Category Archives: Drugs

Colombia leader hits out at ‘hypocrisy’ of middle-class cocaine users

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Iván Duque decries social acceptability of drug that inflicts environmental and social damage on producers

Middle-class cocaine users are inconsistent hypocrites if they fail to recognise the environmental and social damage their drug use is inflicting on producer countries, the Colombian president has said during a visit to London.

In an interview with the Guardian on Monday, Iván Duque said that cocaine’s social acceptability had to end. “There are many people who present themselves as environmentalists, and if they want to be coherent, they must understand all the environmental damage that is caused by the production of cocaine – not just destroying tropical forests, [but] spreading chemicals in protected areas and destroying human capital,” he said.

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Earliest known signs of cannabis smoking unearthed in China

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Incense burners found at 2,500-year-old cemetery suggest intentional use of to get high

Scorched wooden incense burners unearthed at an ancient burial ground in the mountains of western China contain the oldest clear evidence of cannabis smoking yet found, archaeologists say.

Residues of high potency cannabis found in the burners, and on charred pebbles placed inside them, suggest that funeral rites at the 2,500-year-old Jirzankal cemetery in the Pamir mountains may have been rather hazy affairs.

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Michael Gove’s No 10 hopes falter after cocaine admission

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Environment secretary is facing calls to withdraw from Tory leadership campaign

Michael Gove’s campaign to be Conservative leader is hanging in the balance with calls for him to quit the race, as he was forced to insist that he never misled officials about his use of class A drugs.

The environment secretary gave an interview admitting he was “fortunate” to have avoided jail for possession of cocaine, after a new book revealed he had taken the drug on several occasions while a journalist around 20 years ago.

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Trump’s family holiday to UK Disneyland makes for painful viewing | John Crace

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With sketch writers banned from his press conference with Theresa May, I was forced to endure it on TV

Sometimes I worry I am more psychically connected to Tottenham Hotspur than is healthy. Having done my two events at the Hay festival, I went back to the friends I was staying with to watch the Champions League final. Only to find they didn’t have BT Sport and their internet connection was patchy at best. So I ended up viewing the game on my iPad with a screen that kept buffering and then freezing. Which of course was entirely appropriate, because buffering and freezing appeared to be Spurs’ main game plan. The biggest match in the club’s history, against a team playing well below its best, and Spurs also chose to have a complete off day. Even down to giving away a dodgy penalty inside the first minute. You can’t get more Spursy than that. It almost made me proud. Still, there was one upside. The two friends, Matthew and Terry, who ended up using my tickets kept me updated with photos throughout their trip, from their arrival in Toulouse to their eight-hour car journey to Madrid to their picnic on the beach on the way back. What struck me most was that they were both smiling in every shot. Something I would never have managed. I would have been sick with anxiety before the game and acutely depressed after it. There was no avoiding it. The right two people went to the game. Though it was a little upsetting to realise all my friends almost certainly have a better time without me.

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Man dies on Aeromexico flight after swallowing 246 packets of cocaine

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Japanese national flying from Bogota to Tokyo is declared dead from an overdose

A Japanese man with 246 packets of cocaine in his stomach and intestines died mid-flight on his way from Bogota to Tokyo, authorities have said in northern Mexico where the plane made an emergency landing.

The 42-year-old man, identified only as Udo N, began having a seizure after the commercial flight from the Colombian capital made a stopover in Mexico City, the prosecutor’s office for the state of Sonora said. “Flight attendants noticed a person suffering convulsions and requested permission to make an emergency landing in Hermosillo, Sonora,” it said.

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Behind the bloodshed: the chilling untold stories about Charles Manson

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Tarantino’s epic is the big draw at Cannes. But there are other Manson movies around – including one about what ultimately happened to the young women who fell under the murderer’s spell

Over the last half century, one villain has loomed large over Hollywood. The gruesome murders committed by Charles Manson and his followers in the summer of 1969 have filled countless films and documentaries about stardom and the debaucheries of the 1960s. But his malign influence extends far beyond the screen. Aside from murdering eight people, Manson and his disciples – the Family – have been blamed for wiping out the counterculture, free love, communes and hippies.

