Mephedrone, the latest drug craze on the UK party scene, has arrived in St. John’s, as evidenced by an RNC seizure of the controlled substance yesterday.

Skeletal formula of mephedrone, via Wikipedia.

In the UK mephedrone is legal, sold most often as plant food by online retailers, though that loophole probably won’t last for long. People are reportedly being hospitalized and even dying from taking the drug, which has been banned in Denmark, Germany, Estonia, Sweden and the Channel Island of Jersey, according to a March 18 article from the Globe and Mail.

In the same article, Erin Beasly of the Canadian Centre for Substance Abuse in Ottawa makes a prediction that was perhaps too conservative on mephedrone’s arrival in Canada.

“If it’s seen in Europe then we will see it over here in the next six months,” Ms. Beasley said. “Something that’s cheaper and more effective than ecstasy or cocaine as a stimulant or euphoriant – I suspect it will catch on.”

Try three months.

Despite what some people think, mephedrone is viewed as a controlled substance by Health Canada.

Today’s story on CBC.ca about the plague of dealer-on-dealer drug crime in Gotham City St. John’s reeks of PR-serving, headline-grabbing BS.

It contains no actual news, no story, just a bunch of quotes from cops and lawyers about how out-of-whack the illegale drug trade is getting now that dealers have started turning on each other en masse.

I mean, get a load of their weapons!

If this had followed a report on something that actually happened, an instance of such a case that the CBC themselves had investigated, I would see the need. But the entire report is in response to nothing other than whatever information the RCMP and RNC have decided to disseminate. A lot of which amounts to, “well, crimes like these are rarely reported, but we know.”

It’s like ambulance chasing without the actual ambulance. Just reports on how loud the sirens were.

According to a report from The Telegram today, The RCMP flew their AS 350B3 helicopter up and down the island’s west coast last week in search of marijuana grow sites and bagged themselves eight of them. In total there were 136 plants seized.

As a discerning commenter on the story noted, “136 plants in 8 sites = 17 plants per site. Grow ops? They have to be kidding.”

In fact, none of the commenters so far seem impressed with the RCMP’s latest big bust, with some crying out for the drug to be legalized so that more focus can be given to combating the real crimes, such as acts of violence and theft, being committed in our province.

No arrests are noted in the story.

Update:

CBC Early Edition News just confirmed that there were no charges laid over these grow sites. You would think the RCMP would be more interested in busting the perpetrators than simply confiscating the plants.

Now that the headlines are abuzz with the bust, there’s no chance a stake out of the areas would yield anything.

From oversized classrooms to overworked parents, today’s kids are pretty much left to their own devices. As a result, it seems they’ve started going feral.

From VOCM.com:

The City of Mount Pearl is stepping up enforcement in light of a vicious assault in the city. A 34 year old man received serious facial injuries after he was attacked by a group of young people on the weekend. Mayor Randy Simms says while it was a disturbing incident, it was an isolated one. Simms says they will be talking with Municipal Enforcement and RNC. He says this event has taken them aback, but he wants to assure that Mount Pearl is still a safe city. He reminds people to use common sense precautions while walking the trails.

Common sense precautions like what? Avoid young people?

Sorry b’ys, but these aren’t an isolated group of kids who suddenly decided to go savage, and simply beefing up security isn’t going to make this problem go away.

I suppose we could blame the drug dealers and their irresistible candy.

I mean, there’s got to be some direction other than towards ourselves that we can look, right?

[image via http://www.flickr.com/photos/arisvl/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0]

I was pretty excited when I heard Ramona Dearing say she was going to start the show on Radio Noon today with an interview with the United Nations’ synthetic drug expert, Matthew Nice.

Earlier this week the CBC ran a story where they published unquestioned speculation from the RCMP about how ecstasy was being marketed to kids in the province as candy.

Getting an ecstasy expert on the line and sharing with us some hard facts about the drug should go far towards making up for their rather uncritical treatment of such a serious subject.

Or so I thought.

Little in the way of facts or figures were presented in the conversation. Nice explained that high blood pressure and heart failure can result from long term use of MDMA (the active ingredient in an ecstasy pill). Of course, the same could be said for prolonged use of bacon.

As for death caused by overdose, Nice had this to say: “People die from overdose.”

