Drug News You Can Use
Another Ivy drug bust: Cornell student faces heroin charges
On Sunday morning, Ithaca, N.Y. police arrested a 26-year-old woman, who is listed as being a Cornell University student, and charged her with possessing nearly six ounces of heroin that is worth more than $150,000. It was one of the largest seizures in the police department’s history, according to The Ithaca Journal.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/campus-overload/2010/12/another_ivy_drug_bust_cornell.html
Navy drug suspect list hits 17
SEVENTEEN sailors have been identified as members of a suspected drug trafficking ring at Sydney’s Garden Island naval base.
In what now looms as the Australian Defence Force’s largest drugs scandal in at least two decades, The Australian can reveal that the sailors under investigation belong to the navy’s Fleet Support Unit, which is responsible for maintaining ships and submarines at Garden Island.
Teen Drug Use Increases
Marijuana use among U.S. teens is increasing, despite decades of prevention efforts.
The troubling results of the 2010 Monitoring The Future survey, a product of the National Institutes on Drug Abuse, show that 16 percent of the nation’s eighth-graders use marijuana on a daily basis. That’s up from 14.5 percent in 2009.
http://www.suntelegraph.com/cms/news/story-206498.html
Doctor’s drug abuse not pretty or rare
“To go to a doctor who is impaired can really have deadly consequences. It’s no different than an airline pilot who is using drugs or alcohol in that you’re often dealing with life and death circumstances,” said Steve Levin, a medical malpractice attorney with the Levin & Perconti law firm in Chicago.
Remarkably, Ready said that as far as he knows he never did harm to a patient in the operating room. But he knows his clouded judgment put them at grave risk.
Recently, those kinds of risks have sparked a number of patients’ rights advocacy groups to call for mandatory drug testing of all medical professionals, said Diane Pinakiewicz, president of the National Patient Safety Foundation in Boston. Many in the medical community argue such testing would infringe on personal privacy.
Through the first 10 months of 2010, Illinois’ state licensing board reprimanded or suspended the licenses of at least 156 medical professionals for stealing, using or mishandling drugs, or failing drug tests. Those numbers have remained fairly consistent over the last 10 years, records show, even while awareness of the problem in the medical community has grown.
http://www.standard.net/topics/features/2010/12/13/doctors-drug-abuse-not-pretty-or-rare
Falls employee sentenced for drug deals
A former Niagara Falls city worker is headed to prison for selling drugs out of his city truck.
http://www.wivb.com/dpp/news/crime/Falls-employee-sentenced-for-drug-deals
