Some Trucking Companies Use Hair Tests to Detect Drugs in Drivers

By Join Together Staff | July 30, 2012 | Leave a comment | Filed in Drugs,Government & Prevention

Some trucking companies are using hair tests to test drivers for drug use, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

At Schneider National Inc., 38,000 applicants have undergone hair drug testing over the past four years, the newspaper notes. Of those, 1,411 failed the test, for drugs including cocaine and marijuana. More than 90 percent of those applicants passed a urine test for the same drugs. Urine testing is the government-mandated industry standard, according to the article.

While molecules of some drugs, such as methamphetamine, remain in the urine for only a few days, they can stay in the hair for months. Because applicants know in advance they will be tested, they can abstain from drug use for a few days to obtain a clean urine sample. A 2007 investigation by the Government Accountability Office found it is easy to cheat on urine tests, either by sending in someone else to take the test, by adding drug-masking agents purchased online, or by diluting the sample with water.

“The urine-based drug test is simply not catching chronic drug users,” Don Osterberg, Senior Vice President of Safety and Security for Schneider, told the newspaper. He says the government allows hair testing, but it is not officially recognized.

Schneider wants the U.S. Department of Transportation to make hair testing official, and allow test results to be shared with other trucking companies.

“It’s a deterrent,” said John Spiros, Vice President of Safety and Claims Management at Roehl Transport, which began testing hair last year. “When people know that you’re doing hair-follicle testing, a lot of them won’t even apply.”

Hair testing has drawbacks. It does not detect recent drug use, and may show positive results for smoked drugs in someone who has been in the same room but did not smoke drugs themselves

Relative of addicts 'planning on going to their funerals'

By SAMANTHA ALLEN

sallen@fosters.com

DOVER — A local woman told Foster's many of her relatives who abuse prescription drugs have recently turned to "bath salts," a legal stimulant soon-to-be outlawed this year, because it's cheaper and readily available in stores.

She said the effects of the "legal high" have ruined the lives of her family and she is terrified for the future.

"I'm just planning on going to their funerals," she said. "Drugs have literally ripped apart my entire family."

One relative of hers, a Farmington resident, has nearly overdosed or committed suicide several times this year while on bath salts.

"It's killed one of my relatives and it's about to take another if he doesn't get help," she said.

Different forms of bath salts — the street name for a legal substance falsely-advertised as bath beads, plant food and incense — contains methylenedioxypyrovalerone (MDPV) and mephedrone, stimulants which doctors say act like Ecstasy when taken.

Users consume the manufactured drugs by smoking, injecting or ingesting them and experience effects similar to those of cocaine, LSD, MDMA and methamphetamine, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration.

A ban on bath salts and other "synthetic marijuana" compounds is set to go into effect Oct. 1 of this year, with President Barack Obama signing new legislation earlier this month. This past week, more than 90 individuals were arrested and more than 19 million packets of "designer" synthetic drugs were seized in the first-ever nationwide law enforcement action, called Operation Log Jam, by the DEA.

But local agencies say they are still grappling with the phenomena of this drug, which is recently available on shelves at local gas stations and convenience stores.

Frisbie Memorial Hospital Memorial Hospital's Assistant Director of Emergency Medical Services Gary Brock said his team has dealt with calls from bath salts users since last year, and the episodes are typically very violent. He said at the peak of incoming calls, Frisbie Memorial Hospital EMS received about a dozen reports every week, primarily out of the Rochester area, though their coverage extends to other Tri-City communities and beyond.

"The majority of calls we get are for individuals who are out of control," he said. "They're either out of control hallucinating or they're violent."

The unidentified woman said her addict relative has on many occasions called her house, claiming cracks in the walls are video cameras looking in on him, and his home is surrounded by police looking to arrest him. She said when her family drives to Farmington to help, he is often extremely agitated and fights against those wanting to help him.

Brock said this type of paranoia is a common occurrence in the calls he has responded to.

