A growing number of California infants are born addicted to drugs, according to a Bee review of new state data.
About 1,190 California newborns were diagnosed with drug withdrawal syndrome last year, up more than 50 percent from a decade earlier, according to hospital discharge data from the Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development. That translates to about one addicted newborn for every 400 births.
Makenzee Kennedy is looked over by recreational therapist Adrienne Blizzard while waiting for a visit from her mother at Mount Washington Pediatric Hospital. The hospital has a department that specializes in weaning newborns off of heroin and other drugs. A nationwide increase in babies born addicted to drugs has hit California hard. Bill O’LearyThe Washington Post
The increase comes as the number of California births has dropped sharply.
Neonatal drug withdrawal syndrome generally occurs when mothers use drugs, particularly opiate painkillers, for an extended period during pregnancy. Its symptoms are similar to what addicts often experience when stopping a drug: sweating, fever, restlessness, poor appetite, vomiting and tremors.
The rise in babies addicted to drugs corresponds with a sharp increase in ER visits and hospitalizations due to overdoses involving prescription drugs, heroin and other opiods, state figures show.
Neonatal withdrawal, while painful, generally does not have a severe, long-term effect on infant health, so long as proper care is received. More concerning in the long run are other consequences of maternal drug abuse, particularly congenital abnormalities and developmental problems often associated with preterm birth. Newborns addicted to drugs are also more likely to be born prematurely.
Illicit drug use is not always the cause of drug withdrawal syndrome in newborns. Doctors sometimes legitimately prescribe strong painkillers to expectant mothers suffering from an injury or painful pregnancy. In these cases, doctors weigh weaning an infant off painkillers against the possible danger posed to the pregnancy if a mother remains in pain.
When the syndrome is caused by illicit drug use, the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act of 2003 requires doctors to report it to child welfare.
BALTIMORE – Baltimore reached a grim milestone on Friday, three months after riots erupted in response to the death of Freddie Gray in police custody: With 45 homicides in July, the city has seen more bloodshed in a single month than it has in 43 years.
Police reported three deaths — two men shot Thursday and one on Friday. The men died at local hospitals.
With their deaths, this year's homicides reached 189, far outpacing the 119 killings by July's end in 2014. Nonfatal shootings have soared to 366, compared to 200 by the same date last year. July's total was the worst since the city recorded 45 killings in August 1972, according to The Baltimore Sun.
The seemingly Sisyphean task of containing the city's violence prompted Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake to fire her police commissioner, Anthony Batts, on July 8.
"Too many continue to die on our streets," Rawlings-Blake said then. "Families are tired of dealing with this pain, and so am I. Recent events have placed an intense focus on our police leadership, distracting many from what needs to be our main focus: the fight against crime."
But the killings have not abated under Interim Commissioner Kevin Davis since then.
Baltimore is not unique in its suffering; crimes are spiking in big cities around the country.
But while the city's police are closing cases— Davis announced arrests in three recent murders several days ago — the violence is outpacing their efforts. Davis said Tuesday the "clearance rate" is at 36.6 percent, far lower than the department's mid-40s average.
Crime experts and residents of Baltimore's most dangerous neighborhoods cite a confluence of factors: mistrust of the police; generalized anger and hopelessness over a lack of opportunities for young black men; and competition among dealers of illegal drugs, bolstered by the looting of prescription pills from pharmacies during the riot.
Federal drug enforcement agents said gangs targeted 32 pharmacies in the city, taking roughly 300,000 doses of opiates, as the riots caused $9 million in property damage in the city.
Perched on a friend's stoop, Sherry Moore, 55, said she knew "mostly all" of the young men killed recently in West Baltimore, including an 18-year-old fatally shot a half-block away. Moore said many more pills are on the street since the riot, making people wilder than usual.
"The ones doing the violence, the shootings, they're eating Percocet like candy and they're not thinking about consequences. They have no discipline, they have no respect — they think this is a game. How many can I put down on the East side? How many can I put down on the West side?"
The tally of 42 homicides in May included Gray, who died in April after his neck was broken in police custody. The July tally likewise includes a previous death — a baby whose death in June was ruled a homicide in July.
Shawn Ellerman, Assistant Special Agent in Charge of the Baltimore division of the Drug Enforcement Administration, said May's homicide spike was probably related to the stolen prescription drugs, a supply that is likely exhausted by now. But the drug trade is inherently violent, and turf wars tend to prompt retaliatory killings.
"You can't attribute every murder to narcotics, but I would think a good number" of them are, he said. "You could say it's retaliation from drug trafficking, it's retaliation from gangs moving in from other territories. But there have been drug markets in Baltimore for years."
Across West Baltimore, residents complain that drug addiction and crime are part of a cycle that begins with despair among children who lack educational and recreational opportunities, and extends when people can't find work.
"We need jobs! We need jobs!" a man riding around on a bicycle shouted to anyone who'd listen after four people were shot, three of them fatally, on a street corner in July.
