Overdose deaths from prescription painkillers have skyrocketed in the past decade. Every year, nearly 15,000 people die from overdoses involving these drugs—more than those who die from heroin and cocaine combined.


Prescription Painkiller Overdoses in the U.S.
http://www.cdc.gov/Features/VitalSigns/PainkillerOverdoses/

hey, great article again speak easy man, this lady is such a miserable, miserable... bleeding at the pores corrupt piece of garbage. I hate to say it man but if there was a prohibition on canoli's I bet you this this lady would not be in this position, i assure you, you'd see this chick a good 4-5 months out of the year in a regular NYC train station, panhandling for the majority of the day, disappearing in the early afternoon for a couple hours then back at the panhandling spot after the wakeup canoli, of course, this time there'd be some sugar powder on her cheeks as one man says to her, who sees her everyday, and, out of pity always throws her some change, "hey, you know, there's help out there for you... I mean, aren't you sick and tired of being sick and tired?? you say that you need money for your kids... but everyday i see you in the morning, you disappear then you come back looking a little more full then you did earlier with sugary residue on your cheeks... i think you have a problem.. i think you need to let go, let god, let go let authority, let go let district attorney....." and Napolitano would deny it, it's not sugar residue from those illegal canolis it's makeup that got caked up as she rushed from the spot to check on her kids, of course. The dude would shake his head and again out of pity throw her a few cents. After the majority of the day was over shed count up all the dough she got, it's rarely enough (once in awhile, it works out to be 'enough' - usually on holidays or around the givingness of drunk folks) but she counts up in her head how many canolis she could get with this version of the daily loot.... at 20 bucks a canoli, when they used to be legal back in the 'old days' in little italy for 25 cents a piece... she can get two and a half canolis... she'll see if her 'guy' who they call 'the baker' will 'spot her' or 'loan her' on 'credit' an extra canoli... she may need to, ahem, 'clean his house' for the credit, if he's in one of THOSE moods, but whatever, it's not like she's got a choice, i mean, who'd be dumb enough to actually try to save this cash and NOT get a canoli? you know? cause then youre not gonna be able to sleep, and it'll feel...sorta like god is trying to turn you inside out in terms of pain.. that gnawing pain of not having that canoli. those hot flashes, the constipation, then nuclear toilet visits.. the hot, the cold, and the worst, those striking pins and needles in the legs when you lay down, nobody is gonna go through that. So she disppears again, gets those canolis..and since most times she asks for credit, the baker IS in that mood, she did clean his house, too bad she don't know and wont (not until she goes to a canoli substitution clinic, where they give out sugar free italian pastries which are always old and dry and just not even close to the canoli in anyway - though she dreams of one day, maybe winning the lottery and going to europe, where canolis are still prohibited, but are legal in medical settings, depending on country, with the UK, denmark, holland, germany and a couple others leading the way in canoli maintenance treatment) that the baker has hep C and HIV, cause he wasn't always a baker, before he turned his life over to the 'authority' but realized the money to be made in the canoli trade as a former canoli consumer, he was a canoli addict himself... and in that dirty canoli world, the baker once had no choice, there was a situation in that chaos whereby he and someone else only had one fat canoli, the bakers pal took a bite, shared the other half with the baker and the baker consumed it, caught diseases from that shared canoli and his life as he knew it, changed... 

As it has been said by many and holds true, "it is not a war on drugs but instead it is a war on people." A tool used to strip away Civil Rights and to empower law enforcement. I am forced to sit in pain because the government so restricts and controls drugs that I can not legally get treatment. Pot helps, not only with pain management but Schizophrenia as well. These people are using the law as a rock to hide under. If they will come out, I will fight them. At the gym, by Queensberry rules all legal so they can't cry for back-up or try to put me in prison for life. The worst, most, vile creatures ever misconceived, hide under under the rock called law. Already many, many thousands have been locked away, victims to these hypocrites.I would fight them but they are cowards, deserving only to fail. 

Oh, and here I was thinking that Gil said that the 'drug war' was over and everything was rainbows and lollypops.. when did it start back up again? 

Despite the consistency with which the U.S. government pats itself on the back for a job poorly done, it’s still embarrassing when one of its hack bureaucrats openly lies to one or more neighboring countries with the expectation that anyone with any brains is going to believe what she says.  This is the sort of thing that gets shoes thrown at politicians.

As Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano owes it to her fellow citizens to get real in her assessments of international threats and issues.  A seething drug war on one’s border with a fatality rate closing in on the total number of American casualties in Viet Nam is no measure of success.  Prohibition was supposed to prevent victims, not create them.  Whether it’s getting arrested or killed in a drug war, or being forced as a taxpayer to fund wasteful strategies, a majority of citizens are victimized by failed prohibition policies that would have been declared obsolete and off limits eight-decades ago were it not for pandering phonies like Napolitano and Harry Anslinger, to name a few.

Anyone in the United States who really wants to consume an illegal drug can do so.  The drug situation exists as it does because prohibitions create black markets, and black markets make it easier to obtain drugs than would otherwise be the case were drugs to be regulated like legal ones.  All Janet Napolitano has proven by her claim of drug war success is that she is completely clueless about national security, which makes her incompetent and unfit to serve in her appointed position as Secretary of Homeland Security.

Giordano 

I'm sure all the coca farmers in Colombia, Peru and other South American countries, who have seen their livelihoods decimated, and their children poisoned and killed by military spraying of pesticides which kill all their crops (the legal ones, too) and ultimately leach into the ground water and pollute the Amazon - I'm sure they'll all be thrilled to know that the drug war will continue to rage unabated.

Colombia is the third largest recipient of US aid, topped only by Israel and Egypt. 80% of this aid comes in the form of military aid to fight the drug war - while their military has been consistently identified as the top violator of human rights world wide (the US military aside). How does Napolitano sleep at night? "What about the children?" What do you suppose Napolitano tells her children about what mommy does for a living?

Homeland Security would like nothing more than to fuse the war on terror with the war on drugs.  These psychopaths see the drug industry and drug users as a huge base in which to propel their new prison economy.  This is evident by the Obama administration's war on medical marijuana and USA medical marijuana producers and suppliers.  By taking down the domestic wholesale market, the marijuana trade falls back to criminal cartels and organized crime.  So then it is easier to frame the marijuana issue as one of national security, rather than a public health issue.

"A thousand dead children means we're winning war on drugs." ~ Michele Leonhart

 

And here I thought that Psychopaths got medicated or insitutionalized. . . turns out they get hired by Duh Gutterment.

You can't legislate morality.

Why is there a war on drugs? Why are we carelessly polluting our world? Why do you have to pay for healthcare? Why is inequality spreading? What's with the MSM? What's curtailing our liberties and government? These problems all have a common genesis.  It is the agenda of the wealthy power elite class created from the systemic fascination with monetary wealth, greed, and the exploitation and theft of others under such fair guises as free market capitalism where really only corporatism and corruption prevails. Currently the prison-industrial complex in which prisons (increasingly privatized themselves) and the corporations contracted to build, operate and maintain them are making insane amounts of money warehousing citizens, over half of which are minor drug offenders. Many judges have been corrupted with payments from facilities that will later house the people convicted by them. There is also a reason the united states is one of 3 countries (the other two being Afghanistan and the Vatican) that has not ratified the Kyoto protocol (a seemingly reasonable multinational agreement to lower carbon emissions according to an, all be it, lenient (considering the consequences of polluting the earth) timetable for those of you who don’t know). And no such action will be taken until the elite class will agree it is profitable. ‘Green’ alternatives will only materialize and the war on drugs will end only when the change is deemed profitable, its as simple as that. Many fraudulent ‘green’ alternatives will appear in the meantime to satisfy the average activist including wind farms (which have an overall negative carbon footprint when you account from the materials and means to build them, a disgusting lie really), fraking for natural gas, which is so obviously disastrous for the environment, and the most laughable one, clean coal. Any sort of 'progress' whether it be social, political, economical must first face the behemoth that is the wealthy elite and their merciless endeavor for profits. It's always about money, always. If your theory about any social or political or even ecological dilemma doesn't include the incentive to make money, it is wrong. MY OWN OPINION: I fear it is too late for the modern world however. By the time the momentum in the industrial world has changed the biosphere and the ecosystem will have been significantly altered. And I believe the complacency of people and the continued assurance of the complacency of people set up by the powers at be have ensured this disastrous outcome. The global population will begin to decline (something that hasn’t happened for over 1400 years if only accounting local Europe) slowly, then more rapidly as we struggle to attain basic things like fresh water, which is becoming scarce at an alarming rate, millions of people will be displaced and killed by spreading deserts and other natural killers like the super bugs we have bred from generations of ignorant and unethical anti-bacterial usage (perpetuated again by the pursuit of profits by pharmaceutical companies around the globe) which will likely kill many people left in the post industrial stone-age. All of which may begin in our life times if we are lucky enough to witness looming catalyzing calamities such as the landslide tsunami originating from the cumbre vieja in the canary islands which is poised to destroy the eastern seaboard of the USA, or the over due super large earthquake along the san andreas fault which will likely devastate California, or most dangerously the super volcano that is Yellowstone national park erupting in our lifetimes. Not to mention the probabilistic certainty a sizable asteroid will strike the earth leading to another inevitable extinction event. Yes, I foresee fear and discrimination will again become the human races mother and father and we will as a whole be pushed back into another kind of dark age. If there is any lesson to be learned from this plight I believe it lies in the recognition of some basic truths. That we are all one, that we must recognize that in a globalized, civilized world the surplus of one person’s needs and desires is at the expense of another mans needs and desires. We need to recognize that no one earns more than they need and that all people share resources. We must also recognize that injustices descend from inequality, and that the misunderstanding of this cause and effect has created many of the longstanding issues in society. And most importantly that human beings and nature are inseparable, harmonious, and inescapably part of the same system. A system which that will likely see the end of our species. And that our only hope is to return to equilibrium in that system, to stop living beyond our means, or face certain annihilation.

