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Please feel free to share this information http://www.ishss.uva.nl/addiction Dear colleagues, We are pleased to let you know that the Summer Institute on Alcohol, Drugs and Addiction will be held at the International School for Humanities and Social Sciences at the Universiteit van Amsterdam from July 13- 26, 2008.

Are HMO's pretending to treat chronic pain? Like Kaiser pretending to offer a chronic pain program, accepting you into it and then saying no we can't let you in after waiting months to get in.

I could not get my truck into Mexico, so I have turned back. I'm currently sitting in Ponca City, Oklahoma, on my way back to the Great White North. I will then book a flight to Mexico City, but that will probably be three weeks or a month from now to take advantage of lower fares. Gotta run--there's an icy storm blowing in--but I'll be back tomorrow, and I'll have a few things to say about bureaucracy and corruption on the border, "Fourth Amendment-free zones" along the border, and all those Texas highway patrol cars lurking on US 281 coming out of the Rio Grande Valley.

Vancouver police are currently at the scene of the sixth homicide of '08 and this is another targeted shooting in the criminal underworld. While the government is spending 10 million on a prison retro

B.C. health minister George Abbott announced today(Fri.Feb.15'08)that the old Willingdon Juvenile Detention Center was to be re-fitted with 100 new beds and put back in use to deal with those unfortunate souls that run afoul of the "new" drug court his government is opening in Burnaby this summer.The claim is that this will be exclusively for people with multiple barriers such as addiction and mental illness.We had drug courts in B.C. back in the seventies to deal with the so called runaway drug problem of the day.There was also an attempt to make addiction itself a criminal act and the fact that a person was an addict was to be reason enough to lock them up till a cure was found or they died.Needless to say the program didn't meet even the barest necessity for proof required to pass such an abomination and several addicts,myself included,attended every meeting and asked questions they couldn't answer.The plan was dropped within weeks of it's being announced.This has the same bad smell that that legislation had and it will be very surprising if they don't succumb to the temptation to solve the drug problem by simply locking everyone up.The support for this program was from a group of select politicians that went to Europe and came back saying that they had found a program with a success rate of 70%.As usual the evidence was 100% anecdotal but that didn't stop the government from throwing money at the project.Surrey mayor Dianne Watts was one of the main proponents of this project.Watts thinks harm reduction is a diet plan and supports all things prohibition with the blind faith of the believer.Willingdon is an old institution with a terrible legacy of lost youth and criminal abuse that destroyed most that entered it's door.This is another waste of tax dollars on a program with nothing new to offer and as Mr.Abbott himself was quoted as saying;"will probably have to hold some for the rest of their lives".The people that this is aimed at are not the criminals that are doing the drive by shootings or the contract killings.This is an effort to put away

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Full Text of Lawsuit and Discussion

Full Text of Lawsuit Including Footnotes

PRN in Kansas - updated News archive

I had a feeling this wasn't going very far:

A Manhattan federal judge Thursday tossed out a $55 million suit filed by former federal drug agents who say the movie "American Gangster" tagged them as criminals.

Three former Drug Enforcement Administration agents sued NBC Universal last month, contending they were slandered by an on-screen claim that Harlem druglord Frank Lucas' cooperation "led to the convictions of three-quarters of New York City's Drug Enforcement Agency."

For starters, Judge Colleen McMahon said, the New York City Drug Enforcement Agency doesn't exist.

"It would behoove a major corporation like Universal (which is owned by a major news organization, NBC) not to put inaccurate statements at the end of popular films," McMahon wrote. "However, nothing in this particular untrue statement is actionable." [NY Daily News]

Cool. And now that we've thrown DEA out of civil court, let's toss a few of their criminal cases too. Starting with this one…

To my great surprise,recent letters to the cities local papers have expressed support for justice Catherine Bruce's tossing of evidence in a grow bust because cops used SWAT style tactics to enter the premises.There were the mandatory letters from cops wives and from the pro police lobby that inferred the cops would be threatened or that the occupants would get rid of the evidence but people weren't buying.The thought of someone trying to flush 700 plants and the concurrent hydroponic material was so comical that even the papers cartoonist took a poke at the concept.The very best complaint was that battering in a door with a ram would somehow negate the booby traps that were mentioned.Needless to say,hitting the door with a ram would set off any traps faster than just about anything else.The fact is,there has not been a case where bashing in someones door has saved a single police life and the opposite is not the case.One young man was shot holding a remote control.The fact that the US has had many tragedies from just such raids was probably as prominent in this ruling as was anything that's happened here.Of course there was a letter invoking Mayerthorpe,where four mounties were ambushed by a cop hating psycho but the ambush occurred long after the place had been secured and the case had nothing at all to do with violent swat style entries.It's just an example of the desperation that law enforcement is feeling now that their bully tactics have seen the light of day and been found wanting.