Drug

As a 16-year veteran of a California police department who's worked various patrol, investigative and undercover assignments, I feel the need to respond to the June 30 story about the death of Sasha Rodriguez at the recent Electric Daisy Carnival so the citizens of Los Angeles as well as the rest of California know. I cannot believe that public officials approved the use of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum for this event. Have we not learned yet what a rave is? Since the 1980s, "rave" has denoted a specific type of party that includes the use of psychedelic drugs.

Olympic sprint champion Florence Griffith Joyner died after suffering an epileptic seizure, according to autopsy results released Thursday, and her family and friends say they hope the findings will put to rest rumors that drug use contributed to her death. Griffith Joyner died last month in her sleep at age 38. Her husband, Al Joyner, bitterly criticized those who suggested that she took performance-enhancing drugs.

From a prison cell outside California, an inmate known as "Evil" was making himself known on Ventura County's streets. Martin Madrigal, 39, was squeezing drug profits from street gangs for the prison-based Mexican Mafia, according to a grand jury indictment released Tuesday. He was so feared that rival gangs cooperated on extortion schemes, drug deals and violent crimes, according to law enforcement officials. The 35-count indictment portrays Madrigal as a powerful figure representing an efficient and merciless organization that law enforcement officials believe has been operating for decades, largely from behind bars, calling shots among street gangs.

The discovery of drugs inside the car of a pair of hikers rescued in a multiday search has prompted Orange County officials to consider charging them for the $160,000 operation and fanned a debate on when people should pay for their misadventures. One of the hikers, Nicolas Cendoya, was charged Tuesday with a felony count of methamphetamine possession after authorities said they found a small amount of the drug in the car the pair parked before setting off on an Easter Sunday hike.

BEIJING -- It was reality television in the extreme. Chinese state television Friday broadcast nearly one hour of live images of the last moments of four foreign drug traffickers about to be executed for the 2011 killing of 13 Chinese fishermen on the Mekong River. Although the cameras pulled away before the final lethal injection, the unprecedented pre-execution coverage unleashed a storm of criticism and debate about the death penalty. Psychologists decried the live coverage as distressing  to children, while lawyers complained that it violated a clause in the criminal code against parading the condemned before execution.

Mexican drug kingpin Joaquin "Chapo" Guzman has fallen off Forbes magazine's annual list of the world's billionaires. Guzman, who has been in hiding since escaping from a maximum-security prison in 2001, is chieftain of the Sinaloa cartel, Mexico's biggest and oldest drug-trafficking network. He first made the billionaire list in 2009 and remained on it until this year. Luisa Kroll, an editor at Forbes, said that Guzman's "whereabouts are unknown" and therefore it's difficult to verify his assets.

Former boxing champions Oscar De La Hoya and Julio Cesar Chavez said that they abused drugs and alcohol while training for fights at the tail end of their careers. The star boxers, who underwent rehab and say that they have been clean for a few years, discussed their former vices during the premiere of ESPN Deportes' new talk show "El Bar," which airs Friday at 6 p.m. De La Hoya, a Mexican American legend, said that he drank before at least two championship fights, including the final bout of his career in 2008 against Manny Pacquiao.

Re "Dying for relief," Dec. 30 In reading your series on abuses of prescription drugs, I wonder whether you have thought of the negative consequences of repeatedly trumpeting this "crisis" on the front page. There is no question that some people are going to over-medicate themselves with both legal and non-legal substances, and I applaud those physicians who take it upon themselves to look twice at patients. But whether all this adds up to a public health emergency that could be eliminated by Big Brother is doubtful.

I want to feel good for Nick D'Aloisio, I really do. It's not every day that a 17-year-old kid becomes a millionaire after spending off-hours while attending school writing code for a smartphone app. My petty jealousy aside, though, D'Aloisio's story got me thinking: Are there any other industries -- other than entertainment -- that would create opportunities like this? I can't think of any. First of all, there just aren't a lot of businesses that allow teenagers to participate, even on the periphery.

In patients with moderate Alzheimer's disease, an experimental drug that alters the brain's "fight or flight" impulse succeeded in improving memory modestly when it was added to at least one of the medications already in wide use to treat the memory-robbing disease. Compared with subjects taking the drug memantine and a placebo, subjects supplementing their customary drug regimen for three months with the experimental drug--ORM-12741--scored more highly on two measures of memory.