The Drug War has gone too far.

 

Sitting in your Ivory Towers

making laws against the flowers

while flowers of your choice are fine.

Coffee, cigarettes and wine

State Supported

State Promoted

Advertised and Subsidized.

 

With wiretaps and pre-dawn busts

your Pot Commandos power lusts

make the cartels rich as nations

while you pass your legislations

designed for sound bite

spin gyrations.

 

You burn their crops.

You corrupt their cops.

You drive prices to their tops.

 

Spending billions.

Watching millions.

 

Confiscate a home, a car

Bend over search

Piss in the jar.

 

Supply-demand and rising prices

paid in blood and sexual vices.

They cope with dope

but it’s you that pays

with midnight fears of alleyways.

 

You’re both torching pipes and laying lines

Who’ll be first to change their minds.

 

The Drug War has gone too far.

Jim Ware.

I like that old poem by Franklin Adams in 1931

 

PROHIBITION IS AN AWFUL FLOP.

WE LIKE IT.

IT CAN'T STOP WHAT IT'S MEANT TO STOP.

WE LIKE IT.

IT'S LEFT A TRAIL OF GRAFT AND SLIME

IT'S FILLED OUR LAND WITH VICE AND CRIME

IT'S DON'T PROHIBIT WORTH A DIME

NEVERTHELESS, WE'RE FOR IT.

As has been mentioned herin by many,these politicians are cynical and corrupt in every aspect of their lives.Small wonder that they calculate that the best step,politically,is to promote and support the war on drugs.Obama,for one,did a 180 on cannabis as soon as he saw that he actually had a shot at being president.He appointed as his running mate one Joe Biden explicitly because he was seen to be hard on drugs.These people know that their own CIA has been knee deep in the drug trade since the early 60's.Smuggle them in and sell them in America's ghettos to pay for all those black ops they're so fond of.Oliver North got a job on Faux and freeway Ricky got time.Reagan probably had alzheimers.What is truly horrifying is the emphasis placed on marijuana by government policy and the office of the drug czar while Amerika's children turn to meth and oxycontin.Prohibition is an obvious failure and all the drug war has accomplished is to put the manufacture,sale and movement of all drugs into the hands of a far more organized and lethal group than in the past with the result that drugs are cheaper,more plentiful and stronger.Gangs are now everywhere and heavily armed.It used to be the neighborhood drug dealer was someone you went to school with.Now it's all gangsters and if the neighborhood guy try's to step out he will probably be shot.This is the progress they speak of?At least the people in Latin America have learned that the harder you push,the harder they push back.There will always be someone willing to fill the void as long as prohibition artificially inflates the price of drugs.It will end only one way.It's just a matter of how many more lives must be shattered or taken away before these politicians stop lying to us and do the right thing.Right now,they have wars to pay for.