Junkies for Trump – Trumpazoid Celebrates Overdose Deaths of Ohio Farmer’s Kids

There is an epidemic out there in Trump Country. And it is killing more white, rural and suburban kids than all the black-on-black crime than any of the cities…Over three times as many and growing every year.

The Chumph’s budget cuts, and Paul Ryan’s Chumpcare assure that more of these kids will be dying, because of cuts (or outright dropping) in addiction treatment, availability of overdose drugs, and availability of counseling.

These kid’s parents voted for Trump…And in doing so killed their own children.

Voting race over the lives of their own children.

Trumpcare cuts include treatment for addiction…

Ohio farmer loses two kids to heroin overdose — and Obamacare-hating Trump fan celebrates

An Ohio father who lost two of his three children to heroin overdoses said he received a letter celebrating their deaths that was postmarked from a condominium complex owned by President Donald Trump.

Roger Winemiller shared his family’s story earlier this month with the New York Timesand WCPO-TV, and he got an anonymous letter about a week later that called for the repeal of Obamacare and referred to Trump, the TV station reported.

“It’s wonderful that junkies overdose and die,” the letter reads. “That is the only way we can rid America of all those low-life scum. I am so happy that your children did their part in reducing the drug population.”

The writer suggested that the Republican plan to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act would break the grip of heroin addiction in many parts of the U.S.

“We should look forward to the repeal of filthy Obamacare,” the letter reads. “When we reduce mooching, those thieves will quickly die when they lose medical access.”

The Wayne Township father lost his 31-year-old daughter to overdose March 26, 2016, and her older brother died from overdose nine months later. His surviving son, Roger T. Winemiller, has also struggled with drug addiction but is currently in recovery.

“It’s a perfect example of what we face here in this nation,” Winemiller said. “The type of people who are too heartless and self-centered to realize that addicts are beautiful people, and they are someone’s son or daughter. If they had a chance to talk to a recovering addict and see how vibrant they are, how intelligent, they might think differently.”

The letter was marked with a Trump Palace return address, but an employee told WCPO that the Trump Group-owned residential property had never had a resident whose name matched the sender’s signature.

Warren County, where Winemiller lives, backed Trump over Hillary Clinton in November’s election by a 67-29 spread — a much higher margin that Ohio’s overall 52-44 tilt toward the Republican candidate.

The southwestern Ohio county, like many others that backed Trump, is struggling with an epidemic of heroin addiction.

A recent task force report found Warren County, an exurban community between Cincinnati and Dayton, had seen a double- or triple-digit increase in opioid heroin overdoses and deaths.

Drug overdose was listed as the cause of death in 20 fatalities in 2014, up from 11 in Warren County a decade before, and shot up to 60 in 2015, according to medical authorities.

About 70 percent of those addiction cases start with prescription drug use in the home, but some addicts move on to heroin — which is both cheaper and more powerful.

A post-election analysis by historian Kathleen Frydl found a strong correlation between the opioid epidemic and counties in Ohio and Pennsylvania that swung from President Barack Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016.

Twenty-six Ohio counties reported 20 or more drug overdose deaths per 100,000 people in 2015, and there was a 10 percent surge in all but two of those counties in support for Trump compared with Republican Mitt Romney in 2012.

There was a corresponding 10-percent or more drop in Clinton support compared with Obama in the previous election — and the shift was big enough for five of those counties to flip from Democrat in 2012 to GOP in 2016.

All but four of 33 high-overdose counties in Pennsylvania followed the same trend.

Another study by Penn State sociologist Shannon Monnat found Trump’s overperformance in Rust Belt counties correlated with other public health crises — including drug and alcohol addiction and suicide.

 

More People Dying From Heroin Overdose Than Murder by Gun!

Check this out…

OF course the majority (by a pretty good margin) of these deaths are of white people living in the suburbs and rural areas…So unlike the “crack epidemic” there isn’t going to be any push to criminalize.

Yet another reason the “War on Drugs” has been an utter and complete failure.

Heroin deaths surpass gun homicides for the first time, CDC data shows

Opioid deaths continued to surge in 2015, surpassing 30,000 for the first time in recent history, according to CDC data released Thursday.

That marks an increase of nearly 5,000 deaths from 2014. Deaths involving powerful synthetic opiates, like fentanyl, rose by nearly 75 percent from 2014 to 2015.

Heroin deaths spiked too, rising by more than 2,000 cases. For the first time since at least the late 1990s, there were more deaths due to heroin than to traditional opioid painkillers, like hydrocodone and oxycodone.

In the CDC’s opioid death data, deaths may involve more than one individual drug category, so numbers in the chart above aren’t mutually exclusive. Many opioid fatalities involve a combination of drugs, often multiple types of opioids, or opioids in conjunction with other sedative substances like alcohol.

