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The Associated Press newswire reports:
After three defendants fatally overdosed in a single week last year, it became clear that Buffalo's ordinary drug treatment court was no match for the heroin and painkiller crisis.
Now the city is experimenting with the nation's first opioid crisis intervention court, which can get users into treatment within hours of their arrest instead of days, requires them to check in with a judge every day for a month instead of once a week, and puts them on strict curfews. Administering justice takes a back seat to the overarching goal of simply keeping defendants alive.
[...] Buffalo-area health officials blamed 300 deaths on opioid overdoses in 2016, up from 127 two years earlier. That includes a young couple who did not make it to their second drug court appearance last spring. The woman's father arrived instead to tell the judge his daughter and her boyfriend had died the night before.
[...] "This 30-day thing is like being beat up and being asked to get in the ring again, and you're required to," 36-year-old Ron Woods said after one of his daily face-to-face meetings with City Court Judge Craig Hannah, who presides over the program.
Woods said his heroin use started with an addiction to painkillers prescribed after cancer treatments that began when he was 21. He was arrested on drug charges in mid-May and agreed to intervention with the dual hope of kicking the opioids that have killed two dozen friends and seeing the felony charges against him reduced or dismissed.
[...] "I don't want to die in the streets, especially with the fentanyl out there," Sammy Delgado, one of the handcuffed defendants, said.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by LoRdTAW on Monday July 10 2017, @06:24PM
It's amazing how good a job the government and lobbyists have done to demonize marijuana over the decades. We still have people who firmly say no to legalization and push for even harsher sentencing because of some false sense of morals. Meanwhile the pharmaceutical industry has had no repercussions for selling what amounts to legal heroin which is responsible for the surge in opioid addiction, crime, and deaths. Once the pills became hard to come by, people switched to cheap heroin. Every young kid at my work in their 20's can name one or more people they know who has died from a heroin overdose. Many started using pills in their teens.
For me I use it as a sleep aid to help combat the restlessness of anxiety. I also notice it really helps with food digestion. Foods which have a chance of giving me diarrhea now quietly sit and digest producing solid stool. And you can't beat the 100% all natural solution to the problem requiring minimal processing which amounts to growing, harvesting and drying. It lends itself very well to people who wish to grow their own medicine. Don't want to smoke it? Vape it using any number of electric or even flame based vaporizers. Almost impossible to overdose on unless you ingest pure extract which would be stupid expensive.
My only fear is the inevitable commercialization via the pharmacological industry. They will undoubtedly use every dirty trick in the book to keep it illegal while patenting, trademarking and distilling the plant down to base chemicals they will neatly package and sell as a "safe" alternative to the demonized marijuana at a substantial markup.