Right, but how many people die from overdose? How often? Under what circumstances? This kind of information is actually very hard to find. You’d think if people were dropping like flies over this shit the authorities would be pushing the numbers.

As for the RCMP’s assertion that ecstasy pills are brightly coloured and cartoon-clad to appeal to kids, Nice agreed. He then went on to explain that his definition of “kids” is the under-24 club-going demographic — hardly the image the RCMP were trying to conjure with their references to Spider-Man.

I can appreciate that there is an agenda in place here, which is to get ecstasy off the streets. What I can’t appreciate are the tactics by which this agenda is being carried out.

Tactics such as proliferating vague or false information about ecstasy only strengthen that drug’s staying power. The truth will always surface, and as it does the validity of the authorities and their agenda will be weakened

One thing Nice did confirm, which was of value, is that a lot of so-called ecstasy pills, who’s main ingredient should be MDMA, are cut with far more harmful substances which attempt to either mimic the effects of the drug or encourage addiction. That, I think we can all agree, sucks.

If the RCMP really wanted to send the message home about the dangers of ecstasy pills, they wouldn’t be conjuring boogie men to try and scare us, they’d be publishing lab tests which confirm what chemicals are found in the pills they confiscate and explaining to us in honest detail what the effects of those chemicals can be.

Information, not speculation, please.

The RCMP bagged themselves a major drug bust yesterday, seizing around 15,000 ecstasy pills, some coke and close to $4,000 in cash — down from yesterday’s initial report from the CBC, which has since been edited, of $150,000 in cash (though the sub they sent out to my RSS feed reader still contains the error).

I guess the CBC got caught up in all the excitement. It happens.

That would pretty much be it in terms of story, were it not for the following from a subsequent CBC report:

RCMP Const. Stephen Conohan said the ecstasy pills are colourful and have cartoon characters such as Spider-Man on them. Police say it’s an effort to trick children into thinking they are eating candy.

“It’s no big deal if I take one with a Spider-Man on it,” Conohan said of how drug dealers hope young kids respond. “It’s all a marketing ploy.”

This theory of ecstasy being marketed as candy is offered by RCMP Const. Stephen Conohan with no proof whatsoever, and yet the CBC just regurgitates it without any effort to question or substantiate the statement.

“Do you have reports from children that dealers have tried to offer them ecstasy as candy?” might be my first question.

Next I’d probably ask what makes these colourful, cartoon-covered pills any different, marketing-wise, than the pills that have already been on the market for many, many years. Like these ecstasy pills from 2005:

Finally I might ask, my reporter’s hat snug over my head, what these ecstasy pills taste like, since any kid who’s offered a piece of candy is going to give that thing a good chew (then immediately spit whatever’s in their mouth out and run home crying, the taste of an ecstasy pill is reportedly so bad).

Never mind the fact that any kid young and stupid enough to believe a pill with Spider-Man on it is candy isn’t going to have access to the kind of money that would make them a worthy market, anyway.

Anyone who takes ecstasy knows they’re taking ecstasy. The cops are trying to paint a picture of youth in danger, but they’re being really sketchy about it.

Due to the illegal nature of ecstasy pills, what was originally just a dose of MDMA (makes people feel happy and empathetic, no proven harmful side effects, being tested as therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder) has become an unregulated cocktail of who-knows-what. It’s the “who-knows-what” part that can be dangerous — to anyone who takes it, not just some made-up demographic from the drug war PR department.

We don’t need to be mislead about street drugs in order to believe there’s a problem. That only leads to more problems.

It would be awfully nice if we could address the problems of street drugs as they are, and not as they are perceived. In order for us to do so, the police need to keep their focus on telling us the truth, and the media need to keep their focus on holding the police to that standard.

[image via]

Newfoundland and Labrador: resource rich, but with a track record for waste. That which, with a little bit of collective effort could be given a second chance, is far too often discarded like garbage.

If only I were referring to paper or plastic.

People who seem to no longer serve a purpose get thrown away in this province. We treat them like refuse, cast them aside and try our best to forget about them.

Our prison, Her Majesty’s Penitentiary (if she new her name was attached to this thing, surely she would be insulted) is like a 150 year old human landfill. Conditions there are reportedly so bad that Ron Fitzpatrick, executive director of Turnings, a rehabilitation centre in St. John’s, said last month that he would like to see the place blown up.