"Many of the signs and symptoms are very rapid heart rate, high blood pressure, chest pain — but very, very often, we encounter them hallucinating, acting paranoid and delusional," he said. "We haven't had any serious injuries (to EMS responders), but they certainly present a physical risk to both police and EMS as these patients ultimately have to be restrained while dealing with their medical issues."

With more than 30 years in emergency response, and 14 years at Frisbie Memorial Hospital, Brock said he can only hope the bath salts phenomena does not reach the level of the methamphetamine "epidemic" witnessed across the country. He said locally, bath salt users have already tied up hospital resources and emergency room staff for hours at a time.

"Bath salts do not clear their body for hours and hours and hours," he explained. "A patient can be in crisis for a very long time. It creates a log jam in the hospitals. A bath salt abuser who's in crisis can take up to half of the emergency room staff to initially try to deal with the crisis, and those are staff members that are being pulled away from other folks."

In 2010, 57 poison centers reported receiving 303 calls concerning bath salts use. In 2011, from January to August, that number rose 4,720. At the national level, the DEA reported the number of calls multiplied nearly four times, with 3,200 calls in 2010 to 13,000 in 2011. 60 percent of the cases reportedly involved patients 25 and younger.

Recently however, Brock said he has seen a drop-off in the calls and, while he can't point to anything specifically, he said it may have to do with the ban slated for this fall. Also, effective Jan. 1, 2013, New Hampshire's "driving while intoxicated" (DWI) charge will include language to outlaw all chemical substances which are considered to impair a driver, including bath salts, prescription drugs and over-the-counter medications such as Benadryl.

"We've certainly been seeing the decline in the bath salts issues and we'll welcome that relief," he added.

For the local woman concerned for her relative, she said she is appalled by the social systems in place that encourage her family members to keep using. She said her Farmington relative has a network of friends who trade narcotic prescriptions or buy pills at $1 per milligram, and when they can't get a hold of those substances, they fall back on bath salts to get them through the lull.

As she learns local stores are pulling their supply in advance of the upcoming ban, she said her relatives will even turn to alcohol. She wishes more rehabilitative services were available, noting her homeless relative, who lives hopping from couch to couch, can't afford health insurance.

"He stays in. He doesn't go out," she said. "It's a beautiful summer and he's pale, pale, pale. He's a vampire. They (his friends) all are. They stay up all night doing Suboxone and Oxys and Percocets, Vicodin, and then bath salts when they can't get those. That's why bath salts isn't an exclusive story."

Brock said his department is aware of the prescription drug users turning to bath salts to aid their addiction, but he said a patient's reaction to bath salts is unlike any other he has observed.

"One of the problems with it is their chemical makeups are very similar to amphetamines. Use creates a high in the addiction centers of the brain that would cause an individual to want to seek that high again," he said. "(But) the methamphetamine abusers we see tend to not have these violent and paranoid behaviors with every instance of use, whereas anecdotally, our experience has been that we see a great deal more violence and hallucinations with use of the bath salts. It may be the combination of all the unknown (manufactured) chemicals with this that's causing this very dangerous behavior."

Lawmakers continue to warn manufacturers of these drugs, said to be based internationally, find new ways to tweak their chemical compounds so they can stay ahead of the law and design new drugs that have yet to be banned in forthcoming years.

Time will tell how manufacturers respond to the new laws in place while the community hopes these bans have some effect on halting drug use at the local level.

The Rebel Doctor

Meet Gabor Maté, a doctor who works with North America’s only supervised injection site and believes that addicts are some of the happiest people he knows.


The Good Doctor Photo via


By Kristen McGuiness  The FiX

07/11/12
In the field of addiction, Hungarian-born Gabor Maté is known for his controversial and revolutionary theories on the sources of addiction and how addicts should be treated. And he knows of what he speaks: in the early 2000s, Maté joined the Portland Hotel Society (PHS), a clinic for Vancouver’s homeless and drug addicted, and he followed that by working withInsite—the only supervised injection site in North America. In his so-called spare time, the Canadian doctor has written best-selling books on parenting, stress, and ADD. 2011 saw the release of In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts, his much-acclaimed treatise on the way addiction begins in childhood.

