The Crime Report (https://thecrimereport.org/category/drugs/)
Although a public health approach to the deepening fentanyl crisis could yield best results, legislators are dusting off a “war on drugs playbook” with harsher, draconian laws that threaten to backfire, according to a newly released report.
John Kapoor, a former billionaire who founded opioid maker Insys Therapeutics Inc., was sentenced to 5½ years in federal prison for his role in a racketeering conspiracy to illegally boost sales of his firm’s prescription fentanyl drug Subsys.
The Department of Health and Human Services said it was a “clerical error.” President Donald Trump’s declaration of a “public health emergency” is back into effect, but its impact has been minimal.
At least 18 states could loosen their marijuana laws in 2020. National support in a Gallup survey is up to 66 percent from 34 percent in 2001.
The change is buried in a massive spending bill passed by Congress late last year. Pressed by constituents and state officials, lawmakers of both parties and the Trump administration agreed to broaden the scope of a $1.5 billion grant program restricted to the opioid crisis.
Philadelphia has spent more than a year pouring resources and initiatives into the neighborhood at the epicenter of the worst urban opioid crisis in America, but 2019’s death toll appears equal to 2018’s. The city’s 2020 plan attacks the problem on multiple fronts in an expanded target area of the city.
Just a few weeks into the uncharted waters of legal adult-use cannabis in Illinois, some suburban Chicago police departments are facing challenges of not just training officers but also educating members of the public who mistakenly think the state has entered a “legal free-for-all,” in the words of one police chief.
The lawsuit follows a $465 million judgment won by the state against Johnson & Johnson.
Despite a decline in overdose deaths, the opioid epidemic has imposed “severe” costs on West Virginia’s justice system, according to a forensics expert in the state.
A recent paper found that after Washington State legalized recreational marijuana in 2012, rapes decreased by as much as 30 percent, and thefts by 20 percent. But half of sheriffs surveyed in states that have legalized pot say crime rates have increased.