• Did Drugs Kill Michael Jackson? Sleep Expert Says Yes [AP]
• More Pharmacies Report More Shortages of More Critical Meds [Reuters]
• Justin Townes Earle Out of Recovery, Back Into Music {SFGate]
• Aussie, 14, Tests Positive Pot, May Avoid Brutal Bali Prison [Sydney Herald]
• The UnCoke: Rapper DMX Found God and Beat Addiction [TMZ]
• With Teen Binges Spiking, New EZ Screening Is In Vogue [Time Healthland] 
• Op-Ed: Why the Feds Should Legalize Pot [Mercury News] 
• Wrestling With Booze: Tragic Scott Hall Documentary Airs Wednesday [Miami Herald]             

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A former New York City undercover detective, Stephen Anderson, may have lost a few friends on the force after his testimony last week in a corruption scandal that led to the arrest of eight narc squad cops. Testifying for the prosecution in a plea agreement, the former NYPD detective testified yesterday that it is common practice to plant drugs—known as "flaking"—on innocent people in order to meet arrest quotas. Anderson was busted for planting cocaine on four men in a Queens bar in 2008, to help out another cop whose arrest numbers were low. “It's almost like you have no emotion with it, that they attach the bodies to it," he said nonchalantly to a stunned Brooklyn courtroom. "They're going to be out of jail tomorrow anyway—nothing is going to happen to them.” Yet not only does cocaine possession in New York carry with it a fine up to $500,000 and a minimum four-month jail sentence, it also can stain a person’s record forever, making it difficult or impossible to find employment or to apply for public housing—making it unclear why police would thing that “nothing is going to happen to them.” Just ask the Colon brothers. In 2008, Anderson and his partner were caught on surveillance video dancing on the street in front of the bar in Queens. Then, they arrested four men, including Jose and Maximo Colon. The officers later lied in their court testimony that they had bought drugs from the men. The Colon brothers swore under oath that it didn’t happen, and two hours of surveillance video show no contact between the brothers and the officers, prompting the prosecution to drop the charges and begin to investigate the police. In the six months that it took for the Colon brothers to find justice, they lost their business and all their savings. The city paid a $300,000 settlement to the Colons for false arrest. 

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This story out of Wisconsin about a 26-year-old Madison man who got arrested after overdosing on heroin in a Port-a-Potty reminded me of a similar story I heard a few years back told by a heroin addict I’ll call Dave. Now, Dave used to commute to Philly from Delaware on a daily basis to cop dope. It’s common for addicts in the 50-mile radius of suburban sprawl to flock to the Badlands section of North Philly for its famed 24-hour drive-through service at one of the many heroin corners in the barrio. Police know this, too; anyone with an out-of-state plate in that particular neighborhood on a Saturday night is liable to be tailed, pulled over and then escorted back to the Interstate by Philly’s Finest. So buying drugs for the out-of-towner is a real in-and-out affair; you want to get your shit and roll out pronto so as not to attract too much attention.

But where to shoot up? You’ve got a bundle sitting in your lap, and obviously you don’t feel like waiting an hour until you’re home to get high, especially if you’re dopesick, so where do you get a hit off in the middle of the night when every business with a public bathroom is closed?

A few years back, the answer to that question for hundreds of commuter junkies was the legendary Port-a-Potty on Aramingo Avenue. Aramingo is the main thoroughfare connecting the Interstate with Lehigh Avenue, gateway to the Badlands dope corners. And for many months a big stretch of Aramingo was under construction as a strip mall was being put up. There, at the building site, just off Aramingo, right before the highway on-ramp, basically in the perfect location for an addict who just copped a bunch of Badlands dope, was a single Port-a-Potty. You can imagine the scene there on Saturday nights.

Dave said that often when he pulled up to the Port-a-Potty there was such a long line that you’d think the Thanksgiving Day parade had just rolled past; it was a patently absurd sight for an otherwise remote, quiet part of town at that time of day. Sometimes he stopped by the site and, seeing no line, thought he had the Port-a-Potty all to himself—but when he yanked on the door he found it locked, and there would be a shout from within for him to be patient and wait his turn. One night he found no line for the Port-a-Potty, and the door was unlocked. Jackpot!

