Drug News

A Justice Department review has found that a multi-agency drug intelligence center in El Paso, Texas, assigned to monitor illegal drug trafficking, suffered from “several significant weaknesses” — including unstaffed key offices and important information that agencies never shared. http://abcnews.go.com/News/article/texas-drug-enforcement-office-disorganized-hindered-interdiction-efforts/story?id=10923661

Fifteen suspected drug gang members were killed in a shootout with Mexican soldiers on Tuesday in western Mexico in the latest fatal clash between warring cartels and federal forces. http://www.reuters.com/places/mexico

Coca cultivation is surging once again in this country’s remote tropical valleys, part of a major repositioning of the Andean drug trade that is making Peru a contender to surpass Colombia as the world’s largest exporter of cocaine. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/14/world/americas/14peru.html

Border seizures of methamphetamine are surging after years of decline, indicating that the drug once seen as a poor man’s cocaine drummed up in backwoods U.S. kitchens is becoming a key export of Mexican drug traffickers. The Drug Enforcement Administration estimates the vast majority of all U.S. meth seized now originates in Mexico, with increasing…

Want to know where the Unabomber is doing time? Not a problem. How about the American Taliban, the Olympic Park bomber, or the only man convicted of conspiring in the Sept. 11 attacks? All of that information is in the public record and readily available on the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ website. But when it…

Lagos — Despite the rate at which offenders are being caught and ‘hopefully punished’, pushers of hard drugs are not seemingly discouraged. If anything, instead of giving up on the nefarious act of pushing hard drugs like cocaine, heroin and the rest, they seem to be devising new means to beat security especially at the…

Ecstasy (3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine [MDMA]) is an illegal synthetic amphetamine used as a stimulant and hallucinogen (1–3). On January 4, 2010, the Los Angeles County (LAC) Department of Public Health (DPH) learned of six MDMA-related emergency department (ED) visits and one death, all linked to a New Year’s Eve event attended by approximately 45,000 persons. http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5922a1.htm?s_cid=mm5922a1_w

What seems like a carefree night of revelry at a “rave” can quickly turn tragic when the club drug ecstasy is involved, finds a new report on one such event from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Bad reactions to ecstasy, in some cases mixed with alcohol or other drugs, were implicated in…

For decades, marijuana growers in Northern California have received reports of pending police raids from a local community radio station and citizens wary of the drug war. Now, police — citing a boom in marijuana production and a possible influx of armed illegal drug traffickers — say the practice needs to stop. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127538267

Fourteen states and the District of Columbia allow people to use marijuana to treat a wide variety of ailments. Each law is different — but if you look at them in chronological order, a pattern emerges: The laws are becoming stricter. The states passing laws today include more regulation than the early adopters did. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127012745