Three new films are making fresh attempts to reckon with “the symbol of animalism and evil”, as Rolling Stone magazine called him. The biggest is Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, about to premiere at the Cannes film festival. Set in Los Angeles during the Manson era, the film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as a fading TV western star and Brad Pitt as his stunt double, both attempting to make the leap to the big screen. Margot Robbie plays Sharon Tate – the actor and wife of director Roman Polanski – who was brutally murdered by the Family. Manson, a background figure in the film, is played by Damon Herriman.

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Blow up: how half a tonne of cocaine transformed the life of an island

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In 2001, a smugglers’ yacht washed up in the Azores and disgorged its contents. The island of São Miguel was quickly flooded with high-grade cocaine – and nearly 20 years on, it is still feeling the effects.

By Matthew Bremner

Around midday on 6 June 2001, locals from Pilar da Bretanha, a parish on the northwestern tip of the Atlantic island São Miguel, saw a white yacht, about 40 feet long, drifting aimlessly near the area’s sheer cliffs. None of the villagers had ever seen a boat of this size floating so close to that part of the coast, where the sea was shallow, the tides strong and the rocks razor-sharp. They supposed it was an amateur sailor who had got lost.

In fact, the man sailing the boat was a skilled seaman. Two Italian passports, a Spanish passport and a Spanish national ID card were later found in his possession, all of which showed the same 44-year-old with weathered skin and dark curly hair. But each of the four documents listed a different name. In the previous three months, he had crossed the Atlantic twice, sailing more than 3,000 miles from the Canary Islands, just west of Morocco, to north-east Venezuela, and then back again, to São Miguel, 1,000 miles west of Portugal.

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Berlin park designates ‘pink zone’ areas for drug dealers

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Repeated attempts by police to clear dealers from Görlitzer Park in Kreuzberg prompts move by park manager

Drug dealers in Berlin are to be given designated spaces in a city centre park to carry out transactions, leading to criticism that authorities have capitulated to criminal gangs.

For years there has been a heated debate about Görlitzer Park, a popular meeting point in the trendy southern Berlin district of Kreuzberg, which has been attracting an ever increasing number of drug dealers. Local people said they were reluctant to let children and pets roam free there.

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Denver becomes first US city to decriminalize ‘magic mushrooms’

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Unofficial results show citizen initiative on psilocybin passed, following path of decriminalized cannabis

Voters on Tuesday made Denver the first US city to in effect decriminalize psilocybin – the psychoactive substance in “magic mushrooms” – adding a new chapter to the city’s role in shaping wider drug policy.

The citizen initiative on the ballot followed the same tack taken by marijuana activists to decriminalize pot possession in 2005 in the city. That move was followed by statewide legalization in 2012. A number of other states have since broadly allowed marijuana sales and use by adults.

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Bear Clan: a model of indigenous activism that’s swept across Canada

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An organisation founded in the 90s and revived in 2014 is now 1,100 volunteers who walk the streets looking for ways to help

In a small room in a Winnipeg community centre, dozens of volunteers strap on bright yellow vests and ready themselves for night patrol. Some will pick up syringes along the way, others will hand out fresh fruit and water – all under the banner of protecting the city’s most vulnerable.

“We are the boots on the ground,” said James Favel, the founder of Winnipeg’s Bear Clan. “We are the direct action that our nation has been crying for for decades.”

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Science professor allegedly taught students to make ecstasy

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Tatsunori Iwamura reportedly admitted getting students in his pharmaceutical class at Japanese university to make illegal drug

A Japanese university professor could face up to 10 years in prison after allegedly teaching his students how to produce MDMA to “further their knowledge” of pharmaceuticals, according to reports.

Tatsunori Iwamura, 61, has been likened to Walter White, the fictional chemistry teacher in the cult TV series Breaking Bad who starts manufacturing crystal meth after being diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer.

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Canada’s legal weed struggles to light up as smokers stick to black market

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Six months after legalisation, licensed producers are unable to keep up with the demand or quality of neighborhood dealers

When Melissa, a resident of Halifax, Nova Scotia, went to one of Canada’s first government cannabis stores, she wasn’t impressed. “You can’t look at what they have. You can’t smell the product,” she said. “It’s too expensive.”

And so she, like tens of thousand of other Canadians, went back to their old habits: buying from neighbourhood dealers.

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New antibiotics could be developed using fish slime, scientists say

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Mucus that protects fish contains substances that could help tackle MRSA and E coli

Fish slime could be key to the development of new antibiotics, researchers say.