Except that the Port-a-Potty was in fact occupied—by a corpse with a syringe still stuck in the crook of its arm. Dave cursed the corpse: What kind of fucking jerkoff ODs in a Port-a-John? This dead guy was preventing him from getting his hit off. Dave was pissed that he would now have to cook and shoot his dope on the side of the road in full view of passing traffic, which he did.

Not surprisingly, after the body was found by construction workers the Port-a-Potty disappeared, much to the dismay of thousands of suburban dopefiends around the Tri-State Area.

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• Video: Hollywood Phone Hacker Is All Apologies, Blames Addiction [Celebrity Gossip]
• Update: BlackBerry Withdrawal Relief! Service Restored! [New York Times]
• Global "CrackBerry" Outages Cause Beltway "Black-pocalypse" [Politico]
• One Year After Rescue, Chilean Miners Are Trapped in Addiction [Santiago Times]
• "Demon Gambling Made Me Do It," Says Thieving Las Vegas Priest [Los Angeles Times]
• Girls Aloud's Sarah Harding in Rehab to Lay Off the Remy [Independent Online]

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In poor countries, up to 25% of all drugs are counterfeit, according to the World Health Organization. These often-ineffective, sometimes-toxic medicines make up a nearly $200 million industry worldwide. The black market in fake anti-malarial drugs alone kills 100,000 Africans a year. Counterfeit knockoffs have become a big headache for India, where contentious patent laws have enabled the fast development of the world's largest industry in generic prescription drugs—and where overwhelmed quality-control enforcement has, in turn, enabled the fast development of the world's second-largest black market in fake drugs (China is the world's no. 1 maker of counterfeit goods.) With its generics industry's reputation at stake, the Indian government launched an anti-counterfeit campaign, regularly raiding suspect manufacturers, but the lab tests necessary to confirm even a single fake drug are slow and expensive. Now the Indian Ministry of Health is initiating what it hopes is a far more efficient strategy—targeting the drug packaging—by requiring drugmakers to invest in advanced security technology to improve counterfeit detection, including 2D barcodes, scratch-off labels and printed quick response (QR) codes that allow any consumer with a camera phone and web access to scan the code and link to the manufacturer’s website to authenticate the drug. Starting this month, all pharmaceutical exporters must print barcodes on the outer-most packaging. A secondary-level track-and-trace system, mandatory next year, will offer additional package identification. Of course, the new approach has its drawbacks: not every consumer in India (to say nothing of Africa) has a sleek new iPhone with which to snap and scan.  Paul Lalvani, dean of Empower School of Health, says that Indian drugmakers “impact the lives of over six million people around the world who are on anti-HIV drugs and 200 million people on anti-malarials. So it's important for India to reassure consumers worldwide of the safety and credibility of drugs.” Meantime, Chinese drug-safety officials sit back and watch the U.S. Food and Drug Agency's first-ever overseas branch attempt to penetrate China's vast web of unregulated, corrupt supply chain for drugs.

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California Governor Jerry Brown signed two bills this week that will increase access to sterile needles for injection-drug users, with a view to decreasing the spread of HIV and hepatitis C. The first bill lets pharmacies sell syringes to adults without a prescription: California is one of the last states to legalize such sales. The second bill allows health and social-service agencies to provide needle-exchange programs in locations where the rapid spread of HIV, hepatitis and other infections present particularly high risks. Assemblywoman Nancy Skinner (D-Berkeley), who took the lead on the needle-exchange law, told The Fix: “Syringe exchanges shouldn’t be about politics. They are about the science of public health.” Every agency that has evaluated the policy of needle-exchange—including the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Medical Association, and the World Health Organization—has found that such programs decrease the spread of infectious disease without increasing levels of drug-use. And the costs of not adopting these schemes—in terms of health-care and lost life—are enormous. The office of state Senator Leland Yee (D-San Francisco), who wrote the first bill, cited a report by the California Research Bureau saying hospitalizations for hepatitis B and C cost the state $2 billion in 2007. The per-patient lifetime cost of treating HIV/AIDS is now estimated to top $600,000. Yet needle-exchange as a policy remains controversial in some counties. Just last month, the Fresno County board of supervisors blocked a previously-approved plan to legalize a well established needle exchange—despite county health officials’ warnings that new HIV and hepatitis C infections are rising. “AIDS and hepatitis do not recognize county borders and thus our current policy is not nearly as effective as it should be,” said Yee.

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