prison AIDS walk

This is amazing:

Housing Works has long provided housing and services to help formerly incarcerated people get their lives on track. Now, through a federal government grant, Housing Works has implemented an innovative new program that sets people up with care before they get out of prison. The Housing Works program targets HIV-positive and high risk minority ex-offenders moving to New York City. The program has just begun in September, and seven people have already been connected with care and treatment at Housing Works.
“I always tell people that planning for re-entry starts the day you’re locked up,” said Ray Rios, Housing Works central intake/outreach program director.
And the good will goes both ways.
The prisoners at Otisville Correctional Facility held an AIDSWalk on World AIDS Day (December 1) where one-quarter of the prison participated in the walk. They raised $240 for Housing Works. The inmates joked that they wish they could have given $240,000; they all make less than 25 cents a day.
Housing Works

free NYC - Irving Penn at MOMA

I love Irving Penn (and really wish he was not always described as a fashion photographer - he was infinitely more.) Ten or so of his photographs are on display in the MOMA lobby. They are free to see and well worth it.

If you do have the time and money for a full visit, the best Gabriel Orozco is the easiest to miss; it is in the stairwell with exhibit computers.

save california needle exchange!

heroin and hysterics

nyc.gov has already removed its new injection safety flyer, Take Charge Take Care, from its website. (I have made it available here.)
This flyer elicited plenty of nonsense repsponses. My only real criticism is of its reliance on the same magical thinking incorporated into most injection safety information.

yesterday

@alli_k: 3 hallways of close-up flower photographs on the way to a pelvic exam. Subtle.

@nharlotekk: clearly, you need a briefcase full of sausage

AP asshat

Actor Charlie Sheen Arrested in Colorado
....Sheen is the son of actor Martin Sheen. His screen credits include ''Platoon,'' ''Wall Street'' and the ''Hot Shots!'' movies. He nearly died of a drug overdose in 1998 but received court-ordered rehabilitation.
4You mean AND received court-ordered rehabilitation, asshat.

Merry jew-on-xmas!

The real thing at the ONDCP?

Addiction on 2 Fronts: Work and Home
By Sarah Kershaw
WASHINGTON — His son had been dead from an overdose only three months when A. Thomas McLellan, among the nation’s leading researchers on addiction, got a call from the office of Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. Would he accept the nomination to be the government’s No. 2 drug-control official?
Dr. McLellan, 61, makes no secret of his cynicism about government — “I hate Washington,” as he put it in an interview — and he had no intention of leaving his job as a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and scientific director of the Treatment Research Institute in Philadelphia. ....


Drug Dependence, a Chronic Medical Illness Implications for Treatment, Insurance, and Outcomes Evaluation
A. Thomas Mclellan, David C. Lewis, Charles P. O’Brien, Herbert D. Kleber
JAMA, October 4, 2000—Vol 284, No. 13
The effects of drug dependence on social systems has helped shape the generally held view that drug dependence is primarily a social problem, not a health problem. In turn, medical approaches to prevention and treatment are lacking. We examined evidence that drug (including alcohol) dependence is a chronic medical illness. A literature review compared the diagnoses, heritability, etiology (genetic and environmental factors), pathophysiology, and response to treatments (adherence and relapse) of drug dependence vs type 2 diabetes mellitus, hypertension, and asthma. Genetic heritability, personal choice, and environmental factors are comparably involved in the etiology and course of all of these disorders. Drug dependence produces significant and lasting changes in brain chemistry and function. Effective medications are available for treating nicotine, alcohol, and opiate dependence but not stimulant or marijuana dependence. Medication adherence and relapse rates are similar across these illnesses. Drug dependence generally has been treated as if it were an acute illness. Review results suggest that long-term care strategies of medication management and continued monitoring produce lasting benefits. Drug dependence should be insured, treated, and evaluated like other chronic illnesses.
JAMA

Sentiment I could have never predicted experiencing:

I almost wish Ralph Nader was running.
guns AND prisons? please.
Gun opponents up in arms as Jerry Brown aids NRA
Phillip Matier, Andrew Ross
It may come as a surprise to many of his Democratic supporters, but Attorney General and gubernatorial hopeful Jerry Brown has gone to bat for the National Rifle Association.
The NRA's cause: urging the U.S. Supreme Court to guarantee the ability of gun owners across the land to keep and bear arms.
Last year, the high court struck down a ban on handguns in Washington, D.C., ruling for the first time that the Second Amendment's right to bear arms applies to individuals who keep a gun at home for self-defense. But the court made it clear the ruling applied only to the District of Columbia, a federal enclave.
Now, gun advocates are challenging Chicago's handgun ban, asking the Supreme Court to rule that the Second Amendment equally applies to the states. And there was no shortage of states - 34 in all - jumping on the bandwagon in support of the court hearing the case.
In July, before the court agreed to take the case, Brown went so far as to file his own friend-of-the-court brief asking that Chicago's gun ban be overturned - arguing that if the court doesn't act, "California citizens could be deprived of the constitutional right to possess handguns in their homes." ....

I enjoyed this too much not to share.

In Defense of New York
By Charles M. Blow
Representative John Shadegg of Arizona really knows how to put on a show.
Earlier this month, he used a live baby as part of a quasi-ventriloquist act on the House floor. Creepy? Yes. Still, we let it slide.
But he doesn’t get two passes in a row. Monday, he took a swipe at Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City for saying that the city could handle the security for the trial of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.
Shadegg sniped, “I saw the mayor of New York today said ‘We’re tough. We can do it.’ Well mayor, how are you going to feel when it’s your daughter that’s kidnapped, at school, by a terrorist?”
Say what you will about New Yorkers, but question our toughness, you will not.
Whether a civil or military trial would provide the best chances of securing a conviction while simultaneously signaling to the world a righting of America’s moral compass is a fair debate. But questioning whether New York City can handle the trial is an insult.
(By the way, what’s with this business of the mayor’s daughter being kidnapped? It sounds like the plot of a Jackie Chan movie.)
We New Yorkers live with the threat of terrorism every day — on our trains, in our high-rises, in our plazas. But we’ve learned to cope. Not by being afraid, but by being vigilant. Bringing Mohammed to Manhattan isn’t going to move the needle much.
A police spokesman told Reuters that “eight terrorism plots against the city have been scuttled since 2001, including plots to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge and the retaining wall at ground zero.”
Yet the city didn’t blink. Schools still opened, trains still ran and the Naked Cowboy still serenaded gaggles of grown women who giggled like schoolgirls.
So Mr. Congressman, how many terror plots have been squashed in your district? Take your time. I’ll wait.
We love this city, and nothing and no one will make us afraid to be in it. We refuse to be cowed by cowards — not by those hiding in the Hindu Kush or by those hyperventilating in the halls of Congress.
And what galls us most is having watched for years as politicians like Shadegg used fear-mongering about 9/11 and the threat of attacks as a political tool.
Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani used it to sidestep the extreme racial divisiveness he fostered in the city. Former President George W. Bush used it as a Trojan horse to ravage our civil liberties. Dick Cheney is still using it to shield his transgressions.
Let us be clear: The fear tactics that work in the hinterlands don’t work here.
We rose from the ashes of the Twin Towers. We don’t need a puppeteering politician from Phoenix lecturing us about being tough in the face of terror.

whiskey and the narc!