Category Archives: Drugs
Ericka Pease Passes Out on Painkillers, Leaves Children Unattended
Town of Maine, NY (WBNG Binghamton) A town of Maine woman is arrested on child endangerment charges.
Deputies responded to Ericka Pease’s trailer on Cherry Drive in the town of Maine around 11:30 Thursday night.
The trailer’s door was left wide open.
A 5-year-old boy was running around the neighborhood and a 1-year-old boy was found inside the trailer sitting in a playpen with a soiled diaper.
Deputies said Pease was on the couch asleep and they couldn’t wake her up. When she finally woke up, she admitted to taking painkillers.
Pease refused medical treatment and was arrested and transported to the Broome County Jail. She will return to Maine Court on a later date.
Pease is charged with two misdemeanor counts of endangering the welfare of a child.
Tiara Drake Charged With Poisoning Family Members After Being Denied Cheese
BATTLEBORO, N.C. — A North Carolina woman is charged with trying to poison five family members after one of them refused to share some cheese with her.
A statement from the Nash County Sheriff’s Office said 24-year-old Tiara Drake wanted some of a relative’s cheese on Friday, but the woman refused to share.
The sheriff’s office said Drake awakened before the rest of the family the next morning and used detergent, window cleaner and a household cleanser to poison the cheese. The rest of the family made breakfast with the cheese and began eating it before one of them determined it was tainted.
Drake is charged with five counts of attempted first-degree murder and jailed under $50,000 bond. She had a court appearance Monday but didn’t have an attorney at the hearing.
Taylor Powers Rescued From Colorado Mountain After Ingesting Mushrooms, Stripping Naked
Meet Taylor Powers.
The college student, 21, had to be rescued yesterday afternoon off a Colorado mountain after she ingested mushrooms, stripped off her clothes, and scuffled with two classmates with whom she had been hiking.
After receiving a 911 call that a female hiker was “high on mushrooms and in distress,” Boulder County Sheriff’s Office deputies and other assorted rescue personnel (35 in total) responded to Chautauqua Park.
Powers, seen above, was located by a park ranger who discovered that the University of Colorado undergrad had “removed all of her clothing and was being restrained” by two male companions. Rescuers had to handcuff the unruly Powers, who struggled as she was placed in a rescue basket.
Cited for unlawful consumption of a controlled substance, Powers was transported to a Boulder hospital, where she was treated and released last night. “Further charges are pending against others involved,” deputies reported.
Powers, a communications major, has not commented on her weekend adventure on her Facebook page (which includes hiking and skiing photos).
New Study Says Pot Smokers Are Thinner & Have Lower Blood Sugar … Even with the Munchies?
by Rebekah Sager
Seems like maybe it pays off to smoke more than a little weed. According to a study published in the American Journal of Medicine, people who regularly smoke marijuana may have better control of their blood sugar and may be skinnier than non-marijuana users.
The research shows that people who reported regularly using marijuana had a lower risk of insulin resistance and had lower fasting insulin levels, compared with people who never used marijuana. Researchers also found an association between using marijuana and having a smaller waistline and higher levels of “good” HDL cholesterol, compared with non-users.
“We found that marijuana use was associated with lower levels of fasting insulin and (insulin resistance), and smaller waist circumference,” say the scientists from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, the University of Nebraska and the Harvard School of Public Health.
The new study included data from 4,657 people who were part of the National Health and Nutrition Survey from 2005 to 2010. Among all the study participants, 1,975 had used marijuana before but weren’t current users, and 579 were current marijuana users. There were 2,103 people who had never used it.
Researchers found that the associations between marijuana use and insulin and cholesterol levels were especially pronounced among the current users
Pot smokers had 16% lower insulin levels than their non-smoking counterparts. They also showed a 17% decrease in insulin resistance, a condition that makes glucose difficult to absorb for the body. These appear to be pretty serious health benefits for a very over-weight US.
More than one-third of U.S. adults (35.7%) are obese. In 2008, medical costs associated with obesity were estimated at $147 billion; the medical costs for people who are obese were $1,429 higher than those of normal weight. Over 1.9 million new cases of diabetes were diagnosed in people aged 20 years and older in 2010–the latest Morbidity and Mortality report (MMWR) released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that from 1995 to 2010, there was at least a 100% increase in the prevalence of diagnosed diabetes cases in 18 states. Forty-two states saw an increase of at least 50%.