In a grim milestone, more people died from heroin-related causes than from gun homicides in 2015. As recently as 2007, gun homicides outnumbered heroin deaths by more than 5 to 1.

These increases come amid a year-over-year increase in mortality across the board, resulting in the first decline in American life expectancy since 1993.

 

 

The New Drug Epidemic…Why No Criminalization?

Back in the late 80’s and early 90’s politicians rushed to write and approve punitive laws for users of “crack” cocaine…Because the majority of users of that form of cocaine were black. Never mind that powder cocaine, and crack are the same drug.

Now America has a new “drug epidemic”…And the same politicians want to look the other way, because in vast majority the victims are white.

The racial driven decision to hide this problem under the guise of “just white people acting out” has devastated rural and suburban communities, and promulgated this problem to the point the numbers are big enough to impact Mortality Rates. To move the dime on the death rates of 250 million people in this country…

“Houston…We got a problem”.

Drug Overdoses Propel Rise in Mortality Rates of Young Whites

Drug overdoses are driving up the death rate of young white adults in the United States to levels not seen since the end of the AIDS epidemic more than two decades ago — a turn of fortune that stands in sharp contrast to falling death rates for young blacks, a New York Times analysis of death certificates has found.

The rising death rates for those young white adults, ages 25 to 34, make them the first generation since the Vietnam War years of the mid-1960s to experience higher death rates in early adulthood than the generation that preceded it.

The Times analyzed nearly 60 million death certificates collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 1990 to 2014. It found death rates for non-Hispanic whites either rising or flattening for all the adult age groups under 65 — a trend that was particularly pronounced in women — even as medical advances sharply reduce deaths from traditional killers like heart disease. Death rates for blacks and most Hispanic groups continued to fall.

The analysis shows that the rise in white mortality extends well beyond the 45- to 54-year-old age group documented by a pair of Princeton economists in a research paper that startled policy makers and politicians two months ago.

While the death rate among young whites rose for every age group over the five years before 2014, it rose faster by any measure for the less educated, by 23 percent for those without a high school education, compared with only 4 percent for those with a college degree or more.

The drug overdose numbers were stark. In 2014, the overdose death rate for whites ages 25 to 34 was five times its level in 1999, and the rate for 35- to 44-year-old whites tripled during that period. The numbers cover both illegal and prescription drugs.

“That is startling,” said Dr. Wilson Compton, the deputy director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. “Those are tremendous increases.”

Rising rates of overdose deaths and suicide appear to have erased the benefits from advances in medical treatment for most age groups of whites. Death rates for drug overdoses and suicides “are running counter to those of chronic diseases,” like heart disease, said Ian Rockett, an epidemiologist at West Virginia University…Read the rest here…

 

Epidemics in Black and White…The End of the War on Drugs

The “crack epidemic” of the late 80’s and early 90’s is over. One of the key racial hypocrisies of the response to the epidemic was to make sentences for possessing “crack”, used by black folks, about 5 times worse than cocaine, the same drug – used by whites.

Now we have a “heroin epidemic”, but the legal and legislative response is almost invisible. Indeed, you wouldn’t even know this was going on if you watched the evening news.

That’s because about 90% of the new addicts are white, don’t live in the city…And start using heroin as a cheaper substitute to the drugs they have been stealing out of Mommy and Daddy’s bathroom cabinet.

The move now is to “treat” addicts.

Having some experience in dealing with that with a friend – that is one long hard road. I went to some of those meetings in support, about 5 years ago, and was stunned by what I saw. I remember years ago the streets of downtown Baltimore being covered by heroin addicts – mostly black, mostly from the ghetto. Baltimore during the 8070′ through the 90’s had the largest population of addicted in any major city. These folks at the the new meeting were mostly white, mostly the addicts were kids under the age of 25, and we mostly from middle class families. And it is driving ancillary crime in rural and suburban areas to support their habits.

But heaven forbid we fill the jails with white addicts.

The end of the senseless “War on Drugs”, is indeed all about racial politics.

A photo of Courtney Griffin, who died of a heroin overdose in 2014, with her sister Shannon, left, and her mother, Pamela.

In Heroin Crisis, White Families Seek Gentler War on Drugs

When Courtney Griffin was using heroin, she lied, disappeared and stole constantly from her parents to support her $400-a-day habit. Her family paid her debts, never filed a police report and kept her addiction secret — until she was found dead last year of an overdose.

At Courtney’s funeral, they decided to acknowledge the reality that redefined their lives: Their bright, beautiful daughter, just 20, who played the French horn in high school and dreamed of living in Hawaii, had been kicked out of the Marines for drugs. Eventually, she overdosed at her boyfriend’s grandmother’s house, where she died alone.

