Poisoned Drug Supply

Although Scottish authorities have yet to find any dirty dope, they have found another heroin user dead of anthrax.

At least seven heroin users have died from dope contaminated with anthrax in Scotland, and one in Germany. Harm reductionists and public health experts are demanding that government respond with more than "quit using."

More than a year after the DEA quietly reported that a veterinary anti-parasitic agent was showing up in cocaine, and after at least two US deaths linked to the tainted drug, federal public health officials have finally issued an alert warning doctors, treatment centers, and public health professionals of the menace.

Nearly 40,000 died of drug-related causes in 2006, the vast majority of them overdoses. Dying on drugs is rapidly gaining on dying in car wrecks as America's leading accidental cause of death -- a grim demonstration of the failure of prohibition.

An Associated Press story at the end of August raised the alarm about levasimole-tainted cocaine, but the problem has been emerging for years. Now, while waiting for the feds to act, harm reductionists and public health workers grapple with how to respond.

When 136 people died after drinking illicit alcohol in India's Gujarat state, critics were quick to call for an end to alcohol prohibition there. The state government isn't listening to them.

Numbers and analysis on both sides of the ocean show the drug war to be a failure based on the weakest of assumptions.

Drug offender registries are a hare-brained idea that is more likely to help young people find drug dealers than prevent them.