More community engagement, progressive policing policies and opportunities for young people in poverty could help, community activist Munir Bahar said.
"People are focusing on enforcement, not preventing violence. Police enforce a code, a law. Our job as the community is to prevent the violence, and we've failed," said Bahar, who leads the annual 300 Men March against violence in West Baltimore.
"We need anti-violence organizations, we need mentorship programs, we need a long-term solution. But we also need immediate relief," Bahar added. "When we're in something so deep, we have to stop it before you can analyze what the root is."
Strained relationships between police and the public also play a role, according to Eugene O'Donnell, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
Arrests plummeted and violence soared after six officers were indicted in Gray's death. Residents accused police of abandoning their posts for fear of facing criminal charges for making arrests, and said emboldened criminals were settling scores with little risk of being caught.
The department denied these claims, and police cars have been evident patrolling West Baltimore's central thoroughfares recently.
But O'Donnell said the perception of lawlessness is just as powerful than the reality.
"We have a national issue where the police feel they are the Public Enemy No. 1," he said, making some officers stand down and criminals become more brazen.
"There's a rhythm to the streets," he added. "And when people get away with gun violence, it has a long-term emboldening effect. And the good people in the neighborhood think, 'Who has the upper hand?'"
“You’re Honor at the time of the looting my client was returning from singing in the church choir, after he taught the homeless illiterate how to read and in his spare time builds houses for the poor.”
The Drug Enforcement Agency released photographs Thursday of nine people officials say are connected with looting prescription drugs from Baltimore pharmacies during the April unrest related to the death of Freddie Gray.
The move came a day after Baltimore police Commissioner Anthony W. Batts revised the estimate of how many drugs were stolen to more than 175,000 units, or doses.
“That amount of drugs has thrown off the balance on the streets of Baltimore,” Batts said.
DEA Special Agent Gary Tuggle said even more drugs were stolen than initially reported. About 40 percent of the looted pharmacies have not finished counting losses, he said.
Twenty-seven pharmacies and two methadone clinics were looted when rioting erupted April 27, the day of Gray’s funeral.[…]
harmacy and law enforcement officials said they have seen no evidence that personal information found on stolen prescriptions has been used for fraud. Nevertheless, Rite Aid hired Kroll, a risk management firm, “to alert impacted customers via a letter of notification and share with them the proactive measures it has taken to guard against identity theft.”
As if it weren’t bad enough that American taxpayers annually dole out huge sums to educate, incarcerate and medically treat illegal immigrants, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) spent tens of millions of dollars to give them free prescription drugs.
In all, CMS, which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), blew $29 million to cover Medicare Part D prescription drugs for 4,139 “unlawfully present” individuals that did not qualify for the benefit, according to an HHS Inspector General report. This occurred during a two-year period between 2009 and 2011, according to the agency watchdog.
If you think that’s bad, earlier this year CMS paid $91.6 million to health care providers to cover 2,600 ineligible illegal aliens. A 1996 law specifically prohibits illegal immigrants from getting federal healthcare benefits such as Medicare and Medicaid yet it continues to occur, despite audits exposing the violations. How? Because CMS doesn’t have policies and procedures that could enable it to detect such “improper payments,” according to an HHS Inspector General report released in January.
That means Americans will likely continue paying exorbitant amounts to provide illegal aliens with services banned by federal law. The prescription scandal involves Medicare Part D, a voluntary program that requires qualified beneficiaries to enroll in the federally approved prescription drug plan by completing paperwork.
Supposedly CMS uses information from the Social Security Administration to verify eligibility, but the new audit reveals this: “CMS did not have a policy addressing payments for unlawfully present beneficiaries under Medicare Part D that was equivalent to the existing policy that covers payments for these beneficiaries under Parts A and B.” That means the agency doesn’t have “internal controls to identify and disenroll unlawfully present beneficiaries.”
In a nutshell, it appears that the Health Department’s watchdog is essentially saying that there’s nothing the feds can do about this. The lost money cannot be recovered and the inspector general simply suggests the obvious; to “develop and implement controls to ensure that Medicare does not pay for prescription drugs for unlawfully present beneficiaries.”
NEW YORK (Reuters) – U.S. law enforcement authorities have shut down “Silk Road,” an anonymous Internet marketplace for illegal drugs like heroin and cocaine and criminal activities such as murder for hire, and arrested its alleged owner.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation said Wednesday it arrested Silk Road owner, Ross William Ulbricht, 29, known online as “Dread Pirate Roberts,” in San Francisco on Tuesday, according to court filings.
Ulbricht, who holds an advanced degree in chemical engineering, appeared in federal court on Wednesday and a bail hearing was set for Friday.
His lawyer Brandon LeBlanc, a public defender, declined to comment.
Federal prosecutors in New York charged Ulbricht with one count each of narcotics trafficking conspiracy, computer hacking conspiracy and money laundering conspiracy, the filing said.