Dr. Maté spoke with The Fix about his views on how addiction arises and the best ways to treat it.

How did you get into addiction therapy?

I worked in family practice for over 20 years and in palliative care for seven, which is when I became interested in childhood mental health issues and finally I went into addiction work. It’s impossible to be in family practice and not run across some addiction. Early on in my career I had worked in downtown Vancouver [notorious for its drug use and homelessness] and I knew I would go back. 

What was your role at the Portland Hotel Society?

I was on the on-staff physician there for 12 years—the first full-time physician they had ever had. It is a highly concentrated area of drug use and some of our clients were highly addicted. These are people who are at the extreme end of the addictive spectrum: they are dependent on meth, cocaine, heroin, cigarettes and alcohol and as a result, they suffer from many physical problems: HIV, Hepatitis C, joint infections, and abscesses. And of course they have mental health issues as well. 


At the very heart of addiction is the deep absence of self-esteem, which is caused by stress to the traumatized child. 

What was your experience at Insite?

People are allowed to bring their illicit drugs and, under supervised conditions, are given clean water and clean needles to use to inject. Nurses are on site to help so people will be resuscitated should they overdose. The immediate purpose of Insite is to eliminate the disease transmission from one addict to the next and to reduce the rate of infection. When you think about it, it’s straightforward. It’s better for people to inject with clean water rather than dirty water from a back alley. But beyond that, our intention is to treat people like human beings and, for many, this is a new experience.

What have you learned about addiction from those experiences?

First of all, I’ve come to learn that nature has very little to do with addiction. There are certain genes that may predispose to certain addictions but if the person is treated well, those genes have no impact on their behavior. Addiction runs in families because the same conditions are recreated from one generation to the next. So you need to look at people’s lives, not their hereditary. If you look at why addicts are soothing themselves through chemicals, you have to look at why they have discomfort and you will see that they have all experienced childhood adversity—the pain and distress that they needed to escape. 

And from that end, what do you see as the role of stress and trauma in addiction?

Once you’re traumatized as a child, you will continue to be traumatized as an adult [until you get help] because you will not have the emotional balance necessary to heal the trauma. Women who were abused as children will seek out abusive partners. And society plays its part in that, too. Even though we live in a highly addicted society, it is only the substance addicts that are criminalized and ostracized. People who are addicted to, say, cigarettes—or even power—are considered okay. But if someone is addicted to heroin, that person will be further stressed by the criminal system and the medical system, neither of which have much understanding or compassion for addiction. 

Why is the War on Drugs a failure and how can we really solve the drug epidemic?

The War on Drugs is an utter failure only if we accept that its fundamental intention is the elimination of addiction and of drug trafficking. But from another perspective, it may not be a failure at all. Is the war in Iraq a failure? Not for the companies that make billions of dollars of profit on it, not for the military who make billions of dollars, or the contractors or politicians. The War on Drugs has been a failure from the position of its stated aims. But is it a failure? Not from the point of view of the police apparatus, not from the perspective of the big drug dealers who are in cahoots with government agencies around the world, nor from those who profit from the increasingly privatized jail system, nor those who supply jails, and so on.

You seem to have a very humanistic view on addiction. Why do you think that is?

First you have to understand that the source of addiction is in the human himself. Then you think: how do you help someone who is pain? First by acknowledging their suffering and validating their attempt to escape from their pain, then by helping them not suffer so that they don’t have to rely on the drugs. It takes a whole different perspective. Resources that are used to incarcerate people would have to be used to help people to rewire their brains in healthy ways—through access to food, safe housing, good counseling, and employment skills: those things addicts that don’t have and have no way of getting under the current system. At the very heart of addiction is the deep absence of self-esteem, which is caused by stress to the traumatized child. Addicts believe that if all these negative things happen to them, there must be something wrong with them. When they are punished and attacked and criticized further, it hardens that deep sense of self-loathing.

