The LA Times reports about El Mañana, a border newspaper with staffers in Mexico and the US, and its decision to fall silent about drug-related violence:

Newspapers all along the border face a similar challenge in reporting cartel violence. A dozen Mexican journalists disappeared from 2006 to 2012 and an additional 14 were killed, according to a report earlier this year by the Committee to Protect Journalists. Mexico's human rights commission says 81 journalists have been killed since 2000. Last month, some journalists created an interactive map to track such attacks.

At El Mañana, the decision to self-censor went against family tradition. Cantú's grandfather started the newspaper about 90 years ago as the people's paper, calling it El Mañana — literally "tomorrow," or metaphorically, "the future." Over the years, El Mañana's slogan became "La verdad sin fronteras," or "The truth without borders." The paper has a staff of 20 in Laredo and 200 across the border, with a total circulation of 16,000, and 40,000 daily visitors online. For decades it had covered the rise of Mexican drug cartels.

That began to change in 2004, when editor Roberto Mora García, 42, was killed on his way home from work in Nuevo Laredo, stabbed more than two dozen times.

Then things escalated:

Two years later, armed men shot up the Nuevo Laredo office, leaving a reporter paralyzed. Afterward, the paper installed bulletproof glass and fortified walls.

A year ago this month, men again shot into the office with assault rifles and tossed a homemade grenade into the building.

No one was injured, but that was the last straw. The paper published an editorial that said it would "abstain, for as long as necessary, from publishing any information that is related to violent conflicts which our city and other regions of the country suffer from" because of "lack of conditions to freely exercise journalism."

If knowing is half the battle, we're losing the whole war.

Saturday, April 27 is "National Drug Take Back Day," and Seattle is participating with a prescription drug take back program, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the city's five Seattle Police Department precincts. It's a great opportunity to reduce the opportunity of theft or abuse by getting rid of unwanted or expired prescription drugs. And of course, collected drugs will be disposed of in an environmentally friendly manner (as opposed to flushing them into Puget Sound).

Great program. But it has Slog reader Max wondering if, like our recent gun buyback program, this proactive measure might lead to some unintended consequences?

I wonder if a secondary market will appear on the streets next to the precincts, with people offering cash for painkillers?

No. Of course not. That would be illegal. Because it would be way more dangerous to allow people to offer cash for Vicodin than it is to allow them to offer cash for guns, no questions asked.

• Kelly O

Because there's a common drug that might secretly fuck with your feelings:

[W]e don't think of Tylenol as altering our mental state. People can take it and still drive a car and go to work and remain fully present beings. But the more it's studied, the more it seems we may be overlooking subtle cognitive effects. In 2009, research showed that it seemed to dull the pain of social rejection — sort of like alcohol or Xanax. The author of that study, Nathan DeWall at the University of Kentucky, said at that time, "Social pain, such as chronic loneliness, damages health as much as smoking and obesity." ...

Then in a similar, separate experiment, they primed the subjects by having them watch video clips. They either watched The Simpsons or a film by surrealistic neonoir writer/director David Lynch, in which humans with rabbit heads wander an urban apartment muttering non sequiturs. They then passed judgement on people arrested in a hockey riot. Again, the people in the existential mindset imposed harsh sanctions, but the people who'd watched The Simpsons were lenient. If they'd taken Tylenol first, though, the David Lynch-induced anxiety was apparently blunted.

Okay, now half of you need to watch this video and tell me how harshly I should be sanctioned for writing this post:

Continue reading »

New York City Council speaker Christine Quinn introduced a bill today that would hike the city's smoking age from 18 to 21. “By raising the legal purchase age to 21, we will prevent a generation of New Yorkers from becoming addicted to smoking and ultimately save thousands of lives,” Quinn said in a press release posted on Joe My God. And she's mostly right—making it harder to get tobacco will, almost certainly, decrease access, delay initial exposure, nix some addictions, and save smokers and society enormous health costs and death tolls.

But here's a question about this thinking: What interest does society have in prohibiting adults from using a legal substance? Tobacco is unhealthy—it's potentially lethal—but we don't prohibit Whoppers, Krispy Kremes, and Mountain Dew. All those things are unhealthy and potentially lethal. (In fact, a study from the Columbia University and City College recently found that "the total health burden of obesity surpassed the total health impact of smoking.") Even when those unhealthy products are regulated, they're not banned in any age group. The argument for delaying the drinking age three years into adulthood is partly a matter of public safety—not just the safety of the individual, but the safety of the everyone else in the general public. "The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reports that the 21 minimum legal drinking age has reduced traffic fatalities involving drivers 18 to 20 years old by 13 percent and saves approximately 900 lives a year," says the Minnesota Department of Health.

But allowing 18 year olds to smoke doesn't necessarily make them dangerous to others. You might even make the opposite case: By prohibiting this substance from adults—who can vote, drive, and go to war—you're encouraging a huge black market for cigarettes. And black markets come with lost revenue for public health, gangs that control those revenues, and violence to defend their illegal market share. Either way, someone gets screwed.