“Silk Road has emerged as the most sophisticated and extensive criminal marketplace on the Internet today,” FBI agent Christopher Tarbell said in the criminal complaint.
The site was used by “several thousand drug dealers” to sell “hundreds of kilograms of illegal drugs,” he said.
The site, which has operated since early 2011, also offered tutorials on hacking ATM machines, contact lists for black market connections and counterfeiters, and guns and hit men for sale, according to the charges.
More than 900,000 registered users of the site bought and sold drugs using the digital currency Bitcoin. In recent media reports about the growing popularity of Bitcoin, the Silk Road website has emerged as part of a darker side to the use of digital currencies.
Thanks to new regulations that are part of the federal Affordable Care Act, patients will be asked to disclose more personal information to their doctors — including how often they have sex and how with how many sexual partners.
And once they do, it won’t really be personal information any more.
One provision of the new Obamacare law will have doctors asking their patients about their sex lives and history of drug use, even if such information is completely unrelated to why the patient is seeking medical treatment, according to a report in Monday’s New York Post,
Christina Sandefur, a lawyer for the Goldwater Institute, an Arizona-based conservative think tank challenging the Affordable Care Act in federal court, said the arrangement is a violation of patients’ privacy rights.
“Once you’ve shared your information with a private third party, the Supreme Court has ruled that is fair game for the government,” she told Watchdog.org, noting the recent disclosures of data sharing between the National Security Agency andGoogle, Facebook and other online services.
Doctors and hospitals who refuse to participate could be cut-off from some federal funds, and individuals who decline to share sensitive information may have to pay the fines — taxes, according to the Supreme Court — outlined in the federal health care law.
“This is nasty business,” New York cardiologist Dr. Adam Budzikowski told the Post.
Budzikowski called the sex questions “insensitive, stupid and very intrusive.”
The president’s “reforms” aim to turn doctors into government agents, pressuring them financially to ask questions they consider inappropriate and unnecessary, and to violate their Hippocratic Oath to keep patients’ records confidential, the Post reported.
Thanks to laws that protect the confidentiality of doctor-patient conversations — in the same way conversations with your lawyer or your priest are considered off-the-record and — people generally are more open with their doctors than with friends and family.
That’s a good thing for both doctors and patients. Privileged communication means patients will give honest answers and doctors can get vital information.
Forget zero tolerance. Bay City Public School teachers for years could be caught repeatedly under the influence of illegal drugs or alcohol without being fired.
Teachers in possession or under the influence of illegal drugs could be caught three times before they lost their job, and they got five strikes if they were drunk on school grounds before being fired. A school district official said the language in the union contract that protects teachers for those instances "was incorporated into the teacher Master Agreement in 1997."
Those protections also were included in the Bay City Education Association teacher’s contract that was agreed to in January in section 16.1300 "Controlled Substances" on page 92. That contract expired June 30 and negotiations on a new contract are ongoing.
Students weren’t given as many chances. The code of conduct for middle school and high school students states that if they are found to be under the influence or in possession of illegal drugs, they get a 5-day suspension or a 3-day suspension with counseling on the first offense.
A teacher caught selling drugs in class would get a 3-day suspension without pay with mandatory counseling, but wouldn’t be fired unless the teacher did it a second time.
"They must have had been high to approve that contract because no sober person would agree to that kind of policy," said Leon Drolet, chairman of the Michigan Taxpayers Alliance. "The role models are held to a lower standard than the students. That just sends a horrible message. If anything is indicative of how far school boards are willing to bend to kiss the rings of union leaders, this is it.
"That is an absolute disgrace," he said.
The provision of the teachers' contract that allowed up to five strikes for being under the influence of alcohol and three strikes for being under the influence of illegal drugs before being fired was ruled as unenforceable by Public Act 103 in July 2011. However, the union contract states that if Public Act 103 is struck down, the policy goes back into effect for teachers.
Author Paul Kengor wants you to know just how radical Frank Marshal Davis — a man many consider to have been a mentor to President Barack Obama during his teenage years — was.
“Obama’s mentor was considered so radical, and such a potential pro-Soviet threat, that the federal government placed him on the Security Index,” Kengor told The Daily Caller in an interview about his new book on Davis, simply titled “The Communist.”
“That meant that if a war broke out between the United States and the Soviet Union, Frank Marshall Davis could be placed under immediate arrest. Think about that. Obama had that sort of influence. And The Washington Post will focus on whether Mitt Romney was bullying in high school? With the kind of influence that Obama had, Obama would have trouble getting a security clearance for an entry-level government job.”
Obama refers to Davis in his memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” simply as “Frank” and never elaborates on his radical history. Kengor believes this is because Obama wanted to avoid the political liability of being associated with Davis’ politics. But if Obama was concerned about protecting his future political prospects while writing his memoir, why would he include details of his drug use?