Antibiotic resistance is a growing danger, with experts warning of a return to a situation where everyday infections could become life-threatening. The NHS is aiming to cut antibiotic use by 15% by 2024 in a bid to tackle the problem – which has been called a danger to humanity – while the government has also announced it is looking into offering incentives to drug companies to come up with new antibiotics.

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The campaign for a ‘drug-free world’ is costing lives | Louise Arbour and Mohamed ElBaradei

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Global policy on drug control is unrealistic, and has taken a harsh toll on millions of the world’s poorest people

Drug control efforts across the world are a threat to human dignity and the right to life.

In 2017, more than 70,000 people died from a drug overdose in the US. Among the reasons for these deaths are the lack of access to health and harm-reduction services, as well as the fear of legal repression, which often dissuades people who use drugs from asking for help.

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Social workers can do so much more than just pick up the pieces

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At its best, social work can break cycles of crisis, and help people change their lives and communities

  • Guardian Jobs: see the latest vacancies in social care

Too often, social services are designed as rotating doors. They focus on individuals in crisis who, when the symptoms of the emergency have eased, are sent directly back to the stressful situation that caused all the damage – a painful, costly and tragic cycle.

There is little focus in formal social services on helping people to transform their environments to provide ongoing support and love, let alone engaging people to become advocates for their rights. Yet outside these limitations, social workers are supporting connections in communities designed to last people’s whole lifetimes. In many countries we call it “working beyond services”. There are countless examples around the world.

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Fake drugs kill more than 250,000 children a year, doctors warn

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Printer ink, paint and arsenic found in some drugs sold to treat life-threatening illnesses

Doctors have called for an urgent international effort to combat a “pandemic of bad drugs” that is thought to kill hundreds of thousands of people globally every year.

A surge in counterfeit and poor quality medicines means that 250,000 children a year are thought to die after receiving shoddy or outright fake drugs intended to treat malaria and pneumonia alone, the doctors warned.

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British child raised in Pakistan jail returned to UK without mother

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Khadija Shah gave birth to daughter Malaika, now 6, while serving a life sentence for smuggling heroin

A six-year-old girl who has spent her entire life inside a Pakistani prison after her British mother was convicted of drug trafficking has been released and returned to the UK.

Khadija Shah, 32, gave birth to her daughter Malaika while serving a life sentence inside the notorious Adiala prison in Rawalpindi, in the Punjab province.

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Global war on drugs could harm efforts to abolish death sentences – study

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Iran reforms drive 90% fall in death penalty worldwide, but report warns hardline approach to minor cases violates human rights

Global efforts to abolish the death penalty are in danger of being undermined by anti-drug governments that use capital punishment to enforce a zero-tolerance approach, experts have warned.

The caution comes even though the number of people sentenced to death for drug offences around the world has actually fallen by nearly 90% over the past four years, according to a study by Harm Reduction International, with 91 known deaths last year compared with 755 in 2015.

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Musician jailed over girlfriend’s drug death at Bestival

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Ceon Broughton imprisoned for eight and a half years for manslaughter of Louella Fletcher-Michie

A musician who supplied his girlfriend with a lethal dose of drugs and filmed her as she lay dying at a music festival has been jailed for eight and a half years.

Ceon Broughton, 30, gave Louella Fletcher-Michie, 24, the party drug 2C-P at Bestival in Dorset in September 2017. Jurors at Winchester crown court were shown footage in which Fletcher-Michie repeatedly shouts at Broughton to phone her mother but he dismisses her, telling her to “put your phone away”.

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The Kid and The Choirboy – the harrowing story of George Pell’s victims

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In this extract from Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of George Pell, one boy’s family tell Louise Milligan the cataclysmic effect abuse had on him

This is the story of two teenage boys sent on scholarships from what were then Melbourne’s inner suburbs to a Catholic boys’ school – St Kevin’s College. St Kevin’s is in Toorak, Melbourne’s most exclusive precinct.

The school is wedged between the Kooyong Tennis Club and the Yarra River, and closed behind grand iron gates with gilded lettering. The boys wear boater hats and navy blazers, candy-striped with emerald and gold. While the area the boys came from has now gentrified, in the 1990s it might as well have been a different planet.

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