Fitzpatrick also recently spoke out about how we treat our recovering addicts. A temporary detox centre had to be set up on St. Claire Avenue recently when the centre in Pleasantville was shut down due to leaky pipes. Though the pipes have been fixed, the centre remains closed due to high levels of creosote, a wood preserver, that were found during the repairs.

The temporary centre is a third the size of the one in Pleasantville and, until Fitzpatrick complained to our health minister, Paul Oram, it had carpet in rooms where people go to detox (read: defecate uncontrollably), giving the place a terrible smell despite cleaning efforts.

A third the size means more people who don’t get a shot at getting clean. Which means more people out there trying to get a fix, which means more people on the streets likely to turn to crime.

The solution at that point would be to round them up and toss them in the Pen. Not a very elegant solution. Surely there must be a better way.

It would be extremely naive to think that criminals are simply bad people who get what they deserve.

Everyone is born with a will to survive. Depending on the situation we’re born into, the things we learn to do to ensure that survival — be it share with our neighbour or steal from them — will be different.

Criminal behaviours are obviously learned and encouraged throughout the course of a criminal’s life. They are learned and encouraged as a matter of survival.

And please, check your ego at the door before you step in to say that people should simply know to choose better. Have you made the right choice every time you had an option presented before you?

Of course not. We all make mistakes. But your life probably hasn’t involved the same set of stakes as a criminal’s. And you might have had better guidance. So I guess you got lucky.

The upside here is that behaviours can be modified. In order for a person to do this, though, they need help.

And yet, what’s our solution? Throw them in the junk yard and force them to network with the other criminals there for their survival. It’s no wonder that by the time they make it back out onto the streets they’re worse off than before.

Let me be perfectly blunt: you don’t have to pity these people or even care about them to want to help them. And don’t worry: this isn’t about taking away the rights of the victims or putting criminals on pedestals.

This is about justice.

If your idea of justice is revenge then you don’t understand the concept of justice. You also don’t understand that revenge is an endless cycle.

This is about making everyone’s lives better. Yours and mine and everyone else’s.

We need to help criminals learn to function without resorting to crime. That way, when they return among us we can have at least some measure of assurance that they won’t be a threat to themselves or others.

Unless a person is being sentenced to a life of incarceration with no chance of parole, the only option we should consider in sentencing is a carefully controlled and strictly monitored program of rehabilitation.

Otherwise, we’re just throwing people away and watching as our province turns to garbage.

[photo via http://www.flickr.com/photos/uber-tuber/ / CC BY-ND 2.0]

VOCM published a news clip today regarding a marijuana shortage in Corner Brook. Well, the real word on the street is that the shortage is actually province wide.

Over the past several months there have been countless high profile marijuana busts across the province, and as Corporal Kymbal Vardy of the RNC says, “police are doing a good job of keeping marijuana off the streets”.  And, while these headlines may bring comfort to the conservative citizens of our city, and province, the real story is that hard drugs, such as cocaine and ecstasy have never been easier to obtain.

The same, “word on the street”, states that as the RNC and RCMP dedicate increased resources on taking down petty marijuana dealers, hard drug dealers can peddle their wares at a lower cost to a young population that can’t find or afford marijuana.

[ image via ]

Update: The CBC are reporting that the RNC are after a syringe-wielding thief who’s description matches that of the guy I found shooting up earlier today, as mentioned below. Yikes.

Just now, I came upon three members of the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary scouring the park between Long’s Hill and Livingstone Street.

According to the officer I spoke with, they were in pursuit of a suspect in a car theft. She asked if I’d seen a gentlemen in a black t-shirt go by. I explained how I came across a man in black t-shirt in the park an hour or so ago shooting up, but that was it.

This wasn’t the first time I’ve come across someone shooting up in broad daylight in this park. In either case, I’ve never gotten any trouble from the people doing this, probably because whenever I cross their path I don’t say anything and just give them a wide berth as I pass on through. Like you would.

The officer I spoke with told me they weren’t certain the man they were after had stolen the car, but they pursued him because he ran off when he saw them. If it was the same guy I saw, she figured he may have just ran off because he was in possession of drugs.