So, smoke up people–it just might save your life.
Destiny Spitler, 12, Dies After Putting On Grandmother’s Pain Patch
CLINTON, MO (KCTV) - A Missouri girl got her hands on a powerful medicine that ended up killing her, but it wasn’t pills or any liquid.
Sadly, the emergency call police got in Clinton over weekend is not that uncommon – the result of a powerful pain killing patch. And it is not just teens looking to get high.
Oftentimes, it is much more innocent mistakes that turn deadly.
A cross in the front lawn of Destiny Spitler’s home marks a significant and sudden loss.
“Always happy. Bubbly. She was very bubbly,” former babysitter Mary Hawkins said.
The 12-year-old girl’s grandmother described Destiny as loving, giving and caring.
“She loved to sing. She sang all the time. But apparently she was a very curious little girl that we didn’t realize,” Diana Spitler said.
Destiny’s grandma uses fentanyl, a powerful pain patch, to manage her back pain.
When Destiny died in her sleep Saturday morning, investigators found one on her thigh.
What prompted the 12-year-old to affix it is unclear, but her grandmother said Destiny pulled it from the trash.
“It was a patch that was from last Tuesday. And she put it on,” Diana Spitler said.
Toxicologist Dr. Stephen Thornton, with the University of Kansas Hospital, said he has seen many cases where children have overdosed on a patch tossed in the trash, sometimes thinking it is a sticker.
“Once you use that patch and you take it off, it still has about 50 percent of the fentanyl that was started with,” Thornton said.
That is why it’s important to consider not just how people store their medications, but also how to dispose of it.
It’s something Destiny’s grandmother didn’t know and something she wants others to hear.
“Mothers, fathers … anyone who wears these dang patches, dispose of them, fold them up in tiny little pieces and flush them down the stool so your babies won’t be like mine,” she said.
That is exactly what doctors recommend – crumple it or fold it, then flush it.
People may have heard before not to flush medicine because it contaminates ground water, but there are a handful of medications the FDA does recommend flushing because they are so dangerous for children, and this is one of them. Click here for more information.
At this point, police aren’t certain if the fentanyl itself killed Destiny or if it was an interaction with medication she was taking that was prescribed to her.
They expect to have a more conclusive autopsy report in six to eight weeks.
Intoxicated Son Falls On Mom, Pins Her On Floor for Hours … Happy Mother’s Day
RIVERSIDE, Ill. (CBS) — A Riverside man was arrested last Thursday for drunkenly falling and passing out on his mother, pinning her to the kitchen floor for hours, according to a press release from the Riverside Police Department.
The woman, 81, laid there for an extended period of time before she was able to get relatives to call police. When first responders arrived at the scene, they reported that the legs of the mother and the son were intertwined and the son as passed out as he laid on his mother.
The mother was taken to Loyola University Medical Center, where she had to have surgery on her hip, which was broken in three places. The son was taken to McNeal Hospital to be treated for alcohol poisoning.
According to police, Robert Golba, 55, had an order of protection and under the terms of it he was not allowed in the residence under the influence of any drug or alcohol.
The violation of the order of protection did help Riverside police officers make a case against Mr. Golba for injuring his mother,” said Riverside Police Chief Thomas Weitzel in a press release.
Golba was charged with one count of felony violation of order of protection.
When you run your hand up a nun’s thigh, you don’t expect to find two kilos of cocaine
Three women dressed like nuns have been arrested at a Colombian airport allegedly smuggling drugs.
Police said the women, aged 20, 32 and 37 had two kilos (4.4lb) of cocaine each strapped to their bodies.
Officers said they became suspicious because the women “didn’t look like nuns” and their habits “didn’t look right”.
They were travelling from the capital Bogota to the island of San Andres, popular with holidaymakers.
Police Capt Oscar Davila said they appeared nervous, and the fabric of their habits did not match that of genuine nuns.
The three, who according to police broke into tears when the cocaine was discovered strapped to their legs, will be charged with drug smuggling.
They reportedly said they had been forced into drug trafficking because of “financial hardship”.
The Colombian island of San Andres, just off the coast of Nicaragua, is a popular destination for foreign and Colombian tourists alike.
The island is also along a busy drug-smuggling route, especially popular with speedboats and submarines laden with cocaine, stopping off on their way from Colombia to Central America.
