Hard News: Nasty mixtures
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So we can expect an increase in productivity (at least in the short-term) from Australian miners.
Will Campbell Live followup their recent story* on the party pill coma if new evidence comes out about what was consumed by the 23 years old (and son of a TV3 staffer). If so, will that lead to a call to ban MDMA?
[* John - very unimpressed with that story - was surprised to see you run something like that]
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merc,
Does John C get to decide what runs?
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I thought it was a case of pills being palmed of as legal are in fact being made with all sorts of legal and illegal crap in them? It wouldn't surprise me if this was the case - the profit margins in this business are huge. It would make pefect criminal sense to make up some shit, put it in packaging that makes it look like a legal product, and bang - whole new market. Whatever the case is, I am totally pissed off with the way the police and party pill manufacturers are playing politics over this. The cops seem more interested in half arse half truth press releases trying to link BZP with illegal drugs than they are with protecting the public. The party pill manufactureres seem more concerned with pointing out the error of the police PR than they are with informing the public if bung pills are being sold as legal BZP products.
Lost in all this is the public's health. For Gods sake, if a bung pill is out there then just fucking tell people. The police have a duty to tell the community the colour, name, and general description of any pill that has hurt or killed anyone. If the pills are being packaged and sold as "legal" and the STANZ knows anything then they should tell people. No one should be crippled or killed for a $50 high just so people can play politics over BZP.
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Lost in all this is the public's health. For Gods sake, if a bung pill is out there then just fucking tell people. The police have a duty to tell the community the colour, name, and general description of any pill that has hurt or killed anyone.
Quite right. I guess the only risk is that some munter will think those ones must be extra good and seek them out - but if someone is hurt by a bad pill because it was politically incorrect for the police to issue a specific warning ...
If the pills are being packaged and sold as "legal" and the STANZ knows anything then they should tell people. No one should be crippled or killed for a $50 high just so people can play politics over BZP.
I would guess that some of the STANZ people have more specific market knowledge than they let on, but these clearly aren't retail party pills. I've never seen one of these grey-market BZP jobs, but I guess you come across them if you're a twentysomething drum 'n' bass freak in the South Island.
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John - very unimpressed with that story - was surprised to see you run something like that.
I think they put themselves in a risky position when they went with a story focusing on a staff member.
It's very hard to turn around and contradict someone in a position like that, but it was not helpful when the father went on Campbell Live and declared that party pills have "rat poison and horse tranquiliser" in them and it wasn't swiftly corrected. I got the feeling JC knew that too.
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parents object to pot as much because it's smoking as because it's drugs, and they favour a public health approach over a criminal justice approach.
And of course, we can't have little Jonny going to jail for smoking a bit of weed, can we - 'cos "we" (the parents) did that and it didn't hurt us - hence the public health approach. 'cos Little Jonny isn't one of those "dirty addicts" - he's a good boy
(sigh)
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merc,
Quite. Meanwhile we appear to losing our war on drugs,
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/1/story.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10424849 -
It would make pefect criminal sense to make up some shit, put it in packaging that makes it look like a legal product, and bang - whole new market.
Yes, that makes sense, but including in that shit mdme & speed would be as sensible as the last drug rumour - P laced dope from tinny houses. Surely selling speed and X as legal party pills would mean getting less money than selling them as speed and X.
Cutting illegal substances with BZP to up the profits, that I can believe. -
As a child of the hippie generation I got sound advice from my mum on the subject of drug-taking: DON'T EVER purchase or consume miscellaneous crap from people you don't know & trust (definitely including dodgy street vendors) - not every high is a good high, etc etc.
As it turns out, horrors of one too many encounters with Mum's hopped-up, burnt out hippy mates pretty much turned me off drugs of the mind-altering variety, but this has always seemed like a sensible and reasonably practical precaution. Sure, it's not as easy or spontaneous as taking something that's offered to you when you're out on the town, but surely keeping one's brain in good long-term working order is worth a bit of advance preparation?
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Quite. Meanwhile we appear to losing our war on drugs
Short of universal, compulsory, and frequent blood tests, the authorities will never realise their wetdream of a pharmacologically compliant society.
With regards ecstasy, methamphetamine, LSD and the like, it's less of a War on Drugs and more of a War on Staying Up All Night & Having a Good Time. Unwinnable.
