Tag: meth

Ice Cream Truck Reportedly Used As Front For Marijuana, Meth Sales

Authorities say the drugs in the truck had a street value between $2,000 and $4,000.

A California ice cream truck was selling much more than just innocent summer treats when authorities caught up with it earlier in the week, alleging that the truck was a front for a drug-dealing business.

Inside the Long Beach truck, cops found a bag of methamphetamine, marijuana in mason jars and small baggies, a box of sandwich bags, a scale, cash and a gun, according to The Long Beach Post. While it wasn’t clear whether the truck was actually selling ice cream, police say that its main purpose was to be a cover for drug sales.

The truck’s operators, George Sylvester Williams, 57, and Monti Michael Ware, 41, were arrested on Sunday afternoon. Williams is being held on $30,000 bail, and Ware is being held on $50,000 bail because he is also facing charges for possessing a gun while dealing drugs and possessing a gun as an ex-felon.

The Long Beach Police Department announced the arrest of the men, both from Long Beach, on Twitter.

Long Beach Police Department spokeswoman Arantxa Chavarria said that the drugs in the truck had a street value between $2,000 and $4,000.

This isn’t the first time that an ice cream truck has been used for cover for an illicit business. In June, authorities in Conyers, Georgia, arrested an ice cream truck driver after a teenager reported that the man was trying to break into a mailbox. When police caught up with the driver, 19-year-old Cameron Callaway, they found marijuana, scales and a gun inside the truck.

“He could very well have been selling marijuana out of the ice cream truck,” said Conyers police Sgt. Kim Lucas.

Neighbors said that they were not surprised, since the truck’s driver hadn’t exactly been inconspicuous.

“What ice cream man delivers ice cream at six in the morning, three in the morning?” said Jerri Rogers, who called police after her daughter saw the driver breaking into the mailbox. “My kids have been telling me, ‘He sells dope.’”

In 2014, another California ice cream truck driver was arrested after reportedly trying to sell methamphetamine to a customer. Kelly Brown, 62, was taken into custody after a witness called police and said, “The ice cream [truck] driver just tried to sell me some drugs,” according to The Huffington Post.

There have also been reports of ice cream truck drivers in Maryland and New York trying to use their vehicles to sell illicit drugs.

View the original article at thefix.com

30 August 2018
"Motherhood & Meth" Doc Explores How The Drug Affects Families

The documentary spotlights Fresno, California, where the high incidence of child abuse is directly attributed to methamphetamine.

With so much focus on the opioid crisis, many don’t realize that meth is reportedly making a big comeback, and now a new documentary, Motherhood & Meth, is taking a look at the devastating consequences of being a parent suffering from addiction.

Motherhood & Meth is a short documentary directed by journalist Mary Newman, and it specifically focuses on the connection between meth addiction and child abuse.

The documentary spotlights Fresno, California, where a large degree of child abuse is directly attributed to the drug.

The Valley Children’s Hospital, which is in the Fresno area, sees about 1,000 cases of abuse every year, and the hospital’s medical director, Dr. Philip Hyden, believes meth is involved in 70% of them.

Child abuse and neglect cases in Fresno County have gone up 31% in the last 15 years, and often the abuse can start early, with a reported 19,000 pregnant women in America suffering from meth addiction. (In the Fresno area, meth is the number one drug abused by pregnant women when they check into rehab.)

Newman told The Atlantic that when she talked to mothers with addiction for her documentary, “I would ask if meth ever caused them or someone in their life to become violent. Everyone responded with an emphatic ‘yes.’”

And a number of the people Newman spoke to were repeating cycles of violence they suffered when they were young, often from parents that were also hooked on meth themselves.

“The power methamphetamine has on a person’s life was the most surprising part of [reporting] this story,” Newman says. “I would speak with people struggling with addiction and they would have a certain self-awareness that their decisions were derailing their life, but they would also describe a feeling of complete helplessness.”

This documentary reports that meth busts in California have increased over five times between 2000 and 2016, and a DEA official told the Atlantic that meth is cheaper than ever to buy, with the prices dropping from about $968 an ounce in 2013, to $250 in 2016.

Leticia Bayton, a Fresno cop who was interviewed for the documentary, confessed that her sister, who is also a mother, succumbed to meth addiction.

“It destroyed her,” she said. “It completely killed her from the inside out. She used to be an excellent mother, totally attentive, devoted to her child. Then once the meth came in, she stopped caring about herself and her children. Her sense of responsibility faded, and her entire life revolved around where she was going to get her next hit.”

View the original article at thefix.com

29 August 2018
Scientists Dosed Artificial Brain With Meth For New Study

Scientists chose to use meth on the brain replica because much is still unknown about the the drug and its effects on the body.

It’s no secret that certain drugs are bad for your brain. However, scientists at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering can now tell you exactly how bad meth is for you, after dosing an artificial brain with the drug and watching the results.

To do this, researchers used organ chips, computer chips lined with living human cells that can be used to test how human organs function and react to substances.

In this case, the researchers were focused on the blood-brain barrier (BBB). This filter normally allows some substances to pass into the brain, while keeping other potentially harmful substances out. Using drugs, including meth, can alter the BBB, making it easier for toxins to reach the brain, according to Motherboard.

To show this and study exactly how it works, researchers dosed a brain chip mimicking the function of the BBB with meth.

“Just like in the brains of people who choose to smoke meth, the BBB chips started to leak,” Kit Parker, professor of Bioengineering and Applied Physics, told Digital Trends. “That’s exactly what happens when you smoke meth—and why you shouldn’t.”

Ben Maoz, one of three lead study authors from the Wyss Institute, said that the team chose meth because it is known to be particularly harmful to the brain.