“When I was a kid, junkies were the worst,” Doug Griffin, 63, Courtney’s father, recalled in their comfortable home here in southeastern New Hampshire. “I used to have an office in New York City. I saw them.”

Noting that “junkies” is a word he would never use now, he said that these days, “they’re working right next to you and you don’t even know it. They’re in my daughter’s bedroom — they are my daughter.”

When the nation’s long-running war against drugs was defined by the crack epidemic and based in poor, predominantly black urban areas, the public response was defined by zero tolerance and stiff prison sentences. But today’s heroin crisis is different. While heroin use has climbed among all demographic groups, it has skyrocketed among whites; nearly 90 percent of those who tried heroin for the first time in the last decade were white.

And the growing army of families of those lost to heroin — many of them in the suburbs and small towns — are now using their influence, anger and grief to cushion the country’s approach to drugs, from altering the language around addiction to prodding government to treat it not as a crime, but as a disease.

“Because the demographic of people affected are more white, more middle class, these are parents who are empowered,” said Michael Botticelli, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, better known as the nation’s drug czar. “They know how to call a legislator, they know how to get angry with their insurance company, they know how to advocate. They have been so instrumental in changing the conversation.”

Mr. Botticelli, a recovering alcoholic who has been sober for 26 years, speaks to some of these parents regularly.

Their efforts also include lobbying statehouses, holding rallies and starting nonprofit organizations, making these mothers and fathers part of a growing backlash against the harsh tactics of traditional drug enforcement. These days, in rare bipartisan or even nonpartisan agreement, punishment is out and compassion is in.

The presidential candidates of both parties are now talking about the drug epidemic, with Hillary Rodham Clinton hosting forums on the issue as Jeb Bush and Carly Fiorina tell their own stories of loss while calling for more care and empathy.

Families meet at a Counseling Session and pray for their family members and friends who are addicted.

Last week, President Obama traveled to West Virginia, a mostly white state with high levels of overdoses, to discuss his $133 million proposal to expand access for drug treatment and prevention programs. The Justice Department is also preparing to release roughly 6,000 inmates from federal prisons as part of an effort to roll back the severe penalties issued to nonviolent drug dealers in decades past.

And in one of the most striking shifts in this new era, some local police departments have stopped punishing many heroin users. In Gloucester, Mass., those who walk into the police station and ask for help, even if they are carrying drugs or needles, are no longer arrested. Instead, they are diverted to treatment, despite questions about the police departments’ unilateral authority to do so. It is an approach being replicated by three dozen other police departments around the country.

“How these policies evolve in the first place, and the connection with race, seems very stark,” said Marc Mauer, executive director of the Sentencing Project, which examines racial issues in the criminal justice system.

Still, he and other experts said, a broad consensus seems to be emerging: The drug problem will not be solved by arrests alone, but rather by treatment.

Parents like the Griffins say that while they recognize the racial shift in heroin use, politicians and law enforcement are responding in this new way because “they realized what they were doing wasn’t working.”

“They’re paying more attention because people are screaming about it,” Mr. Griffin said. “I work with 100 people every day — parents, people in recovery, addicts — who are invading the statehouse, doing everything we can to make as much noise as we can to try to save these kids.”

An Epidemic’s New Terrain

Heroin’s spread into the suburbs and small towns grew out of an earlier wave of addiction to prescription painkillers; together the two trends are ravaging the country…

Deaths from heroin rose to 8,260 in 2013, quadrupling since 2000 and aggravating what some were already calling the worst drug overdose epidemic in United States history.

Over all, drug overdoses now cause more deaths than car crashes, with opioids like OxyContin and other pain medications killing 44 people a day….Read the Rest Here…

 

A Vaccine for Heroin Addiction?

Wow – this could be  major game changer.

And you thought there were only Zombies in the movies..

Mexican scientists successfully test vaccine that could cut heroin addiction

A group of Mexican scientists is working on a vaccine that could reduce addiction to one of the world’s most notorious narcotics: heroin.

Researchers at the country’s National Institute of Psychiatry say they have successfully tested the vaccine on mice and are preparing to test it on humans.

The vaccine, which has been patented in the US, makes the body resistant to the effects of heroin, so users would no longer get a rush of pleasure when they smoked or injected it.

“It would be a vaccine for people who are serious addicts, who have not had success with other treatments and decide to use this application to get away from drugs,” the institute’s director Maria Elena Medina said on Thursday.

Scientists worldwide have been searching for drug addiction vaccines for several years, but none have yet been fully developed. A group at the US National Institute on Drug Abuse has reported significant progress in a vaccine for cocaine.

However, the Mexican scientists appear to be close to making a breakthrough on a heroin vaccine and have received funds from the US institute as well as the Mexican government.

