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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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”.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...The first drug-checking service licensed by the Home Office will allow users to have their illicit substances tested without fear of being arrested in a move that could be rolled out nationally if it is shown to save lives.
The year-long pilot project, which had a soft launch in Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, last Friday but begins in earnest this week, will allow anyone over the age of 18 to take their drugs to the clinic, run by the charity Addaction. Testing the content will take about 10 minutes, during which time the user will complete a short questionnaire to allow harm reduction advice to be tailored to them.
Continue reading...Allegations emerged this week that jury members followed media coverage of high profile trial, despite orders not to
Lawyers for convicted drug trafficker Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán intend to petition for a new trial after a news report indicated that multiple jurors followed media coverage of the trial against the instructions of the judge in the case.
Allegations of juror misconduct came to light earlier this week in an article published by Vice News. In the piece, an anonymous juror said jurors had routinely violated the judge’s instructions to “stay away from media coverage, not doing any research on the internet or otherwise and [to not] communicate anything about the case to anyone”.
Continue reading...Two former military pilots, a customs officer and celebrity bodyguard among the accused
Sitting on the asphalt at Punta Cana international airport in the Dominican Republic, the private plane was about to take off for an overnight flight to Saint-Tropez in France when police swooped.
Inside the aircraft, a Dassault Falcon 50, officers found four Frenchmen – two pilots and two passengers – along with 680kg of cocaine, with an estimated street value of €20m (£17.5m), in 26 battered suitcases.
Continue reading...Artist brands planned donation from pharmaceutical family to National Portrait Gallery unethical over OxyContin link
The National Portrait Gallery will be forced to turn down a gift of £1m from members of the multibillionaire Sackler family if it goes ahead with a prestigious new exhibition of the work of US artist Nan Goldin.
The photographer and activist is threatening to boycott the gallery if it accepts the donation from the owners of the American pharmaceutical company that makes the addictive painkiller OxyContin, the Observer has learned.
Continue reading...Bar attacked near hotel zone amid rising drug-related violence in the Caribbean resort city
Five people have been shot dead and five more wounded in Cancún after gunmen burst into a bar in the Mexican resort city and opened fire.
Quintana Roo state prosecutors said the attack on Saturday took place in a club called La Kuka, on a main avenue in central Cancún about 6km (4 miles) away from the Caribbean resort city’s seaside tourist hotel zone, situated on the Yucatán Peninsula.
Continue reading...Toronto researchers believe the drug can also help those with depression, schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s
An experimental drug that bolsters ailing brain cells has raised hopes of a treatment for memory loss, poor decision making and other mental impairments that often strike in old age.
The drug could be taken as a daily pill by over-55s if clinical trials, which are expected to start within two years, show that the medicine is safe and effective at preventing memory lapses.
Continue reading...Demonstrators call on museum to refuse donations from the owners of OxyContin
US art photographer and activist Nan Goldin brought the Guggenheim Museum in New York to a standstill on Saturday night as thousands of fake prescriptions were dropped into the atrium to protest against the institution’s acceptance of donations from the family who owns the maker of OxyContin – the prescription painkiller at the root of America’s opioids crisis.
Tourists and locals gawped in confusion as Goldin and fellow demonstrators began chanting criticism of the Sackler family, who owns Purdue Pharma. The activists handed out fake pill bottles as sheets of paper fluttered down inside the landmark building.
Continue reading...Carfentanil, described as ‘extremely potent’ and often undetectable, involved in multiple overdose deaths
Coroners in two of Ohio’s largest counties have issued drug abuse warnings following the reappearance of an opioid so powerful it’s sometimes used to sedate elephants.
Dr Anahi Ortiz is coroner in Franklin county in central Ohio. She said Friday that the county which calls Columbus home had at least three carfentanil-related overdose deaths in January.
Continue reading...Warnings on coercion and blackmailing over smartphones went unheeded, say experts, as child exploitation spirals
A failure to grasp how technology and social media is being used to coerce, control, blackmail and track the movements of children as young as 11 by “county lines” drug gangs has seen an epidemic of child criminal exploitation spiral out of control in the UK.
“For the past seven or eight years we have been warning the government, the authorities, teachers, anyone who would listen, that technology is the central organising feature of the county lines business model,” said Sheldon Thomas, a consultant on gang behaviour through his organisation Gangsline.
Continue reading...Britain snorts more of the drug than almost anywhere in Europe, more young people are taking it and deaths are rising. Why?
The moment Dan (not his real name) realised he had a problem with cocaine, he had been off work for a week, sick with flu. His phone buzzed. It was his cocaine dealer, calling to check he was OK. When Dan, one of his favoured customers, hadn’t been in touch to buy the cocaine he usually took several times a week, the dealer knew something was wrong.
“I don’t like thinking about that,” Dan says, shaking his head as we sit in a London pub. Now 36, Dan estimates he has spent £25,000 on cocaine. Lines in the pub on a Friday night after work. Lines on a Wednesday evening at a friend’s house while earnestly discussing 90s hip-hop. Lines at house parties, weddings, birthday parties and for no reason at all, other than that cocaine – the white powder that makes no one a better version of themselves, but that many of us continue to do anyway – is everywhere and freely available.
Continue reading...Eleven people left ill in Sydney and six near Ballarat after Australia Day long weekend music festivals
A teenage boy has been found with almost 600 capsules and $2,000 cash at a Sydney music festival where several people left critically ill due to drug use.
Six young men aged under 25 left the Hardcore Till I Die festival at Sydney Olympic Park on Saturday in critical or serious conditions. All were either stable or discharged from hospital by Sunday.
Continue reading...Prohibition makes our world a more dangerous place, trapping people in poverty
I have spoken out on many issues during my career, but there is one that leaders in poorer countries passionately lobby me to campaign on: the prohibition of drugs.
The “war on drugs” is harming the most vulnerable and criminalising poverty. It is not a war on drugs – despite decades of prohibition, drug production and consumption is on the increase globally – it is a war on the poor. Prohibition damages people and the planet.
Continue reading...Doctors call for more transparency amid fears of shortages, especially of insulin
Ministers have been urged by top doctors to reveal the extent of national drug stocks, amid growing evidence patients are stockpiling medication in preparation for a no-deal Brexit.
The Royal College of Physicians (RCP), which represents tens of thousands of doctors, urged the government to be more “transparent about national stockpiles, particularly for things that are already in short supply or need refrigeration, such as insulin”.
Continue reading...Alex Cifuentes, a close associate of the cartel chief, testified that he told US authorities about the alleged bribe in 2016
A witness at the US trial of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán has testified that he told US authorities the accused Mexican drug lord once paid a $100m bribe to former Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto.
Alex Cifuentes, who has said he was a close associate of the Sinaloa cartel chief for years, discussed the alleged bribe under cross-examination by one of Guzman’s lawyers in Brooklyn federal court on Tuesday. Asked if he told authorities in 2016 that Guzman arranged the bribe, he answered: “That’s right.”
Continue reading...The bodies, some burned, found in the northern border town of Tamaulipas that’s convulsed by fighting to control drug trafficking
Mexican authorities are investigating a battle between two suspected gangs that left at least 20 bodies, 17 of them burned, in a border town near where Donald Trump will visit on Thursday to win support for his plan to build a wall.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said at his daily morning news conference that initial information pointed to a “battle between two groups”, and that security officials would later provide further information.
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