I suspect that the best option is to make (relatively) safe ecstasy available via pharmacies. Getting high-quality ecstasy from a known supplier would likely result in a collapse of the P market (as well as that of the less-than-great BZPs) and probably a drop in alcohol-related crime.
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Hmmm ... I went and had a look at Pill Reports and the Aust-NZ section seems to have a strikingly high number of adulterated pills listed. They're all Australian reports, but it would be reasonable to assume some of the bad pills are making it over here.
Case in point: "Pink DVDs". Reports here and here
No one really seems to know what's in them. Nasty.
If bad people in NZ are taking something like this, bulking it up with BZP, reconstituting and onselling, it's not surprising we have a problem.
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I suspect that the best option is to make (relatively) safe ecstasy available via pharmacies. Getting high-quality ecstasy from a known supplier would likely result in a collapse of the P market (as well as that of the less-than-great BZPs) and probably a drop in alcohol-related crime.
I suspect that there are now synthetic drugs that would do ecstasy's job with an even lower risk. Matt Bowden's Ease (methylone) sort of fit that bill. But that was declared illegal because it was discovered that it was, um, illegal - while BZP is in the shops because it couldn't be construed as an analog of any currently banned drug. It's not exactly a rational process.
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Cutting illegal substances with BZP to up the profits, that I can believe.
Of course. The newspapers, whether wilfully or not, just got it arse-about.
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merc,
Kicks himself hard...don't get involved in drug debates...repeat to self.
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And now a message from the target demographic:
This 'X cut with BZP' notion has a loud ring of truth about it. Right now in Wellington there is a lot of X around, but it is cheap X, and it has a shitty BZP-like comedown. But I'm not convinced that this is a major problem - if you're the type of person to be buying illicit pills, and you are offered a cheaper pill, you assume it is cut. On the other hand, if you pay full price but wind up with a cut pill, you know you've been ripped off and you change dealers. I really can't imagine an X+BZP mixture is more dangerous than the standard X+Speed or X+P that we're used to. What exactly is the issue here? "Drug dealers are dishonest"?
(For those who haven't experienced a party pill comedown, just imagine how you'd feel the morning after eating, say, a couple hundred peppers, dried, powdered, and compressed into a pill.)
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That's a fairly fundamental part of the story to get wrong. I only caught the end of the interview with the ESR guy on National yesterday afternoon, so didn't pick up on the actual story. I was really struggling to understand why someone would put an expensive illegal substance into a cheaper legal party pill. Unless it was a loss-leader to get brand loyalty... Anyhoo, thanks to RB for digging a little deeper and clearing up more un-journalistic behaviour from the main stream media.
I suspect that the best option is to make (relatively) safe ecstasy available via pharmacies. Getting high-quality ecstasy from a known supplier would likely result in a collapse of the P market (as well as that of the less-than-great BZPs) and probably a drop in alcohol-related crime.
Bring on the Soma!
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That's a fairly fundamental part of the story to get wrong.
And they had to ignore the opening line of the police press release to do it.
I only caught the end of the interview with the ESR guy on National yesterday afternoon, so didn't pick up on the actual story. I was really struggling to understand why someone would put an expensive illegal substance into a cheaper legal party pill. Unless it was a loss-leader to get brand loyalty... Anyhoo, thanks to RB for digging a little deeper and clearing up more un-journalistic behaviour from the main stream media.
It's one area of reporting where the MSM not only feels entitled but positively obliged to get it wrong. It took about two seconds to guess there was something wrong with the angle.
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I really can't imagine an X+BZP mixture is more dangerous than the standard X+Speed or X+P that we're used to. What exactly is the issue here? "Drug dealers are dishonest"?
The stuff on Pill Reports suggests that there's some weirder things going into pills across the Tasman, including 2CB (alright on its own, but a potentially nasty surprise in an "ecstasy" pill), ketamine, and other things I've never even heard of. Two of the reports recorded suppressed lung function. You can see where that could go wrong.
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I don't believe this. Party Pills should be regulated more stringently, not labelled Class C and prohibited, which will make adulteration easier, not more difficult.
And meanwhile, we learn that there were 218 P lab busts next year. Hello? P is a Class A drug, and deservedly so. Why are we wasting our time on this when something that deadly, highly addictive and toxic is out there?!
Look at this chilling doco from PBS' highly regarded Frontline series:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/meth/interviews.html
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As this thread seems to be about the media as much as the drugs, here's a couple of links from the Independent yesterday about prescribing heroin.
