprehension and hesitation regarding calling on the Israeli police. The police concur that the Palestinians help the police in the war against drugs more than in any other area of crime. Residents are quite willing to let the police use their rooftops as lookouts for drug dealers and when patrol vehicles come to pick up dealers local residents do not crowd around the vehicles in an attempt to delay them, as the do in other types of cases.
http://www.haaretzdaily.com/
The Terror War on Drugs – January 2003 The Terror War on Drugs
Published by The LA Weekly - Friday 27 December, 2002
Copyright: The LA Weekly
If Steve Treleaven had a dollar for every time a fellow inmate had told him that there was no way he could have received 20 years just for growing some pot on his land, he would be a rich man. And if he had another dollar for every time that he had been told he would never end up doing the whole sentence, he could be running for governor. Instead, he is sitting alone in the visiting room of the shiny, new U.S. penitentiary in Atwater, about 300 miles north of where he spent a carefree childhood in Van Nuys and a few million light-years away from the life he had now hoped to be living.
In his letters out, he describes himself as POW number 08656—023. Like tens of thousands of others across the country, he is a prisoner in the war on drugs, a war that has been widened over the last few months so that it is now part of a more popular and comprehensible war on terrorism. Any regular television watcher is now familiar with the commercials in which contrite young people admit to having helped to kill a judge or a policeman because, by using drugs, they contributed to the funding of international terrorism.
The ads, produced by the Office of National Drug Control Policy, suggest that any American buying drugs could end up financing terrorists, "whether you're shooting heroin, snorting cocaine, taking Ecstasy or sharing a joint in your friend's back yard." The government Web site, which displays the campaign and the reasons behind it, explains the new policy thus: "As America recovers from the loss and destruction of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, government officials and policymakers are focusing on the link between terror and drug trafficking."
The logic may seem a little wobbly, but this is not a story where logic plays a leading role. Just when it seemed that judicial attitudes toward marijuana and cases like Steve Treleaven's might be changing and when many European countries are relaxing cannabis laws, the keys in the doors of places like Atwater are being given another twist. And terrorism is being used as an excuse for keeping those doors locked.
The 46-year-old Treleaven probably went to school or hung out with — or sold some weed to — readers of this publication. They may remember a handsome, easygoing young man with piercing blue eyes and thick wavy dark hair who graduated from Polytechnic High School in 1974 and who was always up for any good times going in the Valley. "Everyone smoked pot back then, it was so easy and non-threatening," says Treleaven as he settles down for what will be a three-hour conversation. Back then, it seemed only a matter of time before marijuana would become legal, he says, and he found that selling weed to his circle of friends was an easy way of making money. "Then, somewhere along the line, the country decided it was a major offense."
In fact, Treleaven's first brush with the law came in 1981 when he was busted for possession. It was a warning shot. He was sentenced to a series of weekend detentions, and concluded that there were smarter ways to live his life and simpler places than L.A. to do so. He loved the wild and skiing, and was planning to move to Colorado when a side trip to see a friend in Idaho made him realize he could achieve his own private dream right there. He had already done some construction work, and once there started out doing odd jobs and eventually formed his own small company. He met a woman, Mollie, settled down in Sandpoint with her, and had a son. It was in many ways the perfect life. He even became that archetype of suburban normality: the local kids' soccer coach. "It was the greatest fun I had in my life," he says.
But Treleaven had a brother on whom the sun was not shining so brightly. A Vietnam veteran, his brother had acquired a heavy drug habit and along with it many attendant problems. He had been diagnosed HIV positive and was a sick man. His buddies down in Arizona, where he was then living, had told him that one way to deal with the pains and the eating difficulties associated with the medicines he was taking for his illness was to smoke marijuana. He remembered that little brother Steve knew all about that world, and contacted him to ask if he could help out.
As it happened, Treleaven's brother's request coincided with a friend in Idaho suggesting that he and Treleaven grow some weed together in the woods. As a builder, Treleaven could construct a shed which they would conceal underground and in which they would grow the marijuana. It worked out fine. Treleaven sent some of his share of the weed to his brother, who smoked it, recovered his appetite and regained his health. His brother also supplied others who had the same illness, in what was a sort of unofficial medical-marijuana club.
Not that Treleaven is suggesting that he was just a postmodern version of Mother Teresa administering to the sick. "I'm not trying to say that I was doing something I didn't know was wrong," says Treleaven, dressed in his beige prison jump suit. "But I never in a million years thought anyone could do this time for growing pot." He knew what happened to people who grew pot on their land in Idaho, because the local papers wrote about them periodically; they would spend a year or so inside — if they were unlucky.
