Workers at plant in Romont alert authorities to mysterious white powder found in sacks of coffee beans
Swiss police have seized more than 500kg of cocaine from a shipment of coffee beans delivered to a Nespresso plant.
Workers at the plant in Romont, in the western Swiss canton of Fribourg, alerted authorities to a mysterious white powder found in sacks of coffee beans, police said.
Continue reading...Davina McCall documentary highlights benefits and postcode lottery of previously rejected utrogestan
A sought-after hormone replacement therapy is being reassessed for use in Scotland after TV presenter and menopause campaigner Davina McCall revealed a postcode lottery in its prescription across the UK.
Amid an ongoing supply crisis of HRT products, McCall spoke to specialists about the benefits of utrogestan, a “body identical” micronised progesterone, which is derived from plants, in her Channel 4 documentary Sex, Mind and Menopause, broadcast on Monday.
Continue reading...Andrew Fahie was arrested last week in a US Drug Enforcement Administration sting as he was preparing to board a private jet
The premier of the British Virgin Islands has demanded his immediate release from US custody, arguing he is immune from prosecution on cocaine-smuggling charges because he is the elected, constitutional head of government of the British overseas territory.
An attorney for Andrew Fahie made the request in a filing with Miami federal court on Monday.
Continue reading...In a further twist, the islands’ premier has been arrested in a Miami sting operation on suspicion of drug trafficking
Britain is poised to impose a form of direct rule over the British Virgin Islands after the Caribbean territory’s premier was arrested in Miami on suspicion of drug running, and a UK-appointed commission of inquiry found rampant failings in governance.
Andrew Fahie appeared in federal court in Miami on Friday, a day after he was arrested by the US Drug Enforcement Agency in an elaborate sting operation that also snared the chief executive of the BVI port authority and her son.
Continue reading...Andrew Fahie is due in court on drug charges in Miami after arrest following months-long undercover operation
In mid-October, as Sir Gary Hickinbottom’s commission of inquiry into the government of the British Virgin Islands, led by the premier, Andrew Fahie, was taking laborious public oral evidence for a 44th day, a US Drug Enforcement Administration informant was, according to court papers, meeting some self-proclaimed Lebanese Hezbollah operatives on the BVI island of Tortola to discuss how to shift cocaine through the territory en route to Puerto Rico, Miami and New York.
Hickinbottom was taking mind-numbingly dull evidence on how to apply for BVI citizenship, and whether the process was open to manipulation.
Continue reading...Police arrived at the venue to find wedding guests being treated for ‘symptoms consistent with that of someone who has used illegal drugs’
A Florida bride and her wedding caterer have been criminally charged after serving food laced with marijuana to their wedding guests, sickening them and sending several to hospital.
Danya Shea Svoboda, 42, and Jocelyn Montrinice Bryant, 31, who catered her wedding, face charges of violating Florida’s anti-tampering laws, delivery of marijuana and culpable negligence.
Continue reading...He was found guilty on charges that he injected the men with methamphetamine in exchange for sex, leading to overdoses
The wealthy political activist and Democratic donor Ed Buck was sentenced to 30 years in prison on charges that he supplied and personally injected gay men with methamphetamine in exchange for sex, leading to two deaths and multiple other overdoses.
Buck, 67, was found guilty in July by a federal jury on all nine counts, including having a drug house, distributing methamphetamine and enticing men to travel for prostitution.
Continue reading...Deaths rise even as teen drug use drops overall, with researchers pointing to flood of deadly counterfeit pills
Drug overdose deaths among high school-aged US teens have more than doubled since 2019, driven by a rise in the deadly opioid fentanyl, a new study has found.
Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, who analyzed mortality rates among 14- to 18-year-olds over the past decade, found that while drug use among this age group is actually falling, fatalities are on the rise, jumping from 492 in 2019 to 954 in 2020, then climbing to 1,146 in 2021.
