RTFA: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/specia…

The U.S. government has injected hundreds of foreigners it has deported with dangerous psychotropic drugs against their will to keep them sedated during the trip back to their home country, according to medical records, internal documents and interviews with people who have been drugged.

The government’s forced use of antipsychotic drugs, in people who have no history of mental illness, includes dozens of cases in which the “pre-flight cocktail,” as a document calls it, had such a potent effect that federal guards needed a wheelchair to move the slumped deportee onto an airplane.

“Unsteady gait. Fell onto tarmac,” says a medical note on the deportation of a 38-year-old woman to Costa Rica in late spring 2005. Another detainee was “dragged down the aisle in handcuffs, semi-comatose,” according to an airline crew member’s written account. Repeatedly, documents describe immigration guards “taking down” a reluctant deportee to be tranquilized before heading to an airport.

This is evidence of a problem.

RTFA: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601102&si…

The seven social sins are:
1. “Bioethical’ violations such as birth control
2. “Morally dubious” experiments such as stem cell research
3. Drug abuse
4. Polluting the environment
5. Contributing to widening divide between rich and poor
6. Excessive wealth
7. Creating poverty

Hmmm… Morally dubious, indeed. I guess drug use (e.g. alcohol during a religious ceremony) is set apart from drug abuse. Don’t forget: you can ALWAYS be forgiven. In Catholicism (maybe in all of Christianity), there’s a sacrament involving being forgiven on your death-bed.

Well, on the topic of drugs, I use this as the basis for the demand to take the fluoride out of my municipal tap water! My toothpaste packaging tells me it’s a drug, and yet I get more fluoride with every glass of water I drink. I know my intake of fluoride is excessive, because on the basis of the poison recommendation on the toothpaste, I intake 8x the amount I use for brushing. Is this abuse? I’m beginning to think so…

On second glance, this looks like a pretty good list. I think the definition of the word “Sin” needs to be reworked.

RTFA: http://www.ajc.com/multimedia/content/multimedia/v…

Rufus Terrill has had it with the drug dealers, petty thieves and vandals he says roam the streets outside his downtown Atlanta bar, O’Terrills. Instead of calling the police or hiring private security guards, Terrill built his own security robot. (Ryon Horne/AJC)

Yep… that’s actually the headline…

RTFA: http://www.reuters.com/article/oddlyEnoughNews/idU…

JERUSALEM Reuters - The biblical Israelites may have been high on a hallucinogenic plant when Moses brought the Ten Commandments down from Mount Sinai, according to a new study by an Israeli psychology professor.

Writing in the British journal Time and Mind, Benny Shanon of Jerusalems Hebrew University said two plants in the Sinai desert contain the same psychoactive molecules as those found in plants from which the powerful Amazonian hallucinogenic brew ayahuasca is prepared.

The thunder, lightning and blaring of a trumpet which the Book of Exodus says emanated from Mount Sinai could just have been the imaginings of a people in an “altered state of awareness,” Shanon hypothesized.

“In advanced forms of ayahuasca inebriation, the seeing of light is accompanied by profound religious and spiritual feelings,” Shanon wrote.

“On such occasions, one often feels that in seeing the light, one is encountering the ground of all Being … many identify this power as God.”

I had this same thought years ago… although professors are much more likely to be taken seriously than anonymous hacks.

RTFA: http://www.kmbc.com/news/14587550/detail.html

A 21-year-old man has been accused of using a toad to get high.Clay County sheriff’s deputies said David Theiss, of Kansas City, possessed a Colorado River toad with the intention of using it as a hallucinogenic. Experts said it’s possible to lick the toad’s venom glands to achieve psychedelic effects.

Thank you for making God’s animals illegal. Did you know that a human can be used to murder another human?

RTFA: http://www.boingboing.net/2007/10/29/bush-fundrais…

Remember the strange circumstances surrounding the Gulfstream II jet filled with 3.7 tons of cocaine that crashed in the Yucatan last month? There’s more.

According to Mad Cow Morning News, the plane was once owned by ultra-rich Bush supporter Stephen Adams. (In July, the Federal Election Commission filed suit against Adams on charges that he “failed to report and include proper disclaimers on $1,000,000 in billboard ads during the 2004 Presidential race.”)

Not only that, but Mad Cow alleges that Adam’s business partner owned the other American drug plane that was found in Mexico with 5.5 tons of cocaine in 2006.

Okay - this is two stories in a row involving CIA drug planes.

RTFA: http://www.boingboing.net/2007/10/31/chicago-pubic…

In the comments to the weird story about the crashed drug plane with ties to the CIA, Mongip pointed to a “much more detailed, objective and intriguing investigative report on this plane,”
from Chicago Public Radio.

This story is crazy, and these airplanes are insane.

RTFA: http://okfuture.net/2007/10/31/schwarzenegger-says…

The Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, recently told an interviewer for the British edition of GQ that marijuana is “not a drug”. When pressed by the interviewer on his well documented use of marijuana in the film documentary Pumping Iron, he said ” That is not a drug. It’s a leaf”. So, you bench press several hundred pounds, squat nearly half a ton, you get tired and you want to unwind . . . the obvious non-drug of choice is marijuana! Alas, when the PR implications of this statement became obvious, we got this from his press secretary:
“The governor was doing an interview with the host of ‘America’s Got Talent,’ the newest version of the gong show,” McLear said. “I think it’s important to keep that quote in the context of the environment where it was said.”

Good fellow, that Arnold is.

RTFA: http://www.slate.com/id/2175730/entry/2175732/

So, as the FDA has licensed chemical substitutes for what were once thought to be dangerous drugs, does that mean roughly the same thing as the legalization of cocaine, marijuana, and heroin? Not exactly. Drugs prescribed are usually taken differently than recreational drugs, of course, even if at some level the chemical hit is the same. More broadly, the current program of drug legalization in the United States is closely and explicitly tied to the strange economics of the U.S. health-care industry. The consequence is that how people get their dopamine or other brain chemicals is ever more explicitly, like the rest of medicine, tied to questions of class.

Antidepressants and anxiety treatments aren’t cheap: A fancy drug like Wellbutrin can cost anywhere from $1,000 to $2,400 a year. These drugs also require access to a sympathetic doctor who will issue a prescription. That’s why, generally speaking, the new legalization program is for better-off Americans. As the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University reports, rich people tend to abuse prescription drugs, while poorer Americans tend to self-medicate with old-fashioned illegal drugs or just get drunk.

The big picture reveals a nation that, let’s face it, likes drugs: Expert Joseph Califano estimates that the United States, representing just 4 percent of the world’s population, consumes nearly two-thirds of the world’s recreational drugs. In pursuit of that habit, the country has, in slow motion, found ways for the better-off parts of society to use drugs without getting near the scary drug laws it promulgated in the 20th century. Our parents and grandparents banned drugs, but the current generation is re-legalizing them. That’s why Rush Limbaugh, as a drug user, is in a sense a symbol of our times. He, like many celebrities, is a recovering addict. But with Limbaugh being somewhat outside of the 1960s drug culture, the medical marijuana movement was not for him. Instead, Limbaugh, the addicted culture warrior, has become the true poster child of the new drug legalization program.

Wow! Great analysis. This serious is really interesting so far.

RTFA: http://www.whitehousedrugpolicy.gov/publications/p…

National Drug Control Strategy

February 2007

Appendix B: National Drug Control Funding

Agency Summary, FY 2006-FY 2008

Following up on the use of national forests to grow marijuana, here are the details of the US federal response to drug use in the United States. This contains some interesting details, but I think this generally represents federal priorities for drugs.