I don't have the answer. BUT SLOGGERS ALWAYS HAVE THE ANSWER!

This new Pew Poll is a big deal:

For the first time in more than four decades of polling on the issue, a majority of Americans favor legalizing the use of marijuana. A national survey finds that 52% say that the use of marijuana should be made legal while 45% say it should not.

The pro-legal-pot numbers have climbed more than ten points in the last three years. Go read the full report.

A smidgen of real scientific research about levamisole in cocaine (instead of our decidedly nonscientific, shoestring journalism) is trickling onto the web. This study for the Annals of Emergency Medicine tracked people who wound up in US hospitals between mid-October 2009 and the following May. (The wheels of science turn slowly.)

Of the 46 potential cases reported from 6 states, half met eligibility criteria and had medical chart abstractions completed (n=23; 50%). Of these, close to half of the patients were interviewed (n=10; 43%). The average age was 44.4 years; just over half were men (n=12; 52%). The majority of patients presented to emergency departments (n=19; 83%). More than half presented with infectious illnesses (n=12; 52%), and nearly half reported active skin lesions (n=10; 44%). The majority of interview respondents used cocaine greater than 2 to 3 times a week (n=9; 90%), used cocaine more than 2 years (n=6; 60%), and preferred crack cocaine (n=6; 60%). All were unaware of exposure to levamisole through cocaine and of levamisole's inherent toxicity (n=10; 100%).

Our anecdotal evidence showed that levamisole poisoning was more frequent in regular users and in crack users—but I'm surprised to see that crack users make up only slightly more than half of this sample. And it's showing up in heroin, too, but only three percent of the seized herion, per the most recent numbers. (And three percent sounds small enough to be an accidental contamination or a whatever's-lying-around cut, not an actual economic strategy.)

And an anonymous commenter on The Stranger's first story about levamisole recently wrote:

Levamisole here in vancouver canada is mostly used to cut crack , because they doble their money , if a dealer cooks one ounce of coke, he adds another ounce of levamisole to it , becoming all together two ounces , and the users cant tell abd they think its base rock because they see only oil in the pipe and no dust left from the old cut that was baking soda .. Thats the reality of why they add levamisole to cocaine here in vancouver .. They sell the levamisole here for 1000 per kilo ..

That matches one of the theories we'd originally proposed—that levamisole makes a good cut, even though it's rarer than something like baking soda—because it has a chemical relationship with cocaine that passes street tests. Dealers (on a corner level or on an international level) who use purer-seeming cuts will be more popular than dealers who use obvious cuts.

But official sources—medical, governmental—have yet to officially solve the mystery of the tainted cocaine.

...then it's legal.

Some mysterious angel just delivered a bunch of pot to me. And now it's legal just to post photos of our pot on Slog, so... I am. Technically, it's still illegal to sell pot until the Washington State Liquor Control Board works out the details on who can grow pot and sell it, pursuant to our new marijuana legalization law.

But possessing pot is legal if it just appears out of the ether.

So that means the paper bag of pot that arrived—which said "Happy New Year, Dominic Holden" and contained seven smaller plastic bags of pot and a note that says, "If it falls from heaven, it's legal"—is totally legal. Thanks, mystery angel! It was nearly an ounce in total (that's a couple grams of it in the photo), and that amounts to roughly 20 times more pot than I could smoke in a year. So I've left it out for my dear coworkers. Because I can. Because it's legal now—if it falls from heaven.

...the press kits have been fantastic. Good work, publicists.

This is your president speaking...

In an interview with ABC News, President Obama told Barbara Walters that recreational pot smoking in states that have legalized the drug is not a major concern for his administration.
“We’ve got bigger fish to fry,” Obama said of marijuana smokers in Colorado and Washington, the two states where recreational use is now legal.
“It would not make sense for us to see a top priority as going after recreational users in states that have determined that it’s legal,” he said.

You're not supposed to do it outside the privacy of your own home, but that's not stopping people. And for the time being at least, SPD's only giving verbal warnings. I heard one of the women saying to her male companion as I passed, "The laws are more lax than Amsterdam's."

News intern Al Jacobs reports in this week's Stranger:

Now that smoking weed is perfectly legal and state-regulated pot stores are on their way, what do street-level pot dealers make of the passage of Initiative 502?

To find out, I went to the University District and walked along the Ave. When people called out "Bud?" or offered to sell me weed, I identified myself as a reporter and asked them what they thought about legalization.

I was surprised by how many of them talked to me. Some were suspicious that I was just looking for free weed. One guy—yes, they were all men—asked me if I was "jive-talking" him. (He then handed me a strawberry-flavored lollipop and told me to have a nice day.) Another guy, dressed in a fur hat and gold chain, responded to my question on his feelings about I-502 with a glare and a question of his own: "Do I look optimistic?"

Others had more to say.

You gotta hear what else they had to say. KEEP READING --->