One focuses on the crime impact. (This was yesterday's front page story).
Heroin addicts commit on average 432 crimes a year, costing a total of £45,000, according to research.
The other tends to focus on other impacts, such as the surprising (to me) reduction in usage rates.
Am not sure that drawing comparison between European heroin use and little old NZ's party pills, P, pot and gluesniffing is really comparing apples to apples.
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Hey all,
I'm surprise that this BZP thing still keeps being a story, and one that keeps escalating, with more media heat being applied. I wrote this song BZP almost two years ago, and nothing much has changed since then. It's still a storm in a pee cup.
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I'd fully believe that someone making E's would choose to cut them with BZP - cheap (especially in quantity) available and reasonably psychoactive. Especially in NZ where MDMA and it's precursors are expensive. People use all sorts of things to cut illegal drugs - should we control the sale of glucose or xylitol? At least they're not using paracetamol!
Equally, I don't think anyone making OTC pills would put anything controlled in them. Ok, you'd build a name quite quickly - you'd be the most popular brand shortly before you got busted!
I don't believe the NZ cops are to be trusted with producing accurate information on anything - especially given that these guys are probably all too typical.
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The irresponsible journalism is driving me nuts regarding BZP - I've been covering a fair bit of it lately in my site, though was hoping not to as I don't want to be seen as apill crazed munter - just someone who cares abour personal freedom and civil liberties:
A quick cut and past though:
This article is trying to make out that legally obtained BZP based pills contain either MDMA (commonly known as ecstacy) or Meth (i.e. P) in them. This is simply not the case. There are NO legally sold BZP based party pills on the market in New Zealand which contain any illegal substance under the misuse of drugs act. Any journalist (or Police officer) reporting otherwise, is either guilty or idiocy, lying or has no journalistic integrity.
What they are describing in this case is pills being sold illegally (which shouldn't be illegal in the first place) as E, but which are not pure MDMA. Often drugs (regardless of the type) are cut with other substances, sometimes other drugs, other times just simple substances, such as chalk, washing powder, who knows when its illegal and there are no trading standards to go by.
In this case - the "E" was obviously cut with BZP, which is cheaper to purchase legally in New Zealand than the ingredients to make E (i.e. MDMA). This allows the drug dealers to increase their profits, while their customers still get "high" albiet with different effects to real E (i.e. speedy as opposed to "loved up" feelings that E users typically experiance).
Certain puritan tories, are using this as an excuse to call for the banning of BZP again. Which has to be the stupidest reponse known to man. These people are already breaking the law by selling E, does she really think that by criminalising BZP that they won't be doing this? Having these drugs illegal just makes it more likely that they will be cut with crappy, nasty and potentially dangerous substances, as users by breaking the law have no legal rights over the quality of what they buy.
Regulating BZP won't stop E from containing BZP, just like it won't stop it from containing washing powder, glass or anything else. Banning won't either. If anything it increases the likelyhood of it containing something more dangerous than the drug itself.
Prohibition doesn't work - and the journalists and police involved with this irresponsible reporting should be ashamed of themselfs. Then again, when have they ever let the facts get in the way of a good story to sell to conservative busybodies that infest New Zealand.
More will be at: http://mikeenz.blogspot.com/search/label/BZP
The Libz are setting up a petition regarding BZP (paper based) .. I've cloned it on the web and its available at:
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I fucking hate spikers. They're up there with murderers and rapists, breaking the courtesy of consent. The greater harm these days lies not in the individual substances, but polydrug lotto. The Misuse of Drugs Act needs to be completely rewritten to properly mitigate the greater harms of inferior or dodgy quality, lucrative super-profits, and hypocrisy (Got Ritalin?).
If we don't get this sorted, there's a lot more evil shit on the way. Time to front up before the mental health accounts go ballistic. Comparatively speaking.
The Oz stats are unsurprising. Over there, weed is a hick drug. Good for Nimbin, but the cities are in another class altogether. It's a bit like expecting stoners at the Viaduct. Wrong target market.
Bad karma to the Jesus Campbell Show for that bit.
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Who needs drugs when the Black Caps are producing such euphoria in me! There's nothing like the high from seeing Australia beaten. 3 times in a row. 10 wicket wins. Chasing down record totals.
:-P
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