Review:
A Painkiller's Double Life As An Illegal Street Drug
TV Review -- '48 Hours: Addicted'
In a scene of creepy voyeurism and joltingly effective reporting, a 22-year-old named Troy Swett, who looks like any middle-class college student in a red sweatshirt and baseball cap, sits in his messy apartment in Maine and prepares to stick a needle in his arm as the cameras watch. "I'm ashamed of it," he tells Harold Dow, the CBS reporter sitting next to him as he crushes a pill, cooks it up in a spoon and ties off his arm.
Later, as Mr. Swett travels to California for a rapid detox treatment that promises to cure him in hours after four years of addiction, CBS gives him a video camera so he can tape himself preparing his syringe in an airport bathroom.
His is by far...
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Suggested Reading
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Drug War Retreat:
England Moves To Decriminalize Narcotics
For British Prime Minister Tony Blair, there might never be a more opportune moment to stand down from a war that has grown increasingly unpopular at home.
It may only have been a matter of time, but Britain, which has enthusiastically assumed a co-leadership role in the "first war of the 21st century," the War on Terror, has chosen this moment to quietly but unmistakably begin a cessation of hostilities in the last and longest war of the 20th: the war on drugs.
In late October, Home Secretary David Blunkett announced that the government would soon stop arresting or even cautioning people for marijuana possession. Blunkett also indicated that the Labour Party is ready to discuss expanding the legal distribution of heroin to addicts and reclassifying the drug ecstasy-thought to be used by as many as half a million Britons each weekend-as a "soft" drug, with accompanying reductions in penalties for its manufacture, sale and possession.
The drug war... |
