Drugs

The obituary in the York Weekly was heartbreaking. Just 17, Bethany Fritz was a high school senior hoping to study art at the University of Maine. She lived in an affluent coastal community of tidal pools, winding roads and thick stands of maple and oak. She loved her family and friends, her two cats and her dog, Farleigh. Unmentioned was her cause of death: an overdose of heroin.

In the heart of the Ethiopian community here, a group of friends gathered after work in an office to chew on dried khat leaves before going home to their wives and children. Sweet tea and sodas stood on a circular wooden table between green mounds of the plant, a mild narcotic grown in the Horn of Africa. As the sky grew darker the conversation became increasingly heated, flipping from religion to jobs to local politics. Suddenly, one of the men paused and turned in his chair.

The request for drugs for Anna Nicole Smith slid off the fax of a Valley Village pharmacy five days after the model's son had died in the Bahamas. A psychiatrist wanted 300 tablets of methadone, two types of sedatives, a muscle relaxer, an anti-inflammatory drug and four bottles of a painkiller nicknamed "hospital heroin," unsealed court records show. The amount and combination alarmed the pharmacist, who later recalled thinking, "They are going to kill her with this." He phoned Smith's internist and said he had no intention of filling a prescription that amounted to "pharmaceutical suicide," according to court documents.

The wife of a Sunny Hills High School teacher was convicted and sentenced to one year of house arrest Friday for planting drugs and a gun in the trunk of her estranged husband's car in a conspiracy that led to the popular history teacher's wrongful arrest for having drugs on campus. Devon Eileen Abbott, 33, and her boyfriend, Soloman Brian Silver, 42, conspired to hide a shotgun, marijuana and prescription pills in the vehicle of Gregory Abbott. The two successfully schemed to have him arrested for crimes he did not commit.

The cul-de-sac in a residential Tustin neighborhood, especially on a gray rainy afternoon like Wednesday, seems a long way from the brightness and glamour of the celebrity world of Hollywood and beyond. But drugs and alcohol don't care where you live, and you can get just as loaded and lost in Tustin as Tinseltown. Or Anywhere Else, USA. Tim Chapman works almost exclusively out of the public eye.

The investigation into actor Heath Ledger's death Monday as a possible drug overdose is bringing attention to a nationwide health crisis: Overdose fatalities have risen dramatically in the United States since 1999, largely because of prescription drugs. According to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, unintentional poisoning deaths -- 95% of which are drug overdoses -- increased from 12,186 in 1999 to 20,950 in 2004.

Two foreign nationals who said they were forcibly drugged by U.S. immigration officials during failed efforts to deport them have agreed to a settlement in the case, their attorney said Tuesday.

Senate Democrats on Tuesday rebuffed Atty. Gen. Michael B. Mukasey's request for legislation that would cancel the U.S. Sentencing Commission's recent decision to retroactively apply lower jail terms to as many as 19,500 crack cocaine offenders sentenced under tough "war on drugs" legislation from the 1980s. About 1,600 of those inmates will be eligible to apply for reduced sentences this year, according to the commission. The new guidelines take effect March 3.

It wasn't long ago that the pharmaceutical industry viewed HIV drugs as more of a public service than possible bestsellers. Unlike in the case of cancer or heart disease, where drugs for patients in richer markets such as the United States and Europe can be instantly and startlingly profitable, two-thirds of people infected with HIV are in impoverished regions in Africa. But something unexpected is happening: As treatment of HIV patients in the U.S.

The U.S. Anti-Doping Agency would consider running a drug testing program in which first offenders were not suspended for two years, its chief executive said Tuesday, raising the stakes as Commissioner Bud Selig returns to Congress today to testify about baseball's drug policy. Selig has rebuffed calls to outsource drug testing to a third party and has rejected the World Anti-Doping Agency standard of a two-year ban for a first positive test.