Drugs News

Report: Mexican Drug War Being Armed By American Guns

11:42 am EST September 8th, 2010 | Crime | 12 Comments

Guns

From Mayors Against Illegal Guns:

The report shows that of the guns recovered from Mexican crime scenes and submitted for tracing by ATF between 2006 and 2009, four in ten of those guns were originally sold in Texas. The three other border states – Arizona, California, and New Mexico – were the source for another third of those guns.

When controlling for state population, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas each have export rates 169 percent greater than any other state and at a rate three times as high as the fourth border state, California. Relatively lax gun laws in Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas may contribute to that disparity.

The report also notes that the time between the original sale of guns at U.S. gun dealers and the recovery of those guns at Mexican crime scenes is decreasing – a sign of ever more sophisticated gun trafficking.”

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The Crisis Of Overmedicated Children

10:12 am EST September 2nd, 2010 | News | 23 Comments

Too often nowadays, parents just don’t want to do the job of raising their children, and instead put them on dangerous, mood-altering drugs as a substitute for parenting. It’s very sad.

At 18 months, Kyle Warren started taking a daily antipsychotic drug on the orders of a pediatrician trying to quell the boy’s severe temper tantrums.

Thus began a troubled toddler’s journey from one doctor to another, from one diagnosis to another, involving even more drugs. Autism, bipolar disorder, hyperactivity, insomnia, oppositional defiant disorder. The boy’s daily pill regimen multiplied: the antipsychotic Risperdal, the antidepressant Prozac, two sleeping medicines and one for attention-deficit disorder. All by the time he was 3.

He was sedated, drooling and overweight from the side effects of the antipsychotic medicine. Although his mother, Brandy Warren, had been at her ‘wit’s end’ when she resorted to the drug treatment, she began to worry about Kyle’s altered personality. ‘All I had was a medicated little boy,’ Ms. Warren said. ‘I didn’t have my son. It’s like, you’d look into his eyes and you would just see just blankness.’

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Jim Geraghty And The Latest In Moral Equivalence

8:13 pm EST March 5th, 2009 | News | 10 Comments

They’ll say anything to defend Leader Limbaugh. Anything.

rush limbaugh mugshotThis example is National Review’s Jim Geraghty* who takes issue with characterizations of Leader Limbaugh as a pill-popping oaf. Geraghty says, wouldn’t that justify calling President Obama a “cokehead” for his previous drug use?

But here’s the difference – President Obama did this when he was a young kid. He has made it quite clear that it was a stupid thing to do. In fact, he lectured youngsters on how stupid it was.

When Rush Limbaugh was busted for his addiction to Oxycontin he was, to take a phrase from Cedric The Entertainer, a grown-ass man. A grown-ass man who had spent decades, at that point, pointing to himself as a moral better of anyone else in the world.

In Geraghty’s world of moral equivalence, the stupid actions of a youngster are just the same as the self-described leader of the Republican party.

Well, maybe he has a point.

* I’d also like to point out that this is the ad copy used to sell Jim Geraghty’s book “Voting To Kill: How 9/11 Launched The Era Of Republican Leadership”

From “security moms” to neo-Jacksonian bloggers, people across the country are confronting the post-9/11 era with white-knuckle anger and relentless determination. Voting to Kill captures this zeitgeist, showing why terrorism was the defining issue in 2002 and 2004, and will be in 2006 and 2008, as Republicans rev up instinctively hawkish Americans to vote and campaign as if their lives depend on it.

Geraghty’s book was released in September of 2006, two months before anti-war Democrats swept to control of the House and Senate, and two years and two months before an anti-war Democrat was elected to the presidency by a margin of over 10 million votes. So if you want someone with their finger on the thud-thud-thud pulse of the American people, Geraghty is clearly your man.

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