Continue reading...A study found that more than 2m counterfeit pills were confiscated in the last quarter of 2021 alone
Over the past four years, the number of counterfeit pills containing fentanyl that have been seized by US law enforcement jumped by 4,850%, according to a new study, underscoring how an alarming surge in the deadly drug is putting people at increasing risk for accidental overdose.
The study by a consortium of academic researchers, led by New York University, was released on Thursday. Using a first-of-its-kind, real time analysis of federal data, it found that more than 2m fake pills were seized by officials in the last quarter of 2021 alone – up from 42,000 in the first quarter of 2018. Researchers also found that the number of individual seizures involving fentanyl pills increased by 834%.
Continue reading...Experts suggest all-time low smoking rates may be thanks to less socializing and more time with kids
In the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, more Americans drank heavily and used illicit drugs – but apparently fewer smoked.
US cigarette smoking dropped to a new all-time low in 2020, with one in eight adults saying they were current smokers, according to survey data released on Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Adult e-cigarette use also dropped, the CDC reported.
Continue reading...Six men and a woman were taken to hospitals on Thursday in an incident that highlights a two-year trend in suspected opioid overdoses
Police have made an arrest in connection with fentanyl overdoses that involved five cadets from the US Military Academy at a Florida vacation home during spring break this week.
Wilton Manors police said six men and a woman overdosed on fentanyl-laced cocaine and were taken to hospitals on Thursday. Authorities said late on Friday they had made an arrest, but did not offer specifics.
Continue reading...Monarch said to have mild symptoms, but staff may look to drugs recently approved in UK
With the Queen approaching her 96th birthday in April, there was always going to be concern about her contracting Covid, but the monarch has tested positive against a radically different backdrop from when the virus arrived in the UK.
In addition to the protection afforded by her vaccinations – and she is understood to have had a booster – she could also be given antiviral drugs approved by UK authorities as recently as December.
Continue reading...The rural back yards of the Czech Republic hide Europe’s biggest methamphetamine problem. Users like Lenka have a complex story to tell
I was researching ideas for a documentary when a friend told me about a village in a rural region of the Czech Republic. He half-joked that when people in this place visited their family, the grandma wouldn’t bake fresh cakes to serve with coffee, as is the custom, but fresh meth. Most people in the village were on meth, he said, even those with children.
I grew up in 1980s Czechoslovakia when it was still part of the Soviet bloc. As a teenager I read Memento by Radek John and Zoo Station by Christiane F, both about meth and heroin addicts. When I was 20, I discovered that one of my childhood friends had become a heroin user. He was the only one from among his group who lived.
Barbora Benesova is the director of Lenka, a Guardian Documentaries film
Continue reading...My drinking and drug use pushed me over the edge into a complete breakdown. Then a stint in rehab made me question how much we really understand about addiction
I’m lying in bed when I hear the commotion. I peer through the doorway of my room, and right outside, the new guy is getting in Ruiz’s face. There’s a phone right outside the door, one of those sturdy metal payphones like one you’d see on a street corner, and Ruiz, a gentle older man with shoulders stooped by the demoralisation of his nth relapse and hospitalisation, is just trying to talk to his family. But the new guy has been manic and pacing since he arrived a few hours ago, and he won’t take no for an answer.
I watch the new guy stalk the other way across the doorway, muttering to himself, menacing even in retreat. Then a warning shout echoes from much too far in the distance, and he appears once again – flying, near horizontal – to tackle Ruiz, dragging him off the phone.
Continue reading...At first, I could hardly get through a novel. But slowly reading – and writing – saved me from a life of drugs, rehab and jail
When I was in tenth grade in Tampa, Florida, I was, like millions of other high school students, assigned to read The Catcher in the Rye for English class. Like millions of other high school students, I was extremely fragile. I was holding on by a thread. I was 15 and spent much of my time at school, on the days I would go, doing OxyContin, Xanax, cocaine and speed in the bathroom. I jittered and itched through class, and my internal life was, to say the least, stifled. It would continue to be stifled for the next few years, until it became so claustrophobic that I attempted suicide. Needless to say, I was pretty hit or miss with school assignments. But I had always liked to read. I decided to crack Salinger’s book and read a chapter or two. I stayed up all night and finished it. I came into class the next day wired, eyes wide: it felt as if I had been hooked up to a car battery. I remember walking into the classroom and saying to my English teacher, “What the hell was that?”
