Drug Court Savings

Portugal's drug policy pays off; US eyes lessons
By Barry Hatton

....San Francisco's drug court saves the city $14,297 per offender, officials said. Expanding drug courts to all 1.5 million drug offenders in the U.S. would cost more than $13 billion annually, but would return more than $40 billion, according to a study by John Roman, a senior researcher at the Urban Institute's Justice Policy Center....

Postsecret & Merrill Singer

"People readily, if perhaps with a sheepish smile, can admit they are addicted to their morning cup of coffee without the least fear that their morality, sanity, or competence will be questioned or that they might face criminal charges and a potentially long prison sentence.
In the nineteenth century, the same was true of heroin or cocaine addiction. All of this changed early in the twentieth century as a push for criminalization gained momentum" (Singer 2006: p55).

Needle Exchange in Iran (and what the US should notice)

An Enlightened Exchange in Iran
by Tina Rosenberg
 This is a story about a courageous policy in an unexpected place. In this place homeless shelters have vending machines selling clean syringes for injecting drugs. Drug users are not prosecuted as long as they are in treatment programs. Drug addicts are given clean needles and methadone maintenance therapy ─ available on a widespread basis even in prison. These tactics have worked to reduce crime, lower H.I.V. rates among drug users and keep AIDS from spreading out into the general population. The place is not Amsterdam. It is Tehran....

follow-up piece:
How Iran Derailed a Health Crisis
 So how did Iran do it? How did a conservative theocracy decide to deal with its drug addicts as if it were Canada?... The science behind harm reduction is solid ─ but the politics are acutely dangerous.....

let's try this again...

when do we start imprisoning drug manufacturers? Prescription opiates are responsible for an increasing proportion of overdose deaths, so they are next, right?
oh.
wait.

Des Moines man sentenced in heroin death
DES MOINES, Iowa —Federal prosecutors say a Des Moines man has been sentenced to more than 15 years in prison for his role in the heroin death of another person.
Federal officials said Tuesday that Shawn Sweeney appeared last week before a federal judge and was sentenced to 188 months in prison after pleading guilty to distributing heroin. He also was given three years of supervised release and must pay $100 to a crime victims' fund.
Prosecutors say Sweeney distributed heroin to another man who distributed to an individual who died Jan. 24, 2009, in Ames after ingesting the drug.

HIV Prisoner Segregation in SC and Alabama

To reiterate, these programs are unjust, unconstitutional, and, wait for it, enormously expensive. yeah, phenomenally thorough thinking on all fronts.

SC prisons brace for lawsuit over inmates with HIV
By Meg Kinnard
September 21, 2010

COLUMBIA, S.C. — South Carolina prison officials say they have no plans to stop segregating HIV-positive inmates despite the threat of a lawsuit by the U.S. Justice Department.
The state faces a Wednesday deadline to change the practice, which prison officials say is best for inmates and prison employees.
         All state prisons "are safer from a public health perspective and a security perspective as a direct result of this program," Corrections Department attorney David Tatarsky wrote in an August response to the Department of Justice.
         More than 400 HIV-positive inmates are housed together at maximum security prisons in Columbia, including some who would not usually be in such high-security facilities. Infected prisoners attend activities with other inmates, including work, school and faith-based programs, but eat and sleep separately.
        "Many inmates with HIV suffer disparate treatment from other similarly situated inmates without HIV," the department wrote to South Carolina officials in June, when it gave them three months to make changes.
         Alabama, which has 250 HIV-positive inmates, is the only other state that segregates them. Both were criticized in a report issued earlier this year by the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch, which said officials should house all inmates together and give prisoners condoms and syringes to slow the spread of AIDS.
         The report argued that HIV-positive inmates don't have access to the same programs and jobs as other prisoners and are wrongly stigmatized. They are also prevented from participating in work-release programs, meaning they can't earn credits to shorten their sentences.
         "That inevitably means that they serve longer sentences and are essentially being warehoused for no reason other than a medical condition," Margaret Winter, associate director of the ACLU's National Prison Project, said Tuesday.
        Corrections officials have offered a compromise that would also allow infected inmates to attend work-release programs, but Director Jon Ozmint has said DOJ shot down that proposal.
In the mid-1980s, 46 of the nation's 51 prison systems housed HIV-positive prisoners separately from the general population, but most have since stopped. Most recently, Mississippi stopped segregating its 152 HIV-positive inmates in May, sending them to prisons around the state.
         The Department of Justice did not respond to requests for comment Tuesday.
Alabama officials said they have not been threatened with a lawsuit. South Carolina prison officials were not available for comment Tuesday, but said in an Aug. 20 response to the DOJ that they do not intend to change their policy."

how to make chrome worth using on a mac:

The Extensions:
Context Menu Search
Copy Title+URL to clipboard
FreshStart - Cross Browser Session Manager
Search Box
YouTube Video Downloader
Send from Gmail
FlashBlock
Auto Bit.ly

Applescripting Language for Chrome....
tell application "Google Chrome"
tell application "System Events"
tell application process "Google Chrome"
set PageURL to value of text field 1 of tool bar 1 of window 1
end tell
(for an example of a finished script, see mail_bitly_and_title.scpt.)

guess I am finished complaining...

computer help

you know you are back in SF when...

your dog wants to wear a hoody:

&
produce costs less than rent:

semen & HIV

HIV-1 Populations in Semen Arise through Multiple Mechanisms
PLoS Pathogens

Maybe I am easily impressed, but this finding seems amazing to me.
•The types and distribution of HIV genotypes found in an individual's semen can differ significantly from those found in his blood.
•The immune system related proteins found in semen indicate that relative to blood, semen may be particularly conducive to viral replication.
__________________________________________

Abstract
HIV-1 is present in anatomical compartments and bodily fluids. Most transmissions occur through sexual acts, making virus in semen the proximal source in male donors. We find three distinct relationships in comparing viral RNA populations between blood and semen in men with chronic HIV-1 infection, and we propose that the viral populations in semen arise by multiple mechanisms including: direct import of virus, oligoclonal amplification within the seminal tract, or compartmentalization. In addition, we find significant enrichment of six out of nineteen cytokines and chemokines in semen of both HIV-infected and uninfected men, and another seven further enriched in infected individuals. The enrichment of cytokines involved in innate immunity in the seminal tract, complemented with chemokines in infected men, creates an environment conducive to T cell activation and viral replication. These studies define different relationships between virus in blood and semen that can significantly alter the composition of the viral population at the source that is most proximal to the transmitted virus.

Anderson JA, Ping L-H, Dibben O, Jabara CB, Arney L, et al. (2010) HIV-1 Populations in Semen Arise through Multiple Mechanisms. PLoS Pathog 6(8).

HIV disclosure charges

These cases seem to almost always involve male defendants. This week, female defendants in Germany and Michigan.

German Pop Singer on Trial for Concealing H.I.V. Status From Sexual Partners


HIV positive woman pleads no contest, gets 11 months in failure to disclose case
(Michigan Messenger)