Tag Archives: Drug

News

Obama gave $443 million no-bid contract to drug firm run by Democrat fundraiser

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From the radically leftist Los Angeles Times.

Excerpt:

Over the last year, the Obama administration has aggressively pushed a $433-million plan to buy an experimental smallpox drug, despite uncertainty over whether it is needed or will work.

Senior officials have taken unusual steps to secure the contract for New York-based Siga Technologies Inc., whose controlling shareholder is billionaire Ronald O. Perelman, one of the world’s richest men and a longtime Democratic Party donor.

When Siga complained that contracting specialists at the Department of Health and Human Services were resisting the company’s financial demands, senior officials replaced the government’s lead negotiator for the deal, interviews and documents show.

When Siga was in danger of losing its grip on the contract a year ago, the officials blocked other firms from competing.

Siga was awarded the final contract in May through a “sole-source” procurement in which it was the only company asked to submit a proposal. The contract calls for Siga to deliver 1.7 million doses of the drug for the nation’s biodefense stockpile. The price of approximately $255 per dose is well above what the government’s specialists had earlier said was reasonable, according to internal documents and interviews.

[…]Dr. Thomas M. Mack, an epidemiologist at USC’s Keck School of Medicine, battled smallpox outbreaks in Pakistan and has advised the Food and Drug Administration on the virus. He called the plan to stockpile Siga’s drug “a waste of time and a waste of money.”

Yet another Solyndra to add to the pile of Solyndras. It turns out that Obama actually does like millionaires and billionaires – enough to give them millions of taxpayer dollars from the middle class.

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News

Is Colombia or Mexico better at dealing with criminal gangs?

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Colombian soldiers strike against FARC

Here’s a good story from Investors Business Daily.

Excerpt:

Colombia’s army blew away the field marshal of FARC’s narco-terror war Wednesday, showing with a jolt that to win, it’s terrorists who must “absorb” attacks, not innocents. Mexico and the U.S. have much to learn.

Seems the adage that Colombia is the only country where guerrillas die of old age isn’t true anymore.

On Thursday, Colombia celebrated news of the demise of Jorge Briceno, military commander and second-highest chief of FARC. The 57-year-old terrorist went down in a hail of bombs and gunfire over three days in a jungle bunker near La Macarena.

The Colombian army suffered no deaths and left at least 20 guerrillas dead on the jungle floor. Briceno’s demise marks the fourth knockout of FARC’s seven-man “Politburo”since 2008.

“This is the most crushing blow against the FARC in its entire history,” said Colombia’s president, Juan Manuel Santos, speaking from the sidelines at the United Nations in New York.

[…]Colombia’s war is in reality the southern flank of the same war that Mexico is fighting with its cartels — and that war is spilling over into the U.S. This is why Americans must pay attention.

The growing lawlessness on our border encompasses drugs, but also alien smuggling, kidnapping, counterfeiting and other acts of organized crime, with ties to global terror.

In Colombia’s case, it brooks no talk about “absorbing” terror attacks, as President Obama recently suggested in the U.S. If anything, Colombia seems to have taken lessons from Gen. David Petraeus’ surge in Iraq that took the war to the terrorists — and made sure they were the ones to worry about “absorbing” the attacks.

FARC is a left-wing Marxist terrorist group that traffics in cocaine. Hmmm. Cocaine? Terrorism? Marxism? That reminds me of someone. Who could it be?

Do you know what we should do to help Colombia defeat the Marxist-terrorist-drug cartel? We should sign a free trade deal so they can buy our stuff and we can buy their stuff. That will help them to grow more prosperous, and we’ll be more prosperous too! In fact, Canada has already done that. Canada likes Colombia. That’s why they signed a free trade agreement with Colombia. But the Democrats don’t like Colombia. Obama and the Democrats have delayed the signing of a free trade agreement with Colombia since they came into office.

News

New research shows that drug-facilitated sexual assault is a myth

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Story in the UK Daily Mail. (H/T Suzanne at Big Blue Wave)

Excerpt:

A toxicology expert from the Forensic Science Service, which analyses evidence for the police, told the Mail he had come across only one sample of blood or urine containing Rohypnol – the most commonly talked about ‘date-rape’ drug – in the past decade.

‘The reality is drink spiking is very, very rare’, said senior forensic scientist Michael Scott-Ham. ‘Alcohol itself is the problem.’

A controversial study, published last week, claimed drink spiking is an ‘urban myth’, a modern scapegoat for a generation of women who cannot face the fact that the vast amounts of alcohol many are imbibing could be in any way responsible for a loss of control, which can have devastating consequences.

‘Something very curious is going on,’ says Dr Adam Burgess, who spent a year researching the issue at the University of ‘s school of social policy for a project funded by the British Academy.

‘How can you account for this great big gap between lack of any evidence for drink spiking and what so many women believe is going on?

‘There’s a displacement exercise going on here. Why, despite all the evidence, do women so readily blame the spiker rather than the amount of alcohol they are drinking? That is the real issue here.’

[…]Could it be that women instinctively feel that if they admit to themselves how much they had drunk they would also be admitting they were somehow to blame for putting themselves at risk?

Believing your drink was spiked transfers the blame to a malevolent, external force, something which women have no control over. It shifts responsibility.

[…]Dr Burgess and his team interviewed 236 women at three universities in Kent, Sussex and London during 2006 and 2007.

They sought to investigate students’ knowledge of ‘date rape’ drugs, whether they or someone they knew had been a victim and whether they had changed their behaviour in relation to the perceived threat.

And consider closely how the attitudes of these women diverge from reality, such that they perceive themselves as helpless victims, even though they are in fact directly responsible for their own misfortunes.

Only ten out of the 236 claimed to have experienced drink spiking personally and none had been subject to sexual assault.

Yet 55 per cent claimed to have known someone whose drink had been spiked.

But among respondents, 75 per cent believed having a drink spiked with drugs was a more significant risk factor for sexual assault than drinking alcohol or taking drugs, despite the fact that police believe the opposite is true.

Another pivotal study offers further evidence that alcohol is the drug to be guarded against.

The study, conducted by the Forensic Science Service in 2005, examined 1,014 cases of ‘drug facilitated sexual assault’ by analysing blood and urine samples from victims gathered by police forces in England and .

In only 21 – about 2 per cent – were traces of drugs found that the women had not taken voluntarily.

These included Ecstasy, gammahydroxybutyrate (GHB) and tranquillisers. Alcohol was picked up in 46 per cent of cases. Illegal drugs such as cannabis and cocaine were in 34 per cent of cases.

Suzanne, who is pro-life, adds:

I am certain that massive amounts of alcohol consumption contributes to abortions in this country.

If you’re a woman who drinks large amounts of alcohol around strange men looking to score, you’re placing yourself in danger. That is the reality.

Unfortunately, people have a strange way of denying reality.

[…]You are responsible for the foreseeable consequences of your actions. Doing something stupid under the influence of alcohol is one of them. That’s obvious. So don’t get drunk.

Well said!

My previous article on women behaving irresponsibly is here. An article from Laura of Pursuing Holiness also talked about the danger of women refusing to take responsibility for their own choices. Her article has a lot of scary examples. And a previous post that documents how leniently women are treated when committing domestic violence is here. According to the best available research, women commit acts of domestic violence at about the same rate as men, even though male victims are almost never recognized by social services.