“My son was not a reckless person. He decided to try what he thought was acid”
A drug marketed as an alternative to LSD or mescaline could be among the most powerful and potentially deadly of the synthetic drugs that have inundated the market in recent years, police and physicians believe.
A 19-year-old from the West Valley was in a medically induced coma for four days after taking the drug, a synthetic hallucinogen known as “n-bomb,” and would have died if he had not received treatment when he did, according to a physician.
Scottsdale police are investigating whether the deaths this year of two 18-year-olds are linked to the drug.
“That is certainly a possibility, based on what witnesses are telling us — that either this drug is involved, some variant of that,” said Sgt. Mark Clark, a Scottsdale police spokesman. “Certainly, when anyone becomes deceased from a possibility of any of these new drugs that are out there, we are obviously concerned.”
The first case in Scottsdale involved an 18-year-old Saguaro High School student who died in late January after taking what he assumed was LSD.
Scottsdale police are also investigating the death of an 18-year-old Arizona State University student who authorities believe died after taking the drug last weekend.
In the January case, Noah Carrasco lost consciousness shortly after taking the dose, administered through nose drops. An onlooker thought Carrasco simply needed to get some fresh air and sleep it off, said Carrasco’s mother, Susan Wadsworth.
A friend drove Carrasco around for a while but later became more concerned and took Carrasco to the hospital about 1:40 a.m. on Jan. 25.
“He’d been dead already at least for a couple of hours,” Wadsworth said. “They didn’t know that that’s what they were taking. My son was not a reckless person. He decided to try what he thought was acid, and obviously I didn’t know this at the time. But he would never have tried something he knew was that dangerous.”
Clark said it’s the same story with all the synthetic drugs. Whether they’re marketed as synthetic marijuana, cocaine or ecstasy, there is no reliable way to know what they are made of or how the body will react.
Ignorance about the drugs stretches from the streets to the crime labs, where scientists have to try to determine what substances are present in order for investigators to know what they’re dealing with.
“One of the problems with all these drugs is that we don’t know how they extract out of blood and how to recover them,” said Vince Figarelli, superintendent of the Arizona Department of Public Safety’s crime lab, where analysts have seen a couple of “n-bomb” cases.
“With most of these, there are no clinical trials,” he said. “These weren’t designed or approved for ingestion for medicinal purposes. There are no tests done on human subjects for us to rely on, or to go in and do an analysis of blood on the back end.”
The drug was first synthesized in 1991 by a Bay Area chemist and was banned in the United States in 2012, said Dr. Frank LoVecchio, a physician at Banner Good Samaritan Medical Center who co-authored a report on the unnamed 19-year-old’s case.
A Drug Enforcement Administration spokeswoman in Phoenix said investigators nationwide believe the drug is sold online and most often imported from foreign markets. She said the substance gets the street name “n-bomb” because of the series of chemicals that are key ingredients: N-BOMe.
The active chemical in one popular version of the drug is referred to as 2C-I, but other variations of that chemical have been found as chemists attempt to avoid the federal government’s ban on that ingredient.
The variations are a particular concern to Scottsdale police, Clark said.
“What you have is some amateur chemists who are trying to change the formulation of a drug that’s been declared an illegal substance to try to stay ahead of the law,” Clark said. “Kids — and it’s mostly kids who are taking this — need to understand that this chemical variant could be changed by a very, very little bit and it can prove to be very harmful. Just because someone says that it’s safe or someone says that it’s acid, everyone’s metabolism is different.”
The effort to sell “n-bomb” and its variants as drugs similar to LSD or mescaline is nothing more than a marketing gimmick, LoVecchio said.
“They act very similar to methamphetamine,” LoVecchio said. “Except this lasts longer, (has) worse fever (and) longer seizures.”
The 19-year-old patient that LoVecchio treated was brought in after taking the drug, sold as “smiles,” at a rave. He suffered from seizures shortly thereafter, according to the medical report.
Physicians could not stop the seizures, so the teen was placed into a medically induced coma. For the next four days, physicians treated the teenager with a battery of drugs, attempting to bring him out of a coma each day only to have the seizures resume.
“The agitation and hallucinations resolved on hospital day five,” the report states, and the patient was sent home the following day.
Two weeks later, he was still suffering from episodes of forgetfulness, according to the report.