I didn’t know anything about the book. I didn’t know that the men who shot John Lennon and Ronald Reagan were both obsessed with it. I didn’t know that it was the subject of endless think pieces debating the ethical ramifications of Holden Caulfield’s character. I didn’t know Salinger stormed the beaches on D-Day, carried scars from his years in war. I just got sucked in. It is a funny, polarising little book. I remember my girlfriend at the time saying she hated it, that she couldn’t get through it. But my teacher told me that every year at least one person does what I did, gets hooked up to the car battery. Looking back, it makes sense that someone in my particular situation would have this reaction to it. In fact, it is almost embarrassing just how cliched it is. But that’s what happened. And, in what would become a theme of my life, what stuck with me more than any of the particular content of the book was the feeling of being sucked in, of losing time trapped in someone else’s words and turbulent emotions.
Continue reading...Former boxer Agustín Álvarez jailed for piloting a sub carrying 3,000kg of cocaine across the Atlantic
Twenty-eight months after it began in a clandestine shipyard deep in the Brazilian Amazon, one of the more unlikely criminal voyages of all time came to an end on Tuesday with the seven sentences handed down by a court in north-west Spain.
Agustín Álvarez, a 31-year-old former Spanish amateur boxing champion, was jailed for 11 years for piloting a semi-submersible “narco-submarine” carrying 3,068kg of cocaine worth an estimated €123m (£104m) across the Atlantic. His two crewmates, Ecuadorian cousins Luis Tomás Benítez Manzaba and Pedro Roberto Delgado Manzaba, received the same sentence, while four Spaniards who conspired with Álvarez to help guide the sub ashore were jailed for between seven and nine years.
Continue reading...Improved automated drug detection systems and enhanced partnerships with law enforcement are among changes
Snapchat has announced new efforts to combat drug dealing on the platform, changes that come as drug-related deaths among US high school and college-aged youth are exploding.
The company said it has improved automated drug detection systems, enhanced partnerships with law enforcement, and launched a new portal educating users on the dangers of drugs.
Erin McCormick contributed reporting
Continue reading...Accidental deaths soar among young people amid a proliferation of fentanyl-filled pharmaceuticals
Fourteen-year-old Alondra Salinas had set out her new white sneakers and packed her backpack the night before the first day of in-person high school when police say she responded to an offer on Snapchat for blue pills, which turned out to be deadly fentanyl. Her mother couldn’t wake her the next morning.
Seventeen-year-old Zachary Didier was waiting to hear back on his college applications when a fake Percocet killed him. Sammy Berman Chapman, a 16-year-old straight-A student, died in his bedroom after taking what he thought was a single Xanax.
Continue reading...In this quasi-religious programme, ‘working the steps’ is the remedy for any problem, but for me the cracks soon started to show
Eight of us sat together in a circle in a wooden shed, an outbuilding at a large country house, somewhere in the south of England. The door was ajar, and spring light flooded the room. “Can anyone name any treatment methods for addiction, other than the 12 steps?” asked a counsellor.
“Cognitive behavioural therapy?” offered a patient.
Continue reading...The armed group broke into the jail in Tula and opened fire, injuring a guard and a police officer
Mexican gangsters used a convoy of vehicles – including a truck with homemade armour-plating – to ram their way into a prison before opening fire at guards and rescuing nine inmates.
Several other vehicles were also set on fire in the spectacular plot targeting the jail in the central city of Tula. The escapees include José Artemio Maldonado Mejía, alias “El Michoacano”, the leader of a local crime organisation known as Pueblos Unidos.
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