During the tests, mice were given access to deposits of heroin over an extended period of time. Those given the vaccine showed a huge drop in heroin consumption, giving the institute hope that it could also work on people, Medina said.

Kim Janda, a scientist working on his own narcotics vaccines at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, said that the Mexican vaccine could function but with some shortcomings.

“It could be reasonably effective, but maybe too general and affect too many different types of opioids as well as heroin,” Janda said.

Mexico has a growing drug addiction problem. Health secretary Jose Cordoba recently said the country now has about 450,000 hard drug addicts, particularly along the trafficking corridors of the US-Mexico border.

Mexican gangsters grow opium poppies in the Sierra Madre mountains and convert them into heroin known as Black Tar and Mexican Mud, which are smuggled over the Rio Grande.

 

New Fungus Destroying Afghan Opium Crops

If the US Government didn’t spread this fungus – then they need to get a sample and start growing it, and spray it on every single field…

And kill it all.

The "Opium ball" is formed after the plant flowers, and contains the opium...

Fungus hits Afghan opium poppies

A serious disease is affecting opium poppies in Afghanistan, Antonio Maria Costa, the head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) has said.

Mr Costa told the BBC that this year’s opium production could be reduced by a quarter, compared with last year.

He said the disease – a fungus – is thought to have infected about half of the country’s poppy crop. Afghanistan produces 92% of the world’s opium.

Mr Costa said opium prices had gone up by around 50% in the region.

That could have an impact on revenues for insurgent groups like the Taliban which have large stockpiles of opium, he told the BBC’s Bethany Bell.

The fungus attacks the root of the plant, climbs up the stem and makes the opium capsule wither away.

It was affecting poppies in the provinces of Helmand and Kandahar, the heartland of opium cultivation and the insurgency in Afghanistan, he said.

 

Of Racial Stereotypes… And Reality

Crack “epidemic”!

Well, there is heroin epidemic sweeping America, and you don’t hear a damn thing about it.

The reason is the victims of this epidemic aren’t, by and large, black folks in the proverbial “ghetto”…

It’s white, middle class kids.

So… Where’s the new “War on Drugs”?

A lethal business model targets Middle America – Sugar cane farmers from a tiny Mexican county use savvy marketing and low prices to push black-tar heroin in the United States.

Immigrants from an obscure corner of Mexico are changing heroin use in many parts of America.

Farm boys from a tiny county that once depended on sugar cane have perfected an ingenious business model for selling a semi-processed form of Mexican heroin known as black tar.

Using convenient delivery by car and aggressive marketing, they have moved into cities and small towns across the United States, often creating demand for heroin where there was little or none. In many of those places, authorities report increases in overdoses and deaths.

Immigrants from Xalisco in the Pacific Coast state of Nayarit, Mexico, they have brought an audacious entrepreneurial spirit to the heroin trade. Their success stems from both their product, which is cheaper and more potent than Colombian heroin, and their business model, which places a premium on customer convenience and satisfaction.

Users need not venture into dangerous neighborhoods for their fix. Instead, they phone in their orders and drivers take the drug to them. Crew bosses sometimes call users after a delivery to check on the quality of service. They encourage users to bring in new customers, rewarding them with free heroin if they do.

In contrast to Mexico’s big cartels — violent, top-down organizations that mainly enrich a small group — the Xalisco networks are small, decentralized businesses. Each is run by an entrepreneur whose workers may soon strike out on their own and become his competitors. They have no all-powerful leader and rarely use guns, according to narcotics investigators and imprisoned former dealers.

Leaving the wholesale business to the cartels, they have mined outsize profits from the retail trade, selling heroin a tenth of a gram at a time. Competition among the networks has reduced prices, further spreading heroin addiction.

“I call them the Xalisco boys,” said Dennis Chavez, a Denver police narcotics officer who has arrested dozens of dealers from Xalisco (pronounced ha-LEES-ko) and has studied their connections to other cities. “They’re nationwide.”

Their acumen and energy are a major reason why Mexican heroin has become more pervasive in this country, gaining market share at a time when heroin use overall is stable or declining, according to government estimates.

The Xalisco retail strategy has “absolutely changed the user and the methods of usage,” said Chris Long, a police narcotics officer in Charlotte, N.C., where competition among Xalisco dealers has cut prices from $25 to $12.50 per dose of black-tar heroin. “It’s almost like Wal-Mart: ‘We’re going to keep our prices cheap and grow from there.’ It works.”

Xalisco bosses have avoided the nation’s largest cities with established heroin organizations. Instead, using Southern California and Phoenix as staging areas, they have established networks in Salt Lake City; Reno; Boise, Idaho; Indianapolis; Nashville; and Myrtle Beach, S.C., among other places. From those cities, their heroin — called black tar because it’s sticky and dark — has made its way into suburbs and small towns.