How, then, do addicts get themselves out of that cycle? Is there room for free will in recovery from addiction?

Is there free will? When you think about it, there is no absolute free will because let’s say that you and Donald Trump both have the freedom to fly a private jet. You have the freedom but he has the ability. The same thing is true psychologically. Donald Trump might be free to have a spiritually validated life but he might not be able. He needs the accouterments, and riches and power, and that has to do with psychic factors that he has no control of. Free will implies consciousness. For addicts, their behaviors are very unconscious. The safer people feel and the more accepted they feel, the more they feel connected to others. The more defensive they are, the more reactive they are. You can give them the conditions where they can develop free will. Very few people have absolute free will because very few people have absolute consciousness—the addicts least of all, and that includes the power addict.

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Portugal Decriminalized All Drugs Eleven Years Ago And The Results Are Staggering

Samuel Blackstone | Jul. 17, 2012, 9:37 AM

AP Photo/ Paulo DuarteOn July 1st, 2001, Portugal decriminalized every imaginable drug, from marijuana, to cocaine, to heroin. Some thought Lisbon would become a drug tourist haven, others predicted usage rates among youths to surge.



Eleven years later, it turns out they were both wrong.

Over a decade has passed since Portugal changed its philosophy from labeling drug users as criminals to labeling them as people affected by a disease. This time lapse has allowed statistics to develop and in time, has made Portugal an example to follow.

First, some clarification.

Portugal's move to decriminalize does not mean people can carry around, use, and sell drugs free from police interference. That would be legalization. Rather, all drugs are "decriminalized," meaning drug possession, distribution, and use is still illegal. While distribution and trafficking is still a criminal offense, possession and use is moved out of criminal courts and into a special court where each offender's unique situation is judged by legal experts, psychologists, and social workers. Treatment and further action is decided in these courts, where addicts and drug use is treated as a public health service rather than referring it to the justice system (like the U.S.), reports Fox News.

The resulting effect: a drastic reduction in addicts, with Portuguese officials and reports highlighting that this number, at 100,000 before the new policy was enacted, has been halved in the following ten years. Portugal's drug usage rates are now among the lowest of EU member states, according to the same report.

One more outcome: a lot less sick people. Drug related diseases including STDs and overdoses have been reduced even more than usage rates, which experts believe is the result of the government offering treatment with no threat of legal ramifications to addicts.

While this policy is by no means news, the statistics and figures, which take years to develop and subsequently depict the effects of the change, seem to be worth noting. In a country like America, which may take the philosophy of criminalization a bit far (more than half of America's federal inmates are in prison on drug convictions), other alternatives must, and to a small degree, are being discussed.

For policymakers or people simply interested in this topic, cases like Portugal are a great place to start.
See also: Here's How America's Love Of Methamphetamine Helped Create The Hellish Mexican Drug War >

Researcher Developing Vaccine to Treat Heroin Addiction and Protect Against HIV

By Join Together Staff | July 26, 2012 | 1 Comment | Filed in Drugs, Funding,Prevention, Research & Treatment

A researcher at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research has been awarded a grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) to develop a vaccine that would treat heroin addiction and protect against HIV.

Dr. Gary R. Matyas has been selected as the 2012 recipient of the NIDA Avant-Garde Award for Medications Development, Phys.Orgreports. He will receive $1,000,000 per year for five years to support his research.

“This highly innovative dual-vaccine model would simultaneously address the intertwined epidemics of heroin abuse and HIV,” said NIDA Director Dr. Nora D. Volkow. “The implications for public health are enormous.”

“Heroin use is strongly associated with a high risk of HIV infection and represents an increasingly important worldwide health problem,” Dr. Matyas said. “The possibility of creating a combination heroin-HIV vaccine provides an important opportunity to address both a unique treatment for heroin abuse as well as continuing the quest to develop an effective preventive HIV vaccine.”