But Steve Treleaven was very unlucky. One of the teenagers who had done some wood-chopping work on his land told his father, a deputy sheriff, about his boss. The sheriff looked up Treleaven's record, spotted that conviction back in 1981, and from there it was downhill all the way to the federal court. Instead of the case being dealt with at a state level, Treleaven's became a federal target as part of the expanding war on drugs, and he entered the world of the mandatory minimum sentence.
Now the method of production that Treleaven and his two friends had chosen was growing thousands of very small plants, each weighing about 7 grams. But, by the federal method of calculating, each plant is assessed, regardless of its true weight, at 1,000 grams. Treleaven was thus charged with producing 8,000 pounds of marijuana when, in fact, he personally could have been responsible for only just under 27 pounds. This is when the mandatory minimums really kick in. As a "manufacturer" of the notional but nonexistent 8,000 pounds, he was jailed for 10 years. Because of his 1981 possession conviction, the mandatory minimum of 10 years was doubled, and he was jailed for 20 years.
His brother, deprived of his supply, speedily lost 50 pounds, became confined to a wheelchair, and was dead within the year.
I HEARD ABOUT TRELEAVEN'S CASE FROM AN organization called Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM), which campaigns against the laws that have played such a role in locking up the estimated 470,000 people now behind bars for drug offenses. Some of the most egregious cases may sound familiar: Douglas Gray was jailed for life in July 1992 for buying a pound of marijuana for himself and friends from a local criminal who had been paid $100 by the local police in Decatur, Alabama, to work as an informer. A Vietnam vet, Gray had not been in trouble with the police for 13 years and had never committed any offenses serious enough for jail. Because the amount of marijuana he purchased was enough to make him a dealer, he was jailed for life without parole. John Casali from Humboldt County, California, was arrested in 1992 for growing marijuana. It was his first offense, but he was jailed for 10 years, the mandatory minimum. An apologetic judge told him: "This is one of the most difficult sentencings I've had . . . I would like nothing better than to give you a lower sentence."
Atwater opened last January. It lies at the end of a side road past some stables, and visitors are greeted with a big color photo of U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, under whose auspices it operates. It was one of a cluster of prisons in California commissioned during the boom time in the '90s when penitentiaries were springing up on the theory that "If you build them, they will be convicted." It is a high-security establishment. Treleaven, who taught construction work to inmates without any skills, is now employed cleaning the showers.
"I love this country," said Treleaven, who talks with pride about his son who is now a college soccer star, "but this government just sucks, it's corrupt, it's evil. Maybe I'm a conspiracy theorist, but I think there may be a lot of big money from the alcohol companies behind the status quo. And they've built a lot of new prisons, and they have to keep them full. About 90 percent of all drugs arrests are for marijuana, so if they decriminalize it they knock the legs out of the war on drugs. Some of the sentences are just insane, people doing life for marijuana. I have met one Argentinian who is doing 500 years for money laundering."
Treleaven believes that many politicians privately oppose the punitive nature of marijuana laws, "but no one wants to stand up and say it in case they're accused of being soft on drugs." Now that the drug war has been linked to Osama bin Laden, he believes that politicians who could bring about change will be even less likely to do so. The ads that link marijuana use to support for terrorism "make my blood boil," he says. "One hundred years from now they're going to look back and say, 'What the hell were these people thinking?' But we've got to live through it all."
Here is the great conundrum. Over the last few weeks, I have smelled the familiar whiff of marijuana smoke during concerts at the Hollywood Bowl and the Greek Theater, while strolling down the Venice boardwalk, and while conducting a vox pop in East L.A., often within sniffing distance of the police. It seems to be such a common activity that many people today obviously feel that the risks of arrest are few. Yet in 2000, there were 734,498 marijuana-related arrests nationwide — 646,042 of them for simple possession — out of a total of 1,579,566 drugs arrests of all kinds, the highest ever recorded by the FBI.
And there are now more prisoners in American jails for drug offenses than in the entire jail systems of Western Europe combined. Last year, the U.S. spent $40 billion in the war against drugs, a 40-fold increase since 1980. The effect of this "war" has been minimal in terms of combating drug usage and winning the battle of public opinion. More than a third of Americans — 35 percent — over ä the age of 11 have tried marijuana, and an estimated 11 million say that they are current users. Those who have experienced the effects of the "war" firsthand say that many people are unaware of how many are affected by it. In Seattle, Nora Callahan helps to run the November Coalition, which she founded with another woman who, like herself, had a brother jailed for a long time in prison on a drug offense.
