Drug overdose epidemic top cause of US injury deaths

Drug overdoses have reached epidemic levels in the United States where they are the leading cause of injury deaths, surpassing car accidents and gunshots, the Drug Enforcement Administration said Wednesday. “Drug abuse is ending too many lives too soon and destroying families and communities,” DEA Administrator Chuck Rosenberg said. “We must reach young people at an even earlier age and …

Increase seen in prescription drug use in US

Between 1999-2012, overall prescription drug use increased among U.S. adults, with this increase seen for the majority of but not all drug classes, according to a study in the November 3 issue of JAMA. Use of prescription drugs represents a major expenditure in the United States, and research suggests that use of prescription drugs is increasing. Yet much of the …

Meryl Nass, M.D. – The Real Afghanistan Surge is in Heroin Production and Tripled Opium Cultivation since the US military arrived/ UN and US Government documents

Recently I worked in another Maine city and was astonished at the number of patients I encountered who were using heroin.  I had never seen anything like it, during a lifetime practicing medicine. In New Hampshire, it was said, deaths from heroin now exceed deaths from car accidents.  Nationwide, CDC noted, “Between 2002 and 2013, the rate of heroin-related overdose deaths nearly quadrupled, and more than …

Eric London – A portrait of life in America’s Rust Belt

Spread out across the prairies of north-central Indiana are dozens of towns and small cities whose streets and industrial parks once buzzed and hummed with the sound of automobile production. Over the highways and railroad tracks linking places like Muncie, Kokomo, and Marion to the industrial capitals of Detroit and Chicago there passed millions upon millions of loads of car …

America’s war on drugs is empowering Mexico’s drug cartels By Don Winslow

I’ve been writing about the war on drugs for 15 years. That’s a sad statement, if you think about it. Particularly given that 15 years is less than half the life of this particular war, which, at 44, has gone on longer than the Civil War, World War II, Vietnam and Afghanistan combined. The war has multiple fronts, but my particular beat …

The NSA’s Technotyranny: One Nation Under Surveillance – John Whitehead

We now have a fourth branch of government.As I document in my new book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, this fourth branch came into being without any electoral mandate or constitutional referendum, and yet it possesses superpowers, above and beyond those of any other government agency save the military. It is all-knowing, all-seeing and all-powerful. It operates beyond …

Drug War Fail: More Heroin Addicts Are Created By Doctors Than Drug Dealers – Carey Wedler

A recently released Drug Enforcement Administration reportreveals not only that heroin use has exploded, but that 4 out of 5 new users have previously abused prescription drugs. The details of the analysis, titled the “National Heroin Threat Assessment,” unwittingly demonstrate that the Drug War has failed to curb drug use and has actually exacerbated the problem. The report opens with an overview of …

Human Rights Abuses Rampant Under Drug War, 100 Groups Tell UN – Lauren McCauley

Citing large scale human rights abuses and discriminatory enforcement practices, more than 100 organizations on Wednesday sent an open letter (pdf) to the United Nations calling for a significant shift in global drug policy. The international coalition is comprised of non-governmental organizations and drug reform advocacy groups—such as Human Rights Watch, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Drug Policy Alliance—as well …

Same Surveillance State, Different War

It’s been a long 22 months since the first of thousands of classified government documents became public in what has turned into a drumbeat of astonishing revelations about the scope of mass surveillance carried out by the United States government. On Tuesday evening, USA Today detailed a massive surveillance operation, run by the intelligence arm of the Drug Enforcement Agency, that began in …

U.S. secretly tracked billions of calls for decades

The U.S. government started keeping secret records of Americans’ international telephone calls nearly a decade before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, harvesting billions of calls in a program that provided a blueprint for the far broader National Security Agency surveillance that followed. For more than two decades, the Justice Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration amassed logs of virtually all …