“Our primary reason for choosing this drug is that it is one of the most addictive drugs responsible for thousands of deaths,” Maoz said to Motherboard via email. “Given this tragic statistic, it is surprising that much is still unknown. Therefore, we sought to use this novel system to unveil the metabolic effect of meth on the different parts of the [neurovascular unit].”

Researchers found that about 10% of the dose of meth went through the BBB, similar to what happens when people smoke meth. Researchers were then able to examine how parts of the brain communicate, giving them insight that they wouldn’t be able to glean without the organ chips.

“The novelty relating to organ chips is that they enable us to carry out what is essentially a ‘synthetic biology’ approach at the cell, tissue, and organ level,” said Donald Ingber, director of the Wyss Institute.

“In this study, we could use this synthetic approach to break down a complex organ—in this case, the human brain—into individual sub-compartments of the brain microvasculature and normally tightly intertwined neuronal networks. Because we can separate out each compartment and control ‘ins and outs,’ while analyzing them with state-of-the-art analytical technologies, we were able to gain insights into how cells within these different compartments communicate with each other.”

View the original article at thefix.com

28 August 2018
Man Reportedly Asked Cops To Test Meth After Bad Reaction To Drug

“If you believe you were sold bad drugs, we are offering a free service to test them for you,” Florida police wrote on Facebook after the arrest.

A Florida man was arrested last week after asking cops to test his meth for him so he could “press charges” against the dealer who supposedly ripped him off.

Douglas Peter Kelly called detectives on Tuesday to report a “violent reaction” to some drugs he’d bought a week earlier. He was afraid he’d been given some sub-par speed, but the detectives on the other end of the phone offered to help.

“In an effort to ensure the quality of the drug the suspect purchased, detectives told Kelly if he came to the sheriff’s office they could test the narcotic he purchased,” the sheriff’s office later wrote on Facebook.

So the 49-year-old man drove to the Putnam County Sheriff’s Office to fork over the foil-wrapped crystals for testing.

Though he’d feared the substance was actually the synthetic drug Flakka, a field test showed it was indeed the meth his dealer promised.

Unfortunately, instead of congratulating him on his solid purchase, police arrested the Hawthorne man and charged him with felony drug possession. He was booked into the county jail and later released on $2,500 bond, according to The Smoking Gun.

Afterward, the sheriff’s office posted on Facebook a tongue-in-cheek reminder of their services.

“If you believe you were sold bad drugs, we are offering a free service to test them for you,” they wrote. “Our detectives are always ready to assist anyone who believes they were misled in their illegal drug purchase.”

Last year, another Florida man found himself behind bars after a similar blunder. David Blackmon of Fort Walton Beach called police in July 2017 to report that someone had swiped a bag of blow from his car, according to the Miami Herald.

After Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Office deputies arrived on scene to investigate, Blackmon explained that he was a drug dealer and some ne’er-do-well had busted into his parked car and stolen a quarter-ounce of cocaine along with some cash.

Deputies found a crack rock still in the car along with a pipe, and ultimately Blackmon was arrested for resisting, paraphernalia and cocaine possession. He was booked into the county jail and released on $4,000 bond.

View the original article at thefix.com

18 June 2018
What's Fueling The Rise Of Meth?

Ohio, Nevada, Utah and parts of Montana have seen a recent rise in methamphetamine use.

In rural Ohio, an increasing number of opioid users are turning to methamphetamine to get high, driven in part by a medication that is meant to help them stay sober.

“Right now that’s our biggest challenge—is methamphetamines,” Amanda Lee, a counselor at Health Recovery Services in McArthur, Ohio, told NPR. “I think partly because of the Vivitrol program.”

Vivitrol is an injectable medication used to support recovery from opioid addiction. It works by blocking opioid receptors in the brain, so that people are not able to get high off opioids. However, Lee points out that when the underlying cause of addiction—like pain or trauma—is not addressed, desperate users simply find a new substance to abuse.

“The Vivitrol injection does not cover receptors in the brain for methamphetamines, so they can still get high on meth,” Lee said. “So they are using methamphetamines on top of the Vivitrol injection.”

Lee said that in her opinion, methamphetamine is much more debilitating than opioids.

“There’s paranoia. There is hallucinations. It almost looks like people have schizophrenia,” she said. “Methamphetamines scare me more than opiates ever did.”

“You can’t really describe the smell,” said Detective Ryan Cain, lead narcotics detective for Vinton County, Ohio. “It’s a combination of lithium out of a battery. A lot of them use Coleman camp fuel. It’s a solvent. They use ammonium nitrate, which is usually out of a cold pack. And all of it’s very cancerous.”

Trecia Kimes-Brown, the county prosecutor, has seen how meth addiction, like opioids, involves the whole family.

“When you’re living in a house where people are making meth, it’s not just the health effects. These kids are living in these environments where, you know, they’re not being fed,” she said. “They’re not being clothed properly. They’re not being sent to school. They’re being mistreated. And they have a front-row seat to all of this.”

In addition to meth produced locally, cheap meth from Mexico is now trafficked into Ohio by drug cartels south of the border, according to officials.

Ohio isn’t unique in how the drug crisis has shifted. In Kentucky, the focus on preventing opioid addiction also contributed to an increase in meth addiction.

“People say, ‘Why do you not have an opioid problem? Why does Daviess County not suffer the same problems?’” Sheriff Keith Cain said last month. “I’d like to say it’s because of progressive police work. But I think the prime reason we don’t have an opioid problem here is because our people are addicted to meth.”

Nevada, Utah and parts of Montana have also seen a rise in methamphetamine use recently.

“Meth is kind of the forgotten drug out there, and it’s still a huge problem in our society,” Lt. Todd Royce with Utah Highway Patrol said last month. “It’s a horrible epidemic and it destroys families.”

View the original article at thefix.com

15 June 2018