"This is a horrible, inhumane war," said Callahan. "They say drugs fund the terrorists. Gasoline funds the terrorists." She said that the public was still ill-informed about the effects of the law. "As soon as we show them people's stories, they say, 'That could be my brother.' People feel shame at the policy . . . Some of the conservatives here get angrier than the hippies, it's the overreach of government they don't like, and these are mainly people who don't think about drugs much until they pick up their Prozac prescription. There is a lot of anger about the hypocrisy."
JULIE STEWART, THE PRESIDENT OF FAMM, started the organization a decade ago after her brother was jailed for five years for growing marijuana. "These are ordinary people given extraordinary sentences," said Stewart. "I was naive enough to think that once legislators knew what was happening, they would undo the laws. That didn't happen, but the tide is beginning to turn in Congress." Stewart said that whenever there is a "crime du jour," Congress responds with severe penalties, whether it's piracy in 1790 or drugs today.
"There is a demonization of drug offenders in the U.S., but it's not the kingpins doing the hard time, it's these low-level offenses," said Monica Pratt of FAMM. "These laws make it very simple to get a very, very long sentence. And the people that could make a difference don't."
The Bush-appointed drug czar, John L. Walters, favors jail over rehabilitation for drug users and opposes medical-marijuana use. He believes that the problem has been exaggerated: "What really drives the battle against law enforcement and punishment is not a commitment to treatment, but the widely held view that we are imprisoning too many people for merely possessing illegal drugs, that drug and other criminal sentences are too long and harsh, and the criminal-justice system is unjustly punishing young black men. These are among the great urban myths of our time."
Now a group of Americans who face imprisonment here for marijuana offenses are seeking political asylum in Canada, having headed for the nearest foreign border and finding that Vancouver may be just their kind of town. They are claiming asylum status on the grounds that they have "genuine fears of persecution" in their own country. Whether they succeed in this strategy is a moot point, but what is interesting is that the Canadian authorities have decided to hear their arguments and allow them their day in court, permitting them to remain in Canada until hearings next spring.
One of those seeking asylum is Renee Boje, whom the U.S. wishes to extradite to stand trial for cultivating cannabis plants at the home of Todd McCormick, the L.A. medical-marijuana activist. She told AlterNet from her home in Vancouver: "I'm a member of a class of society they're trying to oppress or wipe out completely." If convicted down in L.A., she faces the possibility of 10 years inside, and the length of that sentence is part of her plea that she would face "persecution" if she were to return south of the border. "There are hundreds of Americans here because they are being persecuted by their own government," she said.
Canada has recently moved to soften penalties for marijuana possession, reflecting trends across Europe. In the United Kingdom, David Blunkett, a home secretary certainly not known for his liberal views, surprised many when he reclassified cannabis as a less harmful drug and relaxed the laws earlier this year, introducing a system whereby police officers would no longer routinely arrest those found in possession but would adopt a "seize and warn" policy. Arrests would occur only if a child was involved or a "flagrant disregard for the law" was shown — such as blowing the smoke in an officer's face.
Meanwhile, people like Steve Treleaven must carry on with their sentences. "I was a young man when I got arrested," says Treleaven, who may have already lost many years and much hair from the top of his head, but who has managed to remain fit and sharp in mind and body by running 30 miles a week round the quarter-mile prison track and by his habit of voraciously reading everything from history books to his weekly Nation. "I was an old man within a year, so what I try and do now is make sure that when I get out, I'm as young as I can be." What would make him happiest, one feels, would be to see his son play soccer. Like many who are denied a chance to shout their case from the ramparts, he talks almost nonstop, so the visit is soon over, an event signaled by that familiar international soundtrack of incarceration, the jangling of keys.
When I previously lived in California, up north in San Anselmo back in the early '70s, I remember hearing on KSAN-FM a song from the first album of an up-and-coming young singer-songwriter from Chicago called John Prine. It was called "The Illegal Smile" — "It don't cost very much and it lasts a long while/Will you please tell the man I didn't kill anyone/I just want to have me some fun." I don't think any of us listening then thought that, three decades later, people like Steve Treleaven would be sitting in cells in California serving the kind of sentences you get for killing someone.
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