Evidence of the drug affecting Arizona users is relatively thin so far, with few police agencies reporting that their investigators have encountered “n-bomb” and its variants and many unaware of its lethal potential. Only a handful of fatalities have been reported nationwide, and physicians at Banner Good Samaritan wrote a report in February about the drug’s effects on the 19-year-old, framing it as one of the first laboratory-confirmed cases.
LoVecchio said he has since seen similar cases, but he was not aware of any deaths linked to the drug.
A law Gov. Jan Brewer signed in April makes it illegal to possess one of the backbone chemicals in the drug and helps to ensure that the variants are illegal too, Figarelli said.
But it is a near-constant race for investigators to keep up with chemists who try to stay in front of the changing legal landscape when it comes to synthetics, according to investigators, making it more difficult for police to identify and spread the word about potentially lethal drugs that are making their way on the market.
“That is the biggest problem we face,” said Sgt. Tommy Thompson, a Phoenix police spokesman and former narcotics detective.
Eating lint out of the carpet isn’t normal ……. but if you’re on meth it is
A man is charged after police said he was eating lint out of the carpet at Burlington Coat Factory.
According to the arrest report, 50-year-old Jeffrey Wagner was alone in the shoe section eating pieces of lint out of the carpet.
Officers reported that Wagner had dilated eyes, slurred speech and was unsteady on his feet.
Police said Wagner admitted to smoking crystal meth and had drugs in his possession.
According to the report, Wagner had Lorotabs, a bag of crystal meth, one bag of unknown pills and one bag of an unknown white powder.
He is charged with possession of a controlled substance and public intoxication.
Washington state Judge to police: “Give that man his marijuana back, or else”
Give the man his marijuana. That was the gist of a simple order Tacoma Municipal Court Judge Jack Emery gave to Tacoma police two months ago.
Police refused.
Thursday, Emery repeated himself with emphasis: Police have seven days to comply with his Feb. 28 order and return the pot to Tacoma resident Joseph L. Robertson, or face a possible order of contempt.
“Appeal or comply,” Emery told assistant city attorney John Walker. “Or next week, show up, and I would advise you to bring counsel.”
The ruling was a small procedural victory for Robertson, but it could set the stage for a precedent-setting debate, and a collision between state and federal laws governing marijuana.
Police seized the pot in May 2012 after pulling Robertson over for speeding. The officer who made the stop reported smelling marijuana inside Robertson’s car and later found a small amount.
Robertson was cited for driving without a valid license and misdemeanor marijuana possession and released. City prosecutors dismissed the possession charge in December after the state’s vote to legalize the possession of small amounts of marijuana.
Robertson then asked for his pot back, and provided proof of medical marijuana authorization. The city refused, which prompted Emery’s Feb. 28 order.
Thursday, Robertson and his attorney, Jay Berneburg, were back in court, complaining that the city hadn’t complied. Robertson, a big man with a pony tail, wore an old Oakland Raiders jersey and sunglasses. Berneburg, also pony-tailed, wore a suit.
“Contemptuous” was the word Emery used to describe the city’s response to his earlier order. He held up a thick stack of legal briefs from the city, delivered one day before Thursday’s hearing. The city had blown the deadline to make such arguments, even if they had merit, the judge said.
The next step is uncertain – the next hearing is set for May 2. The matter could be resolved by then, or it could bounce up another legal level.
Emery’s order requires the city to fill out a release form and transmit it to the Pierce County Sheriff’s Department, which operates the property room where seized evidence (including Robertson’s pot) is stored.
The city could fill out the form and transmit it, leaving the onus of the decision on Pierce County. If the county refuses to return the pot, that could set up an appeal to Pierce County Superior Court.
Pierce County Sheriff’s spokesman Ed Troyer said Tacoma police could collect the pot; but the sheriff’s office won’t hand it to Robertson.
“It’s Tacoma’s case,” Troyer said. “If they want it, they can come and get it.”
Emery was careful to point out the jurisdictional tangle as he gave his ruling Thursday; he has legal authority over the city, but not the county.
“I am going to order that you fill out the appropriate release and transmit it to the sheriff’s department,” Emery said, addressing Walker. “Then I’m going to set a hearing next week. I think there’s contemptuous behavior here.”
Emery added that the case was “a quagmire,” due to the conflicting provisions of state and federal law.
After the hearing, Berneburg said that if the county refuses to return his client’s pot, he would file an appeal.
“This isn’t gonna end,” Berneburg said. “This is not gonna end.”
